Not an Optical Illusion (an end of 2018 ramble)

No, it’s not.  Today was longer than yesterday!!!  We’re back to my kind of world; the positive, glass half-full, optimistic world, where today is great, and tomorrow will be even better.

I’ve been known to make rash decisions, in my optimistic exuberance.  That is where the downs come in; optimists aren’t always up, up, up.  There are times when I faithfully take the world at literal stated value, ignoring the cautious advice of friends, family, and everyone else I know who has a brain in their head, unlike me, with just empathy.  Chaos usually ensues.

Empathy is laudable, but it didn’t make me rich, not even enviable.  My sister thinks I’m an angel, and I try to live up to her thought.  But Clarence had been working for several hundred years before he got his wings.  I’ve got too much Elmer Gantry in me to ever get my wings.  Few of like mind.

Touching a few lives is worthwhile.  I’ve done more of that this past score of years.  It’s more like I think teaching must be.  I’m happy with my past career in STEM, but another path might have been teaching.

Welcome 2019 – soon worms in my compost – soon strawberries in my front yard – soon friends in need – some of STEM guidance – some of spiritual.

ACEs

https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/sesame-street-changing-childrens-lives-around-world

Luncheons with my Father

The first business lunch with my father was in North Beach at Enrico's.  The year was 1968.  I was 30 and my dad was 56.  We called them business lunches because I had reached that age of acceptance for a father, where we could engage in a conversation as peers of the business world.  He had his own business and I knew it well from years of listening at the dinner table as he unwound over the cocktail of the decade; martinis when he was younger, scotch as he mellowed in midlife, and wine after he retired.  I was able to comment intelligently because I had worked for his company half a dozen summers as I grew up, starting and staying at the bottom of the totem pole.  I had my career and it was a new field, computers.  He saw that their magic would transform the world.  We often ate at Enrico's over the next fifteen years and we always had the same thing, a Salisbury Steak on sourdough, and two tall gin and tonics, one before and one with the meal.  I never liked gin, but this was the right drink for the occasion.  He didn't just order gin, too plebian, "Tanqueray and tonic, please, … tall."

Enrico's was a favorite because it was a sidewalk café and we watched the pretty girls walk by on Broadway and Montgomery.  Hookers and hippies in outrageous clothing and I was in the middle of it with my involvement in Champagne Taste on Upper Grant Avenue.  My father got vicarious pleasure out of the social side, Carol Doda walking by and saying, "Hi, Peter."  He was based in San Jose, what many then considered a small town, and I was up here with the movers and the shakers.  I was working for an investment company that was responsible on some days for a significant percentage of the activity on the NYSE.  I was a consultant to the mutual fund manager, Bob Brown, in the trading room.  I would bring my dad tips and we would talk about the stock market.  The market was like gambling for him, just short term investments.  I would relay advice from Bob Brown.

My jobs changed like a light bulb over the next few years and there were gaps, like when I went back to graduate school.  When I moved to England, these luncheons stopped for good.  I was infrequently in San Francisco, and after I returned and he was too old to travel from his retirement in Carmel just for lunch.  So, the seventies define these luncheons.  These years spanned an extremely active period of my social life, many women, houses, parties, and other events.  He would avidly listen to my tales of adventure in the wilds of the San Francisco seventies.

We tried to eat at other places whenever possible.  Enrico's was a bit far from the Financial District and when I was busy with work and thought about what those two G&Ts would do to me, I redirected us to Sam's or the Tadich Grill.  Tadich's was our number two place.  Dickie always had Sand Dabs there.  I always had the Dover Sole, one of his favorites, but not at this restaurant.  Here I drank a glass of white wine.  It's funny how you pick up traits from your parents.  I follow in my father's footsteps.  I still always order the same thing at a restaurant; chicken livers at The Village Inn, Salmon at River's End.  Usually we would take a table; if we were feeling frisky, we would sit at the bar where one of the two of us would be successful in striking up a conversation with a babe.

We didn't miss many restaurants over the years.  I dragged him to a Japanese place on Montgomery where you had to take your shoes off.  He loved everything Japanese, so it wasn't much of a fight.  He liked Sam's, famous for fish and for curtains across the private booths.  I took the whole PEMEX team from Mexico there one time for a celebration and they loved it.  He also loved Jack's, although they always embarrassed him by forcing him to wear a tie.  We only ate there a few times because I didn't like the food.  I thought it was an old gentleman's club that was pretentious and stodgy.

I was only able to drag him a few times to Vanessi's on Broadway.  It never came off as well for lunches as it did at dinner time.  I was fond of the place when I returned to San Francisco after graduate school.  I had an apartment up the hill on Montgomery Street.  I would stop in on my way home from the Financial District.  Facing yet another 300-foot climb, I would decide to defer this until after a nice meal and a glass of wine.  I always sat at the counter where you could watch the Genoese saute chefs putting on a display of knife and pan tossing at the live gas flame grills.  There was always a special and I took it.  I always added a Zabaglione for a dessert.  This has disappeared off the menu of every American restaurant.  These days it is available only as an ice cream treat that is awful.  A web search finds it only at one restaurant, and that in New Zealand. 

The chef would start with a copper half globe bowl that he could hold over an open flame.  In would go the whites of several eggs, some white wine, and some sugar.  All these ingredients the chef seemed to just toss in randomly.  That was it, simple.  He wire-whisked it over a flame until the egg white began to froth up.  The chef then served it hot from the pan into a sundae dish; the extra coming after you had spooned in the first few mouthfuls.  It's a wonderful dessert but requires preparation when you are ready to eat it and that doesn't fit with today's restaurants.

My father and I did the luncheon thing because it excluded women.  I was a raconteur only because I was my father's son.  He lived vicariously through me in those years.  When we met at night, there were usually problems.  I don't remember how he roped me into it, but one night he dragged me to a dinner with an "investment prospect."  She was younger than I was and trying to market jewelry.  She was as embarrassed as I was, and she and I tacitly agreed to end the evening as soon as possible.  Worst case was when my parents and I were sharing an apartment on Nob Hill.  Late one evening, I went over to Blum's in the lobby of the Fairmont for coffee and a dish of ice cream while I read the next morning's Chronicle.  The sounds of a piano bar pulled me into the lounge and lo and behold, my father was sitting next to the piano.  "What are you doing here?" I asked.  Just then a hotel man came up to us, "Here is your key Mr. Andrews.  The lady is already up in the room."  What was there to say?  I left.

 

Recruitment

Mid-Term GJ Recruitment for 6-month Term

Sonoma County has tried something unique for Juror recruitment.  For the second year in a row, we found ourselves in an unenviable position, having a jury of less than nineteen, with no alternates.  We hope to cure this condition before it settles in.

Sonoma County’s local Grand Jury Association, the sitting Grand Jury, and the Sonoma County Superior Court launched an October/November, 5-week, blitz campaign for recruiting new juror pool candidates.  The candidates would only be committed to the 2019 half of the jury term.

Because of the short notice and duration of this campaign, we avoided events like speeches or mixers.  The only documents we used, specific to the Mid-Term aspect of this campaign, were flyer and PSA.  Our focus targets were each addressable by either telephone or internet:

1)     Prior Jurors – We have routinely asked them for the past two years, without remarkable success; but still, we did it again.  We maintain a list of past jurors from the last five years.  We sent them all a flyer.  BTW: our total pool this year was under twenty.

2)     The Press - Deadlines were a problem.  If we’d had two months lead-time, this approach would have been far more effective.  Nonetheless, we hit more than half of our dozen plus small town rags.  We wrote a letter to the Editor of each, linking in the October 2017 fires, and attaching PSA and flyer.  This was immensely successful, at least for stirring concern and discussion.  All the print media bought into the message and printed something, one monthly (35,000 print-run) published the flyer for free.  This seems to have generated over a dozen application responses.

3)     Senior Centers – We have fifteen senior-centric organizations in Sonoma County.  Our timing missed all but one of their monthly newsletters.  The good news was that, most of them put our flyer up on their online site, printed it out for display around their venue, and were anxiously ready to support us in December-January, when we come back again for 2019-2020 full year recruitment.  We sent a “suggested item” for including in their newsletter, the press Letter to the Editor. 

We are sending out the flyer again, with the suggested reminder that the Courts may consider applications for the Mid-Tern 2018-19 Jury, as well for the 2019-20 Jury Pool.

It is our hope that an early December announcement to ten thousand seniors will bring in another half dozen qualified applicants.

4)     Libraries – Sonoma County has a dozen regional libraries.  We placed in each of them, a 3-tier information display holder, which contained flyers, the PSAs, and applications.  This may or may not be a successful outreach contact, but it is at least a brick-and-mortar venue to pick up the information and application.

Questions

How do we measure success?  by the number of applications?
How will this group be trained?  CGJA has offered.
Will this group be offered first year membership in CGJA?  CGJA has offered.
How will the sitting Jury adapt to a mid-year freshman squad?

I was just settling in for that long Winter's nap

 when out on the TV there arose such a clatter,

   I sprang from my garden to see what was the matter.

 

Last year's remains of ten thousand new homeless,

  were redoubled with victims in this year’s.

It's the new norm says Brown,

    and Trump says, not his fault.

 

But that nap will need wait,

  for we're all watching for embers;

   floods are our past,

     with no rain in our future.

Pack Your Bags

Well, by now, everybody on the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and the West Coast fully realize that Global Warming is for real and is a cataclysmic horror.

The only states not on board are the Great Lakes states.  Speaking from California, we were just coming to grips with Earthquakes, and myself floods, up in rural Northern California.  This Smokey Winter thing mandates a whole new survival plan. 

All of us have had an Evacuation plan of sorts, based on anything from a back-pack to a six cubic foot storage container.  Some survival necessities: food, water, medicines, etc., plus those things we couldn’t do without.  That list is personal.  It may include cell phones, computers, baby or wedding pictures, tax records, other financial documents, avocations, collections.  I could go on.

In this new age, it is different now.  Earthquakes could disarray things, Floods could distort them, but they wouldn’t be gone.  Fires turn things to dust.  No more to be seen, felt, touched, or experienced in any way.  Gone.

This is a characteristic of death.  Dust unto dust.

If I get an evacuation notice now, here in my rural community, for fire, there is nothing I need take with me, just as if the grim reaper had appeared.  There is no bag to pack.  I may head south to San Jose, but things could be worse there.  I may head to Modoc County, but by myself, no things.

Things are just mental triggers to remember the past – think harder and it will all come back.  The technological environment we live in will reconstruct your life – it remembers all faithfully.  It’s all in the Cloud, so maybe the one thing I’d keep handy is a flash drive with my latest thoughts, ideas, and plans, or artwork.

It’s of no use to the grim reaper, but you may run into a library computer and be able to plug in and continue.  The rest is just things, and when you die, they’ll all be gone.

The 1983 LEADS Party

Five months into my one-year extension, to all appearances we had a success on our hands.  I tried to get the American, or at least the Silicon Valley standard successful completion party organized.  I met with nothing but resistance.  The primary celebrant should have been John Cuckney, who had saved his job and more to the point had guaranteed a promotion to bigger and better things.  Secondary were a number of consulting agencies who had a part of this project, some greater and some lesser.  But Lucas had spent millions of pounds on this project and the ramifications reverberated throughout Lucas and computing in the Midlands.  The only group that stepped forward was the female group, represented by one of Sue's friends, a real work-a-holic, and a good businessperson.  Eventually, but not before the event, John Cuckney gave me ₤100, then he and his wife attended and actually took most of the credit for the project success and for the party.  As a good consultant, I kept my mouth shut as to how the party was being financed, hinting that all entities profiting from the venture were supporting the party.  This episode did not engender warm feelings in me towards John, nor to Lucas.  Other than about ₤250, the bulk of the party was on my personal shoulders, not even Rand kicked in.

We held the party on a Sunday, May 29, 1983.  John and I couldn't agree on a date, probably because John didn't really want to have the party.  If he had come to me and said something to the effect that this was similar to my Aston Martin escapade, I probably would have gone along with him.  But John Cuckney didn't talk to me, thinking he could squelch it through his Rand connections and I went ahead with the planning on my own since Rand didn't want to fund it either.  Twenty years later now, this party would probably cost about $10,000.  There were probably a hundred people, everyone felt a part of the success, and John felt a bit chagrined, but that was a part of management.  You can tell by reviewing the bill, that everyone had a great time.

I know that this project and party went down into history as one of the greatest project completion parties in the West Midlands ever.  People are still referring to it twenty years later, as to which Sue will attest, having gone to some of the re-unions.  There was something about projects in those days that transcended company and or job, a feeling of camaraderie that made you feel that your team could tackle any project and make it a success. 

Become a Grand Juror

One of the many groups trying to get back up on its feet this year after the October fires is the Sonoma County Civil Grand Jury, overseen by the Sonoma County Superior Court.

With so many people impacted, we didn’t have sufficient jurors and alternates last year and we are facing the same problems this year.  The Sonoma County Superior Court has taken action and has launched a mid-term (the county fiscal year 7/1/18 – 6/30/19) recruitment drive, which is a unique event in California.

Please consider donating six months of your time, a day a week, to this long-standing, governmental watchdog agency; go to http://sonoma.courts.ca.gov/info/administration/grand-jury to sign up.

Peter Andrews                                                                    

President, Sonoma County Grand Jury Association

An Honorable Man

For Sessions is an honourable man;

So are they all, all honourable men–

Come I to speak in McCain’s funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me:

But Sessions says he was ambitious;

And Sessions is an honourable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome

Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:

Did this in McCain seem ambitious?

When that the poor have cried, McCain hath wept:

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet Sessions says he was ambitious;

And Sessions is an honourable man.

You all did see that on the Lupercal

I thrice presented him a kingly crown,

Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

Yet Sessions says he was ambitious;

And, sure, he is an honourable man.

I speak not to disprove what Sessions spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love him once, not without cause:

What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;

My heart is in the coffin there with McCain,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

 

Fifty Years of Lunch Rooms

We’ve all been captivated this past year by cultural dichotomies: conservative versus liberal, East coast versus West coast, Ivy League versus Pac 12, and simply best versus worst.  Maybe it is Urban versus Suburban, but in my fifty years as a businessperson, I’ve always eaten lunch, and I’ve enjoyed the perspective from the above different cultural sides.

The Brett Kavanaugh hearing was the trigger for my comparison between East Coast lunches, “Whatever happened to our old Economics Professor Higgens, still at Yale?” and West coast lunches “Did you get in on Tim’s new AI start-up?”  Old boys versus new kids – stodginess versus creativity.

It’s stereotypical, but the East coast lunch is classical and has been around for centuries.  It isn't going to change. The West coast lunch is dynamic, ever changing, and I watched those changes over the last five decades of the 20th century.  The West coast lunch set the tone for the rest of the country, at the limits and setting the pace for decades into the future.

We Californians set these trends, incorporating Asian and Latin American dishes, leading the way in methods of delivery, opening the worlds of fresh fruits, vegetables, and seafood.  Finally, the ultimate, concierge catering to individual whims.  Coffee is no longer burned and black from a machine in the break room.  Now it’s which of the variations on a latte or cappuccino would you like?

Of course, along with this are some cultural changes: the West imported executive lunchrooms and assembly line food service, but these have not survived.  We are more egalitarian than easterners are, never had a North-South split.  No East West either since we developed the West after the civil war.

I started working, as a teenager, for my father's business.  His business was typical when it came to lunchtime.  I know, because I used to deliver packages from his business to those I will mention and scores more, often at lunchtime.  Lunchtime in Santa Clara Valley in the fifties was a personal time.  My father and I, when he was in town, would grab a hamburger or a tuna salad sandwich and play pinball for an hour at the deli around the corner.  Most employees at his office brought lunch from home; I did too.  If my father were on the road, I would eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then play Ping-Pong with the other employees: Luke, Lucy, Delores, and Jack. 

Things were the same all over the Valley.  I saw it at the places I delivered to and worked at.  We saw the lunch truck become a more prevalent icon of the times in the late sixties and early seventies as people's lives heated up and life became too busy to pack a sandwich in the morning.  At my first real computer job, GT&E Lenkurt, they had the typical Silicon Valley assembly-line luncheon cafeteria.  At least for those early Valley days, the food was nutritious and cheap; few companies had contracted with catered services.  Lenkurt was my first exposure to a factory cafeteria for the line workers.  But we junior management also used it most of the time.  As senior management told us, over martinis, at a local luncheon restaurant that they had approved for expense accounts, the whole point was "If they go off site," my boss’s boss said, sipping his second martini, "they will come back sloshed on booze and not be any good on the production line."  My peer group of up-and-comers wasn't into martinis, but we would go out once a month to a hamburger joint that was awesome and we'd drink a beer or two.

My office at IBM wasn't big enough to support a cafeteria, so everyone brought their own lunch.  Once a week, we went out to lunch at one of the local hot dog places.  At GT&E, we might hoist a few beers once a month, but at IBM, management strictly forbade drinking, even on your own time.  Luncheons at the lower levels were still controlled feedings of the monkeys, but now that I was doing some selling and entertaining, I was enjoying the benefits of an expense account.  When I moved to San Francisco in the sixties, life turned topsy-turvy, including the business world and especially luncheons with clients, peers, managers, and anybody else connected with the business world.  People in the Valley, so I heard, were demanding Perrier water with their lunch and gourmet food.  The Chronicle often ran articles explaining the latest weirdness of these Silicon Valley people.

I lived and worked for fifteen-years in San Francisco.  The City was completely opposite to the suburbs, where Apple and HP were rising-giants and fast food was in no one’s best interests.  I acquired a wealth of knowledge about restaurants, both lunch and dinner, but these are stories I tell elsewhere.

I did a stint in San Francisco at ISI, an Insurance and Mutual Fund holding company.  They had one of the classic East Coast style management dining rooms.  Management-only, allowed-grades, usually just men in suits and ties.  You had an account there automatically and the company charged meals to your next paycheck.  When I started there, I could only attend as a guest of my manager.  It wasn't until my first promotion that I attended the executive dining room with privileges.  The food was amazingly cheap and could be custom cooked to one's taste.  The thinking was twofold; everyone kept talking business, and nobody drank alcohol.  The company figured that if they let you out the door in downtown San Francisco, you'd get back in two hours and you'd be reeling from a few drinks.

Returning to the University of Arizona for graduate school, I was able to eat in the catered faculty lounge.  The rules were faculty only but no one ever tried to stop me.  When I came back to San Francisco a few years later, the East coast lunch concept had died out.  I had started to work for smaller concerns as a consultant.  The only posh elite luncheon room was the one I encountered at IBM Santa Teresa.  I played host to visiting dignitaries and IBM kept a special lunchroom for people like my guests.  We ordered from a menu and I became familiar with the wait staff. The lunches were free to me, so I loved this.

There was a management lunchroom at Lucas in Birmingham England when I first visited, but it was gone by the next year when I returned to start work full time.  During my first year there, a small revolt by all the contractors caused them to close up the by-key-only executive washrooms.  They removed the gold fittings and then reopened them to the general staff.  It signaled the end of an era.

I spent most of the eighties decade in England, far out of step with Silicon Valley, which was probably why I was there.  When I came back, the tech-boom was booming.  Benefits were generous; contractors like me were in demand.  The golden heyday for computer nerds.  Still, it was a problem to lure smart techies from the East coast or Texas.   Food was cheap, so companies lavished it on us.  Pizza and beer satisfies most nerds as much as wild-caught Salmon and Chalk Hill Chardonnay.

I worked as an independent contractor for over a dozen companies that last decade: HP, Amdahl, IBM, Ziff-Davis, Sequent, Mervyn’s, VISA, Franklin-Templeton, InfoWorld, Lotus, Hitachi, Stratus, and finally Agilent in Santa Rosa.  The epitome of all these was Silicon Graphics.  They were the forerunner of what you see today: company transportation systems, sponsored education, and of course, virtually free, catered meals – if you were willing to work beyond 5pm, anything, from anyone and free breakfast before nine.  Friday-night beer bashes or anything else you wanted.  The food was the best that money could buy.  Same reasons – free labor.

I can’t comment on the past decade.  Things have settled down a bit, especially after the crash a decade ago.  I’m retired now, but I’m not surprised at anything I read or hear about the technology company rewards these days.  Those were my golden heydays, working 50-70 hour weeks at high hourly rates.  The rates aren’t back yet [foreign competition], but the benefits are even more elaborate now.  Don’t spread the word though.  I’m happy when those from the East coast with their old-boy’s network are satisfied with their NYC connections.  We West-coasters will replace them all with AI robots soon.

Remember, robots don’t eat lunch [or drink alcohol].

 

Final Score

Final Score

Yes, when I was under 40, death was for old people; deal with it.  From then until 60, was a cautionary age – insurance: yes or no, investing? Why didn’t our parents plan?  60-80, we continually rolled the dice.  It’s all OK; we’ve lived a good life, we’re ready; and not moving again.

No, having past into the End Zone, I find the perspective has changed yet again.  Now I feel like George Burns, I don’t know anybody.  It’s either that, or everybody else is already dead or dying.  Where are the new horizons?

Yes, I’m somewhat OK with this: I got a ten-year reprieve from my Doc at Kaiser last week.  “Don’t get hit by a bus, and you’re good for another decade.”  That’s what we all want to hear.  But as I wrote the above, my perspective has changed.  I don’t care about me anymore.  I’m done with plaudits.

No, I have plenty of time left to deliver my words of wisdom.  So, what’s on or off my bucket list?  I like working with lists.

Yes, I’d like to finish installing some windows I bought a decade ago.  I installed the windows downstairs; I didn't need ladders needed back then.  It was technically an awesome job, but people complain about my finish work on the wood framing.  It will take upstairs scaffolding to finish the job, and I‘m concerned about me on that ladder.

No, I don’t need to travel anymore; I’ve been to the four corners – but my passport is now long expired.  The stories I read and hear do not entice me back to air travel.

Yes, I’d like my book club to be a legacy, successful, but not too much.  Spice and Variety can still be a good thing.  It is my platform for espousing the classics, and my desire is to preach good books as long as I can.

No, I don’t need cars, clothes, or other things; I buy my clothes at Walmart.  I’m still a techie, but, landline, no smart phone, Windows PC.

Yes, I’ve had so much fun recently with my fence-side garden that I want to expand that project into all of my surrounding fence-line boundaries.

No, I’m not writing reflections and/or memoirs for kids, grandkids, or any other family members.  They have no attention span, and these days it can be a third or even fourth generational mismatch.  I write what I write for my peers, and mostly for myself, to feel good about moving into this final end zone.

Where I Am From - an exercise

I am from the golf course at Lochmoor where the sweaty green grass smells of fetid mosquito water and the men swish golf balls in a machine that reeks.

As with all things pre-Californian, I have no complete memories of events, just snippets of imagery and with the Lochmoor Golf & Country Club, a smell associated with it.  That remembered standing water smell is probably a common childhood snippet.  The heavy sweet smell of rotting lawn clippings from the fairways, dumped in the little streamlets along most fairways.  In the summer, there is not enough water to keep a flow going, but the daily watering of the fairways delivers its waters down to the edges and into marshy areas.  Mosquitoes abound.  It's worst on the back nine because it's a straight run along 11, 12, and 13, all slightly downhill and so the runoff accumulates and feeds little pools along the way.

I was only eight and nine years old, too young to be carrying a golf bag around the course.  My dad thought it good exercise just to walk four or five miles and so he had me go fetch him the proper club for his next shot.  I learned terms like, "approach shot,"  "the lie of the green."  I also learned words like "shit!" and "fuck!" because he always was playing in a foursome with three customers.  I learned that customers were evil men who gambled, swore, drank too much, and cheated on their wives.  But I also understood that customers were our bread and butter and we had to be nice to them at all times, let them win at cards and golf, provide them with liquor and, at times women.  When I was with golf people, I had to keep quiet, unlike with bowling people.

Playing a round of 18 holes with customers took about four hours for the golf and another two at the 19^th hole.  Liquor was available along the course from a little shack at the 6^th and the 11^th tees, where a black man would sell you beer or soft drinks.  I always ordered a Vernor's ginger ale at the 11^th.  Californians equate golf with thoughts of Pebble Beach.  It has those panoramic vistas.  Lochmoor was a classic wooded, hilly course with long fairways.  Teeing off at number one, the wooded forest envelopes you.

We don't have mosquitoes in California, but every now and then I get a whiff of fetid air from some standing pool and it reminds me of those days walking the hills of Lochmoor.  I'm sure my mother was happy to get me out of the house and doing something healthy.  I was a classic nerd, thinking about math and science most of the time.  My Dad's friend Rod Mindling posed a classic question to me at age eight.  "Is it better, to get $100 every day for a month or one cent the first day, than two cents the second, four cents the third, doubling each day for thirty days?"  When I went to bed at night, I would try, in my head, to compute thirty factorial.  After a week, I got it.

I got headaches and nightmares from this sort of cerebral nighttime activity, "How many miles could light travel in one year?"  186,000 X 365 X 24 X 60 X 60.  My parents were worried about the nightmares and I started in on wearing glasses at age five, they started out as Coke bottles.  But I think they were proud that I was a budding little genius.  This showed up in troublesome ways in Detroit.  I have always been, even at that young age, a ringleader, the guy who devised plots that would lead to fun and fireworks.  Richárd School sent me home on a three-day suspension in the third grade for organizing a group of boys to attack, at recess, a group of girls and pull their pants down in the snowy depths of a Michigan winter.  I organized a doctor's office in the basement of our house, where the neighbor girls would have to report for examination.

Just before we left Detroit in the spring of 1948, my sister and I attended the Lochmoor Easter Egg Hunt, an annual event for member’s kids.  I was nine at the time and my sister seven.  Easter was a formal event with elaborate baskets provided and wonderful chocolates scattered all around the clubhouse grounds on a clear blue-sky day.

 

I am from the land of snow a foot taller than I, where we sled all day and build forts for snowball wars all afternoon.  This is a time when I am so bundled up I can only waddle.

 

To be truthful, only rarely were the winter’s snowdrifts over my head.  But I do remember one school day when someone had plowed the sidewalks so the kids could go to school.  I had my sister in tow, must have been ’47 or ’48 and the snow was certainly over her head, about at my eye level.  One of the places I remember sledding was a new construction zone.  The nation built backlogged housing after the War and Detroit finished several streets before any houses were on them yet.  I remember one steep slope as 30° downhill for two blocks.  My father was with my sister and I and we all three went down the hill at first, and then I did it once on my own.  I think the time with my father was with a borrowed toboggan, but we had a sled as well.  My sister was scared of doing the run on the sled and actually so was I, but machismo made me do it solo.

The snowball wars were something I could really get into, sort of a precursor of playing football where “feel no pain” is the watchword.  My sister couldn’t throw, so I had her hide below and make snowballs for me to throw.  The forts became elaborate even though they were very transitory.

How we stood the severe cold, I don’t know.  Kids just generate their own heat.

 

I am from the streets that burn great piles of orange and red leaves, which smell like roasted nuts in the autumn evenings.

Autumn leaves have a magical attraction, at least to those of us who grew up in the Midwest or Northeast.  When I had the time and money, in my fifties, I would make an annual trek to New England in October.  I did half a dozen or more of these trips, mainly to see the pure splendor of the colored leaves.

New England trips took my mind back to Detroit days, raking and piling up the leaves.  My friends and I found running and jumping into the leaf piles were great fun.  I still have a scar over my left eye from where someone had left a rake in the pile of leaves and it came close to putting my eye out.  Sunday afternoon was the time for raking leaves and burning the piles just at twilight.  Everyone on the block lingered outside on these clear, crisp and sunny, but cold afternoons.  In those days, men still worked half-days on Saturdays; TV hadn’t invented professional football yet.  Yard work was a way for the men to meet with the neighborhood community.  The other six days a week, the women would exchange recipes, best buys, and gossip.  But on Sunday, in the Midwest, mom would be home cooking a major Sunday supper, eaten early.  We kids would try to roast acorns and potatoes in the burning leaves fire.  This was never very successful; mostly we forgot them until they had burned to a crisp.  This wasn't California, where men understood barbecuing.  At school, we would bring in specially gathered leaves and press them into books.  We learned to tell oak from maple.

 

I am from the city where kids roam in bands and gangs and plot how to steal candy from the corner store.

Gang meetings with school friends; older boys bullying us; chasing girls at recess; Dick Clark as my lead henchman; kicked out of school for teasing the girls; stealing silver dollars from coffee cans; leadership; the basement at Moran.

 

I am from the bowling alleys and boat docks where I help my father.

Bowling people were fun.  They were my dad's peers and friends.  When I was six or seven years old, his friends started me off as just a spectator.  Dickie bowled regularly with Jimmy Carson, Henry Bokram, and Ed Moran.  I was too young to bowl myself.  But, at some point, I graduated to score keeper.  I was good at the math part and loved constructing those perfect "X"s for strikes and "O"s for splits and slashes "/" for spares.  If they were going slow enough, after a few beers, I could fill in the "X"s like n and the spares with half-strikes, y's.

 

I am from those moments, which are a pleasure to remember now.

Unintended consequences

I hope I didn’t cause the birds to stay around longer than normal this year.

I’m worried that my Edenesque backyard is too comfortable for my birds.

It is like primordial soup, exhibiting the full cycle of life.

My backyard should be on the tour for a Biology class visit, but it might turn everyone into Buddhists, believing in the cycle of Life.

I was transplanting a few Salvia seedlings into my backyard fence garden today.

Afterward, in contemplation about nothing, I watched a small finch fly in to my latticework.

“That was nice,” I thought.  A few minutes later, another came, and then another.

I thought it was the same one, and he or she was being cautious.  But when I rose to leave the patio, a dozen finches rose in unison and flew away.  That’s when I became worried about them. 

The backyard was a secondary project for the past several years.  The composting this year has been a focal point.  Composting was a catalyst that has made the patio a meditation sanctuary for me.  I’ve always been organic, avoided toxins, planted attractors, used compost, and took classes.

 

I went a step further last year.  I composted four yards of detritus from my backyard and kitchen, with worms.  I’m on my way to doing another four yards this year.  I built a fence-line, garden-box bed requiring, magically, four cubic yards of compost.

I started the year by buying fours yards of compost from Grab-And-Grow.  All this compost has changed my garden over the last twelve months.

Besides a testimonial for going organic, this is a full circle of life testimonial.

I have watched my garden boxes grow from empty vessels to food storage compartments, then wombs for seeds and seedlings.  The sun, water, and organic nutrients worked together to create striving early life.

Lately, I’ve watched the bugs and bees visiting to enjoy the wares of flowers and other floral delicacies.

It all progressed so quickly – today the birds, which were eating the bugs, which were licking the nectars.

And the detritus, ten feet away, in a compost pile, rotting for the benefit of a microbial community, feeding my worms, who may eventually feed the birds, but whose by-product will certainly feed next year’s plants.

I am an observer of this “rich pageant of life” and want to be a part of it.

Not as burned ash, but as a rotting corpse, food for all the biota, and the chain of life above.