Capers With Carroll

After watching the sun come up over the English countryside, I landed at Luton International Airport before 7:00 AM, and committed my first rookie error within minutes. I carried no British pounds, but had $600 in US Traveler’s Checks. (Note to those who grew up in the age of ATMs: These used to be a thing, allowing traveling Neanderthals to go to a bank and obtain cash.) I supposed a better exchange rate at banks farther from the airport, and as it was still too early for banking, I decided to walk as far as I could before banks opened. It skipped my mind that banks observe no hours at all on Sundays.

After watching the sun come up over the English countryside, I landed at Luton International Airport before 7:00 AM, and committed my first rookie error within minutes. I carried no British pounds, but had $600 in US Traveler’s Checks. (Note to those who grew up in the age of ATMs: These used to be a thing, allowing traveling Neanderthals to go to a bank and obtain cash.) I supposed a better exchange rate at banks farther from the airport, and as it was still too early for banking, I decided to walk as far as I could before banks opened. It skipped my mind that banks observe no hours at all on Sundays.

After watching the sun come up over the English countryside, I landed at Luton International Airport before 7:00 AM, and committed my first rookie error within minutes. I carried no British pounds, but had $600 in US Traveler’s Checks. (Note to those who grew up in the age of ATMs: These used to be a thing, allowing traveling Neanderthals to go to a bank and obtain cash.) I supposed a better exchange rate at banks farther from the airport, and as it was still too early for banking, I decided to walk as far as I could before banks opened. It skipped my mind that banks observe no hours at all on Sundays.

After watching the sun come up over the English countryside, I landed at Luton International Airport before 7:00 AM, and committed my first rookie error within minutes. I carried no British pounds, but had $600 in US Traveler’s Checks. (Note to those who grew up in the age of ATMs: These used to be a thing, allowing traveling Neanderthals to go to a bank and obtain cash.) I supposed a better exchange rate at banks farther from the airport, and as it was still too early for banking, I decided to walk as far as I could before banks opened. It skipped my mind that banks observe no hours at all on Sundays.

I had an address for a bed and breakfast in Earl’s Court, a mere 32 miles away. I had walked that far in a day previously so even after I realized my mistake, I was not concerned. I had hiked the high Sierras. I ran run cross country in high school and my first year of college. I’d run a marathon in Mexico. I once got my high school class to challenge the class just ahead of us to a contest to see which class could rack up the most total laps on a Saturday, and personally tallied 33 miles, so I set out on a beautiful sunny morning to walk to Earl’s Court. I probably walked past dozens of bed and breakfasts that would have served me well, but a friend had given me the address of the place he’d stayed in Earl’s Court.

First time travelers may be struck by the fact that a foreign country appears in the same colors as at home, but somehow looks different. I was pondering that when a car stopped and a young man offered me a ride. I gladly accepted, and obeyed his instructions to stow my rucksack in the boot. Do you know that the British drive on the wrong side of the road? They also seat the driver on the wrong side of the car. I had read about it, but now I saw this peculiarity verified.

When my benefactor learned that this was my first day in England, he decided to divert and show me some local Roman ruins. We had a most congenial time, and then he let me out to continue on my way. The countryside gradually gave way to industrial areas, and then brownstone residential areas, and then I was in Earl’s Court. I had successfully flown across an ocean, walked most of 32 miles, gotten some exercise (though not much to eat), met a native, seen some Roman ruins, and located a target address. I decided I ought to recount my safety and my successes in letters to Vicki and my parents.

Of course, I had no return address to offer them other than the bed and breakfast in Earl’s Court, and it would be two weeks for my letters to get to California and receive answers back (Note to those who grew up in the age of email and texting: Letters were a thing that allowed Neanderthals to communicate over long distances, albeit very slowly). On the plus side, those two weeks would allow me time to visit Ireland before continuing to France, where I would hunker down with my novel and the French language. I still entertained that objective.

A few thoughts from 50 years later:

After yesterday’s episode, I messaged with a high school friend who did her travel with the army, as a nurse, and though she did not go to Vietnam, the topic came up in our discussion. For my generation, it often will. For my cohort, our post-high-school years were either spent in Vietnam or trying to stay out of Vietnam, or maybe protesting in the streets over Vietnam.

Like many of my peers, I was conflicted about Vietnam. I loved my country and wanted to defend it, but questions nagged me about whether in Vietnam we were the good guys or the bad guys. I started college three days after high school, not because I wanted to avoid the draft (Note to those who grew up in the era of an all-volunteer army: It used to be that when the letter from the draft board arrived, you reported for military duty). In 1968, the best way to stay free of the draft was to stay in school. Although I did want to avoid the draft, my primary motivation for college was excitement about college. However, those first weeks, I buddied around with a friend who really wasn’t that excited about school. Toby dropped out, got drafted, and died standing in the boot camp breakfast line. A recruit standing behind him dropped his rifle.

After watching the sun come up over the English countryside, I landed at Luton International Airport before 7:00 AM, and committed my first rookie error within minutes. I carried no British pounds, but had $600 in US Traveler’s Checks. (Note to those who grew up in the age of ATMs: These used to be a thing, allowing traveling Neanderthals to go to a bank and obtain cash.) I supposed a better exchange rate at banks farther from the airport, and as it was still too early for banking, I decided to walk as far as I could before banks opened. It skipped my mind that banks observe no hours at all on Sundays.

The spring I was finishing up at community college and getting ready to transfer to UCLA, the employment office connected me with a middle aged veteran who needed a man Friday. Pat suffered from emphysema, due to an accident in the Air Force. He knew he was dying, and wanted to do so in Europe. My job would be to carry his oxygen tank, and then accompany his body home at the end. He would pay all of my expenses and a nice salary. Most importantly for me, it would be my longed-for trip overseas. I look back on that episode as the supreme test of my transition to adulthood. Going with Pat would mean I would have to cancel my plans for UCLA. Pat told me Sen. Cranston owed him some favors and could fix me up with the draft board. Although I didn’t want to go to Vietnam, I also didn’t want some politician pulling strings for me. I drove Pat to Cranston’s office, but the Senator had been called away that day. Pat was expecting a big check from the government, but I began to wonder if it was actually coming. Pat liked to brag about the friends he looked forward to seeing, but from his description, some of them impressed me as a little shady. He also talked about the girls he would be able to get me, and how they could move in with us. That wasn’t the kind of girlfriend I wanted. After investing five or six months in Pat’s dream, and as much as I wanted to see Europe, I realized that I wanted to be my own boss when I traveled. I told Pat I was going to UCLA. To have gone with Pat then would have traded away everything of value that I have today.

I remained timid and indecisive about the war. I took part in a few demonstrations, and wavered over the question of what to do if drafted. I could not imagine killing another human being. Maybe I would go in as a medic. Maybe I would go to Canada. Dying for my country was one thing, but what if our side was actually the bad guys? That would be worse than dying in the boot camp breakfast line.

One more friendship stands out: I had written a 500 page—typed, double spaced—murder mystery (Note to those who learned word processing at a computer key board: Word-working was once done at a manual instrument that left one’s fingers raw and swollen at the end of the writing day). I had alternated 12-hour writing days with days carting Pat around. UCLA had a novel writing contest that first quarter and my 500 pages lost to a Vietnam vet’s 30-page opening chapter. Brian Jones took his $5,000 prize, went home and beat up his wife. The prize went for her hospital costs and the divorce. Over the next two years that I had to get to know him, I watched the Man Who Had Everything slowly fall apart.

We did not understand PTSD in those days, nor PITS (Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress), a concept first described by Psychologist and Sociologist Rachel MacNair. As I heard MacNair present at a conference in 2019, and then driving the carpool back to our shared AirB&B, she put into words exactly what I sensed had happened to Brian Jones. Brian had been the All-American everything: football quarterback, Student Body President, going steady with the head cheer-leader. Then he had done the All-American thing to do in 1966; he joined the Marines. When I asked about his experience in Vietnam, he could only shrug and say, “I killed a lot of Gooks.” There is PTSD trauma that soldiers experience when bullets are flying and friends all around them are dying, but PITS kicks in when someone raised with high moral values must face that they have become a murderer. Within a few months of my return from Europe, Brian Jones drove a van full of marijuana over a cliff, while running from police.

I believe I have seen PITS twice more. For a while I was visiting and corresponding with an inmate on Death Row in San Quentin Prison. He had been convicted as a serial killer. Independent research brought me an account of a childhood murder-dismemberment (of his mother) in which he had been forced to participate. Every one of his murders had been a reenactment of that event.

And then, in helping a friend clean up after a tenant, I found the letter-to-herself of a woman whose life had spiraled down after an abortion. Her agony came out in one haunting line, “This is not who I am!”

In 1972, as I left for Europe, the United States was struggling with a similar disconnect. “This is not who we are!”

Fifty years ago, today, I boarded a flight in Los Angeles and flew to Luton, just north of London, UK. Thus began the great coming-of-age adventure of my life. My mother and my then girlfriend (Vicki, who has now been my wife for 49 years) saw me off at the airport. In flight, I remember the Rocky Mountains covered with a layer of golden-yellow Aspen trees, ice chunks floating in Hudson Bay, an hour in a duty-free shop beside a snow-cleared runway in Iceland, and the first rays of daylight as we took off from Edinburgh. I was 22, and—unlike today—I had been able to work my way through UCLA with no debts, and graduate with $1,000 in the bank.

I did not walk in the graduation ceremonies. Skipping those expenses gave me another hundred dollars for my voyage. Instead, I walked from my last final exam to a student travel agency and bought my one-way ticket to Europe. The other choice had been Japan, which interested me more, but five years of French would serve me better than my three quarters of Japanese. It was my plan to sojourn for a year in Paris. I would work on making my French useful, and write on the novel from which I had already shown Vicki portions over a year earlier. My last quarter at UCLA had been exhausting. During registration, a counselor pointed out that I had accrued 207 units, and once I went over 208 without graduating, I would not be allowed to register for another quarter. I had transferred in from community college with more than the usual totals, and then decided to add a kinesiology minor and creative writing classes to my history major. I also, wanting to explore what eventually became my career, took the ‘Education of the Mexican-American Child’ class in which I met Vicki. The gist of it was, to complete all my graduation requirements, I needed to take and pass 28 units my final quarter. I may have set the all-time UCLA record for most units to earn a BA. As I returned to campus after buying my ticket, I looked out on the sea of peers who were practicing for the ceremony. Was there even one person I needed to say 'goodbye' to? Vicki came to mind. Our almost-two-year relationship had been friendly, but not romantic, and I did not see much chance that I could find her in the crowd. I did see her roommate, who promised she would pass along my goodbye. My main activity for the summer would be two volunteer sessions as a camp counselor, one with teen diabetics and the second for kids who came largely from Los Angeles Chinatown, where I had been tutoring English during my time at UCLA. One preparatory task for that was interviewing the families for each camper. One of those families spoke only Spanish. I had not yet begun the Spanish which would later serve as my almost-competent second language, so I called Vicki and asked if she would translate for me. On a Saturday morning I picked her up and we drove to Chinatown, but the family was not at home. I knew there was an Asian-American culture fair going on that weekend at nearby Echo Park, so we went there to kill some time. The family still wasn’t home, so we drove to USC, where Vicki would be taking classes for a teaching credential. We did a lot of talking. By the time I got her home in the late afternoon (unbeknownst to me, she had a date she needed to get ready for), I had begun to rethink our relationship. We had a wild summer. By the time Vicki and my Mom dropped me off at LAX, I was much less sure that I wanted to be gone for the full year. As we parted, I whispered, “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

Fifty years ago, this week, and looking down at the Rocky Mountains from an altitude of 35,000 feet, the memory I retrieve is hundreds of miles of Aspin trees, in their September golden-yellow magnificence. Glued to the window two hours into my coming-of-age trip, I guessed first that the amazing sight might be blooming goldenrod. Then I realized the blaze of color was not flowers, but autumn leaves. Growing up in Los Angeles, I’d not had much experience with fall colors. Sadly, my useless little camera had no way to catch the grandeur nor the color of the Quaking Aspen.

After the goodbyes in L.A., my views of the western United States seemed mostly parched and drab. After the Aspen in Colorado, my next strong memory is chunks of ice floating in Hudson Bay, then snow piled beside the runway in Iceland. Finally, I saw the first hints of dawn while taking off for the last leg from Glasgow. Travel stimulates memories like no other activity I know. I cannot remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I can reach back 50 years and recount my day-by-day events, conversations, and impressions for the three months of my travels. Then, I can contrast what I actually did with what I’d expected to do, and see how those experiences determined the rest of my life. It had been my original plan to take a brief look at London and then go to France. I would find a room, work on my novel, and finally learn the language that had eluded me through five years of high school and college coursework. Instead, my ADHD and ENTP curiosity would kick in. I would visit Wales, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, the two Germanies, Switzerland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Israel. I’d spend just the briefest couple of days in France, leaving me with French I still can’t speak, and I am now 50 years closer to finishing my novel. Dwarfing all that, though, I left home an agnostic—although intrigued—but came home a firm believer in Jesus Christ. Between now and Christmas, regular readers of my feed can expect to see me reliving the highlights from those three months, though I have several off-topic essays in process as well (see ‘ADHD and ENTP,’ above). Oh, and I’m working again on my novel. I hope many of you stop by.

On this December 14th, and just one day shy of my birthday, I’m looking back at my 2021 New Year’s resolutions and the goals I set out in January, and which I hope to recalibrate for the year ahead. For starters, twelve months ago I resolved to reduce the amount of stuff that encumbered me. There I’ve had partial success. I did empty out one storage shed, though I had hoped to complete a second one. A visitor might not notice the improvements in my garage and office, but I do. Health-wise, I had hoped to drop 30 pounds in 2021, in preparation to lose another 30 in 2022. For this year, I only have 25 of the 30 to go, but I will keep trying. I intended to get out and walk more. After previous annual averages of 1.6, 1.5 and 1.4 daily miles, I’m at 2.0 for 2021. It helped that I discovered podcasts and a headset, but I had hoped for closer to five. I will keep working at it. I had hoped to finish my novel. Oh, well. I will pursue that in 2022, if the Lord tarries. My most successful efforts came in my reading and Bible study. I wanted to read once through the entire Bible and then spend extra time in Jonah. On that, I am on track for success. I’ve been on-and-off in Jonah throughout the year, and in the daily readings from The One Year Bible, Jonah shows up, well…for today, December 14. Jonah interests me because I think that those of us who have God’s Word—and who can see the signs of coming judgment—are called to carry the warning while there is time for the world (and individuals in it) to seek God’s mercy. Jonah understood the task, but tried to flee. God, however, would not let him get away. There are powerful lessons to be learned in that. My study of Jonah was helped by the mid-year discovery of the Bible Project Podcast, and their weekly teaching. They spent one whole month on how to read the Bible, and used Jonah as their sample text. I don’t believe I have missed any of their programs since March or April. Over the summer, I put several of their episodes on repeat, listening to individual programs four and five times while I worked in my yard. I hope to continue that in the next year, and recommend them to my readers. Forty-nine Octobers ago, I discovered that the greatest victory in life came from surrendering one’s life to Christ. During these 49 years, I have managed complete reads through the Bible five times. One summer I used the vacation to go straight through, Genesis to Revelation. Other years I’ve used various reading plans, including The One Year Bible. Last year I was about 60% successful. This year, I’m on track to finish the 365 fifteen-minute portions on December 31. Each day comes with a couple of chapters from the laws, histories, and prophets of the Hebrew authors; a chapter or so from the New Testament; a section from Psalms; and two or three verses from Proverbs.

I find great value in juxtaposing passages that may have been written a thousand years or more apart. The Bible deals with the biggest of all possible pictures, and needs to be seen in its continuity. Themes, conflicts, and puzzles introduced in Genesis find climax, answers and denouement in Revelation. Although a cursory understanding of Jesus—sufficient even for someone to find faith—can come from just a few New Testament verses, a deeper appreciation comes from long and careful study that includes the early writings from Hebrew. Conversely, the multiple mysteries presented in the Old Testament find their solutions in the New. We see God set up a standard to which no generation nor any single individual can manage to achieve, and yet God promises forgiveness, acceptance, and that there will be a group who enjoy unlimited and unending fellowship with Him. As well, God identifies the Hebrew people as His choice among all the peoples of the world, and yet He promises to bless all those other peoples through the Hebrews. Readers follow the developing promise of a coming someone special, but that someone looks sometimes human and sometimes divine. He is sometimes presented as gentle and self-sacrificing, even unto death; but then, in passages that seem to be chronologically later, he is revealed as the ultimate conquering king. Without Jesus, so many of the stories in the Hebrew histories seem random and contradictory. What’s with Abraham sacrificing Isaac? How do we explain Joseph tossed into the pit by the brothers who are later held up as Patriarchs? How do we interpret the bronze serpent in the desert? We’re given strange dreams, recorded with the idea that someday they would make sense, and given festivals for which God exacts very precise details. We plod through failure after failure by the supposed heroes of the story. We see prophetic voices announcing the most horrendous judgments, and yet those prophets end their individual writings on optimistic looks into the future. All this comes within a pattern of God accomplishing seemingly contradictory goals in ways that could not have been humanly imagined, yet each makes perfect sense after it is completed. God is master over the mutually exclusive. Common to both sections of scripture are the promises of separation and restoration. The Hebrew people, true to promises in Deuteronomy 28, have spent much of their history blown around like dust in the wind, spread among every other nation on earth. One year before my birth they again became a nation with a physical homeland under their own government. The Messiah also went away with the promise to come back. When His disciples asked Him when that would be, He gave them a parable about a fig tree. They had, in fact, seen Him curse a fig tree, just a day or two before His crucifixion, and the tree had died. In the Bible, the fig tree is often used as a symbol of the Hebrew nation in physical possession of the land, as opposed to grape vines and olive trees, which held reference to spiritual and religious aspects for the Jews. Jesus tells His disciples, “Now learn the parable from the fig tree: as soon as its branch has become tender and sprouts its leaves, you know that summer is near; so you too, when you see all these things, recognize that He is near, right at the door. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. (Matthew 24:32-34, see also Mark 13 and Luke 12). The children who in 1948 watched news reels of the Israeli flag hoisted for the first time over Jerusalem are all older than me, and I will be 72 tomorrow. The clock is ticking on the cohort just ahead of me. Jesus warns us that “about that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” (Matt. 24:36) Then He draws a parallel with the generation lost in the flood during Noah’s time, and follows with two stories of people who were not paying attention, nor were they ready at the arrival of a calamity or an important person that they should have expected. He finishes with a command, “Therefore be on the alert, for you do not know which day your Lord is coming.” (Matt. 24:42) Throughout history, various ones who have tried to calculate the day and the time of Christ’s return have ended up sadly embarrassed. In 1843 and 1844, in the heat of the Second Great Awakening, followers of William Miller went through a succession of anticipated dates. They gave away properties, dressed in white, sat on rooftops waiting, and ultimately were let down by the Great Disappointment. In the 1950s and ‘60s, as Mao Zedong’s Communists murdered perhaps one million believers, or about one out of every three Chinese Christians, we can perhaps forgive those Christ followers for expecting that Jesus would soon return. The same might be expected among Christians in Afghanistan today, or in Nigeria, or North Korea. Yet Christ absolutely tells us to be watching and alert. We are to be cognizant of famines, earthquakes, and events in the weather, ‘wars and rumors of wars,’ and events in the heavens. His return would come after the Good News (Gospel) had been preached to the whole world, a process that I was privileged to observe in a small part during my time in Colombia. One after another, Bible translation teams delivered that prerequisite into remote languages that had never previously had it. The Bible also gives us patterns to internalize as New Testament events fulfill Old Testament prototypes. Jesus—whom John the Baptist calls ‘The Lamb of God’ (i.e., the Passover sacrifice, John 1:29)—at the Last Supper interpreted His broken body and shed blood as the bread and wine of the traditional Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread. His death on the cross, at the very moment that priests in the nearby Temple were sacrificing lambs for the nation, and on the same mountainside where Abraham had been prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac—fulfilled such passages as Genesis 22:8, Isaiah 53, and Exodus 12. Even as the Jewish leaders tried to avoid crucifying Jesus during the feast, Jesus exerted control, assuring that His sacrifice would occur at the correct prophetic moment. Fifty days later, on the Feast of Pentecost (Weeks, or First Fruits), the Holy Spirit fell on the crowd of worshippers, giving birth to the church, the ‘first fruits’ of Christ’s harvest. The next prophetic event, corresponding as well to the next feast on the Jewish calendar—the one I will be watching for this year, and the next, and the next, until it happens—is Christ’s return, or Second Coming. The feast is called variously Yom Teruah, Rosh Hashanah, the Feast of Trumpets (or shouting), or sometimes, ‘the feast of which no man knows the day or the hour.’ This last is because on the first day of the seventh month, the announcing shofar is blown only when those watching the heavens actually see the first sliver of the new moon. That could be delayed by cloudy weather. Observant Jews set aside all work and spend the day in quiet and prayer. The Apostle Paul describes the event I am waiting for this way, “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who remain, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17) This year, one of my resolutions is to be watching the heavens during Rosh Hashanah (September 25-27, 2022). If necessary, I will do the same in 2023 (Sept 15-17), and 2024 (Oct. 2-4). It’s possible that in this coming year, I will be joined by many who have no interest in Jesus. Those observers will be captivated by NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). In this first attempt at kinetic impactor technology, NASA hopes to ram an asteroid out of its set path. Their target is Didymos B, a smaller asteroid, or moonlet, that orbits a larger asteroid, Didymos A. Launched November 23, 2021 from California, DART is set to intercept the Didymos duo 6.8 million miles away from Earth, on September 26, 2022. We will all be watching on the same time September days. ‘Didymus’ means ‘twin,’ and with a slightly different spelling, it was a nickname for Thomas, the disciple who was not present when Christ first appeared to the other disciples. Upon hearing their report, he said, “Unless I see in His hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.” Eight days later, when Christ again appeared to them, He turned to Thomas and said, “Place your finger here, and see My hands; and take your hand and put it into My side; and do not continue in disbelief, but be a believer.” Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you now believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.” (John 20:27-29) My 2022 New Year’s resolutions will include more attention to losing some weight and getting out to walk more. I will work on my novel, the garage, and that last shed. I intend to read again through the whole Bible, but this time, maybe I will set a schedule to finish before Rosh Hashanah. And now, I need to go read Jonah, and passages from Revelation 5, Psalm 133, and Proverbs 29.

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.

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.

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.

Well, we powered it up this morning to find that while we slept, five visitors stopped by to put Capers over the one thousand mark, but none of them left the required comment to make them eligible for the big prize. Fortunately, all those who entered our contest are closely enough related to the author that they are already on the short list for autographed copies of Friday 10:03 when it is finally published.

However, if this may seem a disappointing conclusion to our big contest, our disappointment probably pales compared to that of googlers who come to Capers hoping to find the music video Itsy Bitsy Spider and instead found this. We have managed to frustrate 14 such searchers in the last three weeks alone. So, our next contest: an autographed copy of my novel (when it finally gets into print) to the one thousandth person who visits The Ittsy Bittsy Spider, thinking they'll see EliZe (with thanks to arachnomusicologist Mataikhan for identifying this artist) singing Itsy Bitsy Spider (and leaves a comment).

Currently, if one queries "ceanosis" from Google Images, one receives four pages of images, fifty of which come from this blog. However, the one ceanosis image I've actually posted is not among them.

I discovered this after observing that several viewers came to my blog as a result of a "ceanosis" search, but they ended up landing at truly random locations on the blog. This is the kind of marvelous trivia that comes my way courtesy of BlogPatrol, which I added to this site December 5, 2007, about the time I started to get serious about this blogging thing.

During that time, I have had 993 visitors, which means that someone in the next day or two will become my One Thousandth Visitor. I suppose I could have one of those flashing pop-ups, congratulating that visitor and promising a prize, except I can't think of any prize that I'm ready to offer. Oh, and I don't know how to create one of those flashing pop-ups.

Someday I hope to have an autographed copy of my novel to give away. So here's what we'll do: to be in the running for a someday-autographed-copy of my novel, leave a comment below this post. Then check back in a day or two to discover who landed as The Capers One Thousandth Visitor!

Milestone: This evening, I will have the last meeting of the last class in my four-year study program for the Master of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing (Fiction), at California State University, Fresno. I still have one very big test to take (probably in July), and my thesis to complete. The thesis is a rewrite of the first eight chapters (about 120 pages) of Friday 10:03. The class that finishes tonight has studied The Modern Memoir. Each student will read a portion of memoir they have written, and I will read from this very blog, History of my novel. So with today’s entry, I am multitasking.

This series begins here.

In the picture, the skinny guy with a full head of hair is me, on the day I left for Europe, almost thirty-six years ago. The beautiful girl is Vicki. In my backpack, I carried the opening chapters of my novel, which I fully expected to revise and add to, while I hunkered down in Paris and turned my five years of classroom French into something useful. 

However, my flight took me only as far as Luton, thirty miles north of London. I hiked those thirty miles and checked into a bed and breakfast. Then, since I now had an address, it made sense to write to Vicki and my parents, let them know I’d reached England safely, and then stick around long enough to hear back from them. I guessed that might take about ten or twelve days. I spent a couple of those days poking around London, and then decided I probably had time for a round trip to Ireland. I joined the Youth Hostel Association, rode the Tube to the end of the line, and stuck out my thumb. I spent a couple of days at Stratford-on-Avon, took in a Shakespeare play, and then caught a ride all the way into central Wales.

My ride let me out with the instructions to walk to a bridge that crossed a gorge, and that on the other side I would find a Youth Hostel. Unfortunately, the walk was a great deal farther than she described it, and I found myself in pitch dark and the middle of someone’s pasture. I rolled out my sleeping bag, but spent a fitful night, afraid that I was trespassing on someone’s property.

However, at sunrise, I discovered the closest dwelling had long-since been abandoned. My over-night nest had actually been quite a safe place. My map indicated that I was still a several-hour hike from the closest paved road, so I began to walk, nibbling wild blackberries and enjoying the beauty of the morning.

In fact, the rapid change from the uncalled-for anxiety of the dark hours to the pleasant discoveries of the morning, caused this agnostic to first ponder the existence of God, and then to lean in favor of that fact, and finally to praise the God-Who-Might-Be-There.

Within a couple of minutes, I came upon a small cluster of houses. A well-dressed, middle-aged woman came out of one of them and asked me where I was headed.

“Aberystwyth,” I replied, naming the major city along the central Welsh coastline.

“Then come in and sit. I’m goin’ to Aberystwyth in half an hour, and I’ll give you a lift.”

And she did, though first she gave me a cup of tea.

At this point in the story, I can’t divulge how this fits as a link in why it’s taken me almost forty years to finish writing my novel, but it does. I’ll pick up the story next time.

(This series begins here.)

So it was my plan to rent a garret in Paris, practice my French, and write my novel.

The day of my last final, in June, 1972, I bought a one-way ticket as far as London, for September 16. I intended to spend most of the summer writing, with two ten-day breaks to volunteer at UCLA’s summer camp for underprivileged kids, UniCamp. I planned one session for elementary-aged diabetics, and a second for the kids I’d been doing ESL with in Chinatown.

What I hadn’t planned on for that summer was falling in love.

Vicki and I had been friends for 18 months. We'd even spent one day together at the beach (see Part 8), but I graduated from UCLA not expecting to see her again. However, for the Chinatown kids I was registering for UniCamp, I needed to interview the parents and I had one Spanish speaking family on my list. In those days I had some fumbling French and the barest beginnings of Japanese. But Vicki was fluent in Spanish and I’d left UCLA the last day regretting that I’d never had a chance for a proper goodbye.

We arranged to go together on a Saturday morning for the interviews. Events of the day conspired so that we had about ten hours to talk about deep things, and sometime during that day, I caught a glimpse of possibilities I’d previously ruled out. Long-story-short, we spent the summer investigating those possibilities. I did my summer camps, but I got very little writing done.

And when she accompanied me to the airport on September 16th, I told her I’d be home for Christmas.

(This series begins here.)

It has been almost three months since I posted Part 11 of this series, and three weeks since I even mentioned Friday 10:03. That is fitting. Over the four decades that I have been working on this book, I have several times gone years without writing a word.

During these three months, I actually have made considerable progress on the book itself. I reached 75,000 words (about 250 pages, probably 70% of the finished novel) and turned that over to David Anthony Durham, my thesis chair. I also had three shorter sections critiqued by other writers at Mount Hermon, and pitched the book to three different editors and two agents. David got back to me with a very thorough critique (Oy vey! Have I got a job for me!), and we agreed that rather than trying to first finish and then rewrite the whole book (a thesis only needs to be 120 pages), I would rewrite a portion of what I already have, be done with the thesis, and finish the novel with my degree in hand.

But now, with the current events updated, our history must jump back to 1972, the year I graduated from UCLA. I did not even bother to walk in the ceremonies. Instead, I walked out of my last final and went directly to a travel agent. There I bought a one-way ticket to Europe. It was my plan to rent a garret in Paris, practice my French, and take a year to write my novel.

Little did I know.

For five days straddling last weekend, I took part in the 2008 edition of the Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference. I have now been home long enough to almost catch up on my sleep, but only to barely begin digesting all the information I picked up, and to try to remember all the people I met.

My 'Major Track' consisted of nine hours of workshop led by Randy Ingermanson. Randy's an interesting guy--physicist turned novelist--and I enjoyed getting to know the other members of the crew, as well. They helped me see some new ways of looking at my story.<

I workshopped the first twenty pages of Friday 10:03, and came away with a nice balance of affirmation in what I've written so far, and suggestions for improvement. I attended some of the shorter classes and discussion sessions, but I skipped several to meet one-on-one with editors and agents. Once I've made my changes, I have a couple of invitations for places to submit it.

I bunked with a couple of interesting fellows. Norris Burkes writes a syndicated column from his back ground as a chaplain in hospitals and the military. Lawrence Darmani (below, on the front porch of our cottage) came all the way from Ghana. He has published both fiction and poetry, and is the Africa Regional Trainer for Media Associates International, a ministry that trains and encourages writers, editors, and publishers in parts of the world that lack a history of printing their own literatures.Mount Hermon is a beautiful location. Therein lays my biggest regret: there was so much going on, I barely had time to take in the scenery.

After I wrote about all the earthquake activity around Guadalupe Victoria, Baja California (which had another 5.0 the next afternoon), Caedmonstia asked, “How big does an earthquake have to be for people to feel it?” Someplace, I’m sure there are wonderful scientific answers to that, such as, “It depends.” But I am thinking more experientially. In this new series, I will be describing the Standout Moments of My Personal Seismological Memory:

San Fernando, California, Feb, 9, 1971, 6:01 a.m., (6.6 on the Richter scale). I was about twenty miles away, on the 5th floor of a UCLA dorm building. It woke me up with the thought that a railroad train was coming through the bedroom. Those who were coherent enough to run to the windows reported seeing a wave of green explosions as transformers went dead across the still-dark city. Sixty five people died in the earthquake (most in one hospital that collapsed). The quake was much worse at my parents' house (a freestanding cabinet fell across my sister and her bed), only about ten miles from the epicenter and downstream from a large earthen dam. For me, it was the only time I ever remember everybody being awake and in line for breakfast when the dining hall opened at 7:00. But for what? Classes were canceled. I had been tutoring ESL at Castelar Elementary School in Chinatown, but the main building was sufficiently cracked that it could never be used again. A mile south of that was the Hall of Justice, which included both the DA’s and Sheriff’s offices, courtrooms, and several floors of jail. It also suffered damage and had to be evacuated and boarded up. It still stands empty, today. That made it difficult for me to research it when I wanted to use it as a location for my novel, Friday 10:03. Eventually, I talked to my father's cousin who had worked there, and it became one of my favorite locales in the book.
 

The quake was followed by numerous aftershocks, four of them greater than 5.0. That quarter, I was taking a class in Chinese history from a Prof. David Farquhar, quite well known in his field, and quite able to get totally lost in his lectures. The aftershocks had loosened a couple of the acoustical tiles in our classroom, so he told us that if a quake hit, we were permitted to stand and move to the sides of the room. Once he looked up from his lecture and found everyone ringed around the room, and said, “Oh, did we have an earthquake?” So, in answer to the question, “How big does an earthquake have to be for people to feel it?” the fact is, undergraduates listening to a lecture on Chinese history will detect a smaller quake than a scholar giving that same lecture.

(This series begins here.)

I recall a program on the history of Rock and Roll in which one of the greats (I remember it being Lou Rawls) was asked (in discussing the Righteous Brothers), “Can white guys have soul?” Rawls just chuckled in a way that said: That’s too silly a question to even answer.

I take comfort in that, because for me, the parallel question is, “Can a white guy write ethnic literature?” I contend that if it is theoretically possible, I am a pretty likely candidate to accomplish it. Beginning in high school, I have been a serious student of immigration and the interaction of cultures—not just here, but world wide. In college, I took Japanese, tutored English in Chinatown, specialized in the history of China and Japan, and was elected an “Honorary Asian” in order to serve as a summer-camp counselor at an “all Asian” camp. Then I married into a Mexican-American family, switched to studying Spanish, and divided 28 years between living in Latin America and teaching in predominantly Mexican-American communities in California.

For that reason, I really liked a comment I read in a recent discussion in BOMB MAGAZINE between novelists Gabriela Jauregui, Daniel Alarcón, and Alex Espinoza. Alex is one of the professors on my thesis committee, and all three get pegged as Chicano Novelists. Part of the discussion addresses the very existance of subsets to American Literature, but I especially liked this comment by Alarcón:

Storytelling is, at its essence, how human beings create tribe. It comes from this entirely human need. If we share the same story, if we know the same characters, the same histories, the same myths, then we’re the same. It all goes back to the need to create connection between humans, so that we can separate ourselves: “us” from “them.” Ideally, what the universalization of literature does is create a bigger “us” and a smaller “them.”

For the ‘us’ to get bigger and the ‘them’ to get smaller, I believe there must be writers on both sides writing in the margins that currently exist between groups. By writing from within those margins, I can help introduce my friends on one side to my friends on the other side—friends who might not otherwise meet. I’ve said that Friday 10:03 is a California novel. Because California is—and always has been—a place of ethnic interaction, I believe the same must be true of any California novel. And even a white guy can do it.

(This series begins here.)

Friday 10:03 is a California novel. It has settings in northern, southern, and central California, but all the action takes place within a nine day period in California history. I don’t want to give away my story, but I can talk about some of the settings.

During the years (1970-1972) that I began writing the novel, I was studying at UCLA, working two part time jobs in the San Fernando Valley, and volunteering as an ESL tutor in Chinatown. I spent a lot of time on the freeways. At the end of 1972, I went to Europe. (The novel does have flashbacks to events in London and Paris). Then I earned my teaching credential at CSULA (1973-1975), located east of downtown. As I traveled from place to place, I collected locals for my story.

Many years later, as I picked up writing again, I went back and walked some of those locations to be sure I remembered them correctly, but at least one no longer existed.

In 1973, I picked up a newspaper and read that bull-dozers were scheduled to raze the last vestiges of Hicks Camp. I had read about El Monte’s farm labor camps in the writings of Carey McWilliams (see part 5). The moment I saw the paper, I knew I wanted a family in my story to live there. I had three days to see it before it disappeared forever.

The reporter had interviewed a social worker at a youth center near the camp. I found the social worker and asked for a tour. I was able to go inside one of the last homes still standing, and conduct an interview with the owner. All these years later, I don’t know where the notes are that I took that day, or the photographs, or the interview tape. However, in a story characterized by careful attention to settings, that is one of two settings that most please me. The other will have to wait for this account to move ahead 32 years.

(This series begins here.)

I don’t have strong memories of actually writing the early sections of what I was not yet calling Friday 10:03 (I won’t even let slip the previous working titles I’d given it.) I do remember doing research. I also remember meeting someone who could have appeared in the book, but doesn’t.

Together, Steve and I worked as banquet waiters at UCLA. (Like so much else, he got there first, and I followed along.) One day, we were setting up the biggest hall we had for a crowd I remember at about one thousand luncheoners. We got everything set up, and enjoyed a lull while the crowd filed in. Back stage, retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren was waiting to go on as keynote speaker. Warren had been Governor of California when Caryl Chessman first landed on Death Row, and during half the years Chessman spent there. Then he went to the Supreme Court to serve while Chessman submitted his appeals.

Warren fascinates me for a very different reason. Probably his crowning achievement was writing the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. He also wrote Miranda v. Arizona and had a hand in Gideon v. Wainwright, two cases I make mention of in Friday 10:03 . These were all dramatic advances for civil rights in our country. But Warren had also been a key figure in one of the worst civil rights miscarriages in our nation’s history. Certain business elements in California and out-and-out racists had been trying for many years to get rid of Japanese competition. When World War II broke out, Earl Warren (then Attorney General of California) served their interests by leading the effort to have the Japanese interned in relocation camps. In his autobiography he admitted that was a mistake. I have always wondered about the degree to which Warren’s regrets about his failures over Japanese relocation led to his civil rights boldness on the Supreme Court.

Fresh in our memory at the time was the commission led by Warren into the assassination of JFK, thought by many to be one of the biggest coverups in history.

There is no Earl Warren character in Friday 10:03 . But don’t be surprised if he shows up in a later novel.

Back stage at the banquet, five or six of us waiters stood around with Earl Warren.

We chitchatted. No one asked a serious question.

One benefit of raising five children is that as they each venture in directions I have never gone, I am the richer for it. For example, my computer-tech sons keep me up-and-running and challenge me to stay current. My two children who have married Brazilians have introduced me to a wonderful country (and a language) I had hitherto pretty much ignored. (Now, my quasi-citizenship-by-inlawhood is turning to China, though that country has long fascinated me.) My daughter who has focused on Peace Studies and solutions for domestic violence has challenged me in that direction. The daughter who has been working with a ministry to the differently-abled is now beginning a masters degree in Spiritual Formation and Leadership. Two of my children have chosen liturgical churches far different from the Evangelical tradition in which I raised them. Etc.

Cognitive Science is a branch of learning I only became aware of as two of my children took it up. I have never had it explained to me the same way twice, but it basically comes down to trying to figure out how the brain works. So for my son who studies Cognitive Linguistics, the question becomes, “How does the brain do language?” For my son who studies Cognitive Ethno-Fashion, the question is, “How does the brain work in cultural ways to do clothing and adornment?”

This last item became important to me this week as I worked on my novel. In discussing literary genres, the imaginary line between ‘Historical’ and ‘Contemporary’ falls somewhere around 1950. At the time I began my novel, it was plainly Contemporary. Forty years later as I strive to finish it, I’ve come to consider 1966 as Historical. About ten days ago, I decided to include a cameo appearance by James Pike, then the controversial Episcopal Bishop of California. I turned to my Cognitive Ethno-Fashionologist son, who happens also to have ambitions toward the Episcopal priesthood, and we have studied photographs of Bishop Pike and the fashion choices then available to an Episcopal bishop. I have learned far more than I could ever use in a cameo appearance, but it has been a marvelous opportunity to go back in history and visit another world with my son as tour-guide. I think readers will also enjoy the cameo.

Today I reached 60,000 words in my novel. That's about 220 pages of manuscript. Averaged over the 37 years since I put the first words on paper, that comes out to about 4.44 words per day.

Wow! That means I completed 38 weeks worth of writing, just since I got out of bed this morning. No wonder I'm tired!