Category: Family

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Nellie Bly and Me

Here’s the book I was contributing to in late 2007 and through May 2008: “Irish American Chronicle.” (Me, I would have called it “The Irish American Chronicle”; but I’m hung up on articles, I guess.)

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Anyway, UPS deposited a heavy box on the porch on Friday. Part of my payment, in addition to a writing credit and that old standby, cash, was nine copies of the book. It’s a coffee table number, and definitely in the popular/pictorial history vein.

I could go into my many quibbles with this kind of book, starting with the suspicions stirred upon encountering a foreword by the noted scholar Maureen O’Hara. But I won’t. It was a nice surprise to get the book, which I’d long ago stopped thinking about. For the most part, it’s well written and edited. I got a chance to research and write about a lot of fascinating subjects: Nellie Bly, for instance, who was both a pioneering (Irish-American) journalist and inventor of the 55-gallon oil drum (check out this article — a PDF file — from the American Oil & Gas Historical Society).

Besides, the book’s got lots of nice pictures. Now I have an entry in the Library of Congress database. And eight books to give away.

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Tannenbaum

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We’re just getting into that part of January where you start looking at the Christmas tree and thinking that it’s overstayed its welcome. No–that you’ve let it overstay its welcome. While all the more efficient and tidy households have long since bundled their trees out to the curb for recycling–I don’t think anyone has a municipal Xmas tree bonfire anymore like our Chicago suburb did–there’s our Noble fir, still lighting up our post-holiday nights. And our tree waits to see if we’ll challenge the Brekke family record for Christmas tree longevity, which was well into February as I recall.  

Well, this one will come down, the way they all have. It’ll lie out there by the curb and get tossed in the back of a compactor truck and driven away to be ground up with all the other discarded trees. I’m starting to get teary.

Auf wiedersehen, o tannenbaum!

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Post-Holiday Drip

The first of January has always felt to me more like the end of something than a beginning. From childhood, I have always had the feeling that New Year marked the close of everything I looked forward to at Christmas. New Year’s Day meant it was almost time to go back to school. It began a bleak stretch of winter with only the weak promise of Lincoln’s Birthday (this was an Illinois upbringing, after all, and Presidents Day came along after I was done with school) to get me out of class. The all-day football was a diversion, but hardly satisfying except that as long as that last game was still on — and it would be the Orange Bowl, playing long into the Central Time night — the holidays weren’t really over. Then time would finally run out, and you’d be facing January with nothing to take the edge off the fact the season had turned to cold, hard winter. Holiday lights and Christmas trees? They stayed up for a while, sometimes for weeks, but overnight turned into a reminder of the last pang-inducing and overdue holiday chore.

The first of the year? I’ll take the second, when I feel like I’m already sledding down the course of something new.

(And not — not! — that this is a comment on this year’s New Year’s Day, which was marked by taking down the luminaria this morning; seeing the wonderful documentary “Man on Wire” over in San Francisco with Kate, Eamon, and Sakura; having a repast of pizza and beer over at Lanesplitter, the Oakland restaurant where Thom works, and then going over to Thom and Elle’s place to check out some new electronics and the beginning, anyway, of “Iron Man.” It was a great day. But as a holiday, I’m not sure that I get it.)

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Guest Observation: Dylan Thomas

The closing lines of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” My favorite part of one of my favorite poems. Merry Christmas, wherever you are on this Christmas night.

“… Always on Christmas night there was music.

An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang

‘Cherry Ripe,’ and another uncle sang ‘Drake’s Drum.’

It was very warm in the little house.

Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip

wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death,

and then another in which she said her heart

was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody

laughed again; and then I went to bed.

“Looking out my bedroom window, out into

the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow,

I could see the lights in the windows

of all the other houses on our hill and hear

the music rising from them up the long, steadily

falling night. I turned the gas down, I got

into bed. I said some words to the close and

holy darkness, and then I slept.”

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Liten Julaften

My dad called last night to wish us "happy liten julaften"–approximately "happy little Christmas Eve" in Norwegian, or at least in his mother's Norwegian. When he was eight or nine years old, his mother placated his mounting impatience to open something, anything, among the gifts accumulating under the Christmas tree in their home on the South Side of Chicago. His mom came up with "liten julaften" on the 23rd (note, the Norway Norwegian actually do observe a "lille julaften" then, too; traditionally, I read on the Internet, that's the occasion for decorating the tree). Anyway, in my dad's Chicago Norwegian household, he was allowed to open one present on the 23rd.

Happy liten julaften to you, too, Pop.

And in other news: Had another piece on the radio this morning. This time it was a short, featury piece on holiday lights. Before I jump to the critique (some other day), here's the lead paragraph for the story as it aired on KQED this morning, and the audio, too:

Host intro: Nothing this time of year is as fun as a holiday light display. But like everything else in a world concerned with climate change, the lights we love come with a cost–and a possible solution. KQED's Dan Brekke reports.

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Anniversary

To one of my readers:

Things I remember from December 1 —

You, beautiful, as it rained outside.

All the friends and family who were there.

I was late because I’d been cooking.

After the vows and the party at the preschool in the hills,

we went to a bar with some friends

where the owner feted us with Cook’s champagne.

Or should I say “champagne”?

Then we went home together.

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Times Five

Brief historical note: I posted my first entry here five years ago yesterday. A basic stat for the Infospigot era: 1,679 posts. An average of 336 a year, or 28 a month. I’ve never figured the average number of words per post, but I think I’ve mixed it up: a smattering of short ones, long ones, and in-between ones. Plenty that were mostly about the pictures I was putting up. I’ll make a ballpark guess and say the average length has been 350 words. If true, the total verbiage here totals something like 600,000 words. That’s the equivalent of 2,400 typed pages: a very long book, but with no plot, no central subject, little action, and a dimly understood protagonist. All I can say is thanks for reading. Thanks for returning. And thanks for all the responses along the way.

We’ll soldier on, despite a recent newsflash that blogging is dead. Let’s see what the next five years brings.

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Clean Rice

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Last Thursday night, just outside the town of Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture. We were walking along a semi-rural road just after sunset, and, not reading Japanese, I had no idea what this little kiosk was. My son Eamon said, “Well, what would a farming community like this need?” Well, there were rice fields all around us, scattered with single-family homes and small apartment buildings. But I still had no clue what I was looking at.

The large characters on the canopy say, “Kubota Clean.” What I was looking at was a personal rice mill (built by the Kubota company). People bring their winnowed household rice here, dump it in the hopper, put in some money, and this unit hulls and polishes the rice to the finely finished white grain most in Japan prefer. Not sure what the U.S. equivalent would be. A neighborhood flour mill to grind people’s wheat into flour?

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So, *That* Happened

Item 1: We returned from Japan today. In fact, I’m on my second Sunday evening (we took off from Narita airport, outside Tokyo, at about 7:15 Sunday night; and here it is getting close to 7:15 Sunday night after landing in San Francisco before noon. I understand the why and how of it, but it’s still strange.

Item 2: Before we left, I mentioned to someone that gee, the Cubs might be out of the playoffs by the time I get back home. Just indulging a moment of pre-emptively rueful Cubsy-ness. When we got home early this afternoon I picked up the San Francisco Chronicle, whose Sunday sports section featured not one but two misspelled names in other headlines, and saw the news that the Chicago nine had been swept. You can say wait till next year, or you can just admit you’re not waiting anymore. Go Pale Hose–spoil that beautiful Tampa Bay Rays story for us.

Item 3: Sometime I’ll relate my greatest adventure of September 2008, which was not flying to Japan but running out of gas on the very busy San Francisco Bay Bridge. I believe I’m an unindicted co-conspirator in the event, which involved a faulty fuel gauge.

Item 4: Not to leave the subject of The Trip too quickly: We flew Japan Air Lines both ways to Tokyo. Oddly (or probably not), about two-thirds of the seating space is devoted to first and business class. We were jammed in the back with the other groundlings. One of the entertainments offered on the screens-at-every-seat was a map of our flight’s progress. This morning, I saw that we were nearing the Northern California coast and started looking for Mount Shasta. The mountain is our Fuji, 14,000-some feet, a good hundred miles in from the coast. At the point I started looking, probably near Point Arena, we were about 200 miles from the mountain. But there, way off, rising above the clouds, was that beautiful snowy (not Sno-) cone.

It’s interesting to be back, even after just a week away.

(And where did the post title come from? Watch the clip below. You gotta stay with it to the end.)

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Mokuyobi

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Our last day in Tokyo on this trip. It’s a city reputed to have a daytime population of 30 million as people come in on the network of trains and subways to work. The packing you’ve heard about on Tokyo commuter trains is one effect of the rush into the city. In the evening, the crowd ebbs a bit more slowly. Lots of people stay in the city late, dining and drinking with workmates or friends. The next morning, the tide flows in again. That’s old news, but it’s still captivating to see firsthand.

The trains, whether you’re talking about the superfast long-distance lines like the Shinkansen or the most humble local, are stunning for their speed, efficiency, convenience and cleanliness. I’ve never seen anything that comes close in the United States–though that’s entirely for lack of trying. What the Japanese do with railroads requires a lot of money and a sort of infrastructure context–because the highway network is relatively undeveloped, you wouldn’t want to try a casual 200-mile drive anywhere unless you have a lot of time to burn. Back home, we spend more and more grudgingly on public works projects, but you can be sure that the money that’s out there will go to highways first and to every other mode of moving people second.

Again, old news. I’ll leave the Tokyo chapter with this advice: If you can, go with one of your kids–preferably after they’ve studied Japanese, married a local, lived in the city for a couple of years and have become fluent in the language. That way, you don’t have to worry about details like navigating on your own. In all seriousness, Eamon and Sakura have been the best guides we could have had. In fact, I feel like I missed out on the obligatory foreign-visitor anxiety.

Tonight, we’re in Tsukuba, a small city (by Japanese standards) about 50 miles north of Tokyo and at the end of a brand-new commuter rail line. Tomorrow we head up into the mountains north of here to the hot springs resort of Nikko. And then somewhere in the next two or three days, I guess we get back on a plane and fly to San Francisco. Not sure how much I’ll get to post between now and then. I’ll catch up on one side of the ocean or the other.

[Pictures (click for larger versions): Above: Up to JR platform at Kanda Station, downtown Tokyo. Below: Notice designating train car as “women only” during the morning commute–a measure taken to give female passengers a way of avoiding groping male riders. Bottom: As seen from Hijiri Bridge, trains cross the Kanda River at Ochanomizu Station.]

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