Stress Relief

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My last nerve!

I don't know about you, but with the pandemic and the upcoming inauguration, stress sits on my shoulders like a 12-foot, hundred pound python named Charles. It's gotten to the point that I find myself holding my breath doing such death-defying stunts as writing blog posts, getting the dogs back in the house, waiting for the bread's second rise, or trying to go to sleep at night. 

Of course, during the evening, sitting on the couch, watching George Gently -- my current British cop show of choice -- I fall asleep easily. I do miss the ending, but that means I can watch it again and still enjoy the mystery. I do find cop shows very relaxing. First off their focus is narrow, the crime is local and has no far reaching consequences. There's a mystery for me to solve and whether or not I can suss out the whos and whys, the cop on the case does. The villain is apprehended and I'm satisfied there will be a trial, a verdict, and a sentence.

Or I can read a book. Oddly enough, I find nonfiction to be better therapy during these trying days. Fiction seems somehow too frivolous. Yeah, right. What sort of frivolity can I get up to reading narrative histories, or books about theoretical physics? Actually, Shelby Foote's Civil War in three volumes, reassures me that my nation has indeed been in worse straights than it is today. And
S. James Gates, Jr. and Cathie Pelletier's Proving Einstein Right is an engaging travelogue -- scientists' early 20th Century adventures following solar eclipses around the world, doncha know.

I was reading Barack Obama's A Promised Land. It's really quite good. It not only gets into the nuts and bolts of running for office, but why run and what his goals were. I was reminded of Arthur Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy and His Times which I read some forty years ago. Back then I was inspired that there was hope for a better world and politics could play a positive role in achieving that better world. Then January 6, 2021 and the assault on the United States Capitol.

I needed something else to read. Something as far from politics as possible. So I went back to a book I enjoyed the first time through and each time I've dipped into it since. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer, Random House's Chief Copy Editor.

And you thought the other books I've mentioned would be anything but light reading. Of course, you're right. But Dreyer's English IS light reading. Mr. Dreyer says out loud, or rather in black and white, all those things you've ever thought about English grammar rules. Like his admonition against sentence fragments where he then quotes his "favorite novel opener of all time" from Dickens's Bleak House:

     "London. Michaelmas Term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.
      Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly
      retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,
      forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering
      down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as
      full-grown snow-flakes -- gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun."

The quote runs on for a good, full page. Mr. Dreyer challenges us to count the excerpt's complete sentences and let him know when we get past zero. He enthuses, "Isn't that great? Don't you want to run off and read the whole novel now? Do! I'll wait here for three months." 

That was one of my best laughs of the day when I first read it and it continues to make me laugh every time I read it. Anybody who's ever read Dickens gets it! 

Maybe, after Trump is gone, Biden is safely inaugurated, the fences along the Mall are taken down, and the National Guard Troops have gone home, we can breathe normally again and read whatever we want. Even Dickens.

Hiroshima -- Book Review

The original book was copyrighted and published in 1946. It is nonfiction. The edition I just finished reading was published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1985. I know, I know -- where have I been that it's taken me so long to read it? And why did I read it now?

Reason No. 1 -- my daughter loaned it to me. She's a student at Colorado University, Denver. Her Honors Project is a book of poetry focused on poetry of witness and documentary poetics. This is but one of the books she's reading in preparation to write her poems.               .

Reason No. 2 -- In today's world climate the threat of nuclear war has thrown me back to the days of my youth when magazines had Jello recipes, diets, and blue prints for bomb shelters.

And Reason No. 3 -- Hersey's book Hiroshima mentions Father Hubert Schiffer, a German Jesuit priest. He and three other priests were in their Hiroshima mission compound less than one mile from ground zero on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the bomb called "Little Boy" exploded over the Japanese city.

Many years ago I got to hear Fr. Schiffer speak. At that time he was the Catholic Chaplain at the University of Oklahoma. Appropriately enough, he was speaking in the underground auditorium between the Sequoyah Building and the Will Rogers Building in Oklahoma City's Capital Complex. That area included a cafeteria, the auditorium, and enough space for important state government officials to take cover in the event of a nuclear attack.

I remember it had huge metal doors that could be closed and ample supplies of water and crackers in barrels. I also remember that across the hall from the auditorium was a cafeteria (which we Welfare Department employees patronized religiously.)  They made the best cinnamon rolls and coffee, good reasons for us to look forward to coffee breaks.

Anyway, when Fr. Schiffer spoke, he told about his time in Hiroshima.

At the time of the bombing Wikipedia sets Hiroshima's population at approximately 340,000–350,000. Fr. Schiffer said that before the bomb, he could not see the ocean from his building because of the city's many other buildings. After the bomb, almost everything in the central part of the city was gone. There was nothing to block his view of the sea. Wikipedia estimated as many as 123,000 people died that first day.

Fr. Schiffer told about being taken out of the city to recuperate from injuries and radiation sickness. It took about a year for him to recover. When he was well enough, he returned to the city to find orphaned children roaming the city, depending on each other, and living however they could. He took over the bombed-out shell of a building and began collecting the children and the necessities to care for them -- sometimes leaving food outside the building to lure them in.

The American occupying forces had plenty of supplies in the area but Schiffer was blocked from them by the red tape many of us are familiar with. Finally, with a borrowed truck and a couple of people to help, he showed up at the gate of a supply depot. He explained that he needed bedding and food for his orphans, but he did not yet have official approval. The MPs refused him admittance.

He said he was going in to get what he needed. He had his helpers get out of the truck. He laid down in the front seat behind the truck's steering wheel, gunned it, and crashed through the gate. The MPs (I guess thinking it not a good idea to fire on a priest) stood by while he and his helpers loaded the truck. They handed the MPs a list of what they were taking and left. Father Schiffer said he never heard any complaints from the American military, nor did he receive a bill. In fact, after that, the Americans responded in a more favorable and timely manner to his requests for aid.

John Hersey's book follows six survivors of the bomb. The book begins:

August 6,1945

Miss Toshinki Sasaki, a clerk in the personel department of the East Asia Tim Works, had just turned her head to chat with the girl at the next desk.

Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a physician, had just sat down to read the paper on the porch of his private hospital.

Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor's widow, was watching a neighbor from her kitchen window.

Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Priest, lay on a cot in the mission house reading a Jesuit magazine.

Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young surgeon, walked along a hospital corridor with a blood specimen for a Wasserman test.

The Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, was about to unload a cart of clothes at a rich man's home in the suburbs.

The mundane activities did not really touch me until I read the Hiroshima Methodist Church and, all of a sudden, I realized that my view of World War II Japan was fundamentally wrong. A Methodist Church -- not a mission, but a church lead by a Japanese Methodist minister and attended by Japanese parishioners. In his book Hersey talks about damage to the Chamber of Commerce Building, the difficulty of withdrawing money from the damaged banks, the heroic efforts of medical personnel to treat the horribly wounded in equally badly damaged hospitals, etc., etc., etc.

This did not at all fit my John Wayne/Robert Mitchum-American-movies-trained concept of the people who attacked my people at Pearl Harbor.

Of course, these were not the people who attacked Pearl Harbor, any more than I was the person who dropped that atom bomb on them. I hadn't realized just how complete my sense of us and them was -- at least for the Japan that existed then.

That was before I was born. That was the Japan that my father fought in the Pacific. In my mind, somehow World War II Japan was completely separate from the Japan where my school friend Ray's great grandparents came from. Or the 1970's Japan my little yellow Honda car came from.

The original book ended and was published during the first anniversary year of the bombing. Hersey wrote:  A year after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto's church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same.

The hope at the end of World War II was that nuclear weapons would never be used again. Hersey does not end the revised edition with such rose-tinted glasses. He dates the development of nuclear weapons around the world up until the 1985 edition of Hiroshima. He brings us up to the fortieth anniversary of that first nuclear bomb. Each of the six survivors was still alive. They had built new lives for themselves. They had endured.

The cover of  Hiroshima quotes the Saturday Review of Literature -- "Everyone able to read should read it."

I concur.

No One Snaps Beans with Grandma Anymore -- Nonfiction

Or shells peas or shucks corn or pieces quilts or, for that matter, quilts with Grandma anymore.

This was the title of a piece that showed up on my Facebook feed and now I can't for the life of me locate the article. It doesn't really matter. Whatever point the article made, the title makes the point for me that we need to take time to explore our history.

Not the history that Miss Hall taught us in the eleventh grade. That history was about people so important that they have become legends. People who wrote the Declaration of Independence and spoke the Gettysburg Address and spoke the I Have a Dream speech.

I mean our history. Our stories. And we didn't get them just snapping beans. We got them around the dinner table. Or in the early evening sitting on the front porch. At family picnics when the little kids sat on the ice-cream churn holding the top down while the men cranked and cranked until the ice cream was frozen enough to make churning nearly impossible.

Or in the car when us kids couldn't stand Daddy's Country and Western music and he couldn't stand our Rock and Roll so the radio just rode along silently while someone said "Do you remember the time..." Or someone else pointed out the place where Great Grandpa and Great Grandma first settled when they came to Oklahoma -- the men and big boys came in a covered wagon along with the livestock, the women and little children came on the train.

The story about Grandma's grandpa who was still picking cotton at age 94 and making his grandchildren hop to keep up with him.

The story about a time when Grandpa could ride a horse in the Deep Fork Creek Valley through grass so tall you couldn't see the horse.

And about Granddad carrying planks in the back of a vehicle he called "the duck" to lay across creeks where there was no bridge so he could deliver the mail.

The story about Dad's being sent by steam locomotive from Rhode Island, a place none of us were quite sure where it was, all the way across the United States to the West Coast to be shipped to the South Seas in World War II. And how they had to go north from Denver into Wyoming, then west across the Rockies, because the mountains weren't so tall there and the train could pull the grade.

About the mean rooster that flogged my cousin Chris who was just a little boy. And we had that rooster the next day for Sunday dinner.

About watching Neil Armstrong in that grainy, black and white, TV picture take humanity's first step on the moon. Astronaut Armstrong was definitely the stuff of legend, but the people in the den watching were my story. There were nine people, three generations -- some watching avidly as history was made, a couple oohing and ahhhing over a new baby and a couple more playing with a new puppy. It seemed to me that I, alone, understood the importance of the television event.

Actually, I alone was missing history being made right there in that room with me. Now, the old people who were in that room are long gone. They took with them, the recipe for Big Mama's Fresh Apple Cake, stories of the early days in the uranium ball mills of New Mexico and the oil fields of Oklahoma. Even the baby has grown children and I've lost touch with him and all his stories.

The important thing about snapping beans and shelling peas, is being present to our own histories as they're being told. Indeed, as they're being made.

Where was I when the big world events were making news? When the Cuban Missile Crises made the news? When President Kennedy was murdered? When my friends were being shipped to Vietnam. When the Oklahoma City Bombing happened? When the World Trade Center was attacked?

How did I meet my first husband? What was it like when my son was born? What went wrong with that first marriage? How did I meet the man I happily live with now. What was it like when my daughter was born.

Where have all those people gone? What did they do?

Where are all those people still in what is becoming my history? What are they doing right now, today? What will they do as they make their way in the world?

What are we doing? How will we make our way?

We don't need to snap beans anymore. We can if we want to. Better yet, we can take the time whenever, wherever. To find out what that youngest grandchild's favorite color is? Take a ride with the newest licensed driver in the family. With the radio turned off, of course. Watch the video of the band performance and basketball game on Facebook.

We can scrapbook, read our daughter-in-law's blog, attend a slam poetry competition, listen with enthusiasm to a discussion of soda firing pottery.

The venues may have changed, but we're still busy making our histories. And we can still pay attention.

#atozchallenge

The Pluto Files -- a review

See all those pink Post-Its? They mark things I wanted to quote in this review; new bits of information I wanted to remember; funny things he said that I wanted to tell somebody -- my husband, my daughter, anybody who'd listen.

Too many, too many.

In The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet, Neil deGrasse Tyson tells the history of not just Pluto but of our understanding of our solar system.

He explores America's proprietary attitude toward Pluto. Pluto has always been practically an American planet. It was, after all, discovered by an American and made famous as Mickey Mouse's best friend. How more American could it be? How could it be demoted from its planet status by a bunch of mere scientists?

Tyson recounts his own part in that demotion. The decision to exclude Pluto from the new Rose Center's exhibit of Solar System planets was made in order to save money should discussions, then ongoing in the world of cosmology, redefine 'planet' making Pluto no longer a planet and instantly rendering the exhibit wrong. 

Not because he led the anti-Pluto-as-a-planet movement, but because he was Director of the Hayden Planetarium and he had tacitly accepted the role of astrophysics-interpreter-in-chief, he was the lightning rod. He drew the fury of the American Press and school children from across the country, incensed and offended that their planet was no longer officially considered a planet. 

Third grade teachers throughout the nation recognized a teaching moment. 

And suddenly, Tyson (not the boxer) was a household name. Not, in my opinion, a bad thing. Anything that focuses America on something scientific rather than sports has got to be good -- any publicity is good, right? Even bad publicity. Or detestations from third graders.

And it wasn't just children. Songs were written. Editorial cartoons were published. Comedians had fodder. And other scientists, even astrophysicists, took professional exception.

There were debates. According to Tyson's accounts these debates were every bit as passionate and acrimonious as the current crop of political debates, complete with verbal fireworks. (Though I don't think birther considerations came into any of them.)

The International Astronomical Union did not define 'planet' until 2006. The same year the other Tyson retired from boxing and six years after the Rose Center opened setting off the Pluto-as-a-Planet controversy.  

But more seriously, how can it be that physicists come so late to the method of taxonomy long employed by biologists? Tyson does not explain that, but he does explore the current modes of organizing the celestial bodies by their physical properties.

As the brouhaha subsided, the letters from children changed. This letter Tyson received from 8-year-old Siddiq summed it up. "We just have to get over it. That's Science."

As all good scientist should do, indeed sensible humans of any stripe should do with any of our life questions, Tyson leaves open the possibilities of new information changing our closely held views of reality. Again.

To give Pluto the last word, Tyson shares how political cartoonist Aislin in the Montreal Gazette imagines Pluto's concern with all things human: 

Probably the best news for me is Tyson identifies Ceres as a Dwarf Planet. It was the largest of the asteroids in the Main Asteroid Belt when I first started writing Murder on Ceres. A novel my husband describes as science fiction for people who like murder mysteries and a murder mystery for people who like science fiction. 

There Are Days -- another Essay on Editors

Yep, it was a day just like Alexander had. And I'd been looking forward to it -- nay, anticipating it. It was going to be wonderful. I would win the lottery. I would be the teacher's pet. My editor would congratulate me and tell me I had done it. I had written the most perfect YA short story.

If your mother did not read Judith Viorst's Alexander stories to you when you were little or you did not read them to your children when you were big, I must tell you you must. They are wonderful and true and, without a doubt, they are your stories, too. That morning I did not wake up with chewing gum in my hair. I have only one brother and his name is neither Nick nor Anthony. And he hasn't pushed me down in the mud in many years. But that day I understood Alexander's pain.

My daughter, who is also my editor, has been trying to get me to write something YA for a number of years. For those of you out there who are not writers (bless your hearts) YA stands for Young Adult, probably the most salable genre in fiction today.

Because YA fiction needs to be focused on something and someone young adults can relate to, the most obvious element is a young adult protagonist. The Young Adult Library Services Association defines young adults as being between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Wikipedia states that authors and readers of YA literature more generally accept the age parameters as sixteen to twenty-five. 

This year has been the year for me to expand beyond my comfort zone into nonfiction and now YA fiction. I never thought I'd like nonfiction because it's so limiting. I mean the story has to be, you know, true. And I'm here to tell you I have a long history of embellishing true stories, adding a flourish here or there, maybe a bit of embroidery around the cuff. I mean, with a little imagination you can always make a good story better. But I did it a while back.

On to YA fiction. I've always read what is now called YA fiction -- Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, Louise Rennison's Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, etc. But I write in a somewhat understated way. I have to trust my readers to bring their own intensity to my work. I guess I have never trusted young people to have enough life experience to have their own intensity.

Silly me. It's because they don't have enough life experience that they have not lost their intensity. At my age, I know the sun will rise tomorrow. That having survived the dangers of today and yesterday and the day before that that I will be able to meet the challenges of tomorrow. They don't. Every moment is make or break. Every challenge is world-changing either as the greatest victory or the most abject failure. Intensity is what they do best.

Realizing that does not help. How do I write a fitting intensity? Can I do it in my normal low-key style or must I morph into a slam-bang Marvel Comic Book writer?

Then there's the question of topic. High school dating? No. Werewolves and vampires? Impossible! Super powers? Not likely.

Wait a minute. Super powers. Why not?! My character wouldn't have to be faster than a speeding bullet or able to start fires with her mind or foretell the future. I figured out a super power that I could accept as plausible. Well, not really. But close enough. And Grace liked it when I pitched it to her.

Then a situation that a YA reader could relate to. Yep, got that, too. And I could relate to it. Else how could I write it?

And I wrote it. It was great. Intense. Suspenseful. Engaged all the senses. (Not smell, but teens don't seem to have an effective sense of smell anyway. Think about the gallons of scent teen boys slather themselves with. And it doesn't seem to dissuade teen girls from hanging out with them.)

I was so pleased with myself. I emailed it to my editor and waited for her response. Of course she has a life, so she couldn't read it fast enough. I mean she did it when she could which was not fast enough. But she did. Finally. And called.

"It's not YA," she said. 

Nobody loves me.

Then she added, "It's a good story. Well written. Clean. Flows well."

Everybody hates me.

"If you were reading this story, who would you say was the main character?" she asked.

I didn't have to guess. It was the father.

Think I'll go eat worms.

"The daughter should be the main character," she said.

Editors! Who needs 'em?! 

Obviously I do. Not just to check my spelling and punctuation. Not just identifying continuity problems or pointing out the use of the same action verb too many times. Or passive verbs that should be action verbs. Or eliminating expository writing. Or avoiding non sequiturs. Etc., etc., etc.

I needed her to point out the most painfully obvious error. The daughter should be the main character in a YA short story.

Okay.

I don't like worms.

I am a writer. I can do this. Rewrite!

Z is for Zed -- Nonfiction

I love English. It just satisfies my soul. American English, Australian English, British English. English from around the world.

British English comes in handy. I can use the vulgarisms and not feel the least inclination to blush. Nor will anyone around me take me to task for unacceptable language.

British television is such a gold mine of language. Not Downton Abbey. So far their only exclamation has been “Crikey” and that only twice. Plus it’s not really an expletive – I don’t think. I could Google it and the other words to find out how they translate into American English, but then I’d know what they mean and I might be constrained against using them freely.

Doc Martin is a better source. The Portwenn folk call him all kinds of things. And I understand why. He doesn’t have the best bedside manner. He seems usually to take it in stride, though. No doubt he’s used to it.

A couple of weeks ago one young patient, a lad of maybe nine or ten, went off on Doctor Martin Ellingham.

“You’re the W word,” he shouted adding “and the T word and the Zed word.”

Doc Martin stopped in his tracks and asked the young man “What’s the Zed word?”

My husband translated, “wanker and tosser.” He knows his Britishisms better than I, but he didn’t know what the Zed word was either.

Today is the last day of the 2015 A to Z Blogging Challenge and I hope it is the last one of its kind for me. It has been difficult.

My uncle told my father that the Veteran’s Administration will provide him with dentures at no cost to him. And being a naturally thrifty man, he wanted to get new dentures through them. Daddy was in the Navy in World War II, so it seemed possible.

He has some cognition problems and doesn’t walk long distances well so I took on the task of trying to enroll him for VA benefits. There’s an office not far from out home, so I gathered his Discharge papers, my Durable Power of Attorney papers, his 2014 Income Tax information and went to that office.

Today wasn’t a particularly busy day for them so my wait was about forty-five minutes. I had John Lescroart’s Hunt Club with me – on my e-reader which fits nicely in my purse. Then the customer service guy very kindly told me they don’t do that or medical care eligibility there and that I would need to go to the VA Medical Center in downtown Denver.

So I did.

Denver is not the biggest town I’ve ever driven in. Dallas and Houston are bigger. Los Angeles is bigger still. But I was younger then and very nearly invincible.

There are one-way streets, so you don’t want to make a wrong turn or you may not find your way back to the street you’re looking for. And traffic is high volume made up of drivers who know where they want to go and are not patient with the likes of me. But I got there.

And parking in Downtown Denver is difficult to find. I was pleased to find that the VA has a multistory parking garage. Finding the entrance is a little tricky but I got a parking place.

There were forms to fill out before I could see the Enrollment Officer. I filled them out as completely as I could. I got to one area that I had not planned for and tried to call my husband so he could get the information for me. I knew exactly where it was, but my phone wasn’t working. It had been working, but not anymore. I decided to go ahead and get in line. My ticket was 150 and they were serving 148 so my wait couldn’t be very long.

The waiting area was filled with people waiting for the Lab, a different number scheme on their tickets. And they were much worse off than I. Old people with walkers and on oxygen. Young people in wheelchairs. The thirty-something man who sat next to me smelled of tobacco smoke and I knew he must be more stressed than I was.

Again I read, avoiding eye-contact with the other waiting people who avoided eye-contact with me. Everybody there was having a long day and chit chat with strangers would not make it any easier.

After a shorter wait than some there, the Enrollment Officer called my number and asked “What can we do for you today?”

I told him my father needed new dentures and he stopped me right there. He didn’t look at the incomplete forms.

“We only provide dentures if the veteran has a service connected injury that causes him to need dentures.” He apologized for any inconvenience my drive downtown may have caused and called the next ticket “One-fifty-one.”

Backing out of my parking place I accidentally hit the rear bumper of a car parked behind me. It was the plastic bumper cars have and it was just scuffed. At first we couldn’t really tell which car it was I’d backed into. Those parking garages are so dark.

A VA policeman was johnny on the spot. But it took a bit to get some help there to direct traffic. You wouldn’t believe how many cars go in and out of that parking garage. And, of course, my vehicle was blocking one lane.

It took a while for all the paperwork and photographs and discussion about whether to let me go and them notify the owners of the victim car or keep me there until the owners returned. (They were somewhere in that great rabbit warren of a hospital.)

They did let me go, saying they would write it up as “Improper Backing.” Well, no duh. If I’d backed properly I wouldn’t have bumped into that car.

Traffic was a nightmare, I was shaky from the parking garage experience, and I’d never driven on those particular streets before. I knew my way home lay to the west, toward the mountains. The thing is, you can’t see the mountains from down there for all the big buildings and trees.

I stopped and got my phone fixed and finally made it safely home.

I may not know what the Zed word is, but I surely did have a Zed-word kind of day.