January 29, 2005
Florida
So I got the work in Florida, and will be down there for a couple of days starting Monday. I told my sons this evening, and the younger one punched me on the arm and said, "You suck. I hate you."
I know this is his way of saying he will miss me, but it is also his way of saying, "I should be going too." At 11, he has already been to Florida a half-dozen times, including Red Sox spring training and Disney World. He has also been all over New England, to New York, and to Washington DC.
I could do the "I walked five miles to school" routine at these moments. After all, I didn't see Florida until I was 30, and I really didn't travel much at all until my late 30s. But I don't. The world is a big and wonderful place. Why shouldn't my son be disappointed when he thinks he has missed out on a chance to go someplace warm in the middle of winter?
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:14 PM
January 27, 2005
New York, Again
So I made it to New York on Sunday, at the tail end of the blizzard. There was a lot less snow in New York than Boston--about one foot instead of almost three. Then I came home last night to another 6 inches of snow. Good thing it was the fluffy stuff.
But, you know, when you have three feet of snow, it really doesn't matter if it is light or not. It reminds me of when my nephew Jake spent a couple of years doing construction in the desert heat around Phoenix. It wasn't unusual for him and his brother Max to work several days in a row with the temperature over 110°. "But you know," he would say with a wink, "It was a dry heat."
I have stayed on the Upper West Side the past couple of trips, and I have found a new part of the city to really love. I had spent some time up around Columbia when my brothers were there, around 110th and Broadway, and later I had some business at Columbia University Press, also in the same neighborhood. But lately I have been staying in the West 70s and 80s--the Lucerne on Amsterdam Ave last trip, and this time The Excelsior on 81st and Columbus, just opposite the Museum of Natural History. I had lunch at the Museum on Tuesday, and spent time in the exhibits. The dinosaurs in the great hall are a treat of course, but I especially liked the North American mammals. Giant, taxidermed beasts including Elk and Buffalo.
To get to my client, I took the #1 train all the way to its northern terminus--242nd Street and Van Cortland Park in the Bronx. For the last 100 blocks or so, a small group of us was treated to a lengthy sermon delivered by this slender, almost elegant middle-aged African American man. He stood over me and a young fellow and condemned us both to an eternity in a fiery hell. Heck of a way to start the day, so I was really tickled to find a Dunkin Donuts outside the 242nd St Station and I treated myself to an extra-large coffee.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:32 AM
January 23, 2005
Snow
It's hard to tell how much snow we have. The snow is powdery and the winds are high, so the drifting is substantial. It's up to the windows of my Honda Accord, but it only looks about a foot or so around the basketball net in the back. I have to get to New York tonight, but it doesn't seem worth it to shovel yet. The snow continues to really blow, and it's only about 10° F.
A quick scan of the headlines says 20 inches of snow had fallen at Logan Airport by early this morning.
The path of the storm reminds me a little bit of the blizzard of 1978, which most people still consider the granddaddy of storms in the northeast. The blizzard of 1978 started on a late Monday afternoon as a I recall, and thousands of commuters fought their way home through it. This storm came with tons of warning, and started on Saturday afternoon, so it has been less chaotic.
Amtrak is getting through, as is the MBTA, so if I can dig myself out, I should be able to make it to NY tonight.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 11:12 AM
January 19, 2005
Grandma
So I was sitting in this great kosher deli on the Upper West Side of Manhattan the other day, enjoying this incredible half-sour pickle, and the thought suddenly occurred to me, Did my Italian grandmother ever have a half-sour pickle? (And, please, no bad jokes here, this is my grandmother we are talking about here.)
It's possible she never did. I think I ate eat pretty much every type of dish my Grandma ever made--pasta, veal, chicken, soup, pizza, cream cheese pie, pizzales, anise cookies. I had breakfast, lunch, and dinner at her house dozens of times. I left there with plates and bowls and platters of leftovers. I am close to 100% sure that nothing pickled was ever consumed there.
Why does this matter? Well, to begin with, it was an incredibly good pickle, and it got me thinking about how much pleasure there is in good, simple food. And I can't think about good food without thinking of my Grandma. A lot of memories fade with time, but I have a million memories of my Grandma and food. In almost all of these memories she is cooking me something, serving me something, offering me more of something, or asking me what I would like next. Her tomato sauce had the whole world in it--tomatos, paste, garlic, onions, seasoning, meatballs, sausage, chicken, pork--and her versions of things still dominate whole categories of food for me--pasta, sauce, veal, pizza, cookies, to name a few. "Mangia," she would say. "There's plenty more. Mangia."
Biting into that pickle the other day, I had the sudden specific realization that I was a million miles and light years from my Grandma. She's been gone twenty years now, and the thought of my Grandma in a kosher deli on the Upper West Side makes as much sense as Kruschev in Disneyland. Not that Grandma had any biases--I can honestly say she never had a harsh word for anyone--but that she would have been so completely out of context. I can picture my Grandma in precious few places--her kitchen, her dining room, her church. But New York City? Grandma came through Ellis Island on her way from Palermo to Boston, but I am pretty sure she didn't stop on the Upper West Side.
Come to think of it, a more creative writer than me would put her there. It would be 1974. She would be a young, vibrant 84, with another decade to go before she is gone. Somehow, I have talked her into coming to New York with me to visit my brothers at Columbia. We are tired from the trip. It's been a long day, but I convince Grandma to have dinner with me at this kosher deli, Barney Greengrass (The Sturgeon King!) while my brothers finish their studying. The menu might as well be Greek to her, but I pick a few things for us. "Let's have the pastrami, Grandma. That sounds Italian." She is unconvinced, but she lets me order. We sip our Cokes. In no time at all giant steaming sandwiches are in front of us. She looks carefully at the sandwich, the mustard, the assortment of pickles. I spread some mustard on her sandwich.
"Mangia, Grandma," I tell her. "It's been a long day. Mangia."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:55 PM
We're Moving
Well, it's official. I have decided to incorporate this blog into the new group blog we are now doing over at the The Gilbane Report. I think the new blog is much better for my readers, as it includes several really expert folks writing on a wide variety of issues related to content manahement. You can also, if you care to, read just my postings in their own category here.
My sincere thanks to all of you who have been reading, commenting, and corresponding with me via email. I enjoyed the conversation, and I appreciated your time and feedback as I found my blogging "voice." Let's continue the conversation over at the new locale.
Let me also mention briefly that I do write a more personal blog, elsewhere on this site. I will continue to write that blog, separate from the technology blogging I will now be doing at Gilbane.com.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:46 PM | Comments (1)
4 Degrees
It's 4 degrees outside as I write this. Baseball seems very far away.
I have an opportunity to do some work in Florida next week. When I was writing the proposal today, I was tempted to offer a very, very steep discount.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:19 AM
January 18, 2005
Breece Pancake
Writing about Tim O'Brien got me thinking about other writers who have written about Vietnam, and that led me to Breece Pancake, or Breece D'J Pancake, as he came to be known. The terse biography on Amazon.com gives the outline of his life:
Breece D'J Pancake was born in West Virginia in 1952. He attended Marshall University, taught English at Virginia military schools, and then entered the creative writing program at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he died in 1979. During his lifetime, his short fiction was published primarily in The Atlantic.
Pancake was discovered by author James Alan McPherson when Pancake was a graduate writing student at the University of Virginia. Over the next couple of years, Pancake published a number of short stories in The Atlantic Monthly, and I had the dumb luck of reading a few of them. They blew me away. After he committed suicide in 1979, Little, Brown published a book of his collected stories. Joyce Carol Oates gave the book a rave review on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, and fellow West Virginian Jayne Anne Phillips said of the book, "Breece Pancake's stories comprise no less than an American Dubliners."
There are a few good Breece Pancake resources on the Web, including a nice collection of critical praise here, a nice brief biography here, and an NPR audio feature here. There is an especially good essay about Pancake by Cynthia Kadohata at MississippiReview.com.
Now I started this by saying that Pancake wrote about Vietnam, which is only half-true. All of his stories are set in his native West Virginia, but one story, "The Honored Dead," deals with a young man facing the draft. It is a heartbreaking story, and maybe the best short story I have ever read. I often thought of the young man in "The Honored Dead" as the spiritual brother of the soldier in "Machine Dreams" and "The Things They Carried."
The book is well worth the read.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 9:11 PM
January 17, 2005
Football
I have written elsewhere that I am much more of a baseball fan than anything else, but it is hard to not love watching The New England Patriots, who seem to have exactly the opposite karma that the Red Sox always had prior to this year. The Patriots themselves were always kind of the poor stepchildren in professional football--kind of like the Texas Rangers are to baseball and the Los Angeles Clippers are to basketball. Now they are the team that simply gets it done.
They dominated the Indianapolis Colts last night. I was struck as the game was winding down how relaxed and happy the Patriots players looked on the sideline. They were clearly pleased with a job well done, but their expressions also suggested to me that they hadn't doubted the outcome at all. This after everyone had picked the Colts to win, and many didn't seem to even give the Pats a chance. Yet these young men seemed to clearly be signalling that they knew they were the better team, and it was simply a matter of getting the job done.
This speaks to me of one of the differences between football and baseball, though I honestly don't know enough about football to be confident in my analysis. But it seems to me that in football, there are fewer odd variables to a game. In other words, the better team usually does win. In baseball, more freak things can happen--a rookie pitcher who comes in and pitches brilliantly, the light-hitting shortstop who suddenly hits a three-run home run (Bucky Fucking Dent!), the surehanded fielder who suddenly makes two errors in one inning.
Football has turnovers--interceptions, fumbles. These can make the difference in a game, and often do. But it seems to me that the better football teams are often better in that aspect of the game as well. They cough the ball up less, and they cause the other team to cough it up more.
Anyway, a few thoughts on that. It was fun to see the Patriots win last night. More power to them.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 2:15 PM
January 15, 2005
"I was a coward. I went to Vietnam."
There are some things I know to be true without even confirming them, and one of these things is that George W. Bush has never read The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien's heartbreaking and staggering collection of short stories based on his experience in the Vietnam War. This is a book that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go. It opens with the following:
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed 10 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among necessities or near-necessities were p-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound caked. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds including the liner and camouflage cover. They carried the standard fatigue jacket and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet they carried jungle boots-2.1 pounds-and Dave Jensen carried three pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl's foot powder as a precaution against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried 6 or 7 ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated. Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-entered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With is quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost 2 pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.
I read the book every couple of years, and read it again last summer, but I might read it again even sooner. I was reading about Tim O'Brien recently and came across a profile by my friend Don Lee where O'Brien mentioned an essay he wrote for The New York Times. The essay related O'Brien's return to Vietnam, 25 years after he fought there, and the ensuing depression and anxiety he suffered from the experience.
Today, O'Brien has no regrets about publishing the article. He considers it one of the best things he has ever written. "I reread it maybe once every two months," he says, "just to remind myself what writing's for. I don't mean catharsis. I mean communication. It was a hard thing to do. It saved my life, but it was a fuck of a thing to print." After taking nine months off and pulling his life back together, O'Brien started another novel, intrigued enough by the first page to write a second, propelled, as always, by his fundamental faith in the power of storytelling.
It's a powerful essay, well worth reading.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:12 PM
Titan
The Huygens space probe reached the Saturnian moon Titan today. You can see some of the images here. I wonder if today's events have Kurt Vonnegut rethinking anything.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 AM | Comments (2)
