Even More About Pie

My neighbor Steve took umbrage (see his comment) at not being introduced to sugar cream pie, and I promised to make things right when I make the pie right. He also suggested that sugar cream sounded a lot like the chess pie he knew years ago (pictured below).

He’s right about that. They are very similar, but the Hoosier version does not include eggs or corn meal. Both, judging from my Internet research, sometimes do not set firmly.

My sugar cream pie was tasty as could be—rich, sweet, and smooth—but way too soupy. We had to eat it with spoons. So my sister, a richly experienced cook, and I started researching possible causes for the failure to set. She believes it had to do with the butter fat content of the cream (ideally 40 percent) and with the temperature reached. Suggestions include using a thermometer to confirm actual oven temperature, bringing the cream to room temperature before making the filling, stirring the filling during baking to assure uniform temperature throughout. Chess pie recipes suggest turning the oven off when the pie is done and leaving it in the oven to cool. The cream pie recipes say specifically to take it out after 45 or 50 minutes. Some even suggest putting it in the refrigerator to set after baking.

Clearly I will have to practice. When I get it right, Steve, you will be the first to test it.

Chess pie picture above from http://www.cookingwithoutanet.com/2009/05/baking-class-chess-pie.html

More About Pie

I recently stumbled upon a magazine article about something called “Hoosier sugar cream pie,” and it rang a bell. I well remember loving such a pie as a child, but we didn’t call it Hoosier. It was just sugar cream pie. Some outlander probably added the “Hoosier” to distinguish it from the more famous Boston cream pie, which is not a pie at all but a cake with chocolate icing.

Anyway, this magazine article said the recipe dated to 1816, the year Indiana became a state. So I went to my source, The Hoosier Cookbook, published by Indiana University Press in 1976. There I found the same recipe with a notation that it was 160 years old. The order of listed ingredients had been changed.

Let’s see: 1976 minus 160 equals, uh, 1816.

An old friend and former colleague recently asked me for a pie crust recipe I mentioned back in August. It too came from The Hoosier Cookbook, but copyright expressly forbids reproducing or utilizing any part of the book in any form without written permission. Presumably “utilizing” does not include baking pie.

So I won’t be posting the recipe without permission. But Jon, e-mail me at f-starr@northwestern.edu. I think Indiana University Press won’t sue me if I pass it on privately to a good friend. 
Photo: whatscookingamerica.net

Still Here

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of my death are exaggerated. In fact, I haven’t even been sick if you don’t count a wonky lower back.

But yes, I have been gone too long from this place, and I hope some of you agree. Electronic indications are that a few faithful readers have persevered. Beyond the United States, most of them are in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. That’s good. I spent a lot of time in those parts as a newspaper reporter.

So, get to the point. What’s my excuse?

Well, apart from black mold after Hurricane Irene, the arrival of crisp weather and associated bird dog duties, and continuing daily bouts of wrestling with The Moon, I have no excuse.

Ah, The Moon. Yes, there’s the real culprit. I’ve mostly used available time for The Moon, not the blog, although I did capitulate to the advice of the experts and activate a Facebook page, an act that required little time. 

So here’s what I’ve been doing.

It became clear that readers of the book would need to know things Main Character could not know. To fix that I had to shift the narrative’s point of view from one limited to him to one that writers call omniscient. (Don’t you love that concept?) This meant some rewriting of earlier material.

I also had to bring some other characters into the tale to dramatize actions that Main Character can’t know about. This meant inserting whole chapters in parts of the book I thought I’d finished.   

Third circumstance: the writing has outrun my outline. For some time I’ve been making up plot structure as I go. This has worked reasonably well since I’ve always known the general arc of the story. But it requires getting down basic structure—bare bones of the action—and coming back later to flesh it out with mood, description, characters’ reactions, explanation of motives, etc.

Too much information for you? Okay, I’ll stop now. But I did promise that this blog would be partly about writing the novel, and that is more about process than content. 

The Fire Next Time

High summer here has always been hard to bear. This one was the worst in memory, long weeks of heat and humidity near one hundred. Then, quickly, came a mighty wind killing century-old trees, an earthquake that rattled homes and confidence, a hurricane that drove water through our old house’s seams, followed by a week-long deluge.

Aftermath of Hurricane Irene

Another hurricane is out there somewhere. In Texas there’s fire and drought.

The writing seemed to fetch up on the rocks too for a time. Not writers’ block, whatever that is. No, not that. Rather I reached a place where events become quite precipitous and start occurring quickly, and that posed a dilemma. Should I speed up the pace to match the events and move quickly through them, or would that simply seem impatient? Should I slow them down instead to provide more sensory perception, more detailed description so the reader can savor them? I wrote it both ways and liked neither one very much.

The hard truth of course lay somewhere in the middle, that is, I should select the telling moments and concentrate on them but be sure the details earn their keep. Otherwise kill them. Many hard choices along this path, concentrating on this, skipping over that. It feels like walking through a minefield must feel, though I’ve never walked through one. It’s a critical period, hard to concentrate when also thinking about some unnamed tropical depression in the Atlantic.

James Baldwin wrote this:

“If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”

A New Topic -– Pie

Alright I confess. This post has nothing whatever to do with the novel. As for the “more-or-less-connected-with-the-work-in-progress” standard that I promised for blog posts, this one is in the "less-connected" category. So much for my rules.

Not long ago my friend and fellow Hoosier Larry McCoy taught me how to bake a pie. That is, he mailed me an old Indiana recipe for apple pie including a great recipe for the crust. As every pie lover knows, the crust is the hardest part to get right. It must be difficult, because so few people get it right. I love to cook, but baking is outside my competence and as a long-time lover of pie I consider that a great pity.

As you’ve no doubt concluded by now if you’re still reading, I tried Larry’s recipe and it worked beautifully. It worked so well I made several more pies with other fillings.  

This started last fall, so I did a harvest pie with apple, walnuts and cranberries (Scrumptious!), a pumpkin pie, a pecan pie, several more with apple, and when spring came I made a blueberry pie and one of peach. Sometimes I had a little trouble keeping the crust together enough to get it into the pan unbroken, so I tried adding a tablespoon of ice-cold water. That seemed to work. Now I’m working on perfecting the fillings.

If I'm only reinventing the wheel here, old pie-baking hands, speak up. I’d be happy for your suggestions.

For a friend’s birthday recently I used a simple Eastern Shore recipe to make a cherry filling. The result looked so good that I took this picture, and my friend pronounced the pie good. I think he also said terrific and maybe something else. I believe he meant it because his e-mail ended this way:

“And more pie, always more pie...”

Thanks to him and thanks to Larry. 

Time Out

There’s only one best dog in the world, and every boy has it.  I’m not sure who said that first, but I heard it first from Jan. And as in most things, she’s right.

I’m that boy.

My dog and I have been practicing retrieves, a canvas dummy thrown or launched over land, and she’s getting better each day. But then, she’s the best dog in the world, isn’t she? A floatable one over water is great fun to watch, but she needs more confidence in water.

After weeks of 100+ temperatures and oppressive humidity, we had three days of relief. A fresh breeze at sunrise, fresh local peaches and coffee may well salvage what threatened to become a miserable summer vacation. Today the steam is back.

This vacation provided an opportunity to visit one of my favorite bookstores, The Book Bank. It’s known on-line as Crawford’s Nautical Books, and you can visit it at HTTP://www.crawfordsnautical.com/. Gary and Susan Crawford buy and sell what they call “watery books”—anything related to the sea, boats, ships, navigation, fishing, sailing, voyages, islands, or otherwise watery. They have a wonderful collection, and I could spend hours wandering through their rooms.

My other favorite is The Book Escape in Baltimore, which also offers new and used books. It’s co-owned and operated by Andrew Stonebarger,  a wonderfully patient man who allows customers to wander about as long as they like while he remains available at a respectful distance. He’s been hugely helpful in finding unusual books I needed for research.  

What a comfort to have a cozy book store nearby!

The Ospreys, Again

Sorry to keep going on about this, but it’s worth mentioning.

There was a dead osprey in our yard this afternoon. We’d been gone and when we returned it appeared that the osprey had been there for a while. It looked like an adult, big, with well developed talons and beak, tail feathers and wings. But its body mass was nearly gone.

How did this happen? There was no sign of trauma that I could see, though it was far too late for a necropsy. Trying to imagine the causes of death I thought of poison, a natural illness, a shooting, and little else. These birds are so powerful and self sufficient there seems little else that coud kill them.

The heat was too great to dig a hole for burial, so we bagged it (the bird) and carried it to a disposal area. Which osprey it was, whether it left young or a mate, I do not know. But I learned this. I now know why the parents of our young one in the water (see earlier post) could not save it. The talons are fearsome. Long, curved and sharp as needles. I certainly would not wish to be saved in a set of those. 

The Mysterious Mr. Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.

An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,

Exhales from out her golden rim,

And, softly dripping, drop by drop,

Upon the quiet mountain top,

Steals drowsily and musically

Into the universal valley.

A friend sent me this quotation the other day, and I loved the beautiful language and the soft imagery. It strikes me as a near-perfect description of the photograph that introduces my blog. These lines come from a poem called "The Sleeper." There are many possible readings of them. One is the approach of death. Another might be the transport of a moon-induced inspiration into the "universal" consciousness, a rather vague idea that represents to me the effort to create a novel. Or are those a single reading?

Dog Days

What’s a poor vizsla to do?

We’re outdoor dogs, and this mid-summer is a miserable time of year. Hunting season is over and won’t start until fall. We try to train, Pops and I. Once a week or so we work out on live birds with some other dogs, and I get to run off-leash. But mostly I sit in the shade because the trainers work on one dog at a time. The rest of the week Pop stays indoors because, he says, “It’s too hot to go out.”

Now I wouldn’t know this firsthand, but I’ve heard that my ancestors used to hunt all day long, even in heat like this. The Great Hungarian Plain, where we come from, gets as hot as this in summer—90 to 105. That’s what it is here now. We vizslas have thin, short-haired coats. I guess my ancestors simply got acclimatized to it. But I’m acclimatized to air-conditioning.  

So I put on weight, and my muscles get flabby. And sometimes I just go stir-crazy and run top speed around the house to burn up energy. When that happens Pops better get out of my way.

When fall comes I’ll have to work hard to get back in shape. Can’t wait! 

Formula Fun

Jan said, "Take the red car."

But it wouldn’t be up to me; I knew that. Then the voice behind me said, "Frank, take the red car." Now that was karma, and the word isn't big enough to describe what happened next. 

I would drive the red car—the color of Ferrari, the most famous name in racing. The sky was blue, the sun warm, and a winding track lay ahead. The formula cars were lined up ready to go, and we were going to do a dozen laps or so at racing speeds. 

What does this have to do with writing a novel? I’ll tell you. 

There’s no better way to refresh the old muse than going racing. It clears the mind, leaving it fresh and clean as a mountain stream. The concentration required to write is nothing at all compared to the concentration required to dive into a corner at 120 mph, brake hard, downshift, and come out fast and fully in control. When you get it right, it’s better than sex (almost).  Facing total destruction and defeating it several times per lap is a tonic that lasts for days. Weeks!

But eventually it wears off. Several years ago I stopped amateur racing and sold the turquoise Porsche 914-6 race car pictured on this page. People ask me, “Don’t you miss it?” Ah, if only they knew!

When the Internet brought an opportunity to buy a ride, it was more than an old Formula One fan could resist. I'd never driven an open-wheel single-seater. 
The venue was Summit Point, West Virginia. I know the old track well, but they put us on the Jefferson Circuit, a short and treacherous 1.1 miles that I hadn't driven in several years. 

So here's the story, in pictures: 

The cars, small, lightweight, and fast.

I get some reconnaissance laps with a professional.

Am I nuts?

Smile, dammit!

Climbing aboard looks easy when they do it.

Where are the pedals?

That's not my helmet; it's my head. 

The competition: half my age and half my weight.

A cushion behind makes a short guy taller. 

What's that thing for?

My game face.

Okay. I can do this!

Any questions?

Whooooeee!

First lap ends. Guess who's in front.

Bye-bye!

Lap two: my pursuers fall back.

Lap three: where are they?

Uh-oh!

Next lap: He's still there!

He's still there, and ahead is a back marker.

Free at last! I've lapped the back marker and my pursuers are stuck behind him.

A nasty corner: double apex, decreasing radius, off-camber, and downhill.  Many come to grief here.
And I complete another lap alone. 

Last lap: The radio tells me "Checkered flag!" 

 Climbing out. 

Still climbing out. 

Still climbing out. Why is this so hard?

Hey guys, I've got to sit down awhile. I'm soaked through. But if this were a race, I would have won.

So the moral is: Age and wile top youth and skill. The truth is that soon I would have had a fight because those guys were in my mirrors for the last two laps. Then they would see what wile is. 
Thanks to my wife, who took the pictures. 

Buckle Up and Hold On Tight

A surprise is coming. Think speed.

Whodunit and Why?

Here’s the beginning of a novel.

A hunter in the Savage River State Forest raises his gun and kills the only nesting female goshawk in the state of Maryland, leaving her body on the forest floor and her three chicks to die in the nest. That part is not fiction. It happened this week.

The rest could be a novel. Even if the shooter is caught we may never fully understand the motive. It takes a heap of abuse or some radical thinking for a person to kill deliberately such an extremely rare and beautiful bird.

Farmers have been known to kill predators that endangered their livestock and thus their livelihoods. That could be understandable, though it’s hard to imagine that the only goshawk in Maryland did that much damage living in the midst of a 54,000-acre state forest.

Or did it attack and kill someone’s pet? That would be another story.

The Maryland Legislative Sportsmen's Foundation offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of this shooter. Persons with information about the crime are asked to call the Poacher Hot Line: 1-800-635-6124.

The Baltimore Sun's outdoor writer Candus Thomson wrote a detailed story in the paper of June 27. The earlier accounts can be found here and here.
This is a stunning story. Again I say it's worthy of a novel or nonfiction book. 

Using and Abusing Language

The Novel continues apace. The main character is now in a bind (Isn’t that where he’s supposed to be?) and trouble is all around him. Good. The deeper we get into it, the looser the writing becomes, it seems. Inconsistency is not desirable; I’d like it to be so loose throughout. Perhaps I can fix that during revisions.

What do I mean by loose? I mean the opposite of tight as in uptight or self-conscious. When the action is sailing along the writing does too. When the poor old author is trying too hard the writing betrays his discomfort. It gets tight. (This meaning has nothing to do with conciseness or verbosity.)

One day I became acutely aware of idiom and whether it properly reflected the time and place of the action, a time and place I personally did not experience—middle Europe during World War II. Sometimes expressions from middle East-Coast-America during 2011 slip in. Must I worry about that?

My response is this. The characters should use expressions of the time and place to the extent that I can represent them naturally. I try to do this by channeling (a fad word I won’t use elsewhere) people I knew from that time and place. I’m old enough to remember terms and expressions of the late 1940s. I had two uncles in the war who came back with favorite wartime expressions and European brides. And I had the good fortune to enjoy long exposure to central European people and culture during much of my own life. The trick is to hear those voices and mimic them. 

Once or twice my readers have objected to an expression I used as too modern, and I changed it. But since the characters are conversing in their native language or occasionally someone else’s language and only rarely in English it seems reasonable that the book, being written in English, might be a translation of their dialogue. The translator, who is also the author, is a twenty-first century American living on the East Coast and striving to produce a book his contemporaries will find readable.

The script for the recent remake of “True Grit” starring Jeff Bridges was so wooden and stilted that the dialogue was often incomprehensible. Did the scriptwriters actually believe late 19^th century people talked like that? Or was this some elaborate Coen Brothers joke that I didn’t get? Either way it nearly ruined a good story in spite of Bridges’ first-rate performance. You’ll have to see the whole movie to hear what I mean, but here’s a clip to tempt you.

A Wild Goose Chase

In the midst of a quiet day after the storm we were sitting on the (now partially) screened porch discussing the unwanted treetop in our midst when a neighbor and his wife came by walking their dogs. 

The dogs were playing at the water's edge when the youngest, a German Shorthaired Pointer of some eighteen months, felt herself provoked by the sight of Canada geese in the cove and set out to chase them. In the blink of an eye she was nearly out of sight, which set off general alarums and excursions.

The geese swam away, and soon it began to appear that the pup was swimming in circles. Neighbor Peter is a courageous man and loves his dogs. In an instant he had handed someone his wallet and hit the water fully dressed, shoes and all. Our niece Sloane (Excitement travels with her.) headed to the shed to launch a kayak, and I went to help her. By the time she was in the water Peter had almost reached his dog, having walked the entire distance on the muddy bottom. 

When Sloane the kayakmeister reached them Peter had turned Masha the dog around and was bringing her back, their two heads barely visible in the distance, the water close under their chins, and Sloane in the kayak comfortingly nearby.

Since Sloane’s arrival always heralds excitement perhaps I should have a video camera ready for her next visit. 

A Bad Day for Trees

This was not your usual Chesapeake Bay thunderstorm. Not by a country mile. At first glance I thought tornado. But the experts were right; there was no rotation. Everything that fell—century-old trees, halves of trees, big limbs—everything fell eastward. The west side of our house looked sandblasted, with less paint but a new coat of leaves. The other three sides were untouched. It looked like the straight-line winds of a microburst.

The result was devastation to trees. Throughout our little village big trees came thudding down. One neighbor lost six including a solid willow oak some 150 years old that took several others with it. The workers said a piece of its trunk weighed 26,000 pounds. A grand old maple at the corner of our lane left a stump the size of a card table. Miraculously there was no report of personal injury or damage to dwellings, though a few outbuildings were damaged.

We found three bird nests and several dead birds the next day as we picked up leaves and branches in the yard. Our resident ospreys seem to have weathered the storm well in their nest on the navigation light; Ma and Pa and one or two chicks were visible there. The osprey nest on my neighbor’s dock looked smaller than before, but the adults were still on it and I saw what I believe was a chick.

But the character of our bucolic tree-shaded village has changed. Now it looks undressed and exposed to the merciless sun.

It all happened without warning during the Friday cocktail hour. A local weather station that records conditions every five minutes showed a 5-mph gust and then dead calm at 7:24 pm. The next five-minute record, at 7:29 pm, showed both sustained wind and gust speeds at 70 mph. There the record stopped suddenly and didn’t resume until 11:30 the next morning when the power came back. (Oddly, the Friday record read 40 mph when I checked it today.)

I suspect that the actual top wind speed was higher. Neighbors who experienced it—we did not—agreed that it was closer to 100 mph, and I believe them. It may have been still rising when the power failed.

One neighbor said she heard a heavy thump-thump—“It sounded like a giant walking the earth.”—of big trees broken off or ripped up by their roots.

Once there was an old silver maple with a big hole in the trunk and an imaginary resident owl that stared out with ghostly aspect at the end of a neighbor’s lane at twilight. We called it the Harry Potter tree. It was removed more than a year ago revealing a picturesque young pine tree. Now the pine tree is broken in half.

The healthy and shapely young persimmon tree that shaded the south side of our house became a misshapen snag, the top half of it stuck into our screen porch.

I’m convinced there’s a lesson in this storm, a pattern developing. A damaging wind of a somewhat less ferocity blew two venerable Adirondack chairs far into the cove last summer. Two years ago the village became impassable under several feet of snow from two blizzards in the same week. Tides are consistently higher than they were two or three years ago. High tides routinely wash the bottom of the docks and cover riprap, and low tides no longer reveal the mud. As recently as five years ago water washing the under side of docks was rare, the result of an unusual storm or days of strong southerly wind.

Climate scientists suggest we’re in for an period of more extreme weather, and it looks to me like it has begun. 

Return of the Cottontail

Some years ago a large family of cottontail rabbits gamboled and grazed in our yard on warm summer evenings. Then quite suddenly they disappeared and we missed them.

I didn’t think it was the arrival of Sam the vizsla that chased them out. Eventually I realized that we’d destroyed their habitat. They lived in the forest of Phragmites that was taking over our shoreline. Because this reed multiplies so aggressively and kills other plants, the state tries to eradicate it. So one autumn our Phragmites disappeared and so did our rabbits.

Well, this morning Sam the vizsla disappeared into the boxwoods where the sun never shines, and a moment later out popped Peter Cottontail himself in a big hurry, followed by Sam in hot pursuit. Now Peter was headed for the invisible fence, which would have administered a convincing admonition to poor Sam, and I didn’t want that.

“Wait!” I shouted with as much authority as I could muster. That’s a command we’ve practiced a lot, Sam and I, and to my delight she skidded to a stop that would have done a New York taxi proud. Maybe Peter will return.

Meanwhile, Mother Osprey sat serenely on her nest—no sign of Papa or the chicks—summer goslings swam about, now almost as big as their parents. A lone duck watched from the riprap, and young shoots of Phragmites poked through the sandy bank. 

Berlin Showdown: So who won?

Throughout the Cold War there was only one direct confrontation between Soviet and U.S. soldiers. It could hardly have been more dangerous. In the fall of 1961 ten Soviet tanks and ten American tanks faced each other in a narrow shopping street at a distance of 100 paces across the white line dividing East and West Berlin. For eighteen hours their crews awaited further orders with nervous trigger fingers, sighting gun targets and revving their engines.

When the orders came, they withdrew, Soviets first, then the Americans. It isn’t known what the agreement included, but the four-power right of access to all of Berlin ended on that day. The United States never again challenged the right of East Germany to control Berlin’s crossing points, even though under the four-power agreement the East German government had no authority in the city. War—which could have become nuclear—was avoided at the cost of the agreed principle of free access. Berliners, like Hungarians five years earlier, were abandoned. The tension of Berlin, and Cuba a year later, shaped American policy for the next thirty years.

Frederick Kempe, in his new book Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the World’s Most Dangerous Place, offers a detailed and well researched account of the politics, personalities, and events that contributed to this crisis. He lays much of the responsibility for it on the doorstep of the new and inexperienced American president John Kennedy.  

Allied leaders and the entrenched American establishment distrusted the young president. The disaster at the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy's rebuff of Nikita Khrushchev’s initial gestures of rapprochement contributed to Khrushchev’s distrust of him. Khrushchev sharply changed course and ambushed Kennedy at their summit meeting in Vienna. Shortly thereafter the Russian gave in to domestic and East German pressure to stop the westward flow of East Germany’s intelligentsia through Berlin by agreeing to close the border and let the East German leader Walter Ulbricht precipitate a confrontation. 

I experienced this crisis some distance away as a member of a medium tank battalion whose assigned duty in the event of war was to slow the advance of a vastly larger Soviet Bloc tank force that was expected to pour through the Fulda Gap. Our 50-ton M48A1 tanks, consuming gasoline at the rate of three gallons per mile, hadn’t enough capacity to reach the battlefield and then to fight. The solution to this problem was four external 55-gallon steel drums of gasoline fitted aft of the back deck about two feet from the usually red-hot exhaust ports. The driver was meant to jettison the drums at the critical moment by pulling a lever. Mercifully, we never went into combat with this arrangement or any other.

Kempe’s account corrected the date of my experience, related in a post last month. Though the other facts of that account are correct to the best of my memory, Kempe’s work makes it clear that our battalion was not called to alert in August because ranking Americans, both military and civilian in Berlin and Washington, saw no urgency in the first closure of the border on August 13, 1961. It wasn’t until October 27 that American officials insisted, with military preparation to enforce it, upon their right to enter East Berlin freely. When the East German guards stood fast, the crisis began. So it was early in the morning of October 28, a Saturday, that our unit was called to alert 300 miles southwest of Berlin. To our good fortune and the world’s, nothing violent happened.   

Excitement

Our niece came down the other day and took one of the kayaks out on the cove. After a while in response to some excited shouting I ran outdoors to see what was the matter.

“Sloane rescued a baby osprey!” came the reply.

Glad our niece was safe, and quite certain nothing could be done for a baby bird fallen out of its high nest, I went back to my book. Soon there was more excitement. I returned to find our kind neighbor lady on the dock, a shovel in her hand, and her guests gamely motoring away toward the navigation light with a round little bundle of feathers, beak, and claws about the size of a softball, wrapped in a towel. 

The osprey nest, perched on the very top of the light’s supporting structure, was far out of reach. What a dangerous and foolish mission, I thought. The parents will be angry like a mama bear. In a moment, one of the guests was out of the dinghy and climbing toward the nest. Mama and Papa Osprey circled warily making no sound or warlike approach.

In the blink of an eye all was well again. Baby was in her (his?) nest. Mama and Papa were back, standing guard. The dinghy departed, and I felt quite foolish. Nothing could be done? Indeed!

Congratulations to the neighbor lady who took charge, Sloane who fished the bird from the water, and the sailors who returned it to its nest. 
For the rest of the weekend all seemed normal around the nest as far as we could tell. But we know so little about these creatures. For example, we've heard it said that if the scent of humans is on a baby bird the parents will disown it. So Sloane scooped it out of the water with her paddle, and everyone took care not to touch it. But is that belief true?  

Another question: If ospreys can carry birds and fish to the nest in their claws couldn't they have returned their baby to the nest? If anyone knows the answers to such questions, we'd like to hear from you.

Imagine being and not being

Imagine doing both simultaneously.

Not easy? Well, suppose you could join a therapy group to help you over the rough spots. And if the reward for success was absolutely heavenly, you might consider trying it? Now suppose one requirement would be to make peace with your worst enemy. Would that be a disincentive? At the very least it’s an interesting proposition for discussion, isn’t it?

Dalma Takács likes to pose questions, big, probing, existential ones. And discussion is what she wants to stimulate with her new novel, The Condo or ... Life, A Sequel. In the spirit of full disclosure I must say that she is a generous friend who has given much good advice on the book I’m writing. She asks tough questions in a gentle way. I imagine that she uses the Socratic method as a professor of English at Notre Dame College in Cleveland, Ohio, and though Socrates does not appear as a character in her book—if he had, he could have had a chat with George Bernard Shaw—the reader senses his presence nonetheless.

She has developed a wonderfully imaginative concept as a framework to consider the nature of evil and whether it is acceptable or desirable to forgive evil. To what extent must one resist evil? Should we make a distinction between evil and the evil-doer? Do we connive with evil by not resisting it? And most crucially, do we destroy ourselves by resisting it too rigidly?

Questions like these arise in extreme circumstances like wartime, and Ms. Takács brings to her task the knowledge and experience that lends urgency to them. Like a good Socratic teacher, she doesn’t presume to give answers. She only frames the questions and so challenges us to think about them.

What is most remarkable is the deceptively simple vehicle she created for this discussion, an easy read of only 149 pages in paperback from Xlibris, described at http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.aspx?bookid=87668.

13 August 1961

Such things always happen on Sunday mornings, and there’s a reason; young Army guys are sleeping off their Saturday night parties.

My phone rang about three that morning. A coded message from division headquarters had arrived, and the code clerk had a three-day pass. Would I come in and decipher it? I quickly dressed and drove three kilometers to the former Nazi airfield that was home to my assigned unit, a medium tank battalion. The message was simple; our unit was on alert. Some seventy-five tank engines wrecked the pre-dawn silence, the radio networks crackled, and we awaited further orders. At four in the afternoon the alert ended, the radios were switched off, and therein—as they say—lies the tale.

We didn’t know why we were alerted or why we stood down, but within hours the whole world knew. In Berlin East German troops had begun tearing up streets and erecting barbed wire barriers that would become the infamous Berlin Wall. While we waited, thinking of swarms of Warsaw Pact tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap, President Kennedy was deciding not to take military action, a decision that determined a generation of Cold War relations.

Frederick Kempe’s book Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the World’s Most Dangerous Place is being released today by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. I’ll be eager to read it and to share with you some thoughts. 

Hidden Treasure

This afternoon on a walk among the twenty-five houses that make up our village we came upon a sign for a yard sale. It urged us onto private property we would not normally have entered. There was no longer a crowd or evidence of a sale, but the front door opened and a friendly face invited us in, even with our dog. We’d missed the sale, but the welcome was beyond resisting. There were books left, our weakness, lots of books, old ones. An early copy of Leaves of Grass had been sold, the owner said, to a man who told her he didn’t know much about books. We were envious, but we left with a contemporary mystery story by Henning Mankell, A Mencken Chrestomathy from 1937, and a much-used copy of More Language That Needs Watching: Second Aid For Writers and Editors, by Theodore Bernstein, a New York Times editor until 1950. The owner of the house was herself the wife and daughter-in-law of newspapermen and resisted our effort to pay.    

The Osprey Are Back

Their high-pitched tweets, so misleading, like sweet little birds in the brush. But no, that tweet belongs to a quick and violent predator. Still it’s good to have them back. I love their graceful aerobatics and their big ungainly nests balanced on a navigation light or the pilings of my neighbor’s dock. Soon they’ll have eggs to hatch, chicks to feed, and their innocent-sounding little tweets will fill the evening air, as they grab mice, fish, and small birds to feed the little ones.

Spring has come to the island. 

Safely on the Bottom?

Now that Osama bin Laden is safely on the bottom of the Arabian Sea, we can turn our attention back to the larger Mideast revolution—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Libya et al—a new movement toward democracy fueled by social-network technology.

That’s quick shorthand for it, but not so fast, Buckaroos. Before Facebook and Twitter there was samizdat, the low-tech networking device invented forty-five years ago by Soviet dissidents, and look what it got them.

This Russian acronym—self  (sam) + publishing (izdat)—described the network created when a typist using seven sheets of onion-skin and carbon paper made copies of an uncensored document, distributed it to friends, each of whom made seven more copies and distributed those, etc. It was dangerous work. People were sent to prison camps for it.

But copies found their way into the hands of foreign correspondents and eventually onto western radio broadcasts to be heard, despite jamming, by the very Russians the censors meant to shield. This uncontrolled flow of information led to a growing movement of thoughtful and courageous adults whose political dissent had much more to do ultimately with the fall of communism and the Berlin wall than did the American president Ronald Reagan.

Something like that is what’s happening in the Middle East, though now the speed of transmission is instantaneous. But if we assume democracy will result, we may be mistaken. We have only to look at what developed in Russia, where there’s still little tolerance for uncontrolled news reporting and independent thinking.

What Else I Love

If you suspected that I’m fond of Chekhov, you’d be right. Especially “The Cherry Orchard,” and many of his short stories, in particular one called “Misery” and the famous “Lady With A Dog.” 

Here are some other works I love (not equally and in no order):

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Sea by John Banville

Sea Room by Adam Nicolson

The movie “Casablanca”

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi

The Hammerklavier Sonata by Beethoven

The movie “Babe” 

Many books by Stephen Hunter and James Lee Burke

Did I mention Anton Chekhov?

Formula One racing, but not nearly so much now that Bernie Ecclestone has turned a once-valiant and daring sport into his own private cash cow. It’s much less interesting under his control. It promises to become even less interesting if the takeover attempt by Rupert Murdoch and Italian investors related to Ferrari succeeds.  

What I think I should love and don’t yet: David Foster Wallace. Ulysses. Faulkner. Still trying.