What a simple moment of ‘doh!’ when I saw these. Why aren’t there easy to use foot rests on every barstool? Sure, a bar rail is handy when it’s available, but many a shorter-legged person can’t reach it from a barstool. Here in Antwerp I saw several variations on this theme. C’mon, America! Get with the program.
Vacationing has meant several things over the years. As a child it meant adventure. Dad would plan a two-week sojourn through the beauty of the American West, plotting the journey for months, and utilizing guidebooks (well, the AAA one) to find both motels and sights to see along the way. By the time I reached “summer job” stage and such vacations no longer were possible, we had seen most of the national parks from the Rockies westward, plus the Grand Canyon, and the tourist hot spots of Southern California (Disneyland, the San Diego Zoo, Knott’s Berry Farm, etc.). We visited San Francisco in 1968 where I saw my great-grandmother on her deathbed and hippies in The Haight. And we always tried to loop through either Seattle or Woodburn, OR, to visit one set of grandparents. Back then, vacationing meant lots of hours in a car reading or imagining things as the countryside went by. It meant rolling with the punches when the road Dad wanted to drive was under construction or the motel he wanted looked better suited to hookers than small children. It mostly meant seeing state after state, park after park, city after city which I had never seen before, and which in my short life presented amazing memories and lessons.
I couldn’t capture that as a younger adult. Vacations at first mostly entailed going home to visit my parents and my friends. I tried a brief camping trip along the Snake and Salmon rivers, but the spectacular views couldn’t make up for my inability to build a fire and thereby have any food to eat. (Or perhaps one could say, the views couldn’t make up for my ineptness as a camper.) A bit later as a newly wedded teacher, summers were for further training, loafing at my in-law’s lake cabin a couple times, and once or twice attempting to emulate my father’s grand tours of the West. I thereby got to see parts of Arizona south of the Grand Canyon for the first time and see some lesser known but equally impressive sights. I explored my own state, Washington, better. The 10 to 11-week length of our summer breaks diluted the compressed wonder of a two-week vacation.
Life changes and a relocation to greater Philadelphia put the kibosh on traditional vacations. Just living there was a new experience. After two years there I discovered a new type of vacation which brings a different kind of satisfaction: the introductory tour. I had met a new love (who married me the next year), and I had entered corporate America where two weeks is the only significant time off you get. I took this woman on a whirlwind nine-day tour of Washington and meet-the-folks. My bride-to-be loved the state and my parents loved her. I repeated the tour in 2017 for a dear couple of friends from North Carolina.
[Disclaimer time: despite the fact I’ve lived in Washington for only four years since I left it back in 1992, I still consider it one of the best places on Earth. My values have to do with variety. In my mind only California comes close to the diversity of climactic zones and has the varied population densities ranging from the Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia wash of people to areas where it’s difficult to find the next house from the one you’re standing beside. Want desert? Check. Alpine? Check. Rainforest? Check. Scablands, Arctic, Temperate forest? Check, check, and check.]
Less than a year after our marriage in 1995, we vacationed to New Mexico for two weeks. We wandered from Albuquerque north, were unimpressed with Santa Fe and hightailed to Taos. In ’95 it had started to build up, but only a little. We stayed at an honest-to-God auto court, and breakfasted at a old West-style cafe on the square. (Revisiting in 2022 saddened me when I saw all of that charm washed away by touristy stuff.) That second week of the vacations, all my tensions dropped away as we shot into southwestern Colorado for two nights before striking to southern NM and the Carlsbad Caverns. Until a couple weeks ago, I held this up as our standard of Best Vacation Ever.
Then we cruised down the Rhine River for eight days on the Viking Hlin, and visited Basel, Switzerland, and Antwerp, Belgium, at the beginning and end of the voyage, respectively. Viking is known for catering to old folks like us (no one under 18 is allowed) and for its all-inclusive approach. We could have been very happy just eating the food, drinking the beer and wine with lunch and dinner, and taking the included tours, but it made sense for us to add two optional tours, take care of gratuities in one tidy little package, and buy the Silver Sipper beverage package so that we could drink beer, wine, and cocktails just about any time we wanted. Given the slant toward the retired and soon-to-be-retired, I must say my initial introduction to the ship gave me a jolt:
I’ve nothing against people living the love lives they desire, but still I was thankful there occurred no hot gay sex (that I know of ) on the Hlin. It reinforced my initial reaction after two nights in Basel before boarding, that European cities seem to take a more blasé view about tagging. There seems to be an unwritten rule that it isn’t done on cathedrals and other historical buildings, but other than that…sure, indulge yourself.
As with my Hawaii series [tag: Hawaii] and my Virtual Vacation series [tag: Virtual Vacation] about Michigan and Ohio, this will be a lengthy series of posts recounting how two neophytes who never traveled abroad for pleasure decided to do so in retirement. For now, I’ll end with two photos about our first few hours onboard.
Benny began in July to prepare for August. Perhaps, given our weather in July, he just thought the calendar had turned already? Regardless, the “dog days of August” do not interest this cat. Instead he will withdraw until the temps cool down.
Charlie defies the heat, regards it as Finns do the sauna. He spends hours ‘on the boards’ relaxing with the moist heat penetrating his bones. His version of a cold plunge? Walking indoors for a food break and a quick nap in the A/C-cooled house before resuming the therapeutic 100+ heat indices.
When I headed off to college in 1972 my curiosity led me to enroll in an experimental education program funded by the Ford Foundation. I hope to write of that someday, but today we consider two peculiar residents of my library: two editions of The Whole Earth Catalog. Being 18 in 1972, I didn’t exactly participate in “The Sixties” which meant I hadn’t heard of The Whole Earth Catalog until it appeared on the textbook list for that experimental program I’d enrolled in. What is it and why am I making a big deal about it? Is this just some oldster nostalgia trip? Maybe, but I think it’s much more than that.
The WEC basically laid the groundwork for what today is Wirecutter and everything like it, except…what if Wirecutter had a hefty dose of social awareness ethos baked in? And what if there were no suspicions that Wirecutter and websites like it make decisions partially based on monetary reward? Before The WEC, I’m unaware how one could have gone to a single source for information, evaluations, and recommendations on a number of topics. Everything one needed know about consuming involved a physical trip to interface with salespeople. In certain cases one could consult a dedicated publication for audio equipment, say, or fashion, but sooner or later one needed to go to a store to buy something. If I wanted information about high quality stereo equipment, I went to Huppin’s Hi-Fi downtown where all the audiophiles (a.k.a., stereo gearheads) gathered and had all the information. When one wanted furniture, one headed to a furniture store or several and bought the best of whatever you saw. The same with clothes, garden tools, hardware, books, cars, pretty much anything. Who knew if it was good? Who knew if the price here was as good as there? If you ordered something, like a car with all the options in your favorite color, you started at a dealership. Everything filtered through the salespeople.
But the WEC gathered its recommendations for just about everything which interested the Peace Generation (or whatever you want to call us), told you why it represented the best you could buy, and gave information about how to get it. Or as the Function statement on the very first page of The Last WEC said , “The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting.” This “last” edition didn’t have a table of contents. After page two told you how to get the stuff, and other tips, the third page launched right into “Whole Systems” and starting with the subsection Buckminster Fuller (anything dealing with Buckminster Fuller, a near-god of social planning). Other sections dealt with land use, industry, craft, community, nomadics, communication, and learning. These were loosely defined: subsections in Learning include “Thinking,” “Serendipity,” “Psychology,” and “Free Schools”. Additionally, the lower right corner of all right-hand pages from Page 9 onward contained the story “Divine Right’s Trip” where the main character, Divine Right, experiences many adventures of the time until he lands on the Whole Earth Catalog at the very end, a sort of gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow thing.
I could write pages and pages about the WEC to little effect on anyone who hasn’t seen it. In its way it picked up the tradition of the old Sears-Roebuck catalogs which allowed people living in the backwaters of America to buy through the mail most of the things they could ever want for their farms, their businesses, their personal health, and to clothe their bodies. (“Through the mail” • prep phrase describing movement of written communication and goods prior to delivery services such as UPS and FedEx) The S-R catalog fell onto hard times when everyone started to get electricity and cars made it easier to get to the merchants.
After navigating the remainder of the 1970’s and all of the 1980’s, issuing a few Supplements—the informal publications which came out between editions of The WEC—founder Stewart Brand and crew decided a new edition needed to be published. Those 20 years saw the introduction and rise of the personal computer, for one thing, and the starry-eyed, inchoate idealism of The Sixties had given way to a gritty, in-the-trenches attitude by the early 90’s. Most of the casual members of the Peace Generation had left the ranks, lured by money, security, and mere existence. The title page of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog quoted Brand from 1969: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” before explaining that good things performed by governments and other large bodies were being obscured by “gross defects”; a rising personal power needed a guide to the new tools making this possible.
Two random samples from The WEC shall suffice, one from each.
Opening The Last Whole Earth Catalog to pages 36-37, I find myself in the middle of a five-page description of something called Liferaft Earth. I’ve no personal knowledge of this, and I’m not reading all five pages of very tiny print (looks like 6-8pt type; it varies because consistency was not a strong point for The WEC). It appears to be about making sure everyone on the planet has enough to eat. Here’s a snippet from the top of the second column of page 35…
The following five pages chronicles a week-long event sponsored and organized by the CATALOG in October 1969.
Richard Brautigan saw the end of it. The beginning of it was three days I spent alone on a train with excellent hash and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. Ehrlich had been a teacher of mine, back in his butterfly and my tarantula days, so I knew to believe him.
—SB
“SB” was Stewart Brand who created and led the WEC publication team. Incidentally, in looking for a formal description of his title/role, I discovered the entire Last WEC was composed using an IBM Selectric typewriter. I didn’t find his role.
I left a bookmark in the Millennium edition long ago. Opening to this page brought me to the Communications section/Writing subsection. An article preceding the tools for and about writing begins, “We are swimming in a great polluted sea of language, and we wonder why we can’t write.” How much more so now! It continues:
We wonder why we don’t want to read. Even worse, we cease to wonder; we just don’t do it. It’s as though it didn’t matter anymore.
As though hammers didn’t matter; as though air didn’t matter; as though horses and balloons had disappeared.
It’s not a hardware problem; it’s not a brain-wire problem. It’s a writing problem. It’s software, it’s soft words, it’s swampish bureaucratic slide-down of mush-mouthed ass-covering prose that promotes long term despair in humans.
—Jon Carroll
This appears on page 242 of 384 pages in a book measuring 11×14.5 inches in fonts rarely bigger than 8pt. You can see how one would get lost in there, and how part of him would never come back out. Which is why more than fifty years later they remain on my bookshelves despite the hundreds (thousands?) which have not withstood the journey.
Today I needed to move two of my bookcases because I inconveniently parked them underneath the main water shutoff valve to my house. Downstream of that valve is the Pressure Relief Valve (Pressure Regulating Valve?) or PRV which will be replaced tomorrow. Books moved include the latter half of the alphabet for authors of fiction, plus poetry, essays, books about reading and language, literary quarterlies, literature anthologies, drama, and the stuff I call “books too big to fit anywhere else”. Moving these books renewed the love affair I have with them.
I cannot claim to have coined the word bibliophilia but my spell checker doesn’t like it. Obviously a primitive type of AI with all the words at its digital fingertips would sneer at such a word. I maintain it exists, nonetheless, and I further claim it describes a condition similar to addiction in that those afflicted with it do not recognize it as a malady. Rather they proudly lean into it right up to the moment it degrades their lives into sociopathy. I never had a lot going for me in the sociopathy-avoidance spectrum; it therefore has impacted my life little.
Though I read 99% of my books electronically now, I’ve developed no attachment to them the way I have to the physical ones. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have the history with them? No matter. I realized today what a wonderful paradigm for a series of posts! Forthwith:
I’ve carted around the above two dictionaries since 1978. They were ‘useless’ even then. The one on the bottom has a copyright of 1939 on it, with 14 more copyrights stretching back to 1903 on the reverse of the title page. In 1939 my mother was 10. This must have guided her through the end of elementary school and through high school. It undoubtedly felt the fingers of my grandfather paging through it as he sought a word for some of his reports and letters. He would have been in his 40’s at the time.
As with the bottom dictionary, the one on top reminds me of a relative also. When my mother was in her early teens around 1941-1943, her Uncle Dennis came to live with his half-sister (my grandmother) and her small family. He needed to establish residency in Washington State because he planned to attend the University of Washington. I’m not sure if he worked for a year or attended high school. This dictionary is copyrighted 1942, and its title I feel reflects his academic bent. (He went to work in an athletic supply store in Seattle after graduation, eventually bought it with one or two partners, and had a very comfortable life financially. The store was called Athletic Supply.)
All my childhood I stared at these dictionaries and pulled them out again and again, every time we visited my grandparents. I’m pretty sure where my brother and I slept is where my great-uncle lived for that year. Upon graduation I guess he figured he didn’t need the dictionary anymore. My grandfather had finished off the basement in gorgeous tongue-and-groove pine boards, and he built in next to his desk the bookcase which held these two volumes.
As I may have detailed before, I purged about 400 books from our library in 2020, primarily so I could use some of the shelves to display family memorabilia. Books I felt held no special tug on my heart joined those I felt wouldn’t be read again nor would they need to be consulted. It represented a Marie Kondo approach: if the book brought joy, it almost always stayed on the shelf. The rest were boxed up and shoved in a closet. One doesn’t just throw away books unless they’re an ignorant cretin which means they likely don’t own books in the first place. (Although there was that mother/daughter pair I saw once at a giant book sale who were buying a shopping cart full of books based on how they looked! Books as interior design elements! Horrific to think such people exist.) I’ve since found an outlet in a used bookstore/coffee shop/beer & wine cafe which gives me credit for the books I drop off. Imagine that! I drop off a half dozen hardbacks, and I get to buy three pints on half-price Wednesday!
Though 400 went to live in the closet, an even 1100 remain. I can’t believe that when I look at the shelves, but that’s what my library cataloging program says. Today, just pulling down about seven shelves of books inspired such joy and memories. There are the literary quarterlies I got from Eastern Washington University while teaching English. And there are the half dozen volumes of varying size I needed to buy for my Medieval Literature class. Oh look, there’s the best book I ever read on the slipperiness of translations (Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language by Douglas R Hofstadter who previously had won the Pulitzer Prize for Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid). Oh, my college literature texts! The glorious translation of Anna Karenina purchased on the first family vacation I organized just a couple years before my father died. And look there, the slim volume of fairy tales my parents and grandparents read to me when I and my brother were quite young.
Some of it is snob appeal. I make no apologies for that. If you can’t be proud of yourself for having read a goodly collection of great literature, if you think it a waste of your time, then I ask, why did you waste it? Didn’t you have something better to do? Like, I don’t know, trade it for a differently colored book which matches your decor better?
In the weeks ahead I’ll focus on particular books which spark that wonderful joy of reading…like the books about reading itself!
Because you deserve something more artistic than that blurry photo of a fawn:
I almost feel embarrassed to post this photo of such poor quality. In my defense, the fawn zipped by so quickly, this represents my best. Much like a swimmer in a lap pool, the fawn ran back and forth, taking about 100 yards for each lap. The crashing of the brush is what grabbed my attention. It had rained for hours the previous night, which caused me to attribute the crashing sound to a falling branch at first. I tried to pan with the fawn, but you can see how difficult that was. Additionally, I shot the photo through the screen of my screened-in porch. Meanwhile, mama calmly moved from yard to yard sampling the greenery.
For several weeks I’ve written, re-written, and re-re-written a difficult piece about my father. Its point still eludes me. I fear several things: I’ve attempted to describe something, but I’m only describing it superficially; I’ve selected an inferior topic to one which begs to be heard; or perhaps what I’m writing about doesn’t rise to worthiness. This has delayed my promise to myself to post one piece of writing about my father every Sunday. It’s been like attempting to grasp a wriggling fish. I shall continue to rant to the air, to myself, to my wife—heck, to the birds on the grass—about this, and hope it gels in my mind and in my words.
Until then I’ll post a few photos, and maybe I’ll write something less weighty, something which elicits a few chuckles or wry reactions. Yes. That would be it.
I feed birds, mostly black-oil sunflower seeds. This year it looks like I’ll through about 400 pounds of them. Apparently one got planted in our newly landscaped front yard, and there amid many of the similar-spiky Obedient plants was this lone sunflower. I love sunflowers. Therefore, I got pretty irritated when something, probably a deer, nipped off the top where a bud had been forming. The joke’s on the deer, though. By trimming the plant, it put up TWO stalks from where it had been lopped, each of which had buds…until one burst open on Independence Day.
all the voices in my head 