speaking of lumbering apes

Film: Eadweard Muybridge
There’s a brief piece in Science this week about bouncy legs -- how the calculus predicts that locomotion on stiff legs is most efficient and yet all of us -- and small critters especially -- bounce about when we move.

A new computer model nails the reason why:

Integrative physiologist Monica Daley of the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in Hatfield, U.K., had observed how adeptly the guinea fowl, an African bird known for its running skill, negotiated sudden drops and other obstacles. She wondered how the shape of an animal's body and the nature of the terrain -- details left out of earlier simulations because they're difficult to model -- would alter the models' predictions.

So she and RVC colleague James Usherwood devised a computer model that didn't sidestep the complexities of animal motion. Instead of attaching legs to an idealized point with a certain mass, the new model linked them to a bouncing body -- the seesawing guts and other tissue an animal carries as it moves -- and set them on an uneven course.

As Daley expected, the less-idealized runners fared better on compliant legs. The spring in their step offset the bounce of their bodies, resulting in a smaller energy cost. "That's interesting and quite novel," says biomechanist Manoj Srinivasan of OhioStateUniversity in Columbus, who was not involved with the research. [1]

This is a lovely nod to the impact of terrain on our evolutionary development and only adds fuel to my long simmering theory that we are born and made and shaped by place; that each of us carries our own terroir and inherits some from those who came before us.

That, like wine, we are seasoned by our soil.

It also reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad when I was small and we were navigating the precarious paths of Mesa Verde. I was terrified. “Walk like an Indian,” he told me. “Bounce a little bit.”

I don’t know where he received this intelligence (it well could have been while he was rambling through the desert with Native American friends in search of peyote buds; it may have come to him after they were consumed; it was probably from the pages of a book) but it turns out it works. I deployed it at Mesa Verde -- with success -- and I've found whenever I’m uncertain about my footing on rough trails that exaggerating the spring in my step gets me through the worst of it (with some adjustments in the presence of scree).

Works on mountain bikes, too.

It’s counter intuitive, because when fear settles in while walking the cliff’s edge the instinct is to go rigid and inch your way along in terror. But it's also old news, isn't it: like the drunk who emerges unscathed from the crash with the upright toppled and dying around him, or the reed that bends in the wind.

It's the pliable who survive.


[1] Gisela Telis, Why Bouncy Legs Work Better, Science 23 March 2010

p.s. the apes are still lumbering for a little while longer yet »

road rat

road rat
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

In my memory our VW camper was vast and magical. It smelled of vinyl and metal window screens and orange juice in a carton that my mother pulled from the small fridge behind the front seats. The yellow plaid curtains lifted on the hot breezes of summer and I longed to sleep in the popup bunk that my sister claimed by right of primogeniture.

I can’t recall if I ever actually sat on the thin foam of her little cubbyhole that rose over the roof of the bus like a crow’s nest peering out over strange seas; I remember only that she meted out peeks to me as I stood on my tiptoes, all curiosity and tense tendons, before she decided that was enough I had to go now, to play elsewhere with my Barbie in the strange wilderness where we had dropped anchor, to load her long hair and legs and her fashion sunglasses into her red convertible and dream of racing along the open road.

temporary markers

This is where Corinne is buried. She was my grandmother’s older sister, a marvel on the violin, who attended the Cornish School of Arts (just down the road from where she lays now) on scholarship (her family was not the sort that was able to afford tuition).

She died when she was 8 years old of meningitis. Her family buried her in the Spring rain of 1925. My grandmother was 7 when she stood beside her sister’s grave.

Seven years later they buried Ingebor, my grandmother’s grandmother, at the far opposite edge of Lakeview Cemetery. (Only the rich have the luxury of family plots.) There as here the ground is thick with paupers under pauper’s stones, all of them invisible. Rough cinder blocks with the names and dates of death roughly stamped in them. The birth is not noted, and if you want to see the stone at all you need a plot map and a trowel or you ask the nice man at the office to bring out a shovel. This is because the headstones of the poor are not maintained on the regular maintenance rounds and the sod soon reclaims them.

I can verify that there are dozen stones that run below those two large slabs from here all the way to the fence that edges the property close by. I can verify this because I dug them all up one wet Spring day with my trowel. My grandmother sat nearby offering color commentary, darkly wicked and witty, words I thought I could never possibly forget; words I wish I had written down because, of course, I’ve forgotten them all.

But not how she made me laugh, and how she sat there watching me work, a far away sadness in her eyes beneath the laughter; a faint hope that we would find what we were looking for; a set jaw that was prepared for disappointment.

I wish I could describe the light on her face when we finally found the stone.

This is where I asked them to lay the new stone this Summer, as Grama lay dying across town. The man at the office (his last name was very Guys and Dolls -- something like Detroit) was a bit baffled by the request as he ran the calculations; frustrated that the plots were far distant from one another (they wouldn’t be able to share a stone); graciously offering to run the numbers for children’s headstones (they’re smaller, less expensive); pointing me to the standard issue granite.

Still, as he punched the numbers into his 10-key and gave me the result he said: “There it is. I mean: that’s a trip.”

He didn’t mean a groovy trip. He meant: you could take that money and go to Hawaii.

The stones were installed within a month’s time, and I stopped by to see them when I was in Seattle over this last weekend. They’re simple: I asked that they be carved verbatim to their temporary markers. I requested no ornament.

I simply wanted them to be seen.




p.s. The original markers? I had them shipped home. They’re in my backyard, under the big bluestem grasses.


Update: I posted an annotated map identifying Ingebor and Corinne's plots, along with a few others »

daddy walked in darkness

Photo: Me & my daddy on a family camping trip in Vermont. I was probably three.

The mother of my high school boyfriend was the first person to call me a nomad. J told me about it later, saying she remarked it was a wonder I was so normal, seeing how I lead such a nomadic life. I was a high school senior then, and I had attended twelve different schools, only a small fraction of which were in the same school district.

We were the renters on the block; the kids who were always a little unkempt. I learned in awkward and sometimes embarrassing ways that we were different from the kids who rooted long and hard in a single place and all knew each other from Kindergarten; learned in bright hot flashes that we were the transient ones.

But being the new kid in many lonely lunchrooms gained me the skill of knowing always how to be anywhere, easily. How to make friends; how to be the first to say hello. I suspect it’s also the root cause of my persistent solitude and my wandering. Never having a place to settle and be easy in your skin means it’s best to keep moving.

I know now that our curious habits were my father's doing. At the time I assumed no agency -- that was just how things were. Always. Predictably. Now that I’m grown I have a heart full of theories about why we were on the move so much, but this post isn’t about what was missing, or about what gnawed through the electrical lines in the dark; this post is about what made it all okay somehow.

I suspect the music had something to do with it; somehow managed to anchor it all, somehow produced in all four of us kids a solid center to start from and make our way in the world with some kind of certainty that what we were doing was all right.

The music was always there, and the music was always home. It was there when friends gathered late around the table, or when my dad let us come with him to the studio. It was there when he picked up his guitar, whether an emotional storm had just blown through the house and throats ached from the yelling, or we were just floating collectively on a the sweet tide of Sunday morning.

I still feel it every time my daddy picks up his guitar and plays. Felt it when he strummed just a few fragments over Christmas; felt it when he played for the first time after his coma, after he came back from the dead, when he was home at last and I handed him a rental six-string on the doctor’s prescription, who said it would help the neurons destroyed in the accident wire back up again.

There is something inarticulate in a tune, when it's shared and when it's authentic, that says: it’s okay to search this thing out, to figure out for your own self what it all means. When the music's playing there's an unspoken invitation to ride it, it’s yours; and there's an unspoken understanding that the ones playing with you will keep you company, ride right alongside, and find their own measure.

Where everything is all right.

A note about the clip: My dad recorded this a long time back when he was recording and promoting and producing for Jerden Records in Seattle. It's shown up on a couple of compilation CDs in recent years, but it's impossible to find a shareable clip online, so I patched together this brief video with Apple's iMovie program. I'm still a newbie at the app -- I prefer Adobe Premiere but my PC hard drive combusted and there's no getting at my installation -- so regrettably, until I can figure out how to override the time constraints, all I can offer you is a one minute clip of a three minute track. Of my daddy. Walking in darkness. (It's an old blues cover -- I'll see if I can hit him up for more info about the song's history and the recording itself.)

p.s. My grama, my father's mother, hated this song -- in a what-will-the-neighbors-think kind of way.

good for you and me

Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts

Why I want an i-pod touch

Although I am only ten, I want an i-pod touch. Here are 3 main reasons I should get an i-pod touch for Christmas. I really want to get one.

The first reason why I would like an i-pod touch is because if I get one now, I won’t need any other i-pods. K has a shuffle and a nano and barely uses them. The i-pod touch can last years without needing a new i-pod to keep you entertained. I really wish you would consider getting me the i-pod that will last a lifetime.

The next reason I would like an i-pod touch is because how much it can do. This amazing i-pod has music, free games, and much more. I will always get free games never a game you have to pay for. Just a regular i-pod can’t beat an i-pod touch. Not even 2 of them are as amazing as an i-pod touch. And dad, If I got an i-pod touch, I wouldn’t be asking to play your i phone.

The last reason why you should consider getting me an i-pod touch is well, just listen. Think, you bought K 2 i-pods and if you bought us all 2 i-pods it would be like this. Why not just buy 1 i-pod that for each of them that they will use a lot and not have an i-pod that they don’t use sitting around the house, make that 2 because neither one of those i-pods are as good as an i-pod touch. Please please please get me an i-pod touch.

These are 3 main reasons why I want to get an i-pod touch; they are good for you and me. Please consider getting me one, and if you just don’t want to get me like you did with my DS, you can get gift cards but I would really really like an i-pod touch.

PS. Sydney and Natalie both have an i-pod touch

A letter from my niece, M, to her father, posted here with both her consent and her dad's.

I was mostly impressed with the three-point essay construction.

what makes for a best day ever?

Converging on Washington D.C. to have lunch with your big sister and your little brother and fill your lungs with oxygen-rich big gulps of laughter pretty much does the trick.

And okay, to D's point, maybe not the best day ever; but almost definitely the best Wednesday ever. Rounded out nicely by dinner with an old friend and a bliss-filled few hours at the Phillips Collection, on top of the whole National Geographic thing.

Plus the kindly Kimpton upgrade to a freakin' suite at the Hotel Helix (where this shot was taken) didn't hurt.

(Love you guys.)

me & my bompa

Getting baptized.
And loved.

I've never seen this shot before -- my little brother (right. too old to be little. but he's still my little brother.) just posted it to Facebook.

See that grin on my Bompa's face? That's how you know you're with family.

Happy Birthday to me.

you are the everything

My Grama and my Dad.
I'm beginning to understand a little better how my brain reacts to really bad news. It scrambles around in the dark for a fingerhold that feels like normal and it plots a course that is familiar and reassures itself that this changes nothing; that life is as it was.

Night passes and morning comes, like it did last night, like it did this morning, after I received word of Grama’s fall and stroke and internal and external head injuries, and the thing that felt so much like logic the day before -- that certainly her condition wouldn’t get much worse between now and Friday when finally I could break away from the meetings that promised to keep me busy on the West Coast all week; that certainly I could stay focused all that time even though my aunt promised me updates daily or more frequently as needed to chart Grama’s progress -- all of that shattered brittle with the dawn. Along with the certainty that she doesn't know me anymore anyway so what difference does it make if I'm there at all?

What the hell was I thinking?

I just booked my flight. I leave in the morning.

pressing

The word specimen doesn't adequately convey the feel of these gorgeous plates by photographer Stephen J. Joseph. Each is elegantly rearranged on the page, caught in its moment of life, and a powerful connective zap moves from Muir to us through these photos of the plants he encountered, described, and collected.

Judith Larner Lowry writing in Orion Magazine about a new collection of the photographs of John Muir's plant specimens: Nature's Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir's Botanical Legacy, by Bonnie J. Gisel with images by Stephen J. Joseph; Foreword by David Rains Wallace.

We weren’t church goers when I was a kid, but we knew enough to revere Jesus and John Muir.

Which is almost certainly my father’s fault.

My dad wore thick wool socks that he called his John Muir socks. He taught us early that the woods and the mountains and the rocky shore that limned the Puget Sound were where the action was; that anything else (this house? these four walls?) was artificial; a compromise.

My father’s love of books is why I love books; is why the acoustics of every room in my home are impacted by the soft muffling of pages arrayed against the wall. My father’s love of books gave me always a soft place to fall, a universe that welcomed me, a place where I could sort through the crazies and understand what was sane. I read Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jack London and big stacks of National Geographic just because they were there.

And John Muir.

When my father fell fast into a coma for reasons none of us understood while hiking through Utah’s red rock canyon country, my brothers and my sister and I took turns by his bedside, where we read John Muir to him through the tubes that snaked through every orifice, through the lids that danced from his dreams, through the edema that bloated his body beyond recall.

We read of mountain sides and rock slides and ravines. Of snowstorms and earthquakes and the cooling shade of conifer trees.

Scripture. Story. Salve.

Until he woke, we read.

my brothers

My Brothers.

Delayed in Detroit just now
I called you

First Denver, then Philly.

We shared details
Made plans
Deferred others

And I thought how I wanted
to capture this
full feeling I have
in my heart
when I hear your smiles

How I worry through your stress
your projects
your children
how I beam presumptuously
when it all goes well

Thought maybe I could
trace out the memories
that make us kin

Football tackles
and Fisher Price little people

Dying to the count of ten
(one thousand one, one thousand two)
in neighborhood battles of war

Big wheels and bikes

Your slight frames riding my knees
as I revved and roared speedway sounds
and leaned into the turns
your tiny hands grinding my balled fist
like a stick shift
your feet on my shoulders
(the gas and the brake)

The electric proximity of play

Thought maybe there would
be a way to sketch out
those years when everything
went to hell and we fled the house
each as we could
to find firm earth
to forage for comfort like we’d known
once
when that house was home

But there’s no way, my brothers,
to ink out the ache that remains
when I cut the line and end the call

The fractured terror of missing you always
The rich round way I love you

There’s no way to explain what I mean
when I call you My Brothers.

whatever I touch

For those of you keeping track: The Miser Brothers (Snow Miser, above, and his cranky sibling Heat Miser), from the annually aired The Year Without a Santa Claus, were part of the 'Hoo Girls repertoire.

Give me a ring and I'll be happy to sing it for ya. Maybe we can even get she who aspired to be a mermaid on the line.

eager for the treat

Like wine, oysters take on characteristics of the terroir, so to speak, in which they are raised; the wildly different tastes result not from biology but from the variant diets, temperatures and salinity offered by the water in which the individual oysters spend their lives.

From Gem of the Ocean in the 20 December issue of the Economist.

Not too long ago I was in the Bay Area and joined a friend for dinner at an unremarkable French something or other in San Jose. He was tasked with reviewing the restaurant: dinner was on the house and the company was stellar so I happily complied.

I can't remember my entree. Duck maybe? I do remember the oysters that came before. They were from Hood Canal on the Olympic Peninsula, where my Aunt has a place, and where the beach is thick with oyster shells thrown back to the beach post-consumption where they then act as wedding beds for future generations of their kin.

I dressed my half-shell and slid it down. I was unprepared for the tears that followed: Brief and salty, like the oyster's own liquor.

The oyster tasted of home; the home I left for Chicago that for a confluence of reasons I was just then acutely missing. Like my own Madeleine the oyster contained all of that: the chill mist, the briny smell of the Puget Sound, the table surrounded by family. Surrounded by friends.

When I was living in Seattle, in the winter months, I would pick up fresh Olympias at the Pike Place Market and serve them up per Patricia Wells' direction for a simple Bordeaux fisherman's meal: oysters on the half-shell, accompanied by hand-seasoned sausage, a green salad, a crunchy loaf of bread, and a humble wine.

I served this meal to my dad once, when he was passing through town, and it may have been that we finished two humble bottles of wine but, whatever the reason, when he pushed back from the table the man who has dined with Jim Morrison at Chicago's Playboy Mansion and devoured ribs with Muddy Waters on Nob Hill said: "That was the best meal I've ever had."

And so I've posted it here for you.

Huîtres et Saucisses
From Patricia Wells' Bistro Cooking

1 dozen oysters, shells well scrubbed under cold running water, shucked
Crushed ice
8 ounces (250 g) bulk pork sausage meat
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves or 1 teaspoon dried
1 teaspoon crushed hot red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Place the oysters on a plate of crushed ice. Arrange the oysters balancing them so they do not lose any of their liquid. Cover loosely with aluminum foil and refrigerate. Remove the oysters 10 minutes before serving.

Ed: This would be a good time to prep that salad. Toss just before serving.

In a medium-size bowl, blend the sausage meat with the thyme (herbes de provence is also nice), pepper flakes, and salt. Mix well with your hands to blend thoroughly.

Shape the pork mixture into 4 equal-size round patties about 1/2 inch (1.5 cm) thick.

In a medium-size skillet, cook the patties over medium-high heat until golden brown on the outside and cooked all the way through, about 5 minutes on each side. Drain on paper towels.

Serve the sausages immediately, accompanied by the oysters, slices of buttered, crisp-crusted bread, and chilled white wine Or red. Per your druthers. And don't forget your choice of dressing for the oysters. I dig horseradish, cocktail sauce and Tabasco.

Serves 4.

p.s. title from the walrus and the carpenter, of course »

grand potentate's ball

Grama at the Seattle Science Center.

I think this was taken the year my grandfather was Grand Potentate of the Nile Temple in Seattle. (She still has the rhinestone studded fez that he wore.)

Early 60s sometime -- 1963, maybe?

I don't think she'd know anymore if I asked her.

bacon calling

the bacon bag »
I think I know what my brother's getting me for Christmas -- he just sent me a link to this Reuters news video: Wrap your phone in bacon »

(mmm bacon.)

croup.

one of my most vivid memories from when I was small was when I had the croup -- I remember it so strongly -- I was about 3 and we lived in NYC and I couldn't breathe and my father carried me into the hot shower and held me in his arms in the steam, holding me close and coaxing me to breathe. I was feverish and remember the hallucinations, believing them to be real, of scary demons rising in the mist.

so vivid. I really did feel the urgency and fear of the situation. and remember so strongly the safety of my daddy's chest as he held me close.

years later I asked him "remember when..." and he said: oh yeah. it was exactly like that. I thought you might die on me. and then he hugged me tight.

Tapped out from shipping off a 50 page document for work within a string of larger deadlines leading to still more deadlines.

No complaints, especially in this economy, just no time to post anything of interest.

Browsing Tampen's flickrstream this morning (and stumbling across his lovely waiting for mermaids shot) I was reminded of a comment I left a long time back on his blog.

So I've recycled it here.

A cheap way to post something personal in a hurry. But also a reminder of the times we don't nearly make it back.

And then we do.

my honored soliders. my ancestors. my dead.

Bompa, my paternal grandfather, who served as a Naval Communications Officer in the Pacific Theater during WWII and endured Guadalcanal.

Bumpa, my maternal grandfather, who served as a Merchant Marine in the Pacific.

Grandpa S., my step-grandfather, who soldered steel on the Battleship Missouri, on whose decks the Japanese surrendered to General McArthur.

Uncle Stan, my grandmother's brother, who parachuted behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge.

Uncle Jack, my Nini's dearest brother and elder by only 18 months, who as a Staff Sergeant and tail gunner lost his life on July 9, 1944 when his B-24 bomber was shot down over the Ploesti Oil Fields in Romania. He was 21 years old.

And one of my great great great uncles on my mother's side, whose name I don't know, who was the first of his small town in Virginia to be killed in the Civil War.

These are my honored soldiers. My ancestors. My dead.

It's Veterans Day: Hug a Soldier.

ichor

Making the coffee for my folks on weekend mornings was one of my first grown up jobs -- and one that I fought my sister for until we relented into rotation.

From under the covers, still sleepy from the week, my dad would lay out the prescription -- the ratio of scoops in the flat bottomed basket to the whole pot of water that I’d pour into the Mr. Coffee coffee maker before flipping the switch to drip and breathing in deep as the steam rose from the plastic contraption.

When it was brewed and done I’d deliver the coffee to them in bed, black, taking care to walk slow so as not to slosh, feeling important and useful and accomplished.

When I was in high school a new crew moved in, against the tears and wishes of me and my brothers. My stepmother gone, my sister off to college, my father’s girlfriend and her two girls brought their percolator with them. It stewed up a bitter brew that sat and warmed for too many hours until it grew dark and viscous. I poured my first cup from that percolator, the first that I intended to drink myself, and did, when I was a sophomore in high school and alone in the house. I laced it heavily with cream and sugar. And then poured the second.

We took to each other immediately, coffee and me. I’d flaunt a mug and a bottomless carafe late at night at Denny’s, arguing philosophy with my boyfriend, the way the cool kids flaunted cigarettes.

My habit was so steep in college, and my pockets so poor, that I trained as a barista just to stay caffeinated. (The coffee was free.)

I drink it now with cream after I’ve brewed it through a cone shaped filter and favor a varietal from Chicago’s Intelligentsia, although this morning I’m drinking a cup of Cone Zone, which my Dad and his new and lasting and first girlfriend I’ve ever loved so much, C, delivered when they passed through town a few months ago. Cone Zone is named after the construction zone that currently surrounds the coffee shop that C owns and runs in Grand Junction.

I met C for the first time when my father lay dying in a hospital bed in Grand Junction. He’d talked of her before, but I dismissed her as just the latest of too many to count. When she walked into the ICU, a true cowgirl with long and curly pure white hair, just back and still bruised from her mother’s funeral, and said to my father deep in his coma “oh honey what have you done to yourself?” I knew she was more than that, and cried even harder, knowing he had even more to lose.

That she loves coffee, that she pours a beautiful shot, that she brought us two pounds as a matter of course -- is only one of the reasons that I know we’re kin for sure.

p.s. another way I know: C posts as desertmoon on flickr »

the magic kingdom

I wish I could say that my memories of being five years old at Disneyland with my Nini and Bumpa and cousin S were giddy with cotton candy and Mickey and friends.

They aren’t.

What I remember in high relief is the ambient anxiety that colored everything, edged in the fierce competition that I felt with my cousin, who’s not even a month younger than I am (I'm the tall one).

I remember silently gloating when S put her shoes on the wrong feet and my Nini suggested that she should try to get it right -- like I had. The sweet relief and triumph when her mouse eared balloon popped against the rough cottage cheese of our hotel ceiling and mine did not.

I remember the fierce jealousy I felt when S got to hold Nini’s hand and I had to hold my Bumpa’s, who scared me a little. The keen disappointment when a moshpit of goats ate my brand new white cashmere sweater at the petting zoo (which I suspect must have been Knott’s Berry Farm).

I suspect the adrenal charged moments that fill my memories had a lot to do with circumstances that were, at five years old, out of my control. We’d just moved cross-country from New York to Sonoma, and my Dad hadn’t moved with us. I don't remember that anyone ever explained why, but I do remember one rare and distant phone call when he told me he was living in a place called Denver, which sounded lonely and lost and far away.

I remember the way the sunshine hit the curved steps that we climbed before the large unsmiling building where I received my social security card, how I whined to be in my mother’s arms, how my younger brother was instead. I remember the unkind look of the lady behind the desk, and hearing the word welfare for the first time ever; hearing the shame in my mother’s voice that was tangled in relief.

The slides from the Disneyland trip -- which my Nini set aside for me some time ago but that I only really studied for the first time this weekend -- told me what I couldn’t know then but know now, looking back. Of a gift given by my grandparents: a safe harbor in the storm, a magical kingdom in a world that was unraveling to be anything but. A place of soft velvet giant chipmunk arms that serve up the kind of hugs that still the waters, if only for a little while.

speaking of steinways & hearths

speaking of steinways & hearths
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

This is my grandfather's Steinway.

For a long time it lived in the house that Bompa built, nestled between the dining room and his richly outfitted bar that smelled sweet like the masterful martinis that cooked his liver and put him in his grave.

He was a WWII vet who saw Guadalcanal and told great stories about beer rations and contests with sawdust and ice and deep pits dug on South Pacific beaches to see who could keep their beer the coldest for longest in that tropical heat. He told the story of how, as a communications officer, he and a few fellow soldiers were left on the island to create radio chatter while the others shipped out for elsewhere, in the hope the enemy would hear and presume the island was still occupied.

The others shipped out in a hurry and left all their beer behind.

My Bompa told that story laughing; told of the plunder; the abandoned beer pits like sea turtle nests loaded with fresh eggs.

He never mentioned the fear of being a lonely mark for Japanese bombs.

When I'd ask him to tell me a war story -- a real battle story -- he'd say he spent his time hiding out in pineapple fields, and then he'd make another martini, tenderly working the essence of a lime peel around the rim of his glass.

Once I found and furtively read a letter he wrote to his mother from the Pacific theater. The images are all I recall: the dark fear of an air raid and then, the planes gone, the slow stirrings, the murmurs of conversation, and out of the warming stillness: the sound of a piano, playing.

The letter closed with words of gratitude and love.

The Steinway was his one holy relic, and still he let his grandkids pound on it. "Careful. Gently," he'd urge us. But still: He let us.

My sister and I played Heart and Soul on this keyboard so often that he insisted on paying for lessons one summer so he could hear something else.

My aunt has it now. I snapped this on my cameraphone when I was in Seattle at the tail end of July. Her grandson managed to nick a corner off the right hand side. I winced when I saw the jagged break, composite layers of deep red varnish peeled back under the serene concert hall black, like a freshly skinned knee flushed wet with the rising blood.

wag more. bark less.

Just sent off my dad, his sweet Cookie and their Luke.

Miss 'em already.

Posting by cameraphone.

They're road tripping from Grand Junction, CO to Detroit, MI to "deliver Ed" -- Cookie's step-dad, who wanted his ashes laid alongside Cookie's Mom at the Cadillac Memorial Gardens.