An Interstate of mind

I

There are certain experiences so deeply-engrained in American myth—if one accepts Jung’s definition of myth as “collective memory”—that you feel as if having had one or more of these experiences is almost a prerequisite for qualifying as an American. Stepping into a voting booth on election day. Hearing an umpire shout “Play ball” on a mild summer evening. Coping with melting ice cream during a Fourth of July fireworks display. DX’ing on your car radio somewhere out in the middle of nowhere and picking up nothing but country music.

Or taking the long, long drive that got you out into that middle of nowhere in the first place.

In fact, that last should be near the top of any such list, and I would hope that at some time in his or her life every American would have the opportunity to cross the United States. Not in an airplane, either, but in one of the slower, perhaps even a bit less comfortable ways. Train? Okay, but even that’s a little “touristy.” Bus, or better yet, because more personal, car. (Who but we Americans have ever been so affectively attached to their cars? And don’t take my word for it, just break out any one of Bruce Springsteen’s early albums.)

Of all American myths, none is more pervasive, deeply-rooted or powerful than that of the open road. How much of our literature and even our popular culture have had their roots in the notion of the road as metaphor for spiritual quest? Walt Whitman’s name comes to mind right away, then more names: Steinbeck, Kerouac.

Then of course come songs, movies and classic television shows. Route 66 was a hit for Nat King Cole and later, a TV series in which Martin Milner and George Maharis rode boldly in search of self-enlightenment in their Chevy Corvette. Americans of a certain age (over 45) will remember Michael Parks meandering about the country on a motorcycle for two television seasons in a Route 66 retread on NBC called Then Came Bronson. A treacly song popular when I was in high school, Me and You and a Dog Named Boo, celebrated a couple of happy hippies “Travelin’ and a-livin’ off the land.” The late Roger Miller’s biggest hit record, King of The Road, was a ditty about a footloose “man of means by no means” knocking around the highways and byways.

Then there are Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider; Al Pacino and Gene Hackman in Scarecrow; Lee Marvin's virtuoso hobo in Emperor of the North. The prose of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is almost uniformly dreadful, but books don’t have to be well-written to sell well, (think John Grisham) and there was a good reason why Zen became a runaway bestseller when it was first published in 1974. It, too, tapped into the subconscious yearning of America (in this case, collegiate America, fond of both Zen and motorcycles) for the road, with its freedom of open spaces and the unlimited possibilities of Whitman’s great democratic vista. So did Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon’s 1983 paean to the back roads of the republic, those thin blue veins that crisscross the spaces between the interstate highways in almost any road atlas.

I have driven across the United States twice, most recently just a few weeks ago. And on both occasions I realized that, their external circumstances notwithstanding, the two journeys represented the fulfillment of a kind of fantasy, and an archetypically American one at that. Many years ago in Mexicali, when I first attended a bullfight, or years after that, when I was in Paris and treated myself to lunch in a good cafe on the Place San Michel, I chided myself with a half-grin, “You’re fulfilling a ‘Hemingway’ fantasy, doing this.” Crossing America in a car was just as clearly, for me anyway, the fulfillment of a “Kerouac” fantasy, although the adventures he chronicled in On The Road and its follow-up volume, The Dharma Bums, were certainly wilder and more colorful than anything I experienced. Doesn’t really matter, though. On stage, the play’s the thing. On the road, the trip’s the thing, and trips are as individual as the people who make them. None is exactly like another. In Bitter Lemons of Cyprus Lawrence Durrell wrote that journeys, like artists, are born and not made. As the Germans say, Genau.

My first crossing of America by car, in 2003, was neither a relaxed vacation nor a self-indulgent voyage of self-discovery fraught with earnest notebook-scribbling and photographing of forests, rivers and canyons (although I did, at the request of some friends, take a few snapshots along the way.) It was a mad dash for safe haven. My luck and my money had both run out and so had my list of places to go. I had been living in suburban Washington, D.C. and had lost my job a few months earlier. Unable to find work anywhere, (in 2002 the economy was still in its post-9/11 slump) by that winter I had run out of options. I could no longer pay the rent on my apartment in Wheaton, MD. My sister in Reno, NV invited me to come stay with her and look for work there.

But I had to get there, and that involved a logistic nightmare. I couldn’t just walk away from a stuffed apartment. I owned about 10,000 lbs. worth of...well, the usual things people accumulate. Furniture, clothes. Pots & pans; forks & knives; plates & cups. Books, records, CDs, TV set, computer, stereo, pictures, VHS tapes, sheets and blankets. Those souvenir beer steins from Munich. Those Russian lacquer boxes from Moscow. The matryoshka dolls. The golf clubs. The snorkeling gear. I truly came to an understanding that winter of what a burden possessions are. I longed to just shuck my clothes like St. Francis and wander off into the woods. But you can’t do that anymore, nor would I ever have had the courage to. And there was no way I could store all of that stuff. Ultimately I gave away almost all of it. The furniture, clothes and kitchen things went to the Salvation Army, while my library, my precious, lovingly-assembled collection of books and music that had been my ongoing project for 30 years, was donated to the Friends of the Wheaton Library. They came and carted it all away for sale, including books and vinyl LPs that I’d had since high school. I wept.

But not for long. “Pack up your peaches and get out here,” my sister in Reno had exhorted me on the phone. My car, a 1990 Geo Storm which already had more than 130,000 miles on it, became a lifeboat. A few things did go into storage in Wheaton; the rest went into the car. I dropped off the key to my apartment and spent one last night in the nation’s capital, or more accurately, with a friend in Arlington, VA. She served me a delicious supper of baked salmon. We drank wine. I played Trivial Pursuit with her son. The next morning, early, I was on my way.

This was no sightseeing trip. 2,267 miles separate Arlington from Reno. And I had to wonder if my car was going to make it. Yes, I’d had it serviced before leaving, but it was 13 years old and had already seen much at my hands, including two years of tearing up and down the Autobahn in Germany. I crossed my fingers and tried to keep my speed under 70. A colleague had once dubbed my Geo “the Blue Shoe.” If we made it to Nevada, this would be the Blue Shoe’s finest hour.

II

That first day I drove for ten hours and got as far as Indianapolis, where I arrived in a cold rain. I had a friend there who had offered to put me up for the night, saving the cost of one motel anyway, but once I got there I had to wait for her to finish her shift working the front desk at a local Holiday Inn. Her relief, scheduled to come on at midnight, was late of course. I sat in the hotel lobby, my eyes drooping from the long day on the road, watching an old Golden Girls rerun on the Lifetime Channel and wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to just check into the Super-8 and forget about trying to save $39.95

At 12:25 a.m. my friend’s relief showed up. We drove back to her place, where I was dismayed to discover that she had a TV set in the bedroom and, at that late hour, wanted to watch a country-music awards show. I got about four hours’ sleep that first night. She had to turn right around and go back to work in the morning, and at 6:10 a.m. her kitschy drug store alarm clock started approximating the sound of a rooster going cock-a-doodle-doo. We had coffee together at a nearby McDonald’s and then I was back on the interstate, on my way out of Indiana.

I crossed into Illinois about 90 minutes later, heeding the sign that reminded me I was now on Central Standard Time. Driving across southern Illinois that morning I realized the limits of terrestrial radio once you get outside the major urban areas. There was little on the dial at all, and what little there was would have provided the late Mike Royko with ample gunpowder for one of his old Chicago Sun-Times columns about the hicks and rubes who lived downstate. One station was even broadcasting local obituaries, something I had never heard before, and I had worked in small-town radio myself.

Continuing to follow Interstate 70, I traversed the length of Missouri that morning and early afternoon, crossing the Mississippi River and passing the famous St. Louis “Gateway to the West” arch in a long haul that had me in Kansas City by 1:30 p.m. Kansas City had been my target stopping-place for Day Two, but 1:30 p.m. seemed a bit early to be pulling off the road, so I kept going. But a few minutes later, after crossing into Kansas, the fatigue burning my eyeballs reminded me that I had only slept four hours or so the night before. So I pulled off the road in Kansas City, Kansas, the lesser twin of the “real” Kansas City where the football Chiefs and baseball Royals are to be found, and checked into a motel, where an afternoon nap preceded a genuine night’s sleep.

By the next afternoon I had made it as far as Denver, after covering Kansas in what was up until that time the most boring drive I could remember. In an old episode of the Barney Miller series on TV, a federal witness-protection subject who keeps coming back to New York and getting into trouble is finally threatened with, “Do you know what there is in Kansas? WHEAT!” I’ve got news for one and all: there’s even less than that. Kansas is so vast and barren, at least along the I-70 corridor, that I was terrified of running out of gas in the middle of nowhere; any time I saw a gas station, I would “stop and top” whether I needed to or not. At some point that afternoon I crossed into Colorado, where I found that John Denver’s song Rocky Mountain High had no relevance whatever. Eastern Colorado is essentially a continuation of Kansas; only a climb in elevation so gradual that you don’t even notice it distinguishes the one state from the other. About an hour and a half out of Denver, still looking at topography that reminded me of Kansas, I was surprised to see a sign that said I was now at an elevation of nearly 5,000 feet. When did that happen? No, Colorado doesn’t start to look like postcard Colorado (think Coors beer trucks) until you’re west of Denver, a fact I learned after spending the night in yet another motel, this one near the railroad tracks, unfortunately, which meant I was listening to trains all night, and then making my way through Denver’s ghastly Monday-morning commute traffic, eventually finding my way out of town and on up into the Rocky Mountains.

Here was where I actually saw the Blue Shoe’s “finest hour.” Loaded up like the Joads’ jalopy in The Grapes of Wrath, the Shoe got me through the Rockies, which were still largely snow-covered in late March. She slowed to 35 and would go no faster on some steep climbs, but made up for it going downhill. The descent out of the Rockies was as tortured as the climb into them, but I lunched that afternoon in end-of-the-world Grand Junction knowing that the toughest part of the drive was behind me. I was in the great west now, land of (mostly) flat spaces.

I pushed on into eastern Utah. Did I think Kansas had been desolate? Eastern Utah looks like the moon. Literally. As I drove through, and gazed upon, mile after mile of trackless waste, I thought of Neil Armstrong’s description of the lunar surface in 1969, “magnificent desolation.” Closer to home, you saw the movie Stagecoach, right? Imagine yourself on the set of Stagecoach, whose climactic scenes were in fact filmed in Monument Valley, Utah, not far from where I was that day. The plucky Shoe bravely soldiered on, but when I saw a sign that read, “Next services 100 miles,” my blood damn near froze. My car only held 10 gallons of gas, and if I got stuck out here, I’d really be stuck. To save fuel, I hugged the right lane and kept my speed under 60. I didn’t have to worry about being cursed by other drivers; it seemed as though I had the entire highway for 100 miles in both directions to myself. I could worry about that instead.

Utah is as varied as Colorado. At Salina I got off I-70 and turned north toward Provo and Salt Lake City, gradually leaving the moon behind and entering countryside that looked more like Switzerland: green valleys surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Lovely country, the Utah that Utah wants you to come visit, and bring your skis. I almost overshot Salt Lake City. Staying on the interstate while I looked for a motel along the frontage roads, I drove and drove...and when I came to the airport, (and saw a sign directing me to Interstate 80 which also said “Reno 385”) I knew that I had driven too far. I turned around and went back, spending my last night on the road in a Motel 6 in the Salt Lake suburb of Midvale. Here an urban legend was exploded, by the way. No, I found out, motel rooms in Utah do not offer guests the Book of Mormon instead of the Gideon Bible, as I had heard or read somewhere. I opened the drawer beside the bed and there was the familiar Gideon Bible in its usual place along with the Yellow Pages and the takeout pizza menus.

The next day was the final lap of my 2,200-mile dash for sanctuary—I could be in Reno by midafternoon if I didn’t let myself get distracted.

In fact, a major distraction promptly intruded itself: after traversing western Utah’s vast expanse of the closest thing to nothing earth has to offer, including the unearthly spectacle of the white and endless Bonneville Salt Flats, where Craig Breedlove set the world land speed record in 1964, racing across the sand at 600 mph in the Spirit of America, (essentially a jet aircraft with no wings) I crossed into Nevada and, stopping for gas, discovered that the Blue Shoe, no Spirit of America despite her spunk, was leaking transmission fluid. For the last 300-or-so miles of my trip I was sweating proverbial bullets, pulling off the road every time I came to a town to replenish the Blue Shoe’s transmission fluid, including a stop in Battle Mountain, NV, immortalized by the travel pages of the Washington Post in 2001 as “The Armpit of America” in an article I remembered reading, and giggling at, as I sat at my desk in a comfortable corporate office just outside Baltimore, never imagining for a moment that Battle Mountain would be anywhere in my own future. But here, just as the article had said, on a mountain overlooking the town, there stood the giant white letters “BM,” a detail the Post could not resist pointing out with an appropriate snigger. I was tempted to stop and have lunch in Battle Mountain, if only to be able to tell people I had, but it’s not the kind of place that encourages lingering, and anyway I still had 170 miles to go. Onward, leaking.

Around 4:00 that afternoon I pulled into my sister’s driveway in Reno. The frenzied trek was over. Of course my luck would be no different there, and two months later I would be pushing on to my final destination, the old family homestead in southern California, where fate had been busy, it seemed, setting me up to join my younger sister in caregiving for our father, who was 89 at the time and on the verge of dementia. I would find a job there at last, working on the local newspaper, and the Blue Shoe would be replaced by a 1995 Saturn SL. A year after that my younger sister would die and I would become my father’s sole caregiver for the final year of his own life. But all of that was in the future. For the moment I was in Reno, many, many miles from where I had begun, looking for work when I wasn’t sticking aluminum trays from Pep Boys under my car in a doomed effort to protect my brother-in-law’s driveway from the drippings of the Blue Shoe’s incontinent transmission. If this particular experience with the romance of the road had taught me anything, it was that satellite radio would probably be a damn good investment. You’d be amazed at how little there is to listen to between Indianapolis and Reno, and somewhere around the middle of Kansas I sure was getting sick of the sound of my own voice.

Oh, yes, and I learned one other thing on this trek as well: Burger King is the only fast-food chain anywhere that serves decent coffee.

III

Four years later I crossed America again, this time in the other direction, and this time, not alone. Between the five-day dash for sanctuary in 2003 and my return to Washington, D.C. in 2007, much had happened and the contours of life had been considerably altered. By 2005 my younger sister and my father were both gone, and by the fall of that year I had gotten married for a second time, to a woman, moreover, who lived and enjoyed her own version of the gypsy life. Valerie, my second wife, is a real estate broker with an expensive hobby. She’s what you might call a frustrated interior decorator, in the same sense that her husband is a frustrated poet. She likes to buy a house, flip it, sell it and then move on to the next one. I haven’t checked, but this might be some kind of record: by the time Valerie and I had been married for 18 months, we were moving into our third house. Valerie has boasted on her own blog (http://valerrealestate.blogspot.com) of having moved 40 times in her life. Well, I’m up there too: in addition to the moving around I did as a young journalist years ago, I also spent 14 years in the foreign service, so I’m not far behind Valerie: 35 lifetime moves. But three moves together in 19 months of marriage? If we were a couple of romantic young kids, pursuing nascent careers while schlepping from apartment to apartment after a cheap honeymoon at the Disneyland Motel, maybe. But Valerie and I are both past 50. These are single-family homes we’re hopping around to, and each one gets furnished with real stuff, not orange-crate bookshelves and plastic end tables from IKEA.

Before we got married, Valerie relocated from Washington, D.C. to southern California, bought and remodeled a house there for us to live in (Move #1). After a few months, we decided to seek a business opportunity. Valerie had always wanted to try running a bed-and-breakfast. We found a beautiful one in Spokane, WA, bought it and relocated to Spokane to try our hands at being innkeepers (Move #2.) But after just a few months in the B&B business, Valerie decided she was bored to tears. Running a B&B just wasn’t enough of a business challenge for her, and there was also the fact that we were going broke, so she decided it was time to return to her home turf and get back into the real estate business. She bought a house in Washington, D.C. and we sold the bed-and-breakfast (Move #3.)

Valerie went to Washington ahead of me to look for a home and get started up in her old business again. I stayed behind in Spokane to run the bed-and-breakfast while it was up for sale and take care of our menagerie of three miniature schnauzer dogs and three mostly-contentious cats. The B&B sold remarkably quickly, (one month) which presented yet another logistical challenge: getting everything we owned, which aside from the menagerie also included a 2006 Chrysler PT Cruiser, from Spokane to the District of Columbia.

Yes, it was time to make that journey again. Only this time it would be Interstate 90 rather than 70. A more northerly route, a whole new panorama of states to see, a whole new set of impressions to garner, another plunge into what Kerouac called the Great American Night, although in our case it could be more accurately termed the Great American Afternoon. Valerie doesn’t like to drive after sunset and, while I don’t mind it as much as she does, at 51 I’m a bit set in my ways. (Actually, I was a bit set in my ways at 25, but of that another time.) The truth is, whether I’m at home in my own living room or checking out the local weather forecast on cable TV in some motel room in Sheboygan, evening means cocktails, a light meal and an early bedtime. It doesn’t mean pushing the center line until midnight, trying to set mileage records. To heck with that. Ask any trucker: 500 miles is a good day’s work. I’ve been known to do 600, but only if I get started by 8 a.m. After that, hang up the keys. And for me, that usually means by 7 p.m.

This time I was pleased to notice myself anticipating the journey with something other than panic. After all, this was a completely different equation. This, if still neither meandering summer holiday nor Route 66-style quest for the answers to life’s questions that, according to the myth anyway, only the highway can provide, neither was it throwing a leg over the gunwale of the last lifeboat leaving the Titanic, a feeling that had unquestionably attended my solitary departure from Maryland in 2003.

We vacated the old mansion in Spokane on Monday, May 14. Once the moving van had pulled away, there was nothing left but for the auctioneer to come over, inventory and cart away what was to be auctioned off. As a living space, the house was empty.
I had already arranged to board our six animals at a local kennel for our last night in town. Valerie and I would stay at another B&B, around the corner from our own, operated by a friend who was now, suddenly, merely our hostess and no longer a colleague in the hospitality business. We were set to meet some friends at O’Doherty’s Irish Grill, a popular downtown watering hole, for a few farewell drinks.

Just before piling the dogs into the PT Cruiser to take them off to the kennel, I let them out into the backyard one last time from what had been their home (and ours) in the mansion’s attic. We would be leaving one family member behind, my abyssinian cat Amadeus, who had died the previous September and whose grave was beneath the blue spruce tree in the back yard. There was a wicker rocking chair there where I would sometimes sit beside his grave, on which I had placed a homemade marker, and smoke a cigar. Born in Germany in 1987, where my first wife Chris and I had gotten him from a cat breeder outside Frankfurt, Amadeus had lived to be 19 and had traveled all over the world before coming to his final resting place in America’s inland northwest. I had already removed his little gravestone and had the movers pack it up. Meanwhile, the puppy among our three schnauzers, Stanley, gave me a poignant moment in those last few minutes that we would occupy the Fotheringham House. Not understanding that this was it, and that after doing his business in the yard he would be taken to a kennel and not return for the evening as usual to the cozy attic where he had grown up, when he was finished romping in the yard Stanley slipped through the open kitchen door and dashed back up the three flights of stairs, thinking no doubt that he was being a good boy in returning to the attic without having to be told. I had to go up and retrieve him. As I climbed the stairs to the attic for the last time, I could see his little face peering out from the top of the stairs. “You don’t understand, Stanley,” I said as I carried him down to the car. “You don’t live here anymore.”

Remember the I Love Lucy episode in which the Ricardos and Mertzes are getting ready to leave for California, where Ricky is to appear in a Hollywood movie? They, too, are crossing America by car, and Ricky wants to get going at 6 a.m. on departure day. But with all of the rowdydow involved in packing and repacking the car, they don’t get on the road out of New York City until 6 p.m. Well, our departure from Spokane wasn’t quite that bogged down in delay, but on the morning we were to hit the highway we still had a short list of chores we had to do first: fetch the animals from the kennel (which was in the wrong direction of course) pick up a prescription at the drug store and drop off our cable TV box at Comcast. Finally we got on to Interstate 90 East. I glanced at the clock in the car as we cruised through the city of Spokane Valley, just east of Spokane proper. It was 10:15 a.m. Two people, six animals and 2,094 miles of road in front of us, west to east this time. The cats were in pet carriers. The dogs weren’t, but that was okay. Dogs get bored easily, especially in the car, and when dogs get bored, they sleep, which is exactly what we wanted them to do.

The state line between Washington and Idaho is about 20 minutes east of Spokane. (I had been in the habit for the past year of buying my liquor in Post Falls, booze being slightly cheaper on the Idaho side.) It takes just about an hour and a half to cross the Idaho panhandle on I-90, and at 11:55 a.m. we were crossing into Montana, just in time to set the clock in the car ahead one hour as we entered Mountain Time. Lunch was Burger King fare in Missoula, a lovely university town in the Bitterroot Valley which we had visited for our first wedding anniversary the previous October.

Somewhere in the mountains and valleys between Missoula and Bozeman we passed the Continental Divide, a tourist surprise I had not anticipated, never having driven across Montana any further than Missoula before. By 5:30 p.m. we were pulling into Bozeman, where I remembered that Valerie Hemingway, Papa’s erstwhile daughter-in-law and the author of Running With The Bulls: My Years With The Hemingways, which I had reviewed for a Hemingway website, still lived. (A couple of months earlier I had tried to look her up as a favor for a young journalist in New York who was seeking some information about Hemingway that she hoped Valerie Hemingway might provide, but Bozeman directory assistance wouldn’t give me her phone number.) My Valerie, meanwhile, had a yellow pages-type guide to pet-friendly motels across the USA, and she promptly found a Comfort Inn in Bozeman that would welcome our pooches and kitties (for an extra fee.) Supper that night was crackers, cheese, salami and grapes from a Wal-Mart Super Center just behind the motel (so much has changed since frontier days, or for that matter since Kerouac). Bozeman, surrounded by mountains, reminded me somewhat of Reno. Given my memories of Reno, I wasn’t sure whether I liked that or not.

When we visited Missoula in the autumn of 2006, I was seeing Montana for the first time. That was the reason, actually, I had chosen Missoula for Valerie’s and my first-anniversary trip. I had never seen Montana and wanted to. I was not disappointed. Looking around at the seemingly-endless vista of the Bitterroot Valley (not for nothing does Montana call itself “Big Sky Country”) I thought, honestly, “This is where I want to die.” With that thought in mind, as we crossed the northern tier of states on Interstate 90 in flawless spring weather, (I don’t think we saw a cloudy day all the way from eastern Washington to the District of Columbia) I had my eye out for such places, places that might just grab me and say, as the countryside around Missoula did, that this is where you would stay if you could.

And I actually saw such a place. I don’t know if I could find it again, but somewhere between Bozeman and Billings, Montana, about 40 miles west of Billings and about two miles or so west of a tiny hamlet called Columbus, I glanced out the window of the car, looking beyond the south side of the interstate, and saw a little valley surrounded by pine forest, with the snow-covered peaks of the Rockies in the distance behind it. It was so stunningly beautiful in the morning sunlight that I thought, “Forget Missoula. If I were to hit the Powerball Lottery tomorrow, I’d build a house somewhere in the middle of that valley and never set foot out of that valley again.”

I kept these sentiments to myself, by the way. My wife does not share my fondness for the great northwest or for the outdoors generally. An east coast, urban girl, she has little use for scenery of any kind unless it augments the view from the verandah of some blue-chip property she’s trying to sell. I learned some time ago that an afternoon drive through breathtaking countryside is not her idea of a good time. While I ooh-and-ah over the landscape, she’ll be sitting there in the passenger seat reading an interior-decorating magazine. She was in a big hurry to get back to Washington, D.C. and business. In fact she was already fretting that if we didn’t get a move on, we wouldn’t make it to the east coast by Saturday and she might miss out on a listing. We were still nearly 2,000 miles from Maryland, but in her mind she was already there, talking about wanting to pull off the road in Rockville so she could pick up some pillows she had ordered at the La-Z-Boy store. Well, I reminded myself, this was one of the many reasons I married Valerie. She’s good at all the things I’m not good at, like making money. And keeping track of details. I never in my life met such a meticulous record-keeper or maker of lists. She was born to be in charge, as I was not. Back in the days when we were both government employees, (Valerie was with INS and I was with the State Department) she was supervising 800 people while I was pushing buttons and shredding paper in a room with no windows, damned glad that I didn’t have to supervise anybody. Yes, it was a good thing that I kept my fantasy about that secret valley in a corner of Montana to myself.

IV

We refueled in Billings, and from there Interstate 90 took us southward into Sheridan, Wyoming, whence it hooks east and, after traversing a northeastern slice of that state, passes into South Dakota. The mountains ended and gradually the plains began. We stopped for lunch in a little Wyoming town called Buffalo, where the food was awful and the coffee worse (where was Burger King when I needed it?)

Did I say that eastern Utah looked like the moon? Northeastern Wyoming, once you get beyond Buffalo, looks pretty much as I would like to imagine the surface of Mars must look: flat and barren, with mysterious hilly formations that look like they might have been created by the giant ants in the movie Them. Once you cross into South Dakota, which we did around 2 p.m. that day, the countryside becomes friendly again; Spearfish, SD looked like a pleasant enough place, though I was disappointed by Rapid City. Flat and spread out all over the place, it reminded me a little too much of California’s Imperial Valley, where I had done hard (and hot) time while trying to break into the newspaper business back when I was about 24. Nondescript, in other words.

But about 100 miles out of a town with the unlikely name of Wall, we began seeing signs that invited us to visit some sort of eighth-wonder-of-the-world called Wall Drug. If you’re old enough to remember the legendary Burma Shave advertising campaigns (I’m not) which featured rhyming rows of signs along the old highways of pre-interstate America, you’ll have some idea of what the owners of Wall Drug are up to in west-central South Dakota. As the miles click by, so do the signs, promising that this Wall Drug is a truly marvelous place offering everything from amusements for the kids to free coffee and doughnuts for veterans. A restaurant. A saloon. A museum. Gift shops. Wall Drug, in short, is South Dakota’s answer to Knott’s Berry Farm, and yes, by the time we reached Wall the signs had done their duty: we were so curious that we just had to stop there. Besides, the dogs needed to be walked. They walked in Wall, (and did other things too) and I walked out with a souvenir coffee mug.

We spent that night in Kadoka, a town so small it didn’t even have a grocery store open after sunset, so to get something for supper I had to go across the highway from the motel where we were flopped and order some greasy take-out food from a bar and grill that looked precisely as you might imagine a bar-and-grill in a town called Kadoka, South Dakota would look: a handful of old people polishing off plates of burgers and fries at rickety-looking tables; one or two wannabe cowboys with large belt buckles drinking Coors or maybe it was Bud under a hand-lettered sign announcing that a local country-western band would be performing there live on Saturday. I sat at the bar and ordered a scotch-and-water while I waited for the food. It was more water than scotch and I didn’t finish it.

The next morning I discovered that the motel didn’t even have the convenience of a dumpster. I wound up emptying the cats’ litter box into the outdoor wastebasket between the rooms. We got out of Kadoka in a hurry.

On Thursday, our third day out of Spokane, we crossed two major American rivers in one day: The Missouri, which we encountered at midmorning somewhere between Kadoka and Sioux Falls, and then later the Mississippi, which forms the boundary between southern Minnesota and Wisconsin, which we crossed around 5:30 that afternoon. This was a 600-mile day. We left Kadoka at 7:45 a.m. Mountain Time and were pulling into Wisconsin Dells, about 50 miles west of Madison, shortly before sunset. We pulled off the road in Wisconsin Dells only because pushing on to Madison would have involved another 40 minutes of driving and we both felt like we’d driven far enough that day. But Wisconsin Dells is not the sort of place I would have chosen to stop for the night if I had known anything about it. It seems to be southern Wisconsin’s playground. The main drag consists of little but amusement parks, theme parks and water parks. Plenty of motels, though, and that was a plus, although the one we checked into had a policy of accepting only one of each kind of pet, whereas we had three of each. The cats were no problem; we just sneaked them into the room and they remained indoors. But the dogs had to be walked, so we walked them one at a time, taking turns so that anyone who saw us might assume that we were different guests with different dogs.

Friday was our last full day on the road, and it was another marathon. Leaving Wisconsin Dells around 8 a.m., we stayed on Interstate 90, crossing into Illinois roughly two hours later. Our route skirted the northeast corner of that state in much the same way we had skirted Wyoming two days earlier, but this time that meant driving right through the middle of downtown Chicago at 11 O’clock in the morning. Anyone out there who knows otherwise is free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I suspect that Chicago, whose downtown I was seeing for the first time, is like Los Angeles in this respect: there’s no rush hour, it’s just congested all the time. Our experience of being stuck in traffic was accompanied by a seemingly-endless discussion of illegal immigration on the Glenn Beck radio program on XM. (yes, I had gotten this welcome thingamajig installed in my car several months in advance of this trip.) It took us close to an hour to get through the center of Chicago, and it was a tremendous relief to find ourselves on the other side of it, but even more of a relief to get past the city of Gary, Indiana, which smells awful, at least from the turnpike. Lunch was McDonald’s fare in mid-turnpike, where we pulled off to put gas in the car and I shared my outrage with another motorist, a man with Nevada tags on his car, as we both got gouged $3.49 a gallon for regular unleaded. “It’s a toll road, and they know they have a captive audience,” I said.

We passed into Ohio at 2:40 p.m., pushing our watches ahead an hour when we suddenly realized that, being out of Indiana, we were now on Eastern Time. But the afternoon was far from over. At 7 p.m. we were entering Pennsylvania, where we made our last overnight stop in a town called Cranberry, where we had somewhat cramped motel accommodations at a Red Roof Inn, but I was delighted to find that just two blocks to the north was a huge shopping mall where I could get everything we needed that night: cat litter for our cats, deli salads for our supper and yet another 12-pack of Diet Coke for my wife, who may or may not hold stock in the Coca-Cola Bottling Company but is nevertheless doing her best to keep it afloat: 8-10 cans of Diet Coke every day of her life.

By early the following afternoon we were at our new home in northeast Washington, D.C. and yes, we did make that stop in Rockville, coming down I-270, to pick up those pillows at La-Z-Boy. The area wasted no time in gigging me with bad memories: driving down Route 355 in Rockville, for example, was a return to personal ignominy—I spent a lot of time cruising up and down 355 four winters earlier as I went back and forth from Wheaton to Rockville, firing off one fax after another in response to one job ad after another. Wheaton had no Kinko’s in those days; I had to drive over to Rockville to get to a fax machine.

The good news is that our new home is in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington, one part of the nation’s capital with which I have not been heretofore familiar, and therefore relatively uninfected with bad memories. We live on a quiet little side street, quiet, anyway, except for the police cars and fire department ambulances in the distance that you hear every five minutes in any big city. Our next-door neighbors, Ted and Myrt, are as nice as can be; they recently returned from a visit to relatives in North Carolina and shared with us some half-smokes they bought there. (Half-smokes are definitely an east coast pleasure; I never saw them in California.) Another neighbor, “Mr. Bowie,” is an old retired guy who mows everyone’s lawn. Somehow he has a monopoly on lawn-mowing in this neighborhood; I suspect the reason is that he charges next to nothing, undercutting (no pun intended) any lawn service I can think of.

There are things about being on the east coast again that I’m going to have to adjust to, most notably the horrible summers. I wouldn’t wish the mid-Atlantic region on my worst enemy between June and September. The heat and humidity are so bad that on some days it’s like living in the men’s locker room at Gold’s Gym during the evening rush. If you have to go outside, you move slowly, and you go outside as little as possible. Other than that, living on the east coast in the summertime makes it difficult for me to follow my hometown baseball team, the San Diego Padres. It’s one thing if they’re on a road a trip and are back here playing the Washington Nationals or the Atlanta Braves. But if they’re playing at home on the west coast, the games don’t come on TV or radio back here until 10:10 p.m. local time. There are certain things I’ll do for my team, (such as turn out at the ballpark here in D.C. and root for them against the hometown Nationals) but staying up until 1:30 a.m. in front of the tube is not one of them, not unless we’re talking about the World Series, to which they have been twice, and lost both times.

V

Now I have had each and every one of the experiences I listed at the beginning of this essay. I have stepped into a voting booth on election day (though on at least one occasion I had to be shown how to work the stupid levers); I have heard an umpire shout “Play ball” on a mild summer evening (last year it was at Avista Stadium, where Valerie and I had gone to see the single-A Spokane Indians play against the Tri-City Dust Devils, and I will always be grateful for it); I have coped with melting ice cream (and warm beer) on the Fourth of July; I have twisted the radio dial in my car around while driving through Nowhere, USA and found myself unable to find anything to listen to but some bogus cowpoke who probably wouldn’t know which end of a horse the shit comes out of, whining about how the woman he’d had wrapped around his finger just came unwound, so now he was whiskey-bound. Yee-hah.

And I’ve driven across the United States, twice. Okay, in and of itself it’s not such a big deal. Over-the-road truckers do it for a living. (By the way, I once attended a truck-driving school and it gave me a new and profound respect for truckers, if not for their reputed taste in music.) But as one who has lived all over the western hemisphere—and I’m not going to give you the “tarpaper shack in America” routine; it’s a big, beautiful world out there—I can honestly say that I feel more at home in my own country, having driven back and forth across it a couple of times than I ever did when my experience of the United States was confined to the two coasts. Just what does it mean to “feel at home?” I’m not 100 percent sure, but I do know that these long hauls felt like validations of a sort, and I think almost anyone who has made the race from coast to coast would tell you something similar. It’s like going to visit a relative whose existence you had previously known only from hearing your parents talk about him. You come away with a somewhat-strengthened sense of family. As America devolves into a culture of 500 cable channels, where none of the families on my street watch the same programs or recognize the same celebrities, (and I remember when, at 8:15 on a Saturday night, you’d hear All In The Family coming out of every window on the block) anything we do to remind ourselves of what we all have in common is, I think, to the good. When I was a child Chevrolet had a television commercial in which a chorus of voices urged one and all to “See the USA in your Chevrolet; America is asking you to call.” Nowadays that message sounds so ingenuous as to seem almost idiotic, but maybe it’s only the tone. Maybe it’s only because America was a more naive, innocent place in 1963, and our ears are no longer accustomed to hearing jingles. It’s not the same America out there, but it’s still out there, in fact I believe Kerouac’s Great American Night is still out there somewhere as well. I might not be inclined to stay up late enough to see it, but I’m already looking forward to making that crossing again one day.

Maybe the southern route, across Texas and New Mexico, next time. But I’m no fool; if I do that I’ll make sure to go no later than April, before it gets too hot down there.

12 (No, 13) reminders that you're well past 40

I drafted these about eight years ago and slipped them into a letter to my late mother. Now that I'm past 50, I can honestly say that they're even truer now than they were then:

1. You feel a surge of pride when you're able to rise from a crouching position without hearing your knees go "crack."

2. You're choosing a pair of pants to wear on a Saturday morning, and decide you really would rather wear baggy corduroys than tight jeans.

3. You're looking through your wallet for a postage stamp and discover that for six months you've been carrying around the business card of a urologist.

4. Instead of throwing that business card away, you remind yourself that you really should make an appointment to see that urologist.

5. You actually do begin seeing your dentist twice a year, as you remember them recommending 20 years ago. (20 years ago you didn't even think about your dentist twice a year.)

6. You catch yourself talking like your father, e.g. "What was wrong with the way we USED to do this?" and "Why can't they leave well enough alone?"

7. You're stuck in traffic alongside some zit-faced moron who has grunge rock or speed rap blasting away at earsplitting levels, and you roll up your car window in a fit of pique, muttering, "They call that shit MUSIC?"

8. You're having a couple of brews in a local tavern, and you admire the way the barmaid fills your glass. (20 years ago you would have been admiring the way she filled her T-shirt.)

9. You finally break down and get glasses, and all the way from the optometrist's office back to your car, you're looking at your reflection in the windows of all the other parked cars and thinking, "You know, on me they don't look so bad."

10. You read in a health magazine that doing deep knee-bends can cause hemorrhoids, and you immediately, without question, quit doing deep-knee bends. (You were getting tired of listening to your knees go "crack," anyway.)

11. You actually read health magazines at all.

12. You catch yourself planning dinner around Wheel of Fortune.

and this one, which just came up:

13. You get "carded" at the grocery store while buying a six-pack of beer, and instead of being annoyed, you want to give the store clerk a big, fat kiss.

11 Things I learned running a Bed-and-Breakfast

My wife Valerie and I are packing it in after one year of operating the Fotheringham House Bed-and-Breakfast in Spokane, Washington.

It was something we wanted to try, or more specifically, that Valerie wanted to try. For years she had been wondering what it would be like to run a nice bed-and-breakfast somewhere. Now she knows, and with that knowledge, thank you, she’ll go back to selling real estate, which was what she did before.

I have spoken with some of my fellow B&B proprietors here in the Northwest, and the question that haunts many of us these days is whether the B&B phenomenon itself may be reaching the end of its arc. Bed-and-Breakfasts really “took off” in the 1980s as a cozier alternative to the Red Roof Inn or the EZ-8 Motel. Many people found that they liked the feel of staying in someone’s private home, particularly if it were historic and quaint, and being provided during their stay with such niceties as monogrammed bathrobes and soap, a living room with fireplace where you could sip a glass of wine before going upstairs to your room, and of course, a sumptuous breakfast, as often as not served on fine china, when you got up in the morning.

But B&Bs seem to be on the wane these days. Last summer I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about their current decline. It seems a lot of B&B owners are taking advantage of the real estate market and selling out – not to people who want to run B&Bs, but to people who want to turn the B&B back into a house. In fact that’s what Valerie and I have just done: the new owner of Fotheringham House is not going to run a bed-and-breakfast here. I understand he already owns some historic properties here in Spokane, and is now adding this one to his holdings. The house was built in 1891 and has historic designation; it can’t be torn down or turned into a bowling alley. It will stay as is, but the function it has served since 1983, entertaining overnight guests, will be no more.

Valerie has already returned to her real estate business in Washington, D.C. I will be joining her there in a few weeks, after the final details of closing the sale of the house and auctioning off the antique furniture and other B&B trappings are taken care of.

Life’s experiences, even its failed ones, are always opportunities to learn. I have compiled a list of 11 things I learned while operating a bed-and-breakfast. Current B&B owners might see something familiar here; prospective ones might see things they should take note of, for cautionary purposes. Here, anyway, is a list of things I learned in my one year of operating a bed-and-breakfast in the state of Washington:

1. There are more women vegetarians out there than men vegetarians. Years ago I read a newspaper article which suggested there was some evidence of gender-based food preferences. Women, whose bodies tend to be smaller and lighter than those of men, don't usually need to burn as many calories and are therefore more likely to be satisfied with a pasta dish or a salad. Men tend to want their meat and potatoes. (The flip side of that was that men, according to the study, were more likely to be able to resist the dessert tray than women.) Whether there's a tie-in or not, I have noticed that more women, when asked about their food preferences, will say "no meat" or "no pork" than men will.

2. Speaking of vegetarians, when you’re booking an overnight guest, “Are you a vegetarian?” is nowhere near specific enough a question. You need to cross-examine people about their dietary foibles as if you were the District Attorney in a poisoning case. This one is allergic to walnuts, this one can’t eat grapefruit, this one will eat chicken sausage, but won’t eat pork; I had a woman plunk herself down at my breakfast table one morning and announce that she was only allowed 296 calories for breakfast owing to the diet she was on. She demanded to examine the container from the yogurt I served her. “Nope, too many calories,” she said. I think we finally got her to eat some granola, but she wouldn’t put whole milk on it.

3. And then there are vegans. Vegans are a pain in the ass. Operating a B&B, I had to learn the distinction between a “vegetarian” and a “vegan.” I think if you look in the dictionary, it will say something like, “Vegan. N. 1. Vegetarian who ought to be in a straitjacket.” Vegans won’t eat ANYTHING that has anything remotely to do with animals. That means not just meat, but also any and all dairy products and, in some extreme cases, even honey, as honey is made by bees and bees are little animals, right? I had a vegan guest last summer. I didn’t know WHAT to feed this guy. Finally I just gave him a bowl of oatmeal with no milk, and hoped he’d leave early.

4. If you want a certain area of your house to be off-limits, make sure it’s clearly posted as such. People will generally wander anywhere they like, provided no one tells them not to. I have forgotten to lock my front door and had people just walk right into the house, ignoring the “Please Ring The Doorbell” sign. They see those credit-card decals on the front door and they think, “Hotel. I’ll just walk in.” The previous owners of this B&B, when hosting a wedding or a reception downstairs, would rope off the staircase so people wouldn’t wander upstairs and poke around. And even that didn’t always work. The husband half of the former team told me of a time he was relaxing up in the innkeeper’s attic apartment on the third floor, watching TV, and two women came walking right in, having climbed the stairs to the attic despite the sign on the door that read “Innkeeper’s Quarters,” because they wanted to “look around.”

5. Don’t assume that people are going to be punctual, especially when it involves something as fundamental as getting out of bed in the morning. I had to learn that if someone asks that their breakfast be served at 8 a.m., don’t assume that that means they’ll be at the breakfast table at 8 a.m. Not everyone is a morning person like me; some people have real trouble getting out of bed on time. I learned this the hard way: a shirred-egg dish that had been timed to be ready at 8 a.m. would be ready for the garbage can at 8:25 when the guests finally came straggling in to the breakfast room. I learned not to put the eggs in the oven until I actually heard footsteps coming down the stairs.

6. Americans are not very “European.” For a nation as wildly obsessed with sex as we Americans are, we are remarkably up-tight about certain things that Europeans don’t even think about much. Actually, I already knew this from having lived in Germany, where the locals routinely bathe together in public spas, to the shock-disguised-as-boredom of visiting Americans, who despite the supposedly-prurient society they come from are somewhat hysterical about nudity. Well, nudity isn’t really an issue in the B&B game, but bathrooms are, and my wife and I lost a lot of business owing to the fact that our B&B had four rooms, of which only one had a private bath. The other three shared a bathroom. Now, stop and think about this for a moment. If you went to stay in someone’s house, which is essentially what you’re doing when you stay at a B&B, you would not expect to have your own bathroom. You shared a bathroom with your family when you were growing up, didn’t you? But we lost a lot of business when people would call and, upon learning that the room-with-private-bath was booked and they’d have to take one of the rooms that share a bath, would take their business somewhere else. All I can say is, for such people was Motel 6 invented.

7. If you’re anywhere near the border between the U.S. and Canada, learn Celsius. Spokane is only two hours from British Columbia, and we had plenty of Canadian guests during our one-year tenure as innkeepers. When my Canadian guests would ask for a weather forecast, and I would say, “Overcast and 68,” well, I might as well have been describing conditions on Venus to them. For one thing, Canadians say “Mainly cloudy,” not “overcast,” and to them, 68 is 20. Same with Europeans, Russians and most of the rest of the world that was never part of the British Empire. Meteorological multiculturalism. (Also, it doesn’t hurt to be able to convert miles to kilometers if asked.)

8. Do not have your laundry facility where you feed your pets. I lost track of the amount of cat food I swept up after sticking my foot in the cat-food dish while taking sheets out of the washing machine. Also, if you fancy fresh, clean-smelling laundry, it’s not a good area to keep the litter box, either.

9. A surprisingly large number of people don’t like mushrooms. I used to prepare an egg dish for breakfast that included among its ingredients green onions, bell peppers, cheese and mushrooms. Now, I love mushrooms myself, and I thought most people did. After all, mushrooms are included among the choices of topping in any pizzeria you can name. But after taking breakfast dishes back to the kitchen and having to scrape little piles of mushrooms into the garbage disposal because people were picking them out of their eggs, I came to the astonishing conclusion that most of the world doesn’t seem to share my fondness for mushrooms. I started leaving them out of the recipe.

10. Clearly establish a policy about cancellations, and stick to it. I hate to say this, but on the whole, women are far cheaper than men. Don’t take my word for it. Ask any waitress, or anyone else in food service. Women are lousy tippers. They’re also much more likely to try and beat out the check than men are. Be that as it may, we had a couple of incidents in which people (both times it was women) called up to cancel a reservation of one sort or another, and went into a screaming fit when told that they would have to pay anyway because they were canceling on too short notice. Our policy was seven days. But we had one woman call and want to cancel on 24 hours notice, and when told that she would have to pay anyway, raised hell with my wife, then put her husband on the phone to raise hell with me. Incredibly, when my wife told her that our seven-day policy was clearly spelled out on our website, she shouted, “It’s not my responsibility to read what your website says!” I swear to God, she really said that. I’d like to see this same woman walk on to the lot of a car dealership and try to claim that it wasn’t her responsibility to read what the price sticker on the car said.

11. Don’t live in the attic. This might seem minor, but unless your marriage is as rock-solid as the Prudential stone, you don’t want to be spending all day long cheek-by-jowl with your spouse, trying to run a business, and then at the end of the day retire together to a cramped, stuffy attic with low-slanted ceilings that the taller of you (me, in this case) keeps bumping his head against. Too much togetherness combined with too little space is not good for a marriage. And that, as Trevor Howard said to Robert Mitchum at the end of “Ryan’s Daughter,” is my parting gift to you.

Cindy, we hardly knew you

This is the way it goes. On the last day of school your friends all sign your yearbook. Then everyone splits up for the summer. In the fall, you’re all back in class again.

Until graduation day. Then everyone signs your yearbook one last time, maybe at greater length, with cute remarks about some especially memorable thing you did or said in school, some inside joke you and the signer shared. (Years later, when you open that yearbook again on what T.S. Eliot called “the evening with the photograph album,” you won’t remember what the joke was.)

Again everyone goes their separate ways, only now it’s for keeps. “We’ll pass, and be forgotten with the rest,” Tom Lehrer sang in one of his early satirical songs. It was meant for a laugh, and it got one on the old comedy album where I first heard it, a reminder that pain, the truth that hurts, is almost always a key ingredient in humor.

When I got the news last week that one of the most beautiful girls I had known in high school had just died of cancer at the age of 50, one of the first things I remembered was something she wrote in my high school yearbook the spring I graduated. I was wrapping up my senior year, getting fitted for the graduation gown. She was a junior, would graduate the following spring.

“I hope we’ll remain friends over the years,” Cindy Buford wrote.

So much of life is about regrets. People who say they “have no regrets” must be spending most of their time on some planet other than Earth. Missed opportunities alone form a whole sub-category of regrets, and who among us can claim they’ve never missed an opportunity? Here was one more item to add to my catalog of regrets, that Cindy and I did not remain friends over the years. I lost touch with her quickly after high school, never saw her face again until her family sent me some photos at my request for use in this blog posting.

In fairness to those of us who knew her in high school, then lost her, it wasn’t for lack of trying that we were unable to reconnect. My old pal Charlie Berigan, who graduated in the same class as Cindy, (the three of us were in the Chula Vista High School choir together) attended her memorial in my place. I live in the state of Washington these days and couldn’t make it back to California on such short notice. Charlie called me the day after the memorial gathering and we had a long chat about his experience there. “They had a video, and two big photo collages,” he said. “And it was strange to see all this and realize, here was an entire life that we didn’t even know about.” Well, yes, we’re all fiftyish now and I saw Cindy for the last time shortly before her 18th birthday. A lot of water flowed under a lot of bridges that I never even saw.

But on at least one occasion that I remember, Charlie and I did make an attempt to find Cindy. This was maybe the mid-1990s. He and I happened, every now and then, to be back in Chula Vista at the same time although life had taken us both far and wide from the city in which we grew up. I’d been in the foreign service and had traveled all over the western half of the globe; Charlie had spent most of his adult life in New York pursuing the career of a musician.

On one such visit home, probably over a bottle of scotch and a bowl of melting ice, we got to sharing memories of the Spartan Choir and the people we had known there. It was inevitable that Cindy’s name would come up, and it did.

Neither of us was much of a sleuth, but a day or two later we made a stab, in our own clumsy way, at tracking her down.

We didn’t get far. Anyone who has ever tried to organize a class reunion knows how it is. The boys are usually much easier to locate than the girls, because girls so often get married and change their last names. We didn’t find Cindy and the matter was, with palpable regret, dropped. We both would have loved to see her, or at least talk with her again.

The years continued on their way. Then about a week ago came that phone call. Charlie spotted the death notice in the San Diego Union-Tribune of someone named “Cindy Buford-Wissbaum.” There was no chance of a mistake. Time had run out while we weren’t looking. Cindy had died on Christmas Eve, but we were just now finding out about it. He read the obituary to me, word for word. Then I went online and found the electronic version of the death notice. I knew that SignonSanDiego.com, the Internet version of the Union-Tribune, had a “guest book” feature in its obituary section and I wanted to sign the guest book in case one of Cindy’s family might contact me through it. The death notice did not mention what had killed her, but as a former newspaperman who has written his share of obits, I could pick up clues. It said that she had died “surrounded by her family and friends,” which is obit-speak for a long illness. Of course I guessed cancer, and I turned out to be right, as I learned a few evenings later when her sister called me (I’d left my phone number in the guest book) and we had a long visit. Cindy had actually survived one bout of cancer, only to be stricken with another, in another part of her body. How could such a thing have happened, especially to a girl I remembered as being so beautiful that heads would turn when she walked into a room?

Mine included. I don’t remember ever having the big adolescent crush on Cindy myself, although I did, during the latter part of my senior year, have it pretty bad for her shotgun-riding pal Laura. But for Cindy I remember feeling only the normal, routine lust that any healthy, heterosexual 17 year-old boy would feel for a pretty girl at school. That and a kind of deep, jokey affection. I teased Cindy often. Her striking feminine beauty notwithstanding, Cindy at 17 had an incorrigible trash-mouth. She could talk like a longshoreman, and often did. I gave her a bad time about it now and then. Sometimes she would laugh. Sometimes would tell me to f*** off. Sometimes both. But when she signed my yearbook, she thanked me, in affectionate terms, for “all your advice.”

In fact this jocular to-and-fro about her cinematic “saloon girl with a golden heart” routine (and the golden heart was beyond question) led to our one and only date, Cindy and me.

Of course I had a secret wish to go out with Cindy. Most of the boys who knew her did, I’m sure. But I never had the nerve to ask her out. First of all, I knew she wasn’t interested in me that way and secondly, I was shy around girls. I remember being gratified to read years later in a magazine article that most adolescents actually get through high school without ever going out on a date. The dating group on high school campuses is actually a minority, and was even in my day, the early 1970s. I was one of those kids. I belonged to no clique. I was neither an athlete, nor involved in student government, nor a debater (although I was on the speech squad my senior year) nor in the school band. I didn’t have my own car until college. Pretty much all I had were the highbrow novels I lugged back and forth to school, and a somewhat sullen, rebellious attitude. Girls, by and large, were not interested in me. Friday and Saturday nights were for television, not dates.

But one evening the choir was performing at some music festival or other and I saw an “opening” which might allow me to make a date with Cindy relatively risk-free, which is to say a proposal unlikely to get me crushed like a bug on a windshield. Not for a thousand dollars would I have walked up to her and said, “Cindy, will you go out with me?” That would have been tantamount to playing chicken at 90 mph, with a similar danger-level. No, what I did instead was play an angle off my sometimes-flirtatious “Cindy, quit acting like a whore” routine. I approached her backstage near the beginning of the show and said, “Bufe,”—I always called her ‘Bufe,’ never ‘Cindy’—“I’ll tell you what. If you can conduct yourself like a lady for just one evening, keep your language squeaky-clean, I’ll take you someplace expensive for dinner.” I had a weekend job in a gas station which put a few dollars in my pocket and made such an offer possible.

“The Hotel del Coronado?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said nonchalantly, my knees shaking.

“Can I have lobster?”

“Yeah, you can have lobster. We’ll both have lobster.”

She took the bet and won it. She even came up to me at intermission and gave me a curtsey. (She was being a bit of a smartass.) Anyway, we both won that night. She got a promise of a fancy dinner out and I got a date with one of the prettiest girls in school, if also the one who might have been voted most likely to win the Redd Foxx Pottymouth Bake-off.

One of the reasons I have not gotten further in life than I have is because I’m a terminal procrastinator. You’d think a boy who had just made a date with a knockout like Cindy would want to cash in as soon as possible. No, I think it was July before I got the nerve to actually call her up and ask if she would like to have that promised dinner. We arranged a date and I made a reservation at the Hotel del Coronado's storied Prince of Wales Grill. (A not-too-relevant factoid: more than 30 years later my wife Valerie and I would spend our wedding night at that same hotel.)

On the night I went to pick up Cindy at her parents’ home, I was delighted to find that she had “fussed” a little for our date—she had dressed up, in a blue chiffon something-or-other. Matching pale blue shoes. She looked absolutely marvelous. I was probably wearing the navy-blue sport jacket I’d gotten as a graduation present—anyone out there remember double-knits? Over this I recall wearing an overcoat, a second-hand one that I’d bought at a thrift shop. Overcoats are not de rigeur in southern California, particularly not in July, but I was 17 and putting on literary airs. Somehow I had decided that writers wore overcoats. So off we went to dinner in my mother’s faded green 1965 Chevy Bel Air, the fairy-tale princess on the arm of Lieutenant Columbo.

I remember little about that evening except that I was nervous and unsure of what to say or do from moment to moment. We dined in the Prince of Wales Grill, all right. A lobster dinner for two in 1973 cost $25; that detail I do remember. After dinner we walked around the hotel grounds a bit, then headed back to Chula Vista where, in a major step down to low-rent, we ended up having dessert at Daisy’s Coffee Shop. I don’t remember what I had; Cindy had cheesecake. I remember using the word “discreet” in our conversation, which she didn’t know, and trying to explain to her what it meant. After dessert I was at an embarrassed loss to suggest what we do next, but Cindy solved the problem by saying “I want to go home.” So I took her home. I think I got a little kiss, and then she went into the house and that was that. I probably drove home and watched The Dick Cavett Show.

I saw Cindy one more time. I came back to my school to visit one day the following winter. You could still do that in those days—there was no seven-foot-tall metal fence surrounding the campus and you didn’t have to sign in at the front office, either. You could just park and walk on in. Unbelieveable, now.

It was lunchtime and all the students were milling around. As I parked my car in the parking lot, Cindy spotted me, ran over to my car and gave me a big hug. That was the last time I ever saw her.

Then came all that stuff Charlie was talking about, all the things that comprise an adult lifetime, to which he and I were not privy, the things we didn’t get to share with Cindy because, in the sloppy, arms-too-full way people tend to lead their lives, we let her get away. She was married twice. (There’s a funny story, apparently, about how she met her second husband, Larry Wissbaum, while out searching for her cat, also named “Larry.”) She had no children, but did have a stepdaughter, and numerous nephews and nieces. She had a career in dental hygiene. She became an enthusiastic devotee of fishing. She moved to Colorado, where she died.

In the classic play Our Town, playwright Thornton Wilder tries to impress upon his audience the significance, in the cosmic scheme, of the minutiae which make up 99 percent of our waking lives and which, ironically, we don’t notice. Consider the implications of that. “Suddenly,” the stage manager who narrates the play says, “You clap your hands and bang! You’re 70.” And out of the 36,792,000 minutes, including those you spend asleep, that make up those 70 years, maybe 36 million go by unheeded and unremembered. Every night when you dream your brain does a kind of “core dump,” sorting through experiences and throwing out those it judges to be toss-able. Probably to be too overloaded with memory would result in some kind of psychosis. (I think Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story about this.) But contemplating Cindy’s life and remembering the small part of it that was part of mine, it’s strange to think that she went on to become a whole other person than the one I knew. She forged a trail of experiences and perceptions in the 33 years after our last meeting of which I was not, and could not be, any part, just as I did and of which, conversely, she was no part. We knew each other, Cindy and I, when we were young, slim, unwrinkled and in my case, with a full head of hair, all of which we took for granted as youth does, and all of which vanished as we moved on and on into that territory that Henry James called “The general lost freshness.” In Our Town, the character Emily, who has just died in childbirth, is offered a chance to go back and re-live one day of her life. She chooses her 12th birthday, but finds the experience so unbearable that within moments she asks to be returned to the cemetery. Every moment was so innately precious, and she appreciated so little of it. The realization is more than she can bear.

For the same reason, I don’t suppose I would want to re-live that summer evening again, when Cindy and I were young. But it was a gift I’m glad time allowed us to share, and Cindy was a gift everyone who knew her will always cherish, as long as memory permits. I’ll never have the chance to tell Cindy how important she was, or even how much that one evening when we were kids meant to me. I just hope she knew, and, perhaps, knows. R.I.P.

Winter Blues? Batter Up!

I really don’t have a problem with winter, myself.

It might have something to do with my French-Canadian ancestry. But winter doesn’t bother me. Not even an unusually gray winter, like the one we’ve had here in Spokane this year. I once spent the winter in Moscow (Russia, not Idaho) and was as happy as a wet dog behind the kitchen stove from the first snowflake to the last slush-ball. Of course I was hopelessly in love with a beautiful Russian girl at the time, and you know the old song about “June in January.” Love will color your perception of anything, even the supposedly brutal Russian winter.

I know that not many people share my fondness for white snowscapes and gray skies. The late pianist Glenn Gould did, but with him there was that “Canadian connection”—Gould was a native of Canada. My wife, for instance, would much rather be in the Bahamas right now. (She’s welcome to them. I’ll take the inland northwest over the tropics any day.)

My best friend, Jim Provenza, turns 52 next Sunday (Feb. 18). He and his older brother Rick were both February babies. A lot of people get the blues in February, when winter hits the two-months-and-still-going mark. Unfortunately Rick was one of them, despite being a February child. He tended to get depressed in February and in February, 1998, took his own life.

To a lot of people February is like 28 Mondays. This is the time of year when those susceptible to Seasonal Affective Disorder, the blues that result from lack of sunshine, are most likely to be seeing counselors, busting out the SAD lights, booking flights to Aruba or hammering themselves with booze.

It’s a pity that so many February-blues sufferers simply do that, suffer, and wait. I could offer them a quick and easy fix for February Funk.

If only they knew what we baseball fans know, and have known all along.

Spring begins in February!

It does for us, anyway. At this moment, on Valentine’s Day, planeloads of baseball players are disembarking in places like Lakeland, Vero Beach and Fort Myers, Florida and Tucson, Scottsdale and Peoria, Arizona. Spring training starts today, for pitchers and catchers anyway. The rest of the players will show up in a week or so. But by the end of February, every player in Major League Baseball will be out there stretching, throwing, running and taking batting practice, either in the Grapefruit League (Florida) or the Cactus League (Arizona.) Talking baseball among themselves when they aren’t catching up on what they did all winter. On the official website of Major League Baseball, a clock is ticking: Countdown To Spring Training Games. 13 days to go. It might seem incredible to someone in Syracuse, NY, digging out from under 100 inches of snow, but then again, if that snow-digger is a baseball fan, it’s not strange at all. Hickory and horsehide are in the air, February or no.

And if spring training comes, can Opening Day be far behind? First will come the exhibition games of course, which start in early March. Everyone’s rusty of course, so the exhibition games sometimes have absurdly lopsided scores: 20-3. 19-6. So what? The faithful are signing up even now (yours truly among them) for Internet and cable packages which will permit us to tune in the pre-season action.

We already smell April: the freshly-mown outfield grass, hot dogs, glove leather, foaming beer. Crazy? Obsessive? Maybe. But no worse than the football fan I remember from long ago, when ABC Monday Night Football made its debut, who celebrated that one additional day of gridiron action because “You can see the weekend from Tuesday.”

Well, you can see April from mid-February, if you’re a baseball fan, that is. It doesn’t bother me if the skies are still gray and there’s snow and sleet in the forecast. Not when I can log on and read about the Red Sox’ new pitching sensation Daisuke Matsusaka. Or about the St. Louis Cardinals’ chances to repeat in the World Series this year. Or about the fact that the San Diego Padres now have both Giles brothers, Marcus and Brian, playing for them. Or about Barry Zito’s having crossed the bay: he’s now working for the San Francisco Giants, no longer for the Oakland A’s.

The work begins soon. As does spring. It starts right now, on V-day, at least in places like Peoria, AZ and Vero Beach.

I love this quotation about baseball, from Joel Zweskin, a Chicago White Sox fan who lives in North Carolina:

“It’s unique unto itself. Football, basketball and hockey are variations of the same concept—back and forth in a linear progression to score a goal. Baseball, however, is mapped out on the field unlike any other sport. A running back or return specialist can run 100 yards, tops; a baserunner legging out an inside-the-park homer runs 20 yards farther. Baseball is the most democratic of sports—any size can play, and because the ball is not controlled by the offense but rather the defense, every player at any given time is involved in a play. Along with the anecdotally accepted premise that hitting a pitched baseball is the single most difficult thing to do in sports, so might fielding a 175 mph line drive or grounder down the line. I love baseball because it is the greatest game ever invented.”

Amen, brother. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. And play ball!

Professor Higgins, call Star Fleet

A few days ago my wife was watching a rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Klingons were mad at the Romulans, or maybe it was the other way around. Everyone was arguing.

I started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Valerie asked.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “You don’t see – or better yet, hear, what’s so funny?”

It was the way they were talking. I’ve been listening to the dialogue on the various incarnations of Star Trek for about 40 years now. It never ceases to amaze me how, no matter where the starship Enterprise goes in the entire galaxy, everyone, and everything, the crew encounters not only speaks perfect English, but the kind of perfect English you might hear in a Saturday Night Live skit satirizing the Royal Shakespeare Festival.

You know what I’m talking about. The Emperor of the Zorcons, warrior caste of the Planet Detox, addresses Captain Kirk or Captain Picard, who is trying to mediate a genocidal war between the Zorcons and their rival caste, the Kazoobicons. It sounds something like this:

“I see that you have spoken the truth, Outworlder. And as you were speaking, I saw fear in the eyes of the Kazoobicon. We will take your advice and submit our dispute to the judgment of your federation. For it is written in the ancient books that the Kazoobicons can only be trusted in negotiations if a disinterested third party is holding the french fries.”

Sound familiar? You bet it does! The one common denominator in virtually every science-fiction TV show ever made is that everyone except the humans makes speeches instead of talking. Did you ever notice this? I sure have.

It never fails to make me think of the funniest review of a TV show I ever read. It was in TV Guide, in, I think, 1983. I don’t remember who wrote the review, but I wish I had saved the person’s name because I never read two more accurate – or funnier – sentences.

The show being reviewed was a spectacularly silly sci-fi series, which only lasted one season, called The Man From Atlantis. The man from Atlantis was a visitor from another world. The usual stuff: he had unearthly powers and used them to solve earthly problems every week. I don’t remember what all of his powers were; I think one of them was that he had gills like a fish and could live underwater.

In any case, the review started out something like this: “It’s always easy to spot the visitor from another planet in a TV show. He’s the one with no sense of humor who speaks better English than everyone else. Maybe someday television will give us a space alien who says ‘ain’t got no’ and tells mother-in-law jokes. In the meantime, we have The Man From Atlantis.”

Of course a lot of this is budget-driven. TV shows usually have tighter purse strings than feature films. In the Star Trek movies, or in other space operas like Star Wars, a touch of interstellar verisimilitude is sometimes provided when you hear one of the Glorks actually speaking Glork – with subtitles. Remember the guy Han Solo zapped under the table in the first Star Wars movie? He was speaking Glork or Oobsheek or whatever, and the audience was left to conclude that Harrison Ford’s character had picked up enough of the alien’s patois to follow the threats that were being made against him, right up until the moment he pulled the trigger and blew the Glork right through the wall.

TV usually can’t afford to do this, and has to resort to such cost-cutting sleight-of-hand as the universal translator in Star Trek: The Next Generation. This swoopy gizmo enables the crew of the Enterprise to understand everyone from the Gloobs of Planet Sneeho to the Icky-Yuck Fish People of Beta Arcturus 16. Eliminating the curse of Space Babble smooths the way, after the requisite number of jeopardies and space explosions, to yet another victory for the forces of galactic niceness.

But shortcuts to universal English aside, there remains that other problem. The entire crew of the Enterprise, even its non-human contingent—Spock in the first series, a whole array of extraterrestrials in The Next Generation—was capable of human banter. Even Worf, the Klingon on the bridge in the second series, while not likely to show up wearing a flower that squirted water or making jokes about the vagaries of dating Klingon women, every now and then got off a riff that scented of wit.

However, and this is as true for the other incarnations of the series, Voyager and Deep Space Nine as it is for the first two, most of the time non-human characters appear, they talk like Roman generals making battlefield speeches in the pages of Titus Livius. And the longer I watch these shows in syndicated reruns, the funnier it seems.

Are there other civilizations in the universe? I’m not the guy to ask. 40 years ago it was largely assumed that, given the billions of stars that make up a galaxy and the billions of galaxies that make up the universe, other civilizations must exist, somewhere. But the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been combing the heavens for decades and hasn’t heard a peep from anything that sounds like it might be sentient. And recent biological and chemical research is moving in the direction of establishing that the conditions necessary to foster and sustain life are in fact extremely rare in the cosmos. Earth may indeed be a fluke. We may, indeed, be alone.

But if we’re not, and if SETI does indeed one day detect evidence of intelligent life somewhere else in the universe, some scrap of an ancient radio broadcast from M31 or a television program from the Horsehead Nebula, I hope and pray that whatever we hear won’t be on the order of “We must move swiftly to prevent the Woobles from invading our Horsnick sector.”

I hope it will be something more on the order of, “Lucy! You got some ‘splainin’ to do!!!”

Footballius Ridiculum

I sweat the small stuff. My wife only gets upset about the big stuff. We complement each other that way.

We had a fire last week at a property we own. Valerie nearly cried. I was upset, but not as much as I am when, say, I see some moron running a red light because he's too busy talking on a cell phone to notice that he just ran a red light.

Which brings me to the subject of the Super Bowl.

I haven't actually watched the Super Bowl in years. But that doesn't matter, because we've reached that time of year when the Super Bowl is looming larger with each passing day, everywhere you look. Here it comes: the annual two-million-dollar-a-minute festival of TV ads. Let's be honest, For a lot of people that's exactly what the Super Bowl is, not so much a sporting event as a showcase for expensive advertising. Come to think of it, I suppose an evening of multimillion dollar one-upmanship on the part of Coca-Cola, Pepsi and the Ford Motor Company does qualify as a kind of sporting event.

I'm not a football fan, but if I were, I'd be more likely to follow college football than the NFL. In fact there have been autumn Saturday afternoons when I felt that I was missing out on something in not following college football, when I look around and see how much fun a lot of other people are having watching it. My biggest problem with college football is that there are so many teams out there I can't keep track of all of them. What team would I root for? I can't even wade through the alphabet soup of the universities they represent. I went to San Diego State, but somehow never became a fan of the Aztecs. They turn up on TV so seldom, especially since I left the San Diego area, that following their fortunes hardly seems worth the effort.

Why would I be more likely to follow college football? Incredible as it might sound, given the amount of money that college athletic programs suck up, it's because college football is so much less blatantly showbiz than professional football. Professional football didn't even acquire a mass audience until the advent of television, and I think that says a lot. Baseball had a mass following even before radio, and when radio came along, that medium and baseball seemed made for each other, at least once the hysterical fears of team owners, who thought radio would hurt ticket sales, was overcome. There are still people around who think radio is a better way to experience baseball than television. But the NFL would be nowhere without the Tube.

TV equals Hype. Hype equals marketing. Always has. And the "little thing" that gets my goat every year about the Super Bowl is directly related to the hype that is marketing and the marketing that is hype.

I'm talking about those damn Roman numerals.

The first Super Bowl was played in January, 1967. NFL historians out there may correct me if I'm wrong, but the Super Bowl grew directly out of the battle for television. For decades there was only the National Football League. Then, in 1961, a new league was created, the American Football League. Football borrowed a page from baseball: two leagues, the National and the American. Not a bad idea at all. More competition, for one thing. More jobs for professional football players. More ticket sales.

More television contracts. There's the rub, by the way. The AFL knew it was competing with the older NFL for eyeballs on screens, and it hit upon a brilliant play: changing the style of the game. The AFL, with new, young teams like the New York Jets, Boston Patriots and San Diego Chargers, began playing a more pass-related game than the NFL, which still laid its heaviest emphasis on running. It worked better than might have been expected. After a few seasons the upstart AFL was stealing major market share from the NFL. Then came the first Super Bowl, football's equivalent of the World Series. The best team in the AFL would play the best team in the NFL.

Then the AFL won. If you're old enough to remember, it was January, 1969. Joe Namath predicted -- no, guaranteed -- that his high-flying Jets would win the Super Bowl from the hard-charging Baltimore Colts. The Jets won that game, 16-7. The NFL panicked. This was TV money we were talking about! The following year the two leagues were joined under the NFL umbrella as the AFC and the NFC. All the money was going into one place again.

That big victory by the New York Jets was in a game called Super Bowl III. Not just "the Super Bowl," but "Super Bowl III."

The Lords of Football aka the Lords of Television aka The Lords of Marketing and Hype decided that this big football game somehow had to be imbued with an awe-inspiring sense of historical significance, as if this were some epic clash stretching back for centuries and not something that had just been cooked up for TV. So they inaugurated the ridiculous annual marketing tradition of assigning a Roman numeral to each Super Bowl game, you know, to give it Weight, as in World War I. World War II. Pope John XXIII.

Did you watch World Series CIII last October? No. If you watched it at all, you watched "the World Series," period.

I didn't have a serious problem with this Roman numeral business for the first few years they were doing it. I, II, III, IV, V...most of us can deal with those caesarian digits -- after all, for 30 years now most of us have learned to associate them with "Rocky" movies. And when I was young, Hollywood for some reason used to use Roman numerals to assign copyright dates to television shows. If you're of a certain age (mine) you got used to seeing them after the credits. Super Bowl I was played in the year MCMLXVII. We were taught some of this in school, by the way, just to drive home what an important leap forward the discovery of the number "zero" was. (The Romans didn't have zero, and their math suffered accordingly.)

But I don't think it's being taught in schools anymore, because not much of anything is taught in schools anymore except multiculturalism and self-esteem. This year we're being sold Super Bowl XLI. Enough already! Yes, I know that XLI means "41," but I would be willing to bet that very few people under the age of 35 do. Most people under 35 can't find Washington, D.C. on a map, think the Civil War was fought back around the time of Babe Ruth, and spell the word "Cars" as "Car's." Don't try to tell me that they can read "Super Bowl XLI" and know what they're looking at. Or care. In fact a lot of them are only tuning in to see the $5 million Pepsi ad in which Jennifer Lopez is computer-morphed into a can of Pepsi and then sucked into a spaceship that promptly takes off for planet -- er, large object -- Pluto.

Before Super Bowl XLII rolls around, I would like to ask the Lords of Hype to re-think this annual insult to everyone's intelligence -- or lack of it. They won't of course, and I'd also be willing to bet that very few people share my curmudgeonly dislike for this bit of cultural effluvium. (From the Latin Effluere, to flow out.) But still I make my plea: let's dump this cheesy marketing ploy, guys! It it has no place in the year MMVII!

The Case For Staying Home

I took my wife to the airport yesterday, very early in the morning. (Why does everyone insist on flying at o-dark-thirty?) We live in Spokane, Washington, and she was on her way to Washington, D.C. for some business meetings.

All I can say is, I'm glad it was her and not me. I'm not all that crazy about Washington, D.C. myself, and I'm also a chronic fearful flyer. But neither of those, really, is the point.

It's not news to anyone that air travel seems to be getting more unpleasant every year. Yes, 9/11 has had much to do with it -- all that extra security hassle, the possibility that you might be selected out of the line for a special pat-down, and those TSA drones, some of whom are definitely of the "give her an inch and she thinks she's a ruler" school. You know the ones I mean, the ones who obviously get a woodie from barking orders at people.

But that's not the whole story, either. Once upon a time, (it was before my time, that's for sure) air travel was a genteel experience. My late mother was of the generation that saw the transition from rail travel to air travel, and in the 1950s when that transition was going on, people treated getting on an airplane as something of a special occasion -- they even dressed up to fly. Can you imagine such a thing? Look around an airport terminal today. There's a guy checking in what looks like a box of plumber's tools. There's a girl wearing her sweater inside out. There's a guy in flip-flops, with a backpack on his back and a pair of skis under his arm. There are two kids, one with green hair and the other wearing a faded Metallica T-shirt, their iPods clamped to their heads, dead to the world, eyes glazed as they wait in the endless line for check-in.

Yes, the quality of life in the air has definitely declined. You shoehorn yourself into that economy-class seat, your knees against the back of the seat in front of you, just in time for some guy with a carry-on bag the size of a Volkswagen Beetle to shove his belly into your nose as he in turn tries to shoehorn that monster bag into the overhead compartment. Then you have to unfasten your safety belt and squeeze back into the aisle so he can climb over your seat and get to his.

Then you get to spend an hour, or two, or five with your arms practically pinioned to your sides because that's all there's room for. When the plane hits turbulence (which in my experience always happens at the very moment they've put that tray in front of you with the tepid coffee and the peanuts) you don't even have room to panic. The person in the seat behind you has the music on his headphones turned up so loud it sounds like he's running an electric lawn edger. The woman across the aisle from you is travelling with two toddlers engaged in a screaming contest. (They'll scream until final approach, then, when the plane touches down, they'll both be asleep.)

And as if all of this weren't enough, this current travel season we're in the middle of has been making headlines for its bad weather. We all saw the pictures on the news not long ago of Denver airport locked down by a blizzard, people sleeping on the terminal floor using their carry-ons as pillows, stuck in limbo like Tom Hanks in the movie The Terminal somewhere between Los Angeles and Atlanta, where they've already missed Christmas dinner at Aunt Irene's. And the horror stories, the tales of outrage. My favorite was the man who told the TV cameras that one of the airlines had instructed its counter personnel to remove their ID badges so that irate travellers wouldn't know the name of the person they were talking to, and could not, therefore, make specific complaints about rudeness or unhelpfulness. Welcome to the service sector, 21st century style.

For all of these reasons, I was glad to be the one driving the car to the airport. I was glad to be carrying the to-be checked bag into the terminal. I was glad to be standing in line just to keep Valerie company and then bestowing the see-you-in-a-few-days kiss, safe in the knowledge that while she would momentarily be joining the Corps of Flying Sardines, I would be returning to my warm little bed to recapture some of the snooze-time I'd lost by getting up at 4:30 a.m. to see her off.

It had snowed the night before, Interstate 90 was icy and the mercury was hovering around 18 Fahrenheit (minus 8 Celsius) as I drove Valerie to Spokane Airport in the dark. There was a bit of a breeze at the airport as well, which made that 18 degrees feel like, oh, maybe 7? (Minus 14 Celsius?) The airport was remarkably busy for 5 a.m. -- where were all these people going so early on a frozen Thursday morning?

And then came that little touch of the surreal that so often attends airport terminals, especially in the wee hours. I immediately noticed, queued up among all the parka-and-wool-cap wearing winter travelers, yawning, scratching themselves and oh, yes, even at such an hour, blabbering witlessly into their damn cellphones, one guy wearing shorts.

Where do these people come from? Did this guy just get off the interplanetary space bus from the Planet Gelato, where 18 Fahrenheit with a wind-chill of 7 is reason to bust out the Coppertone? Everyone else in this terminal looks like they're getting ready to go skiing; this guy looks like he's about to step off the Pacific Princess in Acapulco and go order a Mai Tai with an umbrella in it.

"What's up with that guy over there?" I said to Valerie. "Is he kidding with those SHORTS?"

"Maybe he's going to Miami, or the Bahamas," my wife offered.

Well, okay, fair enough. People do sometimes dress for their destination, not their point of departure. By the way, I did this once, in reverse and regretted it. I dressed -- and packed -- for my point of departure, which happened to be Cote d'Ivoire, west Africa, and not for my destination, which happened to be Washington, D.C. The month was March. Result: I arrived in D.C. with a suitcase full of shorts and muscle shirts to find that the east coast had just been hit by a blizzard and I was up to my expectations in snow.

Maybe this doofus was bound for tropical climes and figured why bundle up if he'd just have to take the heavy stuff off when he got where he was going?


He and Valerie were in two separate lines, and reached the baggage check-in counter at the same time. Both chose to do the automatic check-in thing, sticking the credit card in the little monitor and having their boarding passes spat at them by a computer. As Valerie was in the process of getting hers, I glanced over at how Mr. Shorts was doing.

Imagine my surprise when I saw what came up on the monitor screen. His name, Seymour K. Doofus, his POD, Spokane, Washington, and then his destination.

Buffalo, N.Y.

As soon as I got Valerie away from the ticket counter and we were walking to the security gate where we would have to part paths, I whispered to her (in a stage-whisper), "The guy in shorts is not going to Miami, he's going to Buffalo! Does he know something about Buffalo the rest of us don't?"

"Maybe Buffalo is having a January heat-wave."

Well, the east coast has seen higher-than-normal temperatures in recent weeks, but my reading and hearing of the news indicated that it had already ended, and more normal winter temperatures had returned. Perhaps it had been 65 degrees in Buffalo the week before, and this guy just hadn't gotten the memo that Old Man Winter had moved back in. Maybe. But in the age of the Internet, not likely.

I kissed Valerie goodbye. See you Monday. Then I walked back to the car.

"How are you today?" the parking attendant asked me when I stopped to pay for parking.

"How am I? I saw a guy in the terminal wearing shorts, and he was going to Buffalo."

Back out on the highway, headed back to Spokane, I said it again, out loud. "There was a guy in the terminal wearing shorts, and he was going to Buffalo."

And I was going back to bed. I think I got the better end of that deal.

Atheism chic

About a year ago I was writing in this space about the neverending debate between "Darwinists" and "creationists." In using the term "neverending" I'm speaking from a purely pragmatic viewpoint: the debate began "raging" in 1925 with the John Scopes "Monkey" trial, had some kerosene thrown on it 30 years later when a Broadway play based on the Scopes trial hit the boards and then the silver screen, and in recent years has flamed up yet again. 80-plus years of argument does nearly qualify as "neverending," I think.

Last New Year's I brought this subject up chiefly to comment on the poisonous incivility that has informed the issue. The single biggest poisoner: biologist Richard Dawkins, a passionate darwinian who has swallowed that particular version of evolutionary theory whole and finds in it not only justification for atheism, but for a noisy, high-profile crusade against religious belief of any kind.

Nothing new about this of course. Atheists have been screaming about the irrationality of religious belief for centuries. But Dawkins is unusually vehement, even for a typical village God-denier. With sneers, jeers and buckets of snot, he dismisses anyone who refuses to accept the darwinian whole cloth he has swallowed as either ignorant or an idiot or both.

My chief objection, a year ago, was not so much to Dawkins' opinions. As I'll point out in a moment, there is absolutely nothing new about them. Science and secular philosophy have been sneering at religion since Darwin and long before that. No, my main objection was to Dawkins' childishness, his arrogant sense of certainty, that his opinion is the only correct one and that anyone who disagrees with him should be locked up as dangerous. You see, I met a great many Richard Dawkinses when I was in elementary school. They were the often-bespectacled nerdy boys who never got picked for kickball. Resentful of their nerd-status on the playground, they tended to spend recess walking around the perimeter of the schoolyard, talking about Einstein. To compensate for the fact that they never got picked for kickball or asked to run for class president, they put on a cloak of intellectual superiority and went around calling anyone who wasn't interested in the theory of relativity an idiot.

I knew these kids well. I was one of them. But I grew up. Evidently Richard Dawkins didn't.

But now I have something new to object to. For some reason Dawkins and fellow atheist tub-thumpers such as Sam Harris are getting boatloads, truckloads, stadium-loads of publicity lately, and I'm still trying to figure out why.

As I just pointed out, there is absolutely nothing new about atheism. Shelley published a spirited defense of it in 1809. Baron d'Holbach was pitching atheism as part of the French Enlightenment in the mid-18th century.

And you can take it back much, much further. Bertrand Russell, the most famous atheist of the 20th century, claimed that his own view of the universe was essentially that of Lucretius, the 1st-century B.C. philosopher of science who reduced the entire universe to atoms, and is therefore considered by many to be the father of reductionist materialism, the notion that if we can simply reduce everything to the smallest possible components of what it's made of, we will have figured out the secrets of everything. Russell discussed his debt to Lucretius in his most famous book, The History of Western Philosophy. Why Russell, a mathematician, was so proud to adopt the worldview of a man who lived 1,500 years before such basic scientific tools as the telescope and microscope is a question no one ever bothered to ask. I would ask him now, but he died in 1971.

Even as Dawkins and his ilk aspire to reduce biology to chemistry and hence, to pure mechanics, some are arguing that reductionist materialism has taken us about as far as it can. But that still leaves me wondering why Dawkins and company are getting so much press. Dawkins' name pops up on Arts and Letters Daily.com at least once a week. His name was recently on the cover of Time magazine and it also seems to be on an awful lot of people's lips. You'd think the media had never seen an atheist before.

A recent issue of Wired magazine trumpeted from its cover: "The New Atheism: Inside the Crusade Against Religion."

Why have reductionist materialism and its nephew, atheism, become the latest version of radical chic? And why is Richard Dawkins suddenly as big a celebrity as Paris Hilton?

Political explanations have been offered. I privately wondered, not long ago, if atheism's current vogue on the covers of major magazines might not have something to do with President Bush. Cultural trends are always reactions to something, and in the United States anyway, there is no cultural catalyst quite like an unpopular president.

While I was thinking these thoughts, Jonah Goldberg verbalised them for me on National Review Online. Since Bush has been demonized for his supposedly-messianic sense of the rightness of his cause, and moreover since he is a self-professed evangelical Christian, Goldberg suggested that the nearly-pathological levels of hatred for Bush on the left and in academia may indeed lie at the core of the current craze for making Christian fundamentalism, and religion in general, out as the latest great threat to American democracy. Secularists, most of them on the left, are screaming about the "danger" of religious believers and their "certainty" about the truth of their beliefs. (The same people, meanwhile, have little or nothing to say about Islamic fundamentalism, looking the other way while it stages suicide bombings and flies airplanes into skyscrapers.)

Goldberg's logical retort to militant secularists : You decry believers for their "certainty." What about YOUR "certainty?" Dawkins is so "certain" that there isn't a God that he wants to round up and imprison those who are certain that there is. Why is he allowed his "certainty," while those who don't share it are labeled "dangerous?"

I have another question for those who believe that if only we abolish religion from the earth, we'll all be living in a utopia of peace and brotherhood, "relating to each other instead of to some fictitious deity." Religious belief, we are told, has given the world only intolerance, bigotry and genocide. Even if that were true, which it isn't, (Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, has a rich humanistic tradition) if you want to check up on religious bigotry, intolerance and advocacy of genocide, I would forget about Pope Benedict XVI, or even Jerry Falwell, and go talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That's his billiard-cue.

Anyway, here's my question: have any of you "atheist-chic" types taken a look at recent history? Because I have a news flash for you: despite John Lennon's treacly little song Imagine, with its simple-minded vision of a religion-free paradise, atheism does not have much of a track record for promoting peace and brotherhood.

In fact atheism's track record reads more like a rap sheet: Stalin made atheism the state religion of his utopia, and quite a utopia it was: Siberian labor camps running at full capacity, secret police pounding on doors in the middle of the night, innocent people shot through the head in cellars, family members disappearing never to be heard from again, a general atmosphere of terror and paranoia everywhere. But those nasty old churches had been closed and turned into museums, so all of this had to be to the good, right?

More recently we have North Korea, the atheistic paradise in which those caught practicing religion have their heads crushed by steamrollers.

John Lennon sang wistfully that he was a "dreamer," then added "but I'm not the only one." I saw these words on a bumper sticker recently and they made my blood run cold. If atheism's record for compassion is anything to go by, Lennon's dreamy notion that "the world will be as one" after religious belief has been banned is a bone-chilling one. (Or perhaps I should say "bone-crushing.")

But getting back to my original subject, the debate between "darwinists" and "creationists," I really don't think this debate will ever be settled, never mind Richard Dawkins' belief that he's on the verge of great, God-destroying scientific breakthroughs.

Why? Because the two sides are not even speaking the same language. Despite the gaps in Darwin's theory, (and it DOES have gaps in it, never mind what Dawkins tells you: Darwin lacked the equipment and the data to speculate about, for example, the living cell, and his elegant theory, while it does account for much, does not jive with fossil evidence) its proponents claim to be speaking the language of science. "No heaven, No hell, just science," said the cover of Wired.

Well, that's fine. But we have tended, over the past century, to make science the new religion. Dawkins gets points from the secular left for his supposedly-honest desire to subject religion to the same criteria of scrutiny as science. This is disingenuous at best, sheer party propaganda at worst. Why should faith in science replace faith in God? Really, why should it? I believe in the benefits of scientific research, but I see no reason to dethrone God and put science in his place. Science loves to brag about how smart it is, but science has frequently been wrong. Why should we condemn religion for its mistakes and give science a pass for its own? Both are human artifacts.

The enthronement of science in the 20th-21st century mind, believe it or not, has a precedent. The 18th century similarly enthroned "reason," with science under reason's umbrella. The Enlightenment, as led by the likes of Voltaire, Diderot and yes, Baron d'Holbach, convinced thinkers in the West that man was a fundamentally a rational animal who, once he was shorn of his demons and superstitions, would follow reason ever forward into the daylight of peace, tolerance and forebearance.

Then along came the French Revolution, running amok with guillotines, swimming in blood. So much for reason. And if that wasn't enough to convince everyone that reason was a pretty wobbly peg to hang your hat on, there followed the Napoleonic wars, World War I, World War II and everything else they brought in their train.

We have all benefitted tremendously from science. And it is good to keep our minds free of cobwebs. But the enthronement of science as the new be-all and end-all makes no more sense to me than the enthronement of reason proved to be, and by the way I, for one, would not want to live in a world governed by a council of Richard Dawkinses.

Religion, unlike science, requires the leap of faith. This initially made me suspicious of Intelligent Design theory because, like all who were raised in a world steeped in science, I could not take seriously a "scientific" proposition that began with a religious idea, e.g. that there is a God, and that we are going to undertake a study of nature aimed at proving that there is a God. Science doesn't start with such suppositions. It analyses the evidence and then draws conclusions, it doesn't begin with conclusions.

But it's this very leap of faith that will keep the two sides from ever really finding common ground. Michael J. Behe's book "Darwin's Black Box" (1996) calls into question some of the presuppositions of the darwinist flavor of natural selection, and puts forth the idea that the irreducible complexity of nature (significantly, in the living cell) cannot be accounted for by the baby-steps approach to natural selection put forth in Darwin, and therefore must be accounted for by some other means. Behe sees intelligent design as that means. Dawkins hoots and jeers, calling the idea "Behe's empty box." But I see every bit as much "certainty" in Dawkins as in Behe, and not a shred more reason to believe one rather than the other.

With this "debate" having received so much shrill media attention recently, I suppose it's no surprise, the rapidity with which it reached the level of the funny papers. Just a couple of weeks ago, a pre-Christmas entry of Berkeley Breathed's Opus comic, featuring the funny little penguin we all remember from Breathed's 1980's Bloom County strip, had Opus the Penguin and Steve Dallas the sleazy lawyer playing the roles, respectively, of a Dawkins and a Behe. Throughout the strip they conduct their debate at the level of "Was created!" "Just happened!" And neither has any real evidence to back up his claim. Then, at the end, they part in a spirit of yuletide reconciliation...blowing raspberries at each other.

I think that pretty well says it. Bring on the next big debate. And keep in mind what I quoted atheist Arthur C. Clarke as saying in a blog posting a few months ago: "The truth will be far stranger."

Happy New Year.

A Christmas Letter

My counselor urged me to write a letter to my beloved younger sister, Lynn, who died on September 10, 2004. Initially I thought the idea rather silly, but went ahead and wrote the letter. Here it is. This is my holiday offering to anyone who, like me, is feeling sad at this time of year for having lost a loved one.

Dear Lynne,

I’m spelling your name the way you liked it spelled, although since you died, I’ve gone back to spelling it the way it was spelled on your birth certificate. That’s because I’m pretending you’re actually going to read this, and I know you always preferred “Lynne” to “Lynn,” although, personally, I never saw anything wrong with the original spelling. By the way, after you died, I asked Madelon if she knew whether there were any special reason Mom decided to name you “Lynn” when you were born. Madelon said there was no special reason, just that Mom had always wanted a daughter named Lynn. The “Edith” part, your middle name, you know about of course: that was Grandma Winrow's name.

I’m writing this in the midst of a season, and in a place, both of which you loved more than anything. Yes, it’s officially the holiday season now, December 1st as I write this. And guess what? I’m writing to you from Spokane. And guess what further? There is snow on the ground. And on top of all that, I have XM Satellite radio streaming over my computer speakers, and as I type these words, somebody is playing Angels We Have Heard On High on the piano. I’m in the attic of an old Victorian house in Spokane, at Christmastime, in a landscape filled with snow, writing to you as Christmas music streams over the Internet. If you were here, you’d be in seventh heaven, I know. If you were here, I know what we would be doing: stringing lights, putting up decorations, playing the familiar holiday CDs…and laughing, laughing, laughing. That’s what you and I did best together, and most, although admittedly not quite so much at the end.

Except sometimes. Remember the day, I think it was in February or March of 2004, maybe six months before you died, when we went shopping together to Target and Kohl’s out in Eastlake? We were looking, I think, for a bedspread for my bed. It was a Saturday, overcast and gray. Walking around the aisles of the store, we passed the little girls’ section and, spotting a “Barbie” bedspread, you suggested I buy that. Then you added to that a “Hello Kitty” telephone, and we were off and running with another of our hysterical gags. “This is KELLEY’S room? A ‘Barbie’ bedspread and a ‘Hello Kitty’ telephone?” “Oh, you know Kelley, he buys whatever’s on sale.” And we laughed and laughed all the way home. It was like old times.

You remember the old postcard cliché, “Wish you were here.”

Hemingway sought to write “the truest sentence” he knew. And the truest sentence I know is “Wish you were here.”

Wish YOU were here, that is. Christmas in Spokane. Bing Crosby’s home town. Our place. Tonight, or rather this afternoon because you were usually drunk-asleep by evening, we would have the 102,000th running of White Christmas on the VCR, and I’d be rolling my eyeballs because as you know that never was MY favorite movie. I always preferred Holiday Inn, (despite the comically racist "Lincoln’s Birthday” number) mainly because I much prefer Fred Astaire as a foil to Bing Crosby over Danny Kaye, whom I always found just about unbearable. But I liked the music from White Christmas well enough; who could dislike Irving Berlin? Say, do you remember the video I sent you from Moscow, Christmas, 1993? Remember on the videotape, it was about 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon and already dark outside because it does that in Moscow at Christmas, and we were waiting for our Russian dinner guests to arrive and I had White Christmas going on the VCR and I panned the camcorder across the TV screen so you could see that we were watching that movie, or at least had it on for background noise? I almost felt you were with me then. Remember, later on the videotape when all of us, Chris, me, Sasha, Nadya, Bob, Masha and Anya, were opening presents, and I panned around the room and had everyone say “hello” to you?

I wish I could do that now. It’s Christmas in Spokane, and there’s snow on the ground and you’re not here. There’s something wrong with that.

How many times did we talk about coming back here? And that’s all we did, just talk about it. And it would have been so easy to make it happen, as Valerie showed me. And by the way, when you quoted Terry Lawson as saying Spokane was “ruined” now, you were misinformed. I’ve spoken to Terry since Valerie and I moved here last spring, and found out what really lay behind that remark: Terry just hates cities, that’s all, and she thinks Spokane is too big a city. Gimme a break. When we moved here in April, she was living in Chattaroy, a wide spot in the road on Highway 2 about 25 miles north of Spokane. She said she “pitied” me living near downtown Spokane. Was she crazy? Spokane is no bigger than Chula Vista. I didn’t think I needed “pity” at all. I was glad to be here. Chattaroy? It’s nothing but a bunch of mobile homes, at least what I could see from the highway. If Terry wants to live in a huddle of mobile homes out in the woods, fine for her. I’d rather be in town, as long as the town is Spokane.

“Ruined?” I’m here to tell you Spokane is still as charming as it was when we were kids and used to ride the North Monroe Street bus downtown on Saturday afternoons. (Remember those horrible old green buses Spokane used to have in the 1960s?)

You would still recognize downtown Spokane, although a few things have changed. Riverfront Park was not here when you and I lived here, but that’s an improvement. We could stroll through it together now. You’d like it. There’s even a carousel. The old Bon Marche building is still there, although Macy’s has engulfed and devoured the Bon Marche store itself. The Parkade Plaza, a landmark in our childhood, is still there, although the Ice Creamery and that place we used to go for German wurst are gone. The old Main and Post Market is gone, and so is the Post Theater, where I remember going to see Thunderball one hot summer afternoon. The old, red Spokesman-Review building is still there, although it’s had a substantial facelift. Clarke’s Old Book Store is gone. The old Crescent department store building, which you loved because it looked like an old-fashioned department store out of I Love Lucy or Miracle on 34th Street, is still there, but it’s no longer a department store. It’s been converted to office space for rental and is now called The Crescent Center.

Perhaps the change you would find most dismaying is that the Woolworth’s where we used to stop for a hot dog and a cup of coffee before boarding the bus for home, is gone. There’s a Nordstrom’s where it used to be, and in fact that entire block is now a three-tier shopping mall. Oh well. There are still plenty of places around where we could drop in for coffee and a hot dog if you were here. There’s a nice little pizza place right around the corner from our house where Valerie and I often go for lunch.

But the river is unchanged, as is Riverside State Park and Bowl and Pitcher monument, where you and I went lure-losing that legendary summer day and where, as you know, Carla and I scattered your ashes on October 29, 2004. In short, Spokane is still much as we left it. The old neighborhood where we lived, around the intersection of Francis and Alberta over on the north side, is almost unchanged, although your old school, Loma Vista Elementary, is gone: there’s a park where it used to be. Jamison’s and Pete’s Pill Box are gone, but that little strip mall where they were located is still there; there’s still a little grocery there, and a Domino’s Pizza.

I have an important issue I want to discuss with you this Christmas. It has to do with your death.

I suppose anyone who loses a loved one is going to try and find some rationale for blaming themselves in that person’s death. I have to tell you that when we told Dr. Leon that Dad was getting more confused in the evenings, and Dr. Leon concluded that it might be due to the Vicodin, and promptly changed his painkiller prescription from Vicodin to Methadone, I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me (it SHOULD have) that since you were taking most of Dad’s Vicodin and Dad wasn’t really getting that much of it, the Vicodin COULD NOT be the culprit. I didn’t think to say that. To my everlasting shame, I remember thinking, when I heard that Dr. Leon had made that decision, that perhaps having the Vicodin taken away from you would “cure” your painkiller addiction. Silly me. But whatever culpability I bear ends there. I’m not a pharmacist; the fact that Methadone is stronger than Vicodin, and lasts longer in the bloodstream, was something I could not be expected to know.

But damn it, our sister Carla should have said something. She’s a NURSE, for chrissakes, she knows about pharmaceuticals. It was she who told me, after you took that deadly overdose, that Methadone is stronger than Vicodin. The whole family knew you were taking Dad’s Vicodin. Carla should have put two and two together and figured that if the Vicodin were taken away, you would naturally start taking the Methadone. And Carla should have sat you down and told you, right to your face, “Look, we all know you’ve been taking the Vicodin. Methadone is actually stronger, even if the pills appear smaller. BE CAREFUL WITH IT.” But she didn’t bother to do that. Nobody said a word to you about the properties of Methadone. And I suspect the reason you overdosed that morning was that very one: the little white Methadone pills were smaller than the ovular, yellow Vicodin pills, so you thought you had to take more to get the effect you wanted. You took three, when one would have been sufficient. The autopsy found 15 milligrams in your bloodstream. Those were 5 mg tablets. Carla should have said something to you. You might be alive now, and helping me string Christmas lights, if she had.

And here’s the supreme irony: the Methadone proved ineffectual against Dad’s pain, and Dr. Leon eventually canceled the prescription. Too late to save you, unfortunately.

After Dad died, we sold the house. I was sad to see it leave the family after 65 years (remember? Grandpa Winrow bought that house in 1941.) But the people who bought it did not tear it down as the lawyer thought they would. They’ve decided to fix the place up. Lord knows it was overdue for fixing up. That makes me feel somewhat better anyway, and I would hope it would you, yoo.

I promised you, in a letter I wrote six years ago this Christmas, that I would never leave you. I’m glad I lived to keep that promise. I’m only sorry I didn’t get to keep it longer.

Kelley