Backland

The signs of spring

It has been too cool and wet to do much gardening. The abundance of birdsong bewilders me. Spring is unsettling--the leaves are so small, the flowers are barely open, the grass is dark but the lawn patchy. Sparrows are in the gutters, but I can't see what they're doing there.

The other morning a coyote wandered up and down the railroad tracks behind our house. Unlike the majestic, wolfish one I saw in Palos Forest a year ago, this one's fur was short; it looked mean. Was it lost or hunting for something? I wanted it to find some goose eggs--there are too many geese in the neighborhood--but that seemed unlikely there.

As I pluck the weeds, the wind scatters them over the sidewalk. Their roots seem old, firmly established; the leaves just snap off when I pull. One bulb I planted last fall has produced such an ungainly lily that I'm not so sure I'm ready for it to bloom. I want to pull it too, but that would be criminal.

A mouse got into the basement. I keep lowering the thermostat. The matzo is diminishing. Soccer games have begun. The signs of spring are inescapable. Where will it all end?

The possibilities are limitless.

Breaking the ice

It’s not easy to break ice with ice, but my boy Jacky showed us how it could be done: stand on a bridge with a chunk as big as your head and drop it onto the lagoon near the bank. It must have been his twentieth attempt--the other, smaller chunks just skittered away--and it was a glorious shattering. There’s ice everywhere today--on the sidewalks, roads, trees, bushes; clinging to the tennis ball after I throw it for the dog to chase, persisting on my windshield no matter how hard I scrape, hanging from the porch roof in spikes. But ice is best when it breaks.

Conesville, Iowa

I lived in Iowa City from 1986 to 1988, and Conesville, which is nearby, remains quite vivid in my mind.

In the very heart of the town was an enormous grain silo, surrounded by mud, grass, and junk. The main streets were on either side of the silo. The houses were nondescript but many of them had elaborate Christmas decorations year-round, like electrically lit plastic Santas and elves. There was a strong Mexican presence, though by no means a majority. I remember visiting a quilting fair (or something similar) in the high school. I also remember going into a bar and watching some folks play whist. When I asked how it was played, I was told, "Well, the highest card is an ace, see, and then comes the king, and then the queen, and then the jack . . ."

Memories being what they are, Conesville may differ markedly from my recollection. But the satellite image of it below confirms it, as does the population (according to the 2000 census): 424.

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A hunger/fasting routine

This is a follow up to my previous post on the health benefits of hunger and fasting.

First, don't snack. Eat your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, fill yourself, and then don't eat until the next meal.

Then, skip an average of two meals a week. Don't skip dinner--that's a family meal; and leave either Saturday or Sunday as a day to eat whatever and whenever you want. That leaves twelve other meals to choose from. Schedule yourself so that some weeks you skip no meals at all and others you skip four or more. Occasionally, skip two meals on the same day.

I eat a little bit more during the meals before and after the ones I skip. It makes things easier, but I don't know if it's a good idea.

I do some additional fasting on Jewish fast days and during the Days of Awe (I recently skipped seven meals two weeks in a row, which wasn't as hard as I'd thought it would be), and for two months a year I refrain from fasting. Intermittent fasting keeps me feeling healthy, if a bit out-of-balance at times; it helps keep my weight low; and it gives me a lot more energy (not to mention spare time). It requires a lot of self-control, though--sometimes I'll cheat with a glass of milk, a tortilla chip or two, or a couple squares of chocolate (for the caffeine). See my previous post for other health benefits; there's also plenty of good information (and more challenging routines) on the web (just search for "intermittent fasting").

Why I am no longer a vegetarian

When I was seventeen and faced with nasty conflicts between my parents, often involving my brother and myself, I would take long walks. I would usually go up to the top of a hill where I could look out over a barbed-wire fence on some meadows with a few trees. There I would commune silently with God, whom I imagined lived by the willow-thronged creek sequestered in the distant valley. But on occasion I would wander further afield. On one particularly fraught evening I went up Smith Road towards Moore's Pike and told my troubles to a group of surprisingly attentive cows. In return, I made them a promise: I would never eat one of them again.

It was far easier for me to keep kosher after that. My family had never bothered about keeping kosher, and getting kosher meat in a non-kosher family at the age of seventeen would have been a struggle. So I just stopped eating meat altogether. I kept my real reasons to myself--if anyone asked, I just said I felt sorry for the poor animals.

But in 2008, after reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, I realized that if we didn't eat cows, there would hardly be any, and the same went for sheep, chickens, and turkeys. As Pollan puts it, "Most domesticated animals can't survive in the wild; in fact, without us eating them they wouldn't exist at all!" Not only the existence of the cows I talked to, but their happiness, their comfort, also depended on my eating them. To quote Pollan once again, "At least for the domestic animal . . . the good life, if we can call it that, simply doesn't exist, cannot be achieved, apart from humans--apart from our farms and therefore from our meat eating. . . . Domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered, through Darwinian trial and error, that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own."

That said, I did not want to eat any animals from factory farms. When I eat out, I am still a vegetarian, unless I come across meat on the menu that I know was raised in a humane way (for example, bison  or goat, since these animals are almost always raised humanely, or beef or chicken sourced from a local farm, or meat labeled organic). When I cook, though, I cook a lot of meat, which I buy from local farmers, either at a farmer's market or through Bruno's Organics, an Indiana company that delivers locally grown meat to Chicago.

As for keeping kosher, that's no longer so important to me. The injunction against boiling a calf in its mothers milk does not imply, to me, that you shouldn't eat chicken with butter. What gets more difficult is the commandment not to eat the blood with the flesh (Leviticus 17:10-14). One should slaughter an animal so that most of its blood runs out--traditionally with a fast and virtuoso slit of its neck. This made a lot of sense in the ancient world: bloody meat will go bad far more quickly than meat without blood, and this method of slaughter is widely recognized as humane. Is this rule now as irrelevant and anachronistic as the rule against wearing clothing from a mixture of two kinds of material (Leviticus 19:19)? I don't know. Kosher meat is invariably far too salty for my taste, and it's not easy to obtain meat that's both organic and kosher. Yet Michael Lesy's The Forbidden Zone, an excellent investigation of the American way of death, convinced me that kosher slaughtering was far less painful than the alternatives.

So next time I buy meat directly from the farmer, I think I'll ask them about their slaughtering practices. Perhaps it will relieve my conscience to some degree. Or perhaps it will have the opposite effect.

Read, read on

To celebrate having finished writing the second draft of my novel The Birdwatchers I here post a song about a bird and reading:

The Books - An Owl with Knees (2005)

Here are the lyrics:

Eat rye straw
Leave, withdraw
Drink ink tea
Stay with me 

Fame stay shy
By way of why
Wait, lie low
Old ones' odd odes 

Read. Read on
Read, read on
Breathe, be calm
You're gone, gone on 

It's strange to see how time agrees to slow down for owls with knees.

Syrinx

I took many flute lessons as a teenager, and always enjoyed them. Of all the pieces I learned, the one I liked the most was Debussy's "Syrinx" (composed in 1913). To my ears now, it carries a whiff of the same kind of kitschy exoticism one finds in a lot of early-twentieth-century compositions, but a vague exoticism, with a tinge of the far east and a tinge of the near--a mix of the Greek panpipes with the Chinese pipa. Thirty years ago, though, it suggested to me nothing but pure modernism--it was delightfully bizarre.

This superb rendition was sent me by Scott Gaul in 2007, and I treasure it. I believe it was recorded in the late 1940s or early '50s.

Martin Ruderman - Syrinx (Claude Debussy)

Some thoughts on color

The leaves of the Japanese maple in the Japanese garden in Jackson Park are the color of the very heart of a fire. The white mulberries in the park are sweeter than the black ones, but also pack less flavor, just like white and yellow corn. Are all white fruits sweeter and milder than their colorful counterparts? I prefer the latter. What would Preston Sturges' Hail, the Conquering Hero, which I saw Friday night, be like if it had been shot in red, white, and blue rather than black and white? Would that have lent it more bite and cut down its sentimentality? At least half the appeal of William Eggleston's best photos lies in the saturation of the color--compare his dye imbibition prints to his chromogenic prints. This renders the images less real--or, perhaps, hyperreal. The same can be said for the color films of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray--not to mention David Lynch and Sofia Coppola. The Japanese maple is super-saturated too, at least in the sun. It's bursting with flavor.

Please Give

Friday night Karen and I went to see a disarmingly slight but quite charming movie called Please Give. I appreciated the quirkiness of its characters, the comedy of its situations; I didn't appreciate its resemblance to television--a series of short scenes, intertwined plots, no sensuality in the cinematography, no probing into a character's depth. Critics have compared it to Woody Allen's early movies, but those had more bite; and to Eric Rohmer's movies, but those had more passion.

The central conundrum of the movie is the impulse to be charitable, and its implicit message is that charity to strangers never works but charity to loved ones is what really matters. That may sound trite, but not as trite as the end of the movie, which implies that spoiling an already spoiled brat even more with an expensive yet casual gift will heal all rifts. But the movie is also about death, which is here painless and convenient; adultery, which is here equally painless and convenient; and, as an aside, the love of nature, which is here unnatural and inconvenient. It's also about making money, though, and what it says about that subject is more nuanced.

The dollar-bill game

I love games. I play poker online and with friends; I play Settlers of Catan with my family; I play baseball and soccer with my son and Rummikub with my daughter; I used to play Scrabble and rummy 500 all the time. I often view my entire life as a game.

One of the games I like best is a math game you can play in your head with a dollar bill. I made it up a few years ago, but it still challenges me on occasion. Here’s how you play.

Take the eight-digit number on the bill and put an imaginary equals sign between the second and third digit. The first two digits are now a number between 0 and 99. The object is to make the last six digits equal to that number using plus, minus, times, and divided-by signs, along with parentheses. These last six digits cannot be combined with each other to make two-digit numbers, nor can they be reordered.

Once you’ve succeeded in making this equation work, put the equals sign between the sixth and seventh digit and do the same thing, the last two digits representing a two-digit number.

For example, in my pocket are five bills with the following sequences:

a) 4 8 7 8 9 2 6 0 

b) 3 6 8 0 3 1 4 1 

c) 0 3 0 9 7 2 8 5

d) 7 6 7 4 9 8 3 2

e) 3 9 4 4 0 2 3 4

Solutions are:

a) 48 = (7 + 8 – 9 + 2) * (6 + 0)
    4 + 8 + (7 + 8 + 9) * 2 = 60

b) 36 = (8 + 0) * (3 + 1) + 4 * 1
    –3 + 6 * 8 + 0 – 3 – 1 = 41

c) 03 = 0 * 9 * 7 * 2 + 8 – 5
    unsolvable

d) 76 = 7 – 4 + 9 * 8 + 3 – 2
    –7 – 6 + 7 * 4 + 9 + 8 = 32

e) 39 =  4 * 4 * (0 + 2) + 3 + 4
    (–3 + [9 – 4] * 4) * (0 + 2) = 34

The last half of the last bill was difficult for me, but it only took me two or three minutes. I still occasionally find a bill that will take me ten minutes to solve, and it feels like a real triumph when I do.

A day of minor defeats

A VW Jetta rather noisily crushed my right front turning light in the parking lot of the Paul Douglas Forest Preserve Saturday at noon. The driver, a college freshman named Chris, somehow missed seeing my bright red Honda coming toward him when he backed out of his spot, feeling good from just having won a game of flag football (he played defensive end). One might say that his car (actually, his girlfriend's) tackled mine, but that would be stretching a metaphor too far.

After exchanging information and getting a police report from the park policeman, which took, all told, forty-five minutes, my binoculars and I went off for a hike, rather out of the mood for it by this point. The great blue herons were roosting on poles high above the marsh as usual, occasionally swooping down like pterodactyls; red-winged blackbirds gamboled among low bare branches. I watched a vulture for a while, flying with magnificent grace in large circles close to the ground, its red head bright above its dull black body. Two sandhill cranes--the first I've seen in Illinois--were walking happily together wearing their little red caps, occasionally emitting their gargling cry, even louder than the geese.

The preserve is quite vast, crisscrossed with deer trails, but without any hiking trails at all; you have to bushwhack across the swamps and creeks. Dense forest alternates with marshland, but the majority of the land is brush and rolling meadows, and most of the trees are crabapple (though there are some delicious wild apple trees too). For some reason several of the trees near the rookery had been cut down and ground up--I'm not sure why or what the plan is. The playing fields are all near the parking lot, and I can't imagine anyone trying to convert the ground where the crushed trees lay to playing fields, as it's simply too marshy.

I rediscovered the spot where at some point an earthen bridge had been built over the creek that otherwise renders inaccessible the eastern two-thirds of the preserve, but I didn't spend much time exploring. I drove back home and fried an onion, a zucchini, garlic, leftover baked sweet potato, and cashews, and grated some havarti dill over it all. I felt like having a cocktail--I had a blackthorne in the fridge left over from a poker game--but I didn't. 

Catherine and her kids, Celia (seven) and Zavier (eleven), stopped by on their bikes, and Jacky (my son, eight) and I joined them on ours with Maybe (our dog) running alongside me. We cycled down the Midway past the ice rink and played a tough game of soccer for half an hour, Zavier and Catherine beating the three of us five to four. We tried playing baseball with a tennis ball, but Maybe kept catching it and not letting us have it back, and even after we tied her up, the enthusiasm was gone. We cycled back and had hot chocolate.

Karen (my wife) is laid up with a broken leg, and Catherine went upstairs to chat with her for a while; I made dinner (baked sweet potatoes and a stew of ground beef, onions, red peppers, tomatoes, and cumin). At 8:30 we were to spend an hour without electricity (some environmental group had been promoting this silly scheme), so we unpacked and filled our oil lamps; then Catherine and her family came by bearing pastries. We served champagne--the real stuff, not the sparkling wine I usually get--lit lamps and candles, turned out the lights, and played Settlers of Catan (the kids played Life). Jeff (Catherine's husband) won handily, though it was his first time playing.

It was after 10:30 by the time I finally put Jacky to bed; Thalia, my daughter, was out of town with friends, but called to say goodnight at 11:00. Karen, trying to stop Maybe from breaking our dessert plates, had shattered one of her precious crystal champagne glasses; I cleaned up the rest of the mess. It had been a day of minor defeats. But at least I had played the games.

The flavor of mildly burnt things

My mother told me to broil the eggplant twelve-and-a-half minutes on each side, then cut it in half and let it cool down. I poured off and sopped up the liquid, then scooped out the insides into a bowl. I added half a chopped and lightly sauteed onion, some lemon juice, olive oil, yogurt, pepper, and a teaspoon of salt.

There are few things more enticing than a good eggplant salad, rich with the smell of its burnt husk. The smoky flavor of mildly burnt things--corn on the cob grilled in its husk, caramelized leeks, sweet potatoes roasted a little too long, a singed lamb chop--or earthy drinks like Caol Ila and Côte-Rôtie--I cannot resist. I ate most of the eggplant salad, too sour, strong, and stringy for my family, and still wanted more.  

Stones in my passway

Another kidney stone (see my previous post below) attacked me on January 15. The emergency waiting room was crowded; after two and a half hours of the worst pain I've ever had, I threw up for the first time in years. This stone, which enjoyed a five- or six-day visit to my ureter, was four millimeters wide, twice as big as the last. And the doctors tell me my kidneys are planning to deliver quite a few more. I took flomax, vicodin, ibuprofen, and something for nausea; I should have taken senna and colace too, but no one told me to. Instead I ingested three tablespoons of castor oil one evening, desperate to ease the constipation the opiates caused. The resulting stomach cramps, which lasted over three days, were almost as painful and debilitating as the stone.

Now I'm almost back to normal. The snow is all melting, even in the back yard, which gets little warmth or sun in the winter. Conditions may be harsh, but even a frail body usually recovers after a while.

Stepped on by an elephant

At seven yesterday morning I was eating an omelette I'd made when a pain in the region of my right waist, halfway between my front and back, pushed me out of the kitchen and upstairs to bed. By the time my moans alerted my wife, I was beginning to suspect that this wasn't a pulled muscle or trapped gas. A 911 call brought firemen, whose truck couldn't turn down our narrow street, and who told me I didn't have to wait for the ambulance--my wife could drive me to the hospital. I was hollering in the car like an enraged beast; if a question was asked, my answer was given at the top of my lungs. I wanted to lie on the floor of the admittance room, but the nurses wouldn't let me; I was taken to a chamber quickly enough, however, where I lay and winced and bellowed and cried. Dilaudid did the trick--the pain abruptly ceased, and the ceiling began to move past me as if I were swimming backstroke. The doctor told me it was probably a kidney stone, and they gave me intravenous saline solution so that I could urinate into a jar. They found blood, so took me to get a CT scan. I lay on a narrow bed; it moved slowly through a large gray tube which told me, in a simulated female voice, how and when to breathe. The transportation nurses neglected to take me back to the ER; while I sat cold and lonely in a wheelchair for close to an hour, the drug wore off, a TV set in the room shut down, all the other patients disappeared, and the doctor looked at the scan's results and talked to my wife in my absence. Finally the CT technician wheeled me back to the ER, where the doctor told me the stone, two millimeters wide, had already passed into my bladder. The ordeal was over.

It is often said that the pain of a kidney stone is the worst pain you'll feel in your life. That may be true for me; but then again, I've never broken a bone or a tooth, had a heart attack or cancer, fallen down a flight of stairs, or been shot, scalped, run over, stepped on by an elephant. I have had my heart broken, and while that pain didn't make me holler quite so loudly, I'd rather have a kidney stone any day.

Cold Water Sheets

In 1992, at the age of twenty-nine, I recorded a cassette tape of twelve songs I’d written. It was called Cold Water Sheets. I have now made MP3 files of these songs, eight of which (the first and last four) I’ve posted below. (Warning: “Fieldsong” has a bad word in it so you might not want to listen to it around youngsters.)

The Party

Coming Around

Poolside

Shameface

I'm Not Sorry Yet

Fieldsong

Warm

Heaven Knows

I’d been making these cassette tapes for about five years—I think Cold Water Sheets was my sixth or seventh. It was also my saddest, my best, and my last. I haven’t written a song since—I felt like I could never top this. I haven’t even touched a guitar in years.

On the cover of the cassette case was a melancholy panel I xeroxed from Chester Brown’s Ed, The Happy Clown, which was and remains my all-time favorite comic book. On the inside was written the names of the songs and “In memoriam Ivan Brown.”

I had been volunteering for GMHC, and Ivan had been my first “buddy.” He was pretty near death when I first met him, and he never left St. Vincent’s hospital during the months I spent with him. He seemed like a saint to me. He was from Bushwick, an unpleasant Brooklyn neighborhood, where he had lived with his sister. Not many people came to see him now except, occasionally, his brother. I later found out that this was because it was simply too painful for those who loved him to see him in such a state.

Near the end he was in the ICU, hooked up to a ventilator and a large number of tubes. They ran cold water under his sheets to keep his temperature down (hence the title of the cassette). One day I came to see him and saw that he was unplugged. I was surprised and delighted and came close to him. His eyes were open, and maybe I said something to him. Then I noticed he was dead. I was alone with him in that room for a few seconds before death, like a wave, pushed me out.

The funeral was in the South Bronx, and I got lost. I arrived an hour late, but that was OK—his family arrived an hour or two later, their limo having gotten even more lost. I was the only white person there, but nobody cared. I said a few words during the service. Afterwards we took him to the crematorium; his cousin was planning to scatter his ashes over his mother’s grave in North Carolina.

A few weeks later his ex-boyfriend, Sterling, a fireman who lived in Prospect Heights, held a post-mortem birthday party for Ivan, and served crabs and Alabama slams. I had a great time talking about Ivan to all his old friends and family and dancing to tapes he had made. That’s what the first song, “The Party,” is about—well, that, and the day of his death (“the change in your eyes”).

Some of the other songs have nothing at all to do with Ivan, but are about other things I was going through and doing at the time. And I’m pretty sure Ivan wouldn’t have liked this tape at all. It’s whiny straight-white-boy music. He preferred Prince.