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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.