Heat Wave

Hot, hot, HOT! Instead of calling it The Valley of the Sun we should redesignate it The Valley of the Heat. We’ve never in our nineteen years here experienced a June as hot as this one has been. We can’t even fall back on that old Arizona platitude “But it’s a dry heat.” Doesn’t matter. One can’t do much of anything whether it’s dry or humid. Either way it’s unbearable. With all the climatic oddities this year has thus far brought us—tornadoes, flooding, blizzards, hurricanes, extreme drought, excessive heat—our science guys should be working on some way to control the weather. Like finding a way to straighten out the jet streams that now dip and rise and make for all kinds of odd scenarios. This latest shows us on the weather map a huge reverse sideways S across our nation, with the western half inside the top of the S, the eastern half in the other end of the S, extreme heat in the west, extreme rain in the east. Just pull that baby by its ends and straighten it out and stop all this nonsense.

Match Play

I just finished two novels by John Coyne, both about golf from the past, featuring Ben Hogan and Walter Hagen in The Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan and The Caddie Who Played with Hickory. Both were pretty good and both just crammed with golf, shot by shot matches that served as the centers of both plots. I remember long ago trying to pedal my golf novel, Match Play, to New York publishers, having them all tell me it was too full of golf. And I tried to tell them that was the point, to give golf enthusiasts a novel about non-PGA golf. But none of them ever bought that argument. After the two Coyne books, I decided to go back and reread Match Play, to see how it held up after all these years. It held up very well. In fact, it was better than either of the Caddie books by Coyne. I may be biased, however. And one of the passages I’m most proud of was the valedictory speech made by the young Amy Forrest. I wish I’d somehow, sometime, somewhere, been able to deliver that very speech. Here it is. See what you think.

When it was her turn to speak, she climbed the steps to the stage, crossed to the podium, and then paused for a full thirty seconds just looking at the audience, smiling, waiting for everyone to become quiet. She seemed totally assured, totally in control. When she had everyone’s attention, even that of her fellow seniors, she very quietly began:

“Thank you.” A warm smile and another short pause. “Thank you. I wasn’t really waiting for anything in particular. I was just waiting . . . savoring the moment. Because, you see, I’m already aware how quickly life passes. I know I’m very young, and probably youthfully presumptuous to make such a statement . . . but I had great teachers . . . most of them dead, I’m afraid.” A smattering of puzzled laughter from the audience. “Some very good ones still living, I’m happy to report. I’ve learned this lesson about life’s brevity mainly from the things I’ve read, my dead but still very alive teachers. Nearly every writer worth his salt at one time or another has had something to say about how brief, like morning dew, is this thing called life. I’ve learned it in school, from teachers, live ones, who have warned me, scolded me, to make good use of my time, for time is precious. ‘Tempus fugit! Tempus fugit!’ they say, shaking their collective fingers at me. ‘Time flies! Carpe diem! Seize the day! Seize it before the day seizes you, because, God knows, it will seize you.’ ”

She paused for the Latin maxims to sink in.

“And I appreciate that lesson from them. I’ve learned that all too often we wish the time away, wish for moments in our lives to hurry up and get here, and too often we forget to live while we’re waiting for those moments. I’ve heard many of my fellow graduates saying for the last four years how they could hardly wait to get out of high school, to get out on their own and away from all the controls on their lives. You know—parents, teachers, mean old principals . . .” and a low chuckle with that last comment accompanied by warm laughter from the audience, an audience that was entirely with her now, listening to what she was saying. “Well, I’m here to tell you that that moment is here . . . and now . . . and you’d all better just slow it down and savor the moment . . . whether you’re graduating from high school as we are, or you’ve just received that hoped-for promotion, or you’ve just had a birthday or a newborn son or daughter, or you simply woke up this morning and found yourself alive and healthy. They’re all moments worth savoring.”

She went on to talk about how she hoped she and her fellow graduates all over the nation would be committed to improving the quality of life not only in our country, but everywhere in the world. She alluded to things that Mark Thorne, the salutatorian, had said, to things the congressman had said. She was obviously extemporizing, winging it, and it was wonderful. I don’t know three people who could do what she did, speak to a group of people with as much clarity, sincerity, and the skill to hold her thoughts together and communicate them to an audience that was actually listening to every word she said. A remarkable feat. And if I hadn’t realized it before, I certainly realized it then—Amy Forrest was a remarkable girl. No, a remarkable woman.

Her concluding remarks returned to her opening theme—savoring the moments of our lives. “. . . and everyone, it seems, comes eventually to the same conclusion about life, that there wasn’t time enough to do all the things we’d planned, or that we regret not having done all the things we wanted to, or that we’d spent—spent, what an appropriate way to describe it—that we’d spent our lives living what Thoreau called ‘lives of quiet desperation’ instead of what Omar Khayyam recommended, that we ‘make the most of what we yet may spend, before we too unto the dust descend.’ And Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard asks, ‘Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life’s made of.’

“But nearly all of those who write of or speak of their regrets, their conclusions about life and time and the brevity of the one and the swiftness of the other, nearly all are looking back at life, almost as though none of us can learn the obvious and universal lesson until it’s too late, as though we’re all too blind or too ignorant to learn from the words of others. Singers sing the message, telling us to ‘stop and smell the roses,’ urging us to ‘hold this moment fast, and live and love as hard as you know how, and make this moment last, because the best of times is now!’ ”

She looked out over the audience and paused for a moment, to let that last now sink in, and although I knew she couldn’t see me in the darkened auditorium, I felt she was looking at me and had been directing her words at me. And then she smiled and continued.

“And poets rhyme the message. Phillip James Bailey says, ‘We live in feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart-throbs.’ Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam warns that ‘Time is slipping underneath our feet, unborn tomorrow, and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet.’ Longfellow tells us that ‘art is long, and time is fleeting, and our hearts, though stout and brave, still, like muffled drums, are beating funeral marches to the grave,’ a sentiment echoing Andrew Marvell, who over three hundred years ago with tongue in cheek said, ‘The grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace.’ And Robert Herrick advises me to gather my rosebuds while I may, because ‘Old Time is still a-flying, and this same flower that smiles today, tomorrow will be dying.’ ”

Then she paused again, for at least fifteen seconds, looking at various sections of the audience and smiling at each as though sharing some secret, a very nice bit of dramatic business that didn’t seem at all affected or planned.

“Yes. All of us here—parents full of pride for this moment in their children’s lives, relatives and friends here to share in this moment, teachers who have meant so much to us in preparing us for the moment, I and my fellow graduating seniors who have for so long wished for this moment—all of us should pay better attention to the lesson of those who have gone before us: Andrew Marvell and Longfellow and Ben Franklin and Omar Khayyam and nearly every other writer since time began. And all of those who may not have been writers but who have expressed or even felt the lesson. Let’s listen to what they said. Let’s listen with our hearts as well as our ears. Maybe we can’t halt time, maybe we can’t stretch it beyond its given length . . . but we can certainly make what little time we have more valuable. Let’s really stop and smell the roses. Let’s really love instead of hate. Let’s really savor the moment, . . . this moment, . . . because the best of times really is . . . now!” And her head was nodding as she held us for a moment longer, looking around the audience, smiling. And we sat in total silence.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, and left the podium to return to her seat in the audience.
* * *
If anyone is interested in reading Match Play, it’s available in hard copy at Amazon.com, or in e-book form at lulu.com. Granted, I’m as biased about the book’s merits as a proud father is biased about the good looks of his children. Too many publishers have called my child ugly. I hope you disagree.

The Sea of Grass

South Dakota

More on big-belly meals. The next morning we breakfasted at the Grand Oasis, a restaurant near the motel where we were staying after four nights at the casino. Rosalie had a 3-egg cheese and mushroom omelet that covered her plate and I ordered a new item on the menu—eggs and hashbrowns with locally made German sausage. The eggs were standard, the hashbrowns about twice what I needed, and the sausage, two huge chunks of meat that no one could have managed to consume in one sitting. If you know what a ring of bologna is, just imagine this German sausage as a ring. I was served what would have been nearly half a ring. Whoa! From now on I’ll order from the children’s menu.

The relativity of time. The years go by increasingly swift, like a film in fast motion, and I can never believe how many years have flown by from someone’s birthday or the birth of a child or a grand niece or nephew. What seems like only a year or two turns out to be eight or ten. Not possible, I say. Quick time. Not so for our stay in South Dakota. In the past, whenever we’d return, usually for some class reunion and usually over the Fourth of July, almost from the first day I would be in a countdown mode looking for our departure. We were always there too long, each day a day merely to get through, marking time as though I had all the time in the world to watch each day crawl like a snail mired in molasses. Well, the days were even slower on this trip. After only three days we’d been there far too long and we could hardly wait to board that plane to take us home. It was all about relatives, and the time with them was relative.

We were there to help my brother Bob celebrate his ninetieth birthday. The festivities went well. His daughter Jackie had put together a twenty-three minute photo album with music, many shots of Bob and all his relatives (and there were a bunch) cascading across the screen from youth to old age. It was very nice. And we ate a bountiful dinner before the eating of birthday cake. Again, whew! He wasn’t asked to blow out ninety candles, thank goodness, or we’d have never gotten any cake. We got to see and converse with relatives we hadn’t seen in a long time and may never see again. Sad how the last chapter of one’s life is so filled with final goodbyes. Rosalie’s sister Phyllis is in the final stages of Alzheimer’s and probably won’t last much longer. I hope not. What she’s now enduring isn’t life. It’s a death not quite completed, but should be. If I were ever put in a place like the one she’s in, I’d find some way to escape—out an emergency exit into a South Dakota blizzard where I could lie down in a snowdrift, a snow pillow to soften my ascent (or possibly descent) into eternity. That’s the way I’d go. But by then I probably wouldn’t remember what I wanted to do. I really must keep that bottle of pills near at hand so I can use them just before someone takes me to the Golden Bridge Old Folks Home. Golden Bridge, my ass.

Flight & Fatties

I realize how few people who follow this blog would be interested in hearing about our trip to South Dakota. But there are a few things I have to say if even to myself.

First, a comment about air travel as opposed to ground travel. Flying is almost too complicated these days. In the past, pre-9/11 days, one could get to the airport, check luggage at the terminal entrance, find the right gate, sit a bit, and then board the plane. All a process requiring at most half an hour to an hour. Now, one has to arrive at least two hours ahead of departure, standing in a line for thirty or forty minutes to check in luggage, then another ten or twenty minutes to go through a security check sans shoes, belt, everything in the pockets, then an hour or so waiting to board the plane. Whew! Then a heavy sigh as one sits too near a seat companion and waits for takeoff. But first, nearly all passengers cramming ponderous carry-on luggage into overhead compartments, then a helium-voiced attendant shrilling incomprehensible pre-flight instructions at a rate of 1,000 wpm. No longer any free amenities as in the old days; now you pay, through the nose—$2 for water or soda, $3 to $5 for assorted snacks, $5 for beer or wine, $7 for cocktails. And $6 if you want a pillow and blanket. It all seems so complicated now. I think I’d almost rather spend three days in a car than fly to my destination. The old days of flying were better, but the new days require a necessary security thanks to all the terrorists who would prefer to kill as many of us infidels as they can.

We got to Bismarck, ND, at 7:30, then stood in line for half an hour waiting for our luggage and an Enterprise rental car. And finally, finally, we were on our way south into South Dakota. But first, naturally, we had to stop at a Perkins restaurant not far from the airport. This is a Perkins we had visited many times coming from and going to the airport, and we should have remembered the size of the portions. But we didn’t. Rosalie ordered a cheeseburger and fries and I a Reuben melt and fries. Her cheeseburger was huge, with lettuce, tomato, onion, and enough fries for three or four NFL linebackers. My Reuben was huge, with enough fries for three or four NFL offensive linemen. Why do too many restaurants now serve meals that are at least 40% too much for normal people? Maybe that’s why we now have too many abnormally large people, too many big-bellied, big-butted girls and boys, too many roly-poly men and women all galumphing around the country.

To be continued.

Fathers' Day 2013

Happy Fathers’ Day, all you fathers who may be reading this. I’m spending my day watching U.S. Open coverage, hoping either Phil Mickelson or Steve Stricker can pull it out. But, oh, the pain of watching Tiger play like a pussy cat. His short game is just awful, bad chipping, bad putting (36 putts on Saturday). And Merion is acting more like a tiger than Tiger is. What an interestingly awful layout. Anyone within six or seven shots of Phil can win it because at any time a double, triple, or quadruple bogey, or even something like Sergio’s ten yesterday, could pop up in a leader’s round. All us hackers like to watch tour players suffer in Opens. But part of me hates to see what the USGA sometimes does to make it such a painful tournament.

Tomorrow I’m going on a week-long hiatus from the blogs. We’re flying to South Dakota for a family get-together. And it will be a week of temps in the seventies instead of our triple digits here in Arizona. But a week away from Squeakie and Charlie is long enough. Going back to our home country is always good, but coming back to this home is even better.
So, so long, dear readers. I’ll see you in a week.

How about a little father humor?
Jon: What’s the difference between a high-hit baseball and a maggot’s father?
Tom: What?
Jon: One’s a pop fly. The other’s a fly pop

Four men are in the hospital waiting room because their wives are having babies. A nurse goes up to the first guy and says, “Congratulations! You’re the father of twins.”
“That’s odd,” answers the man. “I work for the Minnesota Twins!”
A nurse says to the second guy, “Congratulations! You’re the father of triplets!”
“That’s weird,” answers the second man. “I work for the 3M company!”
A nurse tells the third man, “Congratulations! You’re the father of quadruplets!”
“That’s strange,” he answers. “I work for the Four Seasons hotel!”
The last man is groaning and banging his head against the wall. “What’s wrong?” the others ask.
“I work for 7 Up!”

The Cat House

Cats, cats, and more cats. As you can tell, we're fond of cats, even Garfield. Especially Garfield. You'd think we'd have dogs, since I call this blog "Doggy-Dog World." Instead, we have two cats (or they have us), Squeakie, the aging and shrinking calico who's still boss of the house, and Charlie, our young tuxedo cat who thinks he owns every nook and cranny in our house. Squeakie knows better.
There she is with those big soulful eyes.

And here's Charlie in one of his hidey holes. He's just licking his chaps when he thinks he'll take over from Squeakie. Squeakie says, "Think again, Chuck."

And finally, another cat collage.

Tonys & Into the Woods

How do you spell “talent?” Tonys. How do you spell “spectacle?” Tonys. How do you spell “class?” Tonys. Or you might spell them all with “Neil Patrick Harris.” Last Sunday’s Tony Awards Show was talented, spectacular, and classy, better by a wide margin than the Academy Awards Show. And if the Oscars producers don’t beg Neil Patrick Harris to host their next show, they’re making a big mistake. Even the acceptance speeches (with only a few exceptions) were classy and relatively short. I wasn’t quite sure what Cicely Tyson was doing when she was led to the stage to accept her award. She seemed to be either drunk, high, or in serious need of some ginkgo biloba. What a strange acceptance speech she gave. Cyndi Lauper, who won for writing the music to Kinky Boots (which also won for best new musical), gave a heartwarming acceptance, thanking all of Broadway for taking her into their family. The only time the speeches reminded me too much of the Oscars was when forty or fifty people would troop to the stage to accept one award, with speeches that went far too long by far too many people trying for their fifteen seconds of fame. And then you have Neil Patrick Harris, one of the most talented, funny, classy guys on Broadway or the tube. His opening number with a cast of what seemed to be hundreds was spectacular. And how he ever pulled off the closing number is beyond me. The lyrics included nearly all of the show’s winners. How did someone write it in such a short time? How did Harris and the others learn the lyrics in such a short time? I don’t know. But I also wonder how he managed to get to the back of the theatre when he supposedly escaped from a magic box on stage. He must have run like Superman. The highlighted musical numbers from nominated shows were, as usual, wonderful, especially the one from Pippin, with dancers and acrobats spinning around all over the place while singing the lyrics to “Magic to Do.” Talk about magical.

And while I’m on the subject of Broadway musicals, last night we went to the Arizona Broadway Theatre to see our local rendering of Into the Woods, book by James Lapine, music by—who else?—Stephen Sondheim. Into the Woods is perhaps my favorite musical. Before I retired, I used a video of it to teach my English students about staging, set design, and theatrical tricks of the stage trade. The set design of Woods in one of the most complicated ever, and I wondered how our ABT would be able to handle the triple sets and story lines of the opening number—Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and the Baker and His Wife—handle the setting in the woods with characters from the seven different story lines all crisscrossing in and out and around the large tree in the center, handle the foot-crunching noises of the giants that came down Jack’s beanstalk, create the many costumes and props needed (Milky the cow, the Witch’s magic cane, the horse that carried Cinderella to the castle for her wedding;, the scrim used for grandmother’s house with the wolf gobbling up both Granny and Red Riding Hood). All of it—the staging, the set design, the lighting, the costumes, the props—were done as professionally and as well as the original Broadway production. And the voices were all excellent, requiring ten actors with big voices to handle Sondheim’s near-operatic score. Wow! I think I’d like to see it again. And again.

Mark Murphy & Kurt Elling

I haven't written anything about music in a long time. So, now it's time again. I'm a long ago jazz fan, going all the way back to Stan Kenton in the middle of the last century, whose band sent me crashing on my way. And all the early jazz vocalists, like Sarah Vaughan and Ella (I don't even have to give her last nema) and Carmen MacRae and a host of others. Notice that I haven't mentioned any male jass vocalitsts? Frank (I don't even have to give his last name) doesn't count, since he's not really a jazz singer, even though what he does is better than anything anyone else has ever done. And I guess I was a fan of the Velvet Fog, Mel Torme, but only with one ear. Then I found Mark Murphy a decade or so ago. I don't remember how I found him, maybe YouTube or Amazon or browsing at the now defunct Borders. Or maybe he, like magic, found me. Mark Murphy isn't a singer any but jazz fanatics would know. He was always better known and listened to in Europe than here. And anyone who doesn't care for scat wouldn't care for him, because he's the male Ella when it comes to improv scat. He has about a four-octave range, and he takes us and a song up and down and around and around till it comes out here. Just listen to what he does with "Speak Low" when he was a youngster of eighty.

And then I found Kurt Elling. I found him through Rene Fleming, the opera soprano, who once said that Elling was one of her favorite singers. The Murphy influence on Elling is obvious when you listen to them side by side. Listen to his version of "My Foolish Heart. Listen carefully to the central portion about the moon being a moth. Wow. And notice what the piano player does during that moth segment, playing keys with his left hand, plucking piano strings with his right. Wow.

And if, after listening to these two, you aren't a captive Murphy and Elling fan, then you can just shake your head and wonder what in hell I was talking about.

Two Biggies

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Bad Weather

All the bad weather news of late—tornadoes like avenging devils swooping down on our nation’s midsection, especially Oklahoma, fires in California, torrential rains and flooding in the upper Midwest, hurricane season about to begin its devastating ugliness. All we now need is a series of earthquakes and a plague of locusts and we’d have it all. Meanwhile, we in Arizona look at the news, the weather channel people telling us and showing us this destruction and loss of life, and we say a silent prayer that we aren’t subject to these weather aberrations. We have occasional flash floods through which a few idiots try to drive but only the occasional idiot ever dies. We have towering dust storms, haboobs, through which a few idiots try to drive, but only the occasional idiot ever dies. These dust storms are more a nuisance than a hazard, with all the home pools (of which there are many) filling to the brim with sand and grit. We have devastating fires in the pine forests to the north, mostly destroying residences but few people. But we have no tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, mud slides, blizzards, flooding,no plague of locusts, and only a few bothersome insects. People will say we have killer heat in the summer. Heat, yes. Killer heat, no. And one does not have to shovel heat.

Sunday Rambling

I went to breakfast this morning, to Carrie’s because I knew it would be less crowded than the Hole in One. Rosalie didn’t go. She only goes to keep me company and I assured her I was not alone even though alone. I always had my friend, whatever book I was then reading, in this case Kate Atkinson’s short story collection Not the End of the World. She has become one of my very best friends.

I sat at a small table along the wall separating the waitress run and the dining room. Carrie’s is a pleasant little restaurant in a U-shaped shopping area across the street from the Hole in One, with assorted artifacts from the Thirties and Forties residing on a high shelf along the walls—canisters of ancient coffee, empty boxes of saltine crackers and CheeseIts, oil lamps and tiny dolls and porcelain cats and dogs. Beneath the upper shelf were a dozen Norman Rockwell reproductions—the cop and the runaway boy sitting at a lunch counter, the triple self-portrait of Rockwell leaning out to see himself in a mirror as he painted himself (I wonder if any of our mirror images would be more dexter than sisister, as Rockwell's pipe now seems to be in the dexter side of his mouth), three baseball umpires checking the amount of rainfall, the apprehensive boy in the dentist’s chair, the grandfather and grandson fishing in the old mill stream. Where would the Saturday Evening Post have been without Rockwell? Where would Rockwell have been without the SEP? I think theirs was a mutual success story. Unfortunately, I was seated too near a tall old man and his grandson (and not the Rockwell pair). The man must have been a bit deaf, as are many of our seniors here in Sun City West, because he kept up a steady barrage of over-loud questions for the grandson, a boy of four or five. He (the grandfather) was wearing shorts (what else?) and a vary-colored shirt and his legs were knobby and varicosed and ugly. Why not wear long pants when one’s legs are as ugly as his? I certainly do. My legs, from ankle to knee are so ugly that no one but I and Rosalie and assorted doctors and the cats ever see them. I wouldn’t want anyone to see them and wonder why I didn’t wear long pants. The cats no long arch their backs and his when they see my legs. My legs are blackened from the psoriasis, still psoriatic scaly but less so than a year ago, and stitched all over from various surgical scars, with two deep depressions from my ill-advised radiation treatments, the main one the silver dollar-sized wound I treated for three years, like a meteor crater near my shin bone. As I said—ugly.

I ordered eggs over medium, fried potatoes, ham, and a biscuit, all of which was about twice as much as I needed. I wonder how in my pre-denture past I was able to eat all the food I was served when out to dine. I’ve since found that almost every restaurant serves dishes that are nearly twice as much as a diner needs, a fact that partly explains our rising obesity in this country. And yet we all seem to oink it all down for fear of not getting our money’s worth, or of hearing that parental voice when we were young, “Just think of all the little boys and girls starving in Africa or India. You must clean up your plates.” And clean them up we did. Can’t let the rest of the world think we’re throwing good food away. Can’t let all those starving children think we’re wasting food. Maybe we should take half of all the food we try to consume and ship it to all those starving children. But I’m sure we’d find some way to screw up that kind of charity.

Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson

Well, Kate Atkinson, you finally did me in. I just finished your latest novel Life After Life, and I was both fascinated and confounded at the same time. How in the world did you do it? How did you manage to keep all the story lines in order and all the tiny details that were encased in each of those story lines, each one slightly different each time they were introduced? By story lines, I mean the various lives the main character leads each time after she dies one way or another. The main character, a young English woman named Ursula Todd, born in 1910, dies in childbirth, drowns as a child in a tidal undertow, dies from a fall out her upstairs window, got pneumonia as a young girl and dies, dies again of influenza as a young girl, dies as a young woman from gas in her apartment when the pilot light goes out, dies from a savage beating from her husband, commits suicide in a bombed out city in Germany at the end of WWII, and dies a number of other ways. Life after life. And each life is parallel to all the others but with variations in the details of each. Amazing. Atkinson handles time like a fruit cocktail: puts all the temporal elements in a blender and stirs them all together. She moves back and forth, in and out, nothing straightforward in the telling, labeling each time segment but including within it backward details as the various characters remember events. The settings are the English countryside, a blitzkrieged London, prewar Germany, a bombed-out Germany, pre-war London, post-war London. I’d love to see this as a movie, but the script writers wouldn’t be able to pull it off. I’d also like to recommend this book to anyone with the fortitude to wade through Atkinson’s complicated world view. But any impatient readers should avoid it like the plague. If you'd care to read a review of the novel that explains it far better than I can. go to Meg Wolitzer.

Life in the Arbor

I’ve written (fairly often) about the arbor vitae trees that guard our back property line. For those unacquainted with arbor vitae, they’re an evergreen from the cypress family, soft, not prickly leaves or needles, shaped like hands, with blue berries that appear once or twice a year as invitation to birds. Some are tall and skinny (pyramidalis), some are low and squat like fat munchkins (globe). And some, like ours, are tall and stately and rounded like Christmas trees. Most people here in the Valley of the Sun keep them pruned down to five or six feet, but we’ve let our go as high as they want. And apparently they’ve wanted to touch the clouds. When I came to Arizona in 1994 to buy a house in Sun City West, one of the things that most attracted me to the one we bought was that wonderful privacy hedge of nine arbor vitaes. Not that I don’t love my neighbors. Good fences really do make good neighbors, as Frost told me years ago. I just don’t want to have to see my neighbors or exchange neighborly hellos from one back yard to the other. The trees were about fifteen feet all when we moved in. They’re now up to thirty feet. One on the left side gave up the ghost about ten years ago, becoming a ghastly brown skeleton of its former green glory, and we had it taken down. But the hole was filled in nicely by an oleander bush. They first hung lower branches to the ground like hoop skirts, providing shelter for the many birds and beasts that lived with us—rabbits, lizards, quail and doves, even a family of javalinas that grew fond of the quail block we’d put out for the birds. We have since had them trimmed up about four feet, and, sadly, depriving most of the backyard beasties of a home. The javalina mom or dad, around midnight, would drag the block into the sheltering arbor vitae and chomp down as much as they could break off the block. Their little pink son, as far as I know, didn’t get any. After retrieving the remains of the quail block two or three times, we finally gave in the pigs and let them have it. But we bought no more quail blocks, and the javalina family moved on to more generous pastures. The trees and their inhabitants became the focus of my children’s novel, Life in the Arbor—Rollie Rabbit, Fred Lizard, Mollie Monarch, and Buzz Hummingbird. I love that book and wish that every third or fourth grader in Arizona could read it. But that’s not in my publishing cards. They’ll just never know what they’re missing. Sounds too much like sour grapes on my part. If there’s anyone who might read this and are interested in my Life in the Arbor, it’s available at Amazon.com in hard or soft cover, or at lulu.com as an e-book. I’d hope you’d be as enchanted as I am. But then, a writer shouldn’t be enchanted by his own work. However, I am.

Tiger

Sunday with Colonial golf in Texas, an afternoon Diamondback game, maybe a little NBA action this evening. I wonder how many Sunday hours I’ve spent in my life watching Sunday sports. Too many even to guess at. Tiger’s not playing this weekend, so I watch the action with one eye only. Boo Weekly seems bound to win, but he has a lot of pursuers. Matt Kuchar is near the top and he seems likeable, though the boys in the tower say he has a volcanic temper. How can anyone with such a cherubic smile be prone to anger? Which lead me back to Tiger. So many people (both PGA players as well as a bunch of old farts here in Sun City West) are now saying he’s a bad person and no one likes him. He’s too withdrawn, they say, too unfriendly. He spits all the time on camera and should be penalized for it. He shows fits of anger and swears on camera. He plays mind games on fellow competitors (hear that, Sergio?). He cheats and tourney officials let him get by with it (for example, the cheatful drop on 15 in this year’s Masters, the cheatful drop after hitting into the water on 15 in this year’s Players). He gets too much on-and off-camera coverage. He’s a lecherous womanizer. Let me speak to those charges. Hogan was called “the wee icemon” because he never acknowledges the people he was playing with. Tommy Bolt (Lightning Bolt) would often wrap a club around a tree when anything went wrong. Sergio has been seen to slam a club into the ground after a bad shot. Nearly every golfer, pro or amateur, has dropped a few F-bombs during the course of a round at this infernal game. Many of the young players spit during around but the camera doesn’t see them because the cameras are always on Tiger. Sam Snead, according to those who knew him, was a notorious golf shark who not only player mind games but would also cheat a bit when he was playing with buddies. The omnipresent camera that follows Tiger, the many many articles written about Tiger aren’t of Tiger’s doing. It’s just that I and most other golf addicts want to see him and read about him. As for the womanizing, I wonder how many tour players, on the road for much of each year, have dallied with some sexy golf groupie. I’ve heard rumors that the hallowed and haloed Arnold Palmer dallied a bit in his youth. I realize I’ve sometimes (often) been too ardent in my admiration for Tiger. I know that admiration took a big hit on that fateful November night a few years ago. But I still admire him for the golf marvels he produces. And I hope I live long enough to see him win that 19th major.

Movie Chatter

A word or two about movies. I haven’t yet seen Gatsby and I’m not sure I want to. I’d hate to have this glitzy 3-D version spoil one of my favorite novels. I love Leonardo DiCaprio and I’m sure he makes an admirable Jay, but from what I’ve seen of the previews, there seems to be a too Dolbyish score and too much confetti flying at the viewer. That’s too much emphasis on the effects than on The Great Gatsy I know. And speaking of ear-shattering Dolby sound (which seems to be the case with every action flick that comes out), I just saw Star Trek, Into Darkness and felt like my head was exploding along with the exploding cities and space ships, the smashing of fists into faces (and no one seemed to be very seriously injured by these gargantuan blows). For Trekies, this was a wonderful film for renewing our acquaintance with the young Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Bones, Uhura, and Sulu. Even an aging Leonard Nimoy made a brief appearance. And the futuristic gadgetry on the Enterprise and the smaller ships was wonderful, as were the digitized views of 23rd century cities. But the story was too confusing with too many unanswered questions, the sound effects too deafening, too much hand-to-hand combat. I’d give it 3½ stars instead of the 5 most other critics are giving it. Now, I guess I’ll go see what Iron Man 3 is doing, compare its special effects to Star Trek, watch Gweneth Paltro do her stuff. Hell, I’d go just to watch her whether it was sci-fi or country or a little Shakespeare stuff.

Teeth & Time

It's been nearly two years now that I've been fighting the good (or bad) fight with my teeth. Somewhere in mid-2011 I had three Mexican crowns (no, not Mexican monarchs, Mexican dental crowns) all decide to break off at the gum line, all in one month. Instead of implants I decided to go with a partial upper plate. Didn't work but it cost a bundle. Went to a different dentist who went "tsk tsk" and told me it was a bad decision. So he had an oral surrgeon pull five uppers for an exorbitant $1250. Then a six month wait for the gums to settle for a more complete upper plate and a final partial upper plate for aother exorbitant amount. Hated the plate. Went to Midwestern Dental University to see what they could do: extract the remaining upper teeth and five lower teeth and build two temporary plates, a complete upper and a partial lower. Then another six months for the gums to recede. All this time I have two temporary plates that bounced all over in my mouth when I chewed. And now, finally, I have only three more weeks until my permanent plates come back from the lab. Then I should have a mouthful of teeth that actually work. And all for a mere $4,000. Yikes! I've put over $12,000 into a reconstructed chew. The bad news? The twelve grand. The good news? I've lost about 25 pounds because I had to chew so slowly that I was always full after half a meal. What a way to lose weight.

Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again. I say you can go home again as long as you're not looking for what was once there, like youth and youthful dreams and old romances.

Back Yard News

It’s a lovely Sunday morning in the Valley. The day is clear with a slight breeze, temps in the mid-seventies. The dumb doves seem to be everywhere, who-who-who-whooing to each other, wings slapping loudly as they fight for position in the arbor vitae or engage in their seemingly endless sexual activities. The other morning I watched a female browsing for juuust the right sticks for a hastily made nest. I wonder how many nestings and egg layings they do in the course of a year. Apparently , with all the sexual activity, they just go from one hatch to another. Judging from the many doves we have in our neighborhood they must raise thirty or forty a year. A seldom seen road runner came skulking through our yard a bit ago, but no Wile E. Coyote giving chase. Curious how few coyotes come through our yard anymore. We used to have three large siblings browse through every week or so, but I haven’t seen them for several months. I read an article about a coyote pup that ran headlong into a jumping cholla. Oh, what a mess he found. Jumping cholla, or teddy bear cholla, are an infernal cactus that look as innocent as a teddy bear, but when you inadvertently brush up against one, its little arms seem to jump out at you and attach to foot or leg, and when you try to detach it with hand, it then sinks its little innocent barbs into the hand. And then the other hand when you try to rid yourself of it. The coyote pup would have died a painful death if not for two workers at the golf course that found him. They held him down and used a pair of pliers to extricate the pup, then gave him back to a wary mom. One lucky lad. The other thing curiously absent are the quail families coming and going. We used to see countless parents with as many as twenty little acorn babies scurrying by. But so far, none this year. The road runner couldn’t possibly account for their absence, although they can eat baby quail like popcorn. I haven’t seen the cardinal for a while, but I still hear him sing now and then. And the yellow monarch that hung around for several weeks is now gone. They usually migrate in great social clouds, but this one seemed to be too independent for that. She finally flew the coop north to join her fellow kings and queens, in time to lay her eggs that will hatch and become caterpillars that munch on milkweed before chrysalising to repeat the whole process. Such a nice circle of life. We should all be as lucky as monarchs (both kings and queens as well as flutterbys).

Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson again, simply because she’s such a fascinating read. In a front cover blurb for When Will There Be Good News? Stephen King says it succinctly and accurately: “As a reader I was charmed. As a novelist, I was staggered by Atkinson’s narrative wizardry.” That’s high praise from the king of horror, who himself often engages in narrative sleight of hand. Yes, her narrative wizardry, her legerdemain, her “now you see it, now you don’t.” She keeps the reader on his toes as she leads him back and forth in time, holding up an event and then examining it from different points of view, showing it to us before and after, then snatching it away to begin another chapter in another time with a new set of characters. She tends to rely too much on coincidence, but as Jackson Brodie says, “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.” She coincidentally hooks diverse characters into her plots, not finalizing their connections until the very end, and though the reader notices the unlikeliness of the connections, he doesn’t care because of the serendipitous plot endings. She inserts little mental asides in parentheses, sometimes in brackets, some just bare, some in italics and some in quote marks. I’ve quit trying to figure out what the different methods signify. But the real skill, the real charm, lies in the characters. They think and say and do things that knock me out with their unexpectedness. Reggie, a tough little sixteen-year-old, is a good example. She remembers waving goodbye to her “mum,” who was going on holiday, tragically drowning in a hotel pool. The memory of that farewell was “murky, half made-up, with the missing bits filled in. Really, every time a person said goodbye to another person, they should pay attention, just in case it was the last time. First things were good, last things not so much.” She describes her Latin tutor: “Ms. MacDonald was in her fifties, but she had never been young. When she was a teacher at the school, she looked as if she ironed herself every morning and had never betrayed a trace of irrational behavior (quite the opposite), but now not only had she embraced a crazy religion but she dressed as if she were one step away from being a bag lady, and her house was two steps beyond squalid.” Later, she’s considering death and God’s involvement: “Was there a kind of lottery (Reggie imagined a raffle) where God picked out your chosen method of going—‘Heart attack for him, cancer for her, let’s see, have we had a terrible car crash yet this month?’ Not that Reggie believed in God, but it was interesting sometimes to imagine. Did God get out of bed one morning and draw back the curtains (Reggie’s imaginary God led a very domesticated life) and think, ‘A drowning in a hotel swimming pool today, I fancy. We haven’t had that one in a while.’ ” Dr. Joanna Hunter also considers God, and says something so true to my heart, so much as I’ve always believed, I have to mention it. “Joanna didn’t believe in God, how could she, but she believed in the existence of the soul, believed indeed in the transference of the soul, and although she wouldn’t have stood up at a scientific conference and declared it, she also believed that she carried the souls of her dead family inside her and one day the baby would do the same for her. Just because you were a rational and skeptical atheist didn’t mean that you didn’t have to get through every day the best way you could.” Louise Monroe, a detective who is attracted to the ex-cop Jackson Brodie, is one tough cookie, and considers this about criminals and the death penalty: “Sometimes Louise hankered after the days when prisoners were made to walk endlessly on treadmills or turn crank handles. Pedophiles, murderers, rapists, should they really be making books ? If it were up to Louise, she would put the lot of them down.” As I’ve said, nearly everything is quotable. I hope I live long enough to read everything Kate Atkinson writes, long enough to continue quoting her.

The Bates Motel

The finale of The Bates Motel next week, and what an odd but fascinating series it’s been so far. That dreadful (in all meanings of the word) house on the hill, the seedy motel below, Norma Bates and Norman Bates sharing the house (and also the bed), blood and pot just everywhere. The viewer is seeing these people with the plot of Psycho in the back of his mind, seeing the traces of madness in young Norman, remembering the desiccated body of Norma in that rocking chair, the “shriek shriek” of the screaming violins as Norman pulls the shower curtain aside to reveal a wet and screaming Janet Leigh just before Norman’s knife gets her. And now we’re seeing how it all began. Vera Farmiga, as Norma, will be nominated for an Emma for what she does with this character. And she deserves to win it. She’s sexy, tormented, obsessive, possessive, and strong enough and brutal enough to kill anyone who gets in her way. Then there’s Freddie Highmore as Norman, a sweet young teenager who sometimes blacks out in times of crisis, like when he bops his abusive father in the head with a heavy blender receptacle as the father was knocking Norma around the kitchen, or when he bops Keith Summers in the head when Summers (the former owner of the motel) is about to rape Norma, who then stabs and kills Summers when he comes to. Norman has the face of an angel with a hint evil lurking in the eyes. He loves his mother . . . maybe too much. She loves her son . . . maybe too much. His school chum Emma Decody trails after Norman like a dog, hauling along with her the oxygen tank she needs to stay alive (and we can see that somewhere in the future she’ll lose the tank or have it taken from her). Her father teaches Norman the art of taxidermy. And what does that suggest about Norma when she dies? Right. Yikes! All this against the background of White Pine Bay, Oregon, with secrets everywhere—an unidentified drug lord, a huge field of marijuana, a sex ring and captive Oriental girls, a nasty man who rents room 9 but is there really to find money left behind by Keith Summers. It would be just another horror series except for Vera Farmiga. She makes it much more than that.