“I don’t know why I’m here.”

“”You’re here because you don’t know why you’re here.”

“Did you drive”

“I did.”

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

On Wednesday afternoon my wife, Mary,  woke from a nap unable to keep a memory for more than twenty seconds. 

I had asked her about an upcoming visit from her sister; she was puzzled, verging on angry, as she had no memory of that visit. After wrestling with that issue to no conclusion, I asked if she remembered calling her sister about the visit. Again, what the hell was I talking about?  I then asked if she remembered going out for lunch. Nothing. Did she remember the Memorial Day picnic with friends? Nothing. Blank. 

I’d seen movies and read case studies like Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, but nothing had prepared me for an exchange with my wife, who was absolutely herself, sharp, funny, logical and at the same time unaware of anything beyond the most immediate conversation.

She quickly agreed to a trip to the Emergency Room, confessing that she felt somewhat muddled, perhaps half way between sleep and full consciousness. She repeated that observation throughout the trip to the hospital. Caught in a loop. On the other hand, when I said we were on our way, she immediately asked me to go to the more sophisticated of our local hospitals. When she had dressed, even as her condition was increasingly obvious, she took off her ring, apparently anticipating an MRI.

“Where’s my ring?”

That question joined the pronouncement of demi-sleep and hope for the better hospital. She couldn’t summon the name of the hospital she preferred, but recognized it when I identified it.

We were hustled into an examination space at the more sophisticated hospital’s Emergency Room and as I finished the paperwork, she was wheeled off for a CT scan. Mary was unruffled by the flurry of activity, frequently laughing at the absurdity of her inability to connect with the present moment. I was terrified that cancer might have returned and metastasized to her brain.

The scan was clear. A chest x-ray was clear. No answers forthcoming.

She was admitted to the hospital, but no rooms were available, so she was hooked up with wires and an IV port and left on a bed in a supply room at the back of the ER. We spent the next five hours repeating the same conversation again and again.

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

“Your memory seems to be impaired.”

Laughter. “No kidding.”

“Where is my ring”

“You took it off before we came.”

“Is there metal in my scrunchie?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Don’t they want to test me?”

“You had a CT scan.”

“No, when?”

“When we first arrived.”

“Did you drive?”

“I did.”

“Is this the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Did you drive?”

And so on.

She was in a great mood. Joking with doctors and nurses. Telling a doctor she wouldn’t remember him the next time he came by. Telling another doctor she might remember his name because it was the same as an artist she admired. Forgetting that the doctors had stopped in.  Announcing that she used to be an EMT.  Apologizing then telling me that when she had a concussion as a girl, she apologized over and over.  Announcing she used to be an EMT.  Apologizing.

She was in every way herself, aware that her memory was compromised, but not anxious, simply perplexed. Amused. Smart.

A nurse checked her vitals and told us that her tests had revealed a urinary tract infection.

“How did they get my urine?”

“You walked to the bathroom with a nurse.”

“How did they get my urine?”

About five hours into our stay, a third neurologist stepped in to question Mary. I’d noticed what I thought was a slight improvement in that she referred to events and conversations with more fluency. The doctor took her through the stroke protocol again (“show me your teeth.”) and was quick to see that she had no symptoms.  

“What day is it?”

“Wednesday.”

An hour earlier she could not have answered that question.

“What month is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“At the hospital.”

“What month is it?”  

Mary looked at me.

“Don’t look at him,” the doctor joked.  “His memory is fine.”

“Maybe June?”

Again not possible an hour earlier.

“We gave you an antibiotic about an hour ago.  There is a possibility the urinary tract infection is the issue. If we don’t see improvement, we’ll move to the MRI.”

The conversation with the doctor lasted about ten minutes, and I thought Mary might have been slightly more responsive than she had been when we arrived.

Hope.  Guarding against hope.

I left Mary at the hospital and returned home to take care of our two dogs.  Didn’t sleep much.  In a stunning turn of events, I woke the dogs rather than their waking me and spent some time feeding and exercising them before leaving for the hospital again.

I have a friend whose advice about worrying has always been, “Why don’t we wait until we get there?”  Great advice, but it’s not easy to keep from projecting a dark future. On the drive to the hospital I wept imagining Mary unable to do what she has loved doing.  She trains dogs, and owners, explaining dog language and gestures, helping owners connect with their dogs.  Many of her clients have found training for dog agility competition, a wonderful pastime and a great way to bring joy to their dogs while they become more skilled in handling their pets.  Mary’s always been a teacher, no matter what the situation might be, and she has a particular gift in her ability to understand how each student learns, adapting her instruction to each distinctive challenge.

I couldn’t imagine how she could do what she loved without memory.

I also couldn’t imagine not having our conversations.  I know a lot about where her feelings are, and she understands me in a way that allows me to share myself as I cannot with anyone else.

“Wait until we get there.”  Hope.

When I walked into the ER very early the next morning, Mary was back.  

There were a few glitches, very much like those of a person coming out of deep slumber, but she was able to remember everything I told her about the previous day, and able to remember which clients were due to arrive for training and how to make contact with each of them.

“Where’s my ring?”

“You took it off before we left the house.”

I must have worried about getting an MRI.”

“You took off your earrings too.”

“I wasn’t wearing earrings.”

“Ah.”

“I hope I made you drive.”

“You did.”

“I’m glad we came to this hospital instead of the others.”

“You asked for the more sophisticated hospital.”

“I couldn’t remember the name, but I knew I wanted to be here.”  She looked around.  “This reminds me of the room the doctors on Gray’s Anatomy use for a quickie between operations.”

Mary is still taking the antibiotic.  She’s exhausted and physically a bit wobbly, but she is entirely herself with a memory now restored to minutes before we had the conversation that convinced me that something was wrong.  It happens that I had been teaching a course in which we spent some time talking about brain activity.  I’d made the point that we can put electrodes in a region of the brain and observe activity, but we don’t know how we fall asleep, why we sleep, why we dream, what sleep actually does.  I’d said that almost all of what we guess about the brain we guess because something has gone wrong; a man mistakes his wife for a hat.

It turns out that among women over the age of sixty, urinary tract infection and dehydration can bring on short term memory loss.  I say ,”over sixty”; articles describing the phenomenon use terms such as “senior” or “elderly”.  Mary is over sixty but not to my mind elderly.  Of course, I’m ten years older than she is, so my perspective could be skewed.  The good news is … well, there is a ton of good news, the most obvious being that although she had amnesia, Mary is not suffering from dementia.  It could have been much worse; I have discovered that in some cases, a person can hallucinate or become angrily paranoid.

Oh, and modern medicine cannot explain why the urinary tract infection affects the brain. The immune system system is compromised, they say.  Ok, but urinary tract to brain? 

Mine is not to wonder why but to simply be grateful that two tablets a day have returned Mary to me and to the many people who consider themselves lucky to know her.

Here we are in the first stages of post-covid overtures to normality and feeling a bit Rip Van Winkleish. Seriously.  Do any of us actually have a firm grasp of time spent away from the world?  It’s been a long hibernation.

Ask any bear; hibernation is full of good news and bad.  

The good news about hibernation is isolation from all the pesky issues that trouble us in our waking lives.  Remember that guy we ran into every morning at the coffee shop?  You know, the guy that shared the ending of novels and films at full volume?  How about the woman who works in the office next to ours?  We have seen her every day for fifteen years as we wait for the elevator to arrive.  We know a lot about her and her family.  We are almost friends, but we’re not sure if her name is Prudence or Priscilla, and it is much too late to ask.  Great movies are about to be released.  We don’t have to spend a hunk of change to sit in front of the sisters who smell like cabbage discussing their mother’s crusty skin issues while a baby squirms and yowls in the  lap directly behind us.  Unlike our friends the bears, we might not have lost the extra ten or twenty pounds in hibernation.  In fact, we’ve been loosening the drawstring on the old pajamas as we checked in on Zoom, and nobody knows or cares. Haven’t paid a dime for gym membership and don’t feel guilty. Watched the entire 327 episodes of Supernatural and don’t feel guilty. Haven’t cleaned the house since March, 2020 and don’t feel guilty.

One piece of bad news about hibernation is that we were immersed in a thousand enterprises that in the past we had no time to investigate or feel concern about. Had we spent 20 hours a day doom scrolling before Covid? Did we have a TikTok account or even know how to access TikTok? Could we have named the 32 species of orchids that went extinct last year? Would we have known that Kanye West’s bid for the presidency was endorsed by Elon Musk or that West gave Kim Kardashian a hologram of her dead father?

More bad news about hibernation comes around now, as we’re thinking about dropping the mask and watching the high school band march in the 4th of July parade.  When, exactly IS the 4th of July?  Time stopped, or got flattened sometime in the last year.  Has it been a year?  We did Christmas, right?  Right?  

And, bottom line, we’re about to enter the company of humans we haven’t seen since … whenever that was.  Do we shake hands?  Hug?  Tug at our forelock?  All the social cues we had spent a lifetime acquiring are in question.  How close is too close?  Do we need to see a vaccination card before breaking the six foot bubble?  And then, what do we say?  

I mean, really.  What do we say?

Long time no see?  Whatcha been up to?  How ‘bout those Mets?

Politics?  Off the table.  Who knows who has subscribed to what core set of improbable beliefs having to do with demon spawn in yogurt.  Health?  Also tricky.  In the best of times a health inventory makes for sluggish conversation.  In these troubled times, who knows what sorts of  medical events have transpired.  Finance?  Uh, no.  

I travel in several circles, some of which are ordinary, reasonably clever people, interesting in their own right but not much given to reading widely..  Seems to me I’m on pretty safe ground asking what they’ve been watching on Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or in my case, Acorn. The doors open wide and quickly.  During the past year (or whatever), some strong emotions have been attached to our virtual life on the couch.  Tiger King?  NXIVM?  Woody Allen?  How do we feel about Teenage Bounty Hunters being cancelled by Netflix?  Betrayed, right?

The reading folks I once knew, whenever that was, are likely to have taken on the authors they had always intended to read.  I’m reading a lot of Japanese novels in translation, but I remember reading pals talking about the Russians, or Rushdie, or Kafka, or Proust.  We’ll see, won’t we.

And, should all else fail, who hasn’t watched at least one season of the British Baking Show?  That ought to keep the conversational wheels turning for a while.

Then, shaking hands, or not, hugging, or not, we hustle home to watch Mare of Easttown or All Creatures Great and Small, or Survivor, and breathe a long sigh of relief in having found our way back to our solitary cave and a pair of forgiving pajama bottoms.

My daughter is alternately amused and netlled by my unquestioning eagerness to pursue whatever book, film, vacation, or adventure I find touted in the New York Times.  I speak with enthusiasm as if the Times had called me directly and with sweet concern for my well being curated a lifetime of experience just for me;I refer to the paper as I might to a neighbor or book club friend.  It’s personal.

There have been some notable treasures, of course, along the way, and a few very minor disappointments, but for the most part, the Times opens doors I had not thought to approach.  And yet, that legacy of good will and trust is hanging on by a thread this morning as I recoil from a novel that came highly regarded and I would have said, recommended.  

To be fair, I responded to one of the frequent “Books Update”, a list of books currently under discussion, rather than having read a review of the novel.  In the past it’s worked out well;  I’ve simply noted a title, opened my account at the local library, and jumped on the waiting list for the next hot copy.  Some have been my sort of book, others not so much.  I’ve taken a chance over the years and find that the Times (my friend) is running with about an 80% hot stuff rate.  Winners in the last year include The Aosawa Murders, The Beauty in Breaking, A Children’s Bible, Hidden Valley Road, How Much Of These Hills Is Gold, Marilynne Robinson’s Jack, Sisters, and the unexpectedly fabulous Nothing To See Here.  So-so or just not my cup of tea that week were other highly regarded books such as The Biggest Bluff, Blacktop Wasteland, Deacon King Kong, and The Glass Kingdom.  Nothing lost.  No harm, no foul. 

Fairness having been invoked, I ought to note that there are many books that were closed to me at one point in my life and richly enjoyed later.  Then too, I’m a writer without an agent, self publishing books that languish in the nether depths of Amazon’s vanity collection.  A book may have the resentment hurdle to clear, particularly if the genre is new or the portrayal of characters challenging.  That said, I’ve come to admire books that present characters who would drive me to madness were I to encounter them in real life.  Nick Cave’s Bunny Munro, for example, may be the most loathsome person I’ve encountered in print, but I couldn’t put the book down.

Had I read Joshua Ferris’ review of The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver, I suspect I would have cancelled my hold on the book at the library.  Ferris is amused by and sympathetic to unlikeable characters, citing Cormac McCarthy’s unrelenting portrayal of unredeemed characters as a refreshing antidote to a happy happy resolution for characters who have been misunderstood or mistreated.  By the end of the review, having lauded Shriver’s refusal to yield to the pity paradigm, however, he does acknowledge the book’s resolution left him thinking, “Who cares?” 

I didn’t get that far.  

I have a tall pile of books and who knows how many years to read them.  I’ll give a new book thirty minutes to reel me in.  If I’m eager to read the next page, I’ll generally stick with it all the way to the end.  I’m relatively easy to please, but a strong beginning goes a long way.  An author makes a choice in opening their world to us, in introducing a novel’s protagonists, for example,  I give Shriver points for chutzpah; her  characters presented on the first page are Remington and Serenata Alabaster.  Remington Alabaster.  Serenata Alabaster.  What am I to do with names such as those?  Bold choice by Shriverl, but “look-at-me” writing runs the risk of sliding into precious posturing, which in this case darkens as the Alabaster’s relationship is short on affection. Serenata’s reflexive contempt for Remington in particular wears thin.  Remington’s disregard for Sereneta’s feelings is almost as off-putting.

Shriver’s published fifteen novels, all of which have been well received; she’ll survive any quibble I might have about her latest. My greater concern is in repairing the pipeline so that the Jackson County Library and I are teaming up for a strong summer of reading.  The key, I think, is in finding a balance between the “sure things’ ‘ and the “strap on your seat belt” experiments that offer great reward or immediate disappointment.  I’ll keep reading the Mann Booker long list and following my favorite authors, but at the moment I’m sitting with Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, a compilation of forty new fairy tales by authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Shelly Jackson, Neil Gaimon, and a host of others, Murakami’s IQ 84,and Moby Dick.  The Times didn’t have to recommend Melville or Murakami, but virtually every other choice this summer will come from the pages of the New York Times, who you will remember, is a particular friend of mine.

I’m an introvert and should remember that I’ll start to numb out somewhere in the first minutes of the second hour, but I forget just how forcefully I hit that wall even in the most pleasant social gathering,  I have no idea where my wife lands along the personality continuum, but she stays on the phone for more than 30 seconds per call, enjoys lengthy conversations with folks she has just met, and clearly has much more staying power at holiday picnics than I do.  I admire her social skill and wish I didn’t lose energy in the company of people I genuinely like and whose lives interest me.

Take yesterday, for instance.  We were invited to a lovely luncheon with interesting people in a comfortable setting.  I quite enjoyed the first hour.  I hadn’t realized how quiet I had become until a latecomer entered into the conversation.  Earlier in the afternoon I would have been fascinated by much of what she said and might have joined the discussion, but as she spoke I realized my mind had left the building.

I think the conversation had somehow slid into a comparison of the effectiveness of dogs versus pigs in hunting truffles.  I like the word truffle so had almost come to the surface.  I was on the way out again when the latecomer began to describe her experience of working with her dog in search and rescue.  It turned out that having mastered the complexities of searching and rescuing, her dog had gone on to become a certified cadaver dog.

I know!

She and her Flat-Coated retriever, Morgan, were off the next weekend for their first workshop with actual cadavers.  Apparently, donors had made their former bodies available for exercises such as these, and dog and owner were keen to get at the real thing.  She had my attention now.  Had I not lost the power of expression I would have asked many questions about the body farm they would be visiting and the logistical complications which might arrive with such a search.  I am pleased to report that someone did ask about the difficulty in finding articles of clothing or other personal possessions that would allow the dog to track.  My question exactly, or rather, one of my questions.  

Apparently, it doesn’t matter.  With a chuckle, the trainer advised us that a cadaver is a cadaver is a cadaver.  Her delivery did not falter as she passed on this tidy fun fact:

“We all smell the same when we’re dead.”

I am prone to the occasional existential crisis. To be completely transparent, that occasional crisis is actually quite regular.  I had just finished leading a six week virtual conversation on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and was up on Hinduism, Taoism, Mahayana Buddhism, and the practical and portable version of Zen Buddhism as it evolved in this country.  Dharma, Karma, the search for one’s Buddha nature were on my mind, but I was not prepared to take man’s search for meaning to the olfactory level. In other company, in another setting, I might have blurted out, “Whoah!  I’m looking forward to the transmigration of the soul,but I am not entirely happy to learn that for a while I may just be meat!”  Or something along those lines.  

Happily, however, I was distracted by more pedestrian thoughts, the first of which, I regret to say, had to do with how we smell as we’re walking around in our present state of being alive.  I moved past the questions about where our smells go after … you know … to a quick cataloging of people I know well and their respective odors.  I have encountered some distinctive bouquets along the way, but the more I thought about it, the more aware I became of my preconscious information about people and their emanations which must be part of the vocabulary in the interior language of dogs.

I use the term “preconscious” because although there is considerable scientific evidence to support the theory that scent is an important part of the attraction we feel toward particular people, it’s not something we’re aware of and certainly not the stuff of valentines.  It’s not a secret, exactly, but it’s a bit awkward to admit that you’ve found a life partner based, to some degree, on a quality that we hardly recognize and one that we can’t change.  Yes, we can mask the musk, splash on Dior’s “Hypnotic Poison Perfume”, spray on “Pheromone for Men”, bathe, stay away from garlic, onions, cumin and curry, but the base scent is ours and ours alone.  

Until we shuffle off this mortal coil.

In what may seem a digression, I have had to admit that although I love to write and knock off hundreds of words every day to stay in shape, my powers of invention are limited.  The thought of writing a daily column for a newspaper, for example, instantly reduces me to torpor; I simply have a limited number of ideas.  

Where do I find grist for the mill?  I’d be completely out of luck were it not for overheard conversions.  My faithful readers will remember “Not the First Dead Thing I Kept in the Freezer – Overheard at the Coffee Shop”.  Gold.  Pure gold.  What a gift it is to take a line like that and allow the questions to flood in. 

I’m not done with “We all smell the same when we’re dead”.  There are some profundities to explore and odd observations to make.  Smell Dating, for example, which I hadn’t known was a thing.  

It is.  

And more of this anon.

Some years ago, Ken Stewart, a longtime friend and filmmaker was kind enough to ask me what I was likely to take on in my next play. I’d just finished a play about trans-national adoption and wanted a subject that would absorb my attention for the next year or so. He’d recently wrapped up his documentary, The Richmond Rosies, an account of the contribution made by women working in the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, California turning out Victory and Liberty ships. He’d interviewed the surviving women who had been known as Rosie the Riveters or Welding Wendys and had pulled together some amazing footage. He’d also built a friendship with the Rosies, continuing to visit with them after the film had been released. A subject had been on my mind, but I feared it would be something he wouldn’t recognize although it is a significant chapter in race relations in the United States . With some care, I began to speak about Black sailors put on trial for mutiny during WWII. I hadn’t finished the sentence when he jumped in:

 “Port Chicago? That’s what I’m doing next.”

Ken’s focus is sharper than mine, and he has staying power as a writer, director, and producer. His new film, a documentary entitled The Port Chicago Incident, is in distribution. The synopsis of the film is straightforward, echoing the mission statement of the National Park’s Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Monument.

A violent and powerful explosion in July 1944 sent shock waves through Port Chicago, Ca and the US Navy. 320 sailors were killed instantly, and 50 sailors were charged with mutiny in the aftermath. It became the largest mutiny trial in US Naval history and was the tipping point for the desegregation of the U.S. Navy and ultimately the entire U.S. Military.

It is not surprising that the Park Service does not identify the personnel assigned to the loading of munitions at this isolated facility as Black stevedores, nor does it describe the triple shifts worked,the lack of instruction given the men loading munitions,the absence of safety measures, the poor maintenance of of the machinery used in loading explosives on ships, or the gambling on daily totals of pounds loaded by White officers who had returned to active duty or newly commissioned with no experience in handling munitions.  The Park Service doesn’t describe the contempt with which White officers held the men who worked with munitions.  A common supposition among officers was that the Black sailors assigned to Port Chicago were not capable of understanding procedural regulations or safety measures; neither were in place.

My play never came together, largely because I couldn’t decide what story I wanted to tell. As I set out to work on the project, I saw three separate and equally compelling chapters. The first would describe the conditions under which Black Americans served in WWII, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in particular, a munitions depot and loading facility that provided the munitions needed by the Paciific Fleet. 160,000 Black Americans enlisted in the Navy during the war; they were permitted to serve as cooks, stewards, or stevedores.  An “Intelligence” test determined which would be assigned the most physically demanding job – loading explosives at Port Chicago.  One study found that  the Alpha Intelligence used by the Army after WWI designated 89% of Black enlistees as “morons”.  

The second story chronicles the ineptitude of White officers who operated the facility with no regard for the lives of the men in their command and a description of the explosion.  Three shifts operated around the clock, ordered to enter into speed contests; the officers amused themselves by betting in which shift would load the greatest tonnage; Blackboards were placed on the docks so that the tally was always visible. Given no instruction in handling the explosives, men working on the docks were told that large bombs, torpedoes, and shells could not explode without fuses.  Officers ordered the men to use crowbars to unpack the bombs, to roll the heavy bombs and shells to the docks, and to drop the munitions in nets into the hold of receiving ships. The winches used to deposit the over full nets were not maintained; their brakes often gave out.  The explosion which took place at 10:18 pm on July 17, 1944 sent smoke and fire almost two miles into the sky.  The effects were felt 30 miles away in San Francisco, and the blast was heard in Nevada.  All personnel working on the docks were killed and many at the station were killed or injured.  In the end, 535 Black sailors were killed or injured, roughly two thirds of the men assigned to the station.

The third story is the account of what was called a mutiny.

Following the explosion, White officers were given hardship leave, and 329 Black sailors were transferred to the Mare Island munitions facility.  On August 8th, the men were marched to the dock and ordered to load explosives on a ship in port.  The men refused; no measures had been taken to ensure the safe transfer of munitions. The 258 men who refused were taken by barge to a makeshift prison intended to hold no more than 70 prisoners. On August 11th, the prisoners were addressed by Admiral Carleton Wright and told that those who continued to refuse orders would be subject to the charge of mutiny.  He suggested that while fear of another disaster was understandable, death by firing squad was a worse option.  The 50 men who continued to refuse orders were declared mutinous.

Admiral Wright convened the General Court Martial which was held in Marine barracks at the Treasure Island Navy, charging the Port Chicago 50 with “a deliberate purpose and intent to override superior military authority,” a charge which in wartime could be punished by death.  The surviving records of the trial are appalling, filled with racial slurs and dismissal of the defendants accounts of the events.  The defense attempted to present the actions of the prisoners as insubordination rather than mutiny, a defense NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall endorsed and one that he continued to cite in the aftermath of the court-martial.  All 50 were found guilty.  They were given a 15 year sentence to be served at the Terminal Island DisciplinaryBarracks in San Pedro.  Marshall continued to advocate for the prisoners, filing an appeal, which was unsuccessful.  At the end of the war, the sentences were reduced, and by 1946 all but three had been released on parole to complete their enlistment.

The Navy had closed ranks in carrying out the court-martial and in imprisoning the Port Chicago 50, but the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, had already begun the integration of Black sailors into service on all auxiliary ships.  The Navy, formerly the most segregated, was the first of the services to end segregation in all aspects of enlistment, including assignments, ranks, facilities, and housing.  The rest of the armed forces were not integrated until 1948.

Courtroom dramas always allow for great moments of passion and reckless histrionics, catnip for clumsy dramatists such as I am.  I was tempted for a few weeks, then I came against the hard truth:  Although there is a great deal of value in bringing the Port Chicago Disaster to public attention, as Ken has done so well, the very human dimensions of the mutiny trial are not mine to tell.  It has to be told in language and cadences that are not mine; the world does not need the Uncle Remus version of the mutiny trial.  

This story is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, that reveal a dark history we as a nation have been reluctant to face.  A cherished and carefully decorated idealization of ourselves as people more aware of justice, more capable of kindness, more worthy of admiration has started to crumble.  Story by story, voice by voice, we have an opportunity to see ourselves as we have been and as we are.  

Look, I’ve got a mind of my own, occasionally borrowed by one misguided enthusiasm or another, but still, mine.  I’m capable of change. I used to love Turkish Taffy; now I give it a wide berth.  I’m fond of wordplay and British humor and can’t watch what passes for comedy on broadcast television.

The point is, damn it, as I edge ever closer to the last frontier, I am still relegated to the class of human known as “Baby Boomer”.  I’ve never liked the term; “Boomer” is less infantilizing, but reeks of bonhomie and machismo.  I’ll admit that “The Pig in the Python” is clever until my over-active suggestibility kicks in, and I’m gifted with the image of an enormous snake roiling in discomfort as its distended belly is attacked from within by the frantic flailing of an undigested animal, in this case, “Babe”.

Apparently, that’s us, and before grammarians leave the room, please, nobody in their right mind would say, “That’s we”.  Don’t start questioning my use of “their” to modify a singular subject either; we’re over it.

“Is that it?”, you ask; “in a universe of grievances, you sat down to gripe about your generational nickname?”

Well, yes, but only in passing.  As you have probably guessed, this morning’s meditation has to do with the eternal questions: “What do we know, and how do we know it?”  

More precisely, “what the hell is wrong with sleeping through the night?”  See, that’s where the generational carping comes in.  Apparently, my generation has arrived at yet another of life’s check points, and I am not amused. I’m grumpy and mildly delusional, clumsy and thick witted, and it seems I’m not alone.  I’ve been informed that nobody cares, and that’s fine; I can maintain a full head of discontent without an audience.  

“Have you tried … ?”

Yep, not the cryogenic bath or rohypnol, but pretty much every other nostrum and sleep inducing practice.  The weighted blanket and banana tea were not terrible ideas; the jury is still out on making a to-do list, slathering myself with essential oils, and breathing through the left nostril.  After years in denial, I’ve gone through several sleep studies and now slap on my Respironics DreamWear mask, hit the switch, and hope nobody has to find me in the end, lifeless, looking like the star of 1907’s Le Cochon Danseur, a terrifying anthropomorphic dancing pig.  My two or three hours of “sleep” then ended, I check my AHI (apnea hypopnea Index) to see how many times I stop breathing per hour.  On a good night, my brain forgets to tell me to breathe about 25 times an hour; last night the needle was buried at 51, indicating that my apnea can be characterized as moderately severe.  I thought severity was a condition like uniqueness, incapable of modification, but again, nobody cares or wants to know.

Here’s what interests me, however, and what should be of interest to anyone who sleeps … or doesn’t:  We (and by “we” I mean anyone) don’t know what sleep is, why we sleep, how we fall asleep, why we dream, or why the same “we”, having evolved to the peak of mentation, spend about a third of a lifetime unconscious.

“Wait …” you interject.  “What about the four stages of non-Rem sleep and the four or five cycles of REM sleep?  What about that?  We know that/”

Uh huh.  This is a messy analog, but let’s say you leave a partially eaten melon out on the sidewalk.  Let’s say you do that under laboratory conditions, day after day.  You’ll gather a lot of facts about what melons look like on day one and day five, you have some information about who shows up to live in the rapidly decomposing melon, You’ll even be able to talk about the relative speed of decomposition based on temperature.  But if our understanding of melon half-life is based entirely on external observation, all we’ve got is description.  

It’s not easy to get beyond external description with regard to the brain. The temptation is to say that we’ve got a Schrodinger’s cat here; a paradox of quantum superposition in which a subatomic event may or may not happen in an arena we cannot see without affecting the outcome, but we’ve been slicing and dicing brains for quite a spell, mapping brain activities with magnetic resonance imaging, and from time to time carrying out what is gently called Deep Brain Stimulation, implanting electrodes in certain areas of the brain and turning on the juice.  We’ve zapped enough brains to deduce that the four lobes have specific jobs to do, finally able to say, for example, that the temporal lobe controls memory, speech, and sense of smell. 

Again, uh huh.  Got that temporal lobe business all wrapped up, do we?

I’m not prepared to say that everything we know about the operation of anything is really only available to us when it doesn’t work, but let’s agree that with regard to the brain, information arrives with dysfunction.  Ok, so let’s take a look at what happens when a temporal lobe is damaged.  Sure, we get impairments in auditory functions, visual functions, loss of language perception, impaired long term memory, and … altered personality and altered sexual behavior.  

So, where are dreams?  All over it seems, although there’s a little less activity in the frontal lobe during REM, leading highly trained researchers with postdoctoral expertise to suggest that paucity of frontal lobe activity may explain why we do not self-correct or criticize the wacky stuff that comes up in our dreams.  In other words, no idea.

I’m cranky this morning and inclined to hang the entire medical profession out to dry, but the truth is that nobody really knows what they are doing with regard to sleep, so I might just as well slip into my pig face, drink some banana tea, listen to the calming sound of a forest primeval, rub myself with extract of henbane, breathe through my left nostril, and make a to-do list.

I am a creature of habit. 

My morning ritual is not quite as intricately methodical as chado or sado, the Japanese tea ceremony, the “way of tea”. No tatami mats. No hanging scrolls. There are, however, certain items placed in certain order, necessary to the shaving ritual, a three part exercise involving a shaving cream bowl provided by Taylor of Old Bond Street, and two razors with double edged blades made with highest quality steel by Gilette in the Czech Republic. 

That portion of the ritualized greeting of the day accomplished, I set aside fifteen minutes of silent mental exercise, accomplished with the assistance of one of the New York Times collections of crossword puzzles. I can’t explain why other crossword compendia do not speak to me, but there it is. The Times or nothing.

There are limits, however, that cannot be breached. The time limit is flexible, and I have put down a cortex damaging puzzle to be completed on another try, but my sweet spot is the puzzles published on Wednesdays and Thursdays. I can work with the Friday and Saturday puzzles when I can spend more than fifteen minutes on the task, but the ritual demands orderly procession from one task to the next,and there are dogs to feed. 

Have I done a Sunday puzzle? I have; the cost was great and the hours lost will never be recaptured. 

I like words well enough and challenge, but the exercise comes in practicing a particular sort of discipline. Each of us has certain abilities; recognizing words by simply looking at empty boxes is not one of mine. My wife and daughter, for example, are whizzes at solving Wheel of Fortune missing word challenges; my daughter actually got a word before the first letter appeared. Lacking the spatial genius they possess, my method is more deliberate. 

I won’t say that everything I learned I learned from completing crossword puzzles, but the lessons I have learned in black and white are significant.

In the first place, I might not start at the first place. The temptation is to start with the clues running across the page from left to right, then turning to the clues running down the page, top to bottom. As is often true of life its own self, however, clues are likely to be obscure or ambiguous.  A first clue might be “Shaver’s purchase” in four letters. OK, I’ll take a leap and assume that we’re talking about the sort of shaving that is part of my ritual, but several words might fit the bill. I’m inclined to go with “soap” or “blade”, but in this case, the correct entry would have been “foam”.  Then, of course, the clue might have referred to those who shave wood, or points, or minutes off a commute.

The point is that without knowing that my entry is absolutely the only answer that could work in that space, I might happily pencil in “blade” and find myself hamstrung when answers to the first clues running down the page are at odds with the letters in place. In this case, for example, “blade” would have been useless in finding the answer to, “Big sugar exporter”, which turned out to be Fiji. Who knew?

The first lesson has been this: I’m best served by starting with what I know.  Had I been completely stuck in ambiguity, I could have turned to clues 50 and 51 across, way down at the bottom of the page – “Sitcom pioneer Desi” and “Nicolas of Con Air”.   No ambiguity there.  Desi Arnaz and Nicolas Cage.  I had to remember that Desi’s last name, pronounced ArNEZ, is spelled with an ‘a’, but other than that, slam dunk.  Having those two words in place, 50 down – “Elemental particle” in four letters – has to be “atom”, and having “atom”, 60 across – “Doomsayer’s sign” in four letters – is pretty likely ‘omen”.

The second lesson follows the first in recognizing that as one word clarifies the identity of another, the process works best by tugging at each available string until the entire puzzle is pulled apart, and that tugging is not necessarily done by serially attacking clues one through fifty in order.  In fact, the task is not only more difficult when order has to be maintained, it is changed.  By the time I have encountered eight clues running across the page, each of which is shrouded in deceptive ambiguity, I have nothing. Let’s say this is a Wednesday puzzle, considered to be far less challenging than those that follow it.  I’m looking at empty squares and quickly overwhelmed by my inadequacy on this, a medium level puzzle.  I take a breath and try the eight clues running in sequence down the page, only to find that once again, no rock-solid answers arrive.  I’ve now exhausted sixteen clues without putting pencil to paper.

What does this say about me? Maybe I need to scale down my ambition and do the Monday puzzle on The Atlantic’s website, twenty-four spaces in all, five across and nine down, with clues such as “Gargantuan aquatic mammal with a blowhole” in five letters.  Maybe I should admit defeat and watch youtube videos of animal best friends.  I should do that in any case, but in this moment the choice before me is to yield or push my brain a bit farther until I find a clue I can answer, then the next, and the next.

The lesson for me is that I can’t know what I know if I walk away.  I have to take it one word at a time.  As Anne Lamott’s father advised her brother, stuck and overwhelmed by a project on birds, “Bird by bird, buddy.  Just take it bird by bird.”

We’re talking about fifteen minutes before I grab a cup of coffee and a yoghurt.  Fifteen minutes of brain tuning.  Some days are better than others.  I’ve raced through an entire puzzle in ten minutes and on others found myself stuck on “Gargantuan mammal with a blowhole”.  

The final lesson is that I’m content with finishing a puzzle even as I meet friends who polish off the Sunday crossword in ink.  This not “Zen and the Art of Crosswords”, but things do go better when I am amused by a crossword’s tricky word play and appreciative of the lengths to which someone has gone to provide me with fifteen minutes not engaged in culture wars, financial planning, or the to-do list languishing on the refrigerator door.

So, mammals with blowholes?  I began the quest, whale by whale until I hit the headline: “Scientists Discover A Mouth Breathing Dolphin”.  The world is unimaginably surprising.

My granddaughter has a new game.  She sets out her family of stuffed animals, arranges them in a row, and tells them to get ready to evacuate.  She warns them: “The sky is orange again!”.  The muppets then proceed in an orderly fashion, as orderly as muppets can be in crisis, escaping the conflagration for the moment.

Everyone we know has a “GO” bag packed and a box of important documents by the front door.  The folks who provide water for irrigation here have advised us that they won’t start making water available until June and that there won’t be much when it arrives.  Our pasture is already dusty and cracked in April.

I signed onto the Rogueweather site to make sure I hadn’t been sleeping during a rainfall.  Turns out, the site has had to develop new language to describe what’s happening this year.  Modifying their already grim report that there has been “no measurable amount” of rain this month, they now report “no trace”.  Since October of 2020, our part of the valley has had a total of eleven inches of rain, and no measurable amount of snow.

My son lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where he came to expect rain frequently during the winter.  He moved to Corvallis because likes a thick grey overcast day, and recent estimates indicated that Carvallis would get something like 51 inches of rain a year.  Last year the average was 36.34 inches, which by itself is troubling, but last week Corvallis was under a “Red Flag” warning, the warning of dangerously powerful and erratic winds which ordinarily might come in late July or August.

On September 8th, 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, my wife and I stood in the pasture watching the sky fill with plumes of thick smoke.  We knew there had been a “Red Flag Warning”, but the very heavy wind was oddly persistent.  By midnight on September 8th, 11,000 people in our town and the adjacent town had lost their homes. Almost two thousand homes and business had become nightmarish ruins of ash and melted metal.  The local bank burned to the ground; only its vault still stood in the middle of the devastation.  Those who lost homes found that the fire had burned with such intensity that there was literally, “nothing left to sift through”. 

We and every family in the valley learned the difference between evacuation warnings: Level 1 (“Be Ready”), Level 2 (“Get Set”) and Level 3 (“GO!”).  We went back and forth as the sky grew darker, never received a warning, but heard explosions close to our home, packed the car, and drove to a friend’s home outside the fire ring.  We love our agricultural valley with its lovely winding roads, but those roads were clogged, and there was no control of traffic as we fled.

That day was a terrible announcement of a change in fires affecting the Northwest.  We had come to accept the fire season and the layers of thick smoke that fll the valley from July to September, but those earlier fires had been forest wildfires.  This time fire came to town, not only raging through our southern corner of the state, but reaching the outskirts of Portland.  Only a year earlier, businesses in our region lost much of their summer income as visitors chose not to drive into smoke, or, willing to brave the smoke, found that the passes into the valley and the highways to the south of us were closed as fires persisted.

Like the frog in slowly boiling water, we were not entirely aware that the summers when we first arrived had subsequently grown increasingly hot and dry.  We complained through the three or four weeks of very hot weather, but knew relief would soon arrive.  On the first week of summer in 2020, from June 22 – June 28, the highs ranged from 96 to 103.  To the south, Sacramento saw the needle reach 100 on May 25th, 2020.  100 degree days have become common and expected.

I’m sitting on our deck in April, 2021.  The grass is green, flowers are blooming, a mild breeze ruffles the leaves of the rose bushes just starting to bud.  The thought of our beautiful corner of the world in flames is devastating, but our bags are packed, just in case.

Draft # 5 –Why I can’t Write the Great American Romance Novel

Ramona rubbed her chafed wrists, gingerly stepping down from the mizzenmast where she had been displayed like a captive chained to the mizzenmast. “What do you intend to do with me?” Her cheeks burned red, salt air and salt spray having had their way with her for several hours. The swarthy pirate captain slowly licked his the blade of his cutlass …

I can’t do this. I’ve tried, I really have, but I just don’t have the whatever it takes to churn out the sort of romance novel that clogs the shelves at airports and sit in stacks at vacation rentals. I’m terminally sentimental as any who have heard me gurgle through even the most ham-handed happy ending can attest. I’m a sucker for a good romantic comedy, and am generally able to buy some pretty threadbare plotting in order to see true love triumph. I’m not very keen on ravishings, however, and the notion of seduction at sword-point makes me very uneasy.

The most I can manage is to lump around a few self-consciously contrived descriptions:

“Klaus, a common gardner, bowed as the Countess stepped from the carriage. Maria Hassenpfeifel von Strep was in no mood to be trifled with. The journey from Salzburg had been uncomfortable, the company unbearable, and her unquenched appetites had reached terminal unquenchability. As Klaus lowered his head, Maria noted the span of his shoulders and the intriguing bulge of his calf as he stooped awkwardly before her.

“Have that man brought to my chamber,” she ordered, rapping Matilda her lady-in-waiting with the edge of her fan. “I have much to teach him in the finer points of submission to his betters.”

….. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

“I think I may have made a terrible mistake,” Harrison admitted. “This capsule is designed to accomodate but one astronaut, and I did not see you here until the portal had slammed shut.” Captain Temptation O’ Hara looked up at the intruder, noting the tautness with which his galactic track suit pulled across his chest and the intriguing bulge of his quadriceps fempris as he scrambled above her free of gravity.

O’Hara laughed softly. “Well, we’re only moments away from the cyrogenic long sleep, and we’ll be awfully busy on Proserpena, the newly discovered tenth planet, so why don’t we get to know each other before we’re iced down?”

Despite the freedom in floating free, it was obvious that Harrison’s galactic trousers had become painfully constraining. “I’ll be down in a minute. I have to change into something more comfortable.”

“Don’t bother,” O’Hara chuckled, tugging him to the ceiling, “I’m ready to fire my boosters right now

…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Jodi had only been the firm’s art director for a week when she was summoned to the chairman’s office. He stood facing the floor to ceiling window overlooking Central Park, turning slowly as Jodi entered. His Italian loafers crafted from the hides of unborn impalas gleamed as he faced Jodi. His elegantly tailored suit coat was unbuttoned, allowing her to notice the crisp white linen shirt straining across his chest. She noted too the intriguing bulge in the pocket of the newly loosened jacket.

Her imagination racing, she approached the chairman’s desk with a mix of caution and excitement.

“You wanted to see me, Mr. Poundbetter? She was short of breath; her question seemed an invitation. Her face reddened as the chairman rose and crossed to her, extending his hand.

“I just wanted to welcome you to the firm…” he began, but Jodie squeaked, “So firm.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

A circus is no place to begin an affair, Melody thought as she approached the living area known as Clown Alley. The invitation had come in the second of half of yesterday’s show, when Ruffles, a robustly hulking actor sporting a bright red clown nose and a mop of straw hair came to her section of the bleachers. Other clowns lumbered gracelessly in floppy shoes and loose one piece garments; Ruffles enacted the role of comic weight lifter, tossing barbells like flavor straws. Shirtless, his lower torso bound only by a tightly cinched diaper, Ruffles posed for a moment before Melody, selecting her as the audience member treated in viewwing a cascade of abdominal muscles, a virtual 32 pack, nudged into an abdominal ballet. Melody assumed his torso had been greased as the circus lights played on his expanding chest; even more intriguing? The bulge slightly to the left of the cleft he displayed in turning away from Melody, his caboose writhing like a snake on a gridle.

………………………………………………………………………………………..

When I think of the really good novels that bring romance to life, anything by Jane Austen and a couple of Brontes, for example, I’m aware of the power of mind behind the narration. Yes, there are moments that cause reckless swooning, but it’s the indelibilityof the central character that really makes the novel substantial. That is not to say that the central character is not without flaws. Austen admitted that she began writing Emma as a complicated character, going so far as to say, “”I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”

She liked a challenge and so do I. I’m putting the ravishing pirate on the gangplank and dropping him to the depths of the ocean, to remain captive in Davey Jones’ Locker. Rather than maim a genre I don’t understand, I think an appropriate challenge might be in creating and supporting a character I don’t much like. Coming soon, to a Cogitator near you, the first installment of The Man Nobody Could Stand.

My son and daughter graduated from college approximately ten years ago, and in a burst of parental munificence, I offered to pay for their college yearbook, remembering how expensive those compendia had become and how little I wanted to spend of my own money as a recent graduate.  I also remembered my very mixed feelings about about my college career, more losses than wins from my perspective in the first years out, regrets that might have kept me from shelling out a bundle as I began to look for employment.  My parents paid for my yearbooks, I guess, as they probably did for every aspect of my existence. I began to reflect on how little thought I gave to what it must have cost to keep me blissfully unaware of life’s bumps and bruises, when the phrase, “I didn’t ask you to do that” arrived unbidden, reminding me that one of the parental units had prepared an invoice itemizing that cost to the dollar.

The point to all of this is that I made the offer in good faith, contacted the colleges, and found that they don’t do yearbooks anymore.  My own college, a fuzzily friendly intimate haven for good people of all sorts, stopped publishing yearbooks with the 2014 edition.  I had worked in boarding schools, occasionally acting as advisor to the yearbook, and understood the time, energy, and money it took to pull a year together with photos in focus and as few egregiously embarrassing portraits as possible.  There was, perhaps still is, a penchant for “photo bombing”, commonly crashing the portraits of the debate team without having been a debater; I won’t go into detail in describing the very unfortunate, occasionally graphic photographs which have slipped into perpetuity despite the assigning of faculty gatekeepers.  During my years, video yearbooks began to appear, offering a far more immediate and vibrant evocation of a senior’s journey.  Many were artful, some were inclusive, all are now sitting in the attic with the VHS tapes of family vacations and treasured mix tapes on cassette.

My kids seem to be lumping along yearbook-free with no notable scarring; they have friends and keep up with them, far more regularly than I did.  It occurs to me in this moment that I have passed the Biblically endorsed lifespan of threescore and ten (Wycliffe Bible, Leviticus 12, published in 1388) and may have more interest in things past than in things ahead.  In this seventh decade I do find myself searching my memory for any variety of insignificant facts.  When I manage to retrieve a particularly juicy one, I send it on to one of my pals only to find that they are puzzled with my gift rather than amused, gently advising me that once again I may not have been present in my own life.

All of that aside, my relationships with yearbooks goes well beyond the ordinary human’s experience of the genre.  For any number of reasons, most having to do with allergy to instruction, I was often (always) confined during study hours in the hope that I might, well, study.  All in vain, however, because trapped in the library, I had little choice but to seek amusement where I could find it, and find it I did … in yearbooks.  I would go on to write a guide to generally under esteemed colleges in part because I had come to know and love them as they were in the years before they found their way to the library’s shelves.  I don’t know why my boarding school had copies of forty or fifty colleges, but it was with thanks that I dove into them.  Some live more vividly in memory than others; I suppose they must have seemed more exotic.  In any case, I know quite a lot about Union College in Schenectady, New York (The 1958 Garnet), Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida (The 1956 Tomokan), and The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia (The 1957 Colonial Echo) and many, many more.

In my own college career, diversion still a priority, I raided that library’s collection of yearbooks, floating blissfully away to college lives I might have lived in parallel universes.  I suspect that I was doing sociological research without fully understanding all that I took in, but, there was also a lovely esthetic to be found in early yearbooks, flourishes and furbelows, particularly in the illustrations that then filled the introductory pages.  I stumbled upon a collection of college bookplates, for example, that I still consider among the artifacts I most admire.  It’s a wonder that I did not become a professional archivist; a quick glance at my bookshelves, however, reveals the depth of my amateur archiving.  I might have let the fascination with yearbooks drift into the same category as my fascination with professional wrestling (another story) had I not driven past The Book Barn somewhere south of Bangor, Maine and decided, what the heck, let’s take a look.  

I am not alone I know in enjoying the fantasy of finding an immaculate Mercedes 190 SL, silver grey with red interior, lying under stacks of newspapers in a long neglected garage.  Unlikely, you say.  The Book Barn was actually a barn, a large barn, stuffed with books of every variety.  I like old books and had picked up a few along the way, often selecting a purchase based on the appearance of the spine or cover alone.  Like a glutton in Wonkaland, I was overwhelmed by the options before me, blindly rushing from aisle to aisle.  I came upon a dull brownish green spine that seemed to call me, paused, flipped open the book, and found that I was holding the 1917 Princeton Bric -A- Brac, a yearbook celebrating the achievements of many Princeton Tigers but with particular fondness, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Princeton ‘17.  Fitzgerald wasn’t the only luminary in the class; literary critic Edmund “Bunny” Wilson was his junior and became what Fitzgerald called his “literary conscience”.  Wilson’s in the yearbook, of course, and Fitzgerald is all over it.  Active in the Triangle Club, Fitzgerald sang, acted, and wrote the text and lyrics for the year’s ambitious production of “Fi – Fi – Fi”. The book is filled with pictures of every activity, from the Banjo Club to the Cottage Club, one of the “Big Four” eating clubs (Cottage, Tiger Inn, Cap and Gown, and Ivy).

It’s an incredibly detailed recreation of the life of the university in the last years of WWI, presenting a portrait of the Ivied upper class in the second decade of the century.  My collection reflects my interest in boarding schools as well as colleges; I read those yearbooks on the sly during study hours as well.  Recently, I began assembling material for a book on boarding schools, a book that is slowly decomposing somewhere in digital neverland.  My ambition and pleasure combined as I scouted out histories of the schools and approximately thirty boarding school yearbooks.

There’s a lot to be learned in looking at these annuals, as there was for Ken Burns in reading letters written during The Civil War.  Tides turn, fads and fashions change, language particular to a generation gives way to the following decade’s locutions.  I remain fascinated as a quasi-historian but know that an element at play from the start has been “nose pressed to the window watching the swells at ease in their clubrooms”, an outsiders’ longing for a world I never knew.

There are more expensive and dangerous hobbies, to be sure.  I’m content to wait by the mailbox, hoping the next delivery will bring the 1949 Kiskimentian, the yearbook of The Kiskiminetas Springs School in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, plenty interesting in its own right, but extraordinary in that it chronicles the senior year of Robert Bruce (Bob) Mathias.  He’d won the Gold Medal in the Decathlon at the London Olympic Games in 1948, returning to Kiski for his senior year in high school before entering Stanford.  He’d win again in Helsinki in 1952, after playing for Stanford in The Rose Bowl.  I’m looking at a picture of the Kiski School track team, Bob Mathias among the group at the starting line, and imagining what it must have been like for high school boys peeking sideways at an Olympian athlete casually taking his position at the start.  Mathias played football and basketball at Kiski as well and sang in the Glee Club.  He also won the citation for “Best Track Athlete”, a not entirely unexpected honor.

I’m currently not scooping up yearbooks, or Mercedes 190SLs, but I’m not likely to drive past a weathered book barn without circling back, just to see what might be at the bottom of a pile of dust covered large books. Oh, and by the way, that 1917 Princeton Bric A Brac? Now worth $1500.00. Fitzgerald in in the back row just left of center of the picture accompanying this article.