Capers With Carroll

My short visit to Ireland—three days of hard travel—did not allow me time to get as far north as Sligo, from whence hailed my paternal great-great-grandfather Carroll, nor to get out of the car in Cork, which I incorrectly thought had been the birthplace of my great-great-grandfather Kelley. However, I did spend a delightful overnight in Limerick. I have to assume the city figures somewhere in my DNA. Here is a quick one that I wrote just today:

An illustrious PM named Lis Truss
Said, “No longer can I hold this trust.”
The greatest frustration
Is viscous inflation
But we shan’t dissolve Commons. It is this thus.

I’m unable to find a photograph of the Youth Hostel in Limerick, and I have only a vague memory that it was somewhere near the city center. In lieu of photographs, I will tuck in a sampling of limericks from my collection.

What I do remember is the uproariously fun discussion we had when we discovered that the 17 guests who gathered in the common room that evening spoke 14 different dialects of English. Between us, we represented Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, Boston, Georgia, Texas, Scotsmen, Welsh, several areas in England, and—of course—the standard and correct English that we speak in California. Since everyone was traveling, we each had recent observations of the funny differences in the ways English speakers say things. In addition to a cheap and clean place to sleep, one of the benefits of the Youth Hostels is trading experiences with the other travelers. Often, many were coming from where I hoped to go next, and could give impressions and advice.

When we could laugh no more, an Aussie girl told me she wanted to go for a beer, but didn’t want to be the only girl in the pub. She offered to buy me a drink if I would be her escort. Had she not asked, I probably would not have thought to include a pub in my Irish experiences. I’m glad I did. It was quiet, but the atmosphere was friendly. She did turn out to be the only female in the room, but we enjoyed our conversation walking over and back, and each drank one beer.

For a day that started in Loo Bridge and included the Ring-of-Kerry, I was more-than-ready to turn in when we got back to the Hostel. Just a few days earlier, I had attended a play by the Royal Shakespearian Theater, in Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon. As nice as that had been, now I was sleeping a night in the city that had given its name to the Limerick, the apex of English literature and culture.

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.

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

Photo by Natu's Grandma

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

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

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



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

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

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

At our grandsons’ ages, six weeks of development equals a full year of coursework at a major university. Sometime since our last visit, Nilo (now three months) learned to return a smile, and Natu (at twenty-three months) had both picked up names for all the other members of the family and begun to group words into phrases. As fast as I offered him new words, he took them, repeated them a dozen times, and made them his own. On a walk together, we studied the web of a Metepiera sp. in a rosemary bush and watched the spider hide under her protective tent. Then we continued on and played with Agelenids, Uloborids, and a Holocnemus in their webs. We saw a line of ants on the sidewalk and he got down on his stomach to watch them closely, repeating, “Ants, ants, ants, ants.” Then on our return trip, he ran to the rosemary bush, calling out, “Spider house! Spider house!”

This visit, for the first time, he called us Grandma and Papa.

Of course, this means I am now labeled. When Natu was born, my wife asked me what I wanted my grandchildren to call me. I wasn’t sure. It isn’t often in our culture that we get to choose a name for ourselves. I had a Grandpa Lynn and a Grandpa Howard, but somehow Grandpa Brian never seemed right. My mother’s grandfathers were Gramp (yeah, I could be a Gramp) and Grandfather (well, that might be a little too formal). I had second cousins whose grandfathers were Pa’s Pa and Ma’s Pa, which tickled me but didn’t fit me. When I spoke to infant Natu in the third person, I found myself using Papa, the same name my children called my father-in-law (though I’m not sure whether it came from Spanish or Italian, each an influence in my wife’s family). In Natu’s bilingualism, the first vowel has elongated to be a more Portuguese PAA-pa. (In contrast, Natu’s father is Pa-PA-i.). His grandfather in Brazil will have a name altogether different.

However, as my family grows, we are about to leap beyond our European linguistic influences. Early next year I expect to add a Mandarin-speaking daughter-in-law. I am very pleased with that thought. It was an early personal goal that all of my children would grow up as polylinguals and world citizens, and by the grace of God, they have. So at a new stage in life, as I have the opportunity to pick a new name, that aspect of my life could be part of the mix. I asked Middle Son how to say grandfather in Mandarin. The choices seem to be YeYe, or Lao Ye. Lao by itself is an honorific that might be used as a means of address between two longtime friends, such as “Lao Wang” and “Lao Chang,” to be translated as “Old Wang” and “Old Chang.” That kind of appealed to me. I began to think about Lao Papa.

But it may be too late. Natu already has me labeled, and the pattern he sets will be followed by all the grandchildren I hope are yet to come. And you know what? In my grandson’s voice, it sounds pretty good.

Well, there he is, two weeks after his birth, but still a few days shy of his due date. At least in my presence, he's been pretty mild mannered. One of his first accomplishments, of course, is making Natu look much older than he was even a few days ago. At twenty-one months, Natu is mostly interested in cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, and bicycles, but the word this evening is that Natu has added 'Nilo' to his vocabulary.



An update on Monday’s post: I also have word this evening on Angel, my five-year-old friend in the Pediatric ICU. Doctors have now kept him stable since Sunday, with his temperature and swelling less than they had feared. There has been none of the organ failure they had anticipated. He's still a very ill little boy, but at least the news is encouraging.

From six thousand miles away, Vera asked for pictures of my garden. Vera is majoring in Quality and Safety of Food, at Shandong Normal University, in Jinan. We have been IM’ing about fruits and vegetables. Fortunately, my grandson was visiting to help me give the tour.

We started in my sun room. The tank holds Piume, the water turtle. The white pots have sweet granadilla seedlings. The black pot has a young Yellow Pitaya (Hylocereus megalanthus). Its close cousin, the Red Pitaya (dragonfruit Hylocereus undatus), can be seen at the very back of the room. Neither the pitaya nor the dragonfruit has ever blossomed or fruited for me.Avocados are not common in China. Vera once saw some in a supermarket. “They said they came from the USA, so the price was extremely high.” I have two small avocado trees. This year, for the first time, I have about 15 small fruit, which will probably ripen in late fall.The big tree at the left is a Fuyu persimmon. It gives me a large crop every year. I love to eat them fresh, and dried, they are like candy. The little tree is a Babcock peach, new this year. Behind it is a prickly pear cactus. At my feet are potato plants. In the next week or two, Nathanael will graduate from being a baby to being a big brother. That’s his mother in the center.The tree is a tangerine. I get a heavy crop every year. What I can’t eat fresh, I peel and freeze, to eat like popsicles the rest of the year. The red flowers are roses, and the light green leaves are melons I call dinya, which is the generic name for melon in Russian. I found these in Uzbekistan, but they are similar if not identical to the Hami melon I saw in China (哈蜜瓜, but more oblong, and whiter flesh than a canteloup).These grapes are Thompson seedless, and will be ripe in July. My bilingual grandson calls them uvas, which is the Portuguese word. I also have two varieties of red seedless grapes. Behind Nathanael are Italian Honey Figs (Lattarula). They give a short crop in June, and then, after a few weeks, a longer, second crop that lasts until the cold weather hits. I dry them, freeze them, and eat them fresh.The red flowers are pomegranates, and will be ripe in November. The purple flowers are artichokes. By the time they bloom, it is too late to eat them. We ate some, but the flower is so beautiful we like to leave some to feast our eyes on.Ooh, the apricots should be ready to harvest in a couple of weeks.Vera tells me the most Vitamin-C rich fruit is the kiwi. My kiwi vines are two years old. I hope to have fruit next year.I enjoy keeping my garden full of growing things.

In Colombia, whenever I stumbled upon a female Epicadus heterogaster (THOMISIDAE), I would stop and marvel at God’s infinite whimsy. Even a fairly diligent stumbler, like myself, will only see females, as the ladies may outweigh the gents by a factor of one hundred. The males stroll around their mate’s bodies with all the romantic status, I suppose, of body lice.

The females, meanwhile, try to pass themselves off as flowers, orchids specifically. Hence one of their common names: 'Flower Mimicking Crab Spider.' I know, you weren’t immediately put in mind of a corsage when you saw my photograph, but then, properly posed in a bouquet of similarly colored flowers, she only has to fool an occasional fly.

To the naked eye, they seem to have two eyes, due to the 'mascara effect.' Actually, there are eight eyes, four hidden in each of the two streaks of eye shadow. Charles Darwin thought he counted ten eyes when he captured one in Rio de Janeiro, in 1832. He records “Abdomen encrusted & with 5 conical peaks.” In my own mind, I remember it having three. Yet “The strange orchid-mimicking South American arachnid Epicadus Heterogaster (sic on the capitalized 'H') is commonly known as the Seven-Spined Crab Spider” I learned this as fact number 324 (out of 693), on a page titled “77 facts about the number 7.”

(Note this alternative: If your first language is Japanese, ‘カニグモ科’ may be translated back into English as "Seven-spinned Crab Spider").

The whimsy just keeps coming.

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.

With the wedding and honeymoon over, this week my daughter and my new son-in-law are visiting with us before they return to their home in Brazil. He is working on his English, and I am slowly picking up a little Portuguese. For example, I am now his sogro, and he is now my genro, except that the ‘r’ is pronounced like an ‘h’, and the initial ‘g’ is pronounced like a ‘zh’.

So far, meu genro has put up with a lot of strange things from seu sogro, but yesterday his curiosity reached a threshold. What good—he wondered—is a pet tarantula that hardly ever moves?

Well, on one level, Farrah is a holdover pet from my last classroom, as is Piume the Red-Eared Slider, who was originally my daughter’s before she moved to Brazil. On another level, Farrah is a living pun. Tarantulas make up the family Theraphosidae, and the common California tarantula is Theraphosa aphonopelma. Theraphosa sounds so much like Farrah Fawcett, and both are covered by such beautiful hair, that for a pun lover like myself, Farrah can move at glacial speed around her cage and still be worth every cricket or beetle I toss her.

However, for the benefit of meu genro, we brought Farrah out for a walk. At this point, I think he was quite satisfied with her glacial speed.

Sometime between our Thanksgiving and Christmas visits, my grandson gained the ability to use morphologically recognizable English. (His parents often use Portuguese, as well, but if the kid’s using it, I wouldn’t recognize it.) As he tried to pet the elderly and remarkably patient Psychokitty, Nato plainly repeated, “ca(t).” Then he vroomed the wooden car that first belonged to his uncle, and said, “ca(r),” managing to get the subtle difference in the vowels. Thus, he is beginning with nouns, as did his father, thirty years ago, poking his finger against the aquarium to say, “fi(sh),” and watching the pooch go by and saying, “do(g).” The auntie, whom I walked down the aisle last Saturday, and the linguist uncle who took off for China immediately after the wedding, both began with directionals, she standing at my feet to say, “Up,” and he at the front door to run together as one word, “Go ou(t).” Nato is also using sign language. In the parking lot the morning after the wedding, he patted his head to say he wanted to wear my hat.

(Photo by his father)
My grandson and I have begun our conversation.