The Redwoods of Wisconsin

It was a day to wake up thinking about the American chestnut tree.

Why?

Well, the American chestnut was once called “the redwood of the East,” since it could grow up to 70 feet tall, it grew straight, and the wood resisted rot and mildew. In fact, as you can see in the video below, one tree could provide enough wood to build a barn and a house.

And they were all over Appalachia, accounting for perhaps 25% of the forest canopy. Here, take a look:

That’s a serious tree, right? Unfortunately, the tree is extinct, though there are millions of specimens growing from Georgia to Maine.

How can that be?

In 1904, the legend goes, a botanist introduced the Chinese Chestnut into the New York Botanical Gardens, and those tree were infected with a fungal blight, to which the Chinese chestnut had resistance. But the American chestnut? It had none, and soon, almost all trees were afflicted with a canker that grew around the tree, killing off anything above. The tree, however, could still sprout, but those sprouts too would be infected. So what was once a majestic tree now exists as a shrub. If lucky, the tree can make it up to 25 feet or so before succumbing—a far cry from the 100 feet of the trees before the fungus arrived.

Rapidly, the trees fell ill and died; it’s a rare person who may have seen one. But here’s the good news: there are two groups taking two separate paths working to save the tree. The first group is the American Chestnut Foundation, located in Asheville, North Carolina, which started out cross-breeding American chestnuts with Chinese chestnuts. Then, they bred up to six generations of trees exclusively with the American chestnut; now they have achieved trees that are 94% American. And they’ve planted 14,000 on 30 acres of rural Pennsylvania. By the way, one of the cool benefits of sending 300 bucks to the American Chestnut Foundation—besides being able to brag to your friends that you’re a “chestnut leaf annual sponsor”—is that you might (if they’re available) get four chestnut seeds of your own to plant. However, first you have to sign an agreement; here’s a summary from the Foundation’s website:

The Germplasm Agreement is a standard agreement used by many universities when someone is testing plantings such as TACF’s Restoration Chestnuts. In fact, the agreement is very similar to agreements used by the University of Wisconsin, Iowa State University and several other universities that are involved in agricultural and forestry research.

This agreement in no way dictates any control over your property or does the agreement keep you from eventually harvesting your trees for lumber.Since these trees are unproven, it is critical that test plantings or the subsequent seeds produced by your trees not be planted without TACF knowing the location of the plantings. Otherwise we can’t evaluate the progress of the plantings.

The other group working on the chestnut is at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and they’ve chosen another strategy: inserting a blight-resistance gene (from wheat, of all things) into the American chestnut. And they, too, seem posed for success. So as The New York Times points out, it seems to be a matter of time. We’ll know, probably in ten years or so.

Can’t wait? Well, anybody near La Crosse, Wisconsin should consider contacting the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, and begging, pleading, doing-whatever-you-can to see what was, at least in 2003, the largest strand of American chestnuts in the world. Located in the West Salem area, well, here’s that the DNR had to say:

There are thousands of mammoth chestnut trees standing on 60 acres of private forestland in La Crosse County. These trees comprise the largest remaining stand of American chestnut in the world.

Sadly, the Wisconsin chestnuts were hit by the blight, despite being quite far out of the natural habitat (they were brought from the east by Martin Hicks, an early settler), but the grove is being monitored by scientists from UW-La Crosse, Michigan State, and West Virginia University. So though the strand has been reduced, there’s hope for a comeback.

Dr. William MacDonald, of West Virginia University, said this about the chestnut blight: it was "the single greatest catastrophe known in recorded North American forest history."

Today’s good news?

In a decade, it might be over!

P.S. Disinclined to spend three hundred dollars on four nuts? Well, unbelievably, you can plant 8 to 12 in seedlings by ordering from a nursery in Wisconsin. Not this year—I called and learned that they were out of stock. But next year, yes. When I asked how the nursery had obtained the seedlings, the response was a bit vague. Best of all is the price: $8.49, which goes down to 2.99 if you order 250 saplings. Where do these saplings come from? The man at the nursery wouldn’t say, but here’s what the website said:

These seedlings are grown from chestnuts collected from a large orchard of very old American Chestnut trees which have never displayed symptoms of the blight even though the blight has affected all the other trees in the region.  It is uncommon to see this happen and leads us to believe that the parents may have some natural built in blight resistance.

Here’s the link…

http://www.chiefrivernursery.com/store/American-Chestnut-6-12-Seedlings.html 

A Journalist and an Historian

Well, he’s an interesting guy, with an interesting set of beliefs. And he’s much in the news, now, since he has taken Edward Snowden’s revelations public through The Guardian and The Washington Post.

But the hour-long interview that I just watched was filmed two years ago, when Glenn Greenwald was relatively unknown, and had just published his book, With Liberty and Justice for Some. The central premise of the book? That our political institutions have become so corrupted that we now have a two-tiered system of justice—one for the rich and powerful, the other for the rest of us.

A defining moment for Greenwald was Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. From then on, the idea that we had to “look forward, move on, achieve closure” meant that every president since then joins the old boys network. A classic case, according to Greenwald, was how even in the interregnum of winning the election and the inauguration, Obama was slithering out of persecution of the Bush administration for war crimes, for lying to the American people and to Congress, for launching an aggressive war. Which, by the way, was the key crime of Adolf Hitler that the United States and the world charged in the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.

And it’s a clear path—the lack of prosecution of Richard Nixon lead to the lack of persecution for Irangate and high officials in the Reagan administration, the invasion of Iraq in Desert Storm, the torture and abuses of human rights in the Bush years. And as Greenwald points out, anybody who suggests that Bush be held to justice has instantly self-marginalized himself.

What’s particularly curious is—where’s the outrage? We are, after all, living in the most connected era in history. I can now tell you that in Syria, the foreign minister has appeared to agree to demands to allow international inspection or control. A hundred and fifty years ago, people were still fighting in wars after the truce had been declared.

By now, everyone can see the problem: we have an oligarchy. Members of Congress spend half of their time—minimally—struggling to get elected. And that money doesn’t come from you and me. Unless, of course, your last name is Rockefeller….

The other curious thing is how easy it should be, hypothetically, to solve the whole thing. Look, other governments have found out or figured out ways to take the money out of politics. Why can’t we?

We could start with simply funding public elections. Punto—oh, and can we put an end to television advertising? Debates, yes—but a president or senator isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a product. Though they have become so….

The next thing to do would be to throw out all the fancy voting apparatus and go back to the paper ballot and the cardboard box. The voting machine industry, by the way, is highly technical, extremely expensive, and is dominated by about three companies, all headed by rabid Republicans.

We also are going to have to increase minimum wage. Oh, and speaking of which—and speaking also of the corrosive effect of money on public policy—here’s Bill Moyers on the other NRA.

In June, the National Restaurant Association boasted that its lobbyists had stopped minimum wage increases in 27 out of 29 states in 2013. In Connecticut, which increased its state minimum wage, a raise in the base pay for tipped workers such as waitresses and bartenders vanished in the final bill. A similar scenario unfolded in New York State: It increased its minimum wage, but the NRA’s last-minute lobbying derailed raising the pre-tip wage at restaurants and bars. The deals came despite polls showing 80 percent support for raising the minimum wage.     

Rounding back to Greenwald, he argues that we have a system in which the powerful get away—figuratively and even occasionally literally—with murder, whereas the poor are more easily incarcerated than ever.

OK—jailing is one thing we do to the poor. The other thing we do—as I learned in class today—is to use them as cannon fodder. That’s what my student taught me, as she showed me a photo on her iPhone of her nephew, who had just enlisted in the army.

Well, he thought it was all he could do. He had just turned 18, he had bad grades and couldn’t go to the university, and jobs? Are you kidding?

I tried to be hopeful; my student was near tears. But the reality is that if her nephew comes back, his life may be just as hellish as it was in Iraq. It may, in fact, become something like Iraq 2.0, with the terrors being internal and systemic, as opposed to external and random.

Oh, and the people who wrecked the system, so that there are no jobs, and kids have to off to war? The criminals in the thousand-dollar suits? They’re free, and riding a soaring stock market right now….

Greenwald also makes the point that we have blended the lines between the public and private sectors. And nowhere is this more true than in “national security.” Who would have imagined a world in which we have out-sourced granting security access? It’s madness.

And Greenwald’s observation that journalists have changed is interesting—instead of the hard-bitten, cynical, go-after-the-bastards-and-damn-the-costs guys of the past, we now have people who are employed by corporations, and who know how the corporation works. Which—news flash, here—is by smiling, going along with the herd, ducking your head and not rocking boats.

Well, I came upon Greenwald by listening to “Conversations with History,” a great, hour-long program coming out of UCLA. Yesterday, I watched William Cronon, the president of the American Historical Association and a professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Today was Greenwald.

And both men were inspiring. Oddly, both men spoke briefly of the necessity of hope. Given that Cronon is a specialist in Environmental History, and Greenwald in First Amendment and Civil Rights, one wonders…

Which man has the most reason to be hopeful?

Or the most need?

Wal-Mart Joins the Parade

OK—so they did it.

It’s a little late for me, since Wal-Mart laid me off over two years ago, but it will be great for the rest of the gay and lesbian associates who are still clinging to their job. Now, those associates can put their husbands, wives, domestic partners on the health plan.

What happened? Did a great liberal wave sweep through the corporate home offices in Bentonville, Arkansas?

Nah—it happened as Mr. Fernández said it would. It got too complicated, for one thing, to figure out what state allowed for domestic partners, what state allowed for marriage equality, when one state would institute marriage equality. Oh, and what to do about a married gay guy living across the river in Minnesota but working in a store in Wisconsin?

That was one thing. The other thing? Talent—and how to attract it. OK, retail is not like academia, which arguably has a higher percent of gays and lesbians than retail. But you’d be surprised—I was—by the number of LGBT folk in high positions in Wal-Mart. And how do you attract a key person away from Costco when Sam’s won’t put her or his partner on the health plan?

That—if memory serves—was also the gist of a letter sent to the Wisconsin legislature by the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. Yes, the UW’s History Department has traditionally been very strong. But several high-powered historians had turned down the UW to go teach at Harvard, since Massachusetts was the first state to allow gay marriage, and remains in the vanguard.

Or what do you do when you’re transferring an employee from Massachusetts to Mississippi? His compensation package is going to change, if he can no longer put his husband on the health plan.

Lastly, and Wal-Mart admits it—they held out until the very end. Of the 30 top retailers, only two (Publix and a chain I’ve never heard of) are not offering benefits to same-sex couples.

I wish there were any pleasure in this for me, since I battled for several years to put Raf on the health plan. Instead, he paid several thousand dollars more to be covered under Cobra, when his old job folded. And he is now paying several thousand more from his old job to cover me, since my job folded, and Raf’s current employer—like Wal-Mart—doesn’t allow him to put me on the health plan.

But it’s hardly the money issue that makes me so sour on hearing this news.

I defended the company when I worked for it, for nearly 10 years. Does it pay its workers badly? Yes—and with the exception of Costco—so do all the other retailers. Does it have a disproportionate number of part-time workers? Again, no more so than the rest. Does it fight tooth and nail against unions? Absolutely.

We would have, in fact, seminars on what legally we could say to employees on the topic of unions. No, we couldn’t threaten to fire either individuals or close the store if an employee advocated for unions, or if the store joined one. But we could explain the company policy, which went something like, “Wal-Mart has the open door policy, which is a way to assure that management and workers communicate and come to an agreement.”

Well, I used that policy to press Wal-Mart to put Raf on the health plan. And, be fair, I was listened to, treated respectfully, and told “no.” Be more fair—the policy only promises that you’ll be heard, not that you’ll get what you want.

The problem I have is the strong-armed tactics. Ten current and former employees were arrested in front of the Washington DC offices of Wal-Mart, recently. And even worse, some 60 or 70 associates have been fired or disciplined for traveling to Bentonville during the annual meeting to protest conditions in the stores.

And Sam Walton would be reeling in his grave at the thought of employees risking their jobs to bus into Arkansas to raise grievances, while the top management was having what is essentially a huge party. Why? Because the Walton family owns about 60% of the stock. So yeah, they have to have an annual meeting—big deal.

Oh, and that 60% of the stock? That’s equivalent to the amount of money owned by the bottom 40% of the American people.

So would Sam Walton be at the party, or would he be outside, listening.

No question in my mind….      

Cage recaged?

It’s been a day when all my rituals got shuffled, if not dropped. I woke up late, the morning went untrotted, the students never got their assignment, and there was seemingly nothing to write about. In a funk, I turned to a TED Talk on music by the contemporary composer Mark Applebaum.

And Applebaum is an engaging guy—bright, witty, funny. And his music is just as idiosyncratic as he is. He started out by playing a bit of Beethoven and then asking the question—is it music?

He then began to talk about his compositions, among which is the Concerto for Florist and Orchestra (nope—you’re gonna have to look it up yourself). And then he went on to demonstrate a new instrument he had invented: it had, among other things, all the combs he could find in the house, what looked like the ball from a toilet tank, and a coiled metal door stopper).

Right—so that was interesting. Now then, what about the music?

Well, it’s something that used to be called avant-garde and might now be called devant-garde. By which I mean that there was a time, in those days of the sixties, when blindfolded artists were flinging paint at canvases for a set period of time, letting it all dry, and then shipping it off to be displayed at museums, where people would stand about and pontificate. Or, painters would paint a canvas one solid color; there’s a whole room full of such art in the MoMA.

“Are we going to try to take this seriously?” I asked Johnny, who was standing next to me.

“Nah,” he said, and we both headed for the next hall.

Well, we all got busy doing other things, and somehow all that experimental zaniness faded away. So I was quite prepared, in fact very cheerfully prepared, to dismiss Applebaum as another gimmick, another in a long line of guys doing essentially the same thing.

Wrong. I ended liking the piece below, entitled “Aphasia,” which was inspired by seeing two deaf mutes having a heated conversation—a discussion full of affect but with no sound. And it’s clear—the guy must have worked long hours both to compose it and then to memorize it.

So what’s it all about? It’s a metaphor for the “expressive paralysis” that comes on in that dreaded moment when it’s a battle between the empty page of music and the composer—and the empty page is winning. Here’s what Applebaum said about it….

"Kids love it. So do people who need a break from conventional modes of expression."

Aha!—that’s why I liked it!

In this, however, not all people join me. Has anyone else noticed—the people who comment on YouTube videos have to be the most churlish in the universe? So I was unsurprised to run into this: Typical liberal arts bullshit. Trying to be edgy but comes off looking like something Tim and Eric created.

Tim? Eric? Who are they?

Well that was interesting, so what about the piece, Echololia? And what, by the way, was echololia? Echolalia I knew, as any old psychiatric nurse would—schizophrenics occasionally repeat the last three or four words of a sentence; kids do too, at a certain stage of development. The difference? Kids grow out of it.

The piece, at any rate, is a sequence of sounds that we wouldn’t necessarily consider music—drills, hammers, the screech of duct tape. Curiously, the only sound from a standard musical comes at the very end of the piece—and no, I won’t spoil it. So how would it sound?

Applebaum scores again! And here the churl that inevitably taps out his frustration in YouTube scoffs—John Cage did it all years ago.

Well that seemed like something I had to check out, and yes, as you can see below, Cage did much the same thing years ago.



Speaking of Cage, I didn’t know that he had been Merce Cunningham’s romantic partner for years—a fact of absolutely no significance. Just a drop of trivia dripping into the blog—sorry!

Well, that got me thinking—there is indeed nothing new under the sun. And I’m sure that Applebaum knows of Harry Partch, especially since they are (was, in the case of Partch) both Californians.

Partch was a definite loose screw—at one point he was a hobo, at another point he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And yes, he too invented his own instruments—he described himself as “a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry".

He did more—he decided to throw out the traditional scale and created, well…let Wikipedia describe it….

Inspired by Sensations of Tone, Hermann von Helmholtz's book on acoustics and the perception of sound, Partch based his music strictly on just intonation. He tuned his instruments using the overtone series, and extended it past the twelfth partial. This allowed for a larger number of smaller, unequal intervals than found in the Western classical music tradition's twelve-tone equal temperament. Partch's tuning is often classed as microtonality, as it allowed for intervals smaller than 100 cents, though Partch did not conceive his tuning in such a context.[28] Instead, he saw it as a return to pre-Classical Western musical roots, in particular to the music of the ancient Greeks. By taking the principles he found in Helmholtz's book, he expanded his tuning system until it allowed for a division of the octave into 43 tones based on ratios of small integers.

Confused? Join the club—I had several semesters of music theory, and I can barely wade through the paragraph myself.

So yes, Applebaum had people who had trod down the path he’s now treading—so what? Haven’t we all? And yes, I’ll go along, at the moment, with his answer to the question of the Beethoven? Is it music?

His response?

It’s the wrong question—it should be, “Is it interesting?”

Yes—to both Beethoven and Applebaum.

The Trigger that Pulls the Finger

If you watch the video clip below—and there may be reasons not to—you may have the opposite effect than the title suggests. The video is called “The Liberator,” but might better be called ‘The Enslaver.”

The worlds of technology and computing have merged into something truly frightening: the world’s first printable, plastic gun. Yes, you can now download the file for printing a gun from the website…nah, you won’t get it here.

You may be wondering how a “printer” can print a gun. Well, it seems that there are printers that lay down threads of melted polymers—basically liquid plastic—in precise patterns. It’s just like a regular printer, except this one is 3D, with the layers being placed on top of each other; instead of ink, the printer uses plastic.

So a 25-year old law student at the University of Texas got it into his head to create the thing, and joined up with a young engineer to do so. And as you can see in the video below, it worked. So now, anybody with 8,000 bucks to buy a 3D printer from eBay, can download the file for creating the device, which has one metal part, completely inessential but placed there for the purpose of triggering metal detectors.

This is hogwash, of course: anybody who wishes to avoid detection would be able to do so in seconds.

You could also point out that $8000 will buy you a lot of guns more powerful than a plastic gun, but that isn’t the point. Sure, it’s 8000 bucks now, but in five years time? We’ll probably be making our kids’ dolls at home from files downloaded from Mattel, not running out to buy Barbie at Toys ’R Us.

So that means that anyone, any man / woman / and-especially-worrisome-child will be able to get a cheap, lethal, anonymous gun. And that means forget gun control, because there won’t be a chance of that happening. In fact, here is the (un-named) website’s comment on the impact of this gun:

This project might change the way we think about gun control and consumption. How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet? Let’s find out.

“Hey, dude, let’s make a cheap, lethal weapon available to absolutely everybody, and see what happens!”

“Cool, dude!”

I would call this attitude irresponsible, but to Cody Wilson, the 25-year old mastermind of this affair, it’s not. It is, in fact, all very cozy with his radical libertarian / anarchist beliefs. Everyone, you see, should have a gun because the government can come at any moment and infringe on our God-given rights.

Oh—just one problem. Having all the guns in the world is useless, because the government has far more, and far more resources. Remember the Branch Davidian Siege in Waco in 1993? Guess who won?

Several thoughts come to mind. Readers will thrill to hear—the “30,000 Lives Project,” debuted in New York City’s Central Park last Sunday, with five volunteers and me reading names and distributing flyers. It was a beautiful spring day, and I felt a little bad about intruding my agenda into it: isn’t it enough to have survived a grueling, cold, dark winter? Can’t a person enjoy the sun and flowering trees without some guy putting gun control into my face?

But we did, and one of the volunteers got a hostile reaction—a gun nut who was completely against the project. But she’s a tough and persuasive woman, that volunteer, and she prodded the guy gently, and told the story of her husband’s nephew, who had used his father’s gun to shoot himself. The family, as you can imagine, was not distraught but destroyed. And in the end, the guy came around—he began thinking.

Unlike John and I, who stopped thinking after we saw a piece on the plastic gun—as well as the video below—on the McNeil Lehrer News Hour.

“You know what,” said John angrily, “Let’s all just fucking arm ourselves! Let’s completely fucking forget about gun control, because these bastards have completely changed the game, and if we don’t arm ourselves we’re just poor sacks of shit waiting to get snuffed out!”

Or words to that effect…..

At least John could speak, I was stunned into wordlessness (not a common state for me….).

Well, I looked it up today, and I’m happy / sad to report that research done at my very own alma mater—the University of Wisconsin—that just by seeing a gun, test subjects react more aggressively than others who have seen a neutral object. And in another experiment, drivers honked more at a van with a visibly loaded rifle rack stalled at a green light than a van without the rifle. Which is crazy—logically, drivers should honk LESS at a load vehicle than a (presumably) unloaded one. Oh, and a further thought—it seems that the human eye can detect snakes and spiders—potentially venomous agents—faster than we detect other stimuli.

But guess what?

We also detect guns at the same speed as the snakes and spiders. So it may not be the case that we evolved to detect the snakes / spiders. Or it may be that we have evolved to include guns as well.

I think I have my answer, now, to my question—why am I spending two hours a week reciting names in public places? I wanted to know what was behind this weird American obsession with guns.

A Dutchman explained it to me in Central Park last Sunday.

“We’re sill getting used to the American obsession with the three G’s.”

And that would be?

“Guns, God, and Government,” he replied.

And it was true, I thought. Some of us are pretty crazy on all three—they believe that the government is going to tyrannically enforce their Godless agenda on them, and the only chance of keeping that from happening is…

…a gun.

Actually, a lotta guns.

Because I’ve come to believe, guns are a positive feedback cycle. Like pornography, they’re addictive. The number of gun-owners may be down, but the number of guns those owners possess is way up.

I guess I should be used to living in my nutty country, afflicted with its obsession with the 3 G’s.

Cancel, I am used to it.

The question is how much longer can anyone live with it. 

Odyssey

It was a day when the Puerto Rican Goddess chose her theme with typical exuberance.

“Our great grandfather came to Puerto Rico from the Canary Islands as a very young man without a penny. He collected wood in the fields, and then went and stood by the side of the road. Took anything anybody would give him for the wood. He saved and saved, never spending any money on anything, but buying land. He ended up a very rich man, and bought one of the first cars in a town west of here. Then he realized: he could travel for less on the públicos—the public cars. So he sold the car back to the dealer.”

A story a friend, Carlos, told me at the café. We were talking families, and how for the generation of the Great Depression it’s agony to shell out a dime they don’t need to spend.

Now, of course, they can afford all the help they need. But Carlos’s parents are still living frugally, still wanting to pass something on to their children, still worried that they’ll run through their money and be a burden.

“Your mother always wanted to go to Europe,” said Carlos’s father, when Carlos, having reviewed his father’s finances, told him just how well he had done.

They hadn’t, of course. They had stayed home and worked and gotten places their parents hadn’t—both Carlos’s parents went to the States and got Master’s Degrees, both worked, both believed passionately in getting ahead.

No time for Europe.

Oh, and no money, either.

There were similar stories in my family. Franny’s family were eccentrics, Jack came from salt-of-the-earth Norwegian immigrants. No money there, although there is a hospital ward that my grandmother had donated somewhere in Chicago. And she hadn’t had a car until she was shamed into it by hearing a rumor that the Newhouses were too poor to buy one. So she bought a Cadillac, drove it to church, drove it back, had the tires taken off, and kept it on cinder blocks in the front yard.

And like Carlos’s parents, Jack had been a big believer of getting ahead, making progress, going somewhere and making a life that was better than the person’s who had given you that life.

And then giving a hand to somebody less fortunate—but as hardworking—as you.

Which is why Jack had called up his old friend at the Urban League, sometime in the late 80’s.

He’d gotten it into his head that parents needed to read to their kids.

Well, he certainly did.

There’s a photo of me, somewhere, with Jack lying down on the couch, and me sitting on a pillow above his head. He’s holding the book that we both are reading.

So Jack had teamed up with his old buddy, and they were busy on a project involving filming parents reading a book, visible to the viewer, to their kids. At least that’s how I remember it. And since that had been Jack’s project-of-the-moment when he died, we had asked for donations to the program in lieu of flowers.

As a writer, Jack respected conciseness. He tended, however, to use the telephone as an instrument to explore what he thought. He would call his friend at the Urban League, get the voice mail, and then leave one, two or even three lengthy, pontificating messages. The Urban League guy wrote a warm tribute to Jack after he died, and finally confessed that most of the time, he had only listened to the concluding message.

Right—so it seemed to be a day organized around some simple themes: poverty, getting ahead, hard work and giving back. Which had been as the well the theme of the remarkable documentary I had seen the night before.

On the flimsiest of excuses, I had written an old high school classmate, Emily Auerbach, now a distinguished professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We hadn’t been close, but we knew each other. I was a cellist, she an oboist—we shared a lot of Shostakovich Fifth together.

Franny had mentioned her, once or twice, over the years and had attended some of her lectures. And she’s no lightweight. Margaret Drabble writes about Searching for Jane Austen, “Emily Auerbach's approach to Jane Austen is lively, engaging, and thoroughly modern. Like Austen, Auerbach wears her wide learning lightly and imparts a great deal of information in a most enjoyable manner.”

Right, Margaret Drabble—the heaviest of guns….

But I have, as you know, until the end of February 2013 to get my message out. You can have a good, comfortable death at the time and place of your choice. You don’t need to rot away in a nursing home. You can die at home with the cat on your bed on a spring afternoon—just as Franny did.

So it was time to call in whatever artillery seemed at hand. I tracked down Emily—not hard to do—and sent her an email.

Some time elapsed. She replied, apologizing for the delay. My email talking about the book I had written about the death of my mother had arrived…

…on the day Emily had buried her mother.

So it was one of those times that an email couldn’t do it. Time to phone. I did, stammered out an apology, and then began to watch the documentary for which Emily had sent me a link.

I’m happy to say that while I’ve been occupying myself with the daily trot and writing blog posts, some of my high school classmates are actually doing some real work. And no, not on Austen—which I’ve not read, but will—but on the south side of Madison. In a library—The Irwin A. and Robert D. Goodman Library. Didn’t know the library, but did recognize the building behind it.

The Madison Urban League.

Emily, it seems, never knew poverty, as I—knock on wood—have not. But her parents did, and were only able to escape it through the help of a remarkable institution, Berea College, which was free. So her parents, like Carlos’s and mine, had gone onward and upward, and now Emily was reaching out and giving a hand.

Or a handout. Or homework she had assigned and graded.

It’s called the Odyssey Project, and it’s a free, yearlong, fully accredited university course with the intention of getting people who never would have dreamed of going to the university…

…into the university.

And out, with a degree.

More than a degree. A changed life, or rather, lives. Because nothing happens in a vacuum. You’re a kid, and you watch your mother go from homelessness to university graduate. You think that doesn’t have an effect? Especially when she calls you on your skipping classes in high school.

She’s not big on subtlety, the Puerto Rican Goddess. She paints with a pretty big brush. Sometimes that’s best, I think. Sometimes the message really is simple. You can change lives. You can get ahead. If you’re sitting pretty now, stand up, look below you, reach down and give a hand.

Raf swears that there’s something unique about Wisconsin—its efficiency, its earnestness, its almost naïve belief that institutions and systems can work, and can get better. I scoff at the idea.

Until I see an old classmate in a room with thirty poor people on whom, as a colleague says, “she just won’t give up. She won’t let anyone slip away.”

And Raf passes the Kleenex to dry my tears.