Lost... Found...Taken

You may find this hard to believe, but when I was younger, I used to run 3-4 miles every day, do 200 push-ups, and 250 crunches; I meditated for 30 minutes-1 hour each day. I could even control my pulse rate and body temp with thought and concentration. And I kept up my routine regardless of rain, sleet, heat, or social obligations. I felt good.

That's not to say that these activities were easy. The first 200 yards of every run took determination to keep going, as did the first fifteen push-ups and the first fifty crunches. But anyone who exercises regularly knows that once you get past that hurdle, you get into "The Zone." The Zone is that place where you stop counting the steps you've taken, stop thinking about the catch in your side; you're movements become automatic; your mind drifts elsewhere or nowhere, and you just keep going. I liked The Zone.

But once I started undergraduate studies full time, I allowed time to become my master, and I lost The Zone. I just couldn't keep up with its rhythms.

Periodically over the last decade, I have tried to find my way back, but I could never quite get there. Stress or weather or just plain fatigue would push me off course again and again until I would give up the search, return home determined to try again the next day. But eventually I'd give in and stop looking.

That is, until the past few weeks. It started as a desire to get out... get out of the house, get out of town, just get out. I began taking my bicycle out to the bike path that runs by our house and going a short distance along it each day. It felt nice to be doing something, to be going somewhere but not going any place particular; I was just going. Every day, I'd go a little further and a little further, not out of any intention to do so, mind you. No. I was just enjoying myself, so I'd think, "Why not go just a few minutes more. I have time." Then one day this week, I realized I had found "The Zone." There it was on a bike path in California's central valley. Who knew?

The path is cracked and pitted by the merciless rays of the California sun, but I'm not bothered by the bumps. I speed along at a fairly quick pace, but I'm not pushing myself or the bike to our limits; I'm just cruising, knocking off the miles without even getting out of breath. I've been biking about 15 miles a day with virtually no effort, once I get beyond the confines of my neighborhood. I just roll through the farmland to the west of town and let my mind wander where it will.

Yesterday, I noticed the haze on the horizon. It was worse than the day before. Arnold Swartzenegger's drawling, broken English plays in my head, "All ov CAL-i-FORN-ia is full of smoke. De smoke is very bad for de health. It is not good to breath de smoke, especially for dose wit asthma." But I'm in The Zone. I don't care about smoke.

But today I could smell it as soon as I walked out the door. I'd gone about two miles when it enveloped me like a fog. I am one well acquainted with fog. It is my friend. So, I rode on, expecting to feel the cool moisture caress my skin, but instead there were stabs of pain as my lungs betrayed me, the acrid smoke palpably bitter in my mouth. My eyes began to burn. I had to turn back.

As I biked my way back to my air-conditioner-filtered home, I thought that this time, I had not lost The Zone; it had been taken from me. I had been forcibly ejected, and I'd only experienced it for such a precious little time. California sucks! And don't let anyone tell you differently.

Bi-coastal Disorder

I hadn't realized it had been so long since my last post. I've had things I could post about. For one, Darling Wife and I celebrated our third anniversary last week, and we spent a great deal of time reminiscing about our life together. We have certainly had some great times. Lots of stuff to think about there. And my father and stepmother visited us for the first time ever. In fact, I think it may have been the most time I've spent with my father in my life. Yeah, there was some bloggable material in there. But I just haven't felt like it. For the first time in years, I am really, really enjoying just being home, curled up on the sofa with a good book in my hand, puppies at my feet, and DW at my side. There is very little lure to a computerized escape.

But life is not all wonderful. If you've been following the news, you know that California is once again on fire. There is a sizable blaze in Napa Valley, pretty close to where we live. We aren't threatened by the conflagration, but the delta breeze that we usually value so much in the summer for it's cooling freshness is wafting smoke and fumes into our charming university town. The air is hazy and difficult to breathe. I am reminded again of how much I dislike it here.

And escape, blessed escape is on the horizon. My nephew has thrown us a lifeline in the form of a graduation invitation from upstate New York. Blessed child! We will be departing this inferno via a red-eye flight from San Francisco Thursday night and traversing the breadth of our nation for a few wondrous days on the opposite coast. In fact, we will be flying into our nuptial city, that fabulous old Puritan town, and driving the entire width of the great state of Massachusetts. Glory be! And though thunderstorms are predicted to dampen the affair, I think DW and I will welcome the mercy drops. I can almost feel my skin soaking up the heavenly moisture even now, and my nostrils inflate, drinking in the sweetly remembered scent of rain-soaked Berkshire forests.

It is a good thing we aren't taking the dogs or we might not return to this accursed land of flame and ash at the end of the earth. Does anyone know if you can Fed-Ex live animals?

Unread Books Meme

Thanks Michele for turning me onto this. It was fun. I'm not going to explain what it is because my three readers already know.

The rules:
bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself

1 The ultimate hitchhiker's guide by Douglas Adams*
2 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
3 The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
4 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5 Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
6 Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
7 Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8 One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9 Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
10 The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
11 Ulysses by James Joyce
12 War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
13 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
14 The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15 Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
16 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte*
17 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
18 Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
19 A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
20 The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
21 Middlemarch by George Eliot
22 Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
23 The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
24 The Kor'an by Anonymous
25 Moby Dick by Herman Melville
26 The Odyssey by Homer
27 The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
28 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
29 The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
30 The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
31 Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
32 Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
33 The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
34 The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
35 The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
36 The sound and the fury by William Faulkner
37 The Iliad by Homer
38 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf*
39 Emma by Jane Austen
40 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
41 Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence
42 Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift
43 The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne*
44 Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
45 Dracula by Bram Stoker*
46 Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence
47 A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
48 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
49 The once and future king by T. H. White
50 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
51 To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
52 Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
53 Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
54 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens*
55 Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
56 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
57 Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
58 The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
59 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
60 Underworld by Don DeLillo
61 Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
62 The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
63 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte*
64 The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
65 The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells*
66 Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
67 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
68 Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
69 A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
70 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
71 The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri
72 The inferno by Dante Alighieri
73 Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
74 The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
75 Swann's way by Marcel Proust
76 The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
77 The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon
78 Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen
79 The portrait of a lady by Henry James
80 Silas Marner by George Eliot
81 The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde*
82 The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas
83 The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
84 The book thief by Markus Zusak
85 The confusion by Neal Stephenson
86 One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey
87 Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
88 Bleak House by Charles Dickens*
89 The system of the world by Neal Stephenson
90 The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene
91 Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
92 The known world by Edward P. Jones
93 The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger
94 The mill on the Floss by George Eliot
95 The English patient by Michael Ondaatje
96 Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
97 Dubliners by James Joyce
98 Les misérables by Victor Hugo
99 The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan
100 Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace
101 Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
102 Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison
103 Persuasion by Jane Austen
104 A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
105 The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens*
106 Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller

42 read, 9 of which I've read more than once. Like Michele, I have generally read them for study, but I did enjoy several of them and would have read them again for pleasure if there were but world enough and time.
3 started but not finished; however, I will say that this was not because I didn't like them. All of them were books read for school when I was younger, and I was forced to abandon them from time constraints. I would gladly pick any of them up again.
9 owned but not read. I think only one or two of them are actually mine. The rest belong to Darling Wife, and I think I would like to read most of them. In fact, she brought quite a few books into our marriage that fall into this category, and I wouldn't doubt that I've left some on this list un-underlined when they should be.
1 I hated. Proust... it was really, really dull. I guess I just didn't get into it.

Unlike Michele, I would like to read several on this list, and expect I will get around to many of them eventually.

Reclamation

Do you remember my new friend, the one who asked me to learn gun handling and go to a shooting range with him? It turned out that he wasn't really a friend after all. I haven't heard from him since that first week or so, and he hasn't responded to a message from me in about a month. I've been busy, so I haven't made a huge effort to contact him, but I have sent the random e-mail here and there and received no replies to any of them.

The last time we spoke, he told me his doctor found a heart murmur or something. He said the docs ran a bunch of tests, but he wasn't going to worry about it until they told him it was time to be concerned. When I didn't hear from him, I wondered if he was alright. All I have is his work e-mail address, and even though he's a tech junkie who connects to his work computer from everywhere he goes, including his phone, there was the slight possibility that he wasn't responding because he was missing work. I admit, I was a little concerned. Not enough to call him or go by his office, but concerned nonetheless.

But I saw him on campus today. I was riding my bike home when I saw him crossing to the sidewalk about 40 yards ahead. It took me a moment to register that it was him, and by the time I got to where he'd crossed, he'd already moved along the sidewalk a considerable distance. If I'd bumped into him naturally, I'd have spoken to him easily, but chasing him down seemed weird under the circumstances. So, I pedaled on without stopping, but now I'm really wondering what's going on.

Obviously, he doesn't want to be friends. That's fine. I don't really want to be friends with him either. It doesn't matter what his reasons are. Who would want to hang out with someone who doesn't want to hang out with them? That would hardly be a satisfying relationship. Besides, he's irresponsible and immature. This isn't sour grapes talking. His primary activities outside of work amount to smoking pot, playing video games, and going to the Bay Area to visit his folks. He's only 25. Maybe I'd just been trying to be young; I don't know. But that sort of behavior didn't suit me even when I was young.

The problem is, I loaned him some books. They aren't valuable at all, just some paperbacks. Nor are they favorites or anything. But they are mine, and I would like to have them back. My last couple of e-mails to him have been related to this issue, but he has ignored them. So, what should I do?

Nth Degree of Separation

I called him "Blue Boy." Of course, he isn't actually blue, but he wears blue. Blue jeans, blue jacket, blue helmet... even his bike is blue. I first noticed him because he comes through my crosswalk every morning almost precisely at 7:45, and that just happens to be the time that I need to move from one side of the street to the other.

See, the schools in my burg have staggered start-times so that the high-schoolers, who travel west through the intersection where I work in the mornings, come earlier than the middle-schoolers, who travel east. Consequently, midway through my morning shift, I have to change curbs in order to most effectively assist the kids in their crossings.

After a couple of weeks of observation of Blue Boy, I learned to rely on his timing. I didn't even check my watch anymore. I just waited until I saw that familiar blue form pass through the crosswalk to alter my standing position.

My reliance on him caused me to observe Blue Boy more closely, to pick him out of the crowd. He is handsome in an Aryan sort of way. I catch a glimpse of his blond hair beneath his helmet and notice the aristocratic shape of his nose as he breezes past me. He sits on his bike with confidence and skill, and his blue eyes never flicker for an instant in my direction, even when I have to stop him until there is a break in the flow of traffic to allow him to cross. He glides down the hill behind me and turns the corner to cross the street with speed and absolute silence. In a town where most kids say "hello," "good morning," or "thank you" as they cross, or at least make eye contact and nod, his lack of acknowledgment smacks of rudeness. I determined for myself that he is haughty or at the very least callous. The exactness of his timing every day and the unvarying monotony of his clothing contributing to my impression of him as cold and aloof.

Then one day, I noticed that Blue Boy's blue jacket is a varsity letter jacket. Surprise. He is an athlete and no doubt popular. Or that's what I first thought when I noticed it. Then I wondered at the fact that I had not marked it before. One can believe a letter jacket to be a symbol of elitism and discrimination or as a mark of pride and achievement, but regardless of the significance one places on the sign, it has more meaning than the nondescript "blue jacket" I had labeled him with up to that point. How could I not see it?

The next day, Blue Boy wore a hooded sweatshirt of a much lighter shade of blue than the letter jacket, and as soon as I saw it, I realized that this was not the first time I'd seen it. He frequently alternates between the jacket and the hoodie, and perhaps even other garments as well, but I had failed to take notice of this either.

I began to be aware that I had not seen Blue Boy at all. For my own purposes, I had branded him with a moniker that segregated him from the mass of his schoolmates and learned a few of his routines, and from this paltry evidence, I had constructed a profile for him that may have little or nothing to do with the boy himself. I mean, for crying out loud, I call him "Blue Boy," and in my mind, that is his identity. How could he be more than a cardboard cutout of a person? He is a color, not a reality.

One day not long after I made this observation, Blue Boy was accompanied by another lad. This one, about the same age, was of a completely different disposition. He is friendly and perhaps a little geeky. His clothes reveal somewhat less attention to fashion than many of the youths I see, and he never passes up the chance to speak to me. On more than one occasion, he has even initiated a brief conversation when he has had to wait for a pause in traffic. I'd never heard Blue Boy speak before, never seen him pay attention to anything in his surroundings as he sped past, but here he was, riding slowly in pace with this other kid. He talked animatedly, telling the other boy some sort of story about something he'd seen on TV or a movie. They were clearly friends.

I stood in amazement. Not at the boys, but at myself. Granted, I have little contact with these kids, so it is only natural that my assumptions about them are flawed and inaccurate. But it got me to thinking about how little we know anyone and how much we think we know. Do we really see others or do we always only see ourselves? I may never know Blue Boy's name, and I may never see more than a shallow surface, but I like to think it will be his and not mine. Do you think that's possible?

Little Suprises

I haven't felt much like blogging lately. Not that I've been in a bad mood. Sure, the extreme heat, horribly dry winds, and forest fires we've been experiencing have somewhat squelched the high I was feeling a few weeks ago, but I'm in a pretty good mood all the same. It's just that now that I am finished with my classes until fall, I have more free time, and I haven't been inclined to spend it sitting at the computer. You know how it is.

But I had to share this one really cool thing that we just discovered. Darling Wife had the dogs out in the backyard for their... er... comfort, and she called through the window to ask if I had ever seen a hummingbird's nest. I remarked, "Only in pictures." She then asked me what they were made out of, etc., and explained that she thought we had one in the tree in our back yard.

I went out to investigate, and sure enough there it was. Here are a few snapshots for your entertainment. Cool, eh?













If you look closely at the last one, you can sort of see that they are made out of moss, and... get this... spider webs. That's why it's white. And that's probably why it nested here. Plenty of webs for its use... that and the feeder by the back fence.

Golden Days

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Do you know the scent of jasmine?

Not that sickly sweet, heavy perfume that air fresheners and candles call jasmine, but the light, flowery fragrance of spring in the tropics that defines true jasmine. Certainly it's strong, but it's also fresh and soft, not cloying and stifling like the artificial wannabes. As I ride my bike around the city, that fragrance pervades everything, and I think that the ambrosia of the Olympian gods must surely have smelled like this.

The poppies, the orange-colored California Golden Poppies, are also in radiant bloom right now in more abundance than I have ever seen them, delicately tossing their happy faces in the breeze beneath the more subdued and stately tea roses that seem to have appeared full-grown in front yards all over town.

I never cease to be amazed at how much a pleasant landscape lifts my spirits. And yes, I am in a good mood. I realized that quite unexpectedly last week. I am happy.

I'm not quite sure why. Oh, I could give you reasons. The flowers and mild temperatures are one. Did you know there is rain in our forecast for this evening? I know that means very little to those of you in more moderate climates, but for us, this is a big deal. We haven't had rain since early February and didn't expect any until October. It isn't supposed to be much, but OH HOW EXCITING it is! The realization that the fiscal outlook for Darling Wife and I is not quite as bleak for this summer as it has been in years past also adds to my pleasure. Or maybe it's that the school semester is winding down, and for the first time in a decade I am not stressed by that. I do have quite a bit of work, but it's all manageable, and its impending hiatus is pleasant to think on. What is more, my father and step-mother will be visiting us in a couple of months for the first time ever, and it's possible that another friend may drop in for a few days next month. These visits promise contact outside of our own domestic sphere as well as some nice tourist activities beyond the boundaries of our central valley home. What's more, we have plans to visit Boston briefly at the end of June when we travel to the northeast for my nephew's high school graduation. I can't tell you how much I long to see the cramped old metropolis! And finally Fergus continues to amaze us by how cute and well-behaved he is. He adores our company so much that he hangs his head in sadness when it's time for him to leave us at bedtime, but he always goes without fuss or difficulty. He has never once chewed up a shoe or piece of furniture, and he went for a long walk with us yesterday with a jaunty trot and hardly a pause to sniff a shrub that surprised and delighted us both. He is truly a joy, better than either of us could ever have hoped for.

But all of these reasons, and the many more I could give, don't quite explain why I am in such high form. But I guess I really shouldn't search for reasons. I'll just enjoy it while it lasts.

they're gone

Have you ever seen that scene toward the end of Fried Green Tomatoes in which Kathy Bates's character discovers Jessica Tandy's character sitting on her suitcase in front of a vacant lot where her home used to be?

If you have, then you can picture what I must have looked like when, walking home from work this afternoon, I saw a bare spot where "my" bee colony had been only a few days ago. The only evidence of its existence were some twigs lying on the ground with the torn remnants of honeycombs clinging to their surfaces.

At first, I thought the high winds we had last night and this morning might have blown the hive down. I searched frantically in the grass and bushes for its crushed remains, but there were none to be found.

Then my eyes lit on the smooth stub of the tree branch where the limb containing the cluster had been cut away. The clean whiteness at the site of amputation seemed so casual... so matter-of-fact.

When I reported the presence of the colony back in the fall, I expected this to happen. I thought the campus community would rush to remove this threat to the safety of students, faculty, and staff. But when my report was greeted with disinterest and nonchalance, I assumed the bees were safe in their new home, at least from the campus authorities. And as the fall gave way to winter and then spring, you know how much I came to regard the bees, stubbornly clinging to survival under the harshest conditions and despite all odds. I should have known that it was merely bureaucratic slowness and academic insouciance that preserved their meager lives for a few paltry months of struggle instead of any strength of will or determination on the part of the bees, their famed busyness availing nothing in the face of the constant, inevitability of red-tape bound progress that would eventually catch them up.

I would like to think that some eager bee-keeper scooped up the little colony and gave it a nice warm home in a box in his back yard, but I know too much of the ways of the world to trust to that shallow hope.

Is it silly to feel so strongly over a bunch of bugs? Especially when I violently destroyed several members of the same species when they invaded my home via the chimney on Monday of this very week? Is it hypocritical and ridiculous? I think maybe it is. But as I stood, staring at the emptiness where for so many weeks there was buzzing life, I cannot help but feel a profound sense of loss.

Hanging On

They are alive... Or at least some of them are... Or rather, the community survives.


I take comfort from that. The "expert" was wrong. They weren't frozen, or starved, or eaten.


But what about the individuals, the ones whose bodies I witnessed curled up on the ground among the grass. Do they matter as long as the hive lives on? I think the bees, if they could say anything, would say not. It's not like they had individual lives separate from the hive.


Still, a note of sadness creeps into my joy at their continued, stubborn hold on life and a university tree.

The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.

I hear the call of the Red-shouldered Hawk most days as I ride to work in the morning. On occasion I see her, gliding gracefully across the heavens, and I think how beautiful, how noble she is. More than once, I have seen her engage in battle with my own enemy, the crow. Crows are troublesome and messy creatures that will have no other soul at peace while they have air in their breast to cry out with a tumultuous uproar. They swoop and harass the hawk as she goes on her way struggling to find food for herself and her young or as she sits in a treetop taking a much deserved rest from the hunt. But she does not allow these raucous creatures to trouble her. She dives and tacks with skill and nonchalance. What a fine beast she is, I think, as I ride along, observing the aerial drama.

When suddenly it occurs to me that she is a predator, a cold blooded killer that ends the life of others so that hers might continue a little while longer. Why is it that we think raptors so admirable and respectable, while we disdain and belittle the skulking animals that are their prey? Is it because of the skulking? Do we think that mice and rabbits like to scrabble around in underbrush and dark corners, that they are just naturally happiest wallowing in the poorest and most degrading existence while the raptor soars through the sky in unbounded freedom? Or is it possible that these more humble creatures long, as we do, for more than their lot but are are forced to slink in the shadows to avoid the sharp talons and ripping beaks of those we hold in such esteem? Can a rabbit be noble, can a mole?