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Hi all,

I do not know the degree to which the Southern California wildfires of the past week - and expecially the past weekend - have made the global press.  I imagine a fair bit, but you never know.  As I suspect I may be asked to repeat our story to a couple folks - not that I am not willing to do so - I thought I would write it out.  For me, it is a bit of catharis as well.

Just to let you know at the outset, it seems to be a fairly happy ending, for us at least.  About as good as one could hope.  As of right now - Sunday evening - there are multiple fires burning across Southern California.  As of Friday night, the fires had burned about 30,000 acres.  Right now, they have burned almost 300,000 acres and they show absolutely no sign of stopping - indeed they are still multiplying on multiple fronts and are stretching the efforts of some 10,000 plus firemen to the breaking point.  This is our story of a couple of those acres.

For those of you have not visited us, we live on a suburban street right up
against a small hillside that is covered with grass and shrubs and which goes basically uninterupted into the national forest that makes up Los Angeles’s northern border. In terms of fire hazard, it is rated moderate by my insurance company - the hillsides burn every couple years, but tend to do so in a fairly moderate fashion.  There is no significant brush fuel on any side of the house, other than the hillside across the street that the house faces -for our neighbors on the other side of the street, the hillside is their backyard, separated by an engineered creek and a walking/biking/horseriding path. When we bought the house, we actually did investigate the brushfire history and concluded that it was a reasonable risk (as did our insurance company).  As some of you who talked to me about this last year may recall, there was a fairly significant fire in the upper mountains last year and it behaved exactly like that - over a period of
days, the fire meandered across some 30,000 acres - but did not burn the final
hills up to our house, which meant the fuel was still in place.

LA experiences a phenomenon in the fall called Santa Ana winds.  Los Angeles is a coastal basin, surrounded by mountains.  While the basin ranges from sea level to some 400 meters, the far side of mountains are much higher - 1500 meters or more, in what is called the high desert.  The high desert extends all the way the the western edge of the Rocky mountains, in what is called the Great Basin.  Whenever there is an atmospheric pressure differential between the coastal basin and the Great Basin, the laws of physics intervene and nature tries to create an equilibrium (high pressure air rushes in to fill lower pressure air) in a phenonemon called wind.  For this reason, Palm Springs and Tehachapi are among the foremost wind energy development regions in the world - it always blows.  When the pressure differential grows (generally, when the coastal region is starting to experience the beginnings of winter season conditions), the winds grow correspondingly stronger and several mountain passes funnel that power particularly effectively.  When you add random gusts of wind of 60 to 120 km per hour to raging fires, the results are what you might expect.

Last Tuesday, the fire subsequently known as the Grand Prix fire (I have no idea why) began about 15 or 20 miles east of our house.  These happen all the time and while is was significant (it got pretty smokey for a couple days), it was nothing outstandingly out of the ordinary.  As of Saturday AM, Grand Prix began to move west more aggressively, into the northern reaches of a community some 10-12 miles to our east.  At the same time, the “Old” fire (about 20 miles further east) began and immediately ripped violently though a residential community, taking out some 200 houses in an afternoon. This drew some firefighting resources away from Grand Prix, but who knows if any of this could be stopped or slowed by anything.  From what i witnessed, I highly doubt it.

In the early evening, we decided to take drive out to the east, to see what was going on with Grand Prix and, frankly, to gawk at the power of nature. I had missed last year’s fires in our area and Sheryl wanted me to see them. From a fairly good distance and the safety of our car, we saw what were clearly powerful fires, strung along the mountainside.  We did note that the fire was few more miles west than was generally being reported on the news reports.  By 8PM or so, I would estimate they were maybe 8 miles as the crow flies from where we live, maybe a little less.  That said, there is a major canyon between what we were watching and where we live and most of the mountains above us would have no significant fuel, because of the destruction from last year’s fire in the higher mountains.

At 10PM, we put Walter and Leah to bed (special treat - Sleeping Beauty was on TV) - and i stepped outside.  Due to the generaly smokiness, we had been keeping the house closed with aircon on, so I immediately noticed an increase in the smokiness.  We noted a very small orange glow on the mountains on the far side of the canyon, very high up (maybe 5000 feet) and at least five miles away.  When we went to bed an hour later, the small orange glow had grown significantly, but still was contained on the far side of the canyon, which is a major firebreak.

Somewhere around 2AM, Sheryl and I both woke up with a bit of a headache. The doorbell rang - at 2AM you assume this is a fireman with an orderly evacuation order.  It was out neighbor’s teenage daughter, telling us that the fire was in the hills across the street, they were evacuating and we should probably do the same.  i walked outside, and realized that we had a reasonably immediate threat, but by the intensity of the glow, it was still a little ways off.  After going back in, we started gathering those things that we would want to save (just in case), but frankly, i was still not convinced that we would be leaving all that soon.

About one minute later, the house was blasted by a shot of wind that I can only describe as lethal.  We absolutely shook and I was certain from the tremor that something solid had hit the house.  Nothing had (I checked), but i accelerated my efforts.  Sheryl gathered the kids from their rooms and put them on our bed while she started packing up the various odd things that I decided to save in various absent-minded trips through the house.  It is amazing how your mind works - or does not work as the case may be - in that kind of situation.  As I walked back and forth through the house, looking out the front window as I passed, I could see that the fire was certainly closer to our hillside.

I opened up the garage to start packing things and was greeted by Hell, in a bad mood at that.  Smoke was incredibly thick, winds were whipping, embers and sparks were just flying down the street.  The fire had crested the hillside and had enveloped it.  Despite the thickness of the smoke, I saw big flames racing down the hillside, “racing” as in “faster than you could possibly run” were you up there.  It was, without a doubt, the single most frightening moment of my life.  All of this had taken maybe 5-7 minutes since the neighbor had knocked on my door.  Sheryl timed racing the kids to the minivan betwen gusts of wind and embers and I threw everything in we had packed so far, including the dog.  She took off - everybody in the neighborhood was similarly just racing themselves into their cars, and i went in a grabbed couple more things, ncluding Nico (our cat), who promptly escaped from the car, making me chase around for about 45 seconds (I would guess) before just saying - “well cat, you had a good 12 years - see if you’ve used up all nine of those lives”.  Power went out and i had to get the garage door down, which took a few extra seconds. I think those extra activities probably contributed to the smoke inhalation cough i have been fighting since.

I got into our other car and drove out with the remaining neighbors with flame, flying embers and smoke everywhere - when i got to the main street (maybe 250 meters), four firetrucks were heading in.  I had very little hope that they could do anything - it had to be too late.  I don’t know how big the flames were - suffice to say, they were the biggest flames I’ve ever seen in my life close up - maybe 10 or 15 meters high.  Who knows. We met up at a friends’ house and spent the rest of the night basically freaking out, but assured that we’d gotten the most important things (our lives and key papers, bascially) and hoped for the best. About two hours later, i tried to drive back up and see if I could see anything, but everything was cut off by police blockades.  It was a long night.

Amazingly, our house and all the other houses in our neghborhood survived. Hundreds of homes in the region have been lost and hundreds more almost certainly will be, but those four fire trucks did what I can only describe as the impossible.  In the midst of a powerful, rapacious firestorm that was creating its own whipping winds that they arrived late to, they set up a line and they held it.  The sheer bravery to go INTO something like - let alone actually work there - boggles my mind, Apparently it was firefighters from the City of Anaheim - Claremont firefighters having been dispatched out to some other part of the line.  Multiple neighbors across the street have singed trees and back fences in their backyards - those guys somehow put them all out.  We’ll be sending them a nice contribution.

Our house smells like a nasty smoked sausage and the big gust of wind ripped off a nice chunk of our heavy roof tiles (which makes our survival even more remarkable, because that left exposed wood), but other than that we are OK.  Nico survived, though looked a bit smudged.  If I ever wanted my cat to be able to talk, this would be the time.  One small blessing is that it will take a good ten years for the hillside to build up enough fuel to burn significantly again.  There are fires in the general vicinity still, but it would take a long shot ember to nail us - the local fuel is now gone.  Claremont lost 65 homes in a period of a couple hours, and we already know of two friends who lost their homes.

I don’t think we did anything wrong, except to not monitor the fires progress all night.  That might have helped a bit, but frankly, this came on so fast, that even the fire marshalls (who are supposed to start evacuating people out well before the actual threat) were only showing up at the time that we were all basically running for our lives.  They told us later that they too had been completely caught by surprise by how fast and how furious this particular lick of the fire moved.

This scene is repeating itself all over the region - sometimes fast and furious, sometimes slow and methodical.  Multiple firelines are progressing on multiple fronts, sometimes 20 or 30 kilometers across.  The Santa Ana winds are supposed to slow down in the next day or so.  There are three major areas of fires and they form a triangle with points about 100 to 120 miles apart.  There are probably a dozen smaller fires in between - but small is pretty relative in this case. Grand Prix and Old (who have now joined into a single massive fire whose main front is climbing into the mountain resort areas) are both suspected as being caused by arson - in other words, this was done deliberately.  It sounds as if at least a thousand homes will be lost, maybe many more.  Every firefighter south of San Francisco is deployed in the region and thousands more are pouring in from around the West.  By all appearances, there simply cannot be enough.

In the meanwhile, everything looks and feels pretty post-apocalyptic.  We have a bit to do over the next couple days, regarding insurance claims and the like (though thankfully, just for roof and smoke damage).  We’ve moved for a night into a hotel that is not quite so stinky and we are thinking about retreating out of the region until things are a bit more reasonable.  Not sure about that just yet.

I’ll be in touch soon

mds

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The main event of the day was art at SFMOMA.  The Chagall exhibit has been in town since June, but we waited till now to see it so we could double up and catch the newly opened Arbus show too during one of the two weekends they overlapped.  It was crowded, but Mario Botta’s post-modern ziggaurat with the dramaticly angled marble smokestack handled us all nicely.  SO: let’s get aesthetic:

Chagall is too well-known for me to expect much from his work.  This established beyond doubt that I am an idiot.  The exhibit was large, over 150 works spanning from 1909 to 1970, featuring many pieces I’ve never seen even in reproduction.  His color, imagination, themes, courage and depth were profound.  His early work recalls Modigliani, Braque, Picasso and many other titans of modernism, though not in slavish imitation but as an original and contemporary co-creator of this critical school.  But when he came into his own, with themes of renewal, persecution, rredemption and above all, love, his work literally brought tears to my eyes.  The response he evokes is intense and visceral.  Works I’d seen in reproduction came to life and embraced me entirely; works that were new to me left my jaw on the polished wood floor even as my heart escaped through my eyes and plastered itself to the canvas.  It was pure art, the human soul made visual and visible and captured in time and space.  Phenomenal stuff.  He lived till he was 97 and even at that age continued to produce truly original, new and uplifting work. 

My emotions in turmoil, we descended two flights to see Arbus on the third floor.  Again, it was a large exhibit, hundreds of items including her notebooks and influences (photographic and otherwise), her cameras and proofsheets, her letters and sketches and personal books from her personal library.  But it was overwhelmingly dominated by her photography, if that’s the right word for what she did with her camera.  The works are uniformly beautiful from a purely aesthetic standpoint, perfectly composed and lit and organized.  But what she photographed was often the opposite of what we call beautiful.  Most of the photos were of people from the ordinary to the freakish.  Families out for a walk, children at play, individuals on the street - all captured in moments of overwhelming honesty and truth, but so as to raise terrible questions about the nature of the human spirit.  And her pictures of beautiful people - debutants, “winners,” society ladies and establishment men in tuxedos, are even darker and more disturbing for being so thoroughly superficial and artificial.  Are we truly so bitter, so ugly, so false and so hideous, from our skin right down to our souls?  Many more of her photos are of the underworld - strippers, transvestites, ambiguous couples, sinister children and twisted elders… each face is an encyclopedia of desperation and regret.  Occasionally, especially in her series on nudists, she’d find true warmth and humanity, but you’d have to fight the bizarre situation to find it; her landscapes were eerie and unreal (though manifestly identical to the reality in which we live); her posed shots were repellent in their perfect reflection of the pantomime of our own lives and her candid shots were like pulling off a scab or looking under a flat rock at the pillbugs and earwigs - and she accomplished all of this with unerring and incessant beauty within the frame of the photo.  I’m not sure how else to describe it.  The most intense room in the exhibit was the last one, in which she had a series taken at an asylum for the insane and developmentally disabled; most of the inmates were wearing masks or makeshift costumes and cavorted around large open fields in obvious parody of what I call “real life.” But the frame of the photo dissolves at that point, you walk out of the room and see everybody around you as they are, as subjects and objects, of art and of pity and even in a way of love, all the more in proportion to how much they are hateful and unbeautiful and twisted by their circumstances.  Arbus committed suicide in 1971, after about 20 years of photography.  This may be the first major retrospective of her work since 1972.  It broke my heart and built it back out of kodachrome and paper bags. 

We had time for only one more exhibit: Regan Louie’s contemporary collection of 50 giant photographs of Asian sex workers.  The photos are all about five feet tall and four feet wide, very crisp in focus, very deep in color, very cold in feeling.  Where Arbus made sociology into art, Louie has made art into sociology.  I was able to look deeply into faces I’d never otherwise see, but were I ever to see them, I’d never look at them this closely.  These are women on the market, some actively selling themselves to him and some, understanding his artistic intentions, letting the camera in behind their facade of come-on makeup.  The works were, again, beautiful but hard to look at.  They were accompanied by 70 or so important works of photography that represented the supra-boudoir tradition going back to the mid-19th century - photos of whores and carousers, posed and candid, erotic and tragic; photos of human degradation and recreations of folktales and entnological studies with vaguely prurient undertones… walking out of that exhibit, I felt overwhelmingly lucky and sad. 

The entire visit to the museum had its own special dichotomy, in that we’d arrived at 9:30 to wait in line for three hours in the warm alley and then on the hot sidewalk of 3d street; I was beginning to think that we wouldn’t be able to spend enough time in the exhibits to justify the price of admission (we were still a good 45 minutes from the ticket counter) when a woman approached us in the teeming line to ask if we wanted free tickets.  She’d just attended the exhibit and her tickets hadn’t been torn, and with that she handed us each a free pass to the art.  If there’s one thing that’s better than great (anything), it’s free great (anything).  We stood there for a moment as our neighbors in the line congratulated us and then we just cruised into the building.  The timing was perfect.  We’d arrived at the exact right moment to be exactly where we needed to be at the exact moment our angel of gratuitous art bestowed her gift on us.  It made the wait feel as if it hadn’t happened, and it made the art much more beautiful and powerful for not having to had pay to see it. 

One more dichotomy for the day: On awakening yesterday a bit earlier than I’d expected, I took a shower in dim natural light and felt a slight pulled muscle in my back - so I toweled off, pulled on bike shorts and shimano clip-ins, and took a quick ride across the big orange bridge before breakfast.  It’s about a 5 mile ride, which takes me about 40 minutes (there are some decent hills to cover both going and coming back); the air was cool on my legs and in my lungs on the way to Marin county and had warmed up to sublime tepidity by the time I turned around back home.  I felt great the whole time, worked out that pulled trapezius, and felt energized and tingly for hours - until we left the museum, a bit worn and frazzled by the six hours we’d spent standing and staring in amazement and awe.  We got home just in time to empty the dog and don our stretchies for the poweryoga class we’ve been attending at the Presidio Y, where I always develop a full-body sheen of sweat while exercising every muscle I own in a vigorous, strenuous, deep but not percussive series of poses, vinyasas, and calesthenics.  I feel it up the sides of my thighs as I sit here typing this, and down my back, in my neck, my triceps, my calves and feet and fingertips… it’s a great class, very challenging and fulfilling.  At the end of class as we lay quietly on our backs, eyes closed, palms upward in the natural light as it faded into dusk and beyond, the pines and eukes rustling and perfuming the air outside the many wide windows of the room, the teacher read this poem by Pablo Neruda:

And now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth
let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.
Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Now I’ll count up to twelve,
and you keep quiet and I will go.
***
Then we all went, went home.... and I ate a salad for supper and watched some cartoons and went to a wonderful bed of blissful sleep, and now it is now and time for me to go back to my office for five more days of honest toil.  I’ve spent too long typing this but I felt I had to memorialize it, so that I would not forget how things come together and make each other more meaningful and important.  I hope you enjoyed reading about it, but that wasn’t the point - it was something I had to do for myself.  And now I will do things for other people, and revel in the contradiction.  Have a great week.

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The dinner party was a lot of fun.  I ate well and laughed plentifully.  (Parenthetically, my personal triumph for the evening was my description of a christmas ornament that Kel’s sketchy distant cousin by marriage hung on the family christmas tree a few years back: meeting the family for the very first time, he immediately went to the tree, which had been lovingly decorated, after delicate negotiations, by four generations of careful hands with delicate and cherished ornaments - and he stuck a Mr. Hanky on it.  We all thought it was pretty gauche.  Someone at the party asked if it was one of the talking Mr. Hanky toys.  “No,” I replied, “it was a mute poo.” Good times.)

It was at this party that I was reminded of that thing I’d been trying to remember for a while: an instance in which I was spontaneously cheered.  For a few weeks, for some reason, I’ve been able to recall four such events but I felt sure that there was one more.  Well, Chris and Mo reminded me of the missing incident at the dinner table when they asked me, laughingly, for the gravy.  Since my mind is finally at peace after spending the better part of a month thrashing this controversy into a thin gruelly pulp, I figured I’d better just get it all into words and have done with it, thus making it your problem and not mine. 

WHEN DAN GOT CHEERED SPONTANEOUSLY (in chronological order):

* 10th grade, first day of English class (that would make it 1979, incredibly): The teacher was a really uptight logophilic pedagogue with a napoleon complex.  He was assigning seats and sent Mark G to the next-to-lat seat in the next-to-last row. “Does anyone here know the WORD for next-to-last?” he asked with unctious superiority.  I raised my hand as I spoke the answer, not waiting to be called on for fear that he wouldn’t see me and thus might not fully appreciate whom he was to teach.  My voice was 2-1/2 octaves deeper than his as I intoned, “PENULTIMATE.” Mr. A’s mouth dropped and his infinitely tiresome and seemingly endless nattering dried up for a moment.  My classmates cheered.  I wound up as a teacher’s pet, again, of course, but wrote a lot of silly poetry to entertain myself and a few select friends over the course of the semester. 

* Grad night at Disneyland, end of senior year of high school (1982): I was with the cute 11th grade girl whom I couldn’t believe was my friend (she was way too pretty and popular to hang out with the likes of me).  There were thousands upon thousands of giddy high school grads and their giddy dates, from hundreds of high schools all over southern california, milling about and acting smart everywhere.  My friend and I wanted to ride the Big Thunder Mountain Railway, so we made our way to the back of an enormous line that wove in and out of artificial gullies and ravines.  Several people from my school were ahead of me in line, near the front.  One of them noticed us at the back of the line and called out to me, urging us to cut in with him.  His friends joined in.  Soon, the entire line was chanting my name, thousands of kids shouting themselves hoarse for me and ushering us up to a position of favored privilege with my classmates.  I was like unto a god, though not quite so comfortably dressed. 

* Around 1989, summertime, in Santa Barbara: I was with Kel and a friend of hers from work at the bookstore.  It was a windy day and we were walking.  A gust blew my big straw hat off my head.  Responding instantly, I wheeled, kicked up my knee nice and high, and sprinted after the hat as it rolled on its brim down the street.  It took me about ten paces to catch up, snatching it by the brim as I overtook it.  I slowed to a trot and wedged it back onto my head as a car rolled past, a large well-travelled domestic sedan of some sort.  Inside were several young people, probably college kids, waving and cheering.  I waved to them in triumph.  I had caught my hat.  I had bested nature, had refused to be the butt of an aeolian joke.  I’d like to think, maybe, I inspired them a little.  But really, probably not. 

* Around 1995, summertime, at the corner of Park Presidio and Fulton: this is just three blocks from my flat and was on my favorite bike route through the park.  I was riding with Jon and one other person - Andy? Lisa?  Dave?  Whoever it was, I knew the trail really well, was in good shape, and was the first to emerge at our exit point for the park.  I stood on the bike in my stretch shorts, hands on hips, breathing hard and deep, a sheen of perspiration and dust on my face and arms and legs.  A little sporty pickup cruised past us, coming down the boulevard into the park.  A young woman drove, another passenged.  The truck was in the far right lane, so the passenger was quite near to me as they drove by while I waited for my friends, one of whom (Jon) was just emerging from the groves of the park.  The passenger in the truck was leaned far back in her seat, wearing shades and riotously permed hair.  As the truck passed me she hooted a howl in my direction.  Jon pulled up on his bike next to me just as it happened.  “Dude,” he observed, “that was totally for you.” She shoulda took a picture.  They last longer.  And sometimes I pose.

* The one I just remembered last saturday night: It was just after thanksgiving, around 1998.  Some of Kel’s colleagues from work were having a second thanksgiving, for all the poor saps who had to endure a tedious familial version of that most cupiditous of celebrations.  I didn’t know but a very few of the many guests.  I’d asked what I could do or bring; the hosts (Chris and Mo) asked how I was with gravy.  I said I could make gravy just fine, so they suggested I bring some and make some more once I was there out of their pan drippings.  I agreed and gave it no further thought, except to cook down a nice big pot of tangy onion gravy before we piled into the car and drove to cowtown for the party.  We (Kel, me and the gravy) arrived after things had already gotten into a pretty well-lubricated gear. I walked into this house I’d barely ever visited before, full of staggering strangers and abandoned plastic cups of wine.  One such stranger looked me over drunkenly in the entry foyer and asked me, “Are you Dan?” I said, “yes;” he then set up a call: THE GRAVY MAN IS HERE!  People started coming out of the woodwork, crowding around, brimming with gravy-related questions and enthusiasm.  Soon the general hubbub resolved into a cheer: “Dan, Dan, the gravy man,” repeated over and again till I drank a big shot of whisky.  My onion gravy was well-received; the one I cooked with the pan drippings was actually a big challenge, but one which I overcame with aplomb, earning me widespread adulation.

To some who were there that night, I remain the gravy man, and they cheer me still for no reason other than that.  They don’t even know that I know the word “penultimate,” have friends up ahead near the front of the line, can catch up with my own hat, and look hot on my bike.  Maybe I should have t-shirts made, listing my manifold accomplishments.  Maybe I’ll just keep them to myself and smile that secret special smile.  Yeah, that’s the one.  Like I know something worth knowing.  As if.

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I like the multiplicity of colors in the title.  Okay?  So don’t pester me while I have a sharp knife in my hands.  Start with 2 or 3 boneless breasts of chicken and cut them into chunks, two or three bites worth each.  Get a cast iron skillet (no fooling, these are the only way to go) and heat 3-4 tablespoons of olive oil in it over med-high heat till the oil is almost at the smoke point, and then throw in a handful of cracked black pepper, which sizzles and fries up in the hot oil most gratifyingly. 

Once the frying of the pepper starts slowing down, toss in the chicken and stir it around till it is slightly cooked on all sides, and then let it rest on the heat for several minutes at a shot, until the “down” side is seared to an entertaining reddish color, using a spatula to flip the chunks (I’m a big chunk flipper from the old school) so they get color on several sides, each time letting them sit quietly on the heat till the color is right.  Caveat: cook too much and it’ll get dry.  Keep an eye on it, and when it’s done, remove the chicken from the heat and set it aside, like in a bowl.  Or just sitting on the counter.  Hell, you’re the one who has to eat it. 

You now have a hot hot skillet with peppery chickeny oil residue in it.  Chop a medium yellow onion into small pieces and fry it in the pan till it starts to get translucent; stir it around and let it perform a preliminary deglazing.  However, pretty much as soon as the deglaze is kicking in and the onions are pulling crispies and flavor from the pan, the sugars in the onion will start to caramelize and the glaze will reassert itself with a vengeance.  Oh yeah?, you can mutter through clenched teeth, a bottle of dry white wine in your trembling fist (I used pinot grigio ((heh))); pour a cup or so of wine into the pan and it’ll bubble up with effervescent enthusiasm.  While it’s bubbling, scrape the glaze with the spatula and make sure all the flavor is infused into the liquid, not stuck to the pan.  Lower the heat and toss in a red pepper, sliced into thin strips, and some chopped fennel, in similar sized pieces and approximately equal quantity. 

Get another pan, non-stick, and make a roux.  (Oh okay, okay: heat two teaspoons of butter till it just starts to bubble, and then add an equal amount of flour and blend them around till the mixture is homogenous, foamy, and starting to turn toasty brown in color.) Pour some of the liquid from the wine-veggies pan (the pepper and fennel should have thrown some more moisture so there should be a decent amount of liquid to use) into the roux and stir it in well, and then quickly repeat, and quickly repeat again - the roux will absorb the liquid and turn into a thick sauce. 

Once the roux is vaugely liquidy, pour it back into the veggies pan and keep stirring it till it’s all absorbed and smooth and saucy; if you need more liquid, add more wine, you’re looking for something that pours but isn’t runny.  Stir the chicken chunks back into the sauce and then serve it over rotini pasta with the rest of the wine and maybe some grilled tomatoes (sliced, under the broiler with some parm or asiago cheese on top) on the side.  And don’t tell anyone where you heard about this.  It’ll be our little secret.

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I’m surprised to find a new comment on a post I put up so long ago, but since you felt it important enough to make a statement at this late date, it is at least worth the dignity of a response. 

1) That post related only to reported news events and objective facts: criminal records, vacations taken, decisions made, materials and discussions kept from the public eye.  I didn’t resort to insults or name-calling; I didn’t call anybody ugly or dumb.  It disappoints me that you can do little more in response than to impugn my sexuality or toughness.  You have no idea how many fights I’ve fought or against whom, or how I’d handle myself given the awesome power and responsibility that our president enjoys.  If you think I’m weak, tell me why.  But remember: it always takes guts to disagree with the forces that weild unanswerable power, as the present administration does.  It’s easy to suck up their pabulum and kowtow to their authority.

2) I wish that Bush *would* run this country.  He’s gutting environmental, educational, and civil protections, leaving critical decisions in the hands of local corporate interests or over-zealous law enforcement and religious hierarchies.  I also wish that he’d stop trying to run *other* countries.  When we’re being attacked, we should go to war.  When we can’t find our enemy, we shouldn’t just transfer our anger to the nearest convenient dictator.  We’ve spent 79 billion in Iraq already and have found NO WMDs, NO ability for Saddam to have harmed a hair on our heads, and NO SADDAM.  Meanwhile teachers are being laid off and forests are being levelled and old people are living on the streets when they get evicted from their apartments for buying prescription medicine instead of paying rent.  We’re in serious trouble and need a leader in the White House, not a wanna-be fighter pilot mouthing scripted platitudes. 

3) For the record, I think Clinton had some serious moral deficiencies and most likely he did what he was accused of with Monica and several others.  I don’t consider any of that an impeachable offense, though.  It was a matter of private sexuality, not public policy.  Lying about foreign policy, making up evidence to justify our going to war, giving vital governmental powers over to private friends with business interests, and locking up innocent people because they come from the wrong country - that’s a different story.  And the hypocrisy with which our president attacks those who follow in his footsteps as a draft evader, a drunk driver, and an underachiever who got where he is through nepotism and powerful connections - it’s shameful.

4, and finally:) I don’t want to be president.  But if I were, I would think very carefully before committing money we don’t have on a war we didn’t have to fight against people already decimated by starvation and disease.  I’d work harder to build international coalitions to solve international problems.  And I’d worry more about the working poor and children in inadequate public schools, than the right to put the word GOD on everybody’s walls and lips or the profit margins of oil companies.  What’s more, I volunteer my time and work full-time for non-profit enterprise, all dedicated to making my community a better, safer, and smarter place to live.  If you don’t invest your time and energy (if not your money) in such efforts, please don’t accuse others who do of being weak.  It is hard work to fix things, and calling people out with schoolyard taunts isn’t just useless - it’s counterproductive and keeps us from moving forward. 

I wouldn’t have known of your comment if I didn’t have email notification of new comments.  If you have something to say to me, come out and say it.  Don’t hide in comments that haven’t been updated in 2 months or more.  Be proud of your opinion, or keep it to yourself.  My email address is on my blog.  And don’t worry about staying buried as you currently are - I’m going to post your letter to me right now.  Welcome to daylight. 

***

Now that’s a fun way to start a new day.  Union bargaining teambuilding went well yesterday; tonight I go back to my tutoring program and help a 60 year old woman learn to read.  I think I’m going to have good posture all day long.  It makes me such an easy target!

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Kel pointed out to me that all the carvings were the same name, by different people.  One of them said “R.I.P.” She suggested that this was the work of homeless folk.  There are a lot of homeless folk in our neighborhood; some are well-integrated with the conventional constituency, whereas some are stupid drunk losers who foul our parkland and litter our gardens.  These guys, you never see with a book - though they sometimes tote a busted old guitar or a milk crate. They talk loud and stumble.  Some have been around a long time, like ten years or more, yet continue to skate just under the surface of our tight neighborhood society; some come and go in a sunburned frenzy of mixed liquors and reeking sneakers.  I think Kel’s right: the carvings in our sidewalk are a tribute to one of these, someone named “Marty.”

RIP, Marty.  One of your friends actually spelled it “MANTY” - the task of memorializing you in letters was beyond his abilities.  The work of each writer, though sloppy, wavering, unsure, will mark the end of your life for as long as the sidewalk exists - a life for which there likely will be no other epitaph.  There will be no other acknowledgment of the extinguishment of Marty.  Maybe there wasn’ t much to mourn; though my baser angels try to persuade me he was a dreg among dregs, I really am in no position to know either way.  But his name now will carry forward, calling out his modest legend into eternity:

MARTiN / THE PO’REST / MAY YOU PASS
CD / PEaCe / OUt
MANTY INTERPRICES Inc
RIP / MARTY / WE WILL MISS YOU / 1-31-71 - 7-19-03
(plus two or three squares with runes, crosses, and other symbolism)

There is a square of sidewalk I like on Balboa Street, I think, between 17th and 19th somewhere, with the word “Susan” simply carved in childish script and the date 1957.  All the squares around it have been torn out and replaced several times over, but this one yellowing quadrilateral has been preserved somehow as a record of one child’s day almost half a century ago.  Maybe Marty’s memorial will likewise endure.  But it’s not likely.  They still have to trench and conduit the whole other side of the street again, I think.  All that new concrete is going to get torn up.  If anybody’s going to remember Marty, I don’t think it’s going to be because of this sidewalk.  It was a lovely sentiment, thought inaptly executed - the medium they chose was transient and the message’s time will sortly be up.  I wonder if any of the eulogists will be around to see it happen. I wonder if they would care. 

Such thoughts of space and time and the meaning of life recall to my mind a parable from the services I attended recently:

A child wandered into the woods every day.  His parents were amused, then curious, then got worried.  “Why,” they asked, “do you wander in the woods every day?” “To find God,” the child responded.  The parents laughed indulgently before explaining, “You don’t have to go into the woods to find God - God is the same everywhere.” The child listened, thought, and then replied, “Perhaps God is the same everywhere - but I’m not.”

I go to LA on Wednesday for the day - bargaining is beginning again.  I have non-metallic shoes and a dufflebag full of smiles for the other passengers on the plane.  DON’T MAKE ME USE THEM.  They have to last all week.

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* What we didn’t know we were holding

These ones are easy.  There is a place in most any living space - often, more than one such space - where things hide.  Maybe it’s a suitcase full of paperwork or a closet in the spare room that shelters mysterious artifacts or a desk drawer where you dump everything that you don’t want to think about.  In my house I have a junk drawer, a spare closet, a nighttable drawer, and a few boxes of “memorabilia.” And this is after years of studiously jettisoning extra stuff.  Each time I go into any of these places, I find something I’d totally forgotten about.  These things can take any form - toys, notes, correspondence, posters… I can identify these items by the mental response I get in unearthing them: “Oh man, do I still have this?” That response tells me that I didn’t remember that I even owned this item anymore.  And that probably means I don’t need it anymore.  If I needed it, I’d have known I had it, right?  (That one’s rhetorical.  The answer is “yes.") But instead, sometime not long after the dawn of time, I put it away for undisclosed reasons (probably because I couldn’t be bothered to throw it away at that moment) and never thought of it again.  On rediscovering such an item, I need to undertake a short mental exercise: “When am I actually going to need this again?  Is anyone going to ask me about it?  Does it have any intrinsic aesthetic value?” If these questions garner a negative response - if I didn’t know I had it, and can’t imagine why I’ll need it again, and it’s not particularly nice to look at or stroke with my fingertips or otherwise - I can get rid of it.  No more thinking is needed.  Just drag around a garbage bag and fill it up with these items whenever they surface.  Bag that old stuff.  One category down, three to go. 

* What we don’t feel allowed to get rid of

These things don’t necessarily live in the “hidey holes” around the apartment or manse - they’re often carefully stored in special places, though sometimes they’ve been there so long you forgot you put them there.  Books from relatives, presents given on long-past special occasaions, official paperwork from parts of your life that are far far behind you… I have calendars going back to the mid-90s, for example, and a lovely piece of not-very-meaningful calligraphy I got for my wedding 14 years ago that has no frame anymore, and a collection of puns my grandfather wanted to publish.  Why don’t I feel allowed to get rid of these things?  Different reasons.  Sometimes I originally kept them for official CYA purposes, but as of today my ass has progressed sufficiently out of the past and into the present that usually I no longer need that particular coverage.  Dump the junk - like the student loan files from the 80s and 90s, the ancient cancelled checks, the registration and insurance for cars I no longer own....  Then there are items that it seems it would be disrespectful to dump.  I have to ask myself if the person who gave me these items still cares about them, and if not, whether I care anymore myself.  I have to give myself permission not to keep things I actually don’t want, regardless of who gave them to me.  If the purpose of a gift was to commemorate a moment which has drowned in the tides of time, and the giver won’t even know I’m ridding myself of it - bag it.  Except: sometimes these things represent the epitome or culmination of a person about whom I truly care.  The calligraphy was just a nice gift, not the crystalization of a precious personality.  The stupid puns are what my grandfather was all about, and we discussed them repeatedly and at length to the end of his days.  I don’t care if they suck.  I am keeping them.  They meant too much to him, for them to mean nothing to me.  I’m still not allowed to get rid of such as these.  But the rest goes in the bag. 

* What we hold for malicious purposes

These are items that were preserved for one purpose, and one purpose only: to get back at someone else.  Bad photos of ex-friends, notes left at my desk or front door in a bad temper, little essays or letters about peeves and irritations that would long since have been forgotten but for my having memorialized them....  And here, we find outselves needing to do an internal inventory too.  Because most of this stuff isn’t actually stuff - it’s memory, recollection, carefully pickled grudge.  And if you thought the junk drawer was a mess, try looking in that space under your frontal cortex.  The clutter is breathtaking.  So in these cases, it’s better just to deal with items that come up one at a time, as the opportunity presents itself, rather than to attempt a wholesale housecleaning.  You’ll just wind up with old grudge stuck under your fingernails and a splitting headache and a big mess instead of a neatly compressed mess.  And what is this stuff, anyway?  Why is it still around?  At the time, it seemed critical to me that some given incident or issue or discrepancy or problem be preserved, because I would then be able, at some point in the future (which is now) to go back and say, “Yes, but back in 1997 you were mean to me” or “Sure, but look at this terrible photo of you” or “let’s just tell our studio audience how you ate my sandwich back in the early 80’s.” Well that doesn’t sound too productive in the light of this new day.  Anyone I wanted to get back at, I either did it already, made up with, or disentangled myself from.  These are like loose psychic fishing hooks in the lingere drawer of my psyche, intended to be tools but really just agents of random chaos and destruction.  If I could get back the energy I put into hoarding these sour memories in anticipation of their triumphant use, I would earn back a year or two of life.  Well, there’s no time like the present to cut my losses.  My bag is getting full, but there is plenty of room for these valueless lumps of dross.  Letters to student advisors, complaints to my boss, sniping back-and-forths with the auto repair shop, and numberless whining gripes - all these go into the bag.  Whew.  I’m feeling 10 pounds lighter already. 

* Reminders of lives lived and days past

This is, for me, the hardest category about which to be objective.  I do like to keep little reminders of the good times I’ve enjoyed and the hard times I’ve overcome.  But how many do I need?  And why?  I try to limit myself to items that actually hold a lesson for me, or items with aesthetic value, or single commemoratives of transfiguring events.  There were a lot of old photos of me at various summercamps, posing with my cabinmates.  I don’t know these people anymore, they’re bad photos of me and meaningless otherwise.  There are my bluebooks from college - I’ll keep a few from really good classes, one with a really good grade and complimentary comments, and the calculus final which is in my handwriting, seems to be my own work, but which is total incomprehensible gibberish to me, proving that I am capable of achieving the impossible.  Law school graduation photo?  Keep it.  Law school graduation program?  I’ve got that covered with the photo; dump it.  Notes passed to me in high school from the startlingly beautiful girl?  I’ll keep one or two to remind myself that I merited attention from someone so much in demand at one point in my life.  The rest say nothing further - they’re dumpable.  Favorite old t-shirts I can’t wear anymore?  Tickets to concerts I attended years ago?  CDs I used to love and now never listen to even when I’m bored?  If I’m not using it, and it doesn’t teach me anything about myself, and isn’t nice enough to show to guests or even to impose on my own sorry self, it’s time to let it go. 

In theory, once the dead wood has been discarded, it’s easier to get more things done - even easier to see what needs to get done in the first place.  Maybe I’ll be more productive.  Maybe I’ll just enjoy the empty echoing sound that rings out as I pace around my apartment or that bounces inside my skull now that there’s so much less surplussage to baffle the sound.  Where does that leave me?  Not anywhere in particular - but the view is a lot clearer and my clothes fit better.  Have I gotten rid of anything?  I think so.  Did it make a difference? Time will tell.  I sure threw away a lot of crap, but maybe that was just the first layer.  But this is for sure: I have more storage space.  And you know what that means: nature abhors a vacuum....

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All I can truly count on, year in and year out, is the cycle. The sun rises higher in the summer and less in the winter; I struggle against my enslavement in the spring and celebrate my frailty in the fall.  Musical instruments litter the pulpit in front of me - piano, dulcimer, shofar; electric bass and drumkit and singing bowls and oboe.  They rest quietly as the hall fills, with strangers and old friends, with traditional families, new age units, and solos like me.  Voices well up in the lofty room as I sit quietly with my pen.  It’s now 7 pm - time for voices to be still and instruments to come to life.  I don’t know what that means, if it means anything at all.  That might be my first lesson tonight: I don’t know what any of it means; but I embrace its happening with all the soul I am favored to call my own. 

*****

That’s pretty brief, given my late propensity for overlocution.  (BTW “shana tovah” means “a good year” - the traditional greeting.  Makes my sha-na-na joke slightly less unfunny, no?  No? Okay, no.) Let me round it out with another tidbit:

That evening, at the door to the hall, I was greeted by ushers with baskets of polished stones, red and green and black and white and blue.  We were each told to select one that “spoke to us.” I looked into the basket until I saw a stone that was sensuously rounded, so darkly black that it seemed to glow.  I took it.  Later in the service we were told that the stone stands for our favorite bad habit - the one we know we shouldn’t love, but that we love anyway; the one we keep telling ourselves to give up every time we succumb to it.  And maybe this year we’ll be ready to let it go.  If we are, we can just go to the beach or a stream and toss it away and we’ll be free of it, once and for all.  This relates to the ancient ceremony of tashlich, in which, on the day after Rosh Hashona, we are to go to a body of living water into which we are to empty breadcrumbs out of our pockets, each crumb representing a sin we intend to cast away.  When you get a lot of people together dumping out breadcrumbs, though, it can agitate the geese, so they encouraged us to use stones instead - even to the extent of giving us little baggies of rough small stones for this purpose, together with a short ceremonial primer for personal use. 

But, to return to the special polished stone that represents our own favorite personal failing: maybe we’re not ready to give it up yet.  We still enjoy it. It still speaks too sweetly to us, shines too brightly for us to let it go.  We’re not done with it, or it with us.  For such ongoing habits, we should take our special stone home and leave it where we’ll see it.  It will remind us of how it is part of us still, encouraging us to reevaluate our relationship to it every day.  And someday, eventually, it will seem less shiny and will stop talking so sweetly.  Then it will be to us what it truly is - a dead thing, inert and hard and cold.  Till then it should live with us as we live with those things that we are not ready to change about ourselves. 

My shiny rock is next to my computer at home on an old rusty can labeled “dehydrated water” that’s arranged thoughtfully on the funky biomorphic magazine table.  I’ll have to see how long it stays as beautiful as it was when I plucked it from the basket last week.  But frankly it still looks pretty good to me.

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First, building management has been swearing it’s one mouse, we are all seeing the same little varmit, it’s not an infestation - it’s just a solo sojourn, a lonely visitation soon to be concluded.  But that one little mouse is 2” and 4” in length; he’s grey and black and brown; timid and brazen.  Just as I tend to focus on one thing I’d like to change about myself, one failing to be remedied or one strength to develop further, but in fact my myriad frailties require soulful repair in myriad ways beyond the one error that first catches my attention, similarly, the mouse we see should remind us of the many mice we don’t.  The single mouse does not exist.  Message to building management: your mouse problem goes deeper than you think.  All our problems do.  The less of them we see, the deeper they are likely to go.

The building manager should know this even though her professional training consists solely of a Masters in Jewish Studies.  She’s a loud, heavy, pushy woman who uses the speaker phone all the time at top volume with her door open.  She’s blamed a friend of mine, our sweet and thoughtful librarian, for letting “the” mouse into the building in a box brought in from off-site storage.  When my friend tried to defend herself, or at least verify the gravamen of the accusation, the building manager backed off, claiming that the box had been lost, or destroyed, and anyway she didn’t know which box it had been or what had been in it.  She had blame to spare, but nothing to back it up.  Here’s a suggestion for the building manager: you’ve got a problem (or problems) running around your building.  Work on solving it (them).  Clean up the mess that is now your responsibility. Your efforts to shift blame and accuse others are no credit to you, and distract us all from the issue at hand.  I won’t tell you how to catch a mouse, but I will tell you that accusing others of creating the problem won’t solve it.  And frankly, mice happen.  Deal with it. 

But the mouse - or mice - itself: I couldn’t help but feel a share of kinship with it.  He was hungry and scared, surrounded by giants, imperiled by traps and poisions at every turn.  The mouse knew no malice, sought only to survive and propagate.  Sure, he pooped on our desks - but not out of vindictiveness, merely in accord with natural law.  Mouse eats; mouse poops.  It wasn’t meant to mean anything more.  When I saw him scurry in the broad daylight from carrel to carrel I could only think how frightened he must have been to expose himself to such monsters as we are, screaming and stomping and throwing things at him.  No one was bit or attacked - the closest was when the cute data entry clerk had him pingponging around behind the CPU under her desk.  And sure, she was shocked and she squealed - but the mouse was literally bouncing off the walls, tiny and frail and desparate for peace.  As are we all.  It’s tempting to draw the “vermin as sin” analogy and be done with it, but it seems more meaningful to me to think in terms of mice as men.  I felt sorry for the little fella.  Compassion, after all, is my special gift. 

I picked this essay to post today out of my writings over the past week, because yesterday one of the staff in finance mentioned to me, without rancor, that a mouse had been found dead in a poison glue trap.  The details of his demise were too gruesome for me to recount, but suffice to say, I am deeply torn over what has happened to that fuzzy little pest.  He clearly knew absolute terror in his final hours, and showed great courage in his effort to overcome his predicament.  But now we’re down one mouse, and maybe up one more human frailty that we need to address.

And I mentioned “compassion” as my special gift: I know this because I drew the card.  My congregation draws cards on Rosh Hashona morning from two baskets at the doors to the meetinghall, business cards turned face down, one basket of blue cards and one of buff, each inscribed with a personal quality.  One card represents your special gift - that which will guide you through dark times, that you can rely on when all else seems equivocal and unsure.  The other card is your challenge - the thing you want to inculcate in yourself, that, if nurtured and fostered, will help you blossom as a person.  Which is which, is up to you to decide.  Last year I chose persistence (my gift) and balance (my challenge, still).  This year I chose joy and compassion.  I have compassion out the wazoo; I cry at hallmark commercials.  I still seek true joy, the happiness that looks not past itself for justification and completeness.  That little mouse - I feel for him.  And what I feel is not joy.

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�I�m so sorry,� Adolpho continued, �let me buy you another drink.� She continued to stare at him, her eyes burning holes in his.  �What were you drinking?  I�ll set you right up,� he struggled to continue, as he asked himself, �What have I done?  Is she really so angry with me?� As if in slow motion, she turned fully to face him, her hair sweeping her shoulder and her hips swiveling parallel to his.  With breathtaking grace, her face broke into a broad smile, eyes brightening and lips parting to reveal even white teeth.  �Hi, I�m sorry, what did you say?� she asked ingenuously.  �I just wasn�t � I didn�t expect to � anyway, I�m sorry, what did you say?� She put a finger to her hair, then quickly withdrew it.  Adolpho started again: �I was apologizing, I bumped into you and made you spill � “

She laughed lightly and put her hand on his arm.  �Oh no, you didn�t bump into me.  I got in your way and spilled all over myself.  I�m so clumsy. I�m sorry.  Here, your glass is empty � let me get you another.  Lager, right?� �How did you know?� She blushed.  �I was listening.  When you ordered last time.� �Why?� �Oh stop, you�re embarrassing me.  Don�t make me say.� With that, she turned and went to the bar.  Adolpho watched her, feeling his pulse quicken a bit.  She ordered the drinks and got a towel from the bartender, used it to blot the moisture from her clothes.  She looked back at Adolpho and grinned, and his pulse quickened further.  She came back with two lagers and a big smile, and he followed her to a table near the front of the club.  �You don�t come here often,� she observed over the brimming glasses.  Adolpho was surprised.  �I�ve never been here before.  How did you know?,� he asked. �I�d have noticed you,� she replied, and then quickly dropped her eyes to her drink.  �I�m here every weekend and I always notice the new guys.  But I�ve never seen you.  And I wouldn�t have missed you.� She looked again at him, her gaze lingering.  �Did you come here for the dancing?,� she continued.  �What dancing?,� he asked, looking around at the crowded room.  �Come on,� she said, and, taking his hand, led him toward the front door. 

Just inside the foyer, a small staircase dropped precipitously into a dark basement.  As he followed her down into the humid space, the bright sound of live music enveloped him.  A salsa band was perched on a tiny stage at one end of the long narrow space, and the floor was filled with swirling, swaying, sweating bodies.  She smiled broadly at him, drank a substantial quantity of her beer, and pulled him onto the floor.  One hand held her pint glass, the other wrapped around his waist and pulled them tight � the only way to dance in that overcrowded space.  The music flowed through them, and he abandoned his beer so he could concentrate on moving together with her.  The songs flowed seamlessly into each other and they moved as one with a single spirit until a slow quiet number caught them holding each other close and tight.  Adolpho lifted her head from his shoulder in both his hands, and he looked deeply into her hazel eyes, and she into his of pure obsidian. 

�Why did you say I didn�t bump into you upstairs?  I really did, and I�m sorry for making you spill.� She gazed back at him and her face was peaceful and open.  �I was too close behind you.  I had been moving closer and closer for several minutes.  I wanted to be near you, to hear your voice and smell your skin.  I�m sorry � it�s an invasion, it�s terribly rude � but I just felt like I had to be near you.  And then you took one tiny step back and I wasn�t ready and I spilled my beer.  I deserved it.  What I don�t deserve � is this��, and with that she lay her head back on his shoulder and sighed deeply.  They held each other wordlessly as the music meandered.  But then the tempo began to pick up, with a hard heavy beat pounding out of the congas.  The next song would be another high-energy frenzy, but Adolpho could tell by the way they held each other that neither of them wanted that kind of experience just then. 

�Can we just go somewhere and talk a little?� he asked her as the band grew louder and more frantic.  She smiled, nodded, and, taking his hand, walked him back behind the stage, where a short hallway led to a door that opened on an alley at the rear of the club.  The air outside was warm and soft, like the hand that was leading him forward.  �My name�s Adela,� she nearly whispered as they reached the quiet of the night.  �I�m parked just behind that next building.  Where would you like to go?� Adolpho did not even consider any answer other than the honest truth: �I�m Adolpho, and I�ll go pretty much anywhere you take me.  I just got to town today so I don�t have any suggestions, but I can�t imagine anything I�d rather do than be with you, wherever you�d like to be.  I just wanted to be alone with you.� Adela dropped her eyes and squeezed his hand a little.  �There�s a waterfall just west of the city.  Most people don�t even know it�s there, but I love it.  This time of year, it�s running pretty strong.  Can I show you?� Adolpho followed her over to her car and she opened the passenger door for him.  He started to get inside, but as his face slipped passed hers, he was unable to stop himself from giving her a gentle kiss on the lips.  He felt that kiss to the soles of his feet but pulled back an inch or two, to make sure he hadn�t just gone too far.  She closed her eyes and grabbed the back of his neck, pulling him back in toward her.  �Okay,� he thought to himself, �now everything is just perfect.�

Epilogue: In April ‘02 I went to Cleveland for a conference and met up with a fascinating group of colleagues from around the country.  Some of us knew each other, most of us didn’t.  We went to a Cuban restaurant for dinner one night in a part of town with which none of us was familiar, and ate very well; we repaired afterwards for drinks in the long narrow tavern area at the front of the cafe and eventually wandered down the steep foyer stairs to cap the night with some salsa dancing in a very crowded narrow room where the music was live and the mood was elated.  It was that night that I met Adolpho, who does exist.  At one point he’d evaporated from our group, and as we wondered where he’d gone we generated a few provocative possibilities which were the genesis of this story.  None of them were accurate as things turned out, but it was fun to imagine it while it lasted.  But now it’s over.  I mean, it’s all over.  The End.

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It seemed that, within a moment of losing his vision, it began to return.  The tingling and throbbing in his hands and feet soon filled his whole body.  When he tried to move, he found himself strapped upright to a board of some sort, spread-eagled and helpless.  He couldn’t even turn his head; a band seemed to be holding it in place.  The floor seemed to start well below his feet.  He couldn’t move, and he didn’t want to.  The room was very bright; the light was diffuse and seemed to radiate from the walls.  Though he couldn’t look down to see them, he felt sure that a few beings like the one he’d encountered in the club were gathered around his feet.  As his eyes adjusted to the bright and unfamiliar light, he was able to discern two of the little fellows running a handheld scanner of some sort over his body.  He was still dressed, he realized, relieved – either nothing too gruesome had happened to him yet, or he’d slept through it.  He blinked audibly and the creatures both quickly looked up at him from their scanners. One came forward with a tentacle outstretched; the other slapped it and the two went eye to eye for a moment before the first of them stepped back, a beige flush running up its lardaceous complexion.  Both backed out of the room; a hissing seemed to indicate a door had opened but the room beyond was also white and glowing and Adolpho couldn’t tell where one chamber ended and the other began.  The two beings didn’t turn and leave him, nor did a door seem to close them off from him – they just pixilated out into more whiteness, leaving Adolpho trapped and dangling.

The light changed: the walls dimmed and a central fixture began to shine incandescently.  Shadows formed where shadows would be expected.  A hiss behind Adolpho’s right shoulder was followed by two long slender shadows falling on the floor in front of him, yet he still couldn’t turn to see what was casting them.  A voice spoke to him, synthetic but nearby: “You have nothing to fear; we only need your advice.” The band around his head loosened – disappeared, in fact; Adolpho turned his head to see what had spoken to him.  A being unlike those he’d seen before stood holding a small box in front of its thorax; it was at least seven feet tall, with three legs, three arms, and a face that seemed to wrap around a long podlike head part.  Two eyes peered at him intensely; a third at the back of the head seemed to glance at a second being that was moving into the room behind it.  Their arms were long and multiply jointed, moving as gracefully as seaweed in gentle ocean currents, terminating in a cluster of rootlike fingers.  Their legs were thick, looked to be extremely strong, and moved in a loping pattern, the rear one reaching forward and then the two front ones extending in concert.  From the two beings, Adolpho could hear a series of sounds - high whinings and clickings that seemed to emanate from below their chests. 

The foremost being moved the small box in front of itself again and the synthesized voice spoke to Adolpho: “We regret taking you from your friends.  We had no choice.  We will let you down but request that you not to move from this room.” Adolpho said, “Okay,” his voice hollow and small.  The two beings peered intently at the box and then raised their eyes to each other and whistle-hissed together.  The box repeated to him, “ha ha ha ha ha,” with a joyless cheer.  Before the last synthetic chuckle had faded from his ears, long tuberous fingers swiftly began unfastening his bonds.  Even once his arms and feet were freed, however, he remained lifted up above the floor, a sickly tingling in the soles of his feet.  “We’re going to let you down now,” the voice advised him emotionlessly, translating the buzzing sounds the beings directed to him.  The second being turned a dial on a wall where Adolpho had not previously noticed a dial, and he dropped softly to his feet as the tingling faded and then disappeared.

Gravity seemed a bit light here; he felt as if he could easily jump up to the high ceiling but didn’t want to try for fear of upsetting his hosts.  He just rubbed his wrists and looked around at the blank walls and the two spectral alien life forms, and kept quiet.  “We have been observing your planet for some time,” a creature said through the box; Adolpho thought perhaps it was the rearmost being that was now speaking to him. The box continued, “We have traveled a long distance to meet you.  It was our intention to travel elsewhere, but we encountered your planet’s electromagnetic transmissions and felt it necessary to stop to learn more about you.  There are many intelligent species in the universe about which we have yet much to learn.  But we had not anticipated that beings like you existed.  This is why we are communicating through this clumsy device – we have not had time to learn to speak your language properly, and it is necessary that we obtain your advice quickly.” The room fell silent; it was Adolpho’s turn to speak.  He wanted to conserve his breath, his words, his welcome.  These things could obviously do with him what they wanted; he preferred to give them no reason to take action of any kind.  Still, he had to ask them their purposes, their intentions.  “Why?,” he inquired. 

The beings consulted, clicking and waving rapidly.  The box eventually was utilized to voice their reply, “Excellent!  This is exactly why we brought you here.  Do you not see the difference between us?  You are bilateral in design, whereas we are radial!  Our anatomy, physiology, biology are based on the circle.  Our sense organs are arranged around our whole bodies.  Our arms and legs extend from a central point in three directions.  Yours proceed to either side of a longitudinal bisection.  As a result, we enjoy certain advantages in logic, math theory, and reproduction.  We are faster and more sturdy than your species.  But we lack an essentially bi-lateral trait – that of linear thinking.  In monitoring your transmissions, your television and radio, for example, we note that your species is able to resolve issues in a dialectic manner that is unfamiliar to us.  When this kind of logic is applied to our strategic decisions, it results in unusually high success rates.  We think around problems – you think through them.  We need to learn your thinking to progress beyond our current capacity.”

“Great,” said Adolpho slowly, speaking toward the box but watching his handlers carefully.  “What do you want me to do about it?” “Advise us,” said the one in back.  “Teach us how to think as you do.  We will share our technology with you, and give you all that our culture offers.  Make us like you and you will have all you could desire.” With this, a door slid open behind Adolpho.  Wary, he spun around to see what was coming.  It was a platform, floating toward him without visible means of support, bearing a shimmering cloak, a long pointed metal stick with a brace at the back, and a small metal box.  “This is a translator box, so you can speak with us at will.  This is a weapon that can kill any of us instantly, even at a remote distance.  And this is the raiment of honored guests; it will give you access to every degree of the circle of our social structure.  If you want us to return you, we will remove ourselves from your memory and you will be placed back among your friends without incident or delay.  But please, consider what we have asked.  You have so much to offer us.  We have so much to offer you.”

Adolpho considered the two beings that stood with quiet hope before him, one eye on each other and two on him.  He looked at the items he was being offered; they were of inexpressibly fine workmanship and he wanted to run his fingers over them.  “Okay,” he thought to himself, “now things are really getting way too interesting....”

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The stranger began to step to the back of the club, toward the dj.  Adolpho followed, concentrating on the man’s back as they cut through the crowd.  Something told him that he might be in danger if he didn’t follow instructions.  They reached the sound table and the stranger exchanged a glance with the dj behind it, a burly man with a shaved head dressed in black leather with wraparound shades.  The dj stepped a bit closer to the console and the man led Adolpho behind it, past the turntables, back into the far corner where the door to the huge safe stood, its works exposed and gleaming.  The man punched a series of recessed keys at the inner edge of the massive door.  The machinery did not move, but something moved somewhere - Adolpho could feel the meshing of heavy metal bars and gears under the floor, like the opening of prison doors.  A black velvet backdrop hung from ceiling to floor at the corner of the room, masking the hinges of the huge safe door.  The man stood next to that drapery, pulling Adolpho next to him with a gentle yet vice-like grip on his arm, and then nodded to the dj, who tapped a button on the edge of the equalizer. 

A highly amplified speaker near the front of the club came on line - every head spun toward the door.  The man pulled Adolpho behind the drapery, where the hidden corner of the door – to all appearances, the hinged edge – stood ajar a few inches.  Slipping inside, the man led Adolpho through the narrow gap into a corridor that sloped sharply upwards.  Once they were both inside, the man punched another code into a keypad on the wall and the door swung shut with a deep resonant thump that echoed in Adolpho’s bones. 

The floor was concrete, smooth, not old.  The walls were cinderblock.  A small bright bulb had been set into the concrete ceiling, illuminating a narrow passage that sloped up sharply to a severe curve around a corner fifty feet or so away.  “Are we safe?,” Adolpho asked, his voice sounding disembodied in the antiseptic space.  After the noise and bustle of the club, the passageway seemed morbidly quiet.  “I can’t tell yet.  Let’s go,” the man replied, walking swiftly along the passage.  His footsteps echoed with a hard hollow crack each time his heels hit the floor; Adolpho’s steps were so quiet he was sure he could hear his heart beating.  After the curve in the passageway the steep climb continued toward another u-turn at the next corner, and then again to another; it seemed to Adolpho that they were snaking back and forth up to the top of the building.  When he had arrived he hadn’t really paid attention to the height of the building but he thought three or four flights was about as tall as it should be; after ten or so switchbacks he felt sure they’d climbed a lot higher than that. 

The man’s powerful physique filled the skinny hallway in front of Adolpho, who had no idea how much further he would be taken - until, without warning, the man stopped and gestured with his hand in front of him; a hissing and clicking indicated that another security door had opened.  The man stepped out into the cold night air and Adolpho followed him through this second door, noting in passing that, instead of a lock or keypad, the door bore a metal plate with the imprint of a hand, laser-readers set into all five fingertips.  The door shut behind them with a clunk that sounded terribly final.  They had reached the top of the building, many stories above ground, on the roof of a tower set far back from the edges of the main structure.  Peering down below, Adolpho saw that the base of the tower was protected with steel spikes set into the walls, wrapped with razor wire and surveyed by several cameras.  “Get away from the edge,” the man ordered. 

Adolpho quickly pulled back.  “Are we safe yet?,” he repeated.  “Safe enough to talk,” the man replied.  “Our ride will be here soon.  I’ve sent the extract signal.  First things first - are you okay?” “Yes, I’m fine,” Adolpho answered, “but why have you taken me here?” “They said you’d be curious,” the man said almost to himself. “That will help when we’re in the field.  Training will start tomorrow at o-five hundred; you’ll need language, demolition and protocol.  Here’s the short version: There are some secrets we let them steal, and some that we don’t.  They are planning to steal some secrets we can’t afford to share.  I was brought in to protect them - to protect our national security.  I couldn’t do it alone, so I had them find you.  Between the two of us, they won’t know what hit them.  But let me assure you of one thing - no one will know about our mission short of the highest levels of intelligence - ours, and possibly theirs if we’re not careful.  For sure, our President won’t be informed.  Some things are better kept out of the hands of children, if you know what I mean.  So don’t expect him to thank you for your work.  Your thanks will be the preservation of our way of life.  In the field, you’ll either enjoy the height of luxury or the depths of privation.  Probably both.  You’ll be compensated well if you survive.  If you don’t… it’ll be like you never existed.  Are you ready to get started?”

Adolpho heard a whirring sound overhead.  Looking up, he saw a black chopper in whisper mode hovering in place, shedding altitude quickly until he could distinguish the rivets in its fuselage.  A bay door opened and a rope ladder dropped to the rooftop.  The man slapped Adolpho on the shoulder.  “Take the first step, son - the rest will all come easily.” Adolpho gulped, gripped the twisted cords and set a foot on the metal rung that swayed before him in the downdraft of the chopper.  “Okay,” he thought to himself, “now things are really getting too interesting....”

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