Topic 205: On Keeping a Secret

Carol:

Ask Me No Questions….

 Generally, I don’t care much for keeping a secret although I realize that depends on the what and why of it. I don’t like “skeleton in the closet” secrets, but I respect the privacy of people who confide in me. But, what about the garden variety little secrets that lead to happy endings? I’m just not very good at those. 
 

For one, I do not have a poker face. My family knows this and takes advantage. We used to play a game called Rommoli at big family gatherings for the holidays. The game would get pretty competitive, and the only edge I really had was being the youngest and thus not considered a threat.  During one round, I drew a hand that I knew could not be beaten in the poker phase. The more I looked at those cards, the more excited I got.   The corners of my mouth started to curl up in an uncontrollable grin. When we got to betting for the poker hand, my oldest brother looked at me and turned to the rest of the family. “Don’t bet anything. Look at Carol’s face. She has a winning hand.” So, I ended up taking the hand with absolutely no pay-off. I told you my family is competitive.
 
Not having a poker face is only part of the problem. The other part is that I hate to lie. Even the happiest secrets involve some dishonesty or equivocation. “No dear, I am not planning a surprise party for your birthday.” When asked a direct question, even though I want to keep the surprise, I get squirmy and uncomfortable inside or I break into that darn uncontrollable grin. Either way my body language is a give-away, so I try avoidance tactics, such as “Now dear, I know you don’t like surprise parties.”
 

I have managed to pull off surprises by only telling half the truth. And, the fun of watching the expression of delight on someone’s face  is worth the squirmy lies. When I threw a party for my mother’s 85th birthday, she took great pleasure in working on the invitation list with me and the details of food and decorations.  At the party, she was having such fun being regaled by her friends in the church choir that she didn’t notice when our back door opened In walked the secret “gift” I had managed to keep, both my brothers and their wives from California. The look of total joy on her face was worth keeping that particular secret.
 

I’m not the only one who has kept a secret like that. One of my favorite surprises came after my son was born. A friend in town invited me to a “little informal coffee gathering.” She said it might be hard to find a babysitter, so I was welcome to bring both the baby and the two-year old. The other ladies wouldn’t mind. When I came into her living room, the first person I saw was one of my neighbors. I remember thinking it an interesting coincidence that she knew my hostess. Then, in walked a friend from church, oh another interesting coincidence. When commented to my hostess about the serendipity of it all, and she burst out laughing. “Why, Carol, didn’t you figure out this is a baby shower for you?” Duh.
 

So, this is a big birthday year for my husband. For his last big birthday, I planned a surprise weekend at a beautiful hotel with lots of family. I may have something special planned already, maybe not. I’ll just stop there because he reads our Daily Theme essays, and I wouldn’t want him to start asking questions.

Megan:

Growing up, I was taught that secrets are lies. Being asked to keep a secret was being asked to lie, unless the secret was temporary, in the case of a surprise or a gift. I always had the feeling that my parents felt secrets within a family were a sign of oppression and dysfunction, and consequently they tried to raise my brother and I to be open and honest people.

 I remember only two times my father asked me to keep a secret – both times the secret was from my brother. My uncle died when I was 6, and my father asked me to keep the details from my brother who was 4 because he was too young to understand. The second time was when I confided to my father that I didn’t believe in God and wanted to stop going to church. I was 12, and my father told me it was important to set an example for my brother so I had to keep going and not mention anything to him. The first secret I understood, the second I resented.

Now that we are grown, my parents’ attitudes seem to have shifted. My mother has always been uncomfortable with the idea of keeping secrets, but at the same time has often said there are some things she doesn’t want to know. She also hates gossip, and tries to mind her own business, and depending on her mood she sometimes doesn’t even share things one might expect to come up in a normal conversation. While I was still in England, my brother lost his job. I didn’t speak to him as often as I did my parents, so it was several months before I found out. He was as surprised as I was that no one had told me. Living as far away as I did, I would have thought my parents would keep me up to date about the family.

As I’m writing this, I understand more why they discouraged secrets when we were children, but keep them now that we are adults. It was a matter of safety, I guess. Children should be raised without shame or fear, but adults have a right to some privacy. This is an issue that comes up often in my writing.  There are things that I know, events that have played a part in shaping me, that are not mine to share. There are things I have done, mistakes I have made and learned from, and because of the learning I cannot regret them. But still I hesitate to share them because I’m afraid it might change the way my parents look at me. This is exactly what they wanted to avoid by raising children to be open and honest, but it’s unescapable. Everyone keeps secrets from their parents.  We know they have unconditional love, but see no reason to test it.

Topic 204: On Arising to the Occasion

Carol:

Let Them Eat Cake

One of Megan’s grade school science projects was a baking experiment. She made a series of  cakes from scratch, leaving a different ingredient out each time, took photos of the various cakes and, showed show the chemistry behind the cakes. Baking powder, of course, was the key ingredient in the rising process, but we also had to factor in the variable of altitude. At our altitude (5000 feet), changes in both the amount of ingredients and the oven temperature are required.
 

I have sometimes felt a certain obligation to make my own cakes for special occasions. After all, isn’t that what mothers do? And, I would often foist upon myself the added pressure of creating a theme to match the event. My first baking effort was a great success. I made a Valentine’s Day cake following a recipe in my Betty Crocker children’s cookbook. It showed how to bake a square cake and a round cake, then cut the round cake in half and attach with icing to two sides of the square, making a perfect heart. Of course, the cake was a big success because I was 10 and my parents gushed over my creativity and hard work. Fifth grade was a good year for me. I was the best artist in my class, and I baked. Unfortunately, I peaked that year. My drawings never got any better, and my cakes still look like they were made by a ten year-old.
 

There were some exceptions. I made a circus cake one year with a little carousel and decorated animal crackers. The birthday girl and her playmates appreciated it, and it must have tasted pretty good because they dug in with four-year old enthusiasm. My best effort was the spaceship cake for Marshall’s 4th birthday. His friend Francis had a birthday the same week, so we had a little party with just the two families. Francis’ mom and I covered their little bicycle helmets with tin foil, and each wing of the spaceship cake had a boy’s name on it. It was a big success. Now that I think about it, I didn’t bake that cake. Francis’ mother did. Darn.

 

 

Somewhere along the way,I found out about The Cake Lady. She lived up the road and we used to see her almost everyday hiking the hill behind our house.    She had a reputation all over Prescott for her beautiful, delicious recipes, so much better than store-bought, infinitely better than my homemade efforts.  And she had an artist’s talent for decorating. The Cake Lady’s cakes commemorated Megan’s high school graduation, Marc’s sixtieth birthday, and my mother’s 85th birthday, all of them decorating with little personal touches for the occasion. My mother’s cake was the most beautiful I had ever seen,  with little musical notes to mark her many years of singing in the Methodist choir and cascades of delicate flowers and butterflies around the edges. 
 

Eventually, the Cake Lady retired from baking (boo hoo).  A few years ago she slowed down her exercise routine, not because she couldn’t keep up that energetic pace but because her dog couldn’t.  Now, she is part of our early morning “walk and talk” group. Today is her birthday, so she didn’t have much time to stay and chat because all her family is arriving to celebrate #75. Arisin’ to the occasion, her loving husband put her under strict orders. No baking.  Happy birthday, Cake Lady. 

Megan:

During my freshman year in college, I joined the crew team. We practiced five days a week starting at 4 AM.  We had to get up that early because it was a half hour’s drive to the reservoir where we rowed, and then we had to get the boats in the water. The sun would come up over the Oakland hills, and I’m sure from above we looked just like the teams you see in movies about Ivy League schools – our boats gliding over a perfectly smooth surface like a water bug. 

Down in the boat, it was a different story. We were usually cold and wet, our inexpert rowing often splashing each other. Occasionally, someone would “catch a crab” which meant the oar jammed in the water, driving the handle end into a stomach. We were warned that at high speed, catching a crab could launch someone right out of a boat, but at the worst, it just knocked the wind out of us.  Every now and then we would find our rhythm, row in sync and fly across the water, and it was beautiful, just like in the movies.

Not all the practices included rowing on the water. We spent a lot of time in the gym, and outside running. One time we ran a series of staircases by Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland. We ran them for an hour straight, and towards the end I paused and told the coach I needed a break. She yelled at me to keep going, and at the top of the stairs on the final lap, I threw up all over a perfectly landscaped flower bed. The coach applauded my dedication, using me as an example for the team, but I planned her murder on the ride back to campus.

Eventually the early hours got to me.  Four AM is not much earlier than I wake up now, but back then, I wasn’t getting up for practice, I was staying up. I worked the last shift in the library, and then when I got back to the dorm, I wanted to hang out with my friends. In college, I found that most of the fun stuff was happening between midnight and 3 AM, and I didn’t want to miss anything. For the most part, my classes were all in the afternoon and evening, so I went to bed after practice and slept most of the day.  

I wasn’t the only one who lived this way and it drove the coach crazy. She hated that the team was full of drinkers, smokers and up-all-night partiers and criticized our lack of commitment to the team. Rightly so. Eventually this led to a mass exodus and more than half the team quit, including me. I used the excuse that it wasn’t fun anymore, which, in my late teens, was my go-to reason for quitting anything. I didn’t understand back then that there’s a real sense of accomplishment in seeing something through, especially when it’s hard.  I wish I hadn’t quit, but for the most part, I’ve seen everything through since then. Except for Pilates.

Topic 203: Bird Music

Carol:

Birdland Lullaby

Mourning Dove

My husband is a collector. He keeps books, magazines and other hobby paraphernalia all over the house. That includes a shelf in our bedroom with 22 books on birds and bird-watching. Binoculars of varying sizes and quality are stored in closets although his favorites are in the drawer of the washstand by our front door, ready to grab when he heads out on the morning walk. Birding has become a passion for him, and it has become enjoyable for me as well. I like to sit on my deck and recognize the symphony of bird songs Marc has taught me to recognize: phainopeplas, mourning doves, Gambel’s quail and Steller’s Jays.
 

Just below the shelf with 22 bird books is a very large book representing another of Marc’s more recent passions,  jazz. The book is Jazz: A History of America’s Music (Ward and Burns) which we bought for Marc along with a set of CD’s from the soundtrack of Ken Burns’ 19-hour PBS documentary (2000). When I told Marc today’s topic was “bird music,” he immediately responded “Charlie Parker.” 
 

Charlie “Bird” Parker, the great jazz saxophonist,   got his nickname “Yardbird” only because he loved to eat chicken. It became shortened to “Bird,” a nickname  he played off in in such  jazz compositions as “Yardbird Suite,” “Ornithology,” and “Bird of Paradise” (source: “Charlie Parker).
 

By the early 1950’s Charlie Parker was at the height of his career and influence on the American jazz scene. Bass player Charlie Mingus wrote a tune honoring the musician he admired so much, titled “Gunslinging Bird.”  Parker’s unique chord changes, built off 12-bar blues chords, became known as “Bird Changes.” The Birdland Jazz Club in New York City was named for him , and he was the headliner at the club’s 1949 opening. One of the most famous jazz songs of all times was a direct reference to Parker and the club, George Shearing’s 1952  “Lullaby of Birdland.”
 

Unfortunately, Charlie “Bird” Parker’s personal life was marked by chronic abuse of alcohol and heroin. In the late 1940’s he was committed to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in California, where he stayed for six months. He was even banned from the Birdland Jazz Club. When he died on March 12, 1955, he was only 34-years old. Actor/Director/Composer Clint Eastwood turned Parker’s story  into the excellent 1988 film Bird starring Forest Whitaker. Whitaker researched Parker’s life thoroughly and even took saxophone lessons to prepare for the part, which won him a Best Actor Award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival (source: “Forest Whitaker”).
 

Okay, so I’m a bit of a collector myself. I have a stack of piano music in a closet off the living-room,  much of it from the 1950’s when I was learning to play the piano.  Right underneath the Czerny book of scales is the sheet music for “Lullaby of Birdland” with George Shearing’s picture on the front. It actually belonged to my older brother Doug, the brother who drove me crazy with his bongo drums and loud rock-and-roll music on the record player, especially "Rock Around the Clock.” But, I loved to listen to him play the piano, hunched over the keyboard and looking cool. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still see him in the corner of the living-room leaning over the keys and I can still hear the notes of that jazz piece.
 

Thanks to Marc, I enjoy bird music. Thanks to Doug, I enjoy Birdland music.
 

Sources:
“Charlie Parker.” Wikipedia. 
“Forest Whitaker.” Wikipedia.
Image of Mourning Dove. Althepal modified by snowmanradio. Wikimedia Commons.
          

Megan:

Did you hear that?

Before I got Bella, I used to turn down going on walks with my dad because I thought he was going to talk about birds all the time, and stop every 3 feet to look through his binoculars at birds, and ask me all the time if I could hear the birds.

For the record, I can almost never hear the birds. There’s an entire world of sounds around me that I can neither detect nor identify. (Just this exact very second, as I was typing this, I felt a fly crawled into my ear. I could hear it buzzing and I had a moment of panic about whether or not I should stick my finger in my ear, what if I squashed the fly and there were dead fly parts stuck inside my ear forever? But it turned out the sound was my phone on vibrate. There was no fly, I was just getting a text message.) Most of the time, it doesn’t bother me that I can’t hear. My father hears things I can’t. Big deal, so does the dog.

He (my father, not the dog) can identify birds by their sounds. We’ll be walking along in the early morning quiet and he’ll suddenly stop and say, “Did you hear that? That’s a Bottle-neck Toey.” Then, in a higher voice, he says “Drink your teeeea.’” And we’ll pause and sometimes I do hear it – a chirping sound with the same rhythm and number of syllables as “Drink your teeeeea”.

There’s one bird he’s really obsessed with lately, which apparently whistles like it’s trying to get my attention. He whistles to mimic the sound, and I can hear him. The other night at dinner, Dad put down the fork and said, “Did you hear that?” and my mother nodded. “It’s a Fee-No-Pep-La. Megan can’t hear it.”
My mother looked at me, surprised. “You can’t hear it?”
“No.” I said, “I can’t hear it.”
And then both of them were whistling at me, like they were trying to get my attention, a quick short whispered whistle and, again, I could hear them just fine. Then there was be a long pause, and my mom said, “You still can’t hear it?”
 

No.

So, this is what I was hoping to avoid by not going on the walks. But as you can see, there is no avoiding it at the dinner table, and Bella has to be walked. Turns out there are plenty of other things I can talk about with my father, and there’s other wildlife to watch and listen for – I can hear the coyotes howl just fine. But still, I’ll be in the middle of an involved story about this funny thing I saw on Youtube and how explaining it doesn’t really do it justice so I’ll just show him when we get home and then I realize he’s not walking next to me anymore. So I turn around and he’s got the binoculars up, panning the tree line and he says, “Did you hear that?”

Topic 202: Smoke Wreaths

Carol:

       Smokin’ Words

I worry a little bit.  What we’re going to do for daily theme topics when the basket is empty now that we have used up 202 out of the 250 provided by Mr. William Tanner in his book Essays and Essay Writing (rev 1927). How are we going to come up with new subjects to write about? Today’s topic was a head-scratcher. What the heck is a smoke-wreath? What gave Mr. Tanner the idea for this topic? Where does any author find inspiration?

 

Rudyard Kipling smokes a cigar

Rudyard Kipling found a subject by reading a court case. Apparently, he wrote “The Betrothed” after reading about a breach of promise case. A young woman had given her fiancé a “me or the cigars” ultimatum. Kipling imagines the young man’s thoughts:
 

“We quarrelled about Havanas--we fought o'er a good cheroot,
And I knew she is exacting, and she says I am a brute.
 

Open the old cigar-box--let me consider a space;In the soft blue veil of the vapour musing on Maggie's face.”

Does the narrator form smoke wreaths out of that “soft blue veil of the vapour” while thinking about his betrothed?  A funeral wreath perhaps? By the end of the 50-plus lines of rhyme, we hear the the death knell on Maggie’s bridal hopes, “A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke; And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.” Kipling’s poem paints a picture of a rather blasé bachelor whose “breach of promise” probably saved the young Maggie from a very unhappy marriage.
 

Kipling began writing and publishing poems and short stories while working for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, India during the 1880’s. He must have spent countless hours smoking cigars and drinking pints at the bars where the young British soldiers congregated, listening to their tales of homesickness and fatigue, capturing their variegated accents and songs in his verses. 
 

“The Betrothed” found its way into another collection published in 1895 by the Joseph  Knight Company in 1895. The book was Pipe and Pouch: The Smoker’s Own Book of Poetry.  Kipling’s poem is in the “B” section of the book, which includes “The Ballad of the Pipe” and “The Ballad of Tobacco.”  The selections include writings by well-known writers such as James Russell Lowell, James Whitcomb Riley, and Lord Byron.”  Some are sober, some are whimsical, some are excessive:
 

In the smoke of my dear cigarito

cloud castles rise gorgeous and tall;

And Eros, divine muchachitoWith smiles hovers over it all (p. 92 “To a Pipe of Tobacco”)

One selection in Knight’s collection, “Smoking Song” (p. 78), lists no author or source other than the label “college song.” Its words are unusually poetic and evoke a sense of anticipated loss:

Chorus:Then drown the fears of the coming yearsAnd the dread of change before us;The way is sweet to our willing feet,With the smoke-wreaths twining o’er us.” (p. 78)

Perhaps puffing a Meerschaum pipe was an indulgence of William Tanner,  the editor of the 1927 text that provides our daily theme topics. Maybe he chomped on a cheroot while prepping for his English classes at Boston University and writing his 1922 Composition and Rhetoric. Or maybe, like me, he didn’t smoke at all but was a connoisseur of poetry, whose personal library included Pipe and Pouch. Did that odd little collection of smokin’ words give him the idea for a writing topic on “smoke-wreaths” ?

Sources:

Kipling, Rudyard. “The Betrothed.”
Knight, Joseph, ed. Pipe and Pouch: The Smoker’s Own Book of Poetry. Gutenberg. 
“Rudyard Kipling.”

Megan:

I have a friend who can blow smoke rings. 

 Back when I was smoking (and had purple hair), she tried to show me how to do it. 

I don't remember exactly what she said, but I do remember that the explanation wasn't very helpful.

Nor was her criticism very constructive when I couldn't figure it out.

The smoke went up my nose and I choked. 

I don't have purple hair anymore, and I also do not smoke. But my friend is still my friend. 

Believe it or not, she used to be a teacher.

Topic 201: Behind the Teeth

Carol:

Mouthing Off

Sometimes don’t you just feel like putting your hands over your ears and screaming? The kind of “behind the teeth” primal howl of emotion that implodes if you don’t open your mouth and let it out?  I start to feel it when my daughter gets “that tone” in her voice as she asks “Are you finished with the essay yet?”
 

Yesterday, we decided to forego the essay. Megan suggested it, and I didn’t argue because every other Monday I get really stressed out.  That’s when I experience the convergence of writing the daily theme, picking up the house for the arrival of the cleaning crew and getting ready for my volunteer “job.” Stress makes me get “that tone” in my voice, too, and I feel like putting my hands over my ears and screaming. I must have a really tough life, eh, if I let such minutia make me feel crazy. 
 

Not that I have never experienced real scream-worthy stress. I was teaching one January when both my pre-school kids got chicken pox. I would get up at 5 a.m. to grade papers and prep for the class, drive in through the slush of a winter storm to teach, then head back home to start soaking them in oatmeal baths to alleviate the itching. I worried a lot about what new illness would create day-care havoc. 
 

My major stress relief back then, besides hiring a cleaning lady, was being with the students. Most of them were women, most mothers. They knew exactly what I was going through and commiserated with the right amount of sympathy and humor. In fact, I felt more relaxed at work than at home.
 
Right about that same time my husband was experiencing his own scream-worthy stress. He hated his job, didn’t much care for the people he worked with, and was frustrated with demanding, angry clients. His body reacted with debilitating migraine headaches, so It became obvious that some kind of change needed to happen. That was the spring we decided to take a year off and travel the country in a motorhome.
 

For the most part, that odyssey  provided just the respite from the screaming, howling stress that we both needed. We threw away all our work-centered routines, got up with the sun and went to bed with the moon. And, over an 18,000 mile journey, we only had two loud, emotional melt-downs, both times when we were hungry, tired and cranky.  And we returned to Prescott with plenty of memories to sustain us when the stress started to roll over us again.
 

I don’t know all that much about the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, but I saw his painting “The Scream”(1893) when I was studying in Europe.  It was part of a larger Munch exhibition but I only remember “The Scream.” I was mesmerized by the anguish of the figure, shown through primitive, broad strokes. Apparently, Munch himself understood that “behind the teeth” raw emotion of suffering. He wrote to a friend, “You know my picture, ‘The Scream?’ I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood…After that I gave up hope of ever being in love again” (source: “Edvard Munch”).
 

Okay, so I was exaggerating a bit. I do feel stretched to the limit sometimes, even without juggling work and family, but I have never experienced that deep angst of Munch’s painting, thankfully never experienced such loss of hope or love.
 

Any minute now, Megan is going to call up to me with The Question. “are you finished yet?” I don’t have to put my hands over my ears and scream because…. I’m finished.
 

Source:
“Edvard Munch.” Wikipedia.

Megan:

We didn’t write yesterday for a few different reasons, but if I’d been able to think of something to say about his topic, we probably wouldn’t have taken the day off. Today we don’t have any early morning obligations, so I can’t weasel my way out of it again. Even Googling the topic didn’t help, but I did learn that there are behind-the-teeth braces available now. That’s cool. But I’ve never had braces so I can’t talk about how nice it would have been to have the new ones, instead of the other, front-of-teeth kind. Instead, I’m going to talk about the dogs. Again.

Last Friday, Milo got into a fight with a friend’s neighbor’s dog. Every Friday we have coffee at this neighbor’s house, and we let the dogs off leash to roam her giant fenced in yard. Usually Milo ignores the neighbor’s dogs, but for some reason – and I think Bella was the reason – they went for each other at the fence. I heard the noise and ran with my father to break them up. The other dog had squeezed its head through the fence and clamped onto Milo’s jaw. My father had to kick the dog several times before he let go of Milo’s face.

There was a fair amount of blood, from both animals, because before the dog got Milo, Milo got the dog. I didn’t see how it started, but since Milo is the least aggressive dog ever, I think he must have been protecting Bella – who’d spent the whole fight leaping straight into the air and howling. After the bleeding stopped, Milo was fine, but my mother and I agreed that we should not take the dogs back to our friend’s house.

So, we decided to try the dog park. I’d taken Bella the week before, but we hadn’t tried it with both dogs. Milo immediately joined a pack of males, each determined to mark every plant, chair and garbage can, while Bella followed along. I wasn’t sure how our two dogs would interact with each other with so many other distractions around. At home they are pretty attached (correction, Bella is attached to Milo), but I just figured it was because there were no other options. But the only time she left his side was if he sneaked off without telling her. When she noticed he was missing, she’d run over to me and wait for Milo to come back into view.

After awhile, we were joined by two pit bulls – one was a little puppy, much smaller than Bella, and the other was huge and terrifying but very sweet.  He took a liking to Bella, and Milo took a liking to the pit puppy. Neither of the younger dogs appreciated the attention. Bella hid under my chair and the other puppy crawled into my lap, Milo still salivating by her rear end. And then I noticed he was dripping blood all over the puppy’s back. He’d somehow opened the wound he’d received the day before. 

I’m not that familiar with dog parks, but it is my understanding that there is an etiquette. Don’t bring aggressive dogs, or dogs in heat, or unvaccinated animals. One dog bleeding all over another also seemed like bad manners, so we apologized and left. But as soon as I’m sure he’s healed up, we’ll go back again.

Service Delay...

No essays today. No good reason either. We'll be back tomorrow.

Topic 200: Mechanical Pleasures

Carol:

    Building Better Mousetraps

 

Okay, so we have a rodent problem living here in the middle of horse pastures and open land.  Our strategy has gone from torture to tender as we evolved  from metal spring traps baited with cheese to self-contained pest hotels baited with poison to our current no-kill metal trap baited with peanut butter. I wouldn’t exactly call the current trap a “mechanical pleasure,” but it is safe and humane.  Now if Rube Goldberg had designed it….
 

Rube Goldberg wasn’t exactly known for building a better anything. But, his drawings of head-scratching,  complex  inventions for  every imaginable human activity gave everybody great pleasure and live on through science and education groups that continue to hold conventions and award prizes for inventions  that honor Rube’s spirit of whacky ingenuity.  One of the best known is the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest, held every March at Purdue University.  The contest was even featured in a documentary called….aha, Mousetrap to Mars.
 

Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) studied engineering at Cal Berkeley. His first post-university job was with the City of San Francisco as an engineer for the Water and Sewers Department, but he left after six months to become a sports cartoonist. He achieved fame later through nation-wide syndication starting in 1922.  He was the first president of the National Cartoonists Society and won a 1948 Pulitzer Prize for his political cartoons.  It’s easy to imagine how an engineer working with water and sewer designs might end up drawing weird and whimsical inventions (source: “Rube Goldeberg”)

 

Goldberg’s name later became synonymous with any kind of simple activity or process achieved through a complicated chain reaction.  In 1963, Ideal Toy Company started selling Mouse Trap, a three-dimensional board game that begins with the players devising their own Rube Goldberg trap, and goofy contraptions that play off his original ideas show up in all kinds of animated cartoons and feature films, such as Tom and Jerry or Wallace and Gromit.

 

All of the above information came from Wikipedia. I didn’t want to use Wikipedia because my Google search showed an official Rube Goldberg website. I was delighted when I first reached the site because it was full of information and links to all kinds of recent articles, Most exciting was the notice that 16 of his copyright protected cartoons would be available in July for free use in honor of his July birthday.  Here is one of those cartoons, showing a mechanical device that would give me pleasure if it really worked on my husband. The video I handed to him several days ago is still on our dining room table.

 

Just after I started scrolling through the cartoons on the official Goldberg website, my computer got stalled with a “loading” sign, freezing everything. Rebooting and returning to the website created the same problem, so after a Rube Goldberg-like series of pulling out and putting back in wires and plugs-- interrupting my daughter’s train of writing to the point of crankiness--I decided to forego the rich but possibly virus-infested world of R.G. for the shallow but safer Wikipedia.
 

Okay, so this essay itself is taking on the convolutions of a Rube Goldberg invention. I started out with mouse traps and I need to work my way back to mouse traps. At our house, we have found the best rule of thumb in all things mechanical—bread machines, espresso machines, mousetraps—is Keep It Simple.

 

Sources:
Image of Rube Goldberg cartoon. Came from the official website, temporary permission
     to use without copyright. Look it up yourself.
Image of no kill trap. Wikipedia.
 “Rube Goldberg.” 

Megan:

MAC-anical Pleasures

 Those of us who were born in the early 80’s are the first generation to not remember a world before personal computers. Those born in the 90’s will not remember a time before the Internet.  And the 2000’s generation won’t remember a world without smart phones.

In our house we have three laptops and one desktop computer. We have two flat screen TVs with DVRs, several stereos, two iPods, and three cell phones. Those are just the gadgets that work – their predecessors are stashed all over the house, basement and shed. I found a brand new printer/scanner still in its box in the basement, with a receipt taped to it from 2004.  We’ve always had computers in our house – our first was an Apple Macintosh in the mid-80’s. We switched to PCs when the Internet became widely accessible in the mid-90’s , and then back to Mac’s again by the time I started college (except for my mother, who is afraid of change even though that original Mac was hers).

 

I started with a huge grey iMac. I wanted a purple one, but my father ignored my wishes.  En routeback to Oakland for my second year at Mills, I stopped off at Kelly’s house in L.A. for a few nights and lugged the thing inside for safe keeping. Her father, who at the time reminded me a bit of Cher’s dad in Clueless (scary) asked me why I needed to put a space helmet on his dining room table.  For grad school, I switched to a Notebook, and then finally graduated to a MacBook Pro two years ago. I wanted a black Notebook, but my requests were once again ignored. I shouldn’t complain because each time my father ignored my color preference, I wound up with a more powerful computer.

As I’ve grown up with these machines, they’ve shifted from novelty to commonplace, from convenient to essential.  I know people who literally have anxiety attacks if they are unable to access the Internet. I welcome breaks from the computer, but it’s rare for me to go more than a couple of hours without using it (or my phone) to look something up.  That being said, I don’t get a lot of pleasure or satisfaction out of using it. It’s a necessary tool, but it doesn’t excite my enthusiasm.

I do, however, get immense pleasure from my iPod. I have always loved portable music players, but the iPod changed everything. I didn’t have to worry anymore about bringing enough mix tapes (and then CD’s) on a trip. I’m not a runner, but until I got my iPod, my excuse not to run was always that it caused my CD walkman to skip. I take my iPod everywhere, and as soon as the contract on my Droid expires, I want to get an iPhone – not because I think they are superior, I’m just tired of having to carry around two things when I could be carrying one thing.

Listening to music while I drive or walk around is favorite activity. Although it’s somewhat isolating, and can even be dangerous -- the other day I almost got hit by a car I didn’t hear coming – it alters my mood like nothing else. I rarely listen to whole albums at once – and my iTunes playlists tend to be named for the place I was visiting when I made it (“A NOLA List”), people I want to share particular music with (“For Colyn”), or a specific mood (“Conflicted” and “Upbeatish”).  Exciting music makes me walk faster, classical music can enhance a view, and a happy song improves my attitude and boosts my confidence. My iPod allows me to create a soundtrack for my life.

Topic 199: Safety Valves in Student Life

Carol:

             Pass the Pitcher

“This place was really cool. At night the bar was actually pretty kickin', and the bartender poured super stiff drinks.  The karaoke was always hilarious.    ..Alas, this place is closed (2009 online review of Frank’s).

A safety valve is a device that allows the automatic release of something (usually steam) from a boiler or pressurized vessel. Without that release, the tank can build up pressure to the point of exploding.  I never really felt enough anger or frustration to reach that point of near-explosion. But, my college friends studied a lot harder than I did, felt more family pressure than I did, and worried more about their grades and scholarships.  So, we had our hang-outs as a way to let go of that built-up steam.
 

In 1970, that hang-out in Riverside was Frank’s on Iowa off of West Blaine. No karaoke back then, no stiff drinks. It was just a “blue collar” bar close to campus with a juke box heavily loaded with country western music and several dark tables where we gathered for hours over cheap pitchers of beer.  We never really mixed with the guys on the barstools who were finishing off the week’s work, probably using Frank’s as their own safety valve. There was always the feeling that we should lower our voices when we got to talking about The War, Reagan, or any of the other touchstone events of that year of protest. Politics was an issue where Town and Gown didn’t always see eye to eye.
 

Maybe Frank’s Bar needed to find more ways to attract the students who didn’t want to hear Willie Nelson or drink cheap pitchers. The bar and grill closed in 2009 although there was talk that it might open under new ownership.
 

Mory's around 1914

The guy I drank with at Frank’s in Riverside headed back East to law school, and I joined him there the year before we got married. The student safety valve of choice at Yale depended a lot on pedigree. The aristos and legacies often congregated at Mory’s, adjacent to campus. It had been founded as a private club in 1849, but the establishment eventually broadened its membership under pressure from a changing Yale community. Still, women weren’t allowed to join until 1972, the year I was working at Yale as a secretary. The guy I shared pitchers with at Frank’s recollects that he went in there to look around once, but not having the money or inclination to pay for a membership, he never ate there. History and pedigree aside, Mory’s closed its doors in 2009 after suffering increasing financial losses. Thanks to aggressive fundraising and a new business model, Mory’s reopened in 2010 and membership fees for students and alums are pretty reasonable.
 

Instead of hanging out at Mory’s, Marc and his friends showed up for  pizza and beer at Hungry Charlie’s on York Street. I don’t recollect anything distinctly unique about the place, another loud and noisy student spot where we were bound to run into someone we knew after a night of study. We said good-bye to New Haven in 1974, the same year   New Haven said good-bye to Hungry Charlie’s. Its new owners turned it into a very successful night club and concert spot called Toad’s Place.
 

Bars close, students graduate, new pressures build up with jobs, family and mortgages. Frank’s and Hungry Charlie’s morphed into the Daley Double in Encinitas where our friends would gather for a pitcher and listen to Willie Nelson. The real safety valve—then and now—was not the beer but the people that came with it.

Sources:
Image of beer.  Silk Tort 14 Feb 2006.
Mory’s. Wikipedia.
Toad’s Place. Wikipedia. 

Megan:

Public Safety at Mills College

Mills Hall

I've mentioned several times that I went to  Mills College, in Oakland CA. I had no intention of attending a women’s school, but I fell in love with the campus. I remember the brochure for prospective students claimed there were 11 trees for every student. The campus, as I have described elsewhere, is 135 acres of rolling hills, oak and eucalyptus trees, with a creek and a small lake.  What makes this setting even more unique is the fact that it sits right in the middle of one of the poorest, rundown areas of Oakland – although since I graduated, that area has undergone a transformation. Mills was founded in 1852, and has sat at its present location for more than 100 years – so the college predates the neighborhood.

As the city grew up around the college, the campus became more isolated. Walls and fences were erected and the multiple entrances were reduced to one. A major freeway cut the campus in half, and would have eliminated it completely had the founders not been buried there. Still, when I visited with my father in the Spring of 1999, it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. My father loved it too, but I could tell he had concerns about the neighborhood.  And he was reassured by the single entrance, with a gatehouse manned 24 hours a day by campus security. I don’t want to give the impression that the Mills had a closed campus – the school put a lot of effort into integrating with the community, opening the pool for local children, allowing dog walkers and other pedestrians. But all visitors had to check in with campus security as they came onto the campus.

The undergraduate students had a love/hate relationship with the security team, which is called “Public Safety.” Depending on our moods, we were sometimes reassured and sometimes annoyed at having to present our IDs at the gate. Other times, if we were waved through without having to stop, we would say to each other – “That’s not right! I could be here to kill everyone. “ As if presenting an ID would have identified us as killers. 

Public Safety also annoyed us if we were trying to break rules.  As with all colleges, there was significant part of the student population drinking underage and taking recreational drugs.  For the most part, I believe, Public Safety didn’t consider it their jobs to interfere – as long as we weren’t too obvious about it. Once we had a BBQ on the president’s lawn, hid a keg in her shrubbery, and just got a wave from the security guards as they drove by in a golf cart.

The President's House

There was only one time when I thought we might get in actual trouble. Freshman year, one of my friends had a Jeep Wrangler that she liked to take off-roading around the campus. There were clear signs on the hiking trails forbidding motorized traffic, but this was a new car and she wanted to play with it. On more than one occasion we engaged in a low-speed chase with Public Safety, lights flashing as they pursued us in a little SUV. My friend never stopped, and she always beat them. Eventually, they erected barriers of hay stacks and fallen trees, which the Jeep still could have cleared, but we didn’t want to push our luck.

The Library

For the most part though, Public Safety was our friend. And after dark, we used them as a taxi service. I always worked the late shifts in the library – finishing around midnight. It was quieter then, and I could wear my pajamas. Every night, about 5 minutes before closing, a Public Safety officer would patrol the library, and then give the student workers a ride up the hill to the dorms. In my opinion, this was their greatest service, not because of the “dangerous” neighborhood, but because the campus was riddled with skunks.





*PS: Mom just asked me where the valves part of the essay is as if she's never strayed from a topic before.

Topic 198: Talkers

Carol:

The Biography of Phil A. Buster

Right now it seems like the folks we elected to serve our needs in Washington are all talk and no show. Will they come to an agreement on the budget, raise the debt ceiling or not, to increase taxes or not, stall or vote? With all that discussion and debate, even the F word has been thrown around.
 

Filibuster, the process by which United States Senators can delay or even prevent a vote on a bill with a tag-team style talkathon. The word itself, according to the US Government website, comes from a Dutch word meaning “pirate,” as if politicians who invoke the filibuster rule are high jacking the ship of state, if only temporarily.
 

There are rules to the filibuster rule, of course. Speak as long as you want on any topic you choose unless or until three-fifths of the Senate (it was two-thirds until 1975) calls for closure under Senate Rule XXII, or “cloture” if you prefer the more elegant French term. Rule XXII, adopted in 1917 under pressure from Woodrow Wilson, was first used in 1919 to end a filibuster against the Treaty of Versailles. How a propos.
 

Filibusters were most often used in the mid- 20th century on civil rights issues, and particularly by southern Senators.  When my family lived in  Louisiana during the 1940’s, my mother sent her parents an editorial from the Houston Post “which amused us but also burned us up a little too. The attitude of the South is so different from ours. They think they are a law unto themselves… And to think that a group of senators could take up a week of valuable time pulling a filibuster as they did!”
 

The 1942  filibuster my mother was referring took place over five days, when southern senators were attempting to forestall legislation that would eliminate the poll taxes used in their states to keep low-income residents from the voting booths (most often African-Americans).  Over thirty years later, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond would take the record for the longest individual filibuster  when he spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the 1957 Civil Rights Act (source: “Filibuster and Cloture”).

Huey Long in mid-talk

My mother also mentioned Huey Long in her letters from Louisiana. Long had been assassinated in 1935 after serving first as Governor of Louisiana and then as its Senator from 1932 until his death. He was a colorful and effective communicator whose Senate tactics are captured for posterity in The U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, where his bronze statue shows “this master of the Senate filibuster captured in mid-sentence” (source “Huey Long Filibusters"). His most famous filibuster took place in June 1935 when he spoke for over 15 hours. He began by reading and dissecting every page of the United States Constitution.  When he ran out of topics, reporters in the press gallery sent him notes, and eventually he resorted to talking about southern recipes such as fried oysters.
 

The most famous invoker of Rule XXII was Jefferson Smith—not a southerner and not even a real politician. Who didn’t cry when the naïve young Senator, played by Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, talked himself into exhaustion in defense of his reputation.  Who hasn’t seen that movie and wished for a real Jefferson Smith to bring his honesty and high ideals to Washington.  It took a 1939 movie by Frank Capra to show the world what Phil A. Buster is all about.

Filming Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Sources: 

“Filibuster and Cloture.” US Senate website.
 “Huey Long Filibusters June 12-13 1935.” US Senate website.
          

Megan:

My extended family is full of talkers – people with big voices and big ideas, eager to share gossip, stories, anecdotes and memories. Get us together and everyone is talking at once, and it’s so loud that sometimes my dad has to sit in the car. My immediate family isn’t really like that. My father and brother are very quiet, and I’m only talk a lot if I’m with a good friend. Even my mother, who has the loudest voice after years of projecting it to the back of a classroom, isn’t really a talker.  As with any of us, if there’s a topic we are interested in or passionate about, we can’t shut up about it (I’m looking at you, Genealogy) but generally speaking, there’s a lot of quiet time in our house.

Or, there was before we got the puppy. Milo only makes noise if someone has pulled into the driveway, or Bella is pulling on his ears.  Bella, on the other hand, is a talker. She has a vocal response to pretty much everything (except intruders), but nothing valuable to say. This morning, on our walk, we were plodding along at our usual pace with no wild or domestic animals in the area to distract us, but Bella kept up a steady whine for blocks at a time. She wasn’t pulling on the leash or acting agitated in anyway, but she wouldn’t shut up either.

In the house, she’s been driving my mother crazy by barking to go out, barking to come in, barking to get Milo excited. Even when she’s asleep, she makes noise. If I shift her out of my way, she keeps her eyes closed but releases a deep, guttural rattle – not a growl, more like a groan. She growls too, if I bug her too much, but I ignore that and keep bugging her because I don’t want her to think she can take that kind of attitude with me. It’s not polite.

The other day, I took Bella over to a friend’s house to play with her dog. Our dogs have play dates. I can see how easy it is to let pets become surrogate children --  especially when we use the same language to describe their activities. Anyway, we were sitting in my friend’s back yard and the neighbor pulled into the driveway next door.  My friend’s dog, Lucky, totally ignored the neighbor while Bella went all territorial. 

Her guard hairs stood up, and I always wish I had a camera when that happens because it is the least impressive thing I’ve ever seen. Milo gets a full Mohawk from head to tail when he’s on alert. Bella has one tuft between her shoulders, and one just above her tail – it just looks like she was brushed the wrong way.  But up went her little hairs and she tore over to the fence barking and hollering until I called her back. I reminded her that we were guests, and that if the resident dog wasn’t alarmed, there was no reason for her to be either.

Despite her near-constant vocalizations, she’s turning out to be a good dog. She hasn’t eaten a dead animal in 4 days and hasn’t had an accident in weeks. We’ve still got a ways to go on obedience and sleeping through the night. The other night I found myself quoting to her a specific passage from this book – and by passage, I mean the title. 

Topic 197: On Going to War

Carol:

     Soldiers of God

Today’s topic was one of the first we pulled from the basket eleven months ago when we started our daily theme project. Too complex, too controversial, too somber, too personal—too everything-- for a 500-600 word essay. Megan is braver than me, more honest in tackling the tough topics that enflame debate and fracture families. But, I’m thinking this morning about The Battle Hymn of the Republic and the thousands of American clergymen who had heart and spirit wrenching decisions to make about their congregations, their families and their own roles in the unfolding of the American Civil War.
 

My paternal grandmother had DeWitt, Malone and Caldwell relatives in most of the southern states. As might be predicted, her great-grandfather Lewis Lee DeWitt Senior, pastor of Bassett Creek Baptist Church, took up the battle cry of the Confederacy and volunteered for the Home Guards of Clarke County, Alabama. Four of his sons, numerous nephews and son-in-law had already joined.  But, the battle lines were not so clearly drawn in the larger Baptist denomination. By the beginning of the war, the Church had already split over the issue of slavery, with the Southern Baptist Convention formed in 1845 in Augusta, Georgia (source “Southern Baptist.”).
 

The Presbyterian Church had also split into southern and northern factions. My grandmother’s Caldwell relatives during the Civil War were mostly Presbyterians:  Rev. Cyrus K Caldwell in Tennessee, Rev Andrew Harper Caldwell of Panola County, Mississippi,  and Rev John Madison McKnitt in Rome, Georgia. Rev. Robert Caldwell Grundy had become the pastor of a Presbyterian church in Memphis, Tennessee in 1857, but despite his southern roots,  

In the climactic period leading up to the Civil war he courageously and loyally opposed the secession of the southern states. . .after the war was precipitated and the city was occupied by Confederate troops they compelled him to close his church, besides which he suffered other indignities by reason of his adherence to his convictions (Connelley and Coulter 66)

 By the end of the war, Rev. Grundy had moved his family from the hostility of the Memphis congregation to Ohio where he died in 1865.   


My paternal grandfather had numerous clergy relatives in his Grandfather Cowles’ extended family, many of whom  who had dispersed throughout the Midwest from Connecticut and New York. In September 1862, Congregationalist Minister Salmon Cowles was living in Lee County, Iowa when he wrote to a Massachusetts cousin:
 

I do not know what are God's designs by such terrible judgments upon our beloved Country -- But my mind was struck forcibly with the conviction from the first, & the conviction has been increasing up to this time, that God has some grand purpose to accomplish, by this mighty uprising, & awful chastisement.

Unlike the Bapists and the Presbyterians, the Congregational Church had escaped the divisiveness of the Civil War mainly because of demographics( few adherents in the southern states) although the Church was divided among its leadership on how to end slavery.
 
Another Cowles cousin, Presbyterian minister Sylvester Cowles of New York wrote to the American Anti-Slavery Society of of the anguish of a young church member who had visited family in Alabama. “To see members of the same church sit at the communion table of our Lord one day, and the next to see one seize any weapon and knock  the other down, as he had seen, he could not live there” (Source: American  Slavery as It Is 177-178).
 

It turns out religion in America, the twists and turns that take us in different spiritual directions, is not so simple. Religion is not a tall, steady, oak tree with a sturdy Methodist branch here and a Baptist branch there but a rambling, prickly vine that sends shoots into unexpected places. And, in 1861 for the clergy of America, soldiers of God, never was the issue of going to war more complex, more controversial, more sober, more personal.

Sources:
American  Slavery as it is: Testimony of a thousand witnesses.
Connelley, William Elsey and Ellis Merton Coulter. History of Kentucky, Vol. 5. P 66

 

Megan:

Today I have transcribed selections from my journal written in March and April 2003, when we first invaded Iraq. At that time, I had been studying abroad in England, but was back in the US for Spring Break. I could probably say more to contextualize and/or explain these entries, but I'm just going to let them stand.

March 19, 2003
WAR today.
I’m in Arizona now. Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq. 

Tonight we bombed them. And the war began.
 

I have no thoughts.

March 22, 2003
The WAR. (It’s called Operation Iraqi Freedom) For f***’s sake.

I leaned against a pillar, eating ice cream and watching the protest like it was another form of entertainment, like this war itself – flip on the TV, there it is, we can watch the bombs get dropped for free, without risk, without much concern for those standing below and when it gets boring, we turn it off. And when the marchers turned the corner towards me, I practically ran to the car – didn’t want to be recognized with my ice cream apathy and I drove to the mall to complete the transition into a person I loathe. I can’t make any excuses. This is not okay.

Later:
How is a foreign attack on an American fort while we are at war considered an act of terrorism? If they resist, defend themselves, they become terrorists? Where is the logic? What am I missing? The reason I don’t pay attention is because I am so irritated by the vocabulary, the implications of “evil doers” and “regime change” and “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” It feels like propaganda.

I’m not paranoid, but I don’t believe what’s going on. I think the government is hiding information. We don’t know that he has Weapons of Mass Destruction. Aren’t we just making a country of soon-to-be fatherless children hate Americans more?

But the soldiers are surrendering. Maybe they do want him gone. Maybe this is the right thing.

I’ll never pretend to be politically and socially aware again.

April 9, 2003
In the mornings, we watch WAR on television. My friend thinks if we were at war all the time, there would be WarTV because people wouldn’t want to watch it on every channel. We can turn the war on and off. The TV is dark and we sit on the porch because it’s a sunny day. We watch the cat watch the birds.

They took down a statue of him and the Iraqis rode the head through the street. Wonder briefly if it was a good idea, maybe the war is good. But Rumsfeld apologizes to the relatives of an Afgani family, accidentally killed yesterday. We don’t know where Saddam is. Or Osama. And we change the channel and watch Regis and Kelly.

April 21, 2003
On the plane to England, but still on the ground.

The WAR might be over. Dunno. The Regime is over anyway. Strange how I thought I’d experience war in a foreign country, but it starts just after I leave and is over before I return. Not that the military action is over… I wish I knew more about things, but I never know if what’s being said is true. And I don’t know what I mean by truth.