December 5, 2000
G'day!
First, a sad note. This letter is composed off and on during the
year; when I wrote positively about my grandmother's status last year, it was
early in 1999. She passed away on December 26, 1999, at the
age of 98. The overwhelming family
consensus was that it was a relief, because my grandmother was not having fun
towards the end. She said repeatedly
during the latter part of 1999 that she wished her time would come and that she
wished she could jump off a bridge. She had,
in the last few months, become nearly blind, her hearing had been terrible for
years, and she had become pretty well confined to her wheelchair. She hated living this way and was, I know,
glad to make her exit. (At our family
gathering at Christmas, the adults draw names to determine whom they will give
presents the following year. She flatly
refused to draw one; she said "I won't be here next year.") We held a memorial service; her cremated
remains were buried at Fort
Snelling National
Cemetery. (She was the widow of a World War I vet--a
vet who never left the United States and who died in 1932, to her great
delight, leaving her to raise her daughter--my mother--alone, but very
successfully and quite happily.)
Our friend John Arlandson (who is one
of the group at our New Year's Eve dinners) wrote last year in his Christmas
letter that his beloved mother had died.
I was struck by what he had written about her because it also
characterized my grandmother so perfectly.
With appreciation of his graceful language, I quote him about my
grandmother: "She was a loving
mother, grandmother, and great lady. She
was . . . a laugher, a crier, a hugger, a fighter and survivor. She had an unwavering faith and believed
deeply in the power of prayer. She was
part of 'The Greatest Generation' which experienced and survived the Great
Depression and World War II. She
represented and lived the values and beliefs of the generation -- family, honor, sacrifice and duty. A generation that saved the world and then on
to rebuild its schools, universities, hospitals and museums. A generation most of which did not attend
college but created the most educated generation in the world. And they did it in a very modest way. We all owe them much."
I cannot say it better. Although her time had come, in her judgment,
we still miss her deeply.
* * *
The wit of Krystin Engstrand
(1): Krystin and I were driving on some
errand in mid-December, 1999, and she remarked idly that if she could not get
in to any other course in her next term in high school, she would enroll for
cheerleading. I simply glanced at her
and raised my eyebrows. She then said
that she had just said that to see what my reaction would be, and that
"cheerleaders, in my opinion, are ditzy blondes who can't do anything
better in life." I nodded my
assent, recognizing that cheerleaders the world over would take vigorous issue
with us and they would point out that cheerleading is a competitive event
itself. I am reminded of George Bernard
Shaw's line, however, paraphrased for this purpose: those who can, play; those who can't,
cheerlead. This seems to me to be true
especially in a day when the opportunities for girls and women to compete in
sport have expanded tremendously. So I
doubt Krystin will become a cheerleader.
The wit of Krystin Engstrand (2): One evening Pat and I were sitting in our
living room talking when Krystin wandered in with her backpack in hand. She looked at us and said in a serious tone,
“I have what every teenager’s parent dreads.”
We stared at her in some alarm and waited. She then whipped open her backpack and held
up a small volume. “The driver’s
education manual!” she exulted, grinning.
We burst out laughing. Nice line.
* * *
(Meals, 1) I reported last year that we were heading up
to the North Shore of Lake Superior for New Year's Eve, 1999. We did so.
The weekend was temperate, the company was delightful, and the world
continued to function despite the change to Y2K. Pat and Krystin skied all day January 1; Elliott
got on skis for 15 minutes and declared that he would never do so again. (He later agreed to take lessons.) The magnificent dinner played out about as I
had expected: our good friends the
Dixons, despite having asked the other 4 couples to take responsibility for the
year 2000 dinner, nonetheless ended up largely running the event. I cannot tell if that was because the rest of
us did not step forward to take enough responsibility or because they did not
believe the rest of us were capable of producing a dinner of sufficient
quality. It may have been both. As for the latter concern, in our case they
would have been absolutely right.
In any event, 17 of us had an
absolutely magnificent dinner (7 of our offspring were present, for the first
time) in a room about 10 X 12 in a rental unit in Lutsen, MN. A couple of us, reflecting on the meal later,
concluded that it may have been one of the best that we've had despite the
circumstances of transporting the food from the Twin Cities, preparing it in an
extremely modest kitchen, and eating it in rather cramped quarters. Another of the couples, moreover, brought up
wine and champagne glasses, table cloths, ribbon, candles, and silverware, so
it seemed like a most festive occasion.
I frankly can't imagine that we could have had a better time on the
millennial New Year's Eve.
(Meals, 2) The next night we went out for dinner at the
Naniboujou Lodge. We drove an hour to
within 20 miles of the Canadian border, on a 2-lane highway in a night that
was, as we drew close to our destination, pitch black along the Lake Superior shore and where there was no sign of
life. When we arrived, however, we drove
into a (snow covered) parking lot to behold a two-story building dating to the
1920s with a warm glow from the windows and cheery lights showing. Inside, the dining room was 30 X 80, with a
fire blazing in the largest stone fireplace in Minnesota (or so they claim,
anyway), a large Christmas tree covered with lights, a 20- or 25-foot ceiling,
and perhaps 50 people sitting at tables.
The ceiling and walls are covered with bright orange, red, turquoise,
and yellow Cree Indian designs, which creates an attractive ambience. The service was outstanding and the meal
(fixed price, fixed menu) was pretty good.
It was one of the more interesting dining experiences we had had--and we
felt as though we had driven to the edge of the planet to get to it. (What was extraordinary was that of the 7
adults at the dinner, 3 of us ran into people with whom we worked in the Twin
Cities--in this place way off the beaten path.) I recommend the Naniboujou for any of you
who might get to the far northeastern end of the North Shore. The rest of the year 2000, in terms of
dining, seemed to be unlikely to match the experiences with which we had begun
the year. (We were wrong.)
* * *
(Meals, 3) On the topic of dining, more or less, Pat and
I were invited to an interesting dinner party early in the year. It consisted of a group of people quite
different from the sort with whom we usually consort; instead of the usual
assortment of lawyers and others, in this case, it included a sculptor, a
painter, and a writer/poet, along with an English professor and a couple of
other people. The conversation at one
point turned to the end of WWII; I related that I had just finished reading a
book by a military historian that examined very closely the events leading up
to Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb.
The folks at the table seemed to be largely of the view that he was
wrong to have done so; after thinking about all the evidence marshaled by the
author of the book (from both US and Japanese records, many of the latter of
which were newly available), I had concluded that Truman did what he had to do.
One woman made a comment to the
effect that “we all” would agree that Gandhi’s approach would have been
best. I murmured that not “all” of us
agreed. As I thought about it, I
wondered if being a successful leader of nonviolent resistance does not mean
picking your time and place with great care—at least from the retrospective
vantage point of history. Gandhi led his
protests in India
when Britain
was already ambivalent about trying to keep control; Martin Luther King led his
effort when the United
States was already feeling that race
relations needed attention. I surmise,
however, that if Gandhi had been Chinese in 1937, the Japanese military would
have killed him along with thousands of other Chinese and buried him in an
unmarked grave and we would never have known who he was. For all I know, there are thousands of
Chinese Gandhis buried in such graves.
* * *
Except for a trip to Hawaii for our honeymoon
in early 1983, Pat and I had not gone off the North American continent up to
early in 2000 (except for the Outer Banks on the East Coast, which hardly
counts). And with the exception of a few
days in Miami
some years ago, we had not traveled without the children since before Krystin
was born in 1984. This year we left
both the children and the continent--the latter in a big way: we went to Australia for two weeks in late
February and early March. I will say at
the outset that we had a wonderful time, and that we did so mostly because we
had delightful Australian hosts who took care of us the entire time we were
there. (The children stayed at home with
a young woman from my office who has been a tutor for Krystin and who had
stayed in the house with them when we were in Miami.
They had a wonderful time with the parents gone, Nicole ran the house
splendidly, and no one needed us during our absence. We concluded that kids need a vacation from
their parents as much as parents need a break from their kids.)
For a few years in the mid-1980s, at
the behest of a friend, we served as volunteer hosts for visitors to the
Minneapolis Aquatennial (the city's annual summer festival). We did not know, before then, that festivals
across the United States,
and the world, send their chief executives and sometimes their
"royalty" to visit other festivals.
The host city calls on local folks to serve as hosts for the
visitors: the guests are provided hotels
and meals, but the hosts are expected to shepherd the visitors around to
various functions and to show them the Twin Cities. In 1985 the town of Wagga Wagga, New South Wales,
Australia, sent
both its festival executive (and spouse) and its "Gumi Queen"
(similar to the "Queen of the Lakes" at the Mpls Aquatennial). The parents of the Gumi Queen brought her to Minneapolis; we were
asked to host the parents, Brian and Margaret Partridge. We spent a week with them, liked them
instantly and greatly, and had a delightful time with them.
The Partridges returned to the U.S. in 1989,
at which time we saw them briefly, and again in 1999, when they stayed at our
home for a long weekend. In the
meantime, we had stayed in touch via letter, and they had been badgering us for
14 years to visit them. But a trip to Australia is
not something that we, at any rate, decide to take on the spur of the
moment. It's not cheap and if one is
going, it requires at least a couple of weeks (which is far too short a time,
but with work lives and children, it is all we could manage). When they visited in May of 1999, however,
they told us that they had purchased two condos in Sydney since last we had spoken with them and
that if we were to come over we could have one of the condos for a week and
then come spend time with them in Wagga.
After they left, Pat and I talked and decided that this generous an
offer was not going to come along again soon, if ever in our lifetime, and that
we simply had to go. Our ideal trip
anywhere (Iowa
or Australia
or anywhere in between) is spending time with local people, and this presented
a sterling opportunity.
So we went. The only part of the trip that we did not
like was the getting there (and coming home).
After the 4-hour flight to LA, we left LA to fly 14 hours nonstop to Sydney. Fourteen hours in a plane is
excruciating. Fortunately, we left LA at
8:30 in the evening so it
was dark the entire flight; after about 11:00
(our body time), the lights in the plane were turned off so everyone could
sleep. Basically the morning was chasing
us all the way across the Pacific; for the last half hour as we were
approaching Sydney,
before we dipped below the clouds, we could look backwards out of the plane and
discern the first faint glimmer of dawn, an orange glow on the eastern
horizon. Then through the clouds and
into the dark morning (6:00 a.m.)
of Sydney. By the time we left the airport, however, it
was daylight, although overcast.
We must have eked out some sleep
during the 14 hours we were in the silver tube crossing the ocean (a phenomenon
that I still regard as miraculous, even though I vaguely understand the physics
of aircraft). Our hosts met us, got us
into Sydney and
settled in the promised condo, and we were walking the streets of Sydney by 9:00 that Sunday morning. We suffered no jet lag at all.
The first thing that struck me was
the number of people out and about in the city.
If you go downtown in Minneapolis
on a Sunday morning, you could shoot cannon balls down the streets and not run
much risk of hitting anyone. There were
people everywhere sightseeing and shopping.
Our friend Judith Martin, a professor of (urban) Geography at the U of
Minnesota, cautioned me, however, that one cannot compare U.S. cities
with European cities in this way (and Sydney
is, in many ways, a European city). (She
had, in the summer of 1999, also gone to Sydney and stayed in the exact same
condo that we did, because I put her in touch with Brian and Margaret before
she went.)
One reason, she wrote, is that
American cities had much more physical space in which to grow, so are more
spread out. This was not true early in
American urban development, but "as soon as streetcars and subways began
to run, everyone who could afford to leave the center of the city seemed to do
so. . . . Urban dwellers across the
country chose not to crowd together in city neighborhoods when they saw an
alternative." There are also more
pedestrian areas in European cities because people there have smaller living
quarters and tend to use outdoor space as an extension of their homes (e.g.,
beer gardens in Germany). Americans are also much more committed to
using their cars and accustomed to being able to drive anywhere and park and
shop. Suburban shopping centers and
malls, in the U.S.,
she also wrote, "have become true community centers--places where concerts
and craft shows are held; some shopping centers open early for morning joggers
and speed walkers [a la the Mall of America]." These centers also drain people from the
center city. Whatever the cultural or
geographic reasons, downtown Sunday mornings in Sydney and Minneapolis are definitely not the same.
There is another way they are
different. Sydney must be one of the most beautiful port
cities in the world. (Anyone who watched
the Olympics can see what I mean.) I
have not seen any of the major non-U.S. harbors on the planet, but it is
difficult to conceive that there are many that are more striking. Our condo was on the north side of the
harbor, 10th (top) floor overlooking the water, the Sydney harbor bridge, the Opera House, and
downtown Sydney. It is difficult to believe one can become
inured to spectacular views, but we almost did.
We had coffee every morning and watched the cargo and cruise ships,
ferries, sailboats come and go (and even saw jet skis—but since we were high
enough up, and far enough away, we could not hear them). We daily walked out of our building and half
a block to the ferry stop and rode the ferry into and around Sydney.
Usually there were quite a few people also on the ferry who, judging
from their attire, were going to work.
What a delightful way to commute to work; my drive down the river road
along the Mississippi
is calm and pretty but it certainly doesn’t compare to a ferry ride across Sydney harbor.
We were impressed—touched—by how
America-friendly Australia
was. I am sure that that is in part
because of the people we were with:
while none of them were old enough to have been involved in or even
remember much about World War II, their parents were, and those parents seem to
have instilled great admiration for Americans in their children (because the
United States saved Australia from invasion by the Japanese, at the Battle of
Coral Bay, when Great Britain was unable to do so). The friendliness also came, no doubt, because
we spent time with Australians who introduced us to their friends, but I sensed
a liking for Americans among those with whom we spent time.
(Meals,
4) This was perhaps the longest trip out
of the U.S.
that one could take and still be in an Anglo-Saxon/English culture. Australia is certainly not an alien
place, culturally, for Americans. They
speak the same language (mostly) and do things pretty much the same way. The McDonalds burgers have beets instead of
pickles (I know, I tried one). In some
places they also put a fried egg on your hamburger, in addition to the beets;
some places there also make the largest hamburgers we have ever seen (in the
tiny hamlet of Batlow, outside Wagga, where one would hardly expect to find
people much less a wonderful airy country inn, the buns were literally as big
as a salad plate and the hamburger extended beyond the edges of the bun). (And that is that about hamburgers!)
(Meals, 5) One of Brian's friends of long standing
(since 1951) and his spousal equivalent[1]
invited us to dinner. After getting
stuck in a North Sydney rush hour traffic jam,
the four of us joined Harry and Margaret (another Margaret) for cocktails and
dinner. We spent about 5 hours on what I
would call a deck[2] on
their house on one of the hills overlooking the Sydney harbor (from a different
vantage point) and eating oysters on the half shell, prawns on the barbie,[3]
and fresh salmon (plus assorted other things like salad and bread and
vegetables). We think it was all fresh
seafood from the Pacific that day. It
was a heavenly dinner that we would be hard-pressed to duplicate here. And besides that, the company was great fun.
I raised at this dinner a topic that
I asked a number of Australians about:
whether Australia
should sever its connection with the crown of England. After our visit, I emailed a member of the
faculty of the University
of Sydney (who had
obtained his Ph.D. from the University
of Minnesota!) He provided me a little information. Even though Australia is clearly an
independent nation, it still has a Governor-General as titular head of
government, appointed by Queen Elizabeth II of England (on recommendation of
the Prime Minister of Australia), and each of the Australian states also has a
Governor appointed by the Queen, on recommendation of the elected premier (the
premier being equivalent to U.S. governors). These appointments are pro forma
(automatically accepted by the Crown).
My faculty contact in Sydney
told me that the Governor-General and Governors "act entirely on their own
behalf (i.e., without Crown consultation/intervention). They are
quintessentially ceremonial figures except in very rare but not
literally-spelled-out circumstances. In
some States their 'reserve' powers to act outside the incumbent Government's
advice have been formally circumscribed.
This is not so at the national level, where the theoretical powers
remain. The Governor-General's reserve
powers have over the century been invoked only once to dismiss a Government and
call a fresh election against the Government's wishes, or indeed
knowledge." (For instance, when we
toured Government House in Sydney,
the home of the (Crown-appointed) Governor of New South Wales, the tour guide
told us the Governor must approve the laws enacted by the state
legislatures--but does so routinely).
There was a major brouhaha 25 years
ago, when the (national) Governor-General dismissed the Australian parliament
and called for new elections. I was told
that quite a few Australians welcomed this extraordinary intervention by the
Governor-General because the incumbent government was said to be totally financially
inept and driving Australia
into bankruptcy. The Chief Justice of
the Australian Supreme Court urged the Governor-General to exercise his
power. But it was extraordinary,
because no Governor-General in this century had actually exercised the
legal powers that he possessed. (In the
new elections, the opposition won the election handily.)
Australia recently held a
referendum on whether to become the Republic of Australia and, thereby, cut the
tie to England. The outcome was that Australia remains part
of the Commonwealth--but quite a number of people with whom I spoke said that
the proposal failed only because the President, in the proposal presented to
the voters, would not have been elected by popular vote (as in the United
States, more or less) but by the legislature.
That caused quite a few with republican sympathies to nonetheless vote
against it. Even those who oppose
severing the relationship with the Crown thought that if the right proposal
were made the change to a republic would garner 75% of the vote.
Margaret, of the couple whom we
visited for dinner, thought Australia
should "grow up" and become a republic. So did a number of others. On the other hand, some thought there was no
harm in the existing tie, changing to a republic would not change a thing about
Australian politics or the political system, and it would just cost a lot of
money to have to design and print/mint all new dollar bills and coins (all of
which now have Queen Elizabeth on them) and change a lot of names of everything
else (for example, the Royal Australian Air Force would obviously drop the
"Royal" from its name).
My suspicion is that there may be a
generational gap in perception here, with more of the younger generation
favoring the idea of a republic and those who are older (e.g., my age, or more)
ready to keep the tie to Mother England.
(Meals, 6) To return to the topic of food, the meal with
Harry and Margaret was one of two “barbies” to which we were invited to during
our visit. The other was in Wagga with 3
of the 4 of Brian and Margaret’s daughters, their spouses/boyfriend, and
grandchildren. There is an Australian
folk song entitled “Aussie Bar-B-Q” which includes these passages (and which
illustrate some of the slight variations in terminology between Australia and America):
(1) (2)
When
the summer sun is shining When
the steaks are burning fiercely
On Australia’s
happy land And
the smoke gets in your eyes
Around
countless fires in strange attire Your
snags[4]
all taste of fried toothpaste
You
can see many solemn bands And
your mouth is full of flies
Of
glum Australians watching It’s
a national institution
Their
lunch go up in flames It’s
Australian through and through
By
the smoke and the smell you can plainly tell So
come on mate and grab your plate
That
it’s barbie time again. Let’s
have a Bar-B-Q.
(4) (5)
There’s
a fly stuck in the margarine And
when the barbie’s over
The
bread has gone rock hard And
you’re homeward once again
Who
forgot the Aeroguard?[7] Many lonely hours
you’ll spend
There’s
bull ants in the esky[8] You may find
yourself reflecting
And
the beer is running out As
many often do
And
what you saw in mum’s coleslaw Come
rain or shine that’s the very last time
You
just don’t think about You’ll
have a Bar-B-Q.
Fortunately, I can report that we had no such
experiences. The food was cooked
exquisitely well at both events, there were no bugs or ants in the esky, and
the beer didn’t run out. We would have
no reservations about going to as many Australian Bar-B-Q’s as people would
invite us to.
Many of you will have watched some
of the 2000 Olympics from Sydney. We did take a ferry out the Parramatta River
to the site of the Olympics and toured a few of the facilities. We were not sure how the area would
accommodate all those people, but from what I can tell from Olympic coverage
the Australians did a very good job.
The Sydney Opera House is as
breath-taking on the inside as it is on the outside. We took a tour (one of the most wonderful
tours we have ever taken, anywhere, of anything, because the tour guide was an
extremely well-spoken, articulate, and funny retired Australian diplomat). If you look at the two sets of
"fins" that seem to make up the building, one set is the Opera House
and the other is the Concert Hall--and the concert hall is one of the most
beautiful I have ever seen. One of the
most surprising facts about the building is that the roof is made up of two
shades of pale yellow ceramic tile--even though it appears white. The architect decided against white because
it was thought it would have been too brightly reflective. Another interesting fact is that the original
architect, a Dane, who obtained the commission by winning an international
contest, never saw it completed and has never returned to see it. The project took so long, cost so much more
than originally expected, and became so mired down in politics that he quit. The exterior of the building is his; the
interior is not. Interestingly, the
building will soon undergo a $200 million renovation--and he has agreed to come
and help, even though he is now in his mid-80s and living in Europe.
After six days in Sydney, we headed inland to Wagga Wagga. “Wagga” in the Aboriginal language means
“crow.” In Aboriginal, to indicate the
plural, one repeats the word: hence,
Wagga Wagga is "place of many crows."
We cannot attest to whether that remains accurate today; we didn’t see
particularly many crows. Wagga is a town
of about 60,000, 5-6 hours east of Sydney,
the largest inland city in the “Riverina” (which is the drainage basin of the Murrumbidgee River, I think). It’s a very pleasant place, and we slowed
down our pace somewhat. We looked around
the town, met a number of the Partridges’ friends and family, and relaxed a
little.
The land west of Sydney out to Wagga consists of undulating
hills, land that was mostly brown (because the first week of March was the end
of summer and it had been quite dry).
The closest analogy I can come up with, which will make sense to our
Midwestern friends and relatives, is that Wagga is like
LaCrosse/LaCrescent. It is the same kind
of gently hilly terrain, although I think the Minnesota and Wisconsin land is more cropland while the
area around Wagga appeared to have brush, bush, and sand. The closest large metropolitan area would be
similar to the distance from LaCrosse to Chicago;
Wagga sits by itself quite a ways from any large city, although it is
surrounded by a number of small scenic towns.
I never heard anyone in Wagga refer to the area as “God’s country,”
however.
We did take a day trip from Wagga to
Canberra, the
Australian national capitol. Their
capitol is a striking contemporary building; it’s only 11 years old and built on
the top of hill (sort of like Washington,
D.C.). In their case, however, they cut off the top
of the hill, built the capitol building partially into the ground, and then put
the dirt and grass back up over part of the building so the hill is still there. We toured both the new and the old
(“temporary” capitol building from 1929-1989) and even sat in on “Question
Time” in the House of Representatives.
Question Time is when the opposition members of
Parliament get to ask questions of the Government ministers—except that in
addition to posing a question, they follow up with catcalls and other loud
questions and jeering at the answers from the minister. It was really quite rowdy; there is nothing
like it in American politics. Pat and
the Partridges were dismayed; I thought it was great fun. They do this every day at 2:00 for an hour! (There was a nursing home scandal in Sydney that broke while
we were there; the opposition was addressing heated questions to the Minister
for Aged Care about what she and her agency had and had not done. She didn’t do a very good job of answering
them. The Sydney Morning Herald
the next day called for her resignation.
I don’t know what happened.) One
of my political science friends told me that Question Time has deteriorated in
recent years, and that at least in England it used to be much more
intellectual. He cited as an example of
earlier sophistication the time Winston Churchill once remarked at Question
Time that Prime Minister Atlee was a modest man who had much to be modest
about.
(Meals, 7) We enjoyed going to clubs, a feature of
social life that the Australians clearly imported from the English—and that
Americans did not. We went to the
Kirribilli Returned Serviceman’s League in Sydney twice.
The RSL is equivalent to the VFW here, but the ambiance and the quality
of the décor are vastly superior to any VFW I’ve ever seen. They also have slot machines. (Pat and I both played on them for the first,
and likely last, time in our lives. We
both lost a little money.) The food
there, as many places, was served bistro style (cafeteria) and was
acceptable—but nothing like the other dinners we had. The great advantage of the RSL (apart from
another great Harbor view) was that the drinks were extremely cheap.
In Wagga, we went to Brian’s Commercial Club (for,
naturally, “businessmen”), where the men go in the back and play snooker while
the women (more appropriately in that context, the “ladies”) sit in the front
lounge and chat. I learned to play
snooker with Brian and two of his friends; at first they asked if I had ever
played pool or picked up a cue (I certainly had). The four of us played absolutely the worst
game I have ever seen—even though I had never played before, the angles for
bouncing balls off the sides of a billiards table are the same in pool and
snooker. Pat did not like this division
by sex and came back to watch the snooker game.
We also went to the Wagga Leagues Club for dinner; again, bistro style,
decent food, considerable wine and beer, and great company—we ate with three
other couples, friends of Brian and Margaret.
(Pat was dismayed that again the table was divided by sex.) It struck both Pat and me at this dinner that
the Australians knew much more about the U.S. than any comparable group of
Americans would know about Australia;
some of them had visited the U.S.
more than once. (But these were also
fairly affluent folks who’d had the time, resources, and inclination to
travel.)
The night sky in the southern
hemisphere is noticeably different from that in the northern. For one thing, it seemed to us that there are
many, many more stars in the sky. The
Southern Cross, Australia’s
symbol (on its flag), is readily visible.
Even more noticeable is the Milky Way—it is a vast cloud of stars. My astronomer friends tell me the Milky Way
is like a large plate composed of stars, and from the southern hemisphere one
is standing inside the plate looking outward toward the edges. There is no comparable view in the northern
hemisphere, the sky of which is tilted away from the plate.
Yes, we did see some of the native
fauna. We went to an animal park where I
had the emus coming after my bag of animal food. We played with domesticated kangaroos (one of
which snatched my food bag, so I grabbed it around the neck and snatched it
back). We petted the koalas, which were
sound asleep in gum trees in the most awkward-looking positions. We saw a dingo and a wombat, both behind
fences. We also saw, when wandering in
the woods in the hills above Wagga, two live kangaroos. I took a picture of them from a distance,
then walked toward them to see how close I could get. They decided I was getting too close, so
turned and hopped away. So
simultaneously did about 30 other kangaroos that we had never seen lurking in
the brush and bushes—there was a line of kangaroos hopping away. Were we startled.
(Meals, 8)
The award for the longest and most elegant lunch that we have ever had
in our lives goes to Stella Evans of Wagga.
We met Rowland and Stella in 1985 as well; they came to Minneapolis the same time as Partridges. While we were in Wagga, they invited Brian
and Margaret and us to lunch. Lunch
started at 1:00 and ended
at 5:30. (We skipped dinner and went directly to play
bridge that evening at Val Hopwood’s bridge club.) The food was exquisite, the china and silver
composed a lovely table, and we sat in what I would call a glass atrium off
their kitchen and family room overlooking the pool and an immaculately-manicured
lawn and garden. It was a delightful
afternoon. We decided we could easily
spend several afternoons a week that way if we could always have such a
marvelous combination of setting, company, and food.
There are slight differences that
any traveler to another country must face:
money, distance, and temperature calculations. (In most of the "western" world, of
course, the distance and temperature calculations are the same--just different
from the U.S.) The money was easy; Australians use the same
decimal system that we do. The “problem”
was calculating the discount, because the Australian dollar was worth about 60
cents to the American dollar while we were there; all the Australians said we
could not have come at a better time.
Rather than saving money from the exchange rate, however, I think we
just spent more to make up for the difference.
We found it interesting that both Canada (which
we also visited; more about that later) and Australia have done away with the
1$ bill; they have $1 and $2 coins and their smallest paper bill is $5. (Australia has also done away with
the penny.) So one walks around with a
lot of change. They have both figured
out to do one thing with their money that the U.S. mint hasn’t: the $1 and $2
coins have a bronze finish (in different ways) while those less than a dollar
are chrome. So one doesn’t mix them up,
unlike the U.S.
fiasco with the Susan B. Anthony dollar.
We just had to adjust to doing a lot more business with coins than we
were accustomed to.
Naturally, as good Minnesotans, we
talked about the weather—although last winter was so mild for Minnesota there wasn’t been much to talk
about. (We of course had to tell horror
stories about how cold it gets in Minnesota
to people who live in a climate roughly equivalent to that of Los Angeles.) There is no quick in-the-mind conversion from
Celsius to Fahrenheit temperatures that I’ve identified, but I already knew
from our backyard thermometer that I don’t like anything over 30 C (about 90
F). We were told we were lucky while in Sydney; the week before
we arrived the temperature was over 40 C (well above 100 F). While we were there it was in the 70s and 80s
F. The same was true while we were in
Wagga; over the two weeks, a number of days were slightly overcast, but that
made walking around more pleasant.
Australians do not build freeways quite the same way
Americans do, but that may reflect the fact that they have only 18 million
people, most of whom are spread across the southeastern coast of a land mass
the size of the United
States.
They just don’t have the traffic congestion that we do and don’t need
the high-speed, multi-lane, restricted access roads that we do. (We thought about renting a car, before we
arrived; once I saw the narrow streets and sharp turns of Sydney, and knew that
all my driving instincts would be exactly and dangerously wrong—because
Australians drive on the left-hand side of the street—I quickly abandoned any
idea of driving. Besides, Brian and
Margaret were so willing to go anywhere that we didn’t need to risk driving. We had to slow their pace down.)
I should note that when we say we visited Australia, it
would be the equivalent (geographically) of spending a week in Miami and perhaps a week in Tallahassee--and then going home and telling
friends you visited the United
States.
The biggest difference in that analogy is that for Miami to have the
same relative population as Sydney vis-Ã -vis the rest of the country it would
have to have about 70 million people, with most of the rest of the U.S.
population living on the coast between Washington D.C. and New Orleans, a few
scattered along the west coast, and virtually none living in the area from the
Appalachians to the Rockies and the Gulf to the Canadian border.
* * *
We were interested that perhaps
three or four times while we were in Australia different people asked us
about the school shootings in the U.S. It was during our visit that one youngster
shot another—which, of course, made the headlines in the Australian
papers. People were mystified that the U.S. allowed
guns to be so freely owned. We were,
frankly, embarrassed; we had no good answer to their questions. I explained that we have this odd Second
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary
to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
shall not be infringed”) which, along with incredibly powerful lobbying by gun
owners and associations, essentially prevents effective gun control laws in the
United States.
It was instructive to see the
distaste and dismay the Australians had for loose gun ownership laws. Both Pat and I are strong supporters of
restrictive gun control laws—we do not own a gun and never will, I hope. Without defending American laws and practices
that arguably permit schoolhouse shootings, I must say that Australians are
less likely to have these kinds of shootings on statistics alone: with 18 million Australians compared to 275
million Americans, we’re bound to have more such tragedies. I was curious about this so I poked around
the web a little and learned about the Australian gun control experience.
Twelve years ago, authors of a report from the
Australian Institute of Criminology wrote that "firearms
are widely available in Australia
and they [are] used to threaten, injure and kill citizens." The report said there "are at least 3.5 million guns of all types,
registered, unregistered, licensed and unlicensed, in the hands of private
citizens in Australia.
In 1979 there was one gun to every five or six people in the nation. Today
there is one gun to every four people."
(I believe the corresponding figure for the United States is one gun per
person. And they were alarmed at a one
to four ratio!)
In May, 1999, authors of another report from the
same Institute wrote that “following the deaths by semi-automatic firearms of 35 people
at Port Arthur, Tasmania, on 28 April 1996, many Australians have asked
whether, and how, a re-occurrence of such events could be prevented. . .
.” Following that slaughter, and others
that preceded it in Britain
and the U.S.,
the Australian governments adopted “the Nationwide Agreement on Firearms, which
effectively banned self-loading rifles and self-loading and pump-action
shotguns; introduced a nationwide registration of firearms; and introduced
stringent limitations to firearm ownership (namely, minimum age of 18 years and
satisfactory reason and fitness for ownership).” They reported that crimes involving the use
of handguns had declined markedly since the change; in 1997-98 Australia had
311 homicides. I think the Twin Cities
alone had that many. As one who does
not believe it should be necessary to own a gun in order to live in civilized
society, I can only wish that the U.S. would adopt similar
legislation.
Two days after I composed the preceding
four paragraphs I received in the mail a membership card for the National Rifle
Association, a letter soliciting my support for opposing any gun control laws
(in quite emotional and apocalyptic terms), and a survey expressing my views
(presumably in total opposition to gun control laws). I decided not to send in the survey because I
didn't want Charlton Heston showing up at our door telling me that God was
going to strike me down for favoring gun control laws. (What I ever did to get on the NRA mailing is
beyond me.)
An interesting book came out several
months after our visit to Australia,
authored by Michael Bellesiles. Bellesiles writes that
"an astoundingly high level of personal violence separates the United States
from every other industrial nation. To
find comparable levels of interpersonal violence, one must examine nations in
the midst of civil wars or social chaos. . . .
In a typical week, more Americans are killed with guns than in all of Western Europe in a year. . . . In no other industrial nation do military
surgeons train at an urban hospital to gain battlefield experience, as is the
case at the Washington
Hospital Center
in the nation's capital. It is now
thought normal and appropriate for urban elementary schools to install metal
detectors to check for firearms. And
when a Denver
pawnshop advertised a sale of pistols as a "back-to-school" special,
400 people showed up to buy guns."
He observed that "the gun is so central to
American identity that the nation's history has been meticulously reconstructed
to promote the necessity of a heavily armed American public." He then comments, however, that "America's gun
culture is an invented tradition. It was
not present at the nation's creation, whenever we fix that point. Rather, it developed in a single generation,
among those who experienced the onset of the Civil War and that disaster
itself. All cultural attributes have a
starting point, and a path of development.
America's
gun culture is unusual only in that one can determine the precise period in
which a specific artifact became central to a nation's identity and
self-conception. Prior to the 1860's,
guns were not perceived as a significant component of America's
national identity, essential to its survival. . . . The prosperity and survival of the United States
depended on the grace of God, or civic virtue, or the individual's pursuit of
self-interest. The notion that a
well-armed public buttressed the American dream would have appeared harebrained
to most Americans before the Civil War.
But starting in the 1850's, cultural and social standards began a fairly
rapid shift that soon placed guns in ever more American hands and at the core
of essential cultural values. By the
mid-1870's, males in the United
States had a fixation with firearms that any
modern enthusiast would recognize and salute."
Does not anyone besides us (and most
Americans before 1850) think this is a little nuts?
* * *
After not really thinking recently a
great deal about an issue that has vexed the American political and legal
system for decades, Pat and I found ourselves in a discussion about abortion
that bothered us. We were playing bridge
one night with two friends and happened to start talking about stem cell
research. That led to a discussion about
abortion and the opposition of some in Congress to the use of stem cells
because the primary source of such cells is aborted fetuses.
Three of us at the bridge table were
quite firmly pro-choice. The fourth, we
learned to our surprise, was vehemently anti-abortion (that is, would not
permit abortions under any circumstances).
In that view, abortion is murder.
Anyone not asleep for the last 27 years, since the Supreme Court
decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973, knows that those who oppose abortion view it
as murder, but I had never had it brought home so sharply (or to my
consciousness in that way). As I thought
about it, for the first time it really became clear to me that there can be no
room for compromise for those who view abortion as murder--who's going to
compromise on murder? It's OK some times
but not others? (This also raised in my
mind the consistency of the position taken by those who oppose abortion except
in the case of incest or rape, for example--is it not still murder even in
those circumstances, if one believes abortion is murder? Selective murder is OK?)
This led me to draw an analogy for
myself: would I sit down at a bridge
table with three officers of the SS, the organization responsible for running
the Nazi extermination camps? Even if
the officers themselves had desk jobs and did not participate in the actual
killing of the Jews and gypsies and others, could I socialize with them? (My answer to myself was a firm
"no.") If my analogy were
valid, then I asked myself if I am playing bridge with someone who could
(should?) view the other three people at the table, including me, as advocates
or at least supporters of murder, just as I would have seen the three SS
officers as advocates or supporters of murder?
How can I easily share the company of someone who must think me guilty
of supporting such horrendous crime? (It
may be that my analogy with the SS officers breaks down, but even after I
thought more about it I didn't think it invalid.)
The temperature of the exchange was
increased when Pat commented that if she thought she could cure Krystin's
diabetes by obtaining stem cells from a related fetus, she would get pregnant
and then abort the fetus to obtain the cells needed to make Krystin healthy. So, it was said, "you would murder one
child to cure another." I suggested
the language itself was provocative, but was told that that is what would be
happening. Pat's position (with which I
agreed) didn't make our views any more palatable, to say the least. (Since there is no medical reason to do so,
there is no risk of it happening.)
It was a disquieting
conversation. (Our other friend at the
table later commented that the conversation "scared the hell" out of
her.) I now understand far better why there
has been no "compromise" acceptable to those who oppose abortion
(with exceptions or not). That there is
such an issue in American politics disturbs me.
I can't do anything about it, of course, because one's view of when life
begins (such that terminating it becomes murder) is not necessarily susceptible
to rational argument. Our friend will
not likely change her mind; nor will we.
What will confound the argument even
further is the ability of the medical sciences to save fetuses earlier and
earlier in pregnancies. The Supreme
Court decision was predicated in part on the state of medical science at the
time: abortions are permitted in the
first trimester because the fetus could only rarely be saved. That is becoming less and less true; medicine
is allowing viability earlier and earlier.
Interestingly enough, however, on the day I happened to compose these
paragraphs there was an article in the New York Times (May 8, 2000)
reporting on research suggesting that fetuses rescued early (that is, premature)
that survive have significantly greater medical and developmental problems in a
number of areas than do fetuses carried full or even later term. That may reflect the inability of medical
science to adequately replicate the womb for these very small fetuses (which
might improve significantly in future years).
So rather than becoming any easier to deal with, the issue may get even
murkier and more contentious.
* * *
The legislative process in Minnesota
this past Spring was something to behold, largely with distaste. The Governor, the Republican-majority House,
and the Democratic-majority Senate could not agree on how to use the huge state
budget surplus. At the suggestion of
Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe, the three split the surplus three ways and
each got to determine how to spend one-third.
The Governor devoted his third to reducing car license tabs, the chief
benefit of which will go to people who buy very expensive new cars. Folks who own older cars will see little or
no benefit. The House used the money for
a one-time tax rebate and a permanent reduction in Minnesota income taxes. The Senate used the money for education and
various other projects around the state.
At the conclusion of the legislative session Senator Moe said something
to the effect that while the people of Minnesota
should not be pleased at the process, the result was a good one.
My view was exactly the opposite.
The process didn't particularly bother me--I think it was simply a more
public (and perhaps somewhat more extreme) version of the political
horse-trading that goes on at the end of any legislative session. It did seem perverse but things did get
done.
The results, however, I find disappointing. (I must admit that I am one of those unusual
people who does not object to paying taxes.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote in a Court
opinion that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. I agree.) Instead of using the enormous surpluses to
improve the long-term well-being of the people of the state, especially those
who are disadvantaged, and putting money into areas that would help ensure that
the state has a robust economy in the future, two-thirds of it went to tax
reductions. In my judgment, the license
tab fee reduction reflected the childish obsession of Jesse Ventura to change
things that affect him personally. He
likes to buy new vehicles and he doesn't like to pay the license fees. So people who buy a new Lexis or SUV pay much
less. In terms of the income tax cut,
Pat and I figured out that we will receive about $1.25 more on each
paycheck. We are thrilled.
What seems to have been lost in this pell-mell rush to give as
much money back to the taxpayers as possible is the notion of public
goods. We no longer seem prepared to spend
money on things that benefit all of us collectively (such as colleges and
universities, hospitals, roads and bridges, public services, technological
infrastructure, and so on). I recall one
of the mantras of Bob Dole's presidential campaign, that taxes should be cut
because the voters know better how to spend their money than the
government.
I, for one, think the premise is simply false. There are many
things that "we the people" have to spend money on together, things
that none of us individually can effect.
I cannot spend my money on freeways or police or the multitude of other
"social administration" costs that we need to incur if we are to live
together in society. Instead, Minnesota seems to have
set as its goal to be as much like Alabama
or Mississippi
as possible. They have low taxes--and by
most measures, a lousy quality of life.
We have tried this experiment in the United States in some of the states
and I suspect most people outside the low-tax and low-income states wouldn't
want the experiment to be replicated nationally if they realized what doing so
would mean. (There are a few
exceptions: Texas and Alaska are generally low-tax states but
that's because of oil revenues.)
The other part of the experiment is the high-tax states, such as
Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts:
I would wager a significant amount of money that there is a high
positive correlation between the multitude of national quality-of-life surveys
(which one frequently sees reports about in the newspapers on everything from
health to education to political participation and so on) and the level of
taxation: those states with a high
quality of life also have the highest tax rates. Any careful examination of the qualities that
make a state a good place to live would, I bet, lead inevitably to the
conclusion that the state's tax and finance structure bear directly on how the
state measures up. If a state spends its
tax revenues wisely, presumably the more the state government has to spend the
more it can do for its residents (within a certain but undefined
limit--obviously, to put the extreme case, 100% taxation would eliminate all
business and industry and drive an economy into the ground). Texas,
on these measures, even with all the oil money, doesn't look so attractive. Legislative or gubernatorial determination
that the state will have as little money as possible is an invitation to a
fairly crappy quality of life in a state, it seems to me.
I shouldn't gripe about politics in this letter, but this outcome
so annoyed me that I couldn't help it.
We seem to have lost all sense of collective responsibility for
ourselves and to future generations--to our great loss, in my opinion. As of December, 2000, the state is predicting
another $3 billion surplus in the treasury over the next couple of years and
the wrangling over tax rebates/reductions versus spending has already
begun. (What I find interesting about
this debate is that polls suggest the public is not that interested in tax cuts
and that many would prefer to see money spent in areas that help ensure a
healthy society. That message, however,
is lost on those for whom cutting taxes is a religion; they are true believers,
not bothered by facts.)
(I also don't buy the dogma--and it is dogma--that the government
can't spend money wisely or accomplish any good. There is solid social science research
running back decades that demonstrates the fallaciousness of that belief. The corporate record, that much-vaunted
private sector alternative to which the government is often compared, isn't
that great in making sound economic and financial decisions, either.) OK, so much for the government-and-economics
preaching.
* * *
Elliott paid me a high compliment one day, although
he didn’t know it. I was sitting at the
computer, immediately adjacent to the open door to our family room. Elliott and a friend were in the family room
playing and having a friendly argument about some “fact” that his friend had
heard on TV. Elliott, after disputing
the point for a few moments, finally said “I don’t believe any of that stuff
unless my dad tells me.” One of the
moments that makes parenting worth it.
(Elliott is fortunate enough to have a dad who works at a major research
university; if Elliott asks me a question that he really wants the answer to,
and I don’t know it, which is about 98% of the time, I can usually find someone
on the faculty who can tell me. [The
classic example: how many snowflakes are
there in a pile of snow about as tall as I am?
A friend on the physics faculty gave me the formula to calculate it.])
* * *
There is, or was, a label on wine produced in Minnesota that said
something to the effect that it was produced “where the grapes suffer.” It’s not only grapes; it’s also impatiens and
coleus and snapdragons when the idiot gardeners are lured by unusual
temperatures in early May to put plants out in pots. Summer came abruptly to central Minnesota this
year. It was into the 80s and 90s the
first week of May. I found it peculiar
to turn on the air conditioning on May 4.
I soon turned it off; late May and most of June was quite cool. The
plants do not like it when the temperatures dip back into the high 30s at
night.
We again remodeled our back yard
this spring. Yes, we have been teased
that we have done this several times, but always because of other
circumstances--we put in the swing set, we added on the back of the house, and
so on. This time we added on to the deck
and brought in 7 tons of river rock. The
dog ran a path from one side of the house to the other across the back yard,
leaving nothing but dirt (and mud). So
we extended the deck and (Pat and Krystin, mostly) put rocks over all the
mud. We now have about a 10 x 10 plot of
grass with gardens, and rocks everywhere else.
We will NOT again change the back yard as long as we live there--except
maybe to replace the swing set with another garden once Elliott no longer uses
it. (The price of this effort was a
severe case of tendonitis in one of Pat's arms, from shoveling and then pushing
wheelbarrows full of rocks. Even several
months later she had to begin physical therapy and take an anti-inflammatory.)
* * *
Transportation was the big issue in our family
starting June 9. Krystin, heaven forbid,
passed her written driving test and received her permit--so, of course, she
immediately had to begin driving. I took
her to drive across the street from our house into a little tangletown of
drives and lanes that has very little traffic; I also had her practice in the
local school parking lot. Pat that same
night then let her drive to a local shopping center about 5-6 miles away. Pat is much braver than I am. But Krystin drove quite a bit and was
actually pretty good.
At the same time Krystin was
learning to operate cars, Elliott's attention was focused on bikes--which he
had never learned to ride. (He received
a bike for his 9th birthday and burst into tears when he saw
it.) Pat told him, for two months before
school ended on June 9, that if he didn't know how to ride a bike by the time
school was over the Nintendo 64 was going away--we were determined that Elliott
was not going to grow up without learning how to ride a bike. He had tried, half-heartedly, to ride it
during the spring but he didn't know how to ride June 9, so Saturday morning
June 10 Pat unplugged the Nintendo and put it away. Saturday afternoon Elliott poked around
trying to ride his bike, without much success, and if Pat or I tried to help
him, he'd end up storming away and into the house. Sunday morning one friend came over (on his
bike) and spent time helping Elliott ride; Sunday afternoon another friend came
over (on his bike) and helped more. By
Sunday evening Elliott could ride pretty well; within a day or so he could ride
it perfectly well. So he got his Nintendo
back.
Krystin's summer 2000 was even
busier than her summer 1999. She went to
visit a friend (from last year's Spanish camp) in Las Vegas in mid-June (leading Pat to sniff
that Krystin was going places that she--Pat--had never been). She went again to Spanish camp for two weeks,
then to Prince Edward Island with us, then to horse camp in northern Minnesota
and then to Camp Needlepoint for kids with diabetes. She loves it.
Elliott, Mr. Stay-at-Home, even went
to camp for the first time this year, with one of his buddies. His buddy didn't manage to make it through
the week; his dad had to come and get him on Tuesday. Elliott, however, had a grand time and wants
to go again. In general, however, he
resists any proposal to travel more than about 5 miles from home. We have thought about going to the West Coast
on the train next summer; he doesn't want to go. We're planning on going to London this spring; he adamantly did not want
to go (and won't; we will take Krystin and one of her best friends while
Elliott stays home with our good friend Nicole again). We think what he'd like to do, as he at age
10 envisions his own adult future, is buy the house we live in so he can stay
here and not move anywhere at all. This
is not a plan in which we will acquiesce (and probably--we hope!--one that will
never materialize or reflect his interests as he matures). I am delighted we have made his home a place
he likes so much but we may have done too good a job.
* * *
I managed to plow through the most
recent biography of J. Pierpont Morgan; I read it mostly because the reviews of
the book were so good. I tried to figure
out what lessons I could learn from the book and didn't come away with many. I have a hard time imagining a lifestyle
where I go to Europe every January for a
couple of months and buy art objects for $25,000 to $250,000 at the drop of a
hat. I did learn that Morgan had one
thing in common with my paternal grandfather:
they both played solitaire.
Morgan played it on the boats going over to Europe. To a certain extent the book was a
disappointment because Morgan left very little written material behind. I surmise there may not have BEEN much
written material--and also that he wasn't a particularly deep thinker or
reflective man. He was an incredibly
successful banker, someone born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth
who made the most of the chance. I do
have a better understanding, however, of the role he and other bankers played,
and what they were trying to achieve, in trying to keep the U. S. economy
from failing in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Ever since then I have been making
my way through From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life,
1500 to the Present, by Jacques Barzun.
I find it rewarding, and am learning an enormous amount, but it is dense
reading and I can only get through about 15-20 pages at a time. At the rate I'm going I'll still be at it by
the time I send the next letter.
On the topic of books, I can say
(without intending to gloat--I'm not sure why this would be worth gloating
about) that I am probably one of not very many people who have read all 4 of
the Harry Potter books aloud. (As I
think more about it, that statement may not be accurate; there may be a lot of
people who have read the books aloud to their children.) They are an interesting phenomenon. I read them aloud to Elliott (although
occasionally he would get impatient if I could not find time to read to him and
he'd read ahead). Krystin read them
(finishing them before Elliott and I did).
Pat is in the midst of the 4th volume. I was at a meeting of senior faculty members
from the University; two of them (whose children are grown) confessed to having
read them all. At a dinner we had
recently, one University senior administrator also admitted having purchased
and read all 4 books (she said that she hated it when one of the books ended
because then she had to leave the world of magic and return to the more prosaic
real world). A number of our friends
have read the books. It is
understandable why the books have sold so well; J. K. Rowling tells an
intriguing, imaginative story that appeals to both kids and adults (and as a
friend pointed out to me, a story in each book that is structured like a
mystery novel so that one always wants to read the next chapter).
* * *
In July we spent a week on Prince
Edward Island (PEI). We made a labor of
getting there, however, that we won't repeat when we go elsewhere. We flew to Maine and then drove to PEI, which is about an 8-hour drive. En route, we stopped overnight at the Maine cottage rented for
years by one of my long-time friends on the faculty and his wife, Fred and
Charlotte Morrison. Fred wasn't there
but Charlotte
was and she served as a very gracious host.
It was about the kind of setting one expects on the craggy coast of Maine. We had a boat ride around the harbor and then
Charlotte rowed
Pat and the kids out to a little island and dug mussels. Our host cooked them; the kids did not eat
them. (Neither did I; my one prejudice
in eating is that I won't eat slimy things--so I decline boiled mussels,
oysters, and escargot.)
The only way I can think to describe PEI is this: over the crest of every hill there is a
picture that begs to be taken. The
rolling hills and neat farms, frequently with the ocean or picturesque farm
buildings or small villages in the setting, make for a beautiful place. We often DID stop over the crest of a hill to
snap a picture.
PEI is dotted with small country churches,
most dating from the middle 1800s, and most of them lovely. We visited and took pictures of quite a
few. (We have pictures of the insides of
many of the small country Catholic churches; the Anglicans, however, locked all
their churches. There were no other
denominations to speak of.) PEI is also ringed with
lighthouses, of which we visited a number.
One of the ones we visited, Cape
Bear, had tour guides; it
was the first place to receive an SOS from the Titanic. The lighthouse keeper at first thought the
message was a joke--everyone knew the Titanic was unsinkable--but he did relay
the message nonetheless. All of the
lighthouses keep the flashing pattern assigned to it (e.g., 5 seconds on, 3
seconds off, or 3 seconds on, 3 seconds off).
I asked the Cape Bear tour guide if any of the boats actually still used
the flashing lights to guide them; she said something along the lines of
"heavens, no, they all use GPS and radar and sonar." So they keep the lighthouses functioning
purely for the amusement of tourists, I guess.
Anyone who visits PEI needs to have read “Anne of Green
Gables” by L. M. Montgomery, or at least know the story, because the Anne books
are set on PEI. We were staying at a cottage about two blocks
from Green Gables (the house of the book title was based on a real house), and
of course we went to see the actual house.
L. M. Montgomery was born about a block from where we were staying, and
we also visited the home of one of her sets of grandparents. At that home we were given the tour by
Carolyn Collins, the wife of a faculty friend of mine of many years and who has
written a series of companion volumes to the Anne of Green Gables books. It was delightful to spend time with her—both
because she was fun to be with and because she told us much that we would not
have learned otherwise. (She also gave
us good advice on restaurants, something one always needs in a strange
place. Elliott does not like lobster.)
The kids had a good time but they
got annoyed with us for looking at churches and lighthouses. They did enjoy the tour that Carolyn gave
them of L. M. Montgomery's grandparents' home, however, and they liked
snorkeling. I can now say that I have
put on a wetsuit; I doubt I'll rush to do it again. And snorkeling in the north Atlantic
is dull compared to snorkeling in Hawaii
(or a lot of the places in the world, no doubt), but it was a novel experience
for them. What they liked the most,
however, was swimming in the pool at the resort we stayed at. Instilling in our children an interest in the
geography, history, and culture of a place seems to be a talent that Pat and I
lack.
* * *
My dad made a big move this year,
from his house in south Minneapolis
to a seniors apartment complex near downtown.[9] I took him to an appointment with his neurologist
(who treats his Parkinson's) in late July.
The neurologist recommended my dad go to a rehab clinic, to get physical
therapy, his diet improved, and his medications evaluated. My dad was there two weeks and we all saw a
tremendous change for the better--he was much more chipper and more mobile than
he had been for quite some time. (We
learned from the physical medicine doctor that his spine has fused itself
together from his neck to his tailbone, something she described as unusual but
not rare. That situation, as you can
imagine, limits his mobility quite a bit, and in combination with arthritis in
his back, causes considerable recurring pain.
But they seem to have gotten the pain under control, at least somewhat.)
The medical folks at the rehab
clinic told my dad that they believed he should move out of his house. So we ("we" being Gary, Pat, Tracy, and Joan) managed to find a
place quickly, luckily. The place he
moved to, The Kenwood, is a very nice place that seems to be very well run and
very high quality. It is most definitely
NOT a "nursing home" in any sense of the phrase. My brother and I had talked earlier in the
summer with my dad about moving out of the house, because we were worried about
his isolation and diet and medications, but nothing had been done before the
stint in the hospital. Once he made the
move, however, it seems that my dad was quite pleased with the place--and
within a matter of weeks instructed us to put the house on the market. (This is perhaps less difficult for him than
it might be for others; he confided to my brother and me a couple of years ago
that he never liked this house and only bought it because my mother liked
it. So I don't have any sense that he
had great sentimental attachment to it.)
The house was sold quite promptly thereafter, in mid-September.
One odd quirk of my dad's record of
home ownership in Minneapolis: when my parents first bought a house in the
city, they lived on Emerson Avenue. Then they moved to Dupont (and lived for 22
years in the house that the three children grew up in). Then they moved to Colfax, and my dad lived
there another 22 years. Now he has moved
to The Kenwood, which is on Bryant. So
he has gone E - D - C - B in his avenues.
We don't know where on Aldrich he might live.
* * *
The school year began with little
fuss. Elliott was ready to get back, as
he always is. But he seems to be much
more lackadaisical about his school work; his teacher tells he seems to be
above it all. This obviously requires
work on our part. And perhaps a little
less Nintendo and Game Boy.
Krystin was more ambivalent about going back--but
who wouldn't be, after spending much of the summer traveling. Next summer may be different for her; she may
find a job. As with many American teenagers
of this generation, she loves things material, and if she's to indulge her
tastes for the material she has to earn money (or, to be more accurate, she has
to earn more money than her parents are willing to give her as an allowance). Camps may not play such a prominent role in
her life after this. Alas, another sign
of the passing of childhood. (Krystin
did get a part-time job in November; she's a waitress at a senior cooperative
residence about 3 blocks from us. Thus
far she seems to like it. She received
her first paycheck at the end of November; we'll keep a photocopy of it for
her. My dad made a copy of my first
paycheck; it was for $15.62.)
* * *
No one needs to hear any more about the U.S.
presidential election this year but I do want to relate the reaction of our
children. Krystin, who has never had any
interest in things political up to this point, got very interested in the
results. She watched returns on November
7, cheered when her candidates were ahead and groaned when they were not. She quizzed me about the Electoral College
and interrogated me about why I supported the candidates that I did. (At least thus far in her life she has agreed
with my views about the candidate and the issues. I am aware that that is not necessarily going
to be the case forever.) So she now pays
more attention to issues and elections.
That warms the heart of a political science major.
Elliott also took a position. On the night of the third presidential debate
he and I were working on building a Lego castle; we were listening to the
debate on the radio, not watching it on TV.
I thought Elliott was lost in his own world while I was listening, but
every once in awhile he piped up and asked me a question about something that
Bush or Gore said. The day of the
election, he came home and reported that they had held a mock election in his
class. He told me that most kids voted
the way they did because that's the way their parents voted. He, however (he told me) knew why he voted
the way he did because he had listened to the debate and made up his mind on
the issues that were important to him.
(What really set him off was gun control; he is vehemently in favor of
strict gun control laws. He hates
guns. It is interesting to me to hear
that because he is constantly playing Nintendo and Game Boy games; in some of
them, he shoots and kills critters, monsters, and even cartoon people with all
kinds of wild weapons.[10]) So he seems to be on the road to becoming an
active political observer. That also
warms the heart of the political science major.
At the time I bring this letter to a
close, we do not yet know who will be the next President. Irrespective of the outcome, I think the
events have been a wonderful civics lesson for many Americans--as well as a wake-up
call to fix the way we cast votes. (The
mess in Florida
is almost impossible to imagine in the county in which we live--the ballots are
not confusing, are marked with a pen, and are instantly rejected by the machine
if one votes for two candidates, so that one can destroy that ballot and start
over. The system also allows voters to
start over if they make a mistake.) Many
have decried the resort to the courts as a means to determining the outcome of
the election. I don't; I'm amused that
people think it's bad or strange. As one
columnist wrote in Time, it is surprising that anyone is surprised; the
American national pastime is filing lawsuits.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French visitor to America in the 1830s, observed that
ultimately all social questions in America become legal
questions. Not much has changed since he
wrote. I am confident the system will
work through the issue and one of the two will become President.
* * *
Christmas this year will be at our
house, something our children have not experienced very much since we always
used to go to Wisconsin
to my brother's. Since they have moved
back to the Twin Cities, however, we've agreed to rotate the location of the
holidays.
We may soon be rotating among three households. It appears that my sister and her husband
(and one of their three children) will be moving back to the Twin Cities from Austin, Texas,
where they have lived for the past 13-14 years.
My sister is not excited because she hates the cold; her husband's job
with 3M, however, requires the move, so that is that. So, as she related to me in an email, one of
the first things she will have to do when she gets back to Minnesota is buy gloves and boots and coats
because she has none of these things any more.
So that's been the year with
us: the usual ups and downs and arounds
with more ups and arounds than downs. I
hope you have a happy holiday season and a wonderful new year.
[1] Thank
you, Holger Christiansen.
[2] Except
that it was not wood, it was concrete, it had a waist-level wall around the
perimeter, and it was at the second-story level.
[3] That is,
shrimp on the barbeque. I was not
certain how to spell "barbie" when I wrote this. One of the most charming people we met in
Wagga Wagga, a neighbor of the Partridges, Val Hopwood, later told me in an
email that she could not recall having seen the phrase written anywhere, even
though it is used constantly in Australia, but she was fairly certain it was,
in fact, "barbie." Pat and I
also played in one of the local bridge clubs in Wagga, at Val’s
invitation. We were 6th out
of 12 pairs.
[4]I owe
thanks to Val Hopwood for helping me out with these terms. Snags are sausages. When I wrote down these lyrics from a CD we
purchased, there was "barbie"!
But I had already exchanged emails with Val before I found it spelled
out in the song lyrics.
[5]
Mosquitoes, of which we saw very few.
[6] Outdoor
toilet; a loo.
[7] bug
repellant.
[8] cooler.
[9] For
family members and friends who don't have the information: his address is 825 Summit Avenue, #1207, Minneapolis,
MN 55403;
his telephone # is 612-374-0876.
[10] I
suppose this should not surprise me.
Elliott has always been among the most risk-averse people I have ever
known. He avoids activities which
present a threat, or a potential threat, to his physical well-being. Since guns clearly present a significant
potential threat, it is logical he would not like them.
