2001 annual letter

                                                                        December 2001

Greetings everyone!

            I hope your year went well and that you and your family

and friends are healthy and happy.  We are well.[1]

            There are a few odds and ends left over from last year.

First, in my comments about the discussion of abortion and whether

or not I could sit at a bridge table with anyone who might regard me

as the equivalent of a Nazi SS officer, I didn’t finish the thought

adequately.  What I should have concluded the point with was this: 

even though I was uncomfortable with the analogy, I am able to put it out of mind.  In addition, obviously our friend does not see us as the equivalent of SS officers (or presumably would no longer associate with us).  So we continue to play bridge with her, and indeed count her as a cheery and good friend despite this fundamental difference over the issue of abortion.  I guess the situation is a reflection of that normal human ability to tolerate contradiction in daily life without going crazy.

            This subject has not arisen at our bridge table again but it obviously has in connection with stem cell research.  One suspects that if and as discoveries are made using stem cells that combat human affliction (especially if initial discoveries are made in private research labs or elsewhere in the world), the restrictions placed on the research in the U.S. will vanish when people start barraging their Congressional representatives for support for treatment of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and so on.  That’s my prediction, anyway.

            Second, our house remodeling agonies only ended last summer (2000).  A window in our main floor bathroom was removed because the wall is now interior.  The 1931 ceramic tiling had gone around the bottom half of the window.  To get the tiling filled in was a major challenge that went unmet until four years after the rest of the remodeling was (mostly) done; two different tile guys tried to do it and completely botched it.  We have a marvelous general contractor we now use for all work on the house; his estimate to put in the tile and finish the bathroom was $900.  The final bill was $3000.  We were not thrilled, but he did a beautiful job.  He apologized for the discrepancy and gave us a rebate.  But I think that ended the agonies of remodeling.  Never again.

            Third, you may remember I fulminated against the opponents of gun control last year, and cited a book by Michael Bellesiles in which he argued that before the Civil War, few carried guns and most would have thought the gun culture in America now was strange.  Since publishing the book, Professor Bellesiles has had to “arm himself with secrecy after receiving anonymous threats,” according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.  He had to change his home telephone number and use a “stealth” email address to avoid harassment.  For example, he “received five computer viruses intended to destroy his computer’s hard drive, and numerous threatening e-mail messages and anonymous phone calls.”  Bellesiles told the reporter that “‘initially I would respond. One message was sent to the board of trustees at Emory [University, where he is employed as a faculty member] calling for me to be fired because I was a communist. I wrote back that I’m a registered Republican, a John McCain supporter, and a gun owner, and the guy wrote back, “You only think you’re a Republican; you’re really a state-controlled Socialist.”’”  Bellesiles concluded that he would do no more work on guns after he finishes a book he’s working on. “These people are so hateful, I don’t want anything to do with them.”

            I hardly need add anything to the last item.  But I will say that if this kind of threat to academic freedom of faculty--who are hired and paid by universities to be critics and truth-tellers to society--becomes widespread, the role of the university is compromised to the point where it cannot fulfill its obligations.

            This particular venue of the gun-control debate continued into the year.  Professor Bellesiles’s university, Emory, asked him to make a statement rebutting his critics--something I have never heard of before.  So he did.  (I can’t tell for sure, but I surmise that if the administration of the University of Minnesota were to ask a faculty member to issue a statement rebutting critics of his or her research, the faculty at large would be angry at an intrusion into academic freedom.  Presumably the scholars in the field would be quick to jump on something that was erroneous or misleading--which they do all the time in most fields I know of.  For an institutional administration to intervene is unusual.  One can only wonder if the Emory Board of Trustees has not come under pressure from those who oppose gun-control laws, or if the Board put pressure on the administration.)  The controversy goes on.

*  *  *

            We really got winter in the middle of December, 2000:  for a period, bitterly cold (oh, I suppose not that bitterly cold for Minnesota; only -10 degrees in the Twin Cities) and then all of a sudden lots of snow a week before Christmas.  It was, according to the weather columnist in the newspaper, supposed to be the coldest Christmas in a century.  (When I related this to the children, Elliott piped to the effect that “of course it’s the coldest Christmas in the century; it’s the only one in the century so far.”  Smart aleck.)  I don’t think it ever got quite as cold as was predicted, but it was cold.  I don’t know about others in Minnesota and similar climates, but I find that when it gets extremely cold outside, our house is chilly even if I turn up the thermostat to 71 or 72 degrees--there’s something about the bitter cold that just makes the house cold no matter what.

And, by the end of the month, according to the paper, it turned into one of the snowiest Decembers on record.  By late spring we were told that this was the snowiest winter since 1965.  So normal Minnesota weather returned, after several winters that were quite mild. 

*  *  *

            After we opened all the boxes of Christmas decorations in December, 2000, I told Pat we had to stop buying holiday decorating stuff.  Over the years we evolved a division of responsibilities:  after we cut down and bring home the tree on the morning after Thanksgiving, we spend much of the rest of the day decorating.  (We decorate too much, we admit.)  I do the lights and the garland on the tree; the kids then put on ornaments.  Pat puts up a lot of other stuff.  Up until last year we could get it all done by early evening.  In 2000 we couldn’t finish and the decorating took us until Saturday morning.  That’s too much.  It took until Saturday morning again this year--but at least it didn’t take any longer than last year.  That’s progress, right?

*  *  *

            One of the issues that came before one of the University committees with which I work was whether animals should be used in research.  There is a student group, Student Organization for Animal Rights (SOAR) that proposed, as a first step, the University ban research using primates (monkeys).  The advocates of this view believe that there has been no significant benefit for humans from the use of animals in research; they also said that they do not believe humans should have domestic pets (because those are animals whose freedom is being curtailed so they are not able to lead natural lives in their own environment).  The objectives of SOAR are not too different from those of the Animal Liberation Front; that group was responsible for break-ins at University labs, the destruction of computers and research data, and release of animals (most of which could not possibly have survived for very long).

            Another student group (primarily composed of graduate students in the medical/biological sciences) came before the committee later, Focus on Animal Contributions To Science (FACTS).  The FACTS people said the SOAR assertions about the lack of benefits from research using animals are simply wrong; FACTS provided a very long list of human afflictions which are treated, or have been cured, with results from research that at least began with animals. They also argued that species--of which humans are one--do exercise their superiority however they can.  Lions eat other animals; so do eagles and owls and a lot of other animals.  At the silly level, people eat yeast (among many other things).  (The FACTS people also noted that animal research has led to improvement in ANIMAL care as well--vaccines, treatments, etc.  This, of course, would not be particularly impressive to those who do not believe humans should have domestic pets, much less use them for food or research.)

            The fundamental difference between the animal rights advocates and those who favor continued use of animals in research, it was said, is whether humans have the right to exercise whatever superior abilities they have to dominate and use other species.  The animal rights advocates favor the release of all research animals (into shelters where they can live in peace).

            On the facts, the animals rights people are, in my opinion, simply wrong.  The people who do research using animals, and know the historical outcomes of that research, get justifiably apoplectic when it is said that animal research has had no impact on human health and medicine.  Unless one thinks the people in a wide variety of medical disciplines are all lying, it is not possible to credit the notion that animal research has not helped reduce human suffering; the list of contributions to human health developed as result of research using animals is pages and pages long.  (No one, by the way, thinks animals should be treated cruelly; there are complex federal and state laws governing the use of animals in research and I have not encountered anyone doing animal research who does not believe firmly in treating the animals as carefully and caringly as possible.)

I asked one of my friends on the Medical School faculty (whose career is in research on diabetes) about the foundations of the modern treatment of diabetes:  would Krystin’s health be as good as it is, or her prognosis as positive as it is, had there not been animal research.  His response was emphatic:  she would not be as well off, by any means, had there not been years of animal research preceding modern treatment.  (Before the development of synthetic human insulin, which Krystin uses, pigs and cows were killed to obtain insulin for humans.  Had that not occurred, large numbers of those with diabetes would have died and it is nearly inconceivable that synthetic insulin would have been developed.)  I am sorry, but I take the rather harsh view that “better 1000 dead baboons than my dead daughter.”

I also think there are some instances when humans should vigorously and exhaustively exercise their species superiority:  I want every monkey in the world carrying the ebola virus dead.  Very, very dead.  I believe most who have studied the disease also believe that AIDS evolved from monkeys as well; there’s another group of monkeys I would gladly have wiped out if I could have identified every one with the virus.

One of the amusing conclusions one must reach, I think, if one accepts the propositions of the animal rights advocates, is that our hunter-gatherer forebears of 50,000 or more years ago were wrong to kill animals (with the superior skills they had developed in the use of weapons and language to communicate) and they were wrong to domesticate animals for food and for pets (e.g., cows, pigs, dogs, cats).  I suspect that if one were able to travel back in time and tell those folks that they could not domesticate animals to make their food sources more reliable and could not use their human attributes and skills to catch their food, our ancestors would have despaired about the future of their species.

I must also admit that I am uninterested in becoming a vegetarian.  I have nothing against people who want to be vegetarians; I just don’t care to join them.  I have no religious or philosophical or ethical reasons for doing so.  The only arguable reason to do so, from my vantage point, is for health reasons:  one can make the case that a vegetarian diet, carefully constructed, might be more healthy than a diet with animal products in it.  Our family, however, has neither the interest nor the motivation to pursue our health to that extent.  And I like chicken and beef and eggs.

* * *

            People who hate paying taxes can skip down to the next  * * *.

            Sometimes I worry at the directions in which American political culture seems to be going.  As one of my faculty colleagues pointed out recently, we live in an era when private consumption is more highly valued than public investment.  I think one of the most thoughtful columnists in American today is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.  He wrote a column last March that probably best captures my own views.

To listen to President Bush, you’d think our only two choices today were a tax cut that returns the surplus to the people or having it wasted by the government.  He never discusses a third possibility — that government provides essential services in our lives, that we as Americans are fortunate to have the services we have, and that we constantly need to be reinvesting in them because we have a collective responsibility to our children’s future, and to the less fortunate, to ensure that the government always has the resources to provide.  Being a U.S. citizen is a privilege and a responsibility. It’s not just a transaction about how much you paid in taxes and how much you get back.

So when Mr. Bush repeats his mantra that the budget surplus “is not the government’s money, it’s your money,” he’s right.  But the sentence is incomplete.

We must finish the thought:

“It’s not the government’s money.  It’s your money.  But it’s also going to be your responsibility to pay your parents’ nursing home bills when they get old and you find that Social Security and Medicare are underfunded because of today’s excessive tax cut.”

“It’s not the government’s money.  It’s your money.  But it’s also going to be your traffic jam, when the government can’t afford to invest in mass transit around cities so your 20-minute commute becomes an hour.”

“It’s not the government’s money.  It’s your money.  But it’s also going to be your dilapidated public school, because of a lack of funds for new school building.”

“It’s not the government’s money.  It’s your money.  But it’s also going to be your busy signal, when you call a federal agency for help in five years and you’re put on hold for a week because it’s understaffed.”

“It’s not the government’s money.  It’s your money.  But then, it’s also your favorite national park that will be underfunded, provided Mr. Bush hasn’t sold it off to an oil company.”

“It’s not the government’s money.  It’s your money.  Of course it’s also going to be your home alarm system that you’ll need to install to deal with the rise in crime when all those kids who should have Head Start today but don’t for lack of funds, or the 44 million Americans without health care, become desperate adults.”

            We have, as a nation, seem to have lost sight of the value of public goods, the things that benefit all of us directly or indirectly and that we must all pay for or they will not be produced.  Instead we enact tax rebates and tax cuts rather than contemplating what one friend calls our inter-generational responsibilities to our children and grandchildren. 

Another facet of this issue is the question of what to do when the economy goes into the tank and state and federal governments face large deficits because tax revenues head south:  those who support tax cuts and rebates do not argue (or if they do I’ve missed it) then that we are under-taxed.  This seems to be a one-way argument:  we are over-taxed if there are surpluses but we have to cut government services when there is a recession.  The logic of this reasoning is unclear to me; the outcomes are troublesome to contemplate.  If one believes that “we the people” do provide ourselves valuable services--and in the United States, at least, the “government” is “we the people”--then to constantly hack, squeeze, and reduce roads, schools, parks, environmental protection, food and factory standards, and so on, in order to fatten our wallets a bit, does not make a great deal of sense to me.  All it means is we get second-rate (or no) services that we all need.

I did a little poking around on the web and developed the following chart, which I thought was quite interesting.

State Rankings on Tax Levels and Other Indicators

(A)                   (B)[2]                              (C)[3]                              (D)[4]                              (E)[5]

Rank                Taxes per                     Development                State of                        Most                capita                           Report Card                 Caring                          Livable                        FY1999                       2000                            1998                           

1                      Connecticut                 A-B-A                          Minnesota                   Minnesota

2                      Delaware                     B-B-B                          Massachusetts             Colorado         

3                      Hawaii                         D-F-D                          Connecticut                 Iowa               

4                      Minnesota                   A-C-A                         New Hampshire            Virginia

5                      Massachusetts             A-A-A                         Maine                          Utah    

6                      Michigan                      B-A-B                          Wisconsin                    Connecticut

7                      Wisconsin                    A-C-B                          Vermont                      Kansas            

8                      California                     D-A-B                          New Jersey                  Wisconsin       

9                      Washington                  B-A-A                          Iowa                            Massachusetts

10                    New York                    C-B-B                          Alaska                         Nebraska

41                    Montana                      D-D-D                         Texas                           Oklahoma       

42                    South Carolina             C-C-F                           Alabama                     No. Carolina

43                    Colorado                      A-A-A                         Florida                         Kentucky        

44                    Alaska                         C-D-D                          Nevada                        Arkansas         

45                    Alabama                     D-C-D                         South Carolina             Tennessee

46                    Louisiana                    F-D-F                          Arkansas                      Alabama        

47                    Tennessee                    C-C-C                          Arizona                        New Mexico   

48                    Texas                           F-B-C                           Louisiana                    West Virginia  

49                    South Dakota               B-F-D                          Mississippi                   Louisiana       

50                    New Hampshire            A-B-D                          New Mexico                Mississippi

            There are dozens if not hundreds of such rankings; I tried to pick out three (in addition to the tax rankings by The Tax Foundation, columns A & B) that were themselves a collection of additional measures.  One could do a doctoral dissertation on this subject and perhaps it would be a useful study for someone in the state administration to pursue more systematically and in greater depth.

            What I was trying to explore was the relationship between level of taxes levied in a state and that state’s quality of life and economic health. The results are highly suggestive.  Here’s how to read the table:  The letter grades for economic development, in column (C) correspond to the state tax ranking in column (B)--columns A, B, and C are all the same state.  For example, in Column B Louisiana is rated 46^th in terms of per capita tax collections, in Column C Louisiana is given an F on economic performance, a D on business vitality, and an F on development capacity; in Column D Louisiana is ranked 48^th in “caring” as measured by the 32 indicators compiled by United Way; and in Column E Louisiana ranks 49^th in quality of life according to the 43 compiled indicators used by Morgan Quinto.

The data on the table, while mixed, suggest to me that in general higher taxes are related to economic health and also probably linked to quality of life.  (Note that the economic grades, in column C, are much better for the high-tax states than they are for the low-tax states.)  And in general, the higher the state taxes, the higher the quality of life.  There are four states that tax highly and also rank highly on the quality indicators:  Minnesota, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Connecticut.  There are two states that tax lightly and also rank very low on the quality indicators:  Alabama and Louisiana.

            These measures are not perfect and thoughtful study might provide more information; there is a wealth of information and data available, especially from the U.S. Census Bureau.  I did not take the time to fully analyze the data for all 50 states but I would be surprised if there did not turn out to be a clear relationship between tax policy and the other measures.  And there are some variations.

--          Iowa’s tax rates are not in the top 10 (it’s 28^th) but it ranks in the top 10 in the two other measures, so Iowans are presumably getting a good deal for their tax dollars; on the Development Report Card Iowa gets an A-D-B.

--          Arkansas and Mississippi are in the bottom 10 in both measures but tax in the middle range (Arkansas is 19^th in tax rates; Mississippi is 31^st); one might think that taxpayers there aren't getting the same bang for the buck as are people in other states.  On the Development Report Card Arkansas gets a D-D-F and Mississippi gets an F-C-F.

--          It would appear that Hawaiians are not getting a good deal:  they pay very high taxes but their state doesn’t rank in the top 10 in the other two categories and it has lousy economic development measures.  There may be other factors at work here, given Hawaii's odd geography.

--          Coloradans are getting a good deal:  their economic development measures are at the top and they rank highly in livability as well (but not so well on caring, where they stand 21^st).

Statisticians will be quick to point out that any relationship between taxes and these other measures are correlations and that one cannot conclude higher taxes “cause” higher rankings on economic health, caring, or livability.  In the technical sense, the statisticians are right; common sense tells me, however, that a state that spends more on roads and schools and public services will be more highly ranked on quality of life and caring than states which do not.  The conclusion I draw from this is that cutting taxes and giving rebates are not necessarily good for the State of Minnesota.  Minnesota ranked 4^th in tax burden in 1999 but first in “state of caring” in 2001 and “most livable.”  That alone says a lot to me:  we appear to get what we pay for.  (Of course, if a state government is corrupt, incompetent, or inefficient, then high taxes do not do as much for the common good.  I think that most of us who live in Minnesota and observe state politics would say we have a decent track record here.)

It seems to me that those who advocate for continued and deeper tax cuts forget the dictum of that conservative Republican Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote that “I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization.”  Naturally I would rather not have to pay taxes—I’d rather have the money to invest, travel, dine out, and so on.  But I also want to leave our children a nation at peace with itself and whose citizens are afforded the opportunity to live a good life.  I do not think that goal is achieved when we make the wealthy wealthier and the poor poorer.  That, however, is the direction in which we are moving.  I would rather give up some of my income for the larger social good.  We can argue all day about how much of our incomes Americans ought to give up for that social good--and I certainly don’t believe in confiscatory taxation--but right now it strikes me there is a meanness, a selfishness, that pervades American public policy making—I see it both nationally and in state politics.  I am disappointed and worried.  And I don’t believe that I am, at present (before any tax cuts) taxed too highly, when I look at the problems we all face (everything from traffic congestion and rusting bridges to deteriorating schools to overloaded federal food inspection programs to a strained judiciary to inadequately funded programs for the economically disadvantaged).

The prevailing attitude appears to be that government is a “beast.”  The author of a letter to the editor to the Star-Tribune in June wrote that “a policy that was popular at the federal level some years

ago . . . was called ‘Starve the Beast.’  The problem is that we the people are the beast.”  

One of my distinguished political science colleagues used more provocative language in describing the $1.35 trillion tax cut as an effort to hamstring the government and “the rape of American society.”  Except in those instances where subsidies to corporations are seen as beneficial, he added, with considerable distaste.   What the tax cuts and rebates and the lobbying for more cuts demonstrates, he concluded, is the unrelenting greed of well-off Americans.

What is mystifying, he said, is why those who say they are fiscal conservatives are seen as the best custodian of the long-term financial health of the nation; recent events suggest the opposite, but the myth continues.  It is interesting that two of the states now facing the worst financial difficulties are Florida and Texas, where there have been deep cuts in permanent tax rates at the behest of Republican governors and legislators; according to one article I read recently, conservative legislators in both states now believe the tax cuts were a mistake (the article appeared long before the events of September 11).  What is also interesting is information provided to the University by its investment advisors:  when the tax rebate checks from the federal government started arriving in mailboxes, the rate of personal savings in the country went up significantly.  Contrary to expectations, people did not go out and spend the money; they saved it, and thus did not help stimulate the economy and end the downturn.  It seems to me long past time when Congress and state legislatures need seriously to re-think the impact of taxing and spending policies.

(There was, in late November, an article about Norway in our local newspaper.  Norwegians pay 60% taxes but have cradle-to-grave economic security, mothers have 3-year maternity leaves, and everyone is guaranteed 8 weeks of vacation per year.  The police do not carry guns and there are about 50 murders per year (fewer than in the Twin Cities).  While it is impossible to compare the largely homogeneous small country of Norway to the heterogeneous and large United States, it does seem to me there may be some lessons we could learn.  (I wouldn't be keen on paying 60% taxes, but . . . . ))

* * *

            I have come to conclude that one of the more important substances in our lives is adhesives.  I am brought to this peculiar conclusion because of an irritating need to re-do photograph albums but it also bears on furniture, appliances, wallpaper, and a lot of other things in the house.

            After dawdling for nearly 10 years, Pat and I finally tackled the obnoxious task of getting our pictures into photograph albums.  We looked at the ones we had done, through about 1992; already the pages of the albums are yellowing and the glue holding the plastic covers over the pictures is coming undone.  (And these were expensive albums from an outfit that specializes in photo albums.)  So in addition to sorting and ordering hundreds of photographs from a number of years, we also have to go tear apart and re-do earlier albums.  This did not make us happy. 

Even more annoying is the fact that I have an album my mother put together in the mid-1940s.  She used the little paper “corners” that are glued on the page and the 4 corners of each photo are slipped into them.  Those little “corners” are still firmly glued to the pages; not one of the pictures has fallen out of an album of perhaps 40 pages.  Obviously the quality of adhesives in the world has declined in the last half-century.

We’ve given up on commercial albums.[6] We just put the pictures on acid-free paper and insert them into vinyl page protectors and put labels on the page protectors with names, dates, places[7] and put the pages in a three-ring binder. These albums should, barring fire or water or similar damage, last for the next several generations to look at.  If anyone cares, of course--maybe our children will just throw them away when we die.  (We are, of course, relying on the quality of the adhesive on the double-sided tape and on the labels--maybe these will dry up and fall off, too, again demonstrating the decline in the quality of adhesives in the world.) 

* * *

            We departed for London on April 5.  On the evening of April 4 we got to sit outside on our deck for an hour or so.  The temperature reached 53 degrees on April 4, ending a string of 148 days in the Twin Cities without reaching 50 degrees.  In July 53 degrees would feel darn cold; on April 4 it felt wonderfully warm.  We sat out again April 15, the night after we returned from London.  Again, we had to wear jackets.  The next time it was reasonable to sit out was April 28.

            Meantime, this year it was the end of April before we got the gardens cleaned out and saw the plants poking through the soil.  The last day of April, one of the pleasantest we have seen in a very long time, was when I could actually say I was “hot” from working outside.  I had to break down and put on shorts and a t-shirt before I went to the local garden store to get a couple dozen pansies (so there would at least be some color on our deck).  We finally got all the outdoor plants in on the May 12-13 weekend—much later than last year.  And then, May 14, I came home and all our new plants had wilted--because the temperature was 95°!  And again the next day.  What a shock.

            I have concluded it is part of the job description of at least some teen-age girls (maybe of boys as well, but I haven’t experienced that yet) to be moody, unpleasant, and short-tempered.  But even Krystin, that last day of April, came bouncing into the house (after staying over night at her aunt and uncle’s) and said “how could anyone be in a bad mood on such a nice day as this?”  After I recovered, I agreed.  Maybe her good mood was caused by the fact that she was going to use the car to go to the Mall of America to go shopping with friends.

* * *

London I         Pat and I took Krystin and her friend Christine to London in April.  (Christine is the one who traveled with Krystin and me from Martha’s Vineyard to Myrtle Beach in the beastly hot mid-summer of 1999.)  We spent 8 days in London.  For reasons I’ll explain, Pat and I returned to London for 5 days over Memorial Day weekend, 6 weeks later.

            We have decided that one can divide the world into two groups of people:  travelers and vacationers.  Vacationers go to a beach, or resort, and swim, play golf or tennis, eat out, and generally have a good time with no great ambition to do more than that.  Travelers go somewhere to see things and places and to learn.  Pat and I are travelers.  We quit being vacationers a few years ago.  Sitting on the beach in the sun reading a book (even under an umbrella) is not a good idea when both of our fathers have had to have cancerous skin lesions removed.  So has Pat.

            I further divide travelers into two groups:  those who (primarily) like to see the wonders of nature and all its splendor and those who (primarily) like to see the cities and creations of humanity.  I fall into the latter category; I am not quite of the position that “you’ve seen one mountain, you’ve seen them all,” but I must admit I am close.  I think my travel preference is about 70% cities and human constructs and 30% nature.  (Pat says these numbers are inaccurate and that it is at least 80/20.)

            I also came to realize on this trip that my sight-seeing ambitions far outstrip my time, my feet, and the energy of everyone else with me.  I started out with the goal of doing 4 things a day.  I quickly cut it to 3, and we often only got in 2. 

            In any event, I got to see a city to my heart’s content while in London.  Or, to be more accurate, we got to see a few parts of a very large and interesting city.  We did all the touristy things, some for ourselves and some for the two girls:  the Tower of London and the crown jewels, Westminster Abbey, Greenwich Village, the Palace of Westminster (a.k.a. the Houses of Parliament), a double-decker bus ride, Kensington Palace (from the outside), walked along both banks of the Thames, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace (which, afterwards, even the girls admitted was a waste of time), Globe Theater, saw “Mousetrap” (the 20,130^th performance of Agatha Christie’s parlor mystery, in its 49^th year, and Pat guessed whodunit before the end), the Museum of London, the British Museum (twice), St. James’s Park, the Museum of London, Harrod’s (I don’t know who buys stuff there; everything I looked at was about 50% more than what I could get it for somewhere else, even taking into account the fact that prices in England are much higher than here; it also makes Dayton’s in Minneapolis look like a Wal-Mart; on the one hand, it was sort of gauche, but on the other hand it was the most well-organized department store I have ever been in), Trafalgar Square and St. Martin in the Fields, Covent Gardens, and so on.  But there was much we did not have time to do.

            My more sophisticated friends will laugh at my next admission.  I have for many years known of the “Elgin Marbles” and that they were in the British Museum.  Beyond that I had no idea what they were.  I had various uninformed pictures in my mind:  gigantic granite balls used in the early Olympics, perfectly shaped small marble balls used for children’s games in Greece, who knows what.  I never had a clear picture.  When going through the British Museum, I finally found and saw them.  Little did I realize they were fragments from the frieze of the Parthenon, named after the British noble, Lord Elgin, who had a role in retrieving them and bringing them to England.  Now I know what the Elgin Marbles are.  (And they’re impressive.)

            One thing we did not get to do, that we wanted to, was go to a couple more shows.  We wanted to see both “Phantom of the Opera” and “My Fair Lady” (the latter of which is a new production in London).  Tickets for both were sold out all the time we were there.  So before we went the second time, I emailed ahead and ordered tickets in advance for “Phantom.”  “My Fair Lady” was sold out through its entire run.

            While we stayed in London with the two girls we had a 3-bedroom apartment with a small living room, 2 bathrooms, and a kitchenette.  We had originally thought about a hotel room with sleeping for 4 but put that notion aside after about 10 seconds of thought.  Both Krystin and Christine are such slobs when it comes to their living quarters that there was no way Pat and I were going to spend 8 days living in a mess.  Two hotel rooms would have been a little pricey but we would have taken them—and then discovered this apartment option, which was perfect.  We all had our privacy and they kept their mess in their bedroom.

            If we lived in (central) London, we would certainly only have one vehicle.  (It would also be all we could afford, given what we understand real estate prices to be.)  But there would be no need to drive anywhere in the city; the Underground was a marvelous way to get around.  After two days there, we readily let the two girls go off by themselves; they could read the Underground map as well as we could and were very good at getting around.  (Nor did we ever have any sense that it would be unsafe for them to be out alone; one afternoon we let them go after lunch and told them to be back to our apartment by 8:00.  They were.)  No one comes away from London, after riding the Underground, ever forgetting the phrase “Mind the Gap.”  One hears it, in a booming voice, as every train pulls into a station, cautioning passengers to careful about the (very small) gap between the edge of the station platform and the train cars.

            What surprised us was how close together things were.  Pat and I went for a walk one evening through Kensington Park.  By the time we had decided to head back home, we ran into an Underground station that was 3 stops away from our apartment.  We thought it was a long ways; it was about a mile and a half.

            We took a lot of tours while in London.  I had discovered on the web an outfit called “London Walks,” which offers about 50 or 60 different 2-hour walking tours all over London.  They looked very interesting to me.  I learned from a couple of friends who had been there and used them that they were also very good.  So while there we actually took about 6 of their walks.  At the first one (people simply show up at a designated Underground stop; the guide is holding up the “London Walks” brochure so one can find him/her), the guide welcomed us and announced that the Brits in the group would probably be surprised to be having a tour in London given by an American.  (He told the Americans that this was to their advantage because we would be able to understand him.)  We wondered about this, but the guy clearly knew London (he explained that he had lived in the city for 30 years, studied it endlessly, and married an English woman and their kids were growing up in England).  At one point during the walk he mentioned that he could personally guide 49 of the “London Walks” walks.

            As we strolled along I asked the guy where he was from.  He was the son of a dairy farmer in Platteville, Wisconsin.  He also told me that for two summers, to earn money to attend college in London, he worked on the railroads immediately adjacent to the University of Minnesota.  So we went 5000 miles around the globe to get a tour of London from some guy who worked in college about 6 blocks from where I do.  While I am less astonished than I used to be by “small world” incidents, I must say that this amused me considerably.

            Before we went to London, I had emailed to “London Walks” to ask a few questions.  I received prompt, full, and friendly emails in response.  When we got back to Minneapolis, I emailed again to complain about one of the walks (the details of which are not worth reciting).  I also mentioned that we would be returning and wanted to take a couple more of the walks that we had missed the first time.  This guy emailing me (I presume the owner) mentioned one we should take the “Along the Thames Pub Walk” and said that of the 49 walks he could personally guide, this was his favorite.  So I emailed back and say “OK, are you the David who gave the Old Kensington tour on such and such a date?”  He acknowledged that he was; so we had, as our first walking tour, the (American) owner of “London Walks.”  He said he remembered us and that we’d meet again on the pub walk.

            One of tours I enjoyed most was our first one, the Houses of Parliament (which was not a “London Walks” tour--it is given by a member of the staff of Parliament).  Apparently one must request tickets for this tour a long time in advance; I must have done so by email early in the year and then completely forgot about it.  The day before we were leaving I received an email from someone at Parliament telling me I had four tickets for a tour and needed to pick them up by 3:00 on Friday—the day we were to arrive, at 9:00 in the morning.  Of course, our plane was delayed leaving Minneapolis by 3 hours, so instead of getting in at 9:00 we got in about 11:00—and had to race like devils to get to our apartment, dump our luggage, and find our way on the Underground to Parliament.  All of this on about 2 hours sleep.

Phrases  We did learn the (ostensible) origin of several English phrases.  To “toe the line” comes from the days when members of Parliament (MPs) carried swords into the chamber and were known, if tempers rose, to get into fights.  At some point they put a line on the floor in front of the benches on each side (Government party on one side, opposition on the other); the lines are just far enough apart that even if two people swing a sword at each other, the tips will not meet.  When Parliamentary speakers got excited, perhaps unsheathing their sword and stepping toward their opponent, the speaker would cry “toe the line,” and anyone who didn’t do so would be ejected from the House. 

            Another phrase we learned the origin of, in our Parliament tour, was “in the bag.”  There is, at one end of the House of Commons, a large bag hung on a hook.  If any citizen wanted something taken up in Parliament, he or she sent a note to his/her MP.  The notes are put in this bag.  Sometimes the citizen would not hear anything for some time and would complain, at which time the MP would assure the constituent that the note was “in the bag,” meaning it would be taken up at some point by the House.

One final and gruesome phrase we learned about.  On one of our walking tours the guide told us the origin of the phrase “you’re pulling my leg.”  On Tower Green, outside the Tower of London, where all the males were executed (the women were executed inside the Tower grounds), those who were affluent would slip the hangman a tip and tell him to pull their leg so their neck would break and the death would be quick.

This same guide also asked us (as did they all) to be quite careful in crossing the streets; sometimes the group was large enough that not everyone could get across on one “walk” light.  The guide, who was also a barrister, cautioned us that it is a peculiarity of English law that if one is walking across the street against the light, and a motorist hits you, not only are you at fault, you are also liable for any damage to the vehicle or injury to the driver. 

One tour we took was the “Jack the Ripper” walk, guided by a man who has written one of the definitive books on the murders.  (They took place in 1888; the victims were prostitutes whose bodies were quite badly disfigured by the murderer.).  We went walking in parts of London that, even 113 years later, were not elegant (although being re-gentrified); the guide showed us where the murders took place and told us what the police did to follow up.  (When one reads about visiting London, one is told to think of London as an egg with two yolks; the yolks are the City of London (the original city, built on the Roman settlement) and the City of Westminster (where London expanded south along the Thames, now the site of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, among other things.)  It was interesting; it appears the murderer got away with the crimes—they have not been solved to this day—because of professional rivalry between the police of the City of London and the police of the City of Westminster.  The crimes were committed on the west end of the City of London and the east end of the City of Westminster; all the murderer had to do was cross the street and slip into the gloom (all the murders were at night), and the police from one city could not chase him into the other.

On the question of real estate, we learned during the “Jack the Ripper” walk that some rather modest row houses, originally built as middle class homes for silk weavers, could be purchased 10 years ago for £20,000.  Now they go for about £1 million each.  The advantage is not (yet) the neighborhood; it must be that they are in central London.  Yikes.  (The £ was worth about $1.60 or a little more at the time.)  During a boat trip to Greenwich we also saw a large number of old warehouses that have been (or are being) converted to equally expensive condos.  Like I said, we’d own only one car.

            One of the places Pat and I walked around was Kensington Park and we looked at the Albert Memorial.  Queen Victoria reigned 1837-1901; her husband, Albert, died in 1863 and she had this elaborate (some might say gaudy) memorial erected, which recently re-opened after all the gold leaf was replaced, to the tune of several million £s.  (She went into mourning at his death and basically mourned until she died, 38 years later.)  I came to have more respect for Albert when I learned that on his deathbed he told Victoria that England should not side with the South in the American Civil War (which it had been toying with doing).  He was also a supporter of science and the arts; one of the great concert halls in London is Albert Hall and one of the great museums in London is the Victoria and Albert.

            Christine and I did the tour of the new Shakespeare’s Globe Theater; Pat and Krystin had coffee.  I learned much about 16^th Century theater and realized that were I ever to be able to travel back in time, going to the theater to see one of Shakespeare’s plays would not be on the agenda.  The seating for the theater is three levels of seats in a semi-circle around the stage, with standing room (but no roof) in front of the stage.  When one went to the theater in the 1400s and 1500s, it was a 5-6 hour venture.  They served beer and food—but there were no bathrooms.  So one just relieved oneself in the seat.  If you were on the top tier (which is where the Queen sat), I guess you were OK, but down below the liquid would drip down between the slats of the floorboards.  It must have reeked to high heaven.  It sounds pretty disgusting by 21^st Century standards.  (The tour guide assured us that they do have bathrooms in the new theater.)

            It is thought that the origin of the term “eavesdrop” came from the original of this theater:  those standing in the open pit could, when it rained during a play (the theater was and is open to the sky) lean far back under the eaves to stay dry.  One would then hear the gossip dropping from the seats.  Of course, if all this other liquid is dripping down from the seating above, how dry would you stay?

            The solidity of the buildings in London struck us.  Much of the city (the parts that were not bombed during WWII) consists of buildings of stone and mortar; one has a sense that they are “permanent.”  The apartment we stayed in was built in the late 1800s, I believe, and a fair number of the buildings in the city date from then or earlier.  In contrast, when one looks at the skyline of any modern American city, it does not seem likely that many of the glass-faced office towers will still be there in 150 years.  Judith Martin (my source for much information about cities, obviously) commented that we indeed do not know if those buildings will still be standing--because no one knows how long structural steel lasts.  Cut granite and stone, stacked up to create walls, will pretty much sit there forever; what steel will do, over the long term, is not known.  She added that “the changing fashions of buildings have already shown us the limited lifespan of more recent structures.”

            (I wrote the preceding paragraph last spring, long before the September 11 terrorist attacks on the East Coast.  Clearly structural steel does not withstand temperatures of 1500 or more degrees, but that’s certainly not what I had in mind when I composed those sentences.)

London II        Pat and I returned to London in late May, this time by ourselves.  We did much that we had not had time to do before and a few things we could not do before (that is, visit a pub or two).  We visited the Tate Modern museum (of modern art; I have finally concluded that I am simply a troglodyte who does not like or understand very much of modern art.  But we did see something made by someone with whom we had had dinner in Minneapolis!  U of Minnesota Professor Emeritus Warren Mackenzie, who works with clay, among other things, had pieces on display at the Tate.). 

            On the recommendation of our friend Sam Warner, we also visited the wonderful little Sir John Soane’s Museum.  Soane was the architect of the Bank of England (and of numerous other buildings) who put his architectural talents to extraordinary use in his own home in order to house and display the thousands of items he collected from other people who traveled around the world (he almost never left England).  The home is full of antiquities, paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and various other items; it makes fascinating use of skylights, mirrors, windows, and stairs to put the interior space to optimal use.  Soane and his wife had two sons; the favorite died young and the other was a reckless debtor.  Soane decided that he would not risk his collection falling into the hands of the debtor son so used his influence to have an Act of Parliament passed declaring that the collection was to be turned into a museum--which it was, in the 1830s, and has been so ever since.  We received an absolutely delightful two-hour tour from the curator/librarian of the museum, a tour we ranked as one of the three best we have ever received (on a par with one we received from a docent of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. and from a retired Australian diplomat of the Sydney Opera House).

            Sometimes I think Pat has aural dyslexia.  We encountered the names of two people with similar names who were collectors.  Sir John Soane I mentioned already; Sir Hans Sloane also collected things and his collection became the foundation for the British Museum.  There is also a Sloane Square in London.  He is also known for something else.  “Whilst in Jamaica, Sloane was introduced to Cocoa as a drink favoured by the local people. He found it ‘nauseous’ but by mixing it with milk made it more palatable. He brought this chocolate recipe back to England where it was manufactured and at first sold by apothecaries as a medicine.  Eventually, in the 19^th century, it was being taken up by Messrs Cadbury who manufactured chocolate using Sloane’s recipe” (quoted from http://www.nhm.ac.uk/botany/databases/sloane/hanssloane.htm).  Pat was forever confusing Soane and Sloane.

            We also visited the Victoria and Albert Museum; I never got off the main floor.  It describes itself as the world’s largest museum devoted to the decorative arts.  They have a very broad definition of “decorative arts”; it includes sculpture, ceramics, architecture, textiles, interior decoration, stained glass, and furniture.

            More Phrases   On a Chelsea Pub Walk, we learned (supposedly) the origin of the phrase “mind your Ps and Qs.”  In the days when ale and beer was brewed locally at each pub, the alcohol content varied from day to day.  If the alcohol content in a particular batch was high, the alewife would write a message to customers to “mind your pints and quarts”--so they would know they were likely to get inebriated if they drank too much of that day’s ale.

            This time around we did get to see “Phantom of the Opera”; I ordered the tickets a month in advance.  The production is overly-staged, by modern lights, but (said the program) the intent was to replicate the staging used in operas at the time the original story was written (the 1890s).  We did learn one thing:  read the libretto before going to see a production like this.  Our friend Dagny Christiansen urged us to do so, so the night before we left we sat in our living room and listened to the CD of the soundtrack and read the words along with the music.  It made a world of difference when we were actually in the theater in London.  It was a fun show to see and hear, but it struck me that there was nothing wrong with the Phantom that modern cosmetic surgery couldn’t have corrected.

            One friend of mine here in the Twin Cities, who has forgotten more opera than I would ever know even if I studied it for the rest of my life, dismissed Phantom as containing no memorable music whatever.  Maybe so, but on the other hand, Phantom hasn’t been around for 150-300 years, as have most of the great operas, so one cannot have heard the individual pieces dozens of times in life; I think it is difficult to tell what will survive and what won’t.  I’m not quite so dismissive; I think it possible that the music that will last from this period (parallel to the survival, for example, of Beethoven or Mozart) will include music such as that written for “serious” musicals such as Phantom.  Fortunately, no one can prove me wrong, since no one I know--barring some interesting developments in medicine--will be around 150 or 300 years from now to look at what music from the 20^th Century is still performed.

            We also this time saw two palaces, one at Hampton Court (the home of the English monarchs beginning with Henry VIII in the 1430s and running through Anne in the early 1700s) and the other Blenheim Palace, the home of the Dukes of Marlborough (Winston Churchill’s family) from the time it was built in the early 1700s.  Hampton Court, we read, has over 1100 rooms, but it looked to us to be a very uncomfortable place.  Blenheim Palace, with only about 110 rooms and a 3½-acre roof, was smaller but more impressive.  The Duke and his family live in half; the other half consists of ceremonial and state rooms that are almost never used.  The Duke and his family eat in the state dining room only on Christmas.  These rooms can be rented out for corporate and social functions, we learned (the only way the Duke can afford to continue to own Blenheim); Sylvester Stallone had his wedding reception there, for a mere £15,000.  The current Duke, the 11^th, had as his grandmother Consuelo Vanderbilt, the American railroad heiress who married the 9^th Duke in an arranged marriage.  She gave him two children but couldn’t stand him and divorced him after about a decade.

We spent the day on the Richmond/Hampton Court tour with two women who had also been on a walking tour with us the night before.  It was great fun to do our tour with them, and we learned that one of them, with her husband, owns a bed-and-breakfast in St. Petersburg, Florida.  Her friend told Pat that the place is beautiful.  Since we had talked a little about, in the future, going to someplace warm for at least a short period during the winter, and since we’ve had a standing invitation from the former Director of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics at the University, Merrily Baker, to come visit her near Naples, Florida, we decided we’d do so this year.  So our plans are to head to St. Petersburg the very end of December and return the weekend after New Year’s.  We just hope that our friends the Dixons don’t kick us off the New Year’s Eve dinner invitation list because we miss a year.

“Getting away from winter” isn’t something most people in Minnesota would feel strongly about, at least not as late as mid-November.  The temperatures got into the 70s quite often.  I made puckish remarks to friends about wanting a lot of snow and cold quick so that when we went to Florida in January it would feel like we were really escaping the winter.

True to meteorological form, however, winter came.  As I finish this letter, in late November, we are being inundated in snow the Monday after Thanksgiving after one of the warmest Novembers on record.  And of course, after a day in Owatonna with Pat's family for a Thanksgiving gathering, we got home Sunday night before the snows of post-Thanksgiving Monday to find that our furnace was not working.  What timing.  (It got fixed on Monday.)

* * *

            One night before we left for London the first time, Pat and I were talking about what we were going to do while there and our conversation drifted to travel in general.  We eventually asked ourselves “where do we want to travel before we die or become too incapacitated to travel?”  That led to composing what I jokingly called “our itinerary for life”:  all the places we want to get to.  It is a remarkably Eurocentric list, I must say.  There are non-European places I want to go that Pat is not particularly interested in, and vice-versa.  So, given the opportunity, I guess we’ll do Europe as much as feel we need to and, if we haven’t exhausted our interest or our ability to travel, we shall then figure out what other places we want to go.  (We are agreed that we want to go to New Zealand and back to Australia.)

            We have also decided to start doing our traveling now.  We know of a number of people who have said they will travel once they retire.  Unfortunately, we also know of people who, upon reaching retirement, lacked the energy or ability to travel because they were ill or disabled--or because one of the other of the pair had died.  So, rather than being prudent and saving more money, we shall save less and spend more on travel.  We will also take the kids on at least some trips because we believe it is immensely educational for them.  (Elliott is still impressed with the fact that quite a number of people on Prince Edward Island spoke French.  Even though London is hardly an alien place for an English-speaking American, I think Krystin still learned a great deal simply by being in another country.)  Pat and I shall look at our travel pictures when we’re in the nursing home.

* * *

            I went on an overnight camp in May with Elliott and the 4^th grade classes in his school; we went to Camp Courage about an hour west of the Twin Cities.  They had various activities planned.  I was disconcerted and dismayed at how much everybody yelled at the kids:  do this, be quiet, stand in line, go there, stop doing that, and on and on.  I think 75% of the words coming out of the mouths of the adults were commands, in fairly harsh tones, to do or stop doing something.

At one point after a meal, a young woman stood up in front of everyone and started lecturing us on the importance of conservation of energy (she checked all the cabins when everyone came to eat to see how well people did in turning off lights, fans, etc.) in an offensively didactic fashion.  I held my head in my hands, grimacing to myself.  One of the parents at the next table saw me and started laughing silently; I noticed.  I leaned over; she asked me if my wife talked like that.  I said heavens no and if she did we would have been divorced years ago.  I told her I thought the young woman would have made a fine group leader for the Hitler Youth instructional staff (and her title would have been, if I recall my rusty German correctly, “gruppenführer”).

The camp experience led me to understand in a more personal way the criticisms leveled by some who have studied K-12 education that it suppresses every streak of individualism in kids.  I know that keeping forty 10-year-olds on track is probably a challenge but I was distinctly unimpressed by the approach used.  I came away from the day and a half feeling like I’d been to boot camp for the Prussian army.  Elliott is a pretty reserved kid in school and groups so he was never the source of any problems.  I asked him after we got home if school was like that all the time; he said it wasn’t quite that bad but there was still a lot of ordering around.  I hope he comes through all this with his own personality and independence intact and unbowed.

Odd Things that Stick in the Memory 1:  One amusing incident at the camp, however, made me remember how long odd facts can stick to people.  We took a night hike in order to listen to the sounds of the various critters in the area around the camp.  The hike leader at one point stopped all the kids and asked them to identify the colors of the clothes on the kids around them.  They could not readily do so, of course.  She went on to explain why--something I learned in Psychology 1 when a freshman in college.

The eye’s photoreceptors (cells) are rods and cones.  There are about 120 million rods in each eye; they are for perceiving in dim light but can only perceive in black, white, and shades of gray, and the images tend to have blurred edges.  There are about 6 or 7 million cones; they perceive color and sharpness (and give human beings the ability to see great detail in objects).  The other factoid I remember from this college lecture on human eye physiology is why freeway information signs (e.g., “Pittsburgh -- 75 miles”) are green:  because of the difference in what rods and cones perceive, human eyes can most easily see the color green in conditions of low light.  This is a result of the Purkinje Shift, named after the chap who figured out the difference between what rods and cones perceive.  (Don’t ask me any more about this; this exhausts my knowledge on the subject. And I will admit that I had to go on the web for a little of this; I certainly did not remember the number of rods and cones.)

The kids were totally uninterested in rods and cones.

* * *

            Krystin started driving alone this spring.  She passed her driver’s test on April 26 and, of course, that night wanted to drive over to a friend’s softball game.  I didn’t get home until a little later; Pat told her to go ahead.  When I got home, it dawned on us that neither had called our insurance agent to add Krystin (for some strange reason, she did not have to be added when she was driving with only her permit).  There was no way, at 7:00 at night, we could reach our agent to get a binder issued.  We called our friend Scott Eller, an attorney whose practice is not at all related to car insurance, as far as I know, and he told me what I was afraid of:  “I don’t think she’s covered.”  If he were me, he told us, he’d go find her and get the car and bring it home.

            Panicked, we tried to do that, but could not find Krystin.  So we came back home, picturing disaster:  she’d crash into someone, cause injuries with huge medical bills, and we’d be in bankruptcy court.  She called shortly on the cell phone to say the game had been cancelled so she and her friend went off for awhile.  We told her to drive home very carefully.  She got home without mishap.  I dearly love her, and am almost always glad to see her (well, not so glad when she’s surly), but this time I was especially glad to see her.

            In a conversation with our insurance agent the next morning, I related these events.  She replied airily “oh, she would have been covered, since she was driving with your consent.”  To which another friend of mine later asked, if that’s true, “why would you ever add her to the policy and increase your premiums by hundreds of dollars per year?”  Good question.  But I decided not to test the implied hypothesis.

* * *

            Elliott and I were talking one night about the lottery.  About once or twice a year I’ll buy a Powerball ticket, if I happen to be in a place where they sell them and I have an odd dollar bill.  I had done so that night and the jackpot was $70 million at the time.  He was speculating about what we would do if I won the $70 million.  We talked about it for a little while and then I said something to the effect that “well, it’s fun to speculate but as your mother says, I have as much chance of winning the lottery as I do of being eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex on my way to work tomorrow.” 

            Elliott responded by saying “yeah, but why dream about winning a dollar?  We might as well dream big time.”  Odd Things that Stick in the Memory 2:  I told him that he had repeated, in sentiment if not exact words, one of the oft-quoted remarks of Daniel Burnham, the city planner for Chicago at the turn of the (20^th) century.  My urban geographer friend Judith Martin tells me Burnham wrote in 1912, “make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood.  Make big plans, aim high in hope and work.”

* * *

            In the words of the local weather columnist for the newspaper, we had “summer lite” in May and June.  In the first week of June the temperature barely made it above 60°.  Before we left for London again in May, I pulled all the plants off our deck into the family room because the nighttime temperatures were getting down into the high 30s, which hothouse and house plants do not like.  They sat inside for several days.  Although I am not fond of high temperatures and the usual high humidity that comes with them in Minnesota, these temperatures in the 40s and 50s in June are too reminiscent of winter. 

            I think the first day I went to work without needing a jacket was June 11.  After that we had global warming in Minnesota; the weather was dreadful:  in the 90s, with high humidity, and darn little moisture.  It only cooled off a little towards the end of July and then stayed very hot well into August--much warmer than it normally is here in the summer.  In the meantime, we watered plants and lawn every day.  (The City of Minneapolis never imposed a watering ban, although a number of cities and suburbs did so.) 

We only cooled down the second week of August.  By that time, after many days in the 90s, I was commenting to my friends and colleagues that I actually prefer -10 degrees.

* * *

Even though “My Fair Lady” is on the saccharine side, Professor Henry Higgins has proven to be a useful character with which to teach Krystin and Elliott about misogyny and good English.  They have both seen the movie; we also have the cassette tape of the soundtrack, which, about 3 years ago, Elliott wanted to listen to every time we drove anywhere.  (I was so sick of that soundtrack I thought I’d never want to hear any of those songs again.)

One time Elliott was listening to the soundtrack and noticed a mistake.  One of the songs has Higgins singing (saying, actually, since Rex Harrison couldn’t sing a note) “if I was a woman who’d been to a ball. . . .”  Elliott piped up, “shouldn’t it be ‘if I were a woman’?”  He was right, of course.  I began to think at that point that perhaps I had gone a little too far in trying to teach them to speak good English.  Elliott was only about 8 years old at the time.

I was confirmed in my fear when, later in the summer, Elliott persuaded me to let him put the soundtrack to My Fair Lady on while we were driving.  As Harrison spoke the line about “there are some places where English completely disappears.  Why in America they haven’t used it in years!” Elliott turned to me and said something to the effect that “there’s at least ONE person in America who speaks proper English.”  He meant me.  I told him that was very kind, but that I did NOT always speak proper English and that besides, I speak American English--and Henry Higgins wouldn’t like my English no matter how “correct” it might be.  But it was nice of Elliott to have such a high opinion of his father’s speech.

We took the kids to see the play at the Chanhassen Dinner Theater.  The food was palatable; the play was quite good, although very different from the movie.  One of the lessons I have tried to instill in the two kids flows from the theme that underlies the story:  that Higgins can take a girl selling flowers with an awful Cockney accent and, by intense language instruction, pass her off as a member of the British upper class at a major social event.  What I’ve told them is that the way one speaks, the way one constructs sentences (or fails to do so), the words one uses, conveys an enormous amount of information to an attentive listener.  Even in the United States--less class-ridden than England--the use of language betrays to a certain but noticeable extent education and social/economic background.

What is important, I tell them, is not that they sound like they belong to the British upper class but that they speak in such a way that they do not disqualify themselves for opportunities in life (like jobs or schooling).  To some this may sound snooty but I’ve been in plenty of candidate interviews where I have concluded the person should not be offered a position because his or her English is so bad he or she will not represent the office well or be able to perform the duties of the job.  What I most need to instill in both children is to forget that the word “like” exists in English!  Everything is “like”:  "like I need new jeans" or "he was like really cute" and so on.

Odd Things that Stick in the Memory 3:  “My Fair Lady” is another instance, for me, where an odd item has stuck for over 30 years.  I can recall quite well a freshman political science course, taught by Professor Edwin Fogelman, in a building now demolished, in which Professor Fogelman was talking about “My Fair Lady” and “Pygmalion,” the play by George Bernard Shaw upon which “My Fair Lady” is based.  Fogelman told the class that “My Fair Lady” was the Americanized version; given the English social class structure, a professor of phonetics from a wealthy and perhaps titled background would never marry Liza Doolittle, the girl who sells flowers in the slums of London.  In the Shaw play, he does not; Shaw was English and knew his audience.  In “My Fair Lady,” the implication at the end of the movie is that she stays with him.  Americans needed a happy ending; the English were more realistic.

I reminded Professor Fogelman (with whom I have worked and spoken off and on a number of times in the intervening three decades) of this small excerpt from the lecture he gave those many years ago.  He responded “isn’t it odd what sticks in a student’s mind?  Education is truly mysterious!”  He did say that my recollection was correct “except I would (or should) have said that ‘in Shaw's play, Liza walks out of the house, never to return. . . .’  Actually, Shaw is also sounding a feminist note here, by having Liza strike out on her own as an independent woman.”

That’s the other lesson from My Fair Lady:  how silly it is to discriminate on the basis of sex.

*  *  *

Last summer (that is, 2000) we spread “river rock” over perhaps 2/3 of our back yard, after first laying down a layer of plastic to prevent plants from growing through the rocks.  (River rock consists of stones with mostly rounded edges about ½ to ¾ the size of a golf ball.)  We did so at the suggestion of a landscaper who specializes in yards with dogs; we could not keep grass growing where the dog ran so all we had was mud whenever it rained.  These rounded rocks are supposedly OK for the pads of dogs’ feet.  It looks fine and did the trick.

This year, however, with a bumper crop of maple tree seeds, the whirlybirds, and a lot of other seeds floating in from around the neighborhood, we realized that these seeds were getting washed down between the rocks and would soon form a nice layer of dirt between the plastic and the rocks.  So we sat periodically last spring and picked out, by hand, the whirlybirds, seeds, bark, stick, and other organic items that would contribute to dirt production.  It was tedious, but also relaxing.  I kept thinking, however, that the Duke of Marlborough probably doesn’t sit and pick seeds out of the rocks and gardens that surround Blenheim Palace.  Of course, we have a little less land than his 21,000 acres.

* * *

            We traveled with the kids over 4^th of July week to British Columbia, Canada.  We stayed for 3 days in Vancouver and 3 days in Victoria, on Vancouver Island.  We thus continue our pattern of traveling within the British dominions.

            I said I was of the school that “you’ve seen one mountain, you’ve seen them all.”  OK, I admit that seeing Mount Ranier sticking up into the sky, while flying by it, was impressive, and seeing Mounts Baker and Hood from Vancouver and from a ferry from Victoria to Anacortes, Washington, was also impressive.  And I concede without reservation that the scenery in general around both Vancouver and Victoria is spectacular--and worth looking at on a regular basis.  So I did while we were there.

            While in Vancouver and Victoria we did most of the things that people advised us to do.  We went to the top of Grouse Mountain (outside Vancouver, up a gondola, with breathtaking views of the entire city and the water around it, and got, among other things, a short natural history tour, during which a deer stood on a path about 10 feet from us and just watched us walk by).  We went white-water rafting down the Chilliwack River, east of Vancouver  (the kids enjoyed it, as did we, but they wanted the rapids to be more wild than they were; I told them next time).  We walked through Lynn Canyon Park and across a suspension bridge over a ravine with waterfalls and forest; the woods were beautiful and quiet.  We took a trolley tour of the city and went to the area where it first began (Gastown, the stores in which, unfortunately, are beginning to take on the characteristics of those in downtown Virginia Beach and other places:  selling cheap and tacky tourist junk and t-shirts).

            Victoria is a lovely city.  After the trials of a ferry crossing that took most of a day (both because of road construction and what seemed to be inept management), we went from the mainland to Vancouver Island.  We thought we were going to stay in Nanaimo, which is where the ferry landed, but it was not a pleasant place.  It was clearly economically depressed; the best one can say about the downtown is that it was strip mall in a run-down town.  Our hotel was equally depressing--so we promptly made reservations for a place in Victoria and left early the next morning for the 2-hour drive south.  The brochures for both the town and the hotel were quite misleading.

            Once in Victoria we had a great time.  It’s certainly a picturesque setting, a beautiful harbor surrounded by mountains (on the west, south, and east, by the State of Washington; only to the north is the view of Canada).   We stayed in a hotel with a room overlooking the inner harbor toward the downtown, looking directly at the grand old hotel in town, The Empress, and at the legislative buildings (outlined in lights at night, at the direction of the architect in the 1880s).  We didn’t stay for high tea at the Empress--we didn’t have right clothes along with us (formal dress required) and I didn’t think that the kids could appreciate high tea at $46 each.

            Everyone we talked to before we made the trip told us to visit the Butchart Gardens, just north of Victoria.  We did so.  They were as beautiful as advertised--and there is no way to convey with the written word the impressions that so many thousands of blossoming flowers can have.  We did get several ideas for our own gardens which we shall have to try out next spring.  They are said (at least by the locals) to be the most beautiful gardens in the world.  Who knows how one measures that; I thought the Longwood Gardens, outside Philadelphia, were pretty spectacular, too.  I’m sure there are other formal gardens in the world that could lay claim to number one as well.

* * *

            What do you do in this situation?

            Elliott went to camp in mid-July.  He went to a YMCA camp last summer and had a wonderful time.  This spring, the parents of  his buddy Zach suggested a camp just outside the Twin Cities, a sort of nature camp.  I went to the camp’s website and concluded, after reviewing it, that this might not be exactly what two 10-year-old guys who spend much of their time playing Gameboy, Nintendo, and computer games would really want.  So I made them spend time looking at the website; afterwards, they both said they still really wanted to go.  OK, we signed Elliott up and Zach’s parents signed him up.

            We dropped the boys off on a Sunday.  At the camp, the boys slept on platform tents (a canvas roof but open on the sides) on cots, with mosquito netting draped over their sleeping bags.  There was no electricity in the tents.  The bathroom facility was an outhouse.

On Tuesday we received a note from Elliott saying he wanted to come home early and that he was bored.  We set it aside, knowing he had written it on Monday, less than a full day after he had been there. 

            On Saturday there came in the mail another note from Elliott, written and sent after he had been there five full days.  (The temperatures and humidity had been very high the entire week--both in the

90s--and it had rained several nights.)  He wrote:

            “Hi Dad

By the time you read this, you will have read my other letter.  Camp is the worst thing I have ever been to.  I really want to go home.  It’s hot, wet, buggy, stinky, there are no showers, the bathroom is full of spiders, I’m dirty, homesick, bored, and stinky.  I can’t live another day here.  The way I see it, I’m wasting my summer vacation.  It would be great if you could pick me up and take me home early.  Zach hates this camp too.  We both want to go.  The counselors are mean, and they don’t give us any privlages.  Send a response as soon as possible.

                                    Miss you a lot,

                                    Elliott”

            If you have or had a child, what do you do?  Pat and Krystin were not home; neither were Zach’s parents.  I opened the letter about 3:30.

I was at the camp picking Elliott up by about 4:30.  He is not an emotionally expressive kid but his face lit up when he saw me arrive.  We were out of the camp within 10 minutes of the time I arrived, and never have I seen him so glad.  I brought him home; he was covered with mosquito bites (he told me had counted them and that he had 160 bites).  The first thing he did was race into the shower--and this is a kid whom I usually have to remind to take a shower.  (He took a second shower later the same day!)  He was so glad to be home that on Sunday he never left the house except to go out in the back yard to swing, one of his favorite forms of getting away and going into his own world.  (And yes, I am keeping the letter--it is priceless.)

            On the drive back from the camp I said to Elliott that I didn’t want him soured on all summer camps--this was a bad experience but there are camps he would like.  He agreed and related that earlier in the summer Zach had gone to a camp sponsored by the Audobon Society; he said he wanted to go that camp with Zach next summer.  As he described the camp, he drew a thoughtful distinction:  “I want to study nature, I don’t want to be in nature.”  The Audobon camp has air-conditioned cabins, he told me.

            Elliott’s plaintive letter was in stark contrast to the opening paragraph of the one we received from Krystin a month later, when she was at her two-week summer camp for kids with diabetes. 

“Hey mom and dad! 

“Camp is going good.  I like all the people in my group. . . .  It’s going to be a good two weeks.”

And, according to her when she got back home, it was indeed a good two weeks.  So sometimes things go right.

* * *

            Pat claims she can’t organize a party.  Pat obviously doesn’t know her own talents.  I had been simultaneously fretting, wondering, and amused at the idea that there would be some kind of party, surprise or otherwise, for my 50^th birthday.  Starting about the beginning of July, every time we had a social event with friends I was suspicious that the event would not be what I was told (e.g., dinner with friends) but instead a party of some kind.  It never was.

            In late June Pat told me we were going to host a 25^th wedding anniversary party for my brother and his wife, Tracy and Joan.  This made perfect sense to me; their daughter wanted to have a party for them but since she lives in Wisconsin, it would be more convenient if we were to host it.  So the day arrives, in late July, and people start showing up for this party.  It was, however, a 50^th birthday party--the one event all summer that I had not suspected would be something other than what I expected.  I only figured it out when people whom my brother and sister-in-law did not know, like my friends from the University, started appearing.

            The party was great fun and I’m glad Pat arranged it.  But as for the claim that she cannot arrange a party, that is so much hooey.  She was as nervous as our cat that I would discover what the party was really about but I was too dense to figure it out.  (One of my former bosses, now-retired Professor Warren Ibele, wrote a note to Pat to explain that he and his wife could not come--and sent it to our home address despite Pat’s request that people only contact her at her office.  He sent the note to our home address, and of course I recognized his impeccably neat engineer’s handwriting.  It did not dawn on me to wonder why Warren would be writing a note to Pat.  Now how oblivious is that?  But Warren also wrote me an absolutely marvelous note which concluded with this advice:  “so be of good cheer, the first fifty are the hardest; the decades following are more gentle but glide by more swiftly.”)

            The party continued, in a small way, in mid-August, when Pat, Elliott, and I drove to Iowa City to spend a weekend with our friends Christine Grant, Peg Burke, and Bonnie Slatton, whom we have known for 25 years.  (All three were national leaders in women’s college athletics in the 1970s and early 1980s, when women’s athletics had its own national governing organization, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.  Then the NCAA decided to expand from men’s sports to include women--and basically wiped out the AIAW.  When I had staff responsibility for athletics at the University of Minnesota, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, I got to know these three.  They became good friends, and we have since visited and stayed with Christine perhaps a dozen or more times; we spent the first three days after we got married at Christine’s because we had decided to delay our honeymoon.  Since she went home to visit family in Scotland right after we were married, she told us to go down and occupy her house!  So we did.)

            Anyway, Pat brought down the remnants of the cake from the first party; Christine gave me a CD of favorite Scottish music and Peg (who retired from the faculty at the U of Iowa and became an antique dealer) gave me a dozen or so new (to me) buttons for my collection of presidential campaign buttons.  That was extremely thoughtful.  The music came because Pat and I have talked about going to Scotland and want to overlap with a time that Christine will be there; she has, instead, volunteered the service of her brother in Scotland, who, she told us, is much nicer than she is and who also loves to give tours to visitors to Scotland.  What more would we want?

* * *

            Having diabetes is no fun under the best of circumstances.  For a teenager, like Krystin, it is really not fun.  As anyone who remembers being a teenager knows, or who has raised kids knows, different is deadly for teenagers.  Diabetes makes a kid different. 

            At 16, however, the therapists and the diabetic medical staff advised Pat and me that it was time to let Krystin take over the management of her disease.  Presumably she will be going off to college in two years; at that point, she will have to take control because we (mostly Pat, I must clarify) won’t be there to superintend her testing, insulin administration, and diet.

            The initial result of the transfer of responsibility was not a great success; Krystin got ill because she did not have the ability to manage the diabetes.  She lost weight, slept long hours, and had headaches and stomach aches; all of these follow from consistently high blood sugar levels.  She was also at risk of losing her driver’s license because the endocrinologist must sign a form each year indicating the patient has her diabetes under control; Krystin’s doctor was not going to sign the form. 

Just before Labor Day, before the school year began, Pat and I intervened.  We had to prevent a downhill slide that was affecting Krystin’s long-term health as well as her ability to perform in school.  Since that time, with a few ups and downs, she’s gotten much better.

* * *

            Pat, Krystin, and I were at Krystin’s doctor on the morning of September 11.  In walking to my office across campus, I overheard a construction worker talking about a plane that hit some building.  I didn’t think much of it.  Then I overheard someone else talking on a cell phone about the New York building hit by an airplane.  When I got to the building in which I have my office, one of the staff members in our finance VP office came into the lobby the same time I did and asked me if I had heard about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers.

            I thought then, and have since heard it said in the national news media, that we shall all remember what we were doing and where we were when we heard the news of these attacks, just as anyone in their late 40s or 50 or older will remember where they were when they heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot.  I told Elliott and Krystin this that very afternoon.

My personal reaction was that life should go on.  It did go on immediately in my work.  The chair of a major committee that I work with talked with me late morning about whether to cancel a meeting that afternoon; my view was that that was exactly (in an obviously trivial sense) what the hijackers hoped to achieve--a disruption of life.  I didn’t think it was any disrespect for those who died for the U of M’s committee to hold its meeting anyway.  (I said that if I were among the dead, in those circumstances, I’d want everyone to go about their business--with the hope that in some way the death would be appropriately memorialized.  But not by a disruption of the nation.)  So that was my perhaps cold-hearted take on how we should respond.  (We did have the meeting; everyone came.)

            I don’t have anything more to say about the attacks that hasn’t already been written at least a dozen times.  But perhaps something that most may not have thought of:  Robert Putnam has written a book titled Bowling Alone, in which he documents and describes the decline in American “social capital.”  Americans do not join groups or social clubs as much as they did in the past, they do not vote or participate in the political process, they do not partake of cultural events as much, they simply do not engage in social activities that knit a community, a state, the nation together as much as their parents and grandparents did (hence the title, bowling alone--people don’t even bowl together as much).  I am indebted to my colleague Darwin Hendel for pointing out to me the following quote from Putnam’s book:

“Creating (or re-creating) social capital is no simple task.  It would be eased by a palpable national crisis, like war or depression or national disaster, but for better and for worse, America at the dawn of the new century faces no such galvanizing crisis.”

            Interestingly, a couple of weeks after I wrote these words, Putnam had an editorial in the New York Times talking about social capital and the events of September 11.[8]

The America of six decades ago now seems achingly familiar. The attack on Pearl Harbor, like the attacks of Sept. 11, evoked feelings of pride and citizenship — as well as anxiety and helplessness — in every American. In the days and weeks following Dec. 7, 1941, Americans sought meaning and comfort in their communities, just as we do now.  And we can find inspiration in the very institutions and practices they created 60 years ago.

A durable community cannot be built on mere images of disaster, however vivid or memorable. It arises from countless individual acts of concern and solidarity. Television images of ash-covered firefighters cannot create community bonds any more than radio reports of burning battleships could.

What created the civic community in the United States in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor? The victory gardens in nearly everyone's backyard, the Boy Scouts at filling stations collecting floor mats for scrap rubber, the affordable war bonds, the practice of giving rides to hitchhiking soldiers and war workers — all these taught "the greatest generation" an enduring lesson in civic involvement.

Their involvement was as varied as it was deep. The Civilian Defense Corps grew to 12 million Americans in mid-1943, from 1.2 million in 1942. In Chicago, 16,000 block captains in the corps took an oath of allegiance in a mass ceremony; they practiced first aid, supervised blackouts and planned gas decontamination. Nationwide, Red Cross volunteers swelled to 7.5 million in 1945, from 1.1 million in 1940. By 1943, volunteers at 4,300 civilian-defense volunteer offices were fixing school lunches, providing day care and organizing scrap drives.

All these endeavors represented cooperation between the federal government and civic society. Sometimes the government merely offered encouragement and approval, as it did with the victory gardens. Often it played an active role, or even the prime role. . . .

. . . All Americans felt they had to do their share, thereby enhancing each American's sense that her commitment and contribution mattered. . . .

Society is different now, of course, as is the war we are fighting. Americans have become more transient, and involvement in civic institutions is in decline. The war itself involves far fewer Americans in battle; it creates few material hardships; the enemy is largely invisible. Nonetheless, we can take action to ensure that this resurgence of community involvement continues.

Since Sept. 11, we Americans have surprised ourselves in our solidarity. . . .  Still, underneath all this mutual concern lies an unsettling question: Will this new mood last?

I believe it can. Even 60 years ago, civic involvement took hold and flourished only with government support. It was not all spontaneous. This is both instructive and reassuring; instructive because it shows that the most selfless civic duties cannot be performed without government help, reassuring because it shows us a path toward a more civil society today. . . .  This new period of crisis can make real to us and our children the value of deeper community connections.

            I hope Professor Putnam is right.

* * *

            Early in the year I read Hitler 1889-1936:  Hubris, the newest biography, by Ian Kershaw.  Several thoughts occurred to me as I was reading about Hitler’s rise to power.  For many years the Nazi party was one of many small parties on the radical right fringe of German politics; no one in the early years predicted it would ever achieve any significant level of power.  It was a party different from most other parties of the time (or now), in Germany or elsewhere:  Kershaw describes how it became a “leader party”:  it did not have the usual organizational attributes but was instead built almost solely on loyalty and obedience to the leader.  Hitler himself was almost exclusively a propagandist; he had no interest in actually administering a government (which is one reason the Third Reich eventually collapsed).  He had little learning and little in the way of organizational skills; apart from his highly-selective readings that reinforced his own views, he knew little about the world.  The Nazi party was built on Hitler’s rhetoric and ideas, a ghastly amalgam of anti-semitism, anti-Marxism, mythic notions of Germanism and nationalism, racial purity, and revenge for the loss of World War I.  We have in the United States a number of fringe parties on the radical right which few think will ever achieve power.

            Kershaw maintains that Hitler’s rise to power was avoidable--at any number of times--but that he rose to power was a reflection of both his own extraordinary powers as a propagandist and the desperate situation in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s (that is, the Depression).  But one of the primary reasons he succeeded (apart from serendipity) is because the leading elements of German society during the Weimar Republic were, in essence, opposed to a democracy and wanted it replaced with an authoritarian regime.  Had there not been an ineffective parliamentary democracy and an economy taking a nosedive, Hitler would have remained on the fringe of German politics.

            I found myself wondering whether the United States, if subjected to the same kinds of circumstances that faced Weimar Germany, would resort to a quest for a “leader.”  We did not do so during the Depression (although there were a few would-be leaders who looked authoritarian, such as Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin), and one wants to believe that the democratic urges and system in this country are deeply-enough rooted that we will not do so in the future.  It was, however, frightening to read about how people--including university students and faculty, often the “liberals” in a society--flocked to the Nazi banner, with its virulent anti-semitism, anti-foreigner-ism, anti-intellectualism.  Once Hitler became Reich Chancellor in 1933, there was little resistance to him from groups--and what little there was was squashed by Nazi thugs.  At least up to this point in American (and British) history, there have been few if any “leader parties” that have had any significant role in events.  I profoundly hope there never are; it is difficult to envision a healthy democratic society predicated on loyalty and obedience to a leader.

            Odd Things that Stick in the Memory 4:  In reading Kershaw I was reminded of a seminar I took during graduate school on leadership and management in higher education.  The professor said that leadership studies are messy.  There are plenty of great leaders in American history (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln) and in world history, but, she reminded us, there is a dark side to leadership; the German word for leader is führer.  My friend commented recently on this.  “This was in the context of a quick-and-dirty exercise that I often do -- getting people to generate words that come into their minds when they think of leadership.  In this class (as is usually the case), virtually all of the words are positive.  But, when we ask people to think about people that they have worked with in leadership positions, the list of words is often very different!  I call this common effect ‘the Romance of Leadership’ . . . .  I went on . . . in this class to talk about the fact that this is a very American phenomenon.  In other cultures (Scandinavian, for example), the notions of leadership are far more democratic than ours; in other languages (Dutch) there is no real equivalent to our word ‘leadership’ -- at least in the connotations that we have given it.”

            Later in the year I read Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum; it’s a summary and critical review of all the explanations that have been offered on the reason(s) Hitler did what he did and how the historians and philosophers have viewed Hitler and the Holocaust in the larger context of history.   One of the points of contention, for example, is over whether Hitler actually believed that what he was doing was right (ridding the world of the “infection” of Jews and other undesirables) or if he simply used virulent anti-Semitism as a tool to gain power.  Another question is whether Hitler and the Holocaust are within the bounds of history or if he/it are so different from what has gone before or since that it is “off the charts,” so abnormal that it falls in a class by itself.  One of the problems the Hitler explainers confront is whether, by explaining, they exculpate.  (If, for example, one says he was “mad,” then it is more difficult to hold him blameworthy--just as, in most western legal systems, we do not incarcerate or punish those who we adjudge to have been “mentally defective” or “insane” at the time they committed a crime.) 

            The book also raised the interesting (and age-old) question of “what is evil?”  Was Hitler evil?  In the view of one of the most distinguished British historians of World War II and Hitler, “if not Hitler, then who?”  But if he was crazy, the question of evil becomes a problem.  If he truly believed what he preached, is that evil or simply misguided?  What if his behavior and beliefs were shaped by a protective mother and an abusive father?  Some argue that it was only Hitler who could have achieved the power that he did--that it was his unique personality and talents, combined with the circumstances in Weimar Germany, that led to the rise of the Third Reich with all its awful practices.  Alternatively, it has been argued that Hitler was simply the culmination of events in a Germany treated unwisely by the victors in World War I and plagued by hyper-inflation and a democracy thwarted by most influential groups in the country and that if not Hitler it would have been someone else.   At least for me, these are interesting questions, because in many ways we still live in a world that Hitler bequeathed us (although I think that is less true now, with the fall of the Soviet Union, than it was up until 1990).

* * *

ON PSYCHOLOGICAL AND OTHER KINDS OF LIFE IN MINNESOTA

Shortly after the events of September 11 I received an unrelated email message from a long-time friend, originally from Minnesota but now living on the East Coast.  In the message my friend posed these comments:

“How’s everyone else in the Great Normative State of Minnesota doing in these trying times? 

“It took me a separation of many years and miles to learn of and begin to understand what Minnesota’s culture is about, for good and for ill.  Garrison Keillor has captured some of the lighthearted side of it, of course, but there’s a very dark side:  implicit rigid rules, norms and behavioral expectations that nobody talks much about.  These wreak a terrible psychological toll on anybody who tries to live more freely outside those boundaries.

“Beneath that legendary veneer of Minnesotan good cheer, these constraints drive a seething resentment and frustration that seems to burble up in many Minnesotans at unguarded moments.  The only ones who seem never to be affected are those who uncritically accept the norms as proper and honor the boundaries instinctively, or those whose wiring is a little under spec.

“I am told the reason for it is the ethnic homogeneity, and some values transported from the places of origin of those groups which may have had relevance in the old country but appear as out of place in the new as Victorian furniture might seem in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

“It took me months to assimilate this model once I encountered it and began to connect the dots; it may seem to you as if I’m describing an alien planet since you’ve never lived apart from it.”

These assertions about Minnesota’s culture intrigued me enough that I forwarded them to a number of faculty friends and a couple of their spouses.  Here are the responses, identified by the place where the individual grew up.  (All the entries are direct quotes.)

(Pennsylvania) 

More or less right, I think--though I don’t know about the “seething” and “bubbling.”  We have noticed a very strong normative homogeneity here.

(non-U.S.)

On the face of it, it appears to be a mean-spirited analysis of his heritage and in the light of my limited experience, it is totally unfair. Our friends who were born and have grown up here certainly don’t appear to display any greater degree of neurosis than the rest of us and it is hard to think of the local culture as oppressive and crippling to the “soul.”  If the guy has some personality problem he should seek the answers somewhere other than in his MN roots. This is not Kristin Lavransdatter country!  Not to mention that there were always more Germans here than Scandinavians and Catholics as well as Lutherans.  Tell the guy to get a life!

(Wisconsin)

I don’t know what he's talking about.  I probably don’t know what he is talking about because I was born here, into a Scandinavian-Lutheran family, in a rural area, and my family roots go back to when Wisconsin was a territory and the great Norwegian immigration of the mid-1800s.  So how does a fish recognize the water it has always swum in? 

            I do agree that there is a dark side to the culture here.  The person who captured it the best was that Dean of Dentistry . . . who came from [the East Coast]. . . .  He was dead on.  The primary thing I remember was his rude awakening that people would smile and nod their heads, saying nothing, and then leave the meeting and take out their knives to shred whatever the initiative or point of the meeting had been.  It’s the “Minnesota Nice” syndrome, in which no one says what they think, feigns agreement and concern, and then engages in despicable sabotage.

(Illinois)

My reaction is that this guy seems pretty angry, and that he’s been away from here long enough to be unaware of the profound changes being wrought by new demographics -- Hispanics in rural MN, etc.  That’s not to say that all is rosy, but folks are working hard to incorporate “others” into their view of their MN world.

EVERY place (and the people therein) displays some kind of normative behavior.  I surely thought that much of what I found here was odd when I first arrived, but I’m certain that, had you moved to my old Chicago neighborhood, you’d have found that pretty odd, too.

Somehow, this past week, the idea of “norms and behavioral expectation” doesn’t seem so negative, except when they’re prescribed by the Taliban!

(Kansas)

There is a great deal of truth in the observation.  The University is probably more tolerant of difference than other parts of the Twin Cities, and the Twin Cities are probably more tolerant than other parts of the state.  But it is still true--even at the University.

            Just one more thought:  Some years ago . . . we had a reception for . . . visiting students from [Sweden.  They were each asked] to give name, home town, and “something unique about yourself--a hobby, sport, or accomplishment.”  At the end of the reception, several of the students told me how embarrassed they were, because a Swede never admits that there is ANYTHING unique or different.  The goal is not to stand out or be distinctive.

[Some lose that trait.]  Most Minnesotans, however, still have some element of it.  Visiting professors who come here from elsewhere always comment on how unwilling our students are to take any

position other than the “safe middle.”  How unwilling they are to “stand out” as having a different view.

            The more I think about it, the more I think your friend is right!

(non-U.S.)

There is a book with the title "Swedish Mentality," by a Swedish anthropologist by the name of Ake Daun. . . .  It may answer some of your questions--although it is not all that simple. He talks about “modal personalities,” and points to some traits that are probably present among Swedes to a great extent than among some other groups.  Although it may be only 25% of the Swedes who are really like that, it may be a higher percentage than among, let’s say, Italians.  Some of the characteristics that Daun finds are somewhat similar to your interlocutors’ observations.

As far as Minnesota is concerned, some of its citizens probably have some of the characteristics described--maybe to a somewhat higher percentage than in, for example, New York City.  Where did they come from?  You must remember that there are as many Germans in Minnesota as there are Scandinavians (all told).  And as many Norwegians as Swedes.

(Indiana)

Hmmm--I just don’t see it.  I must be one of those folks who instinctively abides by the norms.

(Midwest)

I guess I don’t have sufficient distance yet, or maybe because I grew up Lutheran (and in the Midwest) it is hard to separate myself from the Minnesota ethic and look at it objectively.  I tend to think that what is beneath the surface in Minnesota is much like what is on the surface.  How else would one account for the large number of charitable foundations in the state and their resources, for example?  (This is decidedly not the case in [another state], by contrast.)  To me, the Jesse Ventura phenomenon is Minnesotans taking a flyer because they have a little too much dullness in many of their public officials--and he is so boorishly exotic. But there must be more to it than that.

(don’t know where from)

Well, I am an “outlander” in that I moved here at the age of 44.  It just doesn’t ring true to me.  Sounds as if he has a problem with his family and has generalized it to the state!

(New York)

I’m puzzled too and don’t know what to think.  Perhaps that’s because, although I’m not from Minnesota, I’m kind of quasi-Minnesotan in various ways:  i.e., I grew up in a small, upstate N.Y. town, my parents were German (albeit German Jewish refugees), and I’ve now lived in Minnesota for over

30 years.  So I’m perhaps not very sensitive to what troubles your friend, without some specific examples from him.  I can imagine these feelings coming from someone from a minority (African-American or Hispanic) culture.  The comments might also make more sense if I understood what he is comparing “Minnesota culture” to (e.g., if the point of reference were New York City, San Francisco, or L.A.).

(Southwest)

Now DON’T quote me, but. . . .  I agree.  Having been raised in [the Southwest], which is like being raised in the south but with a frontier edge, I am tempted, at times, to want to repay Minnesota nice with a smile and a straightforward, f___ you, to the smiling, bland, non-confrontational Minnesotans. . . .  I also think that the characteristic your friend is describing is also the underpinning for the resentment by the populace of the U of M.  How can we dare to think that we’re ‘better than anyone else’ and they are consciously or unconsciously keeping us in our proper place by underfunding and not bragging about what has or can be accomplished here.  We have a GREAT university, but GREAT is not in their lexicon.

(California)

My immediate reaction is that I noticed a relatively benign version of the “normative state” when I first moved to Minnesota.  In Minneapolis, away from the university community at least, there seemed to be a relatively insular, self-regarding, and self-righteous (yet compulsively modest) subculture.  I hardly felt oppressed by it since I agreed with most of the values that seemed to underpin it.  But I never felt very much a part of it.

In St. Paul I encountered the Catholic version of the same thing--made particularly visible in my neighborhood by the quiet tension between the long-time residents and the yuppie gentrifiers like myself.  On the other hand, it’s not clear there’s anything uniquely Minnesotan about that. 

On to [a small town in Minnesota] where I really did find a version of what your friend describes.  I quit thinking Garrison Keillor was all that funny.  Even [a Minnesota private college] was a version of hard-core Lutheran culture and values--people there were friendly enough to a point, but very hard to know beyond that.

Then, in my Twin Cities swan song, I thought I saw Minneapolis evolving into a relatively heterogeneous, cosmopolitan city.  No longer was it the "big small town" we used to marvel at--or so it seemed to me, anyway.  The “normative state” seemed to be in retreat, for better or worse.

So I guess my take on the issue is that there’s something to what your friend says, but it depends greatly on where you were and when you were there.

(Arkansas)

I think this description of Minnesota is an overreaction to the culture.  Young people resist any pressures to conform, I guess, and maybe he was still in that phase when he went to grad school in MN.  I certainly never felt that way; I was glad to shake off the shackles of the south and embrace Minnesota’s freedom.

(Another California, does not know the other Californian, above)

Although I don’t presume to understand the cultural or social origins of some of his observations of native Minnesotans, I could most certainly resurrect a few observations of my own, all of which were compatible with his.

I will hazard a speculation on the origins of “Minnesota nice” (which I’ll describe from my perspective immediately below):  Perhaps as in other cultures in which environmental forces necessitate cooperation and tolerance (e.g., high density in many Asian cultures), there is such an origin for the precursors to “Minnesota nice,” or what I refer to as “ritualized politeness”:  The winters in Scandinavian countries (and Northern Germany, for that matter) are long, dark, and terribly cold, necessitating high density indoor dwelling for a large part of the year.  Perhaps the “veneer of good cheer” that your friend referenced is a social imperative in such close quarters, from which escape can be literally life-threatening.

So much for my two cents’ worth on the origins of the phenomena your friend described.  Over the years, I have indeed become well aware--at least sporadically--that I’m most definitely “not from here.”

Minnesotans confuse me sometimes.  Outwardly there is the pleasantness, good cheer, and jocularity that one sometimes finds in rural American or even in the Deep South (at least among folks the same color as we are).  Folks there make eye contact with strangers, and even say “hello” or inquire politely, “How about this weather?”  What confused me when I first moved here (after having lived on both coasts, elsewhere in the Midwest, in the South, and in Europe to boot, as you know) was that when Minnesotans said something like “Nice weather, eh?” or “How about those Vikings” or whatever else made for safe potential topics of conversation, such utterances were most definitely not an invitation to further conversation; potential topics remained just that:  unactualized potential.  Elsewhere I’ve lived, such comments were indeed an invitation to converse further, and believe you me, I most certainly irritated some Minnesotans and they irritated me until I figured that out.  A polite comment from a Minnesotan in an elevator, such as "nice hat," is most definitely not an invitation to discuss hats, apparel, or anything else, for that matter, as I soon discovered.  So, there is this appearance of interest in others or engagement with others that’s a kind of highly ritualized vehicle of politeness or acknowledgement that goes no further.  I quickly learned not to confuse the appearance of interest or concern with such interest or concern proper.

Some true anecdotes that led me to my conclusions:

One of the first confusing encounters I had was the comment on the elevator.  A man told me that I had a nice hat.  And when I tried to pick up the conversation--after all, he started it, I thought--you’d have thought I farted in the damn elevator.  Not only did the guy break eye contact, but he turned sideways so that there’d be no danger of a real conversation between the ground and the six floor!  Weird.

At [the grocery store] I stand silent, waiting for the total.  The nice young woman remarks offhandedly--yet with some semblance of interest and friendliness--“Looks like you’re gonna have a party.”  Something like that, anyway.  I start to say yes, that friends were stopping by to cook out the next day, and the “nice” young woman acts as if she doesn’t give a shit.  She won’t make eye contact, and can’t even muster a good ol’ Minnesota “that’s interesting.”  Weird.  In the South, such a friendly comment from a checker would be a genuine invitation to conversational chit-chat that breaks up the monotony of otherwise boring and thankless job.

One of my favorites.  The son of some old friends in Texas lived with a roommate whose girlfriend was a native Minnesotan.  Brett (my friends’ son) asked me about Minnesotans when I was down for a Texas visit (after we’d been living in Minnesota for going on ten years).  He was puzzled.  He didn’t think that Kristen liked him very much, and he couldn’t figure out why.  I asked him to describe the typical interaction with Kristen that led him to that conclusion.  Over and over again, it would go something like this.  Kristen would encounter Brett and would make some observation or some cursory inquiry and Brett would launch into what he thought was going to be a conversation.  At some point--Kristen was far too polite to interrupt him--Kristen would say, “That’s interesting.”  Like any non-Minnesotan, Brett took the expression at face value, and feeling validated and reinforced, he’d continue blithely on.  Big mistake, I told him.  

In Minnesota “that’s interesting” can mean any number of things, as I learned after I got savvy.  “That’s interesting” can mean, “I couldn’t disagree more, but I don’t want to argue, so let’s just drop this exchange.”  “That’s interesting” could mean “You’re boring the shit out of me, but I’m too polite to say so.”  “That’s interesting” could mean “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, but I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”  “That’s interesting” could also mean “That’s interesting,” but far less than half of the time.  So, I encouraged Brett to quit talking every time Kristen said “that’s interesting,” and they got along much better after his lesson in Minnesotan.

Now, such close adherence to the rituals of politeness can get a little tiresome, and so Minnesotans have to engage in some form of catharsis:  They hit the road.  For a long time--until disabused of my folly by native Minnesotans--I thought that Minnesota drivers were among the most oblivious on the road.  I mean, really!  Don’t they see me signalling or trying to enter the freeway?  What could they possibly be thinking or attending to?  And finally it all made much more sense!  Minnesota drivers were not oblivious at all.  They were engaging in passive aggression as a kind of catharsis!  And passive aggression on a big scale.  I’d try to merge from an entry ramp.  Cars to my immediate left would not speed up to get ahead of me, would not slow down to let me enter ahead of them.   No no no.  They would adjust their velocity so that they could successfully prevent me from entering, period. 

In other parts of the country, I learned that making eye contact with drivers during rush hour would increase the odds that a driver would let me merge in ahead of him or her.  Not in Minnesota!  Those passive aggressive drivers--exhausted and frustrated from an entire day of being nice--would refuse to make eye contact with me, all the better not to feel obliged to let me merge. 

And their lane changes?  First, make sure not to accelerate; in fact, it’s preferable to slow down.  Signal or don’t, it doesn’t matter.  Just dare the other driver to hit you.  The other driver won’t hit you (assuming he or she is a Minnesotan), because that’s active aggression.  The worst that will happen is that the pissed-off driver whom you’ve cut off during your lane change will thwart the entry of the next merging vehicle.

(New York)

To be honest, I do not understand exactly what he is trying to say, but it is hardly Minnesota specific.  It could be said about many or most places, and of course any social situation is complicated, not one-sided.  Anthropologists some time ago gave up trying to capture a culture by a few sentences, and anyway we are hardly “a culture” isolated from this and that.

(Southwest)

I don’t think I agree with the bitterness of this observer about Minnesota’s homogeneity--and its consequences.  When I first moved here, I used to joke that the difference between [  ] and Minnesota is that in [  ] there are no rules, and in Minnesota there’s a rule for everything.  But actually in many other places, such as [  ], conformity is imposed quite stringently--and there are often ugly sanctions if one is “outside” certain social limits--if one is black, for example, or poor, etc.  In Minnesota, “rules” aren’t the same thing as conformity or uniformity, and there is something quite wonderful about living in the liberal political air of this state.  I’ve heard the argument about the underside of Minnesota nice before--especially, for example, for minorities.  But I can tell you that no one is even asking questions about, say, racial profiling in Muskogee.

(Minnesota)

I pretty much agree with your expat friend, and I must confess that when I left here for extended periods (1949-52 in Chicago, 1954-60 mostly in Europe) I felt a lot freer; and I really need to get out of the state--and the country--to the UK for a while annually or I get stir-crazy.

I don’t think it is nearly as bad now as it was thirty years ago (let alone fifty), perhaps partly because of the influx of people from different (from the earlier) parts; but I suspect that a lot of the newcomers are culturally converted to the [Minnesota norms], mostly unawares (but where is that not the case?  It’s called assimilation, going Roman).  A black student of mine a couple of years ago told me that “Minnesota nice” is what it may look like, but “passive-aggressive” is what it is.  Some students from Wisconsin sense something like this, too.  One I asked how she thought [people from Wisconsin] are different from Minnesotans said that Minnesotans think too highly of themselves and their state.  There seems to be a bit of that, too, though the pride is no doubt due partly to the magnitude and relative numbers of the homegrown talent like Bob Dylan and Garrison Keillor--whose Lake Wobegon reflects in a comic, quasi-Lutheran way the sort of characteristics your friend speaks of.

Minnesotans (like me!) come back or stay here in large numbers, however, so either there must be something redeeming in the environment or they are sufficiently indoctrinated that they don’t feel at home anywhere else.  These issues can be very complex, as they are also with the terrorist-suicides . . . :  they can seem normal as can be and in many if not most ways are, but then there is the odd part.

With us that’s mainly enforced conformity and repression (to which a few respond very creatively, some very neurotically or worse), with them it’s lethal dedication.

(Ohio)

I don’t know what he is talking about.  If he were not a friend of yours, I would suggest that he has gone off some sort of deep end and is stretching, unsuccessfully, to find some deeper understanding of matters.

* * *

            Pat went to visit one of her sisters in Virginia in late September.  We have noted with interest (and, to tell the truth, with some degree of amazement and surprise) that several of our friends and colleagues are now wary about flying or refuse to do so at all.  We can’t imagine that.  I was scheduled to fly 3 times in November and December, Pat twice.  The last time, at the very end of the year, we are taking the kids to Florida for a week, to St. Petersburg and to Naples to visit friends.  It never dawned on us to reconsider the trip.  I doubt flying in the U.S. is going to be less safe, even with the glitches in airport security--and even given the events of September 11, I am sure that statistically flying is several orders of magnitude safer than driving to work. 

As several commentators have observed, moreover, any would-be hijackers will in the future face the wrath of all the rest of the passengers on the plane, who will start throwing things and tackling them.  It made sense to be passive in earlier hijackings; you were probably going to end up in Havana or Cairo or who knows where but your life would go on--it was mostly inconvenient.  (Yes, there were occasionally some passengers killed, but not many, really.)  Now, however, no one will be passive.

            In any event, Pat was gone Saturday to Tuesday.  I cannot understand how single parents can function effectively over the long term.  None of the adult household tasks got done unless I did them, which meant a doubling of the household workload.  We have kids at ages where they can be reasonably self-sufficient; I do not understand how any parent--forget whether mother or father--can comfortably and wisely manage a household with small children without a fairly decent income.

            The tables were turned in mid-November, when I attended a professional conference in Richmond, VA, for four days.  After that, Pat decided that she’d travel with me in the future and we’d get a house- and kid-sitter.

            Except for one brief visit to Pat’s sister in Richmond many years ago, I had never been in the city. There were 3 of us from the U of Minnesota who did a few things together in between conference sessions.  Our hotel was right downtown, close to a number of interesting sites. 

            We took two mini-tours (15 minutes each) of the Virginia State Capitol.  It’s a perfectly nice building, designed by Thomas Jefferson; we were startled at the apparent discrepancy between the outside (designed to look like a Greek temple) and the interior (with a dome and rotunda).  The dome is under the roof.  The Virginia capitol building is much smaller and less ornate than Minnesota’s capitol.  We went next door and toured the Governor’s Mansion as well--it is also considerably less ornate and smaller than the Minnesota version.   One of my colleagues commented, after the Governor’s mansion tour, that he liked small pieces of history and museums because he could get his arms around them--as opposed to huge museums.  I agreed with the sentiment, to a certain extent:  the British Museum is a wonderful place but it would take weeks or months of visits to understand the entire collection; in some ways Sir John Soane’s Museum was more comprehensible.

            We had great fun touring the Confederate White House, the residence of Jefferson Davis and his family for almost the entire Civil War (although they had to vacate a couple of times as Union troops got too close to Richmond).  It is much smaller than the White House in Washington, but the two front parlors in the Richmond version are quite similar to the Red and Blue rooms in the Washington version.  This was also a case where we had a young tour guide who was enthusiastic, funny, and very knowledgeable.  (He related that after the war, about 10 days before he was assassinated, Lincoln came to Richmond to see the Confederate White House.)   The Museum of the Confederacy, attached to the White House, was a delightful small museum that is clearly well-tended.  (At the same time, however, there was no advocacy of Confederate positions or any sentimental attachment to a culture/government long gone--it was a straightforward presentation of history.)  For anyone in the area, it is well worth the 2-3 hours.

            Jefferson Davis was a gaunt man--6 feet tall and 130 pounds--who also worked 18-20 hours per day 7 days a week.  He suffered from multiple afflictions--neuralgia that left him blind in one eye and his face sometimes immobilized on one side, migraine headaches, an ulcer, recurring malarial fevers, and other things that I forgot.  Sometimes he would stay inside the White House for weeks, leading to rumors that he had died.  I asked the tour guide if his health improved after the war; he said it did, noticeably, because many of his problems were stress-induced.  (Davis lived until 1889, to the age of 80; his wife lived until 1906 and consulted on the restoration of the White House, which was acquired as a museum in 1896.)

            At least according to the guide, the federal government decided to drop all charges against Davis about two years after the Civil War.  There had been sentiment to try him for treason, but apparently the Johnson administration decided that there was a chance that Davis’s legal arguments (that the Confederate states had the right to secede) might prevail in the Supreme Court.  They didn’t want to take any chances on that happening, so dropped all charges.  Davis ended up living on a Mississippi plantation the last 12 years of his life.

            Finally, we toured the home of John Marshall, the “great” chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court--the one who built the court into what it has become today, and someone who thwarted and annoyed Thomas Jefferson much of his presidency.  This was not a well-tended museum:  it is a museum, but it is clearly a one-person operation, maintained with contributions and perhaps a few funds from the Society for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.  It was fun, however, and our tour guide clearly knew a lot about Marshall, but it was sort of sad to see the home not well-kept as a first-rate small museum, given the enormous and central role that Marshall played in the evolution of the American political system.

            I am certain that if Marshall had been on the Court in 1867, there would have been no chance whatsoever that any arguments about the right of a state to secede would have prevailed:  Marshall was one of the firmest advocates of a strong central government who came out of the revolutionary era.  It was Jefferson who argued, in the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions adopted by the two state legislatures in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts enacted by Congress under President John Adams, that the states had a right to secede.

* * *

            I think we had our last trick-and-treater in 2000 (that is, last year, not this year).  Elliott was trying to decide if he wanted to go out this Halloween, so I finally asked him about it.  “Let me get this straight," I said.  "You don’t like to wear a costume, you don’t like to go up to people’s houses and ring the doorbell, and you don’t even particularly want to eat the candy.  So what is it I’m missing here?”  He replied, without hesitation, “you’re not missing a thing.  I’m not going.”  So that was that.

* * *

            As we draw on to Thanksgiving and the end of November, I am glad that we seem to be calming down as a nation.  (Evidence may turn up in the near future about the anthrax scare, but the consensus view as I write this is that it likely comes from a discontented domestic, not a foreign terrorist--and we’ve always had to put up with goofballs like that throughout American history.)  One of my concerns is that we shall tread on our own civil liberties in the name of defending the homeland.  Hitler made similar arguments about communists and Jews in Germany--but by drawing that analogy I do not compare Bush and his attorney general Mr. Ashcroft to Hitler and his cronies.  I do, however, point out that any nation can be at risk of sacrificing the rights it has fought for in the name of defending itself.  This is not an original observation, of course, but it is one I think about more and more as I watch the actions of the federal government in recent weeks.

            And as we approach the end of the year, I see happening exactly what I worried about last spring:  the economy has gone south and with it federal, state, and city budgets.  Now we face cuts in programs that benefit primarily the less-well-off in society as well as provide all of us necessary services.  I am equally alarmed at proposals to cut taxes even further and to provide these cuts to those who have the most money.  As I said, I worry about the civic atmosphere of the country.

* * *

            All the best.  I hope we're in touch at some point in the upcoming year.

           

---

[1] Decoration courtesy of Elliott.  This is Charmander, a Poke'mon character; Elliott drew him and decorated him with holly and ivy for the season.

[2] Tax Foundation, http://www.taxfoundation.org/staterankings.html

[3] Development Report Card for the States, http://drc.cfed.org/; the letter grades are for the states ranked on tax levels in column B.  A-B-B means an A for economic performance, a B for business vitality, and a B for development capacity.

[4] United Way, http://www.unitedway.org/stateofcaring/soc_products.cfm (Executive Summary)

[5] Morgan Quitno Press, http://www.morganquitno.com/sr01mlrnk.htm

[6] Except that I received a lovely album from friends at a surprise birthday party--which I used for pictures taken at the party.   This works nicely when the pictures are all landscape orientation; when they are both landscape and portrait, even the albums with sleeves for the pictures do not work, unless one is willing to keep turning the album from top to side and back.

[7] At least in our families, from 1900 to the 1960s or so, people took pictures and never noted date, place, or people in the picture.  As a result, I have had to discard a number of photographs from the turn of the century and earlier because I had no idea who the people in them were--there is no one left alive who knows.  I suppose I could have stuck them in my albums and said they were some unknown relatives, but I don’t even know that those pictured were relatives.

                The other lesson we learned, in sorting through pictures from the mid-1990s, is to write the dates and places on the damn things right when they are developed.  We have pictures from only 5 years ago that we cannot now remember why the heck we took them.

[8] New York Times, October 19, 2001.