Capers With Carroll

(In mid September, 2022, I began a series commemorating the 50th anniversary of my coming-of-age trek across Europe and Israel in 1972. I posted eleven episodes before being interrupted at Thanksgiving time. This would probably come in at something like episode twenty, but I'm putting it here for other reasons which should become obvious. Technical difficulties prevented me from posting this when I first wrote it, on September 24, which was the 50th Yom Kippur since the 1973 war. It was also before the outbreak of the war now being fought.)

At a couple of minutes before 2:00, on the afternoon of Yom Kippur (October 6, in 1973, but ending at sundown this evening, September 25, 50 years later), when a coalition with troops from twelve nations launched a surprise attack upon Israel, many Jews both in Israel and elsewhere around the world were at synagogue services, observing their Day of Atonement, the most holy fast of the year. Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, in line by birth to the Levitical priesthood, was on the Greek island of Hydra, just off the Peloponnesian coast, with a woman named Suzanne (but not the Suzanne from his song of that name) and their toddler. He was 39 and feared he was washed up as a performer. He had never served in the military, even for his native Canada, and had the reputation of being something of a pacifist. Although he had lapsed as an observant Jew, at hearing the news of war, he took the ferry to the mainland, traveling light. He did not even take his guitar.

I, a gentile, was settling into my first year of marriage. We had spent our first six weeks at a family cabin at Mt. Baldy Village, just outside Los Angeles, and now we were back in the city. I had seen Cohen in concert at UCLA, three years earlier, from a second-row seat in the very center, smack dab in front of him. While attendees were arriving to fill Royce Hall, a voice in the back began to rant wildly and Cohen came from behind the curtain. The heckler came forward and the two sat on the edge of the stage and talked quietly. Cohen settled him down and gave him a parting hug. I did not know it, but just a couple of months earlier, while touring Europe, Cohen had talked his backup musicians into a concert at a mental hospital. When a patient stood mid-concert and challenged Cohen with a question about what the singer would do for him, Cohen set aside his guitar, went into the audience, and held the man in an embrace.

Only as I researched this essay did I learn that the interrupter in Royce had been actor Dennis Hopper, a friend of Cohen’s. For a period of eight days, right then, Hopper had been married to Michelle Phillips, recently divorced from both John Phillips and the Mammas and the Papas. She would be singing backup in the second half of the show, and Hopper had talked Cohen into giving her the job. For the first half of the concert, Cohen shared the stage only with a chair, a microphone, and his guitar. He sang songs that I knew well from his two albums, most notably, “Suzanne,’ “Sisters of Mercy,” “So Long, Marianne,” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” Cohen’s genius was for quiet lullabies of detachment and desperation. Cohen had difficulty forming attachments, but he had a talent for turning goodbyes into great poetry and hypnotic music.

I'm not looking for another as I wander in my time
Walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me
It's just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea
But let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie
Your eyes are soft with sorrow
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye

His goodbye to Suzanne (not that Suzanne) on Hydra was more of a ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing, but I know I have to go, and I may be back.’ He got on the ferry, and then an airplane, and arrived at Lod Airport in Tel Aviv.

Eleven months previous, I too landed at Lod, with even less reason to be there. After graduating from UCLA, I bought a one-way ticket to London, thinking I would get as far as France to spend a year. Then, before I could actually use that ticket, I fell hard for the only woman I have ever loved, and to whom I am married today. Cohen and I are opposites in so many ways, yet his songs have fascinated me now for some 55 years.

I knew I was coming back Stateside in just a few months. However, while hitch-hiking through Europe, doors opened and doors closed, rides either materialized or didn’t, and instead of Paris, I visited Amsterdam, Berlin, Basel, Venice, Belgrade, and Istanbul. First in East Germany and then in the West, I encountered God in a way I could never go back upon, and in ways I don’t believe Cohen ever did. When doors opened to direct me to Israel, I was ready for it. I arrived at Lod airport on an El Al flight from Istanbul. At both ends of the flight, passengers faced the strictest security I have ever seen, even after 9/11. In that November, 1972, only six months had passed since members of the Japanese Red Army pulled machine guns from their luggage, killing 26 and injuring 80.

Cohen had been to Jerusalem in April, at the end of his 1972 European tour. Once on stage, he’d become flustered when the crowd applauded after the first few words of “Like a Bird on a Wire.”

Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.

He stopped singing and explained why he could not go on with the concert, “…it says in the Kabbalah that unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne. And somehow, the male and female part of me refuse to encounter one another tonight, and God does not sit on his throne. And this is a terrible thing to happen in Jerusalem.” (https://www.israellycool.com/.../when-leonard-cohen.../) Cohen then walked off, followed by the band. At that point, the audience took up spontaneous versions of well-known songs in Hebrew. Back stage, Cohen shaved while the promoters and band tried to coax him back on stage. In his guitar case, he found an old package of LSD, which he split up among them, later describing the shared acid as “like the Eucharist.” It was Cohen’s special talent to use sacred imagery to describe the profane. After this ‘priestly’ duty, Cohen returned to the stage, crying, to listen to the crowd sing, and add a song of his own.

In Jerusalem, I located an acquaintance from UCLA, named Ilene. The next day, she snuck me onto a field trip with her Palestinian Archeology class. In the role of academics, we hopscotched north along the Jordan River, to stops in Galilee and catacombs near Haifa, listening to lectures. Then Ilene and I hitchhiked for a weekend in Safed, an artist’s colony and the highest city in Israel. Under the Ottoman rulers, Safed had been the study-center of Kabbalah. Alongside Israeli soldiers, we waited for rides at hitching points. The soldiers then put in a good word for us with any drivers who stopped. We rode along the border of the Golan Heights, chatting with our armed escorts. In Safed, we watched a continuous pattern of Israeli Air Force planes patrolling the Lebanese border, only about ten miles away.

In Tel Aviv, Cohen thought he would volunteer for work on a kibbutz, but visited cafés that he remembered from the disastrous tour of 20 months earlier. There, musicians recognized him and invited him to help entertain troops in the Sinai Desert, where the war was going very badly. They found him a guitar.

Actually, the war was going badly everywhere. The simultaneous attacks from Egypt into the Sinai and from Syria into the Golan Heights had caught an overconfident and relaxed Israel during a holiday. Observant Jews were between the first and second of the three main portions of the liturgy, and non-observant Jews were indulging themselves in secular pleasures.

Cohen would have been in this second group. Although raised in a Montreal synagogue founded by his rabbi grandfather, and deeply infused by its rhythms and language, Leonard Cohen was faith-curious, but living the life of a secular man. Israeli journalist Matti Friedman, author of WHO BY FIRE: LEONARD COHEN IN THE SINAI, describes Cohen’s public image as “a poet of cigarettes and sex and quiet human desperation, who’d dismissed the Jewish community that raised him as a vessel of empty ritual, who despised violence and thought little of states…” (p. 5). Yet much later, when Cohen was residing at a Zen Buddhist monastery, just two miles upstream from my family’s cabin at Mt. Baldy, he would tell an interviewer, “…I was never looking for a new religion. I have a very good religion, which is called Judaism. I have no interest in acquiring another religion.” (p. 41)

It intrigues me that Cohen, and an impressive list of other secular Jews, including Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Randy Newman, and Carly Simon, provided my generation with its musical score and lyrics, the Psalms of our secular experience.

Cohen knew well that he had been born in the bloodline of priests—Kohanim in Hebrew—running through his grandfather, then through 3,000 years of fathers and sons to the generation of Zadok, chief priest at the time of Solomon’s Temple. Finally it sound its Levitical source in Aaron, the brother of Moses. Cohen struggled with that. A new acquaintance in Tel Aviv sized him up quickly, “You must decide whether you are a lecher or a priest.” (p. 166). In notes he assembled just after the war, perhaps for a novel he never produced, Cohen recounts, “The interior voice said, you will only sing again if you give up lechery. Choose.” (p. 48). In the Temple, one whole branch of the priests were singers. Cohen was at a point in life where he doubted even that hereditary gift.

What Cohen could not have known, at least until he was living at the Zen Monastery, was that DNA studies in the late 1990s concluded that the genetic code bore out the historicity of this Kohanim tradition. Researchers have identified a pattern of genetic markers that is as much as ten times more common among Cohens than for non-Kohanim-Jews. That holds true among both Ashkenazi and Sephardic populations, and even for Lemba tribesmen in Zimbabwe and South Africa, who maintain a tradition of Jewishness.

Out in the Sinai Desert, at one end of the father-to-son chain of Kohanim, Moses recorded God’s declaration that only men from this one family could service the Tabernacle. Among their duties would be calling the people away from their daily tasks, often ministering during the worship with singing and musical instruments. Now, at the other end of the chain, Leonard Cohen, much though he might want to escape the priesthood, was heading into the Sinai to minister in music to the troops.

The Sinai was bathed in blood. The small troop of musicians would drive until they saw a cluster of soldiers, stop, and sing a few songs. Sometimes these soldiers were just arriving from hot battle, with minutes-old images of flying ordinance and falling comrades. Many were not sure who this singer was, nor could they understand the English of the songs he sang. He spoke no Hebrew. Few understood that here was a musician who had sung in 1970 before for a crowd of 600,000 on the Isle of Wight. Most were more excited to see the Israeli singers that they recognized. Cohen sang standing in a tight circle of soldiers, or sitting in the sand, or on the scoop of a bulldozer. One photograph shows him standing in front of General Ariel Sharon, who is talking to a well-known Israeli singer. Later, Sharon did not remember that Cohen had been there. (p. 141)

counter-offensive across the Suez into Egypt. At one point, Cohen helped carry stretchers with wounded soldiers from helicopters to a makeshift hospital. His memoire records that as they moved through territory that had seen recent battle, he recoiled against the sight of bodies littering the sand, but felt relief when he learned the dead were Egyptians, not Jews. Then he felt guilt for feeling that relief. Those had been some mothers’ sons. There was no LSD to cushion what he was seeing, only soldiers’ rations and quick naps on the sand. In between performances he worked out a new song, though the recorded version is gentler in places than the verses he sang in the desert.

I asked my father
I said, father change my name
The one I'm using now it's covered up
With fear and filth and cowardice and shame…
He said, I locked you in this body
I meant it as a kind of trial
You can use it for a weapon
Or to make some woman smile...
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover,
lover, lover come back to me
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover,
lover, lover come back to me
Then let me start again, I cried
I want a face that's fair this time
I want a spirit that is calm…
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover,
lover, lover come back to me
Yes and lover, lover, lover, lover, lover,
lover, lover come back to me

Of the three liturgical high points of the Yom Kippur commemoration—due to its solemnity, not to be confused with a celebration—the first, a thousand-year-old prayer called Unetaneh Tokef, had been recited before the coordinated attacks. It begins, “Let us relate the power of this day’s holiness.” It speaks of God’s judgements, the insignificance of man, and projects the idea that this Day of Atonement seals everyone’s fate for the coming year:

How many will pass on and how many be created,
Who will live and who will die,
Who will reach the end of their days and who will not,
Who by wind and who by fire,
Who by the sword and who by wild beast,
Who by famine and who by thirst… (p. 16)

This prayer formed the inspiration for Cohen’s 1974 song, ‘Who by Fire.’

During the second high point, all the male Cohens in the congregation stand around the gathering to recite a blessing that was left as a vestige after the destruction of the Second Temple, by the Romans, in 70 AD. “May God bless you and guard you. May God shine His face upon you and be gracious to you. May God lift up His face to you and grant you peace.” (p. 17)

The third and final highpoint, reached at the very end of the 24-hour fast, when everyone is tired, is a reading of the Book of Jonah, the most complex history ever presented in 48 sentences. At the beginning of 2022, on my short list of New Year’s resolutions, I wrote that I wanted to better understand Jonah. Eighteen months later, I think I am finally getting it, although perhaps I’m not taking the same message that all Yom Kippur worshippers are receiving.

Jonah, a prophet of God, is told to take a message to the people of Nineveh, not only pagans, but as wicked and blood-thirsty a city as ever existed. Jonah hops a boat going the opposite direction. He knows that he cannot escape from God, but perhaps he can escape from his job description. In a storm, he finds himself in the hands of pagans more righteous than he, but God uses him to demonstrate to those pagans His own awesome power. Then Jonah is swallowed by a fish, and surrenders himself to God’s will. The fish spits him up on the shore, and Jonah goes to preach in Nineveh. I have seen speculation that after three days stewing in a fish’s stomach juices, Jonah may have arrived in Nineveh looking like God’s demonstration project. The Ninevites repent, and God spares them from the judgement that He had pronounced. Jonah goes to sulk on a hilltop, where God provides a vine for shade and then a worm to kill the vine. Jonah is angry at God, both for His mercy on the wicked Ninevites and for taking away the protective shade, and God challenges him that he has no right or reason to stand in judgement on the Creator.

Why should Jonah’s memoire be read as the culminating activity on the Day of Atonement? In a very real sense, Jonah is Everyman, and we are all in need of atonement. We have all, together, and each, individually attempted to run from God and the job descriptions He has given us. We have all and each of us attempted to cast judgement on God for both the unrighteous who He has blessed and the righteous He has apparently overlooked. Even honest atheists, if they examine their hearts, will likely discover that their disbelief in God is rooted in those judgements.

But for Israel—and ratchet it up a notch for the Cohens—the job description is even more direct. Beginning with Abraham, God’s chosen people, like Jonah, were chosen to be God’s demonstration project. In this allegory, the rest of us are Ninevites.

The temptation for the chosen is to run as Jonah did, or to pass the job description off on others. Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye, addressing God, says, “I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can't You choose someone else?”

God very clearly sets out the stakes in this demonstration. By the time we get to Deuteronomy, chapters 27-30, Moses has completed his 40 years leading the Hebrews around in the Sinai. He gives his final instructions—rules against theft, mistreatment of the vulnerable, and lechery. Then, before turning them over to Joshua’s leadership and sending them across the Jordan, Moses tells the leaders that once they are in Israel, they are to put half the people on Mount Gerizim. There, they will shout a list of blessings that will come from obedience to God. Facing them, the other half will stand on nearby Mount Ebal, to shout curses that will follow disobedience. The script acknowledges that it’s for demonstration purposes. Concerning the blessings: “Then all the peoples on earth will see that you are called by the name of the LORD… “ (28:10a) Then later, concerning the curses: “The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth.” (28:25). And again: “You will become a thing of horror, a byword and an object of ridicule among all the peoples where the LORD will drive you.” (28:37)

The curses require a long chapter, remarkably foretelling the actual experience of the Jewish Diaspora: “Then the LORD will scatter you among all nations, from one end of the earth to the other…” (28:64) “Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the LORD will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your life.” (28:65-66)

However, Chapter 30 speaks of a restoration. Many of the families that were taken away to Babylon in the exile never got back to Israel. Cohen’s ancestors became Polish and Lithuanian Ashkenazim. Other families became the Sephardic population of Iberia. Yet over the course of 2,500 years they never lost their identity or the pull of the land. “Then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the LORD your God will gather you and bring you back.” (30:3-4)

That pull was so strong, that when a secular and lecherous Canadian Cohen, while fleeing his priestly calling, heard that Israel was under attack, his response was, “I’m not sure what I’m doing, but I know I have to go, and I may be back.”

I left Stratford-upon-Avon the morning after attending the Shakespeare play. One ride took me through Herefordshire and to the border of Wales, where I found myself in barren-looking highlands. My strongest memory is of a Royal Airforce pilot, who was practicing hugging the hilltops with his jet, up and down the valley, over the hill top to be out of sight for a few moments, and then back. For a while, it was just the two of us in those hills.

I have been searching in vain for the box of slides I took during this trip. Not that any of them stand out for quality; they don’t. I also have not been able to find the collection of letters home, saved by my mother and returned to me after her death. I probably did not even take a picture of these mountains, as they impressed me as rather bleak. However, in writing this episode, I did a Google search for a woman I would later meet, and discovered that she loved those mountains and spent much of her life taking pictures of central Wales. She advocated for the preservation of both its natural environment and the Welsh language. Often, though, she did not claim her photographs. When she did, she signed variously as Lis or Liz, Fleming-Williams, or just Williams.

Somewhere along there, I hitched a second ride. As it was approaching late afternoon, I had settled on reaching a Youth Hostel at Pontarfynach (Welsh for ‘Devil’s Bridge’). The driver knew of it, and let me off with instructions that if I followed the trail that she pointed out, it would cross a pasture and go down a deep gully. There would be a foot bridge, and the trail on the other side would take me to Pontarfynach.

The trail was just as she described it, following beside one of those walls that is just stones piled on top of each other as generations of farmers cleared their fields. The gully and bridge were also what she described, but by the time I started up the other side, the sun was down and darkness had set in. I realized it would be too dark to find my way any farther. I was beside a pasture, and could see the farm house farther up the hillside. I’m not into trespassing, but decided to step over the barbed wire and roll out my sleeping bag in a flat space.

Fog came in, which I felt gave me some protection against discovery, but I did not sleep well. I worried both about being where I hadn’t been invited and about the possibility of some cow coming along and stepping on me. In the morning, I quickly rolled up my sleeping bag and continued up the trail, which took me to a spot where I could look back on the farmhouse. This is the photograph which I most wanted to find and include here—but haven’t—with the green hillside, sparkling with dewdrops in the sunshine, the stone building, and an exposed opening where the roof had long-since disappeared. I had been worried about the occupants of an abandoned ruin. I recognized the lesson, and chewed upon it as I walked in the morning sunshine.

The trail put me out on a dirt road and my map told me I had a hike of about 12 miles, passing through Pontarfynach, and on to the city of Aberystwyth. The lush countryside was everything the higher mountains had not been, and the roadside even offered wild blackberries. I pondered the worries that had needlessly prevented a restful night’s sleep, and I had a strong sense that God had been watching out for me.

The God question consumed a lot of energy at that point in my life. Did He even exist? And if so, in what form? My religious education had been in Methodist congregations, which had molded in me the social gospel. I appreciated the fellowship of good people, doing good things, and enjoying wholesome fun and friendships. However, in my teens, I could not escape the observation that this group seemed to treat the Bible as a convenient mythology for holding the social club together. My own reading of the Bible refused to allow that as an option. Either the Bible was true in its claims, or it had to be rejected. I would not base my life on a myth.

I went looking through the world’s other religions for truth. I read the Quran and came away unimpressed. Upanishads and sutras left me bored. I did entertain a brief attraction to Daoism and the Dao De Ching, but it seemed to me that to be a good Daoist, one would need to live as a hermit in a cave. I knew myself to be a people-person.

By the time I graduated from high school, I leaned towards the idea that all of the world’s religions could be reduced to the Golden Rule. That summer, however, I visited relatives in Oregon and heard a rabbi speak. Not only did he actually accept all of the Bible as truth, but he believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Jewish Messiah. I tucked that away in my mind. It bounced back a few years later while reading about a Vietnamese religion, Cao Dai. Caodaism, as Time Magazine explained it, hoped to unite all the world’s faiths into one. They proposed a pantheon of great spirits: Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tse, Gandhi…(up to this point, I was nodding)…and Victor Hugo. I felt as if I had been stabbed, seeing Jesus and Victor Hugo in the same sentence. Yet obviously, once any other human being could be put in the same sentence as Jesus, any group would be free to add their own superstar. I had to mull my reaction. It also brought back a lesson I had learned from reading the Dao De Ching. There is an enormous gulf between what Lao Tse taught and the way the religion is practiced today. I needed to look only at Jesus, and not the behavior of his modern adherents.

I replayed much of this in my mind as I entered Pontarfynach in the early morning sunshine, inwardly praising the God for whom I still questioned even his existence.

Out of a house, a woman came out to greet me, “Where are you going?”

“Aberystwyth,” I told her.

“I’m driving there in half an hour. Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea. Then I'll take you there.”

She told me that her name was Barbara Fleming-Williams, that she lived in London. This was their vacation home, and her husband had just published a book on the English landscape painter John Constable. I enjoyed the tea while she finished her preparations, and before she dropped me off in Aberystwyth, we traded addresses.

Aberystwyth turned out to be a small city, colorful and quaint, with the ruins of an ancient castle. A plaid wool cap tempted me beyond my budget, but I thought better of it, and then began the 55 mile hike, south, toward Fishguard. Fishguard would offer both a Youth Hostel and a boat to Ireland.

Despite the marvels I had already experienced in one day, I began to be depressed by the distance I still needed to cover. Then I recalled the last words Vicki had given me at the airport, “No matter what happens, remember to praise God in all things.” Indeed, I had been praising God when Mrs. Fleming-Williams came out to greet me, and I did have a great deal for which to praise God.

While I was still somewhat lost in praising this God about whose existence I wasn’t quite convinced, far down the road, a truck pulled to a stop from a side road, and the driver waved to me. I broke into the best run I could manage with my heavy backpack, and climbed into the passenger side. He was an auto parts delivery man, and we drove down the coast unloading his wares at petrol stations. We had a jolly good conversation and at each garage, the owner invited us to sit for tea and what they called biscuits and I would call cookies. Finally, on the edge of Fishguard, he treated me to fish and chips. I arrived at the hostel with enough daylight left to join two Swiss boys in a walk along the cliffs above the sea.

Beat (bay-AHT) and Urs were also headed over to Ireland, so we decided to travel together. As it turned out, they would later visit me in the States, and after we were married, Vicki and I would travel through Switzerland and Italy with Beat. Barbara Fleming-Williams daughter Lis would also visit us in America. What a day!

As Beat and I got to know each other that night, he asked me if I was religious. I told him that I was not.

Afterthoughts: In preparing to write this, I came upon obituaries for both Lis Fleming-Williams (d. 2019) and her father (1998). Barbara died in the 1980s. Lis had devoted her life to protecting the natural environment and wildlife of Central Wales. We had a brief visit with them in London in 1976, but otherwise had no communication after Lis and a friend visited us in Los Angeles during the summer that Vicki and I got married. For both Vicki and I, the strongest memory of that visit is the embarrassment we felt when Lis’s stomach pains required us to take her to Emergency at Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital, in Los Angeles. It was very obvious that our American healthcare system did not match what she would have expected from the British system. When I search back to my first questioning of our American system, I go back to that hospital visit.

I found a free map of London and walked the city for two days. I soon learned that the three things I needed in order to learn a new city were a map, a couple of days, and walking.

Travel teaches us much about a foreign place. By comparing and contrasting, we also get fresh eyes to better understand what we consider home. In 2022, looking back 50 years, I am struck by how much my travels have taught me about myself, as well. The passage of time has a similar effect. I’ve been thinking as I write this about my cousin Lance, who would have celebrated his 23rd birthday on the day I flew from Los Angeles to London, if only had he not drowned in a scuba accident when we were both 17. At 17, Lance never got a chance to learn just who he was. I am also comparing my trip 50 years ago with the current trip of a friend who is posting each day from Greece. I am learning a great deal about Greece, but more-so, although I have considered her as family and admired her for 40 years, I am also gaining new insights into who she is, and comparing her meticulously planned trip with my trip, which had almost no planning at all.

My plan was to go over there and have a look around.

I wouldn’t be traveling in total ignorance, because I had been visiting England vicariously since meeting Benjamin Franklin in a children’s book at the age of eight. Franklin first visited London to study the art of printing. He lived there again, 1757-1762 and 1764-1775, as the representative of the Pennsylvania colony. Increasingly during those years he also became the primary representative for all the British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard. I could imagine myself arriving in London much as Franklin had arrived in Philadelphia, a run-away, walking the city with bread stuffed in his pockets.

I did walk past the house marked as Franklin’s home. It’s a mere ten-minute walk from the Parliament building. He rented rooms in that building for almost 16 years. In Franklin (along with Jefferson, who much preferred France) I’d had my first hero, my first tastes of travel, and—I realize now—not an imaginary friend, but a friend from another era, and a soul mate. I could not have told you for another 25 years anything about Myers-Briggs personality typology, but somehow, my shared characteristics with Franklin (ENTP and the often-concurrent ADHD) grabbed me, and in the process hooked me on history, biography, geography, and a layman’s fascination with anthropology, zoology, botany, linguistics, meteorology, and all the other interests that Franklin (and INTP Jefferson) found to interest them.

By the time I landed in London, I had read biographies of Churchill, Gladstone, Henry VIII, Victoria, Elizabeth I, Drake, Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Admiral Nelson, Newton, Faraday, Cromwell, Richard the Lion Hearted, and Raleigh; and read works by Shakespeare, Austin, Dickens, Tolkien, Lewis, and Orwell. I had also studied my English genealogy, including the Rev. Stephen Bachilor, a Puritan divine who brought four grandsons and my mother’s line to Boston, in 1632. After some scandal (there is evidence that his fourth wife formed the model for Hester Prynnes, in Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter’), Bachilor returned to London for his final years. On a later trip I would do a search for his grave.

From Earl’s Court to Buckingham Palace is a three-mile walk, or slightly farther if one takes a route along the Themes. I looked in on whatever I could enter without a fee, which included several hours in the Victoria and Albert Museum and an hour-or-so in the balcony listening to a debate in the House of Lords over a bill to install culverts beside roads somewhere. Several walks through the Hyde and St. James Parks gave me a baseline to judge change in the city during my four return trips. (On a Sunday in 2000, it seemed like most of the women in Hyde Park were dressed in black hijabs and niqabs.) I remember crossing a Themes bridge one evening after lights were on, and coming upon the statue of a young woman, and thinking very much about Vicki. On future trips to London, I have ventured farther upriver and down, but on this trip, there was plenty to see in the center of the city.

My London walk included locating offices of the Youth Hostel Association, where £20 bought me membership, a guide book, and a map of all the Youth Hostels in Europe. I was on my way.

·  ISBN: 0380806150





A previous Dodger post, The Back of Duke Snyder's Head, is from Feb 28, 2011.
The link on this screen saver is here

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.

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.

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

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?”