I love hardware stores

It's therapeutic for me to write these true stories down: hard luck tales where I make my own hard luck, tales of coping with adversity, or bumbling through adversity. The story of buying fruit with Asa in Guatemala was another example. (That one was a better story, because it had Asa in it.) Oh, the other reason I'm writing this particular one is that I like saying “wing nut”.

The other day Tesi asked me if we by any chance have some sort of liquid for clearing drains. I said I didn’t think so, and I asked her which sink was having a problem. She told me which one, and she said that she had been trying all the tricks she knew, but that it was still being slow to drain. I said I was pretty sure that I could open the U-shaped trap underneath and deal with the problem that way. I did that once before.

So later that day I took a crack at it. I looked under the bathroom sink, noting that the plumbing down there is all plastic and therefore not likely to be corroded into immobility. I removed some of the clutter, put a basin under the trap, unscrewed the white plastic nut at the bottom of the white plastic U, and watched eagerly as the water come out. I was hoping for a great mass of hair, or at least a little clump of beard trimmings, or maybe some kind of greasy or soapy blob. I wanted to see the cause of the problem and to see that it was gone. Disappointingly, what came out was just a mostly clear and only slightly smelly liquid. I probed the pipe from below with a finger, but there was nothing. I flushed the pipes with water for a while. I closed it up again, thinking "Oh well, it’s probably a little better now."

It seemed to be dripping a little, so I tightened the nut some more. And some more. There was a bad sound. The plastic nut had sheared right off. I said a bad word.

My next task was to retrieve the hollow fragment that was still screwed into the plumbing. This went surprisingly well. A sort of reverse application of a small pointy pair of pliers got the job done. (I could tell you about my large collection of small pliers, but that’s a different boring hardware story.) Then I had to think about replacing what I had broken.

Well I just about always enjoy a trip to the hardware store, but I wasn’t in the mood. I wasn’t in a good mood at all. For one thing, I wanted to get back to doing mathematics; this was supposed to be a brief break in my work day. Besides, I was extremely annoyed with myself for breaking the part. Still, I had a task to do.

Now, fortunately, in addition to the several hardware stores within a mile or two of our home there is also Watertown Supply, a plumbing supply house. I’ve been there a few times before. It’s not quite as much fun as a hardware store, because all the wares are kept out of sight behind a counter. Also, it primarily caters to tradespeople, and we ordinary folks are made to feel like second-class customers. We stand at a separate counter, and there is a sign explaining that tradespeople get served first. But it seemed like the right place to go.

I found my way there (making almost no wrong turns), and in fact I did not have to wait long at the counter. The man heard my story and looked at my broken part and explained that he would have to sell me a whole new U-trap. My heart sank at the thought of the expense of that, and at the increased opportunities for breaking things, until he explained that he just meant that I could buy a new trap for $6.99 and take the nut out of it to use. But as it turned out, this was not to be. The one that he found did not have the right size nut.

His suggestion at that point was to buy a one-size-fits-all stopper intended for temporary use, a rubbery thing with a bolt through its center and a wing nut on one end of the bolt. You stick it in the hole, and when you turn the wing nut it expands to fit snugly. Well, I really shouldn’t say “one-size-fits-all”, because the only ones he had were really small. But he said that any hardware store would have what I needed.

As I said, I normally love any excuse to go to any hardware store. I like all of them, though not all in precisely the same way. There are some that are funny, some that are very welcoming, some that have a no-nonsense feel but also inspire great confidence. Some have more stuff than others, or more of one kind of stuff. Other things being equal, I usually go to Winters Hardware. It's the one closest to home and the one that I feel the most loyal to, and it is staffed by enjoyable quirky characters. But this time I picked Coolidge Hardware, the one that was right on my way home.

I walked in and immediately encountered a nice eager young man who wanted to know how he could help me. When I started to explain what I needed, he got a nervous, lost look in his eyes and quickly took me to his boss. The boss knew exactly what I was talking about and told me exactly where to find it. There are two sizes, he said.

Actually there were three kinds to choose from, all of the same brand but in three sizes. They were displayed in a charming old-fashioned hardware-store way: mounted on a vertical surface was a stout piece of cardboard holding about twelve of these items, each one threaded through a hole in the card, plug in front and wing nut in back. They had come from the factory like that. The card bore faded words in a bygone style of lettering, naming the manufacturer and identifying the product and praising its virtues in a mild way. I would like to say that there was a cartoon involved, but probably not. It just feels like there was. Neatly penciled on the card was the price. Three sizes, three cards, three prices.

The plugs were not quite what I expected. They were cylindrical — the one at Watertown Supply had been tapered — but I figured they would do the job. The question was which size to get. I took the broken part out of my pocket for comparison. The smallest plugs were too small. The biggest were too big. The middle ones seemed just right. I took one and paid for it: $2.29 plus tax. The cashier was the same young man who had first met me. I declined his offer of a receipt. As I drove home I mused: Why would I want a receipt? Well, what if I need to return the plug because it doesn’t fit? Hey, maybe I should have bought two of different sizes and returned the one that didn’t fit! Yeah, but that’s an extra trip. I don’t like going to the hardware store that much. Anyway, I’d probably just never get around to returning the other one. It would end up in the basement, in that horrible jumble of  things we'll never need and would have trouble finding if we did.

I got home. I tried to put the plug in. It was way too small.

Heaving a great sigh, I got back in the car and drove back to the store. I laughingly told the nice young man that, believe it or not, I had bought the wrong size. I screwed my plug back into its card and unscrewed another plug from another card and told the man that I owed him 20 cents plus tax. As I walked to where I had parked the car, I began thinking about making this story into a blog post, or at least a Facebook post. I thought maybe I would declare that, although I love hardware stores, I have a dysfunctional relationship with them. Also that one reason I love them is that they remind me of my father. As I drove, I realized that I would not be the first person who has ever made all three of these statements: "I love X." "X reminds me of my father." "I have a troubled relationship with X."

I tried to put the plug in. It seemed way too big. I got it in by jamming it hard, but it wasn’t very straight. I started over. I got it a little straighter this time, but it didn’t seem right. I turned the wing nut. I opened the tap. Water leaked a little at the plug.

That’s when Tesi got home. I told her my sad tale and my two alternative theories: (1) the first plug that I bought, the middle-sized one, really would have fit if I had only given it a chance and turned the wing nut enough to make it expand all the way, (2) those tapered ones that I saw at the plumbing supply place really are better. If I believed (1), then I should go back to the store a third time to get the plug I bought the first time. If I believed (2), then I should go somewhere else, probably Winters.

I decided to go to Winters. I reasoned (cravenly) that, even if they only had the same kind of plug that I had found at Coolidge, at least I would be spared the embarrassment of having to face that nice young man again. I even briefly considered going there on foot; I thought that some fresh air and exercise might improve my mood. But I discarded this idea when I thought about what it would do to my mood if I found nothing like what I needed there and had to walk back empty-handed.

The proprietor, Wanda, was minding the store. She knew exactly what I meant, and she also knew that she didn’t have any of them. She led me to a side room and pointed to one of those old-fashioned cards with the holes: just holes this time, no plugs. It wasn’t even the same brand as the ones at the other store, but still it had a card with holes. As I was leaving, another customer entered, an older woman. Well, come to think of it, maybe about my age. I was briefly taken aback when she asked me "Wander around, do you know?" But then I got it, and said "She's in that other room. She was just helping me." As I drove back to Coolidge for the third time, I wondered, idly, if the plugs Wanda was sold out of were the tapered kind.

That's it, really. I was helped by the same nice young man again. He did not laugh at me, but he did not laugh with me, either. I took a middle-sized plug, but I did not return the plug that was too large, because at that point I was not sure of anything. However, theory (1) was proved correct.

I suppose I might return the large plug some day. 

Guatemala, Part Twelve: The Duck of the Lake

I've already posted this on FaceBook, but I'd like to make a more permanent record of it, so here it is:

On our first evening in Pana, Tesi looked out at beautiful Lake Atitlan and said that there was supposed to be some special duck that lives there. I was not surprised to hear Asa speaking my own thoughts in reply: "You mean a special _species_ of duck, or a special _individual_ duck?" Then I heard myself slowly exclaiming, in a weird creaky old voice, "Ah, yes, my grandfather used to feed that very same duck so many years ago. Old Quaxolotl!"

Guatemala, Part Eleven: My Hat -- Really

(continued from Part Ten)

As I said, I have more to say about the hat.

Getting back to the beginning of that outing:  I was definitely on the lookout for some kind of hat when we went into town.  The tropical sun was merciless, and I don't have nearly as much hair on top as I used to.  We hadn't gone far from the car when my eye was caught by piles and piles of hats at the entrance of a shop -- neatly nested stacks of cheap-looking local-style straw hats for tourists -- straw hats with colored bands.  They pulled me like a magnet.  I didn't even pause to make sure that somebody in the family knew where I was going.

I had to pick a good one.  My vacation hat was not going to have a black band, for example.  I needed something bright, ideally multicolored.  The hats with rainbow bands all seemed to be too small.  I began shifting hats from stack to stack, peering inside them one after another.  Just as I was beginning to get discouraged, a sales lady came and helped me.  In no time I had what I needed -- a big enough hat with a mostly red band -- and I happily hurried away to find the family.

I don't want to make too much of this hat.  It's just a hat.  For the rest of the trip I wore it a lot, because, well, I needed protection from the sun.  Also because it was my hat.  I started calling it "my silly tourist hat."

During our first visit with Amadi's birthmother and her kids, I omitted the hat even when we went out for a walk on the sunny streets.  I was self-conscious about looking like a foreigner who foolishly tries to dress up like a local.  Also, I wore shiny black dress shoes that day.  We had the idea that, although we are in the habit of going barefoot indoors at home, it might be offensive to do so when receiving guests in a strange country; and I took this principle one step further and put on my good shiny shoes instead of my shabby tattered sneakers that day.

When packing for the trip, I had stuck those "grownup Daddy shoes" in the suitcase.  At the time, that choice on my part had struck me as odd.  I had tentatively classified it as one of those irrational things that people do when preparing for a trip, as they try to fend off the anxiety that goes with heading into the unknown.  On the other hand, I also thought that it might have been a perfectly sensible choice, in which case maybe my having doubts about it could be classified as one of those irrational things people do when preparing for a trip ...   When Tesi saw me unpacking the shoes in Antigua, it became clear that she also found it an odd choice.  But I think my reasoning was sound:  (a) even a person like me who always packs light for a trip should probably take more than one pair of shoes along, (b) it's true that I don't wear these shoes much at home, but it's also true that they are very comfortable, (c) if I want to dress up just a little better than usual at any point (for example when meeting the birth family), these shoes will help, and (d) while the sight of me in shoes like these might startle those who know me well, it is a completely unremarkable sight for the rest of the world.

(I call them "grownup Daddy shoes" because that's what they feel like.  I suppose the right term is "dress shoes."  They are extremely plain, but shiny.  When I put them on, or when I put any dress shoes on, it almost feels as if I'm putting on a coat and tie.  And putting on a coat and tie feels like putting on a costume, like I'm trying to disguise myself as a grownup.  For many men these would be everyday shoes.  Certainly in my father's day they would have been. )

I was glad that I wore them that day in the house in Antigua; it did not feel odd at all.  On the other hand, when the same visitors came back the next day I felt relaxed enough to revert to my everyday scruffy black sneakers, and also to wear the silly tourist hat when we went out in the sun for another walk around the neighborhood.

I don't know the language of hats any better than I know the language of ties or dress shoes or sports jackets.  Sport jackets?  (Sport jackets!  Those casual things that you wear -- with a tie! -- when you're not dressing up in a suit or something!  Is a tweed jacket a sport jacket?)  Since our trip I've been trying to learn a little bit about hats, not so much because of my straw hat, but more because a Facebook friend, Polly's husband Andrew, started reporting on the comments he gets from strangers when he goes out on the streets of New York in 2014 in a fedora.  After some internet research, now I at least know roughly what a fedora looks like.  I think maybe I could distinguish a fedora from a stodgy old homburg, for example, but the finer distinctions are beyond my reach.  I think of Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy L. Sayers's Have His Carcase, looking at the murder victim's hat:

"Last year's hat, reblocked, with new ribbon.  Shape, a little more emphatic than is quite necessary.  Deduction:  not wealthy, but keen on his personal appearance."

I'm pretty sure that back in, say, the early 60's, my father wore a hat when he went to work. I see him in a dark suit (or maybe just dark pants and a dark sports jacket), with a white shirt and a tie and grownup Daddy shoes and a hat.  A fedora, I suppose?  At the end of the day he would walk into the house and hang up his hat.  Also he would whistle a happy little tune that signaled "I'm home!" Six rapid notes that ran together, hi-lo-hi-lo-hi-loooo.  Sol-mi-sol-mi-sol-mi.  Such a familiar and welcome sound!

By the late 60's the world was changing.  I think he started dressing a little more casually for the office.  When I try to picture him coming home from work in those days, the scene is in color rather than black and white.  I have to ask my sisters what they remember about his hats and shoes and jackets.

I believe that my silly tourist hat is of the type that is called a "Panama hat".  I understand that Panama hats originated in Ecuador, and that the very best ones are so fine that they are waterproof and can be rolled up small for packing without doing them any harm.  Mine is the other extreme:  probably such a bad cheap imitation of a Panama hat that as far as a real hat person is concerned it doesn't deserve the name.  Anyway, I wasn't about to pack it in a bag when we left Guatemala.  It was either wear it or leave it behind.

I could have left it in the house in Antigua.  Come to think of it, there were some straw hats already there.  Quite likely they were meant for our use, left there by the landlord or by previous visitors.  Why did I even buy a hat?  It's true that there was one hat in the house that we didn't think we should touch.  It graced the head of a piece of found art in the living room: a big piece of a tree with raised arms.  But I think I could have borrowed one of the others.  Still, I wanted my very own vacation hat.  And, although I didn't know if I would ever wear it again, I wanted to take it with me when we left for home.

On airplanes there was no problem tucking the hat into an overhead compartment, but in airports I wore it on my head.  It was just one more thing to juggle when going through security.

We flew from Guatemala City to Boston by way of Miami, just like that other time when we were bringing baby Amadi home.  Somehow we had forgotten about the tedious part where you have to recover your checked bags, lug them through immigration and customs, and check them again for the next flight.

Back in the year 2000 our experience in Miami was nightmarish:  we had a narrow window of time between flights, we were slowed down at immigration by having to show adoption papers, and after customs we had to get ourselves, our two-month-old baby, and all of our luggage to the other end of the huge airport in a big hurry using muscle power alone.

This time it was much better:  we had more time, there was now a shuttle train from one end of the terminal to the other, and our baby had become a big thirteen-year-old who could walk on her feet.  Also, we got some streamlined service because 86-year-old Gerry cleverly requested a wheelchair.  But it's still a pretty horrible airport.

(At the baggage carousel:  Asa and I are waiting, waiting, waiting for the bags.  A chatty man next to us:  "Where are you guys from?"  "Boston"  "Oh.  Well, at least you have good sports teams there.  Hey, you have a game this weekend."  [Think.  What is he talking about?  Let's see, what time of year is it?  It's January.  Oh, I bet he's talking about football playoffs.  Wow, I didn't even know the Patriots were in the playoffs this year. ]  "I don't really pay much attention to any sport except baseball. Sometimes not even that.  Where are you from?"  "Chicago.  Miami airport is the worst airport in the world.  I've been coming through here every six months for years.  Once they stole all my Christmas presents.  Oh, they weren't worth much, but still, they were Christmas presents ..." )

Besides the shuttle train, the other nice surprise was the fancy machine for processing your passport.  I think these are very new.  I don't know if all the US points of entry have them yet.  You stand in front of one of a number of big kiosk thingies, and you hold your passport face down on a screen so it can be scanned.  Then the machine tells you to look it in the eye, and it amazingly adjusts itself to your height (even if you are in a wheelchair!), and it takes your picture and prints it out with other data on a slip of paper, which you take to the human agent at the booth on your way out of the hall.  I was the first of the five of us to undergo this process, so I was not exactly ready when the shutter clicked.  I didn't think to take off my reading glasses, which I had put on to study the fascinating gadget and to read the directions it was giving me.  I didn't think to take the hat off, either.  But I did manage to look right into the lens, and to keep my eyes open.  I came off looking like some kind of inept but cheerful spy.  I was really really hoping that we would end up with a copy of the picture to take home, but no:  it stayed with the human agent at the booth.  I would have liked to use it as my new Facebook profile. 

It wasn't until after the trip that it dawned on me how much my hat had to do with my father. In my youth the annual family vacation was a high point of the year for my parents, my sisters, and me.  Every August we would head for the woods and go camping:  either at drive-in campgrounds, or on islands, or in later years on a sort of houseboat.  (We sometimes kept a journal, writing down some memories together each day as we went along.  One of my sisters recently came across the home-made Ship's Log that I made for my father one year.  It was made of an actual log, cut in half, hinged, and filled with blank pages. )  And, now that I think of it, he always had a vacation hat.  He might use the same one two years in a row, but it seems to me that he would often just pick one up on our travels when the mood struck, or when the right hat appeared.  It served to keep the sun off his bald spot, and it was also an emblem of family fun and Daddy in vacation mode.  The one I remember best was the type of striped cloth cap that is associated with locomotive engineers.

Guatemala, Part Ten: My Hat

This post is out of chronological order, as usual. It begins on our third full day in Guatemala, when I bought myself a hat.

On New Years Day we five went into the center of Antigua to see things and do things. Up to that point some of us had been out on an errand or two, while others had not strayed far from the house. The affair of the empty cistern and the overheated pump had run its course. It seemed like time to start behaving like tourists.

It was almost noon. We piled into the Jeep. (I don't think we had yet figured out how to get into the back seat without contortions. That would come later.) Tesi drove. We parked near a pedestrians-only street that looked like a good place to start. The mid-day sun was beating down, and I bought a hat. We entered an old church, with its shrines and chapels and elaborate Nativity scene, trying not to intrude on the believers. (I took my hat off.) We bought two wooden flutes (one for Gerry, one for Asa) from a man who showed them off by playing old Simon and Garfunkel hits, including "El Condor Pasa" of course but also "Sounds of Silence" and I forget what else. We wandered through a big store full of lovely woven fabrics, oddities, and tacky tourist things, but we were not yet ready to buy much more than postcards.

Then it was time to make our way, hot and tired and hungry, on cobblestoned streets (Ha! Now I'm thinking of another S+G song, "For Emily Whenever I May Find Her", because it has cobblestones in it. Except that it doesn't have any explicit cobblestones in it -- I just looked up the lyrics -- isn't that funny?-- in my mind that song is set in cobblestoned streets) toward the square, the Parque, in the center of town, beyond which was the place we had chosen to have lunch. Actually, the heat and the cobbled bumpiness were such that, on second thought, we decided to travel those few blocks by car rather than on foot.

Let's look at the restaurant's website: "Cafe Flor is a beautiful Thai restaurant and piano bar located only 1/2 block from Antigua's Central Park. Our delicious menu, friendly service, and our unmistakably warm and intimate atmosphere are what makes us famous." That was all true, except no piano at lunch. I half-expected to see our faces at the site when I went there just now, because the owner snapped a few publicity pictures with our permission, but we don't seem to be in their current slideshow. I wonder if we ever were. Oh! Asa has found us on the restaurant's Facebook page!

After a brief encounter with an ATM, we split up, Tesi and Asa walking to La Bodegona while Gerry, Amadi, and I waited at the Park. We watched people and stray dogs, and I got at least five shoe-shine offers in 15 minutes. I wasn't even wearing the kind of shoes that you're supposed to use shoe polish on. They're sort of sneakers. They're really old and beat up. They used to be shiny. Hey, what do I know about shoes, maybe I should have been shining them all those years.

Then the food shoppers returned and we piled into the Jeep and went home, to nap or do crossword puzzles or walk around the neighborhood as the spirit moved us.

I have a lot more to say about the hat.

Guatemala, Part Nine: Singer-songwriter

(continued from Part Eight)

In a corner was some equipment -- stools, microphones, and so forth -- and it was clear that there was going be some kind of performance. Eventually a scruffy lanky man of the Anglo type, neither young nor old, started tuning his guitar and making other adjustments. Then it began.

I'm not sure of the sequence. I think he started right in with a song, and the stage patter didn't come in until later. The first song was an unfamiliar one. It might have been the one about Minnesota girls, or women. There may have been trains in it, too. I think the song expressed admiration for the tough people of that cold northern region. I'm afraid I wasn't listening closely to the words. I didn't have a high opinion of his guitar playing, or of his singing either, but I remember thinking that strictly speaking, by some standards, his singing wasn't really worse than Bob Dylan's. I later learned that Asa (who, unlike me, has a very low tolerance for Dylan's singing) also thought of Dylan right away.

My best guess is that this song was one of his own, because fairly soon he did tell us that he is a songwriter. He told us a number of things about himself. He said that he was from Texas. He explained that he is a "I'm a, um, I'm a [pause], um, I'm a [longer pause], what do you call it? a songwriter." It's not clear whether he was pretending that he had never described himself that way before, or pretending that he'd been living in Guatemala so long that he was starting to forget his English, or really losing his word-finding ability through some natural or unnatural process, or what.

The second or third song that he sang was an actual Dylan song: "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues".

When you're lost in the rain in Juarez, and it's Easter time, too ...

I thought it was an interesting choice of song for a US expatriate to sing to tourists in Latin America.

Sweet Melinda, the peasants call her the goddess of doom ...

He sang "doom". I think some people sing "gloom". I think maybe Judy Collins sang "gloom" in the version we had at home when I was growing up.

I'm goin' back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough!

His stage patter also included some almost completely incomprehensible (to me) remarks about Texas statewide politics. And he let us know that he runs a music school for children. I couldn't help thinking of the scene at the end of "School of Rock" when Ned Schneebly is teaching the beginning guitar class ("all right, your fingers are almost in the right place ...")

His wife was there with him: mostly for moral support, but she did join him for one number. She stood in front of a mike (do I have to spell it "mic"? I mean, a bicycle isn't a bic), and while he sang a song about a train she made train sounds. Not whistle sounds, but "choo choo" sounds, or I should say "ch ch" -- and in a rhythm that neither Asa nor I could really get a handle on.

I looked up the Dylan song later, on Wikipedia, because I couldn't remember the name of it or some of the lyrics and it was running through my head. I learned that "Tom Thumb" is a reference to something by Rimbeau, and also that some critic called the song a comic tour de force. I always thought of it as more sad and dreary than funny, but maybe that's because Judy Collins sang it that way. Now it's running through my head again.

Guatemala, Part Eight: Out on the Town in Pana

After the long drive to Panajachel on Friday the five of us checked into our hotel, had lunch outdoors overlooking the lake, and spent the rest of the afternoon in various combinations napping, trying out the hotel pool, or exploring the neighborhood a little.

Amadi and I began with the pool. It had a water slide -- not a very long one, but you did have to climb quite a few stairs to get to the launch point. When I first went up there, I was disappointed to find that the water was not flowing. (I don't think we can count this as one more example of our family's bad plumbing karma.) It seemed like an admission of defeat to climb back down the stairs, so I took the slide down -- not so much sliding as inching. This got the attention of a hotel employee, who rushed outside, leaped over a narrow strait in the pool, disappeared into an underground chamber, and turned on the works. (If the works had then exploded, that would have counted as an example of our bad plumbing karma.) Later on, Tesi and Gerry both joined us at the pool. There were also a few other families around, including a youngish couple from California with a lively and loud baby. He stared at me, as babies often do, and he was definitely amused when I made weird sputtering and trumpeting noises for him by exhaling through puckered lips at the surface of the pool.

At some point Tesi and Asa began to explore the central touristy street of the town, the Calle Santander. Their main goal was to identify a place to have dinner later: a restaurant serving decent food in pleasant surroundings, with some good vegan options for Asa, preferably cheaper than the hotel restaurant.

The place that they chose, Las Chinitas, offered mixed Asian cuisine. It had an indoor-outdoor feel, with big hanging plants and tasteful strings of lights. One booth had a stuffed-animal-strewn bed around it instead of benches, but we passed on that and took a table in the corner.

The food was just fine, and I'm not saying we didn't have a good time, but there were a few things about the ambiance that could not have been predicted.

One, the steady stream of vendors. Women selling woven bracelets and such would come right up to the table, and their response to a polite refusal would be either to try again with a different member of the party, or to tell us that they hadn't sold anything all day, or just to stand silent in hopes of being paid to go away. Sad and disturbing.

Two, that loud baby again. The California couple showed up, and their kid yelled a lot during dinner. (We would have a third chance to hear him again later on, in the middle of the night, since their hotel room was right next to ours.) Tesi actually took a turn quieting him at dinner, carrying him around the room and pointing things out to him. She is a keen observer of human beings, and especially babies, both by nature and by training, and she was pretty sure that the parents needed a break and that the baby would tolerate being entertained by a stranger for a few minutes.

Three, there was the live music. This gets a post of its own.

Guatemala, Part Seven: Tom and Asa Finish Shopping

(continued from Parts Five and Six)

We headed east in search of bread. The idea had been to go to either (a) Organica or (b) Sabe Rico, but I had a third idea: (c) the Italian bakery that Tesi and I had discovered a week earlier, when we were having trouble finding Organica and Sabe Rico. (Tesi and I had had trouble trouble finding them because, although I marked them on a map before we left the house, the map that I marked them on was not the map we took with us in the Jeep.) We were closer to (c) than to (a) or (b), and (c) had really great bread. I thought I knew what block it was on, but I was wrong. We could have asked someone, but I didn't know the name of the bakery. We bought bread at (b).

It had become clear by this point that we were not going to be home by 5:30. When we spoke with Tesi on the phone it also became clear that it really did matter when we got home, because Nancy was waiting to serve this meal to us. So Tesi grabbed the keys to the Jeep and headed downtown to rescue us from the consequences of our folly. In hindsight I would say that, in addition to underestimating how much time it would take to walk to La Bodegona and overlooking the fact that it takes longer to go to two stores than to one, we had also failed to allow some leeway for how long it might take a couple of people like us to choose some fruit.

In spite of some guilty feelings about how much trouble we had caused, I was perfectly prepared to rattle away about the fun we had had, until Tesi stopped us in our tracks when she heard what we had bought:

"Now don't flip out, guys, but you know Mum and I can't eat grapefruit."

Well, I used to know that about Tesi. Grapefruit (and no other citrus!) interferes with some prescription medication that she takes. And Gerry takes the same one, it seems. I could have said "Hang on, we're not absolutely sure they're grapefruit -- let's look up 'toronja' when we get back to the house", but I didn't think of it. Another thing I didn't think of until later is that if we had only been watching the time -- if we had only known while still in La Bodegona that we were going to be getting a ride home -- the melon decision would have been a no-brainer.

I should also mention that the next day, when Tesi finally happened to look at the bananas we had bought, she kindly pointed out that they were not banana bananas but plantains -- those starchy ones for cooking. Well, as soon as she said it I could see it. I mean, I've seen plantains before: they tend to be not just larger but angular -- very much like the ones we bought. No excuses. Though, you know, it's not like there are only two kinds of bananas in the world: I mean, given that there are grapefruit here that don't look like the grapefruit at home, why shouldn't there also be bananas here that don't look like the bananas at home? But no excuses. Though I am still wondering why anybody would put cooking bananas in the stand-alone fruit section of the store!!! Okay, maybe I did flip out a little.

Somebody also pointed out that when La Bodegona didn't have a lot to offer in the way of fruit we could have gone to the mercado. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. I had heard of that place, but I never knew where it was. Too bad. Yeah, too bad we didn't go get our fruit at the place where everybody says don't ever eat any of the fruit or vegetables from that place no matter what!

Sorry about that outburst.

The grapefruit were actually quite good. Amadi loved them. I liked them. Asa tried them, but the verdict was no, he really doesn't care for grapefruit.

Guatemala, Part Six: Tom and Asa Buy Fruit

(continued from Part Five)

We headed into town by the western route, on the busy road that runs past the building supply places. This would take us straight to La Bodegona, and afterward we could go east in search of good bread and then continue in the same direction to Fifth Avenida, the other main way back to our neighborhood. I had a nostalgic urge to walk Fifth Ave, the road full of surprises that Tesi and I had traveled by Jeep a week earlier, on the first morning, still disoriented and excited by the newness of it all. It was a little longer and dustier than the western route, but also freer of heavy traffic and the horrible fumes of trucks and buses.

As we went along, we talked of this and that.

Tom: There’s a Spanish word I keep running into. One of those connective words that doesn’t add a lot of meaning to a sentence. Sort of a signpost word.

Asa: Are you going to tell me what it is?

Tom: I keep not quite figuring out what it means, and I keep not getting around to looking it up or asking someone.

Asa: Are you going to tell me what it is?

Tom: It’s pretty long for one of those little words.

Asa: Are you going to tell me what it is?

Tom: entonces

Asa: I wondered if it might be entonces.

He told me that it functions much like “so” or “then” at the beginning of a sentence. Then he went on to muse about the nuances of the word, to explore his own understanding of it. Is it more like “then” in a chronological sense, or like “then” in a logical sense, or is it both? He drew parallels with some words in English. It was a nice glimpse of a thoughtful mind at work.

He went on to talk about a song they sang in Mads. That’s the Amherst College Madrigal Singers, a huge part of his life. They don’t just sing madrigals; they sing a cappella music from the Olden Days, the Renaissance give or take. One of the songs they learned last year was from Catalonia, and it had a three-word phrase in it that had given him the idea that the Spanish word entonces might have been formed by smooshing together essentially those same three words. I forget the details, but maybe he’ll remind me and I’ll edit this. [Or maybe not. See his comment below.]

We kept walking. His phone rang. It was Tesi, saying “and a small bottle of olive oil, please”. We kept walking.

When we got to La Bodegona, Asa initially took the lead, because he knew some things. He had been there before. He knew where the dairy section was, and that it was organized oddly. I chose a large plastic shopping basket, of the kind that converts into a wheeled vehicle with a long handle. The handle was a little short for me, so I picked the basket up. This made for a certain amount of tricky maneuvering, lifting it over people’s heads and so on, where the aisles were narrow. At one point Asa looked up from his search for milk and yogurt and thought he saw me dancing with the basket to the piped-in music, but I wasn’t dancing exactly. I wasn’t exactly not dancing, either. We explored the most relevant-looking dairy case until we had what we wanted, though many things were not quite what we expected and some things were not quite what they seemed. Asa took his time with one plastic jug, reading the fine print several times over. “I just wanted to be sure," he said "that it was whole milk and not whole something else.”

Then on to the fruit.

There was a gleaming array of neatly stacked bright red apples. Well, apple is a fruit. But, hey, we can get apples at home. Besides, these look like a kind of apple that we would turn up our noses at at home: probably all shine and no flavor. And anyway we’re not supposed to eat the fruit here without either peeling it or soaking it in a bleach solution for a good long time. Do we really want to buy apples if we can’t eat them like apples?

What else is there? Aha: right here, a sort of little table divided into three bins, full of various fruits.

The first bin held melons, nice-looking big melons, sort of like what we call honeydews at home. And big. I wonder what they’re called. Did you know that there is no Spanish word for melons in general? There’s a word for watermelon. Yes, I know. There’s got to be a word for this kind. Is there a word “cantalopa” or something? Wait, who cares what they’re called? They’re melons. They look big. They might even be ripe. Yeah, but they’re big. Do we really want to carry them all the way back? I’ll carry the melon if you carry everything else, ha-ha. No, listen, last week we got a melon when people were coming over, and we couldn’t finish it even with all that help. Forget it. We’re flying out of here in like 36 hours. No, I think we could finish it. Remember: we had a pineapple, too, that other day.

Yeah, but it’s so big. Do we really want to carry it?

The second bin held bananas. Some were green. Some had too many brown spots. Some looked good. I guess we’ll take a couple of bananas.

The third bin held several round things which suggested grapefruit. They were citrus, and they were the right size, but on the other they were lumpy and blotchy. Also, on top of the pile there was something else, one unidentified oblong fruit.

We looked around for more options. We looked all over the store. Nope. We asked an employee: is there any more fruit elsewhere in the store? Nope. We postponed the fruit decision and went looking for other things.

Here are some onions. They're not red, but they'll do.

Tom: I was guessing the sugar would be somewhere near the salt.

Asa: Yes, but it’s not.

Asa got a text from Tesi suggesting we pick up a bottle of red wine. Unnecessary: I had already had the same thought. Asa found paper napkins. I found red wine. I pointed at a giant bag of Froot Loops. This was good for a laugh. Thirteen and a half years ago, when we went to Guatemala to adopt baby Amadi, six-year-old Asa discovered Froot Loops at the hotel’s breakfast buffet and ate them every day for a week. There are pictures of this. He had never heard of them before that week, and he has never had the urge to eat them at any time since.

Tom: Hey, I found the sugar. It was near the salt.

Asa: Oh, I thought you meant really near the salt.

The fruit question. Right. We’ll get back to that.

Ice packs? We were looking for either the reusable ones that go in the freezer or else the chemical ones that you activate by hitting them. We had a little  fantasy about the hilarious conversation that might ensue if we asked about things that get cold when you hit them. That sounds pretty funny in English, and we didn’t even know the Spanish for “ice pack”. But Asa got a few sentences lined up in his head and summoned the nerve to politely bother a busy-looking employees with our question. She informed him that the phrase he was looking for was “bolsa de hielo”, and she got on her walkie-talkie. While we waited for the answer, we wondered aloud whether this was going to end with somebody showing us a nice bag full of ice cubes.

No, no ice packs. On to the kitchen towels. We found them, but none were distinctively Guatemalan.

There was no more avoiding it: it was time to face up once and for all to the fruit decision. We went back to the three-part bin and considered our options. It seemed to me that we could use a little more information. Of course Asa, as the Spanish speaker, was going to be the one asking the questions; my role was mainly to goad him into bothering somebody. At this point my increasingly heavy basket was on the floor, on wheels, handle extended, never mind if it was a little short.

After some slight hesitation, he managed to flag down an employee and ask her about the things that looked sort of like grapefruit. We knew the word for “orange”; in fact, I believe Asa had used it in his question. We did not know the word for “grapefruit”. As she answered, we were pretty sure that we were now hearing the word for “grapefruit”. “TOR-onja”, she said, coming down very slowly and heavily on the first syllable as if to make it clear to the meanest intelligence that this was not the same word as “naranja”, and repeating herself several times for further emphasis. She let us know that they were not as sweet as oranges, that they had a bitterness. Although she was being quite friendly and helpful, we could not help feeling just a little bit condescended to. Anyway, we figured they were grapefruit.

Asa remarked that he doesn’t really like grapefruit. I remarked that in that case he could eat bananas. We seemed to be getting close to a decision, but I had a sudden curiosity about the oblong thing.

After some further hesitation Asa found someone — the same person, actually — to ask about this. “Papaya” was the answer, delivered with a certain look. (Well, to tell the truth, papaya would have been my first guess.) At this point she was fairly close to openly laughing at us — not in a mean way but in a “what planet are you people from?” way.

I happened to know that Tesi cannot eat papaya: it does something bad to her. So we chose three of the probable grapefruit and three of the biggest bananas and stepped toward the checkout.

“Wait!” said Asa. He had remembered the one thing on the list that we never wrote down — the thing Tesi had called him about. But when I say “remembered” I don't mean that either of us could remember what item it was. We stood there staring, thinking, muttering for a minute. It was Asa who got it (oh, for a young brain!): olive oil. And there it was, right in front of us! (No, Asa, we are buying the smallest bottle. We are not buying the second smallest even if it’s cheaper by the liter. You need not bother with that computation.)

Our business at La Bodegona was done.

Guatemala, Part Five: Tom and Asa Decide To Go Shopping

Our departure for Pana was supposed to mark the beginning of the "true vacation" part of the trip. Up till then we had been renting a house and fending for ourselves: buying groceries, cooking meals, washing dishes, doing laundry -- and when I say "we" I mean above all Tesi. Add to that the water/plumbing fiasco and a somewhat busy social schedule, including emotionally laden meetings with Amadi's birth family, and you have a week that was long on satisfaction but short on relaxation.

I have to say about the grocery shopping that, although it was different from home in some respects (bumpy roads, hard to park, hard to find things in the store), it was just like home in one way: in spite of our best efforts to plan ahead there was always at least one more thing we needed, and I don't think a day ever went by without a trip to La Bodegona, the supermarket.

The next 48+ hours were to be different. On Saturday we were to be driven to Pana, where we had rooms reserved at a very good hotel. On Sunday we were to have a private tour of Lake Atitlan by motorboat (lancha). On Monday we would be driven back to Antigua. In between, we would be free to choose between swimming in the hotel pool, napping in a hammock or in the room, doing a little gift shopping -- whatever. We would have meals in the hotel or in some nearby restaurant. In short, it was time to take it easy. Furthermore, Tesi had arranged for someone else to prepare dinner for us when we got back to the house Antigua on Monday: Nancy, who cleans the house twice a week. Tesi even had a plan for Tuesday dinner, which was to save us from another trip to La Bodegona before leaving for home on Wednesday.

And that's basically how the weekend went, except for a couple of us getting a pretty severe case of the kind of gastro-intestinal trouble that sometimes affects visitors to that part of the world.

When we got back to Antigua on Monday, Gerry mentioned that she was at a stage where she would very much like to have some fruit to eat -- the one thing we didn't have! Asa and I volunteered to go to the store, and in no time there was a shopping list: as long as you're going there, how about a couple of big red onions? And some yogurt. And a thing of whole milk, but not too big. Sugar. Paper napkins. And we could probably use another loaf of bread. You could even, instead of supermarket bread, get something good from one of those other places: Organico or Sabe Rico. And we might as well see if they have an ice pack for Gerry's back. Oh, and just see if they have any brightly colored kitchen towels to take home, with pictures of something Guatemalan on them.

It was Asa's idea to make this expedition on foot rather than by Jeep. I thought it was a great idea: a little exercise, a little adventure, a little special time together. I did stop and raise the question of timing -- I didn't want to delay dinner, especially if Nancy was sticking around to serve it to us -- but after a brief discussion it was agreed that dinner would not be until 5:30 anyway, and off we went.

Guatemala, Part Four: Outline

It's been over a week since the last installment, and we're home now -- out of the delightfully mild "tropics" and back in the bitter cold of the "temperate" zone.

This travelogue was never meant to be a complete or balanced thing, but I would like to write down a few more stories. Before doing so, here is a bare outline, to assist the memory of those who were there and the understanding of those who were not.

12/29  Travel day.

12/30  Settling in in Antigua, getting to know the house, the neighborhood, the Jeep, the roads, and La Bodegona supermarket. Visit from Luvia's family. The convite.  

12/31  Meeting with Susi. Lunch by Nancy. Tom and Amadi walk halfway to town. Water/plumbing crisis. Fireworks.

1/1      Resolution of plumbing crisis. All go downtown together (hat, church, flutes, postcards, Thai lunch).

1/2      First meeting with Jacky and kids. 

1/3      Second meeting with Jacky and kids. Lunch at Luvia's house.

1/4      Water crisis continues. Long ride to Panajachel by shuttle van. Dinner at Las Chinitas.

1/5      Lake Atitlan by boat. Dinner with friends.

1/6      Breakfast at the Deli. Long ride back to Antigua by shuttle van. Tom and Asa walk to La Bodegona. Dinner by Nancy.

1/7      A fairly quiet last day, with just a touch of water crisis. Tom, Asa, and Amadi walk to the post office.

1/8      Home.

Some stories that should be told, and maybe will be:

Tesi and Tom's first somewhat dazed trip into town in the Jeep.

The convite in San Miguel Duenas: parade floats and dance troupes.

Tesi and Asa's alarming ride with the plumber on New Years Eve.

Lost in the rain in Juarez in a Chinese restaurant in Panajachel. [done]

Lake Atitlan: geology, the grandfather statue, the Romeo and Juliet of the lake, an herb garden, and natural dyes.

Asa and Tom walk the long dusty road in quest of fruit and other things and largely fail with regard to fruit. [done]

Asa, Amadi, and Tom walk the long dusty road just to mail a few postcards.

Guatemala, Part Three: Up Early

Tesi and I were awake before dawn today, and I followed her to the roof to watch the sun come up. While waiting for it to climb above the hills on our left, we had plenty of time to enjoy all kinds of other things, including:

The slightly active volcano on our right, which the locals call "Fuego", starting to smoke, stopping, starting, stopping, starting -- at first just little clinging wreaths of ash but later a rising plume.

The inactive volcano in front of us, which the locals call "Agua", its upper reaches covered, the peak sometimes showing above the cloud, sometimes not. Most of the clouds were drifting along from SSE to NNW, but the one on Agua was just sitting there: sort of like the halo in a Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim logo, but fatter. (Added a few days later: I have learned that this kind of cloud around a mountain peak is called a "lenticular cap".)

A light that must have been Venus setting behind a ridge on our right. (You will gather that we were facing south.) 

The sky slowly getting brighter and bluer, with pinkness appearing in various directions at various times.

Birds singing and squawking and buzzing. I have to take it back about the parrots that I saw four mornings ago: I'm now sure that they were just the ubiquitous Great-Tailed Grackles. I was fooled by the fact that I was viewing their iridescent backs in flight from above, when they can look positively blue in the right light.

Hawks (buzzards?) soaring in the distance.

The two great cypresses on the other side of the lane. They stand in a big estate called Las Ahuehuetes, ahuehuete being the local word for that kind of tree. According to Wikipedia, a famous ahuehuete in Mexico is either the stoutest tree in the world or in second place to a certain baobab (not that the ones across the lane are of anything like that caliber).

Getting back to the volcanoes:

Agua has not erupted in historical memory, but in 1541 it deluged the nearby town of Ciudad Vieja with a horrendous mudslide, prompting the Spanish colonial authorities to move their capital over here, to Antigua Guatemala. Of course, what they called the new capital was "Guatemala", without the "Antigua", until the province got a new new capital (the modern Guatemala City) in the 1770s. That second move was not to get away from volcanoes but to get away from earthquakes.

Fuego does erupt every few years, and even when it's not positively erupting it sometimes does more than just send up ash plumes: it let out a great booming belch on one of our first nights here, and we're told that if only we had looked over that way we might have seen some glowing lava at the very top.

I forgot to say: An animal has also been climbing on our roof -- on the tiles, not the platform that we use. A noisy nocturnal animal. Sometimes it sounds like it's chewing on the house. It stops if we pound on the bedroom ceiling. We haven't seen it, but they tell us that it must be the oversized opossum called a taqasim.

Guatemala, Part Two: New Years Eve

Asa has been very much in the front line throughout our little crisis. That’s partly because he and Tesi are the Spanish speakers in the family, but mainly because he has been acting like a grownup. I think it’s interesting to see what this kind of challenge brings out in people. What do you do with your anxiety? Can you transform it into some kind of useful energy?

In one of Wodehouse’s stories (the only Jeeves and Wooster story in which Jeeves has the narrative voice) Jeeves remarks that Mr. Wooster lacks “the gift of the unusual situation”. There have been moments in my life when I have thought the same about Asa. (There have also been moments when I have thought it about myself.)

Asa showed up well yesterday. He translated, he relayed messages, he searched for the breaker box, he rode along with Tesi when she headed off at dusk in the Jeep with Juan Jose to look for plumbing supplies. (That first time, summoned by his nephew from some party, Juan Jose had come by bus, not by motorbike. More about that scary bumpy dark Jeep ride later.)

But what set the seal upon it for Tesi and me was when Asa was selected to receive the crucial instructions. At the point when the plumber had done all he could in the dark after closing time on a holiday with nothing but hand tools and a piece of plastic pipe and a length of rope, J. B. stood in front of us all, hesitating, saying “I need to choose someone …” and picked The Young Man. Suddenly at that moment, viewed against the backdrop of a strange place and an unusual challenge, our child looked like an adult to us.

After that, Amadi, Gerry, and Tesi went to bed one by one but Asa and I stayed up. He checked on the pump from time to time. We climbed to the roof at quarter to midnight, when it was getting really loud. There were firework displays in every direction: in the center of town, in a neighbor’s yard two doors away, on a distant ridge line, everywhere — not to mention marvelous flying lanterns, small translucent glowing hot air balloons launched into the night sky one after another.

When we came back down, Asa checked on the pump again. This area was his responsibility; I was merely an observer. There was a funny moment, though, when he seemed to want my help for the trip to the breaker box to shut off the system for the night. He was just a little tiny bit afraid. ("Because electricity" was how he put it.)

Oh, and I should mention the other way that Asa was in the front line yesterday. You may be wondering why, when the firefighters had filled our cistern, that was not the end of the story. Well, the head firefighter Miguel was being thorough, and before putting hose to cistern he wanted to get a good look at the house’s water supply system. He found the covered nook in the front garden where the water, having made its way through a series of buried tanks, is pumped into a pressure tank. While contemplating it he gave what should have been a harmless gentle nudge to a PVC pipe. What happened next happened very fast: a related pipe suddenly sprang a leak and sprayed a good deal of hot water straight into Asa’s face and chest at high velocity.

Our understanding is that when (a) there was no more water coming to the pump and (b) a relay that should have shut off the pump failed, then (c) the pump, running dry, overheated, to the extent that the pipes leading to it were handling much more pressure than usual, not to mention heat. In that moment, the very surprised Asa said a word that I have rarely heard him say. We thought of keeping the bit of burst pipe as a souvenir, but I think in the end we left it at the house for the amusement of our landlord.

Tesi and I have been saying for years that we have terrible plumbing karma. This is not the time to tell all the old stories, but we have had the strangest leaks and disasters over the years. It's pretty clear that we brought our bad luck with us to Antigua. I couldn't help wondering whether it would follow us on our side trip to Pana.

Guatemala, Part One: New Years Day

January 1, 2014
Antigua, Guatemala

I awoke before the rest of the family at 6:00 and climbed the alarmingly steep and narrow stairs to the rooftop terrace. I had not been up there this early before, and I was rewarded today by birdsong and the sight of many teal-colored parrots flying in and out of a tree in the neighbor’s yard — also the usual over-sized grackles.

Looking further afield, I saw the nearest volcano, its top hidden in a cloud. Antigua sits in a bowl, circled by volcanoes. All of their peaks are in cloud right now, so I can’t tell whether the active one is puffing.

I know the shape of the horizon a little better than I did yesterday, because last night at midnight Asa and I saw many of these ridgelines beautifully lit up when we went on the roof to watch the fireworks.

I’m down on the ground floor now. I might have stayed on the roof longer except for a couple of things. I wanted to use the toilet and, ideally, to flush it, but that seemed to call for turning the household water supply back on, and that would have meant going to the meditation room next to the Moroccan lounge and flipping the correct circuit breaker, then sticking around to keep an eye on the temporary plumbing arrangements in the front garden. Asa, who received our instructions from the plumber last night and conveyed them to the rest of us, carefully explained this again at bed time last night. If you’re going to have to step outdoors every few minutes to make sure that the makeshift piece of PVC pipe is still lashed securely to the pump, then you probably don’t want to be hanging out on the roof.

Actually Asa received his instructions from J. B., the piano player who takes care of this house when the landlord is traveling. J. B. received them from the plumber Juan Jose, who made an emergency call in the late afternoon even though it was New Years Eve. Juan Jose is an uncle of one of the volunteer firemen who came to pump water into our cistern after we discovered that the municipal water supply had not been reaching this neighborhood for a few days.

To tell the truth, I still haven’t turned the water on. I could get along easily without it until Juan Jose returns this morning to make more permanent repairs, given the vast quantities of safe drinking water which the very apologetic J. B. has left us with -- I mean, I could get along without it until everybody else wakes up and starts taking showers and flushing toilets. So I just came downstairs, used a toilet whose tank was still full, went outside to satisfy my curiosity on a point which had been nagging me about the Jeep — is it really true that neither one of the front seats folds forward to make it easier to climb into the back seat ? (yes, I think so) -- and, if not, how tricky will it be for Asa, Amadi, and me to all get in the back seat if the five of us decide to visit Luvia, Wilfredo, and Daniel on Friday? (I think we can manage) — and then came in and started writing. But I think I will flip the breaker now. If anything blows up, I’ll just turn the system off again until Juan Jose arrives in an hour or two.

*****

Forty-five minutes later. No surprises when I flipped the switch. I am sitting in a rocking chair on the front stoop, with a cup of coffee and a newly charged laptop. Tesi has come downstairs and gone back up to take a bath before the water is shut off again.

I’m still hearing birds, though it’s no longer anything like dawn. I’m still hearing occasional fireworks, though it’s no longer New Years Eve. I’m also hearing a lot of church bells, though it’s not Sunday.

In front of me is the entrance gate, which I have unlocked for the plumber. I’m watching it through the jungly front garden: palm trees with their crisscrossing fronds, a potted rosemary three feet tall, some of those big-leaved hotel-lobby plants, a raspberry cane that’s climbing into a tree in the company of flowering tropical vines.

To my right, beyond the orange tree, is the other spot that I’m keeping an eye on, where the water pump is cycling on and off. I’ve just gone and looked; it’s still holding up.

*****

The plumber has arrived, on a little motorcycle, looked at the job in the morning light, and gone away to get some supplies.

Rock gardens, Part 2

A short ride on a big bus took us to the monastery, on a hillside on the northwestern outskirts of Kyoto. A guide conducted our group of forty or fifty around the grounds, which I admired, and probably through some of the rooms, though I don't recall, and I'm sure that we heard something about the history of the monastery, which I promptly forgot. The high point was to be the rock garden, and I wasn't paying a lot of attention to anything else. I wasn't feeling cynical. I felt, or wanted to feel, ready to have a powerful experience.

We viewed the garden from a low platform, a long open verandah that lay all along one side of the main building. There was plenty of room for all of us to stand there and contemplate the garden's austere beauty, its mystical what-is-it, its enigmatic presence. But I found it impossible to get in the right frame of mind while standing in a crowd. I wanted to commune with the rocks, to hear them silently speaking to me. I wanted something to fall into place--to feel a wave of oneness--something!--but I just couldn't get past the chatter of the people around me. It may have been quiet chatter, but even the idea of chatter was too much. I didn't blame them: they were interfering with my experience, and I was probably interfering with theirs. We coped as best we could, I suppose. Then a second and louder busload arrived: a crowd of camera-happy tourists from somewhere in Europe, if I recall correctly. Any chance of a special moment was over.

We were escorted back to our bus by a roundabout route. We walked slowly past a pond lined with lovely flowering shrubs. Very nice. Drooping trees reflected in still water. Lily pads. Wasted on me, though, in that moment of disappointment. We boarded the bus, and it bounced and blatted its way back down the hill to the city center and left us to go our own ways.

Rock gardens, Part 1

There is a shop in Cambridge, Mass., that specializes in clever ironic gifts for clever ironic people. You know what I mean: an Etch-a-Sketch key chain, a silver pin in the shape of Edward Gorey's Uninvited Guest, some interesting object that on second examination turns out to be a clock, a realistic imitation of a tipped-over wine-glass with a realistic imitation of a puddle of red wine attached, a wind-up toy for the connoisseur, campy stuff like a Diamond Jubilee Edition waving Solar Queen (and Corgi), a ceramic tile that proclaims "I am Woman. I am strong. I am so tired." (I shouldn't be so snide about it; I've shopped there myself, happily.)

You used to be able to go into this place and buy a miniature Japanese rock garden in a box. Maybe you still can.

I don't know about you, but when I see the words "rock garden" the first thing I think of is a place where decorative plants grow among rock outcroppings. There was a sunny little rock-studded embankment like that near my parents' house, covered (except for the rocks) with mosses and flowering this and that.

But that's not what I'm talking about. I mean the kind of rock garden with no plants at all, such as you might find at a Zen monastery in Japan. It consists of a bed of sand in a rectangular border or frame, in which rocks of various shapes and sizes have been arranged just so. The sand is raked regularly, to smooth it out and to remove any leaves and other debris that have come along. I imagine that from time to time the gardener or the abbot or some other very wise person might even rearrange the rocks, after careful deliberation.

The box in the gift shop contained everything you would need to set up a scale model of such a thing: a rectangular frame, enough sand, a handful of little dark rocks, and a teeny-tiny rake. The only thing that was missing was a wise person to arrange the rocks. The scale of the thing was maybe 1:50, so--I don't know--maybe you would only need some fraction of the full wisdom of a Zen rock-garden master. Would it be 1/50? 1/2500?

Well, I never had one of these, but I was aware of them, and I believe that for the most part I took their existence in the ironic or campy spirit in which it was meant. I also wondered whether there were any people who took these things seriously, people who actually thought that they could get some of the esthetic or philosophical or spiritual benefit of a Zen rock garden by acquiring the home version. Silly people: without the heft of the rocks, without the landscape, without the history, without the years of spiritual discipline, all you have is a box of toys from a toy store.

At least I'm pretty sure I wondered about that. And although this was a long ago I'm pretty sure that those speculations extended to questions/thoughts/confusions such as:

What in fact are the benefits of a Zen rock garden?

Is "benefit" even the right word, or am I falsely imposing some American utilitarianism here? What is a garden for?

Should I be less cynical about miniature Zen rock gardens? Who am I to say that someone with a toy rake and a box of sand and a few little rocks can't find a good Zen moment in their own way? What do I know about it?

Or, turning it around, should I be more cynical about full-size Zen rock gardens? Those carefully chosen but natural-looking arrangements of the stones: do I really believe that an observer with the right training, the right sort of highly refined sensibility, sees something that I don't see there? Is this like The Emperor's New Clothes? Zen can have a joking quality; is the joke on me for even trying to comprehend this practice of arranging rocks on a bed of sand?

In August of 1990 the big quadrennial event known as the International Congress of Mathematicians was held in Kyoto, and I had the honor of being one of the many invited speakers. At any math conference there is likely to be half a day set aside to take a break from lectures. At a small meeting there might be an organized outing for those who want it, but basically you are on your own. At the ICM the free afternoon was meticulously planned. In a packet that came to me before I left home there were descriptions of a dozen or more excursions, and a form for reserving a place in one of them. I don't think I was ever in doubt: as second and third choices I may have put down the boat trip on a river and the boat trip on a lake, but my first choice had to be the tour of the Zen monastery with its world-famous rock garden.

Watersheds, Waterways, and Penguins: Part 4

The Concord River arises from the confluence of the Sudbury and Assabet Rivers in Concord and goes on to pour itself (as I said before) into the Merrimack. That's the sort of thing I like to know.

Looking further afield, the Ohio River arises from the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela in Pittsburgh. Try saying this aloud: "the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela". Say it a few times.

Of course, not every confluence involves three river names: far from it. Very often the outgoing stream bears the same name as one of the two incoming streams and the other is considered a tributary. (Is it still called a confluence in that case? Sometimes it is, certainly: that's how the city of Koblenz, where the Moselle flows into the Rhine, got its name.)

Sometimes the people who name the rivers get it wrong, in the sense that the bigger branch is called a tributary. A famous example is where the Missouri River meets the Mississippi at Saint Louis. The Mississippi upstream from Saint Louis is negligible in comparison with the Missouri. If anyone asks you what the longest river in North America is (and if they mean it to be a question about physical reality rather than about the names of things), the answer is not a river that has a single name for its whole length: it consists of the Missouri and part of the Mississippi. I believe this is widely known; I've known it since I was a child. (Actually--and I didn't know this until recently--there is more to say here. The Missouri arises from a confluence of not two but three rivers, not one of them called the Missouri, and the full list of names of segments of the continent's longest river seems to be "Mississippi River", "Missouri River", "Jefferson River", "Beaverhead River", "Red Rock River", "Hellroaring Creek".)

Anyway, by some kind of logic the upper portion of the Mississippi should have some other name, and the Missouri should be considered part of the Mississippi.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not here to complain, or to push one kind of logic at the expense of another. I can enjoy the names of rivers, and I can enjoy the reality of rivers, and I can also enjoy a little mismatch between the names and the reality.

After the Missouri the other main tributary of the Mississippi is the Ohio. This comes in further downstream, on the other side, the east. Imagine following the Ohio upstream from where it ends in the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. First you have Indiana on your left and Kentucky on your right. Later Ohio replaces Indiana, then West Virginia replaces Kentucky, then the river leads you into Pennsylvania and, as we know, ends (in name only) at Pittsburgh.

I like to think about the vast drainage basin of the Mississippi system, the huge middle portion of North America whose waters end up in the Mississippi Delta. You can see on a map that parts of it come very close to the Great Lakes. In Minnesota there is a divide, probably not very dramatic if you saw it up close, between the Mississippi and Lake Superior. It continues through Wisconsin and Illinois (where the relevant Great Lake is Lake Michigan) and into Indiana, possibly Michigan, and Ohio (now it's dividing the Ohio River from Lake Erie) and Pennsylvania, and even up into New York state, between Lake Ontario and the headwaters of the Allegheny.

The fairly vast drainage basin on the other side of this divide is that of the Saint Lawrence River, which is fed by the Great Lakes and opens into a wide bay or estuary called the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, in eastern Canada.

I have sometimes thought about the fact that there must be a point in New York where the basins of the Mississippi, the Saint Lawrence, and something else come together. I was pretty sure that the something else had to be Chesapeake Bay, because once, when I had occasion to drive from the Boston area to the State University of New York at Binghamton, somewhere on a lovely highway southwest of Albany, a sign told me that I was crossing the Susquehanna.

I like to imagine coloring in a map of North America in a certain way. First color the Mississippi basin. Then color the Saint Lawrence (or Great Lakes) basin. Look at the territory surrounded by these two basins and the Atlantic, and color in whatever drainage basin it is that touches both of the first two basins, namely that of Chesapeake Bay, which is fed by the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and some other rivers whose names I don't know. Now look at the remaining territory between the Saint Lawrence and Chesapeake basins and look for the basin that touches both; I suppose it is that of the Hudson. Now look between the Hudson and the Chesapeake and find the Delaware. Look between the Saint Lawrence and the Hudson and find, what? the Connecticut? And between the Saint Lawrence and the Connecticut the Merrimack? It's all about looking for those triple points. Between the Merrimack and the Connecticut is, I'm guessing, the Blackstone. And between the Blackstone and the Merrimack, finally the Charles?

Getting back to the Mississippi and the logic of river-naming, here's something I didn't know until recently, and it kind of blows my mind. Where the Ohio meets the Mississippi, the Ohio is in fact the bigger branch by flow rate (though not of course by length).

Imagine starting at the place in Louisiana where all that water flows into the Gulf of Mexico and, ignoring the names of things, going to see where the water is coming from. Travel up the stream, choosing at every confluence the branch that has the majority of the water. You would pass the mouths of the Red River, the Arkansas River*, and others, but at Cairo you would turn right and follow the Ohio. At Pittsburgh you would turn left and follow the Allegheny into western New York and then back into Pennsylvania, ending in some little creek in the woods.



* This is an impressively long river. And apparently outside of the state of Arkansas its name is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable. Think "Kansas". And apparently that's how some people used to pronounce the state of Arkansas, until the state legislature passed a resolution in 1881 to settle the matter.

Waterways, Watersheds, and Penguins: Part 3

In the nearby city of Newton there is a road that I have been noticing for years. I like to roll its name around in my mouth: Albemarle Road. It's not a major route, but it has some striking qualities (apart from its name). It wanders along, crossing more important streets at sometimes funny angles, and wherever it goes it sports a broad green median strip. You can see why it wanders: it's following a waterway: in the middle of the green strip is what looks like an elegant drainage ditch, its sides lined with stone. The elegance is spoiled somewhat by the fact that there's usually not much more than a slimy trickle of water in it. At least that's my impression. Maybe I'm being unfair. I should really get out of the car and take a closer look.

At the northern end of all of this the road comes to a dead end (or rather two dead ends, one on each side of the water) and the stream disappears into the woods, casts aside its artificial stone walls, and after about 100 yards debouches into the Charles. Moving in the other direction, upstream, you come to a residential block of Albemarle Road (two one-way roads joined by a footbridge) followed by a longer block in which one side is residential but the other is a big public park with a playground, athletic fields, and a swimming pool. Through the middle of all of this runs the stream in its stony ditch, with grassy banks sloping down to it from the roadway. At Watertown Street the grassy banks suddenly give way to a stretch of impenetrable-looking jungliness, a fenced-off block in which weeds and vines have been allowed free rein on both sides of the water; and then suddenly the jungle gives way to an attractive little neighborhood park with benches and paved walks and plantings. Here Albemarle Road ends and the brook, still with squared off stone-lined sides, can be seen running between back yards. To spot any more of it from a public place you have to zig-zag around the neighborhood looking for all the spots where the stream ducks under yet another road. After about five of those I lose the trail. It emerges from under a street, but across the street is no sign of it.

Of course I have looked at a map. The Newton page of my Street Atlas of Metro Boston and Eastern Massachusetts shows that there is quite a bit more to this waterway: its headwaters are shown as being about a mile to the southwest of where I lose it (quite close to another part of the Charles, in fact--there is a ridge of high ground by the river in that part of Newton, so that rain falling quite near the river will initially flow away from it, not finding its way in until much further downriver). This supposed upper portion of the brook is on the other side of the Turnpike from the lower part that I have described. But I've gone over there and looked, and I can't find it.

Oh, the map told me its name, too: Cheesecake Brook.

Now, I have lots of questions about all of this, such as: How did Cheesecake Brook and the area around it get chosen for this special treatment, with stone walls and parks and footbridges and all? Was that jungly bit once meant to be a public park, too? What is the history of Albemarle Road? Why can't I find the upper part of the brook? And why "Cheesecake"?

I have not been in a hurry to answer these questions. (The answers might not be as enjoyable as the questions, you know.) I do in fact have tentative answers to some of them, based on some internet searching. But before I go into that I might have to tell some stories about family life, the Mystic/Charles divide, and the mighty Mississippi.

Waterways, Watersheds, and Penguins: Part 2

Rivers

One source of my current obsession with rivers is that I cross the Charles River a lot. I've been noticing this for some time. Every time I drive to Providence I cross the Charles five times, and every time I drive back I cross it seven times. I enjoy understanding this, and I want to share my knowledge. Of course the general explanation is that I'm not going in a straight line and that the river is not going in a straight line, either, but there are interesting details. For example, you can see high places here and there that account for bends in the river. And there is the coincidence that the river runs right through the area where Route 128 connects with the Turnpike, where there are looping, branching ramps (different ones for different directions of travel), and that just at that spot the river is as wiggly as it ever gets. I could go on, but maybe I'll spare you.

Of course, when I'm making those drives alone I don't spend the whole time talking to myself about crossing the Charles. That would be boring. If I am in a geographical mood, I can find other things to think about. For example, between the last crossing of the Charles and the first crossing of the Neponset, where exactly does the highway cross the watershed? There used to be a sign: "Entering Neponset River Watershed", but it must have disappeared when they widened the highway. Where was it? Common sense says that the divide must be either at this one high point in the town of Dedham or at this other high point in the town of -- well, I think that that other high point is also in Dedham, but I can't be sure: somewhere between the "Entering Dedham" sign near Exit 17 and the "Entering Dedham" sign near Exit 15 the road must have left Dedham. There ought to be another sign: "Entering [town]". Westwood, maybe? I wonder if there was a sign before they widened the highway ... But I see that I am digressing. Let's get back to rivers.

Watersheds 

And let's get this "watershed" business out of the way. Many of us know that the good old sense of that word is the sense that I used it in in the paragraph above, as opposed to the sense of the highway sign. As Henry Fowler puts it in Modern English Usage, a watershed is "the line of high land dividing the waters that flow in one direction from those that flow in the other, called in America a divide." He goes on, "The older of us were taught that that was its meaning, and the senses sometimes given to it of river-basin and catchment area and drainage-slope were mere ignorant guesses due to confusion with the familiar word shed." He laments, but he also concedes that the battle has been lost, that it has been lost for some time--and he is writing all of this in 1926. Of course the battle was lost: battles like that are nearly always futile.

Where does that leave us? The new sense is thriving and the old sense is not dead. In context it is usually easy to distinguish the two senses. No problem, right?

Well, I have no problem when other people use the word, but I have a little problem every time I use it. I feel the need to make it clear that I know the history of the word, and even to show that there is some part of me that disapproves (like Fowler) of the upstart modern sense, however convenient it may be. For the rest of this series of posts I will try to set those feelings aside and freely use "watershed" interchangeably in both senses.

The Charles, the principal river in these parts, flows into Boston Harbor. The Concord River, not so many miles west of here, is a tributary not of the Charles but of the Merrimack, which it joins at the old mill town of Lowell, well to the north. The Merrimack has a lot more water flowing through it than the Charles does, and most of its water comes from the White Mountains of New Hampshire, still further north. I have sometimes wondered what a map of these watersheds would look like--I mean, a map showing the outlines of these drainage-basins, catchment areas, valleys--these watersheds. And there must be what I would call a triple point, a place where three watersheds come together: those of the Charles, the Concord/Merrimack,  and the Mystic (what a great name!), this last being a smaller river that enters Boston harbor just north of the Charles. Where's the triple point, I wonder? I've worked out that it is somewhere in Lexington, but I'd like to know more. And where does the Charles-Mystic divide run from there? It has to go through parts of Belmont,  Cambridge, Medford?, certainly Somerville. That pond in front of Belmont High School--it receives water from a brook running down from Belmont Hill, but where does the water go from there? I suppose either to the Charles by way of Fresh Pond or to the Mystic by way of Alewife Brook (another fine name). Come to think of it, the space between Fresh Pond and the railroad tracks near Alewife Station is so flat that the question of locating that divide has got be a subtle one. Besides, whatever divide existed there in a state of nature must be long gone: that flat space is largely paved over now. I mean, there is a shopping center with a big parking lot on each side of you as you drive away from Fresh Pond on Alewife Brook Parkway, a.k.a Route 2 westbound, a.k.a. Route 3 northbound, a.k.a Route 16 eastbound. (Routes 2 and 16 are state highways; Route 3 is part of the old Federal Highway System.) But I see that I have wandered off the subject again.

Penguins

When Tesi was a child, her family used the word "penguins" as a private signal meaning something like "That's quite enough, dear. I think you can stop talking about that specific topic now." It was a reference to the following true story (I found this version at the website Futility Closet):

In 1944 a children’s book club sent a volume about penguins to a 10-year-old girl, enclosing a card seeking her opinion. She wrote, 'This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.' American diplomat Hugh Gibson called it the finest piece of literary criticism he had ever read."

Imagine that you have guests for dinner. One of your children starts giving an account of something that happened to them, or something they did, or something they have been learning about, and it is an excruciatingly detailed account, and the end is nowhere in sight. The time has come for drastic action, but you don't want to embarrass the speaker, so you casually work the word "penguins" into a sentence, something like, "Was there anything about penguins in it?"

If all goes well, the child quietly gets the message and cedes the floor. He or she probably flashes the signaler a quick irritated look, guests may raise a few eyebrows as they try to work out what just happened, and life goes on. (Occasionally the child will go beyond flashing looks and loudly reply, "It is not penguins!")

I have been saying "child", but theoretically it could just as well be an adult who requires this treatment. Some families probably have more need of such a private signal than others; we certainly find use for it around here.

I'll get to Cheesecake Brook next time. I have a lot to say about it.

Waterways, Watersheds, and Penguins: Part 1

There's something I want to write about, but I haven't been able to decide where to start. It has to do with rivers, roads that cross rivers, watersheds in several senses, obsessive fact-collecting (and therefore penguins in the family sense), fatherhood, and an excellent Father's Day present. I might start with Cheesecake Brook.

Blet

I've recently learned the word "blet"--learned it in the WWF sense. That's not World Wildlife Federation, nor is it the World Wresting Federation. It's Words With Friends, the online Scrabble knockoff, one of whose distinctive features is that you can try an unlikely word with no fear of consequences: the software will tell you if it's on the approved list, and if it isn't then it's still your turn and your opponent doesn't even have to know what stupid-ass combination of letters you just tried to get away with. I'm somewhat addicted to this game, as are my wife, my son, and various friends of ours. Tesi recently told me that she had the word "blet" played against her by our friend Katherine. I was glad to hear it: I happened to be in a game with Asa in which that word might be very useful. He had played "lets" in such a way that someone with a "b" could add to it and maybe get another word on a triple word score. About a week later I finally got my "b" and took advantage. (The outcome of the game is still in doubt; he had a bit of a lead, but now it's a close one.) Here's the great thing: "blet" seems to be a word worth knowing for other reasons. Possibly neither Katherine nor Tesi bothered to look the word up. Neither did I, I admit. Asa (a true intellectual) did, at the Wordnik site. So you know that thing that pears do? When you buy some pears, and they're not ripe yet, but then before you notice that they're ready to eat they suddenly go from underripe to soft/brown/yucky? I think that that's called "bletting". Apparently an English botanist called Lindley adapted the French verb blettir. What I haven't got straight is precisely which kinds of pears-going-bad the word applies to: the OED (my old paper version) quibbles as to whether some other dictionary has misinterpreted Lindley: maybe if there are brown spots then it's just plain rot, not bletting. I'm very interested in this thing that pears do, because it's so disappointing. But I'm even more interested in using words correctly. Also I don't know whether "blet" is related to "blight". (This was Tesi's suggestion.) Can anyone tell me?