Lookit What I Got in the Mail Today!

[Recommended listening while reading this post: "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.]

My friend ronniecat visited Cuba recently, and sent me a souvenir from her trip. When I opened the package, the first thing I saw was the box -- a delightful recipe box with a chicken theme, appropriate for Ft. Harrington. Inside the box was the brown baseball, which ronnie described thusly in her note that accompanied the package:

"... I bought this at a market in Old Havana [...] these had wooden balls at the core [...] when Cubans play 'beisbol,' this is typical of what they're playing with, though this is a step up, as store-bought, from 'I made it myself' balls!"

Unknown to ronnie, after the box, and after the ball, a whole series of memories came tumbling out of the brown paper package:

When I was a little kid in Upstate New York, I loved the game of baseball, and I was enchanted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose games I could hear on the radio. I was a chunky, awkward little kid, though, and wasn't very good at athletic enterprises:

Little League tryouts, spring, 1958. I'm the kid throwing at the target.

When I was 11 years old, I tried out for Little League. I was one of the few kids who didn't make the cut for any team at all. I was crushed. My Dad was inspired.

He built a number of training facilities around our home in the backcountry, including:

Hand-eye coordination wall, 1959

... this "bounce-back" stone wall and flagstone terrace. Its function was to improve my fielding abilities by providing unpredictable ricochets which trained me to react to batted balls quickly (very quickly, since I was to use a tennis ball, not a baseball), and...

Batting cage, 1960

... a batting cage, where he would pitch balls to me from the regulation 60 feet, 6 inches away. He enticed me to learn to switch-hit by having me simulate the Dodgers' (by then in the faraway land of Los Angeles) lineup according to whether the hitter was right- or left-handed.

It became clear pretty soon, though, that hitting wasn't going to be my strength, so we switched to pitching. By 1962, he had trained me to throw accurately enough that I could do pretty well in summer-league competition:

Me pitching for the Norwich Masons against the Sherburne town team, 1962

By then, I was in high school, and the goal was to be a pitcher for the Norwich Purple Tornado. Dad's training went into high gear. My athleticism was still meager, but I was a strong, chunky guy, and Dad knew a thing or two about leverage. In the summer of '62, he had me throw over and over again with a prop that engaged my best assets (ahem), husky thighs and a big butt: a folding chair placed right in front of me. By having to kick my left leg over the back of that chair, I learned to bring maximum force into my pitches, and eventually developed a nasty fastball. Poor Dad, the batter in all this training, developed quite a colorful left side that summer from all the bruises. Velocity, he could train me for -- accuracy, not so much. Unfortunately, I can't find a picture in his slide trove of the infamous chair.

Fireballer in training, 1963

All of his and my efforts paid off in 1964, my Junior year in high school. I made the varsity team, and was their ace starting pitcher for that one season. There is not a single picture of that chapter. Dad couldn't stand to do anything but sit on the back rail of the bleachers while I was pitching, anxiously chewing on his fingernails, and he never brought a camera to any of my games as a varsity pitcher. I did okay, not great, because I still couldn't accurately guide my pitches -- I still hold the league record for hit batsmen in a season (primarily because the league dissolved the next year, but still...), and the Catholic kids who batted against me would cross themselves before every pitch.

The coach was a former minor-league pro player who knew some scouts, and (I think as a favor to my Dad, but I don't know for sure) he brought in a Yankees' scout to watch one of my games. His advice to me after the game was blunt: I could throw balls past high school kids, but there was no way I could ever do well even in the low minors, so I should concentrate on my studies.

So I did. And I never played organized ball again after that season, but I wasn't bitter about it at all. I pretty much knew that was the case, anyway, and Dad and I had already proved that I was better than somebody who couldn't make Little League!

More importantly, Dad and I had worked on something important together, for crucially formative years for each of us, and had accomplished much more than baseball alone could account for.

Veterans' Park, Norwich, New York: the home field of the Norwich Purple Tornado

I took the last picture in the summer of 2001, when I made a pilgrimage back to Chenango county to scatter my parents' ashes in the nearby Whaupaunaucau forest, across Thompson Creek from the little house I grew up in, and its hillside lot where Dad built the batting cage and all the rest. The little grandstand looked bigger when I was playing earnestly there, and you can see the corner rail, high up in the back, where Dad sat and gnawed his fingernails so many years ago.

Thank you, ronnie. Thank you so very, very much.

[Coda: the title of this post is meant to echo the one you can see by clicking here.]

Announcement: New Blog for Pix [Updated]

The Murphy Gang, Atlanta, 1946 -- Top row: Catherine (my mother), Carolyn; Middle row: Joseph Charlie, Edith, Ophalon; Front row: John Calvin, Tom, Ed.

I've just initiated "SherPics," a repository for daily pictures from the Harrington archives. Probably of most interest to family, this new blog will feature snapshots from my Dad's and my archives. The intent is to post snapshots on the day of the year on which they were taken, or, if a specific date can't be determined, at least within the month of their origin.

Here's the link.

UPDATE, March 28:
At JannieP's inspired suggestion, the new blog has been re-titled "PicShers." I can't tell you how much I wish I had thought of that! The address remains http://sherpics.blogspot.com , though.

================================

Annual Renewal Notice

For SherWords' readers in the snowy climes of Maine, Michigan, and New Brunswick (to name a few if not all), I am happy to tell you that relief is on the way: spring has sprung its notice here in Ft. Harrington, and will be wafting its way to you posthaste. It says here.

This afternoon I took a little stroll around the compound and snapped these shots of things sprouting, budding, and blooming in the yard (click on any image to see a larger version):

Lilac...

... plum (with buds looking remarkably like tiny Brussels Sprouts)

... peach ...

... apple ...

... and jasmine sprouting brand-new, so briefly-red leaves.




The camillia trees have been blossoming since last month, but they're just now hitting their full stride, producing a wealth of blossoms too heavy for their stems, which fall on the deck with an audible PLOP at all hours, in...

... white ...

... red ...

... and pink.

The spaniels, hard at work watching me this afternoon.


In another sense of annual renewal, today was Diane's and my 17th wedding anniversary, which we celebrated with dinner at the Shadowbrook Restaurant in Capitola (or "Capitola-by-the-Sea" as its chamber of commerce would like -- just to make sure, I suppose, that we don't think it's Capitola-by-the-Forest or Capitola-by-the-Reactor.)

The most enjoyable way to reach the restaurant's entrance is by a steep cable car down from the parking area.




Delightful place, delightful meal, and a delightful 17 years.






And in yet another sense of renewal, and in yet another delight, Diane's older son, Ryan, and his wife, Christel, are expecting their firstborn, a daughter, next month.

Alnitak loved the cradle we got for them, and was not happy when we took it away to the baby shower last week! (This photo was taken last Saturday, and is the only one in this post not taken today.)

Happy renewal, everybody!

=============================================

Flickers from February

Whacked swing, damaged by a redwood limb's downward trajectory, Ft. Harrington, February, 2002.

The shortest month is, gladly, the shortest month. February, in any northern hemisphere clime, is winter at its dreariest, and, even in so clement a place a Northern California, its blessings are generally on the artificially-heated side of the door.

Here are some blessings from today, February 23^rd, in the central dwelling in Ft. Harrington, as we rode out a mild storm:

Guinness can sit comfortably on any of his sides in any of three dimensions.

Finn, still twitchy and still trying to figure out all this zoo, has become comfortable with the spaniels…

… and is sufficiently happy with his little buddy, Guinness, that he doesn’t completely freak out when Guinness jumps into his snuggle-stuffs.

============================

Downunder Perplexion

These four pictures of parts of little towns in Australia are taken directly from Google Earth, and have not been altered at all. They should present a puzzlement to modestly well-informed North American viewers of above-average perceptiveness.

So, what’s puzzling about these images? The first person to get it right will win a box of brand-new, unused semicolons from Brian Fies, or, if the winner is Brian Fies, a box of dots. Real elevated dots, not those newfangled, deflated, tired, lying-on-the-line ones.

(Click on the images to see a larger version... if you need to, wimp!)

Broken Hill, New South Wales, Argent (upper right to lower left) and Oxide (perpendicular thereto) Streets.


Forbes, New South Wales, Templar (upper left to lower right) and Lachlan (perpendicular) Streets, with a roundabout intersection.

Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, Hannan (left) and Egan (right) Streets.

Parkes, New South Wales, Highway 39 (left) and Currajong Street. I first recognized the oddity that this quiz refers to at about the location of the light-blue “39” shield in this image in April of 1986, when I passed through Parkes on a little pilgrimage.

Good luck!

Fonzie

Fonzie has his own manifold of reality's dimensional geometry. This napkin box, for example, is perfectly adequate for him in most nodes.

Another interpretation, of course, is that Fonzie is nuts.

Horse With No Name

The Harrington Cherokee at Arches National Park.

My Dad and I had very different attitudes about cars, and they were very different from our attitudes about everything else.

Dad, a child of the Depression, was meticulously cheap. I have a box full of steno notebooks in which he recorded every purchase he made at gasoline pumps from 1950 until his death half a century later, for example, and (if I hadn’t destroyed them after his death) similar bulky records, to the penny, of absolutely everything else he ever spent anything under a few thousand dollars on. Major purchases had their own tracking, I guess, so he didn’t feel a need to scurry after their pennies in a similar way.

A major exception to his penuriousness was cars.

He’d keep a wallet or a belt until it wore down to dust, but he wouldn’t keep a car beyond two years. This manic trading-in of nearly-new cars had a benefit for me, of course – I got to enjoy NEW CARS almost all the time! Some of his vehicles can be seen by clicking here.

I, on the other hand, am about as negligent as one can imagine about daily economy. I don’t even balance my own checkbook every month, for example, trusting the bank to get those sorts of things right. If my Dad were still alive, that admission on my part would launch him into the aether, spitting and screaming.

But I am a fanatic about milking every possible mile out of a car.

The first photo ever taken of the Harrington Cherokee: May, 1992. I had just driven the truck back to our apartment complex, and (respectively) Colin, Diane, and Ryan were thrilled to see it, since they were used to being crammed into an old, broken-down VW squareback until then. To see a more recent picture of Colin and Ryan – at Ryan’s wedding in 2006 – click here. (In that picture, Ryan’s wife, Christel, is holding my granddaughter, Doug and Adrianne's girl, Grace.)

I am sixty years old. Until the beginning of this millennium, I had owned exactly three cars. I had a 1964 Rambler from 1969 to 1972, a 1972 VW Squareback from 1972 to 1992, and this post’s 1992 Jeep Cherokee from 1992 to…

Tomorrow.

(Since the turn of the millennium, I have acquired two more vehicles: a Y2K Jeep Wrangler and a 2005 Dodge pickup. I must be getting sloppy.)

The Cherokee is one of those mechanical beasts that somehow manages to worm its way into the heart as though it were alive. Diane and I love(d) it to pieces, and are sad to see it go. We didn’t love it enough to give it a sweet nickname (as some folks do for their cars in a bit of over-anthropomorphizing), but, if we had, it would have been “Refrigerator Box.” When Diane first mentioned that she wanted a Cherokee in the early ‘90’s, I snidely characterized the model as such a box. Good box, it turns out.

Cherokee traversing an Arches National Park back trail.

But, tomorrow, the Cherokee will no longer be ours. I'll transfer its ownership to someone who will make good use of its goat-like terrain navigation capabilities to research, on the ground, a work on Joshua Trees. He will not, I imagine, mind its peripheral aging, such as its dead radio or sagging headliner, but will appreciate its solid drive train and magnificent off-road swagger. I hope he will, at any rate.

Kelsey and Emma loved riding in the Cherokee.

The Cherokee was a working truck (note the haybale in the back.)

The Cherokee loves National Parks. And, I suspect, its dance within them is not quite done yet.

The Cherokee’s replacement at Ft. Harrington, posing in Yosemite above Bridalveil Fall. Its styling is far from the classic, squared-off panels of the Cherokee, but (given its owner’s proclivities) it will probably be truckin’ along in 2025.

'Bye, Cherokee. You did us well, and you did us well long. Here's hoping you do your new driver as well for at least a little while.

Flight

(With sincere and abject apologies to the ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson.)

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Photo by Adam Harrington

Like up in the air on my mamma's feet,
Up on her tickling toes,
While the sky so fair behind my hair
Echoes our happy glow.

Photo by Adrianne Harrington

=======================================

Gravely Pleasant Memories

More than thirty years ago, during our country’s feckless self-congratulations on having survived a mere two centuries, I lived alone in a rented room in an old house near a graveyard in Oakland, California.

My room was on the first floor, facing a neon sign across the street. The bright sign read (and still reads) “Oakland Crematorium Columbarium Mausoleum.” I didn’t do a whole lot of barbequeing during the year or so I lived there.

The cemetery to which the smoker was attached, though, is a beautiful one, and historic insofar as a European-style graveyard can be in so recently-subsumed a place as California. It stretches up from a genteel neighborhood of Oakland into low hills with spectacular views (weather permitting) toward the west to the Golden Gate and San Francisco. I used to wander its farther reaches, unkempt repositories of the lesser-blessed, and closer better-manicured bastions of merchant princes of the late 1800’s. I wordlessly hobnobbed with Crockers and with Adamses (the patriarch of the latter was the founder of Oakland from Binghamton, NY) and with nameless folks buried by the creek in graves overgrown by brush.

I loved that place.

Fast forward thirty years.

My surviving son, Adam, now lives just a few hundred yards from the room I lived in then. He hikes the cemetery now, in his mornings, and sent along these photos from his walk last weekend:

Steel-colored fog hides the Golden Gate Bridge (it would be in center frame) on an Oakland January. Doug’s memorial bench is a few hundred yards behind this viewpoint. (Photo by Adam Harrington)

Livermore Plot (photo by Adam Harrington)

An important Anglo settler family in Northern California was the Livermores , after whom the city of Livermore, its famous weapons lab, and the prominence atop Angel Island in San Francisco Bay are named. They have a plot along what I came to think of as “Millionaire’s Row,” but, as Adam’s photos show…

Nobody home. (Photo by Adam Harrington)

… the Livermore plot is oddly vacant! Adam says, “If one were to photo-shop the middle R from the family name, he would create quite an appropriate moniker for this oddly empty plot. All the surrounding ones are very much full.”

Live more, friends. Live more.

==================================

Stormy Weather

Yes, it rained pretty hard here yesterday.

No, it wasn’t a big deal.

However, since the fairly typical just-after-the-solstice storm here in Northern California gathered some national (and even international) news attention (and since Ft. Harrington’s dear friend, Lucile Taber, went looking in this blog for updates), I’ll put up this special edition post about it.

Kings Creek from the Ft. Harrington back deck, Wednesday, January 2^nd.

We needed rain pretty badly. Last winter (the usual rainy season here in the Santa Cruz Mountains) was exceptionally dry, and that’s bad news for an isolated community like this that depends on groundwater for all of its water needs – not just for household use, but for emergency agencies, firefighters in particular. The picture above, looking downstream along the creek through the heart of Creepy Hollow, shows how depleted the watershed had become. It was taken a day before the forecast triple-storm was to hit our area.

Thursday, January 3^rd, brought a little spritz of a shower… but yesterday, Friday, January 4^th, brought the first big rainfall we’ve had in two years. According to the Ft. Harrington rain gauge, we had 6 ½ inches in 24 hours from 5pm Thursday to 5pm Friday, and by mid-afternoon Friday, the creek looked like this:

Kings Creek from the Ft. Harrington back deck, Friday, January 4^th.

I estimate that the creek rose about three feet in that 24-hour period, but it wasn’t even close to being a worry for anyone here in the Hollow. Oldtimers hereabouts say that the creek can crest above the red patio at the right of the frame in the above pictures, but we haven’t seen that in our decade here. We have seen the creek significantly higher than it was this week, though:

Kings Creek in the winter of 2005-06.

Creepy Hollow, with Ft. Harrington at its core, is sheltered by high mountain ridges from most winds in winter storms, and it was for this one. While Northern California in general was blasted by sometimes hurricane-speed winds, our air was relatively tranquil during the downpours. We are, however, dependent on the electrical power grid for our distributed electricity, and that grid failed (as it usually does several times each winter.) The Hollow was without electrical power from the grid for most of Friday – but that’s no never-mind, since almost every house in the Hollow has a generator like the Fort does. Loud, is all, not major bad news, since the generators keep the refrigerators, furnaces, and lights going. The worst inconvenience for humans is that cable TV (and internet services) go out when the main power grid does.

When a storm is over, the creeks and rivers exhale mist among the redwoods. These two pictures are from "downtown" Boulder Creek this afternoon. (Click on any image for a bigger version.)

Kelsey and I surveyed the Creek this afternoon (make sure the volume is turned up on your computer and then click the arrowhead):

In this clip, I address Kesley as "Kelsey-the-Dog," which is actually what he's usually called around here. I don't know why, since there's not much doubt about whether he's a dog or not.

All in all, the storm was a blessing for us, not a problem. It was a blessing because it recharged, all in one shot, the groundwater on which this entire community vitally depends. However, it would have been a big problem for me if it hadn’t happened while I was on winter break from school: any highway I might have tried to take from Ft. Harrington to Silicon Valley was closed due to mud/rock/dirt slides or downed trees. But I didn’t have to go anywhere, so Mrs. Fort and I and all the fourfeet snuggled down and napped through most of it. So did the chickens, but in their house, not ours.

Earlier storms have not been as benign. Below are some scenes from previous winters:

Above, Adam and Ryan survey some storm damage on the Fort's main building's roof in 2001.

Things get really bad when the wind does get fierce here in the Hollow: redwood branches can’t take the strain, snap (with a sound like a rifle shot) and fall their hundreds of feet onto whatever happens to be below. Those falling branches are called “widowmakers,” and the one above fell just up the road from the Fort in the winter of ’01- 02.

When a winter storm brings snow, it also brings carloads of folks up from Silicon Valley to revel in it. Above is a group of DeAnza students frolicking at a vista point above our San Lorenzo Valley in the winter of 2004-05.

The San Lorenzo Valley in 2004. Ft. Harrington is somewhere close to the middle of this rainy frame.

==================================

I Didn't Plan on This Post

This blog is supposedly written by an astronomer, and is supposedly in part about astronomy, but you wouldn’t know it recently without the verbiage around its Blogger frame.

A historically significant Galaxie.

I really am working on a couple of big posts about science and community colleges’ ways of wrenching it into relevance for our students. Multi-spectral views of the “grand design” spiral galaxy M74 are in the offing here in SherWords, for example, and in the works are guest blogs from electrifying explainers of modern Meteorology and Geology. Let’s hope that the latter guest appearances happen before global warming and/or earthquakes kill us all. (The astronomer is holding a major asteroid impact back as a trump card.)

But, meanwhile, Fort Harrington just insists on continuing to happen. And, particularly, its short, supposedly “dumb” denizens insist on being cute in ways that can’t be ignored, unless you can ignore a baseball bat applied to your nose.

You think being cute is a once-in-a-while thing? HAH. These critters work on it full time, and sometimes perversely. For example, the last post in this blog was a presumably unusually-cute picture of Emma. Yesterday, she just had to trump that with the prettiest picture ever taken of her, seriously:

Emma, January 2nd, 2008

And, the day before that (New Year’s Day), Guinness and the still-acclimating Finn McCool just had to practice their Hallmark audition:

Finn McCool and Guinness celebrate New Year's Day, 2008.

And, yesterday, even the chickens had to get into the “You just TRY to leave this out of your precious blog, pinky!” game, notably the remarkable Specks…

Speckles surveys the deck rail after the solstice.

… and Bratty, the Black Giant.

Bratty perseveres, kicking dirt to uncover worms, a month after the loss of her sister.

Bratty’s picture is both warm and heartbreaking to Diane and me. Pepper was her nearly identical sister, and (if you can believe it), Pepper’s eyes were even more startling in their warmth.