The Indy 500

What ever happened to those days of yesteryear, when I could listen to the entire daylong, Indianapolis 500-mile race on the radio?

 

I love it that a woman, Danica Patrick, led the race and almost won recently.  That will cause a lot of talk in Gasoline Alley[1].  I remember when the big talk was whether a foreigner, Mario Andretti, could possibly compete with the Gasoline Alley regulars.  The race in those days was always on a Sunday and would start at 10 am California time.  I began listening to the pre-race show starting at eight.  I knew for days by then who was favored, who had pole position, what drivers hadn't made it and could be possible substitute drivers later on in the race [that’s never done anymore].  I would listen for an hour or two of the race at home, just to make sure that I knew what my opinions were on each driver's chances.  Then I would venture out to meet up with other friends of mine who were also listening, like Jerry Ashe, whose father knew all about cars.  Jerry’s dad ran the Chevron station in downtown San Jose.

We loved names like Johnny Parsons, Troy Rutmann, Tony Bettenhausen, and of course wild Billy Vukovich.  Lead foot Billy.  When we were old enough to drive cars ourselves, we always imagined handling them just like Billy Vukovich would have; taking curves on two wheels, coming out onto the straight-aways, flat-footed.  The Foyts and the Unsers were long off in the future.  The car teams were run by names like Akajanian and these were the dominant days of the Offenhauser engine, although we young’uns silently rooted for the Novi super-charged V-8, which we knew would eventually rule the Brickyard[2].

On and on into the afternoon the tension would build as famous names, that for years we had known and rooted for, would jockey for position and exchange the lead.  The tension sometimes became unbearable, not unlike the double overtime basketball game Walter Matthau was looking forward to in “House Calls,” 1978 with Glenda Jackson.  The sights and sounds and the smells of auto racing we knew well from attending the “hard tops” on Saturday nights at the San Jose Speedway.  We were able to conflate the play-by-play coming over the radio with the visceral reality that we experienced at the hard tops. 

 

There’s nothing like the smell of soft rubber dust in the air from cars continually spinning their wheels.  Half-burnt fuel is another great smell.  These smells pervaded the tiny 7,500 seat Speedway bleachers.  The first time I went there, we were walking up to the gate and my friend yelled, “Look Out!” and a huge tire came over the wall and flew by us into the parking lot.  The cars at the hard tops weren’t worth more than a few hundred dollars.  They were just street jalopies, stripped of all non-essentials, but with half a dozen roll bars welded on.  One of the things stripped off were mufflers.  The noise of a dozen cars, their engines racing at full throttle, none more than a hundred yards away, meant you had to shout at the top of your lungs to communicate with your friends during a race.

The test wasn’t of the cars, it was of the men, foolish enough, young enough and brave enough to race at full throttle, 60 MPH, around a third of a mile track for 5, 10, or 20 laps against half a dozen other wild ones.  Al “Mambo” Pombo was the Merced favorite and champion.  Our very favorite was Ray Raineri, a local San Jose man, who had an automotive shop in town.  The appeal was that for a few hundred bucks, any one of us could have entered the race and tested our skills with these other men.  It wasn’t TV or a fantasy.  In the article below, I noticed one of my high school classmates, Kathryn Batinich’s big brother Mike’s name in the 4^th heat, beaten by Pombo, but earning a third place.

I only watched the Indy 500 on the big screen pay per view once, in the mid-sixties, down at the San Jose Civic Auditorium.  It was a disappointment; most coverage is, when you see the events in person or on TV.  I didn't stay more than an hour.  TV takes away the whole thrill of imagining doing all the driving yourself.

I could be Lead Foot Billy, while listening to a frantic announcer,

"Vukovich tucks almost wildly into the infield ... He’s passing Rutmann on the inside!!  He’s completely surprised Troy. ... Billy swerves and fishtails back onto the track … now just inches in the lead."

 

We didn't listen to Indy 500 racing anymore after the 1955 fiery death of Billy Vukovich.  An era was over.  The Gasoline Alley names were history now.  The Offy was history.  European road racers took over with big overhead cam V-8s.

      Sigh …

 

---

[1] A huge storage and maintenance area for the 33 cars in the Indy 500 race is underneath the stands and called Gasoline Alley.

[2] The 2-½ mile track was laid with 3 million bricks in 1910.  Paving it over started after WW-II, all but 1 yard completed in 1961.

Summer's End 2018

A photographic update of my end-of-summer activities and an assessment of their efficacy.

Front Yard (from the vantage point of the Rio Theater seats)

The street side was supposed to be a “wall” of Black-eyed Susan vine.  This is possible (see backyard photo), but the soil isn’t as good, and there’s the highway-side stress.  I also started late in the spring.  I will address these issues next year and try again.  I intend laying tarps along this strip to keep it warm and protected next winter.  My guess is that twice as much compost and half the water will improve things next year.  I love providing a gift of food for strangers, and will continue having strawberries.

The middle area turned out as a new-flower hill.  I’m hoping this seasonal “hill” will graciously accept more soil amendment each year for the next few seasons.

The house side area has usually been a bed of nasturtiums and poppy’s, but recently has included my last few remnants of a virulent Morning Glory vine. The battle is still raging, but I will continue to contain the war between them all.  My recently, rekindled interest in flying creatures may cause me to redevelop this walkway in front of the rental unit into a butterfly path.

Back Yard

Black-eyed Susan vine actually worked this year (I tried it last year to no avail).  This coming winter, I will keep this strip warm and protected.  This now forms one of my sanctuaries.  I will complete this project next year, when my garden boxes fill out.

Fence line-Garden Boxes may actually be the solution to a problem I’ve had since I’ve lived here.  This strip has plagued me for years.  The fence-line shares a three-foot wide strip of dirt, spanning the fence.  I’ve been organic on my side – but my neighbor has been a committed Roundup user.  Whatever I plant dies.

I have now built an 18’ X 2’ X 3’ four cubic yard garden box, filled mostly with organic compost.

I have Chilean and regular Jasmine, Passionflower vine, many attempts at starting Trumpet vine, and a myriad of other plants and vines.

REFLECTIONS

Maybe I begin to understand Sarah Winchester building a new room every year.  That was probably misconstrued.  We all need to think about next year, it is an essential a part of living this year, a recognition of the seasons, both within the calendar year, and of the stages of life.

Doing things in the garden this year, for next year’s benefit is in some ways symbolic of doing things, taking actions now, which are not going to affect my life, but will be beneficial to those following me.

 

Searching for a Good Masseuse

Before a midlife melanoma cancer scare, my only knowledge of massage came from Men’s magazine references to “massage parlors,” preferably in the Far East; the magazines cited Thailand. 

There’s nothing like a brush with death, though, to make you more clearly examine life.  I can’t say that my experience evoked the immediacy of the Russian roulette scenes in the movie, “The Deer Hunter,” which shook me to my core every time I thought of them for years afterward.  Nonetheless, I thought about many things more clearly, after my night-nurse signed off on me, the night before my operation, by saying to another nurse, “too bad he’s going to die,” thinking I was asleep.  It was hard to get asleep.

Post-Op I decided to “Smell the Roses”.  So, when my doctor, Michael Gerber of Mill Valley, told me that, besides my vitamin injections, iridology, reflexology, and biofeedback training, I needed weekly massage therapy treatments, specifically addressing my lymphatic system, I said, “Okay,” without question.

I started on my path to massage enlightenment with his recommendation of a person in Mill Valley who was expensive and inconvenient.  Since part of my regimen with Dr. Gerber was a healthy diet, I gathered a list of San Francisco massage practitioners, who had posted advertisements on bulletin boards of Vegan restaurants and health food stores.

Living anywhere in the western free world, an early-acquired skill is parsing advertising messages.  We expect sophistication, but I was reading ads from hippies, hookers, and new-age freaks.  Most were incompetent.  I mean that my expectation was a combined euphoric/healthy feeling afterward, and a general sense of time not wasted.  This was rarely evident. 

After several “bored-housewife,” and “girl-next-door” backrubs, an ad lured me by promised Esalen-type hot-tub luxury.  It started with a l-e-n-g-t-h-y backrub followed by an application of some sort of sports cream, like Vicks.  This burned like hell, and was mostly applied it to my nether regions.  Following this was a proposal.  I declined; now ready to give up the quest for a sincere masseuse.

No!  Wait!  They do exist.  But they are rare.

By sheer luck, I found a woman who knew about lymphatic massage.  She was augmenting her salary downtown, not trying to get rich off me.  We worked together previously in the Financial District at an investment firm.

This was all long before I went to massage school, but keep in mind I was motivated by survival, so I learned some massage basics at Dr. Gerber’s Holistic center.  Two fluid flow systems of health concern post-cancer are oxygenating outward blood flow, and inward lymphatic flow for toxin removal.  The point of the massage is to stimulate these systems to optimal levels of performance. 

The “good” feelings are a nice side effect.

 

I began a period of becoming a connoisseur of massage with accoutrements like hot tubs, wraps, and showers. I had a wonderful place along Union Street in the Marina.  Just a hole in the wall, but they had a hot tub, a small shower and tables for two masseuses.  I always felt so good afterwards; I would stop in a sushi bar and have some eel or octopus.

But it ended when I moved to England.  I couldn’t find anything other than military or sports massages: “Lift your leg, higher! Higher!”  All the spas were for women and they were loath to find a male in their midst.  I stopped getting massages.

I arrived back in the Bay Area after a decade.  I was busy with a wife and kids, so it wasn’t until they left me and went back to England that I even had time for massage.  My sister had been using someone for massages for several years.  For my birthday, my sister gave me a 3-massage gift certificate with her masseuse.  Massage was quickly a habit again and I started going once a week for a full hour’s massage.  I learned that massage can become addictive and that the personal bonds become deep over time.

The years passed and I found a new masseuse closer to my house and work in San Mateo.  That was Barbara Zaller, who I went to for several years, until my move to Sonoma County.  I eventually went to Massage School in Santa Rosa, but only after unsuccessful attempts at finding someone local at the Russian River.  After Susie Garber of Rosemarie’s, I tried Cyndee Green for a few months but she was into her new business in Guerneville.  My neighbor recommended Gina Woods.  She was perfect and lasted about eighteen months.  She went to India, gone for several years.  I was working and tried to blend a little housecleaning, meal preparation and massage with Jody Ann Cafferata; also Diane Timmerman.  None of them lasted. 

I decided to become a certified massage therapist when I retired.  I put all my effort into the months of massage school, and the ensuing years of books, practice, and training.  I studied anatomy, learning all the components of the lymphatic system.  I practiced technique and discovered that I worked well with older people.  I felt I was mindful, aware, and in tune with my clients.  My focus was still lymphatic massage, an excellent modality for detoxing, which was relevant to my local clients around the River.  I most enjoyed doing the yoga massages, though.  It’s great for the older clients who have difficulty bending and stretching.  With Thai massage, the practitioner assists the client into yoga poses for specific massage work.

Before middle age, I never thought of giving massages, only getting them.  After middle age, I was enjoying giving massages rather than getting them. Good massage releases energy.  The counter-intuitive fact is that both bodies can benefit from this freshly released energy.  I usually feel energized after giving a massage.

When I learned to give massages, I rather got out of the habit of getting them.  When I retired and couldn’t afford to pay to get massages anymore, I was only giving them.

Now I rarely do either.

Family of Strangers

A family of strangers is visiting my back yard this year.

I think they are here to share meals with a vigorous vine that I started 2-3 years ago, a Trumpet vine [ https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/ornamental/vines/trumpet-vine ], which has taken over the pear, fig, and gingko trees.

I learned to appreciate the helicopter, whirring sound of hummingbirds forty years ago while white-water rafting in the upper reaches of Idaho.  I’ve tried, ever since, to attract them through gardening, but never with sugar water, without any success.  I usually focus my plantings on bugs and small flying insects.  I love the twilight hour, when bats, insects, and a completely separate fauna come out to eat, drink, and be merry.

So, I was surprised, but ignored, a few inquisitive hummingbirds last year, who came around after sunset to look at my back yard.

No ignoring them this year, though.

They dominate that otherwise quiet hour; and they probably feast on the small flying insect Hors d'œuvres, before they get to dessert with the Trumpet vine flowers.

As I took pictures tonight, they were dive-bombing me to scare me away.  No way could I get a picture of one – I don’t think that fast with a camera in my hand.

The flowers are beautiful, and sensuous with their romantic reds and pinks.  The vine has integrated itself amongst my “grove” of pear, gingko, and fig trees.  It’s battling with a similarly invasive Clematis vine, with its’ long thin leaves).  The gingko is oriental and takes 50-100 years to mature – it’s twenty, well rooted and strong; the fig is young, but always fights its way to the top; the pear is my age, no longer fruitful, but strong support for the others to lean on.

Peter's Worst Fear

“Put your arms across your chest and I’ll put on one more hot herbal towel,” said my masseuse, and I started to get a bad premonition as she tucked in the sides of a bottom sheet.  I felt like an Egyptian mummy.  I couldn’t move a muscle.  Before I knew it, she was giving me parting instructions, “I’ll stop in every ten minutes or so.  This treatment takes thirty minutes.”

I was at Rosemarie’s spa in Guerneville.  My ten o’clock appointment was for an herbal wrap, and as a treat to myself, a massage.  The herbal wrap was business.  I do massage in my home.  Should I offer an herbal wrap?  There would be an investment in specialty sheets and towels.  I rarely receive a massage because I’m always too busy giving them.

I had stripped off my clothes and lay on my back on top of a normal massage table, a steaming hot, herbal-soaked sheet underneath me.  “Okay, Peter, now I’m going to use hot herbal-soaked towels on various parts of your body,” said my regular masseuse, Susie Garber.  She was a jovial, heavyset woman, who had done twenty years as an Army nurse.  She loved the care giving, but not the hospital routine.  “You’ll love this Peter; makes you feel really clean.    One on each leg.    One the length of your torso.    Better keep that out of my way.    Good.” 

Then she was gone.

I was trapped.  Panic mounted in me; it was sheer terror.  I could barely control my breathing.  Crazy thoughts went through my mind; what if the building caught fire, I couldn’t even wiggle a finger, what if I suffered a heart attack or hyper-ventilated.  I did what everybody does when you are gripped with fear; I promised God that I would devote my life to spiritual acts.  I thought back to how the seed of this fear had been planted in me.

I was seven years old, sitting in our kitchen on a summer’s day in Detroit.  My mother and I had just finished listening to a soap opera.  It was Our Gal Sunday, “the story that asks the question, ‘Can this girl from a little mining town in the west find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?’”

“What are we going to do next?” I asked.

“Well I’m going to change the sheets and later, you can help me with the mangle, but you’ll have to find something now to keep you busy.”

“Will you turn on the Victrola in the dining room?”

“Okay, I’ll put on Beethoven.  You can stand on this chair and conduct.   That’ll keep you busy for a while,” then she left the room.

I stood on my father’s oak chair.  I used a spoon as a baton.  Arturo Toscanini would be hard pressed to match my depth of emotional feeling or the vivacity of my baton work.  I didn’t have the long gray hair like Toscanini, but my head whipped around just like his, talking with my eyes and facial tics to each section of the orchestra.  The baton was delicately flicked like a touch on the triangle, perfectly timed to bring in each new musical idea.  All too soon, the symphony ended.

I looked around the room and noticed the nine by twelve carpet in the middle of the floor.  Hmmm, I thought to myself.  What would it be like to roll up in the carpet and then unroll yourself?  I lay down lengthwise along the edge of the carpet.  I grabbed the tassels that fringed the carpet and started rocking back and forth until I thought I had enough momentum.

And there I was, just like the older me on the massage table.  But at seven, there wasn’t a lifetime’s experience to help in describing the feeling.  All I knew at seven was; I’m going to die, I’ll be here forever, I can’t breathe, I can’t even scream, I can’t see and I’m afraid.

Later my mother walked back into the room.  “Oh my, what have you done now?” and she unrolled me.  She doesn’t remember the event; I have lived sixty years with the fear of claustrophobia.  When Susie came back in the room to mop my forehead with cucumber water, I tried to keep some calm in my voice and said, “I think for the rest of the herbal wrap, I’d like to have my arms out in the open, above the sheet. 

I decided not to use this herbal wrap service again.

Mother's Worms

I’m finally learning about rural land use and crop farming.  There are those in my family who will say I’ve had a green thumb since we moved to California in 1948.  I do have and show the genetic disposition towards that end, which I inherited from my mother, a fertile-land advocate from her birth a century ago.  But the truth is that I have painstakingly developed “my green thumb”, and only recently, during my past twenty years of retirement in Sonoma County. 

I enrolled in a sustainable land management programme at Sonoma State.  I’ve done trial and error at my place and at the Guerneville Community Church.  I learned about composting and tried it at the Church.  My daughter’s influence recently prompted me to try worm composting again.  Now I am a convert.

My mother, loved worms, lusted after worms, and despaired the last thirty years of her life in Carmel, that she couldn’t have them in her garden.  She had become of an age, when the size of her Carmel garden was too great for her to take care of herself.  Her professional gardener, as many do, used only sterile compost (no worms), and brought in yards of it every year to feed the annuals and perennials.  And at the end of each season, massive pruning, cutting, and carting away took place, of the prior year’s detritus.  So, the soil remained sterile.  There was no food for worms.

In those years, I attempted to bring up buckets of dirt from my gardens, laden with worms.  They didn’t last – no food.  I was doing the right things back in my gardens, but I didn’t understand it and it didn’t work at mother’s house.

The penny dropped this past year.  I tried it with my SSU sustainable idea – four wood pallets [freely available], linked together by bungee cord, providing a 3ft X 3ft X 3ft bin {1 cubic yard}.  I quickly ran out of room in the first bin, and went to a second, then third, and finally fourth bin, before the weather turned and I got on the using cycle.  It’s mid-August and I’ve harvested two bins of their perfect, rich, wormy compost to start spreading around the yard to both feed this year’s plants and also provide water retention benefits.

Now, having experienced this complete cycle, I realize that I have achieved stasis: four yards out in the fall – four yards in during the spring.  Except, I’m adding in plant starts, and their accompanying starter soil; and I’m adding in all the tops, cuttings, and peelings from my mostly vegetarian diet.  I also add in daily coffee grounds, a bit of newsprint, etc.

This cycle could go on and on until California drops under the ocean floor, and then comes back up again 300 million years from now, and the worms [who may then dominate the world] harvest the oil from the compressed plant material in my garden.

To My Mother

Through the windows of her photographs,

I feel most near to the adventures of her life.

Derring-do and mad-cap travels, Jenny’s to Mach-I

Oberlin to the tamed, warm west.

Martini in one hand, arguing politics like Senator Clay,

but quietly raising a family, cementing a business.

She was the freeway of our family

with entrances to dozens of hearts around the world.

But for all the fortune she has amassed in memories,

there is no slow-down in her step toward

self-fulfillment and the health & welfare of family,

and so I send my heartfelt gratitude

for her constant enrichment of my life.

Nirvana?

I have reached a Nirvana point today with many facets of my life.

I have recently directed all my energy to my yards, front, and back.

The front is in perfect balance right now – everything in harmony – the little hills and valleys working together spatially; the fall colors, strawberries and one-eyed Susan’s,  and now sunflowers contrasting with the spring and summer wildflowers, bursting with my worm rich compost, which attract the local birds in the early am, and then again in the late pm.

With great physical relief, I finished the backyard, sunrise-fence flower boxes, and sat down to a celebration with local fauna.  As I sat there, on my back patio, a glass of white wine in hand, my handcrafted, aboveground sprinkler system kicking in, a butterfly first came to visit, then as things quieted down; the bees came to visit, followed by a dragonfly.  It was hours before the hummingbirds would visit, but the cat came to see why it was now quiet.  I could now visualize the cat’s future perch on the highest platform of my garden boxes, where the first rays of sunshine in winter mornings will wake it from contented sleep.

Nirvana also means searching, and I have been reading Jack Kerouac’s, “The Dharma Bums”, lately, for our Senior Center Book Club.  This has of course, colored my thoughts on gardens above.

Reading Kerouac has transformed me back to the argot of hard-boiled Mickey Spillane, whose “I, the Jury” (1947) represented that era of cocky, sometimes college-educated, mostly 20-something, young men who had survived a world war, and if they could handle Hitler, they could survive anything.  This writing style only lasted a few years, maybe 1946-49, but it was seminal to me, aged 8-12, and defined my machismo; that I was as a man, or wanted to be.

So, now I’ve recently cleared my responsibilities to Library, Radio, Grand Jury, and other local NGOs, where is my future focus?

I recently tried a "creative" writing class, because I hate to let grass grow under my feet but it was too commercial; many were manically striving to become “published”; not me, so I'm still looking.

When I was newly retired, I attended weekly memoir classes, and wrote scores of stories and vignettes about my life.  I went on for five years of taking courses with SRJC, Sonoma State, Gotham Writers, many classes in each of those venues, as well as private writing groups.

Having thought more about what I really need now, it's not inspiration, but rather just: (1) the rhythm of writing something every week, (2) having it peer-reviewed, and (3) keeping it focused on an end goal, rather than ramblings, which I have been doing lately, and while fun, and sometimes receiving good reviews, could be gathered together into a chapter called, "Midnight e-mails from the Death Café".

Awake in the Garden of Eden

I woke up one morning in The Garden of Eden. My mother was fixing me some breakfast, she said, “Go outside, and play while I unpack.” It was a hot day, 10:30, and already 80° in San Jose. Bulldozers had scrapped the earth around our new tract house. Right out the back door, there was a thirty-foot DMZ, then the neglected orchards. They were doomed to go in the next wave of building. Just at the edge of the plum orchard and directly behind our house was a broadly sweeping tree with huge leaves that looked exotic, just as I imagined palm fronds. The tree was laden with dark purple, almost black, pear shaped fruit.

We had just arrived in the Valley of Hearts Delight after a cross-country, permanent move by my parents to find their fortune in California. I knew no one out here. My fellow fourth grade friends in Detroit were in another world, impossibly far away. Jim, Dick, and I had run in a pack and continually got in trouble together. I was their leader. The two neighbor girls, Beverly and Frances, down the street in Detroit had just turned ten and eleven that spring. They had been teaching me how to play Doctor. We would do this in the basement. One of the sisters would stay on lookout while the other one and I would play "full checkup." We kept looking for whatever it was our parents were scared we would find, but we never did find it. I felt alone without my Detroit friends and no new ones until September, two months away.

Back in the house, my mother told me, “This is fruit. A fig and it is okay to eat if you wash it.” At the fig tree, I pulled a big fat one off and wiped it on my T-shirt. It was hot and when I bit in, it exploded in my mouth, almost with effervescence, as if it had been fermenting.

Figs from the store are nothing like the ones you pick from the tree on a hot summer day. Dried, they are too chewy because there is more skin than pulp. Cold, they are too fleshy and disgusting, like eating a piece of raw animal. However, big, hot, and ripe, the fig fills you with rich sugary sweetness.

Like any fourth grade boy in those days, I was curious and fearless, and thus I began my summer of wanderings through the orchards of San Jose. All my life I had lived in a busy city. Now, immersed in such solitude, I would roam from sun-up to sundown and rarely see another living soul, except birds. The joy to me was the fecundity of the land. Around the ugly scar of our rock and cement-droppings back yard, I found wild tomato plants, sprouted from the seeds of construction workers' lunches. They blossomed without tending and produced the most beautiful fruit. The dusty heat of the Santa Clara Valley summer added to the aroma and the taste.

The smell of tomato plant when you crinkle a leaf or two still drives me wild with memories. The taste of those small, hot tomatoes was rich and filling, in with one bite and chewed with two more.

All the fruit around me then was much smaller than the things you get in stores today. Growers sell their plums and tomatoes by the pound weight. These days they grow them to hold more water and then the growers profit 89¢ a pound from free rain and irrigation water.

Beyond the fig tree was the orchard of plums. Rotting, but sweet-smelling plums strewed the ground below each tree, but there still was a limitless supply in the trees. The sweet smell of these wasp-covered rotting plums was delicious. My mouth watered and I had to learn the hard way, to control my daily intake of ripe plums. They were tiny and you could pop the whole thing into your mouth.

Just picture all the flavor of one of those giant plums you get today concentrated into a piece of fruit a quarter the size, without irradiation, chemicals, or poisons.

Since they fit into the mouth whole, the trick was to bite across the broadest part of the fruit. They were ovoid in shape like a partly flattened egg with a seam. You bit on this seam and the plum would split in two. Then you could extract the pit, still in your mouth and spit it out. If the plum were properly ripe, the pit would separate easily.

I was so in tune with the earth, as the weeks passed by, that periodically as I ran into a large mound of freshly bulldozed dirt, I stripped and buried myself in it up to my armpits, just to feel the earth in touch with my body.

To balance the sugary aspect of this daily diet of tomatoes, figs and plums, there were walnuts and almonds. I learned that summer how to harvest a walnut. The skin was thick and light green if I pulled one off the tree. The juice in the skin was so strong that it stained my hands and took days to work off. If the green skin sealed the nutshell, I could not get it off; the shell and nut were one. I had to wait for the skin to dry out and start to fall off. Once the shell was on the ground with no skin, I could not tell how old the walnut was. So best was to spot a withered or cracked skin that was easy to flick away. Then I broke open the shell by placing the walnut between the bases of my two palms, as if I was praying. I kept the seam between the two halves of the walnut shell in contact with my palms. I interlocked my fingers for more leverage, and then squeezed and the walnut shell split in two. Too green and the walnut meat was chewy and bitter. If it was too old, it was like a black peanut. Just right was tasty and full of protein.

The Valley is now made of Silicon, not fruit trees.  I prospered from this transition.  But I regret that these moments are lost to history. 

 

Speed Chess

The word chess evokes boredom for most people. The image that comes up is of two old men spending an entire day making one move every twenty or thirty minutes. I owned a chess club toward the end of the seventies and I fervently wanted to change that image. The description above is what The Mechanics Institute was like just off Market Street. I wanted my club to be youthful and vibrant.

I had originally opened just a second hand bookstore with a partner, Douglas, running it Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. I came in some evenings and worked the weekend. When I would go out for coffee at "The Meat Market" next door, I would watch with interest the two tables where chess players challenged each other to 5-minute chess. Half a dozen other on-lookers would watch and kibbitz the game. I had been playing chess all my life. I used to think I was good. I had never played with a clock before, though. I didn't know what it was at first.

A chess clock has two clocks housed in the same box. There are two buttons: one for each player that stops your clock from ticking and starts your opponent's clock. One of the two clocks is always running. So if you set each clock to 10:00 and begin a game, you can manage a rule that says, "You must either win or lose before your clock reads noon." Now you have imposed a time limit on the entire game of less than four hours. In speed chess, or “blitz”, players universally give each person five minutes for the entire game. No, not each move, the whole game. That's about seven seconds a move for a 40-move game. No boredom here, you can get in six games an hour, faster than shooting pool and about the same as playing poker.

I started playing speed chess in The Meat Market, but I would often invite a few players back to the bookshop to continue playing. After a few months, I had set up four permanent tables for chess playing. I also branched out from the general used book selection to a specialty area of just chess books. I started with used chess books that I found in other bookstores around the Bay Area. Booksellers routinely give each other 40% discounts, so this is a good way to start an inventory. I ran an ad in "Bookman's Weekly" that kept a steady stream of good quality and some rare chess books.

As this started to bring in money, I added some in-print book lines and chess equipment, sets, boards, and clocks. I had become a standard meeting place for hundreds of chess players. The next phase was when I started the regular Friday night speed chess tournaments, $5 entry fee, $50 first prize, 16-player maximum. It became the talk of the town, in chess playing circles. The good players came, thinking of an easy $50 or $20 prize. The less than good players come to be able to say they had played with the good players. There were usually more people in the audience of kibbitzers than players. I began a rating system similar to the one used by the International Chess Federation. It was a way of flattering egos to have your ranking posted in my club.

After six months, my store had become a haven for chess players. I was subscribing to all the chess periodicals, many of them soviet and eastern European. I had become a US Chess Federation sanctioned tournament director and I held a "slow" chess tournament once a month over a weekend. I held a women's tournament, an under 16 tournament and as a lark, I put together a team and we played the Marshall Club in New York City by telephone. The speed chess tournaments, though, drove it all.

Seven seconds a move, and in the beginning of the game, it was more like one second a move, lightning speed. The players would continuously fidget, stand up, sit down, curse, scream, and cheat if they were losing and could get away with it. The audience thought this was better than many other forms of entertainment. At any time, there were as many as eight games going on in three different rooms. My place was the main floor of an old Victorian. Every entrant had to play each of the other players, one game, with the white pieces, the other with the black. Runners would update a master scoreboard with results. I kept a running point count, one for a win, none for a loss. Ties only rarely occurred because of the clock factor. You can figure that this was about three hours of entertaining fun for players and audience.

By popular demand, I started a second, Tuesday night speed chess tournament, keeping the $5 entry fee and raised the entry fee on Friday nights to $10, a $100 prize, and an 18-player maximum. Walter Browne, the reigning US Chess Champion starting attending from Berkeley. Chess players from New York, visiting California to play in big tournaments, would schedule my Friday night tournament as a must stop. One afternoon in came Anatoly Lein and Leonid Shamkovitch. They were Soviet players ranked numbers 3 and 5 in the world. They had sought asylum at a tournament in Paris earlier in the year.

Word spread that three of the world's top ten players, Walter Browne was number 10, would be competing that night. I started getting bribe offers for entry to the tournament. Twenty bucks to be able to say you had lost to three of the worlds best players; maybe one would become world's champion. I set up a lottery with numbers picked out of a hat, just to play. The crowd was the biggest ever, hard to move around, maybe a hundred and fifty people. Lein & Shamkovitch hung around for the summer, but that Grand Masters tournament was the high point.

Cat Retirement Home

I’m thinking about formally making my yard a retirement home for cats.

I’ve had three retired cats in my two decades here in Monte Rio.  One was already a rescue that wasn’t well enough for the country-life. But the other two, old urban cats thought they went to heaven.
No more pungency of garbage spills and dog smells.  My enclosed, 20-year old organic garden has the scent of herbs and flowers that attracts bees, wasps, small birds, and a myriad of other flying and crawling bugs.  These things are an enjoyable zoo for cats.

“No Dogs!” did I say?  Tall, redwood fencing completely encloses my backyard, which allows cat’s entry and exit, but not dogs.  A safe haven when needs be; but only two blocks from forested hills to the North, or the Russian River to the South.

The soil is black and rich with organics; twenty years of alternating between vegetables and flowers, but always with organic soil amendments, and now I’m making my own compost, four yards a year, rotating bins with: my yard detritus, my vegetarian cuttings and excess  coffee grounds and newspaper, a bit of commercially composted product, and periodically some outside dirt.  I add a dozen new worms every few months, and water (drip hose) daily.
Plenty of room to go potty [the cat] with privacy, ease, and comfort.

My thoughts on candidates

10-14 years of age (no kittens) [appropriately spayed & neutered]
Urban lifestyle (appreciate the freedom) [Can find way home]
Healthy (same as me, cat age times 7) [pills but no needles]
Will be an outdoor cat (and love it) [no litter box]

My Commitments

Food, Log Fire, and Loving always available on a rainy night
Compassion, understanding, and forgiveness always there 24/7
Unquestioning Love, Petting, and Commitment

I'm Retired

I’ve been saying that for years, with the same caveat that all of us use, “and I’ve never worked harder.”

That’s a crock.  We’ve slowed down, so there’s less time available for us to do things.  We have way less energy, physical and mental, to do things anyway.  So, the old, in general, accomplish a lot less than they used to  --  but memories are a great asset for the old, we used to work double the effort, and twice as long to achieve today’s similar goals.

 

 

Sitting in my back garden today, somewhat after 3:30, when I’d finished my day’s gardening work, I drifted off into a momentary catnap, when the four-o’clock sea breeze gently awakened me, my last dream-world thought, “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of knowing you?” [Eds. Note: I think in reality, “knowing” was “being introduced to”.]  My psyche doesn’t do double-meanings.

Morpheus is the God of the old, for sure.  I could happily spend half my life in my dreamland of today.  I no longer dream about losing my school combination locker code; or flying around the world; or even flying when I knew how, but didn’t have a license; no more walking down a public street naked.  These days, most of my encounters are with my parents, generally current day scenarios, but with them, or just my mother, having miraculously aged to a cogent 108, we discuss current scenarios, not so much older ones, although older decision points do come 

into play from time to time.

I have a huge back history of dreamland houses that I have owned, rented, managed, usually close to real abodes, maybe the places I missed, didn’t rent, or acquire.  Several of these are still clear in my mind, room by room, and or garden plot by garden plot, with faults, for which I had fixes, including gardening fixes.  These recurred in dreams for decades, easy to bring up, but not there normally.

Did I tie these places to people? No, not real people.  At least not my parents.  Maybe some real people, or, again, possibly some real people with whom I never wound up having a relationship.

I dream a lot.

I dream in color [if necessary].