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Circles of time

– In which Dorn’s dreams come true.

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udiobooks made it possible to commute all the way to Silver Spring and stay sane. The best of them can be engrossing, sometimes dangerously so. I was listening to A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, read by the author (or by his computer-generated voice), and at one point I got so caught up in the narrative that I ran off the road. I was on the beltway at the time, so this could have ended badly! Luckily it didn’t, and I righted myself and continued home.

It wasn’t just me, it was the book. Kathleen told me that she was listening to the same audiobook on the way to her teaching job, and she was concentrating on it so hard that she ran off the road (again, luckily, with no permanent consequences).

Stephen Hawking suggested in his book that if you allow for the possibility of imaginary time (time measured in imaginary numbers), our universe’s entire history can be described as a higher-dimension sphere with no endpoints, rather than a time “line”. (Apologies for my crude paraphrasing. His concepts are hard for me to describe or even understand, especially while navigating a car at 60 miles per hour.) 

The book was mostly beyond me, but it left me with a sense of wonder at the ways of the universe and the human mind. What if time wasn’t an arrow with a beginning and an end, but a circle? 

*       *       *

I’ve had my own direct experiences with imaginary time, and I can confirm that it can travel in a circle. Many of you, I suspect, have experienced time circles of your own, and it’s got little to do with physics or metaphysics.

I’ll describe two time circles, one with a diameter of about 40 years, and one of about 20 years. 

I entered the first time circle when I was about six or seven years old, so it was 1960 or 1961. I had recently learned about how years work, and someone told me about the end of the century coming in about 40 years, when the odometer would click over from year 1999 to year 2000. I was fascinated by the idea, and I tried to imagine what that would be like. I tried to imagine what I would be like. I would be 45 or 46 years old, so a grownup, like my teacher or my parents. Maybe I’d be a parent myself. I might wear a suit and tie and have a crew cut and wear glasses. I tried to picture what I might look like, and imagine how I would feel, and “be”, as an adult. This imagination game went on for several days, until my mind was distracted by some new thought, and eventually I forgot about it. 

My life progressed, in ways both predictable and suprising, and eventually I found myself in the year 2000. The memory of the young me picturing his 46-year-old self came pouring back. I pictured myself at six, and I remembered what it was like to be six, picturing me at 46. 

My memory of the young me was spotty, and much of what I had imagined back then didn’t come to pass (no crew cut!). So neither old me nor young me was too spot on about what the other was like, but after 40 years I was still as much me as I was back then, despite the missed predictions and lost memories. I felt as if a vast circuit had been completed, and I had come back to where I started. I mentally smiled at my young self and wished him well on his future, as he congratulated me on my past. (Regular readers will know I can be smug. This started, apparently, at quite a young age.)

*       *       *

The second time circle started about 20 years ago. I was transitioning jobs, and had found what seemed like a good opportunity with the Navy out in Port Hueneme, California, when I got a call from my daughter. “Guess what Dad, I’m pregnant!” She and her husband were living in northern Virginia, so the prospect of moving anywhere away from the mid-Atlantic area immediately lost its allure. I had a daydream that was startling (for me) for its power and clarity. Some day, I imagined, I’d be leaning on the railing of the deck at my house with my 20-year-old grandson as the sun went down, and we’d be drinking some beers and yakking about the kind of stuff families yakked about–cars, girls, jobs, whatever. 

Unlike the memory from my first time circle, this one stayed near the surface, and every now and then I’d take it out and savor it. Our daughter had a boy, who was bright, loving and happy. At about three years old, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. We all knew that from then on, his life would take different turns than it otherwise would have, and I quietly stored my daydream away as something that might have been. 

With the love and support of his parents, he grew up a good person, mostly healthy and mostly happy, as we hope all children will be. He sees the world differently than I do, but as I watched him mature, I saw the universal human condition as he learned who he was and how he fit in the world, and in all his struggles and triumphs. 

He’s about twenty now, and earlier this year he had come over to spend a few days with us and help out with some house cleaning chores. It was hard work, but the days were pleasant and the evenings watching the sunset light up the other shore of the Chesapeake Bay were magical. He had developed an intense interest in automobiles and machinery, and we were on the deck relaxing and discussing the pros and cons of new and older engine models, and my daydream came bursting into my consciousness! We were drinking sodas, not beers (had I thought about it when creating the daydream, I would have realized that even back then the drinking age was 21), but in every important way, this was the closure of that mental circuit I had created twenty years earlier. I nearly cried. 

The second time circle started shortly before the first one had completed, and I like to think of them as forming two links in a time “chain” that describes my life. I like this idea because it implies that I’m now in a third time circle, and someday I will be surprised and delighted to be brought back to something from my past. I think about the future like everyone does, I guess, and I don’t have any idea which of my forward thoughts might be the basis for the next link in my time chain, but just knowing the circle might be forming around me even now makes the present a little lighter, and the future a little more worth reaching for.

Thanks for listening, from me and from younger me.

Dorn
5 October 2019, 1999, and 1960

Herbivore log

– In which Dorn records his switch to an extra-taurustrial diet.

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ERBIVORE LOG.

Day 1 (Oct 1). Twenty-four hours into my eat-no-cow pledge (made here), still no irrational meat cravings, which I worried might happen. I tried to remember the rules of vegetarianism from 40 years ago. Is “protein complementarity” still a thing? (Google says no.) What’s good for protein? Beans, rice, hummus, uh, quinoa? What’s easy enough to make that I’ll actually do it?

And what about the beef already in the freezer—is it out of bounds? The environmental damage is already done. Still, best not to eat it if somebody else will, to keep to the spirit of the rule. If no one else will eat it (e.g., the chili), I probably should, so the cow’s (and the rainforest’s) sacrifice isn’t in vain.

What about other kinds of meats? The promise was only for cow meat (mainly ’cause we’re getting into chicken soup season). I nibbled some bacon from a recipe Kathleen was making. That’s allowed, right? A pig is not a cow. Pigs and chickens don’t burn down rainforests, they just pollute and kill the Chesapeake Bay. And I can’t be expected to solve both problems single-handedly!

Supper: red beans and rice.

Day 2 (Oct 2). Not craving meat yet, but thinking a lot about food. I realize I’m mentally approaching this like I approach being on a diet, which experience has shown does not work in the long run.

I need to develop a new mindset. I should be approaching this as a cooking challenge. I like cooking, and I like trying out new recipes. The days when I didn’t have enough time or energy after work to prepare anything complex are long gone. So the main reason I couldn’t sustain my youthful vegetarianism (or at least the main reason I admitted to myself) is also long gone. The biggest thing holding me back now is probably just inertia. The Post reported on squid salads and armenian chicken meatballs today—I gotta get me some recipes!

Supper: shrimp salad.

Day 3 (Oct 3). An article in the Washington Post today reported a drop in Amazon rainforest fires. My cow-free diet is working! More likely, the press attention of the fires that led to my diet is also working in more direct ways. Either way, good news.

Supper: macaroni & lentils.

Day 4 (Oct 4). It’s Friday, so my body is craving movie popcorn! I’m not ready for The Joker—the murderous white sociopath meme feels too close to home these days. And we already saw Ad Astra (spoiler alert: the Brad Pitt character talks about his feelings for three billion miles).

The Washington Post online had a timely article, “Impossible vs. Beyond: We tested cook-at-home versions to see who makes a better vegan burger”.

They felt that the Impossible Burger was the best of what they tested, and good enough to be more than just the “least bad” of the contestants. I’ll store that info, but right now I’m too busy experimenting with real food ingredients. I’ll turn to fake meats when I’m tired of plant-based plants.

Supper: chicken mushroom soup.

Day 5 (Oct 5). Today was my first real challenge. Cleaning out the freezer, we found a flank steak begging to be charred rare on the grill for breakfast, with sides of broccoli and jacket potatoes cooked just right. Man that looks good!

Stay strong, homie! I let my mind drift back to my college days, where I’d learned my iron discipline. Sunday night was always steak night, but what I liked best about it were the baked potatoes, covered with melted butter and sour cream. That’s roughing it. I concentrated on my baked potato, which was actually really good, though we didn’t have any sour cream. We’d baked it British style for about 3 hours to get that crispy outside and soft inside.

And maybe I cut up the broccoli on the cutting board. And maybe the broccoli touched a little of the flank steak juice there. By accident. But I held firm!

Supper: veggies, and mac & cheese.

Day 6 (Oct 6). This showed up in my Facebook feed today:

Man, that Zuckerberg knows your every thought, doesn’t he? Nothing else interesting meat-wise happened today.

Supper: salmon.

Day 7 (Oct 7). Weekly grocery shopping. Got some beef (for others), picked up some commercial veggie-burgers (but nothing that claimed to be imitation meat).

Nothing remarkable happened today, even by my low standards for what’s worth remarking on. Maybe this a-bovine thing has already settled into my new normal. This’ll be my last log entry until something interesting happens (if ever).

Supper: a Field-burger™.

Thanks for your patience. Next post, something interesting.
Dorn
10/8/2019

Take a chance—dance!

– In which Dorn and Kathleen face the music.

athleen and I caught that 1937 Fred Aistaire/Ginger Rogers classic Shall We Dance Sunday morning, on one of those oldies channels that fill cable these days (more evidence that cable is a dying business, catering mainly to people who have been watching it so long that it’s too much trouble to change). We caught it at the very end, at the odd number with dozens of Ginger Rogerses dancing with Fred to the title song (this number:)

Kathleen reminded me that we used to dance, and suggested I write a blog post about those days.

It’s true. We were never much good, solely because I was never any good (Kathleen was a natural, but I was always a geeky stiff Scandinavian). Kathleen would sometimes try to teach me to dance better, but her lessons always seemed to involve exhorting me to “just feel the music”. (This was quite beyond me, but I got her back—once when she wanted me to teach her some aspect of calculus, I told her she just needed to “feel the math”. Ha!)

When the County offered ballroom dance lessons, we signed up for them. They were taught by an amazing old character, Neil Valiant, a ballroom dancer from the Old School. He told us he was the man who brought the Salsa to the US from Cuba in the forties. He claimed he could teach anyone to dance, and he was right. Under his tutelage, he even taught me to dance (poorly) the Foxtrot, Cha-cha, Waltz, Samba, and my personal favorite, the Tango! I was still Scandinavian (and hence wooden), but at least I knew the steps.

Luckily, as Kathleen pointed out, you don’t have to dance well to enjoy dancing. We would sometimes dance in the aisles at the grocery store, when the muzac playing over the store PA system was right. It was fun and romantic, and when our young daughters were with us, it had the additional positive effect of mortifying them.

When we decided to have a re-wedding, we invited Neil to be the reception entertainment: he brought his collection of ballroom oldies, and after he performed some of his teaching magic on the guests, we all danced to them. Kathleen and I kicked it off with a Tango first dance. We all had a lot of fun and it worked out great.

We had our own Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers experience at a swanky hotel in Switzerland. We were doing a budget-tour of Europe tacked onto a business trip to a conference in Germany. We decided that at one stop, we would splurge and stay at a multi-star hotel, under the shadow of the Matterhorn in San Moritz. It was quite swanky (for us) and even a bit intimidating—I remember the table settings having more utensils than I had ever eaten with before, and wondering the purposes of the extras.

But when they started piping in the music, we plucked up our courage and waltzed through the hallways, up the grand stairs, and out onto the balcony. The setting could have been one from those Fred Astaire high-society dance fantasy movies, except it was in color.

We weren’t magically transformed into Fred and Ginger, but we didn’t embarrass ourselves either, and when other dinner guests there saw us dancing, although they didn’t rise and join us, they did watch and smile. We were content.

My Fred Astaire (or maybe Sean Spicer, if I’m honest) moment was many years ago now (we were the youngsters at the hotel, back then), but it still warms my heart. Maybe more than ever, as my mis-steps fade from my memory and only the courage and the triumph of the dance remain. Thank you, Kathleen.

And thank you!
Dorn
10/7/2019

Our House

In which Lona reminisces about building a house…

The inktober (where you draw and post something in ink every day of October) prompt for today was “build”, which makes me think about the biggest building project I ever had: my house. It didn’t start out as a personal building project back in 1977. My husband, Gordon, and I picked out a pretty modest plan from a home design book, ordered the plans, and took them to a contractor. He wanted $60,000 to build it, which was a fortune to us, so we went back to the drawing board, literally. The problem with the plans we had was that I didn’t know how to build it so our new course of action was to design something so simple we could build it ourselves. In this case, the government was there to help with a $1.25 book from USDA called Low-Cost Wood Homes for Rural America – Construction Manual. Everything we needed to know was in the book! Following the instructions in the book I sketched out a little house, only 20’ x 24’, before ‘tiny houses’ were even a cool thing. A friend of ours who worked in drafting made official looking copies of the plan so we could get a building permit. We marked out the house corners on our lot with four posts and string and had some foundations poured and some block laid by a local brick layer. We went down to Bryans Road Building and Supply and old man Lund was willing to give us a line of credit because Gordon’s mother had gone to school with him back in the 1920’s. The supplies all came in one truckload. To start building, we enlisted our friend, John Greene, who had been working framing houses, who said he could do ours but he needed $6.00 an hour and we had to hire an assistant, too. We decided to save money by me being the assistant. Gordon wasn’t eligible because he had to keep working to bring home the bacon, so to speak. Luckily my mother-in-law was a very willing and free babysitter to our one year old. Contrary to what one might think, the framing of a house goes up pretty easily and this was done in a couple of weeks. We made one major change when we realized that we could have an attic bedroom just by changing the pitch of the roof. We decided to just do it and hope the building inspector wouldn’t give us a hard time. After that I remember putting in insulation, building cabinets, putting down tile on the floor, and doing the wiring even though it was Gordon, not me, who knew enough to pass the test that you need to pass if you want to do your own wiring. It sounds crazy, but by this time we were seriously into saving money, so I even made our own doors and windows. We hired and fired a drywall guy that didn’t seem to know what he was doing. My sister-in-law helped me with some drywall and showed me how to do it. The worst plumbers in the world tried to put in the bathroom sink by attaching it just to drywall and they also drilled a huge hole to run pipe right through our main supporting beam and they forgot to slope the sewer line! I failed the electrical inspection the first time and had to redo things in a way Gordon said was a worse way to do it – but by this time I was more interested in listening to the inspector than Gordon so I would pass. My brother helped us with siding and painting the outside. (I don’t want to forget that other friends and family had been helping all along! Thanks!) At some point all the tasks seemed interminable, so our mantra became, “it’s just a shack”, which is what really helped us finally call it finished. After some inspection ups and downs, we got an occupancy permit and chased the squirrels out and moved in. (Never mind that some stuff like the baseboards would take another 35 years to finish.) I believe we had spent around $20,000.

That was forty years ago. Over the years we’ve added on, built decks, replaced most of my crummy windows and doors, put in central heat, re-roofed and even added some closets which were egregiously missing initially. In the end, I believe the main qualities that helped us complete this project were perseverance and a certain lowering of standards. It may not be the fanciest house, but after all the work that went into it, it has always felt like ‘home’.

Cold turkey (mmm, turkey!)

– In which Dorn battles with his inner carnivore.

S

unday dinner last week was a grilled ribeye steak, cooked just right—starting to char on the outside, still pink and dripping on the inside. It was SO GOOD. It’s really a psychological superfood, like chocolate! It is for me anyway. 

The great thing about steak, or meat in general, is you don’t have to work at it to come out with a delicious meal. It’s tasty seared, sauted, spitted, stewed, fried, roasted or even raw. And when it’s cooked up right, it’s just out of this world! 

Back when Kathleen and I were first married, long before you were born, I was a vegetarian for a while. I’d learned a little about ecosystem dynamics in college, including the rule of 10s: 100 lbs of grass = 10 lbs of herbivore (cow) = 1 pound of carnivore (me). Even back in the seventies, it was simple math that the more population we had, the less sustainable was the idea of eating meat.

My vege-plan soon collapsed—I found it was just too hard making tasty nutritious meatless meals, and meat was so easy. When a cow or pig seemed almost designed do the work of turning vegetables into a delicious meal for me, why should I slave away at trying to make a meal out of soybeans and lentils? I shouldn’t! So I’ve been living off the metabolic labors of other animals pretty much all of my adult life.

Every now and then I get a twinge of guilt. The latest one was triggered by a joke/rant by Bill Maher, who noted that the Amazon rainforest was being burned down by cattle ranchers to make room for hamburgers. My first thought was how awful it was that they would destroy the rainforest. My second was how awful it was anyone would support cattle ranchers doing that, by buying their meat. But surely that’s not me! I don’t eat so much meat that my habits would have any effect on South American cattle economics or rainforest survivability! Do I?

I checked it out. From quora.com, I found that a steer might yield the equivalent of 1800 hamburgers. 

(Irrelevant side note: When I googled “how many burgers are in a cow?”, another hit also came up, the answer to “how many cows are in a burger?”. It varies with the processing methods used, but McDonalds says that each of its burgers could have the meat of maybe 100 different cows in it. [*]

If I eat 360 burgers a year—I don’t (I don’t think!), but it keeps the math simple—that amounts to about 20% of a cow’s meat. Each cow needs about 35 acres of grassland[*], so my appetite for meat needs about 7 acres of grassland to satisfy. 

Every acre of the Amazon rainforest can absorb about 1.3 tons of CO2 annually[*], so if the grassland used to raise my hamburgers was created by destroying rainforest, it resulted in about 10 extra tons of CO2 a year in the atmosphere.

Satellite image of burning rainforest
Satellite image of South American rainforest fires

This is twice the carbon footprint I produced by commuting to work[*], which was already high because I chose to live 75 miles south of my job (though I mitigated my choice by telecommuting and using public transportation). 

I told myself that I had to commute because I had to work, but I can’t claim that I have to eat meat! I’m pretty much an omnivore, and I pretty much like everything I eat. 

Ironically, almost the only thing in my entire 65 years that tasted so bad to me that I had to take it out of my mouth rather than swallow it, was one of the early commercial plant-based meat substitutes (a vegetarian hot dog) that came on the market maybe 40 years ago, and that I tried out of curiosity. 

(Irrelevant side note: The only other time I ever had to do this was when I tried to eat “Phoenix feet” I had ordered from the greasy-spoon Dim Sum restaurant on New Hampshire Avenue near where I used to work.)

But nowadays, with plant-based “Beyond beef” and “Impossible burgers”, I don’t even have to give up the taste of meat. I’ve tried the impossible burger at restaurants, and it really tastes like meat. Although it didn’t really taste like good meat. I got it at a restaurant that was known for its hamburgers, but this one tasted more like meat loaf. Passable meat loaf, to be sure, but it wasn’t a match for a greasy, umamic, carcinogenic, char-broiled burger!

Even so, the bottom line is that it is harder and harder for me to excuse my failure to do my part for the planet by giving up, or at least cutting back on, the meat in my diet. It’s not even a sacrifice, not really, just an inconvenience that comes with any lifestyle change. 

I’ve heard that if you want to successfully change the way you eat, you must set yourself simple absolute rules and follow them absolutely. “No more french fries, ever” might be a successful rule, but “No fries except on special occasions”, or “Always leave about half the fries on the plate” are almost certain recipes for backsliding into old habits. 

But I’m not ready to say “No more meat!”, that’s too absolute. I can’t think of any clever argument to justify this reluctance, I just don’t want to give up this guilty pleasure completely.

So here’s what I’ve decided to do: 

No more cow meat until Thanksgiving. Then I’ll take stock (ha ha, stock, get it?), see how I’m doing, and decide where to go next. Plus to make cheating less attractive, I’ll report how I did in a post so everyone will know my lapses, or lack thereof. 

Thanksgiving is about two months away, so by my crude calculations this commitment will reduce my carbon footprint by about ⅙ of ten tons, or 1.7 tons of carbon dioxide. We’ll see.

*   *   *

This was a difficult post to write. I first decided I should do something about my environmentally irresponsible carnivorous ways, and then I decided that I might be able to write a good blog post about it. But then (over a bowl of chili con carne) I weakened, and thought maybe I wasn’t ready to make such a big lifestyle change. Maybe I better forget the whole thing, even though I already had an outline of the post in my head. 

I reached my lowest point when I thought, maybe I could not drop the meat from my diet at all, and just write about my internal struggles with the concept of going meatless. I could score some karmic points by just thinking through the process honestly, and not making excuses when I failed to muster the strength to change. I pretty much had no shame by then. 

But as I wrote, I was forced to think through the implications of my diet, and my reasons for not wanting to do the right thing. The implications were undeniable (even if the math was sloppy), and my reasons were indefensible. So by the time I was done, I decided I would do my best to conquer my weaker, hungrier self. 

The writing was a good experience for me. So far at this blogging business, I’ve been writing about something I had done, but this time, it felt like instead I was doing something I had written about. It made the experience more powerful for me, and I think it—and the promised followup post—might increase my chances of being able to make a permanent change for the better. 

Thanks as always for listening. If my posts are getting too self-absorbed or navel-gazey for you, please let me know in a comment. 

Dorn
9/30/2019