The Best Commemoration Idea So Far

The Rolling Requiem is (in the words of their website):

a worldwide concert to honor those lost and those who helped others on September 11, 2001. While this terrorist tragedy took place in three United States locations, people from all over the world were affected. The goal of the Rolling Requiem is to have choirs performing in each time zone around the globe, beginning at 8:46 AM, the moment of the first attack With choirs in each time zone performing, continuous signing, or Rolling Requiem, will be heard throughout a 24-hour period.

The Requiem in question is, of course, the Mozart Requiem. It helped me survive when Diane died. In expressing grief, it transcended it, and it helped me feel, acknowledge, and go beyond my own mourning.

I’ll be participating in this by playing the Requiem (conducted by Sir Neville Marriner) on my headphones at work.

Music like this transcends politics. Someday soon I need to discuss the complex feelings 9/11 rouses in me, but one thing is sure: this requiem is great enough to acknowledge our dead, to grieve for our lost heroes, and to look beyond factionalism, greed, hatred, and despair.

Baseball Miracles

The Phillies are second in their division with a 67-66 record, and the Oakland A’s (my west coast team) have the best record in the American League. Wow. Amazing.

More Gruesome than the Mütter Museum

Oh God — tours of the Philadelphia slums. Not that I need them — I finished my undergraduate education at Temple University, and that’s also where I went to grad school. I used to live on the border between Powelton Village and Mantua, in a basement apartment with enormous rats, moldering linoleum, and overhead pipes that gently rained chunks of asbestos onto my face all night.

Later on I lived in various squalid apartments near the Art Museum. In those days, that neighborhood was partly slum, partly gentrified. The house next door had been in one of the glossy shelter magazines; the one beyond was a drug house. (No crack in those far-off days.) One day, waiting for a bus on a street corner, I was nearly picked up on suspicion of prostitution. Hey, I was young, moderately attractive, and wearing shorts. Those were the days when a few rogue Philadelphia cops were known to pick up young girls and rape them. Luckily I had my work ID proving that I was a file clerk for the IRS. That (and my refusal to be intimidated, probably) kept me from arrest or rape, but the cops hassled me for a good 15 minutes. Then the bus came.

Still. Despite one of the most corrupt police forces in the US (the granny squad used to mug short, skinny people and then arrest their victims), despite the slums, even despite the double MOVE fiasco, I love Philadelphia. I get homesick for it sometimes, and not just for cheesesteaks and decent hot pretzels. (I rarely ate cheesesteaks when I was there — too greasy even for me.) I do miss some Philadelphia foods, such as excellent pizza, the flaming cheese at South Street Souvlaki, and every single dish at Chun Hing.

I don’t have time tonight to do Philadelphia justice: not the Art Museum, which is a hell of a lot more than just Rocky running up the steps; nor the jewelbox Rodin Museum, which houses the best collection of Rodins outside Meudon; nor the lights of Boathouse Row; nor the streets and parks when the dogwoods flower; nor the rivers; nor the comfortable, walkable size of that city. (It had better be walkable, because driving there is a mess.)

I can’t even do justice to one of my favorite sections of the city. Society Hill has narrow streets, bumpy brick sidewalks, and domestic architecture that is hauntingly spare. There are also a few very beautiful churches, including Christ Church; grand trees in Washington Square; and above all, the perfect proportions and human scale of Independence Hall.

Could a document as beautiful, as deeply respectful of the individual, have come out of the ugly blockhouse modern buildings that currently house the Federal offices in Philadelphia? Maybe. (I’ll have to check the record of the decisions handed down there.) God knows there have been plenty of atrocities perpetrated by people who lived and worked in elegant houses. But when I walked past Independence Hall, I felt proud to be an American. That architecture epitomizes the glories of the Age of Reason. (Another time we’ll deal with the less glorious side of that time period.) Walking into the Federal courthouse in Philadelphia, I felt like a serf in a Kafka novel or a luckless comrade trying to deal with a commissar.

I picked up the link to the slum tours from the blog of a friend of mine. We’re about as far apart politically as we can well be, but we share certain pleasures: architecture and Philadelphia, to name two. I also introduced him to James Lileks’ hilarious website. Not only does it have astonishing 1950s architecture, it’s also home to the Gallery of Regrettable Food, now available as a book. Warning: don’t read his website while you’re at work, unless you want to explain your stifled laughter and wet chair to all your co-workers.

There is nothing to do with some griefs but sing them. —Judy Collins

This Is What I Get for Talking about Medical Specimens

That’s a funny place for a bruise. Inner thigh, high up. . . . No discoloration, but a walnut-sized lump definitely tender to the touch.

That was Tuesday morning around 5:30 AM, when I got up to go to the bathroom. By the time I got ready for work, the thing had grown and hardened. It felt like a flattened cone. The tip was half an inch under the skin, a smooth expanse bigger than the walnut. The rest of it widened to a mass wider than my hand — big, hot, painful. A hell of a bruise. Hmmm.

After some thought, I talked to Michele about it. She made me promise to get to a doctor if it didn’t improve. All day, whenever I left my desk I was aware of it, because it hurt. I talked to a doctor. Could be thrombophlebitis or a deep-vein thrombosis, a blood clot caught in the leg vein, which has obvious risks. So I spent last evening in the Kaiser urgent-care center, waiting, being examined, waiting, getting an ultrasound, waiting, getting a prescription for an antibiotic.

The good news is that it isn’t a clot. Probably either a cyst or a lipoma. The bad news is that whatever it is, it’s (A) painful and (B) going to need further tests and poking around. And I loathe that. I don’t worry about dying. What bothers me is being in the hands of the medical world. And I admit that my guess is that this isn’t a cyst (weird place for a cyst, deep in muscle tissue). I bet it’s a lipoma, because they run in the family, I’ve had one before, and they tend to recur.

Nine years ago, my annual pelvic exam was enlivened when the doctor discovered a mass in my belly. After a couple of months of tests (X-ray, ultrasound, MRI, IVP), a tumor the size of a canteloupe was removed. It was first diagnosed as a liposarcoma, a slow-growing and exceedingly rare cancer. After further testing, though, the tumor was reclassified as a lipoma. Still, they followed me up for three years, just in case.

I am not looking forward to going through this all again.

Live, from San Jose, It’s GalaxyQuest!

Actually, it isn’t, though that film is practically a documentary. I plan to sit home alone Friday night and watch it, peacefully munching popcorn, while the rest of the Califamily lives the dream at the World Science Fiction Convention, better known as WorldCon. This year’s event is ConJose. And if it didn’t cost a fortune, and if I weren’t so exhausted by work, and if I didn’t blanch at the thought of so many thousands of people all in the same place, I’d be tempted to go too.

Some of my favorite authors will be there. Neil Gaiman. Terry Pratchett. (My housemates have the strictest orders to bring either one of them home if it’s humanly possible.) I don’t know about some of the New Wave authors I learned to love when I was first reading SF in the early 1970s. Joanna Russ and Ursula LeGuin are both turning 73 this year. I don’t know if either one bothers traveling to these events any more. Samuel Delany is younger, but he now lives across the country and teaches at Temple in the creative writing program where I earned my MA. God only knows about Tom Disch or J.G. Ballard. I bet Harlan Ellison will be there, though, and Robert Silverberg, and. . . .

Maybe they’ll see new writers I’ve found so wonderful — Sean Stewart, Neal Stephenson, Elizabeth Moon. Pat Cadigan and Lois McMaster Bujold will definitely be there.

Plus thousands of people who read SF, who stay up late at night singing parody songs, who sell costumes and toys and books. But I’m not going, and not just because I need the time to rest and write, enjoy the emotional luxury of a weekend alone, quake at the thought of more than three strangers in the same place, and am saving my pennies for my writers’ conference in a few weeks.

See, I read SF. I love a lot of SF. But I am not a fan.

There is a whole fan culture, brutally and hilariously caricatured (it is a slight exaggeration) in Sharyn McCrumb’s Bimbos of the Death Sun (murder at an SF convention) and Zombies of the Gene Pool (what happens to fans when they grow up?). Like any culture, they have a history, heroes and villains, shared vocabulary bewildering to outsiders, rituals, sacred objects.

The stereotypical fan is an unwashed geek, either grossly fat or pitifully skinny, who still lives at home, works in a techie field unless s/he’s still in high school, can’t get a date with the opposite sex and may not understand which sex exactly is opposite, if any, and possesses no life outside the SF fan world. And the stereotype is bullshit. Mostly.

Fans tend to be bright, imaginative, and incredibly tolerant of people who look or act different. A lot of fans were or are misfits until they reached fandom, and they extend acceptance to pretty much anybody who can talk about the finer points of SF. When I was at Eastern College, I hung out with a group colloquially known as the Hobbits. They were fans, and they were wonderful people, if somewhat unworldly and sheltered and too fond of Luke Skywalker for my taste. They put up with me, obnoxious as I was at 17 and 18. And yet.

And yet I’m a misfit here among the misfits, somehow. There’s a singlemindedness about fandom that I don’t share. Michele and Paul have read enormous quantities of SF, far more than I have, and I’ve read a lot. It’s not fair or accurate to say that they’re undiscriminating; they introduced me to Neal Stephenson, a spectacularly fine writer, and they know how good he is. But they enjoy stuff I could only plow through at gunpoint. I too am a geek, but I’m a style geek, not a substance geek. (You’d never know that from the way I’m blundering through this.) Most of the fiction they read is SF. I read more widely in fiction. God knows they’re both knowledgeable enough about other things — Michele has her MA in theology and church history, and Paul is a tech writer, a trained chemist, and an expert on that category of human endeavor that Michele calls “cults, cryptohistory, and loons.” (Lizards from space control the White House!)

Oh, hell. Maybe I’m just making excuses for being too damned claustrophobic and shy to attend. All I know is that there are SF books that changed my life, that my favorite new authors are mostly writing SF or fantasy, that I can quote by heart long stretches of Peter Beagle’s astonishing The Last Unicorn and that I’ve reread The Folk of the Air half a dozen times. I will always remember the shock of reading Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” in Again, Dangerous Visions. That story (and The Female Man, the subsequent book based on it) helped me recognize myself, just as The Last Unicorn has gained more meaning with every re-reading. It’s a funny and sad and irreverent and beautiful fairy tale, as close to perfect as any book can be.

Maybe . . . maybe fans are just more optimistic than I am. The gulf I feel between them and me isn’t one of intelligence, taste, grooming, personality. It’s something in the worldview. SF is not just escapist literature, though some is, of course; some of the bleakest books are SF, and the authors I admire all grapple with serious moral issues. But all the fans I’ve known well have been essentially innocent souls, even the lovely Goth ones, even the ones who are tortured artists in their own right grappling with serious issues.

Whatever. I’m not making much sense anymore, so off to bed.

No fans were harmed in the making of this blog. So far the author has also escaped harm, though blame the fans if I get brained.

We Seem to Be Taking a Morbid Turn Here (This entry not for the squeamish. Be warned.)

But what the hell. It’s a good article on one of my favorite places in Philadelphia. There’s even a picture. (Not gruesome; actually rather peaceful.)

Then there’s the Mütter Museum — considered by cognoscenti one of the strangest of all of the museums in Philadelphia and right up there with the weirdest in the world. (Roadside America loves it.) But the Mütter Museum doesn’t just gratify sick curiosity to see what weird things people swallow or inhale. (There’s a vast, many-drawered cabinet with Dr. Chevalier Jackson’s collection of items he removed from luckless patients.) It’s almost like a church of medicine — or, no, some other sacred ground: a battlefield, perhaps. A monument to defeat.

The Mütter Museum (such an appropriate name) maintains the dignity of its patients. It’s never mocking or cruel; its hushed and reverent atmosphere is the opposite of a freak show. Like a good mother, it loves and cherishes even the strangest of its progeny. And I feel a weird tenderness for these carefully preserved anomalies.

The skeletal babies particularly draw me. They have such serene little smiles — an effect of toothless jaws meeting, but whatever the reason, they all have the air of elderly gurus too wise to speak. With their huge eye sockets and appealing smiles, they hit all my instinctive baby-loving buttons, the ones that get me cooing and babbling over friends’ babies, friends’ babies’ toes, and even the baby-shoe displays at KMart. (Not that any friends will let me near their babies after reading this.)

One of the sets of conjoined twins is especially dear to me. The baby was born with one head, faced forward, and two perfect little bodies facing one another in an endless, motionless waltz. That solitary, dual, dancing child — children, really — can be seen as a symbol of the Self and the Shadow. But they are also, quite clearly, dead babies. Some woman bore them in pain and grieved their misery and loss. Promise unfulfilled, hope turned to despair. Yet the baby dances alone and smiles as if she had a secret.

Getting ready for the anniversary of 9/11

Read this poem.

Harvest

For months now we’ve been eating vegetables from our garden: homegrown greens and peas, zucchini and crookneck squash, amusingly shaped carrots and fragrant herbs. And now it’s tomato and pepper and lemon time. Over the weekend Sonja put up a few jars of flavorsome lemon-ginger marmalade. Paul, scientist to the core, has invented candied habanero peppers, which for sheer force of personality make cinnamon red-hots taste like marshmallows. (Paul enjoys making super-spicy food, but he doesn’t eat it himself.) And today Michele picked, blanched, peeled, seeded, chopped, and cooked dozens and dozens of tomatoes, then canned the resulting sauce.

All this is wonderful, just the kind of thing I was hoping for when we formed this family. Yet part of me is sad, too, because it also makes me homesick. I miss my sisters and mother. I miss the summer mornings when we woke early and I made crazy breakfasts — popovers like edible balloons, tender homemade doughnuts and fritters, even onion rings one memorable morning. I miss all singing together. I miss going to the fair.

Now, the Harford Fair is still a genuine working country fair. It’s held the third full week in August (and yes, I was thinking about it all last week), and it’s a festival of all the skills and pleasures of country life, from tractor pulls to tatting, but especially focused on the basic skills of the farm family: raising healthy animals, growing good crops, preserving and cooking those foods, maintaining a well-managed household.

I always loved wandering through Floral Hall and Vegetable Hall, looking at the exhibits. The quilts, weaving, and needlework are spectacular, some even museum-class work. There are displays of children’s schoolwork and 4-H Club projects, homemade jellies and pickles, breads, cookies, decorated cakes, handmade furniture, beautifully arranged garden flowers, and market baskets that aren’t just an economist’s metaphor but actual baskets brimming with crisp vegetables and ripe fruits. Farmers can win prizes for the best hay, steers, horses, pigs, corn, honey. Or they can compete in tractor pulls, sawing and felling competitions, axe-throwing contests, horse- and pony-pulls.

There are plenty of other things to see, too: rides and a midway, the library’s annual book sale (source of many of my books when I was growing up), the Good News Bus where children can see a free slideshow about God’s Plan of Salvation, political booths, church groups selling home-baked goodies, dealers selling woodstoves or tractors or chainsaws or antiques, exhibits of old farm machinery and tools, the local gun club, and dozens of food booths. From the Montrose Marching Band’s infamous milkshakes and funnel cakes to the whole ox roast, there are millions of calories available — and all so seductively aromatic. But so are the trampled grass, the green pungency of the tomatoes on display, the clean animal scent of the barns.

If that was all, it would still be wonderful, but there’s more. The fair is on the ridge in Harford, and you can look across the valley as you approach from the Jackson side and see the brilliant fair spread out like the City of God amid the green fields. When I was a teenager, I always made sure I was on the Ferris wheel just at dusk to watch the moon rise over the mountain; beyond the hill was Jackson and home; beyond that was heaven.

Jackson is still there, but changed and lessened: the church sold for an antique shop, the people we loved scattered, my family among them, the house burned. My home is in California, and I fit in here better than I ever could in conservative rural Pennsylvania. But I lost something real when I left there. Continuity. I had a world, and I was homesick for it even when I lived there. I didn’t fit. I couldn’t live there and be my own complete self. I’ve found here beautiful landscapes and loving people, a solid church, a job I love, a family.

Here I have everything but the past.

Many thanks to my generous friend Joe, who sent me the copy of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that I’m listening to now. For various reasons it’s been a difficult day, and I needed the power of a truly great piece of music to help me tonight. This version was conducted by Christopher Hogwood, featuring the London Symphony Chorus and the Academy of Ancient Music playing authentic instruments. It’s somewhat faster paced than the versions I’ve heard before, but it is grand beyond words.