Don't Think I Knew

It’s a beautiful, sunny day, warm enough to skip the sweater and just ride with my coat over a tee-shirt for the first time since the autumn.   I head north and decide to snap some photos by the lake where I’d heard all the frog mating music a few weeks back.  No one is making any noise today.  All that insemination presumably happened and now all the countless tadpoles that spawned as a result are working the gills they'll loose, developing quietly beneath the swamp surface. 

The seven-year-old me would have wanted to go down to the water’s edge and verify this hypothesis.  More than verify I would have wanted to marvel in the tadpole proliferation.  I suppose I would have wanted to bring some of the tadpole’s home.  I would have wanted to own and lay claim to them, if I’m honest about that particular period of me.  I may well have averred from the messy prospect of bringing home a bucket full of tadpoles home.  But if, there were any frogs, I certainly would have wanted to catch them and bring them back to look at and marvel at, in a bucket.

I seem to remember when I lived in Harrison New York that there was an abandoned field that connected the end of Bellain Avenue with Brentwood Park.  And it must have been spring time, when I was seven or so that I crossed that field and looked down at a random pool of water and saw hundreds of small tadpoles swimming about aimlessly.  I was dazzled.  And I don’t think I knew what to do. 

Not now, perhaps.  But soon, this pond will become an extraordinary feeding ground then, if my guess about the tadpole population proves accurate.  Birds like the heron and snakes and owls and presumably a broad swath of the mammals and bird predators that exist would be rather interested in all these young frogs in the making.  What is the infant mortality rate like for frogs?  Dreadful, certainly.   There all quiet today.  That’s for the best.  I’m intrigued, but not sufficiently so to plod on down there and explore further, today.

Saturday, 3/21/20

To Objectively Make Sense

Enjoyed spending a good part of the day with Herodotus.  My older on had to read him in the first semester of her obligatory humanities class at Reed College last fall.  I bought the entire reading list and tried to keep up with her.  I read just about everything, eventually and though she and her classmates only needed to read sections of the Old Testament and Herodotus, I figured I may as well see these civilizational pillars through in their fullness, And though it clearly sidetracked me from Humanities course progression, I’m glad I made time for both.

In both cases there was a keen sense that I was finally doing what any reasonably educated person should have done during their formative education.  Why did it take me till I was fifty-two?  The “Old Testament” is uniquely complicated, of course, as it represents absolute truth for so many, for so long so that a secular mind is often inclined to ignore it wholesale.  And this is ignorance, for there is arguably no, more important work to familiarize oneself with, in trying to make sense of western civilization.

The version I have of “The Histories,” the Landmark version, by Robert Strassler is enormous to consider, but filled with tasteful photos and copious maps it is a joy to read and soon you find you’re drawn in, to his remarkably objective style.  The “father of history” from the fifth century B.C.    Is there a proper Chinese historian to point to who antedates Sima Qian in the early Han Dynasty?  (145 to 86 BCE).  I’m sure there must be something that acts as a chronicle, but the flowering of philosophical writings from the axial age in China are not generally thought of as histories and it is Sima Qian who is usually credited as being the father of Chinese history, someone who tries to objectively make sense of the past.

Sima Qian wouldn’t have had much of an empirical evidence to make him question whether or not China was the only civilized place on earth.  What else but ferocious horseback warriors to the north and animist tribes to the south would there have been to point to that wasn't part of the Chinese civilized world?  I checked and it does not appear that Sima Qian ever mentions Buddhism, the first major challenge Chinese civilization ever properly confronts.  But Herodotus is wonderfully and completely disabused of any such presumptions.  He visits Egypt!  What else is there to say?  This is clearly an older, extraordinary civilization which he rightly notes, the Greeks borrowed heavily from.  He describes the extraordinary Persian with a level head and instinctive respect and curiosity.  Perpetual conflict of competing civilizational expressions then, there in the Mediterranean, in the Near East.    

I used to be amazed that people knew great detail about the battles of Cyrus or Xerxes against the Greeks.  Literature and period movies would have us believe that every English school boy knew the details of Themistocles at Salamis, of Leonidas at Thermopylae.  Now I realize they largely were simply familiar with Herodotus and “The Histories.”  

Friday, 3/20/20

Around the Hypnotic Set

I’d ordered cards, a puzzle, some color-by-number books, a chess set and a game of Monopoly.  My kids were raised playing the Hong Kong version of Monopoly, where Boardwalk is “The Peak” and you get a five-thousand Hong Kong dollar note instead of the five-hundred you’d otherwise put in Free Parking.  You get used to landing on Wong Tai Sin and Central and with comparative ease, the mind adjusts playing in Pearl River Delta rather than the Jersey shore.     

Amazon did not have the Hong Kong version available for shipment and so I procured the classic Monopoly, which seems very alien to my daughters.  And none of it lasts more than a minute once you all roll and start making your way around the hypnotic set.  Buy as much as you can as quickly as you can . . . strategic thinking in Monopoly is pretty straight forward.  But whereas most other such games have limited attraction as the years roll on, Monopoly casts a spell of familiarity, as if you’re revisiting a playground you used to frequent where you learned the operating manual of the American hustle.   

Lady luck is fickle.  Sometimes you roll well.  And sometimes . . .  Who me?  I landed on Park Place early.  Later I got the “Advance Token to Boardwalk” card in the Chance pile and not long into the game had hotels on both properties.  And it would just be a matter of time before someone would land there and be completely unable to pay and I would use whatever they scraped together to meet the rent,  to buy or trade more for my burgeoning portfolio.  Soon I had the corner with Baltic and Mediterranean and though it took some time it was now only really a matter of time.

I don’t know if the story is apocryphal or not, but I’d read somewhere about a game of Monopoly that John Lennon was involved in during that “Beatles 65” period, when he was singing songs like "Money", where as the story goes, he played for keeps and was maximum aggressive, hell-bent on winning, delighting in other's losses.   I don’t suspect he would have played any different in the period right after he wrote “Imagine” either.  Compassion and kindness only prolong the inevitable in Monopoly. 

Thursday 3/19/20

Quietly Show Her Prowess

I insisted on teaching a class yesterday.  All my classes have been cancelled. I won’t be teaching this spring.  I’ve got two nineteen-year-olds and fifteen-year old here, under this roof for the foreseeable future.  I have long bemoaned that neither of my girls knows much about U.S. History.  And . . . we’re all stuck here.  Why not devote one hour per day to ‘class time?’  I bought a U.S. History text book.  I’ll read one chapter ahead every night and speak to the topic off the cuff.

It also struck me that our little countryside hold out was reminiscent of “The Decameron.”  People escaping the plague-infested city and telling stories to each other to pass the time and avoid infection.  I ordered a copy of the book on-line, but neither it nor the U.S. history text will be here for a few more days.  But fortunately, they’re all available on-line.

The course unexpectedly allowed my younger one, to shine, to the detriment of the two older gals.  Which dynasty was contemporaneous with Rome?  "Han."  She knew it.  Who was the founder of the Holy Roman Empire?  "Charlemagne. " Nailed it.  We’d worked together on her history papers this year.  She knew this and you could see how happy she was to quietly show her prowess.  Yesterday was all about the pre-Columbian Native Americans.  Today we did, comparative China and Europe up until the Columbus' voyage. 

“The Decameron,” is now, urgently au courant.  One immediate takeaway that helps calm one perhaps is that Florence in 1348 was indescribably worse than New York, 2020.  How terrifying it must have been without any recourse other than prayer or flight.  I tried to get the girls to imagine a disease that resulted in one out of every three people you know falling down dead.  The narrator describes the horror of that Florentine hell and one is immediately grateful that our own, contemporary tragedy isn't on the order what these ladies and gentlemen were quarantining themselves from there in the Tuscan countryside.   

Wednesday 3/18/20

These Same Woods Behind

My little nephew’s birthday today so I sent him another Beatle Album: “The Red Album: 63-66.”  I imagine him listening to “She Loves You” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand” for the first time ever.  I also sent him “The Little Red Lighthouse” which is something a young guy who lives in norther New Jersey, in the proximity of the George Washington Bridge should know about. But I confess, I have a nagging suspicion I may have given it to him before.   

I thought I was being slick in ordering a Monopoly game, two packs of cards, a thousand-piece puzzle and some color-by-numbers books, all of which were sent to my mom’s, on the other side of the river.  This, I only realized after noticing the “successfully delivered” line on my Amazon account and not seeing anything on my doorstep, nor the mailbox, nor the finding anyone who could confirm or deny over at the neighbor's house whether they had a package or not, only to recheck and see that the default address, my mother's, which I should have changed a while ago, was where I had told Amazon to send things.

BTS on the ride over.  Surprised?  Saw my mom and stepdad and kept it to at least six feet of space, save for our elbow bumps.  An overcast day, I had a flash of some time back in high school listening to “Revolver” on a rainy day like this with my friend, who's still my friend, walking, we were, as I recall, through these same woods behind my house and we were listening to George’s “Love to You,” that day and it brought into clear view just then, what seventeen had felt like.  On the way home I threw on “Revolver,” and let its particular magic unwind for my portion of the ride. 

At the supermarket where we were supposed to pick up water, we bumped into my dad.  He had gloves on and was buying things for the compound he lives in.  We bumped elbows as well, exchanged pleasantries, kept our distance.  Such is the quality of engagement with loved ones these days.  Back in the car my daughter demanded Sgt. Peppers and I gladly obliged. 

Tuesday 03/17/20

I Instinctively Fought Her

We listened to BTS for the first forty-five minutes on the way down.  It’s a ninety-minute drive to Newark Airport.  The second half of the ride was mine.  Leaving at 5:30AM, pitch dark, neither of us was very communicative.  I’ve now heard the new BTS album “Map of the Soul 7” many dozens of times and I don’t have any more lines of inquiry to pursue with this topic. I pull up to the Sunoco Station.  There’s a sign saying the card swipe isn’t working and to pay inside, so I spin the car around to another pump. 

My younger daughter is trying to understand just when it was we “already” crossed into the state of New Jersey, when her sister called.  Her plane landed thirty minutes early.  “Find a coffee shop.  We’ll be there at 7:00AM in thirty-minutes.  I had on a “Roots of OK Jazz” album with some tinny, Congolese rhumba to sooth me as a navigated the latter part of our ride, through the Garden State Parkway. 

Newark was, of course, less crowded than usual.  Roadside parking aggressive and selfish, as always.  There she is with her mask on and her two enormous suitcases.  These bags were well over fifty pounds each and I lugged them up into back of the Highlander, closed the door and sped back up to New Paltz.  Her school waited longer than many to close.  Her friends all told her, “you called it accurately.”

There is a truck stop, not long after you leave 17 and get on the New York State Throughway and my younger one was clamoring for me to stop to get something to eat. I sat there among all the eighteen wheelers after failing to find a place to park.  The girls went in to get some drinks at Starbucks and I thumbed through the Spotify library and thought to put on D’Angelo’s “Black Messiah,”, which sounded great until I got antsy at having a third song begin without any of these ladies back in the car.  Where were they?  I put on Jeroge Bem, impulsively and still they didn’t come.  Amazing how quickly and thoroughly I lost my cool.  I called them both.  No reply.  They finally showed and said it was a long line.  Which didn’t quite add up.  I didn’t even get my Starbucks espresso but had to settle for a Dunkin Doughnuts version instead.

On the way up the little one said she wanted to put on a tune and I instinctively fought her.  It was my turn.  But she hinted that it was something I’d like and it was.  She was correct.  Eight years or so back I’d gotten one hundred or more female acts from the last hundred years, for them to consider.   One they definitely loved was the Runaways “Cherry Bomb” and we all enjoyed cranking it up loudly as we sped out of the truck stop.  “Hello Daddy, Hello Mom.”



Monday 03/16/19

Lectures Loosely Tied

Franco and the OK Jazz sustaining a plateau of pure joy for what seems beyond endurance towards the end of the first song: “Oko Regretter Ngai Mama”, recorded live on Zaireian TV, back in 1975.  Last night, up early for no particular reason though unmistakably up.  I finished reading a book my stepdad had leant me by John Gaddis, a Yale historian entitled: “On Grand Strategy.”  As the dust jacket suggested, it seemed a series of lectures, loosely tied, mapping meditations on statecraft through western, and to be fair some of Chinese, history.  My mind turned on fashioning lectures into chapters this way. 

This year, I won’t be doing any work as a professor for the first time in six years or so.  Another COVID-19 casualty, the summer rotation at the Shanghai campus of the university where I teach was cancelled six weeks back.  And I will miss the chance to engage with smart students and revisit cases and Chinese history, once again.  Reading Gaddis’ section on Lincoln, who I was last considering a few months back in the “Bardot” with George Saunders, it occurred to me that I might be able to use this home-bound down time we’re going to have for the next few weeks, (months?) to run an informal class here.

My older daughter will be home tomorrow.  She’ll be with us for the foreseeable.  Her sister is also home, with her school’s break extended indefinitely.  My daughter’s friend who’d otherwise be stuck in San Diego will also come and join us.  So, I went on to Amazon after I finished the Gaddis’ book and got a well-recommended U.S. history text book for A.P. high school.  That’s just about right as the young one is in tenth grade and the older two are only college freshman.  My daughters, at least has never properly been taught this material in school.

I’ve long insisted that the older one take at least one, U.S. History class during her undergraduate career.  Perhaps I could just teach it here, now. I’ve long wanted the U.S. history review myself, au courant in as much as I now seem to reside here, and might just develop some new “lecture” material through the process. Honestly, I don’t know if this presumption of mine will have sufficiently strong girding to hold beyond the first day or two.  But I can sell.  I’ll give it a shot. 

Sunday, 03/15/20