Rolling On One

We left Maine on Sunday of Memorial Day weekend so we could drive from Newton to Mamaroneck on Monday. My mom was east for a wedding in Baltimore and went to visit her sister on Monday. Last summer she was talking about coming to Maine for a week or so at the end of this summer, but by now she wasn’t sure she would want to travel that much. This trip could turn out to be our only chance to see her in the East this year, so we went to Westchester for the day.

I’ve got a bunch of pictures, but no easy way to find them from this computer; so I’ll stop here until I can post them.

Here’s my aunt Mimi and her daughter Robin, who was maybe in first grade when I went off to college:

Robin is starting a business designing and manufacturing high-grade reusable paper placemats and napkins. She had brought some samples. Click on the picture for her business website (which I have to say is a lot classier than this one.)

It was also my uncle Bert’s birthday, and there was a cake for him.

Here’s the younger generation, Mimi’s grandkids:

Me and my mother, badly backlit:

And, Charley and Nicole made the trip down, because they’re weren’t likely to see my mom any other way.

Millie, Joel, their daughter Gena, and Gena’s three kids were at our house in Maine for the week after the 4th of July. Arlene stayed up there with them for the week and I went back to Newton to work. Unfortunately there were several rainy days that week so the boys didn’t get outside as much as we had hoped, and the reports I got were that the boys were a handful a lot of the time. I just saw them the first weekend. The weather was good Saturday, and the boys were eager to go outside and help mark the trails with more plastic ribbon. Baylor, the 2-year-old, didn’t make it all the way around on his own, but I was impressed at how much he did walk by himself. At some point they had gone out shopping and came back with a few new toys which they are showing off here:

Mason, 7, with a superball with a car in it. Mason is the easiest of the three to have around. He’ll play quietly or read a lot of the time, and do kid sudoku puzzles.

Trey, 5, wielding a plastic sword. He’s the most active of the three.

Not with a new toy, but trying to decide what piece of Fischer-Teknik to add to the current construction, Baylor, 2. Reported to have been a handful later in the week.

Saturday afternoon Arlene and I got out on the lake in the old aluminum rowboat with Mason and Trey. The boys were sitting on the seat in the stern with me rowing facing them. They sort of got the idea that they had to tell me which way to go because the oarsman is facing backwards and can’t tell, but they weren’t really concentrating on navigation.

We went over to Sue and Richard’s for 4th of July cookout. The weather was very threatening so we ended up eating indoors, but I did tend the grill outside on their deck. Their cookout menu always includes grilled kielbasa, which I like very much and never get any other time. Sue asked me to bring over “a seasonal pie” for dessert. I made a blueberry pie —

— and a lime chiffon pie, which may be less seasonal but I like them so much I’ll make them any time I have an excuse. Keebler packs their graham cracker pie crusts with a plastic cover inside the shell, which you can invert and use to cover the meringue after the pir is baked. I must have done that before I took the picture, but there it is.

The sky was so dark with threats of rain that the city fireworks display started early. And indeed was raining lightly through the show.

Firstly, here was my raised-bed garden maybe as long as a month ago

Those taller plants along the right rear edge are radishes about to go to seed. Here they are ready to wash and eat. Man, those were strong radishes!:

One of the things that football coaches, basketball coaches, and baseball managers always remind their teams is not to underestimate their opponents. The Democrats have forgotten that for the last six years. Just because a guy won’t pronounce “nuclear” in a standard way, they think he’s dumb. It’s not so.

I heard a commentator on NPR a few weeks ago say that although a common criticism of the Bush administration is that it’s incompetent, that’s not the case. They have been extremely successful at governing in the interests of corporate America and rich individuals.

An example of this is Bush’s remark to the head of FEMA after Hurricane Katrina, “Brownie, you’ve been doing a great job.” As I see it, that was not evidence that Bush was out of touch with what was going on, but rather exactly what he meant to say: FEMA was doing very well at what the administration wanted it to do, that is, funnel federal money to their friends.

The insight that the administration knows what it’s doing leads to a reevaluation of what’s been going on in the country. Now, I have no evidence at all for what I’m about to say, but it makes too much sense to dismiss out of hand.

I’m convinced that the only real reason for the war in Iraq is to steal the Iraqi oil industry for Halliburton. There was no exit strategy for the war not because the administration didn’t think far enough ahead to realize it needed one, but because there was never any intention to exit. We’re hearing recently that we may need to maintain a presence there for fifty years as we have in Korea. Once you realize that the administration is not stupid, it becomes obvious that that was always Cheney’s plan. That’s just what will be necessary to maintain control of the oil industry there, known as “defend American interests.”

That’s also why it’s so important to the administration to have their loyalists filling all the U.S. Attorney’s positions. If contracts are written with Halliburton or other companies working in Iraq saying that the U.S will be responsible for protecting them, it will be difficult for Congress to say that we have to pull all our troops out. If they go to the Justice department to ask if the country is really obligated to stay there, what will the lawyers there say? If they’re Cheney loyalists, they’ll say, “Sorry, there are contracts that obligate us to say.” If they’re really impartial, they’ll say, “There are contracts that we’ll have to think a long time before we figure how to get around.”

I know people say not to attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. In this case, I really don’t think stupidity is the explanation. Too much hangs together.

We went to Sue and Richard’s (in Newton) for a fourth of July cookout. I was tapped to make pies, a blueberry pie and a lime chiffon pie, for dessert. The menu always features grilled kielbasa, which I never get any other time. It was a little too rainy to eat outside, though I was left in charge of the grill to do the hamburgs before it really started raining. The fireworks started ahead of schedule — we weren’t at the field yet when the first rockets went up — because it was darker sooner than they expected. Watching fireworks in a light rain wasn’t bad. A good thing that they started early, too, because it was raining hard ten minutes after we got home.

The highlight of the trip home was seeing an opossum crossing Centre Street, I think just on the Newton Corner side of the Cabot Street intersection. We weren’t sure at a distance what it was — Arlene said her first impression was of a 2-liter soda bottle rolling across the street — but we got a good clear look before it turned around and scurried back the way it had come.

I’ve been reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and loving it. So you can see how the guy writes, here’s the backstory of some of the characters, WWII refugees resettled in the imaginary Jewish homeland in Alaska:

On the heels of Jews from Germany and Austria, the Shemets family was dumped with their fellow Galitzers at Camp Slattery, in a muskeg swamp ten miles from the hard-bitten, half-decrepit town of Sitka… In drafty, tin-roofed huts and barracks, they underwent six months of intensive acclimatization by a crack team of fifteen billion mosquitoes working under contract with the U.S. Interior Department.

We had a goodbye lunch for a coworker who’s leaving (by now ten days ago, must have been June 21) and took a picture of the whole crew. Left to right, Dick, Ken, Danae, Michael, Esther, Matt, Igor (guest of honor), Aaron, me, Jon, Jacob:

Picture taken at Taam China, a strictly kosher restaurant in Newton Upper Falls.

We went to New Jersey last weekend to an 80th birthday party for Arlene’s mother’s second cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth and her sister have been vegetarians since they were kids. Their father ran a vegetarian hotel in Florida long long ago but died before the girls were college age. Elizabeth’s sister Becky lived with Arlene’s mother’s family after that, which is why they both were much closer to this side of the family than you would expect from second cousins. I guess Arlene’s mother was in college or maybe already married by the time Becky moved in with the family, but her aunt Lee was still living at home. Lee came in from Buffalo for the party over the weekend, which was an extra big motivation for Arlene to go. Left to right, Arlene, Lee’s son Neil, his wife Olga, and Lee:

Another part of it was that Arlene couldn’t figure out when else she would ever see Liz’s and Becky’s kids, her third cousins, if she didn’t go.Here’s one of the cousins. Maybe you’ve heard his by-line on NPR, “For NPR, this is Bruce Konviser in Prague”:

The party was at an Afghan restaurant, Silk Road, in a mini-mall in Warren NJ.

The food was wonderful, the best stuffed grape leaves I’ve ever had, hot bread fresh out of the oven, and delicious vegetarian entrees and rice.

Instead of singing “Happy Birthday to You”, Liz’s kids who had arranged the event passed out music to a four part round composed as a birthday song, with words they had written for Elizabeth. We rehearsed it while Liz was in the rest room and sung it as a two-part round when she got back.

So having finished Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, I’m now reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemans’ Union and loving it.

Once upon a time there was an ad campaign, maybe only on billboards in the New York City subways, featuring a very diverse collection of people saying “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye bread”. I think probably you do have to be Jewish to love  The Yiddish Policemans’ Union. I’d like to hear reports about it from people who aren’t Jewish, to see.

The premise of the book is based on the historical fact that around the beginning of World War II there was a proposal to open part of Alaska to settlement by Jewish refugees from Europe. The proposal didn’t go anywhere. The book is a fantasy, what if it had, and if Isreal had never gotten off the ground. Then the book goes on to try to recreate a sort of 1940s noir murder mystery story — maybe something that Dashiell Hammett would have written if his parents had spoken Yiddish, set in the present time in that alternate Sitka, Alaska. Of course the book is in English, except for a few words here and there, but the characters are supposed to be speaking Yiddish except for when it says “…, Berko said in American.” Besides the few words here and there (for instance, when anyone wants to smoke, which of course for the ’40s atmosphere they do all the time, they light up a papiros) the overall cadence of the language feels as if it just got off the boat — as if it was translated right out of Yiddish, or could be translated right into it, without missing a beat. A lot of the book is very funny, along the lines of Garrison Keillior’s Guy Noir but maybe more so and maybe less silly but with every bit as much colorful description and outrageous metaphor. It all reminds me of riding the Sea Beach Express subway to visit my grandparents in Brooklyn in the ’60s and seeing everyone reading Yiddish newspapers.