CAPE COD REPORTS, 2006 These Cape Reports were originally letters to friends and family. They were meant to follow the sound email policy of never saying anything you wouldn't want the world to read, but if you see something here that offends you, let me know. No offense was intended, and I apologize. Many last names have been suppressed, so as not to intrude in friend’s lives. You’ll have to sort out the characters by context, if you care. JANUARY February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December 7 January 06 It was so nice one day last week that we took tunafish salad sandwiches and coffee to Provincetown and walked to Race Point. Lovely but very quiet. The nearest thing to wildlife was a giant container ship on the horizon. Later we parked at an unattended lot in town and walked from the wharf to Wa, the Japanese arts store across the street from Bubula's. Or to where it used to be. Wa is moving to new and larger quarters. Everything changes. P'town was bright and pretty but nearly deserted, a half a dozen stores open, a Subway. Spooky, like after the Second Coming, except that of course P'town would be Left Behind. It's probably busier on weekends. We decided to look in the big old UU church and found the door open and a young man just coming out. He spent twenty minutes showing us around. It's absolutely beautiful, a huge trompe l'oeil room on the second floor. Their legend is that the church in P'town was founded when two girls found a book by a Universalist divine washed up on the beach. They read it and were delighted to find that all their brothers, fathers, and uncles who had been lost at sea were safely in heaven. The small congregation uses the theater on the ground floor for services in the winter and the large room in the summer when they rent out the theater. Some of the plays are rather raunchy, our friend said. He bemoaned that P'town is barely a real town anymore. They may have to close the schools. Fewer stores and restaurants stay open past the season, so fewer residents can find jobs and are tempted to sell their houses at inflated prices and move away. It's happening in Eastham as well. Eventually we'll all be part of Greater Nantucket. As the rich become richer and collect second and third houses and there are more people without a roof, a job, health insurance, or hope, what eventually happens? I think a belated but high tech 1984 is more likely than a revolution. We walked out to the bay another day. Not a soul in residence anywhere. Like walking through a Mayan city. "Look at that," I said. "Three birds eating the red berries from that Christmas wreath." "Four," said Nancy, "and they're bluebirds!" And so they were, the first we've seen on the Cape. Very exciting. -- At the beech a giant frown loader was neatly piling boulders to make a breakwater. The operator was very skillful and artistic. What does it cost to have a breakwater made of ten ton boulders? If you have to ask.. The next day, in cold rain and wind, we walked in the swamp. Where better on such a day? I saw a small yellow sticker attached to a red cedar. Some new CCNS forest project? It said, "Completely Fat Free". And I would imagine a good souce of fiber as well. We're doing fine. The Fellowship's New Year's brunch was fun and well-attended. Don took some good pictures and published them in the Cape Codder. We owe dinners to a few non-fellowship folks and look forward to them. We look forward also to a visit from Mari in February. It's nice of people to come to see us on our sand spit. Seen from across 3,000 miles of ocean, our little dune could appear a bit insubstantial. I've thought about watercolor painting for some time. I've made a rather clever easel at least and taken some books from the library. There are probably as many beginning watercolor books as there are beginning watercolorists. None of them is very helpful. The books, that is. Every woman on the Cape, and half the men, paint or have painted. It's the local cliché. A few of them are extremely good, or appear so to me. Maybe I'll take a class. That's the right thing to do, and I have good people to ask about the best teachers. -- People always ask out of politeness whether I'm still writing. I am. I wrote two Morris stories this week and have another in mind. They come in spurts. The Chaplain and The Pig continues slowly. The characters take on different roles every few weeks. I work on Newhouse as well. -- The painting is more a substitute for outdoor work, which I don't do in the cold. Wimpy, but perhaps it's just age. I offered to repaint the kitchen cabinets gray and replace the bronze hinges with stainless steel. Nancy is thinking about it. She'd rather wave a wand and have brand new cabinets and marble countertops appear, but wands are expensive. I did put the last of the stainless steel screws in the porch steps. I got tired of From Jesus to Christianity. I remember I wearied of the subject once before in seminary, trying to squeeze too much from a handful of nineteen hundred year old writings. That's the problem, nothing written down sooner than thirty to fifty years after the death of Jesus, most over a hundred years later. The continuous existence of the church, however imperfect, has always been better evidence. What was interesting in the book were the details on how well Jesus and his activities fit into the contemporary world of Jewish sects and Greek mystery religions. -- La Belle France a short history (English title: Friend or Foe: an Anglo-Saxon History of France) was pretty good. Our very nice librarian says, 'La belle Fraantz,' but I understand her problem. After two years of French conversation can I say 'la belle fraauunce' without feeling silly, though not necessarily without sounding silly. -- The Victorians, by A.N. Wilson is enjoyable. I have several more fat books lined up. -- We heard the author of La Belle France on Book TV this morning. He was very witty and entertaining, always appreciated in a scholar. The world pageant offers both hopes and fears. The NSA, Presidential Signing Statements, Sharon, Abramoff, Alito. We watched the hearings and learned much about the Supreme Court but little about the judge except that he'll probably be another Thomas or Scalia, which is about what one could expect. CSpan is pretty much the only thing on TV worth watching. They'll probably take it away. I tried remembering way back the other day, to my single digits, and found that I remember places, smells (the memory of the smell, not quite the smell itself), sounds, and textures much better than I remember people. Is that odd or is it normal? We had Lois and Barry to dinner, the psychologists. We like them more each time. Lois is still working three days a week. Any troubled person who goes to her is fortunate. Barry must have been quite an effective therapist too. Now he devotes his energies to poetry. They recommend Amherst where they lived for many years, lovely country and lots of things going on. Then why did they move to the Cape? No ocean in Amherst. I hope the animal rights folks arrested out west weren't good friends. I suppose ultimately I'd come down on the side of law (if not order), but as some commentator pointed out it was absurd of our government to name them as "our most dangerous terrorists." Has anyone noticed that they attack things, not people? My mother got a letter today from H&R Block, addressed to our address in Eastham: "Dear Evelyn Chenoweth: Your recent move opens the door to some surprising tax deduction!" I guess the old saying about death and taxes is accurate. Some of you might be interested in coffeegeek.com FEBRUARY 8 Feb 06 We walked to Coast Guard during an "astronomical" high tide. We thought we'd make it, but the approach to the bridge was squishy, so we turned around and eventually drove out to the beach. A good think, as when we walked down to the bridge from the beach side it was under a foot of water. This is about as "extreme" as we like our weather. I think I'm as much of a positivist as you can be (although I'm perfectly open to fairies at the bottom of the garden and oxen kneeling on Christmas Eve), but I'm a little superstitious about saying, "I wish it would snow." We are to get some this weekend. -- Lovely sunny bracing days for the last few. We watched a mute Superbowl with classical music playing in the background. I said I wouldn't mind the sound, but Nancy said she preferred it that way too. We turned on the halftime show briefly to hear The Rolling Stones. As we watched the audience gyrate with their arms in the air, and Nancy said, "That reminds my of one of those paintings is the lost souls in hellfire by Bosch." We watched some of the King ceremonies. Nancy thought Rosa Parks' funeral had better music. It was good that the four presidents attended, even making veiled snipes. I don't seem to be maintaining my letter writing pace. My online ur-blog has continued for 6 years. Perhaps it will be more occasional at least. My father slowed a bit in later years, but there was a letter in his typewriter when he died. I'm glad to have his vast correspondence although I will probably never read it all. His air pistols, Samurai sword and switchblade were gone when I flew to Florida for his funeral. His 1/2 inch electric drill remained, and if I had had the spiritual energy I would have found a way to bring it. At the time I thought it would look too much like an Uzzi in my luggage. Our neighbor Vinni cut up a very large branch that had broken off one of Dave Russell's big oaks (with the absent Dave's permission), and offered me some. I took a wheel barrel full. It should be nice and dry by the time visitors arrive. For the French group I recorded off the web De Gaulle's speech on June 22, 1940, calling on all free French to rally to "Moi, General de Gaulle!" Stirring, though not up to either Churchill or Roosevelt. We enjoy listening to The World. You hear things like, "In football, Egypt..." Our day is structured. I get up a 6:30, turn on the coffee and the computer, check my email, and write for a couple hours. Breakfast is usually some strange day-old bread or roll from the Stop & Shop, thawed and toasted whole. We do our daily shopping and return by 11:30. Lunch is generally a can of soup, and a chapter or two in a "serious" book. After lunch we take our walk. After the walk, if I'm not building anything, I now paint for an hour. At four we listen to The World. At 4:15 we have wine and cheese. At five we eat. And after that we read and listen to music until 11:00. I don't envy those with more active lives, not do I feel guilty about mine. We do have our weekly chores, meetings, etc. Notes & Queries" "Indeed a visitor from another culture, or planet, who did not know what the function of the 'Holy Land' was, could be forgiven for supposing that it had been devised specifically as a battleground, where worshippers of supposedly the same all-loving deity came to denounce, abuse, and murder one another." A.N. Wilson, The Victorians. Thomas Hardy in his oblique, gentle, provincial English way had a bigger target in his ever-bright blue countryman's eyes. 'I have been looking for God for 50 years, and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him.' A. N. Wilson, The Victorians. And yet, from Hardy's 'The Oxen': If someone said on Christmas Eve, 'Come, see the oxen kneel 'In the lonely barton by ynder coomb Our childhood sed to know,' I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so. On a visit to Paris Tolstoy witnessed a man being guillotined and felt that, merely by attending such an atrocious act, he was colluding in murder. "in the same way now, at the sight of the hunger, cold and degradation of thousands of people, I understood not with my mind or my heart but with my whole being, that the existence of tens of thousands of such people in Moscow -- while I and thousands of others over-eat ourselves with beef-steaks and sturgeon and cover our horses and floors with cloth and carpet - no matter what all the learned men in the world may say about its necessity -- is a crime, not committed once but constantly; and that I with my luxury not merely tolerate it but share in it." Tolstoy, What then Must We Do, 1886. Rich people can use their wealth to protect themselves and have less need of the State's protection; but the mass of the poor have nothing of their own with which to defend themselves and have to depend above all on the protection of the state. Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 1891. 11 Feb 06 Some lovely sunny bracing days. We walked to Coast Guard during an "astronomical" high tide. We thought we could make it, but the approach to the bridge was squishy, so we turned around and eventually drove out to the beach. A good thing, as when we walked down to the bridge from the beach side it was under a foot of water. This is about as "extreme" as we like our weather. I think I'm as much of a positivist as one can be (although I'm open to fairies at the bottom of the garden and oxen kneeling on Christmas Eve), but I'm a little hesitant about wishing for snow. We we’re to get some over the weekend so we bought more candles. In the event, there was a lot, more than a foot. I shoveled every couple of hours, just two ruts for the wheels. We probably ended up shoveling more snow that way, but it was easy to do. Like looking for your car keys under the street light. Nancy did one shoveling. Not too hard she said, but once was enough. Alas, we had to cancel the Fellowship, and CBS Sunday Morning wasn’t on. Did I mention the bottlenose dolphins we saw at Audubon? Six feet long, pulled up on the land near the bridge at Goose Pond. They had red tags attached to their fins and looked more like plastic replicas than dead animals. There have been dozens of dolphin beachings lately, but it’s thought they’re owing to ‘natural’ causes and not the result of pollution or Naval sonar. Of course all our misdemeanors are by definition ‘natural.’ We watched a muted Super bowl with classical music playing in the background. I said I wouldn't mind the sound, but Nancy preferred it that way too. We turned the sound up very briefly during the halftime show to hear a bit of The Rolling Stones. As we watched the audience gyrate silently with their arms in the air, Nancy said, "That reminds me of one of those paintings by Bosch, of the lost souls in Hell." No offense intended. Nancy watched the King ceremonies. She thought Rosa Parks' funeral had better music, but it was good that the four presidents attended, even making veiled snipes at one another. My online ur-blog has continued for 6 years. It may become more occasional now. My father slowed a bit in his later years, although there was a letter in his typewriter when he died. I'm glad to have his papers. His air pistols, Samurai sword, and switchblade had been disposed of by the time I flew to Florida for his funeral. His 1/2 inch electric drill remained, and if I had had the spiritual energy I would have found a way to bring it home. At the time I thought it looked too much like an Uzzi. Our neighbor Vinni cut up a very large branch that had broken off one of Dave Russell's big oaks (with the absent Dave's permission), and offered me some logs. I took a wheel barrel full. It should be dry by the time visitors arrive. For the French group I recorded off the web De Gaulle's speech on June 22, 1940, calling on all free French to rally to "Moi, General de Gaulle!" Stirring, though not up to either Churchill or Roosevelt. We enjoy listening to “The World” on public radio. You hear things like, "In football, Egypt..." Our day is very structured. I get up a 6:30, turn on the coffee and the computer, check my email, download the French news, and write for a couple hours. My breakfast is usually some strange day-old bread or roll from the Stop & Shop, thawed and toasted whole. We do our shopping and errands and return by 11:30. Lunch is generally a can of soup, and a chapter or two in a "serious" book. After lunch we take our walk. After the walk, if I'm not building something, I now paint for an hour. At four we listen to The World. At 4:15 we have wine and cheese. At five we eat. And after that we read and listen to music until 11:00. I don't envy those with more active lives, not do I feel guilty about mine. We have our weekly chores, meetings, etc. A good life. ------------ You may remember that in the ‘50’s my father, as Corporate Secretary of Liggett and Myers, sent a politely canned answer to a somewhat disjointed letter from a Canadian woman. For the next 15 years he received weekly, and increasingly bizarre, letters from the same woman. Toward the end they were just envelopes containing pages cut from a dictionary. My mother tended in her later years to send (quite relevant and amusing) newspaper articles, cartoons, and the like. She just didn’t have that much to say she admitted. The following are some entertaining quotes: --- A.N. Wilson talked about his book, The Victorian, on Book TV I’ve just finished reading it and enjoyed it very much. Wilson was a very dry Brit. "Indeed a visitor from another planet, who did not know what the function of the 'Holy Land' was, could be forgiven for supposing that it had been devised specifically as a battleground, where worshippers of supposedly the same all-loving deity came to denounce, abuse, and murder one another." “Thomas Hardy in his oblique, gentle, provincial English way had a bigger target in his ever-bright blue countryman's eyes. 'I have been looking for God for 50 years, and I think that if he had existed I should have discovered him.' “ And yet, in 'The Oxen', Hardy writes: If someone said on Christmas Eve, 'Come, see the oxen kneel 'In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,' I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so. Paraphrased by Wilson from, Tolstoy, What then Must We Do, 1886. On a visit to Paris Tolstoy witnessed a man being guillotined and felt that, by merely attending such an atrocious act, he was colluding in murder. In the same way, to permit the hunger, cold, and degradation of thousands, while we stuff ourselves with beef-steak and sturgeon and cover our floors with carpets – is a crime no matter what all the learned men in the world may say about its necessity! Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 1891. Rich people can use their wealth to protect themselves and have less need of the State's protection; but the mass of the poor have nothing of their own with which to defend themselves and have to depend above all on the protection of the state. --- From a Times op-ed last week: Just before he became Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger warned that Western culture was sliding toward a relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own desires. In his first encyclical, “God is Love,” the pope faults modern people for missing the transcendent meaning of love and instead caring for one another just because we feel like it. The op-ed author asks, “Is that relativism, and if so is it wrong? What Pope Benedict calls relativism are actually the values of secular liberalism: individual autonomy, equal rights, and freedom of conscience.” ----- I don’t often agree with David Brooks, the moderately conservative Times columnist, but he wrote a good piece supporting gay marriage some months ago. This Sunday, his op-ed “Questions of Culture” is worth reading. “Once, not that long ago, economics was the queen of the social sciences. Human beings were assumed to be profit-maximizing creatures, trending toward reasonableness.” This would naturally result in people becoming more secular, nationalism fading, global institutions rising, with better communication greater cooperation and understanding, and more independent and rational-minded voters. “None of these suppositions turned out to be true.”........“The events of the past years have thrown us back to the murky realms of theology, sociology, anthropology, and history.....The fundamental change is that human beings now look less like self-interested individuals and more like socially embedded products of family and group.......” – Let’s hear it for anthropology! I’d add only that if anything were ever murky it’s economics, “the gray science.” ------ APRIL 7 April 06 It's still 40 degrees most days, but it's sunny, and the birds, the honeysuckle, the trees, the bulbs, the grass, the garlic mustard, and all the hearty crew can read the calendar. We keep our eyes peeled, but we haven't seen the Red Maple Swamp otter yet. I need to check a few details about porch roof construction and get to work on that. N is already exploring the bay window project. It was time for our quinquennial septic tank pumping ("pump and dump" in the trade), so we called Attaboy ("Faster than a Seagull on a French Fry"), and true to their ad a nice young man appeared next morning in a beautiful new truck. "Nice hole," he said. I'd dug down to the cover, not a service provided by every homeowner. I gave him the diagram of the Chapel in the Pines's septic system, and he went there next. I checked later and indeed saw the ground dug up about where the tank ought to be. It's quite satisfying to have had your tank pumped and pronounced "normal." A considerable relief as well, for septic fixes tend to be expensive. The rotten egg smell at the chapel has been identified (a magnesium instead of an aluminum anode rod in the water heater) and fixed. Fortunately TR is a chemist and Dave a bricoleur. Honest, he has a business card that says so. A bricoleur is an odd-job man. Dave has done many things, farmer, policeman, technical school instructor in wood and metal working, etc. He makes model aircraft out of metal that sell at high prices, for charity. I've undercoated the woodwork in the guest room and will proceed to paint it the same light gray as the kitchen cabinets. This was part of the plan, as a gallon is too much paint for the kitchen and a half gallon nearly the same cost. With the twin beds this room is rather small, as those who have inhabited it will remember. With trepidation (it involves the fatal "cutting holes in the wall" syndrome) I suggested a partial solution, and N pronounced it "brilliant." I'll inset a countertop, mirror, drawers, and shelves in the wall which opens into the basement stairwell, where there is a large amount of unused space. It was nice having my article on the Fellowship published in the Cape Codder. Don had said he'd sent it on to the editor in chief, and that was the last I heard. I figured oh well and, surprise, there it was! Unchanged too. No, I don't think it will bring in the hoards. Not that we really want hoards, just a few more good men and women. Five years ago someone expressed concern that the Fellowship might get too big and change its character. I had to chuckle quietly. We said the same thing about many of our offerings at the Penn Library. Never happened. I did put out a few fliers for the talk this Sunday by the Rasmussens on The Lewis and Clark Trail. Growing up in St. Louis, Lewis and Clark were my first intimations of history, and I'm still fond of them, warts and all. We asked TR and Bets to dinner on the 10th. "That's next Monday," I said to N. "Oh!" she said. "I thought it was a week from Monday! We'll have to go to the store!" TR and Bets are vegetarians. They eat dairy, so they get our famous spaghetti and spinach, one of my favorites. It contains one egg. I'd asked about eggs and TR didn't mention them. We won't say anything either. It can be like Kissinger's famous dinner in China, where pork was renamed "duck". I think they are both easy-going health and broadly-environmental principled vegetarians. But I'm not sure. Bets is a manager at the Orleans "Whole Foods" (not the chain). I've been enjoying Karen Armstrong's new book, The Great Transformation; the beginning of our religious traditions. It covers 1600 to 220 BCE and primarily "the Axial Age" during which the great religious geniuses got beyond ritual and sacrifice and discovered "a transcendent dimension at the core of our being," i.e. the self, the atman, and its joys and sorrows. Best discussion of the origins of the great religions I've ever read. Don' t know if practitioners would agree. Also Gary Will's What Jesus Meant? According to Wills, he didn't mean to found a church. "Heaven's reign is himself, the avenue of access to the Father. He partly opened that access on earth, but the process will be complete only in the Father's bosom when history ends. One enters the heavenly reign by sharing Jesus' own intimacy with the Father. He is the Vine, to which the branches must be attached to draw life from him. By becoming members of his mystical body, one honors the Father and passes the key test for a disciple: treating the poor, the thirsty, the hungry, the naked as if they were Jesus." (Incidentally, we can't ever ourselves tell who is fixed to the vine -- so there!) -- This is strong stuff. I think it's why Christianity endures. I suppose it's what drives George Bush and the more sincere of his keepers. Except, where's the charity with these guys? That's Armstrong's mantra too. You can tell a true religion because it produces economic and social justice. The administration just produces tax cuts for the wealthy. And Tom Delay is a deeply religious man. Go figure. -- The other problems with this picture are that it doesn't fully emerge until the Gospel of John, which was written at least 100 years after Jesus' death, and, appealing as it may be, the whole business just bonks off a lot of beans. Faith is required in any event, but it makes more sense to some to have faith that things pretty much are as they appear to be. Evidently Darwin felt the same regret. To be continued. 17 April 06 I was watching a squirrel sit on a branch and flip his (or her) tail. It was really quite a graceful and eloquent performance. I've seen this often before but never watched it carefully. It could be a full-fledged language. I don't suppose it is, but I flipped back with my hand, and the squirrel seemed to reply. We carried on an inane conversation for several minutes. N and I were in Provincetown the other day, standing behind Whaler's Wharf where the old broken sign for "Provincetown Playhouse" is lying, when an Englishwoman and her daughter asked about the playhouse. We talked about O'Niell and such, London subways (she hated them), the Boston MTA (she loved it -- greener fields, I suppose), whale watching (the whole boat was violently seasick (we tutted), and then she said, "Did we see a fox or a coyote this morning?" We discussed it and couldn't decide. There are foxes that look like coyotes and vice versa, but there are also foxes that look like they stepped from the "F is for" page of a child's alphabet book, and coyotes that look like White Fang. I saw one this morning come through our woods and cross the street to "xxx Pitts". (We thought the sign had been "The Pitts" before it was partially blacked out, but on close inspection it turned out to be "Wm Pitts.") The coyote was a big canine, maybe 40 pounds, still with most of its gray-brown winter coat, long legs, and the famous wolf-like cold eyes. I love seeing them. We went to P'town because it was a lovely day. We walked at the Beech Forest. It is really still pre-spring, not much action. We ate our sandwiches at the Visitor’s Center and then drove into town and parked on Commercial Street. P'town was bright and colorful, populated but certainly not busy, and diligently preparing for the season. Painting, carpentering, restocking, and much cheerful talk all around us. We felt pleasantly like part of it. "Oh, good color, but you missed a bit of trim there." One of the more genuine artificial places on the planet. Our neighbor the pilot was taking his boat up to Race Point yesterday because there had been many whale sightings close in. He also had seen the big humpback at Macmillan Wharf that we saw with John one Thanksgiving. It hung around for a week, he said. The Easter Brunch was very enjoyable. All potlucks are unplanned and always work out. Evidently the population in general is conveniently apportioned among salad, desert, appetizer, and main dish people. Joan Sparrow's grandson, a local plumber, came and asked if he could come back as he'd had such a fascinating conversation with "that guy in the red shirt" (Art Rosenzweig). We said sure. A woman named Nickerson is moving to Eastham from Nantucket and bringing her dozen bee hives. Art had a long conversation with her about spirituality. Cindy came, on her way back to Michigan. We'll miss her. We said get rich, come back, and build a trophy home. She left the Fellowship an old electric organ "for the rummage sale." Fortunately she and the plumber were strong enough to bring it in her trailer. Cindy is six feet, 200 pounds. Then there's Julie, a friend of TR's who chipped our fallen trees for us. She's 6'2" and maybe 225, but she's still partly he until she can afford the operation. I read an amusing crime novel that should be in PETA's library, The Ethical Assassin (I think), about an animal rights hit man. The assassin is entertaining, but the hero of the book is a 17 year old kid, selling encyclopedias in Florida to finance his first year at Columbia University. The hole in the wall project advances satisfactorily. N approves. It's more complicated than I planned. Inevitably, as I never plan in detail. Dorothy Sayers, in her Mind of the Maker, proposes that God has a rough plot idea in mind but lets the actors improvise. Improvisation r us. 21 April 06 As to immigrants, I think our country has an obligation to be as generous and useful to the world as it can be, something we are far from doing now. But I don't see opening the borders to the world's problems as doing that. The Haitians and the Chaddians will follow to "do the jobs that Mexicans won't do", i.e. for literally slave wages. We have created the problem and are obligated to solve it. Close the borders, firmly enforce the law on employers, help recent, non-invested comers to repatriate, and deal over time with the families. Some to stay with close supervision, some to go with continued assistance. Return fairness to the process from now on. We do need immigrants, but with 300 million inhabitants we ought to be able to collect our own garbage and get paid a living wage for doing it. 27 April 06 We bought an 8 inch Japanese style Farberware chef's knife for $9.95 at the Stop & Shop. Sounds cheapo, but it works great. We can slice and dice just like Ming. We're inactivists and imperfectionists. Lifestyles of the cheap and simple. Saw a good eggplant Parmiagane on America's Test Kitchen and found pretty much the same recipe in our Vegetarian cookbook. We'll try it. -- We always welcome recipe suggestions. The Water Women of WILPF (Women's International League for Peace and Freedom) program was interesting and depressing. Did you know that there are places in the US where it's illegal to collect your own rain water? All the rain that falls in your yard belongs to a commercial water company and must be allowed to sink into the soil. (Though I think this may be more like not bringing food and drink into the ballpark than ownership.) Wellfleet had considered privatizing, but it was voted down. Not sure how that would work on the Cape anyway, as it's all one source. It was once thought our water came in an underground river from New Hampshire, but it's now known that our single lens is self-contained and all fed from Cape rainwater. Will air be privatized next? I suppose it has been in a sense. Permission to pollute the air is bought and sold. What fun. Some "churches" provide solutions. We offer problems. Saw Karen Armstrong on Book TV talk about The Great Transformation for a second time. Standing room crowd in the bookstore in DC. One senses a hunger. Well worth watching. She looked a bit worn. Great book. File the title away in your to-be-looked-at list. All the changes in our relationship to the universe and the holy had been well rung 200 years BCE. She tells it clearly. N and I teeter between wu wei (the ritual "doing nothing" of Chinese kings) and yo wei (self-effort, of the mildest sort in our case). Spring doesn't burst onto the scene here. It creeps in almost unnoticed. The garlic mustard and bush honeysuckle are doing fine, but buds are barely visible on the trees. Last year we left here during early spring to find late spring in England and returned two week later to more early spring. We don't escape global warming though. We haven't had real ice flows since the winter of '99. The forsythia is healthy this year, and there are some lovely stands of daffodils. We admired Bob Fay's garden and pointed out that we provided the woods on the block. He was polite about our woods. The wealthiest part of Westfield, N.J. was called Witchwood (or maybe Wychwood). Ours is a true witch wood, a Tolkein's Mirkwood (although without the giant spiders and black squirrels), tangled and thick. Pretty ticky too. We're belling a chicken tonight for Steve and Kathy Hertz. This is nothing like belling the cat. We used our stoneware cooking bell for the first time last month, and it worked wonderfully, very moist and flavorful chicken. It's best to brown it first. Browning a whole chicken is a peculiar task which N is glad to leave to me. -- The guest room wall-niche (formerly hole-in-the-wall-project) is done except for the drawer. We need to visit Mid-Cape for wood and a drawer slide. They should have an honor roll for faithful customers. I'm always asked if I have a contractor number. Maybe I should get one. I used to give blood at the Penn hospital, and once overheard a great fuss being made over someone who'd given for ten years. I'd given blood for more years than that but in those days I wouldn't have chatted up the vampires. I'm almost finished with Scorpion's Gate, a novel by Richard Clark (yes, that Richard Clark). Pretty good technothriller, set a few years hence, about a president in bed with the Saudi princes and a mad Secretary of Defence planning to go to war in the middle-east over faked provocations. Where does he get these crazy plot ideas! If it was morning in America 25 years ago I guess now it's l'heure bleu Americaine or maybe the twilight of the kitchen goddess. We had our book group discussion of Tracy Kidder's Mountains beyond Mountains, about Paul Farmer. Farmer got his MD and PhD (in anthropology) from Harvard at the same time, having spent only about half the required time in residence, the other half in Haiti. He's written scores of books and articles, been involved in many public health efforts around the world. Long the partner of Ophelia Dahl, daughter of Roald Dahl (James and the Giant Peach) and Patricia Neal (actress with CP). Finally proposed to her, but she said nah because he was really married to his work. She still is CEO of his organization Partners in Health, in Boston. No one in the book group really knew what to make of him. Kidder did a good job, but an interesting book was hard to write. (Loved his Soul of New Machine eons ago.) Farmer is unique, brilliant, workaholic, talkative, private, a warm and dedicated clinician who can do international relations, a wordsmith, fond of food, drink, and women, but little time for any. No interest in money. Married Didi an educated, patient Haitian; they have a daughter Catherine. He's only 46. Main message: Farmer is strange; there is a huge amount to be done in world health; it can be done; it isn't being done; it probably won't be done; we have to try. "The long defeat" Farmer calls it. Cheer you up? -- Next month Barak Obama. We always welcome book suggestions. I pulled a new 1000 page book on Africa off the shelf at the Snow Library, looked suspiciously through the chapters and then at the last page. Guess what: the situation is hopeless! The corruption is so total that any effort to help ends up in someone's Swiss bank account. Hopeless but not serious, and one must try. The Chinese dealt with this 2500 years ago. JUNE 11 June 06 We celebrated our 42'd anniversary by going out to dinner, a rare occurrence. We tried the new ribs place across Rte 6 from where JP's is being rebuilt. N enjoyed her fish, and I thought my half rack of barbequed ribs was fantastic. I hadn't had ribs since Denise Plested cooked them for us 40 years ago in West Philadelphia. I probably won't have them again in this lifetime. I'm already carrying too much karma. Sometimes eating out is good, sometimes less so. It's rarely better than what we eat at home far more cheaply and have the fun of cooking it. Eating out with friends is festive, but it's hard for aging ears to talk in noisy restaurants. Hi-speed internet is great. Friends say, you still had dialup! I didn't use it that much, I said. You will, they replied. Well, maybe. It's great for the lack of waiting. It's great for the French radio and TV. I use it more for info, because it's there. I still don't use it just to use it. Too many other things to do. 'Browsing the web' seems a bit feckless. At nearly 71 the efficiency is appreciated. I tell myself I don't have to accomplish anything. Just get up in the morning, make coffee, and enjoy the day. But I feel like I ought to accomplish small things at least, that I want to, and that I'd better get on with it! The front porch is nearly done. There was a long rain delay. It rained buckets for days. Five inches in Falmouth. They had floods. On Cape Cod! We just had mammoth puddles and had to find a few inventive routes. The swamp is full and incredibly lush. Everything is lush. I like lush. What if it rained like this all summer? Would it get too lush? Would we molder? We'll see. We had to buy a new toaster oven, as our 10 year old Black & Decker died. We bought a new Black & Decker at Snows on their 15% off sale day. There are instructions in 8 languages. To make a piece of toast, you..... 20 June 06 The front porch, a distraction I hadn't planned on, is finished. The screen door finally closes after I sanded the doorstep for two days. I varnished the step and that should do it. The step is supported by the last slat from John's old bed, which we think was previously Mari's old bed. The bulk of the bed lives on, of course, in the penitential futon. I think we'll wait now until after the visiting season to put a roof on the back porch, but N mentioned shelves for the guestroom closet and, voila, we produced them in one day. The guest room needs only a light in the alcove, which awaits inspiration. (Hey, another great book title: "A Light in the Alcove." Not a book I'd read. I hear titles all the time: "The Concrete Gazebo", "Bad Grapes Don't Bounce"; "Askew"; "Tangled Vines"; "A Remembrance of Cod"; "All the More Easier". Feel free to write the book. Now a good title would be John's famous: "Is This Where We Are?" A real challenge.) It's time for the annual chipmunk run, when every chipmunk in town has to run across the road in front of our car, tail straight up, points for how close they can cut it. We try to avoid them but never look back. There seem to be an awful lot of chipmunks this year. And voles, the short-tailed, short-legged furry cigar butts which are nearly as quick across the road as the chipmunks. -- N just saw a great crested flycatcher on top of the bird feeder! They're a big bird, with a yellow breast and a buzz cut. We planted two nice creeping junipers on either side of the back porch. More rain last night, it's rained practically every day for weeks. The wood are a jungle. We like it that way, but we hope the rain pauses next weekend. When we used to have to go to Hyannis to get our car serviced, we combined it with a trip to the mall and lunch. New that there's a Honda place in Orleans we have breakfast at the Hearth and Kettle while we wait. A nice custom. Breakfast out is the best restaurant meal. For once, we didn't run into the WWII air men association, where we always see Dave Eagles who was a bombardier stationed in Italy. The bombed the Ploesti oil fields. He has many great stories, not about war but about wartime Italy. N and I are enjoying Jewish Literacy, the most important things to know about the Jewish religion, its people, and its history, by Joseph Telushkin, a Conservative Rabbi. It's long but interesting, informative, highly readable, and even amusing in spots. Probably the worlds' best story, with wonderful gems of wisdom in the commentaries on the Torah. JULY 11 July 06 Sunday Joan Sparrow talked about Ellery Channing, transcendentalist. Joan is tiny and 85 and put one leg up on a shooting stick while she talked, then both legs. She has a wonderful voice. There were visitors. We were quite proud of her. But it wasn't about transcendentalism at all. No one ever really talks about transcendentalism. It may not even have existed except in retrospect. I defined it once for a group, but I forget anything I said. She talked about Ellery Channing. Not William Ellery Channing the great Unitarian Divine. This Ellery Channing was a distant nephew, a spectacularly ne'er-do-well charmer who wandered the world living off his friends and relatives, abandoning his wife and children, writing poetry, and accompanying Thoreau on walks to Maine and Cape Cod. Wouldn't we have liked to listen to their conversations! Joan talked about the cast of characters, Channing, Emerson, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, et al, Brook Farm, and the so aptly named Fruitlands. Then she read a short paper her mother had written about Channing in 1981, at the age of ninety. It was wry and clever and fun. Her mother lived to be a hundred. Some people should. - Maria and Nathaniel Hawthorne were well known, by the way, as a particularly amorous couple. Just this month Maria and their daughter were returned from England to lie beside Nathaniel. It was wonderful to see you all. We think of you often in your daily rounds. We had to check in with my parents after each of their many moves so we could visualize their lives as recorded in weekly letters by my father. His letters were more philosophical than mine, which was both good and bad. Our small Cape lives are like the nature trails, the same but subtly different every day. For variety, we take the trails backwards sometimes, a whole new experience. Or we try to see them from another point of view. The National Seashore's "Caution Tick Habitat" signs are suggestive. I can imagine the letters: "Dear Park Administrator: Lately you have been trimming the edges of the trails through our habitat. This makes hunting difficult for us. Please desist immediately! Yours, The Ticks." - We passed a couple desperately removing ticks from their big hairy sheepdog in the Fort Hill parking lot. "There's terrible ticks on the trail!" they warned us. "Hm," says N. "I suppose you know that dogs aren't allowed on the trails?" "But WE got them, too!" they wailed. So I suppose it's all right. We didn't notice any ticks. Perhaps they got them all. My grandfather Frohock wrote "note that" letters. "Note that you have been.... Note that you went to...." Flattering in a way, but not too informative. My digital camera in portrait mode (138 pictures on my 16MB chip) does a nice job with the local flora. I'm replacing as many as I can of the filched images in the Eastham Wildlife database with my own. No amount of prose or photos can capture nature, however. Perhaps a poem can, but poetry is hard. I've tried. I've worked a whole week on some and at the end had just a small pile of words. The 16th is "Poetry Sunday" at the chapel. One of these is traditional every year. It also fills a Sunday when we're failed to entice a speaker. I looked up Billy Collins, Alan Dugan, and Ted Kooser on the web. Poetry is like chocolate, too rich to consume much of it at a time. No one makes a living at it. Few even make a name. Anyone can do it, though, and a bad poem is still a poem and possibly more revealing than a good one. Probably, in fact. -- So I got a book of poems by each of the three from the library (fortunately Martha The Librarian is a poet.) Wonderful stuff, but I'll never be able to choose. N says put off the porch roof until she's paid the bills. Maybe in August. Don't mind if I do. It's a bit warm these days for light construction, although I don't notice once I get started. Sweat is it's own antidote. I learned on guard duty that letting yourself feel as cold as you are really works. Alas, though, the mind can't protect you from frostbite or sunstroke. Anyway, I have to finish the talk on The Great Transformation before the 23d. The "beginnings of our religious traditions" in 400 pages is hard enough. In 45 minutes it's absurd. I may have to leave something out. I bought a 99 cent packet of Sun-Bird Thai Red Curry Seasoning Mix some weeks ago. I whipped it up as an alternative sauce for a stir fry I was making, and, wonder of wonders, it was pretty spicy, but N liked it. We put a bit on by spoon, to taste, rather than mixing in the whole packet. Still another cheap thrill. Beverly arrives tomorrow night. If she can get out of Boston. The Big Dig strikes again. It must be a holy mess. 25 July 06 A beautiful day yesterday. The kind when we used to stand in the parking lot outside Genuardi's and say, " This reminds me of Cape Cod!" We still do that occasionally in the Stop and Shop parking lot. Elder humor. We walked at Audubon where there was quite a full house. Their new buildings are handsome although not finished inside. We inspected two green herons with the Bushnells and saw not a speck of green. I looked in the Peterson Guide later. It said green herons have "a bluish back and a chestnut neck." Quite so. Then why not call them chestnut herons? The legs are supposed to be greenish yellow but looked orange in the illustration. The illustration of the immature green heron did show it with decidedly green legs. And so what, you say. We had a long talk with the woman in charge of the Audubon's new gardens. We know nothing about gardens, but the proper nodding can make you an expert. Nancy mentioned "invasives" and got the party line. Gardeners are very serious. As are philatelists and many others I suppose. I always contended that I was serious, but no one took me seriously. That afternoon it was still so nice we walked at Salt Pond. We met an old woman with a foreign accent who asked the way to the beach. We directed her. She also wanted directions to the bay. All on foot. I suggested a map, but some people can't read maps, just as some people can remember names. The talk on Karen Armstrong went okay I thought. We had a goodly crowd, at least half of whom were visitors. This was just as well as many of our own were off on jaunts. One very large, in fact downright giant visitor said he thought most religious intuitions were inspired by violence. No one disagreed. And that was indeed a major point of Armstrong's about the Axial Age. I talked with him afterwards. He was an engineer who has worked all around the world. He could have been a model for The Chaplain in my novel, but I didn't tell him. He had worked in the middle east and said all the middle eastern countries worked against each other. It would seem so. -- Next week Art talks on Rumi, a medieval Sufi poet. We provide the goodies. I'm considering adding pickled herring to the usual fare, as Art and I both like it. The smallest jar is $5, however, more pickled herring than anyone really wants, but we'll see. Burt and Joyce Hallowell came to the meeting. He's our neighbor, the ex-president of Tufts. They seemed interested in the book group too. They're reading Daniel Dennett's new book on religion, which won't be a book group choice. I'd seen it at the library but passed it by as I assumed I knew what he'd say and would agree. Maybe I'll read it. It's completely reductionist, but so what. Why the "intelligent design" folks would expect to be able to see the hand of the almighty has always puzzled me. I have no idea whether or not there's a god who throws dice, but I can't imagine one wasting time with a cosmic muppet show. We had hamburgers for supper. "Would you like a slice of onion with your burger?" I asked the lady. "Yes," she said, "a thin one." So I cut a thin slice and asked if it was okay. "That's nice," she said. "You like the slice?" I said. "The slice is nice?" "I like the slice," she said. "The slice is nice." I have now pepped up the Fellowship's web site a bit. If anyone has suggestions I'd be glad to hear them: www.nfuu.org I also cut the chapel grass, leaving a large patch of wildflowers in the back yard uncut, the unpaid landscaper's prerogative. Tomorrow the old refrigerator, which was sold to us as used for just two days but was actually used for three years, will be taken away and replaced with a theoretically brand new one, at additional cost. If it sounds to good to be true.... We hear there is an unexplained upsurge of murder and mayhem in Boston and DC. City dwellers take extra care. Perhaps it's global warming. Perhaps some folks have noticed that the TV ads which used to be for Oxydol and Pepsident, products they could actually buy, are now all for products they can't afford. And that takes us up to the minute. AUGUST 1 August 06 Is this how summers will be from now on? We thought we'd gone to heaven when we moved from Saint Louis to New Jersey in 1947 and didn't have to sleep on a sheet on the living room floor all summer. From Philadelphia to Cape Cod was another such cool move, but the summer heat keeps after us. I suppose another Little Ice Age, although pleasant, would have its inconveniences as well. We might freeze and starve. I gather that global warming, too, will create serious problems for the food supply in many parts of the world, and we're all linked now, so our supplies will go down as well and prices up. Perhaps we'll manufacture food from coal, which we seem to have plenty of for the moment Won't that be tasty! Or maybe it will. Everything is mathematical, digital, a matter of degrees. If we can overrun the tastebuds' ability to distinguish anthracite from anchovies, we've got it made. I already like veggie burgers better than most hamburgers. Veggie bluefish? We'll see. I'm glad Maury now has air conditioning. It wasn't thought necessary in San Diego. It wasn't thought necessary anywhere once. My family got its first air conditioner in 1964, a window unit that cooled the whole first floor of 550 Colonial. We thought it quite marvelous. The Furness (Fine Arts) Library at Penn was air conditioned only in the 1980's. They had long slow summers before that. Slow is not all bad. I see San Francisco is back in the 70's. Fortunately low tide is running through the middle of the day this week. We can walk on the beach, which is more breezy than the trails and less buggy. The vistas are good for the soul. The soul such as it is. I'm thoroughly enjoying Daniel C. Dennett's new book, Breaking the Spell, religion as a natural phenomenon. His point is not to show definitively how this is the case but rather how it could be the case and how the question is suitable for scientific investigation. I'm more than halfway through, and it's very enlightening and entertaining. I passed it by when I first saw it in the library because I figured I already agreed. I'm glad I reconsidered. Full of interesting bits: "In the UK, the law regarding cruelty to animals draws an important moral line at whether the animal is a vertebrate.....It's a pretty good place to draw the line, but laws can be amended, and this one was. Cephalopods--octopus, squid, cuttlefish-- were recently made honorable vertebrates.....because they have such strikingly sophisticated nervous systems." I don't entirely agree with Dennett about religion, of course. William James defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Sounds good to me, and pretty adaptable, but Dennett calls these people "spiritual" not "religious". "They are, if you like, honorary vertebrates." For Dennett, religion is always about the supernatural. For me, everything is natural, including us, the supernatural, the spirits in the wood, god or gods, the Ground-of-Being, etc. How could it not be? Natural and thoroughly physio-chemically determined as well. And yet business proceeds as usual, and why not: trying to live together in peace and enjoy life. An old addiction surfaced in a mild form. I decided that the Eastham Wildlife database should have a search function if possible. 1AND1, the Fellowship web site provider, doesn't allow Perl scripts. It does allow ASP.net, which I'm investigating. Nor does my Comcast.net web site support Perl. But my old free Prohosting website does, so I wrote a small search engine and link to this from 1&1 and Comcast. Now I have to do all the indexing in the database itself. Should keep me out of other mischief. I'll report on progress. This stuff IS addictive. In the olden days I used to work on programs until they finally ran or my eyes fell out. The son of the friendly woman behind the counter at the post office was killed in Iraq. He was a sergeant, a career military man, and the first soldier killed from the Cape. Single mother. Only son. Very sad. One would like to feel his death was worth something. The local papers say it was. Bob, a veteran of many island campaigns in the South Pacific, says it never is (in general, not this death). How can I, a veteran of the Hofbrauhaus Campaign of 1960 and a puzzled bystander during Vietnam, say anything? P'fui. I don't say much about Lebanon either, but ugly as it is I don't see that the Israelis have much choice. Except for a small number of ultra-orthodox and secular nationalists who want all of Palestine, most Israelis just want to live in peace. But how can they when their neighbors send missiles and suicide bombers and demand the destruction of Israel and the death of all Jews. Words can be violent acts too. The daughter and family of one member of the Fellowship escaped from Southern Lebanon and think Hesbollah fighter are heroes. Other Fellowship members are dedicated pacifists. We leave the topic alone. Little to be gained by fighting the war here. As my Jewish professor friend, a frequent visitor to Israel said, "I don't know what's right, but I know that the Israeli's, wise or foolish, are the final authorities on the health and survival of Israel." At Art's suggestion, we tried a can of red salmon. Pricey but good for two salads. Good but not that much better than tuna. I think we'll have tunafish salad sandwiches for supper. We walk on the flats at 11:00. No farther than we feel like. Remember that when you were children (decades ago, right) there were still shells on the beach? Now there are just small black snails, lots of them. The cockroach of the sea, I guess. Natural selection in action. Then in 2630, the Great Snail and Cockroach War... 15 August 06 I often check the weather in "our" cities on my Comcast home page: Eastham, Philadelphia, Virginia Beach, San Diego, and now Oakland. We're all having pretty good weather these days. I wouldn't have thought San Francisco would be so much cooler than Oakland! Of course the weather reported for Hyannis is often not ours and for Boston almost never is. Weather is an important part of our lives, but we don't let it change our habits. Nancy watches the weather channel quite a bit. It's cosy. The weatherpersons obviously feel deprived at the moment. They live for hurricanes, floods, and blizzards. We can live without them. Our home insurance company dumped the whole Cape. Wimps! Our agent scurried and found us other insurance, no doubt more expensive. A walk on the flats yesterday was heavenly. Bright, breezy, cool enough for a denim shirt. Sail boats, children, and great space. "I found a crab!" one cries. How many crabs been discovered over the ages by how many children? Fifteen seconds of crustacean fame. Too bad there aren't more shells and sea creatures on the beach. There are still fish in the sea, as evidenced by the many distant fishing boats. Bluefish are plentiful this summer(yum), and even sea bass (too expensive and bland). TR showed slides and a video of Andy Goldsworthy's constructions with nature on Sunday. Fantastic stuff, what patience. He met Goldsworthy in California, a fellow Scot. TR was born in this country, his parents Scots through Canada and briefly "illegal aliens" (affects your point of view), but he likes to think of himself as a Scot. -- I enjoy looking for patterns in nature with my digital camera. No need to mess with it like Goldsworthy, at least on a micro scale. All sorts of amazing stuff turns up. The Eastham Wildlife database has vastly expanded since I've been taking my own pictures. I've no plans to finish it. It's up now, but I'll announce a grand re-opening one of these days. Of course I have to identify things before I add them, which is sometimes a challenge even with a dozen trail guides and the web. There are 134 varieties of goldenrod. It's everywhere in Eastham, almost all of one variety which I now think is Seaside Goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens). All Eastham frogs are mud-colored on top (that I can understand) and bright green on the bottom (why?). These appear to be, not surprisingly, Green Frogs (Rana clamitans). Green frogs are known by their large external ear drums, black back stripes and a very green upper lip. They would be noticable on anyone. I found a few ragweed plants on North Forty. I've heard of ragweed all my life, but I couldn't have identified it before today. So it goes. A harmless hobby. I need to change the name of the database: Natural History of Eastham, Natural Eastham, Eastham: plants, animals, habitats. Haven't decided. Eastham Wildlife is the only thing left on my free Prohosting web pages, because that's the only place I can use Perl scripts. Fortunately they give me 100MB of disk space, and the database takes only 8 so far. My Comcast web page offers only 25MB, which is still plenty for everything else. 1 AND 1, which I use for the Fellowship page provides 500MB, of which we use hardly any. Maybe I'll use some for backup. N and I are reading "Team of Rivals", about Lincoln's Cabinet, by Doris Kearns Goodwin for the book group. 800p. but very good. I knew I hadn't properly appreciated Lincoln because of my visceral dislike of the Civil War. He sounds like a remarkable man, brilliant, effective, and good. Kind, sad, and funny, too. Someone you'd like to know. We have almost ten times as many people in the country now. Are there no Lincolns among them? We could particularly use his refusal to demonize his enemies, slaveholders, drinkers, etc. Our neighbors Burt and Joyce are reading it, but they'll be in Maine for the book group. They may come to the next meeting. Small dragon fly (tiny voice): "Please, sir, may I have a Ferrari-red thorax." Lord of the Dragon Flies: "You maaaaay." There's a baby bunny in our yard. I keep thinking it's a small gray rock. There are a lot of bunnies in our yard this year. It reminds me of the time we stayed over on town cove near the Cove Burying Ground, and the rabbits were tripping over each other. Perhaps it will be a good winter for coyotes. Karen's new apartment sounds nice. I'm glad Scout likes the windows. I hear Sara and Andy's condo has new tile on the kitchen floor, almost. We hear that Megan and John and the cats are happy in their still bareish new apartment which is surrounded by ethnic eateries. Heaven! Maury appreciates her air-conditioner. Brown of Brown's Burner is fall-servicing our furnace even as I write. All's pretty well with the households, except that we might have a small leak between the pump and the water tank. A bear that could be. I emphasize that the longish thing I sent about humanism is just if you're interested. I wrote something about Israel too, which I may send along. My colleagues at the Fellowship being largely pacifists aren't too happy with Israel at the moment. I agree that violence (like revolution) usually makes things worse, but history and context can't be ignored. I sent it to the Israel Embassy, asking for a critique or something better. Who know's if they'll reply, but they've been polite before. -- Lifestyles of the idle. Maury says that she just finished reading "A Man Without a Country" by Kurt Vonnegut, and he says that 'humanists act as decently, fairly and honorably as they can without any expectation of rewards and punishments.' -- Even as a little kid, the 'reward in Heaven' part sounded odd to me. If that's what it's about, I'll take mine here. "Be good for goodness sake," sounded about right, (if you ignore the illogic of 'He knows when you've been bad or good...'). -- She also went to a talk on Ancient Iraq. The instructor had a piece of genuine cuneiform writing and a few copies. It was illegibly tiny, but she guessed they didn't live long enough to have middle aged eyes. -- Teeth too I must add. I'm down three that I don't seem to need, which I figure saved us a mint. I have them filled but not crowned. Looking around, I note that many seniors seem to have lost interest in being dentally ready for prime time. I have this apple sticker problem. Drives Nancy bananas. I peel the coded sticker off the apple so as not to eat it (Southern Rose #3001) and idly attach it to my pants or shirt. They turn up in the wash. I'll try to be better. Time for lunch. It was bound to happen eventually. 24 August 06 The competing yellow pages was just delivered, "one in every driveway," apparently. Is it stupidity or passive aggression, that a book was dropped at each end of the many "U" shaped driveways in Eastham, most entrances obviously belonging to the same house, four extra on just our street? Perhaps the workers felt that they were not underpaid to deliver the phone books so much as underpaid to unload them, which they did. I note on the front page ("a la une" as the French say) of the NYT that Oakland is trying to deal with their soaring murder rate, particularly in East Oakland, one of the cradles of rap. They're trying diplomacy, which evidently has been fairly effective in other cities. Perhaps we could try it in the middle east. I'm well along in "Team of Rivals." I'd known that emancipation wasn't Lincoln's main concern, at least at the beginning of the war. It was to preserve the Union. Was that worth 600,000 lives I always wondered? But I'd missed the point. Lincoln was concerned with proving that democracy ("of the people, by the people, and for the people")could work. That the minority could live with the decisions of the majority and the majority consider the needs and wishes of the minority. A point which is evidently difficult for many pre-democratic societies to grasp. "We win, you lose!" -- A lot of deaths just the same, and does the majority's beating the minority bloody to get their acquiesence count, but at least I get the point. The porch roof procedes slowly. "Did you have to take down the gutter?" N asks. I explained. My construction often entails a certain amount of preparatory destruction. "Making holes in the house" never goes over well, but it usually works out in the end. As does doing my own design and engineering. If there's an appropriate how-to book, I'll use it, but there often isn't. David J is supposed to call this week about coming to fix the leak somewhere between the pump and the tank. The pressure drops about 2 pounds per hour. What a drag. This pioneering thing has it's limitations. At least we don't have to generate out own electricity, most of the time. Back to Vonegut a moment: The notion of a reward in heaven seems unworthy. What if you get a better offer? Do it because I say so (dietary laws?) makes more sense but begs the question. Being good for its own sake may be an illusion, however. I can remember as a child doing things mostly to please my parents, not to earn a reward or avoid punishment but just to please them. I worked partly to please my boss in the same neutral way, and she her boss, she said. -- Penn tried merit pay briefly. I predicted it would have no effect, and it didn't, so they stopped it. People don't really work for money itself. -- I do many things to please my wife and children. How about to please myself, gain my own approval, polish up my self-image? Maybe, but it's never seemed that way. I don't require my own approval. Why should anyone? We do the best we can, alas. -- "Human restlessness" my father would say. Creativity? A nice concept. Are we working with Mother Nature here or against Her? She's hardly a fair judge or taskmaster. As N pointed out yesterday, nature is absolutely ruthless but at least absolutely honest. Honest is good. 28 August 3006 It was jacket weather for my walk this morning. Neol Beyle's sign is down to "3 days to Labor Day!" There are fewer cars in driveways and less traffic on the roads. It's the Shoulder Season, the Chamber of Commerce's answer to the dreaded end of business summer. We've had enough rain to keep the leaves green, so maybe we'll have some fall color besides Virginia Creeper and poison ivy. A large turtle was crossing the road as we backed out of our driveway. We stopped the car and I tried to move him (or her), but he didn't want to be moved, so I took his picture and gently nudged him into the woods. The last turtle we saw in Eastham was eating a giant mushroom. The mushroom was brown on the outside and bright yellowish green inside. Yum. And that's the latest report from your instant naturalist. The Sunday program was a talk on travel by a very nice couple, about their first, guided, business, and pleasure travels. B and J are in their sixties and married just a few years ago. Both were ex-Peace Corps, an experience that seems as determining and life-long as the Marines. They met at a Peace Corps administrative meeting. Both are great world travelers and have friends literally everywhere. They made travel sound like a service to humanity. I agree that while being somehow useful is what makes our lives satisfying, it's not the goal of life, which is simply living. I was reminded of my own first modest travel experience. My mother and sister and I went to Florida by train to stay with my grandparents for the month of January in 1942. Union Station in St. Louis seemed particularly huge to me as I was very small at the time. The hissing steam and screeching metal under the glass-covered train shed and the roar and sulfurous smoke on the platforms between the moving cars were about as exciting as anything I'd ever experienced. The trip took 2 1/2 days because civilian trains had a low priority during the war. I opened the window shade a crack in the early morning and watched from my Pullman berth as farmers drove their mules to the field. We ate in the still elegant dinning car. It was still The Old South and fascinating to me. I remember standing in the corridor, watching the Mississippi when the large man next to me said, "Boy, there are catfish in that river bigger than you are." The unwelded rails still clicked you to sleep, and the engine was coal fired. We arrived in Florida eventually, the Old Florida as well, with palmetto thickets and orange groves, palms, green benches on every corner, and beach shacks rather than condos. Air freight fish and fruit hadn't reached St. Louis, and I made the pleasant discovery of fresh oranges and pineapples, sea scallops, and grouper. Highly satisfactory. -- I seem to have reaches the age of reminiscence. The porch roof frame is partially assembled in the garage. Now all I have to do is figure out how to levitate it into position. -- I did, and it's up. Next the roof. I'll send a picture. We heard on the news that the Library at Club Guantanimo has 4,000 volumes in 15 languages. Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are very popular. The "librarian," a female intelligence expert, said straight-facedly, "It's good escape literature." We much enjoyed John's post card of Berkeley. What a beautiful campus. Makes Penn look a bit dowdy. And the hills! I'd heard of the Berkeley hills but couldn't visualize them. The red roofs and creamy masonry remind me (sorry)of Stanford 60 years ago. We had dinner at a restaurant in Palo Alto which advertised itself as "The Original Home of Pea Soup." I wasn't a very sophisticated 12, but this seemed unlikely even to me. My questions received ambiguous answers. Andy's chipmunk picture has been put to good use in the Eastham Natural History database. This is always in progress but has reached a considerable size. Check it out at my new web address: http://chenoweth01.home.comcast.net/ There's some other new stuff, stories, a draft novel, new images. I see Norfolk and Virginia Beach are under two feet of water. Hope all is more or less well. Berkeley certainly seems to have nice weather. I'm astounded that San Francisco's lows are 20 degrees lower than Oakland's. Where do they take their measurements, on top of Twin Peaks? SEPTEMBER 21 September 06 The well-lady came a week ago Friday, 3 weeks after we called. Mrs. J. is very nice, Sara's size, age, and general appearance. She was in a hurry as she said they had company coming from New Hampshire and were hoping for good weather on the weekend as they were all planning to ride their motorcycles to P'town. She fixed the leak and installed a one-way pressure valve in about 20 minutes. Cape contractors are overworked but efficient. We heard herds of motorcycles on Herringbrook several times and said, there they go! I'm not overworked at all but have progressed on the porch. See below. I'll put on the roof after we come back from Paris. The part I was looking for finally turned up at the dump, a 4' by 2" piece of 1/16th stainless steel strapping. Cut into 4 pieces and holes drilled it ties the posts to the foundation and the stairs to the deck. Good old dump, it rarely fails if you have patience. The chapel painters have been twice and are now off for two weeks. At least the price is right, a dozen doughnuts and 5 sandwiches per day (one apiece that is). They've done a good job so far. I bought a 250mb memory chip for my camera. 16mb has done me well for a year, as I just dump it when it's full, but now I can take 150 full-sized pics of Paris (more than enough N says) or 2,000 smaller ones! N has done a big business in her pictures lately, sold 100 or so for the benefit of ECEC. She enjoys being "the photographer". I also got new glasses (lenses). Traveling galvanizes one. They do work better, especially without all the scratches. The glasses guy is an old Marine who's recovering from hip surgery. He has coached and played hocky for 45 years he said. I told him I loved playing hockey (true) when I was thirteen and didn't have far to fall. He smiled. But I was just in the army. I was counting on Cosi, a renowned sandwich shop on rue de Seine, for many meals. But it appeared to have the same address as Les Temps Perdu restaurant. I finally used pagesjaunes to look at a picture of every building on the fifties block of rue de Seine and found them side by side. The wrong address was give for Cosi on the web. The web is cool. I looked up jet lag and found many useless cures. Best advice seems to be to drink much water and avoid alcohol and caffeine. Sounds good to me. We'll have N well hydrated. The puppet lady talked at the Fellowship last Sunday. Neither of us has any interest in puppets, but I rather liked the puppet lady. She's a therapist at a Boston mental hospital, energetic, attractive, and possibly slightly spacey herself. She had a marionette that was actually pretty effective, a scarf puppet with a head like "The Scream". Amazing what few clues it takes to indicate emotions. Marsha the Witch was a large hand puppet. I poked N and said, "Marsha looks like xxx." N nearly fell off her chair. I saw xxx a few days later, and I was right. OCTOBER 7 Oct 06 I've long said Paris was my favorite city. It still is, but I realize it's a city really only for the French. For the rest of us it's an adult theme park. In the mile walking radius from our hotel are: the Seine, very clean and busy streets, parks, public spaces, government buildings, churches, millions of restaurants, cafes, bistros, and brasseries, hotels, residences, and retail stores. Large business offices, factories, bedroom communities, and depressed neighborhoods are mostly well out beyond the inner city. The Welcome Hotel was fine. The room was tiny but clean and efficient, the staff friendly and helpful, the price right, and the location on the corner of St. Germain and Rue de Seine perfect. St. Germain is a very busy street (you notice when 10 motorcycles and scooters blast off as the light changes) and the all-night Cafe Mondrian heats up. But the rooms are soundproofed and double windowed. Just don't be over-large, and DON'T go to Paris in the summer. Our weather was perfect, sunny, 60-70, and 50's at night. Theme park or not, we had a wonderful eight days. We saw all the museums, parks, and churches we intended to and ate very well indeed. "It's all about the food," says an associate of ours. Not quite, perhaps, but close. Everything we ate was amazingly good: cafe-creme and croissants each morning at Paul a half block away, a demi of Carlsburg every afternoon at 5:30 at the Cafe Mondrian just below our window. Splendid omlettes at the Mondrian, beef burgandy and onion soup at La Citrouelle ("The Pumpkin"), duck and creme brule at Brasserie Bofinger, splended sandwiches from lunch stands at the museums, etc. The Orsey is a terrific collection in an amazing building. The Musee Armee in the Invalides had just finished redoing their 1st and 2d world war exhibition this summer. The exhibits, texts, and videos were fascinating. I could have spent days. The explanations at the museum in the Insitute du Monde Arabe were the best I've ever read of the Arab world. N found she could read them too. We didn't manage all 150 rooms of the Musee Carnavalet, which covers French history from the 16th century to the 1930's and includes a replica of Proust's cork-lined room. We'll have to go back. We easily got to St. Denis by metro and found it a fine old balilica (and now the cathedral of a new diocese). Our hour drinking beer and watching the passersby each evening at the Mondrian was perhaps the most pleasant time of all. Tourists, crones, workmen, students, office workers, the young and the beautiful and the exotic. As we were recognized as regulars we got more goodies with our beer each night, pretzels, crackers, olives. (Although why the marshmallows I will never understand.) Another hi-light was attending Sunday mass at St. Sulpice and hearing the excellent choir and famous organ. I could almost understand the sermon except for the echo. The only one thing more we might have asked for was to be a few decades younger. 12 Oct 06 Life goes on. The back porch is finished except for the shingles. Paul, who owned a sheet metal fabrication business in the Bronx, made me flashings that fit the valleys perfectly. It's taken me only twice as long as it once took me to build half a house, but that was long ago. We went to Coast Guard Beach Saturday to see the crosses memorializing the American dead in Iraq. There was also a symbolic graveyard of Iraqi children. When we got to the end of the boardwalk I gave a little involuntary gasp. A man standing there with buttons on said, "You didn't know this would be here?" And I said, yes, we'd come to see it, but I just hadn't realized what three thousand wooden crosses would look like. They disappeared over a distant rise in the beach. 600,000 Iraquis! Why can't we stop this? We didn't stay for the noontime service. Our neighbors are coming to the book group at our house tomorrow, a former president of Tufts who's a friend of Daniel Dennett. Cool! -- A small group but a very good discussion of the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon, a story supposedly told by a 15 year old autistic boy. Back to Paris. The more I think about it, the stranger it is. It's hard to believe that all corporate offices are out in the banlieus. I don't think they are, but we didn't see them. We also didn't see any gas stations at all. We saw gas stations in London. With a very few exceptions we also saw no dirt or trash. Streets are washed and swept constantly. I gather that the street cleaner is a respected and quite well-paid job in Paris. Trash is collected efficiently, very early, and relatively quietly. The cans are standard large green plastic containers, and the trucks don't seem to include noisy mashers. Mundane info, but it adds up to a pleasant ambiance. -- The exception is a fair number of homeless, panhandlers, and crazies (generally clutching a bottle of wine as they lurch mumbling down the sidewalk, and right through sidewalk cafes but without bothering anyone). There are small encampments of homeless on some narrow ledges along the Seine. There was indeed a supermarket across the street from our hotel, where we bought banned substances (toothpaste, shampoo, etc.) and candy bars. It was pretty good-sized but mostly hidden in the innards of the building with two small and rather sub-fusc entrances, one on Rue de Seine and the other on Rue de Buci. We hadn't realized it was there at all at first pass. We bought excellent fruit at a corner market. Crowds are fast moving but skilled and polite, no contact. Perhaps that's true in our cities too, our recent experience is limited, but the Parisiens do seem particularly good at it and by and large quite patient and helpful to visitors. Perhaps that's necessity, as half the people we passed on the street seemed to be visitors, including French tourists, and, as in London near the BM, Spanish, Italians, Schandinavians, Germans, Asians, and Americans. The other half were clearly locals. I used my French, but as I'd expected everyone answered me in good English. Oh well. We had a brief conversation with a French woman and her child who was eyeing our lunch. We talked with a lone Englishwoman eating fish and chips in an otherwise very French restaurant. We talked in another restaurant with an American woman who worked for IBM and her very pleasant Scots boyfriend. And we had a longish French/English chat with a bored museum guard who explained American poltics to us (red states/blue states) and told us we would always be welcome in France. He suggested we move there, as he said many English who don't like Tony Blair are doing. Bill Opel gave a talk on "prayer" in a post-Christian world. A matter of personal honesty and planning what to do about it all. An Orthodox Rabbi from New Haven visited. He had taught French Literature at Yale. He agreed with Nancy that it's all practice rather than belief and seemed to be a humanist. Interesting world. Below is M. le Duck, eyeing our sandwiches at the Tuillerie Gardens. Tuillerie means tile works. There was once a tile works here, and then a palace, both gone. There was a tile works in Oreland where the Presbyterian Church is now. Also gone but without leaving a famous pleasure garden in it's place. NOVEMBER 11 November 06 Many very little things. The Chinese Feast went well, spread cheer, and earned $2500 for ECEC. N and I helped set tables for 120 and served soup out of cauldrons on rolling tables. Corn soup with fake crab, I my opinion the least successful of Bill's productions, but he insists. His excellent egg rolls were cold by the time we got to eat, but the rest was delicious, particularly the sweet and sour pork. Helen and the head of ECEC spoke briefly. Then N got up in front of the mike and gave out thank you gifts to Bill and the organizers like a pro. She wasn't even nervous, she said, although she's never used a microphone or addressed such a crowd before. A multi-talented lady. Jari's pot luck, held in place of the postponed potluck with Am ha Yam, was small and excellent. Strangely all the men sat at the dining room table and all the women in the living room. Never happened like that before. TR and I pretty well finished up the painting of the outside of the chapel that had been left by the sheriff’s men. (The sheriff of Barnstable County, not Nottingham.) They will be back in December to paint the inside. Bob Sparrow (of the Chocolate S) had left a ladder that took both of us old geezers to move around. -- I also weeded the chapel and its basement of junk and raised a huge pile in the back yard of the chapel. No one seemed interested in reviewing my discards. Not sure how we'll get it all to the dump. The Fellowship's Thanksgiving Dinner is this Friday evening. N and I may end up cooking one (both?) of the turkeys by default. Eventually we may end up doing everything. Perhaps our purpose in life. The dinner is fun and attracts all sorts of folk we don't ordinarily see. Once again, "It's all about the food." I bestirred myself (N stayed home) to an evening poetry reading at the Snow Library. Barry was reading three of his. I knew several other people there. Four of the poets, including Barry, were excellent. The others were ernest. Lois asked me "was it worth coming." Come on, Lois, I came to hear Barry, but it was. It's like the art exhibitions at the Snow; always a few amazing works. The Book Group is discussing Becoming Justice Blackmun. My choice, a fascinating study of the Supreme Court. I'm curious as to what our active RC members will have to say, as Blackmum became identified with Roe. The election! Thank goodness, the news is worth listening to again. Duval Patrick and our local Sara Peake won along with the dems and the nation. What can be done? Who knows, but it's got to be better than it was. I delight in Nancy Pelosi. Loved seeing her with George and George being sooo bipartisan. Amusing that Pelosi was held up as the supreme threat to get out the Republican vote. Nancy Pelosi, aaaaaargh. Be fun if the US and France both had women presidents. Bought a 14' 2x10 yesterday to reinforce the floor beneath an upstars mini-laundry. Not this year, but I thought as long as I'm still up to such antics I'd better do it. We heard Barak on Book TV talking about The Audacity of Hope. So exciting that you heard him in person, Karen. Who knows what the next two years will bring, but I'm beginning to think it's not too soon for a run for the presidency. I like Hillery a lot, but I'm not sure I know anyone else who does. My Paris talk is totally out of hand at this point, but cutting is easy. I also thought of a fall-back activity in case TR's video projector fails. (The heritage of my library career where we were always prepared for our A/V technology to bomb out.) The chapel talk last week was by a serious quilter. Some beautiful stuff. Very complex. I was going to mention Gee's Bend, as N and I had loved the TV special on the quilts. Elsa, a professional artist, got in first with a question a tad less diplomatic than what I was planning, and steam came out of the lady's ears. Seems that the serious quilting establishment was mightily pissed when a group of mere "folk" quilters made the national scene while the artists were still almost unknown. 27 November 2006 The trip to San Francisco went well. Our boarding passes printed out smoothly at home, buses were on time, security was easy and uncrowded, planes left and arrived as scheduled, and our seat-mates were of normal size and demeanor. But no matter how smoothly flights go these days they seem to get harder. You think maybe it's our age? We were a bit surprised to get nothing but drinks on our long flights. Forewarned, it's just as well I guess, as one can bring better from home. Mari made us delicious turkey sandwiches for our return trip, with fruit, crackers, and cookies. Nancy, who has never been fond of turkey (you wondered why we always had giant chickens on holidays?), loved Mari's thanksgiving turkey and ate heartily. Thanksgiving for twelve at Mari's was fun. It was nice to see the Galindos. and Gardners. Miranda has a good job with a large architectural firm in S.F., and Lilian is working at the U.C. Berkely Press and likes it. Gloria is enjoying and working hard at the charter school principal business as is Mari at the Press. San Francisco was spectacular as always. Mari took us to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, a twenty minute walk from Shrader Steet, through the huge eucalyptus, redwoods, assorted palms, and other exotic flora. She has a membership and goes often; what a treat! A big and very handsome museum. We saw the Gee's Bend quilts and were quite impressed. One difference from the "art" quilts we saw at the Fellowship a few weeks ago was immediately apparent. These quilts were made of used cloth. Well of course! They were keeping warm with the materials at hand. A number were "work clothes" quilts, with mended rips and tears. The quotes besides some of the quilts were eloquent. One woman told of how she had made a quilt of her husband's work clothes after his death. Another, in her nineties, explained that her fingers were still good, but she lacked the spirit to make quilts. "Age just got me." Oh my. I read recently that polls indicate that people are happiest between the ages of 55 and 70. I can see that. Perhaps on average happiness fades a bit after seventy because of loss of spouses or, heaven forbid, of children, and the gradual failing of health. Several of our friends have told us that health (or the lack of it) comes to occupy too much of their time. A good reason to carry a book, though that's not a panacea. Megan and John look good and are enjoying their busy lives. Their work/study is evidently rewarding and companionable. Their appartment is comfortable and much like the one in West Philadelphia. Their neighborhood is even better. Charming and convenient, with every sort of store, cafe, restaurant you'd want and a bit of neighborhood spirit. Perhaps its an illusion, but we find people in California particularly friendly. The Cape is friendly of course, but the East in general is perhaps a bit less so. The University of California at Berkeley was a surprise to me. It's neither an urban nor a "collegiate" campus. I'd descripe it as Golden Gate Park with many handsome buildings. John's office and classrooms are in the ARF, the Archaeological Resaerch Facility, a classy old fraternity house dating from early 20th century. We were driven to the top of Grizzly Peak, which looms 1500 feet or so above the campus and the Lawrence Livermore Labs. Fantastic view when I had unclutched my knuckles. I seem to be ambivalent about heights. Once, as a teen ager naturally, I climbed up the outside of a fire tower without concern. Airplanes are fine. Tall buildings a little less so, and winding mountain roads not fine at all, even when I'm driving. I've discovered cappucino! It's never too late. Amazingly, it tastes to me just like the cafe creme we raved about at Paul's in Paris. Also, Andy's technique with bagels (ca. 5 minutes in a hot toaster oven) works well with English muffins too. A great visit, but it's good to be home. I'm glad we had the energy to make Sunday's program: Tony Perry, French and bilingual, lived long in Paris, Ph.D. from Yale, taught comparative literature, converted to Orthodox Judaism, rabbi in New Haven, author of 12 books, owns with charming and high-powered wife the giant "summer cottage" with swimming pool on Locust across the road from the Opels. He gave an interesting talk on his latest book, which I'm reading: "The Honeymoon is Over; Jonah's Argument with God." I was wrong, Sara, he's not an atheist, but he says "belief is unimportant." Only action/practice counts. Meaning both religious practice (such as not driving on Saturdays) and social action, living a good life. Sounds good to me. A reviewer says, "thoroughly orthodox yet richly ecumenical." Perry says the Orthodox will never get anywhere until they change their views on women. I'm also enjoying Niall (Niel) Ferguson's new book "The War of the World; 20th century conflict and the descent of the West." Almost 800 pages. When a book is good, I like it to be long. I finished Joan Didion's "A year of Magical Thinking" in two sittings. A bit like chugging down a gallon of innards cleaner for a colonoscopy, keep going and you get through it. It's about her frazzled thinking in the year after her husband's sudden death and their daughter's serious illness. I found it grim, scary, and annoying, but perhaps it will be salutary to have read it. Anyway, it was the book group's choice, and I know many think well of it. I've been weeding. There is a giant pile of junk covered with a tarp in the back yard of the chapel, and our garage is filled with our own trash. We need a truck, but it will have to be many trunk loads over time. Very refreshing to recycle one's impedimenta. I forget whether I mentioned that the Paris talk/show went well. It was fun to prepare and fun to do, and evidently sufficiently entertaining to watch. I'm glad it's done, and I can get back to normal morning activities, like writing. Batchelor parties in New York appear to be tricky. As you may have heard, one got a little out of hand over the weekend, and the police shot the groom 50 times. As even Mayor Bloomberg says, this seems excessive. DECEMBER 4 Dec 2006 It’s cold and clear, as it should be. No one was at Coast Guard Beach this afternoon despite the lovely weather. We heard Niall Ferguson on Book TV talking about “The War of the World”, his new book which I’m halfway through. To summarize 800 pages: war tends to happen when a multi-ethnic society disintegrates and there is economic volatility and an empire is in decline. The American empire has been in decline since 1901, he says, but for now we have economic stability. Eastern empires are on the rise, of course. Sorry, guys, but I’m afraid there’s not much N and I can do about all this. We heard an interview with Jimmy Carter. These are a dime a dozen because he’s written so many books, but they’re always rewarding. Wonderful man, even if you find his grin annoying. A self-styled born-again Christian evangelist no less. So much for Harris, Dawkins, and co. The problem is not religion, as Pogo would point out, but us. -- On top of everything else, the Carters are serious bird watchers! -- Of course it helps to have been President. Someone suggested that the works of Patrick O'Brien would give him helpful background for his novel about the American Revolution. The next day a complete set appeared at is doorstep. -- His book of poetry is the only poetry best seller yet. Doesn't make me want to rush out and buy it. Then there was a fellow speaking, rather well alas, about his book on what a violent and in tolerant religion Islam is. This was followed fortunately by Karen Armstrong undoing all his good work with a presentation on, "Muhammad, a prophet for our times." She's a peach, but she needs a hair consultant. I think about religion fairly often, always changing and refining my thoughts. Humans are communal and share religious practice and belief. Groups can offer support and a kindly mirror. Faith, however, is personal. We may be guided by others, but ultimately we have to see the world through our own eyes, trust our own experience and conscience, and determine our own purpose and goals. Else why be a person? I have trouble accepting an all-knowing, all-powerful god who allows so much suffering and injustice, but atheism per se would require a pointless leap of faith. I just don’t know. Not a bad place to be, if you enjoy learning. Our friend the rabbi says belief is of little importance anyway. Actions count. William James says the thought follows the act. For the evolutionary biologist and philosopher Daniel Dennett, and for many/even most other people, religion implies the supernatural, but I think everything is natural. Each religion has its good points, its beauties, insights, and consolations, as well as its shortcomings. I particularly value Judaism because it deals with the world we live in. Some of my friends reject religion altogether, as supernatural, mistaken, and the cause of much misery. They consider themselves humanists and scientists, as I do myself. But we can’t escape religion. Our religion is the way we live, the values we live by. Science too has its mysteries and metaphors, its leaps of faith, methods, and procedures, sacred texts and shamans, its sins and glories and its goals. Its "facts" and "truths" spend their brief lives in quotes. And to be realistic, science no longer means Harvey, Newton, or Darwin alone in his study but Merck and Lockheed. Nor is its goal the glory of God or the increase of human knowledge. To each his own, unless our religion harms others. Nazism and Stalinism were hurtful, but laisser-faire capitalism is little better, and for sheer mayhem none has matched Christianity and Islam at their worst. Science could do be worse; vide “1984” and “Brave New World.” Religion is life, and life can be lived with grace and generosity, or not. Be kind, stay curious. An easy creed. Lately I've been waking in the middle of the night. Is this one reason happiness is supposed to fade after seventy? Last night I thought about Iraq. What a mess. Every day it's worse. We stumbled into World War I, Darfur seems almost like a natural catastrophe, but it’s taken 70 years of applied stupidity to destroy the cradle of civilization. And we're still at it. Burton Crosby Hallowell died suddenly at 91. Burt and Joyce were our neighbors. Born in Orleans, Ph.D. in economics from Princeton in 1949, the President of Tufts University from 1967-1976. He had many interesting things to say at our last book group. I saw him and his wife on their bicycles just a couple weeks ago. Nice people. Dec 18 06 Our daily routines are probably a substitute for the hope of immortality, like my parents' frequent moves, but we enjoy them. Life always intrudes anyway. The book group today isn't about a book we particularly liked, A Year of Magical Thinking, but we like the group. Jari's Christmas pot luck is Wednesday. We're known for our good salads, their simplicity probably, like the old Leica. Then an open house at the Harris's, whose new home is a replacement for the Hatch house and incorporates some of the old woodwork. The chapel has been painted inside and out. We spent an afternoon masking so the painters could paint. They did a good job. And why not, as otherwise they're in their cells 23 hours a day. A good argument for staying out of jail. The Bourne prison work program is very popular on the Cape (for public buildings, churches, etc.) The contractors are all as busy as they like, so competition isn't a problem. -- In the process I managed to have a truckload of old junk removed from the chapel and carted to the dump. We look forward to our holiday visits, if not the drives. Getting to Hamilton or Philadelphia is about an 8 hour trip, but going almost anywhere by air takes us twelve, plus the fuss and the expense. Monorail blimp would be better. Maybe someday. I have Bill's old slide projector and am about to convert some of the family slides to digital. We will share as might interest you. I've finished Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Entertainingly done, those clever Brits. I share his scientific world view, as I do those of Dennett, Spinker, E.O. Wilson, Sam Harris, etc. But with reservations: 1) The many people, known personally or by reputation, who are smarter, better educated, and more useful in the world than I and are deeply religious count a great deal to me. Jimmy Carter, for instance, born-again evangelical, scientist, author, and world-traveling peacemaker. 2) The high likelihood that the world's troubles would continue unabated regardless of the state of our belief. 3) The still considerable majority of liberal and moderate believers, who tend to be glossed over or called enablers for the fundamentalists. 4) My notion that each of our world views and value systems constitutes a religion. We are all people of faith in our own way, including scientists and humanists. 5) All our language is necessarily metaphorical and all our facts and realities live in quotes. Yes, the depredations of fundamentalists, particularly against women and children, are outrageous, and no, I don't want my life run by fundamentalists of any variety. An American theocracy could happen, and we need to stay alert, but there's unhelpful dogmatism on all sides. Science doesn't advance in a strait line, particularly when it's financed by industry, and religion doesn't stand still. I stay hopeful. Easier to do on Cape Cod than in Afghanistan. N has been ruminating on "the best beef Burgundy ever" that we had in Paris and came up with something very close. No building projects until the spring at the soonest. The bay window in the dining room is next but may wait for the wedding and the theoretically projected fall trip to London, Truro, and Edinburgh. As always, we shall see. 31 December 2006 This is the last letter/journal-entry for the year, and I guess it's sort of a Christmas letter as well. Oh dear. In the old year: The new back porch, Paris, many walks, many books. [Check the Journal in a day or so for 2006: chenoweth01.home.comcast.net ] In the new year I get to be president of the dwindling but still enjoyable Nauset Fellowship. We'll probably bring the ECEC Friends to a close, having accomplished our mission with few casualties. We'll read, walk the trails, knit (Nancy), listen to music, and try to think up interesting dishes. We'll continue with the book group. I'll hope to write and paint a bit. Maybe I'll build the bay window. Maybe I'll plant a vegetable garden. I'll continue with the French Group. -- France 24 is live French TV on the web, which I enjoy. -- We look forward to the July wedding. And maybe, maybe we'll go to London and Edinburgh in the fall. We'll see. It's actually the 1st of January 2007, but that belongs to the new year. I haven't decided whether I'll continue the online journal. I probably will, just less religiously, although how much less religious can a U/U get? I hope my colleagues who are planning for an evening discussion of Sam Harris's Letter to Christian Nation on the 14th aren't disappointed if few turn up. I didn't particularly like the book and may provide the only counterpoint. [Summary of the book at the Fellowship web site: nfuu.org ] But all that belongs to the new year as well. We enjoyed our holiday journey. The 8 hour drive to Hamilton, New York was easy but rather dull, as rain, fog, and mist obscured the whole way. The Berkshires might have been attractive otherwise. I doubt the NY Thruway from Albany to Utica is ever particularly scenic. We did note the Mohawk River and stretches of the Erie Canal, and N sang bits of canal songs remembered from Girl Scouts. Hamilton, however, is a lovely old town. The entire center burned in 1895 (around the time Red Bud, Illinois and great grandfather Jenneman's taverns burned.) Hamilton was rebuilt immediately and looks quite handsome, a ca. 1900 small city of brick buildings preserved in aspic. The ornate "Opera House" is now the movie theater, or rather the multiplex. A brick flatiron building contains the large and modern Colgate College Bookstore. I'm sure the presence of Colgate accounts for much of Hamilton's prosperous and cared-for look, the musical activities, ethnic restaurants, etc. Colgate has a good solid campus. We particularly enjoyed the restored (or never faltering) multi-colored Victorian mansions. -- N and I at one time wanted a "big old Victorian house." Providence no doubt did us a good turn. We had only a quick drive through Colgate, but walked around the nearby Hamilton College campus, Megan's alma mater. A very cold walk. Megan said, "now I know why I had so many scarves in college!" It seemed a nice place. The large chapel is spare and beautiful, an excellent wedding venue. I was intrigued that here was no door to a "sacristy" near the altar. Participants in any ceremony must come through the congregation. Priests would have no way to escape an enraged mob. Perhaps this is a theological statement. We had a good visit. Mark and Linda's house is lovely. I thought it was new, but evidently Mark renewed a rundown property. He has a world of tools in his handsome basement and the skill to use them well. I'm mildly envious, but at least with my motley collection of accidental tools I never felt constrained to use them beyond necessity. He has his eye on a neighboring property which could be bought and fixed up. What a treat that would be, a whole house to play with! The Colgate Inn was built in the 20's and is creakily posh. It will be an excellent location for the wedding reception in July. The library will be very nice for the rehearsal dinner, and the "Green Room" can hold a vast assembly. The continental breakfast was fine, although Nancy would have liked some boiling water for her packet of oatmeal. I managed well with crackers, liverwurst, cheese, a hardboiled egg, and pastry. I recount the food not simply because septuagenarians are fixated on food but because I thought the menu was rather odd. The nice lady who managed the buffet was on the slow side. The Starbucks coffee was fine. The country around Hamilton and driving south is very attractive farmland. It was strange to see billboards. There are some successful dairy farms, pretty rolling hills and wooded hilltops dusted with snow. A good bit of poverty too, trailers, collapsed barns, unpainted shacks, etc., but I realize it's simply on view here more than in urban areas. We have poverty half a mile from us on Cape sand roads. We just don't see it. Other, smaller and less well-preserved towns nearby had "opera houses" as well. They meant it, of course, as they all pre-dated the movies. We drove J and M to Philadelphia for Nella's wedding in the Univesity Museum. John had won a free night at the posh Inn-At-Penn. They seem to be thriving in Oakland/Berkeley and very much enjoying work and study. I don't know if I would want to live my whole life in The Bay Area, but it seems to me a wonderful place for young folks to spend a few years. Almost everyone interesting they will meet later in life will probably have been there for a spell. John literally bumped into two GFS classmates in their Oakland neighborhood. -- Karen and David looked and sounded good, and it was nice to see Tyrone again. While Megan, Karen, and Ruthie looked for dresses, John met Tyrone and Eugene at a coffee shop to play cards and talk. "Just like high school," Megan said. We had a couple of hours to kill and visited the Penn Library where we saw David and Bob. I pronounced them unchanged in appearance. We passed L's office which looked like a paper factory explosion as it had 7 years ago. We ate well, talked much, retired to our Springhill Suites home-away-from-home and headed back to the Cape on Saturday. Whew. -- Someone said of us, "you're not old." Well, thank you, but if not quite old, 71 is a bit worn.