Game One

I didn't write "Casey at the Bat," Ernest Lawrence Thayer did in 1888. But I thought it worth remembering after Game One of the American League Championship Series. I understand it's in the public domain, so here's your chance to enjoy it again.

 

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to the hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, “If only Casey could but get a whack at that—
We’d put up even money now, with Casey at the bat.”

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a hoodoo, while the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despisèd, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It pounded on the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey’s manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey’s bearing and a smile lit Casey’s face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt ‘twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his
     shirt;
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance flashed in Casey’s eye, a sneer curled Casey’s lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the
     air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped—
“That ain’t my style," said Casey. “Strike one!” the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled
     roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore;
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted someone on the stand;
And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his
     hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey’s visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the dun sphere flew;
But Casey still ignored it and the umpire said, “Strike two!”

“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered
     “Fraud!”
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles
     strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children
     shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

The Trouble with Research

 My novel is not about the Middle East. But in researching it I came across a remarkable story that anyone who thinks about today’s Middle East should read.

Needing to improve on my high-school-level understanding of World War I and the subsequent peace conference in Paris, I bought and began consuming a library shelf or two of books about the Great War, how it began and the manner of its conclusion. I was especially interested in learning what kind of Allied reasoning had required the mutilation of Hungary. Unlike the punishment of Germany, the post-war dismemberment of Hungary seemed like nothing more than the fruit of Georges Clemenceau’s private stubbornness combined with his ignorance of eastern Europe. Unlike Germany, Hungary hadn’t eagerly prosecuted the war, though it was the Austro-Hungarian empire that launched the first attack. The Hungarian prime minister István Tisza was the only official among the Central Powers to oppose the war, arguing correctly that it would lead to a disastrous weltkrieg (world war). He appears to have been the first to use that term. But Hungary’s punishment by the Treaty of Trianon was far greater than Germany’s by the Treaty of Versailles.

The problem with pursuing such research is that it becomes so easy to go astray. Before I had resolved my Clemenceau question I happened to pick up a dog-eared, paperback copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence’s account of his role in organizing the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule—the same events portrayed in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia.”  While reading this, drawn in by Lawrence’s lyrical prose, I happened to hear a radio interview with an author who was saying that at the end of the first war the question of who would rule the Middle East had been decided in a five-minute conversation between the French prime minister Clemenceau and the British prime minister David Lloyd George. The book was titled Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. What he said sounded very much like my suspicion about what happened to Hungary. So I needed to know how reliable the author Scott Anderson was and how much he knew about Clemenceau. I found his book well researched and his Clemenceau-Lloyd George anecdote confirmed by the historian Margaret MacMillan in her detailed account of the peace conference, Paris 1919.

The remarkable five-minute conversation that sealed the future of the Middle East took place secretly in a London townhouse a year and a half before the Paris peace agreements were concluded, and it broke all the British promises made to the Arabs during their revolt against the Turks, a sad conclusion to the epic tale of the Arab struggle for self-rule. The result was a map drawn to suit European needs and ignore the tribal and sectarian concerns of the Arabs. We westerners shouldn’t wonder why Islamic extremists still focus their anger on us.

The view, which I gather is widely held, that a collection of self-important but small-minded European leaders blundered into the first World War for reasons that had more to do with self aggrandizement and fear of losing their power than with the welfare of their people seems a roughly accurate if over-simplified summary of the cause. The massive human slaughter they created was followed by a peace arrangement that ensured more world-wide war and tension, up to and including the recent beheadings in the Middle East. 

Such a Dog?

Michiko Kakutani in this morning's Times reviewed a new novel titled The Dog by Joseph O’Neill, poor fellow. She found nothing in it to like, nothing at all. The story she found static and shallow, unconcerned with large issues, and without emotional power. The narration was suffocating and the main character generic. “None of this,” she wrote, “is remotely interesting to the reader.”

Why then did she write the review? And why did the Times put it on the front of The Arts section—or indeed anywhere in the paper? Why did they think readers would be interested in a book she found so totally boring? Aren’t most boring books ignored and left to die of neglect?

If the Times reviewed it because O’Neill’s previous book Netherland had been warmly received in 2008, was it necessary to torpedo his new one so thoroughly and leave the landscape littered with its wreckage? It makes one wonder about motives. At least, that might explain why some authors do not read reviews.

Now comes the Sunday Book Review section on August 7 with its front page devoted to a review of the same book, The Dog, but written by novelist Lawrence Osborne who quite liked it.

He found the narrator “wrapped up in an erudite and deliciously comic game of cat and mouse with a world that will never reward him or even treat him fairly.” He found the “mad lingo...exquisite and wonderfully overcooked....Perhaps,” he added, “it’s well beyond the ken of your average New York lawyer.”  (Or book critic?)

“With a consummate elegance,” Osborne concluded, “The Dog turns in on itself in imitation of the dreadful circling and futility of consciousness itself. Its subplots go nowhere, as in life. But, unlike life, its wit and brio keep us temporarily more alive than we usually allow ourselves to be.”

Contrast that concluding sentence of Osborne’s with Kakutani’s last sentence:

“Alas, in The Dog, the narrator barely budges from his unhappy little cocoon, and there are no captivating characters...to alleviate his spiral of self-pity—or the reader’s boredom.”

So, there you have it: The Dog is either elegant and witty or unbearably awful.  

Telling the Painful Part

In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Bob Timberg and I worked together in The Baltimore Sun’s Washington Bureau. He covered the White House, arguably the most challenging and visible of the bureau’s regular assignments, and became one of the most respected reporters in town.

That was remarkable only because of his unique burden. Bob’s face and hands had been painfully disfigured by burn scars that often caused strangers to look away. His friends knew he’d hit a land mine in Vietnam, but neither he nor we talked about it. The war had been over for fifteen years and Bob, it seemed, had put it behind him without anger or bitterness. An amiable, thoughtful, and energetic colleague, he devoted himself to uncovering stories no one else had, including many connected to the Iran-Contra scandal.  

In quiet moments, though, I confess I wondered what rage must simmer behind that mask, what he felt about the war and his contemporaries who had refused to go and felt righteous about it. And I wondered how he had overcome the physical and psychic scars of his war to build such a successful career.

Now, twenty-four years later, he has told us in a gutsy and brutally honest memoir titled Blue-Eyed Boy.

Timberg, a handsome Naval Academy graduate, was a Marine first lieutenant delivering a payroll near Da Nang in January 1967 when the track vehicle he was riding on suddenly threw him up on a cloud of flame that wiped out his future.

He wrote about it reluctantly, he says in the Prologue, “to remember how I decided not to die. Not to let my future die.”  He has published three other highly regarded books, posted a successful 30-year career in newspapers, and edited a prestigious military journal, but he calls the decision to reclaim his future his “most significant achievement.”

In his very personal telling I found this long and arduous journey, the rebuilding of his life, his face, and his earning capacity, an emotionally difficult tale to read but one impossible to put aside. He endured thirty-five surgeries—one on his eyelids without anesthesia—a monstrous depression, and the stares of children and adults, then returned to a culture that hated his war and disdained and abused those who fought it.

But there’s neither self-pity nor self-praise here. He frankly describes his role in destroying marriages to two loving and loyal women and the anger he felt toward those contemporaries who “relied on world-class duplicity to avoid duty in Vietnam. And then claimed the moral high ground.”

The voice is authentic Timberg. You can hear it in the Prologue:

“ ‘Reclaimed my future’ has a bullshit, self-help-book sound that I hate,” he writes. “Don’t worry, I won’t resort to it again, at least I don’t think I will. But I know there is something true here, something real and fragile...something essentially human about what I fought my way through.”

We’re all the richer for his having the courage and generosity to share it. Everyone with a stake in war—and that’s all of us, whether Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the next one—should read Blue-Eyed Boy. 

Land of Easy Living

This osprey appeared on our neighbor's dock one fine morning looking like the conductor of an all-gull orchestra. Eventually the gulls left, but he stayed for seven and a half hours. He didn't leave until, as we walked toward him in the late afternoon to see if he had been wounded, he peacefully went home to the green light at the end of the dock.

The Moon is Written

In the much-too-long time since last I reported, I have not only finished the first draft of the novel, but completed three major revisions, some of them with the help of very perceptive readers. Was it necessary to abandon the blog to finish the novel? It seems that, for me at least, it was. In any event, that is the way it worked, and I don’t believe I could have done it otherwise. My apologies to those who hoped for more regular postings, but there’s good news. Now that the manuscript is finished there’s time to blog, and blog I will—about what happened in the intervening time (was it really two years?) and what’s happening now.

Stay tuned. More to come. 

Santorum's Choice

It was an odd place, historically speaking, for Rick Santorum to make this particular speech. If his campaign did not know the history of it, they are incompetent. If they did know and chose Herrin, Illinois, anyway they should explain.

Herrin was the site of a brutal massacre of strikebreakers in 1922, an event in which 23 men died and which President Harding called a "shocking crime" that "shamed and horrified the country."

Santorum, who has grown fond of presenting his candidacy as one of historic necessity, cites the Constitution and the Civil War as comparable moments of urgency. Yesterday without mentioning Herrin’s bloody history he issued there a ringing call to action.

 Exhorting his crowd to remember the Constitution writers’ pledge of “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” he told his audience that “your honor is on the line.” The torch of freedom the patriots passed down could go out, he warned, “if we are not successful in this election...if you walk out of here and not just vote for me, but you actually do the duty of freedom: actually work hard, call your friends, post this up on Facebook, tweet about it, write about it....”

Herrin and Williamson County are not like the rest of Illinois. Paul Angle, in his 1992 book Bloody Williamson, wrote that in this county murder "was no novelty" but an indigenous condition. Historically, dating to before the Civil War, it was a place of blood vendettas, vigilante lawlessness, quick tempers, sudden violence, racist lynching, Klan rule, massacres, kangaroo courts, and corrupt government. 

Here is an account of the massacre, excerpted from my unpublished memoir Murder He Wrote:

On the morning of June 22, 1922, just outside of Herrin an army of 500 striking miners and their sympathizers surrounded the Southern Illinois Coal Company compound on the edge of a new strip mine whose owner had broken a strike agreement.

All night there was shooting as company guards and strikebreakers took cover behind railroad ties and empty coal cars. Two union miners and one of the guards died, and explosions destroyed the mine's water supply. At dawn the besieged strikebreakers sent out a guard with a cook's apron tied to a broomstick offering surrender if they would be allowed to leave safely. A voice replied, "Come on out and we'll get you out of the county." As they were marched down the road toward Herrin's rail station the pro-union mob grew angrier and began shooting prisoners one at a time, starting with the mine superintendent. Someone who arrived in a car at that moment, later identified as a union officer named Hugh Willis, told the mob leaders not to shoot prisoners on the road but to take them into the woods and "kill all you can."

When the mass of prisoners approached a barbed wire fence and tried to climb over one got hung up, someone fired a pistol unleashing a wild volley of more gunfire. In the resulting slaughter nineteen men died. Some were hanged from trees. Some were pursued and executed. Wounded men crying for mercy or water were kicked and shot in the head. Several had their throats cut. Others were urinated upon as they lay dying. A Chicago newspaperman who tried to give water to one victim was threatened with a cocked rifle and a warning: "Keep away, God damn you!"

The horror of the Herrin Massacre galvanized the nation. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it "the most brutal and horrifying crime that has ever stained the garments of organized labor." In the U.S. Senate it was compared with German atrocities in the recent war. President Harding called it a "shocking crime" that "shamed and horrified the country" and asked for legislation to allow punishment of such "barbarity" in federal instead of state courts.

Thirteen men were indicted and divided into two groups for trial. Eight of them in the Williamson County jail were given fans against the heat, a Victrola and phonograph records for entertainment, and home-cooked dinners. After all thirteen of them were found not guilty in spite of positive identification of the killers, State's Attorney Delos Duty announced he would pursue it no further.

"I tried to convince two juries . . .," he said. "I'm not complaining, but it's a hopeless proposition."

To paraphrase another Rick: Of all the towns, in all the counties, in all the states to make that speech, Santorum chose Herrin, Illinois.

Will No One Step Up?

Mitt Romney, given the opportunity to reject Rush Limbaugh's vulgarity (see previous post), has declined to do so.

"I'll just say this, which is, it's not the language I would have used," Romney said in Cleveland. "I'm focusing on the issues that I think are significant in the country today, and that's why I'm here talking about jobs and Ohio."

It’s not “the langauge” he would have used, but he did not challenge the idea. He too took refuge in the choice of “language.” Doesn’t he know that he’s saying public slander over a difference of opinion is acceptable? Another word for that is intolerance, the characteristic mark of a one-party system.

Will no Republican reject it?

words, words, words

In his effort to extract his foot from his mouth, the radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has given us a perfect example of the nonapology apology fashionable among politicians when they get into mouth trouble. He blamed his choice of words when he chose to slander a Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke rather than rebut her opinion.  

The professional word user has blamed the tool of his trade, like a carpenter blaming his hammer. 

What he offered was not an apology, because it does not address the offense. It was not the words that were at fault. It was the idea they expressed. Words have meaning, and we select them to express ideas. The idea must exist in our heads first if the words are to follow. He carefully chose his words and they eloquently expressed his thought. There can be no confusion about that, for he said it several ways.

It’s the idea that was wrong. If there can be an acceptable apology it can only address his vulgar idea, not the words he chose to express it. 

At Last

The sugar cream pie mystery is solved.

Well, maybe not. I changed too many variables for scientific research. A scientist would change one at a time. I was impatient and changed ‘em all, but the result was perfection.

First, I used “heavy cream” instead of “whipping cream,” the difference being 36 percent butterfat versus 34 percent. Unfortunately the butterfat content does not appear on most cream containers, but those descriptions do. Except when they label it “heavy whipping cream.”

Second, I brought the cream to room temperature before making the filling. I suspect that the starting temperature was a crucial factor in the failure of the first filling to set properly. This is the one precaution I’ll always take in the future.

Third, on the theory that the filling cooks from the outside edges inward, I stirred it carefully with a wooden spoon during baking to make the temperature uniform throughout. This had the unwanted side effect of destroying the smooth and pretty finish on top.

Fourth, ovens are not perfect, and I baked this pie in a different oven that might have reached a higher baking temperature though the settings were the same. To be certain, I should test the two ovens with an oven thermometer. 

Fifth, as soon as the pie was cool enough to do so I put it in the refrigerator to set. In an hour or two I cut two pieces, and they held their shape perfectly. Tasted good, too!

So, Hungry on Tilghman, you are invited to test the next one. 

Get Over It

I was in New York City for the weekend. Early Saturday morning I walked over to the Rockefeller Center Starbucks for a coffee and a copy of the Times. Got the coffee. No Times.
     Where can I get one, I asked the barista. She didn’t know.
     Huh?
     Okay, so she doesn’t read the Times.
     I asked a uniformed security guy, classic New Yorker.

“Used to be a stand in the basement here, but they took it out. There was one over on the corner. It’s gone. There were three here. Did you try a drug store?”

By now I was so flummoxed I didn’t care whether the drug store had papers. I returned to the hotel—half a block away—and asked the desk clerk. Hotels have papers for their guests. Don’t they?

“There are some in the restaurant for browsing, but you can’t take it.”

I can’t buy a Times? In the middle of Manhattan? I thought, but did not say: Why the hell not?

“Well,” said the desk clerk, “maybe in the middle of Manhattan....”

And 51^st between Fifth and Sixth is not the middle?

Manhattan news stand in 2011, via iStockphoto.

That afternoon on a three-hour walk around the city I saw exactly one corner news stand. What happened and when did they disappear? Yesterday? Last week?

I was a newspaper man for forty-one years, and when I thought about it I knew perfectly well why there were no papers. The answer was simple. If there were a profit to be made selling them in Manhattan, people would sell them. If not, then not. News is available—often free—online. Many people don’t read newspapers, and the publishers are learning that they should be glad of that. For them, it’s a blessing.

Think about it. Transmitting information via ink on paper is a Fifteenth Century technology now hopelessly inefficient. We think paper is lightweight, but it’s not. If a Sunday Times weighs a pound, then the Sunday circulation of a million copies weighs a million pounds. Delivering them requires hundreds of big trucks, pay and benefits for hundreds of drivers not to mention the pressmen, and there’s ink, paper, dealers’ markup, et cetera. These costs can be eliminated, and not replaced, by transmitting content instantly via the Internet. Why would one do otherwise when advertising revenues are drying up, as they have been for two decades? Costs that can be eliminated must be eliminated for news companies to survive. The old business model no longer works.

I had known this would happen. I hadn’t expected to see it so dramatically and quickly.

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!