I consider myself rather ordinary looking, neither good looking or its opposite. I just sort of blend into the woodwork, at least when I am alone. But even so, I am part of a highly visible family.

The spouse, on the other hand, has always been conspicuous.  She was born with the right leg significantly shorter than the left, and she has always worn a brace on that leg. The brace has taken various forms, but since I have known her, two pieces of metal on the side of the leg extend above and below her shoe. The shoe sits on a metal plate and is attached to the plate by a T-bolt. She drills through the sole of the right shoe, forces the nut part through the hole, and fastens the bolt from under the plate, which has a hole, to the shoe. A crosspiece is at the bottom of the brace covered in tire rubber, and this is what she walks on. A leather cuff with Velcro is at the top of the brace, and this wraps around her leg. Of course, this makes her noticeable, and that does have a benefit. People do not have to meet her three or four times, like they do me, to remember her, and acquaintances from decades ago instantly recognize her.

On the other hand, strangers everywhere regularly stare at her.  Sometimes we have joked about it. In my small northern hometown, we stood outside Prange’s department store. Some wonderful Wisconsinites stopped about ten feet away and stood and gaped. She looked uncomfortable, and I said, “They have never seen anyone from Florida before.” She laughed.

Little kids do not always stand ten feet away to stare. Many come up right to her with eyes locked on the brace. Some ask about it. The wife has a patter for these situations—“I was born that way; were you born with a short leg?”–but sometimes it is wearisome. And often the parents get embarrassed or get angry at their child for their apparent rudeness, and this only makes things worse.

In my initial years with her, I learned to accept what she had long before accepted—not to be surprised by the stares and comments. These experiences, however, did make me reflect on some childhood behavior. My hometown, like many small places in the Upper Midwest, was all white. Six miles north of us, however, was a small Army base. (Gunnery practice was held there. Shells were fired at targets carried by pilotless planes towing targets over the lake. If invaders flew at fifty miles per hour like these planes, I knew we would be safe.) Some of the soldiers were black, and on a few occasions these soldiers would come to our downtown. They stood out, perhaps even more than the wife. I know that once at the very corner outside Prange’s where she was stared at, I stood motionless across the street and stared and stared at the black soldier. Because of the wife, only decades later did I get an inkling of what that man might have been feeling.

Then along came the daughter.  We were not the first couple to adopt an Asian child, but when she entered our lives, Korean adoptees were not as common as they would be later. Now not just the spouse, but the daughter could bring stares and comments when she was with two white adults. (Apart from us she is, of course, less noticeable if she is in a community that has more than a sprinkling of Asians, but sometimes that is not the case. The daughter and I just came back from a trip to Peru along with fifteen white people in addition to me. The daughter stood out whether or not she was with me.) When the daughter was still a toddler, the spouse was sitting on a park bench. A girl maybe six years old looked at the daughter and then up at the spouse and then back at the daughter and then at the spouse again. After this had gone on for a while, the girl approached the spouse and stood there for a moment. Finally she asked, “Is that your baby?” The spouse replied, “Yes.” “Funny,” the girl felt compelled to say, “she came out sorta Chinese.”

I was in Venice on a water bus with the daughter when she was three. A man kept staring at us. He started talking to me in broken English. I gathered he was asking whether the daughter was mine. I replied, “Yes,” but he was not satisfied. He kept jabbering, and since my Italian consists of a few words that might appear on a menu, I did not understand him. Finally, I grasped that he was asking if she truly was my daughter, why was she Asian. I told him that she was born in Korea, and my wife and I had adopted her. His loud and insistent replies indicated that he did not understand. How come she was Asian? I tried to find a simpler way to convey this in English, but he just kept getting louder. He was making me, and others on the boat, feel uncomfortable. Finally, I said, “Wife. Chinese.” He said the Italian equivalent of “Ah,” and walked away.

I am part of a conspicuous couple and conspicuous family, but I do not feel the center of the attention. I am the barely noticed person with The Woman with the Brace or the unremarkable white man with The Asian Female. Perhaps only one time did I feel personally conspicuous because of the family.

The daughter was maybe four, and we were in New Hampshire for a week in a rented cottage. I took the daughter to a toy store. The spouse for part of the week was at a scientific conference, and she was not with us. It was a weekday, and I was the only man in the store. A vacuum cleaner was a demo toy, and the daughter starting “vacuuming” the carpeted stairs that went from one level of the store to the next. She went on and on trying to clean each step. I felt that the mothers were all looking at me out of their peripheral vision and thinking, “Oh, he is one of those men who have traditional notions for girls. Next he is going to tie one of those little aprons on her and bring her to the toy stove.” And I wanted to say, “I would never give her a vacuum cleaner. She has trucks and Legos and I play ball with her all the time.” (The daughter is no longer a girl, but she still likes to vacuum. Maybe I should have bought that toy for her.)

On this same trip, I decided that as long as we were going to be in a New England village we should experience as much small town life as possible. I had us do things like go to a church dinner at some ungodly hour like 5 PM (the food was not good; I did not buy this church’s cookbook) and to a chicken barbecue in the town park (the food was quite good, but there was no cookbook). We had gone to both the grocery stores and the specialty food shops and, of course, to the gas station as well as a trip to the hardware store. Towards the end of the week, we were back in the park for a band concert.  I stayed with our picnic packings while the spouse and the daughter went closer to the bandstand. A seemingly nice man came up to me and said, “I have seen you around town, and I want to say, God bless you for all that you have done.”  I must have looked dumbfounded. He then indicated that he meant that I must be wonderful for having married a cripple and adopted an Asian.  All I could do was smile politely and say, “Thank you.” But as he walked away, I thought how little he understood. I had not adopted out of a sense of charity, and I had merely married the woman I loved. I was not somehow apart from those two, however, conspicuous they might be to others. The three of us were simply family no matter how others might stare or wonder.

Being conspicuous and part of a conspicuous family, however, must have affected the three of us—our images of ourselves, each other, and how the rest of the world reacts to us individually and as a family. The daughter has written, amusingly and touchingly, about her identity. Perhaps someday I will get her to post about that.

Take it nice ‘n’ easy said the old song. ”Nice” and “easy” seem to belong together. On the other hand, there is a big difference in saying,“She is nice” from saying, “She is easy.”

“To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.” Toni Morrison, Beloved.

Your Name is the highest-grossing anime film in history. It is quite a movie with a distinctive, touching (albeit somewhat confusing) story with remarkable art. And the animated people have five fingers.

“And how can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?” Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Perhaps we can bring back the T-shirt from 2002: “I never thought that I would miss Nixon.”

I was taught that it was improper and disrespectful to clap after the singing of the national anthem, but many, if not most, people do applaud at its conclusion.

“Anxious for some permanency, I guess I needed to be reminded how temporal permanency is.” Patti Smith, M Train.

While I was having a heart event, I felt that I was being whisked down a long, dark tunnel. I could do nothing to prevent my movement. Finally, I saw a blue light at the end of the darkness.  It started to pulse, and I felt myself being pulled even quicker down the tunnel towards the pulsation. But as I started to glide into that abyss, I heard a voice shout, “No!  No!  That’s New Jersey.” I returned to the living.

“Marriage is something we make from available materials.” Don DeLillo, The Names.

The man was in his 50s. He said that he now lived in Virginia but that he was raised in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn and was a retired New York City firefighter. I asked if it was hard to give up the adrenaline rush of being a fireman.  He replied, almost sounding wistful, “One day you have it, and then it is just gone.”

“The boiling point of water is straightforward, but the boiling point of societies is mysterious.” Rebecca Solnit, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.

In every tennis match, whoever wins the last point wins. Remember, all you have to do is win the final point.

“Without faith, how open and beautiful and terrifying the world must have seemed to him.” Ian McEwan, The Children Act.

LT’s parents had been devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, meeting at a Kingdom Hall and getting married young.  As LT said, “JWs do not allow premarital sex.” They are also not tolerant of homosexuality, but a friend from the church “came out.” The now openly-lesbian friend was, I think the phrase is, “de-fellowshipped.”  This requires shunning by the rest of the congregation, but LT’s mother continued to be a friend to the rejected gay woman. As a result, LT’s mother was banished from the JWs as was her father.  This was a huge act of rebellion for one immersed in the church as LT’s parents were. There are all sorts of stories of courage that are not known.

[Note: After today’s post, the next one will be on May 19. Off to Machu Picchu.}

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” Harry G. Frankfort, On Bullshit.

“The Film Snob’s stance is one of proprietary knowingness—the pleasure he takes in movies derives not only from the sensory experience of watching them, but also from knowing more about them than you do, and from zealously guarding this knowledge from the cheesy, Julia Roberts-loving masses, who have no right whatsoever to be fluent in the works of Sam (White Dog) Fuller and Andrei (the original Solaris) Tarkovsky.”  David Kamp with Lawrence Levi, The Film Snob’s Dictionary.

“In 1934, the summer before I entered third grade, my grandmother mistook Andrew Imhof for a girl.” Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife.

“In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.” Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

“I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well.” Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

“Imagine yourself on a moonlit night in mid-August in the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.”  Garland Allen and Jeffrey Baker, Biology: Scientific Process and Social Issues.

“To be honest I thought the road trip would be a caper.” Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain.

“Once, in those dear dead days, almost, but not quite beyond recall, there was a view of science that commanded widespread popular and academic assent.” Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions.

“Manhattan is shaped like an ocean liner or a lozenge or like a paramecium (what remains of the protruding piers, its cilia) or like a gourd or like some sort of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere.”  Phillip Lopate, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan.

“Making one’s home in an unpublished novel wasn’t without its compensations.”  Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots.

“She was running, running as she had done before in her dreams, except this wasn’t a dream, even though with the flares dropping, as slowly as petals, and the yellow light, and the dark streets with the orange glow on the skyline it could easily be a dream, a horror dream.”  Robert Wilson, The Company of Strangers.

“The girl screamed once, only the once, but it was enough.” Ian Rankin, Exit Music.

“When the old man died, there was probably no great joy in heaven; and quite certainly little if any real grief in Charlbury Drive, the pleasantly unpretentious cul-de-sac of semi-detached houses to which he had retired.”  Colin Dexter, The Secret of Annexe 3.

Like most of you, I learned to ride a bike as a kid.  I rode my bike around our town to visit friends, to get to ball games, and to go to school.  The grade school was lined with bike racks.  High school was different.  We walked to high school and did not ride bikes.  I am not sure how this developed, but the convention was firmly entrenched.  Maybe because we expected to get driver’s licenses in high school, biking to school seemed like little kid’s stuff.  Of course, teenagers don’t really use logic to determine what is fashionable or not.  We followed other dictates in high school that now seem to make little sense.  Thus, in this era before backpacks or book bags, girls carried school book in one fashion and boys in another.  None of us wore hats in the winter even though temperatures could get below zero, and I am not talking Centigrade here, but we did wear ear muffs. So as convention dictated in my town, daily bike riding ended when high school began.

I still rode occasionally through the years, but I was not a regular bicyclist again until I was near 40 when both my doctor and my body told me I had to give up running.  All my running, however, and it was a lot, had made me addicted to exercise.  I replaced jogging to and from work and long training runs with biking to work and beyond.  One activity, however, did not really substitute for the other.  I had learned to run in the City.  I knew how to deal with traffic, vehicular and pedestrian.  I did not feel unsafe on the sidewalks and streets.  I could enjoy the views from the bridges and the waterfront paths.  It was different on a bike.  Of course, I had to pay close attention to cars and trucks.  The City then made few efforts to be bike-friendly, and the comparatively few bikers around then almost always seemed to come as a surprise to drivers who weren’t expecting them. But moving vehicles were only a small part of the problem.  I quickly learned that bikers were invisible to many exiting parked cars.  Time and again people opened a vehicle door into my biking path forcing me to swerve into the portion of the road where cars drove. My heartbeat would increase from more than the exercise.  And then there were the jaywalkers coming out between parked cars, a common experience.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I jaywalk.  I do not like cities where pedestrians wait for the light to change even though no cars are in sight or where walkers won’t cross in the middle of the block when it is convenient. (Yes, I am looking at you, LA, but also Madison, and sort of Washington, D.C.) But at least back then, while the jaywalkers may have looked out for the cars, trucks, and buses, to them bikers were almost invisible.  Again, I often had to swerve into the car lanes to avoid the pedestrian, and again the heart rate went up from more than exercise,

I don’t always learn quickly.  I biked to work for several years before I would accept the fact that while running to and from the office had actually relaxed me, biking the same routes often left me jangled.  Then the day came when I thought the gods were talking to me.  After biking to work, while making coffee, I looked at the newspaper and spied the obit of a biker who had been killed the previous day in a car accident.  I went about my business and thought that news was out of my mind, but going home that night, I turned a corner on my bike and saw a man on the pavement next to a mangled bike next to a bus.  The man was not moving.  I did ride my bike home that night, but I never again rode it to work.

How about you?  If you have biked in a city, have you, or how much have you, been afraid?

P.S. I do now occasionally ride a bike in the City. I avoid certain areas that I think will be problematic for me on a bike, but it is clear to me that the City is now better for bikers than when I gave it up as a major activity—more and better bike lanes and both drivers and pedestrians more aware of bikers.  The world sometimes does get better.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.” Pogo

A few weeks ago the Florida House of Representatives issued an apology to the survivors of the Groveland Four, also known as the Groveland Boys. I had known nothing about the four black men accused of raping a white teenager in Groveland, Florida, in 1949 until I saw Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King at Greenlight Bookstore. I looked at the back cover of the paperback and saw that the book was about racial injustice stemming from a rape charge. I put the book back down thinking I essentially knew this story already since I had read much about the Scottsboro Boys. And, of course, I had read To Kill a Mockingbird. But finally, the third or fourth time I picked up the book, I bought it.

I was surprised. I found King’s book a page-turner, and while it bore similarities to other racial tragedies, the story was not something I had read before. That would have been impossible. I learned many things from Devil in the Grove including that every story of injustice is unique. Every story of injustice is worth telling and hearing.

This story started when a seventeen-year-old said that she and her husband had been attacked in their stalled car and she had been raped by four black men. Three of those men were quickly arrested while the fourth fled. A hundred-person posse using tracking dogs found the fourth in hiding. When the fugitive emerged and supposedly threatened that posse with a pistol, he was gunned down.

Meanwhile, an angry crowd besieged the local jail. When that mob learned that the arrested men were being held elsewhere, it rampaged in the black section of Groveland firing guns and burning buildings. After several days, during which most of the blacks fled their homes to seek safety elsewhere, the National Guard quelled the rioting.

Although the police said two suspects confessed, those two said the confessions were beaten out of them. At trial, the confessions were not presented. The doctor who examined the married teenager did not testify. (It had been suggested that the girl cried rape to explain her bruises from her husband’s beating.) Footprints at the scene did not match the suspects’ shoes. The trial’s result, of course, was a foregone conviction. The youngest of the three men was given a life sentence. He never appealed to avoid the possibility of a death sentence if an appeal were successful and a retrial held. The other two were sentenced to death. They appealed.

The executive director of the Florida NAACP protested the convictions and called for the removal and prosecution of the sheriff. On Christmas night of 1951, a bomb exploded under the bedroom of the NAACP’s director’s house. He and his wife were killed. Nobody was identified as responsible for this double homicide until a 2005 investigation named four then-dead, long-time members of the KKK as suspects.

The two appealed convictions were reversed, and a new trial order. The prisoners were then being held in the state prison, and the sheriff of Lake County, which included Groveland, picked them up to take them back to Lake County ostensibly for trial. The sheriff reported that the two attacked him and that he shot each three times. One was killed at that scene; the other feigned death and lived.  The sheriff was exonerated of any wrongdoing in the shooting.

Represented by Thurgood Marshall, the surviving defendant was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death again. The Florida governor later commuted that sentence to life in prison.

Gilbert King presents strong evidence to show likelihoods that the girl was not raped; that the prisoners were beaten; that forensic evidence was fabricated;  and that the sheriff shot his two prisoners without provocation.  This information has now led to the apology by the Florida House of Representatives.

King, however, does much more than relate the injustices done to the Groveland Four. He places the rape charge and its aftermath into a broader picture of northern Florida society in the post-World War II era. Black’s houses were burned; black veterans were threatened for wearing their uniforms after their discharges; other blacks were simply beaten; black maids were raped by white employers. Blacks could not vote; they could not serve on juries. They were not allowed to hold jobs of importance in the white society. The schools were segregated, and few blacks could obtain a meaningful education.

All this might seem to be a product of simple racism, but King shows that the situation was more complicated than that. The citrus industry boomed after WWII. The government had improved roads so citrus products could be more easily distributed around the country.  Processes to concentrate juice had emerged, and government contracts to buy concentrated juices had been let. But Lake County had a problem; the labor force was thin. Of course, believers in free markets would predict that the cost of labor would increase, but the Lake County citrus growers and canners did not want that free market. They wanted cheap labor.

Racism is a large part of the reasons that blacks were kept “in their place,” but the maintenance of a cheap labor pool was also important. Thus, when workers were needed, blacks were arrested and charged with vagrancy. They got heavy fines and had no choice but to work for the low wages in the groves, often under the watch of armed guards, as part of a process called “debt peonage.” All this required the wealthy whites to urge an interesting line; to keep blacks in their place, but don’t make the oppression so bad that they leave the area. Some places in Florida had been so harsh that blacks had fled to other parts of the country depleting their cheap labor forces. Lake County did not want that. Be harsh, but not so harsh that the black workers left. This more subtle, economic racism turned a blind eye to the actions of the KKK and its ilk as long as it did not cause the Lake County blacks to find homes elsewhere.

We can properly call the society presented by Devil in the Grove racist, but we should also put another label on it. This was terrorism; a word headline writers used in the 1950s to described the happenings in Lake County. The terrorism did not come from isolated pockets in the community; it was a society of terrorists. If it was not state-sponsored terrorism, it certainly was state-condoned terrorism.

Lake County was not alone. Such terrorism was accepted through a large swath of the country for an extensive part of the country’s existence.  Even if slavery should not be formally labeled as terrorism because it was legal, the unchecked terrorism that was inflicted on black society lasted from the end of Reconstruction through the 1960s when it tapered off . . . somewhat. The largest group of terrorists who have ever operated in this country were not foreigners; they were good red-blooded Americans.

Many of us want to deny that the Groveland travesty was typical. Surely it was an outlier. It happened in the South after all. This is captured by a blurb attributed to the Chicago Tribune on my copy of King’s book: “A powerful and well-told drama of Southern injustice.” Southern injustice, not American injustice. As if we are not all one country. (We will ignore that NAACP facilities were bombed in Boston in 1976; in Tacoma, Washington, in 1983; and in Colorado Springs in 2015.)

We should also recognize that the “benefits” of this terrorism extended far beyond the citrus grove owners. For example, the bankers who loaned money to those owners benefited. The canners of grapefruit sections gained from the artificially low cost of the fruit, and, of course, consumers throughout the country benefited from lower costs. It was not, however, just the Florida citrus industry that benefited from our racial terrorism, but all employers, including the genteel white lady with a black maid or cook, seeking cheap labor.

Today we fear terrorism against our country. It is a diffuse fear, one spread to all parts of our society. The terrorist is seen as other; one with roots or connections or sympathies to something foreign; one who has dark skin. This terrorism seems incomprehensible, but perhaps we could better understand it if we our examined our own history. This country’s foundation has many pillars, but one of them has been terrorism.

The victims of this homegrown terrorism were seen as “other,” and that made it easier to target them.  The concept of otherness is powerful. Surely it has been easier for us to wage military actions in places where we see the population as “other,” but we should realize that to those societies we are seen as the foreign outsider.  For the terrorist we now fear, we are now the “other,” and that makes it easier for terrorism to occur against us.

Perhaps we can better grasp today’s if we can understand our own history and how our homegrown terrorism flourished, for then we might recognize “We have met the terrorist, . . . “

Her picture on the badge around her neck showed her with hair much longer than she now had. I said something about that to the Chinese-American nurse who was taking care of me. She said that it used to come down to her waist, but she had it cut so she could donate it for wigs for chemotherapy patients. Then she went on to say, “I am not very curvy, and when my hair was so short, I looked like a boy. I cried for two or three months.” Even so, when her hair grew long enough, she was going to cut it and donate it again.

An attractive server in my local biergarten is in the process of opening her own restaurant. She says that it will be dog-friendly and vegetarian. Can the canines be happy if the doggy treats consist of untouched quinoa, salsify, and (sigh), the ever-popular purple kale?

What does it mean about our patriotism or our education that the words of the national anthem now appear on those large scoreboards at sporting events?

Crossing over the platform to get to another subway train at 8 AM on a Wednesday morning, the mother (I assume) is holding the hand of a three year old.  Mother, pleasantly,”Sweetie, that is not a snack.  That is a treat.”  A couple of beats later, a little voice.  “Then next time, could you pack a treat?”

“Not men who ran the world, but who made it run.” Ian McEwan, The Children Act.

Over dinner, the new acquaintance told me that his son had died at eighteen after years of a disease. The man said that he felt worthless and that he could not work.  How could he be effective at his job if he could not help his son?

I just finished reading Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan. To my surprise, it was not about the beginnings of Goldman Sachs.

A tidbit for your novel: At a scenic view on a trail on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, a chain link fence is in place with a sign warning not to approach the edge of the lookout.  Behind the sign, hidden from the casual hiker, a lovelock is secured to the fence. It does not say, “Sam Loves Sally” or “William and Wesley Forever.” Instead, commercially inscribed on it is only, “I (heart) Paris.”  Write a page or a paragraph.

“Privatizing the gains of investment; socializing the risk. This is a classic strategy for politically powerful entrepreneurs.” Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

“Profound ideas bear repeating, or rediscovery, and many original ideas do not.” Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.

Four women had just completed a tennis game and were trying to arrange their next match.  It started to take some time as there were many conflicting commitments. Finally, Ann said that she had to leave.  She was going to a local church’s antique fair, an annual event with displays ranging from expensive jewelry to 1970s kitsch. Ann then said, “Oops I don’t have any money with me, but if I find anything I need at the fair, I’ll go home and get my wallet.” Do you ever find something you need at an antique show?

I did today what I often do when I go by one; I visited and pondered a cemetery.    Surely cemeteries have been created to be visited, and you should stop in, especially if it is a nice spring day.

Different cemeteries have different charms. Well maintained ones are often beautiful.  Lush landscaping.  Mature trees.  Birds.  Squirrels.  The rundown cemetery has the fascination of the wonder of lost stories and forgotten lives.

Although the cemetery I visited today contained the graves of many of the famous, I did not seek them out.  I never do.  Instead I look at random inscriptions.  1880-1942.  1921-2010.  Beloved.  Mother.  You Will Live in Our Hearts Forever.  Somehow this gives me peace except for those like 2004-2008, 1909-1919, which produce a sadness for those who were left behind.  In an old cemetery where the tombstones are so weathered that I can only guess at what the inscriptions read, I feel as if the scene is trying to impart some transcendental message, but I never catch it.

I don’t know if my interest in cemeteries existed before I worked in one.  Until then my contact with the death industry had been sparse.  My grandfather, who lived in the upper flat of our two-story house, died when I was in high school.  (He died on his seventieth birthday.  His son, my father, lived until 80.  Ergo, by my impeccable logic, I get until 90.)  Surely there must have been a funeral, but I have no memory of it.

But also when in high school, Mr. U died.  Although I had no contact with Mr. U, he had been an important figure In education in my town and had a school named after him. I was among those tapped to be the student representatives at a funeral-home ceremony for him.  Up until then, I had seen dead people primarily on TV and movie cowboy shows, and these “corpses” always seemed as if they were going to sit up in a moment.  But as I entered, there was not only a group of frightening adults (I did not know them, and I was shy; I tried to avoid talking even to parents of friends), but also an open casket with the remains, my lightning-quick mind concluded, of Mr. U.  Adults tried to talk to me; I would have found this difficult no matter what, but I kept trying not to look over at the dead guy.  And was that makeup?

My first real exposure to a cemetery came in the summer at the end of high school when I had a job in a local cemetery. There I did not look on the dead.  Instead, I was the main watering guy.  It was a hot, dry season.  A portion of the cemetery did not have underground sprinklers, hoses were used to water the grass there.  Each morning I would do a round turning on spigots that had attached hoses.  This took about 90 minutes, and I made a second round.  I turned off the spigot, walked to the end of the hose, moved the sprinkler to an unwatered patch, walked back to the spigot, turned it on, and then repeated this pattern at the next spigot until the end of the work day when I turned off the spigots.  This might seem boring and lonely, but it was not to me.  I had trouble talking with the adults who worked there, and I found the cemetery a place for peaceful contemplation.  The work suited. (Except that the hoses were black and black stuff got imbedded in my fingers’ whorls.  My hands looked dirty, and that bothered me because this was the summer when I was sure that I was going to unbutton a blouse, may unbutton many blouses.  But, I feared, not if my hands looked grossly dirty. I scrubbed, and scrubbed and scrubbed.  Lava soap was my friend.  So was Boraxo. They didn’t really work.)

The cemetery’s full-time employees did the core work.  They dug the graves; they lowered the casket after a service; they filled in the hole; they landscaped after the burial.  Only once in a while, usually on a weekend when enough of the full-timers were not on call, did I assist. On one Saturday when I was helping, I was waiting for the mourners to leave the grave site so that we could shovel in and level the soil.  Then we would be through, and I might have the time to make my baseball game.  But two or three mourners lingered and lingered.  I must have indicated my impatience, and one of the full-time worker quietly but firmly told me to have respect for those still there.  That struck me.  This physical laborer, who must have seen a comparable scene many times, could see beyond himself to the humanity of those others.  His was not just a job to feed his family, but also one to serve those others.  I was embarrassed for myself.

On another Saturday, after the family and friends had left, we went to the grave to do our tasks.  The casket was suspended over the grave by one of those machines with canvas stretchers.  A crank lowered the casket to the bottom of what really was a six-foot hole.  Then one of the stretchers was detached from the machine and pulled under the casket and up to the other side.  In the normal course, the soil that had been put to the side of the grave was shoveled into the hole, and the ground raked.  A few days later, after the soil’s settling, this raw ground would be landscaped.  But this time, after the lowering, the canvas strips got stuck.  The full-timers tried this and that, but the canvas was not freed.  Finally, the crew chief looked at me, pointed at the hole, and told me to deal with the situation.  Either free the canvas or toss the loose end back up so the casket could be raised again and the process started anew.  To this fit youngster, seemingly no big deal.  But, and it was big but, the grave was only a few inches wider and longer than the casket.  I was not really jumping into a six-foot hole; I was really going to leap onto a casket. In an instant, an image stuck in my mind.  My feet would crash through the casket, and I would be standing on a dead person.  Or I would go through the lid, slip, and be lying face to face with a corpse.  And other variations of this theme.  Of course, these were false worries.  The casket was not a pine box loosely hammered together.  It was one of the Cadillacs sold by funeral homes to those who probably could not afford it.  That lid could handle a lot more than my 148 pounds.  It was going to hold more than that when the grave was filled in.  I jumped, quickly freed the stretcher, and clambered out without incident.  But those images were stuck.  I had nightmares for days, maybe even weeks, and I won’t be surprised if in writing about this, that I don’t have nightmares again.

A few weeks later I was called to the cemetery office.  The manager was there with a tiny, old man.  A small box was on the counter.  It contained the ashes of the man’s wife.  The manager instructed me to carry the container to a specified place in the cemetery where a hole for the box had already been dug.  I should lower the container and then help the man fill the hole.

I lifted the container.  It was heavy.  Very heavy.  I stumbled a bit, but then moved on.  I had never before carried human ashes, and I wondered how they could weigh so much.  The man started to talk about his wife as we shuffled on.  I half listened and as I did generally with adults tried to say as little as possible.  Although I tried to hide them, he may have seen my struggles with the box and said that it was lined with lead.  I wondered why he would have his wife cremated and have the remains in the kind of container meant to prevent decay.  He talked more and more about his wife.  I could almost touch his love for her.  Then he started to talk about her death.  It had been a slow, wasting disease.  I could tell it had been awful.  He said that by the end he barely recognized her.  She did not look like the person he had been in love with for over sixty years.  He said that he had wanted an open-casket funeral, but . . . Cremation had not always been the plan.

I had learned some stuff that summer.  I was a teenage boy and (therefore) a wiseass, but I had been taught that I should respect the grief of others.  After the man had tossed a handful of soil on the box, as I was about to shovel in more, I finally said, I guess you are going to miss her very much.  He cried.

So, what is the proper response to this grief of others especially when they are relative strangers and you did not know or barely knew the loved one?  Silence? Platitudes? (So sorry for your loss?)  Something else?

Blaine Harden has written an interesting dual biography in The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom.  He juxtaposes the lives of Kim Il Sung, who led his country into what we call the Korean War, with that of pilot No Kim Suk who fought in that war but eventually fled to the Americans in a Russian jet. I read the book because I knew next to nothing of these stories, but I also discovered that I also knew next to nothing about the savagery of the American bombing during that time.

Harden reports that we “massively and continuously bombed North Korea for three years, turning nearly every city, town, and village in the Pennsylvania-sized country ” into a wasteland. A postwar Russian study concluded that “85 percent of all structures in the country were destroyed.”  A precise death toll is not known, but good estimates range from 1.3 to 2 million.  The Strangelovian General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during this period, had urged massive bombing at the war’s beginning. He thought that by killing a large number of civilians quickly, we could  force a quick surrender. American strategists found that proposal too horrible, but, according to Harden, we instead “used massive bombing to kill civilians slowly and in large numbers.”

The result of this carnage was not victory, but a stalemate, with Kim and his heirs still continuing to control North Korea.

This made me reflect on other episodes of American bombing.  My images had been formed by World War II movies where American bomber crews took out Krupp factories or brave fighter pilots skillfully shot Zeros out of the sky to preserve aircraft carriers or to give cover to advancing marines on Pacific isles. But these were military targets.  Of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were different, but somehow the use of the atomic bombs was justified to end the war and actually save lives. It was a notable exception to our conventional bombing.  We fought clean.

The image became at least modified by reading Slaughterhouse-Five and Billy Pilgrim’s survival of the Dresden firebombing.  Even tough we had intentionally destroyed this city before August 1945, but I still assumed that Dresden was still just another exception to our general practices.  However, Tony, my knowledgeable ex-marine friend, told me we also firebombed Tokyo.  A little research revealed that Operation Meetinghouse on March 9-10, 1945, was one of the most destructive bombing raids in history.  Hundreds of B-29s dropped napalm and other incendiaries on a working-class area of Tokyo.  The resulting firestorm destroyed fifteen square miles of the city causing an estimated 100,000 deaths in a matter of hours.  I cannot truly imagine the horror.

How little I knew of our bombings, however, was most forcefully presented to me on a recent trip to Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.  After seeing endless displays of historic Buddhas in Thailand, we were on a boat on the Laotian portion of the Mekong seeking yet more religious images.  Our guide was a thirty-five-year-old Laotian native.  I asked him, “Don’t you hate Americans?”  Silence for a beat.  Silence for a few more beats, and then he said, “It depends on how old you are.”  Without stating how his parents viewed Americans, he said that his mother and father had endured many years of U.S. bombing.  A hole had been dug in the floor of their hut in which they huddled whenever they heard American planes. He, however, had been born after the bombing, and people of his age, he said somewhat noncommittally, did not always hold the same view of the Americans as an older generation did.

I remembered that during the Vietnam War, called the American War in Vietnam, we had bombed the Ho Chi Minh trail that wound through Laos and Cambodia to prevent supplies and men from reaching Vietnam.  But, with a little more research, I began to learn how extensive that bombing was.  America bombed Laos for a decade starting in 1964, and bomb it we did—over 680,000 missions.  That averages one every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nearly a decade.  More ordinance may have been used on Laos than was used on Europe during World War II. Per capita, we made Laos probably the most bombed country on earth.

Many of the cluster bombs never exploded and still sit in the Laotian countryside.  Thousands have been killed or wounded by the bombs since the American raids ended in 1973 with deaths continuing every year. Plowing a field can be an act of bravery or stupidity.

In 2016, President Obama visited Laos, and promised that for three years, the United States would give $30 million a year to find and dismantle unexploded bombs.  One report states that the United States spent $13.4 million per day (in 2013 dollars) for nine years in bombing Laos.

I saw the President described as being of “deep ignorance.” But if you are deeply ignorant, aren’t you shallow, too?

Always ask for directions in New York City in a loud voice. This increases the chance that someone will correct the first set of directions. The correction-giver is usually right.

The eighteen-month child was securely, I say securely, strapped into a stroller. Yet he was wearing a bicycle helmet. Isn’t that carrying protective parenting too far?

I consider myself an intellectual when I make it to the end of a New York Review of Books article.

A person on a TV panel talked almost gleefully about the power of the “mother of all bombs” we had just dropped. Other panelists nodded sagely. He then said, “But we must expect to be in Afghanistan for a generation.” Say what! Did he look so happy about the magnitude of the munition because he thought that if we had not dropped it, we would have been in Afghanistan for a generation and a day?

As a result of a domestic dispute, a woman was murdered in a school along with an eight-year-old “bystander.” I waited for some commentator to say this would not have happened if we unfettered Second Amendment rights so that the little boy could have been packing.

It is amusing to hear the spouse and the daughter discuss whether the spouse is wearing mom jeans.

In a park or outside an old house, I would come across a hand pump as a kid. Of course, I had to try it. The first couple strokes always seemed hard, but with minimal persistence they became easier. As I pumped I would wonder if the pump still worked. Was there really water down there? Sometimes the effort produced nothing, but with others, a little water would spurt out. That sight produced a quickened, more forceful stroke. Then larger spurts, and finally, a stream without interruption. These efforts always produced a smile and a sense of accomplishment. Yet again, a satisfaction that most in a younger generation will never have.

“He is a prince.” Doesn’t sound derogatory. But compare: “She is a princess.”

“Not for the first time, she had validation for her long held belief that Homo sapiens was genetically linked to pond scum.” Elizabeth George, Deception on his Mind

I listen to radio shows featuring what used to be called “the standards” but now are often referred to as having come from the Great American Songbook. The beautiful and memorable music of Rodgers, Hammerstein, Dietz, Lerner, and similar composers are played. Such programs, however, never seem to play the compositions of Hank Williams, an American who wrote perfect songs. Hank Williams belongs in the Great American Songbook.

Are you like me and wonder when you see a 5 Napkin Burger whether that means the meat is that juicy and delicious or that greasy and disgusting?

There was such a difference between a woman’s magazine and a girlie magazine.

consider myself a bright person.  I think I reason well.  I think I generally understand what good proof requires.  I retain a lot of knowledge from the trivial (Norway became independent in 1906; the horse was named Bucephalus; Henry Aaron had a home run taken away because the umpire ruled that his foot was outside the batter’s box) to the more important (a general understanding of Bayes’ Theorem; Article I defines the powers of Congress) to the crucial (my spouse’s birthday).

But no matter how hard I try, I can’t retain information about some topics. I know little about botany even though I have taken many hikes with terrific naturalists who show me how to identify plants. Sure I can recognize a maple leaf, but that is not because of the guides.  I credit “Oh Canada”.  (I credit Canada for many things:  Bobby Hull, Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood, great comedians and actors, and a plethora of professional wrestlers—I’m looking at you, Bret “The Hitman” Hart and Stampede Wrestling.)  But I can’t tell a rhododendron from a mountain laurel, a coleus from a coelacanth.

Recently I visited a number of western National Parks and heard much about the geology of Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and other parks on the Colorado Plateau.  I learn something, but that knowledge quickly disappears.  I don’t think it is simply because I have heard the philosopher of science Sheldon Cooper’s assertion that geology is the Kardashian of science.

I do actually have some basic understanding of plate tectonics and continental drift.  Years ago I read a marvelous essay by Stephen Jay Gould on the subject.  (I am being redundant; I have found all Gould essays to be marvelous.)  I have absorbed that plate tectonics is one of the most important Kuhnian paradigm-shifting theories of the Twentieth Century, but while I retain the names of other paradigm shifters, Darwin, Newton, Einstein, I have not retained the name of the geology game changer.  I recently read Patti Smith’s description of the Continental Drift Club, and its homage to Alfred Wegener.  And I say, “Who?”  It finally dawns on me that he is the person Stephen Jay had written about, but I had forgotten.  I could remember the origins of the West Coast Offense (a real, not metaphoric, game changer making too many football games alike tedious), but not the person who, in an important sense, remade the understanding of our present world.

When it comes to knowledge going beyond the concept of plate tectonics, however, I am sure that it will disappear.  On the trip just completed, Kirt, the geologist (also musician and photographer), gave wonderful lectures.  I learned about the Cretaceous Sea, Navajo Sandstone, Kaibab Limestone, and how different erosion rates have led to what geologists call the Grand Staircase.  But I know that I have not truly absorbed this information.  A year or two from now if I am asked to describe this geology, I will say something about the Keokuk Limestone that compressed the Beelzebub Basalt with Balthazar Bedrock at the lowest level thereby forming the Grand Ballroom.