Raun MacKinnon Burnham

Rainbows and Iceboating

3/17/2018

I have never been iceboating, which is something I have wanted to do steadily but not obsessively since I saw them flying over the ice in the distance on a bitter cold winter day somewhere in Wisconsin. Before I got married and for some years after, I toured colleges through a booking service called the College Coffeehouse Circuit. When I saw the iceboats, I was traveling on one of those swings. I was age twenty-three. I performed as a solo act, vocals and guitar, for a small series of maybe six schools in Wisconsin. It was the dead of winter. The bookings themselves were in rathskellers at the schools. Some had permanent facilities and others improvised setups in their cafeterias after the evening meal was served then cleared up.
   On this tour, I was still single and socialized with students and occasionally dated staff members. I guess I was attractive enough, because some very nice guys asked me out. Sometimes I accepted their offers. At the time of the iceboat day, however, I was in a carful of other people. We were on an outing, not a date. It was daytime, possibly on Sunday, which I usually took as a weekly day off during a tour.
   I think back to seeing the iceboats. They were probably racing. Their sails were full while they zipped along. As I watched them, I could imagine the freezing wind on my face and the magical blur of passing scenery. I asked if there was any way I could get a ride on one of those boats. I was to be disappointed. The kids I was with were exceedingly kind and hospitable to me, but none of them knew anyone who had or ran an iceboat.
   I suppose I could go iceboating in my head. I’ve been out in very cold weather. On one winter tour up in Canada, it was frequently fifteen to twenty below zero. It was interesting to learn there that the air did not feel cold in a dry climate. I had to be careful to dress warmly enough, because the bitter cold was not bitter. My face and nose got numb quickly, especially in the wind, but to me back then, they did not hurt. That came later after I was again inside, thawing out, my skin burning while it woke up again.
   I could imagine now being bundled up in my fake shearling coat, which is very warm. I would have double wool socks on my feet inside my size eight Doc Marten boots that I still wear. They are eights because I had a broken foot a few years ago that stayed swollen for a long time after I hurt it. The size eight Docs were quite useful. After my foot went back down, I got a pair of gel insoles for those Docs. They fit all right now with heavy socks and the insoles. I think they would be excellent for iceboating. I would have on a cashmere muffler and wear my shearling Russian hat if moths have not eaten too much of it. I also used to have Irish shearling gloves, but I think they finally died or got lost in our last move. I have not seen them in several years. I do have some fake Polartec gloves with an Animal Rescue Society label. I could probably use those maybe pulled over a smaller pair of woolen gloves. So I imagine myself stuffed in warm winter wear, looking like a hassock with eyeglasses, sitting wherever a passenger would sit in an iceboat. I like to imagine I would be looking forward, but I would take facing backwards if that was all I could get. It would be bright and cold, so cold the air would seem to be crackling. I would feel the wind trying to find my cheeks to lay the flat of its cold knife blade on them -- threatening but not perilous like the sharp edge -- while the boat captain would set the sail and release the brake (do they have a brake? There must be some way of braking). We would fly down across the ice so fast. It would be dead quiet with just the wind, because it is sailing, no motor. It would be eye-burning bright because of the sun and snow. It would be too fast and over much too soon. I would want them to tack back (do iceboats tack across the wind? I cannot think why they would not) so we could reach or run again. I would want to sit in that boat until long blue shadows were in the snow, then I guess they would have to peel me out of my seat. I know I would be stiff and cold but very happy.
   I get a similar joy from rainbows. Luckily for me, I live in a part of the world where they are frequent, thus more accessible. There are not as many as there were one day of my honeymoon in Scotland on the road from Glasgow to Mull. We saw three in the space of half an hour. Here, however, we do get them satisfyingly often.
   Just a few days ago, I saw a tremendous rainbow. I was coming back up the hill on the 104 from the 305 intersection. I rounded a bend, when suddenly there it was. I did not yet see the entire arch, but the lower stem on the right was really bright. You could see the raindrops washing the colors’ edges in it. For the moment, which was a long one, nearly fifteen minutes, the rainbow shone. It developed into a full arch. There was a faint second bow trying to form to the right next to the first.
   I reminded myself I was in a car and driving. Rainbows are supposed to be lucky, so I kept my eyes more fully on the road and stole peeks at the bow as I drove up to where I turn off and go up to my house. I hung a left onto my road, which is a straight hill up to our condo. Then I said “wow” out loud. The entire arch stretched like a giant benediction over where I live. It was heart-lifting. I heard the enormous mental C chord that goes off my head when I see something amazing, like the first time I saw the windows at St. Chapelle in Paris. The rainbow was so bright that there was an additional thin rainbow underscoring the large one. Also, the sibling rainbow to the right side still was faintly there as well, following its brother.
   I drove up the hill and around to the back and parked my car. I climbed out quickly and looked to the north. There were too many trees. The rainbow was gone. But I felt like it had been just a ton of good luck shining down. I ran into Don, my neighbor retiree from the Navy who also does some maintenance and keeps an eye on our buildings and grounds. He told me the county had just approved a water-saving garden for our complex. These gardens are part of a local scheme to filter water for the watershed before it returns down to salmon runs and the Sound.
   This was wonderful news. There is a twenty-foot-long water-catching hollow next to our condo building. Ever since we moved here, I have wondered if it would be possible to plant a garden in or around it. Now the county will install rocks and gravel and plant it out for us with hardy native perennials. The stones and plants will act as the water filter. The condo across the street from us got one, which looks very good. There is another big beautiful water garden down below the skateboard park about a mile from where I live. We don’t have to pay anything to anybody other than to make sure our groundsmen do not kill any of the plants.
   I’m totally pumped. That rainbow was the best kind of luck.

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Hot Israeli Men Eating Hummus

2/8/2018

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I was born quite a while before the U.S. military formed the Arpanet and then its phenomenally-successful offshoot, the internet. Back in the sixties and seventies, before computers, if I wanted to find out unusual facts or look for humor, I read Life, The New Yorker, MAD Magazine, and for a very brief while, Trump (yes there was a magazine called Trump. It was founded by a writer named Harvey Kurtzman, not by the current president). I also read SHOW while it was around, Cracked, which was never quite as good as MAD, and the New York Herald Tribune. After I married, because my husband read the New York Times, I started reading it too. InitialIy, I did not like that the Times carried no comics, just a political cartoon, but over time I adjusted to their format and began to follow op-ed columnists. I read Russell Baker, whom I loved, William Safire when he wrote about language but not politics, and Maureen Dowd, who in her own way was so dependable because to me, she seemed to dislike nearly everybody.
   By 1994, my husband and I both owned personal computers. He came later to computering, but once he understood what a PC could do and figured out how to use it, he did not look back. I got into internet surfing, which was a novel adventure. There were many fewer websites to be discovered then. The bizarre, disgusting and humorous ones were much easier to find. One useful aid was a site, Mirsky’s Worst of the Web, which for several years was a reliable resource for anything quirky or disgustingly funny. Mirsky’s introduced me to The Japanese Enema Museum, The Squashed Bug Museum, some websites that posted serial photographs of Spam decomposing (which took longer than you would think) and a website with a series of photographs of someone cremating Easter Peep candies with a blowtorch. This all was back in the slow bitstream modem days before DSL, T-1 lines and satellite connections.
   As the data streaming got faster, videos came in. I discovered YouTube in 2008. Since then there has been a video proliferation of weird, whimsical and some frankly sick and twisted stuff that can be sidesplittingly funny. Does anyone out there besides me like Gregory Shitcock?
   It was a revelation to be able to sit in my home and access all that was allowable and a lot that wasn’t. For a while, I and my friends probably wasted more brain cells on the riches of the World Wide Web than on useful work. It became hard not to sneak a peek online at the job, especially if you had a boss who regularly came in to work late. We all checked internet stuff daily at the law firm where I worked. The lawyers did, too.
   One friend of mine became much too exuberant with his e-mail blasts of dirty jokes to a selected list. His joie de vivre caught up with him one day when he mistakenly hit “send” and transmitted something funny but disgusting to an entire branch office. He was fired the next day. A month or so later at another job, he was unrepentantly back at it again. We continued to laugh at his messages while he continued risking his livelihood. E-mail then was what Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram seem to have become now.
   I have stopped surfing for interesting and weird websites, because there are just so many of them. I do like to cruise around occasionally in Google Images. It’s a little bit like the old web-surfing. It’s just jpegs, no videos and no proliferation of adware poking at you on your screen. Yes, Google has ads, but the kinds of websites I used to like to visit probably now would bristle with banners, buttons, GIF animations and flashing text inviting me to spend money or gamble or download computer repair programs that undoubtedly would gunk up my iMac beyond repair. No. Google Images is challenging enough. In its favor, it’s quiet, nothing starts to play, I don’t hear a spoken-voice pitch for anything, and there is no music. I see images. The search hits may not be what I specifically want, but if I keep trying, I nearly always find images interesting or bizarre enough to make me happy.
   Recently I stumbled across something I thought was unusual but not at all disgusting and definitely fun. I found out there is an Instagram page entitled “Hot Israeli Men Eating Hummus.” I don’t have an Instagram account, but I was intrigued, so I decided to search the phrase “Hot Israeli Men Eating Hummus” in Google Images. Oh my. I got a screenful of photos of very hunky guys, each holding a dish of hummus, or tasting some hummus or just out and out shoveling hummus into his mouth. Most of these dudes were looking straight at the camera, some of them seductively, all of them in an upbeat way. There were no pictures of unhappy men with tears in their eyes frowning about anything. Most of the boys were bare-chested. All were fit and handsome enough to be photographed with or without hummus.
   I was interested in checking to see if anyone posed and ate hummus in his full Monty. I scrolled down quite a ways but didn’t find any Hot Israeli Men doing that. Perhaps I shouldn’t. Porn sites are dreary, and I hate the thought of a food as lovely as hummus ending up on the seamy side of town.
   I did find many portrait photos of seductive hummus plates, all of them frankly drool-worthy. I have liked hummus as a meal since I was a teenager. Hummus was the only subject I found within the confines of my search terms that one might consider to be au naturale. Many hummuses, however, had olive oil poured on with a sprinkling of paprika and chopped parsley, so none were strictly nude. Some even had whole chickpeas spooned on as a garnish which I thought was an interesting touch.
   I am a woman of a certain age. I do admit I like occasionally and non-obsessively to see images of muscular guys. I think a six-packed gentleman holding an appetizing food is a nice idea for a picture. Maybe someone should publish one of those calendars like there have been done of fire departments. Each month could feature a different food with a different sort of man. I’m sure a clever editor could accommodate all kinds of fantasies: Bald guys eating potatoes. Bearded men tasting hotdish casserole. Young fellows posing with doughnuts. Fit older studs brandishing salads. Diversity would be encouraged. The important feature is that they pose with food that is freshly made and would look appetizing. That is to say, no Spam past its prime or torched Easter Peeps, thank you.
   Perhaps the editor could poll the models before photographing them, so they could be supplied with foods they individually like. That way, on each page the male models would look as fine, happy and hungry as the hot Israeli men eating hummus in my Google Images search. For a contemplated pose, I don’t know if being bare-chested should be a requirement, but it sure couldn’t hurt.

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Road Trip October 2016

1/30/2018

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Burnham and I are on the road again for the first time in two years. We are going to Redmond, Oregon to see people Jerry has met online through Ancestry.com. The wife is the genealogy enthusiast. Her husband is a distant cousin of mine whom I’ve never met before. After we set out, all the way down through Washington State it rains heavily, the kind of weather you associate with western Washington but which we have not seen much of this summer or the one before. We are in Jerry’s big Prius, one of those cars in which you cannot feel the speed. We roll along cheerfully at ninety-three miles per hour. I tell him to dial it back. The road is wet, and it’s still raining. I make him laugh by saying “We’re only starting out. Let’s not get a ticket. Maybe on the way back home, then you can get a ticket.”
   I’m reminded of a trip we took maybe the second year we were married. We were doing a college concert tour. Somewhere past Ocala, Florida, a town with which we seemed to have bad luck always, I was asleep on the front seat next to Jerry with my head resting on his knee. He was doing ninety-five on a rainy wet road in our leased car. He got chased down by an Ocala highway patrolman. Jerry stopped the car and walked back to talk with the officer who chewed him out royally. I woke up and raised my head up. The cop saw me, and I saw him. His face was beet-red with the veins popping out on his neck. He yelled some more, wrote Jerry a ticket and then drove off. I asked Jerry what happened. He said, “He was about to throw me in jail. He was pissed off because he had to do one-fifteen to catch me. Lucky he saw you and decided just to write the ticket instead.”
   My beloved is afflicted with a leadfoot.
   We get down to the Columbia River and cross the bridge into Oregon. Like magic, suddenly the sun is out. Dramatic clouds pass over, but there is plenty of sky. We go down and turn left to pick up the 84, then head over to a town called The Dalles. I have no idea how to say the name. Is it “The Dales?” Or maybe “The Dallas?” How about “The Dawls?” Beats me. I’ll need to find out after we return home.
   Shortly after however-you-pronounce-it, at the east end of town before the dam, there is supposed to be a right turn on to the 197. The drive on the 84 from Portland has been spectacular with evergreen stands of trees all pointy like teeth waiting to taste the sky or birds in flight or the air. There are gorgeous huge rises of rock patched with evergreen trees and vertically-striated dirt-colored mineral formations. Over all of it like a blessing from the gods is an immense sky with just a few clouds. As if for emphasis, to the north there is a long blue line of low mountains crowned with dirty wool-colored clouds with an obvious rain shower or two connecting those clouds to the ground below.
   We find the 197 and hang a right. Within ten minutes, we are driving through big curvaceous hills covered in golden stalks, everything looking like some giant Japanese Zen gardener raked it all into patterns following the contours of the land. There are dirt-colored patches in the fields, maybe harvest aftermaths of some other type of crop. Everything now is short stalks, golden or dun-colored. I’m not enough of a farmer really to know, but I’m thinking wheat. Otherwise, I’m looking at what remains of the biggest hay harvest I’ve ever seen. I’m more inclined towards wheat, though. I’ve seen a hayfield after it was mown. This does not look the same. I’m told later the crop possibly is alfalfa.
   We drive down 197 for about one hundred forty miles. We fly through this country that looks like northern California on steroids. The sun shines directly in our eyes often enough to half-blind us as Jerry drives the switchbacks down to the valley. Sun that brutal and bright can almost be sickening, but the golden light it pours all over everything is a little like the way butter tastes on popcorn. It just triples the sensory appeal. As we get nearer to our destination, the sun begins to set behind a cloud one minute and come back out the next. The distant golden hills with the shadows cast by the fading light and backed by the azure sky look like some kind of Cecil B. De Mille movie set, if it had been designed by Maxfield Parrish. I try for as many good pictures as I can on my phone before the light fades away into night.
   Later we have checked in to a motel, had a meal and I sit writing this. Mr. Wonderful is asleep. My leadfoot drove all day with only two breaks. He’s earned his rest. I’ll be turning in soon myself, hoping I’ve caught some of those amazing views and stored them in my brain where they can come out again in my dreams. I have photos, and I’ll enjoy them, but nothing beats the living of something, nothing at all that I can imagine.

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Regression To The Mean

10/5/2017

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I recently found out about regression to the mean. It is a kind of evanescent-seeming statistical phenomenon that is said to operate on everything. The idea of it is that there is something that will make anything repetitive that can be valued or quantified in some way over time behave in a way that varies in each repetition. There will be differences over the series with each cycle or generation. The differences reflect regression in the next generation either towards or away from their statistical mean. Over the repetition series succeeding generations end up evening out at the mean. In some pairs of measured repetitions or generations, you can obtain a definitive percentage reflecting regression to the mean. The thing that blew me away is that regression to the mean seems to operate on everything that repeats or recycles. I did not know this.

   The original idea of regression to the mean came to Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, when he was studying genetics and considering the children of tall parents and the children of short parents. He initially called the phenomenon “regression to the mediocre.” What he noticed was that tall people’s children often turned out to be shorter than their parents, while short people’s children often turned out to be taller than their parents. He also examined seed size variations in successive generations of sweet pea plants and found that regression to the mean operated on sweet pea generations.

   I do not know if regression to the mean originally inspired experimenters to use a control group along with a study group, but it is a common reason now for doing so. The way to find and measure the effect of regression to the mean of course would be to compare the results of the two groups. The difference in the result could reflect regression. I had no idea that statistics, which previously seemed to me like the dry-as-dust tools and products of insurance adjusters or sports analysts could contain something as metaphysical as regression to the mean. It seems that statistics can.

   I think of different things that could be affected by regression to the mean. Certainly I would consider my less-than-brilliant career in the performing arts as a possibility. Every time I started doing well, something happened to cause me to regress back to my former state of not being successful. I spent fifteen years battling regression to the mean without even knowing it. Luck plays a huge part in success, much more than people are willing to admit. Artists like me have known this for decades. I didn’t particularly enjoy this knowledge, because my professional luck was not good, but now I understand my lack of luck at key times and the effect of its absence on my career’s fitful and minor progress. I think this fluctuation of luck could at least partly be explained by regression to the mean during my career’s lifetime.

   I’m not saying I am a particularly unlucky person. Overall, in my life, I’ve had good luck in marriage, pretty good luck in health, average to poor luck in the music business and unknown luck in the other arts that I express but have not tried to sell. I’ve survived to old age whereas a number of gifted and wonderful friends of mine have been taken too early from this earth. I think overall my life-luck has been better than theirs just because I am still here and still creating art. I don’t know what the regression or mean might be of the art I create, but for the moment, I think each piece I put forward is a little bit better than the one before. But this could also just be my ego pushing encouragingly from behind saying pay no attention to that regression hanging over your head.

   Does regression apply in cosmic situations? What would be the earth’s mean over its lifetime of variations in orbit? Would this matter? Is gravity like some kind of regression to the mean, pulling away or pulling towards? Our universe must be expanding in an infinity of points geometrically. Does it waver? Could we know this? Maybe the arc of the repetitions would be too huge. We couldn’t notice our cosmos’ regression to the mean, because we are so infinitesimally small we can’t measure it. We might only be in absolutely the first cycle or generation in time as we know it for this particular universe.

   Could regression to the mean operate on subatomic particles? How about fluctuations in atoms? Wasn’t it Niels Bohr who postulated about electrons being metaphorical rings of energy and jumping back in forth to different energy levels within the atom structure? Regression might work on those rings. I saw on TV that there is something like electron-energy-packets in the sun’s interior. There are energy pulses or something that work their way out to the surface from the center of the sun. Does regression to the mean make them advance and retreat? Does this operate somehow on the sun’s workings overall? Do sunspots have something to do with regression to the mean? They repeat every eleven years. We know they have variation. What would be their mean? Could chaos somehow have regression to the mean hovering around the edges of the fracas, throwing in a punch or two?

   Would regression to the mean be at work at CERN in Switzerland when they do repeated cycles of colliding particles into each other? Some collision cycles produce particles the researchers are looking for. Some cycles do not. Is there a mean they can derive from the series of attempts? How do they express that? Would any variation of particles then be regression to the mean? Would this be useful to CERN in measuring the efficacy of their experiment?

   For the sake of conceptualization, is there a consistent pattern overall to visualize when we consider regression to the mean? Is it in the shape of an arc or a wave or a line with waves through it? Or is it maybe an infinity of points going in and out, like breathing? When I am breathing are some breaths further away from my breathing’s mean and some breaths closer? I guess there would be, but I couldn’t know it exactly, because I would have to die before they could arrive at the quantity that helps determine the mean. Maybe the regression number continually resets itself. Maybe they could do some sort of posthumous statistics for me after I’m gone. At this point in my life, which is at the farther end, rather than the beginning (when I was a child), am I furthest away from my mean or closest? What would be my mean anyway? Is our mean determined before or after we exist? Do we have infinite means? I am not an eminent person. If I became eminent before I die, would that be my life reaching its acme and being furthest from its mean?

   The idea of reaching the acme makes me think of George Harrison’s death as described by his wife. George Harrison was extremely spiritual despite his earlier rock ‘n roll life. He remained eminent, embraced Hinduism and was a devout follower to the end of his life. In an interview, his wife said there was light at his moment of death. Maybe he achieved an ultimate insight when he reached his transcendental instant, and he moved even further away from the mean, or maybe much nearer to it. Perhaps his mean had been his original eminence. Perhaps his regression from the mean was achieving nirvana. Or maybe it was the other way around.

   Now I consider infinity/eternity which are the numerical/time expressions of the same thing, which is uncountable, circular, never-ending even in your dreams — a mobius strip. The number eight on its side. The circle of life in another metaphorical sense. I’ve recently found out there is more than one type of infinity. That’s a thought for pondering while taking a shower, a walk, or trying to go to sleep. Here’s infinity minding its own business being infinite. And here’s someone, anyone who wants to quantify anything, so they break infinity down into integers or little chunks of time, or quanta, or the steps of the tortoise in Xeno's original story, or, I don’t know, some kind of units of dark matter. And taking it to dark matter starts to make my brain hurt. I know dark matter is out there, but I have not a clue whether there’s any kind of repetition in it.

   I can see regression to the mean and the manifestation of the uncertainty principle (in which of course the event changes if you observe it). I can think of gravity. I can see Zeno’s Paradox, which uses infinity as the reason you can’t get there from here, but of course, you can, which must mean that Zeno’s infinity might be different from the infinity that is the universe and the stars and the arc of the time/space continuum or the endless row of integers or seconds from zero to forever. Did regression to the mean start with The Singularity like we think everything else cosmic and subatomic that we know did? I guess it must have begun right after, since it can’t exist without series and repetition.

   I think regression to the mean rides on the shoulders of time. All that I have mentioned in the paragraphs above depends on time in some way or other. Time carries everything. I think of the realm of possibility juxtaposed with the realm of probability, and time must be included. I think of eternity, which is another expression of time, that is endless time. Possibility is covered by anticipated time. Probability is covered by time that could happen but we don’t know how much yet.

   I am reminded of the Stephen Miller Band song, “Fly Like An Eagle,” which opens with a wonderful line:

Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future

   My life’s ups and downs ride on the shoulders of regression to the mean, and regression to the mean rides on the shoulders of time. If I try to look at me and my universe clearly, and consider everything that replicates or repeats, I keep seeing regression to the mean’s long fingers pulling on all the strings.

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Dead Bird, Donkeys and Llamas

9/2/2017

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These days I no longer have a plot of land to garden, so I maintain 20-25 containers of various sizes with plants and right next to the house, a mini greenhouse with a three-by-three foot square container and a little cover that can be raised and lowered. The mini greenhouse at the moment is hosting some sunflowers that are busy petering out. They had been planted by some animal in a row around the edge. Somewhere on our grounds is a chipmunk with a sense of design.

I hope the sunflowers’ faded and droopy blooms will produce some seeds before I have to remove what’s left of their stems and leaves, which look sad. There are also two volunteer tomatoes who came up late this year and are trying frantically to make up for lost time by producing flowers and fruits almost immediately. They are volunteers of the wonderful black Russian cherry tomatoes I have grown now for four years. This year none of the seeds I planted came up. We had an unusually cold spring, which probably was the cause of earlier tomato reluctance and failure. So these little guys are not getting huge, but they are faithfully making children and are welcome indeed. I’ll keep some seed from them for next year and try to get it into the soil in a more timely fashion. I hope there will be enough light and heat left this season for these fruits to ripen.

Plant life never fails to cheer me up. What did stop me in my tracks a week or so ago was a little dead bird on my pavement next to the patch of communal lawn (brown this dry year) between our building and the bordering hedge. On that afternoon, the day was very hot. The bird, which had a yellow body and small grey, white and black wings, lay on its back with its toes turned up. It was a quintessential dead bird, looking like the way a cartoonist would draw one. I didn’t notice any loose feathers, so I think it probably just fell out of the sky, or landed and then keeled over dead. A cat had not gotten to it. I looked down at it and up at the sky and then back down at it. I hoped it had died of age and not the heat.

This is the second dead bird I have found out on my patio in the past year. There are quite a lot of small birds that come around, so I guess it’s to be expected. I always feel sorry for them -- birds seem like little epitomes of life, especially when they’re on the wing, so it’s grievous to see them, still and lifeless on the ground.

I went inside and got a plastic bag and picked up the unfortunate, wrapping it in the bag and tying up the handles. When I was done with the hose, I took the bag out to the dumpster across the parking area from my place, and I gently tossed the bag into the trash. I guess at this time in my life, this must pass for what formerly would have been a little funeral with a matchbox coffin and appropriate prayers. Just like everything else, life must move on and change. Obsequies and other rites for birds get simplified. I suspect the same will be true for me when it’s my turn.

I recently visited my ex-sister-in-law's housewarming party on Vashon Island. I met a number of agreeable people who live near Marge’s new domicile. Everyone seemed pleasant and to be enjoying their residency on Vashon, which is charming, small and filled with all types of people. Main street is quaint with an overlay of crunchy granola new-aginess, but not cloyingly so.

At the party, I found the most interesting topic of conversation to me was the cougar that was found on the island and recently shot dead. It had been preying on neighborhood animals. When it killed and ate two donkeys and two llamas, local authorities decided that was enough, so they packed iron and went forth and hunted the big cat down.

I’m just as happy where I am not to have to worry about anything wilder than the local deer, although there are tales of mountain lions and bears spotted here in past years. The critteriest critters I’ve encountered up on the hilltop have been baby snakes. They go their way, and I go mine.

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The Lady at the Ligeti

7/17/2017

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Jerry and I went to the last performance for our season of Seattle Symphony. We heard the Ligeti Requiem, which was haunting and interesting. I would love to see the score, because the singing both for choir and soloists was so difficult, I'm interested in reading for myself what they had to learn and sing. After the intermission, we heard Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Mahler is not Jerry's and my personal favorite, but we thought the third movement of the symphony was moving and beautiful, and we liked the energetic last movement. The thing that most struck me about the evening was an encounter I had with a person during intermission. Jerry stayed put in his seat. I headed up the aisle to go to the restroom. I was hoping if I did this, waiting for the ferry later would not be the agony it sometimes can be.

As I was working my way through the milling throng in the lobby, all lining up to the wine bar or heading to the resties like I was, I found myself behind a couple. The gentleman was tall and bald. He looked prosperous and conventional. The lady, however, nearly stopped me in my tracks. She was blonde, tall and slim. She was elegantly gowned in a cloth-of-gold close-fitting floor length dress with an open back. I could see that the garment had a halter front with fabric ties knotted around her neck. What was absolutely unexpected and gorgeous was that this lady was tattooed all over her body and arms that I could see. I don't know if she had any body art on her lower torso and legs, but what I could see on the upper part of her was fabulous. She had floral arms, some kind of Asian writing on the undersides of her arms and a beautiful pair of life-sized wings on her back. I was so knocked out, I lost all propriety and tapped her lightly on her arm. She turned and looked down kindly at me. I gushed, "I apologize for disturbing you, but I must tell you how absolutely fabulous, how gorgeous your body art is. Did you have it done in Japan?" She smiled and told me no she had it done in many places and that she had traveled very widely. I said again how lovely she was, and I turned swiftly and headed down the hall to the Ladies' room. Of course there was a line. It was intermission. Now here was the lady again standing behind me. I could not help but look at her and our eyes met. She said, "Isn't it beautiful, the music?" I said yes it is. She told me she has a nine-year-old son, who already owns a concert-going suit with a bow tie and everything. She is looking forward to taking him to his first concert. I said, "How wonderful! I've been going to concerts since I was a kid. I know he'll love it." She said yes, music was wonderful. I agreed on that and we parted company.

On my way out, I spotted her gentleman companion waiting for her in the hall. I looked up at him, and he glanced down a little frostily at me. I smiled and murmured "Have a wonderful night," and headed back up the hall and through the lobby to my seat.

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Watching the Grammys with a Fever

4/27/2017

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I watched the Grammys ceremonies a day late this year. Because Jerry and I hard-disk a ton of stuff and then watch it later, we have fallen into the habit of not watching awards programs sometimes until several days after they have been broadcast. Occasionally, like with the Oscars, we will watch the awards on the same night. In the last couple of years, though, we have been watching the Grammys on the day after or the one after that.

I had been sick for about a week. I got something I thought was a cold until I spiked a four-day fever, which kept me very low. I slept a lot while I was febrile, and as usual, when I have a fever, I dream weird dreams. I guess everyone does, although my dreams get weird in that their logic gets skewed and there are strange word combinations. When I was younger, my dream visions would be strange, but now that I’m older for some reason, it is all about the text. The other thing of course about fever dreams is that they just keep repeating themselves over and over until you wake up to go to the toilet, and then once you are back to sleep, a new bizarre scenario presents itself and you go off, and the new dreams start repeating themselves again.

Before Jerry fired up the recording of the Grammys, I built a kind of nest for myself on the couch. Normally, the cat would be right there with me, but we had the fireplace on, and kitty is totally committed to being a fur-covered rotisserie in front of that fire. She stretches out so her belly fur gets quite warm, and then she stretches and turns over and heats her back. She has an almost obscene look on her face, the essence of hedonism, while she does this. My lap, legs and knees could never compete with the fire.

I built my nest of about half a dozen pillows in various shapes and sizes up against which I leaned and put my feet up at an angle on the coffee table. I shifted so my butt was hanging off the edge of the sofa framework over which the seat cushion has worn down. Couch science requires that I hang my butt over this hard place, or I’ll begin to get numb and squirm before I’m ready to get up for a pee break. After ensuring butt comfort, I threw a Costco $13.95 fuzzy gray- and-white throw over myself, settled in and folded my arms over my stomach. Jerry was firmly relaxing, ensconced in the Sam Hooker rocker I gave him about fifteen years ago. This is a chair he sat down in at the store in Pasadena. He didn’t need to say anything to me. I knew from that moment on, this was his chair. So I got it for him.

The Grammys came on. I was too sick to be able to remember later who opened the show. I just know at an early stage James Corden, the emcee, who is a Brit and has some musical talents, made a comedic entrance in which he fell down the stairs. I was hoping he did not hurt himself right off the blocks, but he seemed okay once he finally got himself upright again. There was business with a missing shoe and sock, and I suppose the audience laughed. Jerry and I did not, but don’t forget, I was sick and Jerry’s sense of humor is much quieter than mine.

Over the past few years, the women in the Grammys all have seemed to dress themselves more and more strangely, except for Adele who is unfailingly elegant in her appearance. It is interesting that she looks like she is a nineteen-eighties society matron in her forties, with a big smooth hairdo and just a ton of eye makeup. She looks way older than she actually is. Because I am elderly, I am not troubled by this. I like her gowns. They are modest, dark-colored and generally becoming, kind of like her musical arrangements, which themselves are simple, drop- dead elegant, and when her voice is in tune, sound absolutely stunning. Adele carries only the important production elements with her, like a few strings and a core rhythm section. She is the quintessence of a certain kind of style. When I see her, I think of Dionne Warwick and other woman artists who work small on stage but who are so powerful.

The usual Grammys pantheon consists of idols like Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Nikki Minaj, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and romeos like Bruno Mars, Wu-Tang Clan, Fifty Cent, Eminem, and Chris Brown. In years past, some of these artists have usually done production numbers with dancers, back up singers, full bands with or without strings and large-sized sets and elaborate costumes. I am sure these program segments cost a lot of money, and I have wondered if the artists themselves have to pay for them as they would for the Super Bowl half- time productions. As best I can determine from a cursory Google search, the show pays the production costs, but I have a hard time believing that fact, given how expensive Beyonce’s turn appeared to be this year. I did find out that the artists are not paid for their appearances. Their compensation comes from the publicity value of being before a huge TV audience. They also each are given munificent swag bags.

This year, I think some of the ladies’ dress designers had a private contest to see who could dress their performer in the oddest gown. There was a lot of hemline improvisation, different unusual fabrics, including leather, and just a whole lot of improprietous bosom tissue on display. Everyone was conscientious about not upsetting the television censors, but many necklines were slashed down to the navel and spread open. There was a considerable amount of side flesh on view. No observer would have any doubt as to whether or not these women were women.

This year’s Grammys show was the third one I have seen in which Beyonce performed in a major large-production program segment and was given a prominent spot in the program. There was so much mention of her last year and the year before, that I was surprised that there was all the mention of her again this year, although to be fair, she was nominated in several categories for her album “Lemonade.” As far as I know, “Lemonade” received glowing reviews and was a hit album. I have only heard small portions of it including the two songs she included in her Grammys turn.
I personally have nothing against Beyonce. I think she is loaded with talent and I have enjoyed seeing her occasionally, first with Destiny’s Child and then later on her own. She sings in tune and dances with energy. I am sure she has a huge and very devoted coterie of fans. I will probably never go to a live performance, because those things are now such circuses and getting into and out of them requires almost as much time as the performance itself. I could make an exception if she were to appear at the Hollywood Bowl, maybe, or in another easily-accessible theater somewhere where I could watch the show from a seated position.

Not long before Grammys night, there was a flurry of news about Beyonce. She and her husband proudly announced that they were expecting twins. There appeared online an elaborately posed professionally-photographed portrait of her, resting on her knees and heels and posed sideways so the world could see the progress of the unborns. She wore somewhat of a Mona Lisa smile and brief shorts and a bra. There were a lot of roses and a filmy veil. I’m sure she was grateful to God and her husband and their little daughter and all of the fans for being there for her in the wonder of her moment. I was reminded of the famous Vanity Fair portrait of Demi Moore, heavily pregnant with I’m not sure which child, but I think it was when she still was married to Bruce Willis, so I’m guessing one of the Willis children. What I do remember is Demi was very pregnant and very naked and like Beyonce in her portrait, Demi looked as if she were extremely pleased with herself.

I have not borne any children, so I cannot speak from authority about what it must feel like to produce one, but I imagine for a lot of women, there is understandable pride, a huge sense of worth and maybe an animal satisfaction in knowing that you are replicating your species. I’m only guessing on these feelings, but I thought I saw those elemental emotions both in Demi’s face and Beyonce’s face. I can truthfully say that if I had ever been pregnant, no matter how great my fame, you could not have paid me enough to bare my stomach to the world at large. But that is my problem of modesty, obviously, not theirs.

The Grammys program rolled on. Adele did her first turn early in the program. She gave her usual elegant presentation and the crowd went nuts. Various awards then were handed out. One group’s acceptance speech was amusing, and Jerry and I enjoyed it. The artist explained that he and his group used to watch the Grammys in their boxers when they were unknowns, so they thought it would only be fitting to accept their Grammy trophies in their boxers. They shed their trousers before stepping up onto the podium. Jerry and I both laughed and liked the modest down-to-earth humor.

I noticed a lack of acoustic music. Actually, I noticed a lack of instrumental music. There was a lot of vocal music, including Pentatonix whom I always enjoy, and there were tributes to David Bowie and Prince. Lady Gaga did a turn with Metallica singing “Moth Into Flame,” and I enjoyed thinking she might have done it just to show that she also could sing heavy metal. I believe despite her unfortunately silly name that she has been endowed with the most formidable musical talent of any of the women there. I’m not a worshipful follower, but I definitely am a fan and have been pleased over the past four years to see Gaga morph from rock to jazz to show tunes to heavy metal, all without turning a hair. I think that is impressive.

I shifted my butt slightly and adjusted my fluffy comforter. It was finally time for Beyonce to do her big number, which was to be a medley of two songs from her album “Lemonade.” Watching her made me think of febrile dreams, and since I had a fever anyway, I tried to suspend my disbelief at what I was watching. As best I can remember, there were images of a small army of women dressed in filmy dresses waving their arms so they would look like East Indian many-armed goddesses. It was a miasmic vision, blurred, presumably sensual, although I’m not sure about that. Beyonce came slowly in walking on a catwalk I think, cradling her belly in her hands. She was dressed in shiny gold beading and filmy lace and sections of oiled flesh on display and huge, huge maternal boobs caught up in the costume, and spilling over the top. You could see her entire midriff somehow through lace. Her hair was a mass of wavy tresses topped with a gold coronet with rays sticking out of it and a sub-coronet made of gold roses. She wore what looked like a tall Ubangi necklace of stacked metal rings. I wasn’t sure if she was channeling some kind of Vedic picture, The National Geographic, Freda Kahlo, Las Vegas showgirls or maybe all of the above. When I closed my eyes, I could still see her and the outline of that shimmering image.

She was languidly singing, and there were lines of women dancing while she sang. She herself sat down in a chair, which tilted and lowered her down and raised her up again. I guess it was some sort of representation of a birthing chair, but I was not quite sure. I could not understand a single word of what she sang. I had a cascade of feverish thoughts about what I was seeing. I could not get the idea out of my head, and I know it is disgusting, but I will be honest here: I thought I was looking at the most expensive, gilded, be-ruffled and ribboned split beaver shot I had ever seen. I was revolted, appalled and fascinated all at the same time. And mind you, I had a fever, so I’m not sure I’m remembering any of it with much accuracy.

Adele collected most of the awards in the categories where she and Beyonce were both nominated. I believe Adele earned and deserved her awards. I think she is a magnificent singer and should be proud of her talent. What mystified me and still does was the amount of mawkish almost servile adoration Adele rendered publicly to Beyonce. It made me wonder if perhaps Beyonce somehow owns the Grammys show in some tangible way and no other woman was supposed to win the big prizes. I wonder this, because at a previous Grammy show, I vaguely remember that I watched Beyonce performing “Take My Hand Precious Lord” when a lady gospel singer was there to sing that hymn. At the time, it seemed more than plausible to me that Beyonce perhaps had pitched a hissy backstage, and the producer made an adjustment and gave her the solo. She performed it competently, but I would rather have heard the gospel singer do it. This maybe is only me, but watching this year’s show, I got a sense that Beyonce seemed to be demanding something from the Grammys above and beyond the usual respect accorded a star. I don’t know what it was, but Adele’s pitiful kowtowing to Beyonce after Adele won her own four Grammys seemed to be an embodiment of that debt. I wanted Adele to beam and stand up proud, and I was disappointed that she chose to hand off all the honor to Beyonce who, regardless of her garish expensive madonna-like display, had not gotten the votes.

I don’t know. I really did have a fever, and maybe this all was just in my head.

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Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony -- The Mating Call

4/3/2017

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I went to Benaroya Hall to hear the Seattle Symphony play a most exquisite rendition of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in F major. Jerry and I went out together to celebrate our forty-fifth wedding anniversary. We got married all that time ago on a rainy day in New York City. We were joined in matrimony by the Reverend Walter Kring of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York. The church still exists, but Reverend Kring of course is long gone.
   On this evening, we enjoyed a nice dinner at the Brooklyn, with a generous bowser bag to take home, and we heard in the first half of the concert a short Debussy piece that the composer wrote and used to win the Rome Prize, and then a modern violin concerto by Aaron Jay Kerins played by James Ehnes. This is the first violin concerto I ever heard where the violinist was actually shredding on his instrument like a heavy-metal rock guitarist. It was intriguing, and Jerry and I both admired Mr. Ehnes’ stamina and musicianship.
   After the interval it was time for the Pastoral Symphony. I need to explain that this sixth symphony of Beethoven’s has a particular meaning for me. When I was four or five years old, I saw Walt Disney’s film, Fantasia, for the first time. There are a number of images in that film that I remember from my first very early viewing. Some things got burned into my brain. I remembered the giant devil in Night On Bald Mountain. I remembered the silly hippo ballerina in Dance of the Hours. I remembered the Waltz of the Flowers from Nutcracker Suite. There were frost fairies, and everywhere they touched turned to ice crystals and frost. When I saw the film again at the age of eleven and then once more after I was married and we had some time to kill one day in Texas, I was surprised how many details I still recalled.
   Fantasia also included an audio/visual rendering of the Pastoral Symphony. I didn’t recall that sequence at all from when I was very small. Maybe I slept through it. What I think happened, though, was the Disney subject matter of it didn’t really register with me until I was older and more aware of what it was about. You see, most of that Disney segment had a story line about really cute scantily-clad girl centaurs meeting really buff boy centaurs and going off in pairs, presumably to mate and produce precious little baby centaurs.
   Beethoven’s story line to the piece was about going out to the country on a summer day and relaxing by a stream and then happy villagers having a party and dancing, and a thunderstorm building up and disrupting everything and then peace and harmony replenishing themselves with a lovely, repetitive cadence that eventually concluded itself in a full resonant closing chord. It is a gorgeous piece, just lush in every way orchestrally and melodically, and of course like all Beethoven, it is jam-packed with wonderful themes and recapitulations of themes and descriptive music that paints pictures for the listener.
   Because Disney got into my young brain first before Beethoven did, by the time I was in my teens and had seen the movie again, I could not hear the Pastoral without thinking of those centaurs and centaurettes getting themselves ready for their big dates. I remembered there were also adorable little cherubs as only Disney could create them flying around and helping the girls and boys primp and preen before going out.
   At Benaroya, Jerry and I sat comfortably close to one another so that our arms and knees were touching. He was fully into the music, as was I, when at the beginning of the second movement, which to me is seductive and silky with those very smooth resonant string passages (especially the cellos), I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.
   I was sitting next to a couple who were to my right. She was directly next to me and her escort (who I thought might be her husband) put his arm around her and began a figure-eight hand movement on her upper arm and shoulder that I think could be considered universal male body language for “I’ve got plans for me and you after this concert is over.” His companion laid her head on his shoulder and turned slightly towards him, which I suppose is universal date body language for “I’m just as interested as you are in doing what you’d like us to do after the concert.” So the second movement wound its suave way through time, and I realized that portions of the Pastoral could make excellent make-out music, and perhaps through time they have. The thought did not occur to me until I saw this couple. When the next livelier movement started, she laid her hand on his knee, and he covered her hand with his.
   I could not watch them closely any longer. It would have been rude. Now I was enjoying the performance of some favorite music, and the centaurs and cherubs were busily dancing in my head. But I had seen enough of this couple that I was briefly and wildly tempted to hiss at them, “Get a room!” I minded my manners and said nothing. They enjoyed their concert hall version of necking, which was something like my concert hall version of tapping my foot -- I move my toes inside my shoe to the time, so that I show little movement and make no sound. Nothing can be more irritating at a classical music performance than a fellow audience member who hums, taps his foot or bobs his head. It is very tempting to move to the music, but you really must not.
   These people were not being overtly disruptive to those around them, but they did set my imagination into motion. I fantasized that this was their last night together for all time. He was going to be taken away at dawn to prison somewhere up in the cold, dead wastes of northern Canada, and it was highly likely he would not survive. My other imaginary scenario was that they had just found each other again after entire lifetimes apart, her in Seattle and him in Sheboygan, married to other people and raising their families, and only were able at last to express to each other their great original love at the concert that night.
   The Pastoral had now worked its way forward to the thunderstorm. I turned my attention to the tympani booms of the storm and the centaurs and centaurettes in my head all hurrying for cover. I tried to ignore the lovebirds sitting next to me.
   I have to admit I did want to know better what they looked like. The woman appeared to be bird-bone slim and dressed in slacks and a red sweater. She had elegantly manicured hands, which looked older than mine, tipped with scarlet nails. She had a beautiful mane of ash-blond hair. She reminded me of my ex-sister-in-law’s Aunt Joan, who maintained herself exquisitely throughout her life. On the evening that I met Joan, I first saw her from behind with her slim figure and long fall of blonde hair, and I thought she was one of her daughters. Then she turned around, and although her face was beautifully made up, she did look older, and I realized she was Aunt Joan.
   I did not see my concert neighbor’s face until we all stood up to applaud at the end. I took a quick peek and saw that she wore glasses and was probably my age or not much younger, which is to say she had been around the turntable a few times. From behind she looked maybe twenty. Her companion was bald with craggy features. He was dressed in jeans and had rather a crisp, military look with his chiseled face and no-nonsense air. I could not help thinking that now I knew his secret — beneath his crusty exterior was a sentimental lover who was wooing his lady with those shoulder-caresses in the Benaroya Hall orchestra section during the second movement of the Pastoral.
   I am convinced that the mating call theme simply is implicit in the Pastoral and Uncle Walt’s artists picked up on that way back in the early nineteen-forties and cleverly embodied it in an art cartoon. Here, at Benaroya Hall down in the orchestra section, were two inarguably adult people who, like Disney’s adolescent centaurs, were recapitulating that same theme right next to me on my anniversary night.

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Womxn's Walk Seattle January 21, 2017

2/28/2017

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I went with my two nieces on January 21, 2017, to the Womxn’s March in Seattle. The main reason I chose to go, despite having to perambulate on elderly feet and hips that choose to complain at inopportune moments, was that No. 45’s election and inauguration were a choice and a confirmation of choice of a kind that I never experienced before.
   I felt the impact of the 2016 presidential election with more anxiety and anger than I have had for any other in my life. I’m talking now about election results over a long span of time. I was disappointed when Nixon and Reagan and George W. Bush were elected for the first time, but I was not frightened. I distrusted them, but I thought of them as the usual American politicians. They might be too sly, or too slick or too paternalistic and arrogant, but they were those things within the context of political processes and behaviors to which I and my fellow citizens were accustomed.
   I have read that other progressive liberal citizens had a bad visceral reaction to No. 45’s election, and that it bothered a number of men and women, not just me. I know I am not alone when I confess that when the results were announced on television, I felt a shock similar to the kind of pit-of-the-stomach feeling we get when we hear that someone has died. Through the following weeks, I not only had my rage and disappointment to deal with but a dull sorrow as if I were waiting out the days leading up to a funeral.
   I need to explain that I was not a Clinton supporter. I voted for her as a no vote to No. 45 rather than as a pro vote for her. She did not convince me that she would firmly address issues I thought were most important, and I do not believe she ran a campaign in 2016 that convinced me to vote for her either. I supported her in 2008, which I thought truly was her time, and I was sorry Obama defeated her, but it was as obvious to me as to everyone else that he ran a near-perfect primary campaign and then a near-perfect presidential one that year. Clinton repeated some 2008 mistakes in 2016 of which I think the costliest were her again taking districts for granted that she must have been warned were not securely hers. There are also the Russian hacking and FBI interference to take into consideration. It is a shame, but I think there are a few too many people out there who hate her, whether it is reasonable or not, and she does not seem to have the type of personality that is able to overcome such relentless bad feeling. I think she would have made a conscientious, decent president, but her weak campaign strategy and lackluster message did not bring it home in 2008 or 2016. Yes, yes, in 2016 she won the popular vote, but she did not win the electoral, and that is the one that counts. Obama and his people took nothing for granted, did the math and kept their eyes on the electoral. They did that twice, which is one reason why Obama won twice. We know now that No. 45’s strategy relied on the electoral calculation as well.
   As it did for others, Inauguration Day loomed like a doom day in my mind. When I was a kid, I can remember anticipating painful, difficult medical procedures or some sort of discipline and punishment that engendered a dread matching what I now was feeling. Along with others I knew online, we planned not to watch the ceremonies. We chose to tell our friends that we were seeing movies, or reading, or getting outside, or doing just anything else we could think of but not watching the television, not checking news status, and for me, not wanting to stumble across anything showing No. 45 enjoying his triumph.
   In particular, I did not want to hear that man speak. I think he has an ugly, unmusical voice. He aspirates his “p’s,” so when he speaks it sounds like he is punching the microphone. His speeches seem clearly to illustrate his perceivable character. Through them, he gives the impression of being impatient, cruel, ill-natured, inhumane and indifferent to suffering (I guess he thinks showing compassion would make him seem weak). I sense no empathy, generosity, kindness or tolerance in him, other than to his grown children who seem to trust him. In later internet posts, I saw some video footage of how rudely he treated his wife in public at the Inaugural, and she appeared to have a kind of deer in the headlights look that made me uneasy.
   I felt like there had been a death in my family and somehow I too was awaiting execution. So I was relieved when my niece sent me a message on Facebook to invite me to go to the Womxn’s March in Seattle on the day after No. 45’s inauguration. Women in our area wanted to march in support of the big Women’s March in Washington D.C. which I read in the paper was the bright idea of a retired lawyer who put it out in the aether, and everyone jumped on it. I let my niece know I was interested in going to walk, and I hoped we could walk together.
   On January 21, I went to meet my niece Wandee down at the Bainbridge Island ferry. There was a huge line waiting to walk on the boat. I actually wondered if I might not get on, but I did, and Wandee was already on, and we met up and greeted each other. I heard later that our particular ferry carried huge payload of 2,500 walk-on passengers and full car levels. Despite being loaded to the gunnels, the boat made its way successfully across the sound to Seattle. The Washington Ferry personnel all were cheerful and polite and took good care of us. I went to check the line for the ladies’ room (too long) and saw Governor Inslee talking to the boat manager who must have put him on the PA system, because the Governor made a short announcement a few minutes later to the entire boatload of us declaring that day to be Seattle’s pink day in honor of the march and wishing us all good luck.
   Some of us were allowed to disembark through the car level after the vehicles left. Everyone everywhere, including the little kids in strollers, husbands, brothers, wives, sisters, grandmas, everyone was cheerful, no pushing, no squabbles. There were a lot of people, but we all were on our best behavior.
   After we walked off the ferry, we looked up and my other niece, Val, was standing on the overhead walkway filming us on her smartphone. We shouted and waved, and then she came down and we walked together over to a corner where Val called for an Uber car. We had twenty minutes to wait and spent part of it listening to a homeless man who ranted at us happily about how awful No. 45 was. He didn’t make much sense, but we agreed with him in spirit if not in fact. The speeches were starting at Judkins Park at ten a.m. We resigned ourselves to being late for the speeches.
   After the Uber car arrived, it took us another half hour to get near enough to Judkins Park to leave the Uber and walk up the rest of the way. We were among many people at that point, and when we actually arrived at the park, many many more than that. There was a huge crowd, so big that I had no chance to get the scope of how many people were there. We were at the southern end of the park, and the walk itself started from somewhere in the middle of the park. We inched forward with the rest of the crowd until we came out on twenty-third street where we were able to stop and start, moving forward for another quarter hour or so.
   Because this is Seattle, rain had been predicted to fall on this day, but overhead it was sunny and bright with occasional clouds drifting by, nothing like the wet slog for which we had prepared ourselves. I carried my poncho over my arm and did not need it even once during the hours I was there. My nieces and I all were dressed warmly in the kind of clothes you could peel off and tie around your waist if you needed. All three of us had lived both in California and Washington state, and we understood the concept of being prepared for bone-chilling cold and then removing layers as the sun rose higher.
   The three of us all spent our time reading signs while inching forward. We saw
anti-No. 45 signs, pro-women signs, and pro-peace signs. My favorite slogans out of many were “Get Your Tiny Hands Off My Rights” and “Tiny Hands, Russian Fingers.” There were more depictions of Putin that I expected, and none of them were complimentary. There were various messages carrying humane themes, and pro-Muslim themes.
   In the crowd itself a great many of us, carrying signs or not, wore pussy hats of one kind or another. I had found myself a black billed cap that had cat ears. I did not have time to knit myself a pussy hat, so I hoped this hat, which would shade my face as well as covering my head, would serve as a political message as well. My hat drew a few compliments, and my nieces both were amused by it. Neither of them wore a pussy hat. They both are very busy working women, and I’m sure they had no time to sit down and knit a hat. I love them with all my heart and I enjoyed spending time with them, especially on this day.
   We finally got far enough on twenty-third street to turn onto Jackson. We did not walk the entire parade route, but as I recall, Jackson was going to turn off onto 4th and head north and then the route would head further west somewhere. The walk was supposed to terminate at a rally up at the Space Needle, but my nieces and I would not be attending. One of us had to drive back down to Olympia to go to work, and the other had to attend a charity auction, and I had to go back over the water, so at one p.m. we were going to peel off on 4th and then head back down the hill and over to the ferry where we would part company.
   For the moment, we finally were walking rather than inching down Jackson. I got a sense of how big the parade was, and it was huge. We walkers filled the street and along the sides were lines of well-wishers everywhere along our route. People were smiling, they had their kids out to watch us, just as we paraders had kids walking with us and babies in strollers. I took a few cell-phone pictures including a rare selfie (I hate them, but it seemed appropriate that day) with my two nieces. I also got a shot looking downhill at the crowd. That is when I realized we were probably not tens of thousands but closer to at least a hundred thousand. The organizers had been hoping for fifty thousand. I heard on the news later that they estimated one hundred twenty-five thousand actually came out to walk.
   In my life, I have only been in one larger crowd, and that was the attendance at Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington D.C. in 2010. The estimated crowd size there was more than two hundred thousand people. For reasons I still cannot explain, I went to that rally, flying in from California alone. I attended with my friend Kathy McCabe. I don’t know if it was a perfect moment and day for her, but in many ways it was for me. The rally was held on October 30, shortly before the 2010 election where the Republicans regained control of the House. The rally itself was a lovely event, very much like the walk I was now on in 2017 on the other side of the country. Everyone was civil and well-behaved. Remembering Jon Stewart’s rally speech, I’m amused and depressed now at how much civil discourse has deteriorated in this country since 2010.
   As my nieces and I walked downhill, people around us were talking and pointing up to the sky. I looked up with the others and saw two bald eagles flying overhead. We could plainly see their white heads and tails. They circled high and stayed above us for about a quarter hour. I can imagine they looked down at our huge flow of humans below and wondered what the hell we all were doing. Then they flew off, no doubt to try to find a place to hunt lunch and then hunker down and enjoy the daylight for a while.
   I thought the eagles were lovely. Since they are the national bird of the U.S., they embodied my hope to myself that somehow we would prevail as a nation and not surrender to the awful temptations that No. 45 and his adherents are tendering to us — the invitations to chaos, provincialism, xenophobia, repression of free exchange of ideas, hatred and bigotry as well as their re-identifying our national ideals to reflect these things. I hoped the eagles represented some kind of blessing for our march, since we were all together wearing out shoe leather for a common good positive purpose. It was a march of resistance, but I thought it was a march of hopeful resistance. It was a very good day for me to go, be with beloveds, wear myself out, dissipate anger and fear for a while, just take in the sun, and smile.

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The Untimely Death of Justin Ripley

5/29/2016

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THE UNTIMELY DEATH OF JUSTIN RIPLEY

[CORRECTION: Neil Cross wrote "Luther," not Nick Cross. Sorry about that. Now corrected.]

   I have been in a turmoil recently over nothing, except that from another point of view, it’s over everything. My brain-box has been churning through a wash of thoughts concerning the death of Justin Ripley, Canada’s harvesting of baby harp seal pelts back in the late Sixties, the rise of Donald Trump, and what I think of as the metaphorical headlong approach of the United States to the brink of oblivion, otherwise called the 2016 Election. I will try to explain.

   My husband and I have been watching a lot of slightly-used, but still very entertaining, British TV shows, one of which is of spectacularly-higher quality than the others, namely, the series, “Luther,” a crime drama set in London, written by Neil Cross, and starring Idris Elba, whom I had seen for the first time just last year in “Beasts of No Nation,” in his stellar performance as The Commandant, a complicatedly evil man leading a ragtag insurgent army of youths and boys through the towns and woods of a fictional African country. The scenario, set dressing and performances all were distinctively convincing, and the young boy, Abraham Attah, who played the hero, Agu, did as good a child actor performance as I have ever seen in a film. Mr. Elba, of course, having a mythic size and persona, was the most noticeable in any scene he inhabited, but still the young boy’s odyssey and his interactions with the other kids were memorably fine. We saw the film, because I am an SAG-AFTRA One Union voting member, and during the awards season, I received a screener of it for consideration.

   “Luther” was launched on BBC in the United Kingdom in 2010 and aired for four seasons. PBS started showing it earlier this year here in the Western United States, and my husband and I quickly got interested and made it part of the group of programs that we regularly record to hard disk and then watch. I thought the program was up there in quality with “The Sopranos,” and even possibly nibbling at the heels of my top favorite, “Breaking Bad,” which I think was a perfectly written and acted television series. As we watched onward through the “Luther” episodes, my husband and I both noted to one another how dark the stories were and how tragic. I wondered what had thrown the hero, John Luther, so badly off-track in his life. His marriage was over at the start of the series, and things only got worse for him and his ex-wife as the episodes unfolded. Had Luther been mentally ill? You could think such a thing, seeing how violently he behaved in the very first installment, although the script was careful to have him torture only the very evil criminal he held at bay at the edge of a stair precipice to get the location of the child the criminal had hidden, or to kick and punch out an unfortunate living-room door in his former domicile, now taken over by his ex-wife and her paramour. At the time, in a rare humorous moment, Luther pointed out to his terrified ex-wife that he would never hurt her, how could she even think that? And of course, Luther’s posture, continually hunched when he walked the streets, and his very blackness (and Elba looks to be pure African, so almost blue-black in complexion), seemed to reflect the screenwriter’s expressed noir world-view. The overall light in the films is dark -- many episodes begin at night. The daylight sky usually is grey. The air seems mostly to look like it is chilly. A lot of what you see underlining the optics, even the soundtrack, and the story line, is dull, somber, and morbid. The show’s theme music has a throb that feels to me like a headache. It’s a fascinating, depressing, alternate view of everyday people in London, a city I have always loved, because of what I have perceived as its vibrancy and rush of life. I have always thought of London as the European city most like New York City in its energy. But I also lived for a long time in Los Angeles, and this show made London seem most like the absolute polar opposite of L.A., which is flooded with light for many months of the year, and always seems to my mind’s eye to be filled with flowers, sparkling things like the Pacific Ocean, or sequins, or jewels, and sunsets that are the very embodiment of Technicolor. The London of “Luther” is black, grey, dun, dirt-colored, everywhere looking like the prologue or epilogue of a funeral.

   I don’t view myself as an absolute realist. I do try to be realistic. I am no longer young, so in some ways, I shouldn’t have the luxury of being a complete fantasist or idealist. I try to keep those mental indulgences down to a dull roar. Death and taxes inform my life these days, although it’s getting easier to pay the latter now that I am retired, and to make my peace with the former, which is peeking at me from not too great a distance of years. I didn’t believe I could get pulled in by a powerful unreality any more, but life and our existence seem to be here for us to prove our own self theories wrong. Let me try to explain.

   I watched the Luther episodes, week by week, being introduced to stories of new villains, each one realistic and crueler than the last, some criminal, and some now Luther’s own gone-wrong colleagues on the force, and I began to perceive the growing constriction of Mr. Cross’ plotting starting to close in on Mr. Luther. Time after time, he would be at procedural odds with one higher-up officer or another, even those who had taken professional risks on his behalf. The stories didn’t allow us to see apparent resolutions to some of these conflicts, which would be business as usual in a typical American crime drama, but did not happen here in this English one, and while frustrating, it did add to the singular nature of the Luther series itself. I am still not certain why the George Stark character so hated Luther and why he seemed to make Stark go so crazy. I understood Erin Gray’s rancor, while she was working with Stark to take Luther down, because Luther had made her look bad to her colleagues in a prior episode. To the end, Stark remained somewhat of a mystery to me, although he seemed to have greater power over Luther than anyone else except Martin Shenk, his superior officer. We know Stark assembled a well-stuffed Luther file, but his explanations of everything in it all seemed to be his perceptions and wishful thinking rather than what we viewers all knew was the truth.

   As I understand classical tragedy, there is always a doomed character, the person who meets Nemesis through no hubris or fault of his own. For me, this character was D.S. Justin Ripley, portrayed sympathetically and realistically by the actor Warren Brown. Ripley was introduced in Season One, Episode 1, and Mr. Brown had prominent cast member billing in the series credits, so I considered the Ripley character to be an ongoing part of the series. He joined Luther’s team, having made it clear that he wanted the assignment and had pressed hard to get it. As he developed, Ripley became the epitome of a hard-working, loyal, responsible and honest subordinate. In performing his job, Ripley waded unarmed into angry crowds, chased suspects down numerous back alleys and in one episode was strung up to a post and tortured by a suspect before managing to free himself and escape. As a viewer, I believed in Ripley and grew fond of him. In Seasons Two and Three, I watched anxiously as Stark and Gray tried to force him to gather evidence of Luther’s misdeeds in order to help them build a case against him. I was cheered when Ripley ultimately refused to turn against Luther. These scenes went by quickly, and I nearly missed Luther’s grateful realization of what Ripley had done for him.

   Then in the next episode, Neil Cross killed Ripley off. He did it quickly, messily, and at the hands of an absolutely loathsome madman who had been made insane by grief and despair at the death of his wife. This character, named Tom Marwood, seemed to be the culmination of a number of insane murderers, each one nastier than the last, who paraded through the Luther series. Ripley, unarmed to the end, stood up bravely to Marwood, and Cross rewarded Ripley’s goodness and rightness by having Marwood unload a sawed-off shotgun into Ripley’s chest.

   This episode was aired for the first time in the UK on July 16, 2013, when, if the Internet is correct, it caused a wave of dismay among fans. I saw it in May of 2016, and it absolutely knocked me for a loop. I cried out in shock when it happened, and I remained upset for quite a long time afterward. It was brilliant writing, and I’m sure Mr. Cross was quite satisfied with how he turned the plot, but I actually felt genuine grief for the imaginary D.S. Ripley, and sorry for his imaginary wife and children, and his imaginary family and friends. I felt I had been among them, and I was bereaved.

   To be completely honest, it was more than bereaved. Somehow, I don’t know why this happened, but the untimely death of Justin Ripley brought up an ancient and extremely painful insight that I did not know still was swimming around in the inky depths of my subconscious. I had learned something from more than ten years of therapy starting in my mid-twenties until my thirties, and I recognized that this pain was old. I’m still not sure what originally caused it. It could easily have been something that happened to me before I could speak or even articulate a thought. In pondering it after I saw the “Luther” episode, I remembered another insight instance in my life, with similar pain, when I was twenty-four and visiting in Atlanta with my then-boyfriend, whom I did not end up marrying. He had that week’s copy of Look magazine, and I made the mistake of reading an article in it about seal clubbing in one of the Canadian Maritimes, probably Newfoundland, but now I don’t remember. The article, which I think was a polemic about animal rights, was illustrated with photographs, and they showed a succession of pictures of a baby harp seal, first alive, then with men clubbing it, and skinning it, and then a final picture of the skinned baby seal, bloody and still alive, left out on the ice. I put the magazine down and cried for three days, and I can tell you now, almost fifty years later, I still see that last picture in my mind’s eye. To me, it was and is a powerful, if extreme, illustration of the triumph of indifferent, inhumane cruelty over innocence, and if I thought enough about it now, I could cry again for three more days over that poor little baby seal. It wasn’t that Justin Ripley was the harp seal, but when he died in the Luther program, I was unexpectedly and sharply reminded again of that harp seal.

   Which brings Donald Trump to mind, because it’s hard these days for me not to think of Trump when I think about indifferent cruelty. Let me try to explain. I just need to reassure you all, I mentioned earlier that I do try to be realistic, not too idealistic and to avoid letting fantasy take over in my real life. I break these promises to myself sometimes even more when thinking about politics than when thinking about television shows.

   My husband and I have watched a relentless procession of liberal commentary programs, debates and other coverage of 2016’s endless cavalcade of candidates. We tend to vote Democrat. The last time I voted differently was for Jon Anderson in 1980. My husband was worse. He voted for Barry Commoner that year. I just want you to understand that I cannot in any way, even maybe in a former life, entertain a rationale for supporting Donald Trump for the presidency. After thinking about the “Luther” program, however, I believe I now can articulate an explanation that is not too idealistic or fantastic as to why I don’t want Mr. Trump for president.

   It is because I think he is cruel. And further, I think he is indifferently cruel. I think he would be cruel to this nation in a way similar to Neil Cross, who with his Marwood character, was cruel to Justin Ripley’s fans by snuffing his light out, and to John Luther by yanking away yet another person who either loved him or was loved by him. The reason I think of Trump’s cruelty being indifferent is that I don’t think he really sees this country as a nation of individuals. I think he views all of us who are not rich like him as somehow being handy cash resources for his kind of people, the plutocratic ones. We are perhaps mere ideas, rather than being human beings. We are, in maybe a farfetched but not impossible metaphor, an ice field of harp seals being lined up for harvesting.

   I think Neil Cross constructed a wonderful, if cruel, world in “Luther,” and I can picture this nation looking similar to that world if Trump takes over and redecorates the White House in his tacky 18th-Century French scrollwork and gilded plaster, and then pulls the blinds down. We haven’t been told yet the specific ways Donald Trump would be cruel to the people of this country, but he keeps dropping us hints. I’ve seen more than a few instances in which he has expressed his cruel intentions in some of the ugly things he has promised to people at his rallies -- the exclusion of Muslims, degrading of women, the Wall to keep out Mexicans, beating up anyone who protests. He has been absolutely masterful at playing to Americans’ worst qualities -- our provincialism, isolationism, bigotry and greed -- and one reason I think his supporters respond so strongly to him is because in a way, he embodies them, albeit dressed up in a bespoke suit and a sun-bed tan, and that weird hairstyle that looks like it is newly built for him every morning. To me, he seems like the classic negative archetype of a mid-twentieth-century American -- fat, ugly, and with a loud mouth. My recollection from the Sixties is that was how we Americans were viewed by people in other countries for many years after the end of World War II. It makes me think of Trump himself as one of those wealthy, loud-voiced, American tourists who go to spend the winter months at a small resort, in the Caribbean for instance, and to the locals, he is there seemingly forever, perennially demanding and boring, brazenly self-involved, and always tipping in small change.

   As to the United States edging nearer to the brink of annihilation, I just made that up. I’m thinking after all the lies we’ve heard so far this year from televised debates and assorted politicians, my little fib won’t count for much. I’m fairly confident we would survive a Trump presidency, but most likely the nation’s recovery from the aftermath would not be completed within my lifetime.

© 2016 Raun MacKinnon Burnham

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The Untimely Death of Justin Ripley

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