How to Break an Ankle, Part 11

It can be brutally hot in the desert just east of San Diego in August, but not in town, where the breeze passes over the cool waters of Mission Bay and sways the tall palms on Bancroft Street, and wafts over the dahlias coming into bloom in the front yard and caresses us in the shade of the porch.

We were sitting on the swing, Gram and I, in the early afternoon, drinking lemonade and talking about my future.
"So after college, what?" she asked.
"Well, it's not like I have much of a choice. Can I have one of your cigarettes?
"No, dear, I'm counting these."

She was always trying to cut down on smoking, restricting herself to a certain number of smokes per day; either that, or trying to keep people from mooching cigarettes from her. They were Parliaments, in a blue and white box.
"Well, I suppose I'll be drafted, and then shipped off to Vietnam, and then shipped back in a box," I said, trying to be flippant, even though my post-graduate prospects were scaring me to death.
"Oh, don't think that way," she said, waving her bony hand dismissively. She had been a Navy wife for many years, moving her family all over the country and to Panama and back. She said the military was a vast place, and a good place to accumulate life experience, and if I really wanted to be a writer, I would need lots of that.
"You're so young," she said with that deep, halting laugh of hers. "What have you got to write about?"

She talked about her mother and her grandmother and their writing regimens. And she told me I had to read more if I wanted to become a good writer. "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" were a couple of the books she suggested.

(Just the other day, I found in my box of mementos a list she had mailed me later, written in her neat, left-leaning script on an index card, 10 books to read right away. "The Black Rose" and "Green Dolphin Street," are among them. Regrettably, I have yet to read any of them. But I will.)

"Here, go ahead, have one of my cigarettes," she said. "I'll resume quitting tomorrow." She watched me smoke, smiling contentedly, her head cocked to one side.
Read the good authors and learn from them, but don't pay any attention to what is fashionable and contemporary and novel, she said.
"Write about what you know."

Today's gripe

I've tried as hard as I can to avoid politics in this space, but something I heard on television this morning crawled under my skin. Both the presidential candidates have said some pretty stupid things over the past few months, and I just can't take it anymore.

At a rally in Ohio yesterday, John McCain introduced Joe the Plumber as "an American hero."
Now wait just a minute.

This is the guy who asked Barack Obama a question which was, essentially: If I were really a licensed plumber, and if I weren't already a tax delinquent, and if I wanted to start my own business, and if that business were successful enough to make more than $250,000 in profit, would my taxes go up from 36 percent to 39 percent?

So, now he's an "American hero," just like the brave and unselfish soldiers who have thrown themselves on hand grenades to save the lives of their comrades.

What a sad denigration of heroism this is.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 10

(Grandmother Dorothy and my father, Bronxville, N.Y., 1957)

My mother's family history is simple and straightforward: They came to this country in early 20th century from Poland, where my mother's parents were born, peasants, like countless generations before them.
My father's family tree is more complicated and mysterious, its trunk and lower branches obscured in the ground fog of time. What little we know about the paternal line is something we'd rather not know at all. You wouldn't either if you found out Booker T. Washington was a slave on your ancestors' Virginia plantation. While Booker T. was working for The Man - James Burroughs – my father's mother's Irish and Scottish ancestors were on the Oregon Trail. They became pioneers in Oregon, Washington and Alaska and seafarers who sailed the China route. At the time my mother's mother was boarding a steamship for America, my paternal great-great-grandmother, Ada Woodruff Anderson, was churning out novels about adventure in the Northwest. Her daughter, Great-grandmother McCully, would become a writer, too, mostly of gardening books and articles. Her daughter – my grandmother Dorothy – never published but was a writer at heart, an avid reader and the composer of great letters. She would have a profound influence on my career, although this would not be apparent until years after that summer of '69 in California.

She lived on Bancroft Street in San Diego at the time, an old, quiet neighborhood, with her second husband, Harry, a retired Navy man. It was a house I still walk through and around in my dreams: a garage stacked with dusty curiosities, a miniature house where Gram did her sewing, a lemon tree, a shuffleboard court, and a garden that Harry was constantly tending and watering.

Gram was pencil thin with a constant and broad smile that made her top-heavy. I remember her, there and when she visited us on the East Coast, as delicate and sophisticated, a cigarette and cocktail balancing in her hands like weights on a scale.
I spent a couple of days at their home that August, poking around the garage, playing golf with Harry, and sitting in the porch swing with Gram, and that's where it happened. No, not the broken ankle, but her influence on me: what she would say that would set my course.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 9

Although Bim sold insurance for a living, most of his friends had real-man jobs: policemen, firemen, career Marines. He took me to their weekly poker game for some cigar smoking and whiskey sipping and gambling, although these guys played with nothing but pennies. Sorry, but it's not so impressive when the motorcycle cop in a muscle shirt and flat-top pushes a stack into the pile and says, "I raise ya 15 big ones," and a hush falls across the table, even though he's talking about 15 cents.

It was this group of he-men who taught me to play Indian poker. This came late in the evening, when they had had too much to drink and were acting silly. In Indian poker, everyone gets a card that he holds against his own forehead so that everyone can see the player's card except that player. It's a game that seventh-graders find hilarious; for drill sergeants and San Diego's Finest, it's pathetic.

Bim let me ride his motorcycle around the neighborhood, and he promised that he would borrow a friend's bike and the two of us would ride out into the desert and spend the day. But when Saturday came, his friend did also, and I found myself riding passenger on Bim's bike, which was more than disappointing; it was mortifying, because there is nothing so pointless as being a passenger on a motorcycle. It's like watching someone eat a good steak while your jaw is wired shut.

Nevertheless, the day was enjoyable, exploring wilderness which today's is probably a housing development or a shopping mall. Bim's friend pointed to a cliff from which a trickle of water fell smashing on the rocks below. He said that he had seen a girl standing at the top of that cliff two weeks earlier, stark naked except for a string of beads around her neck.

For a young man in 1969, that was an exciting thought. I kept my eyes peeled for naked women, but we saw almost no one the whole day. Exploring around the base of that cliff that afternoon, I found a bead necklace among the wet rocks and put it in my pocket. Years later, I would take that necklace out of a box of mementos and recall that vision of unclothed beauty, that vision that I never experienced other than in a tale told under the canopy of tall aspens on a hot Southern California day.

Whine, whine, whine

C: We love Beth Dolinar's column but if she continues to inject political barbs in them we will cancel our subscription. - M.O.

A: What? Did I miss something? You're talking about Beth Dolinar, right? The woman who writes about her kids and after-school treats and hair extensions and such things. Sponge Bob Squarepants isn't running for Congress, is he?

How to Break and Ankle, Part 8

Bim and his wife, Jeanine, had three little boys, the oldest of which was 9. Perhaps it was for their sake, because my presence would be an influence on them, that Bim was determined to make a man out of me.

My hair wasn't all that long at the time, but it was long enough to make my aunt and uncle worry that I might be one of those kind, you know, "light in the loafers," as he would say, a Nancy-boy. So the first thing they did was to arrange a blind date.

"I already have a girlfriend," I pleaded, but they ignored this as imaginary nonsense and summoned one Debbie, a neighbor girl who stood about six feet-two in flat shoes, and add another four or five inches for the teased hairdo. I kept this photo of us, Debbie and me in the backyard of Bim's house with my cousins and their dog. Jeanine had sent it to me and had written some quotations on the back. Apparently, I had said, "Boy, are you tall!" And apparently, Debbie had said, "Don't you have any other shoes?"

I can't recall where we went that night or what we did, but I do remember the crick in my neck I got from looking up all evening.

Bim's next manly endeavor was to take me to San Diego Stadium to watch the Chargers play and exhibition football game. Our seats were in the top row of the highest section, the steps to which were so steep that it was nearly impossible to carry beers up to them without spilling them. We carried many beers. We cheered with such enthusiasm that the few other people sitting below us in our section found other seats where they could remain dry. The top section of seats was so steep that when after my fifth beer I lost my balance and tumbled forward, I landed five rows away.

If you think that here is where I finally broke my ankle, you are wrong. I landed as relaxed as a laundry bag filled with lingerie, and got up laughing like a jackass.

No, I would get my punishment, but it would come later.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 7

Back in 1969, the airlines offered student discounts, and you could fly standby for half price. I used to fly to New York from Pittsburgh for $12, and that included a meal and a complimentary cocktail. So, flying from Chicago to California, rather than hitchhiking, was a no-brainer. I probably paid no more than $40 for the flight to Los Angeles and the connection to San Diego.

I called Bim from the airport in Los Angeles and told him when I would be arriving. Bim was my father's half-brother, just eight years my senior. As a child, visiting relatives in California with my family, I had idolized Bim, the rollicking teenager with a stack of comic books in his closet as high as my head.

Back then, the entire clan would come out to the airport in San Diego to greet us – all my father's siblings and cousins and all of their children – cheering us as we emerged from the baggage area as if we were movie stars. Coming in for a landing, I wondered if I would get the traditional welcome, even on such short notice. But only Bim was waiting for me. I saw him before he saw me, touching up his neatly coiffed hair with a pocket comb, standing in the bright sunlight in a white dress shirt and black slacks, looking so adult.

And then he saw me, sauntering toward him in an old work shirt and bell-bottoms I had altered myself by slitting the legs and sewing in triangles of bandanna cloth; a knapsack flung over my shoulder, the long hair and muttonchops, the aviator sunglasses. Then he recognized me, although his face was screwed into a question mark. He said my name, but it was a question. We shook hands, and he tentatively touched my shoulder. He could not mask his disappointment.
"Jeez! Look at you," he said. "You got so tall, and… I just didn't expect… I mean, what's with the costume?"

He had expected me to appear clean-shaven and clean-cut, dressed appropriately for travel, a younger version of my father, the brother he idolized. I was a shock, from which he would recover, but he would spend the next week or so trying hard to make me "normal."

How to Break an Ankle, Part 6

I trotted after the white Chrysler that had stopped on the ramp. I could see three men in the car. The back door swung open. I took a quick look. It looked like an episode of "Ozzie and Harriet."

OK, for all of you not old enough to get that, I'm not talking about zoned-out rock and reality star Ozzie Osborne, but rather Ozzie Nelson. That old TV show featured the real-life Nelson family in make-believe situation comedy. The two boys, Ricky and David, were the handsome, athletic, respectful, white-bread ideal sons with no nonsense about them. David's fraternity brothers were always dropping by the house for large helpings of milk and cookies. It was a show about typical America that exists only in the wishful thinking of chuckleheads.

Well anyway, David's fraternity brothers were offering me a ride, which I took. The guy sitting next to me in the back seat was wearing a short-sleeve madras shirt, white jeans with neatly ironed creases, and Docksiders. They all looked as if they'd just come from a barber shop. Where was I going? Why? Where was I from? What did my father do for a living? Did I enjoy sailing? They peppered me with questions, and all three, even the driver, felt compelled to look at me and make eye contact when they spoke. It made me nervous.

"Do you smoke pot?" the one in the backseat, the youngest, asked me. He seemed fascinated with my clothes and long hair and sideburns. I realized that they had picked me up out of curiosity. They had seen hippies before, but they'd never really talked to one. "Sometimes, but I don't make a habit of it," I answered. They all looked very disappointed.

By afternoon we were rolling across industrial Indiana. The questions kept coming: "How long do you think it will take you to get to California?" "Where will you sleep along the way?" "Aren't you afraid of being stranded in the desert?" I hadn't thought about these things, and although I tried to be nonchalant, the questions rang in my head like alarms. I unfolded my map and studied it. Hmmm. I thought Iowa was a small state, but on the map it looked enormous, vacant, frightening.

David's fraternity brothers were headed for their homes somewhere north of Chicago. Earlier, I had told them they could drop me off just beyond Gary, Ind. I thought about the 1,750 miles of hot pavement ahead of me and considered the bottoms of my moccasin slippers, purchased just a week earlier but already sprouting holes.
"Do you guys pass O'Hare Airport on your way home?" I asked them. "How about just letting me off there."

Complaints and questions

C: I've received the OR for 20 years and have come to rely upon it as a
primary news source. However, as somebody who has been following the
presidential election closely, I was surprised to see you feature the
AP article, "AP poll: Race tightening in final weeks" prominently on
the front page. As you probably know, AP is not the only organization
out their conducting polling and, as pointed out in the article, the
results of the AP poll differ widely from MOST of the other reputable
polls. If you would like to see an effective comparison of all of the
presidential polling data, I suggest you visit
this site. In any case, given the anomalous nature of the AP poll, I think that the OR exhibited
bad judgment in highlighting this information on the front page. - A.L.

A: Polls rarely come up with the same results, and they can be way off at times. What was significant about the AP poll was that it did differ from the other polls and came up with results that showed the race much tighter than other polls indicate. Also, this poll suggested the race is growing increasingly tighter. That is news, and the fact that this poll employed basically the same standards as other national polls and had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points gave it veracity.

Granted, we at this newspaper may put a little more trust in the AP poll because we are a part of the Associated Press. Not many readers realize it, by the AP is not just a service we purchase; it is a worldwide cooperative in which member newspapers and other media share the news they gather and pool their resources in order to cover news around the world that would be impossible to cover on their own. The news that the O-R gathers and writes is picked up by the AP and offered to other newspapers, TV and radio stations, and what those others gather is offered to us.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 5

The drivers of cars and trucks coming through the Ohio Turnpike entrance stopped and grabbed their tickets, then headed up the westbound ramp, staring straight ahead, ignoring me as I sat on a guardrail holding my "WEST" sign. Patience, I kept reminding myself.

Another group of hitchhikers had appeared beside the eastbound ramp – two girls and a boy, maybe my age or a little younger. Every time a likely looking ride passed them, the girls would jump up and down and wave their signs, like cheerleaders at a fundraiser car wash. One of the signs read "N.Y." and the other said "Woodstock" and was adorned with a guitar and flower crudely drawn with crayon.
I watched them wear themselves out for about half an hour, and then one of the girls crossed the traffic and headed in my direction. She was wearing hip-hugger bellbottoms and a fringed leather vest with nothing on underneath it.
"Hey, man, like where are you going?" she asked me.
I held up my sign and told her California.
"Wow! That's like really far away. What's happening there?"
I told her I didn't know of anything happening there, I just wanted to go there.
"Far out! We're going to the Woodstock Musical Festival. Did you hear about it? Like everyone is going to be there."
I'd heard something about it, but wasn't interested. I had grown up around New York and had gone to boarding school upstate, and I had no desire to be back there at the moment.
"Hey, man, why don't you come with us? It would be groovy."
No thanks, I told her. Wherever she was going, this Woodstock thing, couldn't be as thrilling as California. Of course, I didn't mention that I wasn't going to San Francisco to drop acid and demonstrate against the war and have my fill of free love, but rather going to San Diego to stay with my grandmother, aunts and uncles and share the bedrooms of my juvenile cousins.

"Well, peace, man," she said, flashing me the hand sign before heading back across the ramps. Even before she reached her friends, a VW microbus loaded with luggage on top had stopped to offer them a ride. Pulling away in a sputtering cloud of exhaust, the girl flashed me another peace sign out the window, and I felt a pang of regret.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris' fifth collection of stories, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames," is, like the others, hilarious. To enjoy his self-effacing humor and appreciate the often preposterous situations he finds himself in, you have to get over the fact that he is openly gay and not shy about his preferences and peculiarities. If you can accept that, you'll be treated to laugh-out-loud reading.

Sedaris has made a living out of writing stories and then reading them to audiences. That his stories are intended to be heard is the strength of his writing. The author Kurt Vonnegut used to say that he wrote novels like a series of jokes, a few paragraphs building to a punchline. Sedaris takes the same approach.

Beyond the belly laughs, Sedaris is a keen observer of human nature, a quality that has become more apparent with each succeeding book. Among the human frailties he expounds on in this book is addiction, and his description of quitting cigarettes will strike a chord with anyone who has ever tried it.

Western Pa. "racist"?

U.S. Rep. John Murtha caused quite a stir and was rightly lambasted for his remark in an interview with the Post-Gazette editorial board that Western Pennsylvania was "racist." Talk about painting with a wide brush.
Murtha met with the Observer-Reporter editorial board a few days later and acknowledged his mistake.

"I shouldn't have said that," he explained. "What I should have said was that there are racist elements here, and who would argue with that?" That there are racist elements all over the country is true, and you would think undeniable, yet some would indeed argue with that.
Murtha said he was confronted by a man who was angry about the racist remark. "I'm not a racist," the man told Murtha, "it's just that I can't vote for a black man."

I had a similar experience the other day. A guy told me: "I don't care, I'll vote for Obama, I don't care if he's black or green with yellow polka dots. He's not going to move next door to me or marry my daughter, so it's OK for him to be president."

How to Break and Ankle, Part 4

Monroe was not the only Perrysburg boy to attend W&J College. Regis was also in our class, and through the two of them and visits to their homes on weekends and vacations, I made other friends in the town I thought of as ideal and dreamlike.

It seemed that most times we approached Perrysburg through thunderstorms on the Ohio Turnpike, but in the distance we could see the town gleaming like a diamond, rays of sunlight from a break in the clouds reflecting off wet roofs and church spires. The weather was always perfect in Perrysburg, its people always pleasant, and if there were any problems there, they were packed away in boxes and stacked in cedar closets.

My recollection of those days I spent there in August is foggy after nearly 40 years, but I do remember that I did not see Regis, because he had already left for basic training in the Air Force. And I recall the guilt I felt for my betrayal of him.

In the beginning of our sophomore year at college, Regis and I became close friends and confided in each other about our fear of the future. We felt trapped in college, needing to be there for the draft deferment only. If we left college, we'd be drafted, and there looked to be no end to the Vietnam War, so once we graduated, we'd be sure to be plucked. The U.S. was drafting more than 300,000 young men a year at the time, and although only a small percentage of them would end up in combat, you couldn't tell us that at the time. In our troubled minds, being in the military was equal to death in a rice paddy.
We were angry at the government for the theft of our freedom, torn by the conflict between our own morality and sense of duty to country, and ashamed of our cowardice. So, we made a plan to escape, to emigrate to Australia. At the end of the semester, we withdrew from W&J. I called home and told them that I had quit college, but not about Australia. The next day, my father flew up from Florida, and he, along with the dean of students, managed to talk some sense into me, and I re-enrolled.

Regis' father did not come. "I knew you wouldn't go through with it," he told me in disgust as he left for home. Rather than be drafted into the Army, he enlisted in the Air Force. Monroe would do the same.

Regis' family lived on Front Street, and I stopped by to see them. They tried to be pleasant and welcoming, but there was a noticeable chill in the conversation, and awkward avoidance of Regis' name. He was gone, and they could not put aside the fact that I was a cause of that.

When I left their house it started to rain, and it rained all night. I decided it was time to move on.

Whine, whine, whine

C: I have received the Observer-Reporter for over 20 years even with the political left slant in most headlines. The endorsement you gave in 2004 to John Kerry was weak at best but the endorsement for Obama lacks any reasoning or facts on him. You talk more about how John McCain is not ready than Obama being qualified. Could that be because of his slim resume as you mention. You compare his slim resume to Sarah Palin who is running for VP with John McCain. Truth is she has more experience in governemnt than Obama. Biden? The guys a joke and not worth talking about. I can't subscribe to a paper that endorses a SOCIALIST. And Obama is a socialist if you care to check. Thank you for your time. Now I will call and cancel my subscription. - T.S.

Answer No. 1: "Error of opinion is to be tolerated when reason is left free to combat it." - Thomas Jefferson
Answer No. 2: Oh, shut up you nasty old crank.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 3

(Fred, left, and Monroe in my dorm room, 1968)

The two-lane road to Perrysburg was 14 miles long, and because no one would stop to give me a ride, I had to walk all the way, in my slippers. Dusk and I reached Second Street at the same time, and I was hot, tired, footsore and discouraged.
A quiet had settled on the town; the birds had quit singing, and only the faint humming or air conditioners and the occasional creaking and slamming of a screen door could be heard.

Earlier, walking backward with my thumb stuck out, I had daydreamed of walking into town quite differently: My friends would come running out of their houses, yelling "He's here! By God, he made it!" Their sisters would throw their arms around my neck and peck me with kisses, and we would all march arm in arm to some beer bash held in my honor.

The blue light of television sets flickered and smells of finished suppers emanated from the old houses shaded by sycamores as I reached my friend Monroe's house and knocked on the door.

Monroe and I lived on the same floor of our dormitory our freshman year at W&J. He, his roommate Fred and I became close friends, but both of them left college after that first year, Fred flunking out and Monroe on his own accord. Monroe had the look of British entitlement about him – powder-blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, prominent teeth. Put him in a pair of jodhpurs and riding boots and you'd swear he was one of Queen Elizabeth's sons. He was funny, and kind, and although it never dawned on us at the time, gay. "Gay" was not a term in use at that time. If anyone had ever broached the subject – and no one did – we would have said, "Are you kidding? Monroe's not a homo! He's just… sensitive." We were in denial, despite all the obvious clues. Fred let Monroe do all the decorating in their room, which had posters of Dionne Warwick and Barbra Streisand on the walls, a beaded curtain in the doorway and Judy Garland on the stereo.

I knocked again at the door, but the house was dark and silent.
With a heavy sigh, I lifted my pack and padded down the walk toward town, feeling invisible, in search of a pay phone and, I hoped, an offer of a bed for the night from one of my other Perrysburg friends.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 2

At 20, I hadn't been alive long enough to acquire much wisdom, which you could see by looking at my feet. I stood at the entrance ramp to the Turnpike in Beaver County wearing a pair of bedroom slippers. They were soft-soled moccasins that I bought at K-mart for $2.99. They were a lot cheaper than real shoes, but they didn't hold up too well on pavement. I'd just buy another pair every time the soles wore through to my bare feet. They looked cool, I thought.

I wouldn't even consider picking up a hitchhiker today, but hitching rides was a common and relatively safe form of transportation for young people in the 1960s. A tractor hauling a flat-bed trailer loaded with girders slowed and stopped and I had to climb like a monkey to get up into the cab. As safe as hitchhiking seemed, you still had to wonder about the people who picked you up. It was always a good idea to take a good look inside the vehicle before you sat down and slammed the door. The truck looked OK: an aqua-colored transistor radio hanging from the roof of the cab, a box of Tiparillos and a statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard. The driver, a fortyish, paunchy, jovial man in a wifebeater T-shirt, asked me where I was headed.
"California, eventually, but Perrysburg, Ohio, to start," I told him. I planned to mooch off friends first. He said he was headed for Michigan but could drop me off at an exit about 14 miles from my destination. No problem, I thought.

He told me he liked to offer rides, that talking helped keep him awake on the long hauls. He did most of the talking, telling jokes and laughing in that way that some people do – silently, squinting, lips pursed, convulsing. He told me that I couldn't imagine what he witnessed from his seat high above the other cars. He had seen both men and women driving on the turnpike stark naked. He described the sexual acts he had witnessed in passing cars.
We drove west through the hottest and brightest part of that August day with the windows open, bouncing as if we were riding in a stage coach. Approaching Toledo, he pulled off the road at a place near where I'd be able to get a ride toward Perrysburg. We shook hands, he wished me luck getting to California, I thanked him, opened the door and, forgetting I was about eight feet off the ground, tumbled to the gravel.

But I did not break my ankle then. That would come later.

Whine, whine whine

C: Since you have allowed The Observer-Reporter to become a willing partner with the Democratic Party Propaganda Wing - the Associated Press - why not scrounge up enough courage and decency to place a name on your masthead that actually describes the conversion. I'll assist you. Consider: "The Democrat Reporter" or, even better, "The Socialist Democrat Reporter". The latest swill that you pass off as journalism,
"Review: Palin has checkered history on ethics issues" (October 15,2008 - front page -right) is another of the unsubstantiated, rumor based rantings of a couple of AP hatcheters who have slithered through the sewers of Alaska muckraking for any little fantasy from anyone who has ever had any reason to wish Sarah Palin harm. No one, not even Sarah Palin, becomes the Governor of a State without ruffling a feather. All your AP hacks, and the army of investigators sent to Alaska by the Democratic party, have found as sources are political foes who are slightly disarranged of wing and mind.- R.K.

A: A really important part of news are its first three letters: n-e-w. Sarah Palin is new and news. Barack Obama has been around running for president for two years, and all of his skeletons have been trotted out of the closet, dusted off and examined already. And Joe Biden and John McCain have been around forever. Every mistake they've ever made has already been written about many times. John McCain was embroiled in a scandal that branded him as one of the "Keating Five," but that was back in the '80s, and nobody cares about that anymore.

And nobody would give a damn about Sarah Palin taking gifts and favors and giving fat government jobs to her friends if she hadn't climbed up on a pedestal and proclaimed herself a champion of ethics.

Sorry, pal, but it's the job of reporters to point out the hypocrisy of politicians, and they all get their turn being poked, Democrat, Republican or whatever.

How to Break and Ankle, Part 1

Bones, even those of a healthy 20-year-old, will break when stressed in just the right way. This usually happens when you least expect it, so I learned in the summer of 1969. Let me take you back there.

Think back to when you listened to Neil Diamond singing "Sweet Caroline," and Creedence Clearwater Revival doing "Bad Moon Rising." Think about the first time you might have heard "Hot Fun in the Summertime" on the radio. That was the summer of 1969.

My academic performance during my sophomore year at W&J College had been miserable, and so I was forced to attend the summer session to soak up some Shakespeare and sociology. Classes were over at the end of July, and I had the whole month of August to kill before the fall semester began. I had no desire to go home; my parents had moved during the school year to Florida, which was hot and friendless and no home to me.

Spending August at the apartment on North Avenue I shared with friends was an option, but not a good one. We had fun that summer – skinny-dipping at the No. 4 dam south of town, and the party we hosted at our apartment for the moon walk on July 20 – but there were problems. My friend Richard, from my hometown, had enrolled for summer classes and moved in with me. It was his mother's idea. After breaking up with his girlfriend, he had suffered a mental breakdown. She thought summer school would be a good distraction, and that I could keep a close watch on him. I agreed, not knowing just how far over the edge Richard had gone.

You could see Richard coming from blocks away; he was the one wearing the blaze-orange flight suit and the green rubber boots. When you didn't see him, you'd hear him, wailing away on his electric guitar from his nest on the third floor of our building, littered with empty gin bottles. What he played was mainly distortion and feedback, which sounded like torture and brought neighbors to our door begging us to make him turn down the volume.

We fought about this, and one time he even packed his things in his Mercury Cougar and left town, much to my relief. But a few hours later, he returned, promising to behave better. He settled into his nest and, eventually, his old habits and showed no intention of leaving until September.

And so I had to go. I thought I would make it an adventure, so one morning I packed a knapsack, wrote the word WEST on a piece of shirt cardboard with a Magic Marker and left Washington, intending to hitchhike to California.

A new story

There comes a point in many a young person's life when he or she must break away from parents, or friends, or school and go on a quest. This is a rite of passage, an affirmation of independence, a search for adventure, an escape from routine.

The quest may not lead that person very far away, physically, but it often leads to unexpected discoveries and consequences.

Many young people embarking on their journeys of discovery in the summer of 1969 found themselves dancing in the mud at Woodstock. Although my own quest occurred at that very time, I was not present at that famous musical festival but chose an entirely different direction.

I'll be writing about that journey over the next several weeks. As always, I'll stick to the truth as much as my faulty memory can recall it. The characters you'll read about are or were real people, although I may change their names. And please feel free to comment about your own experiences and share them with other readers of this blog.

I'll give this story a curiously cryptic title: "How to Break an Ankle." It starts tomorrow.

Today's gripe

Last night, on the way home from work, I passed the following dead animals lying by the side of the road: a deer, a raccoon, an opossum, a ground hog, a skunk and two cats. This in a distance of less than 8 miles.

These must be really hard times, not just for humans, but for animals. Why else would they be throwing themselves in the paths of cars in such numbers?

I'm going to start an office pool, the winner of which will correctly predict the day this month (or next) when PennDOT gets around to sending the carcass collector to Park Avenue to remove the deer just across from the cemetery entrance and right up the street from the high school. You can't miss it. It's bloated, its legs are sticking up in the air, and it's starting to leak.

Complaints and comments

Where have all the whiners gone? Don't get me wrong; I don't really miss them. but I am curious as to why readers of this newspaper and this blog who normally devote a good bit of their leisure time to bitching and moaning about how we write and edit have suddenly gone quiet.

Maybe they've all gone off to campaign rallies to either boo Sarah Palin at hockey games or to plead with John McCain to win so that their unborn babies do not have to grow up in an Obama administration.

Of course, it's possible that I've simply scared them away from this blog with my boring stories that never seem to end. Oh, by the way, I'm starting another one tomorrow. Anyone have a problem with that?

Chasing Utopia

(Walking paths at EVI meander through the village.)

While staying at the Wild Goose, I leafed through "Eco Village at Ithaca: Pioneering a Sustainable Culture," written by one of the community's founders, Liz Walker, in 2005.

It took about three years for an idea to develop to the point when land was purchased and construction began. In 1994, this mission statement was adopted:
"The ultimate goal of EVI is nothing less than to design the human habitat. We are creating a model community of some 500 residents that will exemplify sustainable systems of living - systems that are not only practical in themselves but replicable in others. The completed project will demonstrate the feasibility of a design that meets basic human needs such as shelter and food production, energy, social interaction, work and recreation while preserving natural ecosystems."

Walker's book describes the community's innovative efforts in energy production and use, conflict resolution and economics (dollars are stretched by sharing resources). But she also writes about the problems common in all of society - problems that even the smartest, best-educated and well-meaning people cannot avoid. In any community, there are those who must have their own way and are intolerant of others' opinions. She cites a rift over whether the community dining hall should offer some meals containing meat, and how that led to three families pulling up stakes, despite tireless efforts to reach compromise. And then there are those who just won't turn down the volume on their stereos.

In the little neighborhood where the Wild Goose is, the closely packed houses all face toward a common area with footpaths. All kitchens face this area so that it's possible to see who's home and what the kids are doing and with whom they're playing. This closeness has its advantages, and it's easy to imagine how it might drive someone crazy.

There may be no Utopia, no perfect way for humans to live together. But that doesn't mean that people should stop chasing it.

Discovering Eco Village

(The dining hall at Eco Village of Ithaca)

At about this time last year, we were planning a trip to Ithaca. Problem was, it was Parents Weekend, or something like that, at Cornell University, and every single hotel room in town was booked. Except for one. That was at the Wild Goose Bed & Breakfast.

It seemed too good to be true. Sure, it was a couple of miles from town, but it was less than half the price of the Holiday Inn. We pulled off Route 79 onto a dusty dirt road called Rachel Carson Way that wound through fields of an organic farm. The Wild Goose was in Eco Village, an "experimental community" that we saw as a cluster of modern, angular homes. You can't just drive up to the houses; you have to park and then haul your bags on foot into the village, which is for pedestrians only. (We found out later that there are carts lying around that anyone can use to haul stuff.)

No one was home at the Wild Goose, but the door was open. Eco Village is a place where people don't normally lock their doors. We followed Post-it notes up to our room, which was small but cozy. We had to share a bath with another room, but for the price, it could hardly be beat.

Later, we met the innkeeper, Gail Carson, a former opera singer, who filled us in on Eco Village, how it got started, and who the people are that live there. Although they do have a dining hall and take turns cooking meals for the community (mostly vegetarian, $6 a person), Gail assured us that the folks did not go out in the fields, hold hands and chant at the moon, or do any other such things we might associate with the communes of the 1960s. These are pretty normal people who just happen to like living in a close community of caring neighbors.

It is not, however, Utopia. That's because it is inhabited by human beings, who make everything difficult.

Gorging on nature

Please excuse my disappearance. We thought we might get away from all the election B.S. and the crashing market for a few days by going up to the Finger Lakes to visit our son and his girlfriend. Of course, there is no escaping politics.

For a couple of hours, though, we did find some relief in one of Ithaca's fabulous gorges. This photo was taken along the hiking trail at Buttermilk Falls State Park. As in all the gorges in Ithaca and Watkins Glen, the scenery is spectacular and the hike invigorating. And it's all free.

As we did last year, we spent our nights at Eco Village, and experimental community high on a hill overlooking the town. It's sort of a commune that grew up and became sensible. More about it later.

We've got gas

One thing that Sarah Palin mentioned last night in the debate was particularly interesting: "And we're building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline, which is North America's largest and most expensive infrastructure project ever to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets."

The part about "we're building" is a bit of a stretch. It's still more of a pipe dream, if you will. It's been in the planning stages for many years, and it looks as if construction won't be started - if at all - until sometime in 2010. The plan is to build a pipeline all the way from Prudhoe Bay to Chicago and pump 4 billion cubic feet of natural gas to the U.S. each day. This would provide 7 percent of the nation's gas supply. When The New York Times wrote about this last April, (click to read),, the cost was estimated at $30 billion. That's inflation for ya.

Now what I'm thinking is this: Allegheny Power couldn't even manage to build a power line across Washington and Greene counties for all the heat they got, so how are the oil companies going to talk everyone from the friggin' North Pole to Chicago, Ill., to let this pipeline cross their backyards?

And here's an interesting observation: Gas wells are being drilled all over this area into what is called the Marcellus Shale. There's about 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas locked in the shale down there, more than half of it in Pennsylvania. Current U.S. demand for gas is 23 trillion cubic feet per year. Granted, the gas in the Marcellus Shale is a little harder to extract than the gas in Alaska, but criminy! You don't have to spend $40 billion to pipe it; the pipelines are already here.

I can see why Palin prefers the Alaska gas option: It will bring Alaskans $3 billion a year. But if the Marcellus Shale turns out to be as productive as some folks think, that pipe will remain a dream.

Today's gripe

The renegade Republicans who voted against the bailout measure in the House earlier this week had a couple of good points. I think their idea of making banks purchase insurance on their bad loans instead of having the government purchase them had some merit. I think their objection to buying those securities at some imaginary value rather than the present market price was right on. But some of those renegades, including our own Congressman Tim Murphy, voted against the measure for preposterous reasons. Here's what Murphy said in a press release immediately after the vote:

"... Instead of moving the bad debt around we should be creating a means by which to bring actual money into the markets. If we drilled on the outer continental shelf and went for the Colorado shale oil, if we looked to the north slope of Alaska we would yield trillions in federal income. Trillions of dollars into our economy. Real money. But we continue to keep it all off limits."

I guess Murphy has it in mind to nationalize all the oil companies, because how else would we yield "trillions of dollars in federal income." Even if our government were to subsidize all this new drilling (you think about a $700 billion incentive to the oil companies would work?), it would take many years for the oil to reach the market, and if the oil companies were not nationalized, they would simply be selling it on the world spot market. How would that free up credit in this country?

All we have to do to get out of this mess is to drill for more oil? Hey, I guess that kid you were going to send to college can wait 8 or 10 years until he can get his college loans. Hope your car last that long, too.

Whine, whine, whine

An angry reader phoned the office the other day, demanding to speak to "somebody important." Not that I am all that important, but I wasn't around my desk at the time, so the call went to another editor, who listened patiently but was unable to get a word in before the caller hung up.

Basically, the complaint was about the front-page article on Monday about Sarah Palin and the favors she had received as mayor of her Alaskan town. We are out to get her and never write anything positive about her, the editor was told.

The gifts and favors Palin received as mayor were typical of small-town politics - perhaps sleazy, but hardly criminal. These ethical lapses were no big deal at the time they happened and would be no big deal now, and the article by the Associated Press would never have been written, if it were not for Palin's own claim to be the champion of ethics in Alaskan politics. The Republican campaign advertisements have gone even farther, claiming she "saved" Alaska from oil company villains and crooked politicians.

The press has an obligation to hold all politicians to their word, and just because she is a woman and a highly popular candidate does not excuse her from scrutiny.

Little Dorrit

It was a classic summer for me, starting it with "War and Peace" and ending it with another hefty tome, Charles Dickens' "Little Dorrit," weighing in at a little over 800 pages.

Written in serial form from 1855 to 1857, "Little Dorrit" is one of Dickens' later - but less well-known - novels. The reason might be that as far as the story line goes, it's a bit of a turkey. The story is weak; some of the characters are two-dimensional; and the climax is a confusing jumble of loose ends hastily tied. "Little Dorrit" was not, however, the end of Dickens' great work; two of his best novels, "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Great Expectations," would follow.

"Little Dorrit," like "Bleak House," is satire and a scathing assault on British life. Government bureaucracy, particularly the patent office, is targeted, along with the ruling class and its obsession for "society" and financial speculation. Characters consist of a handful of decent, practical and honest people surrounded by a crowd of greedy, self-important, vain, pretentious, cold-hearted villains.

As weak as the story may be, Dickens' language is strong: at times hilarious, often sarcastic, and elevated by brilliant description.

What makes "Little Dorrit" worth reading today - more than 150 years after it was written - is its exposure of timeless human weakness. The social attitudes are eerily familiar, and the characters are uncannily similar to the people we know and deal with every day.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 20

Our journey swept through southern India like the hands of a clock: The early hours were spent on the tropical eastern coast, the later hours following the Cauvery River north through the ever-increasing heat. At midnight we were in Bangalore, now the epicenter of India's emerging economy and middle class, and finally in the wee hours back in Madras under a broiling February sun. "This is not bad," our Indian friends told us of the weather. "In April, it is damn hot. You could not live here. Surely, you would die." I didn't argue.

We were tired and irritable, having spent five weeks hopping from one Rotary club to another throughout Tamil Nadu, visiting the schools, clinics and institutions these clubs support because their government does not. Some of what we saw had a lasting effect on us – images like the serious faces of hundreds of young girls at an orphanage near Hosur (above). Later, I would become a Rotarian myself, and more than a decade after my visit there, our club would send a container with 14 tons of books to schools and libraries in Chennai and the coastal area hit by the tsunami.

You may wonder how I have managed to recall, with such an imperfect memory, direct quotations for this story after so long a time. Upon my return, I wrote a book about my experience in India and called it "Driving to the Center of the Universe." Much of what I wrote in this story was extracted from the book, which was never published. No one wanted to publish my book because it... well... stinks. You've read the best parts; the other 100,000 words aren't worth anyone's time. If I were reviewing this book, I would pan it mercilessly. Reading over passages now – long, whining complaints about travel inconveniences – I am appalled and keep asking myself, "Who cares!?"

Writing the book, howver, helped me sort out the mountain of information that had been crammed into my head. I can see that in this passage from its conclusion:

"...My mind flickered with images: of ravens and painted cows, dark eyes, white teeth and long braids, bindis and beedis, toe rings and nose jewelry, the aroma of curry and masala and of rotting vegetables and smoldering straw and sewage, the curling smoke of incense and the brilliance of winter light reflected in marble.
"We had journeyed to the Center of the Universe, and now we were headed back to the fringes on the edge of blackness. Or were we? I had stood on that spot in that ancient place in Chidambaram and considered the deities, and nothing had happened. It wasn't the place to stand, I realized, it was the act of standing. The Center of the Universe is, after all, not a place but a viewpoint, and I would always be there."

THE END

Today's gripe

If you're wondering where the city cops are when you need them the most, why they are not out pounding the beat in neighborhoods crippled by crime, arresting drug dealers and copper thieves and prostitutes more often, take a look at the Police Beat in today's paper.

Seems a couple of middle school students at Washington Park School got into a fight and - Heavens! If you can imagine it! - struck each other. The police were called to break it up and charge the kids with disorderly conduct.

It used to be that the teachers would break up fights and send the kids to the principal's office, where they would get a dressing-down before their parents were called in. Punishment was decided, by the school and by the parents. The kids were made to shake hands and told that if they persisted in any more shenanigans, they'd be shipped off to Reform School.
Now, this is a problem for the police and the court system to handle.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 19

(One of many couples married at a mass wedding sponsored by the Rotary Club of Kumbakonam, India, in January 1995)

Nothing is quite so appalling to Western – particularly American - social sensibilities as the arranged marriage. And in India, the majority of marriages are arranged. Extraordinary matches are referred to as "love marriages."

I spent most nights in the homes of Rotarians, and all of my host couples had been wed by the arrangement of their parents. I talked with Madan and Monisha about theirs.
"Our parents arranged our marriage, perhaps when we were babies," Monisha said.
"You see, we are cousins," said Madan. "My mother and Monisha's mother are sisters."
No wonder they looked so much alike. "So you knew each other all your lives," I said.
"No, not at all," said Monisha. "We had never met. Our parents told us about the arrangement and we met, and we liked each other."

"We knew that we wanted to marry, but we were very young, and we wanted to wait awhile," Madan said. "I told my father, 'Yes, I will marry Monisha someday,' and he became very alarmed and said that we must marry right then. I said, 'we can't marry now, we're not old enough and we want to do some other things first,' and he said that was impossible, that all the arrangements for the wedding had been made and to wait would bring dishonor on the family."
"So, we had no choice," added Monisha. "We were just 20 years old and 19, too young, and we could not understand what all the rush was about. I asked my mother why, and she said, 'Why wait?' I was very upset, but now it's OK. Our marriage is good, and it has worked out. Still, I wish we could have waited.

In Hosur, I met Chitra, a tall, elegant and somewhat sullen 20-year-old. I asked her if her parents would arrange a marriage for her. "Yes, of course, thank God," she answered. I was a little shocked at her reasons. She said that it was stupid for young people to marry based solely on their sexual attraction to each other, that this was what animals do. She abhorred the idea of dating, all the trouble and hassle to remain attractive all the time, the anxiety and desperation of trying to find someone to love.
Chitra said it was so much easier for her to relax and enjoy her youth, leaving the work and worry of finding a husband to her parents. And she trusted her parents implicitly to find a good match, a sensible man who could provide for her and whom she could grow to love.

At this time, in 1995, I had a son in college and a daughter in high school. The more I heard about arranged marriages, the more I liked the idea. Somehow, though, I didn't think "Relax, Daughter, and let me find you a good husband" would go over to well at home.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 18

We have squirrels and chipmunks. India has monkeys. Lots of them.

I snapped this photo on the ascent from Salem to Yercaud, a mountain station. Our driver pulled off the side of the road for a moment for us to enjoy the view, but when the monkeys approached, he took off. "They can be very forward," he warned.
The acceleration and the braking, the squealing of the tires as we rounded countless switchbacks on our way up the mountain made me sick. We stopped to rest and walk through a forest; I fell behind the others, leaned against a tree and rejected my breakfast.

I was pale and sweating by the time we arrived at a coffee plantation to meet the owners and share lunch with them. I declined lunch but took in the conversation, which was about leopards and bison, and monkeys.
"They are such awful pests, said Dayalan, the proprietor. "We don't want any monkeys here. They can destroy an entire coffee crop. We shoot them, you know. And when we do, we hang them from their tails in the trees. That seems to scare most of them away."

We spent that night and another at the top of the mountain in a hotel on many levels descending a cliff. "Oh, look!" exclaimed Jill one of our team members. "Way down there. See them walking? It's a family of monkeys! I have a bag of peanuts in my room. Let's throw them down to them.
Bad idea.

The peanuts peppered the rocks below. The monkeys stopped in their tracks and scanned the hotel. They began to race up the cliff, not bothering with the scattered nuts but aiming for the source. Primates began to appear everywhere below us. There had been just five or six monkeys in the family group, and now there were 20 or 30 of them in a semicircle just below the hotel, intently eyeing us. Another handful of peanuts was thrown, and within a minute no less than 60, perhaps 80 monkeys were clambering up the lowest levels of the hotel, jumping on roofs, flying from roof to roof. One thumped on the roof above us, then swung down and perched on the railing of our balcony. Then another, and we retreated to our rooms and slammed the doors. They studied us through the windows of our rooms with businesslike, expressionless faces.
When they lost interest and moved on, we crept from our rooms back to the balcony. On a path below us, a security guard nodded to us and shook his head. "Now you silly people have learned your lesson!" he yelled to us.
"Don't leave your doors or windows open," someone else warned us later. "They will go into your rooms and take your things. They will come right up to you and snatch the eyeglasses right off your face and run away with them."

Dancing With Shiva, Part 17

Had I not been to the temple in Chidambaram, and had not done my little mental dance with Shiva, I might have elevated my disgust of the child labor I witnessed to the level of conviction, citing it as another example of how backward India is. But I was newly aware that the world is far more complicated than I had imagined, and that we enlightened Westerners do not have the exclusive franchise to ALL THAT IS RIGHT.
I pumped our Rotarian guide for information.

"It is not lawful to employ children in India," he said. "The factory manager knows this. If the government inspectors come, they will shut him down. But you see, the village you have just visited, it is all a factory, and all around here are villages just like this one."

The odds of being inspected were slim and worth the gamble, he said. Some of the factories were family operations, in which parents and children all work together. But in most cases, parents essentially sell their children into servitude. They receive a lump sum from the factory manager in exchange for "apprenticeship" of the children, who do not attend school and work eight hours a day, six days a week. Some receive clothing and food, but for others, knowledge of the trade is the only compensation.

I asked our guide how people could tolerate such exploitation. He patiently explained that this was not how the arrangement was viewed in India.
"The factory manager is being a very good man. He is having much respect and is giving to the parents money, and to the child he is giving a trade. With no factories, the life of the people would be terrible, terrible."
The cottage industries would not exist at all if managers were compelled to pay workers the wages and benefits mandated by the government, he said. There would be no textile industry around Salem, and 100,000 people would face starvation. "You see, the people here are having much happiness."

This was difficult to absorb: children deprived of their childhood, forced into factory labor, doomed to illiteracy – and these were the lucky ones. These were the kids who would not starve, who would know a trade, who would get jobs in the big textile mills, who might earn enough money so that their own children might attend school. It was what they hoped, anyway, and hope was in no short supply in the village I visited.

It is easy for us, the pampered and overfed, to condemn the Third World for its exploitation of workers, to call for boycotts, to insist that these poor laborers would be much better off without their jobs. We cannot imagine a life in which survival is a daily walk on the wire, with no net to catch us if we fall.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 16

Our cars entered the small factory village just after noon, running a slalom course through granite pillars used by the villagers for the manufacture of saris. We crept slowly through the back streets of stone and dust, barely wider than our vehicles, while pedestrians flattened themselves against the walls of houses and ducked into convenient doorways to allow us to pass. We stopped in front of what appeared to be an ordinary residence, no different than any other house on the street, a kolam design still visible before the threshold.

We walked into a room packed with machinery roaring and clattering at such a loud level that our guide had to shout in our faces to be heard.
"MACHINE-WOVEN COTTON!" he screamed. When our eyes adjusted to the dimness, we saw scores of spools spinning like tops, their thread sucked down into the rapid and violent machinery. The room was hot, the air thick with lint and the odor of sweat and lubricating oil. We drifted through the room and into a courtyard, onto which opened several other buildings with clattering machinery. From this place we were able to watch the factory workers who fed the machines, who breathed the lint and secreted the perspiration. Most of them were children, some as young as 8 or 9 years old.

We had heard about child labor in India, of course; everybody had. Hollywood celebrities had been leading protests against companies that purchased clothing made in just this sort of factory. Here it was. I was dumbfounded but snapped photos rapidly, automatically. I expected the factory manager to object or become defensive, but instead he seemed honored that we showed so much interest. I kneeled on the concrete floor to photograph a child who was gathering empty and nearly empty spools from the ground and placing them in a basket. She squatted barefoot in a threadbare dress, her tiny hands snatching, moving as fast as sparrows. She chattered in Tamil to a boy of about 11 who tended a machine a few feet away. She ignored us. This was a Saturday afternoon, the end of a 48-hour workweek, and this little girl's mind was occupied with other thoughts. Her hair was loose and wild, brown and matted with the dirt of a childhood wasted in this hellish existence. Her arms were as thin as Cuban cigars.

In another room, three girls pretended to work diligently, all the while stealing glances at us, whispering and poking each other with their bony elbows. A boy of about 9 had wandered away from his post to stare at us. Presently, the boy's supervisor – a kid just a few years older – came up behind the child and slapped him on the side of the head and ordered him back to work, which did not even rate a pause in the factory manager's screamed explanations of the workings of the mill.

Agitated by all I had seen, I wandered out of the building and toward a square in the center of the village where the cars had been parked. I sat by a fountain, tucking under my thighs my hands, shaking with rage from this Dickensian experience. All around were children – the ones still not working in the village's factories – laughing and playing. The adults who crossed the square seemed as happy as the kids. Clearly, the town was in a party mood. As I looked around more carefully, I became more confused. How could people so impoverished, exploited and doomed to lives of hopeless struggle behave like families at Disney World, like chipper salesmen at a golf outing?

Dancing With Shiva, Part 15

Most of us have a tendency to be self-centered, to think of the moon and the sun and the stars revolving around the patch of earth on which we stand. Some boast about living in the greatest city, or in the greatest country, all other countries being mere satellites.

About 35 years ago, some sarcastic vandal climbed up one of the big green exit signs along Interstate 70 just south of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and spray-painted "CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE" beneath the words, "Arnold City." I'd smile every time I passed this graffiti for 15 years until the sign was replaced.

Chidambaram's claim, however, produced no chuckle. You would not find it so laughable, either, if you were plopped down on the other side of Earth in a strange and ancient temple; if you looked upon the figure of the dancing Shiva, felt taken in by his many arms, entranced by his casual beauty; if you touched his bronze skin, the color of the ocean under an overcast sky, made smooth by so many millions of caresses over a thousand years; if you felt its perpetual warmth for a thousand years of hot Indian days; if you sensed your own self-destructive tendencies in your mental dance with the sensuous Destroyer.

I said that I left that temple wiser than when I'd entered it. I went in thinking that I was living in the most important time, as part of the most advanced and enlightened civilization, living in the greatest country and under the greatest government the world has ever known. I came out thinking how old human history really is, and how many enlightened civilizations have risen and fallen, and how much power has been used and abused to subjugate people, how vast is the universe and how far from its center we must be, and how insignificant our existence is in the great march of Time.

I had walked in as a snob, touring a land I thought of as pitiful and backward. When I walked out, I would not see India that way again, nor view the world that way. I did not realize that at the time. It would not hit me until a few days later.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 14

The next morning, Annamalai took us to the Nataraja Temple, a 40-acre complex that dates to the fifth century, although most of the structures were built between the 12th and 16th centuries. According to Hindu tradition, this Chidambaram site is the center of the universe.
From the Footloose Guide:
"Chidambaram takes its name from two words – 'chid,' which, according to Saiva philosophy, means thinking consciousness, and 'ambaram,' the expanse of the skies or heaven. Thus the city believes itself to be the center from which all human knowledge expands."

After entering the east gate of this massive temple, Annamalai led us to a place where a small crowd had gathered in front of a stone building housing a statue of Shiva, the god often depicted dancing in a ring of fire on the back of a baby devil. Annamalai pushed people aside and entered the building and emerged with an aged holy man, whom we were asked to gather around. The priest held a stone dish, black and greasy and sprinkled with flower petals, and on the dish burned a pot of scented oil between piles of ash and scarlet powder. As instructed, I dipped my fingers into the ash and drew a line down the middle of my forehead to the bridge of my nose, then dabbed a bit of scarlet between my eyes. The ash is a reminder of our mortality, of what our bodies will soon become. The red signifies the immortality of God. (Contrary to popular belief, Hinduism is not a polytheistic religion. My Hindu friends insist that the "gods" that are worshiped are simply aspects of the one Creator.)

Annamalai took me by the elbow and led me to an area with a smooth marble floor inlaid with a star about four feet across.
"Stand here and look this way, you will see Shiva," Annamalai said. "Turn this way, you see Rama. Turn around again, you see Vishnu. This, this spot… center of universe!"

I stood on the star and waited for some sensation, for an epiphany, but there was nothing. As others took their turn on the star, I imagined how the architects of this temple felt when they raised these enormous columns and embedded this star. Here was Vishnu, the preserver. Here was Shiva, the destroyer. Preservation and destruction meeting at this point, in this place, which at the time it was built must have seemed to everyone in this part of the world the ultimate in human achievement.

Preservation and destruction meeting at one point. How strange that the center of the universe should be here, in the middle of the two. Strange for me, anyway, not being Hindu, not raised to think of all things around me, animate and inanimate, as being the fabric of my spirituality.

This temple visit did not make a Hindu of me, nor did it make me any less of a skeptic of religion in general. But I was a wiser person when I left it than when I entered, and I can credit the figure dancing in a ring of fire for that.

Comments and complaints

I received a call from a woman the other day who was concerned about the tone of comments on some of our blogs, particularly on Mike Kovak's "Varsity Letters." She noted that although some of the comments might not be obscene, they were mean-spirited and hurtful to the young athletes about which these comments are directed. She suggested that we be more discriminating in the comments we permit to be posted.

We do not edit comments posted on our blogs, but we do toss ones that are obscene, libelous or contain outrageously and obviously false information. It is certainly discouraging to read some of the comments that meet the guidelines yet seethe with anger and hatred, but, unfortunately, these are reflections of the feelings of many people in our community, and we do ourselves no good by ignoring them.

There are, on average, 40,000 individuals who visit O-R Online each week. A few of them spend a great deal of time at our site, as evidenced by the blog posts. The caller and I agreed that some of these people apparently have way to much free time on their hands. And for some of them, anonymity offers them the courage they need to choose enemies and lash out at them viciously.

I yearn for a more elevated level of discussion, but we can't reach that level by restricting the forum we have created to only the genteel. What guides us here at the O-R are the words of Thomas Jefferson, spoken during his first inaugural address in 1801, in a plea for civility among warring political factions and used as the slogan of this newspaper for many years:

"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

Whine, whine, whine

From our Reader Survey, mailed back with subscription renewals...

C: Please!! Explain to Park Burrougs (sic) that the most important item in USA is the economy. Its his and the papers duty to publish daily stock market results. Of course he will probaly (sic) just hang up on you. - K.M.

A: Please!! This is the 21st century, and if any paper at all had a duty to publish complete stock market results, it would be the Wall Street Journal, but even that paper doesn't. Fact is that stock listings are available instantly to anyone on the Internet, and these days, very few people don't have that access. Stock listings have gone the was of hospital admissions and the Radio Log.

We dropped complete Sunday listings more than 10 years ago and hardly heard a whimper, because by Sunday morning, Friday's closing prices were old, old news. We still publish a daily market report with selected listings from the New York, American and Nasdaq exchanges, and that's more than you'll find in, say, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

If anyone were to call to complain about our stock listings, I would tell him this and not hang up on him. But the fact is I don't get calls about this because anyone who needs to follow the market closely has a much better way to do it than a newspaper.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 13

We came into Chidambaram at night, rain coming down hard, our taxi sliding through the muddy streets. In this dark city, images flashed in the glare of headlights like pieces of dreams: running limbs, the startled stare of a cow, bundles balanced on heads, the obscure shapes of goats rooting through garbage. We had been lulled into a false sense of familiarity during our stay in Pondicherry. Now, it seemed, we were in a different world.

Our Rotarian hosts met us at the Hotel Saradaram. All were men, dressed in dhotis – long, white cotton fabric wrapped around their waists like towels – and shirts with long, squared-off tails that ended in the middle of their thighs. Their skin was dark and most had gray ash smeared on their foreheads – evidence of their recent visit to the temple. Their English was rapid and incomprehensible. They divided us and took us away to their homes.

One of the men took me by my wrist and one of my team member's by the other and led us out of the hotel and into an unlit parking area, where we stumbled through ankle-deep muddy puddles. I thought, what a silly idea to be wearing socks.
It was hard to make out anything of Chidambaram from the car at night. I had read in one guidebook that it was a city of about 75,000 people. But a map and publication of the state of Tamil Nadu estimated the population at 200,000. I asked my host, Chinna Annamalai, hunched over the steering wheel and squinting at the crowded road ahead, which figure was correct.
"No one knows," Annamalai answered. We can only guess. We are having too many people here, this is what I know."

I think that's what he said, anyway, because I could understand barely half of his dialect of English. Our ride was punctuated by the jolt of the wheels of his Ambassador sedan falling into deep potholes.
"These roads… disgrace… fools in government… lying bastards!" I understood.
Annamalai's house was so close to the street that we stepped right from the car onto the threshold. As we did so, we were greeted by a trio of fawning servants – young men who had gone goofy at the sight of foreigners. Annamalai jumped from the car and ordered the servants to get the bags and take them upstairs. Then he commanded us through the door and ordered us to sit in chairs in an area of the house separated from the rest of it by folding screens.
"Rest!" he ordered, before flying up the steps to scold the servants for their clumsiness. Then he came flying down the steps. "So. Relax!" he demanded, then proceeded toward the kitchen, where we could hear him barking orders over the clatter of pots and pans and the chattering of female voices.

We sat erect in our chairs. Presently. We heard a commotion in the street: excited children running and laughing, music, the banging of drums and the blaring of horns, distant but coming closer. We stepped out the door and peered down the road. Annamalai appeared behind us and explained: "This is a god… bringing… the street. This is happening only once a year… this night… holy people… pulling a god through all the streets of the town."

Bare-chested priests with painted faces beat skin drums and blew long thin, brass horns, performing what seemed like insane, free-form jazz. Behind them, a pair of bullocks pulled a float, a cart strung with electric bulbs, festooned with flowers and candles, and a great, colorful, gaudy display surrounding a small black idol.
The procession stopped directly in front of us, and a man who looked to be the head priest approached us and placed flower garlands around my neck, all the time wailing some incantation. A crowd had gathered, how large I could not tell. They pushed a jostled, and pressed closer and closer, maneuvering for a closer look at the pale foreigners with their trousers rolled up to their knees, exposing their long feet and legs as white as naked ducks.

Whoops!

My apologies to all who watched the video previously posted on Part 12 of Dancing With Shiva. I grabbed the wrong video this morning from YouTube - one that had been doctored with obscene subtitles.
I've since posted the CORRECT, unadulterated version.

- Your humbled G.O.E.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 12

We had come to India just in time to witness its shift from a Third World country to an emerging economic force, and at just that moment (at least it seemed to us) when ancient Indian customs and modern Western influences were in curious and perfect balance. Take the music, for example.




Ancient rhythms and traditional instruments blended with the lyrics and social influence of Europe and America in so many popular hits on radio and in Bollywood films.
One night in Pondicherry, attending a Rotary celebration, we watched as Indian women in saris abandoned dignity an modesty to dance with each other to the pounding beat of "Take It Easy Policy," a song from the hit movie "Khadalan," blaring from loudspeakers all around us.
Over that music and the laughter and the clatter of plates in the buffet line, I talked with Asha about raising children in general, and 14-year-old girls, in particular.

"She is not wanting to do as she is told, she will not dress properly, she thinks she knows everything, and then there is this Michael Jackson," Asha said.
"Michael Jackson?" I asked in disbelief. I told her I thought he was rather passé.
Asha was animated, her gold bracelets jangling, and she spoke with exaggerated outrage that was amusing and entertaining. "Here is this awful person who goes to bed with children and has all these surgeries to change his face and make himself white, and my daughter worships him as some kind of god."
Asha's carriage was so casual and sophisticated, and her attitudes seemed so modern and Western to me, but at the same time I realized that she was equally devoted Indian culture and tradition, and that she was most probably would arrange the marriages of her children.

Donna Vesely, our team leader, stayed in Asha's house, and a few years later, Asha's daughter became a Rotary exchange student and lived with Donna. She did not lose her rebellious streak in the intervening years, going home to Pondicherry after the school year with a tattoo.
But Asha would never have an opportunity to arrange the girl's marriage, because one night, on that terrible stretch of Highway 45 between Pondicherry and Madras, her daughter lost her life.

Comments and suggestions

C: What an awesome display of flags today along Jefferson Ave on Wash Hi property. What made it even more enjoyable was the ability to actually look closely at them (while sitting in the daily traffic jam) and reflect on what they were representing. This traffic jam going to and from work has been a major hassle but today the time was spent in remembrance of those whose lives were taken. Thanks to whoever was responsible for the flags. I hope you got some pictures of it. - P.F.

A: One photo was featured on our home page today and another is our front-page photo tomorrow.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 11

Her name was Mirra Alfassa, who was born in France in 1878 and came to Pondicherry in 1914 as a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. She became his closest associate, collaborating with him in his writings and taking over administration of the ashram from him in 1926.
Aurobindo died in 1950, but the ashram continued to thrive and grow under the leadership of The Mother, which she began to be called.
Alfassa died in 1973, setting off a long power struggle among her followers that became ugly and violent. But the ashram continues to be a dominating presence in the former French enclave.

When I visited in 1995, the ashram owned about 400 buildings in Pondicherry and was the area's major employer, operating its own farms, construction companies, oil and floor mills, a foundry, sheet-metal works, laundries, schools, hospitals, printers, paper-makers, and a whole range of arts and handicrafts manufacturing. All this economic activity makes the ashram a powerful force in the community, dictating pretty much how things will run, and not everyone in Pondicherry is happy about that.

As big as the operation is in the city, there's also a rural extension called Auroville. It was The Mother's dream that Auroville would become a community of 50,000 people from all over the world who would live and work in peace and harmony.
Auroville opened to grand ceremony in 1968, with representatives of 121 nations each depositing a sample of their earth in an urn that forms the centerpiece of the Matri Mandar monument (in photo above, shown during a long pause in its construction).
Melissa Shales wrote in the "Footloose Guide to Southern India":
"Money and volunteers poured in and construction began in earnest, but it all came to a grinding halt when The Mother died only five years later. Immediately, a power struggle blew up between the Sri Aurobindo Society (who run the ashram) and the community at Auroville, who wished to run their own affairs. Over the next 15 years, it literally became a battleground, the violence becoming so bad that police had to be called twice. Everyone lobbied furiously, claims of corruption, free sex and drug taking were bandied back and forth and local and national governments became involved. When in 1976, the Society tried to starve out the Aurovillians by withholding funds, France, Germany and the United States were drawn into the dispute, providing food parcels to stop their citizens from starving. In 1980, central government took charge and even nationalized the project… Things have now calmed down, and construction has begun again, but no one has yet managed to reach a settlement and it is all a far cry from The Mother's original concept."

When we visited Auroville in 1995, about 750 people lived there, most working on research projects for health, education and agriculture. Farming supplied the community with most of its food, and scattered through and around Auroville were Tamil villages hosting cottage industries and craftsmen.
Now, there are about 1,700 residents of Auroville, and the giant sphere is complete and a gleaming gold, but a deep division remains between the followers of the ashram and the Aurovillians, evidenced by recent charges and an investigation of child sexual abuse at the experimental community.

Peace and harmony are indeed elusive.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 10

A bicycle nearly rammed the side of the car in which I was a passenger, and the driver, Ajay Virmani, my host in Pondicherry, chuckled at my flinching reaction and beeped his horn, almost as an afterthought.
"Aren't there any stop signs here?" I asked. "These four-way intersection – no lights, no signs, how do you keep from being killed?"
"We simply sound the horn and keep watch. And we trust in God."

We entered a wide boulevard that dead-ended at the ocean. Ajay, a thin, suave Bengali bachelor in his early 40s, parked the car on the sidewalk in front of the Rendezvous restaurant. There were no other cars on the street for blocks. I wondered about parking on the sidewalk when the entire street was free. "We just park anywhere," Ajay said. "There is never any problem."
We ate sausages and bacon and omelets with mushrooms and French fries and drank strong, black coffee – not common fare in southern India – and then he took me to his house, where I'd be staying for the better part of a week.

My room was on the third floor, as high as just about any building in Pondy, and too high for the lazy mosquitoes to reach, Ajay told me. It was a bare room – just a mattress on the floor and a couple of lawn chairs, and an enormous framed photo of an old woman. Coming up from the first floor, I had noticed photos all through the house of the same woman and some guru. I had asked Ajay who she was; he said she was the mother. "Your mother?" I asked. "No, THE Mother," he responded.

When he left me to rest and he to return to his office, I opened my Footloose guidebook to research the old woman and the guru. Pondicherry is home to a famous ashram, and all those posters around Ajay's house had something to do with this quasi-religion.
"Ashram" means "retreat," and there are many in India. The one in Pondicherry was founded by Sri Aurobindo, the seer, poet and Indian nationalist who developed a philosophy of salvation through spiritual evolution. Born Aurobindo Ghose in Calcutta in 1872, he was educated in Christian schools and at Cambridge, but returned to India in 1892 and became interested in native culture, yoga, Indian languages and classical Sanskrit.
Aurobindo bcame a revolutionary, bent on helping India free itself from the British raj. The British jailed him in 1908, and two years later he fled to refuge in French-held Pondicherry. He devoted the rest of his life there to his philosophy, founding an ashram that would be a cultural center for spiritual development, attracting people from all over the world.

Aurobindo wrote volume after volume of nearly incomprehensible explanation of his philosophy, which eventually attracted throngs of hippies to the ashram, not for the logic of his thought, but for the romance. But long before the beaded and barefoot Westerners trooped into Pondy, someone else came to town who would change the ashram to something Aurobindo could never have conceived in his most far-out dreams: The Mother.

Dancing With Shiva, Part 9

A couple of months ago, I got a call from India. The caller wished to know if my company was interested in outsourcing any of its work to his company. I silently chuckled during his sales pitch, imagining how someone in India might write an account of, say, a North Franklin Township meeting for our newspaper.
I told the caller that I couldn't foresee any possibility of a working relationship, given the nature of our business (although a newspaper in California, the Pasadena Star-News, has done exactly that). I asked him from where he was calling.
"Pondicherry," was his answer.
"Ah, Pondy," I said. Tell me, is that restaurant, Rendezvous, still operating down by the sea?"
Taken aback by my familiarity with his city, the caller seemed at a loss for words, but he recovered and told me that Rendezvous was a place he frequented and enjoyed. "How do you know Pondy?" he asked.
I know it well enough for it to be my favorite place in all of India, I told him.

The British were not the only Europeans to colonize India. The French and Portuguese also claimed parts of it for themselves. Pondicherry was built by the French, who withdrew in 1954. It is laid out in a grid of wide streets. The architecture is European, the atmosphere tropically decadent.
The French government abandoned Pondy many years ago, but French culture proved to be more difficult to uproot than its bureaucracy. Pondicherry is actually a separate state with its own government, even though it is tiny and divided into three enclaves: the area of the city, another area about 100 kilometers down the coast, and another one on the west coast. French is still spoken in Pondy, and many Indian residents born before 1954 hold French citizenship.

Where Bombay and Madras were assaults on the senses, the blinding colors, the constant noise, the rub of human flesh in crowds, Pondicherry was everything different: muted pastels, sleepy, shaded and uncrowded streets beyond which could be heard the thump of waves upon sand. Here, too, we would uncover aspects of India other than the visually sensual: the entrepreneurial, the intellectual, the affluent and, more than anything, the spiritual.

Today's gripes

I haven't owned a motorcycle for something like 38 years now, and there's a reason for that: It's because of all the car-driving idiots who don't acknowledge the existence of motorcycles (or bicycles) on the road.

Several times a week in this kind of bike-riding weather, I witness the driver of a car turning left across traffic, oblivious to the motorcycle approaching, despite blazing headlamp and usually roaring engine. Quite a few area bikers have been injured, and some killed this year in precisely this manner.

The car-drivers who do this should lose their licenses, permanently.