Liberia, a first pass

So…. Liberia. Yeah, the reactions I'm getting are pretty bipolar. They're either "That's so freakin' amazing - how on earth did you get picked for something like that?!?" or "Why on earth would you want to do something like that?!?" Nothing in between those two extremes, which, I guess, makes sense - the phrase "I'm going to Liberia next week as an election monitor for the Carter Center" plants a point that's statistically a bit extreme in terms of demographic unlikelihood. On par with, I suppose, "I'm going to abandon friends and family for a few months to work at the South Pole." Point taken. And the questions I'm getting in response are about the same. The thing is, in this case, I don't have so good an answer to either.

"How" is easier, I guess. Devon and I have been supporters of the Carter Center ("TCC") for a couple of years now, ever since they helped me out with a Liberian public health project proposal I'd been asked to evaluate. I didn't know the first thing about Liberia or public health, they knew both intimately. I've also been talking with them in the capacity of my "day job" - I was studying how mobile phones could be used to help field workers gather data, and they were trying to figure out how to use mobile phones for monitoring elections, among other things. Good match.

TCC deploys two kinds of observers in elections: long-term observers, or LTOs, get there a few weeks before the event itself. They work on getting, for lack of a better term, the mood on the ground. They attend rallies and follow candidates around. They tend to be skilled professionals with a nose for what it looks like if something's awry - maybe a candidate is looking like they're being threatened. Maybe a candidate is hinting at violence if, say, "the peoples' will is not respected." (Remember, it's always about respecting the peoples' will, isn't it?) Anyhow, these guys are the pros.

But for the period immediately before and during the election, TCC needs broader coverage. When the actual voting starts, they need to see what materializes - are people being turned away at some polling stations? Is there intimidation? Are there complications with the ballots, not enough, or how they're being stored? Is the chain of custody respected, handing the boxes from the polling place to federal election officials? Is Diebold involved in any way? (sorry, cheap shot there). For these bits, they want as broad coverage as they can get. And it doesn't require a particularly trained observer to provide that coverage. After all, as Peter Gabriel, the founder of Witness.org (and yes, rock star) observed: "People tend to behave better if they know they're being watched." So TCC also deploys a swath of short-term observers (STOs) a couple of days before the election. In contrast to the sophisticated, nuance-detecting LTOs, STOs may be relatively um, untrained. Like me, for example. We're going to get a couple of days of training in Monrovia once we land, prior to deployment, and then it's off to the bush.

The Carter Center's been doing this for years, though, so they've got this training/deployment process down to a science. That being said, I don’t know how much I'll be able to report back while I'm on the ground there - remember that Liberia's got pretty much no running water or electrical grid, let alone decent internet connectivity. So it'll very much be catch as catch can when I can get somewhere with a signal. So the blog may go dark for a bit starting Oct 5th. Don't worry - I'll be taking notes and writing as I go, and it'll all go up as soon as I get back and recovered from whatever Icky Tropical Diseases I've picked up there (kidding about the ITDs, I promise!).

...

Eh, okay, sorry - this hasn't turned out to be a scintillating, clever, or even particularly informative post. I'm excited about this, really. I'm also tired - been trying to get too many things done at work prior to leaving, and not sleeping particularly well. Somewhere in my dreams, a mackerel wearing a top hat will offer me ear plugs, and I latch onto the significance of the event: Ear plugs! I must remember to pack ear plugs!  Then I roll fitfully for the next few hours trying to grasp on to the slippery idea, straining against the limits of my unconsciousness. Until I wake up at dawn, more exhausted than I was when I lay down, and turn to Devon: "I had the strangest dream: for some reason, I thought it was vital that I put a mackerel in my luggage and bring it to Liberia..."

Messing about in boats

Everyone knows the quotation, right? "There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." Yes, yes, Kenneth Graham, Wind in the Willows. Yes, you in the front row, five points for Ravenclaw. I'd never read the book - remember, I didn't really read much as a kid - but I knew that quotation. What I didn't know was that it was uttered by the oblivious boat man (okay "boat rat" - yes, another five for Ravenclaw) just before he rams the shore and spills himself and passenger flat on their rodent keisters.

But Rat is right, and the fact that, after this crash he goes on with his paean to boating without missing a beat is a tribute to Graham's understanding of boats. Of what they do to us. Or of what they let us do to ourselves. Whenever I manage to get out on the water, I'm always - always, always, always - struck by the thought that I don't spend nearly enough time simply messing about in boats.

Had that thought again a couple of weeks ago, a week before the craziness, when Zach and I got to spend a bit of time sailing together up in Berkeley. You remember Zach, right? Polie cargo dog - sorry, "Cargo Specialist" - who's been everything from 911 dispatcher to tall ship sailor (certified Able Seaman, served as deckhand on the HMS Bounty for a couple of years). Lives on the Icelandic cargo vessel docked at Pier 50. Yes, you remember Zach - hard not to.

Anyhow, my friend Anthony up in Berkeley is also a sailor, and I really wanted to introduce the two of them. Actually, I really wanted to go sailing, and figured that introducing A to Z would be a good excuse to get taken sailing. But yeah, I did want them to meet.

Anthony was going out with some friends that Wednesday evening on a sunset sail, and told us to come on up. We skipped out of work a couple of hours early to beat the East Bay traffic, picked up some chocolate to share (always nice to have something to share), and made our way to the Berkeley marina.

I tried to do what I could to help as we motored our way out of the marina and raised sail. Mostly that seemed to be "stay out of the way" and "relax". As Zach observed, 90% of being a good sailor is doing what you're told. The other 10% is doing what you're told. So I kept my head clear of the boom (you know why it's called the "boom", right?) stayed off the lines, and planted myself on the windward rail to enjoy the ride.

And y'know, September on the bay, with the city ahead of you and sun dropping behind the Marin headlands? Hard not to enjoy. We were heeled over 10-20 degrees on a steady port tack, north and west in the vague direction of Sausalito. Zach and one of Anthony's students took turns manning the wheel, while the others were bringing up brie, roast red pepper sandwiches and Pinot from the galley. Wasn't much to do but enjoy the ride.

Once we'd settled in, I found Zach sitting up on the forward deck, away from the bustle of conversation and tasty appetizers. He was looking leeward, looking out over the water with a forgetful smile and bottle of Fat Tire ale. It was a peaceful look so I hesitated before scrambling along the rail to join him - never want to interrupt someone's groove.

I excused myself and plonked down beside him, joining in the gaze out over the water. Made some offhand comment about how it could be a whole lot worse, and still not suck. He nodded appreciatively and agreed.

"Life is good?"

"Yeah, it's a good time to be Zach."

I sympathized - it was a good time to be Pablo, too.

We crossed the wake of some other sailboat, long gone, and a curtain of spray jumped the rail to give us a light soaking. Zach looked over and gave me an ear to ear grin.

"Been a while since I've been out on the water. Was wanting some of that."

My mind hopscotched back to Japan, half a lifetime ago, during hanami season. "Hanami" is "flower watching" - you go out and picnic in the parks under the cherry trees. You do spend some time actually marveling at the beauty of the impossibly white carpet of trees that line the parks of Tokyo - the first time I saw a cherry tree in full bloom, I thought it was some sort of outdoor art installation. But the real point of hanami is to sit and drink sake with your friends. You spread out a blanket and enough munchies to provide pretense of a picnic, then pull out the bottle with those little matched glasses and spend the afternoon toasting your friends and mutual good fortune.

Japan is full of wonderful little superstitions, so no national ritual like hanami would be without its share. The one that came to mind at this moment was this one: as the wind comes up in the afternoon, a Japanese park is - at times - swirling in a veritable snowstorm of airborne cherry blossom petals. It is considered auspicious for one of these petals to land in your sake cup as you hold it; all the better if you have just made a toast. It is taken as a sign that, in some way, fate has toasted with you and ratified your fortune.

So - that wave? Felt good to have to cold spray on my face. But also felt a little like the universe was commending our appreciation of the good fortune its had dropped in our laps. Acknowledging it with a watery high five, if you will. I realized I was grinning too. Yes indeed, it was a good time to be any of us. Especially those of us out on the water that day, just messing about in boats.

Here comes the sun

photo by Christy Schultz

Okay, now for something a little less heavy.

Sun is just now coming up. I like this time of year, when I'm typically up just a little before the dawn, when the sky to the east is that impossible deep blue-black curtain, laced at the bottom with a spreading glow of pinkorangeyellowredwhite. It's best when that last quarter moon is hanging there, too, falling behind an hour each day until it disappears into the sunrise and emerges, renewed, a fresh sliver at dusk. Yeah, I like sunrises.

Folks down at the Pole have sunrise on their mind, too. After six months of night, those crazy, wonderful, maddening, brave, unbelievably loveable folks are seeing the light. Well, they've been starting to see the light for a couple of weeks now, but a couple of days ago, clear skies and atmospheric refraction brought them their first glimpse of sun in just about six months. Official "sunrise" is today, and I expect there's some serious ritual frolicking going on down there.

It's also a weird, bittersweet time too, from what I can tell. The ordeal is nearly over - not that you could tell from the thermometer: they had another cold streak pushing the edge of -100F again just a couple of days ago. But the first Basler with freshies and replacements is due in less than a month, and the station will be filled with unfamiliar new faces that upset comfortable routines. I mean, I remember how unnerving it was for me coming back to civilization from Pole: the sea of strange people, talking at me - I didn't know how to respond. And that was after only three months, with a nice comfy population of 240. The 49 (it is 49, right? Jens has been behaving?) souls wintering over have been isolated for almost 9 months. You're going to get, as the language goes, a little toasty in that situation.

photo by Robert Schwartz

I'm still trying to get my vicarious fixes from the ice. There are the blogs, but they tended to go quiet in August. I can understand: it must seem like the world outside is so far away - exists only on a flickering screen for those hours when the satellites are up. You've already said everything that you can think of to tell them, what more is there? There are the Facebook and Google+ posts - Eric staking his well-earned bragging rights for soldiering off on his rounds as windchill dropped below -130, Christy and Robert's breathtaking aurora pictures, shots of the fire barrels and streaks in the sky from the emergency airdrop, the crate of fresh oranges and bag of mail that some thoughtful soul included in the pallet (hey - if you're going to send a C-17 on a 5000 mile round trip to drop off a couple of boxes of supplies, you might as well bring some nice things too).

A few folks have been keeping up the effort. It's well worth shimmying on over to http://southpolestation.com/links.html to have a look at the blogs. Marco's pictorial on suiting up to go skiing at -85F is particularly memorable; I really do believe he went skiing every day over winter - he's that kind of crazy). And Grace's paean to "Why I'm here" captures things in a way that makes me desperately ice-sick (yes, that's a word. At least it is now). Oh heck - take a break from your normal blogs and, on this morning of the first - and only - sunrise at the South Pole all year, head on over to http://southpolestation.com/links.html to read up on what the Polies have been up to. It's so much better than just checking Facebook again.

Marco, Ben, Kevin, Jens (back row), Christy and Grace (front row)
photo by Christy Schultz

Not at Reno

It's when you don't want to write, that you should really be writing. Like right now. I don't want to write because I don't know how to tell this story, because it's not a good one. Well, the "good" part of it is that Jeremy and I were - by chance - far from the "bad" stuff, and our friends near the "bad" stuff are - by narrow chance alone - unhurt.

You've probably seen the news by now about the crash into the box seats at the Reno Air Races. Friend of mine had invited me and Jem to come up and join them. He and his son had scored box seats front and center. They were driving up Wednesday to catch every day of the race, but Devon was adamant that Jem not miss any school. We decided that I would fly Jem up after school on Friday (today), and we'd join Dave and his son for the weekend. We'd delayed for an hour because of high winds, but were just about to head out to the airport when I got the call from Dave telling me not to come - there'd been a crash.

I didn't quite follow - crashes at Reno weren't all that infrequent. Usually it was someone losing an engine and bellying the plane in on the runway or a field somewhere, totaling his priceless Mustang or Bearcat, but getting off with a broken arm or a couple of ribs. There were bad crashes, too - pilots did get killed every three or four years. They'd usually shut down races for the day, but start the next morning with a memorial flight "because Johnny would have wanted it to go on." And on it went.

So I was a bit puzzled by Dave's instructions. No, he insisted, it was really bad. They weren't hurt (what was he talking about?) but they were going to try to get home. He'd call me later.

It was only in the following hours, eyes glued on the Twitter feed, that it became clear what happened. One of the experienced racers - Jimmy Leeward flying "Galloping Ghost" - apparently suffered a mechanical failure (fingers are pointing at a trim tab coming loose). He went straight up, and came damned near straight down, right into the crowd at the edge of the box seats. The plane disintegrated in a mass of flying steel shrapnel, and Dave, his son and a hundred other spectators were right in the middle of it. Dave and his son got off lucky - folks right next to them weren't. A dozen or more people are reported dead, with many times that in the hospital. Room for pause - if Devon weren't so insistent on Jem not missing school, we would have been right there next to Dave.

So. Man, what do you do with this? Do you go flying - to get right back on the horse? Dunno if that's relevant. It wasn't normal flying, not the kind Dave and I do. It was Unlimited Air Racing - widely recognized as sport balancing skill and risk management against the reality of maneuvering half a dozen 10,000 lb turbocharged warbirds within arm's length of each other at 500 mph while bouncing along the late-summer turbulence of a Reno afternoon. Lots of things can go wrong very quickly. But that's the racers - spectators are supposed to be, just, spectators. Regardless, we're getting together with Dave and his son tomorrow - they both could probably use someone to talk to. And what do you say to a boy that has just been through something like that? I think we all could use someone to talk to.

About that pot of petunias...

Quick update - remember how we were talking about how "probable" and "improbable" seem to have slightly different semantics in the Pabloverse? Well, it's happening again: a couple of rather unlikely (in the normal world) events have  have just come up heads at the same time. I need some sleep, so I'm not going to attempt to spin any tales here, and will just dump the news.

1) Got email from the USAP in Christchurch. They say that the salvage crews managed to retrieve our bags from the wreckage of the hotel. Don't know the condition of anything or how complete the "retrieval" was, but we're clearly getting something back. They want to know where to send it. It'll be nice to get pictures and my old passport back, but I'd kind of said "goodbye" to all that stuff as a bit of a Buddhist lesson in earthquake survival, so in a strange way, I'm not feeling it as the WoW-this-is-FABULOUS kind of news I would have expected. No doubt I will get to write more about that later. But it does draw a curtain closed on one adventure…

2) …just as another comes off the block. Okay, this isn't the kind of "OMG OMG OMFG" unexpected good news I had a year ago, but there's an entirely new adventure in the works. You all know about the Carter Center, right? Whenever there's a potentially controversial election in somewhere, the Carter Center has observers in the field, monitoring polling stations and reporting irregularities. Well, Liberia's got a hugely important election coming up next month. Devon and I have been involved a little bit with Liberian reconstruction and democracy projects there and… well, the Carter Center has asked if I'm available to go to Liberia next month to serve as one of their election monitors. I'm soooooooo psyched!

First thing everyone asks: no, it's not going to be dangerous. It's going to be difficult, uncomfortable, sweaty and exhausting work - we'll be going up country into impossibly rural sections of a heartbreakingly-impoverished tropical country in the middle of the rainy season. It's going to be pretty awful, but it's not going to be dangerous. Everyone in Liberia is looking at reconstruction, and the contest here is about who will lead that (In contrast, the Carter Center is also sending monitors to the Congo for DRC elections. DRC elections will be dangerous, and there's no way on earth I'd sign up for that.)

Anyhow. Getting selected as a monitor by the CC is an enormous honor, and a big responsibility. I'm nervous as all hell about letting the team down. You know me - I'm always nervous about letting the team down, regardless of what team it is, and what we're supposed to be doing. Part of it, I guess, is that being part of a team is so important to me. I like achieving stuff - difficult stuff - but I'm uncomfortable with individual recognition. I'm so much happier being able to say "Yeah, I helped with that" than standing out. So I want to be part of a team. But the implications of screwing up are magnified - what if your screwup causes the team to fail? That's the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. At Pole, I was part of a team - a bunch of different teams, depending on how you look at it. And I think I did okay, pulling my weight. Here, it's a whole new team. It's a much shorter project - just about a week and a half - but it's going to be every bit as intense. And the ramifications of screwing up? Yeah, I don't want to think about it. But we've all gotta just trust that we'll each do our best, right? And that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Oh boy, the adventure continues!

Chuck Yeager

I keep trying to write up the Chuck Yeager story, and it's just not working. Remember? That's one of those not-nearly-as-good-as-I-can-make-it-sound stories I love telling. Telling it is fun, but writing it up has been a chore - I get a few pages in, then when I look back at what I've written, it's awful. Awful, awful, stilted drivel.

It's sad, because it's a fun story to tell. I like to save it for when I'm with other pilots, and we're all bellying up to the proverbial bar to pull out our best "There I was…" stories. We're pilots, and we like to do the "Aw shucks" thing and then casually pull out a big-gun boast to prove our flying prowess. I like to pull out the Yeager story something like this: "Yeager? Yeah, I've met Chuck Yeager a few times. Last time was at the TRARON Formation Flying Clinic. We didn't get to spend too much time talking then, but I did get to ride backseat with him."

Pause for dramatic effect. Hear the whistle. Feel the awe and envy radiating like a heat lamp from the face of every other pilot within earshot. Watch as they bite their lips and sloooowly tuck their hotshot "There I was…" story back in its holster. Save it, pal, no way you're gonna win this gunfight. Smile knowingly, and savor the moment.

Then finish the story: "Yeah, I got to ride backseat with him, all right. In his rental car."

Heh. I get called some pretty bad things after dropping that other shoe, but it's always by someone with a smile on their face.

Sad thing is, it wasn't even Yeager who offered me the ride. Everyone was heading out to dinner together after the last flights of the day, and I didn't have any ground transportation. I was looking rather bewildered at the prospect of having to walk to the restaurant and his wife took pity on me. "You need a ride?" I nodded with all the piteous appreciation of a middle-aged Oliver Twist, and she offered that I could ride with them. Yeager climbed in, noticed me in the back seat and gave me the sort of "Who left that in our car?" look you'd reserve for discovering a week-old Domino's pizza wedged in the seat cushions, but the Missus mollified him "It's okay honey - he just needs a ride to the restaurant." I got a resigned harrumph, and tried to make myself as small and quiet as I could for the duration of the three-mile drive.

--

But here's the thing: Yeager does have a reputation as a cranky old SOB, but I understand. You would too, if every time you opened a door you got a face full of General-Yeager-it's-an-honor-to-meet-you-can-you-please-sign-my-son's-forehead-with-this-Sharpie? I imagine it kind of wears you down. You want to just sit down at the end of the day, pop open a beer, and share flying stories with your buddies ("Hey did I tell you about the time I gave Pablo Cohn a ride in my rental car?" Sorry… drifting off a bit there). And there are all these military wannabe groupies who get all breathless pushing in like a rugby scrum wanting a picture and a piece of your story.

Not that I'm blaming the groupies - I've been a groupie with the best of them. But I can tell when a man is done and wants to be left alone. And that afternoon in hangar, after the last flight was done, I could tell he wanted to be left alone. Wanted to kick back on the couch and shoot the breeze with Eberhardt and Vance and the other old warbird pilots without 40 complete strangers wearing camo and "Prowlers Rule" t-shirts people leaning in to hang on his every word. And I could tell it just wasn't going to happen. This goes on for, say, 50 years or so? You're going to get cranky, I guarantee it.

So it was with great trepidation that I got in that car that night. Didn't want to be One of Those People. But I did need a ride or I was going to be hoofing it for the next hour through the back streets of Merced in the dark, arriving when everyone else was pushing back their plates and wondering what was on the dessert menu.

…

I thought back to the last time I met Yeager. Wasn't a proper "meeting" that time, either, I guess. Was at Oshkosh, the annual EAA fly-in. Mecca for aviators and all - I've written about it a couple of times.

It was yet another one of those insanely hot, humid afternoons they get in July there. I was ducking back to the flight line between a maze of support trailers, trying to stay in the shade as best as I could, when I popped out into a little open area just big enough to give the two guys sitting there room to stretch out in their lawn chairs. They were eating ice cream, having a quiet moment away from the craziness of the crowd. I just about tripped over Yeager's legs as I came around the corner and lost myself in a sea of apology.

He smiled absently and said something like "Eh, don't worry about it."

I said something about appreciating the really nice flying I'd seen him do that morning.

"What? The airplane was doing the flying. I was just riding along, wiggling the controls."

I got brave: "Maybe. But couldn't help but notice that airplanes seem to fly much nicer when it's you who's wiggling the controls."

He looked me in the eye, right in the eye now, and gave me a real smile.

"Eh, maybe."

That was enough to make my day. I thanked him again, and got the hell out of there. He'd indulged this groupie long enough, and I wanted him to get a chance to finish his ice cream in peace.

Improbabilities

I’m dancing “Hava Nagilah” with the Catholic mother of my ex-girlfriend. At a Bat Mitzvah in a Buddhist temple. I'm having the time of my life, and I know that to make up for it, there's a potted petunia plant somewhere high above the stratosphere that's about to have another bad day.*

*(If the Douglas Adams reference stumps you, stop reading this blog and pick up Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Sit down and read it.** Really - it goes quickly and your life will be much better for it. Certainly better than if you just kept reading this blog.)

**(At least the first three books – honestly, after that I think it starts getting a bit dodgy, and you might want to switch over to the Dirk Gently series. But definitely the first three, and you can save yourself the trouble of that stitched-together collection of posthumous stuff.)

Anyhow. If the "potted petunia" bit didn't stump you, but the ex-girlfriend's-mother-buddhist-bat-mitzvah thing left you puzzled, welcome to my highly improbable life. Okay, not "improbable", just… well, not what you'd expect. Some time ago, when I remarked on an "against all odds" event in my recent past, one of my wiser friends corrected me: "You mean 'against all normal people odds'. The Pabloverse has clearly established itself as differently organized."

So it's not improbable, or even highly unlikely, if you know me well enough. Let me explain: If you do know me well enough, you'll know that I really, really, really want to be thought of as a nice guy. Yes, it's a character flaw, but it's my character flaw, so I have to deal with it. And dealing with it is really hard when you come to the subject of being an ex-boyfriend.

Face it: we’re all lousy boyfriends and lousy girlfriends as we grow up, and it’s through the process of inflicting unintended emotional trauma on each other that we learn to be good ones. With luck, we don’t marry until we’re fairly well along in the process, so that our spouse (hi Devon!) never realizes what horrible people we used to be.

It’s this awareness that got me, some time ago, into the otherwise inexplicable habit of looking up old girlfriends to apologize. Really, just that: “Hi, it’s me. Doing fine, thanks – yes, married, two kids, living in California. And you? Great! So, mostly, I just wanted to let you know that now, in retrospect, I realize that I was a complete @#$^$% back when we were dating. Yeah – sorry about that. Thanks for being so understanding. Okay, cheers – good talking with you. Bye.”

Does this make me weird? Is this some sort of infantile obsession? Doesn’t much matter - it's all part and parcel of my favorite character flaw, so I have to deal with it. Besides, by now I’ve pretty much tracked down the entire list of people I remember being awful to, and I feel a lot better about myself for it. (If you think I've been unrepentantly awful to you - whether or not we've dated - please drop me a line off-list and I'll see what I can do about it. We're coming up to Yom Kippur, so I'm working on some bulk emotional absolution.)

It was only about a year ago that I finally had the nerve to email Mary to apologize. The longer you date someone, the more chances you have to be awful to them, and Mary and I had dated for a long time, so there was plenty of awful to apologize for. But I did a little bit of Googling to track down her email address and wrote a note (Point of concern for Ms. Manners: is it appropriate to apologize for cyberstalking someone if you only did it so that you could contact them to apologize for other stuff?***)

***(Remind me, some time, to tell you about the handwritten thank-you-and-apology note I have from Ms. Manners – that story is as good as it sounds)).

Anyhow – Mary wrote back. She was living in Seattle with husband Fred and two daughters; I should let her know when I was next in town, and we’d go out to dinner to do introductions and catch up.

Did all that. Fred is a complete sweetheart – witty and kind and gracious (remember that he’s having dinner with a guy he’s probably heard horror stories about). The kids are smart and spunky as all get-out. Turns out that Em, the oldest of the two, is studying for her Bat Mitzvah. Going to be Labor Day Weekend, 2011 – Fred tells me I should bring the family. All goes on the mental back burner until, well, here I am, dancing Hava Nagilah in a Buddhist temple.

The rest of the gang is here, too. It's like a college reunion with the people I knew from after college. From all those crazy times when we were young. Liz and Alex are still together, and they’ve got a hellaciously fun, outgoing redhead boy that I need to introduce to Jeremy. Janine and Gabrielle. Only Mark and Susan are missing – they’re living somewhere out east now. “Aunt Linda” (Mary’s kid sister, and source of constant torment when we were dating – she, at least, was under no illusions about what a bad boyfriend I was) sidled up and poked me in the side, the way she used to do back then to say “Hi”. Said that a few weeks ago, she’d told Em a “Pablo joke” and Em shocked her by saying “Oh yeah, I know Pablo.” No, I didn’t have the courage to ask what a “Pablo joke” was – really, some things you’re just better off not knowing. But she gives me a big hug and a nodding kind of smile. The kind of smile that said “It’s cool – we were all @#$^$%s back then, weren’t we?”

Then the music starts up again, and the guys over in the center of the room need help doing the "lift kids on the chair and dance around with them" thing. Yes, traditionally that's what you do with bride and groom at a Jewish wedding. Traditionally. But the kids are squealing to be lifted up and danced around with, and "tradition"? Remember the bit about the bat-mitzvah-in-a-Buddhist-temple. The whole thing is a cultural analog of molecular gastronomy, where, if you do it right, you can take an eclectic collection of highly improbable – even instinctively incompatible - ingredients that have come together in a way that, well, just works. Well, Mary and Fred have done this right, and it's working - it's working wonderfully. Even if, somewhere far overhead in low earth orbit, a pot of petunias is about to have a bad day (Read the books, okay? Just read the books).

Errata

Okay – in the interest of journalistic integrity, I need to correct myself: Contrary to popular belief and prior assertion, the Center of the Universe is not at the base of the rocket on 35th and Evanston. It’s about a block east, on a median strip near the base of Fremont Ave. I know it seems like a small difference in the grand scheme of it all, but these things Might Be Important in an emergency.

I apologize for any harm or inconvenience I may have caused by my carelessness.

Seattle

Damn, I love this place. Sitting at waterside in the shade of late summer grapevines, watching kayakers ply their way up the ship canal and under the Fremont Bridge. Overhead, like a forgotten melody, yet another ancient Beaver on floats rumbles westward to the islands, or parts unknown. At my back lies Fremont, haven of the comfortably weird and self-proclaimed Center of the Universe (it’s right over there, where the 50-foot rocket/art perches at the corner of 35th and Evanston). To my left, under the bridge is the Fremont Troll. What, the bridges in your city don’t have trolls? It’s somehow comforting to be here now, as five hundred miles to the south, Burning Man is reaching is frenzied pitch. I find myself wondering whether Seattleites – especially those from Fremont – make it out to the playa much; somehow it feels like there’s just a touch of that escape from what burners call “the default world” right here, every day. Just enough, enough to remind you that “normal” is a choice.

I could live here. Come to think of it, I have lived here, and I could easily do it again. Yeah, I know I’m here in the glorious late summer Seattle sun. That February is cold (don’t speak to me about cold!), dark and wet, wet, wet. But I lived here for seven years, remember? I know that there’s joy and beauty in the rain, too. The engulfing dark, lush green. The splash of kids dancing around the raindial on the hill at Gasworks Park. The ferries. Yes, the ferries. We’re not even gonna start on the ferries. I love riding ferries in the rain – so sue me.

But that was then, a long time ago. And possibly again, a long time from now. Can’t live in either of those times. For the moment, I’m gonna live in the now – now, when it’s 5:40 on a Friday evening and it’s time for me to stroll down the street to absorb the glorious weirdness on my way to dinner with an old friend. Now? “Now” is a good time to be here.

Northbound - again

The story about Chuck Yeager isn’t as good as I’ve made it sound, of course, but that’s going to have to wait. I’m on the road again, and will try to keep my nose in the present, rather than digging through the dusty trove of Stories Not Yet Told.

I’m not saying that the dusty trove isn’t a better place to look – Jeff Greenwald says he has to let a story settle in his mind, roll around in his pocket for a year or so before it’s become polished and familiar enough to hold at arm’s length and tell. It certainly feels easier that way. The mind is like a “bag of holding” (yeah, I used to play D&D way back when it was all pencils, graph paper and Volume 2, before they had… no, wait, I’m not supposed to be doing the ‘curmudgeon’ thing until much later on, am I?). But it seems you can always reach in, Dylan Thomas-like on Christmas morning, and pull out wonderful memories you’d long forgotten you were carrying.

This time, I’m northbound again (pauses – wonders - how many of these missives have I begun with “Northbound”?). Just for a day and a half, to get a day of work in up at the Seattle office and kick up the dust of some old memories with some old friends. There’s that “memories” thing again – I’m sure by the time I’m southbound tomorrow, I’ll be glowing with all sorts of rekindled recollections. But that’s later – for now, I’m just northbound.

To be clear, I’m northbound in Row 34D of a pressurized metal tube getting blasted through the sky six miles up at not too much less than the speed of sound – a technological miracle that would have stunned Orville and Wilber a hundred years ago. Leonardo, half a millennium back, would just nod his head of course – yeah, he figured something like that – but the actual line of engineering from Kitty Hawk to here? Stunning.

Not that my traveling companions get much encouragement to consider the miracle of flight – like me, they’ve been herded, berated, searched and intimidated through the security line, patronized and told to sit down, strap in and let the flight attendant know if we need another drink, and recommended to close the window shade (looking out to the world – the world, I tell you!) so that their seatmates can better watch the sitcom and car insurance ads on the in-flight TV screens. Leonardo didn’t see that one coming. That whole “Once you have tasted flight…” thing? Sorry Leo. The big complaint I heard on my way back from DC last month was that they were charging for in-flight wifi. No, don’t think about it; just too depressing.

Anyhow – here I am. No real stories to tell at the moment, but they'll come - they'll come.