The Proustian Plumber

The garbage disposal goes out at least once a month, filling the sink with vegetable fragments and microbial soup. Our rental has a decent view of the San Francisco bay, but the toilets are lousy, and the finicky disposal goes on strike when things like dimes and champagne wire get stuck in its gullet. Sometimes, my husband manages to fix it, but this time, we had to call the plumber.

He showed up at 9 a.m. as promised, Miguel, a short, trim El Salvadoran in his early thirties with a smile that challenged the morning fog. He got right down to work while I started a pot of coffee.  French Roast, fresh ground. A rich java aroma permeated the room.  I offered him a cup – black, three spoons of sugar. 

“The smell of this coffee," the plumber said, "it reminds me of my grandmother’s house, in El Salvador.”  I took a sip of my coffee and leaned back against the kitchen counter. I sensed a story coming on.

Miguel put down his wrench and picked up his cup. He looked just past me, and I could feel the landscape of his childhood materialize around us. The coffee plantation in El Salvador where he was born, he explained, is the most beautiful place on Earth. He should know, he grew up there. His parents used to work the fields for the plantation owner.  Some members of Miguel's extended family still tend those same fields. The rows of coffee plants stretch all the way to the foot of the mountain and when they flower, their small white blooms dust the tropical landscape like a miraculous snowfall. The earth is rich and the people are poor, but they live in the protective shadow of an extinct volcano and wake to bird song and balmy weather.

"My grandmother, she would make us coffee with sugar and ground corn. Thick, like oatmeal. You eat it with a spoon. The smell would wake us up in the morning. "

Despite his caffeinated diet, Miguel grew, and his father watched him closely. Several of the boy's friends drifted into gangs. MS13 is a strong draw for teenagers whose only prospects are field work.  Four childhood playmates hardened into criminals and met violent, early deaths. Miguel's father moved the family to El Norte, specifically, San Francisco. There, Miguel and his siblings managed to stay out of trouble. It's been twenty years since they last saw their grandmother.

Long grown, with two kids and a wife, Miguel is glad to be making a decent living and living an honest life. He loves Northern California and takes his children fishing in the San Francisco Bay. Still, the bracing smell of strong coffee caused an aftershock of longing. His memories flowed freely, like water down my newly unclogged drain.

"My kids, they are Americans. They work hard in school. I work hard for them. But some day, I am going to retire in El Salvador. I'll buy some land in the valley where I'm from. My kids can come visit."

Greek to Me

When I was a girl, my father had a phrase he used to shrug off a minor set back – things like going to the theater on the wrong night, missing the last subway or getting rained on at the beach. A verbal reset button helps put life's little snafus into perspective. "It is what it is," serves that purpose for a lot of people, but for my father it was, "The best laid plans of mice and men aft gang astray."

He said it was  from a poem by George Burns –  the 18th Century Scottish bard, not the comedian. He would explain repeatedly how "aft gang" was Old English for "often goes. Alas, I looked it up for this blog and it's actually "gang aft a-gley," (which is, in fact, Old English for "often goes"). "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft a-gley."

The verse, which John Steinbeck borrowed as the title of his novel, Of Mice and Men, is from the poem To a Mouse. It tells of how Burns upturned a mouse's nest while ploughing a field. The poem is an apology to the poor critter, whose efforts to build a snug den have come to naught:

...But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane [you aren't alone] 
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley, [often go awry] 
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promised joy...

Oh how I wish I could read this with an actual brogue.

But on to the best-laid plan.With my daughter interning in San Francisco this summer, and our 19 year old son is still living with us, I was pondering some kind of family night out, something more special than the nearest cineplex. This is challenging. Junior doesn't do theater, and there is little hope of our various musical tastes coming to a harmonic convergence.

Then I got an email from my old friend  Ticketmaster.  Coming up, Al Green at the Greek Theater.  Al Green. Old school R&B. Great songs, great singing. What's not to like? Junior would get his snark on,  but I knew he'd enjoy it on some level.

Part of the UC Berkeley campus, the Greek Theater is a classic outdoor amphitheater next to the sports stadium. Both venues sit atop the Hayward Fault. We learned the hard way how uncomfortable the theater's cement bleachers are. Tech companies put their logos on foam butt pillows and hand them out for free at the ticket entrance but your rear is still numb by the time the opening act leaves the stage. Better to buy lawn seats and arrive strategically early. You can get close enough to see reasonably well, the acoustics are just fine and you get to sprawl out on your blanket and have a picnic. Dinner with Al Green! A rare evening of non-dysfunctional family bonding!  I made menus up in my head. Roast chicken. Pasta salad. Maybe I'll bake.

I reminded my son of the date, a week in advance. That's way too early for it to stick in his mind and normally, I would be reminding him again three days before the event. Except I forgot, because I'm ADD too.  And so it was that the boy and his friends bought tickets to an all-day Batman marathon, culminating in the screening of the latest sequel at midnight. The show was – you guessed it – on the same night as Al Green.

Oh well, I rationalized. The kid probably would not have become an instant Al Green fan anyway. I knew I could sell the ticket at the gate.  I'd revisit the menu for more grown up tastes. We could get some prosciutto, pâté and stinky cheeses and enjoy the music with our daughter.

Except daughter is traumatized by a deluge of articles about unemployed law school grads. She's worried she won't find work and she's trying to make a good impression. Of course, she got a last-minute assignment the day of the concert and cancelled on us.

Such is life, I told myself. Easier to sell two tickets than one. The picnic got paired down to prosciutto and melon, bread and cheese. Our family outing had morphed into a date night.

We got to the Greek Theater in plenty of time and readily parked above the theater. The lot was almost empty, as was the payment booth. We scrambled down a grassy hill to the ticket area. We were first in line: no one was there. And I mean no one. The concession stands were unmanned. There were no venue employees to be seen. I knew the date was right – I had gotten a reminder email the day before. Then my husband spoke up. "Maybe it's at the Greek Theater in LA." I grabbed my phone and googled. Yep. Right venue, wrong city.  Glad I could make a contribution to Al's retirement fund. At least our kids weren't there or I'd never hear the end of it.

There was still some daylight left and we decided to go find a spot to eat outdoors at nearby Tilden Regional Park. We stopped the car by a meadow. The remaining patch of late afternoon sun had already abandoned the lone picnic table. We sat in the shade, chilled by an insistent breeze. We'd be dining al-fresco-your-ass-off. I poured us some iced tea and wine. When I pulled the prosciutto out of my bag, I realized I had left the melon at home.

We packed it in and went home to join the melon. "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft a-gley,"

The Pain, It's Plain, Comes Mainly From Your Brain.

Years ago, we relocated from Los Angeles to Cleveland for my husband's job. The culture shock, like the winters, was extreme.  The city had just one of everything - one art museum,  one independent movie theater, one Japanese restaurant, one Mexican joint. When we told our neighbors we had come from LA, they looked at us as though we had just admitted to sacrificing goats in the basement. I had to retire my fabulous vintage wardrobe lest I be branded a weirdo. I even received an irony-free invitation  to a tupperware party.

We were barely moved in when I began to have stomach symptoms. At first, the nauseating hunger made me suspect that I was pregnant. Then my father, who is a physician, diagnosed me over the phone. You have a beginning ulcer, he said. Sure enough, when I found work, a diversion from my despair at being mired in the midwest, the ulcer went away.

Several moves later, I find myself in the Bay Area.  Over the past eight years, I have been dealing with a family situation that can best be described as death by a thousand cuts. I now have a visceral understanding of the Janis Joplin song, take another little piece of my heart. Picture my heart, sliced paper-thin and fanned out like carpaccio on a bed of arrugula. But I have a talent for compartmentalization, and so I soldier on. Still, it seems all that stress, anger and sadness I sublimate needs a place to go, which is why, at one time or another, I have had the following conditions:

• Panic attacks, in which I forget to breathe.

• A cricopharyngeal spasm - literally, the feeling of a lump in your throat. Except it goes away when you eat or drink.

• Occular migraines, during which my vision blurs for 20-30 minutes.

• Sinus migraines, for which I was needlessly fed antibiotics for years, until I was enlightened by an eccentric old ENT.

• Sudden unexplained itchiness of the face, hands and even the feet.

• Hip pain that was diagnosed as bursitis.

• Lower back pain and sciatica.

•A disc issue in my neck, with muscle pain in the shoulder and arm, and occasional numbness in the fingers.

At this point, you are thinking one of two things: This woman is a mess, or this woman is a nut job. But I can assure you, I am not a hypochondriac. I don't go running to the doctor all the time. I just take stress out on my body. I'm like a garden hose with an air bubble in it - you push the bubble out of one place and it pops up somewhere else. Now, if I get a weird symptom, I look it up. Chances are, there's a stress connection. But enough about me. Let's talk about you.

I believe there's a good possibility you just recognized yourself, even if your repertoire of ailments is less varied. Maybe it's "all in your mind" but your discomfort is real – even acute.  Dr. John Sarno, whose book Healing Back Pain I have just finished reading, says this pain is physiologically real, but it's caused by the brain. It's the subconscious mind's strategy for deflecting attention from anger and anxiety. Your brain tells your nerves to light a fire under that tennis elbow, which diverts your focus from unpleasant emotions. But the pain really exists. It's not in your head; it's caused by your head.  The theory is that the  brain wrecks its havoc by reducing oxygen flow to the affected areas. Dr. Sarno calls this Tension Myositis Syndrome, or TMS. He believes disc pain, bursitis, tendonitis and a host of other minor chronic ailments are all manifestations of TMS. Sometimes, the TMS relocates in a new place. You finally lose the sciatica and your shoulder starts talking to you.

If you read this book, and you buy into the good doctor's theory, you can put that nagging sports injury, bad back, sore hip etc. to rest. Acknowledging that your brain is literally ordering your nerves to fire and cause you pain – viscerally understanding this – could make the pain go away. You've outsmarted your tormentor, the unconscious mind. Dr. Sarno gives his patients a list of Daily Reminders. I'll just reveal the first one: "The pain is due to TMS, not to a structural abnormality." I could reproduce the entire list, but I think a guy whose medical advice is to stop spending money on back treatments and realize that you are just TMS-ing deserves to sell a book or three. (Although I'm sure he has a thriving practice. I actually know someone who took his advice and didn't have neck surgery, and she is now a yoga teacher and pain-free.)

Garden variety back and neck pain are the least of it. Dr. Sarno suspects a host of ailments could be manifestations of TMS. Fibromalgia, plantar fasciitis, eczema, even acne. There is a lot in this book that is highly speculative, and I don't have the scientific background to vouch for it. However,  Dr. Sarno's expertise lies in back and neck problems and he has many satisfied former patients.

As I write this, I am sitting at my desk without a trace of discomfort. No sacroiliac issues, no mid-back spasms, no aching trapezius muscles, no stiff, clicking neck. Of course I still occasionally wake up with a sore back, or over rotate my neck a bit and feel a twinge. Only now, I immediately stop and remind myself that it doesn't have to get any worse if I don't let it. If I'm honest with myself, I can usually identify the emotional issue my brain is trying to pawn off on my body, and once I figure out what's really ailing me, the pain goes away. Try this next time your bad back/sore hip/trick shoulder starts acting up. Especially if you've already tried everything else.

Flip

If this blog isn't your slice of pizza, I have another one. Check out my snide side. You might like it better. Or maybe it'll be a toss up.

Mac Hawk Down

Right when word of the new Mac trojan horse came out, my machine started going loopy. The timing was not great, as I was rushing to get a long edit out to a client so she could read it on the red-eye back to DC. Strange warnings unintelligible to non-geeks kept popping up on my screen. I got hit with slo-mo operations, email glitches, the dreaded spinning pizza and – the scary part for a copywriter – word crashes. Was my computer infected? Had my machine been turned into a zombie bot, using my good name to hook my friends up with Canadian mail order drug companies? I was so rattled, I pasted my 15 page document into an email to my client, just in case the attachment was corrupted.

Time to call the mac guy.

I use a service that makes house calls and they just happened to have a tech in my neighborhood when I called in my request. I never know who they're sending, but they all do a fine job. This time, I got a former ranger.

No, not this kind of ranger.

And definitely not this one.

THIS kind of ranger.

Special ops, baby. 75th Ranger Regiment. An elite fighting force groomed for challenging and often top-secret missions. The fittest of the fit, strongest of the strong, bravest of the brave. Their slogan is "Rangers Lead the Way" and boy, do they deserve a more manly motto. (Which I would gladly provide, for my usual hourly rate, but I digress, which is also usual.)

You would never know from the fellow's placid demeanor and well-fed physique that his boots were on the ground during our ill-fated forray into Mogadishu, Sudan. He was chatty from the get-go, informing me that he was having a good day, as indicated by the fact that his previous customer had tipped him, which "Doesn't happen very often,". Hint, hint.

Of course, I immediately decided that I would tip him too. His is one of those professions, like dog grooming, where customers don't necessarily think about giving a gratuity. (Years ago, I had my consciousness raised by my mother in law, who always tipped hotel maids. "Why would you give three bucks to a guy for taking your bags up on a wheeled cart and ignore someone who makes your bed and cleans your bathroom?"  I have tipped hotel maids ever since, except for the time I found the previous occupant's pubes in the tub.)

Ranger Mac got to working on my machine, and soon called me over to show me something. (Since it had to do with the workings of my computer, I have forgotten what it was.) Rather than shlep back and forth with my broken leg, I sat down on a stool next to him and hovered while he worked. He was a talkative chap, and told me lots of war stories. Not the metaphorical kind: Actual war stories. He didn't go into too much detail about the battle of Mogadishu, other than to say that he was part of "Task Force Ranger", the first group of ground forces to enter the city. Their mission: to capture Sudanese warlord General Aidid. Ranger Mac was one of the 73 American wounded in that ill-fated venture. He showed me the bullet wound scar on his leg, which earned him one of his two purple hearts. "October 3rd 1992," he declared,"was the worst day of my life,".

Sudan wasn't his only combat experience. Ranger Mac was part of the invasion of Panama, code name "Operation Just Cause." ( Just Cause. Shock and Awe. Desert Storm. I have often wondered who names these things. Probably a civilian dweeb with a windowless office in some forgotten corner of the Pentagon.) I learned that prior to the official invasion, we were already fighting a covert war against Panamanian cocaine processors. Ranger Mac flew on several secret sorties in which he and his brothers in arms bombed coke labs deep in the jungle. But the most startling yarn involved a 23 year old soldier from Nebraska. The Ranger unit was on a stealth operation through the Panamanian jungle. My computer guy was walking ten feet behind Nebraska boy when the kid was hit with what looked like a "a bolt of lightening" coming up from the jungle floor: the deadly and rabidly territorial Fer de Lance snake. It latched its jaws onto the young soldier's hand and bit down so hard, it broke two of his fingers. Five minutes later, the poor lad was dead.

Ranger Mac's last deployment was to Afghanistan. He didn't go into a lot of detail, and I was afraid to pry for fear of appearing ghoulish, or bringing back memories he'd rather not revisit. What struck me most was when he remarked that he understood why Robert Bales snapped and went on a shooting rampage in Afghanistan. You go into a village one day, he explained, and are greeted by smiling villagers and throngs of  curious, laughing children. You return the next day to find the streets eerily empty and all the doors and windows shut, a sure sign that the Taliban are around and a fire fight could break out any second. It's impossible to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys." After a while, this messes with your mind. Indeed, Ranger Mac confessed that he too had experienced PTSD. Fortunately for his wife and child, his manifested itself through depression rather than violent rage and he managed to work through it.

Despite his hero status and  three stints  "fighting for our freedom" on three continents, Ranger Mac didn't see the point of any of the conflicts in which he had taken part. In fact, he sounded like a typical East Bay liberal. He had enlisted to get his education paid for, and he had paid for it in spades. Ranger Mac was a gentle, outgoing, intellectually curious guy. Besides his military service, we covered several other topics - Oliver Sachs books, our favorite hiking spots, and his baby daughter, whose photo he proudly showed me. After he left, with my $20 tip in his pocket, I had a sudden pang of guilt that I hadn't "thanked him for his service." I don't think he minded - he's a different person now.

Cheese Wheels

Long before I broke my leg, I shelled out for two tickets to the Artisan Cheese Festival in Petaluma. Four hours of gourmet grazing with an occasional pause to sample a wine, port or microbrew. There was no way I'd get through this on crutches. My son put it succinctly: "Mom, you suck at crutches." No argument here. Not only would it be challenging – and exhausting - to navigate the show, it would be impossible, with both hands pressing down on the crutch-handles, to feed my face.

We decided to rent a wheelchair.

The show was held under a big white tent outside the Petaluma Sheraton Hotel. Le tout-fromage Californien was there: Cowgirl Creamery, Laura Chenel, Point Reyes Blue and many smaller, but no less inspired cheese makers. There were pungent blooming rinds, feisty blues, camembert wanna-bes and brie-manqués, old-school cheddars wrapped in black wax, new-school tomes coated in coffee grinds, goat crottins rolled in lavender and thyme, mini-mozarelles marinating in extra-virgin olive oil, crunchy parmesan crackers, delicate mini cheese cakes and unexpected luxury chocolates. If you wanted actual lunch, you could get gourmet pizza made fresh in a portable oven or crepes, your choice of ham and cheese or, for the true philistine, PB&J. The crowd consisted mostly of foodies, with the occasional cheese monger or specialty food buyer schmoozing and collecting brochures.

At first, the wheelchair experience was disheartening. We arrived around lunch time and the place was packed. I had a hard time learning to control the chair because I have a hard time learning to drive anything. Cars, sailboats, rowboats, ATVs, mopeds, wheel chairs... it's all counterintuitive to me. So I advanced tentatively, with my face just above the level of the average person's butt, stopping the chair with my good leg every twenty seconds or so in order not to run over anyone's feet. Getting close to a vendor display was a challenge, but if I managed to push my way in with my wheelchair, I was usually rewarded with an extra large sympathy sample.

The crowd started to thin by mid-afternoon, just as I was beginning to feel the cumulative effect of all those small wine and beer samples. (Can you get a ticket for drunk driving a wheelchair?). The chair is an inexpensive model, the kind with smaller elevated inner wheels that you turn by hand. It's a workout. When my biceps would start burning, my spouse would push me for a few yards. Sometimes, he'd stop without telling me. At one point, I found myself hurtling down an aisle, on a collision course with a lady almost large enough to block it entirely. Only when I turned around to tell hubby to slow down did I realize he was still three tables back, hovering over the cheddar samples. Good thing I'd finally figured out how to work the brakes.

Clover Dairy's cheddar sculpture.

We're keeping the chair until my cast comes off. It allows me to make dinner, which is tough to do while standing on one leg. We've also taken it on outings. At the movies, I get to sit in the handicapped area - lots of leg room and nobody blocking my view. We brought the chair along when we went to see a terrific exhibit of British 19th century art, The Cult of Beauty. After my husband dropped me off and went in search of parking, a nice man volunteered to push me up the inclined path to the museum. Later, at the museum café, I pulled right up to a table and dispatched Hubbie to get us capucinnos and warm bread puddings. When he returned, I confessed that there are advantages to this wheelchair business. (Rather George Costanza of me, I know). He joked that we should keep the chair to get good seats at the movies. At precisely that moment, a couple walked by pushing a tiny disabled boy in a diminutive wheelchair of his own. Suddenly, I felt like an impostor and my inner George Costanza went back to napping under his desk.

Still, there's no denying the chair's magic. People offering me giant cheese chunks, holding doors for me, helping me negotiate curbs, and handing me paper towels in the movie theater bathroom – the last time random strangers were this nice to me, I was pregnant with my son, so it's been about twenty years. It's not that I crave the attention, or that it makes me feel special. I am fortunate that unlike that little boy in the museum, I'll soon be back to standing on my own two feet. It's just that seeing people go out of their way for someone they've never met makes me feel just a little bit better about humanity. And I needed that.

Cheese Samples

About the Guild

Fun Classes (My daughter and I have taken a half dozen of these)

Pungent Present

The wheelchair of tomorrow is not a chair.

Break Dancing

I have always been sensitive about my shortcomings, most of which involve my mechanical, mathematical and athletic skills, or lack thereof. This makes me self-aware enough to know that I shouldn't fix cars, play poker, ballroom dance, ski or juggle chainsaws. Since I am a terminal klutz, I try to stay away from anything dangerous. As a result, I had only broken three small bones in my life:
• My pinky trying to catch a kickball.
• My big toe tripping over a vacuum cord.
• My little toe, executing a yoga lunge. (Told you I was a klutz.)

Note the use of the word "had".

As I type this, my right leg, (yes, the driving leg) is propped on a big blue exercise ball. My calf is straining against a tight plaster cast like a sausage about to burst from its casing. You see, a couple of weekends ago, I finally got my husband to go hiking with me. I am a fast walker and I march up and down hills with all the conviction of an invading army, but my old man has a 4 mile maximum, after which his knees turn on him. We agreed to try a gentler hike – he would push himself and Helen Redy here would reign herself in.

We decided to go to Black Mountain Regional Park, in the South Bay, where my husband lived back in his hippy days. Choosing comfort over common sense, I eschewed the heavy hiking boots and put on my old walking shoes with the worn out soles. The hike started out with great drama, as there had been a car and bicycle accident up the road. A rescue copter was idling atop a small butte behind the entrance to the staging area. We stepped aside to let two paramedics go by, carrying the unfortunate cyclist on a stretcher. I snapped a few pictures of the copter taking off and we headed down the trail.

It was T shirt weather and the sky was impossibly blue. We passed gophers, hawks and deer on our way up to the top of Black Mountain, where we were greeted by a panoramic vista of the South Bay, three other hikers and a chatty female ranger who told us all about the big controversy over the president of the California Fish and Game Commission's love of mountain lion hunting. We rested a bit, drank some water and headed back the way we had come. It was an uneventful descent until about a mile and a half from the staging area. The trail was dry and pebbly,slanting downward, towards the base of the mountain, as well as sideways, towards a dip just deep enough to call a precipice. In retrospect, the hiking boots would have been a better choice of footwear.

The first time I slipped, I didn't really fall. I skidded. I made like a surfer and adjusted my weight to stay upright. The ligaments on the side of my ankle strained as I regained my balance. It stung, but I sucked it up.

Five minutes later, I literally fell. On my hindquarters. It would have been embarrassing were my husband not used to it.

The third time was the charm. I tried to check myself the way I had before, but I couldn't stop my momentum. I went down, and this time, it hurt. A lot.

My ankle didn't feel broken. I was convinced I just had a bad sprain. I hobbled, butt-dragged and hopped the remaining mile and a half back to the staging area. Some nice hikers broke a branch for me to use as a cane. I reached the bottom of the hill just as my leg gave out. I plopped down on a log next to the fire lane while my husband went to get the car. As soon as he pulled up, a ranger appeared and asked us to move. When he saw my leg, he chided us for not calling for help. I said we hadn't thought of it, though actually, I had. I wasn't about to suffer the embarrassment of an airlift, and one always ends up getting billed for this sort of thing. Besides, now I can say I walked a mile and a half downhill on a broken ankle. I have earned my macho street cred for life.

Enough crowing.

I went to see the podiatrist the next day, and the X-ray showed an inverted V-shaped break in my lower fibula. I've gone from hard-driving hiker to the spaz with the cast. There are just enough steps in the house that I scoot and crawl rather than hassle with them. My dog is afraid of the crutches and is mad at me because I can't walk him. Bathing is a nightmare. The toilet is very close to the tub, so I sit on the seat and tape a garbage bag around my leg. The first time I washed, I straddled the edge of the tub and got in the shower with my good leg, letting the injured one rest on the commode. When I had cleaned up to the best of my limited abilities, I pivoted on my good leg, turning the bad one towards the tub, and lowered my butt backwards onto the toilet seat, which chose that precise moment to pop a bolt. The seat swiveled all the way to the side and I went flying. I fell on a half open drawer, bruised my behind and banged my broken leg on the tub. There I lay, wet, naked and pathetic on the cold, hard tile, crying like a little girl.

So much for macho street cred.

Marching to the beat of the Falun Gong

I don't know if the Chinese really will take over the world. But one day last week, they took over my neighborhood.

I was on my way home from the grocery store, taking the hair pin turn onto my hillside street, only to find the access blocked by an old white station wagon. The driver was letting out an Asian man and woman in their twenties. As soon as their feet hit the ground, they raced to my car and knocked on the window, brandishing brochures for Shen Yun, an entertainment in the grand Chinese tradition. Music, dance, spectacle, culture, acrobats, something for the whole family. I rolled down my window. It was evident from our brief interaction that these folks spoke not a word of English beyond the two or three they'd learned by rote. "No, thank you" wasn't registering, so I smiled and took the pamphlet.

An hour later, I set out for my hill walk. Everywhere I went, I encountered Chinese people with minimal English skills, handing out the same four-color brochures. And they weren't all determined young adults in their twenties. I saw a couple of old ladies huffing and puffing up the high-grade hills, putting handouts in every mailbox. I walked fast but one intrepid woman caught up with me. Though I shook my head no, she kept trying to foist the handout on me, so I defaulted to international sign language. I pointed to my chest for I. Then, I did the walking sign with my fingers. Next, I did the thumb and index around the eyes binocular sign. I ended by pointing to the brochure. I. Go. See. Program. She nodded solemnly, once, and walked away. Thrilled by my own non-verbal communication skills, I did a preemptive strike, in international sign language, on the next two brochure distributors I ran into. Unfortunately, they looked at me as though I were insane. Eventually, I reached higher ground and stopped running into Shen Yun canvasers.

The first thing I did when I got home was get my google on. I thought Shen Yun might be a fun holiday night on the town for the nuclear fam. Since we're all rigorously unsentimental, secular contrarians, A Christmas Carol does not do it for us. (This year, we sprang for a night of satire with John Oliver and a bluesy new year's shindig with the Tedeschi Trucks band). Besides, I was curious. There was money and a sense of mission behind this Shen Yun advertising push and I wondered whether this was some kind of good will PR initiative on the part of the Chinese government. In the days that followed, I would see buses role by with Shen Yun bus sides, billboards along 101 and a plethora of newspaper ads. If it was a Chinese PR effort, they were spending beaucoup bucks.

My assumptions were proven to be horse pucky when I found this internet article from the Chicago Chinese Consulate. The article is enititled Shen Yun, a Political Tool of Falun Gong. According to the writer, a functionary at the Chicago Chinese consulate, the performance depicts the Chinese authorities as persecutors of Falun Gong practitioners. Which of course is the truth. The Chinese have arrested some 30,000 of their Falun Gong practicing compatriots.

Anyway, in uptight, indignant prose, the consulate spokesperson dissects every aspect of the performance and how it besmirches China's reputation. Here's an excerpt:
"In the name of promoting "traditional culture", Shen Yun Performing Arts presents these shows for more than merely cheating the audience into the theater. By publicizing the "persecution" on Falun Gong, it plans to make the show into an important platform for Falun Gong organization to publicize its cultic theories and to propagandize the heretical ideas of Li Hongzhi in the name of promoting "divine culture" so as to appeal to good-natured Chinese and foreign audiences not knowing the truth and to realize their evil purpose of exerting mind control over them."

Got that? It's quite a rant. You can't help but wonder whether the guy is a true believer or just angling to climb up the party hierarchy.

I am familiar with Falun Gongers - I grew up in DC and spent a long stretch of time there as an adult. There were always a handful of Falun Gong protesters on the small grass circle in the middle of the roundabout mid-Connecticut Avenue, in front of the Chinese embassy. I couldn't find a photo of those little gatherings online, but here is a protest at the Mall in DC.


China, like all totalitarian states, doesn't recognize the right to assembly unless it's a government-organized shindig. Churches, clubs, political groups, any entity in which a group of people might band together and exchange ideas, is suspect. Falun Gong is especially threatening because there has been a personality cult around its founder, Li Hongzhi. Li is thought to be living in New York city with his wife and daughter since 1998, but has disappeared from the public eye. Falun Gong, which combines elements of Buddhism, Taoism and Qigong breathing and meditation, is his creation. And there is no doubt that Li has some strange beliefs, and some reactionary ones.

• The goal of this take on Qi Gong, an ancient Chinese practice based on the idea of energy flowing through the body, is for the practitioner to gain enlightenment and immortality. And that would be physical immortality. Li maintains that if they just practice hard and long enough, old women will start menstruating again and old men will see their ear hair fall out. (OK, so I made up the part about the ear hair).

• True believers don't need science or medicine. Li can heal anyone who really has faith in Falun Gong – unless you have a terminal illness or are mentally ill, in which case, he won't attempt to cure you because you can't focus enough to practice.

• Cultivating Falon Gong means you get a Falun, a colorful wheel representing the universe, installed in your lower abdomen. (Sorry, I searched in vain for information on the actual installation process, or whether you can call SEARS to schedule it.) Although the wheel is represented as a colorful circle containing a backwards swaztika, it is not a physical object. (If it were real, some hipster would have had one implanted in his navel by now).The metaphysical wheel absorbs energy from the universe when it rotates clockwise. When it rotates counter clockwise, it releases waste material, which makes me wonder whether one poops more post falun-implantation.

• Aliens have infiltrated the human population and are responsible for most technological innovation. They control us and are developing cloning so they can eventually replace us.

• Affection, love and friendship are all "sentimentality". The Falun Gong practitioner must relinquish human affection in order to "practice cultivation".

• Homosexuality and interracial marriage are immoral and there are different heavens for people of different races, at least for those slackers who are unable to achieve immortality through their practice. Not sure where the biracial people end up.

• In order to cultivate his or her "supernormal energy", the practitioner must do the Five Exercises, a series of tai chi- like moves.

• This is the final period of the Last Havoc.
Okay, I'll give them that one.

Since 1989, the Chinese government has been persecuting Falun Gong practitioners through the use of propaganda, arrest, re-education, imprisonment and torture. It's hard to understand why. Certainly, Li's flock shares some loopy and reprehensible views regarding science, race and sexuality, but that fails to explain why the Chinese political establishment finds them so threatening. The Falun gang is non-materialistic, non-violent and apolitical. Rather than seek to change the reality of life under Communist rule, they live in their own alternate reality. The Falunites are not dangerous dissidents, oppressed creative geniuses or passionate revolutionaries. They are gentle, harmless goofballs with a right to their wacky beliefs and ritual workout sessions. All they claim to seek is "Truthfulness, forbearance and compassion." And of course, Enlightenment.

Here in the United States, we have formed a government based on a different type of Enlightenment, that of 18th century European humanists like the French Philosopher, Voltaire. A fellow whose most famous quote captures the essence of a free society. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Kind of how I feel about Falun Gong.

Links:

Saved by a DVD

No, we're not political.

Oh yes, you are..

Wild Turkey

I can only think of two reasons a person would decide not to live in the Oakland Hills. If you have children, the first is a biggie – the school system. Budgets have been eviscerated and teachers laid off, and there's no silver lining. The other reason is as sensible as it is theoretical. The peaceful, eminently walkable Oakland Hills, with their Eucalyptus Groves, backyard redwood trees, forest fauna and breathtaking views of San Francisco Bay, sit right atop the dreaded Hayward Fault. Personally, I realize parking my butt here is seismically unwise but I love it – the cool, moist air, the 6-point buck preening on the patio, the occasional, environmentally incorrect whiff of woodsmoke from a neighbor's fireplace, the dense fog giving way to sharp blue skies. Since we moved here from Orinda last Summer, I've been getting my exercise climbing the steep, meandering streets, staking out my new territory.

I was on one of these exploratory ventures, walking briskly, mindful of the waning day, when I came upon a flock of wild turkeys. It wasn't my first turkey encounter. A few weeks earlier, I had stopped to observe two adult birds and a couple of chicken-sized young'uns pecking around someone's front yard. When I pulled out my cell to photograph them, it spooked one of the youngsters. He darted under a car and immediately got stuck. For five long minutes, I could hear him flapping his wings and peeping hysterically. I was just looking around for a stick to try and nudge him to freedom when he managed to extricate himself from the undercarriage.

This time, there were at least a dozen birds milling about, mostly hens. (Immature male turkeys are known as jakes, and adult males are called toms or gobblers).They had taken over the backyard and carport of a small home along the road and were puttering around like they owned the place. Their muted black and brown plumage blended into the mulch and fallen leaves, but their fuschia faces screamed dinosaur. It's a family resemblance: turkeys descend from carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods. Over hundreds of thousands of years, theropods got smaller, developed feathers and evolved into the first birds.

So what are those strange growths on the turkeys' faces? Or rather, on the male turkey's faces. The female,or hen, has a more discrete, pointy profile and a bluish head. The long, flabby red thing that hangs from a Tom turkey's forehead is a snood. The fleshy crimson blob that covers his neck is a wattle, and the bumpy, wart-like growths that give the wattle its texture are caruncles. Snoods and wattles function a bit like mood rings. When the Tom is hot to trot, his facial nasty bits get engorged with blood and become bright red. But if he catches sight of a coyote, or maybe a rifle-toting human, his snood and wattle go blue with fear. And if the Tom isn't feeling well because, maybe, somebody told him his brother was on the menu for Thanksgiving, that jiggly face and neck fade to a pale pinky beige.


This is also a snood. They were big in the forties so they're way overdue for a comeback. This could be your chance to be a trend-setter.


This is also a wattle. On humans, it is not considered sexy.


This is not a waddle. I think it's a case of testicular migration.

Turkeys are sexually dimorphic, meaning the genders are two different sizes. The male can be formidable – larger and brighter in color than the female, and weighing as much as 38 pounds (The biggest wild turkey ever recorded). Turkey hens are daintier, maxing out at around 12 pounds. While turkeys all have 3-toed feet, the toms have an extra "toe", really more of a sharp spur behind each of their lower legs, which they use for fighting. Male turkeys also have a "beard", a tuft of hair-like feathers that grows from the center of their breast. 10-20% of females have a much smaller version of this same feature. Whether the bearded ladies are feistier, I do not know. Both hens and toms have the amazing ability to rotate their heads 360 degrees, like in The Exorcist, minus the projectile vomiting.

After my turkey encounter, I don't need to do research to tell you that they have a wide vocabulary. They cluck, yelp, coo, purr, cackle and tweet. The Toms can also make drumming and spitting sounds using organs in their chests called air sacs. (Air sacs supplement the lungs and all birds have them, because flight requires a high metabolic rate and extra oxygen). The one thing I didn't hear any of my neighborhood turkeys do was gobble. As it turns out, only the males gobble, and only when they are in the mood for love.

Male turkeys are polygamous and mate with as many females as they can. Don't tell the kiddies, but the classic turkey silhouette that's a mainstay of elementary school art projects is actually a turkey come-on. They fan out their tail feathers and puff out their chests to show off their beards and impress the hens. Toms are total bros and like to do their strutting in pairs, usually a dominant bird and a more passive one. The top tom gets the hot hen, and his sidekick gets her girlfriend with the beard. After mating, the females make nests in shallow holes in the ground, which they cover with vegetation. They lay one egg a day over the course of 10-14 days. Once the "poults" hatch, they leave the nest within 24 hours, never to return.

Like their number one predator, man, turkeys are omnivorous. They eat all kinds of plant parts, from tree bark to grasses, seeds, nuts and berries. They have a fondness for insects, and will occasionally consume amphibians and small reptiles. The wild turkey population of the United States is estimated at around 7 million, and as their natural territory shrinks, they are moving to the suburbs. A backyard bird feeder is like a candy store to a turkey, and once he starts pecking round your yard, he will quickly take over and invite all his friends. They'll poop where they please, snack on your flowers and vegetables, scratch up your car and patio furniture and maybe even go after your dog. If turkeys get over their fear of humans, they can get nasty and have been known to attack people – not unreasonable behavior considering our annual November ritual. But now that they're starting to organize, they just might put Thanksgiving out of business. I hear the National Wild Turkey Federation has thousands of members.

Pix from my turkey encounter











Side Dishes

Yes, they really do descend from dinosaurs

Take pride in your wattle

This claims to be the National Wild Turkey Federation, but the members are all human.

Reporter gets attacked by wild turkey

Shake, Rattle, Rock and Roll

Every region has its disasters. Tornadoes in the Midwest. Hurricanes in the South. Firestorms in the Southwest and the Republican congress in Washington DC. Since I live in the Bay Area, I'm supposed to be worried about earthquakes, which I confess, I am not. We are among the 90% of local idiots who are totally unprepared for The Big One. We don’t have an emergency water supply. Our stash of canned goods consists of smoked oysters, water chestnuts and anchovies. I’m sure there’s a flash light in the house somewhere, but I’m equally certain it’s out of batteries.

It’s easy to live in denial when you’re married to a native who thinks the best thing to do when a quake hits is jump into bed and get busy “so you can really feel the earth move.” In truth, we haven't had a single seismic event since we moved out to NorCal four years ago. When the Virginia quake hit last month, I was almost jealous. Gargoyles were tumbling off the National Cathedral while the ground here in the nation's earthquake capital remained calm as a meditating monk. You'd never know our place in the Oakland Hills was barely a mile from the Hayward fault.


With the Hayward to the west and the San Andreas Fault to the east, San Francisco Bay is the meat in a seismic sandwich. The San Andreas is a locked fault, which means the pressure between two opposed tectonic plates is equalized. If one of them suddenly gives, the consequences could be catastrophic. The Hayward fault, on the other hand, is a strike-slip fault, where two plates move past each other at a rate of a quarter of an inch a year, in a phenomenon known as fault creep. You can see evidence of this geological migration all over the East Bay.

Having lulled myself into a false state of seismic security, I was typing away in my home office. It was a glorious, sunny afternoon and I bitterly resented having to stay indoors and work. I was tweaking a hospital brochure when a sound like a distant door slamming jolted me out of my seat. Then, the shaking began. My heart upped its pumping. I felt a throbbing in my eardrums.Windows rattled. The dishes clattered in the cupboards. A decorative tin toppled off the end table.  The whole thing lasted about 20 seconds. If it's true that animals can predict earthquakes, then my dog is either an idiot or one cool customer. He was at my feet, gnawing on a rib bone when the quake hit. He never even looked up.

Within seconds, everyone was on Facebook. (OK, everybody over 40. Everybody else was on Twitter). "Did you feel it?" " We sure did." "That was a good one." "4.0, I looked it up."

No damages, no new cracks in the wall. Just Mother Nature reminding everyone one who's boss. But I had a decision to make because that night, we had tickets to see Paul Simon at UC Berkeley's Greek Theater. The campus literally straddles the fault line and there was a good chance we would be experiencing aftershocks, or worse, another quake.

Built in 1903 with a donation from William Randolph Hearst, the Greek Theater is an outdoor venue with 8,500 uncomfortable cement seats. If you're smart and thrifty, you sit on the steep hill facing the theater. Get there early and you have a decent view from the lawn seats closest to the stage. Plus, you can enjoy a picnic along with the concert. Do your best to ignore the fact that the Greek sits just east of the Hayward Fault and has an official seismic rating of "very poor". (One block over, the Cal Memorial Stadium, where the Golden Bears play football, is literally bisected by the fault, which runs goalpost to goalpost. I think their seismic rating is "abysmal." Or maybe "horrendous.")

In the end, we took our chances. My husband would never have let me chicken out anyway. Paul Simon had a solid opening act, a very young folk singing duo called the Secret Sisters. They were a little too hillbilly for my spouse, but I enjoyed them. We were finishing our steak and gorgonzola salads when the Sisters left the stage. We sprawled out on the grass and got comfortable as we waited for the main attraction.

At precisely 8:16 pm,right before Paul and his band came out, the ground beneath our bottoms heaved again. We felt like fleas being shaken off by a giant dog. The aftershock, as we later found out, was a 3.9 on the Richter scale. The crowd roared and applauded, and five minutes later, Paul Simon arrived on stage. With a little help from Mother Nature, he rocked the house.


Find Berkeley on the map and travel down the red fault line towards Oakland. The area with a little yellow circle is about where we are - we have a head-on view of the Bay Bridge. I have no idea why the map maker created that circle, and I'm not sure I want to know.


Examples of "fault creep"

Extra Credit Reading:

•More about fault creep

•Bay Area Quake 101 I learned from my hair dresser that the entire U C Berkeley Geology Department lives in a section of the Berkeley Hills near Indian Rock Park. That's where the bedrock is, which means when the big one hits, the ground will not liquefy under your home.