The Battle of Groncho

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All what jazz?

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

Is jazz the “American classical music?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear CF,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In praise of Mondays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Still hate and dread Mondays? Here are some suggestions:

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

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

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

4. Adopt the Julian calendar.

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

"But monsieur--"

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

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

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

Out to the line, one last time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six days later my little sister died.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hail, cowabunga and farewell.

Moscow Days, Moscow Nights

I

The collapse of a marketplace roof in Moscow last week, killing at least 56 people, caught the world's attention. Newspapers ran articles, with photographs, of rescue workers searching the rubble for survivors. The weight of heavy snow on the roof was the preliminary explanation for the collapse; Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov was quick to rule out terrorist activity.

Where Moscow goes, tragedy follows. This time it was a collapsing roof. Last time it was an auditorium full of theatergoers held hostage, with a bungled government rescue attempt that left many dead. What will it be next time? Whatever it is, I expect it won't be good.

And every time I open a newspaper or log on the Internet and read about a bombing, hostage situation, collapsed roof or some other terrible thing going on in Russia's capital, I don't just cluck my tongue with dismay, mumble some piety about human suffering and then move on to the sports page. I fret. I worry. I check my map of Moscow to see where the latest catastrophe struck and then, perhaps, worry some more.

You see, I have family there. Sort of.

I used to be in the Foreign Service, and no, I wouldn't be surprised to hear the question "What's that?" Believe it or not, most of my fellow Americans don't give much thought either to foreign affairs or to how they're conducted.

America's "Foreign Service" is a concatenation of federal agencies, operating under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of State, which conducts business at American embassies and consulates overseas. It includes the State Department, USAID, the Foreign Commercial Service and a few other, smaller agencies. USIA used to be a separate part of it, but its functions have been taken over by State. Depending on the size and location of the mission, other, non-affiliated federal agencies such as the FBI, the Secret Service and even the military will operate under the same roof as the diplomats, but they answer to their own head offices in Washington.

And then of course there's the CIA, which is everywhere, nowhere and not popular. The Agency pretty much keeps to itself overseas, which is fine with everyone else, because in most embassies and consulates, at least the ones I've worked in, nobody particularly likes the "spooks." There is resentment over the fact that the CIA is given enormous amounts of money each year by Congress and doesn't have to account to anyone for how it's spent. No doubt as a direct by-product of such fiscal favoritism, Agency employees tend to treat their State Department counterparts as poor relatives, which doesn't do much for spook popularity in the embassy cafeteria.

But I didn't sit down this morning to discuss the turf wars of American bureaucracy.

I was a State Department employee for more than 13 years. Before leaving the government in 1999 to take a marketing job on the east coast, I had served in Frankfurt, Germany; Brasilia, Brazil; Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire; Moscow; Washington D.C. and then Bonn, Germany. (My career at State ran a neat 10-year cycle: it began and ended in Germany.)

They say in the Foreign Service that you always maintain a special affection for your first overseas post. And yes, I can say that Frankfurt-am-Main will always have a very nostalgic tug on me. I was 30 years old when assigned there, and had never been out of the United States unless you count haircuts in Tijuana and bullfights in Mexicali. Now all of a sudden I was going to central Europe, and for two years, no less. I had always longed to visit Europe; having the government send me there, fresh from Washington, was a giddy experience, never to be forgotten.

But the foreign service post that really grabbed my heart, and has never let go, was not my first, but my fourth and next-to-last: Moscow.

The circumstances of my assignment there probably had something to do with the enchantment. One joins the Foreign Service dreaming of seeing the world's great capitals. Nothing against Brasilia and Abidjan, but they are both rather sleepy, out-of-the-way cities. By the time I volunteered for a transfer to Moscow in the winter of 1993, I had spent nearly five years at these two off-the-beaten-track diplomatic posts.

When I got word that I was indeed going to Moscow, suddenly a life that had been floating downstream in the subtropical west African heat seemed to mash down on the accelerator.

I spent two months in Washington, D.C. that spring, going through elementary Russian-language training. My classmates were mostly employees of a private contracting company, preparing to go overseas and perform ancillary services at the embassy in Russia. Most of them had never been overseas at all, and you could feel the crackle of expectation in the fragrant spring air. We talked excitedly amongst ourselves, the sentences often beginning with "When we get to Moscow..." It had only been a year and a half since the collapse of the USSR and Russia was still in her post-Soviet "wild west" period, which gave the prospect of going there just a dash of danger that made it more exciting still. On cable television we were able to watch The Moscow Evening News dubbed into English, and we watched it every night, following the drama that we would soon be seeing first-hand.

On May 23, 1993, I arrived in Moscow. I had finally made it to "one of the world's great capitals." An air of magic and unreality prevailed: late May is just about the best time of the year to visit Russia--not only is the long, harsh winter over by then, but with summer coming on, you're getting close to 20 hours of daylight. Moscow sits at close to 56 degrees north latitude, and its summer days are very long: dawn begins shortly after 3 a.m., and there is still lingering twilight at 11 p.m. Surely the long, long days helped create the feeling of magic.

The feeling of unreality had to do with the contrast between life behind our embassy wall and life beyond it. The American compound in Moscow has often been called "Fort Apache," and with good reason. Built during the Soviet period, with its prevailing "circle the wagons" mentality, the American compound is entirely self-contained. I actually heard of Americans spending two years in Moscow without ever leaving the compound. Imagine living in Moscow and not even bothering to visit Red Square! (Foreign Service life is wasted on some people, but that's a subject for another discussion.)

But if the "Golden Ghetto" is indeed what you want from Foreign Service life, AmEmbassy Moscow is the place for it. The compound contains everything needed for American-style existence: cable TV; a fully-stocked commissary; a video store; a gymnasium with swimming pool and Nautilus equipment; a barber shop/beauty parlor; a cafeteria, a library and even its own bar. If all you want to do is go to work and go home, you can spend two years at the American embassy in Moscow and hardly notice you've left Cedar Rapids.

There lay the unreality: here I was, 6,000 miles from home, in this gigantic, historic city in the middle of the world's largest country, (11 time zones) torn by its own struggle to throw off 75 years of communist mismanagement and move on to a new future. In fact, Russia came close to civil war a few months later, with me standing right there watching. But amidst all of this, I was able to recline in my American-style bathtub in my American-style apartment inside the walls of Fort Apache, beer in hand, and feel as if everything "Russian" were very far away.

But I'm not a Golden Ghetto guy, although on a compound that contained so many creature comforts, I could see where people might become that way very quickly without noticing it. I unpacked, put away my things and got into the rhythm of going to the office each morning. I worked in the communications unit, a area with no windows, which probably helped maintain the feeling of living in a 24-hour environment where it was never really night. Time starts to get away from you quickly in such a setting.

In fact, pretty soon eight days had gone by and I realized that I hadn't been off the compound myself yet. I hastened to correct that, visiting, in rapid succession, Red Square and Lenin's tomb; the flea market at Ismailovo Park; Zwemmer's, the English-language bookstore near Kuznetski Most, and of course plunging into the redolent, rough-and-tumble world of the Moscow Metro, which is unlike any other subway system I've ever ridden--just go and experience it, if you ever get the chance.

Some of my confreres from the embassy were squeamish about eating the local food, and would only eat stuff from the American commissary. Not me: in a none-too-clean hotel grill near the Ismailovo Metro station, as my companion stuck to bottled beer, I dove hungrily into local shashlik, and with no ill-effects, I'm happy to say. Flavored vodka and Cuban cigars were available, cheap, at the street kiosks which were everywhere in those days, but which later disappeared as Russia's economy began to gain a more even keel. I hiked with a friend down to Gorky Park one morning, where they were having the annual May celebration honoring the Border Guards. Drunks were everywhere of course, and while we were there we also saw a scene right out of Sergei Eisenstein: a pit bull had gotten off its leash and was attacking a horse. What a wild and crazy place! I hadn't felt so exhiliarated by the experience of a city since the first time I visited New York.

And of course I made Russian friends. I met Sasha through a stateside acquaintance; he was a computer weenie and English teacher whose English was, not surprisingly, superb, and we struck up a friendship quickly. He would come to the embassy on Saturday nights and we would watch American movies together on video. Then Sasha introduced me to his little girlfriend Anya, a student of his who spoke very little English but picked it up rapidly as we got to know each other better, and by the way made a brave, dogged, doomed attempt to improve my Russian. Next I met Sasha's brother Boris, known to friends and family as "Bob." Bob was an authentic movie nut, Liza Minelli his idol. He enthusastically joined our Saturday-night filmfests, which came routinely to include dinner, myself as host.

Then finally came Nadya, who, bless her heart, got me into trouble.

An English teacher like Sasha, (they had met teaching English at the Moscow Engineering Institute) Nadya was a classical-music enthusiast who, like many Russian girls, had once dreamed of becoming a ballerina and in fact had worked very hard for several years at her dancing. Nadya's training as a dancer was evident in the way she moved: I was enchanted by the way she would cross a room or a street with the flowing grace of a gazelle. After Sasha introduced us, Nadya and I began attending the opera and classical concerts occasionally. Among other things, we saw Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame at the Bolshoi Theater and pianist Mikhail Pletnev at the Moscow Conservatory. Soft-spoken and well educated, with beautiful brown eyes and a kind, gentle smile, Nadya also joined our little dinner circle, coming to my apartment for the first time at Thanksgiving.

Within six weeks I was in love with her. And although she was cagey in that eternally-feminine way, Nadya gave hints that she did return my feelings, at least enough to matter. Thence came the trouble: in 1994 the State Department had not yet gotten around to lifting its cold war-era ban on fraternization with Russian citizens. Some busybody reported to the embassy security office that I had been seen on the street holding hands with and kissing someone who fitted Nadya's description.

The next thing I knew, I was on a plane back to Washington, where I was promptly raked over the coals by a couple of officious little Diplomatic Security goons in yellow neckties who thought a little hand-holding at the Bolshoi just had to mean that I had four or five commies under my bed. They done-thunk they'd caught theirselfs a SPAH! (You can also bet they done-thunk they wuz gonna get theirselfs a PROMOTION for it.)

My assignment to Moscow was immediately broken. But the hopes of the officious goons at DS that they would get promotions for breaking up a spy ring were to be dashed: they were able to find no smoking gun, no evidence of counterintelligence activity, nothing. They couldn't even rap my knuckles for sleeping with Nadya, because the truth was, at that point, I hadn't. All they could do was reassign me to Washington. Within a few weeks I was twiddling my thumbs at a desk at State Annex 34 in Springfield, Virginia, a few miles south of D.C. There I would sit for the next two years, mostly reading the newspaper and playing solitaire.

II

That might have been the end of the story. But falling in love with Nadya had only cemented a feeling that had been growing ever since I had first sat down with this little group and shared a convivial meal, followed by a screening in my living room of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Right Stuff.

That feeling was that I had come to regard Sasha, Bob, Anya, Nadya and Bob's girlfriend Masha (who joined us later, and who by the way looked a lot like Liza Minelli, and who today is well known to Moscow radio listeners as Masha Makeeva, entertainment reporter for Russkoye Radio) as my family. And I wasn't about to allow the State Department's in-house gestapo to separate me permanently from my family, particularly not the most important person in it. Since I was already in love with Nadya anyway, she became the focal point of my efforts, which were (a) To hasten the end of the "non-fraternization" policy in any way I could, or (b) To find another job, in the private sector, so that I could tell the State Department to kiss my big, fat, hairy French-Canadian ass and be reunited with Nadya just as soon as I could scrape together the air fare.

I did what any red-blooded, pissed-off American would do in such a circumstance: I wrote a letter to my congressman.

At first I wasn't sure which member of Congress I should write to. But then, remembering that I was still registered to vote in Chula Vista, California, I decided it should be 51st District Rep. Bob Filner, a Democrat who at that time was serving his first term.

In two pages, I sounded off to Filner about the knuckle-dragging idiocy of continuing to adhere to a policy that had clearly sprung from the Free World-vs.-Iron Curtain paradigm, when the USSR had now been officially dead for more than two years.

Filner has been re-elected five times since then, and one of the chief reasons is because his staff is so good at answering correspondence. Filner's office pixies really earn their pay: when you write to him, you generally get an answer within days. I did, anyway; Filner's sympathetic reply expressed concern over what had happened to me in Moscow, and he said he would have his staff look into the matter.

Over the next few months, as I corresponded with Filner's office and sundry other entities including the Washington Post and the White House, (whose intramural boneheads promptly forwarded my correspondence to the State Department, which just as promptly sent me a letter slapping me on the wrist for such presumption) I learned some interesting things.

For one, I learned that back in August of 1993, just three months after I'd arrived in Moscow, President Bill Clinton had signed an executive order instructing all agencies doing business overseas to re-evaluate (which meant change) all of those outmoded policies whose purpose had been to minimize contacts between Americans and citizens of the so-called "bloc" countries. In other words, the end of "non-frat," as we called it, had already been mandated: months before I was turned in for the crime of hand-holding with a former Komsomolka, the White House had already told everyone to get the lead out and discard the very policies under which I was ordered out of Moscow. The State Department, I learned, had been spending $1.2 million a year enforcing a dinosaur policy left over from the Nixon-Brezhnev days.

My source for that money figure, by the way, was an unimpeachable one: Peter Flynn was Administrative Counselor at the American Embassy in Moscow when I was there. He knew better than any American in Russia how much money was being spent, where and for what. It had fallen to Peter to call me into his office one morning after I had been ratted out, to inform me that I was being immediately sent back to the States.

When I began protesting the lunacy of maintaining "non-frat" in post-Soviet Moscow, where Americans were marrying Russians left and right, Pete simply held up his hand. "You're preaching to the converted," he told me. "It's costing us $1.2 million a year to enforce that policy." He then proceeded to recite the other ways in which, as an administrator, he found "non-frat" a thorn in his own side.

But in many ways the American mission in Moscow was a mirror-image of the totalitarian regime it was originally put there to monitor and watch, and in no way more than the influence and power the Regional Security Office wielded over the mission. "The RSO runs Moscow," it was said, and with a great deal of truth. Pete Flynn was third in command at the embassy after the ambassador and the Charge d'Affaires, but he could do nothing for me. The RSO's hyperventilating paranoia about counterintelligence trumped everything. I was on that plane back to Washington the day after we spoke in Pete's office.

But as my letter-writing to Filner, Clinton, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, The House Committee on International Affairs and Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory should have made clear to anyone, I wasn't about to be quiet about this. Boat-rockers in the State Department don't prosper; the Good Ole Boy network at Foggy Bottom is as airtight as was the court of Louis XIV: anyone who runs afoul of it in any way becomes a leper. There was a legend about the guy who kicked up such a fuss about smoking in State Department offices that he managed to get an agency-wide ban on smoking imposed. He was also promptly marked as a troublemaker and was never promoted again.

I expected the same fate, and I didn't care. I had been working in communications at State for nine years by then, had only taken the job because I wanted to travel and was beyond tired of it, and it didn't matter to me if I remained in my current grade until asked to retire. I'd ceased thinking in terms of "career." All I wanted at that point was to make some stupid people uncomfortable, and if at all possible, to hold Nadya in my arms once again.

Just as the affair in Moscow had been more Peyton Place than John Le Carre, so the business in Washington turned out to be more waiting game than confrontation. Yes, I had the emotional satisfaction of annoying a few bureaucratic microbes with my letter-writing and phone calling, but since the wheels had already been set in motion by Clinton's executive order, issued while I was still enjoying summer afternoons in Moscow, the only thing I really had to do was wait. But that's my problem: I've never been a good waiter. (I used to tell my Russian friends that I never could have managed as a Soviet, having no patience at all for standing in lines, which is what Soviet citizens spent half their lives doing.) And of course, bureaucracy being what it is, nobody ever knows how long the wait will be.

But one morning in May, 1995, almost two years to the day after I'd arrived in Moscow and 11 months after I'd been sent home, I was puttering around my tiny apartment on Capitol Hill, making coffee, ironing my shirt, preparing to drag myself to Springfield for another day of solitaire and newspaper reading. I'd switched on the Today show and had one ear on it as I schlepped around sipping coffee and getting dressed. Before they cut to the first commercial break, the teaser for the upcoming news headlines included, "...and Americans in Moscow can love a little more freely now. We'll tell you about that when we come back."

I was there when they came back, all right.

"Non-frat" had been lifted. Sort of. The new policy, over which the newsies were snickering, was jocularly being called "Kiss-and-Tell." Americans at the embassy in Moscow were free to date the locals now, but with the requirement that the names of any locals they dated had to be reported to the RSO.

My friend Lena, who taught Russian at the Foreign Service Institute and through whom I had met Sasha two years earlier, lived a few blocks from me, closer to the U.S. Capitol. She had been following this saga right along with me, had even translated into Russian for me a letter I wrote to Nadya's mother a few months after the storm broke. Lena didn't drive, so I usually picked her up in the mornings and drove her to her bus stop on our way to work. But I couldn't wait, that morning, to get over to her place and give her this news. I picked up the phone and called her.

"Oo men'ya novost'i ochen' prekrast'ni," I said. ("I have wonderful news.")

She didn't have to ask what it was. "Oh, my GOD!" she said.

How lightly were the news media treating this story? The Washington Post ran it that morning, not in the world news section, but in the Style section, where they ran fluffy features and funny stuff. "In Moscow, love thaws the cold war," the headline read. Style section or no, I clipped the item, put it into an inter-office envelope, looked up the office address of the chinless, slope-shouldered little DS rat who had been assigned to jerk me around the year before, and sent it to him.

Nadya and I were reunited, that summer, on Spain's Costa Brava. We spent two weeks on the beach, in the party town of Lloret de Mar, with side-trips to nearby Barcelona. Nadya had cut her hair very short, and she looked incredibly beautiful in her blue two-piece swimsuit. I hadn't realized what a lovely figure she had: in Moscow I had only seen her bundled up in winter clothes.

But here's where the fairy-tale ends. Our brief winter idyll back in Moscow had had all the hallmarks of early infatuation: long phone calls, furtive gazes, little discoveries, mutual admissions of thinking about each other constantly. I don't think either of us realized at the time how big a role prohibition played in this: Nadya was forbidden fruit, and as the Russian poet Yevtushenko said, stating the obvious, stolen apples taste better than bought ones. Now that we were allowed to see each other, mostly what we did was bicker. And not about spy stuff, either, but about the sorts of things you might expect any not-too-compatible couple to bicker about: who took the room key; you spent too much time in the bathroom and we missed the bus; I want to go on a tour, and you just want to sit on the beach and drink beer. And here was a biggie: "Stop criticizing socialism! My country used to be great!"

My gentle response to that one: Your country still is great, babe. And always will be. England's greatness lies in Shakespeare, parliamentary tradition and the Lake District, not the fact that she once possessed an empire. Russia's greatness lies in Tolstoy, Pushkin, birch forests; a spiritual tradition of suffering and survival that inspires the rest of the world, and oh yes, let's not forget those little meat pies I can't get enough of. There will always be an England and there will always be Russia. Marx and Lenin sold you a bill of goods, but that's over and done with. Move on.

Yes, we bickered. But she also sang Russian songs to me as we stood together on the rocks above the beach after supper at our hotel, and I sang American songs to her. We went for long walks and talked a great deal more than had been possible in Moscow. We swam in the Mediterranean. We shopped in nearby Tossa de Mar. We rode on a carousel in Lloret's town square. We attended an aquatic show, where Nadya clapped her hands and laughed like a little girl at the antics of the dolphins. I'm probably the only American who ever toured Barcelona with a Russian-speaking tour guide: a bus tour was part of Nadya's package and I came along, the only native English-speaker on a bus full of Russians. And yes, we made love.

And yes, when I got back to Washington I sent "the memo" downtown, as the new policy required. I never heard an official peep out of anyone about it.

III

In the years since then, I have seen my "family" at intervals, and on both sides of the pond. Nadya could never be induced to visit America; given the nature of the trouble she got me into in Moscow, I think she always feared that if she showed up on these shores, she would find herself pounced upon by the FBI or some other overly-inquisitive government agency. But we saw each other in various European venues over the next few years: Munich; the Mediterranean coast of Turkey; the Adriatic coast of Croatia. And yes, I did return to Moscow for unofficial visits a couple of times, in 1997 and '98.

But over the years, Nadya's and my relationship has gradually metamorphosed from romance into a sort of affectionate cultural exchange program. She sends me books by Bulgakov, Kuprin and Ludmila Ulitskaya; I send her Jack Kerouac and Saul Bellow.

This shift was probably inevitable, given the enormous geographic gulf between us, plus the fact that Nadya made it clear, very early on, that she had no interest in leaving Russia to come live in the United States. Long-distance romance is a zero-sum game, just ask anyone who's ever played it. We met at the seashore one final time, in 2000, in the little Croatian resort town of Cavtat. I have not seen her since, although we visit on the phone occasionally. When I returned to Moscow in the late 1990s, she took great pleasure in serving as my tour guide, walking me through the Kremlin; past the statues near the Patriarch's Ponds commemorating the fables of "Grandpa" Kruilov; through the Tretyakov art gallery and of course, for long walks in Kuskovo Park, not far from where she lives. Her mother, Nina, speaks no English but is delightful and has always treated me like, well, like family. Nadya and I still bicker now and then, from our opposite sides of the globe, (I've had to learn not to bring up Stalin's name) but we laugh a lot too.

Anya, my sweet little former tutor from Moscow days, worked for several years for the Pepsi-Cola company at its offices near Sheremetovo airport. When I returned to Moscow in 1997 for a week's visit, she commandeered a company car, met me at the airport and took me into town, to the apartment of the Americans I was staying with on Kutuzovski Prospect. One spring during my second and last tour of duty in Germany, she was rewarded by her company for an especially productive quarter with a weekend in Prague. That's just a short hop from Germany, and I drove down to Frankfurt, got on a plane and met Anya and her friend Katya in Prague, where we spent a pleasant weekend walking around that beautiful city, noshing on pizza and reminiscing. Anya got married in 2000 and today has a little boy, Matvei, who is about to turn 6 years old as I write these words. We stay in touch by e-mail and, once in a great while by telephone.

Boris, aka "Bob" is the family member I've seen most often on the left side of the Atlantic. Bob proved himself very adept at "working" post-Soviet society. He has been involved with a number of NGOs, and through them wangled numerous trips to the United States in the late 1990s to attend various workshops and conferences. He spent a year in Baltimore teaching Russian at a school run by the Quakers, and we saw a lot of each other that year as I was living in Washington, D.C. and he would come down to spend the weekend, shop and eat my cooking. (He praised my borsch highly--said it tasted like the real thing.) And of course we would always go to the movies, usually to a second-run theater in Georgetown where you could get in on a Sunday afternoon for two bucks.

Bob happened to be scheduled to fly in from Moscow on the afternoon of Oct. 1, 2000. I was to meet him at Reagan National. The very night before, my ex-wife Chris and I had been having dinner together when my younger sister called from California with the news that my mother had suffered a stroke and had been taken to the hospital. When I met Bob at the airport, I had to respond to his jovial "How are you doing?" with "Not so good. My mother had a stroke yesterday."

I took Bob to Chris' place, and hardly had we come through the door with his suitcases than the phone rang again. It was my sister again, and with more bad news: Mom had suffered a further stroke and it looked like she was a goner. There wasn't time for me to fly out to the west coast and be there; it had all happened too suddenly.

I was living in Baltimore myself by then; I had quit the State Department the previous fall and was now working for a technology company in the Baltimore suburbs. Bob had a few days before he was scheduled to attend his conference, so we agreed that he would come back to Baltimore and spend a few days with me, then return to the D.C. area, where Chris would get custody of him for the rest of his stay.

Bob and I drove to Baltimore and went back to my apartment. That night, as he was planted in front of the TV set watching Richard Gere in The Cotton Club on the American Movie Classics channel, I got yet another phone call from my sister. She was in tears this time.

"We took Mom off life support," she sobbed. "She's gone."

"That's it," I told Bob when I got off the phone. "My mother's dead."

He did the only thing he could do: he got up off the couch and put his arms around me. Nobody wants to be alone at such a moment, and I've often wondered since then about the odd quirk of coincidence that had Bob Demidov flying into Washington, and then staying at my apartment with me, on the very day my mother died. I lived alone in those days, and spent most of my time alone. I had the odd feeling, in the days that followed, that somebody or something wanted someone to be there with me when that awful event happened, and for whatever reason, it just happened to be Russian Bob, who then proceeded to eat me out of house and home over the next few days, because bless his heart, that's what he did best.

Of course I flew to California a couple of weeks later for the memorial service. As I was on my way out the door, suitcase in hand, to head for the airport, I heard the answering machine in my kitchen talking. Somehow I had missed the phone's ring.

I considered just leaving it for when I got back, but decided to check. It might be something important. I went into the kitchen and pushed the button to play back the message.

It was Anya, calling from Moscow. She knew I was to leave that day; I had e-mailed her my travel plans.

"Kelley, this is Anya," she said. "I know there isn't much I can do at a time like this, but I want you to know: I'm with you."

Yes, these people are my family. So whenever I hear of a roof collapse or a bombing in Moscow, I go into an e-mailing and phone-calling tizzy until I'm sure everyone's all right. When I heard of a terrorist attack at an apartment building adjacent to a school a few years ago, I damn near dropped my uppers (I would have, if I'd had uppers.) The Kruschchoba building in which Nadya and her mother live is near a school! Unable to reach Nadya, I e-mailed Sasha, who calmly replied, "Kelley, every apartment complex in Moscow has a school next to it." Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten that. And sure enough, the tragedy had in fact happened on the other side of town.

The theater-hostage crisis hit closer to home. None of "mine" were there, but Nadya had a friend who had tickets for that night, but didn't go. Jeopardy by two degrees of separation.

Sometimes I bore my American friends by talking about Moscow. Since the cold war ended, there just doesn't seem to be much interest in Russia anymore, in fact, until 9/11, it seemed as if many Americans had simply climbed into their treehouses and pulled the rope ladder up after them. What happened overseas didn't matter. It sure does now.

It never stopped mattering for me, fortunately, and I have my "family," as much as my foreign service background, to thank for it.

And now I have to wrap this up, because it's time for me to go to www.weather.com and take a look at the weather forecast and the temperature in Moscow. Got to check and make sure if everyone "back home" is comfortable and warm.

Do svidanya.

No Bloggers Allowed

Last week the Financial Times newspaper published a 4,500-word article, written by Washington, D.C. freelancer Trevor Butterworth, which dismissed blogging as basically a big, fat nothing.

Bloggers should hang it up, take down the posts, delete their blogs and go back to watching Survivor, seemed the article's main thrust. Leave journalism to the professionals, all you yahoos out there in the blogosphere. You haven't challenged the mainstream media, which are alive and well, so you might as well just take your ball and go home. Blogging, touted a few years ago as the Next Big Thing, turned out to be nothing bigger or more lasting to the culture than Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire (remember Darva Conger, anyone?)

Well, the first question that popped into my mind after reading this article was, "If blogging is such a big, fat nothing, why has the Financial Times devoted 4,500 words to dismissing it?" Surely a big, fat nothing doesn't deserve 50 inches of space in one of the world's biggest newspapers.

I detect the gatekeeper mentality here, by which I mean the age-old attitude of those who have finally, after endless social climbing, sycophancy and possibly a few greased palms here and there, been admitted to the Snotty Acres Country Club. They're inside, and they don't want to let anyone else in. "I'm a professional journalist, here are my credentials, and by the way here's the check I got for that piece in the Financial Times. You so-called "citizen journalists" don't even have union cards. Get lost."

I always hesitate to use the term "elite" when talking about the media, and it annoys me when others do. "Elite" is a positive term: "The Marines are a military elite." "He belongs to an elite group, the world's ten best cherry-pit spitters." Wasn't there an old James Caan movie called The Killer Elite?

I'm happy to report that there are those who speak for the other side, such as influential blogger Glenn Reynolds, who has written a book about blogging:

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5601300

When discussing the establishment media and its insistence on dismissing the johnny-come-latelies, the word that comes to my mind is not "elite," but rather, "snobbery," and with all the insecurity that "snobbery" implies. Let me be clear: I will agree with Mr. Butterworth that bloggers are probably not going to put the New York Times out of business. (They don't have to. the New York Times is busy engineering its own obsolescence even as we speak.) But when Dave Barry described newspaper editors, a few years ago already, as "a group of men who hold meetings at which they discuss what to do about the Internet," he was being serious as only really fine humor can be.

Yes, the blogosphere is total anarchy. (Rather like the Internet was in its own infancy.) And yes, there is a lot of crap in the blogosphere. There's also a lot of crap in paper-and-ink journalism, just stroll down to any busy street corner in a major city and look over the myriad "free" newspapers available for the grabbing. As professional journalism, many of them make the better blogs look like back issues of Intellectual Digest.

I confess that I find most blogs unreadable. Too much blogging is done on the fly, with a scissors-and-paste approach: a sentence will be broken up with two or three links to something completely irrelevant, or so obscure that you scratch your head and mutter "Who cares?" followed at the end of the paragraph by a photo of someone's elbow on a restaurant table, a half-empty glass of beer next to it.

Up to a point, the Trevor Butterworths of this world do have a point: a lot of blogging is silly, narcissistic, sloppy, half-baked and obtuse. That's what happens when you make something available to anyone and everyone, make it free no less, and make it easy. If everyone can be his own journalist, any idiot can be a journalist. And there are legions of bloggers out there who can't push a noun against a verb, and if they do, they usually spell it wrong.

But there are a lot of excellent blogs out there, too. You're looking at one. In case you haven't noticed, you're reading an essay here, an editorial, not some crazed pastiche of what my friend J.D. and I had for lunch yesterday at Ernie's Diner. That's what I do when I'm not writing other things. See, I have a union card, like Butterworth: I've written for the "real" media, the kind that dirty your fingers with cheap ink, as many, many bloggers have. I haven't published in the Financial Times, but I have written for a number of newspapers, and--why not toot my own horn a little bit?--I even won an award from the San Diego Press Club a couple of years ago.

Unlike Mr. Butterworth, the fact that I have worked in the "real" media doesn't make me dismissive of blogging. There are some heavy-hitters in the "real" media blogging on the side these days. And in fairness to Butterworth, he does acknowledge that fact, when he notes that "established" journalists, operating as bloggers, took down the arrogant and oh-so-smug Dan Rather in 2004. But a side-note here, Trevor: the memos that Rather peddled to CBS regarding President Bush's National Guard service were not "supposedly fake," as you assert; they were fake, period. Got it? Had they been "supposedly fake," Rather would still have his job.

Yes, making everyone his own journalist seems, on the surface, about as silly as making everyone his own pope. But wait a minute: wasn't that what the Reformation was all about?

Just because a certain medium is swamped at the moment, and swamped with a lot of detritus, doesn't mean we should take the tents down. The term "weblog" is only 10 years old, and any new phenomenon, especially if it's related to disseminating information, is going to generate a lot of brush that will later need clearing. I have been blogging since 2004; Night Thoughts At Noon is my fourth blog in about a year and a half. I've been putting them up and taking them down, experimenting and refining my act until I get it the way I want it. I like the fact that I'm free to do this.

Does it bother me that no one reads my blog? Yes, of course it does. After each posting, I attach its link to an e-mail and send it around to 10 or 15 friends. If I'm lucky, one will respond, which means the other 14 didn't even bother clicking on my link.

But even though that does bother me, I try not to let it. I've been writing since I was in my teens, (which means that when I started I was using a typewriter, a device many under-30 bloggers have never seen) and plan to be blogging long after the novelty has worn off among those out there for whom blogging is indeed just a novelty.

Let's not forget that there was a time when the discursive essay itself, the "editorial," if you will, was also something nobody had ever heard of. The "other directedness" (to use a 1960s term) of the medieval mind-set, in which the only thing that separated man from God was sin, would no doubt have dismissed such assertion of the individual personality as frivolous. Then along came a fellow named Montaigne, and a new level of discourse became available.

So let anarchy reign, I say. Who knows? When the dust settles, maybe blogging will have its own version of the Pulitzer.

See you at the luncheon. It should be interesting.

"Roses for Dummies" vs. The Dummy in the Roses

Remember the great American plant fad?

Chances are you will, provided you're over 40 and spent the years of your youth either in the city, or in suburbia, or in any other setting where nature isn't taken for granted.

The 1970s, my demographic's decade of high school, college and lowered expectations, was without doubt the tackiest decade of the last century. Oh, you think the Fifties were worse? As the French say, "uh-uh." Hula hoops, poodle skirts and Davy Crockett hats were as nothing compared to what the decade of oil embargoes and Watergate gave us. One fad after another came and went, each more idiotic, tasteless, annoying, or all three, than the last. Streaking. Glam rock. Pet rock. CB radio ("Break-break 19, good buddy. Brain-Dead here. Got yer ears on?...") Disco. Roller disco. Polyester leisure suits. Big, ugly medallions. Pop Rocks. Mohawks.

You get the idea. And in the midst of all this, while we were watching (or avoiding) The Waltons, Charlie's Angels, Three's Company and Battlestar Galactica (the original version, in which Lorne Greene and the blow-dried warriors of Galactica went up against the Cylons, an army of malignant outer-space jukeboxes) we were also hanging, stringing, and potting plants all over our houses, apartments and various flops. Your hanging plants became as much a part of your family as your schnauzer or your tabby. When you moved to a smaller place, you found friends to adopt your plants. Just about everybody's place, in the '70s, looked like a cross between the Amazon basin and the local gypsy tea room. In the 1974 film Conrack, Jon Voight spray-waters his plants before getting his day started. Very "Seventies," that scene.

Where did all of this originate? Who knows? There was a conservation fad at the very beginning of that decade which exalted everything green, but of course that's not what it was called. "Conservation" was hardly a good marketing term for a fad that wanted to tie itself to the Sixties counterculture movement. After all, "conservation" has the same lexical root as "conservative:" how un-hip does that sound? No, the politically-charged buzzword for the conservation movement was "Ecology," although conservation was really what Earth Day was all about. Could you have imagined all those tree-hugging hippies chanting "Conservation Now?" I think not. A popular band of that era, Rare Earth, called one of its albums Ecology. Had it been called Conservation, it probably wouldn't have gone too far up the charts. (Without wandering too far afield here, "conservation" has a Latin root, while "ecology" comes from the Greek. Were the Greeks "cooler" than the Romans?)

Be all that as it may, my point is that it could have been a natural segue from "Ecology Now" and "Save The Whales" to surrounding yourself on all sides with burgeoning, friendly ferns that you could dust, spray-water and talk baby-talk to, in order that you might feel "close to the land," up there in your sixth-floor walkup with the orange-crate bookcases, the waterbed, the hibachi on the fire escape and the wall poster over the beanbag chair of David Bowie as Aladdin Sane.

I wasn't part of it. Then or later. The closest thing to plants in my room were the dust-bunnies under the bed, or the occasional science project that would start spontaneously in a cup of coffee forgotten in the bathroom. The last gift anybody ever wanted to give me, if they knew what was good for the gift, was a plant.

As a little boy when I had my tonsils out, I was given a small plant, in a cute little planter that depicted a baseball-catcher, crouching behind the plate, as a get-well gift. I got well, but the plant didn't. Despite my watering (or maybe because of it) the plant died.

That pretty much set the tone for my life with plants. In short, I have a proverbial black thumb. I can't grow anything. A couple of summers ago, when my father was still alive, I did manage to put in our family's annual crop of summer tomatoes in the back yard, and they did quite well. In fact we had so many tomatoes we were giving them away. But I was just functioning as my father's hands and knees; he was the one who knew about growing tomatoes, but at age 89 he could no longer do the necessary kneeling and digging. So I did the kneeling and digging, putting the plants just where he told me to, spacing them apart just so, putting in the fertilizer just so, and then watering them according to his schedule. Result: vicarious success.

But this past summer, with my father sinking into dementia, I could no longer rely on his help. Reluctant to abandon a family tradition that went back more than 20 years, I tried to put in the tomato crop without his guidance, and the result was a regular tomato massacre: half my plants died and had to be replaced. At least half the rest ended up rotten or caterpillar-gnawed and had to be thrown into the weeds for the neighborhood possums, who fortunately aren't too choosy. We did have a few fresh tomatoes last summer, but with me playing the Old MacDonald role, the glory days of bumper crops were over.

And now my wife and I have decided to go into business. We have bought a bed-and-breakfast in Spokane, Washington, the Fotheringham House (www.fotheringham.net) We're very excited about this new venture; neither of us has ever run a B&B before, or in my case, ever run anything before. Until Valerie and I were married, I always assumed that I was going to spend the rest of my functional life on someone's payroll or unemployed. This will be the first time I've ever been in business for myself. Fortunately, Valerie has been in business before. She has run a successful real-estate business for almost ten years. This pretty clearly indicates what the breakdown of work is going to be at our bed-and-breakfast. Valerie's an experienced businesswoman; I make a mean omelet. She's going to be running the business; I'm going to be the chief cook, sommellier and groundskeeper.

And therein lies my source of anxiety. The Fotheringham House has a rose garden. And not just any rose garden, but one which is pretty well-known in the area. Take a look at it: http://www.fotheringham.net/gardens.html. We flew to Spokane this winter to see the place and meet the couple from whom we're buying it. We discovered that the gardens around the Fotheringham House are something of a local attraction: there's a park right across the street, and in the spring and summer when the weather is good, people visiting the park often stroll across the street to behold the Fotheringham rose garden.

And I'M going to be responsible for the care of this magnificent garden? I, who couldn't keep ferns alive in my apartment in Germany, even though the windows faced east and west and I was able to give them both morning and afternoon sunshine? I, half of whose tomatoes last year either wouldn't grow at all or ended up being tossed to the possums?

Poul Jensen, who has been running Fotheringham House for the last five years with his wife Irene, told me I have nothing to worry about. He didn't know anything about roses when he took over either, he said, and the gardens have been flourishing under his care.

Somehow I don't find that too reassuring. He doesn't know he's talking to the Jack Kervorkian of the plant world. Yes, I do take some solace in the fact that the Jensens aren't moving far away--in fact they're only moving across the street. Should I discover in a panic one fine morning that my flowers are dropping like audience attention at this year's Grammy Awards, I can dash across the street and ask Poul for some guidance. But of course I don't want to do that too often.

My wife bought me a copy of Roses For Dummies. This book might prove helpful; I'm hoping to be able to secure some guidance from it. But I do have a track record for always coming up with the one problem, whether we're talking about a car, a computer, a cell phone or a rose, that's not covered in the book.

And it doesn't help any, knowing that these gardens have a reputation. I'm going to be the keeper of a landmark, for heaven's sake. Talk about psychological pressure: now I know how the guys who sweep up around the Lincoln Memorial feel.

I guess I'll go leaf through my new handbook and see if I'm able to anticipate--and maybe head off--a few potential rose-disasters that might confront me when it's time to put on the overalls and face my delicate, redolent charges...not to mention my public from the park across the street. But I can tell you this much for certain: before actually attempting the hands-on care of Fotheringham's famous garden, I'll be consulting some other titles as well.

Four Roses sounds like a good one...

It ain't over 'til the fat guy dies

Way back in 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young recorded a catchy, but extremely silly song entitled Deja vu. It was the title track from one of their albums, actually. In hyperventilating harmony, the quartet gushed about the possibility of reincarnation: "And ya know, it makes me wonder,/What's goin' on,/Uuuuuuuuunder/The ground!"

I don't know about the ground, but sometimes I wonder, quite seriously, what's goin' on, uuuuuuuup in,/the air.

My religious friends maintain that some things in this world just can't be explained, and must be left to the mysterious ways of the Lord. My atheist friends maintain that there's nothing that can't be explained, given enough scientific theorizing and research. I'll let them duke that out.

In the meantime, I'm wondering about invisible signals from Out There Someplace. No, I'm not hearing voices. It's just that it's happened repeatedly in my life that I'll be going about my daylight business, spinning out the stream of consciousness which in real life is much more complicated than James Joyce or William Faulkner ever made it in a book, and some odd confluence of data comes together in the course of the day.

A very simple example (kind of a silly one, but it illustrates what I'm driving at): I'm a TV rerun addict. I got hooked on Nick at Nite back in the 1980s, and still watch its successor cable channel, TV Land. I've been a member of the Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watcher's Club since 1990.

I'll be muddling my way through the course of a typical day, and all of a sudden I'll remember a line from or an episode of TAGS, as we fans call the show, for example the episode where the goat eats the dynamite, (Otis: "You're not Uncle George! You're a goat!") and then later that day when I switch on the tube, voila, they're running the episode about the goat that eats the dynamite.

Okay, 249 episodes of TAGS were filmed between 1960, when the show came on the air, and 1968, when it went off the air, so you could argue that on any given day I have a 1-in-249 chance of thinking about that day's episode. Then again, if you factor in the possibility that I might not think about the show at all on a given day, the odds against my picking the right episode diminish significantly.

Still, it has happened often enough to catch my attention, and not just with regard to TAGS, but to other television shows, and movies as well. Just yesterday, around lunchtime, I was thinking of a scene from Stanley Kubrick's classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Last night at 7:00, when I switched on Turner Classic Movies, not only were they running 2001, but exactly the scene I had been thinking of.

Just what the heck is it about me and my TV set that we're so in tune with each other? Is it possible that among the electric shenanigans that the neurons in my brain are up to every waking hour, is something that makes me a sort of on-again-off-again TV antenna, capable of picking up a stray signal here and there, even as I'm buying a pound of cheese at Albertson's or putting the dog outside to pee on the lawn?

Maybe some of us are better at this sort of thing than others. I used to have a girlfriend, way over in Moscow, Russia, named Nadya. This was long-distance romance at its most inconvenient. Nadya and I actually got to see one another perhaps once every 18 months to two years, living as we did on different continents. And before the murderous competition of the Baby Bells and whatnot drove the cost of long-distance calling down to the dirt-cheap levels it's at now, I couldn't afford to call her on the phone very often. But almost invariably, when I did call, Nadya would say, "I knew you were going to call tonight," or "I was just thinking about you."

I'll bet you've had an experience like this, haven't you? You'll be thinking about someone you haven't thought of in a while, a friend, a relative, an enemy or maybe even a celebrity you don't think about very often. Next thing you know, you get a phone call or an e-mail from that person, or if it's a celebrity, you read their obituary in the newspaper. True vignette: many years ago, while living in Germany, I was going over the titles on my library shelf one afternoon, and happened to reach down a copy of James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It On The Mountain. I hadn't read it since college, or thought about it in years. I leafed through it, remembering when I had first read it, then put it back on the shelf and went about my business.

The next day I saw Baldwin's obituary in the International Herald-Tribune. "Looks like I bumped off another celebrity," I remarked in my diary, since this sort of coincidence had happened before.

Heads up, Reese Witherspoon: you don't want me thinking about you too often. Okay, darlin', you've been warned. Exercise, watch your diet, have regular check-ups and hope I find another movie star to admire from afar.

I had a particularly striking experience of this sort just this week, striking enough (and weird enough) to justify making some notes about this odd phenomenon of now-I'm-tuned-in, now-I'm-not.

Back in 1994, nearly 12 years ago, I was a federal employee sitting at my desk in suburban Washington, D.C. doing what federal employees do: woolgathering and waiting for it to be 5 p.m. so I could go home. I had a copy of the Washington Post that I'd picked up that morning, and picking idly through it, making my way leisurely to my horoscope and Calvin and Hobbes, I came across the odd story of Mitchell Rupe.

Mitchell Rupe was on death row in Washington state. He had been convicted of fatally shooting two Olympia bank tellers during a robbery in 1981 and was awaiting the noose. (Capital punishment in the state of Washington is hanging.)

Rupe came up with an extremely original way of cheating the hangman. He went on a prolonged eating binge. Somehow, in addition to the prison food, he managed to smuggle so much junk food into the joint, and gobble it all down, that his weight ballooned to more than 400 pounds. Then, as his conviction was going through the mandatory appeal process that all death penalty cases go through, his lawyer pitched the notion to the judge that Rupe must not hang. Being as fat as he was, his lawyer argued, there was now the possibility that if he were hanged he would be decapitated, and decapitation is "cruel and unusual punishment."

The judge bought the story. Rupe had eaten his way off death row.

I was writing a letter to Nadya that week, as I often did in those days, and like a good letter-writer I was in the habit of tucking in pictures, newspaper clippings and other items of interest. I found this item so curious, one of those things that ends up in the "weird news" roundup of the tabloids, that I clipped it and tucked it in with my letter, to give Nadya, who had never been to America, a glimpse of the absurdities that often attend the American criminal justice system.

The letter was mailed off to Moscow, and that was the last thought I gave Mitchell Rupe for more than 11 years.

Wednesday, February 8, 2006: I'm driving my car across Chula Vista in the bright morning sunshine, returning home after running some errands. Just as I'm crossing the intersection of Hilltop Drive and H Street, I suddenly remember the story about the fat guy who beat the rope with a regimen of twinkies and ding-dongs back in the mid-1990s. I do not remember his name. I cross the intersection, continue on my way and my thoughts very quickly move on to other things.

1 p.m., same day: I decide to drop in at my favorite Chula Vista cafe, Ernie's Diner, for some lunch. That morning I had picked up a copy of the San Diego Union-Tribune, but had not had a chance to look at it yet. I walk into Ernie's with the newspaper tucked under my arm, head for the outdoor patio in back (I like Ernie's because you can eat outdoors and enjoy the California sunshine) and order my usual. My waitress friend Timoko brings me a glass of wine.

While waiting for my salad, I sip my wine and begin perusing the U-T. On page A4, about halfway down the left side of the page, I glimpse this mini-item:

Spared convict dies
after lengthy illness

SPOKANE, Wash.--Mitchell Rupe,
a former death row inmate
once found too obese
to hang, died at the Washing-
ton State Penitentiary
in Walla Walla yesterday
after a long illness, a prison
spokeswoman said. He was
51 and died in the prison hos-
pital of liver disease.

The Associated Press story recounted Rupe's tale in one additional paragraph, concluding that he had weighed about 270 pounds when he died.

To my atheist-materialist friends who will shrug this off with "coincidence" and go back to watching American Idol, I would respond only that as coincidences go, it's an extremely strange one. To my religious friends who will see agency in this snapshot of deja fat before they go back to watching American Idol, I can only respond, why in the world would God want to bring me "full circle" on something so utterly bizarre, which certainly falls under the heading of Useless Information unless I myself happen to be binging on twinkies these days, which I'm not?

Probably the same reason he wanted to remind me not to miss the episode about the goat that ate the dynamite.

And so to breakfast.