Thanksgiving

In my childhood and teen years I thanked God for everything. Everyone did. You thanked Him for all the things you had and for all the things you didn’t have, for the tribulations He spared you and those inflicted on you: the former showed his love, the latter was His way of testing your love.

You might think that this reflection comes as I prepare an edifying invocation for Thanksgiving dinner next week.

It doesn’t. Now I give thanks mainly because I never became addicted to smoking and radio talk shows and that I am not a Republican, not exactly what you close your eyes and say in solemn tones before a joyous feast.

This solemn recollection comes as I am doing what I usually do when my wife prepares dinner at home: the unskilled tasks of washing the vegetables, and later, the pots, pans and dishes. It’s the only contribution I can make or that she wants me to make, given my utter lack of culinary skill.

The fervent thanks comes to mind because I recall how much more complicated those tasks were back when I was a kid. You had to wash and clean all the food ingredients, thoroughly.

You sifted the flour, I never knew why, but I suspected it was to isolate the odd weevil: hey we lived thousands of miles from any wheat field and transportation was slow, so one or two would have crept in while government regulators were busy dealing with World War II.

You “picked” the rice, meaning you spread it out on the table and laboriously picked out every tiny grain of gravel or granulated asphalt or husks that escaped the winnowing wind which blew those particles from the crumbling, partially paved rural road on which that rice had been laid out in the sun to dry.

The first time I tried to help my wife with cooking chicken, she asked me what I was doing, as I was trying with surgical care and precision to remove every trace of membrane that didn’t look like meat from the “Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast”. That was what I thought I had seen my mother and sisters always doing when preparing chicken, whole chickens, raised in our backyard, or any kind of meat, didn’t they? How was I to know that that was already done at a processing plant before that chicken was packaged?

Washing vegetables meant washing each leaf of lettuce, individually, peeling every carrot, scrubbing every cassava, yam, dasheen or potato, scrutinizing every organic (the only kind then) fruit for the odd worm.

It’s a role that I, as a male, inherited from a culture and generation in which males were nourished by the womenfolk: mothers, wives, sisters. Even in the years while abroad at university, it was the kind Irish lady of the household with which I lodged who provided most of my meals. In my early post-university years when I had to fend for myself as a single adult male, I did what single, adult males of most species do for survival. I hung out with similar single adult males and as a pack we foraged for food: from compassionate wives of married friends, girlfriends, fastfood joints, the occasional splurge on a dinner date...those were survival.

So, I never learned to cook.

I have tried to adjust to my new reality of a household in which there’s no division of labor along gender lines. In fact I fancy that I make a reasonable boiled egg and choose just the right number of seconds in microwaving frozen burritos, chicken pot pies and vegetables. But my wife and kids are unanimous in assigning me those unskilled tasks when they are cooking. I wonder why.

Or should I just be thankful?

Windows Opening on the World

Somewhere among the muddled memories of my High School days is a line of poetry that refers to “Magic casements opening on...faerie lands forlorn”. Or something to that effect. The poet is either Keats or Coleridge of the group of English poets then known as the “Romantic Poets”, later, as the “Lake Poets”. I remember it because my English Litt. teacher hated it and expressed his loathing at every opportunity.

I couldn’t understand why he disliked it so much. There were numerous other passages that to me were just as overblown.

Besides, to me, windows had always seemed as, well, windows, letting in the riches of the outside world. I wasn’t much of an outdoors kid, so for me, windows were an important conduit to the world outside.

They let in the clean fresh breezes after rain. The “Demarara” windows at rented seaside vacation chalets, large slabs of solid wood or framed wooden jalousies, hinged at the top and resting on a broad shelf-like sill that jutted out from the wall, and propped open with a stick, framed tranquil expanses of sea with an occasional fisherman’s pirogue moving too slowly to leave a wake, just a transitory thin furrow. The fragrance and colors of Tropical flora came into the house through windows. People talked to each other through their windows. The palette and pastry sellers, the women who did the laundry, the postman, all announced themselves through the front windows.

Windows protected you from the forbidding aspects of your world, like lightning and thunder, and the dark of night. And every now and then, by accident of course, I batted or threw a ball through the glass pane of a closed window touching off a less than pleasant encounter with the neighbors or my parents.

After I left the Tropics and woke up on my first morning in London I realized that windows could open onto a lonely, drab, forlorn world of stark chimney pots vague, gray and ghostly in their shrouds of coal polluted air. Close the sashes as tightly as you could and the bleak, damp air still crept in and wailed and rattled as it did.

New windows rapidly began opening when I went overseas to study. They were metaphorical windows: opportunities that opened on to new vistas of career and personal development.

There have been memorable windows along my travels: my hotel room in Vienna with twelve foot ceilings and tall windows draped with heavy velvet curtains that looked out across to the Opera House and down below, on the busy Ringstrasse with its trolleys and a walking street with its patisseries and fine shops. A panorama of snow-covered jagged Alps and the quaint ancient wooden covered bridge filled my hotel window at Lake Lucerne, Switzerland. The fantasy of a city built on water, that magical element of my childhood, eventually fulfilled itself in the view of the canals of Venice from a hotel window. In the window of my cruise ship docked in Alicante, Spain, the defiant, turreted walls of the Moorish fort marching across a hill still glowered defiantly as they did at attackers centuries ago.

For various reasons, but mostly because airports have become such a nuisance and planes beset by irritating, unnecessary and unexpected annoyances, I haven’t travelled much recently, but I have found a rich source of wondrous windows to a world far from forlorn in the form of live webcams.

As I sit by my fireside, at the touch of an icon on my handheld iPod Touch a panoply of windows puts me into any kind of live milieu, indoors or outdoors, that I can wish for. There are sunny beaches and resorts to escape to when the chill, dark weather of Seattle closes in. The pandas, tigers and other exotic animals in zoos tumble and prowl. College campuses and bookstores, bars, restaurants, museums, pachinko parlors and even a barbershop in Tokyo, construction sites, cruise ships at sea...something is open at any time of day or night.

My favorite scenes though are of city centers. I have become well acquainted with the daily rhythm of life at a busy intersection of a city in Hungary and another in Bulgaria. The webcams at those two sites offer especially fine resolution in their pictures, have a good frame rate so that movement seems pretty natural and both have functions such as panning, zooming and tilting that can be controlled by me sitting here thousands of miles away.

Those cities are 8 and 9 hours ahead of my time, so at my nighttime I join in the bustle early in their workday: the trams closely following each other, picking up and letting out their passengers, cars and delivery trucks circling the traffic roundabout, the people dressed in their winter coats hustling along or stopping to chat and gesture, going into and out of business places. The pictures are sharp enough to distinguish some facial features. Once I could even conjecture a snippet of the conversation of a group of three people waiting for their trolley: one of them gestured, and the other lifted his foot and pointed at his shoe. “Yes. New pair of shoes...like them?” They were all slightly just larger than large ants, five or six thousand miles away, but it was like being there, a tourist chancing upon a conversation.

After I wake up on my morning I can observe the scene at the end of their day: employees pushing large trash bins out to the sidewalks to be emptied later then walking off with a shopping bag, or returning to the shop’s door to check that it is locked before driving away in a car that has pulled up to the curb for them.

The city is shutting down for the night: trolleys are less frequent now, the traffic and pedestrians almost all gone. Traffic lights blink to empty streets. I feel as though I should be turning up the collar of my winter coat, checking the door one more time to see if its secure, then walking out of view.

A Glimmer of Light

A Glimmer of Light

An automatic night light in the bathroom keeps me from stumbling into the bathtub or worse in the dark. Its sensor turns it on when the room is dark, then turns it off when there’s other light. For the next several months of feeble light of the Fall and winter in practice it will be on all of the time because there is rarely enough natural light to activate the sensor. It will stay on except when I turn on the ceiling fixture.

It was quite a surprise this morning to find that there was enough natural light to activate the sensor of that night light.

Could it have been a parting gift of Mother Nature on this last day of Daylight Saving time?

As of Sunday, night will begin falling before 5:00p, today’s 6:00p. which already feels far too early for it to be dark outside. Already the time between sunrise and sunset is less than 10 hours, but daytime is actually even shorter than that because like me, the sun is usually reluctant to start the day and starts fading long before it sets.

Coming from the Tropics where it’s almost always 12 hours of daylight and 12 of night throughout the year, I still marvel at the varying lengths of day that accompany the seasons.

Lawton

Lawton

For years I had periodically resolved to do a Google search on my former colleague and friend, Lawton, or take a chance on calling the phone number I had for him from a very long time ago.

Lawton and I and a mutual friend had spent many evenings at the office he managed while he worked long after all the other personnel had gone home, until one or other of the three would decide it was time to find something to eat. That usually meant driving to the pizza parlor where we had become regular customers.

I have no idea why, last Sunday, on a lugubrious, wet, gray Fall afternoon, just another like so many at this time of year, I actually typed his name into my browser. I would like to think that it was some conjunction of prescience and nostalgia stripping away the accumulation of excuses and procrastination with which I had covered up my negligence, just like the strong wind that at that moment was tearing all the red, gold and brown leaves off the trees. But I know it was sheer coincidence.

Lawton had passed away barely a month earlier.

His obituary remarked that he had never missed a day’s work in forty-seven years, that he was always the first to arrive and the last to leave, that he always made those around him happy. It listed his many talents and the numerous community activities and groups that he led or participated in.

The grief and gloom descending as I read on was suddenly replaced by a triumphant pride as I read that four years before his passing, the city had renamed the school where he had managed the office for fifty years, for him. That was no perfunctory honor. That school Board has a strict policy of naming its schools only for the Founding Fathers of the nation. This is the only exception it has made in its almost 90 years of existence.

It was so fitting, for Lawton was an exceptional man.

Robots at School

My son’s e-mail arrived at about midnight. It was a message confirming that he would be picking me up to take me to his daughter’s extra-curricular activity at her High School the next day, Saturday. It was a routine message, except for the few words at the end.

He knew I would be awake late as usual, at the computer, when the e-mail would be delivered. He ended with an injunction:
“Go to sleep! :)”

How often his mother and I had said that to him, tenderly, sternly, exasperated, always affectionately! The smiley face he had added seemed to say that yes, he remembered, and was happy with the memories; he was turning the tables on me. I felt a circle had now been closed.

On Saturday morning we drove in heavy rain past playing fields where teams of little children were slogging in the water and mud playing soccer while their parents stood on the sidelines urging them on. Thirty years earlier we would have been out there in the rain and cold, me insulated in a jacket, gloves, scarf, cap, my son in his uniform getting all muddied up, so much so that sometimes I would have to hose off his legs on the patio outside the house before he could run inside for a hot shower.

Today, it became more and more evident to me how my son’s role and mine had now been reversed. He was in the driver’s seat, literally.

And times had changed too. Yes, there were still those soccer matches, and at that moment his younger daughter was playing in one, watched by her mother. But he and I were headed to the school gym to watch a contest of robots built and programmed by his daughter and her colleagues at their school, something undreamt of as a high school extra-curricular activity when my son was a student.

The robot players in action:
(Please click the arrow to start the video clip)



Meet the robots:

Fishermen's Festival

at
Fishermen’s Terminal, Seattle


Fishing has supported human life for thousands of years.



Primitive fishing in streams and lakes was a placid activity, but large scale commercial fishing, such as is done by the fishing fleet based here at Fishermen’s Terminal in Seattle is very arduous and very dangerous. The daily floral tributes at the base of this monument in memory of fishermen lost at sea attest to the heavy price the crews of the fishing vessels sometimes pay to bring us our sustenance from the sea.

The names of some of the more recently lost fishermen are written on this survival suit.







You may have watched a very dramatic documentary “The Deadliest Catch” on the Discovery Channel. This is the ship featured in that tv show. It is open to visitors so I’ll take you on board later on in this narrative.

Every year on the last weekend of September the Fishermen’s Terminal hosts the Fall Fishermen’s Festival to honor those hardworking, courageous men and women who sail out from here into the Gulf of Alaska, some as far as the Bering Sea and to give the public an opportunity to visit their boats, see the nets and gear they use and enjoy some of their catch.

This is the Ballard Bridge which I often drive across,











or where I sometimes sit in my car with varying degrees of impatience when it is raised to let a ship through. At those times I get a glimpse of the vast fishing fleet down below.

Today I am down here at the Festival getting a close-up view of the boats.


Imagine, as the fishing vessels set out down this ship canal to Puget Sound and out to the Pacific, at certain months of the year there are mature salmon swimming below them in the opposite direction on their way to the streams where they were born three years or so earlier to spawn a new generation. At times, the hatchlings will be swimming in the same direction as the boats out to sea to become their catch later on.

Let’s go to the Fishermen’s Festival: (Click on picture for slideshow)

The Graying of America

We have been told for some time now to prepare for an America, in fact a world, dominated by older people.

But who would have guessed these consequences of such a shift of demographics?

Yesterday my wife e-mailed me a newspaper report about a couple being robbed while having “an intimate moment” in a dumpster in a lane outside an apartment.

Wacky, but not particularly thought-provoking... until I read the details (no, not those details):

The couple were 44 years old, the robbers in their 60’s and 50’s.
Think about that: the couple making out were middle-aged, not teenagers. The roving delinquents, seniors, not twentysomethings.

And the place? well it used to be a car parked in a secluded spot, a movie theater...those teenage hormones raged all the time so a couple could pick and choose their trysting place. Now, it’s a matter of when and where the Viagra kicks in for its limited opportunity.

The future is here and it’s not too pretty.