Capers With Carroll

Entertaining Myself outside the US Embassy

2011-07-03T17:58:00.000-07:00

One nice thing about the hobbies of entomology and botany is that they can be indulged almost anywhere. These two weeks I have been traveling in Brazil. We’ve had many little adventures, but our big one was a road trip to the US embassy in Brasilia to register the citizenship of my youngest grandson. The three-hour drive is pretty, but we arrived late by approximately the same amount of time it takes to clean up after a car-sick three-year-old. Then, the embassy security personnel considered it excessive that the registration of one infant should require the admission of seven people, even if each of the siblings, parents, and grandparents carried US passports. My son—very good in a crisis—managed to negotiate for six, but the guards insisted that a line had to be drawn, and I found myself left outside as the rest of my family went in. Thus it was that I enjoyed about 90 minutes exploring the landscaped area in front of the US and French embassies and a patch of weeds that surrounded a construction site.

The city of Brasilia is younger than I am. It was not laid out until 1956, by which time I was in 1^st grade. The idea was to encourage the development of Brazil’s interior by placing a new capital smack in the middle of undeveloped territory. Today, the metropolitan area boasts over three million people, but its recent agrarian past was evident in the Brachiaria that dominated all of the non-landscaped areas. This part of Brazil was largely settled by immigrants from Germany and Italy, but the Brachiaria came from Africa. Brought in as high-protein forage for cattle, it has pushed out the native flora.

As is often the case, the field of Brachiaria had also become home to several hills of leaf-cutter ants, probably Atta cephalotes. I found a column of these ants moving up and down a young mango tree, but they weren’t moving any cargo. I have seen them, overnight, strip the leaves from a bigger tree than this one, but perhaps these workers, like me, were simply out for a late-afternoon stroll while the rest of the family did something inside the embassy.

Several kinds of butterflies flitted about the Brachiaria. The sun was too low and the individuals too skittish for me to get many pictures, but one black and white skipper sat still while I manipulated my lens within about five inches. After several days of research I am convinced it is the Tropical Checkered Skipper, Pyrgus oileus (sometimes seen as P. orcus), on a Lilac Tasselflower, Emilia sonchifolia. The P. oileus caterpillar feeds on Malvaceae (like cotton or mallow), but the adult likes the nectar of Compositae, like this Emilia (an immigrant from either Africa or South East Asia).

Next I investigated a long wall heavily colonized by the Brown Widow Spider, Latrodectus geometricus. Each of the females rested under a little awning; so that I wasn’t sure what I had I dislodged one. The one male I saw rested out front in a web more condensed and full of trash than the Black Widows we have in California. The egg sac is also distinct, covered with little bumps. I captured one female to use later for studio portraits.

The landscaped areas in front of the embassy have several short palm trees. I gave each some careful inspection, in hopes of finding a jumping spider, but instead I found this wasp nest. It was now late enough that the wasps—possibly yellowjackets—were inside for the night. I was happy to leave them there. I photographed the nest from several angles, which prompted a visit from the embassy security guard, who reminded me politely that I was not to point my camera at the embassy itself.

I moved on to a tree that offered peeling bark and found my jumping spider. It was probably an immature Menemerus bivittatus, the Gray Wall Jumper, a pantropical species I have seen in several countries. Later, on a dead tree, I pulled back some bark and had an adult disappear into the grass before I could get a good look at her, but from a small nest I began to see hatchlings escaping. I suspect these were also M. bivittatus, and added a couple to my collection for later filming.

About this time my family reappeared, my grandson registered in time to celebrate his first 4^th of July. However, before we left Brasilia, we took a drive through the downtown, including a pass around three sides of the congressional building (Palacio do Congress) and one corner of the presidential office (Palacio do Planalto), the supreme court, and the national cathedral. That’s the nice thing about having travel as a hobby, it can be indulged almost anywhere.

Open-air Arthropodarium on a Charlotte Corday

2011-06-25T17:42:00.001-07:00

School is out, so it's catch-up time here at Capers. All the thoughts and observations that I've carried around since things accelerated in March can finally find a place to land.

In the few minutes I could snatch here or there over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been enjoying a hedge of passion vines and grapes that I started last summer. Over the winter, I covered (and saved) some of the passion vines with clear plastic, and learned a lesson from what I never got covered. A freeze came on suddenly just before Thanksgiving. Then the winter turned mild but wet. The rains continued longer than I can ever remember. I covered a length of about 16 feet (8 to 10 feet high), but I never quite got the plastic as far as the P. amethyst. It survived the worst cold and still had green on it until almost the end March, but then it died. I have since read that some prefer dry ground when it is cold. I replaced the dead one as soon as Lowes put the spring vines out, and next winter I will cover it.

The section I protected included the bright red P. vitafolia, the maracuya-bearing P. frederick, and what the big-box home-improvement center had labeled as P. victoria (which is lavender), but turns out to be one of the whites, either ‘Charlotte Corday,’ or ‘Constance Elliott.’ Until someone corrects me, I will go with the former, named for the ‘Angel of Assassination’ who went to the guillotine for stabbing-to-death Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat in his bath-tub. She hoped it would end the Reign of Terror. In actuality, it turned them each into martyrs, one for each side, but among Reign-of-Terror floral remembrances, this flower stands out as perhaps the most delicate. As a history teacher, it’s hard to imagine planting anything in my yard with more history than that.

The white one has been blooming for a couple of months, and has set dozens of fruit. The vitafolia and frederick just began blooming last week. The primary pollinators for passion flowers are bumble bees. In our area, that’s the Valley Carpenter Bee, Xylocopa veripuncta. I see them mainly in the late afternoon, most often two of the black females, and occasionally a single tan-orange male. He seems mostly to be checking things out, and I don’t see him land anywhere. They don’t seem to mind either me or the camera, and when the females are intent on a flower, they let me approach within four or five inches.The bees are just the right height to brush under the five overhanging anthers, picking up pollen on their backs, and carrying it to deposit against the three stigmas. They seem to prefer the whites, visit the frederick only after several visits to each of the available white blossoms, and show no interest at all in the vitafolia.I first encountered an insectarium at the Berlin zoo, misnamed though, because it housed and displayed both insects (I saw my first walking stick) and spiders (I saw my first Argiope). Spiders are not insects, but both are arthropods. A better name for such a display therefore is "arthropodarium."

In early June, I began seeing a California Hairstreak Satyrium.

A week later, the first Gulf Fritillary arrived.

The Argentine Ant tends to dominate my yard, but so far I have not seen them tending herds of scale insects.

So far, I have seen four species of spiders in my hedge.

Holocnemus pluchei immigrated into our area in the 1970s, but now is ubiquitous.

Cheiracanthium mildei needed no introduction: It was already everywhere.

Of the spiders that show up as hedge residents, my two favorites are jumping spiders (family Salticidae). The male Thiodina hespera took exception to being photographed, but I will have the rest of the summer to get a clearer picture. This was the species that first attracted my attention and launched my interest in spiders, some 37 years ago, so we are old friends. Back then, using my first set of close-up lenses, I took my first spider pictures and sent them off to a scholar studying this genus. In those days, the species had no name, and I heard recently that the specialist considered naming the species after me. I don't think my little investigations would have justified that, but it helps explain why I consider this Thiodina almost a member of the family.

The second jumping spider was a female Sassacus vitis. She appeared just after a microscope I had ordered arrived in the mail. She thereby won the right to be my first subject under the new apparatus. On a leaf, her iridescent scales would catch the sun and cast a glint of golden bronze. She is loose again on my hedge, and I will try again to catch a picture of that glint.

The summer and my hedge are still young. I will be traveling some, and trying to write for a portion of each day. But my microscope is brand new, my arthropodarium is just beginning, and school doesn't start for another eight weeks. Life is sweet.

Heaven is for Real (and Takes Visitors)

2011-03-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

This post reviewed the book Heaven Is for Real, by Todd Burpo. I have removed it for for reconsideration.

The Back of Duke Snider's Head

2011-02-28T19:26:00.000-08:00

The report today of Duke Snider’s passing brings two small memories to mind, though most of his Hall-of-Fame career (1947-1964) was before my time and on the other side of the continent.

My Time with baseball started in 1959, the Dodgers’ second year out of Brooklyn. My Cub Scout den drove downtown to the Coliseum to watch the Dodgers host Cincinnati. I would have been nine, and I’m not even sure Snider played. I remember Pee Wee Reese, Wally Moon, and Gil Hodges. It was still the core of the team that had come from back east, and Snider was one of its most fabled players, but I hadn’t yet caught the fever. We sat in way-yonder center field seats where Snider would have been the nearest player in front of us, so maybe I spent nine innings staring at the back of his head. However, my two strongest memories are how far from the game we actually were, and how fast the Reds’ Vada Pinson could run from home to first on a single.

I didn’t really become a baseball fan until the Kaufax-Drysdale-Wills teams of the mid-60s. By then, the Dodgers had moved from the Coliseum to their own stadium, and Snider had moved to the Mets, Giants, and retirement. It was then I finally saw the Duke up close.

Off-season, Snider made his home in Fallbrook, California, rooted for the local high school athletic teams, farmed avocados, and attended the Methodist church. My own family had tried weekend avocado ranching near Fallbrook. My cousins attended high school there, and played baseball. They also attended the Methodist church, and I heard frequent mention of Duke Snider.

One Sunday, we made the trip to the Fallbrook church. My mother’s favorite, but long-retired pastor was making a guest appearance. As I took a seat, my cousin pointed at the man in front of me. “That’s Duke Snider,” he whispered. I spent the next hour looking at the back of the great man’s head. Afterwards, Snider got up and left and my mother pulled me up front to show me off to her pastor.

There you have it: a baseball great passes on to the ages and my two strongest memories are of the back of his head. Rest In Peace, Duke.

Forty-Eight Generations and a Birth Announcement

2011-02-12T13:21:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the deep recesses of history, God told man to be fruitful and multiply: to fill the earth.

In the early 6th Century, when Bishop (later, Saint) Arnulf of Metz (582–640) stepped into verifiable history, claiming a possibly-mythical ancestry of Roman senators and Merovingian princesses, the population of Europe stood at perhaps 25 million. Arnulf begat Ansegisel (born c. 602), who begat Pippin the Middle, Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia, who begat Charles Martel, who saved Christendom from the Moors at Tours, in 732. Charles begat Pepin the Short, who reigned (752-68) as King of the Franks.

Pepin begat Charlemagne, King of the Franks from 768, and Emperor of the Romans, from 800 to his death. For his reforms, Charlemagne has been called the Father of Europe, but he was also, biologically, ancestor to every royal dynasty that later inhabited the continent. It is estimated that more than half the population of Europe—maybe fifteen million people—lived in his realms. He personally sired 20 children, by eight women, but conservatively, if we suppose that his progeny only doubled in each successive generation, had there been no intermarriage, his living descendents today would be triple the current population of earth.

Charlemagne begat Louis the Pious (778 – 840), King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor, whose daughter Gisela (820 – 874) was likely married to Henry of Franconia and bore Ingeltrude, whose a son Berengar ruled as lord of Rennes until both his land and his daughter were captured by the Viking chieftain Rollo (Old Norse, Hrólfr, c. 870 – c. 932). Poppa converted her husband to Christianity (though Viking habits die hard), and their descendents were known as the Dukes of Normandy: William I Longsword (893-942) begat Richard I the Fearless (933-996), who begat Richard II the Good (970-1026), who begat Richard III (997-1027), who begat Robert I, called variously “the Magnificent” or “the Devil” (1000-1035), who begat William II the Bastard (c. 1028-1087), who shed that moniker at the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, becoming William I the Conqueror, King of the English.

England, with perhaps a million souls at the conquest, grew to as many as seven million within three centuries. A warming trend brought longer growing seasons. Better ploughs and the horse collar allowed more land to be farmed. The rise of powerful kingdoms brought relative stability.

William begat Henry I (c. 1068-1135), whose daughter Matilda (1102-1167) was briefly Empress of the Holy Roman Empire. When her father died, she attempted to rule England in her own right, but was more successful in passing the throne to her son Henry II Plantagenet (1133-1189).

Henry acknowledged paternity of William Longespee (1176-1226), whose daughter Ida (1210-1269) bore Beatrice de Beauchamp (1242-1285), who bore Maud Fitz Thomas (1265- 1329), who bore Ada de Botetourt (c. 1288-1349), who bore Maud de St Philibert (1327-1360). Even while the Black Plague was ravaging Europe, claiming 40% of the population of Germany, 50% of Provence, and 70% of Tuscany, this Maud bore Maud Trussell (1340-1369), who bore Maud Matilda Hastang (1358-c. 1409), each woman married to a knight. Maud and her husband, Sir Ralph (1355-1410) brought forth the first Sir Humphrey Stafford (1384-1419), whose death in France just weeks after the victory at Rouen may have been due to wounds in the battle, but not before he sired a second Sir Humphrey (1400-1450), who sired a third (1426-1486), who sired a fourth (1429-1486), who sired a fifth (1497-1540), whose daughter Eleanor (c. 1545-1608) bore Stafford Barlowe (c. 1570-1638), “a Gentleman of Lutterworth.”

Stafford’s daughter Audrey (1603-1676) first bore a son, Christopher Almy (1632-1713), and then both generations migrated to America, settling in Rhode Island. He begat Elizabeth Almy (1663-1712), who bore Rebecca Morris (1697-1749), who married John Chamberlain, and moved to New Jersey. It is believed the Chamberlains owned slaves. Their son Noah (1760-1840) served in the Revolutionary War.

Noah begat John C. Chamberlain (1812-1866), who begat Samuel L. Chamberlain (1842-1914), who fought with an Ohio regiment in the Civil War, and then walked out on a wife and daughter, Anna Margaret Chamberlain (1875-1956), who I remember meeting once, when I was very small. Anna hailed from Scotch ancestry. The population of Europe doubled during the 18th Century, and did so again in the 19th. At that time, 70 million people came to America, both to the United States, and to places like Brazil.

Anna Chamberlain married Thomas Boyer Reef Kelley and bore Ruth Ella Kelley (1899-1974). They tried to make a go of it on the Dakota prairie, but gave up and moved to be near the shipyards in Washington. Ruth married Howard Vincent Carroll (b. New York, 1898). He was of recent Irish and German extraction, refugees of the Potato Famine. Today, 6.2 million Irish live in Ireland, and 80 million live somewhere else. Howard left Ruth with two sons, including Donald, who has been everything a son could want in a father. Donald begat Brian, who teaches school and blogs on Saturdays. Brian begat Matthew, who has been everything a father could want in a son, and Matthew—already with two wonderful sons—begat Eliezer Carroll, who was born yesterday, in Goiania, Goiás, Brazil.

Welcome, Eliezer, to the family. We are saints and devils, counts and no-counts. There are not quite 7 billion of us. Help take care of the place, be fruitful, and live long.

Photo by his father
Thank-yous to Sally Carroll, Devin Carroll, and Wikipedia for contributing information to these thoughts.

Back to Normalcy after a Rabbit Firestorm: Anatomy of a Capers Chūnyùn

2011-02-05T13:06:00.001-08:00

World-wide, Chinese New Year is celebrated by Spring Festival and Chūnyùn (春运), the greatest annual migration on earth. In 2008, the 1.3 billion Chinese took 2.2 billion train trips within the 40 day travel window. The celebrations include feasting, fireworks, dragons dancing in the streets, and time with family and friends. Apparently, also, they google the phrase Xin nian kuai le.

I know this last detail because over the past six weeks, this blog has been celebrating its fourth annual Capers Virtual Chūnyùn. I began seeing traffic pick up in mid December, helping to make that my most-visited month ever. Traffic continued steady through January and then spiked on Saturday the 29th. For the first time in the blog's six year history, page views topped 1,000. All by itself, Wednesday—Chinese New Year—brought 429. Five days into February, its totals now exceed all of January. Just four days this week, Monday through Thursday, out-performed the whole four month period, April to July.

Credit Google.

I'm assuming the vast majority of my traffic came from overseas Chinese. This past month, if Sweden’s nearly 13,000 Chinese expatriates went to google.com.se and searched for Xin nian kuai le, they got 272 000 results, of which my 2008 New Year’s greeting was listed 2nd. The United Arab Emirate’s 180,000 Chinese found me 3rd, and sent me 29 hits. Also at 2nd, Singapore’s 3.6 million found me 300 times. Myanmar’s million-plus found my 2008 message 4th and December 2010 update 5th. They made 139 visits. The UK’s 400,000 Chinese clicked on me 111 times. None of my visitors clicked in from China itself, but there, “新年快乐”would be far likelier to get lost in the crowd than would Xin Nian Kuai Le in the Diaspora. That and 2010 saw Google and China tangle, with a reduction of Google’s presence.

When all these numbers began to develop, my first reaction was awe over the chance popularity of an almost-throw-away post from three years ago. It struck me as random and surreal. Then, as I studied the source locations, I was transported back forty years, to a time in my life before marriage into a Spanish-speaking family, nine years living in Colombia, and 20 years teaching recent immigrants from Mexico. My focus on Latin America and its immigrants had interrupted an earlier interest.

I mentioned in my recent post on Fred Korematsu Day that I took at class at Pasadena City College called Sociology of the Asian in America. I took it because, even in high school, I had an interest in immigration and the mixing of cultures. Over the course of completing a history major, whatever class I might be taking, I wrote about Asian immigration into the Western world. I wrote about Japanese in Mexico, Cuba, Peru, and Brazil, and especially, I wrote about the Chinese in Europe. During three quarters of independent study at UCLA, I wrote what I believe was the longest treatment of the Chinese in France that then existed in English (it has since been surpassed).

As blog hits came in from Holland, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, and Sweden, I was once again looking at the Chinese in Europe, and a Diasphora that now includes places like Dubai and Nairobi (I showed up 4th at Google Kenya).

I’m not sure yet what conclusions to draw, but I find myself thinking again on this subject after many years away from it. I am also beginning to read When a Billion Chinese Jump, by Jonathan Watts. Stay tuned. My thoughts in this Year of the Rabbit may turn increasingly to China, and its Diasphora. Watts’ premise is that any race to stave off global warming and worldwide ecological disaster will be won or lost in mainland China. The same may be true in a wide variety of human activities. I am fortunate to have friends both inside and outside of China, and about two months of Chinese travel experience. That doesn’t rank me yet as an expert, but it gives me a place to start.

Happy Year of the Rabbit

Notes:
On Chūnyùn. On the Chinese Diasphora, and the Chinese in Europe.

Disclosure of Material Connection: The link above is an “affiliate link.” This means if someone clicks on the link and purchases the item, I will receive a commission. This has never happened yet, and would only be a pittance if it did. For this reason, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

A Civil Fred Korematsu Day, to You and Yours

2011-01-29T10:30:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow will be Fred Korematsu Day, as will January 30th in all future years, declared so by Governor Schwarzenegger and the unanimous desire of both houses of the California Legislature. Parallel days in Oregon or Washington might honor Minoru Yasui and Gordon Hirabayashi. In my own mind, it will be Jiro Morita Day, and by extension—like a Rosa Parks Day or a César Chavez Day—it will be a time to reflect on how citizens in a supposedly civil society can respond at those moments when civility is in jeopardy.

While I was growing up, each of my parents spoke of the pain and confusion they felt in 1942 when their Nisei classmates were sent away to government “Relocation Camps.” Later, while I was taking a year of Japanese language at Pasadena City College, the school offered “Sociology of the Asian in America.” The course might qualify among the ethnic studies courses that have just been outlawed by the state of Arizona, but I look back upon it as one of the most fruitful classes I ever took. Three hours one night a week, with a 20 minute break, I quickly began spending those twenty minutes—and the walk to the parking lot after class—with Jiro Morita. At 80, he told me he was taking the class “to stay young.”

I spent every possible moment asking about his long life.

In early 1942, when the United States government was preparing to lock up the entire Japanese community on the west coast, the Japanese themselves worked through intense debate over how to respond. Poet Amy Uyematsu, Mr. Morita’s granddaughter, writes,

Grandpa was good at persuading the others
after the official evacuation orders.
Detained at Tulare Assembly Center,
he was the voice of reason among his angry friends,
raising everyone’s spirits
when he started the morning exercise class.

(From “Desert Camouflage,” in Stone Bow Prayer)

Most of the issei (1st generation immigrants) and nisei (2nd generation/US citizens) decided that obedience to the government’s order would offer their best long-term hope for full integration into American society. Three American-born young men, however, decided to test their 14th Amendment rights and protections. Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui performed that most-American of exercises: they took it to court.

Korematsu (1919 – 2005), born in Oakland, first tried plastic surgery and a name change to evade the order for Japanese to report for relocation. When that failed, he agreed to let his arrest be used as a test case. Korematsu remained at the Topaz, Utah, internment camp while Korematsu v. United States worked its way to the Supreme Court. They decided against him, 6-3.

Although Korematsu was an unskilled laborer, both Hirabayashi (b. 1918, in Seattle) and Yasui (1916-1986, of Hood River) had earned bachelors degrees from their state universities. Yasui even held a law degree and the rank of second lieutenant in the U.S. Army's Infantry Reserve. The relocation order was preceded by curfews, which each man intentionally violated before surrendering to authorities. Eventually the Supreme Court linked the two cases and rendered a unanimous decision: The government had the authority to order detention and relocation of even U.S. citizens under its war powers. Korematsu’s conviction was not overturned until 1983, Yasui’s until 1986, and Hirabayashi’s until 1987.

Source

In the early 1970’s, I had a brief, chance meeting with Gordon Hirabayashi. During my two years at UCLA, I studied additional Japanese language and a year each of Japanese and Chinese history. I also volunteered as an ESL tutor at Castelar Elementary School (L.A. Chinatown), and as a summer counselor for an Asian session of Unicamp. This took me often into the Asian American Study Center, where Elsie Osajima, Mr. Morita’s daughter, was an administrative assistant. Once, when I entered Mrs. Osajima’s office on some errand, I found several people chatting with Mr. Hirabayashi. It was very like a similar meeting, during the same months, and no more than 500 yards apart, with former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren. In each case, I knew it was a rare privilege to connect with an important moment in history, and yet the situation didn’t allow for me to ask questions. On the spur of the moment, I couldn’t even think of any.

However, the two meetings provide an interesting juxtaposition. Earl Warren, as Attorney General of California, was the driving force behind convincing President Roosevelt of the necessity for removing the Japanese from their homes and communities. The same Warren Court (1954-1969) that did so much to advance civil rights in so many other areas also could have been the court to reverse Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui. It didn’t. What my parents identified immediately as wrong when their high school chums were hauled away in 1942, the federal courts only caught up with in the 1980’s. Then, California recognition had to wait until 2011.

If there is a lesson in Earl Warren’s life, it is that for any community, prejudice is easiest to see from outside the area, or outside the era. Warren could see the prejudice against African Americans in the South, yet at the same time, he was either blind to, or unwilling to face prejudice against the Japanese in California. This brings us back to Arizona, today, and the efforts to redefine citizenship. Fred Korematsu looked back on his own case and pursued justice an a reversal of the court's decision, not for his own sake, but so that the United States could be counted on to give the 14th Amendment guarantees to every person ever born or naturalized in the United States, and in whichever state they might reside.

May it ever be so.

As I prepared this post, the miracle of Google allowed me to connect with Amy Uyematsu and Elsie Osajima. I intend soon to write more about Jiro Morita. He was an amazing man.

In the meantime, enjoy a civil Fred Korematsu Day. Pick an injustice, and ponder how to alleviate it.

Additional Resources:

Korematsu v. United States
Hirabayashi v. United States
Yasui v. United States
Ex Parte Endo

In this PBS video, Mr. Korematsu tells his own story.

This book targets readers from 3rd to 6th grades.

This book targets grades 7 through 10. Although it appears to be out of print, used copies may be available. Perhaps, now that California has an annual Fred Korematsu Day, it will be reprinted.

Gordon Hirabayashi - On the Day of Remembrance: A Statement of Conscience
In this nearly-two-hour from 2000, Gordon Hirabayashi discusses the Japanese Evacuation and its importance to history.

Disclosure of Material Connection: The Amazon links above are “affiliate links.” This means if someone clicks on the link and purchases the item, I will receive a commission. This has never happened to me as of today, and would only be a pittance if it did. I have no financial arrangement concerning any of the other materials I have linked with. I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

DC-3 Nostalgia Follow-Up

2011-01-24T19:57:00.000-08:00

Last month’s Capers tribute to the DC-3 became part of a conversation, both here and on Facebook, that included several of my former students and a couple of students who graduated from Lomalinda before my time.

Garth Harms obtained this picture from photographer Jeff Evans, who spent a couple of months in Colombia just before I got there. That dates the picture to late ’83 or early ’84.

Photo by Jeff Evans

It’s authentic, right down to the left-wheel and rear-wheel ruts where the plane pivoted to put its passenger door facing the covered waiting area. The entire community was here to receive my family when we stepped off the plane the first time, and in turn, we joined the crowd for countless welcomings and goodbyes. Departures had a ritual: after final hugs, the doors closed but the waving continued. Then the engines would rev (first one side, then the other) and well wishers would jump on motor cycles for a race to the last hill at the end of the runway, for final salutes as the gooney bird lifted off. This airplane was central to so many emotional moments that just looking at the picture—all these years later—touches a nerve.

One educational advantage that students in Lomalinda enjoyed was an unusual opportunity for work experience during high school. Kirk Garreans tells me he had the privilege of working alongside the DC-3 crew. Through his connections, he also came up with the fact that DC-3s continue to be active in the relief efforts in Haiti. Ponder that a moment: the youngest DC-3s are 65 years old, and still play a role in work-a-day aviation. Amazing.

Kirk also traced “our” DC-3 to its current owners, Dynamic Aviation, of Bridgewater, Virginia. The firm supplies “special-mission aviation solutions,” with over 150 aircraft doing commercial charter, fire management, sterile insect application, airborne data acquisition and other tasks. Before writing my first post, I was 90% certain I’d found the airplane, but Kirk’s information locked it. Dynamic Aviation restored the craft (N47E) to its original, 1943, Air Force paint job and insignia, and renamed it “Miss Virginia.” Here it is:

Finally, Kirk reported that Miss Virginia was part of the twenty-six plane, 75th Anniversary Fly-In to Oshkosh. Several nice videos are posted on You-Tube. Here is one:

A tip of the wings to all who participated in this conversation.

(My earlier post is here.)

Happy Birthday, DC-3

2010-12-29T11:19:00.001-08:00

In the rush of Christmas, I’m a little late with this post. I had hoped to have it ready for December 17th, when one old friend turned 75 and another turned 108.

On December 17, 1935, at Santa Monica, California, test pilots tried out the first DC-3. Exactly 32 years earlier, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilber Wright piloted their Wright Flier 1 to what is generally considered the first sustained flight by a self-propelled and pilot-controlled aircraft.

I’m not a pilot, but I enjoy being a passenger. I love both the arriving in some exotic place and—under most conditions—the process of getting there. Maps fascinate me, as does the world they represent. (Ask the two generations of students to whom I have assigned map learning.) Having the earth stretched out beneath me is like enjoying the map in its purest form. I have pressed my nose to the window of multiple crossings of the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Caribbean, and on flights that puddle-jumped across four continents.

I remember all the places I visited, but some of those airplanes I got on, got off, and forgot. By far, my favorite flights were in the airplanes that carried me during the nine years I lived in Colombia. In 1984, I moved my family to Lomalinda, a small Bible-translation and linguistics center on the Colombian llanos, or eastern plains. When I arrived, the center had three single-engine, Short Take-Off and Landing (STOL) Helio Couriers, and an unusual looking plane called the Evangel. In addition, twice a week, the community was served by a DC-3 flight from Bogotá. Primarily, the small planes connected us to the state capital (Villavicencio, a.k.a. “Villao”), or remote areas where indigenous languages were still spoken. Through Bogotá, the DC-3 connected us to the rest of the world.Loading the DC-3, Bogotá, Colombia, October 1985

Lomalinda was 35 miles from the closest paved highway, miles that were always difficult and sometimes impassable. I remember one rainy trip where buses and trucks lined up on both sides of a thousand-yard mud pit while two Caterpillar tractors sloshed back and forth, towing a single vehicle each trip. In good weather, the road trip to Bogotá took 12 hours. The DC-3 could do it in just under an hour.

Cockpit of the DC-3, with seats for pilot,
co-pilot, a third crew-member, and to
offer one passenger a remarkable
vicarious experience.

When the DC-3 went into production in the mid 1930’s, it revolutionized passenger airline service. It cut the New York to Los Angeles trip from 38 ½ hours (beginning with a train ride from N.Y. City to Cleveland, and then 13 more stops to L.A.), to 17 ¾ hours, with just three stops. In four years, as one airline after another went to DC-3s, the rate of passenger fatalities per million miles flown fell by four-fifths. Over the same years, the cost of airline tickets fell by half and the volume of passengers more than quintupled. DC-3s had captured 90% of the world’s airline traffic. By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Douglas Company had built 507 of the DC-3s. War brought a military version, the C-47, and production that reached 4,878 in 1944 alone.

The DC-3 assembly line shut down in 1945. That means the airplane that carried my family that last leg to Lomalinda could not have been less than 39 years old. It might have been closer to 48. By comparison, I was 35. Before we left California, we junked the Dodge Dart we’d been driving. It died at 19.

It is difficult to pick a date in automotive history as dramatic as Kitty Hawk, but by 1903, motorcars had almost a century of experimentation behind them and were in production in both Europe and the United States. Still, by 1984, most pre-1945 models saved their public appearances for car shows. Few pre-’45 buses had regular runs and few pre-’45 trucks hauled freight. The DC-3 arrived 32 years into aviation history, and then served widely for roughly 50. This would be like the common-place usage today of a 1940’s telephone, or a 1980 photocopier.

My daughter, earning
her wings as a stewardess.

After World War II, cheap military surplus DC-3s made possible the beginnings of many new airlines, or fell into private hands. From Lomalinda, it was 35 miles in one direction and 60 in the other to find airstrips capable of handling a DC-3. Therefore, when storms sealed off either destination, airplanes landed on our strip to wait out the weather. I remember once counting 13 aircraft crowded in our little parking lot, half of them DC-3s.

In many ways, the DC-3, at age 50, was more comfortable than airplanes fresh off the assembly line today. For one thing, seats seemed roomier, aisles wider, and windows larger. True, the cabins were noisier, and unpressurized. At high altitudes (like over the Andes, to reach Bogotá), passengers sipped oxygen from tubes. I remember one painful flight with a head cold, descending into Lomalinda with the pilot circling the airport an extra two times to give my ears additional time to adjust. But more, I remember the spectacular views of Andes and Llanos.

Sipping oxygen at 16,000 feet
Colombians pass down a story that when God created Colombia, the angels came to complain that no place should be allowed such beauty. God is supposed to have replied, “Yes, but wait until you see what else I will do to it.” In many ways the country has suffered a torturous history, but its landscapes are breath-taking, and to fly over it is dazzling. Few places on earth display as many shades of green, or as wide a variety of clouds, sunsets, or rainbows.

The Colombian Llanos,
under the wing of the DC-3.

I might have ridden the DC-3 eight or ten times. It brought my youngest son home after his birth, brought my in-laws for a visit, and carried my wife and me to a second honeymoon in Bogotá. For part of one flight, I sat in the cockpit’s fourth seat and the pilot pointed out the unremarkable peak of Nevado del Ruiz. On November 13, 1985, a small eruption of the volcano melted the snowcap and sent a wave of boiling mud across the town of Armero, killing some 23,000 in the worst recorded lahar in history. The disaster sent our DC-3 into full-time relief service. Even at fifty, this veteran was not an air-show classic. It was still a workhorse.

For this reason, it came as a shock when the government decided no longer to allow DC-3s over the Andes. Ours had superchargers on the engines that gave them extra power and safety, and our pilots trooped to government offices looking for an exemption, but to no avail. Unable to use it for the Bogotá run, we had no choice but to sell it. My last photographs of the DC-3 are from 1987. I was told the plane had been purchased by a company that flew tourists over the Grand Canyon. It continued to serve.

This year, aficionados celebrated the DC-3’s three-quarters of a century with a formation flight across Wisconsin. Twenty-three DC-3s landed together in Oshkosh; of 26 that had had gathered at Rock Falls, Illinois, to attempt the flight; of the hundred or so still operational in the United States; of the some fifteen thousand made during the decade of their construction. Would you like one? I see this one advertised for only $299,000.

I found some of my history for this here.

Merry Christmas to All!

2010-12-25T10:44:00.000-08:00

For many people, "Christmas Tree" means an evergreen with fancy glass balls and strings of lights. In Colombia, it was leafless stem and branches, wrapped in cotton and decorated with ornaments. I'm coming to appreciate the persimmon tree in my back yard, which hides most of its fruit until the cold weather strips it of its foliage. Then the bright orange ornaments stand out against the gray sky, each one a sweet gift. Merry Christmas, everyone.

新年快乐 (Xin Nian Kuai Le!), 2011 Rabbit Version

2010-12-22T05:59:00.000-08:00

When is Chinese New Year? The calendar tells us the Year of the Rabbit doesn't begin until February 3, 2011, but my scientific study shows that the anticipation of it started about a week ago.

It has become a peculiar annual pattern here at Capers with Carroll that in mid December, Sitemeter reports that my February 1, 2008 New Year's greeting becomes more popular than anything I have written before or since. Throughout the year, a smattering of visitors arrive by Googling either "新年快乐" or "Xin Nian Kuai Le," but suddenly, a week ago, it became a torrent. The Capers archives store 148 entries on a wide variety of topics, but over the last nine days, a full third of the traffic has come for this single, two-year-old post. How can that be? The last ten hits have come from Poland, France, Germany, Thailand, Italy, Canada, and two each from Singapore and Vietnam. Perhaps these place-names define the Chinese diaspora. I do not understand this phenomenon, but like other mysteries in life, I can enjoy it without knowing how it works.

And so, I send my New Year's greetings in advance, to all the Chinese (and other Asians) spread around the world: Xin Nian Kuai Le!

(P.S., This post received such heavy traffic, especially from Singapore, UK, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, UAE, and the European continent, that I wrote about it here.)

Christmas with Huckabee

2010-12-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

Can't Wait Till Christmas
by Mike Huckabee

Reading level: Ages 4-8
Hardcover: 32 pages
Publisher: Putnam Juvenile (October 5, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0399255397
ISBN-13: 978-0399255397

With back-to-back best-sellers about Christmas, one might believe that Mike Huckabee was an active candidate for Santa Claus, rather than an unannounced candidate for President of the United States. The two roles have several similarities.

For starters, both Santa and presidential campaigners come with fictions that everyone recognizes, but with which all participants play along. In this case, we have the fiction that Huckabee has not decided whether or not to run. Like sports seasons, campaigns break down into practice games, league play, and a national championship. During preseason play, candidates romance the voters with the fantasy that they have not made up their minds about running. For Huckabee to say he’s not running is comparable to the San Diego Padres saying, “It hurt a lot last year to get beat in the play-offs by the Giants, so we’re coming to Spring Training this year, but we haven’t decided yet whether we will play any regular season games.” While it’s true that candidates may drop out at any time (and at a rate of about one every-other week during primary season), about a dozen Republicans could now be described as running until-they-are-forced-to-drop-out. In this pack, Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich stand out as the leaders.

In 2009, I supported Huckabee in the primaries and waited for him to make a local appearance, if not in Visalia, then in Fresno or Bakersfield. When he never came, I realized he had chosen not to contest California. Huckabee has now worked Visalia twice in 20 months (he spoke at the Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast in May, 2009). We may be a city of only 125,000, but we’re the commercial center of a red county in a blue state, and a link in California’s Bible belt. This time, it’s safe to say Huckabee plans to do battle in the California primary.

After writing several books on public policy and a couple of exhortations in favor of weight loss and building a legacy, the pair of Christmas books might seem a little innocuous. Not so. The Christmas season follows immediately after the November elections and allows Huckabee to hit the stump before the last recounts have been decided from the midterm contests. It also quietly plays the nostalgia card for Huckabee’s base. There is considerable resentment that Winter Holidays have supplanted Christmas Vacations. It certainly wasn’t that way in the 1950’s, when these autobiographical stories took place.

Last year’s A Simple Christmas told 12 stories from Huckabee’s childhood. They stress the influences and events that built his character. (And certainly character is one of Huckabee’s long suits: there will be no intern embarrassments or Watergate burglaries from a Huckabee presidency.) Each story teaches a lesson, and some express Huckabee’s Christian faith. This year’s Can’t Wait Till Christmas takes just one of those stories, adds pictures, and reworks it as a children’s story.

The plot is simple. Young Mike and his somewhat older sister cannot resist sneaking a peek at the Christmas presents wrapped under the tree. One thing leads to another until Mike is re-wrapping a dirty football to return to the pile. His sister is re-wrapping a slightly used chemistry set. They are discovered. Parental wisdom and mercy prevail, but a lesson is learned about the importance of patience.

Or has it really been learned? This two-week, “non-political” book tour started at the Richard Nixon Library (how’s that for an icon of non-politicosity?), and runs to Seattle, with multiple signings each day. Huckabee appears to be chomping at the bit to launch a campaign that technically won't start for another year. Notice the transportation being used for this tour. I ask my author friends: have you ever traveled to a book-signing in this kind of style?

Or has your publisher hired personal assistants to travel ahead, to organize the crowd before your arrival, and then to open and hold the books for economy of motion as you sign and give handshakes as well? (The guffaws some of you may hear are my writing friends exchanging book-signing stories.)

I was about 12 when I attended my first celebrity autograph event, Sandy Koufax coming to a local bank to sign souvenir plastic bats. At 14, as a reporter for my junior high newspaper, I went through the reception line twice in order to interview Nelson Rockefeller in his primary contest against Barry Goldwater. I’ve attended presidential campaign rallies with Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Shirley Chisholm, and George McGovern, and author signings by Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Franzen, Randy Alcorn, T. Davis Bunn, and Jerry B. Jenkens. All of my experience tells me this was a campaign stop, not a book signing.

Yet it was very impressive, and scrupulously clean. There were no sign-up tables, campaign buttons, or literature handouts. The press release said he would be at Borders in the evening, from eight until nine, and sign 400 books, signature only—no personal inscriptions. Borders distributed numbered tickets throughout the day, and began organizing the line at 7:00. The ~~candidate~~ author arrived four minutes early (Clinton would have been 90 minutes late), as personable and at-ease as I have ever seen any person at the center of attention. Perhaps 250 people stood ready. (For a children’s book, reading level four to eight, surprisingly few of the attendees were under voting age.) When people asked for anything extra, he politely told them he needed to get signatures for everybody first, but they could try coming through the line a second time. I had him sign his 2009, Do The Right Thing, and then went and got a second book. As the numbers thinned, he began posing for pictures. When Pictures slowed, Borders employees rolled out several carts with another couple hundred books, which his staff fed him assembly-line style. Finally, at six minutes past nine, he was out the front door and back on the bus. At each step in the process, as people encouraged him to run or promised to vote for him, he graciously thanked them for the comment, but stated that he hadn’t made any decision.

So does any of the imposture put me off? No. Two years ago Huckabee was my favorite candidate based on issues. Now I’ve seen him up close. He is the most talented politician I have ever seen, winsome, easy-going, yet remarkably self-disciplined.

In a manner of speaking, I can’t wait till Christmas.

Try a Feijoa-Colada

2010-11-27T13:34:00.000-08:00

Later today I will harvest this year’s last feijoas (a.k.a., pineapple guava, or guavasteen; Acca sellowiana, syn. Feijoa sellowiana). A few I will spoon out and eat fresh, but most I will puree and pour into ice trays. The fruit comes ripe in October, but I find its robust flavor most agreeable on hot summer days, and then iced and diluted with coconut juice.

Most gardeners allow their feijoas to fall to the ground, unused. As a shrub or small tree, it makes a nice hedge or stand-alone ornamental. The fruit falls while still hard, and then needs a day or two before it softens to the touch and is ready to eat. Left on the ground, they go bad quickly, but I set mine in a box indoors until I can process them.

The fruit packs a burst of unique flavor, sometimes more than the uninitiated is prepared for, and especially when left in the skin. It compares to a citrus zest, with uses in salsas, chutneys, or sweetbreads, but even diced small in a fruit salad, I have seen plates come back to the kitchen with the feijoas pushed to the side.

However, almost daily throughout this past summer, I enjoyed a frothy mug of iced feijoa-colada, from cubes I froze this time last year. When pureeing the feijoa, skin and all, I use canned coconut juice for any necessary liquid, and then use chilled coconut juice to blend the drink on the sweltering summer days when I am ready to enjoy it. The two flavors balance well, zesty but sweet, and require no additional ingredients.
(Note: I once offered a taste of feijoas to a class of students and two members of the class experienced minor reactions, passing about an hour in drowsiness. I searched the web for some mention of this, without seeing anything, but two students was eight percent of my sample, and their drowsiness came on rather quickly after tasting the fruit.)

Thanksgiving Salad: Persimmons, Pomegranates, and Kiwis

2010-11-22T19:23:00.000-08:00

Many Novembers ago I came home from a farmers’ market with a collection of persimmons, pomegranates, and kiwis. I mixed them in a salad and was so pleased with the results that it became my default offering for any potluck or party between Columbus Day and New Years’. Now I have all three planted in my yard. I’m a devotee of local fruit.

I like the colors in this salad, as well as the flavors and textures. The kiwis are soft, sweet, and gently tangy. The fuyu persimmons add crunch like a crisp pear and hint at cinnamon with their flavor. The pomegranates explode between the teeth and turn to a winsome juice. (Some varieties can be a little tart, but the one I grow is wonderful.) Occasionally I’ve thrown in late-harvest grapes (a purple-black variety is available in my local farmers markets), or fresh pineapple if I’m willing to cheat and add a yellow import.

The slicing and husking for a large bowl of this salad takes about an hour. Most varieties of kiwis require peeling, while pomegranates must be carefully coaxed from their shells. Persimmons can be eaten in the skin, but for salads I prefer to take it off. Both pomegranates and persimmons are long-lived in a fruit bowl (and longer with refrigeration), but the kiwi presents itself with a shorter window of readiness. I have kept them in a frig for up to ten weeks, but I’ve learned to put soft ones in cold storage and hard ones out on the sink four to seven days before I will need them.

The photograph shows the version I made tonight. I had three helpings at dinner, and may have another bowl before bed. Enjoy.

Right Place at the Right Time

2010-11-16T21:14:00.000-08:00

God's Guest List: Welcoming Those Who Influence Our Lives
by Debbie Macomber
• Hardcover: 208 pages (also available for Kindle)
• Publisher: Howard Books (November 2, 2010)
• ISBN-10: 143910896X

It’s always fun to be anthologized. It means an author interested in a subject surveyed the available literature and found one’s offerings noteworthy. That kind of complement puts an extra zest into sitting down at the keyboard for one’s next efforts.

Debbie Macomber has had a career in fiction that proves the power of plodding. I heard her tell her own story at the Mount Hermon writer’s conference, where she was the keynote speaker in 2008. A dyslexic with only a high school education and toddlers to care for, she yearned to be a novelist. Macomber tells the story with humor, but what I took away concerned a tenacity that eventually paid off with over 150 novels published, and over 60 million copies sold. Within the industry, people also mention her stunning accomplishment in maintaining a mailing list with every person who ever expressed an interest in her writing (begun in a shoebox, before the advent of computers), and her use of that list for a steady output of thank-you notes and personal invitations anytime she would be appearing in an area or releasing a new book.

Macomber was fun to listen to, and some of her modules show up in this volume, one of her rare ventures into non-fiction. Of course, that’s not why I’m plugging her book on my blog. However, the explanation begins with that same 2008 conference at Mount Hermon. It's a right-place-at-the-right-time story about getting into an anthology of right-place-at-the-right-time stories. There, at a meal, I briefly met Janet Kobobel Grant, of the Books and Such Literary Agency.

After the conference, I put the agency blog, Between the Lines, on my reader. The agency’s members rotate the duties and host one of the better daily conversations about writing and the publishing industry. Over these 30 months, I have joined in when the topic brought something to my mind.

A writer is only a writer if he or she writes. My problem is that teaching junior high school is an extreme sport. After running 7:30 to 3:00 on adrenalin, trying to stay one step ahead of 120 teens, the kids leave and I go brain-dead and drowsy. Sometimes in the evening I write tests or worksheets. I don’t have the oomph to work on my novel. But a couple times a week I might have the energy to craft one good paragraph and leave it somewhere on a blog.

So when I returned to Mount Hermon for this year’s Christian Writers’ Conference, I made a point of searching out the Books and Such table at lunch the second day. Wendy Lawton was already seated and was asking people’s names. I gave her mine and her eyes dropped immediately to my name badge, “Oh,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to get in touch with you.”

For an unpublished author, that kind of opening line from a respected agent is about as good as it can get. But it got better. Wendy explained that she was working with Debbie Macomber on a book project and they wanted my permission to include an anecdote I had posted on their blog. It’s an account from my 2004 trip to China. I’d already reported a variation of it here, but it was a rich enough experience that it could be told from a dozen different angles, each supporting a different thesis. In this case, I offered it in response to comments Wendy had posted about literary pilgrimages.

The upshot is, this week’s mail brought a signed copy of Debbie Macomber’s new book, God’s Guest List: Welcoming Those Who Influence Our Lives. (I'm sure I've also made it onto her prodigious address list.) She asks the reader to look at those times in our lives when we were at the right place at the right time and to acknowledge that these weren’t coincidences. Some of this overlaps the keynote addresses she gave at Mount Hermon, other parts of it are new. Some of it is her own story. Some of it comes from others. And page 72 is all mine.

Before her career got off the ground, Macomber made a list of famous people she wanted to meet and began pecking away at it. However, as she began to actually meet some of these people she found herself disappointed. Up close, some of the famous turned out to be unimpressive or even unpleasant. That caused her to begin looking closer at the non-famous, the people all around her whom she had previously looked right past. Then she began to examine those "coincidental" moments that she had previously not focused on, and to gather similar experiences from others. From those examinations came this book.

Like any anthology, it can be read straight through, or in small doses. I’ll admit: I skimmed through until I found page 72. Now I’ve gone back and read some of the passages I skipped over, and others beyond. There’s some interesting stuff. It’s a book I can enjoy being a part of. I was at the right place at the right time, and I'm glad for it.

Savoring a Tiny Dragon

2010-11-07T19:16:00.000-08:00

It wasn't very big, but neither was it going to get any bigger, so today I clipped my little dragon fruit and split it with Vicki. That works out to 46 days from hand pollination to plate, and puts an end to the fun little episode that began here. It was delicate, sweet, and everything I could have asked for, except bigger. The main suspense came with the first slice of the skin, since I had been hoping for the variety with white insides rather than purple. The dragon gratified even that desire. Ah, the little delights of life.

Actually, for a garden that gets very little attention after school starts in August, I continue to find delights anytime I can get out there. It is a full week into November, but rather than calling it quits for the year, two varieties of passion vine seem to be accelerating their bloom. The red Passiflora vitifolia opens upward, while the lavender P. amethyst (amethystina?) wants to hang its blossoms downward.

Today I harvested both the lingering summer crops (cherry tomatoes and a handful of Italian Honey Figs), fall crops (persimmons, pomegranates, and pineapple guavas), and a winter crop (one freak navel orange).

Oh, and one tropical fruit that shouldn't even grow in our area . . .

. . . a delightful little Chinese dragon.

My Dragon Fruit at 39 Days

2010-10-31T17:53:00.001-07:00

If we can pull away from the California elections, long enough to focus on more important things, the most profound question of the moment is whether my Chinese Dragon Fruit is at its peak of ripeness. I reported September 22nd about the first blossom I've ever had on my several-year-old vine, and about hand pollinating it. I'd read that these fruit ripened at 30 days, but this one didn't start showing color until about five days ago. Now the big question: When will it be at perfection?

Okay, back to my election endorsements.

(P.S., the delectable continuation of this saga can be found here.)

Election 2010: Beware the Gerrymanderati, Props 20 and 27

2010-10-30T10:09:00.000-07:00

Few things in legislative craft are as easy to dislike or as difficult to eradicate as the gerrymandered district. A basic tenant of the American democratic ideal is that the last safe seat should have been the one held by the Kings George, First, Second, and Third.

It is not so in practice: safe seats—oftentimes gerrymandered—are the norm, at least in California. In California elections since the last redistricting (2002), there have been 692 races for state senate or assembly or federal congressperson. An astounding 687 (99.3%) resulted in a return of the same party to the seat. Although term limits denied reelection to some individual officeholders, one party was able to wrest a seat away from the other party only 5 times.

This was never supposed to happen. When the founding fathers designed our system of government, the legislature was supposed to be so close to the people that it would shift with their every mood, even if turbulent or Tea Party-esque. Alexander Hamilton feared this and wanted senators appointed for life (he also wanted a king), but was overruled by the majority.

A few years ago I attended a Visalia forum for candidates who hoped to represent California’s 34th Assembly district. One candidate came from Lone Pine. As the crow flies that is only about 80 miles, but no respectable crow would fly it and no road braves it, for it requires going over the backbone of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, with its passes between here and Lone Pine up at about 12,000 feet. The candidate from Lone Pine had to drive some 235 miles and travel through two other assembly districts to get here.

When I study the outlines of my district, its geographic center seems to be in empty desert, about 20 miles north east of Calico Ghost Town, roughly 220 miles from my home, or four hours by car. I believe half that distance would take me to the center of four or maybe five other assembly districts. I am disenfranchised because my assemblyperson must drive for seven hours to get from one end of her district to the other, while some of her peers can do the same in 45 minutes. This means that my representative is left with less time to devote to representing me, simply because of the gerrymander.

But worse, if 99.3% of elections serve to maintain the status quo, every voter is disenfranchised, because every legislator is allowed to get comfortable, unless they so anger voters from their own party as to bring on a contested primary.

Voters thought they had changed this for state races with Prop 11, in 2008. Many voters hoped this year’s Prop 20 would extend the correction to congressional districts. The gerrymanderati countered with Prop 27, which would undo Prop 11 and save the safe seats.

Any reader who has come this far knows where my sympathies lie on these two propositions. However, in poking around on the Web, I first got swept away by websites devoted to the weird shapes of gerrymandered districts, and then by a couple of names that jolted me back to some foreboding memories from my youth.

In 1971, I took a part-time job as a custodian for a rundown strip-mall in Van Nuys. It was the perfect set-up for a UCLA student, $200-a-month for odds and ends I could fit around my class schedule. The downside was the creepiness of the people I was working for. I never passed by my boss’s office without wondering if I was working for Mafia dons. I never saw the boss and his brother together without the feeling they were plotting to take over the world. I stuck out the year, graduated, and quit.

It turns out I was half right. They were not Mafia dons. They were plotting to take over the world. And they have been remarkably successful at doing so. Before I had ever even seen a computer, Michael Berman understood that it could be used to assemble mailing lists of niche interest groups that would allow politicians to target a large collection of small audiences with sometimes contradictory promises. Then, computers could facilitate the otherwise tedious process of drawing gerrymandered districts. His methodology became the fountainhead of Democratic successes from Willie Brown to Nancy Pelosi, and propelled his brother Howard to chairmanship of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. As one article explains, by following the money, it becomes evident that Prop 27 is largely inspired for protecting Howard Berman’s funny-shaped (my Rorschach results: Frankenstein on skis) district, to the larger end—through his chairmanship—of protecting Israel. (Full disclosure: like many Evangelicals, I am highly favorable toward American support of Israel, though I would like to see it accomplished by way of honest elections.)

I do not get to vote in Mr. Berman’s district (though my assembly district nearly curves around to the other side of it). But I do get to vote against this kind of districting. In an earlier endorsement, I said I would support Prop 25 (to pass the budget by simple legislative majority) only if it came as a package with Prop. 20. As it stands now, the two-thirds majority is necessary because 99.3% of our elections serve to protect safe seats.

I will watch the polls until the last minute. If Prop 20 looks like it will win, and Prop 27 looks like it will lose, then and only then will I vote for Prop 25.

Note: Connie Conway is the assemblyperson in my safe-seat Republican district. I’ve followed Connie since she succeeded her father as county supervisor. I am happy with her and would probably vote for her even if she had a serious challenge.

*These numbers come from a Visalia Times-Delta editorial that gave no further source.

Map of Howard Berman's district

Try this for fun.

When the morning commute looks like this . . .

2010-10-28T20:41:00.000-07:00

. . . it must be getting close to the end of Daylight Savings (I think we have nine more days).

A quick word from our Sponsor: "My mercies are new every morning."

Election 2010: Marijuana turns me into a Marxist

2010-10-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

By my title, I don’t mean that smoking it (never have, never will) sends me scurrying for my Mao cap and Ché t-shirt. Rather, in puzzling out how government should treat marijuana, I am very sensitive to social class differences. The Haves with whom I attended UCLA could close their dorm rooms Friday evenings, toke up, and still graduate and go on for their MBA’s. But among the heavily Have-not population where I teach, hop-heads have neither such security nor such safety net. They often fail to graduate from junior high. They become parents while attending a few years of continuation high school. By young adulthood, too many are on to harder substances, in prison, or dead.

Thus, as I come to a study of California Prop 19, the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010, which seeks to relax marijuana laws, I need to make it clear that my sentiments are middle class and my sympathies are for kids growing up in poverty. Rich kids will hire lawyers and avoid jail time. The rich and upper middle can afford to indulge in the so-called “victimless crimes,” while those same behaviors create victims to the third and fourth generation among the poor.

Secondly, I need to point out the sorry history of Nullification. Pennsylvania farmers announced they would not pay the whiskey tax, and Washington and Hamilton stomped them. Jefferson and Madison toyed with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, and lost. Calhoun said South Carolina would not collect the federal tariff, and got swept aside. The Civil War should have settled this question for all time, but for good measure, Orval Faubus stood in the school-house door to block federal integration, and Eisenhower sent the US Army to escort the incoming students to their classrooms. Drug policy, like that for immigration or marriage, needs to be set on a national scale. A single state may set more stringent rules (for example, California’s laws on greenhouse emissions), but can never set the bar lower than the federal laws. Federal policy should never be set by an initiative in California, the legislature in Arizona, or the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. Passage of this proposition on Nov. 2, will open many years of litigation on Nov. 3. Californians would be setting themselves up to forfeit untold federal dollars by drawing a marijuana Mason-Dixon Line at the Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona borders.

The practical purpose of this proposition then must be seen as leverage: California, a state with 53 congressmen, goes on record in opposition to the federal law. California, owner of a 10.2% share in the Electoral College, will now have the right to ask any visiting presidential candidate what he or she plans to do to remedy the situation. Maybe we would start a bandwagon effect. Maybe down the road we would see change in the federal law. There may or may not be merit in this argument. California voters have twice passed defense-of-marriage initiatives, with the total number of states that have passed traditional marriage constitutional amendments topping 30. Thus far, however, I see no congressional momentum for national legislation. This would seem to undermine the argument in favor of leverage. Any readers who have come this far looking only for my recommendation on Prop 19 may stop here. Proposition 19 is rejected as out of order.

Nevertheless, the subject having come up, I have a few additional thoughts over a full, federal legalization of marijuana. The best reasons have very little to do with California, at all.

Personal experience #1 – I walk into a restroom and the twelve-year-old is quick enough to flick his joint into the toilet tank, but a little too tipsy to correctly manipulate the handle. The ten year old is blurry-eyed and can only stammer bad answers to my questions.

Personal experience #2 – I discuss Prop 19 with five classes of 7th and 8th graders, and ask midway through each what it probably costs in our area for a kilo of marijuana. Five consecutive classes each settle quickly in the $450 ballpark. I have no way of knowing if they were correct, but the agreement was startling, and every class knew whom to turn to as the in-house expert.

Personal experience #3 – Juan, teacher in a thatched-roof jungle school house and a friend from my days in Colombia, is pulled from his classroom by drug-financed revolutionaries, taken to the village square, and shot, only because he serves in a government school.

From the first two experiences, I learn that whatever we’re currently doing has only limited success among the 12 or 14-year-olds I care about and can put faces to. The truth is, most of my students are clean. And for the minority who are using, the marijuana is probably a symptom—not the origin—of their pathologies (though it may serve as an accelerator). Even, though, at some $450/kilo, and when we know it will be a curse on their lives, we are currently incapable of keeping it out of their hands.

But I have experience at both ends of the pipeline. As Haves, our buying power has the ability to destabilize any number of Have-not nations to the south of us. I can remember life in Colombia during a couple of years when drug cartels assassinated a judge, on average, every other week. Over the last decade and a half, Colombia has reestablished a fair degree of order, but the price has been a government willing to overlook thousands of extrajudicial killings of mostly Have-not peasants by mostly Have “self-defense” forces. For two decades, the US has been funding one side of the civil war with military aide and the other side of the war with our appetite for “victimless” recreational highs.

Proponents of Prop 19 argue that decriminalizing marijuana will save us enormous sums of money, redirect police attention toward violent crime, and provide a windfall in taxes. I believe all three claims rest on doubtful assumptions, but we have been suckered by such promises before. The state lottery, we were told when we voted for it, would dry-up illegal gambling and insure great wealth for our schools. Instead, it has saddled Have-nots with a massive regressive tax, trained up a clientele for a vibrant-but-untaxable underground gambling industry, fostered a get-rich-quick mentality that helped fuel the housing bubble, and left us with schools that are starved for basic necessities.

However—and I offer this very tentatively—a reevaluation of our entire national drug policy (not a substance-by-substance approach) might make sense as an act of neighborly concern. Our Have drug appetite today is financing war in Have-not Mexico between over-funded thugs and an under-funded government. Legalizing marijuana (and thus reducing its price [and then you would also have to consider the likes of cocaine]) might take the lifeblood away from a criminal element that has become a force unto itself inside our closest neighbor.

I know, I’m talking like a Marxist.

Election 2010: Why this Republican will vote for Jerry Brown

2010-10-09T08:46:00.000-07:00

It has been some thirty years since I last voted for a Democrat. I’d just about concluded I might never do it again. After all these years, my memory is a little foggy, but I’m inclined to think I voted to elect a young Jerry Brown for governor of California in 1974 (over Houston Flournoy), and maybe again in 1978 (over Evelle Younger). I know I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and liked him even as I grew more disgusted with his party. I know my last vote for a Democrat was in 1980, when I supported Rose Ann Vuich, my local state senator. She had given me almost two hours for an in-depth newspaper interview on California issues, and I came away so impressed that I could not vote against her, even if she was a Democrat.

But I have now gone 30 years without being seriously tempted to do it again. I told myself to watch for and support Pro-Life Democrats, but I saw a pattern develop. The Democratic Party took Pro-Life individuals like Ted Kennedy, Jessie Jackson, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore, and subverted them to the Pro-Abortion mold. I watched them marginalize Pro-Life voices like Pennsylvania’s Robert Casey, Sr., and Bob Casey, Jr. The party is inextricably captive to Big Abortion—America's most unregulated industry—necrotrophic and eugenicidal, extending its corruption into our national fabric in countless hidden ways. Yet it has only to clap a “Choice” riff with its forceps and scissors and the Democratic Party leaps to form a conga line.

Even so, this year I found myself inching closer to voting Democratic again. Inching until I could no longer ignore where I stood.

I will not vote for Barbara Boxer. Every once in a while during Dianne Feinstein’s 18 years in the Senate, I’ve opened the newspaper to read some statement she has made, and had to admit, “Yeah, much as I dislike like her, she is probably right on that one.” But during the same years, I have never had to make a similar comment about Boxer. She is the politician I would most like to send into retirement this year. I may still harbor some reservations about Carly Fiorina, but if I had a thousand votes, she would get them all.

I am thinking instead about Jerry Brown. I am free to do that because no matter who we vote for, the next governor of California will be Pro-Abortion. (Note: I realize the self-referential term for this is “Pro-Choice,” but I find that disingenuous.) The Pro-Life contenders all fell away during the primary. I have looked at all the third party candidates. None has a chance to win, and none deserves one. I am left to choose between Brown and Meg Whitman.

I go way back with Brown. I attended L.A. Pierce College while he cut his political teeth serving on the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees. Later, while attending UCLA, I discovered him standing at a little podium on the Free Speech Lawn. I joined six or eight other students to listen until my next class. He was thoughtful and engaging.

Brown served four years as secretary of state and eight as governor. He earned the moniker “Governor Moonbeam” for a certain zen goofiness, but the nuttiness in Brown’s administration was hope in the jojoba bean, or roller-skating with Ronstadt under the rotunda (full disclosure: one of my all-time favorite albums is Linda Ronstadt’s Canciones de Mi Padre). We chuckled over his personal frugality. Brown paid more to mothball the extravagant Reagan-built governor’s mansion than he spent to rent an apartment and sleep on a tatami mat. But his penny-pinching carried over to government finance. When California passed Prop 13, Brown carefully cut the state budget to what we could live on. He earned the endorsement of Howard Jarvis. (Yeah, wrap your head around that one.)

An ex-governor at age 45, Brown became something of a Harold Stassen, running three times for president and once for senator. But in an age when ex-presidential candidates golf, peddle their memoirs, or do talk-shows for FOX (okay, bad image, for Brown it would be NPR), Brown ran for mayor of Oakland. This is akin to ex-president Jimmy Carter nailing shingles for Habitat for Humanity, or ex-president Theodore Roosevelt serving in Liberia with the Peace Corps (I may have that one wrong, but I know he was doing something in Africa). Mayors of Palm Springs do photo ops with starlets. Mayors of Oakland do middle-of-the-night triage. And by all accounts, he did it well.

Then Brown moved on to become California’s attorney general. During these three years, what I notice is Brown’s commitment to carrying out the law as it is written, even when it may disagree with his personal inclination. I happen to agree with Brown on Capital Punishment: the death penalty is wrong, but needs to be enforced until the voters prohibit it.

Meanwhile, Meg Whitman was acquiring her personal billion-some dollars and finding it too inconvenient to get over to her precinct voting booth to perform the most basic duty of citizenship. (She was, however, free with her checkbook: apparently paupers vote while billionaires buy. She is on record donating and even campaigning for, um . . . Barbara Boxer.)

When Whitman decided to enter politics herself, she quickly hired as adviser the best ex-governor money could buy, Pete Wilson. By coincidence, it is Pete Wilson I hold personally responsible for the current sad condition of the Republican Party in California. AWOL where Republican instincts are best (Life), Wilson had to demagogue where they are worst (immigration xenophobia, deregulation of historically dangerous businesses and industries, and guns). In the process he permanently alienated the ever-growing Hispanic community, ripe with its Family Values voters. For short-term political gain, Wilson was willing to sacrifice the future of both my state and my party. Yet now, every pirouette in Whitman’s dance bears Wilson’s choreography.

However, the greatest difference between Whitman and Brown may come in the fine print of their position statements. For starters, Whitman doesn’t have much. Her pronouncements skim along the surface with well-vetted platitudes. In contrast, Brown’s come loaded with the kinds of minutia gleaned over a lifetime of trying to solve the Gordian knots of public policy.

Take one area that matters to me: Education. As a teacher married to a teacher, I’d come to the conclusion that testing corporations do not so much serve the teachers, students, or parents of our state as hold them for ransom. California pays these corporations enormous sums of money and then submits itself to the corporations’ convenience. Rather than have the summer to digest test information and make reasoned decisions about how to improve a program, the corporations deliver scores for April tests in mid August, after most schools have spent June and July designing course offerings and student schedules. It is an annual ritual in my home for my math-department-chairperson wife to start the first day of school exhausted from a series of all-nighters reworking the program after the last-minute delivery of four-month-old data. With that in mind, let me quote just one short section of Brown’s education proposal, as a representative sample that demonstrates the quality of the whole:

Our current State testing program costs over $100 million, is more than 10 years old, and is not as helpful as it could be to parents and educators. It is time to make some basic changes to improve our testing system.

Typically, tests are given in the spring over a 3-day period and results come back in August. Final school accountability scores aren’t ready for almost a year.

These tests should be reduced in scope and testing time, and results need to be provided to educators and parents far more quickly.
These year-end tests should be supplemented by very short assessments during the school year. The assessment goal should be to help the teachers, students and their families know where they stand and what specific improvements are needed.
Tests should not measure factoids as much as understanding.
Finally, state tests should be linked to college preparation and career readiness, but current tests were not designed to do this.

(Full text here)
(Um, Meg, this is it?)

Do I resent the way Meg Whitman has used her money to buy my party’s nomination, water down or erode its core values, and stifle intelligent political discussion?

Yes.

Is that the main reason I will be voting for Jerry Brown?

No.

Much as I disagree with Jerry Brown over the issue that has most animated my political decisions over the last 30 years, when the abortion issue is neutralized, Jerry Brown really is a fine candidate for governor.

Election 2010, My Endorsements

2010-10-05T22:49:00.000-07:00

With the November 2 election day just three weeks away, it is time to pull out my sample ballot and make some decisions. It is also time to celebrate political freedoms that allow every citizen to speak out and let their opinions be heard. Today I’ve been looking at California’s Prop 25.

Officially described as, “Changes Legislative Vote Requirement to Pass a Budget from Two-Thirds to a Simple Majority. Retains Two-Thirds Vote Requirement for Taxes. Initiative Constitutional Amendment,” Proposition 25 is an attempt to change a system that habitually fails to deliver a state budget when it is due (June 15). It has only been on time once in 24 years. In 2008, California went without a budget until September 16. In 2009 it was later. Today, 93 days into the 2010 budget year, the governor and legislative leaders have a plan they have mutually slapped backs over, but it won’t have legislative approval for at least two more days. In the meantime we maintain skeleton services by rotating one-size-fits-all unpaid days off for state workers. Clearly the system is broken.

Even so, until today, I was hesitant to support Prop 25. What changed today was a California Supreme Court unanimous decision that our governor does, indeed, have a line item veto. Hypothetically, the duties of a governor should be, in this order: 1) administer legislation passed by the legislature, including the spending of money allocated in the budget, 2) supply information and direction to the legislature on necessary course-changes, and 3) veto legislative nonsense. California’s recent history, however, has necessitated a reverse in that order. First, the nonsense has been preponderant, spending us into a hole from which we cannot climb out. Second, when there is no money, its administration is impossible. For all practical purposes, however, it has been left up to the legislature’s minority party to supply the necessary veto. Today’s ruling returns the veto to its proper place with the governor.

Prop 25 also penalizes all members of the legislature by eliminating their pay during any period the state is without a budget. This is good, but I hope later changes will go even further. Producing a budget is the number one job of the legislature, yet even during these 93 days without a budget, the legislature has divided its attention along a wide variety of rabbit trails. First, I would like to suggest that one week before the deadline, if preliminary versions have not passed each house separately, all work on other legislation be suspended, unless the governor declares an emergency. Then, once the state enters the budget year without a budget, no non-budgetary vote by either house would be valid, unless declared emergency by the governor. Second, I would suggest that if the budget becomes one month overdue, no member of the current legislature would be eligible for re-election. I would even balance this last suggestion with a partial relaxation of term limits. No one can argue that California has better government today than we had before term limits. We have only asked lots of freshmen legislators to try and outfox lots of veteran lobbyists. Third, we should pass Prop 20 so that no party in legislative power can so gerrymander the districts that a minority party has unfair difficulty maintaining a reasonable presence in the capital.

Today I received a scare-mail saying Prop 25 would end Prop 13 and raise the taxes on my house to 1.14% of Fair Market Value. However, I find the following in the text of the bill (section 3: Purpose and intent, paragraph 2) "This measure will not change Proposition 13's property tax limitations in any way. This measure will not change the two thirds vote requirement for the legislature to raise taxes." If I am reading that wrong, or somehow missing some insidious fine print, I will reconsider. But otherwise, I am going to vote for both Prop 25 and Prop 20.

One-Night Stand with a Chinese Dragon

2010-09-22T21:18:00.001-07:00

Some twenty-five years ago in a Bogotá market, I met my first yellow pitayas, a fist-sized fruit with a bumpy rind and delicate white flesh. I rummaged through the pile and found one with enough of its cactus stem attached that I could try rooting it. It grew but never thrived nor blossomed. I brought a cutting from that plant through customs in 1990, but lost it to a freeze. By the time I tried to bring another cutting through customs, the Hylocereus megalanthus was protected as an endangered species and I lost my sample to confiscation.

Eventually a member of the California Rare Fruit Growers offered me cuttings of both the pitaya and its near cousin, the Chinese Dragon Fruit (Hylocereus undatus), but I’ve never had the right place, or the right climate, or the right touch. They grow best in places like Thailand. I’ve waited in vain, watching for my first blossom.

Last night it came. My potted and trellised vine sprawls in a hard-to-reach corner of my sun-porch, but I noticed a tiny bud last week. It grew at a rate of over an inch a day until it reached eleven inches. I lived in fear of missing its brief appearance. The Hylocereus blossom only opens once, for seven or eight hours, in the middle of the night. When I found it open, I was most surprised to see an off-center pistil overlooking a mass of delicate stamens. Its smell was noticeable, though drab, but the flower was stunning. I quick snapped some pictures, brought my wife out for a viewing, and plucked some stamens for hand-pollination.

Now I must wait to see if my efforts will pay off. My reading tells me the Dragon Fruit needs thirty days from blossom to mature fruit. I’m counting.

The picture at left is from a Dragon Fruit I enjoyed in Kunming, China.

Update: Almost ripe at day 39.

A Passion for Passion Vine

2010-09-18T22:21:00.000-07:00

One of my delights this past month has been a new hedge of passion vine along my back fence. My impetus was new construction on the vacant lot behind us: I wanted some quick privacy. Since I had developed a fondness for the genus Passiflora while living in South America, I decided to try several species, some for their spectacular flowers, some for their fruit (a "sweet granadilla" and the sour "maracuya") and one for its cold hardiness.The first to bloom has been this P. vitifolia. The blossoms last only from sun-up to sun-down, but new ones appear almost daily. So far, none have set fruit, even with my attempts at hand pollination, but I’ve noticed a sudden influx of hummingbirds, fritillary butterflies, and even a swallowtail. Such fun.

Of Time, Setbacks, and God’s Good Gifts

2010-07-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

I have been reminded lately that every day is a bonus, and that gifts sometimes come in strange packages.

In January, after I posted a review of Malcolm Magee’s book on Woodrow Wilson, we became Facebook friends and discovered how much we have in common. Recently he noted that next week he will be celebrating the tenth anniversary of an automobile collision that severed both of his legs (doctors were able to reattach one of them) and twice stopped the beating of his heart. From the distance of ten years he writes, “the accident has been a gift to me.”

His story caused me to count back and realize that this spring marked the thirtieth anniversary of a similar experience in my own life. And yes, it was a gift.

In the spring of 1980, I was enjoying marriage and parenthood, but undergoing trial-by-fire at the hands of my junior high students. Combined, my responsibilities left me exhausted, yet I sensed there was something more I should be doing. I just couldn’t puzzle out what that might be.

I decided to fast and ask God for some direction.

For four or five days I took only water. I had fasted that long once before, without distress, but mid-morning on a Tuesday, I began to feel horrible and decided to order the school lunch. That lunch hit my stomach like an anchor catching mud, but I figured I deserved it for so awkwardly ending a fast. I came back to teach the next day, wondering if maybe I had some kind of flu. Midday Thursday I told the kids not to kill each other, and put my head down on the desk. Finally, Friday, I called for a sub.

Over that weekend, I decided to take a full week off. Sunday I drove to school to lay out lesson plans. The copy machine malfunctioned, so I stretched out on the floor to try repairing it, in more pain than I had ever been in my life. Monday I saw a doctor. Wednesday morning I got an X-ray. Wednesday afternoon I got the results: a large mass in my abdomen could either be a ruptured appendix or colon cancer, more likely the latter, as the appendicitis would have already killed me, several days previously. I went into surgery Thursday, thinking I had advanced cancer.

But it actually was the appendix. I suspect I was alive because my fast had shut down my intestines, slowing the spread of the infection. I came home from the hospital to six weeks of forced rest.

They were good weeks for sitting and thinking. To begin with, I had the joy of knowing I had received a powerful and direct answer to prayer. I had asked God for something more, and for direction, and now He was at work to give me that, and to teach me some valuable lessons.

During my three years of teaching, I had banked nearly six weeks of sick leave because . . . well, I would work even with a ruptured appendix. My primary motivation had been fear. I knew what my junior-high students could do, even when I was there. It terrified me what they might do when I was gone. After my surgery, I realized how much I needed to let go of that.

I also tried to calculate how many Sabbaths I had passed over to do school work: probably something near the number of days I was confined now at home. It struck me that God will collect His Sabbaths one way or another.

Magee notes the “odd progression from suffering to hope” that Paul speaks of in Romans 5. Before the accident he had been “wrestling with the conflict between faith and reason,” so much so that the denomination in which he had pastored expelled him. He reports that after the accident, “for whatever reason those two quit fighting in my head.”

I had been looking for that “something more.” We had already been looking for a new church, one that did a better job of teaching the Bible, but with time to sit and talk with my wife, we realized that we needed to accelerate the effort. Once we did find a church we liked, we experienced the greatest burst of spiritual growth in our lives. Our marriage grew stronger. Our parenting grew more effective, as did my teaching. I had already been considering teaching overseas with a mission organization. After my six weeks at home, it became my passion. It took four years to reach Colombia, but the decade that followed provided both the most fascinating and fulfilling years of my career, and the richest family years. By coincidence, Magee’s father had served as a pilot on the same Bible translation center in the years just before I got there, and his sisters had attended the same little school where I came to teach.

In these ten additional years since his injuries, Magee married off all of his children, watched them spread around the world, and welcomed five grandchildren. In my own additional thirty, I added my last two children, raised all five, watched them spread around the world, and sometime in the next week expect to welcome my fifth grandchild. These have been rich years for both of us, every day a gift.

I am trying to be a novelist, and for each of the stories I have in mind, I already know the endings. I also know how my own story ends: Someday I will leave this body behind and step into the presence of Christ, wearing a new body. In crafting a novel, the protagonist often suffers one big set-back about one-third of the way through the story, and a second major setback at the two-thirds mark. Yet oftentimes, these apparent setbacks turn out to be gifts. My appendectomy came at age thirty, and was a gift. This month, at sixty, I have started treatment for prostate cancer. If this is my second setback, I still have a third of my earthly story ahead of me, if not in actual number of days, at least in narrative content.

But even if I have another thirty years, I get them one bonus day at a time. And I’m going to watch and see how God turns this cancer into a gift.

(Note: I have a daughter who works for Joni Eareckson Tada and Joni’s ministry to the disabled. At the same time I learned of my cancer, Joni went public with hers. On her website I found a link to a very helpful article by John Piper, “Don't Waste Your Cancer.”)

My Three Most Important Life Goals

2010-07-20T23:37:00.000-07:00

(A couple of weeks ago, over on Facebook, my daughter-in-law asked respondents to list their top three life goals and report on whether these had been accomplished. I like Facebook, but it has the problem of dropping things off the bottom of the page. I put some serious thought into my answer, so am reposting it here with some minor reworking.)

Angie,
One goal I had from youth was to see if I couldn't leave the world a better place than when I found it. That is not the kind of goal one finishes and checks off, but I think I can look back on some places where I have exerted some energy in that direction, and on some accomplishments that give me satisfaction. My years in Colombia were very well spent, and whenever I see a public bus in Visalia, I have the satisfaction of knowing my efforts—thirty years ago—were important in getting that system started. I also recognized from a young age that one aspect of this goal would mean finding the right person to marry, and making her life richer for having married me. Another would be raising children who would also leave the world better than they found it. Many of my friends either put off having kids, or had no kids at all, partly on the idea that the world was too crowded and each additional child would be a negative. I felt the total number of people wasn't the problem, but rather the ratio of givers to takers. I think, by God's grace, that Vicki and I have managed to improve on that ratio.

Another goal was to get a well-rounded education. My early heroes were Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. They were interested in almost everything, and not just knowledgeable, but contributors in almost every area where they had interests. Again, no one with this kind of goal can ever say they have arrived. There is always something else to learn. But I deeply enjoy the wide variety of interests and fields where I have some understanding. For me, a broad education requires travel and familiarity with foreign languages. I have traveled extensively, and not just the superficial organized tours or cruises, but going places and involving myself in the lives of the local people. That has added enormous richness to my life. I have a rudimentary reading knowledge of all the major Romance languages, and general use of Spanish, but I still want to learn some Chinese, some Japanese, some Turkish, and better Portuguese. If I continue to lose my hearing, I may have to settle for only reading knowledge, but I don't ever plan to be done.

I also wanted to know why I was here on Earth in the first place. That involved the question of whether or not there is such a person as God, and if so, what God's nature might be, and what this God might expect from me. Again, this is not a goal which one completes and then moves on to something new. I have come to a certainty that God does exist. I reached that conclusion 38 years ago, and each passing year has added to my certainty. But finite creatures can never completely understand an infinite God. There is always something else for God to reveal about Himself. I believe I understand the most important thing God expects of me, and that was settled 38 years ago. But again, when God is finally done expecting new things of me here, He will graduate me to eternity and I can really start learning why He made me in the first place.

Of my other goals, the most important was that I wanted to write. I've written lots of little things, and I'm getting to the big ones. It is an important goal to me, but the other things have all ranged above it. I've also enjoyed teaching, but mainly for the way as it has allowed me to pursue the more important goals. During each era in my life, there have been special, short-term goals, but these have been the goals that I carried with me for the journey.

A Little Memory of John Wooden

2010-06-05T15:28:00.000-07:00

Many people who knew John Wooden much better than I are recounting stories of him today, and I have no original pictures. But I can’t let his passing go completely unmentioned here. Wooden graduated to Heaven yesterday, at 99.

The last time I saw John Wooden was spring of ’72. He came out a side door at Pauley Pavilion, just as I approached, and he gave me a little smile and nod of his head. It was the same door I’d seen Haile Selassie exit from four years earlier, but I’d gotten neither a smile nor a nod on that occasion. Selassie was the reigning emperor of Ethiopia. Wooden, the “Wizard of Westwood,” was the reigning king of college basketball. He’d just won the 8th of his eventual ten NCAA National Championships. At UCLA, his genius was more recognized than any of our Nobel Prize winners. If it had been his nature to be as imperial as Selassie, he had earned the right.

Wooden had given a guest lecture a few weeks earlier in one of my kinesiology classes, but I can’t imagine he still recognized me. I was just one of 35,000 students at UCLA., but more than anything else, Wooden was a teacher. All 35,000 of us were his students, and I got a smile.

I’ve read that after ten national championships he was most proud that his teams ranked highest in number of athletes who actually graduated. I became acquainted with some of those young men, Terry Schofield, Sven Nader, and Keith (later, Jamaal) Wilkes. He recruited athletes of fine character, not just physical prowess. Among his many personal accomplishments, he was proudest of winning the Big Ten Academic Achievement Award (during the year he also led his team to the conference championship) for the highest GPA. He was a remarkable man, a gentleman scholar, and a servant of God, and I was blessed by the little bit he touched my life.

(In poking around on the web, I find this interview with Wooden, in which he quotes a poem written by Sven Nader. Nader lived in our dorm during my sophomore year [as did Wilkes, Bill Walton, and the rest of the freshmen team]. I remember Sven's beautiful singing voice. Seven-footers have a lot of lung capacity.)

AmGen Tour of California

2010-05-20T11:36:00.000-07:00

The AmGen Tour of California's fifth stage (Visalia to Bakersfield) passed about half a mile from our campus today, so I walked a group of 7th graders over to watch the race. It was about twenty-five minutes each way, with another thirty minutes wait once we got there, for about 20 seconds of bicycles, preceded by three minutes of police cars and followed by three minutes of team vehicles. If someone can recognize or label individual riders, I would appreciate it. I'm told Lance Armstrong is is wearing #2, but I couldn't see any numbers, and he certainly didn't stop to chat. They were about seven miles into a ride that will go about 125 today, and finish on Sunday. After the racers blurred past, my students asked, "Is that all of it?" I tried to tell them ahead of time it would be over pretty fast, but it may be one of those things you have to see to understand.

Now we've seen it.

Breaking the winter hiatus

2010-05-02T14:29:00.000-07:00

The poppies are telling me the Capers winter hiatus has extended unbecomingly into the spring. That leads to a problem of surface tension. How does one return to blogging after a twelve-week absence without unleashing all the stored up thoughts? This, in turn, becomes self-perpetuating. When one does not know where to start, one rarely gets started.

I did not mean to leave-off posting. Life happens. Weeds infiltrate. Laundry accumulates. I spend my days teaching junior high: six performances a day in the center ring. Stare them back to their seats, find new ways to entertain them, keep records of everything, hope they don’t call one’s bluff, grade the papers, and pray they’ll somehow pick up what they need for the state tests. Whistle while you work. Collapse in front of the computer screen when the kids go home. There may be energy for Facebook, but not for much else.

This year’s distraction is that a third of the teachers at my school got lay-off notices, me included. I expect that most of us will be hired back by August, but it is one more example of amateur-hour at the highest levels of California government. There are other current events I want to write about, most noticeably the issue of immigration reform. I attended a Tea Party on Tax Day, but I am a party of one, searching among strange bed-fellows for someone to whom I can feel comfortable granting my vote.

I attended the four-day Mount Hermon Christian Writers’ Conference over Palm Sunday weekend. I had attended twice before, and was accompanied this time by my daughter Rebecca. We took a ten-hour class in writing narrative non-fiction from Lynn Vincent. I appreciated Lynn’s work during the ten years she wrote for World magazine, and her recent books have included NY Times bestseller The Same Kind of Different as Me, and Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue. She taught an excellent class, and it has seeded much of my thinking over the last month. Some of those thoughts may turn up here on Capers over the next few weeks.

I also renewed friendships from previous conferences and made new ones. Among the former was Randy Ingermanson, who taught the workshop I participated in two years ago. Among the latter was Dale Cramer. Referring only to the “L word,” Randy pointed Dale out as an author who writes in the same Literary Fiction category where my stories seem to fall. I came home from the conference with a tall stack of books to add to the stack I’m picking up at the Perspectives course I’m taking Sunday nights. Is it just a coincidence that I stopped blog-posting right when the Perspectives course began? I tend to read several books simultaneously and finish a bunch at the same time. The next few weeks may see a slew of Capers book reviews.

I also hope to get back to a series I was running two years ago, on the history of my novel. I posted fourteen episodes and then got interrupted. Fortunately, in the interim, I have made significant progress on the novel itself, and I came home from Mount Hermon with some encouraging feedback from a couple of well-respected agents. If I’m not teaching in the fall, I will be busy finishing the current novel and starting the next two. Capers will also stand to benefit. I wouldn’t expect to see a three month winter hiatus next year.

Hey Tiger (老虎), have a Xīn Nián Kuài Lè (新年快乐) Valentines Day

2010-02-06T22:32:00.000-08:00

This week, as chūnyùn (春运), the largest annual migration on earth (likely 210 million passengers in 40 days), gets underway, it’s time for the Capers with Carroll Annual Chinese New Years Post. Chinese custom says that the third visit makes one a friend, so this third installment of Spring Festival greetings raises our blog-tradition to a new level.

I hope all of my friends in China (and some in Korea and parts of Southeast Asia) enjoy wonderful holidays with their families, and prosperous and healthy new years.

Everything points to an auspicious year for love. For the first time since 1934 (Year of the Dog) and 1953 (Year of the Snake), the lunar calendar teams up with the Gregorian calendar to usher in the Year of the Tiger on the same day as the Western world’s Valentine’s Day. (China celebrates its own version of Valentines Day, qīxījié [七夕节], on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month: August 16th for 2010.) Let’s face it, as Valentine images, dogs and snakes can’t compete with tigers. Go get ‘em tigers!

A lot has changed in a year. Last year, the chūnyùn migration bogged down in the kind of freak snow storm that had the Chinese government working hard to avoid any thoughts that it might have lost what the ancient Chinese referred to as the “Mandate of Heaven.” As I write this, it’s the Atlantic coast of the United States that is bogged down in a storm that mandate-damaged President Obama himself referred to as “Snowmageddon.” We are different cultures, to say the least.

Again this year, my Xīn Nián Kuài Lè posts for 2008 and 2009 begin drawing heavy traffic about six weeks ago. I suspect people are googling the Romanized pinyin spelling and hoping to find the Chinese characters. If so, in the spirit of the season, we here at Capers are pleased to provide this service. To each and every one: a full measure of New Year’s happiness.

Woodrow Wilson, Part 2: The Book Review

2010-01-28T21:53:00.000-08:00

What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy
by Malcolm D. Magee
Baylor University Press, 2008
ISBN 1602580707

The tragedy is that Woodrow Wilson was right. Wilson stood alone as the last best hope of staving off World War II. Of course, that just adds to the enormity of his failure.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was reading Malcolm D. Magee’s What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-based Foreign Policy. (Full disclosure: since my previous post, I have become Facebook friends with Magee.)

Forty pages into the book, I called it a “Woodrow Wilson biography,” but the book is much more focused than the usual biography. Magee gives us only enough biography to explain the mental processes that carried Wilson to his critical moment at Versailles, and there failed him.

The title uses “foreign policy” narrowly, but “faith” broadly. Magee makes no mention of Wilson’s dealings with Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua, or the Bolshevik Revolution (using the take-over of Veracruz Mexico as a sample of Wilson's interventionist policies), nor his reaction to the Balfour Declaration or Armenian genocide. I found myself turning to other sources to fill the gaps. This study’s concept of faith, however, goes beyond Wilson’s understanding of Biblical Christianity. The objects of Wilson’s faith included democracy, the power of his own mind, and a paternalistic sense that as both God’s Man for the Moment and a White American, Wilson could know better what would benefit other countries than the citizens could know for themselves.

Inside Wilson's Faith

From his father, Wilson inherited both a tradition of Presbyterian thought and a mantel of Presbyterian leadership. Young Wilson’s faith was heavy on Christian duty and the idea that in each generation, God picked a Moses or a David to lead society into greater conformity to God’s will. Early in life, Wilson developed a deep metaphysical appreciation for the power of Words in the hand of God’s Chosen Servant.

Wilson also grew up comfortable with a wide range of antinomies. Antinomies are those apparent contradictions within Christian doctrine: Jesus is 100% God at the same time he is 100% man, or salvation is by Free Will at the same time it is predestined. Antinomies require the faith that God can resolve these paradoxes at a higher level than man can presently see, and Wilson saw no reason why antinomies couldn’t exist in every area of life. For example, even with the great weight he placed on Words in the hand of God’s Servant, he saw no reason why subsequent generations could not reinterpret the meaning of such words, whether found in the Bible, the Constitution, a treaty to end a war, or a charter for his League of Nations. Wilson also saw no conflict between what our age would delineate as Creation and Evolution.

Magee makes only quick mention of the fact that 21st century labels like fundamentalism (or liberal and conservative) only confuse the issue when applied to late 19th century debates, or to Wilson’s early 20th century eschatology. I would have dwelt more on the sea-change in Christian thought brought on by the two World Wars: American leaders from Washington to Wilson believed mankind was getting better, that with advances in Christian institutions and education the world could be sanctified enough to make it ready for Christ’s second coming. Unfortunately, the carnage of civil war within European Christendom changed this. Post-war Christianity could no longer hope that man might bring in an age of righteousness on behalf of Christ. Only Christ’s physical return could solve mankind’s problems. True, this swerve came after Wilson left the stage, but somehow, readers need to understand how the stage itself has shifted.

A Failure to Flip-Flop

One of Wilson’s characteristics was an inability (or powerful unwillingness) to change his mind, either in the face of new facts, or of potent opposition. He was, after all, God’s Chosen Vessel. I find this interesting because so often we hear politicians criticized for their “flip-flops.” Wilson could have benefited greatly from some carefully nuanced redirection. Politics is the art of the achievable. In 1999 and 2007, I was first drawn to George W. Bush and Mike Huckabee over the issue of immigration reform (having already narrowed my field over abortion). In each case, I felt these men hoped to rearrange policy in a direction of mercy rather than retribution. However, after the 9/11 attacks, I recognized that Bush could not do this, and in the face of vocal opposition, Huckabee needed to retreat. Wilson, as described by Magee, could not bring himself to any such reevaluation. There were indications that the Senate might have approved Wilson’s treaty with the addition of only minor “reservations,” but Wilson refused to pursue the feelers.

Another Wilson pattern was to trust the reports of personal friends over those of State Department professionals, even when his friends did not speak the language or have any previous experience in the country. Eventually, the only friend he trusted was Edith, his second wife, and she only told him what she thought he wanted to hear.

The presentation is relentless. Seventy pages into the book, I found myself rooting for Wilson, hoping that he could do at least one thing right. Ninety pages into the book I began to wonder if I was being set up for an argument against Dominionism.

Perhaps I am primed to such a suspicion. A couple of years ago, an atheist I am close to challenged me with questions about this doctrine as if it was something to which I probably adhered. I had never heard of it. In poking around, I’ve come to the conclusion that Dominionism is the derogatory term used by opponents who largely caricature its teachings or exaggerate its influence. I found Magee’s page at the website of Michigan State University’s Department of Religious Studies, and indeed, Magee lists a “growing anti-intellectualism in much of modern American religion” as the impetus for leaving his earlier profession and pursuing the study of history, and mentions as his current project “a study of Christian Reconstruction’s influence on politics.” Christian Reconstruction is the term preferred by adherents of what the other side calls Dominionism.

By whatever name, this movement grows out of the writings R. J. Rushdoony and David Barton, and has been promulgated by media ministers such as D. James Kennedy. (Full disclosure: In the 1980’s I was given a book by Rushdoony, but couldn’t get into it. I soured on Kennedy when I wrote for his pamphlet on Thomas Jefferson, only to find lots of interesting tidbits, but no footnotes or bibliography. I finished at least one book by Barton. Though it was slanted in favor of the U.S. being a Christian nation, it was no worse than—and a health balance to—the state textbooks I had been given to teach from. The 8th grade text gave five pages to the Plymouth Puritans without ever mentioning that they had come to America looking for religious freedom. The 7th grade world history gave 124 words to Jesus, presented as a progressive Jewish rabbi; a full page to Paul, seen as the founder of Christianity; and four pages to Muhammad. Since the 80’s, my impression is that textbooks have improved greatly.)

Keeping History as History

In the end, though, Magee makes no attempt to tie Wilson’s failure to any current political debate. This is good, because it wouldn’t have worked. Rushdoony wasn’t born until the end of Wilson’s first term, and Rushdoony would likely not have claimed Wilson as the best example of what Rushdoony hoped to reconstruct. On the other hand, the ACLU—organized at the end of Wilson’s second term—might well claim to be in the tradition of Wilson’s Progressivism. The Fundamentalist Movement, which didn’t appear until Wilson was on his deathbed, would have been put off by Wilson’s relaxed attitude to reinterpreting both the Bible and the Constitution, and by his willingness to entertain the possibility of his own person fulfilling the promise of Christ’s Second Coming (Magee, 87-88).

The fact is, no one accomplishes admittance to the rarified heights of the presidency without some kind of faith, whether that be theistic, secular, or merely pragmatic. It would be fanciful to posit that someone might formulate a foreign policy divorced from any faith. Magee makes something of the same argument in a short epilogue. (Actually, the whole book is short: a body of 114 pages, four pages of epilogue, and 70 pages of appendices, notes, sources, and an index: I suspect this study served as a PhD thesis.)

It is always disappointing to realize how ordinary our giants are up close. We want our Great Men to be flawless, and we despise them for falling short of that mark. None will either be or bring the Second Coming. It is hard to imagine a different president leading us into World War I. Teddy Roosevelt? William Howard Taft? William Jennings Bryan?

I opened this book with some questions I hoped it might answer. I enjoyed the read, but finish up with only a longer list of questions. That, I think, may be the best measure of a good read.

Woodrow Wilson, Part One: The Personal Connections

2010-01-09T13:56:00.000-08:00

I am currently reading a Woodrow Wilson biography, my first in perhaps 45 years. Some kind of response will probably follow, but already, as a reader, I bring such a jumble of thoughts to the text that I must clear those out before I can look at the book objectively.

Ever since reading my first Wilson biography, sometime in my early teens, I’ve viewed the 28th presidency as America’s classical Greek tragedy: the Noble Enterprise that fails because of the Great Leader’s one Fatal Flaw. In high school, when an assignment called for a dramatic reading, I performed Wilson’s speech to Congress, calling for war against Germany. Wilson’s life is thinking-man’s theater.

When I personalize history, I am connected to Woodrow Wilson through my great-grandfather, Winfred J. Sanborn.

As far as I know, the two men only met once, and that probably briefly. When Wilson came to Los Angeles on his cross country tour to whip up support for the League of Nations, my great-grandfather sat somewhere behind him on the stage. Later, both my great-grandparents attended a private dinner with the President and the First Lady. By that point in the trip, biographies show an exhausted president, a personal physician deeply worried about Wilson’s health, and yet too many well-wishers outside the hotel room to allow him any rest. The Sanborns could not have warranted much of his time.

In 1919, my great-grandfather (1869 – 1947) was in his first of fourteen years on the Los Angeles City Council. Wilson (1856–1924) was in his sixth year as president. Unbeknown to either, on that Saturday, September 20th, Wilson was only two weeks away from the stroke that would render him an invalid during the remainder of his presidency, paralyzed and blind on the left side. My great-grandfather also suffered a stroke, one year before his death, and three before my birth. My mother recounts sitting by his bedside, watching while he struggled to form words that wouldn’t come. That becomes my image of Wilson’s last year in office.

My great-grandfather, a postman-turned-mortician, entered politics because he envisioned a Los Angeles in which bridges would span the river basin and railroad tracks that separated Boyle Heights from downtown. Too many motorists and pedestrians had lost their lives to one or the other.

Wilson, political science professor turned president of Princeton University, had entered academia with every intention of turning to politics, because he envisioned a whole world of changes. Too many tyrants crushed the hopes of entire empires, and too many people had lost their lives to war. He was not just a nation builder, he was a world builder.

Both Wilson and my great-grandfather were active in Presbyterian leadership before turning to civil government. When the national Presbyterian conference split over the Civil War, Wilson’s father led in organizing its Southern branch. Woodrow chose the classroom over the pulpit, but led as a layman. When modernist professors pressed Princeton for liberalization, Wilson held the line against them. In 1905, when the Northern branch (Presbyterian Church in the USA) held its General Assembly in Los Angeles, Winfred Sanborn served on the entertainment committee. By 1920 and 1922, he was serving as a delegate to the General Assemblies held in Philadelphia and Des Moines. Those conferences also faced modernist/fundamentalist struggles. I’ve always wondered where my great-grandfather stood.

As largely a faith-based voter, I pay careful attention to what a politician believes. Last year I reviewed Stephen Mansfield’s The Faith of Barack Obama. The biography I’m reading now is Malcolm D. Magee’s What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-based Foreign Policy. The book largely ignores the domestic scene, where Wilson enjoyed great success (I’ve seen Wilson credited with enacting all of his own domestic policy, with time to go back and enact the campaign promises made by his 1912 opponents, William H. Taft and Theodore Roosevelt). It is overseas that Wilson is remembered for winning the war and losing the peace.

I am only about 40 pages into the book, and I am reading slowly, pondering as I go. I wish I could read it together with my great-grandfather. When I finish the book, I’m sure I will have some thoughts to share. But for now, I just needed to clear my mind of these prerequisites. Thank you for indulging me.

The Spiders of China: An Obscurantist’s Personalized Review

2009-12-24T17:22:00.000-08:00

The Spiders of China

Language: English
Author: Song Daxiang, Zhu Mingsheng, & Chen Jun
Publication date: 1999

Size:180x260mm
Number of Pages: 640 pages with 330 figure plates + 4 color plates
Binding: Hardcover, US $89.00

ISBN: 7-5375-1892-0

Over Thanksgiving I received an early Christmas present that not many readers of this blog will have on their wish lists. For me, however, The Spiders of China sits at the intersection of several personal interests: I am a bibliophile, an aficionado of fine spiders, amateur sinocologist, and I get my thrill-of-the-hunt from tracking down those little pieces of information that no one else seems to care about. I am also the man who has everything (as of today, even a new grandson). What else is left to get me?

I obtained my first foreign-language spider book in 1976, when I mastered enough Italian to go into a Rome book store and ask, "Dove si trova un libro di ragni?" From our Berlin stop on that same trip I brought home Leben am seidenen Faden: Die rätselvolle Welt der Spinnen. Colombia and Brazil share a paucity of spider books, but many of their species show up in the well-done Arañas de Chiapas, my trophy from a trip no farther than Tucson.

Thus, in 2004, when I was preparing to visit China, one of my first activities was to make a list of books I wanted to find. Amazon didn’t know these books existed, but I found The Spiders of China on the web at China Scientific Book Service.

Silly me, I figured it would be easier, more fun, and maybe less expensive to actually buy the book in China. (I also seem to recall some problem in getting the website to accept an order.) With that goal, in Shanghai, I made a visit to the largest book store I have ever seen, four or five stories high, with hundreds of thousands of books on display . . .

. . . but not The Spiders of China. I consoled myself with a thin paperback on the insect pests in sugar cane.

Later in my trip, I was more successful with another book on my list, not just finding The Edible Insects of China, but meeting author Chen Xiaoming, and getting an autographed copy. Yet I had to come home without The Spiders of China.

Nor was I able to find a copy during my short trip to Zhejiang in 2008.

However, what I did secure in last year’s trip was familial connections in China. I’m not sure how they managed the trick (one does not ask those details about a gift), but the gist of it is, I now have my copy of The Spiders of China.

From the introduction, I learned the Chinese word for Spider (蜘蛛 zhīzhū) means “knowing to kill the bad element.” That makes sense. I also learned that spiders have appeared in Chinese literature since about 1200 BC; and that my own favorite family, the jumping spiders (Salticidae), first drew mention in 1756.

I bonded with the Salticidae about 35 years ago, watching one explore a terrarium. They move with the studied concentration and graceful control I later saw on the streets in China, where Tai Chi enthusiasts exercise amidst passers-by.

Opening the new book, my first hope was to identify a Salticid I photographed on the campus of South West China Normal University, Beibei, Chongqing, where I taught English the summer of 2004.

Drawings in the book helped me quickly settle upon the genus Harmochirus (Wikipedia lists nine species, from Africa to Japan), for which the book offered two, H. brachiatus and H. insulanus.

A quick web search suggested my spider looked more like brachiatus, but also disclosed two new species described since 1999, H. pineus and H. proszynski. I discovered that the Chinese arachnologist most familiar with Harmochirus was Dr. Li Shuqiang, so I sent Dr. Li my photographs. He graciously confirmed both the identification as Harmochirus and my fear that these photographs would be insufficient for identification of species. The fact is, within a given genus, most species of spider can only be distinguished by the shapes of their genitalia. For this reason, The Spiders of China devotes some 300 pages to drawings intended to serve researchers who have specimens under the microscope. Alas, I took only pictures (see also this Nephila) in China, and preserved no specimens.

The other 330 pages, however, give a very useful introduction to the 56 families of spiders in China (a few of which are unfamiliar to me in America), and to their genera, for which a photograph is often sufficient for identification.

To which many readers may be thinking, “So what?”

Many years ago, at the end of a school year, our principal roasted the teachers with funny awards. Mr. Hollinger dubbed me the “Staff Obscurantist.” As I’ve thought about that over the years, I’ve concluded he hit the nail right on the head. I’ve spent my life intrigued by a long list of things that would interest few other people, whether in history, linguistics, botany, zoology, or anthropology. In the process, I’ve come to realize my unique challenge as a writer: steep myself in the obscure from a dozen different fields, and distill from them the details that can embellish a story and open up the subjects to readers who would otherwise not care.

To those of you who have read this far in a review of The Spiders of China, may I ask, “What kept you reading?”

Tis the Season for Googling Product Reviews

2009-11-30T21:04:00.000-08:00

As evidence that we have entered the season of buying things, BlogPatrol tells me that over the last week, of the 20 visitors who found my site through a Google search, 15 were looking for some variation on “Canon PowerShot SD1200.”

I wrote my product review in June, five days and 300 pictures into owning my SD1200, so perhaps it is time for an update.

I’ve lost count of how many pictures I’ve taken over these six months, but I continue to enjoy this camera and have grown to trust it. (My G3 used to accidentally power-on while riding in my zippered waist pack. This on-button avoids that problem.) The small size means I am comfortable carrying it almost any time I leave the house. That, in turn, means I have it with me almost any time some image catches my fancy, for example, this ground fog I spotted on my way to work one morning.

After 30 years of using film, I continue to marvel at a digital camera’s ability to capture low light or overly bright situations (or the two existing in the same frame), and at the ever-more-compact memory cards (the tiny unit in the SD 1200 carries more than the five larger cards I carried through China, in 2004, for my G3, and multiple times more than the 40 roles of film I carried through Europe, in 2000). Maybe these things color my conclusions. Maybe some jaded techie who never shot on film or lugged around a bulky SLR can find something to complain about on this mighty-mite camera, but I can’t.

Lance, Forty-three Years Later

2009-11-15T20:56:00.000-08:00

On September 16th, I mentioned it would have been my cousin Lance’s 60th birthday, had he not drowned when we were both 17. I quoted a haiku I wrote the day after his death, and promised a post once I had taken some time to ponder the matter.

Like linked syllables
from the same word—now parted—
all my meanings change.

After two months of thinking on the subject, I’ve concluded that my thoughts haven’t fluctuated much over these 43 years. I’ve only gained the supporting details to confirm my immediate impression. When Lance died, indeed, all my meanings changed.

I’m guessing this family picture dates between Thanksgiving, 1962, and Easter, 1963. About then, my aunt and uncle returned from two years in the Congo and began inviting African foreign students to our family get-togethers. Lance would already be 12, and I turned 12 between the two holidays. I was in 7th grade.

Until age four, Lance and I lived in houses next door to each other. Until age ten, our large extended family got together monthly at Grandma’s house, or at my aunt’s. We also shared an avocado orchard near Fallbrook, a cabin at Mt. Baldy village, and an annual week-long camping trip to Kings Canyon. We spent a lot of time together.

It’s not surprising that we’re posed next to each other. Until 7th grade, when I fell in with a group of boys at school, Lance was my closest friend.

In the picture, it looks like I might have had three inches on Lance, but the athletic prowess was all his. When the cousins played football in the park beside Grandma’s house, I got pushed aside by rushers while Lance ran for touchdowns. I shied away from sports, while Lance played a year above his age in Little League, and led his league in home runs. During picking season, he climbed stronger and faster, and dared avocados further out on the branch. It was that athleticism and daring, in fact, that led to his death, scuba diving in kelp beds off Laguna Beach.

It was an idyllic childhood. While our parents sat for their monthly corporate ranch-board meeting, the cousins played Hide and Seek outside, or Murder-in-the-Dark or pillow fights in the back bedroom. During work weekends in the orchard, we pulled weeds for an hour or so and then ran off to catch lizards and frogs. On summer days at Grandma’s, we’d dig a big hole in the sand and cover it with a piece of plywood to make a fort. At Baldy, we’d spend a weekend in the snow or a Fourth of July moving rocks to dam up the stream. By junior high, we’d sold the ranch, but Lance’s family had moved to a rural house near Fallbrook. Days we rode a raft on a nearby pond and nights we played flashlight wars in an acre-or-so of feral bamboo. Lance always knew how to come up with a new activity.

Mostly, it was fun play without mischief, but I do remember an incident from the era of this picture. My parents had gone shopping, leaving Lance and me in charge of my four younger siblings. For some reason we were trying to fool my youngest brother into believing my middle brother was injured. Lance picked up the telephone and hollered, “Quick, send an ambulance! Devin is hurt bad!” Then he went pale and hung up the receiver. In an amazing coincidence of timing, my parents had been calling to check on us. The connection had been made, though the phone had not yet rung. Needless-to-say, it did ring immediately after he hung up. It’s the only time I ever remember us in trouble.

It was my childhood that ended when Lance died (even if adulthood didn’t arrive right away). The protective coating had been stripped away. Though we were more attuned than most children to problems in places like Africa, and my grandparents had suffered a serious automobile accident, our clan had been spared so many of life’s ravages. That ended when Lance was wrenched from our midst. Then, while I was in college, a flood devastated the house at Baldy, and Lance’s parents separated. The idyll was over.

The first change I saw after Lance’s death was that we all hugged more. Coming from New England Puritan stock, we had not been very demonstrative in our affection. Now we hugged the people we loved while we still had them.

Lance drowned in the spring, in the middle of track season. In high school I had discovered an ability to run long distances, my first athletic success. The second change I observed was a loss of purpose in my running. I suddenly realized how much of my inspiration to excel in track came from a desire to impress and compete with Lance. A pulled muscle also hampered me, but it was my most disappointing track season. I ran competitively two more years, and eventually got my mile time down to a pretty respectable 4:32, but without Lance, I never again had the need to prove myself athletically.

I can’t prove the connection, but the third development that shook my family after Lance drowned was religious. Growing up, we had all been part of the Methodist Church. Yet within five years of Lance’s death, half of the family had moved to more conservative churches, while the other half had found something more liberal, or stopped attending altogether.

Death brings to the surface a host of religious questions, and my family had been a long time without a death. We would continue so. Forty-three years later, of the 27 family members in the photograph, only Lance, my grandparents, and a cousin of my mother’s are missing today. For myself, I suddenly had to wrestle with questions of God’s fairness, and of my own mortality.

I was almost 23 before I reached spiritual equilibrium by placing my faith in Jesus Christ. For me, that has been a very happy result. It has led to virtually all of the deep satisfactions I have enjoyed in the intervening 36 years and gives me promise of even greater joys to come. Over the years, though, I sometimes mourned the price Lance had to pay for my propitious wake-up call. Not any more. I recently heard from his sister that in an old box of Lance’s things, she and her mother discovered a testimony, from just a few months before his death, of the same decision I’d make later. While I have been here, Lance has been in the very presence of the risen Christ.

I do not know why God chooses to take some to Heaven young, and leave others on Earth to grow old, but I suspect it has less to do with the nature of this life than with the variety of individuals with whom God wants to populate Heaven. Scripture tells us they will be from every tribe and nation. Experience tells us they will be from every age and experience. God, who created all diversity, must delight in it.

I praise God for the part Lance played in my life while he was here, and for the changes wrought by his leaving. I praise God for the hope of seeing Lance again. Looking back 43 years, and not expecting to live another 43, I am closer to seeing Lance again than to the last time I saw him. That’s change I can believe in.

60th Birthday for One Ever-Young

2009-09-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

After my eulogy for Oscar last week, it was not my intention to write again soon about the death of a 17-year-old. But I looked at the calendar today and realized this would have been my cousin Lance’s 60th birthday. All these years later, it threw me for a loop.

In a very close extended family, Lance was my senior by only three months. Until I entered my teens, I had no closer friend. About Easter of our junior year of high school, Lance drowned while scuba diving off the Southern California coast. The next day I wrote this haiku:

Like linked syllables
from the same word—now parted—

all my meanings change.

It won’t happen tonight, but I will be working on a post. You can watch for it.

Civility in a Time of Lying

2009-09-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

Democracy requires a difficult-to-maintain veneer of decorum over the hottest of passions. When all else fails, the two sides must still be able to speak to each other politely and be heard over the din. There should also be respect for office. One test of this might be self-inspection on the part of those either angered or pleased about Rep. Joe Wilson’s outbreak during President Obama’s healthcare speech: Did they have the identical or an opposite reaction when the Iraqi reporter threw a shoe at President Bush?

For the record, I disagree with Rep. Wilson on several points. First, I believe a speech by the President to Congress should be interrupted only by applause, whether polite or exuberant, or it should be submitted to in stony silence, out of respect for both institutions. Second, Rep Wilson’s explosion came when President Obama declared that no illegal alien would be covered under the coming healthcare plan. As I have expressed before, I don’t believe most of our undocumented neighbors are the kinds of bogey-men they have been made out to be. Even with ten or fifteen million of them combined, I don’t believe people working at minimum wage in farm fields or sweatshops harm America as much as the executives who have given themselves huge bonuses out of money the government intended for bailing out mismanaged businesses. (If it turns out any recipient of those multimillion-dollar travesties was here illegally, I say, yes, ship them home with empty pockets.)

On the other hand, when it is journalists or bloggers who catch a president or congress spinning facts to the detriment of truth, it is our duty to point that out. The subject over which I am best prepared to support such a charge is abortion. In Wednesday’s speech, President Obama asserted, “And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up – under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.”

Fact: H.R. 3200, as it currently stands with an amendment written by Rep. Lois Capps (R-Calif) and approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee (30 pro-abortion Democrats favoring and 28 Republicans and pro-life Democrats opposing), the bill “explicitly permits the Secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, pro-abortion advocate Kathleen Sebelius, to include abortion in the services offered by public option and requires abortion coverage in the government health plan if the Hyde amendment is ever reversed. HR 3200 authorizes taxpayer-funded affordability credits and the Capps amendment specifically requires taxpayer subsidies to flow to plans that include abortion, but creates an accounting scheme designed to give the impression that public funds will not subsidize abortion. The Capps amendment also requires that a plan that includes abortion be made available in every region of the country.” Source

Fact: Later that same day, this same committee defeated (30-29) a bipartisan amendment proposed by Reps. Joe Pitts (R-PA) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) designed to prevent mandated abortion coverage in the essential benefits package. Source

Conclusion: Unless President Obama is proposing to remove the Capps Amendment and replace it with wording from the Pitts/Stupak Amendment, he lied in his speech this week.

Secondly, Obama’s reference to federal conscience laws “under our plan” can only be true in a sense so narrow he would need to cross his fingers behind his back. Last March, the Obama administration published in the Federal Register a proposal to rescind all Bush-era protections for medical personnel who refused to participate in abortions on moral grounds. Obama apparently means that the current “our plan” promises to protect those conscience laws which remain after his previous plan has eliminated them altogether. To this observer, that also looks like a lie.

Two years ago, when speaking to a Planned Parenthood audience, candidate Obama promised to eliminate these conscience protections and to include abortion-coverage in his national health insurance package, “In my mind, reproductive care is essential care,” he said. “It is basic care. And so it is at the center and at the heart of the plan that I propose. Essentially … we're gonna set up a public plan … that will provide all essential services, including reproductive services. We also will subsidize those who prefer to stay in the private insurance market — except the insurers are going to have to abide by the same rules in terms of providing comprehensive care, including reproductive care. I still believe that it is important for Planned Parenthood to be part of that system.” (Note: By "reproductive care," Obama means abortion and by “part of that system,” he means federal subsidies.) Source

I was alone with my wife in the privacy of a living room when candidate Obama sat with Rick Warren and described himself as a moderate on abortion. Even then, I did not blurt out, “You Lie!”

The record, however, shows that during three different years in the Illinois Senate, Barack Obama led opposition to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. At the same time, the US House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly and the US Senate voted 98-0 to pass nearly identical legislation. Even the pro-abortion group NARAL remained neutral. But “moderate” Obama fought hard to protect the rights of hospital personnel to abandon living babies and let them die. Then he denied he had done so. He maintained that denial until the case against him was so strong that he could maintain the lie no longer. On August 18, 2008, just two days after the Saddleback Forum, his campaign admitted the truth. (Links to Obama’s votes on Illinois BAIPA)

It damages our Democracy when a congressman interrupts a president’s speech to call him a liar. But the damage is at least as severe when a president lies to Congress and to the American People. We do need to fix our broken health insurance system, and some of what the President is proposing impresses me as reasonable. However, when he uses his condescending “I’m an adult, so stop acting like a child” look to cover his lies on abortion, and then gives the same look to put down the legitimate fears of others, how can I as a voter trust him?

It is also difficult for me to trust the President when groups with whom he has partnered get caught in blatant disregard for the laws of our country. One prime example is the number of times hidden cameras or microphones have caught staff members in Planned Parenthood facilities across the country telling purportedly under-aged girls to hide the age of the men who have impregnated them, thus allowing Planned Parenthood to evade reporting laws on statutory rape. Unfortunately, those videos have become common enough to lose their punch, and I still haven’t seen where Obama has even acknowledged their existence.

Already, however, the Obama administration is racing to sever its connections with ACORN after a video that left me gasping when I saw it yesterday. An under-cover investigative couple walks into an ACORN housing office in Baltimore: She pretends to be a prostitute in need of housing to bring in and set up undocumented girls (under age 15) from El Salvador; He wants to divert funds from this “business” to make a run for Congress. Without batting an eye, two ACORN staffers pull out code books and begin explaining how it will need to be set up to best avoid taxes. The good news is: the Obama Administration will pull ACORN’s contract to help with next year’s census. The bad news is: Obama has worked closely with a group long-accused of lying and misrepresentation, and never saw a problem until all plausible deniably disappeared.

The President not only lies, but he hangs around with people for whom lying is a way of life.

I say that as civilly as I can manage.

A sample of the Planned Parenthood videos: hiding statutory rape, accepting donations earmarked for eugenics, showing as a lie PPA denials of racist sympathies

Just one of several editings of the ACORN videos. Variations abound.

Eulogy for Oscar

2009-09-08T20:03:00.000-07:00

Oscar Esparza

(May 30, 1992-Aug 8, 2009)

In the final minutes of his life, driving a car that had been stolen at gun-point just eleven hours earlier, Oscar raced ahead of a pursuing police officer. Running through a stop sign at perhaps 90 mph, he collided with a family of seven in a pickup, sending both vehicles flying into an orange orchard. All five children in the pickup died, as did Oscar and two friends riding with him in the stolen car. Oscar was 17. I had not seen him in two years. For that last meeting, I’d waited in a visiting room at juvenile hall while officers marshaled in a line of hardened teens. Oscar was polite and friendly, but kept his emotions well guarded. At the end he thanked me for coming and took his place in line to march out. I cared about Oscar, had long feared that it might end as it did, and hoped fervently that it wouldn’t. I cannot make excuses for Oscar: what he did is inexcusable. At best I can offer his story.

I took this smiling picture of Oscar eight years ago, on the day I met him. As a third grade teacher, I decided I wanted to meet every student in my class before the first day of school. I called him on the telephone and invited myself to his home. We had a good time. I met his two older brothers, two younger brothers, two younger sisters, mother, and the mother’s boyfriend. Oscar was a handsome kid, but I recognized that, even as a nine-year old, life had not been easy for Oscar, nor would he be easy to have in class. Walking back to my car, I stopped to talk to a student I’d taught the previous year. He told me that Oscar had stolen his bicycle, and after the police returned it, Oscar stole it again.

I had a special reason to spend time with Oscar. During the previous year, I had been asking God for one troubled boy I could come alongside and try to point in a more positive direction. I had read that when the Department of Corrections wants to predict how many prison beds will be needed down the line, they look at how many third grade boys are reading below grade-level today. Each year, I could look around my third grade classroom and see eight or ten boys reading below grade-level, some of them quite far below. At that time, 93% of all incarcerated adults were males, most of them still comparatively young. I’d read that 95% of them had no positive relationship with a father-figure, nor had ever had one. I could look around my classroom and see five or six boys in that situation. I attended a presentation on how to pick an individual to pour your life into, and came away with three principles: a) pick someone who is open, b) pick someone well-known in the community [whether famous or infamous], and then, c) wait for God’s supernatural confirmation.

For a year, I had watched and prayed. I spent extra time with a couple of boys, and then met Oscar. He was open. He was “the worst boy in the whole class” and next-younger brother to “the worst boy in the whole school.” After school hours, Oscar and I began meeting for a session that doubled as one-on-one reading lesson and Bible study. My principal approved as long as I took it off-campus. I began to see the kind of coincidences that point to supernatural confirmation.

Early on, I began to focus our Bible study on the problem of anger. Oscar had many reasons to be angry. Anger is the human response when something has not been fair, and life was never fair to Oscar. But anger did not serve Oscar well. When life has been unfair, anger is often Satan’s way to take away whatever we have left. Often, it even destroys what good things others have.

In my first lesson with Oscar, I had him memorize James 1:19, “Be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.” Soon after, Oscar came in from a recess, explosive over something that had happened on the playground. I got down at his eye-level, took him by the shoulders, and asked, “What does James 1:19 say?” He thought a few seconds. Then I watched all the anger drain out of his face. He smiled sheepishly at me and recited it, “Be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.” Fully relaxed, he was able to enter the classroom and go to work. It is my favorite memory of Oscar.

After a couple of months, the next-older brother joined our Bible study. Then, when the family moved to another neighborhood and Oscar no longer attended my school, I began picking the boys up twice a week for Sunday school and my church’s children’s program. The boys and I took an occasional hike, or some other field trip, I attended Oscar’s basketball games at the youth center, and I have an old wood pile in my back yard that Oscar worked with me to stack.

We continued to work on anger.

When Oscar had been about five, both parents went to prison for a year and the four boys went to live with an uncle in another state. That was the year we expect students to learn the basics of reading. Oscar didn’t.

When the boys returned to their mother, she told them that their father was in prison in Mexico, and they would never see him again. I do not know the truth, but in retrospect, I wonder if Oscar suspected at the time that he was being lied to by someone he loved.

One boyfriend came for a while and then left. Another came to stay. The family grew to eight siblings. When she was sober, or when I visited, Oscar’s mother was attentive and loving. Only the kids witnessed her other side. I have a file with some of the worksheets we did. Here, in his own 4^th grade handwriting is a description of a situation he knew well:

Oscar also had to struggle with being the younger brother of “the worst boy in the whole school.” Oscar both idolized his brother and resented the lopsided share of attention that the brother’s behavior garnered. A week before Oscar died, the brother called about something else, and then ended the conversation with, “If you see Oscar, tell him to come home. He’s still trying to be like I was.”

Just after Oscar’s eleventh birthday, this older-brother/sibling-rival/best-friend/idol went into juvenile hall for violence within the home. They never lived together again. About that same time, a boy standing on the corner two doors from their house was killed in a drive-by shooting. On the way home from church, Oscar pointed out the front yard where a friend’s uncle had been killed. After Oscar’s death, a newspaper quoted a police officer remarking about the teenager’s “callous disregard for human life.” It’s true. But callouses form to protect a tender place from frequent injury.

When Oscar was twelve, his mother moved the family to Los Angeles, both to get away from an abusive boyfriend and to give Oscar a fresh start at another school. Six months later, she returned to Visalia. Unable to afford a place of her own, she moved the family into the home of a friend. Even with one brother from each family locked away, it was two mothers and thirteen kids in a three-bedroom house, in the same bad neighborhood. Oscar started spending days at a time with his buddies. If he was home, he’d smile and greet me when I came to pick up his younger siblings for Sunday school, but he’d lost interest in going himself.

Meanwhile, his mother began a downward spiral: alcohol, days spent at the casinos, a string of boyfriends. On the day I saw a black eye on the younger brother and knew I had to report her to CPS, someone else beat me to it. CPS discovered old warrants. She was arrested, sent to prison, and then deported. I believe Oscar saw her just once again (by running away from a guardian and trying to adjust to life in a country he had never before visited), but he never again saw any of his five younger siblings, nor his oldest brother.

After years of working with young people of all ages, I know that children under ten or eleven tend to be flexible enough to move and adjust. Older teens often have the maturity to do so. Children in their early teens seem to be the most vulnerable. They are so wrapped up in their peer groups that uprooting them can send even the most secure into a tailspin. Oscar never had the chance to start from that kind of height. He ran away from the foster home, and hid with his buddies. For Oscar, it was the closest he could get to creating a “home.” As near as I can reconstruct, he spent most of that first year out of school, even though he was already so far behind. When authorities found him, they put him in juvenile hall. Whenever they tried placing him outside its walls, he went looking for either his buddies or his mother.

For these last few years, I had to try and follow Oscar from his occasional visits to MySpace. He used the screen name “Killer.” He listed his emotion as “Angry.” The last time I saw Oscar, he told me the main thing he wanted in life was to eat his mother’s cooking.

If life was fair, every boy could eat his mother’s cooking. He would live securely with two parents who loved him and would learn to read well (and read first in the language he spoke at home). If life was fair, no boy would be locked up for trying to find home. But certainly, if life was fair, Oscar’s pain and confusion would not have brought such pain and confusion to three other families, and to their entire community. As father to my own five children, I think especially of the Salazar family, who seem from newspaper accounts to have had everything that Oscar didn’t, and were raising their kids just as Oscar could only have dreamed of. The newspaper quotes an aunt as saying, “We’re trying to be as strong as our Christian faith allows us to be.”

As a Christian myself, I acknowledge that Christians have a special problem here that materialists do not have. In dog-eat-dog “survival of the fittest,” there is no expectation of fairness. If we are just the sum of our charged particles, the collapse of a family or the collision of two cars should carry no deeper moral questions than the collapse of a star or the collision of two asteroids. Indeed, the death of a youth who had so few of the skills or aptitudes for gaining adult success might be viewed as simply “natural selection.” The fact that mankind longs for fairness and responds angrily to its absence is, by itself, evidence that we are made in the image of a moral, fairness-seeking God. But for Christians, the challenge is to answer how a moral God could allow such unfair things to happen.

I do believe God wants fairness. However, “fairness” requires moral choices, which in turn require a standard that can be either obeyed or disobeyed. We are not simply charged particles moving always in the right direction, held in line by the narrow confines of inescapable obedience. We stumble. We drift. We rebel. We take that which we know is not ours. We sin and are sinned against. We come into life victims (some more than others) of a tide of sin that surrounds us. Then as perpetrators, we propagate and perpetuate that tide so that it washes against both those we love and those we don’t even know.

On discussion boards after the crash, I saw comments thanking God that scum like Oscar got what they deserved in the crash. I saw mention of someone's hope that Oscar had gone straight to Hell. I also saw racist pronouncements about the occupants of both vehicles, and their ethnic disregard for seat-belt laws. I lump each of these attitudes into the same category as the sin that entangled Oscar.

One who truly understands Hell cannot wish it on anyone. Hell was never created as a place for human souls. It was created as a prison for Satan and his demons, a place of never-ending loneliness, pain, and regret. It is God’s desire that every human soul spend eternity with Him, in Heaven. But God honors the decisions of individuals. When someone chooses to walk away from God, Hell is the farthest away from God one can get.

I have reason to hope that Oscar isn’t there. On the first Sunday of June, 2002, I heard Oscar say a simple prayer. He asked God to forgive him his sins, and come into his life. Someone once approached a famous evangelist and said, “I saw one of your converts last night, drunk and in the gutter.” The evangelist replied, “Yes, it must have been one of mine. It couldn’t have been one of God’s.” Maybe Oscar was only one of my converts, and never one of God’s. But I have hope.

It is easy for someone to compare themselves with Oscar, and say, “At least I never stole cars or killed innocent kids,” but no one gets into Heaven by comparison with others. Heaven is perfect and the standard for admittance is perfection. Even the best of us misses perfection by a great margin. As a Christian, the good news is that Jesus offers to pay the full price for all of my sins, and in return, to credit me with His perfection. The only requirement is that I must accept the gift in faith. Of course, once I’ve been relieved of my load, I can’t begrudge Christ for relieving anyone else of theirs. For many of us, that is the hardest part: We continue to clamor for fairness, even when God wants to trump fairness with mercy and grace.

To be sure, Christ desires changes in the lives of His followers. I saw disappointingly little change in Oscar. Two passages in I Corinthians (3:10-15 & 11:27-32) seem to teach that when God’s patience runs out with believers who continue in gross sin, He finds it necessary to end their earthly lives prematurely. They arrive in Heaven, but without any of the rewards other believers will receive.

No one can see the heart of another, but I hope to see Oscar in Heaven. It will be the home that on earth eluded him.

“(God) will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." (Rev. 21:4)

I know nothing about the two teens riding with Oscar, but I do expect to see the Salazar children in Heaven. At the end of the Book of Job, when God restored Job to double of everything he had owned before Satan took it from him, the one total matched but not doubled was Job’s 10 children. The implication is that these ten later children were not to replace the first ten—children cannot be replaced—but came in addition to the ten who would be waiting for Job in Heaven when he arrived. I pray that God blesses the Salazars accordingly. I also pray that they will find a way to forgive Oscar, on this side of Heaven, not for Oscar’s sake, or mine, but for their own. Anger rarely serves any of us well. Instead, it is only Satan’s way to take away what we have left.

In the month since Oscar's death, I've wondered what else might have been done. I gave him my best shot and folks at my church went over-and-above to minister to him. The public schools did the best they could, as did the foster community and the juvenile justice system. At the mortuary I met some of the young men Oscar hung with. In their own way, they tried. My theology tells me that no one is ever beyond God's reach, or the ability to change, but that ultimately each person is responsible for their own decisions. The Bible also explains that a parent's poor decisions wreck consequences to the fourth generation (Exodus 34:7, etc.). There's more here than I can sort out in a month. I will leave it at this: I cared about Oscar, and I mourn his death. Right now it hurts. But I have already found someone else I will love in the name of Christ. I invite you to go and do likewise.

* * * * * * * *

Some of the themes I touched on in this eulogy come up in a novel that I still have a lot of work to complete, maybe two or three years worth. For anyone who is interested in hearing about that novel when it is finally available, I have a Kontactr button in the left hand margin of this page. Please leave your name. I will treat it with care.

A Virus Warning

2009-08-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

I interrupt this period of silence to warn readers that, should your computer start flashing you messages that Windows has discovered a virus and you need to purchase "PC Antispyware2010," it's already too late. Wipe your PC clean and start all over. This blog will resume when I finally get my rig back from the shop. (Oh, and be careful about adding widgets to your Google home page. I'm highly suspicious of my daily dose of Dilbert.)

I’m Ho-ome

2009-08-07T23:11:00.000-07:00

I’m vegging today after what has seemed like the most intense summer since 2000, when we pushed for seven weeks through Uzbekistan and eight countries in Europe. This summer, we drove some six thousand miles, going north to a family reunion in Wenatchee, WA . . .

. . . and south, to San Diego, for part two of the wedding that began with part one in China, last October.

Since the last time we had the whole family together for a picture, we’ve added six members.

Along the way, we enjoyed delightful visits with family and friends, some of whom we hadn’t seen in over a decade.

(Product review: The success of this summer was made possible by my Toyota Sienna, which will be ten years old this fall. It flipped 158,000 miles on Monday. During one, three-day, one-thousand-mile segment, it carried five adults and way-too-much luggage. It had all the power I needed going up steep grades, and comfortably handled curvy Highway 101. Thanks to Bob and Jim at The Auto Shop, the Sienna has never suffered a breakdown, or needed a tow. With the removable seats out, the Sienna has moved my children in-and-out of multiple apartments. With the seats in, it has carried countless kids on field trips or to Sunday school. What a blessing this car has been. Thanks, Vicki, for buying me this car, and for riding around with me all summer.)

So yesterday and today I’ve been moving kind of slow. I’ve pulled a few weeds, run some laundry, and started to think about school starting in ten days. I’m also trying to make amends to a blog that has been feeling abandoned.

A few thoughts:

We live in a big, beautiful country. We saw parts of California, Oregon, and Washington that I hadn’t seen before, and revisited some places that were familiar. If I had stopped to soak in every vista that tempted me, I would still be on the road.

Family is a tremendous blessing. This summer I got to spend time with my parents, the aunts and uncles who helped raise me (all now in their 80s), and with the cohort of siblings and cousins who grew up with me (and have grown with me now, well into middle age). The nieces, nephews, and cousins-once-removed pop up as spitting images of the previous generations, but with the twist of their own generation’s unique personality and outlook. I got quality time with the children I raised, the spouses my children have married, and my grandchildren. Pretty amazing.

I need to learn more Portuguese. With Brazilians as son-in-law and daughter-in-law, and now a nephew with a Brazilian girlfriend, I listened to a lot of Portuguese this summer. I over-heard my Chinese-born daughter-in-law encouraging my son-in-law to “Speak only English!” His English is coming along, and we had several conversations we could not have had last time I saw him. My grandsons, also, are progressing as bilinguals. Yet there were times this summer when I wanted to follow a conversation, and couldn’t. I have been working recently on Chinese, but I need to redouble my efforts toward Portuguese.

While I was gone, hundreds of luscious figs fell on the ground. Pity. I must redouble my efforts to see that no new figs go unappreciated while the season lasts.

I went the summer without getting any writing done. (Okay, three paragraphs on my novel.) Now I will need to write at the same time I am teaching. I find that very difficult.

So, here’s to a wonderful summer. And now on to the challenges of a new school year. Life is good.

Shasta: La Vista, Baby

2009-07-12T21:12:00.000-07:00

I've stepped out of California for just a few days, headed for a family reunion in Washington. In all my previous passes through Oregon, I've stayed on Interstate 5, to visit relatives in the Willamette Valley, but this time we tried Highway 97. I'd never seen Shasta from this angle (north and east of the mountain). For all its current problems, California still has the ability to dazzle one with the sheer beauty of its vistas. I'll be back.

Where North is West and East is South

2009-07-03T18:12:00.000-07:00

I realize how easy it is to kick California when it’s down, but if this state is having trouble finding its way out of the woods, part of the problem may stem from a federal highway system that can’t distinguish north and south from east and west. I’ve run up against this problem twice in the last month.

The first time, I was in Contra Costa County, trying to get on Interstate 80 at Richmond Parkway. I intended to travel due south for the thirteen miles that would put me on Interstate 880. Then I would continue south-by-southeast to US 101, and still farther south-by-southeast to Gilroy. However, in approaching the freeway onramp, my choices were “East” or “West.”

Taken continentally, Interstate 80 runs from San Francisco, California to Teaneck, New Jersey, which I will grant is farther east than I have ever been. In my personal experience, I-80 connects San Francisco to Lake Tahoe, a route that moves the traveler about 110 miles north to arrive 125 miles east. However, the immediate portion I intended to travel runs 13 miles due south. In the middle of choosing a correct lane for the choices of on-ramps, I had no reason to imagine either the highway’s western end across the Oakland Bay Bridge into Frisco, or the 2899.54 miles to Teaneck. “East” or “West” was not the choice I needed to be offered.

The following two weeks, I was in Southern California, using the Ventura Freeway to run back and forth between Camarillo (on the west) and Glendale (on the east). About the first 50 miles are on US 101. Then it becomes US 134. But notice I use “east” and “west.” For over a hundred miles, the 101, 134, and then the 210 hug a line at 34°8’ N Latitude. In the morning, inbound drivers have the rising sun in their eyes, replaced outbound in the evening by the setting sun. Yet at 30 consecutive on-ramps, drivers face a choice of “North” or “South.”

Maybe this is unimportant in a state that is $24 billion (and counting) short of balancing its budget, where the governor has declared a state of emergency (hey, at least he’s not off hiking the Appalachian Trail), where the treasurer is paying the state’s debts with IOU’s, and lists of possible solutions include a constitutional convention. After all, we got into this problem because for thirty years the legislature busied itself with piddling stuff because they couldn’t face the big problem.

However, as a state, we’re lost and can’t determine which way to go. We’ve spent the last year more-or-less hugging a tree. If help is coming, it hasn’t yet appeared. We may have to venture out on our own, into territory where the trails aren’t marked. But what is worse, some of our routes bear fictitious or fanciful orientation. If we start by correcting these, maybe we can figure out where we ought to be headed.

Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS: a product review

2009-06-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

I was slow going digital with my photography. As late as the summer of 2000, I dragged forty roles of slide film and my Nikon SLR for seven weeks across Europe and Uzbekistan. I still hadn’t organized and viewed all those slides when I bought my Canon G3 during the summer of 2003, and now, of course, when I want to use one of those European shots, I first have to digitize it. My G3 has been twice to China and twice to Brazil. It has recorded weddings for my five children, gotten me nearly three years into grandfatherhood, and illustrated these first five years of Capers with Carroll. On a single day in Yunnan, I shot 600 keepers from a bus window. In Pernambuco, I captured 120 images of one male Frigga sp. to get the picture I use at the top of this blog. That would have been a prohibitive four 36-shot rolls of film. I love my G3.

However, in September, I spent some time in the camera section of a big-box electronics store, helping a visitor from China choose a pocket-sized digital. Suddenly the G3 felt pretty bulky. My favorite shirt is a guayabera with four pockets. They will hold the G3, but it’s awkward to maintain for more than a few minutes. I usually carry my camera on a belly strap, but that creates other problems. Whether I’m photographing urban wildlife or grand kids, the key to success is to have the camera perpetually at hand. Even as a junior high teacher, whether I want to record evidence against a graffiti artist or a cute candid shot to forward to the yearbook, a camera in the pocket is worth two in the closet.

So Friday I bought (and my wife credited to Father’s Day) a Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS. Consumer Reports had rated it their top choice and Staples offered a good deal.

As the photographs show, it passes the grand-kids test. Natu and I were on opposite sides of a spider web. I was trying to capture an image of the too-small spider (visible as an orange-brown smudge), but the camera’s automatic focus went for the better shot.

In my first several attempts at photographing the hummingbird, the automatic focus preferred the surrounding foliage (a tough shot for any but the best manual focus), blurring the bird, before my subject did me a favor and came out to a better perch. I’ve grown spoiled by the ability of the G3’s small display to rotate out of the camera to facilitate shots from difficult angles, but the PowerShot’s much bigger display outdoes the G3 in bright sunshine. It even outlines the targets where it has chosen to focus. On the G3, the zoom always seemed to cost clarity, but I’m very pleased with the zoom on my hummingbird shots.

I’m also pleased with the jumping spider (Habrocestum sp.) and water strider shots, taken at the default full-wide angle. In each case, the critter let me get within 18 inches, and the pixel density let me crop and enlarge. For closer studies of insects and spiders, I will continue to use the even higher density capacity of my G3. For those, I fix the camera on a tripod, turn the subject loose on a leaf, manipulate the leaf to achieve focus, and record a superabundance of poses. Spontaneity is not an issue.

I’ve now taken about 300 photographs with the SD 1200. I like the quality of the pictures and the feel of the camera. Its turn-on speed and short lag-time on the shutter are big improvements over the G3. Even with a protective case, it fits so comfortably in my pocket that I foresee keeping it with me most of the time.

I present to you the new workhorse of this blog.

(For a six-month update, look here.)

Rowing past San Quentin

2009-06-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

I don’t want to give away the part it plays in my story, but I spent last weekend researching the sport of sweep rowing, especially as it’s practiced in the waters around San Quentin State Prison. The Marin Rowing Association has its boathouse up Corte Madera, in Larkspur, just a few hundred yards west of the prison. Over a year ago, I started following their website. Then, on my last visit to San Francisco, I dropped by and watched the activity as the teams returned from a big race, cleaned up the equipment, and put it away. I tried to stay out of their way, but picked out one fellow to catch in the parking lot with some questions. It was my great good fortune to pick Ron Arlas, Larkspur city councilman and former mayor, with rowing experience going back to the 1960s. He has gone over-and-above, not just answering questions, but taking an active interest in my story, offering suggestions, and opening doors. In short, he’s become a friend.

So last Saturday, with the weather perfect, I got to ride along with the coach in a launch as we followed the morning workout. In this shot, we had already been out near the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge, and were headed back. That’s Ron in seat three from the bow, and East Block of the prison directly over his head.

My pen-pal on Death Row mentioned once that from his cell he could sometimes see the teams practicing. My angle was so much better.

On Sunday, I went back for the two-hour Learn-to-Row workshop that MRA offers. I’ve rowed rowboats and canoes, but these boats offer a different feel, and I wanted to experience it. We began with an hour of land-based instruction, and then proceeded to launch into Corte Madera, four novices with four veterans and our coxswain-instructor.

Research done, now it’s back to writing.

Bamboo and Rattan @ the Clark

2009-05-31T21:12:00.000-07:00

My interest in Japan goes back to high school. I finished a year of Japanese language at Pasadena City College and a year of its history at UCLA. So I’ve been vaguely aware of the Clark Center for Japanese Art & Culture for several years. I’d just never gotten there. The Clark sits only 28 miles from my doorstep, but it’s not in a direction I’m accustomed to travel.

Yamaguchi Ryuun, White Wave, 2006

Kings County is largely dairy country, the milking sheds and herd corrals interrupted only by the alfalfa fields that support them. Most of the dairy families trace their roots to recent immigrants from Holland or the Azores. It’s not the kind of landscape where one would expect to find one of only two museums in America dedicated entirely to Japanese art.

The land has a poor record for supporting high culture. In the late 1970s, a Canadian hoping to found a Shakespearian theater studied a map, saw a ‘Stratford’ (another 14 miles of dairy land beyond the Clark) roughly midway between the Los Angeles and San Francisco markets, and came for a look. At Stratford, he found a fork in the road, a hay barn, and some farm-worker housing. Not ready to give up, he backtracked through Hanford and all the way to Visalia before he could find a host community for his company. For several seasons, they produced some fine theater, but the L.A. and S.F. crowds never materialized. Without those crowds, the show went dark.

So it is pleasantly surprising to see another attempt at world-class culture birthed among the dairy herds. In this case, the herds help insure the endowment. Founder Willard G. Clark began the center with money earned in the international bull-sperm market. He still lives on the property, separated from the museum complex by Japanese gardens and a pond. While the literature rack presents opportunities for sponsorships and donations to help expand the work, the existing program looks healthy.

My immediate inspiration for making this visit was to preview a possible reward-trip for a handful of my hardest working students. (I’ve taken students to the Getty, but the round trip is 370 miles.) My seventh grade history class does a unit on Japan, and the Clark Center came to mind as we talked in class.

Fujisuka Shosel, Fire,2006

I arrived on a Saturday afternoon, the final day of an exhibition on contemporary Japanese bamboo art. The Clark is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 1:00 to 5:00 PM. One building houses the offices and an impressive collection of books. I didn’t come with either the credentials to poke through their rare texts or a subject I was ready to research, but I know where it is now, if I’m ever up to that.

My entrance interrupted one of the curators at her work. She took my five dollars, showed me their literature rack, and then escorted me to the gallery. As we left the office, we passed a coat of samurai armor for an exhibit that begins next August.

One enters the exhibit hall through sets of outer and inner doors, between which the visitor slips out of his shoes. After a small anteroom, the main hall is large enough to display 25 or 30 works. (In storage, somewhere on the grounds, another 1,700 works from the permanent collection await their turns.) I was met at the door by an intern from Germany, and found one couple already present. Later, a mother and daughter joined us. Sometimes we gathered around a particular piece and discussed it with the intern. Other times we separated and enjoyed the art in silence.

I came to this exhibition with negligible background on bamboo art. As a child, I remember studying a couple of rattan and bamboo chairs, and I once spent ten days in an Amazon village where I watched the women splitting vines, soaking them, and weaving them into basketry. These pieces begin with some of the same basic techniques. Apparently, within the current generation of Japanese craftsmen, some who had apprenticed working on lampshades and containers shifted their attention to abstract sculpture. Their work demonstrates attention to form and texture, with color schemes that owe much of their subtle variations to shadows within the work itself. I found it interesting, but my 7th graders will probably be more excited by next August’s Samurai armor.

Outside, the Clark Center has a display devoted to Bonsai. In the afternoon breeze while I was there, it came with the authentic aroma of, well, this might be a good place to invoke the wisdom of Proverbs 14:4, “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.” (English Standard Version) The Clark testifies to such abundance.

I enjoyed my first visit to the Clark, and as new exhibits pass through, I hope to go back. Not quite fourteen years old, the museum has made an impressive start. I hope it grows.

More photos of both this exhibit and the next one can be found here.

Thanks, Lucho: tribute to a great teacher

2009-05-27T22:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I attended the memorial service for Luis “Lucho” Figallo, long-time Spanish teacher at Golden West, the high school where four of my five children attended. All four studied under Mr. Figallo, probably averaging two years apiece. That’s eight Back-to-School Nights, eight Open Houses, and somehow, we always got around to see Mr. Figallo, even when we didn’t have kids in his classes. Oftentimes we stayed late in his classroom. After all the other parents had gone home, Lucho would offer advice to my fledgling-Spanish-teacher wife. He was always ready to give help, switching back-and-forth between beautiful Spanish and his own ebullient brand of English.

For most of the nearly 20 years I knew Lucho, he insisted that he was “going to retire in another two or three years,” but he only left the classroom two years ago. He was a people person. He loved his students. He loved his subject. After teaching high school all day, he taught night school at the local community college, often to classes full of his former students. I saw a post today on the College of Sequoias site, from a former student at both schools who then went back into Mr. Figallo’s Golden West class as a substitute teacher. “. . . even though he wasn't there in person his loving presence was felt. I don't know if it was because of all the kind smiles on the student faces or if it was because of that jolly old piñata with Figi's resemblance.”

I know the history of that piñata. A committee worked on it, but it took its final form in a back bedroom at my house. And it did bear an uncanny resemblance to Figallo. He was wearing a beard in those days, but it was that smile (and if I recall, the Panama hat) that gave it away.

Each of my children who had him has fond memories of Mr. Figallo, but my greatest debt goes back to the year my eldest son entered 9th grade. We were just back from five years in Colombia, but my son was very unsure of his Spanish. Under Mr. Figallo, I saw his confidence grow. Then, just before Easter, Figallo pulled Matthew aside. The youth group from the church where Lucho was an elder needed a translator for their Spring Break trip to Mexico. Would Matthew consider helping out?

Matthew went. He was one of the youngest members of the group and had not been part of any of the team-building exercises or fund-raisers. However, as the translator, Matthew found himself where the action was, in a key position of leadership. He came home secure in his Spanish and suddenly aware of new gifts as a leader. But it did not stop there. Lucho continued to support and encourage Matthew through another decade and a half. The confidence Matthew gained studying under Mr. Figallo has carried him into fluency in German, Russian, and Portuguese and starts in a couple more. Thanks, Lucho.

Lucho grew up in Peru and came by himself to the US as a young man, learned English while working in a grocery store, and earned a masters degree in Spanish Literature. A coworker gave him a Bible. He studied it carefully and decided to base his life on what he found there. At the end of his life, battling cancer, he and his wife prayed that God would give him the strength to make one last trip to Peru, to say goodbye to the family he left behind, and to encourage their Christian walks. Coming back into Los Angeles, when the pilot announced “We are now beginning our descent,” Lucho said only, “I’m not going down. I’m going up.” With that, he stood in the presence of Jesus.

A life well lived.
Thanks, Lucho. I hope Mary has the piñata.

The Diary of "Helena Morley," a review

2009-05-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

(I am double-posting this review as a way to inaugurate my new blog, Back Lit. Here at Capers with Carroll, I post more frequently, but with shorter posts on a wider variety of timely topics. There, I will have fewer pictures, but longer essays, more focused on literature, and less tied to current happenings. I hope to begin writing reviews of whatever I am reading. Some will be new publications. Others will come from the pile of books I collected but was too busy to read during my masters program. Still more will be from the old and out-of-print treasures I enjoy finding at used book stores or saving from boxes of discards destined for the dumpster. I also plan to resurrect papers I wrote for classes, for some of which I put in far too much effort to only have them read by one professor.)

The Diary of "Helena Morley"
translated and introduced by Elizabeth Bishop
Paperback, 282 pages, Farrar, 1995
Film adaptation (2004) by Helena Solberg, as Vida de Menina.

For a bibliophile like myself, one of the lasting blessings from sending my children to college is that the books they bought for now-forgotten classes still occupy bookshelves here at the house. Thus, when I finished reading the last assigned novel of my own masters’ degree program and turned to the shelves for my first, guilt-free, frivolous reading in five years, my eyes fell on this diary, penned by a teenaged girl in a backwater-Brazilian mining town in the 1890s, published in Portuguese (Minha Vida de Menina) in the 1940s, translated into English in the 1950s, purchased by my daughter in the 1990s for a History of Latin America class at Westmont College, and left behind seven years ago when that daughter made Brazil her home. I now have my own cache of Brazilian memories, but I don’t think they are necessary to appreciate this book. In Brazilian literature it is considered a classic, but its appeal should be far broader.

Helena Morley (pseudonym for Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant, 1880-1970) had a British-physician grandfather who migrated to Brazil and grew wealthy and a father who bought and managed marginal diamond mines and grew poor. At thirteen, attending a four-year normal school that would qualify her to teach primary school, a teacher assigned her to keep a diary. By her own description, Helena was mischievous, intelligent but lazy in her studies, and more fond of house work than homework (the diary being an exception). She was her grandmother’s favorite, but burdened by a godmother, her aunt, whose ‘love’ seemed to be expressed diabolically. Readers see her alert to both her own inner thought life, and her context in the larger community.

That community, Diamantina, Minas Gerais, some three hundred miles inland from Rio de Janeiro, is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site as an example of Brazilian Baroque Architecture, but the population still hasn’t reached 50,000. Her neighbors were poor families with both adults and children sorting through piles of gravel, picking out tiny diamonds or flecks of gold. Helena was there to witness the arrival of the first post office, and discussion about a possible railroad line. She thought the train money could be better spent bringing the town clean drinking water, and worried that the post office was replacing the lame delivery man who had to be lifted each day onto his donkey.

Brazil outlawed slavery in the years just before this diary began (newborns in 1871, and older slaves in 1885), and one of the interesting dynamics in Helena’s community involved the relationship between those who had once been masters or slaves. Her grandparents had owned slaves. Upon emancipation, most of the males moved to the big cities to find work and most of the females (more than available work required) stayed on to enjoy economic security with grandma. Helena’s daily entrees offer a wealth of material on the interaction between these two groups. There were resentments in both directions, yet honest affection, as well. There was also a pattern of white women with empty nests taking in orphaned black babies and raising them almost as pets.

Throughout, Helena describes her own conflict over Catholicism. She asks her mother to stay on her knees while Helena takes tests she hasn't sufficiently studied for, and catalogues saints by distinguishing which ones offer effective returns on prayer, and which ones don’t. She suffers under an aunt who, after the family has already offered sufficient prayers for the evening, then launches into long prayers to move the souls of nearly-forgotten relatives from Purgatory to Heaven. Helena also struggles with the belief it is a sin to consider her priest homely, and then wonders how she can confess that to him.

The story is full of rich characterizations; the neighbor lady who steals chickens, but then offers heroic help when Helena’s mother is sick; the father who reinvests all of his income in buying new mines, leaving his family in poverty; the grandmother who holds the family (and servants) together. There are also delightful vignettes; the women-folk carrying laundry to the river and Helena interrupting her bath and hair-washing to catch a dinner’s worth of the crawdads nibbling at her feet; the monkey who would toss Helena the ripest fruit from the top of the tree; the disaster when—at age 14, against her will and with no orientation or instructions—the crazy godmother arranges for Helena to substitute teach one month in a classroom of hellions.

In my day job, I teach junior high. Some things never change. The day after I read Helena’s account of being caught with a crib-sheet during a test (a footnote tells us they are called concertinas in the Portuguese), I saw one of my better students awkwardly trying to use one during the test I was administering. Helena’s teacher walked around and stood beside her for most of the test period, enabling the other students to use their own concertinas unnoticed. I walked around and stood next to my student. She sweated under the pressure, and after a while, handed me her test. Across the top, I wrote, “Would you like to start over, without the cheat-sheet?” With downcast eyes, she nodded agreement. In her diary, Helena lamented her poor luck.

Separated by 115 years, different languages, and all the changes of our modern age, a fourteen-year-old is still a fourteen-year-old. That a junior-high-aged girl produced this finely-layered story reminds us how observant this age-group can be. My own students can ignore the lesson I’m teaching, but will notice if I wear a new shirt. Helena has that same capacity. She carried me back three generations, across 6,000 miles, to another culture, and showed me the students in my classroom today.

California Election After-Thoughts

2009-05-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

California’s polls have been closed almost three hours, with the voters rendering judgment over a lose-lose choice. On the five budget-balancing (well, not even balancing…call it juggling) propositions, voters ruled that the chaos of the unknown is preferable to the shell-game offered by the state’s elected leadership. The margins are running between 40-60 and 37-63. The only the measure to pass prohibits politicians from voting themselves raises during years running deficit budgets. That one is up 77-23.

Our state has been ungovernable for a decade, maybe two. The reasons include a hodgepodge of ballot propositions, and term-limits. The first takes away the legislature’s flexibility in fashioning a budget. The second takes away their incentive to do so. Since reelection beyond a second term is denied them, they have very little reason to go the extra mile. Then, since the legislators as a group are transitory, the savvy movers-and-shakers come from the armies of staffers and lobbyists who never find themselves termed out. The end result is a legislature that busies itself fiddling while California burns.

Today’s Prop 1F, therefore, while it’s a feel-good “Take that!” for the voters, does nothing to solve our problems. Many of the suggestions I hear do no better. For example, denying legislators’ their salaries during periods when the state enters a budget year without a new budget sounds good, but provides insufficient leverage.

However, what if we did away with term limits, but replaced them with a stipulation that anytime the legislature failed to approve a version of a budget by the deadline, no member of that legislature could appear on the ballot at the next election? I would even let members run write-in campaigns to retain their seats, or return to office after sitting out a term.

Term limits have not given us better government. Neither has government by ballot proposition. We need a legislature that functions well enough to erase the need for ballot propositions. We want to reward good service, and penalize poor service. We want to overcome the tendency for a senate or assembly seat to become a lifetime appointment. We want to provide the incentive for our legislators to sweat a little on our behalf, and level the playing field for a challenger when the incumbent’s performance has fallen short. I believe my proposal would be a step in that direction.

New Heights in Bad Poetry

2009-05-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

One comment on my last post sent me scurrying back to the keyboard to draft another entry for Chip MacGregor's Bad Poetry Contest. I may finally be a contender for the lava lamp.

Love or Not-Love

Attention, Aficionados of Fine Bad Poetry

2009-05-08T21:44:00.000-07:00

As an adolescent, I wrote quite a bit of poetry that, even now, I look back upon as being several cuts above the, well . . . adolescent. I stopped writing poetry when I married. Subsequent soul-searching led me to the conclusion that my verse had been tied up in my loneliness. No longer lonely, my muse fell out of use. In my recently-completed program for a masters degree in creative writing, I produced nary a poem.

However, what my MFA professors could not draw out of me, a blog competition has. Literary agent Chip MacGregor runs an annual Bad Poetry Contest. I took a class from Chip at Mount Hermon, in 2003, and read his blog regularly. I’m still a little miffed at him for not recognizing the brilliance of my entry last year. The poem has been up since last May for the thousands who read his blog, but I figure it’s time to share it with the tens (sometimes twelves) who read mine. Chip threw down the gauntlet with the assertion that

There are only four words in the English language that rhyme with love: "Dove" and "Above" are the popular choices. "Shove" and "glove" don't really count. Use of the baby word "Wuv" can get you shot. (British citizens who enter are allowed to use the word "guv," as in "guv'nor," but don't push it. We Scots have been pushed around by you people long enough.)

I thought I deserved at least an honorable mention for expanding his list 0.4-fold with this entry:

Love

This year, I’ve decided I won’t wait twelve months to share my poem here. I won’t even wait to hear if I won the Grand Prize lava lamp. So here is my 2009 (untitled) Bad Poem:

And if this one doesn’t win, I’ll cultivate a new bad poem for next year.

Living in a SwH1N1e Flu Disaster Area

2009-04-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

I hate to even bring this up, knowing that several of my readers survived Hurricane Hugo. Others helped in the cleanup and rescue after the Indian Ocean tsunami and a handful are veterans of last year’s Sichuan earthquake. However, my county in California has been officially recognized as a disaster area. I would tell you the common name of the disaster, except that leadership of both WHO and US (boy, doesn’t THAT sound like Abbot and Costello) decided the long-standing name was slanderous, and replaced it with a moniker that will never catch on. Fortunately, the virus itself mutates rapidly, raiding DNA from its unwitting hosts. Thus, I’m suggesting we mutate the name of this pandemic and call it the SwH1N1e Flu of 2009.

This morning, I peacefully over-slept, but then hurried around to get the trash can to the curb before leaving for work. During the day, I proctored some tests, corrected some papers, and tried to explain the causes of the American Civil War to several groups of 8th graders. It was eerie.

Eerier yet, the kid we sent home yesterday with fever and a suspicious rash was back in class today, looking healthy.

Some of the 8th graders have gone to mimicking the masks they see in newscasts. They wrap lengths of paper towel around their faces (well, it does help avoid the causes of the American Civil War). They are mostly disappointed that an after-school dance was canceled, but school itself was not.

Coming home, I visited several stores in hopes of buying alcohol-based hand-sanitizer. Finally, I found some symptom of disaster: Hoarders had beaten me to the squirt-bottles of Prell. In the midst of times like this, it is the human kindnesses that stand out: The manager of PetCo remembered that he had a package in the back, designed to fit a wall dispenser they no longer used. He gave it to me for free.

The big question in the press (Google shows it has generated 3,344 news stories) is what Vice President Joe Biden said (or meant to say, or would have said if the lobbyists had properly briefed him) about flying in airplanes during the pandemic. What he seems to have said is that he would advise his family not to. (We were warned, as far back as the convention, that he is sometimes capable of this, or worse.)

Um. Texas is closing down entire big-city school districts.

The difference, however, is that school districts are tax supported while airlines need paying customers. So the spokespersons said first that Biden meant he would tell his family not to fly to Mexico. Later they said Biden meant he would tell his family not to fly if they suspected that they might be carrying the disease, were contagious, and constituted a likely danger to other passengers. (This is also the administration that believes condoms provide an adequate barrier against all the pertinent viruses, so there is precedent.) Personally, I’m glad that—for other reasons—I had already decided not to fly anywhere in the next several months.

But I do plan to keep going to school, until the health department recommends closing it. I will squirt hand-sanitizer on my students and hope we can look back on this official disaster as a fizzle. If that should come to pass, I will take off my hat, admit WHO’s on first, and let them call this virus anything they want.

Sunset @ Muir Beach Overview

2009-04-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

This sunset is brought to you by a bad Google Map that sent me eight or nine miles past the motel where I had reservations, and out narrow Highway 1. Fog had already hidden the Golden Gate Bridge, and was closing quickly on this scene, to the low moans of fog horns and the whistle of wind in the moss-draped trees behind me. I stood it as long as I could and then hurried back to the car and its heater. Then I drove back in the direction of cell-phone reception. The desk clerk's Urdu flavored English was difficult to decifer, but I caught that the motel could be seen near a Walgreen's. I'm in Marin County doing research (on the inland side of the peninsula) for my novel. (Note to Google: no Walgreen's up this stretch of Highway 1.) Note to self: Thank Google for one serindipitous bad map.

Shock and Awe

2009-04-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.

There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead...'"

(Matthew 28:1-7a NIV)

Oh happy day! Jesus, the Christ, has shattered the gates of Hell.

Annual Return of the Orange Watsonia

2009-03-20T21:38:00.000-07:00

My grandmother (nee Watson) felt a special attachment to the Watsonia, and nurtured a healthy patch of them in her yard. My sister had the foresight to gather some of the corms. She’s moved several times over the last decade, but a colony of those Watsonias moved as she moved. At some point, she passed a couple of starts to me. Rushed for time, I put them into a poorly-chosen patch of ground, not knowing where I might eventually place them. In part, I stuck them in a patch of yellow oxalis (O. pes-caprae) because this was another plant I associated with my grandmother’s yard.

That must have been, what, six or seven years ago? I wish I could say these plants were thriving. (Well, the oxalis is: no matter how pretty it may be, it well-deserves its reputation as an aggressively invasive weed.) Recent research tells me Watsonias like loose, well drained soil that doesn’t completely dry out in the summer. Unfortunately, I have them in heavy soil, beyond where the sprinklers reach in our 110° July. Under the circumstances, I’m thrilled that after all these parched summers, the Watsonia still manages to send up its annual stalk of orange blossoms.

Wikipedia tells me that Watsonias are out of fashion in a nursery industry that wants to fill that niche with its near-relative the gladiola. I suppose the gladiola is showier, with a dramatic spray of bigger flowers. I do enjoy a gladiola when I see one. But the Watsonias carry me back 50 years to my grandmother’s yard.

It is difficult for me to believe that this year will mark the 20th anniversary of my grandmother’s death. It is remarkable how much she is still with us. My brother recently digitized old recordings of her playing ragtime piano. That reminded me that someplace I have several hours of interviews on reel-to-reel that I want to transfer to CD. This week, however, it has been enough to watch the symmetrical rows of orange trumpets catch the sun, and enjoy my grandmother's company as I admire them.

A Tribute to Clara Ingram Judson

2009-03-01T20:23:00.000-08:00

As a compulsive reader and pathological scavenger, I cannot pass a box of free books without stopping to rummage. Thus, one day last week on my way off campus, I stopped in the teachers’ room to glance through a stack of culls from the library shelves. Several books looked interesting, but a slim volume titled Boat Builder sent me into—not exactly an out-of-body experience—but certainly 50 years across time.

“Robert Fulton,” I said to myself as I glanced at the author: Judson.

I was not always a compulsive reader. My mother tells me that as a 3rd grader, I knew how to read by hadn’t quite figured out what it was for. I enjoyed having my parents read to me, but I can remember that every two weeks my mother would take me to the public library in hopes that some book would catch my fancy. It did not happen until I discovered the shelf of biographies by Clara Ingram Judson. In rapid succession, I read every book there. By the time I completed it, I was a lover of both reading and history.

She wrote about people: Thomas Jefferson: Champion of the People and Benjamin Franklin became more than role models, they became personal playmates. Each book enriched my understanding of what one human life could accomplish: Abraham Lincoln (back in print, 2007, Sterling Point Books: Abraham Lincoln: Friend of the People ), George Washington: Leader of the People, Theodore Roosevelt: Fighting Patriot, Mr Justice Holmes, Jane Addams and Hull House, Thomas Edison, Simon Bolivar, Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, Sun Yat-Sen, Donald McKay and his Yankee Clippers, John Jacob Astor, William Gorgas curing Yellow Fever, and Christopher Columbus. She wrote about places as if they were people: Sault Ste Marie, and the St. Lawrence Seaway. I look down the list now on Amazon, and I remember every one of them.

By the time I got to high school, I did not need to read the history books. I had read biographies of almost everyone mentioned in the texts.

Today I earn my living herding twelve and thirteen-year-olds through history. I try to make it interesting for them by telling stories about the individuals who made our history. Many of those stories I picked up before I was ten, from reading Clara Ingram Judson. But beyond that, yesterday I turned in my thesis for a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing (fiction). It is a complex novel, at the surface a story about the death penalty, but at a deeper level it says a great deal about immigrants and immigration. So I was amazed just now as I looked at Judson’s list of books. There was another series she wrote, historical fiction, each book the account of one immigrant family. I had forgotten those books, yet I read the titles, and could fill in every country of origin:
Sod-house Winter: They Came from Sweden,
The lost violin;: They came from Bohemia, and books on immigrants from Ireland, France, Scotland, and Dalmatia. If you had asked me a week ago where I developed my life-long interest in immigration, I might have traced it to reading Carey McWilliams in my teens, but there it is: reading Clara Ingram Judson before I turned ten.

Going through grad school these past five years, I have often been asked to name an author who helped mold me. I always felt a little deficient for not having a ready answer. Now I have an answer, it’s just not what any of the questioners would expect.

Judson (1878-1960) would have been a contemporary of my great-grandmother. Among other things, she wrote cook-books for girls and a fiction series of “Mary Jane” books that I never read. You can get Mary Jane now as a Kindle Book, with the reader’s choice of foreign language embedded so that by placing the cursor over a word, the Spanish (for example, Mary Jane - Webster's Spanish Thesaurus Edition ), Italian, German, French, Bulgarian, Polish, Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi, Ukrainian, Czech, Thai, or Urdu translation will appear. Having spent my lifetime thinking about how immigrants assimilate (or fail to), that tickles me. Looking at what she chose to write about, I think it would have tickled Judson, as well.

At the end of my thesis, I have a three page selected bibliography. I know, novels don’t usually come with bibliographies, but mine is an historical novel and I’ve put a lot of research into it. As a compulsive reader and a pathological scavenger, I’ve collected ideas from all over. Actually, when I started writing the novel, less than ten years after Judson’s death, I thought I was working on a contemporary. It has only turned into an historical as it has taken me nearly four decades to complete it. In the course of preparation for publication, the thesis will be back in my hands at least once to make some corrections.

When it does, I am going to sneak one more book onto the bibliography: something, anything, by Clara Ingram Judson.

One Wet Metepeira in Need of a Housing Bailout

2009-02-09T22:53:00.000-08:00

For several months, I’ve been checking in on this Metepeira sp. single mom where she lives in a Montrose rosemary bush. During the summer, she enjoys certain advantages over other denizens of the Southern California housing market. She pays no association fees, and faces no adjustable mortgage. Sure, there are strings attached, but she controls the strings. She thatches together an awning in the center of her web, here and there tacking on the carcass of an insect she’s sucked dry. Notice, she’s not the one being sucked dry.

But in today’s rain, she looked pretty glum. It was obvious she was retaining water. She’s an obvious candidate, first for a bailout, and then a little stimulus. Seems everyone's a candidate these days.

I took this picture on low density, so it misses out on a lot of details. You have to trust me that she has eight legs and eight eyes. That’s kind of the way I look at the packages being put together now in Washington. When an $800 billion bonus is being designed on short notice by a president, his cabinet, 100 senators, and 435 congressmen, the first thing that is certain is that no one understands the details. The second is that hundreds of pet projects that couldn’t see the light of day last year suddenly found the light. Picture yourself winning a spending spree at Walmart, up to half a year's salary, but only what you could personally drag to the checkout counter in fifteen minutes. Then multiply that by astronomical dollar amounts, 100 senators and 435 congressmen. A thousand Metepeiras couldn’t spin such a tangled web. Finally, imagine how you will feel to learn it wasn't a true giveaway. The full price went on your credit card.

And then next week we will do it again with Round Two of the mortgage bailout, doubling-or-more the Bush bailout that seemed incomprehensively massive such a short time ago. There is no way for me to analyze the Stimulus Bill. The point is to create jobs, and even Bridges to No-Where create jobs. I can’t even judge the Bailout. It’s a roll-of-the-dice whose repercussions will be felt for several generations. I can, however, make a few observations I haven’t seen elsewhere.

First, the bailouts are a de facto method of devaluing the dollar. Nations do this when they want to make their goods more attractive to world markets, and overseas products less attractive to buyers at home. It's probably something we need, but it’s something we ought to acknowledge we are doing if that is our goal. The law of supply and demand says that if three trillion dollars are dumped into a stable or over-supply of housing, each dollar already there will buy that much less, thus devaluing all dollars. It is a quiet way to roll back pension obligations and union contracts (of which no entity is so burdoned as government).

Similar situations have occurred twice in my lifetime. Home ownership had been out of the reach of most urban dwellers until the GI Bill at the end of World War II, but in the 1950’s and 1960’s, my parents’ generation found that most couples could buy a house on one income. In the last 60’s and 70’s, many couples decided they could gain a market advantage by applying a second income to home buying. True, the average new house got a little bigger, and added a few amenities, but even older homes doubled and tripled in price. In the supply-and-demand bidding war for houses, suddenly a second income became a requirement for home buying. Baby Boomer buyers were working twice as hard for the same house, and World War II era sellers were carting the new-found wealth to the bank. Boomers eventually got some of those bank deposits back as inheritances, but it was a poor trade-off for many.

Prices again took off during the Clinton and Bush years as government policies allowed for riskier and riskier loans, but a similar pattern emerged. Easy loans allowed bidding wars that left sellers rich and buyers enslaved. In California, we then penalized the new buyers with Proposition 13, which gave them property tax rates three or four times higher than the house next door.

So with that record, we are now going to pour two or three trillion dollars into the housing market. The banks will get theirs. The sellers will get theirs. The big losers are buyers and those on fixed incomes. Fortunately, there will be a few new jobs earning our new devalued dollars. Those will help cover the taxes that the next generation will owe to pay for all this.

For a lot of young couples looking for housing, it may be time to learn a lesson from the Metepeira: Thatch together an awning, and hope for dry weather.

Nature-Walking with Natu (In Lieu of a 25 Things List)

2009-02-08T19:19:00.000-08:00

As a dedicated fadoclast (for example, I have never watched a Superbowl), I will not be doing one of those Facebook 25 Things Lists, though I have been tagged twice. I don’t foresee enough time for making lists anytime soon. I have my thesis due to the committee in ten days, an important speaking engagement (sidebar) next month, a daughter’s wedding in early April, the daily-ness of teaching junior high, and a myriad of unexpected demands on my time. Take today, for example. I brought the love-of-my-life to L.A. so she could spend a day with our soon-to-be-married daughter and take advantage of Disneyland’s current offer of free entrance on a birthday.

In L.A., I have a son attending seminary and two grandsons. By watching the eldest for the day, my son could get off for some research for a paper he has due. For me, the height of delicious decadence is a bug net, an expanse of foliage, and maybe a child or two to share the discoveries. (I’ve never met a youngster who couldn’t get excited about a bug net. That’s an experiment I’ve conducted on three continents.)

Catching bugs has nothing to do with my employment, or getting my novel written. It is totally frivolous. I constructed my first bug net when I was 25, after graduating UCLA with no more biology than the lower division Intro course. That’s why it tickles me that my little bug-net excursions find occasional mention in the scientific literature, like this one in the journal Biota Colombiana. (See pages 2 & 3, and Tatepeira carrolli listed on page 5.) I even had the privilege of editing the English abstract (not yet on-line) for the Chinese PhD. thesis from which this gallnut article was taken.

With all this as background, this morning Natu and I took off looking for some spiders. Unfortunately, it was chilly and damp, and the spiders didn’t come out to play. We had to content ourselves with other diversions.

I like to crumple fresh bay leaves and hold them to my nose. I like turning over rocks, to see what scurries away. I like watching a little boy’s eyes get big at a sow bug.

Whaddya know, I’ve said 24 random things about myself. I probably won’t finish, though. I live under a cloud of unfinished projects, but hey, there are so many delightful distractions.
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#26 - One of my favorite songs is a tune by Bob Dylan. The only lyric goes, "All the white horses in the sun, how'm I s'posed to get any writing done?"

It's That Time Again! 新年快乐 (Xin Nian Kuai Le!)

2009-01-25T19:47:00.000-08:00

It's still Sunday evening in California, but it's just past noon on New Years (Monday) in China, so this goes out with warm wishes for a healthful and prosperous Year of the Ox. In looking back at the Year of the Rat just finishing, one surprise here at Capers was that the page that most often captured visiters coming over from a Google search was . . . (the envelope, please) . . . 新年快乐 (Xin Nian Kuai Le!) from a year ago. We've had a steady stream throughout the year, often from Europe. This week, 新年快乐 got ten hits from the United Arab Emirates alone. So while I'm wishing all my Chinese friends a wonderful new year, I'm also scratching my head and wondering to what I owe this popularity. So a request: If you arrived at this blog after a Google search for "新年快乐", please leave a comment and explain what you hoped to find here. And then, may you enjoy health, peace, prosperity, and joy in this Year of the Ox.

My Hat, It Has Three Cognates

2009-01-06T17:25:00.000-08:00

Natu found me eating breakfast in my stockinged feet and brought one of my big shoes, lifted my foot to maneuver it into place, and then ran off to get the matching partner. Pretty ambitious for a 28-month-old. Once my shoes were on, he went to the front door and stood beckoning. We located his shoes and a sweatshirt, and I put on my hat. Natu raced off to find his chapéu. His Portuguese-challenged grandfather defaulted to the chapeau of other-wise forgotten high-school French, which his grandmother corrected and sent us on our way. With chapéu, there is no conflict between Natu's Portuguese and the sombrero of my wife’s Spanish, and only a rough resemblance to her Italian cappello. As we race to keep up with our bilingual grandson’s Portuguese, it intrigues me that when the Portuguese varies from the Spanish, its cognates sometimes run after the French, and other times bow to the Italian.

Photo by Natu's Grandma

On our walk, Natu and I saw an “avião up in the sky!” (Which I heard as the Spanish avión, and no doubt confused him as I repeated it.)

He gets excited by the Christmas lights that are still up and is working hard on his colors. He nails yellow pretty consistently, but confuses blue, red, and green. Of course, with his mother they are azul, vermelho, e verde.

Over our heads, it was “Squirrels dançando!” while at our feet it was “Pinecones swimming!”

We stooped and I introduced him to water-logged acorns. He took one in each hand, “One acorn! Two acorn!” The numbers are also coming in both languages. I showed him how acorns have chapéu. He met that with the glee that only a two-year-old can muster.

“Acorn, chapéu!” we volleyed back and forth.

Natu and Papa both understand the first rule of language learning: ‘Put every new word to immediate use.’

Kicking Myself in a Dark Gymnasium

2008-12-12T21:28:00.000-08:00

Lately I've run into enough former students to remind myself I’ve been teaching for 38 years (counting back to my first volunteer assignments while still at UCLA). I reckon some 2000 students have passed through my classes, some of whom are now well entrenched in middle age. I always enjoy seeing or hearing from them.

I'd already been thinking of a blog series on some of those former students when one showed up today to dance for an assembly. Rene Jaramillo began competitive pow wow dancing several years before he showed up in '77 for some junior high history. Native American dancing is still his passion, one he shares with his wife and daughter. Between getting my current class seated and the beginning of the performance, Rene and I had a moment to renew our acquaintance and ask about mutual friends.

I was kicking myself for not bringing my camera, when I remembered a function on my cell phone that I haven’t even played with after a year of carrying it around. In the low light, Rene’s fast dancing gets totally lost, but the stills are recognizable, if not quite satisfactory.

As I begin this occasional series on former students, Rene represents my 7th grade World History class of ’77-’78, and the 8th grade U.S. History class of ’78-’79, my first full time job. We also enjoyed some great recess basketball. Rene currently works at a Sports Chalet and has danced for audiences across the U.S. and Europe. Next time, I’ll try and have a camera that can catch the action.

Two October Weddings (twice father-of-the-groom)

2008-11-30T19:38:00.000-08:00

If I seem to be on a jag about weddings, credit my children. Three have gotten married since last Christmas and a fourth is planning nuptials in April. In October alone, we held two CA weddings, seven thousand miles apart. If raising five children has taught me that no two siblings are alike, this year has taught me the same about weddings. For Timothy and Danielle’s wedding, CA stood for zip codes: 92870, 93907, and 93291, one for the wedding and one each for home town receptions for the bride and groom. Three weeks later, for Lucien and Angie’s wedding, CA stood for flights: Air China 984 and 1509, thirteen hours from Los Angeles to Beijing and another two hours from Beijing to Hangzhou. Then we drove most of two hours to Jinhua.

For Timothy and Danielle, the wedding rehearsal began about an hour late because the principals were stuck in Angels/Red Sox playoff traffic. (I never did hear who won.) After practicing the ceremony through once (and some parts twice), the party moved a few blocks for an Italian dinner. Rehearsals are not part of modern weddings in China, where ceremony is minimal and planning takes a back seat to spontaneity. But we did gather for lunch with the same participants who would have been invited to an American-style wedding-rehearsal dinner. We ate Chinese. (Well, that’s where we were!)

Invitations to Timothy and Danielle’s wedding suggested that guests (and perhaps especially the father-of-the-groom) not bring cameras, trusting that official photographer Shannon Leith would provide all the pictures anyone could desire. A nice selection of engagement and wedding photos are available at Shannon’s site. Invitations to Lucien and Angie’s wedding circulated via Facebook. There was no official photographer, and most of the pictures were snapped by the father-of-the-groom.

Even though Timothy (a very talented tailor) designed and made Danielle’s dress, they still followed the American tradition in which the groom does not see the bride on the wedding day until she walks down the isle.

Photo by Shannon Leith

Lucien and Angie broke a Chinese tradition that the wedding couple should be the first to arrive at the location where they would together greet the guests. This wedding couple arrived alongside the early guests and organized the decorating committee. Then they slipped away to dress.

Later, your photographer and the groom’s mother just happened to be present when Lucien appeared to escort his bride back to their shindig.

At Timothy and Danielle’s Episcopal wedding, Father David of Blessed Sacrament officiated, while Timothy’s good friend Rabi Kevin canted a call-to-worship and blessings in Hebrew.

Photo by Shannon Leith

Most Chinese weddings have no officiate, only a master-of-ceremonies. Lucien and Angie went one better. Angie served as her own MC. The languages were Chinese and English.

For Lucien and Angie, the primary expression of the bride’s ethnicity was the Korean groom’s trousseau, a gift from the bride’s grandparents. For Timothy and Danielle, it was Kransekake.

Photo by Shannon Leith

This Norwegian wedding cake is made from finely ground almonds, formed into a series of ever-smaller rings. The new couple (and some older couples) take one ring in their mouths, biting from opposite sides in a maneuver that requires proximity and coordination.

Photos by Shannon Leith

Then there was dancing, elegant and fun to watch.

Lucien and Angie also had a cake cutting followed by dancing. In this video, see if you can spot any differences. (For elegant dancing, watch for Angie’s 80-year-old grandparents.) Lucien may have started a new wedding tradition for the Chinese, bonfire jumping to his Uncle Forrest’s mandolin picking.

In the end, both weddings provided wonderful parties and great memories. We also come out of October with two delightful new daughters-in-law and . . . (just what is the correct English term for ones children’s’ in-laws? . . . in-laws-once-removed?) . . . friends-with-children-in-common.

Photo by Shannon Leith

Photographer yet to be identified

I think I have this straight:
Most expensive single item for Timothy and Danielle’s wedding: The Photographer
Most expensive single item for Lucien and Angie’s wedding: The Fireworks