August 31, 2005 - An Open Womb

August 31, 2005 - An Open Womb

Womb is a wonderful place, warm, secure, nourishing, and relatively free of pain. The cord tying you to womb brings sustenance and removes harmful waste. Inside womb, awareness of your surroundings seems to emerge as if you had been dreaming and are slowly aroused from sleep. As you awake, you begin to build a mental picture of the world. The cord is a wonderful thing because through it you have an emotional link to the larger world of womb. Instinctively the fear womb experiences you experience as is true for all the other emotions womb feels: pleasure, pain, anger, hurt, hate, love, lust, longing, etc. By the time you leave womb, you will have come to know the complete spectrum of human emotions.

There is a world outside if the strange sounds and occasional prods are more than self-generated fanciful thoughts. You know the sounds of familiar voices, those that are regularly heard. Instinctive you know that some of the time, the voices you hear are addressing you. At other times you know they are talking to one another, often about you, but just as often about things that affect you and everyone else around you. Besides the voices you also hear noises—the sound of a cock crowing, the bark of a dog, the meow of a cat, the screech of a siren, the roar and rumble of buses, cars, trucks, and trains. You hear human noises—the sound of people talking. You know these are strangers because the words are a confusing disconnected jumble of sounds: disjointed phrases and clauses coming together to produce a din.

You hear street racket too: the sound of doors and windows opening and closing, the footfalls of hundreds of nearby feet. Unidentifiable pops, screeches, whooshes, clatter, ringing; the sound of scraping, dragging, and metal and wood rattling; the sound of radio playing music and spoken commentary.

There is a whole cacophony of other sounds related to the womb: the rumble of gas complaining to be released from the confines of stomach and intestines and the sound of their final expulsion; the sound of swallowing and digestion; the low-frequency growl of solid and liquid waste passing; the rush of air being inhaled and exhaled, the staccato tick of you and womb suffering from hiccups—tick, tick, tick… Above all these noises there is the comforting measured beat of womb’s heart, bump, bump, bump, bump,…

Inside womb there is no concept of time. Days, weeks, and months are a continuum with no beginning and no end. There are no sensory cues of day and night. There are only the riparian rhythms of nourishment coming from the cord tied to womb and waste departing by the same route. You know this rhythm by the affect each has on your body, a sense of satiation from the former, excretion from the latter. You sleep and wake to a cadence opposite that of womb. When womb is active and in motion you sleep. When womb is sedentary and still you are awake.

Chemical triggers you are completely unaware of control the larger function of womb. Over time you become aware that womb is getting more confined and that your degree of freedom is becoming increasingly impaired. Where before you could fully articulate your arms and legs you now have a restricted range of motion represented in your infant brain as sensory feedback of hands and feet meeting the unyielding wall of womb. You are also aware that your head is pointing down and that your legs—bent at the knees, which are close enough to your mouth that you could kiss both were you so inclined—are pointing up toward the top of womb.

At some moment in time, you become aware of a major change in womb. There is a surge of adrenaline in amounts unlike any you have sense heretofore. And there is a constriction that courses through womb that you sense as a intense downward pressure. The first passes quickly followed some time later by another. As each successive constriction occurs, you suddenly grow aware of an ever slightly quickening pace—almost an urgency in womb to expel you from its confines.

To a baby born at the end of World War II in Manila, The Philippines, the strange sounds are a mix of different languages—Tagalog and English among others, combined with the muffled reports of explosions heard at a distance, followed occasionally by a surge of adrenaline coursing through your tiny body as womb begins to move abruptly. It’s a hell of a way to enter the world.

August 29, 2005 – Nevada, Arizona, and California in Two Days

August 29, 2005 – Nevada, Arizona, and California in Two Days

Heading out of Las Vegas midday on Monday July 21st with my wife IM and our daughters, RD and ME, IM’s brother WS, sister-in-law YS, and niece LS in our 1980 Pontiac diesel Station Wagon, we made our way along Highway 93 south and east toward the Hoover Dam. Viewing the dam—the dream of Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the U.S.—that made Las Vegas and turned the fertile deserts of California and Arizona into vast expanses of agriculture, was a first for everyone. The narrow two-lane stretch of Highway 93 atop the dam was bumper to bumper with cars moving slowly in both directions as each vied to find a parking spot on either side of the dam. We managed to find a spot and everyone piled out walking out onto the dam and looking down its dizzying 726 feet height on one side and the 28,537,000 acre feet of Colorado River on the other side. We were all staggered by the spectacle. My mind kept jumping between the daylight brightness of Fremont Street in Las Vegas the night before and the Colorado River-powered generators below, the former entirely dependent on the latter: a caged genie doing the bidding of its hedonistic master.

After our stop at Hoover Dam, we carried on south on Highway 93 until its intersection with Interstate 40 at Kingman, Arizona. There we headed east of I-40 toward Flagstaff, Arizona and our reservations at the Pony Soldier Inn at 3030 E Santa Fe Avenue—old U.S. Route 66. The following morning we rose early and made the long drive north to the south rim of the canyon, parking with the gathering throng of tourist like us. We were all anxious to glimpse the remarkable landmark. The first thing you notice being at the canyon is the altitude, 7000 feet above sea level, and I was getting winded easily. However, all my concern about breathing vanished as I approached the rim of the canyon and peered down into the incredible depth and breadth of this natural wonder. What you’re viewing is a strikingly beautiful representation of the age of the earth and the hardest concept to grasp is the number of years it took to construct what we were looking at: 2 billion years to create the rock formations at the bottom of the enormous gorge. In comparison to the 80-year life expectancy of mere mortals, you cannot help but realize how transient and temporary human life is. Long after all traces of human life are erased from the face of the earth, this gigantic spectacle will continue to bear witness to the geological history of this earth of ours.

My brother-in-law WS is an inquisitive fellow who takes great pleasure in analyzing new discoveries. But I suspect, like the rest of us, he was as completely overwhelmed by the sensory overload he received at the canyon: so much information your mind could not determine where to focus its attention. (I recall hearing a piece of Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite as I wondered about the Canyon rim that day.) Here before you was the entire history of the earth going back 2 billion years: the volcanic eruptions near and far, the earth's collisions with meteorites that deposited debris over the its surface, the plant and animal life of millions of years past, even the movement of the earth over time, all written in stone for the experienced eye to read. For the vast majority of those standing on the rim that morning, it was about the sense of awe the vista inspired within, not about the written record inscribed in the rock. The Indians native to the region—Hualapai, Havasupai, Kaibab-Paiute, Hopi, and Navajo—know the canyon as do the animals that call it home. They understand its character and personality and must despair to share this beautiful place with the likes of tourist who troop through on day trips trying to capture in a few days at most, what they have spent a lifetime trying to comprehend. If I were one of them, I would certainly feel that way.

For us, the canyon was a day trip. In addition to our excursion to the canyon, our other experience was the dinner we had at Black Bart’s Steak House at 2760 E. Butler Avenue right off I-40 the night before venturing to the canyon. We were attracted by its billboard advertisement and decided to drop in before checking into the Pony Soldier. For our guests from out of town, the restaurant was perfect: its interior resembling our modern concept of a 1800s saloon, college students dressed in period costumes, meat and potatoes faire that all of us could get into, and the sort of alcoholic beverages Black Bart would certainly turn his nose up at, but perfectly suited for present company: margaritas and red wine to accompany the steaks—which were not bad. The added treat was the rousing songs the waiters and waitresses would break into on a moment’s notice. Our guests got a feel for the old west filtered though the modern imagination.

On Wednesday morning, after breakfast, we drove west on I-40 to its intersection with Interstate 17, the north-south highway connecting Flagstaff with its hotter more heavily populated neighbor to the south, Phoenix, our destination. The trip down I-17 was a descent into hell from the forested heavenly heights of Flagstaff filled with aspen, birch, spruce, oak, and Ponderosa pine trees. Along the way, we would pass, the Red Rocks of Sedona, Arizona, sacred to Native Americans, and watch the forest give way to the prickly pear, barrel, yucca, ocotillo, mesquite, cholla, and organ-pipe cactus as well as wild flowers: golden columbines, paint brushes, poppies, and phlox. Eventually we would finally spy the majestic, gesturing saguaro cactus. YS kept describing her dreaded fear of snakes and absolute horror of encountering a rattlesnake or Gila monster. She was spared confrontation with both in the rest stops along the way south. In Phoenix we spent the day cooling off in the motel’s swimming pool and later cooped up inside the air-conditioned motel room waiting for the sun to end its relentless broiling. Once evening arrived, like nocturnal animals, we emerged from our artificial motel room coolness into a still warm evening and watched the sun sink toward California as we drove to dinner.

Our stay in Phoenix was an overnight rest stop as we began our trek back toward California on Thursday. We had done Las Vegas and Hoover Dam, two manmade wonders and the Grand Canyon and the Sonoran Desert, two natural works that for me certainly held more mystery and wonder than the two former. For the trip back, we headed south on Interstate 10 toward Tucson. At the I-10 junction with Interstate 8, we exited on to I-8 and headed west along the U.S. border with Mexico. Arriving at Yuma in mid afternoon, we picked up the pace entering into California making our way toward San Diego racing with the American Canal from Yuma to the outskirts of El Centro. From there, I-8 headed up over the Vallecito Mountains, where my downhill speed caught the attention of a California Highway Patrol on patrol. It was getting close to his shift change I could tell because instead of pulling me over he passed me on the left after I had slowed and moved into the right lane. As he passed, he used his car loud speaker to tell me to observe the 55 MPH speed limit. I acknowledged that I would and let him pass me doing 60 MPH and soon 65 after he had put us a sufficient distance behind in his rear view mirror.

It was close to 7:30 PM when we entered the city limits of San Diego. Our motel reservations were in Anaheim. Winding our way through the late commute traffic of the city, we eventually exited I-8 onto Interstate 5 north bound toward Orange County and Los Angeles beyond. We had just come in off a desert with temperatures hovering on either side of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, we were being cooled by the evening on-shore flow from the Pacific. It was close to 9:00 AM when we pulled into the parking lot of the San Juan Capistrano Amtrak Train Station. Across the street from the train station was a restaurant that was still serving and we were all starving from our long drive across the desert and up the coast. Getting out of the car in the train station parking lot all dress in t-shirts and shorts to accommodate the heat of the desert southwest we were all shivering in the cold. We quickly pulled on sweatshirts and hurried into the restaurant before they stopped serving. The meal was one of those memorable events that happen when you least expect it. The mixed drinks and food tasted great and we were the last customers being served. The server, a young man, was in good spirits, taking his time clearing our table, and chatting with us about where we had been and where we were going. After dessert and coffee, I gave him a big tip and we drove on to our motel in Anaheim in preparation for three days in Southern California.

August 26, 2005 – Journey to the City of Sin

August 26, 2005 – Journey to the City of Sin

IM’s family in Scotland always viewed the U.S. and California in particular, as a long distance from their mist-enshrouded, heather-covered wee bit hill and glen. IM’s mother’s generation remembered cousins and uncles who left for America, never to return and never to be heard from again. Scots fall into two categories, those who leave and spend a lifetime longing for the green hills of Caledonia and those who never leave. You can imagine what IM’s family thought when their 18-year old, second-born daughter proclaimed that she was immigrating to America to seek her fortune. IM fell into the first category. Each time we would visit, we would invite IM’s parents and siblings to make the journey by plane and be our guest for a couple of weeks. We would show them the sights of the great southwest and of the magnificent coast of California. In 1980, IM’s brother WS, sister-in-law YS, and niece LS all came to visit. It meant a great deal to IM that her brother braved the journey to visit her in her adopted land.

When they arrived on Thursday July 17th 1980 at San Francisco Airport, we were there to meet their plane. Two weeks earlier, I had purchased a 7-passenger Pontiac diesel station wagon. We were in the last throes of another gas shortage and you would encounter lines at gas stations, but there was no shortage of diesel fuel, which was also cheaper than gasoline. About the only disadvantage to the wagon was the burst of diesel exhaust that accompanied each time the car accelerated from a full stop. Never mind that diesel advocates proclaimed the exhaust was less harmful than gas, it smelled, looked terrible, and it couldn’t be good to breath. The adults sat around the kitchen table after dinner and talked until the early morning hours. I left the group 1:00 o’clock. I had one more day of work before the start of my two-week vacation. IM was in such a deep sleep when I left at 7:30 in the morning she didn’t stir when I kissed her goodbye. ME, RD and their cousin LS were sleeping away, the untroubled slumber of youth on summer break from school.

We had dinner out on Friday night at Charlie Browns in Sunnyvale, on North Mathilda Avenue just north of the California Highway 101 and 237 junction and we all turned in early to get a early start on our journey through the California desert to Las Vegas. The restaurant was just north of the Sheraton Sunnyvale. We rose the next morning and packed the station full, bags of luggage on top, two kids in the third seat, two adults and one child in the middle and IM and me up front. We set out on California Highway 101 heading south, cutting over on California Highway 152 to Interstate 5 heading south. My brother-in-law has an insatiable curiosity. Just a bit taller than me at 5 feet 10 inches tall, with a slim build, a head of thick black hair, blue eyes that always appear to be smiling, and a prominent nose. When he talks—earning and engaging even when discussing the most mundane of topics—he always appears to be racing to keep up with the thoughts that rush through his mind.

YS is also an eager conversationalist—the difference between Americans and Brits is the latter have mastered the art of conversation—who at times has to compete with WS to get her point across. Pensive when not talking, animated when she speaks, YS is petite under 5 feet, 4 inches tall, with short blond hair and blue eyes. On this trip, she amused our daughters ME and RD with tales of Thor and Tai, their dog and cat, who had secretly stowed away and were accompanying us on our journey, always ahead of us as we arrived at each new destination. The girls were completely fascinated with the tales and during the trip, had begun to look forward to the latest exploits of the imaginary dog and cat. LS was the quietest of the group, taking in the scenery and occasionally questioning. The petite young thing, a bit shorter than her mom, had inherited her mother’s blue eyes, though hers required glasses. She was fresh out of school and wondering what she was going to do with her life. The trip was her vacation before having to deal with the realities of adult life.

We arrived in Barstow, California late on Saturday. It was named after William Barstow Strong, president of the Santa Fe Railroad, which came to town in 1888. I’ve always thought of the town as a place for passing through, which is what my family and I did when we relocated from El Paso, Texas to Tacoma, Washington. Historic Route 66 runs through its downtown. In the great depression immigrants in their possession-laden cars and trucks passed through as they sought to escape from the dust bowl and find work in the land of gold and silver. After spending Saturday night in Barstow, at a Best Western with a swimming pool and air conditioning, perfect for a late afternoon temperature, close to 100 degree Fahrenheit, we headed east toward Las Vegas on Interstate 15. However, we were stopped shortly after getting underway by the little town of Calico, a ghost town converted into a tourist attraction, six miles north of Daggett— which began life in 1860 across the Mojave River from Barstow. The small town of Calico in the Mojave Desert experienced its cataclysmic birth in 1882 when silver was discovered in Calico Mountains, thus beginning one of the largest silver strikes in California history—the golden state had its unfair share of precious metals. Light-complexioned Scots in shorts and T-shirts, exposed skin reddening in the mid-day sun, wandered through a 100-year ghost town with hundreds of others. This was before “sun block” had become part of our lexicon.

From Calico, we loaded up the air conditioned Pontiac and headed east toward Las Vegas, where we had rooms at the Mardi Gras Inn at 3500 Paradise Road. It’s one major intersection south of the Las Vegas Convention Center and it has a pool. After relaxing after the hot two and a half hour drive, we began our wild night in Vegas with a buffet dinner at the Sahara Hotel. This was not the family-friendly Vegas of today but adults-only before Steve Winn began remaking the strip into a fantasy land for adults and children, that derived more dollars from other services than gambling. However, back then gambling was what kept the lights on and our guests tried their hand at slot machines until all had lost their limit. The kids not permitted on the gambling floor watched the adults lose their money from the sideline, our youngest RD completely swept up in the sensory overload. She was convinced she would grow up and open her own place on the strip—thank God she got over that crazy notion.

Las Vegas is about that part of every person's psyche that is kept in check for most of the time. Within that psyche—that which is responsible for one's thoughts and feelings; the seat of the faculty of reason—are these images of exotic places we'd like to visit and pleasures we'd like to indulge in once we've arrived. Las Vegas is our imagination realized: Paris where everyone speaks English, Venice without the reality of a city under siege by the sea, the Great Pyramids at Giza without the fear of being a victim of terrorism, Italy the way Steve Winn knows you want it to be. Of course this is the Las Vegas born in the last decade of the 20th Century. The latter Vegas had stopped dressing itself with apparel from Fredericks of Hollywood turning instead to Haute Couture houses of Europe. But underneath all that expensive outerwear was the same trashy broad that had been seducing us all along.

After our buffet dinner, we drove downtown and walked out onto daylight bright Fremont Street and I watched the faces of everyone in our group fill with amazement at the visual and aural overload they were experiencing there at 10:00 PM on a hot July Sunday night—temperature in the upper 80s or low 90s Fahrenheit. I had been in Las Vegas several times but had never left the Strip to explore the wonders of Fremont Street. The Vegas that we were showing our guests from Scotland right then was the one of the Rat Pack, the smoking, drinking, gambling Vegas of the 1950s and 1960s. This was the Vegas of The Godfather movies, where women were dames and lady luck was the only woman a man wooed and seldom won. It reflected the fantasy of its age, where vice was the pleasure we all sought and after we had our fill, we felt guilty and rightfully so because we had been “bad.”

August 24, 2005 – Kismet in the 1970s

August 24, 2005 – Kismet in the 1970s

One of the great perks of working for Xerox Corp. back in the early 1970s was their benefits package, which included compensation for work related college courses. I took advantage of their generosity by enrolling at the University of Santa Clara Master’s Program in Econometrics. Xerox's generosity was most obvious in its funding of the Palo Alto Research Center or Xerox PARC, which would be the source for the graphical user interface, the Ethernet, many innovations in graphics such as BITblt for rapid image manipulation, and the list goes on.

I entered the night school master’s program at U of Santa Clara in the fall of 1975, the class was just over a dozen students in size, several from Africa, a couple for South America, and couple from Asia, the rest of us from high tech companies in Silicon Valley. There were four courses that comprised the heart of the program. Econometrics 1 through 4. I would need to take the Calculus and Analytic Geometry course I had neglected during my undergraduate education. This I began at the San Jose City College, a junior college on Moorpark Avenue above and on the western side of Interstate 280 between Bascom and Leigh Avenues. In the meantime, I would take the reading courses required in the Santa Clara program and plan my attack on the math heavy core courses, once I had mastered the Calculus.

I won’t bore you with the excruciating details of economics but it’s the one discipline that examines the impact of greed and avarice that makes all our money-based and barter-based transactions work. Those practicing the dismal science include Thomas Robert Malthus—who gave it its gloomy epithet, Thosten Veblin—who made "conspicuous consumption" part of our language, John Maynard Keynes—who influenced Franklyn Roosevelt to spend his way out of the Great Depression, and Milton Friedman who brought “laissez-faire” economics back in vogue. These thinkers among many others were attempting to build a model of the economy to help better predict its behavior. The course in Econometrics was the latest attempt at the mathematical model.

The problem that economist have had building an accurate model is a lack of good data. Keynes attempted to collect this data manually, having a group of workers follow the spending pattern of a representative sample of consumers. Governments worldwide have always collected data. In the 20th Century, they began making the data more widely available, the most obvious being the census performed every decade—though how accurate can that be in a highly mobile society, which the U.S. and Europeans were becoming after the Second World War. Then there were the other statistics the government collected and distributed, consumer confidence, new housing starts, automobile production, inflation, unemployment and the list goes on. As we enter the 21st Century, this data is becoming better and more abundant thanks to the Internet. Manufacturers and services providers know more about the demographics of this nation than has ever been known in the past. And the degree of their understanding of individual behavior is becoming frighteningly Orwellian—but that’s another story.

Why was I taking the course considering my position as a marketing guy at a high tech company? I asked myself that question on many occasions and the obvious answers were “to get a better job… But that didn’t wash because I lacked the experience practicing the discipline, that someone my age should have in combination with the degree to qualify for the higher salary. If I were a rocket scientist that experience would be a secondary consideration, but that wasn’t the case. Another answer that better described my motives was that I still longed for the academic life, the discipline of working toward comprehending a foreign concept and in the process better understanding the subject being studied as well as understanding the bounds of my own personal ability.

I pursued my course of study through the fall of 1975 and throughout 1976, taking everything except those four econometric courses. When the fall of 1976 arrived, I had to dive in and begin building that model. I hung in for the better half of the semester but somewhere along the way, I got lost in the advanced math. In the past, I could just pour more time and extra effort into grasping the mathematical concepts, but no amount of extra help or tutoring was going to catch me up to the rest of the class. I dropped the course promising to resume it again in the Spring and in the meantime try to grasp as much of it as I could on my own and with the help of tutors and a tolerant professor who put up with my continuous stream of requests for extra help during his office hours.

I came to realize that my reluctance to grapple with math concepts in high school and in my undergraduate years was now preventing me from grasping something I really wanted to master. I’ve come to realize over time that your choices define whom you are. I had made my choices early in life and there was no way to change them now. I wrestled with the implications of having to give up on a task I’d undertaken. I was spared all the self-inflicted conflict by a completely unexpected turn of events: the offer of a job as West Coast Editor for Computer Design Magazine. At that one fork in the road of my life, I was given the change in an occupation I was seeking in the Master’s program and it would take full advantage of all the experience I had amassed in the Navy and all my previous employers. And it would give me a chance to write for an audience. I felt like the characters in a Greek play when some Olympian god intercedes to change the life of some mere mortal on earth: Kismet.

August 23, 2005 – Learning What It’s Like to be Ripped Off

August 23, 2005 – Learning What It’s Like to be Ripped Off

After we arrived in California in October 1974, courtesy of Diablo Systems Inc., a Subsidiary of Xerox Corp., we bought a house on Hellyer Avenue right across the street from Hellyer Elementary School. Our first-grade bound, first-born daughter ME was late getting enrolled but by the first week of November she was already making friends—the thing she does best—and catching up on the course materials she had missed. ME already had a couple of years of Montessori pre-school, however, as a parent, the first real day of school for your child is a momentous occasion. You’re surrendering a vast part of your baby’s intellectual cultivation to someone else. You’ve also just set the timer in motion that will take you to middle age and beyond, your children rushing the timer forward as you wish you could slow it down.

As IM got ME off to school, I spent the early weekends in our new place landscaping the bare earth lawn in our front, side, and back yard. We had a corner lot. The development we were in was full of young families, adults our age with elementary school age children. The neighbor to our rear had a young son and an older daughter from a previous marriage. The husband, a nice guy, liked to race cars and had his racer in his driveway on occasion. He had a day job, working in construction, which helped finance his expensive hobby and his wife also worked. He like to regale me of his exploits on the racetrack, something I enjoyed as all men of my age, had excess testosterone circulating in his blood and speed was its natural expression. I recall him describing a crash that destroyed his racer at the oval track on Tully Road—the one we could hear in the distance on hot summer nights when our windows were open. He had “bought that wall” and walked away unscathed.

The one couple who was not in our age group was our neighbor on Hellyer Avenue, a retired Air Force Colonel, DB, and his wife, VB, with a high-strung, house-bound German Shepherd both treated like one of their kids. The couple’s adult age children, three sons and a daughter, were all out of the house except the youngest. As an ex-Army kid, I understood what the siblings had gone through their young lives, being moved from one armed services encampment to another. IM formed a neighborly relationship with VB. DB and I would talk whenever he ventured out to work in the yard, which was frequent when we first moved in but increasingly less as time went on. As IM, the girls, and I were starting life together, DB and VB had already been there, done that—kind of like where IM and I are now that the girls are grown and raising children of their own.

Our Hellyer Avenue home was the early years of our life in California, the years from 1974 through 1979—the lion’s share of the 70s decade. Right after we got settled we began to hear stories of houses in the neighborhood being burgled when no one was home. I was working in the yard one Sunday when someone ran out of neighbor’s house at the rear carrying the race car driver’s television set, which he dumped into the back seat of a car then jumped in as a female driver gun the engine and sped away. As I saw the man open the car door and hastily deposit the TV in the back seat, I dropped the shovel I had been holding and ran after the car as it pulled away memorizing the license plate. I called the police and reported the theft giving them the license plate, the direction the car was traveling as it drove away and what little description of the burglars I could remember: Hispanic male in his mid-twenties carrying the TV, Hispanic female of the same age; both in jeans and white tee shirt; no distinguishing facial features, long dark brown hair on the malel, short cropped dark brown hair on the female—fit the description of a lot of people in San Jose including me—though I was out of the age group. As the police arrive a good 30 minutes later, the owners also returned from their shopping outing. I explained what had happened and they went inside with the police to survey the damage.

Seeing the ease with which the thieves entered my neighbor’s place, I told IM that I was going to the hardware store for deadbolts to reinforce the doors. When I returned, I added one to the side garage door, putting the new lock halfway the distance between the existing doorknob and the bottom of the door, screwing the hardware into the two-by-fours surrounding the doorframe. I installed keyed deadbolts on both the front and rear door—you needed a key to open the door from inside or outside. Anytime we left home we took the keys with us. After a day of reinforcing the locks on all our doors, I went out to check on my neighbors who had been invaded. I learned that after the police had left, the couple and their son decided to shut their house up and go visit family elsewhere in San Jose. When they returned home that evening, they found that the thieves had returned and taken a few other possessions left behind when I interrupted their plunder. The police officer had told them that the burglars would steal a parked car use it to transport the stolen goods to a location where they moved the stolen property to another car and abandon the hot car—so much for my taking down the license number of the getaway vehicle.

I returned home thinking that this gang of thieves was determined and resourceful. I began to wonder if my extra precautions were a sufficient match for them. One Friday night a week later I had the answer to my question. We returned home after going out to dinner and as soon as I entered the house I could sense someone had been inside, probably from the smell, the scent of someone strange. As we walked into the living room and looked into the kitchen, we saw the broken rear window and the sliding glass door left open. The thieves had tried to enter the house by the side garage door and had been unable to force the deadbolt I had installed. Frustrated, they broke the rear window, reached in and opened the sliding glass door and entered the house. Once inside they tried to enter the garage from inside the house but found the deadbolt blocking their way. They then began rummaging through the house picking up easily carried items, a camera, a small stereo in the den... We must have interrupted their progress as the television and other heavier items had been left behind. Also, the bedrooms had not been thoroughly searched, as IM’s jewelry had not been found.

We called the police and an hour later an officer came in to examine where the break in occurred and what items had been removed. The only obvious sign of theft was the broken glass of the rear kitchen window and the dangling wires in the den where the stereo had been disconnected from the speakers and turntable. The officer was polite, told us there was little chance any of our stolen things would be recovered but told us to make a list of the item we found missing and send a copy to police headquarters with the case number he provided us. The thieves would be caught but by the time they were, our things would have already been long gone—sold at the Tully Road Flea Market or fenced through a dealer in stolen property. I asked him how we might prevent this in the future and he suggested a burglar alarm system with private security service monitoring the house when we weren’t around. After he left, IM and the kids were still pretty spooked and I told them I would stay awake while they went to sleep. I stayed up a good part of the night but eventually dozed off in the early morning. I woke Saturday morning and repaired the window and then called several vendors that installed decorative window bars. We got estimates and accepted the one promising installation in two days. He would return on Tuesday to put the bars up.

In the meantime, I took a couple of days off work and stayed in the house whenever IM had to go out to run errands. On Monday morning, IM took off and I watched her car drive down Hellyer Avenue toward Senter Road. The was the usual time she left to drop our youngest daughter RD at a Montessori Pre School near the intersection of Capital Expressway and Almaden Expressway, a great little school that RD looked forward to attending. As soon as IM’s car had passed out of sight beyond Hellyer School, an old dilapidated four-door white Chevrolet pulled up on Sacramento Avenue where it T’s into Hellyer. He stopped on Sacramento on the side next to the school and got out of the car, looked right into the kitchen window where I was standing looking at him and abruptly turned his back, opened the driver side door, released the hood of the car from under the dash board and open the hood. He looked around for no more than ten seconds, closed the hood and got back into the car and drove away looking once at me as he sped away. He was a tall black man, black hair short-cropped to this head, with a wiry build wearing light blue jeans, white T-shirt and tennis shoes. I knew he had been in our house and he knew I knew it. He also knew he would not be getting in again.

Once the bars had been installed, IM, the kids, and I stopped worrying about burglars, though they continued to happen in the neighborhood, though the retired couple next door was not burgled. DB and the German Shepherd never left the house and DB had a gun. On one weekend, several neighbors working in the yard saw two men running from a house on Sacramento Avenue. The men gave chase and caught one of the two. He pleaded with them to beat him up but not called the police. They beat him up then called the police. It was rage and frustration of being helpless to stop offenses against the normalcy that the homeowners all felt was their right. The police came and took the thief away. The officers wisely skipped the lecture on neighbors taking the law into their own hands. The burglary that violated the sanctity of our home taught me that even in the most civilized of worlds, ultimately the individual is still responsible for his family’s well being.

August 22, 2005 – Life as a Subscription Model

August 22, 2005 – Life as a Subscription Model

I spent the weekend “puttering around the house,” taking care of all those little things you tend to put off doing, especially if you have something more important to do like watch a movie, sleep in late, spend time shopping for items you really don’t need but have to have. I’ve had more important things to do for most of this year, but this weekend I decided to do those chores I had been putting off. One of the reasons for my change in priorities was my car started having mechanical problems on Thursday and I put it in the shop early Friday morning. My daily routine had been disrupted and mentally I had to rearrange my schedule for the next several days awaiting the outcome of the car repair. Something serious would mean the end of shopping for items I really didn’t need as well as other activities that required discretionary spending—some car repairs can end up costing the equivalent of a big screen TV. And after the expenditure the only thing you have to show for it is what you come to expect every day—the ability to drive to and from work in some degree of comfort though the drive will probably be anything but comforting. We live in an age of tolls that we pay each day of our lives.

They are the little tolls that none of us notice: on our way to work the Starbuck latte, the bear claw from the Boulanger on South Market Street near the intersection with San Fernando Street in San Jose (my personal favorite), the bagel at Noah’s Bagels. Then there are the subscriptions that we willingly pay because we have to have cell phones—in addition to the land line we have at home—cable TV with premium channels, high-speed Internet access, and new to both my wife IM and I, Netflix, and new to me Simply Audiobooks. Our cars fit into this category since the vast majority of households buy cars on credit, a monthly expense, fill the gas tank regularly—in the Bay Area a once a week (if not more often) expense, and there are the repairs as I experienced this past week, that happen at irregular intervals—though the regularly scheduled maintenance happens in intervals of miles or months and my car has an indicator that reminds me when service is due. The other tolls, of course, include our daily bread, groceries every week (if not more often), meals purchased at restaurants—daily in the case of those who buy lunch, weekly or more often during the week for dinners out rather than eaten at home. Taken as a whole, we’re part of a constantly flowing stream of money, receiving it at monthly, twice monthly, every other weekly, or some other interval and sending it along at the intervals just described for the subscriptions of our lives.

What got me on this tirade was my routine being disrupted and my changing priorities to complete long neglected chores about the house. Chores are another form of toll extracted from all of us. There was a time in my life when I did all the service on my car, changing oil, replacing brakes shoes, replacing points and plugs and tuning the engine afterwards—some impossible to do today thanks to the electronics found in all cars built in the past decade or more. My father for the longest time didn’t own a car model any older than 1970—he’s since come around to the realization that cars are transportation not a hobby. What I’m saying in a very round about way is that so much of our lives have been changed to the subscription model I described. I have a lawn service that takes care of my lawn (automatic sprinklers water the lawn). IM has a maid service to clean the house. Appliances are serviced, whenever required and we’re outraged if a repair is ever needed—we’ve had washers, dryers, refrigerators and electric ranges that have operated without problems for 10 to 15 years or more. The same applies to home electronics though we’re apt to change TVs, home audio, computers, video games and personal electronics at much shorter intervals because of technology obsolescence. I laugh at store salesmen trying to sell me extended warranties on products that will be replaced well before anything fails.

The chores we’re left to do are the small things that are not worth calling someone else to take care of, as I was confronted with this weekend: repairing a noisy gate, catching a gopher that has been burrowing tunnels all over my front lawn, replacing wood chips in the flower beds of our small gardens in the front lawn, repairing a faulty gas barbecue grill, and cleaning up the oil drippings on the garage floor left by car that I picked up from the shop at noon on Saturday. My car is seven years old and had close to 120,000 miles on it. The cassette player doesn’t work and I haven’t replace it because the CD player is fine, a row of LEDs in the indicator for my sound system is out; the result is the numbers and letters in the display are not fully formed, though I can interpret the meaning just fine. My wife IM wants me to trade the car in but I’m kind of fond of it and the older I get, the more attached I’m becoming to things. I’ll trade it in but not just yet.

Like the steady stream of money that comes in and goes out, life is a continuous flow of regularly occurring events that give us all a sense of normalcy in our lives: five days of commuting to work, two days of weekend, the arrival of expected holidays—I’m looking forward to Labor Day, the regularly scheduled events associated with work—the closing of the quarter—lots of activity then its aftermath—a couple of days of getting the adrenalin back up, the out of town travel—never completely predictable but occurring at intervals during the year nonetheless. The older I get the more predictable becomes the pattern of recurring events and the more I have to improvise on the pattern to keep myself interested in staying in this bucket brigade of life.

August 20, 2005 – Aftermath of Loma Prieta

August 20, 2005 – Aftermath of Loma Prieta

In the aftermath of the 15 second of white-as-a-sheet terror my wife IM and I experienced on Tuesday October 17, 1989 at 5:04 PM when the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta Earthquake struck, we walked restlessly about the backyard in a state of shock, venturing into the house occasionally to check if the power had been restored. IM had spoken to our daughter ME at U.C. Irvine and we told ME to call her grandparents in El Paso to let them know we were okay. Our great worry was our second daughter RD, who was at school at U.C. Santa Cruz. Because news reports from our battery powered radio were scant, we had no idea of what damage had befallen other towns in the Bay Area. Somehow, neither IM nor I were experiencing any sense of foreboding or dread over RD. We were just anxious to hear from her to know where she was. By now, the phone was producing a constant busy signal. We could not call out, as all the circuits were jammed.

We had done some of the tasks public service broadcasts had instructed us to do periodically over the years in case of an earthquake. We checked for the smell of gas, but we didn’t shut off the gas coming into the house. Though gas was still available, it did us little good in preparing our dinner—our stove was electric. We were also reluctant to open the refrigerator hoping the power would return before its entire contents had to be tossed. The truth be known was neither of us was very hungry. Fear, surplus adrenalin, and continuing worry for our daughter RD was suppressing any hunger we had. IM and I were both so restless we were unable to sit or stay in one place. After a good hour or so with no further movement of the earth, we felt safe enough to tour the house for damage beyond the fallen framed posters. I cleared away the glass; glad to have something to occupy my mind, while IM inspected the bedrooms upstairs. The den was remarkably undisturbed though the funky shelf resting atop the desk where the computer sat would have to be slid back in place. The paperback and hard cover books stacked in shelves around the tiny closet of the den had ridden the wave without falling.

The mess from the two fallen framed posters was soon cleared away and IM and I resumed our restless wandering. Sometime around 7:00 PM, nearly two hours after the shaking ended, ME managed to get through again. She had spoken with RD’s boyfriend—like ME, a student at U.C. Irvine—who somehow got a call through to RD’s dorm at U.C. Santa Cruz. She was fine. The campus had come through relatively unscathed, but downtown Santa Cruz had suffered major damage. RD would try to call home later when the lines freed up. From ME, we also learned that the highways between the Bay Area and Santa Cruz and Monterey had been closed by rockslides and debris blocking sections on California Highways 17 and 152. We couldn’t drive over to collect RD and she couldn’t drive herself home, though she was actually safer at school.

Just as our phone conversation was winding down, the lights came back on and the television, which we had neglected to turn off, flashed on screen the San Francisco news broadcast running damage reports from various cities in the Bay Area. The recorded video on the screen showed the mid-span of the Oakland Bay Bridge where the one section of roadbed had toppled from the upper deck to the lower deck. In the aftermath of the collapse, a frightened motorist traveling at high speed failed to see the missing section and drove his car to his death; another motorist capturing the tragedy on videotape. The video showed views from the television station’s hovering helicopter as well as from a camera crew on the upper deck of the bridge filming the rescue effort near the edge of the fallen section.

Another scene that was getting plenty of airtime was the fire in the Marina District of San Francisco where the fire crews were frantically working to shut off broken gas mains and to find water to fight the raging fires accelerated by the escaping gas. Many broken water mains in the area of the fire had forced crews to improvise portable hydrants and hose tenders to pump water from the Bay to fight back the blaze. I discovered later that the earthquake had damage the home of a PR lady I dealt with a good deal. She was in Japan at the time of the disaster and watched helplessly Japanese TV and CNN broadcasts showed her neighborhood in flames. Television loves a good fire: color, chaos, conflict, and danger. Elsewhere in the city at Sixth and Bluxome Streets, a wall of bricks collapsed killing six people. The count of the dead attributed to the disaster would reach nearly 70.

The largest number, suffering their fate in a stretch of road just east of the impassable Bay Bridge on the collapsed section of the Cypress Freeway, a 3-mile stretch of the Eastshore Freeway between 18th and 34th streets that brought traffic from California 17 (Interstate 880) into the MacArthur Maze. The Maze is a giant interchange with Interstate 80 going west to San Francisco over the Bay Bridge and in conjunction with Interstate 580 going east to Berkeley, while 580 carries on to Alemeda and northern Contra Costa County, and Interstate 80 ferrying traffic between the East Bay and the San Francisco and Berkeley. The 52-foot wide Cypress Freeway, a two-deck roadway with northbound traffic on the lower deck and southbound traffic above, opened in 1952. Both decks were above ground, the bottom deck resting in the cross member of giant concrete “H” supports, the upper deck lying across the top of the “H”. When the freeway collapsed, the legs of the H broke away at the cross member bringing the upper deck down on top of the lower—the broken legs from the top of the H splayed on either side of the roadway.

The last drama of the disaster would play out in the crushed remains of the Cypress Freeway as ordinary citizens living in the poor neighborhoods that lay in the shadow of the high speed road—now slowed to a stop forever—climbed through the rubble trying to find signs of life emanating from any of the crushed metal coffins buried under tons of concrete and the approaching blackness of night. The rescuers encountered numerous survivors, some carried out, some able to walk out with help, others trapped in the rubble needing help to be extricated. Two of the trapped that were able to escape were six-year old Julio Berumen and his eight-year old sister Cathy, their mother crushed to death in the front seat of their car. And the rescue would go on through the night and the follow day and day after.

By Saturday, the Cypress had become a graveyard with little hope of finding anyone else alive. As structural engineers climbed about the structure beginning at 6:00 AM, one of them saw faint movement in a silver Chevrolet Sprint. Buck Helm, a 57-year old shipping clerk managed to wave his hand faintly and a five hour long rescue ensued after which he was pulled from the rubble to exalted cheering by rescuers’ awed by the man’s escape from death. He had endured 89 hours refusing to give in death. He would survive another 28 days in hospital before succumbing.

IM and I had finally gotten word from RD late Tuesday evening that she was okay and on Saturday, she came home for the weekend, wanting to feel the security of family and the familiarity of her things around her. We all felt that way.

August 19, 2005 – Terror at 5:04 PM, October 17, 1989

August 19, 2005 – Terror at 5:04 PM, October 17, 1989

The morning of Tuesday October 17, 1989 had begun much like any other in Northern California: overnight overcast shrouding the communities hugging the bay was beginning to burn back to the coast. The Sun was taking its time making the fog beat its retreat—daylight savings time would end the weekend after next. I was in my room at the Monterey Sheraton Hotel, having arrived on Sunday afternoon for the Dataquest Semiconductor ’89 Conference, an annual event, featuring the Who’s Who of the industry. Sunday evening us editors had dinner with Pasquale Pistorio, the CEO of SGS Thomson Microelectronics—now known as STMicro. He gave us the essence of what he planned to present during his talk early Monday morning at the Monterey Conference Center. I had sat in on his presentation and found it one of the more interesting ones of the conference. The two-day event featured Dataquest analysts and industry luminaries making presentation on the globalization of the semiconductor industry, which was already well on its way. Besides SGS Thomson, representing Europe the big names in Japanese semiconductors represented the lion’s share of the industry outside the U.S. Hitachi, Toshiba, NEC, Fujitsu, and others.

Tuesday was the last day of the event and everyone was looking forward to getting back to a normal routine. Rather than stick around to the bitter end at 5:00 PM, I decided to leave at 4:00 PM and make it home before the crowd left Monterey en masse. The drive back was along California Highway 1, Monterey Bay sparkling in the late afternoon sun, still well above the horizon thanks to Daylight Savings Time. From Monterey to Seaside, the bay plays peak a boo hiding behind the developments that dot the bay side of Highway 1. On my left as I pass the Holiday Inn, now the Best Western Beach Resort Monterey, I leave Monterey and enter Seaside and the bay bids me farewell as I start heading inland. The undeveloped open expanse of shifting dunes, locked in battle with the sparse coarse grass covering, that struggles to contain them on either side of Highway 1, probably look much the same as when John Steinbeck wandered the region. Certainly, the landscape of farms growing artichoke and other vegetables that take over from the dunes further north on the scenic road, would look familiar to the author. At Castroville, I leave Highway 1 and head east on Highway 156 and soon reach the 156 interchange with California Highway 101.

When I arrived at home, my wife IM was puttering around the kitchen making dinner and after catching up on our respective days, I dashed upstairs to turn on my computer, a Macintosh Classis with an external hard drive connected to the Mac’s SCSI port—very high tech and fast back then compared to running the computer with the slow built in Mac floppy. The Mac sat on a desk that had a shelf module sitting atop the desk. The module resembled an H that someone had added vertical legs outside each of the original legs and mounted and nailed horizontal shelves between the vertical pairs of legs. Once completed, he had nailed a shelf across the top of all four legs. The hard drive rested in the inside top space between the top shelf and the middle shelf of the H. In the small shelves in the two vertical pairs of legs were books, floppy disks, and a computer modem. The Macintosh sat on the desk in front of the shelf with a SCSI cable running from the back of the computer up to the hard drive.

Just after I had turned on the computer and was waiting for it to boot up, I felt the first movement of the earthquake— it was 5:04 PM—and then in an instant the full force of it began to move the house, like some giant kid playing with a toy. Luckily the earthquake’s movement was trying to push the desk and shelf sideways. If it had been crosswise, I would have been buried under books, a hard drive, and modem, as well as the crazily constructed “H” shelf. I struggled to maintain my balance and tried to leave the room going against the motion of the quake. Once outside the door of my office I was at the top of the staircase to my right. I heard IM screaming my name at the top of her voice and two loud crashes. I stumbled down the stairs two and three at a time—now going in the direction of the quake’s movement—I held on to the handrail to keep from falling headfirst. At the bottom of the stairs I looked left into the kitchen and saw IM hanging on for dear life to the cabinets forming an island in the middle of the kitchen. As soon as I entered the kitchen, the shaking stopped. I saw IM white as a ghost standing rigid as a stone statue.

When I saw nothing had fallen on her, I started laughing hysterically—my expression of relief and as a way to diffuse the terror still on IM’s face. We had just experienced a 6.9 magnitude earthquake and we were still in one piece and the house wasn’t trashed, though once we walked into the living room we found two heavy posters in frames with glass fronts had fallen and the glass had broken. IM was shaking and still scared and I took her outside in the backyard just in case Mother Nature wanted to take another shot as us. The television station that was on the TV when I came in was off the air. We had lost power like much of the rest of the Bay Area. We had a battery-powered radio and I turned it on to hear the announcer stating the obvious—that we had experience a large earthquake. As soon as I got outside the phone rang—the phones back then still worked when the power was out. It was ME our oldest daughter, who was attending U.C. Irvine. She had heard the news and had called to see if we were unhurt. IM spent a good few minutes talking with ME relaying all that we had experienced during the eternity the shaking lasted. It lasted all of fifteen seconds, but terror has a way of stretching time.

August 17, 2005 – The Day President Kennedy was Assassinated

August 17, 2005 – The Day President Kennedy was Assassinated

Friday, November 22, 1963 began like any other day on Treasure Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. It was a school day for me and I awoke to the sound of reveille in my barracks. I hauled myself out of bed, grabbed my overnight case from my locker and headed for the head to confront a line of mirrors over a sink that wasn’t already occupied by early risers who got a jump on the rest of us. A shave, tooth brushing, and face washing followed by a quick comb through my short regulation Navy haircut and I was ready to jump into my dress blues and head for the mess hall for breakfast before rushing off to my first class in the morning.

I had befriended a sailor, Manny (not his real name) from my home town of El Paso—he had attended El Paso High School, a rival of Austin High School, where I had gone for the first three of my high school years. Manny had begun to teach me the art of Korean Karate and I had the bruises to attest to my tutorial. He and I headed off to the mess hall together discussing some point of an exercise we had gone over the night before. Manny was a perfectionist when it came to martial arts. I suspect it was motivated by having to fight a lot during high school, a fact that belied his almost gentle manner—I didn’t think it was his nature to be a warrior but he had learned that when life pushed you, you had to push back. Beyond teaching me the art of applying lethal force in self-defense, Manny continually intellectualized the whole activity, making a case for beauty in the use of force for a noble end. Like the great predators, men were by nature aggressive and violent, but as thinking beings it was imperative to channel that nature to worthy battles.

Manny was also big into bodybuilding. He and I had about the same build, 5 feet, seven inches tall, 130 lbs when we first met in late September. Over the past two months, he had put on an additional 30 lbs, lifting weights and bulking up ingesting large amount of carbohydrates. He would work out then hit the mess hall where he would eat a half a loaf of bread and butter before diving into his dinner. He would explain that the work out had broken down all these muscle cells in his body and the flood of food would be rebuilding them overnight. He used the weights to sculpt his body and the Karate to make those same muscles have more purpose than simply looking good. The reality was that we were part of a military organization whose purpose was to bring force to bear in the service of the United States. Being trained as a radio technician, it was easy to loose sight of what I would be doing once I put to sea on a fighting ship.

John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the U.S. and my Commander-in-Chief, had arisen well before us in his suite at the Texas Hotel in Ft. Worth, Texas and left the hotel room without his wife and greeted well wishers in a nearby parking lot before joining her for breakfast with the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. As Manny and I were into the second hour of our class, the Kennedy’s and the Johnson’s were flying from Ft. Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base to Dallas Love Field, bordered by Mockingbird Lane on the southeast, by Loop 12 on the northwest, by Lemmon Avenue on the northeast and Denton Drive on the southwest. The President’s motorcade left Love Field turning left on Mockingbird Lane then right and traveling down Lemmon Avenue jogging right onto Turtle Creek Blvd, jogging left onto North Harwood Street, and making a right onto Main Street. When Main approached Houston Street, the motorcade turned right on Houston Street and left on Elm Street heading west toward its rendezvous with Lee Harvey Oswald.

At 10:30 AM Pacific Standard Time, 12:30 PM Central Standard Time, the path of the 35th President of the United States crossed that of Lee Harvey Oswald and in an instant, the President was shot dead. It didn’t take long for the news to spread from Dallas—not the instantaneous response we’ve come to expect from CNN, but within an hour of the terrible deed, the AP, UPI, and other news services were broadcasting the terrible news. We found out as we broke for lunch and made our way to the mess hall on Treasure Island, where everyone working there was already talking about what had happened. The mess hall was one of the places on base where radios played continuously in the galley. The atmosphere inside the mess hall was electric with the fight or flight instinct that animals get when they are confronted with a threat. When the Commander in Chief is attacked, what does that mean to the rank and file military?

It took a good half hour for the initial shock to wear off. Manny and I moved through the serving line listening to the sailor serving us answer a barrage of questions. As soon as one question was answered another one would take its place. Who did the shooting? Was the President dead? Had the military been put on alert… We were asking and getting answers for unprecedented questions from word-of-mouth sources inside the base mess hall. The rest of Friday and the weekend were shrouded in an oppressive gloom that hung over everyone civilian and military alike. I remember little of that time other than the sense of loss I felt. The television news broadcasters finally began to tell a coherent story about the events earlier in the day. We knew that the President had been shot by a lone gunman name Lee Harvey Oswald, that the military had not been put on alert, that we had a new president, and that the nation was going to mourn its fallen leader. Wednesday of the following week, November 26th the President was buried in Arlington National Cemetery and then it was over. School and our normal lives resumed. Manny and I began our Karate practice sessions again and we both started preparing for a major exam at school.

August 15, 2005 - Making the Grade

August 15, 2005 - Making the Grade

November 4, 1963 was a Monday, one of the most significant days of my life, though it would take a lifetime for me to appreciate its value. I was still 17 years old, fresh out of high school—I graduated in June—and it was like I was returning to school after an extended summer vacation. I would turn 18 at the end of November. The immediate significance of this day was somewhat apparent to me. Many of my classmates were sailors who had enlisted for a six-year tour of duty to be allowed to attend this school. Many of them were destined for the Navy's newest fleet of nuclear submarines. I couldn’t qualify for subs because I wore glasses. Unlike my classmates, I had joined the service before turning 18 which meant they had to discharge me when I turned 21, three years and a few days from now. I happened to be here because of a computer making the assignment, a human would have realized that my short enlistment time would preclude such special treatment without a commitment of reenlistment for two year when my first tour of duty was over—I’ve always view this event as Catch 22, the mirror image.

The school I was entering was one of the longest the Navy offered, 38 weeks, and 20 percent of the class would not make it. Some would drop back a class or two. Others would just not be able to keep up or refused to do so. In either event, they would end up scrubbing decks for a taskmaster of a Bosun’s Mate. He was the boogie man that kept me applying myself throughout the time I was in school, far more effectively than any threat or promised reward had done when I was in high school. I began to apply myself to learning, as I had never done before. I quickly learned that for me to retain anything I heard in lectures, it had to be written down. Everything that entered my head had to go through my right hand. It was how I reined in a mind that like a bee seeking pollen flitting from one thought to the next as if dwelling on any one was forbidden. I would apply the discipline I learned grasping electronic theory and practice to every aspect of my later life.

Of all the instructors I had during that 38 weeks, I remember the first one, CV, the one who took us through the first 11 weeks of theory, which was largely physics that I had not applied myself to during my senior of high school but managed to pass. CV was a tall—easily six feet, thin, and ungainly—his shoulder were slightly hunched. He had cross-cropped straw colored hair, hazel eyes that seemed not to focus on you when you spoke face to face. They rather appeared to be viewing a spot just behind you. He spoke with a midwestern accent—Iowa, Nebraska, or Ohio. He gave off a scholarly air as if he were pondering some problem when he sat behind the desk watching us during a test or pop quiz. He had an open door policy if you needed help after hours, and I was a frequent visitor when we had word problems for homework, the bane of my school life.

In our class there was one guy, BK, who had a commanding presence that made you take notice of him, though he never drew attention to himself—on the contrary, he was always reticent to speak. You didn’t have a conversation with him but rather asked a question and received an answer in the least amount of words possible to convey a thought. He was just shy of six feet tall, a nonplussed expression fixed on a slightly rounded face that resembled Jim Morrison, close-cropped dark chocolate colored hair. He was also the brightest member of the class effortlessly passing every pop quiz or test. The class was a chore for him because it gave him no challenge. What BK did to offset this was create his own challenge. He organized the continuous poker game that began when he arrived on Treasure Island and lasted until he graduated. He was continually leaving a poker game in the early morning hours well ahead of the others at the table. His earnings were so lucrative and predictable that he rented an apartment in the Potrero District of San Francisco near Marisposa Street. I was invited there once. He and his friend were walking toward us on Market Street in mid afternoon and his friend, a classmate, recognized me and another classmate and asked if we wanted to come to BK’s place for a party. Both had their arms around attractive girls so we readily accepted. When we arrive the house was full of people only a handful of sailors from Treasure Island, the rest from the neighborhood or elsewhere in the city. I was completely out of place in this gathering. After trying to engage other partygoers in conversation with only a minimum of success, I left walking back to Market Street. It was late afternoon and I suspected the party would go on through the night. I was struck by the ability of people like BK to cruise through life effortlessly, gifted with a quick mind, charisma that attracted both women and men who wanted to be around him, and the instinct to succeed at whatever he applied himself to—he graduated top of the class, though I never learned what assignment he got when he left school.

BK attracted men who aspired to be like him but lacked his natural ability. Two of them, LS and HG were regulars at his poker games, neither one a consistent winner, tending to have hot and cold streaks. Both were struggling in school largely because they seldom put the time into studying, preferring the poker table or evening in the city barhopping when they had the money. I suspected they were cheating on most of their exams and pop quizzes possibly getting answers from the class that was a week ahead of ours. They weren’t getting them from BK who kept himself in the corner seat farthest from CV’s desk. CV quit calling on BK with questions because he always had the right answer. LS and HG sat in the middle of the back row next to one another.

As the end of the first 11 weeks of training came, we were all to be given our final exam, a long two-hour affair that began as soon as we entered class at 800 hours on Friday January 17th 1964. We had to turn in what we had completed exactly at 1100 hours. We were then given a long lunch and expected back in class at 1300 hours for instructions on starting the next phase of our training on Monday the following week for those who passed the exam. When we returned to lunch instead of going into the classroom, CV ordered us into formation at parade rest in the yard outside class. Something didn’t seem right. As soon as we were assembled and accounted for, he announced that some of us had cheated on the exam. It would be better for their records if the guilty parties would announce themselves rather than be called out. No one stepped forward though everyone to a man in the class knew the guilty parties. I think we were all worried that some of us might be implicated because of our ties with the two culprits. When no one fell out of ranks and followed CV into the classroom after what seemed like a long time, CV returned and called for LS and HG to report to his office. He then ordered the rest of us back into class and to await his return.

CV returned an hour later without a word about LS or HG and simply stated that cheating in class would not be tolerated and anyone caught would be dealt with severely. He then went on to describe what we would be expected to do in our next 10 weeks of classes. He said grades would be posted at the end of the day and those who didn’t make a passing grade would be notified and informed as to what would become of them. It was a long afternoon, but at the end of the day, I had made the grade and would move on with the class. Another underage classmate and I made our way to a small bar on Grant Avenue near Chinatown in San Francisco. The bartender would serve us without asking for an ID. It was typically half full on a Friday night with locals, the occasional tourists, and sailors like us, most of them legal. Back then Scotch and soda was the only drink I knew by name and that's what I drank. We sat and drank all the pent up tension away as we talked about the fate of LS and HG. We both realized that we were on a fast moving train and we had to stay on for the entire ride.

August 14, 2005 – Taking a Turn at Performing

August 14, 2005 – Taking a Turn at Performing

A squad of sailors in dress blue uniforms three columns wide by four rows deep, each with an M1 Rifle held at a 45 degree angle over their right shoulder, the rifle butt secure in each sailor’s white gloved right hand, right forearm perpendicular to the ground, right elbow rigid to left side. Each sailor’s white cotton twill rounded crown cap resting squarely on the head with the lower front edge approximately 1-1/2 inch above the eyebrows, each set of eyes fixed in at the back of the head of the sailor in front. The 12-man formation is moving in unison but with the mechanical cadence of toy sailors, their black boots and white leggings sliding left leg forward unbent at the knee, followed by right leg. Their progress is the same as a normal march, but somehow it seems to happen in slow motion. The scene is the Merced County Fair Parade down 17th Street (now Main Street) on a weekend in the middle of September 1963. It’s got to be in the low 90s Fahrenheit—typical late summer in California’s Central Valley, a slight breeze with the hint of cool in it just perceptible. The main street of Merced is right out of early 20th Century California—two- and three-story buildings line the parade route: a J.C. Penney Department Store, Bank of America in a solid brick structure with high ceiling main floor topped by two stories of office space, Ingraham’s Jewelers, and other business. Along the parade route with small American flags in one hand, fans in the other, are families: men in short sleeve sport shirts and gabardine or some such material pants; women in floral designed, light summer dresses and shod in sensible flats; and kids dressed much like their parents.

As the toy Navy formation reaches the reviewing stand and slows, the squad leader gives the command “halt” followed by “order arms.” He then issues the command “left face.” As the team executes the command, the sailor in the second row of the column closest to the reviewing stand abruptly falls backwards and lays on the pavement unmoving, stiff as a plastic toy sailor toppled from an upright position. He is face up, his team members staring blankly at the reviewing stand. The sailor is one of two black men in the ranks and he is the tallest member of the squad. He makes the fall because his action will create the greatest tension in the audience. Did he make a mistake? Did he pass out? Is he hurt? All these questions immediately flood the mind of those watching, especially those in the reviewing stand—of many groups in the parade they will remember this one. The squad leader out in front of the formation does a mechanical left face, takes three steps forward, does another left face, marches to the downed sailor and in mechanical movement, rights the fallen sailor who remains rigid at attention as all this occurs.

Once the fallen sailor is back on his feet facing the reviewing stand, the squad leader retraces his steps to the front of the squad, issues a series of commands that has the team running through the M1 Manual of Arms—a sequence of movements that brings the rifle to the left shoulder then the right shoulder. In between the two shoulders the rifle is twirled with the ease of a majorette’s baton. Once the rifle is back on the right shoulder after the demonstration is complete, he issues the command “right face” then orders the squad “forward march!” The formation resumes its mechanical shuffle march in perfect synchronization, the fallen sailor none the worse for the fall, is completely unaffected. The crowd applauds its approval as the sailors move along. The fall was rehearsed and was part of the drill. The black sailor appears to fall flat, but in reality he bends his body at the waist just before impact and takes the fall with his butt keeping his upper body completely tensed so that the momentum of the fall is offset by the tension and the torso has a soft landing.

I had just joined the U.S. Navy Treasure Island Drill Team toward the end of August and this was my first chance to see the team perform before an audience. I was supporting the sailors in formation. Some of the eight of us that accompanied the marchers were understudies to those in the parade, ready to take over if one of the first string had to bow out. We were behind the reviewing stand and watched our comrades go through their performance as they had been doing since the drill team was formed, long before I ever arrive on August 10th. It was warm in our dress blue uniform and we had little to do except watch. The glory all went to the sailors on the street. At the end of the parade, we would all be loaded back on the Navy bus that brought us here earlier in the day and returned to our barracks on Treasure Island, another perk of being on the team was sharing the team’s barracks, off by itself and only half full and no one to tell us what to do except the squad leader who was responsible for discipline of all the members of the team. His second in command ruled the roost when he had shore leave and vice versa. The squad leader was mixed Asian American born in Hawaii, his second in command also from Hawaii an Anglo. The two knew each other in the islands and acted more like brothers than friends. Besides the two black guys and me—a Pacific Islander, the rest of the squad were Anglos from Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, New Jersey…

I had arrived early to the U.S. Naval Training Center at Treasure Island for a school that would train me to be a radio technician. The class would not begin until the first week of November. In the meantime, I was being given “make work” jobs while I waited. When I met one of the drill team members, he invited me to try out for the team where I would spend the day practicing drills, something that seemed more rewarding than serving in the work detail. Joining the drill team reminded of my childhood days in the Boy Scouts and Little League baseball. You became part of the team, which had its own set of rituals for initiating you into the group. Once you were in you learned the jargon, the secret signs, the mannerisms that identified you as part of the group. Members of the group formed friendships for a night of drinking and searching for possible dates. Most of the team members were at least 21 and nights of drinking left the underage guys out. I went into town a couple of times with other underage members of the team to bowl or roller skate—back then there were rinks where you paid to rent skates and took to the floor hoping to find someone to take to the movies or meet later at the rink or a bowling alley.

A typical day reminded me of boot camp in the amount of drills we did. The performing team members were the drill instructors and they would begin the day running though all the maneuvers each new trainee needed to join the ranks or those performing. Each day, I would practice the mechanical walk while holding the bearing of the mechanical sailor we were supposed to be. Details such as keeping eyes completely fixed and unmoving on a space in front while observing the visual and audio cues from men in front and to your left and right to ensure you were exactly synchronized to their movement. During the parade in Merced, the squad acted as a single body and the audience suspended belief and began to believe that these were toy sailors not real sailors putting on an act—the team was that precise in its collective motion. The routine also included performing the Manual of Arms with the drill teams own interpretation. The team’s manual is performed with the mechanical movements expected of toy sailors as well as the added twirls and other embellishments to make it more appealing to an audience. I practiced the manual with the same repetitive zeal that a weightlifter does reps in front of a mirror. We were performers and what we saw in the mirror was what the audience would see when we took our act public.

I enjoyed my time on the team, but when my class began on November 11th, I had to make a choice, split my energy between endeavors or concentrate on one. The decision was an easy one to make. I realized after many weeks of work that I couldn’t get the emotional excitement about the performance that the other members of the team seemed to have. Without that fire in the belly, that need to convince the audience that you were a mechanical sailor, I knew I was shortchanging the audience as well as my fellow team members. For that short two months, I had the closest thing I would ever come to joining the circus, which is what the team reminded me of. Our act was marching toy sailors that performed a set of stylized standard military maneuvers for an audience. It was a thing of beauty to watch and it took dedicated performers willing to sacrifice to make it beautiful. I took my leave of the group, wished them continued success, and never saw them perform again.

August 11, 2005 – Observations on the Grand Formosa Regent Hotel

August 11, 2005 – Observations on the Grand Formosa Regent Hotel

I’m sitting in the lobby of the posh Grand Formosa Regent Hotel. It’s Sunday February 8th 2004, about 1000 hours. I had breakfast in my room 1038 and have left to let the maid clean the room. It’s a rest day, before the conference that I’ve been sent here to handle, is due to occur. It’s a 2-day event starting on Monday and I’m to stay till Wednesday February 11th when I wing my way back to San Francisco on the evening Evergreen Airline flight 18, departing Taipei at 1950 hours (7:20 PM).

Outside the hotel, it’s about 55 degrees Fahrenheit and there is a steady rain, which had begun last night as I arrived at Chang Kai Shek airport at around 2300h Saturday aboard EVA Flight 27. The hotel lobby is bustling with travelers and there is an excitement that I’ve experienced in other storied hotels—the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, the St Regis in New York, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, etc. It’s generated by the residents and guest all exuding an energy that comes from their own expectations of the wonderful time they are about to have, are having, or have just experienced. Here after all was a place where the great figures of history passed the time, politicians, celebrities, and other notable figures of the arts and letters. I’ve always marveled at the power of myth and its affect on human experience, my own included. I’ve found the effect very exhilarating.

The hotel sits on a slight hill perhaps 20 or 30 feet above street level with the lobby entrance at the top of the rise, sheltered by a Porte-cochere tall enough to amply accommodate the tour buses that regularly pick up and drop off passengers. It must have dynamite feng shui, something the layout of the hotel lobby attests to as well. The hotel entrance is accessed by a brick driveway sufficiently wide to accommodate the buses, limos and cars that constantly stream in front of the hotel and have to turn around to retreat back down the hill.

As I entered the lobby last night, the registration desk is at my right—a welcome sight as I crawled wearily out of the Mercedes 500SL that serves as the hotel limo, dispatched to CKS to pick up arriving guests for a modest $NT1950. The 15-hour flight from SFO to CKS allowed sporadic sleep at best. I had an aisle seat in a slightly upgraded section of the main cabin on the Boeing 747—same size seat with enough leg room to stretch your legs—$145.00 more than the base coach faire of $755.42—but it did not accommodate real rest. I suspect a more costly business class seat would have taken its toll after 15 hours.

Walking across the polished gleaming oyster-shell-colored marble floor I’m greeted by a pleasant male clerk, who examined my passport and swiped my American Express card as he completed my registration that would put me into one of the posh rooms on 10th floor. On the wall directly across from the registration desk was another desk of about the same dimensions. During the day it was peopled by the concierge staff as well as the bellmen who occupied the area nearest the entrance. From the lobby entrance to just beyond the long registration desk, the shiny marble reflects the tall ceiling with its hanging chandelier. Beyond the registration area a large square carpet covers the marble forming a lounge area with a brown leather couch and chairs lining the walls on either side of the carpet. In the center of the carpet sits a large speckled block marble coffee table. Beyond the carpeted lounge a bank of six elevator cars ferry guests down two floors or up fourteen floors to the top of the rectangular-shaped 5-star grand hotel.

I was soon checked in and the bellman took charge of the narrow 3- by 4-foot cardboard box containing the three signs I would use at the conference on Monday and my brown and olive folding soft-sided Monk Original Skyway 2-suit hanging bag. I was happy to be rid of the two albatrosses I had borne to and from two airports. He promised to meet me in my room and pointed me toward the 6-car elevator bank opposite the entrance about a third the length of the hotel from front to back. I shouldered my notebook PC bag—the 21st century equivalent to the briefcase—now almost obsolete, walked across the area carpet in the part of the lobby to the right of the registration desk. One of the six cars was waiting as I approached and I boarded and within a quarter of a minute I was walking toward my room.

This morning, two JAL airline pilots in full flight uniform, pulling their luggage on wheels behind them exited the hotel through automatic sliding glass doors and entered a waiting limo to take them to CKS. In front of me, a European gentleman—Italian comes to mind—attired in beige patterned sport coat, open neck sport shirt, and slacks greets an Asian couple—man and woman—speaking to them in English, suggesting they take a table in the smoking section. The olive-skinned host had a high backward sloping forehead, prominent Roman nose, and piercing eyes set in a wide prominent cheekboned face—a very commanding visage. If I were casting a novel, he would be a European industrialist entertaining the Chinese CEO of a large Taiwan-based company he was about to acquire—the CEO’s wife, being the CFO of the company, founded twenty years ago as a family venture now with a billion dollar valuation.

The lobby is teeming with guest all carrying umbrellas and/or attired in raincoats. As you enter the hotel, the registration desk is on your right. The oyster-shell-colored marble floor extends the length of the level, which traverses the lobby, the lounge where I’m sitting, flowing through and around the two banks of three elevators each and proceeding to another lounge area beyond the elevators where the marble diverges again around a large square opening in the second level ringed in by a waist high metal and glass fence. Low-slung glass-topped cocktail tables and metal and leather lounge seating hugging the waist-high fence and the opposing walls on all four sides of the opening, provide idling guest a view of the expansive restaurant below. The marble continues its journey beyond the opening into the conference room area occupying the remainder of the lobby level: the Grand Ballroom, where the conference I was attending would be held.

I had begun the day having a western-style breakfast in my hotel room, Outside my window as I ate my two-eggs over easy with hash browns, toast, and coffee, mid-morning in Taipei had provided an overcast sky and intermittent showers to color the 10th-floor view of an adjacent building to my right, the top of which was one or two floor below mine. Directly in front was a square city block of park with well-trimmed grass, the occasional cement and wood park benches sat at intervals beside the concrete sidewalks that sliced the park at diagonals forming a huge X that was visible from my vantage but not apparent at ground level. Beyond the park was the major intersection of Chungshan N Road and Nanking E Road, which even on Sunday had its share of traffic maneuvering through the red light controlling the two 3-lane thoroughfares. I had taken photos of the huge sign adorning the top of the adjacent building with my digital still camera. I had gotten shots of the park from a variety of different angles. I lack the eye and the steady hand to be a good photographer. I could probably fix the latter but I would still be short the essential element—an eye.

I had taken the elevator down to lobby level shortly after lunch. I wasn’t hungry but decided to order a glass of champagne, which I sipped for the better part of an hour at one of the cocktail tables that looked down on the restaurant below. After paying my bill I ventured to the front of the hotel where I sat in one of the leather couches in the hotel lobby between the bank of elevators to my right and the registration desk on my left.

One floor down is street level. This level contains shops on either side of a large court that contains seating for the main restaurant. The court below, which forms an expansive square, is open to the lobby level. Beyond the court the lower level ducks under the lobby level and extends about one third of the total depth of the hotel—front to back. This area beneath is an extension of the main restaurant where lunch is served buffet style. Buffets are very popular in Taiwan’s upscale hotels.

Beneath the restaurant level are two more levels containing a shopping arcade replete with all the chic stores you would find in any metropolitan city worldwide: Ralph Lauren, Mont Blanc, Godiva, Hugo Boss (opening February 2004—a sign in their shop window advises, though they had better get a move on if they are to be ready for business by March). Within the mall you are transported out of the local geography and placed in this artificial world that could physically be located anywhere in the world. There are few if any cues that suggest this is Taipei, not LA, Tokyo, London or Paris. And there is little sense of day or night save the fact that the mall is empty suggesting the first day of the week in the Christian world. It’s Sunday and the picture I take of the artificially lit mall—imagine a long brightly lit corridor with upscale storefronts staring at one another across the aisle— and it has only a couple of people wandering the long hall window shopping.

The oyster-colored marble floor, that begins as you enter the hotel, extends the length of the lobby from the entrance and beyond the rectangular carpeted lounge area where I’m now sitting on a leather couch on the side of the hotel where the registration desk is located. I’ve finished my glass of champagne and decided to continue my study of the inside of this marvelous building. The seating area is divided in two parts: the part where I’m sitting and its mirror image on the opposite side of the hotel. Between the two, a sporadic stream of guests walk to and from the two banks of three elevators to my right, each elevator taking guests down three floors or up 14 floors to the top of the hotel. I am sitting on a low-backed brown leather sofa that looks at its twin across a lows-slung, dark-wood, black speckled-marble top, square coffee table not quite as wide as the sofa. To my right are two herringbone beige cloth upholstered chairs sitting side-by-side staring mutely at their twins across the coffee table. At each corners of this square shaped seating area are four square lamp tables with the same dark wood and marble top as the coffee table and all the same height as the coffee table. Atop each lamp table rests a tall four-sided pyramid-shaped lamp body mounted atop a brass base, a white cylinder lampshade corrals the right from a single high-wattage light bulb. The lamp sits right in the middle of the table. The entire seating area rests atop a dark sea green carpet with a design that resembles a flock of birds in flight each bird separated equidistant from its neighbor. Looking at the pattern for a moment gives the viewer the impression of movement.

Starting at the entrance to the hotel and extending to the elevator banks and beyond are cylindrical columns—I count five equally spaced from the entrance to the elevators banks running down each side of the hotel lobby. Beyond the elevators to the rear of the hotel the columns continue beyond my range of view. Each reinforced concrete cylinder is faced with the alabaster-colored marble. A dark wood baseboard six inches or so high binds each column to the floor. When I entered the hotel for the first time and saw the column I was put in mind of the rows of stone columns that populate the ancient Egyptian temples at Karnak. The registration desk and the concierge desk on the opposite wall—both dark wood and chest high—each sits between the second and third column counting from the entrance to the back of the hotel. Behind each desk is a huge wall hanging that rises from just above the floor to just below ceiling and spans the distances between the second and third columns. Behind both the concierge desk and the registration desk is a wall hanging that covers the area from just above the floor to just below the ceiling. It extends from just inside the second column to just inside the third column. A brown frame about six to eight inches thick frames the wall hanging. The wall hanging is alabaster in color. Starting at the top and moving down are rows of equally spaced peaks and troughs. The overall impression is of looking at the surface of water from above and seeing perfectly spaced waves.

The wall behind the seating area directly across from me is a storefront, boarded up with white drywall a sign on the front announcing that Harry Winston, New York Jeweler would be opening in 2004. Arranged below the sign are three large photos; the one to my left is trimmed in a black border around a white background in the center of which is a gold necklace studded with diamonds, though its entire length is not shown. The picture in the middle is of a gold ring with a large rectangular shaped diamond viewed from the top on a black background. The picture on the right resembles the one on the left—both are trimmed in black with white background. This last picture is of a diamond-studded gold bracelet. I got the message, very pretty adult ornaments with very hefty price tags. To the left and toward the concierge desk is a small Marc Jacobs shoe store.

On the wall between Marc Jacobs and the concierge desk is a tall narrow mirror, easily eight feet high, by four or five feet wide. Mounted on the wall on the other side of the concierge desk near the entrance is an identical tall narrow mirror. Both are framed in a six-inch frame the color of alabaster. The surface of the frame has the same wave pattern as found on the wall hanging separating the twin mirrors. Each mirror is mounted so that it stands out from the wall, which is entirely paneled in the same oyster-shell colored marble on the floor. There are five rows of long, narrow marble panels. Each panel runs the length of the wall from the entrance to Marc Jacobs shoe store. Each panel is separated from its neighbor by an inch to two-inch wide space. The panel at the bottom of the wall contrasts with the other four that rise to the ceiling. It is a darker beige color. The wall opposite, behind the registration desk, is a mirror image of the one behind the concierge desk.

It’s early afternoon and the concierge desk has been kept busy by a sporadic steam of guests inquiring about all manner of things both inside the hotel and out: dinner reservations for tonight, shuttle schedules between Taipei and CKS, bus schedules, costs of taxis between Taipei and other cities on the island. The registration desk has had less traffic, the occasional late checkout, guests complaining about something in their room, lost or misplaced keys, “have you any messages for…”: the daily life of any hotel. I wonder how many times a clerk has answered the same question over a year or for the time he or she has been behind either desk, each inquiry is its own small drama played out in the time it takes to ask and receive a response. I’ve observed as much of the life in the lobby of the Formosa Grand Hotel as I can handle for one day and return to my room to check e-mails and do some work.

August 9, 2005 – Getting to Know You, Again

August 9, 2005 – Getting to Know You, Again

A Continental Airlines Flight out of SFO brought me back home to El Paso on Saturday, December 3rd, 1966. My high school buddy RA had driven me to the airport from San Jose. For the past week, I had been camped out in an apartment RA shared with a couple of San Jose State college students in their senior year. The three of them had a fondness for The Monkeys TV Show as I recall. The highlight of my week with RA and his friends was my 21st birthday, which we celebrated at midnight on November 29th--I turned 21 on November 30th. I had also submitted my resume to a number of employers in the area hoping to land a job so I could stay in the area, my one major hope was IBM with the large facility on Cottle Road where I presented myself and requested an employment application, which I completed and returned to the human resources representative. She told me that I would receive a letter within a month that would arrange a time for me to take a test the company administered to all applicants. I explained that I would be in El Paso during that time and she had me add that information to the application. Not to worry she assured me as IBM has an office in every city and I could take the exam at any one of them. Though I took the test and nothing came of it, this would begin my long-term relationship with the IBM Corp. that continues to this day.

Leaving San Francisco on my return flight to El Paso left me with a heavy heart. I was leaving a place I really wanted to be, for a place, that five and a half years ago, I had sought to leave. It was the summer before my junior year in high school and I asked my parents if I could drive my Vespa scooter—top speed 50 miles and hour with one person aboard—with RA out to California. I had saved money from my paper route and he and I would spend the summer with his sister and brother-in-law. RA had taken the Greyhound bus to California the summer before and was planning to do so again unless I could give him a ride on the Vespa. As you might imagine no parent in their right mind would have permitted such an unsupervised journey, nor would RA's parents consent to him riding with me either. It was a great disappointment that took me the summer to get over. My disappointment was aggravated when RA returned in the fall and told me what a great time he had with his newfound girlfriend. Hayward, California where RA’s sister and husband lived had everything that El Paso lacked. They got all the top 40 songs before us. They got the best movies, the best clothes, the best dances, everything before we did. That’s where everything was happening. El Paso was where everything that was happening came, to stop happening.

I would leave El Paso the following year. My father was stationed at Ft Lewis, Washington, a sprawling Army base just south of Tacoma, Washington and we moved from El Paso the summer of 1962, the start of my senior year of high school. My sisters and I had been wrenched from familiar places enough in our earlier lives that one more move was no big deal. Each time, you got over your feeling of loss quicker. It was tough but in the end each wrenching made us better able to handle much of the grief everyone feels in his or her life. I joined the Navy after graduating from Clover Park High School, in the Tacoma suburb of Lakewood, Washington. I had begun smoking as a sophomore when I was in El Paso, a pack every couple of days of Marlboro cigarettes. RA my good buddy had brought the habit back from California right after his first trip and it was required to be cool. Just before I graduated high school I told my dad, a pack-a-day smoker, that I had taken up the habit. He said if that was what I wanted to do then I should do it, but it wasn’t good for me.

When I left the family in Ft. Lewis, I never thought I would be returning to El Paso, but here I was flying back nearly five years later. I knew I couldn’t go back home, but I needed to return to reclaim something I felt I had lost when I left. After seven months back home I realized that I had lost my innocence and I would never be able to find it again. In that period of time, beside working and going to school, IM and I had continued the correspondence we had carried on while I was in Japan and she was in Australia. She had gone there to be with her sister and her family after I left her on Long Island in 1965 when my 5-month assignment for the Navy ended. She was returning from Sidney aboard the SS Oriana arriving March 21st, with ports of call in Auckland, Suva (Fiji Islands), Honolulu, British Columbia, and into San Francisco. I told her I would meet her and bring her back with me to El Paso. At the time all we wanted was to see one another again. I had bought a used yellow 1965 two-door Chevrolet Corvair Monza. I left right after work on Monday March 20th and started heading west on Interstate 10. The plan was to drive straight through and arrive in San Francisco, Tuesday when IM’s ship docked in San Francisco. Impatient and impetuous as a 21-year old can be, I pushed the Corvair relentless, reaching speeds of 85 miles and hour, which was pretty fast back then because the highway patrol was far more vigilant for speeders than they are now. But my recklessness put me in Blythe, California just as the sun was rising Tuesday morning.

However, everything comes at a price and for me the price was the Corvair’s engine. The sunrise imbued with renew energy and I-10 from Blythe to Desert Center was straight as an arrow and with hardly any traffic. I put the accelerator down and kept the car right at 80 miles and hour, passing what few cars were on the road. About 15 miles beyond Desert Center I started to pass an 18-wheeler when the Corvair’s opposed six-cylinder air-cooled engine lost power and I was forced to give up the effort to overtake the truck. I fell in line behind him and pulled over to the side of the highway. Without turning off the engine, which was causing a noticeable vibration, I lifted the lid on the rear engine compartment and watched the engine shaking. I had to have thrown a piston. I got back into the car and pulled slowly onto the highway and proceeded on to Chiriaco Summit, where there was a service station with a tow truck. The mechanic on duty took one look at the engine and told me it had to be taken to a garage; the closest of any size was in Indio 30 miles further west.

I dropped the car at a Chevrolet dealership that told me it would take a good week to get the parts and repair the engine. I left the car, found a Greyhound Bus Station and hopped a bus heading for San Francisco. It took me all of Tuesday and half of Wednesday to finally make San Francisco. I knew the city pretty well from having lived there four years earlier. I walked from the bus station to the Embarcadero Road where IM’s ship was docked and found her in her stateroom. If only we could have stayed a few days aboard the Oriana before starting the journey back, it would be wonderful. But, life doesn’t work that way. The Oriana was about to leave for LA and IM’s stateroom would be host to another passenger. We had to gather her belongings and be on our way. A cab took her luggage, a wonderful black 30-in. long by 16-in. wide, and 16-in. high steamer trunk with two latches on either side of the lid and a lock in the middle. It had a couple of steamship luggage labels pasted on the sides too. We checked the trunk through to El Paso and bought two tickets to Los Angeles where we were invited to spend the night with my sister SA, her husband BA, and my nephew GA. The bus was departing at 9:00 getting into LA late morning on Thursday March 23rd. From there we would then continue on to El Paso. We had several hours before our bus was to leave so IM and I walked about San Francisco trying to visit as many of the tourist spots as was possible in such a short time: Union Square, Nob Hill, and a stroll through China Town. We capped our brief visit with dinner at Tad’s Steak House then walked back to the bus station for the trip south.

The bus we took from San Francisco to Los Angeles was a local and it must have stopped at a dozen cities in the Central Valley of California before pulling into LA, where my sister and family collected the two of us just after noon. If you want to test the strength of a relationship, spend a night together on a Greyhound bus. When we arrived at my sister’s place we had a chance to clean up and eat a proper meal. All I can remember about that night was a warm meal, a good night’s sleep, and the kindness of my sister and her husband toward IM and me. When our short stay was over the evening of Friday March 24th, the three of them drove us back to the Greyhound Bus Station in LA for another night trip into the desert of Arizona, New Mexico and on into El Paso. Being in the back seat of their car, I remember marveling at the endless expanse of freeway we traveled between Long Beach and LA.

By now, IM and I had gotten used to the cramped confines of the Greyhound bus and managed to sleep slightly better than on the first leg of the trip. This was aided by the bus not stopping and the interior lights not coming on every couple of hours. The following morning, we made one stop for breakfast, though for the life of me I can’t remember where, before getting back aboard and heading on into El Paso. We arrived in El Paso in the late afternoon on Saturday. My dad came to collect us at the Greyhound Bus Station in El Paso. IM’s trunk was already waiting for us. The two of us had made a difficult trip together and were still speaking to one another. It was a good sign that maybe we could get along.

August 8, 2005 – Building a Nest in Silicon Valley