Peace on Earth, at home, anyway

It's Christmas Eve again already, and here is my annual Christmas blog . . .

Finding Peace

“Peace on Earth” this Christmas?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snoopy season

Our house is directly below the approach path that various aircraft follow when doing a flyover at Qualcomm Stadium, about nine miles to the northwest. In 1998, when San Diego hosted a Super Bowl, I walked outside about five minutes before kickoff and saw a black speck southeast of us. The speck grew rapidly into a Stealth Bomber, about 1,000 feet above me, streaking toward the stadium. Too late to run for the camera, but before bowl games now I never go outside without it. Tonight, the Poinsettia Bowl is being played at Qualcomm. At 3:30, in the vicinity of our house, Snoopy was warming up. Click on the images for a close-up.

With some sun peeking through

Click on the images for a closer view.

Under Treatment

Last Friday was a bizarre day.

I had had a cold all week, but still looking forward to going to Denver. Tyler had 50-yard-line tickets to the Chargers-Broncos game and had asked me to come visit him and Kathleen and go to the game. Friday morning, getting up and getting ready to go to the airport, I actually felt better. But as Karen drove me down, I felt some real congestion starting up.

She let me out, I got into a curbside line, but was coughing so hard I had to step out of line twice. I couldn't get my breath and felt like I might throw up. I started to feel totally isolated, alone in a crowd. I got upstairs and through security, but on the concourse it really hit me. It felt like I had a column of warm, salty water, bubbling in my windpipe, and it was coming up to drown me. Coughing did no good. The water was right there, bubbling just beneath my throat, and I couldn't breathe.

I stopped and sat down. I envied the people passing by, completely unconcerned with their health or immediate future. I had my boarding pass in my pocket but realized that I was not going to get on the airplane. My seat was 25A, and I could see one of these futile coughing fits starting up as the plane left the gate, and I could not get up to go the restroom and put my head between my legs to let the mucus drain and get some air.

I took my pass up to the gate and handed it to the boarding agent. "I am sick and can't go on your airplane today." I called Karen to come get me. "You're kidding!" she said, knowing how I had looked forward to this trip. Tyler and I had been figuring menus all week, and he had asked me for a recipe for elk chili. I made one up and sent it to him, without any confidence it would be edible.

An hour later Karen and I were on the phone to Kaiser, begging to see my primary care physician. When I told the screening nurse what had happened, she referred me straight to the emergency room. I felt so bad for Karen; she had been looking forward to some quiet time, and now this. Talking to the registration nurse, I could barely breathe. Half an hour later, in Bed 13 of Module D in the emergency area, a nice, engaging doctor named Chiang confirmed I had pneumonia. "But I had a pneumonia shot last year," I said. He shrugged. "There are different types of pneumonia."

He and a wonderful nurse named Rhonda took care of me, getting xrays, studying histories, taking blood cultures out of one arm and feeding antibiotics into the other. I told her I had really wanted to be on an airplane on this particular morning, but the way I felt, this emergency room, under her care, was really the place for me to be. And then I had an epiphany. Money is the combat issue in the health care debate, but to anyone in a situation like mine, there are two words that are priceless: "under treatment." Until those two words are available, on any given day, to any given citizen, this country is not prioritizing correctly.

A weather worthy weekend

Click on the images for a close-up.

It looks like we won't have an Acorn Fever season at all, this autumn in Southern California. Now it is Oct. 2, and we have yet to experience that first cool snap that triggers the Fever. That snap is forecast to begin later today, with the arrival of a cold front coming down the coast from the Gulf of Alaska. If the weather bureau is right, tomorrow will be cloudy, cool and rainy at our house. Given the late date of this cool snap, it has a chance to endure for three or four days before temperatures warm again. This is key. When a snap like this hits in early September, it may be only 24 hours before the temperatures have gone back up into the 90s, trapping Southern Californians in the flannels they pulled on in the gray, cool dawn.

Now, in early October, we may have a few days to adjust. We can enjoy the warmth of our flannels, long enough to be willing to put them away, this time in the front of the closet, when temperatures climb again, into the 80s or 90s, by Thursday or Friday.

Meanwhile, as the weather forecasters focused on the north, a tropical storm named Olaf spun up off the southwestern tip of Baja California, and then headed north, straight for us. I pray for such events, but they are exceedingly rare, when tropical storms - what we call monsoon moisture - reach us from the south and east. As a weather freak, I was ticked off when the weather bureau said Olaf would be steered east, away from us, by the very system that was promising to bring us our first cool, rainy experience of the season on Saturday and Sunday.

It turns out that Olaf had some swagger, and sent streams of clouds into our area before the front from the north could do its steering work. By noon yesterday, there was talk of sprinkles. By 3 p.m., light showers were possible, and by 4, there was a mention of thunderstorms. At our house, east of downtown San Diego, all this talk amounted to about 47 wet dots where raindrops hit our flagstone. The sky, on the other hand, was alive with Olaf. The showers didn't hit the ground, but they were up there. "Virga" is what the weather people call showers that don't reach the ground.

These showers do unique things, however, with sunlight. I have lived at Alta Mira since 1992, and I have seen some amazing scenery in the sky. Yesterday, though, brought something entirely new, that Karen, who snapped these images, called "sun showers." I hope I am lucky enough to see something like this again, someday, in the skies west of our house. And this weekend, we still have a rainy Sunday to look forward to.

Staring at a new world beyond the windows

We are doing a lot of gazing out the window these days. A guy named Greg Rubin lifted up our house this summer and plunked it down in the middle of the most amazing desert garden. He and his crew finished their work two weeks ago, but still we gaze, and try to understand. I could have sworn there was an ancient, cracked, concrete patio out there, and hideous, stamped pavers – some of them scalloped! – set on their edges and used as a low retaining wall, and below the french doors a wide step I made myself, out of concrete brick and two-by-twelves of which any trailer park landlord would be proud.

Now, from the living room couch, I swear we see a curvy design of pale flagstone terrace and walkways, gravel areas, mulch beds, tiny (for the moment) native plants, and dry-stacked stone walls, a landscape such as tourists might encounter when renting premium villas in Palm Springs and Scottsdale. For a few days, Gulliver would have none of it. He would creep gingerly halfway down the new stone walk meandering through mulch beds along the side of the house, then make a decision: “This is not where I live.” And retire to the indoors, which he still recognized.

Actually we wish his confusion had carried on a little longer. Now he feels quite regal in his new environment and never returns to the house within bringing in a few strands of mulch clinging to his Sheltie feathers, which mulch, it turns out, loves.

The terrace tableau carries around the corner to the glider porch, with space expanding several new feet out from the porch to the lip of a retaining wall that gives a crisp frame to the view. Beyond the front door, with its new flagstone stoop, the flagstone transitions to the meandering stone walk and a long slope of mulch studded with a variety of native plants. The walk passes a new garden setting on the left, at the back of the house, and on the right, a bubbling fountain at the point where wide stone steps cascade down to the garage and street. The transition from the old back to the new back is even more startling than the change around on the patio side.

The term, “native plant” refers to plants that are native to the deserts, both high and low, that are so typical of Southern California and much of the Southwest. Our house is 13 miles from the Pacific Ocean, which we can see – when we remember to look, these days – from the new terrace. Yet we are lucky to get 12 inches of rain a year. Someday the water SoCal imports from the north and east will run out, but for now there is enough to support all types of lush, grassy landscaping, but many Californians dote on the native plant option. In fact there is a “Native Plant Society.”

Native plants love our natural semi-arid circumstances, and once they take hold, they grow into a palette of sizes, shapes, textures, and flowery color. Around our house, Greg, the owner of CalOwn, and his crew set in 16 varieties of native plants, and a couple of types of trees. We are already seeing tiny flowers of blue, purple, yellow, and red.
The work took a hard-working crew five weeks, and it was the kind of hard work that goes with landscaping a house that has, as they say in the trade, “difficult access.” I won’t tell you what it cost, but it was ungodly reasonable, given the result. I have never in my life seen an equivalent bang for the buck.

Waking up to an Acorn Fever scare

Yesterday morning dawned cloudy, breezy, and suspiciously cool. Not just our run-of-the-mill coastal Southern California "marine layer" clouds, either. These clouds had some heft. I checked the calendar: August 7. A chill rose on the back of my neck. Acorn Fever. We have never had a breakout of Acorn Fever this early. The weather records show that we have had occurrences in August, but always late August, with enough proximity to September to allow us to think it could happen any day now.

But Aug. 7 would catch us totally unprepared. I pulled on my sweatshirt – DON'T BE ALARMED, I have been wearing it indoors as we have kept the A/C running to combat our recent hot days – and went outside to sniff the wind. It was brisk, out of the southwest, coming off the ocean. It was unusually cool, and it almost, but not quite, had a bite. It's normally this bite that sets off the Fever, so I felt good about that. The low, thick clouds were also starting to burn off, another good sign, but above them were high streaks of cirrus with scattered cumulus below. It looked like a November sky. It would bear watching.

The cause of all of this was a low pressure system, "unseasonably strong," the Weather Bureau said. It was moving off the ocean into Central California. Trailing off it, into our territory, was a windy front that was prompting wind advisories in the mountains and deserts to our east. For us, it meant the arrival of this breeze I was sniffing, and temperatures 10 to 15 degrees lower than earlier in the week. The clouds, the actual temperature drop, and, most critically, the Saturday morning weather, would determine the actions of the populace.

It was this populace, the Southern California locals, to whom my reassuring DON'T BE ALARMED, above, was directed. These are Acorn Fever veterans, and they know the symptoms: a feeling of coziness, an urge to pull on sweat clothes, the need to build a fire, to rake leaves, to cook a pot of chili, to drive to the mountains with the car heater on to buy jugs of apple cider.. I assumed the duty, three decades ago, of Acorn Fever sentinel in our area, advising readers in my San Diego Union column of the conditions and what we might expect as each Fever season approached. People still approach me in supermarkets, saying, "What kind of Acorn Fever season do you think we will have this year?"

Well, this year, I am glad the harbinger happened on a Friday. Saturday being a holiday for most will naturally minimize the number of workers who might otherwise have gone to work in woolens and pashminas this morning. The number of homeowners pulling on Pendletons, swilling hot chocolate, raking nonexistent leaves (the Fever and what it does to humans can truly be pitiful to watch) and building roaring fires will be increased, of course, on a Saturday morning, but these victims will be closer to safety when the temperature hits 90 by noon. That is the typical Acorn Fever pattern in Southern California: a cool snap arriving overnight, a cloudy, breezy morning with temperatures in the 60s – or, in severe episodes, in the 50s – and then the temperature rebounding to 90 by noon, trapping victims far from home, spilling out of office buildings onto steamy sidewalks under a stark blue sky, leaving silent rescue crews to collect soggy piles of autumn outfits where humans, melted alive by the Fever had stood, nothing now but the DNA in their sweat to identify them.

Yesterday remained on the cool side – high 70s – through the afternoon. So far so good. We would know the rest at Saturday daybreak. When it arrived, I pulled on my sweater, got coffee, went outside and sat on the glider. There were clouds, but not heavy, more marine-layerish. No breeze. Just cool enough to feel bare skin draw up, but only slightly. I scanned the neighborhood for chimney smoke; there was none. Good sign. After 20 minutes I went back to the kitchen and waited for the urge to make waffles and chili. It didn't come. I think we dodged a bullet.

A few words from Big Dog's favorite talking animal

Believe me, I am not going to be taking over this blog. I only have a brain the size of a lime, and my people have brains the size of cauliflowers. So I can't compete with that. I have them where I want them anyway. It's not every dog that can talk his human blogger into giving him some space, but mine does. He calls me Gulliver. I call him Big Dog. He wears a blue t-shirt sometimes that says right on it: "Big Dog." It makes me proud.

His job is media, and he knows how important animals are to media. He says: "Can animals talk?" "Yes!" I say. He says: "Who's the most famous talking animal in the world today?" I say: "Snoopy!" Can you imagine "Peanuts" without Snoopy? I can't. He is even on some of the blimps that fly through my sky yard. (If you click on the picture once, then twice, you can see Snoopy flying the blimp!) No, Big Dog says, Snoopy is pretty famous, but not this famous. What is the answer? Mickey Mouse! A mouse! A brain the size of a lentil! But Mickey presides over a multi-billion-dollar international entertainment corporation. It goes to show you, brain size doesn't always matter.

Then Big Dog says: "You know who my favorite talking animal is?" I shake my head. "You!" he says, and scratches me just below my ear, where I like it. Last week, when Bo, the First Dog, got an op-ed in The New York Times, Big Dog agreed that I should have some blog time, too. Now my dog brothers and sisters suddenly seem to be all over the papers, and on TV. Maybe they were always there and I just didn't notice.

The Times really seems to be going to the dogs. I don't say that as a bad thing. On Monday, they introduced a new feature, "The Puppy Diaries: Taking the Plunge With a New Dog." Is that cool, or what? This morning, Wednesday, two days later, that story is still No. 2 on the Times' "Most Popular Email" list. Dogs rule! Dog stories got legs! I bet you I could live to be two hundred and never see a story like that about cats.

The star of that story is Scout, who is a golden retriever. The story says Scout's breeder thoroughly checked out the people who wanted to take her home. The writer of the story, Jill Abramson, was tickled, but didn't seem to mind, because she knows that dogs are worth it. She is going to write every Monday about what it is like, "raising a puppy through its first year of life." Scout, just go on the paper and you've got it made. Jill says: "Somehow I had forgotten how much having a new puppy is like having a new baby." It brings a tear to my eye. I had to go over to Big Dog and give him a nostalgic tap on the leg with my muzzle.

There was another big story, happening right here in San Diego, but it made the national news. This one was about playing tapes of dogs barking, to chase the seals out of Children's Cove, down in La Jolla. They are ready to spend $700,000 on the project. That's a lot of Science Diet! I hereby notify the City of San Diego that I will do the job, in person, for only $350,000. Contact Big Dog.

A few thoughts from Gulliver

If the President's dog, Bo, can write an op-ed piece and get it published in this morning's New York Times, I can certainly have some fun with the occasional blog of my own. My name is Gulliver. "Gully" for short. To my human readers, Happy Friday! To my dog brothers and sisters, Happy Dog Day!

Dogs are certainly coming up in the world. First there is Bo's column (well written! You should read it), and then on the "Today" show (I nap through most of it) this morning, a story about Pet Airways. You wouldn't get me on one of those things, but now dogs (and yes, cats) can fly out of cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia, and not in the baggage hold, like in times prior, but right up in the passengers' cabin (all the people stuff has been taken out).

I’m a stay-at-home dog. You can barely get me into the car to go to the vet. Plenty of excitement here. We live on the side of a hill, and I watch the street down there for people and dogs, and when I see them, my ears and tail go up and I bark like crazy until I can't see them anymore. The hill is so steep that the telephone poles along the street are actually below my eye level, and I am all the time looking down at birds flying past. It does interesting things to dog instincts. Barkeley – Dog, I miss her – told me that when your yard is open space that you start to want to chase things like airplanes and blimps when they are flying low through your "yard." I have seen pictures of her barking and chasing a Sanyo blimp that came by pretty low one day.

I was a big puppy when they brought me home 10 years ago, obviously destined, when I grew up, to be bigger than Barkeley, who was average size for a Sheltie. That's why they call me Gulliver. Barkeley was great, a real lady, and very kind, but also a lot of fun. We had great chases, even if she was faster than I was. She was beautiful, but she had funny ears. They didn't flop over. She died a couple of Christmases ago, and I still miss her. I hear talk around here of getting another puppy, but it hasn't happened yet.

Don't get me wrong. Life is good. My people love me, and I think they even understand me a little bit. They don't mind when I run right past them to my food bowl. They just look at me and say, "Food first, people second," so they know basic dog philosophy. They also tell me I am beautiful, but I don't pay much attention to that. I am not a dog to put on airs. Give me the simple life, a good ear scratch, a shady hallway. At Alta Mira, every day is a dog's life. Bo, my friend, you can have the spotlight. I wonder if he is on Facebook.

Alta Mira Gallery

Some Alta Mira fireworks for the Fourth . . .

Click on the image for a close-up.

Recorded

1:27 p.m., Friday, June 5, 2009

A break in the June Gloom

Clouds are not a curiosity in Southern California. We have low clouds all the time. In fact, we are in our season of what we call May Gray, proceeding now into what we call June Gloom. We sit next to the Pacific Ocean, and it interacts with the atmosphere this time of year to create a "marine layer" which is a deck of fog-level clouds that sit over us from dawn to midday and sometimes longer.

But rarely, like today, we get a distant weather feature called an offshore low, that can bring us clouds like these. Today's low was sitting off the coast, 600 miles west of San Francisco, with no jet stream to guide it anywhere. Rotating around this low were bands of moisture and instability that actually brought rain, wind, thunder and lightning to parts of Southern California today. The local news opened with a five-minute story on this weather. We saw none at our house, however. I have a long reputation as a reverse Joe Btfsplk, the Li'l Abner character who always had a storm cloud over his head. Wherever I travel, even in summer in Tornado Alley, and how much I hope for stormy weather, clear skies always follow me.


But these clouds were fine. After general clouds all day, these thoroughbreds showed up about 5 p.m. They were gorgeous.


And a few seconds after I snapped this last image, I felt a drop of rain on my left forearm. Only one.

Sunset, Alta Mira, May 17, 2009

Click on the image for a close-up.

Getting her feet wet in Ancillary Dilemmas

The highlight reel advances from the ceiling fan last week to the kitchen yesterday morning, where Karen is calling to me: “Michael, can you come in here for a minute?”

I am in the bedroom, dressing, in a bit of a hurry. But her tone is beckoning. Not alarmed, or hysterical, so I know it’s not a spider or a snake. It says, “No need to call 911, but there’s something in here that you really need to see, right now.” I drop my pants, walk down the hall and into the kitchen and there is Karen, standing over a dishwasher that is about one-third full of soap suds. Tongues of suds have trickled out at the corners and are spreading alluvially onto the floor. It looks like a dishwasher with rabies.

I hate this. I have had some success as a handyman in my homeowning history, but sick dishwashers are unapproachable by amateurs. You put dishes and soap in, close the door, turn it on, and behind the closed door things of unimaginable wisdom occur until the hissing stops, you open the door, and the dishes are clean. There is only one thing I know to do, before we call the appliance people. “It could be the drain is blocked,” I say.

She tells me that in fact she had found a cap loose in the bottom of the washer. It is the cap that screws into the opening of a reservoir in the door that holds a kind of rinsing product. Years ago I poured some of this rinsing product, called Jet Dry, into the reservoir and have not thought about it again since. Karen has now screwed the cap back into the opening, but the machine is not draining. I have another thought. “You were washing pots and pans in the sink while the machine was running,” I say, starting to glow with brilliance. “Maybe the volume was too much for the drain.” Karen closes the door, starts the machine, soap pours out. I shrug.

“Call the plumber,” I say, and head off up the hall. Then Karen says, “Oh no!” in a stricken sort of way that brings me back. She is standing in front of the open sink cabinet, a bottle of Dawn Dishwashing Soap in one hand, a bottle of Jet Dry in the other. They are very similar. She doesn’t have to speak; I can reconstruct the truth. Loading the washer, she finds the cap, decides to fill the reservoir, but instead of Jet Dry she has poured in a three-month supply of Dawn Dishwashing Soap. I ache with empathy for her. This is what I call an Ancillary Dilemma, when an act meant to correct some situation in fact turns it into a completely different situation that is geometrically more complex than the original. I have dozens of Ancillary Dilemmas in my handyman record. Once again, as with the ceiling fan, I feel a bit of pride stirring, this time for Karen standing there with the two bottles in her hands. As Ancillary Dilemmas go, this one is pretty good.

So good, in fact, that it resists Googling. “Wrong soap in dishwasher” yields 1,270,000 results, so common as to be plebian. From the dishwasher manual (which I recommended), she discovers that the reservoir is called simply the “rinse agent.” For historical purposes, I undertake this search myself. “Wrong soap in rinse agent” yields no results at all, but invites a further search of wrong soap in rinse agents “without quotes.” That search yields 234,000 results, with this caveat at the bottom of the first page: “Tip: these results do not include the word ‘wrong.’ Show results that include ‘wrong’.” That search yields 12,000 results, including a link to WikiAnswers, which provides this solution:

“Take the door apart and remove the jet dry reservoir. Thoroughly rinse out the reservoir, then put everything back together.” Right. This is the same as a recipe for hamburgers that begins, “Go out and kill a cow.” The appliance repair people are coming tomorrow. Though you would think that a human who can navigate himself through Google to get to a WikiAnswer for “Wrong soap in rinse agent” should be able to find his way through a dishwasher door. There are some truths that just don’t make sense.

Hello 911? A ceiling fan killed my husband

We have a handsome new ceiling fan in the living room. The five blades are thick, dark-reddish wood, extending out 62 inches from a dark bronze hub, and beautifully concave. Mark, our electrician, installed it this morning then turned it on. Compared to the old fan, the blades’ rotation was lazy.

“Turn it up to high,” Karen said. Mark looked at the remote control. “It is on high,” he said. We checked the remote, and, sure enough it was on high. “It’s moving a lot of air,” Mark said. “If it turned any faster than that,” I said, eying the prodigious blades, “the house would take off.”

It is a vast improvement over the old fan, which had 52-inch blades with the wicker-look inserts, but did not hold its proportional weight in the space, which features a vaulted ceiling and a massive ridgepole beam spanning the width of the room. This new fan reminds me of the noxious commercial where the cool couple sits across the desk from the mega-cool designer, who asks, “And what can I do for you?” And the woman, who was either highly paid or had no idea how idiotic this made her look, sets a faucet fixture on the desk and says, “Design a house around this.”

You could have designed our living room around this new ceiling fan. But we didn’t exactly go looking for it. The old fan would still be with us if I hadn’t single-handedly destroyed it last week. That fan had a pull chain that I had used successfully for years to change its speed. It had three speeds: low, medium, high. It was on medium, and Karen, on a warm evening, asked me to change it to high. “Three clicks,” I said. “Low, off, high.” I reached up and pulled the chain.

I don’t exactly know what happened next. I felt the chain knob slip free of my fingers. That has happened before. The chain, freed, arced upward. That has happened before. Then something happened. The motor housing, above the blades, started turning with the blades. The entire unit was rotating. Karen yelled, “It’s unscrewing at the top!” “What?” I yelled, transfixed by the rotating motor housing. “Unscrewing! At the top!” She yelled something about what I should do, but I yelled back, “Shut up!” I shouldn’t have done that, but I needed time to think. I ran to get a dining chair, climbed on it, and tried to stop the fan turning. I looked up at the beam and saw that the drop rod had become completely unscrewed from the beam housing. The fan had dropped about a foot and was hanging suspended only by its wiring.

I stared at the wiring and wondered if my death would come from electrocution, or fan blade blows, or falling off the chair, or telling Karen to shut up. Then the fan stopped. I let it go. I climbed off the chair. Karen spared me. Probably not 60 seconds had passed. It seemed like an eternity.

In the aftermath, I surmised that the chain must have arced just high enough to be caught by the blade hub, around which it wrapped, jamming into the clearance between the hub and the motor housing. And then the motor housing started to turn. There was no way to intervene. Before I was finished thinking about it, I had developed a bit of pride in myself, in the sense of contributing to a highlight reel. It was like the time I almost drowned when my water ski tips got pointed down, just as the towrope handle got trapped between my legs. That was a long time ago. But you remember.

A first-rate mockingbird

Every morning, for the last several mornings, on a telephone pole down the hill from us, sits a mockingbird I wish Atticus Finch could see.

Atticus is, of course, the memorable lead character, memorably played by Gregory Peck, in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” A scene comes where Atticus is explaining to his children, Jem and Scout, his way with guns. He says: “I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted - if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
“Why?” says Jem.
“Well,” Atticus says, “I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.”

This singer down on the telephone pole, he is pure mockingbird. He chirps, tweets, trills, imitates motors, makes a noise like a cane stick dragged across a washboard. Singing his heart out. When it gets too much for him, which is about once a minute, he leaps into the air, rising several feet on a fluttering of his wings with their distinctive white chevron markings and then settles back to his perch, never missing a beat.

Some Texan from the past had the good sense to claim the mockingbird as the State Bird of Texas. Things have felt very much like Texas around our house the past few days, with the breeze already warm even before sunup, the Texas privet in bloom, and the mockingbird partying down on the telephone pole. He seems to like it there. Lots of bird types perch on that pole – hawks, crows, sparrows, finches. But they come and go. Our mockingbird has occupied the pole exclusively since last weekend. Once a couple of sparrows approached, landing on braces below the beam where the mockingbird was singing away. I got the impression that the sparrows wanted him to shut up, and were going to team up on him. They advanced upward, but the mockingbird turned to meet them, and away they flew, either intimidated or unable to stand the decibel level.

Of course at night, the mockingbird becomes a party animal. Sometimes a mockingbird will take a midnight shine to the bottlebrush tree at the corner of the house and sing the night away. A person trying to sleep can become sparrowish toward such behavior. This has not happened since Karen and I have been married, but she recalls times when she would go outside at 2 a.m. and heave rocks into trees toward the music. I don’t object to this – I don’t think Gregory Peck could kill a mockingbird with a rock in the middle of the night – but it’s not something I would do. I hold a fondness for a bird that would stay up and sing all night. It wouldn’t be a sin, but maybe, for me, a transgression, to diss a mockingbird.

A privet space

In my brain exists a neural pathway, created at the instant I got a whiff of Texas privet. Since I was born in March, I would have been two months old. We had privet in the front yard, and its blossoms open in April and May. I imagine I was nestled in somebody's lap on the front porch when it happened. I wonder what I did. I would have hated mashed bananas by then; probably I took the scent of privet as something from the opposite pole of this strange new world, placed there by God as an apology for the banana. So I would have smiled.


I still smile. Every time. Same way. Here is something special about life. When I leaned to sniff these blossoms this morning, I was transported to a specific place in space and time, where it is morning in May, about 10 o'clock, 80 degrees, a hint of breeze. I go to that exact same space, every time. So far we have only two clusters, this and one other, that have bloomed, but the cluster on the left above will pop this week. They only bloom in late April and May, and the rest of the time it's a hedge. So these weeks are dear, and transporting.

Sunset, moonrise

A couple of times a year, the sun sets at Alta Mira, and the moon rises, almost at the same time. But only every two or three years, if we are lucky, does the sun set and the moon rise in a way that forces us to make a choice. Last night was such a night. The sun and moon were both so compelling, in their departure and arrival, that you had to choose your compulsion. As you did, you had to turn your back on the other. No way to have both at the same time. These events represent proof of something my grandmother Susie always said. "You can't have it all." I don't know if she learned that by watching sunsets and moonrises in her native Alabama, or adopted Texas, but I can speak to her from Southern California and tell her what she said was true.

Actually, I missed the best shot of all. I was watching events from the glider when I looked at the clouds in the east and thought I saw something huge and white. I wasn't looking for it, so its size shocked me. I realized it was the moon, emerging. I ran for the camera and got the image above, which isn't half as dramatic as what I had seen seconds before. But it wasn't bad. Then I turned my back on the moon and shot the sun. Moon and sun, looming through clouds and trees.

And back to the moon, starting to emerge. The moon plays optical tricks, depending on what it is near. Here, it does not appear nearly so large as when I first saw it. At that moment, it looked as big as a planet.

And up she came.

Another evening like this will be along again in a couple of years. Maybe sooner. The planet, in presenting its grandeur, always likes it to be a surprise.

Spouse one-ups husband on rat quick-thinking

We don’t live out in the country, but we do live on a hillside with sufficient open space around to encourage owls to nest, coyotes to prowl, and wood rats to multiply.

The owls do flybys of our porch, at eye level, at deepest twilight. The coyotes come and go, sometimes within 20 feet of the house, and we know when they are in the area by their pre-dawn chattering. Nothing we can do about any of that, but then the wood rats took a liking to the crawl space beneath the house.

They come up the slope, more than the owls care to catch, to the edge of the deck, through a little stand of hibiscus, then tear across to the house and down the access to the crawlspace. They are pretty big, and lightning fast. If one ran into your leg at full throttle, it might break your ankle. We saw them in the evening, at a predictable time when the light had been fading for about half an hour. We might be in the living room, watching television, with the French doors open to let in the breeze, and we would glimpse a darting movement – several darting movements, spaced a minute or so apart – from the access back to the hibiscus and over the slope.

Weekend before last, we decided it was time. We got rat poison at Dixieline and plotted our strategy. We didn’t want the critters dying under the house, so we set a tray in amongst the hibiscus just as the sun hit the horizon. Then we closed the doors so Gulliver couldn’t get outside and possibly find the tray. I put a rubber band around my wrist, to remind me to bring in the tray after about an hour and a half, when it was dark.

The first night, there was barely a nibble gone out of the tray. The second night, we couldn’t even find the tray. The third night we found the tray, and it was empty. Hee hee. I don’t like killing anything anymore, even spiders, but neither do I want wood rats to muscle up under the joists one night and carry the house down the slope.

Karen read on the box it took three days for the poison to work. I reasoned they would get sick sooner than that, too sick to get back to the crawlspace the next day. Meantime, the evening track meet disappeared. We entered a period of waiting. Saturday morning, we were sitting in the nook, drinking coffee, reading the papers, minding our own business. The dishwasher was running. From the direction of the dishwasher there came a small click. I didn’t hear it at first, but Karen did. For living things in the house other than ourselves, she has radar like a bat. “Did you hear that?” she said. “No,” I said. Then it came again. Again.

A series of clicks, like water dripping. It was coming from inside the wall, at eye level above the sink. I walked around to the other side of the wall, by the front door, and heard the clicks. They were spaced about 20 seconds apart. Then they stopped. It was Karen, several minutes later, who said in a low voice, “A rat in his death throes.” I wished bitterly that I had said it first. It sounded possible: the hind leg of the rat, jerking in the rhythm of the death spiral, kicking against the interior of the wall.

We should know by the weekend, if we’ll be drinking coffee out on the glider.

Killer Storm Looms!

I know, it is not easy being a weathercaster in Southern California, a desert next to a mammoth ocean with a cold current running offshore the length of the entire Pacific Coast. As a native Texan weather freak, I try to keep that in mind on mornings like these. For the last four days, the weather burons have advertised "a quick return to winter weather," with a vigorous trough racing southward bringing high winds and some rain, maybe half an inch, starting Saturday night and continuing through Sunday. This morning at 2 I awoke and listened for rain hitting the roof. Didn't hear any. I was disappointed. Texas weather freaks gear up for a promise of storminess the same way 11-year-old girls gear up for a Hannah Montana concert. It is goofy, I know, but it is just within us to go outside with the thunder booming and grin into the gale. We take great pleasure in anticipating same. Frequently, however, in Southern California, a Texan's hopes are dashed. It is idiotic to feel disappointment with the sort of weather I got to view when I went outside this morning. On the other hand, we get to see this almost every day.

The weather burons online insist the front will race through today. Or maybe it has already raced through so fast that no one saw it, not even the Doppler Radar. Now it is March 22, and this event most certainly would have been the last of our rainy season. The Southern California weather freaks can put their hopes away, the same way Easterners store their snowshoes. If you want a closer look at how nice it was this morning, click on the image, then click the Back arrow to return here.