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?

Nemo, Part III

I've been out there shoveling. It's a very different experience by daylight: more cheerful, like. I did more than we need for the dipping-things-in-chocolate party that we're having later, i.e. more than enough to allow people to come and go on foot. Probably in my next bout I will make the driveway driveable and clear the sidewalk to the next driveway.

Before coming in I walked up and down the street to say hello to other shovelers, and to clear some space around the two nearest fire hydrants. I really liked the phone reminders to do that, and might have been a little disappointed if someone else had beaten me to it.

I also walked around the house, shaking snow off the poor holly bush that was bent double (and in the process inadvertently unplugging some Christmas lights so that I needed to hunt around in the snow for the other end) and making my snowman ball more visible. I was sorry to say that the snow that's falling now is not the kram kind, so there won't be a second ball. This last bit meant walking in snow higher than my boots.

I took off my snow-caked jeans right away and put something else on, but the skin of my legs still feels chilled 45 minutes later.

More Nemo

At A Bad Guide I asked whether the Norwegians had a name for that sticky snow that's good for snow balls. Trond Engen replied

A handy adjective: kram: "Snøen er kram. Vi lager snømann!". No single-morpheme noun. The noun kramsnø is formed with the adjective.

I put that into Google Translate and got "The snow is wet. We make a snowman!"

We did lose power last night, but not for very long. It's still snowing now, in the morning.

Nemo

We're having a snowstorm, the first big one of the year, much bigger than anything we had last year. I'm glad. It's exciting. It's beautiful. I feel festive. (Also just a little anxious, maybe.)

 Of course there have been warnings for days. The storm has a name, Nemo. We have learned that it is the offspring of two storm systems, one coming up the Atlantic coast and one coming from the Great Lakes and beyond. These two parent storms were nameless, as far as I know. Nemo is a "superstorm". The word "thundersnow" is in the air, too, or so I have been hearing on Facebook. Maybe if I watched more TV I would know what that word is supposed to mean. I haven't heard any thunder.

By Thursday, if not before, it was clear that things would be starting in the middle of the day Friday, with the heaviest snowfall occurring overnight. Estimates of the total amount have varied. Maybe about two feet? By Thursday night many school closures, or at least early closings, had been announced, and eventually the governor of Massachusetts declared that all towns should cancel school for the day.

Since Thursday evening I have taken several phone calls that were recorded messages from the municipal authorities. Things like "This is officer Callahan of the Watertown police department ... Please exercise common sense and avoid driving after the storm begins unless it is absolutely necessary ... Check on your neighbors ... It is illegal to move snow into the road or onto the sidewalk .. You are required to clear a passage at least 36 inches wide on any sidewalk on your property within 24 hours ..." and later "This is Officer Callahan of the Watertown police department, with a message from the Public Works Department. A snow emergency has been declared. Starting at 12:00 noon Friday on-street parking is prohibited ... Our snowplow drivers will be working very hard for many hours. Please do not try to stop a snowplow [Do people stop them? Why? To tell them how to do do their jobs? To complain about plowed snow blocking driveways?] ... We remind you to check on your neighbors, and to shovel out fire hydrants that are covered with snow ..."

At some point on Friday the governor declared that he had signed an executive order making it illegal to drive after 4pm (with a few obvious exceptions). He then went on to point out that there could be some very deep drifts, and to urge people to be cautious about playfully leaping into them because there might be something hard underneath.

Some time late Friday afternoon, when it had been snowing for about seven hours and several inches had accumulated and darkness was falling, the phone rang. This time Tesi answered, and she listened to another long recorded message. This one was from our electric company. The gist of it was "A major snowstorm is expected on Friday. You should plan ahead and make sure you have everything you might need if the power goes out. If you have a particular need of electrical power, such as for a medical device, you should consider leaving the area before the storm comes."

So I think we award high scores to the town and to the governor, and a very low score to the power company.

Then there are the TV weather news people. As I say, I don't watch that much TV, or at least I don't watch that much TV news. The cliche is that these people live for moments like this, and that when the moment arrives they milk it for all the drama it's worth, and more. Sometimes they hype a storm and it doesn't live up to the hype, and we roll our eyes. Sometimes they hype a storm and it turns out to be a whopper, and it still seems like the hype was a little bit on the nutty side, even if the forecast was factually accurate. For the most part I believe that their line is "this is going to be really bad". At the same time it's clear that for them bad is good: telling us about this bad thing that's about to happen is their favorite part of their profession. Not that I mind so much, since my main feeling about a storm like this is "Oh, boy, this is going to be fun/beautiful/something to remember".

Last night I heard one guy on TV explaining about the two storm systems coming together to create this situation. He was pointing at a map and saying "it looks like one of the systems is lagging behind the other, but that's all right". What did he mean? It sounded like he meant "I know it looks like this won't be quite the superstorm that we have been predicting, but don't worry: this is going be a hell of a bad storm".

One thing about this snow: it's the good sticky kind, perfect for making snowballs and snowmen, or other snow sculptures. I don't have anybody to have a snowball fight with these days, really (and I'm not sure I ever really enjoyed that sort of thing as a kid), but I'd love to make a snowman. Before it got dark tonight, when there were still two or three inches on the ground, I was in the yard with Amadi, and I had the pleasure of rolling a snowball around in the back yard until it was a respectable size, suitable for stage one of a classic snowman. I lifted it onto an outdoor table (it was not quite too heavy for that), ostensibly to prevent it from disappearing overnight when the rest of the snow has fallen. In the morning, after laboriously shoveling out all that snow from the driveway, or maybe during a break from that, I will finish the job. Asa has reminded me of the snow kangaroo that we made a few years ago. I also remember the snow caterpillar that we made many years ago. That one was easy, in a way--just keep making more big balls of snow, and line them all up--but, as I've just been reminded, each ball is a nontrivial amount of work. I think I'll stick with one three-ball snowman this year, and shoveling one driveway, our sidewalk, maybe a neighbor's sidewalk, clearing one fire hydrant ...