In Like a Lion, Vertigio, Home Alone, An Eye for An Eye

Help. I'm falling. Or the snow is. Or it's supposed to. Big storm coming up the East Coast. Even Alabama and Atlanta are involved. Can the Eastern Shore expect any less? Talk about vertigo. The storm is spinning and spinning. Boston in for 15 inches. I loved that city. Once, when I was a college boy. But, it's too cold, too much snow, and way too expensive.

I'm home alone for a week writing, walking, reading and watching tv. I watched Vertigo and now, Analyse This--you know, the one with Billy Crystal and DeNiro, and I feel like writing like a mobster. Like all the pretty women in Long Island talk. The prettiest, most innocent prom queen sounds like a mobster up there. As for the Vertigo angle, it was a good movie--except did Mr. Stewart, pictured above, really just suspect the Kim Novak was not Kim Novak after Kim Novak got murdered? And did Kim Novak really think Mr. Steward didn't recognize her because her hair was a different color? And, did they fall desperately in love with each other in one day? Just wondering.

Last Friday night, for some reason, my right eye went bad on me. It's called Central Serous Chorioretinopathy. Fluid leaks in under the retina, detaches it, and leaves a big brown spot in the middle of your field of vision. Left eye is fine, but it's strange trying to read this way. The docs said it maybe caused by stress. Terry told them I was retired, that I lie around all day, and asked them if I should maybe take more naps. I suggested that I take just longer naps. In any event, I call my left eye Mr. Liberal. It thinks it can see things as they really are. I call my right eye Mr. Hannity, who sees the world through a brown smear. Talk about vertigo. The poor Republicans. The best they can do is Rush Limbaugh? Things have spiraled out of control for the Grand Old (Pity) Party.

A Gray Day in Februrary

There's a reason February is the shortest month and today that reason is fully evident. But those complaints about this most miserable 28/29 days of the year have been filed before so I won't go there. Pour yourself a cuppa strong stuff and get on with it.

Of more interest are the headlines. Among the usual world-wide horrors, I see that Paris Hilton has been rewarded for her no-talent efforts to reach movie stardom. She's been given a Razzie. Poor thing. I wonder how she reacts to such public drubbings of her efforts to be something other than a rich and pretty party girl. How long can one survive the 'unbearable lightness of being?' Even the likes of Paris want to be taken seriously. It killed Marlyin Monroe and she had talent. And if the Razzies have been issued, the real Show--the Academy Awards must be close at hand. Tout ce qui brille, n' est pas or--all that glitters is not gold.

Mr. Obama has been very busy getting his administration off to a rousing start and the American public seems to approve. Those poor cranky Republicans are honking and squeaking and snarling and gnashing their collective teeth. Talk about public drubbings. I heard an interesting observation the other day--Nixon was a moderate compared to the GOP folks that are out there squealing their tires now. Imagine. Where will this polarization of America take us? I suspect that the wisdom of the great middle of us--the vast population of moderates that is the real America and who voted the GOP off the island, will ultimately keep us on more-or-less a steady course (but didn't they vote in "W" twice?).

I'm 97 pages into the next book and have had some very fine luck with it this week. There's nothing quite like it when it flows.

By the way, the picture above is of a sign on the door of a restaurant in Kamakura, Japan. It would make a good title for a short story or a collection of short stories.

Love Letters From the War: Our Parents Teach Us What Is Really Important

Left to right: Me, Dad, my brother John, Mom


We found the letters in a shoe box, where all old letters should be found. They were on a shelf way under a cabinet in the living room, behind a lot of other stuff. Lucky for us. I'm pretty sure Dad would have burned them had he found them first.

They are love letters, every one of them, pure and simple. They range from passionate to playful, gentle to newsy, anguishing to soothing. They tell the story of an entire generation. Soon after their marriage in 1943, Dad had left for war, serving in the Navy on a destroyer in the North Atlantic. He left behind a young wife pregnant with their first child.

In one letter, my father writes, "I want to love you passionately for the rest of my life." He was true to his intentions. Each was the other's first and only love. Here they are in the picture above, taken last week at the nursing home in Massachusetts where they now live--still together. Dad will be 90 in July, Mom 88 in April. It's seldom easy to put your parents into a nursing home even if its absolutely necessary. The only way they went willingly was with the promise that they could still share the same bed. We got permission from the nursing home administrators to drop the side rails and push their beds together. They spend their days together, holding hands and reading, watching TV, and looking out over the New England countryside. They spend their nights lying side by side as they have for the past sixty-six years.

Dismasted Off the Coast of Guam: A Sailor's Small Adventure

It came down like all those sudden, violent, once-in-a-life-time things that you can't shut up about later. A perfect day in the blue, blue Pacific, four miles off the coast of Guam. Fifteen knots of wind with lots of gusts to twenty and slowly picking up to maybe twenty five. The sky was as blue as the water and speckled with those little white popcorn clouds that float high on the breeze and on the horizon was the varied greens of the tropical island's mountains rising up from the sea.

Carpe Diem is a Tayana 43, a powerful little cutter, lithe and nimble, and a joy to sail. We had the full main up and about half the jib rolled out and she seemed well balanced and happy. In fact, we were all happy--if not well balanced. There were four of us on board, the owners, Don and Jan Goldhorn, my wife, Terry, and I. We were having a special reunion, sailing all together again, as we had so many times in the past, after a seven month separation, running up into the breeze on a glorious trade wind day.

Don and Jan had just had some work done on Carpe Diem. The mast had been taken off and a new radar, GPS, and windex wired in. The bottom had been done and all the sea cocks serviced. It had been an expensive project and they were proud and happy and ready to take on the big blue ocean that surrounds this lovely island.

There was no warning, no indication that something was amiss, that somehow the nearly invisible devil-worm of stainless steel corrosion had dug its way into the T-pins at the bottoms of the turnbuckles where the lower shrouds hang on to the chain plates. One of them must have given out first and the others then followed, unable to take the strain. Don, Jan, and Terry were back in the cockpit, I was sitting on the upwind side of the boat, just aft of the mast. Later we all remembered it differently. Terry heard nothing, but said she watched as the mast crumbled, in slow motion, into the sea to leeward. I was looking out toward the island and heard a loud rending of metal and metallic pop just above my head. What I saw when I looked up had nothing to do with slow motion; in an instant the 67-foot mast was gone, the whole rig disappeared.

Carpe Diem, suddenly every bit the great, wing-broken seabird, turned across the wind and hung there, the sails having become a great sea anchor. We, the crew, were dumbfounded but far from speechless. Epithets of shock and awe filled the air as we played for time and found our senses. In the end, we were all calm and got down to the business of sorting things out. No one was hurt, the seas, here in the lee of the island, were moderate, and we were not taking on water. After forty-five minutes of trying to get the broken mast lined up with the boat and secured so we could motor home, we decided the better part of valor was to call for assistance. Keeping this blog short, four hours later, Carpe Diem was safely back in her slip. The mail sail was cut away and set adrift, bits of the mast and the brand-new roller furling rig, now hopelessly bent and twisted, had been dragged to the nearest marina, hauled out of the water, and deposited in a parking lot for later consideration/stripping.

We are all fine. We are all wiser and, for what its worth, we are all better sailors.

I Lose a Literary Hero: Goodbye to Mr. Updike

(Photo by Martha Updike)

Everything I needed to know in life, I learned from John Updike. I've got at least thirteen of his books, mostly dog-eared paperbacks, on my bookshelf. I probably read and lost or gave away that many more--and he wrote a whole lot more than that. I started reading him early and fast and I can say that in that special sense--the writer-to-reader-conversation sense--I've known him all of my adult life. In that sense, we were pals, John Updike and I.

He was bright beyond my capacity to understand intelligence, worldly in the strange, provincial way bookish people often are and great writers have to be, and yet able to communicate absolutely vital information about life to me, the farm boy from the Berkshire hills of New England. His writing was wise, profoundly titillating (literary sex? He got bad marks from the critics for that), and he had a wonderful grasp of how tragically funny people are when they descend into the murky wallow that is their humanity. Once I had read Updike, I understood my parents wisdom in fleeing suburbia when they did.

I saw him and heard him speak once. He was the speaker at my daughter's graduation from The University of Massachusetts back in, let's see, was it '89? It was hard to see him from way, way back where I was standing, on my tip-toes. All I could see was the shock of unruly gray hair as his stuttering delivery echoed over the heads of the milling, singing, happy mob. I wish I could say that I came away with a great pearl of Updike wisdom, but no, there was too much going on, too may distractions to follow the gist of his message.

From the endless reviews and essays and short stories to the novels about desperate housewives to the great ones about Rabbit Angstrom to the wonderful volume he called Selfconscousness, he covered it all--the true man of letters. How many are there of you left out there now, John?

Suviving Jet Lag, Sake, and Hirohito's Revenge: Blogging From the Far Side of the World

Here is the traveler, just new in Tokyo, jet-lagged, imposed upon, lost, gagging on the truth of his duality. Referring quickly to a copy of the Teaching of Buddha he found in his hotel on top of the Gideon Bible, the agonizing pilgrim finds the Dhammapada: A fool who thinks he is a fool is for that very reason a wise man. The fool who thinks that he is a wise man is called a fool indeed. And then, below that, our foolish-indeed traveler reads: Hard is birth as man, Hard is the life of mortals, Hard is the hearing of the Sublime Truth, Hard is the appearance of a Buddha.


Sensing a step toward enlightenment, the weary castaway reads on: Not to do any evil, To cultivate good, To purify one's mind,--this is the advice of the Buddhas.

But where to find the Buddhas? In the bright lights and big city that is Tokyo?

No, the sublimely foolish wandered finds the Buddhas in the temple. Lots of them. And then, later, in the company of fine friendships, takes another step toward---what? If it is the things we cling to that make us suffer, the traveler releases his jet lag, willingly, but clings to his friends a bit longer.

The cause of human suffering is undoubtedly found in the thirsts of the physical body and in the illusions of worldly passion. If these thirsts and illusions are traced to their source, they are found to be rooted in the intense desires of physical instincts.....

Off to Tokyo and Guam: What's This About Sake Bombs?

Here I am a few years ago with my great friend Don on the seawall on the island of Guam. We were neighbors when Terry and I lived on a sailboat on this seawall for 10 years. Seems impossible now. You can just see the blue sail cover of our boat off to the left of the picture. We had had some luck fishing that day and were proud, very happy, and just maybe a little drunk. So be it.

Tomorrow we fly to Tokyo and then next Monday, back to Guam for some book research and FEA business and some sailing and fishing, too, and a lot of partying, I'm certain. Right here on this seawall, the scene of a decade of great living.

Speaking of Tokyo, I'm glad I had to go to google to check on the history of SAKE or I never would have gotten the recipe for sake bombs. I'm going to try one--or maybe they don't actually drink sake bombs in Tokyo. Might be one of those American things. See, you fill a glass with beer and then carefully balance a shot of sake on two chopsticks over the beer and then after saying some sort of prayer or whatever, you hit the shot glass and the sake falls into the beer, glass and all. Never tried it and I'm not much into either sake or beer but I'll have to try just one. I'm actually a moderate drinker--really.

Spent the morning packing ( Success--I can wear size 36 pants again without raising my blood pressure) for the trip. The trouble is packing for winter Tokyo and tropical Guam--gonna need two suitcases, I guess. Hate that.

The cats are getting nervous. It stresses them out when we leave. Zeke always vomits on the bed and other find'em-with-your-foot places like the new, hand-woven carpet from India we have in the dining room. Always a pleasure coming home to those kinds of surprises.

The plumber was supposed to come this morning to heat wrap the pipes. He promised me (third time's a charm?). It's gonna get real cold tomorrow and last year the pipes froze. The plumber (is his name Joe? No, Joe the Plumber is in Israel reporting news, under, he says, the protection of his Christian God) doesn't want to do the job because he has to crawl/slide way in under the house to reach the pipes. He's been avoiding my phone calls by using caller I.D. but I nailed him yesterday by using my cell phone. Ha. He hasn't shown up yet and it's 12:30 p.m. I have a feeling he'll get the last laugh.

So, I'm outta here for almost two weeks. I might get to do a blog from the Far Rim of the Pacific. Until then.