The Battle of Groncho

Life in the post-cold war, Internet-based world is just endlessly interesting.

Not that life wasn’t interesting before, it’s just that we’re able to do things now that were simply unimaginable when I was a kid, or even before I turned 40.

I suppose every generation can say that, of course. My Dad was 13 when Lindbergh flew the Atlantic; less than 40 years later he himself was flying to the Far East on a passenger plane. No doubt having the one experience while remembering the other would have given him pause no less than does the fact that I’m able to swap e-mails all afternoon with my pal Vasiliy, who lives in Moscow.

Vasiliy is a nightowl and I’m an early bird. This makes us perfect e-mail pals: when it’s 3 O’clock in the afternoon in California, it’s 2 O’clock the next morning in Moscow. I’m digesting my lunch and he’s pecking away at his computer while Moscow sleeps.

It hasn’t even been a generation since this was unthinkable. It’s only been about 15 years. Not only were the United States and the Soviet Union enemies in everything but name, but in 1991 there was effectively no such thing as e-mail, because in 1991 there was effectively no such thing as the Internet. I went to Africa that year, and a friend of mine suggested that there might be some way we could connect our computers to modems and swap information between California and Africa over the phone. It was an intriguing idea, but it seemed a bit farfetched.

Now Vasiliy and I sit here, 6,147 miles apart, and chit-chat all afternoon (or all night, depending on whether you’re looking over my shoulder or his) like a couple of little old ladies on a park bench feeding the pigeons. And not surprisingly, the topic of conversation is quite often how the world has changed in our lifetimes. Vasiliy is older than I, so his memories go back farther. I vaguely remember Kruschchev and Kennedy; Vasiliy remembers Stalin and Truman.

He sent me an electronic newspaper clipping last week, from the English-language Moscow Times newspaper. The article, by journalist Gyorgi Bovt, was called Playing on the Old Myths, and it addressed, in a Russian context, a depressing, perhaps even scary phenomenon that I have noticed in an American context: young people today don’t know anything.

I’m serious. Young people today can tell you all about the last episode of American Idol. They can show you how to set up your iPod. They’re computer savvy. They’re whizzes at text-messaging on cell phones.

But most of them couldn’t find Washington, D.C. on a map if their lives depended on it; they write “it’s” for “This animal is nocturnal in its eating habits,” and they think LOL is a word. They can’t concentrate for more than four minutes, they consider Grand Theft Auto a productive way to spend an afternoon, and they think John F. Kennedy was some guy who was president back around the time of Lincoln.

Guess what? Russia has the same problem. Playing On the Old Myths began with the writer expressing dismay at some of the questions his daughter asks him. She and her peers know next-to-nothing about Russia’s communist past. The generation born after Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika—which is already 20 years behind us—has no memory of what its parents remember: standing in line for three hours to buy some sausage. Lenin’s picture everywhere you looked. A telephone call if you failed to show up for a Komsomol meeting, demanding the reason for your absence. Having to go into the kitchen and turn on the radio if you wanted to talk safely. The GULAG.

Today’s Russian kids are as uninterested in anything that happened earlier than last week as their American counterparts. And that’s a little scary: some of them even think things Soviet are kind of cool, like today’s blissfully ignorant American 20 year-olds going around wearing Che Guevara T-shirts because the idea of revolution is also, like, you know, kind of cool. They don’t want to hear about Stalin; they barely know who he was. It goes without saying that they don’t read Solzhenitsyn, although I'm told he is required reading in Russian schools now. But, kids being kids, I'm sure that only accomplishes the opposite of what's intended: if you want a young person to avoid a certain author, just make that author "required reading." I was required to read Nathaniel Hawthorne myself, and today wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot scarlet "A." (And isn't that a funny bit of irony: a generation ago Russians were forbidden to read Solzhenitsyn. Now their children are encouraged to read him, but they don't want to.)

For 40 years and more, Russians obsessed about World War II. It was all they wanted to talk about. As late as 1985, an American diplomat noted the curiosity of attending a Soviet embassy dinner and finding that World War II dominated the conversation all evening long. Russia’s experience in World War II was like nothing in modern history: the country was invaded and 26 million people died, many of them civilians. (By contrast, the U.S. took roughly 250,000 casualties in that war, almost all of them military.)

But the difference between our generation and the current one is, we were interested in remembering, even what we didn’t personally remember. I was born 10 years after the war ended, but my school pals and I were steeped in it as history. Was this because we were smarter than today’s kids? No, it was a mass-culture phenomenon. The generation that fought World War II, and the Korean War which followed it a few years later, came home and became a gigantic television and movie audience, and we, its children, formed a vicarious audience for what our parents were watching. Hollywood saw gold: all these people who had experienced the war, or even just military service if they hadn’t actually seen action, were of course going to be fascinated by their own experience. I grew up awash in TV shows and movies about World War II: dramas as true-to-life as Combat! And comedies as silly as McHale’s Navy were our weekly fare in those days. And then there were the semi-documentaries, earnest programs such as Battle Line and Navy Log, which kept our fathers boring us over dinner, correcting the shows’ mistakes.

That all of this would rub off on us kids of the 1960s was inevitable. By the time I was eight I could recite the names of the Normandy beaches on D-Day: Utah, Omaha, Sword, Juno and Gold. (Utah and Omaha were the Americans; Sword and Gold the British, and Juno the Canadians.) We boys often ran around after school re-enacting World War II battles with toy guns. (Today’s parents would be horrified by the idea of giving their children toy guns to play with, but they have no problem with their children playing video games that center around blowing up buildings.) About the same time I was reading a written-for-children account of D-Day, I went to a friend’s birthday party and we boys were taken out for a big treat: we were taken to a war museum at which we were shown a display, under glass, animated by the standards of that day but static by today's standards, that used model ships and electric lights to re-create the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. There was a voice narration, and lights were used to track the events of the attack: ships that had been sunk were illuminated in red; those that escaped were lit green. I cannot imagine an audience of eight year-olds standing still for such a thing today, but we were truly fascinated.

We even discussed the war among ourselves, if you can imagine such a thing. And it was the kind of discourse that only eight year-olds could have. My best pals in the fourth grade were Brown Russell and Marty Jorgensen. Brown’s father was a major in the army, (unusual for San Diego, which is a huge navy town) and Marty’s was a chief in the navy. Not only was re-enacting World War II moments a regular part of our play, but we would teach each other history, the funky history of eight-year-olds to be sure, but it showed where our interests lay.

Marty regaled me one afternoon with his account of “The Battle of Groncho.” Now, I knew all about D-Day, and I knew about Pearl Harbor, and I had heard of Midway, and I knew about Wake Island and ultimately, about Hiroshima, but this Battle of Groncho was a new one on me. I probed Marty with questions. Was this battle against the Germans or the Japanese? The Japanese, was the answer. So it was fought in the Pacific. Which side won? “U.S.,” he answered.

And so on and so on, until I figured out that he was talking about the Battle of Guadalcanal, which he couldn’t pronounce.

I don’t mean to be rough on today’s younger generation (aside from the fact that they’re semi-literate and as ignorant as monads.) In fairness to them, there is nothing in their parents’ past like what we had in ours. There was no global convulsion in the 1970’s and ‘80s comparable to what happened in the ‘30s and ‘40s, reshaping the entire world that came after. But it wasn’t a dull time either (well, once we got out of the ‘70s, which were all in all pretty dreary). There was in fact big global stuff happening in the ‘80s, it’s just that it didn’t involve tanks and guns to anywhere near the extent it did 40 years earlier. And by the way, the things that Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev did in the 1980s, did in fact reshape our world almost as dramatically as the guns and bombs of the 1940s. Don’t think so? Listen to this tidbit of dinner conversation I recall: in 1991 my wife and I were invited to Christmas dinner by some friends at the American embassy in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, where I was then posted. It was on that very day that Gorbachev went on Soviet television, announced that he was resigning as Premier of the USSR, wished everyone good night and good luck, and walked quietly off the stage, ringing down the curtain after 74 years on a nation.

Someone at the dinner table remarked, “Have you noticed how much the map of Europe today looks like the map of Europe in 1912?”

Think that wasn’t a reshaping of the world, refashioning Europe, in grand ricorso fashion, so that it looked once again much the way it looked before Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Francis Ferdinand, triggering World War I, which would in turn trigger World War II, which would in turn...

No, Gavrilo Princip is not a rapper. And World War I happened after the American Civil War, not before it. And Albania is a country, not the capital of New York. And...oh, hell. Is it time for Survivor yet?

All what jazz?

Once upon a time I saw the following aesthetic question bandied about in some remote corner of (musical) academia:

Is jazz the “American classical music?”

You could make a strong argument that it is, and not only because the essence of jazz is improvisation, which also has deep roots in the European classical tradition: Mozart and Beethoven regularly made improvisation a feature of their public concerts. Classical musicians pretty much don’t “do” improvisation anymore; it’s been left to jazz to pick up that particular baton.

Jazz has native roots. Black America invented jazz. Its homegrown quality could also be put forth as an argument for the “American classical” label.

There is a sillier side to the case as well, but one which I’m not going to let pass: jazz, like classical music, is perceived as outside the popular mainstream. It plays to a devoted audience of cognoscenti, the same way classical does. Jazz aficionados will spend hours debating the relative merits of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, or of Charlie Parker Bird, John Coltrane and Stan Getz, just as classical buffs will go on about Horowitz vs. Rubinstein or Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Anne-Sophie Mutter. Most of the mass public never heard of these people. To fans their names are the stuff of legend.

Once, when I was in my early twenties, I was discussing music with a fellow young journalist. She was about the same age I was. “I’m trying to get into jazz,” she remarked, adding that she and her boyfriend were slated to attend a jazz trio’s performance at some club in San Diego that weekend.

Her comment stayed with me. One never had to “try” to “get into” the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen or U2; you simply switched on the radio and their tunes either appealed to you or they didn’t. It wasn’t like going to school. But my colleague’s statement that she was “trying” to get into jazz implied the sort of eat-your-vegetables mindset that we normally associate with PBS and music appreciation class: jazz, to some people, apparently smacks sufficiently of sophistication and high culture that they feel it’s something uplifting, which they should force-feed themselves in order to be better-educated people, or at least to seem more hip.

I’m having these thoughts because last night my wife and I viewed the 1988 biopic Bird starring Forrest Whitaker, directed by Clint Eastwood. I’d seen it before; Valerie hadn’t. It tells the sad story of Charlie Parker, “Bird” to his fans, the great jazz saxophonist whose heroin addiction ended his life at 34. Parker and his contemporary Coltrane, also a saxophonist, were semi-deified in their lifetimes and afterward. The beat poet Gregory Corso wrote a posthumous encomium to Parker. Coltrane was deified literally: I read once of a tiny San Francisco Bay Area cult that actually enshrined Coltrane as a sort of minor divinity. I’m not talking about the kitschy idolatry of Graceland here, but a mainstream church which incorporates Coltrane into its liturgy.

Fan-craziness aside, there was one scene in Bird that I found particularly poignant: Parker, a musician’s musician, hears a recording of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and decides he just has to meet this cat from Russia. Stravinsky was living in Hollywood at the time. Parker decides to go and seek him out. Well, of course Bird is strung out on smack when he shows up on Stravinsky’s doorstep in the middle of the night, and when Stravinsky peers out through his front door window and sees this enormous black man standing there wanting to come in and visit, he totally freaks. I don’t know whether the incident actually occurred or not, but it seemed to me a heavy-handed bit of symbolism on Eastwood’s part as director: the brash “new world” musician goes in search of the old world “father figure,” and succeeds only in scaring the daylights out of him. Well, Stravinsky was himself an admirer of jazz; he composed his Ebony Concerto for Benny Goodman. In fact jazz early on attracted the attention of a goodly number of “old-world” musicians, including Serge Koussevitsky, Darius Milhaud and others. Here in the U.S., native-born composers like Aaron Copland absorbed jazz influences readily and enthusiastically.

So. Is jazz “the American classical music?” In terms of style, the easy answer would be yes: people go to a jazz concert in the same spirit they would attend the philharmonic. They may be anticipating a toe-tapping good time, but they’re also seeking food for the soul.

But in terms of substance? You might just as well ask “is rock-and-roll the realization of the blues’ promise, or a corruption of it?” Now, there’s an argument that actually divided rockers in the 1960s. Brian Jones, who founded the Rolling Stones in 1962, eventually drifted apart from his band-mates Keith Richards and Mick Jagger because he wanted to hew closely to the tradition of the blues, and felt the others were betraying its purity by straying into a more commercial type of rock n’ roll. Listen to old recordings of The Cream and you’ll hear Eric Clapton locked in a similar struggle. Though The Cream remained generally more faithful to the “blues” tradition than the Stones did, who knows how long they could have kept it up? The Cream disbanded in 1969; the Stones are still touring in 2006. Die young and stay true to your ideals. In fact that's exactly what Brian Jones did: he drowned in his swimming pool, at age 27, in the same year that The Cream broke up. (Take note: I resisted the urge to write "the Cream separated.")

Because music is the only purely abstract art, cross-breeding is in its nature. No musical tradition stays “pure” for long. Musicians in different genres are listening to each other all the time, without the constraints of language barriers or the need for cognitive interpretation that can hamper the appreciation of the visual arts. Paul Simon goes to South Africa, comes home and records an album of South African “accordion jive” music with an American accent. Copland visits Mexico, then writes El Salon Mexico in praise of a cantina where he enjoyed himself there. If ever there was a musical tradition considered “hermetic,” it would be that of the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg and that crowd, who, serving German chromaticism with monklike fervor, worked out their famous dodecaphonic system which sought to preserve the purity of the post-Wagnerian Austro-Germanic tradition by abolishing the very notion of writing in keys. How highbrow can you get? But then along comes a cheeky, erudite American jazzman named Bill Evans, who appropriates the Schoenberg/Berg/Webern paradigm for a bouncy little delight called Twelve Tone Tune.

One is tempted to recall Pierre Boulez’ injunction about three decades ago that we shouldn’t even waste our breath talking about such distinctions. “There is neither classical nor modern music,” he said circa 1970, "there is only music.” In fact, decades before Boulez made that remark, Copland had anticipated him in practice as well as word: in 1937 Copland was teaching a music appreciation course at The New School in New York in which he amalgamated everything from medieval music to modern jazz under one heading. But of course Boulez was French; France has a long and well-entrenched musical tradition of its own. The question of whether or not jazz is “the American classical music” isn’t so easily dismissed as a parlor game: it’s part and parcel of America’s two-centuries-old struggle to position itself and its adolescent culture in relation to the Old World. It’s generally agreed now that the common culture is dead. Society is so compartmentalized anymore that there is practically nothing we all share in common.

But still we worry about how the world sees us. At the moment America’s stock abroad is pretty low, although we do still have our admirers. It’s hard to be the only remaining superpower and popular at the same time. But perhaps there is an opportunity here, and perhaps jazz is part of it. Why not? It has been before. When American troops liberated Paris near the end of the Second World War, the sound of Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw, Billie Holliday and Glenn Miller filled the air. Whatever the ultimate cause of the USSR’s collapse in 1991, the quiet infusion of jazz was one of the first cracks in the Soviet monolith: Russian novelist Vassily Aksyonov has gone so far as to state that, in his youth, jazz was “America’s secret weapon number one” in the struggle with the Soviets. He and his friends in Moscow sneaked around listening to American jazz whenever they could get away from prying official ears.

Okay, I’ve been told the kids of the world are only interested in hip-hop these days. But that misses the point, which is that by exporting jazz, we were exporting our best and most original, something the world valued and looked to us for. Hip-hop is only “culture” insofar as bad attitude is culture, and I predict that ultimately hip-hop is going to have no more relevance to America’s standing among the world’s cultures than last month’s issue of Newsweek. There was a time when we thought heavy-metal was never going to go away, but it’s finally in abeyance. Why? Not hard: the 16-year-olds who went to Megadeth concerts in 1986 are all in their mid-thirties now. Attitude doesn’t travel well.

But great music does. Jazz has carried the banner of American homegrown culture through more than one conflict, charmed and seduced audiences from London to Tokyo. Perhaps that perspective does justify jazz as “classical,” if you define a culture’s “classical” artifacts as those which not only embody the best it has to offer, but which form the basis for a tradition that later generations build on. When Branford Marsalis channels Charlie Parker, he’s tapping into a genuine, authentic cultural tradition just as surely as Mikhail Pletnev is when he sits down at the piano to give Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition another reading.

Jazz sends a message of hope, just as Beethoven does. And it’s a distinctly American message of hope, one which seeped into the darkest corners of totalitarianism in the last century. That’s what the great classics do. When Mark Knopfler sang that “a saxophone was made to go with the night,” he was speaking truer words than he knew. It is to be hoped that as the world struggles through its current night, the tenor sax, in whoever’s hands, will play on right into the small hours of the morning.

By day, all cats ain't gray. (Or female.)

In October, 2005, Cat Fancy magazine published an article entitled Break The Man Code. Written by a man, Chris Keller, it delved into the subject of why society traditionally paints men as liking dogs and hating cats, with the attendant stereotype that prejudice carries in its train that there's something sissy about preferring cats to dogs.

I wrote the following letter to CF, which was never published of course.

(The photo above is of my "boys," Amadeus and von Humboldt Fleischer, "Humboldt" for short.)

Dear CF,

Huge kudos to Chris Keller for his little essay on "Men and Cats." (Can someone put me in touch with this guy?) As a man who loves cats, I've been a lone voice in the wilderness for years, or I thought I was.

I don't want to delve too deeply into amateur psychology here, but it seems to me that American men's societally-reinforced reputation for disliking cats and preferring dogs may simply be a subcategory (no pun intended) of misogyny. Cats come in both sexes, as do all of us higher vertebrates, but there is a tendency, in America anyway, to consider all cats as female. My little abyssinian pal, Amadeus, and his midnight-colored buddy Humboldt are both constantly referred to as "she" by visitors, even though both are definitely guys. (In Amadeus' case, a very old guy: he's going on 19.)

I've noted this phenomenon for years. In our "macho"-obsessed culture, liking cats is considered sissy, and at the same time, all cats are reflexively thought of as girls. Coincidence? I'm no feminist, and I'll be the first one to tell you that "misogynist," like "racist," is a word that too many people are throwing around too freely these days. But is this particular coincidence a coincidence? I doubt it. Like all prejudices, it's stupid, but stupid prejudices die hard. Cats, thought of as always and everywhere female, are considered a pet fit only for women. Dogs, on the other hand, are popularly associated with such "manly" pursuits as hunting, and no one would look at a dog, from the front anyway, and assume without asking that it was female.

Moreover, dogs are openly, brazenly, unapologetically subservient, which cats are not. That, too, plays to the "macho" sensibility, the need always to feel "in control." In other words, "real" men (meaning insecure men) don't like a pet they can't command. Hence, the canard that dogs are for men and cats are for women. Well, if it's misogynist to think all cats are female and instinctively dislike them for that reason, it may well be misanthropic (you don't hear THAT word very much in today's PC-dominated discourse: it means "disliking men," which doesn't have quite the stigma that disliking women does, for some reason) to assume that men are the only ones who suffer from the I-gotta-be-in-charge syndrome. I had a supervisor at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, Germany a decade ago, a big, tall beefy woman who obviously had the I-gotta-be-in-charge syndrome up the ying-yang. You probably won't be surprised to learn that her pets were not cats, but two LARGE dogs.

And, by the way, disliking cats is not exclusively a male illness. I once had a couple over for dinner, and the extremely rude wife-half of this couple, (an Army sergeant, by the way) upon being examined by my curious and friendly feline friend Alexander, urgently requested that I keep the cat away from her. "Why." I asked, "are you allergic?" "No," she replied. "I don't like cats." She had a four year-old son at the time, and to this day, I regret not having gotten right in her face and demanded "How would you like it if I came over to YOUR house and said, 'Keep this kid away from me, I don't like kids?" I should have thrown the bitch out the door, but I didn't want to embarrass my wife, so we went ahead with dinner. The next day I made sure everyone at the office heard about her outrageous behavior.

Chris might have mentioned that writers traditionally love cats, and that includes the "manliest" of all American writers, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had a huge family of cats at his home in Cuba. In fact today, more than 40 years after his death, his cats' descendants are still breeding there. And let's not forget T.S. Eliot, whose "Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats" formed the basis for one of Broadway's most beloved musicals.

Two of the biggest, brawniest he-guys I ever worked with, my friend Bill Barna, who played football in college and who now works for Microsoft, and my late friend Alan McCarthy, station engineer at KUIC-FM in Vacaville, CA, were both devoted kitty-lovers.

My wife has two dogs, and I have two cats. Go figure.

In praise of Mondays

I was driving across town this morning, and like just about everyone else driving across town, I had the radio on in my car.

"A happy Monday to you," the deejay intoned. Then added, "if that's not an oxymoron."

We're all supposed to hate Monday. There's a song called Blue Monday. Garfield the Cat famously hates Mondays (and I've always wondered why, since he doesn't have a job.)

But I just put my finger on the key to the cultural vilification of Mondays: the secret woid, as Groucho Marx would have said, is "Job."

If this is true, (and it is) it points up a very sad state of affairs. The whole notion of "Blue Monday" is tied up with the idea that we all hate our jobs, or at least, hate to work. Monday is unpopular because it represents the beginning of the five-day work week, the "grind." Friday is the nirvana we all seek; Wednesday is "hump day" because, once you get past 12 noon on Wednesday, you're more than halfway to Friday.

Stop and think about this for a minute. Most of us spend 30-or-so years of our lives engaged in regular, day-to-day employment. That's almost half your time on earth. Five-sevenths of that 30 years is going to be workdays, vacations and holidays excepted. One-seventh of it is going to be Mondays. And if, as many believe, this life is it, the one you get, what's the point of dreading one-seventh of it?

These days, at age 50, I find that I rather like Mondays. Yes, I hated and dreaded Mondays as a kid because Monday meant back to school. I hated and dreaded the month of September for the same reason. But I have reversed my position on both. Now I tend to look more favorably on Mondays than I did throughout my school days, and the month of September, well, that means the beginning of fall, which, as I grew up, became something more to anticipate than dread. We learn to take longer views when we get older. As a small child, I thought of September only in terms of summer-vacation-is-over. In adolescence I came to regard it as the gateway to the holiday season, and by the way, my birthday is in October, which sweetened the autumn breeze further.

Right up until I graduated from college, Monday was such a dreaded thing to me that I would usually become melancholy on Sunday night, as I saw it looming. It had simply always been that way. Monday was a day with no redeeming qualities unless you happened to like Little House On The Prairie, which aired on NBC Monday nights at 8:00.

But when I was in my second year of college, I made a friend at school. Her name was Lucia. Lucia was an adult student--at the time we became acquainted, she had three children aged 16, 14 and 12, and her husband was a Navy officer. She lived close to the campus, and so decided to start taking college-level classes for something to do. (She got her Master's degree a few years later, and I still don't have mine.)

While by no means a saccharine, make-you-cringe optimist, Lucia had a way of making the best of situations. One afternoon when we had an hour or so to kill between classes, she invited me over to her house for lunch. She fixed me a sandwich and poured me a beer, which was a treat because I was 19 and not yet old enough to legally drink beer. Her kitchen was a quiet and cheerful place, in the middle of a very tidy suburban home. And as we ate and talked, Lucia gave me a perspective on Mondays that was utterly new and novel to a 19 year-old school-hater for whom the words "Saturday afternoon" meant heaven and "Monday morning" was an invitation to thoughts of suicide.

"I like Monday," Lucia said. "Especially Monday morning."

"Why, for God's sake?" I asked.

"Are you kidding? On Monday morning everyone clears out. My husband goes back to the office, the kids go back to school, and I can just pour a cup of coffee, sit down by myself and enjoy the peace and quiet."

Well, I hadn't thought of that, and why should I have? I mean, what reason was there for me to be familiar with the viewpoint of a 40 year-old wife and mother to whom weekends meant a houseful of teenagers and not, as they did to me, 48 hours of delicious, no-responsibility fooling around?

It made me stop and think. There was another way to view Mondays than the way I always had.

Now that I'm a decade older than Lucia was the day she served me that lunch, and even though I never raised teenagers, I'm coming around to viewing Mondays pretty much the way she did.

I've never especially cared for Sundays. I know there are people for whom Sunday is their favorite day: regular churchgoers like it, as do people who enjoy loafing around sipping coffee and reading the Sunday paper all day.

But for me, and again this is a prejudice that goes back to childhood, Sunday was always the mortuary of the week. My family were not churchgoers, except for my mother, who went to church because she was employed there as an organist. So Sunday lacked that ritual. Also, on Sunday most businesses were closed, much more so than today anyway, and worst of all for a kid growing up in that largely pre-cable era, Sunday was the day when there was nothing decent on TV. Saturday morning meant cartoons; Sunday morning meant boring religious shows. Sunday afternoon was likewise a TV wasteland, and it led inevitably into Sunday night, which meant early bedtime because of school the next day. Yuck.

I've carried this over into adulthood. School is no longer an issue, nor is TV. But Sundays remain a trial for me, the weekly re-enactment in miniature of the dog days of August, when you just start wishing the autumn breezes would begin to blow, and life start moving again. I know the idea behind the sabbath is that it's supposed to be a day of rest. But I'm going to have a nice, long rest when I'm dead. Why should I have a preview of it every week?

Viewed that way, Mondays aren't so bad. I go out into the street on Monday morning and what I see is the world returned to its ordinary-time self: businesses open. Trucks making deliveries. The mailman scooting around. The guy across the street sanding the side of his house, getting ready to paint it.

I once had a job where I worked weekends, with Friday and Monday my days off. That was cool, to be able to go out on Monday and ride my bike around when everyone else was in their offices.


And some businesses do this of course. Since Sunday is traditionally the busiest day of the week in the restaurant business, some small restaurants close on Mondays and make that their day off.

Still hate and dread Mondays? Here are some suggestions:

1. Find another job. if what you do is getting you down to the point where you dread the start of the work week, maybe you should take direct action.

2. Make Monday the day of a pleasant ritual. Start regularly going to a favorite luncheon spot on Mondays. Or meeting with friends for drinks after work. Or make Monday the day you habitually knock off early. Make up for it by working a little extra on a couple of other days.

3. Move to a country where Monday is the sabbath.

4. Adopt the Julian calendar.

Or you could go into the restaurant business. Which reminds me of one of my favorite classic TV-comedy moments: in an episode of Get Smart, the late Don Adams goes into a French restaurant. This is one of the most oft-repeated gags in sitcom history: the American who makes a fool of himself in a French restaurant because he can't understand the menu. Remember Lucy and the escargots? Well, in this case, not wanting to tip off the waiter to his ignorance of French, Maxwell Smart points to "Ferme le lundi" at the bottom of the menu card and says, "I'll have that."

"But monsieur--"

"Look, that's what I want. I'll have that."

"Very good, monsieur. One order of 'Closed on Mondays.' "

I don't know what kind of sauce the French would put on that, but I'll bet it would be good.

Out to the line, one last time

Early last year I wrote the following column for the Chula Vista, CA Star-News, where I was employed at the time as a reporter:

"In 1963, when I was seven years old, a previously-unknown rock n' roll band called The Surfaris suddenly scored a monster hit, then sank like a stone. The Surfaris were textbook one-hit wonders.

The tune was a bare-bones, mechanically repetitious instrumental, but there was definitely something new there: the spark of whatever is meant by "style."

It rocketed up the charts, soon becoming a staple among garage bands across America. After all, any idiot who could master three guitar chords could play Wipe-Out.

The song helped ignite the nationwide surfing craze which went on to dominate that era. And anyone who was growing up then knows what its title means: to "wipe out" is to fall off your surfboard and land, ignominiously, in the drink.

Decades later, I've been learning of such things firsthand.

Late last August, about six weeks ahead of my 49th birthday, I decided to take up surfing.

Although I have traveled much, I spent most of my childhood and youth right here in the South Bay, and have as much right as anyone to claim the title "Californian." When I was with the U.S. State Department, moving around the globe, my Foreign Service friends would invariably ask me two questions when they learned I was from California: (1) Have you ever been in an earthquake? And (2) Are you a surfer?

Do it, I decided. It's a birthright.

I contacted Randy Couts, a 30-year veteran surfer and professional surfing instructor, and we arranged to meet in Coronado for my first lesson.

Loitering in the family kitchen with my sisters Carla and Lynne, I mentioned my plans. Carla approved wholeheartedly: "It's great exercise!" My little sister Lynne, who always knew how to flatter me, chimed in with, "As if he needs it. He's as hard as a rock." Yeah, right. Anyway, I had my first surfing lesson Saturday, September 4, 2004.

Six days later my little sister died.

She was addicted to both alcohol and painkillers, and our 90 year-old father had a doctor's prescription for methadone. Lynne got into Dad's methadone, unwittingly took more than she could handle, chased it down with liquor, lay down for a midmorning nap and, soon after, stopped breathing. She was 47.

That was Friday, September 10. My next lesson was scheduled for the following day. I canceled.


But a week later, I was back in Coronado with Randy, paddling around in the soup, going "outside," (e.g. beyond the breakers) learning the trick of "arching" to establish balance before attempting to stand up on the board. And wiping out. Over and over.

The cliche about climbing back on your bicycle doesn't really apply here. After all, my surfing lessons and my sister's death had nothing to do with each other except timing.

But when you lose a loved one, you're handed the most basic existential choice anyone ever faces: do I go on, or not?

Some people don't. Lynne, for example. Our mother died in 2000. While the rest of us worked through the seasons of grief until the pain faded as it will, Lynne could not and would not relinquish her grief. It stayed, and co-opted her life. Chronically depressed, she withdrew into booze, pills and comfort food. She did little during her final year except sleep, watch TV, drink brandy straight from the bottle, smoke cigarettes and order pizza from La Bella's. Her death was accidental, but by the time it happened, her interest in going on living was perfunctory at best.

People still ask Carla and me how we're managing. We have a ready reply: "We're putting one foot in front of the other. That's all you can do."

Perhaps it sounds trite, but that really is the choice. Put one foot in front of the other. Or don't. In my case, beneath the umbrella of that long walk falls the ongoing attempt to master a zen-like art: getting my feet positioned properly on the surfboard so as to stay balanced on a wave. "Catch a wave and you're sittin' on top of the world," the Beach Boys once sang. Well, I'm a long, long way from sitting on top of the world, but at this point I'm doing well if, coming "inside," I manage to avoid a wipe-out. "

The tragic death of my younger sister aside, from which I am still recovering, it was a pretty conceit I had back then: boy returns to California after years of traveling, and, on the fair cusp of age 50, decides to become a surfer.

I was serious enough about it. Not only did I take some lessons from the redoubtable Randy Couts, but I also bought a used surfboard from him, not to mention a brand-new $200 wet suit from the Surf Hut in Imperial Beach, CA.

But this idea went the way of the best-laid plans. For one thing, my lessons kind of fizzled out. I had engaged Randy on a for-trade basis: instead of cash, I was going to pay him for the lessons by writing an article for the local newspaper about him and his business, teaching people to surf for $50 an hour. Since he wasn't being paid in cash, Randy's motivation for continuing the lessons probably wasn't the strongest, and in any case his interest was listing away from surfing and toward golf. After four lessons, we just didn't get together anymore.

The romantic image of the lonely surfer catching a few last waves in the sunset may be an attractive one, but that lonely surfer is probably not a beginner, as I was. Without someone to surf with, my own motivation to go out and get wet wasn't much better than lukewarm, especially being a beginner and therefore likely to make a fool of myself in front of more experienced surfers.

There was also my fear of the water. Randy concentrated on trying to get me over it, and he had a small measure of success, ("Here, where we're paddling, it's only about eight feet deep.") but he had a big demon to kill: when I was 11 years old I got caught in a rip current and damn near drowned at Silver Strand State Beach, just a couple of miles to the south of Coronado, where Randy was teaching me. I'm a good enough swimmer, but ever since that day have had a fear of going into the ocean deeper than up to my shoulders. Paddling out to the line with Randy was one thing, but after he was gone, it took a lot to get me to try it alone.

The truth is, after my lessons with Randy petered out in November, 2004 with the higher surf of winter coming on, I only attempted to go out two more times. In January, 2005 I strapped my board to the roof of my 1995 Saturn, went out to Coronado by myself, got into my wet suit, paddled around for about 30 minutes and then went home.

I didn't try again until June, when I placed an ad on the Internet for someone to surf with, and a nice guy up in Pacific Beach sent me an e-mail. He invited me to meet him at Tourmaline, one of San Diego's most popular surfing spots, the following Saturday. We did meet, and we did take our surfboards into the water, and we did start paddling, and that's where any resemblance between what he was doing and what I was doing ended. He was surfing, e.g. catching waves and riding them in while standing on his board. I was floundering, e.g. slipping, falling off, not even attempting to stand up. I made it out to the line once, but was having such an exhausting time just sitting on my board trying to not to tip over that I gave up in frustration and came in after just a few minutes.

He was nice about the whole thing, ("Well, you did make it out there once") and even suggested that we might try again in a couple of weeks, but I didn't hear from him again and I don't blame him.

Since then, my surfboard has just sat in the weeds, gathering dust.

And now I'm getting ready to leave the ocean far behind. My wife and I have purchased a business in Spokane, Washington and we plan to be moving there within the next few weeks. Spokane, as a quick glance at the atlas reveals, is roughly 250 miles inland from Seattle. That means 250 miles from the beach. Skiing is very big in Spokane. Surfing is not.

We will be having a garage sale soon, but believe it or not, I do not plan to get rid of my surfboard. I'm going to keep it, as a reminder of a nice idea I once had, and perhaps even as a hedge against the future. Who knows whether I might once again live near the ocean one day, and want to try taking up this wonderful sport again? My recent conceit was to be a 50 year-old surfer. There's no reason why I couldn't be a 60 year-old one.

In fact, we went up to Encinitas a week ago and ended up having lunch at a Caribbean-themed cafe there. I picked up a copy of the local newspaper, the Coast News, and, while waiting for my lunch, read a column by local surfer Chris Ahrens, who has written four books about surfing and who regularly writes for that paper. His Feb. 27 column was a tribute to local surfing filmmaker Hal Jepsen, who died Feb. 6.

Chris' column mentioned a memorial paddle scheduled for Feb. 26 at Buccaneer Beach. This is a lovely ritual in the world of surfing: when a famous figure in the sport dies, quite often his brother and sister surfers will get together at a specified beach and paddle "out to the line" in his memory. I actually thought of e-mailing Chris for directions and joining the memorial paddle, as a gesture of respect from a wannabe who loves the idea of surfing but didn't manage to quite "get there," at least not this time.

But no, the memorial paddle was set for the next day. Too short notice. I decided to let it pass. (Besides, what if I were to slip and fall off my surfboard in front of all those experienced surfers? It would have been too much to bear.)

We leave in four weeks. My surfboard is lying in the driveway, my wet suit down in the garage among boxes of old clothes and rusty bicycles.

But I'm trying to get psyched up to go out to the beach, by myself, just one last time. Before we pack up and leave for Spokane, I am determined to get that surfboard back atop that Saturn, toss my wetsuit into the trunk, drive out to Coronado myself and, by hook or by crook, get on that board and paddle out to the line, whether there's actually any "line" there or not. (Actually, I think I'd feel less pressure if there were no one around.) As Randy reminded me, the water at Coronado is only eight feet deep, and I can swim. If I fall in the drink, which I'm bound to, I'll make it to shore okay. After all, the board floats; that's what surfboards do.

As I say, I owe it to a good idea I once had, not to mention my love for the southern California coast where I grew up, and my somewhat-hushed respect for a sport I've always admired, if somehow from afar.

Hail, cowabunga and farewell.