MEMORIES OF NEPAL: TREKKING AND LOCAL JUSTICE.

While in Kathmandu in 1982 Terry and I arranged a trek in the Himalayas. Through a tourist agency we hired a crew who would carry our packs, cook our meals, set up and break camp, and lead us on a route near Machhapuchhre in the Annapurna Range, a towering and imposing 24,000 foot mountain rising dramatically from a much lower plateau. Safety was supposedly not an issue--we had heard only positive things--but having a guide not only made for greater comfort but it also was insurance against getting lost in the mountains if we undertook the trek on our own, and even though we were traveling on the cheap it didn’t stretch our budget too much. We were matched up with a Canadian woman and an Australian guy, both about our age, and to attend to the four of us, we were provided with an experienced guide named Ratna, a cook and several porters. We met most of them in Pokhara after a several hour bus ride along winding mountain roads from Kathmandu, and set out the following day.

Day one started out on an inauspicious note. Less than two hours after leaving Pokhara we were walking on a broad path along a fast flowing river when we saw a strapping young Tibetan man, with broad muscled shoulders and glowing skin, lying face down in the water among large boulders. Several people had arrived at the scene. Word spread quickly that he had committed suicide. We were shocked, we were told it was highly unusual, and we walked on, shaken.

The trek was amazing. We walked about 50 miles in 8 days, about 3000 vertical feet per day, sometimes challenging. There were few roads in Nepal at the time and the villages and towns were connected by a vast network of paths. Some paths were broad and flat and could accommodate pack animals, and some were narrow and steep and rocky and only agile humans could navigate them. They wound through forests and small villages and along mountainsides, sometimes with vertiginous views. At one point we passed through a dense miles-long forest of 30-foot rhododendron trees in full bloom.

The larger paths, and even the smaller ones, were essentially foot highways. Streams of people passed by, some carrying unfathomable loads. Most stuff was carried in a sort of giant hemp-like sack with a broad strap that went around the forehead; the weight was borne on the forehead and back and those who carried heavy loads of wood and bags of rice and root vegetables walked stooped toward the ground. Believe it or not we even saw a few porters carrying giant loads of glass-bottled Coca Cola on their backs up to the higher more remote villages. Many walked barefoot in all kinds of weather, though some had hand-me-down sneakers with the laces removed and open just enough to squeeze in their widespread feet that were so terribly cracked and rough. Any romantic notion I harbored that they might be hardened to the pain fell away quickly.

Because transport was so difficult, and because everything had to be hand carried, most products were extremely local. In the course of a few hours of walking you could pass through one village with houses built only of bamboo and grasses and another village further up the mountain in which all the houses were made of stone and stucco. Endless miles of terraced fields turned whole mountainsides into giant avant-garde geometric earthworks best seen from the opposite sides of valleys, and spoke of hundreds of years of back-wrenching work. And we got some spectacular views of high peaks. One morning we awoke very early and climbed about 2500 feet before dawn, rising to about 13,000 feet to see the sun rise between multiple 20,000+ foot peaks and fast moving clouds. I felt like I was dreaming at the top of the world.

Each evening the crew gathered wood and started a fire, cooked rice and cut up vegetables for curry, brewed tea, and set up the tents. Considering our pretty basic standards at the time, it was comfortable. We all got along well. The porters spoke some English, Ratna was mostly fluent, and they were sensitive and gentle, though their lives were anything but. One morning we passed through a town and the cook bought a live chicken for the dinner that evening. The gentleness and loving attention the cook paid to the chicken that day was beautiful. He carried it in his pack on his shoulder and petted its head and cooed to him all day along the path; the chicken seemed calm and content. When it came time to prepare dinner, the cook deftly slit the neck of the chicken, drained the blood, collected it and cooked it separately, an apparent treat. I don't remember any struggle.

On the fourth night of the trek we camped just outside a village with about a dozen small houses, situated on a river. As usual we left our backpacks in the open air outside our tents, this time propped up against a stone wall. When we got up in the morning the packs were gone. Ratna and our crew were in disbelief, and within minutes the whole town was there, arguing. They seemed in shock. "This kind of thing never happens." "Our livelihood depends on the trekkers coming through." They were ashamed for their fellow countrymen and worried that word might spread to avoid the area. 

We weren't sure what to do. We had the one set of clothes we had taken off in our tent, our sleeping bags, and luckily our wallets with our passports. Everything else was gone, clothes, first-aid kits, supplies. Ratna discussed the situation with men from the town. A decision was made--without my input--that we would walk 6 hours each way to the nearest police outpost to report the incident; it was considered that important. So I got ready to walk the 12 hour round trip, maybe for nothing. Terry and our Canadian and Australian friends were to stay the day in the village and enjoy lying in the sun and swimming in the river.

We were a sort of a posse. Ratna, one of our porters, a half dozen people from the town where we were robbed, and I started walking in the direction of the outpost. They would ask every person we passed whether they had seen a stolen pack or anything suspicious. About an hour in, someone said he'd seen a guy in unusual clothes just up ahead. Indeed he was wearing my shirt and sneakers. He ran, but the villagers caught up with him, tackled him and roughed him up, with slaps to the face and body and lots of screaming and threatening.

After claiming that he'd bought the stuff from the thief, upon more coercion he finally admitted that he'd taken the packs, but that it had been in the middle of the night and now the goods were spread around to other people. They kept slapping and screaming at him and finally he said that he had stashed the stuff in a bunch of hidden locations that he could take us to. Meanwhile more local villagers joined us; there was a reputation to uphold. For the next 4 or 5 hours, as he led us through miles of remote terrain, we ran and leapt up and down the beautiful terraced hills, 2 or 3 feet at a time, all at high altitude. I happened to be in the best shape of my life at that point, but I was stretched to my physical limit. Absolutely exhausting and rattling. The locals were running and jumping like billy goats and olympic hurdle champs and I was just making it, with blisters and aching knees.

He'd hidden things behind rocks in remote forests, in friends' huts in several villages, in a container buried in the dirt, and it turned out, his mother's house. The "posse", which had grown to about 20 folks by now, physically dragged him up to his village, which consisted of a half dozen bamboo huts and some cleared dirt, found his mother, screamed at her, slapped her on the face numerous times, knocked her to the ground and then started kicking dirt on her. At this point the low-level fear I had felt all day turned to near-panic; how violent would local justice get? Much to my relief they left her on the ground and made the thief apologize, formally, directly to my face. Very intense.

We got almost everything back. The only things gone, if I remember correctly, were a few packs of cigarettes and a couple of Cadbury chocolate bars, all presumably consumed by then, and one pair of Terry's underwear.

The next day we continued our trek. My knees were a bit shaken and sore, but once again we were glorying in the unforgettable beauty of the country and the charm of the people. Perhaps the most bizarre part of the whole episode followed. For the next three days, until our return to Pokhara, hundreds of people coming from every direction asked if we were the victims of the robbery. The news had spread throughout the countryside for many many miles. Locals, porters, trekkers, everyone knew about us. We were briefly famous.

MY FIRST TRIP TO TOKYO, 1988

For a little more than a decade after graduating from college I made art full time, bought and sold art books part time, and managed an apartment building in Oakland CA. But I wasn't making enough money, so when the opportunity arose to work for a long-established bookseller specializing in rare books on art and architecture, I took the leap and started working there in January of 1988. One of my jobs would be to go to Japan to sell books, an exciting prospect for me.

In 1988 Japan was near the peak of a massive economic bubble, and prior to going I read a bunch of books about doing business there, all of which were intimidating. But in mid-June I boarded a plane at JFK and 15 hours later arrived to the confusion of Narita airport, found a bus for the 90 minute or so trip into Tokyo, and had my first bleary-eyed glimpse of the immensity of the city on my way into town. The hotel we had booked was modern and compact, with barely enough space to open my suitcase. But it was efficiently designed, with the clock, radio, lights and tv controls built into the paneled headboard, and it had good AC that fought the heat, humidity, and generally awful air that sat over Tokyo. Prices were famously exorbitant--I had read about $100 melons and $1000 dinners--and that tiny room cost nearly $300 a night.

On Monday morning I was supposed to go to Yushodo Booksellers, the premier rare book firm in Japan, folks who had bought books from us in the past. I had a 10 o'clock appointment, but the directions for the supposed 20 minute trip seemed confusing and I'd already been up for hours so I left the hotel at 7:45. I'd find a coffee shop once I found my way there.

I got off at the right subway stop but was immediately disoriented. The map I had was mostly in Japanese and confusing so I started asking people for directions. People were friendly and helpful and gave me all sorts of detailed directions, all incorrect. Addresses in Tokyo are quirky; streets, if they're even named, start, stop and then continue after long gaps and the building numbering is not sequential but rather often determined by when it was built. I kept walking around in circles. 8:30 passed, 9:00, 9:30. It was hot and humid and by now the knot of my tie was soaked through with sweat. By 9:45 I was just about ready to quit, had decided this job was impossible and I couldn't do it, and I would return home, quit my job, and apply to law school. But just minutes before my appointment I finally turned a corner and saw the sign for Yushodo, tried to calm myself and stop sweating, and walked in precisely on time, 10 AM sharp.

Yushodo owned a six story building filled with warehouses of books and crowded, cluttered offices, but I met with several antiquarian specialists in the serene and spacious wood-paneled rare book room, with 18th century European furniture and vitrines displaying rare books and ephemera including some unforgettable photographs of Abraham Lincoln. As I would find in most offices in Japan at the time, in the center of the table there was a large cut-glass ashtray, and by the end of the meeting it was full of butts and ashes. Much to my shock, they bought our books like it was a fire sale. Their business was booming, collectors and institutions were throwing money around like confetti, and they needed stock. I wasn't carrying the books themselves, but rather descriptions of titles in our stock, each on a file card. They kept throwing the cards around--books on Central Asian art, Greek sculpture, Medieval European art and architecture, Modernist architecture--and kept piling up thousand-dollar books. By the time they took me out to a very fancy lunch shortly after noon--sushi so fresh and strange to me that I could swear some of it was still moving on the plate--they had spent what I considered a small fortune. I was almost giddy.

And business-wise the two weeks continued mostly like that, eight business days in Tokyo and two in Kyoto. Two appointments each day, countless hours of being lost and being ready to give up, awkward lunches, cultural mistakes, and fantastic sales. Most of the appointments were with booksellers, some one-man operations and others large companies with outlets nationwide, who would buy our books and then resell them to their customers at double or triple our prices; other appointments were with curators and librarians at museums. Most of the national and prefectural universities were actually required by law at that time to buy only from Japanese vendors so the Japanese booksellers had a virtual monopoly and could ask whatever prices they wanted. It was great for them, and in turn for us.

My workdays were long but I had some time at night. After finding a reasonably priced place to eat dinner, usually a workingman's joint, I walked and walked and walked until late at night soaking up the city, drinking in as much as possible because I didn't know if I'd ever make the trip again. Tokyo was crazily bustling, the subways claustrophobic, the department stores frenzied with people buying expensive luxury goods, the sidewalks tight, the large intersections undulating with waves of people. In Ginza the neon display was spectacular, turning night to day, and the elegant storefronts on the bright boulevards featured carefully crafted art installations, sometimes borrowing from Surrealism, Expressionism, and Minimalism; occasionally a single handcrafted handbag or ceramic vase or string of pearls, with just the right lighting, made up the entire display. Images of Audrey Hepburn were ubiquitous and fortune tellers had tiny tables set up in doorways of closed shops, often with lines of people waiting to hear their fate. The side streets were darker, more mysterious and almost sinister, with greeters beckoning passersby to come into their bars and sex shows, and there were countless tiny open-air restaurants that served yakitori and beer. I remember being shocked at how many businessmen were walking arm-in-arm, drunk to the point of falling over, on their way to the nearest subway station after a 15-hour day of work and afterwork bonding.

 The trip was super successful, I stuck with the job, and I ended up making 39 trips to Japan over the next 27 years. And once I became familiar with the city, that trip to Yushodo did indeed take 20 minutes door to door.

MEMORIES OF BARCELONA IN THE WAKE OF A TERRORIST ATTACK

August 17, 2017

I first visited Barcelona in December 1992. By then my boss and eventual partner had long taken over the reigns of the business from his parents, who had started it during the Second World War. For decades they had bought books in Europe for resale to American libraries, making a couple of buying trips there each year; in the early years his parents would make the trips and then Peter took over. They visited many of the same places year after year but were always looking for new sources. After I had been with the firm for a few years I started making the trips as well, and we would throw in new places just to see if they'd be worthwhile. So when planning my winter trip that year, we decided why not try Barcelona?

It was pretty much love at first sight. After spending more than a week in cold, wet, dark northern Europe, Barcelona was warm and clear and bright. When I stepped off the airport bus onto Placa de Catalunya, the Saturday evening crowds on the Ramblas were exuberant, packed with pedestrians, street entertainers, vendors and con men. 

I was planning to visit booksellers on Monday and Tuesday, but I had Sunday off and decided to make the most of it. So I walked endlessly, visited the medieval quarter and its Gothic cathedral, went to an exhibition of German Expressionist painting in Gaudi's Casa Batllo, and then took a taxi up to Park Guell. When the taxi driver asked me if I was interested in Gaudi and the other Art Nouveau architects and I said very much so, he offered to drive me around to several important buildings on the way up to Park Guell, including Domenech i Montaner's Hospital de Sant Pau. The enthusiasm, knowledge and pride he expressed as we drove past buildings by Gaudi, Puig i Cadafalch, Domenech and others were unforgettable. And Park Guell just blew me away.

Monday morning didn’t start out according to plan. I arrived at the first place I had marked in the guidebook, supposed to open at 9:30, but there was no sign of anyone for the next 25 minutes so I walked a mile to the second one I had marked. Same deal. And then a third. I was stranded, and puzzled. By now it was getting close to 11:30. Getting a bit desperate I turned around and went back to the first place and boom! a gold mine. Piles of terrific material at reasonable prices including a massive set from the 1870s on medieval Catalan architecture with large mounted albumen photographs. I knew immediately that I'd be coming back.

And indeed Barcelona became a superb source for us. I ended up visiting close to twenty times. Wonderful books year after year, and some of my favorite experiences as a bookseller. 19th century books with mounted photographs, Art Nouveau material galore, modernist periodicals and serials about the Spanish Civil War, Surrealist stuff, illustrated books, and tons of foreign (meaning other European) material. Two of my best days ever were spent unpacking the library of the aforementioned Puig i Cadafalch with the bookseller who had acquired the library from his family, in a remote basement warehouse. He would make up prices on the spot and I'd say yes or no. The treasures that we unpacked, and the ones that I could afford to buy, were spectacular. Among the many books I got that day was the best trade catalogue we ever owned, a giant folio chromolithographic masterpiece advertising art nouveau ceramic tiles.

I got to know the Ramblas well. The booksellers with whom I worked were either in the university neighborhood near Placa de Catalunya, or in the medieval quarter a short walk down the Ramblas. I almost always stayed in the area around Placa de Catalunya, so my nighttime walks and dinners often took me up and down the Ramblas as well. I'm usually put off by touristy areas, but for some reason I love it there. I know there are all sorts of petty thieves and con artists, but the street performers are ubiquitous, there's a festive feeling in the air, and I get the sense that a lot of the older folks sitting on the benches are locals. The Ramblas that's so indelibly etched in my mind is filled with people joyously celebrating life.

MEMORIES OF MY FATHER ON THE 100th ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH

March 17, 2018

Having our picture taken. I'm three or four years old, standing on the brick railing outside the entrance to our apartment building in the Bronx. We're both dressed up; my father is wearing a suit and a felt fedora and my pants itch and I'm squirming. He’s holding my upper arm, keeping me steady while my mother snaps the photo.

Showing me his stamp albums. I was maybe five years old and very impressionable. He had a special page of stamps from French Guiana with unforgettable images of dugout canoes and young men in loin cloths aiming bows and arrows. French Guiana was one of the places he was stationed during World War II, managing the construction of airbases in the jungle, having just graduated from architecture school.

Waiting for an emergency visit from a doctor at my grandmother’s apartment, my father sitting on the edge of the bed comforting me, which was unusual for him. I had been hit in the solar plexus by an older cousin during an argument over what to watch on TV and I couldn’t catch my breath. To distract and calm me he told me tales of his service in the Caribbean and South America. The story that stuck with the me most was his getting so seasick on a troop ship on the way to Trinidad in the middle of a storm that he said it was the only time he ever wanted to die.

His snake skin. When he was in French Guiana he killed two huge jungle snakes by running them over with a Jeep, and he had one of them, a boa constrictor, skinned as a memento. The second snake was an anaconda, black and much larger, and he had a photo of seven brawny local men holding it up for the camera. The boa constrictor skin was large and colorful and needed about a half dozen elementary school kids to unfurl it. I was the star of show-and-tell from first through fifth grades. It was possibly the best show-and-tell in history.

Driving on a residential street somewhere in New Jersey in our new 1961 Mercury Monterey on our way to visit relatives, Bruce and me in the back seat. My father slowed down while looking to his left and said "Did you see that doorknob?" I started to say something, but my mother interrupted and said “Sam keep your eyes on the road!”

Visiting my father's office in NYC during summer vacation when I was around ten years old. It must have been during school vacation; I had been to his office for brief weekend visits before, but never for a whole day of work. At Grand Central Station we bought corn muffins and he told me he got one every day on the way to the office. Walking uptown I had to run to keep up with him. It was about 15 blocks to his office on Sixth Avenue at 54th Street and I was thankful for red lights because I could finally catch my breath. His office was on the 33rd floor of a 34 story building with knee to ceiling glass windows overlooking the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art. For a while I sat (in my mind, bravely) on the ledge right next to the window and it was vertiginous but super exciting. But my most vivid memory of that day is how fast he moved and how hard he worked, virtually never slowing down.

My father painting at home. He had carved out a piece of our small basement for a workshop, and an adjacent part for painting. I was always struck at how deft his movements were, swift and sure. It looked like he was pushing paint around haphazardly and then it magically turned into something. When I was young I took it for granted. When I started to paint seriously when I was 12 or 13 I was awed and jealous. I still am.

Showing me his portfolio of hundreds of drawings he had been required to make as an an architecture student, sketching famous and not-so-famous buildings and structures around the world. He had drawn images of Greek and Roman temples, Italian Renaissance and Baroque churches, and 19th and 20th century modernist buildings. His line was strong and certain and unquestioning. Curiously he had razored out the grades he got on each work and I wondered why; they all looked like A work to me. I still have them.

Teaching me how to sharpen a drawing pencil. He used a flat, wide wooden pencil, and rather than sharpen it to a point, he showed me how to sharpen it to a wedge so that one could vary the thickness of the line while drawing. It was my first time using a single-edge razor blade.

Bringing home a salvaged piece of finished hardwood thrown out from a job site to use as a display mount for an award he'd gotten in architecture school: Best Draughtsman of the NYU Class of 1940. He wasn't boastful in any way at all, but he was proud of that medal.

In my sophomore year of college, I got a really good pair of lined leather winter boots. But I lived with a friend's Belgian shepherd puppy who one night ate the top of my boot. During Christmas break my father somehow found some leather and repaired it with a heavy needle and thick coated thread. This was in December of 1972. I still have those boots and went out in the snow in them this past winter.

Seeing my father doing inspection tours at the partially built One Astor Plaza on Broadway while I was working there as a union laborer during my college breaks. We workers were dust covered and filthy and my father would come by dapperly dressed in suit and tie and hat, rolled up blueprints in hand, and everyone would stop working and there would be silence. The managers were respectful and deferential, but I could sense in my fellow low-level workers a combination of respect, resentment, and disdain.

When I was preparing to leave for my 8 month trip along the Central Asian silk route in 1973-1974, my father exercised what must have been painful restraint, given how much he worried about me and my brother. My mother pleaded with me not to go, over and over; my father hated the idea of my going but I think he realized I was going no matter what he said.

Visiting us when we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. We took a trip to Big Sur and were driving up Route One back to SF when we stopped to admire the view and take photos. My father quickly did a drawing on the spot with markers, of the cliffs meeting the ocean at a turn in the road. It reminded me of a very good John Marin, whom he admired.

Telling a joke. He was usually terrible at it, getting the timing wrong, forgetting critical segments. But he would start giggling while he told it and it was infectious; often everyone would end up laughing.

My father was a terrific photographer. But he had a habit that became one of our family’s signature jokes. Whenever he’d arrange a group portrait, he’d aim and focus and say “one...two...oh wait one second, you move a little to the right, now one... two...oh wait, let me get a different angle, ok one...two....” This could go on for minutes.

A few years after we moved into our house in White Plains in 1958, my father turned a large second story deck into an enclosed porch, doing everything himself. Over the years he made improvements, more permanence, a new roof, and it essentially became an extension of our kitchen. Many years later when we were visiting, when he was in his early seventies and still working full-time, he was climbing on the roof, one foot in mid-air, hanging on to a protruding piece of wood with one hand and hammering with the other. My mother was screaming for him to get down, and eventually we were too.

He was the most devoted son I've ever known. He was unusually close to his mother, perhaps having to do with hanging on to her while walking across Eastern Europe as a toddler fleeing horrific pogroms in the wake of the Russian revolution. When she was still young and healthy he spoke to her every night, and in her later years when she was sick and uncertain, he would speak to her four or five times a day, and visit a couple of times a week. He would excuse himself from meetings to call her. It was the source of some jealousy between my mother and his.

For the nearly three decades that I worked as a full-time book dealer I traveled extensively, both domestically and overseas, a couple of hundred week-long or longer trips while he was still alive. I'd call my parents to say goodbye every time I left and my father would say the same thing, every single time: "Don't forget to have a good time. It's later than you think!" It became a family joke and personal motto. And then when I'd return, we'd do a sort of Abbott and Costello routine. He'd ask "How'd you find the kids when you got home?" (meaning had they changed much?), and I'd respond "It was easy, I just looked in their rooms." As corny as could be but he giggled with delight just about every time I said it.

Taking a day trip to Yale University when Terry and I were visiting from California circa 1980. We visited the Art Museum and the Beinecke Library and had a nice lunch. It was a wonderful day and I remember sitting in the back seat of the car on the way back to the house wishing I could freeze time.

The sparkle in his eye and the joy he took in Terry's signature walnut pie, year after year after year.

My father eating hot dogs with eight year old Josh, living with difficulty in an assisted living apartment. Josh was always patient and graceful with him, and my father always perked up when he came to visit.

My having to sign documents and checks for him because his hand, which had been so sure, was shaking so violently from Parkinson's.

Suffering from dementia in his final year, forgetting that my mother--his wife of 61 years--had died a few months earlier, desperate because he didn't know why she wasn't in bed and where had she gone?

REFLECTIONS ON RETURNING HOME FROM ITALY

October 27, 2016

I've always thought of civilization as a thin veneer over a roiling turmoil of base instincts. And the past few years have made me increasingly fear for the worst, that the barbarians are at the gate and we're about to sink into yet another period of human folly during which the worst of our impulses are expressed. It's not just Trump, it's the millions of people who would follow such a grotesque, egomaniacal snake-oil salesman. And it's not just the United States. The forces of willful ignorance seem to be gaining ascendancy worldwide. But visiting Italy, going in and out of countless 500, 600, 800 year old structures filled with paintings, sculptures, decorative art, maps, anatomical models and other scientific artifacts, once again gave me solace. It's a reminder that there's a pervasive and time-tested yearning for us to create beauty and permanence, to try to make sense of our existence through art and science, to create monuments, to celebrate our cultural achievements. Lord knows, Italy has had its share of upheavals. Wars, plagues, earthquakes, inquisitions, political and religious insanity. And yet much of the beauty created over these many hundreds of years not only survives, but is revered, and crowds of people flock to see it. I got a renewed sense that we may go through bad times and good, but even in the face of adversity the human spirit and drive to create and communicate prevail.

Photo: Train station, Bologna, October 2016

THE UNITAS HOTEL, PRAGUE

January 2011

My hotel in Prague, the Unitas at 9 Bartolomejska Street, was luxuriously comfortable, a warm haven from the bitter cold outdoors. My room was spacious, with sleek modernist furniture and an oversize bathroom with a huge soaking tub, and the staff was welcoming and friendly. I felt very lucky to be staying there. At check-out I learned that the site had been a convent from ca 1700 until 1950, at which time the Sisters were evicted and it became a headquarters for the secret police. An underground prison was built in the basement, and Vaclav Havel was imprisoned there several times; as President he gave an extensive interview in his cell for a documentary about his life. A staff member offered to give me a tour of the hidden cells, left untouched during the otherwise beautiful and extensive renovations of the last decade. The contrast between Havel’s cell—dank, dark, and infused with mold—and the luxurious accommodations upstairs was brutally stark. And the contrast between his experience there and mine profound. I was deeply humbled.

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SMOKING HASH IN HERAT, NOVEMBER 1973

In November 1973, during an eight month adventure traveling overland along the ancient Silk Route, I left Mashhad, the last big city in eastern Iran, and took a comfortable, modern, heated bus to the Iranian/Afghan border. There everything changed. Though many parts of Iran and Turkey had seemed remote and pre-modern, they didn't prepare me for Afghanistan. Once I had officially exited Iran I took a short trip in a rusty old VW bus, protected by armed guards, across a stretch of territory under the jurisdiction of neither country, literally called "No Man's Land". I wish I had a photo of the signs. At the other side I came to a second border, into Afghanistan. The border station seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, a drafty, dilapidated mud-brick building with a rickety wooden table where an official in a too-large and stained uniform sat on the only chair, checked my visa, and stamped and wrote in my passport. I was with a couple of other Westerners and there were several tribesmen there as well, turbaned and with deeply lined faces, all squatting flat-footed on the floor. Several of them were armed with rifles and had massive curved knives in embossed leather sheaves hanging from their waists. I felt completely out of my comfort zone and vaguely unsafe but I also felt totally alive and excited. I was 20 years old. I may have left the USA in 1973 but now I was back in the Middle Ages.

From that border outpost, we--both Westerners and tribesmen--got on another beaten up minibus for the two hour drive to Herat, the first major city in western Afghanistan and the third largest city in the country. By this time it was evening, dark and cold. The minibus had no heat, the windows were broken and wouldn't close, and the dirt and gravel highway was pocked and bumpy, but to me that was all part of the adventure. The night was stunningly clear and a nearly full moon lit the rock-strewn desert landscape, casting long shadows.

After a half hour or so we pulled off the road. Again a single mud-brick building in the middle of the desert, this time a one-room teahouse. The long narrow space, lit by flickering oil lamps, had two raised seating platforms padded with carpets along the walls, filled with squatting men, some of them again heavily armed, and it was heated by a large, smoky, wood-burning stove in the back that had blackened the surrounding walls over the years. We were offered tea from an ancient samovar and it was great to get some warmth in me. But apparently the real reason for the stop was to smoke hashish. The men were sharing chillum after chillum of a combination of hash and tobacco. There was one man who spoke English and he invited us to join them and we did. Smoking hash with turbaned tribesmen in a smoky, dimly-lit, middle-of-nowhere teahouse was exhilarating and disorienting, and when we finally stepped back outside to board the minibus the stars seemed too big to be true. Was I even on the same planet?

When we finally made it to Herat later that night, we were taken to a place where a bunch of other Westerners were camped. It was an ancient camel caravansary, a sprawling two-story mud-brick building with a central atrium and dozens of rooms that had originally been camel stables, now repurposed as rooms for penny-pinching travelers. My room, like the others, was windowless and empty except for a worn straw mat, a wood burning stove and a single candle. A room cost 3 cents per night, though I had to buy extra candles and firewood to heat the place; another 10 cents or so.

The next morning, local hashish dealers came by, selling to the travelers. Having spent my high school and early college years--as my mother used to say--"experimenting" with pot, I had heard legendary tales about the hashish in Asia. But I had also heard cautionary tales about the harsh laws in several countries, and the last thing I wanted was to waste away in some horrific jail cell. In the couple of months I was in Turkey and Iran I was offered pot and hash a few times but I always said no.

But here it seemed different, it appeared to be an integral part of the culture, at least among men. Several of us staying at the caravansary chipped in and bought a slab of hash, 100 grams, for three dollars. A single Marlboro cigarette sold on the street--not a pack--cost more than a gram. We spent the next several days in a smoky dreamlike haze. There were a couple of dozen Westerners traveling the Silk route who were taking a break in Herat, and it was quite a party. After communal morning and afternoon smoking of chillums in the dark candle-lit rooms we stepped outside into the bright sun and bracing chill air. We took long walks around the city, with wide boulevards mostly empty of motor vehicles and vast rows of single-story monochromatic adobe-type buildings, some connected for what seemed like hundreds of yards. Surrounding the city lay the ruins of massive fortresses; the most impressive was built by Genghis Khan.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, under the Timurid dynasty, Herat was known as a beacon of civilization, the home of important poets and musicians and artists. In 1973 it seemed about as primitive a large city as I could imagine, at least infrastructure-wise. I'd been in plenty of small villages without sewers or electricity, but this was a city of well over 100,000 residents and it only had electric power for about 4 hours a day, from roughly 5 to 9 PM. There was no refrigeration, no sewer system, no modern conveniences at all. Because of the lack of refrigeration the food choices were very limited; I remember living on rice, eggs, peas, bread, chicken and tea.

The strangest thing about Herat, though, was that I never saw a woman's face. In parts of Turkey and Iran, some women wore burkas that covered the entire face, but in most cases at least the eyes and part of the face were visible. Here, every woman wore a head to toe black burka with a sort of mesh fabric covering the eyes. They were entirely invisible, almost non-beings. I tried to be open and non-judgmental--I was visiting their culture after all--but I was deeply conflicted and uncomfortable.

My week in Herat was one of the most memorable of the adventure. I felt about as far away from modern civilization as I ever have in a large populated city. But, as a twenty year old is bound to, I overdid it. Too much smoke, too many shared germs. By the time I got to Kabul later in the month, I had come down with bronchitis. Fortunately a round of antibiotics did wonders and soon I was ready to continue on through the Khyber Pass to Pakistan, India, and Nepal.

ASIA, NEW YORK, CALIFORNIA, APRIL-AUGUST 1974

On a Wednesday morning in mid-August 1974 my 54 year old uncle died in my arms. I was visiting his family in Southern California, down from San Francisco for a few days, meeting my mother's brother for the first time since I was a toddler. I was supposed to fly back to the Bay Area that afternoon. My aunt had left for work and my cousins were still asleep while I was awake in my sleeping bag on the living room floor. At 8:55 AM I heard a groan and a loud thud, ran to the kitchen and found him on the floor unconscious but sputtering. As I cradled his head in my arms and called out to my cousins he went limp. They tried to resuscitate him while I called the police, but he was gone.

That event, devastating to his immediate family, changed my life too. It felt like the proverbial rug had been pulled out from under me. About a week later I was in a car heading across country, unexpectedly going back to Cornell University for my junior year. I hadn't planned on doing so.

In April I had returned to my parents' home in White Plains from a nearly 8 month overseas adventure, mostly in western Asia and the Indian subcontinent. I had become ill in Kathmandu, and after a couple of bad weeks I went to a local clinic. It was in a rustic crumbling-brick building in a dusty neighborhood, with a sparsely equipped examination room and a dirt-floor waiting room furnished with rough wooden benches. The people I sat with all had advanced illnesses--a youngish man with a softball sized tumor in his neck, a toddler with encrusted skin, a misshapen old woman barely able to walk--and I wondered what they thought of a strapping 20 year old foreigner with no visible ailment sharing the bench. After a brief wait, the doctor asked me a few questions in broken English and handed me a two week supply of pills and said I should be fine.

But I wasn't. I couldn't absorb enough nourishment and I kept losing weight. When I had lost almost 40 pounds I decided to exercise my first-world privilege and return to the States earlier than I had planned and get proper medical attention. I didn't let my parents know I was returning, partly because I didn't want to worry them, partly because I wanted it to be a surprise and partly because after making my way across remote and strange lands I wanted to see what it was like to land as a traveler, rather than a local, in NYC.

For the first leg I flew from Kathmandu to Patna in Bihar State in India. When I boarded the plane in Kathmandu they didn’t mention anything about political unrest and rioting in Bihar. But when I landed in Patna there was a dusk to dawn curfew and I had to either get to a hotel or take a train out of the city. I opted for the train. I took a bicycle rickshaw from the airport to the train station and on the way I saw soldiers everywhere and we passed two dead bodies in the street, students killed during rioting, surrounded by crowds. The train station was claustrophobically and frenetically packed, delays were rampant, and after I finally got on a train it sat about 100 yards outside the station for several hours before it departed. Sixteen or so hours later I arrived in New Delhi, only to learn that some time after my train had left a bomb had gone off at the Patna train station, wounding several people.

I had an open-ended ticket from New Delhi to London on BOAC and I was lucky to get a seat on one of the two flights that week. At the New Delhi airport I was told that the plane had mechanical trouble and I was to be rebooked on a Syrian Arab Airlines flight. I was a bit concerned because Syria was officially still at war with Israel in the wake of the Yom Kippur War and as a Jew I knew I wasn't welcome there. The agents said it was a direct non-stop flight from New Delhi to London and I had nothing to worry about. But once airborne, that plane had mechanical problems as well, and we touched down in Damascus. It turned out great. No problem at passport control and we wouldn't be able to fly again until the following morning so they put us up gratis in a high-rise hotel in downtown Damascus, the nicest place I had stayed in months. I woke up at 5 AM and wandered the streets of the then beautiful city, walking past mosques and minarets under a smoky, sunlit yellow sky for two hours before catching the shuttle to the airport.

In London I stayed in a youth hostel for a couple of days waiting for my flight back to the States and the most vivid memory I have is trying to relearn sitting on a toilet seat after 6 months of squatting over Asian toilets.

Eventually I landed at JFK, took a bus into Manhattan, a train to White Plains, another bus to within a half mile or so to my parents' house, and walked the rest of the way home. I was a sight. I had given up my western clothing, was wearing Indian drawstring pants, sandals, a Nepalese yak wool coat and a backpack, and was 40 pounds lighter than I was when I had left. When I rang the doorbell and my mother answered, she screamed and had to grab the doorjamb to keep from falling and it took her several minutes to pull herself together. At that moment I realized how crazy I was to have surprised her and to this day I still feel a little guilty about it.

I saw the doctor the next morning, got treated for a bad case of amoebic dysentery as well as food-borne hepatitis, and spent the next month hibernating at my parents' house, gaining weight and strength. It was the only time I ever drank milkshakes with the intention of gaining weight. But my wanderlust hadn't ceased. So in late May I flew to San Francisco, where some friends from Cornell were spending the summer. I slept on a kitchen floor for a couple of weeks and then several of us found a beautiful house in the Sunset district that we sublet from two high school teachers who were traveling for the summer. It was a cool house, with hand thrown pottery and macrame, hippie influenced but neat and clean.

I fell head over heels in love with San Francisco. I loved the neat rows of well-kept houses, the cycle of fog and sun, the diffuse glow of the late afternoon light. There was a steep hill about a block from our house that had a great view over the Sunset and Richmond districts and Golden Gate Park out to the Pacific in one direction, and Twin Peaks to the other, an ideal pot-smoking perch. 

I got a lucrative job for a few weeks painting a couple of empty apartments on Nob Hill, which paid for most of the summer. But mostly I was playing guitar and singing on the streets. I had this romantic notion that if the right guy walked by at the right time I'd be offered a record contract. It never happened of course. I wrote poetry and songs and watched TV, mostly Perry Mason reruns and the news building up to Nixon's resignation. I hitchhiked to LA and back just for the fun of it. On the way back I was picked up by a bunch of hippies smoking pot in a VW bus (yes, really) at an entrance to I-5 in the Central Valley in 106 degree sun and was dropped off two hours later in the Sunset district, where it was 52 degrees; I'd never experienced a weather fluctuation like that. I was living the ideal life of youthful freedom.

My friends were planning to go back to Cornell after the summer, but I decided I wanted to stay in the Bay Area. So I applied to UC Berkeley as a transfer student and got in. Trouble is I wasn't allowed to enroll until the following January, which presented a few challenges. Once our sublet ended in late August, I'd have to find a job and a place to live until I could start my junior year at Cal. I figured I'd go visit my mother's brother's family in southern California for a few days and when I returned I'd start the apartment and job search.

I never got that far. My parents flew out to LA for the funeral and I stayed in southern California for several days. Curiously my mother had stepped into a pothole, fallen and broken her ankle the same morning that her brother died. Turned out that happened at 11:55 AM in New York and her brother collapsed at 8:55 AM in CA, perhaps simultaneously. An uncanny coincidence. 

When I returned to San Francisco after the funeral I was still in a state of shock. The idea of being alone, finding a job and an apartment, and just having the energy to persevere felt overwhelming to me. So a few days later, I was in the backseat of my roommate's car, zipping across the vastness of America with a long-haired Belgian Shepherd's head resting in my lap. A week later we were back in Ithaca, school was just starting, the chill of early fall was setting in. My life had taken a new direction. It was one of my first lessons in how a single event can profoundly change the course of our lives forever. The next year I met my wife-to-be Terry and my now lifelong friend Steve. The rest, as they say, is mystery.

 Photo: Back at school, circa 1975

MEMORIES OF NICE IN THE WAKE OF A TERRORIST ATTACK

From the early 1990s to the mid 2000s I had the pleasure of including Nice in one of my two yearly book buying trips to Europe. Each December I would follow more or less the same itinerary, the first week in Switzerland (Zurich, Basel, Bern and Geneva), and the second week in Nice, Vence (a lovely town about an hour by bus in the hills above Nice), Marseille, and Barcelona. Though I loved Switzerland and almost always found a trove of good books there, and though there was a sense of pre-Christmas festivity in the air, it was almost always cold, overcast, drizzly, and slushy, so it was a great relief to arrive in Nice and see the sun. In fact I could count on that whole second week providing a respite from the wet socks in which I tramped through Switzerland, and it provided a last gasp of good weather before heading back to the New England winter.

 My impressions of Nice were fleeting--I would spend less than two days there each trip--but overwhelmingly positive. I didn't usually buy books in Paris, but the few times I did I found many of the proprietors sort of cranky and unhelpful and not very tolerant of my pathetic French. But the folks in Nice were always friendly, welcoming, and helpful, and my little side trip to Vence for half a day was often a charm. Granted, I was in Nice during off season so it wasn't filled with crowds of tourists, so my impression would probably be much different if I visited in summer. The city wasn't crowded and older couples walked slowly along the boulevards bundled up with scarves against the 50 degree "chill". Hunting for books there was only marginally successful, but I kept going because I usually found at least enough to justify the stop and because it made sense geographically. I do have a vivid memory of one shop because looking for books there was downright dangerous. An older couple ran the place and they could be found sitting in thick smoke in the same chairs year after year, Gauloises stuck on their lips, chatting with friends and customers. The interesting, uncatalogued stuff was in an attic above the shop but it wasn't structurally sound. Books were piled knee to shoulder high, but only on the parts of the floor that would support them. I would go up there alone, and I was told that I should step only where there were books because I could fall through any part of the floor that was exposed. Interesting, but I made it work. I'd shift one pile onto another, hear some creaking, stand in that spot, and do it over and over again. I actually found good stuff up there...and I survived.

But one visit stands out, and it was quite an eye-opener. I arrived at the Nice airport on the afternoon of December 7th, 2000 to find the city in turmoil. There was a mass protest going on against the EU and globalization, inspired by the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization. Apparently 75,000 protesters had been in the streets the past two days, smashing storefronts, attacking banks, etc. The public transit system was suspended, no busses or trams running, and it took about an hour to get a taxi to take me to the center of the city where my hotel was. But the taxi was stopped by the military outside the center and I ended up having to drag my suitcases for about a mile through the streets, a t-shirt wrapped around my mouth against the lingering tear gas, past battered buildings, broken glass everywhere, and checkpoints at just about every intersection. I had to show my passport at least half a dozen times and my suitcases were repeatedly opened on my way to the hotel. And at the hotel, metal detectors and pat downs. Needless to say, my book buying in Nice that year was squelched--none of the shops were open the next day--though through a convoluted array of taxis and busses that were running outside the city, I did at least make it to Vence.

 So of course all this got dredged up last night as I watched with horror as events unfolded there and I can only imagine what a nightmare that city is going through. It always struck me as the epitome of, in Matisse's term, "luxe, calme et volupte". But sadly and tragically the cult of death continues.

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MEMORIES OF NEPAL: KATHMANDU 1974

There's long been a special place in my heart for Kathmandu. When I first got there at the end of 1973 I was 20. I thought I had left college indefinitely but was in fact in the midst of a year off, and I'd been traveling for more than 4 months, much of it through, for me, very alien cultures and landscapes. Across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India before Nepal, all overland, first with a group of people in a WWII troop truck and later by myriad forms of public transportation. Through deserts, jungles, countless towns and villages, and cities like Istanbul, Herat, Kabul, Peshawar, and Amritsar. I was brought to tears by the beauty of the tile work of Isfahan and the death-in-the-streets poverty of Lahore. Amazing, exciting and eye-opening as it all was I rarely felt at fully at ease, and to some degree was always on guard.

But in Kathmandu I thought I had found the proverbial Shangri La. There was a graceful beauty to the city and its people. I loved the steadfast calmness of the Nepalis and the Tibetans, with their beautiful skin and their sweet toughness in the face of hard living, and I loved the architecture, with its finely wrought wooden carvings and profuse ornamentation. Life in the streets seemed so "real" to me, with butchers, ear-wax cleaners, and metal workers plying their trades in public, but without the frenetic in-your-faceness of India. The vegetation was lush and welcoming, animals and smells were everywhere, it was winter and the weather was warm and the sun was strong. And at least on the surface (or perhaps in my 20-year old imagination) the people seemed genuinely happy.

Western travel to Nepal was unusual prior to the 1960s, with most of the mountainous areas restricted, but by the early 1970s Kathmandu had become a magnet for the legions of hippie freak travelers on the Silk Route, either coming east from Europe or going west from Australia and New Zealand. There wasn’t much tourist infrastructure besides what catered to the penny-pinching youth. Only a couple of basic Western style hotels, few paved roads, no streetlights. It took 19 hours to get a phone call through to the States. Tourist lodges offered very basic shared rooms, usually with a communal bathroom, which consisted of a hose with cold water for a shower and a hole in the floor toilet, or you rented a room in someone's house. After spending the first month in a couple of lodges, I rented a private room in a home for the next two months. It had stucco walls with years of soot and was cozy and dark. No electricity after dinner and I remember sitting in my sleeping bag reading, writing, and drawing by candlelight. The "bathroom" ceiling was literally 5 feet high and I couldn't even come close to standing up. I loved it there. The family was warm and welcoming and the rent was $3 a week.

The first three months of 1974 in Kathmandu were magical, at least for a 20-year old American artist-type wanderer with a little spending money. The pie shops that had sprung up to cater to the backpackers had become hangouts for the profusion of writers, artists, and musicians among the travelers. Everyone shared stories and art and music. I was carrying a guitar, as were many others, and spontaneous acoustic jam sessions were the norm. Sometimes Nepalis--kids who worked in the pie shops mostly--would join in with native instruments and somehow it all meshed. I had a regular gig at a small western-run bar in town; I played two evenings a week for about six weeks at the Union Jack Pub for tips and a meal and drinks. Even at the time I realized I had serendipitously stumbled into a wonderful and fleeting cultural moment. 

One small food detail I remember vividly: Corn flakes. They were unlike any packaged cereal I had tasted in the States, they absolutely burst with the flavor of corn. It was a taste revelation and it’s viscerally memorable.

Among other favorite memories of that stay in Kathmandu: Regular and numerous visits to the Swayambhunath temple complex, including a couple of new-agey full moon festivals there; and tripping at an unbelievable Hindu religious festival somewhere outside of the city, with something like 200,000 pilgrims who had arrived from all over the Indian subcontinent. Among the mind-boggling things I saw that day was a young boy, maybe 9 or 10, in training to be a sadhu, standing on one leg, his entire body painted white, with two long metal spikes stuck through his protruding tongue, one going sideways and the other vertical; and an older sadhu, seated, being plastered with a mud mixture that hardened quickly, in order to show that he could reduce his breathing to one breath in some number of hours (I don’t remember how many). I didn’t know what or how to think about all I saw.

In late March I got sick. Possibly something in one of those magical pie shops. My digestive tract was under assault and I started to lose weight, much too quickly. I went to a local clinic, where the other patients in the waiting area--all locals--looked near death. I remember one guy with a growth on his neck the size of a softball. I looked healthy compared to everyone else there. But I was misdiagnosed and given the wrong medicine and I got sicker and lost more weight. It became clear that I should head back to the States. Getting back to New York via India and London was an adventure in itself, with an unexpected stop in Damascus, and by the time I got home I had lost 40 pounds. Once treated for amoebic dysentery and food-borne hepatitis I recovered, had a good time gaining the weight back, and eventually continued my adventure by heading out to San Francisco for the summer. Another story.

The next time I was in Kathmandu was with my wife Terry in 1982, when we spent about a month in Nepal. It was still magical, with its glorious temples and stupas and gentle generous people. But it was utterly transformed. Five star hotels, buses filled with Japanese tourists, paved roads, direct dial phones, a major tourist industry. When I tried to find the house in which I had stayed, I not only couldn't find it, I couldn't find the street or even the neighborhood. The entire district had been razed and rebuilt. Greater Nepal had not yet undergone such changes yet. We enjoyed an amazing trek starting in Pokhara, with eight days of glorious walking in the shadow of Machhapuchhre in the Annapurna Range, a 26,000 foot peak. The trek was filled with adventures and wonders and beauty and more stories and my love for the country deepened. I haven't been back since.

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WORKING AS A LABORER DURING COLLEGE, 1970-1973

At the end of high school and in my first years of college I worked several summer vacations and winter breaks as a laborer in NYC. It was pure nepotism. My father, who had begun his career as an architect, had eventually become VP in charge of construction for a major developer in Manhattan, and he got me into the Laborers union. Laborers International was the lowest rung of the union ladder, specializing in heavy cleanup. My co-workers were, in general, pretty rough company, and as a group we were looked down on by the more skilled workers, the carpenters, steelworkers, brick-layers, pipe-fitters, HVAC men, plasterers and painters. But for me it was an incredible opportunity; while my friends were making $1.75 an hour at summer jobs, I was making $8.50 or more. And I knew it wouldn't last forever, which made it almost palatable; I assumed I would go on to a less brutal job, more stimulating intellectually and socially, and wouldn't be stuck destroying my body like the guys with whom I worked.

But I was the proverbial square peg in a block of round holes. The first day of the first summer, I showed up at the construction shanty after having commuted from my parents' house in White Plains, somewhat surprised to find a group of guys drinking beer at 7:30 AM. I walked in with a New York Times in my hand and I was immediately told that the Times was "not allowed" on this job site. I laughed, thinking they were joking, but they were dead serious, they told me to get rid of it right then and there and never bring one in again. I was immediately labeled, derisively, "the college kid". I had long hair and a beard, which didn't go over well either. It was another very divisive time, the Vietnam War was in full swing and construction workers were generally "America Love it or Leave It" types. The year before I started, violence had flared in NYC when a large group of construction workers, organized by the AFL-CIO, attacked protesters in the street after the Kent State shootings. So I kept my mouth shut.

I worked on several job sites, though the vast bulk of my time was spent on a giant project, One Astor Plaza, in the middle of Times' Square. At that time Times Square was a seedy, gritty X-rated zone, with crummy run-down stores selling discount merchandise and live sex shows, and hookers walked the streets, some not very discreetly. The project I worked on was a massive 56 story building on the site of the old Astor Hotel on Broadway, stretching from 44th to 45th streets and half of an avenue block to the west. It was intended to be an anchor for the "new" Times Square in an attempt to turn the area into a G-rated destination for pedestrians and tourists. It clearly worked; 40 years later the Disneyfication of Times Square is full and complete. 

Because I was the "college kid", and later even more derisively, "the boss's son", I was given some of the crappiest jobs on the site. Some were utterly disgusting, like cleaning the newly installed bathroom fixtures that were used by some of the workers despite the fact that the plumbing was not yet working. But some were, surprisingly, to my liking, like taking orders for coffee and pastries from a dozen guys and going to the local take-out joint to get them filled. That became my regular task every day because I could keep the orders straight and return the correct change to everyone, and it was a godsend for me; it allowed me to take a break from the often horribly strenuous and dirty work that went on from 8 AM to Noon and then again from 12:30 to 3:30 PM. That task also allowed me to see how hard and beautifully some people worked--the people at the take-out restaurant were like ballet dancers, filling countless orders unbelievably quickly and efficiently, without an unnecessary move.

There were some particularly memorable days, and one highlighted the occasional absurdity of the job. One day three of us were working on a wide open floor with no partitions to define the interior. There was a huge pile of debris, mostly broken up concrete and rebars, probably something like 20-25 feet in diameter and 5 or 6 feet high. In the morning we had to move the pile from one side of the floor to the other, about 150 feet away. It took the three of us more than three hours to move it across the floor, one wheelbarrow-full after another. We finally finished just before lunch. When we came back after lunch we were told to move the pile back to where it had been; bosses were supposed to visit the site and they wanted us to look busy. Sisyphus had nothing on us! And another day the construction elevator was out of service and we had to carry 96 pound bags of cement on our shoulders up two flights of stairs so a new floor could be poured. After 7 hours of that I was nearly dead.

There were some real characters. I worked with two convicted murderers who had served 20+ years in prison. One seemed like a truly gentle soul, the other like a pressure-cooker ready to explode. I witnessed a fight in a stairwell that I thought was going to end in death, one guy brandishing a pick-ax and the other a two by four, but fortunately some brawny guys intervened and a relative peace was restored. Another guy kept telling me to not work so hard, that you only have to look hard at work when the bosses come around. His line was "make it last...not so fast...make it last.", and he repeated it day after day year after year. The saving grace for me was that my father had also gotten my cousin Michael into the union and when I had the chance to work with him at least I had a like-minded soul to talk to.

 When we worked or ate lunch on the street level adjacent to the sidewalk, the catcalling was non-stop. Every attractive woman that walked by was whistled at, ogled, and verbally propositioned. I was in an awkward position because it was not in my nature or upbringing to do such a thing but there was intense peer pressure. But I kept quiet. Some of my colleagues thought of me--in their words in that far less politically correct time--as a "queer" or a "fairy". And the reactions of the women often surprised me. While most did their best to ignore the catcalling and walk a little faster, an unexpected number of them seemed to enjoy it and even played with the men, sashaying a bit more provocatively as they walked by. The workers would go wild, gesture suggestively and cheer. An interesting lesson in sociology.

After working three summer vacations and two winter breaks, it ended. On my unexpected last day eight of us picked up a 600 pound steel beam and in an awkward movement I threw my back out really badly. It was the first of several back injuries I suffered through in my 20s and early 30s. I got workers' comp but after about six weeks, though I was still in pretty bad pain, the union doc said no more workers' comp for me. So I quit. But I had saved up enough for some school expenses, a new electric guitar, and, most importantly, for my upcoming eight month trip across Europe and Central and South Asia that I undertook starting in September 1973.

SUMMER OF 1960

In the summer of 1960, the summer between first and second grade, the summer my grandfather died and I turned seven years old, my mother gave me a wonderful gift.

 I had been an only child for more than five years before my brother was born. My parents doted on me, they indulged my precociousness, and I loved being the star in the center of their universe. When my brother Bruce arrived in the fall of 1958 I knew I was supposed to be excited but to tell the truth I wasn’t really that thrilled. I was no longer king of the hill.

 There’s a film that exists of my sixth birthday party. My father is filming out of our second story picture window onto the backyard below. My nine month old brother is peacefully ensconced in his bassinet on the patio while about 25 six-year-olds dash in and out of the screen in the midst of a game of ringolevio. At one point I appear, run over to the bassinet, and start hitting my brother. I have no recollection of what I felt at the moment, but clearly I was not happy that my special day was being compromised by the very existence of this new baby. I hit him over and over and then stopped and ran back to the game. Whenever we watched the film when we were growing up my mother would scream at my father: “Sam, how could you just keep filming that and not do anything?” My father, a steady-handed documentarian, kept filming and that one snippet of film speaks volumes.

 Just to set the record straight, I long ago became very close to my brother, though it took a few years.

 Anyway, back to the summer of 1960. My mother must have thought I needed special time alone with her, or maybe she wanted to introduce me to a wider cultural experience, but she took me into New York City once a week that summer. Those visits helped feed my voracious hunger for experience and knowledge and had a significant effect on my worldview. 

 I don’t remember all the places we went, but I remember how wonderful I felt on those outings. We’d take the train into the city from White Plains and go to one or two places and have lunch. I remember the dinosaurs and dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, Boccioni’s City Rising and Monet’s Water Lillies at the old MOMA, the Egyptian sarcophagi and especially the Roman wall paintings at the Met (those panels with their intense reds were some of my mom’s favorite works in all of art history).

 We went to Rockefeller Center and saw the Rockettes before a movie matinee, we watched the live taping of a TV game show, and I was really impressed by a giant globe we saw somewhere; it was indoors but I have no recollection where. We went to the Public Library on 42ndStreet and the reading room seemed like some kind of grand temple to me. 

I remember that the Horn and Hardart Automat seemed like futuristic magic to me--I loved getting that macaroni and cheese out of the window--and I was amazed by how fast some of the workers moved in different lunch places we visited.

 But the most vivid memory I have of that summer is visiting the United Nations. I was mesmerized. We got guest passes to the General Assembly and wore headphones so we could hear the English translation of whatever speech was happening. I was awed by the diplomats, by the wide array of exotic clothing I’d only seen on stamps and in the encyclopedia, by the sense of purpose and optimism. I got a sense of endless possibilities, that the world was joining together to conquer disease and war, that all of these nations would work together during my lifetime to achieve some sort of utopian vision for the planet.

 I always had a world map on my wall hanging above my bed, and I’d study it every night before I’d turn the light off. I was never bored by it. It seemed like a recipe for endless adventure. When we visited the UN, my mother bought me a set of flags of the nations of the world. They were little paper flags that I had to cut out and glue around lollipop-stick flagpoles and place in a cheap cardboard base that had about 100 holes in it. I put the set of flags on my dresser and would match the flags with the countries on the map. I was intrigued and thrilled by the imagery on many of the flags, particularly the unusual ones like Saudi Arabia, but one held a special place in my imagination. The flag of Nepal wasn’t rectangular like all the others, but consisted of two triangles, one above the other. I decided there must be something really special about that place and somewhere in the deep regions of my brain I determined I would have to visit it some day. I really loved that set of flags.

MY FIRST FEW WEEKS AT COLLEGE, SEPTEMBER 1971

When I entered Cornell University as a freshman in the fall of 1971, I was a naive, privileged 18 year old with a vague and hopeful notion of college being a time to try to figure out my place in the universe. I was filled with high-minded ideas of studying philosophy and physics and literature and history in order to try to find answers to the big questions in life, questions that had concerned me for a much of my mostly introverted and driven childhood. I had been a very serious kid, way more so than I am now. Having read a lot in high school, from 19th century Russian novelists to James Baldwin to Abbie Hoffman to Nietzsche, I was passionate and confused and angst-ridden and grasping, and I thought if I only read the right books or asked the right questions or found the right spiritual path I could figure out this crazy thing called life.

Cornell seemed beyond beautiful that September. The air was fresh and sharp and the light was angled, warm, and deep, casting a glow on the fabled ivy-covered buildings. Isolated in western New York State, set among gorgeous rolling hills and valleys, it seemed like an ideal place to sequester oneself from the larger world and have the luxury to study the great works of mankind. The first few weeks of school the weather was invigorating and intoxicating, the sun still warm during the day but giving way to a brisk chill in the evening. I felt awake and aware and thrilled to be alive.

But I quickly realized that my notion of college was skewed and overly idealistic. As an incoming freshman in 1971, self-righteously disdainful of the corporate power structure and our military provocations, I was taken aback during orientation week by the rows and rows of tables of corporate recruiters in Willard Straight Hall, the grand old student union. Every major corporation in America was represented, from Dow Chemical to 3M to General Electric, and many of the tables had lines of students seeking literature, connections, and advice, wanting a secure work situation as soon as they graduated college. I quickly realized that I didn't fit in. My head was lost in the philosophical clouds while most of these bright young people were preparing themselves for a life of corporate plenty.

Those first weeks I was introduced to fraternity or "Greek" life, though I had no intention of joining one. Being a male freshman in a dormitory in North Campus I was recruited by representatives from various houses. Parties at the frat houses were ubiquitous. Drinking was rampant and voluminous to the point of self-harm. As part of an initiation routine at one of the houses, my next-door dorm mate was encouraged to drink an eight ounce glass of whiskey straight down, no stopping. Not only did he do that, but he followed it with another eight ounce glass and then an additional four ounces. Twenty ounces in the space of twenty minutes. Of course he passed out, and what did the frat guys do? They carried him back to his dorm room and dropped him on the bed, unconscious. He was vomiting on himself when I called medical security and they came and took him and pumped his stomach. He joined that fraternity.

But most troubling was frat house sex culture. As part of the push to get boys like me to "rush" a fraternity, all sorts of things were said. One guy bragged about "brothers" getting women drunk and having sex. Another told me they'd get women stoned on quaaludes and the guys at the frat would have their turns with them. At first I thought it was just talk. But I went to only one party and within minutes I was told I could get laid upstairs. Just like the allegations being made about Kavanaugh and that whole culture of power and misogyny. I left disgusted but I didn't do anything about it. In the light of recent events those memories are more disturbing and haunting than ever.

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CALCUTTA 1982: STREET-SLEEPERS AND WRESTLERS

In early 1982 Terry and I spent a couple of months in India and Nepal. We were in Calcutta in late March and already it was almost unbearably hot. During the midday hours the sun reflected off the dank streets and it felt like you were being baked and steamed at the same time. While we were there Terry was suffering from a stomach bug, so I explored on my own for a few days. To avoid the worst of the heat I'd leave our cheap funky hotel room very early, 5 or 6 in the morning, and return by 8 or 9. And I'd go out again at dusk when the heat started to dissipate slightly. During most of the day, we camped in our room and drank Orange Fanta and lemon soda and read. The room didn't have AC but it did have a large ceiling fan that was either poorly mounted or broken; it swayed precariously from side to side and groaned as it rotated and circulated the hot air. The fan was right over our bed and we were almost certain the long blades were going to fly off and chop us to pieces, but it was just too stifling to turn it off.

One advantage of being up and out so early was that I got to see the city wake up. Literally. At the time there were estimated to be about 300,000 "street sleepers" in the city, people who lived on the sidewalks in makeshift tents made of canvas or cardboard and rope. Many of them got up at regular hours and went off to jobs and returned to the same spots in the evening. Public water spigots served as the morning bath, often 10 or 20 people sharing one fountain, and food was cooked on tiny coal burners. Despite the poverty and the awful smells and the utter lack of privacy, there was a vibrancy that was palpable and urgent. As an outsider wandering the streets I felt like I was privy to the intimate routines of many thousands of people whose lives were completely exposed. I'd never seen anything quite like it and haven't since. 

On one of my early morning wanderings I happened upon a group of wrestlers. They were part of a long tradition called Kushti, a subculture devoted to yoga, bodybuilding, wrestling, spiritual discipline and celibacy. No drinking, no smoking, no sex, a rigorous life of devotion. Apparently there were a number of similar "akharas" (a sort of ashram) around the city, and the groups would have wrestling competitions. When they saw me watching them through the fence surrounding their compound, they invited me in. I watched them train and took pictures respectfully and my presence seemed to be license for them to show off and have a good time. It was decided that the older man, who was the guru and trainer, would be covered with mud in my honor. Despite the lack of a common language, much laughter and warmth ensued.

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MY FATHER'S EARLY YEARS AS A REFUGEE: ESCAPING POGROMS IN UKRAINE, 1919-1923

My father was born in 1918 in Kitaigorod, a Jewish village not far from Kiev in Ukraine. His family was, by shtetl standards, wealthy; they owned the general store in town, lived in a two story wood-frame house, and in their youth my grandmother and her sisters regularly rode horses.

In 1919 two pogroms came to town, the second more violent than the first. During the second pogrom, my grandmother Elka held her only child, my father, behind heavy curtains in the kitchen while her own mother was shot and killed in the next room in front of her other children, two of whom were also shot but survived. For decades I've imagined the horror Elka went through, hearing what she heard and hoping her son wouldn't cry out and be discovered, knowing that if he did they'd be killed. The town was ransacked, possessions were looted or destroyed, and extended family members and townspeople were murdered and gravely injured. According to an oral account given by one of my grandmother's sisters about 25 years ago, when dawn arrived the following morning hundreds of corpses were lying in the streets. They were buried in unidentified mass graves, the women in one area and the men in another.

My grandparents knew the only option was to flee. They were only 21 years old, young and scared and with a toddler. My grandmother was friendly with a young Gentile woman in the next town, and thinking they wouldn't make it, she asked her friend if she would take my father and raise him as her own son. The woman said yes she would, but a child should be with his mother. My grandmother agreed, and she, my grandfather, and their 15-month-old son set out on a multi-year voyage that took them across eastern Europe, much of it by foot. My father's brother was born en route in Romania. I don't know the details, but I imagine my grandparents stopped in various places and lived and worked long enough to get enough money to move on to the next destination. That part of the history has been lost. But they finally made it to Constantinople before getting passage to the United States, where some relatives had already established themselves. They arrived at Ellis Island in 1923. My father was 5 years old and didn't speak a word of English.

Once here, my grandparents established a successful dry-goods business that ended up thriving for decades, and by 1941 my father had graduated from NYU's School of Architecture. I have the medal he was awarded for best draughtsman in his class. He served for several years in the Navy, built air bases in the Caribbean during the Second World War, and went on to a fulfilling career building skyscrapers in New York City. He married my mother, had two children, moved to the suburbs and lived a long and fruitful life. Pretty much the definition of the American Dream.

Many families have gone through worse trauma than mine and many are going through unimaginable terror right this moment as I sit in my comfortable book-lined home office looking out at a serene New England landscape. My family's experiences, so profound on a personal level, are but a drop in the bucket of the American experience. Though I fear otherwise, I can only hope that the present bleak historical moment will be overcome and sanity and long-tested American values will eventually prevail. I'm not an optimist when it comes to human affairs, but that doesn't mean I can't be hopeful.

"Outcasts", 1944. An etching by my great-uncle Isaac Friedlander (born Latvia 1890, died NYC 1968).

ALL HAIL! TRUTH IS DEAD!

January 31, 2017

I fear that while we're marching and phone-calling and signing petitions and wearing pussy hats, there's actually a coup d'etat taking place. All hail, truth is dead! Or am I being too paranoid? (The image is by Paul Iribe, ca. 1934, from "Parlons Francais".)

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ORIGINS OF MY WANDERLUST: CHILDHOOD MEMORY, THE STAMP STORE, 1960-1963

The shop was a high-ceilinged, dusty, poorly-lit space with dingy grey-green paint on the walls and vinyl tile flooring that was worn through to the wood underlayment. It smelled old. A couple of haphazardly-filled waist-high glass display cases, both cracked and chipped and one with a flickering flourescent light, separated the front of the shop from the rear. The front was mostly open space with a few unmatched chairs, and in the area behind the cases there were a large, beat-up, cluttered wooden desk, a ripped and sagging leather chair, and an assortment of tall rickety-looking shelves housing albums, boxes, and myriad other containers. 

I started visiting the stamp store when I was seven years old and it turned into an odd ritual. Once every couple of months, after I had saved most or all of my 25 or 50 cents per week allowance, my mother dropped me off at the shop in downtown White Plains. This was before urban renewal had come to town and the neighborhood was run down, with dilapidated storefronts housing struggling and failing businesses. I remember the area as being vaguely threatening, not many people around, newspapers and cigarette butts littering the sidewalk, but it might not have been as sketchy as I remember because my mother felt comfortable enough to leave me there for an hour or so while she did some other shopping. Or perhaps it was just a different time.

The proprietor seemed ancient to me, but now I wonder how old he was. His shoulders were crooked and his face was etched, but there was a softness to his eyes. He moved with slow determination and a slight limp. He seemed lonely and sad and poor but he was kind and gentle and he always gave me his undivided and respectful attention. 

I had discovered my father's stamp collection when I was six. By any objective measure it was modest, housed in a beat up old album with the front cover partially detached. There was nothing rare or valuable in the collection, just a random assortment of foreign and domestic stamps, some that he had salvaged by steaming them off of envelopes, some that he had acquired in the Caribbean during the war years. But for me that album was transformative, a sort of portal through which I could escape into the world. The images captivated and thrilled: dugout canoes from French Guiana, Hindu temples in India, the Sphinx in Egypt, royal portraits from Europe.

For me, at that age, it was magic. My imagination went berserk. I could smell the wet wood of the dugout canoes, could taste the dust in those Indian temples, could feel the Saharan heat. Leafing through that old album I would enter a dream-like state, with at least one foot in the reality pictured on the tiny rectangle of gummed paper. 

I decided I wanted to start a collection of my own. I started by asking relatives and friends of my parents for any unusual stamps they might come across, but my first real substantial trove was obtained by answering an ad in, I believe, a sports magazine. 100 foreign stamps for a dollar! I had to wait something like six weeks, which seemed like six years, but when they arrived I was smitten. Recent issues from newly independent states in sub-Saharan Africa, stamps from China and Japan, the South Pacific, Europe, the Americas. Being an information junkie even at that tender age, I'd look up the countries--first in the Golden Book Encyclopedia and later in the Columbia Encyclopedia--and read about the people, the climate, the terrain, the products they made, the architecture. I just couldn't get enough.

When I was in second grade I begged for and got the Regent World Stamp Album, a massive tome about 4 inches thick, with entries for all the countries in the world that had ever printed stamps. It was heavenly but humbling. Though by then I had bought several lots of stamps by mail from magazine ads, and had received literally hundreds of examples, most of the countries in the album remained empty. There were so many countries! I decided to make it my life goal to try to get at least one stamp from every place listed in that album. Which led me to the stamp store on Main Street.

Each time I'd go to the shop I'd carry a hand-written list of the countries I needed to get a stamp from to make my album complete. The names still evoke wonderment. Aden, Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Alouites, Alexandretta, Allenstein, Andorra, Anjouan, Armenia, Ascension, Azerbaijan, Azores. And those were only the A's! The old man would survey the list, repeat the names in his heavy Eastern European accent, and pull album after album off the shelves. Though the shelves appeared disorganized and messy, he could pinpoint exactly what he was looking for. Sometimes he had to climb on a wooden step-stool to reach the higher shelves and I remember worrying, each time, that he'd fall. After extracting the stamps from the albums with tweezers held in his long and delicate fingers, he'd proudly present a number of possibilities. I'd ponder and discuss with him the merits of the stamps and the countries and after an hour or so I'd choose two or three examples that would fit my very modest budget, I'd give him my dollar or two, and then I'd wait outside for my mother to pick me up. When I got home I'd immediately run to the encyclopedia and read about the places I'd acquired stamps from. I wanted to visit those places so badly it almost hurt and I at least partially attribute my life-long insatiable wanderlust to those early stamp collecting years.

Though the shop was crumbling, though there was a pall of failure about the place, it seemed that once I walked through that old man's door the whole world was available to me. I could only imagine the treasures that were hidden in all those albums and storage containers. Tickets to the most obscure and wonder-filled places on the planet. I probably visited him 20 or 25 times over about a three year period. In all those visits I don't ever remember another person being in the shop. Though my dollar or two each month or so couldn't have mattered much, I remember him engaging me with full concentration every time I was there.

He helped me make a lot of progress towards my goal of getting a stamp from each country, but I never got there. One day around the beginning of fifth grade my mother was about to drop me off at the shop but it was closed and empty, the business and the old man gone. I never learned what happened, whether the business had finally failed, if the building had been condemned, if he had gotten sick. I still remember feeling hollow that day. I'm not sure if I ever knew his name.

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MY FATHER IN WORLD WAR TWO

When I was six years old I discovered my father's world postage stamp album. In it, amidst what seemed like a trove of jewels, was a page of brightly colored stamps from French Guiana showing jungles, natives in dugout canoes, and archers in loincloths drawing back their bows and aiming upward, calmly tensed and poised to shoot. The first time I remember him talking about his wartime experiences was when I asked him about those stamps.

 Samuel Malam was, in a way, an embodiment of the American Dream. Born Shmuel Melamedman in 1918 in a town about 40 miles from Kiev, he was a year old when my grandparents fled their home after a horrific pogrom. Their epic journey took them south through eastern Europe to Constantinople, much of it by foot, and from there on to New York City, where they arrived at Ellis Island in 1923, along with a younger son Benjamin who was born along the way. By 1940 my father, who started first grade confused, terrified and not speaking a word of English, had graduated with an architecture degree from NYU, won the prize for the best draughtsman in his class, and had been assimilated into the American melting pot.

 In the wake of Pearl Harbor, armed with his recently minted architecture degree, he joined the Seabees, the civilian battalion responsible for military construction, and later signed on with the Navy as Chief Petty Officer. He was shipped out to Trinidad, British West Indies in early 1942 and put to work designing, organizing and directing the building of airbases there. It was thought that the Germans would try to establish military bases in South America and make their way north, eventually attacking the mainland US. As a defense, the Americans started building bases all through the Caribbean and northern South America.

 He spent the war years in what he liked to refer to as "the tropics”. Unlike many of his compatriots who served in the European and Pacific theaters, he saw no combat and his life wasn't being threatened. In fact, despite some privations and hardships—being away from his family for the first time, missing his wife-to-be, eating crappy food, and suffering from a constant barrage of heat and humidity, not to mention scorpions and gigantic snakes--as an officer he lived relatively well and he spoke of that time of his life with excitement and nostalgia.

 From early 1942 until December 1945, he was sent from outpost to outpost, mostly in Trinidad and French Guiana, but also in Dutch Guiana, Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Sometimes he lived on bases in or near cities and towns, other times in end-of-the-earth wilderness, always directing the clearing of jungles and forests in order to lay down concrete runways and build barracks, offices, munitions storage facilities, and the other infrastructure of air bases. It was his first “real” job, and with it came a sense of authority, the satisfaction of seeing projects go from conception to completion quickly, and the notion that they were doing essential and necessary work to further the war effort.

 In his free time he painted. He used watercolors and pastels and he did some plein-air work, some documentary, some architectural. Town and street views, shops, local factories, a bauxite mine and refinery, idyllic scenes of fishing boats and palms, his living quarters and bases. His signature surety of line is already there, and it would develop in the urban scenes he painted in the Bronx and Manhattan later in the 1940s and 1950s.

 He also took photos and made albums. His quarters, people, colleagues, his friends both in the service and local, nature, views of construction, town and cityscapes, his various outposts, seaside views, jungle views, his prized orchids, and most interesting to me as a kid, many shots of the prisoners and “liberes” from Devil’s Island, who had settled into tragic post-prison lives in Cayenne, the capital city where he was stationed on and off for a couple of years.

 When the writer Ernie Pyle visited Cayenne, he wrote of the terrible existence of the so-called liberes, destined to live out the remainder of their lives in squalor, and my father must have thought highly of it because I’ve come across several copies of that essay tucked into various photo albums.

 When in Port of Spain, Trinidad, he did an architectural survey of the city. It’s not extensive, but it is meaningful, a rare documentation of the city, a snapshot in time. He drew an annotated map accompanied by 30 or so photos of street scenes and notable buildings, each captioned on the back. One thing he mentioned many times was the dearth of travellers’ infrastructure the region. Most places had none; Port of Spain had one hotel, in the international modernist style. Of course within a couple of decades the entire Caribbean had become a tourist magnet.

 While in the jungle he killed a number of snakes, including a couple of really big ones. One was a 12’ boa constrictor and another (an anaconda?) that must have been 20’ long. He wasn’t a swashbuckler; he ran them over with a Jeep. There’s a picture that exists (I found it!) of about a half dozen locals holding up the bigger one. As for the boa (also found the photo!), he had it skinned and dried, and the snakeskin that he brought back was absolutely the best show-and-tell item ever in the history of elementary school.

 He made friends among colleagues, and I remember that we used to get season’s greetings cards from several of them during my childhood, but he spoke more about locals he had befriended. I don’t remember the circumstances but he spent a lot of time with a fellow named Nazim in Trinidad. I think he was a first generation West Indian from the subcontinent. They made excursions around the island and there are photos of them visiting a monastery, eating in various restaurants, and at a Hindu wedding together. When Nazim himself got married, my father was away in French Guiana, but Nazim sent him a roll of photos of the wedding. It must have been a meaningful friendship.

 And my father spoke most highly of another friend, an artist/musician/dancer named Boscoe Holder, a man he said was one of the most talented people he had ever met. He spent time with him at his studio and went to see him dance. I remember in the 1960s Boscoe’s brother Geoffrey, a dancer and choreographer, was in NYC and got in touch with my father. I don’t remember if anything came of it, but I remember his being delighted. I just googled both brothers, and wow, he was right about their talent!

 All this against the backdrop of a life back home. My father had met, dated, and fallen in love with Jeannette Lubarsky, I think in 1939 or 1940. As was the case with so many people in that generation, war got in the way of love. In the nearly four years my father was gone, I think he was able to return on leave three, or at most, four times, for two weeks at a stretch. I don’t know when they got engaged, but they were married on one of those leaves, on February 6th, 1944. He wasn’t home for good until December 1945. They were married 61 years.

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DETROIT MEMORY 1963

My father, an architect who worked for a major NYC builder, was in charge of the construction of the Detroit Bank and Trust Building in downtown Detroit in the early 60s. He commuted from NY to Detroit on a weekly basis for 3 years or so. In the summer of 1963, my mother, brother and I joined him for about 6 weeks. His weekday home was a downtown luxury apartment building, which happened to be the summer home for those Detroit Tigers whose permanent residence was not in the Detroit area. The team provided 8 or 9 players with apartments in the very building in which I spent the summer.

I was a crazy passionate baseball fan at that point. When I found out that I lived in practically a holy site, I decided to knock on doors and get autographs. I would go around with my little 5-year old brother, Bruce, and in general we were treated super well. Everyone signed autographs, and a couple of people invited us in to talk. Norm Cash and his wife even gave us milk and cookies. I was in heaven.

The last encounter, near the end of our stay in the building, wasn't quite as great. I knocked on Denny McClain's door around 3 in the afternoon (he was a rookie just up from the minors, I think). He didn't answer, but I heard something so I knocked several times. Finally he opened the door part way with only a towel around his waist, looked at me and said "whadduya want kid?". I was so intimidated I didn't know what to say and I started stammering out an answer when I heard a woman's voice say, "who's that, Denny?" He said "just some kid" and closed the door on me.

Of course, being a naive 10 year old I didn't realize that I had interrupted this guy having sex with his girlfriend in the middle of the afternoon of an off-day. Despite the fact that my mother was quite amused when I told her the story, it was only years later that it dawned on me what had happened. 

Postscript: The ball pictured here was a gift from a colleague of my father's. Denny McClain went on to be a star, the last 30-game-winning pitcher in the majors, and eventually spent considerable time in prison and rehab for activities with organized crime.

PATRIOTISM IS NOT ENOUGH. I MUST HAVE NO HATRED OR BITTERNESS FOR ANYONE

I was deeply moved when I saw this monument the last time I was in London. Edith Cavell was a British nurse in WWI who insisted on treating wounded soldiers on both sides. After helping 200 allied soldiers escape from occupied Belgium, she was arrested, charged with treason, and sentenced to death. Despite worldwide pleas for mercy she was killed by a German firing squad on October 12, 1915.

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