Remembering the Pleasant Whooshing Sound of Microfilm Machines

 If you live long enough, things in life come in cycles. I was marveling at this just now while doing some research online for an ongoing research project. The research had me using my laptop to look up PDFs of articles from the New York Times in March 1912, specifically the ones that contained the first reports of the discovery of the South Pole by Roald Amundsen and his party of fellow Norwegians. 

Exactly forty years ago, in the Spring of 1982, I was a junior at Fort Collins High School, and I enrolled in a course in the English department on compositional writing. The class was taught by Mrs. (Sandy) Turk, whom I had previously taken for an American literature course as a sophomore, where we read The Scarlet Letter. Mrs. Turk had the reputation of being very rigorous and tough, and that is one of the reasons I enjoyed her courses very much. In another course of hers, Grammar Review for the College Bound, I learned how to diagram sentences, mapping out the parts of speech. That course may have been the high point of my academic career. I routinely blew out the curve on the exams, scoring much higher than the other students, including the "smart girls" who were used to being the best in the class, and who were irked that a boy could come and show them up so easily. Mrs. Turk, although on the English faculty, was decidedly not a feminist. By certain comments in regard to Hester Prynne in Hawthorne, I concluded that she was one of those women who are wise to the wiles of femininity, and who can provide insight into female nature to clueless young men such as yours truly. No doubt she had voted for Reagan. 

In that compositional writing course, we had to pursue a number of projects, including a compare-and-contrast paper, and an argumentative position paper. The big project, however, was to be a research project, on any subject we chose, that would specifically require us to use the microfilm resources in the library of Colorado State University, the campus of which was across the street from the high school.

Many of the students found this project to be a burden, but I absolutely loved the challenge. Back then I was much more of a rules-follower than I was later in life, so I had no problem conforming to the instructions. I did what teachers asked me to do. Dutifully I use the family car to drive to the CSU Library. As a routine, night after night, I went down into the basement where one found the microfilm archives of the New York Times, checking out the spools I needed for my research that night, and then loading them up into the machine. How I love the whooshing sound that the spools made in the mechanical reels as one scrolled through them, and then pressed the rapid rewind button.

For the subject of my research paper, I had chosen the discovery of the South Pole, and specifically the race between Amundsen and Scott in 1911-1912 to be the first to reach there. I had been fascinated with Antarctica and its exploration even in elementary school, reading all the books on it in my school library. So I was already familiar with the overall facts, including the triumph of Amundsen in reaching the pole and returning, and the tragedy of Scott and his party, with their Shetland ponies, perishing just miles away from salvation.

I was very methodical in my research, tracking down the newspaper accounts from the embarkation of both expeditions in 1910 until the final reports in the spring of 1912. After a couple weeks, I set about writing up the paper, meticulously citing the articles in an account I wrote using one of the school's typewriters. I've always been prone to typos, as I am still now, so I went through lots of correction tape and whiteout, but in the end the paper was perfect and I got an A for it and for the course too.

Weirdly enough, just days after I finished that paper, an old-style shooting war broke out in the South Atlantic Ocean, over a group of obscure islands that only Antarctica geeks like my knew about, namely the Falkland Islands.  It was the center of world news for weeks on end, in a throwback way. At the time I already had map of the Falklands on my bedroom wall, and had always wanted to go there. I was pissed off that Argentina had invaded them and spoiled it all, and put the islands in the focus of the attention of the world. The final project in Mrs. Turk's class that spring was the argumentative paper, and I very enthusiastically typed up a well-documented paper on the righteousness of the British cause versus the Argentines in claiming sovereignty over the islands.

As I got older and went to college, my boyhood fascination for Antarctica waned. I went many years without caring much about it, in the way I once had. Even a stint working in Arctic climatological research in Alaska in 1987 didn't rekindle my interest much.  When a friend of mine recently proposed that we book a tour to the ice sheet, I responded with a rather negative sentiment. I could only imagine the relief I would feel at getting back.

Lately, however, due to a scientific research project I am following my mind has turned to Antarctica again with a ferocious interest, and this morning, with my laptop, the descendant of the Apple IIe computers of the early 1980s, I am sitting in my comfortable home office looking up the very same articles in the New York Times that I did forty years ago, and snipping out sections and printing them out on my laser printer, compiling a massive research report that probably only I will ever see. It is the making of such things that one finds the great value, even if one never consults them directly.

These kinds of cycles make me think about the surreal comedy of time. When I sat in the basement of the CSU Library, exactly seventy years had passed since the reports of Amundsen's success had surfaced in the world press, following his return to Australia. Now forty years more have passed. Forty is less than seventy, but it is approaching the same order of magnitude.

The world has changed a lot since 1982, but compared to the changes between 1912 and 1982, it seems almost stagnant. Pretty much everything that has changed since the 1980s is because of the Internet. The world looks mostly the same in a lot of ways. Automobiles are sleeker and houses are bigger. People wear the same casual clothes, but almost everyone is fatter, even the young people, because of the changes in our life styles. 

The Falklands are once again quiet and forgotten by the world. My old high school was shuttered in the 1990s and was remodeled to become part of CSU itself. The basement of the CSU library was flooded in a massive rainstorm that inundated the campus in 1997, and caused the drowning of people living in a nearby trailer park. I wonder what became of the microfilm I used.  

Everything is online now, preserved digitally. Someday all those 0's and 1's may be all that is left of our entire civilization. 

Does She Like Animals? And Do Animals Like Her?

Christmas Eve. It rained all night and all morning. The sound was the best thing I've slept to since our first night on Kauai, at the Sealodge in Princeville, where we opened the window and heard the pounding of the surf in the dark, a couple hundred feet below at the bottom of the cliff.

When the rains stopped today I walked over to get the mail, finding a Christmas card from my cousin in Florida, and a stack of solicitations for charity donations, as well a key to a package in one of the lockers.

This morning while we wrapped presents for each other, and for Ginger's folks, and her niece, whom we will see tomorrow in Mesa, Ginger turned on the television to EWTN, watching a scratchy old movie about the nativity, followed the live feed provided by the Vatican News Service of the evening mass from St. Peters. I noticed that the prayers were in Latin. It was the new mass in Latin. Many folks wouldn't know what a strange thing this was. to see at this moment in Church history.

We are watching Christmas in Connecticut for the second time in three days. I was reluctant to watch it again so soon after the last time, but it was on TCM again, and there was nothing else on. Two nights I had called out a hundred new things I noticed about the movie, and the intricacies of the story and the characters. I thought there was nothing left to say. Already I have noticed a dozen new things this time. Among them I noticed that the cow's real name was not Mecushla. That's the name that Dennis Morgan's character bestows on it, based on what he thinks is the name of the fictional cow in Elizabeth Lane's magazine columns about her fictional farm. At least I think that's the case. But as soon as he says it, the cow becomes Mecushla. He names it. It's very Adam-like energy, from Genesis. The man names the animals.

There is much animal energy in the movie. During their romantic interlude walking the cow together, this furnishes the qualifying questions that Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan exchange with each, in their courtship. Does she like animals? And do animals like her?

Felix (S.Z. Sakall)  is the cow .They become one. Likewise the judge and the horse (the pulls the carriage) are one. The cow and the horse both act spontaneously in the story to move the two lovers towards matrimony. The cow gives them their romantic interlude. The horse takes them into the hands of the State, which will provide them the legal bond required by matrimony and society. That the romantic interlude was quasi-illicit (because Stanwyck's character is posing as a married woman) means that the corresponding interaction with the State finds them in jail. But the judge whom they face is friendly, and marries them instead. Such is the lightness of their punishment, because Stanwyck was not really married after all, and thus besides the rhetoric she expresses (all but endorsing flirting by married woman), she did nothing wrong. Neither did he. 

The Untold Stories of a Life of Traveling

 As I write this, I am no longer on the windswept barren landscape of central Nevada, but far away, thousands of miles in fact, listening as the surf pounds the base of the cliff below below the condo we have rented for a couple nights from AirBnB. Nearby the palm trees are clacking in the stiff, warm breeze. It is sunny and lush.

Yesterday afternoon, after a six hour non-stop flight from Phoenix, we landed at Lihue airport here on the island of Kauai. Ginger had wanted to make a trip to Hawaii. We hadn't taken this kind of luxury just-for-the-heck-of-it vacation in years. Of the four main islands in Hawaii, this is the one that neither of us had visited before, so it was a natural choice. I probably would not have come here unless Ginger had pushed for it, but now that I am here, I am very glad of it.

Funny how memory works. As we left the airport yesterday, my mind was carried back to many years ago,  to a recollection that was jarred loose in my mind. In college in the 1980s I knew a girl who went to Kauai, on a trip that was paid by her grandparents as a gift. What I remembered was how she said she had wound up making the trip all by herself. Her boyfriend at the time went off on some other adventure and abandoned her. Other than thinking her boyfriend was clueless, what struck me was her sadness in recollecting the trip because she had been by herself in such a beautiful place. 

At the time, I thought it odd, because when I was younger, and even up until perhaps a decade ago, traveling by myself seemed natural. When I was very young, back in the 1980s I preferred it partly because I met so many people that way. I was open to the world.

But in my old age, the idea of traveling by myself seems very sad. What is the point of going places by oneself? I realized several years ago that a great deal of my enjoyment in traveling alone had been that I got to return home and tell people about my travels--especially my late grandmother (who delighted in hearing my adventures), and my late mother and father, who would sit for hours on end as I narrated what I had seen. I never knew how much that mattered, to do that, until they were all gone and there was no one to tell what I had seen. At that point, the world became a lonely place to me, and every spot on the world, no matter how beautiful, seemed like every other spot. 

To be here by myself, as that girl I once knew had been, would seem like an island prison. But I am not alone, and that makes all the difference.

In Honor of the Lucky Ones

The next day (Tuesday) we had the second memorial for Dick, this one being his military funeral, out at the Northern Nevada Veteran's Cemetery near the town of Fernley, east of Reno.

I knew Dick had bought his plot out there. The last time I saw him he had told the story of making his daughter take him out there to check it out. 

I drove there by myself in my rental car on Tuesday morning, arriving in Fernley almost two hours early. I wanted to make sure to get out there and have some time to unwind before the funeral started. I turned out to be a good decision.

Fernley is about forty five minutes on the Interstate east of Reno. In the old days of my college-era travels, this is part of the Interstate where you realize you are heading out into the vast barrenness of central Nevada, where the population centers are small and far from each other.  Driving there always brings back primal memories from those days. 

Fernley is now about as far east as the greater Reno orbit now extends. One feels one is at the edge of the earth. As I came off the Interstate, I recognized the Wal-Mart where seven years before, Ginger and I had parked in our rented truck, waiting for Okki and the others to arrive from the East, before cutting up the backroad to Burning Man. All of that seemed so far in the past.

My early arrival gave me a chance to park the car out where the road turns to dirt, becoming public land where I could stretch by legs. It was sunny but windy. I realized I had left my sunglasses in Arizona. I would probably be the only person there without sunglasses, I thought.

Out where I parked, on the north side of the interchange, past the truck stops, I could see about half a dozen other vehicles further along the road, a few them being RVs, and one being a sedan car with the windows all taped over.  A couple women walked with their dog. I had stumbled into one of the outposts of the Nomadland world of America. It was not the first time. 

After stretching my legs in the sun and the wind I drove along the paved road and found the veteran's cemetery, which was a little outpost of grassy-lawn civilization in the scrubland, sheltered by trees as a palisade windbreak.  

In a way it looked terribly lonely, all by itself in the barrenness. But in a few minutes, after parking my car along the back part of the looping road, behind the memorial wall, I would change my mind. My early arrival gave me time to walk along the memorial wall, and see the names, vital dates, and service details of the men whose remains were interred there. 

I didn't think it would affect me so much. I'd seen many war cemeteries. But knowing that they were about to put my great-uncle's remains in this place changed my perspective. I could see why he wanted to be here, amidst all these other men, with whom he shared the bond of being a veteran. He'd earned his way into here.

"These were the lucky ones," I thought to myself. All the dates here indicated men who had served in World War II or Korea, and who had survived, and been able to come home and have families, like Dick.

The cemetery is not big. It did't take long to walk up and down the wall, and feel the weight of the lives that were lived, and which were commemorated there. Soon I meandered down to the entrance and saw the people I had recognized from the day before, my extended family--Dick's family, as well as some of Dick's former employees at his court reporting firm, a couple women who loved him for the friendship he had given them over the years, and for whom I was a stand-in for Dick, offering my arm to both of them, one on each side, as we walked over to the ceremony.

They gave him the customary salute by salute. I felt such love towards the guys that were out there doing that for Dick, dressed up in their uniforms. What a privilege to get to do that.

Then we put his ashes in a box in the ground where there was a temporary marker where the stone would go in the lawn. I had thought things would be over then, and I was sad to see it all ending. But to my delight, Dick's son in law, the new patriarch, said we would all be meeting for a meal in Reno, at their favorite Mexican restaurant.

I was delighted to eke out some more fellowship. As I drove back to Reno, joyful at the thought of spending more time with these people I came to love so quickly, I could see the Sierra, snow-capped through the gorge of the Truckee River. I wondered what they looked like to Dick way back in 1957, when came out here by himself, and founded a life and a family. For a moment I forgot all about my own failures in life, to live a life anything close to that, and felt the beauty of it all.

Following Dick to Virginia City

 Dick's memorial in Reno was spread out over two days. On Monday we had the church service, a funeral mass at Our Lady of the Snows, which was his parish church in Dick's neighborhood, one of the nicer older districts of Reno.

Dick had sung in the choir for years there, and knew Father Chuck, who celebrated the funeral mass, for many decades, going back to when Dick's kids and later grandkids went to the adjoining Catholic School.

It was a beautiful mass. Afterwards we gathered again for a reception at the Western Interpretative Center of Barnes Ranch on the south side of Reno, where Dick's son in law, the remaining patriarch of the clan, had rented the center and had it catered. It was a splendid event, and I got to spent much time getting to know my second cousins--Dick's grand-kids. They are "youngsters" as I called them, in their twenties. I told them stories about our great-grandfather--Dick's father.

One of Dick's grandson's had spoken at the memorial about his wonderful memories going up to Virginia City with Dick. They were warm, fun memories, and so after the reception, with the light still good, I drove up over the summit into the mountains to that old mining tone, now a tourist destination, where the wind comes out the dry, cold interior basin of Nevada. I found myself exploring the museum in the basement of St. Mary's of the Mountains, which was the first Catholic Church in Nevada, I think, and was the center of Nevada Catholicism for many decades. 

The interior of the church itself was very nice as well. I bought a candle for Dick at the gift shop and lit it on the way out.

Two Trips to Nevada

This past month has been very active, exhausting. In late October I flew up to Las Vegas by myself and spent three nights at the Ahern Hotel on Sahara as part of the Patriot Doubledown conference. It was a MAGA conference that had been scheduled at one of Caesars convention centers, but was kicked out because the media got wind and made a stink about something said by one of the organizers. The Ahern Hotel is owned by Frank Ahern, a rental equipment entrepreneur in Nevada who is a friend of Donald Trump, and who stepped up last year during the campaign to host one of Trump's campaign rallies when the mayor and governor tried to shut him out of the state. The Ahern Hotel was recently the Lucky Dragon, a Chinese casino-hotel. The conference was in what used to be the casino hall. There were still chairs with the dragon and Chinese writing on the back.

The speakers were interesting, but I was there really to see Patrick Gunnels of Reading Epic Threads, whom I have followed for over a year, and have come a regular contributing member of his writers. There were six of us in all from the RET community. It was a great joy to meet them all. We sat like the cool kids in the back of the casino hall, much of the time, forming our own clique of cool kids. There was plenty of time for breakout sessions in the cabana by the pool, and also in the hotel bar. I got to meet some awesome folks.

In the wake of it all, it was decided by Patrick and others to have our conference, to be called "Threadfest," and tentatively to held in Nashville in late April. Of course I am looking forward to going.

After the weekend was over, I flew directly up to Salt Lake City, as Ginger was up there for part of her work, staying in the usual hotel in downtown. When that was over, we flew back to Phoenix and life seemed to resume its normal pace briefly, but then we got sick by some unspecified illness which knocked us both out for a couple weeks.  It made work, even from home, challenging.

Then last Sunday, recovered, I flew up to Reno to attend the memorial of Great-Uncle Dick, who passed away last month at age 95. It was a very emotional event. Flying up, I was heartbroken, not only to lose him, and him being the last member of that generation who knew people and lived certain events, but also because I thought it would be the last time I'd be going to Reno in the warmth of fellowshipperhaps, that after this it would be an empty town for me.

Instead I found so much love from Dick's family, and got to see his children for the first time since they were teenagers and came to Iowa, and also his grandchildren, who are my second cousins, and whom I regaled with stories about our great-grandfather George, Dick's father, who was a very interesting man. They all treated like family, which was the most touching thing in the world. Reno is a still a place where I have family. In fact, in some ways, it has wound up as one of the centers of gravity of people who know me and have some love for me. The joy of that is a huge consolation for losing Dick.

The Small Town in Each of Us

 During our trip up to the Rim to stay in the cabin in Strawberry, we drove several times the few miles down the slope into the nearby town of Pine. Pine is a small town to be sure, but given that it has a grocery store and other civic institutions, such as a Mormon Church (reflecting the early settlement of the area), it seems like a metropolis compared to the hamlet of Strawberry. Besides the restaurants where we dined, there is an ice cream parlor, and many antique stores and second-hand stores, which seem  to be he main town industry.

It so happens that our visit fell during the weekend of the Fall Festival in Pine. That's the official title--Fall Festival. The banners for the event were hung along the road as one passed on the highway that cuts through town. Mostly it appeared to be a chance for traveling merchants to set up their booths, and for the local businesses along the highway to bring in customers.

When we saw the first banner, we had a good joke about it. Just the week before, we had watched the premiere of a new movie on the Hallmark Channel in which the story centers around the rescue of a foundering event called the Fall Festival. It seemed too generic a title to be a real, but here we were in Pine, experiencing the real thing.

One of the rules of the Hallmark Channel movie is that every story must include what I call the town dance. It is not a scene typically in the third act of the story in which the hero and the heroine find themselves together at a festive public event. It need not necessarily be a town dance per se, but something equivalent to it, including a large holiday party or even a wedding. 

I had coined the term years ago during my movie-going obsession, noticing how common it was to find such a scene. There are many canonical examples. The one I like to cite from my 2008-2010 movie going years is the one on the pier in Nights in Rodanthe, mainly because I must have seen the trailer to it several dozen times during the spring of 2009.  Yet it is an old trope, and there are many examples from classic cinema, for example Christmas in Connecticut or Meet Me in St. Louis.

Invariably contemporary town dances in movies have festive lights like these:

Once during my travels I saw a town dance scene for a Hollywood movie being filmed at the old converted Union Pacific depot in Logan, Utah. I peeked inside and saw a well-known television actress on a stage in the far end of the room. During the scene, she was playing a guitar alongside a little girl. The room was decorated with these lights. I chatted with a local teenage guy who worked in the depot and he said the actress was a terror who was making everyone in the production miserable. I've since learned she has that reputation and she no longer gets much work in the industry after being a hot commodity for a couple years.

The town dance always happens to fall exactly when it is necessary for the story. What luck that the characters find themselves there at the moment! The important element of the story is that the hero and the heroine are seen and accepted by the community as couple. It is thus a dry run for the eventual wedding itself.

Sometimes the event is indeed part of an annual festival for the small town. The festival is always one with a long tradition that is beloved by the locals, and which everyone in town takes part in some form. In such a story, one of the characters is always a well-known local who has participated in the festival in the past, and who is active is preserving the tradition. 

The other character is the traveler who is often from a big city, or is returning to their hometown after being away in the world. In such a case, the festival becomes a means which the city character not only falls in love with the other character, but becomes enchanted by the town itself and decides to abandon their big city ambitions, which are false to their true nature, and to stay in the small town.

A great example of this story is Doc Hollywood, in which Michael J. Fox plays a newly minted plastic surgeon on his way to Beverly Hills to start a lucrative career. By a twist of fate, he is waylaid in a small town in South Carolina, smack in the middle of the annual Pumpkin Festival. It just so happens that the town needs a new doctor, but of course it is not a glamorous and well-paying position.

Once you learn to see the town dance or the annual festival in a story, it very much sticks out. One reason that the town dances stick out is that they are so outside of reality. Town dances, and annual festivals, really don't exist in America as they are portrayed in these movie, even in classic ones from the 1940s. There is something far too communal about the ones in the story. Everyone knows each other like a family, and are comfortable in their skin around each other. The events are too inclusive to be real. They reflect our deep yearning for a community event that doesn't exist, but which we wish exists.

It is one reason that almost all Hallmark Channel movies are about at least one of the characters finding peace in small town life. It reflects our deep dissatisfaction which modern civilization.

But as I pointed out to Ginger, the small towns that are depicted in these movies, even though they are shot in real locations, are highly stylized versions that reflect what we want small towns to look like. The main difference between the movie small towns and real ones is that all real communities in America are not only dirtier and grittier, but they are far more automobile-centric than any of the ones in movies. I remarked on this while we drove through Pine, where the Fall Festival is along a wide highway with cars parked long it. There is no way that one would mistake it for something in a movie.

The small towns in movies don't seem to need parking lots and fast food franchises. The camera angles make them look like Hollywood sets. They don't have power lines and road construction. They don't reflect the economic distress of most communities, in that unglamorous way that almost everyone in America experiences either directly or indirectly, in every little town across the country. 

The real American small town communities, the way most people in them live, are all but invisible in movies, as if they don't even exist. One of the very few exceptions I can remember is Frozen River, in which the heroine lives in a trailer and works at a dollar store trying to make ends meet. It is one of the few movies I saw during my run of theater-going, while I was traveling the country by car, in which I recognized the America I was driving through.

Again we see in this idealization a yearning for things missing from our rootless hyperconnected culture, and it always comes back to feeling a greater sense of one's grounded place in a community, and especially as part of a tradition that connects us to the past and the future. This is the type of place where we want to believe true love is possible.

Strawberry Supply Chain

Last weekend we drove up to the Rim, where we spent two nights in a cabin that Ginger rented, as a short getaway in honor of my birthday. The cabin was in the tiny hamlet of Strawberry, which is up the road from the slightest less tiny town of Pine, such that the two of them are often mentioned together.

During the summer, the Rim is a popular getaway for folks in the Valley, escaping the heat at higher altitudes. Even this time of year, when the weather cools, it is hard to get a reservation on weekends. The Strawberry Inn and its cabins were almost booked up by the time Ginger made her reservations.

It was sublime to be up among the pines. Strawberry is not on the top of the Rim, but far enough up the flank to feel that one is "on the Rim." 

Strawberry is mostly a line of businesses on either side of the road, including a few restaurants, in particular one called Mamma Jo's which serves Italian food, where we dined on our first evening, as well as an small hut that serves freshly baked savory and sweet empanadas, where we walked to get our breakfast on Saturday morning. 

We had gotten our coffee at the Windmill, which is a tiny structure that looks like its name, which serves coffee starting at six thirty in the morning. We had walked over there and gotten our morning hot drinks. We had tried to get food there, but the proprietor, speaking through the small window, told us that he nothing of foodstuffs available.

"Normally we have oatmeal," he said. "But we haven't gotten any in a while." He explained that his supplier hadn't been able to deliver certain critical supplies in weeks. Among other things, he was short on plastic lids. When I got a refill, he asked if I wouldn't mind reusing the lid.

It was my first real life encounter to a phenomenon I had been hearing about for weeks on Youtube--empty shelves and failures in the supply chain. It hadn't hit us in Scottsdale, but it had reached Strawberry.

I wondered if this whole episode about the supply chain will fade away and become a memory, or perhaps it will become something serious. I am bad about predicting the future about such things.

Of Lightning Bugs and Misfits

 When I left the table at the Bourbon Steakhouse in the Fairmont Princess, I put my staff-signed birthday card in the vest pocket of the black leather jacket I had worn. I had grabbed the jacket just as we left. It finally felt like it was autumn enough to wear it.

But the reason I had worn it was because it had belonged to my Great-Uncle Dick. He had gifted it to me last November when I visited him. It had been the last thing he had done during our visit, right as I was about to go out the door. He had directed me to the jacket in the closet by the door, asking if I wanted it. He is a much smaller man than me, but it fit perfectly.

When I took it off my coat rack yesterday to wear it out, it had been almost exactly twenty-four hours since I had gotten the message pop-up on my laptop. It was from "Laurie" and it simply said "My father died this morning."

It took me a few seconds to process who Laurie was, and then I realized it was Dick's daughter, who lives in Reno. She is my late mother's cousin. I haven't actually seen her since 1975 when Dick brought his family to visit his sister, my grandmother, at their home in Iowa. 

Last year after my visit, I interacted with Laurie. I told her I had remembered that visit. Normally I was the oldest of the kids around, but for once I saw the background filled with a teenagers jumping around and playing wildly with joy. Laurie had said she remembered the visit as well, especially as it was the first time she had ever seen lightning bugs, which are something I associate with being in my grandparent's backyard, but which I missed when when we moved to Colorado, where they are much more rare than the midwest.

I had told Laurie that I wanted to be notified with any developments with her father. She had been true to word when he went into the hospital in April, and placed on hospice watch by the doctor. But then he had recovered and went home, defying the doctor's pronouncement of doom.

Laurie told me that he had died peacefully. I figured he must have died about the time that Facebook went into its massive worldwide shutdown yesterday, so I will always have that event to mark it in the historical timeline of my memory.

Of course I am brutally sad about this, and I can barely begin to think of all that has been lost. He was the last of his family of eight siblings. He was the last person from that generation. He was the last person to know my grandparents in their prime. He was the last person to know my great-grandfather, whom he last saw in the late 1940s, even though he lived to 1974. They did not have a good relationship. But all access to memories of those people is gone know.

He was born in 1925. He served in the 15th Air Force during World War II, with the 97th Bomb Group, flying missions out of Foggia, Italy. He participated in the only allied bombing of Prague.

He went to court reporter school after the war. He went went in the late 1950s and founded his own court reporting firm in Reno. He bought property throughout Nevada. During out last meeting he told me about land he had bought. We both agreed that Gardnerville, which is just south of Reno, was a boom town. "If I were starting out again, that's where I'd buy land."

He met Marilyn Monroe when she was in Reno at the courthouse filming The Misfits, which was her last movie. He got to see her off camera, the real Norma Jean Baker, and see her turn into "Marilyn Monroe" when fans arrived. She was a completely different person, he said, the way she transformed.

That day last November, when I left him with the gifted leather jacket, I had driven up to Lake Tahoe where I had dined at his favorite steakhouse, the Eagle's Nest. That was one of the reasons I had accepted Ginger's offer at the last minute, and decided we should go to a steakhouse on my birthday.

I can barely imagine a world without all those people in it, who once filled the backyard of my grandparent's house on Hunziker Drive in Ames, that white colonial with its big backyard. My mother's cousins are still alive, and so are me and my sisters. But I am estranged from my sisters, and I barely know my mother's cousins. Perhaps I will meet them if I can get up to Reno for the memorial. I told Laurie to keep me in the loop.

Dick was the last of my family I could speak openly to about my opinions of the world. He voted for the same person I did. When I told him last November that justice would be done, and that the stolen election would rectified, he growled "good!". 

I'm so glad I got to see him that last time. For some reason I knew it would be the last time. His body was failing him, it was easy to see. He was not comfortable, to say the least, even though he held on to living independently until the end.

Among the reasons I am glad is that during our last visit, I got to tell him how much I had loved my grandparents--his older sister and her husband, who had already served in the War in Italy. 

"Really?" he said. I was almost in tears explaining. It touched him to hear it, and somehow I could see it gave me some peace, to hear such an expression of love within our family, especially since his own granddaughter had cut off contact with him over politics, something she will bitterly regret one day.

"He thought highly of you," Laurie said, after I sent a long text speaking of my grief.

It was one of the best things anyone has ever said to me.

Birthday on the Grid

 Yesterday around sunset we found ourselves in the mazelike streets surrounding the Fairmont Princess resort in north Scottsdale, looking for a place to park. Signs directed us towards the parking the Pumpkinfest, but at the entrance to the lost, we were informed the charge was seventy-two dollars, which included admission, so we drove back to the hotel entrance, where we were informed that our best option for parking for the steakhouse was to use valet parking, which would complementary if we got the ticket validated inside the restaurant. Ginger looked at the valet ticket as we went inside. It turns out the normal valet charge is a hundred dollars. Welcome to Scottsdale.

We'd been to the steakhouse before, a couple years back, for Ginger's birthday. She'd picked it out. They have wagyu beef, which is what she ordered. At the time I had gotten a normal steak. As she reminded me this time, I wouldn't let her taste my steak, as hers was so much better than mine.

As we dine early, the restaurant was almost empty and we got small table near the large plate glass windows. The waiter was friendly and offered us suggestions on cocktails and an appetizer. Since it was my birthday, I got to choose the latter. I took the waiter's suggestion to get the tuna tartare. A guy came out from the kitchen and prepared it in front of us, chopping up the other ingredients, including a quail egg, and reforming it in a triangle. It turned out to be a great choice.

In the meantime they brought out complementary duck fat fries, in three different varieties. I remembered we had gotten the same when we had come for Ginger's birthday.

We had been planning on ordering steaks, but it turns out that one of the house specialities is a Maine Lobster Pot Pie, which the waiter claimed was his favorite dish. We were supposed to be in Maine this week. The trip had been scuttled due to the ongoing health situation, and conflicts with various people.

As much as I wanted a steak, I decided to order the Lobster Pot Pie. Ginger ordered it as well, and when it was ready, they brought it out in a casserole and prepared the plate for us to share.

Ginger had told them it was my birthday when making the reservation, and they make a big deal about it, including giving me an extra desert item with a birthday candle, to augment to the white chocolate torte and the pumpkin cake that we ordered off the usual menu. 

The card was signed by all the servers in the restaurant. I would brush it off, but it was the only card I got this year, so it was nice to get one.

Over dinner I told Ginger that I had received a flood of birthday wishes.

"Really?" she said, happily.

"Yes. I got a birthday text from my dentist. I got a celebratory happy birthday email from the apartment complex management, one from [name of company I work for], two from my banks, and one from Blitz the Bearcat, the new mascot of [undergraduate institution I graduated from and which I think about as little as possible]. And oh yes, Google sent me a happy birthday pop-up notice, to go along with their ones they sent telling me its Latinx heritage month, and some kind of pagan wiccan holiday for the extended solstice."

It makes the paper card I got from the restaurant staff seem downright traditional. I like the way it felt in my fingers.

Our Lady of Victory + 450

 

Just a note that this week marks the 450th anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto, one of the most significant days in the history of Western Civilization.

"More than a military victory, Lepanto was a moral one. For decades, the Ottoman Turks had terrified Europe, and the victories of Suleiman the Magnificent caused Christian Europe serious concern. The defeat at Lepanto further exemplified the rapid deterioration of Ottoman might under Selim II, and Christians rejoiced at this setback for the Ottomans. The mystique of Ottoman power was tarnished significantly by this battle, and Christian Europe was heartened." (Paul K. Davis)

Wikipedia:

On 7 October 1571, the Holy League, a coalition of southern European Catholic maritime states, sailed from Messina, Sicily, and met a powerful Ottoman fleet. Knowing that the Christian forces were at a distinct material disadvantage, Pope Pius V called for all of Europe to pray the Rosary for victory, and led a rosary procession in Rome...

 The lookout on the Real sighted the Turkish van at dawn of 7 October. Don Juan of Austria called a council of war and decided to offer battle. He travelled through his fleet in a swift sailing vessel, exhorting his officers and men to do their utmost. The Sacrament was administered to all, the galley slaves were freed from their chains, and the standard of the Holy League was raised to the truck of the flagship.

Plan of the Battle (formation of the fleets just before contact)

The wind was at first against the Christians, and it was feared that the Turks would be able to make contact before a line of battle could be formed. But around noon, shortly before contact, the wind shifted to favour the Christians, enabling most of the squadrons to reach their assigned position before contact. ...In the ensuing mêlée, the ships came so close to each other as to form an almost continuous platform of hand-to-hand fighting in which both leaders were killed. The Christian galley slaves freed from the Turkish ships were supplied with arms and joined in the fighting, turning the battle in favour of the Christian side. 

After the battle Pius V instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory in order to commemorate the victory at Lepanto, which he attributed to the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Color of October

 The news has been crazy lately. I don't mean the mainstream news outlets. I don't watch them, and I have little idea what is going on with them. To me, all of that is a propaganda narrative that is of little value in learning about what is really going on.

I refer instead to the alternative news outlets. Everything seems to be on the boil, not only about the shadow political world, but about the economy. What is happening in the world economy--Chinese real estate collapse, Chinese power outages, collapse of the world supply chain, energy prices skyrocketing in Europe, the stock market teetering--has a lot of people both in the alternative world, and the ones with one foot in the mainstream, speculating about possible seismic developments in the near future. Are you prepared?

As usual, my response to such things is usually to disengage with the fervor. I have no idea what is going to happen in the near future. My guesses would be as good as random chance. 

Partly this is because I know that even within the alternative world, where there is an authentic desire among most people to know the truth of things, akin to true journalism, there is a consciousness that we are in the dark about so much. How can any of us make judgments about what is going to happen. We live with the uncertainty day by day, of whether any sense of the momentary normal will continue to carry through next week, next month, or next year

I feel a peacefulness in knowing there is nothing I can do about any of this. The world will play out with me as a mere spectator. There is no point in risking my emotional state on any of it.

Beyond the Anthropocentric Apocalypse

 In the second half of the Twentieth Century, we got used to speaking about the end of the world. Most of the discussions centered around the consequences of a world-wide nuclear war that would destroy civilization and possibly the biosphere of the Earth, rendering it uninhabitable.

Towards the end of the century, and into this one, we transitioned to discussing the end of the world due to human-caused changes in the atmosphere of the earth. After asserting that human beings were driving the Earth to a nice Ice Age, we switched to a belief that human beings were going to cause the Earth to heat up beyond a zone of temperature in which much of Earth's flora and fauna could continue to exist. Then we transitioned to believing that humans were going to disrupt the climate patterns in some unknown but chaotic fashion, both colder and hotter, rainier and drier, in a such a way as to accomplish the same dire end.

What all of these scenarios had in common is an end of the world as we know it due to human agency.  In the case of a nuclear exchange, it was not only the warlike tendencies of humanity, but man's need to understanding the fundamental laws of physics, a quest which had unleashed the golem of particle physics. Our quest for knowledge was our undoing.

In the case of Global Cooling/Warming/Climate Change, the culprit was our modern society and our opulence built on resource usage.

In all these scenarios, which were both proximate and somewhat predictable, the solution to saving the world involved blaming Man himself, and correcting something in human nature. 

This makes sense from a historical point of view, as by the Twentieth Century, western civilization had transitioned away from a belief of God as the supreme intelligence in the Cosmos towards a belief in Man as being supreme. Not surprisingly, our apocalyptic scenarios transitioned from ones due to the intervention of God to ones due to the effects of human agency. 

There are other more exotic scenarios one could mention, that have been explored in science fiction, for example the arrival of deleterious extraterrestrials who someone bring about the end of human existence or civilization. In such scenarios, it is almost always the cause that humans somehow were instrumental in bringing this about, e.g. by our modern radio and television broadcasts out into the galaxy, or by our space exploration that "went too far."

Our "God-caused" end-of-the-world scenarios still existed, but they receded far away, either to the edge of time and space itself (the heat death of the universe, or the Sun going supernova), or to random, unpredictable disaster events (asteroid impact), ones that might be countered by human technology. 

But what if we were to become aware that the most significant threat to the world, that could lead to the end of the world, was both proximate and predictable (like Climate Change), but was in no way due to human agency, and furthermore could not be prevented by any human intervention?

That is, suppose we became aware of some impeding apocalyptic event, that was not due to human action, but which would happen, say, twenty to thirty years from now at most, perhaps sooner, which was probably inevitable, but which could not be stopped by any imaginable human agency?

One wonders how humanity would react under such a scenario. The anthropocentric folks who are wedded to Climate Change as being their preferred end-of-the-world scenario (and who are using it as a cudgel to force changes in human behavior they deem as necessary), would probably not want to give up their favorite future end-times scenario. They would fight against the acceptance of such a God-driven scenario about which we could do nothing.

One wonders if the awareness of such a "God-driven" apocalypse, if it emerged into public consciousness, would lead to a shift in the religious consciousness of the world. What if there was nothing we could do about it except beg God Almighty for some miraculous intervention?

The Return of the Physicist, for Maybe the First Time

Back in the year 1990, as a first year graduate student at the University of Texas, I wrote a research proposal as part of a competition sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Among the prizes for the competition were free hours one could use on one of several Cray supercomputer, the fastest machines in the world available at the time, which were located in California. With ten hours one could do a lot of number crunching for projects that require that kind of thing. 

I can't remember why I was motivated to enter the competition, or even how I heard about. I wasn't particularly interested in the computer time. Nevertheless I decided to enter it, and I wrote a short essay of several pages proposing a research program into what at the time was my favorite subject in all of physics--the spiral structure of spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way. The idea that conglomerations of tens of billions of stars in quasi-random movement could form and sustain such large-scale ordered structured seemed to me to be mind boggling.

It is not as if we don't have good theories as to why spiral galaxies have the form they do. To say it is an open question, or a mystery, is not to say we are completely in the dark. It means we don't have definite, conclusive proof of any one particular theory as to why spiral structure exists. It is one of the questions that astrophysicists continue to study, from the expanding data gathered by astronomers.

I mention this because lately I have found myself thinking deeply about the structure of spiral galaxies again, including the Milky Way. This time it is not about the star structure---the luminous spirals--but rather a more subtle spiral structure that is invisible to the naked eye, and which has emerged in recent years as a very controversial topic. It is the apparent existence of a spiral structure of plasma (charged particles) that is essential huge spiral version of the solar wind, but which pervades throughout the galaxy. 

As I mentioned, it is a very controversial topic, more so than one might think. The reason for it being controversial is very fascinating, but I am hesitant to discuss them here, beyond saying that it may have deep implications for the future of the human race.

I became aware of all this recently via Youtube, from a channel I found which discusses space weather (sunspots, solar corona mass ejections, solar storms, etc.). The person who runs it is an amateur but he does a daily review of published papers in astrophysics that is like catnip for someone like me. I have learned more from him in the last couple months than I have in many years. I am thinking of diving into his references for my talk next year in Prague (if that conference happens, and if I can even get there).

I have felt physics to be dead for many years. All of a sudden it has sprung back to life for me, and I am fascinated again by old questions. I feel I have the jump on much of the physics world in studying new and exiting things, in part because I am not bound by adherence to the dogmas that one has to use to explain certain atmospheric phenomena in regard to geomagnetism (cough, climate change, cough).

Not only do I feel interested in physics again, I feel as if I need to participate in it because I have a role to play in it. Whenever I feel this, it is a powerful feeling. 

By the way, as it happens, I won second place in the nationwide NSF competition with my galaxy essay. This was rather stunning to me, as at the time I was barely holding on in graduate school by my fingertips, and I was constantly questioning whether I even belonged in the program. Technical writing, however, is one of my strengths, so in some ways it was easy to shine.

Those ten free hours became part of leverage I used I getting my position at the Stat Mech Center. I never used them, however, as I never needed them. Probably my laptop is as powerful as those Cray Machines from thirty years ago (maybe not).

Those Cray machines in California, it should be mentioned, were, I think, the original "backbone" of something called the Internet. It was something physicists used back in the early Nineties. I remember telling my people about it. I'm not sure whatever became of it.

All I Need for Today

 Lying in bed on Sunday afternoon, hearing the television set from the other room, and feeling as if it were fifty years ago--these brought back the memories of people whom I loved, and who loved me, and who are gone.

But coming to consciousness, as I reflected on the pleasantness I felt, it struck me that the entire gist of the feeling of happiness in that moment came from the knowledge that someone else was out in the other room, that I was not alone. It was the knowledge, that I could go through the door and see a face of a person I loved, and that loved me, and that I could spend the rest of the day in contented fellowship with that person---all of this in the present moment, and the near future--this is what gave me the deepest satisfaction.

That feeling, that I am welcome, and that I can share fellowship and love with others, has been at the core of the search of much of my adult life. I have felt it at times, and at other times barely felt it. As the years have gone by I have to come to treasure the memories of times I felt that.

Lately I feel barely connected to other people, as if my world has whittled down to just a few people who would even notice if I were gone from the world, or even care. But one is infinitely more than none, and even if there were no other people, God is present, and to worship and adore him, even in complete solitude and isolation, would be enough to get up in the morning, and enough to go on living day to day.

But I am not alone. I have the blessings of love and company with me. One is infinitely more than none. For today at least, it is all I need.

Things That Come Back on a Rainy Sunday Afternoon

 Sunday continued the beautiful, merciful rains here. These were not thunderstorms but gentle soaking rains of grey skies that lasted the entire day. Such days are so rare here. I found myself sitting outside on the porch to listen to the sound, and draw in the sweet humid air.

In the afternoon I went into the bedroom to take a nap for half an hour while Ginger sat in the living room watching a football game. When I take naps in the afternoon, I can fall asleep almost instantly.

After about twenty minutes I awoke from my dreamless nap, in those seconds after waking, I was in a state of suspension from the world, my conscious thoughts not having returned yet.

I could hear the sound of the television set from the next room, and in that instant, I was carried back to a sensation from long ago, fifty years perhaps, of being in my grandparents house on a Sunday afternoon, with the television set on.  The purity of the feeling was a great comfort to me. The veil between the present and the past was pierced. 

As my awareness returned to me, of my surroundings, and of the present of my life, I held the sensation I had felt, of being fifty years in the past, on me like a warm blanket.  

How beautiful it had been, so long ago, to have lived those moments with my family. I reflected on how I had spent my childhood only wanting to grow up, to leave behind my childhood, and to live an adult life. Here I was, five decades later, drinking the pure water of memory like the waters of life.

Grief can be overwhelming at times, even years after one loses someone. The finality of death is brutal,  One somehow believe the absence will pass. But it cannot pass in this lifetime. These moments when the veil between past and present is pierced are merciful gifts with no downside. One cannot manufacture them, yet they come, often enough to make life pleasant, and to quench the thirst one feels for the comforting love that has fled with the death of others.

My Faustian Dreams

 This morning, in the pre-dawn darkness, when I opened the sliding door to go out to the porch, the pleasant smell of the overnight shower filled my nostrils. At once I remembered that I had woken in the middle of the night, at some undetermined time, and had heard the soothing sound of the rain on the roof.

I had forgotten about the rain, or rather it had no registered in my recollections on waking. It felt a dream that had come back to me, triggered by some incident in the waking hours that jarred the previously unretrievable memory of the images that filled one's mind during the night.

In that instance, my mind brought up  the opening lines of Goethe's Faust:

Ihr naht euch wieder schwankende Gestalten, 

Die Früh sich einst dem trüben Blick gezeigt.

Versuch ich wohl, euch diesmal festzuhalten?

Fühl ich mein Herz nach jenem Wahn geneigt?

 

Again you show yourselves, you wavering Forms,

Revealed, as you once were, to clouded vision.

Shall I attempt to hold you fast once more?

Heart’s willing still to suffer that illusion?

I had been having rather interesting dreams lately, ones in which certain people from my past, living and dead, were making repeated appearances. I rarely dream about anyone in my life at the moment. Mostly it is about people from whom I am estranged, and who have passed away into the next life.

There is often a sadness about these dreams, even as I dream them, as I often have felt the distance from these individuals who have been dear to me. 

Lately, however, there has been a shift in the tone of these dreams. I feel in the dreams as if the estrangement is over, and that I with them in fellowship again. Even the dreams of the ones who have died seem to feel comforting. Of course there is still the poignancy of waking from these dreams, and realizing that it was merely in my imagination.  Yet I am of the inclination to believe that something has changed, or is changing, on some scale that I cannot understand. I don't really expect to see any of these people again in this life. If my dream means anything, is connected to something that many people are probably experiencing, and its meaning can only be vaguely inferred from my own small nighttime imagination.

A Levi-Straussian Analysis of Our Own Mortality

 One of the core ideas of Structuralism as it was elaborated by the great French philosopher/anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was the overthrow of the idea that in regards to a story or a myth, there is one correct version of the story that can be taken as normative. Instead, all variations of the story or myth are considered part of a "space" of the story, with the story being not a single narrative but the space encompassing the variations.

The canonical example he gave was the Oedipus myth. In college one is apt to learn the version of Euripides, and this is the version that Freud took as normative in his discussion of human psychology. But this version is only one of many versions with many variations, including Oedipus' own birth, as well as his ultimate fate, and many other plot points. Lévi-Strauss famously made a chart of these variations in order to illustrate the "space" of the myth of Oedipus.

I didn't really get this concept fully until I listened to a Youtube recording of a lecture he gave at Berkeley in 1984, towards the end of his active career. In this lecture, which I've linked here, Lévi-Strauss describes the work of an anthropologist from a century earlier who traveled in the remote river valleys of British Columbia collecting myths from the tribals groups. These groups has long lived in loose contact with each over the millennia. The anthropologist (whose name escapes me) noticed that the groups had essentially the same myth, but with variations of the plot. In one version, the main character journeys to the mountains. In another he goes down to the sea, etc. 

Lévi-Strauss asserted that just as the tribal groups had dispersed so as to fill all of the inhabitable valleys over time, so too the myth common to them had developed variations to fill out the space of variations within the story. There was no "true" version. All of the versions and variations together were the myth. The variations were not incidental. What was varied was in fact the key to understanding the story. Understanding this is necessary to understanding the core of Structuralism (and by extension, Post-Strucutalism).

I thought about this aspect of Structuralism while reflecting on the Ave Maria prayer. Of course there are small variations of the prayer, line by line, in any language. But what is more fascinating to me is the variational space created by the languages together as a set. The fact that the prayer was "originally" in Latin (dating at least from the early 11th century) is not important in the Structuralist sense. The Latin version as it exists today is only one of the variations within the space.

When comparing the Ave Maria in different languages line by line, by far the greatest variation occurs in the first words, in which one greets Mary:

English: Hail Mary

Latin: Ave Maria (Hail Mary)

Portuguese: Ave Maria (Hail Mary)

Greek: Χαίρε Μαρία (Hail Mary)

Polish: Zdrowaś Maryjo (Hail Mary)

Italian: Ave o Maria (Hail O Mary)

French: Je vous salue Marie (I greet/salute you Mary)

Spanish: Dios te salve Maria (God save thee Mary)

German: Gegrüßet seist du, Maria (Greeted be thou, Mary)

Irish: Sé do bheatha, a Mhuire (Welcome [to thee], o Mary)

Here I've translated to either thou (familiar) or you (formal, polite) as appropriate. In some languages, the distinction cannot be made from the greeting itself, while in others it is implicit. Among these my personal favorite is German, as it uses not only the familiar pronoun but the subjunctive of the verb sein (to be).  The Spanish also uses the subjunctive mood in the greeting.

The French verb saluer and the Spanish verb salvar both obvious descend form the Latin salvare, from which comes the common greeting salve, which is used to greet Mary is the Salve Regina (Hail Holy Queen) prayer. The common French greeting salut comes from the same root (I think), and our English word salute likewise.

At the other end of the spectrum in the Rosary is the entire second stanza,

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Pray for us sinners, 

Now and in the hour of our death.

In nearly every case of the languages above, the wording is as close as possible to the English version given here. The only exception is a slight variation in the Greek version, where Mary is not called "Mother of God" but Θεοτόκε, which is the vocative form of the noun theotokos, meaning roughly "God-birther," which is the most common epithet of Mary among the Greek Christians, and by extension in many of the Orthodox churches. The Orthodox actually have their own variation of the Hail Mary, but I'll discuss that a different time.

There is something comforting to me that all of the versions end with a reference to one's own death. The words our death are invariably the last words in the prayer in all versions. They bring a great big thud to the prayer that stars off soaring with an invocation to the mother of God. This is perhaps the central point of the prayer. To remember our own inevitable death and look forward to Mary's help at that moment, whether it is only minutes away, or many years from now. It invokes Mary to be present not only as death approaches, but when death is imminent.

Thus in praying the Rosary, one contemplates (by vocalization) one's inevitable demise at least 50 times a day. Without this the prayer would not be half as powerful. It is the ultimate sobriety, the ultimate realism of life. 

By the way from the above, you can probably tell which language I'm trying to add as my tenth way of reciting the Rosary.  I needed a Celtic language in the mix. Irish Gaelic is very challenging and intimidating to the beginner but thankfully I began learning it over 25 years ago, so the spelling and pronunciation seem somewhat natural to me at this point.

Jazz Among All the Women

 Not all of the mistakes and alterations one hears in the recitation of the rosary in the livestreams arise from not being a native speaker. In plenty of cases, across the spectrum of languages, one hears variations and alterations in pronunciation and wording that, if one picks up on them, can be highly insightful about the language one is hearing.

In pronunciation, the biggest variation one hears is in Portuguese. Anyone who speaks Portuguese would not be surprised by this.  Any of them could tell you how the R-sound at the beginning of words becomes an H in Brazilian pronunciation, and that the round pure O vowel becomes an OO. Thus the Brazilians actually pronounce Rio as "Hee-oo.:  But one hears this in continental Portuguese too. It is not cut and dry.

Some Portuguese continental speakers still roll out their r's in the Spanish way. This is common at Fatima, of course. But like I said, it's complicated. It is not uncommon to hear the same speaker, from one repetition of the Ave Maria to the next, pronounce rogai por nos peccadores (pray for us sinners), in the continental way and then in the Brazilian style. Obviously this is not done in some purposeful way, but "just happens" as they recite it. I did not at all expect this. What does this tell us? It says that to the Portuguese ear, these two ways of pronouncing the word have the same value of interpretation to the ear. In a Structuralist sense, they form part of an axis of pronunciation in the variation of the line, which are all equivalent.

Even more interesting to me are when a native speaker alters the wording of a prayer, either by a mistake, or on purpose.  One mistake I heard by a Spanish woman greatly intrigued me. As anyone who has learned Spanish knows, that language has two different verbs that are equivalent to our verb "to be," namely ser and estar. 

One learns in Spanish class that, roughly, ser is used for permanent conditions and identity, whereas estar is used for temporary conditions and spatial location. 

Learning the distinction between them is easy in theory, but remembering to use them correctly and naturally when speaking is a different matter. I am still susceptible to saying Yo soy (the ser form) when I should be using Yo estoy. Spanish speakers probably expect to hear this mistake made by English speakers, in almost a stereotypical way.

In the Rosary, the distinction between the two verbs is crucial to the meaning. In asseting that Mary is blessed among women, one says in Spanish bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, which (because eres is the conjugated form of ser) asserts that Maris is permanently blessed among women as part of her identity and being. It is not a passing condition. Likewise in the Spanish equivalent of "the Lord is with thee", one says El Señor es contigo, asserting that the Lord being with Mary is a fixed condition.

Well, normally at least. Last week I heard this mix-up happen by a native speaker of Spanish, while reciting the Ave Maria at Lourdes. By her accent, the woman who made it was obviously continental, as are most of the Spanish-speaking priests and sisters at Lourdes.  Yet in reciting the line I mentioned, on one of the ten sequential repetitions of the prayer that form a decade of the Rosary, she spontaneously said El Señor está contigo, which means that the Lord happens to be with Mary at the moment.

By the next repetition, she had fixed her mistake. She only made it once. Yet it blew me away to hear it by a native speaker of Spanish. 

Even more intriguing to me are when one of the reciters changes the wording of the prayer, freestyling perhaps to provide an alternate version. Today during the fifth and final decade of the Italian Rosary at Lourdes, which is always done by Italian priests, of which they are plenty at Lourdes, the older priest who was tasked with being clean-up changed tu sei benedetta fra le donne "thou art blessed among the women", to tu sei benedetta fra tutte le donne "thou art blessed among all the women". As he did so, he punched the pronunciation of tutte, lingering on the double t as Italian speakers do. It was very pleasing. I felt his joy and enthusiasm in his recitation. It felt like hearing a jazz musician cutting loose in a solo.

On the Joys of Thou and Thee

 In the last few weeks, one of the other non-native speakers who has taken his turn in leading the crowd at Lourdes for the English-language rosary is from a country I cannot quite identify. He is obviously European, and is accent is pretty good. A first I thought he was Irish, but then he gave himself away with a few mistakes. Notably he almost always says "blessed art thou among woman." A native speaker would never get the plural wrong that way.

Today I noticed that he was jumping back and forth between the two forms of the English second-person. He would (correctly) begin by addressing the Holy Mother using the archaic familiar thou, but in the next line he would switch to "and blessed is the fruit of your womb..."

Personally it is one of the joys of recitation of the rosary in English that I get to address Mary using the archaic singular second-person thou, which has mostly disappeared from everyday English. The archaic thou always indicates that one is addressing one individual, not many, and that this person is familiar enough to you as a friend or family member.

Most of the other European languages still preserve this distinction in their pronouns, so speakers of those languages would have little trouble understanding why one would use thou in English in the Ave Maria prayer to address Mary. Yet I still find it admirably that they invariably bother to use the archaic from. To me, to hear it recited with you seems unnatural, as if I am putting unnecessary distance between myself as the Blessed Mother. It is too formal.

In some of the languages which still actively preserve the thou-you pronoun distinction, one uses the familiar (thou) form in the Ave Maria. In German one addresses her as du. In Italian, one addresses her as tu; in Spanish, tú; in Polish ty; in Latin tu. In Greek, where Maria is called theotokos (the "God-bearer"), one uses the familiar pronoun form too to address her.

Yet in a few others, one addresses Maria more formally. In Portuguese, one uses vós, which is archaic in Portuguese and was formerly only used for multiple individuals. Today it is an old-fashioned way to refer to multiple people, or to one individual in a formal sense.  So it feels archaic to the Portuguese ear, but also is deferential. Portuguese has many different ways of saying "thou/you". The use of vós is probably heard by most speakers of Portuguese only in prayers or in the mass.

In French, one addresses Maria using vous, which is not archaic at all but is strictly a formal address to another person, meant to indicate respect or politeness. Unlike Portuguese, where the pronoun situation is quite messy, in French it is very clear the distinction between the familiar/singular and the formal plural. 

I've spent quite a bit of time reflecting on this. Why does French address the Blessed Mother deferentially like this, whereas in Spanish and German, and other languages, one uses the equivalent of thou, addressing Mary like a family member?

I want to make something out of it, but I can only guess at the linguistic aspects of this and how it relates to French culture. In a lot of ways, French culture is still a big mystery to me. I have learned to take things in France as they are, without trying to make big conclusions about what they mean.

Rosenkrantz is Full of Gray

 During a particular day, between the livestreams at the shrines Lourdes and Fatima, it is possible to recite the rosary live in five different languages--English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese (and sixth, Polish, on Saturdays).

Of the these six languages I just mentioned, five of the recitations are always done by priests and sisters who are native speakers of the language. In the one of the languages, however, the recitation is almost almost done by non-native speakers of the language. Guess which language it is? Of course it is English. The recitation of the rosary (from Lourdes at 6 AM Pacific) is almost always done by people who have learned English as a second or third language.

Occasionally, one hears a native English speaker, for example a priest from English, Ireland, or the United States.  Instead one hears from a rotating group of speakers from around the world. Often the English-language recitation is done by what I assume are priests from Francophone Africa. They often do the French language ones as well, as often as priests from France itself. 

 Over the summer, the English-language rosary was often led by a German priest, who himself occasionally led a German-language rosary when there was a special pilgrimage group that provided a large-enough crowd. I was delighted to have the opportunity to recite the German version with them, but it only happens from time to time. By the way, the German word for rosary is Rosenkrantz, like the minor character in Shakespeare's Hamlet, who was later made famous by Tom Stoppard.

One learns much from hearing the non-native speakers attempt to lead the crowd at the grotto in the sequence of prayers. The German priest I mentioned invariably pronounced the first line of the Ave Maria prayer as "Hail Mary, full of gray." The s-sound at the end of the word grace disappeared entirely. He always pronounced it like this. I inferred that for German speakers, it is no normal to play that strong s-sound at the end of words. If I had a few minutes with the priest, I could no doubt help him improve his recitation, as it is sometimes humorously distracting to hear mispronounce that word over and over.

Yet They Keep Coming

 In the last week, my morning routine on the porch has evolved slightly to accommodate a curious development here in North Scottsdale. The extra-heavy monsoon we got this year in August resulted in, among other things, an explosion of the insect population. For the first time since we have lived here in the Phoenix area, we have been confronted by mosquitoes.

Ginger in particular, being a ginger, feels at the mercy of them, so we must keep our patio door shut. This also keeps out the wasps that seem to find their way onto our porch, and sometimes get too curious in exploring the interior of the apartment. The wasps too are novel visitors because of the rain.

The mosquitoes start coming after me about an hour before dawn and keep up their attack for the next three hours while I pray, meditate, and work from the rocking chair.

In order to fend them off, I have made it part of my evening routine to place a pair of socks, as well as a long sleeve button shirt, on the porch next to the chair. Evening still wearing my pajamas, I don the shirt and put on the socks as a defense against the mosquitoes. Nevertheless my hands are exposed and within an hour after dawn, usually my fingers are slightly swollen from the bites I have gotten without noticing.

Of course I could just buy some mosquito repellent. I think every morning I will do this, and yet I have let the days go by. Part of my things that surely the mosquitoes will go away any day now, and thus I will not need the repellent anymore. Yet they keep coming.

One good about the insect boom is that there has been a corresponding increase all the way up the food chain.  As many would point out to you, the Sonoran Desert is full of life, especially birds. 

Ginger was awakened in the middle of the night this week by loud hooting outside our window. She went to the kitchen to a great horned owl perched on the roof, silhouetted against the dark sky. I woke up shortly afterwards and went out to the porch and heard it hooting without seeing it.

The sound of an owl is very comforting. It's too bad they don't eat mosquitoes. 

Learning Polish With Noise-canceling Headphones

 A few minutes before five thirty a.m. this morning Pacific time, the Youtube interface indicates that there are two people waiting for the start of the live feed from the grotto at Lourdes for the Saturday recitation of the holy rosary in the Polish language.

I think how odd it is, that one of those two people, in the whole world, is a guy in his pajamas on his apartment porch in Scottsdale, Arizona, who is not Polish, who has not been to Poland in over thirty years, who barely speaks any of the language, and who is not even Catholic. 

When the broadcast starts at five thirty, I see the small group of pilgrims huddled in front of the entrance of the opening in the rock. They have umbrellas. Inside the opening the priest in white robes comes up to the lectern. The feed cuts to a close up of him as he welcomes the pilgrims in the language they understand, and makes the sign of the cross and pronounces words that I understand: W imię Ojca i Syna i Ducha Świętego (vvee-MYEH noyt-SAH ee see-NAH ee doo-HA swen-TEH-go).

Over the next half hour I listen in the dark of my porch wearing the noise-canceling headphones that Apple gave me as a free bonus when I bought my last laptop two years ago. I had only begun using them in the last couple months (I had even thought of giving them away as a gift), but had discovered how wonderfully they work, especially for the close listening of languages one is trying to learn.

The Poles only get to do their rosary once a week at Lourdes, always on Saturday, and they make they most of it. The same cadre of priests, together with one woman who is probably a nun, tag team in the recitations, like a rap group. They speak quickly as if to make sure they will get through the whole thing in their allotted half hour of time before the next group of priests will the stage in the little cave opening.

For the first couple minutes, the priests words are ones I can only partially understand, mostly through context. He asks for our prayers for the intentions of various people he names. There is usually a "Dorota" in the group, a common woman's name. Or maybe it's the same Dorota every week. I can't tell. I have a good friend in Poland whom I met in 1985 in Athens, and he later married a woman named Dorota and had four children with her. I met her in 1990 when I visited them. I always think of her when the priest says that name.

Amidst the words I barely understand, suddenly the priest launches into the Apostle's Creed in Polish. I recognize it, and understand it line by line, but I cannot yet recite it. I make the most of it by echoing the last few words of each line that I hear. Slowly I will build up the competency to recite the whole thing from memory.

Then, as if by magic, comes words I know well by now from my drills. Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie (OY-cheh nash. Kuh-TOOR-us yest vv NYEH-byeh).  They roll out of the priest's mouth quickly. He has been reciting these same words from his earliest childhood no doubt, and they familiar to every Pole, just as the words of the Lord's Prayer are in English to me. 

The minute I hear them, I try to speak them along with the priest at the same speed, without having to think about the next line, and getting each syllable right. I fumble over a few lines at the start, and have to catch up a half beat later, but I do well. There will be five more times to hear it and recite it during the next half hour, from the different speakers on stage as they take their turns, each seemingly outdoing each other in the fluidity at which they let it roll off their tongue. I will never be quite as good as they are, but I can almost match their speed at this point, when I am in the groove. 

Much easier at this point is the Hail Mary itself, which comes in five sets of ten, with the the two stanzas recited in call and response fashion. Zdrowaś Maryjo, łaski pełna, Pan z Tobą

(ZDROH-vas mah-REE-oh, VAS-kees pay-OH-na pan STOH-boam.

At this point I am almost at native speed. With my headphones I relax and begin to listen to the priest or the nun in the recitation of the words while speaking them myself along with them. I hear my own pronunciation resonating in my skull while I hear theirs and my brain makes notes as to where I am not pronouncing the syllables the way they are, allowing fine tuning each time through. Their is a mental trick one can do, where one pretends that the words of the native speaker are actually coming out of one's own mouth, and at that instant, one can become aware of the way one's lips and tongue are not in the right positions to actually make those syllables that way. 

It is in these moments of special consciousness that one can feel ones lips shifting subtly to make the syllables more correctly, to match the voice that one is attempting to reproduce, that is coming into one's ears. It must be connected to primal way we learn our native languages, because somehow it works. One knows this when one feels a strain on ones lips and facial muscles because they are now working in a new way that puts a strain on ones normal facial muscles. It is, I suppose, like being an athlete who is training, and who feels the limitations of one's leg muscles while running, but then shifts into a groove in which those muscles become activated in the way they should. 

As I mentioned in the past, each language has its own demands on one's facial muscles that way, stretching them in a particular unique fashion. 

Each priest in turns speaks also in a different register. I try to match it, in the same way one shifts keys while singing. When the woman takes her turn, I try to match her high feminine pitch as well. She is perhaps not a nun, but a lay helper, as her long blond hair is uncovered. She is tall and pretty, and I have a tiny crush on her in that pure way that is inspired by a common devotion to the Mother of God, the way boys have crushes on their elementary school teachers. 

This week, however, I don't even notice her appearance, as I have kept my eyes closed the entire half hour, to focus on what I am hearing and speaking. 

Her voice, however, is familiar to me. It is a refreshing drink of cool water after the gruff masculine recitation of the aged priest who took his turn just before her (see 23:00 in the video below). Anyone who thinks that Marian devotion is somehow demeaning to women is, to me, insane.

She is a good singe. A couple weeks ago she ended the Saturday half hour by singing what I later learned was a Polish hymn. It took some digging to find the words online, as I had to transliterate them from her singing by guessing at how to spell the words, so I could look them. The fact that I could successfully find the name of the hymn, with help from Google's auto correct of my spelling, was a little triumph in my language learning journey.

During the rosary, it is always a challenge to keeps one's mind focussed on the prayer itself. This is especially true when one is using it the way I am, to learn a language little by little. My mind wonders to what my Polish friend would think, if he heard me suddenly spit out the words of the Lord's Prayer or the Hail Mary in his own language. I could tell him I have learned it, via email, but such knowledge expressed that way doesn't have the impact it would, just hearing someone say it. He has never heard me speak his language. It would be fun to surprise him, just to see his reaction. I wonder if I will get the chance. Who knows when I will ever be in Europe again, or when he will come here.