Giants in the Earth?

I’m a piker—having done it the easy way—but for many people, the journey from the Old World to the new was drenched in difficulty. It certainly was for Inge and Olaf, the young couple featured in the tender, poignant movie Sweet Land, the first full-length film directed by Ali Selim.

Much of the movie is what isn’t said, and yet what is clear; as well, for me, much of the movie is not what happens, but what doesn’t. Perhaps that’s why what seems to be a simple, did-anything-happen-in-this-movie is filled with subtleties and suggestions.

The plot is simple—Inge, a young German mail-order bride arrives in Northern Minnesota carrying two suitcases, a huge wooden-horned phonograph, and—critically—no papers. But she’s also equipped with a strong will: true, having closed the door behind her, there was no going back. But she’s determined to make a good life out of what she has come to. And that is? A community that deeply mistrusts her, a wedding that the minister calls off the afternoon of her arrival, a fiancé with whom she quarrels almost immediately and whose language she doesn’t speak. Right—if she didn’t have a backbone to start with, she was certainly going to have to order one quick….

Curiously, the movie is so strong in its characterizations—and so well played and shot—that it survives any bullets a rational mind might shoot. How, for example, did Inge get to Minnesota without papers? And were Inge and Olaf really threshing all that wheat by hand? Not to mention cutting it all by hand? What were the horses doing—smoking Gauloises and discussing Cubism?

Selim, the director, in an interview said that the feisty, stubborn character of Inge was probably not historically likely or true. Hmmm—to me, it made perfect sense: my father’s mother was second generation Norwegian-American, but no pushover. What child of the prairies could be? So what if the story of my grandmother ordering my father—who wanted a quarter to go to the movies—to move the woodpile from one side of the house, report back for orders, and then get told to move the pile back to where it had been…so what if that story wasn’t true? The point is that we all believed it, as anyone who had known her would have. Poetic truth is just as strong—I actually want to claim stronger—than physical or objective truth.

Which also means that one of the main characters, though it never rolls through the credits, is the land itself. The film is shot so beautifully that you can hear the crickets at night, and feel the heat shimmering off the wheat field late in the summer afternoon. But perhaps because the film is based on a short story, the specter of winter, with its arctic blasts and accumulations of snow for which the Norwegians—sheltered by the Gulf Stream—were completely unprepared, is never raised.

I came to the film through Taí, my much-loved Puerto Rican sister, who had happened across the film and had immediately thought of me. She had heard, as well as edited the print versions, of the stories of my father’s days in the Dustbowl in North Dakota, and knew something as well about the emotional landscape of the Scandinavians, and how it had interacted with their new physical landscape. Because by no means is the settler experience the story of how the newcomer arrives to change the land—it’s also the story of how the land molds the settler. Nor is it clear—at least in my mind—which is the greater transformation.

My father’s grandparents did that a century and a half ago, I did a truncated version a couple of decades ago. True, I arrived in Puerto Rico without a word of Spanish, but it was hardly the case that this most Americanized island of the Caribbean was going to be a familiar world to me.

Or was it?

Because I had left my aged parents behind, as well as my world. People spoke English, yes—but almost always as a second language: I would see the desperate looks of wonderful people I met at parties, they were eager to escape me. Or rather, escape the burden of speaking a foreign language. Parties at which I started several steps back, since at gringo parties the men all sit around on one end of the room and worry about politics and the economy, and the women are at the other end, worrying about society and their kids. But what are men and women doing at Puerto Rican parties?

Dancing salsa!

So I was still quite bug-eyed when, three or four weeks before my father died, he decided to visit me for the first time in Puerto Rico. It was unusual in several respects: unlike my mother, Jack hated to travel. Nor was he, temperamentally or experientially, particularly suited to Hispanic culture. So a stolid Norwegian-American encountering the exuberance of tropical, Latin culture? As I was learning, this oil and water was going require a lot of shaking…

But I had written him, in a moment of love and remembrance, and told him that he and my mother had been great parents, that they had done right by me when they were tired or frustrated or—especially—poor. I can see now my mother’s hand writing the check for $2500, the check that would buy me the cello that has accompanied me through my life, that has been and is my voice.

“Whew,” she said, “I’ve never written a check that big….”

They had met my cello teacher, he had played the instrument, and had said it was a fair price. He then gave the instrument to me, to try out for a week.

“Franny,” I overheard my father say to my mother in the kitchen, “we’re going to have to buy that cello for Marc…”

It hadn’t always been easy between my father and me, since the unspoken fact that I was gay made—as unspoken things do—a gap. But in the spring of his 84^th year, he traveled to the tropics; later that year, we winterized the house in the Wisconsin woods, and discovered post-it notes everywhere: turn off this valve, remove this screen. It was clear: he had known he was going to die.

We were living on Calle Sol in Old San Juan in a small apartment; above us lived Pablo, an older gay man, who was also a professor of Sociology. And he was astute as well, remembering Margaret Mead or whoever’s dictum that people are more alike than different. Even so, I was astonished when Pablo asked my father if he had ever read Giants in the Earth.

It was like asking a Chinaman if he had ever eaten rice….

Except that that would be an insult; Jack, however, was delighted to be asked the question, and replied that he certainly had, and had, as well, an anecdote about it.

Pat yourself on the back, Dear Reader, and count yourself well-versed if you’ve even heard of Ole Edvart Rølvaag’s trilogy, of which Giants is one part, but the book was well-known and often read in the early part of the 20^th century: it’s an account of the Norwegian immigrants in the Dakotas. My father, who had spent some dark years during the dust-bowl in Maxbass, North Dakota, had read the book, and was eager to know what an older neighbor—who had lived through the isolation, ostracism, plagues, cruel weather, lost crops, anything-in-short-of-Biblical-proportions—had thought of the book.

“Humf,” she sniffed, “he didn’t do nothin’ but write down what we lived….”

An example of what they lived? Well, according to what Jack told me, the early settlers had tried to get to the Dakotas as early in the planting season as possible, because—besides getting a crop in—you wanted to build your house before winter came. Otherwise, you’d be forced to do as many did: carve as much of a hole as you could in the earth, erect a sort of lean-to against the howling, frigid winds, and huddle for five months of a North Dakota winter.

Wait—is that story true? Or was it simply the kind of story that the old-timers told the newer immigrants: part of the you-don’t-know-how-easy-you-got-it drill?

Well, I remembered all this as I watched Sweet Land with Taí and Mr. Fernández—the cause of the most recent Newhouse immigration—and also with the shades of my immigrant grandparents, who were as present as they were invisible, and especially when the plot turned….

A good story requires a good villain, and here, it’s the banker, wearing his good suits, putting the screws on the farmers, inventorying their household goods, and threatening foreclosure. Great for the movie, but not so good in real life, since my grandfather, in addition to being a farmer out in North Dakota, was also the…

…banker.

It was acknowledged, but not embraced, this part of our history, and if I know anything about it, it’s from a cousin, who sent me some papers about the Gold-Stabeck Land and Credit Company of Land and Credit Company of Southern Minnesota, incorporated on 16 December 1901. The story is complicated, as families tend to be, but the essence of it is that a group of Norwegian immigrants who had settled in Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin in the last half of the 19^th century were bankrolling immigrants in North Dakota who were coming slightly later.

Consider my great grandfather, who was born in Rollag, Norway, in 1841 and emigrated to the US in 1859—he moved in with his aunt and her husband who, their child having died, adopted him. (The husband had been in the States since 1842, which must have made him one of the first Norwegians to settle in the New World.) And what do we know of Niri Oleson (Naeset) Newhouse, my great grandfather? Well, in a letter he wrote in 1869 to his family back in Norway, two things stand out.

The first is extreme—at least to modern eyes—religiosity: he devotes half of the letter to his parents to moralizing on sacred themes: the need to walk the path of the righteous, the need to unite with brethren despite differences, etc. The news that he has had another son, and that the first is healthy—though hastily mentioned before all this moralizing—is almost an afterthought.

The second is more tantalizing; he writes a single sentence:

I often think about how nice it would have been if we had been not so far apart, so that we with our mouths could have spoken what is in our minds. Yes—even a handshake with you would have meant very much to me.

Then, a crack in the Nordic emotional landscape having erupted, he flies back into the moralizing, and finishes with a report on the crops, as well as worry about the national debt of two billion dollars, the result of the Civil War.

Niri’s oldest son, William, went to college, and then to the University of Wisconsin Law School; he was for some years the District Attorney of Rock County in Illinois. Then he joined the Gold-Stabeck Company, which was taking advantage of the opening of North Dakota.

The railroad had arrived, or rather was arriving, and speculators were buying land around the tracks. And the weather was good—wetter than it usually was, which was good for wheat. So the Gold-Stabeck Company seemed to do a little of everything: buying and selling securities, trading commodities, buying and selling land. And according to my father, his father spent a lot of time traveling from Clinton, Wisconsin—the family home—to Minneapolis—home of the Gold-Stabeck Company—and North Dakota. Remember the boom years of the 1990’s and the first part of the 2000’s? That’s what the first decades of the 20th century were: everybody was making money, everybody was sure the good times would go on forever, nobody thought that the weather would revert to the parched aridity that would kill the wheat.

And so my grandfather was catching trains west with some frequency; years later my father would say that the sound of a train whistle would plunge him into a deep sadness: it brought back too many farewells.

The good times couldn’t last, though in the good years my grandfather had acquired a couple of farms near Maxbass, North Dakota. And when, in 1922, the weather turned, the dust bowl started, the farmers couldn’t pay their mortgages, the bankers and the people who had sold the “safe” securities couldn’t pay the bondholders.

In  1992, according to my cousin, my grandfather and grandmother moved out to North Dakota, to try to make the land work, and to try to make good on the promises they had made to the people who had invested with them.

Nor was he the only member of the family out there: my grandfather’s Uncle Martin was there, and was also involved in finance—through the Maxbass Security Bank, of which he was vice president. He stayed there, the family records report, until his death.

That’s the official story. The unofficial story, whispered through the generations and disputed officially, was that Uncle Mart had spent most of his own money hoping to keep the bank afloat, hoping not to disappoint the people—his neighbors—who had trusted in him and invested with him. When the money was gone, he put up the “out of business sign” on the front door of the bank, and went home. He had failed.

It weighed on him: the people who had lost their savings; the widows who were now destitute; the neighbors and friends whom he would have to see at church and whom his wife would have to greet in the shops. It didn’t on his young children. Who decided to point, at the breakfast table, the spouts of the coffee pot, the creamer, the juice pitcher—anything that had a spout—directly at their father. He cracked, walked into the barn, and shot himself.

People remember the Great Depression, but forget that the boom years of the twenties were terrible for farmers. My grandfather and grandmother retreated back to northern Illinois, and sent, some years later, my father out to North Dakota, to live on the farm and work it as he could. My father described the trip in a letter to his cousin, to whom he had not been close.

So why write?

They both had ridden motorcycles, Jack, my father, had fallen for a lemon with a beautiful paint job. They spent, apparently, more time pushing the cycle than they ever did riding it, and were treated as only one step up from tramps. Did he spend the nights in jail cells, as so many itinerants moving west did? He’s not around to tell me, nor is anyone else.

But there are the stories I remember. The hailstorm that arrived, and wiped out the wheat field, ruined the crop, doomed them to a year with no income. My father and his father had watched the storm from the front porch of the small, rickety frame house. In twenty minutes, the ground was covered with golf-ball sized chunks of ice.

“Get some cream from the barn,” my grandfather had said, “and we’ll make some ice cream….”

There were sheep, which gave birth, and the newborn lambs required feeding. So there Jack was, in his early twenties, in one of the two rooms of the house. The lambs would be with him in one room, he’d grab one lamb, feed it, and then throw it into the other room, over a partition he had established. When the last lamb was fed, he could trudge off to bed.

The winters were long, fuel was scarce. In particular, firewood, which was the source of heat and cooking. My father once described how on clear days in Maxbass, close to the Canadian border, he could see down to the Turtle Mountains halfway across the state. It gave him, he said, a wonderful, exhilarating sense of being on top of the world; when he returned to hilly Minneapolis, he would feel claustrophobic.

Very nice—but it argues for a lack of trees, and those that were there tended to be dwarfed and wind-bent. Jack began to ponder the telephone poles that were being erected. And so he cut the first one down, and then learned: when you’ve succumbed once, how easy is it to sin again?

There was the time a cowboy—yes, a real-life cowboy, with a hand-rolled cigarette jutting from his teeth—dropped in, as my father was raising the bread dough. My father, embarrassed to be at the womanly task of baking bread, decided to leave the chore until the cowboy had left. But the man spotted the dough under the towel, and asked:

“Whatcha got there, boy?”

Jack declined to say. But the cowboy was having none of it; he strode over, whipped the towel off the dough, and stared at it.

“Jesus Christ, boy, you gotta punch down this dough,” and did so. He then started kneading.

My father must have suffered an isolation harder than the physical isolation, great though that was. It was no shame to be broke during the dustbowl, but what was it, to be the son and nephew of the men who had lent the money, foreclosed the properties, gone broke themselves, and left their creditors in ruins? It could be argued: my father had no part in the mess, even if his elders—though now impoverished themselves—had been at least partially to blame. But could the farmers or their wives remember that, as they saw my twenty-something father on the streets of Maxbass? And what did my father feel, as he looked into the eyes of those good people, who had bet on the weather and the good times, and had lost? Bawling lambs must have been the least of my father’s problems.

“North Dakota had a big effect on him; it marked him for life,” said my mother. And little wonder—never did he feel really safe, really secure. He worried about money and financial security and his kids and their jobs to his end.

What role had my grandfather played in the debacle that was the Dustbowl of the twenties? A century ago, he had been doing well, prospering, making money for himself and the people who trusted him. Then it all went west—and not in the good sense.

What can be said for him?

He went back to the community—and later sent his son to it—and lived with and faced down the neighbors who had trusted him. Who knows what that had cost?

Were any of them—my father, my grandfather, my great-uncle—giants in the earth? Certainly not completely: they were the victimizers and the victims, the victor and the vanquished, men who held up their world until it fell down upon them. What—if any—was their heroism?

They held on….

An Achingly Beautiful Voice

All it took was one phrase, one utterly beautiful and musically criminal phrase that absolutely took my breath away. In that one moment, there was no other singer possible than Arleen Auger; there was no other music than that suspect but achingly beautiful Bach.

And I was hooked, as I have been ever since. Her voice is perhaps the cleanest I’ve ever heard, her intonation was impeccable, and her control was spectacular. And on stage, she projected a regal simplicity: she had started out as an elementary teacher, drifted in singing, and started her career subbing for Lucia Popp. Here’s The New York Times on the subject:

As it turned out, the soprano Lucia Popp had just withdrawn from a production of "Zauberflote" at the Vienna State Opera. That company's director, Josef Krips, heard Miss Auger's audition at the smaller Volksoper, and offered her a contract. When she joined the company, she later said, she knew only the one role, had no stage experience and did not speak German. She made her debut without a rehearsal, and had to ask other singers where to go as she was pushed out on stage.

Right—you’d remember that night!

And so, like so many other young American singers, Auger formed her career in  Europe, and though she later became known in the States, it was her nearly 200 recordings that were her introduction.

Obviously, those 200 recordings included a lot of music, and Auger’s repertoire went from Monteverdi to two song cycles by women composers that Auger had commissioned. And the only time I saw Auger in concert, she had made the slightly unusual choice of championing Ned Rorem in her recital. 

She was singing on the cusp, and what a glorious cusp it was. We now have amazing musicians singing impeccably in what is  called “historically informed perfortmance practice,” which means, if a whole group of musicologists are to believed, that the sounds that come out of Philippe Jaroussky’s voice today are utterly the same that Monteverdi—four hundred years ago—would have heard.

There are days I feel that—and I know this is heresy—arguing with the early-music guys is like arguing with a cat, and guess who always wins? But Auger in her peak was before the peak of historically informed blah-blah-blah. So what did that mean? Well, there was a harpsichord yes—we were that far along—but the cellist playing the continuo? As you can hear below, he’s (I’m presuming “he”) using the most gorgeous vibrato, which h creates a golden tone that is ravishing, ravishing…but in Bach? In Handel?

And what about those tempi? Modern singers have their foot quite firmly on the gas, and there are times you feel you’re on a sort of musical autobahn, but Auger? She’s out there floating across azure skies and above golden fields in some lovely balloon, being held aloft by her own gorgeous voice. Is it correct, that lovely voice? Probably not. But it’s achingly beautiful.

“Achingly,” by the way, being the adjective of choice for Auger—check out the comments by all the YouTube commentators, and you’ll see that it’s the frontrunner.

It’s the voice, yes, but also what we know: this luminous, luscious artist contracted brain cancer in her early fifties, and died cruelly young at age 53. Today, she would be 75—no longer singing, but very probably teaching, and very likely contributing a lot to younger singers.

A friend, a fine male alto who, yes, toed the musical line of our times once confessed: however difficult vibrato is for a string player, it’s utterly natural for the human voice. So yes, he used vibrato sparingly in baroque music, but he was never altogether convinced.   

And for Auger? However wrong she is, she’s absolutely right!

Anyone seen Lorca?

It was an improbable thing to do, which may have made it probable, since who can predict what a poet named Lady will do? She disappeared for a month in France—OK, it wasn’t really a disappearance, since she appeared from time to time via Facebook sitting in front of châteaux, or drinking wine, or contemplating courtyards: you get to do stuff like that if you marry French guys. But whatever possessed Lady to put her child in a regular school?

The point was that the 12-year old Naïa, was homeschooled—home being in this case the café / gift shop owned by her parents. And though her tutor was a pillar of ordinary, her adopted uncle, who sat writing nearby? Definitely less than a steadying influence.

“She won’t last a week,” said Montalvo, as we were reading—as an exercise in use of punctuation—a letter of recommendation I had written for Naïa. “She’ll take one look at the playground, hate it, and retreat into a corner, never speaking to anybody.”

This had to be protested—there are limits to disloyalty that even I have to respect. We did, however, briefly discuss whether we could start a little pool, with everybody chipping in a buck or two and betting on the likely day of balking.

Because how could it not happen? For one thing, Naïa has never been seen to sit—her one mode of repose is a flop. From this vantage, whatever education had to be poured into her was done so like a dowager duchess dispensing tea. It stayed there long enough to be dribbled off onto a test, and then the space was given off to more interesting affairs like dinosaurs and dragons.

From time to time, questions arose to which—mistakenly—I was thought to have the answers. What was the predicate of a sentence? And what then was a predicate nominative?

“It is that,” I said, “which follows a copulative verb….”

The tutor sputtered, the tutee twittered, I maintained a haughty silence.

I know, I know—the very same English teachers who draped the lascivious legs of the grand piano (you know men and their lustful ways….) came up with the term “linking verb,” but so? Could you resist using the word “copulative” to a twelve-year old?

“I don’t know what that means,” said the tutor.

“Easy,” I tell him. “Birds do it, bees do it, and baby, verbs can REALLY do it.”

So we got that sorted out, and then proceeded to the next question, which is why would anybody care?

Answer—because it’ll be on the test.

“I greatly fear,” I tell them, ”that one day some horrid educator will make an enormous blunder and put something you’ll actually want to know on the test. And since your habit of forgetting everything on the test—for which I salute you, by the way—has now gone through ‘instinctual’ and is well into the territory of ‘congenital,’ what will you do?”

Twelve-year olds? They know when to ignore you.

Which Naïa did yesterday, after I told her she had blown her chances of paying her way into Yale or Harvard: she’ll have to rely on a dragon scholarship. Why? Because she told me she had fallen at school

“Excellent,” I told her, “though it may have been a bit more subtle to have waited for the third week. As it is, it could seem just a bit mercenary.”

“I don’t know what that is….”

“The point is whether you filed an incident report?”

“Marc, I just got up. Some kid helped me….”

I’m appalled.

“You allowed a non-medically trained person to attend you? You should have stayed in place, groaning loudly, speed-dialing your mother’s lawyer, and clamoring for a neurologist to see you immediately! Naïa, how can you not know that?”

“It was just a little fall, and it doesn’t hurt as much know as it did an hour ago.”

“That’s a terrible sign,” I tell her, “since it’s very clear that your nerve cell are necrolysing.” She doesn’t know the word, nor does the computer, but that hardly matters.

“It means that your nerve cells are slowly dying, as a result of this trauma, and that at any minute they will explode, releasing the deadliest toxins into your bloodstream. It’s actually quite improbable that by tomorrow you’ll be able to walk. Amputation, even here with a kitchen knife, is probably the only solution.”

Lady comes by to kiss Naïa.

“Remember this moment,” I tell Lady, “since this will be the last moment, in life, in which you’ll kiss your daughter! Ah, there’ll you’ll be, in the cemetery, flung down on the raised ground of your daughter’s grave, wailing and showering the tombstone with your tears. Hah! See what you’ve done?”

“No it won’t,” says Lady, and to prove it kisses Naïa again. 

“You’ve no one to blame but yourself,” I tell her. “And don’t look to me for support! No, I’ll be right there in the cemetery, raking you to coals. ‘You cast your daughter to certain death, woman, and see now how you pay! Wail, wail, but to no avail! Ne’er more will she flop on the red sofa, fiddling with her iPad, and animalizing her imaginary zoos! Nay, she is gone, gone—killed by the mother who rashly thrust her into that deathtrap of a school! Weep, wench, weep—no tears will bring her back!’”

Mothers of 12-year old girls? They know how to ignore you too….

“It’s completely not right,” I tell Jorge a moment ago. “I keep looking over to where she should be, and then I realize, she’s in some dumb school.”

“I know,” says Jorge, “I miss her too….”

“You know what worries me? Where will this end? What if she decides to put Lorca, the pet Chihuahua, in school? Will we just have to put up with that? And what if Neruda, the green Dominican parrot, gets it into his head to stop screaming?”

“That bird can die,” says Jorge so quickly that we both know: it’s true.

So forget the bird, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re dognapping Lorca until Naïa returns.

Oh, and can we start a pool on that?

A Time to Heal

It lasted a week or it lasted a couple of weeks, or it came and then it went, only to come back stronger or weaker. But the point isn’t really how long it lasted, because one thing about disease is that it distorts time. Or perhaps it has its own time, one in which the watches and the clocks and the places you have to go and the people you have to see get replaced by the joints, which are being broken by torturers who could have taught tricks to the Chinese, or the wet bedclothes at three in the morning, since the fever has burned all the fluids out of you. And where are you now? In suspended time, freezing, sopping wet, and too tired and too afraid to get out of bed into the tropical night, since 75 degrees with a gentle night breeze will feel like Wisconsin, February, at seven AM standing on Park Street, as the wind courses off Lake Mendota.

It was, when I was able to think about it at all, somewhat like the anteroom to AIDS. There were the fevers of about 105 degrees, which coupled with being alone, produced a fear and a disorientation that was as divorced from reality…wait, it WAS reality. Because the Marc who was essentially driven by his mind—the body being completely happy to be steered and sped along as needed—had become his body, which at this point was falling apart at the speed of a nuclear fission.

In moments like, people are likely to come home—people whose body has been doing what the body should be doing, which is carry the brain / mind around effortlessly—these people tend to come home and bring wisdom from a land once inhabited but now deserted, sere, converted into a lunar landscape. And what do these people say?

“You have to eat,” they say. And wouldn’t that be logical, if any food tasted anything like it used to, or even if it didn’t, if it tasted something like how you remembered food to taste? Then there’s the question—lifting the fork to the mouth is something that Schwarzenegger could have done in his heavy-training days, but Marc? Whose total energy is being consumed by shivering, since the difference between the 98 degrees outside my body and the 105 degrees inside my body has produced copious sweating and shivering.

“Just eat that side of beef,” says Mr. Fernández, “and then you can start in on the four or five industrial sized pots of soup I’ve made you. And what did you have for lunch?”

What did I have for lunch? OK—ask me an easy one, for starters, such as ‘what is the Max Planck Constant and what is its role in the history of modern physics?’

Fortunately, Mr. Fernández is among the oldest of several siblings, which means he has years of reasoning with the less robust minded. So he’s well equipped to say things for which there are no good answers. How’s this: “well, how do you expect to get better if you don’t eat?” Or this, a personal favorite: “well, you have to go the doctor, you know….”

And why do I have to go the doctor? Because the doctor will say hugely important words, which are to go home, rest, take Tylenol for pain. And then wait until the virus decide to go somewhere else and mess with them.

Oh—and further crucial advice: drink lots of fluids.

All of this, min d you, started because a mosquito who presented a particularly vicious and venomous visage decided to bite me, knowing full well that he was harboring the Chikungunya virus: Chikungunya in this case being a Malaysian world meaning (Wikipedia’s definition) “bent doubled over” or (my version) “you’re completely fucked.”

And so the world staggered on for about two weeks and guess what? However much I berate myself for doing a singularly bad job of keep the world in some reasonable order, it now appears that things really do mess up when I stray from the job. That little situation in Gaza—it certainly didn’t get any better. Oh, and it turns out that we’re back to bombing Iraq. Even worse, we have a white cop in a predominantly black community of Missouri, and what does the cop do? Take the kid out better than any of Capone’s boys ever did in Chicago a century ago. Oh, and when the community—rather thin-skinned of them, but whoever said working with the public was any picnic—protested, what was the reaction?

“It made the dear 60’s seem kind of quaint,” I remarked to Mr. Fernández last night, since we’ve graduated back from statements-reasoning-with-a-three-year-old to something like normal adult discourse. Because in the old days, the cops had Billy clubs, yes, and canisters of tear gas. Right—there wasn’t much to be done about the Billy clubs, but everybody knew that a handkerchief soaked in vinegar would get you through the worst of the tear gas. But now?

What happened, at least what I saw on YouTube this morning, was an army mobilizing against an enemy, which in this case was the community it was supposed to serve. I’m what passes for white, getting to the age where a cane will become my third leg, and speak the language of respect—as in how to get people to give it to you. But if I were young, poor, and black?

I’d be terrified.

It seemed that a week or two in bed with breaking bones might have been the better alternative than a week or two seeing Ferguson Missouri burn. I shuddered, scowled, and turned to Monteverdi.

At least it was better than Taking Tylenol, getting lots of rest, and drinking lots of fluid…..