Muse Gumbo

Images of Turkey in 10 Glorious Minutes

2011-07-13T08:25:00.005-06:00

This is my last post on my Turkey trip. I don't plan to write much text, other than to say that my trip to Turkey was one of the best travel experiences I have ever had. I have taken photos that I like from the 1500 or so that my wife and I snapped and have put them together in a slide show with music. I don't provide any narration, so if you are curious about any of the images feel free to comment or send me a message.

In conclusion, I would encourage you, if you ever have a chance to travel there, to take that opportunity. It is a fascinating country right on the edge of many different worlds and many different epochs of human history. In such a place, you can't help have your outlook expand and grow.

Culture in Turkey: Eight Moments

2011-06-27T11:16:00.040-06:00

This will be my second to last post on Turkey. The last post will consist of a slideshow I am putting together. However, I want in this post to focus on some scattered and random moments that I want to remember, and will throughout the rest of my life. They are in no particular order but are presented just as they come into my head.

The bunnies know all

Moment One - The Bunny Tells It Like It Is

This is a moment that I like to complain about, but it was actually really sweet. Megan and I were walking along a street after leaving the Istanbul Modern Art Museum. It was late in the day and we had decided to head down to the Galata Bridge, where we would cross over and have a fish sandwich, or maybe go to one of the restaurants underneath the bridge and have a fish dinner. As we walked along a little park not far from the museum, we passed an older man behind a sort of podium-like thing. I immediately noticed that two tiny bunnies were perched on top. The man saw me looking, and motioned for me to come pet them. By now Megan had noticed, and so we went over to see. He picked up the bunnies, plopped them into our hands (they were small enough to fit in one palm) and then asked me if I spoke English, French or German. I said English, and he grabbed the bunny back and set it on the podium. The top of the podium had a slit where there were little strips of paper sticking out. He tapped the podium and the bunny took a slip of paper from its mouth and put it in his hand. He gave the paper to me. I read it - it was my fortune! In the meantime, he was doing the same for Megan. She also got her fortune.

He charged us 5 lira (about $3.50) for the fortunes, but as Megan said, it was really worth it. Unfortunately, the bunnies were nicer to her than me. My fortune said I was "quarrelsome," while hers said very nice things about her. It's true, I was being quarrelsome that day, but I'm not going to take that from a bunny without defending myself!

Relaxed at the bath house after my "manhandling."

Moment 2 - Manhandled

There was a brief moment, when I was in the Cağaloğlu Hamami (a Turkish bath house), that I thought that my attendant was going to pull my face right off my skull. His name was Chan, or perhaps Çan in Turkish, and he had been working there for 30 years as a bath attendant. I wasn't sure that I would have wanted to make soaping up and rubbing men my life's work, but he obviously was good at it. He weighed somewhere well north of 250 pounds, and he manhandled me around on the wet marble as if I was a rubber ball and he was an elephant idly playing with it.

I have no pictures of me getting the treatment because it's hard to take a photo when you're getting lathered up and rinsed off, but here's a video of Michael Palin getting a Turkish bath. If I'm not mistaken, his attendant is a younger Çan.

In another moment, when Çan washed my hair, he was so extremely gentle that I temporarily forgot that the lather was being worked into my scalp by a man who could have easily broken me like a twig. With my eyes closed, I enjoyed the feeling of someone else's fingers roaming over my head. I've had members of the opposite gender stroke my hair and massage my scalp - and occasionally a male masseuse - but when you looked at the girth of Çan and heard every so often the gruff voice bark "Is no good?" you really had to suspend your disbelief that such a person could at one moment roughly pull your arms to the point that you were afraid they might come out of the sockets, and at the next lightly massage your temples.

Would I go back? Of course I would, in a minute.

Hittite bull from the Pergamom Gate

Moment 3 - Living History

Actually, this is a collection of small moments. Most of the time, we were running from historic site to historic site because we were on a schedule. It was those times, however, when I got to stay in a place for a moment and try to take into my mind the vast enormity of history and place that I truly experienced Turkey. I felt shivers in my spine as I looked down the main avenue of Ephesus to the remnants of the facade of the Library of Celsus and thought about how many people had trod these steps when the city was, 2000 years ago, the second city of the Roman Empire. I got the same shivers as I imagined the painters of the frescoes on the 12th century churches carved into the stone at Goreme. I thought of the novels I had read (the Dorothy Dunnett novels and Eco's Baudolino) in which Constantinople plays a key role as I wandered through the historic sites of the city, especially Hagia Sophia and the underground Cistern. Having read books about the long history of this place, I felt a strange kinship to it. Even though I was physically seeing Turkey and its sites for the first time, it felt like I knew them and so it was like greeting an old friend.

In Turkey there are shops galore selling all kinds of tchochskies

Moment 4 - Keeping it Local

I was full of amazement, constantly, at the level of entrepreneurism in Turkey. I did not see many chains of American and European variety there, but a LOT of home grown industries. I know from reading that the current ruling party really focused on building entrepreneurism in Turkey. As a result, Turkey has eight - that's right eight!!!! - domestic airlines. I'm sure that's more than the United States has at the moment. I don't know much about Turkey's domestic economy, but it seems to be free of the rampant monopolism and oligopolism that has become the American economy. The upshot was that we ate local food, drank local alcohol, and shopped at local stores. Certainly, one could find European and American products, but they were often right next to Turkish competitors. Perhaps this is a product of protectionism, and the Turkish economy will, now that it's more open than ever, become more crowded by Western companies. I hope not. I hope that Turkish companies will continue to engage in the kind of competition you rarely see in capitalist countries nowadays.

Apeth Keasoy, actually Areti or Virtue, looks silently over the plaza.

Moment 5 - Who was Apeth Keasoy?

As I looked at the statue in the nook in the facade of the Library of Celsus in Ephesus, I wondered: who was Apeth Keasoy? She was part of a group of four women, most of whom had what appeared to be the same last name, Keasoy. The most undamaged statue of one woman had the name Apeth Keasoy inscribed in Greek at the base. The another statue, more damaged, was titled Sophia Keasoy. I don't remember what the two others were.

The library is one of the finest examples of Roman architecture still standing. Ephesus itself was a Greek city in Turkey that for a while was the second most important city in the Roman Empire. The library was built to house up to 12,000 scrolls, and was laid out very carefully so as to take advantage of the morning light for early risers.

She appeared to have her right hip cocked upward. Her hands were missing, but one would probably rest upon her breast, while the other might hold a fold of her dress. Her hair appeared to be curled, and covered with a type of hood. Her gaze was directed outward, and little to the right and upward.

She fascinated me. Here was a woman whose image, captured in stone, conveys a thinking person. I thought that she must have had some kind of interest in arts and letters to be immortalized so at a library. I assumed that she also must have been wealthy. Perhaps she and Sophia were sisters who provided some needed funding to the construction of the library. Perhaps she was a regular patron, reading scrolls from authors from Ephesus and beyond and learning what scholars of her time knew about the wider world.

I could imagine her, clutching her the fold of her dress to keep it out of the way while she climbed the stairs to the library in the early summer sun, hurrying to read some newly acquired works in the cool interior of the library. Off across the plaza, her sister, not clearly visible in the dawn, calls to her and she turns on the steps, her hood falling back and revealing her long, dark, curly hair. She waves and then turns again, pulling her hood back over her hair and vanishes into the main entrance of the library for another day of learning, imagining, and dreaming.

Digging for information, of course, totally shattered my image. The statues are merely representations. The other three represent Sophia (wisdom), Episteme (knowledge), Ennoia (intelligence). What I interpreted as Apeth is actually Areti, representing virtue. No matter. I still prefer to place her in the little story I concocted. She seems more real to me that way.

I mortgaged my kid's college fund for this....Wait, I don't have a kid.

Moment 6 - Buying a Rug

My friend Laura Bruzzese writes about this experience more eloquently than I can, (see her posts on her Turkish rug buying experience here and here) but buying a rug is a singular experience in Turkey. Ostensibly, our group was going to see a demonstration on rug making at a rug shop. Okay, I thought. I can deal with that. Maybe I can look at rugs in the bazaar or something later.

What I learned is that the explanation of rug-making is only the beginning of the hard sell. A loom is dragged out, usually with an unfinished rug being woven. Explanations are given about the weave and the materials. The worth of the rug is measured by the type and blend of materials (wool, silk, or cotton), the intricacy of the design (the number of knots is a clue), and the age of the rug (these rugs can last 300 years or more). Stories are told about the meaning of the rugs and the motivations of the young women who weave them. They are often marriage rugs, but they also serve a purpose of keeping the room warmer.

However, this part of the sell doesn't last as long as the next part. Tea is served, and examples of various rugs are brought out. Suddenly, the realization hits that you've moved beyond the educational component to the sell. Perhaps you notice it because suddenly you have a person, a salesman (and they are ALL men), standing next to you, asking you what you are looking for in terms of size, texture and the like and then snapping orders to an assistant to bring out this and that rug. As the assistant throws the rug at your feet, you realize at that moment that you have a quick choice, either extricate yourself or go for it. You go for it because you have secretly known to yourself that you want to buy a rug. To use an analogy, it is like the choice you have with a beautiful woman who is trying to seduce you. Either you make the choice to walk away, or you plunge in knowing that's what you wanted all along.

In the end, if you continue walking down the path, after an hour or so of looking at carpets of different weaves, materials, sizes and colors, you have been skillfully maneuvered by your salesperson to the rug you wish to settle on. Now comes the negotiation. A price is thrown out that makes you blanch. You counter offer, and the salesperson looks pained. He can't go that low...he has a boss to please, a family to support. But, since you are an honored guest, he could probably let it go for this amount, though it pains him. At this point, you have a choice. You can still walk away before consummating your relationship. But then, you know you might feel empty having come that far only to leave the object of your desire behind. You MUST, at this point, be willing to do just that, or you will have no chance of a great deal. So you look pained in turn, say it is all very tempting, and offer another price. The salesman tells you he can't go any lower, but that he needs to talk to his boss and maybe, just maybe, there is a chance. You wait for a few minutes, the rug lying on the floor tantalizingly before you, and finally the salesman comes back. Yes, the boss has allowed it just this one time for you, such an honored guest. The deal is made, money is exchanged, shipping is arranged, and you have your rug.

In our case, it was a $1400 price for a rug that is probably worth $5,000 - $6,000 on the American market. That's more than I've ever spent at one time except for trips and cars. It is a mercerized cotton carpet that feels like silk, and a design that represents the seven hills of Istanbul. It will last 300 years, easily, and since I have no children we will have to decide who we will leave it to after I'm gone. And I must say, the negotiation was easy because our tour already set up deep discounts. The shop was so open about this that they told Laura that if she decided that she no longer wanted her rug, they would buy it back from her for %25 more than she paid for it because they knew they would sell it again. So what I describe is a mixture of what I think might happen in a really hard sell, based on my experience. It certainly wasn't to be missed.

Istanbul soccer fan anticipation his team's championship

Moment 7 - Soccer

We were in Istanbul for the final games of the Turkish League. The hometown team, Fenerbaçe, was in close race for the title with the team from Trabzon. Unlike in the U.S., there are no playoffs. The winner of the league is determined by record and, if there is a tie, goals scored throughout the season. Fenerbaçe needed to win to take the title. When the team won, it was as if Istanbul came to life in spontaneous joy. Car horns blared, cheers erupted from almost every building, and impromptu street demonstrations and parades broke out all over the city.

I have never lived in a European soccer mad city. This was my momentary experience of it.

Breathing away the afternoon in a haze of fruity smoke

Moment 8 - Hookah

Getting my wife to slow down is sometimes very difficult. She is a driven person and wants to see everything she can in this lifetime because she doesn't want to miss a minute of it. I am less ambitious. I was surprised when, after visiting the Istanbul Modern Art Museum, we stopped at a row of lounges nearby. There we ordered a hookah with some berry flavored sweet tobacco. I am not a smoker, but I partook of the hookah. The tobacco was nice and smooth. Life passed by for an hour and a half. A cat climbed on our laps and lay there, content, just as we were content to let it. A couple of guys sat at a neighboring table with a hookah playing dominoes. A couple sat over in a corner talking in low whispers.

It was a great afternoon.

Culture in Turkey: Food, Glorious Food (and Drink)!

2011-06-18T07:52:00.022-06:00

Lovely meal presentation. Get used to it! There's more!

I am probably the last person who should write about food. In our journalists' group to Turkey, on which I had the privilege of tagging along due to my wife's (Megan Kamerick) membership in the fourth estate, we had a former chef (Gwyneth Doland) who occasionally would comment on the presentation of the food, then the subtle flavors of what she tasted in this dish or that delicacy or the other dessert.

Me? I have less sublime delineations. Bad, Not that bad, Good, Really Good, and F***ing Amazing.

How can you possibly resist something like that, every single day?

It should tell you something about the overall quality of Turkish food when I relate this little trip tidbit. About the third day of the trip, I woke up with the distinct feeling that I really didn't need to eat again for a few days. We had, after all, had three large meals a day up to that point, including a dinner with a family that included I believe eight courses with a dessert and tea. I was literally stuffed. Much of it was rich, full fat food that because of my lack of a troublesome gall bladder that became too much of a whining complaining organ some seven years ago and had to be relieved of its duties, I really shouldn't have been eating because of possibly horrific side effects. But eat I did. And so, with that full feeling that yet is sort of unsatisfying, I marched down to tackle a new day and vowed to not eat much.

But I continued to eat, and eat, and eat whatever was put in front of me. Like a good boy, and like my mama taught me, because everything was just so damn good I couldn't help myself. Most everything was incredible.

The fish was usually fresh caught from the Bosporus, and very tasty!

There are two meals that stand out in my mind as sub par. Just two meals in a three week period! One of those meals occurred when we visited a high school founded by members of the social movement that was sponsoring our trip. We were ushered into a cafeteria and served our lunch by the cafeteria staff. We were given lentil soup, a salad and chicken, with baklava for dessert. The lentil soup was uninspiring compared to the other soups we had before, the chicken was a bit dry, the salad just average, and the baklava was too soft and mushy. And yet, as I even ate all of this meal, I realized that if I were on a tasting tour of school cafeterias and this was a lunch I was served, this meal would probably rank in the top five. If you have to eat lunch in a school cafeteria, well, you would want to eat that meal.

The other sub par meal we had was after the group had split up and Megan and I were on our third or so day alone in Istanbul. Because our guide said we just HAD to have fish sandwich down by the Bosporus, we went to get one. There are these crazy little boats that bob nauseatingly near the Galata Bridge. They are like tiny barges with awnings over them that makes them look like one of those carts, carried on the shoulders of servants, that pashas ride in. In them, somehow cooking despite the motion on the water, men slap fish on the grill. You go up, order a fish sandwich, and in a minute it comes wrapped to you for 5 or so Turkish lira (about $3.50). Grab a Coke and you're set. Unfortunately, the fish is full of bones so you spend a lot of time picking them out of your teeth, and just being slapped on a piece of bread, it doesn't have much taste.

At the hotel breakfast buffet in Ankara, they actually had fresh honeycomb!

But that's it. Only two sub par meals. And notice that I write sub par. Not bad. Because my food experience of Istanbul and much of the rest of Turkey is like my experience of New Orleans. You really have to work hard to find a bad meal.

And so, a litany of what we ate both in restaurants and elsewhere. You've already, I'm sure, been perusing some of the pictures of the food I've been sprinkling throughout this post. The typical meal would begin with a lentil soup. There would usually be a salad, called a shepherd's salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, maybe peppers and maybe some olives. Cheese was often involved in the meal. Sometimes there were sarmas, similar to the Greek dolmas, which are grape leaves wrapped around a mix of meat, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers or other things. We also had kofte's, which were Turkish meatballs. We had what our chef member Gwyneth called "darling little footballs" which were called kibbeh and were fried concoctions of bulgur and meat (usually lamb or beef). Fresh fruit was always a staple of the table. If you got through all that, then the main dish might come. It usually involved rice and could include stuffed eggplant, or a doner kebap or iskender kebap, or this tiny little pasta-like dish called monte, that was delicious. As you slipped into a food coma at that point, dessert would arrive and was usually sweet beyond your wildest dreams. It might be baklava or a cake-like offering. Sometimes, goat's milk ice cream would accompany the dessert (which really pleased my tongue but sent my gall-bladderless digestive system into hyperdrive). Of course, all of this was washed down by copious amounts of Turkish tea, a dark tea colored soft amber in small Turkish tea glasses that resembled the shape of a curvy, voluptuous woman.

Brightly colored candy rolled onto sticks and served fresh on the street.

On one night, when we were hosted by a family, I even surprised myself. The wife of one of our guides, Habibe Aksoy, had told us prior to the trip that when visiting a Turkish home, we should expect a lot of food. It is polite, she said, to eat something of everything. In fact, it is expected. One of the very few vegetables I don't like is eggplant. And when I mean very few vegetables, I'm the kind of guy who likes brussels sprouts and spinach and liked them when I was a kid. So amidst all of this amazing food being sent toward me down the table, I was least excited about the eggplant dish that was coming, but like a good guest I took a good portion of it and prepared myself to eat it. I took a bite, and then another, and then another. I had seconds of that eggplant. In the hands of our hostess and her sister, even a dish that I traditionally stayed away from was a delight.

Two memorable evenings were spent eating seafood in restaurants beneath the Galata Bridge, next to the lapping waters of the Golden Horn, while the fishing poles of the fishermen above us rhythmically moved up and down as they tried to bait fish into biting their lures. Unlike the fish sandwich, the restaurant prepared fish - we ordered a type of sea bass but they had all kinds - was done to perfection. Light, flaky and freshly cooked. Both times, they brought the uncooked fish fully laid out to the table so that we could see exactly what we would be getting.

Sarah Gustavus of KUNM is happy to show off her "pizza boat" as we called them.

Another memorable meal, simply because of the ambience of the place, occurred just after our group left and we checked into our hotel. Megan asked the clerk for a good place to eat. He asked what kind of food we wanted, and she said "something local." He got very excited and told us about his favorite place about five stops up the metro line. "Not touristical," he said and said the food was good. So we followed his advice. He must have called them because we got off the train trying to find the place, and saw a man in the window of a restaurant waving to us. We went in, and the waiter was very nice and clearly wanted to talk to us about how he read the Financial Times and what we thought of it. We were the only non-Turks in the place. The food was good and filling. We left, and decided to walk a bit, and suddenly another man in an apron came running after us to tell us about his restaurant. We told him we had just eaten but he handed us a menu and told us to come back to his place at any time and that he would be happy to help us.

We also had a meal in a small corner restaurant near the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, a meat-like stew with curry I think served over rice with a side of french bread, that was sublime in its simplicity and flavored even more by the non-stop patter of the old man who owned the restaurant and who had traveled to Europe, Canada and the US and wanted, almost needed it seemed, to relate his experiences and impressions of those places.

These little pastas were called monte, and they were delicious!

Breakfasts in our hotels were always full affairs. Everything was available and included in the price of the room. Eggs, meats, cheeses, vegetables, olives, yogurt, muesli and other cereals, breads, coffee, tea. I got used to having some meat, vegetables and olives with my eggs and cereal.

For drink at meals, tea was always available. A local drink that I could not get into, but which some members of our group liked was ayran, a salty yogurt drink. Megan really like a sour cherry drink called vishne. Of course soft drinks were available, including Coke Zero and Fanta. I tried a local cola called Cola Turka, which I thought was pretty good. For alcohol, beer was mostly limited to a Turkish lager called Efes. Wine was available, often of Turkish origin, and we drank some Cappadocian red wines which were tasty. Often bars had western mixed drinks like martinis and margaritas available, but if you ordered them you had to be prepared for anything as it seemed to depend on what the bartender decided to make them out of. The occasional mystery of the alcoholic mixed drinks, coupled with the steadiness of the other drinks that we knew were always available, only added rather than detracted from the pleasure of the trip and of being in someplace new.

We actually visited the set of a Turkish cooking show. Our chef and theirs converse (Gwyneth Doland of KNME at left).

But the drink I loved, and dearly wish I had brought some home with me, was raki. Raki is the national drink of Turkey, a heady anise seed brandy (probably much like ouzo but don't tell the Turks that - to them it's different and better than the Greek version) that is served straight and when mixed with water, becomes cloudy. Stephen Kinzer, in Crescent and Star, says it is the perfect drink for Turkey: everything seems clear and optimistic at first, but after a while becomes murky and cloudy and full of inner pessimism. The next time I am in Turkey, I will visit a meyhane, where raki and mezze and music are served non-stop and where people gather to talk about things important to Turks. But for now, I'll just remember the licorice-like flavor of the raki on my tongue.

So, I'll end this post on Turkish food with the only thing I can really say about it that conveys the full range of what I felt about the food on our trip.

F***ing amazing.

Go ahead, have one more dessert. Pistachio encrusted baklava with goat milk ice cream. You know you wanna!

Religion in Turkey: Crossroads of Faiths

2011-06-08T15:40:00.042-06:00

I was walking through the Arasta Bazaar, near the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. We were on our way to a place for lunch after seeing the Topkapi Palace. The bazaar was quiet. There were a few people looking in store windows, and a few shopkeepers standing at their doorways. I was at a leisurely pace, looking at the wares on either side of me, when suddenly the air erupted with a sound that I knew, but never heard. The Islamic call to prayer.

The Blue Mosque through a window of Hagia Sophia

The most immediate sound came from the Blue Mosque, which was right nearby. However, the call seemed to echo...at least that's what I thought until I realized that the other calls that I thought were echoes sounded slightly different. As I listened, there seemed to be a call and response going on, as one call to prayer engendered a response by another, multiplied many times. It was a simple call, an invocation of God's greatness, but the power of it stopped me in my tracks, and I stood in the middle of the bazaar with people going around me, a smile on my face, and I thought "this is the reason I wanted to come to Turkey."

I tried to capture that moment again, later in the trip, by going through the Arasta Bazaar around the time a call to prayer happened, but I couldn't. By then I'd already heard it a lot of times and it's initial power to awe had gone. I came close one morning, sitting on the rooftop terrace of my hotel, the Hagia Sophia rising on one side and the Blue Mosque on another, watching the ships ply the Bosporus and enter the Sea of Marmara, but you only get your first time once.

The goddess Kubaba on a Hittite frieze

Turkey can be a religious experience in itself, and it has the power of many religious traditions to give it special importance. Gods were conceived in Turkey that crossed religious boundaries. Take the goddess Cybele, for instance. She was the Phrygian Earth Mother. She was analogous to the Hittite Kubaba, often seen on friezes carrying a pomegranate. The worship of the goddess spread to Greece, and eventually to Roman Republic during the second Punic War, when an oracle said that foreign foes invading Italy would not prevail if Cybele was present. Livy reported that her statue was moved from Anatolia to Rome with great ceremony, met at the Roman port in Ostia by a high Roman official and carried in triumph to the Temple of Victory on Palatine Hill.

The current National Geographic has an article which indicates that Turkey may have been the cradle of religion. A temple, built 11,600 years ago, was found in Southern Turkey at a site called Göbekli Tepe that predates all other known temples. It's presence indicates that religion itself may have found its first expression on the Anatolian plains.

The library of Celsus at Ephesus. Did St. Paul stand in this plaza?

Turkey also figures very prominently in Christianity. The Bible lists many places now found in modern day Turkey, and many biblical figures may have been residents. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was reputed to have spent her last days near Ephesus. Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark came to rest, is located in Turkey, and St. Paul preached to cities and towns in Turkey, most notably the Ephesians.

Church carved into the stone at Göreme. Inside are amazing frescoes.

In the region of Turkey known as Cappadocia, orthodox Christians carved churches into the living stone of the region. This stone, called tuff, was soft to carve but hardened in contact with air. The churches of Göreme were cut out of rock outcroppings and resemble mini-cathedrals with domed roofs and columns supporting arches. Every surface was painted with bright frescoes depicting Christ and his life according to the Bible. These churches first appeared in the 12th century, and were used as late as the 1920s. Unfortunately, some of the frescoes were defaced, but even today their splendor lives on. It's too bad they wouldn't let us take pictures, but their image lies in my mind.

Madonna and Child in mosaic at Hagia Sophia

Turkey was one battleground where Christianity and Islam clashed. Islam eventually supplanted Christianity as the predominant religion there, symbolized most notably by the conversion of one of the largest and most magnificent cathedrals in Christendom, St. Sophia of Istanbul, into a mosque. Yet an interesting story explains why the Madonna with child was the only one of St. Sophia's beautiful mosaics that was not plastered over by the Ottomans as the cathedral was converted. Turkey had a long history, predating the Ottomans, of worshiping mother goddess figures, starting with Cybele and eventually Mary during Christian times. While the Ottomans were very willing to cover up other aspects of Christianity, they acknowledged the tradition of the Turkish populace and left Mary and child alone. Other churches that weren't such prominent symbols of Byzantine rule as St. Sophia were spared, even when they were turned into mosques. A great example is the Chora Church, originally built outside the walls of Constantinople, which now has beautiful and reasonably well-preserved Byzantine mosaics.

Woman touches Jesus' hem in 14th century mosaic in the Chora Church

Rumi's tomb in Konya

Sufism as a sect of Islam originated in Turkey, and was developed in the teachings and writings of the Mevlana Rumi. We visited Rumi's tomb in Konya on a national holiday, which meant it was crowded because it is considered a pilgrimage site. Inside were the coffins of Rumi, his family and followers, and amazing displays of Islamic artifacts such as incredibly gilded Korans, the artistry of which rivals the illuminated texts of Christianity. There was, encased in alarmed glass, a few supposed strands of Mohammed's beard which, if one put one's nose to a small hole at the base of the glass, one could detect a rose-like odor. I was reminded of similar stories about the incorruptibility of saints, whose bodies, when exhumed, often were intact and gave off the smell of roses. Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the seat of the Ottoman Empire, also had such relics. Whether you believe their authenticity or not, particular care was shown in showing off the staff of Moses, the skull of John the Baptist, the cast footprint of Mohammed, the turban of Joseph, and the saucepan of Abraham. If that last one gives you a little doubletake, it made me blink too. The saucepan of Abraham!

The Muslim Ottoman Empire was remarkably tolerant in its relations with other religious communities, allowing Jews and Christians to live, work and worship in peace at most times throughout its history. When Jews were expelled from Spain in the 15th century, Ottoman ships evacuated many from Spanish ports and gave them new lives in Turkey. The Sultan Beyazid II wrote, and I paraphrase, that he was amazed that Ferdinand II of Spain was considered a wise king, since by expelling the Jews he impoverished his country and enriched Beyazid's.

Modern Turkey, however, originated as a secular state but is waging a public and so far democratic debate on the practice of Islam. While Kemalist governments never completely banned religious practice, and even were known to use Islam as a political tool, Atatürk abolished the Muslim Caliphate in Istanbul. According to Stephen Kinzer in Crescent and Star, the Muslim Caliphate was the highest religious officialdom in Islam at the time, so its abolishing was akin to abolishing the Vatican. Atatürk also banned the fez, the traditional trapezoidal headwear of the Ottomans, due to its religious connotations. He also insisted that the call to prayer be chanted in Turkish rather than Arabic (though he ultimately stepped back from this demand) and banned women from wearing headscarves.

Head of Medusa guarding a Roman sarcophagus

However, today Turkish women wearing headscarves and raincoats to preserve modesty walk side by side and arm in arm with female friends who wear T-shirts and blue jeans and let their hair flow free. The party currently in power, the Justice and Development Party, is a moderate Islamist party that is committed to governance through democracy and not imposing its religious preferences on the populace. The populace maintains some of the quasi-religious/superstitious elements influenced by the many civilizations that lived there. For example, on Greek and Roman buildings and sarcophagi, the head of Medusa was often carved to ward off evil. As you'll remember, Medusa's head had snakes growing out of it, and her gaze could turn whatever she looked at into stone. The Romans and Greeks thought her gaze could protect if turned outward. Today, walking past shops and through the bazaars, one can find countless iterations and sizes of blue glass disks with an eye pattern on bracelets, necklaces, rings, earrings, and fashioned into wall decorations, among other uses. Stepping over the lintel into a shop, or looking up at a restaurant wall, or placed in a corner in someone's house, one might see these disks set unobtrusively into the concrete or the plaster. This is the modern day Turkish eye of Medusa, equivalent to the ojo malo - the evil eye - protecting that business or home from harm.

If you are here at this blog with evil intent, the eye of Medusa will reflect it back at you

On one of our last days in Istanbul, my wife and I visited a small mosque, incredibly tiled mosque in the Spice Bazaar, then revisited Hagia Sophia, still showing remnants of her glorious past as a Christian cathedral, and finally, that night, took in a Sufi religious ceremony. It was an amazing cross section of religion in Turkey all in one day. Hagia Sophia is an amazing building, an architectural wonder that has stood for 1500 years, and for 1000 of those years was the largest church in Christianity, and for almost 500 years was a mosque, a symbol of Islam's triumph.

One example of the gorgeous tilework in mosques around Turkey

The small mosque at the Spice Bazaar, the Rüstem Paşa Mosque, is described by Rick Steves as Istanbul's Sainte-Chapelle. It is not a huge place on the Istanbul skyline that draws one to it...instead you have to find the entrance in the maze of shops outside the spice market...but when you go in you find amazing tilework decorating the inside of the mosque. We stayed a while in this mosque, going in well after the call to prayer in order to not disturb worshippers.

Finally, the Sufi ceremony is one that I will long remember. We drove a long way into an unfamiliar part of the city after paying $120 Turkish lira to join a group. The ceremony took place in a Sufi community center. After prayers, the Sufi master and the rest of the dervishes came out onto the main floor, and after silent permission from the Sufi master, the dervishes whirled away. Through whirling, the dervish emulates all creation, which spins naturally, and by doing so comes closer to God. I listened to the music and watched the Sufis spin oblivious to everything but their own movement and their own relationship to God, and for a while I too was taken away.

I have come away from Turkey, with that original call to prayer lodged firmly in my memory, thinking that if I were to take five times out of my day, like a Muslim, to meditate or pray, even if it's for 30 seconds, I might be more centered in my life. At my age, I'm starting to realize that one needs centeredness in his or her life. I think I found inspiration to find my own centeredness in my trip to Turkey. One cannot visit Turkey without confronting the long, dynamic and sometimes painful history of major religions and their interactions. Frankly, one wouldn't want to. All of the religions in Turkey and their collective wisdom can teach us valuable things about ourselves. If I were allowed to keep only one memory of my trip to Turkey, it would have been that moment in the bazaar where the call to prayer called to me, and allowed me to touch for a moment that universal and mystical yearning beyond my understanding, but so illuminating.

Politics in Turkey: Vibrant and Active

2011-06-01T15:21:00.019-06:00

I'm a political scientist, so I went into Turkey with enough academic background to make some sense of the politics there. However, I did not go to Turkey with enough historical background. I learned quickly that to understand Turkish politics, one must know modern Turkish history and the contributions of one particular man who shaped the Turkish state.

A little background is thus in order. Modern Turkey arose from the dying embers of the Ottoman Empire, which existed for nearly 500 years. Ruled by a number of sultans, the Ottoman Empire at one point possessed enough lands and territories and maintained control over enough vassal states to resemble the Roman Empire at its height. In fact, it conquered the remnants of the Roman Empire, capturing Constantinople in the 1400s and making it the capital. The Empire and its leaders were known in the West as fierce, ferocious and ruthless. However, the Ottoman sultans also were acknowledged for their tolerance and willingness to allow diverse groups such as Jews and Christians to live relatively freely and unmolested within the Empire and to practice their religions in peace.

Large portrait of Atatürk, Istanbul

By the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was dying. It entered the war as an ally of Germany with the hopes of acquiring its lost lands, but did not acquit itself well for the most part. The only exception to this was a stand by Turkish troops against the British at Gallipoli. The commander of the Turkish troops at Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal (known as Atatürk), became a hero in Turkey. He used this popularity to seize power and establish the modern Turkish state on the foundations of secularism. In his view, the Turkish state had to be strong and drag the Turkish people to prosperity. While his state was not democratic, he put through a number of government actions that stressed education, literacy, a West-oriented international policy, and market reforms. Above all, he argued that the Turkish state should resist association with Islam and promote and maintain secularism. Before he died, he was THE political leader in Turkey. In Stephen Kinzer's wonderful book, The Crescent and Star, Kinzer quotes Atatürk's motto as government "for the people, in spite of the people." He literally dragged his reluctant nation into the 20th century and in many ways set it up to be a vibrant democracy. Since his death, his cult of personality lives on in Turkey. His tomb in Ankara is a huge draw from all over the country. There's also a mini Mt. Rushmore, where Atatürk's head is carved into a large rock, in Ankara

Turkey's Mt. Rushmore: Atatürk in stone

However, democracy has come in fits and starts. After Atatürk, successive leaders saw their role as preserving his legacy, but not necessarily realizing his vision. The Turkish military, which considers itself the guardian of Atatürk's legacy, staged coups whenever they sensed too much democracy or too much religion creeping into the Turkish state. Kinzer argues that only with the election of the current prime minister, and his vision of a Turkey where Islam and democracy are compatible, has Turkey truly entered a democratic era, much to the consternation of some mired in the past.

When we arrived in Turkey, the populace was preparing for elections to be held in June. Everywhere, signs promoting the promises of various Turkish politicians were out and evident. Campaign rallies were being staged at least every other day. Party campaign vans blaring music and sporting large images of a candidate drove slowly down streets. The current party, the Justice and Development Party (the JDP, also known in Turkish as the AKP), has been in power for eight years and is poised to be elected to another eight years. A moderate Islamist party, it challenges our assumptions about Islamic parties by not only being credited with helping Turkish democracy flower, but also being Western-oriented and committed to the ideal that democracy and Islam can coexist and even flourish together. I cannot emphasize how this conception of democracy can shatter stereotypes in the U.S. who view Muslim countries as anti-democratic at best and active supporters of terrorism at worst. On the contrary the opposition forces in Turkey, the parties aligned with secularism, nationalism and in many ways, Ataturk's Kemalist values, are often linked with anti-democratic forces.

My wife, Megan Kamerick, stands next to an armed Turkish military guard at Topkapi Palace

For example, coinciding with our arrival were a number of revelations about the Turkish military's plans to stage a coup to topple the JDP government in 2005, and sex-tape scandals that were undoing the fortunes of another nationalist party, the MHP. A huge leap for Turkish democracy was that these issues were being discussed openly in the press and among the populace, and cases against military personnel were being prepared for trial. At least one major journalist in Turkey admitted in an interview with a newspaper during our stay that in the past, the media didn't question the military and sometimes actively colluded with it in anti-democratic behavior. That these types of activities are being brought into the light gives promise to Turkey's democracy. This doesn't mean that Turkish democracy is firmly rooted, but it's a major step in that direction.

One way in which Turkey hopes to cement its democracy, according to some journalists that we met with, is through its application to the European Union. While the EU waffles about whether it will accept Turkey in 2015, when Turkey formally comes up for membership, and finds many reasons (many justified) to question Turkey's commitment to democracy, Turkey forges ahead with its application. The EU may ultimately be uncomfortable with a Muslim country in its ranks, but the journalists told us that in meeting the application criteria, Turkey will strengthen its democracy and its commitment to individual and human rights. In that sense, Turkey wins regardless of whether it is accepted or not.

There is a question of whether Turkey even really needs the EU. If considered part of Europe, it currently has the strongest economy thanks to pragmatic government policies that mix free trade and openness to foreign investment with healthy government social policies. It is also the third fastest growing economy in the world. Politically, it has worked hard to forge good ties with all of its neighbors, save Armenia, and it has taken more of a leadership role in Middle East politics by steering a pragmatic course. It has chastised Arab states to recognize Israel's right to exist, has criticized Syrian leaders for their heavy-handed actions against popular protest, and as a member of NATO has exerted its influence on NATO policy in Libya.

Turkish Cypriot woman dances in Istanbul in event promoting tourism to North Cyprus

However, Turkey has some foreign policy issues that continue to fester. Relations with Armenia, which wants Turkey to admit and atone for what they see as a genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century, have not been good though the president recently visited Armenia to watch a soccer game. It was the first time that a Turkish government official has officially visited Armenia. Turkey also has had significant difficulties with their largest minority population, the Kurds. A Kurdish separatist party, the PKK, has committed acts of terrorism against the Turkish state and continues to be a major thorn in the side of the Turkish government. Finally, the Cyprus issue continues to be an ongoing problem with Greece. Turkey occupies the northern third of Cyprus, the only supporter of the Turkish Cypriot nation.

March in support of the "Spanish Revolution" in Istanbul

A really positive thing for Turkish democratic development is the activity of civil society. Turks are always ready and willing to talk about Turkish politics in general and specifically. Gatherings and protests are common. One afternoon toward the end of our trip, as my wife and I walked down Istiklal Avenue, a main thoroughfare that is a busy slice of the modern Turkey, we happened upon two demonstrations. One march supported workers that had lost their jobs. Another group rallied in support of the Spanish voters who rejected their government. On that same street, political parties set up booths and handed out flyers and pamphlets for everything ranging from nationalist to socialist and even communist causes. Politicians we met with told us that turnout in Turkish elections is 80-90 percent of the voting population. This level of political activity can only mean good things for Turkish democracy.

Workers' rally in Istanbul

For us, Turkish politics seemed very complicated and hard to grasp, but we left with a better understanding of the political forces driving Turkey. In my opinion, Turkey still needs to make improvements, but its political system is a long way from where it was even 10 years ago. And what country doesn't need to make improvements? Democracy is not static, but an ever-changing and evolving creation. I'm convinced that Turkey is doing many good things in the political arena.

My trip into Turkey

2011-05-25T02:42:00.024-06:00

Panorama view of Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque from the rooftop terrace of Hotel Nomade

As I wrote the initial draft of this post, I was sitting on the rooftop terrace of the Hotel Nomade in the Sultanahmet district of Istanbul, Turkey. How I got there is little short of amazing, considering that after two weeks the Hotel Nomade was the first hotel I paid for on the trip, and I had just eaten the first meal I've bought myself. I am now home and reflecting on the trip and its meaning for me.

In February, Megan asked if I wanted to go to Turkey. Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a New Mexico state senator and a friend from our circles at the Newman Center Catholic community at UNM, was putting together a group of journalists to go to Turkey and learn more about the country and the activities of the Gülen movement. The Gülen Movement is an effort established by moderate Islamic religious leader and educator, Fethullah Gülen, to promote a moderate, Western-oriented Islam in Turkey, to increase understanding and dialogue between the West and Turkey, and to situate Turkey as the leading moderate Islamic country in the world. He emphasizes dialogue and education. The movement, depending on whom one speaks with, is respected and admired by many and has much political influence, though there are those that distrust its motives. The Turkish military is one institution that distrusts the movement, though I've read that the Turkish police are in favor of the movement. Like all governments, the Turkish government can lean one way or another in its regard of the Gülen movement depending on which way the political winds blow.

We met with Resul Aksoy three times over the next couple of months. He directs the activities of the Turquoise Council in Albuquerque and was to lead our trip. The council is in the process of establishing a Turkish-American community center in Albuquerque and is hoping that informative trips with politicians and journalists will help establish the center. Resul explained that the Turquoise Council, whose main office is in Houston, would pay all lodging and meals for the trip. I could tag along with Megan, as a representative of academia. We would pay for our plane flights. Megan was concerned about journalistic ethics and quid-pro-quo, but Resul insisted that nothing would be expected of her in terms of what she wrote. He laid out an ambitious itinerary, so Megan and I decided that we would tack on a few extra days in Istanbul to wind down and see things we missed. Our group coalesced and became the following: Donna Bruzzese, psychotherapist; Laura Bruzzese, clay artist; Arcie Chapa, filmmaker and host of the KUNM Call-in Show; Gwyneth Doland of KNME's New Mexico In Focus; Gene Grant of KNME's New Mexico In Focus; Sarah Gustavus, journalist with KUNM; Michael Hess, political scientist; Megan Kamerick, senior reporter with the New Mexico Business Weekly; and Jerry Ortiz y Pino, New Mexico state senator.

Hagia Sophia - cathedral and mosque

That was how, on May 12th, I ended up on a flight to Istanbul. Posts following this one will detail the particulars about the trip from my perspective. The remainder of this post will give you an idea of what I expected going to Turkey. The reality was definitely not something that I envisioned. I had a sense of the history of Turkey. For centuries, the land has served as the fertile field where home-grown kingdoms and empires, such as Troy, Lydia, the Hittite Kingdom and Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, have risen and fell. It has been a key in the rise of other empires, such as the Persian Empire and Alexander the Great's short-lived empire, which have coveted its land and territory and used them as stepping stones to greatness. It cradled both Western and Eastern civilization, and it served as a battleground between cultures as well as nurturing all of them. It served as a key component in the rise of both Christianity and Islam.

I also knew some of the recent history - in 1923 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established the Turkish Republic on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, and since then Turkey has militantly defended its position as a secular Muslim state oriented toward the West. Turkey now sits at the edge of Europe, considering itself a part of the European tradition but also treated as an outsider (albeit an important one) by the other European countries. It is a member of NATO, and is considered an OECD country.

I thought that Turkey would be like Mexico, another OECD state that has elements of both a developing country and a modernized one. I saw Turkey as a country most likely ruled by elites in wealthy cities masking incredible poverty at the margins. This may actually be the case - I did not get the opportunity to go to Eastern Turkey where I understand that development has not been as strong.

Modern socially-conservative fashion in Turkey

What I didn't expect was a vibrant, extremely forward-looking country with arguably the strongest economy in Europe and the third fastest growing economy in the world. I didn't expect Istanbul to be such a cosmopolitan, exciting and modern place, despite my knowledge of its history. I didn't expect to find such a warm and gracious people, given the United State's often troublesome relations with Muslim countries. I hate to admit it, but I retained a lot of stereotypes of Muslim countries even though I knew that Turkey was different than, say, Saudi Arabia. I had visited Bangladesh in 1998, and pictured a much more developed version of Bangladesh (which is also a secular Muslim country). In other words, I thought I'd find a somewhat culturally and religiously conservative place where I would need to watch what I said and did a little, kind of like how a social progressive who doesn't want to offend would avoid religious and political conversation in Texas. While there are elements of an Islamic social conservatism in Turkey, it coexists with its modern, vibrant culture. In other words, the fascinating thing about Turkey is that it embodies pretty much everything, old and new, and it is not uncommon to see women in headscarves and modest raincoats walking arm in arm with women with long free-flowing hair and blue jeans.

Most unexpectedly, I didn't expect to have feeling of "gee, I could see myself living here," with "here" especially meaning a place like Istanbul.

What I did expect was a deep and layered culture based on a rich history, and I got that and more. In the next few posts I'll give more examples in words and pictures. Please be aware that the opinions expressed here are my own and not those of my companions nor of any particular group. I will also provide links to other opinions and information throughout my posts on Turkey so that the reader can have access to alternative information.

Check out Littourati!

2010-04-17T18:04:00.002-06:00

I've relaunched and re-started Littourati, the blog about life, literature and maps. Check it out here:

Littourati.

Ghosts in the Adobe Walls

2010-03-17T14:37:00.008-06:00

Above: Peter Diseth and Kate Costello as Ernie and Jerry Pyle in the Ka-HOOTZ production of The Headlight Zone.

I'm in a play.

I haven't been onstage in years. Five years to be exact. I was an aide to President Bush in a sketch performed during the Gridiron Show in New Orleans. That was a mixture of music and comedy put on by members of the New Orleans Press Club that satirized local, regional and national politics. I also danced in the opening number on the show, and contributed musically, rewriting lyrics to the song "Stayin' Alive" to reflect the state of affairs at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Not long after that show, I moved to Albuquerque, and a year after that, Charity Hospital, the Gridiron Show, and New Orleans were inundated with water. Of the three, Charity Hospital did not survive.

Before that, since my wife is a journalist and has been a performer in Gridiron Shows in New Orleans and San Antonio, I often wrote songs for them. One was "Wal-Mart," which satirized the razing of a housing project to make way for a Wal-Mart in the Garden District of New Orleans, all to the tune of "Love Shack." My favorite line? "The Waltons shimmy! The Waltons shimmmy and dance around and around and around!" One was "Erectile Dysfunction," which I wrote for the San Antonio Gridiron show about Bob Dole and his little problem, to the tune of "Conjunction Junction."

Now, five years after my last stage appearance, I am back. I'm appearing in Albuquerque, like some washed up vaudevillian of old, in a drama no less. "Ghosts in the Adobe Walls" is a ten minute play that is part of a set of seven such plays in the production "The Headlight Zone," produced by Ka-Hootz Theater. It is, of course, done in the style of the old Twilight Zone TV shows, and I play a Rod Serling character who appears on stage and narrates, complete with little moral at the end.

My co-worker, in her other life, is a producer, director, writer and sometimes actor, and this set of sketches was her idea. She had directed another sketch show, entitled "Any Night Live" and I helped her run her lines so that she could learn the parts she was portraying. One was a Twilight Zone type of sketch, and when I did the voice of Rod Serling, I really did Rod Serling. That evidently remained in her mind, because she asked me to be one of the five people portraying Rod in her new show.

My wife also stumbled into the same play when my co-worker mentioned that she was having trouble casting women. I told her that my wife had stage experience, and before I knew it, she was cast in the lead role as a woman being victimized by her ex-husband who gets some otherworldly help.

Our opening night is this coming Friday, and I'm not nervous. I know my lines. The only thing that I'm not comfortable with is holding a cigarette. I don't smoke, so it doesn't come naturally to me. But I have Rod's cadence down. I can POP the MAIN WORDS in a SENTence, JUST like HE did. And the writing is obtuse enough to sound profound, though Rod could sound profound reciting Rub a Dub Dub, three men in a tub.

It's fun, and in the wake of some difficult times last year, gratifying to know that I can put myself out there. Oh, and I've had two complements on my rehearsal performances. One was from a sound guy, who told me that he really liked how I did Rod. The other was from a mentally handicapped adult with Down Syndrome, who told me I was really good out there even though he hadn't seen me perform at all. But it was great of him to give me some love, and I'll take all the compliments I can get.

Tucson: Who Knew?

2010-03-15T12:56:00.002-06:00

Perhaps I'm naive, but I just discovered Tucson as a destination.

My wife had to go to Tucson, in her capacity as president of the Journalism and Women's Symposium (JAWS - their logo is a pink shark with lipstick). JAWS is scouting out locations for their 2012 annual meeting. Not any location will do. Members want a resort style place and access to wilderness for hiking and recreation. Meetings are to be rotated throughout regions, and 2012 is the Southwest's turn. So, off we went to Tucson to look at hotel/resorts.

If you are the spouse of someone who is scouting for such meetings, it's a great deal because the hotels are doing whatever they can to get picked. Hotel rooms are comped, meals are comped, drinks are comped, your wife gets little gift bags that include candy, tchotchkes, and often complementary bottles of wine and food are sent to your hotel room. The El Conquistador Hilton gave us what must have been the biggest suite in their place -- the room was bigger than our house with a bathroom bigger than our kitchen complete with steam shower. It was a nice vacation for me.

But the thing that surprised me completely about Tucson was the food. I knew that it was a college town, and you can't go anywhere without seeing University of Arizona logos and gear. I knew it was deserty, that there was cactus all over, that it butted up on some national monuments and parks. I knew that it was a place for golf. But I didn't know about its foodie reputation, until now.

Tuscon features some James Beard Award chefs, I was told, and indeed a Tucson chef, Janos Wilder of the restaurant Janos, is a semifinalist for this year's Outstanding Chef award. We were wined and dined at the JW Marriot, the Hilton El Conquistador, the Westward Look, and the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort - all with excellent food. In addition, we dined on our own at a highly recommended restaurant named Harvest.

All I know is that the good was great. I live in Albuquerque, which is a similar sized city, and while we have good restaurants here, Albuquerque is not completely a foodie town. But Tucson definitely was. If I go back, I will probably have to scale back my expectations on where I stay, but I certainly will know that I can eat well. Usually, that's a big part of what makes a trip, and a place, memorable.

Knowns and Unknowns

2008-05-19T15:56:00.003-06:00

This weekend, a lot of things happened at once. Okay, well maybe two big things. But it seems that they are coming all at once. I've hit the time where it seems that endings and beginnings all mingle and mash together.

First for the beginnings and the knowns. Most reading this will know that I finished my dissertation this May. I actually defended the thing last November, but took some time to address some shortcomings that my committee saw. That pushed back my graduation date until this past weekend. I had waffled on attending, but I finally decided to do it. Eight years, after all, is a long investment and I should get something out of the deal. If that means walking across a stage and getting a diploma and a handshake, then so be it!

Going back to New Orleans was great as usual. We stayed with our friends Kevin and Brenda and the kids. However, it was a little sad. Every time we go back, it was with me as a student of the University of New Orleans. That was at the time the major connection with New Orleans that brought me back time and again. We would also go to Mardi Gras, but that was made possible because I was a student, and didn't have a steady job.

However, as of Friday, May 16th, I am not a student. That connection with New Orleans has been severed. I'm an alumnus of the University of New Orleans. We have friends there, and Mardi Gras will still go on year after year. But something seems changed. Other things will change as well. No more student prices at our local movie theater. I've joined the adults again!

The second big thing to hit was my acceptance of a job. I agreed to a one-year contract with the political science department at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. The opportunity is a great one. I will teach three classes a semester and have time to work on research that will make me a more attractive job candidate for a tenure track position next year. But, taking the position means leaving Megan and staying in Lubbock on weekdays and commuting home on weekends. That is going to be difficult on us, and we have to take care of a few difficult logistics before I start in August, like buying a car (an activity I loathe). It will also possibly put the crimp on going to Mardi Gras (at least for me) in the coming year.

I had to agree to a one-year position because of the apparent shortcomings in my resume. I don't have enough publications that matter, I have been out of the academic environment for four years, and I only taught, heavens forbid, at my own institution. I also am not a specialist in the Middle East (the flavor of the month in political science - it suddenly became important after 9/11). So while I watched all my colleagues get tenure track positions around me, I languished. So, Texas Tech here I come.

If I sound whiny, okay, you're right. I'm iffy on living in Lubbock, especially after living in California, Milwaukee, San Antonio, New Orleans, and Albuquerque. And I'd hoped that I would find a full-time position with a tenure track. Alas, it was not to be. But, a job's a job, and for at least a year we will have two incomes and maybe save up something that will help us buy a house in the future. Perhaps if we are lucky, we'll be able to stay in Albuquerque. I may find academia is not for me, or may find that if teaching is what I want, a community college is acceptable. So there are lots of positives.

It's all endings and beginnings. Here is the vid of the event that led to this musing, if you're interested...

Help us name our new friend!

2008-03-09T21:26:00.006-06:00

Megan met "Erica" at a groundbreaking for a big solar panel manufacturing plant at Mesa del Sol. Mesa del Sol (Mesa of the Sun) is a big development here in Albuquerque. "Erica" was there because at 3 years old she had recently been turned into the city animal shelter and was considered very adoptable. The mayor of Albuquerque mandates that a shelter animal show up at his press events in order to publicize the plight of shelter animals and encourage adoptions Megan liked her from first sight. I showed up because Megan had gotten a flat tire on the way. I liked her too. Because we agreed to adopt her at the event, the mayor waived all the fees, which included her spay surgery, vaccinations and microchipping.

Here's our problem. Megan doesn't feel that "Erica" fits her. We are searching for a new name, and hope that you will weigh in. Based on the pix below, does she look like an "Erica?" Or does she need another name? We were thinking something that refers to the sun, given her coloring and the fact that we met her at Mesa del Sol.

Here's our options - you can add one if you like:

Erica (name stays the same) - I think that it could be a female version of Eric the Red, which would fit.

Surya (pronounced Sur-ee-yah), the chief solar deity in Hinduism. We've seen the deity referred to as both male and female.

Fiona - Megan just likes the name - means "fair," "white," "beautiful."

Brigid - associated with sacred flames, or the Celtic sun goddess.

Soleil - pronounced so-lay. French, meaning sun.

Foxy Brown - well, she does look like a fox a bit!

Any help you can give us would be greatly appreciated! If you think of a name, by all means suggest it. Comment away, the forum's open!

All on a Mardi Gras Day

2008-02-08T08:24:00.001-07:00

Megan and I have just returned from New Orleans, where the weather was unseasonably warm and Carnival wrapped up its 2008 season with parades and revelry on February 5th, Fat Tuesday, otherwise known as Mardi Gras.

The Communist Crawfish Committee and Proletariat gives a final salute before heading out to the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday, February 5th, a day that will go down in history as the rising of the new Red Menace.

This year, we tried to capture some pictures, thanks to the new digital camera, of different sides of the festivities. For years, we have tried to convince people that Mardi Gras in New Orleans was something different, something that made this city where we lived for four years culturally unique. The destruction and devastation caused by the failure of the levees after Hurricane Katrina (and let's be clear about this - Hurricane Katrina did not destroy New Orleans, the catastrophic failure of inadequate levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers did), made this mission even more urgent. New Orleans is a unique place well worth preserving. We have argued with people who we consider reasonable, who ask why New Orleans is worth saving. We think it is, and I hope this post gives some reasons why.

This picture sums up what the rest of America thinks Mardi Gras stands for. These are tourists, not native New Orleanians, who manage to get lots of beads even though they do not flash for them, and manage to have a family-friendly holiday. No, I did not take this picture, but got it off the web here if you must see the unedited version

A lot of misunderstandings about New Orleans come from its signature celebration, Carnival and Mardi Gras. For those who don't know what this means, Carnival follows the Catholic liturgical calendar. It begins after the Christmas season ends in early January, and runs until Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Because it follows the Catholic calendar, Carnival has a different length each year, and Mardi Gras, the Tuesday before the beginning of Lent, falls on a different date each year. This year, Mardi Gras was early, falling on February 5th. In 2009 it will fall on February 24th.

Costumes are fantastic and whimsical during Carnival

Carnival is historically the time when mirth and revelry reign, before people had to do 40 days of sacrifice and reflection in the time leading up to Easter. This spirit of celebration has been linked to various pre-Christian traditions - harvest, Roman paganism, etc. - but the tradition has continued to this day. Numerous European countries celebrate Carnival (I experienced Carnival first in Germany), as do a number of South American countries.

Carnival in New Orleans has been traced back to the 1700s, when the French residents hosted balls and masques. When the Americans took over in the 1800s, Carnival began to reflect some of their traditions. Societies known as Krewes began to form in the mid-1800s, and their parades and balls and the crowning of kings and queens began to dominate the Carnival celebrations.

Much of that tradition continues today, though the rest of America sees only one type of image - that of young ladies flashing their breasts to receive beads thrown from balconies on Bourbon Street. This type of revelry is the exception to Carnival and not the norm, and is usually performed by tourists to New Orleans, not residents. The Carnival that we have come to know is family friendly. It starts in earnest typically about two weeks before Mardi Gras, with small neighborhood parades increasing over the two weeks in size and frequency until, the weekend before Mardi Gras, the Super Krewes stage elaborate and fantastic parades each night.

These large parades feature as many as 30 floats, 10 or more marching bands, and can take 3-4 hours to pass by. The traditional parade route is down St. Charles Avenue, but the Super Krewe of Endymion's traditional route is through Mid-City down Canal Street. Families come out in droves to watch these parades and host parade-themed parties if they live in the neighborhoods where the parades are. People look for the politically-satirical themed floats of Krewe D'Etat and the Krewe of Muses, the fantastic and whimsical floats of the Krewe of Bacchus and Endymion, the floats of Zulu, who's tradition is in mocking Carnival, and the parade of the King of Carnival, Rex. Children eagerly look forward to the throws they get from riders on the floats, which include beads, stuffed animals, and other trinkets. During this time even the music changes, with radio stations (particularly WWOZ) playing Carnival-themed music 24-7.

Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, is headlined by two giant parades and mirth and revelry in the French Quarter. Families line St. Charles Avenue to watch the parades - it is another family holiday like Christmas or Thanksgiving - and spend the day together afterward. Others, like Megan and I, head in costume down to the French Quarter, to walk around and enjoy all the other fantastically costumed people. Of course, on that day, you will find some people enjoying the holiday for all it is worth in a minimum of dress or with a very risque taste. However, most of it is simply fun and exciting to watch.

The best part of Mardi Gras is realizing that it's a Tuesday, and while the rest of America drudges along in its work, an entire city is taking time off to celebrate life and each other, before entering back into normality. This year, Mardi Gras fell on Super Tuesday, so while our neighbors and friends back in New Mexico were standing in line trying to vote for Barack or Hillary in what appears to be an embarrasment of a democratic caucus, we were blissfully celebrating, having a drink at a little party with a guest costumed as Super Tuesday (in fabulous boots). It's a tradition unlike any other in America. That, along with the musical contributions of New Orleans, it's history as our most "European" city, and its importance as the largest port in America makes it worth saving.

Click here if you are interested in seeing more of our 2008 Carnival experience. And read this column by New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, who sums up the end of Mardi Gras 2008 more poetically than I. For me, I'll say that after a Carnival season, the urge to settle down and become more preoccupied with more spiritual and "heavenly" pursuits almost comes as a welcome - like the rest at the end of a long day of focusing on some task at hand. Like everyone else, I'm tired, and maybe that's what Carnival is all about - reminding us that we can celebrate now and pursue the pleasures of life, but there's always a need for self-reflection and the pursuit of higher and more important endeavors. In New Orleans, that pursuit is facing reality again - for many, rebuilding homes, reconstituting family and trying to remake a once great city from the ground up.

Angel framed by sunlight at St. Louis Cemetary #3. Time to stop celebrating and think of higher pursuits

Surprise Visit Home

2008-01-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

It was a great idea, a perfect idea. My mom, I was thinking, was convinced I was a terrible son because I didn't go to visit her during Christmas. The reasons were valid - Megan was heading to El Salvador and we had just gotten back from my defense in New Orleans, our credit card bill was piling up, and a myriad of other reasons. My mom was understanding, but you could hear the disappointment dripping out of her voice each time we talked. Then, I saw a deal come up at Southwest Airlines for mid-January. I could take the trip while Megan was in El Salvador, and spend time with her. So I booked the ticket and planned to surprise her. My sister, who lives with my mom, was in on the plan.

Last Tuesday, January 8th, I flew out. I told my mom that I was going to be working and otherwise unavailable the whole day until later and that I would call her in the evening. In reality, I flew into Sacramento, rented a car (they gave me a Prius - how about that?) and drove the four hours to my hometown. I arrived at around 8:30 p.m. I silently drove the car up the driveway (and because Priuses are really completely silent on electric power at slow speeds, it was a bonus!), and parked by the garage. I called my mom on the phone, standing just outside her door, and she thought I was in Albuquerque. She happily chatted for a minute or two, while my sister ushered me in. I got inside where she was sitting in her chair watching television with her back to me while talking to the son she thought was in New Mexico. At an opportune point in the conversation, I interjected a "is that so?" She turned her head to the side, telling me "just a minute, someone's here." She looked but by that time, I had moved around to the other side. "Pauline, is someone here?" she asked my sister. Pauline said, "you're hearing things, woman." Or something to that effect. When she turned back around, I was standing in front of her.

My mom's eyes looked at me uncomprehendingly, then got a little bit of an annoyed wrinkle around her eyes, as if to say "I'm talking to you on the phone, you are not in front of me." Perhaps she thought she was having an hallucination. I think she stayed in shock the rest of the evening, as she didn't look at me much, mumbled something about giving her a heart attack, and instead of conversing with me much read the supermarket ads. But, I have to say, the visit was probably one of the best home I've had in a long time...very relaxing and my mom was more than happy after her initial shock wore off to make me feel welcome, fed and rested. My sister was filled with an endless amount of things to do, and we took our cameras and went traipsing about. You can see more pictures of our adventures that she has posted on her MySpace blog by clicking here. About the only downside of the trip was that the whole time I was there the weather was foggy, cloudy, or rainy, except for the glorious blue sky that greeted me on the day I had to leave. And I didn't get much sleep the last night because the dog had a glorious fit of diarrhea that made him need to get up and get outside every two hours because he ate some bad thing outside. But, we've all had that happen at one time or another, haven't we?

The above photo was taken at Camp 20. My mom was literally raised in the woods. Her father was a logger, and she grew up in lumber camps far from civilization. We made a trip out to where she lived until moving into town when she started high school. We were really seeking sun because we hadn't seen it for days at the coast.

This is the school she attended. It really is a little red schoolhouse! She was in charge of getting up, opening the building and starting the fire in the winter. They actually moved the building on skids when they moved the logging camp using a "donkey" machine to pull it.

An enormous wave rolls in on a cloudy day in Fort Bragg.

A harbor seal pokes its head out of the frothy surf to see what I'm up to. In Irish legend, some seals are Selkies, and can take human female form, actually, beautiful human female form, and seduce men. I can see why...on land they are pretty bloblike, but in water they are sleek, gorgeous, and curious. Once, one made a soft, womanly sounding "hoo" at me. A friend of mine told me that one should feel honored when an animal chooses to acknowledge them and communicate. I have felt very touched by these seemingly gentle creatures since, and make sure I go to see them and honor them in turn whenever I go to my hometown.

This tree on the property adjoining ours looks like a gnarly hand waiting snatch at whatever comes within its clutching reach.

The trees did trap this old car, which I discovered while out "boondoggling," as my sister Pauline colorfully puts it, which is, to say, I was traipsing about the woods and trespassing on people's property. I can't think of a more beautiful graveyard. Just cover me with leaves and let me decay!

My youngest sister, Pauline, up the trail on the edge of the bluff, "boondoggling."

Pauline serenely looks out over the Pacific ocean bluffs at Little River, California, quietly emulating the heron sitting on the rock in the distance. See how Buddha-like she is.

Playing with the new camera

2008-01-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

My mother and my sister combined to give me a nice birthday present this year, and I've been having a great time playing around with my Canon Powershot A560. This is the first digital camera that I've truly owned (that's not a hand-me-down) and though it's not ideal if you want to be a professional, or even take professional looking amateur shots, it still allows some fun pictures - and I can always touch them up using photo software!

With that in mind, I wanted to post a few of the shots I've taken in the past couple of weeks. I've also been posting pics from the past on a cool website called Panoramio. It allows you to map your photos using Google maps, and photos that meet their criteria are linked to Google Earth. It's kind of cool to find some of your photos in Google Earth, where many others can see them. If you want to see some of my Panoramio photos, you can find them here.

Without further ado...some photos from the new camera...

Virgen de Guadalupe in tile keeps our porch blessed

Sunset over the West Mesa in Albuquerque

Green chile stew, posole, fresh tortillas and salad at Frontier Diner

"Indian-head" sign on Central Avenue

Blue-man on downtown mural

Part of Route 66 mural

More of the Route 66 mural. Notice how the vent was made into the airplane propellor!

My Twisted Birthday Humor

2007-12-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

Source: Perry Bible Fellowship

I usually don't make a big fuss about my birthday, and now that I'm in my 40s, the mid-life crises are hard to stave off each time another year passes. Here's some humor about it, though!

Prospero Ano Nuevo from Mike and Megan

2007-12-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

Has it really been another year?

Another year has come and gone, and we are still here and kicking in Albuquerque. We have spent the last few days frantically getting ready for and celebrating Christmas. We recently attended a La Posada in a neighborhood here in Albuquerque, which is where residents re-enact Joseph and Mary’s attempts to find shelter so she could give birth to Jesus. A young woman dressed as Mary sits on a burro and is led by a young man dressed as Joseph, and they stop at houses in the neighborhood asking for shelter, and are refused. They are accompanied by children dressed as angels, a depiction of the star of Bethlehem, and a group of Matachinas dancers, all wearing shirts commemorating the Santo Niño de Atocha. At the last stop, the Catholic church, the doors are opened and they are allowed to come in.

We have no momentous events that compare to the birth of the Christ child and the passing of another year, but there have been many important events for us in the past year that we would like to share with you.

Dissertaton...Done!!!! - by Mike

Seven years ago, when we moved from San Antonio to New Orleans so that I could begin a Ph.D. program in Political Science, did we ever think that it would take so long? We survived four years of my classroom studies, a move to Albuquerque so Megan could take a new job, watching from afar as our friends and the city we loved suffered through Katrina, and finally my push toward the goal for three plus years here in the Land of Enchantment.

Well, it’s finally done. I defended my dissertation on November 12th, 2007 and pending final revisions, I will be hooded by my committee chairman in New Orleans this spring. For all intents and purposes, you may call me Dr. Michael L. Hess, Ph.D.

It still hasn’t sunk in completely yet. I’m very aware of all the support I have had throughout this journey. Specifically, because she has supported me and kept me in food and toilet paper, and put up with my down points (which were pretty down), my biggest Christmas present this year is that Megan is still here with me. And she still is pushing me and exhorting me – to get a job!

So that’s the next step. If you know of a college or a university near you that needs a political science professor with an emphasis in international relations and comparative politics and a regional interest in Latin America, let me know.

I also want to shout out thanks to a few other people, living and not. Thanks, Mom, for all your support and encouragement. Uncle Elwin, even though you are gone, you always looked forward to having the first Ph.D. in the family, and I’m sorry you aren’t able to share it with me. Uncle Jack, you were always meant to be the first Ph.D. in our family, in political science no less, and you fueled my desire to go to college. I think that it is a tribute to you that I have achieved this goal. Wherever you are, I hope you’re smiling. John and Elaine, thanks for your support and advice – your familiarity with academics was a great resource. Megan, you have always been the rock I leaned on, so this achievement has been as much yours as it is mine. I love you and thank you. To the rest of my family and friends, thanks for all your support and encouragement over the years. You may not think you had any impact, but you did.

Megan's Corner

How can I compete with all that? Let’s just say it’s been momentous to be along on the ride for all this with Mike. I’ve decided to follow in his footsteps to El Salvador. I’m going down in January for 10 days with a prayer and action delegation from our parish with a number of younger students. We’ll be visiting sites commemorating the civil war, such as the Misa Popular where Oscar Romero is buried, and working with Aprodehni, a group set up to help the children of El Salvador.

Otherwise this year has been quite busy for me. I’m still at the New Mexico Business Weekly, which has had a fair amount of turbulence this year, but seems to have settled down for the better. I cover the film industry, which is exploding here, tourism, arts business, small business and government. I’m doing some occasional freelance for AAA’s New Mexico magazine and others. And I do radio regularly on our NPR affiliated KUNM. I host Weekend Edition every other Saturday morning and I do a women’s newscast for the Women’s Focus show every couple of weeks at noon, and occasionally some longer interviews. Every so often I host the global music show and Mike and I will be hosting the freeform music show on Christmas Day, which should be a blast. If we get this missive to you in time, tune in at www.kunm.org.

We’ve grown to like New Mexico quite a bit. It’s beautiful, has fabulous outdoor activities, an amazingly varied terrain, great weather with four seasons and a vibrant cultural life, but it’s likely we’ll have to move on if Mike gets a job next year. We’re both feeling a desire to settle somewhere, so picking up and moving again is not necessarily desirable. I’m getting tired of saying goodbye to people. But we’ve certainly been lucky to live in some fascinating places.

Mike finds his birth family - by Mike

This year was another momentous year in that I found and came in contact with my birth family on both my birth mother’s and father’s side. It really started the previous November, but I really didn’t make actual contact until January of this year. I discovered that although my birth parents have passed on, I have a half-brother and half-sister on my birth-mother’s side, and multiple siblings on my birth-father’s side. This past summer, when we went out to a friend’s wedding in LA, I met my half brother, Bob, at his home near San Luis Obispo, and while there I spoke to my half-sister, Jeanne, on the phone. In addition, I have met my birth-mother’s two surviving sisters and a whole brood of cousins that live in Ohio. After I spoke with one aunt, Maxine, she and a cousin, Diana, made it possible for Megan and I to attend the family reunion in June. It was there for the first time that people told me how much I looked like a “Mayle,” my birth-mother’s maiden name. It was a fantastic experience meeting these people that I never knew existed just a year before.

Unfortunately, my attempts to make contact with my birth-father’s other children did not meet with much success. They don’t really think of their father in a good light, and therefore are not that interested in learning about me. However, my birth father came from the province of Ontario in Canada and he has one surviving brother. This man, Morris, is my uncle and I have spoken to him over the phone and have had extensive e-mail conversations with his granddaughter, Sherry. I hope to get out to meet them sometime this coming year.

Trip to El Salvador - by Mike

This small country has played a big part in our lives this year. In May, I flew to San Salvador for five weeks of intensive language study. I lived with a 75-year-old woman and her 15-year-old granddaughter, and I rode a loud, belching, recycled American school bus daily to the school where I did 4 hours of language class and then afternoons of cultural study. I also did interviews for my dissertation with political leaders and academics. I came out of the experience with a basic understanding of Spanish – ¿Donde están los baños? – and a greater appreciation for the problems of developing countries in general and the difficulties faced by Salvadorans in particular. If you want to see some photos of my experience, you can go to
http://picasaweb.google.com/salsa.fresca/ElSalvador.

Other Travels - by Megan

Mike made a madcap 2 day drive into Mexico to help deliver a donated van to a project there. We saw our friend Elisabeth married in the Los Angeles area. We returned to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, of course, and for Mike’s diss defense (shout out to the Fitzpatricks for always welcoming us into their home!) Things keep getting better for the city each time we go back, but it’s still struggling in the wake of Katrina. I encourage everyone to visit and spend your money there. We returned to San Antonio in the spring to attend an anniversary event for Mike’s old employer, the Socially Responsible Investment Coalition. Thanks to Leilah and Scott and their beautiful bambino for their hospitality. For our 12th anniversary in September, we spent a few days at Mesa Verde National Monument in southern Colorado. And we returned to Wisconsin in October for the first time in many years because I had a journalism conference there. Thanks to Kevin and Karen for putting us up in Milwaukee, the Bolins for putting up with us us DePere and giving us the best chocolate toffee on earth, and Eileen, Vic and Connor for hosting us in Chicago. We connected with old New Orleans friend Maya Held in Milwaukee and my former grad school friends Jim Chilsen and Matt Simonette in Chicago. We also visited my parents at Thanksgiving, which was lovely and relaxing (I slept nine hours a night) and helped rehydrate my dessicated winter skin (high desert + cold = lizard hands).

Am I a real "Doctor," or do I only play one on TV

2007-11-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

After a whirlwind of activity, this past Monday morning, 9:00 central time, found me pacing outside the deans office at the Liberal Arts building on the campus of the University of New Orleans. Megan was by my side, making some talk and trying to calm the anxieties that were getting more and more intense. About 10 minutes before, I had been inside a conference room in the Dean's office as Prof. Marc Rosenblum called Prof. Amy Poteete at Concordia University in Canada and Prof. David Lektzian at Texas Tech University on a speakerphone. Prof. Michael Huelshoff and Prof. Sondra Venable came in at this time. For the next hour and a half, my fate would be in their hands. They sent me out of the room so they could discuss how to deal with me.

Punishment? Maybe. Rendition? Probably not as bad. Waterboarding? Well, I suppose this experience could be equated with a drowning sensation - at least I felt it could. I was defending my dissertation.

I had been working toward this moment for seven years, and I was nervous. The day before, I had opened my e-mail to find 8 pages of notes sent by Dr. Poteete, most of which were things that she felt were vital to be revised before she would agree to sign off on my dissertation. I was upset that there were so many shortcomings in the paper, I was concerned that I would not be able to justify my decisions I had made, and I was even afraid that when asked a question, I would just freeze and not be able to answer.

I felt this despite the encouragement from my chair, Marc Rosenblum, that the dissertation was defensible, that I would be fine. When Marc came out to call me back in the room, my heart jumped into my throat. Megan came in behind me to sit in, after all, defenses are public and she wanted to give me something to lock my eyes on to when I felt like I might throw up.

Marc looked at me after a short introduction, and asked me to give my presentation. I looked at Megan, decided it was better to be honest, and then just told them how nervous I was. At that point, my nervousness seemed to go down, and I began. I told them in broad strokes of my research. I admitted there were problems, but I also stated what I thought that my research accomplished. In a voice that started out shaky and quavering, but got stronger as I went on, I laid out the past 4 years of my life on this project and all 330 pages into a fifteen minute recap.

It was a difficult time - there were many criticisms. I didn't take a strong theoretical stand, leading to a lack of focus in the overall direction of the dissertation. I used some variables in my statistical analyses that were suspect. My case studies didn't necessarily add up and were thin on citations. The criticisms, and helpful suggestions for making my dissertation stronger, went on for about an hour and a half.

They sent me out of the room again. I paced alone - Megan had left after she deemed that I was okay and went to meet a mutual friend for coffee. About 5 minutes passed that seemed like an eternity. Then, Marc came to the door. I started toward him, and as I got to the door he shook my hand and said "Congratulations, Dr. Hess." I still have a lot of revisions to make, but for all intents and purposes, I have my Ph.d.

My first thought was for the person who should have had the title of "Dr. Hess" first. I almost feel bad for having it. My uncle Jack had been put through college by his older brother, my father. Uncle Jack went to Cal Berkeley, got his undergraduate and his masters degree. I have his Masters thesis here. He then completed his coursework for his doctorate sometime in the mid-sixties. He was an instructor at Berkeley, a graduate teacher, and began working on his dissertation. He never finished it. Or perhaps the real story is that he finished it multiple times, never thought it was good enough, and started over again. He refused to compromise his principles, even when a friend told him that he could hire someone to ghost-write it for him based on his own research. It eventually drove him into a huge depression, had him hearing voices, and at least once left him homeless. He died in Seattle, having never reached the potential that was meant for him. He was supposed to be Dr. Hess. As we popped the champagne corks in the Political Science main office, his image, or what I could remember of it, was in my mind.

It was Uncle Jack who planted the seed of college in me. When I was little I thought it was great that I had this cool uncle who was at a college. He encouraged me to ask questions. I remember him giving a little start when I asked him why the scenery moved faster when it was closer, and more slowly when it was far away. He thought that an awfully astute question for a grade schooler to be asking. I swore I'd go to college like him. Unfortunately, he died before he could see me graduate from anything. And here I was, with the title that had eluded him, that he was supposed to have.

I haven't really processed this yet. It has been hard for me to feel like a Ph.d because I feel no different than I did before. I don't feel any smarter. I still have the same aches and pains. My wife can tell you that the same annoying habits I had before are still with me. I feel like I should have some sense of accomplishment, but I just feel...disconnected.

Yet I have run the race, and have pretty much completed the marathon. My life will now move on, past student and into a career. It's kind of late at almost 44 years old, but it had to happen some time. I hope I can look back on this time and realize that I did accomplish something worthwhile, something difficult, something that I can celebrate and be proud of, and accept that other people are proud of me.

Maybe it starts with this. I haven't done this yet, and you will be here to witness it. It feels funny to me, and I'm a little embarrassed to write it. Really. Maybe you can tell how you think it fits.

Michael L. Hess, Ph.d.

Pics from a weekend road trip into Mexico

2007-09-11T13:10:00.000-06:00

On a Thursday morning I woke up, prepared for another day of dissertating. In fact, I was ready to spend the whole weekend dissertating and preparing job application materials.

Instead, the phone rang at 8:30 am. It was Claire. "How would you feel about driving a van down to the Rancho in Mexico?" she asked.

The Rancho is a place where an organization named Esperanza de Joaquin has set up a community center and provides help for the rural people in the area, many of whom are desperately poor, with their basic needs as well as development opportunities. The van was donated, and Mary, the executive director, wanted to get it down there to serve as an ambulance to get people to a hospital or clinic should they need to go. Unfortunately, her husband Frank was unable to go due to physical limitations. So, they thought of me.

The following photos give a little idea of the trip. We left at 6:30 am on Friday, September 7, 2007 and arrived there at around 9:00 pm on Saturday, September 8th. The van was large, drank gasoline like an alcoholic sucking down a pint of Jack Daniels, and moved around so much in the wind that you wondered if you would be able to keep it on the road. The Mexican roads were surprisingly good, much better than I expected. In fact the worse ones we were on were no worse than the worse ones I've driven in Louisiana. Unfortunately, I did not have time to take a lot of photos. I would have loved to snap some pics of Guanajuato, which is a lovely little city, but I was hard pressed for time.

If you can't see the slideshow below, click here for a page with the pictures on it.

Our 12th Anniversary in Mesa Verde

2007-09-04T22:43:00.000-06:00

It's been awhile since my last post. I apologize. Things have been so busy, what with trying to finish my dissertation and all, I haven't had time to do much posting. This will be a very quick update.

My dissertation is on schedule to be completed this fall and defended. I just finished the first draft of my last, or second to last, chapter. I am in the middle of looking for and beginning to apply for jobs for 2008. These have been full-time jobs, to say the least. I have also found some time to work for the standardized patient program, bringing in a little supplemental income.

And, Megan and I celebrated our 12th this past Sunday, September 2nd. We went over the Labor Day weekend to Mesa Verde National Monument. I have put a slide show of pictures in this blog, but if you want a better look, at least through the lense of our crappy digital camera, you can click here to get to the page where they are stored.

Look for some posts coming up, hopefully not too long from now, where I'll tell you about my first Mayle family reunion, my discovery of my biological father's family, and other fantastic and fun things.

Here's the slide show...

Mayles, meet the Mayles, we're a West Virginia family...

2007-06-20T08:26:00.001-06:00

I know all of you have been on pins and needles, getting ready for this post. The first meeting between me and the new family I have found. Would there be fireworks? Would I be greeted like a prodigal son? Or would I be cast out in shame?

I'm really hamming this up for effect. Actually, the reception was more of the former than the latter, save for the fact that I am really not the prodigal son, and no shame was involved.

Megan made quite an impression - maybe even bigger than me. She won three contests at the family reunion, and $50. After the third time, they were asking why I brought her! But they really liked her.

I have attached the slideshow below to give you the flavor of the weekend:

Off to Meet the New Fam

2007-06-15T06:57:00.000-06:00

Today I'm off to meet the new family on my birth mother's side. We were persuaded to go to the reunion in Ohio. I actually feel a little nervous about this. As you know from reading my riveting multi-part series My New Identity Crisis, Parts 1-8 (to reach the first post in that series go here), I never met my birth mother, who died in 1997. However, her two surviving siblings will be at this reunion. I've been told that one of the sisters, Garnett, looks exactly like my birth mother, Ruby. So, for once I've started feeling some emotion.

For their part, the family has welcomed me with open arms, and made a fantastically generous gesture that made it possible for us to attend. This has been more than I ever dreamed would happen when I first embarked on this search.

So, wish me luck. Mayle's, here I come -- I hope you're not disappointed in your prodigal son!

Pictures of El Salvador

2007-06-14T11:49:00.001-06:00

Hey everyone, I have pictures of El Salvador. Unfortunately, I didn't bring a digital camera so they were taken with disposables, but I fixed some of them that weren't that good to begin with, and picked the best of the others.

You can find the pictures at the following website:

http://picasaweb.google.com/salsa.fresca/ElSalvador/

Hope you enjoy them!

A pleasant last week, and disaster relief of a sort...

2007-06-11T07:32:00.001-06:00

I meant to add more to my last post, but the computer at the school in El Salvador was acting really slow and therefore I didn't get a chance to write everything I wanted. Now that I've arrived back home, I feel that some sort of overall wrap-up post is needed.

As I said before, the last week was very pleasant in many ways. I re-read one of my previous posts, and I sounded a bit bitter by the social situation at the school. And indeed I was. The problem was this. I essentially stepped into a group dynamic thing going on at the school. The school, called the Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad (CIS), is different from many schools in Central America because it is flexible about the timing of Spanish study. Many of its Spanish students are also voluntary English teachers to Salvadorans. They teach English at night, and then study Spanish at the school in the morning for half-price. I didn't have the time to do that, so when I arrived, the English cycle had already been going on for four weeks and a number of the Spanish students had been there for a while. So, when I arrived, full of questions and seeking help to get oriented, I felt that they weren't too interested in meeting me and knowing who I was. They had each other. They were also much younger than me. I'm not a needy person, but I don't like to be intentionally excluded from things. Each day in that first week I would come down to find that plans were being made for lunch, for a movie in the evening, or for weekend trips. But as these plans were being made while I was in the room, there was never an invitation floated to me. There was one other person at the school who was older than me and who kept to himself, and I befriended him, and he told me that he felt the same thing, that he might as well have been invisible there. So I was angry -- angry at the British, Canadian, American and European students who just didn't seem to get it and who seemed so exclusionary and unhelpful.

With the departure of most of those students, a small new group came in. Four new young Americans arrived, and a Dutch woman who came earlier and was invited to participate in the previous group but who always was open and nice to me, made things much more pleasant. A British woman who barely talked to me before began to open conversation with me. Suddenly I was invited to bars, and felt included. And that meant a lot. It would have been more helpful had the previous group offered some support and help when I arrived, but certainly for me the environment was now more pleasant since a new group came in.

I managed to squeeze in a few activities in the last week. The most moving and difficult of these was a trip to Berlín, about 100 km east of San Salvador. The rainy season had started very quickly, with a number of torrential thunderstorms that dropped a lot of rain. Such amounts of rain usually don't happen that early in the rainy season, and the area was unprepared. Deforestation in the country, as well as the fact that many villages sit perched on mountainsides, makes for opportunities for disaster. In Berlín, a couple of rivers burst through their normal courses, sending water, mud, and boulders crashing through houses. About 72 families were displaced from their homes. 4 people were killed. The force of the water was so strong that two bodies were found 15 km away from the town. The CIS, which also works with community organizations and had a relationship with community organizations in the town, obtained a small grant to provide packets of basic necessities to the families.

I spoke to a young girl of 15 whose mother was killed in the flooding. She has an older brother, but he was badly hurt and in the hospital, making her the head of her family and responsible for her younger brother and sister. Her aunt was helping her, but since her aunt lost her home too and had to care for her own children, it was difficult. Both families were in a shelter at a local church and both had no idea what they would do. They said they would stay at the church until they were told to leave, and after that, they said they didn't know what would happen.

In this case, the reaction of the government of El Salvador was politically motivated. The town is governed by members of the opposition FMLN. A law passed recently required the El Salvadoran government to coordinate disaster relief with local officials. According to the local officials, the government refused to coordinate with them despite the law. A few mattresses were delivered when the government showed up, but they were left with a local priest who then turned them over to the city. The government officials, according to the local officials, made a big show of speaking to ruling party members, but in the end did not do much for the displaced victims. The city was instead coordinating with NGO's to provide what they could to the victims. In the face of all the need, the small packets of toothpaste, toothbrushes, toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, soap, cooking pots, and wash tubs we delivered, while gratefully received, didn't seem to be much.

The rest of my week was spent in school, laboring over my now kindergarten level of Spanish and cursing the need for two different kinds of past tenses and two different forms of the verb "to be." I also indulged in a luxury, seeing El Hombre Araña (Spiderman 3) in English with Spanish subtitles. I brought my host roses for her birthday on Monday (she turned 73) and I took my host family out for a last dinner on Friday, the day before I left. I finally learned something of my host's life, and came away with even more respect for her. I'm sure that her story is not atypical in El Salvador, but it is atypical for me. She lost her husband, a union organizer, sometime before the civil war, I think. I believe he was killed at a demonstration. She lost two of her four children during the war. Still, she continues to be active in organizing and marching and every morning we watched the talk show hosted by the person who many hope will be the leftist candidate for president in 2009, Mauricio Funes, and she would explain to me the many nuances of the political situation in her country. I would only get a little of these conversations, but her passion for her country and her ability to keep going in the face of her many tragedies is inspiring. Lately, she has been caring for her 15 year old granddaughter from Nicaragua whose father died last year and whose mother (my host's daughter) was having difficulty caring for three children by herself.

My time in El Salvador is now at an end, for now. My wife is considering a trip down for a week with a group in January or so, and perhaps I may go along. What did I get out of my trip. I got an appreciation for a country that is so troubled...a capitalist paradise that is plagued by crime, violence, inequality, and poor services even as it aggressively takes free market measures that exacerbate these problems and yet are applauded by our government and the developed world in general. It truly makes you wonder whether this prescription for prosperity will be the undoing of us all, resulting in vast inequalities the world over, and destabilizing and destroying all the good that has been created. I hold great esteem for people there who continue to fight and work for justice and better conditions despite overwhelming odds against them. I obtained some knowledge of a new language. And I added more real-world experience to ideas obtained academically, rounding out and nuancing my own ideas.

Would I encourage people to go to El Salvador? You bet, if only to experience the extreme contrasts in a country that has fulfilled many of the conditions that developed countries have put on it. But moreover, to experience a people that continue to struggle and still manage to smile every day.

A pleasant last week

2007-06-08T15:54:00.000-06:00

So, my last week here in El Salvador has been a pleasant one. A new grou of people came in last week and they have been much easier to be with, along with a couple of the previous people who stayed. So my time here has been a little less lonely.

Could El Salvador be the face of the future of the United States?

2007-06-06T07:56:00.000-06:00

Okay, here is my one political/economic analysis off the cuff for now for this trip. Let me lay out a couple of hypothetical countries first, and then go off on my rant.

Country A is a small country located in the developing world. As per usual, economics and politics are intertwined in this country. The country has a history of military rule, followed by a revolution that failed to overthrow the ruling powers, but did manage to create a stalemate that was followed by peace accords and the integration of the rebels into the political system. Since then, the former rebel force has become a political party with some strength, but has never been able to win enough to govern the country. The country is polarized between a left and a right, with a non-existent center. Since the peace accords, the right has held the presidency exclusively.

Economically, the Country A has mostly been dominated by a few wealthy families, who have combined their wealth and power with the right. They have maintained a corrupt governmental system that advances their economic interests. The country since the peace accords has opened up to global liberalization of trade and finance in the name of development. There have always been poor in Country A, but the domination of the economy and government by the wealthy has increased the number of poor and the gap between the rich and the poor. The civil war was largely fought over the exclusion of the poor from the ability to make a living. Since the peace accords, many things have gotten worse. Many people have given up on the political system. The crime rate has risen, and gangs have multiplied, making the cities some of the most dangerous places in the world. There is no interest in combatting crime, because some of the wealthy are making lots of money off of the insecurity, holding interest in security companies and arms dealing. The trafficking of drugs and other illegal items has become another staple of the economy. Many poor, desperate, have left the country, looking for work in the developing world. If they make it through illegal immigration, they send their remittances back to their families in Country A.

Country B is a large country in the developed world. It has a huge economy which has become more and more dependent on imports from the rest of the world. It has pushed for free trade on its own terms, largely because it feeds its endless need for consumption. Its corporations have established themselves in many developing countries, particularly in that area it considers its back yard. These corporations, in an endless search for profit, demand more concessions from the countries that they establish themselves in, such as exemption from taxes, right to drive down minimum wages, weak regulatory laws and other benefits to them.

Politically, Country B has been veering to the right for decades. The current leader has consolidated power for his party and his administration even further. It is allied with the wealthier segments of the population, and has been steadily cutting back social programs and benefits to the least-well off members of its society. As a result, crime has grown, and people feel less secure economically. The political situation has undergone much polarization, but ordinary people have participated less because they don´t feel that either side offers them much change.

These are brief snapshots. As you may have guessed, Country A is El Salvador and Country B is the United States. However, what I see is that the United States could be El Salvador in a matter of years, particularly if we continue on the present economic and political course we are on. If the gap between rich and poor is allowed to widen, if one party consolidates so much power that it can control the political machinery, if the links between business and political leaders continue to grow, if social programs and benefits to the poor are cut, if the poor have no recourse other than crime, gangs and desperation, if the political system continues to polarize, then we are not far from being El Salvador.

Do we really want that? And how do we make sure it doesn´t happen?

One Month in El Salvador

2007-06-01T15:26:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow, June 2, 2007 I will have spent one month in El Salvador. After next week it will be the longest I´ve spent in any one country.

What have I learned so far from my Salvadoran experience?

Welll, I have learned some Spanish. Yo puedo hablar, escribir y leer un poco ahora. However, my reading is probably the best. Listening is a problem if people speak normally, and in El Salvador normally is usually very fast and very low. I was told this is a trait they learned in the civil war, when you never knew who was listening. Speaking gives me the most problems. I speak very slowly, with a lot of ums and ahs and often, regardless of what I think, say the wrong form of the verb, use the wrong verb tense, find myself at a loss for words, have to ask others to speak slowly, and generally make a fool of myself using the wrong word. Like the time I said I was embarassed and actually said I was pregnant. Is it my fault that the word for pregnant in Spanish is embarazada, and that the actual word for embarassed is completely different? Often, When I am at a loss for words, I add an ¨o¨ and it works, or a ¨mente¨ as in ¨actualmente.¨ But sometimes it doesn´t.

A second thing I´ve learned is that non-Salvadorans often don´t learn from the Salvadorans they are mixing with. My experience here has been that Salvadorans are open, inclusive, friendly, kind, and are truly interested in you and your life. From the people I spend a lot of time with to the people I meet on the street when I ask for directions, they ask you where you´re from, why you´re here, and what you think of their country. They tell you a little about themselves, such as a cousin or aunt they have in Virginia or Los Angeles and how they´ve gone to visit there once, or hope to go soon.

The non-Salvadorans, mostly Europeans and Americans and Canadians, seemed to me to be closed, suspicious, exclusive, unhelpful and overwhelmingly young. It seems to me that the point of volunteering or paying for language lessons in a school that has the name ¨inter-cambio¨, or interchange, in it is to learn from the culture you are in. Alas, only one or two of the people that I´ve met here that are non-Salvadoran really seemed to take what they have seen in Salvadoran culture and apply it to their life, and the one person I´m really thinking of is really a Chinese woman from Australia.

I´ve also learned that El Salvador is probably on the way to future struggle, and this time, the United States probably won´t be as invested in the country as it has been. Many conditions here are worse than they were when the civil war was raging. Inequality is more stark, the political system is corrupt, the government is corrupt, the richest families have tightened their control on capital and are making millions and millions while most of the population, especially in the rural areas, manages to scrape by. El Salvador is the largest company store in the world. Whether the economic policies of free trade will help in the long run is hard to say, but that is small comfort to the millions that are having a hard time now.

But the US is still invested in a large way. At least a million of Salvadorans, maybe now closer to two million, live in the United States and send money they earn home to their families. If there is an eruption of conflict in the future, you can bet that we will be hearing from those Salvadorans.

I´ll have a couple more posts in this next week before I return to the states. And, I only have 7 days before I can finally take a hot shower again!

The Noise

2007-05-29T10:18:00.000-06:00

I don´t know if El Salvador is the norm, but I have discovered while being here that it seems like Latin American culture likes a lot of sound. Big sound!

For example, just out on the street, things are loud. Horns honk, even when there is no possible way that honking the horn will make traffic any better. Bus horns have huge booming honks. Microbuses often have tunes in their horns. For example, every morning at 7:00, I can hear from my room two microbuses, one whose horn plays La Cucaracha, and the other bus where the horn plays the theme from The Godfather.

On street corners, music often booms out of speakers placed on the sidewalk at ear splitting levels. My one visit to the Super mall here, the Metro Centro, filled my ears with booming bass and techno at a Digicel vending booth set up in the courtyard.

People in their apartments often have huge stereo systems, like the neighbors to my host, which play music to not only entertain their neighbors, but pretty much the whole neighborhood. I´ve heard everything coming from their apartment, including such US classic rock bands as Queen and Guns ´n´ Roses, all at decibel levels to wake the dead. Lately, some Latin American chica caliente has been riding the top of the airwaves, and these neighbors bought the album and play it over and over again. I can sing you the main tune if you want, I almost know it by heart now. It´s all fine during the day, but not at 6:00 in the morning or 10:30 at night.

In buses, the driver blares out loud techno music for the enjoyment of his passengers, all of whom appear not to care.

The strange thing is, El Salvadorans themselves are not necessarily loud and boisterous. If you have a bunch of El Salvadorans and a couple of ¨gringos¨ on the bus, the gringos invariably will be talking the loudest. I was told that during the civil war, Salvadorans learned to talk fast and low.

Is this the norm in all Latin cultures, or is it just found in El Salvador?

I Have So Far Survived all Dangers, Yay Me

2007-05-28T12:10:00.000-06:00

There are many dangers in El Salvador, and I feel like I brushed up against all of them this weekend. Everything, regardless of what is happening, always seems threatening in San Salvador. On Saturday morning, I was up at the crack of dawn in order to get to the school by 6 a.m. so that we could make a day trip to La Palma, an arty town in the highlands of Chalatenango. When I got on the bus, I noticed two things. First, the bus was standing, not moving. Second, there was a guy talking to the bus driver, and peering into the bus very intently. Great, I thought, here is where I get accosted. The guy peered in my direction for a moment, then paid the driver and got in. He moved down the aisle of the bus, and I could smell the alcohol he'd been drinking. He sat right behind me, and then started to chat up the young woman who was sitting on the other side and to the right. I breathed a small sigh of relief.

When I reached my stop, I got off and began to walk toward the school. A wizened, bent old woman was walking her little dog. Another large dog, loose, was interested in it and began to sniff at it. Then he saw another dog in the distance, and went to go investigate that. Now, I don't like loose dogs here. God knows what they have, rabies probably, and you don't want to get too close to them. So I wasn't thinking and was very much surprised when as I walked past this woman, keeping my eye on the loose dog off to the right, her little dog launched himself at my leg. With some effort she pulled him back, but as I walked I could feel that he had scratched me. Great, I thought. Rabies shots here I come. But I walked the few blocks to the school and looked. There were two slight scratches on the skin. Then Peter, a nurse, showed up and he said the skin wasn't broken so I was okay--no blood means that even if those were tooth marks on my leg, the rabies would not have entered my bloodstream.

After a very nice day in La Palma, we returned on a standing room only bus packed with people. When we reached San Salvador, me and two others got on a bus that would take us close to where we lived. At some point, the bus stopped and a bus monitor stationed at the stop was talking to the driver. I noticed a young guy hop the turnstile of the bus without paying. Nobody said anything. This wasn´t necessarily surprising, because vendors often hop the turnstile with the bus driver´s assent and sell candy or ask for donations to this or that Christian church. But this guy wasn´t selling anything. As he came back toward us I noticed the tattoo on his arm. Pascal, a Dutch woman with me who had done research on the gangs, said later that she noticed that he had tattoos on his face as well. Tattoos are a sure sign of gang membership. He sat behind us a couple of seats, and then got off a couple of stops later. Obviously he was just interested in transportation and nothing else, but it was unnerving.

When I got home, I immediately was bitten by three mosquitos -- carriers of the deadly Dengue fever. But nothing has happened to me yet, so I guess I´m okay.

They have told me to not anything off the street here, but can you blame me if yesterday, after suffering all these near misses, that I threw caution to the wind and ate a pickled mango with salt and salsa purchased from a street vendor? Nothing to report, my stomach is fine! How much longer can I flirt with danger? To reassure my wife, I really don't want to!

Commies

2007-05-25T15:07:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we met with a student group at the University. In the United States, when you say student group you usually mean a group of students that likes to do social activities together. Sometimes, they are organized more around social problems, and volunteer in the community.

In El Salvador, you are talking about a whole different kind of thing. We met the leader of the student group in the Psychology building at the University of San Salvador. He took us through campus to another building, where we entered a dark and somber room. The walls were hung with pictures of Mao, Che, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, Marx etc. An AK-47 painted on the wall had the words Revolution or Death in Spanish underneath. Another wall had pictures of 7 or 8 students who died in a massacre of protesting students in 1975 and for whom the group was named.

And what does this group do? It fights for larger budgets to the university, which the government continually underfunds, and tries to effect structural change within the university. It also fights for larger structural changes in the society. Occasionally they go out to poor areas and help children celebrate birthdays and holidays. But, if there is a march, they will be in the streets with other students, demanding that the system change.

This type of student group, the kind that doesn't exist just as a social club but also puts itself on the front lines of protest, often at the risk of jail or even death for its members, does not really exist anymore in the American university system. It did in the 1960s, at the height of America´s social movements. Unfortunately, years of prosperity and conservative governments have all but done away with this type of organization in the US. We don´t even want the whiff of communism around. But they are still fighting the fight here in El Salvador. I don´t really want to see a Marxist-Leninist agenda implemented, but I admire they are willing to fight and risk their lives for what they believe in, and their willingness to stand up also gives impetus to other, more moderate political student groups with wider appeal to stand up also to oppression and injustice.

Cooperatives, Coffee and Coke

2007-05-23T12:53:00.000-06:00

On the outskirts of San Salvador, visible from almost every point in the city, is the San Salvador volcano. It rises about 6,000 feet above the city. Its sides are green and lush and it is quite beautiful on the days that you can see it, i.e. days when it is not hazy or clouded over. Yesterday we got a chance to get on this volcano. The occasion was a ¨field trip¨we usually make in the afternoons to see some political or cultural aspect of El Salvador that we would not see otherwise. We took two buses and a taxi to get to a ¨cafe finca¨on the slopes of the volcano. A finca is a cooperative farm, and this one harvests coffee.

The first thing I noticed was the amazingly colorful flowers that grew out of the hillside. The most amazing purples and yellows and reds were visible. The climate here is tropical, and if El Salvador wasn´t the second most deforested country in the Western Hemisphere (behind Haiti), there would be a rainforest almost as lush as the ones in Costa Rica. The second thing I noticed were the security guards. As usual, this business was protected by security which wielded sawed off shotguns. What most intrigued me however, was the size of the shot in the shells. It was huge. I´ve done some hunting in my younger life with a shotgun. The shot in the shells I used was mostly small pellets meant to kill birds. The shot in these shells were meant to stop something big. Something like a man, or a large bear. Literally, being shot with one of these shells would kill you.

This cooperative farm was established in the early 1980s when the ruling government, trying to defuse some of the guerilla´s reasons for fighting the civil war, passed land reform laws that limited land holdings to a certain amount of hectares per individual. Of course, the ruling party that passed the laws was made up of the very same people that owned most of the land. So, what do you think happened? Bingo, even as they were passing the law they were working their way around it. They basically put individual pieces of land to individual members of each family -- for all intents and purposes it was still owned by one person but in law, by several. Some plots were set aside to redistribute, and some of these plots, like the cafe finca, became cooperative ventures. So now, the cafe finca sits on about, I think 1600 hectares of land on the volcano. It supports roughly 600 families, many of whom care for the coffee trees and pick the coffee beans when they are ready.

The government does not like such cooperatives, and makes trouble for them legislatively when they can. Right now, they are poised to have a law passed that will make further trouble for the cooperatives. But, this cooperative serves more than just as a source of income. It is one of the last vestiges of rain-forest in the city. It serves as a safe harbor for many species that would not have a place to live, or a safe refuge during migration. As such, it is an island of tranquility in the midst of busy, hectic San Salvador.

Oh, and in case you don´t think that Coke is evil, and sometimes I am ashamed I drink it, Coke bills itself as ¨Buena Fuente de Hidratacion.¨ A good source of hydration. Hmmm....I always heard that sugar and caffeine actually dehydrated you. So, Coke sells itself for Salvadoran health.

The City that Kindness Forgot?

2007-05-21T13:35:00.000-06:00

San Salvador is not a kind city. You are reminded of this every day. The city is constantly on edge. Wherever you go, you can´t let your guard down for a minute. This manifests itself in simple and more complex ways.

For example, there is no pedestrian right of way in El Salvador. Cars are kings of the road. In the States, if you are in a crosswalk, you can expect the cars to stop for you while you walk across. In San Salvador, if you are in a crosswalk, you run the risk of getting run down because the cars won´t stop for you. If they do stop, they will honk their horns at you. You have to make sure that 1) you have the light and 2) despite that, there are no cars coming. They won´t stop for you. Believe me. And if you are hit, for all intents and purposes it´s your fault for walking even if you are in a marked crosswalk.

Another example, a little more complex. Crime is very prevalent here. No matter where you walk, whether you are in a ¨good¨ neighborhood or a ¨rough¨ neighborhood, you will see all the windows barred. Houses are often hidden behind 10 foot walls, with one or two layers of razor wire on top. The apartment in which I am staying resembles a jail cell in front, with an iron-frame door and iron-grill work around. Every morning, when I leave, my host walks out with me to make sure there is nobody hiding underneath the stairs to ¨jack¨ me when I walk out.

Another guy here, a person in his 60s who came down here to teach English and get Spanish lessons at half-price for 10 weeks, said he felt safe withdrawing money at a bank in a shopping center because there was a security guard with a shotgun standing near by. Unfortunately, his bubble was burst when we were told that the security guys won't help you...they are just hired to protect the business they are standing in front of, not to stop crime on you. Chances are they will look the other way.

That's another thing that reminds you that the city is not huggie bears and perfume. In front of many businesses, large and small, stands a guy in uniform with a sawed-off shotgun. They are protecting these businesses, allegedly. I've been told that the biggest security company is a large business interest of the former president of El Salvador, Christiani, who is still very important to the ruling party, ARENA. Thus, there is a disincentive to reduce crime because then it hurts profits to said security company. However, it completely reinforces the notion that you are not ever safe on the street when you walk past so many businesses with razor wire all around, a vicious dog locked inside, and a guy with a sawed off shotgun outside who will do nothing to help you if a bunch of gang members are beating the hell out of you right in front of him -- as long as they don't touch the merchandise inside.

Downtown, the city center is tinged with danger. You get sin and redemption all at the city plaza, where the cathedral and the prostitution business are separated by only a block or so. The market that makes up much of downtown is full of honest people making a business, and theives selling their stolen merchandise. Everyone walks through quickly, eager to get business done and get out, looking all around and holding on to their belongings.

And I've mentioned the gangs before. Everywhere you go, you see gang grafitti. Even near my school, the signs of the notorious MS-13 marks walls.

Why is this so? Because of the extreme inequalities here. In a country that looks good on the UN and World Bank charts, with its better than normal GDP, the inequalities are staggering. The richest people get richer, while the vast majority of poor people struggle to survive. Many leave for the US, where they work crappy jobs and send home remittances. 15% of the GDP comes from Salvadorans living in the US. For those that stay, crime is often the only option to get by.

You might think it is all horrible here. But no, not always. There are random acts of kindness and goodness that pop up from time to time, and make you feel bad for looking at everyone as a possible robber or murderer. Like the nameless woman on the bus who, when I was looking for my stop in the first week here tapped my shoulder and asked A donde vas? Or the completely spontaneous Buenas that come when you pass people on the street. Or the old couple I passed last Sunday and I said Buenos dias and their eyes lit up and they smiled and responded heartily Buenos dias! On Saturday past, a guy I barely know invited me to come to San Vicente with him, underneath a towering volcano, where he and his uncle are fixing up a home that was destroyed in the earthquake of 2001.

Yes, kindness didn't completely forget San Salvador. It occasionally sprouts in the open, but most of the time if you scratch the surface, you'll find it hiding below and waiting for a reason to come out.

Robbed!

2007-05-16T10:12:00.000-06:00

I spoke of the crowded buses earlier, which I found out aren't operated by the city of San Salvador but are all private. Imagine, all these private buses tooling up and down the street!

I learned a little of the dangers of the crowded buses yesterday. I went to the bus stop. I was a little later than usual. The stop was crowded, meaning a bus hadn't come in a while. I let the first bus pass because it was absolutely packed. The second, a minibus, was very comical. It was packed to, but still a guy who rides with the bus was trying to get people to jump on. And people did while he berated them to hurry up and jam themselves in. By the time he was finished, there were about 6 guys including himself hanging on to the little step into the bus, clinging however they could to keep from falling off while the minibus lurched down the street, dangerously tilted to one side.

A third bus came, and I couldn't wait any longer. I got on. It was very crowded and we were packed in like sardines. At the university, the bus emptied and I took a seat. I got off as usual and walked to the language school.

Four hours later, I decided to get some lunch with a couple of other people. I went to pull out my money, and it was gone. I figure I was picked on the bus, but it also could have been at the stop where I remember a guy stood very near me and another guy brushed me when he walked past. I heard that the pickpockets work in teams, with one providing the distraction while the other reaches in. Fortunately, I wasn't carrying a lot of cash, about $15 in my pocket, so it wasn't a great loss to me though it would have fed me lunch into next week.

It's hard, after experiences like this, to not think that San Salvador is a lawless place. You have to worry about gangs, who have been known to board buses and rob people in broad daylight. You have to worry about walking into the wrong neighborhoods. You have to always look and be vigilant. I've lived in inner-city Milwaukee and in New Orleans, which was practically one big inner-city, and I have never felt so vulnerable as I have here in San Salvador. Of course, getting pick pocketed could have happened in any city on earth. It's just that in San Salvador, well, it just seems like you should expect it, whereas everywhere else it seems a little more random, a little less desperate.

Cashew Juice

2007-05-15T12:08:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I had juice from the fruit of the cashew tree. I didn´t even know that cashews had fruit, much less you could make juice out of them. But cashews have big fruit.

A few days ago, I had juice made out of the fruit of bayberries. I have no idea what the heck bayberries are, but the juice of the fruit is really good.

I haven´t been lacking for fruit on this trip. Mangos, papayas, strawberries, apples, oranges. My host mama has been making a lot of things for me. She fries bananas and plantains, and makes all kinds of licuados, i.e. fruit smoothies. I was worried that she would make me sick, but it turns out that she has been disinfecting the fruit.

The one thing that she´s only made for me once, which is surprising considering it is the national food, is pupusas. They are basically corn tortillas with beans and/or cheese and sometimes meat inside. They are very good. In our latest trip to the campo, I had a full meal of pupusas and a drink for about 90 cents.

Today I saw something that just boggled my mind. A small minivan, which serves my bus route, pulled up. The buses hadn´t been there in a while and there were a lot of people waiting. This mini bus pulled up and all these people rushed to get on. The bus was already full, and a guy was trying to get them on so the minbus could continue onward. It eventually left, leaning precipitously to one side, with about 5 or 6 guys hanging off on a little step outside. Evidently, there are no laws about overcrowding in this country.

Well, I´m signing off now. Hasta luego.

The Buses in San Salvador

2007-05-11T10:08:00.000-06:00

Riding the bus in San Salvador is quite an experience. The buses look like old recycled school buses from the U.S., and they appear to having been kept running forever. They are often colorful, though not as colorful as the ones I saw in Bangladesh in the country, but they often contain sayings on them, such as the one I saw this morning reading, in Spanish, ¨Jesus is yesterday, now and always.¨ The numbers on the bus are often hard to read, because they are ¨tricked out¨ in a way, so you have to pay attention if you are on a busy street with many buses. Fortunately, there seems to be no schedule for the buses, and you often have the buses from the same route following right behind one another, so if you miss one there will soon be another. You get on and simply hand a quarter over to the driver.

There is no such thing as a catalytic converter on the buses here. They often belch black smoke which adds to the overall pollution in the air over San Salvador, which is significant. The volcano nearby is often almost shrouded by smog. There is no air conditioning on the bus, so lots of belching buses leads to all that stuff coming in through the open windows of the bus you are riding.

The bus I take in the morning is always crowded, so people are standing in the aisles as well as seated two to a seat. You have to politely but firmly make your way past people, especially when you have to get off. Luckily for me, most of the people empty out at the University, so I usually have a place to sit about halfway through the journey. Getting off is a matter of simply getting up and moving to the door at the back. The driver sees you, and stops at the next available place on the street. If the bus is crowded and the driver can´t see you, or misses where you want to get off, you bang on the wall of the bus so that he can hear you and stop.

But Mike, you are thinking, ¨a quarter?¨ El Salvador has switched over to the dollar, so all transactions are in US currency. The local currency is practically non-existent. The difficulty is that the ATMS give out bills in 10s and 20s, but where you are likely to eat, they usually don´t like to change such large bills. You have to try to have a good supply of dollar bills. It is easier in the city, but in the country, a 10 will not be changed no matter how hard you try. We are going to the country this weekend, and I´m literally going to go to the bank to get 20 ones so I will be able to pay for my food.

So far, I have seen many of the places of violence which occurred during the civil war. A couple of days ago, we went to the University of Central America, where 6 Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were killed by army forces in a raid in 1989 - it was thought by the army that doing so would end the FMLN´s final offensive in the city. Yesterday, we visited the church where Msgr. Oscar Romero was assassinated, widely assumed by agents of the government, in the early 1980s. Our guide said that this was the catalyst for the armed struggle against the government. This weekend, we will visit the site of the El Mozote massacre.

However, it has not all been doom and gloom. I went to a combined performance, totally free, of the El Salvador Symphony, Choir and a ballet company. The choir and symphony performed Carmina Burana, while the ballet company interpreted it through dance. It brought down the house, and the president of El Salvador took a bow onstage with the company.

I´m hoping to get interviews starting next week on my dissertation -- we´ll see, it has been more difficult than I thought. Y mi español is mejor, pero yo hago aprender mucho.

First week in El Salvador

2007-05-09T08:02:00.000-06:00

Hello. This will be a short post on my first week in El Salvador, as I will have to go to class in a moment. I arrived safely, and am now living with a woman and her 15 year old granddaughter in a small apartment in the Mejicanos neighborhood of San Salvador, which borders on the University of El Salvador. The neighborhood is very working class, and looks rougher than it is, I believe. I take a bus for about 15 minutes each morning to the language school, which is located on the other side of the University.

Mrs. Deras, my host, speaks no English. The apartment is very small, not air conditioned. They have given me one room while she and Galia sleep in another. She is a very good cook, and though the meals are small, they are laden with fruits, beans, rice, and even vegetables which she disinfects for me. I am filled each time I eat.

Things are inexpensive here. I can get a meal for $2.50 which would cost me at least $7.00 in the US.

Crime is always a worry. There are gangs roaming around, and they have been known to get on buses and rob people. I was told that they do not want to hurt or kill anyone, they just want money or something they can sell. That is good news -- I always carry $15-$20 to give in case that happens. It probably will not, but it is better to stay safe.

I am gaining a little facility in the language. I understand more than I can speak. It is difficult and frustrating to keep having to look up things in the dictionary. But, hopefully after the 3rd or 4th time, it sinks in.

We visited the University of Central America yesterday, where the six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter will killed by the army during the final offensive of the civil war in 1989. It was very sobering and at times gruesome --they have kept all the photos of the aftermath. The university is quite beautiful, however.

Today we are visiting the Anthropological Museum, and then there is a symphony performance for a small donation tonight at the Presidential Theater.

I will write more in a while.

Leaving Today, but news on adoption story

2007-05-05T06:56:00.000-06:00

Hi Folks. I'm leaving today for El Salvador. But I just wanted to give you a sort of postscript to my adoption story.

The grand niece of my father, Andy Andraza, happened to be taking a mental break at work and did a google search on her maiden name. She came across one of my adoption posts, and left a message on my blog. You can see her message on My New Identity Crisis, Part 6.

This is a huge break, because it indicates the spelling of the name of my father was correct, and it offers a lot of clues to go on.

Okay...off to the developing world. I will be posting occasionally to this site about my adventures as time allows!

San Salvador, City of Lights, City of Dreams!!!

2007-05-02T09:41:00.000-06:00

On Saturday, I'm off to El Salvador for 5 weeks. What will I be doing there? I'm going there to do work for my dissertation, mostly conduct interviews on my topic with political leaders. I'm also going to an intense language immersion school. I will be living in a home with a family in the capital city of San Salvador, and attending at least four hours of Spanish class per day.

I'm excited and nervous about it. I'm excited I will finally learn some practical Spanish, and going to another country is always an adventure. I'm nervous because, in my infinite wisdom, I have picked what is arguably the most dangerous country in the Western hemisphere. El Salvador is rife with organized crime on a higher level, and gang crime and violence on a lower level. All those illegal El Salvadoran immigrants that were involved in US gangs that we deported in the late 80s went back to El Salvador and established the gangs there. The MS-13 is probably the most notorious gang, with significant membership in both the US and El Salvador. The city is full of petty and violent crime. I've been warned not to bring anything with me that I couldn't afford to lose, as there is a greater likelihood that I will be held up if I look like I have anything of value on me.

Why did I pick El Salvador? I wanted to go to a cheap language school, which many Central American countries have (I have a friend attending school in a rural area of Guatemala right now) but also I wanted to be near the people I needed to interview, and being in a capital city was the best bet for that.

So, that's the long and short of it. I will be arriving back in the States on June 9th where I will start the drive toward finishing off this dissertation once and for all.

I will try to post on this blog once in a while from down there. I have heard that there are Internet cafes where I can get online, so I will do my best to let you all know that I'm alive and well. In the mean time, if any of you want to contact Megan, feel free. She'll be a little lonely!

I Have Bifocals

2007-04-18T09:58:00.000-06:00

Okay, I've officially joined the old geezer club. I now have bifocals. No, there isn't a line separating the two lenses -- they're much more sophisticated than that -- but it's noticeable to me. I get a slight buzz moving my head back and forth, especially watching the computer screen, and seeing it go all wavy when different areas of the lense move across the screen.

But hey, there's a bright side...they have cool magnetic snap on shades!

The picture at left is me in my new shades. The girl? I couldn't keep her off me after I picked them up. I gotta shake her loose before Megan gets home!

My New Identity Crisis: Part 8 - To Go or Not to Go, That is the Question

2007-04-11T08:46:00.000-06:00

Well, this is (temporarily) the last of my suddenly 8 part series about my new identity crisis, though I will periodically keep you updated on my adventures in discovering new things about my life from this point onward. After all, I still have to have my meeting with my half-brother Bob, I need to meet the legendary Mama Joyce, and there are a few other things that still need to be learned, such as tracking down the lady-killing milkman, my biological father Andy.

For this last post, however, I will explain my current dilemma. My newfound cousin, Diana Jones, told me over the phone that there will be a Mayle family reunion in Ohio on June 16th. At the reunion will be my biological mother Ruby's last two remaining siblings, my new aunts Garnett and Maxine.

A couple of weeks ago, Bob told me that I should call Maxine. He had told her about me and she was anxious to talk to me and was expecting my call. I mentioned this to Diana over e-mail, and she called me to give me the "lay of the land" in terms of talking with Maxine. This was helpful, or I might have stepped early on a couple of land mines. However, Diana also encouraged me to call Maxine. She reiterated that talking to her will be as close to talking to my biological mother as I would be able to get. After talking with Diana, I planned to call Maxine on the following weekend.

I put the call through on a Sunday afternoon. Again, I was a bit tongue-tied at the beginning and all I came out with was "Hi, I'm Michael Hess, and I have recently discovered that I am the son of your sister Ruby. I guess that makes you my aunt." Maxine responded, "well, I guess that does." She proceeded to welcome me to the family.

Maxine is in her 70s, and lives now in a town just outside of Cleveland, Ohio. She told me that she misses West Virginia, and would love to live there again but her kids and grandkids are all close in Ohio so she stays there. In a way, I understood her quite a bit. She reminds me of a combination of my adoptive mother Shirley, and Shirley's mother. She has reached an age where she tells things like she sees them and isn't apologetic about it. We spoke for about a half hour. She told me that Bob is a wonderful guy, and that when he came to visit they drove to her and Ruby's old hometown in West Virginia. She related some stories. She's very sensitive about how outsiders view people from where she's from, which makes sense if you read the previous post. She said that she told Bob on their drive down that he should get out of this head the notion that people there are like hillbillies and walk around barefoot. She told me that no sooner had she said this than they rounded a curve, and there was some guy sitting on the porch of his house, smoking his pipe and his bare feet up on the porch railing!

We talked about my mother, and my biological father. "I've met your father," she said, "Ruby brought him out here once. I don't think he like me very much."

Why, I asked?

"I run a decent house," she said. "They were unmarried, and I didn't want that to be an example to my children. So I made them sleep separately. I don't think he liked that too much."

"Well, it was your house and your rules," I said. "Good for you for sticking to them!"

Like Diana, she invited me to the family reunion.

My problem is this. I am going to El Salvador for about a month starting in early May. I will be coming back on June 9th, just a week prior to the reunion. The week after the reunion, I will be heading to California for a good friend's wedding (Go EB!!!!), and a possible meeting with Bob. I'm not sure that I can afford another trip to the Midwest, both in time and expenses. However, I also am keenly aware that these remaining links to my birth mother are getting older, and that you never know how long these opportunities will be around. So, I'm quite torn at the moment between going and not going.

I would appreciate any thoughts you have on the matter. I'm sure that these meetings will happen sooner or later, but it's difficult to say whether I should bite the bullet and get it all done now.

So, here's the synopsis just so you can remember the journey we've traveled so far. I went searching for family history on my adopted father's side. In the process, I met a person who helped me find that history, and offered to look into my adoption and that story. With her help, we managed to uncover the identity of my birth mother, which led to the discovery of a half-brother and sister, a new family and a new family history and heritage to explore. I've been accepted as one of that family, and now I am struggling with the pace of learning more and meeting people in that family.

The final thing I am asking myself at this point is "Who am I?" Am I Michael Wayne Rodger, born to Ruby Rodger and a part of all that history? Am I Michael Louis Hess, who was raised by Vernon and Shirley, with all that good and bad history. Am I Mike, raised for a year and a half by Mama Joyce who clearly was responsible for some of my most formative years? Am I a combination of all of those? What has turned me into the person I am today? As I move forward, how do I approach these questions? Will I come to emotionally feel my connection to all of this, rather than experiencing all these new revelations as a purely intellectual curiousity? The way that I relate to the world and myself seems to be in the balance, and I quite haven't made sense of what it means. It's confusing and exciting all at the same time. I just hope that my emotions someday catch up.

Photo 1: Diana Jones and former Green Bay Packer Wally Mahle - both newfound cousins.

Photo 2: My new aunts and uncle, Garnett, Charles (deceased) and Maxine, circa 1999.

Photo 3: 2006 Mayle family reunion.

My New Identity Crisis: Part 7 - I'm a What?

2007-04-06T08:54:00.003-06:00

"It may come as somewhat of a surprise to many to learn that there exists in the northern counties of (West Virginia) a racial island of mixed bloods, known locally as 'Guineas,' numbering several thousand persons. The origin of this mixed race is unrecorded, and the relative proportion of white, Negro and Indian blood entering into its makeup is difficult to ascertain....It is difficult to find a completely acceptable term to designate these mixed people. Stigmatized by white public opinion as a sort of outcast group, they dislike and resent any designation used by outsiders for themselves.

"The family names of the Guineas are limited in number and are the most important items for identification of members. The characteristic names are Adams, Collins, Croston, Dalton, Dorton, Kennedy, Male, Miner or Minard, Newman, Norris and Prichard. of these by far the most frequent in occurrence is Male....The Males, who also spell their name as Mayle, Mail and Mahle, trace their descent back to an ancestor who was said to have come over from England during colonial times. One observer thinks that there may be some connection between the Males and the Malay Race. It is said, moreover, that in the Male clan the white and Indian is much more prominent than the Negro.

"A considerable period of isolation must be assumed to account for the long-continued inbreeding which has characterized the Guineas for a number of generations. "According to West Virginia law white schools are to be separate from colored. For at least 30 years the Guinea children have been attending schools separate from the white....Apparently no Negroes attend these Guinea Schools and there are several Negro schools in the two counties also.

"The contempt of some of the neighboring white people for the Guineas is marked. They are regarded as the dregs of society, as outcasts of little consequence or importance. Others among the whites feel much more sympathetic toward the Guineas and speak of them as capable people when they are given opportunities for advancement. The chief complaints which one hears made are chicken-thieving, bootlegging of illicit liquor, and similar derelictions.

"Permanent migration out of Barbour and Taylor Counties has been recommended by local white officials as they best solution for the individual Guinea. By moving to a community in which there is no knowledge of the Guineas as a group it is quite possible for the individual to pass into the white classification in many instances."

Excerpts from Gilbert, Jr., William Harlen,"Mixed Bloods of the Upper Monongahela Valley, West Virginia." Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 36(1): 1-13.

Irish, English, German and French Canadian. That's what I was. Whenever I asked my mom (Shirley Hess) what nationality I was, that's what I was told. Pretty white bread, if you ask me. Nothing really exciting there. I mean, sure, the Irish history and all has been very exciting for me to explore as an adult -- all the mayhem, blood, fighting, repression and such. But I've only appreciated it as an adult. And the German history -- they always seemed to be the troublemakers of Europe starting from the time the various tribes periodically sacked Rome, all the way up through Nazi Germany. That was pretty exciting too, even as a kid, but the Germans were always the bad guys. The English always seemed staid and boring to me. Sure they built a great empire and gave us Shakespeare, but as a kid I couldn't get excited over it. French Canadian? What did that mean? Did that mean I was French, or Canadian?

So, imagine my surprise when I learned that my birth mother, Ruby Rodger, was originally Ruby Mayle from West Virginia, and that she was from a group of people called the "Guineas." The Guineas are roughly equivalent to other ridge dwelling peoples of the eastern mountains of America stretching from West Virginia down through Kentucky and Tennessee. Similar groups of people are called "Melungeons" in Kentucky and Tennessee. They were generally the "backwoods" people, awfully poor, and generally scorned by the rest of society.

The difficulty for the Guineas was the taint of non-white blood. In this society, and we even see this today, unenlightened people still consider it a defect if you're less than white. The Guineas, according to Bob and other accounts, certainly had Indian in them. There is also strong evidence that some mixing with blacks also occurred. Today, up in the Chestnut Ridge area of West Virginia, you can find families, all with the same last name, whose people look pure white, pure black and everything in between. Bob told me that even within his own family, he looks pretty white, his younger brother had blond very curly hair, and his sister looks very Indian. "A motley, mixed race crew," he proclaimed us.

Bob has introduced me to Diana Jones, a first cousin on my birth mother's side. Diana's mother, Ruby's sister also came from West Virginia, got married and moved to Oklahoma. Diana lives in North Texas. Diana is also a prominent Mayle family genealogist. When Bob sent me a bunch of pictures of his family, I told him "I don't think I look like any of you." Bob sent a few more pictures. He said "I think you look like my son, Jesse." He also sent some other family pictures from the past, and sent a picture of one Thomas Male, who he said was our most African-American looking ancestor. As I was looking through the pictures, I could see some resemblance to Bob's son, but the picture of Thomas really struck Megan and I as resembling me in certain ways. Megan pointed out the nose, the blue eyes (they look gray in the black and white photograph), the line of the jaw and even the forehead. Above are the pictures of Jesse, me and Thomas Male. What do you think?

I guess the question is what do I think? Well, I am actually kind of excited to have my blood and heritage spiced up like this. I have only visited West Virginia once -- I drove through on a business trip and stopped at the fabulous New River Gorge to look and take pictures, but it left a great impression on me. I also visited Appalachia twice, Hazard Kentucky to be specific, and really felt an affinity to the place. Perhaps subconscious memories of my ancestors' environment were haunting me at the time. Being able to say that I have Indian, and perhaps even African-American, blood doesn't bother me in the least. I like the fact that I can explore this brand new heritage. However, I must be careful with my new family. Diana warned me that some members of the Mayle family, particularly older members, are not ready to talk about some aspects of their lineage. It's much easier for them to accept Indian heritage than black heritage. In the case of the older members, being labeled as "colored," being victims of discrimination, being labeled and outcast has left raw open wounds. I don't necessarily want to poke at any of these. Slowly, Diana and other younger members of the Mayle family are pushing for the Mayles to embrace their history, but it takes time and old feelings and secrets are hard to change.

At least I know that I'm a little more complex than Irish, English, German and French Canadian. And that's kind of fun, don't you think?

Next up: To go or not to go, that is the question

Photo 1: Thomas Male, probably late 1800s or early 1900s?

Photo 2: Jesse Rodger, Bob Rodger's son (and my nephew, I guess!)

Photo 3: Do I look more exciting to you now?

My New Identity Crisis: Part 6 -- My New Brother

2007-04-04T12:00:00.000-06:00

How was I to approach my new brother? He was interested in hearing from me, so that was good. But what would I say to him? Hi, I'm your brother Mike? Hey Bro? Bruuuuuutherrrrrrrrr!!!!!!??? It was hard for me to work up the nerve to contact him and I didn't think I could do it by phone right away. Since Ruth had forwarded both an e-mail and a phone number, I opted to do the e-mail first to introduce myself.

I wanted to make a few points clear, just because I would have had these questions had I been in his situation. First, I wanted to make clear that I wasn't expecting anything. I had started this search simply to learn more about myself and where I came from, and I didn't want him to think that I had any needs or issues. Second, I wanted him to be able to tell me how comfortable he was with this process and I wanted him to give me an idea about how far I could question him. Third, I wanted him to feel free to break off any time he wanted to. In other words, I wanted to give him the opportunity to control the pace of everything. I also had no idea whether or what he would tell his brothers and sister about me at this point, and on the expectation that they would have questions, I wanted to be as upfront about my motivations and expectations as possible. So I composed the following e-mail:

Hello Mr. Rodger,

Ruth ______ e-mailed me and told me that she spoke to you about me and that it would be okay for me to contact you. As you know, we have reason to believe that I am related to your mother Ruby Rodger, and therefore to you and your siblings. Ruth assured me that you seem to have no difficulty with this and are willing to speak with me. I hope therefore that my contacting you is not presumptuous in any way.

I wanted to contact you first by e-mail rather than by phone, just so that I can explain myself and my motivations for looking into my biological history. Ruth probably told you the story about how she and I became acquainted with one another while I was looking into my adopted family's history and that at some point in our correspondence I told her that I was adopted. She offered to help me find my biological family if I was ever interested in doing so. I had been informally kicking around the idea for a couple of years. There was a rumor about my biological parents and birth that floated around with me and which I wondered if was true. There was also a rumor that I had a sister or a half-sister (based on the fact that there was a little girl that looked so much like me though younger, at the Children's Home Society who was adopted out to Robert Goulet's brother). These rumors were interesting. I agreed to let her find what she could.

In the course of her investigations, she found five boys who were born in Eureka, California on December 29, 1963, my birthdate, and told me that one of them or none of them could be me. One of the boys was a Michael W. Rodger, born to a woman who's maiden name was Mayle.

Ruth also helped me track down a foster parent who had taken me in from the age of 5 months to 2 years. This woman, who I called "Mama Joyce," had wanted to adopt me. I was the first baby she took in, and she became very attached to me. She had been trying to become pregnant for 9 years, and had given up. However, not long after arranging to adopt me, she became pregnant and her husband wanted to raise their own daughter so she very reluctantly gave me up. I was eventually adopted at 2½ by a couple, Vernon and Shirley Hess, and raised in Fort Bragg, California.

"Mama Joyce" was very excited to hear from me and asked me why I sought her out now. I explained to her that for me, life really began at 2½ when I was adopted, and were my earliest memories. I told her I had been getting more interested in learning about my history before that and where I came from over the past couple of years (probably a little mid-life crisis) and she said "Oh, well would you like to know the name of your mother?" I expressed surprise that she had that information, and she said that foster parents usually didn't have it, but somehow she did. She informed me that my biological mother's name was Ruby M. Rodger, and that my original name was Michael Wayne Rodger. She said that the information said "father unknown," and that the birth mother was "allergic to metals."

So, that left little doubt that Ruby Rodger was my birth mother. Ruth did some looking through her genealogical resources and found that Ms. Rodger died in 1997 but that there were four children born to her and Alexander Rodger. At that point I had to make a decision on whether I would be interested in contacting you.

I want to let you know that there are no ulterior motives on my part in contacting you. I realize there are many reasons why adoptees seek out their biological families. I am not seeking anything but information. I'm married, and working on a Ph.d in Political Science which should be finished sometime in 2007. I'm comfortable and secure. I don't really need to know about my history to live out my life in satisfaction and happiness. I'm just curious about the circumstances of my birth and where I came from.

Nor do I expect a warm and fuzzy "family reunion" and to be accepted with open arms by the Rodger family. My goal will be, if you are willing, to explore and simply let this process take its course. If I gain new friends and self-understanding, that would be wonderful and the most of what I seek. If I do gain a new "family", which I've heard happens to some adoptees that seek out their biological families, that would be more than I expect.

I told Ruth before she contacted anyone that if there is any indication whatsoever that my surfacing or resurfacing in your life would be painful, traumatic or cause any distress whatsoever, I would back off immediately and cease any attempt at present or future contact. I have no wish to cause anyone any pain, and as far as I'm concerned, everything that I've learned up to this point has been wonderful and a real bonus. My sister even managed to track down a young picture of Ruby Mayle on a website so I've actually seen something of my biological mother's face. I am attaching it if you haven't seen it -- hopefully it is actually her picture.

So, all that being written, I am looking forward to speaking with you and learning more. Please let me know what might be a good time and day to reach you. Alternatively, you can contact me via this e-mail, or by my phone numbers.

I sent this off in mid-December. I didn't have long to wait for an answer. Bob e-mailed me right back. In his e-mail, he indicated that the photo (shown in my last post) was indeed Ruby Rodger. He said that she took up with a man named Andy Andraza, though he wasn't sure if that was the way to spell the last name. They moved to Eureka for a while in the early sixties. He said that years later his mother sadly said "I once knew a woman who gave away her baby," and that his sister once found some adoption papers. He said he was convinced that I was Ruby's baby.

He also said, in response to my statement about a family reunion, that both of his brothers had died and his sister is mentally ill and living in Florida, so that for all intents and purposes, he is what's left of the family. He told me that he was glad to hear from me, and that he would send information and photos.

Since then, Bob has sent me a steady stream of information. We've talked once on the phone, for approximately two hours. From my little bit of dealing with him, I like him very much though I have to be patient about getting information -- I have so many questions that it's hard to wait for something new.

Bob was born in 1949, so he is approximately 14 years older than I am. He is a half-brother as his father and my father were separate people. He lives in California, and he makes a living creating and constructing trade show displays. I've also learned that he is an artist in his spare time. He is married, and has three children. One, a daughter is in her 30s and lives in Sacramento. Another daughter is attending college in Eureka. His son is in his last year of high school.

I've learned from Bob that his older and younger brother have both taken their own lives. His sister spent most of her adult life homeless and is in a relatively stable place in Florida right now.

About my birth mother, I've learned a bit from him in the e-mails, on the phone call and from an account that he wrote up about her. Bob does not want the information details to be disseminated and I respect his wishes but I believe that I can make some general statements. In general, I learned that Ruby had a very difficult life. She was born in West Virginia in 1923 in a coal mining area -- many of her family worked in the mines and it was an awfully hard life. How hard? She was one of 11 siblings, five of which died before reaching adulthood. One brother accidentally drank lye water and suffered terribly for few years because of his burned esophagus until he died, and another sister died of typhoid fever. Her family, the Mayles (pronounced May-lee) is one of only six or so family surnames in that area that inhabited the area very early in America's history and interbred with Indians and African-Americans. In fact, this cultural cross-breeding was enough to brand these families as "colored."

I've learned that Ruby moved to Ohio in her late teens where she met her husband. She quickly realized that her marriage wasn't great but only got divorced in the early 60s. She met a man, Andy, who was the love of her life and she had a stormy and tempestous relationship with him for about 10 years. I was the product of that relationship. I learned that my biological father may have been the main reason for her giving me up for adoption. I have learned that Ruby spent her last years beset by major health problems, and suffered from some regrets about giving me up. However, it appears that her death in 1997, at which Bob was present at her side, was a peaceful one.

I have learned that my father was a blue-eyed sax player from Canada, a milkman who liked the ladies. I don't know much other than that, except that he was fun loving and that Bob liked him. I don't know if he is still alive, but chances are slim.

I've taken in this information but it hasn't really emotionally hit me yet. I think, when I meet Bob in person, maybe this year, I might be able to realize the enormity of it all. The life of my birth mother sounds like a hard and a sad one, and it sort of answers one of my "what if" questions. My life would probably not have been better with her. However, I would have liked to have had the chance to meet her, to learn from her about her life, and to see for myself this person who gave me life. I haven't truly dealt with the fact that I have a mentally ill half-sister, or what that may mean for me in the long run. Bob has encouraged me to leave her be and again I am more than willing to follow his judgment -- he said that she is in the most stable place she has been in years and that simply knowing of me might upset that balance.

So, I still have a lot to learn about my biological family, even though it seems that I've learned a lot so far. And I still don't know what emotionally and practically this all means for me. What this journey has done, however, is connect me to a whole new culture wrapped up in the story of Ruby's family, the Mayles, and the other families of Barbour County, West Virginia where she came from. More about that fascinating story in the next post.

Next up: I'm a What?

Photo 1: Ruby and Bob Rodger, 1950

Photo 2: The Rodger family in the early 50s, Bob, Ruby, Alex Sr., Alex Jr.

Photo 3: Jeanne Rodger, 1968

Photo 4: Andy, my biological father, 1969

Photo 5: Bob Rodger, my half-brother, circa 2005.

My New Identity Crisis: Part 5 - My Birth Mother and Baby Pictures

2007-04-03T08:05:00.000-06:00

"Oh," said Mama Joyce. "Would you like to know the name of your birth mother?"

I was speechless for second. Ruth had suggested that finding Mama Joyce would be a key to finding out more about myself. However, I had expected clues about me, not names. From talking to Tia and Pop over the years, I knew that foster parents were not supposed to know anything about the birth parents of the children to maintain privacy.

"You have that?" I asked after a moment's silence.

"I have it right here in this book I made," she said.

What else could I say but yes?

"Your name was Michael Wayne Rodger," Mama Joyce said. "Your mother was named Ruby Rodger, and I even have an address for her in Santa Monica, though this was 40 years ago."

I later looked back at the e-mail that Ruth had sent with the names of the five boys born in Humbolt County on my birthday. Sure enough, I had been looking right at Michael W. Rodger in the midst of those. I was one of those boys.

I wrote the name and the address down. Oddly, I was curiously detached at the moment. I had just learned that my mother's name was Ruby, and that I was Michael Wayne. It just didn't fit with what I felt about myself. This was the first moment of disconnect I felt with the whole experience, where my identity crisis began. I was discovering a whole new area of my life to explore, but it was like looking at something through a window -- I just couldn't touch it and feel it yet.

Mama Joyce and I talked for a little while longer. She told me that a woman who used to be a neighbor and who is presently in a nursing home would be very happy to know that she heard from me. She said this woman just loved me, and was very sad when I left. Before we hung up I asked her if she would be willing to see me the next time I got out to her area when I visit my family. She said she would love to. So far I have not been out there yet, but she will be one of the first people I see the next time I'm there.

I e-mailed Ruth about the phone call. She was very glad Mama Joyce and I had talked and felt very good about her role in getting us together, and said she just knew that some good information would come out of it. I passed on the information Mama Joyce gave me about my birth mother. Not only did we have a first name and a last name, but we also had a maiden name thanks to Ruth's original search that first yielded the name of Michael W. Rodger. The information also included "Mother's maiden name Mayle." Ruth began to search again. Meanwhile, after telling my sister this story, she Googled "Ruby Mayle" and turned up a picture. The website that had this picture was put together by a man named Glenn Barnett in Columbus, Ohio, and listed a Ruby Rodger along with a whole host brothers and sisters. According to the website, this Ruby was married to a Alex Rodger, and they had one son, Alex Jr. I had no knowledge of whether this was the same Ruby Rodger that was my birth mother, and I sent an e-mail to him. However, it bounced back to me.

This was to be the first picture I ever saw of my biological mother, Ruby. As I looked at it, I examined it minutely for any semblance of myself in it. I had supposed that if I ever met my biological family, I would look somewhat like them. If this was my mother, I couldn't see myself in her. Again, I felt strangely detached. Where was the connection, and when would I feel it?

Mama Joyce gave me another priceless gift that I didn't expect. She had told me that she had a number of pictures of me when I was with her. I was hoping that when I got to see her, that I would see these pictures. But a few days before Christmas, I received a package from her in the mail. Inside was a gift wrapped item with a small tag that read "Happy Birthday." My birthday was must one week away. The item was a photo album, and it was filled with pictures of me, from 5 months old to two years.

For the first time in this whole process, I really felt emotion. I haven't felt this emotion since then either. Most of this process has left me in a state of detachment. I'm not sure why this is, though I think that I began this search as an exercise in intellectual curiosity. Before the search, there were the "I wonders..." and the "What ifs..." and the "Why..."'s. During the search, one clue seemingly led to another, and it became a kind of puzzle that needed to be solved.

But when I received the photo album from Mama Joyce, the meaning of this enterprise hit home. The photo album is not simply pictures pasted into a book. The album was put together carefully and lovingly. It has captions under the pictures. The first one which reads "6-08-64. Our first baby - Michael Wayne Rodger. Say "ah" Mikie. 5 mos. 26" tall. 15 lbs." There is one that reads "Bye Mom, I'm going for a walk now..." One says "Hi Daddy..." At the end, there was a full, 8½ x 11 family photo. This album was the beginning of a family album. A woman does not use words like "Our baby," "Mom" and "Daddy" if there isn't a familial and emotional bond. Clearly, I was to be part of this family. For some reason, that didn't happen. I hope to question Mama Joyce more about what led her to give me up and see if the reality matches with the stories I've been told. What really jumped out at me from the album, however, was the care, the love, and the emotion conveyed in the album. It all overcame me and flooded me with emotions. A hole had been filled in part of the empty history in my life from birth to 2 years. I wasn't sure what I would do with it, but I felt good about it. Given my dysfunctional family life over the years, where unconditional love becomes in many ways "conditional," to know that I was unconditionally loved by someone during my most formative period made me feel very blessed -- how many orphaned children who aren't adopted until they are over 2 years old can say the same?

Meanwhile, Ruth was busy working through what seemed to me to be an almost magical genealogical process. She soon e-mailed me with more information. Ruby was born in 1923 in West Virginia, and died in California in 1997. There was no information on how she got from West Virginia to California, though her Social Security number was apparently obtained in Ohio. She was married to an Alexander Rodger. Apparently, there were four children by this marriage, three boys and a girl. These children would apparently be my siblings. A divorce with Alexander went through in 1962.

The fact that she had apparently passed on made me pause for a moment. I would never be able to meet and talk with my mother. I had many questions that couldn't be explained by official records. For example, what led Ruby to divorce? The fact that she was divorced in 1962, before my birth, still left more questions. My birth father was listed as "unknown" in the records. It could have been Alexander, but probably not since I was born at the end of 1963, so most likely my father was somebody other than Alexander Rodger. Who was he, and what was he like? Why, if Ruby lived in the LA area, did she travel several hours north to Eureka to give birth to me? Why did she give me up for adoption? Did the children have any idea that I exist? Most of them would have been old enough to know something, it seems. Would they accept me if I came into their lives? These and a host of questions were swirling around my brain.

Then, this missive from Ruth:

"I just spoke with your brother, Bob....He told me that you can feel free to contact him any time. That there is probably a lot you'd like to know about your mother and there might be some information on your biological father, too??....He does not appear to have any issues with your birth."

Next up: My new brother

Photo 1: Ruby Mayle, my biological mother

Photo 2: Michael Wayne Rodger, my earliest photo (5 months old)

Photo 3: What might have been...the Rice family circa 1964 - William, Joyce, Michael.

My New Identity Crisis: Part 4 - Finding Mama Joyce

2007-04-01T10:29:00.000-06:00

From Ruth on November 27th, 2006:

"...five males were born in Humboldt County on 29 December 1963. You might be any one of these or none of them, it's hard to say. But here's the names:

(1) SCOTT B. FORD - mother's name CHAPPELL

(2) WILLIAM D. LIPSCOMB - mother's name GALONIS

(3) MICHAEL W. RODGER - mother MAYLE

(4) GREGORY A. SCOTT - mother SHOLES

(5) LAWRENCE M. TIMM - mother PITTMAN

"Like I mentioned earlier, it's quite possible that one of the above names might be your original name?"

Take a look at those names, all boys born on my birthday in the county where my birth certificate says I was allegedly born. Does any one of them strike you as possibly belonging to me? I looked them over and didn't see me in any of them, not the first time that this feeling would strike me during this adventure. But, it was a start, I suppose.

Why did your adoptive mother name you Michael, Ruth wanted to know? My simple answer was that my mom told me that I came to her with the name Mike. That's what they called me at the adoption agency. Since I was over two years old and responding to Mike, she said that she and Vernon decided that changing my name would be too confusing. They gave me the middle name of Louis, after Shirley's father. As far as I was concerned, it was another of those stories that revolved around me that couldn't be proven. Examples of these stories were that I was the product of an affair between a milkman and a college professor's wife, and that I had a younger sister in the same adoption agency at the same time as me who was adopted by the singer and Las Vegas showman Robert Goulet's brother.

I told Ruth of Mama Joyce, the mythical woman who had kept me for a number of months and who had wanted to adopt me, but had to give me up. The stories about Mama Joyce came to me from my second set of foster parents, Thelma and Laurence Wills (I called them Tia and Pop), who kept me for three months or so before my adoption but who I kept in regular contact with until their deaths. Mama Joyce, I was told, was planning to adopt me but when she got pregnant, her attachment to me created problems in her marriage. She evidently had given me up to the adoption agency at great emotional cost. Tia and Pop were reluctant to tell me much about her in respect to her privacy, but I think that they had some contact with her. Later, Tia and Pop began to have their own health difficulties and we didn't talk about my past much any more.

About a year and a half ago, Shirley sent me some information about myself that she had kept. Included in the information was a folder with sheets of paper written by Mama Joyce in which she catalogs my likes, dislikes, habits, speech patterns and development -- in a word, everything. Also in the information were two letters written by Mama Joyce in response to a letter that Shirley had written to her not long after my adoption. The letters showed the difficulties that Mama Joyce had in giving me up. She spoke of the excitement upon learning from her husband that a letter had came from Shirley (she was visiting an aunt in Oregon and was not home). She exclaimed how I was such an extraordinary child (her words, not mine!). In a second letter, after she had received the letter and pictures from Shirley, she speaks about how happy she is to see me in a good home, how she knows that I have gone to a good place, and that she can live happy knowing that I will be okay. These letters simply showed the depth of her feeling.

Unfortunately, after I had read them I somehow misplaced them. The letters had given Mama Joyce's last name and an address. Ruth felt that tracking down Mama Joyce would be a key component of the search for my roots. I literally tore the house apart looking for them. It took a couple of weeks, but I eventually found them sitting in a place that was literally in plain sight in our office, scattered amongst the detritus of my dissertation and other office clutter.

With this bit of information, Ruth went to work. She had already been tracking down tenuous leads. With a last name, she was able to first locate some records, but nothing current, and then finally she was able to locate a brother. With my permission, she called this man and explained who I was.

Mama Joyce's brother said he didn't remember me, but if I wrote a letter to her and mailed it to him, he said he would give it to her as she was visiting him soon. So, I wrote a letter explaining who I was and how I found her brother. I included a copy of my earliest photo, and put the envelope unsealed into a larger envelope so that he could look at it if he so chose.

It turned out that Mama Joyce's brother did remember me, and was trying to protect his sister. He knew how she would react when she heard I was trying to reach her. At her visit, he waited until her last night there to tell her about me. When she learned the news, she immediately got on the phone and called Ruth and they spoke. Ruth called me personally with the news that she had made contact, and that Mama Joyce wanted me to call her the following Sunday at home.

Mama Joyce couldn't wait for me to call, and called me herself. We spoke for about a half hour. I gave her a rough sketch of my life. She wanted to know why I wanted to contact her now. I told her that perhaps it was a mid-life crisis, but that I was curious about who I was and where I came from. I had heard the stories about her, and I finally wanted to know what the facts were. I also told her that I was interested in finding out more about my heritage and where I came from.

And then came some words that I was not really expecting, and which really floored me.

"Oh," said Mama Joyce. "Would you like to know the name of your birth mother?"

Next part: My Birth Mother and Baby Pictures

My New Identity Crisis: Part 3 -- My Answer to Ruth

2007-03-30T21:43:00.000-06:00

When I last left off, I was perusing a proposal from Ruth, the genealogist I had met online but had never met in person. She asked if she could help me find my birth family, and something that I had thought about off and on throughout my life was suddenly sitting in my lap.

What kid, who knows he or she has been adopted, doesn't think about finding his or her birth parents? I can't say that such a desire was at the top of my list of things to do, but it was always something I thought I would explore "someday." However, I can't deny that I hadn't thought about my birth mother and father, what they looked like. Sometimes at night on any December 29th, my birthday, before I went to sleep and as I lay there in the dark, I would wonder if somewhere out there someone was also thinking of me.

As I began to hit my forties, I think my mid-life crisis took the form of an identity crisis rather than an "Oh my god I'm halfway to death" crisis. I realized that, having been adopted after I was 2 years old, that I had no history before my earliest memory and that there was nobody that could tell me what I was like. I had no baby pictures. My earliest picture of myself was at 2½ years. For some reason, this began to bother me a little.

I knew I existed before two. I heard the stories. The rumor that was passed to my adoptive mom, Shirley, was that I was the product of an affair between the wife of a college professor and a milkman. I thought this was funny, but it was the only archetypal story of my "beginnings." I knew that at some point, I was placed in a foster home with a family for what was to be a temporary stay, but the wife, named "Mama" Joyce, became greatly attached to me and she and her husband intended to adopt me. She had been trying for nine years to be pregnant, and had for all intents and purposes given up. As luck would have it, as soon as they made that decision she became pregnant. There was some difference of opinion between her and her husband at this point, and she reluctantly gave me up. I was placed in another foster home for three months, with Thelma and Laurence Wills, and then I was adopted by Vernon and Shirley Hess.

My difficult childhood also fueled my speculation as to my birth. Without going into too much detail, I had a very difficult time at home. Vernon was an alcoholic. Shirley coped by trying to exert control over the home. Vernon also violated the lines separating appropriate and inappropriate attentions to me, to put it mildly. My younger sister developed anorexia-bulimia. To say that we were a dysfunctional family is almost making light of the gravity of the situation.

In these situations, it is easy for a guy to imagine "what ifs." What if I had not been given up for adoption by my birth parents? What if Mama Joyce had been able to adopt me? Don't get me wrong. I was happy with the way I turned out given the possibilities. But with a difficult past, it's easy to imagine somewhat greener pastures, or at least an easier time getting to the pasture in which I now stood.

However, the other part of the equation also included a lot of "what ifs." What if we can't find anything at all? What if we find something and my birth mother, father, or any family doesn't want anything to do with me? These were questions I had to reconcile if I was to move forward. I had heard too many stories of adoptees finding birth family only to realize that they were dragging up old wounds and re-opening old scars that were to remain forever closed. I did not want that for myself - I didn't want to be dragged into some new drama which would, no matter how hard I tried, affect others and even possibly my self-esteem.

After weighing all these questions in my mind, and talking them over with Megan my wife, I decided to go ahead. But Megan had one question that I hadn't thought of. "Why is Ruth doing this," Megan wanted to know? "What does she get out of it?" Megan was a little suspicious because it's not every day that someone just offers to help you without wanting something in return. And the fact was, I wasn't sure I wanted to put out a lot of financial effort to do this. I had been sitting on some paperwork from the adoption agency that handled my case for over a year. I had to pay $100 to get a copy of whatever was in their file on me. The file could include a waiver by the birth parents which would allow me to find them, or it could contain information I already knew. I had been reluctant to send in the money because, with my being a student, we were really only living on one full-time income plus whatever I brought in from some part-time work.

So I wrote to Ruth, saying that I would be interested but that I didn't really have anything to spend on this search financially, and if that was something that was expected I didn't think I could go through with it. I also said that if we go through with this, if there were any indications that going farther would result in pain and hurt to anyone, I would back off immediately. Ruth answered immediately, putting my fears to rest. "My family thinks I'm a bit daff," she wrote, because of her intense interest in genealogy. No, there wouldn't be any financial expectations. Perhaps if we ever met, I could buy her a piece of lemon pie at a little restaurant. And yes, I would have complete control over the process -- if she found something she would inform me first and ask me how to proceed. She would not commence contacting anyone unless she had my complete approval. She further wrote that she felt that I had been sent to her in some way and that her role in this adventure was to help me find what I was looking for, and she was willing to accept the role.

With that out of the way, I gave Ruth the go ahead, and off we went.

Next post: Finding Mama Joyce

My New Identity Crisis: Part 2 -- Ruth's Proposal

2007-03-28T19:35:00.000-06:00

In the last post, I detailed how after a number of years of on and off searching, I finally got a clue about some of the story of Marion Hess Sr., the father of my adoptive father, Vernon. The clue came from a woman named Ruth who had posted some information on line, and when I contacted her, she was kind enough to tell me why she had an interest in Marion.

Ruth explained that she was indirectly related to Vernon's mother Norma, Marion's wife, who died in her early 3os. Norma was the product of a third marriage. Her mother, Lulu, had been married twice before, and had a number of children in those marriages. Ruth's family was an offshoot of Lulu's second marriage. Ruth herself is an amateur genealogist, and when she understood that I was looking for more information on Marion, she tackled the problem with fervor.

We traded a number of e-mails back and forth. I sent her the little information I had, including the social security application, and she used census records, enlistment records and the like to gather more information. Without belaboring the process, she discovered the following facts. First, Marion was from Northwest Ohio and had a sister. His father Andrew worked on a railroad line. Andrew also had a farm, where he raised horses for harness racing. This fit with what little I knew already. Vernon had told me that his father had raced "silkies."

Second, and this was the shocker, Marion had been married in Ohio, and had a son named Julian. At some point, Marion left Ohio never to return, abandoning his wife and son who continued to live with Marion's father and mother. Julian remained in Ohio, and eventually died in 1990 in Columbus. Marion, in the meanwhile, resurfaced in California, met Norma, possibly in the Santa Cruz area, married her and moved to Fort Bragg where they had five boys. Marion became a barber, was a piano player with a music group, and eventually became postmaster in his older age. I do not know if he ever legally ended his first marriage, and I'm not sure that his sons knew that they had an older half-brother in Ohio. I have not been able yet to question his sole surviving son, Robert, about this. However, I was able to send Robert all the information I obtained from Ruth.

Ruth was able to increase my knowledge of Marion by at least 1000% in that month that she went to work, and it was a treasure trove to me. My regret was that I did not get it in time to share with Vernon or his brother Marion, or even their youngest brother Jack who had done some looking on his own before he died in the early 70s.

However, it turns out that the search for Marion was only a step in a greater journey for me. For, in one of the e-mails that I sent to Ruth during this period, I happened to mention that I was adopted. Up to this point, Ruth and I were engaged in a common cause -- we both were interested in finding out information that benefited each other's knowledge of our own families. After I sent that e-mail, Ruth sent a proposal back to me. It seemed that she had helped an acquaintance who had been adopted find his birth family. This man had discovered family he never knew he had and it had been a resounding success. Would searching for yours be of interest to you, she asked me?

Coming in Part 3: My answer to Ruth

Question to readers: What would your answer to Ruth be and why?

Photo: (Holding baby) Lulu Ann Beswick Amaya Pacheco, Norma Pacheco Hess' mother and grandmother of my adoptive father, Vernon Hess

My New Identity Crisis: Part 1 - Finding Marion Hess

2007-03-27T12:01:00.000-06:00

My blogs have been coming infrequently I know, but I think that you will be getting a little flurry in my new multi-part series "My New Identity Crisis." What is my new identity crisis? Do you ever have these moments in your life where you wonder just what or who you are? That is where I am right now. I feel like I'm caught between two worlds, one of which is familiar, has been sprinkled with hardness but also has a lot of good in it, and is the place where up until now I have known myself. The second is a new, mysterious world, full of history that I don't know and possible traps I cannot see, but also exciting possibilities.

The beginnings of my identify crisis began back in September or October, I can't remember which. First, some back story. I was adopted. I came to my adoptive family at age 2½. So, throughout this story I will use first names so that it won't be confusing because as I go on, believe me, it will get confusing. I was adopted by Vernon and Shirley. As I grew up, I began to realize that Vernon didn't know much about his father and mother. In fact, none of his brothers did either, and they didn't talk much to each other about what they did know. I became fascinated with the mysterious Marion Hess Sr. and his wife Norma Pacheco, who died when Vernon was about 7 years old, leaving five sons motherless with an erratic and moody man who said very little about his life before them.

Vernon died in a fire in 1990. He had been preceded in death by his brothers Lonnie and Jack. I attempted to talk a bit about Marion Sr. with Vernon's brother Marion Jr., but Marion Jr. would only reveal bits and pieces and nothing very substantial. I soon figured out that this was because Marion Jr. didn't know very much about his father either, and was also seeking information.

There were tantalizing clues about Marion Sr. A death certificate on file in the Mendocino County seat of Ukiah told that Marion was born in Akron, Ohio. In my 20s, driving to New York from Wisconsin on a business trip, I made a side trip to Akron and tried to look for a birth certificate in the public library there. Unfortunately, since I hadn't done much genealogical research before, I soon learned what all genealogists know -- you must have a lot of time and patience. Censuses aren't conveniently alphabatized, but soundexed. Birth certificates from the late 1800s or early 1900s aren't always available, because many people weren't born in hospitals, and of those who were, the existence of a birth certificate depended on whether the hospital made a practice of issuing them.

However, I was resilient. I sent in a few bucks to the Social Security administration and received a copy of Marion Sr.'s original social security application. From that, I learned that his mother was named Eldora and his father was named Andrew. No more information was forthcoming. And to make matters worse, all of his papers were burned in a house fire in the 1950s.

With the advent of the internet, I began every so often typing his name into a search engine to see if any information would pop up. Usually nothing did. Once, I thought I hit paydirt but then realized I got some information about Marion Hess Jr. I learned at that time that Marion Jr. had over 7000 vintage vinyl 78 rpm records, which were probably worth quite a bit. Marion Jr. died in 2004, I think. After he died, I assume that these recordings went to his sole surviving brother, Robert, who is still alive and living in Idaho.

This past October or so, my wife's sister sent a link to a website called Rootsweb that had information on her family. Just for the heck of it, I typed in Marion Sr.'s name again. I believe I had tried this before in a previous year but nothing came up. However, this time I found something! Someone had posted information about Marion Hess that I had never seen before. Not only did it list his and Norma's marriage but it also listed information about Norma that I certainly never knew, including her mother and father and their various marriages and children. There was an e-mail attached to the information, and so I e-mailed the person to ask her where she had gotten the information and what her interest was in my family. Her name was Ruth, and when she e-mailed me back, neither of us knew that it would set us on a journey that would reveal my own lost past.

Next post: Ruth's proposal

Photo 1 - The Hess family, early 1970s. From left to right: Michael, Vernon, Pauline, Shirley, Mari

Photo 2 - Norma Pacheco and her brother, Bud "Wealthy" Pacheco

Photo 3 - Marion Julian Hess, Sr.

Red Elvises

2007-03-05T08:00:00.000-07:00

Last Friday was Megan's birthday, and since I was out of town we celebrated last night with dinner and a concert. The concert was The Red Elvises, who call themselves "the kickass rock band from Siberia" and "your favorite band." We saw them last about six months ago in Santa Fe, and had a lot of fun so we were looking forward to their return.

The concert was about the same as the first one. A lot of fun with some great musicianship and songs in broken English. The lead, a hulking Ukrainian, would begin songs with a little intro in a thick accent such as "okay, now comes song about tragedy, The Strip Joint is Closed." He was accompanied by a blond flattopped Russian who played a bass shaped like a giant balalaika, a dour Ukrainian guy playing sax, flute and clarinet, a young woman in a spangly, shimmery red dress who simply looked like she was having an orgasm everytime she touched her keyboards, accordion, or other keyed instrument, and an American drummer who was quite good. All of the men except the drummer were dressed in loud, zebra or jaguar print suits.

The band is built for showmanship, and it doesn't disappoint. By the end of the evening, the crowd was doing everything the lead singer asked, whether it was moving the pelvis suggestively or simulating a disco dancer. At one point, he conducts the crowd in a scream off during a song, making it fit into the music they are playing. And always, after a song, he demanded that the audience roar its approval even more. The audience always did.

This band seems to be touring every day of the week, so undoubtedly they will be near you sometime. Check them out at their website. Oh, and here's our favorite song of theirs, "Closet Disco Dancer."

Rest in Peace, Elwin Cox

2007-02-14T15:59:00.000-07:00

My mom called me this afternoon to give me the news. After at least two months of seriously fighting his cancer, Uncle Elwin was gone.

My Aunt Betty and Uncle Elwin always had the family that the rest of us wanted to be in. They had three kids, Little Bobby, Lisa and Gina. Bobby and Lisa were probably at least ten years older than I was, but Gina was adopted at the same time I was, and was about two years younger than me. Every year we went over to their place for Christmas dinner, and one of the great things about it was all the cool stuff that the kids got for Christmas. Whatever toys were cutting edge that year, Bobby, Lisa and Gina got them. Car racing sets, Pong, air hockey. It was a cornucopia of stuff that all of us cousins could play with too when we were there.

Elwin was a fisherman, following in the footsteps of his father. He fished halibut and cod, and made a pretty good living out of what was undoubtedly harsh work. He fished off California at first, but also for many years he fished off Alaska, using a second home in Washington as a home port. Even though their heart was in Washington, he and Aunt Betty would make the trip down to my hometown of Fort Bragg in California to spend the winter, though summers were reserved for the beautiful Olympic peninsula in Washington.

As my mom says, Elwin was a giant presence. He was kind and giving to everyone. Even when you disagreed with him, you couldn't help but admire him for his willingness to share his table and generosity with family, friends, and all the people his sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, and grandkids brought home with them. Everyone knew it was okay, because Uncle Elwin and Aunt Betty would make everyone feel at home.

The Cox's were a card playing family, and Uncle Elwin excelled at poker. Every holiday, after dinner and dessert the card table was brought out. The most memorable poker battles would take place there among the family -- and the most serious card players were my mom and Uncle Elwin. Uncle Elwin, when he was on a tear, was practically unbeatable. This luck also extended to when he visited casinos. I don't know how many times I heard of Uncle Elwin and Aunt Betty winning a couple of thousand dollars after a night at the casino. It was uncanny.

Certainly there were hard times in the family. When my family went through some difficulties when we were younger because of my father's drinking problems, Uncle Elwin and his son Bobby showed up at our house to talk to all of us and try to get us to resolve our problems. I didn't agree with what they were telling us, and I still don't agree with their advice at the time, but the fact remains that it was Elwin's concern for people he loved that motivated him to make the trip. Later on, Gina found a wonderful woman to spend her life with. This was very, very difficult for Elwin and Betty, but again, generosity of spirit, kindness and love for their daughter allowed them to accept Gina's partner as one of the family.

Elwin's legacy is three accomplished and giving children, and a boatload of grandchildren who have all in their own ways made Elwin as proud as he could be. I'm sure that if Elwin left this life with any regrets, it was regret that he would not be able to spend more time with his family. Other than that, I think that after a lifetime of hard work and generosity to others, that he could look back on his life and be satisfied with what he has accomplished.

For me, well, my favorite Uncle Elwin moment came about a year and a half ago. I went home for Christmas 2005. We all went over to Betty and Elwin's just as we had every year. I am working toward a Ph.d, and was surprised when, as we gathered around Elwin and Betty's Christmas table, Elwin asked me to say the Christmas blessing. Usually the Christmas blessing is reserved for someone who is celebrating something special or has distinguished themselves. By asking me, Elwin was saying "We as a family are proud of you and what you have done, Michael." And to tell you the truth, even though I hadn't finished my Ph.d yet, I was very proud at that moment to be a member of that family.

So, Uncle Elwin, rest in peace. You too have a lot to be proud of, and though we will miss you, you'll always live on in and through your family.

I can't believe it's been 3 months

2006-12-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a coon's age. That's really been my fault but explainable. I've been busy working, mostly on my dissertation (Chapter 3 is complete, hooray!) and on my part-time job doing the standardized patient thing.

However, I'm posting today to poll all of you and see what you have to say about this.

In the past four weeks, everything that I knew about my past has been turned upside down. I believe that I mentioned in a previous post that I was adopted. Here's the long convoluted tale.

My family (the ones who adopted me) has long known nothing about my grandfather Marion Julian Hess, and his wife, Norma (Pacheco) Hess. These are my father's parents. My grandmother died in her 30s, and my grandfather died in the 50s. We knew nothing about my grandmother because her sons knew little, and because she died so young. We knew nothing about my grandfather because he didn't talk to his sons much about his life before he came to California, and most records were lost in a house fire in the 50s. At least two of my uncles were interested, but never turned up much. Now, my father is dead, as are all of his brothers save the oldest, and so every so often I would keep the flame alive by typing my grandfather's name into Google or some other genealogical website I would run across.

Recently, this habit turned up some new information. My grandfather and grandmother were entered into Rootsweb. Not only that, there was information I had never seen before about my grandmother, including her mother, father, and a whole host of other information. The information was posted by a woman named Ruth in Bellingham, Washington. I e-mailed her and asked her what her interest was in the Hess family.

We began a correspondence. I learned that my grandmother, Norma (Pacheco) Hess was born in the Santa Cruz area, and was one of five children. Her mother had two previous marriages before having Norma and her siblings by John Pacheco. Ruth also did some more research on my grandfather. We found that Marion Julian Hess left Ohio and turned up in California around 1918, but evidently left a wife and child behind him. This wife and child moved in with my grandfather's father, Andrew Hess. My grandfather's secret son, Julian Hess, lived until 1990 and died in Columbus, Ohio. He was my father's half-brother, and my dad and his brothers probably never knew they had a half-brother in the Midwest.

This was amazing information! In the course of a week, I knew 5000% more about my father's family than I ever knew before.

However, things got more interesting. In the course of our correspondence, I mentioned to Ruth that I had been adopted. She responded that she had helped another adoptee find his birth family, and would be willing to help me if I were interested. I had given this some thought in the past, but had always been reticent due to time and money constraints. I also did not want to bring pain to someone or their family.

However, I did authorize Ruth to look up and find a woman who had kept me in foster care from when I was five months until I was 2 years. This woman, who I knew as "Mama Joyce," had written a couple of letters to my mom shortly after I was adopted. Mama Joyce had been trying to get pregnant for a long time. Eventually, she gave up and decided to take in foster children. I was her first baby, and she became extremely attached to me. She had wanted to adopt me, and considered me her baby, until she unexpectedly became pregnant with her first and only child. Discussions with her husband led to her reluctantly giving me up.

I thought Mama Joyce would have some information on me, and asked Ruth to see if she could find her. I only had her then married name. Ruth ended up tracking down her brother, and through him I made contact for the first time since I was 2 with Mama Joyce, who was overjoyed to talk to me after all these years. For the first time, I can now learn something about what I was like before the age of 2½!

In the course of that conversation, however, something happened that floored me. Mama Joyce revealed to me who my birth mother actually was. She was named Ruby, and when I was born my first and middle names were Michael Wayne (my current name is Michael Louis). I also learned my original last name. We did not discuss much more than that, but I learned that Ruby was from Santa Monica, but gave birth to me in Eureka, a long distance from Santa Monica. She would have been around 40 years old when she gave birth to me. I had heard a rumor before, from my mother, who said that I was born as a result of an affair that my birth mother had. And indeed, the record that Mama Joyce had said "father unknown."

I wrote to Ruth yesterday and told her what I learned. Last night, she e-mailed me with the possibility that my birth mother had died in 1997. However, she had four children who are presumably still alive. The oldest would be about 60 years old right now, and the youngest about 50. If there was an "affair," these would be most likely my half-brothers/sisters, whatever they are. If not, they could be full-blood relatives.

So now I am in a conundrum. Should I attempt to contact them. I don't want to bring pain into anyone's life. If I am the result of an affair, what if they don't know about me? If not an affair, what if my adoption was the result of some other family tragedy that would be too painful to bring up? Is it worth it for me to contact them? Ruth has offered to act as intermediary -- in other words to contact the siblings if she can track them down, discretely inquire if Ruby is indeed their mother, and see where it goes. Should I go that route?

So what do you think? I must admit that suddenly I'm a little frightened of all this. Help me out!

Littourati on WorldHum

2006-09-29T15:02:00.000-06:00

My other blog has been getting some attention. Yesterday, an interview I did with WorldHum was posted on the web. To see the interview, go here:

WorldHum interview

I haven't posted much here because I've been really busy, but I promise I'll put more up soon.

Back Water Blues

2006-08-29T09:38:00.000-06:00

Many people have been remembering New Orleans today. At 12:22 a.m. this morning, my wife Megan played Rebirth Brass Band's "Feel Like Funkin' It Up, Part 2" and Randy Newman's "Lousiana 1927" in honor of New Orleans as she hosted the Global Music Show on our local public radio station (click here to see her playlist).

EB, who lived next door to us for a good part of the time she was in New Orleans, has posted her own blog about her remembrances, regrets and hopes.

Keith, a former colleague of Megan who is remodeling his flooded home, wrote a guest blog on EB's site which gives an indication of some New Orleans residents "go it alone" attitude.

Fritz, who still lives and works in New Orleans, has also offered some of his own reflections, especially those things that he has learned about his fellow Americans after a crisis (can you guess that some of it's not pretty).

Laura, who also lives and works in New Orleans, wrote a long e-mail detailing the slow progress she observes in the city. Highlights include:

The devastated area is larger than the size of Great Britain
Perhaps only 20% of the debris has been picked up in New Orleans
The flies that have feasted on rotting food last summer have proved bountiful for the food chain, leading to a population explosion of rats
The city pumps twice as much water as it needs to maintain pressure in the pipes due to all the unfixed leaks caused by the storm and flooding
Only one-third of the hospitals are open, and there is no major trauma care facility available in the city limits
There has been an influx of Hispanics into the city that are helping the city rebuild, and that means more good Latin American food
Some have managed to keep a sense of humor by posting signs outside gutted or abandoned houses such as "Pardon our dust while we remodel," "Slight water damage, price negotiable," "Clearance sale, everything must go. Please loot!," and "House available, bright airy floor plan, no floors."

I don't have much to add to what has been said already, except to marvel that as America revisits New Orleans and Katrina one year later, all the same old debates come up. The New Orleans Times-Picayune ran a fascinating story about one screw-up after another in hurricane planning and New Orleans, starting from the moment that Bienville decided to lay out a city on a thin strip of high ground in the swamps on the banks of the Mississippi (conclusion: it was a great choice for a site in the 1700s, when he conceived it, and a terrible choice were he making it today), all the way through the follies of the 20th century Army Corps of Engineers, and federal, state and local efforts. I still occasionally run into people that wonder why New Orleans should be saved at all. Never mind that it is the second largest port in the country, never mind that it is a cultural treasure. Never mind that when people's houses flood because levees break in the Midwest, when houses fall because earthquakes hit Los Angeles and San Francisco, when houses are sprayed across fields by tornadoes in Oklahoma, when residential areas on barrier islands are scraped clean by hurricanes in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, and when forest fires gut houses that are built in fire-prone areas we don't question why THOSE PEOPLE should rebuild their homes in such disaster prone areas when it is more likely that they will be rebuilding again in 10-20 years.

But these questions still come up with New Orleans. The pace of recovery, the lackadaisacal way in which various levels of government have dealt with the crisis, all say one thing to the people who live in or are trying to return to New Orleans: We don't give a crap about you.

Even President Bush's latest visit to New Orleans manages to draw attention to the shortcomings of his government and highlight how willing he is to point fingers elsewhere. One one hand, he argues that hope is alive and money is coming (you'd think that money should have been there before the one year anniversary) and then on the other implies that the state and the city are to blame for the slow recovery.

It is truly sad that the richest country in the world should be castigated by the United Nations for failing to live up to its obligations to its own people after a natural disaster, that it has directly and indirectly hampered the right of displaced refugees to return home, and that out of $126 million donated by foreign countries to the U.S. government (United Arab Emirates: 99 million; China: $5 million; Brunei: $1 million; Bangladesh: $1 million; Rwanda: $100,000; Afghanistan: $99,800 to name a few), $60 million has languished in the Treasury Department and has not gone to rebuilding efforts because the U.S. has not figured out how to spend the money. It is sad that Qatar bypassed the U.S. government, and therefore its $60 million that was granted to universities, schools, hospitals and charities has been able to be put to direct use. It is sad that out of $110 billion allocated by Congress for recovery efforts, only about $45 billion has been allocated, and much has been lost to fraud and wasteful spending.

I guess I said I didn't have much to add, but I did. In all of this the people who have really suffered are forgotten, and I'm as guilty as the next person for forgetting. For people who have made it back to New Orleans, the recovery has been slow, and depression has been rampant in a city that was known for its "Let The Good Times Roll" atmosphere. Those who haven't made it back (about half the city's population) wonder if they ever will. Today I will remember those people, and the graveyard of the 9th Ward, as well as my friends whose lives were changed by Katrina, and the rebuilding efforts of people who are determined to bring the city back.

I'll leave my own remembrance with the lyrics of "Back Water Blues" by Bessie Smith. Though it was written about the 1927 flood, the songs lyrics still hauntingly apply today, especially for the residents of New Orleans who lost so much one year ago today:

Back Water Blues

When it rained five days and the skies turned dark as night
When it rained five days and the skies turned dark as night
There was trouble taking place in the lowlands at night

I woke up this morning, wouldn't even get out of my door
I woke up this morning, wouldn't even get out of my door
Enough trouble to make poor girl wonder where she gonna go

They rowed a little boat, about five miles 'cross the farm
They rowed a little boat, about five miles 'cross the farm
I packed up all my clothing, throwed it in and they rowed me along

It thundered and it lightened and the winds began to blow
It thundered and it lightened and the winds began to blow
There was a thousand women, didn't have no place to go

I went out to the lonesome, high old lonesome hill
I went out to the lonesome, high old lonesome hill
I looked down on the old house, where I used to live

Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go
Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go
'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more

Hmm, I can't live there no more
Hmm, I can't live there no more
And there ain't no place for a poor old girl to go

(Image found at http://adventureswmikenjen.photosite.com/~photos/tn/1_348.ts1142551315990.jpg)

Did you jump today?

2006-07-20T17:09:00.000-06:00

Today was the big jump day! Did you miss it?

WorldJumpDay.org urged everyone to get out and jump today. The goal was to stop global warming and put the earth into a milder climate by changing the orbit of the earth slightly...by putting it a little farther away from the sun. They calculated that they needed 600 million jumpers to jump at the same time, and they registered just over that amount on their website.

When you signed up, there was a form that you filled out that told you, based on your latitude and longitude, exactly what time you needed to jump. Here in Albuquerque it was 4:39 p.m. on July 20th.

At 4:10 or so, I pulled up outside the student union building at the University of New Mexico and sat down on the porch area outside the building to read a book for the next half hour. At 4:38, having read a chapter and a half, I got up and casually walked over to the barrier that separates the porch from the main mall. Stepping up to the top, I judged that the 3 foot drop would create a suitable Mike force, adding to the force of 600 million or so jumpers and knocking the earth slightly off orbit.

At 4:39, I leapt off and hit the ground a second later.

I was slightly disappointed. I didn't feel the earth move at all, which sounds like I was looking for an orgasmic experience. Frankly, I was hoping for something...a small tremor...maybe the volcanoes on the west mesa doing a little belch...news notice that geiger scales had recorded the event. Even people stopping for a second, and noticing that something was slightly different, would have been some sort of confirmation that I had done something important, rather than stupidly jumping three feet off a concrete ledge. But people kept walking, and nothing seemed different.

WorldJumpDay.org says that they are now computing the results and will know whether the earth moved any in a few days. Meanwhile, if you notice the weather becoming a little less hot, the climate more agreeable, and the sun a little off kilter, you can all thank me for doing my part to help!

This hit me hard

2006-07-12T18:52:00.000-06:00

I opened the newspaper yesterday to the comics, and found this as the first comic on the page. I think this really got to me because we are only 4 months past saying goodbye for the last time to our dog. I didn't expect the emotional response I'd have, but I still feel the emptiness.

I miss you Hannibal.

Pardon My Planet
July 11, 2006

Reading Alburquerque

2006-07-01T13:42:00.000-06:00

I usually try to read a book about the place where I live. Especially when you're in a place that seems new, it helps give you a sense of where you're at. When I lived in New Orleans, I read the quintessential Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, as well as Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. Before that, when I lived in San Antonio, I read a forgettable book called San Antonio, and I stayed away from accounts of The Alamo. I don't think I read a fictional book about Milwaukee, but I was too young to care about that at the time. There are no fictional books, as far as I know, about the place that I grew up, though once I read a book by T. Coraghesson Boyle, Budding Prospects, which was set in the forests between our town and the next one to the east and had to do with marijuana growing.

However, the only book that I read that even mentioned the area where Albuquerque was located was Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is a wonderful book but is set in the 1800s and therefore doesn't tell me much about the Albuquerque of today. So, when Megan brought home a book entitled Alburquerque by Rudolfo Anaya, I put that on my list to read at some point. I just finished the book a couple of days ago, and I must say that I enjoyed it.

Set in Albuquerque in the early 90s, the book encompasses the length and breadth of the city. The death of a white artist, Cynthia Johnson, from cancer sets in motion a series of events that leads a young Mexican-American boxer, Abrán, to question his upbringing and a nurse, Lucinda, to befriend him and fall in love with him. Her death also affects a mayoral race, featuring the incumbent Marisa Martínez, a young and beautiful Latina woman, an elderly business scion, Walter Johnson, who also happens to be the father of the artist and who disowned her, and a political climber, Frank Dominic, with dubious hereditary links to the Duke of Alburquerque and ambitions for the eventual governorship. Abrán, discovering that Cynthia was his true mother, begins a quest to find his real father, and is pulled into city politics. He agrees to a fight in return for information Dominic says he can get about Abrán's father, and has a brief one-night affair with the incumbent mayor. He is given advice during the novel by Joe, a burned out alcoholic Indian Vietnam vet from Santo Domingo who is chasing his own demons, and Ben Chavez, a jaded poet who knows more than he reveals to Abrán.

Rudolfo Anaya is largely known as the founder of Chicano literature, and Alburquerque is filled with references to many cultures which make up Chicano culture -- Mexican, New Mexican, Indian, and Spanish. However, Anaya also references all of those cultures which make up New Mexico, including whites, and even crypto-Jews. It is telling that Abrán, the hero, is the product of the forbidden love between a white woman and a Mexican-American man, and symbolizes the best and strongest of both cultures. Everyone in power needs Abrán, and tries to manipulate him in their own best interests, but Abrán, armed with the knowledge given to him by an old curandera when she utters to him "tu eres tu," manages to keep his sense of self about him and eventually gains those things which matter to him most.

Readers of this book will find a lot of Albuquerque in it -- including Tingley Beach, the University of New Mexico, West-side development, the Country Club district, the Sandias and Old Town and New Town. There are also references to Albuquerque's past history and development, and at least a few visions of what Albuquerque can become (both good and bad).

Alburquerque was a nice first book for me to read about my present city, and I hope that some of you will consider reading it too, especially if you live in the shadow of the Sandias.

Domo Arigato, Mistress Ho-Boto!

2006-06-19T15:16:00.000-06:00

It almost feels like my 20s and 30s never happened! With all these fashions and styles coming back from the 70s, here I am at 42 and not at all surprised that suddenly roller derby leagues are springing up everywhere, even in my current town of Albuquerque. Anyone who was slightly conscious during the 70s has to remember roller derby. Featuring hot chicks in hotpants or miniskirts on roller skates traveling around a circular track beating the hell out of one another in a pro-wrestling kind of way, the roller derby packed drama and action that engaged the attentions of many a horny pubescent male. I happened to be in junior high and high school when roller derby was on the air, and I would watch mostly to get the thrill of female flesh flying around and perhaps, oh just perhaps, a peek up the skirt. After all, this was marketing to men in the age of sexual freedom, and women did not have the athletic opportunities to which we are accustomed today, particularly in sports involving physical contact through hitting. So, seeing a mock athletic contest (and I say mock in only the loosest terms, because those roller derby pioneers had to be athletes to time their blocks, take falls and choreograph their moves like they did) at that time was something new and interesting, even if it wasn't going to attract ratings like the Super Bowl or the World Series.

Of course, that all went away as we became more aware of the exploitation of women as objects. Women moved into the mainstream of sports, and today we are much more open and accepting of women as athletes, and powerful ones at that. We enjoy seeing them perform and succeed in sports that, in the 70s and before, were exclusive to or dominated by men, like basketball, soccer and other sports.

But women competing in physical contact sports has always remained in the dark corners of society, although now it is becoming more common. New pioneers are beginning to appear. There are now full-contact women's football teams, Holly Holm is a world champion boxer here in Albuquerque with the chance to potentially make millions of dollars as boxing's next star, and women are even getting into the professional wrestling circuit (though I think they are still considered oddities). I think society sees something that is both disturbing and exciting when women smack each other around in the name of competition. It goes against most of our traditional expectations of women; that they are caregivers and nourishers. Despite our enjoyment of movie and television portrayals of ass-kicking female icons like Buffy and Dark Angel, the women of the X-men and so on, we have trouble reconciling these two visions of the feminine. Either women are ass-kickers, and somewhat scary but exciting, or providers and nourishers and therefore easier to relate to. So how do we reconcile these two sides of the feminine?

Enter our friend, the irrepressible Tiffany. She talked Megan and I out to Midnight Rodeo, one of those country juke joints with the circular dance track around the bar in the middle, to see a Duke City Derby bout between the Ho-Bots and the Doomsdames. Little did I know that Tiffany was leading me to a socio-cultural lesson (and neither did Tiffany, I believe). I went expecting a comic and over-the-top show much like roller derby in the 70s, and in many ways I wasn't disappointed. The skating sirens of the league dressed in wild costumes. The Ho-Bots, as their name implied, wore metallic short skirts or shorts with fishnet stockings, often torn in places, and went by names such as R2-Beat-U, Vixenator, and Molotov Cocktease. The Doomsdames sported a post-apocalyptic style, also tight and somewhat revealing, and tended to have shorter styled hair and names such as Mortal Wombat, Apocalicious and Cynderblock. Penalties were enforced by Hot Wheelz, of the local burlesque troupe Burlesque Noir, dressed in a leather thigh-high dress, and consisted of the offender locked stocks during a match and mock-whipped. The two worst offenders were instructed to spin a wheel, and to participate in the contest the arrow settled upon -- in this case musical chairs in which a stool was set on the ground. Music was played, and when the music stopped a free-for-all ensued between the two contestants both trying to grab the stool until one of them won by straddling the now upended piece of furniture.

The winner of that mini-contest, and my new heroine, was the disturbingly named vixen, Dahmernatrix. (Side note: When I lived in Milwaukee, in the mid-late 80s, it turned out that I lived just 4 or 5 blocks from Jeffrey Dahmer, so the name has some close-to-home meanings for me)

Both Tiffany and I picked Dahmernatrix as our favorite skater independently of each other. Captain of the Ho-Bots, Dahmernatrix had to watch her team lose that day despite her efforts. Serving as the jammer, or the team member whose job it is to pass skaters from the other team and earn points while avoiding getting blocked or knocked down, she consistently sailed around, between and among the pack, scooting out front and doing some blocking of her own. Unfortunately, some of her other team members weren't up to the task that day. "Newbies," she explained to us later after the match. "We'll practice with them this next month and get them used to falling, getting knocked around and giving it back."

When Dahmernatrix agreed to come over after the bout and meet us, Tiffany became extremely excited. Tiffany said it was her best day since Pika Brittlebrush named her in her blog as one of the girls she (Pika) would do. Dahmernatrix was very accommodating and warm, and Tiffany was simply gushing with superlatives about her. Dahmernatrix was nice enough to talk to us about roller derby, her team's loss, injuries, and roller derby leagues in general. She posed for pictures with both me and Tiffany, though I sadly learned today that my picture with her was lost. Megan asked Dahmernatrix if it is true that her day job is spent working at a homeless shelter, and her affirmative answer really pushed her high in my estimation. Okay, yes, I developed a slight crush on Dahmernatrix.

I found myself not only entertained by these women flying around a track at breakneck speed and getting into 3-4 lady pileups, but also impressed at how seriously they took this sport. Though it has its promotional and comic trappings, the participants are dead serious and deathly competitive. Roller derby to them is serious business, as it is to many of their fans who pack Midnight Rodeo once a month during their season.

Thus, the two visions of the feminine, the caregiving and provider versus the ass-kicking competitor, is reconciled in women like Dahmernatrix, roller derby queen and symbol of the 21st century woman, strong and competitive. Yes she can kick ass -- taking the scrapes and falls and inadvertant elbows. And she can give it all back, with her fortitude revealing itself as she throws herself around the track and knocks into her opponents, around and around until her legs can barely support her. The delight in her face before, during and after a battle indicates how much she loves the physicality of her chosen sport. And her costuming, somewhat trashy and sexy at the same time, further proves that real-life ass-kicking women can do it all with panache and humor.

But Dahmernatrix measures up to all those other expectations we typically and often unfairly hold to women. She serves as an example to the newer members of the team without denigrating them for their lack of experience. She takes the time to talk to complete strangers who obviously know nothing about roller derby. But the biggest indication is that her day job is helping homeless men and women at a shelter. Here is a woman who for fun is willing to risk bruises, scrapes, and breaks in physical combat with other women, but who spends most of her meaningful time helping others.

It is interesting that I never learned Dahmernatrix's real name, and probably won't, because while the derby girls consider their roller derby personas their alter-egos, their real lives are a mystery to the rest of us and may be very different than what they portray in their derby characters. We get to know both Clark Kent AND Superman in the comics and movies -- but here I only get to know Dahmernatrix, or Molotov Cocktease, and whatever those characters choose to reveal to me in performance and maybe snippets of conversation after the bout.

As fans of sports, and casual observers, we as society are always happy and a bit surprised when male star athletes do not behave like spoiled millionaires -- when football, basketball and baseball stars do not act like jerks and do something valuable, like acts of charity and selflessness, that we don't expect of them. We think differently about women; we expect them to be selfless and charitable more often. In this modern world, we now are pleasantly surprised when they go against these types and bring out their inner warriors. We are a little taken aback and more than a little curious when we see them enjoy hitting and being hit in competition. It's refreshing, and fun, takes women out of the stereotypes we have put on them and reveals them as more complete beings. Keep enlightening us, Derby Girls! Push the envelope, Dahmernatrix! I've now become your fan. Domo Arigato, Mistress Ho-Boto!

One Plant to Rule Them All

2006-06-16T09:35:00.000-06:00

Last year I let my garden go to seed. It wasn't by design, it was sheer laziness. I wasn't good about pinching off the basil flowers, and I let the cilantro go. Finally, sometime around October or November, I pulled out the dry tomato plants, the dead cilantro stalks and the dried basil plants.

Again, sloth kept me from starting the garden until about mid-May, a little late. I had this grand scheme to clear an area in the vacant lot next door and start a garden, and sometime in March I actually called the owner to see if he would give me permission to do it. He did, but then I found out about two weeks later that there was a plan in the works to sell the lot, so I figured I had better not start my garden lest I lose it.

In May, Megan persuaded me to get off my butt one weekend and go down to a garden store that she had profiled in the New Mexico Business Weekly. The article covered Trees that Please, which not only sold plants but also this magic dirt formula of bacteria, fungi and humus that rejuvenates soil. We went down and Megan sort of went nuts on plants. She likes tomatoes, so we ended up with 12 tomato plants of different varieties. We also came home with 8 yellow pepper plants, 2 basil plants, a thyme plant and a rosemary plant.

You must understand...we don't have a lot of space for a garden. We have probably a 4 foot square box, really, that was suitable to put plants in, and we had way more plants than would fit into it. The rest of the yard at the house we rent, both front and back, is xeriscaped save for a plot of grass in the back yard. So, I dutifully set out making space. Along the cinderblock fence at the side of the house, where the box is, I cut out about 15 feet of the plastic underneath the soil, to a width of about a foot, and folded it back to expose the ground underneath. I then turned the soil and raked it. Megan had bought some of the magic dirt formula, and I added this to the soil and watered it. The next day, I began planting. The tomatoes went along the fence, the peppers, basil and thyme in the box. I found a place for the rosemary farther down the fence, and made room for the two extra pepper plants along there. I then started daily watering in the early morning.

Once I get into gardening, I get into it. My father was an inveterate gardener who had a huge plot of vegetables each year. He grew corn, potatoes, lettuce, squash, beans, peas, carrots, asparagus, all kinds of things. Gardening was one of the few skills I picked up from my dad, because I would help him in spurts from start to finish -- hoeing and spading, weeding, harvesting -- at least enough that I knew the process. And as I get older, I find that gardening, which used to be such a chore for me when I was a young kid, is actually extremely rewarding to me mentally and spiritually. I truly believe that my father, who was an alcoholic and a pretty unhappy man overall, had some of his best moments in his garden, and even now across the years, it is one of the last ways I have to connect to the better memories of him.

I began, halfway joking, to call my garden "My Precious." In my best Gollum voice, I would tell Megan at about 7:30 a.m., "I'm going out to check on....MY PRRRRRRRECIOUSSSSSSSSSSSS!" Soon, we began using that term all the time about the garden. My sister Pauline called one day, and Megan said she'd get me, that I was out with my precious. Pauline was very confused.

The plants began to take off, and currently Precious consists of a number of healthy tomato plants, and all but one of the pepper plants are doing well -- one even has a nicely growing pepper on it! The two basil plants we purchased are going to town, and the rosemary and thyme are holding their own.

There was one thing I didn't expect. Just last week I went out early one morning to water, the weeds began to catch my eye. I gotta do something about that, I thought. I kneeled down and began to pull out some weeds growing around the basil when all of a sudden, a familiar scent from the first plant I pulled out came to my nostrils. I looked again. Suddenly, I noticed all of these little basil plants coming up all over the place in the box! Then I looked a little, and a few of the plants I assumed were weeds were actually cilantro sprouts!

These were the remnants of my last year's garden, and since then, more have sprung up in the most unlikely locations, spread around by the wind and most likely my shovel. Over amongst the tomatoes along the fence, I've found cilantro and basil sprouting there, mixed in among the weed sprouts. Since that area was xeriscaped until I cut the plastic and folded it back, I can only assume that the seed got there by a combination of nature and my efforts to turn the soil.

I had saved some cilantro seed from last year, and last week I planted it in the box in an unused area along the edge. This week, my row of cilantro is coming up too -- to join its relatives that are spread all over the rest of the garden. But so far the basil is the star, and if it continues to grow at the rate it is, we'll be having a lot of "Precious" pesto this year!

Doing the Chicken Dance on Central Avenue

2006-06-13T09:42:00.000-06:00

This weekend contained probably the most live music that Megan and I have had in a while. I wasn't quite sure how we were going to make it through the weekend, given all the events that we had planned, but I trusted to fate and alcohol that we would make it through.

The weekend started with a trip up to Los Alamos after work to see Terri Hendrix. She is a singer-songwriter from Texas, and Megan and I used to travel up to the Cibolo Creek Country Club, a down-to-earth honest-to-god Texas dance hall and watch her play while drinking Shiner Bock as the trains shook the place on their way by. As an added attraction, Terri had her longtime side-man Lloyd Maines with her, who is a legend on the Texas music scene but is probably best known nationally for fathering Dixie Chicks vocalist Natalie Maines. The weather in Los Alamos was cool but clear as we drove up, and we were amazed to find that not many people had gathered for the event. It turned out that there was a nasty rainstorm that came through about an hour before, and that kept a lot of people away. I'd estimate that the crowd was about 100 later on. We had front row seats in our K-Mart chairs on the street, and had a great time listening to Terri's new and old music. We bought a couple of CDs, talked with Terri, and made the 1½ drive back to Albuquerque happy.

Saturday was Gay Pride day, and we went down to Central Avenue for the Pride parade, joining up with Megan's colleague Tiffany and her friends at Graze. The weather was hot, but the paraders beat the heat by dressing down considerably. Megan concentrated on blowing bubbles supplied by Tiffany toward the paraders which was a big hit -- a couple of drag queens squealed "We love bubbles!!!!" at her. I blew a whistle and got a hug from the PFLAG folks. All in all, it was a fine morning. We followed up that evening by going to the budget flicks to see V for Vendetta, which seemed to fit the theme of the day because Megan proclaimed "V" the gayest superhero ever. Though full of Wachowski brothers moralizing (who really talks like V?) Natalie Portman was beautiful and the movie was fun.

Sunday we got up very early and I ran, and Megan walked, the Komen Run/Walk for Breast Cancer Awareness. My time was not that great, but it was a good cause. Afterward, we came home and Megan made a couple of her famous quiches which we took to Tiffany's monthly brunch. We socialized with a bunch of the glitterati of ABQ's young set, including the director of the Democratic Party of New Mexico, famed for calling Republicans a bunch of "punk-ass bitches." Megan's quiche was again a hit, and we left Kristen's house (where Tiffany's brunch was held) with tummies full of food and Mimosas.

We made our way down to the Launchpad on Central at about 6:30 p.m. Due to a misunderstanding about what an "all ages show" actually means, we had to run Megan home to get her I.D., and then come back. It didn't matter. Our goal was to see Brave Combo, another band we had gotten to know in Texas. They have a national following, and while they tend to concentrate on playing "nuclear polka" they can do practically anything in any style -- just witness their hard rocking version of the Hokey Pokey. The highlight of the night was a walk out to Central Avenue where we did their version of the Chicken Dance for the cruisers passing back and forth along the street. When I mean "their version of the Chicken Dance" I mean the Chicken Dance so fast you can't possibly keep up with them. I haven't danced so much since I sat down on a fire ant mound when we lived in San Antonio, and this time it was much more fun! You can hear some of their music here: http://brave.com/bo/sounds/

All in all, it was a great weekend, and we were dead tired by Sunday evening.

Angry Bitter Man

2006-06-06T13:29:00.000-06:00

I am a little angry this week. First, I want someone to tell me why we continue punishing people after their crime has been paid for? Let me explain the basis for the question. Megan and I mentor a young woman who made some bad choices in life and ended up with a felony drug conviction. After serving her sentence in prison, partaking of prison programs to become clean and to better herself, she was released into the community. A team of three of us, Megan, myself and another young woman, met with our "mentee" once a week for six months, and then once a month for another six months. She would tell us about her successes and her concerns, and we would try to help any way we could. Mostly, we could just offer her a sympathetic ear.

What a prisoner faces when they come out of prison, regardless of whether they want to reform or not, is a lifetime of discrimination and neglect. Prisoners are turned out of the prison with little more than what they came in with. They must try to find a place to live that will meet the criteria set out by their parole or probation officer. They must make periodic meetings with their parole or probation officer, regardless of their transportation situation. They must try to find a job to earn their keep. If the former prisoner is serious about trying to stay clean, sober, and out of jail, they often go to regular meetings and try to further their education.

Yet these people suffer a lot of discrimination, and as far as our federal and state governments are concerned, that's just fine. Employers can refuse to hire them. Landlords can refuse to rent to them. Often their only recourse is to run right back into the hands of those people that will prey on them. Many times, after trying to maintain themselves to conform to society, they find that the cards are stacked against them, and go back to crime. Of course, this simply perpetuates the notion that they were not to be trusted in the first place. Yet we (as in society) never gave them a chance.

This has been on my mind since I learned that our mentee, who has kept herself on the straight and narrow since getting out of prison, was let go from her job in a nursing home after a federal review of the employment records of the place. Let me give you some background. Our mentee, since coming out of prison, has maintained a rigorous schedule of NA/AA meetings. She got a job at the university food service, and was an excellent employee, but did not want to stay in food service because she wanted more pay and more satisfying position. She got an apartment in startedin an apartment complex for returning prisoners, and participated in their activities and met their weekly requirements for meetings. Later, she found a boyfriend and moved in with him, and they are in the process of buying a house together. During this whole time, her whole focus has been to turn her life around. She has a sister who is still caught up in the throes of drug and alcohol abuse, and she has minimized her contact with her sister in order to not be tempted by being around. For all intents and purposes, she has been fully embarked on the road to true reform and recovery.

Recently, she landed the job that she wanted -- a nursing home assistant. The people who hired her were fully aware of her past, but she came with high recommendations from everyone and the supervisor was excited to hire her. Of course, working in a nursing home entails some risks for a former drug/alcohol addict -- there is access to drugs in a nursing home. However, as she had shown no sign of wanting ever to return to her former way of life, the nursing home took a gamble and hired her.

However, a federal review of the nursing home led to a review of her application after she was hired. My wife and I and a number of other people wrote letters on her behalf to the agency that was conducting the review. None of this mattered, and she lost her job.

My question is this. How long can we continue to marginalize people who have paid their debt to society, but continue to pay long past their sentences have been served? So many of our historical and religious traditions tell stories like "The Prodigal Son" where someone who has made previous bad choices has been able to redeem him or herself. It takes the person who has made the choices to make a new choice that changes his or her old behavior. It also takes the forgiveness and compassion of those who he or she may have wronged. However, it seems we forget these old tales. Our society basically tells people coming back from prison that they are worthless scum, dumps huge obstacles in their way when they try to reform, and then shakes its head in satisfaction and says "I told you so," when they fall.

I'm not arguing that there aren't people who are unredeemable. Certainly, some people will never overcome their problems -- and a few people are simply too dangerous to society to let free. But how many would change if they were just given a chance? If they were allowed to continue a job, or get an apartment? How many simply fail because our lack of pity and understanding drive them back into the vicious circle of destructive behaviors? We often say if they prove themselves we'll trust them, but then we do everything we can to ensure that they can't succeed.

I hope that our mentee has the mental, spiritual and physical fortitude to continue her amazing progress despite the obstacles. Right now, she is working in a call center which she absolutely hates, but she must to survive. Her punishment continues.

Second, someone please explain this to me. My wife had a minor surgical procedure earlier this year. She got a bill from the hospital -- it seems that our insurance refused to pay part of it because the anesthesiologists that were brought in were not in the network. You have got to be kidding. On the bed, as they are pumping drugs into her to knock her out, my wife is supposed to ask "Hey, are you in network? Because if you aren't, you can't be my anesthesiologist!" WTF? How many of you would think of that?

What nobody has explained to me is just how a nationalized health system would be so terribly terribly bad. As far as I can tell, it can't be any worse than what we have now. Every medical visit for 20 minutes becomes at least a week of straightening out insurance screw-ups. If you like trading your precious time and sitting on the phone with your insurance company instead of spending that time more productively, all the power to you. But the problem is, not only does the insurance company screw up, they then blame it on you, and make it extremely difficult to fix. I'd trade my choice of doctors that only see me for 20 minutes (actually 15 if I'm lucky) for not having to deal with insurance problems.

Third, Megan got dinged on her credit report. Why? Because Entergy in New Orleans sent us a bill about a year after we moved from there, saying that it was overdue. Evidently we were supposed to get it sooner and it never arrived, therefore this bill was the first notice we ever got. We talked to Entergy, made payments on the bill, and forgot about it.

Every year or so, Megan pulls her credit report, and discovered that she had been downgraded. Evidently, despite the fact that we worked in good faith with Entergy once the error was realized, they reported it to the credit reporting companies as a "charge off." Which means, essentially, that they told the credit reporting agencies that we never paid the bill. Megan talked with Entergy and with Equifax, one of the credit agencies, and the error was corrected. But Experian, the other credit agency, refused to correct the error. When Megan tried to call them, she could never get a live person to talk to. When she filled out the forms on line for an investigation, Experian simply sent her a form saying that they had reviewed the complaint and they weren't changing it. Now, Entergy has to tell Experian that they made a mistake, and they seem to be dragging their heels on it.

Who are these faceless corporations that hold our credit ratings in their hands? They are sure quick to respond to a company's report of something wrong with a customer, but they refuse to correct mistakes on behalf of a customer even when documentation is presented. How does one ever get their credit ratings adjusted?

You've got to wonder if a backlash will ever happen...

A Sore Butt on Memorial Day Weekend

2006-06-02T08:56:00.000-06:00

As far as I know, Texas, despite its huge size, has very few national parks. When we lived in San Antonio, we managed to drive the 8 hours to Big Bend National Park, which because of its remote location and its wide variety from low desert to almost alpine conditions, rapidly became one of our favorite parks.

However, looming on the northern horizon were the Guadalupe Mountains, Texas' other national park. We were always curious but never able to to make arrangements to get there. However, fortune presented us with the opportunity this Memorial Day. Megan had to attend a conference of cross-border business in Chihuahua, Mexico the day before Memorial Day. On Thursday night, she drove down to Santa Teresa, just north of El Paso, and grabbed a bus with other conference attendees to Chihuahua while I batched it at home. On Friday, I took an evening plane to El Paso and met Megan in a slightly worn motel called the Cliff Inn. We got some awesome, and I do mean awesome, Tex-Mex food at a joint called La Questa while being serenaded by a guy on guitar, drum machine and foot pedals. Evidently they didn't get too many Anglos in the place, because you could almost hear the needle scratching off the record machine when we walked in. But the food was great, and I suspect the musician switched over to some music to satisfy us -- we heard La Bamba and a Mexican version of a U.S. country and western hit.

The next morning -- Saturday -- we got some breakfast at another local Mexican place. We ordered chilaquiles, a favorite of ours from our Texas days, but Megan was disappointed because she thought they were supposed to have eggs and they didn't. Besides that, the spices were burning her nose hairs off. After breakfast, we shopped for camping food, and then we were off to the Guadalupes.

The Guadalupe Mountains, unlike a lot of the other features in West Texas and New Mexico, are not volcanic in origin. They are the remnants of a 270 million year old reef from when the area was under a vast sea. They run in a crescent through West Texas and southern New Mexico, and Guadalupe Peak is the highest point in Texas at over 8000 feet. We could see them on the horizon for about 50 miles or more, and driving close to them you can see just how massive they are. Geologically they are very impressive.

The first two campgrounds were full, meaning that we had to drive 60 miles around, passing by the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, to come back into Texas to the third and last campground. Fortunately, they took us in despite the fact that the tent camping was full also...they let us pitch the tent in the RV section.

On Sunday, we made the big hike from Dog Canyon up to a trail junction, and then decided to continue onward on the McKittrick Ridge trail until we got tired. The trail wound along the top of the ridge above the spectacular McKittrick Canyon. Unfortunately, we could not hike long enough to get farther along the canyon, but what we saw was pretty awe inspiring. The wind was very strong at the top of the ridge, and the sun was also strong. I got sunburned where I was less than vigilant about my suntan lotion.

All in all, we hiked about 8 hours through some rugged and beautiful country. The trails on top were relatively smooth, but going up and down were very rocky. By the time we got back to the tent, Megan was complaining about her thighs and my butt muscles were very sore (probably because I was the designated pack animal and carrying the backpack with the lunch and water).

We drove out Monday, taking back roads through the interior of New Mexico. We stopped for lunch in Cloudcroft, a cutesy, touristy, ski lodgy type of town filled with stores that cater to the rich and famous that visit there during ski season. We drove along the east edge of White Sands National Monument, with a promise to visit there soon, and along the north edge of the missile range where the first atomic bomb was tested. We got home after about 8 hours of driving, sore and tired, but ultimately refreshed.

Putting my idea to work

2006-05-25T19:25:00.000-06:00

Take a look at my new blog, Littourati, that I hope to update every week or so. This has grown out of the last post and my Google Maps fetish.

Please let me know what you think about the concept. Also, if you want to be a contributor, I would be happy to create a map for you. Send me an e-mail and we can talk about specifics.

I'm Trying an Idea

2006-05-21T10:11:00.000-06:00

I'm trying a new idea that I've been working on. For the past couple of months, off and on, I've been messing around with Google Maps. I have an idea to take some literature that names place names in the U.S., or other places, and create Google Maps showing these places, with quotes from the literature and even information about the places.

This is my test. I recently, after much trial and error, mapped out Sal Paradise's (From Jack Kerouac's "On the Road") first journey using Google Maps. Now I'm inviting you to try it out and tell me what you think.

The map works very well if you use Firefox 1.5 or above, or Internet Explorer 6. It seems to be problematic with any version of Firefox lower than 1.5 or other browsers (i.e. Safari). Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the Google Maps code to make it work across all browsers.

What you should see is a map of the U.S., with a number of points plotted on it, and a line running from point to point. When you click on any point, an info window should show up that lists the place, and a quote about the place taken from the book.

Give it a try and tell me what you think. You can get to it here:

Sal Paradise's First Journey to the Coast

I would be interested in any comments you have. I think it may be fun to develop this into a website with a number of these maps on them for different books -- just to develop interest in the books and for people who might want to visit these "literary" places some day.

For Mom on Mother's Day

2006-05-14T22:31:00.000-06:00

This is my mother, Shirley Hess. The picture was taken about a year and a half ago, at my sister's wedding. Since I have an hour and a half before the end of Mother's Day, and I've never really sat down to write about my mom, I thought I would take a little time to do so.

I e-mailed a recent acquaintance yesterday to wish her a happy Mother's Day, and told her she is really the only mom I know here in Albuquerque. At least, she is the only one I've spoken with a little. The dearth of mothers in my current life has made me think a little more of my own, and the part she has played in my development as a person. Because whether she knows it or not, my mom is a big part of who I am now, some of what I want to be as I get older, and yes, even some of what I don't want to be. Each way that I view her has shaped my life, and in many ways has made me a better person.

This is me, age 2. This picture was probably taken before my mom was my mom. Let me explain that to you more. I was adopted. Except for a few bits and snatches, my life begins with my mom. I know that I was given up for adoption at birth. I know that I went to at least two foster homes before I was adopted. I also know that I was an old adoptee -- most adoptive parents want a baby.

I know that my mom wanted a baby. After years of trying to have children, and a number of miscarriages, she and my father decided to adopt. I think that they were expecting to view babies when they went to the adoption agency. However, an enterprising young social worker named Miss Brinks contrived to put me into the mix of children that they saw, and for some reason my father took a shine to me. They saw me and interacted with me at least a couple of times, and my father was hooked.

My mother, understandably, wanted a baby. She wasn't sure that she wanted a child as old as I was. When she asked my father "Vernon, are you sure that you want this little boy," his answer was something on the order of "I want a kid I can talk to."

At that point, all hinged on my mother. She had misgivings. She had doubts. She wanted a baby. And the reports on me weren't all that great. I had started speaking late, and I couldn't walk very well. The doctors at one point had thought I was brain damaged, or retarded. If she had insisted on getting a baby, then my life would have been drastically different. It is hard to say what would have happened, but as the child gets older, the possibility of adoption goes down. I could have ended up a ward of the state, shuttled in and out of foster homes, and perhaps might have been a much different person.

But my mom took a risk, probably a big risk. She acceded to my father's wishes. And to this day, she has never questioned her choice. Yes, I was a big pain in the ass at times. I had huge dental and eye problems that cost a lot of money. I wet the bed for a number of years. I was willful and rebellious, especially in my teens. But my mom stood by me a lot. A lot more times than I ever gave her credit for. Because my mom was also the family disciplinarian, which made me as I was growing up reserve my anger and resentment for her.

Knowing my mom, she probably feels guilty at times. She was harsh and strict because my father wouldn't be strict. Our family was dysfunctional, centering on my father's alcoholism, and my mother compensated for a lack of control in her family with maintaining strict control over her kids. I chafed under this control. But there were even more insidious forces working inside my family.

When I was 19, a secret that I kept was outed. My younger sister (who also was adopted) was having trouble with an eating disorder and told her psychiatrist something I had told her a few years back. I was called, and told that to help my sister, it should be laid bare in front of the family. So one day, I took off from my college classes and told my family that my father had sexually abused me for 10 years.

I know the fact that this happened eats at my mom still. And the news at the time was a blockbuster. Everybody knew my father was a raging alcoholic, though nobody did or could do anything about it. I further divided our extended family. My mom stood up for me. Eventually she divorced my dad, standing against those who questioned the wisdom of her actions. But I know that she regrets having stayed with him so long especially in light of what happened to me. She often says that she sensed something was wrong but never acted on it. Whether for right or wrong, I never held her personally responsible for what I felt was a universal catastrophe...each of us played our own role in a dysfunctional family system that needed a massive failure for us to move on. That's exactly what happened, eventually. But, I never forgot that she believed me and stood up for me, when she could have easily said I was lying.

But this is my regret. In the years since, my mom and I have not necessarily grown apart, but we've grown differently. She is very guarded of her feelings, and has been so at times where I've desperately wanted her to tell me how she feels. For example, when I got married, I asked her if she was happy for me. She had known Megan, who was to become her daughter-in-law, and liked her. At the time, I was feeling wedding jitters, and really wanted someone to steady me, and tell me I was doing the right thing. Her response was "I'm happy for you if this is what you want to do." It was typical for her, but not exactly what I needed or wanted at the time.

When I talk to my mom, there still seems to be a gulf between us. It is not that I find talking to my mom unpleasant. In fact, we do so almost once a day now. But I can predict what we will talk about. We talk about what she's done that day, what I've done that day, the weather in Fort Bragg where she lives, the weather in Albuquerque where I live, the news from the family, what I will have for dinner and whether I will be cooking or Megan will. There is a comfortable familiarity in it, but also something that is missing. I think it is because we are both so guarded about what we say to each other.

I know my mom loves me. I know that she is proud of me. But I rarely hear it from her. I hear it from other people like my sister or my aunts and uncles. I wish that we could be less guarded.

And I would love to here about my mom's life, her hopes and dreams even if they didn't come true. I have snippets of her life. In a sense, my mom was one of the last of the pioneers, raised in the forests in Northern California in lumber camps during the depression. She went to one of those storybook one room red schoolhouses. She was always the studious and practical one in her family, and was a success in high school. I heard that she was class president and quite an athlete. I have heard that she was the apple of the eye of many boys. When she met my father, she eloped to Reno, and they managed to get there despite the fact that cops were alerted. She loved to go to Vegas in the 50s, and saw Louis Prima and the Rat Pack there in their heyday. I have these little tantalizing snippets of her life, but it is very hard to get her to really talk about her life in full. And since the divorce, I think that she views her life as disappointing, with a failed marriage and kids who had to go through hell to make it through their family life (and some who are still living it).

So this is my Mothers Day mea culpa to you, mom. I'm sorry that life got difficult for you after you took me in. But in my eyes, you did a very brave and heroic thing in accepting a little boy who didn't seem quite right. I hope that you see that all in all, I've turned out fine despite everything which came after, and I couldn't have done it had you not accepted me fully, loved me, and stood up for me when things got difficult. If I had been given a choice back then, I would have chosen to be your son even if I'd known all that lay ahead. Your strength and your commitment to your children have been traits that I always hope to emulate. If I ever have a child, I hope that he or she will look to you as a shining example of how he or she should live their life.

Happy Mother's Day!

The Greatest Short Film Ever!!!!!

2006-05-12T13:49:00.000-06:00

We saw this film last year during a screening of Oscar-nominated shorts. It is delightfully absurd! You can see it (Quicktime) at http://www.735am.com. In Spanish with English subtitles.

Be an Environmentalist AND Have a Good Time

2006-05-05T09:13:00.000-06:00

I was perusing Dave Barry's blog the other day. Dave Barry, as you know, is a columnist for the Miami Herald, and I was at his blog for my weekly dose of his comments on the TV show 24; he's a fan and like the rest of us who watch the show, is amused by the action, the plot twists, the huge gaping holes in the plot, and Chloe the super computer tech geek character. His comments are often hilarious.

He also has other humorous pictures, sites and other things that readers send in to him. I particularly like the "Productivity Enhancers" section, which is full of little games and other diversions to keep you from working.

One section caught my eye, however. It is entitled "Unfit for the Office Unless You Work for the Osbournes." As I perused the entries, I came across a heading entitled "Norwegians Saving the Rainforest: Now We are Suddenly More Interested in the Environment." (*Warning: do not click if you are offended by nudity!) It piqued my interest. I clicked on it, and was welcomed into a whole new world!

If you didn't already click the link, let me explain. The link led to a story about a concert in Norway by a band. I won't name the band, save to say that their name is usually the final scene in a straight porn film. They were performing a show, and a young couple walked on stage and asked "What are you willing to do for the environment?" They then stripped, and began having sex on stage while the band played accompanying music. While they were performing this act, a banner was unfurled saying that they were having sex to save the rainforest. When finished, they walked off, to applause by the concertgoers.

It turns out that these two were from a Norwegian non-profit group called F^&k for Forest (FFF). (Warning: once again, do not click if you are offended by nudity and sexual themes) They actually have a website, and on the website they explain how they are young people who love sex and love the environment. They believe that sexual freedom is natural and good, but various interests have turned it either into something dirty or something to exploit. Thus, their goal is to redirect the exploitative efforts of the porn industry AND to channel people's natural desire for things sexual into something positive for the environment. A hilarious thing about this group is that they actually got start-up money from the Norwegian government, who only knew that they were working on an alternative to save the rainforest. Since then, they have conducted what they call "eco/love terrorism," and offer a pay site for those who want to get their jollies for a good cause. Subscribers to their site, who pay $15 a month (They claim $12 of that goes to saving rainforest), get access to porn photos and movies starring members of FFF or models that they have hired. Megan and I laughed at one video clip, where a young Scandinavian woman with a head of multi-colored hair described how she was going to use a particular sexual aid on herself and said in Scandinavian-tinged English "The more I do this, the more money goes to saving the rainforest!"

Wow, what a groundbreaking activity! The possibilities are endless! I had already seen another website some months earlier, where a group was trying to use sex to get out the American vote...basically you signed up and pledged to have sex with someone who voted (but only if you voted yourself). We could help a whole range of other social issues with this approach. How about F&*k for the Homeless? Or Immorality for Immigrant Rights? Or Porn for Puppies? I can even envision Sex for Sexual Equality. It doesn't have to be the lefties leading the way either. Conservatives could jump on the bandwagon -- Orgies against Abortion, Groping for Gun Rights, F*&king for Family Values...you get the picture!

It heartens me that young people are leading the way on this issue, especially young and beautiful Norwegians. Unfortunately, FFF has run up against some barriers. It seems that they have been fully prepared to donate the $100,000 they've raised to organizations that save the rainforest, but those organizations are refusing the money due to the controversial and perhaps less than legal ways FFF is raising money (sex on a public stage is illegal in Norway). However, they are working around this problem, and have started their own projects in Costa Rica and Brazil. I can't imagine what peasant farmers burning the rainforest will think when some blonde Norwegian god and goddess walks up to them -- "Hello, we are from F^&k for Forest, and you must stop killing the rainforest or we will have sex right here. Don't make us do it!" Will the peasants stop, or simply sit down and watch the show and continue burning afterward?

All I know is that in the wide, wacky world of the Internet, anything is possible -- at least I truly believe that now. And I really wish these kids luck -- if they are having fun and are of age and consenting, it's their business and not mine how they try to make this world a better place. That being said, I don't plan to subscribe. I'll just send my money straight to the Rainforest Action Network and head to our local Castle Superstore for the finest in adult action (just kidding!!!! About the adult store, that is! No, really!).

Call Waiting Sucks

2006-04-07T11:20:00.000-06:00

How would you feel in this following scenario? Suppose you are having a face to face conversation with someone, and someone else comes up and horns in on your conversation. He starts talking to the person who you were talking with, without asking your permission, and the person you are talking with says to you "give me just a minute with this guy," and then spends 20 minutes with the interruptor while you stand there.

My call waiting experiences are often the electronic equivalent of this scene. I'm going to go on a short rant, but it has been brewing for a while. I do not have call waiting on my home phone. I do have call waiting on my cell phone, and I've probably been guilty of the following behavior once in a while myself, so I do not exonerate myself from my own wrath. However, I find it singularly inappropriate and sometimes rude how people use call waiting on their private line.

Of course, putting people on hold has been a tool for businesses and the bane of callers for some time. We all know how frustrating it can be when we are put on hold, especially when we are trying to conduct some business and we are in a hurry.

So why is it that we do the same thing to our friends?

At least when I call my doctor or dentist and they put me on hold, I know that I am on hold because either a) a person called ahead of me and they are finishing up with them or b) there is an emergency going on and they will get to me after it is over.

Of course, not always are things this easy, but as a general rule, businesses usually take care of the first person who calls, whether it is a small local business or a large faceless corporation -- many times their message as you're holding is something on the order of "your call will be answered in the order in which it was received."

However, us private citizens have it backwards. Often, when I call someone who has call waiting, and I'm talking to them, they will suddenly say "Oh, can you hold on a minute?" I usually say "Sure." I am then parked in electronic limbo, while that person then spends 10 or 15 minutes talking to whomever called on the other line. It doesn't matter that I called first. It doesn't matter that I may take offense to waiting on the line for that long. In the backwards reality of private home usage, I must wait while the second caller gets an uninterrupted phone call. Occasionally, if the call is going to go on for longer, the person might say "Oh, can I call you back? Mike's been sitting on the other line." However, by this time I have most likely been gnashing my teeth in fury, and maybe I have even hung up.

Why do we do this to people, especially our friends? It used to be that if a person called, they would get a busy signal if the person they were calling was on the other line. The busy signal meant, for the second caller, that the person they were calling was busy and that they should wait a little while and call back when the person was, hopefully, free.

I know that call waiting is important in some ways. In the old days, the only way that a caller could notify a person of an emergency if the person they were calling was already on the phone was to have an operator break into the call, terminating the first call and connecting the second caller. Today, if there is an emergency, call waiting can make it possible for the emergency to be communicated quickly without an extra step.

Or if the caller is expecting an important phone call...perhaps Ed McMahon is going to call with news that they've won the sweepstakes...they can get that information quickly.

But when we get down to just everyday conversations, why should I, who called first, have my phone call interrupted and my status pushed down to second priority just because the person I've called has gotten indication that a second caller is trying to reach him/her? Why should I be able to break off someone else's conversation simply because I called second? This is wrong. It is discourteous to me, or to whomever was talking first, to break off the conversation and leave him or her in electronic limbo for 10 or 15 minutes.

Therefore, I am proposing call waiting etiquette 101:

1. If you are talking to someone on the phone, and you have call waiting, and it indicates that someone else is ringing you, you may break off the phone call for a minute to answer the other line.

2. If you do so, you should politely tell the person that a call is coming in and ask if it is okay to break the conversation for a moment. If that person says "no" you should not break the conversation, but simply let the other person ring. Chances are, if you have call waiting, you also have call notes or some kind of answering service and he or she will leave a message.

3. If the first caller says "yes, that's okay" you should only spend a moment with the other person on the line while your first caller is in electronic limbo. Spend enough time to simply get his or her name, how to best reach him or her, and then politely inform him or her that remaining on hold until you finish your first call is an option, or you can call back later. Do not launch into an entire conversation that will leave your first caller, who should be your first priority, in limbo for a long time.

These are just simple things, but it will make the telephoning experience much more pleasant for everyone around, and help to ensure that your first caller feels important enough to you that he or she will not be summarily dismissed simply because a second caller is on the line.

Of course, I would prefer the old fashioned busy signal. Sometimes "advances" in technology are "retreats" in common sense and our notions of acceptable community behavior. Just because technology has made it easier for us to be rude to each other, we don't have to follow its siren call in all cases.

And don't get me started on Caller I.D. That's for a later rant.

Truth or Consequences

2006-04-03T11:13:00.000-06:00

This past weekend, Megan and I drove down to Truth or Consequences. Megan is doing a freelance story for AAA New Mexico magazine on the burgeoning arts scene there, and we decided to make a weekend of it, partly because we could use it after the passing of Hannibal, and partly because it offered an opportunity to relax.

I was always intrigued by the name of this little town. T or C, as the locals call it, used to known as Hot Springs, New Mexico, because of the hot springs that simmer under the ground and boil up there. The area looks pretty arid now, despite town's perch on the banks of the Rio Grande, but at one time the area was quite muddy and swampy. The Native American Mimbres people used to farm the area, but were eventually driven out by the Apaches. However, Native Americans considered the area neutral ground, and used the hot springs in the area to relax and heal.

The name actually came from a combination of two attempts at self-promotion. In 1950, Ralph Edwards, producer of the hit radio show Truth or Consequences, wished aloud that some town would rename itself after the game show. Of course, such an action would give more publicity to the game show. However, Hot Springs also thought the idea was a good one for the city too. After all, there are many "Hot Springs" around the country, including a famous one in Arkansas. By adopting the name, the city could gain some celebrity AND separate itself from all those other Hot Springs. In gratitude, Ralph Edwards kept coming back on the anniversary of the name change and bringing Hollywood people with him, to participate in the town's Fiesta.

Despite this interesting history, T or C is a small, sleepy town which rolls up its sidewalks around 8:00 p.m. each evening. It has two main drags, each a one-way split of the main road through town. Main Street is a little less developed than Broadway, but both have shops, cafes and art galleries on them. The arts scene is just starting to develop in T or C, with a number of small businesses that are either full galleries or hybrids of galleries and some other business opening in the past three years. Megan and I strolled around the town, which would take all of 15 minutes should you decide not to stop anywhere. The town seems to be on the verge of becoming one of those cute artsy colonies...but for now, it is just strange and hippy-dippy enough to be quaint and mysterious all at the same time.

However, the main attraction of T or C, and surprisingly the most undeveloped part of it, is its hot springs. There are a number of businesses that cater to people who want to soak in the mineral laden hot waters lying beneath the city range from the rustic to the glamorous. The main hotel in town, for instance, has private baths in the rooms, plus a well-known and regarded restaurant. We stayed in a slightly lower scale establishment, Riverbend Hostel, where our room was simply one end of a partitioned double wide and where we shared the community tub with other guests and members of the community who wanted to soak. The water came out at approximately 120 degrees, and passed through a series of three tubs that were gradually cooler until it drained out into the river. The soaks were nice, and Megan particularly liked soaking in the luke-warm tub next to the flowing Rio Grande.

The nice thing about the weekend was that it was cheap. $50 got us the room and the soaks (private tubs would have been $10 per person extra). Compare that to going up to New Mexico's Ojo Caliente: our friend Anne recently went up there and it cost over $200 for a similar weekend (though she got a massage as well).

There are other places we would like to visit in New Mexico, but this was a nice weekend getaway and a place we would be happy to take any visitors.

Hannibal's Passing

2006-03-29T07:30:00.000-07:00

Hannibal passed quietly March 28th at about 4:20 pm, with us by his side stroking the soft fur on his head. He appeared ready to go...he was tired and refused the last little bit of ice cream Megan tried to give him. He was relaxed, lying on his side and drifting in and out of sleep even before the vet administered a sedative, and when the end came it was very quick.

Megan and I spent the last weekend with him hanging around and telling stories. On Saturday we spent a nice afternoon at a nearby park, Hannibal lying on a blanket, sharing our meal occasionally and watching the other dogs play. Megan and I read poetry about dogs from a book called "Bark", passing the book back and forth and occasionally breaking down into tears at some poignant piece. On Sunday, we took him up to Sandia Peak and I carried him about 50 feet up the 10K trail and set him in the snow, so that he could once again feel the wind blowing down the mountain and feel the snow under his feet. We then went back to the park, and laid him down under a shade tree, and we stretched out beside him and we all promptly went to sleep. It must have been quite a sight -- two adult humans and their dog all stretched out together, slumbering away in the park. Megan remarked that Hannibal was still teaching us, this time teaching us about the importance of resting on our supposed days of rest.

Hannibal enjoyed lots of hamburgers, steak, ice cream and cheese during these final days. We joked that he was probably thinking, "What the f$%^? I've been telling you guys that I want more cheese, steak, hamburger and ice cream for my entire life and you wait until the last three f%*$ing days I'm alive?"

Our vet, Dr. Kathleen Blackshear, was extremely kind and very gentle in how she performed the procedure. She was also very supportive. She developed a bond with him too, and it wasn't easy on her to perform this duty, but in the end we all agreed it was best.

Hannibal's ashes will be returned to us, and we plan to have parts of him sprinkled in the places he loved in all the places he lived: Washington Park in Milwaukee (and perhaps Elkhorn, WI), Brackenridge Park in San Antonio, along Bayou St. John in New Orleans, and on Sandia Peak in Albuquerque. We will keep a very small portion of his remains with us.

Hannibal spent 4 years of his life in New Orleans, which as many of you know, has the right idea about death. Death is not something to be mourned, but to be celebrated because the deceased has finally been called home. "When I die," goes a New Orleans song, "you better second line." In other words, have a big procession with music, dancing, tears AND laughter. So we put on that song, maybe about a half hour after Hannibal passed and danced through our tears until we were laughing and making up lyrics about Hannibal (you better leave that ice-cream on the floor, in case he comes back through the door...when pup dies, you better second line), though we did this with the blinds closed so that our neighbors, who saw us carrying the dog out and wandered over to pay their respects, didn't think we had flipped out.

We can't thank you enough for the support you've expressed over e-mail and in person. Many of you remarked about how close we were to him. This was very true. Perhaps it is silly to feel this way over a pet, but he was more than a pet to us -- he was a valuable and honored member of our family. There is already an emptiness in our house left by his absence. So, your words of support and your understanding of his place in our lives meant very much to us...and we were gratified to know that at the time of Hannibal's journey home, so many of you were thinking of all of us.

This photo is Hannibal's last picture, taken in our back yard about a half hour before Dr. Blackshear arrived. We also want to leave you with two of the poems we read to each other that Saturday in the park which struck deep chords with us:

Tribute to the Memory of the Same Dog
William Wordsworth

Lie here, without a record of thy worth,
Beneath a covering of the common earth!
It is not from unwillingness to praise,
Or want of love, that here no Stone we raise;
More thou deserv'st; but this man gives to man
Brother to brother, this is all we can.
Yet they to whom thy virtues made thee dear
Shall find thee through all changes of the year:
This Oak points out thy grave; the silent tree
Will gladly stand a monument of thee.
We grieved for thee, and wished thy end were past;
And willingly have laid thee here at last:
For thou hadst lived, till every thing that cheers
In thee had yielded to the weight of years;
Extreme old age had wasted thee away,
And left thee but a glimmering of the day;
Thy ears were deaf, and feeble were thy knees, --
I saw thee stagger in the summer breeze,
Too weak to stand against its sportive breath,
And ready for the gentlest stroke of death.
It came, and we were glad; yet tears were shed;
Both man and woman wept when thou wert dead;
Not only for a thousand thoughts that were,
Old household thoughts, in which thou hadst thy share;
But for some precious boons vouchsafed to thee,
Found scarcely anywhere in like degree!
For love, that comes wherever life and sense
Are given by God, in thee was most intense;
A chain of heart, a feeling of the mind,
A tender sympathy, which did thee bind
Not only to us Men, but to thy Kind:
Yea, for thy fellow-brutes in thee we saw
A soul of love, love's intellectual law: --
Hence, if we wept, it was not done in shame;
Our tears from passion and from reason came,
And, therefore, shalt thou be an honoured name!

The House-Dog's Grave
by Robinson Jeffers

I've changed my ways a little: I cannot now
run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream: and you, if you dream a moment,
You see me there.

So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door
Where I used to scratch to go out or in,
And you'd soon open; leave on the kitchen floor
The marks of my drinking pan.

I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do
On the warm stone,
Nor at the foot of your bed: no, all the nights through
I lie alone.

But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet
Outside your window where firelight so often plays,
and where you sit to read -- and I fear often grieving for me --
Every night your lamplight lies on my place.

You, man and woman, live so long it is hard
To think of you ever dying.
A little dog would get tired living so long.
I hope that when you are lying

Under the ground like me your lives will appear
As good and joyful as mine.
No, dears, that's too much hope: you are not so well cared for
As I have been,

And never have known the passionate undivided
Fidelities that I knew.
Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided....
But to me you were true.

You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.
I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures
To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,
I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.

Hannibal's last picture, taken ½ hour before vet arrived.
Yes, I am crying...

The Hardest Decision

2006-03-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Megan and I made the hardest decision we have ever had to make.

We knew it was coming, but we didn't want to admit it. But it finally faced us, demanding an answer, and through our tears we knew what the answer had to be. We will send our friend and companion, who traced the arc of our lives together almost from the beginning of our relationship, through the last door of life into a place where we cannot follow him.

Hannibal has been deteriorating. We've known this a while. But because he was still interested in begging our cheese and toast and ice cream, we overlooked that he was having more trouble walking and standing. Actually, we didn't overlook it, but we simply made adjustments for it, occasionally remarking on it. Over the past year, he got sick a lot, and we accommodated that too. We did what was necessary, dropping lots of money, because that's what you do when someone in your family gets sick. You care for them, and spare no expense.

Some may say that we went overboard. Our vet seemed impressed that we were willing to take care of him past the point where some other dog owners would. Not to make ourselves sound saintly, because perhaps when we own a pet the next time we will make different decisions. But we love this dog and treasured every additional minute that he spent with us.

On Tuesday, all that will come to an end. We will be left with his memory, and our lives will have to adjust once more...this time to his absence. We have traveled a lot of roads on our journey to this moment, which have ranged the gamut of emotions from joy and happiness to most recently sorrow and grief. But one emotion has remained constant - our thankfulness for Hannibal's contribution to our lives. I told Megan the other day that I felt he made me a better person, and I mean that. And I know that half of the great people that we've met and made friends with in the past 15 years would not have entered our life had Hannibal not been present. With his pure white coat, so distinctive among dogs, to his friendly and outgoing demeanor, his patience with people, and his love of life, he was a magnet and made friends in the most unlikely places. Our lives have been enriched not only by Hannibal's presence, but also the ways in which he has led to other, important presences in our lives.

Hannibal, we will miss you terribly. You will leave a big hole in our life. Eventually, we'll find ways to fill the hole, but like dirt settles into a hole, those new things will settle and pack in, leaving a lasting imprint that will constantly remind us of you.

Random Picture of the Week Pt. III

2006-03-07T10:05:00.000-07:00

February 27 - March 5th

It's impossible to remember all the names in this photo, taken probably in the early 1990s. The folks in the picture are mostly ex-Jesuit Volunteer Corps people who we hung out with, some more than others, when we lived in Milwaukee. Lower row is Felicia, her now husband Harold, Joe and unknown. The only persons in the top row whose names I remember are top left: Trish and Tori.

March 6 - 12th

These two handsome guys are Matt Simonette and Jim Chilsen. Both were Megan's colleagues at Marquette's Journalism School. Matt went on to New York University and received a Masters in Film. He currently works for a publication in Chicago. Jim lives in Evanston, Illinois, is married with two children, and works for the Citizens Utility Board in Chicago -- an advocacy organization. This picture was taken in 1995.

Do you want to see the Random Pictures from last year? Go to my Flickr page to see the archive from July - December of last year.

Random Picture of the Week Pt. II

2006-03-07T09:56:00.000-07:00

Here is the second set of random pictures, catching us up to the present.

January 30 - February 5th

A picture of our grapevines in our backyard in Albuquerque during our early spring snow in April 2005. The snow made the grapes scarce that summer, along with the apricots that usually grace the neighbor's tree. Even our pomegranate bush failed to produce this past fall, even though it bore tons of fruit the year before. We're not sure what will happen this year...we have had very little precipitation this winter.

February 6 - 12th

The courtyard of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. The museum was established by the same Ringling of the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. The museum contains many pieces of art collected by its founder and patron, as well as putting on special exhibitions and playing host to traveling exhibits.

February 13 - 19th

Here is Mike, standing in front of Big Balls of Cowtown. This picture was snapped by Megan in Fort Worth, we believe, when we visited there in the late 1990s. While both of us were never attracted to Dallas as a city to visit or live, Fort Worth seemed like an interesting place. Unfortunately, the downtown looked like a tornado went through it, because a tornado really did go through it, blasting windows from some of the high rise buildings there.

February 20 - 26th

The Davis-Hartmann wedding party. Kristen, the bride, was a volunteer in the program Mike ran in Milwaukee. Stefan was a member of the Pallottine order. They had a civil ceremony in Germany, where they live on a collective farm, and a religious ceremony in Geneva, NY where Megan and I delivered the homily for their wedding.

Random Picture of the Week Pt. I

2006-03-07T09:37:00.000-07:00

Another part of my other site, which nobody sees, is the "Random Picture of the Week." Basically, I share a picture, chosen randomly, from the collection on my computer that is digitized. These pictures may look more, or less, professional (after all, we aren't professional photographers). The subjects may be anything, anybody, any time period. I do not influence the selection, even if I don't particularly like the picture. I accompany each with a short explanation.
Each week, I'll post a different random picture, along with the random link, for your enjoyment, or boredom. This is the first of the series to catch us up to present.

January 2 - 8th

In fall of 2004, we received a visit from Michael Kamerick (Megan's brother) and his wife April Orcutt. We took them on a hike on the 10K trail on Sandia Mountain just outside Albuquerque. In Del Agua Canyon, the aspens were starting to show their fall colors, and April snapped this photo from the overlook at the top of the peak.

January 9 - 15th

This picture is from a "medieval" style wedding in Germany, and includes the bride and groom in front with various guests. Notice Mike and Megan in the back on the left. Unfortunately Norman and Sigi are not together any more, but their wedding was quite a good time!

January 16 - 22nd

What can we say about the Golden Gate. Still one of the, if not THE, most picturesque bridge in the world. This picture was taken by Megan while she was in California for her brother Michael's wedding to April Orcutt in 1991.

January 23 - 29th

This fine specimen of manhood is Mike walking along a beach in Texas. Though the beach is most likely on Galveston Island, it could also be at Port Aransas. Megan, after spending much time at her parents' in Florida, was underwhelmed by the brown sand. Mike likes the ocean but is used to the small cove beaches and the dramatic cliffs of the Northern California coast. Both of us were disturbed that Texans simply drive their huge trucks and SUVs right onto the beach, which to us mars the scenery and the beauty that is a beach. But to each his/her own.