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Piecing Things Together, Part II

(Guest Post From the Spouse)

I’ve always liked puzzles. In high school I was one of those nerdy kids who enjoyed the extra credit geometry problems. Figuring out how to complete a geometry proof – when successful – was extremely satisfying and, well, elegant.

Being out of practice with geometric theorems, however, makes solving those mathematical puzzles impossible. But I still like puzzles so, in my advanced age, I have moved on to those less specialized forms of puzzling – namely crossword and jigsaw.

If you are a puzzler, you’ll know what I’m talking about. For others of you, I’ll try to explain why puzzles are so satisfying.

A crossword puzzle requires a modicum of trivial knowledge and some word skills. Having a decent vocabulary and a fair repertoire of synonyms is advantageous. In some puzzles it’s necessary to figure out the “trick” in the puzzle. In Sunday Times puzzles there’s always a trick. Are words inserted backwards? Maybe they turn corners. Two letters in a single square? Some clues may lead to puns or mangled clichés. In the not-too-distant past it was handy to have a crossword puzzle dictionary to look up, say, the definition of a roadside inn on the Silk Road (caravansary), who got the supporting actress Oscar in 1953 (Gloria Graham), or who was Martin Van Buren’s vice president (Richard Mentor Johnson). I guess some people know those things without a reference book; I’m not one of them. So these days it’s equally useful to know how to use the Internet. One doesn’t have to know every answer to every clue in order to complete a crossword puzzle; some of the answers emerge when words around them are completed. When a difficult word or phrase finally “fits” into a crossword puzzle, there must be a spritz of dopamine that bathes the brain. One experiences pleasure at the reasonableness, symmetry and completeness of the puzzle. Moreover, when it “fits,” there’s no more mental agitation. It fits; it belongs; it no longer jars the mind. There’s an aaaah moment.

Jigsaw puzzles are similar but require a different skill set. Here it’s a visual one. Like crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles come in varying degrees of difficulty. In the New York Times, crossword puzzles get harder as the week goes on. Friday’s puzzle is way harder than Monday’s. Saturday’s is impossible (at least for me). While jigsaw puzzles don’t come with a notice of difficulty, it’s safe to say that more pieces mean greater difficulty (we always opt for 1000 pieces), but even though puzzles come with a picture of their completed selves on the box cover, sometimes the difficulty isn’t quite clear until the puzzle is begun. The NBP and I have done many, many puzzles together. The NBP is exceptionally good at them having both a good sense of color and spatial representation. Me? Not nearly as good. The hardest puzzle we have done together was of a polar bear mother and her cub in a snow bank. I, who rely heavily on color, was at a severe disadvantage. White was not necessarily white; it came with subtle shades of gray, green, blue, even pink. Recognizing shape was essential. I would have been lost without the NBP.

The most fun puzzles (to me) are those from Ravensburger. They are fantastical with names like “No. 2 Curious Cupboard” and “The Bizarre Bookshop, #2.” Little pink creatures hide in corners next to giant flowers or old photographs. There’s always a bulldog or two, maybe a kitten. Sometimes there are quilts with beautiful patterns or candlesticks in front of a moon-shaped cookie, stairs leading up to a giant tomato. Books are everywhere with silly titles. There’s a cookbook entitled “2 FISH PERCHance 2 BREAM” or another entitled “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Pie.” Rulers, dolls, witches – well, they’re just delightfully strange. I love them.

We have also done a puzzle shaped like a fish that had kaleidoscopic colors and various geometric designs for the fins and the body. We did a puzzle of a New Orleans scene with many cascading flowers and wrought iron balconies. Flowers – particularly those entangled in wrought iron filigree — are surprisingly hard. My most recent “solution” was a picture of an old postcard of the New York Public Library in the 1940’s. It’s almost impressionistic, the people emerging as mere smudges of charcoal. The library itself is surrounded by buildings with windows, windows, and more windows, and all those windows looked alike. It was a challenge. I confess to having given up on a puzzle from the University of Chicago Alumni Association. Too many leaves with too many branches, and the NBP wasn’t available to help. No fun. No way.

Jigsaw puzzles are not as cognitively challenging as crossword puzzles, and they take a lot longer to complete. However, they share the same aaaaah moment when the piece fits and the church steeple comes into focus or the staircase reaches that tomato. And when the entire puzzle is complete, it’s almost like closing a good book; you’re sorry that it’s over.

Yes. I like piecing things together.

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Snippets

I like that the acrylic blankets I have put on my bed are warmer than the wool ones they replaced. I like that they are fluffier. And I like that when I turn over on a dry, cold night, they shoot out tiny sparks.

The Has Been Guy Donald Trump was talking on Fox News, and I heard him say yet again that he got “almost 75 million votes, more than any other incumbent president.” In the last accounting I saw, Trump got 74,216,154 votes. Only with an unusual rounding technique does this become “almost 75 million.” More important, Trump was not asked why it is germane that he got the most votes of any sitting president when Joe Biden received the most votes ever for any presidential candidate. The germane fact, of course, is that 81,268,924 (almost 82 million by Trump’s reckoning) voted for his chief opponent. Add the three million votes cast for third party candidates, and you can say that 84 million people voted against the HBG, which should be considered a lot more important than that “almost 75 million” voted for him. The most important fact is that he lost, and that he is the Has Been Guy. It may be an interesting bar trivia question as to which NBA team scored the most points while losing, but in the standings all that matters is that they lost. Trump did get a lot of votes; he also lost — big time — hugely. That is what is germane. But the Fox “interviewer” never asked Trump about the importance of his spouting that he got more votes than any incumbent president. And America gets dumber.

Virtue and Vice look much the same,

If Truth is Naked, so is Shame.

                    W.S. Landor

After the author’s text concludes, many books contain a paragraph headed “About the Type.” Thus, a recently read volume had this just before the back cover, “This book was set in Sabon,” which was designed by a “well-known” (?) German twentieth-century typographer based on the work of a sixteenth-century French designer but was named for a Frankfurt typefounder in the 1550s. I, for unknown reasons, always read these paragraphs, but each time I wonder why and if anybody cares about this information. Does anyone ever pick up a book and say, “Oh, this is set in Sabon. It was a pleasure reading that typeface last month. That really makes me look forward to reading this book”?

I passed an eighteen-person line (I counted) waiting to make a purchase at a local coffee spot, and I realized that there is much I don’t understand in life. Anyone who needs a caffeine fix would find another source instead of waiting for a half hour to get it. And if they don’t tremble for the stimulant, why would they stand a half hour in line to buy coffee?

My governor is in political trouble. With each new revelation I think back to the early Covid-19 days when he was everyone’s darling. An astute friend then confidently said to me, “Soon we will all remember again why we hate Andrew Cuomo.” But the claims of sexual harassment always make me uneasy. I don’t think I ever did anything that could have been seen as sexual harassment, but I am never 100% confident that my perceptions and recollections on this front are correct. I know that over a lifetime my knowledge and sensitivities have changed. And I also wonder: What happens when you are bothered by sexual harassment at work, but you are self-employed?

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Ruminations of a Somewhat Literate Person (concluded)

          The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett led me to think about other books in addition to Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere. Bennett’s book concerns light-skinned Black twins, one of whom in adulthood passes for white. I first thought of Band of Angels by Robert Penn Warren, which was recommended to me by my friend Glen in the seventh grade. Growing up in our all-white Wisconsin town as the Civil Rights Era was emerging, Glen and I were learning that race was at the core of America. We discussed race often, and because we were both readers, his recommendation of the book fit into our conversations. (Glen once came up with the solution to the country’s racial problems. He said laws should be passed requiring marriage to someone from another race. Glen was convinced that in a few generations our racial problems would be gone. He was also more advanced musically than I at that dawn of the rock era, and he would tell me what songs and artists to listen for. Looking back, Glen shaped me a lot more than many of my other childhood friends.)

          Band of Angels is not quite a passing-for-white story although there is an element of that. In the book a privileged, pampered daughter of a plantation owner finds out when her father dies that her mother was a slave. Therefore, she is Black. In short order, she is sold into slavery. Etc. Etc. Even at the age of thirteen, while I found this to be a searing, shocking story that made me reflect on slavery and race, I thought that the book was a trashy melodrama. Even so, it gave Glen and me a lot to talk and think about. (By contrast, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is a great book. Although Willie Stark is not the central figure that many think him to be in the book, an interesting book group would read any of the several excellent Huey Long biographies with Warren’s masterpiece for the potential of extended and interesting discussions.)

          While I would not recommend reading Band of Angels in conjunction with The Vanishing Half, a book group could benefit from discussing other books along with Bennett’s. The classic in “passing” literature is over a century old, but I have only recently read James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. The book holds up, and it would be interesting to compare and contrast the importance of a lynching in the two books.

          The Vanishing Half, however, did make me think of a newer book that I have read: One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets, a memoir by Bliss Broyard. Her father, Anatole Broyard, was a literary critic for the New York Times who wrote many daily book reviews that influenced my reading selections. After he died, it was reported that he was “passing,” although his situation may be more complicated than that. Many people knew that Broyard was Black, and few examples, if any, of him claiming to be white are given. He didn’t seek to hide his race; it simply didn’t come up. I am white, but I don’t proclaim it. Why should it be different for a Black? In any event, Bliss Broyard did not grow up thinking of her father, or herself, as Black, and her book discusses her explorations of her father’s family and the effects on her of learning this history. These are the same themes explored fictionally in The Vanishing Half. Discussing the real and fictional side-by-side could be interesting.

          And perhaps The Vanishing Half should be discussed with Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, which many thought was inspired by Anatole Broyard even though Roth said otherwise. In any event, at the heart of The Human Stain is Coleman Silk as imagined by Nathan Zuckerman (as imagined by Philip Roth), a college professor who crosses over the color line. (Perhaps only in a Roth book would someone leave Blackness to become Jewish.)

The Human Stain, however, undercuts my notion of discussing novels together. Since The Vanishing Half, James Weldon Johnson’s book, and One Drop all contain main characters raised as Black who choose to pass as white, my premise of discussing books together should lead me to form a book group ­that included these as well as the Roth book. However, The Human Stain (which I have only just read because I thought that I ought to in order to write this post) is singularly rich and thought-provoking. Its language begs to be dissected and savored. In short, the novel’s unique power and intrigue would only be diluted by considering it with those other books. The Human Stain is a stand-alone and deserves its own discussion.

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¬Ruminations of a Somewhat Literate Person

          I read a lot. Always have. This has been largely a solitary activity. Outside of an educational setting, I have seldom discussed books with anyone other than the spouse or a friend who shared similar knowledge and interests. Recently, however, I have participated in several book groups. I don’t always find the discussions thought-provoking. Only occasionally has the discussion given me a new or deeper insight into the book.

          Part of the reason for this is that often one book reminds me of another. My thoughts are diverted by that juxtaposition, and I would like to explore it. But, of course, in a book group neither can I expect that others will have read what I have nor can I assume that they would be interested in the comparisons. (Often the spouse and I have read the same book, and we do discuss how one book affects our appreciation of another.) And consequently, from my standpoint, the book group discussion is often wanting.

          For example, recently as I was reading Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, I had thoughts about Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Margaret O’Farrell, which I had read only a few weeks before. The novels are quite different. Hamnet is about William Shakespeare’s family, and O’Farrell, with her many striking images, creates a believable sixteenth century England. Gyasi’s novel is set in today’s world and gives us the portrait of a sort of woman who would not have existed in Shakespeare’s day. However, a plague—one ancient, one modern and continuing–is at the heart of each book, but neither author dives deeply into the nature of the plague. Instead, what the books share is a profound sense of grief. In each novel, that grief does not bring people together, as it might, but separates one person from another. Is that inevitable when a young person is lost? Transcendent Kingdom and O’Farrell’s novel are greatly different books, but each made me think about the nature of grief, whether it is shared more when the elderly die, and could it ever be transcended. Was that just my own quirkiness, or would I benefit by having the books discussed together?

          Hamnet, by the way, also had me thinking about another book. Shakespeare’s wife, who is not named Anne Hathaway in O’Farrell’s novel, has the touch of the magical or mystical about her and is closely identified with the woods. That character, who exudes a self-assured strength, reminded me of the wife/mother in a much different book, Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Follett’s character, too, captures a magical and mystical element grounded in her strength drawn from a forest. The spouse would add Green Mansions to this list, since Rema in that novel has some of the same preternatural qualities bequeathed by living in the wild.

          When I read a novel, I naturally think about other books I have read by the same author. Thus, in reading Phil Klay’s Missionaries, I thought about Redeployment. As with too much of my reading, I did not recall the details about that earlier prize-winner, I remember only that I found it exceptional. So did others, since it won America’s foremost literary award, the National Book Award. Missionaries, while worthy, did not strike me as outstanding as Klay’s debut work. That was because while I was reading about the militias and the cartels of Colombia with their atrocities and bloody revenges, I thought about The Cartel by Don Winslow, a novel about the Mexican drug gangs and their atrocities and revenges, which I read a few years ago. Winslow’s book amazed me. It also revolted me, but it impelled me to keep turning the pages, so I concluded that it had to be good. When I read Missionaries, I felt that I had already read much of it in Winslow’s book. Winslow gets labeled as a mystery and crime writer, a label that generally prevents an author from being thrown in the literary camp, but I wondered, if the two books were read side by side, whether Missionaries would be considered “better,” “more artistic,” “more literary” than The Cartel.

          I just finished reading The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett, which has been on the top of the bestsellers list for quite a while. Even so, I don’t tend to categorize it as a “bestseller.” To my mind that category is given to a “brand name author,” that is, somebody who publishes frequently with the book almost always making the bestseller list. The author’s name is nearly as recognizable as a highly advertised soap or soda. The name-brand-author’s book is usually a mystery, thriller, romance, or more recently something with a fantasy element and is often referred to by the author’s name. For example, I am reading an Agatha Christie, a John Sandford, or a Lee Child. I am not denigrating these books. It takes a rare talent to write them, and I enjoy many of them.

          Bennett’s book, however, does not neatly fall into a genre and is more “literary” than many of these bestsellers. It brought to my mind Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, published a few years ago, another bestseller considered more literary than many and that does not fall into one of the usual genres. I have been trying to figure out why one book triggered thoughts of the other. It is perhaps because in both a community becomes a character in the book; the stories concern generations of a family; and family secrets drive the narrative. In addition, they are good and quick reads. Yet in reading each of them I felt if I was reading something that did more than just pass the time but was somehow worthwhile or deeper or more insightful than others on the Sunday bestseller lists. Would others think the two could be usefully discussed together?

(concluded March 1)

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Not TFG, But the HBG

President Biden recently referred to him as “the former guy.” The amusingly insightful columnist Gail Collins thought that this reference would get under his skin and has used the sobriquet “TFG” to needle him. I, however, have been mentally referring to him as the HBG–the “has been guy.” And because of his recent diatribe against Senator Mitch McConnell, I have been wondering whether the HBG has Jewish roots.

His McConnell statement followed the usual formula. First, the HBG praised himself with false claims (he “single-handedly saved at least 12 Senate seats” for the Republicans); whined about the performances of others to explain failures that might be ascribed to him (the Georgia Senate races were lost because of Georgians’ “anguish at their inept Governor, Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and the Republican Party, for not doing its [sic] job on Election Integrity during the 2020 Presidential race”); and then launched into an ad hominem attack on McConnell (“a dour, unsmiling, political hack”). The HBG’s statement made me smile, but almost any attack on McConnell will do that. His statement was almost puckish, close to witty, but I had doubts about its source. Is “dour” in the HBG’s vocabulary? Luckily, we did not have to hear his stab at pronouncing it.

This is all the usual HBG stuff, but what really got my attention was another statement: “Likewise, McConnell has no credibility on China because of his family’s substantial Chinese business holdings. He does nothing on this tremendous economic and military threat.” Senator Mitch is married to Elaine Chao, whose family owns a shipping company that transports goods to and from China and has gotten much of its financing from Chinese financial institutions. The Chao family is, you might say, entangled with China and that might be reason to wonder whether McConnell can be objective when it comes to relationships between China and the United States.

So the HBG seems to have a point, but perhaps he is not the one to be making it. He failed to mention that Elaine Chao was Secretary of Transportation in the just-ousted HBG administration—in fact, she was the longest serving of any of last term’s Cabinet secretaries. Transportation. That’s the business her family is in! If McConnell has no credibility on China because he is married to Elaine Chao, surely the credibility of the person who appointed and retained her in his Cabinet in a position that affected our relations with China should, therefore, also be suspect. After all, the Senate majority leader has little control over our China policies while the HBG sought to set them.

The HBG’s statement also reminded me of the classic definition of the Jewish concept of “chutzpah.” The defendant who has killed his parents comes before the court and begs for mercy because he is an orphan. It takes a lot of chutzpah to criticize McConnell for his wife’s family when you yourself have placed that woman in a position of trust and power concerning China. That leads me to the next question: Can you have such brazen chutzpah if you don’t have Jewish roots?

But these thoughts also made me wonder about labeling him the HBG as I have been doing for a while. Apparently the HBG wants us to believe that he actually recognized the “tremendous economic and military threat” that China posed, but we now learn that on his watch China became the EU’s largest trading partner. Whether his concern was economically sound or not, HBG voiced much anguish over our trade deficits in general, but now we learn that those deficits are larger at the end of the term than when he fluked  into office. If there were any real plans to fix the trade deficits (doubtful), they did not work. But, of course, it was not just his trade policies that failed. His wall was neither built nor financed as he said it would be. His America First plan that was going to give us better infrastructure didn’t exist – witness the catastrophes of the snow and cold of the last few weeks. He promised something cheaper and better than Obamacare, but he never made a single health insurance proposal. And now we have learned that in the last year of his term, life expectancy in this country fell by a year. Covid-19 is only part of the reason for that. It is also because of a flawed healthcare system and the opioid crisis, which he said he would, but never did, address.

Welcome to the HBG’s America. As I thought about this, I realized he is not the Has Been Guy; he’s the Never Was Guy. He is the NWG.

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Camping Was the Way to Travel (concluded)

On our first camping trip, the spouse and I drove to Nova Scotia, which is divided into two distinct pieces, a southern piece shaped like the figure 7 and a smaller, northern piece, Cape Breton Island. We headed to a campground that was at their conjunction, far away from any towns and up on some hills overlooking the Northumberland Strait (I think). For the first time in my life, there was no light pollution. I thought that I had seen a night sky before. I was wrong. The star-lit sky was breathtaking. I finally understood why it’s called the milky way.

Although we were there in August, it was not what I thought of as summer weather. It was cold. Everywhere we went, some Canadian would say, “This is really cold for this time of year.” After a while, it seemed as though the natives had constructed this narrative to appease us tourists. I began to think that even though the cold was actually not so unusual, they wanted the foreigners to think that so the American dollars would keep coming.

Those frigid nights taught us that picking our camp site mattered. Of course, one would like to have a good view of the water, and a picnic table was desirable. We had cleverly set up our tent away from the bathrooms so we would not  be disturbed by the people coming and going. However, the long walk to the facilities in the middle of the night even with the incredible sky made us realize the foolishness of our ways. Having to put on even more clothes for the midnight necessity than the many layers we had put on before getting into the sleeping bags woke us up too much, and no matter what we threw on, we came back shivering, making it hard to fall asleep. After that first night, we moved our tent closer to the bathrooms. Camping was teaching all sorts of practicalities.

I was also learning that I had trouble in a sleeping bag. If I turned over or just tried to adjust my position, I would get tangled up. Eventually the spouse and I found it better to unzip our bags completely and then zip them together, which allowed one to turn over while those “blankets” stayed in place as the partner slept. Not only was it warmer this way, it offered other potential benefits as well.

I was also learning the curse of the air mattress. They weren’t comfortable to begin with, and it was amazing how often they developed leaks. Go to sleep on a cushion of air but wake up on the uneven ground feeling a little rock pushing into the small of your back. Eventually we got camp mattresses made out of foam that rolled up into a tight package. We liked them very much and often used them at home to sleep on when guests came, or we took them with us when visiting friends who did not have a spare bedroom. One of the best purchases we ever made.

I don’t remember much of what we did while staying at this first Nova Scotia campground except that we climbed a fire tower for the view and learned a lot about keeping warm. Upon leaving, we circumnavigated Cape Breton Island where every little quaint fishing village looked as if it were posing for pictures. We made our way south to a campground outside the fishing town of Lunenberg where the incoming tide and waves crashed into caves and caverns making sounds like booms from a cannon. In Lunenberg, we treated ourselves to a restaurant meal in an oceanfront inn. It was quaint as all get out.

From Lunenberg we headed inland to a provincial park containing several lakes, each feeling more remote than the others. In this park I learned why “crazy as a loon” had become an expression. I heard a pair of the birds for the first time and caught a glimpse of one. Once heard, the sound stays with you forever.

By now we were getting pretty good at camping and cooking al fresco. We had stopped in a liquor store before turning inland, and it seemed fitting that in this maritime province the store had a wide array of rums but not too much else. We also bought there a bottle of wine, Canadian wine. Getting to our new campsite, the spouse decided to use the wine in making a beef stew. I don’t know what we thought we would get in a local Canadian wine, but we should have remembered the adage that if you use a wine in cooking, it should be a wine you would drink. We hadn’t drunk any of it. Cooking the stew over an open fire (no wimpy camp stove for us!), we patiently fed and stirred the fire for hours waiting for the stew to be done. In the end, the stew was…well, awful, putrid, uneatable. We had been told not to leave food about the campsite, but we were pretty confident that the racoons and bears would not have eaten it either. (It was a long time before we were willing to try a Canadian wine again, but, dear maple leaf friends, we have had good ones since then—ice and dessert wines from Ontario, and some almost excellent reds from British Columbia.)

We took a ferry leaving Nova Scotia. It went from Digby to St. Johns, New Brunswick, over the famous, picturesque Bay of Fundy. It was short and affordable and cut hours off the drive home. I remember little of that return trip. I think for a change of scenery we drove down the interior of Maine instead of the coast, and I saw that even in the highly settled Northeast, the country still has much inhabited territory. We must have stayed overnight somewhere before getting to Brooklyn, but I have no memory of it.

What I do remember is that we loved the trip, and after getting home and unpacking the car, we started planning our next camping trip. We had found a way for us to travel.

Our camping days are over. Too bad, too, since tents pop up with ease these days without the need of tent stakes, and sleeping bags can keep you warm in arctic winds. Someday soon I hope that we can again find a way to travel. Maybe a first-class boutique hotel in Paris, café au lait, croissants…….?

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Camping Was the Way to Travel

          I had expected to travel regularly after retiring, but Covid-19 has laid waste to those plans. It is hard to think about future trips not knowing when or if I will feel comfortable traveling again, so I have started reminiscing about past trips. I think back to those times when the spouse and I had few funds beyond those for the necessaries, and travel seemed impossible. We had a car but trip expenses–hotels, motels, restaurants—were inconsistent with paying our rent. So, in the spirit of Judy and Mickey, even though we had not done so before, we said, “Let’s go camping.” If we didn’t pay for a motel but slept in a tent, if we didn’t eat in restaurants while traveling but cooked at a campsite, if we didn’t fly but drove, we could … well, travel.

          We had the Dodge Dart, but we needed other things. We had to forgo our few luxuries for a while and gave up occasional dinners at a Mideast restaurant, replaced bottled wines with jugs, and delayed the purchase of a new sweater and tie in order to buy a tent, sleeping bags, a camping stove, lantern, and air mattresses.

          We had two weeks for a trip, and there were so many places we had not been. I don’t remember how the decision was made, but we decided to go to Nova Scotia. It’s a long drive, and there was a car ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, which would have cut hours, perhaps even a day, of driving off the trip, but the ferry’s cost put it out of our range. And, we enjoyed driving and had never seen Maine or New Brunswick. So, Nova Scotia the long way ‘round it was.

          On the first day of this first camping adventure, we drove from Brooklyn to Ogunquit, Maine, and pulled into a campground where we had reserved a spot, using in those primitive days a book (from Rand McNally?) that listed campgrounds around the country on the left side of the pages followed by all sort of symbols describing the place. Through the years we got quite good at scanning the symbolic trees, showers, and tables to find the sites that we might like, but this was a learning adventure for us.

We were camping, but we were not looking for a primitive backwoods experience. We were not backpackers. Our camping was a substitute for more expensive accommodations, and the campgrounds we mostly stayed in had a building with public toilets, sinks, and often showers, as this one did. Our tent was meant to substitute for a small motel room. It was not a WWII pup tent clone but about eight feet square and its center just high enough to stand up in. Luxurious, right?

You might think that we would have practiced putting up the tent before we had embarked, but no. This was our first time, and tents did not then simply pop open like an umbrella. We had to assemble poles and drive tent stakes, which took some effort because we had yet to learn that a three pound hammer was better than a regular one for the job. Although erecting the tent might have been a severe test of a marriage, we got it up, and through the years we developed a good, efficient routine for putting up and taking down the tent. Yeah, this camping idea was a good one.

Although we were not going to be backpackers off alone in the woods, we thought that our camping was going to keep us in touch with nature more than other travelers, but we immediately found “camping” meant different things to different people. A few sites over from ours a “camper” was parked with wires going into and out of it from all angles. A man in a lawn chair, beer in hand, was watching television (!). We did not get the point, but through the years, we saw the equivalent of this many times and always felt a self-righteous superiority to them, but of course, backpackers had a similar reaction to our camping.

We had stopped in Ogunquit because the spouse knew a colleague who had a family place there. It was my first visit to a seaside, summer resort, and I was seeing stuff I had never seen before. We all went out to dinner, and I had my first taste of lobster. Our camping was doing what I hoped that it would: giving us new experiences.

We continued up the beautiful Maine coast the next day into New Brunswick. Our gas station map was mostly blank showing few roads other than the waterfront one we were on. As far as we could tell, New Brunswick was mostly uninhabited forest land. We passed an elegant, old summer resort. We talked about how wonderful it would be to stay there someday, but we never really expected that we would ever be able to afford it.

Setting up the tent for the second time, we damaged a tent spike, and a significant portion of the next day was spent in search of a replacement. It wasn’t exactly a survival moment, but we learned that a large part of camping was coping with the contingencies that arose—where could we buy milk, hamburger rolls, insect repellent, ice, firewood, tent stakes? But this was a good thing because these quotidian matters happily displaced concerns about jobs, political news, and family problems. Nevertheless, tent stakes were a perennial problem. They were aluminum and seemed to break or bend easily. Finding places to buy spares was not a simple matter. Being quick studies, we soon learned to purchase extras in advance.

This was a time not only before podcasts but even before cassettes. At the campsite we blissfully did not have music or news or sports broadcasts, but in the car we sometimes searched for local radio stations. Close to the Nova Scotia border, we found a French one. It came from a little French-speaking town. I, of course, knew that French was spoken in Quebec, but I did not know that there were French-speaking pockets throughout New Brunswick, and I wondered what it was like to grow up in a town of a few thousand surrounded by those speaking another language. Travel, I learned, could free the imagination to consider such things.

(concluded February 22)

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Snippets

Talk all you want about Tom Brady, LeBron James, or Mike Trout, but isn’t Mikaela Shiffrin the best American athlete competing today? Or is it Simone Biles?

With all the hospital mergers, institutions end up with strange and seemingly impossible names. Thus, not far from me is the New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital.

          On a diet, one is supposed to eat slowly. So, at the farmer’s market seafood stand, I bought my diet food—oysters. It takes me fifteen minutes to open each one.

          How often in the coming years do you think Ivanka and Jared will socialize with people who unironically wear MAGA hats?

Although I don’t like to be out in one, I like to hear the term because it sounds poetic: Wintry mix.

We had a winter storm, which raises the questions for boys of all ages: Can you write your name in the snow? Sometimes it is better to be Bob than Randolph.

“It was evening all afternoon/It was snowing/And it was going to snow./The blackbird sat/In the cedar-limbs.” Wallace Stevens.

I read online an article from The Federalist. At the bottom of the article, it said: “The Federalist, a wholly independent division of FDRLST Media.” Can it be “wholly independent” and a division of a larger company? Perhaps someone can explain to me what “wholly independent” means.

Sometimes I am surprised at a lacuna in the spouse’s knowledge. She does not know who Aaron Rodgers is. That prevented me from discussing with her the burning topic of whether he is overrated.

At my age, an aphorism that no longer applies: “A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad; an optimist hopes they are.”

Overheard on an elevator at the Whitney Museum, this truism and puzzler: one young man social distancing from another, said, “Taking care of your mother while she dies is an opportunity of a lifetime.”

I did not sleep well on the night before a stress test necessary for an important medical procedure. I had discomfort in my lower abdomen with an occasional sharp pain. As I lay in bed, I convinced myself that I had a kidney stone. My mind raced. Should I go to the emergency room? Maybe the stone would pass naturally with a bit of pain and blood. Did I know of a doctor to go to? Did the spouse? Could I postpone my scheduled stress test? Would this postpone my valve replacement? Surely, I had to deal with the kidney stone first. Finally, I fell asleep but fifty minutes later I was awake again with a racing mind. What should I do about the kidney stone? How do I cancel my heart procedure appointment? Finally, back to sleep again but awake an hour later. So it went all night long until I finally got up to go up to the hospital for the test, and the worries about the kidney stone dissipated. I came to the convincing, and loud, conclusion that it was only gas.

Posted on by rjonakait

That Anthem Again (concluded)

Ordinary sporting events have ordinary displays of patriotism. However, the Super Bowl has had extraordinary expressions of patriotism. Trying to live up to my pledge to give up football, I did not watch the Super Bowl this year, but a few years ago I was paying only partial attention to the opening ceremonies of the game as I was preparing dinner for the wife and the NBP (I am a modern sort of guy). Listening with half an ear, I thought I heard portions of what seemed like a five minute narration by Johnny Cash about the flag, and there was a trio singing, I think, “America the Beautiful,” and then a sprightly version of the national anthem, followed by the flyover of military jets flying in close formation low over the stadium just as the National Anthem ended.

I have no idea when the flyover ritual started. I am always amazed by it. How can the timing be so precise? My most memorable flyover was combined with another patriotic display, the flight of Challenger. This Challenger is a bald eagle, and I have seen him in action several times at Yankee Stadium. My memory is that the bird was originally released outside the stadium during the National Anthem and would fly to the pitcher’s mound or home plate where he would land majestically on his handler’s wrist. As time went on, Challenger would be released from right in front of the center field fence for his flight to the infield. It is magnificent seeing an eagle fly in the wild, and I always found Challenger’s flight nearly as thrilling. The last time I saw him (I say “him,” but I don’t know whether the eagle is male or female), however, was different. It was a playoff or World Series game because the rosters of both teams had been announced and were lined up on the first and third baselines. Challenger was flying in from the outfield as the National Anthem was concluding, and then the flyover came. This time the planes flew really low. I was in the fourth row of the upper deck, and my knees buckled a bit from the vibrations. (How do the residents of the Bronx respond to this patriotic display? Many must not know it’s coming, and perhaps think New York City is under attack again.) Challenger was not prepared for the flyover. He had been about to land on his handler’s wrist, but the jets seemed to knock him out of the air. It was as if he hit an air pocket, and he dropped like a stone for about ten feet. He then seemed disoriented. He swooped around the lower deck and returned to the playing field where he had Derek Jeter and other players ducking out of his way. He did not land on his handler. He finally settled unceremoniously on the infield grass and appeared very sad and discombobulated. His handler had to walk over and collect him.

Is there truly a connection between such patriotic rituals and the sports events that follow? This question brings back a memory of Rocky Graziano, who won and lost the middleweight championship within a year during the heyday of boxing. After retiring he wrote an autobiography, Somebody Up There Likes Me, which appealed to my schoolboy fantasies and was made into a successful movie starring Paul Newman. Later, he did the talk show circuit telling amusing stories in heavy Brooklynese. On one of them he said that he hated “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Merv Griffiin or Mike Douglas or whoever it was looked at him incredulously and asked why. Graziano replied quite logically, “I knew that whenever the national anthem was over, someone was going to try to knock me unconscious.”Those of us who are sports fans have heard the National Anthem countless times at stadiums and arenas and on broadcasts, but last year there were months when we had no spectator sports, and we weren’t getting the usual doses of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Did we become less patriotic with its absence or is that ritualistic singing irrelevant in having a love of America? I had hoped that with the pandemic, we might reassess the connection between sports and patriotism. That seems to be what the Dallas Mavericks were doing, but just as there is “cancel culture,” there is also mandated culture. In this land of the free, you can apparently be required to act in a way some deem patriotic.be

Of course in the olden days when I first started going to sporting events, the venues did not have the fancy screens and scoreboards of today. Just imagine, you were expected to sing the national anthem from memory instead of reading it off a giant display. What does it say about the level of patriotism or the level of education of sports fans today that it now seems essential to provide the words to the spectators?

And I was taught back then not to applaud after the anthem to show it proper respect. That aspect of decorum is gone. If there is a connection between the singing and patriotism, then sports fans should love this country much more than those who do not know what a pick-off move is. Or at least sports spectators who are not golf fans should. I have heard it said that professional golfers are the most conservative of professional athletes and that golfers in general are more conservative than those who indulge in other pursuits. I do watch golf on television. Unlike every other televised sporting event I have seen (except maybe for tennis, another upper-class sport), I have never heard the national anthem as part of a golf telecast. May I assume that those at a golf event are less patriotic than those at a football game?  I wonder if our previous Golfer-in-Chief ever sang “The Star-Spangled Banner”—assuming he knows the words—before he plopped down in a golf cart for his frequent eighteen holes. Perhaps if he had sung the National Anthem more, he would have supported the Capitol Police.

Posted on by rjonakait

That Anthem Again

The Dallas Mavericks stopped playing the National Anthem before their home games. When news outlets reported this, the National Basketball Association proclaimed that all its teams must play the patriotic music before each game. That got me to thinking back to something I posted in 2017 and some other things since then. In slightly modified form, this is the post from April 23, 2017.

The Nationalism Pastime

It is always moving when the audience stands before the opera begins and sings the National Anthem. My patriotism overflows when the movie is paused at the two-thirds mark to allow us to sing “God Bless America.” And it is thrilling that every outdoor bluegrass concert I have attended starts with an adrenaline-boosting flyover by Air Force jets.

Of course these things don’t happen, but why not when such patriotic performances and displays are routine occurrences at sporting events?  Why is it that nationalism is a part of baseball, football, and NASCAR, but not “cultural” performances? Is it thought that operagoers differ in patriotic fervor from a Minnesota Vikings crowd? If the cultural audience cares less about our country, isn’t that all the more reason to have “The Star-Spangled Banner” before Lohengrin in hopes of increasing national identity? And if the opera audience is already patriotic, surely they would want to sing along to the National Anthem.

I have never researched the history of the National Anthem at sporting events, but a law professor of mine, Harry Kalven, a devoted Chicago Cubs fan even during the decades when you had to be a bit meshugganah to be a Cubs follower, said that it started during World War II. That seems likely, and I guess that once a patriotic ritual starts, it seems unpatriotic for it to end. Thus, we continue to hear the Anthem before the first pitch and now at every sporting event. 

The National Anthem may have been played at sporting events since WWII, but its performance style has changed. Once we had only straightforward renditions that zipped right along. For example, for years “The Star-Spangled Banner” was performed by Robert Merrill at Yankee Stadium—sometimes live and sometimes on a recording (occasionally nowadays a Merrill recording is still used). It clocked in at under two minutes. Now we regularly have versions that seem to be in a contest to see how slowly and with what added emotion the anthem can be sung. Soulful interpretations of the song have been traced back to a particular moment—Marvin Gaye’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game. Since then we have had many take-your-time idiosyncratic versions of it. (Gaye’s version was over two-and-a-half minutes long.) For me, however, it really started with Jose Feliciano at the fifth game of the 1968 World Series. I thought his version was moving and made me hear the song anew, but to many it was offensive because this dark-skinned, blind guy had the nerve to sing it with a fresh insight and in a non-standard style.

Feliciano’s version did not inspire copycats, however, because his career was damaged by it. For incomprehensible reasons, people labeled his rendition unpatriotic and disrespectful, and many radio stations refused to play any of his songs after that. (Question for your history discussion: Is there more division and hate in the country now, or was there more in 1968?) Feliciano’s version, while slower than Merrill’s, was faster than Gaye’s at a little over two minutes. (A joke my father told me which was not stale back then. A Latino boy new to the United States made his way to the stadium for a game. The only seat he could get was in the distant centerfield bleachers under the American flag. He knew no one and was feeling lonely, but he felt welcomed when everyone before the game began, stood, looked at him, and sang, “Jose, can you see?”) What was shocking and outrageous in 1968 is accepted or at least tolerated today, and now we have all sorts of “modern” arrangements of our patriotic hymn. (What does it mean about the connection between patriotism and sporting events that you can place bets on how long the national anthem will take at the Super Bowl? Perhaps to the surprise of many, the under has won the majority of times in the last ten years.)

And now at baseball games we also get “God Bless America.” This started in the aftermath of 9/11. I went with the NBP to a Yankee game not too long after the attacks, and that was the first time I heard it, in the recorded performance by Kate Smith, during the seventh inning. (I wonder how many there recognized her voice. You have to be my age to remember her fifteen-minute TV show.) That made perfect sense then, as did the delay of a different ball game that autumn to hear a speech by President Bush. And, as I said, once started, it is hard to stop a patriotic ritual.

I probably object more than most to “God Bless America.” Baseball games drag on long enough without the song, which does hamper the between-inning routines of the game. Of course, they could get rid of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” which comes right after the patriotic song, but since I go to the park for baseball rituals, I want to hear “Root, root, root for the home team.” (Never, never, never get rid of “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” which plays at a different time in the game. Love it.) Perhaps I would object less if I did not find “God Bless America” so insipid. The best I can say is that it is a step up from the Kars for Kids song, but not a big step. (Have you ever wondered why the Kars for Kids folks don’t tell us with any specificity what the money from the car sales goes for?) As a kid, well before I understood its left-wing political implications, I thought “This Land Is Your Land” was a much better song (still do), and I would be happier if at least some of the time, it were performed in the seventh inning, which I am told has happened at Baltimore Orioles games.

(concluded February 15)