“For a moment of night”

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

I think I’ve found a way to spot Mars in the night sky using Orion’s belt and then two stars.

We live on the fringe of a golf course, and the 6th tee is about thirty yards from our back door. Twice a day I walk out onto the tee box. At night, I stand there and take in the majesty — and I do mean majesty: a word we rarely use other than referring to Charles or Elizabeth and which we ought never use when speaking about individual humans in a hierarchical way but, instead, use universally about the majesty of our humanity and the Created Order around us — I take in the majesty of creation. When the stars are out, not only is it more pretty of course than on a cloudy night. It also is more humbling to me by far than standing in daylight. In daylight, I often feel massaged by Sun as that star lovingly warms what is around me. It lulls me to think that somehow I’m at the center. Night reminds me I’m not. And a starry night is a fearsome thing indeed.

Then in the morning — before coffee, before writing in my journal, before any sacred text reading, and certainly before social media and email — I walk out onto that same tee box and again I take in the majesty and also face my irrational fear of being alone outside at night.

Finding Mars is relatively easy now compared with remembering some of the star names.

In “Orion’s Belt” are, from “east to west” (for lack of a better way to describe their positions), Alnitak Alnilam and Mintaka. I just checked that link and, sure enough, NASA describes their relative position the same way (“east to west”). They are “blue supergiant” suns, more massive and powerful than ours. (That kind of makes one feel almost quaint, yes? To talk about “our sun” when so many other suns out there aren’t possessed at all. Most likely.) All three names are derived from Arabic words, and this makes me think of the three wise men and Zoroastrianism, which was an association bandied about when I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s and before anyone speaking Arabic was considered a terrorist. It was also a time when much of popular Christianity could tolerate a non-Jewish “-ism” to be included in the Nativity story.

  • Alnitak — from an nitaq, “the girdle.”
  • Alnilam — from al Nitham or al Nathm, “the string of pearls.”
  • Mintaka — from al Mintakah, “the belt.”

If I follow these stars from east to west I plot a course further to the west and then north until I find Bellatrix. “Bellatrix” means “female warrior,” and is likely derived from one of two words, both male nouns. Webster’s Dictionary says that “-trix” is a suffix that, when added to words, “forms a feminine noun of agency.” One thinks of “executrix” of an estate (vs. an executor). (The reddit generation has taken “dominatrix” and shortened it to “dom.” Much of language amongst them is abbreviated or even acronym’ed, made easy for texting. In fact, you can turn this entire post into a 572-letter acronym and text it to a friend. They will thank you. Try it.)

Yet being an “executrix,” ladies, is your nom (de guerre…see how I did that?) in only some states. Other states will make the person who executes a Last Will and Testament the “executor” and, effectively, rob women of their agency in such matters. Gender-fluidity — a liquidation of gender from noun to adjective — also robs the identifying person of their definition in the literal sense. I would think their desire would be the opposite. Of course, fluidity does allow one the freedom to sit at the head of the Thanksgiving table one year and at the kids’ table the next.

On the contrary, I like to think of words as ice crystals, branching off from a center and forming a pattern that can be traced back when looking exceedingly closely and with care not to melt their ancestral paths.

For more on this increasingly dull (to some) topic, go HERE. I, for one, hold my breath when searching for the root. One never knows what one will find. It is often a root word meaning something not so much male-dominated as true to its actual meaning, one which we shy from today for fear of losing friends or social media followers, which is to say the same thing. “Gentleman” comes to mind. It used to mean an Englishman of noble birth who owned land. Then it meant a man who was not only polite but polite specifically to women who wanted men to be polite. Then it meant a man who was polite to women who wanted men to be polite to women but not let anyone else know that she wanted that. Today, of course, it refers to a man who walks into an building with no windows at lunchtime carrying a hundred dollars in singles.

From Bellatrix, I fly across the north and veer slightly south until I hit Aldebaran. Yet another word that might be derived through Arabic and originally from the Latin. For more: HERE.

Finally, to Mars, I simply float a little northeast (?). At this point I have lost my sense of direction, because we use direction on a horizontal plane that is not easily tilted. Let me describe it this way: if last night I stood on that tee box facing toward Medina, Texas — which is an ironic posture for an Episcopalian to take when working with Arabic names — and look up, I see Orion’s Belt in the southwest at about 11 o’clock. (Which means, as you now know, that when I tell you in Kerrville, “let’s meet tomorrow at 1 o’clock,” what I am really saying is “let’s have an early breakfast in San Antonio.”)

I follow Bellatrix and Aldebaran by leaning back, and by the time I hit Mars, I’m pretty much looking straight up. Lunchtime in Kerrville. In the end, what we think of as “north” (and south and east and west) is still a self-centered orientation of the universe. It is “around” us. We are not “in it.” Copernicus is rolling in his grave.

This, of course, is one of the main reasons I go outside under the stars — quite alone at night and very alone first thing in the morning. I want to feel “in it” rather than it being “around me,” as I do in daytime. Lulled. (Included in the many etymologies of “lull” and its offspring “lullaby” is the Dutch word “lullen,” which means “to talk nonsense.”)

Instead of being lulled to sleep, I want to feel that irrational fear of being in the dark.

Henry Beston (1888-1968) wrote:

Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it.

Henry Beston in The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod

Again, he writes:

For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars — pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time.

At night, or in early morning, I have nothing to fear except deer, a skunk, maybe a possum, or a stray cat. Yet the hairs on the back of my neck and on my arms actually do stand up. It is irrational. I am never in any danger. Ever. So I walk out there to the tee box to glory in the majesty of the deep navy blue sky and to face down that irrational fear, which is not a fear of anything external so much as it is a fear of what I might learn if I stand still for that one moment of night.

It’s not the wings themselves

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

Monarch butterflies land on branches at Monarch Grove Sanctuary in Pacific Grove, Calif., Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2021. On Thursday, July 21, 2022, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature said migrating monarch butterflies have moved closer to extinction in the past decade – prompting scientists to officially designate them as “endangered.” (AP Photo/Nic Coury, File)

In the fall of 1972 or 1973, when I was 9 or 10, the monarch butterflies were making their way to Mexico. I was fortunate enough to see the daytime sky as densely dotted with them, it seems, as with the stars at night out at our beach house on Fire Island, New York.

I remember it was cold. Cold and rainy. This made each monarch’s air travel much like flying a 3-inch wet Kleenex. For, you see, the monarch butterfly itself is the small creature carried along on those wings, not the wings themselves. We see the latter, but it is the former that must make the long journey.

One morning I awoke and went to the beach. Wearing corduroy pants and a cable knit sweater Mom had made, with a matching one for my younger brother, Jim. I probably wore a white turtleneck. The shirt was probably clean, since Mom kept it that way despite young boys’ proclivities to soil them making forts or fighting off enemies with imaginary guns or tree branches for broad swords. Jim might have even been with me.

As the previous day’s sky had been speckled with these marvelous creatures, so now the beach on this drizzly morning was littered with those orange and brown wings. Some still attached, some detached or tattered.

I walked along and grew sad. I picked up four butterflies that were intact and seemed like maybe they were just knocked unconscious. I carefully transported them — I don’t recall how — and then placed them on the ledge of our second-floor balcony, facing the sun in the south and shielded from the stiff north wind. I monitored them. Waiting for their wings to dry so they could journey on.

The next day, I checked the ledge and three of the four were missing. “They must have dried and flown away,” I told myself.

Mom helped me identify and then write to the Fire Island National Seashore office and report to whichever man was in charge that I had successfully rescued three monarch butterflies from the recent storm, even though I’d lost one. I don’t recall if he wrote back. I do recall that I was still sad about that one.

I wrote up that story as an article for the first edition of a newsletter I’d launch the next spring. The publication had articles (news and also features), poetry and cartoons I had lifted from Highlights Magazine. I offered it to subscribers, and my grandmother became its sole patron. Not enough, I’m sorry to report, to keep it in the black, so I had to shutter it a month later.

The homeowners’ association where we live here in the Texas Hill Country has created a small monarch butterfly “layover station,” for lack of a better phrase. It’s a split-rail enclosed area of probably 75 feet by 35 feet not far from the main road leading into the development. Karen and I often remark that we wished it was a dog run.

Perhaps what little allure it holds for me is about potential, not actual.

Learning to read

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

You’d think that the one ingredient you wouldn’t forget to put in a homemade pumpkin pie is the pumpkin filling itself. Right? It’s a bit like saying you’re a lawyer who didn’t go to law school, rendering you a yer. Or a merry-go-round without any merriment, which becomes a nauseating spin cycle. Or cotton candy without the cotton or the candy, which looks like a confused kid holding a thin white cone upside down.

My first pumpkin pie left me a confused Yer lacking anything close to merriment. My second attempt redeemed me, since I’d learned by then how to read.

You’ll notice that on each one, the crusts came out roughly the same. The recipe I used was given to me by a coworker in ~2004–a coworker who’d raised four kids and had made roughly 532 pies, most of them pumpkin. That’s an exaggeration to make my point: she knew how to make a good crust. And I had only ever asked her about apple pies, since that type was common in New England in the fall, during apple picking season. In fact, I made three pies at once that year using her crust recipe, because we had recently picked so many apples from Honey Pot Hill Orchards. It was that year that Bennett, still a toddler and with my help, would pick an apple and then, when I wasn’t paying attention, take a single bite and drop it on the ground. I’m sure half a peck met this fate.

Anyhow, Anne (my coworker) trained me to use shortening for the crust instead of butter, and to roll out the dough only once. If any dough tore, you were to simply and gently pat it back in place and use a little more flour. I actually have made all my pies using this crust recipe. (I did once bake with a store-bought crust and felt guilty.) My mother-in-law last night confirmed also that for most of her pies, like a lemon merengue, she’d brown the crust first before putting in the filling, but for a pumpkin pie she’d put the filling into the raw crust and bake it. She’s also made closer to 1,000 pies, since she’s raised not four kids as Anne had, but five.

Back to the pie filling.

The directions on the Libby’s pie filling can are fairly clear. (I say “fairly” because that adverb makes a distinction between the manufacturer’s professional recipe writers and my ability to listen to them. P.S.: Though it modifies “clear,” “fairly” here is an adverb of degree, not an adjective. I looked it up so that while my reading skills might be failing, my defensive Google skills are still rapier-like.) The directions say, “Stir in pumpkin…” and, yet, I completely overlooked this, because I was reading the can while it laid on its side, assuming a posture of not wanting to be opened. My hands were otherwise occupied opening the evaporated milk and mixing in the dry ingredients. Later, when I criticized Libby’s instead of worrying about my own side of the street, I would even claim they forgot to tell me to add the evaporated milk. (Of course I added the milk, because–pshaw!–who wouldn’t, right?!) I read over the recipe three times and confirmed each time that they forgot the milk step. I was ready to call the Customer Service line to graciously inform them of the omission, but when taking these photos before writing this, I noticed that the milk instructions were right after the pumpkin instructions. I had added the dry ingredients because I saw them mentioned, and I added the milk because that was listed up top (yes, yes, as the pumpkin was, too), and the cans were sitting in front of me. The Libby’s can was sleeping face down. Of course I’d miss that! Anyone would.

In the end (of both tries) the cross section of pie looked quite different:

Pie 1…as if that wasn’t apparent.
Pie 2…as if that wasn’t apparent.

The first one went into the trash, and it slid nicely off the pie plate, since I’d made the crust so well.

The Beautiful Ima Hogg

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

The temperature this morning was cool-your-coffee-quick degrees when I stepped outside to have those first precious sips. “First precious sips.” I feel that same routine first-ness when I finish reading in bed at night. I set my book down, get up, pull the bottom sheet up and over the top of the mattress — I absolutely hate sleeping on wrinkled sheets (“Ok, Mr. Princess And The Pea”) — and then crawl under the covers. I lie on my back — though I almost never sleep that way, or at least don’t sleep well that way — and let out a sigh. Really, it’s a sigh. Sigh. Such a beautiful word. Almost onomatopoeic. I notice that onomatopoeic has not only a lot of vowels, but it also has all the vowels except a “u.” (It also doesn’t have a “y,” but Y’s are like thumbs. They’re vowels but not vowels.) So I decided to do a little research — that decision was a moment ago; I’m a long way off from sighing in bed, and my coffee is fucking cold by now — and Googled “words with all of the vowels.” Here’s what I got:

Eunoia, at six letters long, is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five main vowels. Seven letter words with this property include adoulie, douleia, eucosia, eulogia, eunomia, eutopia, miaoued, moineau, sequoia, and suoidea.

Guinness World Records

“The Guinness Book of World Records” is now simply “Guinness World Records” online. It changed names in 1999. Heading toward Y2K, while most people feared the sudden collapse of technology, Guinness leaned in. Books became dinosaurs. Except that Caitlyn Jenner, nee Bruce Jenner, will write an actual book, it will be sold at Barnes & Noble, and people will come and have their physical copy signed and perhaps shake Caitlyn’s hand, which will crush the reader’s from having thrown so many shotputs and hurled so many discuses. It will be ok. Because if violence is threatened, Caitlyn can hide in either bathroom. Sorry: low blow. As it were.

But I do want to go back now to those words.

Eunoia. This is a beautiful word. First of all, it actually is beautiful. It comprises the Greek “eu” (beautiful) + “noia” (thought) and can refer to the goodwill between a speaker and her/his audience. (Again, Caitlyn has a distinct advantage here. OK; last time. Promise.) You pronounce it “yoo-NOY-uh.”

The only other real word in this list that we all use is sequoia. The rest of those words above are for professors who live celibate lives, and not by choice.

For example, if you Google “adoulie meaning,” you will get a list of sites that let you know what andouille sausage is. Seriously. If, at the end of this post you are not disgusted, click there and see for yourself.

“Miaoued” means meow’ed, like what a cat does. I am totally serious. Look it up. Its synonym apparently is “miaow.” We all know that both of those spellings for meow — which has fewer letters and is, after all, the choice of writers on a budget — have been created by professors at Ivy League schools to justify their Endowed Chair Of Stick-Up-The-Butt. And while “meow” is a cat sound and onomatopoeic, “miaou” is the sound of a professor teaching a class on cat sounds.

Moineau is French. Look it up. It doesn’t count. Why Google includes it shows that Silicon Valley is going socialist. Why Guinness includes it explains why it no longer has a spine.

Suoidea. This will require my naked contempt. DON’T GOOGLE THIS YET. It is a word from vertebrate zoology — danger already — and means “A superfamily of artiodactyls of the suborder of Paleodonta which includes”…wait for it…

.

.

.

Pigs.

Yup.

And since Suoidea is a type of “superfamily” — “Look at me! I’m a pig, and I live in a superfamily! Whoopee!” — there’s no singular identity within the word. I can’t say I’m a “suoid.” I can say I am suoidean — piglike. I can even say I am from the land of Suoideania — a farm. I can say I like to eat Suoideanese food: trough scraps. Or that my art is suoideanesque.

Sometimes, beautiful words have ugly meanings. Other times, while rare, ugly words have beautiful meanings.

Ima Hogg, one of the most respected women in Texas during the 20th Century. This photo c. 1900.

Three Things I Love About My Truck

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

When we moved to Kerrville five years ago—or, rather, when I was moved here by my Texan wife who in 1997 when we’d been married less than a year and living in New York City and I came home to find her crying over Texas Monthly’s annual chili-cookoff edition which, as you know, is like a siren call to anyone from the Lone Star State and will inexorably draw a woman back regardless of her moving to the city for her career as an architect or following her husband to frozen New England — she swore she’d never move farther north, but… — and back again to New York for his career (“Matzah in New York, Lord, and oyster crackers in New England?! Give me chili or give me death!”) and even with three sons who will eventually need expensive cars and not just weekly subway fare — friends gave us a truck.

Not just any truck.

A white-and-rust 1988 Ford F-150 ranch truck donated to us by friends in Frisco. It had less than 80,000 miles on it.

We had met the couple at the church in NYC where my wife, Karen, and I met. The man was one of two pastors, the other also being from Texas. In fact, there were lots of Texans there. In further fact, if you were from Texas and living in New York at that time, chances are you’d have at least visited Trinity Baptist Church on East 61st Street.

I did not grow up with cars. The first flat tire I changed was two summers ago on our Mini Cooper after watching a couple of YouTube videos. If it weren’t for the internet, I’d be walking the 10-mile round trip to PAX for coffee. (Walking because, my sons said, people here do not ride bicycles. “It’s embarrassing, Dad.” So aside from taking really short flights from Mooney Airfield, a motor vehicle was the only option.)

And now I’ve become quite enamored of this truck. Here are three of the many reasons.

First, it’s a pick-up truck. Which also means it’s a drop-off truck. This, as you all know — and by “all” I mean the 50% of readers who own trucks and the 90+% of that 50% who squeeze theirs into a H-E-B parking spot sticking so far out that I can’t quite get my rinky dink ’88 Ford past you; have mercy — this means that everyone comes calling for a favor.

“I need help getting this mattress over to ”so-and-so’s.”

“I need to take this old washing machine to the landfill.”

“I have a hundred pounds of mulch to haul, and my truck is a 2019 and yours is, well, old…”

Fortunately, this has not been a problem. We live closer to Mooney than to town. If you’re willing to come all this way to borrow the truck and haul your mulch, you might as well go speak to a pilot. He can drop it strategically over your garden with minimum collateral damage to your gas grill.

But the truck bed does make it possible for Karen to schlep around her art supplies and larger canvases. By the way, I sometimes use Yiddish, like schlep. (See companion article on schmear.) Not only do almost all New Yorkers of a certain age, Jewish or not, employ these colorful and almost onomatopoeic words, but they are culturally relevant for those living here, given a recent talk on Kerrville’s first resident, Joshua Brown (“Braun”), who was Jewish.

Second, there are no blind spots. While the steering wheel has too much “play”—it’s more like a boat’s tiller—and while you need to keep it under 55, go slow on the curves and easy on the brakes, it’s otherwise super safe: you signal, give a cursory glance over your shoulder, and the view through the windows—flat glass, not curved; unobstructed by any modern comfort and raised—give you a solid sense of traffic.

Finally: the quarter glass. Also called the valence window. When I have the driver’s side valence opened even a bit and crank the window down all the way, I can rest my bicep on the door and hold onto the vertical trim. I look good doing that. Real good.

I tell you. I’m wearing one of the dozens of snap shirts I’ve purchased here over the past 27 years — my urban-esque Uniqlo jeans well below dashboard level — and no one would guess I’m not from Texas.

Except, maybe, Lyle Lovett.

It’s “cupboard,” not “pantry.”

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

Let me tell you: it hurt a lot more than the photo might suggest. Sometimes the smallest injuries, like a paper cut, can rival the agony of being riddled with bullets like Sonny Corleone (James Caan) in The Godfather. After all, Sonny died, albeit after convulsing in the driver’s seat, through the front passenger door, then up against the side of his twelve-cylinder Lincoln Continental. So, after some production value on the New Jersey Turnpike, Sonny dies, goes back to his trailer on the Paramount Pictures lot, and has a double whiskey and a cigarette.

This was worse than that. By far.

It was a cooking accident. As are all mishaps in the kitchen. They’re “accidents.” And by definition they’re silly. I was making what turned out to be an epic meal.

Bacon-wrapped pickles about to go into the Traeger.
In the Traeger
Finished appetizer.
About-to-eat appetizer
Meatloaf. Highly underrated.
Yeesss.

I’m zipping around the kitchen finishing the appetizer in the Traeger while also checking on the roasted potatoes and trying to time them with the meatloaf, which still needs the glaze and another 15-20 minutes in the oven after that. The green beans and chipotle corn are canned, so I can heat those later on the stovetop. The potatoes are getting dry so they come out. I want to tent them so I can throw them back in the oven until the meatloaf, which is taking way too long, is done. (Remember, it isn’t “done” until it has the glaze baked on. The recipe says the glaze is to die for.)

I will need some aluminum foil. It’s where I store all my wraps/foils/etc., in a lower cabinet in the pantry. (I call it “the cupboard,” but Karen corrects me and says it’s a pantry. I think of “pantry” as a small room, something a realtor might include in a listing, while a cupboard might be small enough for only a pre-schooler or a hungry small dog to hide in. In that same category of misnamed objects and domiciled areas, I still call it a “bureau;” Karen says “dresser.” I’m right, of course, because this is my blog and that’s how I roll.)

So I yank out the aluminum foil–Texas Tough brand from H-E-B–but along with it comes a box of Glad plastic wrap.

You can probably see in the photo to the right that Glad conveniently includes a small tree saw with teeth not unlike those of a great white shark. When I’m putting away leftovers, I always use Glad Press’N Seal, which works so much better than plastic wrap. I use the plastic wrap primarily for the box it comes in and for this small saw, which doesn’t actually cut through the plastic wrap but does allow me to trim back the sage bush behind the house.

So the Glad Bush Saw comes falling out of the cupboard along with the aluminum foil and somehow–it happened so fast, like getting T-boned at an intersection, except people walk away from those “accidents” all the time; just ask my son: he rolled our Hyundai Santa Fe three times after getting hit in front of Papa John’s/Brew Dawgz and literally walked away without a scratch (true story; it was a miracle)–somehow I attempt to keep both foil and Shark Teeth Bush Saw from falling onto the floor and to do so I must have grabbed the saw in my left hand and also tried to push it up with my left knee at the same time while going for the aluminum foil with my right.

The combined effect of my left knee pushing and my left hand grabbing was that I thrust my forefinger along the triple row of teeth of a Great White Shark which, let’s face it, “Jaws” Captain Quint would attest–had he not been eaten–that it did not hurt nearly so much as my cut did. Quint actor Robert Shaw, too, went back to his trailer after he dies a gruesome death and splits a six pack with Caan, who’s already finished off a bottle of Cutty Sark. The two of them talk about directors, starlets and why Shaw didn’t beat out Duvall for the role of Corleone consigliere. Shaw is getting hot under the collar, but Caan shrugs him off saying, “Look, Bob, at least you have a shot at the sequel as a crime boss. I’m toast for the whole trilogy.”

So I grunt a low-throated “Ow!” because at my age, even while wearing a (manly chef’s) apron, you don’t scream or emit any high-pitched noise that might indicate that this actually hurt. Which it did. Like a motherfucker. It was the dignified yell of a black-hat gunslinger finally caught at the business end of the Dodge City sheriff’s rifle getting shot, falling off his horse and saying, “Ahh! Ya got me!”

“WHAT?!” Karen shrieked from the other room. (Because the women in Dodge City always “shriek,” even to this day.)

I went over to the sink and put my finger under the cool Texas water that we pay dearly for except the adjacent Comanche Trace Golf Course which buys its water from a very wealthy lady who owns the groundwater rights so golfers get free water all the time but we only get water if I pay my bill before the 5th of the month after the due date or I get a kindly written but clearly stated reminder that my vended water will be shut off by the 15th if the balance due is not remitted immediately by clicking here and they take all forms of payment except for Diner’s Club. (Does anyone still use Diner’s Club? My dad, a Madison Avenue advertising man, did. All the time.)

So I’m taking all that in–Diner’s Club, paying for water when golfers don’t, “cupboard” or “pantry” (although we all know it’s “cupboard”), and the inherent and schizophrenic bias for and against men named Robert getting cast in the Godfather saga–I’m taking all that in yet every time I move my finger out from the water it bleeds like a sunuvabitch, and my main thought is, “Please, God, let me not need stitches, because the meatloaf has at least another ten minutes at 375 before the glaze goes on.”

But where is Vega?

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

My morning routine, when done “right,” starts with a cup of coffee out back and under the stars if it’s the right time of year. Wrong time of year and it’s either too cold or the sunrise doesn’t align with the my-rise. I take a chair from the porch–one of those white plastic armchair jobs you might find at your local pool–and move it into the yard, far enough out from the house so it feels like the invisible roofline doesn’t extend over my head and far enough from the neighbor’s tree to the left to avoid feeling hemmed in. I feel exposed there underneath that what-is-it?-ness, and that feels good. And “good” not in terms of comfort; rather, quite the opposite. The moon is waning toward a new moon on Saturday, so its light at my back is still bright enough to cast a faint shadow from me onto the grass yet dim enough to allow that shadow to be whatever fear my mind might conjure it to be. We have a black cat, and typically all three cats are raring to get outside when I get up. The black one, Bucket, stations himself just outside our bedroom each morning, and when I crack the door and move my right foot forward, he wheels around without looking up and heads for the backdoor, just to the left in the living room. (Frankly, I think he’s reached a point of taking me for granted, which cats are wont to do.) So he’s the color of a shadow, but only darker. His midnight-purple fur absorbs the light, as might a black hole. Outside, and as I shift slightly with my coffee, seated in that white plastic porch chair, I notice out of the corner of my eye–don’t ask me whether its rods or cones that afford me night vision; I always have to Google it and have yet to assign a heuristic to distinguish them; please drop a comment if you have a good one–I notice a shape also moving slightly. I don’t catch on that the movements are synced. The shadow is dark, and so is my cat and so is a skunk because, frankly, at my age either an eye rod or cone may have decided to sleep in and not help me determine whether I’ll have my leg brushed up against by Bucket or spend the rest of the day in a tomato juice bath. (That simple solution wasn’t what was required, by the way, when our chocolate lab, Leo, was sprayed last year. It was a combination of Dawn dish detergent and like baking soda and something else, or some such concoction. I know it was three things mixed together. And who keeps even one jar of tomato juice in their fridge, after all, let alone a sink or bathtub full?! But back to having coffee under the stars.) I sit there and wonder if Bucket is a skunk or is even there at all. So I “pss-pss-pss” the way one does with cats–as if there’s some magic to that primitive call; but we all know that “pss” substitutes for a cat’s name regardless of its identity, because names are meaningless to them; in fact their name for each of us is as generic. It’s “piss off, yourself. I’ll come when I want affection. Not before, not after.”–I do that universal cat name sound, and then I take my leg and kind of swirl it gently around the area of the shadow to see if Bucket is there. I do that while telling myself that I’m trying to rub his back with my foot. But if he were there, which he isn’t, I’d actually be kicking him in his face. But I do that because it might be a skunk and I don’t want a skunk anywhere near me–half invisible because of the mediocre work of my rods and my cones. Yet that would have been an unwise thing to do with my foot anyway because of the whole day-spent-in-a-bathtub-of-tomato-juice-and-HEB’s-closed-now-anyway. But I do that to feel less exposed sitting in that chair as if before a firing squad–does one ever get to sit during executions, or is it always standing or lying?

I get up out of the chair and look up.

Navy blue with pin pricks.

The waning moon is to the southeast, and Orion is due south at almost eleven o’clock on an imaginary overhead arc. It requires me to tilt my head back at an angle at which I can’t drink coffee with enough confidence that I won’t pour it down the front of my hoodie. I hold my left hand, the one not holding my coffee cup–do you do that, too? Hold your coffee cup with the same hand because after a few decades of holding your coffee cup, it would almost be as unnatural as writing with your untrained hand?–I hold my left hand at arm’s length and, with one eye shut, I raise my forefinger up against Orion’s belt. It fits neatly within the outer two stars, obscuring only the middle star (planet? cluster? galaxy?). I start to wonder what cataclysmic event would have to happen that, at a distance these stars are from us, the left and right stars would travel even slightly toward or away from that middle star. I decide, standing there, that once inside and before writing to you I might Google–again with the free advertising–how far the left star is from us and how far the middle is and, using my A+ in 9th grade geometry, I’d determine how long it might take for the left star to travel to that middle star. I remind myself that the three stars constituting Orion’s belt are vastly different distances from us, and I’d spend the better part of the workday trying to solve this math problem, becoming more knowledgeable but also more unemployed. I remind myself that the whole purpose of coming out here first thing in the morning with coffee only, no phone, is to connect to the Maker of those pin pricks around me. I conduct this connection half mindlessly. I don’t really think about the Creator, to be honest. I simply enjoy where I’m standing. Standing there both mindlesssly and also incredibly aware. I figure that such mindless awareness is itself an acknowledgement that there is a God outside me.

So I realize that the left-hand star might be millions of light years closer than the middle star and that I might have no easy way to determine how long it would take for it to meet the middle star in this pre-dawn sky. And when I put my mind to determining such things, I realize that I’m aware and focused on placing myself within this reality around us. For a moment, I forget about Bucket and skunks and tomato juice. I forget about the lights from the houses behind me now as I look over ours; I forget about the dark smudges of live oak trees or the pickup truck that turns from its side street same time each day and drives deeper into the development (because I’ve already witnessed that somewhat foreign-to-the-dark-and-still-silence event). I forget about those things, and I start to wonder about where Lyra is. Where’s Vega; its anchor? It’s the second brightest star in the northern hemisphere. I can see that through the branches of the neighbor’s tree is Jupiter. Compared to my forefinger at arm’s length, it’s practically the size of a pinhead. “How many angels,” you ask, “can dance on the head of a pin?”

Tell me please, if you find out.

My prediction for car names in 2050

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

The “Gremlin” by AMC was a great Hot Wheels car. We’d set up parallel bendy orange tracks starting at the radiator in the living room–about shoulder height when we were in third grade–dropping down to the Persian carpeted floor and extending the length of our hallway. (How long was the hallway? Several Christmases’ and birthdays’ worth of Hot Wheels track long.)

These races between my brother and me weren’t about speed, though that certainly helped. They were about perseverance. Would the car go the distance to win. Did that one car that was fastest right after my brother’s birthday in September get a slightly bent axle over the next couple months, giving me the edge on December 25.

My Gremlin Hot Wheels would win. A lot. Beating almost every 2-inch challenger.

And that’s where the comparison between Hot Wheels cars and real ones ends.

Most of us never would have bought the real Gremlin automobile. I mean, even looking at the photo above, you go, “Cool!” But then immediately, “That would be such a cool Hot Wheels car.” ‘Fess up. That’s what you were thinking, too, right?

Invariably, they looked like this, or worse:

My theory — and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to theorize this — is that it was all in the name.

The last Gremlin produced was in 1978. But filmmakers knew a good thing when they saw it: why not leverage that to make “Gremlins” in 1984. When the movie came out, we all remembered what a crap car we either owned or almost did.

A lot of car names have come and gone. Here are some that, mercifully, have gone:

King Midget Model III. You absolutely know this guy is British.
  • Horseless (absolutely real name; look it up)
  • OctoAuto (Spiderman’s foe on the New Jersey Turnpike)
  • Dymaxion (the car that was an early loser to Tesla)
  • Dauphine (much like its human counterpart, it ran on expensive Bordeaux wine, which during a dry season would make it undriveable the next year)
  • Model III, by King Midget
  • Aerobile (some consumers pronounced it with a long “i,” and they opted instead to buy a Dauphine, not realizing a drought was to hit southwestern France the following year)
  • the “Janus” is not a bad name but its maker has a clunker of a name: Zunndapp.
  • Morgan Plus 8 Propane (can be used for commuting or barbecuing.)
  • Iron Duke (not bad, but Mustang drivers always challenged you to a drag race and that quickly got old)
  • Multipla (which syllable gets emphasized?)
  • Biturbo (what the hell is this anyway)

We all have our favorite cars and names. I’d like to offer some of my own for manufacturers to start working on. After all, brand marketing starts at ideation.

Trilobite

The name was first used by Electrolux for the world’s first robotic vacuum cleaner but that appliance was phased out. Most robotic vacuum cleaners bump into one’s feet and don’t navigate around dog shit — look it up — and therefore have gone the way of the Gremlin.

Stapler Type Z

This sleek car is actually not meant to go anywhere. It is designed to sit in your driveway and make your neighbors envious. (Model in ballgown standing alongside only comes with the EX trim level, and she’s union so…)

The Saunter

Unlike the Stapler, the Saunter does go. But slowly. In fact, it’s designed for the occupants to enjoy their surroundings by being immersed in them. In its inimitable genius, Mercedes has designed a car that can actually ride along a beachfront boardwalk without breaking any local ordinances, allowing its driver and the person riding shotgun to step out at any point and get an ice cream or cotton candy. Or to ride the Merry-Go-Round. The Saunter’s maximum speed is 18MPH, the trunk has room only for a picnic basket and it does not come with a windshield or ABS brakes. In urban areas, it is allowed in dedicated bike lanes if those lanes are wide enough (which is never). It also rides well in planned communities.

There is no radio. Listen to the birds. Smell the roses.

Like those made by a master Artist

~ Howard Freeman ~ 2 Comments

“Shushi.” Pronounced SHOO-shee. That’s how my dad said it after he took a course in making sushi in…must-have-been 1990, 1991, 1992? Maybe it was as early as during my college years in the ’80s. I know it was at least a few years before he died. He was still generally in a good mood.

It was Dad who had taken me out for my very first sushi. Mid-80s. I’m pretty sure it was at Hiroshi Sushi on Third Avenue between 38th and 39th. I know it was just a block or so down from work, and it was quite near the Irish bar on the corner — now a TD Bank — where my colleagues and I went on Fridays for lunch, have corned beef and cabbage and three mugs of beer ($1 each), and then I’d go back to work and put my head on my desk for an hour or so. I could do that; my office door didn’t have a window.

Dad brought me into Hiroshi Sushi and we walked toward the back. If it’s the same place, the thin corridor of dining room opened up into an alcove with skylights, and it gave you the feeling of being in New York City with its urban sheen but not its cacophony.

I already knew how to use chopsticks, of course — in New York especially, kids learn how to use chopsticks about the time they learn the difference between a Four In Hand and Half-Windsor knot — but he taught me about wasabi and ginger, where to lay my chopsticks when not eating, and also that if we were sitting at the sushi bar itself that I should pay attention to the sushi chef as he did his work, because it was special, almost sacred.

Wags rips a yuppie a new one.

One summer while Mom, Jim and I were at our beach house, Dad took a course in making “shushi.” (Still to this day, I’ve never heard a single person pronounce it like that, and still to this day I wonder if his sushi teacher said it this way.)

He would make it at home, and he did a reasonably good job.

I must admit to you, Dear Reader, that just now I was looking up sushi terms to write a little more precisely — I have always loved good nomenclature since learning sailing terms as a teenager, and part of getting a skipper’s rank was a test on “nomenclature;” even “nomenclature” itself is cool nomenclature…but. Back to it. — I was looking up sushi terms and was reminded (Okay…I pretty much learned for the first time) that “sushi” refers to the seasoned rice itself, not necessarily the final product we’re served (with seaweed, rice, seafood or vegetables). In fact, if I’m going to be very vulnerable right now, I’ll admit that I thought “sashimi” was sushi without the seaweed — that sashimi was simply the fresh uncooked fish sitting on top of rice. Sashimi is in fact the fresh sliced fish all by its glorious self.

All that said, Dad did a pretty fair job of it. He was adventurous with eating. Not with everything, but with eating? Yes. He’d say, when anyone eating with him balked at trying something like salmon roe — which I still won’t eat — “Oh, c’mon! Live dangerously!”

“Live dangerously!” was always a tell that he was smiling inside. That he took great pride in his two sons and his daughters-in-law. That he was enjoying the company of anyone fortunate enough to dine with him.

It is said that people who enter a crowded room are one of two types. One type says, “Here I am!” The other type says, “There you are!” Dad was the latter.

After a while, Dad was neither.

Dad ended himself in 1998, and in looking back I recall that he hadn’t been doing much dangerous living in the kitchen. In his cooking heyday, in addition to sushi he’d have made various Middle Eastern dishes, most of which had no names, dubious ingredients, but were nevertheless quite tasty. He’d make pesto and freeze some of it in ice cube trays, so that when he needed it, he could pop out a block or three and add it to pasta. He always was delayed in getting dinner on the table. Mom would have to remind him to check the broiler for the Italian bread he was toasting: “My love! The BREAD!” The slightly burned loaf would emerge with blackened edges. Scrape, scrape, scrape.

At a certain point, it was he who did most of the cooking, not Mom, because Dad was at home a lot. He got fired when his firm went through a leveraged buyout and the new C-Suite men thought he wasn’t sanguine enough in his sales forecasts. He was a “realist” (his word), born in 1921 and growing up in the Depression and WWII, losing his mother when he was 9 and his father when he was 20, requiring that he quit college in his junior year so he could support his stepmother and three younger half-siblings. But the early Boomer ass-clowns now in charge of Dad’s company had experienced suffering no worse than whether the cuffs of their bellbottom pants got dirty. At the time, I hated them. I suppose I still do. A little.

I ask myself: should I remember Dad as someone whom I saw last as an inert corpse on his bed with an empty bottle of gin on a silver tray at his side and a clear plastic bag over his head; a farewell note nearby? Or should I remember him as the father who’d put me on his shoulders when I was four, wade out into the ocean to where we could both break through the crests of gentle waves after he’d remind me: “Hold your breath.” Should I remember him as dying alone and maybe afraid? (For who can know what went through his mind at the end.) Or should I remember him as someone who was nothing less than heroic in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and 1960s and so on and so forth, as he became the mainstay of a family that extended over generations.

Well, Dear Reader, I have to remember him as all of that.

All of that at once, as we all get remembered, or at least as we should be, if those who remember us are being generous. For generosity, in time, is something we tend to outgrow or ignore. Or withhold.

The “worst” among us now were once children who shared an ice cream cone with the family dog. And the “best” among us then sometimes leave final impressions among their loved ones that become secreted away. Rarely discussed. Causing their wives to feel shame.

The contrasting and complementary decisions we make are like tiles placed alongside each other. Like those Dad placed around the edges of a cutting-board he made when I was ten.

Like a mosaic created by a master Artist.

Mangoes, taxi drivers and God

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

The bats were out again this morning. Around 6:15am. Until recently, I was a bit put out by them. Strike that: I was a bit repulsed by them. I didn’t like them. But then I learned that bats pollinate fruits like bananas and mangoes. I’m agnostic regarding their involvement with the latter, which are hard as hell to cut and make edible, but I am — as I’m sure most of us are — grateful for the banana side of its deployment. And I also learned that we and bats and whales might share a common ancestor from millions of years ago. Yep. Depending on your stance on evolution, we hang out at the same get-togethers on Thanksgiving Day.

In the same breath, I’ll add this: I am as comfortable believing I evolved from a billion years-old protoplasmic blob on Earth’s surface as I am that I came from a 59-year-old blob inside my mother’s womb. Both are miraculous; both are life; both are sacred to me. My and others’ lives and the health of Earth are mine to steward. That is what I believe. ‘Nuff said.

This reminds me of a story.

Shortly after moving to New York from Lubbock in 1995, Karen was riding in a cab with a driver whose name was Nufsed (pronounced NUFF-sedd). She knew what his name was because every yellow taxi in the city must display within view of the passenger an ID plaque with the driver’s name and Taxi and Limousine Commission license number. She being the friendly Texan, she starts talking with “Nufsed,” and because it seems Nufsed is struggling with something in his life, she steers the conversation toward spiritual matters. They reach her destination and she wishes him well and vice versa. A week or two later, she gets in a cab to go somewhere else. (She had not yet realized that real New Yorkers take the subway everywhere, not cabs, but then she hadn’t met me yet, nor had she benefited from my extensive knowledge of the subway system. In fact, she often joked with people while we lived there that the main reason she married me was for my knowledge of the subway system. Now living in Kerrville, Texas, which doesn’t enjoy the benefits of the New York City subway system nor my knowledge of same, I am rendered mostly useless except for my ability to make a decent chicken fettuccine alfredo.)

But back to the story.

As I said, a week or two later Karen took another cab ride — eschewing the subway — and lo and behold the driver was Nufsed! Now, you have to realize that as many yellow taxis that you already think you see in shows involving New York City, that apparent ubiquity is probably under-represented. There are more than 13,000 yellow cabs shuttling fake New Yorkers from one place to another at a cost of $0.50 for every ten feet. More recently, add to that number another 9,000 “Black Cars,” which is the term used for Uber and Lyft drivers and the like. So Karen got in the cab and greeted Nufsed, and he remembered her as well, even though riders are not required to display an ID tag. (Ba-dum-dum. “I’m here all week, folks.”)

You have probably already have guessed that this kind of thing “just doesn’t happen.” Until it does. It’s so unlikely to happen that as many years as I spent in New York, and as capable as I am of remembering faces and names — that’s what essentially I’ve been paid to do for more than a quarter century — what happened to Karen has never happened to me. (Yes, I did take the occasional cab or two.) All I can conclude is that whatever spiritual matters they discussed were matters that, if I know Karen as I do, they are things that Nufsed needed to hear and things that might well have given him new hope in life. New reason to believe he is loved. Their meeting again was no accident, but it can’t be explained.

So I don’t like bats. Or didn’t so much until I remembered their usefulness in consuming mosquitoes that otherwise might have been vexing me. Or until I learned that they cause bananas to be in my life or until I learned that whales and dogs are in my life because of our common ancestor. I like whales and dogs a lot.

So I don’t like bats that much today any more than I like the distant and pimple-covered cousin who, on that large family Thanksgiving Day, stations himself at the far end of the food table eating most of the guacamole and even double dips. (This is Texas. Use your appetizer of choice.) This distant cousin, however, is also the one who volunteers to clean the kitchen later that day, when the rest of us are falling asleep in front of the Cowboys-Giants game on TV.

But I’m big on miracles. I’m big on not knowing how it was that Nufsed and Karen crossed paths a second time in a way that “just doesn’t happen.” I’m big on not knowing how it is that, as my belief goes, all living creatures evolved from an ancient blob in the same way I myself grew from a more-recent blob. (I do also believe, however, that one human’s origin may have been only half-blobulous.) I’m big on mystery, because it is Mystery that breaths faith into my waking moments.

It is said, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” I believe that. But today I believe it in a new way, because of bats and because of Nufsed.

I used to think that the “evidence” was certain prescribed beliefs that I grabbed onto like a life-preserver and that underscored the truth of what I could not see, which was the existence of God. The life-preserver was tangible, it floated and I could grab it and hold it under my chest and stay alive until rescued by a search team from Bora Bora. The life preserver didn’t work for the person next to me, mind you, but it worked for me and my minimum survival, thank-you-very-much-now-fuck-off.

Today I believe that the “evidence” is mystery itself — the “things not seen” — that provides me reason to have and live out faith. That I can’t explain why Nufsed and Karen met twice. That I find it completely compatible, philosophically, biologically and theologically, that I came from two different kinds of blobs, as did bats, whales and dogs. Each creature — except perhaps for the aforementioned Half-Blobulous One — came from an initial blob and a secondary blob as it started its journey toward waking consciousness. That’s what I believe, at least.

The more mystery I encounter, the more mystery that arises one day that science explains the next day and which is then supplanted by new mystery, new science, and is again supplanted the following day…the more that that dynamic repeats each day that I live, the more faith I have that the original blob I came from has blossomed into something so beautiful, so marvelous, so unbelievable — so increasingly Mysterious — that today I have indisputable evidence that I will never have an answer to it other than to declare: “God.”

[PHOTO: Phys.org]