Cross Words

While recuperating from a trifecta of ailments, I became hooked on crossword puzzles. I even bought one of those Dell collections to pass the time on planes. I do the Times crossword every day of the week, and I do the in-flight magazine crossword, and the Sacramento Bee’s. I’ve even tried to puzzle out a People  crossword recently in a doctor’s waiting room. And I would have completed it, too, had I recognized the names of any of the glossy young celebrities it celebrated.

            Work enough puzzles, and after a while you get tired of and even a little affronted by the easy ones: The Times’ Monday puzzle, say; or Tuesday’s sometimes; or the ones they print with the funnies. And you weary of the three-or-four-letter inevitables that appear in every puzzle: Ava, Eva, Uma, Zsa (as in "half a Hungarian actress), gem, Iran, Abel, ass, zoo, anti, ante, ‘ette, 'esse, Isis, asp, sue, baa, Ovid, moo, Ito, halo, ode, rah, Eli, Eros, sot, Mao, urn, ole, Los, tsar, “et tu”, Las, ewe, din, riot, send. And then there are the acronyms and abbreviations: RFD, QED, ACLU, RCA, RDA, OSHA, AOL, IOU, NBA, ETA, BPOE, SST, USSR; and sta., Inc., Ltd., Ste., and so on.

I used to breathe a contemptuous sigh whenever I encountered them. But when I opened that Dell book, I found the first forty or so puzzles beneath my admittedly shaky, autodidact level of erudition. After working backward and thereby completing the more difficult puzzles first, I got to a point where I figured I might as well throw the uncompleted book away. 
But then it occurred to me that I could ignore the clues to the easy ones and use the blank diagrams to make up puzzles of my own. These being diagrams for easy puzzles, few had room for anything more than maybe a couple of six- or seven-letter entries. And I found that after years of playing “Hangman” with my children and weeks of working crossword puzzles with myself I could make up my own puzzles in about ten minutes.

The only drawback was that I could not accomplish this without resorting to at least half a dozen of the inevitables I had scorned, for it turns out that the inevitables are unavoidable. Try as I might to replace them with Hindu divinities or Japanese royalty, I always found that short of employing expletives, the only way I could make my way out of the corner I’d painted myself into was to summon up one of these time-worn standby’s.

My only recourse was to obscure their clues, which I now realize is the puzzler's lifeline. “Actress Gardner,” for instance, or even “Sinatra’s heartbreaker” wouldn’t do for Ava any longer; it had to become something like “Movies’ Lavinia’s first name;” or “Jazz vocalist Lemert;” or even “porn society acronym.” “Egyptian god” Isis I broke up into “Oh, she __ __ she?” Eros became “backward pain.” I disdained “Female sheep” or “lamb’s ma” for ewe (or for that matter “Miss Gardner” for Ava, or “Adam’s squeeze” or "garden lady" for Eve) and came up with “palindromic female.”

These may be random and overreaching acts of defiance against the severe finitude of three- and four-letter English. Nevertheless, I think my children are going to appreciate the clever way I've handled them, for I am bequeathing all of my completed puzzles to them as a fond remembrance of their father. I just hope they don’t end up fighting over them.

Where to?

For the past year or so I've been working on our house here in Davis, turning it from a musty and nondescript ranch house into something more congenial. The first time the realtor opened the front door to the place I nearly turned and fled, for it reminded me of the tract houses from which I picked up a number of unfortunate dates in high school. I could all but see the coiled father seated in his armchair, the anxious mother peeking in from the kitchen, the sullen brothers hovering around the door to the garage, and my date for the evening emerging unrecognizable in full mufti from the hall. 


The house had been occupied for forty years by the same, the original owners: an ailing emeritus and his second wife. A large ranch house to which had been added a mother-in-law apartment in back, it had a stifling, congested atmosphere and a back yard that had been almost entirely paved over, and I immediately crossed it off my list. 


But that was when I still held out hope that a house of some architectural character might come on the market: even a 1920s California cottage with tapering porch columns would have sufficed. Every other town in the Central Valley was replete with foreclosed homes for sale, but not Davis, where the university has kept the local economy afloat and tenure limits the number of homes that come on the market. 


So I returned with my wife to the old professor's house, underwhelming and overpriced though it was, and, beaten down, perhaps, by the run of available houses available in Davis, which but for its core barely dates back to the 1960s, I began to see the house as a kind of tabula rasa, the concrete backyard as a potential pool site, the porch with its 4X4 posts as an Asian verandah similar to ones I had recently chanced upon in Thailand. 


After paring down the price and selling the house we had left in Seattle, I spent many long, hot months installing a pool, reaming out the living room,  knocking out walls, remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms, and installing throughout the house 4 inch wide black trim to try to give the place a Japanese teahouse quality commensurate with the tora gate the previous owner had installed in the front yard. 


I completed the interior some months ago, went to work on the verandah, and finally, last month, painted the exterior: a kind of deep marine green with red beams and yellow rafters and, as elsewhere, black trim.  


But now what? I feel as though I have created a set for a play I've yet to write. About an orientalist, perhaps, or some transplanted old Asia hand. It seems sometimes to say, "Davis? Please, God. Anywhere but Davis." But it's hard to complain about anything or anyone but myself, seeing as how I have, for instance, accomplished a lifelong dream of owning a pool. A small pool, certainly: too small to accommodate much more than a wallow. But a pool nonetheless. And I have planted citrus tree along two sides: dwarf citrus trees but nonetheless fruitful, or so they tell me. And I have a grandchild to look forward to, due in October and destined to frolic, or at least urinate, in the pool in another year or so. 


Maybe out of sheer restlessness I have begun to explore switching the house to solar power, and there are a few maintenance items I have yet to attend to, as there always are in the wonderful world of home owning. But even though I have three plays making the rounds of various theatre companies and a book or two in the offing, I haven't written anything in months, and it's time I climbed back on the literary horse or put him out to pasture; time I made up my mind what road to follow. 

Hello, I must be going

It's unfortunate that the blog page that's been sitting unchanged over the past month sported a cartoon of a "Too Much Information" booth, as too little information has been more the theme since I posted it. 


Some weeks ago I finally managed to persuade my mother to come celebrate her 97th birthday to California from Connecticut to celebrate her 97th birthday with her west coast family. 


The whole family thought the trip was a fine idea: Mom was in great shape, and the proposition seemed to give her a new lease on life after years of grieving for my father. The whole family except my wife, the nurse, who thought it was a foolish and reckless idea but did not have the heart to tell me. 


Mom flew to Sacramento escorted by her grandnephew Garrett and his wife Beth, and after sleeping half a day to recover from the flight, ensconced herself on the verandah, where, as she visited with Garrett and Beth and Debbie and me and enjoyed the sight of the blackbirds bathing in our pool, she was her effervescent self.


My mother has been something of a miracle of nature. No-one who meets her suspects she's as old as she is, and some don't believe us when we tell them. Some thirteen years ago, during my son Jake's graduation from Wesleyan, my sister escorted Mom to the ladies' room the college had established in a field house. It was a sweltering day, and there was a long line of matrons waiting to get in. So my sister went to the head of the line and asked if the ladies would let her eighty-four year-old mother cut in line. "Of course, dear," they said, so Helen retrieved Mom and escorted her forward. But as she reached the head of the line Helen began to hear some grumbling, and finally overheard one woman say to another, "Eighty-four, my foot!" 


So it is understandable that her family -- some of whose members are hoarier than she - thinks she will live forever, or at least that she may be immune to the usual geriatric slings and arrows.  But then, in the wee hours of her birthday, Debbie and I awoke to the sound of a crash and ran in to find my mother crumpled up on the floor of the guest room, having slipped getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. Apparently she had grabbed an end table for support and it collapsed, and now here she lay in great pain. 


Soon the EMT folks arrived and transported her to the local hospital where she was diagnosed with that gravest of geriatric injuries: a fractured hip. It required partially replacing with a steel femur, and by two that afternoon she was under the knife. Once upon a time, a fractured hip was attended by clots and pneumonia and infection and amounted in most cases to a prolonged death sentence. But hip replacement surgery has removed a good deal of risk, and in fact, over the ensuing weeks, the hip was the least of her problems. 


She received extraordinary care: superior to anything she might have received back home. And though she greeted the physical therapists who attended her at the nursing facility into which we squeezed her as though they were the Spanish Inquisition, she made enough progress to be able to fly back east eventually and return to her apartment. 


Over the course of the five or six weeks she was here, I found I could not think of much else, and spent most of my time either visiting her or preparing to visit her -- collecting toiletries, checkbooks, mail, magazines, audio books from the library, snapshots off the web; writing various care givers back east; and reporting on her progress to the rest of the family. My errands and missives served the purpose of creating the illusion that I had some measure of control over something that was happening to someone else. That that someone else was my mother gave this purpose a special urgency, and the primal nature of my relationship, at 64, with my 97 year-old mother, left me with no extra energy to invest in this blog, and if the clumsy way in which this is written is any indication, I may in fact be returning to it prematurely. 

The Slippery Slope of Joy

A few years ago I was invited to a fundraiser for a drug rehab facility by a friend of mine who was one of its alums. My friend, like most of the rest of the gathering, was African-American, and before we lit into our dinners, a minister stood up and began to clap on the upbeat and half sing and half preach a welcoming incantation that had the whole room on its feet, clapping and nodding and shouting amen’s.

     The whole room, that is, except me. I was fascinated by the spontaneous response of the other attendees. But I remained seated. This was in part because there was a lot of Jesus talk in the reverend's incantation, and I do not believe in Jesus. Even if I did believe in Jesus, I regard Christianity's persecution complex as unseemly among any but the persecuted, which I am not. 

     On the other hand, I do not wish to offend, and so at such times as this I never know how to respond, especially if the music is any good. As I remained seated, my host looked down at me and, seeing that I had begun to tap one foot slightly, gave me a wry smile. 

     “Easy now, Andy” he said.

      When Cordelia fatally refused to flatter her father, she declared that she could not "heave her heart into her mouth." I share this problem, though not her predicament, as my father was not King Lear: Dad distrusted flattery, dismissing its practitioners as people who, "you know, try to crawl in under your vest." 

But it's not just flattery I find difficult. It's joy, especially of the unalloyed variety.  
     This morning my wife and I went to the farmer’s market, where one of the University's marching bands was putting on a freeform concert at which, for a donation of $25, you could conduct the band in one of its numbers. I stood listening to the jolly racket they made and enjoying their line-dance moves as they blatted and blasted their way through seventies standards-turned-marching-songs.

     I began to imagine what would happen if I were to fork over $25 and climb onto the little stepladder that passed for the conductor’s dais. I began to choreograph the whole routine. I would identify myself as Arturo Bernstein, perhaps, and play the martinet maestro, commanding them in a German accent to play their pianofortes pizzicato, keep their allegros andante and their andantes al dente and so on, then tapping my baton and declaring, “All right, on seven,” to my wife's astonishment and the crowd's delight. 

     I remembered how Jerry Lewis and Danny Kaye used to take up the baton and lead whole choruses and orchestras in what seemed like spontaneous routines that were actually carefully rehearsed. I would try to follow in that tradition. So on and on I fantasized about my act and the gales of appreciative laughter from the crowd and the musicians, until my wife and I had finished buying vegetables and returned to the car.

Today was Whole Earth Day here in Davis -- not just Earth Day, mind ou, but Whole Earth Day. So this afternoon my wife and I headed off to join the throngs that had gathered on the university quad to celebrate the Whole Earth with whole drum circles, falafel, tie-dye booths, and didgeridus. 

     The crowd was full of people who seemed time-locked in the early seventies (which is the period most people mean when they say the sixties) with their long hair and gypsy outfits and beatific grins. Face-painted and beaded and bare-midriffed young persons in eccentric head gear and sloganeering T-shirts traipsed barefoot through the grass, hackey-sacking and hula hooping, romping and cavorting.

     A capoiera drum line wended its way toward the dance stage, with a large crowd bumping around in rhythm in its wake. My wife began to follow as well, and as I stumbled after her, I managed a couple of slight knee bends and maybe two sways and a few rhythmic shrugs as the drummers led us along. 

     But all this festivity only brought back to me how ill suited I was to my own era, how unfit I am for some varieties of human company, how much time and energy I have spent trying not to make a fool of myself, only to make a derisive ass of myself instead.

        Maybe I would have been better off in upper class 19th century England, when decorousness rather than disinhibition was one of the cardinal virtues. But I don’t really think so. I think that just as I felt stuffy and out of it in the 1970s, I would have suffocated in the 1870s.

     The great ballplayer Satchel Page once prescribed three roads to happiness: to work like you don't need the money, to love like you've never been hurt, and to dance like nobody's watching. 

     I don't know what the hell he was talking about. 

As long as he needs me

My wife has been doing a lot of traveling lately, getting the word out about the new nursing school she's helping to found at the University of California at Davis. This leaves me to my own devices, which seem to deteriorate as the days go by. 
     At first I am the model single male: rising early; cooking myself a wholesome, well balanced meal; cleaning up as I go along (because isn't that half the fun?); buckling down to write. But then I forget lunch, unless the hunger pangs get too pronounced, in which case I pull out a bag of chips, a soda, and some dip, if I can find any. Suppertime passes into night, and around ten I may microwave a hot dog or call out for a pizza, then it's over to the television for some late night viewing, after which I resume writing, snack some more, leave a couple of lights on, turn in, read for an hour or two, and finally drop off around three in the morning. 
     I don't think I'm particularly sleep-averse, and Debbie's regime is not so oppressive that it's as though I must go romping around the schoolyard when she's away. But something truly giddy and juvenile comes over me during her more prolonged absences. 
     I am not entirely helpless. In fact I am handy, can cook my meals, keep my environs relatively tidy, and by the time she gets back I've usually managed to clear away all evidence of my delinquency. The dishes are done, the kitchen sink is spotless, the laundry is washed and dried and sorted, the garbage has been dumped; the recyclables have been, well, recycled; and if I took the opportunity that her absence afforded of taking on some handyman project I have usually completed it, put away the tools, swept up the sawdust. 
     In other words, I usually present a home that's in better shape than when she left it. But I myself am a mess -- malnourished, sugar-high, sleep-deprived -- and may well greet her with my fly open. 


Her homecomings are always marked by a close and bustling inspection of the premises. I call these her fault-finding missions. The more immaculate the home when she gets back, the more intense her scrutiny, as though by getting everything ship-shape I were merely trying to put one over on her. 
     When, inevitably, she does find something amiss -- a paint drop on the laundry room floor, an errant screwdriver, a bottle left uncapped in the refrigerator, a letter unmailed, a call to the furnace repairman unmade  -- it seems to be almost a comfort to her, a confirmation of her core belief that I am a nitwit. 
     I am in no position to argue with that. Nevertheless, these inspections of hers do tend to diminish some of the pleasure I take in her homecomings. 
     But there's nothing like a little belated insight to soothe my wounded feelings, so I have decided that I know what really lies behind these inspections. It is a need to believe that I cannot live without her: that she is necessary to me, so central to my life that without her I would spin off into the void. 

Hyde Park Bred

I watched the Obamas at the Press Club last week, and enjoyed the comedy lesson the President gave a blowsy Jay Leno, especially when Obama followed a gentle jab at Michael Steele with a sly and perfectly timed, "My brother." 
     But what struck me again was the deep but wry affection in which Michelle and Barack Obama hold each other. It all seems to me utterly charming and entirely recognizable. 
     I was raised where the Obamas lived before coming to Washington: in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where my father was Dean of the College at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s. There is something in the cerebral atmosphere of my old neighborhood that seemed to nurture relationships like theirs. 
     My parents shared it, as did several of their married friends. It was passion enriched by intellect,  devotion garnished with humor, erudition with humility. 
     My father went on to work for the Ford Foundation in India and in Africa, and died three years ago, at the age of 96. But before his death, my mother read Obama's autobiography to him, and he would make her pause every now and then to ask why Americans didn't choose men of Obama's quality and complexity for their President. How he would have rejoiced in Obama's election, and taken pride in the way he has handled himself. 
     
When I was very small my mother would sometimes say, perhaps in part to comfort herself that the sacrifices she made on his behalf were worthwhile, that my father should have been president. 
     I sometimes wondered to myself what sort of president my father would have made. I used to invent scenarios in which my father would be appointed, say, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Then some catastrophe -- an electrical accident at a White House pool party, or a shipment of toxic hair dye -- wiped out the rest of the line of presidential succession, leaving my father holding the bag. 
     I suppose my father would have made a better, or at least smarter and better spoken and more honorable Chief of State than Nixon, Johnson, Ford, or either Bush. But would he have been crippled by his erudition and fair-mindedness, his sometimes lofty rationality and instinctive trust in the other guy's good faith? And would the country have forgiven him his sense of humor? 
     Though I could never really imagine it, Obama comes close. The Presidency is a terrible job to wish on anybody. But it has been fascinating, for better or for worse, to watch one of our own go about his business. 

Bwanas and Sahibs

My brother Geoff is an amateur tiger conservationist, and he and I were talking the other day about a recent New Yorker article I recommended he read. It concerned a telegenic American couple named Mark and Delia Owens, whose passion for African elephants seems to have gotten out of hand. 
     Perhaps that is putting it mildly, as there's evidence that their troubled son shot an unarmed poacher to death as an ABC News team stood by, that Mark may have retrieved the body and dumped it into a nearby river, and that at least a portion of the ABC crew went along with the coverup.


There's less debate among conservationists than you might imagine about whether or not it is justified to shoot poachers on sight, especially when they're carrying AK-47's, and especially when whole species are being hunted to extinction for their parts, including several on which Chinese men are apparently willing to spend millions of yuan to avoid taking Viagra.
     But as Geoff and I got to talking, we returned to a beef we both have with Animal Planet, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and PBS, when it comes to nature documentaries. We were brought up on Mutual of Omaha's Animal Kingdom with Merlin Perkins, and Walt Disney's Truelife Adventures, and both of us recognize the extraordinary improvements that have been made to the genre. 
    We are agreed that no-one ever wrote a better documentary script than David Attenborough, and we thrill to the footage intrepid teams of cinematographers have captured for such series as Nature, Blue Planet and Life, including, recently, astounding images shot through falling snow of that most elusive of cats, the snow leopard, dragging its kill up a rocky Himalayan slope.


But our complaint is with the producers of a lot of other wildlife documentaries who, like the writers of historical romances set in exotic places, center their stories around white people instead of the real heroes of animal conservancy: local game wardens and animal conservationists. 
     With little remuneration and no fanfare; at risk to their lives; and often in defiance of their own governments; they are the ones who strive most courageously to sustain the world's wildlife. And yet, at best, they are relegated in most animal documentaries to bit parts: as loyal guides and faithful sidekicks to the sahibs and bwanas who come rolling in from L.A. with their film crews, safari jackets, lomotil, and little bottles of Purell: peppy, entrepreneurial, self dramatizing young people who have narrowly chosen animal conservation over skydiving or bungee jumping.
     We know of a few steadfast indigenes who have been featured, notably Geoff's friends Fateh Singh and the late Billy Arjan Singh, both tiger wallas of irresistible charisma, and I suppose a producer would argue that Western viewers need someone on the screen with whom they can identify. But it seems unfortunate and shortsighted to neglect the real heros of animal conservation and to understimate our capacity to identify with them.