Birth to Brighton

I was born on July 26, 1948 in Chicago. My parents told stories few about my early life and those are all I have to go on. Apparently (pun intended), shortly after my birth they moved to Manteno IL, where my father became one of the staff psychiatrists at the Manteno State Mental Hospital. My mother claims that I was the delight of all the patients some of whom were used as baby sitters.

But my memory is blank until a vague vision surfaces of driving a push-pedal firetruck around a large table with some people I didn't know looking down at me. Guesswork suggests that this may have been during the brief period that we lived in Jamaica Plain, MA. This was probably where I had my first unfortunate adventure.

My parents had these candies (or so I thought) that they ate and they wouldn't share. So one day I found the jar of those candies and hid with it behind the sofa. They were maroon and a little squishy. I squished one so hard that it popped and yellow stuff came out. It didn't smell like it would taste good, but I wiped my hands off and started to eat. I'm not sure how many I ate, I'd like to think that I was ambitious enough to eat the entire jarful, but I probably only ate a few. It was more multivitamins than my parents wanted me to consume and the next memory is of being in a room with a lot of people, a lot of machines, and a plastic tube up my nose.

In 1952 we moved from Jamaica Plain to a house in Brighton, MA, which was partly, stucco. I was bothered by the rough surface. Since it wasn't smooth, my brain was telling me that it was somehow flawed or incomplete.

It might be just as well for me to tell you now that, unlike those little boys made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails, I am made of ADD, OCD, with a touch of something else which, for want of a better term, I’ll call distance. Things that aren't right jump out at me. That's why I was such a good editor. I see patterns in things and anomalies, such as misspellings or inconsistent lists, become obvious. My brother Jonathan can do the same thing with code that I do with words.

I think that I adapted early to these quirks. I think that my lifelong difficulty retaining names and faces may be rooted in my habit of not looking closely at things that will distract or confuse me while trying to follow a conversation. It’s as if I cultivated my own version of Asperger’s Syndrome as a defensive strategy. As for OCD, I still struggle with whether to arrange the books on my shelves by height or subject matter and often default to height within subject. It takes a conscious effort for me to walk down a street without noticing all the stuff that's disordered. I don’t read a book until after I remove the price sticker. The feel of it on my fingertips is too distracting. I dislike my own handwriting because of its inconsistency. I take copious notes and never read them because they're not comfortable for me.

I’m also unusual when it comes to how I relate to other people. An early indication of this was my reaction to the damage left behind by Hurricane Carol in 1954. I was about to start 1st grade at the Alexander Hamilton public school (foreshadowing?) when the storm hit at the end of August 1954. On September 1st, I walked out of the house to see branches and trees down everywhere. Brighton, at the time, seemed to have lots of trees. I had made friends with Susie, a girl who lived across the street and a few doors down. She was going to be in the same class. What interested me most about the destruction was the fact that the large tree in front of Suzy's house had blown over and crashed through her roof. I remember asking if she was hurt or dead, and being oddly disappointed that she was neither.

The basement of our three story house was on two levels. You emerged from the stairs onto the higher level (which I think was about 10' square) with another set of about 3 or four steps to the lower level. This was pretty much my area. I would leap from the upper level into piles of pillows. I had a set of large cardboard blocks which were useful for fortifications and towers.

I once got a splinter in my foot. My father set me on the kitchen table and went to get something to extract it with. As he came back toward me he had a slightly manic grin on his face as he reached into his pocket and pulled out something. There was a click and a bright, shiny, length of dangerous-looking steel appeared. He had confiscated the switchblade from one of his students and decided that this was the time to use it.

The next time my father tried to kill me was when he made octopus soup for dinner. Unfortunately he thought it would be best if cut into large pieces. The panic that resulted from having to reach down my throat to try to extract a piece of tentacle that would neither come up nor go down, provided a spicy dash of adrenaline seasoning.

I tried my hand at dying young by collaborating with my cousin Billy on a particularly stupid stunt. Billy was already in trouble for pilfering my Aunt Ruth's cigarettes; the punishment was to smoke the rest of the pack until he turned green and threw up. So I knew he was a wild and crazy guy. For some reason there was a box of empty coffee cans somewhere in the house. This was back when the cans were opened with a key (the only place you see them now is on those weirdly shaped tins of corned beef). As you turned the key a strip of metal was peeled off. It was extremely sharp, as was the lid of the can.

I'm not sure who first came up with the idea, but Billy and I decided that the best way for us to prove our 7-year-old manhood was to put the lids on the cans to hide the sharp edges, pile the cans onto my bed, stand on the windowsill and fall backwards onto them. This exercise in stupidity and masochism lasted only a couple of rounds until one of the lids popped off and the back of my right hand hit it perfectly. The lid sliced my hand down to the bone.

It was really cool to be able to look into my hand and I studied it carefully as we rushed to the hospital. Instead of stitches, the doctor patched me up with butterfly bandages. Still today there is a lip-print shaped scar there. The good stuff about the incident was that I got to see inside my hand and from then on I always had a way of remembering which way was right.

The backyard had a flat area near the house and a few yards back rose steeply to a stone wall that separated us from an enormous empty lot. The yard was dominated by two trees; a Black Cherry near the back door and a Catalpa catty corner up on the hill. I tried (and failed) to dye my face red with the cherries and use the Catalpa pods as rattles to do what I imagined was some kind of war dance. I was a kid in the 50s. What did I know about cultural appropriation?

Two regular visitors to the house were the milkman, who delivered all kinds of dairy products, and the Nissen man who delivered fresh baked bread. They both came to the backdoor (the kitchen door) with the basic delivery and some optional items like cottage cheese, raisin bread or cookies. I always pleaded for a package of Hermits, a soft and spicy cookie made with molasses and raisins.

Other visitors were my father’s students and collaborators, some of them were from other countries and would live with us for the duration of their stay. One of them was Jose del Castillo who lived in a room on the 3rd floor. My father’s method of waking him for breakfast and the commute to MIT was to stand in the hallway on the ground floor and sing at the top of his lungs, “Jose can you see, by the dawn’s early light.” It was funny once, but it became a daily irritant. My father never could resist a pun no matter what its quality or frequency.

Another thing about Jerry was that he was immensely strong but didn’t always think things through. One day he and my mother got into an argument and she decided to go stay with her mother for a couple of days to cool off. He didn’t want her to go. Instead of hiding the keys to the car or taking off the distributor, or pulling the spark plug wires like a normal, commonsensical person trying to prevent someone from leaving, he opened the hood and removed the spark plugs … with his bare hands.

I started reading very early, and by 1st grade I could read well enough to tackle Sherlock Holmes and I was working my way through “The Sign of the Four”. One night, I awoke in the middle of the night and saw what seemed to be a head silhoutted against the light from a streetlight. I was convinced that Tonga, the Andaman islander from the story was outside my window with his blowgun.

My tabby cat was named Zebra (with a short e as in Zebediah) had her kittens in my underwear drawer, a blond Steiff teddy bear named Randolph, an imaginary friend named Ommi-Ommi, an Irish setter named Moose (whose Milkbone dog biscuits I liked to share), a sister named Ruth, and a brother who, although I argued strongly for the name “Howard Johnson's," was named Jonathan. When we moved to Cambridge in 1955, Moose had been exiled to a farm (really! I visited him there) for protective custody. He had a habit of chasing cars and the cars had a habit of catching him.

Bat Photography

When I was in my teens, I worked for a while for Fred Webster, a scientist who studied bats. Fred's lab was a large Quonset hut in the back yard of his house (which was, appropriately, right next to the Mount Auburn Cemetery). His yard was large enough to also contain a huge, professional quality trampoline in its own building. Fred was proud of the fact that, at the time, it was the largest trampoline east of the the Mississippi. My job included helping to photograph bat flight patterns, develop and print the results and take care of the animals. I still have a small scar on my arm from the subcutaneous anti-rabies shots I had to have in order to work there.

I worked with the little brown bat (Myotis Lucifugus) and one of my favorite tasks was defrosting them. They hibernate well and if you keep them in the freezer compartment of the lab's refrigerator, all you have to do is take them out and let them thaw for a while. I'd go to the lab refrigerator and open the freezer to take out an ice crusted lump and place it in the bottom of a cage. A short while later with the frost melted into a pool around it you could see that it was furry, curled up on itself and small enough to fit in the palm of my hand.

Later in the day it would shake itself awake and climb the wires of the cage to hang upside-down. As I remember we gave them a couple of days to acclimate before flying them.

On one side of the hangar was an expanse of black velvet to provide a non-reflective surface to photograph against. Positioned in front of that backdrop was an electronic cannon that let us fire mealworms into the air to a relatively predictable height. High on the opposite wall was a "gun camera,” a repurposed piece of military hardware that was intended to track and confirm air combat hits. We used a Graflex 4x5 plate film back.

We'd release the bat and, as it flew circles around the hangar, we’d load the little mealworm cannon. Firing the cannon simultaneously started the camera. The bat would dive for the treat and the camera would fire about six sequential exposures in about a second. When the plate was developed we'd have a record of the swoop, loop and capture all on a single plate.

I used to have examples of the photos, but they are lost somewhere.

Jesse Fuller

Summer ~1964

When I was a teenager (just after the flood), I used to hang out in a musical intrument store in Harvard Square called Folk City USA. The owner put up with me by putting a chair out on the street and letting me practice there in hopes that it would bring in customers.

I liked to go there because I could not afford a 12-string guitar and had a serious lust for one. I never paid a lot of attention to who went into the shop.

One day the owner came out of the shop and asked me if I'd like to do someone a favor. I said I would and he took me back into the shop. A slender black man was standing at the counter.

"This guy knows all the music shops in the area," said the owner, waving at me. "I'm sure he can find you what you need."

The old man explained that he had arrived in Boston that morning and someone had stolen his guitar. "She was custom-built for me," he said. "I won't be able to replace her."

Then he told me that he didn't much care about sound quality, but that by that evening he needed a 12-string guitar. The primary criterion was that the tuning pegs had to be at right angles to the head.

"I've got me some arthritis," he told me, "and I can't twist my wrist around too much."

We must have hit at least 10 stores, and the best we could find was a Stella. Gaaahhh, talk about cheap. But it was okay with him. He was very grateful.

In the process of testing the various guitars, I had played a few of them. I played a lot of traditional blues back then. The old man complimented me on my skills and then offered me a job. "You come out to San Francisco," he said. "You can help at the shoeshine during the day, and we'll play some blues after-hours."

I was 15, shy and not very brave. I told him that I would think about it. "You just turn up there someday," he said. "We'll find you a place to stay."

But I never did.

It bubbles up from memory now and then. One of my handful of missed opportunities. I passed up a chance to learn blues from the composer of 'The San Francisco Bay Blues,' Jesse Fuller.

The Eleventh

It was a bright clear fall day as I drove over the Tobin Bridge and into Boston. I commuted in the early morning to avoid rush hour. I was in a good mood. I had some Doo-wop on the radio and a four-shot Americano in the cup holder. I drove through the maze of twisty downtown streets, pulled into my space in the parking garage, grabbed my coffee and my Land's End briefcase and took the elevator up to my office. I managed the documentation department for a large software company.

I booted my computers, adjusted the blinds against the glare of the early morning sun, turned on some music (Bela Fleck this time), sat down, and got to work. I answered the overnight crop of email and checked my schedule for meetings and approaching deadlines.

I was just settling into a rat's nest of verbosity disguised as a chapter of a software manual for automated backups on enterprise networks, when there was a knock on the door and Kate from Quality Assurance opened it and stuck her head in.

"Got a radio?" she asked.

"No just a CD player."

"Okay." It was an unusual request, so I called after her, "What's up?"

"Just wanted to listen to the news," she said turning back. "There's a weird story I heard on the car radio, something about a plane hitting a building in New York."

"One of those little private planes?"

"Must be."

"Let's find out."

She came back while I accessed a streaming news feed. As we listened, the door opened and someone else came in. I waved them to a seat without turning.

"Be with you in a minute," I said.

But of course it wasn't a minute ... it was September 11th.

We sat quietly listening as things progressed getting worse and worse.

Finally over-saturated I turned down the volume and turned from my computer.

My office was full of people, and there were more people grouped outside the door in the corridor. Friends and rivals among my co-workers were sitting on the floor or had pulled chairs from neighboring offices. Many were crying, some were hugging each other for support, but all of them wanted the volume back up.

For a couple of hours we listened in silence, until security came and told us that the office building was closing and we had to leave. We were in a tall office building in downtown Boston, and paranoia had begun to emerge.

The streets were jammed. I called my wife to let her know what was going on and that it would take me some time to get home. She was shaken and asked me to detour to Mission Hill to pick up my daughter and bring her home.

On the way up Huntington Avenue. I watched crowds of students, brightly-plumed, or raven-moody Massachusetts College of Art students, somewhat more preppily garbed Northeastern students, piling off the trolleys and flowing across the street. None of them seemed to notice the increased traffic around them. None of them noticed as a plane flew overhead and drivers ducked.

My daughter wasn't at home, so I drove to where she worked to pick her up. It took hours to get through the clogged streets and back up to the North Shore. We didn't talk much during the ride. Just listened to the news on the radio, switching back and forth between WBUR's NPR coverage, and WBZ's CBS feed.

At some point during the drive something occurred to me. Among the people sitting in and around my office, aghast and horrified and frightened and angry, had been a veritable UN. There were people from every corner of the earth ... people of every religion; Moslems, Sikhs, Coptic Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Wiccans, Atheists, Agnostics, even an eccentric who claimed to be a Jedi practitioner.

And there we all were, sitting side by side in shared disbelief, horror, and communal sympathy, rivalries forgotten, failures unimportant, and, in my microcosm of an office, peace reigned. It's an image that I keep with me, an image that lets me hope.

All these years later, I still feel deep affection and a surge of pride in my fellow geeks and nerds who, in a work environment that prized logic and scientific thought, spontaneously formed an emotional community that ignored differences of culture and spirituality.

And I guess what makes me proudest is that I wasn't surprised, that I knew that there was a commonality, that respect for others' work, understanding of common goals, can lead to an environment where differences are less important than humanity.

The Best School & The Biggest Idiot

     When my family moved from Brighton to Cambridge, I was plucked out of 2nd grade at the Alexander Hamilton Public School (of which I remember nothing) and put into the Shady Hill School, a private school with a unique method of instruction.

     My short time there spoiled me for every other school I ever attended. Never since then have I had so much fun learning.

     Each grade concentrated on a different culture. IIRC 2nd grade concentrated on Native Americans, 3rd was vikings and Norse mythology, and 4th was ancient Greece. The last one is the one I remember best. 

     Nearly every activity centered on that year's culture. In 4th grade, we worked to dramatize Robert Graves' book "The Wrath of Achilles" which we performed. In shop class we made wooden shields and swords and painted them. 

     In art class we learned how to make potato prints and used them to print geometric border on the chitons we wore in the production and made clay pots, our individual and adorably clunky Grecian urns. Mine was shiny black with wavy green stripes and my mother may have it still. 

     We studied Greek mythology from the enormous and enormously entertaining "Gods and Heroes" by Gustav Schwab. I still have my copy of it on my shelves. Even our sports and exercise periods were special. We learned to throw the javelin and discus, ran foot races, did long jumps and high jumps to practice for the school Olympics. We did not take the verisimilitude too far, I cannot remember ever competing naked.

     I often walked the 16 blocks to and from school. I preferred to walk and save my bus fare so I could stop in every few days at the Red & White Market and buy my secret pleasure which was, I swear, anchovy paste which I would hide in my jacket pocket and suck directly out of the tube. I still like anchovies. 

     It was on the way home in the fall that we really lucked out. Some of the other walkers and I would take a short cut through somebody's yard to Mt. Auburn Street. At the back of the yard and, to us at least, not really someones property was a mass of Concord grape vines. I wonder if the owner knew or cared that every day we diminished the potential harvest.

     One of the walkers was Lenore Gessner. She lived a few blocks from the school (on the corner of Traill and Mt.  Auburn I think), and she is the reason that I'm posting these memories today.  close to the school

     I remember her as vivacious, dark-haired and amazingly pretty with a glorious smile. I probably had a bit of a crush on her, every time we were paired in some activity, I quietly rejoiced. (High fives were unknown at the time. 

     One day, I was invited to lunch at her house. The story I told myself for many years was that I'd let her copy my answers on a quiz, but it was far more likely that I helped her with a single answer or on a project. Nevertheless, I duly turned up for lunch only to be taken aback by the magnificence of her home. Dear God! There was a grand piano in the living room and there was so much glass. 

     To make matters even more complex it was a sit down lunch in the dining room. My family lived in an apartment and we didn't even have a dining room. Then came the ultimate shock. There was something weird on my plate, something that I'd never seen before. My father had already nearly killed me with octopus soup so I was suspicious of anything strange at the time. Lenore and her mother recognized my cluelessness and kindly taught me how to deal with the scary artichoke.

     I have heard several reasons why my parents took me out of Shady Hill. One story is that the school psychologist's interest in my particular learning quirks irritated them, but it's more likely that I was breaking their budget. I ended up in the Cambridge public school system and immediately began my new career as an underachiever. 

     A few decades ago I started getting mail from Shady Hill. It seems that they somehow felt that I was an alumnus. At the time, I assumed that either they were either mixed up or desperate for contributions. But then the stalking started. Every year I'd start getting letters and notes and emails from someone who wanted me to send details of my life to her so that she could publish them.

     I tried to tell Lenore that I wasn't really an alumnus, but she refused to let me go. Being a shy and retiring sort, I resisted (I'm a Marxist by nature, never joining clubs that would accept me as a member) but she never gave up. 

     Now it's too late. Yesterday I went to her funeral service. I know that other people from my class were there, but it had been so long and I had insulated myself so well that there was no way to achieve mutual recognition. 

     It was a beautiful day at Mt. Auburn Cemetery; bright sunshine, some trees budding, others in full bloom. I sat near the fountain for a while before going into the chapel. My pad, a spiral notebook and some history books were in my backpack so that I could use my time on the train efficiently, but I left them untouched.

     I went in, amazed to see how many people were there. That wonder only lasted until the eulogies when I realized the chance that I'd squandered by clinging to my outsider status. 

     The bus ride back to Harvard Square took me past Traill Street, past Longfellow Park, past the Red & White where Mrs. Sahagian took advantage of my craving for salted fish, past our old apartment on Hilliard Street then into the "warm dark inside cupboards" of the T. After nearly three hours of bus, subway, train and foot, I walked up the driveway of my hermitage, poured myself a glass of wine and wondered, as I had for the entire trip, why I'm such an idiot.

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Culling the Library

      You might think that I am a bibliomaniac, but that is far from the truth. I am not manic about books. I buy them, sell them, trade them and lend them. I certainly will admit to being a bibliophile, a lover of books. I have always been a voracious reader, ready to be immersed in the new worlds or alternate visions that books provide. As a writer, I understand that words are a form of power that can be used and abused. So when I find a book that I like, I feel that it imparts some of its power to me. My shelves of books are like my armor, Quixotic armor, rusty and dented, but protective nonetheless.

     So disposing of a large part of my library is like stripping away a protective shell, laying myself bare to a world that is not as neatly ordered as my volumes. Like a hermit crab abandoning its shell and trailing its soft abdomen as it searches for another, I feel vulnerable. Unlike J. Alfred Prufrock, I don't particularly want to be a pair of ragged claws, Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

     I will also admit to being a collector. The books that I collect are old, but not necessarily expensive. The most I have ever paid for the books that I collect is about $50, and that one was special since it had the bookplate of its previous owner in it; the previous owner being Harpo Marx. Which reminds me that his brother Groucho once said that, "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark too read." Some that I own I bought for a few dollars at second-hand bookshops only to find later that they were worth hundreds of dollars. Many of these, although dear to me, will be finding new homes.

     The core of my collection consists of quarto-sized books primarily published by The Bodley Head at Oxford, England or Dodd Meade in the US. They are beautifully illustrated fantasies by Cabell, Anatole France and others. They are staying with me, as are the complete sets of Sir Richard Burton's translation of "A Thousand Nights and A Night" and Fraser's "The Golden Bough".

What, then, shall go?

• Most of the poetry. 
• All of the books on technical writing, semiotics, linguistics,
• Most of the math, except for puzzles and Euclid. (I love my wife but oh Euclid.)
• A lot of the science, excluding the natural history.
• Most of the novels except for those that would be nearly impossible to replace. 
• Probably half the books on design.

These will descend into the cardboard purgatory with most of the religion and philosophy.

     Ah me ... I know that I am doing the logical thing, but my heart disagrees with my head. Logic is like the the curate and the barber in Don Quixote, sorting and consigning the mad knight's books to the fire as he lies sleeping.

    That night the housekeeper burned to ashes all the books that were in the yard and in the whole house; and some must have been consumed that deserved preservation in everlasting archives, but their fate and the laziness of the examiner did not permit it, and so in them was verified the proverb that the innocent suffer for the guilty.

    One of the remedies which the curate and the barber immediately applied to their friend's disorder was to wall up and plaster the room where the books were, so that when he got up he should not find them (possibly the cause being removed the effect might cease), and they might say that a magician had carried them off, room and all; and this was done with all despatch. 

     Two days later Don Quixote got up, and the first thing he did was to go and look at his books, and not finding the room where he had left it, he wandered from side to side looking for it. He came to the place where the door used to be, and tried it with his hands, and turned and twisted his eyes in every direction without saying a word; but after a good while he asked his housekeeper whereabouts was the room that held his books.
    The housekeeper, who had been already well instructed in what she was to answer, said, "What room or what nothing is it that your worship is looking for? There are neither room nor books in this house now, for the devil himself has carried all away."

     The reference books stay. So what if I have three rhyming dictionaries ... they stay. The books on colonial history, agriculture and architecture stay.

     Sadly, the easiest to dispose of and the first to be packed will be the collection of books that I have written. It's not as horrifying as it sounds. I spent many years as a technical writer and wrote hundreds of software manuals, marketing guides, reference books, and contributed papers to many periodicals and proceedings. All of them are outdated and although I am proud of the work, they are now meaningless. This will be my responsibility. My housekeeper has no kindling at hand. There will be no garden conflagration. If some of my work must be destroyed, it will be by my hand. I will not make a Lady Burton out of my wife; putting her husband's manuscripts to the torch.

And the orphan books, crammed into their shipping containers, shall immigrate to good homes to be adopted by bibliophiles more settled and secure than I. 

I bid them farewell with a quote from Richard LeGallienne:

    "Thus shall you live upon warm shelves again,
    And 'neath an evening lamp your pages glow."

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Ten Random Things About Me 01

I was once challenged to provide a list of things that people might find unusual or amusing about me.

1. My study contains shelves and boxes containing more than 750 books, in spite of the fact that I have reduced my personal library by more than 80%.
2. I have visited Diego Garcia, a small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
3. I am currently ghost-writing the autobiography of a nasty (and dead) man (it's complicated).
4. My first reaction to being told that I was going to climb Bald Mountain, near Boulder CO, was to ask if it would be at night.
5. I've had my entire paycheck stolen by a beautiful gypsy girl.
6. No matter how diligently I try, I cannot get further than page 20 of Finnegan's Wake.
7. Although I'm vegan now, I used to pride myself that there were very few foods that I could not or would not eat. The most prominent of these are brains, boiled okra, and baluts (look it up if you must, but be warned.) Yes, I have had snake, alligator, thousand-year eggs, ant eggs, cobra blood wine, goat head, etc. etc.
8. In a similar vein, I used to be much fatter than I am now.
9. In Israel, I was once kidnapped by a yeshiva looking for fresh students and spent three hours discussing the ways that ice cream could fail the test for kosher.
10. I can sing some of Donald Swann's musical setting for the songs in The Hobbit. 

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Origin Story

Things started to go sour shortly after I was born. 

I guess that I was a cute enough baby, but the burden of being the first born weighed heavily. My mother pretends that she's joking as she cheerfully tells anyone that when I was born "Unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given." from Handel's Messiah resounded in her head. Essentially, I was set up ... given an impossible goal, so it's not that unusual that I constantly felt that I was falling short of expectations. Other kids just had to deal with criticism like, "why can't you be more like your brother/sister/cousin." The criteria for my success seemed, at least to me, a tad more stringent. I had a higher point to aim for and many more opportunities to fail the entrance requirements for deity. 

In fact, the closest I ever got to performing a miracle was helping to deliver our kids (unless you count the time I shared some crackers and a can of sardines with a friend).

I was born in 1948. My father came from an orthodox Jewish family and mother had been raised Quaker. I'll go into that in more detail some other time. 

My father's family came from near Kiev in Ukraine and settled, for the most part, in Illinois and Michigan. The only members of his family that I really had contact with were my uncle Theodore, a fantastic concert pianist and extraordinarily gifted teacher of the instrument, his family, and on rare occasions my grandparents, Sol and Fanny. Occasionally cousins would make brief appearances but, without context, they were a source of confusion that had little to do with me. I know that I met my father's brother Norman and his family once, I'm not sure if I met his sister Miriam. 

I don't know why my parents chose to keep their kids so distant from our paternal relatives, but I was in my late middle age before I realized that there were other Lettvins out there. All of my father's family stories were of dead people and I had incorrectly assumed that we were the only ones left.

My mother's side was almost as much of a mystery. My grandmother Katherine's maiden name was Dietrich and she had been born in London and married Israel? Brady, a soldier from the U.S. who had joined a Canadian regiment notorious for toughness and wearing kilts known as "the ladies from hell." 

That sounds fairly simple, but wait. Brady wasn't his original last name. During immigration at Ellis Island, the agent had apparently rechristened my grandfather in order to avoid writing out the name Warshavsky on the paperwork. And where was my grandfather from? According to my usual sources (who are unclear if not downright fibbers) he was from a small town just outside Kiev. My father told me not to talk about this since, "the Warshavskys were well known to be supporters of the Czar." It was bad enough that he had married someone thought to be a shiksa, but all hell would break loose if they discovered that she was a Warshavsky.

With two exceptions, I didn't know my mother's family very well either. We seemed as remote from them as from my father's family. Leonard and Bernard lived in the mid-west, and Doris lived in California. The only exception to this separation were my grandmother and Aunt Ruth. My grandfather had deserted the family before I was born and (really ... I'm not making this up) run away with the circus. I met him only once. He showed me some magic tricks, I told him how he did them, and I was of no further interest.

My father's orthodox upbringing did not survive his education as a doctor, psychiatrist, and scientist. So I had no Hebrew school in my childhood. For a long time my concept of Judaism was a subset of people who were smart and told funny stories. It wasn't until my mid 30s that I went through any form of Jewish education, but that's a story for later.

My grandmother Katherine (who I will call Grandma from now on since Fanny wasn't really a factor in my life) was Quaker. My mother considered herself Quaker but, so far as I know, never went to meeting. Grandma was the only person who seemed to be interested in my spiritual upbringing and she took charge. I joined the Cambridge Society of Friends and learned about religion from them.

I now wobble between agnostic and atheist.

This is just an overview. Details and stories will follow. Always keep in mind that these are memories. Some are accurate some are faulty, and I have no way of telling the difference. Some are hearsay, some are hearsay of hearsay, some are misrepresentations, some are lies. Where I feel that it is best to protect identities, I'll use pseudonyms so old friends can breathe a sigh of relief. 

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Tomatoes and Cucumbers

These days it must seem a luxury to have a garden, to have enough land to plant and harvest your own vegetables, fruits and berries, but it was not always that way. Not long ago, it was a necessity. Stores and markets were only for those foodstuffs that you could not grow yourself. If you have an historical bent, and it is focused more on the people and how they lived rather than the big events, this will not be a surprise.

Subsistence gardens were the norm even in the depths of cities. Less than 100 years ago, livestock was found in urban environments with cows, pigs and chickens being raised in Boston, New York City etc. There are still vestiges of this in the community gardens and victory gardens often found in these cities.

The very idea of buying produce that one could grow was antithetical to the values of those times. Household economists avoided purchasing in favor of cultivating. But as we became an industrial, then a service, and now an information economy, we have drifted further and further away from the earth. Our fruits and vegetables come from the supermarket with identifying stickers so that the cashiers don't need to identify the unfamiliar, our meat is packaged in plastic, our foods created in huge vats in factories to save us the effort of even having to look at the uncomfortably organic shapes.

So many things now are cookie-cutter; standardized, sanitized, de-scented, bleached, colored, sorted, all to achieve a kind of homogeneity that is not found in nature. Consistency trumps flavor. Sameness is king. There is a new luxury today, and it is an expensive one. It costs us money, health, and pleasure. It is the luxury of disgust. As corporate farmers and food processors divorce us from our roots, they remove the knowledge of that which sustains our life and substitute a horror of dirt and of nature. The very idea that a caterpillar may have once crawled over the surface of a tomato repulses people. A bird landing on an apple tree makes many people reject the fruit. They should be more concerned when animals refuse to share the food.

My neighbor was a sweet lady. She and I occasionally traded produce. Until her death a few years ago, she was still active, vital, and to my great benefit, an avid gardener. We both eschew chemical fertilizers and insecticides, so neither of us hesitated about eating the food fresh of the vine or bush. What a delight. She appeared at my door one day with four large and gorgeous yellow pattypan squash, and four thin and warty cucumbers. After selfishly slicing a cucumber, adding just a pinch of salt and treating myself to an alfresco lunch on the back porch, I gathered a quart of ripe blueberries for her and left them on her doorstep.

These days many folks think that cucumbers are there merely for texture. They douse them with processed salad dressing to the point that one can no longer taste the vegetable. That is no great loss since the cucumbers one buys from the supermarket are tasteless to begin with. But those from a sun-warmed garden, inconsistent in shape, with warts and mottled skin, do have flavor, one that you should not ruin by the violence of modified starches and ersatz "natural flavors" of a supermarket salad dressing.

Perhaps I've been spoiled. I lived in Southern Italy when I was younger. Gardens abounded. Refrigerators were few. You harvested the food for the day, or bought food that had been grown within a few miles. The travesty we know here as Italian salad dressing was nowhere to be found.

To make an Italian salad, one rinsed the leaves of the lettuce to remove the sand and any remaining insect life. You tore the leaves into the proper size, removing areas of brown where some creature had enjoyed a bit of it before you, and made one or two additions; perhaps some olives, some other greens, a slice or two of radish. To dress it was simple. A glug of olive oil a squeeze of lemon and a pinch of salt. Just enough additional flavor to enhance, rather than disguise the green, crisp, and slightly bitter leaves. Here, in the US, a salad is most often a mess of sugary glop with chemical flavors hiding a tasteless mound of cloned leaves, genetically altered to repel insects and grow to a uniform shape for easy harvesting.

To me, the perfect taste of summer is the tomato sandwich I learned to make in Naples. Here is the recipe:

1. Early in the morning (5 or 6 am is best), walk down to the local bakery and buy a loaf of freshly-baked, crusty Italian bread.
2. Carry it home and put it on the counter to cool. You may want to cover it with a light dishtowel to keep the flies off.
3. At 1 pm, go to the garden and pluck two ripe sun-warmed tomatoes. Plum tomatoes are best, but they should be real ones, the type that are now called "heirloom" and fetch high prices because they cannot be machine harvested.
4. While you are in the garden, pluck a stem of basil and, unless you have some in the kitchen, you might as well grab a bulb of garlic.
5. Back in the kitchen, find the olive oil.
6. Slice the tomatoes into thick slabs.
7. Peel, crush and mince two or three cloves of garlic.
8. Slice about five or ten leaves of basil into thin strips. (You don't need to bother wiping the knife off between jobs ... don't be silly.)
9. Slice the loaf of bread in half, parallel to its base and open it up.
10. Drizzle both halves with a good amount of olive oil.
11. Sprinkle the bottom half evenly with the garlic and shredded basil.
12. Lay the tomato slices across it with the slices overlapping slightly.
13. Take a pinch of coarse salt and scatter it over the red surface.
14. Place the other half of the loaf on top.
15. Cut the sandwich in half and place it on a plate.
16. Put a handful of olives next to it.
17. Pour a glass of mineral water with a squeeze of lemon (or if you want ... a glass of good Chianti).
18. Take the plate and glass out to the garden to the chair and small table under the fig tree.

Serves one.

Meditation on Snow

I promised to keep writing, but the black humours overcame me and I sank into the depths again. Having given up drinking, oblivion was denied me. Having given up smoking, the solace of slow suicide was also unreachable. Which leaves me no recourse except to accept the slow progress of life.

I have struggled to the surface in time for the snow.

It occurs to me that snow is much like an antidepressant medication. It covers the the world in a blanket of fresh crispness like a bed made with freshly ironed sheets (a metaphor I will promptly discard). Winter's appearance of brilliant purity may be nature's way of making up for the dark cold depths of the longer nights. Would that it could.

For the chronic melancholic it is merely a facade.

Beneath the pristine surface, the detritus lies in frozen suspension. Only temporarily hidden are the results of emptied dog dishes, the rubble of the wrappers of fast food and fast sex resisting decomposition and waiting to rise from their fastness in Spring. Should I write a book to be called "A la recherche du temps rapide"?

The chemicals keep winter always. I feel like the Oscar Wilde's selfish giant without even the mirage of faith. My winter is psychopharmaco with out the logic. The balance is maintained. No thaw can be permitted to allow growth for it would also let the garbage bubble muddily to the surface. I am wrapped in winter as a mummy is wrapped in bandages, as a monk is rapt in meditation immobile in opposition to the lust of the enraptured raptor dipping its hooked beak in the steam of its prey.

I am snowbound.

Where's that goat-footed balloon man?

Starting up again

I haven't posted in a long time. I will try to remedy that in two ways: I am going to start rolling up my multiple blogs into this one. The only exception will be the Jerry Lettvin Memorial blog which will be converted into a series of static web pages.

There are a couple of things that I need to make clear.

First, although I call this a memoir, you can expect to see many different types of content: poems, stories, recipes, and rants. I will do my best to label things appropriately so that they can be found.

Second, I write lengthy pieces. I'm old school that way. I'm not writing for your benefit, but for my own. As a result, you may get to your tl;dr limit faster than I get to my point. If you're bored then go away. I probably won't even notice.

Later today I will start to post some of the backlog.

The Time Traveler

In September of 1970, I started working at an herb shop called The Herb Shop, on Chapel Street in New Haven CT. It was an offshoot of an organic food store on Whalley Ave. called ... that's right, The Food Store. I worked with John Thompkins who was a co-owner of both.

We had several enterprises working in the shop. We sold books on herbalism, spices and herbs for cooking, herbs for healing, custom blended perfumes (my particular specialty), and some kick-ass legal herbal smoking mixtures.

We didn't do a lot of business. Often the morning's profits were blown on a bagful of eggrolls from the Chinese restaurant two doors down. But there was a steady clientèle for our curry and chili powders, Mexican and Middle Eastern saffrons, and other culinary spices. The customers for medicinal herbs were more sporadic. We'd have a run on elderflower and mint during cold season, and once when there was an outbreak of VD we did a huge amount of sales of uva ursi and similar herbs.

I was usually the only person in the shop. I became fairly expert in the use of old Materia Medicas, Culpepper's Herbal, and Jethro Kloss' Back To Eden.

The sideline I started in natural fragrances became something of a style. I'd send the prospective customer to have their horoscope done and palm read, then I would do a tarot reading and blend the perfume accordingly. It wasn't entirely bullshit. I had a bit of a nose, had experimented with different skin chemistries, and seemed to have an instinct for the right combinations. I probably could have done it without all the new age folderol but people liked it.

My favorite customer was Tom. Tom was always dressed nicely with a spotless white shirt and striped tie under a grey suit. He also wore a battered old Panama hat that emphasized the mahogany of his skin. He carried himself with dignity and grace and was both charming and courtly.

When he first came into the shop, he asked if I would let him browse the labeled jars behind the counter. I assured him that he was welcome to. After about 30 minutes of study, he came back to the counter and wrote out a list. He was asking for so many ounces of hyssop, and about half that of thyme and on and on. There were about 15 different herbs on his list.

I pulled out a number of plastic bags, but he stopped me. "If you don't mind, please just put them all in the same bag. Paper if you have it."

The mixture didn't sound edible to me, nor particularly potpourri sweet (although it did include dried rosebuds), but he was the customer so I created the mix for him. He laid a few well-worn dollar bills on the counter in payment, thanked me and walked out. About a week later he was back with a different list of herbs. This became a regular event.

After a while my curiosity got the better of me and I asked him what he did with these seemingly illogical blends. He was polite but didn't answer. It took several more visits before he sighed and shook his head.

"Well son," he said, "I've lived through a lot of lives. I was a carpenter in China, a farmer in France, a soldier in Russia, an olive picker in Italy, and a stonecutter in Egypt."

I looked at him in amazement. He was certainly old enough to have done all those things but somehow it didn't seem likely. "When were you in Italy?" I asked. "I lived in Naples for a couple of years."

He chuckled, "It was long before you were born, son. As I recollect, it was back in the time of the Borgias."

Well of course I knew he was either crazy or deluded, but he was a good customer and I still wanted to know how he used the herbs that I sold him. So I asked him to tell me more.

Tom told me that he had an unusual memory. He could remember fragments of each of his previous lives. The earliest fragment was from Egypt. I may have sounded as if I was scoffing when I asked if he had worked on the pyramids, but he shooks his head and said, "Oh no, nothing so grand as that, I did some house foundations and sometimes some roadwork."

I asked how it was that he could remember all those lives. "I can't even remember the name of my third grade teacher," i said.

"About 20 years ago," he told me, "I started remembering bits and pieces. It turned out that the memories came when I smelled certain things. I started developing formulas or recipes that would make it easier to remember. After a while I could make the memories of a specific life happen."

"How do you do it?" I asked.

"The herbs in that bag you just made up for me is the recipe that will take me back to ancient Egypt. I divide it into four portions and tie it into a linen bag, then I steep it in a covered pot of boiling water for an hour. I run myself a steaming hot tub of water and pour the herb liquid in. Then I climb in and close my eyes. It takes about five minutes until I'm walking down the streets of Memphis."

I was startled for a moment, as if there was some kind of a disconnect. Then I remembered that Memphis, TN was named for the ancient Egyptian city.

Over the next few months, he told me more about his past lives. I saved the recipes and the target time and geography of each, but I was never able to get them to work for me.

Eventually we couldn't keep the store going and had to close. When Tom came in for the last time, I had packaged up as much of the remaining stock as I could into his formulas, labeled them and sent him off with a year's supply of free time travel.

One of my better moments

In 1979 I was in the Navy and based on an aircraft carrier with a homeport in Norfolk, Virginia. One night, some friends and I decided to go off base to catch a movie that had just opened. I was looking forward to it. I love Brit comedy and The Life of Brian sounded perfect.

The problem was that Norfolk was a hotbed of televangelism so when we got to the theater, it was surrounded by picketers who were apparently horrified at the sacrilege of it. My companions turned-tail and headed back to the base. I decided to press forward.

As I moved through the crowd, it became obvious that none of the protesters had seen the movie. They were taking a pastor or other third party's opinion and in many cases they didn't know if the third party had viewed the film.

I had a secret weapon for dealing with such people, a clipping that I kept in my wallet for such occasions. When I was approached belligerently by a group, I waited until I was asked the proper question. Finally it came ... "Don't you believe in the bible?"

Of course I do," I replied. "In fact I have documentary proof of its truth."

They were a bit taken aback. "What do you mean?"

"The old testament predicts the presidency of Lyndon Johnson," I said, "and the mess he made of the Vietnam war."

In spite of themselves, they were impressed. They weren't expecting biblical knowledge from someone as irreligious as they assumed me to be.

I pulled out my wallet and said, "Yep." I nodded at one of the bible toters, "Look it up right now." I pulled out my wallet and took out the clipping. "Proverbs 26:17." I held out the clipping.

"He that passeth by and meddleth with strife belonging not to him is like one who picks up a dog by the ears."

They backed slowly away and let me pass.

My short career as a film-maker

The course I took in film-making was a basic introductory one. Always needing to be different, while the other students used small, modern, hand-held, battery-powered cameras with zoom lenses and shot color super 8mm film, I chose to use a monster of a Bolex with a three-lens turret. The Bolex had to be wound up every 20 seconds, needed a shoulder rest or a tripod, and shot black and white 16mm film that needed special processing.

I cobbled together an animation stand and had film splicing and editing equipment. An old army-surplus shoulder bag held film spools and extra lenses. (Deni had kindly drawn a very Dan O'Neill style Mickey Mouse on the bag flap.

I tried. I shot long traveling shots down deserted alleys, empty stairwells, and deserted rooftops, presumably trying to translate my angst into images. Long boring minutes of minutely filmed brickwork were so tedious that I couldn't even watch it to edit it. I finally edited it into a seizure inducing short piece that I almost immediately dumped in the trash.

Realizing that Andy Warhol had naught to fear from my work, I turned briefly to journalism. This lasted a few days in May 1970 and culminated with being tear-gassed on New Haven Green as I unsuccessfully tried to get close enough to Jean Genet, Benjamin Spock, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, or William Sloane Coffin to get a recognizable shot. (Those were the demonstrations at the Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins trial.)

My last foray was into animation. I still have the reel. It was the only color film I shot. Denise did the artwork and I worked out an infantile shooting script. It was a psychedelic countryside with a flowing river and glittering sun. A black egg rolls into the frame, breaks into three parts to become a bird shape, and flies away. The entire film was about 45 seconds long and took us an entire long weekend to shoot.

Thus ended my illustrious film career.

Wayback Machine

Sometime in 1970, Deni and I were living in New Haven. We were poor, but happy, quasi-hippies. We were both working for Yale libraries and I was taking a course in film-making at Quinnipiac College. (Just to help in time placement, my movie camera was a Bolex that held a spool of 100 feet of film, would run for about 20 seconds per winding, and weighed about 8 pounds.)

Sometime during that period we must have found a photo booth and sat for our portraits. As you can see, I was anticipating the "grunge" movement, and Deni was just drop-dead gorgeous.

So who am I anyway?

Assuming that people other than my family might be reading these fragments, I should probably give a brief overview of my chaotic life. This will give many a chance to opt-out of reading any future meanderings and maunderings.

I was a technical writer for most of my life, but I have worked in more discrete occupations than most other people (albeit less out of desire than out of the need to keep my family fed). Many of these jobs will be subjects of posts so I won't detail them now. I write poetry (I am an occasional contributor to The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form), collect books, study colonial American history, write essays about nature, and much more. I used to be a consistent contributor to Salon Magazine's Table Talk.

I am still a fat man, although I have been a strict vegetarian for more than three years. I have had a beard of some type since I was 18 years old, and currently wear it both grey and bushy. I wear a fedora and carry a cane.

I wear bifocals. I prefer work pants or bluejeans to flannels, but usually wear Hawaiian shirts, shorts, and sandals for most of the summer months. I prefer long-sleeved shirts in colder weather but invariably roll up the sleeves.

I try to have a notebook and pen with me at all times but, because I am easily distracted, I currently have about 30 notebooks awaiting transcription into one ... oh look! a squirrel!

I am married and have four children and three grandchildren. I am wonderfully proud of every single one of them.

I drink red wine and occasionally whiskey. I used to smoke a pipe and still have a large collection tucked away in my closet. I haven't smoked tobacco in nearly five years. I go to the gym several times a week.

I am currently trying to finish writing three books.

There is a picture of Tom Baker as Dr. Who hanging over my desk.

Navy Coffee

On the carrier, the media needs of the crew were handled by the ship's PAO (Public Affairs Office). As I mentioned before, we published and broadcast in several different forms.

Some of the operations were automated. There was an easy listening radio station that played huge reels of tape that we changed every few days. A news rebroadcast station played AFRTS broadcasts or the BBC World Service. The third station used live DJs and news readers. We had volunteers to fill some of those slots and me and my crew handled the gaps in the schedule. Other than the volunteers, there were only five or so of us to staff the media complex.

I, for example, had a late night jazz show, a classic rock show, and assembled and read radio newscasts. My subordinates were all excellent guys, each with his own talent set who had similar duties and schedules.

We also ran two television stations, one for entertainment and one for training. We swapped-off as director, engineer, camera man, and newscaster to produce a nightly news show. We collaborated to write the scripts and try to find some kind of graphics to use. We all loved to direct since it meant we got to sit at the video mixer which looked like the Death Star controls in Star Wars (because that's what they used to make it seem like future tech).

You have to remember that this was before the ubiquity of the internet made everything easy to grab. We seldom, if ever, had any video of world or national events, so we maintained files of potentially useful photos and graphics, royalty free clip art, and Navy source materials to try to flesh out the newscast and incidentally to act as art for the ship's daily newspaper.

Before and after the nightly TV news, two men handled the running of the television programs and movies that were broadcast throughout the ship. The others helped edit, write, rewrite, layout, and paste-up the eight page daily newspaper. When that was done we interviewed, wrote, and edited Public Relation Release news and feature stories about members of the ship's crew and sent them to their hometown newspapers. Wrote articles and laid-out the monthly support magazine that was mailed to the sailors' families.

We also scheduled the training television channel, developed scripts, graphics, and talent for demonstrations and instruction. We set up the lighting, audio, and props, then rehearsed, produced, directed and videotaped the shows.

Did I mention that we also ran publicity tours, arranged and staffed special events, and dealt with visiting VIPs when we were in port.

So we had five men in the department and a handful of volunteers to help out with some of the radio and television duties. Our days were long and hectic. it wasn't unusual to see some of us pounding the typewriters in during a TV show or movie. Drills, formations, maintenance, and cleaning would have been like vacations if they hadn't invariably put us behind schedule.

I, as leading petty officer, also had administrative duties. Working up evaluations and keeping personnel records, recommending promotions, ordering supplies, training, working with other departments etc., etc. In my copious free time I was also the Jewish lay-leader for the ship, conducting sabbath services.

The schedule was ridiculous. We'd work twenty hour days for four days straight and then take a half day off to sleep and recuperate.

We were fueled primarily by coffee. There was a 50-cup percolator in the office I shared with the Lieutenant who acted as Public Affairs Officer. It was refilled three or four times a day so you might be able to imagine the volume consumed and our slight obsession about finding the fastest routes to available heads (toilets). This wasn't normal coffee either, our preference (when we could get it) was for the 5 pound olive green cans of "watchstander" coffee which boasted about 50% more caffeine than normal brews.

I'll post a story here some other time about how I poisoned my father by mistake with watchstander.

I became so accustomed to working with the constant buzz, that it took me a decade or so after I left the Navy to bring my consumption down to just 10 cups a day.

Winter doldrums

It has been a long and somewhat grim winter for me. I haven't written much for public consumption. Spring seems just around the corner and the creative juices are starting to rise like maple sap.

Friendly Fire

The following account is intentionally vague, even though the only person in it who might be offended is past caring.

In 1976, I re-enlisted in the USN for a second four year period. I was sent back to DINFOS (the Defense Information School) at Fort Benjamin Harrison for an advanced course in broadcast journalism prior to be assigned to an AFRTS station on an aircraft carrier.

Over the course of the next four years, I managed to get myself onto several enemies lists including, and especially the Captain's. The ship's first captain was fine, but his replacement and I did not see eye-to-eye on many issues. Foremost among the disagreements were those on censorship of the ship's newspaper. He insisted and I resisted.

The first thing that you need to understand is that, in addition to a monthly magazine, 3 24-hour radio stations, 2 television stations and the newscasts for all of them, we produced a daily 8-page newspaper. The newspaper was odd in that it wasn't really necessary. Every department on the ship got AP and UPI newsfeeds and posted them outside their admin offices for people to read.

We would take the same feeds and choose the most important stories, trim them, add photos, etc. Most people picked up a copy of the paper only for the local (shipboard) news and the feature articles. We did try to keep our integrity though, and publish a balanced selection of stories. We won Navy-wide awards for our work.

Which is why it came as something of a shock to get a memo censuring me for printing the story of Elvis Presley's death. The captain wanted me and my four men to go out and collect all the papers then republish the paper removing the story. As I remember, we eventually solved this by blacking out all references to the fact that the death was drug-related rather than republishing. It was foolishness since the same story was hanging on bulletin boards throughout the ship, including the bridge.

For the next two years we had minor skirmishes about what was and was not appropriate for the ship's newspaper. At the end of March 1979 the Three Mile Island incident occurred. The captain explained to me, in a storm of fury and froth, that it was NOT a good idea to have a story about a nuclear power plant accident on a ship that was powered by nuclear reactors.

Again, I tried to point out that the news was already out there, and suggested that the best way to handle it was by using the story and adding to it to explain why the ship's safety procedures and discipline made it unlikely, if not impossible, for something like that to happen on board. This was unacceptable to him and I ended up endearing myself to him further by going over his head and getting the okay from an admiral.

By this time, as you might guess, no one was going to mistake us for BFFs. Then came the crowning moment.

One of the things I did to try to keep our readership up was to write a column for the paper under the pen name of Charlie Noble. The subject matter was usually cool facts about maritime history or terminology. Occasionally I would have some kind of a brain-teaser or puzzle. It was one of those puzzles that put me at the top of the captain's list of people to get rid of.

The question I posed was simple. The ship anchors in the Bay of Naples and at high tide a sailor climbs down a rope ladder to a boat to get shuttled to the shore. As he climbs into the boat he notices that five rungs of the ladder are under water. He comes back to the ship at low tide. How many rungs are under water now?

About three hours after the issue was distributed, I got an envelope, addressed to Charlie Noble, containing several pages of carefully written calculations that explained why only three rungs would be under water with a cover memo saying that this solution had to appear in the next issue along with the solver's name. That solver was the captain.

I have to admit that I toyed with the idea of simply following orders but, copies of the ship's paper were distributed to other ships, in Norfolk and at the Pentagon. If I published his proof, it would have major repercussions for both the Captain and me.

This wasn't going to be pretty. I climbed the 10 flights to his office and asked for a private conversation. First he wanted to know why I was opening other people's mail. I explained the concept of "pen name". Then I told him that I wasn't going to publish his solution because it would leave him open to ridicule. He asked why.

I explained that ships float.

He hemmed and hawed then started to talk about the weight differential when people got off and on. I realized that he was trying to salvage something, but it wasn't going to work. I said that with the mass of the ship, its waterline would barely change if the entire crew left the ship.

The captain told me that I was full of it. He called for the First Lieutenant while telling me that if wrong I would be sent to the brig for disrespect. The First Lieutenant walked in the door, saw the calculations and the newspaper open to my column and winced. He knew instantly what was going on because I had run it past him and he had told me he used a similar story when he did training.

You might wonder why a ship's officer wouldn't understand basic principles, but carrier captains are usually brown shoes (aviators) rather than black shoes (ship drivers).

The problem, of course, was the embarrassment involved. The captain seemed to think that my puzzle was intended to shame him and he never seemed to get that I was just trying to keep him from losing face. To him I seemed contumacious, and disrespectful. To me he became a powerful and dangerous lackwit.

Excuses, excuses ...

I have been trying to write a longer piece, but I keep getting bogged down, so I'll try to entertain you with some random bits and pieces over the next few days.