Thursday December 30, 2004 – Oh What A Beautiful Morning

Thursday December 30, 2004 – Oh What A Beautiful Morning

Wednesday morning began at Doheny Beach at the Doubletree Hotel, room 294. It was a gorgeous morning, too. Outside the sun was ablaze, illuminating a landscape that yesterday was being merciless punished by a fierce Pacific storm, winds gusting to 50 miles per hour—last night a tornado watch was in effect for Catalina Island and Pacific Palisades. At about 7:10 AM I left the Doubletree, attired in running togs and turned left on the Pacific Coast Highway, making my way south. To my left across the PCH is a cliff that must rise straight up at least 150 feet or more. To my right are the train tracks that carry Metrolink and Amtrak trains. A Metrolink passes as I’m a half mile down the PCH from the Doubletree. At the base of the cliff at this point in my run are a series of hotels: Capistrano Surfside Inn, Capistrano Beach Resort, Best Western Dana Point Inn, and Capistrano Seaside Inn—nearest to furthest from the Doubletree.

Just beyond the Seaside Inn, there’s a traffic light that allows cross traffic from Palisades Drive to cross PCH to access Doheny Beach to the north or Capistrano Beach south of the intersection. I crossed the PCH at the light and begin my jog up Palisades. I say “up” because that’s exactly what the street does. If makes a sharp left turn and then climbs at nearly a 45 degree angle parallelling the PCH climbing to the top of the cliff. Near the top of the Palisades’ climb, the street curves right and intersects with Camino Capistrano where I turn right. The run up the incline is one of the most exhilirating parts of the run for me. I always get an enormous sense of accomplishment making it up the grade without stopping to rest. The run along Camino Capistrano passes Pines Park, a beautiful neighborhood park with an incredible view of the pacific from a towering height. Camino Capistrano meanders through a neighborhood of houses with cliff-top oceanviews, but I turn left when it intersects Camino de Estrella, a divided boulevard that climbs at a gentle grade to a K-Mark shopping center on the right and just beyond the Interstate 5 freeway.

I break off the run at the freeway and retrace my route. When I return to Palisades Drive and begin the descent, I am confronted with an incredible view. Directly in front of me (south along the PCH) the big bright ball of sun is just above the horizon, illuminating a small patch of fog just above Capistrano Beach, giving the area a slight glow. A gentle breeze is blowing the few palm trees along the beach, and the dirty grey brown surf is rushing the beach and turning into white water as it breaks. An Amtrak train is streaming along the tracks next to the PCH, which has only a small amount of traffic. The sky is a vivid blue color with puffy white clouds scattered helter-skelter all about. And the sky is filled with flying, squawking birds. And the air has the fresh clean smell that comes only after a drenching rain that clears everything except the smell of earth and saltwater. A picture could not convey the enormity of the view, the sweep of open sea and endless blue and white sky all lit by a blazing red-orange sun. I forget how tired my limbs are drawing strength from the euphoria the scene instills in me.

By the time I return to the Doubletree, it’s just past 8:00 and Doheny Beach is beginning to wake up and get busy. I can hear the sound of breakfast being serve in the hotel coffee shop. There are one or two guest checking out at the reception desk. A man's booming voice talking on a cell phone fills the lobby area. I look up to see him standing on the second floor landing. The hotel staff has hauled out their cleaning carts as I make my way back to my room. Thus began Wednesday. It would end in San Jose after a 450 mile drive back from Doheny Beach along Interstate 5. We managed to make it back before the next Pacific storm began to make its way ashore. Now, it’s nearly midnight on Wednesday and the storm is full upon us. Time to go to bed and enjoy the sound of wind and rain.

Wednesday December 29, 2004 – A House Is Not A Home

Wednesday December 29, 2004 – A House Is Not A Home

It has been raining on and off since we arrived in Southern California yesterday. One reason for the trip was to make arrangements with a local real estate agency to sell a house we had purchased in Irvine about a year ago. It had been a model home in a new development and when we first purchased the place it was completely decorated to give the appearance of a well kept home that actually belonged to someone. Upstairs the back wall of an open area that serves as an office is an array of photographs showing three generations of people—the earliest in the 1960s by the look of the fashions, the next generation in the 1980s and the current ones of today.

In this house, this was the only “family portrait,” but in other models we’ve toured, there are pictures in every room suggesting the occupants of that room, young children in some, adults in others, in living rooms, pictures of family gatherings, all implying that this house has a history. However, quite the opposite is the case. The house has no history and the interior furnishings are pretentious trappings of what an interior decorator believes some idealized family’s house would look like.

The reality is quite different as I visualize the house that we purchased in 1979 when our two daughters were eleven and seven. Our oldest M was in 5th grade and our youngest R was in 2nd grade. Each of them had their own rooms, which really became theirs about a year after we settled into the house. It became a home after our first Christmas. Our home no more resembled the model than I resembled a GQ model.

On the walls of our home there are pictures everywhere of M and R at various stages in their childhood. There are pictures of my wife “I” and me taken when were dating and after we were married. There are pictures of M’s and R’s high school graduation and marriages. There are also pictures everywhere of our four grandchildren. When this extended family comes together at Thanksgiving and Christmas, our home vibrates with the running feet of grandkids, the conversation of daughters and husbands, and the sound of cooking and the celebration that accompanies a feast of this assembled crowd.

The job of marketing packed into the exterior and interior design of a model home is to somehow convey that sense of family and home to prospective buyers. I must confess that the house in Irvine was an investment and not a house we ever intended to occupy. As you grow older, you seek commodities to purchase that will appreciate in value and ideally provide you a store of wealth that you can draw upon as you grow older and can’t work or no longer wish to do so. My father’s entire investment portfolio was tied up on real estate, except for his pension plans. He has lived well off the earnings his real properties have provided.

I grew up thinking of real estate as a place to live in, not something to own for investment value. I’ve since realized that humans delude themselves about owning materials possessions. I think of the great collectors, such as J. Paul Getty and William Randolph Hearst, who amassed great collections of antiquities, only to have them donated to museums or governments to pay off debts or to pass the possessions on to someone with the wherewithal to keep the collections intact. In reality, both collectors only held these precious items for a few decades of their lives. It’s the same with a home. You spend 30 years paying off a mortgage, fill the place with a lifetime of memories and memorabilia, and after your death the executor of your estate sells the property and its contents and divides the proceeds among your heirs.

Yet, I can understand why humans amass material possessions and want to have some place they own that they can call home. Home is, after all, a place where you’re surrounded by the memories of your 30 years spent there. You can hear the voices of your children when they were younger in the hallways. You can remember past holidays as you begin to prepare for a new one. That’s what the Irvine house we’re selling lacks and why we’re putting it on the market for sale.

Tuesday December 28, 2004 – Sojourn to Southern California

Tuesday December 28, 2004 – Sojourn to Southern California

Monday morning we woke to a winter storm that had begun drenching northern and southern California overnight. It broke a spell of dry warm weather that had characterized much of December, normally a wet month for the state. It continued to rain throughout the day from north of Redding, near the Oregon border all the way to Los Angeles. This was the day we had decided to drive down south to spend a couple of days in Dana Point, named for William Henry Dana, author of Ten Years Before the Mast.

From the moment we left home, the sky was overcast and drizzling. And to compound matters, the entire population of northern California appeared to have had the notion of driving south: either to return home from the Christmas holiday or to visit relatives during the week between Christmas and New Year. Driving south on 101 from San Jose to California 152 East, traffic resembled a weekday commute only more cars on the roads had more than one occupant, a clue that few in this pack were on their way to work.

At the highway 152 exit off 101, it took two lights at the end of the off-ramp to finally get onto 152 heading east. The traffic moved at or near the 60 mile per hour limit on the two-line highway—it’s two lanes for a good 15 miles—and then speeded up to 70 as 152 opened into a four-lane road at its junction with California 162. After another 30 miles or so, 152 intersects Interstate 5, the four-lane, straight-as-an-arrow freeway that slices California in half as it cuts a swatch from Canada to Mexico.

At the on-ramp to 5 the heavy traffic from 152 slowed to a crawl, as it merged onto the Interstate. Our hearts sank as we envisioned the entire length of 5 as continuous stop-and-go traffic, averaging 25 to 30 miles per hour, half the speed the highway normally averages. Three miles later the highway opened up after passing a just cleared accident. Our outlook lightened as we set our sights on the first and only stop en route, the Apricot Tree Restaurant at the Panoche Road exit some 90 miles south of the 152 interchange.

The rain continued to threaten throughout the 90-mile drive but failed to make good. We stopped at the Apricot Tree at about 12:40 and were once again aghast at the number of people now streaming off the freeway and into the three gas stations, adjacent to the restaurant. We were likewise dismayed at the near full parking lot and the line of people queued up for a table at the Apricot Pit. We waited a quarter of an hour for a table, were seated, and had a stick-to-your-ribs breakfast—we only order breakfast here, then waited our turn in the queue for the restrooms before finally getting back into the car, refueling at the crowded service station—a pump opened up as we pulled in, and resumed our journey south.

My wife “I” had bought along a book-on-tape to occupy our minds during the usual six-hour trek—The Bone Vault by Linda Fairstein. The female main character Alex Cooper is a prosecutor in New York City Attorney General Paul Battaglia’s office. She is called to the scene of a crime. It appears a young woman’s mummified body has been discovered, wrapped in mummy wrap and contained within the coffin of an Egyptian Princess. The prosecutor along with two NYPD detectives set out to find the killer.

The story provides insight into the inner workings of the Museum on Natural History, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Cloisters Museum of Medieval Art. It also paints a picture of the dark side of museum acquisition techniques during the 19th and early 20th Century, when many of the world’s great treasures were looted and wound up in private collections and eventually into museum collections. As an iceberg, so too are museums with ten percent of their holdings on display and another ninety percent stored away in huge vaults. In one such vault, the bone vault, the story comes to its climax. Blair Brown, one of my favorite actresses and one of the better reading voices, read the abridged book.

The bone Vault got us to the Grapevine—the stretch of 5 that takes the traveler out of California’s great Central Valley over the Tehachapi Mountains—just before 5:00 PM. Traffic over the Grapevine was heavy as it was most of the way from the Apricot Treet. But, now it had started to rain and it was heavy in spots. Couple the rain with the spray from the hundreds of cars and multitude of eighteen-wheelers all clustered together and we were lucky to be averaging 50 miles and hour.

Once over the Grapevine, we decided to go around LA traffic by taking Interstate 210 through Pasadena. This provided the first great trauma of the evening. Coming down off a steep grade, we maneuvered over a couple of lanes of traffic and merged into two on-coming lanes of traffic that within a half a mile would become the off-ramp for 210. We made our way across the traffic and just when we began to breathe easy, we hit a low-point in the road coming down a slight grade at 60 miles and hour. The force of the tires hitting the standing water kicking up spray on either side of the car slowed us to 30 miles an hour. I kept the accelerator pressed, foot off the brake to ensure we made it through the puddle and didn’t stall.

From there we traveled the length of 210 in a steady constant downpour making it difficult to see even with the windshield wiper running at top speed. I could barely make out the car several car lengths in front of me. To compound the problem, the sparsely spaced traffic on 210 was traveling at nearly 70 miles an hour. At least on two occasions I watched cars in front of me hit pockets of standing water at high speed and struggle momentarily to gain control.

The downpour continued relentlessly until we reach California 57 southbound. As we merged off 210 on 57, the rain finally began to let up and I was able to cut the wiper speed to slow and pick up speed heading back to 5, which we picked up near Anaheim where 57 surrenders to 5 and California 22. Back on 5, the trip to Dana Point was uneventful and traffic was surprisingly light for a Monday evening at nearly 8:00 PM.

The evening ended with room service hamburgers, a glass of wine, and two chocolate chip cookies courtesy of the Double Tree Doheny Beach.

Monday December 27, 2004 – Christmas Blues

Monday December 27, 2004 – Christmas Blues

I ran on Sunday, the first time since Christmas Eve. It was therapeutic after two days of being cooped up in a house celebrating the holidays. You would think that Christmas would be a happy season, but for most people—no I believe for every one of us—it’s a time of extreme stress, the antithesis of the most wonderful time of the year. Every memory I have of Christmas has something in it that bears witness to this contention. At least, I am confident in making this claim of my experience with the holiday

The holiday comes as the days in the northern hemisphere have just about reached their shortest hours of daylight, the winter solstice. In Northern California, where I live, you can see the sun hanging low on the horizon as it makes it journey across the sky each day—I know that it is the earth that is turning and rotating round the sun and it’s the earth’s axis orientation that is causing the sun’s position in the sky, but the result is the same in my emotional makeup: I feel depressed.

When I was younger I believed that the cause of my depression was my ignorance: of myself, of the physical world around me that was influencing my moods, of the metaphysical universe that influenced us… However, now that I’ve gotten older and have explored myself, the physical, and metaphysical, the same melancholy afflicts me, though I understand it better now than I did as a youth. The sense of despair that confounds us, has to do with the passage of time. We each have a timer that defines our lifespan. Each passing year marked by the coming of Christmas and the arrival of New Year decrements the timer. We each hear that imperceptible click as the tolling of a bell that heralds the next step toward our inevitable oblivion.

The end does not concern me as I’m resigned to my fate of passing into the next passage that is the journey of life. The Greeks believed you traveled across the river Styx into the land of Hades. Catholisism, which is the religious denomination I’m most comfortable being labeled, believe in purgatory: the step between your earthly existence and heaven and the place likely for most Catholics unable to live the devote life needed for immediate entry into heaven. I have known a few who would qualify for bypassing purgatory and gaining immediate entrance to heaven. And there are probably some popes who would qualify for the opposite destination, hell, based on their behavior on earth. I don’t know what awaits me beyond life, but it’s just another transition that each of us must make and there is no escaping it. In some ways it is the one sure thing we know will happen in life and in this sense we must approach it the same way we approach all other inevitabilities that confront us: the draft that faced me as a young man, school that I was forced to attend beginning at age five and ending at seventeen, every order that the military issued to my father and me when we were both on active duty. We must walk through the door and see what awaits us on the other side assuming that it’s going to be worse than what we left.

But, the season drawing our attention to the fast approaching moment of final passage—at 59 I’m closer than the nearly three generations behind me—is not the only cause of dejection that the season brings on. Another reason for woe is the realization of what you’ve not yet done. How many dreams have I had that I’ve failed to realize? Many of them I’ve reconciled myself that I’m not equipped to realize even if I had put all my effort into it. When I started running twenty-five years ago, I believed that I could work myself into condition that would allow me to compete in a marathon. I can’t tell you the number of times far more gifted athletics have dispelled me of that notion. I have since resigned myself that if I can live to be a 100 and I can still run the distance I run today, then perhaps I’ll be able to outrun all of my peers unless some faster fool has the same ambition.

Running is a matter of genetic make-up. Talented athletics as well as artists, have a gift, a physical skill superior to most all of their contemporaries. I have always hoped that, though I lacked the physical attributes of some, perhaps I have other abilities that over time could be trained and refined to produce something lasting. I’m now of a mind that I came into the world with a set of deficiencies as well as assets. My assets are what I’ve exploited to earn my daily bread. My deficiencies have impeded my efforts to do all the other tasks I had set myself to do as a ninth grade student at Austin High School in El Paso, Texas. Nevertheless, I continue plodding along year after year ever hopeful.

Thursday December 23, 2004 Skinning a Cat in Texas City Texas in 1937

Thursday December 23, 2004 Skinning a Cat in Texas City Texas

I called my dad last night and my mom answered the phone. We exchanged pleasantries—she’s fine, were fine out here. I asked about my niece C and mom said she was still racking in too much in tips being a bartender and part-time white witch and tarot card reader at a local bar to find a proper job. C and mom have always had a very close relationship, with the two of them discussing books (would you believe The Satanic Verses; of course you would since I told you C is a white witch) as well as lots of secrets that the two of them share. I asked mom what the two of them discussed in their daily tete-a-tete but mom was not about to let me in on the exchange. “Talk to your father and kiss the babies for me.”

I had called my dad to check on the progress of several shipments of Christmas packages winging their way from various warehouses around the country to El Paso, Texas. They had all made the journey without incident. I had assuaged my Christmas guilt that retailers nationwide have collectively instilled in me as well as the rest of you out there. I asked my dad what was the name of the guy who first helped him jump aboard a freight car leaving Hattiesburg, Mississippi heading west. It was 1937 and my dad was 16 years old. His grandmother who he had lived with nearly his whole life had died and my father and his mother were not getting along and dad’s illegitimate father was not part of his life. There was a silence on the phone line and I could almost see lines of concentration streak my father’s handsome Aryan face, a legacy of his first generation, illegal-immigrant, German father, who was a well-to-do businessman in New Augusta, Mississippi.

“I just remember, now,” my dad finally said. “I can only recall that I just called him “Pops” and he called me “Son.”

“Just how was it you two met?” I asked.

I heard dad chuckle on the other end of the line. “I had jump aboard a box-car on a slow moving train,” he began, “and I thought I was on my way. About a half hour later the boxcar ends up at the same place I jumped it. The train engineer was just switching cars. I jumped off when the train came to a stop. Then I heard this voice call out to me. ‘If you're planning on going anywhere you better get yourself over here,’ it said. ‘Train’s about ready to take off.’ That was Pops and there was a good natured laugh in the way he said it that made me take to him instantly.’ I gathered up my bag—I had a couple of changes of clothes in it—and ran over to where he was and he showed me which car to jump on and the two of us got aboard, just about the time the train started moving.

“We must have been on that train a couple of days,” he continued, “before Pops said we should get off. We were in San Angelo, Texas. Pops said we should go down to a creek he knew close by where we jumped off and get cleaned up so we didn’t look like a couple of hobos. After we got cleaned up and changed clothes, we found to a café and went in for a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and coffee all for well under a dollar. We were still in the depression and things were cheap. I had some pocket money and Pops had money too—not bad for a couple of bums that had just traveled over 800 miles.

“As we were finishing our breakfast another man in the café approached us and asked Pops if he was looking for work. Pops said he was and the man asked Pops what he could do. Pops said he was a carpenter, plumber, metal worker, and he would have continued his list of skills if the man hadn’t cut him off and ask him: ‘you know how to skin a cat?’ Pops replied immediately, ‘that’s what I do best.’ The man said he’d take him on if he’d be willing to work in Texas City, Texas—down near Galveston. Pops said sure and the man said to bring me along—he thought I was Pops’ kid—and he’d find something for me to do.

“The job that the man needed done was clearing a swamp nearby a group of newly installed oil wells that had just been sunk. Part of the deal for the oil company's rights to drill was that the company had to clean up the swamp. That’s where Pops skill with a Caterpillar tractor came in. He had to control a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer with a shovel on the front and a ripper on the back. My job was cutting bush in the swamp with an ax. The swamp was cluttered not only with the natural debris that accumulates in a swamp, but by the discards of a lumber company who had come into the area and taken out all the timber .

“It wasn’t long before Pops showed me how to operate the Cat and in no time at all I was controlling the beast almost as good as the old man. He’d put me on the machine so he could take a break. On one of these occasions, I was operating the Cat and I felt this tap on my shoulder—you couldn’t hear anyone because of the noise the tractor made. It was the superintendent. I cut the engine and he asked where Pops was. I told him he was in the bush—meaning he'd gone to take a crap. He said he wanted to see the two of us in his office when Pops got back.

“I thought we had been found out but Pops didn’t seemed bothered. We went in and the boss asked Pops if he could put me on another Cat. It seems there was a deadline to get the job done and the oil company was told to step up the pace so I got my own Cat and we kept working. As soon as an area was cleared, the company had dump trucks coming in with topsoil and we would grade the dirt. We worked at that job for a good year and as we were finishing up Pops came down with yellow jaundice. The man looked like hell and he said he was going back to New Orleans and that I should stay on. I told him I’d come with him. He’d stuck by me and I wanted to stick by him.

“He was dead set on jumping a freight car back to New Orleans, but we had made a ton of money back then—I had saved over $1000 and I said we can afford to pay for a ticket for the train ride back. Besides he was weak and was running a high fever and two days in a boxcar wasn’t the best therapy for his symptoms. He relented and we rode back in relative comfort.

“When we got back to New Orleans, Pops had a room at a rooming house that he either owned or was in his family and I stayed with him the night. He was home or as close to home as he was going to get so I didn’t feel bad about leaving him and getting back to Mississippi. I told him I was going to buy a car for the 100-mile trip home. He gave me his phone number and said if I needed anything to give him a call.

“I went to a local Ford dealer in New Orleans and found myself a 1931 Ford Model A Coupe with the mother-in-law seat in the back outside the cab of the car. I told the dealer I wanted to buy the car but he didn’t want to sell it to me because I was only 17 years old. I gave him Pops’ phone number and he called and Pops said, ‘give the kid what he wants.’ And the dealer sold me the car for $300 cash. I drove it home and then bought myself a Philco car radio to go inside. I’ll never forget that car. I’ve been looking for one like it to buy just so I have it.” Yet another artifact for the Museum of Earthly Possessions collection.

Dad and I started rambling on about other things after that but I am determined to find a scale model of the Model A and have it sent to dad for a Christmas present. After we hung up I went to Yahoo shopping and found one, charged it on a credit card and had it shipped to El Paso. I’ll call him on Christmas to see if it made it.

Wednesday December 22, 2004 - The Museum of Earthly Possessions

Wednesday December 22, 2004 - The Museum of Earthly Possessions

I spoke with my dad on the phone today. He’d been to William Beaumont Hospital to collect medication for my mom and had just returned home when I rang. I spoke with my mom for a few minutes asking her how she was feeling—she’s had some stomach trouble of late but seemed to be feeling better today. My mother is addicted to Fox Television News—a real news junky and I can hear the television in the background so I know she’s half listening to me and half catching the chatter from Fox. She tells me she’s been on the treadmill this morning getting her exercise for the day. She asks about her grandchildren and great grandchildren, two of the former, four of the latter. She asks for more videos of the great grandkids playing—I’ve become somewhat of a movie maker with Apple I-Movie and she gets a kick out of the 2- to 3-minute clips of the kids doing something funny while a pop song plays in the background.

My father picks up the extension phone and she says, “talk to your father and kiss the babies for me.” The line goes silent for a second until I hear dad chime in asking how I’m doing and I say “fine” and I ask after him. When I ask my dad that question, I know I’m going to get a detailed answer. He takes me through a list of maladies that he’s gotten over since last we spoke and then launches into his continuing complaints of his knee. The knee transplant he had done a year ago continues to bedevil him, largely because he can’t get up from a kneeling position without the aid of a cane. He’s encouraged by his friends at the VA hospital within William Beaumont. They remind him that he has another six months before the knee will be back to 100 percent and he’ll just have to put up with the inconvenience in the meantime. My father does not take kindly to recuperation. He gets easily frustrated when he’s unable to do something that had been second nature to him, bending down to pick something up without the aid of a cane.

I ask about the progress on getting the building put up to house all of Mr. Upton’s possession. Mr. Upton was dad’s lifelong friend who passed away last year. This year my father spent straightening out a mix up at the cemetery where Mr. Upton had requested to be buried. That task completed, my father’s next duty was to build a place to house Mr. Upton’s collection of “stuff.” Within Mr. Upton’s house and storage sheds is an incredible assortment of bric-a-brac: paintings and prints from flea markets and garage sales, hard bound and paper back books from well known and forgotten authors, musical instruments—accordions, keyboards, guitars, etc, newspapers and magazines with dates in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s—and shoes clothes and junk all amassed by a man who couldn’t or wouldn’t throw anything away. My mom, sisters, and all my family’s friends have lobbied long and hard for a garage sale. However, my father doesn’t have the heart to throw any of it away. Perhaps, it’s the only reminder my father had of Charles Upton’s time upon this earth.

Shortly after Mr. Upton died, my father found a large prefabricated metal building on sale for 50 percent of its list price. It was being sold by a company in Virginia. It required assembly as well as a concrete foundation set with mounting bolts for securing the building. Dad purchased the building and it was shipped by rail to El Paso. My brother, D, who has a fleet of short haul trucks, picked the building up and stored it in a trailer at his place. Dad planned to erect the building on a piece of commercial property my dad bought from Mr. Upton some 30 years ago. The plan was for my dad to hire G, a freelance building contractor to lay the foundation and erect the structure. My father sold G a piece of property and the two have become close friends ever since. The building arrive over six months ago but dad decided to check with the city before putting it up just in case he needed a building permit. Both G and D were convinced that the building was considered a temporary structure hence did not require a permit. However, it would cost dad if the city did force him to tear it down once it was put up.

Dad has had his run ins with the city of El Paso over the years. Usually, he finds a way to get what he wants. This time he found someone in the zoning department who promised to guide him through the process and get the permit. That was five months ago. About a month ago, the lady threw up her hands in despair and advised my dad to put the building up without the permit, since no one in the department had a clue as to what was needed for the type of building he planned to construct. Dad, frustrated with the continuing delay agreed to her advise and G was given the go ahead to lay the foundation and erect the metal structure. It didn’t take G long to raise the building and in about two weeks time, dad was given the tour of the new repository of Charles Upton’s earthly belongings. “It’s huge,” dad said "and exactly what is needed to clean up that lot once and for all." Besides Mr. Upton’s belonging the building will also become a museum of all the old cars my dad ever owned: two 1955 Buicks two-door coupes, a 1957 Cadillac Coupe de Ville—great looking fins, a 1957 Ford Mustang, 1959 Lincoln Continental, and the 1951 Oldsmobile that took the family all over the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Besides the cars, D has a collection of tools he has stored in a small building on the property that will be transferred to the larger building.

There’s only one catch in the completion of the museum: the door. The door that the building manufacturer was offering for sale would have ended up costing about a quarter the cost of the building itself. The manufacturer offered to trim the building to a door my dad could purchase separately. D knew where he could get a for a tenth the cost of the new one. Dad sent the dimensions of D’s door and the building arrived with an opening of that size. Only problem is the door has asbestos in it and had to be quarantined and cleaned by a service that specializes in hazardous waste removal. I asked my dad how they were doing getting the door cleaned and he said they promised to have it ready this week. My dad and I both started laughing knowing that with Christmas this close, he’ll be lucky to see it the first week of January. “I’ve waited this long,” dad said philosophically. “I can wait a few more days.” I’m planning a trip down to help transfer the collection into the new museum. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Tuesday December 21, 2004 - Salvation

Tuesday December 21, 2004 - Salvation

My relationship with religion has been ambivalent, alternating between devotee and agnostic, the former in my youth, the latter for most of my adult life. My earliest recollection of religion was the Baptist Church in Brooklyn, Mississippi when I was a preschool youth. What I remembered most about the church was the singing. The place would ring with the voices of a congregation wanting to demonstrate their devotion by singing the praises of the Lord. My next recollection of church was in El Paso, Texas and now instead of a Baptist Church, I was regularly attending Our Lady of The Assumption Catholic Church at the corner of Byron Street and Truman Avenue. I spent a good deal of time at that church, taking religious instruction to receive my first Holy Communion and thereafter saying confession on Saturday and getting communion on Sunday. I was all of six or seven years old when I discovered Catholicism. It gave me a sense of peace knowing that all the sins I had committed during the week I could confess on Saturday and achieve a state of grace on Sunday after taking the body of Christ during communion. I felt spiritually clean and at peace with myself.

When the Army transferred my father and the rest of us—mom and my three sisters—to Puerto Rico, the first thing I did was find a Catholic Church close by where we lived. I had a special urgency in seeking out the church at the time, as I had begun to have nightmares from which I would awake terrified and filled with a great sense of foreboding and fear. The Church was my refuge from the horror and it seemed to work. I prayed earnestly and the dreams did not recur. Three years later the Army transferred my father to a military installation outside of Lawton, Oklahoma. Now twelve years old, my hormones were driving me crazy and I began to have nightmares again. There weren’t many Catholic Churches in Lawton and my only recourse was to join a Baptist Church within walking distance of our house. What a Catholic Church has that a Baptist Church lacks is a sense of ritual, which I immediately noticed and missed.

All the icons of a 1900-year old religion, the priest attired in his liturgical vestments and his alter boys dressed in white, hands clasped before them entering stage left onto a medieval setting: a massive cross bearing a crucified Christ in the center of the high ceiling wall flanked by a statue of the Virgin Mary on the right and a statue of John the Baptist on the left. In front was the raised alter with a small golden cabinet—resembling a peaked roof house—in the middle, a chalice filled with the hosts that would be dispensed during communion. The alter sat majestically behind a three foot high fence of smooth polished lightwood—walnut or some such—atop two semicircular layers each a stair step higher and half-again the radius of the lower. The lack of pageantry in the Baptist Church made it more difficult for a young boy to embrace.

The catholic church also had the capacity to comfort, this ages old ritual of sacrifice and redemption acted out each Sunday. I was now left to find solace in a religion that was strange to me, a religion that preached that we were all doomed to hell without a true commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. There was no mechanism of a private confession enumerating each transgression to a—for the most part—nonjudgmental priest. Instead, you had to come forward before the congregation as a whole, admit you were a sinner and beg forgiveness of the Lord. Each Sunday, I would sit and watch the pastor rail against the devil, painting a devastating picture of hellfire and brimstone and reminding all in the congregation that this fate awaited those who had not acknowledge the Lord and admitted they were a sinner.

Then the nightmares returned and I began to wrestle with demons that I had kept at bay through years of religious ritual. They were returning along with the dreams that left me frightened and apprehensive. I tried to confront these demons waking and reassuring myself that it was just a dream and not real. It was after a week of fighting these demons by myself that I succumbed to the fire-and-brimstone preacher and leapt up from my seat, acknowledged I was a sinner and asked for forgiveness. My sudden outburst took the preacher completely by surprise. He was into his routine of lambasting all the sinners and suddenly he had to confront one who wanted salvation. Bawling my eyes out, scared out of my wits, I stood emotionally naked in front of a congregation of strangers looking for peace. I found the peace I was looking for that day but it didn’t come from the church, it came from the realization that no one in that church could give me any help for the trouble I had. I was the only person that I could count on to come to my aid. I muddled through the rest of the service and stood beside the preacher as the congregation left church that day, each shaking my hand and giving me a blessing.

I didn’t stop going to church after that. I still enjoyed being in a place with lot of people all doing the same thing, but I stopped believing that the man standing before the assembled congregation had any more answers than I did. He believed in God but couldn’t prove it to himself or anyone else. He tried to help people, who came to him with their problems, but he wasn’t a psychologist or a physician, nor could he lighten the load of someone with a heavy grieving heart. Most were average people with all the baggage that the rest of us carry trying to do God’s work. Of all the priests that I have known, I can only think of one who I would classify as selfless. He did not do well in the Catholic Church but he was loved by all of his parishioners. I’ll talk about him another time.

Saturday December 18, 2004 - Working for the Old Man

Saturday December 18, 2004 - Working for the Old Man

Tacoma, Washington in the summer of 1962 was about 650 miles from where I wanted to be, which was San Francisco, California. But downtown Tacoma was where I was with my folks. My dad, a sergeant in the Army, had been transferred from Ft Bliss near El Paso Texas to Ft. Lewis near Tacoma and we had arrived the first week of June. In the process, my dad had driven our 1951 Oldsmobile carrying the six of us, my three sisters, mom and me, on the 1900-mile journey to our destination. We spent a day and night in Barstow, California visiting Aunt IM and Uncle R. Another day of travel up California 99, the north-south freeway that parallels Interstate 5. Both take you to Sacramento, where we were heading to visit Uncle B and his family, a young daughter and wife with her two sons from a previous marriage. Both sons were a bit older than me, the older very serious and studious and the younger easy going and gregarious. A day and night later and we were off again—I had almost convinced my dad to let me stay with Uncle B but I think Uncle B and his wife were relieved my dad had insisted I come along to Tacoma.

You reconcile yourself to the inevitable and what it turned out to be was an old residential hotel near the heart of downtown Tacoma. Our flat had a couple of bedrooms—one for my mom and dad, a second for my sisters, a living room—where I slept, and a kitchen. Each floor shared a bathroom and toilet—why to this day I don’t like hotel rooms without a bath and toilet. We camped out there for almost two months waiting for housing on Ft. Lewis, about 15 miles south of Tacoma. Back then, bored and missing the familiar routine of El Paso, I read hard-nosed detective novels among other books I purchased at a used book downtown. When I wasn’t reading or hanging out at the Tacoma Public Library on Tacoma Avenue South, I walked the streets of Tacoma, looking for something. What? I have no idea—maybe I was looking for who I was. In the process, I got to know the city but I can’t remember any of the street names or city landmarks—to this day, I love walking all over any city I’m in. Perhaps, most of the time I was walking those streets I was daydreaming about being in California and what I would be doing there. I had a radio that would receive San Francisco stations late at night and I would listen to talk radio and music stations until I fell asleep.

The hotel was run by an older woman in her late forties, early fifties and her husband, who was partially disabled. He did a modest amount of work around the hotel but would get winded easily and she would be on him about exerting himself too much. The two of them seemed to really care for one another and it impressed me. Living there for such a long stretch we got to know the owners and they help find me a part time job working for a friend of theirs who salvaged copper and aluminum wire from electric utilities all over the state of Washington. He had this white 12-foot long flatbed truck with a cab resembling a box with driver and passenger above a gasoline engine. He would pick me up at the hotel while it was still dark outside and I’d climb up into the cab and we’d be off. The old guy was in his sixties and wore bib overalls. He was a big guy over six feet tall with a barrel chest and a midsection spread, all resting on a big frame. He wore a train engineers cap, smoked like a chimney, and loved to talk about everything, where we were going, what we had just past, how the scrap business worked.

Nearly every job was a day trip, after he’d picked me up, we’d put some miles between us and Tacoma, and the sun had begun to rise, he would find a roadside restaurant with a pretty full parking lot and we’d go in and have a great breakfast of eggs, sausage, bacon, home fried potatoes, and white toast, all served with endless cups of coffee. These meals all came on platters and I would eat my fill. The old man would always remark on how much I could eat and how skinny I was, 28-inch waist and barely 130 pounds, but I was pretty sturdy with strong legs from all my walking and arms that could go awhile without tiring. We would typically come upon the job at a utility power station. I’d wait in the truck and the old man would walk off to find the guy in charge. They would haggle and the old man would return to the truck and drive to a place on lot with a pile of cut up aluminum wire and coiled bunches of insulated copper wire. This is when I would earn my keep. With gloved hands, I’d begin pitching the wire up onto the back of the flatbed with the old man directing my work. The truck bed had removable wooden sides that slotted into metal sockets that ringed the bed..

I’d load the insulated copper wire first, then the aluminum. By the time all the wire was loaded the bed was stacked high and the old man had straps he used to secure the load and ensure none of it fell off on the return trip. If there was still time when we got back to the Seattle-Tacoma area, we’d drive to the scrap metal yard, which I think was in Seattle, anyway somewhere near the water. The old man drove the truck in and it was weighed. I’d unload the aluminum and he drove the truck out and it was weighed again. He picked up a ticket with the amount of aluminum he had dumped in pounds and the yard paid him at daily dollar-per-pound rate for scrap aluminum. We would then drive back to his place, which was located on a hill overlooking Tacoma. He had a pretty good-sized piece of property, which had a nice house and a pretty wife, as well as a large weather-beaten work shed. I liked his wife though she was quiet and at least twenty years younger than he was. In the yard was a collection of things, an old car, an old white washing machine—the round kind with the ringers that resembled two rolling pins on top, among other large items.

Access to the old man’s fenced-off property was up a dirt road. With the copper wire in back he’d pull up to a large metal drum set well back from the house and downwind. The drum was about six foot or more in diameter and it had been sliced on a bias so that it resembled a giant scoop missing a handle. The scoop was cradled in a metal frame and my job was to throw the insulated copper wire into the scoop. Once all the wire was off the truck and in the scoop, the old man would park the truck in the driveway between the house and the shed and he would return. I had doused the insulated wire in the scoop with oil from a 50-gallon drum. The oil was also recycled. The old man would ignite the wire and Tacoma would get a blast of black smoke. I was always amazed by the amount of black smoke that the insulation produce, which was probably toxic as well, but of no consequence now.

After the fire died down, the old man would hit the wire with a high-pressure stream of cold water that would knock the bulk of the insulation from the copper. I would do the rest and then load it back onto the bed of the truck. If there was time we would drive the wire up to a scrap metal dealer—copper returned more per pound than the aluminum. He would drop me off back at the hotel. One weekend I came up to help him at his place. There was a lot of copper wire to be burned and he had a couple of other older men working for him doing other jobs at the house. I saw their car parked at the house when my dad dropped me off. It was a 1950s gray Chevrolet that had the appearance of being heavily used and little cared for. The two workers were brothers, an older, gregarious one—in his early thirties and a quieter twenty-something younger man, with an ever-present smile. For them this was the kind of work that paid their way in the world, but they were industrious and seemed to enjoy working for the old man. We had lunch of soup and sandwiches that the old man’s wife prepared and served for the four of us. The older man would try to engage the woman in conversation but she would smile and reply with short brief answers. She touched the old man’s shoulder when she came by the table to ensure we had everything we needed.

At the end of the day, the old man asked the two men to drop me off at my hotel after he paid us our wages—all the old man’s financial transaction were done in cash from a wad of bills in the pocket of his overalls that he had in a money clip. On the way home, the older man kept talking, much like the old man gabbing about everything with the younger man and me listening. Somewhere during his outpouring he mentioned the old man’s wife by name and asked if I knew anything about her. I said no and the older man began to tell me her story. She had been a drugged out prostitute on the streets of Tacoma when somehow the old man took her in. Since then she’d gotten off drugs, stopped hooking, and settled down to marry the old man. You could see the older man was a bit envious of the old man. When we reached the hotel, it was still too early for dinner so I decide to take a walk before going in to clean up for dinner.

I thought about the old man and his place and I realized that he not only collected things that were no longer wanted, he also collected people—the old man’s wife and the two workers—who saw themselves discarded and forgotten. A few weeks later we moved from the hotel to our housing on the base. I worked one more job for the old man after that and then I never saw him again. I often wonder what became of the four of them.

Friday December 17, 2004 – The Ride of a Lifetime

Friday December 17, 2004 – The Ride of a Lifetime

It was a Yamaha 350 motor cycle that carried me through my last two years of college, a bright, sleek orange and chrome beauty that I drove hard and it never complained. God I loved that bike for the great pleasure and sheer exhilaration it gave me. I was working at Collins Radio on Arapahoe Road in Richardson, Texas, which is the third exit north of the Central Expressway—Texas 75 and LBJ Freeway (635)—the great circular that rings three quarters of the greater Dallas metropolitan area. I needed a cheap ride from Collins to the University of Texas at Arlington, some 33 miles south and west of Collins. The Yamaha was ideally suited to the task.

There was one other requirement, some way to make the ride possible during all weather, especially during the thunderstorms that regularly sweep the Dallas area. Dallas lies near the bottom of tornado alley, which runs through the prairies of the mid-west. In the spring, Canadian cold fronts collide with the warm, humid Gulf Coast air streaming northward. These collisions over Dallas generated spectacular lightning shows, torrents of rain, large hail and, often, tornados. I needed an outfit that would take me through this and I could emerge dry as I walked into class at UT. I found my solution in a U.S. Army surplus store, which consisted of a waterproof Army-green hooded jumper and matching pants. To these I added black rubber gloves that extended up above my wrists, which I tucked inside the jumper sleeves. The same solution applied for my feet, slightly oversized rubber boots that slipped over my shoes and tucked inside the waterproof pant legs. The jumper was sufficiently oversized that I could easily put it over a backpack containing books and supplies, and the jumper was sufficiently long enough that it came below the waist of the matching pants. I would put my plastic helmet with clear faceplate over the hood of my jumper. Outfitted thus, I was able to drive at 60 miles and hour in a Dallas downpour with every tire on every 18-wheelers kicking up plenty of road water and still stay completely dry inside my waterproof cocoon.

My 33-mile one-way journey began at Collins with me turning west on Arapahoe and making the short drive to Central Expressway southbound. I left around 4:00 PM to make classes starting at 5:00 PM on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Down Central, which typically moved at the limit three exits then merging onto wide LBJ Freeway. Back then, I could merge onto 695, heading west, open up the throttle full, and accelerate into the fast lane and get up to 70 MPH with little trouble. I could haul at that speed for the entire length of the freeway, which then merges into the North Stemmons Freeway. I would take the southbound off-ramp, a long sweeping high-speed turn that gracefully swung south. I would love catching the slip stream of 18-wheelers, coming up behind then and accelerating being swung around them looking for a hole in the fast-moving traffic streaming down Stemmons. The 2-cylinder, 2-cycle Yamaha had good high-end torque and I could easily accelerate into and out of holes in the traffic. I took pride in making the run without having to use my breaks rather relying on the drag of the unthrottled engine to slow my forward motion.

I left Stemmons right after the Walnut Hill Lane exit, on the Manana Drive off ramp. At this interchange I picked up Texas Highway 12, which I rode for a mile or two further south before merging onto Texas Highway 183, eastbound. This part of the ride passes the imposing open top Texas Stadium, which sits in the triangle formed by 114 heading southeast, 12 headed southwest, and 183 intersecting both running east and west. Thereafter, 183 took me due west to the Texas Highway 360 interchange, where I took the southbound off ramp and stayed on 360 until I reached the Texas Highway 180 interchange. The huge General Motors assembly plant dominated the landscape for most of the way as I leaned into the curving right turn off 380 and onto 180. The new-car chemical smell accompanying the view gave me a visual-olfactory symphony. Three miles west on 180, which is local East Division Street in Arlington, I come to North Cooper Street where I make a left turn into the campus. Back then, Lyndon Johnson had just provided Texas with some funding to help in the expansion of the UT campus system. Considering that Lyndon had not only helped build the school I was attending but he was also paying me a pretty good stipend to attend the school, I loved that good ole boy.

The return trip was the same route in reverse but around 9:00 at night. I had to stop parking at school because some guy ripped off my headlight one night from the UT motorcycle parking lot. I found a friendly gas station at the corner of Division and Cooper to park—I filled up there all the time and the attendant said I could park the bike at the station for nothing. I really enjoyed the walk to campus as it gave me a chance to get some exercise after riding for 40 to 50 minutes and sometimes that was the only exercise I got during a day.

My adventures on the Yamaha began when I first bought it brand new from a shop in Dallas. I had traded a second-hand Jawa—the street bike not the far more popular dirt bike—in on the Yamaha. I had taken possession of the Yamaha and began the drive north on Central Expressway. I had it up to 60 miles an hour in the fast lane and had just passed the Belt Line Road Exit when the front tire blew and I fought to keep control of the bike while moving from the fast lane to the exit lane to make the exit at Arapahoe Road. The cars to my right must have seen my plight and slowed to let me move into the lane and make the exit. At the end of the off-ramp was a service station and I pulled in, the flat front tire making the bike much harder to control at the lower speed. After I limped into the station, I bought a tire patch kit from the station attendant and returned to the bike to remove the front wheel and patch the blowout. As I was finishing the job, the wrench slipped and I blooded my hand. The station attendant had come over to talk while I worked on the flat and he remarked, “now that you bled on it, the bike is really yours.” Somehow the remark made me feel better about the bike and it really had become part of me. It took me through UT and into a whole new life. I had put close to 15,000 miles on it during my junior and senior year at UT. When I graduated I traded it in on a stripped down 1973 Toyota Corolla. With a wife and two young kids, the Yamaha was no longer the ride I needed.

Thursday December 16, 2004 – The Paper Route

Thursday December 16, 2004 – The Paper Route

I called my Dad the other day and he was complaining about how cold it was in El Paso. It does get cold in the winter in El Paso, which is 3750 feet above sea level. My dad’s place sits at the base of the Franklin Mountains, their highest peak towers 7200 feet above sea level. The city sits at north latitude 31 degrees 47 minutes and 25 seconds and at west longitude 106 degrees 25 minutes and 24 seconds. In the winter, it gets down below freezing at night and I can remember one year in the early 1960s when it dropped to an all time low of –8 degrees Fahrenheit.

As a kid back in the early 60s, I had a paper route and I would get up at 5:30 in the morning in the winter. It would be freezing and I would get dressed in front of a heater we had in the living room willing the blowing heat to keep me from shivering as I pulled on jeans, t-shirt, sweat shirt, jacket and gloves. Out the door and onto my Vespa 125 motor scooter, that I had borrowed money from my dad to buy from Sears. It was 1961 and I had nearly paid off my $325 interest free loan at $20/month, over a half of my take home. Gas took another big chunk, and entertainment and clothes ate up the rest. The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which ran from 1959 to 1953 starred Dwayne Hickman, who would appear each week in a new sport shirt that I had to own. Needless to say, I spent a good portion of my earnings trying to keep up with Dobie.

Once I had the Vespa started, the smell of gasoline and oil spewing from the exhaust of the 2-cycle single cylinder engine still a fond memory, I drove down to the all-night Texaco station where my supervisor would have dropped off a bundle of the El Paso Times cinched lengthwise with a single strand of wire. Most times I could pull a couple of papers out from the middle to loosen the stack sufficient to get the rest of the papers out. I bought a box of rubber bands with me and I would roll the papers and cinch them with a rubber band and stack them in two large canvas bags. The bags were linked together by a strip of canvas with a hole in the center large enough to accommodate my head. As I rolled the papers, I was wearing the bags with my head through the hole one bag resting on my back the other on my chest.

I got to know the attendants at the Texaco station where the papers were dropped. We were fellow night workers. Most of the attendants were GIs from Ft Bliss Army Base working nights to earn extra money. Most were bachelors, who would regale me of their adventures helping women in distress with car trouble—I suspect the women also had trouble with the men in their lives as well, including the service station attendants who would only complicate matters, though, to their credit, the attendants did fix the mechanical problems. The station itself was ten to fifteen years old and it had two pump station islands, each with two pumps—regular and premium. It had three service bays with hydraulic lifts. The attendants would also bring their own cars and service them when it was slow at night. The concrete area in the bays and on either side of the pump islands was darkened with grease and oil dropping. And the entire station smelled of gasoline, oil, and new tire rubber.

Back then, the service station attendant’s job was to pump your gas, check your oil, clean your windshield and check your tires. Besides getting filled up you were lucky to get your windshield clean without asking. In the winter, the attendants would invite me into the station office where the cash register and the heater were. Once in a great while, one of them would bring in doughnuts, which they would invite me to share along with a cup of coffee.

When the bags were filled, I would stand and mount the Vespa and begin my route. It ran from Dyer Street, Texas Highway 478 up Truman Avenue to Byron Street. I would turn right on Byron and then right again on Lincoln back to Dyer, left on Dyer and left again on Johnson Avenue—the avenues in the neighborhood were last names of presidents. I would go up Johnson until it dead ended at Travis Elementary School, left a block on Lackland Street to Lincoln, up a block, then right on North Stevens Street a block and left again on Johnson and then up Johnson to Byron, right in front of Our Lady of Assumption Church and down Byron to Hayes and right to complete my route.

I’d get back home at 6:45 or so and would grab breakfast before jumping back on my Vespa for my commute to Austin High School for my 7:30 class. I liked the early class as it got me out of school an hour early. It wasn’t a bad way to go through high school.

Wednesday December 15, 2004 – Tuesday, The Most Productive Weekday

Wednesday December 15, 2004 – Tuesday, The Most Productive Weekday

Tuesday is supposed to be the most productive day of the week—I learned it on Yahoo News. It has to be true, right?However, yesterday began as if it were going to defy this truth. The problem was me. After a restless night, twice awakening for no apparent reason—once just after midnight and again just after 4:00 AM, I emerged groggily from what I thought was a deep sleep—I say this because the clock radio went for at least 30 seconds before I was awake enough to shut it off—NPR was doing some story that had gotten into a dream I was having—talk about freaking me out. I usually awake just ahead of the radio coming on and I turn it off.

In this disoriented state, I pulled on my running gear and make my way into the darkened morn—5:35 AM out the side garage door. It was nearly 50 degrees Fahrenheit outside so a sweatshirt and running shorts were more than adequate dress. Somewhere two miles or so into the jaunt, I lost my momentum and decided to cut the chase short by ten to fifteen minutes. I returned home earlier than normal. Still in a state of what the French call a malaise I wasted enough time that I drove out of the garage and joined the first wave of commuters rushing toward downtown on Monterey Highway at the time I normally join the crowd.

At 7:15 each morning, Monterey Highway moves at 45 to 55 miles an hour from Senter Road all the way to West Alma Avenue. You’ll typically hit the light at Senter but some mornings you can make it all the way to Alma without hitting a light, which is what happened yesterday. You see the same cars along this stretch. Some I recognize by the decals on the back window or bumper, some from their personalized license plate or the customized paint job or bodywork. We pass one another every day without recognizing the other’s presence other than as an obstruction in the roadway moving too slow for the traffic flow or as a wannabe Nascar driver speeding up to 65 or 70 miles an hour to take advantage of the empty right lane that often opens up north of the Oak Hill Memorial Cemetery where Curtner crosses Monterey.

Beyond Alma, us north bound commuters split up. Half of us proceed on Market Street to destinations within or through downtown San Jose. Those proceeding through downtown on Market typically pick up Coleman Avenue heading west under California Highway 87 en route to Interstate 880—there’s a large FMC manufacturing operation just west of the junction of Coleman with 880—a shell of its former self. Coleman provides surface street commuters access to Santa Clara and the business parks on the northwestern side of Mineta San Jose Airport. Coleman also provides access to De La Cruz Boulevard which in turn gives access to Central Expressway and all the high-tech companies along its length in Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. I’ve never timed the commute but it would probably be quicker than trying to reach the same destinations via California Highway 101.

The half I’m with make their way up South Third Street. Monterey becomes South First Street as it crosses Alma. About two more blocks and the right lane of First is forced onto East Humboldt for a block and then forced onto S. Third after another block. The stretch just beyond Humboldt on S. Third has been the site of construction delays for the past year as some developer is building a football field size apartment or condo complex. Beyond the construction, the three lanes of S. Third move through a neighborhood of old Victorian houses all the way to where it crosses under Interstate 280. On the left is Notre Dame High School, the Catholic girls school that obstructs traffic flow on S. Third blocking the left lane with cars dropping students off.

Traffic flow along S. Third picks up beyond the high school as the lights are timed and if you do 30 miles an hour you’ll make each of the lights on East Reed, East Williams, East San Salvador, East San Carlos, and East San Fernando. Beyond E. San Fernando, S. Third narrows to two lanes with the left lane taken up with construction of a block long gray multi-story apartment complex—occupancy available probably at reasonable rents given the oversupply of rental property in the area after the dot-com bust. Third crosses East Santa Clara, widens into three lanes again, and becomes North Third. The commute slows now due to a light at East St. John Street and the early morning members of the San Jose Athletic Club trying to find a parking space on the right side of N. Third—where the club sits in its Grecian splendor or on the opposite side of N. Third which fronts St. James Park, a favorite hang out of the homeless in the warmer months. The light at East St. James Street always stops the commute on N. Third, which gets further slowed as the three lanes of N. Third gets squeezed to two just before the railroad crossing by another multi-story high rise going up on the left—too early to tell if it’s offices or housing.

The commute continues unobstructed thereafter and my spirits have improved as the traffic has moved remarkably fast through the twelve or so miles we’ve driven. My mood improves even further as I merge off I880 onto 101 to find the freeway moving instead of slow-and-go as is normal for this time of day on a Tuesday. It’s just after 7:30 and within twenty minutes I’m pulling into the parking lot ready to start my workday. Remarkably, the productivity of the day resembled the swiftness of my commute far more than the slow progress of my waking experience. I guess Yahoo was right.

Tuesday September 14, 2004 – Exploring the 4th Crusade

Tuesday September 14, 2004 – Exploring the 4th Crusade

I spent the weekend stuck a thousand years or more in the past, around the time of the four Crusades into the holy land. In the process of understanding the Crusades, I stumbled upon a list of the popes heading the Catholic Church from the time of Christ. There have been a total of 264 up to the current Pope John Paul II. The line began with Peter who died somewhere around 64 or 67 AD. He was followed by St. Linus of Tuscany who held the post from 67 to 76 AD. Pope Anacletus ruled until 88 AD and he was followed by Pope St. Clements who held on until 97AD. It’s remarkable that the church has had a continuous line of popes dating back to the beginning of the Christian Era.

What got me started along this line of inquiry was a review of two books on the Crusades by Joan Acocella in the December 13th issue of The New Yorker: Thomas Asbridge”s The First Crusade: A New History and Jonathan Phillips’ The fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople. The second of the two sent me into a number of interesting Internet searches seeking background on the Hagia Sophia—the Church of the Holy Wisdom, in what is now Istanbul. The church, dedicated in 537 AD was commissioned by the Roman Emperior Justinian, who was smitten by and married to the infamous prostitute Theodora—this according to Procopius of Caesarea in his posthumous expose of the emperor The Secret History, the chapter on Theodora is not for those with easily offended sensibilities, a category that excludes me. Procopius was a civil servant and as early as A.D. 527, he became counsellor, assessor, and secretary to Belisarius, one of Justinian’s Generals.

Hagia Sophia was claimed to be a repository of many artifacts from early Christianity: the robe of the Virgin Mary, the Crown of Thorns of Christ, two heads of John the Baptist… What became of these riches is anyone’s guess as the church was looted by the Crusaders en route to the Holy Lands according to Phillips’ book. In reading Acocella’s piece detailing the Fourth Crusade I was struck by how it resembled a really black Monty Python comedy but with real murder, rape, mayhem and plunder. The Crusade aimed to attack Egypt, the center of Islamic power. From Egypt, the crusaders would move on to retake Jerusalem lost to the Turks in 1187. In 1201, the Crusaders struck a deal with the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo for ships to transport 35,000 men and horses for a fee of 85,000 marks—twice the annual income of the kings of France and England, according to Phillips’ history, to the coast of North Africa.

The 4th Crusade was launched by Pope Innocent III who ruled from 1198 to 1216, under leadership of Boniface the Marquis of Monferrat The incentive he offered all who volunteered for the enterprise was salvation from eternal damnation. After making the deal with the Venetian Doge the Crusaders had only a third of the funds needed to pay their debt. The Doge offered them a way to delay their debt—not forgive it—simply attack the city of Zara and return it to Venetian control. Zara was then under control of the King of Hungary, who was a Christian and in the service of Pope Innocent III who forbade the attack. The Crusaders, however, owed a monetary debt to Dandolo and gave him Zara. Furious, the Pope excommunicated the lot but reversed himself realizing he still needed them to attack his Islamic enemy.

Meanwhile, unknown to Innocent III and to Boniface the Marquis of Monferrat, Dandolo had reached an agreement with al-Adil, the Sultan of Egypt, granting the Venetians privileges of trade with the Egyptians and access to the rich trade route of the Red Sea to India. Dandolo now had to find a reason for diverting the Crusade from its intended target. He found it in another prize, Constantinople. Dandolo is a remarkable character. Reportedly in his eighties and nearly blind at the time he becomes Doge, he has taken up with Boniface and the Crusade to look after Venetian interests. But, Dandolo is a far more ruthless and cunning man as his manipulation of the Crusade clearly demonstrates.

The sources on Dandolo suspect that he knew the Crusade would come up short on funds and become in his debt. He allowed the indebtedness to occur to provide leverage he could use to exploit them. First, he uses their force to retake Zara, then he diverts them from Egypt to a target he has a personal reason for attacking. In an earlier part of his life, he had been blinded in Constantinople and seemingly held a grudge against the city. But, beyond the personal animosity, he saw in the conquest of this capital of the Byzantine world, a means of eliminating a powerful rival to Venice dominance of the Mediterranean. Thus, he arranges for Boniface to meet with the exiled prince of Constantinople Alexius Angelus (Alexius IV) son of Isaac II—the deposed emperor had been imprisoned by his own brother, Alexius III. Alexius IV promises the crusaders 200,000 marks and 10,000 men for the crusade against Egypt if they help restore his father to power.

With this much incentive, the Crusaders attack Constantinople and Alexius III flees. whereupon, Isaac II is returned to power and his son Alexius IV becomes co-emperor so that the crusaders are assured of receiving their payment. With a bankrupt city, a weary father sequesters himself in religious pursuits leaving his son to set about melting the precious metals from the city’s great churches into coins to pay the debt. The city’s outraged noblemen rebel and choose a new emperor to replace Alexius IV, a reluctant Nicholas Canobus. Alexius IV appeals to the Crusaders for help. Seeing a power vacuum, another seeking power, Alexius Ducas, rallies Constantinople’s elite Varangian Guard to throw off the attackers. The Varangian Guard were founded by Emperor Basil II in 988, with 6000 Russian Viking warriors sent by Varangian Tsar Vladimir of Russia. Their name comes from an Old Norse word relating to sharers of an oath. The guard decides to back Alexius Ducas, who has Alexius IV first imprisoned then killed. Seeing his initiative the Noblemen decide to rally round Ducas, thus making him emperor Alexius V. But the reign was short lived.

Through a number of unfortunate mistakes by Alexius V and his supporters, the Crusaders drove the new emperor from power. In the aftermath, the city was looted. According to the account of Geoffrey de Villehardouin, a Crusader, in his Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople, Boniface the Marquis of Monferrat and Dandolo, Doge of Venice, demanded all loot be collected and brought together. Three churches were appointed for the receiving of the spoils, and guards were set to ensure the loot’s safekeeping. From this plunder, the Crusaders paid the Venetians the 50,000 marks remaining on the debt and afterwards, divided at least 150,000 marks between themselves.

The cunning genius in this history is the Doge of Venice, who shrewdly manipulated a huge fighting force to his own ends. Besides ridding Venice of rivals, Constantinople and Zara, for domination of the Mediterranean, he secured Corfu, Crete, and ports in the Peloponnese. He also diverted a huge fighting force about to descend on his new ally Egypt. In the process the Doge completely subverted the intended aim of Pope Innocent III. Oddly, the Pope directly benefited in that the Eastern Orthodox Church was returned to Roman controlled albeit for only a half century—until 1261, when the Greeks retook Constantinople to hold it themselves less than two hundred years when the city fell to the Turks in 1453, who still hold it. Throughout this war of intrigue, the large fighting force is manipulated as if it were a puppet. Viewed from the distance of 800 years, their antics would be comical if they weren’t so incredibly brutal.

What I learned in this hyperlink journey about the Internet’s many ancient history sites is that an old Doge can teach you new tricks.

Sunday, December 12, 2004 – The Moveable Feast

Sunday, December 12, 2004 – The Moveable Feast

One of the great perks of my being an editor was I got to go to a lot of parties, disguised as press receptions or press conferences. Now that I’m no longer an editor I get to throw these parties. The rationale for these events is some press announcement the host company wants to make or some gathering in which everyone makes a marketing pitch in the form of an educational presentation. There are several categories of invitees who tend to come. If the host is a public company listed on a major stock exchange, at the top of the pecking order are the financial analysts. If this is an upbeat event, the host company’s corporate communications office and their pricey PR firm pull out the stops to ensure the major analysts show up. Needless to say the company is holding the event at an upscale hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

Another group in attendance is the major business and general press—Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fortune, Times, Newsweek, broadcast news, etc. This group is as coveted as the financial analyst. You could throw into this category, industry analyst from market research firms such as Dataquest, International Data Corp., among others. This latter collection is less coveted and likely to include a great many one-man shops—analysts who have gone off on their own and now sell market reports to a select clientele. Finally, there is the trade press, lowest on the totem pole but encouraged to participate—the PR term for getting a good crowd is “butts in seats” and the trade press will typically deliver plenty of butts in seats. I should know as I was one of those butts for a couple of decades.

There is one other group, which I put into the category of freelancers, stringers, etc. This group is the most fascinating of all because they include writers and editors in between jobs or on their own who are doing piece work and being paid by the word. They’re in attendance because a magazine has assigned them to cover the event or they’ve come hoping to write something they can sell. Then there are the gleaners, retired editors, chronically unemployed writers, or simply people who have learned that a business card with a magazine name and your name and an editorial title will get you into most any press event going on in New York nearly any day in the week—this was all before 9-11, however, and the rules in Manhattan might have changed as a result.

I remember attending the Microsoft event in Manhattan when the software giant announced MS DOS 5 in the late 80s, early 90s. As I collected my badge and my collection of “giveaways”—t-shirts, pens, leatherette binder and pad and all the press releases and background information, I noticed others presenting business cards to the receptionist and having badges hand written. I was speaking with a colleague when he pointed out a lady getting her handwritten badge. He mentioned that over ten years earlier she had worked at a magazine where we had both been several years before. He suspected she was using an old business card to crash the party. There were others with handwritten badges that also looked suspect, but I figured Microsoft could afford to entertain them. I admired their audacity. I would also know their plight several years later when I too became an unemployed writer producing an article for whoever had space to fill and were willing to hire me to fill it—often at highly discounted wages. I wrote several pieces pro bono just to have the byline that I could show to potentially paying clients.

I did find work, ironically producing events just like the Microsoft bash. I had become the master of ceremony at one of the moveable feast that I once attended. Recently, I got a chance to relive the experience of being an invitee at one of these events rather than the host. It was an evening affair in which my company was a participant along with many others. The reception began at 5:00 PM with dinner starting at 7:00 PM followed by a program of speakers until whenever. I arrived shortly after 5:00—the traffic on California 101 moves at a snail’s pace at this time of day and I have to maneuver a good 10 miles of it. By the time I received my badge the festivities were getting underway. The open bars—several were scattered around the cavernous hotel ballroom where the event was being held—were flowing with wine, bear, and mixed drinks. I opted for a glass of Chandon without the liqueur the bartender was about to mix in with it.

Champagne flute in hand, I began wandering around the hall looking for familiar faces, I would recognize someone engaged with a group. If he looked over and we made eye contact and his face flashed recognition, I would raise my glass smiling and he would return the gesture. The across-the-room greeting happened on a number of occasions. If I had still been an editor, he would have broke from his group and engaged me, but we both knew that I held no sway any longer. I was just another working guy like him. I did meet a PR lady who had her own one-person operation doing quite well. She had one client in Europe, and several local ones that kept her busy. We caught up the four years since we had last crossed paths.

What struck me about this gathering was all the gray matter in the room. These were mostly executives who had been in the business as long as I had been and we were all showing our age. (This was not a roomful of younger men in the late 30s early 40s. They had their own gatherings, their own moveable feasts.) We were all the age of the industry that had once been a high-flyer that enjoyed spectacular year-over-year growth. It had now gotten to be mature and no longer experienced such dramatic spurts, rather the opposite, years of modest growth mixed in with years of dramatic declines of late. Suddenly, the party—the moveable feast—that had nourished us all was beginning to attract fewer of us and the venues were not as extravagant as in the past.

When I finished the last party my company had underwritten with the support from a number of other sponsors, I asked the hotel catering manager to bring me a bottle of Coppola Claret and a couple of glasses. He indulged me and returned with three glasses. The two other folks who had made sure the event went off as planned shared in a toast with me. Afterwards, they took off for home, but I had a few lingering guests still talking in the reception area despite the open bar being dismantled. I took my Coppola in to where they were and we sat and talked till the bottle was empty and they went on their way and I sat at the table for a moment luxuriating in the moment before I too took my leave. I wondered how many more such parties I had in me.

Friday, December 10, 2004 – The Old Man & the Sea

Friday, December 10, 2004 – The Old Man & the Sea

I just finished The Old Man and the Sea, my second reading of the last novel by the Nobel Laureate, who took his life with a shotgun in 1959. I first read the novel in my senior year 1962-1963 at Clover Park High School in Tacoma, Washington. I identified with the boy, Manolin back then. This time I identified with Santiago, the old man in the book. Hemingway influenced the generations that grew up reading his work. George Plimpton, the author of Paper Lion—if you’re like me you didn’t read the book but saw the movie with Alan Alda playing Plimpton—and editor of Paris Review, is one example. If you had one phrase to sum up the motivation of characters in any Hemingway book it would be “a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do”—I’m reminded of the circular reasoning of Gertrude Stein, “a rose is a rose…” For those of us growing up in the 1950s, Hemingway’s phrase was all too familiar. When we turned 18, we had to register for the draft or join one of the armed services. We began life with a duty and that sense of duty remained—at least for me.

Hemingway’s story is a retelling of Cervantes Don Quixote, with Santiago playing the Don and Manolin playing the ever faithful, Sancho Panza. Both writers’ main characters have undertaken an impossible task and both are unaware of the magnitude of their mission, even when it has become glaringly apparent to everyone else especially the reader. Santiago is at the end of his life and death is of no consequence to him. What is important to him is to continue doing what he has done all his life. In many ways the reader sees in the words of this, his last story, Hemingway rationalizing his view of the world in his old age. Santiago wants to die doing what he loves to do. Hemingway lacked an occupation that he could die doing—in the boat by himself, Santiago battles the Sharks feeding on his great prize and he sees in this battle the natural struggle that is living. One real possibility is that he will lose the struggle and instead of being the predator, he becomes the prey.

The notion of predator and prey is sharply drawn in the story when Santiago articulates that one fish feeds on another and that he feeds on the fish. The nature of life is that each living creature must feed off another in order to live. Humans at the top of the food chain are themselves prey to diseases, viruses, bacteria, and as carrion—in the wild—by scavengers and in the graveyard by insect larvae and then insects themselves, who continue the cycle by being consumed by higher order plants and animals. It’s a cycle of feeding that returns on itself. There is beauty in the symmetry reflected in the old man’s musings spoken aloud as he attempts to bring his catch back to the village.

There is a stream of conscientiousness, to the storytelling. You come to understand Santiago and what drives him by his compulsive conversation he engages with himself. You learn his dear wife has died, that he traveled to Africa as a young man. You learn that his dreams now are only about the lions he remembered as a young man in Africa coming down to the beach. You sense that the old man knows that he’s getting close to death though in the story there is only one mention of this acknowledgement near the end. Santiago tastes a coppery reflux that he spits into the ocean.

I began by saying that Santiago and Don Quixote are similar. For Hemingway’s old man the quest is for the great fish that Santiago does hook half way through the tale. The conflict appears to be between fisherman and fish, but in reality, the conflict is the old man’s struggle to endure. The fish is symbolic of the struggle that is life and Santiago knows that he must consume himself to endure the struggle and prevail. He relates symbols of the struggle in his reverie of the arm wrestling match with the black man that stretched into two days over the weekend, neither man wanting to relent. The black man would mount an all out effort to press Santiago arm to the table only to have his opponent rebound, and when everyone believe the match would end in a draw, Santiago launched and completed his successful attack to press his opponent’s arm to the table.

He was younger then and now here he is again being tested by other opponents. This time he is an older man and his body, calloused with age, is beginning to struggle to do the bidding of its master. Santiago talks to his two hands as if they were separate from him, chiding the right for being the weaker of the two, complaining to both of their unwillingness to do his bidding—the right hand cramps on him and resists being opened—an eager spirit but a wanting body.

The other major theme of this work is that the goal is not the point of life—as the narrative reveals, it is achieved and lost before the story completes. What remains is the quest and the struggle it entails, the battle between the old man and the enormous Marlin he has hooked that tows him out to sea and the sharks that attack his kill as he makes his way back to port. At this level, the story resembles the bullfight. The matador and bull are locked in this ritual of which the bull is completely ignorant. The matador knows the outcome—the bull will die one way or the other. The bull has to do what nature has bred him to do, charge the matador and establish his dominance. The man has the advantage but is himself expected to perform and in his performance to demonstrate his dominance over this force of nature. How well the matador performs determines if he emerges a living or dead hero, or coward. The old man knows too he is being tested in his struggle. The outcome is inconsequential only that he knows that he has performed well. The Greeks have a word for this. It’s areté, the most articulated value in Greek culture, which translates as "virtue," but, actually means something closer to "reaching your highest human potential."

In Santiago’s world, the ocean is the arena, the sea and its creatures are the opponent—the only variable in the entire venue is Santiago. The large fish is compelled to do what eventually gets him caught on the old man’s hook, the ocean is oblivious of both man and fish, and the sharks are conditioned to scavenge Santiago’s catch. The only variable in this entire scene is the old man. At any point in the story he has the option to give up and return to shore, to allow the sharks to feed unchallenged on his catch—Santiago knows that the sharks will have their way and nothing he can do will stop them, yet he persists in fighting them until he is without means to fight. He looses his harpoon in the battle with the first attacking shark, then his knife after killing three more that follow, and finally breaking his tiller handle converted into a club on the predators that follow. Weaponless and blinded by night, the old man finally allows the scavengers to have their way with his magnificent fish.

He returns to port beaten by the forces of the sea, but not defeated. He dreams of returning to do battle again. This story resembles the catholic mass with Santiago acting the part of the priest, engaging in a prolonged soliloquy, in the course of which he promises to say a set of “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” if he is allowed to catch the Marlin. For such a short work, Hemingway managed to instill within it so many levels of meaning, perhaps the cumulative synthesis of a lifetime of experience. If you read this book as a young person, you should read it again as an old one, there is much the author has to say to both of you.

Thursday December 9, 2004 – I Love the Rain

Thursday December 9, 2004 – I Love the Rain

Today, it’s raining in San Jose and it’s my favorite time of year after a long stretch of hot sunny days—fall is summer in California since September and October have days with daytime temperatures exceeding those of summer months. This year that was not the case though. Our first good rain came in October, a month that is typically dryer than the following three months. The rain rolled in from the Pacific in a curving arc that began in the Ocean off Asia moving northeastward along the Aleutian Islands, following the curve of Alaska and finally making landfall on the western coast of Canada, Washington, and Oregon. From there the moisture-laden weather system slides down into Northern California. The direction of the jet stream determines if California gets drenched or merely showered.

The storms of this October hit California straight on with the jet stream driving the brunt on the storm on-shore directly over the San Francisco Bay Area. This was a good storm and when it hit us, it came with a strong will that broke off tree branches, shook leaves from deciduous trees just beginning to shred—clogging storm drains and causing local flooding, and indiscriminately cut power to various neighborhoods throughout the region. The culprits in the power outages were falling branches severing exposed power lines, or the errant car or truck that rammed and toppled a power pole. A storm like the one in October has personality. It reminds me of a unattended child filled with impetuous energy that wrecks havoc on a well-ordered room filled with precariously placed bric-a-brac. But the storm not only blew strong, it dropped a good couple of inches of rain throughout the region. I knew it was a prodigious rain because of the flooding that filled the parking lot outside my workplace in Palo Alto, which is near the wetlands on the western shore of San Francisco Bay.

There is nothing to compare to the smell of a storm after it has washed a sun-parched region like the bay area. It conjures up in me a sense of a new beginning, an exhilaration that fills me with an enormous sense of well-being. The rain is especially welcome since the entire region for six months or more has only known the teasing moisture of the persistent fog rolling east from the ocean as the sun sets in the west. The fog’s rhythm and motion is directed by the capricious notions of the itinerant high pressure systems that sweep in from the Pacific and move eastward across the continent. When the high decides to linger over the four-corners region of the west, California is baked with temperatures hovering in the high 90s often exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit everywhere in the Bay Area not within 20 to 30 miles of the Pacific Coast. When the storm comes after a spell of such hot weather, the effect is cathartic, as if the smothering embrace of the devil himself had been broken. The experience is similar to the release I felt following a powerful thunderstorm sweeping across East Texas after days of sweltering, humid, windless days. Only the smell after a thunderstorm has the lingering scent of ozone released in the flashes of lightning exploding around us like an artillery fusillade.

The rains of California are not often accompanied by thunder and lightning though cold and warm fronts colliding over the region do occasionally produce thunderstorms and the faint smell of ozone. The sense of smell is primal. It conjures memories much more spontaneously than any of the other senses. The smell of a thunderstorm unleashes a flood of remembrances that stretch back to early childhood, of places—Mississippi, Puerto Rico, Oklahoma, the stretch of desert along Interstate 10 from Blythe, California to Las Cruces, New Mexico—of people—some past away, others alive and well, and of moments in time—an intense downpour on a stretch of Central Expressway between Richardson and Plano, Texas when blinded and trying to slow a fast moving car, I felt completely momentarily helpless—my wife “I” and daughter M terrified in the passenger seat—then exhilarated after we’d passed through the deluge unscathed.

But the rains of this week were not the kind that would linger in memory. These storms lacked personality, a will, a sense of power that others seem to have in abundance. The first storm originally predicted to roll in on Sunday into Monday fell apart managing only to dampen the region with a light rainfall though it did bring winds that initially suggested a sense of mischief, later unfounded. It was followed by a second that arrived Tuesday evening. This one came in howling with a good wind to shake more leaves from trees shedding their spring coat in preparation for winter’s slumber. It also produced some impressive rainfalls in the northern part of the region. However, as the storm attempted to sink southward over the South Bay, the jet stream began to rise pulling the rain along leaving us with barely a quarter inch of precipitation—this update from the proprietress of the cleaners where I picked up my dry cleaning and laundry on my homeward commute.

For California, the rains are travelers whose regular visits during the months of October through February the state depends on. These rains replenish depleted aquifers drained by artesian wells that not only nourish the farmlands that resist suburban sprawl in the Santa Clara Valley, but the suburbanites insatiable thirst for water. They also drop many feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada that the state has harnessed to supply water during the dry months. When these visitors decide to reduce the frequency of their visits, we suffer, not only the lack of water but the absent benediction these rainfalls deliver to those of us that look forward to their yearly baptisms.

Wednesday December 8, 2004 – The Significance of Dreams

Wednesday December 8, 2004 – The Significance of Dreams

I don’t normally remember dreams. Dreams are more the domain of my wife “I”. She dreams frequently and remembers them when she awakens, but more significantly, she understands their meaning—all dreams supposedly represent conflict resolution. Amazing how humans dream in drama or comedy, though I’m sure we remember the dreams that scare the hell out of us far more readily than the ones that make us laugh or smile. It’s no wonder that theater emerged as part of human culture regardless of race or geographic location.

I had this dream the other night that confounded me because I awoke not in a state of fright or uneasiness but rather in a state of confusion. The dream begins with me walking into what I sense is a rest stop along a highway. I have the distinct feeling that I’ve been traveling and have come into this place to rest before continuing on. What is striking about the place when I enter is that I’m completely alone. I enter through two glass doors and there is a long corridor that recedes into darkness toward the rear of the building. No lights are on in the room but the sunlight coming in from windows and glass door provide enough light that I can see the inside.

On my left as I enter the building is a wooden partition that extends from the floor to just below my chest. Inside the glass doors in front of the partition and to the left is a short set of step that lead down into a dining area filled with wooden octagonal tables each with four chairs neatly pushed into the table waiting for patrons to pull them out. There is nothing on the tables, but the room appears clean as if it were waiting to open. Windows on the wall housing the glass door illuminate the empty dining area. On the wall opposite the windows is a line of buffet service stations, cleaned and ready for trays of food that would be behind the station’s glass front—providing diners a view of the food that would be dispensed across the metal shelf mounted atop the grass fronts.

I walk along the corridor with the dining area at my left and in clear view over the wooden partition though the area immediately behind the partition in its shadow, is dark. I walk along the corridor about the length of an Olympic sized swimming pool at which point the partition on my left ends with another short set of stairs providing access into the sunken dining area. I turn left and walk down the short set of steps and just as my head sinks under the partition, the two glass doors open. Hidden in the shadow of the partition, I freeze for a moment willing my ears and nose to give me some indication of who is about to enter the room. I can’t smell any perfume or cologne that would indicate a man or woman. I hear footsteps and then the person stops apparently looking around getting his/her bearing.

I creep up the stairs peering beyond the partition to get a glimpse of the other person in the room, I see him. It is a male dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, looking down the stairs and around the dining area. He seems to be deciding whether to walk down the corridor as I did or to descend the first set of stairs into the dining area. He seems to be looking for something or someone. He begins to walk down the stairs and into the dining area. As he moves down the stairs I move up to the corridor and begin moving into the shadows away from the entrance.

As I get deep enough into the shadows to be hidden, another man comes in through the double glass doors and he also seems to be looking for someone. He immediately determines to walk down the stairs immediately to the left of the entrance and as he does so the first man goes up the stairs as I had done earlier only his movements are not as silent as mine and the second man immediately senses the first. There is a sudden movement as the first man begins to dash for the front door. Just as he is about to run the second man emerges from the stairs at the front and begins firing at the first. Curiously, the second man is not holding a gun but rather something that resembles a gun and it’s firing something that doesn’t make a sound.

As I watch the second man come up the stairs near the entrance, the first man ducks and retreats down the stairs into the dining area. The second man gives chase but not all the way to the second set of stairs, reasoning that the first man will dart for the entrance. Unable to see in the dark behind the partition, the second man returns to the stairs near the entrance and begins to descend the stairs and as he does, he begins firing.

Meanwhile, I realize that the two of them are so occupied by their chase that they are completely unaware of me, as if I’m invisible. I begin to walk toward the entrance to put distance between me and the conflict. As I reach the mid point of the partition, the two emerge from the rear staircase with the second shooting at the first and whatever is propelled from the weapon seems to be going through the first man apparently without doing physical damage. This continues as the pair pass beside me at a walking pace with the second continuing to fire from behind the first.

At this point I wake up. I describe the dream to my wife “I” and she is initially stumped. “What could it possibly mean?” I put it out of my mind, get dress, and go out on my run. I think of the dream off and on while I’m gone and when I return “I” makes the observation that I must have witnessed some kind of conflict in which one man was the aggressor and the second seemed to take the attack without being harmed by it. Apparently I knew the two contestants but had not taken sides.

Her words make me think back to the previous day and curiously, there was an incident at work when just such an encounter occurred and it came vividly back to mind as soon as she described her interpretation. There had been a dispute I had witnessed in which one party was quite put out by something a second had done. Though the former was visibly annoyed—I could sense the tension, the latter was completely nonplussed, treating it as if it were completely insignificant: Yosemite Sam upset, while Bugs Bunny queries “what’s up doc?”

Tuesday December 7, 2004 - San Jose’s Identity Crisis

Tuesday December 7, 2004 - San Jose’s Identity Crisis

When we first arrived in San Jose in October of 1974, the downtown was a sleepy central valley farming town. There had been some high-rise construction but not enough to change the skyline of the city significantly. On West Santa Clara the De Anza Hotel was a derelict building with homeless finding shelter when they weren’t being chased away by police. There was no Fairmont Hotel, Convention Center, Marriott Hotel, Hilton Hotel, Tech Center, Shark Tank… and San Jose State University looked pretty much the way I remembered it when I was last in San Jose back in 1967. About the biggest attraction downtown then was the Center for the Performing Arts. The San Pedro Square area downtown had a few restaurants but they struggled to attract