May 28, 2005 –Don Continues His Story

May 28, 2005 –Don Continues His Story

What I began in my blog of May 26, my friend Don’s story, I’m continuing below. The remarks are taken from a conversation I recorded with Don and Ev, his lovely wife and lifelong love. Some of the names are not spelled correctly—I neglected to have Don spell them for me as we spoke. Where possible, I’ve tried to find the correct spelling. Also, I’ve tried to keep true to the way Don spoke to me, making changes to correct the meaning of what he was saying. In my previous post, Don has just given up a singing career that had brought him fame and wealth. He was now looking for what to do with his life.

“I had to decide what to do. In my artwork I had been drawing. A little bar I went into on Market Street asked me “how about doing an ad in the newspaper?” So I sat there and designed an ad for him. The Examiner was very impressed with the ad. The Westward Ho bar way up on Market Street where the Fox Theatre was and the Fox Bldg is now.

“We were living up on Telegraph Hill and we were throwing a lot of parties. We lived up near where Mel Belli lives. At one of our parties, Cobina Wright Jr.—you probably haven’t heard of her—she was of the F. Scott Fitzgerald era. She was the reining belle of New York society and a columnist. She (Cobina) was out here with a young man named Stanley Boberick, who was later killed in his own airplane flying to LA over the Grapevine from Hanford—where he owned a newspaper with Dan Hopping. Stanley was a good friend of mine and he had a very close friendship with William Randolph Hearst. He (Stanley) was editor of the Stanford Daily and Hearst came out with “Communism in the Colleges” the red influence on college campuses, which damned the Universities for communists’ infiltration. Stanley wrote an editorial on the Hearst story in the Stanford Daily. (Ev: The Bear—the University of California Berkeley college paper—came out with a front-page story on the Stanford Daily.) ‘If there’s a smug pot in your neighbor’s orchard, (what Stanley wrote in the Stanford Daily) would you call out the fire department?’ In other words, sure there is a left wing influence but is all that big a deal

“Hearst liked Stanley’s story and invited him out to San Simeon. (Ev: He wanted to go to work for Hearst.) Stanley was in Dan Hopping’s class. Hearst encouraged Stanley to start his own newspaper and Dan Hopping’s financed them, one in Chico and one in Hanford. I did the masthead for them.

“Anyway, this all happened just when I had stopped singing. Stanley brought Cobina Wright Jr. to our place on Telegraph Hill for one of our parties and I admired her car, which had won first prize in the New York Automobile Show. It was a 1937/38 Buick Phaeton. (Ev: We had been given a book called The Game of Life and How to Play It [by Florence Scovel Shinn]) by a friend of ours. It was about the Unity Philosophy. One of the suggestions in the book was to make a demonstration of wealth. I thought what greater demonstration of wealth could I make if I want success than to buy this car. So I said ‘I want to buy your car.’ I had neither the down payment nor the cash to pay for it. I was doing (designing) candy boxes for Blum’s (an upscale candy supplier in San Francisco) and I went to the banker for Blum’s and I said I want that car. He said, “I’ll give you the loan on the car but you have to come up with a down payment.” I asked how I would go about getting the down payment and he sent me to a loan shark around the corner. I got the down payment.

“I was driving down Market Street in this new car and the advertising man that handled all the restaurants, hotels, and nightclubs (for the Examiner) jumped in—he had liked the ad I had done for the bar—and said “go down and see Bimbo at the 365 Club.” The Examiner put me into Bimbo’s and the Chronicle saw the Examiner using me and they (Chronicle) gave me an office and a title and brought me in as Feature Editor. They gave me a secretary and I put out a special section for the opening of San Francisco Airport: 12 pages. I sold all the ads and wrote the entire editorial.

“In 1941, I (took over) space where the Domei News Agency was—they must have known it was coming because a month before Pearl Harbor they moved out. I took their office (which was) next to Robert O’Brien, now an editor with Reader’s Digest. O’Brien had taken Herb Caen’s place at the Chronicle because Herb got drafted. They (the Chronicle) asked me do a nightclub column. I went to Bob and asked him, ‘how do you write a column?’ He said, ‘you write just like you talk.’ I said, ‘thank you’ and that was my entry to journalism. For nearly 20 years I had a three-times a week column on the strength of that advice.

“We quickly had about 50 accounts all paying retainers. We found out that we could charge a monthly fee—any where from $50 to $200. (Ev: We had the PR business at the same time as Don was writing the columns.) Nobody blew the whistle on me until Senator Nolan came back from the Tribune to the Chronicle—I had been there for a number of years—and he asked ‘who’s this guy make $30,000 a year and handling PR accounts and doing a column?’

“That’s when I got in with the Japanese. One door closes another opens. We’re having dinner with a guy who was the sales manager for Desilu Productions who asked what we did. I said, we’re in PR. O’Brien had written me a letter two days earlier that said, “get in with the Japanese because they need people. This was around 1959/1960. (The sales manager was also involved with a PR organization called IPR.) He went back to New York and made me the West Coast guy for IPR. This fellow running the operation in New York turned out to be a rat. I had done the Korean Ski Team at the 1960 Winter Olympics (Squaw Valley, California). And he refused to pay me because he said I did a lousy job. I had gotten the team covered by every wire service. O’Brien got mad at this and he had a guy at the New York Post do an investigative reporting job on this guy. They murdered him in print. I called Tokyo and told them that they had a bad guy working for them in New York. He was taking all their money… He had $20,000 to $30,000 coming in from these accounts each month and he didn’t even have a secretary. The Tokyo office sent some one over to fire him and they awarded us four great PR accounts in return: Mitsui, Toshiba, Nikko Securities and the New Otani and we’ve had them for 20 years.”

May 26, 2005 – Introducing my Friend Don

May 26, 2005 – Introducing my Friend Don

Sometime in 1980 I sat down with a tape recorder in a San Francisco Restaurant and asked Don S. to tell me a story. With Don that was the only prompting he needed. I needed a tape recorder to capture the steady stream of words that poured out of him any time he spoke. He stood six feet tall, a big frame guy with an imposing yet engaging presence—you just liked being around him: a 60-something man with the pent-up energy of a adolescent child. What follows is a portion of what he said. I’ll provide the rest as I extract his words from the background noise of the restaurant and the conversations going on all around us. Ev is Don’s lovely wife and lifelong love. Where the people Don mentions are still alive, I’ve used capital letters to protect their names. Some of the names are not spelled correctly—I neglected to have Don spell them for me as we spoke. Where possible, I’ve tried to find the correct spelling. Also, I’ve tried to keep true to the way Don spoke to me, making changes to correct the meaning of what he was saying.

“The BART system was my idea. If you can, get Cyril Magnin (apparently Cyril was financing ML for San Francisco City Supervisor in 1945 by retaining Don to be get ML elected) to tell about how I got ML elected supervisor with a newspaper called the Straphanger. (Ev: Seriously, we have a copy of it around). ML didn’t have a chance. He was (in a) panel—you have to get the figures from either ML or Cyril—but ML’s chances were so bad—in a panel of 20 people running for supervisor, he was 20th—that Cyril called me in and said “I’m not going to give you any more money for the campaign because—and I want you to quit wasting your time—he (ML) hasn’t got a chance. So I went on the cuff for 100,000 copies of this newspaper called the Straphanger.

“ML didn’t have a single labor vote—he didn’t have many (vote) at all…. So I went to elevator operators in his building and I said, “Are you going to vote for ML?” Anyway I got 20 or so union people and got them to endorse ML and underneath their names I put the union they belonged to. Nothing wrong with that. (Actually, the Straphanger listed 13 endorsements on its front page some showing names followed by their union affiliation—Gus Katsarsky, office for Steam Fitters Union, others the union itself—National Maritime C.I.O. Union. Big headline: “ML for labor, labor for ML.” (Actually, the headline read “ML For People.”)

“And then I had that he was going to change the street signs because no one could read them, which came about (the headline read “Let’s Have Street Signs That Can Be Read”). I also said he was going to get rid of all the street cars and I drew a cartoon with the caption “There was a lady named Futter who rode on the number two Sutter, it giggled and twisted…da da da…and turned baby’s milk to butter. In a picture in the paper, she’s carrying her baby. (Actually the limerick reads as follows)
(“A strap-hanger named Van Futter
Has to ride on the number two Sutter
It shakes and it shimmies
Til it gives you the jimmies
And turns babies bottles to butter.”)

“And ML promised them a new transit system for the whole bay area and new street cars and to improve the airport. I don’t recall how many other things but by golly he got in and he got the BART system started. He was elected Chairman of the Board of Supervisors first time out. He stayed in politics until he got beat out for Congress and he never tried again. He didn’t use me for his Congress bid. (Ev: he never used Don again.) He got in with political advisors who told him that I wasn’t a political PR man. I never really went after the position in his campaign either. (Ev: our one and only political venture). One and only time.”

JM: Is ML still around?

“Oh yeah. He got a full page in the Examiner the other day. He’s president of the Trial Lawyers Association. He was the lawyer who took the case of a woman hurt in a cable car accident that caused her to have a change in sex drive. He sued the city and got a couple million dollars for her.
…

“I’d been a singer for 10 years and I was on radio almost every day for over ten years. I was performing on NBC—KFRC the network’s local affiliate in San Francisco. I was with Phil Harris Orchestra, which was at the St. Francis. That’s where I met Ev. I was living at the St. Francis when I was 19 or 20 years old. I came down from Montana. I’d won the Atwater Kent Singing Contest for Montana and I placed second in the San Francisco for the Western States. The manager of the hotel, Jimmy McCabe, thought I had a gift, thought I could learn. He hired me and put me in the Sunday Concert Orchestra singing light operatic music at the St Francis every Sunday afternoon or evening. Then he put me into the orchestra as a lead singer. I sang all the Sinatra songs with the orchestra. (Ev: Crosby came on NBC network) I would go on the air for 10 minutes from quarter to 11 until five minutes to 11. Crosby was on at 10 minutes past 11 to 11:20 on the same network.

“Phil Harris dropped me because I married Ev. In those days you couldn’t be (married and) in show business. He said you can’t come with me because you’re married. He was on his way to Los Angeles to be on the Jack Benny Show. He said, “you’re throwing away your career.” I did a common man King Edward. I married Ev and lived to regret it, ha ha. (Ev: all the time he was singing he was also doing art work. He had a studio in the lobby of the St Francis.) I had a studio with a fireplace in it. I was designing candy boxes. I did all the candy boxes for (tk). I did 250 designs for candy companies on the West Coast. I won three packaging awards during that time.

“In school I had no interest in anything excepting the school paper. I excelled in English because I was always editor of the school paper. I put out my first school paper in San Diego in the 8th grade. I went to school all over the United States. My father was an engineer and my mother and he didn’t along too well. (Ev: he was raised with the Seven Day Adventist faith and he would go to these schools where he would do something they didn’t like and he was expelled.) They wanted me to be an evangelist and all I could think of was being put into the position of going (abroad) and converting the heathens to Christianity… For eight years, Ev and I represented a Japanese sect in America—converting Americans to this Japanese form of religion. (Ev: before San Diego, you were much younger then about 9 years old when you put out your first paper in Missoula or where ever it was and I think it was remarkable because he not only put it out but he sold ads and collected money for the ads…) I could do anything circulation, editing, etc…

“I came to California before the Atwater Kent Contest. I was in California before in Mountain View. I talked a Methodist minister into letting me sing hymns. The minister would say his sermon and I would come in a do a song. We called it Sermon and Song. That went on for year. I really enjoyed that and I thought I might like to be a religious singer. So I went to San Jose and spoke to the CBS affiliate (KCSM?). I got an Adventist minister who thought it was a good idea even though I was considered the black sheep of the Church. He figured on the radio no one would know the difference. We put this on and it became the “Voice of Prophesy” which was on 400 stations nationwide. I would estimate that millions of dollars have come into the Adventist church through this media. I did this for a time and then they replaced me with a quartet. I have a chip on my shoulder for this religion because I spent so many unhappy years in their schools and I didn’t know that—the flower children hadn’t come along then and I didn’t know you could rebel against your family at 15.

“When I was approaching 30 I was with Meredith Willson on NBC after I left Phil Harris. Willson had an orchestra on NBC. And I sang in Hollywood with Ben Alexander who had a show. I worked in hotels, nightclubs. I worked several years: seven nights a week without a day off in nightclubs. When I was approaching 30 (Ev: One time he was singing … and it was jammed packed and he had just made his way in. Our son was only a baby at that point—I think, six weeks old. He telephones me one night and says ‘I’m leaving and going to Los Angeles’—right out of the clear blue sky. ‘So and so is opening a brand new … down in Corona—called the Merconium.’) It was built at the beginning of the war for the navy as a recuperation center for naval officers. (Ev: they want to go down and I’m leaving tonight. Doesn’t give anybody any notice. He says, ‘You pack up everything and come down.’ Here I was with a baby. Anyway we get down there and the man had no idea of hiring Don. He was just inviting Don to come down for a weekend. So there we were.)

“He gave us a house and for several months I had an orchestra and we played rotary clubs and so on. (Ev: that was his first public relations job.) I drove all over Southern California in a big Stutz. During this time I tried out for the Great Ziegfeld. They liked the idea that I was named Steele. John Steele was the singer with the Ziegfeld Follies. So they thought it was very good if a Don Steele sang the song “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody.” So I went down and I auditioned with MGM for about five times for the part. I had a falsetto high C. Tony Martin was also trying out and he could hit the full note. So he won and I lost. To be second in Hollywood is to be in the desert. That kind of broke my heart. (Ev: the only time and he came back.) I came back to San Francisco. (circa 1936)

“Yeah, I realized then that I had (a lot of) competitors: Tony Martin, Frank Sinatra, Dick Haynes (Ev: Perry Como) Perry Como, the Eberle Brothers—Bob Eberle—with Tommy Dorsey. I was closer to Eberle in style than any of them. So I got together with Perry Como and I said ‘I sound so much like Eberle’ and he said ‘I sound so much like Crosby,’ so he quit to become a barber and I quit and became a press agent. (Ev: He (Como) came back later.) He came back later but he was a barber for about three years after he left the Ted Weems orchestra. He was with Ted Weems when we had this conversation and I was the Master of Ceremony at the Deauville, which is where Macy’s (on Union Square in San Francisco) is now.

“When I really quit, I was booked into the Golden Gate Theater and was held over for five weeks. At the end of the fifth week—I was doing five shows a day so there wasn’t much room to get out and run around. I did a lot of thinking. I could hardly get off the stage because of signing autographs. April 17th 19xx that was the last time I ever sang.

Don’s midlife crisis in the next installment.

May 25, 2005 – Seeing the World Through Another’s Eyes

May 24, 2005 – Seeing the World Through Another’s Eyes

I’ve mentioned my friend Don S in an earlier blog. He passed away a while back. I’ll have to look up when it actually was. It’s terrible not to remember the date someone who meant something to you passed on. I only bring this up because Don was beyond retirement age when I met him but he was still active in his public relations firm. He had a network of friends that included the movers and shakers of his generation, actors, musicians, politicians, journalists, scientists, as well as the everyday guys like me. He treated them all with the same respect and received it in kind. He and his dear wife E, a native Californian and native San Franciscan who lives with her grand daughter in Southern California now, believed in a religion that practiced what in simple California terms can be summed up as spreading good Karma. No good deed went unrewarded, the two of them vehemently believed. It was something that I most admired about the two of them.

Don lived a charmed life. He was born with a beautiful tenor voice that earned him a living as a headliner at the St Francis Hotel in the 1930s. When radio went looking for talent, they found Don singing in San Francisco at the St. Francis and Bing Crosby in Los Angeles at the Coconut Grove. NBC put both of them on one after the other late night and everyone in earshot had the pleasure of his voice just like those well-heeled folks listening to him live. He sang with some of the big bands of the era. He even took a turn at being an actor. He auditioned for a part in a musical and his competition was Tony Martin. Don recalls loosing the part because Martin could hit a note he couldn’t quite reach. Sometime in the late 30s, he gave up his life as a singer and became a successful columnist for one of the San Francisco papers. I forget which now. He was also the restaurant critic and for a long number of years had tables waiting for him in all the best restaurants of the city. He moved from journalism into publicity and made a number of clubs and restaurants in San Francisco famous: Bimbo’s, the Forbidden City—a Chinese nightclub restaurant featuring Chinese singers and dancers performing western cabaret. He was also instrumental in getting the Hungry i off the ground. Mr. San Francisco, Cyril Magnin—founder of the up-market women’s clothier Joseph Magnin, Co., since purchased—had asked him to help the aspiring political careers of at least one City Councilman. As you can see Don was multifaceted and found interest in everything around him.

He had moved from publicity into public relations becoming affiliated with a group of small PR shops located around the world, some with a handful of people, others with larger staffs. I never saw him with more than himself, E, and a couple of clerical support staff. In the late 1960s his clients were the large Japanese conglomerates, Hitachi, the New Otani Hotel among others, who were looking to find U.S. partners and Don’s address book provided his clients with the right high level contacts. He arranged golf outing at Pebble Beach and the other great courses in the U.S. where these powerful men could meet and build relationships. When I met Don—I don’t recall how he got my name—he was pitching a small Silicon Valley start-up who happen to have, as its advisor and board member a well-known scientist on the Manhattan project. He needed me to write some press releases and a media background piece. I produced the materials and the next thing I know, Don had gotten them a quarter-page editorial piece in Business Week. The company never became a giant but it’s still around.

This was during the early 1980s and Northern California wine was starting to get an international reputation. Don had Geyser Peak Winery as a client and the owner wanted to promote the idea of wine in a can. Don got them a nice write up in Business Week but the can never took off. It was during this time that Don discovered the computer and he took to it with complete abandon. I continued to write for him on occasion, but more often than not, he would have me come into the office to talk about computers so he could get into the language—use the terminology correctly. He and E had IM and I over to his house on Russian Hill—a 180-degree view of San Francisco Bay on occasion—it was always a treat. The middle of the 1980s, high tech went into a slump and the prosperity in Northern California likewise felt less prosperous. Don had to downsize and move from the upper floors of a high rise office building on Market near 3rd Street—on the southwestern corner of Market and 3rd—to a third-floor office with an entrance on Third rather than the grand entrance on Market.

His network of PR companies were all experiencing the same changes Don was—clients were moving away from small shops to larger agencies with big names and national and international offices. Only the Japanese clients remained loyal to the end. As Don hung up his shingle, they invited Don and E for a two-week stay in Japan at the New Otani Hotel. Business Class roundtrip airline accommodations, they were feted throughout the time of their stay. Don could never quite retire, though. One day he was walking on the sidewalk in front of the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Sutter Street in San Francisco. He blacked out and fell. The hotel doorman called an ambulance and he was taken to the hospital where the doctor found he had experienced a stroke. A month or so later, he invited IM and me to have dinner with him and E. He had returned from the hospital and had gotten his strength back. When we arrived Don showed little sign of any debilitating effect from the stroke. He spoke his rapid-fire speech with its colorful language—he wrote the way he spoke and I loved listening to him and reading what he wrote. After dinner, he and I sat sipping the last of the wine we had for dinner. He turned to me in a somber tone and asked if I felt he owed me anything. I told him no, it was the other way around I was in his debt. He smiled and told me we were even. It wasn’t long after that, he passed away in his sleep.

Don taught me a lot about the world. When I met him he was a bit older than I am now. He was experiencing then what I’m experiencing now. The world he knew was fast being lost in the past. All the people he knew who had not achieved the recognition of super stardom like Bing Crosby were unknown to increasing numbers of those around him. I barely knew Phil Harris—a bandleader Don sang for; I vaguely knew the Manhattan Project scientist who headed the small start up he represented; I knew Cyril Magnin, but I doubt anyone reading this blog will know that name—I can’t “google” him and get any information; I knew Tony Martin as a kid but unless you’re into old movies the name is not readily recognizable. All the people Don knew who made the world work had been replaced by a new generation who were making the world run in an entirely different way. They wanted to work with people who shared their life experience, not someone from an earlier generation, who shared little in common with them.

I am now seeing in those younger than me what Don saw in me. I wish he were still around so I could tell him so.

May 24, 2005 - Lunch at Faz Restaurant Sunnyvale

May 24, 2005 – Lunch at Faz Restaurant Sunnyvale

I had lunch today at Faz Restaurant in the Sheraton Hotel near the junction of Mathilda Avenue and California Highway 101 and 235 with Mr. G, a VP at a small start-up company in Mountain View making audio accessories for the burgeoning MP3 player market. I first met Mr. G when he was a VP at a larger Silicon Valley semiconductor company and I was a magazine editor over fifteen years ago. As with most folks who have kicked around the Santa Clara Valley electronics industry, we kept running into one another until one day in 2000 we found ourselves at the same company, a start-up with ambitions of being acquired for an ungodly amount of money. By this time we’re both older employees in our 50s, but age was not a consideration on a job market where talent was scarce and wages were being bid up to acquire that talent. All things come to an end, as did the glorious days of the venture capital inflated dotcom bubble. As the implosion took place I was first to be let go and he followed soon after.

Mr. G’s strength is his Rolodex and his years of experience selling semiconductor high tech. His contacts provided him a sporadic stream of consulting gigs. He explained that he often worked on projects for a few months and was let go when the project completed. He recounted the one consulting job where he was doing the job for someone the new CEO of the company wanted but had to wait for. The job he has currently, he came by during an angel investor gathering, “speed dating but the participants are interested in a financial relationship.” Mr. G asked the CEO about his company and afterwards asked him what he needed beside money. “I need a VP of Business Development.” Mr. G said, “that's what I do, hire me.” The CEO was interested and several meetings later, Mr. G has a new business card and is selling consumer MP3 player accessories. He’s in good humor today as he recites his story.

I asked him about his experience with start-up companies—he’s been through quite a few in the past several years as an employee as well as a consultant. “Start ups are always looking for money,” he said. I imagined an infant’s craving a constant flow of milk. “You need money to get the product developed, then money to market the product. It never seems to stop.” Was that the case for his new company? “They developed the product on their own funds, he says after being encouraged by a customer who needed what they were building. The product got developed and the customer purchased enough product to get the business started. The one order begat more orders and the company began to grow. The need for money never goes away, Mr. G pointed out. Now, the money is needed to expand production and continue R&D for the next new product.

I asked him what it was like trying to find work. It wasn’t pleasant he recounted. It seemed that all the places headhunters sent him to interview, the guy on the other side of the desk was a 35-year-old, who looked at Mr. G and saw his father. Mr. G looked across the desk and saw his son. I knew the feeling. I had seen a number of 35-year-olds behind desks myself. It’s age discrimination pure and simple, but if I were the younger guy or gal, I probably wouldn’t want to hire my dad either. During the last time I looked for work, I was advised by a headhunter that at my age I needed to find people I knew who would create a job for me to take advantage of my skills. As I look back on my life, the first few jobs out of the Navy and later when I graduated college were the only ones I ever got using my resume.

Mr. G observed that headhunters had likewise changed. No longer were they the independents that used their Rolodex and relationships to place guys like Mr. G and me. Most had gone out of business in the last downturn or were absorbed by larger ones. And behind the desks of all those larger firms were 35-year-olds, who saw a difficult placement on the other side of the desk. Someone looking for a job in this market can expect to spend up to two years trying to find permanent employment, Mr. G contends. Still, the market is not biased when it comes to getting work. College graduates are looking at the same difficult job market, not because the economy is depressed, but rather because of increased competition from outsourced labor abroad. Why hire an American worker with a college degree and demanding a high salary and benefits package when you can hire an equally qualified employee abroad for a tenth the salary and benefits cost.

And those benefits are the next casualty of the American way of labor. Retirement plans at giant corporations, most recently United Airlines, so grossly under funded that workers can only expect a fraction of what had been promised them. The situation isn’t much better for workers who invested their 401K money themselves. Mr. G recalls a friend of his who had worked for a large telecommunications company and had banked their entire retirement on company stock when shares were selling for $100 a share. That stock now is worth $3 and that nest egg has been destroyed. Pick a name for the large company: Worldcom, Enron, the list goes on. I had a friend who had banked heavily on Cisco and had lost considerable value from his retirement account.

Our lunch was over. My salmon wasn’t bad and Mr. G’s Mediterranean platter was adequate as well. You might think that our conversation would have left me depressed, but I was quite the opposite. I had enjoyed the company of someone of my generation, who shared the same life experiences and who viewed the world from the same frame of reference. It didn’t hurt that he picked up the tab.

May 21, 2005 – A Scottish Wedding in Kilsyth, 2003

May 21, 2005 – A Scottish Wedding in Kilsyth, 2003

The last major event of our stay in Scotland during the weeks of August 3rd and August 10th of 2003 was the wedding of IM’s nephew, MS to his long time significant other LS. I’ve known MS and his younger sister LR since they were both children. IM and I met them during our first trip back to Scotland to introduce our daughter ME, then barely two years old to her Scottish relatives. IM’s brother WS was marrying YS with her two young children who were close in age to the two children MS and LS have at the time of their wedding. I find comfort in this sort of symmetry. Both couples would have civil marriage ceremonies not a more serious church wedding. IM and I watched MS grow in jumps as our visits were typically every fourth year. We saw the shy pre-teen; the moody teenager; the young man getting married for the first time—it didn’t last; the young man confronting and overcoming a serious medical condition—as a celebration of his victory, he ran the Glasgow Marathon; the moving in with LS as the two set up housekeeping together; the birth of their first born—an adorable young son; the birth of their spirited beautiful younger daughter; and now their marriage: a half a lifetime in fast forward.

It is Saturday morning August 16th and IM and I had just returned from our trip to the Isle of Skye. WS had retrieved my rented kilt along with his own from the clothier in Sterling where we had hired them earlier that week on Monday. WS was wearing the Millennium Tartan, I the Royal Stewart. The Millennium Tartan is the color of new grown grass; with dark vertical and horizontal stripes that frame squares of green. In this checkerboard pattern, every fourth square contains a field of light purple, the color of heather—that grows abundantly in Scotland, especially in the Highlands. Completing his kilt ensemble was a darker green vest; white high collar shirt and matching green bow tie and short tuxedo-style green waistcoat with tails; white kilt hose with Sgian Dubh (the knife originally hidden in the hose) and Ghillie Brogues—shoes provided as part of the kilt rental; and a sporran—purse or pouch hung from around the waist to carry articles otherwise found in pockets.

My kilt was the Royal Stewart Tartan, my wife’s IM’s clan tartan. The dominant color is rose red with two dark grey vertical and horizontal stripes an inch in width separated by a red stripe an inch or wider in width. Down the middle of each vertical and horizontal stripe are two very thin stripes separated by narrow stripe of dark gray. One of the thin stripes is red the other varying colors. Along the top of the uppermost and along the bottom of the lowermost gray horizontal bar is a thin blue stripe. The rightmost and leftmost gray vertical bars have the same thin blue line. Collectively these gray vertical and horizontal bars frame squares of red around the entire kilt. The result is the Royal Stewart Tartan, which I wore with black waistcoat, bow tie, and vest. A real Scotsman does not wear underwear with his kilt. That was made clear in a photograph of the Scottish Black Watch Soldier shown lowering the British Standard from Government House—the official residence of Hong Kong's British governors—during the handover of Hong Kong to China: a gust of wind lifting his kilt to reveal his left buttocks.

The wedding was to take place at Colzium House in the town of Kilsyth. Colzium House was originally built in 1783 with a newer addition in 1861. In 1930, Town Clerk W Mackay Lennox bought the estate and when he retired deeded the property to Kilsyth Burgh, now part of North Lanarkshire, in memory of his Mother. Architecturally the structure mixes traditional Scottish with the more modern Renaissance. Colzium House has a long curving driveway to its main entrance. The facility consisted of a great hall that resembled the inside of a medieval castle: polished light colored wooden floor, high ceilings and crests and coats of arms decorating the walls. Adjacent the great hall on the right was the new addition where the wedding ceremony would occur in the presence of a Scottish lady, equivalent of an American Justice of the Peace.

The groom’s mother YS wore a beige pants suit while IM wore a pastel green dress both perfect for this bright, warm summer Saturday. We all jumped into the hired Mercedes limo for the short drive to the Colzium House in the town of Kilsyth. As we drove up the long curving driveway to the main entrance of the estate, you got the impression of visiting a Scottish nobleman’s estate—the horse drawn carriage conveyance of the past replaced by a fancy automobile. We were not the first to arrive at the entrance of the main hall. Others already assembled were awaiting the arrival of the bridge and groom. The groom arrived first with his best man and was swarmed by well wishers shaking his hand and slapping him on the back in congratulations. When the bride arrived, the scene repeated with all the little girls swooning over the bride’s flowing white wedding dress. Her two accompanying maids of honor—both her sisters—wore lavender dresses.

The side of the great hall—where the guests would assemble for dinner after the wedding and dancing later in the evening—fronted a large manicured lawn, about half the length of and as wide as a football field. It was surrounded by flowering shrubs and trees with an occasional tree within the field of green. After the greetings of bride and groom by the entrance concluded, everyone drifted over to the lawn following the bride and groom who were being ushered there by a tall thin photographer dressed in green tartan and black waistcoat, vest, and tie. He was the husband of one of the bride’s many sisters. He wielded a Nikon single-lens reflex digital camera with a Nikon lens large enough to accommodate a wide range of shots. He had been practicing on his children and the children of other guests. The resulting shots show a collection of kids, frolicking about an open expanse of green lawn: each child alone or in a group caught with an expression of glee, excitement, or playful mischievousness. When the bride and groom and their families made their way to the lawn, the photographer turned his attention to the adults.

Shot against the green landscape, the groom’s son, father, and best man all dressed handsomely in kilts produced a shot right out of a Scottish past. The picture was brought into more modern times as mother, aunt and I joined the picture. The photographer repeated the process for the bride and her family, mom and sisters all beaming with the same excitement that was so clearly evident in the face of the bride. Posing the various groupings of the bride’s and groom’s family took time to set up and the candid shots he took of the process were more engaging than the posed pictures: the groom’s mom slapping her right leg at a joke made at her expense, a contrived expression aimed at the photographer by a maid of honor hamming the camera. As the last of the photos were taken, the guests began to make their way to the new addition of Colzium House where one of the larger rooms had been set with chairs for guests and a small area open set for the lady justice and the bride and groom to carry out the ceremony.

When the time came for bride and groom to make their way to the wedding ceremony after the guests had entered the new addition, the photographer led the way capturing the bride and her two maids of honor as they walk up the path, bride in the middle a maid on honor on each side. Inside the new addition, once everyone was seated the ceremony completed, followed by the cutting of the cake, the photographer kept taking shots throughout. In one sequence of shots, the bride cuts the cake in one frame, looks at the camera and smiles in the next, leans in to receive a kiss on the forehead from her new husband in the third, and finally both look up at the camera in the last. The wedding party then filed out of the new addition and made their way into the great hall set up with rows of round tables from front to back. One long table along the wall looked out of four equally spaced narrow tall windows onto the lawn where everyone was being photographed earlier.

Before the meal service begins, the photographer captures the groom and best man each standing in turn and addressing the assembled throng of well wishers: two happy men each expressing their thoughts and feelings about this moment in time. Then the meal service begins with an announcement made by the head of the catering staff, a tall Scottish woman with a strong voice that carried the length of the hall. She announced the meal and what time the evening reception would begin. By now the sun has begun to warm the great hall and all the men shed their heavy waistcoats.

After the meal completes, the guests assemble outside for more picture taking and visiting. The photographer’s pictures taken during this interval of the day show the happy couple wandering about the enormous lawn, arms around one another, marital bliss—not bad for a couple that have lived together for over a decade and have two lovely children, their older son entering middle school. The groom is a dead wringer for George Clooney and the bride is a brown-haired beauty with a cherubic face that always seems to smile. They have a story to tell these two but I’m not the one to tell it.

The photographer’s pictures next show the group reassembled in the great hall, which has been set for dancing, tables along the wall, a bar near the entrance, and a disc jockey at the opposite end encouraging everyone to get up and dance. Most of evening’s dances are the typical ones you hear at any wedding, but as the night wears on, the disk jockey occasionally plays a Scottish folk song and everyone breaks into the folk dance associated with the music. The alcohol accompanying the festivities was making the dancers better or clouding my judgment. I suspect both. I seem to recall the disc jockey playing “I Belong to Glasgow,” to which everyone sang along including me. The photographer sent me a disk with all his pictures a week after IM and I arrived back in the states. I took every one of his pictures, the product of a great eye, and I turned them into a Quicktime movie set to the music of Celine Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On.” The bride was pleased.

May 18, 2005 – In The Home of The Clan MacLeod

May 18, 2005 – Visiting The Home of The Clan MacLeod

During our visit to Scotland in August of 2003 my wife IM and I spent a week touring the Highlands: a couple of days with IM’s brother and sister-in-law and the rest by ourselves. Our companions left us after we had spent a few days in the town of Strathpeffer slightly north and east of Inverness. The road from Strathpeffer to Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye off the northwestern coast of Scotland takes under a half day to drive. We left early on Wednesday August 13th. IM’s brother and sister-in-law accompanying us as far as Beauly, where they took the A831 east the short distance to Inverness to return the way we came. We took the A833, which headed south and west toward Drumnadrochit. There we stopped briefly to take photos of Urquhart Castle, a medieval fortress set in a strategic Lochside location, midway the length of Loch Ness's western shoreline.

Urquhart Castle is built on a rocky promontory jutting into Loch Ness and commands extensive views. Surrounded on three sides by the deep waters of the loch and easily defended from the landward side it is an ideal site for a fortified residence. And, the surrounding fertile lands and waters provided plentiful crops, fuels, fish and game. Occupied for 500 years, it was abandoned after The Revolution of 1689, during which the castle was badly damaged and never repaired. We drove on from Drumnadrochit on A82 the length of Loch Ness, a narrow long Loch famed for housing the Loch Ness monster—no sighting on this trip. IM and I had driven this road before but what we had noticed this time was the large increase in visitors to nearly every site along the road. The larger numbers could be attributed to the time of our visit—August is the busiest month for tourism throughout Europe, Great Britain included. The Highlands are lush green and the sun is usually shining which also increases the numbers. Packed tour buses were our constant companion along the road and at all the stops along our drive.

We continued on the A82 through Fort Augustus at the southern tip of Loch Ness and on to Invergary, where we turned west on the A87, a two-line winding road through lush purple-heather-laden mountainous terrain. I’m always amazed at the amount of water washing off the mountains of Scotland, clear, fast flowing, and seemingly endless. We pulled off the road driving down a slight incline that took us several hundred yards away from traffic. We got out of the car and felt the solid rock beneath us. We were at the base of a mountain looking up at its gentle gradient rising steadily to a blue sky intermittently hidden by clumps of lazily moving, mist-laden puffy clouds. Near the top of the mountain we could see a steady flow of white water rushing off to the right toward the open water of the Atlantic.

The Isle of Skye is an island accessible by ferry in the south and by the Skye Bridge at the Kyle of Lochalsh in the north, our entry point. The toll bridge, a sleek two pillar structure that arcs in a smooth low-profile curve over the narrow stretch of water separating the Isle of Skye from the Highlands of Scotland, opened in October 1995. From above, the Isle of Sky resembles a lobster with its left claw missing, its tail at the Kyle of Lochalsh. The A87 takes you across the Skye Bridge and up the body of the lobster shaped Isle. It meets up with the A863 at Sligachan that carries on around the western coast of the Isle to Dunvegan. We stayed with the A87, which wound up the eastern side of the Isle through Portree, one of the larger villages on the Isle. A short distance north of Portree the A87 joins the A850 which heads west toward Dunvegan at the northeastern tip of the Isle, while the A87 continues northward on the right claw of the lobster-shaped isle to the town of Uig. We would take that road on Thursday, but today, the A850 delivers us to Dunvegan.

We took our first trip to the Isle in the company of IM’s mother and father in the early 1980s when our two daughters were young girls. We arrived by ferry from Malliag landing on Skye at Armadale. The A851, some of which was one-lane road, ran from the ferry to Broadford, where we picked up the A87 to Sligachan. There we took the A863 north to Dunvegan. We arrived at the town of Dunvegan, a long walk to the castle and took up residence at the Dunvegan Hotel. When I checked in and presented my credit card, upon seeing my last name, the hotel desk clerk smiled and said “welcome.” How much MacLeod I have in me is debatable as my family is descended from freed slaves of mixed heritage as the European features of my grandmother and her ancestors attest.

Our destination this trip was a bed and breakfast inn a few miles south of Dunvegan Castle. We arrive too early to check in so we park in a lot beside the Dunvegan Hotel at the junction of the A850 and A863 and walk to a small row of shops just beyond the hotel on the road to the castle. There we find a small café serving coffee and bakery goods. It’s a most unusual café because upon entering we are confronted with a room full of wooden sailing ships of varying sizes each encapsulated in its own bottle. Beyond the display of ships we find a small seating area with two tables occupied. We take an empty table besides the display of bottled ships and continue our gawking as we wonder aloud about the person with the patience to painstakingly create this flotilla of ancient sailing vessels. Our query is answered with the arrival of the café owner who proudly exclaims that what we were viewing was the product of his labor.

He’s a big-framed Scotsman with longish salt and pepper dark hair wearing a starched long sleeved white shirt with dark trousers. His rectangular face with prominent nose has a small cyst on the right side. We learn his grandmother was from Skye but moved to Glasgow with his mother during the Great Depression. In Glasgow, he recalls his family lived on a street leading to the docks. When he turned 17, he became a merchant seaman and left home to discover the world. He was a construction worker for a time in Australia and Glasgow. A few years back he brought his family to Skye where he learned to be a baker and then opened the café. He had a flare for story telling and managed to string all of this together while bringing us our coffee and pastries and tending to the needs of his other guests. His young son Ian was helping out as well.

When we left the café it was still too early to check in so IM and I drove up for a tour of Dunvegan Castle, which was first built in the 1200s and has been occupied by the MacLeod clan since, possibly the longest occupation by one family of any of the great houses in the British Isles. We parked in the gravel parking lot across from the castle entrance. The castle was just about to open for tours so there were plenty of parking spaces. We queue up at the ticket counter waiting to purchase tickets. Ahead of us was a small boy and his mother, an older man with a young girl—his daughter no doubt, and behind them a young man and woman—German if I guessed their accents correctly—dressed in the garb of touring students (jeans and tee-shirts with backpacks). Behind us is a stylishly dressed Italian couple—older man with attractive woman. The group of us will follow one another around the Castle for the next 40 minutes.

Like most of the great houses of the United Kingdom, Dunvegan Castle is a time capsule of the family that has occupied it for so long: larger than life pictures of the husbands and wives that raised families within its confines, all dressed in the attire of their day. When we first visited the castle in the early 1980s, it was not nearly as busy and there was no ban against flash photography as there is today. I have this one picture taken back then of our oldest daughter beneath a larger-than-life, head-to-toe portrait of Emily Caroline, daughter of Sir C. Ishan Bart and wife of Norman Magnus, 26th Chief of MacLeods. It’s still hung in the same place. An incredibly beautiful woman, Emily Caroline is wearing a broad brimmed pastel colored hat that perfectly frames her long narrow face. Our hatless eldest daughter, ME, also possessing a lovely long narrow face, is pictured at the bottom of the photograph looking toward the camera over her left shoulder, her expression so similar to Emily Caroline’s that you would think they were related.

When we first visited the Isle of Skye, I kept wondering how I would feel coming to a place where those bearing the name MacLeod have their origins. I did not feel the sense of attachment that I thought I might experience. Skye had no more claim on me than the Philippine Islands where I was born, the former being the place where the name I bore originated, the latter the place where I first set foot on earth. Besides California where IM and I have planted roots, the only place that held an attraction to me was the home where my mother and father still lived and where I have spent an ever-decreasing fraction of my time on earth. However, I like this castle and the family who live here. They remind me of endurance and steadfastness. The clan motto is “hold fast” and the family is certainly true to that adage. Dame Flora McLeod, the 28th Chief headed the clan when we first visited in the 1980. She was the driving force behind establishing Clan MacLeod Societies in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. She inherited the estate from her father Sir Reginald MacLeod of MacLeod, the 27th Chief. Sir Reginald inherited it from Emily Caroline’s husband, Magnus.

Dame Flora had two daughters and the youngest Joan had an older son and twin boys. On the death of Dame Flora, the eldest of the twins, John, changed his name to MacLeod and became the 29th Chief of the clan. Just as Dame Flora before him, the new Chief found the title came with immense responsibility. Like most of the large estate of Great Britain, this one had a high cost of upkeep and though the fees charged for tours were offsetting some of the costs, they were not covering them all. Going back to the 1200s, the clan can lay claim to significant lands on the Isle of Skye’s 670-square-mile area (1,735 sq km). This includes a portion of what the people of Scotland consider a national treasure, the Cuillin Hills, which rise to more than 3,000 feet (910 m) and are seven miles in length—a favorite of hikers and mountain climbers. To raise the funds to maintain the property, the Chief offered up the Clan’s portion of the Cuillins for sale. The objections to the sale was swift and loud with the result that a coalition of groups including the Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) and The Highland Council, in association with the John Muir Trust began working with the Clan to provide funds for the upkeep of the castle and estate and the Cuillins would be deeded over to a coalition in some form. As the MacLeods are wont to do, “hold fast.”

We leave the castle following a leisurely walk around the grounds and a tour of the interior. There are a good number of visitors to the castle as the tour buses and full parking lot attest when we left. To get to our hotel, we drive south on the A863 about three or so miles and then turn right into a narrow one-lane dirt road providing access to several farms we can see in the distance. We drive a quarter of a mile on the narrow road dipping into a small valley before rising again, The hotel is on the right as we climb about a third of the way out of the small gully we’d driven down. On a run later in the day, I followed the road as it wound back to the A863, ran south the short distance on the main road to where the one-lane road began and returned to the hotel. The round trip distance is just about 6 miles, which my legs determined was accurate as it took them an hour to make the journey. The view along the rural road south of Dunvegan Castle is of magnificent panoramas across Loch Roag to the Cuillins.

The Dunorin House Hotel where we’re staying,is owned and run by the husband and wife team of Joan and Alasdair MacLean. Their youngest son was tending bar and waiting tables during our stay, a bright young man on his way to college in the fall. Alasdair a jovial stout Scotsman was nearly a foot taller than my five feet, seven inches. His lovely wife Joan handled the greeting of the guests while Alasdair manhandled the kitchen. Both had returned from professional lives to the quiet of this new built rural dwelling they shared with a maximum of ten couples. In our spacious room equipped with modern amenities, we both fell asleep while reading in bed, awakening just in time for dinner, which began and ended in the bar. It was a great meal as I recalled though the dishes we had escape me—I want to say one of us had salmon and the other a game dish: duck or quail.

On Thursday we rose early, had a wonderful breakfast then took a drive up to Portree to spend some time in this much larger town. It is just past 10:00 when we arrive. Portree has a Royal Bank of Scotland with indoor tellers and a walk-up ATM where IM and I replenish our supply of British Pounds. As we approach the bank, we notice the ocean off to the left just beyond what appears to be a drop of a 20 or 30 feet, I’m guessing. I do not venture over to see as we leave the ATM and meander through shops in the town center. Above us is a mixture of clouds, blue sky, and sun lighting everything with an early morning reddish glow. We’re being rained on occasionally as we walk from one shop to another. The rain only adds to our festive mood—just enough to be whimsical, not enough to get us wet. We purchased the usual tourist items, cards, toys and clothes for the grandkids, and small pieces of jewelry—some earrings for our daughters, a ring for IM, etc.

Our urge to shop sated, we decide to drive up to the seaport of Uig the northernmost town on the Isle. You enter the town on the A87, which curves, to the left while hugging the side of a hill. Below is the dark blue water of the North Atlantic. In the distance—at the end of the long left-arcing curve of the A87—is the town and port of Uig with its ferry service to the Western Isles. We arrive around 11:30 and walk about the small village with its tourist shops then walk along the working dock. There is a long queue of cars, caravans, and trucks waiting for the arriving ferry. Here, unlike in Portree, the sun is shining bright and there are only a few hints of clouds painting swatches of white across an otherwise perfect blue sky.

About half-past noon, we end up at a small pub and restaurant with outdoor tables between the tourist shops on one side of the dead-ended A87 and the dock with its large ferry berths on the other. We have a bowl of their fish soup, which was very good. After spending nearly the whole lunch hour at the pub, eating soup and recounting our trip so far, IM and I drove back down to Dunorin House for an evening of fine dining and a restful nights sleep before we head back to Cumbernauld on Friday to prepare for the wedding on Saturday afternoon.

May 16, 2005 – Staying Relevant to Grandchildren

May 16, 2005 – Staying Relevant to Grandchildren

As I played baseball with my grandson MJ last Saturday I recalled playing baseball as a youngster in fifth and sixth grade on a little league team. We lived in Puerto Rico on Ft. Buchanan Army Base just outside of San Juan—a middle-American small town on the northern shore of this small Greater Antilles Island. The place I lived back then had much in common with Pleasanton where my grandson is growing up. However, the world MJ is joining is a world quite different from the world I knew as a child. When I was eight, a bit older than him, television was still in its infancy. Color TVs were yet to come. The 78-RPM record was being replaced by the 33-1/3rd-LP (long playing) vinyl record and for the teenager of the day, there was the 45-RPM record—the dawn of rock and roll was just breaking the horizon with Elvis Presley the pop star of the day. The term “high fidelity” had entered the English language to distinguish lesser quality audio reproduction with the state-of-the-art phonographs being marketed to the masses. The term “stereo” was yet to come. The radio and telephone were just over a half-century old. And computers had just come into the world during the Second World War.

By contrast, MJ inherits a world where there is more mass media than anyone can consume in the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime even. From the time he was born, MJ has being inundated with stimulation. The television set in most households, MJ’s included, is on from the time everyone wakes in the morning until they all fall asleep at night—my youngest daughter and granddaughter, have a habit of falling asleep to Conan O’Brien on late night television. MJ’s house also contains four computers: a Macintosh, his mother uses, a notebook PC his dad’s office provides, and two tangerine Apple ibooks that each of our grandchildren uses for playing games. MJ’s home also contains TiVo, Comcast cable with a few dozen free channels as well as one premium package and on demand movies, a DVD player, and a VCS cassette recorder, not to mention a library of DVDs and video cassettes with movies and television shows for parents and children. MJ’s house has two telephone lines, one with a cordless phone with speakerphone in handset and base station and the other with a fax connection. High-speed broadband access is provided by the cable company, which is definitely faster than the SBC DSL connection I have. Finally, both MJ and his sister EM have a large collection of toys, traditional—dolls and stuffed animals; small trucks, cars, and trains; etc. as well as electronic—Leap Pads, and a variety of V-Tech gadgets. And there are children books, from those intended for the very young all the way to those aimed at the adolescent. Within MJ’s home is enough activity to fill every waking minute of our grandchildren’s lives.

What kind of person will all this stimulation produce? Will it produce someone with a mild to severe case of environmentally induced attention deficit disorder? If MJ’s mother is any indication, it will produce a generation of multi-taskers: carrying on a phone conversation while driving a car and reading directions from a Yahoo map printout, while drinking a Drive-Thru Starbuck Latte. In addition, MJ may be a person who is continuously connected to a circle of friends and acquaintances via instant messaging, e-mail, and always-on pagers and cell phones, thus accessible, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for his entire lifetime.

My wife and I were reminiscing about our childhood and recalling when there was no school how we left home early in the morning and went out to play for the whole day. She and her friends would roam as far as the banks of the nearby River Clyde from her home in Carmyle, a 13th Century Scottish village southeast of Glasgow that was the home of the Clyde Ironworks—where her father worked—when she was growing up. Her stimulation and mine was the world around us, insect bites, skinned knees, trees that had to be climbed, and mischievous pranks that tested the limits of what we were allowed to do.

MJ and his sister gets driven everywhere they have to go outside of home. The backyards of most suburban homes in Northern California are barely large enough to contain the energy of a three-year old like MJ. He needs a park with long expanses of open space to run unchecked for as long as his short little legs will tolerate. Such freedom requires the full-time supervision of an adult, who would be otherwise earning a salary to keep up with the escalating cost of living in this modern world of ours. The result of course is that most children today are given over to the electronic media that surrounds them: DVDs that feature their favorite characters: Dora, Sponge Bob, the Wiggles, all the Disney characters, etc.

Neither the world of his grandparents nor his world is better or worse. They are just different, each with a unique set of challenges that mold the way we each see the world around us. These unique life experiences are also what separate us one generation from the next. The division isn’t so sharp between the baby boomer generation and its off springs—our two daughters. The language of our two worlds are similar enough that we can communicate—though there are ample examples where parent and child say the same words but each understands different meanings. That chasm will only increase between grandparent and grandchild. The challenge for the big people is to somehow learn enough of our grandchildren’s language so as to stay relevant to them.

May 15, 2005 – Passing on The American Pass-time

May 15, 2005 – Passing on The American Pass-time

Yesterday, my wife IM and I went to see out grandson MJ learn about baseball at a school athletic field in Pleasanton, California. The East Bay bedroom community is so like a U.S. city in Iowa or Nebraska. There’s a quaint downtown with a hardware store, lots of mom and pop retail stores, a down-to-earth café the locals queue up to have breakfast in on the weekends. Surprisingly, the small village center has not been overly commercialized with national retail and restaurant chains. In fact, the locals have resisted such attempts. You know it’s a California town, however, by the wine shops on the main street, the British tearoom, where IM and our daughter ME are regulars—it used to be on Main Street but has since moved slightly off Main, and the Mexican food restaurant.

At first glance the city looks ethnically homogeneous: white Anglo Saxons. Each year the city hosts the largest Highland Games in the western U.S. at the Alameda County Fairgrounds, which is within the city limits. (IM and I have gone with our daughters at different times in our lives.) However, the last time IM and I visited our granddaughter’s school for an event, we were both pleasantly surprised by the diversity of cultures represented in the school body—Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Middle Eastern cultures, Europeans, among others. When we last attended a school function all the children were singing “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” “Yankee Doodle,” and a number of other made-in-the-USA songs.

It was the same at our grandson’s baseball events. Fathers and Mothers from around the world converging on the park in Pleasanton to watch their 3- and 4-year olds learn the fine points of playing the All American game of baseball. Like all the others on the field our grandson, MJ, who is only three years old, was learning the basics of catching a lightweight plastic ball. For the baseball infant, catching a ball requires much more hand-eye coordination than most have developed at this young age. Hitting the plastic ball sitting atop a plastic upright that holds the ball at each kid’s waist is a bit easier and most of the young boys and girls were wracking the ball easily from the support.

Running the bases was another mystery to all the assembled infants. The practice involved getting a group of kids to run the bases en masse. Once they had learned the route, the next exercise was to get individuals to leave home, run to first, wait there for a signal and then move to second and third repeating the process at each base to reach home plate. After the group run I watched as MJ and others attempted to follow the lone runner as he made his way from home plate to first. Then, they all followed the runner who decided not to run from home to first but to head out toward second across the imaginary pitcher’s mound. To their credit, the coaches—and there were many of them on hand, had enormous patients. Most were teenagers who understood the infants far better than the parents who had higher expectations of their wee ones.

After training the kids on the individual elements of the game, groups of youngsters were lined up at home plate—there were several baseball diamonds set up, given a bat and instructed to hit the ball, run to first and wait for the next batter to hit the ball. Coaches at each base in the infield made sure that each pint-sized player moved when he or she was supposed to. MJ got to the plate, whacked the ball and at the urging of his mother ran to first base—the kid had made it to first base. As the next batter took his place at home plate and hit the ball—this kid was good and hit a nice line drive to second. In his enthusiasm, however, instead of running to first he chased the ball toward second, only to be caught midway there by his dad and redirected to first, as MJ safely tagged second. Third batter approached the plate, a cute young blond haired girl with twin ponytails. She hit the ball squarely and made a beeline for first as MJ headed for third and the young boy on first tagged second. The fourth batter takes the plate, hits the ball and all runners advance, except MJ, who decides to run off the field only to be snagged by his watchful mom and directed to home base to score.

That was about all we could ask for from our little player for the day and we collected him and his things and headed for home, where grandpa and dad had some homework to do to improve MJ’s basic baseball skills.

May 13, 2005 – What the Fortuneteller Forgot to Mention

May 13, 2005 – What the Fortuneteller Forgot to Mention

Yesterday, I got this call on my cell phone during lunch. I missed it because I was walking through Border’s books on University Avenue in Palo Alto looking for a CD that I knew probably wasn’t in stock. Sure enough a check of their computer system showed that it had to be ordered. I left, reasoning that it was easier for me to order from the Internet than to have them do it. Exiting the rear entrance of Borders I cross the parking lot and end up on Hamilton Avenue and walk the half-block to Waverly where I had parked my car. The phone makes its missed call noise as I drive south on Waverly toward Embarcadero. I punch the call back function on the phone and after a couple of rings my sister VY picks up.

I ask her what’s up and she says our dad fell and broke his leg: talk about being shocked. I asked her how it happened and she said he was walking from the Veterans Administration to the main part of Beaumont Hospital, which sits at the top of Pierce Avenue between North Piedras Street and Alabama Street. From the parking lot you can see Mexico spread out below in the distance to the south. The Hospital sits on the rise that leads up to the Franklin Mountains to the north. As my father was walking down a slight grade, he slipped on a round rock lost his balance and began to fall. He grabbed an adjacent chain link fence to break his fall but caught his leg in an awkward position and gravity did the damage, cracking the left leg in two places.

My father has had a string of bad luck with his legs in the past three years. Several years back he had a hip replacement operation. After the operation was completed and he was lying in recovery, he woke from his drug-induced slumber, thought he was at home, and proceeded to get up from bed and make his way to the bathroom. The new socket popped out as he put weight on the leg and the doctors had to cut him open and reinsert the new ball into its socket. A year and a half later, on the same right leg, his knee had become so painful that he relented and went in again for a knee replacement. Almost two years later, he has still to regain full freedom of motion for the knee, though there were encouraging signs of late. Then this fall broke the left leg between hip and knee, with the knee being badly bruised but not broken. VY says he got fixated on the bruise left knee fearing he would have to have a knee replacement on his one good leg.

What’s bothersome about all this is that my father has always read omens into things that befell him in life. The trouble with his legs must not be boding well in that mind of his. He gets this from his illegitimate German father who for all the time my dad could remember took counsel from a fortuneteller in Augusta, Mississippi, where he lived and was a pillar of the community—sheriff of the county for a number of years, wealthy businessman, etc. He owned a sawmill and my grandmother worked for him, a 16-year teenager, cooking for the wealthy owner. She was an attractive young woman from the pictures I saw of her when I was a child, a mix of Creole and black, like her mother.

She got in family way and my father was the result, a light-skinned, blonde-haired baby from his café-au-lait mother. Growing up my father knew his dad, and spent time with him throughout the time he was at home, and that’s when he got to know his father’s fortuneteller. Before going off to war, he visited her and had a reading. He wanted to know whether or not he would make it through the war. She told him he would, then to his horror she told him he would be banged up pretty bad in a car accident some time after the war. He said, “how can I avoid it?” She said, “you can’t but it won’t kill you.” With the Second World War taking up much of his time, he forgot about the accident that he would live through and concentrated on making sure the fortuneteller wasn’t having him on about not dying in the war.

The military moved my dad around quite a bit and he ended up in Germany in the early 1950s. My mom, my two sisters, and I were living in Mississippi with my grandmother at the time. In Germany my father often went on trips off base to different parts of Germany—this was the land of his father after all. On one such trip, he was traveling in the back seat with another soldier the driver and another passenger in the front. The four were returning to base after a day trip and driving along a high-speed stretch of road late at night. The road abruptly ended in a concrete barrier, which the driver saw too late to stop. He attempted to evade the block and ended up rolling the car off to right of the highway. All four were injured badly but survived. My father immediately recalled what the fortuneteller had predicted.

The right leg was broken badly between the hip and knee. The Army transferred him to William Beaumont for the long recovery, where my mother and sisters joined him, setting up housekeeping in a rented house near the hospital. I remained in Mississippi with my grandmother, but that’s another story. The Army had offered to discharge him with full disability but my father decided to let the leg heal and stick it out for his twenty years in the Army. His doctor back then predicted the leg would give him trouble in his old age, which it did, becoming so painful that he reluctantly submitted to the hip replacement that started his recent string of trouble with his legs.

I spoke with my dad by phone today and found him in good spirits, but feeling a bit foolish that he had fallen. I told him that during my 25 years plus of running, I had a couple of times fallen face first after tripping over an obstacle I had avoided for years. The law of averages dictates that if something unfortunate can happen over the long run, it will. The hospital staff fixed his leg without putting him into a leg cast and discharged him to the civilian rehab center where he recuperated from his hip and knee replacements—I know my dad will be thrilled about that. Nevertheless, that’s where he’s spending the night tonight and for a few more nights I’m sure.

May 12, 2005 – June 1993: Tokyo Where East Meets West

May 12, 2005 – June 1993: Tokyo Where East Meets West

It’s Tuesday, June 14th, 1993 and JA my boss at the Cleveland publishing company I work for and I are checking our bags and getting our boarding passes in preparation for our journey to Japan. Traveling in Southeast Asia back then, the plane of choice was a Boeing 747 and it was a favorite of Singapore Airlines, the carrier that would wing JA and me to Tokyo Narita from Hong Kong Kai Tak. I recall reading a story in the Atlantic Monthly magazine about Boeing. What I remember of the story was how the finished 747 got delivered to the customer—the customer was Singapore Airlines. You can imagine that delivering a 747 would require a bit more than say delivering a top of the line automobile. In fact, I was struck by the ceremony that revolved around the sale. Representatives from Singapore Airlines as well as a complete 747 crew were flown to Boeing’s huge manufacturing facility in Everett, Washington. Boeing spared no expense entertaining these buyer’s representatives.

Once the buyer’s representatives were assured that the plane Boeing was delivering was what they had ordered, they boarded the fully fueled plane with a Boeing flight crew at the controls—the Singapore Airline flight crew strapped in as passengers. The plane took off and headed for Singapore. Once the Boeing pilot determined that the plane was 150 miles off the U.S. coast line, he informed the Singapore Airline representative and Boeing in Everett. At this point, an electronics funds transfer took place from the Singapore Airlines bank to the Boeing bank, once the funds had been deposited, title of the 747 transferred to the airline. The Boeing flight crew left the bridge and the Singapore Airline crew took control of their plane. The tax savings from making the deal in international waters was sufficient to offset the expense of this elaborate transaction. For me, the ceremony of the two flight crews swapping control of the bridge in mid flight after an elaborate electronic transaction occurred resembled the traditional changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace.

I told that story to JA a year earlier in one of our BS sessions over dinner. It had now become part of his repertoire of stories. The Cleveland publisher also owned a trade magazine covering the commercial aviation industry and Boeing was an advertiser. JA was an airplane buff as well and the story tickled his fancy as it did mine.

When we touched down at Narita, JA and I took at cab in from Narita to the Imperial Hotel 1-1, Uchisaiwai-cho 1-chome, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo. My first recollection of the hotel was seeing it during a walkabout in June 1965. I had arrived in Japan after being assigned to the USNS Michelson and was awaiting my ship in the transient center on Yokosuka Naval Base. On a weekend pass, I took the train into Tokyo, got myself a room at the Shimbashi Station Dai Ichi Hotel—the yen-dollar exchange rate was 360 to $1 but on my meager salary, I was lucky to afford the Dai Ichi, considered the “Holiday Inn” of Japan back then—and started touring the city outward from Shimbashi Station. As I walked in the general direction of Hibiya Park, one of the places in Tokyo I would frequent quite often during my time in Japan, I saw the hotel. It was built in 1890 to be a western-style hotel—the first ever in Japan. The wooden Victorian-style Imperial sat across the avenue from the Emperor's palace on the same site the hotel occupies today. In the early 1920s a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed stone and steel structure replaced the old wooden Victorian. The architect employed a motif in his design that made the hotel resemble the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. In 1923, the day the hotel opened, a massive earthquake killed 70,000 in the Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka corridor. Miraculously the hotel survived unscathed. Foreign embassy staff and western news correspondents made it their home in the aftermath of the quake. And the hotel did its parts feeding refugees of the disaster. The art-deco hotel, however, did succumb to later natural disasters and Second World War bombings. It was replaced by the modern high-rise hotel we were now checking into.

JA and I had dinner in one of the hotel’s restaurant. I don’t recall much about the dinner except that JA had a bit more than usual to drink and became loud just before his entree arrived. A full stomach sobered him sufficiently so that we were not ejected from the establishment.

The next morning we were meeting the magazine’s Tokyo correspondent, BP, for breakfast. BP was an ex-patriot American with a Japanese wife and a young son back then. He resembled a character from a Somerset Maugham or Joseph Conrad novel. He was dressed in sport coat over sport shirt and slacks and shod in Hush Puppies or something similar. He was clean-shaven and his brown hair was short but in need of a hair cut. The year before I had come alone to visit Japanese companies for purely editorial reasons and BP accompanied me on each visit. He knew his way around the city and how to survive in a very expensive place on the modest income of a freelance writer. He took me to the foreign press club where he was a member in good standing, showed me a few sights I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. However, this morning BP was hungry. After having a plate of bacon and eggs, he ordered pancakes with a side order of sausage. This was as close as he was going to get to an American breakfast and he was going to get as much as his stomach could accommodate. JA was amazed at BP’s capacity for food. I wanted the two of them to meet so JA knew we had someone in Tokyo and that he was competent. Once the meal was over, BP bade his farewell after thanking us for breakfast.

Our first meeting of the day had been arranged by our sales rep in Japan, Mr. HM of the firm JAC. I had known HM for over a decade and I’ve not found his equal among space sales people anywhere. He was doing a great job for my sister publication but having a difficult time selling anyone on my magazine Electronics, for a whole variety of reasons. Nevertheless, he continued to try and our meetings on Wednesday and Thursday was to sell all the Cleveland publisher’s technical publications. Having an editor in tow made it easier for HM to get companies to meet with us. Japanese companies put stock in titles and positions within companies.

HM speaks very good English. In fact he is so competent as to be able to joke in the language. His favorite jokes are at his wife’s expense and JA and I wonder if HM uses the humor to cover the fact that he is a devoted husband with two kids of high school age. Back then, he and I shared that experience and we would compare notes on child rearing in the U.S. and Japan. We found we faced all the same problems, just slightly different cultural twists. The meetings were productive. HM had pending business at several of the companies we visited and JA help convert some of it into firm commitments.

After our meetings were completed on Wednesday, HM and his boss at JAC took us to dinner at an Italian restaurant close to the JAC offices. In the Japanese tradition we would have been drinking afterwards until the bar threw us out, but JA suggested an early ending to the evening shortly after a nightcap following dinner. Our hosts were probably disappointed that we did not want to get drunk but secretly glad to get home at a reasonable hour. Thursday evening HM and his boss were intent on getting us drunk. They had decided to treat us to a Japanese meal of Yakitori, followed by an evening of karaoke. To my surprise JA did sing after a few rounds of drinks and he held his own when it came to handling whiskey, the drink of choice for karaoke. We finally made it back to the Imperial Hotel around midnight after profuse thanks to HM and his boss for arranging our visits and for a wonderful night of entertainment.

We had afternoon flights out of Narita on Friday. I was going back to San Jose, JA returning to Cleveland by way of Chicago. The trip had been exhausting and I was looking forward to attending a recital our younger daughter was having at UC Irvine—she’s a dance major and the kid can dance.

May 11, 2005 – June 1993: Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel

May 11, 2005 – June 1993: Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel

After our harrowing landing at Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport on June 10th 1993, both my boss JA and I were in dire need of a drink. We were doubly shaken because this was the second time this week we had a narrow escape from a catastrophic event. We kept making morbid jokes about “buying the farm” in Southeast Asia. JA is a big guy, easily a foot taller than me. He’s in his late 50s, with the freckled light complexioned skin that accompanies red-haired Irish men and women. He wears glasses, has a slow deliberate manner of speaking, and loves telling jokes—the trademark of a good salesman, which he was, and still remains, his vice president title notwithstanding. I’ve heard a good number of his jokes since they tend to get repeated meeting after meeting. One of his favorites is intended to convey the Cleveland Publisher’s philosophy regarding its many publications. Upon acquiring Electronics and its sister magazines, we did a dog and pony show to all existing and likely advertisers for the publications. To punctuate the company’s stance on its new acquisition, JA said when it comes to making bacon and eggs, the chicken participates, the pig is fully committed, which presumably was what Cleveland was—fully committed, not a pig.

We clear customs and find a taxi and tell him to take us to the Peninsula Hotel, on Salisbury Road, Tsimshatsui, a grand hotel, overlooking Victoria Harbor, first opened December 11, 1928. The Peninsula sits on Kowloon with an unobstructed view of Hong Kong across the harbor. It has seen a great deal of history in its time. On the afternoon of December 23rd, 1942, Hong Kong Governor, Sir Mark Young—Time magazine described him as a man of the Imperial tradition: Cambridge-educated, a High Churchman, a cricketer and big-game hunter, a stubborn-hearted fighter—surrendered to the Japanese besieging the British Colony. He remained a prisoner there—though I’m sure our accommodations would be a bit better than his.

The hotel—I suspect is one of the reasons JA wanted to make this trip—is a U-shaped building at its base, with the back of the U towering skyward. The hotel was undergoing a major expansion when we arrived, scheduled for completion in 1994. The cab drives into the curved driveway in the center of the U shaped base, where it is surrounded by a couple of the Rolls Royces belonging to the hotel as well as a few other luxury automobiles belonging to hotel guest waiting their turn to be parked or occupied and driven away. It’s past teatime, but before dinner, and the hotel entrance is busy with comings and goings of guests leaving tea or arriving early for a later dinner engagement. Jim and I check in and he and I are escorted to our respective rooms, his, a smoking accommodation, mine non-smoking. When we later visit each other’s room we discover that I got a newer room, but we each have a view of the harbor. After putting our belongings away we meet below in The Bar on the first floor to relax and get ready for a great dinner in Gaddi restaurant, the hotel’s haute cuisine French Restaurant also on the first floor.

JA orders a gin and tonic and I have a glass of champagne as we ramble on about the trip so far, continuing to return to JA’s harrowing escape in Taiwan and the close call with disaster we both experienced a couple of hours earlier. We also discuss the hotel, which has a special place in JA’s heart. He recently remarried after a contentious divorce several years earlier. He and his new bride had stayed at the Peninsula among a series of other equally upscale hotels throughout Southeast Asia. Raffles in Singapore is one I remember him mentioning as well as the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, where we would be staying after our Hong Kong visit. JA waxed poetic about his new bride and their idyllic honeymoon but would become vitriolic when speaking about his divorce settlement. I suspect it was a combination of the Peninsula bringing back the high and the gin reminding him of the low. After a couple of drinks we walked the short distance to the Gaddi where we were seated for dinner. The dining room had only a few guests, as we were early at 7:00 PM. I don’t recall the dinner itself though I do remember feeling a bit awkward at some point during the meal when I spied a full dining room or men and women diners. We were the only two men dining together in the room—a younger oriental-looking man in the company of an older Caucasian man, humm?

I slept in on Saturday, getting up around 8:00—JA had suggested breakfast at 10:00 as he planned to catch up on some lost sleep. I donned my jogging outfit, shorts and a tee shirt and the new counterfeit Nike running shoes I had purchased in the Itaewon shopping district of Seoul the day before. I exited the hotel lobby and joined the early morning runners and walkers that were making their way along the wide promenade that ran both ways in front of the hotel. I turned left with the goal of running about 25 minutes and returning. Despite the early morning hour, the sun had driven the temperature into the high 80s Fahrenheit and the humidity had to be over 90 percent. I was sweating within the first couple of minutes of exertion; something in cooler climes would have taken a good ten to twenty minutes of running. I’m not a competitive runner, managing to do just under seven miles in about fifty-five minutes, when I’m timing myself. Today, I would not be running for time and I was being regularly passed by younger men and women runners, who seemed undisturbed by the heat and humidity. The view around me was stunning—an expanse of blue water separating the promenade from the Emerald-City-like vista of tall concrete and glass skyscrapers comprising the Hong Kong cityscape. The buildings appeared to be floating in the expanse of blue, jutting skyward in a display of wealth and opulence.

Back at the Peninsula after a shower and clean clothes, I meet JA in the lobby for breakfast. I order the two Scottish free-range chicken eggs—I imagine the eggs making the journey from somewhere around Inverness in the north of Scotland all the way to Hong Kong—and bacon, no country of origin specified. Curiously, I remember breakfast but not the haute cuisine meal the night before. Saturday, JA has said we should tour Hong Kong. He wants to show me the sights he and his new bride saw on their last trip out. We take a taxi out to the floating city of Aberdeen and had the taxi wait as we took a walk about. JA recounted his trip here with his new bride and how they had spent time wandering along the pier watching the families in their boats go about their daily routine. I was struck by the wires providing electricity and perhaps telephone communications to the boats and the Styrofoam littering the water surrounding the boats. On the other side of the small harbor were windowed apartments of a uniform gray color and all built in the same narrow and tall boxy shape, one apartment box next to another, the front of each uneven with its neighbor. One box further out, its neighbor set back, the third neighbor down jutting further out than the first. The uneven disarray of building placement relative to one another would incense an anal-retentive person. The other attraction to Aberdeen was the largest floating restaurant I had ever seen, appropriately named Jumbo Floating Restaurant in English. JA described his meal there with his new wife. We found a water taxi and did a short tour around the floating city before returning to our waiting cab to take us back to Hong Kong’s city center.

The remainder of Saturday afternoon was spent shopping. JA had to buy some pricey jewelry for his wife. I found a pair of earrings for my wife IM. Shopping the next day on the Kowloon side of the harbor in the many shops behind the Peninsula Hotel, I bought a wooden Buddha that IM found as endearing as the earrings. Small enough to fit into the palm of my hand, the chubby figure seated crossed legged, had an ear-to-ear smile adorning his cherubic face. He occupies a space in IM’s treasures display to this day.

The remainder of our stay in Hong Kong was uneventful. We dined in the Chesa Restaurant either Sunday or Monday night. I don’t recall which. Chesa is the hotel’s Swiss cuisine restaurant. We had our meeting with local representative on Monday and then spent Tuesday morning trying to sell local companies our publishing company as well as advertising space. We had better luck in Hong Kong than in Taiwan or Korea. Here we were visiting subsidiaries of large U.S. companies. Those we met in these subsidiaries were familiar with our magazines. As we expected no immediate business was forthcoming. I was imagining the creative trip report I was going to write for this trip as we collected our bags we’d checked with the bellman at the Peninsula and loaded ourselves into a cab for the ride out to Kai Tak Airport. There we boarded our routine Singapore Air flight to Narita. I was looking forward to two days in Tokyo before flying back to San Jose on Friday.

May 10, 2005 – June 1993: Seoul Kimpo to Hong Kong Kai Tak

May 10, 2005 – June 1993: Seoul Kimpo to Hong Kong Kai Tak

June 10th 1993 is the fourth day of a two-week journey I’m on with my boss JA a vice president at our Cleveland publishing company. After a first stop in Taiwan for two days, the second leg of the journey took us to Seoul, Korea. This trip was being cleverly financed as our hotel accommodations were being bartered. Our publishing company has a couple of well-regarded hospitality magazines. Large hotel chains reduced their advertising costs by trading hotel accommodations for advertising space in the magazines. The overnight stays during this trip were charged against this barter credit. Writing this largely from memory, I can’t remember the names of the hotels in Taiwan and Seoul.

We arrived early evening at Seoul Kimpo International Airport and once we had cleared customs and retrieved our bags, we got settled into our hotel in Seoul—another five star winner (traveling with a vice president has its rewards). Later that evening we met with the local reporter for Electronics, Kim N.H. He had been our news stringer for over a year by then. Kim is a terrific guy and a great journalist. He supplied us a wide variety of well-written pieces on the goings on within the Korean high tech electronics community. JA and I met him in a small coffee shop near the front of the hotel’s long shopping arcade. Kim and I recognized one another from the photos we had of ourselves in the magazine. I was surprised at the difference between the two-dimension image I had of Kim and his 3-dimensional face. He was about my height, slim, young, and dark-haired. JA and I liked him immediately as he had an easy gracious charm that made us both feel welcome. He spoke English very well and we had an engaging conversation over dinner at one of the hotel’s many restaurant. Kim suggested one offering Western dishes and we were both grateful, each craving a stake and potato meal washed down with alcohol: red wine for me and gin and tonic for JA. Kim declined the alcohol but joined us in our steak and potato faire.

My one regret of that evening was I learned precious little about Kim as he queried the two of us on all manner of topics: the magazine, American politics—William Jefferson Clinton had just taken office as the 42nd President and Kim was keen to know what changes might be forthcoming. JA provided the republican point of view that all hell would be breaking loose. I changed the subject by asking Kim about the Itaewon shopping district in Seoul, something I knew JA was keen on. At the end of the meal, we were waiting for the waiter to return with the check only to learn that Kim had paid the check. We were his guests he insisted and he could not allow us to pay the bill. I lost touch with Kim after the magazine shut down. I continue to feel in his debt for that wonderful evening.

The following morning, I woke early before 6:00AM and ran through the nearly empty streets of Seoul’s city center. The forest of tall building lining the wide multi-lane boulevards I jogged along, made me feel small and insignificant. I returned from my run 30 minutes later, showered and met JA for breakfast at 7:00AM. At 8:00 we met YS with our Korea sales representative firm BCI in the lobby for our day of meetings around Seoul. YS drove a luxurious four-door sedan with air conditioning and all the amenities a car of that time contained. JA was impressed as he took the passenger seat and buckled the seat belt—unlike his previous experience in the passenger seat, the belt worked as expected.

Our day of meetings produced nothing memorable to recount. We were begging for business. Our hosts were attentive and considerate but not forthcoming with anything other than “we’ll discuss your proposal internally and inform YS of our decision,”—definitely a polite “no thanks.” After our second meeting of the morning, YS had invited our host and his associates to lunch—three altogether plus JA, YS, and me. The restaurant was within a block of the office we were visiting so we all walked, entered the establishment and were seated at a round table in a room that was quickly filling with the lunch crowd. YS ordered for the table, a series of family style dishes, one of which—strips of beef and chunks of garlic is what I recall—was cooked on a grill in the center of the table. JA and I both gamely feasted on all the dishes placed before us. The conversation around the table was mostly of the food we were eating. Occasionally YS would engage in business discussions with our three guests.

Two more appointments in the afternoon were followed by a dinner YS hosted for JA and me. He was making reasonable income from representing the Cleveland Company in Korea. Electronics was one of several magazine YS sold space for in the country. Our sister publication, a technical engineering design magazine, produced far more revenue for him, and he wanted to ensure his relationship with Cleveland remained in good standing. He need not have worried. JA was impressed with YS and his company and wanted not only to continue the current arrangement but find ways to expand it further. By this time JA had had a few G&Ts and I was on my second glass of either wine of beer—I can’t recall.

The following morning was Saturday June 12th and JA was intent on hitting the Itaewon shopping district before our afternoon flight from Seoul Kimpo to Hong Kong Kai Tak International Airport in Kowloon. After breakfast, we got a taxi to Itaewon and JA and I walked along the street lined with shops. We went into several as we walked but JA found nothing that arrested his urge to move on, despite the shopkeepers urging of discounts and special deals. After a couple of blocks of walking we entered a store that seemed to capture JA’s attention. It had a good selection of leather goods, but also a collection of counterfeit designer watches that made you feel as if you were at the jewelry counter in Saks Fifth Avenue. JA had a list of items he had to bring back and watches were on the list. He purchased several then turned to a buying spree of designer handbags. The store clerk was beside himself with glee. After he had sated his hunger for shopping he bargained with the shopkeeper to throw in a carry on bag that he could lug his loot away in, this on top of the multiple item discounts the clerk had extended to keep JA’s buying binge going.

Once he had finished JA turned to me and asked if I wasn’t buying anything. I replied that the only thing I wanted was some new running shoes—I was saving myself for Hong Kong. The shopkeeper immediately proffered me a counterfeit pair of Nikes that were surprisingly my size. I tried both on to make sure and then paid for my purchase. We returned to the hotel, packed away our purchases and gathered up our wardrobe—we would have to get our suits and shirts cleaned and pressed over the weekend—and checked out. A cab ride later and the two of us were checking into the Thai Airways ticket counter for our three and a half hour flight. We were both booked into business class: JA had an aisle seat on the starboard side of the plane; I had an aisle on the port side with the mid-ships service island between us. As we took off, the British captain welcomed us aboard in his proper English accent and I started looking forward to a glass of wine once we had reached out cruising altitude and the fasten-seat-belt sign had been turned off.

The flight was completely routine, our third across the East China Sea since arriving in Asia at the start of the week. It was the weekend and JA and I had lost our ties and were looking forward to dinner at our hotel and a day of sightseeing around Hong Kong on Sunday before business began on Monday.

However, under British rule, the second Monday in June was a public holiday: the Queen's Official Birthday. Monday June 14th 1993 was the second Monday in June and we only had one appointment—with our country sales representative CC, and particularly our contact TG. JA planned to discuss renewing the contract between the two as well as expanding business opportunities. TG had not been happy at having to give up his holiday to accommodate our meeting, but did so reluctantly. He had also arranged for one of his associates to schedule morning meetings for us on Tuesday June 15th before our late afternoon flight to Tokyo. As we began our descent into Kai Tak Airport, I was looking forward to disembarking—the pilot’s calming voice announcing the final approach and requesting flight attendants to take their seats.

In the second after the intercom clicked off, the plane violently lurched skyward; the engines screaming from the full throttled exertion the British captain had force upon them. The 747 Heavy lacks the acceleration of say a nimbler rear engine MD 80, but remarkably the huge beast bade its master’s command and began to climb skyward. The force of its climb pushing us all back in our seats, each of us gripping our seat’s armrests with white knuckled determination. The climb turned into a wide looping left hand turn that took us over Kai Tak and reinserted us into the landing pattern of jumbo jets heading into the man made and natural canyon surrounding the airports two long runways. As the plane’s engines resumed a more normal pitch and the plane recommenced a level flight path, the captain came on with the reassuring stiff-upper lip diction that apologized for the sudden jolt. It was unavoidable I’m afraid (or words to that affect). The air traffic controllers mucked up and had had a plane on our runway about to take off as we began our approach. Not to worry we’ll get it right this time round. And he was true to his word.

May 9, 2005 – Cheating Death in Taiwan 1993

May 9, 2005 – Cheating Death in Taiwan 1993

One of the most memorable trips I had as an editor of Electronics magazine occurred in June 1993. I was traveling with my boss, JA, the vice president at the Cleveland-based publishing company that owned the magazine back then. He was flying United to Tokyo from Cleveland by way of Chicago. I was flying American to Tokyo out of San Jose. We both left on Monday June 7th and we met at Narita on Tuesday June 8th where we were both booked on a Singapore Airline flight to Taipei. We made the connection at Narita as planned and then boarded our Singapore Air flight to Taipei—about a three-hour journey. Our hotel in Hsin Chu had provided a limousine service from Chiang Kai-shek Airport. We checked into the hotel after midnight. The one saving grace was the hotel was luxurious. We both had mini-suites and I got a quick bath to wash off the 20 hours of travel I had just experienced and fell asleep waking just after 5:00 AM. I went for a run and returned to get prepared for the day.

The purpose of the near two-week trip was to promote the magazine and hopefully sell some ad space. I was the editorial representative along to describe the magazine’s mission. JA was along to provide as much hard sell as could be accomplished on a first sales call. Our Taiwan representative, UD&P, had arranged our itinerary and accompanied us on our calls to interpret and to provide all the follow-up we hoped these meetings would engender. The details of our visits were routine and not very productive. Our hosts were gracious, listened attentively to our presentations and bid us a pleasant stay in Taiwan. What I remembered most about the trip was the drives between appointments: the sight of new-built modern buildings—awash in advertising spelled out in Chinese characters in the midst of turn-of-the-20th-century Taiwan buildings, the streets of Hsin Chu crowded with cars that were outnumbered considerably by the number of motor scooters and motorbikes, the speakers in our taxis blaring talk radio shows in Chinese—one featuring an American, speaking Mandarin, who would lapse into English (with a New Jersey accent of all things) every so often.

After two days of sales calls, I could tell JA was not pleased with the results—no one was buying what we had to sell. Furthermore, UD&P obviously had not been doing much in the year or two they were in our employ to make locals aware of our company or what we sold. The final straw however was the sales person that accompanied us on our calls, an earnest young woman who had just been promoted from secretary to sales person, I suspect just before we arrived. JA had only praise for her but was incensed that UD&P had not assigned at least a seasoned sales person to us. Also accompanying us was an editor who wrote for the newspaper publishing company that owned UD&P. His purpose was to help open doors that the sales person might find closed to her. For the most part, the strategy worked, but the local companies were more familiar with the English-language newspaper the editor wrote for than the Cleveland publication attempting to get their business.

There we were four of us in our sales person’s small car traveling from our last call on Thursday June 10, 1993 to Chiang Kai-shek airport sometime mid afternoon. She was not a good driver and I’m not saying that because I was in the back seat behind JA. The editor sat beside the driver and would occasionally engage in conversation with JA and me. The two of us in the rear had seat belt, which we used as did the driver. The odd person out was JA who had a seat belt but the buckle failed to latch. On the way to the airport, our driver had the habit of driving in the fast lane but failing to keep up with the speed of drivers in the lane. The result was lots of fast moving cars passing us on the right along the Sun Yat-Sen Expressway. She would move to the right when several cars overtook her then return when the lane was clear. This continued until we exited the expressway and merged on to the four-lane highway that led into CKS airport. At this point, she moved into the right lane and remained there with no indication she planned to give way.

The passengers in the rear seat reconciled ourselves to allow her to pilot the vehicle and since we were nearing the airport it was pointless to try to affect her driving. JA was dozing in the front seat oblivious of the traffic zooming by him on the right. We were nearing the airport when the unthinkable happened. A truck had been tailgating our car in the fast lane using as much intimidation as possible without ramming us in the rear. Our driver, too afraid to pull over and ever more cautious because of sense of danger the truck was posing. When the truck driver realized that the only way to achieve his goal of going faster was to pass on the right, he pulled into the right lane and began to accelerate, he was gaining speed as he came abreast of us on the left and his driver’s side wing mirror clipped the passenger side wing mirror on our car. The force of the impact was just enough to pop the passenger side door. The sound of the impact jolted JA from his slumber just at the moment the driver realized that the passenger door had opened. The driver, shocked by the sound began to swerve from side to side overcompensating first to right as she swerved the car left to avoid the truck, then to the right to avoid running off the road. As she over steered left following the impact the passenger door swung open and JA jolted awake at the abrupt motion. He grabbed the side of the seat with his left hand and kept himself from being ejected at the same time the driver screamed and grabbed his arm. By now, her foot completely off the gas pedal she managed to get control of the car and JA righted himself in the seat. His normally red Irish face and head beneath thinning hair was white with shock and fright. After a moment when the car slowed sufficiently that the danger had passed, we all took a collected sigh of relief as the driver began to profusely apologize. She slowly steered the car into the right lane to allow the sparse traffic behind us, which had slowed when it saw the driver in distress, pass her on the left.

The editor explained to JA what had happened and JA took the driver’s side saying that she had been the victim of a hit and run driver. “Did either of you get the license number?” he asked, to which we both replied negative. I had not thought to look and I’m sure the editor next to me hadn’t either. JA held the door close as our driver continued to apologize as we drove up to the passenger unloading area in front of Singapore Air Lines in Terminal 2 at CKS Airport. JA and I got our bags from the trunk of the aging red Toyota four-door sedan that had nearly been the death of JA. We rolled the passenger rear window down and tied the useless seat belt around the damaged door and the post between front and rear window. It would keep the door from flying open every time the car came to a stop and should get the two of them back to Hsin Chu in one piece. We bade our farewells on the sidewalk in front of Terminal 2 and walked into the terminal to the Singapore Air check in counter. We were both greatly relieved to be winging our way out of Taiwan to Seoul Korea away from the craziness we had just experienced. However this trip had a few more surprises in store for us before we were winging our way home.

May 8, 2005 – The Voyeur

May 8, 2005 – The Voyeur

It is the afternoon of Friday April 29th during my visit to my parents’ home in El Paso a week ago today. After lunch my dad wants to go to Ft Bliss and pick up some wine for me and from there we’re going to visit the collected belongings of dad’s longtime friend, Mr. Charles Upton, now safely stored in a building built to house them. El Paso is remarkably mild for this time of year, not over 70 degrees Fahrenheit. As I flew in earlier this morning on Southwest Airlines, I noticed he desert painted an unusual green in place of its more desolate brown. My father says the region has enjoyed an abnormal amount of rain this year and news reports weeks earlier lauded an abundant blooming of desert flowers.

My father’s ride is a red, four-door Pontiac Grand AM sedan, purchased a couple of years ago from my youngest sister’s closest friend. It’s dependable. My dad hands me the keys and he squeezes into the passenger seat. He’s still have trouble getting into and out of cars because he had not regain a complete range of motion with his right knee, replaced a year ago and a year after his right hip had been replaced. I drive to the base taking Dyer Street south until Monroe Avenue, then turning left and heading east over North-South Texas Highway 54, where Monroe becomes Cassidy Road to the gate into Ft Bliss Military Reservation. In El Paso, the military is still big business and Ft Bliss continues to grow. The guard checks my California driver’s license and my dad’s military id and waves us into the base. Cassidy crosses Sheridan—the right side of which is lined with base houses for officers with families. The left side between Sheridan and Pershing is a grassy park. I had ran along both streets at different stages growing up, as a pre-teen, teenager, and a grown man out of the service myself in the mid-60s.

Military bases are safe havens, places where order rules above all else: 25 miles per hour traffic signs are obeyed—at least when I was younger, they were, no littering, no graffiti, a well ordered world, where kids could pretty much run free without fear of harm, though they could be and were told off by MPs and adults who thought you needed a dressing down for some foolishness or other. A few blocks further along on Cassidy, we come to Marshall Road where we make a left heading north and find the Post Exchange Liquor Store. It’s cheaper here because there are no taxes paid on any of the goods. I find a bottle of Champagne and a bottle of Pinot Noir and we load up and head north along Cassidy and exit the base turning right on Fred Wilson Avenue and head east over the railroad track and turn left heading north of Railroad Blvd, a stretch of road with nothing on either side. It was the road we used to race our Vespa scooters along when I was a kid in high school. We drive north for a few miles then make a left on Threadgill and a few block west we arrive at the lot Mr. Upton sold to my dad many years ago. It now contains a metal building containing pallets of stuff moved from Mr. Upton’s home here to its final resting place.

Inside and on shelves at the back of the rectangular building at the rear of the rectangular lot is all Mr. Upton’s stuff. I look in boxes that I could not access when all this stuff was stored in Mr. Upton’s house. Now, I could open all the boxes and peer in at the man’s collection. The one thing about going through other people’s stuff is you find out their secrets. Mr. Upton liked men’s magazines: a box of back issues of the magazine QUI, as well as the raunchier, “National Screw.” I look through volume 1 issue 3 of the latter and besides the photo spread of attractive unclothed women—now grandparents—there is an interview with Andy Warhol. I’ll admit that I didn’t read the article. The other magazine collection I found was LIFE—issues dating back to the 1960s. I found an issue dated September 11, 1964, devoted to Japan—which I take to help me remember the Japan I knew as a young man. Beside the LIFE back issues is another box containing back issues of a magazine called SEE.

SEE is your basic tabloid, printed on newspaper stock with a color cover. The issue that attracts me is November 1950, which sold for the $0.15 on newsstands. Mr. Upton obviously had a subscription. The only headlines on the cover were “The Walter Winchell Story,” by Ed Weiner and “Night Life in San Francisco,” which is what made me pick the issue. The other attraction to the cover was a model named Roxanne Rosedale, a lovely blond posing in a two piece bikini, light and dark purple stripes running vertically on her top piece and horizontally on her bottom piece. She is standing at the beach, left arm extended along a rock that is about as tall as she is. Waves are washing around her calves as she gazes toward the ocean off to her right, her right arm bent at the elbow, her forearm parallel to the water below.

I’m being a voyeur on Mr. Upton’s private life, what he enjoyed in the privacy of his home, I’m now prying into. I feel a sense of violating his space, like the babysitter or houseguest that rummages about their host’s belongings. Only Mr. Upton will not come back to question my taking two of his magazines. I have the urge to take more, but it is offset by the pang of guilt I experience just taking the two I have already chosen. My father and I leave—curiously; my father does not rummage about Mr. Upton’s belongings. I almost ask him why, but suppress the urge. We return home and during dinner resume our conversation about my parents’ early life together.

May 4, 2005 – Surviving in the 20th Century

May 4, 2005 – Surviving in the 20th Century

It is Friday April 29th and I’ve just arrived home in El Paso after a short flight on Southwest from Austin. I’ve come to spend time with my father and mother and my two sisters, who live in the neighborhood. When you first get home after being away for some time, you spend time getting back into the rhythm of your past life. All of us relate to family in a long worked out ritual. We’re strangers after so many years away and all we have in common is blood and our past together. Now nearing the end of my sixth decade on earth, I’ve been away twice as long as I was ever at home. My parents’ lives still revolve around a daily pattern of close interaction with friends. There’s my uncle SQ on my mother’s side who lives close by. He’s married to a Filipina and has two stepchildren—he has no children of his own from the marriage. There is HM, whose husband died over a decade ago—she’s supporting her one daughter and grandchildren from the marriage. There’s PG, also a widow. Her husband died in a fire some years back. Those are the ones closest to my mother.

My mom and dad were both close to Gene, a man in his 90s, who my parents knew for over 50 years—I mentioned him in an earlier entry. He was a cook in the army and made some memorable meals for the Filipino community when we would often get together to celebrate holidays, weddings, and funerals. His wife Basha, was the taller and thinner of the two, with the stern look of one in perpetual deliberation on some serious problem. The moments when her face would break into a smile were rare. Gene had the body and disposition of the Pillsbury Dough Boy, a round face ready with a smile whenever it turned to you. They were polar opposites and their children reflected it. The oldest, my age and my school mate, HR was as serious as his mother. His two brothers WR and DR, both with the build of their mother and sister CR who shared her father’s rounder shape had their father’s disposition, though with less enthusiasm and extroversion.

Basha died some years back—I forget now the cause. My mother and father were helping clean up and paint their empty house before it was to be sold. The house was one block north and two blocks west of my parents’ house. It was mid morning and mom and dad both watched someone approach the house from the front then circle around to the side as if to enter by the patio door in the reach. Both waited for the door to open and the neighbor next-door to enter but no one did. They walked out the patio door looking for where the visitor might have gone but found no one. Each looked at the other puzzled then smiled and said “Basha” in unison, convinced that her ghost had returned for one last look before she departed this earthly place for good. Convinced that her affairs were being properly handled she went on her way.

Besides friends there is my mother’s family, most thousands of miles from El Paso in the Philippines or scattered all over the world. My mother comes from a large family that lived in Agoo La Union. Her father Luciano’s first wife died shortly after my mother’s younger sister Margarita was born, leaving Mom, her older brother Marion and the newborn behind to grieve. Luciano remarried SQ’s mother and had another six boys and a girl, none of whom my mother knew. She had been given to her father’s brother Domingo to raise in Manila—Domingo wanted Mom to be a companion to his only daughter, Juliana. These details I learned during dinner on Friday as we sat about the kitchen table talking about my mother's early life in the Philippines.

My mother’s father and uncle were both policemen, I learned, but Domingo decided to become an undertaker and went to work for a mortuary on Rizal Avenue in Manila, while Luciano remained a policeman in Agoo La Union. I found a picture of a school class in Agoo—pronounced “a gu o”—on the web, dating back to the early 1900s. It shows a clearing with five large thatched roof buildings extending into the picture, the foremost of which is shaded by a large tree that towers above the roof at the immediate left of the building. At the bottom of the picture are eight to ten rows of children stretching filling the foreground of the picture—easily 500 in total, aligned in as many as 40 to 50 columns. All are dressed in white uniforms. It’s possible that Luciano and Domingo are among those assembled for the picture.

When my mother moved to Manila with her uncle Domingo, she entered a life of comfort. Domingo’s house, which he shared with his common law wife Louisa—they never did get married, was a large flat above the funeral home where he worked. Domingo and Louisa only had the one daughter, though mom could not explain why. Filipino families tend to be large—as Luciano’s family attests. The funeral home was owned by a wealthy woman, who might have given Domingo the job because he was qualified or because he was a handsome rogue, known for his womanizing. (Most Filipino policemen then were lady’s men, my mother declares.) Mom and her cousin Juliana both had their own rooms. The household had a cook-maid—Louisa’s cousin—and a hired male launderer, who kept the household in clean cloths. Mom and Juliana walked the few blocks to elementary school, which sat on a side street off Rizal Avenue. Next to the elementary school, was also a high school. Mom tells me the kids at her school wore uniforms—blue skirts and white blouse with black shoes and white socks for the girls—was it coed? She never said. She explains that at the start of the school year her uncle purchased a dozen uniforms each for Juliana and her and would buy another dozen mid-year.

I asked her about the funeral home and she recalls coming down the stairs into the parlor containing displays of caskets. On occasion she would come down and find her uncle Domingo sleeping in one of them. She would become frightened and would shake him to ensure he was only sleeping. He would rouse from his slumber and return to work. What better place for a nap than in a comfortable casket designed to support the sleeper for eternity? After that exchange, Mom fell silent, no more memories rushing into the present. Mom left home in 1920. A generation earlier, the Philippines had become a U.S. possession in 1898 after defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War. Less than a generation later it would be embroiled in a far greater conflict.

My mother is an enigma, who from a young age learned the art of survival. Given the opportunity to leave home and live with her uncle, she did so without hesitation—she was seven years old when she left her father’s family. She remarked to me that she was the oldest girl and would have been the one to do many of the chores in her father’s household. Mom spent nearly all her young life, apart from her growing numbers of siblings. Her decision to join her uncle Domingo’s family was a wise one. She received a good education while living a comfortable life for the times. Her learning—especially a command of English, acquired from the time she entered school—and her instinct for survival would stand her in good stead for the huge challenges life would throw her way after she left school twelve years later in 1932.

May 3, 2005 - Scotland 2003: Strathpeffer or Bust

May 3, 2005 - Scotland 2003: Strathpeffer or Bust

During our visit to Cumbernauld in Scotland in the summer of 2003 I had gone with my wife IM and brother in law WS to be fitted for a kilt at a men's clothing store in Sterling. I would wear the kilt at the wedding of WS's son on Saturday August 16th. We returned to Baldoran Court and loaded up the two cars with our bags and tested that the cell phones were charged before beginning our trip to a little town north of Inverness. The plan was for WS to lead the two-car convoy. We would stop in Perth for lunch at a famous glass manufacturer on the outskirts of the city.

We found parking for both cars at Caithness Glass and had a buffet lunch followed by a tour of the outlet shop that occupied the back portion of the restaurant. Prices for the colorful glass artwork ran the gamut from a few pounds for flawed pieces all the way to several hundred pounds or more for the more intricate hand made works. Though lovely, they were hardly the types of purchases for a visiting couple from America to carry all around Scotland and all the way back to California. If we were avid collectors IM and I might have opted to do so but we've always traveled light and tended to collect the minimum of souvenirs.

We leave Perth and get back onto the M80 only briefly before the motorway turns into a dual carriageway, A road, the A9. The road is relatively fast from Perth to just north of Duncarty, where the A9 crosses the B8063. Even with the two-lane stretch of the A9, WS and I manage to make good time with traffic congesting around slow moving lorries or the occasional careful driver. A few miles up the road from Duncarty, the A9 widens into a dual carriageway for a mile-long stretch in which WS and I along with a line of other cars manage to get out from behind some of the slower cars and lorries. Along the stretch of the A9 from the end of the dual carriageway, we race the River Tay. It chases us until just north of the town of Dunkeld, known for Dunkeld Cathedral, begun in 730 AD when Celtic missionaries called Culdees built the first structure. The River Tay cuts beneath the A9 just under a mile north of Dunkeld where the B898 T’s into the A9. It resumes its pursuit on the left until it tires of the chase and abruptly turns left just south of Ballinluig and makes a headlong rush to Loch Tay some 12 to 15 miles due west.

We carry on through Pitlochry and further on through Killiecrankie, where the River Garry takes up chasing the A9. North of Killiecrankie we pass Blair Castle located in the Strath of Garry. Whoever held this bit of land was the gatekeeper to the Grampian Mountains and the route into Inverness and the Scottish Highlands. The castle is the family home of the Dukes of Atholl, the present Duke living in South Africa. In 1269, a neighbor, John Comyn, built a castle on the property owned by the Earl of Atholl, who had been away in England for an extended period. The Earl petitioned to and received from King Alexander III of Scotland, his land back along with the castle. Called Comyn's Tower, the structure was incorporated into and is part of Blair Castle to this day.

In the tumultuous history of Scotland and England the Castle has been fought over on numerous occasions. During the Jacobite rebellion it endured the last castle siege in the British Isles. The other distinction the Castle boasts is the home of the Atholl Highlanders, the only private Army in Great Britain, now largely a ceremonial body to amuse celebrity visitors to the castle. Its many famous guest included Queen Victoria who was impressed by the Duke’s private army. Surrounding the castle are the magnificent snow-capped Perthshire Mountains and the many Highland rivers and burns—the habitat of red deer, eagles, and red grouse.

Just a bit north of Blair Castle is the Clan Donnachaidh Center for Genealogy and Scottish History built in 1967 to tell Scottish history from the Clans’ perspective. Located at Bruar, it sits next to the House of Bruar shopping centre, which is where we decided to stop and stretch our legs. The shopping centre was a mix of gift shop selling items of interest to tourist and upscale clothing shops selling kilts and highland attire. All carried overpriced merchandise and I wondered how they could remain in business, though I suspect the constant stream of tourist—the place was overrun when we arrived—provided enough trade to sustain them profitably.

Resuming the journey, we make good time getting on to Inverness. Scottish drivers are just as anxious to get where they are going as American drivers. They're just on the other side of the highway and seated on the opposite side of the car. The first thing you see as you near the city is the wide expanse of Moray Firth to the northeast and the smaller Beauly Firth to the west. A steel bridge straddles the narrow waterway that connects the two. It lies on a northwest plane. Inverness lies on the southeast side of the bridge and our destination is across the bridge and another 15 miles north and east. We have made good time reaching Inverness. It's only a little before 3:00 PM

The drive to Strathpeffer was slow largely because we left the faster dual carriageway A9 at the town of Tore for the two-lane A835. We drove less than 10 miles on the A835 before we joined the AA862 at Maryburgh, traveling less than five miles due north to the town of Dingwall where we made a left onto the A834 for the last six miles or so to Strathpeffer. Not only had the road narrowed with each transition but along the way we managed to get behind a slow moving farm tractor that piled up a line of cars behind it. Only after what seemed like hours but in reality was no more than 10 or 15 minutes the tractor turned off the road and the traffic resumed a normal pace. The towns of Maryburgh, Dingwall, and Tore were small farming communities with a few shops and a collection of houses for the townsfolk. Besides farming the next most obvious large industry is tourism to judge by the number of tour buses sharing the highway with us.

Entering Strathpeffer we were confronted by large stands of trees lining the A834. Beyond the trees on either side of the two-lane road hills covered with trees reached upwards to a beautiful blue sky dotted with small puffs of white clouds. Our hotel, the Ben Wyvis, was on the left as we entered town, a large sprawling Victorian manor house with a long left-curving driveway leading up a slight hill from the highway.

The hotel resembled a block of seven to eight town houses stretching along the asphalt driveway only none of the individual sections had their own access. Only the second townhouse in the block had a wide glass fronted entrance that led to a small, simple registration desk, which was slightly lower than the normal hotel registration desk where the guest and desk clerk see no more than each others’ upper torso. Here both could view each other’s entire torso. Being early we got a choice of parking places as well as a leisurely registration process.

After checking in each couple retired to their adjacent rooms to relax for an hour before venturing out into the town. WS had lingered outside to catch a smoke before joining YS in the room. Irene and I lounged in the relatively spacious room with its single window on the wall directly opposite the door. We had requested twin beds so each would have enough room. Both beds were to the right of the door. The bathroom was on the wall at the immediate left of the entrance. It came with a tub—no shower. Both tub and sink came with the individual hot and cold faucets, but the bath was relatively large, stretching from the sink the length of the bathroom. We had tea and ate the shortbread the hotel had provided. We tried the television to see that it worked and what channels it offered.

Just under an hour we heard WS and YS leaving their room and decided to join them in the hallway. We were off to explore the small quaint Victorian village. It was still mid afternoon just before 4:00 PM so we decided to drive down to Loch Ness before dinner.

May 2, 2005 – A Three-Day Weekend in El Paso

May 2, 2005 – A Three-Day Weekend in El Paso

It’s Friday April 29, 2005 and Austin, Texas is in for an over-90-degree-Fahrenheit day, but I will be long gone by the time it hits that high. I’m winging my way West to El Paso and a visit with my family: Southwest Airlines 95, leaving Gate 8 at 9:00 AM CDT—one folding wardrobe bag containing a suit, two changes of jeans and some dress shirts (my home away from home) to check and a carry-on PC bag containing two Sony Vaio Laptops, that was a pain to take through Bergstrom Airport security.

I’m operating on two nights of little sleep—Wednesday only three hours, Thursday only five hours—and I doze at Gate 8 from about 8:00AM to 8:50AM, my PC bag on end atop my lap serving as a pillow. I awake to find the plane about the board, take a quick toilet break, and return just in time to be the last to board the plane. Traveling alone on Southwest with one carry-on you can board any time as there is always a seat available unless the gate agent miscounted. I find an aisle four rows back from the front, a middle-aged Mexican couple: husband at the window wife in the middle seat. They’re holding hands—his right, grasping her left, his, the hand that earns their living, one with character, one that has known hard work and not complained. Her’s is likewise a hand that labors—not an ornamented hand of leisure. They’re both wearing jeans. I greet them with “good morning,” settle into my seat and resume my slumber.

An hour and a half later, we land at El Paso International Airport, where my sister VY works. She has promised to meet my plane when I arrive and drive me home. As I clear the jet way, I see the familiar airport terminal where 40 years before my wife IM and I used to walk as a pass-time, before there was anything resembling airport security. Back then the tearful reunions and goodbyes happened at the gate not before an armed checkpoint. The terminal had been remodeled and expanded extensively in the near half-century since we roamed the corridors.

VY was at the bottom of the escalator—moved from the last time I flew in via Southwest—waiting to meet me when I arrived. We walked to baggage claim at the front of the terminal and waited no more than five minutes for my bag to be expelled onto the luggage carousel. Gathering my belongings, we walk back through the shopping arcade on the left of the terminal as you walk toward the gates. We exit the arcade to an outdoor smoking area and VY uses her security card to pop a security gate that gives us access to the airport employee parking lot.

As we walk we catch up about her job at the airport, where she went to work, shortly before 9/11 changed U.S. airports forever. My sister has always been a fashion conscious woman who dresses impeccably and today she wears a dark blue woman’s business suit, a lanyard around her neck with security card and picture id. She exchanges greetings with airport employees as we walk about. In the employee parking lot, we find her aging Japanese two-door sedan. “No new car?” I inquire. “It’s paid for,” she says, “and it runs and does not cause me any trouble.”

We catch up as she drives me out the airport on Airport Boulevard then right onto Airport Road. As we head due north, off to our right is the airport and at our left is Ft Bliss Army Base where my father was stationed on and off during his military career. Airport Boulevard curves hard left heading west where the airport property ends and the remains of long closed Biggs Air Field begins—the Army now controls the property. As we come out of the turn we’re on Fred Wilson Avenue. We cross under Texas Highway 54, a high-speed freeway which runs north into New Mexico and we eventually end up at the light on Dyer Street where we turn left toward our house in the Morningside Heights development just beyond William Beaumont Army Hospital on our right.

We arrive at home and I’m a son again, no longer the parent and grandparent that I am in California. Here I’m the returning son coming home to visit my parents who still view me as the young boy who left home over 40 years ago to start the life that has been lived. Now, here at home where I grew up, my parents and I are different yet very much the same. I’ve come to reassure myself that they are well and to come to understand them better while we all still have a chance to do so. Before she leaves for work, I ask my sister VY to have dinner with me on Saturday when my Mom and Dad typically go to church and to see if we can get our other sister LC to come along. Neither my parents nor LC is into dining out all preferring to prepare meals at home, but it’s worth a shot.

Alone with my parents I sit down to a quickly prepared breakfast—I’m starving having left Austin without eating and Southwest not providing anything but junk food which I missed because I was sleeping through the beverage service. AV, Mom's housekeeper and cook for many years, prepares the meal, exactly as my mother has instructed her. It’s wonderful, two eggs over easy with four strips of bacon and a plate of fried rice, coffee and orange juice. We talk as I eat, me explaining about the latest antics of their great-grandchildren, them telling me the latest births and deaths in the local community of friends. My father’s long time friend Mr. Upton had a cross-eyed white cat and he is now purring and doing figure eights around my ankle beneath the chair. Later today, my father has promised to take me by the building he has built to contain all of Mr. Upton’s belongings. My mother is asking to have me show pictures of her great grandkids I’ve got stored on Ofoto. I’m at home and enjoying the warm feeling of being a son again and I feel young again.