Rising mists

Now we are north of Montpelier, VT, in Worcester in an AirBnb which is cute as a button if a little old school in terms of amenities. Every morning there is mist, so that our view down from our deck changes from this

To this

To this

Over a couple of hours. Actually that last transformation heppened in the five minutes or so when I lowered my head to read my novel. It was pretty dramatic.

What with the lake in our backyard and all you would think I would be used to this kind of thing. Similar stuff happens on the surface of the lake early in the morning at certain times of year. Nonetheless, I am reduced to a state of slack-jawed fanboydom by this gradual mist dissipation. Also, when we sit out on the deck and listen to the birds and insects, not necessarily in that order, we hear a little creek off in the woods to the left. 

Yesterday we hiked up Mount Elmore and then I swam in the lake at the bottom. I have now achieved my summer trifecta of lobster roll -- plate of fried clams -- swim in mountain water. And then I went and got coffee, a fresh-baked cookie and a baseball cap with a moose on it!

Mary is also happy enough that we have extended our stay here in VT by one night and trimmed our time in Boston to just the night before we fly out. We our getting our Jeffersonian groove on.

Sweet and Savory

Making our way from Portland over to Worcester, Vermont yesterday, we passed through Standish, Maine a little after noon. Just as we were bending to the right a low-slung white building caught our eye. The sign out front said "Sweet and Savory Bakery." I looked at Mary and said, "Should we check it out?" She nodded assent.

Inside a girl of maybe 10 or 11 was minding the register. Behind the display cases mom and dad were hard at work, as were two even smaller sisters. We surveyed their bill of fare and ordered up some sandwiches, a piece of foccacia with huge chunks of garlic falling off it for post-hike snacking, and a bag of bagels. I told her I was going to get a seltzer and was pondering the flavors: "Grapefruit is my favorite," she told me.

Our young hostess checked with her mom to see how long the sandwiches would take (15 minutes) and asked my name. I told her my name, then she asked "How do you spell that?" I paid and then we mosied off down the hall of this odd building to wait. A number of flyers told us that a musical production ("Shrek, the Musical"?) was coming up soon, maybe in a performance space down the hall. I went to the bathroom, then sat at a table and caught up with my phone. 

We were the only people in there. I was sitting maybe 30 feet down the hallway. When our sandwiches were ready, our cashier yelled at the top of her lungs: "Clark, your order is ready!" 

Off we went.

Mind blowing truths

To date I have done a good job leaning into this vacation thing. I haven't been looking at the markets at all during the day. For the most part I am not reading work email. I am not hassling Mary about how slowly she gets ready to leave wherever we are staying.

For her part, Mary has been saying nothing about my having bacon or sausage every morning. Or, for that matter, when I have had both. 

For example, that glorious morning a few days back in Northport when I -- having preceded her out of bed (as is normal) -- had made my way out to Wentworth's on Rte 1 to peruse their breakfast fare, which I had noticed the day before when picking up orange juice. The stove at our AirBnb turned out not to work so we were on our own for breakfast, you see. So I get up there and look in the warming ovens to see what sorts of goodies they had and there were little bacon, egg and cheeses on english muffins, a good start. But out of the corner of my eye I saw a familiar disc shape, only topped with yellow flaked with pink rather red, white and various other colors. Could it be? My mind whirred as it processed what was before it. Yes! It was indeed..... breakfast pizza! A momentous find, topped with not bacon or sausage but both bacon and sausage. I hesitated only momentarily before grabbing a piece and also a sandwich for Mary because I knew this would be a lot for her.

So I got back to her place and cut her off a piece of my pizza to have with her sandwich. She looked it over carefully and asked about the dark brown spots: "is this mushroom?" Because, you see, she was a bit overwhelmed. No, I explained, it was sausage, because the pizza was topped with both bacon and sausage. She nodded slowly, taking it in.

It reminded me of a time in the fall of '88. I was at Bowdoin being the lead of Kathy Lahti's 75h anniversary production of Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. I was in the basement of the building where the Russian Department had its office, and a student was sitting alone watching Apocalypse Now. He sat there, slack-jawed, trying to process what he was seeing on screen. "Look" he said to me, "they are both drinking and smoking pot at the same time." This was a lot for him to take in, so I calmly said that I thought he was right.

Society Hill

We are now in Portland, Maine. I was very impressed just now to see that our hotel provides its guests with Society Hill toilet paper, the very quintessence of understated luxury.

For the record -- Northport, Maine

For Act 1 of our vacation Mary and I ended up in an AirBnb in Northport, Maine, not far from David and Carol in Belfast. Here's the view from the swing chair in front of our place. Unless, of course, it's all foggy (as it has been for much of the time).

It turns out this has been a brilliant choice. After hanging with David and Carol on Sunday, on Monday Mary and I walked two miles north along the shore road to the village of Bayside, established as the site of a Mehodist camp in the late 19th century. It looks an awful lot like Oak Bluffs from the Vineyard, except that there are no retail establishments whatsoever in Bayside, unless a realtor counts. Then we walked home and cobbled together lunch, despite the fact that our stove didn't work at all (our hosts gave us a small rebate for that0. 

On Tuesday we walked a couple of miles in the other direction from our place and ended up in Temple Heights, also part of Northport. It turns out this place was established as a camp not for Christians, but for mediums and other angelic spiritualists. No joke. It is a going concern to this day.

Then I went and sat in a squat chair and read a mystery novel looking out at the water. It was much like being at the beach in NC in the summer except the bathroom and the coffee machine were much more convenient.

IRS Absurdity

Still working my way through an audit of our 2021 taxes. I have probably whined about it before, but this kind of thing is obviously just part of life and honestly provides me with good experience. If a client has a similar problem, I can provide counsel.

Which is not to say there are not utter absurdities in the details of the process. For instance, when sending something back to the IRS examiner in principle one can submit things online. The specs are below. A reasonable range of file types are in bounds, it all sounds OK. Until you look at the second to last bullet which lays out the types of special characters that cannot be included, which include the dollar sign, the comma, and parentheses.

Chew on that for a second. When sending something to the IRS purtaining to your taxes, a document -- even a pdf or a jpg, so basically an image file -- cannot contain dollar signs or commas. I tried several times to upload something but ultimately gave up, drove to the post office and sent it certified mail or some such. Maddening.

Harris on the Economy

I am of course delighted that Kamala Harris bears the flag for the Democrats now. Though far from perfect (what human is not?), she is at least younger than Biden and therefore not too far along the cognitive decline slope that awaits most of us at some point in time in our future.

On the economy, unfortunately, she is hewing too closely to Biden's script, scapegoating corporations for price gouging and seemingly calling for some sort of government intervention to right every wrong called out by her campaign (admittedly I've only read a WSJ article on her economic agenda so their may be a skew to their reportage). Democrats too often lean in this direction, assuming that government intervention of one sort or another will be the best way to fix things. It's not always true. Sometimes it is, but often it's not. Overall we should be obsessing over which functions should be best financed and executed by the public sector and which by the private. That is one of the great Hegelian questions of modern human history. The answer won't be the same in all societies and places, but it will rhyme and resonate across cultures.

75% of the last 16 years have been under Democratic regimes. There is pent up demand for regulatory relief, which we see expressed by the stampede of companies moving from California to Texas. Not just Tweedledum Musk, others. Rather than squelch it, we should acknowledge it and try to work with it.

In picking Walz as veep, Harris has signaled to progressives that she is on board with them. Now she has room to tack back to the middle to engage moderates. She can and should do so with her economic program, not just because it's politically astute, but because it's correct.

A bookstore in Seattle

When I was in Seattle a couple of weeks back I stopped into the Elliot Bay Book Company after breakfast with one friend and coffee with another. It's a great book store. It doesn't have the depth of Powell's in Portland, but it's great nonetheless.

I went to the business/finance section because I was looking for a specific book for a client (Morgan Housel's  The Psychology of Money). As with your typical book store, this section is hidden away in the back, not unlike the pornography section in magazine stores of yore. When I got there there was a big dad with his 10-11 year old sun. The dad pointed to a Tony Robbins book he apparently had or swore by, while the son seemed puzzled by the whole concept of a book store. The dad explained that, unlike libraries, in book stores one purchased books to keep them rather than borrowed them.

Apparently the boy had never been to a book store before, which is a sad state of affairs but not all that surprising, nearly a quarter of a century after Jeff Bezos took aim at the category. Thankfully, physical stores haven't gone away entirely, but clearly they are now luxury goods and we are lucky to live in a place where we have one.

Half of a Yellow Sun

I just made my way to the end of this novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In my earlier post I mentioned being reminded of my dissertation. The second half of the novel left that in the dust and brought to mind just hard living under war time conditions, though it did remind me of how fruitful the process of reading for the dissertation was, even when the novels I was reading didn't really fit into my thesis.

The realist novel really is a splendid thing. Though people in their 20s and sometimes 30s and those who make a career of keeping graduate students enthralled by serving up juicy ideas for them to chew upon (i.e. humanities faculty) really love experimental narratives, the good old realist novel holds its own over time. I knew almost nothing about Nigeria and the war for Biafran independence (AKA Nigerian Civil War) of 1967-1970, and now I know incrementally more than nothing by virtue of just reading 520 pages on the subject. Given that I'm a pretty well-occupied father and breadwinner with a range of extracurricular pursuits, that's not chopped liver.

What's more, I'm keen to follow up. Specifically, I'd be interested in reading a sequel to follow the arc of the characters forward in their lives. Sadly, Wikipedia tells me that, at least as of now, that ain't happening because there is no sequel, but making the reader care about the characters is the secret sauce of the novel, and Adichie had me. I will return for more.

Pancakes

As I've described before, I've been making pancakes (or french toast) on Sunday more or less my kids' whole lives. Natalie checked out on them a long time ago, claiming that the whole wheat in them was just wrong and that pancakes should be "fluffy" -- and I get that -- but a little healthiness to make mom happy is really a small compromise to enjoy a pure maple syrup delivery vehicle. With Graham moving into his apartment for junior year this week, perhaps never to live under the same roof with us again for a protracted period of time, today's pancakes feel a little like the end of an era.

Not that the pancakes themselves will stop flowing, far from it. I enjoy them too much myself. But the ritual of having kids eat them (or, with the kids' late waking hours, knowing that the kids will eventually eat them when they get out of bed) will be different.

Of course, this could just be typical old person "endism." It feels like as I transition towards where people are talking more and more about retirement and ailments and the like that we become ever more sensitive to mere hints of the end. Even the slight cooling we're experiencing here in what is after all early mid August, a cooling which should offer me only joy, bears with it instead tidings of the end of summer. Even though it's been by most measures a shitty summer, dominated by too much time spend in the hospital with Mary. But it has been nice to have Graham with us once more.

Tall buildings shake

Rightly or wrongly, I cannot listen to this song and not think about 9/11. Talk buildings shake, last cigarette, all of that.

9/11 hit right when I was trying to keep it all together and transition from academia to the for-profit world, from distended adolescence into young parenthood What's more, I was in Manhattan that day and I of course remember vividly going down to 5th Ave from our office at 48th and looking south down at those smoking motherfuckers, which still existed when I did so around 10:15. I remember trudging over to the Hudson around 2:30 in the hopes of getting on a boat to NJ, only to see massive lines of people and realizing that it wasn't all that important that I get home, that I could walk up to Morningside Heights and crash on someone's couch if necessary.

The weeks that followed were far from easy and 9/11 was exacerbated by the fact that the Anthrax letters that followed in its wake were not only being mailed disproportionately to Rockefeller Center where I was working but, it turns out, were being mailed from about a quarter mile away from where we lived in Princeton. And then there was Flight 587 falling out of the sky because of "wake turbulence." Most people have likely forgotten that one. I have not. I also saw that at Rock Center. And then there was the guy driving around the DC suburbs picking people off with a rifle while they filled up their tanks. There was a lot of scary shit going on. Natalie was 16 months old.

So when Natalie and I were riding around in Juneau last week and this song came on I just started crying and hid it as best I could because... that is how I have been trained, Margo Thomas notwithstanding. That is the paternal role. Just suck it all up and act as it's OK. Because, in the end, it is.

Return to Courting Clio

Reading Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, I am struck by how much I am reminded of my dissertation -- Courting Clio. As in Turgenev and other Russian novels of the 1840s-50s, we have a set of interlocking love narratives that seem to embody the broader cultural-colonial context. The radical intellectual and the pretty, intellectual twin, the British guy and more homely but cunning and practical one. The disapproving parents, one set rich and corrupt, the other poor but conniving.. It all flows from the Russian template, perhaps as much Tolstoi as Turgenev. 

Admittedly none of the romantic pairings map the violent conflagration that serves as the novel's backdrop: the Biafran war of succession from Nigeria of 1967-1970. None except the road not traveled, Olanna's earlier near affair with Ibrahim from Kano.

But thus far, 60% of the way in, the novel really isn't about the war in any meaningful way. Yes we (or at least I) learn a fair amount about the Igbo -- who are like the Jews in Europe or the Chinese in Southeast Asia -- the mercantile people who thrive across cultural borders and are therefore resented and targeted by others (Hausa, Yoruba). We learn about all this and to some limited extent it is mapped by the romantic arc of the protagonists, but not so much.

In any event, it's going to be interesting to see how it all goes down.

Then of course there's the question of why I should care about whether my dissertation was right after so many years away from it. Though maybe that's obvious.

Auke Bay

The view from my AirBnb in Juneau.