All rights reserved.
July 29
Stop the (online) Steal!
Hey Amazon Prime, the New York Times and all you other opportunists mining the brave new world of online “subscriptions” for added cash: %^^* your “upgrades.
I subscribe to your services, some of them. You’re welcome. Now leave me alone. You can’t have any more money – and you sure can’t have it without asking. At least, not if I can help it.
Amazon Prime is the worst offender on my online subscription list. I’ve been a Prime member for years; I used to love it, especially the music streaming feature, which allowed me to play ad-free music through my old-school stereo system using only my cellphone as a source.
Unfortunately, it’s not what it used to be. The stuff on my once-extensive personal playlist routinely disappears; lately the playlist seems to recycle the same half dozen songs out of my original 100 or so. At the same time, it adds songs I never asked for. What – I don’t get to chose anymore?
Meanwhile, Amazon keeps jacking up the price of a Prime membership – from $79 a decade ago to $139 today. If they ever asked for my permission to charge my credit card more, I must have missed it. Certainly, I never gave it. No matter; they did it anyway. This is the kind of thing that happens sometimes when businesses have your credit card or PayPal account on file: they start charging you more for their services without asking. Why? Because they can.
Nor is that all. Lately, every time I open the Prime Music app on my cellphone, I get a full-screen plug for an upgrade to something called “Amazon Music Unlimited.” I don’t want “Amazon Music Unlimited.” I want what I used to get; I was happy with that.
Declining is tricky, however, because the “No thanks” option on my cellphone is considerably smaller than the option to “Try it FREE” for a while, after which they would charge me $8.99 more per month. (Without asking, of course.)
Not only is that “No thanks” option harder to see, it typically doesn’t even appear until a second or so after the “Try it FREE” message pops up. At other times it never appears at all. The first time that happened, I was stumped. Eventually, I discovered I could tap a little Prime Music “home” icon at the bottom of the screen as an end-around.
This silly shell game, I’d wager, is intended to trap or trick people into saying “yes” instead of “no.” This I did once by mistake – it was all but inevitable. I ended up paying that “Amazon Music Unlimited” surcharge for multiple months before I noticed the unwanted new charges on my credit card.
I was then able, after many minutes on the phone, to obtain a promise of a full refund for the added amount from the folks at Amazon. Still, duping suckers like myself into signing up for an upgrade they don’t want, and then tapping their credit cards to pay for it, is a con.
Amazon is not the only subscription service out there with its hands in our pockets, of course. For another, um, prime example look no further than that famed gray lady of American journalism, the New York Times. Used to be my 17 bucks a month was enough for a digital subscription – but for months now they’ve been trying to get me to fork out an extra $6.25 a month for an “All access” upgrade.
“All access?” And I thought I was getting all of it. Silly me.
But at least they gave me a choice. In May, however, I discovered the Times had charged my PayPal account $20, instead of the usual $17. When I contacted customer service, their explanation was that the price of a subscription had gone up.
In other words: Sorry, Charlie.
It was news to me – although on panning back through some 60-plus unwanted and unread emails from the New York Times while writing this column, I did locate one dated April 7 announcing “an important change in my subscription.” I didn’t see it in April, and I never consented to give them more money. They just took it. I wish I could say they’re the only ones.
In any event, I was miffed enough that I canceled my subscription. I have since renewed at a much lower promotional rate. Their loss. (As a bonus, they’ve also stopped plugging their “All access” upgrade every time I sign on – at least for now.)
Look – business has always been about making money. I get that. But do 21st-century businesses really need to stoop to sketchy online practices to make a buck? In the beginning, I was attracted to Amazon precisely because it was transparent; you looked for what you wanted on their website at the lowest price, then you bought it and they mailed it to you. Piece of cake.
It was adding Prime that spoiled things for me. Really, I should just drop my Prime subscription and go with Spotify for my music streaming needs – but I’m hooked on free two-day shipping.
The airline industry, too, seems to have discovered that online misdirection can be lucrative. In the giddy, early days of online booking I searched the web for deals with glee. I loved booking my own flights: it was so much simpler, not to mention cheaper, than in the olden days, when you had to pay a travel agent to book it for you. I used to find some killer fares, especially on winter trips to Europe.
It was great while it lasted – but those days are gone. Now when I search for an online airfare, the results are a joke – a bad one. The reason is the dubious new practice known as “bundling.”
“Select your bundle” one bargain carrier encouraged me recently after I clicked on a fare. My “bundle” options, which cost extra, included bringing along one handbag-sized “personal item,” luggage (checked or carry-on) and a seat reservation. Nor does that necessarily exhaust the list; I was traveling alone, but I’ve read that airlines have begun, among other things, to charge families extra to sit together.
I realize that running an airline is a dicey business in the best of times, but this kind of grasping for money is pathetic, not to mention dishonest. It should be illegal for airlines to advertise fares that don’t include basic services all travelers require.
Ultimately, it’s up to government to outlaw such abuses. And it’s heartening to read that plans are in the works to do just that.
In his last State of the Union address, President Joe Biden pledged to “take on ‘junk’ fees, those hidden surcharges too many businesses use to make you pay more.
“For example, we’re making airlines show you the full ticket price upfront, refund your money if your flight is cancelled or delayed. We’ve reduced exorbitant bank overdraft fees, saving consumers more than $1 billion a year.
“We’re cutting credit card late fees by 75%, from $30 to $8.”
“Junk fees may not matter to the very wealthy, but they matter to most folks in homes like the one I grew up in. They add up to hundreds of dollars a month. . .”
“We’re going to ban surprise resort fees that hotels charge on your bill,” he continued. “Those fees can cost you up to $90 a night at hotels that aren’t even resorts.
“We can stop service fees on tickets to concerts and sporting events and make companies disclose all the fees upfront.
“And we’ll prohibit airlines from charging $50 roundtrip for a family just to be able to sit together. Baggage fees are bad enough. Airlines can’t treat your child like a piece of baggage.
“Americans are tired of being — we’re tired of being played for suckers.”
Earlier this spring, U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) officially introduced the “Junk Fee Prevention Act.”
“Concealed surprise fees—nickel and diming Americans to distraction—must be stopped,” said Blumenthal in a statement posted on his Senate website. “Airline travel, concert going, common purchases—seemingly almost everywhere— consumers are compelled to pay hidden excessive charges. Our bill will help end this price gouging—forcing full disclosure upfront and restricting abusive fees. It will mandate basic common sense fairness and transparency, which consumers rightly demand and deserve.”
I’m for that.
-Kevin
Feb. 21
Spring is here?
It’s springtime in Roanoke, Virginia!
Never mind that it’s only February the 21st as I write this – a date better suited to the Winter Olympic Games than Maypole dancing.
Never mind, too, that spring does not officially begin for another month yet, on March 20. For the last few weeks, we’ve had short sleeve weather here. The high today was 66, and it is forecast to be just as high tomorrow – when the day’s low temperature will be 61. This will all change on Thursday, when the forecast is for… 82 degrees! That would be sixteen degrees warmer than it was today, and a good 30 degrees higher than average February high temperatures in Roanoke.
Don’t think the weeds haven’t noticed. Those wicked little harbingers of spring are popping up all over my yard now. I actually harvested my first vegetables of 2023 this week, when I pulled up a few of the wild onions that are spreading like – well, wild onions all over my front slope.
The grass is slowly coming awake as well, poking up here and there above the un-raked autumn leaves.
Here is where I ought to say something about global warming, I suppose – but what strikes me most about the weather these days is the wackiness of it.
New York, like Virginia, is going crazy, weather-wise. On Christmas Eve the temperature in New York City fell into the single digits. Eleven days later, New Yorkers in shorts and t-shirts were enjoying a high of 66 degrees in Central Park.
It was the same story elsewhere in the state. “This is one of the craziest winters I’ve ever seen,” Lake George area resident Nancy Nichols told the New York Times a few days ago. “We’ve gone from minus-17 to T-shirt weather.” (Accompanying photo of a polar plunge at Lake George is by Cindy Schultz for The New York Times.)
At the same time, the Upper Midwest is getting clobbered by Arctic cold and is anticipating record snowfalls. Temperatures in the northern High Plains may run 40 degrees below normal.
Update: NPR reports on February 22 that more than 2300 commercial airline flights have been canceled amid the snow and ice storms in the Midwest, with Denver, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee and Minneapolis among the hardest hit.
#
And then there’s California. As much as five feet of snow may fall in the mountains near Los Angeles this weekend, USA Today reports, and winds could gust up to 75 mph. There is a threat of avalanches.
Numerous weather hazards are expected on Friday and Saturday across the Golden State, especially in the south, due to a vigorous winter storm. According to the National Weather Service, “heavy to excessive rainfall with flooding is very likely from Los Angeles to San Diego and dangerous and potentially life-threatening snow related impacts are likely for mountain, desert, and foothill roadways in southern California.”
That’s Southern California!
Stir eye-popping highs in the Southeast and Southwest regions of the country into the mix – McAllen, Texas hit 95 degrees on Wednesday afternoon, compared to minus nine in Cut Bank, Montana – and you get a mind-boggling gap between the country’s warmest and coldest locales of more than 100 degrees, as CNN points out.
Wacky, indeed.
#
Weather is changeable, of course, and always has been. Early springs have come to Roanoke before, and late ones, too – though the latter are rare these days. But Roanoke’s record one-day snowfall of 15.4 inches came on February 13, 1960, while the so-called “blizzard of ’93” dropped 16 inches or more on the city and its environs over several days a full month later in the season some three decades later, from March 13-15, 1993 . 
I’m not anticipating that this year. Roanoke and the surrounding region as of mid-February have been “virtually snowless” according to Kevin Myatt, writing for the online Cardinal News. Apparently we had a close call mid-month with a storm that might have dropped a foot of snow on us or more, Myatt wrote, had the temperature only fallen a temperature or two.
Missed it by that much.
#
But back to my weeds. I see more of them every day, cluttering up my sidewalk, nudging the foot of my porch steps and spreading out around my drain pipe like a green stain. My garden plot last week was a wash of brown; it’s two-toned now. I’ve even seen flowers – itty-bitty flowers, but flowers. Bigger plants awaken more slowly, of course; my arborvitae are still wearing their deep-winter purple, while the trees are months away from sprouting leaves.
Meanwhile, the last weather forecast I looked at was calling for a dramatic drop in temperatures on Saturday, February 25th, with lows in the 30s and a high of only 45.
I’m pretty sure the weeds won’t care. They’re waking up, and they’re not going back to sleep.
Can the robins be far behind?
-Kevin
Jan. 11
Winter Storms – and the Blizzard of ’93
Thirty years ago I woke up in my cabin in the Virginia mountains and knew I was in trouble.
It was sometime after midnight. Outside my window snow was falling like crazy. And I was shivering with a fever that had come on suddenly. In fact, I had the flu.
Of course, neither snow nor the flu are necessarily life threatening – but I lived on a dirt road in a mountain valley known as Sugar Grove, far from my nearest neighbor. To get out of the valley I would have to drive up a steep, long hill that would be likely be impassable under heavy snow – and this snowfall was heavy indeed. It fact, that mega-storm is now remembered in these parts as “the blizzard of ‘93.”
Making things much, much worse for me was the fact that I had in my refrigerator exactly half a sandwich. Not only would I be stranded for days if the snow kept coming down this way, but I had next-to-nothing left to eat. (In fact, in those days I ate most of my meals in restaurants.) And none of my hardy mountain neighbors would likely be able to offer any help.
I probably should have known the storm was coming; I did not. In those days I never paid weather forecasts much attention. All of my news came from the morning papers, which of course were written the day before, rendering such things as weather forecasts largely obsolete. Also, I had no television set, smartphones had not yet been invented and the internet as we know it and use it today did not exist.
But I was a newspaper reporter. I could handle anything, no excuses, and still file a story on deadline. That was my job – and I was good at it.
At the onset of the blizzard of ‘93, however, I was in real peril and I knew it.
I had that same feeling a couple of nights ago, when an Arctic cold front settled over Virginia after devastating states up north with cold, wind and snow.
This time, I was more prepared – or so I thought. There was food in the refrigerator. I had a new kerosene heater, purchased after the last one I owned caught fire. (Another story.) I had paid attention to the online forecasts predicting a cold snap, with temperatures dropping into the teens.
In fact, the temperature plummeted down to single digits before bottoming out at three degrees.
My aging furnace cannot handle single digit cold and I know it – thus the kerosene heater. The last one, strategically placed at the bottom of the stairs, could keep the whole upstairs warm even if the power went out: it had done so more than once. I figured the new one would work just as well – and it might have, and it may still.
But on that critical night with the temperature dropping, it wouldn’t start.
Over and over again I pushed the lever that engages the battery-powered ignition coil, until the batteries finally died – but the kerosene did not ignite. When the batteries failed I went for the kitchen matches (I had needed them on occasion with my last heater, too), and one by one fired them up and inserted them through the little opening and over the wick: nothing. I tried it many times.
Finally I gave up.
The house was cooling rapidly, as the gas furnace labored almost ceaselessly to keep up. It was a losing battle. Each time the temperature dropped a degree or two I turned the thermostat setting down to match it, so that the furnace could take a little break. The last thing I needed was my furnace giving up the ghost.
But down, down, down went the mercury, from 66 to 64, then 62, then 60, 58, 57, 56, 55, 54…
I have another heater. I knew from experience that it could heat my bedroom just fine. Unfortunately, it is electric. Kerosene heaters work when the power goes out. Electric heaters, of course, do not. Neither, alas, would my furnace, which employs an electric fan. What was I going to do now if the power went out – as it eventually did for more than 143,000 people in Virginia and 1.5 million nationwide?
I could only hope it wouldn’t.
Once again, nearly three decades after the great blizzard of ’93, I was sick, this time with a sinus infection. I am also 30 years older and my night vision has suffered. I no longer like to drive at night. And the last time I went looking for a local hotel room due to a home disaster, I got turned down. Hotels don’t like to rent to locals, apparently, because they sometimes misbehave.
So on this night I poured a glass of wine instead, went into my bedroom, closed the door behind me, turned the electric heater on and prayed that the worst would pass me by.
And it did. For one thing, it didn’t snow here in Southwest Virginia – not like it did in Buffalo, New York, anyway, where the snow levels topped four feet. And the wind gusts seem to have done most of their power line damage in the higher elevations, and not the valley that I live in. In any event, the electricity stayed on. The furnace stabilized at 54 degrees and the heater kept me warm.
But I was scared that night, and with good reason. This was a lethal Arctic storm, with some 61 dead and counting as I write this, and plenty of people were stuck in their cars for hours, waiting for help that couldn’t come – including a man with two small children, who waited 11 hours to be saved .
In the end, the worst that happened to me was that some water lines froze. (My fault: I forgot to keep a trickle of water flowing.) But I was reminded of the awesome power of nature, which only seems to increase, and made newly aware that I might not be able to handle everything it can hurl at me. Not anymore.
Of course, I never really could. On that long-ago night when the blizzard of ‘93 began to howl, I got lucky. I woke up, first of all. I left my bed and took a hot shower in an effort to stop the fever shakes. Then I packed a bag and climbed into my car. It took me three tries to get up that long hill, but I finally made it.
How lucky was I? I was the last person to get out of Sugar Grove for a week.
So where did I go? Up the snowy highway – slowly – to the house my parents lived in then, in Roanoke, some 30 miles away. There I roused my sleeping mother, God rest her soul, who took me in and mothered her grown son back to health. It took awhile – but ten days later I was alive and well and back at work.
Still, I know it could have gone another way. Mother Nature is ultimately in charge and always has been. She owns all of us – and one way or another, she gets us in the end.
Kevin
For more on the infamous 1993 “Storm of the Century,” read Kevin Myatt’s excellent March 8 weather column in The Cardinal News: https://cardinalnews.org/2023/03/08/looking-back-at-blizzard-of-1993-as-this-march-turns-colder/
Looking back at Blizzard of 1993 as this March turns colder
Aug. 5
THE LAND OF FAILED DREAMS
God, Russia.
After four visits, I had come to like it quite a bit – and it seemed to like me back. In the decades after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, I met many Russian people, on Russian soil. I have friends over there.
Vladimir Putin will never be one of them.
And not only because he doesn’t give a damn about me. Putin is a thug and a tyrant, a crook and a killer. He is to blame for the carnage, the indiscriminate bombing and shelling and the murder of women and children in the sovereign nation of Ukraine. In his own country, he has destroyed what once looked like a promising new democracy, and installed himself as ruler for life.
What a pity, and a waste.
#
It was all so different when I first visited, in the summer of 1992. The Berlin Wall had come down less than three years earlier; former Soviet satellites from Armenia to Estonia had declared their independence. Boris Yeltsin had been elected president, in the first Russian presidential election ever.
Thirty years ago, Russia was opening up to the West in a big way. In America, there was so much interest in the newly emerging, newly welcoming democracy that I was able to convince my own small-city newspaper in Roanoke, Va., to send me there. My plan was to cover an exchange visit by some Southwest Virginia schoolteachers. The arrangements would be made by a Virginia company that had opened a factory in the city of Pereslavl-Zalessky, some 90 miles north of Moscow.
Their visit was a great success. The schoolteachers stayed with Russian families, who smothered them with love and affection. All of us were treated like royalty, or rock stars; our various handlers and guides had only to yell out “Americans” to open a path for us through any crowd. For those ten golden days at summer’s end in 1992, we were feted, petted and adored.
The Russians, it turned out, were as curious about us as we were about them. Indeed, they were fascinated by all things American. Some Russian apartments we visited displayed miniature American flags and photographs of President George Bush.
Clothing with American words (any American words – “Shenandoah National Park,” “USA Basketball,” “Sit on it” ) were coveted in Pereslavl-Zalessky.
“For so many years, we weren’t even allowed to think about Americans,” one woman told me. “Our propaganda was very strong. We never spoke good about America. It was always, `Americans, who want war, who want to kill us.’ “
But by 1992, things had changed, she said. “Everybody understands that we are the same like you. That we have the same problems. We want a good future for our children. We have the same problems with drugs, with homeless people, with illness.”
#
I returned to Russia three times after that memorable first visit, staying each time in the former Russia capital and enduring epicenter of the arts, Saint Petersburg. Perhaps the most European of any Russian city, Saint Petersburg’s cultural amenities, including its ballet company and symphony orchestra, are second to none. The State Hermitage Museum is packed with art treasures and is one of the biggest museums in the world.
And people were friendly there. Not Pereslavl-Zalessky friendly – but still curious and never rude. (I wish I could say the same for Parisians.) Bartenders gave me free vodka shots, along with entertaining – and occasionally alarming – conversation. When I attempted to pay one bartender for the vodka, he waved away my money, saying “This is Russia. It’s what we do.”
The bartender, whose name was Slava, was tall and thin and wore a light blazer; as it was a slow night, we were soon deep in conversation. Slava had lived in Maryland; his ambition was to return to America and manage a Hard Rock Cafe. He said there was a sense of impatience in Russia in those days – an expectancy, as though something were about to happen.
“Maybe we go to war,” he mused – and then added, to my horror: “Maybe with you.”
In fact, the Russian army would invade the former Soviet Republic of Georgia later that same year, 2008, in what has been called the first European war of the 21st century.
On that same trip, I once found myself alone with a Russian woman in a Hermitage gallery, and asked her if the museum had any paintings by the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. She asked me in turn, rather charmingly, if I could phrase the question more simply, so I just said:
“Vermeer?”
The name sent her into raptures. She loved Vermeer! The Hermitage owned none of his paintings, she was sorry to say – but she dreamed of taking a trip to Amsterdam to see the Vermeers at the Rijksmuseum. (It has four). For a time she walked with me through the galleries, extolling the virtues of the View of Delft and bemoaning the foolishness of the Russian government for not buying the master’s paintings when it might have done so. She apologized for not speaking better English. A woman of fifty or so, she told me they were forbidden to speak English growing up – but they could read it, and many did.
#
In truth, English was spoken by a surprising number people in Saint Petersburg, and for an intrepid American it was not too hard to get around unescorted. Walking was the best mode of transportation, but Saint Petersburg’s subway system was clean and efficient. (And deep! Saint Petersburg is said to have the deepest subway system in the world.) Though at least one hotel concierge told me the subway wasn’t safe, I used it often.
Olga, the concierge, was a blond spark plug perhaps five feet one and 100 pounds. She lived in fear of something happening to a guest – though she had a kind of gallows humor about it, too. She told me that hotel staffers always worried when guests didn’t return at night – until they finally showed up, as they usually did, in the wee hours. “They were only drunk.”
Olga loved to talk. Once, when I complained of some misfortunes I had suffered in the day’s wanderings, she told me about a bad day she had recently had herself. A contact lens fell out of her eye, and she was forced to attempt to help the hotel guests without being able to see. On rising from bed the next day, she told herself, “Okay, Olga, you must be sure to put the right foot down first.”
Olga knew very well that I was ignoring her advice about the subway. One night as I re-entered the hotel lobby, she put a hand over her heart in mock astonishment.
“Oh!” she said with a smile as I came up the steps. “I’m so happy you are not killed.”
Very funny.
#
I was heavily chaperoned on my visit to Russia in 1992; my journey to Saint Petersburg in 2008 was my first trip to Russia alone, and I was apprehensive. I flew in from Estonia, having spent the prior few days in Tallinn, and my flight to St. Petersburg was apparently the only one scheduled at that time, because the Pulkovo Airport terminal was all but empty. The only person in the lobby was a kid with holes in his blue jeans, holding up a sign that said “Mr. Kittredge” in English. My taxi driver, sent by my hotel.
The ride into the city was dispiriting. It was the dead of winter, but there had apparently been a recent thaw, because snow on the ground was scarce and all the cars and roadside buildings were caked in mud.
That first night I slept poorly. The picture window in my hotel room overlooking the Neva River was a blessing and a curse – a blessing for its spectacular view, a curse because it let it lots of frigid air around the edges. I tossed and turned under my single blanket, and dressed rapidly once morning came.
But that’s not quite right, because morning had not come. The view from my wide window revealed no rising sun. It was almost 9:30, though not yet dawn at that latitude. And it was snowing. The sky was glowing softly, but opaquely; the only thing written on the pearly murk was a necklace of lights on the line of buildings directly across the Neva from me, and a string of orange lights along the Trinity Bridge, which leads from Peter and Paul Fortress to the area of the Summer Gardens and the Field of Mars. I could see this clearly on my map – but from my window the lights leading over the river hung in space, supported by nothing and linking nothing to nothing at all.
The night before I had seen the lollipop-colored domes of the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood floating on the night mist like an hallucination; now even they were gone. There was nothing but these two necklaces of disembodied light. The scene was supernatural, and beautiful.
And then some unfeeling bureaucrat, or perhaps an automatic timer, flicked a switch and the bridge lights vanished. I sighed, donned my heavy clothes, and went downstairs for breakfast, and then out into the snow.
#
That night the wind blew hard off the icy river and I awoke again and again, unable to get warm. I arose at last determined to do something about it, whatever the cost. I knew there were rooms at the back of the hotel available for a higher price.
Alas, it was here that I met the old communist bureaucracy in full force, inexplicable and unbending. Mikhail Bulgakov, who understand Soviet absurdity very well, might have penned what happened next.
The sole visible desk clerk downstairs was on the telephone, deep in a conversation that involved much laughter, and likely had nothing to do with work or cold guests. My notes say that she had red hair and had been nice to me earlier. This time she utterly ignored me – for five minutes, ten, fifteen. To kill time, I visited the little gift shop; when I returned she was still on the phone.
Finally, casting delicacy to the wind, I loomed over her.
“Yes?”
“Would you like me to come back in five minutes?”
“Yes.”
“And you will hang up then?”
To drive home my unsubtle point, I made the phone sign with my pinkie and thumb and, in a sweeping gesture, moved the make-believe phone from my ear to an imaginary cradle. She nodded.
So for five minutes I explored the upper floors, peeking into the precious empty rooms at the back of the hotel. When I returned the girl was still on the phone. Thankfully, some other workers had returned from – well, wherever they had been. I approached a middle-aged woman with heavily styled blond hair whose shirt stopped midway up her breasts, and told her my room was cold and my bed was too small. I was willing to pay more for another room, I said, so long as it was warm.
The woman consulted her computer, then told me what I wanted was impossible.
Now, the old Soviet-era hotel was far from full. When I walked around while waiting for the younger clerk to finish her flirting, all I saw were empty hallways and doors open on unoccupied rooms.
“Why?” I asked.
Because I had booked my room through an online reservation service, she told me, and the reservation would have to be changed by them.
“Call them!”
“They don’t work on Sunday.”
“I bet they do. They work a lot. They emailed me on New Year’s Day.”
“No.”
”I’ll just pay the difference.”
”There is no ‘difference.’ You must contact them and make another reservation.” Apparently I could pay for two rooms, if I wished, but I couldn’t upgrade to a single better one.
“You’re throwing money away,” I told her – and I make a contemptuous throwing gesture with one hand.
“There is nothing I can do.”
“Can I speak to the supervisor?”
I could. She soon arrived – an older woman with glasses on a chain around her neck and a look of concern on her kindly face. There followed more fruitless discussion, however. She offered to put me in a similar room on another floor, but it would likely be no warmer. It was the wind, she explained, working around the edges of the big plate glass windows. Also, my bed would be no larger. The rooms on the back side of the hotel were upgrades. I could not have an upgrade.
“You understand I want to give you money?” I said, shoveling imaginary money onto the counter behind which she stood, watching me: “I don’t say that very often.”
For the first time, she smiled. Perhaps she sensed the irony involved in refusing to allow a guest to upgrade to a more expensive room in a half-empty hotel. But if I had won the battle, I had lost the war.
She told me I could have another blanket.
“Two,” I said, turning petulant.
She smiled again.
“Three. Five.” I winked at her – I couldn’t help it – and went back upstairs for my coat and gloves. As I was pulling them on, a maid arrived with my blankets.
Three of them.
#
I went to orchestral concerts each time I visited Saint Petersburg, and sometimes to ballet performances as well, and they were very fine. Only once did I go to the opera. I didn’t care for it. Tchaikovsky has written some deathless works of music, and portions of the “Queen of Spades” may rank among them, but the narrative seemed silly. Based on a Pushkin short story – a bitter, unsentimental thing with elements of destructive greed and vengeance from beyond the grave – “Queen of Spades” turned into sentimental nonsense on the Mariinsky Theatre stage. Pushkin’s story had some of the strangeness of Dostoevsky, of Russian life; that opera was high school drama. Add a 20 dollar glass of wine (small wonder I was the only one drinking) and an overflowing toilet in a nearby restroom, which filled my little opera box with a sewage reek, and – well, I can’t say the night was a success.
But the old opera house was lovely, the women even more so, and if not for the reek of the overflowing toilet, I might have stayed. As it was I stuck it out for an hour and a half (though not all of that awake), then slipped out for a beer at a nearby pub during intermission and did not return.
Back at my hotel, alas, the night desk clerk – a sweet girl with a perpetual smile – would not let me go to my room without first telling her all about it. She was so young, bright-eyed and eager to hear about my evening that I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had left the theater at intermission, or about the overflowing toilet. And really, who was I to be so cavalier about what to her was clearly something thrilling – perhaps something she could never afford herself? I was a jerk, an ugly American.
So despite the fact that I badly needed to answer nature’s call, I gave her as full an account of the opera as I could – without however, claiming I had liked it. She asked me if the tale had had a happy ending, and I told her the main characters died or went mad. (At least, they did in Pushkin’s version.) We talked a little about the short story itself, which she had not read, and then I excused myself and hurried up to my room.
Once my needs were attended to, however, I felt guilty for bolting, so I picked up a book from my nightstand and took it downstairs and handed it to my friend. The book was entitled “Great Russian Short Stories,” and it included “The Queen of Spades” – in English, of course. She was transported when I told her she could keep it.
I meant to get the girl’s name and take her picture the very next time I saw her, but I never did again.
#
The next morning I walked down Nevsky Prospect in a snow storm, snapping pictures like the fool tourist that I was, At last I ducked into a café and ordered breakfast. My waitress was a shy girl who wouldn’t meet my eyes until I had finished my meal and paid my bill and was already standing up. At that point, I got a quick “Thank you, goodbye” in English.
Astonished, I paused to ask her if she liked the snow.
“I think it’s beautiful,” she said – and I said I thought so, too.
Adapted from “Dreamlands, Behind the Wall: Travels in Eastern Europe and Russia,” by Kevin Kittredge. All rights reserved.
June 17
Kyiv and the Master
GENEVA — The bodies of more than 1,000 civilians have been recovered in areas north of Kyiv, Ukraine, that were occupied by Russian forces…including several hundred who were summarily executed and others who were shot by snipers.
The New York Times, May 12
Thirteen years ago, I went to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
Why? Because it was there. Because I had long been both fascinated and appalled by the former Soviet Union and Russia (knowing someone can blow you up is inherently interesting) – and Ukraine’s history and Russia’s, for better or worse, are intertwined.
That journey has been much on my mind in recent days, as the ancient city and its environs enjoy an uneasy and perhaps only temporary reprieve from Russia’s deadly and unprovoked attacks. (June 5 update: Russian missiles have struck Kyiv for the first time in over a month.)
I liked the city, mostly. Much of it is charming, historic and/or beautiful, from its onion-domed churches and wide promenades to the winding, cobblestoned lane called Andriyivsky Uzviz, or Andrew’s Descent, to Independence Square – which birthed a revolution in 2014. In his semi-autobiographical novel “The White Guard,” Mikhail Bulgakov describes his native city as “a pearl set in turquoise,” and praises “the beautiful deep-blue Dnieper,” the river that divides the town.
What will be left of it all when the dust settles, I wonder?
#
I arrived in Kyiv in the middle of winter, following an overnight flight to Amsterdam from Virginia. It was February 15, 2009, to be precise – a Sunday morning. In retrospect, that 3-hour flight on Ukraine International Airlines was my introduction to the country, and a pleasant one, even though I was nodding off. The Ukrainian plane, a Boeing 737, was well-used, though no more so than many a short hopper back in the states – and this lone Americansky got the whole back row to himself.
This was a ‘tweener’ flight, between breakfast and lunchtime, and in any case I am conditioned to expect no food on American flights – so I was astonished to see a breakfast cart coming round. The meal was a hot Ukrainian breakfast of noodles with many chunks of beef. Just thinking about it makes me hungry now. But I had eaten a full Irish breakfast in a pub back at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, and had no room for all that food. I could only leave it in its tray.
The meal cart was followed by a drink cart, which in lieu of the usual sodas and fruit juices appeared to be a fully stocked bar. The flight attendant assured me everything was free, but I only wanted coffee. Still–this was quite a change from my United flight across the ocean, where I failed to procure a single glass of wine because they couldn’t accept a credit card or be bothered to change a hundred dollar bill. And free? Forget about it.
Ukraine International Airlines had beaten the friendly skies, hands down.
#
The scene at Kyiv’s Boryspil International Airport was, initially at least, less welcoming. Unlike Russia, Ukraine does not require Americans to obtain a visa before visiting. Nonetheless, my line at passport control consumed many, many minutes, during which some mounted video screens unaccountably treated us to images of subway rats on an endless loop. This was apparently a video of a song by the Pet Shop Boys, with the volume turned down. I didn’t care for it.
Airport lines are airport lines; they can be slow in America, too. Still, the wait seemed interminable. Worse, things did not appear to be going very well for those people who actually made it to the windows. Everyone who got there, I noticed, seemed to stay there for a very long time.
A pretty blond woman from my flight ended up in tears after waiting through one line, only to be sent to another. A man in front of me with a British accent was directed to a table to redo his landing application form, or whatever those things are called. I began to fear I might have screwed up something, too.
“I hope I did this right,” I said when my turn finally came, as I handed my application and my passport to the customs agent, a brown-haired woman with bangs.
“Ha–ha,” she laughed, and immediately folded my application in two. Then she tore it in half, handed me back the half labeled “departure” and my passport, and I was through.
#
I had hoped for a moment to collect my thoughts, but it was not to be. Once freed into the waiting room I was instantly besieged by taxi drivers. They were relentless. And I am weak. My plan to take a bus to a distant subway stop, risky at best, began to seem downright foolhardy. In the end I agreed to pay a driver, Sergio, $20 to take me there. For this price I also got his “manager,” Sasha, who I soon gathered was an out of work driver himself; he took the front seat.
Sergio offered to drive me all the way to my rental apartment for an additional ten bucks, but I stuck to my plan to use the subway. When we reached the station, to my horror, Sasha got out, too, and followed me inside, talking all the while. He followed me onto the train and then off again when I reached my stop, at last handing me a homemade business card and offering to be my guide for the rest of my trip.
I told him I would let him know – though I just wanted him to be gone.
#
I had booked my apartment on Darvina Street from a Kyiv rental agency – a process that involved a lengthy email exchange with a Ukrainian woman named Julia while I was still in the States. Another woman, Olesya, apparently the apartment’s actual owner, met me there to let me in. It was essentially one-room as advertised, but with a separate foyer, bathroom and kitchenette. Quite nice.
Olesya was a woman near middle age, very slim, round-eyed and stylish in the knee-high, high-heeled leather boots that seemed de rigueur for pretty Eastern European women in those days. Olesya felt so sorry for me when I told her my cellphone did not work that she gave me her spare, which had formerly been her daughter’s. Without a new SIM card it could only call her, she said – but who else was I going to call in Ukraine?
We went back downstairs and walked down a snow-covered hill to the corner of a busy street, where she pointed out an inexpensive restaurant and a shopping center with a supermarket inside. Borrowing my notebook, she wrote down the security codes for the apartment building, three (!) phone numbers for herself and my own new phone number, then handed the notebook back to me and headed back up that steep, snowy hill in her high-heeled boots.
How do women do that?
#
It was 9 a.m. back where I came from and I hadn’t slept, so my first order of business should have been a nap. Instead I entered that vast subterranean shopping center to buy some essentials and soon lost my way. When I emerged with my bag of stuff, it was from the wrong exit. I had no idea where I was.
I plunged back inside and out again, and found myself no wiser. I consulted my map – but it had somehow turned to cipher. The whole city had become unreadable. For a moment I just stood there, exhausted, bewildered, helpless and overwhelmed.
Darvina Street.
The name came to me and it was enough. I asked a cop, and he pointed out the way.
#
One last word about Julia, the woman from the rental agency. We never met, but we had emailed and spoken on the phone. A few days ago I found the printout I had made of our email exchange; it was critical to me in 2009, since it included Julia’s phone number and the address of Olesya’s apartment. As I was writing this post in early March, nearly two weeks into the invasion, with Russian troops pressing towards Kyiv from three sides, I sent a message to the company email address Julia used back then, and tagged it “Best wishes to Julia.” Astonishingly, she replied herself.
I include our short exchange below in its entirety:
Hello, Julia. I rented an apartment from you and Olesya on Darvina Street in Kiev a dozen years ago. I just wanted to say you are both in my thoughts today and I am hoping for the best for you and all of Ukraine.
Please stay safe.
Sincerely,
Kevin Kittredge
Roanoke, Va USA
Hi, Kevin! Thank you so much! Situation is terrible, but we still hope it will stop soon… (((
Julia
I hope so, too!
Kevin
#
I had many adventures, large and small, during the week I spent in Kyiv and I won’t describe them all here. (The cave monks!) A longer version will be included in my upcoming second book of travel essays. But here are few memories that stand out from that wintertime trip in 2009:
The first night after settling in I walked to the Nezalezhnosti or Independence Square, meeting troops of teenaged girls along the way holding bouquets of flowers bought presumably from the numerous sidewalk vendors. Broad Khreshchatyk Street is, or at least was, closed to traffic on the weekends and walking back and forth on the city’s main drag is said to be Kyivans’ favorite pastime.
At the square itself, ice skaters circled and circled to ear-splitting music. There were many tents with draped slogans proclaiming this and that. (A daily phenomenon, as it turned out.) Independence Square back then was famed for its political protests, but those days ended with the massive Euromaidan protests of 2014, which resulted in more than 100 deaths. In 2009 it was still the city’s favorite meeting place, however.
The square is dominated by a 200-foot column with a winged figure on top – Berehynia, a slavic deity and protectress. Known as the Independence Monument, the column was erected in 2001 to celebrate Ukraine’s independence, which seems especially poignant today.
#
The next day I retraced my steps of the night before, but this time I continued on to the end of the road, where I found myself in a park above the Dnieper River. The day was cold and spitting snow. Turning left, I passed St. Michael of the Golden Dome, a beautiful medieval monastery rebuilt after the Soviets stupidly tore the first one down; the original dated to the 12th century, according to my guidebook. At the opposite end of Volodymyrska Street is Sophia Square and the great cathedral, which is no longer a cathedral at all, but a tourist destination owned and administered by the state. Efforts to return it to the Orthodox Church have reportedly collapsed into squabbling among church factions – a sad state of affairs which reached its nadir with a bloody riot in 1995 at the funeral of the late Patriarch Volodymyr.
I stopped first at a big plastic tent erected outside the building and enjoyed a cup of coffee, while watching teenage girls seated on long benches smoking cigarettes. By the time I finished my coffee and got in line for a ticket, the sun was going down.
#
Saint Sophia (see photo at top), which means “Holy Wisdom,” was apparently modeled on the much bigger Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople, built in the early 500s and now a mosque. They really don’t look alike, but I accept the Byzantine influence; architects from Byzantium are said to have been among the builders. Saint Sophia in Kyiv is some 500 years newer than Hagia Sophia, which leaves it still plenty old; the cathedral was allegedly begun in the year 1011 (some sources say 1037), a century before the western facade of Chartres Cathedral in France.
By some accounts the church commemorates the wedding of the Grand Prince Yaroslav with his new Christian bride, Ingegerd of Sweden, though the dates I’ve found do not bear this out. My guidebook, on the other hand, says it celebrates Yaroslav’s successful defense of Kyiv from tribal raiders. Yaroslav did marry one Ingegerd Olofsdotter, daughter of the Christian king of Sweden, Olof Skötkonung, in 1019; for her alleged support of cathedral building in both Kiev and Novgorad, Ingegerd is now venerated as an Eastern Orthodox saint. She was Yaroslav’s third wife; I don’t know what happened to the other two. There is a fresco in the cathedral that depicts the royal family, arguably including four daughters and six sons.
#
One is not long in Kyiv, or at least in 2009 one was not, without noticing two things: the underground shops and kiosks, and the girls. Both are everywhere. Match-making on every level was one of the main occupations of the city; both marriage brokers and escort services abounded. A sandwich sign on the sidewalk across the street from my favorite cafeteria, for example, read “Daisy Marriage Service.” Another, near St. Michael of the Golden Dome, advertised “Translations and legalizations for marriage and business. Wife’s visa, fiance visa, corporate docs, etc.” I began to understand why so many Kyivan shop fronts had placards in the window that said “Notary” in Cyrillic.
I suppose this is the time to point out how pretty Ukrainian women are, as a rule. They tend to be thin, small, very well-dressed and groomed (the cheap plastic jewelry of the early ’90s is long gone) and favored by nature. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has figured largely in the Eastern European sex trade, and Kyiv’s sidewalk vendors offering marriage services added a touch of the bizarre.
Oddly, perhaps, I was not approached by a single prostitute in Kyiv, nor did I stumble upon an obvious red light district. Perhaps those things aren’t necessary in the age of the internet. There were numerous online and print ads for escort services and “girl guides” in the city – my tourist map was peppered with them – and I guess that is simply how it is done in Ukraine, then and now (though no doubt this Russia nightmare has put a damper on the business). My Lonely Planet guidebook of 2009 called the women “one of independent Ukraine’s biggest tourist attractions.” In Kyiv, that was easy to believe.
Not everyone approves, by any means. The commodification and virtual enslavement of some Eastern European women following the Soviet breakup has been often noted, perhaps most notably in “The Natashas,” the 2003 book by Victor Malarek and the Kyiv-based humanitarian group La Strada.
And a 2013 documentary film about the Ukrainian feminist group Femen carries this indignant title:
“Ukraine is Not a Brothel.”
Indeed.
#
Kyiv has men, too, of course. Spunky Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become an international celebrity since the invasion. And back in 2009 I saw lots of young men gathered in small groups on the sidewalks drinking beer, their hair cropped close to their skulls. They looked vaguely threatening, but they never bothered me.
Once near Independence Square I saw a young man doing figure skating moves on the ice-slick sidewalk amid falling slow, while holding a can of Coca-Cola. Abruptly he turned a perfect cartwheel on the ice without letting go of his can.
Not bad.
#
Kyiv was the childhood home of Mikhail Bulgakov, whose posthumously published novel, “The Master and Margarita,” is one of the few highlights of Soviet-era literature ( though it was repressed for many years). The family home has been turned into a museum, and seeing it was one of the goals of my trip.
Bulgakov died in 1940. A censored version of “The Master” finally appeared in Moskva magazine 26 years later, and a complete manuscript was smuggled out of the country and published in 1967 by the YMCA Press in Paris. It was translated into English that same year.
It’s a wonderful book, one of my all-time favorites, with wild parties, mysterious vanishings (no rarity in the Stalin years) and a cast that includes Satan, Jesus, Judas Iscariot, a pig-sized talking cat, a tormented and persecuted writer whose hated manuscript refuses to burn – and of course the beautiful and devoted Margarita (said to be based on Bulgakov’s third wife, Elena) – a witch who sometimes rides naked on a broom. It made Bulgakov posthumously famous the world over; since its first appearance the novel has been adapted into movies (both live action and animated), tv shows, comic books, ballets, operas, musicals and a radio show broadcast by the BBC. It has been staged hundreds of times by theater companies around the world, and has inspired both classical compositions and rock songs, including the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”
“The Master and Margarita” has little to say about Kyiv, alas, but the fact that the master himself had lived there and set his first novel there was more than enough to pique my interest in his childhood home. So on my last afternoon in the city, I made my way once more to winding little Andriyivsky Uzviz, to visit the Bulgakov Museum.
http://www.kyivhistorymuseum.org/en/mikhail-bulgakov-museum
The museum is a wide, detached two-story building in yellow brick with lots of white stone trim, very pretty. My notes speak of a bas relief of the writer’s face on the wall beside the door; in fact it isn’t “bas” at all, but projects heavily from the wall as though the master himself had thrust his head out a window. The carved wooden door was locked, but I rang and rang until it cracked open briefly to reveal a woman’s face.
“Close, close,” she told me. “Tomorrow.”
She shut the door. And that, alas, was that.
#
Still, the visit wasn’t a complete loss. I had seen at least the pretty yellow house on the steep, serpentine lane that leads up to the exquisite Saint Andrews Church. The church itself is a dainty masterpiece of Russian Rococo, also known as “Elizabethan Baroque,” after the Russian empress and daughter of Peter the Great – beloved for not having executed a single person during her 21-year reign.
Beside the house, meanwhile, was a little park-like space where I found the writer himself, in bronze, sitting on a bench. He sat up straight with both arms and legs crossed, his gaze determinedly inward. He wore a bow tie and his hair was combed straight back. The introduction to my Everyman’s Library edition of “The Master and Margarita” makes reference to Bulgakov’s “magnificent disdain.” It is evident in that statue.
As I looked, people stopped to pose for pictures with Mr. Bulgakov, which I gather from Google happens a lot. Sitting beside the writer on his little bench and precisely mimicking his pose seems to be especially popular. After so many years spent laboring in obscurity on a book he would never see published, I have to think the master relishes the attention.
https://www.kiev4tourists.com/bulgavov-monument
Adapted from “Dreamlands, Behind the Wall: Travels in Eastern Europe and Russia. Most of the photos in this post are from Wikimedia Commons and may be found there. All print rights are reserved to the author.
Jan. 25
Wintertime
A long time ago I was a teenager in Michigan, where the snow began falling in November and kept coming until April (and occasionally May).
Most of my life before and since has been spent in somewhat warmer climes. Not year-round balmy, like Oahu, but not the Upper Midwest, either. It snowed in northeast Oklahoma where I was born, but not that much, and there was no comparing it to Michigan for cold. The same holds true for the wandering years of my young adulthood: snow, yes, save for one winter spent in Florida , but not very often and usually quickly gone.
Not so in Ann Arbor. Come late November or early December, the snow plows would begin to scrape up layer after layer of fresh snow and pile it beside the road, where it melted slowly if at all. When roadside snow hangs around for weeks and months, it loses its Hallmark qualities and turns dirty and hard. A snowball fight with chunks of that stuff could be deadly.
But Michigan winters weren’t only about the snow. (Ann Arbor gets five feet of it a year, by one count.) There were also the frigid temperatures, the gray skies, the shortness of the days, the lack of a respite for month after dreary month. I hated those winters – but the odd truth is, I loved them, too.
The temperatures here in the Southern Appalachians have been Michigan-like lately, and tonight as I write this there is heavy snow. It has brought back memories of those teenage years in Michigan, and what winter meant to me then.
I should begin by noting those years coincided with the greatest changes in my life to date – puberty, in short, and a newfound fascination with the fairer sex (which warmed me up). Those were my wonder years – my years of figuring things out and sometimes growing up too fast.
Somewhere in those years – there were four of them – lie my first kiss, my first rock and roll band, my brief flirtation with communism (I read the Communist Manifesto one day in 9th grade civics class, with only a wink from the teacher, who liked me), my first (and last) school suspension, my first girlfriend and so much more.
It was an eventful time period for the rest of the country, too, ranging as it did roughly from the Tet Offensive to Watergate; those were the years of assassinations, Kent State, Woodstock and the first man on the moon.
So that’s the background. But then there were the winters themselves – dark, bitter cold and so very, very long.
Spring was spectacular in Michigan. It was not just a change of weather, but a change of spirit; it was the end of a long journey to an altogether different place. There was a sense of grand accomplishment in just getting there. I always fell in love in the springtime. I fell in love at other times, too, but in the springtime there was something extra special about it – something commensurate with the monumental changes going on outside. Winter gave me that sense of springtime transformation; it made it possible. Because there is no spring without winter.
Still, that doesn’t explain the nostalgia I feel for Michigan winters. What might is that life seemed to happen mostly in the wintertime there; winter lasted so long it could not have been otherwise. My most poignant memories from those years of wonder are winter memories: teachers (good and not so much), friends, enemies, getting into trouble, playing my clarinet in the concert band. Girls. So many girls. In that magical time they grew prettier and prettier. Paula, Donna, Sarah, Wendy, Amy, Maureen. They thrilled me and they made me cry; sometimes, I made them cry. And most of it happened in the wintertime.
I had a ridiculous amount of freedom in those years, for such a young kid. I was a child of the leafy suburbs; my parents had always let me go pretty much where I wanted. Two things happened in those early Michigan years that expanded my range. First, there was a municipal bus system in Ann Arbor, and my friends and I used it often. Also, increasingly, I hitchhiked (though I don’t think my parents ever knew.)
As a result I frequently made the five-mile trip to downtown, where there were stores, cheap restaurants, pinball joints, college students, zoned-out hippies in bell-bottoms, a hippie boutique, a head shop stocked with counter-culture posters, hash pipes and rolling papers, and a record store, where I bought the hot new albums that dominate classic rock station playlists today. Sometimes, there was marijuana.
And worse. Increasingly, I abused my freedom; those winters could grow dark, in many ways. I had been a good kid once; as a young teenager, I was pretty lousy.
So why do I go back to those winters of my wayward youth again and again in my mind, with what I can only call nostalgia? It’s a good question – one that has been posed to me by people who knew me then. Part of the answer is that in those years I came to see the world as far more interesting and also dangerous than I had suspected. Things were revealing themselves rapidly. They were for me years of modest achievement (the later ones, anyway), but heady growth.
And the danger was real. We – the males among us anyway – grew up in the shadow of war and under the threat of the draft – of being called up and sent across the world to fight in the jungles of a country that was the stuff of our worst nightmares, for a cause we didn’t care about. (And what was the cause, exactly?)
In another sign of the times, there were several bombings in and around the University of Michigan soon after we arrived in Ann Arbor, attributed to a countercultural group. Finally, a serial killer was actively engaged in abducting, raping and murdering a succession of young women. My poor mother, who was raised in the Texas oilfields, must have wondered what she’d gotten into.
The Vietnam War: The Pictures That Moved Them Most
I am nostalgic, too, because I survived. Not everybody did. Some of my friends from those years died young; others – the ones who turned away from the brink (moi), or climbed out of the abyss – went on to live successful lives. My best friend became a lawyer; his brother is a college professor with a PhD from Harvard; my brother recently retired from a distinguished career as a NASA engineer. We were middle class and fortunate; our mistakes did not stick. As for myself, I went on to do the only thing I ever really wanted to do, which was to write for a living – which I did as a newspaper reporter, Sunday feature writer and columnist for 30 years.
My fascination with those northern winters has endured for five decades now. Before Covid I often traveled abroad, mostly in the winter months, and I was partial to places that were cold, where there would be ice and snow: Kiev, Krakow, Prague, Tallinn, Riga and Saint Petersburg, which I have visited three times now, and each time in the dead of winter.
I have walked for hours and hours in Saint Petersburg in February, and once even on the frozen Gulf of Finland (which seems foolish now). One day I sat in a park and watched the snow fall and fall, content. I felt very far from home in Saint Petersburg, but somehow in my element, too, wandering everywhere, looking at everything, falling in love with the Russian ladies and with life – young again in my mind, at least, and in the wintertime.
-Kevin
Nov. 8
100 seconds to midnight
I was born three years after Ivy Mike, the world’s first successful thermonuclear bomb. Mike, of course, did not survive his triumph – but I have lived long enough to read of a tiny town in western Canada, Lytton, where thermometers hit 121 degrees on June 30. That night, Lytton caught fire and burned.
In between Ivy Mike and Lytton came the arms race, DDT, the population explosion, “Silent Spring,” Y2K, millennial cults, rising sea levels, extinctions, Covid 19 and the slow, terrible realization on the part of most sentient human beings that global warming is, in fact, a thing.
Is the apocalypse at hand?
Beats me. The end of life as we know it is easy to imagine, harder to predict. And we’ve been wrong before. (See: Y2K).
But the cheerful folks at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight this year – “the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse and the same time we set in 2020,” they note on their website, thebulletin.org.
But how close is close? Catastrophes large and small don’t often come marked on the calendar ahead of time. They can arrive in an instant – or across unimaginable years.
But come they do, sometimes. Chicken Little could have been right. A wolf finally ate the boy. Pompeii disappeared in a day. (Okay, maybe two.)
This is a restless planet, even without human bumbling and bombs: Thunder crackles, the ground smokes, lava flows as moving continental plates slowly collide, causing earthquakes, thrusting up mountain ranges and occasional tidal waves that push the sea ashore.
Over its 4.5 billion years the earth has heated up and cooled down and heated up again; land masses have come together and broken apart. Seas have come and gone; once upon a time in North America, sharks swam over Kansas. Some 700,000 years ago, glaciers toppled trees in Indiana.
None of those things are what I think of as “apocalyptic,” however.
According to Merriam-Webster, apocalypse is “the expectation of an imminent cosmic cataclysm in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil and raises the righteous to life in a messianic kingdom.”
The Rapture, it is sometimes called, and Judgment Day. It’s when the shit comes down.
Whatever you call it, it’s been getting a lot of ink lately, what with our multiple disasters all happening at once.
“Forests are ablaze. Floods are obliterating. An iceberg nearly half the size of Puerto Rico broke off from Antarctica. . . It’s Mad Max apocalyptic” noted New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, in a July 24 column headlined “Apocalypse Right Now.”
And there was this from the July 10 edition of the Washington Post:
“We now have multiple crises within crises: a covid-19 pandemic, historic wildfires that left us with some of the worst air quality on the planet, a historic ice storm in February, and now a mass casualty event from heat,” said Jennifer Vines, health officer for Multnomah County, which includes Portland, Ore. “We are looking at this changing climate as a glimpse of the new normal.”
Meanwhile a man fighting wildfires in once-frozen Siberia assured the Times in an article that appeared on July 17 that “This is not a phase, this is not a cycle — this is the approach of the end of the world. Mankind will die out, and the era of the dinosaurs will come.”
Dinosaurs? Come again?
Actually, when we talk of the final days, dinosaurs loom large. (Sorry.) What happened to those guys, anyway? Brontosaurs could be 65 feet long and weigh 38 tons – and they were runway models beside the largest of the Titanosaurs, at 82 feet and 70 tons or more.
That’s a lot of dinosaur. And one day they just disappear?
Decades ago, I wrote an article about a geology professor who believed global warming killed the dinosaurs. He also thought modern global warming would fulfill prophesies contained in the Book of Revelation, sometimes called the Apocalypse of St. John. Revelation, the last book in the Christian Bible, is full of colorful chaos, with an earthquake, hail, fire, a bloody moon and stars dropping out of the sky. One memorable passage, often depicted in medieval art, describes Jesus with a two-edged sword poking out of his mouth.
Christ with a sword in his mouth. Wellcome Library, London, via creativecommons.org.
“I looked,” writes the prophet at one point, “and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
That’s great stuff; I’m jealous.
As I recall it, my professor was of the opinion that global warming would lead to our demise due to a heat-related decline in male potency. This, he believed, was also what happened to those dinosaurs.
Alas, I can’t find the article in my boxes of clippings from those pre-digital days, and the professor has left this earth. For those interested in the idea, however, I did find this:
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/climate-change-making-it-harder-to-conceive
A more commonly accepted theory about the dinosaur apocalypse is that they all died when a large asteroid struck the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico 66 million years ago. The impact triggered world-wide earthquakes, mile-high waves and a 330-foot tsunami. Plants and animals ignited; sunlight was blocked for years by the soot, which slowly covered the earth. Photosynthesis stopped. As much as 75 percent of the earth’s flora and fauna may have become extinct.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/soot-dinosaur-impact-180974708/
Now, that’s what I’d call an apocalypse.
There was an upside to this cataclysmic event, however: an explosion of biodiversity in the years and millennia that followed. Mammals thrived, with some species becoming as much as 100 times larger than before.
And eventually, we arrived.
The story of the Chicxulub asteroid tells us much about the regenerative powers of our life-giving planet – but also about the impermanence of everything that lives here, including us.
So again, are we doomed?
I would hazard a guess that homo sapiens won’t be around forever. The fate of most life forms on earth, possibly excluding cockroaches, can be foretold in a nutshell: We evolve into something else or become extinct. (According to the website pestworld.org, cockroaches have been around for at least 280 million years. Comets, schmomets; if you’re a cockroach, there’s always something to eat. https://www.pestworld.org/news-hub/pest-articles/fascinating-cockroach-facts/#:~:text=Cockroaches%20are%20Really%20Old,ago%20in%20the%20Carboniferous%20era.)
The latter is a possibility. Ask a dodo, or a dinosaur. It happened to the Neanderthals, the last of whom died only 40,000 years ago, which is yesterday in geologic time. (We were here then; did we help them out the door? It would have been just like us.)
And how might humanity end? Let us, like Shakespeare, count the ways: We could roast to death or run out of things to eat or poison ourselves or blow ourselves up. There might be a comet out there with our name on it, coming for us right this second. If we make it another seven or eight billion years (unlikely), we can all hold hands together and watch the sun go out.
Wikipedia has a long entry on human extinction in which the usual suspects are mentioned – climate change, nuclear annihilation, biological warfare, asteroids – along with advanced artificial intelligence and self-replicating nanobots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_extinction
Finally, consider the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), which suggests people stop reproducing in order to save the global biosphere. VHEMT’s motto: “May we live long and die out.” https://www.vhemt.org
Now, there’s a thought.
-Kevin
Sept. 19
Rejection
Thirty three-plus years ago, in January of 1988, I quit my job at the Memphis Commercial Appeal, where I’d been a reporter for four years, and headed for the hills. The Southwest Virginia hills, to be precise. I knew and loved them from my years as a student at Virginia Tech, and then as a rookie reporter for the Radford News-Journal, located some 15 miles away.
My plan was to write a novel.
Dear Kevin Kittredge,
Thank you very much for giving me the chance to consider your writing. Upon review, I’m afraid I didn’t feel as if I’d be the right agent for your work. But I do appreciate having had a chance to take a look at this, and wish you the best of luck with this and other projects.
Sincerely,
XXXXXXX
A friend had found me a cabin on a river, in the poetically named Pulaski County hamlet Snowville. (2010 population: 149.) The cabin was cheap, the setting, facing a trout stream and a pretty stone bridge, picture perfect. I settled in and stayed for most of two years, eating through my savings and then scraping by on freelance work while I struggled with my muse.
It was a difficult muse at first, stingy with the good stuff; for many months I wrote garbage, which I long ago threw away. (“Process is nothing” Annie Dillard has written; “erase your tracks.”) But every now and then something happened that raised my flagging spirits. Something real appeared on my typewritten page (and it was typewritten then, and for years to come.) I had, for a paragraph or two, pulled it off; I had written something good. It was pretty flimsy evidence, but I took it to mean that this was something I could do, so long as I never gave up.
Thanks so much for contacting me about your book project, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be the best representative for it. Best of luck on your path to publication.
Yours,
XXXXXXXXXXX
So I kept going. It took six years, but the novel that finally emerged, which I recently renamed “The Cotton Field Madonna,” is something I’m still proud of.
Over the next fifteen years, as I toiled at the Roanoke Times for my living, I wrote two more novels, plus several hundred thousand words of an ongoing narrative that I’ve spent much of my post-newspaper life shaping into three others. I also wrote a book of travel essays: “Dreamlands: Sinners, Saints and the Way of Saint James.” That makes, or soon will make, seven books. I haven’t succeeded in publishing even one.
Dear Kevin,
Thank you so much for the opportunity to read and consider DREAMLANDS. I’m afraid that I’m going to have to pass up the opportunity to represent your manuscript, as I just didn’t quite connect with it on a heart and gut level, but I appreciate you sharing your work with me. I wish you the very best in finding a good home for it, and I hope you and yours are safe and healthy.
Warmly,
XXXXXXXXX
Dear Kevin,
Thank you so much for the opportunity to read and consider WOUNDED. I’m afraid that I’m going to have to pass up the opportunity to represent it, as I just didn’t quite connect with the material on a heart and gut level, but I appreciate you sharing your work with me. I wish you the very best in finding a good home for your work. Thank you again for thinking of me.
Warmly,
XXXXXXXXX
Have I tried? Of course I’ve tried. Since finishing that first novel, I have sent out query letters to many, many agents and a handful of publishers, too. I knew the odds were against me. In the first place, my queries were almost all “unsolicited ” – that is unsought and unasked for, which made them mere needles in some busy agent’s haystack. I had no established, money-making author recommending me, and no “platform” to speak of – that is, no position of authority or expertise that could catapult me onto talk shows where I could plug my books. I wasn’t famous. I was just a small-city newspaper reporter, who pined to do something more.
So I always assumed that getting published would be hard. I never really thought it would be impossible.
Thank you for your query. Please know I carefully considered your project, but I don’t feel I can offer representation at this time. The marketplace is more selective than ever and I must keep a modest list.
Keep going with it, there are numerous agents out there that may be a good fit. I wish you the best of luck!
Sincerely,
XXXXXXXXX
Can I actually write? My answer would be “Yes.” I made my living writing feature articles for newspapers. Writing fiction was a different kettle of fish, it’s true, but I’m my own worst critic. I knew very well that my early efforts stunk. Thirty years into it, I think I can tell the good stuff from the bad. The bad stuff gets re-written until it’s good. The good stuff is the best of me. It may not be everybody’s cup of tea – but worse writers get published every day.
There are many possible reasons for my failure to get published, but one is surely that I write what I want to write, and not what I think will sell. I’m not trying to please anybody; I’m not even trying to make money. I wrote for a paycheck for thirty years. My books were intended to be something more than hack work. Art, in fact.
Dear Kevin Kittredge,
Thank you for sending us ‘Wounded – a novel’. We appreciate the chance to read it, but unfortunately, do not feel the work is right for our agency.
We wish you the best with this and other projects –
Sincerely,
XXXXXXXXX
I probably could have tried harder. I could have queried more agents; somehow, there are always more agents. I could have gone out of my way to meet a few. The truth is, I have never met a literary agent in the flesh, in part because I have never tried. Anonymity is not a good place to start from when seeking publication. Much better to be Madonna, or even Madonna’s brother:
Anonymity, however, was all I had.
For whatever reason, many of my query letters were never answered, and most of the rest were form letter rejections. The best I’ve ever received is a rare, personal version of “No, thanks.”
I don’t know if agents themselves actually read unsolicited queries like mine; the top agents, likely not. William Styron, early in his novel “Sophie’s Choice,” depicts his own salad days reading slush pile manuscripts for the publisher McGraw-Hill, and then writing snarky memos ripping them to pieces. Among his accomplishments before getting fired was counseling the rejection of “Kon Tiki,” a true 1948 account of a three-month Pacific Ocean voyage on a raft. “Months later,” he concludes memorably, “watching this book remain first on the best-seller list for unbelievable week after week, I was able to rationalize my blindness by saying to myself that if McGraw-Hill had paid me more than ninety cents an hour I might have been more sensitive to the nexus between good books and filthy lucre.”
Thank you for sending me your query for WOUNDED. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I must pass on this project; I wasn’t as pulled in by the opening pages as I’d hoped.
The publishing industry is subjective, and what doesn’t work for me might be just what another agent is looking for. I wish you the best of luck in your writing as you work toward publication.
Best,
XXXXXXXXXX
So what am I to do? I was 32 when I started this quest; now I’m 65. If I die tomorrow (possible), my books will die with me on my password-protected computer and Google Chrome. (It’s true some early typewritten manuscripts might survive, but those are just drafts. I should probably burn them.) The alternative to the commercial publishing world is self-publishing, and it has never been cheaper or easier in this age of Kindle and print on demand. Is it time?
I think it is, at least for the earliest books. I’ve begun looking into it. Over the next few months I will blog about my progress; once the books become available, I’ll include links to the site from which they can be ordered or downloaded, which will probably be Amazon.com. (Thanks, Bezos.)
They will never become bestsellers this way – but they won’t be invisible, either. They will have lives that extend beyond my own, and anyone who wants to buy them will be able to. My books will have a chance, in other words, whereas right now they have none.
A chance is all I ask.
-Kevin
June 27
A Walk in the Neighborhood
I live in a neighborhood you might call “mixed.” (It’s been called worse.) I bought my century-old house here a decade ago because it checked all my boxes: it looked solid, there was easy access off a back alley for carrying groceries and band equipment in and out, it offered lots of sunlight, it was within walking distance of downtown. It had other charms, too, not on my list but much appreciated: despite its proximity to downtown, for example, it had a suburban feel, including an empty side lot for buffering (it cost extra) and an unruly privacy hedge between me and my neighbors on the other side.
The house fronted on a busy city street, yes, and it was just five blocks from the Roanoke Rescue Mission – but five city blocks can make a world of difference. In any case, thanks to its position atop a hill, few strangers would be likely to brave those 20-plus front steps to pester me, I reckoned – and few have.
The pièce de résistance, however, was the view. I could see across the Roanoke Valley to the Appalachian ridgelines from all four westward-facing windows, upstairs and down, and from the spacious front porch as well. And it was cheap. Five figures cheap. You want cheap, come to Appalachia.
#
Having worked for the local newspaper for 20 years, I also knew what I was getting into, more or less. This is the working-class side of a former railroad town. In the early 20th century, thousands of people came to Southeast Roanoke from the surrounding hills to work for Norfolk and Western Railway’s East End Locomotive Shops and the American Viscose plant, which made rayon, or synthetic silk.
A century later, Norfolk and Western is now part of Norfolk Southern, soon to be completely headquartered in Atlanta – though its freight trains still rumble past my neighborhood on three sides. The Roanoke East End Shops, which once turned out state-of-the-art steam behemoths like the A class 1218 freight locomotive, now a museum piece, and the streamlined J class 611 (it’s still around, and used for occasional steam excursions) closed in 2020, apparently for good.
As for the viscose plant, which once employed 5000 people and was connected to downtown Roanoke by a streetcare line – it shut down in 1958 after 41 years of operation. Its smokestacks can still be seen from the south side of my neighborhood, where a long decline leads to the Roanoke River. In a quirky turn, the old factory complex is now an urban industrial park with such diverse tenants, according to Google Maps, as an auto garage, a custard and coffee shop, a machine shop and a dance studio, the Star City School of Ballet.
#
There are other jobs now, and the city as a whole has survived its great industrial losses, in part by reinventing itself as a tourist destination, sandwiched between the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Appalachian Trail. There are also some tech jobs and start up companies to go with the new tourist economy, and a massive health complex that includes a medical school; Carilion Clinic, Roanoke’s main health care provider, has become the city’s largest employer. In addition, deep-pockets donors have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars over four decades to give Roanoke a thriving arts and cultural scene and a remade downtown. Roanoke’s population, after an end-of-the century dip, is nearly back to where it was in its industrial prime.
So we are lucky. But there’s also no question Southeast Roanoke is under stress. On some streets houses are in disrepair and shrubs and grass grow unchecked. Other houses burn and remain as eyesores, sometimes for years. Squatters break into unoccupied dwellings in the winter months for shelter, heating themselves with dangerous small fires as best they can. There are drugs made and sold, if not on my street then on another; closer to the local rescue mission, friends have complained of people sleeping on their porches or on their lawns.
On the upside are the thrilling hilltop views of both mountain landscapes and downtown buildings; the promising age of the neighborhood residents, which skews young, not old like me; and a plan by the city to invest millions into revitalizing the northern part of the neighborhood, including my street, Elm Avenue. Much of the neighborhood, Elm Avenue included, has also recently been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
These changes, aided by a national housing shortage, are having an effect on property values; the other night I Googled houses for sale in my immediate area and found nothing for under $100,000. Five-figure rehab bargains like mine, apparently, are a thing of the past.
#
Southeast Roanoke was created, like the city itself, by the merging of railroad lines and the birth of Norfolk and Western Railway in the late 1800s. Coal was the draw; the hills to the west held tons of it, and trains were needed to carry it away. Virtually overnight, the railroad shaped a mountain metropolis here, drawing thousands of job-seekers out of the surrounding hills and earning Roanoke its first nickname, “Magic City.” When the Viscose plant opened a mile away from the locomotive shops in 1917, with a workforce that would quickly grow to 3800, 58 percent of them women, the future of the neighborhood looked bright.
No, it didn’t last. But lately there are signs that, block by block, Southeast is moving on. My house and the one next door are renovated and owner occupied. The house across the street was purchased by a young beautician with an artistic streak, which shows in her front porch decor.
Perhaps the biggest change, and a welcome one, is the neighborhood’s new diversity. Thirty and forty years ago the people living on these emptying streets were White. Today, my neighbor to the west is African-American; another near neighbor, an avid gardener who lives across the alley, is from Japan (I think; her English is limited); a few houses up the alley lives a woman from Kenya. And I see Latinos everywhere.
#
I used to run a lot, sometimes through Southeast, though I didn’t live here then. Now that I do, I’ve become a walker and a talker; almost everyone I see gets a “Hello.” This begins with Luna, a friendly dog who lives at the end of my alley. As I walk along her fence she wags her tail and follows as far as she can.
In Luna’s front yard, spilling into the street, where a portable basketball hoop is set up, there are usually kids playing, most of them Black, though sometimes a White neighbor joins in, too. A little boy no older than two runs up to the curb when he sees me and extends his tiny hand for a gentle high five. Three or four more little ones wave. One of the girls told me once she wants to be a cheerleader when she reaches high school (she has a while to wait). Her older sister just graduated, and in their front yard is a sign that says:
Class of 2021 PH (for Patrick Henry High School)
Congratulations! We’re proud of you!
In fact, as I walk I see a half dozen such signs, and small wonder. Graduating during a pandemic is definitely cause for pride.
#
Down a hill and up another, and the road flattens out for a block before veering downhill again. This part of the neighborhood is rich in old American Four Squares homes – big, blocky two-story houses (rarely one and a half) with shady front porches and gable windows in the sloping roofs. Dating to the ‘20s and ‘30s, four squares had lots of space inside and lots of natural light – and those deep porches would have been a godsend in the days before air conditioning. Highland Avenue has scores of four squares, one after another in a row, many in beautiful condition with fresh paint and landscaped lawns. Highland is one of my favorite streets to walk on, in fact; my friends Mark and Sylvija lived there with their daughter in a four square house before moving around the world to Lithuania a year ago.
Another favorite street is near the old viscose plant – a long, steep two-block stretch that usually marks the beginning of my homeward trek. The first time I walked it a couple of months ago, I was immediately greeted by a musical “Hello” I couldn’t find the source for. It turned out to be a young Black woman sitting in the deepest depths of her shaded porch. She asked if I was getting my exercise, and I assured her I was.
A block farther up the street I came upon a little girl, also Black, playing hopscotch on the sidewalk by herself; she stopped to watch me gravely as I walked by. She was 6 or 7, I guessed. When I said “Hi” she said “Hi” back, and then something I couldn’t make out.
“I’m sorry, what?” I called to her from the middle of the (empty) street.
This time she spoke plainly:
“Are you having a nice day?”
It was getting better and better, in fact. A hundred steps father, on the opposite side of the street, atop a steep slope, is a four square house with a deep covered porch where, three times out out of four, a little Latino girl is playing, who will stop to wave to me. I can see her face already peeking over the brick retaining wall. This time she is surrounded by grow-ups, seated on chairs and a porch swing, talking and enjoying the pretty spring Sunday afternoon. So I call out to all of them –
“Hola!”
– and get a chorus of “Holas” in return. And then, as I pass on up the street –
“Adios, amigo!”
#
Plenty of White people remain in Southeast, too, some perhaps descendants of the men and women who worked in the locomotive shop and the viscose plant, living in homes passed down through the generations. For reasons unclear to me they are usually less in evidence on my walks, but most that I see are cordial, too. In fact, it’s a wonder everyone gets along – and of course sometimes they don’t. I have witnessed arguments between Black and White people near the viscose plant. Bullets have been know to fly here; Julia, my neighbor across the street, says people have been shot in the alley behind her house, and I believe her. But this is true of other neighborhoods, too. And of my alma mater, peaceful, bucolic Virginia Tech, where 32 people were shot to death on April 16, 2007. We Americans, alas, can be shot anywhere these days – and who wants to write about that? It’s depressing.
#
And Southeast Roanoke, ultimately, is not depressing. It is young, alive, multicultural and improving. Spring is a hopeful time, especially at the end of a pandemic, and when I walk through my neighborhood these days, I find much more to cheer me up than bring me down. I’m glad I live here. Southeast is becoming something again – and I’d hate to miss it.
-Kevin
April 30.
My Poor Language!
What happened to my language? The one I was so comfortable using? The one for which I (mostly) knew the rules?
English, I mean. Specifically, American English.
I used to think I knew it pretty well. Hell, I made my living writing it, as a newspaper reporter. But ten years after leaving my last newspaper job, I’m confronting a language in which much has changed.
And I don’t mean just slang or fad words, which change constantly among the young. Though yes, it’s annoying to be so out of the loop. And it’s downright embarrassing to find on a website for people still learning English a top ten list of “American Slang Words you Need to Know in 2021,” and not know three of them myself. (“Stan,” “wack” and “tea” – the last referring not to the foodstuff, apparently, but to gossip.) On a 2020 list I did even worse, whiffing on “snatched” (looking good!), “wig” (amazing), “fit” (outfit), “cap” (a lie) and “fire,” which also means “amazing” – which at least makes a kind of sense.
No, I’m talking about more fundamental changes, to both written and spoken English. While some changes are trivial, or even refreshing, others seem simply wrong to someone educated in the 1960s and ‘70s, like me – misuses that education was partly intended to prevent.
Of course, there never was a foolproof, ironclad rulebook for the English language (though there are certainly a lot of rulebooks!), whatever your 9th grade English teacher may have said. Language is a river, forever moving downstream. Today’s English is not yesterday’s, or tomorrow’s.
And the ultimate arbiters of change are not grammarians and English teachers who write rulebooks, but users like you and me – because when it comes to standard usage, the majority rules. If we do it wrong often enough, sadly, it starts being right. Standard English is like moral relativism; right and wrong depends on the times.
Some language changes bubble up from the young. I have observed for decades, usually with a smile, the shifting, sometimes charming vernacular of the rising tide.
It was in the early aughts, as I was reading a book of short stories by a newly published young writer, that I realized with a jolt that something more elemental might be at work. It wasn’t that he broke rules on purpose, for effect; he just seemed to have different ones. In his writing, the whole foundation had shifted: the participles, the grammar – in short, the rules. What struck me as inelegant, even incompetent was maybe just a new kind of English, related to mine, but not the same. Maybe it was the English of the future.
Or maybe he was just an outlier; I don’t know. But there were other shocks in store for me in the years ahead.
In some cases, I obviously missed a memo. For example, people are no longer arriving at a place, or even in it, but to it, as in this December 20 sports story in the Washington Post:
“He arrived early to the practice facility and stayed late, asked more questions and studied opponents more than in the past.”
Or this picture caption from December 5:
“Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive to the rally on Saturday in Valdosta, Ga.
And this story from my own hometown newspaper, the Roanoke Times, on January 22:
“As she spoke, educators from around the region wound their way through a maze of traffic cones and caution tape before arriving to a table.”
No, no, and no!
Sigh.
But if this is really the way it’s going to be from now on – well then, so be it. At least the meaning is still clear.
Way worse is the use of plural pronouns when speaking of one person only – a sloppy, ungrammatical fix to solve the problem of having no gender-neutral singular pronoun in English. (For some reason, we shy away from “it.”) For centuries, English speakers just used “he” to describe a hypothetical person. The reasons for jettisoning that approach as women struggle for equality are clear.
But “they”? For one person? Really?
Consider the trouble it can lead to in these examples from the Post:
January 30:
Another video shows the suspect carrying a backpack near their waist as they approach the area where the bomb was discovered on Jan. 6. They appear to be wearing a mask and gloves.
February 9:
One of the most notable examples came when he recounted a politician — he wasn’t sure who it was, or where they served, or when it happened — but he was sure that their apology for their comments was unwarranted.
This January 13 example is even worse, with its so-obviously-plural added “s”:
In 2017, a writer on the anonymous message board 4chan, styling themselves* as Q…
I’m sorry, but this gives me vertigo. Reading it is like entering a new dimension – one where people are both themselves and other people, too, simultaneously. I’m sure every one of my elementary school teachers would be appalled. Whoever started this needs his or her knuckles rapped.
*(Curiously, none of my desktop Merriam-Webster dictionaries contains the singular variant, “themself,” which has been around since the 14th century, but the Oxford Languages people consider it a word – “used instead of ‘himself’ or ‘herself’ to refer to a person of unspecified sex.” Merriam-Webster.com, meanwhile, included themself under “Words We’re Watching” back in September, 2019. This stuff is playing out in real time.)
In spoken English (where, I admit, using “they” for “he” or “she” in casual or evasive talk is nothing new), I’ve noticed something else: younger people are dropping the “d” in their contractions. It has become so pervasive among under-40 speakers that even those who use their voices for a living (looking at you, NPR) often drop those middle “d’s”. It is becoming the new normal. My theory is that little girls got a pass on this lingual fluff from their mommies and daddies in the ‘80s and ‘90s because it was so darned cute. It’s less cute in a journalist or other professional approaching middle age – and increasingly, men are doing it, too.
Thus we get “din’t” for “didn’t,” “wun’t” for “wouldn’t” and so on. And it’s not only contractions: I also heard recently, from a 30-something actress on a Netflix series, “Mi’l” instead of “middle.” She left the middle of “middle” out.
C’mon, people! D’s aren’t that hard. Dn’s are harder, but you can get there. Wouldn’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t – and dident doesn’t count.
Yes, we all have vocal quirks; they are part of our personalities, sometimes our charm. I want to point out a trend, not pick on anyone. But the trend is real.
Of course the language will change; it always has. I am reminded in writing this of how much my own English, written and spoken, differs from the English of generations before me.
In his 1979 edition of “The Elements of Style,” co-author E.B. White notes that the word “hopefully” once meant “with hope” – and dismisses its modern usage as “wrong” and “silly”:
To say, “Hopefully, I’ll leave on the noon plane” is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you’ll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you’ll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven’t said it clearly.
Well…I don’t have a problem with “hopefully.” I’ve used it all my life. Nor do I have a problem with the informal language, sentence fragments, slang and street talk used by some of the late 20th century’s more exuberant writers. Things do change.
From time to time during my newspaper years, a reader from an earlier generation would call or email to complain about something I had written that offended his or her grammatical sensitivities. I usually pled guilty, even if I disagreed. They were probably right. When it comes to grammar, I generally trust my instincts. They’re not perfect.
But it is my instincts that are most offended by these 21st century alterations (not that I can do anything about them). I can argue they are lazy, wrong, dumb – but I know what younger folks will say:
Okay, boomer…
Maybe, like Jerry Garcia’s one-time bluegrass band, I’m just old and in the way.
-Kevin
March 27.
My Life in Solitude: Part III
It’s over. I’m not going to die of Covid 19.
The calendar makes it official. Today, March 26, as I write this, marks the two-week anniversary of my second dose of vaccine. My Moderna-made body armor is now operating at its peak efficiency of 94-plus percent immunity against symptomatic Covid. My defense against illness requiring hospitalization or leading to death is near-invincible. If I do die now of Covid, I’ll make headlines.
The truth is, I’ve been pretty well protected for a month now. Immunity just two weeks after the first Moderna shot is 92 percent. Nevertheless, I feel differently today than I did yesterday. You might say I was cured overnight of a dread disease – not of actual Covid 19, but my fear of it. Like a little, floundering ship in the ocean during hurricane season, I have passed through threatening seas to a peaceful harbor. I am safe.
I suppose I should add the qualifiers here. No one is safe until all of us are safe. It may be possible for me to pick up an infection and pass it on to you, without knowing. There are troubling Covid mutations out there now, and probably more to come. I’ll have to continue to wear a mask in most public places, and travel to exotic lands or even to see my unvaccinated sister, Katy*, up north remains on hold. And forget about springtime in Paris; France won’t let me in yet.
Still, something changed for me today. I made it. I knew some who didn’t. An old newspaper colleague; a bass player (like me); a blues guitar-playing preacher: they all died of Covid in the last 12 months. I know others who caught it and survived.
The disease was rampant here. (Infection rates are still high; be careful!) Roanoke, Va. has a population of just under 100,000 people, and as of this writing 7,917 people have or did have Covid, according to the Virginia Department of Health. It’s reasonable to assume asymptomatic infections and mild illnesses were never reported, which would make that number much higher. I was cautious, yes, but I was also lucky. It could have been me.
#
And how does it feel to be safe at last?
It feels wonderful. Vaccination is like the end of the tornado warning, the negative test result, the innocent verdict. It’s a comfort, a soft, spreading joy – certainly a relief. It’s my life back on a silver platter. Though my time is coming, it hasn’t come yet, and it won’t come that way. I may die in an accident or of a heart attack tomorrow – but as far as Covid goes, I’m reprieved.
And I’m grateful. Grateful for 21st century medical science; grateful to live in a wealthy country that gave me a vaccine quickly, safely and at no cost; grateful for my old friend Danny, who seized the moment and made my vaccine appointment online when he saw an opening, pretending to be me. (Thanks for the fraud, buddy, and don’t worry. You’ll be out of jail soon.)
I don’t quite feel free – not yet. Covid discipline dies slowly. This evening I took a walk through my neighborhood and met a very little boy playing near the sidewalk. He raised his hand for a high five. Rather than appeal to two-year-old logic, I tapped the warm, living flesh, gently. I hadn’t touched anyone for a long, long time.
I have avoided restaurants for twelve and a half months now, even for takeout food; that’s going to change. I will go see my friend and favorite bartender Didi, a Covid survivor, on a quiet night someday soon. I’ll hug a vaccinated friend.
For the rest I’m not sure. Isolation is a habit I will have to break. The proper tool may be a screwdriver, not a hammer; I’ll jimmy my world back open, a little at a time.
And then one day when Covid is truly gone, and everyone else is safe, too, I’ll reminisce about the way things were, back in the days of the pandemic. The future can’t come too soon.
*(Follow-up note: She received her first dose March 27.)
-Kevin
Dec. 31.
Don’t Let the Door Hit You On Your Way Out, 2020
I was going to write a list of things to look forward to in 2021, but December has not been a happy month – and Covid deaths are striking close to home. The truth is, 2021 may be 2020, only worse. As Glinda the Good Witch explains to Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” dropping a house on the Wicked Witch of the East is all well and good, but the Wicked Witch of the West remains – and she’s worse.
Still, we can celebrate the end of one very bad year before worrying about the next. And there was much in 2020 to say “good riddance” to. Here’s my list:
Brexit. Finally, the Brits secede. Hope it works for them.
https://apnews.com/article/brexit-relationships-europe-global-trade-coronavirus-pandemic-a5cc4350206b5c0273b41aef4d7b7381
“Presidential” debates. Oh, yeah, right.
Rudy Giuliani. That hotel room! That black stuff! Ick. If only he’d stayed “America’s Mayor.”
My itchy skin. Thank you, miracle drug Dupixent! Now, can you come down on the price?
Dire email solicitations for campaign contributions. (“Gasping in Georgia.” “One last shot, Kevin.” “Chip in before it’s too late!!” “Emergency. All hands on deck.” Etc. ) Sorry, I’m done.
Proud Boys. (But are your mamas?)
Politics.
Hoarding, which led to –
Toilet paper shortages.
Rain. Roanoke, Virginia had the most rainfall ever recorded in 2020, according to Roanoke Times weather columnist Kevin Myatt.
https://roanoke.com/weather/week-ahead-2020-will-end-the-only-way-it-knows-how—-soggy/article_55e0101e-4889-11eb-b8af-0730a7967c72.html#tracking-source=article-related-bottom
My storage shed leaked and rotted back in May and I had to rebuild it.
Fake crowd noise. Really, it’s ridiculous to pipe cheers into empty stadiums. Just stop.
Binge-watching silly shows on Netflix. This is actually a New Year’s Resolution. There are better ways to waste time. So goodbye, Kimmy Schmidt. Keep smiling.
Waiting for a vaccine.
Waiting for things to improve.
Waiting.
-Kevin
Dec. 2.
My Life in Solitude, Part 2
The other night someone knocked unannounced at my back door – a rarity even in normal times (people generally text ahead), but a cause for genuine anxiety now. Like many people, I shy away from face-to-face contact these days, with or without a mask. I don’t like to invite anyone inside my house. If they are inside, I don’t want them to touch things, and I don’t want to touch them or anything they bring with them. And I don’t want to have to tell them so.
Most of all, I don’t want to make a wrong decision in an instant, and then worry for days that I’ll get sick and die.
Such is life in pandemic American. We’re all scared, or should be, of a potentially deadly virus – and like it or not, that virus is carried by our fellow man.
So here at the end of 2020, as for many months now, my life is an exercise in avoidance. No, I can’t escape humanity entirely, though the parameters of my life – I am single and I live alone – make it easier for me than many.
Still, I can only mitigate the dangers. People, with their germs and viruses, keep popping up. There is the grocery store, the doctor’s office, Lowe’s – because things at home break down and must be fixed. If I can’t fix a leaky toilet or a broken dishwasher by myself, I will have to let someone else inside to do it for me – which is worse.
I’ve never been a germophobe, and my attitude toward colds and flu has generally been to just suck it up. I do get a yearly flu shot, though it doesn’t always work. If I get sick anyway, well then, I do. C’est la vie.
But things have changed. As we enter December, 2020, more than a million new infections are being confirmed in the U.S. every week. The death toll is 270,000 and counting; we seem on track to surpass the 400,000-plus American lives lost in World War II before this ends. It is incumbent on all of us, I believe, to do the best we can to not contract the virus and get sick, and to not give the virus to someone else. The first would be awful, the second worse. I don’t want anyone to die because of me.
The pandemic has radically changed the ways I interact with others, and that includes my loved ones. With rare, masked exceptions, I don’t see my family in person anymore. Usually November and December are travel months for me, as I head for Alabama and then Massachusetts to see my brother and my sister and their families during the holidays. But we have canceled in-person holiday celebrations this year. We all agree that getting together isn’t worth the risk.
It’s not that I’ve become unsocial, really. I am not Robinson Crusoe on his island. I live apart but not alone in a city of 100,000; people pass by constantly, in cars, on scooters, on bicycles, on foot. It is rare that there is no one else in sight. And if I’m outside, I usually hallo.
For more in-depth, personal encounters, I have our modern communication tools, the cellphone and computer. Thanks to 21st century technology I can text, email, Zoom, send links and photographs and videos and even talk to people almost anywhere, and I do.
Of course it’s not enough. I would love to eat a good restaurant meal, kiss my sister, hear and play live music again and see the occasional uncovered pretty face. For over a decade, I sipped a glass of house red on Monday nights at Martin’s restaurant while chatting with Didi the bartender. I feasted regularly at lunchtime on Demos and Vickie’s bounteous gyro dinners (gyro with dripping sauce, huge salad with house dressing and French fries) at Paul’s Restaurant, which they own.
Often, too, I went to Blue 5 Restaurant on Wednesday nights to hear local R&B legend Hoppie Vaughan and his Ministers of Soul, and sometimes sat in.
That all ended for me in early March. Had I gotten pregnant then (a purely theoretical proposition, given my age and gender), that baby would be suiting up now to be born.
#
I’ve written this before; life is strange in these plague times, but not unbearable for me. I can keep the world at arm’s length, barring a health emergency, until this virus stops its deadly hunting. My goal is to be here when it finally does.
In the meantime, I stay busy and most days content, reading, writing, practicing music and working in the yard and on my house.
News of a coming vaccine is wonderful. It is possible now to imagine this will end – and even, knock on wood, that I will live to see it. Come spring, with any luck, I will be able to walk or ride my bicycle downtown and not just look at businesses and restaurants, but walk right in, have a gyro or a glass of wine, and talk to people whose faces are uncovered, without dread.
But it will be a different city. How different, I don’t know. But there are signs.
The arts and cultural community may well endure. The Taubman Museum, our palace of art in sculpted steel, remains open three days a week, with restrictions; two ballet companies are offering pandemic-modified performances of the Nutcracker in December; the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra plans a virtual Christmas concert at a date TBA. Mill Mountain Theatre will stage a free Virtual Homecoming Concert featuring songs from previous and upcoming productions on its YouTube channel Dec. 5.
It’s not hard to imagine a valley starved for entertainment rushing back to live events, and the donations that help fund arts and cultural organizations flooding in.
Private businesses may be a different story. Among my own hangouts, Blue 5 is up for lease. Demos and Vickie have maintained a carryout business at Paul’s Restaurant throughout the pandemic; my guess is they’ll continue to be supported here as long as they want to be. Martin’s, where Didi works, remains open, albeit with limited hours right now. (I haven’t gone in.)
As for the myriad smaller restaurants and shops that give a city its personality, who knows? Some have already closed. Valley Repair Service in nearby Salem, where I used to take my old clarinets for maintenance and repairs, shuttered last summer after many years.
For all the rest, I can’t say. I haven’t been out much lately, and I just don’t know.
But it would be bittersweet to walk through town with impunity again, only to see a lot of shuttered windows. And for the 78-and-counting Roanokers who have died from Covid 19, there will be no coming back. (Source: NYT, Dec. 5)
#
How have I changed since March? I won’t really know until this ends and I engage the world again. Any year leaves scars, and this pandemic didn’t take place in a vacuum. America has other woes.
Physically, I’m better than I’ve been in many months. Nagging medical issues had sapped my energy, but allergy shots and some miracle skin injections this year changed my life – or at least my body. When the world does recover, I will greet it with several cleaned-up manuscripts to sell and new musical skills. Because with so much time to practice, I’m getting better at piano, guitar and clarinet.
For the rest, I am less stoical now – more likely to express fear, sadness, love. Especially love, even if it’s just a heart emoji on Facebook. What am I saving it for? To see the daily death count is to remember how much binds us together still, and our common fate.
I look forward to touching people again. Touch is our fifth sense, and the only one not limited to the head. I agree with Walt Whitman, who wrote in “Song of Myself” that “to touch my person to someone else’s is about as much as I can stand.”
I haven’t felt that in the longest time.
#
And what of those visitors at my back door? I glanced out the window on my porch and saw my neighbors, a man and a woman. He was holding a plastic grocery bag. Neither one of them wore a mask.
I was already kicking myself for my weakness the day before, when I opened the front door just as a delivery man was coming up the stairs. Instead of retreating, I held the door open and waited as he scanned the bar code and handed me the package. He did not have a mask on, nor did I. It was the first unprotected interaction I had had with anyone in months.
And now this. They had seen me; I had seen them. Uncertain what to do, I went to the door and opened it, though the glass storm door was still between us. Then recalling my remorse of the day before, I sketched a rapid rectangle around my mouth and nose with my fingers and raced across the house for my closest mask. When I got back the man, too, had put on a mask, and the woman had covered her mouth with her hands. They had leftover Thanksgiving food for me. Their motives were purely kind. I accepted the gift with gratitude, and they left quickly.
Perhaps too quickly; they may have been offended. On the other hand, I’m confident we didn’t give the virus to each other.
And with a dark winter coming, that’s a win for us all.
-Kevin
Oct. 7
Failing Forward
Years ago I read an interview with a famous musician who dropped a 24-karat gold tip on practicing:
“It’s all about spending time doing things that are uncomfortable, so that you can grow and learn,” said Harry Connick Jr., in an interview by Tad Dickens of the Roanoke Times.
I took it to heart.
To practice is to fail sometimes, or more than sometimes – assuming it’s really practice. Practice is screwing things up on the road to getting things right. Failure is not only necessary, it is noble. So I tell myself anyway, because I have to justify my nightly failures somehow. When it comes to practice, if I’m not failing, in my mind I’m not trying.
I’m proud to say that I fail a lot.
Partly I mess up because I am learning new instruments late in life. I have played the electric bass since I was 14, though whole decades went by without my playing it very much. I was too busy making a living. Still, I never abandoned it completely.
But when I decided to get serious about playing music again a decade or so ago, I added a wild card – a beautiful 1939 Chicago-made Kay Musical Instrument Company upright bass.
Molly, I named her. Because a bass that size, with curves like hers, had to have a woman’s name.
Learning to play the upright bass (also called a standup bass, double bass, contrabass, and, more colloquially, a doghouse bass or bass fiddle) so late in life was bound to involve oodles of failure. Fortunately, I loved Molly instantly and practiced often. Within 15 months, I was playing almost every gig on the upright. I had failed my way to success.
Having tasted blood, however, I couldn’t stop there.
A long, long time ago, when I was still in my single digits, I took up the clarinet. For half a dozen years I toiled (and loafed) in school orchestras and bands. I took private lessons, too. Eventually I chucked the licorice stick for the bass guitar and rock and roll – but things learned early in life are not forgotten.
Years passed. Forty of them, in fact. And then one day, for no clear reason, I became convinced that if I bought a clarinet and practiced hard, failing and failing, I would end up better than I ever was. And I would learn to do what I could never do, even way back then: play really cool jazz solos on the clarinet, like Benny Goodman, or Pete Fountain, or Artie Shaw.
And maybe I will, if I live long enough. I haven’t yet – but I sure am failing, so I must be doing something right. Right?
Yet I couldn’t stop there, either.
I had always regretted not playing an instrument that could sound several notes at once, or chords. As a bass player, without chords, I was reduced to keeping time for someone else. Worse, writing songs of my own was almost impossible.
And as for performing all by myself – well, fat chance of that.
So I bought an electric piano, cheap.
And then, last summer, a pawn shop guitar.
Now here I am with an embarrassment of musical riches – electric bass, upright bass, guitar, piano, clarinet. It’s a whole bumper crop of failure opportunities; everywhere I look, I need to get better. Of course, I will never be great or maybe even good at all of these instruments, no matter how much I practice. But practice is a process, not an end. The end is not the point.
Getting better is the point. And I can do that. Anyone can do that. You just have to be willing to fail.
Failing while practicing takes me to new and interesting places, and it also saves time. Really. An hour of focussed misery, rife with squeaks and squawks, wrong notes and crappy solos – failures all – takes me further than eight hours of regurgitating what I already know. That hour, whatever I may think of it then, contains bona fide progress.
And progress, like compound interest, piles up fast. No one starts out knowing how to play a guitar chord. But most people who stick with it play basic chords with ease after a year or less. (I’m getting there.) Besides, you just need three of them to write a song.
As for the piano, picking out chords with my left hand while playing a melody with my right remains a challenge – but the challenge used to be playing the chords at all. In failing, I have progressed.
You might argue I would improve more quickly if I stopped playing so many instruments and focussed on one or two. Maybe so – but my five instruments work together to create a greater whole. Playing guitar chords helps me identify them by ear, which is critical to sitting in with people and playing songs I don’t know, on any instrument. Playing the clarinet makes me think like a soloist, striving for pleasing tone while making things up on the fly. And it inspires me to solo on my other instruments as well.
Another thing about the clarinet: it makes my singing better. I sing more in tune than I used to, and louder. The secret, I think, is in the sinus cavities – those natural resonating chambers we clarinetists need to play in tune. It turns out they can help with singing, too. Who knew?
So far, a better singing voice is my greatest (only?) reward for failing on my clarinet in practice, over and over again. I confess I’m losing hope. Failing for a larger cause is well and good, but it needs to lead somewhere besides the dumpster. Failure without progress is just failure. Maybe it doesn’t always work. Maybe I bit off more than I can chew.
Or maybe I haven’t failed enough yet.
So one more time…
Warning: this video contains fumbled fingering, flat notes and a squawk.
-Kevin
Sept. 6
Democracy and Hibernation
Bears hibernate. So do chipmunks, and kangaroos. Humans cannot – at least, not without medical supervision and lots of ice, and even then, waking up is sometimes problematic.
Still, I can try.
And I’d like to try. America right now is dispiriting and sad; so many people shouting, cursing, hating, shooting. And dying. Especially dying. There are 185,000 and counting of us dead so far from Covid-19. Meanwhile, democracy is on the ropes, not just here but around the world.
“To everything there is a season,” says the Bible. (Ecclesiastes 3.1.)
This one sucks.
So why not make like a bear in winter until happy days return? Or if I can’t really hibernate, at least stay home in power-saving mode, saving my energy for better days?
I’ve had lots of practice lately going nowhere.
Hunkering down is nothing to brag about, even if necessary; it’s a defensive crouch, no more. History does not celebrate those who stayed in their holes. And I understand why others are out there making their voices heard, or inside arguing on social media; there are grave questions to be answered, and those answers may change America for keeps, or even end it.
Like most people, I know where I stand. For the record, I say black lives do matter. I think immigrants help make our country great. And I fear our experiment in self-government, two and a half centuries old, is imperiled.
How so? Our president is casting doubt on the integrity of voting. He won’t pledge to accept election results. Meanwhile, plenty of folks, most of them white and worried about their dwindling majority, are just fine with, say, taking the law into their own hands, or using force to defend “the traditional American way of life.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/01/republicans-least-committed-democratic-principles-are-those-most-worried-about-white-america/)
Democratic principles? The rule of law? A lot of people just don’t care.
I care. But there’s only so much I can do. (So I tell myself.) Civil strife and violence may be in our future – some are predicting it after this election – but I’m not going to fight. I’m old, tired, weaponless and temperamentally unsuited. And I just don’t want to. I’ve even stopped arguing on Facebook. I limit my “likes” these days to cute kids, nature pictures and dogs. (I love dogs.)
Still, I pledge to do two things:
First, I will donate as much money as I can to candidates up and down the ballot who I believe will obey the law, respect all races and religions and help our sick democracy get well. Because once democracy is dead, it’s hard to bring it back to life.
Second, I will vote by absentee ballot, as soon as possible.
It isn’t much, but it’s all I’ve got – and if enough other people do the same it may even work. If so, I’ll come out of my cave (with my mask on; I don’t want to die), and maybe we’ll gather stones together and build things back up.
Because there are seasons for that, too. (Ecclesiastes 3.3-5. And don’t forget the Byrds!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4ga_M5Zdn4
-Kevin
July 20
18 things I can’t Google:
- That smell.
2. Where I was when I first smelled that smell.
3. Where that book is on my bookshelves.
It’s here somewhere, Google…
4. What jazz sounded like before recordings. Nobody wrote that stuff down.
5. The names of people in old family photographs.
6. My father’s old girlfriends. (I have some pictures, or used to. )
7. My mother’s childhood memories.
8. Her father’s voice. (Papaw died when I was 14 months old.)
9. The symphony I forgot the name of, and the composer, too. (Maybe if I hum a few bars, Alexa?)
10. Who has my first bass guitar.
11. Who was in my dreams last week.
12. Where I left my keys.
13. All the girls I’ve loved.
Memories, mysteries. Who are the babies, Google?
14. Why the blues band didn’t work.
15. Who stole my bike.
16. How I lost my old friend.
17. What happens after I die. (I Googled this anyway, and discovered on the English website coventrytelegraph.net these troubling tidbits from a 2018 article:
“You might actually KNOW that you are dead for quite a long time after you die, according to a chilling new study”
and –
“Researchers have discovered you may be able to hear your own death being announced.”
Thanks a whole lot.
https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/uk-world-news/what-happens-when-you-die-14247676)
18. What happens next.
-Kevin
June 14
The Hong Kong Flu
Did I get the Hong Kong Flu? I don’t remember. It ravaged America in the winters of 1968 and ‘69, though it had the grace to vanish in the intervening hot months, thus allowing Woodstock to occur. In any event I turned thirteen in December 1968, just as the first wave was peaking, and I had other things on my mind. My only-just-expired childhood had included bouts with the measles, mumps and chicken pox, and – aided greatly, of course, by my mother’s ministrations – I had beaten them all. Hong Kong, Shmong-Kong. What did I care?
The Hong Kong Flu was for me a not-so-scary scary story. It was in the ether and on my mind in 1968, certainly, like sex, or Vietnam, but in the short term, like them, unlikely to affect me very much. Sex was hardly on the near horizon. I wouldn’t be sent to Vietnam for five years, at least, and I might well escape it altogether (as in fact I did). Ditto the Hong Kong Flu. Besides, it only killed old folks, they said. Even if I did get it, I would suffer at worst, probably, a few days off from school.
Now here I am on the other side of life – and wouldn’t you know it, there’s another damned pandemic in my life. Yet this one is not the same. It is no longer 1968, for one thing, and I stopped believing in my own invincibility quite awhile ago. These days when danger heads my way, I duck and run. That is part of the answer to the question of why the Covid-19 virus seems so different from that other virus, a strain of Influenza A known as H3N2. This time I’m truly frightened.
H3N2 was no pastry puff. It killed 100,000 people over those two winters in America (a number Covid-19 eclipsed in just four months) and more than 1 million around the globe, almost three times as many as Covid-19 as I write this. It was, like Covid-19, highly contagious; according to Encyclopedia Britannica, H3N2 infected 500,000 people in Hong Kong in just two weeks. The stricken suffered chills, fever, muscle pain and weakness, usually lasting four to six days. It was not, as such things go, terribly lethal; deaths were most common among infants and elderly adults. I was approaching life’s sturdy middle years then, waxing and not waning – a tough target. I do remember I found the fact that no known shot or pill could cure it disturbing; on the other hand, there was no fuss about masks and social distancing to remind me something terrible was on the lurk and, alas, no closing of schools. And as it happened, I survived.
But that was half a century ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. My parents are gone now, and most of my friends’ parents, and too many of my friends. Death is not a scary story any more, but all too real – and whatever my own expiration date may be, it is closer by far than it was in 1968. Then, too, these are perilous times. For various reasons, nothing seems entirely safe; not my family, not my country, and not my life.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/05/world/1968-cnnphotos/
Classic photos of 1968, via cnn.com.
True, 1968 was hardly “Happy Days.” Revered leaders were assassinated, cities burned, we were at war, and there was a bitter chasm between liberals and conservatives that in some ways mirrored and in others helped create the one we face today. Yet there was also hope – lots of it. Youth is hopeful by nature, and we young baby boomers, all 76 million of us, were coming into our own. The future beckoned. It was easy to imagine a better one – the one we would build ourselves. We had the smarts, the energy, the drive.
Going, going, gone.
The old have always passed away, and the young replaced them; it is the brutal logic of all life. Who knows what those youngsters coming of age today will make of the world they inherit? But I’ll bet on them, if we don’t mess things up too badly in departing. From what I’ve seen, they’re less angry than we were, and less destructive, too; they’re healthier, happier, generally better educated – and, yes, hopeful, against the odds. We’re leaving them a lot to deal with, but my guess is they’re up to the challenge. They’ll make things work; they’ll make things better. I’d love to be around to watch it happen, though that isn’t up to me.
And what of the H3N2 virus, which stalked my world so long ago? It’s still around. Vaccines were eventually developed, which remain a part of the annual flu shot mix, but the virus mutates, and sometimes comes raging back. It may get me yet, if Covid-19 does not.
“Seasonal H3N2 viruses,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, “are associated with severe illness in older people.”
To be felled in the end by the Hong Kong Flu – yikes! And yet, nature always has the last laugh. It’s something else to think about when the leaves turn.
-Kevin
May 11
My life in Solitude: Part 1
Many years ago, I lived in a cabin. It wasn’t Daniel Boone; I had electricity and heat (sort of). I even had neighbors, although I could not see their houses from the window of my study, where I spent my days and much of my nights. My view instead was of a whitewater stream called the Little River, and a two-lane road on its far side, down which cars seldom passed.
In these days of quarantine I sometimes think about that cabin, where I was more alone than at any time in my life, until now. I long since became a city dweller, and there are houses all around me now, in front, in back and on both sides, but I have never been more alone, or for longer stretches of time. And aside from my fear and dread of this horrible virus, and the specter of the ventilator, and my uncertain prospects come Judgment Day, it isn’t all that bad.
I sought solitude in that cabin, after all. I saw it as a good thing then; I wanted to disappear from the world and write. The inhabited world makes demands of all of us, but in solitude, some disappear. Yes, the lawn must still be mowed – but the oil change, the spring trips to Lowe’s, the routine medical appointments, the home repairs, the social engagements are on hold.
In some ways this distancing accords with my instincts. I am only intermittently social ever, and need time alone. These days, the time I spend away from other people is not just a guilty pleasure, but a moral obligation – a good and necessary deed. I can let the guilt go.
Meanwhile, within the limits of my house and yard, I can mostly do what I want.
So I write. I practice too many (five) musical instruments, which is probably why I don’t get better. I sleep when I’m tired, I read for hours, I text and email family and friends – an option I did not have on the Little River so long ago. I avoid the news when I have the willpower, because the news is bad, and I’m sick of it. I don’t need any updates. I know.
Life is hardly perfect. I can’t see my friends or go to a concert or a restaurant or travel. I’m afraid of the grocery store. (The grocery store!) I am lucky to have money saved; I know many don’t and risk themselves at work each day because they have no choice. If I am content it’s because I have it better than them, and I know it. God bless them and protect them.
Meanwhile, there is food in my cupboard, and coffee and wine enough for another week. After my initial panic, my life has found a rhythm I can live with for a time – and it may be a long time. But if the virus spares me, I’ll survive.
-Kevin
My Sleeping Mind
Sometimes I wake up to my doorbell. I don’t actually have a doorbell.
Other times I sleep through alarm clocks, the ringing of landlines, the chirping of cellphones and actual pounding on doors, front and back. Then again, sometimes I wake up to knocking, but no one is there. My sleeping mind is playing tricks on me.
Partly, certainly, this is because I sometimes work at night, with the result that I sleep during the day. It is an uncomfortable time to sleep. There is always something to be done during daylight hours: shop, check the mail, mow the grass, take the trash out, call a plumber. Sometimes, I don’t want to do any of these things, and my mind wakes me up because I didn’t. Sometimes, I empty the damn trash just so I can get some sleep.
Why does my sleeping mind wake me up for some things and keep me snoozing right through others, arguably more important? I don’t know. It makes bad decisions. It doesn’t prioritize well. It processes recent experience – learning to sleep me right through the early morning hubbub of foreign hotels, for example – and applies it in terrible ways. After one long journey my sister tried to rouse me at my hotel back in America by calling my cellphone and then my room phone. Neither worked, Finally she pounded on my hotel door. Nothing. She thought I was dead. But the second time she knocked, I answered, feeling fine.
My sleeping mind fascinates me, and never so much as when I dream. I have nightmares – don’t we all? – and stress dreams. More often, though, I encounter people long missing or dead – my parents and old girlfriends, especially. It is almost always good to see them. Sometimes, too, my private dreamworks serves up a brand new face, often female, often charming. From such dreams I awaken with regret.
There is another side to my dreaming. We all have daydreams. Over 30 years, I have learned to harness them to the business of writing fiction. It didn’t come easy, but after years of struggling to create a fictional world I learned a secret – or maybe a critical skill. At any rate, I learned to part the veil. I dreamed while I was awake, and used the dream.
Over time, it became almost routine. My mind would coast along with my moving fingers while my waking mind, like a wise old ball coach, judiciously intervened only to keep things credible and moving. Otherwise it kept its distance. In this way I was able to write thousands of pages without overthinking things. (That came later, of course, when my editing mind took over. There is nothing dreamlike about polishing prose.)
But about that doorbell. What was my sleeping mind telling me? To dry my clothes? Feed the birds? Call my sister? I don’t know. My wakeful dreaming gives me enduring stories, but my sleeping mind keeps its secrets. Dreams vanish, and imaginary doorbells tell no tales.
-Kevin
1/28
A million words of French
“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.”
Thus begins one of the longest novels ever written. “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu” (“Of the Search for Lost Time” is one possible translation) by Marcel Proust contains more than a million words; it was published in numerous volumes between 1913 and 1927 – the latter date five years after the author’s death. Because of that one, mammoth book, Proust is widely regarded as one of the greatest 20th century novelists – some have called him the greatest.
The 1981 Random House translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, at nearly 3300 pages, slowly came to mesmerize me as I read it a quarter century ago. (That first sentence reads in their translation, “For a long time I used to go to bed early.”) By the time I turned over the last page, many months after I began reading, I was done with fiction; I read very little more of it for a long time. The reason: Other novels just seemed shallow and contrived, products of a different and a lesser art.
All these years later, I have revised that opinion somewhat. At least, I read novels again, both old and new – and many of them are well worth the reading. But I never really changed my opinion that Proust had given us the final word on a certain kind of fiction – a first-person narrative in which the author explores the furthest reaches of a super-subtle, fascinating mind. And one other thing has never changed; my resolve to do, someday, what was impossible for me back in 1992. Given life enough and time, I would reread Proust – in French.
Well, I’m still alive. And after years of learn-as-you-drive tapes, Rosetta Stone lessons and the reading of other French books by the dozen, always with a dictionary by my side, the time has come.
#
Proust was not the only reason I decided to learn French. In fact, I had wanted to learn the language since childhood. I just never got it done. French tutors for eight year olds did not abound in the American Midwest, and even as I entered what we then called junior high school, in the seventh grade, my request to be admitted to a French class was thwarted. For reasons beyond my ken, my school had devised some kind of lottery to determine whether kids would get language instruction in the seventh grade or the ninth. The years between 12 and 14 are a chasm in the life of a boy; by the time my opportunity arrived, I no longer cared. I took Spanish instead, and barely passed.
#
But the desire to learn French returned. As an adult, I was always coming across French phrases in English or American books that I didn’t understand; it was a kind of a club from which I was excluded. It pissed me off. Then, too, my interest in France began to blossom. I wanted to see the land that contained, as one of my favorite books was entitled, “Mont Saint Michel and Chartres.” Once or twice I looked for private tutors. Then I said to hell with that, and bought a whole French course on cassettes – 16 tapes. For years I listened to those tapes in my car, over and over again, until half of them finally broke. I was a newspaper reporter, and I spent a lot of time in my car. Nobody in those primitive days could bother me until I got where I was going. My drive time was my own.
Once I learned to conjugate verbs, I started reading French at home. I read books on art and architecture first, because so many of the words were similar in French and in English, and then I turned to novels. I began with the Maigret mystery stories of Georges Simenon, and then moved on to Balzac, Zola and George Sand. Eventually I tackled Victor Hugo. I read “Notre Dame de Paris,” featuring the hunchback Quasimodo and the beautiful Esmeralda, and then that monument of 19th century French prose, “Les Miserables.”
I could have started on Proust after that, I guess, but I waited ten more years. Call me chicken.
#
Reading Proust in French or English is difficult, and for the same reasons. It isn’t the vocabulary so much as the long, sometimes very long sentences, packed with subordinate clauses and thoughts spun and spun like cotton candy to gossamer extremes. That is where the magic lies, and the trouble, too. It takes time for the spell to work; to adjust. I wasn’t at all sure in the beginning that I, with my self-taught French, would be able to pull this off.
I can now report that it’s going okay. In fact, it’s going better than expected. In fact, it’s going better than it did the first time through, in English. Who knew? The opening chapters were a slog for me a quarter century ago; it took me several tries over several years to finally make it to the good stuff – specifically, to the stuff about Swann’s scandalous wife, the ex-courtesan Odette. It all got easier after that. The famous early scene with the tea and sweet cake, which awakens an older Proust’s childhood memories, went right over my head in English. This time, forewarned, I got the essence of it in French, though it honestly seemed a bit overdone. But this is the charm of Proust, to those of us who find him charming. He takes a moment, a memory, a yearning, a doubt, a jealousy – especially a jealousy (good God, Albertine!) – to extremes. You get on board, eventually, or drift off.
#
Is Proust better in French? I suppose that’s the central question. Not everyone has thought so. Some of the world’s famous translations (there aren’t that many) are great in part because the translators reimagined the work for modern minds. Robert Fitzgerald, translator par excellence of Virgil and Homer, spoke of something like this to the Paris Review in 1983. For him, recreation was the way to be truest to the original work – to replicate its impact and aliveness.
In Fitzgerald’s case, it’s hard to argue with the result. Other well-known translations have always troubled me a little. Englishwoman Constance Garnett’s translations of the Russian classics have been much-read over the last 100 years – but aren’t they just a little too…tidy? I think she must have cleaned Dostoevsky up.
And then there’s Scott Moncrieff. Adam Gopnik, in a wonderful 2015 essay in The New Yorker, argues that Moncrieff’s Proust translation is a work of art itself, while also noting what others, too, have noted, including Proust himself; Moncrieff rubbed some of the edges off, and made the book a little sweeter than it was. Even Terence Kilmartin, who revised Moncrieff’s translation for the Random House edition of 1981, argued that Moncrieff’s prose tended toward the purple and the precious, while Proust’s never did.
And what do I think? I don’t really know yet. But after 25 years, finally, I soon will.
–Kevin
7/24
Working at night
I’ve never been good at multi-tasking. When I work on several things at once, I’m overwhelmed; I get nothing done. It’s why I work at night.
No, not always. There are certain things that must be done in daylight. Shopping has become an around-the-clock activity for the most part; not so visits to the doctor’s office, the post office, city hall, the barber shop, the bank. Repair men and women must be admitted during working hours. Now and then, I have a lunchtime music gig, and sometimes I have to catch a plane.
But these distractions only prove the point – because they are distractions,
And once I get distracted, my larger goal may go ignored for weeks.
My overarching project of many, many months now is a book of travel essays, “Dreamlands.” I can’t say that I only work on it after midnight, but that is when I work on it best. Distractions between the witching hour and dawn do not exist. Nobody needs me, nobody wants me, nobody cares. I am sometimes surprised to see the rising sun; the time has seemed so short, and I have hardly left my desk.
There is something outré about working through the night; something creepy about doing one’s best work at a time generally associated with nefarious acts, committed by junkies, drunks, hookers and thieves. In my defense, if defense it is, at least I’m not out doing that. Meanwhile, I can skip the midday heat – a blessing in July – and the worst hours for my summer allergies as well.
And it’s quiet.
So quiet.
I admit it’s hard. When I’m ready to socialize, my friends are heading off to work, and when they’re ready, I’m stoking up the coffee pot. And all those daytime chores I catalogued above must still be done, usually on very little sleep.
But my book is nearly finished.
Meanwhile, it‘s 5 a.m. – and here I am.
-Kevin
3/28
Draft of the pitch letter for my new book of travel essays, “Dreamlands”:
Dear New York agents:
Hi. This is a generic cover letter. It’s embarrassing to admit it, but I used to labor for days on personal pitches to you guys, based on careful research into your author lists, your tastes, what others said about you and what you said about yourselves in interviews and on your websites. I’m pretty sure you never read my pitch letters. You’re probably not reading this one. I’m sure I wouldn’t, either. Because, why?
What matters, beyond the sad fact that I am not a famous person who can sell bad poetry on the strength of my name (and now you know), is whether or not you like what I have done with the last four years of my life. As you probably know far better than me, a cover letter is not a book. It’s not even close. I’m sure it’s entirely possible to write a good cover letter about a terrible book. I’m sure people do it all the time.
It’s hard to believe, though, that the people who write good cover letters and the people who write good books are the same people. (I’m sure there are exceptions.) Some of the best books resist thumbnail description. Let’s be honest: if someone pitched you a novel about, say, a guy who wanders around Dublin, Ireland, on a day in June, would you jump on it? How about a plotless narrative told from the viewpoint of a village idiot in Mississippi? Or a meandering memoir by a wannabe French writer who has a thing about his mom, and which includes, early on, a multi-page description of a shrub? I would like to see the cover letters that could sell those books. I couldn’t write them.
So by all means, skip this letter. Please go straight to the attached digital file instead (it’s my book), and decide for yourself if what I’ve written is your cup of tea. If you think it might be, I would be thrilled to talk to you about it for as long as you please, and longer. Give me a call, anytime. The middle of the night is fine. My cellphone number is 540 588-8133. (Am I trusting you, or what? Then again, you aren’t reading this.)
And if you don’t like my book, just hit “delete.” You won’t hurt my feelings. I won’t even know.
It’s better that way.
Best regards,
Kevin Kittredge
Roanoke, VA
kevinkittredge.org
Dreamlands (excerpts)
2/23
Fake news
Many years ago I had two bylines at the top of a small town newspaper, my first employer after college. Seeing my own precious name – twice! – above the fold, on freshly printed papers that still smelled of ink, made my head swell. I was somebody at last!
Fast forward to a training session at another newspaper a few decades later. A writing teacher and former reporter was holding a workshop, and he noticed my attention was elsewhere. When he asked me what was wrong, I told him a story of mine would roll off the presses in 15 minutes.
He nodded.
“Fear,” he said, summing up my feelings exactly. “I don’t miss fear.”
What a difference 20 years had made. In mid-career I, like most people who make their living covering the news, lived in mortal fear of making a mistake. I checked my stories endlessly against my notes, printed sources, and, in later years, the internet. I called night editors after I went home to fix misspellings. Sometimes I got out of bed and went back to the office to make sure I had gotten something right. Still, on days when a complex or controversial article was slated to run, I dreaded seeing my name in print.
Fear. Even now, eight years after I left daily journalism, I still wake up some nights in a cold sweat, certain I got something wrong in a story I wrote only in my dreams.
I think about this when I hear the mainstream media derided by the president and others as “fake news.” Here’s a news bulletin: Nobody I know of who is actually earning a living in reputable journalism makes things up. Everyone knows the consequences of making a single error, let alone inventing something out of whole cloth.
Mainstream media reporters these days get called out on just about every transgression – sometimes by other reporters. In the digital age, when our stories can be read almost anywhere in the world, that chances that our mistakes will escape attention are approximately zilch. (They were never very good.) In truth, completely untrue stories may have better odds, since made-up facts will always have believers, and their authors typically admit no wrong. But those authors don’t work in reputable newsrooms.
Of course there have been exceptions. They are rare enough to be famous, at least among journalists. Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke invented an 8-year-old heroin addict in 1980 and won the Pulitzer Prize. (She had to give it back.) Stephen Glass wrote a series of untrue articles for the New Republic in the late 1990s, several of which I read at the time and unfortunately believed. Jayson Blair invented quotes and facts in his reporting for the New York Times before his resignation in 2003. They were all young, talented, ambitious and dared to dance upon that forbidden third rail of journalism – and they paid for it, losing their jobs, their chosen careers and more. Cooke, for one, told the Columbia Journalism Review in 2016 that “Essentially, I’ve spent the last 30 years waiting to die.”
This is the price of make-believe news.
I worked for six newspapers over 30 years, and I never knew any of my colleagues to make something up. Mess things up, yes; steal them, occasionally. But make them up? Never, no. I know there are people who make things up on purpose to serve a particular agenda (just about anything on Facebook or Twitter is suspect, unless it’s a link to a reputable site) – but they don’t work for my hometown paper, and probably not for yours.
None of this is to imply that newspapers don’t show bias. They do, as anyone who has occasionally read a foreign newspaper knows; they see things differently than we do. Nor does it mean reporters are all nice people, or that I was, always. (I wasn’t.) Still, newspaper reporters and editors try scrupulously and sometimes maddeningly to show both sides of every issue – and they don’t show bias in the ways they are usually accused of showing it; they don’t give one mainstream political candidate more coverage than another if they can help it (some editors count stories, or even column inches), and they don’t make stuff up.
It’s true that newsrooms are populated by people with liberal arts degrees, and that such people skew liberal. And they occasionally get on their high horses, and they go on crusades. (Think: “Big Tobacco,” LGBT rights, feminism, gun control.) I gnashed my teeth a time or two – not at having my stories re-written by more liberal editors, but at having story ideas turned down that my editors couldn’t or wouldn’t see, because of who they were. But these are sins of omission, of zeal, perhaps of near-sidedness – and not fabrication.
I left full-time newspaper work in 2010, but I still tremble at the thought of making a mistake. I still have bad dreams. I’m sure other old reporters do, too. Getting things absolutely right isn’t easy and it isn’t much fun, but it’s critical – and seasoned professionals in the mainstream media know it. That’s why I don’t doubt, on reading a newspaper article or watching CNN, that the story they are telling me, however imperfectly or incompletely, is essentially true – even when I wish it wasn’t.
Facts are facts.
-Kevin
1/2
Winter Weather
I wrote a novel called “Snow” once, set in a winter farmhouse in a blizzard. Only years later did I discover that Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel Laureate, wrote one, too. But I’m not surprised. Snow changes everything; it disrupts our routine; it hides the world, and us. For a little while, nothing is the same.
Snowstorm in Léon, Spain.
The most impressive snow I’ve ever seen was in Ohio, more than half a century ago. A blizzard with howling winds sculpted vast frozen waves of the white stuff, way over my young head. I was seven or eight. I looked up and up at them, amazed.
The most unwelcome snow was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in March. Any March; take your pick. I lived there for four years, from 1968 to ‘72, and each winter the snow lasted far too long. It started falling in November or even earlier, and it never melted – not completely. There were always clumps and shards of it around, especially along the roads, where over time it turned hard and black as the asphalt itself. There was nothing pretty about that March snow.
St. Petersburg sidewalk, Russia
Since then I’ve seen snow in many other places, and it always seems to take on something of the local habitat, the tint of its surroundings. In my college years when I lived surrounded by mountains in Blacksburg, Va., it fell often, sometimes socking in the hamlets and the hollows round about for weeks at a time, though it seldom outstayed its welcome where I was. It never turned black, and at night the whiteness reflected the lights of the pristine little downtown.
Snow in Washington D.C., where I went to high school, wasn’t really rare, but it always turned the city upside down, as if it were. I spent two winters in Ireland and never saw snow – but I saw it on my first trip to Madrid, stirred up by a bitter, far from Mediterranean wind. I encountered it in other parts of Spain as well, namely in Leon and Sarria along the Way of Saint James – but it never lasted long.
I made three winter trips to St. Petersburg, Russia, however, and the snow was always there, piled up at the curbs, packed to concrete hardness on the sidewalks, glazing the icy surfaces of the frozen canals like white frosting on a wedding cake. The canals in February froze so hard that people walked on them, and sometimes threw cans and bottles on them too, where they stayed to spoil the view.
Just a week ago as I write this, I woke up to snow on Rockport, Massachusetts, where I spent my Christmas. It seldom snows in Rockport, where the ocean governs the winter temperatures, but it did then, and it piled up fast, while the wind screamed and howled like a hundred ghosts. It was a little frightening, that snow.
Snowy pilgrims in Sarria, Spain
And then there’s Roanoke, Virginia, where I live now. Roanoke, like Blacksburg, just 30 miles away, lies in a plateau between mountains ranges, but it gets less snow. Some winters it gets none at all. When it does come, at least in my neighborhood, the sidewalks are seldom shoveled and walking downtown, as I often do, is only possible in the middle of the streets. Fortunately, our streets are lightly traveled in a snowstorm. The heart of downtown Roanoke, the City Market, with its century-old storefronts and Farmer’s Market, always looks like Christmas when it snows, whatever the date; it cheers me up. I’m ready anytime.
-Kevin
12/8
Better Days
Dublin, Ireland in 2012
Leaves gone. Thanksgiving gone. Light going, year nearly gone. Fighting a chest cold tonight, I count the year’s losses and bow my head. Battles lost, friends lost, friends laid low, goals unmet – a troubled country and a future profoundly unclear. I don’t think I’ve been less hopeful about the world I live in since the days of the Vietnam War.
But I still have family and friends who love me (I think), my house is paid for and I am (so far as I know) not terminally ill, although at present I feel like last month’s leftovers. And I finished a book this year, “Dreamlands: Saints and Sinners” – the first of two planned memoirs about a lifetime of travel. This one is focussed on Western Europe and the great medieval pilgrimage trail, The Way of Saint James. It was a years-long project I’m happy to get off my suffering chest. (Cough). I hope to find a publisher; if not, I’ll sell it here.
What’s next? Dreamlands volume II, of course, though first I’m going to come up for air. My music has suffered greatly this last year. There are rusty strings to pluck again and gigs to book.
And I have several novels to rework. My grand plan of four connected novels weaving back and forth in time over 30 years was a success only in my mind; nobody else read them. I’m going to operate on them now, separate them surgically, like Siamese twins, and make them walk on their own. And they will be chronological. No more going back and forth in time. I aim to please.
Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2011
Perhaps there will be a trip to Russia, too, assuming they’ll let me in. I’ve been four times before. Russia fascinates me. I grew up during the Cold War, when Russia and Eastern Europe were separated from us by a wall; “Behind the Wall” will be the theme of the second “Dreamlands,” which will cover my visits not only to Russia but to Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Ukraine and maybe some other countries I haven’t been to yet. We’ll see.
Above all, I look for hope in year 2018. No we’re not going to solve all our problems in the near term; but I want to imagine a day coming when we can. There are good signs. The young women I have met courtesy of my recently grown-up nieces inspire me; they’re damned good, damned smart and they aren’t going to listen to “No.” I’m betting on Millennials generally to bridge our worst divides; they don’t seem scarred and branded by them like older people do. I hope they make a better century than the last one. It’s not too late.
Now it’s time to get well for Christmas.
Ice nativity scene in St. Petersburg, Russia.
-Kevin
11/20
The world? What world?
I spent a long time writing my first (and still-unpublished) novel many years ago. I quit one job, worked half-time at another, lived in too many cheap and sublet apartments to count, lost weight, became estranged from my parents and spent far too much time alone. At the end I became almost enraged at any and all distractions that were keeping me from my book; it wasn’t that I loved the book so much, but that I hated not having finished it. It sat in judgment on me day after day, taunting me, accusing me of failure. It had to be done. Nothing would be right again until it was.
A 20th century writing tool.
I made bad choices. I blew off one friend’s wedding, and another friend’s going-away party. I still berate myself for these things, after 20 years. Saying I’m sorry makes no difference; they know I cared about something else more than them. I was, in a word, a monster, not a man.
I’ve done it again.
Not consciously – not entirely – and not for as long. Two months, maybe. But I could see the signs as I approached the end, always elusive, but always in sight, of my book of travel essays, “Dreamlands.” Daylight became a distraction, a summons to work in the yard or go shopping; I closed the curtains. Sometimes I worked all night. I quit going out, at least for fun; I haven’t seen a friend in weeks. When I did go out, it was to stock up on quick meals I could pop into the microwave, eat from a box or cook up in ten minutes – things that wouldn’t distract me from my work. I quit booking music gigs, or even practicing. I couldn’t spare the energy or the time. My life was sleeping and working; if I wasn’t doing one, I did the other. All this for something nobody cared about but me.
Distraction is the enemy of writing, that most solitary of all occupations. If you’re talking to someone, you’re not doing it. You live in your own mind when your write, like it or not. It is not life, but an imitation of it. Meanwhile the world goes on without you. Other people watch babies grow, and grand babies. They have fun together – travel, play tennis, ride bikes. A writer writing can begin to hate the outside world; what a nuisance, for heaven’s sake! He just wants to go home, turn the ringer on his cellphone off, and lock the doors.
This, anyway, is my experience of it. It isn’t good, it isn’t healthy, and I don’t know any other way.
The last months are the worst. By that point it has all gone on too long; you’ve run out out of excuses; wasted months and years. There are only two choices left; closure or failure. Failure is unthinkable, but closure won’t come cheap. It will cost, quite simply, everything. But once it comes, if it comes, the chains will drop, the yoke will gape open, the curse will be finally be gone (until the next book).
The happiest words in English.
“Dreamlands” is done at last, after four years. I just stuck a fork in it. I’m looking forward to rejoining the world, if the world will have me; I know I have some explaining to do. But the holidays are here. There will be parties, family, music, wine. There is no better time to make amends.
Meanwhile, you can read an excerpt from my book here:
Dreamlands (excerpts)
-Kevin
9/18
Diving into Black Water
I grew up in the drug culture. Not the beatnik/be-bop jazz drug culture of the immediate post-World War Two years, but the one after that, the one fed by Vietnam War protests, hippies, the Summer of Love and rock and roll guitars. I was a couple of years too young to run away to San Francisco in the summer of 1967, but by the time Woodstock happened two years later, I was paying attention. Sometime around my 15th birthday I chucked my clarinet and a lifelong record of good behavior and starting playing in rock bands, skipping classes and toking up. Mostly I just smoked marijuana, but I tried LSD a few times, and magic mushrooms, and cocaine once (I felt nothing. It was probably flour.)
I drew the line at heroin.
Why? I was scared of the needle. I was scared of addiction. I was scared, more than anything, of liking it too much.
It’s not that it wasn’t available. It surely was. Even now, 45 years later, I can think of nearly a dozen people in my Michigan neighborhood who were shooting up. I had even watched two friends do it in a basement – one pulling the string tight to make the veins pop out, while the other stuck the needle in.
In the years since, I’ve sometimes wondered why some people stop at the edge of the abyss, while others plunge. In some ways, I’m a risk-taker. In my younger years, I was all-too willing to quit a job and take off for parts unknown, to my parents’ chagrin. And I like to feel good.
But there were always things I wouldn’t do. Stealing a car with my high school friends (they wanted to); having sex with a prostitute; shooting up. When I was in my 20s and living in Florida, a visiting boyhood friend and I climbed a tree beside a river, then sidled out onto an overhanging branch. There was a platform nailed there, a kind of makeshift diving board, but the water far below was black as coffee. It could have been twelve feet deep, or one. My friend jumped, landed with a splash, and happily resurfaced. He called up at me to follow him, but I backed down.
Life is dicey. We have to take our chances to get anywhere – in love, in art, in work, in thought. The line between bold and foolhardy is sometimes only clear in retrospect, and sometimes that’s too late. My own family has been touched by heroin, and touched again. What went around has come around. The cycle is depressing. What the lesson is, I don’t know.
But I come back to that black water. There will always be black water, and people who jump right in. And of those who jump, some will come up grinning, while others drown.
-Kevin
6/12/17
A Good Hair Day in Turkey
Most of the memorable haircuts in my life have been memorably bad. There was the one I received from a girl-pal in the 9th grade that looked like a lop-sided bowl. It was so bad that my mother took pity on me and let me skip school the next day. Instead, she took me to the barber for a rescue job.
Another haircut a decade later, from a sweet young hairdresser new at her job, also required remedial action. And even the best haircuts typically involve a period of rebellion in which my affronted hairs stand up in the most unappealing directions.
The haircut I got recently in Turkey was, by any measure, in a class by itself.
The Mediterranean Shore, Turkey
It was long past time. My hair and beard had grown wild while I was abroad – especially the latter. I had tried to find scissors for a self-trim, but I had failed. They never would gotten past airport security in any case. No, it was a barber or nothing. One morning I found myself in a little Turkish seaside town with time to kill, and decided to take the plunge.
Turkish “berbers” were not hard to find, and I was soon settled into a barber’s chair. My man had dense, dark hair, swept back artfully; he looked like an old-time matinee idol, a little faded. He let me wait while he smoked in the doorway, and then went to work on the haircut of my life.
He cut, and he cut and he cut some more. He cut the same in the same places over and over again, his scissors working endlessly over the comb. He cut my beard, my eyebrows, and without so much as a bye-my-leave, the hairs inside my nose, sticking the scissors up each nostril.
Then came the coup-de grace:
“Would you like some fire?”
Fire?
He had my attention.
“Wow. I don’t know.”
“We’ll try just a little bit.”
He started a long butane lighter burning and brought it close to my ear. Too close to my ear. I was terrified. I’m not sure how he did what he did next, but somehow he flung fire at my ear. In fact, it went right into my ear. It was warm, but it didn’t burn. I guess it didn’t have time. The barber he gave my other ear the same treatment. By the time he finished, all the little downy hairs hiding inside were surely gone.
All in all, he must have worked on me for 45 minutes. When he finally finished, it was indeed short, but not too short, and I took leave of my man well-satisfied. His true genius, however, only revealed itself in the coming days. My hair behaved!! Not a one of them stood up in protest. One swipe of the comb in the morning and I was done.
Clearly, my Turkish barber had been a genius. Perhaps they all are – though they aren’t getting rich. The price of my barber’s bravura performance was all of 45 Turkish lira, or about 12 bucks.
-Kevin
6/5/17
The Turkish Nightclub
: Festival, Istanbul
Three years ago I arrived in Istanbul, Turkey for the first time ever to the raucous sounds of the ancient spring festival known as Hidrellez. In front of my hotel that night, venders cooked spicy meats for a happy mob of revelers beating drums, playing cheap musical instruments and dancing. The energy and the noise channeled the new season; it was glorious. Istanbul, which straddles the line between Europe and Asia, felt restless to me on that visit, as any city of 15 million people would, but not dangerous.
That has changed.
In March, two months ago as I write this, I returned to Istanbul, the former Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. On the morning following my arrival, as I strolled down Independence Avenue, the pedestrian-friendly thoroughfare in the heart of the European side of the city, armored vehicles were everywhere. Every ten yards or so stood a soldier or policeman with a rifle in his arms. A light drizzle added to the sense of gloom. There were few obvious westerners among the walkers; a July coup attempt, terror attacks (including a suicide bombing on that very street) and martial law had apparently scared them all away.
Still, during the two days and three nights I was in the city, almost no one was unkind to me. Far from it. Yasin, Mehmet and Onder, the desk clerks at my hotel, all remembered me from my last stay -better, alas, than I did them; one of them even thanked me for the long-ago investment advice. (“Index funds” I told him. Apparently.) Down in the hotel’s breakfast room one morning, one little girl couldn’t stop waving to me and saying “Hello,” although her twin sister reacted to my presence with sobbing terror. (Their mother finally calmed the frightened tot, and persuaded her to blow me a kiss.)
Meanwhile, each time I ventured out I found people eager to talk with me. More than a few wanted to drink with me. This I successfully avoided – until the end.
*
It was close to midnight. I had just awakened from a nap, and I was taking a last stroll down Independence Avenue when I found myself abruptly face to face with someone I had already met. He had espied me walking that afternoon and called out the obvious:
“USA!”
I smiled then. It was funny that he could tell. He had wanted to have a drink with me (of course), but I told him I was headed back to my hotel room for a nap.
“Later, then.”
“Okay, maybe later.” I never expected to see him again.
Now it was later, and here he was. I cursed my luck. But when he offered to buy my a farewell beer, I figured “What the hell.” One beer was one beer. I had planned to have one anyway. And he was offering to pay.
He said he knew of a place nearby where we’d be treated well.
*
My friend was young, still in his late 20s or early 30s, and spoke English well. As we walked, he told me he was visiting from Ankara, the Turkish capital. He had come to Istanbul to have some fun. He was drunk, but not that drunk. We walked, and walked some more. When I told him I needed to get up early, and he said the bar was just ahead.
At last we arrived at a flight of stairs going down. At the bottom of the staircase was a doorway.
I paused before descending.
“You’re not going to get me arrested, are you?”
“Of course not, Kevin. Everyone in Turkey drinks. It’s legal.”
*
We entered a dimly-lit room, furnished with bar stools, tables and a dance floor in the center. Sometimes they had belly dancers here, my friend explained. There were none this night, although some women were dancing to piped-in music. They wore street clothes and looked like customers themselves. We took a table and immediately were greeted by two waiters. My friend ordered, not beer, but two Rakis. Raki is a popular Turkish alcohol made from grapes.
Was I being foolish? For the traveler in a foreign land, there is a line between being careful and being closed to experience. I didn’t immediately think I’d crossed it. The room was half empty, and the atmosphere subdued. The waiters were well-dressed, like waiters in France. Our drinks arrived quickly, and then some light vegetables to snack on. I crunched a celery stick, lifted my raki, and took a sip. I was starting to relax when two Russian girls arrived. One sat down by my friend. The other sat by me.
They weren’t beauties, though I had the better-looking one. She wasn’t really a girl. She might have been 30 or more. She didn’t snuggle up against me, or touch me. My alarm meter stayed on low.
I like Russian women. They are often smart and witty, and they drink less than the men. This woman spoke English very well. She was a lawyer back in Russia, she said, and had come to Istanbul on vacation.
I believed her. Lots of Russian tourists come to Turkey – and their rubles aren’t worth very much. I’m sure some Russian women aren’t opposed to trading conversation for a drink.
“Let’s buy them a drink,” my friend said.
I shrugged. I had one fifty lira note – worth about $15 – in my pocket. If I could do it for that, well then, fine.
I motioned to the waiter, pulled out my 50 lira note, and asked if that would pay for my drink and the Russian woman’s, too.
His reaction was astounding, somewhere between shock and horror. It was over the top. He instantly produced a bill for $400 lira – about $80. That, he said, was how much I already owed.
“For one raki? That’s ridiculous. Okay, I’m done.”
The Russian women vanished. Leaving my 50 lira note on the table to cover my sip of raki and the celery stalk – I wasn’t going to be guilty of walking out on my bill – I headed for the stairs. Several men got there ahead of me, and barred my way.
*
Was I frightened? Yes. But it could have been worse. I saw no weapons. The men were only half my size. And I had my passport to protect me – they weren’t likely to risk a serious international incident with an American tourist, were they? And I had a secret weapon; I was entirely sober. No doubt they usually pulled this scam on drunks.
I half expected some hulking bouncer to arrive, but none did. Instead an older man appeared, apparently the owner. He held my 50 lira note and that preposterous 400 lira bill in his hand.
He spoke English. I let him have it.
“I’m not paying you 400 lira. I had one sip of raki. One. Give me my money back.”
An argument soon raged, loudly. It wasn’t about the raki, he said. I was in a nightclub, not a bar. I would have to pay for the quality of the experience. I told him I didn’t even want to be in his stupid nightclub; I’d be treated better in a bar. Besides I only had 50 lira. That was all he was going to get.
A waiter arrived with a new bill. This one was for 800 lira. Meanwhile, the owner threatened to call the police. I told him to go ahead. I was ready for a night in a Turkish jail, if need be. I would surely win in the end.
The truth is, I was starting to have fun.
Independence Avenue, Istanbul, 2014
*
My friend, I noticed for the first time, was beside me. He drunkenly implored the owner not to to call the police. Some help he was. But the owner wasn’t going to call the police. One does not call the police to report that he is committing a robbery and the victim is not cooperating. Yes, he took a cellphone out of his pocket and tapped the screen and pretended to be having a conversation with the police in Turkish. I wasn’t impressed.
He put the phone back in his pocket and tried another tack:
“I’ll take a credit card,” he said.
“I only brought 50 lira.”
I pulled my pants pockets out, proving they were empty. It was a mistake. Then man began poking at my coat, probing for a wallet.
“Don’t touch me! You do not touch me.”
The man knew he had gone too far. Or maybe he just knew that I was big and suddenly, very genuinely, mad.
He backed away.
“No, no, I won’t touch you.” There was a note of sadness in his voice.
*
He tried reason:
“Look, I’m an honorable man. You’re an honorable man. You give me two hundred lira, and your friend gives me two hundred lira, and we’ll call it even.”
I’ll give him this – he wasn’t backing down. I was ready to argue some more, but my friend was reaching for his wallet.
“Come on, come on,” he said. “Let’s pay.” He handed the man his credit card. (We! Wasn’t he supposed to be paying for this?)
It was late. I had a plane to catch for the coast in the morning, where I had arranged to meet a friend. It was time to end this drama and go to bed.
“Fine.”
I pulled my wallet from the breast pocket of my coat and handed the man the credit card he knew darned well I had.
“I want to see how much you’re charging me. Show me.”
A suddenly obsequious waiter hurried up with a handheld card credit card reader. I watched as he ran the card. They had won. What the hell. Hadn’t the entertainment been worth the fifty bucks?
*
Still, I wasn’t quite done.
“Where’s my raki? Two hundred lira, and I didn’t even get my raki.”
“I’ll buy you a raki,” the man said. He could well afford to be generous with my money. A waiter brought me a fresh glass. I stood at a counter and drank it to the bottom.
My friend returned, with an empty glass in his hand.
“Let’s have another,” he proposed.
“Hell, no!” I told him goodbye, and left.
Walking back to my hotel, with my 50 dollar raki warm in my belly, I began to laugh.
THE GOLDEN HORN. ISTANBUL.
-Kevin
5/14/17
The Angel and the Nun
Vézelay, France
My beloved France was not especially kind to me on my latest visit, which was in March. My cellphone was stolen in a Paris subway station. I had an ugly argument with a rude hotel desk clerk. Graffiti scrawled in English on the wall of a train station made the writer’s attitude toward America very clear – in the most succinct and American way: “America f… you!”
But there were exceptions. A woman at the charming “Belle Lurette” bookshop on Rue Saint Antoine in Paris made me feel both welcome and appreciated; she helped me find some classic French novels that wouldn’t overtax my French or my credit card. (The bill came to five or six bucks.) The people at my favorite cheap hotel, the Hotel Floridor, near the Denfert Rochereau subway station, were as nice as always.
And then there was the nun at the ancient church of Saint Mary Magdalene in Vézelay, some 140 miles southeast of Paris.
The big hilltop church is ancient; the nave, or great hall, predates Notre Dame in Paris. As I was wandering through it late one morning, breathing it in and trying to get the spirit of the place, I was approached by a delighted nun. She had seen something, and just had to share – and I was the only one in sight.
It is hard to judge the age of a nun in a flowing habit that reveals only a plump, round, happy face; there was only a certain lack of fluidity in her movements to go by, and the evidence in her eyes. At the border of old age, perhaps. Whatever her age, she could hardly contain her happiness. She beckoned to me, smiling broadly, and led me back the way that I had come. Halfway down the nave she stopped and pointed to a gilded angel standing high atop an ornamental bishop’s throne. I hadn’t even noticed it on my way in.
He was a plucky little cherub, holding a palm frond in one hand while lifting a golden trumpet to his lips with the other. The artist had depicted him just touching down from the heavens, with the weight of his right foot on a round base while the left foot trailed in space. It was a dynamic pose – all frozen movement. What made it so striking, though, and had so delighted the nun, was that the angel had caught a shaft of morning sunlight perfectly. He glowed for a moment amid the general gloom.
“Aww,” I said, smiling back at the nun. “It’s his moment to shine.”
“Yes,” she said. “His moment to shine.”
How often was his number called, I wondered? How often was the sun just right, and someone there to notice? Once a year? A decade? A century? For some seconds we admired the angel together. Then the nun hurried off, while I took the little fellow’s picture.
-Kevin
1/28
Family jam sessions, 80 years ago
I come from a family of engineers, on both sides. My father was an engineer, and my mother’s father, and both my uncles. My brother and his wife are engineers; their daughter just became one, too.
As the lone right-brainer among all these analytical Spocks, I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t switched at birth. (Actually, I look just like my father.) Then I remember that there is another side to the story, at least on Dad’s side of the family.
My father’s father – my grandfather – sold cars for a living – but he was also a musician. So were all Dad’s uncles. Dad told me stories of family jam sessions up in Massachusetts when he was young. They played the pop and novelty songs of their day, which was the late 1920s and 1930s. At least one of them, my great Uncle Morris, was pretty good. I never met him, but Dad always spoke of him with the kind of awe that very rational people sometimes feel towards people who create; as if they’re from a different, incomprehensible race of human beings, touched by the gods. Uncle Morris played the banjo and guitar, I think, but according to Dad he could pick up any instrument and play a tune. One day Uncle Morris packed up all his instruments and moved to California, hoping to make a living playing music in Hollywood movies. He ended up working for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Burbank instead, building airplane parts. Back then, California was a world away from Massachusetts, and Dad never saw him again. As for my grandfather, he kept on picking – though he changed with the times. When he died in the early 1970s, I inherited his home-made amplifier and electric guitar.
-Kevin
12/15
Trailing Saint Regis
“Le Chemin du Lapin,” read the hand-painted sign. “The Way of the Rabbit. Follow the Big Ears.”” There were rabbit ears painted beneath the words, and another sign in the distance. Follow them I did, walking a misty circuit around the alpine village of La Louvesc (pronounced “La Loovay”) in the Ardeche Mountains of France.
I was on the trail of a saint – Saint Regis, by name. Father Jean-Francois Régis was a priest who walked these hills four centuries ago, seeking converts. He was a little batty – or, as, one of his hagiographers put it, “original.” Blasphemy enraged him; when he heard a woman cursing in the street one day, he stuffed her mouth with mud. He also had a thing for fallen women – and would do nearly to keep them from doing the deed. This earned him the enmity, and sometimes the blows of many a young man.
Father Regis’ lifelong ambition was to convert the Indians of Canada, where Jesuit priests were routinely getting their ears, tongues and noses cut off in the service of the faith; but the Catholic authorities refused to send him there. So he had to make do with French Huguenots, those erring Protestants, instead. He sought them out in all weathers, slogging uphill and down through snow and rain, preaching and exhorting and hearing confessions until the day he finally dropped, here in La Louvesc, in December of 1640. He died in the local curé’s house on New Year’s Eve. His remains lie in the hamlet’s pretty church.
Why do I care? Well, it’s complicated – too complicated to go into here. But you can read about it in this excerpt from “Dreamlands,” my travel-book-in-progress, here:
Dreamlands (excerpts)
12/2
-Kevin
Winter in Saint Petersburg?
Refreshment stand in St. Petersburg, Russia
Belarus? Azerbaijan? Romania? Serbia? Russia, again? In the back of my mind I have long been planning one last trip to Eastern Europe, to flesh out the last section of my travel book “Dreamlands.” In some ways, the timing has never been better. The dollar is strong, and much of Eastern Europe is still not on the Euro. The ruble has tumbled. Air fares are good, and hotel rooms are available for a song.
But it’s hard. In some countries, visas and a little palm greasing are required. Russia and Azerbaijan both require that I be “invited” by a hotel or a travel agency, which boils down to paying them a fee for a piece of paper. The visa will have to be processed – another fee. I will have to book my flights and provide the evidence before my visa requests are even considered – a risk. I will have to mail my passport off to the agencies doing the evaluations – another risk, not to mention an expense of time. And if I travel in winter, as I usually do, to get the best prices and avoid the tour groups, it will be cold. If I go to Russia, it will be very cold.
And what survives of the former Soviet Union is bleak. On my first trip to Berlin a decade ago, it was easy to see where the wall had been, because that was where the artless bock Soviet architecture began. The transition to capitalism has been unevenly accomplished. The comfort and charm of Western Europe is far from guaranteed.
And then, I’m getting old. I’ll be 61 this month. The last time I went to Russia, I caught the flu. My youthful energy long since spent, increasingly I wonder as I never did before, “What if things go wrong?”
On the other hand…
Late night winter sidewalk. St, Petersburg.
Winter in Saint Petersburg is fabulous. The slantwise light adds color to everything, and the music and ballet alone are worth the trip. Those other places have the great allure of the unknown. Whatever they turn out to be, they will be different from anything I’ve seen before. I have often said, and I think I mean it, that I’m happy to die abroad. Travel, music and love have given me my happiest hours on earth, but none were free of cost. I know the risks.
So there it is. I’ll decide in a week or two – no more. Those visas will take time. Meanwhile, I’ll look at my old pictures of Saint Petersburg. They will either fire the spirit or chill the blood; we’ll see.
-Kevin
10/26
Hillary
Thirty-six years ago, when I was a raw reporter for a small city newspaper west of the Mississippi River, I was sent to cover a political rally in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas. On arrival, I imagined I had been transported to an earlier century. I remember in particular two stout old ladies, sisters maybe, sitting side by side in cotton dresses and sunbonnets. The main speaker was a man, surprisingly young, who was running for governor. It his wife, however, who made the stronger impression on me that day, even though she didn’t speak. She was equally young, with a blonde pony tail and granny glasses, and looked ferociously serious and utterly out of place, like a campus radical at a pioneer potluck supper. She sat apart, alone as I recall, and seemed the polar opposite of her smiling, glad-handing husband, the would-be governor. I did not approach her. In a couple of weeks, though, I will vote for her for president of the United States.
It took me a long time to warm up to the public Hillary Clinton. She seemed the female avatar of condescending liberals -a woman who knew all the answers and exactly what the rest of us should do and think. I voted for Bill in 1992 and against Hillary in 1996. She annoyed me that much.
Like some others, I think, I began to soften when Bill humiliated Hillary with Monica. The goddess seemed suddenly all too human – a hurting puppy, in fact. A decade later, I thought Hillary showed humility and class in losing the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama. Benghazi or no, she was a good and indefatigable secretary of state, in the process becoming perhaps the most admired woman on the planet.
But I think what sealed the deal for me was the story of Hillary and John McCain trading vodka shots. That was not the Hillary I thought I knew, the charmless saint of political correctness who never gave an inch or cracked a smile. She could be – God help us – fun. There is no other presidential candidate still running this year worthy of my vote, but I won’t pull the lever for Hillary while clenching my teeth. She’s better than she was. She learns from her mistakes. She’ll be a great president, given half a chance – and I wish I’d said “Hello” to her all those years ago.
-Kevin
10/2
Bernadette
One hundred and fifty-eight years ago a little girl fell into a trance in the south of France. Bernadette Soubirous was 14; on February 11, 1858, while gathering firewood with her sister and a friend, she paused to take off her shoes and socks to fiord a shallow stream, and was transfixed by a beam of light shining through a cliff face. There followed the first of 18 visions that would turn a little town in the French Pyrenees into one of the greatest pilgrimage sites in the Christian world.
The Grotto at Lourdes
The town, like Madonna’s daughter, is named Lourdes – pronounced something like Luwrda in French and supposedly derived from the Arabic warda, which means rose; the town was long ago ruled by Muslim Spain. It sits at the edge of the Pyrenees mountains. When I was there several years ago, the view from my hotel room window was of snow-capped mountain peaks, ranged one after another, ever higher. I went because I was intrigued by Bernadette’s visions, and by the stories of the thousands of sick people since who have gone to Bernadette’s little grotto over a century and a half to be healed. Some apparently succeeded, at least for a time; the grotto itself used to be lined with the discarded crutches of the formerly lame. The Catholic Church recognizes 69 Lourdes cures, from diseases ranging from tuberculosis to cancer, as miracles. Who was Bernadette, what did she see, and what truly happened and is happening today at Lourdes? What I discovered is part of my upcoming travel book, “Dreamlands.” You can read an excerpt from it here:
Dreamlands (excerpts)
-Kevin
9/28
Turn, turn, turn
To everything, as Solomon wrote, and then the Byrds sang 28 centuries later, there is a season. It is surely true of music; since I started playing regularly again seven or eight years ago, I’ve seen many a band crumble and venues come and go. Two happy constants for me in recent years were Scott Perry and Front Porch Swing, for which I played upright bass, and Annie Moore’s Irish Pub, where we used to perform once a month. (I performed at Annie Moore’s with other bands, too, so often at one point that my presence became a kind of running joke: Oh, look – Kevin again.)
No more. As this too-long, too-hot summer finally turns to fall, I have had to say goodbye to both Scott Perry and Annie Moore’s. Scott has dramatically cut back on his performance schedule to focus on teaching (check out his online instruction courses and more at https://scottperrymusician.mykajabi.com/.) And Annie Moore’s has curtailed its live music schedule as owner Chip Moore retakes the reins and tries to build the business up. I wish them both luck and much success.
Scott at our last Annie Moore’s gig August 19
Meanwhile I’m focussing on new projects, revived projects and other stages. Back Porch Swing, with Jerry Wood on fiddle, Tom Ohmsen and me, is booked once a month at Parkway Brewing in Salem through the end of the year. We hope to get a demo out and book more venues soon, and I will create a page here for the band as well. My own Fat Tuesdays Band continues to perform its New Orleans-inspired jazz; our gigs are usually private events, but look for us around Mardi Gras. One Saturday morning a month, I can be found with some talented musical partner at Our Daily Bread on Brambleton Avenue -which serves scrumptious breakfasts. Djangabond, a gypsy jazz band inspired by the late, great guitarist Django Reinhardt has two gigs in October (alas, both private), and I have promised free musical entertainment for the unveiling of Roanoke’s Tazewell Avenue mural, which I hope will be this fall. There are also new projects on the horizon, and I’ll write all about them when the time comes. An up-to-date list of upcoming gigs is available elsewhere on my website.
About those seasons: the familiar turn, turn, turn refrain in the Byrds 1965 #1 hit was actually added by folksinger Pete Seeger, who originally fitted the ancient words to music. So was the last line: I swear it’s not too late. Here’s the original passage from the Bible. It echoes the world-weary fatalism found throughout Ecclesiastes, which is part of the Old Testament, and the notion there is nothing new under the sun:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
-Kevin
7/22
Twenty three years ago I took six months off from my newspaper job, packed some clothes and my Smith Corona typewriter into three suitcases and moved to Dublin, Ireland. I planned to finish a novel that had been an albatross around my neck for five long years, far away from all the distractions of my life in America. In those days you couldn’t book accommodations online, and I knew nobody in Ireland, so I just bought a plane ticket and trusted to luck. How it all worked out is a story – one I tell in my soon-to-be-finished book of travel memoirs, “Dreamlands.”
I have been back to Dublin several times since I lived there in 1993, most recently in 2012. Twenty three years is a generation, and Dublin has changed very much. The world has come in, thanks to Ireland’s membership in the European Union. The seedy neighborhood I lived in has been gentrified, and the homegrown shops, many of them, now have foreign names and cater to an international clientele. In other ways, however, Dublin is the same: The gloomy skies, the chill, the noise, the damp. It never really rains, and it never really stops. Young Irish mothers still push their prams along the inner city sidewalks; 23 three years ago, they were in them. And Dublin still has the world’s best pubs.
-Kevin
6/25
A long, long time ago, I played the clarinet. I was okay -good enough for second or third chair in the junior high school band – but I could have been better had I practiced, as my band director said. He was a mercurial man, prone to tantrums; when we played particularly badly he sometimes flung his baton across the room and left in a huff. It was a measure of how much we feared him that no one even spoke while he was gone.
One day I was the direct object of his wrath. It had nothing to do with music, but with my thoughtless response to some trivial request he made of me: “Sieg Heil.” The infamous Nazi salute was in the air in those days (it was 1970), thanks to American pop culture; I’d picked it up from comic books and watching “Hogan’s Heroes” on tv. But I had “Sieg Heiled” the wrong man. Someone told me later that the band director had fled from Austria in the Hitler years. True or not, he was furious. I was demoted to the second section, where the clarinet parts were much less interesting – and there, contrary to my expectations, I remained. A more determined student would have overcome that setback, but I cared more in those days about my bass guitar, and girls.
And so I quit. I didn’t play the clarinet again for forty years.
Perhaps I should have let that sleeping dog lie, but I did not. Because I’ve started playing the clarinet again. I can’t say it’s going well. The clarinet is a wicked instrument, devious and hateful; it will betray you with a hideous squawk, given half a chance.
But this time, I’m sticking with it. The attached audio clip is my intro to “Summertime,” the George Gershwin classic, which I play with my Fat Tuesdays Band. The clarinet is a 1932 Selmer “Radio Improved” model (above) with beautiful solid silver keys; sometimes it behaves. I bought it on eBay, and I love the tone. If bourbon could sing, I think, it might sing like this:
-Kevin
6/6
Reading a June 3 story in the Washington Post about the reclusive country singer Bobbie Gentry reminded me of the cameo appearance she made in my novel, “Promises,” singing to wounded troops at a Colorado hospital in 1970. The event was historical; part of her visit to Fitzsimons Army Hospital was broadcast on the Ed Sullivan Show that spring. June 3, meanwhile, is the date of the events recounted in her most famous song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” which Bobbie Gentry wrote herself.
The WAPO story is here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/all-southerners-come-home–as-has-long-disappeared-music-legend-bobbie-gentry/2016/06/02/3988aba2-28df-11e6-a3c4-0724e8e24f3f_story.html
The Ed Sullivan appearance is here, though to see the whole thing costs $1.99: https://itunes.apple.com/us/music-video/ode-to-billie-joe-ed-sullivan/id475569536
And the excerpt from “Promises” is here:
Sometimes famous visitors came to cheer the troops up – football players, politicians or pop stars. One afternoon Bobbie Gentry sang her song about the boy who jumps off a Mississippi bridge, “Ode to Billie Joe,” while standing right there in that big room full of injured boys, with her guitar and her pretty legs and her waterfall of dark hair. Jan stood by Regis’ wheelchair, pressed in among all the soldiers and the hospital staff, and watched and listened in wonder from just ten feet away. It was a revelation to see someone famous up so close, and hear her talk and watch her movements and see her smile. Bobbie Gentry could sing circles around Jan, who couldn’t sing a lick – but she was hardly any older, and every bit as country as was Jan herself. They might have been friends.
-Kevin
5/25
Russia fascinates me. It has since I was very young. In those days, Russia was only a part of the larger Soviet Union, of course, but it was the most important part, and in my young mind, the word “Russia” stood for all of it. Besides, “Russia” sounded a lot more exotic than that long, windy title, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” which, save for the “socialist” part, sounded a lot like home.
But Russia was not like home. Oh, no, no, no…I heard again and again, from teachers, family members and politicians on TV that Russia was in fact the very opposite of America, the anti-America. Because Russia was a communist country, and its people were not free.
What exactly those things meant, I wasn’t sure. A communist, to me, was a Russian bad guy; beyond that I had no clue. As for freedom, I wasn’t very free myself. My life was closely regulated and continuously adjudicated by adults; I was forever being graded, scolded, overruled. My young life, like most young lives, was one long trail of “no’s.” How was life in Russia any different? The communism stuff, which I didn’t understand, was at the root of it. To be a communist, apparently, was very, very bad. It was to prevent the communists from taking over the world, supposedly, that we were fighting in the marshes and jungles of Vietnam. Someday I might have to go there, too.
That was enough right there to make Russia interesting to me, but there was more. For one thing, there were all those nuclear missiles the United States and Russia had pointed at one another. Those missiles were the reason for the fallout shelter in my elementary school, with its familiar black and orange pie sign – a sign that everybody recognized in those days, and which underscored a hovering gloom.
Finally, there was the Iron Curtain. This was the line across Europe, enforced by barbed wire, armed patrols and sometimes land mines, that separated the West from the East, allies from enemies, us from them. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Estonia and all the other members of the Soviet bloc, including Mother Russia itself, were behind that line. They were places, I was sure, that I would never see.
I was wrong. In the quarter century since the Iron Curtain crumbled I have been to Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic and the once-divided city of Berlin. I have been to Russia four times. I will be there in my mind for many months to come, as I wrestle with “Behind the Curtain,” the third and final segment of my travel memoir, “Dreamlands.”
Meanwhile, you can read a “Dreamlands” excerpt here:
Dreamlands (excerpts)
And an argument about communism at the family dinner table from my novel “Within You Without You” here:
Within You Without You (novel excerpt)
And a description of Berlin after the wall came down from my novel “Moondance” here:
http://kevinkittredge.org/moondance/
-Kevin
5/16
I played in a band in college – a California-style rock band in the age of punk, laid-back but very loud. Graduation ended the fun. I soon lost track of everyone save for our willowy, red-headed singer, Lynn Marshall – who later died of melanoma, aged just 39. Over the last few years, however, the rest of us have hooked up again on Facebook. When Bob, the guitar player, invited me to his 60th birthday party, I packed my old Fender bass in the van and went.
It was a three-hour drive. The party could hardly have been more pleasant, with a potluck supper followed by a spirited sing-along. I met Bob’s significant other, Cheryl. l saw people that I hadn’t seen in decades, and I made new friends. But it was after the party, when a group of us followed Bob to his gig at a nearby roadhouse, that the years peeled away.
Inside, the music was loud as a chainsaw. Liquor flowed. Around midnight there was a parking lot fight, and police cars swarmed in. As 1 a.m. approached, I joined Bob and the band on bass and stood amid the drums and amplifiers just like in the old days, soaking things in: the crowded dance floor, the cluttered tables, the hurrying waitresses, the enormous sound. There was no smoke now, and there were cellphones on the tabletops among the personal things. But mostly, it was the same. And I remembered how I used to feel at the end of late-night bar gigs – an after-midnight tiredness that was not quite tiredness, but rather time suspended, frozen in that moment at the other end of life.
-Kevin
5/4
I’ve spent a lot of time on the Way of Saint James, the great medieval pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela in Northwest Spain. No, I’ve never walked it; but I have been to the beginning and the end and to many towns and cities in between. Once, too, I walked over hill and dale and muddy field to the mysterious chapel called “Eunate,” which means “100 doors” in the ancient language of the Basques.
For more than a year now I’ve been writing about The Way for my travel book “Dreamlands.” My rough draft now stands at a ridiculous 55,000 words. That’s about half the length of your average vampire novel, maybe more.
The problem, if there is a problem, is that there’s just so much of the Way to write about. Strands of the trail stretch hundreds of miles across Southern France before weaving together near Puente la Reina – the Queen’s Bridge – in Navarre in Spain. At that point, for most travelers (alternate routes exist), the Way is one, though the weary, footsore pilgrim still has some 400 miles to go.
The Way, also called the Camino, which is Spanish for “road,” has been around for a millennium. It leads to the great cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, which claims to hold the remains of Saint James the Major, one of the 12 disciples of Jesus Christ. The claim has no basis in fact, but millions of people have walked there across the centuries, and still do. In fact, the Way is in the midst of a dramatic revival; hundreds of thousands of people are walking it again each year. The annual tide begins just about now, when the weather turns mild, and will continue unabated through the summer. The trek from the foot of the Pyrenees takes about a month. From the traditional starting points in Le Puy, Paris, Arles and Vézelay in France, it takes more.
A thousand years of walkers have left their mark in art and architecture along the Way. They have made it a fascinating thing in itself. That is why I’ve been there five times now – not to walk it, but to visit the places it has changed, and in some cases created. Most of these places are changing again with the fresh onslaught of pilgrims, including many from America and indeed all around the world – and that is very much a part of my story.
You can read the beginning of it here:
http://kevinkittredge.org/the-way-of-saint-james/
-Kevin
4/21
Little girls like the band I play in called Front Porch Swing. I mean very little girls – including some in diapers. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s our instruments: Scott Perry’s steel resonator guitar, Tom Ohmsen’s old mandolin and my big upright bass. Maybe it’s the fact that we don’t play all that loud. But it’s a rare gig when a girl-tot doesn’t feel the groove. Saturday night it was a dark-haired girl of eight or so. She danced to nearly every song, with a smile that never dimmed. It was an outdoor gig and uncomfortably chilly, but she couldn’t have cared less. She danced with grown-up women, and
Little girls dancing to our music at Dogtown Roadhouse in Floyd, Va. in 2015.
with a man, presumably her father, who slid her between his legs, swing dance style. She danced all by herself to “All Blues,” a lopsided jazz-blues jam by Miles Davis in 6/4 time. She invented her own dance for the lurching rhythm, marching back and forth across the empty floor while twirling her forearms one around the other in perfect time. The event was a wedding reception, and the newlyweds danced the first dance of the night, but the little girl stole the show. Bandleader Scott named her “dance princess,” and even found her a tiara. I’m sure no one, including the bride and groom, had a better time.
-Kevin
5/11
Hey there! I’ve been following your blog for a while now and finally got the bravery to go ahead and give you a shout out from Dallas Texas! Just wanted to tell you keep up the great job!
Articolo fantastico! Grazie Mille.
Prego. 🙂
Woah! I’m really digging the template/theme of this blog. It’s simple, yet effective. A lot of times it’s very difficult to get that “perfect balance” between user friendliness and appearance. I must say you have done a superb job with this. In addition, the blog loads extremely quick for me on Chrome. Exceptional Blog!
Thanks very much. Kevin
First of all I would like to say terrific blog! I had a quick question that I’d like to ask ifyou don’t mind. I was interested to know how you center yourself and clear your mind before writing.I have had trouble clearing my thoughts in gettingmy ideas out. I do take pleasure in writing however it just seems likethe first 10 to 15 minutes are lost just trying to figureout how to begin. Any ideas or hints? Appreciate it!
Ten or fifteen minutes? It usually takes me three hours. 🙂 A writer friend told me long ago that the secret to getting started is to keep your fingers moving. Kevin
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point.You clearly know what youre talking about, why waste your intelligenceon just posting videos to your weblog when you could be giving us something informative toread?
I know this if off topic but I’m looking into starting my own blog and was wondering what all is required to get set up? I’m assuming having a blog like yours would cost a pretty penny? I’m not very web smart so I’m not 100 certain. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Email me at kevinkittredge@yahoo.com and I’ll be happy to talk about it. But I prefer to keep comments here content specific.
Hey there just wanted to give you a brief heads up and let you know a few of the images aren’t loading properly. I’m not sure why but I think its a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different web browsers and both show the same outcome.|
Thank you. It should work now.
Nice site and alot of great information, thank you!
Thanks to all. Kevin
I got what you mean , regards for posting.Woh I am delighted to find this website through google.
I really liked your blog.Really thank you! Great.
Thank you for your post, and i suppose it helps me a lot.
You shared so much information! I really appreciate you sharing it!” “I always enjoy reading your posts and blogs, joker stash.
Only you can do this so perfectly, my friend. briansclub
It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d certainly donate to this brilliant blog! I suppose for now I’ll settle for book-marking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to fresh updates and will talk about this blog with my Facebook group. Chat soon!
Thanks so much for reading. Kevin
I like this site so much, bookmarked.
Thanks, I’m glad you like it. Kevin
Wow, fantastic blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? you make blogging look easy. The overall look of your website is fantastic, let alone the content!
Thanks. I’ve been blogging since 2016.
Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up and let you know a few of the pictures aren’t loading correctly. I’m not sure why but I think its a linking issue. I’ve tried it in two different browsers and both show the same outcome.
Thanks, I’ll check it out…Kevin
Appreciate you sharing, great blog post.Really looking forward to read more.
When I originally commented I clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and now every time a comment is added I get four emails with the same comment. Is there any means you may remove me from that service? Thanks!
You and I have the same problem, my friend. Remove yourself if you can. I try to eliminate scam and junk emails. I do the best I can. Kevin
Hello there! Would you mind if I share your blog with my twitter group? There’s a lot of people that I think would really enjoy your content. Please let me know. Thank you
You can share a link or the URL, of course. Thanks very much.
Kevin
Kevinkittredge.org
Good web site! I really love how it is simple on my eyes and the data are well written. I’m wondering how I could be notified whenever a new post has been made. I have subscribed to your RSS which must do the trick! Have a nice day!
Thank you. Yes, anyone can get email notifications. You can opt in either on my main page or my blog page by scrolling to the very bottom and checking the box. Kevin
This design is steller! You definitely know how to keep a reader entertained. Between your wit and your videos, I was almost moved to start my own blog (well, almost…HaHa!) Great job. I really loved what you had to say, and more than that, how you presented it. Too cool!
Hey there! I’ve been reading your website for a long time now and finally got the bravery to go ahead and give you a shout out from Kingwood Texas! Just wanted to mention keep up the fantastic job!
Thank you very much. Kevin
Hmm is anyone else experiencing problems with the images on this blog loading? I’m trying to figure out if its a problem on my end or if it’s the blog. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Hi. I entered my website directly by Googling instead of signing in and had no trouble seeing the images. Let me know if the trouble persists. To you and everyone else using hotmail email addresses, my own hotmail email address no longer works and I understand that hotmail has now become outlook.com. I can only assume that all these hotmail addresses are bogus. I have tried responding to one or two directly and they came back as invalid. If you want a personal response, please give me a valid email address or message me directly at kevinkittredge@yahoo.com. I’m always happy to talk. Thanks. Kevin.
Amazing blog! Is your theme custom made or did you download it from somewhere? A design like yours with a few simple tweeks would really make my blog stand out. Please let me know where you got your design. Many thanks
Please see my earlier responses and email me if you like. Kevin
Hello there! I could have sworn I’ve been to this blog before but after browsing through some of the post I realized it’s new to me. Anyways, I’m definitely delighted I found it and I’ll be bookmarking and checking back often!
Wonderful blog! Do you have any recommendations for aspiring writers? I’m planning to start my own website soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you suggest starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many choices out there that I’m totally confused .. Any suggestions? Kudos!
Thank you! All I know is WordPress, which I use. To you and anyone else who has questions about my website or blogging: please email me at kevinkittredge@yahoo.com. I would like to keep these comments content specific, but I’m happy to talk via email. Write “Kevin’s blog question” in the header. Thanks, Kevin
Hi this is kind of of off topic but I was wanting to know if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding know-how so I wanted to get guidance from someone with experience. Any help would be enormously appreciated!
I don’t know anything about coding, so we’re in the same boat.
Hmm it seems like your site ate my first comment (it was super long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I had written and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog. I as well am an aspiring blog blogger but I’m still new to everything. Do you have any recommendations for rookie blog writers? I’d definitely appreciate it.
Hi. I’m glad you like the blog. If you want to talk about blogging please email me at kevinkittredge@yahoo.com. Thanks, Kevin
I have been checking out many of your posts and i must say clever stuff. I will surely bookmark your website.
Hello There. I discovered your blog using msn. This is a very well written article. I will be sure to bookmark it and come back to learn more of your helpful info. Thank you for the post. I will certainly return.
Greetings! I’ve been following your weblog for a while now and finally got the courage to go ahead and give you a shout out from Kingwood Texas! Just wanted to mention keep up the great work!
Thank you very much. Kevin
Fantastic blog! Do you have any suggestions for aspiring writers? I’m planning to start my own website soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you propose starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are so many choices out there that I’m totally overwhelmed .. Any suggestions? Many thanks!
I use WordPress. Lots of people do. Good luck!
Hello there! This is my 1st comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and say I genuinely enjoy reading through your blog posts. Can you recommend any other blogs/websites/forums that cover the same topics? Thanks a ton!
Thanks. I don’t know much about blogs other than my own. I’m sure there are lots of good ones out there.
I have not checked in here for some time since I thought it was getting boring, but the last few posts are great quality so I guess I抣l add you back to my everyday bloglist. You deserve it my friend 🙂
Thanks. Kevin
Hey! Do you know if they make any plugins to protect against hackers? I’m kinda paranoid about losing everything I’ve worked hard on. Any suggestions?
I don’t know. You might back it up if you’re worried.
Hey! I’m at work surfing around your blog from my new apple iphone! Just wanted to say I love reading through your blog and look forward to all your posts! Keep up the superb work!
Thank you very much. Kevin
I am extremely impressed with your writing skills as well as with the layout on your weblog. Is this a paid theme or did you modify it yourself? Anyway keep up the excellent quality writing, it抯 rare to see a nice blog like this one today..
Thanks. Please see below.
Hello there, I found your site via Google while searching for a related topic, your web site came up, it looks great. I have bookmarked it in my google bookmarks.
Thanks.
Howdy would you mind stating which blog platform you’re using? I’m going to start my own blog in the near future but I’m having a hard time selecting between BlogEngine/Wordpress/B2evolution and Drupal. The reason I ask is because your design seems different then most blogs and I’m looking for something unique. P.S My apologies for being off-topic but I had to ask!
I used WordPress.com. Good luck with your blog. Kevin
I really like it when people get together and share ideas. Great blog, keep it up!
You are a great writer!
Bless your heart. 🙂 Thanks for reading.
I really like your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you make this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you? Plz answer back as I’m looking to design my own blog and would like to know where u got this from. appreciate it
I designed it using WordPress.com. The software is free and user friendly. Good luck!