Harold Hill? Forget It. Bill Scharf was the music man

Photo at right: Bill Scharf and the author. Rockville, MD, 1995.








I'm listening, as I write this, to an old monaural recording of Beethoven's opera Fidelio.

This live performance, on CD, was made April 26, 1952 in Frankfurt-am-Main, in what was then called West Germany.

I myself would not visit Frankfurt until the mid-1980s. In fact in 1952 I wasn't even born yet.

But William J. Scharf of Cleveland, Ohio was alive, kicking and collecting recordings like this one, and it would be my great good fortune, 37 years later, to make his acquaintance, not to mention the acquaintance of his collection of opera recordings.

And that's not to mention the acquaintance of his remarkable personality. Now that was my great good fortune.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live to a biblical old age, as George Burns and Bob Hope did.

If you ask most people whether they'd like to live to be 100 years old, most people would say yes reflexively -- dying isn't on the "fave" list of anyone I can think of.

But supposing you did live to be 100 years old. Since so few people live that long, by the time you got there, just about everyone you knew in your life would be gone, that is unless you were still making friends in your eighties and nineties.

My pal Bill Scharf didn't live to be 100. He died Aug. 8, 2006 at age 87. But I just know that if Bill had made it to the century mark, he wouldn't have lacked for living friends. He was that kind of guy.

Take me, for example.

What brought Bill and me together was music. Vocal music, to be precise. Bill was a lifelong, passionate, one might almost say fanatic opera lover. He had the most incredible archive of recorded vocal music I have ever encountered. He aspired to sing opera when he was young, never quite got there, but nevertheless followed it, studied it and enjoyed it with a vengeance throughout his life.

It was around 1989 that Bill and I met, through the mail. I was living in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, and working at the American embassy there. Bill was living right where he always had, in the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Brook Park. Bill spent nearly his whole life there, and by the way, with Bill gone, how many people are left now who saw, live and in person, Bob Feller pitch for the Cleveland Indians?

And How did a 33 year-old guy living in Brazil and a 70 year-old guy living in Ohio find each other?

Music, like I said. I was searching for a rare, out-of-print Philips recording by the Irish tenor Frank Patterson, a set of Irish songs arranged by Beethoven for voice, piano and cello. I had been carrying this recording around for years on a cassette tape, pirated from an LP that I'd borrowed from the local public library when I was in college. But the tape was getting worn out, and I was looking for someone who might have this recording and might be willing to make me a fresh pirate copy.

I wrote a letter to the Musical Heritage Society, asking if any of my fellow collectors out there might have this recording and be willing to either make me a copy of it or sell it to me. My letter ran in the next issue of Musical Heritage Review. To my surprise, several of my fellow collectors didn't even wait for me to send them blank tapes or postage: they just went ahead and copied this record, or in some cases a similar one by tenor Bob White, and dropped them in the mail to me.

Bill Scharf was one of these generous pirate-copiers, and along with his tape he tucked in a gracious note saying, among other things, that he, too, had a fondness for this recording.

I tapped out a polite thank-you note and dropped it into the mail going back to the U.S. (The Internet and e-mail were still about four years away at this point.)

Little did I know it, but I'd tapped into a gusher of music. It's a common trait among collectors to enjoy sharing their stuff. Bill really enjoyed it -- seldom would I mention a particular composer or singer in a letter to him that Bill would not respond by filling another cassette tape with bleeding chunks and historic tracks and firing it off to me. He had been recording the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts off the airwaves for decades and had an archive of LPs that must easily have been large enough to keep a radio station going for a year. Soon I had a whole shelf full of cassette tapes, riches from Bill's cornucopia of historic vocal recordings.

I wanted to reciprocate somehow, but how? Yes, I was a collector too, but comparing my collection with his was tantamount to comparing Belgium's nuclear arsenal with Russia's. Finally I selected one of the gems of my collection, a recording I'd made off the radio a few years earlier of Karl Boehm conducting the Bruckner 7th, and sent it off to Bill. Bill immediately protested that I mustn't worry about returning his generosity, but I wanted to. "We're collectors, you and I," I wrote back. "One of the things collectors like to do is share their stuff with each other."

Sure, by now I was regularly sending him money to buy tapes with: if he was going to record all these hundreds of hours of music for me, the least I could do was pay for the tapes and postage. But I found other ways to pay him back. A few years after we first met through the mail, I, now posted at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and able to buy Russian tourist goodies by the carload at the famous Ismailova flea market, went around and asked all my friends back in the states who would like a Russian fur hat, and what kind and what size? Soon I was dispatching a parcel to Brook Park, Ohio containing a brown beaver hat for Bill and a white fox hat for his wife Olivia, known to one and all as "Ollie." Bill dubbed me "The Moscow hat man."

We met in the flesh only once, Bill and I. A year or so after the Moscow experience, I was back in Washington, D.C. when the news suddenly came that Ollie had died from emphysema. A nurse for many years, she had nonetheless maintained a heavy smoking habit. Bill wasn't in the habit of talking about his or his family's troubles, so Olivia's death took me completely by surprise (as would Bill's 11 years later.) I got on the phone and called him. We talked for a long time. Bill was a very devout Catholic and was counting on his faith to see him through this. I remember being struck by the stoicism of his comment that "Now it's just me and the dog."

Bill's son, Bill Jr. lived in Rockville, MD., just a short drive from my digs on Capitol Hill. Bill Sr. announced one week that he was coming to Rockville to visit Bill Jr. and his family. Would I like to meet for lunch? Of course I would. The following Saturday, with directions I'd gotten from Bill Jr., I drove out to his house in Rockville.

There I finally met Bill. He wasn't especially tall, but he was physically imposing: big hands, a firm handshake, and the kind of forceful baritone voice you might expect from someone who had once aspired to be an opera singer. After I'd been introduced to Bill Jr.'s family, Bill and I quickly hustled off in my 1990 Geo Storm to get some lunch. We went to a place that made excellent gyros sandwiches and had a nice long chat while we noshed on them. Bill had done a little bit of just about everything in his pre-retirement life, from writing and editing corporate newsletters to selling insurance to painting houses. He had some stories to tell, but none was quite so remarkable as the story he told that dated from his wife Olivia's funeral, just a month or so earlier.

I've mentioned that Bill was devout. He told me of how, the night Olivia died, he had prayed fervently for a sign. Acknowledging that he was way out of line having the audacity to make such a request of the Almighty, he nevertheless did make this request: if indeed Olivia was with God that night, Bill's entreaty went, would God...well, what? He had to think about it for a minute. "Have someone give me a rose," he related praying. "Or they don't even have to give me a rose. Just have someone call my attention to a rose."

That, Bill told me, had been his prayer.

The very next morning, he continued, he went to his daughter's house, where a family get-together had been planned following a memorial service for Ollie.

"I knocked on the door, and I swear, the moment my daughter opened it, the first thing she did was take me by the arm and say, 'Look, Dad! Over here on the table! Someone sent the most beautiful roses!' And there on the table was a bouquet of one dozen absolutely gorgeous roses. Throughout that day, people kept steering me toward that table and pointing out those roses. Finally I whispered, 'Enough, already, Lord. I get the message!"

I countered with my own recent brush with the paranormal. "Okay, you've told me your story. Now, from the sublime to the ridiculous," I said. "The other day I was reading Calvin and Hobbes because I never miss it, and at the bottom of the same page was my horoscope. It said, 'Count your change! Confusion exists with regard to an expense account! If you're not careful, you'll end up paying a bill you've already paid!' Just the day before I'd gotten a notice from the State Department claiming I had $1,750 in unvouchered travel advances from 1991."

I liked Bill's story better.

Watching the calendar as the new millenium approached, I realized that Bill was past 80 now, and I began to wonder, as the years went by, how I would find out when and if he had died, seeing as how he was now a widower. But he moved from Brook Park to another part of Ohio to be nearer some of his children, so at least he wasn't completely alone. By now we were staying in touch, sporadically, by e-mail. His eyesight was going, as evidenced by the typos in his messages. But he wasn't slowing down; as the new century dawned he was in the middle of a new project: transferring his entire massive archive, or as much as of it as he could manage, from the older tape and LP media to CDs.

In one of his e-mails to me in California, where I was by now living, he mentioned having had a complete checkup recently, but then added, "The doctor declared me good for another 100,000 miles."

I was blogging by now. Bill wasn't much of a blog-reader (not surprising, given that his eyesight was failing) but he did take time out from his busy archiving schedule to shoot me a nasty e-mail informing me that what I had just written criticising the teaching of Intelligent Design in biology classes was "bilge." This was the first negative thing he'd ever said to me. But it didn't stop him from continuing to share with me the riches of his collection, now coming packaged in handsome home-burned CDs with labels showing them clearly to be products of the "Scharf Lab and Archive."

It was completely in character for Bill to not bother mentioning that he had lung cancer. But I have a well-developed sense of the ominous, and when an e-mail popped into my inbox around mid-August of this year, with the subject line "Regarding William Scharf," I knew it wasn't going to be anything good. Bill Jr. in Rockville was informing everyone in Bill senior's Yahoo e-mail address book, a large company of which I was part, that his father had passed away a week earlier.

Well, now I don't have to wonder anymore. There's nothing left now but to be grateful. Grateful to Bill for having lived, grateful to whatever God there may be for allowing me to know him, and of course grateful for the 17-year bounty that I was permitted to enjoy through my long-distance association with this remarkable wannabe singer of long ago who made the service of a great art form his life's consuming passion. "May your last thinks all be thanks," as W.H. Auden wrote. Bill, thanks for your life and thanks for the music.

Coming up after Fidelio, Grace Bumbry and Shirley Verrett in Concert, Convent Garden, 4/25/82. I'm gonna crank this baby up loud. Let the neighbors complain if they want. Music, on this night, knows no regrets.

Eek, I did it again

The audience of four or five that reads my blog when prompted to, because it knows that I won't shut up and leave it alone until it does, is familiar with a posting I put up last February, It Ain't Over 'til The Fat Guy Dies. http://kelleyo.blogspot.com/2006/02/it-aint-over-til-fat-guy-dies.html

In that posting, I discussed the odd phenomenon that every now and then I'll be thinking about a certain person, usually a celebrity, and within a day or two I see that person's obituary in the news.

Just call me the Accidental Reaper. Or The Reaper Unaware.

And it just happened again.

Check out the photo, above right. That is correct, movie buffs. June Allyson, the "Perfect Wife" of all those World War II-era movies, died Saturday at her home in Ojai, CA. She was 88.

I don't know what precise time she died on Saturday, but I shouldn't be at all surprised to learn that it was sometime between 1:15 and 2:15 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time.

That's because I was uttering her name, out loud, at that very moment.

Okay, scoffers, scoff away. Just remember that I've experienced this spooky confluence of events, e.g., I think of 'em and then they die, more than once.

Mystics, heads up. We could be talking about a chicken-and-egg thing here: perhaps it's not that my thinking of them bumps them off, but that I have a psychic strain in me that I don't know about and somehow, when one of these celebs checks out for the Great Studio Commissary In The Sky, their departing shade twangs a chord in the universe that somehow one of my neurons is tuned into. I don't know. Could be the same reason I think of the Andy Griffith Show episode about the goat that ate the dynamite, and then find that that very episode is being played on TV Land that very same day. That's also happened plenty of times.

And yes, it could be just a case of heuristic rock-skipping--one thought leads to another thought, which leads to a name, and every once in a seventh-son-of-the-seventh-son blue moon, they all come together in one great crash of coincidence. No causation, just two flies hovering in St. Paul's Cathedral that manage to bump into each other. Don't know. Probably never will. But here's what happened.

On Saturday, July 8, I was driving to Post Falls, Idaho from Spokane, Washington on a routine "liquor run." Liquor is cheaper in Idaho than in Washington, so I buy my liquor there. Why not? Post Falls is only 25 minutes from Spokane; I can drive over there, buy a jug and drive back in one hour.

While cruising along Interstate 90 toward the Washington-Idaho border, I had the radio on in the car. I was listening to Spokane's jazz station, KEWU, broadcasting from Eastern Washington University. On Saturday afternoons KEWU regularly broadcasts a program of pop tunes from the 1930s and '40s. Hearing this World War II music made me think of a radio documentary about those years in America, The Home Front, which was broadcast in the early 1970s. My Aunt, Jessie Billon, who died a few years ago, once gave me a set of cassette tapes on which she had copied this entire documentary. She wanted to share it with me. My Aunt Jessie, you see, and her husband, my Uncle Pete Billon, also dead now, were what you might call "World War II kids." They were married, when both were still quite young, in 1944.

Uncle Pete was a civilian pilot in the war. He would have served in the military, but was classified 4F due to back problems. Instead, an already accomplished, passionate flyer, he signed on with the China National Air Corp and flew cargo planes betweeen India and China. That was before my time, but I saw the photographs. When I got to know him, (I was born long after the war) he was with United Airlines: for 26 years he flew back and forth between Los Angeles and Honolulu. Uncle Pete loved to fly. It was his life. (You wouldn't think I was his nephew, by the way -- I hate to get anywhere near an airplane. I fly when I have to, but I hate it. I'd rather travel by train any time.)

Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, for understandable reasons, had a nostalgic weakness for that period, which some others who lived through it, my parents for example, did not. For Jessie and Pete, the WWII years were the years of youth, beauty, love, romance, marriage. Never mind Hitler: they were young and healthy and my Aunt Jessie was beautiful. I know because I saw a picture. In fact I saw it often. In fact that picture is burned into my brain.

My grandmother had pictures of all her children around the house of course, and when we would visit her, we kids would see those pictures. Atop the piano were a photo of my mother, (also quite beautiful) and one of Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, taken either on their wedding day or right after. There he is in his dapper uniform; there she is, in a WWII-era print dress, with a WWII-era hairdo. Both are beaming. Aunt Jessie remembered that the judge who married them had taken one look at their ages on the marriage license and harrumphed, "Hmmph. Just a couple of kids!" A genuine harrumph.

The music made me think of the documentary, the documentary made me think of my late aunt and uncle, and the combination of the two made me think of that picture.

Now here comes the "combination of the three" moment: I tried to think of an appropriate descriptive phrase to place that old photo in perspective. "It looks like something from a June Allyson movie," I thought. Then I thought it again. Now, confession time: I KNOW that most people talk to themselves in their cars, but I'm going to admit, openly, that I actually do it. I said it OUT LOUD, with no one there to hear but myself, the radio and the dashboard: "That picture looked like something out of a June Allyson movie." Well, yeah, I always thought my Aunt Jessie looked a tiny bit like June Allyson, but the point is, I thought the thought, and said it out loud. Because it wasn't just a question of my aunt's slight resemblance to June Allyson. It was the whole ball of WWII-era wax: the music, the photo, the memory of that set of documentary tapes. I also remembered that my aunt and uncle, again completely unlike my parents, were inordinately fond of the music of that era: Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Sinatra, Peggy Lee and all the rest of it. June Allyson was inextricably a part of all that, and the kind of actress more likely to be in an imaginary wedding photo with a dashing young flyer than the Rita Hayworths, Betty Grables and Hedy Lamarrs of that era. Those gals all ended up on the inside doors of GI lockers. June Allyson, as her obituary noted, was the one the boys dreamed of bringing home to meet their parents.

That was Saturday. On Monday I saw June Allyson's obituary on Yahoo.com.

Like I said, scoff away. But I'll tell you what: perhaps, as a public service, I should set up a new blog on which I will post the names of celebrities I've been thinking about today. If you're a celebrity, not dead yet, and your name happens to pop up on that list, you might want to make a quick check and see if your affairs are in order.

That is, if you're not already dead.

I have measured out my life with Wally & the Beav

Surfing the web site of TV Land, the cable channel that spotlights classic reruns, (it took over this function a few years ago from its "parent" channel, Nick at Nite) I came across a commemorative blurb about one of the channel's omnipresent offerings, Leave It To Beaver.

Dave Barry once remarked that it was a sign of how truly innocent America once was that television producers in 1957 would think of creating a show whose main character bore the name "Beaver." Yuk-yuk-yuk.

I've been watching Leave It To Beaver almost all my life, something I'm sure the show's original creators never imagined. Yes, syndicated reruns have been with us since Lucy and Desi first created them, but the idea that a show would go on in syndicated reruns forever is a notion that, I'm sure, occurred to few in the 1950s. I'd be very much surprised, in fact, to learn that even Marshall MacLuhan, the guru of media in the 1960s, ever thought of such a thing.

Leave It To Beaver is, in fact, just one of a list of TV shows that I've been watching since I was a kid, and occasionally still watch if there's nothing else on or if I'm waiting for a ball game to start.

My late sister and I were what you might call rerun aficionados ("junkies" if you're less charitable.) We were so in-tune with the reruns we both loved that we used to stand around and whip lines on each other, each challenging the other to recognize the line and, if possible, come back with the appropriate response. The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy formed the core of our repertoire. (Lynn was such an I Love Lucy fan that she could spot production flaws in some of the shows that she had seen more than 500 times, and would point them out to you.)

There are, let me hasten to add, some reruns I won't watch. As in, "They stunk then and they stink now." I never cared for The Brady Bunch, wouldn't even watch it when I was in junior high school and it first came on the air. Three's Company is another bit of '70s fluff with which I would not bother, then or now. In this same vein, a few years ago one of the cable channels was offering up a real moldy oldie from the early '60s, The Real McCoys. Now, I did watch The Real McCoys when I was say, in the fourth grade and it ran on weekday mornings between Lucy and Pete and Gladys, the December Bride spin-off that put Harry Morgan, who would later play Colonel Potter on M*A*S*H, on the sitcom map. (My mother once remarked that "that damned Real McCoys nearly drove me nuts" on days when, due to illness or holidays, my sisters and I were home from school and planted in front of the tube on a weekday morning.) But when The Real McCoys turned up on cable circa 1999, the 44 year-old version of myself quickly shut it off. Great comedy stays fresh; "sappy" doesn't.

So what is it about Leave It To Beaver? Great comedy it isn't, not like Lucy or Dick Van Dyke. I don't know, but I've tended to come back to it -- sometimes just affectionately surfing by -- over and over through the years. A sheepish confession: a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, when President Bush made his famous prime-time speech announcing the war on terror, a colleague at the office asked me the next day, "Did you hear Bush's speech last night?" "I missed it," I replied. "In fact I forgot it was going to be on. I was watching Leave It To Beaver." Hey, it was nine p.m., I was sitting in my favorite chair, and TV Land happened to be my favorite channel. Ipsi Dixit.

Maybe it's just something like comfort food. You know what's going to happen next, there are no surprises, and nobody's facing any consequences for their actions more serious than a stern talking-to from Dad. It isn't great comedy, but because the show's writers based many of the scripts on the stupid things their own kids actually did, it still has a ring of authenticity. Kids don't talk like Wally and the Beav any more, but they still commit similarly goofy acts. The episode in which Beaver loses the money he was given for a haircut, and rather than confess the loss to his parents, lets Wally give him a truly horrible coif, could as easily have been made in 2006 as in 1958. Some things never change, and the tendency of kids to prefer deception over honesty from a fear of parental punishment is one of them.

But one thing has changed, over the years, in my relationship with Leave It To Beaver. As I'm sure is the case with many of my contemporaries, my attitude toward the show has changed in perfect pace with my own growth from childhood to early adulthood to middle age.

Beaver had already left prime-time when I became a regular watcher. I was two years old when it premiered. It ran until 1963, but my mother was such a stickler for having her kids go to bed early that I was seldom up when the show came on in prime time. I recall getting up one night for a drink of water or some such thing and seeing my parents, on the living room sofa, actually watching the prime-time incarnation of Leave It To Beaver. I became a regular watcher myself a year or two later, when the show had left prime time and gone immediately into syndication. One of the local stations in San Diego began running it in the afternoons between 4:00 and 5:00. I would come home and watch it after school. Its appeal to me at that age was obvious: kids love to watch shows whose main characters are kids.

By the time I got to high school, Leave It To Beaver had gone the way that Captain Kangaroo went when I started the fifth grade -- I was now, officially, too hip and sophisticated for such things. High school kids think they know everything, and they love to think of themselves as pillars of sophistication, way ahead of, say, their parents for instance. I, and my sister by the way, took on a derisive attitude toward the show, and no longer watched it unless it was to sit and mock the corny way its characters talked. "Gee, Beaver," we'd say to each other, our voices dripping with sarcasm. In fact we started referring to the show itself as Gee, Beaver. My best friend Jim and I would get together and literally wince at the dialogue, especially in the later shows when the "Beaver" character was getting to be of high school age himself. The teenager of the early 1960s, to the teenager of the early 1970s, was a laughable dinosaur. We were the only authentic teenagers. Whoever didn't speak our patois was just painfully "out of it," as we used to say in those days, and that included the characters on Beaver. The show became a joke.

The next phase of the show's place in my generation's progress from mumps to Alzheimer's might be called The Nick at Nite years. Not for nothing was Nick the success it was, from the mid-1980s on. From about the time the first wave of Boomers hit their early thirties, nostalgia became a highly marketable commodity. A preliminary flicker of this trend hit around 1982, when "Classic Rock" radio stations coast-to-coast began playing 1960s music, and then the movie The Big Chill came along, a nostalgia trip for the "war babies" generation that preceded ours. Dredging up the TV shows that we had all grown up with couldn't be far behind, and when I returned to the U.S. in 1988 after two years in Europe, I was delighted to find the Nickelodeon channel offering, after 8 p.m., a cornucopia of nostalgic treats for those who were kindergarten-aged during the Kennedy years: Make Room For Daddy, My Three Sons, Mr. Ed and The Donna Reed Show, one right after the other, irresistible as pistachios.

From having been the butt of jokes 20 years earlier, Leave It To Beaver was now a "classic." It had become one of those shows that you, with your nascent middle-aged spread, could tune in after a couple of Scotch-and-sodas and get all misty for home, sweet yesterday, that pre-work-force arcadia when your most daunting responsibility was getting your math homework done, and your biggest anxiety whether your younger brother was going to get more Christmas presents than you did.

And now? Now that the 1960s are too far behind us to even occasion nostalgia, Beaver has become a cultural artifact, a distant mirror into which we can gaze with a telescope and make sage observations about the nature of that age gone by. (Dave Barry's crack about beavers, for example.) The show has traced an arc in nearly 50 years, running from popular entertainment to the butt of cornball jokes to a self-indulgent exercise in nostalgia to something almost approximating a museum piece. Ward Cleaver in his age, like Cliff Huxtable in his and, to a lesser extent, Tim Taylor in his, is held up as a model of what his era regarded as a nearly-ideal dad. Even June Cleaver, who was once the object of feminist derision for her habit of doing housework in high heels and a necklace, (Barbara Billingsley, who played the role of June, explained a few years ago that she wore the heels chiefly because Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow, who played her sons, were both taller than she was and it didn't seem appropriate somehow for the boys to be taller than their mother) is no longer ridiculed as she once was. We're sufficiently remote from the Eisenhower-Kennedy years now that ridicule would seem gratuitous at best, quaint at worst. The June Cleaver jokes have all been worn out.

Despite its age, the show has that one element of timelessness going for it, to wit, the fact that children are occasionally quite impossible (like Monday through Sunday, for instance.) Since the basic predicaments of childhood haven't changed much in 5,000 years and probably never will, I can see Leave It To Beaver still being in reruns when our children's children are wondering what the heck their children did with that money they were given this morning for a haircut. Or why they have a baby alligator stashed in the tank of the hall toilet. Or how they could be put on a bus together and end up in different cities. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose. Viva the Beav.

Poems, prayers and promises with the Provenzas

Photo on left: The father of the bride, flanked by both "best men" from his own 1982 wedding. From left to right, Oliver Glover, Jim Provenza and the author.

Photo above: The newlyweds, dancing the night away.


From my offline journal (often more candid than my blog) :

July 1

Sacramento

Jim and I finally connected by cell phone last night. The father of the bride was calling me from the wedding rehearsal dinner and was clearly in a hurry to get off the phone, so we kept it short. I just wanted to make sure he knew that we had arrived from Spokane and were in town. When I see him later today he’ll be wearing a tuxedo. That will be a first for us two “future astronauts” of long ago.

So Jennifer Rose Provenza, whose birth I recorded in these pages 23 years, six months and 18 days ago, is getting married this afternoon.

Although he’s frequently given to pithy thoughts and witty observations, usually having something to do with politics, in all of the years I’ve known her father I have never known him to be the overly reflective type, either drunk or sober. We were on different continents when his brother died, so we never really had the chance to get “down and dirty” on that subject, and in those few instances when it has come up, he has spoken mainly of its impact on his parents and offered speculation about the circumstances surrounding it. (To this day he suspects that Rick was merely having a beer-soaked reverie over the idea of suicide that evening, and that that police revolver’s going off in his hand was an accident. Well, yes, Colt service revolvers do have hair triggers.) But he has never really delved into its personal impact on himself, at least not in any conversation he's ever had with me. Odd that it should be so, given the fact that Jim worshipped his older brother to an extent that I have never witnessed in any other family. There wasn’t a quantum of sibling rivalry between them that I ever saw; indeed Jim seemed determined to follow Rick in his every ambition, in some cases succeeding where his brother failed, such as graduating from law school and yes, managing to stay married. But that’s Jim: I don’t think he has a mean bone in his body, and to use some extremely vapid ‘60s parlance, he has always been very “other-directed.”

But what must he be thinking now? Since I have no daughter of my own, I can only begin to guess. I do know what I’m thinking: I’m remembering an afternoon in Arroyo Grande, CA. Late October. Jennifer was not quite 3. Jim and Donna had driven up from Santa Barbara to visit me at my Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete’s place, where I was house-sitting while they were on a trip to Europe.It was a mild afternoon and I think Jim and I went jogging together. The baby had been fussy before we left the house, crying and whining, and Jim’s mind was preoccupied with that, over and above other topics of discussion, as we walked back to the car. Ever the indulgent Baby Boomer parent, he insisted that we stop at the store on the way back to the house so he could buy her some cookies.I remember thinking this rather odd: in the household where I grew up, children were not rewarded with cookies for whining and crying. I doubt if such was the case in the house where Jim grew up, either. But there you have the key stylistic difference in the way two generations were raised: the Greatest Generation wanted its children (us) to have the educational advantages they hadn’t had. We were all browbeaten to get good grades and get ourselves into college, now that the G.I. bill had made college almost a universal entitlement and not the exclusive preserve of the well-off that it had been before WWII. But perhaps precisely because college wasn’t the Emerald City for us that it had been for our parents, we Baby Boomers merely wanted our own children to be coddled and spoiled as we, in our bottomless narcissism and self-regard, felt we should have been but were not. If we all live long enough, it will be interesting to see how Generation Y raises Generation Z. But in the meantime, good, bad or indifferent, there are the good old rituals to celebrate, the weddings and graduations and all that jazz that’s with us always, and interestingly enough, doesn’t seem to change that much from one generation to the next.

By the way, in addition to that afternoon in Arroyo Grande, I’m also remembering, from that same autumn, an apartment in Lompoc on whose living room carpet copies of Mother Jones shared space with strewn-about Care Bears books. Jim was just starting out as a lawyer, racking up some experience working for legal aid. I was a weekend guest on my way down to Los Angeles, and the sight of Mother Jones sharing the living room rug with the Care Bears struck me as the perfect metaphor for the transforming effect that Jennifer’s arrival had had on the lives of both of her parents, self-styled born-a-bit-too-late leftists who had been very proud of writing language about “working for social change” into their own wedding vows three and a half years earlier. I chuckled as I pointed out the strange confluence of reading matter to Jim. He was good-humored about it, as usual. Despite his passionate campaigning for George McGovern in 1972, (when he himself was still too young to vote) Jim managed never to take himself too seriously. Quite the contrary: he generally maintained an insouciance quite untypical of those earnest young savers-of-the-world who in our youth could talk about nuclear disarmament, and these days can talk about global warming, for as long as ten minutes without blinking once. Jim stopped wearing long hair after high school, switched from pot to liquor after college, and came away from the dreary 1970s almost as cynical about his own party as about the Republicans.

What he mostly was, by 1985, was a devoted family man, the doting father of a little girl. He kept his oar in politics, (today he serves on the Davis school board) but like those happy few among his fellow visionaries who are lucky enough to grow up and find personal responsibility as satisfying as public endeavor, what he mostly is, is a proud father.

I expect that the sight of this proud father in a tuxedo this afternoon may give rise to yet more, and similarly appropriate later-in-life thoughts. Jennifer was precocious as a performer: at age 3 she performed “Georgie Porgie” for a small but delighted crowd, of which I was part, in the middle of a children’s clothing store. I hear she’s going to sing Ave Maria today at her own wedding. She was also a strikingly pretty child, with enormous dark eyes and black hair. “She’s a wop all right,” her father said to me when she was a toddler. And I do expect to see a beautiful bride. Bring it on. Then go ahead and bring on old age for her folks and me, we of the generation so famous for being in denial about such things. Yeah, bring it all on.

End of excerpt from my "offline" journal. Back to blog...

Ah, yes, this business of being a trailing-edge Baby Boomer...(by “trailing edge,” I mean born in the mid-1950s, and hence, about 50 yourself now...)

Reading glasses. AARP membership cards. A bit of morning stiffness in the joints, necessitating extra stretching before you go for that 8 a.m. jog, which by the way is now two miles, not the five it used to be.

Weddings. As in, “of your own children.”

I don’t have any children. What I do have is a friend, born the same year as myself, (1955—and ever since we were in the 6th grade together, he’s held his February birthday over my October one as a badge of seniority) who has two: a boy, 19, who plays bass guitar and has a ring through his lip, and a girl, going on 24, who just came down the aisle all dressed in white.

Jim Provenza, the proud father of the bride, is my oldest friend. This coming October when I mark my 51st birthday, he and I will also mark 40 years of uninterrupted friendship. We met in October, 1966 just about the time I turned 11. The first away-from-school activity I remember us doing together was that Halloween’s trick-or-treating. Jim, as I recall, donned a homemade “spy” outfit. Secret-agent movies were big that year; it was the height of the “James Bond” craze. He decked himself out in a trench coat and snap-brim hat, with an ascot for effect. I was a commando, complete with black turtleneck, black wool cap and plastic machine gun.

I was (co)-best man at Jim’s wedding in 1982. He was best man at my (second) wedding in 2005. He was also present, having traveled 600 miles both times to be so, at the funerals of my mother and my younger sister. I was in Europe when his older brother died, but pounced on the phone and called him the moment I received an e-mail informing me about it. He called me the moment his daughter Jennifer was born, on Dec. 12, 1982. I was in Europe when James Jr. came along five years later, but promptly got an e-mail informing me of that event as well.

Jim’s and my ongoing friendship is remarkable for other reasons besides punctilious attendance on each other’s family joys and tragedies. We only actually lived in the same town for about the first year and a half we knew each other, and only attended the same school one year. Then his family moved, and then my family moved, and we never lived in the same city again. But we stayed in touch, diligently, by letter, by telephone, even for a while, when we were both in junior high school, by sending audiotapes back and forth in the mail. As boys we shared the dream that many boys of the 1960s shared: we aspired to be astronauts. We even belonged to an organization called Future Astronauts of America, which I would be very much surprised to learn had ever graduated a single astronaut. When we moved on to high school, Jim became a debater and decided to focus on a political science major when he went on to college. I got interested in writing and decided I would major in English (I changed that to journalism and history later.) About the time we graduated from high school, Jim wrote me a letter in which he noted the curiosity that we two “future astronauts” should have ended up as English and political science majors.

And that’s not all that makes our friendship special. Our respective politics couldn’t be more different. I’ve been conservative all my life, while Jim, following in the footsteps of his beloved older brother Rick, who aspired to be a 60’s-style Berkeley radical but slightly missed the cut by being born a couple of years too late, is a passionately committed liberal Democrat, yellow-dog to the bone. In spite of all this, Jim and I have never had an argument about politics that I can recall. When we discuss politics, we stick to the things we agree on, such as the fact that most politicians, of whatever ideological stripe, have their price, and it’s usually not that high, either.

I flew to Sacramento to attend his 50th birthday party last year; he reciprocated and came to San Diego to attend mine eight months later.

My wife Valerie and I flew to Sacramento last weekend, this time from our new home in Spokane, Washington, to attend the wedding, in nearby Davis, of Jennifer Provenza and Ian Wallace.

It was a beautiful and beautifully conducted old-fashioned Catholic wedding, a family production with about 150 guests in attendance. The weather cooperated splendidly, at least early on, with unseasonably cool temperatures in the upper 80s. (Later it heated up to 103, but by then everyone was caravanning down to the reception venue, which just happened to be on the Sacramento River delta where it was cooler.)

Thematically the wedding was an ethnic smorgasbord, a sort of haggis stuffed with mozzarella. Ian’s old-world background is Scottish, while Jennifer’s is pretty smoothly Sicilian—she’s a Provenza on her Dad’s side and her mother’s maiden name is Calabria. A Scottish-Italian wedding in a Catholic church: as the guests filed in and took their seats, a bagpiper tootled away at the church door. Later, the groom’s father, of the Wallace clan, belted out “That’s Amore” at a family “variety show” which followed the ceremony. (Bride and groom met in their dramatic arts program in college; almost everyone involved the wedding was some kind of performer.) Jim’s mother got up and sang “The Nearness Of You.” I was amazed. I’ve known Mary Jane Provenza as long as I’ve know her son, and I never knew she could sing solo. Jim has no musical talent whatever; it never occurred to me that others in his family might.

Jim’s “other” best man from his 1982 wedding, Oliver Glover, was also in attendance along with his new bride, Elizabeth. I had not seen Oliver since Jim’s wedding, and we almost didn’t recognize each other. We sat together at the wedding supper and got caught up on what each has been doing in the 24 years since Jim and Donna tied the knot on that courthouse lawn in Santa Barbara, from which I still have some pictures, showing all of us with more hair and smaller stomachs than now.

I don’t know whose idea it was to have the wedding reception at that beautiful mansion house in the delta. I still don’t know. But by the time we got there we had driven so many miles along so many twisting country back roads that I was certain we’d gone off the map. “Okay, whose idea was it to have this thing in Borneo?” I demanded when we finally got there. Jim wouldn’t ‘fess up, neither would he name the culprit. Typical of him. I do know this: he’ll be paying for that party for years.

It was a fine party, with plenty of good food and wine, and the bride and groom, who must have been dying by then to get out of their wedding-cake outfits and slip into Levis, duly made the rounds of every table, greeting all the guests. Nice kids.

I did, however, make certain that we left when there was still some twilight lingering to guide us back to the interstate. I didn’t want to get lost, go off the road and into the river, or have my wife and myself decimated by delta weirdos out of Deliverance. The newlyweds, their parents, grandparents and many other members of the wedding stayed overnight at the mansion. Most of the rest of us had to get ourselves back to civilization, and I didn’t want to be doing that in the dark, especially after a few glasses of chardonnay with my meal.

We flew back to Spokane, by way of Boise, Idaho, on Sunday afternoon. Our two-propeller puddle-jumper slammed into some nasty turbulence -- a thunderstorm -- on approach to Boise, and as we bounced about the sky, some of our fellow passengers screaming with terror, (or perhaps with delighted terror, as you might on the roller coaster at Magic Mountain.) I only hoped my old buddy would appreciate my putting myself through this so that we two old farts could celebrate his daughter's nuptials together. I am in fact no fan of flying, even in the best weather, and he knows that, too. But you do things for family, and after all Jim and I have been through together in close to 40 years, I'd say each of us qualifies for honorary membership in the other's extended clan.

I hear the newlyweds are honeymooning in Hawaii. Add another year or two to how long Dad will be working to pay for all this. But it makes sense to me. At the very least it's perfectly consistent with the ethnic theme of the occasion. Kilts, plaid and bagpipes for a roomful of Provenzas and Calabrias, followed by "That's Amore" and now, tiki torches, surfing and luaus?

What kind of wedding is that?

American, that's what kind.

Have a good time, kids. Don't forget the sunscreen.

To Dad: As the French say "Cheers"

This coming Sunday is Father's Day, and for me it will be the first on which I have no father for whom to buy a gift. My father died last September at age 91.

I had a decidedly two-edged relationship with my old man; we spent as much time not communicating as we did attempting to, not always with a lot of success.

Oh, there were a few things we agreed on. I could count them on the fingers of one hand: 1. Fishing is a good way to spend an afternoon. 2. Baseball is the best game in the world. 3. Businessmen who happen to be old fools with no acting ability should not do their own TV spots. 4. Home-grown tomatoes are better than store-bought.

5. Good scotch is one of life's best pleasures.

Now I'm not here to post an on-line advertisement for Chivas Regal. As it happens, it is not even my favorite scotch. I like Chivas, but it's not my favorite. (That would be Glenlivet, if anyone cares.) I just happened to like that picture, and besides, Chivas figures specifically in the little tale I'm about to tell.

My father and I grew up mostly locking horns. Yes, we grew up together, because he remained essentially about nine years old, emotionally anyway, until the day he died. But this posting is in honor of Father's Day, so I'm not going to highlight his shortcomings. There were quite a few things he excelled at, in fact: gardening for one. He was a very good gardener. He could also touch-type, (back when that still mattered) something I never learned to do. Somewhere along the line he even picked up shorthand, another dead art. To a point, he could fix his own car, and when I was a small child he used to amaze me with his ability to whittle a real-looking pistol out of a piece of wood (I don't think I want to know where he picked up this skill.) He spoke fluent Spanish, and Canuck French, the latter of which he learned in his childhood. He could noodle a little at the piano and knew a few guitar chords. He could play the harmonica. He could whistle so loudly that you could hear him at the end of the block. (Something else I never mastered.) He made great pancakes.

And once, as I was getting ready to go overseas and would be gone for a couple of years, he taught me to sing a French Canadian drinking song.

We were house-sitting for my uncle, who had gone to Europe with his family. It was October, 1985. I had just turned 30; Dad was 71. My Uncle Pete had left us not only the keys to the house, the keys to the car, and orders to eat and drink all the food and liquor on the property, but had also left us in charge of his wide-screen satellite TV. The World Series was just about to begin, and there we were alone on a hilltop in Arroyo Grande, California with a wide-screen TV and a couple of gallons of scotch.

It was shaping up to be a good week.

One night I poured a shot for both of us, and Dad taught me this song:

"Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable,
Prend un petit coup, c'est doux.
Prend un petit coup, c'est rend les gents malade;
Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable.
Prend un petit coup, c'est doux."

Loosely translated, "Take a little drink, it's nice. Take a little drink, it's true, take a little drink, it might make you all sick, but take a little drink anyway."

In the years that followed, this became Dad's and my drinking song. Every time I came back from overseas on home leave or on R&R, as soon as I had stored my bags in the front bedroom of the house and settled in for my visit, there would be the obligatory rendering, usually in the kitchen, of our "Prend un petit coup" song as we clinked glasses with the first drink of the evening.

Now, as I said, I'm not here to do a commercial for Chivas. In fact I hate advertising almost uniformly. But whenever Father's Day approaches, I always remember the one, single advertisement I ever saw that I found touching, perhaps even moving. Whoever dreamed this ad up really knew how to tug the public's heart strings. Or mine, anyway.

As I recall, it appeared in the pages of The New Yorker magazine, and yes, it was an ad for Chivas Regal scotch. A Father's Day-related ad. Its premise was absurdly simple: it showed only a scattered pile of canceled checks. But they were photographed in such a way that you could read every one. As you read them, you quickly got the idea that they parsed, roughly, the first 20 years or so of someone's life, from cradle to college. Each was made out and signed in the same handwriting, with the same man's name. There was a check made out to a diaper service, then one to a pre-school, one to a bicycle shop for a new bike, one to a summer camp, one to an orthodontist for braces, and so on and so on until you got to the big one, made out to a college for tuition. At the bottom of the page, the caption read simply, "You can never thank your father enough. But you can give him Chivas Regal."

Great ad. How great? I wept. Honestly. And I hate ads.

My father began sinking into dementia during the last year of his life. One ability after another went by the wayside, in short order. He lost interest in reading because he could no longer follow the continuity of a book from one chapter to the next. Then he couldn't even read the newspaper anymore. He was writing checks and not entering them in his checkbook. My sister suggested that I should take over paying the bills, so I did. Eventually he could hardly even write anything down. One day, reminded that it was my 49th birthday, he left a couple of $20 bills on my nightstand as a present, and tried to leave me a note saying "Happy Birthday," but he could not even get those words down on paper. In a shaky, wavering hand, (his handwriting had once been elegant -- his was the last generation to learn penmanship in school) the note read, "Happy Juupy Juup Juup Juup Day Day Day!--Dad." That absolutely broke my heart. I still have that note.

From there things just got worse. He started failing to recognize people. He mistook my fiance for my sister. He lost his ability to tell time by looking at the clock, so he was never sure if it was morning or evening.

During his last hospitalization, he could no longer remember whether he and I, and my surviving sister, were father and children or siblings. "Now, you, and Carla and I," he said when I was visiting him in the hospital, "we're brothers and sisters, right?"

"No, Dad," I replied. "Carla is your daughter and I'm your son. You're our father."

"Oh, then that makes me Joey's grandfather!" he said. (Joey was Carla's kid, my father's namesake, and by the way his favorite. But now he couldn't even keep it straight that Joey was his grandson.)

"That's right, Dad. Carla and I are your children, not your brother and sister, and Joey's your grandson," I said.

Soon after that, back home, he started calling me "Bill," (I think one of his brothers was named Bill.) And about that same time, incontinence began. He was wetting his bed almost every night. And he could no longer get himself to bed in the evening or up in the morning. He had to be dressed, undressed, and diapered. Nurses were coming twice a week to give him epogen and to help him take a bath. My older sister told her youngest, my nephew Ricky, to move in with us, presumably to help me take care of Dad.

One night about a month before Dad died, Ricky and I were getting him into his pajamas and putting him to bed for the night. As we were arranging his pillow and pulling the blankets up over him, he began to sing, "Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable, Prend un petit coup, c'est doux..."

We had no drinks, but I sang along with him. I figured it might be the last time we would ever sing that song together.

As it turned out, I was right.

This week, as Father's Day approaches, we are as usual getting bombarded with advertisements to buy this or that for Dad, and as usual it's little except annoying, only now I tend more than ever to tune it out, since everything having to do with fatherhood and fathers is now behind me. I have no children of my own, and with my dad gone, Father's Day, like my parents' respective birthdays, and their anniversary, (my mother died six years ago) has been recycled as nothing more than a date on the calendar.

But that long-ago Chivas ad still reverberates in my memory, as does that little French song, and I suppose they both will for as long as I remember my dad, which means for as long as I last on this old earth myself.

To all of you out there who still have living fathers, let me offer this bit of advice:

Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable. Buy your dad a drink, or if he doesn't drink, the equivalent. Chances are you and your dad have a song you used to sing too, and you never know when you might be singing it for the last time.

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.