I have a friend, I think he’s still alive, who lives in Maine and says there are no seasons in California. Spoken like someone who has never lived in California and spent a long rainy winter pining for spring, or a long dry summer yearning for the rainy season.
When I dropped out of college in 1969, I was semi-fluent in Spanish thanks to a wonderful professor of Spanish I was lucky enough to study with. My semi-fluency in Spanish came in handy when in 1970 I went on an expedition with a marine biologist and his family.
We drove south along the Pacific coast all the way from California to Costa Rica searching for specimens of boring clams, not uninteresting clams, but clams that bore into rocks. And though we found few boring clams south of California, by the end of our odyssey I was fluent in Spanish, fluency I have subsequently mostly lost.
Our two lemon trees are in the midst of blossoming profusely. It remains to be seen if this astonishing blooming will produce much viable fruit, but in the meantime the thousands of blossoms are attracting more bees and hummingbirds than we’ve ever seen around here.
For the first thirteen of my twenty years in Mendocino, the local pelican presence was a small one. Then in the aftermath of a big storm that battered the west coast of North America, thousands of pelicans arrived in Mendocino and nested on the islets adjacent to our headlands, and ever since then we have lots of pelicans spending time hereabouts every year.
On a recent beach walk, this beautiful pelican was sunbathing on the shore and allowed me to snap his/her portrait. What a bird!
October is my birthday month and is also the time of year when our aloe plant sends forth her remarkable orange flower, which always puts me in mind of Dr. Seuss.
This plant has birthed two others I have potted, and now that those two are thriving, I am hopeful they will send forth flowers one day.
I wrote this blog after writing several drafts of an essay about the sorrows of our time in which I tried to make sense of why the people running our country are so intent on doing harm to others, but decided instead to share these other musings.
October 17. Today is my birthday. I am seventy-six.
When I was born in 1949 there were not yet credit cards. For much of my life there were no such things as personal computers or mobile phones or the Internet, yet we somehow managed to communicate with each other. You could travel to thousands of small towns all over America on spacious Greyhound buses for very little money, and I did lots of that.
When I was an aspiring young writer, the only way to make multiple copies of the stories I wrote was to type the story on a piece of typing paper atop a piece of carbon paper atop another piece of paper. If I made a typo, the error could only be effectively corrected by re-typing the entire page again. The quality of the copies was lousy at best. I believe this is why so few people aspired to be writers.
The first photocopy shops opened in the early 1970s, after which a few more people decided to try to be writers. With the advent of personal computers and laser printers in the 1980s, almost everyone who could sort of write decided to try to be a writer. Today we have Artificial Intelligence capable of writing prose that almost no one can distinguish from prose written by really good actual writers.
I have a tradition of asking people on their birthdays if they have any words of wisdom they would like to share. Here is my answer to that question for this year.
Donald Trump, who somehow became President of the United States, not once but twice, really wants to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. I think this is a wonderful goal for him to have. Here are the eight things he needs to do in order to win the prize.
1. Remove all American military personnel from all cities, American and foreign.
2. Cut the defense budget by fifty percent and spend that 700 billion dollars a year to fund universal healthcare from birth to grave and free education from nursery school through graduate school for everyone in America.
3. Build high-speed electric trains connecting all major urban areas to greatly reduce the need for jet travel, which is the largest contributor to global warming.
4. Phase out the use of fossil fuels by creating a solar power system providing more than enough power for everyone and everything in the country.
5. Make producing and selling weapons of any kind illegal.
6. Hire kind, intelligent, well-educated, non-sexist, non-racist people to run the various arms of government.
7. Nominate intelligent non-sexist non-racist people to be our judges.
8. Dedicate the rest of his life to helping the poor and disenfranchised of the world.
If Donald Trump will do these eight things, I’m sure he will win the Nobel Peace Prize, and he’ll probably win more than once.
October 5 was my dear friend Rico’s 74th birthday. Rico died five years ago and he’s always in my thoughts more than usual on his birthday. I communicate with Rico’s older brother Steve on the day, and this year Steve sent me a picture of Rico circa 1988 that made me glad somebody invented photography.
My friend JB Reynolds sent me some nasturtiums seeds a few years ago, and now nasturtiums are a year-round part of our garden scene. I no longer have to plant them. They just come up where they want to be, and this year they made a wonderful display on our orchard gate, a display so lovely that several passersby have stopped to have their pictures taken with the nasturtium wall as backdrop.
We have a feral cat in the neighborhood who includes our acres in his/her ranch, which is the technical term for a cat’s domain. I see him/her a few times a year, and recently he/she was sneaking by my office window and I got this picture. He/she is a brilliant hunter and since his/her arrival we no longer have gophers. Bravo cat!
Our friend Bill Fletcher is a fellow gluten-free baker, and after we sampled his delicious homemade tortillas, Marcia got a tortilla press to make tortillas and chapatis. Today we made chapatis combining sweet potato puree, chickpea flour, and Indian spices. Yum.
I’ve been finding the news of the greater world and the machinations of those in charge of our national government extremely upsetting, so much so I am now limiting my intake of outside news to a little bit in the morning, and nothing in the afternoon or evening because all that horror infects my psyche and ruins my sleep, which is easily ruined.
I don’t want to stick my head in the sand, but I don’t want to be a sleep-deprived zombie either.
My sense is that those in charge of our national government do not want there to be another free and fair election. I think Trump sending troops into cities where troops are not needed is a tactic to prepare the nation for his suppressing the next election on the pretext of some fake crisis.
Portland and Chicago and Los Angeles, contrary to what Trump and his minions keep saying, are not war-torn hellholes, though sadly millions of people believe this nonsense because they get their news from right wing propaganda stations.
In happier news, today we harvested the last of our apples and will soon be making apple huckleberry jam by adding our apples to the several quarts of huckleberries we harvested from the bushes on our property.
We live in a particular part of the redwood forest near Mendocino favored by ravens, not to be confused with crows.
The ravens in our neighborhood check out what’s going on at our house multiple times a day. Within minutes of a package being delivered and left outside our gate, a raven or ravens will descend and with his/her/their incredibly sharp beak(s) decimate the cardboard box to see what lies within.
The ravens are also keen on the prune plums and apples growing in our orchard. Throughout the growing season, ravens will sample plums and apples until they consider the fruit optimally ripe. When the time is ripe, they send word to their brethren and a flock of the big black birds descend on our little trees to feast and carry fruit away to their nests.
As it happens, our ravens generally like to harvest our apples and plums a week or so before we ideally like to harvest the fruit. So sometimes we net our trees to keep the ravens from getting too much of the fruit, but this is a royal pain, so more often I daily monitor the ravens monitoring the fruit, and when the pace of their sampling grows frenetic, we harvest.
This is what happened yesterday when I went out to the orchard. I found two big ravens devouring apples from our most prolific tree and I decided the time had come to pick those apples while there were still some left to pick.
In other news, we’re coming to the end of rose-blooming time around here. Roses, as you probably know, are in the botanical family Rosaceae and share a common ancestor with apples, pears, plums, cherries, strawberries, and almonds.
If you cut an apple in half sideways, not along the core, you will see a star shape formed by the seeds. And if you cut a rose hip sideways, you will see that same star shape.
During the pandemic I decided to read Larousse Gastronomique from start to finish, and I did. What fun. The 1200-page tome is considered by many to be the greatest culinary encyclopedia ever assembled. Along with over four thousand recipes, there are many thousands of fascinating culinary factoids, a few of which I will share with you now.
Cockaigne
A mythical land of plenty, where men live happily without working and there is an abundance of everything. The myth, which is found in Germany and Italy, is particularly deeply rooted in Flemish tradition and dates back to a time when the specter of famine often became reality. In the legend the lucky man arrives at the land of plenty by traveling through a tunnel cut into a mountain of buckwheat flour; there he discovers a roasted pig walking about with a carving knife in its belly, a table covered with pies and tarts, hedges made of sausages, etc. and roast pigeons drop into his mouth.
Colisée (Le)
A huge establishment for entertainment that was built in 1770 near the present Rond-Point on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. It catered to thousands of people and contained four cafes, several dance halls, an ornamental lake, shopping arcades, a restaurant with a fixed-price menu, and small indoor gardens. This leisure complex proved to be highly successful at first – Marie Antoinette went there twice! Eventually, it attracted too few people, and this, together with poor management, caused it to become bankrupt in 1780. It was demolished, and a road was named after it.
Duval (Pierre-Louis)
French butcher (born Montlhéry, 1811; died Paris, 1870) He supplied the Tuileries kitchens and owned several retail butcher’s shops in Paris. In 1860 he had the idea of creating a number of small restaurants serving a single dish – boiled beef and consommé – at a fixed price. The first ‘bouillon’, in the Rue de Montesquieu, was soon followed by a dozen others.
His son Alexandre successfully developed the chain of restaurants and made an immense fortune. A well-known figure of Parisian life nicknamed ‘Godefroi de Bouillon’ by humorists of the time, he composed a Marche de petites bonnes in honor of his waitresses, who all wore a coif of white tulle and, for the first time, replaced the traditional garçons in restaurants.
Fork fourchette
An implement usually made of metal with two, thee, or four prongs on the end of a handle, used at table either for lifting food to the mouth or for serving food. Forks are also used in the kitchen for turning food in cooking, etc.
The fork has a very ancient origin and is mentioned in the Old Testament. It was first used as a ritual instrument to grip pieces of meat destined for sacrifices; later it was used in the kitchen. According to the 11th-century Italian scholar Damiani, forks were introduced into Venice by a Byzantine princess and then spread throughout Italy. But it was Henry III of France who first introduced to the French the custom of using a two-pronged fork at the table.
restaurant
An establishment where meals are served between set hours, either from a fixed menu or a la carte. The word appeared in the 16th century and meant at first “a food which restores” (from restaurer, to restore), and was used more specifically for a rich highly flavored soup capable of restoring lost strength. The 18th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin referred to chocolate, red meat, and consommé as restaurants. From this sense, which survived until the 19th century, the word developed the meaning of “an establishment specializing in the sale of restorative foods.”
Until the late 18th century, the only places for ordinary people to eat out were inns and taverns. In about 1765, a Parisian “bouillon-seller’ named Boulanger wrote on his sign: “Boulanger sells restoratives fit for the gods”, with a motto in dog Latin: Venite ad me omnes qui stomach laboretis, et ego restaurabo vos (Come unto me, all you whose stomachs are aching, and I will restore you.) This was the first restaurant in the modern sense of the term.
One beneficial effect of the Revolution was that the abolition of the guilds and their privileges made it easier to open a restaurant. The first to take advantage of the situation were the cooks and servants from the great houses whose aristocratic owners had fled. Moreover, the arrival in Paris of numerous provincials who had no family in the capital created a pool of faithful customers, augmented by journalists and businessmen. The general feeling of wellbeing under the Directory, following such a chaotic period, coupled with the chance of enjoying the delights of the table hitherto reserved for the rich, created an atmosphere in which restaurants became an established institution.
We had a praying mantis hanging out in our rose bushes for a couple days recently. This was the first praying mantis I’ve seen since I moved to Mendocino twenty years ago. I love praying mantises.
Not only are praying mantises exotic and beautiful and fun to watch, they are responsive to being talked to. This one in our roses, for example, looked at me when I spoke to her and seemed quite interested in what I had to say.
Speaking of which, this mantis visitation reminds me of the two times in my life I definitely had contact with aliens from outer space. And that reminds me of an article I published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser way back in 2011 and then posted on my blog.
So I went into my blog archives, which you can do, too, by going to the bottom of my blog page where several hundred of my articles are archived. Just type in key words and see what comes up.
I did that, typed in aliens, and up came my memoir of the two times I encountered aliens from outer space. I will now re-tell those two incidents.
*
On a winter evening in 1981 at Sacramento City College I read a few of my short stories to a receptive audience of about forty people. After my performance I was about to exit the lecture hall when a most unusual being approached me.
She appeared to be an extremely slender female human approximately six-feet-tall, wearing a sleeveless form-fitting dress made of glimmering silver fabric. At first glance she seemed exquisitely beautiful, and at second glance her face resembled the face of a praying mantis. Most striking of all were her eyes, huge multi-faceted diamonds suspended in large transparent globes floating in her eye sockets.
She was also radiant, and by radiant I mean she seemed to be glowing from within, and her inner light was indistinguishable from sunlight. She spoke with an enticing Serbian accent and I might have fallen in love with her had she not been so obviously an alien from another planet.
“I em Yanina,” she said, her diamond eyes turning subtly turquoise as she spoke. “I hev mosst unusual life to tell, bet I em no writer. Hearink your stories I em zinking, ‘Yes, he is what I em needing for to tell my story.”
Then she took my hand and I felt a fantastic flow of energy entering my body, a terrifying flow that made me quickly let go of her hand before I was rendered her compliant slave.
“I pay you very well,” she said, her diamond eyes glowing ruby red. “Come now to my hotel.”
So powerful was her magnetism, despite my fear of her, I almost agreed to go with her until I realized she was not alone. Standing behind her was a huge man wearing a black suit and a pulsating red bow-tie, his jowly face dominated by a stupendous carrot-red handlebar mustache.
Yanina noticed me noticing her gigantic companion and said, “He is Raul. My bodyguard.” Then she smiled a smile so multi-dimensional it might have been a 3-D rendering of one of Escher’s drawings of infinity.
“Oh,” I said. “Why do you have a…”
“When I tell you my story you will understend why,” she said, reaching for my hand again.
I shoved my hands in my pockets, and using every drop of my emotional strength I said, “Gosh, I’m so sorry but for the next thirty or forty years I’m focusing on my own stuff, though I sure do appreciate you thinking of me in this regard.”
“You are afraid of me,” she said, nodding sagely. “Don’t be. There has never been story like mine. We will save the world. I promise.”
Somehow I escaped.
*
My second meeting with an alien from outer space also took place in Sacramento, seven years after my close encounter with Yanina.
The summer day was blazing hot and humid, my garden a riot of basil and sunflowers and corn and tomatoes. I was sitting on the bottom step of the stairs leading from the garden up to the deck adjoining my house and thinking about where in my garden to stand while holding the hose running over my head to cool down, when I heard a whirring sound and saw something the size of a hummingbird zooming toward me at an altitude of about two feet.
In fact, I thought the thing was a hummingbird because hummingbirds do make a kind of whirring sound when they fly fast, though this was a different sort of whirring than hummingbird whirring.
A split second later the thing was hovering in the air about a foot from my face. It was definitely not a hummingbird. I should note I was not under the influence of any drug or alcohol at the time, though I was excessively warm and more than mildly depressed.
The thing was definitely a machine. I could hear other sounds accompanying the whirring, notably clanking and squeaking. I felt certain the thing was looking at me and checking me out.
I said something like, “Yikes!” and the thing flew away, and I never saw it again.
*
Some years after my close encounter with the alien flying machine in my garden, I saw a documentary made by Errol Morris entitled Fast,Cheap & Out of Control, the title referring to the work of Rodney Brooks, an M.I.T. scientist who designed tiny robots and wrote a famous paper suggesting we send one hundred one-kilogram robots to Mars instead of a single hundred-kilogram robot. That way, if some of the robots broke down or didn’t work properly, there would still be many more robots to carry out the exploring. The paper was entitled “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System” published in 1989 in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.
After seeing this documentary, I was convinced that the flying thing in my garden was an exploratory robot sent from a distant solar system to check out life on earth.
Given the state of the world today, I regret not helping the alien named Yanina write her story. Maybe her story would have saved the world. I also regret not saying to the little alien spacecraft, “Hey let’s talk. Maybe we can figure out a way to interact that will help reverse humanity’s headlong rush to destroy the biosphere.”
Should aliens ever contact me again, I’m ready to communicate.
We’ve been without a functional well for a month and just got our water system back online today! We’ve got four cords of oak firewood to get into the woodshed before the rains come, and the gutters need to be cleaned in anticipation of that blessed rain.
The tubs need to be planted with potatoes, I’ve fallen behind on my pruning of rampant shrubs, the huckleberries are crying out to be harvested, and soon we must net the apple trees to keep the ravens from filching our crop.
I am finally over a debilitating case of food poisoning that rendered me fairly useless for the last eight days. I’m deep into writing a new novel Poets of Mercy, and we’re in the home stretch of preparing my fable The Dog Who Wanted A Person for publication.
Several new tunes are manifesting on the piano to be recorded in October after I have my piano tuned.
And beyond our little plot of land on the outskirts of our little town, the human world has gone batty with people of questionable emotional stability and questionable intelligence running large parts of the global and national shows and making a shambles of our economy, our healthcare system, our government, and what was left of our democracy.
The natural world is reacting to the excesses of greedy humans according to the immutable principles of Universe. And so it goes.
Here is an excerpt from my novel in progress, the novel’s narrator having a memory involving his Korean grandmother Nari.
I’m fifteen, sitting at the kitchen table having an after-school snack and reading A Tale of Two Cities. Nari looks up from her cooking and asks me in Korean, “Is this homework, Ya’akov? This book you’re reading?”
“No. This is the antidote to homework,” I say, smiling. “This is what I love. I feel like I’m actually there in the midst of the French Revolution. The writing is that good.”
She comes to me and I show her the cover of the book.
“I read this book,” she says, returning to her cooking. “Do you know what the title means? A Tale of Two Cities?”
“Well… Paris and London. Half the action takes place in London, half in Paris.”
“That is not what the title means,” she says, chopping an onion.
I frown. “Of course that’s what it means. Those are the two cities where…”
“That’s the surface meaning,” she says calmly. “Dickens means something deeper. He is speaking of two states of being, two ways of feeling, two ways of perceiving. Sorrow and joy. He is asking us to contemplate how sorrow and joy can exist simultaneously in the same moment. That’s why you love that story and why it seems so real to you because it’s how life really is. We want to believe sorrow and joy are different from each other, separate from each other, but they are inseparable, just as you are inseparable from me and from everything else. If you understand this, then you won’t wallow in sorrow and self-pity. You will accept the duality of existence and be less confused.”
Having had encouraging responses to my previous post featuring excerpts from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature published in 1939, a volume I love for being a delightful British-centric time-capsule full of fascinating factoids, here is another batch of goodies from that tome.
Auto-da-fé, a Portuguese expression meaning act of faith, popularly applied to the burning alive of heretics.
Bohemian, frequently used in the sense of a gipsy of society, especially an artist, literary man, or actor, who leads a free, vagabond, or irregular life, and despises conventionalities. This meaning was introduced into English by Thackeray.
Brummel, George Bryan (1778-1840), called BEAU BRUMMEL, a friend of the prince regent (George IV) and leader of fashion in London. He died in poverty at Caen.
Caligula, GAIUS CAESAR, son of Germanicus, so called from his wearing, when a boy, caligae or soldiers’ boots, was Roman emperor A.D. 37-41. The cruelties and vices that marked his reign were perhaps due to his madness. He was finally murdered.
Chiasmus, a figure of speech by which the order of the words in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second, e.g. He saved others; himself he cannot save.
Cook, Eliza (1818-89). Her complete collected poems were published in 1870. The most popular of these was The Old Arm Chair, which had appeared in 1837.
Darien Scheme, THE, a scheme proposed by William Paterson (1658-1719), the projector of the Bank of England, for a Scottish settlement on the isthmus of Panama; the scheme was abandoned in 1700. Practically the whole circulating capital of the Scottish people was invested in the scheme; and so, at the Union (1707), a sum of money was paid by England in compensation for the losses sustained by Scotland.
Derrick, a noted hangman at Tyburn, c. 1600, the origin of the word derrick, a crane.
Deus ex machina, God from the machine, an unexpected event or intervention in a play or novel, which resolves a difficult situation. When a god was introduced in the ancient Greek drama, he was brought on the stage by some mechanical device.
Dolly Dialogues, The, by Anthony Hope (Hawkins) (1894) They are amusing and witty conversations hung on a slight thread of story, in which figure Samuel Travers Carter, a middle-aged bachelor, and the attractive Dolly Foster.
D’Urfey, Thomas (1653-1723), familiarly known as Tom Durfey, wrote a large number of songs, tales, satires, melodramas, and farces. He was a scurrilous fellow, but the familiar friend of everyone, including Charles II and James II.
Elliot, Jane (1727-1805), author of the most popular version of the old lament for Flodden, The Flowers of the Forest, beginning with I’ve heard them lilting at our ewe-milking.
Field, Michael, the pseudonym adopted by Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913). They wrote several novels and some good poetry.
Freud, Sigmund (1856-1939) born at Frieberg in Moravia, of a Jewish family, is known as the inventor of psychoanalysis. His studies led him to important conclusions as the to the influence of a subconscious element in the mind and also as to the importance of the sexual motive in human behavior. He was expelled from Austria in 1938.
One of the few material possessions I inherited from my grandmother Goody is a book entitled The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature, first published in 1939 and reprinted in 1942.
I love this book for many reasons, among them: the perspective of the editors is extremely British-centric, much of the information is so antiquated as to verge on fiction, the writing of the entries is delightfully snobby, and the totality is a time-capsule of the English literary landscape eighty years ago, a landscape so unlike the literary landscape of today this book might be about life on another planet where they also happen to have Shakespeare, Dickens, and Jane Austen.
Here, for your enjoyment, are a handful of entries I especially enjoyed during my latest perusal of the goodly tome.
Southcott, Joanna (1750-1814), a religious fanatic. In 1792 she began to write doggerel prophecies and to claim supernatural gifts, and in time attracted a very large number of followers. She died of brain disease, leaving a sealed box with directions that it should be opened at a time of national crisis. It was opened in 1927 and was found to contain nothing of interest.
Macaulay, Rose, contemporary author among whose chief works are: Potterism (1920), Dangerous Ages (1921), Told By an Idiot (1923) Orphan Island (1924), all novels; also two volumes of verse. She is notable for a deft and epigrammatic style and for her wide reading.
Burnell the Ass, the hero of the Speculum Stultorum of Wireker, Burnell, an ass who wishes to acquire a larger tail, goes to Salerno and to Paris to study, meets with various adventures, and finally loses his tail altogether.
Genius, in classical pagan belief, the tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to every person at his birth, to govern his fortunes and determine his character; also the spirit similarly connected with a place.
Hesperia, the western land for the Greek poets was Italy. The Roman poets similarly gave the name to Spain.
Lover, Samuel (1797-1868), Irish novelist and song-writer, is remembered for his ballad, and the novel developed out of it, Rory O’More (1836), which deals with the tragic events in Ireland in 1798 and also for his novel Handy Andy in which he developed the whimsical aspects of Irish character.
Wilcox, MRS. ELLA WHEELER (née Wheeler) (1855-1919), American poet and journalist, described as the most popular poet of either sex and of any age, read by thousands who never open Shakespeare. She began to publish poems at the age of seven, and her last volume Poems of Affection was published posthumously in 1920. Her Collected Poems were published in 1921.
I grew sunflowers this year for the first time in several years and I’m so glad I did. Van Gogh bouquets for the table, gifts of bouquets for friends, a cheerful presence in the garden on the gloomiest of days.
We had a visit from my niece Lena and her daughter Della who is ten-months-old and rather cute, don’t you think?
Lena and Della and I went to the Mendocino Farmers Market together and Lena bought shishitos to go with our tamales.
Now Marcia and I are in love with shishitos. So easy to cook and so delicious.
The giant two-headed monster log that was way out near the mouth of Big River got moved inland on a big tide. Every time I go to the beach the behemoth is somewhere new. What a beauty!
Work moves apace on my book The Dog Who Wanted A Person with illustrations by Miruna Constantin, local wunderkind prodigy with a pencil. With good fortune we hope to publish the book ere long.
Marcia just posted a fun instructional video on YouTube teaching you how to play a 2:3 poly-rhythm with shakers. Not to be missed if you’ve ever longed to play such a thing. Such fun!
