29 August 09
Sweet Caroline
Numenius and I made a trip to San Francisco today. I wanted to try out some spinning wheels, which I’ve been doing fairly intensely over the past three weeks. I was hoping today’s visit to Carolina Homespun would conclude my search. I had two candidates already, but wanted to be thorough and try every possible likely wheel.
Well, I’ve been surprised. By a Lendrum double treadle. Morgaine explained to me that she didn’t really have one to sell, since the one she had had been requested by someone else. These wheels are made in Toronto and are in a lot of demand so I assumed if I decided to get one I’d wait a while, which was okay.
During my visit the buyer called. She wanted, instead, the cherry Matchless wheel. I bought the Lendrum.
What to call it? As I sat spinning this evening to the Giants game on the radio, the Red Sox eighth-inning anthem, Sweet Caroline, came to my head. This song was recently revealed to have been written all those years ago for a young Caroline Kennedy, whose uncle Ted died this week.
My wheel is Sweet Caroline.
29 August 09
Consistency Out Of Change
Yesterday evening we went with Barbara to see the Sacramento River Cats play the Fresno Grizzlies. The River Cats lost the game 6-3, but ended up clinching the division then when the one team that had a mathematical chance of catching the River Cats in the remaining games of the season also lost. The River Cats have been playing in Sacramento 10 years now and have won their division 8 times. They have also gone on to win the Pacific Coast League championship 3 times so far. I am marveling at their success. This is Triple-A baseball: the whole point of the league is to develop players to go on and play at the major league level. You can’t have a classical team dynasty because the rosters at Triple-A are changing all the time, a hundred plus times each season. Any superbly talented player doesn’t stay at the Triple-A level for long to contribute wins for the team; instead he quickly gets promoted.
So how have the River Cats done it? I don’t know. They must have a very effective managerial office. But we can’t forget the loyal fan base. Go River Cats!
25 August 09
Trained
When Jennifer and I were young and sunburned during a school camping trip, we paired up during a treasure hunt. But we got lost. Somehow, we ended up along the train track, on the line from Madrid to Avila. Pinned against the rock as the train sped by, we closed our eyes and our hearts raced and we caught our breath and emerged from that gully, glad to be alive, and found our way back to camp. I have never forgotten that terror, the sudden realization of the power of metal moving that fast. I did wonder what the train driver thought of our presence there. We didn’t tell. I haven’t talked about it much. You tend to leave out these accounts of childhood stupidity when recounting your misspent youth.
Today at lunch a man died, hit by a train just out across the field from our house. I don’t know if it was a mistake or on purpose. I saw the coroner’s van, the ambulance, the cops. What I do know is this: that train driver will never be the same again. I wish peace for him or her, knowing it’s more likely they will have lifelong nightmares.
Tonight the coyotes will howl, their mysterious howl for the trains and the moon and the night.
21 August 09
Witness To Kittens
When we were in Brunswick, Maine last month we visited the museum home of the Civil War hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, which led me into a bout of reading on the Civil War. First I started with a couple of books on the battle of Gettysburg (including Noah Andre Trudeau’s book Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage). I then followed this by reading David Donald’s classic biography Lincoln.
One of the less known facts about Abraham Lincoln is that he has a reputation of being a great lover of cats, showing up on lists of famous cat lovers together with folks like Albert Schweitzer, Mark Twain, and Winston Churchill. Of this characteristic Donald only has this to say:
From almost the day of his arrival in New Salem [in 1835, when Lincoln was 26], the good women of the village had matrimonial plans for him. They found his awkward clumsiness touching, and they noted how tender he was with small children and how affectionate he was to kittens and other pets.
Wanting to know more about Lincoln’s ailurophilia, I searched down the original source of a tale about Lincoln befriending three orphaned kittens on a visit to General Grant’s camp at City Point, Virginia in March of 1865. The following is from General Horace Porter’s memoir Campaigning with Grant. Porter was at this time Grant’s aide de camp. I was glad to find this citation — Lincoln is a figure about which there is no shortage of mythology!
The President now went aboard his boat to spend the night. The next morning he wandered into the tent of the headquarters telegraph operator, where several of us were sitting…Three tiny kittens were crawling about the tent at the time. The mother had died, and the little wanderers were expressing their grief by mewing piteously. Mr. Lincoln picked them up, took them on his lap, stroked their soft fur, and murmured: “Poor little creatures, don’t cry; you’ll be taken good care of,” and turning to Bowers, said: “Colonel, I hope you will see that these poor little motherless waifs are given plenty of milk and treated kindly.” Bowers replied: “I will see, Mr. President, that they are taken in charge by the cook of our mess, and are well cared for.” Several times during his stay Mr. Lincoln was found fondling these kittens. He would wipe their eyes tenderly with his handkerchief, stroke their smooth coats, and listen to them purring their gratitude to him. It was a curious sight at an army headquarters, upon the eve of a great military crisis in the nation’s history, to see the hand which had affixed the signature to the Emancipation Proclamation, and had signed the commissions of all the heroic men who served the cause of the Union, from the general-in-chief to the lowest lieutenant, tenderly caressing three stray kittens. It well illustrated the kindness of the man’s disposition, and showed the childlike simplicity which was mingled with the grandeur of his nature.
Now if only I could find the source to the story that when Mary Todd Lincoln was asked if her husband had any hobbies, she replied “Cats.”
20 August 09
Common Sense: A Plea
My brother-in-law is an opthalmologist. As far as doctors’ jobs go, it’s quite a good gig. Not the superstardom of neuroscience or surgery, not the large salaries of orthopedics, there is still the bonus of good hours and the huge reward that comes from restoring sight to people semi-blinded by cataracts. He lives in a small town (a real small town: population <4,500, unlike Davis, whose population is now >65,000 and should rightly be called a small city). In this small town, people stop him regularly in the street thanking him for saving their mother’s vision. It’s an aging population, so this happens more than you’d think.
One day, he was called in to operate on a kid who’d poked himself in the eye with a stick. (This also happens more than you’d think.) He passed out cold on the operating room floor, alarming everyone in the room. He was wheeled over for a CT scan, other tests. They called my sister.
“Can I just ask you, what was the age of his patient? Seven? Right. That’s Simon’s age. I think he just had a moment of daddy-itis. I think he’ll be fine.” D’s superabundance of common sense has, more than once, been embarrassing to medical professionals, but I’m really grateful to be related to someone who has this much. It provides perspective.
As we move into chemotherapy with my mother, a friend has recommended a book by David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer: A New Way of Life. The book advocates a combination of good-sense nutrition loaded with antioxidants found in foods (not supplements), especially dark fruits and green tea, exercise, and a meditation or yoga practice. All of it in addition to, not instead of, the tripartite therapies used by modern medicine (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy). Sounds sensible, yes? Hardly worth writing a book over, maybe!
Yet this is not advice you’ll get from most doctors, most oncologists. Why? Because they consider it outside their brief. Oncology is all about finding the rogue cells and killing them as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s not about boosting immune systems. Oncology conferences are full of anxious doctors whose lives are spent trying to keep up with the latest therapies, the latest research, and they probably don’t think they’d have time to keep up with all these nutrition or meditation findings, even if they thought it might be part of their work (but they don’t: medicine is very much in the thrall, still, of the palace of pharmacopia). They are busy people, and unfortunately they are getting busier. Certain cancers are now epidemic in the Western world, especially colon, breast, cervical, lung, prostate. (Esophageal cancer, which killed my father, isn’t, but it’s epidemic in Japan, where people are screened for it aggressively.)
Servan-Schreiber is himself a psychiatric doctor who, during one of his own research experiments, was discovered to have a brain tumor, putting him instantly on the other side of the doctor-patient divide. But the most astonishing thing I read last night was this:
“My knowledge of nutrition… was considerably less than that of an average reader of Cosmopolitan. With only minor exaggeration, the following sums up the extent of what I’d been taught [in medical school]:
- Foods are composed of carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, vitamins, and minerals.
- People who suffer from obesity need to eat fewer calories.
- If diabetic, people must eat less sugar; if hypertensive, less salt; with cardiac disease, less cholesterol.”
Even knowing doctors are overstressed by advances in their fields, surely we can do better than this. Demonstrably, we have, otherwise we’d still be relying on leeches and bloodletting and blue pills and black draughts. Unfortunately, it means we’re going to have to look out for ourselves while they catch up. We’re going to have to use common sense. I wonder if there’s a pill for that. Hmmm….
17 August 09
Don't Send Me Your Heirloom Bibles
This would make a good phrase for a bookbinder’s t-shirt, my instructor informed us at at a course I took on everyday book repair today at the San Francisco Center for The Book. The operative word for what we were learning to do was repair, not restoration, hence no heirlooms. For practice I arrived with several not-so-valuable books and sketchbook journals which we proceeded to operate on using wheat paste and PVA glue, Japanese tissue paper, and book cloth. (There was a time when I was doing a lot of notetaking on these hardbound artists’ journals commonly found in the art department of campus bookstores. What I’ve learned over the years is that although the textblock paper is quite good, the case binding falls apart quite readily with moderate use, hence the need for repairs.) I rebacked two of these journals, and reglued the cover of an ancient copy of the National Geographic bird guide. It was a successful day, and I’m now not afraid of diving into repair projects on ordinary, well-used books that are simply starting to fall apart. But first I need some Japanese tissue!
14 August 09
Spinning Away
I’ve been renting a wheel from Meridian Jacobs and also spinning on my spindle, which is getting easier. The key is consistency. The last yarn I plied was acceptable weight for socks, but I think it wasn’t spun or plied tightly enough for sock yarn.
Numenius has also tried his hand at spindle spinning.
Researching wheels to buy. I’m narrowing down the criteria. Currently they include ease of use, price, beauty, silence, treadle action and how smooth it is. There will be compromises to be made here: you can’t have all of this in one package, it seems. It’s like buying binoculars.
In other news, and very good news, mum got an all-clear from the doctor this morning and has opted to go for the recommended 4-month chemo treatment. The doc provided some great stats on why this was a good idea. We all agreed, though would have supported her no matter what. Celebration, tonight!
9 August 09
Field Of Sun
Late this spring they planted the field just south of our house in sunflowers.
9 August 09
A Fine Day By The Bay
We went on an wonderful outing today to the Giants game in San Francisco, escaping the heat for a pleasant sunny SF day with the fog content to hang just outside the Gate, taking a lovely ferry ride from Vallejo direct to the ballpark, meeting up with our friend Barbara at the game and returning back to Davis with her, and best of all, watching the Giants come from behind and beat the Cincinnati Reds 4-2 in convincing fashion! The bullpen was solid, unlike last night’s meltdown.
I hope everybody’s Sneak Some Zucchini onto Your Neighbors’ Porch Day went according to plan.
7 August 09
Unidimensionality, a Reflection
Davis is a small enough town that you run into people you know well often, people you know less well just as often, and people you hardly know at all pretty much just as often too (these are the people whose name you have learned several times but can’t remember it, nor can you remember the context in which you last saw them, such memory lapses leading to annual embarrassment which I am now happy to blame on menopause).
One of the middle type (a cyclist) only ever seems to see me as a birder. On running into each other, the conversation tends to go like this:
Me: Hi, D.
D: Hi, A! Guess what I saw at my house yesterday! A heron!
Me: Oh, that’s nice.
D: Yes, it was posing/eating/standing/flying (etc.)
I’m not sure why this bothers me so much, but I think it’s because it reduces me to a tiny fragment of my personality, reflecting only one of scores of interests. (It’s akin to when people catch a tiny fragment of my accent and wonder where in Ireland I’m from.) I have actually raised this with D, that I do a bit more than bird. Readers of this blog probably suspect, with good reason, I’m multidimensional to a manic fault.
So I figured it must be a context thing, and started a map of my different personae across Davis. It’s all in the mapping. What would your personal map look like?
(I realize I have trespassed on Numenius’ turf; it’s both his turn to blog and his profession. Sorry, Numenius. You can have the next two.)