Joe Brucia

Joe Brucia has gone over, and following his spirit outbound is a sad exhalation from newspapermen who covered sports, particularly on the West Coast, and especially in San Diego.

Joe was a communications man. His job was to make sure the word – our words – got out, from press tents at sporting events, mainly golf and tennis tournaments. Joe was beloved by the greats and the grunts, whom he treated the same. I was a grunt, a lowly desk man in The San Diego Union sports department sent occasionally to cover the pro tennis circuits as they passed through town. Joe took care of me like he would Jack Murphy or Red Smith or Ring Lardner, whom Joe probably knew.

Joe was happy, and he was enthusiastic, and he was infectious. As far as I saw, nothing ever got him down. He is only the second man (Otto Bos was the first) I have ever said this about: Joe Brucia had a very low threshold of pleasure. His silver linings were a mile wide. He was there before you got there, and he was there when you left. He appeared to love it, every minute.

I don’t know what it’s like on the sports ramble anymore. I hope it’s as loose and collegial as it used to be, but I doubt it. Too many bottom-liners running newsrooms now. The old movies about newspapermen and women over-play the fun part. Not many I knew could ever be that quick or sassy, but I knew quite a few who were slow and sassy. Inside the press tent was a group as professional – sometimes more – than the athletes on the courts. They certainly were more interesting. Being a newspaperman fills up your head with history, and there’s no camaraderie quite like it, when guys sitting around the press tent start playing it back.

History? Joe Brucia was a Western Union operator for 48 years. He started out in the business taking sheets of copy from this or that famous writer at a golf tournament, and sending it out in Morse Code. His obit in The San Diego Union started out with a story, told by obit writer Jack Williams: “It was just a $33.33 check, presented to a promising young golfer at the 1962 Los Angeles Open. But Joe Brucia could see history written all over it. So he photocopied the check – the first of Jack Nicklaus’ storied professional career.”

Nicklaus will exhale at the news of Joe’s passing. Out goes another light in a fading world, so vibrant in its day that they made movies about it. Somebody should make a movie about Joe Brucia. It would start with his fingers tapping a telegraph key, and the camera pulling back and up from the room and the building, RKO-style, following telegraph lines, but faster, faster than speeding locomotives, to tell the speed of Joe’s dots and dashes traveling through the lines, then, appearing out of the air, floating towards us, newspaper pages, and all the dots and dashes morphed by linotypes into words again, words and sentences and paragraphs telling the distant cities what happened on a course or on a court or in a ring.

Nobody out there ever heard of Joe Brucia. Joe’s name never appeared on any of those stories, sent in Morse Code or teletypes or the machine-from-hell Trash 80s into which Joe fed pages when I knew him. But Joe was the story, really, of 20th-century newspapers. I wish I had had the sense to talk to him, get his stories down on paper. Maybe somebody did. Maybe the book is already started. Makes me mad. It would be such a fun book to write.

Anniversary music

I haven’t been here in awhile. Occasionally I get tired of my own stuff and just don’t want to think about it for awhile. I wish other bloggers did that occasionally. But of course I am not a blogger. Bloggers do stream-of-events or stream-of-consciousness. For that, the online environment is a must. I don’t want that. I still want to be picked up like a newspaper.

Karen and I celebrated our first anniversary this morning. We were married at home one year ago, out on the patio on the hillside, with its totally analog impression of being suspended between earth and sky. “We live in a treehouse,” Karen said, looking out the kitchen window last week. I am 63, she is 55. We are very lucky.

We celebrated at 8, the hour of our vows. Between us, champagne and tears flowed in morning December light in Southern California, light like no other, and a sharp Santa Anna wind out of the east. It all filled me up. In fact it overflowed. I lacked the capacity to hold all the feelings, and trying to do so, stretched me a little. I told Karen that: “You stretch me.” On our second anniversary, I will be able to hold a little more. Our third anniversary, a bit more still. And so on. I will always be too small to hold it all, and that is exciting.

We put our wedding music on again: a CD of an Andre Rieu concert, live in Tuscany, turned up to semi-blast. At some point, they played Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” just the Lone Ranger part, without the reflections-in-a-languid-pool buildup. I wished for the intro – it sets up the hellbent part so nicely – but I guess it would not have been practical, in an outdoor concert venue in Tuscany.

So there went the brass, sounding charge for the cavalry of horns and strings, escorting hearts and souls forward and upward into their own suspension between earth and space, and what I thought was, this music began as notes on paper. Rossini never heard the “William Tell Overture” until he wrote it. A man in a study, penciling music language onto paper, as I do now in my back-room office – or is that where I am, really? - connecting my mind to a page in essentially the same way, though I don’t have to crumple a page and start over.

I thought about how Rossini, at his work, was going to be filled up by what he was doing. His notes on paper were going to create a sound. On this page of mine, I have the liberty to go back to his study, before his overture joined the world’s sounds, and sit next to him in my mind, look at him scribbling away, and think: what is this work he is doing, going to do to him, when for the first time he hears the music it makes?

I shiver at the reality. Rossini, in a hall, the music cavalry onstage, swirling delicate figures in the lanquid pool, until it is time. Then: hi-yo, Silver. How did he stand it? How did Gioacchino Rossini, age 37, survive the evening of Aug. 3, 1829, at the Paris Opera?

Same way I survived the morning of Dec. 3, 2006. I filled up, overflowed, and had to stretch a little. And now I am connected to a page, and I wonder if it were translated into music, how would it sound? Now that it is finished, I hope I can hold at least a little more than I could when I started at the top of the page. And it would be great if people reading this for the first time felt different at the end. What if it stretched Rossini? Always there to shoot for. But you can’t do it every day.

Fourth quarter, first Wednesday

The Tuesday elections have proven to be a repudiation of George W. Bush and his administration. Democratic and independent candidates carried the day, and Republicans no longer possess a conservative majority in Congress.

Either way, the nation was going to lose. We’ve lost already, and it’s only the first days after Election Day. Bush has a team that knows how to get around Congress, if it has to. If the Bush team doesn’t have a Republican Congress to “work with,” then the team will work without Congress. Loss of a Republican congressional majority has been a repudiation, but only a vocal one. Bush, Cheney, Rove and Gonzales will continue on their same path, maybe with more machete work to do on balances of power put in place in 1789, but continuing all the same.

It is this inevitability that is so depressing. It’s like the nation is behind, 100-0, at the beginning of the fourth quarter, there’s no mercy rule, and nobody can leave until the fat lady sings. If the Congress had remained Republican-controlled after the elections, who knows what the final score might have been? Now that Republicans have lost control – I don’t say, “Democrats have gained control,” because it’s not that black-and-white (or red-and-blue) – but now that Republicans have lost control, the final score, when Bush is finally carried off the field in 2008, may be 150-14.

Surely a non-Republican Congress can scratch out a couple of scores in two years, but most of the drives won’t get inside the 40-yard line, against an opponent that knows how to use the rules so well.

But who cares? What good are 14 points in the last quarter of a game that was over at the half? In the Congressional locker room, what will the coach say? “Folks, you did your best.” Well, rah rah rah. The stories in the morning papers, when the gun finally sounds in 2008, will be about which nation is bloodied the worst, Iraq or America.

And all we can do is sit in the stands and watch. Can’t leave, can’t get away, can’t go home and fix a martini and turn on the TV and try to forget. Wait til next year? Sheesh. Who wants to watch 2007 in America?

The Bush team has already won. The new Congress, in red jerseys or blue, will be the scrubs, playing out its worst loss in history against the Bush first-string, still sending in a new play every day with a new way to hide the ball until it’s too late. You almost hope all the Republicans had won on Tuesday. Go ahead and shudder at the thought. Or you can shudder at the thought of what the Bush team can do in the fourth period, even ahead 100-0, if it is motivated by a Congress wearing blue jerseys. It would be better to lose, 150-0, with a red congress, than 250-14 with a blue one. Wouldn’t it? Talk about the blues. I got ‘em, baby.

We take what distractions we can find, from the carnage on the field below. The other day a vendor came up the aisle with copies of The New York Times. I bought one, and in it found a column by Thomas L. Friedman, under the headline, “Insulting our troops, and our intelligence.” I have nothing against Republicans, or Republican or conservative philosophy and ideology, or honest Republican elected representatives, or evangelical Christians gay or straight, and I am not energized by the prospects of a party that counts John Kerry among its leaders. I am just an American, sitting in the stands, rooting for a country that is behind 100-0 with a full quarter left to go, reading a Friedman column that is the most succinct expression I have seen, of the way that I feel. Only Friedman is more optimistic than I. He believes Tuesday could make a difference. Remember Andy Griffith’s funny monologue, “What it was, was football”? Well-oiled fellow next to him slaps him on the shoulder and says, “Buddy, have a drink,” only Andy says, “drank.” To you, my seatmates in this stadium from hell, I slap you on the shoulder and say, “Buddy, read Friedman’s column. And have a drank. Have several.”

Fourth quarter

The Tuesday elections may prove to be a repudiation of George W. Bush and his administration. Or the Republican candidates may carry the day and maintain the conservative majority in Congress.

Either way, the nation is going to lose. We’ve lost already, and it’s only the weekend before Election Day. Bush has a team that knows how to get around Congress, if it has to. If the Bush team doesn’t have a Republican Congress to “work with,” then the team will work without Congress. Loss of a Republican congressional majority will be a repudiation, but only a vocal one. Bush, Cheney, Rove and Gonzales will continue on their same path, maybe with more machete work to do on balances of power put in place in 1789, but continuing all the same.

It is this inevitability that is so depressing. It’s like the nation is behind, 100-0, at the beginning of the fourth quarter, there’s no mercy rule, and nobody can leave until the fat lady sings. If the Congress remains Republican-controlled after Tuesday, who knows what the final score will be? If Republicans lose control – I don’t say, “If Democrats gain control,” because it’s not that black-and-white (or red-and-blue) – but if Republicans lose control, the final score, when Bush is finally carried off the field in 2008, may be 150-14.

Surely a non-Republican Congress can scratch out a couple of scores in two years, but most of the drives won’t get inside the 40-yard line, against an opponent that knows how to use the rules so well.

But who cares? What good are 14 points in the last quarter of a game that was over at the half? In the Congressional locker room, what will the coach say? “Folks, you did your best.” Well, rah rah rah. The stories in the morning papers, when the gun finally sounds in 2008, will be about which nation is bloodied the worst, Iraq or America.

And all we can do is sit in the stands and watch. Can’t leave, can’t get away, can’t go home and fix a martini and turn on the TV and try to forget. Wait til next year? Sheesh. Who wants to watch 2007 in America?

The Bush team has already won. The new Congress, in red jerseys or blue, will be the scrubs, playing out its worst loss in history against the Bush first-string, still sending in a new play every day with a new way to hide the ball until it’s too late. You almost hope all the Republicans win on Tuesday. Go ahead and shudder at the thought. Or you can shudder at the thought of what the Bush team can do in the fourth period, even ahead 100-0, if it is motivated by a Congress wearing blue jerseys. It would be better to lose, 150-0, with a red congress, than 250-14 with a blue one. Wouldn’t it? Talk about the blues. I got ‘em, baby.

We take what distractions we can find, from the carnage on the field below. Yesterday a vendor came up the aisle with copies of The New York Times. I bought one, and in it found a column by Thomas L. Friedman, under the headline, “Insulting our troops, and our intelligence.” I have nothing against Republicans, or Republican or conservative philosophy and ideology, or honest Republican elected representatives, or evangelical Christians gay or straight, and I am not energized by the prospects of a party that counts John Kerry among its leaders. I am just an American, sitting in the stands, rooting for a country that is behind 100-0 with a full quarter left to go, reading a Friedman column that is the most succinct expression I have seen, of the way that I feel. Only Friedman is more optimistic than I. He believes Tuesday will make a difference. Remember Andy Griffith’s funny monologue, “What it was, was football”? Well-oiled fellow next to him slaps him on the shoulder and says, “Buddy, have a drink,” only Andy says, “drank.” To you, my seatmates in this stadium from hell, I slap you on the shoulder and say, “Buddy, read Friedman’s column. And have a drank. Have several.”

Conscious Conservatism

There are Neoconservatives, and President Bush tried to establish a Compassionate Conservative label, but the development that may ease us toward the light at the end of this national sewer we are in is the growing Conscious Conservative movement.

Conscious Conservatives are those conservatives, mainly Republican, who have become compelled by the events of the past five years to start putting some distance between themselves and George W. Bush as their political chief executive. They and he may still share some core ideologies and philosophies, but they have just become too conscious of Iraq and Katrina, cronies doing a heck of a job, executive power grabs, the word “terrorism” as a political tool, dangerous detainee policies, national surveillance practices and end runs on the Constitution. Unconscious Conservatives have witnessed these same things, and some of them may be nervous about Bush, but they wouldn’t give up his guarantees to pro-life, guns, and James Dobson, if Bush declared Congress unconstitutional and locked out the Supreme Court.

The irony is, they can have those things, and a competent chief executive, too, when the nation’s electorate becomes conscious-based, a consciousness that takes into account globalization, and terrorism, and the price of being lured into asymmetric warfare against the wrong enemy. No president may have been available, who could measure up to the demands on this country after 9/11, but President Bush’s record would not be too difficult to top. If consciousness, and not political railroading, had been a feature of the 2000 conventions and election, the nation may still have had a pro-life, evangelical Republican president, whose record today almost certainly would have to be preferable to that of George W. Bush.

Conscious Conservatives may be starting to realize something else. The administration points out, almost every day, that the nation has not been attacked by terrorists since 9/11. The emerging reality is that the 9/11 attack hasn’t ended yet. It was just the starting point, the place in Manhattan where the enemy plunged a syringe into the nation, injecting us with a fear-based virus that set into motion erosive events that are occurring still, unchecked. One such event is the immigration wall measure, that James Goldsborough wrote about last week. Another is the signing yesterday, by President Bush, of law that deprives some people of the habeas corpus rule that is a cornerstone of United States jurisprudence.

Such events don’t affect most of us directly, but they create a climate. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about loving airplanes. I also love anticipating trips on airplanes. We are going on a trip soon, and I was online at the airline Website, looking at the planes we will be on, looking at our seat assignments, looking at maps of our destination airports, and suddenly I stopped and stared at the screen. I could feel somebody out there in the government, feel what it would be like if somebody was watching my clicks, and wondering what I was doing. I remembered what a student told me recently. At the library he checked out a book for a paper he was writing on terrorism. A few days later, the FBI showed up at his door. President Bush likes to ask: do you feel safer than you did five years ago? At that moment, looking at a map of DFW, I had to respond: No. I felt watched. This is an erosive climate. I can feel the fear.

Some of this new cadre of Conscious Conservatives enjoy high position. Every time you see a Republican office-holder trying to distance him- or herself from the president, you are looking at a Conscious Conservative. With the November elections close by, their awareness is apparent. As they reassure their district and state voters that they are not in lock-step with Bush Administration policy, the Conscious Conservative movement grows.

The movement should have the effect of expanding the political middle. Not only Dubya-dubious Republicans, but independents and moderate Democrats could find Conscious Conservative appealing. I feel that I am one of those. I am pro-choice, but I am also pro-state’s rights, pro-less government, pro-taxes, as long as they are fair, pro-Constitution, pro-separation of powers, pro-business, pro-mom, pro-apple pie, pro-flag, a veteran, and pro-faith. If a person is pro-faith, how can he also be pro-choice? It is difficult, yes, but so is the woman’s position, and the decision she must make. Only she should have the right to make it.

Who would our candidate be? I have a feeling he or she would come from the conservative side. I can’t think of any particular Democrat smart and tough and willing and aggressive enough to lead the country at this uniquely difficult time. John Kerry couldn’t even rise to keeping himself from getting swift-boated in 2004, and good old avuncular Al Gore lacks the charisma to galvanize the millions away from the margins of the staunch, even on the left. I’m not sure there is an American alive, Republican or Democrat, who after six years of Bush leadership could step in and do anything but sink up to his or her knees in the Bush muck. Colin Powell is tall, and John McCain has been in very deep muck before, so one of them might be able to find some useful footing.

What we really need is a Dave, like in the movie. Good old Dave. I have been thinking about him ever since Bush turned his back on New Orleans. If indifference were an impeachable offense, Congress could send George Bush winging off to Texas at just about any time. But it’s not, and George W. Bush will be President of the United States for more than two years. The best that Conscious Conservatives can hope for is for Dave, a stand-in with affection for the country and a reasonable idea of what to do next. Where have you gone, George Washington? Wow. George W: from first to worst.

The 45th reunion

In the old days, high school reunions left me hung over. Today, they leave me hoarse.

At the 10th and 20th reunions, it was all about breaking into old cliques and drinking your way through your own personal high school highlight reels. Last week, at the 45th, it was all about talking to everybody with a nametag on, with a subtle double-clutch from the past into the present tense. There must have been 100 of us, and if we didn’t all talk to each other, it was because we ran out of time.

All those dipwads, the thumbnail photos of the faces in our senior class yearbook, Abilene, Texas, High School, Class of 1961. Beautiful dipwads, athletic ones, accomplished ones, most likely to succeed, and most likely never to be heard from again, ones. But still dipwads, barely damp with identity after three years in a West Texas high school adult factory.

Now, by God, they all have stories. Amazing stories, happy stories, sad stories, tough ones, routine ones, special ones, brave, even heroic ones, survival ones, triumphant ones, hopeful ones, all written on the road, all those strange highways, that brought us individually from 1961 back to Abilene in 2006. I guess we just had to wait for it. We didn’t have much to talk about, at the 10th and 20th reunions; we hadn’t had enough time yet. Now we have, and it was worth it. I have names, listed on an envelope, just to jog my memory of the fabulous things they said. Many people didn’t come, staying away from the way we used to be. They would have gone home wiser than they are now. But how were they to know?

Sweet, demure, Ellen Turner was there. She taught senior English; I was in her class. Now she’s 94, be 95 on Nov. 18, and I hope somebody in Abilene reading this will bring her flowers. Her best subject, she said, was math. She loved math, but she understood it so well that she didn’t want to teach it, because it would have been boring. I never knew that. She had a relative, a brother or a cousin – 45th-reunionists’ memories aren’t as dependable as they used to be – named Raymonde (I am almost positive she said it was spelled with an “e”) Howard, who was flying a C-47 over France on D-Day and was shot down and killed. Mrs. Turner remembers that as soon as she heard about the invasion on the radio in Abilene, she had an awful feeling that Raymonde had died. She told me how to find his grave, in the military cemetery at Normandy.

Mrs. Turner’s husband was the technician that wired together Abilene’s first television station, KRBC, in 1953. I never knew any of this. Later, he built the studio at KNIT Radio, the first station devoted to rock and roll in the 1950s in Abilene. A disc jockey at that station was Slim Willet, who affected hillbilly dress and accent and wrote unremarkable country songs, with the exception of “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes,” a national hit for Perry Como in 1954. Slim, whose real name was Winston Moore, actually was a smart man with a degree in English. “You know, Mrs. Turner, Slim Willet was actually an erudite man,” I said. “Yes,” she smiled, patiently, “I know.”

I am sorry now that Mrs. Turner may think the former student sitting next to her was named Gary. I had forgotten my nametag, and Molly Cline, the reunionmeister, wouldn’t let me go through the lunch line without one. So off her registration table, I selected Gary Hooker. I wanted Cathy Cox, but Molly wouldn’t let me have it. I had earlier introduced myself to Mrs. Turner as “Michael,” but when I sat down next to her, she said, “Hello, Gary, how are you?”

I stayed with Bob and Marilyn Cluck. When we were in high school, Bob’s mom always seemed to have a lemon icebox pie made when I came over to their house. Last week, Marilyn had a lemon icebox pie ready. A thoughtful thing to do. Bob and I went to the Dixie Pig for breakfast Saturday morning; my uncle Clyde used to take me there for pancakes every Saturday morning when he got back from World War II, in 1946. I bought a couple of Dixie Pig t-shirts – I brag often to my wife, Karen, about the Pig – but I left the damn things in the back of the rental car. At the 45th reunion, we were all starting to slow down.

New brother to the club

Fascinating, this week, to read the story by New York Times travel writer Joe Sharkey, of his experience on an airplane he believed might crash. He was aboard the executive jet, flying above the Amazon forest, that was clipped by a jetliner with 155 people aboard. The jetliner crashed, killing all on board, but Sharkey’s story tells how his damaged aircraft was able to stay airborne until they could find a landing field.

It was the first such experience I had ever read, since the same thing happened to me, almost 50 years ago. On the afternoon of Friday, Nov. 28, 1958, I was on an airplane that I believed was going to crash. For a moment, in fact, I believed it had crashed, and that I must be dead.

I was a sophomore on our district champion high school football team, the Abilene Eagles, and we were flying from Abilene, in West Texas, for a first-round playoff game against Ysleta, an El Paso suburb. We were on two chartered DC-3s, the first team and head coach on the first plane, the scrubs on the second. I was on the second, in the last seat on the right-hand side.

I loved airplanes, knew all the makes and types, liked to go to the Abilene airport and watch the Pioneer Airlines DC-3s come and go. So I knew, that at Big Spring, 100 miles west of Abilene, there was Webb Air Force Base. The base was south of us, to our left, so I got out of my seat and asked the two guys across the aisle if I could lean across and look out their window at the base. There it was, the runway perpendicular to us, maybe five miles away.

In the next instant, without any sense of anything happening, or time passing, I was stuck, spread-eagled, to the ceiling of the airplane. I couldn’t move a finger, couldn’t close my eyes. Directly below my eyes was the window I had been looking out of. Below that was the ground, brown West Texas ranch land, coming up to get me.

In another instant, again without any sense of happening or time, I was on the floor, underneath one of the guys – Graham Holland – I had been leaning over, and on top of us was a lot of stuff, including a long, large, glossy stick, red and white with black marks and numbers on it. Loving airplanes, I knew this was the stick that, at the airport, they used to measure the fuel in the wing tanks. I looked at the stick and thought: this stick is supposed to be outside the airplane. It must mean that I am outside the airplane, too, which means I must be dead. Never having been dead, it made sense that this is what it would look like to a departing spirit: just like life.

But then we started to stir, pick ourselves up. We were flying again, straight and level. It was very quiet on the airplane. The pilot, Charles L. Kageler, came on the intercom. He said we were almost hit by a T-33 jet trainer, taking off from Webb. He said he cut power to his engines, stood the DC-3 (a fabulous airplane) on its left wingtip, and dropped about 1,000 feet. That’s what stuck me to the ceiling. Kageler said the trainer missed us by about 25 feet.

We flew on to El Paso, played the next day, won, 45-0, and flew home without incident. But the people on the airplane that Friday afternoon had become members of a club who know what it is like on an airplane that is about to crash. We knew three things: your life really does pass before your eyes; the ground really does come up to get you; there is no panic, or terror. No one on the airplane yelled, or screamed; it was eerily quiet, during and after.

For 48 years, I believed the absence of terror was because of time. It happened so quickly, the brain couldn’t figure it out. The brain, being a logical instrument, strives to put patterns on everything, but things were happening too fast. I came to believe it was a form of compensation: people who were about to die at least would not die in the indignity of terror.

Now, this week, I read about Joe Sharkey’s experience, a “terrific jolt,” the sight of a wingtip sheared off and the skin of the wing peeling back, losing speed and altitude, and no visible place in the thick rain forest to land. They were in the air for 30 minutes, “the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life,” Sharkey writes. Plenty of time to figure things out. Yet, Sharkey writes: “Amazingly, no one panicked.”

So there must be something else about human beings. We – not our intellect, but our visceral selves – must understand the singularity of life, of being alive, and we are born with an instinct that says such a possession cannot, will not, be taken away. A wingtip is sheared off, the plane is going down, but that’s okay. Plenty of time left. Plenty of fight. I have witnessed some evidence of this. A person is dying, wasted by disease, yet in the last minutes, the final minute, the last seconds, the body is fighting visibly, ferociously, to stay alive, to possess its singularity, until finally it relaxes, takes a deep breath or two, and then surrenders. This thing about life in us makes us all noble. The World Trade Center victims didn’t jump to die. They jumped because it was their last fighting chance to live.

Front Page Values

People are so funny. They have no idea how a newspaper does its job. Last week, stripped across the top of our local paper, The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Letters page, were letters whining about some of the U-T’s recent choices for front-page stories.

One griped about the huge front-page photo of Padres pitcher Trevor Hoffman, the morning after he broke Lee Smith’s all-time major league record for saves. Another thought the front page should be reserved for international, national or statewide content. A third wondered about showing a photo of San Diego teachers on the front page, where the news of the day should be.

Reader annoyance with editorial decisions is an eternal, fascinating irony. The values and realities that editors use to make their decisions were not created by the media, or by the first newspaper publishers 500 years ago. Those values and realities were created by people, our ancient ancestors, dating all the way back to the caves, and we carry them still, every day, and we know what they are. News values are nothing more than categorization and measurement of the way people react to events, and those reactions began tens of thousands of years before the media came into being. In fact the media came into being simply by adopting those values and turning them into a business. There are 10 such values in all, each measured on a strength of zero to 10. Every value is present in every story in the paper, each on its strength of zero to 10.

When an editor looks at a photo of Trevor Hoffman on the front page of The San Diego Union-Tribune, he or she sees novelty (10), proximity (10), prominence (10), and sensationalism (7 or 8). Timeliness (7) and human interest (about a 6) are there, too, but the others are the big four behind the Trevor photo.

Novelty is the news value invoked by the unusual, the rare (Snow In San Diego!). Setting a record in major league baseball in America is an unusual event. People still talk about Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record. Setting a record for saves hadn’t been done for decades. Novelty insured that the feat was noted in Monday newspapers all over the country, even three paragraphs in The New York Times.

There are two types of proximity: physical and emotional. Physical proximity means the story happened close to you. Hoffman pitches for the Padres, the home-town team. If he pitched for far-away Cleveland, the story would have been three paragraphs on an inside sports page. Emotional proximity is just that: the story is close to your emotions. Little guy vs. big guy, David vs. Goliath, is the classic example, because in our lives we have all been Davids at some point, and we know how it feels. When you read a David and Goliath story, you are reading it because of emotional proximity. The U-T did, this week, miss an emotional proximity story. In yesterday’s Letters page was a short letter, way at the bottom, that wondered why, in its Monday “This day in history” feature, the paper didn’t list the PSA crash here on Sept. 25, 1978 that killed 144 people. I don’t expect an actual story until the next anniversary year, 2008, but I did scan the pages, looking for a mention. When it happened, it was a 10-plus for all the values except progress, probably the biggest news story in San Diego media history.

Prominence is simple: big names make news. Trevor Hoffman is a celebrity, who achieved a novel feat, in his home town. And sensationalism, in its legitimate sense, refers to an event that is sensational. The biggest sensational story that I can remember is the farewell tour of the pianist Vladimir Horowitz. His performances were sensational, and they were noted in the media worldwide, as they happened. My biggest personal sensational story is Steve Garvey’s home run (off Lee Smith, incidentally), in Game 4 against the Cubs in 1984. You can ask anyone who was there (all 10 million of them) if they have ever heard a louder roar.

So if people know what these values are, why do they gripe about front-page content selection? They do it because of demographics. Every reader, from highbrow to sports fan, has his or her own list of stories they want to see. It forces editors into choices, which are usually based on another value, consequence: on any given day, which demographic represents the largest number of readers likely to react to this story? It would be good if the paper could get all the news in, every day, but the paper would weigh 20 pounds, they could never sell enough ads, and 90 percent of the content would go unread by any given reader.

Info for MC112 students

Welcome to students from the Media Com 112 classes, M-W 2:30 and 6 p.m. Sorry I can’t be there, but this cold is not better. It has, however, provided me with column material for my regular voiceofsandiego.org column, which will appear tomorrow. The column is an example of journalists always keeping their antennae up, for things that happen as we move through our community, that might make an informative or interesting story.

So today I am going to teach you from a distance. I am using my blog because it is a much easier medium than creating a new page at my GC faculty page. I am going to give you some information about the story diagrams I handed out on Monday, and at the bottom of the blog you will find the raw information for your next assignment, which will be due Monday.

Also, I have left Jefferson for you to pick up, from an envelope on the corkboard next to my office door, Room 261, at the opposite end of the hall from the classroom. Those rewrites are due Monday. Don’t worry about Crash right now, just bring those rewrites and originals on Monday.

We have been talking about Complex Stories in class. A complex story is one in which there is more than one feature. Remember our work with the example in Chapter 7, when we separated features and details (using the Definition of News) we found at least six features. Remember we learned that we can’t have more than four features in any one story, and we had to decide, using the Definition of News, the News Values, and the 5 W’s, which of those six features we were required to put in the lede, to tell the consumer what the story was about.

Then we arrived at Step 2: Find the lede. The lede, of course, tells the consumer what the story is about in a one-sentence paragraph of 25 words or less. In a Simple Story, finding the lede was a slam-dunk. We had found only one feature, one thing going on in the story, so that one feature was also the lede.

Now, in a complex story, we have not one, but two, three, or four features. Finding the lede is not as simple as with our old simple stories; it is more complex. But it is not that complex, if you know how to use the Toolbox. Using the Toolbox, finding the lede in a complex story becomes nothing more than a game of connect-the-dots. It works like this:

You separate features and details, and you find more than one feature. Aha! You have a complex story. You go to Step 2, Find the lede. The Toolbox tells you that the lede tells the consumer what the story is about, etc. The Toolbox also tells you that for a complex story, there are only three kinds of ledes available to you: the Summary Lede, the Outstanding Feature lede, and the Combination Lede.

The Summary includes all the features; an Outstanding Feature is one feature so outstanding that it is far more important than the others; and a Combination uses more than one, but not all, of the features. As with our example in Ch. 7, let’s say we have four features in the story. If we choose a Summary Lede, we’ll use all four. If we choose an Outstanding Feature, we’ll use only one. If we choose a Combination, we may use two, or three, features in the lede.

At that point, it becomes simply a matter of trying them out. With our Ch. 7 example, we tried a Summary lede, but found it was too “crowded,” too much information to get into a good lede. Then we tried Outstanding Feature, but no one feature in the story was enough to give the consumer a good idea of what the story was about. Then we tried our third and last choice, the Combination. We put two features in the lede: “Two people were killed and 12 injured yesterday when three tornadoes ripped through the city.” That was okay, but using three was even better, to give the reader a vivid picture of what the story was about: “Two people were killed and 12 injured yesterday, when three tornadoes ripped through the area, destroying or damaging 100 homes and businesses.”

All we did, to arrive at that lede, was connect the dots, like this: We started at Step 1, separate features and details. We went to Step 2, find the lede. We went to Purpose of the Lede, to tell us what we needed in the lede. We went to Types of Complex Ledes, to tell us the three types of ledes available. Then we simply tried them out.

Once we make the decision about the lede, we get to the rest of the story, which is outlined in the diagrams that I gave you on Monday. They show you this: in a complex story, the type of lede you choose determines the design of the story.

Look at the Summary diagram. In all the diagrams, we assume we have three features in the story. When you choose a Summary lede, you use all the features in the lede. That means, that in the rest of the story, you only have details, arranged in logical order. That’s not so bad.

But look at what happens when you choose an Outstanding Feature lede: in the lede, you have used only one feature, which means there are two features left over, and they are going to have to be placed somewhere in the story. This presents a problem: if the Outstanding Feature is so important that it stands alone in the lede, then it makes sense that the consumer is immediately going to want some details about that feature, to explain its importance. That means, in the second paragraph, you are going to put details of the feature. I know that I have preached to you, that the features are the most important part of the story; they are what the story is about. And details explain the feature.

But it is perfectly ordinary, in a complex story, for details to go before a feature! Imagine the reader is your best friend. You run up to the friend and say, “Guess what!” “What?” the reader says. You tell him the lede, the Outstanding Feature. The friend says, “No kidding!” And then he or she will ask you a question, about that feature. Immediately, the friend wants details. So, in the Outstanding Feature diagram, the second paragraph, and maybe even the third, will include details of Feature 1. Not until you get to the fourth paragraph do you introduce Feature 2. (You are probably confused now, because the handouts I gave you show “Detail 2” in the fourth paragraph, and “Detail 3” in the fifth. Those are typos, committed by a man with a cold in a hurry. Mark them out and write in “Feature 2” in the fourth paragraph, and “Feature 3” in the fifth.

A Combination Lede presents the same problem. When you use two features in the lede, there will be one left over, that must be put in the story, in logical order.

As I said in class, you are responsible for knowing how to diagram the first five paragraphs of each of the three types of complex ledes. On the exam, I might ask: “You have a three-feature story. Of the three, two are clearly more important than the other two. Diagram the first five paragraphs of the story.” What would your diagram look like?

We will refer back to these diagrams next week. For Monday, please read Ch. 8, “Polishing the Lede,” which we will discuss Monday. Below is information for the assignment, Arson, which is due Monday. Also due Monday are the Crash rewrites with originals, and the Jefferson rewrites with the originals. Remember you will find Jefferson in envelopes on the corkboard by my office door. Have a great weekend, and don’t catch cold.

ARSON

Five Fire Department units responded to a call about 10 p.m.
At Fifth Avenue Apartment Motel.
Two apartments were found burning
More than 100 persons were evacuated.
Firemen fought blazes for about 45 minutes.
Both apartments were gutted, while others
Suffered water and smoke damage.
Owner Joe Beasley said he would have to close up
Until he could have the building completely repaired.
One resident told firemen a “former girlfriend”
Deliberately set the fires after he and the occupant
Of adjoining apartments had an argument
With her over a six-pack of beer.
Police arrested Vickie Sue Young
Who gave a Virginia Avenue address
And charged her with arson.
She is in jail in lieu of $40,000 bond.
She will appear in court next Friday.
Firemen said Young splashed lighter fluid
On drapes and furniture in both apartments
And tossed a lighted match at them.
Police plan to question Young about fires
In two other apartment buildings where she was a frequent guest.
(Source: Fire Captain Leonard Basler; Police Detective Bill Cory)

The 19-man army

What I can’t get over is how Osama bin Laden managed to damage my country so badly with an army of 19 men.

I guess we would have to concede him his victory in New York. That defeat was an awful price to pay for ignoring all the intelligence that pointed to an attack.

After that, though, it wasn’t any time at all before we completely acknowledged his unique (in our battle history) skill and determination as an enemy. We know his tactics and understand his strategy. Why, then, five years later, are we still letting him bleed us?

All terrorists are media experts. They know how to manipulate reaction. They know how to get into the news, get onto television, and stay there. Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building at 9 o’clock on the morning of a sunny day. Bin Laden’s pathetic soldiers flew the airplanes into the towers at 9 on the morning of a sunny day. They did that for an excellent reason. They wanted to give the cameras maximum time to see. The plot just discovered in Britain all involved blowing up planes coming from Europe to the United States. Those are daylight flights. Going the other direction, they all take off in the late afternoon or evening.

Reaction is bin Laden’s sword. At first it was a tiny sword, no bigger than 19 boxcutters being snuck through security. Today the sword is huge, for one simple, maddening reason, one reaction that bin Laden was counting on: we are helping him swing it, with our Iraq war, and Patriot Acts, and surveillance schemes, and end runs on the Constitution, and dissolution of values and principles into so-called correct ideology.

So much damage, that sword has wrought in five years. And now it is so late, and we are bleeding from so many cuts. There must be someone in my country’s leadership who has the skill, intelligence and determination to take the sword out of bin Laden’s hands. But I can’t think of a name. All the famous names, in the national leadership, and I can’t think of one who would know exactly what to do, and how to do it, at this point. It certainly hasn’t been George Bush. He may be the Decider, but what we need desperately is a Uniter.

We need someone to remind us who we are. The Bush administration keeps telling us we’re safer than we were five years ago. I don’t feel safer. There’s this huge sword swinging around. Our leadership, with all its display, is acting just like the terrorist wants us to act, then suggests we are dead wrong if we disagree. It makes all of us out to be acting just like the terrorist wants us to act. But we’re not that way. I watched the buildings burning on Sept. 11, and at some point got on email and messaged everybody I knew that we should think what the terrorists would want us to do, and then do the opposite thing. Nobody objected, or disagreed. So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know how to fight a terrorist. We just all need to be brought together in this quiet, firm, fight, and quickly.

Trying to watch football

It’s going to be a long football season. I watched part of the Florida State-Miami game on Monday night and was overwhelmed by the production, which shrank the game itself to a relatively calm eye at the center of a hurricane of visuals and sound.

All television sports is being shrunk in this way, by hurricane production values aimed at a target audience of young men and boys who like bells and whistles more than they like blocking and tackling. The commercial breaks are long and frequent, and the commercials are compressed action movies. Everywhere there are tents and bright lights shining down on sideline sets with former coaches and jocks yelling analysis at each other, and into the living room. Somewhere behind all that are the players, trying to keep warm, even in September, for that moment when play is allowed to resume.

I wish football on television was like dinner at a good restaurant used to be, when the food was great and the waiter was invisible, until two seconds before you needed him, and there he was. Today, everyone who watches sports on television eats at Ruby Tuesday’s (where, true to the form, they brag about making hamburgers out of steaks), or does takeout. ESPN has a morning sports talk show called “Cold Pizza,” which nails the demographic exactly.

The better the game, the worse the hurricane. This weekend it’s No. 1 Ohio State at No. 2 Texas. It is a game that should not be scheduled before the first week of October. It is being played the second weekend in September for only two reasons. One, the hurricane has become monstrously hungry over the last few years, with its power to suck millions of young male eyeballs into primo (god, we even start to talk like them) position to view commercials for steak hamburgers and cheap, shiny cars in which to go for six-packs and tomorrow morning’s cold pizza. That is a hunger that needs to be fed by a big game every week. Two, the hurricane is greedy for perfect conditions. If Ohio State and Texas were allowed to go four games into the season, against teams other than Northern Illinois and North Texas, one of them might lose, and they would no longer be No. 1 and No. 2. They might also be undefeated, and much better, more interesting teams with four games under their belts, but that is not a risk worth taking.

Somewhere in there is a game many of us remember, and still want to watch. The rules have been changed a little, to shorten the game. This year, the clock will start at the instant of kickoff, not when the returner catches the ball, and after first downs, the clock starts when the referee spots the football, not when the ball is snapped. Essentially, the new rules take time away from the game to compensate for the extra time the production hurricane is taking for commercials and halftimes. There are, again, only two reasons for that. One, advertisers and television schedulers want their games in three-hour packets, so when games are stacked consecutively, they can stay on schedule. Two, when games start running long, viewers go to sleep, or pass out, which kills the hurricane pretty quickly.

These are all excellent business reasons, when football on television is the business and revenue is the bottom line. Are they professional? Personally, I don’t think so, but I can’t back that up with anything more than an observation. During the Florida State-Miami hurricane, suddenly there were a succession of football coaches – all the head coaches in the Atlantic Coast Conference, it turned out – making simple statements, as if to their teams in the locker room, about fair play and sportsmanship. They didn’t look or sound believable. They didn’t even look like they belonged.

Mr. Bush's Katrina timeline

President Bush is in Mississippi and Louisiana this week, making Katrina anniversary appearances, but it doesn’t count.

When it did count, or could have counted, a year ago, the president was elsewhere.

On Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005, as national television watched Katrina spinning up to full strength in the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin said that, in a worst-case scenario, storm surge would sweep past the levees and flood the city with 18 feet of water. Nagin was exploring the idea of ordering a mandatory evacuation. Making matters worse, at least 100,000 people in the city lacked the transportation to get out of town. Nagin said the Superdome might be used as a shelter of last resort for people who had no cars, with city bus pick-up points around New Orleans. “This is not a test,” Nagin said. “This is the real deal.”

On Sunday, Aug. 28, Mayor Nagin said, “We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.” Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. In Crawford, Texas, at the Vacation White House, President Bush declared a state of emergency for the Gulf Coast, an action that cleared the way for immediate federal aid. “We cannot stress enough the danger this hurricane poses to Gulf Coast communities,” he said. The president participated in a videoconference with disaster management officials, and he spoke by telephone with the governors of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. FEMA director Michael Brown took up a position in Baton Rouge, north of New Orleans. FEMA started to position water, ice and military rations to points in the Southeast. Thousands of New Orleans residents went to the Superdome.

On Monday, Aug. 29, the hurricane made landfall south of New Orleans at 6 a.m. NBC’s Brian Williams reported from inside the Superdome as winds and rain penetrated its roof. A levee was reported breached, and flood waters gushed into the city. President Bush was flying from Texas to California, where he made a speech on the new Medicare program at a senior center in Rancho Cucamonga. He and Mrs. Bush then flew to the North Island Navy base in Coronado in the afternoon and rode in a motorcade to the Hotel del Coronado.

On Tuesday morning, Aug. 30, 80 percent of New Orleans was under water after multiple levee failures. President Bush made a speech at North Island Naval Air Station in which he compared the Iraq war to World War II. The media focus was almost completely on the New Orleans disaster. “The scope of the catastrophe caught the city by surprise,” reported The New York Times. “A certainly sense of relief that was felt on Monday afternoon, after the eye of the storm swept east of New Orleans, proved cruelly illusory, as authorities and residents woke up Tuesday to a more horrifying result than had been anticipated.” “The magnitude of the situation is untenable,” said Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. “It’s just heartbreaking.” During the day, President Bush said he would cut short his vacation and fly back to Washington. He left San Diego and flew back to Crawford.

On Wednesday, Aug. 31, looting was widespread in New Orleans and the atmosphere increasingly hostile. Some of the looting was of emergency supplies. Food, water and ice were not reaching refugees stranded in New Orleans. Reports from the Superdome were horrifying. “A major American city all but disintegrated yesterday,” said the AP. President Bush departed Waco, Texas, in Air Force One, instructing the pilot to overfly New Orleans and the Gulf Coast devastation. A photo, now famous, is taken of the president looking out of the airplane’s window at the wreckage. The plane continues on to Washington, D.C., where the president later said, “We’re dealing with one of the worst national disasters in our nation’s history. I’m confident that with time you’ll get your life back in order, new communities will flourish, the great city of New Orleans will get back on its feet and America will be a stronger place for it.”

Thursday morning, Sept. 1, the AP reported that “Criticism of the federal response to the most sweeping natural disaster in U.S. history rose to a fever pitch. Some who survived Katrina’s assault Monday died of neglect in the ruins of their homes, on city streets and at New Orleans’ Superdome and convention center.” New Orleans mayor Nagin issued “a desperate SOS.” The White House announced Bush would tour the area Friday.

On Friday morning, Sept. 2, President Bush flew on Air Force One into Mobile Regional Airport: At a briefing there, he spoke the famous line to FEMA director Michael Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

The president toured sites in Alabama and Mississippi and was driven through New Orleans. But he was a day late and a dollar short. The time for him to be on the ground in New Orleans was Tuesday, or at the latest, Wednesday morning. He may not have actually been able to achieve anything, but he would have at least been perceived as doing something, and that would have made all the difference, to us, and to him. Now, a year later, the world might be a different place. But it’s not.

The 9/11 Comic Book

Texans of my generation, looking at the “9-11 Comic Book,” will instantly remember their 7th grade Texas History class. A comic book was used then, too, to teach history.

The comic book depicted the struggles in 1836, at the Alamo, Goliad and San Jacinto, that brought about the defeat of Santa Anna’s armies that won independence for Texas from Mexico. I don’t remember how the book was bound, or presented, but the pages looked just like the pages of a comic book you would buy at the drugstore.

As far as I know, the information was factual, but obviously the action in the drawings was, by definition, dramatized, simply by bringing the events “to life.” We proceeded through graphic scenes of battle, and preparations for battle, that were seen only by people who were actually there.

I liked the book. It was as professionally drawn as any commercial comic book you could buy. The Texans were portrayed as the good guys, and the Mexicans were the bad guys, the same bias that ultimately came through in print texts, though it became much more vivid in comic book form. I’m sure there is an archive of complaints about that, and I have a query in to the Texas State Historical Association.

Also included were the typical sound effects (“Blam!” “Boom!” “Whoosh!”) common to commercial comic books. I don’t remember any objections to that at the time – we were, after all, reading the book under the direction of educational professionals – and we had all seen and heard similar sound recreations in the movie theaters.

I have already ordered a copy of the 9-11 book, real name “The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation,” by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon. If you want to look at it, slate.com is excerpting it, a chapter a day, until Sept. 7. It is definitely a comic book, very well done, but with liberties of style that are raising the question, “Should they be doing this?” Bringing to dramatized life events that occurred in 1836 are one thing, but bringing to dramatized life the battle to take back Flight 93 is something else.

Yes, there are film and video interpretations of that battle, but people are acclimated to seeing drama on a screen one minute, and then allowing that same screen to show them comedy. Our expectations of comic books are less flexible. Unless, of course, you were a Texan in a 7th-grade Texas History class in the 1950s. I realize that citing the Texas educational system does not amount to an overwhelming endorsement for teaching history in comic books, but it has provided that demographic specific flexibility, that others won’t have, when they look at the 9-11 book for the first time.

The comic book simplifies what happened, and that could be interpreted as disrespect. It is also, for better or worse, becoming typical of how Americans receive all their information: there is a short, visual, simplified version, and a long, print version that is as complex as the subject matter requires. Right now, we see the short, visual version on television, with the tease at the end, “For more about this story, go to our Website at www.cbs.com.” At the Website is the long, complex, print version. Both stories have been written by the same reporter. This semester, in my classrooms, as in all the semesters for the last three or four years, I will teach my journalism students how to write both the visual and print stories, because they won’t get hired anywhere if they don’t know how to do both. In fact, pretty soon, the visual (TV) and print (newspapers) mediums will merge, the TV remote will become a mouse also, and at the end of the visual story on the screen, there won’t be a tease, but a link directly to the Website.

I think this is a good thing. It better be, because it is inevitable. I think it is good because the short, visual version always lacks depth. You obtain depth through the print version. Linking them makes perfect sense. That’s why I think the 9-11 comic book is legitimate, and valuable. It is the short, simplified visual version of the longer, extremely complex, print version that, for the time being, is the document of record of an event that we will be a long time understanding.

Accepting the possible

You take your mentors where you find them. It was a turkey buzzard, minding his own business, who made me see that anything is possible.

I thought he was a condor. Huge, black bird, circling and soaring in a hot midday sky around and above our house, several years ago. I was impressed that I might be looking at a condor, a rare bird to which much symbolism is attached. When I spotted him, I thought that some mechanics of symbolism might be in place, guiding him to this house, where I might see him.

Such is vanity. I felt so special that I went inside to telephone the zoo, to report a sighting of this endangered creature far from his natural mountain habitat.

“Probably just a turkey buzzard,” said the voice from the zoo. “We get calls like this all the time. Does he have an ugly head?”

I couldn’t answer that question. I found the binoculars, took them outside, and found the bird, ranging back and forth not more than 200 or 300 yards above and beyond our deck on the hillside, and not more than a quarter-mile to either side. Yes, he had an ugly head, red and wormlike. I watched him anyway. Watched him for a couple of days. He had the span and the presence of a condor, soaring and wheeling on wide wings whose elegant tips and trailing edges flicked in fine-tuned equilibrium with the faint signals from the hot, still, noonday air.

At his wingtips were long, slender feathers, fanned out aristocratically, individually changing pitch (I could see through the binoculars) with every nuance of lift and drift. Not many creatures enjoy such rapport with their element, and I envied his.

The sun was directly overhead. The bird was in a low, watchful glide over the hillside when he apparently had a change of mind. He let the air lift him higher, and turn him in lazy circles, until he was several hundred feet above me. I tracked him with the binoculars. He could see me – I thought he looked at me – though I don’t suppose he was watching me. I wanted to imagine some communication going on, and so I did, even if it was me with me.

He drifted toward the sun. It was so bright that I had to look away. I picked him up again on the other side of the brightness. He came back to the center, circling the brightness as I watched, spiraling nearer to it. I thought it was magnificent, and symbolic at least of opportunity. I watched as long as I could, until I saw him touch the edge of the sun. Then I looked away. I blinked my eyes for only a couple of seconds, then lifted the binoculars again, to pick him up.

But the bird was gone.

I dropped the binoculars and scanned the wide view, from sun to horizon. I turned quickly around the 360-degree circle, searching the sky, feeling very much on the earth point of an axis. The bird was not there.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I looked back at the brightness. Maybe he was still orbiting there. I watched the vicinity for 10 minutes, and the bird didn’t emerge. For the next half-hour I tried to watch all of the sky at once, looking for him. I had watched the bird fly into the sun, liking the symbolism of it, and then the bird had disappeared. For a minute I wished it had been a condor, then was glad it was not. Condors should fly into the sun only for holy men. My turkey buzzard, though lacking romance, had made the same mysticism perfectly accessible to an ordinary man with the sun in his eyes.

The bird did not reappear. I was compelled to wonder what it might mean, to see what I had seen, when a man saw a bird fly into the sun. If I, for whatever reason, had been assigned to be the one to find out, then I was willing. And that changed me.

I saw the bird a couple of hours later, cruising the hillside as before. So I had not been chosen, or assigned, after all. But I was changed nevertheless. I still have no idea how he got out of the sun, but I am not disappointed. In those minutes when I believed he might be gone, I accepted the contention that anything is possible. And when anything is possible, what is there to fear from the unknown, from the realities that can’t be measured? What else is there to do, but to accept the idea of God?

The barbecue technique

I have received a request for directions in preparing Texas barbecue.

You start with a whole brisket, “in the bag,” as they say. You need one that is 8-10 pounds, with a decent slab of fat on it. The fat does the basting, and if you get a brisket that is too lean, it will be dry. Take the brisket out of the bag and sprinkle it liberally with salt and fresh-ground pepper.

My cooker is a 22-inch Weber. I can actually do two briskets on it, if you are feeding that many. Pile a fire of about 30 charcoal briquets (I use Kingsford Mesquite) against one side of the fire grate. On the fire, place two or three chunks of lump mesquite charcoal. You can also use soaked wood chips – oak, mesquite, what have you. On the grate opposite the fire, place a drip pan – I use a big, rectangular aluminum baking pan – lined with foil. Open the bottom vents all the way.

Start no later than 7 a.m. Place the brisket over the drip pan, and place the cooker cover so the vent is over the meat. This vent should be open no more than halfway. Every 45 minutes to an hour, flip the brisket, and add seven or so briquets and a couple more chunks of mesquite charcoal, or more wood chips. You want a fairly slow fire. If you can rest your fingertips on the grill behind the brisket for two or three seconds, that is about right. Use paper towels to turn the meat.

Continue this way all day long. About 7 p.m., feed the fire one last time and let it die out overnight. In the morning, wrap the cooled brisket loosely in foil. Empty the drippings into a saucepan. Put a little water and vinegar in the drip pan and heat it carefully on the stove to loosen up burned-on drippings and add these to the saucepan. Place the saucepan in the freezer until the fat hardens on top. Remove the fat, carefully warm the drippings, and strain them into a separate saucepan. Add a small bottle of ordinary barbecue sauce (I use KC Masterpiece) and heat through to blend drippings and sauce. Add fresh-ground black pepper to taste, a splash more vinegar, and a tablespoon or so of oregano.

When you’re ready to eat, trim the excess fat off the brisket and slice it across the grain into long, thin slices. Place the slices on foil for easy handling and reheat in the Weber. Warm the sauce and serve it on the side.

Use the same fire technique for baby back ribs. Sprinkle three or four racks of ribs with salt, pepper, celery salt, garlic powder, paprika and oregano. Tend them hourly just as you do with brisket, but the ribs only take three or four hours.

Kindergarten lunch quiz

The following quiz is what we call in the media a “repeatable feature,” one that is keyed to a recurring event. As September approaches, the recurring event is the start of school, and this quiz is dedicated to kindergarten teachers everywhere.

Question 1: In any kindergartner’s lunchbox on any given day, mommies are likely to put: (a) unpeeled orange; (b) unpeeled hardboiled egg; (c) bag of chips; (d) energy bar; (e) zip-top can of pudding; (f) fruit juice in pouch with straw packaged in cellophane on the side; (g) yogurt in container sealed with space-age adhesives; (h) orange juice in container sealed with space-age adhesives; (i) any three of the above.

When a kindergartner needs help opening something in his or her lunch, the kindergartner is most likely to ask the help of: (a) school principal; (b) best friend; (c) school custodian; (d) president of school board; (e) kindergarten teacher.

If there are 28 kindergartners in a class, and 28 bring their lunch to school, how many are likely to need help opening something in it: (a) 28; (b) 28; (c) 28; (d) 28; (e) all of the above.

Zip-top cans – where you pop the key one way, then pull the other way to remove the lid – were invented by: (a) Osama bin Laden; (b) Johnson & Johnson; (c) yogurt lobbyists; (d) U.S. Dept. of Education.

If lunchtime is 35 minutes, how long does it take to peel 28 oranges?

to get the shell off a hard-boiled egg without gouging out bits of egg, you need: (a) scalpel; (b) tweezers; (c) brain surgeon; (d) 45 minutes; (e) all of the above.

If you hand back to a kindergartner an egg with bits gouged out of its smooth surface, the odds he will eat it are: (a) 100-1; (b) 99-1; (c) 98-1; (d) 97-1; (e) 96-1.

The term “hermetically sealed” derives from: (a) the ancient Egyptian practice of burying valuables with their dead deep in the core of mammoth pyramids so the devil himself could not get at the valuables; (b) from Nepalese hermits who fell into crevasses where they were sealed in ice, sometimes for centuries, before archaeologists could chip out the well-preserved remains; (c) from Hermes, courier for the gods who, to preserve confidentiality, placed the gods’ dispatches in a magic pouch that he sealed with a flame from the sun.

True or false: The easiest way to open a hermetically sealed bag is to tear down through the seal with your fingers.

T or F: The easiest way to open a hermetically sealed bag is to rip down through the seal with your teeth.

T or F: The easiest way to open a hermetically sealed bag is to grip it on either side in clenched fingers and pull until your rotator cuffs shred.

There really is nothing to threading a straw into a foil juice pouch if you: (a) are in the third year of medical school; (b) can open locks just by feeling the tumblers drop; (c) take it to the kindergarten teacher.

After lunch, who gets to take a nap? (a) kindergartners; (b) kindergarten teacher; (c) president of school board; (d) U.S. Dept. of Education.

Treating dark secrets

I have to tell you something that I would rather keep a secret. I am a victim of toenail fungus. You must have seen the commercial on television. Little yellow critters get under your toenail, and they do their work, and the nail turns yellow. In my case, the right big toe.

I have to tell you this, because it is the second time in my life that revealing such a dark secret has brought me into contact with Vicks Vapo-Rub.

The first time was when I was a kid. I can’t tell you how old I was, but I can tell you the exact day. It was the day I came down with my first cold, ever, in my life, and my grandmother, Susie, found out about it. After that first time, I desperately tried to keep it a secret from her, when I caught a cold, because I knew what would happen next.

She always found out, of course. Susie belonged to an extinct generation, that was born in the 1800s – 1886, for her – and spent most of their early life living in the country, before they moved to the city. Susie was born in northern Alabama, came to Texas in a wagon, lived on a farm in Haskell County, and finally married, settled in Abilene, where there was work, and had six kids, one of whom was my mother.

Susie’s husband, Roy Grant, died in 1929 and she raised the six kids, alone, through the Depression. She was nicely equipped. In the country, women worked to keep men in the fields. Susie brought that mission with her to the city and, as long as I knew her – she died in 1977 – never let go of it. In the city, they may have been her daughters, coming home from work in offices downtown, but she had the table set and ready for them at 5 p.m., rain or shine, heat or cold. To me – I grew up in my grandmother’s house – it meant she poured the milk and had it on the table by 4:45, in the dead of August. By 5, it was warm in the glass. It turned me away from milk, and I still resist eating dinner before 7 p.m.

Susie could spot an illness coming while it was still a mile away. If I sneezed, she was on me like a hawk on a gopher. I could protest, claim it was dandelion fuzz, but it was no use. She had me by the arm, making a stop in the kitchen, turning on the oven to 500 degrees, then on into the bedroom, where she shucked me out of my clothes and got me in the bed. Miraculously in her hand appeared a jar of Vicks Vapo-Rub. Susie was a believer in salve. She had two kinds: Vicks, and some kind of petroleum-based black salve that she squeezed out of a tube. With these two, she could cure anything, or scare us out of catching anything in the first place.

With two fingers, she scooped out the Vicks and rubbed it on my chest. She disappeared for a moment, then reappeared with a 500-degree cuptowel, straight from the oven. This she slapped over the Vicks layer on my chest, snugged it on, and pulled the covers up under my chin. In her hand appeared a teaspoon, and the Vicks jar. She dug the spoon into the jar, came out with a rounded mound of it, and said, “Open your mouth.” You can see why, after the first time, catching a cold became my desperate secret. In went the Vicks, I closed my mouth, pulled it off the spoon and swallowed it straight down. I spent the day in my Venusian stew, trying desperately to get better, and maybe it worked.

I thought when I grew up that I was forever done with Vicks. Now a friend insists it works on toenail fungus, without the side effects of the product mentioned on TV. The friend says it will take a couple of months. I started the treatment yesterday, using my little finger to get the dab of Vicks out of the jar and onto my toe. I wash my finger immediately, but it is no use. It smells like Vicks. My toe smells like Vicks. For the second time in my life, I reek of Vicks Vapo-Rub.

I was putting it on during the day, but Karen said, “You are supposed to put it on before you go to bed, and leave it on all night.” “But,” I protested, “it will get on the sheets.” “Put a sock over it,” she said, in a tone suggesting there was some country life in her background. I did as I was told. During the night, Susie’s voice floated over to me from her own dreamland. “I told you so,” she said.

Impact, Texas

The wet-dry wars in the Southern states continue to this day, according to a story in today’s New York Times.

It is called “local option.” Southern states, including Texas, leave the making of several kinds of law up to local precincts: a county, a city, even a precinct within a city. Alcohol laws are one such local option. In Texas, there are many “wet” counties, and many “dry” counties, where alcohol can’t be sold. Today’s story focused on East Texas, Angelina County, to be exact, which is dry. If a resident of Lufkin, in Angelina County, wants to buy a six-pack of beer, he or she has to cross into Nacogdoches County, which is wet, to buy it.

Texas liquor laws are the reason, after 35 years’ residency in California, I still get a craving for a warm beer. Abilene, my home town, was in Taylor County, which was dry until 1978. If we wanted a beer, we had to drive 35 miles north from Taylor County, across Jones County, and into Haskell County, where there was a liquor store not 50 feet across the county line. Haskell County was wet, but it was illegal to sell cold beer. We took a cooler with us, bought a case of beer off the floor display, and a bag of ice. In the car, we put several beers on ice and drank the first one warm, which tasted pretty good at the end of a long summer workday. By the time we finished the first one, the others were getting nice and cool. Yes, we drank in the car, which was legal in Texas in those days, but frowned upon: along the highways the highway department posted signs: “If you drive, don’t drink; if you drink, don’t drive.”

I have emailed the New York Times reporter with directions to information on Impact, Texas, one of the most interesting stories in the wet-dry lore. Abilene in the 1960s was dry, and with more than 160 churches in a city of 90,000, it was determined to stay that way. Before Haskell County, if an Abilenian wanted a beer, he had to drive to Breckenridge, over in Stephens County, which was about a 60-mile trip, one way. Bootleggers had prospered in Abilene since the 1930s; Abilene had the reputation of being “the wettest dry town in Texas.” But bootleggers didn’t cater to customers just wanting a six-pack, or even a fifth.

In the early ‘60s, an Abilenian named Dallas Perkins decided to do something about it. He owned 30 acres on the north side of town, not too far from Hardin-Simmons University, a Baptist institution. He bought more acreage to bring the total up to about 70 acres, with a population of 50 or 60, enough to vote on a proposal of incorporation. Papers were filed, the vote was taken, and Impact, Texas, was created, for the sole purpose, many believed, of selling alcohol. There was a court fight, of course, and it carried to the Texas Supreme Court before the incorporation and the intent to sell were both upheld in December, 1963.

I was there. Literally. As I recall, Impact opened for business a day or two before Christmas, 1963. I think Pinkie’s had already built a store and was ready for business, but on opening day, two 18-wheelers backed onto the property and sold booze right out of the backs of the trailers. Impact did a booming business for many years, until 1978, when the City of Abilene went wet. Impact still exists – Google “Impact, Texas” – but it’s just another place with a liquor store now. Makes me thirsty for a beer, if I can find a place in San Diego that sells it warm.

Story of a roll

On the shelf behind the toilet in our bathroom sits a roll of toilet paper autographed by Herb Kelleher, founder, former CEO and now executive president, of Southwest Airlines.

Actually, this is “Son of Roll.” There was an earlier Herb Kelleher roll that came to me in events initiated in the 1990s by Jim Price, a native of Childress, Texas, living in San Diego. Jim was in labor relations and traveled a lot, up and down California, mostly on Southwest flights. I knew Jim Price from the media ramble in San Diego, and Jim knew Herb Kelleher, knew him well enough to send him a personal letter of complaint about his airline.

Jim told Herb he had flown Southwest faithfully, “but no more,” Jim said, until Southwest corrected the toilet paper feed on its fleet. At present, Jim said, the paper in the airplane lavatories fed over the top. Everyone with any sense knows it should feed off the bottom. I received a copy of the letter, as one who, Jim sensed from knowing me, would have a definite opinion about toilet paper feeds. Immediately I wrote a column for my paper, The San Diego Union, saying what a great guy Jim Price was, but he was dead wrong about the toilet paper, which should always feed over the top, never off the bottom.

The column found its way to Dallas, because several days later I received a congratulatory letter from Herb Kelleher, along with a roll of Scott tissue, autographed on the wrapper by Mr. Kelleher himself. This I displayed in the bathroom for the longest time, until a new cleaning lady took the roll from the shelf behind the toilet, pulled off the wrapper and threw it away, and installed the roll on the dispenser.

I was mortified, but of course it was my own fault, that the cleaning lady didn’t know the roll for what it was.

Now into the picture comes Dr. Ted Martinez, who until last December was president of Grossmont College, where I teach journalism. At that time, the college district board decided not to renew his contract. It was unpleasant for us. Dr. Martinez was much respected by faculty and staff, as an involved, effective, innovative, president. The board was, well, the board. Faculty and staff were surprised and tickled to death when, in January, Dr. Martinez accepted a high-level job – much higher and infinitely more visible than the Grossmont presidency – in the administration of the new San Diego mayor, Jerry Sanders. I wrote a column about that for San Diego’s online newspaper, voiceofsandiego.org.

Several weeks ago, I wrote a voiceofsandiego column about the ongoing debate (60 years now) concerning a new San Diego airport to replace Lindbergh Field. In that column I expressed great affection for Southwest Airlines, and included a mention of the long-lost Herb Kelleher toilet paper.

This week, we got a call from Dr. Martinez. I wasn’t home, so he told Karen who he was and that he and his wife, Lidia, had read the two voiceofsandiego columns, and they had a surprise for me. As they chatted, Dr. Martinez told Karen that Lidia was the California marketing director for Southwest Airlines. I may have known that, but I had forgotten.

Last night they came over, and Lidia, just back from company meetings in Dallas, presented me a roll of Scott tissue, inscribed on the wrapper: “For Emergency Use Only!” And signed by Herb Kelleher. In a brief installation ceremony, we placed it on the ledge behind the toilet. My next stop is Bed, Bath and Beyond, to get a glass or acrylic case for it. Herb sent a letter, too, and I thought about framing it and hanging it above the toilet paper, but that would probably be a bit much.

Things to do

What’s on TV?

British agents have foiled a terrorist plot, possibly linked to Al Qaeda, to blow up 10 airliners on their routes from London to the United States.

Maybe we should go to a movie instead.

“World Trade Center.”

Well, we can read a book. What are the two top sellers at Amazon?

“The Looming Towers,” about how Sept. 11 happened, and “Fiasco,” about how the Bush administration got us into the Iraq war.

Maybe I’ll just read the newspaper. What are the headlines?

World news: Iraq, Lebanon, BP negligence in oil pipeline shutdown. Local news: investigation shows San Diego city government behaved like Enron in pension scandal.

How about just going for a drive in the mountains?

Gasoline is $60 a tank.

Well, what do you want to do?

There’s a lot to do. Look at that mockingbird, chasing a hawk. Guarding its nest, I guess. Interesting, how the little bird always – and it really does appear to be 100 percent of the time – chases the big bird. I have seen a hummingbird dive-bombing a crow. What is that all about? Lots of mourning doves sitting on the phone lines lately. Must be a particularly time of year for them. They sit in pairs, and it looks like they may be courting. But then one from one pair runs off one from another pair, and then the one left behind takes off, and the second pair hangs around for 15 seconds, then one of them takes off. If they are courting, it doesn’t look as loving as the doves you see on the Hallmark cards.

The spiders are out in force. Orange ones, some small, some larger. They start their webs at dusk, dropping down from an eave and finding an anchor down below somewhere – a stalk, a piece of firewood, the corner of the glider - and shuttle back up for the next leg, a couple more anchors, and then the wide net. You always hope to see the webs after overnight weather has left them appliquéd with dew.

Seeing them at all is the real need. We have to be careful, walking down to the street to get the papers, that we don’t walk into a web, have it draped over our heads, and wonder if the spider is down our collar. The webs are easy enough to see, and I snag loose the anchor on one side, and let the spider scoot off to the other side, into the bush. I don’t like spiders, but I hate to kill them, after all their work, and their obvious faith in the results. It may be the only violence in the world over which I have any control. Of course if one gets down my collar, it’s every creature for himself.

It feels better to collaborate. Yesterday I almost literally sat down into a web anchored to the glider. I saw it just in time. The spider had caught something, very low down in the web, and already had it packaged, to some extent. If I had sat down, the package, and the spider, would have been right by my ear. Instead, I pulled the glider anchor loose, and the spider rushed up the web to the eave. I sat on the opposite end from the web and drank coffee. A few minutes later I looked at the web, now dangling loosely, again. The spider had come back down, tied onto the package, and was hauling it back up, to the eave. Did he know I wasn’t going to hurt him, when he decided to come back down? I hardly think so, but I felt good about it anyway.

Moonrise at Alta Mira

Glider time, 8:25 p.m., August 8. Sunsets are generally clear here, moreso than the sunrise hours, when the cool ocean and the warm earth collaborate on what we call the “marine layer.” In summer, it is almost always warm enough throughout the day to burn off the low clouds or fog and let us have a view of sunset events such as these.

The weather changed slightly today – as much as we can say the “weather changes” in San Diego. The weather does change, but it takes months. Today’s subtleties involved a repositioning of southwest high pressure which created a tug on moisture from the south, called “monsoon moisture” here. The humidity was up, and there were high clouds, and the eastern orientation of this system kept the coastal areas clear of evening haze.

The result is glider time like this. The moon schedule, according to the paper, was to rise at 7:36, our time, but that time is keyed to the flat horizon in our time zone, and the actual moonrise occurs when the edge of the moon arrives at the actual horizon laid down by the foothills that lie just to our east. It was almost 8 when the moon, like a pearl, cultured itself from the earth. It was special tonight, but we are almost at that time, the October full moon, when the sun sets and the moon rises at the same time. This is an impossibly beautiful event, and complete evidence that, no matter who you are or what your possessions are, you can’t have it all. You can’t look at the sunset and the moonrise at the same time. You have to turn to one and then the other.

Tonight I am working on a new computer, flat screen, lots of RAM, etc. Karen saw I needed a new computer, then with Bill’s help (her son), ordered it, and then it arrived and she spent an entire day last week, with Bill’s help, getting it up and operating. Late in the day, she showed me an ad from that morning’s New York Times. It was a Tiffany ad, showing gorgeous diamond earrings for only $9,800. “After getting this computer running, I think these would be nice,” she said, tongue in cheek. And they would. She would wear them beautifully, and she damn sure earned them.

Right now, though, I am cash poor. Instead I gave her tripod equipment for her camera. “The earrings are a couple of years away, but you can make some beautiful things with these,” I wrote her in a card. Tonight she set up the tripod and camera for the first time, and gave us a keepsake of one of the most beautiful things on this earth that either of us has ever seen.

Moonrise at Alta Mira

Flat truth about TV

Television as we know it is on the way out.

“After the holidays, the days of picture-tube TVs are gone,” a CostCo buyer told The New York Times. “One year from now, we will not sell picture-tube TVs.”

Demand is dropping, he said. Consumers want the new, flat-panel television screens that offer better resolution with their plasma or liquid-crystal displays.

From what I have seen of them in the stores, I wouldn’t mind one myself, but there are a couple of obstacles. One is the price, and even if the price were acceptable, I don’t know where we would put the thing when we got it home. It won’t fit in our entertainment center, which really is about to become a dinosaur in the American living room.

If we take the entertainment center out, what do we do with it? In weekends after next year, are we to join lines of citizens at U-Haul counters, renting a trailer to join processions of vehicles hauling our entertainment centers, like worn-out artillery caissons, to the landfills? If so, how quickly will the landfills reach capacity and close? No, the landfill is not an environmentally reasonable solution.

Will we muscle it out to the patio, and bust it into kindling? I hate to do that to a perfectly good piece of expensive furniture that we have only had a few years.

And if we did, what would we do with the VCR, the DVD player, the receiver-amplifier, the tape deck, and the equalizer? And the passel of CDs and VHS tapes in the bottom drawers, poking their corners out of the dust bunnies?

We are looking at a new entertainment center, built to flat-screen specs, or we could just tear out a living room wall and install built-ins, at which time bringing home a new, flat-screen TV is costing anywhere from $4,000 to $25,000.

Fortunately, our old TV is relatively new and should be fine until well beyond the time the manufacturers stop making replacement parts. If we open a special flat-screen TV with furniture and accessories savings account now, it is possible we could have the money at the end of the approximately four years we have left before the broadcasters are providing signals that our old cathode-ray tube TVs will not accept. By then, Father Joe will have figured out a way to build houses out of old entertainment centers, so that problem will be solved. The old TV itself – actually, we have four old TVs in the house – will be recycled.

We’re going to hold short of remodeling the living room for the new flat-panel TV, even though new homes being built now are all designed around a logical place to position flat-panel screens. In a decade, those spaces will make nice art walls, when flat-panel TVs become dinosaurs – one thing about them, they will stack neatly in the landfills – and the next technology arrives.

I am 63 years old, meaning my lifetime is about to exceed the lifespan of the old TVs, the big-tube consoles and portables that started coming into living rooms in the late 1940s. I remember how to adjust the Channel Master, the horizontal hold, the vertical hold, the brightness, the contrast, and the fine tune knob (for UHF). I like telling my students about watching TV in the 1950s, and watching Channel 9, then clicking the big knob over to Channel 12, and rotating the antenna, adjusting the holds and the fine tune, and sitting down for half an hour until it was time to get up and click back to Channel 9 and watch the black-and-white picture shrivel into electronic dust bunnies until the holds were adjusted back to Channel 9 again.

It is informative to look back 50 years, and describe a TV set then, and now turn around and look forward 50 years, and describe the TV set of 2056. I truly believe – and this may actually happen in my lifetime – that media communications in the future will be conducted through sensors we carry around with us, under the skin somewhere, or in a section in the brain, that will project images and sounds from the inside-out, into our eyes and ears, and simply with a thought, we will change channels, or turn off the TV and listen to music for awhile.

I don’t think I am going to like it, but obviously we have no choice. A couple of years from now, we will have a flat-panel TV, like it or not.

Eggs Bob

We actually had a sunrise this morning. I pay so much attention to sunrises because we can see the entire sunrise horizon from Alta Mira, all 47 degrees of it, from the summer solstice in June to the winter solstice in December. From the glider, we can tell where we are on the calendar by the place where the sun comes up.

This morning, I want to introduce “Eggs Bob.” No doubt there are other recipes similar to this one, and that predate it by years or hundreds of years, but Eggs Bob is, I am sure, unique in its origin.

“Bob” is Bob Cluck, whom I have known since grade school, in Abilene, Texas, in the 1950s. He and Marilyn, who are looking at either their 41st or 42nd anniversary, were in California sightseeing along Big Sur last week, and they drove down to San Diego to see us. Bob is an interesting man (just ask Marilyn), with an inquiring turn of mind. We always have the most interesting conversations. One evening we were talking about what we might have for breakfast.

“What do you think would happen,” Bob said, in his paced, deliberate style, “if you took a Ziploc bag, put the eggs in it, with onion, cheese, whatever you wanted, and just put the bag in boiling water?”

You see what I mean by unique origin. There were only a couple of things that kept me from saying, “Let’s try it and see.” The first was getting the eggs, onion, cheese, etc., out of the bag when they were done. The second was what the hot water might do to the bag plastic, in terms of a bad effect on the food, in the time it took the water to cook the eggs. Actually, I would have liked to see the results of my first reservation, getting the eggs out of the bag. It was the second reservation that stopped me. I am leery of plastic polymers, and how they might get into food via a boiled Ziploc bag, and, if a human ate it, if cancer might just pop straight up out of his skin before he could take a bite of toast.

I announced both of these to Bob, who nodded thoughtfully and agreed to my suggestion that we try a modified version of his idea.

Thus, “Eggs Bob.” For individual servings, you need Pyrex custard cups. Grease the cups with a little olive oil on a paper towel. In the bottom, sprinkle onions, peppers, tomatoes, salsa, chopped leftover meats or shrimp, whatever you like. On top of that, break two eggs. Sprinkle on some cheese, if you like.

Fill a skillet three-quarters full of water and bring it to a high simmer, not quite a boil. There is a technical term for this, “bain marie” or something, but just use a skillet three-quarters full of water. When the water simmers, carefully place the custard cups into the water (tongs are useful for this), that should come up not quite to the lip of the cups. Place a lid (glass, if you have it) on the skillet and let the eggs cook. This takes awhile, maybe 10 minutes. The whites firm up and the yolks sort of cloud over.

It’s best if the yolks stay a bit runny at the end. Otherwise you’ve just got a boiled egg. When I took ours out (with tongs and a hot pad), the center of the cup was still slightly jiggly. I served the cups on a plate, with bacon, toast and preserves (Texans love preserves). Dump the eggs or eat them from the cup, your choice. Marilyn and Bob chose the cup, I dumped mine.

They were pretty good. I would have liked my yolks runnier, but I don’t think you can achieve that and still get the whites properly done. I have had them once again, with a bit of chopped shrimp in the bottom, and of course there will be endless variations. I plan to serve Eggs Bob regularly for company, so I can tell the story of where they came from.

Seeing Perini

Glider time . . . . They don’t make gliders like they used to. Sixty years ago, on my Texas front porch, we had a sofa-sized glider that was upholstered like a sofa, with pillows and skirts and flounces, and coil springs underneath, the whole nine yards. Our glider is loveseat-size, cushions and pads on enameled tubular steel. It glides like it is supposed to, which does for porch ruminating what a swing could never do, but comparing it to the old-style gliders is like comparing a 2006 Ford Echo to a 1955 Buick Roadmaster.

More low clouds this morning with points of blue sky peeking through, but no sunrise, which is probably two weeks now without that moment when the first white-bright ray of sun breaks the horizon like a diamond on the rim of the world.

I glide, I Google, I last. Our television remote has a “Last” button on it, which lets you one-click to the last channel you were watching. I like to keep 67, the Food Network, as the “Last” button so when a commercial interrupts the program I’m watching, I can Last over to see what’s cooking, literally.

Wednesday night I Lasted and found myself looking straight into the eyes of Tom Perini, who operates the Perini Ranch Steakhouse in Buffalo Gap, Texas, just south of my home town, caters Texas-style barbecue events nationwide (including at The White House), and has a cookbook, “Texas Cowboy Cooking,” which you need for two recipes if nothing else: Jessica’s Favorite Green Chile Hominy, and Bread Pudding with Whiskey Sauce. The cookbook is available at Amazon.

I was disappointed to discover that Tom was not the whole show, but part of a show, called “Unwrapped,” having to do with outdoor cooking, cowboy style. His role was to recite the history of cowboy, or chuck wagon, cooking, in the lore of the nation’s expansion westward. Tom is a good resource for this: he learned from real ranch cooks around Abilene and Albany, Texas, and his catering setup includes an authentic chuck wagon, and chuck wagon cooks.

Clips showed the Perini cooks at work, what it takes to keep working cowboys fed, and what they mostly eat. I was tickled by one clip, that looked like chicken-fried steak being sizzled in a cast-iron pot over a cookfire, except the items were way too small to be chicken-fried steaks. I would wager the cooks, historically an impish lot, were cooking up calf fries (truly a prairie delicacy) without telling the TV folks. Tom tells an hilarious story about calf fries in his cookbook, starts at the bottom of Page 73.

Suddenly the story cut away from Perini, and went to the plant where they make B&M Baked Beans. The show’s host, a man named Marc Summers, acted like this was a natural segue, giving the suggestion that you would actually eat eastern-style baked beans with Perini’s cooking, a suggestion that made me wish I could feed Summers a raw calf fry on the spot. B&M beans are fine with a hamburger or a hotdog, but what you want with a Perini chuck wagon steak are Ranch Beans, Page 155, which lifelong Texans, wherever they are living, know simply as red, or pinto, beans.

The show wandered on into other places where you wouldn’t find anything you could call cowboy cooking. They did show where and how Lodge black cast-iron skillets are manufactured, and you can’t call your chuck wagon, or kitchen, complete without a black skillet. Still, it was neat to hit Last and suddenly be looking at someone you went to high school with, who has made a name for himself cooking the same kind of food you grew up on. With the exception of the calf fries.

Thinking younger

Glider time. The day begins at 5:30, which in San Diego in August is a little after first light. We get up, make coffee, feed the puppies and Joey the Cat, and then we have about half an hour on the glider with our coffee and dawn events . . .

Thick coastal clouds and drizzle this morning. More weird weather. We had three weeks of heat and monsoon moisture, then almost a week of solid overcast, and now this drizzle. We are supposed to get the heat in September, the overcast in January, and the drizzle in June. I’m not complaining. This morning an ocean breeze was pushing some of the drizzle onto the porch, just enough to mist my face. I had to go back in and pull on a corduroy shirt. After the heat stretch, it was a very nice change, snuggled in a shirt jacket with the collar turned up, coffee hot in the cup, thick clouds hanging heavy and low.

I have decided not to “feel old.” There was a story in the paper several days ago, arguing that “feeling old” makes you old. The story validated the decision I had already made. I have never thought of myself as old, even at age 63. I thank rock and roll for that. I can’t listen to Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and feel old.

Still, a time came when I had to make the decision. Oldness came at me the way I believe it comes to most people, at the side door. Things started to happen to me that start happening naturally to people entering their 60s. We enter an age of fair wear and tear. When I was 59, I had prostate cancer surgery. Earlier this year, I had hip replacement surgery. The health scientists say these are the sorts of ailments that start to occur “when you get older.”

I believed it. Outside of appendicitis in junior high school, I went through life without much need for medical attention. I still don’t wear eyeglasses. I go twice a year to get my teeth cleaned, and last time I went, an xray showed a cavity, my first cavity in more than 40 years, which I liked to attribute to my habit of bathing my teeth regularly in strong water. I was active physically, with not many aches or pains.

So I was a babe in the medical woods, entering the age of fair wear and tear, and I was surprised, and ticked off, when doctors told me my prostate needed to come out, and my hip was shot. They mollified me: “It’s just part of the aging process.”

I accepted that, and acceptance was the side door. Hey, old man, come on in. Set a spell. Here, have a few Advil.

I know I started to act old. Well, not old, just older. Having accepted the aging process, I started to buy into it. That’s when I made the decision. As my hip kept healing throughout the spring, I was amazed by how young I was starting to feel. I decided to act on that. I started jitterbugging in the kitchen. I got back outside, in the yard, the garage, the heavy lifting. Karen and I are eating less and exercising more, and from 215 pounds last December, I am knocking on 200. Last week I pulled on my 36 Levis for the first time in five years.

Then here was the story in the paper: feel old, act old, be old. The old Gillette radio ad, stood on its gray head. The aging process is out there, and being in the age of fair wear and tear is perfectly natural. But I’m not going to help it along.

A cool morning, the gym later. Karen is going to lunch with a friend and is bringing me home some pasta for dinner. Life can be good.