Irish New Year's

Living in San Diego is like living in several timeshares all at once. From our front door in La Mesa, a suburb 13 miles east of downtown, any kind of cultural, topographic and climatologic diversity is no more than two hours away.

It was warm and dry at our house last week, a few days before Christmas, and it didn’t seem very Christmas-y at all. We went for a drive, just for something to do. We could have gone in any number of directions, but we chose west. Winter Pacific storm systems were pounding the northwest, and sending big surf down to us.

We were in Karen’s convertible. It was about 75 and clear as we left, but we put jackets in the trunk. Passing the airport on Harbor Drive, we could see a bank of fog peeping above Point Loma. Up Talbot to Catalina, where the fog was all around us. We left the top down and got jackets out of the trunk. Coasting down Hill Street, we could see waves breaking toward the cliffs, but what really changed for us was the weather. At home we had ceiling fans on. In the car we turned the heater on and turned collars up against the cool, damp breath of the fog. It wasn’t Aspen, but at least it was cuddly. A touch of Christmas at the coast.

We cruised the cliffs, watched waves foaming white as snow over black rock promontories, and let ourselves get nice and chilled. The fog rolled home right behind us, and the temperature dropped. We turned off the ceiling fans, plugged in Christmas lights in the gathering gloom, and built our first fire of the season.

This week, for New Year’s Eve, the destination is Ireland, which is about a mile from our house. Nobody celebrates New Year’s like the Irish. At Hooley’s, an Irish pub nearby, there is a countdown clock above the bar that today is spinning down the seconds, minutes and hours, until Irish New Year’s: 4 p.m. on Saturday, which is midnight in Dublin. I discovered this three New Year’s Eves ago, when my son Tyler, now a picker in Nashville, was playing with a band at Hooley’s on New Year’s Eve as, on the countdown clock, 4 p.m. approached. The place was rocking, and at the stroke of 4, it was Irish New Year’s. We cheered and lifted glasses and sang “Auld Lang Syne.”

It was the perfect hour to celebrate New Year’s. Two years ago, I asked a few friends to join me there, and by 4:30 we were back at my house for drinks and dinner, after which folks could hang around or have plenty of time to move on to other parties geared to midnight and San Diego New Year’s, while others of us turned in at our usual bedtimes. It worked out perfectly; everybody was happy. I lifted a Bushmill’s nightcap to Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, for his thoughtfulness in discovering this place eight time zones west of Dublin, and retired at 9:30 in such bliss that I didn’t even hear the fireworks at midnight.

Now it is a tradition. On Saturday, we will celebrate at 4, then home for cocktails and dinner: roasted chicken, cabbage and sausage, black-eyed peas, biscuits and whiskey bread pudding. The black-eyes, you know, are a southern American New Year’s tradition. Eating black-eyes on New Year’s will bring you good luck in the new year. Standard recipe is half a pound of bacon, diced; one large onion, chopped; and a pound or more of black-eyed peas, fresh preferred but dried will do. If they are dried, soak them overnight.

Cook the bacon in a bean pot until it starts to brown, then stir in the onion, season with salt and pepper, and stir until the onion is soft and a dark glaze is starting to form in the bottom of the pot. Stir in the black-eyes with water just to cover and simmer until done, about an hour. I am also going to add some pork bits pulled off of leftover smoked ribs. In the old days, after the New Year’s Eve party, if I wanted my friends to have black-eyes for luck, I had to send them home with some. No longer, now that New Year’s begins at 4 in the afternoon. Perfect.

Sandpaper in your ears

“Peace on Earth” this Christmas?

Don’t think so. So many Christmas cards I’ve mailed, promising “Peace on Earth.” Hasn’t happened in my lifetime. I have seen Christmas cards in family scrapbooks from the 1940s, including 1943, the year I was born. They promised “Peace on Earth,” in the middle of World War II, with the first tactical atomic explosion at Hiroshima still two years away. I haven’t and wouldn’t be able to document it, but I’ll bet Earth has not had a moment of peace since then.

Maybe if we narrowed it down. “Peace in the Christian World.” Nope. “Peace in America.” Daily murders, violence and crime, in streets, in movies and on TV. “Peace in California.” Road rage capital of the world. “Peace in San Diego.” Har de har har. “Peace in La Mesa.” We do have our quiet moments, but why would I offer that as your Christmas wish? “Peace at my house.” Now we’re getting close, as long as we don’t watch the news, but peace at my house doesn’t do you much good, and your good is my wish.

No, once again this Christmas, peace anywhere on Earth has to be portable, and that peace is achievable. Insurance follows the car, and peace follows the person. “Peace in your mind” is totally possible this Christmas Day, or if not this Christmas (it takes a little work), then by Christmas 2006. If peace follows all the people who come to sit down at your Christmas dinner, then you will have “Peace at the Christmas dinner table.”

At many Christmas dinner tables, though, including many in my past, you might as well ask for “Peace on Earth.”

So many people go through life wired with buttons to be pushed. Such buttons can be pushed from a range of a thousand miles. All it takes is the right word traveling through the air. Get a dozen button-wired people at a Christmas dinner table, and watch out.

The buttons can be unwired. All you have to do is take back the power you have given to some other person to push it. These can be very important and powerful people: mothers, fathers, etc. But it isn’t their power they use to push your buttons. It is yours. You gave it to them years ago, probably starting in childhood. With that power, they can push your buttons at any time and make you feel small, cheap, insignificant, selfish, ungrateful, undesirable, inferior, a lifelong waster of every opportunity you ever had at achieving the greatness that you were born for, if you had only listened to the person leaning with all his or her weight against the thumb pressing your button.

You gave that person that power and weight, and you can take it back. All it takes is forgiveness. Appropriate, at the Christmas season, and the figure it celebrates, that the route to peace involves forgiveness. But it works. I don’t know exactly how it works, and it takes some work and willingness to get there, but when you forgive, you take power back, and peace is there waiting. Forgiveness, power, peace and freedom are all different spellings of the same human condition: happiness.

When you are ready, and it very well could require some professional guidance, you come to a point where you simply say in your mind to a person: “I forgive you.” At that instant, the button becomes unwired. The person may say the same things as before, words that for years you felt as sandpaper in your ears or an arrow through your heart. But now the words pass right through you and out into space. Left behind is a feeling of liberation you have known only in your dreams.

You haven’t said a word to the person about forgiveness. The person knows something has happened, though, because the button doesn’t work anymore. So he or she quits pushing, and it is a relief. It was your power, but it required their energy to keep their thumbs on your buttons all those years, and at some point, inside themselves, they will feel relieved.

But this Christmas story about reachable peace is not about them; it is about you. It is a true story.

Winter solstice

Cloudy, beautiful morning here in east San Diego County, California, North America, and at 10:20 we positioned ourselves on the glider, facing south, to observe the solstice at 10:25.

At that moment, the Earth in its orbit around the Sun reached a place where the Sun’s perpendicular rays hit, just for an instant, the Earth at its southernmost presentation to the Sun.

It was instantaneous: the Earth orbits the sun at a speed of 66,780 miles per hour. I tried to visualize that, assuming a random position in black space where I could watch the Earth, and witness its speed, as it crossed that place where Sun rays bumped the Tropic of Capricorn, 23 ½ degrees south of the Equator. Seconds later, the rays were traveling back north across the Earth’s face toward the summer solstice, at the Tropic of Cancer, 23 ½ degrees north of the equator, where on the glider it will be June 21 or thereabouts.

At 10:25, the Earth was rotating West to East at a speed of about 1,000 miles per hour. It was orbiting the Sun at a speed of 66,780 miles per hour. The Sun and its entire solar system were orbiting in the Milky Way Galaxy at a speed of 487,353 miles per hour. Yet from the glider, it seemed so peaceful. How in the world is it, that people come to believe they are dominant?

Stress tests

The hip joint is still shot.

It was supposed to be replaced today, but yesterday a complication arose. The surgical nurse called and said an EKG, taken a week ago, didn’t look right.

“It doesn’t look like earlier EKGs of yours,” she said.

The result, she said, could have been the result of a number of things, including a minor heart attack, a mistake, or stress.

“I showed the results right away to the anesthesiologist, and until we know what is going on, we are canceling the surgery,” she said.

I assumed, for the EKG, there would have been stress present, of the sort associated with submitting an EKG before going in for surgery in which the top of your leg bone is sawed off and an arthritic pelvic socket reamed out and a prosthetic device hammered into place with four weeks of intensive recovery to follow, with long rehabilitation thereafter. So I think that’s what it was.

“What do we do now?” I asked, feeling a drop of failed-EKG stress sinking in.

The remedy is to go for another test, this one called a “stress echo,” which will take place tomorrow. If that test disproves the other one, she thinks I can get in for surgery next week, thus enabling me to recover sufficiently for the start of spring semester, a deadline with absolutely no stress embedded in it at all.

The good thing is that it is ready-made blog material. I always relax when I know I have something to write about. And I had gotten my Christmas shopping done, in time for the surgery date today.

The Mike Leach campaign

The San Diego-based Kettner Blvd. College of Turkey Surgeons and Airport Relocation Committee has two words for San Diego this Christmas: Mike Leach.

Leach is the football coach at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. He is the only football coach I know of to become the subject of a cover story in The New York Times Magazine. The story was two weeks ago and it detailed Leach’s innovations that are reshaping the geometry, both in space and time, of a football game. If you want a sample, Tech is in the Cotton Bowl on Jan. 2.

I have taken steps in the local media to get a phone and email campaign going to contact the San Diego football leaders and tell them they need to figure out how to bring Leach to our city. A vacancy already exists, at San Diego State. A vacancy could be made to exist, with the San Diego Chargers.

Members of the College favor the second option, for two basic reasons. First, the Chargers’ coaching staff too often, in our opinion, chooses a strategy of playing not to lose, whether for part of a game or sometimes a whole game. This was evident in the Chargers’ 23-21 loss last Sunday to a measurably inferior Miami Dolphin team. The head coach, Marty Schottenheimer, a distinguished coach with long tenure in the NFL, after the loss stated flatly that his team came out to play, but just didn’t play as well as they had been playing. The College begs to suggest the team always reflects the coach. It came out to play the game it had been coached to play, which was not to lose, a recurring theme in Schottenheimer’s history which more than once this season has increased the odds against his team winning.

This is in contrast to Mike Leach, who coaches his team to score on every play it runs, even late in the game with his team ahead 56-14. His intention is not to embarrass the other team. His abiding interest, as The Times discovered, is systems efficiency (his first career was lawyer), and the system happens to be football. If you run a play, Leach believes, the play should score.

They are very interesting plays, with as much as three-to-six-foot splits between the offensive linemen, four receivers spread sideline-to-sideline, and a tailback whose primary job is to catch the ball. Leach told The Times that his idea of offensive balance is to have all five receivers finish the season with 1,000 yards of receptions.

Leach said he spreads out his offense because it is counterproductive to concentrate action into tight areas, which wastes most of the 53-yard-wide field. It works for the run as well as the pass. Why ask his linemen to “open a hole” in a tightly bunched defense, when they can open holes simply by lining up far apart? Spreading the game out means his players must run and run and run, which he conditions them to do, and which the opposing team is not conditioned to do. “Make their fat guys run,” is his credo. When, in the second quarter, you see them bending over with their hands on their hips, you know you’ve got them.

In essence, Leach coaches his team to do three things: score on every play it runs, run the defense into total exhaustion, and hit the other guys as hard as you can. What the College would give to see such a coach on a Chargers sideline.

If that is not possible, then the San Diego State Aztecs are looking for a new man after a season of losing seasons and crowds of 20,000 in a 60,000-seat stadium. Why would Leach leave Texas Tech, which plays in the big-time Big 12 Conference, for San Diego State and the Western Athletic Conference? Well, for one thing, the pleasure of beating WAC teams 70-21 with regularity, unbeaten seasons, and a ticket into a BCS bowl game, prizes much harder, if not impossible, to come by at Texas Tech, which must play Texas and Oklahoma every fall. Mike Leach could put San Diego State on the map the way the University of Miami got on the map in the 1980s and sell out San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium six times a season.

He’s a free thinker and a surfer type too, apparently, and it is a geographic fact that the nearest free thinking and surf to Lubbock, Texas, is San Diego. He is also an innovator first and a football coach second, and a welcome addition to our city’s intellectual base. The College would not hesitate to invite him to speak, and ask him where he thought the airport should go.

The hip joint is shot

I am a 1943 Grant, in reasonably good condition. After a long test drive, I was recently driven off the lot by Karen Marie Werve, who married me with an admonition: “I want 30 more years.”
I feel good about that warranty. All my parts are ‘43s, and I still would take them on a long desert drive at night without fear of breaking down.

But there is wear and tear, and an occasional malfunction. The prostate went three years ago, because of cancer, and so I can’t shift gears as smoothly as I used to.

Now it is a hip. The left one. The doctor said, “The hip is shot.” The shock absorber is gone. Xrays show a sheet of white where once was a gray half-moon of cartilage separating the white ball socket in the pelvis and the ball joint at the top of the leg. My steering has gotten worse and worse over the last couple of years, and my ride is very rough, even on smooth highways. Every step is a pain.

So the original hip joint is coming out, this Thursday. Sixty-two years is not bad service for a part that gets as much daily pounding as a hip. Its replacement, made of titanium and composites, is estimated to last 20 years. How’s that for human durability?

I will miss the original. The procedure involves sawing off the old, worn out ball joint, at the top of the femur. I asked the surgeon, in our pre-op meeting, if I could bring it home. “No,” he said. “But in 1955, I got to bring my appendix home in a jar,” I protested. “No,” he said.

Affection develops for things that serve us well. Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a farewell to a set of Michelins that served me for 100,000 miles. How many miles does the hip joint have on it? No way to know. Now it will disappear into some disposal process, the same way the Michelins went into a recycling machine. I want to pat it on its worn-out head for all the years and fun, the playgrounds, running, swimming, sports, hiking, etc., that it made possible.

I am hoping for a spinal block instead of the general anesthesia, and my orthopedist said I qualified for the “cementless” procedure, which I had hoped for also. Four days in the hospital, rounds of therapy, then either home or to a therapy facility for a few days, then home in time for Christmas. There will be a period of restricted activity and movement, which I intend to parlay into getting waited on hand and foot. A fine thing: a beautiful woman drives you off the lot one week, then two weeks later you drag her into the shop for hip surgery.

A friend from college days has had not one, but two, hip replacements. He said the first two weeks I will feel lousy, then uncomfortable for two weeks, then a shift into steady recovery. I am aiming to be ready for the stairs to my second-floor office when the spring semester begins in late January, and to move furniture, lug around potted plants, and go for long walks for the next 30 years, at any hour that Karen chooses.

Those Grinchy catalogues

Yesterday, shortly before noon, the mail arrived, and in it a Bloomingdale’s catalog of Christmas gifts.

I took it inside, leafed through it, and found two things I liked. I dialed the number, confirmed the account, etc., and placed my first order, for an attractive pair of earrings.

“That is back-ordered until Feb. 7, or sooner,” said the service agent.

“Well, shoot,” I said. “What about this other pair,” and gave her the order number.

“That is back-ordered until Feb. 14, or sooner,” she said.

“This is a Christmas catalog, is it not?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“What about these UGG slippers,” I said, flipping the pages and finding the number, which I read.

“They are back-ordered until Feb. 7,” she said.

“I don’t need them for February, I need them for Christmas,” I said. “I guess I will go somewhere else.”

“I am sorry about that,” said the agent, and we hung up.

It’s not just Bloomingdale’s. Christmas catalogues arrive from many reputable retailers, all with reputations for their concern for customer satisfaction, and by the time I can get to the phone and dial it, all the stuff is not available. Maybe it is a disadvantage of living on the West Coast. The East Coasters get their catalogues three hours earlier, race to the telephone, or bring cellphones to the mailbox with them, and claim all the good stuff while my mailman is still drinking coffee in the day room.

But wouldn’t Bloomie’s want to take this into account? A valued customer is a valued customer, and more important, a sale is a sale.

Karen, my wife, is a genius of organizational analysis, and I asked her what might be the cause. She said she couldn’t say, without talking to a lot of people in the Bloomie’s system, but one fact did catch her eye.

“Both of these items were back-ordered until Feb. 7,” she said. “That is a week before Valentine’s Day.”

Her suggestion was that the customer might realize that, go ahead and order the items as Valentine’s gifts, then thrash through the catalogue looking for something – say, a sterling silver charm (for a charm bracelet) of a chili dog – that might be shippable before Dec. 25. The double sale, she thought, would be a shrewd marketing strategy.

Bloomingdale’s wouldn’t do that, though I hate to give them, or any retailer these days, the idea to think about. Whatever the reason, they didn’t do much for my Christmas spirit, and that’s not the sort of thing all us Santa Claus deputies forget easily.

A song for a lifetime

We had drunk a champagne toast and were getting ready to cut the wedding cake when Karen arrived (I thought) at some kind of private moment of decision and said, “Wait,” and turned to face our 25 guests.

“I want to do something,” she said to them. Her eyes were lowered, nervously. “And I am going to do it. I want to sing Michael a song.”

Cheers went up, and I acted out embarrassment, reached for an afghan off the back of a chair and draped it over my head. There was a time I would not have been acting, but thank God for the stability of being 62 years old. Karen laughed with everyone else, and I told them, pulling off the afghan, “Hey, I’m not embarrassed. I love it,” and I turned to Karen and hugged her.

But this story is not about me. It’s about Karen. “I wanted to surprise you,” she said to me. I was already learning that life with Karen is a series of sparkly little surprises, but nothing like this. She turned me to face her, our living room became quiet, and she took my hands in hers. She sucked in a deep breath, a draught of determination, and let it out slowly. Then she turned her face up to me and began to sing.

There were bells on a hill
But I never heard them ringing
No, I never heard them at all
Til there was you.

I had not heard her sing, and the beauty of her voice surprised me. It was very clear, very steady, with all her heart in it. I looked at her and could not believe this was happening to me. I started to sing, too, so much did I love her, very low, underneath her, until she got to words I didn’t remember. Then there was only her voice in the room. If she had been nervous, it had gone away. Her voice was as luminous as her eyes and her smile.

Then she got to the chorus, with its odd little note twist, and it threw her out of key for the last verse, but nobody cared. It was better, sweetly genuine, that way. She didn’t care, either. She had decided, somewhere in the preparations for our marriage, that she wanted to sing a love song to me.

At the moment, I thought about the challenge she must have carried, from the day it occurred to her to sing a song to me at our wedding. If it had been me, it would have become pure anxiety, learning the song, hoping I would remember the words, and at the crucial moment, having the courage to sing. I would always know that when the time came, I actually wouldn’t have to do it, and no one, except me, would ever know.

That’s not the way it was with her. From the moment she had the idea, she knew she would do it, and she practiced and practiced. But in all the excitement, she almost forgot. She knew there would have to be a right moment for her song, and she didn’t know when or how that moment would arrive, or even if it would.

Then came the toast, and I responded to the toast, saying, “I’ll go first,” as if Karen would go second. As I was saying my response, it came to her. “I had forgotten all about it until then,” she told me later. But she said she realized the right moment had arrived, and as it did, she remembered her song. And when she did, there was no doubt she would sing it. No decision to be made. She may have been nervous, but there was no option of not singing. “That’s not who I am,” she said.

Admiration for this woman routinely pours out of me, and when she said that, I wanted to be just like her. For me, the option would have been there. I might not have sung, and I would have regretted it forever. Not Karen. She turned to me and sang, and took into possession a memory for a lifetime, for her, and maybe even more for me. God, I love who she is.

A new destination

Eight-thirty a.m., Saturday, Dec. 3. An extraordinary morning after overnight showers. The wedding party was in place, on the patio against a backdrop of sunlight, clouds, sky and ocean. I knew my lines and had my game face on, ready to be the strong one if I needed to be.

Inside the house, the processional music started: “Roses from Tyrol,” track 4 on the Andre Rieu “Live in Tuscany” CD. From within the house, a sense of motion. Then Karen appeared in the open French doors and paused, on the arm of her son Bill, at the top of the step.

I saw her, and she saw me, and her face was all beauty, happiness and love. My game face may have resisted for an instant – I couldn’t say – but then it was gone in a flash, and tears were rising. In the same motion my heart left my chest and crossed the 15 feet to her. I had believed that I understood how much I loved her, but no: here was something new. She felt the same; she said she saw the tears in my eyes and surrendered instantly to a physical pull toward me, and toward us, in our commitment. We were at our convergence point, brought there by no easy highways, and the last 15 feet waiting to be closed were completely visible now, and spectacular.

I was able to wait as Bill brought her to me. I shook his hand and said, “Thank you.” Then I took her in my arms and kissed her. Embraced, tears in our eyes, a flurry of little kisses. I said to her, “How are we going to make it through this?” She said, “I don’t know.”

And so the ceremony of marriage between Karen and Michael Grant dissolved into a sustained embrace and numerous little kisses, interrupted by official statements of love, a reading from Gibran, a commitment to vows we had written two days before, the exchange of rings, and the kiss – the ceremonial kiss – at the end. It was the first wedding I ever attended where the ceremony was worked into the experience, and not the other way around. There were only five people with us, but if it had been in a cathedral with thousands, the tears would have raised, the hearts leapt, and the embrace sustained, a universe of two people, with some number of witnesses looking on. I was not meant to be the strong one for Karen. Karen and I together were meant to be the strong ones, placing our loyalty to the lovely intimacy of love before our obligation to ceremony, for anyone wanting to see.

It was a stunning experience, and in the hours afterward, we asked ourselves: What happened? What happened to us when she appeared in the French doors and tore my heart out of my chest, and she saw my tears?

I had believed that I could not love her more completely, but I was wrong. There was another five percent. It made sense. A couple of weeks before the wedding, when the preparations were picking up speed, I started to feel drawn to her in a different way. From our first dates, beginning in September, 2004, we talked about an odd familiarity that we felt, as if we had met before. Maybe there was a tearing apart, and now a coming back together, and the closer we came, the stronger became our old experience of completion, until the actual moment arrived on Saturday morning.

But there is something else happening that is more measurable. We both have done the inner work people do when they want to understand who they are, and why they act and react the way they do. We both understand power and its relationship to freedom and happiness; the three words are essentially the same. With that power, anything is possible. We have agreed for a long time that there will always be more love between us. There is always another five percent waiting. In our lives we will reach new destinations, that are already out there, but we won’t know them until we reach them, and then we will know more about love than we did before.

One of those new destinations was reached Saturday morning. She appeared in the French doors, and bam, we were there. We didn’t realize it for a day or two. It is too powerful when it happens, air totally unbreathed. Only looking back did we understand what had happened, knew where we were. That is exactly how it happens. Exactly.

Wedding Day

No posts this past week because I was focused on getting married.

Yesterday, Dec. 3, Michael and Karen became Michael and Karen Grant. It didn’t feel like Dec. 3, it didn’t feel like Saturday. It was a day suspended beyond time, somewhere between earth and space.

Leftovers

Turkey Tetrazzini

Half a pound spaghetti; half a pound mushrooms, sliced; 3 tablespoons butter; 3 tablespoons flour; 2 cups turkey stock or chicken broth; two or more cups cubed turkey (or ham); half a cup green stuffed olives, sliced; half a cup whipping cream; 2 tablespoons sherry; 1 cup parmesan cheese.

Cook the spaghetti by package directions and drain. In a saucepan, sauté the mushrooms in the butter, then stir in the flour and cook, stirring constantly over medium-high heat, to blend and brown the flour. When the flour begins to brown, add the broth and cook, stirring constantly, until the sauce thickens. Add the turkey and olives and cook five minutes over low heat. Add the cream and sherry, and freshly ground pepper to taste, and stir well to blend. Add salt to taste. Turn the spaghetti, sauce and half the cheese into a baking dish greased with a little olive oil. Sprinkle the rest of the cheese over the top and bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes.

Stuffing Patties

Shape cold stuffing into patties two-thirds the size of an English muffin. Brown on both sides in olive oil.

Stuffing Casserole

Mix leftover stuffing with green bean casserole in equal quantities. Saute cubed turkey dark meat until crispy at the edges, and in the same skillet sauté a handful of button mushrooms. Stir turkey and mushrooms into the stuffing mix and pour all into a greased casserole baking dish. Top with canned onion rings. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

Cranberry Sauce Salad

In a large bowl, mix leftover cranberry sauce (the fresh-cranberry kind), a cup or more of cubed navel orange sections, a small can of black olives, halved, and a couple handfuls of cilantro.

Thanksgiving Monte Cristos

Dip two slices of good sourdough bread in beaten egg. Spread leftover stuffing on one of the slices, place sliced white-meat turkey on top, and a thin layer of cranberry sauce mixed with stuffing on top. Fry in butter until browned on both sides.

Turkey Sandwiches

Sliced white turkey, room temperature; roasted red peppers in a jar; soft white bread; mayonnaise; fresh-ground black pepper.

Slather mayonnaise on two slices of bread. Layer on slices of turkey. Place red pepper over turkey. Grind black pepper over, cover with second slice, cut in half and serve with potato chips.

Annual turkey findings

For the 23rd straight Thanksgiving Day, the findings of the Kettner Blvd. College of Turkey Surgeons and Airport Relocation Committee remain unchanged.

The surest way to have a moist, flavorful turkey for Thanksgiving is to shoot it and smoke it.

If you are new to the debate, the KBCTSARC was created to research answers to two dilemmas of our time:

1) Is there a way to make turkey moist?
2) Where should San Diego locate its new airport?

The first issue is universal, or at least as widespread as those regions on the planet where turkey is cooked and served.

The second issue is local. I was born in Texas, where you can put an airport almost anywhere, but since 1972 I have lived in San Diego, California. Sometime in the 1930s, San Diegans started talking about the need to relocate their airport from Lindbergh Field to some better location.

Three-quarters of a century later, that question is still in the hands of a committee (not the KBCTSARC) which meets regularly to discuss potential locations as disparate as the Imperial Desert (a two-hour drive) and the Pacific Ocean (airport built on piers or pontoons).

The KBCTSARC, meanwhile, goes about its business casually, a pace consistent with our motto: “Not likely to happen in our lifetimes.” Our current airport relocation advice is: leave it where it is. Yes, Lindbergh Field is the smallest major airport in the United States, with no room to expand, and its traffic capacity is about to be reached (a claim first made, incidentally, sometime in the 1950s). We say: let the capacity be reached! If an airport cap means a cap on regional population, business, congestion, air pollution, infrastructure strain, and crime, then by all means, let us mount a campaign to keep Lindbergh where it is!

Regarding the turkey, a fresh bird (not frozen, or previously frozen) is best, about 18 pounds. You will need a large syringe, used originally by large-animal veterinarians but now a popular item in kitchenware stores and catalogues. And you will need a Weber kettle cooker, the 22-inch size, and a bag of charcoal briquets laced with mesquite. With the syringe, inject into the bird’s breasts and thighs a mixture of melted butter, chicken stock, and a couple tablespoons of sherry. In this mixture, saturate a clean dishcloth and place it over the bird.

Build small, 20-briquet fires on either side of the fire grate. Close the kettle and lid vents halfway. Place the bird, unstuffed, in the center of the grille, to create indirect-heat cooking. Moisten the cloth every 45 minutes and tend the fires, adding a few briquets each time. Remove the cloth the last hour of cooking and inject the bird again. Cooking time should be about four hours. When a thigh wiggles freely, he is done. When he is finished, he will come out with a deep mahogany glaze.

But he won’t taste “barbecued.” He will have a smoky essence, but he will be all turkey. Turkey is like hamburger; it remains turkey no matter what you do to it. Thus the usual accompaniments are correct. Roast a big pan of dressing, with oysters and walnuts in it. Make a mess of giblet gravy, and sprinkle a quarter-cup of leftover coffee on the giblets as they are sautéing. Make a big pan of oven-roasted (350 degrees) vegetables: new potatoes, onions, carrots, red and green bell peppers, broccoli stalks, all chunked and tossed with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. When these are starting to get tender, add the broccoli florets and plenty of crimini mushrooms and let it go another 15 minutes.

Have fresh white bread and a full jar of mayonnaise ready for the turkey sandwiches on Friday. Always the best part of Thanksgiving dinner.

A pleasant feel of burden

Here’s a line from David Carr, writing in the “Technology” section of The New York Times, that I like, and believe in:

“The great thing about the Web is that people can say almost anything they please. But it will only mature as a medium if people see that as less of a license than as a burden.”

He was referring mainly to blogs, which in the main are stream-of-consciousness daily (or hourly) journals streaming from every imaginable kind of mind. Most of them would have run their course quickly, as the novelty wore off, both on behalf of the author and the reader, and they moved on before everyone died of boredom.

But then some of these blogs attracted advertisers, who are interested in hit rates as opposed to content. Some of these blogs have made their authors rich, which gives the others incentives to stick around for awhile.

There’s nothing wrong with that. I hope my blog makes money someday. If there is a demographic for a blog that is mostly completed essays, it will. If it means I have to pour my life’s hourly minutiae into a computer, then it won’t, because I won’t go there.

That being said, I do have to follow up on an experiment I had proposed in the blog the other night, to dress up hamburger patties in onions, garlic, green pepper and Trader Joe’s enchilada sauce (the best) served over rice. But I also had a steak that I had cut from a piece of filet mignon in the bag, selling at CostCo for $7.99 a pound. I made the sauce in one skillet, and I need to say that when the onions, green peppers and garlic were getting soft, I poured in a quarter-cup of coffee left over from breakfast and let it bubble down to a glaze. If there is any, I always add a little leftover coffee to sauces, but that’s another story.

I cut the steak into half-inch slices and sautéed them quickly in a little olive oil to brown them but leave them medium-rare. These I placed on the rice and poured the sauce over. Not bad. I had the thawed hamburger, of course, and these I browned thoroughly in a hot skillet, then turned down the heat and let them cook until they were quite dry, just like my grandmother used to make them. They develop their own glaze. You eat them like a big hard beef cookie, and they are delicious.

These are the kinds of things I think is okay to say in a blog. The Web is an absolutely democratic medium, so others can say what they want, too, and that’s all right. There’s infinite space for it – they are only files in a computer – and no doubt a readership for whatever gets written and mistaken for writing. For that reason, the Web will always support a vast community of the immature, or the immaterial.

And I will be here, too. I love to write, as long as there is a little feel of burden to it.

Getting around the First Amendment

The First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed the press practically absolute power to do its job in the brand-new United States of America.

Its job? Watchdog. To the authors of the First Amendment, and the Constitution, that job may have been the most important work to be done, in a society that wished to be free and democratic. That conviction is apparent in the amendment’s language. It states, in part, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.”

The key word is “abridging,” which means to put limits on. It means the authors understood that freedom of the press was a fundamental reality in the new nation, a reality that existed before the Declaration of Independence, and before the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a reference to freedom of the press. The Constitution did not create freedom of the press in the United States, because the authors understood that freedom of the press predated the Constitution.

The watchdog was necessary to expose power where it was mutating into corruption. The authors knew how fragile men were in the guardianship of power; they built what balances they could into the Constitutional structure of the three governmental branches. But it was impossible to anticipate every mutation that power might take into corruption. That threat needed an independent watchdog.

Since the 18th century, then, the press has enjoyed the First Amendment freedom to do its job in behalf of freedom. Here is John Adams: “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” Thus was the press, via the First Amendment, given free access to all men.

Now the press is being discounted by the Bush administration. Here is George W. Bush, speaking to a reporter: “You’re making a powerful assumption, young man. You’re assuming that you represent the public. I don’t accept that.”

Behind that amazing statement is a strategy: “There’s nothing we can do about the First Amendment, so we have to go around it.” The strategy ultimately won’t work, because if the battle ever comes down to a referendum about the free press, the alternatives will suddenly become very clear. It is just such a nasty feeling, that such a strategy has been taken, like pulling up floorboards and finding swarms of termites.

Scratch pancakes, waffles and chili

I am happy to report that I am marrying a woman (Dec. 3) who not only has a bacon press, but she makes pancakes from scratch.

Karen is smart and fun and involved in the world, and of course that is where it starts. It is also cool, and very distinctive, that she makes pancakes from scratch. She made them last weekend, and they were light and fluffy and floated off the plate up to bite level, even with butter and syrup.

I asked her for her recipe, to share in the blog, and she said flour, sugar, salt, egg, milk, the usual recipe, but there is a secret, she said, and she wouldn’t tell me that. She said all the good cooks would know.

“I make good waffles, too,” she said. She already knows about my preference for waffles not with syrup, but with chili, so she was not too reluctant when I suggested that next weekend she make the waffles, and I’ll bring the chili (Hormel, no beans). And we will have a pecan waffle for dessert.

Talking about chili gave me a dinner inspiration. I took out hamburger to thaw, and I was thinking about just well-done hamburger patties, with onion and garlic, and a green salad. Now I am thinking about the patties, with onion and garlic, but also with green chiles and enchilada sauce, served over rice. We will see what happens.

Veterans Day, 2005

I am totally non-partisan in my aggravation with presidents who get us into wars we a) shouldn’t be in, and b) don’t know how to win.

It was John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who stumbled us into Vietnam. That exercise was well under way when I received my draft notice in August, 1966. I didn’t protest. Many draftees in those days shot their big toes off, or ate a pound of sugar the night before their pre-induction physical, or took off for Canada. I was an American first and a foreign policy critic second, so for me, service was the only option.

I did game the system somewhat. By August, 1966, I knew enough about the Vietnam conflict to know I did not want to go there simply as an infantry grunt on the ground. When I got drafted, I looked around for alternatives. I asked an Air Force recruiter about officer training, but apparently there were thousands of guys who thought of that first.

Eventually I decided to enlist in the Army for officer training in artillery. The guns, I figured, were behind the lines. Not until I was in OCS at Fort Sill did I learn that a) in Vietnam there were no lines, and b) practically all artillery officers begin their combat service as FOs, or “forward observers.” The FO was actually in FRONT of the lines, spotting targets and coordinating fire with commands to the gun batterys, back there behind the lines.

Oh well. No one in the service ever actually believes he or she will get killed. At Fort Sill there was a joke that the life expectancy of an artillery second lieutenant in Vietnam was two-thirds of the way down the ramp getting off the airplane from the States. We laughed, and it was the tough, ironic laughter that young men learn who have been thrown together in a completely foreign and demanding environment whose ultimate lesson was survival. But get killed? No way.

Nevertheless, we were eager to learn what the instructors had to show us about doing our jobs, which included staying alive. If I had worked a tenth as hard in college as I did in OCS, I might actually have made the dean’s list.

When I was graduated and commissioned in June, 1967, there were 170 new lieutenants coming out of Artillery OCS every week. All but about 30 percent received assignments that ultimately would take them to Vietnam. I was one of the 30 percent. My assignment was to West Germany, where I spent two years guarding freedom’s European frontier with a big dinosaur of a weapon called an Honest John.

Men I knew went to Vietnam and died there, or served there, survived, and came home changed men, from shared sacrifice in behalf of flawed leadership and a futile mission. For a long time I felt guilty about that. Then in the mid-1980s, I visited the Vietnam Memorial, the “Wall,” in Washington. It was a transforming experience. The Wall took in the light, the day, the living, the whole life that a day has, at any moment, and me with it. The spirits for whom the Wall was erected were my hosts, and they were as much a part of the day, and the life of the day, as I. It was an astonishing memorial to the 55,000-odd names etched into the Wall. People were etching names onto papers flattened against the etchings, and the names appeared on the paper as if emerging from that life inside the Wall, where they lived.

I touched a few names with my own fingers. Before the day had ended, I realized I no longer felt guilty. I just felt lucky.

Today is Veteran’s Day, 2005, and again we are in a war we shouldn’t be in, and we don’t know how to win. This time the president is George W. Bush, and I am aggravated by him. Mainly I am aggravated by an image that is dominating my day, and it is an image of him interviewing soldiers via satellite television, a month or so ago. It was not a spontaneous, but a staged, event, to encourage public support of the war in Iraq. The soldiers had been coached in their answers.

It struck me as an amazing, and amazingly ignorant, betrayal of leadership principles, but the soldiers didn’t seem to mind. They were not in a position to mind, because a) the president is their commander-in-chief, b) they are Americans first and foreign policy critics second, and c) they are there to do a job, and part of that job is staying alive. Whatever else is going on, they understand, first and last, that they are living in a survival world, and it is their world alone to survive. Not much beyond that matters. If it occurred to them that they were being used by the president in this interview, it was in a way that was completely insignificant, compared to the other uses being made of them by him.

That may have been why the president seemed so uncomfortable in their presence. But that may be giving this president too much credit. If a commander-in-chief can’t speak to his soldiers off the cuff, it’s not likely he is interested in what they think, or feel, or say. George W. Bush has become positively creative, in his second term, in discovering ways to memorialize his aversion to leadership. Becoming so ill at ease, trying to appear a leader of fighting men and women, is not the image of a commander that I would prefer to dominate my thoughts, on Veteran’s Day 2005.

Generation gap now light-years

Children – that is, any person age 25 or younger – live in a world so different from the adult world that it could almost be described as a parallel universe.

This is nothing new. It was as true of my generation, in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s, as it is today, except in the matter of degree. I am now 62. When I was 25 and younger, it was popular to say, “Never trust anybody over 30.” Yet we had to live with, and live like, the old fogies. It set up the sort of angst that began to show up in movies like “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Here is a passage from my book “Warbirds,” which is about Texas high school football, but also about America in the 1950s: “American post-war mainstream culture, and the companies that marketed to it, was still adult-oriented, and in goods and services, movies and entertainment, the kids wore and watched and listened to the same things as their parents because that’s all there was. It was very much a youth culture that convened at the movies and in the hamburger joint parking lots, but the movie was ‘Three Coins in the Fountain,’ and Perry Como, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher and Patti Page sang practically all of the music coming out of the car radios.”

That all started to change after 1954, with the arrival in the youth awareness of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and with the spread of television. But compared to 2005, the 1950s in America might as well have occurred on another planet. Last week, in the comic strip “Zits,” Jeremy’s mom has asked him to take out the trash. Jeremy, not moving from the couch, says, “Ages 14-25, $94 billion in discretionary spending.” His mom counters by offering to freeze his allowance. In the last panel, Jeremy, dumping the trash in the can, says, “The retail industry respects me more than my parents do.”

That’s not generally true, but it is true in most cases that the retail industry pays at least as much (and frequently more) attention to children than their parents do. The kids are spending the $94 billion on things they want and have been manufactured, created, or organized for them. If parents researched their kids one-tenth as much as the retail industry does, millions of parent-child relationships would change. In 1954, parents didn’t have to pay attention to what was out there; it was all the same. In 2005, parents can’t keep up with what’s out there, even the ones who try. When my kids were teenagers, I watched MTV regularly, because it was the best way to find out what was going on in my kids’ world. I also tried to watch “The Simpsons.” But I failed. Bart didn’t interest me as entertainment. Neither did MTV, though it was fun to mute the sound and play old Patti Page LPs while Madonna and Aerosmith tore up the screen.

Kids today have terrific power. They have the retail industry wrapped around their little finger, and the media furiously develops product that shows children in control of their, if not the, world. In their world, the 2005 kids find it popular to say to anyone outside that world, that is, anyone over 30, “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

I have heard chatter coming from that world lately. In our college newspaper staff meeting a couple of weeks ago, a female student-reporter said female students in her classes have adopted anti-intellectualism as a tool of popularity. Apparently they are expending quite a bit of energy at their desks, affecting and maintaining an air of indifference. My student-reporter said when she raises a hand to contribute to the class discussion, the girls behind her roll their eyes at each other and say, “There she goes again.”

Then in the San Diego media, a story has developed about a high school girl posing for artsy photos in a student-produced “literary” magazine. The girl is also a professional (though very much still at the portfolio-building stage) model. The story developed when her parents, who knew about her professional activities, became angry when the “lit mag” was published without their knowledge. Apparently the girl never told them about the project.

The parents are suing the school district, but that’s another story. The story here is about two recent examples of activity in the parallel-universe youth world that give us fogies useful information about that world. It is possible that kids in their youth world believe in their power, and that their power is greater than ours. They no longer are obligated to check with us, or to participate with us, and don’t expect us, or want us, to speak unless we are spoken to.

Troubling. It reminds me of “Lord of the Flies.” The little beasts, murderous in their power lust, become little boys again the instant an adult appears. In this story, 2005 may be the instant for adults to appear.

The familiar feel of Valeriegate

I guess 35 years is long enough for history to repeat itself.

The war in Iraq does feel like another Vietnam.

The indictment in Washington does feel like another Watergate.

Richard M. Nixon was simply George W. Bush with a brain.

Not that it did him any good. Nixon still turned away from the truth, when turning toward it would have saved him all that grief. But to hell with his grief. It was the country’s grief that mattered.

Just as it does now. To hell with George W. Bush’s discomfort with this indictment of his vice-president’s chief of staff, and the continuing suspicion hovering over Karl Rove. To hell with all the old catch-phrases emerging again in the media: “It’s the cover-up, not the crime.” “What does he know, and when did he know it?” There’s a nation out here, and it is the nation that matters

After two years of grief, the media finally forced out the “smoking gun” and Nixon became the first President of the United States to resign from office. He did so, he told us on television, not because he lied to us, but because he had lost his political base in Congress.

George W. Bush is losing his political base so fast that you could argue he’s finally found something he’s good at. After the election he was talking about all the political capital that he had, but that stock has crashed. Katrina, Brownie, Harriet. In this space a month ago I wrote: “I seriously think if anyone is worried about Bush these days, it is the group that has placed its agenda in his hands. I know I don’t feel good about a president who demonstrably cannot tell “a heck of a job” from a cheese enchilada, and I am not even counting on him for anything. The neocons are counting on him for everything.”

This president was already going to have trouble getting anything done in the last three years of his term. Now we have this indictment, that feels like Watergate and is sure to turn into Valeriegate, that could drag on for months or years. Interesting, the role the media has in Valeriegate. In Watergate, it was Woodward and Bernstein, indirectly directed by Deep Throat, who starred in the long search for the smoking gun. Now it is Russert, Miller and Cooper, who may not be the key reporters, but the key witnesses, in the Valeriegate investigation. This scares hell out of the journalism community, which is sworn to protect sources, not testify against them. But the source, Scooter Libby, waived the protection privilege and so they testified. Such is my own paranoia about the Bush White House that I wonder if Libby’s waiver wasn’t another brilliant Karl Rove move to rope-a-dope the media into a brand new kind of trouble.

But the hell with that. There’s a nation out here that needs serving. There’s another similarity at work: the Constitution. It was there before, during and after Watergate, and it is there now, and in the end the Constitution will work, and the system of law will prevail.

We don’t yet know what Bush knew, or when he knew it, in Valeriegate, or even if it was a crime to know it. But then, as we all remember so well, it isn’t the crime, it’s the cover-up. How ironic, and tailored to his intelligence, would it be if George W. Bush had to resign his office for covering up a crime that didn’t happen? Bush says he’s a fighter, not a quitter. Nixon used the same words in his resignation speech. It’s an eerily familiar speech to read, right now. You can read it below, in its entirety, if you like. If you do, plug in “Bush” whenever you think “Nixon,” and see how amazingly the events of October, 2005, feel like something that has happened before.

The speech, delivered on national television, Aug. 8, 1974:

“Good evening.

“This is the 37th time I have spoken to you from this office, where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of this Nation. Each time I have done so to discuss with you some matter that I believe affected the national interest.

“In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the Nation. Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me.

“In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort. As long as there was such a base, I felt strongly that it was necessary to see the constitutional process through to its conclusion, that to do otherwise would be unfaithful to the spirit of that deliberately difficult process and a dangerously destabilizing precedent for the future.

“But with the disappearance of that base, I now believe that the constitutional purpose has been served, and there is no longer a need for the process to be prolonged.

“I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the Nation must always come before any personal considerations.
From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation would require.

“I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad.

“To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home.

“Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.

“As I recall the high hopes for America with which we began this second term, I feel a great sadness that I will not be here in this office working on your behalf to achieve those hopes in the next 21/2 years. But in turning over direction of the Government to Vice President Ford, I know, as I told the Nation when I nominated him for that office 10 months ago, that the leadership of America will be in good hands.

“In passing this office to the Vice President, I also do so with the profound sense of the weight of responsibility that will fall on his shoulders tomorrow and, therefore, of the understanding, the patience, the cooperation he will need from all Americans.

“As he assumes that responsibility, he will deserve the help and the support of all of us. As we look to the future, the first essential is to begin healing the wounds of this Nation, to put the bitterness and divisions of the recent past behind us, and to rediscover those shared ideals that lie at the heart of our strength and unity as a great and as a free people.

“By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of that process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.

“I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision. I would say only that if some of my Judgments were wrong, and some were wrong, they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the Nation.

“To those who have stood with me during these past difficult months, to my family, my friends, to many others who joined in supporting my cause because they believed it was right, I will be eternally grateful for your support.

“And to those who have not felt able to give me your support, let me say I leave with no bitterness toward those who have opposed me, because all of us, in the final analysis, have been concerned with the good of the country, however our judgments might differ.

“So, let us all now join together in affirming that common commitment and in helping our new President succeed for the benefit of all Americans.
I shall leave this office with regret at not completing my term, but with gratitude for the privilege of serving as your President for the past 51/2 years. These years have been a momentous time in the history of our Nation and the world. They have been a time of achievement in which we can all be proud, achievements that represent the shared efforts of the Administration, the Congress, and the people.

“But the challenges ahead are equally great, and they, too, will require the support and the efforts of the Congress and the people working in cooperation with the new Administration.

“We have ended America's longest war, but in the work of securing a lasting peace in the world, the goals ahead are even more far-reaching and more difficult. We must complete a structure of peace so that it will be said of this generation, our generation of Americans, by the people of all nations, not only that we ended one war but that we prevented future wars.

“We have unlocked the doors that for a quarter of a century stood between the United States and the People's Republic of China.

“We must now ensure that the one quarter of the world's people who live in the People's Republic of China will be and remain not our enemies but our friends.
In the Middle East, 100 million people in the Arab countries, many of whom have considered us their enemy for nearly 20 years, now look on us as their friends. We must continue to build on that friendship so that peace can settle at last over the Middle East and so that the cradle of civilization will not become its grave.
Together with the Soviet Union we have made the crucial breakthroughs that have begun the process of limiting nuclear arms. But we must set as our goal not just limiting but reducing and finally destroying these terrible weapons so that they cannot destroy civilization and so that the threat of nuclear war will no longer hang over the world and the people.

“We have opened the new relation with the Soviet Union. We must continue to develop and expand that new relationship so that the two strongest nations of the world will live together in cooperation rather than confrontation.

“Around the world, in Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East, there are millions of people who live in terrible poverty, even starvation. We must keep as our goal turning away from production for war and expanding production for peace so that people everywhere on this earth can at last look forward in their children's time, if not in our own time, to having the necessities for a decent life.
Here in America, we are fortunate that most of our people have not only the blessings of liberty but also the means to live full and good and, by the world's standards, even abundant lives. We must press on, however, toward a goal of not only more and better jobs but of full opportunity for every American and of what we are striving so hard right now to achieve, prosperity without inflation.
For more than a quarter of a century in public life I have shared in the turbulent history of this era. I have fought for what I believed in. I have tried to the best of my ability to discharge those duties and meet those responsibilities that were entrusted to me.

“Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, "whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly."

“I pledge to you tonight that as long as I have a breath of life in my body, I shall continue in that spirit. I shall continue to work for the great causes to which I have been dedicated throughout my years as a Congressman, a Senator, a Vice President, and President, the cause of peace not just for America but among all nations, prosperity, justice, and opportunity for all of our people.

“There is one cause above all to which I have been devoted and to which I shall always be devoted for as long as I live.

“When I first took the oath of office as President 51/2 years ago, I made this sacred commitment, to "consecrate my office, my energies, and all the wisdom I can summon to the cause of peace among nations."

“I have done my very best in all the days since to be true to that pledge. As a result of these efforts, I am confident that the world is a safer place today, not only for the people of America but for the people of all nations, and that all of our children have a better chance than before of living in peace rather than dying in war.

“This, more than anything, is what I hoped to achieve when I sought the Presidency. This, more than anything, is what I hope will be my legacy to you, to our country, as I leave the Presidency.

“To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American. In leaving it, I do so with this prayer: May God's grace be with you in all the days ahead.”

40th reunion

I wasn’t sure I would go to my 40th college reunion. But I did, with my bride-to-be, and this morning I pulled on my new red Stanford sweats and went outside to drink coffee on the glider and think about the weekend.

Stanford University, Class of 1965. We had a good turnout, at least 300 (felt more like 500) alumni and spouses and in some cases kids, at the main party Friday night at the Sheraton across El Camino Real from the campus.

They call Stanford “The Farm,” because it was built on a farm – a very large farm – owned by Leland and Jane Stanford. The university was founded in 1891. It was beginning its 70th year when I and my ’65 classmates matriculated in 1961. Today, the university has passed more than a third of its existence since we left. Over the weekend, we meandered in the Quad among familiar stone buildings that had acquired not just the wear of middle age, but the splotchy patina of history, that you would expect to see on the porticos of Florence and Madrid. It placed in me a sense of awe, and respect, that had not been there before.

We munched and moseyed at the party with our own splotchy patinas, looking for a few old friends in a throng of old strangers, 99 percent of us connected in life by only one bond, names on a class list, not enough to allow us to remember each other.

But I didn’t go to see them. I went to see and be with classmates I did remember, brothers in the Class of ’65 who lived together in the old Delta Upsilon House on Salvatierra Street. There were 14 of us there. Dick, Joe, Paul, Sandy, Steve, Mike, Tom, Rich, Ted, Terry, Bill, Dirk, Brooke and me. We came from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Texas, Washington, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Piedmont, and San Diego. During the weekend, we candidly reviewed our collective academic performance. Only one of us, Joe, graduated with any honors, something called “distinction,” he said, and he only did that because, he said frankly, “I gamed the system.”

My Stanford performance was the essence of marginal. The university has always striven to maintain a diverse population, and I have long suspected that was why I was admitted. To balance the brilliance, they needed a white male freshman from a lower middle-class family who attended Texas public schools. When I go back to Stanford, I have to hide my eyes from the things I missed as a student there. I go only to celebrate the experience of simply being there, which was still a true difference in my life.

We are now all professionals, a lot of lawyers, two doctors. Rich is a neurosurgeon at the University of Connecticut medical complex. I had not seen him in 40 years and probably didn’t talk to him more than 20 minutes total – he could only be at the Friday night function – but it was worth the trip.

There were a lot of old stories waiting to be told again, which is why I almost decided not to go. I didn’t want to hear the old stories of the hell raised in those days and nights of the early 1960s. They belonged to a place in my head that I have worked hard to get away from in the last 15 years, and I like 2005 so much, it didn’t make sense to go back to act out the drunken frat-boy indifference of 40 years ago.

Eventually it was curiosity – and something else – that made me decide to go. In the pre-reunion email chatter there was a lot of talk about the old stories and roaring thirsts and a special Saturday afternoon retreat at Zott’s, still there with the same plank tables and pitchers of beer from 40 years ago. But I wondered if the others might also, at this 40th reunion, have felt a shift forward, a preference for our seasoned 62-year-old selves in 2005, over the gifted under-achievers of 1963.

Then Saturday morning I was showing Karen the Quad, and we walked across it toward Memorial Church, and as we reached the arcade and the steps up to the doors, Sandy and his wife Anne walked out. On Sandy’s face was a look that could be interpreted as awe, gratitude, surprise. It was a look that belonged not to the old stories, but to a new story about interacting with an old place and, in Eliot’s lines about the end of our exploring, “to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.”

There were others of us, exploring. Across a distance we would spot them, the brothers, strolling the Quad as we were, looking this way and that, most of us eventually winding up at the Bookstore and joining long lines (the old grads got 10 percent off) to pay for sweats and t-shirts, many of them in small sizes for grandchildren.

Some of the brothers did make it to Zott’s Saturday afternoon. But I was both exploring an old place and celebrating a new one. I loved introducing Karen to the brothers and their wives, and they were happy to hear about our marriage coming in December. We thought about going to Zott’s, but we needed more to make our first trip to San Francisco together, in the new lives that we have. We drove up for lunch, and it was perfect. Driving back down, it was after 4 and we didn’t try for Zott’s. But that night, at our own special reunion party, I was talking to Brooke, who is the new president of the Washington state bar association, and he told me simply that it was “Perfect.”

There is a mood about “Perfect” that implies summation, something not to be improved on, and I was happy it was the word that a man like Brooke would use about the afternoon at Zott’s. I think the word might also be the best one to summarize the weekend. A college homecoming is not like a high school homecoming. In high school, it was the community that united you. In college, you must create your own family. I believe the people in families are like threads bundled together at the starting place, then each thread following its own direction, the threads spreading far apart, in all manner of directions, each picking up its own colors, then at the times they return to the bundle, sharing their colors with the others. When we were bundled again this weekend, as different as we were, I saw that each of the brothers had given me some of their colors. And I have given them some of mine. The ”something else” that made me go was wondering if I belonged. I found that I do.

At 5:28: Astros terrorize television

Starting time, according to the morning paper, of Houston vs. St. Louis, Game 5, was 5:28 p.m.

I announced this to my bride-to-be: “Houston, St. Louis, 5:28.”

“Five twenty-eight what?” she said

“P.M.,” I said.

“Not 5:30?” she said.

I brandished the paper. “Five twenty-eight, is what it says.”

She didn’t respond, telling me loud and clear how silly it was to announce the starting time of a game as 5:28. It’s just the television business at work, reminding us who is boss with a flip reminder to all us great unwashed of how big this game really is. It is not a 5:30 game. It is a 5:28 game.

I have liked the St. Louis Cardinals since Stan Musial was there, but I hope Houston wins and goes to the World Series. The television people are already gnashing their teeth that the idiot Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim put the New York Yankees out of the playoffs and World Series, eliminating all those eyeballs in the nation’s No. 1 television market.

Yet it would be a good test of this Angels marketing experiment of tying themselves to Los Angeles, the No. 2 market, instead of some backwater orange factory like Anaheim. But that good chance at new information got blown to hell by the Chicago White Sox.

The Chicago White Sox! In the World Series! That cost the network probably $100 grand a minute in advertising rates. The only team worth television’s time in Chicago is the Cubbies, who have more fans in most major league towns than the home team. The White Sox? Please. What’s on the movie channels? Turn on “The Daily Show.”

When Albert Pujols hit the home run to send the National League series back to St. Louis, the television people jumped out of their seats. The end of the world – the Houston Astros vs. the Chicago White Sox in the World Series was one out away. The Cards, with at least a shred of national name I.D., lived to breathe another day.

I like games at this level, where the loser goes home, whoever the teams involved might be. That’s how I market this game to my beloved, whose preferences in televised sports are narrow. Tennis, and, if Tiger Woods is playing, golf. But it was Houston-St. Louis, so I didn’t market that hard, which is why we didn’t see the Pujols home run.

It is reasoning like that among the great unwashed which drives the television people crazy. It must have been a dramatic moment of Kirk Gibson quality, but we missed it because if was Houston-St. Louis. Dramatic moments matter to television only when it’s New York vs. Los Angeles.

Of course if New York and Los Angeles were in the World Series, five of the games would start at 5:28 on the West Coast, 8:38 Eastern, and those New York fans would still be watching commercials after midnight. With Houston vs. the White Sox, they can start it any special time they please, 5:28 p.m., or 1:23 a.m., and about the same number of people will watch. They know that, and I love it that they do.

A woman to love me

In March of 2002, I underwent surgery for removal of my cancerous prostate. The cancer was very small (PSA of 4.3) and the surgery was successful.

The surgery was “nerve-sparing,” meaning the surgeon was able to take the prostate without damage to the nerve bundles that enable erection.

But for several months after the surgery, I had no sexual function at all, partly as a reality of recovering from surgery, and partly because the nerves, though intact, were aggravated during the process, and aggravated nerves take time to recover. For several weeks during that period, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, I was also incontinent. I was going through a big bag of Kotex pads every week and four incontinence bed pads every night.

I thought: “No woman is ever going to want to have anything to do with me.” I was 59 years old, alone, after my wife’s death from breast cancer in 2000 – what interesting years those were – I couldn’t get it up, I wet the bed all night, and I never knew during the day when I was going to spring a leak. Nope, I was going to go through the rest of my life alone, leaving a little trail, like a snail.

But I was wrong, and it is important that men coming out of prostate surgery know this. Many men – most of us, probably – go through life believing that women want the same things from sex that we do. But they don’t. Guys, we admire our equipment a lot more than they do, even when we are healthy, virile stallions of 35 or 40. Sex for most women does not begin and end with adoration of a man’s crotch.

Nor can situations like impotence and incontinence get in the way of a woman’s love for you, if she loves you. I knew good friends, a married couple, and more than once, as I saw them socially, they told me the real score. He is a year older than I am, a colon cancer survivor, surgery more than 30 years ago that left him with a colostomy. Radiation at that time created scar tissue that in the last five years has confounded his life and threatened his health in ways that truly should not happen to a human being.

He has tubes coming out of him indefinitely, but he has his strength back, and his life is full. He and his wife, one of the most beautiful, vibrant and professional women I ever knew, invited me more than once to dinner in those Christmas season days of 2002 and sat at their table and told me how much they loved each other, and she told me how she loved him, and how much a woman could find to love in a man like me. They told me how much I, as a man, had to look forward to when I met the woman who would love me.

In January, 2003, I began regular procedures called cystoscopies that gave me my continence back. Slowly my spared nerves regained enough tingle to convince me to get a prescription for Viagra. I picked up that first prescription of eight pills, and the pharmacist said, “That will be $38.” Thirty-eight dollars! I pulled out my credit card, gave it to her, and silently laughed at the circumstances of a man, leaning against the counter, who still had Kotex in his glovebox just in case and for the rest of his life would be paying more than four dollars to get a hard-on.

In September, 2004, I met the woman who would love me. She is 54, smart as a whip, and beautiful. We are engaged to be married Dec. 3. We are living in sin in the meantime and having more fun than should be legal. She has women friends who tell her about men friends who have had prostate surgery and walk around looking so confused and sad. I remember that sadness, and what caused it, and I was wrong. It’s the man a woman loves, not his equipment, and with that, the two of you will always go all the way.

(This blog will be archived in the Back Booth under "Her Cancer and Mine.")

An urge for Barbecue Chili

A coolish, gloomy, damp weekend is forecast – our first of the fall – and I am getting the urge to make Barbecue Chili.

Texans always get the urge to make chili when the weather turns cool, but barbecue is so much in our blood too, that it can be difficult to decide. One autumn – 1979, it was – I decided to see if the two could be combined.

They could, and I have been bragging about it ever since. I have been promising Karen for months that I would cook up a batch, but it was always too summery. This Sunday, I think, will be just right.

If you look for the recipe later on, you will find it in the “Cookbook” at the Back Booth.

You need three pounds of boneless chuck roast, and three pounds of boneless pork shoulder, on the lean side but with some fat, too. (There is a lot of dicing involved, and the boneless cuts make it much easier. If you want to be John Wayne and get bone-in roasts – they’re cheaper and have a little more flavor – go ahead.)

I use a 22-inch Weber kettle to barbecue. Pushed to one side of the fire grate, make a fire of about 30 charcoal briquets – the mesquite kind – and toss on two or three chunks of actual mesquite charcoal. Line a 10 by 13 aluminum cake pan with foil (makes cleanup a lot easier) and place it on the fire grate opposite the fire. Put the grill in place.

Salt and pepper the roasts and place on the grill over the drip pan. Position the kettle cover so the vent is over the meat and barbecue the roasts for four hours, adding seven or eight briquets and a mesquite charcoal chunk every 45 minutes or so.

Have ready two large onions, a large red and green bell pepper, two Anaheim chiles, and six or more garlic cloves, all diced. Let the roasts cool a bit after taking them out of the kettle, to make dicing easier. Dice the roasts into pieces no bigger than your pinky fingernail. This is a messy, onerous step, but so was mixing the paints for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

From the drip pan, measure four tablespoons of fat into a large dutch oven and sauté the onions, peppers and chiles in the fat over medium heat until they are soft and the bottom of the pot starts to brown a little. Add the garlic, one tablespoon each of salt and oregano, and four tablespoons (or more) of good chili powder (I like Gephardt’s Eagle Brand).

Stir the spices into the vegetables for a minute. Then add one 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes, and one 8-ounce can of tomato sauce. Pour the excess fat off the drip pan, and add a cup of water to the pan and heat, stirring, to bring up the cooked-on meat juices. Add this, and the smoked meats, and water barely to cover, and black pepper to taste.

Stir it well, cover and simmer three hours. It makes about five quarts, but it freezes well, and will unfreeze you, on other chilly nights to come.

In bed with Cathie Adams!

George W. Bush has worked a miracle. He has gotten me in bed with Cathie Adams.

He is asking Cathie and me to trust him. “Trust me,” he keeps saying.

Trust him to what? Have the brains God gave a doorknob? Fine. Trust him that Harriet Miers will make a good Supreme Court Justice? Cathie and I have a problem with that.

For me, the problem is trusting George W. Bush. When I think about trusting him, I see him peering out the window of Air Force One at the Katrina landscape the third day after the storm, and then flying on to Washington, instead of turning the plane around and landing at Baton Rouge and being presidential. Here was a man proving once and for all that he couldn’t lead fleas to a dog, and now he is asking me to trust him?

For Cathie Adams, the problem is Harriet Miers. She may not be conservative enough for Cathie, who is a Phyllis Schlafly conservative and president of the Texas subsidiary of Schlafly’s “Eagle Forum.” Cathie expected Bush to nominate a potential Supreme Court justice with a proven conservative track record. Why he chose an unknown like Harriet Miers was a blow.

So now he says to Cathie and me: “Trust me.” But I can’t, and she can’t. Cathie told The Washington Post: “President Bush is asking us to have faith in things unseen. We only have that kind of faith in God.”

So here are Cathie and me in bed together, two Americans who could not be farther apart in what we believe to be true, and neither of us having the slightest bit of faith in the President of the United States. How on earth did we come to this?

First, I have to get Cathie Adams out of my bed. She is a dead person walking. She has no faith in things unseen. My whole existence is faith in things unseen. I am in the 57th grade. This year I will learn things I didn’t know last year, in 56th grade, and next year in 58th grade I will learn things I don’t know now.

What will those things be? I have no idea. They are things unseen. But I know what I have faith in. I have faith in a spirituality that isn’t the dogma of rigid belief, but dynamic, and alive, and growing. My spiritual life continually brings me, when I am spiritually and mentally ready, to a new door, which I open, and step through into a space of virgin light and unbreathed air so pure that it is awhile before my heart is calm enough to let me see and breathe again.

These rooms are not created for me, but already exist, destinations in place at this moment, but I don’t know what the next one is, or the next, and I won’t, until the day I arrive. By this argument, the last room must already exist, and probably God is waiting there, but I can’t know that, or Him, until I arrive.

Faith in things unseen? My God, that’s all there is. In my life, anything is possible, and that makes tomorrow such an awesome mystery. But Cathie Adams wants to establish tomorrow before it gets here. And she represents the political base that put George W. Bush into the White House, with the serious expectation that he turn America into a dead land of faith only in things seen.

But now he has betrayed her! What can I do but shower him with gratitude? It is a most confusing time. Talk about things unseen. Never in my life did I expect I would become politicized, but knowing now that Cathie Adams is out there, 57th grade looks like it could be the year.

New in the Back Booth

New material in the Back Booth. Battling an egg slump in the Cookbook, and in Turning Toward Her Breast Cancer, a new chapter.

Riding out an egg slump

You never can remember exactly how it begins.

You go into the kitchen to make breakfast. Two eggs, basted; bacon; toast; coffee. You fry the bacon, and crack the eggs into the skillet, and one of the yolks breaks.

So it begins. You don’t think about it until the next day, when it happens again. Then it happens a third time. You start to look over your shoulder. They say you’ve had it when you start looking over your shoulder.

The technique is to tap the egg firmly on the skillet rim to make a clean, straight crack. Then in one smooth motion you part the shell and drop the egg into the skillet. It is a pure expression of confidence.

Suddenly you can’t get a clean crack. You have no feel. You become tentative. The result is a tentative, spidery crack with jagged edges that snag the yolk. With the third failurem you know you are in a slump.

You try everything. You change your grip. You straighten your wrist and cock your elbow. You straighten your elbow and cock your wrist. You shorten your backswing. You change your stance. You stand back from the skillet and up close to it. You practice when you can, but a man can only eat so much egg foo yung.

The aggravating thing, when you are in a slump, is that you never break both yolks. How is it that a person can break one yolk every time for a week? A good breakfast, half-ruined. There aren’t many greater disappointments.

The slump will end. All slumps do. You even know how it will end. You will go into the kitchen one morning and go two-for-two, and that will be the end of it, as if it never happened. You’ve been in other slumps. You know that you just have to ride them out. A slump is always in the back of your mind, but you can’t dwell on it. Your self-esteem can rot entirely and suddenly you can’t even chop an onion.

You have to think positively. You have to think of things that you can do.

Every morning you shave your face and all of your neck without a nick. You can tie your shoes in the dark. You can parallel park. You can type 60 words a minute. At a ballgame, you can shell peanuts and hold a beer between your legs and not spill anything. You can fold burritos so the filling will not leak. This slump is doomed.

The real sports business

It sure feels good when your team wins.

At least I think so. I live in San Diego, so Monday mornings when the Chargers win feel better than the Monday mornings after they lose. When they win, I look forward to reading the morning paper and sharing the glory. When they lose, I barely glance at the game stories.

I feel that way because I am a sports fan. Many Americans – probably most Americans – could not care less whether a football team wins or loses, or even if the game is played at all. They are not sports fans, and that is fine. They are probably fans of other things like art, music, dance, mathematics, philosophy, because most people, I am sure, are fans of something.

People can always use something to feel good about, and the easiest and best place to look is at the professional world. We like to see someone who is beautiful the way we aren’t, athletic the way we aren’t, musical the way we aren’t, famous the way we aren’t, successful the way we aren’t.

All these things give their fans a quick, feel-good fix without the fans having to do the least bit of work. No wonder sports is such a huge business. Their real product is not baseball, football or basketball. Their real product is drug-like, delivering euphoria in the good years and hope for euphoria in the lean years. And the dealer is the media. When the Chargers win, the San Diego paper usually gives six pages to the game coverage, and when the Padres gained the baseball playoffs this fall, the paper printed daily special sections with game coverage.

Sports is not a “sports” business; it is a media business, when you dissect it. There is a certain risk in being a dissector. The great 20th century essayist E.B. White wrote: “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

If I thought it took away any of the Monday-morning euphoria, I would not talk any more about sports as a media business. But, realizing it has not taken away any of my fan satisfaction, I feel okay about pushing on.

All the media rules and definitions were created by people, after all, and we instinctively know what is going on. But people need to know how to “read” media, too, to get an objective handle on euphoria sold as a product, so they can enjoy their sports without being manipulated at the same time.

In fact I am developing “Reading Media” (look in the Back Booth) as a primer for the public, about how the media does its work. This material isn’t taught in high school, but it should be. If it were, the public would be familiar with the Definition of News: “News is anything that changes, or threatens to change, the status quo.”

On this very legitimate definition hangs all the news the media brings to the public, every day, 365 days a year. It is the journalist’s core job, reporting that change, or being aware of the threat.

But the threat to the status quo is also at the heart of the media business of sports. The single question: “Who is going to win?” is responsible for billions of dollars in revenue to a media willing to pay multi-millions to sports agencies like the NFL, MLB and NBA (and the NCAA) for rights to bring the question to fans sitting on the edge of their couches. It is also a mainstay in newspaper circulation figures. I am familiar with a fairly recent survey that suggests 35 percent of readers subscribe to a newspaper solely because of sports.

At the heart of the “Who is going to win?” question are several media values: proximity, prominence, conflict and sensational.

Proximity describes either a physical or emotional/psychological attachment of a person to an event. I am a Chargers fan because they are physically close to me, and it makes an emotional difference to me (even if I try to deny it) whether they win or lose. I feel this way even though I have soured on professional football because of its commercialism, and I absolutely hate television’s obsession with trying to turn the sport (collegiate and professional) into something bigger than a game, which is, of course, manipulation targeted at young (some of them 50 years old) males.

I feel good when the Padres win, too, though I am more a football fan than baseball. They were within a couple of games of winning the National League West with more losses than wins, which gained them national attention for the media value of novelty. Then in the playoffs first round, they had to play St. Louis. Talk about a threat to the status quo.

The real weapon of mass destruction

A ranking officer in the FBI – I didn’t catch his name – was being interviewed by the BBC (broadcast on NPR) yesterday, and he was asked: “What do you fear the most?”

“What I fear the most is terrorists,” he said without hesitation, “specifically terrorists who have weapons of mass destruction.”

I don’t know if he said that partly because he wanted forgiveness for the American misread of Saddam and WMDs with which the Bush administration justified invading Iraq. But I thought it was reasonable that the two – Saddam as a terrorist and WMDs as atomic or chemical weapons – were linked in his mind.

But they haven’t linked in my mind since the 9/11 anniversary, and a Discovery Channel documentary about 9/11’s planning and execution. Over and over again, the documentary displayed the faces of the terrorists who took over the four aircraft, and looking at these faces over and over again stirred in me the deepest anger I have felt in a long time.

They were sickening. But Iraq was not vital in their organization. They were not operating under the Iraqi flag. Fifteen of the 19 were Saudi nationals, and all that bound them together was hatred of America, a passion for dying, and Osama bin Laden.

If Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were on trading cards, I would give you one million Saddams for one Osama. But he is at large, can’t be found, after all this time, while the Bush administration’s war on terror is headquartered in Baghdad.

And yes, as people have begun to suggest, Iraq is becoming another Vietnam. Iraq and Vietnam are bound at the hip, because again, this country doesn’t know who the enemy is, or how to fight him. Invading Saddam’s Iraq to get at bin Laden’s terrorist crew is like going to the florist for flour. Like Vietnam, our side in Iraq does not know what to do about how the enemy fights. In Iraq now, America’s big weaponry is jeopardized by small, smart bombs whose design is forever two months ahead of the Americans’ ability to recognize and neutralize them. In their newest iteration, they are triggered by infra-red devices used in garage door openers.

In the war on terror, President Bush is like Charlie Brown on an old greeting card I wish I still had. On the cover, Charlie Brown is at the plate, bat high, waiting for the pitch. He is thinking: “Just when you think you understand the game . . . “: Flip open the card, and there is Charlie Brown, bat still ready, but zipping at him is not a baseball, but a football, and Charlie Brown says, “. . . they go and change the rules.” Poor Charlie Brown. He could be Michael Brown’s dad.

In Washington, there is President Bush, setting the example for the nation, bat high, waiting for the big one, the Saddam WMD, which he is going to hit out of the park, when Osama has already slipped the real WMD past him: a box cutter.

With a box cutter, Osama brought mass destruction to our side, destruction that is still going on, with no end in sight. Iconic buildings in New York’s heart brought down on an ordinary Tuesday morning, with more than 3,000 lives lost. Destruction to industries: insurance, investments, airlines. Destruction of freedom, with the Patriot Act. Resources destruction, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on band-aid security remedies. Confidence destruction, with a frustrated president goaded into attacking an enemy he could find, justified by evidence he couldn’t find, and probably didn’t exist. Another 2,000 lives lost so far in that action, bringing the total box cutter dead to more than 5,000. More resources destruction, with $200 billion the present price tag in Iraq. Then into that destruction roars a hurricane, whose repairs the nation suddenly can’t pay for. Four years of destruction, and counting . . . .

It would be interesting, to undertake a total accounting of the destruction brought to this country, whenever that destruction is finally judged to be ended, by Osama and his 19 soldiers armed with box cutters. I wonder if he had any idea. Listening to the FBI, I know they don’t.

Taking the road less traveled

Sad to learn that Dr. Scott Peck has gone over, at the age of 69, a time of life when he could have most enjoyed those things about life that he had worked to prove true.

Some years ago, in my 40s, I decided that the best possible life would be to have the imagination of a six-year-old and the experience of a 65-year-old. It has worked out almost exactly that way. I am only 62, but that has been enough maturity to experience experience, and to know first-hand how central it is to happiness.

A key chapter in that experience has been exposure to Scott Peck’s thinking. “Life is difficult,” he began, in “The Road Less Traveled.” Then he argued in behalf of turning toward, not away from, difficulty. He called it “the means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively.” He called this “discipline,” and provided four tools a person could use to obtain discipline in one’s life.

One tool was delayed gratification. “Delaying gratification,” he wrote, “is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure in life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with. It is the only decent way to live.”

I read those words for the first time in 1988. I forgot most of the passage, but a few of the words stuck, and have been with me since: “It is the only decent way to live.” They have guided me in ways Peck may not have intended. To live decently, I reasoned, one must do decent things. What does it mean, to do decent things? In many cases, I discovered, it meant to do things the opposite of, or at least quite different from, how I had done them before.

And the words have been reward in themselves. A year ago, I met the woman I am soon to marry. In the course of a now-forgotten (and I hope not too high-minded) conversation, I said the words: “It is the only decent way to live.”

“Scott Peck,” she said immediately, and went to her bookshelf to show me her copy of “Road Less Traveled.” Pleased to have struck a chord, I trotted out another phrase I remembered: “Love is nurturing another’s spiritual growth.” She found it on Page 81 of her text and read to me the entire quote: “I define love thus: the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

Whatever else this woman discovered about me as we came to know each other, at her bookcase she learned that I held an active, practicing definition of love with which she agreed, and I am positive it has made a difference. We have years of nurturing and growth ahead, and truths about love to be discovered that as yet we can only imagine.

In its obituary, The New York Times used this quote from Peck: “I make no distinction between the mind and the spirit, and therefore no distinction between the process of achieving spiritual growth and achieving mental growth. They are one and the same.”

To me, that was affirmation. It meant spirituality wasn’t the dogma of rigid belief, but dynamic, and alive, and growing. My spiritual life continually brings me, when I am spiritually and mentally ready, to a new door, which I open, and step through into a space of virgin light and unbreathed air so pure that it is awhile before my heart is calm enough to let me see and breathe again. These rooms are not created for me, but already exist, destinations in place at this moment, but I don’t know what the next one is, or the next, and I won’t, until the day I arrive. By this argument, the last room must already exist, and probably God is waiting there, but I can’t know that, or Him, until I arrive.

In every new room, sooner or later, life is difficult, just as Scott Peck said. In my experience, happiness has also been in every room, as long as I turned toward the difficulty, and not away. It always seems the decent thing to do. It truly is the only way to live.