my fathers musings

[redneck joe]

yeah how its made is more along my mental capacity...

 

[redneck joe]

What are your favorite books?


The problem I have with trying to answer that question is that my favorite book is frequently the book I am reading when asked that question.

But I will name a few.


The God Problem is one that persists high on my favorites list.
It’s by Howard Bloom who graduated from Reed College a long time ago and has never ceased being impressed by the intellect that that achievement implies.
Having read the book several times, I agree with his high self-esteem.
Howard takes his readers through a maze of history, science, math and physics and leads to the rational conclusion that things are as they are due to the inevitable facts of rules and mechanics rather than supernatural design.
At least I think that’s what he is saying.

Another book that comes to mind isn’t a book at all, but a long and deep friendship that holds together a story that is meted out in 20 volumes. The Aubrey/Maturin Epic is addictive because each time I enter it I’m back in the midst of my closest friends - Jack and Stephen drag a lot of people with them - and I can’t stop reading until volume 20 is read again. The only downside to that phenomenon is that at the end of volume 20 the story of that relationship is only beginning. Unfortunately, the epic’s author, Patrick O’Brian, dies after completing volume 20. I own the published draft of volume 21, but it’s pretty thin gruel.

The Great Rehearsal by Carl Van Doren is a good thing to read every five years. It is a minute-by-minute re-creation of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787. Having some idea about that morsel of United States history can help make one appear less foolish when talking Constitutional Law at cocktail events.

Adventures in Time and Space, published first in 1946, is a thousand-page anthology of the best science fiction of the first half of the Twentieth Century. I read it first in the summer of 1962. I finally found a used hardback reprint of it in 2020. It’s still untamed magic.

Speaking of magic, for me Amor Towles weaves a magic raiment in A Gentleman in Moscow. The plot is magical, so, to be consistent, the characters and their relationships are therefore magical and, in this book - I read The Lincoln Highway and the magic was missing - Towles’ prose often conjures magic. His description of vast miles and miles of Eastern Russia densely clothed with apple trees - an apple forest, he calls it - is one of the clearest pictures of a magic thing that I have ever seen.

Napoleon by Vincent Cronin comes to mind. I bought it on a whim while in the museum store at Versailles. That was my introduction to Napoleon. It’s the reason that I am a fan of Napoleon. It’s why I have read a number of other Napoleon biographies. Reading them has been interesting because biographers of Napoleon adopt one of two approaches: they are either all mayhem and battles, or they are all gossip and relationships. I prefer the latter. Cronin does a third thing: he gossips and battles and gets into the heads of his subjects. That’s why I re-read Napoleon by Cronin every now and then.

The Bears of Blue River by Charles Major is another magical thing. I read it fairly recently after not having read it for, perhaps, fifty years. It unleashed a phenomenon I had never experienced. I found myself reading a word or two and turning the page, time after time after time: I have the book memorized.

The rest of my favorite books reside on various shelves, in various locations. Some are even in boxes. Some I haven’t even read yet. They are all my favorites.

 

[flashback]

I whole heartedly agree with him on the Patrick Obrien saga. I have most in paper back except for those that I loaned out over the years.

 

[redneck joe]

How did you choose where to go to college?
A couple of paragraphs from Screen Saver are the answer to this question.

I had the good fortune to have a good job in the summer of 1960. I was on a surveying crew doing the engineering work for Wanapum Dam which was under construction.

Most of that summer I was on the crew that was establishing exactly where the railroad tracks adjacent to the Columbia River were going to be in relation to the giant lake that would form behind the dam when it filled up.

The specific function was called “shooting a traverse”.

I will leave out the details of that function.

On the traverse down the railroad tracks there were sometimes days on end when the terrain was uniform from hour to hour and day to day. I was always a chain length down the track from the level, and the terrain was unendingly the same; all I had to do was walk to the end of the chain, hold the rod plumb, and let Jerry take the elevation, and then do it again, and again. In those times I had a lot of time to think.

It was during one of those extended periods of days of never-ending repetition that I had a life-changing revelation. It was late enough in the summer that my savings account was getting fairly large, at least by my standards. I had calculated that by the time I ended my summer I would have $730 in the bank. That was, for a seventeen-year-old, a lot of money in 1960. Then I began to think about the financial implications of going to Portland University, even with the partial scholarship. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. I was going to have to spend most of the $730 just to pay for my tuition. I would have almost nothing left over for clothes, or dates or whatever. And why was I going to Portland University? Certainly the scholarship had had something to do with it, but the real answer to the question was that I was going due to inertia. Other than the “assumption” that I was going to go to college, where or how had never been addressed. The $730 addressed the how, but the catastrophic effect addressing it would have on my now treasured bank balance caused the “where” to suddenly surface for the first time as something to be thought about. The answer to “where” came almost magically. And it came in the form of a decision, not a possibility, which made it even more unusual. My typical decision-making process had been to come up with one or more possibilities and worry them to death until I could decide what to do. Those decisions frequently ended up concluding to do none of the above and going back to discovery mode. But on this day I had jumped from a problem to a solution almost instantly. And the solution had just felt right.

The fact that my choice of “where” had felt right from the outset was amazing. Other than being vaguely aware that there was a member of Oregon’s higher education apparatus in Portland, and that its name was Portland State College, I had never thought any more about it. All of a sudden, that was where I was going to go to college. That had been my first object lesson in how money would serve me well as a significant catalytic contributor to clear and decisive thought.

 

[redneck joe]

My father loved nature.

He was fascinated by it from the time he was a small boy and spent his summers in the woods north of Seattle.

Those woods are now all subdivided and built upon and named Lake Forest Park.

But when my father was a little boy those woods were just woods. They had no name. They were expansive and un-subdivided.

Those woods were full of plants and creatures that were so interesting they made the three month summers pass as if they were only a few days long.

My father told me that when I was a little boy.

Those creatures were hidden from all but the most dedicated eyes and ears.

My father was an enthusiastic and dedicated observer. So he had many things to tell that he saw during those summers.

The red huckleberries when they appeared shone like Christmas lights in the forest gloom. Normally those huckleberries were the most nondescript of forest floor shrubbery. They were things that no one would ever notice.

The sudden appearance of dark coral berries changed that briefly.

When the berries appeared those nondescript bushes changed into glorious light green laceworks spattered with countless specks of red.

Then the birds descended upon them.

And then the berries disappeared.

And then the bushes receded from sight into their former anonymity.

But my father knew they were still there.

He told me about them when I was a little boy.

Clusters of gelatinous material laced with tiny spheres appeared every spring in the swamps that oozed out of the little creek that wandered through the woods.

And those spheres always did the same thing.

They always disappeared.

In their place there were instead large numbers of tadpoles.

And before long the tadpoles disappeared.

In their place there were instead large numbers of little thumbnail sized frogs.

The tiny spheres disappeared and then the tadpoles disappeared leaving only little frogs because they were all three one and the same.

The gelatin encased spheres turned into tadpoles and the tadpoles turned into frogs.

My father knew that.

He told me about that when I was a little boy.

Underwater in the little creek were things that looked like bundles of fir needles. And there were bigger things that looked like tubes made of sand grains.

Both of those things were insects.

Rather, they were the larvae of insects yet to become.

“Larvae” was a word my father taught me.

Those larvae lived in the creek bottom until one day they all disappeared.

When they disappeared the air was filled with flying insects.

The larvae disappeared when the flying insects appeared because they were one and the same.

The larvae had turned into flying bugs.

My father knew that.

He told me about that when I was a little boy.

Of all the wild things my father loved, birds were the most loved.

He had books and books of them.

The biggest of the books was the Audubon Bird Book.

When I was a little boy I spent hours and days turning the pages of that gigantic book.

Even now I can often guess at what sort of bird I am looking at aided by flashes of memory from that great Audubon Folio.

I inherited my father’s love of wild things.

And like him, I put birds at the top of the list.

This little collection is the result of several years of wandering Lopez Island.

The beautiful creatures pictured here all did me the honor of sitting still long enough to allow me to capture their images.

I have too many for a little book like this one.

But here are a few of them.

Each bird speaks for itself.

They are not identified.

I leave that enjoyable task to anyone who looks at this book.

If they want to.