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Don’t forget your hands

I was running late. Well, that’s not exactly fair. Let me back up. I was perfectly on time. But then I realized I forgot something, a notebook, and so I had to double back. That’s when the comedy of errors began. I’m sitting at a T-intersection, trying to turn right, and the whole of the town is going the same direction. And as the clock ticked by I waited.

I was supposed to be at a meeting, but now I was running late. And then a dump truck pulled out in front of me, that sort of road-joining that is mostly safely, but entirely annoying. That slowed me down some more, and so on, and then so forth.

I arrived at the meeting place to find the meeting had been rescheduled for tomorrow, which is today. The in-person meeting became a Zoom, which was helpful for file-sharing and the like. And that’s the story of the first meeting of the year.

The good thing about yesterday was that the meeting place was right next to a doc-in-the-box, which I wanted to visit anyway. I’ve been dealing with an unpleasantly persistent case of swimmer’s ear and I hear that medical science has invented an antibiotic drop that’s better than the stuff you can get over the counter. The woman, a PA I think, that I saw said that was indeed a thing, and she filled out a prescription. And, wouldn’t you know it, my pharmacy had it filled before I even got back home. So now there’s stuff in my ear.

Well, not right now, because it’d fall out as I sat here, upright. But I suppose there is stuff in my ear, because swimmer’s ear. It’s getting better, but not as quickly as it should, hence my side visit.

I wouldn’t recommend it. The swimmer’s ear, I mean. The walk-in visit was fine. I didn’t even sit down in the waiting area before they called me back. It was the most in-and-out experience you could imagine, as it should be for such a small thing.

Also, I got my palm scanned. Not for any street performer tarot reasons, mind you. This is how they identify people now. Not from the palm prints, but from the blood vessels. The nice woman at the reception desk told me that. I, of course, knew I could do four minutes of material on this. She knew it as well, because as soon as I started in, she handed me a one-sheet explaining the technology. The long and the short of it is that I have to remember to take my right hand back should I ever need to visit again.

So, note to self and all of that.

We had a nice moon this evening. The view from the backyard.

And the stars above us out front, to the west, looked fine, too. Watering plants in the evening has this reward. If you look up, you can have this nice quiet moment of wonder.

Not pictured, the plane going to Boston that ruined the first shot, cruising over at 30,000 feet. This was, of course, after I spent some time in the gazebo enjoying the fresh air of a cool summer night and the chorus of crickets and the song of whatever else was out there.

I was reading Walter Lord’s The Dawn’s Early Light. It is about the War of 1812.

This one, if I recall correctly, I got because someone my mother-in-law knows was downsizing. She had a great big stack and let me take whatever I wanted, so I of course came away with my arms full. It’s been in the To Read bookcase for a while. Published in 1972, I am just intrigued that a little side note like this one, from the British capture of Washington D.C., made it into a popular history book a century-and-a-half after the fact.

I am up to the subsequent attempt to conquer Baltimore now, so there’s really only whatever happens there and New Orleans to go, I suspect. But it has become one of those books that you don’t want to end. It is my first Lord book and I’ll probably be adding more of his work to my bookshelves. Lord was a talented writer with an incredibly active voice.

We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, the feature where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. If I am still counting this correctly, this is the 44th installment, and the 76th marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series. And this one is relatively new. It is also not especially historic, but I published a similar one last year and the concept is nice.

A rain garden is a shallow basin planted with deep-rooted native wildflowers, grasses and shrubs. Their extensive root systems filter stormwater runoff and help prevent pollutants and sediments from entering our groundwater and waterways.

In addition to helping to prevent erosion and improving water quality, native plants provide essential food and habitat for local wildlife. Their seeds and nectar provide a valuable food source for birds, butterflies and other insects. Native plants are those that were here prior to European settlement. They are well adapted to local conditions and require very little care once established.

I just happened by this one the other day, seeing it out of the corner of my eye as I pedaled between two historic markers. I wonder why there aren’t more of these, wherever there’s a free spot.

There are always free spots.

Next week, we’ll visit a properly old site. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

books / maps / Monday / photo — Comments Off
15
Jul 24

Come for the book, stay for the cats, or vice versa

It was a low effort weekend around here. I blame the heat advisories. And also the sun. It’s possible that both of those things are related. Also, I should blame the Tour. The race was in the Pyrenees this weekend, and the mountains are where all the fun, and much of the grand scenery, is to be found.

We were actually watching the Tour, on tape delay, when the phone call came in Saturday. Turn on the news. The call and texts came at almost the same time. And for the time it took to get off of one streaming app and on to another — several looooooong seconds — and then to the news stations, we wondered. I chose ABC, because of my ABC roots, and because we also got there first. And that was not the Saturday night anyone expected. I turned it off for a while, and back to the race, and then turned it back on again. Just to see if there was anything new, to see if it had all been true.

I checked the calendar — the Tour is on, the sun is out, the temperatures are high — it is only July.

I started a new book yesterday. (I have three going right now, sorta. Just like the old days, almost.) This is Walter Lord’s The Dawn’s Early Light. Published in 1972, it is one of his 13 bestsellers. The blurb on the dust jacket says “Author of A Night To Remember, Incredible Victory, etc.”

“Etc.,” of course, is Latin for, “You’re doing something right as an author.” This is my first Walter Lord book and I can tell you, he’s doing something right.

Codrington is Captain Edward Codrington, captain of the British fleet in naval operations against the Americans. The man in charge had been back and forth, back and forth, on where he wanted to give the Americans what for. But finally it was settled, and Condrington was sailing upriver for the small fishing village of Benedict, Maryland, and then overland to Washington, D.C. The plan was to take 48 hours.

Lord tells us that the problem, on our side, was that the American government was a shambles. And almost nobody in Madison’s cabinet thought the Redcoats would come for swampy Washington. Who’d want the place? That was the thought of Secretary of War, John Armstrong, Jr. He had been a member of the Continental Congress. At this point of American history he was one of the most well regarded in terms of military experience, having served as an aide-de-camp to Generals Mercer and Gates in the Revolutionary War. He was also a fool. (Wikipedia tells me his peers were a bit skeptical about him.)

I bought this book eight years ago this week. I paid a whole penny for it. I’m 64 pages in — my reading interrupted by lightning — and I am comfortable saying it was worth the investment.

And with that, we can now continue on to the site’s most popular weekly feature, the check in with the kitties.

Phoebe would like an adjustment to her midday window curtains, please and thank you.

And here she is later, wondering why I haven’t adjusted her curtains more to her liking.

I took this photo of Poseidon because I was telling a story to a friend about how Poe was taking the heat for one of the humans in the house. It was a good illustration for the punchline, and his chin-rubbing was just perfect. He thought you might enjoy it, too.

And since we’re watching bike racing … and Poe is a big fan of bike racing …

He has been working on his aerodynamic positioning.

I haven’t put him in a wind tunnel, but that looks like a pretty good shape, don’t you think?

books / music / photo / Re-Listening / swimming / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
9
Jul 24

Mid-century sod

It is so hot, it must be July. Later this week, I’m shopping for ice vests. Summer just feels different, the older I get, and it is, of course, getting hotter, too. Maybe I should invest in ice vests.

We sat in the water to read. Shade, body-temperature water and good books. There was little relief in the activity. But it was a lovely activity.

I finished reading a biography on Gino Bartoli, Road to Valor. It’s one of about 250 books you can get on Ginettacio, any number of which are quality reads. It’s one of the handful that focuses a bit more on the Gino the Pious aspect of the man. Champion cyclist, hero of Italy, Resistenza italiana, who had his best years on the bike taken away by the war, a man who nevertheless used his bike to save an uncounted number of people’s lives during that time.

Among his highlights, Bartali won the Giro d’Italia in 1936 and 1937 and the Tour de France in 1938. Then the war, and when it was time to race again, he was already viewed, in his early 30s, as an old man. And so the anziano won the Giro again in 1946, and the Tour in 1948. It was, and remains, the longest between Tour wins and the second longest such streak in the Giro, which brings us to his rival, the great Fausto Coppi.

Coppi was the vanguard of the next generation of great Italian bike racers, another top talent, and he didn’t want to sit in line behind the old man, hence the rivalry. The book oversells it a little. There are stories, not included here, of how the two got along and worked together, even at the peak of their rivalry. But that duality doesn’t lend itself to drama, one supposes.

(Coppi would later set the mark for the longest interval between wins in the Giro.)

Everything about Bartali’s life — short of his riding a bike at the absolute peak of his powers — strikes you as a hard life. But it isn’t a hard read. The authors, Aili McConnon and Andres McConnon, took great pains with their source material and interviewed many people who knew Bartali. He was the subject of some of the myth-making, lyrical style of mid-century Italian journalism, but none of that was used here. Instead, this easy breezy read comes off a tiny bit elementary. It’s a backhanded compliment: I enjoyed the story they were telling. I wanted more of it.

There are other stories about his time during the war that deserve more attention. He put some of his Jewish friends in an apartment he owned, hid people in his cellar. The biography discusses his ferrying messages and forged documents through the Italian underground, hiding them in the frame of his bike and risk his life, trading on his celebrity, to move this information from one place to another. There are varying accounts of how this played out with the fascists and the Nazis, but that gets glossed over somewhat. There was no mention of his leading refugees toward the Swiss Alps in 1943. Some of the gloss is understandable. It wasn’t something he talked about, and a lot of it are now vague and, contemporaneously dangerous diary entries others kept, or decades old recollections. Bartali himself told his son, “One does these things and then that’s that.”

It was an act of his faith, and then, like many people, he simply tried to return to his life, tried to build a new and better one. And chapters and chapters could have been written about that, for most of us are fortunate enough to not know the experience. Just after the war, for example, when Italians started racing bikes again, they did not race for money. No one had any. They raced for chickens. Or for supplies. Or, in one instance, there was a race for pipes, that the winner gave his community so they could continue rebuilding their infrastructure.

There are always a lot more to these stories, is all.

I had a 2,500 yard swim today. The water was about 92 degrees. It felt a bit warm for a swim.

Swimmers say they swim faster in colder water. I swim slow enough, under any conditions, for this to be a negligible, to say nothing of perceiving it. But I did notice how warm the water is. Can a pool feel sticky?

Just as I finished my laps, I saw a plane turning north overhead. I waited until this moment to take a picture, because I thought I might need to make up a navel-gazing essay about two planes occupying the same plane and what it means for time and conspiracy theories and the efficacy of windshield wipers at speed.

But then I rememebered, it is Tuesday, and I’m not pressed for content.

Still, airlines aside, do you think a pilot ever gets up in the air and aims for a contrail? Just to break it up?

And while you think about that, please enjoy one of our stands of brown-eyed susan flowers (Rudbeckia triloba).

If anyone needs some for an art project, a bouquet or flower pressing, let me know. We have plenty.

And, finally, we return once more to the Re-Listening project. Longtime readers now this is an intermittent feature. In my car, I am playing all of my CDs, in the order of their acquisition. Here, I am writing about some of what I hear. It is one part reminiscence, one part excuse to put some good music in this space and entirely an excuse to pad the site.

I’ve been behind on the Re-Listening project for … I dunno … roughly a year. (See? Very intermittent.) It looks, though, as I’ll be caught up next week. That’s a weird feeling. But I digress.

So we’ll return to 2005, when I was listening to the 2004 Harry Connick Jr. release, “Only You.” it was his 21st studio album. It earned a Grammy nomination debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 in the U.S. and hit the top 10 in the UK and Australia. All of the tracks are Baby Boomer standards. I think I picked this up used.

I played this whenever The Yankee was around so I would appear cultured.

My favorite songs were full of understated little moments. The Temptations and Stevie Wonder and a big handful of other recording artists made it famous, but Connick had to do it too. He puts some nice coloratura to it. And that little vocal nod at 1:24 somehow makes the whole song.

I was, and remain, a fan of this one.

And since we’re listening to standards, the next CD up in the Re-Listening project is a Frank Sinatra greatest hits, another 2005 library find. I prefer Deano, but this is pretty good. “Nice ‘n’ Easy” spent nine weeks atop the Billboard chart in 1960, and was nominated for the Grammy in the Album of the Year, Best Male Vocal Performance and Best Arrangement categories. It went gold. Old blue eyes could do no wrong, right? He was doing some things right here, to be sure.

It’s one of those records that is useful to have, but I never really played all of that much.

This is Sinatra’s take of a Hoagy Carmichael-Ned Washington classic. It’s beautiful.

There are 16 tracks, almost all of them are performed as ballads. The notable exception is the first song, the title track.

George and Ira Gershwin wrote this one for an operetta that was never realized. Ginger Rogers and Fred Aistaire brought it to life, Billie Holiday immortalized it. And then came Sinatra. There’s a story out there about how he had to really understand a song, really feel a song, to be able to sing it, and this song is on a slow enough roll that you can think about that for a bit, and then, sure enough, you hear it.

Most of the tracks here will be at least passingly familiar to casual listeners, but you have to have an affinity for 1947 music to know this song. Those times when I play this CD I marvel at how I’ve never heard this before. In 1947 Art Lund, Dick Haymes, Sinatra, Dennis Day, The Pied Pipers and Frankie Laine all had a hit with it. (Lund’s version topped the charts. Sinatra’s peaked at number six.) The Four Freshmen, Andy Williams and Dean Martin all made renditions later as well. But the first time I heard it, it sounded like this.

Those crying violins put you in that cafe, but the voice really puts you in the seat at the table.

And that’ll do it, for now. The next time we return to the Re-Listening project we’ll try some 2000 Americana pop from Minneapolis. And then I’ll be caught up. Unless I get behind again by then.

adventures / books / history / Instagram / photo / swimming / Thursday — Comments Off
4
Jul 24

Happy Fourth

I am starting to feel better today, thanks for asking. Many of the key symptoms have disappeared. I think I hard-coughed all of them right out of my body this morning. It was a huge fit. More the beginning of a cold than the end, or so it felt. But I patiently sat my way into an afternoon without any other great big symptoms.

And so this afternoon I willed my way into the pool to see what would happen.

What happened was I struggled through 500 yards or so and then spent another several hundred yards wondering when I would find my rhythm. Somewhere along the way in a long swim I just slip into a nice (for me) pace that just sees the laps melt away. I haven’t charted this, but it seems like it should come at a fairly consistent time, right? Only I was somewhere around 1,200 yards today and still wondering when that would happen.

It did not happen.

But I did swim what was, on balance, a solid 1,800. And I didn’t feel the need to roll over and sleep the rest of the afternoon away. It felt like progress.

After which I finished reading John Barry’s Rising Tide, which was an incredible book about the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River.

How can something so devastating be all but forgotten just a century later? At a place called Mounds Landing, the levee gave way and “a wall of water three-quarters of a mile across and more than 100 feet high” came through the crevasse. Weeks later, engineers used a 100-foot line to find the bottom, but they failed. The river had gouged a 100-foot-deep channel half a mile wide for a mile inland.

No one could every wrap their arms around an official set of figures for the entirety of the massive watershed, but Barry has some data on the lower Mississippi, where the flood put as much as 30 feet of water over lands where 931,159 people lived. The whole of the country was only 120 million people at the time. Barry continues, “Twenty-seven thousand square miles were inundated, roughly equal to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont combined. (Months later) 1.5 million acres remained underwater. Not until mid-August, more than four months after the first break in a mainline Mississippi River levee, did all the water leave the land.”

The scale and scope is too big for a series of movies, and maybe that’s why it isn’t in the common zeitgeist. The rural nature of the landscape plays a part here, too. Could you imagine if this could have somehow happened on that scale on the east coast? There are certainly plenty of characters you could draw from. This book fixates on Hoover, of course, and on a few of the key locales. But, then, who would be the antagonists. Here’s one.

The good ol’ boy club of New Orleans would be another. Bankers, the New Orleans establishment and nothing but, and they wiped out two adjoining communities, having made desperate promises about it to save their city. New Orleans dynamited the levee that doomed St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. A day later, other upstream collapses proved New Orleans didn’t need the effort. And, of course, New Orleans civic leaders went out of their to deny the compensation promised to their neighbors. New Orleans’ old money would definitely be the bad guys. Alas, it set the stage for Huey Long. The flood — and Calvin Coolidge’s cold shoulder — returned Herbert Hoover to the national stage. The aftermath played a big role in the great migration, and all of it together was hugely influential of generations of what would come for the region.

The current plan for the river takes some of the old hypotheses and puts them together but, Barry finds some flaws in the mathematics. This isn’t an engineering book, though it does deal with some important issues in easily digestible ways. And, then, in 1973 …

It’s all folly — and we know it.

This evening we went to see the fireworks. (We missed them last year.) They were held at the county fairgrounds and we picked out a spot across a wide field from where they launched. We sat on the side of the road and thought of the past and the future. We were far enough away that it wasn’t noisy, and close enough that it was still pretty.

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At home again, we lit sparklers in the backyard. Had a great time of it, too. There were at least three different kinds, because there’s no such thing as a supply chain shortage these days.

I’m trying to talk her into taking sparklers with her everywhere she goes.

It’s not a terribly difficult sell, frankly.

books / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
27
May 24

This is mostly about books, and I’m good with that

It’s been since roughly early March, but I feel like I’m catching up on things around here. Which means this is the week I will catch up on things. Which mean something important and pressing will come along to distract me. Something will make me realize this is a false feeling, and that I am, in fact, behind on all of the chores and hobbies and other things I’m just behind on. I will find that note on my phone that has the list of things I want to do, and things I should do, and things I need to do, and then I’m instantly behind the eight ball once more. This is the way of things. But, for the next day or two, this is a good feeling.

So, please, no one write anything on the web. If I’m caught up, I don’t need you adding anything to the To Do stack.

Aaaaaaand … there it is, I just realized something I’m behind on. Oh well, I’ll get to it Thursday, maybe.

Besides, these guys demand all of my attention anyway. Demand it.

We’ve created monsters.

I wonder how long we will leave this box on the kitchen island since Phoebe has made it her own.

After an afternoon of box-sitting, she was ready to quietly sit next to us and take a little nap.

What, in the world, is cuter than that?

Not to be outdone, Poseidon would like to show you his sleeping technique.

How is that comfortable? And it’s easy to say “He’s a cat,” as if that explains anything. But that guy is as spoiled as can be. Not, his cat cave is sitting on the ottoman, because the cat cave alone wasn’t good enough.

So the cats are doing just fine, thanks for asking. And, once again, it is self evident why their weekly check-in is the most popular regular feature on the site.

This weekend, I discovered we have berries.

Who knew? Not me.

This, I assure you, is the moon.

The timestamp says I took that at 11:09 p.m. on Friday night.

Also, I had a 35-mile bike ride, but we’re just going to treat that it’s not even a big deal, in an effort to normalize longer bike rides. I’ll just say this, 35 is sort of the mental barrier. Once I get through that, I’m ready to go out on actual longer rides, and that’s the plan. I’ll continue increasing the mileage because the goal, as ever, is to take nice, long, enjoyable, bike rides. Tomorrow’s ride will be longer than Saturday’s, and so on, for a while.

This weekend we also returned to our best summer weekend system: reading in the shade on Sunday afternoon. Yesterday I read the great Willie Morris’ Yazoo. Morris was from Yazoo, Mississippi, but while he was working as the editor of Harper’s Magazine he made several trips back to his hometown to follow along with how his unique small town was handling integration.

(Most small towns think they are unique. Some of them are. Yazoo may be. How they handled integration, at least in those early stages, was different from most.)

Morris, being a liberal Southern Democrat, and more so while he was living in the north, was hopeful about those early days, as you might imagine one would be about a place he loved. He became haunted by what happened in the longer term. None of that is an author’s fault, when you expand on a longform article to turn it into a book, the book becomes a bit of amber, and the stuff frozen inside of it can be right, or wrong. What we get, from our modern vantage point, is a glimpse of a particular moment in time, 1970, and just more of Morris, the tremendous reporter and writer.

As I’m sitting there, a little insect flew onto the left margin of the page, sat there for an eyeblink, and then hopped-zipped into the pages. It was eager to be in the book. Perhaps it was eager to be a part of the book. One with the book. Or maybe it wanted to fly to Mississippi, and then thought better of it, because it quickly zipped away.

It’s a musty old book, in that delightful, yellow-paged pulp way. Probably the insect’s impulse had something to do with the paper’s aging process. And, almost as quickly, it thought better of it, and flew away. It was one of those things in life that seemed important, important enough that you wanted to share it, even as you knew, in real time, you had no way to do it, or the feeling, justice. And so here I am.

Anyway, I started it yesterday, I finished it yesterday. I’m pleased to have done so, as part of my quest to read pretty much everything possible that Willie Morris wrote. It isn’t all grand, but if you read Terrains of the Heart, you’ll understand the impulse.

I forgot to mention this entirely, but since we’re on the subject of books, last week I finished Marching Home. The subhead is “Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War.” Subtitles are a terrible modern publishing necessity, but they hit the nail on the head in terms of the thesis.

It turns out, we’ve never been especially good at supporting veterans. I knew that. It goes back to the Revolutionary War and has been a shame and sometimes downright shameful part of the American condition. These guys had it no different.

One part was physical, and one part was the rest of the north wanted to get on with it. Another part was, psychological therapy just wasn’t a thing yet. That’s seeing a 19th century problem through a 21st century lens. It is a thing we caution people about when reading about historical periods, but it’s easy to do, and easy to return to.

Another one would be: 19th century alcohol might have been less than helpful. The descriptions of some of the people in this book beggars belief. But the whole thing really does seem a shame. And while this is, of course, a book about the Union army, reading it makes the humanist wonder how these same real, gritty, daily problems impacted the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, too. As lousy as some of the northern infrastructure was for dealing with these problems en masse, it would have necessarily been hard for those guys, too.

After I finished that book, which was well-written and seemingly exhaustively researched — almost 40 percent of it were footnotes and other after matter — I asked the random number generator to pick another book from my Kindle queue, and I started in on Rising Tide. Again, the subtitle, “The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America” tells the tale. (Why not just use that as the title?)

Where I am, as of this writing, is still about 50 years prior to the flood, but it has been a fine read, and very digestible. These two pages are the bulk of what has been offered in terms of hydrology.

Even something like the movement of water is written in a lean-in style, to author John Barry‘s immense credit. And if these two pages intrigue you, even a little bit, this is a book for you.

I’m five chapters, I think, in. We’ve met three main players. Two of them were surveyor-engineers. One of them was fast, and the other fastidiously, obsessively thorough. The former died in the Civil War. The later did not, and, thus far, has proven to be something of a megalomaniac who becomes the head of the Army Corps of Engineers. And he’s just about to run, head-first, into the third main character, a captain of industry who Barry has thus far portrayed as an irresistible object.

Speaking of which, I think I’ll go back and continue on. When I last looked in, they were just getting to the problem of the legendary sandbars.