The most poignant time…

My parents’ neighbor’s resurrected Christmas tree decoration. Christmas 2023. [*Photo by current owner of the house.*]

Christmas waits impatiently on the other side of midnight, less than five hours away on the East Coast of the US. Besides its ultimate meaning, Christmas carries a bagful of gifts called memories: some good, some painful, some both. When my family returned to Spokane after a 22-month period of moves to Seattle, Los Angeles, and back to Spokane, the neighbors across the street organized a block Christmas decorating project. They lived in the house pictured above. All the men–times differed a bit back then–gathered in the double-car garage just out of the photo to the right, all of the women kept them stocked with hot or cold beverages of their choice, and all of us children ran around in the snow and threw snowballs at each other. For several years our block featured wooden trees lit colorfully…almost as in this photo.

One by one fewer trees appeared each year. This person moved. That person got tired of the maintenance involved. (Ours needed a new stake to keep it upright in the nearly frozen ground.) By the mid-70’s the folks in the pictured house–the ones who instigated the tree-building–had moved, all of the neighborhood children were grown, the trees had disappeared entirely, and ours began its 45-year hibernation in the rafters of our garage.

In 2013 my father died, and in 2019 my mother joined him. Through 2018 the new neighbors in the brick house across the street had taken care of my mother as she declined, assisting her with all those little tasks that get more difficult as one nears 90. My brother lived hundreds of miles away, while I lived thousands. We did nothing with the house during the ten months she alternated quarters in the rehab center or the assisted living facility, but after she had passed we went through the stuff and asked neighbors if they wanted anything. Our neighbor wanted the tree. He spent a couple years before he souped it up with the reflectors, but other than that he returned it to its original condition. It seems appropriate it now lives where it came into being. I ran across this photo looking back through December photos. Funny how so much can be packed into one unassuming photograph.

Phonographic memories

I remember this too. It had sound. I could taste the colors.

A friend of mine speaks of his “phonographic” memory. I believe all of us interested in music have this, else ear-worms would not be a thing, right? Over the past ten years I’ve focused more on this phenomena, and I further believe there’s a distinguishing characteristic between songs we can recall and songs which form our sonic foundation. In the latter type, I don’t mean these are fundamentally good, I just mean that they come unbidden on a Tuesday morning when you’re in the shower, or when you’re driving to the grocery store. Or perhaps you hear a snippet of conversation and an overheard phrase comes to you overlaid with music because it’s word-for-word (or nearly so) with a phrase in a song from your youth.

Here’s one which illustrates the vagaries of this kind of aural memory. “It’s Good News Week” pops into my head every few months for the past couple of years. Why? I have no idea. It gets billed as a protest song, and certainly some of its lines will shake you up–perhaps a few will offend. All I remember, however, are two short stanzas which I have always sung together, but which do not appear consecutively in the song:

It's good news week
Someone's dropped a bomb somewhere
Contaminating atmosphere...

...It's good news week
Doctors finding many ways
Of wrapping brains on metal trays
To keep us from the heat.

Plus, I remember the refrain:

Have you heard the news
What did it say?
Who's won that race?
What's the weather like today?

Memory clouds things, too. I’ve remembered this for nearly 60 years as a novelty song, and listening to it today, it didn’t sound the way I remember it. I wonder if that has something to do with the tiny transistor radio I used to listen to it? Looking at the lyrics today, it seems anything but a novelty song. So many songs from the mid-60’s through the mid-80’s just can’t be played these days. Not like “Walter Wart” from 1966 by The Thorndike Pickledish Choir!

Kona nuts

Our final full day on The Big Island, we drove west across the island to the Kona Coast. It didn’t totally waste our time, but it validated our decision to stay in Hilo. In our short taste of it, the Kona Coast appeals to people who aren’t us–hence they’re nuts: Kona Nuts. Near as I can figure out, the west side of The Big Island appeals to people who like:

Swimming, surfing, snorkling, and scuba diving
Deep sea fishing
Parasailing and its variants
Boating
Lots of physical exercise (running, cycling, and the like)
Shopping in malls, strip and otherwise
Renting AirBnB’s, condos, and vacation houses crammed side by side up the hillsides facing the ocean

We don’t like any of that. Okay, we’ll take an occasional hike, and we’ll poke into those small shops catering to tourists (but they’re better when they don’t). We’re not the physically active types. I’m not at 70, and haven’t been since I flipped the dial past 40.

On top of that, we found the western side of the island to be hot, dry, a bit desiccated. Our first inkling occurred driving across the the caldera of Mauna Kea. We had left rain in Hilo, low wispy clouds misting us, sprinkling us with life-encouraging water. Once we climbed to the center of the island, things looked quite a bit different. (Photos are from our return drive to the east.)

Driving east, back to the rain clouds of Hilo. Looked good to us! September 2024.

I grew up in eastern Washington State where lava flows poke like basalt bones through a grass-covered skin of dirt. It looked a lot like the western half the Big Island. If you told me this next photo was the interstate exchange just west of Spokane where students head south to Eastern Washington University, I would believe you:

Mauna Kea caldera looking northeast from its approximate center. September 2024.

The grass-covered lava of Mauna Kea. September 2024.

Once we descended the steep slopes to Kona coast–an oddity to me; shouldn’t the leeward side be more gently sloped?–we found a whole lotta nothing…which isn’t really fair, but our first stop gave us that impression. The Kaloko-Honokohau National Historic Park starts out looking like this:

Kaloko-Honokohau Nat’l Historic Park, looking toward the ocean. The edge of the “visitor center” visible at left edge of the photo. September 2024.

Although bleak, this stop proved informative. Indigenous peoples used these coasts to trap fish and perform other ocean-related activities (I think they got salt also–can’t remember). Families owned narrow parcels of land stretching from the shore up the slopes. Those members who lived at higher elevations would farm and bring their harvests to the shore to trade for fish and seafood. We chose not to walk the mile-long trail to a recreated site about the coastal folks, primarily because the 90+ degrees and lava fields intimidated us. Finding the entrance to that area of the park proved elusive, hidden and nearly unmarked as it was in the backmost corner of a parking lot for various marina businesses.

A recreated shelter of the indigenous peoples. Kaloko-Honokohau Nat’l Historic Park, September 2024.

After this we drove south into Kailua-Kona proper. We found nothing but strip malls, hotels, gas stations, various support businesses, and the airport where virtually every airline flies except for Southwest Airlines (explaining why we flew into Hilo). We found restrooms and beat feet to the east side of the island. We had great views on our climb out of Kona: foregrounds of all the roofs of the vacation homes, backgrounds of the ocean. Yay.

Reader’s Horror 241219

Today’s assault holds a special dose of vinegar because it inverts the usual way this mistake gets committed. In a New York Times article about the Congressional scuttling of a temporary federal funding bill, Hakeem Jeffries is quoted thusly:

House Republican have been ordered to shut down the government and hurt every day Americans all across this country.

I’m ignoring the politics involved here, except those of grammar, usage, and mechanics. Usually when writers mix up every day and everyday they use the latter to refer to every singled blessed day. This is wrong. When referring to all of the days, every single one of them, there must be a space because we’re using the adjective every to describe and restrict the noun day. However, when we want to describe something as being routine, mundane, ordinary, etc., no space is used. Make the compound word everyday to describe the noun of your choice. In the paragraph above it’s Americans.

I’m tempted to say the above error actually hurts everyday Americans right now, not in some undefined future, but the mistaken usage likely slipped right past most of them. The everyday/every day error resembles those involving into/in to and onto/on to. In the case of today’s horror, the most common format for every + day would be with a space. Non-proficient writers usually slam them together making this supposed-to-be uncommon word more common in print these days. I suspect the reverse is true for the other two, but I’ve no data to support this.

Author’s role: I’m going to assume this error found its way into print due to the author, not an editor. This is a writer for the NYT, one of the premier news organizations in the world. The author should know better. We therefore rate this a 4.

Egregiousness of the error: The error will be read by most readers to mean what the author intended. As explained in the first Reader’s Horror, these space-oriented mistakes where a compound word is used when it should not be represent one of the many confusing aspects of English. Since most readers won’t notice it and will get the intended meaning, we therefore rate this a 2.

My personal reaction rating: I sigh, shake my head slightly, and mutter, “but of course.” Immediately thereafter I also say, “but it’s still wrong.” That makes it a 1.

Final rating: This error rates a 4/2/1 for an 7 out of 10 on the Reader’s Horror scale.

[Note: I’m tweaking the scale, and I’ll write a quick update later. The egregiousness rating above became a “2” instead of a “3” as a result.

Still here!

It’s been lots of interlocking activities for me this December 2024.

Nine days since last post, and that one (actually two) appeared from thin air, a gift of a slight lull between printing out our Christmas newsletter and preparing all of the cards for them. I’m still old-fashioned in that way. I believe a pretty card with an appropriate printed message and augmented with a personal one maintains ties of friendship and family better than an email (or worse, a social media post). It shows a commitment to spending time for your recipient, to let them know you still think of them (even if it’s only once per year and due to their inclusion on the Christmas card address list).

One last ‘task’ today: decorate the tree. We had planned to do so Monday and Tuesday, but we were waiting for a new tree-topper which only arrived yesterday evening. We’ll spend a leisurely afternoon doing this, and we’ll end with some delightful liquid Christmas cheer from one of the many special beers I purchased yesterday. From here on it’s preparing to sing for the Midnight Mass in the late evening of Christmas Eve, the drowsy-but-satisfied feeling of Christmas Day, the indulgent-but-hopefully-easy Christmas dinner, and the beginning of Christmastide, otherwise known as the Twelve Days of Christmas. While I may again post daily during this period, I suggest you revisit last year’s which starts here and marches through the twelve days with absolutely no seriousness except for the unintended kind. See ya soon!

Reader’s horror 241210

Yesterday I read the word jell in the New York Times. If most errors I highlight represent analogs of fingernails on blackboards, this one joins a select group which seems more like needles in my eye or somesuch. Why? Because…

Once there existed the word gelatin/gelatine. In the very early 1700’s French people contrived the word (gélatine) from the Latin gelare meaning “to freeze, congeal” and has roots in the concept of coldness and freezing. Gelatin (my preferred spelling) became shortened to gel to make a verb meaning “to become a gelatin” and around the 1950’s took on a figurative meaning, “to come together and agree well.” Diverse opinions would get discussed and a consensus would gel around a course of action. It branched out to other shades of this meaning.

Once there existed the word jelly. We know what that is; we like to eat it on toasted bread products. Substances would jell to become jelly. By the beginning of the 1900’s a figurative meaning evolved, meaning “to solidify” referring to an idea or project ‘firming up’. A film in the works for years would start to jell around a specific path forward and a casting call would go out.

Though extremely subtle (and frankly, extremely subjective), gel means diverse things coming together and firming up. But jell means the innate properties of a something which should come together and firm up, do so. Not exactly the same.

Obviously both gel and jell look like twin brothers of different mothers, but by my childhood and young adulthood in the 60’s and 70’s the use of jell seemingly had disappeared. That’s a personal observance; maybe it remained widely used, just not in one blessed thing I read. During that time a common product, Jell-O, began whipping the commercial airwaves with every star personality it could find (even if some turned out later to have been sexual predators). And guess what? I began to see jell used where gel had been used before.

I suspect, have suspected, and will continue to suspect the re-introduction of jell doesn’t represent an informed decision to use a word with connotations of sweetness, and doesn’t get limited to projects or ideas firming up. It represents a giant wave in the ocean of writing which has rolled through the ranks of writers too damn ignorant or lazy to realize they’ve co-opted a contrived version of a contrived brand name which comes from gel. And the entire concept of gelatin itself was contrived when the product was invented.

I’m not going to rate this one because “nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong,” and I hate admitting I’m wrong. Hmmph.

Clouds from the ground

My first photo at Volcanoes National Park: a steam vent on the edge of the Kilauea crater. September 2024.

The island of Hawai’i could be called triangular. The west coast roughly runs north to south. From its northern tip, though, the coast runs northwest to southeast. Then from that easternmost point it runs northeast to southwest to join up with the west coast. Situated inland from the southeast-facing coastline lies Volcanoes National Park. Volcanoes presents much more than just dormant craters. Its most active feature (inland) turned out to be the first thing we saw: steam vents. Craters? I found their vastness difficult to comprehend.

Kilauea from steam vents on north rim, looking southwest. September 2024.

I’m not even sure the photo above shows only Kilauea. I see “Hale Ma’uma’u Crater” on the ol’ Google Maps. Lava flowed in 1919, 1921, 1954, 1959, and on and on I would guess. I paid little attention to information, so I’ve only myself to blame! Seeing it seemed more important than reading about it on signs, the internet, pamphlets, and the like.

Trade winds blow northeasterly toward the park. There are dry plains inland, but plenty of slopes catch the moisture. Plant life abounds there. Even in this dryness:

On the edge of the steam vents. Volcanoes National Park, September 2024.

Where the rain can fall, things change rapidly. Just a few miles away from the photos above…

Kilauea Iki Overlook trail. Volcanoes National Park, September 2024.

Eventually I realized this incredibly wide circle we were tracing surrounded a ‘family’ of volcano craters. We continued past many tantalizing side trips, acknowledging our (a) laziness, (b) general physical un-fitness, and (c) certain time constraints. Turning off of the Crater Rim Drive where it intersected Chain of Craters Road–further westward travel was blocked–we traced the path of lava flows to the ocean.

Approaching the coast in Volcanoes National Park. September 2024.

Where lava meets the sea: Holei Sea Arch. Volcanoes National Park, September 2024.

Now that I know more about this park, I would go back to look into lava tubes, to hike a bit here and there, to see if some of the roads had opened up, and to maybe hike down into a crater…maybe. It looked kinda boring to be truthful.

‘Yep, the rock looks just as black down here. Why did we hike down here again?’ Volcanoes National Park, September 2024.

It all impressed this guy who grew up with the volcanoes of the North Cascades, a far different kind of thing.

Cats, humans, and existentialism

Petunia, in the winter woods. Circa 1984.

Petunia became known as the Acid Cat, christened as such by my friend Jeff after he watched this little tiny ball of fluff race up and down our hallway bouncing off of the walls, Ricochet Rabbit-style. I am not exaggerating. She would jump up and bounce off of the wall about a foot above the floor, like a parkour athlete.

This post represents bait-and-switch, however. Petunia only stands in for Henri. My wife and I have just finished watching a couple of YouTube clips of Henri the Existential Cat, a series we dearly loved a decade ago. If you have never heard of this, ~~I direct you to this link in which Henri more or less gets introduced~~, and this link which shows Henri encountering a new resident of the house. But I would encourage you to watch them all. It will take an hour or two out of your day. You will likely thank me, particularly in these times of trial when existing might be the most we can hope for. Henri rather perfectly sums up my existential dilemma during this time of Advent with mindless Christmas celebrations of mercantilism all around me.

[Unfortunately, some of the episodes have been taken down. It has been 11 years after all. Try this one instead. It’s newer, but gives you a very good introduction to his attitude and his feelings about his roommates.]

Merry Advent, y’all. I’ve just about finished my Christmas newsletter, supercharged by my new approach to it. More later.

Flaking out

Tatted (and tarted) snowflake in a window. November 2024.

I discovered 30 minutes in my day! Our holiday newsletter has reached 50% completion. For the first time in several years, I am “on schedule”—I dare not say “ahead” both due to the Law of Jinxing and because I see little time to work on it during the next two days. My Sunday deadline approaches, just as Tuesdays did decades ago when I worked on weeklies. Let me tell you, there’s nothing like starting a Tuesday knowing you don’t have enough copy to fill the empty pages! It really gets the creative juices flowing! I used the same approach as a teacher, walking in some days only clutching a topic in my mind. Lesson plans? Hah!
We kicked Covid out for good this week, but like with any unwanted guest there’s a bit of cleaning up to do. Last night’s choir rehearsal—my first in four weeks, my second in two months—did a number on my throat, partly because I had to violate the “sing from your diaphragm” rule on several pieces. My muscles ache from weeks spent primarily sitting in this office chair. The cough hasn’t completely disappeared either, small but annoying.
And lastly, one of the readers of this site and the one who partly inspired a trip to Michigan in 2023, may be amused by the photo below. I’m not a cider drinker, but I think this is being newly distributed here in NC:

From the exurbs of Detroit! Spotted in a Raleigh, NC, grocery store. November 2024.

Blogus interruptus

I’ve reached the Thanksgiving through who-knows-when-it-all-will-get-done time of the year. My current project, the annual Christmas newsletter, occupies virtually all of my writing bandwidth because it’s a true news letter. This old journalist packages it as a four-page newspaper complete with individual stories, headlines, a masthead, photos, captions, all of it written in the third person. It takes 40 to 80 hours depending how much I agonize over it. (I’m lying: it takes at least 80 hours.)

Meanwhile, one of our cats decided to get his paws on some Vonnegut, but apparently became disgusted it wasn’t Cat’s Cradle.