Wednesday, December 19, 2007

The Best Ones

Here are my choices for the best of 2007 ...

Best song I never would have heard if not for the iPod ads: "1234," by Feist.

Best song I never would have heard if not for the TV show John from Cincinnati: "Johnny Appleseed," by Joe Strummer.

Best continuation of a brilliant career: Magic, by Bruce Springsteen.

Best movie I haven't seen yet: Juno.

Quirky comedy that deserved better: The Darjeeling Limited.

Breakout paperback sensation: Eat, Pray, Love.

Evocative book title: Like You'd Understand, Anyway.

Best essay by a much admired family member: "Testing: One, Two, Three?"

Best blog: Chimichangas at Sunset.

Cutest dog ever: Bodie.

Best new TV series: John from Cincinnati.

Best magazine article: Fast Company's November cover story: "This Mechanic Can Get You 100 MPG (Why Can't Detroit?)."

Best novel I've read in the past year: The Lay of the Land, by Richard Ford.

Best road trip: Along the coast to Santa Barbara.

Woman of the year (this year and every year): Joanne Riske.

Saturday, December 1, 2007

What to Believe

Janet thinks I'm skeptical — one of the most skeptical people she's ever run into.

It's always interesting when people make observations like that about you. You get to compare how they perceive you with how you perceive yourself. The truth is, I have always been a very trusting person, and I choose to remain trusting, generally speaking, in spite of everything.

But I know why Janet thinks I'm skeptical. It's because I argue with her on matters of faith.

Janet has become a serious student of the Bible again after years of exploring other paths. I'm more interested in the other paths.

I no longer call myself a Christian because I think it's a loaded term, loaded with preconceptions, and I'm trying to move beyond that — beyond my own preconceptions and the confining concepts of others.

(As an aside, I had the great good fortune of studying under the late Dr. Gordan Frazee, a self-described Christian mystic, at Linfield College in Oregon. While he had a deep knowledge of the Bible and all it's possible interpretations, his most lasting lesson was simply the way he lived his life. One of his great virtues was not trying to make his students see things his way — a virtue I'm still striving toward. Not that I have any students, but you know what I mean.)

When Janet talks about the Bible, I tend to point out what I see as lapses in logic and flawed reasoning. She, on the other hand, seems to think of logic as a tired argument that no longer works for her.

The surprise here is that I don't really disagree with her on that point (if I understood her correctly). Logic and reason will only take you so far.

Janet doesn't believe in hell.

I don't either.

She says she came to that conclusion from studying the Bible.

I came to the same conclusion, not through the Bible and not through reason. Some things you just know, deep down, and that's what I trust. More than the Bible. More than reason.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

No Particular Order

For the man and woman who brought me into the world.
For the sisters who taught me how to play tennis.
For the surgeon who removed my appendix before it burst.
For the dentist who capped my broken tooth.
For the master who taught me yoga.
For the mechanic who fixes my car.
For the singer who sings that song I like.
For the friends who lift me up when I'm down.
For the woman who still loves me after all these years.
Thanks.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Don't Stop Now

We spread a blanket off to one side of the boat launch, under some trees. Island Lake, in Shelton, Washington, is surrounded by small private homes, and this is the only public access. Since it's still early in the season and the homeowners tend to take the lake for granted, there are no boats or skiers out.

It's 1972, and we're both seventeen.

That's how the story begins. The story "Don't Stop Now" in Hobart.

Hobart is one of my favorite literary journals, and the story appears this month in the online edition.

It's basically a distillation of a novel I started writing in 1972 when I was 17. Two hundred forty-four pages down to five. Reader's Digest, eat your heart out.

Like many first novels, mine was awful (embarrassingly so) and now languishes in the back of a closet, where it belongs. The short story, on the other hand, is pretty darn good. An editor at Esquire called it "a pleasure to read," even if it wasn't really appropriate for the magazine.

More importantly, Hobart loved it.

So, don't stop now; hop on over to Hobart and check it out.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Testing: One, Two, Three?

I'm not the target audience for Literary Momma. It is, after all, "A Literary Magazine for the Maternally Inclined."

Can a man be maternally inclined, or would we call that paternally inclined? Are they different? I couldn't say. I'm not even a parent.

So why do I find myself reading Literary Momma today? Because of a great article called "Testing: One, Two, Three?" by Gretchen Clark.

To me, this piece of creative nonfiction does what great literature is supposed to do: Put you in someone else's shoes and let you experience what it's like to be them. Even if you're not like them. Even if you're someone of a different gender, someone in completely different circumstances.

In just 14 paragraphs, "Testing: One, Two, Three?" gave me a vivid glimpse into the complex and conflicting emotions of motherhood.

What's more, I now feel like I know Gretchen Clark, even though I've already known her for more than 30 years.

She's my sister-in-law.

Monday, October 1, 2007

Writer's Profile

Childhood Ambition: Be the best writer who ever lived. (I was 10 and had never heard of Shakespeare.)

Little-Known Fact: Had first story published (on a mimeograph machine) when in the fourth grade.

Honors: Won first place in a feature-writing contest in high school, despite horrible spelling.

Influences: John Knowles, Earnest Hemingway, Philip Roth, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Elizabeth Tallent, Milan Kundera.

Proudest Moment So Far: Having my first short story published in the Beloit Fiction Journal. (I have another story coming out in Hobart next month that I'm equally proud of.)

Inspiration: Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of Pay It Forward, who told me she collected 120 rejections before her first story was published. (It does pay to be persistent.)

Most Encouraging Note: "I think you're a good writer and I liked what I read ... I cannot flatter where writing is concerned." - L.H., SoHo Press.

Most Discouraging Note:
"I'm afraid this is nowhere near the novel I had hoped for." - L.H., SoHo Press.

Best Advice from a Fellow Writer: "Diversify your emotional investments." - Greg Bardsley.

Goal: Be more playful.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Eat, Pray, Love

For both style and substance, it's hard to imagine a better read that Eat, Pray, Love.

The best-selling memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert is billed as "One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia."

Along the way, there's no shortage of candor and comedy, confusion and crises. But clarity is never far behind.

Check it out. You won't be disappointed.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Joshua Tree

The desert is full of things you can’t hold on to — light and heat and sand that slips through your fingers like friendships you once had. But if you’re looking for a sense of permanence, the desert is the place to go.

California’s two deserts — the Mojave and the Colorado — come together at Joshua Tree National Monument, 140 miles east of L.A. If you go there, you’ll see what I mean.

Some of the Joshua trees have been around for hundreds of years and are now nearly 50 feet tall. (They look like overgrown cacti.) But it’s the immovable boulders and massive rock formations jutting up from the desert floor that really make you feel as if nothing ever changes here.

It’s not true, of course. On some of the rocks you’ll find petroglyphs left by an ancient Indian civilization we know little about — experts aren’t even sure if the etchings were a form of writing or just drawings. Even so. Stand in the shade of a boulder, put your hand on its pebbled surface — still cool in the noonday heat — and you’ll know there’s at least one thing you can hold on to.

Climbers from all over the country come here, to the Wonderland of Rocks, to test themselves on innumerable ascents, but you don’t need ropes or carabiners or gymnast’s chalk to appreciate the Wonderland. Although this maze of granite boulders covers 12 square miles, you can get a good feel for it on an easy-to-follow trail of little more than a mile.

But first you may want to get your bearings by driving through this 850-square-mile preserve. Gently winding roads will lead you from the high-desert beauty of the Mojave to the immense low-desert grandeur of the Pinto Basin in the Colorado. To really get the lay of the land, your first stop should be Keys View — if not the highest point in the monument, as least the highest you can get to on a paved road. From here you can see snow-capped Mount San Gorgonio, Palm Springs, and the Salton Sea. On a clear day you can even spot Signal Mountain, just over the Mexican border, 95 miles away.

You won’t get a real feel for the desert, though, until you leave the roads behind. When you can no longer see pavement or campers or even fellow hikers — that’s when you know you’re in the desert.

It’s hot and you’d better carry plenty of water.

On the trail the only sounds you’ll hear are the crunch of rocks under your boots and, if you’re lucky, the wind riffling through your hair. When you stop, and the air is still, the silence is like a ringing in your ears.

Two more things you can’t hold on to: silence and peace.

We felt it on our way to the Lost Palms Oasis. The trail begins at Cottonwood Spring and leads you out past the Mastodon Mine, over rolling hills and through dry washes. It’s four miles to Lost Palms, and before you get there you realize the desert is also full of things you wouldn’t want to hold on to — prickly pear cactus, whiptail lizards, catclaw shrubs, and rattlesnakes. (Not that we saw any rattlers, but you should carry a snakebite kit just in case.) Still, the variety of cactus and birds and other creatures is astonishing.

The Oasis is a cluster of fan palms at the bottom of a deep ravine. It looks like a long way down, but it doesn’t take long (even coming back up). Among the palms, we pass another hiker who says, “What, no pool to dive into?” There’s clearly water here somewhere, but it’s all below the surface.

We sit in the sand, our backs against a sloping chunk of granite, and enjoy our lunch — bananas, grapes, sandwiches, and cookies — in the shade of the palms. A breeze rustles through the ravine. It’s nice here. We decide to let the desert hold on to us for a while.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Al is ...

Al is sipping a tall decafe mocha with whip.

Al is writing about "high-semantic storage" and other things he doesn't fully understand.

Al is eating a drumstick at his desk and trying to imagine world peace. The drumstick is really good.

Al is reading Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. (His friend Karen Croft did a lot of the research.)

Al is going downstairs for an iced latte.

Al is on a conference call with a bunch of very forward-looking people.

Al is thinking he'd like to be in Maui, bobbing in the waves of Napili Bay right about now.

Al is taking Bodie for a quick walk in the courtyard.

Al is trying to arrange an interview but his subject doesn't have the bandwidth for that right now.

Al is ready for the weekend. Oh, wait, this is only Wednesday.

Al is chowing down on leftover pizza, his workday done.

Al is at the yoga center.

Al is.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Are You Precient?

Here's an outtake from a fascinating conversation I had awhile ago with Steve Rubin, one of our top engineers at Sun ...

"I think that scientists in general are not acting like scientists anymore, but are acting more like religious figures, with their belief in some stuff and rejection of anything that doesn't fit within their doctrines — for example, paranormal effects. I used to reject the paranormal, too. You know, 'That's BS.'

"I had the standard skeptical thing until I did some programming work for Dean Radin. He's considered a paranormal or psychic researcher. He's a Ph.D., scientist, statistical expert, skeptic, and what he does is he goes around and he repeats the experiments that people claim are demonstrating paranormal effects. Someone says, 'The following proves a paranormal effect,' and he says, 'Bullshit. Let's see for ourselves.'

"I was his programmer, building his experiments, and it was quite convincing. Here's one example; I wouldn't have believed it could work.

"Are you prescient? Can you see the future? Some people think they can, but they can't quantify it. They can't prove it. There are a lot of people, by the way, who believe in these effects, but they can't really defend it because someone can always say, 'Oh, you just got a hint from somewhere.'

"What Radin did was he got a collection of pictures. Some of them were 'calm' pictures as he called them. A picture of a spoon. A picture of a flower. Then he had 'difficult' pictures. A picture of a deformed face. A picture of a bloody accident. Pictures of people having sex. Pictures to get your blood boiling. He would then randomly flash these pictures on a screen in front of a subject. Not only that, when the difficult pictures hit the screen, he would play the most annoying, grating, screeching sound. And he had you hooked up to a number of devices, measuring your blood pressure, heart rate, and stuff like that.

"All he told the subjects was, 'We're measuring your response to these pictures.' and he'd show a few dozen pictures. Sure enough, when the difficult pictures hit the screen, the curves jumped. People were not happy. And when the calm pictures hit the screen the biometrics just continued normally. Except for one interesting thing. Before the difficult pictures hit the screen, people's rates would already start to climb. People knew. People are prescient.

"I programmed this thing, and I know I did it right. In fact, I've been programming computers for almost 40 years now. Since high school. I have never in my life had my code scrutinized so heavily as this code. First of all, the random decision to show a calm or annoying picture had to be made immediately before it happened. They didn't want it made ahead of time so someone could argue that it was stored in the computer and somehow detectable. They also wanted to make sure that the amount of code that was executed for the the two paths, calm versus difficult, was the same length of time so no one could detect a little delay.

"They went on and on with this level of scrutiny of the code, checking everything. But there's no doubt about it. Statistical analysis bears it out, as well as just an eyeballing of the data. When a calm picture is coming, people stay calm. When the difficult picture is coming, people know before that thing hits the screen, before that sound comes out of the speaker. They start to get tense ahead of time. Everyone does it (not just the people who claim to be prescient). We can document that all people are prescient, even though they don't know it.

"Prescience? Intuition? These I believe are real phenomena, and we could have endless discussions about why I think they're real. I'm not saying it's real because I've seen the aliens, or taken too many drugs, or something like that. There are some real phenomena out there. And there are many people with theories. My basic take on it is that it's just a phenomenon we haven't learned to measure yet. No one believed in electricity before it was invented. Or radio waves. How magical is that?

"At each point in time we think, 'We know it all. We're done now.' And this is what I complain about with scientists today. They say, 'We have all our answers.' But we don't have all our answers. Did you know that the physical constants are not constant? The speed of light is not constant. Yet scientists blithely treat these things as if they're constants. The history of their values shows that they change, and this is not just due to better measuring equipment. If you go into a lab today and try to measure them ten times in a row, you'll get ten different answers. They're all within a fraction of a percent, or something like that, but they're not constants ... it varies more than the equipment's margin of error. All sorts of things that we think are true are not. But we gloss over that stuff because it's just too hard to believe.

"There is lots out there; we just can't detect it yet."

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

The Time of My Life

Thirty-one years ago today, in a rain-soaked park in Oregon, Joanne and I were huddled under a small shelter with our friends and families.

I was wearing a black velvet suit I'd picked up at the Squire Shop in the Lancaster Mall. Joanne was wearing a long white Gunny Sack dress and looked fantastic.

College buddies played "Here Comes the Sun" on guitar and a borrowed pump organ.

Eleven months earlier, Joanne and I had been among half a dozen students who gathered in Dr. Frazee's office for his course in the Development of Christian Thought. By coincidence, we showed up in similar ski sweaters on the same day, and Joanne was amazed when it kept happening, week after week, on different days.

She never suspected that I might have seen her on campus earlier and run back to my dorm to change.

What can I say? Sometimes fate can use a helping hand.

In the park, with the rain still coming down, it was Dr. Frazee  a bald, robust, and joyous man  who stood before us now with the power to pronounce us husband and wife.

Joanne had earned her art degree a couple of months earlier and was working in the office of Chuck Colvin Ford in McMinnville (home of Linfield College, where we met). I still had a semester to go and had a summer job sorting the empty bottles that came back to the Coca-Cola plant in Salem. Nothing about our future was set except one thing ...

We placed plain gold bands around each other's fingers and promised to love each other for the rest of our lives.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Mom and Apple Pie

When she was alive, my mother made what I considered the best apple pie in the world.

The key to its flaky crust (even on the bottom) was in her fingers. She never used a recipe but knew by the feel of the dough when it was just right.

"When it's too wet you feel it's gooey," she told me. "If it's too dry, you can't roll it out. Then it crumbles too much."

She was 63 then and I was 23, interviewing her for an article I was writing for The Community Press, where I had landed my first job as a reporter.

"I have the feeling — how it's supposed to be," she said.

This small German woman had never even tasted pie before coming to America in 1952.

"I learned how to make it in my second year here," she said. "A neighbor girl came over and showed me how."

She had watched the girl — "I don't remember her name, but she was a very nice girl" — as she carefully measured the ingredients.

"I couldn't read the recipe. That's why I had to see it — what she put in," my mother recalled. "That's why I never used a recipe. I couldn't read English."

At the time she could hardly speak English, and the neighbor girl had to show her, rather than tell her, how to make the pie.

"She measured everything. At first I measured everything, too, but then I just used my own judgment."

If you asked my mom, "How much flour?" or "How much sugar?" she would say, "Until it looks right."

I could never master it, but I did pick up a little secret for anyone who aspires to flaky-crust perfection.

"What makes the best pie is to use lard and shortening together," she told me.

This was not something the neighbor girl taught her, though. She discovered it on her own.

"I didn't have enough shortening one time," she said, "so I had to use half lard."

Don't have any lard on hand?

Get some.

Sunday, July 1, 2007

Lyrics Essay

Bob said business men, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth. None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.

Bruce said tell me what I see when I look in your eyes. Is that you baby or just a brilliant disguise?

Mark said I dreamed your dream for you. Now your dream is real. How can you look at me as if I was just another one of your deals?

Van said everybody feels so determined not to feel anybody else's pain.

Bruce said, remember, the soul of the universe willed a world and it appeared.

Rickie said the world is turning faster than it did when I was young.

John said it's time to go home and I ain't even done with the night.

Van said no one's making no commitments to anybody but themselves.

Bob said my love winks, she does not bother. She knows too much to argue or to judge.

Another Bob said ain't it funny how the night moves?

Patti said I've been lost and I've been found, been lifted up to the gates of heaven and put back down.

Sting said I never made promises lightly and there have been some that I've broken, but I swear in the days still left we'll walk in fields of gold.

Nick said what's so funny 'bout peace, love, and understanding?

Bob said I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

Jewel said in the end only kindness matters.

And Van said you shall take me strongly in your arms again and I will not remember that I ever felt the pain.

Tina said all fear will be gone when we reach the shores of Avalon.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Post Cards from the Edge


This is the story of a road trip we took back in May of 1991 — to Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon — as told through post cards and letters to friends. A trip both awe-inspiring and life-threatening.

SUNDAY
From Carson City, our first overnight stop, we drive straight through the high, flat desert to Ely. On the horizon all around us are mountains dusted with snow. The only shadows are cast by fluffy white clouds with flat, dark bottoms. Very surreal. They look so close, like just a high ceiling. I guess it has something to do with our altitude, which is somewhere around 7,000 feet. Anyway the shadows leave the plain streaked black. It’s beautiful but my butt hurts. At least we have cruise control.

MONDAY
Here at last. The Nevada desert was just a prelude, the casinos a weak attempt to distract us. This is what we came for — the red rock canyons of Utah — and we’re in awe. As we drove along the Virgin River this afternoon, we had to hunker down and peer up through the windshield to find the tops of the canyon walls all around us — as much as 4,000 feet straight up. Joanne said, “Too bad we don’t have a sun roof or a convertible.” Then she thought better of it. Falling rocks, you know.

TUESDAY
Zion is like Yosemite with color. I might have made that up but Joanne assures me she read it to me from a guidebook before we ever left California. It’s true, though. In fact, Zion makes Yosemite look like a rough draft. We ran into a bit of a rainy patch on the trail to Hidden Canyon this morning. It’s really coming down now, but we’re back in our cabin and there’s a fireplace, so everything is just fine.

WEDNESDAY
“Just because the trail’s there doesn’t mean it’s safe.” That bit of advice came from a friendly waiter at breakfast when he found out we’d been hiking in Hidden Canyon in the rain yesterday. “If I’d known you were going to do that, I’d have warned against it. We had a helicopter rescue out there Saturday. We lost a park ranger out there last year when it was dry.” Not to worry. The weather appears to be improving, and we promise to be careful.

THURSDAY
One of the first things you notice here — aside from how much bluer the sky is than you’ve ever known it to be — is how much the sound of wind or running water is amplified in a canyon. Here at Bryce, the Paria River is dry now, but the wind can be very strong and there are other sounds — this morning we were in a narrow canyon photographing two natural bridges, and the sound of a raven’s wings beating the thin, dry air startled and amazed us. The bird flew from one wall to the other and back again in search of a comfortable perch, and if you saw the same thing in a movie you’d say the sound technician got it wrong. It was too loud to be real. But there we were.

The old photos in the lodge are really something. Tourists used to arrive in long touring limousines, often with open roofs, that brought them straight from the railway station in Cedar City. (Union Pacific built the lodge in 1924.) The women wore raccoon coats. The place still has a sort of rustic grandeur, but the staff no longer gathers to sing to departing guests as they did in the thirties, forties, and fifties.

Saw five deer grazing in the field at dusk. They let us get close enough to hear them tear clumps of grass from the ground.

FRIDAY
I don’t know what it is about the dining room here, but I always feel happy when we sit down for a meal. We’re not ourselves anymore. We’re some couple from the twenties, I suppose, since that’s when the lodge was built, and we’ve just come out on the Union Pacific, all the way from Connecticut or New Hampshire.

The food is quite good — especially the Southwest chicken breasts they serve at dinner — and we always pay with traveler’s cheques, which seems to add to the illusion that we came from far, far away in the days before credit cards.

Maybe it’s the exposed beams of the ceiling, the two stone fireplaces, the big windows with their small rectangular panes. Even from a distance the imperfections of the glass are visible — the uneven thickness of the panes. Up close, you can see that some have tiny air bubbles in them.

Or maybe it’s the uniforms. Waitresses wear white aprons over salmon-colored dresses with white cuffs on their short sleeves. Waiters wear bow ties, suspenders, and aprons.

Navajo rugs hang on the wood-paneled walls, and the overhead lights are wrapped in wrought iron with a pine-tree motif. The chairs are made of tree branches with the bark still on them.

It all combines to take you back. In our case, to a time before we were born.

SATURDAY
When we arrived at the North Rim, the park had only been open three days, and it was easy to see why: there were still huge snow drifts along the road. That, along with the white and leafless aspens in among the pines, really gives the place the look of winter rather than spring. The man at the registration desk said, “You’re staying four days? What are you going to do here for four days?” Well, laundry, for one thing. There’s just no getting away from dirty socks.

SUNDAY
Hiked to Widforss Point today, a ten-mile round-trip through forest with numerous canyon overlooks, the most striking view being at Widforss, naturally. It took us three hours to get there, but it was worth it. Didn’t see any of the Kaibab squirrels that live on the North Rim (and nowhere else), but we did spot a screech owl, a deer, and several short-horned lizards.

WEDNESDAY
If I’m calm in emergencies, it’s because I never believe anything bad can happen to me. But later, sometimes, I see how, if we’d done just one thing differently — if we’d made one more mistake — things could have been really bad instead of merely miserable.

Yesterday we hiked down into the Grand Canyon, all the way to Roaring Springs — a drop in elevation of between three and four thousand feet, which of course we had to make up on the return trip.

It took us two hours and twenty-five minutes going down, and they say you should allow twice as long to get back. Not a pleasant thought. We had already drunk half our water supply.

Joanne at least had a hat. I rigged something up with a handkerchief as a headband.

After lunch we decided, to be safe, we’d better fill our water bottles at the pump house. (We didn’t want to take water from the stream because we had no purification tablets.) But there was no trail.

We tried going up the bank. We tried following the water pipe along the stream. We were getting nowhere and expending a lot of energy in the process. Finally, we sat down again and Joanne started drinking long greedy drinks from her water bottle.

“I feel like we’re going to die,” she said.

We started up the trail, but didn’t get far before Joanne found a rock to sit on in a small patch of shade and started guzzling what was left of her water.

“We’re not going to make it. I can’t go on. I feel like we’re going to die,” she said.

My first thought: We’d be fine if you’d just go easy on the water. But I didn’t say that, and I’m glad I didn’t because it could have been our undoing. Instead, I said, “We’ve got two choices: We can go back and get more water from the stream, or we can go on with what we have left.”

“I can’t go on. I don’t feel well, Al.”

We put all the water we had into two bottles, and I took the other two down to the stream. Giardia was the least of my concerns at this point. In about 20 minutes, I was back. Joanne had drunk most of one bottle already, but was feeling better. In fact, I had trouble keeping up with her. We made it to the top in only three and a half hours. We even had time for a shower and a nap before our dinner reservation. All seemed well.

Then, as we finished our meal, Joanne started to feel feverish and then chilled in turns.

The medics came to our room, took her vital signs, and conferred with a doctor by phone. The diagnosis: sinus infection. The treatment: rest, take aspirin, and drink lots of water. The irony: her sinus trouble was probably caused or at least aggrevated by our rapid rise from the canyon.

In any case, to this day, Joanne carries water with her wherever she goes.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Flash-Flood Warnings

Another moment in time. July 1992. We're sitting at the end of a dock on the western shore of Lake Tahoe. Night is falling—and a few drops of rain as well. There are about fifty ski boats and a scattering of sailboats anchored here, all pointing straight across the lake, bows to the tide.

Tugging on the lake is a full moon, though we can't see it.

Behind us the sky is blue and purple, but to the north it's black with clouds. Sheets of lightning flash every few minutes, but there's no thunder, not like this afternoon.

We like it here. The beach is private, but we have a key to the gate because we're staying at the Cottage Inn. A circle of six cottages in a pine grove, the inn is run as a bed and breakfast. In the main building, where breakfast is served, there's also a living room with a fireplace, a stereo, and a small TV. Earlier, the All-Star Game (AL 13, NL 6) was interrupted twice by the Emergency Broadcast System issuing flash-flood warnings around the area.

Despite the weather, we have asked to stay an extra day.

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Artificial Intelligence

Ever been frustrated to the point of screaming because you couldn't get some gadget to do what it was designed to do? Of course you have. We all have.

Then, at the height of your outrage, some helpful bystander  — your father-in-law, perhaps — will say, "You have to be smarter than the machine."

Right.

I once took a sledge hammer to a wristwatch/stopwatch/lap-counter that somehow thought I wanted it to beep every day at 4 a.m.

It wasn't smart enough to run.

Now I see that the processing power of your average desktop computer is expected to surpass that of the human brain by 2022.

Really?

On one hand, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. It's been 10 years since a computer first defeated the world's reigning chess champion. You remember IBM's Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov in 1997, don't you?

(Yeah, me neither, but I looked it up.)

The funny thing is, with computers having gotten twice as fast every couple of years, you'd think they'd be able to do a lot more by now. Like recognize your voice. I have better luck with our five-month-old puppy than any computer I've tried to talk to on the phone.

Now, I'm no engineer, but I get to rub shoulders with some of the best where I work, and I was pleased to see this quote from James Gosling:

"Chess is remarkably simple from a machine's point of view. But to humans it appears complex. Similarly some things that appear simple are far more complex than we perceive them to be."

He noted, for example, that understanding speech is very different from merely recognizing it. From that perspective, a three-year-old child outshines the best computer.

We'll see where they are in 2022, but I wouldn't bet against the brain.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

How Sweet Life Can Be

On the beach at Hanalei Bay we listened to the whoosh and sizzle of gentle waves as they slapped the shore and washed through the course brown sand.

We were not the first ones on the beach—a lone woman and two other couples had beaten us there—but everyone was quiet, said good-morning in passing, and otherwise kept their distance.

We could see tiny fish in the ankle-deep water that stretched a good distance off shore before it got any deeper, and on the sand little translucent crabs moved like dustballs in the wind.

We walked inland along the bay as far as the big black boulders (they looked like giant briquettes) and watched black crabs as big as your hand show off their skill as rock climbers. We were surprised to see them actually jump from one rock to the next.

It was the first morning of our first real vacation. The first time we flew somewhere together. The first time we didn't stay with family. Hers or mine. It was also the first time I realized just how sweet life could be.

It's been nearly 20 years, but I can still bring back the feeling if I try.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

The Red Belt

My wife and I recently returned from 15 days of intensive martial-arts training in the Arizona desert, near Sedona. Eat breakfast, train. Eat lunch, train. Eat dinner, train. Go to bed, start again.

A couple of times we even trained before breakfast.

Several times along the way we decided we didn't want to do any more, but we kept going anyway.

Earned red belts in the end. Never mind the white, yellow, and blue belts that usually come before that in Dahn Mu Do (similar to Tai Chi). Not that we went to Sedona seeking belts. We didn't even know about them until we were there. And we didn't particularly like the idea that there would be a test at the end of our stay. This was our vacation, for God's sake.

But of course once we learned about the red belts we couldn't very well go home without one, could we? Not on your life.

Best part was the stuff we did with swords. Wooden swords that we gave names to, carried everywhere, and slept with every night.

It took us days to master the Vortex Sword form, and I still messed up when it was my turn on stage. I left out a move and ended with my back to the audience. Damn. A quick, impromptu move set things right, but still.

The whole Vortex thing takes about three minutes to perform and seems ridiculously easy now.

That's just the way of things, I guess.

Then again I still need to refine my footwork, and there's a new twist our local instructor shared with us — twirling the sword like a batton to change directions with flair.

I'm working on it.

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Get Back

Sunrise, mountains, forest, stream.

Smile.

Surveyor, construction site, small town, big city, electric power grid.

Traffic light, green.

I am Starbucks. Hope has a voice. Can you hear me now? Cingular has the fewest dropped calls. Three-car collision, Willow at Bayfront. Bed, Bath & Beyond Now Open. Freeway entrance. YouTube. MySpace. LinkedIn. Blogger. Backup on the Dumbarton. Lane ends, merge left. Get Naked and Rule the World. Office space available. As Funds Leverage Up, Fears of Reckoning Rise. Metering lights are on. Morning Edition. Under new management. Al, 7 Days Left to Use Your Personal Shopping Day. Right lane must exit. Emergency Call 9-1-1. No parking anytime. Eyewitness News at 11. Mystery Spot. Explorer, Navigator, Voyager, Ranger, Wrangler, Land Rover. This Bitch Hauls Ass. Life, liberty, and the pursuit.

Traffic light, red.

"... Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson, you're all fakes, run to your mansions. Come around, we'll kick your asses."

Paved road, dirt road, forest, stream, dusk.

Deep breath.

Smile.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight

I was looking for inspiration and came across the story of Lasse Viren.

Remember him? Viren was the guy who stumbled and fell halfway through the Olympic 10,000-meter final in 1972. Any chance the 23-year-old police officer from Finland had of winning a medal appeared to be gone.

He calmly got up and started running again.

Sportswriters consider it one of the great comebacks of all time because Viren not only caught up with the other runners, he passed them all to win the gold.

And he set a world record in the process.

Amazing.

What does that have to do with you, my friend? I wanted to remind you, in case you might have forgotten, that the same spirit resides in you.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Unintended Consequences

When I was very young, maybe five years old, my mother asked me what I wanted to be.

This was in the living room of the house on Satsup Street (still the setting for occasional dreams, since I spent so many of my formative years there). A number a people were around and I was vaguely aware of an older brother answering the same question.

I think I gave the same answer he did, though I don't remember what that was. Fireman, perhaps. I had never thought about it before.

My mother said, "Wouldn't you like to be a pastor?"

Being an agreeable child, I said yes.

She then told everyone what I had said, and I knew right away that I would never be a pastor.

I still find it funny how that worked. I was an agreeable child, as I said, and eager to please, but I felt tricked. This was so clearly what she wanted; it had nothing to do with me.

I did end up being a serious student of religion in college, but I'd be damned if I was going to be a professional.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

The Amoral of the Story

"I don't believe in anything," a colleague once told me.

I didn't believe him.

"I'm serious. I don't. When I sit down and try to decide what I believe ... there's nothing," he said. "It's hard to decide on anything."

"Of course, because that means you have to commit yourself."

"That's right. And what if you find out you were wrong?" he said. "What if you live your whole life and ..."

"You can always change your mind," I said.

I'm afraid that was a little too blithe for my coworker, though.

"What about after the Spanish Inquisition, after you've burned all these people at the stake? What do you say then: 'Oh, we changed our minds'?"

"Never mind," I said, in the sort of pinched, old-woman voice you hear in Monty Python reruns.

"You've got all these crispy critters on your hands," he said.

An important point about the dangers of belief, I suppose, but far removed from any choice we would have to make that day.

Soon the conversation shifted and my colleague started telling me about something he'd seen on TV — an interview with a mass murderer, long imprisoned.

(I say colleague rather than a friend because Pete made it quite clear that he didn't like me. He once called me pious, and he didn't mean it as a complement. I pray to God I don't sound pious now.)

I had missed the interview (intentionally) but wondered what Pete thought.

"He was really bizarre. He was ... well, he was completely amoral."

"Kind of like you, huh?"

"No, Al."

"Well, you don't believe in anything. Isn't that what amoral is?"

"It's not the same thing," he said.

"I think you believe in more than you know."

Monday, April 9, 2007

Another Sister's Perspective

My sister Irma remembers being impressed with our father because he taught himself to read and write in English without much help and doesn't know how in the world he ever did that.

She remembers coming home to see him sitting at the kitchen table reading the World Book encyclopedia. She thinks he probably read the whole series cover-to-cover. He must have, she says, because of all the many times she saw him doing that.

He was so hungry for knowledge, he read constantly.

He always knew everything that was going on all over the world, she recalls, and he used to get disgusted with Americans because nobody knew anything. He'd ask them who the leader of Germany was and nobody knew. He couldn't get over that.

She thought he would have been a great politician, but of course that was not to be.

Another thing she remembers is that Dad couldn't stand it when people sat around in bathrobes, like she used to do, until 10 o'clock in the morning. It about drove him crazy. He just did not like that look. He felt you should get dressed and eat and start the day dressed.

On the (somewhat) humorous side, Irma recalls, he hated seafood — any kind of seafood. It was almost as if he thought it was a sin to eat any of it. Anyway, one time she was fixing razor clams, dipping them in flour and frying them like cutlets. He said, "Oh, those look good" and she said, "I'll give you a plate."

So he sat down and started eating. "This is good," he said. "What is it?"

Not being able to lie to him, she told him — kind of jokingly, like she'd pulled one over on him.

He picked up the plate and flung it across the room.

He was very upset with her for deceiving him, so that was the first and last time she ever did that to him.

Saturday, March 31, 2007

A Sister's Perspective

My sister Hanna says she did not get to know our father well. After all, she did not live at home much of the time. In her teens, she worked as a live-in housekeeper.

Here's what she does remember ...

She remembers talking him into buying a typewriter when she was in school, promising to type his letters for him. She does not remember typing any for him. He never asked.

She remembers that Dad did not make life easy on himself. He had a car in the garage but walked to work.

She remembers that Dad did not like his daughters to wear lipstick -- so they would put it on while on their way to school. Hanna got caught, though. He saw her his way to work, or maybe it was coming back, and she had not wiped her lips hard enough.

She did not ask our parents to attend school activities, because she was embarrassed to be seen with them. (I remember feeling the same way because our parents were different from other parents, foreign.)

She remembers that Dad did not like things broken down. Shortly after she and her husband purchased their house, he drove down with a trunk full of stair forms and put in new front steps. Those steps are still in use today, 40-some years later.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

About My Father

My father was born in Russia, to German parents, and grew up in Poland.

After his father died from cancer and his mother remarried, he was kicked out of the house. His stepfather already had enough kids. He was about 12.

My mother was not his first choice. He was turned down by one of her sisters before he proposed to her.

He worked for a railroad before the war and drove an ammunition truck during the war.

On the battlefield, a dying soldier called out to him to come and pray with him. He did, and it was a good thing because the next bomb hit right where he had been.

After the war, he worked in a foundry.

He brought the family to the United States in 1952 and immediately regretted it, but there was no way to go back.

His first job in this country was shoveling manure.

The cousin who sponsored our family couldn't understand why he was in such a hurry pay his debt, leave the farm, and go to work for the lumber mill in town.

I don't remember this but he was very strict and once chased my oldest brother around the barn with a belt, trying to beat him for being late. It was a turning point. He had lost it and he knew it.

With me, the last of six children, he was always very gentle.

He liked to watch pro wrestling — cheering the good guys and booing the bad — and refused to believe the fights were fake.

He liked beer but preferred Coca-Cola.

He and my mother added a wing to my childhood home without the benefit of blueprints.

When the rest us were in the basement watching TV, you could find my father upstairs in the living room most nights, reading.

Like his father, he died of cancer at an early age. Fifty-three.

I'm fifty-two.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

All or Nothing?

Not long ago, I heard someone I like, someone I respect very much, say, "All religions are stupid."

I didn't say anything because, well ... all religions are stupid.

They're also deeply profound.

They speak to people in some essential way. They must. Otherwise, it seems to me, they wouldn't have any followers.

Here it's probably worth noting that I know a fair amount about one religion and a little about several others, but that's it. There are plenty I know nothing about. Plenty I don't want to know about.

Still, it seems fair to say that all religions are a mixture of life-altering truths and sometimes silly misconceptions. The only serious mistake, to my way of thinking, is the belief that there is only one path.

There are, in fact, many ways to reach any destination you can think of.

What makes religions seem stupid is that too many people think of them in all-or-nothing terms. I say take what works for you and discard the rest.

And be willing to change your mind in light of new information.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Marathon Entry

The runners, more than a thousand of them, were gathering on Broadway for the start of the Trail’s End Marathon, the oldest race of its kind in Oregon. (Seaside, to be exact.) We walked along the street toward the beach and watched them jogging and stretching. It was already past eleven o’clock, and the race was less than half an hour away.

My friend Dan and I were supposed to be among the runners — this was in February of 1984 — but I had developed shin splints and, when they kept recurring, was forced to stop training. Dan hadn’t run since he hurt his back about a month before. Still, it was such a nice day — no rain and not much wind — that I was itching to put on my racing flats. We watched a dog do a trick with Frisbees and I said to Dan, “There’s still time to get changed.”

He shrugged it off as if I was only kidding, but I could tell he was fighting hard not to get caught up in the excitement.

“Come on ...”

“No.”

“You don’t have to finish. Just look at it as a workout with a bunch of other people.”

“No, if I start I have to finish.”

Then, as luck would have it, my wife said she needed to go to our room at the Ebb Tide to get a coat. We walked there with her.

“I’m going to do it,” I said, once in the room. “I’m changing.”

“You’re crazy,” Dan said, but he started changing, too.

Joanne (that’s my wife) could hardly believe it, but she helped me by pinning my number, 549, to my sweatshirt. We had only about fifteen minutes to get into our gear, relieve our nervous bladders, and get back to the starting area.

All three of us were laughing and shaking our heads as we left the hotel. “I don’t believe this,” Joanne said, more than once. She snapped a couple of pictures of us stretching on Broadway, then rushed off to tell the others in our party what we were doing.

We were standing near a hand-written sign that read, Over 4 Hours, but everyone pressed forward as the time drew near. Then I heard a pop that hardly sounded like a gun and we were off.

Slowly at first, we started to jog. The street was lined with people, but we didn’t see Dan’s wife, or her parents, or anyone in our group. Did they see us? No matter. We had a race to think about now.

There were hundreds of runners strung out in front of us, the leaders already out of sight before we had run two blocks. The temptation was to go with the flow — that’s how we had gotten into this thing in the first place — but I wasn’t completely out of my mind. I was able to fight the temptation, although Dad didn’t make it any easier.

“I want to go a little faster than this, don’t you?”

“No.”

Our first split was nine-something. Too fast, considering I hadn’t logged a single mile in the past month and had been able to run only fitfully in the weeks before that.

Dan seemed surprised our pace had been that fast. The news didn’t slow him down, though. I tried again to tell him to relax, enjoy the race.

“It’s hard for me to do something I did competitively for so many years,” he said, “just for fun.”

Our next split was eighteen-something, still a little faster than the pace I would have preferred, but I felt good. The sun was shining and I was enjoying this. As we approached the first station, I let it be known that I was going to walk through it rather than try to drink on the run. Dan agreed and told me to get the ERG, not the water. I had never had ERG before, but it wasn’t half bad.

By now I had no idea where we were, but there were plenty of runners to follow, and Dan knew the course, having run his first marathon here last year. He told me, as we ran, where it would be taking us, but it didn’t really mean much to me. I knew all I needed to know: the course was 26.2 miles. What I didn’t know was whether I could go the distance.

This was my first marathon, and I knew I was not ready for it. I thought: Maybe, though, if I forget about my time, I may just be able to get through this.

“What was cross-country like for you?” Dan asked.

“What was it like?”

“Yeah. What did you think about it? What was it to you?”

We had run together in high school, more than ten years earlier. Dan had been my best friend. A gutsy runner in the Steve Prefontaine mold. I was a middle-of-the-pack team member.

I told Dan I had enjoyed the camaraderie and had felt I was contributing to the success of the team. I also told him I regretted not having pushed myself harder. “But then I have a tendency to burn out if I train too hard — so maybe I knew what I was doing after all.”

We ran past the place where Dan had first met his support crew the year before and kept going for several miles before our impromptu crew honked and waved on its way by in the baby blue New Yorker.

A little while later we spotted Joanne on a corner, focusing her camera on us. Connie, Dan’s wife, was there, too. We asked for Vaseline.

Connie: “We don’t have any.”

Dan: “Go to the store and buy some.”

He was in pain. His shorts had been rubbing him the wrong way for miles.

I gave Joanne the sweatpants that had been bound around my waist almost from the start and she, running beside me, asked, “Are you going to finish?”

“We’ll see.”

She shook her head, smiling. “You guys ...”

But I was experiencing some chaffing, too, and I could tell I was going to have blisters on both feet.

The next time we saw our wives, sure enough, they had the petroleum jelly, and we stopped just long enough to smear some on.

On the run, I told Dan about my blisters and he said that when we saw the girls again I should put Vaseline on my feet.

“I hate to stop. They’re not too bad right now. But it might keep them from getting worse.”

“No problem,” he said. “I’ll help you.”

The girls caught up with us again just before the half. We had been running for two hours by then — matching my longest training run. I still felt okay, but the miles were starting to take their toll. Already I had walked up one hill, trying to conserve energy, and had started to concern myself with running the shortest distance between points on the course.

The girls ran beside us along Highway 101 until we could find a suitable place to sit down. I ripped off one shoe: Dan ripped off the other. We got my socks off, and Joanne dolloped jelly on the ball of each foot. I caught a glimpse of one blister, and it looked worse than it felt, which so far wasn’t bad.

Back on the road, I tried to keep the pace down without being too obvious.

“How ya doing?” Dan asked.

“I feel fine. No problem breathing or anything. My legs are just getting a little heavy.”

“I’ll feel better when we hit mile sixteen. Then there’s only ten miles to go.”

“I should be able to handle that.”

The stretch along Surf Pines Road took a lot out of me, though. It was shaded and scenic, but the rolling hills sapped my energy.

We made it to mile sixteen all right.

“How ya doing?” Dan asked again.

“I’m not getting any faster,” I told him.

“You’re not?” He smiled.

Okay, I guess that was obvious. “I’m just going to try to hold on to this,” I said, meaning my pace, of course. “You can go ahead, though. I only asked you to stay back with me for the half.”

“No,” he said, “we’re going to do this together.”

I’m sure he meant what he said, but I had to walk up the hills and that was death to him. “It’s too hard for me to start running again once I do that,” he said.

I tried to keep running, but once we got on Del Rey Road, that little out-and-back leg, I said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to walk.”

Dan kept going and that was fine with me. I didn’t want to hold him back. The last time I saw him he was on his way back down Del Rey. I gave him the thumbs up.

“I’ll wait for you,” he offered.

“No, go ahead.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, go on.”

So I was on my own. I jogged when I felt I could and walked when I had to. I remember Dan saying how demoralizing this leg had been for him the year before, and I could see why. It seemed to go on forever.

Getting down on the flat didn’t help. I jogged a few yards, but that was all. Walking was the best I could get out of my legs. (By contrast, Dan would rip off a few seven-minute miles starting here, I would learn later.) It was cold, with traffic stirring up a chilling breeze, and my legs felt like they might cramp on me at any moment. Hugging my wet shirt to my chest, I tried to keep warm and kept an eye out for the support car.

It was along here, as I walked from mile nineteen to mile twenty, that I began to think about my motivation. Why was I running this race anyway? What did I think I was doing out here on this desolate road?

I had thought about it before, when I was in training, but my answers did not seem as convincing now. I was out here to test my own determination, to see if I could reach a distant goal. But was it really that important, this goal? The marathon had always been a symbol for me, from the time I first decided to try it. It was a test. If I could go the distance, maybe I could achieve some of my other long-range goals as well. But I wasn’t prepared for this test. It didn’t count.

What I was after, I think, was that certain sense of self I had found through cross-country running in high school. It was in high school that I discovered I could do more than I thought I could. It was then that I had surprised myself with my endurance and gained a quiet sense of confidence in my abilities. That sense had been shaken of late by certain personal setbacks, and I was looking to get it back.

But now, being passed by frail old ladies and chunky girls, I couldn’t remember half of what I had told myself during training. I was ready to quit any time — and why not? I hadn’t been able to prepare for this race. I never expected to finish, not really. This was already farther than I had ever run. Dropping out now would be no disgrace. It certainly didn’t mean I would be giving up on my other goals.

I did some figuring and realized that even if I ran ten-minute miles, I’d still be out here more than an hour. And there was no way I could muster that kind of speed, not even close. Better to give up now.

I was convinced. I was done. Only one thing kept me going: the New Yorker was nowhere in sight. I had no choice but to keep moving.

There was an aid station at about mile twenty and, after drinking more ERG, I started to jog again. The course turned to the right and away from the heavily trafficked street I had been on. Just getting away from the cars made me feel better, and I jogged for maybe two miles, nonstop. I even ran backwards at times, just for the change.

I knew once I came around the golf course and saw 22 painted on the road, I would finish. I stopped thinking about how long it would take. Four miles was all I had left. I could crawl that far if I had to.

Dan was probably finishing about now, though I didn’t think about that. He would be struggling when he crossed the line, but not as much as the year before when he went out too fast and was practically delirious by the time he collapsed in the chute.

Shortly after the final aid station, someone on the side of the road said I had 3.1 miles to go. “Seven-eighths of the race is behind you,” she said. I liked the way she phrased that.

For several miles now I had been having an odd craving for a Hershey bar, and when I saw Joanne along the side of the road I made her promise to get me one when this was over.

She had gotten worried and walked the course backward until she found me. I was moving slowly, but had not collapsed in a heap somewhere along the side of the road as she had feared. She was prepared to jog with me, and I tried it briefly, but mostly I just walked. I thought I would save whatever I had for the promenade. I didn’t want to be walking then, with everyone watching.

As we reached the promenade, there was Dan. His arm around Connie, he leaned on her and limped when he walked. He had a smile for me, and a word of encouragement.

Then we started running, Joanne and I. There weren’t many people around, but that didn’t matter at all. In fact, it was better that way, for me.

I glanced at my watch for the first time in about an hour. “Let’s pick it up a little,” I said. “I want to see if I can break five hours.”

We did pick it up, and I had more left than I thought I would, but the finish was farther away than it looked at first. I could see before I got there that too much time had elapsed.

Joanne peeled off, and I stopped looking at the official clock. I concentrated instead on the finish line. I even forgot to stop my watch when I crossed it. But I remembered something: a feeling I had all but forgotten.

Saturday, March 3, 2007

What's in a Name?

I changed my name when I was fifteen. I wasn’t in any kind of trouble, I just didn’t like the person I had become.

That's not quite right. I simply didn't like the image I had of myself. I saw myself as timid and too easily given to tears. I was wishy-washy and didn't know my own mind. (Few fifteen-year-old really do, but I didn't know that.)

In one sense, my name didn’t really matter. I was living in a new state, and the friends I made knew nothing of my imperfect past. I was free to reinvent myself.

The new name was for my benefit.

Anyway, it was easy to make the change. Up until then, everyone had called me Fred. From then on, I would be Al. Since the name on my birth certificate is Alfred, no paperwork was required.

Did it make a difference? I don't really know. I chose Al because it sounded more sophisticated to me at age 15. But I don't feel any more sophisticated at 52, and it doesn't really matter to me anymore.

Well, not much.

I'm certainly not the small-town boy I once was, and I can't imagine living in a small town again. On the other hand, I still have a sister who calls me Fred and I like how it sounds. Friendly and unpretentious. Qualities I'd like to accentuate.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Alive

I was behind the wheel of our two-door Honda Civic, barreling up I-5 toward Portland, when a smile stretched my lips. I was thinking: Dan is alive! He’s alive and when we get there I can talk to him and we can laugh together the way I feel like laughing now.

This was in 1982. Connie, his wife at the time, had just called us.

“Dan was electrocuted today,” she said.

There was no other word for it. He had taken a lethal 400 volts. No one could explain why he wasn’t dead.

When Joanne and I arrived in Portland, I went to shake my friend's hand.

“Not that one” he said and gave me his left. “The other one’s still a little sore.”

He was lying on their couch, that big brown thing they got such a deal on, and he looked tired, like his limbs were too heavy to lift. He spoke in his normal voice, though, and tried to joke as if nothing serious had happened.

Finally we got the whole story:

They were setting up a conveyor outside on the tank farm at Steinfeld’s, trying out a new idea for streamlined processing of . . . cauliflower, I think. Anyway, some guy forced the plug into a high-voltage outlet where it didn’t belong, and when Dan went to reposition the conveyor, 400 volts grabbed him. He screamed once and tried to get free, but it was useless. The electricity lifted him off the ground and put him back down.

That’s all he remembers.

Witnesses — and there were lots of them, bosses and workers  — said Dan was bounced twice and then hurled, head high, for a distance of about fifteen feet. His body went into rapid convulsions.

At the hospital, doctors looked for entry and exit burns but found none. They gave him a tetanus shot for all the scrapes he suffered hitting the pavement, examined him, and sent him home with a complete recovery expected.

Dan’s sister, Kathy, a nurse there at Emanuel, couldn’t believe they didn’t want to keep him overnight for observation, but here he was at home already. He let Joanne compare one arm to the other, and she said the right arm was still warmer to the touch. Some of the voltage was still coursing around in there.

“I guess the Lord wanted to keep me around a little longer,” Dan said.

His mother, Joy, a compact woman with dark curly hair, was in the kitchen cleaning up after their Kentucky Fried dinner. She had already lost her first husband, Bill, in an on-the-job accident. Kathy was there, too. She had been in nursing school when Joy drove to Portland to deliver the news, and so the job of telling Dan — it had to be in person, not by phone — fell to me, his best friend.

He was telling me now that he would have to go back to the plant the next day, see the scene, and actually touch the conveyor.

“That’ll be hard,” he said.

“Have to get back on the horse that threw you, huh?”

He didn’t answer me, just nodded blankly, and I wondered if he was thinking about the trip we made to the plywood mill to see the machine that struck down his father. He had insisted on seeing it; I’m not sure why. To make it real, I suppose. He was having trouble accepting it could happen — and did happen.

I was thinking about a lot of things. About a silent ride to Eugene in the truck of a family friend some eight years earlier, the highway straight and flat and dark ahead of us. About waking Dan with a late-night phone call once we got into town so he could give us directions to the trailer house he was sharing with some other students. About how he could see it in my face when he opened the door  how I wanted him to see it — before I said a word. Because all I could come up with was: “Your dad is dead.”

Later he would tell me he was glad it was me who broke the news; he couldn’t have taken it from anyone else, he said.

I had lost my own father to cancer so I knew what it was like and I guess that made all the difference, but I remember thinking, What if Dan had died today as, by all rights, he should have? Who was going to tell me, without warning, that he was gone? Who was I going to be able to take that from?

Here he was, though — blinking, breathing, speaking.

Questions of life and death and why were swept aside because here in front of me was something I could accept without question: My friend was alive.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Seven Sayings

Of all the things I've been taught in 52 years, these seven have shaped my thinking the most.

> "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

> "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's."

> "Be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves."

> "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath."

> "Love your enemies."

> "Whatever you want others to do for you, do so for them."

> "Seek and you will find."

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Playing with Guns


I remember a first-grade classmate saying, "You mean your dad and my dad could have been shooting at each other?"

It was possible.

I hadn't really thought about it before then, and it felt funny to admit it, but it was possible.

It was no secret that my dad and mom were born in the old country. For one thing you could hear it. Even when they spoke English, which was most of the time, my parents didn't sound quite like other people.

If you looked close you could see that my dad had been in the war. It was evident in the half-thumb of a war-torn hand. (The left, I think, though I'm no longer certain.) You could see it even more when he was working in the sun and took off his shirt. There on his back was a long, deep crater about the size of a razor clam. The first time I saw it I asked him what it was and he said, very simply, that a bomb exploded near him during the war and a piece of it landed in his back.

I could see that it had been bad, but as a young boy I never even thought about how much worse it could have been.

The day my classmate told me, toy gun a-blazing, about his dad fighting the Germans, I asked my dad about fighting in Hitler's army. I don't recall exactly what I asked, or all that he said, but I do remember the look on his face and the way he shook his head.

He made it clear that he hated Hitler and the Nazis, but then he surprised me with this:

"Hitler did a lot for the German people," he said.

"He did?"

"Ja, sure, in the beginning we were much better off than before ..."

Then, I think, it was impossible for him to tell a young boy everything that was going through his mind.

Forty-some years later, I would sooner forget that my father said what he did about Hitler doing a lot for the German people. But there it is. I remember interrupting — "He did?" — because it shocked me, even then, that the name Hitler could be connected with anything but evil. I was too young to realize (as I'm sure my father did) that the connection was there in what he had just told me -- the division, deprivation, and depravity already implied.

Saturday, February 3, 2007

Nine-One-One

It was a Sunday night in December of 1996, our first year in the house, and we were about to find out how long it would take paramedics to reach our doorstep.

Joanne had gotten out of bed at some point. I knew she wasn't feeling well, and I heard her moan as if ready to throw up. Then there was the clatter of our plastic waste basket tipping over. Then a heavy thump.

I called to her.

No answer.

I found her stretched out on the bathroom floor, her head twisted in a tiny corner where the wall extends just beyond the edge of the tub. Her eyes were open and she was white.

She still wouldn't answer.

I cradled her neck and eased her down flat. Then came the horrifying second when I looked down into her vacant eyes and thought: she's dead.

I didn't want to believe that. I said her name again and again. I couldn't find a pulse. She was so white. I tried to remember CPR and mouth-to-mouth. Make sure her breathing passages are clear, I thought. When I pinched her mouth, I heard her suck air. Good. But her eyes. They didn't move. Didn't even blink.

Back in the bedroom, I dialed 9-1-1, then dragged the phone as far into the hallway as the cord would allow. The part you hold to your ear stretched almost to the bathroom. As I was babbling incoherently, Joanne said, "What are you doing? I'm fine."

I told the operator, but she said the paramedics would be here soon.

A fire truck arrived a few minutes later, followed by an ambulance. Though Joanne seemed to check out okay, they took her to the hospital just to be safe. (Here's the thing: In the morning she was going to quit a job she once loved but now hated, and she had been stressing about it so much she passed out. Breaking an 11-year bond is not something Joanne takes lightly.)

The next day she was resting on the sofa and asked me to fix her some toast.

Grudgingly, I got up and walked to the kitchen.

"You know," I said, "I’m only doing this because you’re alive."

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Wants and Needs

In my day job, I work for a high-tech company, writing about breakthroughs that I try to describe in terms that even I can understand. Hey, I studied journalism in school, not science, so I try to keep it simple. I have to.

The truth is, I admire engineers, scientists, technologist. They impress me not only with their brains but with their hearts.

What motivates them more than anything is a desire to change the world. They spend their time finding ways to do things like, oh, help cancer researchers run simulations 50 times faster. What's more, they refuse to accept the notion that something can't be done simply because other smart people tried and failed.

In short, they're inspiring. There doesn't seem to be any limit to what they can do if they set their minds to it. Yet the best technologists I know think very seriously about the implications of what they're doing.

Most of us don't even do that much.

Which is why I was glad to see Fast Company's "E-Tool Bill of Rights," designed to reset expectations and redraw boundaries that technology tends to erase.

We should never forget that technology is made for us and not the other way around. But it goes beyond that.

Too often, I think, we let the things we want pull us away from the things we need. What we want may be a raise, a promotion, a new car, or a cure for cancer. Good things. But in their pursuit, we've become too busy to eat right, too wound up to sleep at night, too tired to exercise.

In short, we need to take better care of ourselves.

Life is precious.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Random Images

Barefoot girl in a backless dress.

Traffic lights reflected on wet pavement.

The shadow of a small plane flickering across the contours of a grassy shoreline.

Long-haired boys and short-haired girls.

A blue Adirondack chair by itself on the lawn.

Wind-blown palms through mosquito netting.

A white blouse with black buttons.

The smell of chlorine and Coppertone.

A big-breasted blonde in a black bikini.

Silver jet streaking over black hills in a twilight sky.

Cliche curtains ruffled by a lacy breeze.

"Eyelashes wasted on a boy."

Ice-blue lights on the bare branches of twin trees.

Red tail lights fading into a black-and-white winter night.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Now, Smile!

I lost a tooth yesterday. Not just any tooth. One of the front two. The right one, to be exact.

I broke it Friday night biting into a piece of pizza of all things. The pie was a little crispy from being reheated in the oven, but still. I was shocked.

At first the tooth was just loose, but Sunday it broke off while I was chewing something soft and doing my best to avoid the danger zone in my mouth.

Standing in front of a mirror, squinting at the jagged little stump that used to be my tooth, I was in for another shock: I looked like a derelict. It was quite horrifying actually.

This morning my dentist told me that teeth get brittle as we get older. Plus, I have what he called a deep bite, so he wasn't surprised at all. He simply fitted me with a temporary tooth — nothing that would withstand a bite of french bread, but at least I look like my old self — and scheduled a root-canal operation for later in the week.

I'm told that there's a lesson to be learned from every experience, and in this case the lesson is simple: I need to appreciate what I have before it's gone.

Knowing that — really knowing it  is worth more than any tooth.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Work in Progress

I struggle sometimes, because I don't trust my own perceptions.

Should I?

To me the world looks flat, but pictures from space show that it's quite round.

On the other hand, don't try to tell me what to think. I trust my own mind more than anyone else's.

Except when I don't.

The strange thing is it's easier to disbelieve than it is to believe. Disbelief is safer somehow. To believe is to put yourself on the line.

I like to think of myself as a spiritual person. My intuitions, when I trust them, are almost always good. I should trust them more. I think.

I think of the time I was first in line at a red light and thought, Don't be in a hurry. It was an odd thought because I had no reason to be in a hurry. Then, sure enough, a car came speeding through the intersection from my left, two seconds after my light turned green and his turned red.

But I also think of the time I told my best friend he should look for a new job in Roseburg, Oregon. I don't know why I thought of Roseburg -- I'd only been there once -- but he did indeed find a job there. Only it didn't work out and he quit soon after he started.

Good thing he doesn't really remember me suggesting Roseburg.

I've been trying to increase my awareness through yoga, and I look forward to Mondays in particular. On Monday nights, the center where I train holds a special class in which we do 103 Chun Bu Kyung bows. Think of it as an exercise in sincerity and humility. An active meditation. Whether you believe in the Chun Bu Kyung — an ancient spiritual code that begins and ends with one — doesn't really matter. Everyone ends the night feeling calm and peaceful.

Or energized.

You have to trust your own experience.

Sometimes our instructor will ask us to consider a question while we bow. "Ask yourself, 'Who am I?'" she told us recently.

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

I was getting nothing. And then ...

You are God's creation.

I don't know where that came from, but it made me smile.

Later I would wonder if it was a message from the cosmos or just a random thought, but in that moment, I was happy to be God's creation. I felt his pleasure in what he had created.

And in the next moment I realized I was also my own creation.

Think of it (me) as a collaboration.

As a storyteller, I know a little about creating characters and having them take on a life of their own. I love that.

I think God loves it, too.

Monday, January 1, 2007

What I've Learned

> If you're going to criticize me, say something nice first, even if you don't mean it. It will help, even if I know you don't mean it. (Note: Others may require actual sincerity.)

> When I'm feeling down, I play Van Morrison's "And the Healing Has Begun" over and over and over. With each repetition, I start to feel stronger.

> If you like to dance, dance — and don't let anything stop you. Not shyness. Not anything.

> The punishment for lying is always wondering if others are lying to you.

> Buy Reese's peanut butter eggs at Easter time. They're way better than the peanut butter cups. They're fresh.

> Hatred is a waste of time. You only make yourself miserable.

> If you're taking a cruise on, say, the Danube, choose the downstream tour. Less engine noise.

> Think about it: If you were God — omniscient and all-powerful — could you ever be jealous of anyone or anything?

> Would you demand that people worship you?

> If you did, what would that say about your emotional maturity?

> Note to President Bush: If positive thinking were enough, our troops would all be home by now. Try something new.

> The movie What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole will boggle your brain.

> Even when I was attending church and studying the Bible like crazy, I could never understand prayer. You can't say anything to God he doesn't already know.

> Now I think the trick is to make your whole life a prayer, even if you feel compelled to use profanity now and then.

> I really like this quote from Depak Chopra: "At any given moment the universe is working toward the best possible outcome."

Hat humbly doffed to Esquire for its inspiring January issue.