This post is slightly revised from one that first saw the light of blog in 2006. Here in Hawaii, where just about every location that is not a tourist trap or an arm of government is a military base, there are a hundred skilled trumpet players, so getting a professional to play “Taps” at a Memorial Day function is not a problem. In the more rural parts of America, the situation is different …

The trumpet player was trying to relax. Which was one reason he was so tense.

It was Memorial Day. The parades would start in an hour. They would visit little plaques in each of the six villages of their small town on the Maine coast, each plaque in its turn. Some marching, a prayer, a wreath, three guns, Taps.

Taps. The bugle call. It sounds so simple, so easy. But it is not easy. Oh, no. Those high notes are hard to reach, those long tones hard to hold. One butchered phrase turns beauty to agony. And most amateur players butcher several of them. He was an amateur, he knew the risk. He also knew that they were counting on him to get it right. And he’d managed to leave the house, at an hour too damned close to dawn, without caffeine.

He needed to think of something else for a minute. He turned on the car radio, hoping to catch the sports flash. He missed it, as usual. The station was sports talk, and the announcer was just then accepting a call. “Hi, how are ya?” Every caller said the same thing. As if the physical and emotional condition of the announcer had not been on display coast to coast for most of the preceding three hours. As if the caller cared. He turned the radio off.

He turned in to the high school parking lot where the band members were gathering. It was a small town, a small band, and not much of a band. Practically all the members had gone to that high school, had marched in the high school band under the same tyrant teacher. Their number was shrinking now. Some were infirm; others had passed on. Most of the ones who were left were retired. There were not many younger folk. The high school had not had much of a music program after the tyrant left them; those few who had learned to play instruments had other kinds of music in mind. And they weren’t going to be caught dead in the white trousers that, with the red polo shirts, the band had adopted as its uniform.

Most of the band members were assembled into groups, gossiping. The same cliques and families as in 1962. Or was it 1862? Some of those groups had long pedigrees. The order of music had not changed in three years. About half the members did not know the order. Eventually the band president got the players to line up in marching order. Having established who was to stand where (making allowances for the three absent members who would meet them at the first site, which was hard because some of those present kept asking whether they should stand “here” or “there”), she finally got them onto their bus, a school bus. It was a class party.

The trumpet player was from away. They left him alone. He was grateful for this. He was still trying to relax, get ready for “Taps”.

The school bus found others; eventually, there was a small convoy. One bus had the band. Another held the color guard from the local coast guard station, and a detachment of four Marines, the firing squad. In yet another, veterans from the American Legion post, about a dozen. Most had served in World War II or Korea; their coming to attention was now falling victim to arthritis, to osteoporosis. This year there was a single veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a woman. It looked as if the Legion had adopted a Girl Scout. At a few of the stops, there were veterans in cars; at others, a band from the middle school, or an elementary school; at one, a fair number of scouts, girls and boys, with flags. There were spectators, some places more, some fewer. A few tourists downtown, otherwise they were all locals. Not many had flags.

At every site the busloads poured onto the street, about 500 yards from the little plaque that was their destination and their purpose, and sorted themselves out. A chaotic process. The trumpet player thought of iron filings shaken out into a tray and then brought into contact with a magnet, a weak one, not big enough for the job. The retired Air Force major general in charge got the color guard and firing squad organized and then called the parade to order. The order almost always caught the band by surprise; it scrambled madly into formation from its chat groups and got started on its march just a few seconds after it was too late. The trumpet player forgot about it. He needed to be ready. It was almost time.

Some marching, a prayer, a wreath, three guns.

Taps.

The trumpet player, hidden under dark glasses, closed his eyes. He blotted out the ragged red-and-white band, the Legion color-bearer who could no longer hold the American flag highest, the tempestuous, oblivious children in the adjacent playground.

He played. And as the first phrase rose over the parade ground he saw tents, long lines of Civil War tents along the Potomac River, the bugler sounding for them a call they’d never heard before. Then the tents became stones, long lines of white stones at Arlington National Cemetery, which became crosses, long lines of white crosses in a D-Day cemetery in France. One of those white crosses had his name on it, his blood underneath it. A bugler stood beside it. He was that bugler. He lifted the high note over the cross, and it became a pile of Manhattan rubble. And then a pile of body bags, pulled off a transport newly arrived from Iraq. As the last of the call faded away, the bodies were buried under new white stones. Silence.

It was over. The band boarded the bus for the last time and headed back to the high school parking lot. A few moments of mutual congratulations and thanks before the chat groups reformed. Final greetings as they packed their instruments into their cars and headed off for families or American Legion barbecues: “Happy Memorial Day”.

Happy Memorial Day. The massacre of Antietam in the style of Currier and Ives. Ike Eisenhower as a smiley face over the D-Day beaches. “Have a nice day” inscribed on the archway of Abu Ghraib prison. Party ribbons on the lines of white stones. As if …

The trumpet player merely nodded, picked up his trumpet case, and headed for home.

- O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2006, 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

I don’t recall what went on before, but it had to do, no, not with pleasure domes, but with aquaria. You know, the tanks you keep fish in?

I’m walking down a corridor with a man whose appearance and manner keeps changing, but is clearly some sort of acquaintance, and whose name is Mel. The corridor is full of the poundings and shufflings and squealings of construction and deconstruction. Something is being moved; Mel is telling me about it.

We enter a room that is being stripped. In recesses in the wall from which the panelling has been removed, there are four aquaria full of fish, ranging in size from about 20 to about 70 gallons. I am being asked for advice on how to move them. I give instructions, to some young people who hadn’t been there before, to begin with the two small freshwater tanks, leaving the two larger ones, that contain brackish-water and marine fish, for later.

Mel nets two of the freshwater fish – neon tetras – and puts them into a big tank. Neon tetras can’t take salt water, and immediately begin to gasp and struggle. In high-magnification, full-screen mode (real neon tetras are among the smallest fish in Nature, but the projection makes them look like salmon).

“You idiot, Mel, you can’t put those fish in there! Put them back!”

He does. One of the fish – we’re back in full-screen mode – begins to recover. It’s touch and go for the other one.

I don’t find out what happens, because Mel starts talking about one of the marine tanks, which has grown to picture-window size. He is complaining that most of the kinds of fish that he put in there have died or disappeared. The kind that remains, though – a shad-like fish with fluorescent-blue polka dots – is obviously thriving and breeding in the aquarium. I tell him this.

“Why don’t you tell everybody?”, Mel asks.

And suddenly the room is a small theatre full of people, and the tank has grown to full-wall, commercial-aquarium size. The tank has at least four kinds of creatures in it, not including the polka-dotted number. One of them is yellow and both looks and acts more like a seal than a fish.

And I know nothing about any of them.

I madly scramble through a pile of books and magazines on a table in front of the aquarium, looking for pictures and information on the animals in the tank. Most of the magazines are the kinds one would find in the average dentist’s office. I find a soft-cover volume that might have what I need. It has pages about six times as wide as they are tall, they flop conspicuously and uselessly in front of me. I can’t find what I’m looking for, and wouldn’t have time to read it if I did.

I start talking to the audience, making up something that sounds plausible. Only the people in the first three rows can hear me, because there’s no microphone and the room is noisy. One of the audience members stands to ask a question. I can’t hear him, none of the audience can hear him.

I wander around to the back of the hall, trying to find out if there’s a sound technician in the house. I finally find microphones and am ready to start my presentation over, but in the meantime a woman has gone to the front of the room and, working from the table that had held those useless books and magazines, has begun a children’s program. One that I am unwilling to interrupt.

Mel says, “I’ll interrupt her”. And I see him marching to the table while I’m making my way to the front of the room.

There is an ear-piercing squeal of anger and contempt. “You people had nothing prepared!” She stalks off.

Mel is about to leave the hall at the back when I speak up, audible myself for the first time.

“The woman has a point. A good point.” There is loud applause.

“And I am as much to blame as anyone.” More applause.

Mel turns back, comes to the center of the room. It is clear from his expression that any alliance between us is over, and I am now the enemy. “You’d better be ready for what’s coming to you”, he snarls. There is more, but he, and the whole scene, is dissolving. Until I am alone on an empty holodeck.

*          *          *          *          *

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the old cartoon cliché that eating pizza with anchovies before going to bed causes nightmares. For the record, I didn’t. I haven’t seen pizza with anchovies on a menu in years, and I doubt I’d order one if it were available.

I did have a bottle of porter with dinner, and told Quilly that it was fine, but that the good stuff would be called “portest”. You know: port, porter, portest?

Maybe that’s where this nightmare came from. Unless you have a better idea, dear reader.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

It was a particular phase of the moon, and her body was acting accordingly. She scrunched up as an especially strong cramp hit her.

He: I’m sorry, dear. You’re really avising, aren’t you?

She: Yes I … what?

He: Avising.

She: Avising?!?

He: Yeah, well, it sure looks from here like those cramps are trying harder.

She: What’re you trying to do, finish what they started? You’re driving me crazy!

He: No, I’m driving you home. Isn’t that what your hurts put me in the driver’s seat for?

Disclaimer: No cars were rented in the writing of this post. I guess we’re just not enterprising enough.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions expressed are mine, as a private citizen.

It has become a cliché of advertising. The tropical beach, used to sell a tropical product, like rum or Hawai‘i. Where the viewer stands or sits on white sands and looks out over an ocean that is so brilliantly azure, it can’t be real. Must be digitally enhanced.

The real views in Hawai‘i actually look like the advertising. When the sun is out, anyway. Which it is, most of the time.

But not on this late afternoon in early March 2009. At an hour where the sun is usually mixing its pigments for the benefit of a myriad of sunset photographers, clouds have sent the painter home early. The art class is dismissed, except for the students who work in charcoal. They have a subject fit for their tools: a graphite sky, its black lowered brows threatening heavy weather. No, not threatening; promising. A sky like any that heralds an ocean storm over the vacant Oregon coast, or a lake-effect blizzard over the foreclosed homes of Michigan, or a nor’easter over the empty mills of Maine. “For this”, mutter the mainland artists, “I could have saved the airfare.”

The sky scene fills the windows of the oceanfront restaurant. Inside, there is light and noise, the sounds and smells of food and wine and people. For the restaurant is full, indeed there are people waiting in the entry hall, seeking a place. The seated customers trade small talk with each other, and jokes with the smiling servers, and both the air and the spirit are warm. They are guests of Prince Prospero, and life is good.

And none of them is looking out the window at the dark sky, at the spectre that seeks entry.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Originally posted on the defunct Felloffatruck Publications site on 28 May 2007, shortly after The Amoeba landed in Hawai‘i.

Quilly and I saw the same rainbow on our way to work this morning (25 February 2009), she in her car, I on my bicycle. A perfect arch, anchored on Waikiki to the south and Manoa to the north.

For my part, I imagined the guardian leprechauns giving stern lectures in physics to the ones (these days, probably including the Governor of Hawai‘i and the Mayor of Honolulu) who came seeking the pots of gold at the rainbow’s ends.

Then I remembered – the other day, Quilly put in a request for a hoodie. Which are all the rage among the Honolulu natives in winter, when it’s all of three degrees F colder than it is in summer. The same three degrees colder this winter than last, when we were running around in our shorts and T-shirts and wondering what the hell these crazy people were doing, wearing fur coats in this heat.

Made me wonder – if we’re getting acclimated to the weather, are we going to get acclimated to ho hum, just another rainbow? Sometimes (sadly) we have to be reminded what it’s like to marvel …

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

The “Manoa” of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa is a valley, trending in a NE-SW direction, with the Ko‘olau Range at its head and Waikiki where it meets the sea. It is flanked by steep-sided spurs from the mountain range, rising hundreds of feet from the valley floor, which peter out about a mile and a half from the beach.

Up the valley about a mile from campus, there is a shopping center. I have business there, and start walking to it at about 3 PM on a sunny Sunday afternoon. At least, it’s sunny where I am. But the trade winds are blowing, and they are pushing clouds, thick clouds, white at the top but dark at the bottom, over the ridge and down into the head of the valley. Tendrils of those clouds reach for the shoppers of Manoa. They dissipate before they can make good their threat, but every once in awhile, there is a drop of mist on my cheek.

The walk takes about twenty minutes, much of it on a path where the houses and the mango trees block the view of the valley walls. At the end of the path is an open field. Here, the whole upper valley comes into view. And as I’m crossing that field, I notice the stub of a rainbow rising from the ridge spur to my right – the eastern wall of the valley.

Not much of a rainbow, I thought to myself, short and dim. I thought Hawai‘i was supposed to be able to do better than this.

Then I looked again. The stub was the upper part of a double rainbow. The lower part, brilliant and full, had splashed itself against the side of the ridge, never launching itself into the sky but expending its brightness like spray paint against the green mountain.

A few minutes, and a hundred yards or so, and the angle had changed enough so that the top of the bow just managed to clear the ridge. And standing over the top of the bow, almost touching it, there was the waxing moon, five days from the full.

I went into the shopping center, expecting to be inside a good long time and not seeing anything more of the rainbow.

I was right about the “good long time”. It was nearly two hours later when I finally got what I came for and could emerge from a place where the only things Hawai‘ian were the price tags. The sun was low in the sky by the time I could see it again, and the skies clear overhead. But the trades were still blowing, and I looked to the west and to the slanting rays of that sun, and they were mottled by drifts of mist.

And to the east, the rainbow, full and sharp, towered over the parking lot.

I stood in the middle of that parking lot, transfixed. Like I would have in Maine, where a rainbow of such perfect colors and dimensions would stop traffic. People would pile into each other, would race to windows and onto porches and patios (quite possibly still underwater from the just-passed violent thunderstorm), all of them digging for cameras and cell phones.

Manoa’s shopping center was full of cars and people, each one of them with a purpose, each one focused on his or her private errand. Not one of them so much as looked up.

I suppose that’s not so strange. I can imagine a citizen of Hawai‘i, newly landed in Maine, staring in blank-eyed astonishment at the lobsters in the aquarium’s touch tank. While the Mainahs shake their heads and slowly walk away. Tourists!

And then I noticed the moon. The filling moon, in exactly the same place on that rainbow, perched practically touching the top of its arch, that it had been when the rainbow was still spraypaint on the valley’s eastern spur. It’s as if the moon were pulling that rainbow. Stretching it into the fading of the day, higher and higher and yet higher still.

Until the arch can take no more and it shatters into brittle pieces that fall, dissolving as they go, never reaching the valley floor.

Leaving only the memory of color in the gray shapes under moonlight.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007, 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

I was going to post on a completely different topic, but Quilly and Thom have been getting into it over the foibles of drivers and pedestrians here in Paradise (a failing to which your friendly neighborhood Amoeba is also subject). And that reminded me …

As a writer with real talent once wrote, the story I’m about to relate makes a better recitation than a blog post. However, James Thurber made do with words on paper, so I’ll just have to do what I can.

A bunch of us (not the bunch in the post I’ve cited here, but – oh hell, it’s when the teachers of this bunch were among the students, back when elephants had fur) …

As I was saying. A bunch of us were on a field trip, gathered around a campfire and complaining venomously about how lousy and inconsiderate American drivers were. One of the professors of the class, a visiting scientist from what was then West Germany, passed around a bottle of schnapps (guaranteeing him our attention) and disagreed. “Oh, no, American drivers are the most attentive, patient, and courteous drivers I have ever seen!”

We thought that maybe the bottle of schnapps in our hands wasn’t the first one (we’ll call him) Günther had seen that night, and said so. “Ah, but I have proof!“, he said. And he proceeded to tell us about one day on the Autobahn in southern Germany.

This particular Autobahn was of the two-lane, two-way variety, not a divided highway like most freeways in the US are now. The road consisted of the two travel lanes, a shoulder on each side, and, on the other side of each shoulder, a car-devouring ditch and embankment. The speed limit was … well, in those days, there wasn’t one.

And our mild-mannered, bespectacled Günther was on it in a Beetle.

Now, for those of you out there for whom “hippie” is ancient history. The “People’s Car” was quite good enough to get a body from point A to point B, but it wouldn’t set any speed or maneuverability records while doing so. And, as Bill Cosby once pointed out, “if you have a head-on collision with a dog, you lose.”

So here is Günther in his Beetle, puttering along at around 100 kph (ca. 60 mph), which is about as fast as an original-version VW Bug will go without filing a grievance, when over the crest of a hill about a kilometer (0.6 miles) away, a car appears, going the other direction. Four of them, in fact. All of them high-powered Mercedes-Benz sedans, racing down the Autobahn towards Günther at more than 180 kph (115 mph).

Side by side.

Yep. That means what it says. Between the two car-devouring ditch-and-embankment complexes on this two-way Autobahn there are two travel lanes, each one bounded by a shoulder lane. And each one of the four lanes has a Mercedes in it, each one of which is in a moving dead heat with the other three.

Günther considered his options, in all of which the line if you have a head-on collision with a dog, you lose featured prominently. He could not stay where he was. He could not go into the ditch and expect to survive – and even then, the berm might not have been wide enough to spare him a glancing blow from one of those muscle cars. He could not go up – Ferdinand Porsche having neglected to equip his design with helicopter blades. He could not go down – no atomic-powered shovels in the toolkit either.

Günther didn’t mention water on the floor, or his life passing before his eyes. But either or both were likely under the circumstances, and no one would have thought less of him. Or of whatever was left after the Mercedes got through with him. He was in the process of closing his eyes and preparing himself for impact when …

The cars vanished.

Actually, they didn’t, as the sound effects produced by the driver’s side door of Günther’s car announced.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

At the proverbial last possible moment, the four Mercedes had pulled into single file, into the travel lane in which they were supposed to have been in the first place, and raced past the quaking VW and its quaking occupant.

As Günther attempted to regain his equilibrium and resume his journey, he chanced to look through his rear-view mirror.

His four Mercedes antagonists roared on down the Autobahn to their destination, whatever it was.

Side by side.

Günther ended his story and took a pull from the schnapps bottle, confident that his proof had won the argument.

It had.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions expressed are mine, as a private citizen.

He: So you’re going out to the Leeward side of O‘ahu today?

She: I was. But I might have trouble getting there.

He: For why?

She: The road’s closed. There’s been an accident. A bad one. And you know what that means.

He: Yeah. Tragedies for families. And nobody else out there is moving an inch.

She: Well, maybe it’s not so bad. The crash happened near this bridge to nowhere, which they opened, so traffic is moving.

He: You mean the one they show in the news story? Using your pictures?

She: WHAT?!?

He: They used your pictures of the bridge!

She: I thought they looked familiar …

He: Well, now you’ve got a story to tell your photography class. Quill Pen Photos Make Local News. At least the TV station gave you a credit. But I’m sure your instructor will be using this little episode to tell you all about something even better.

She: What?

He: A check.

PS (11 PM HST, 24 Jan.): Quilly’s pictures were only up on the KGMB News site for a few hours. So if you haven’t gone looking yet, don’t bother. If you have and wondered what happened, well, now you know. Presumably, as soon as the TV station got their own news people on the scene, they got and used their own photos. I just hope the word check didn’t scare them away from dear Q …

This evening (2 September 2008), somewhere on the Hawaiian Island of O‘ahu, there is a bus TheBus driver who deserves a medal.

He’ll probably get a lawsuit.

He was driving an express bus ‘ewa-bound from Honolulu during the afternoon rush hour. The bus was full of the Hawaiians who do not feature in the tourist brochures. The ones whose wages wouldn’t cover the cost of a tank of gas way before the price hit US$4.00 a gallon.

And, in the front seats (of course), the ones prominently reserved for the elderly and infirm, a pack of young people. O‘ahu’s finest. Just ask them, if you don’t mind getting your ears blistered for your trouble.

Into this press of humanity walks (barely) an old, frail woman.

The bus driver announces “This bus doesn’t move until the lady sits.”

None of the men or young folk budge. Finally, a middle-aged woman with a gimpy foot yields. The driver is less than happy, but the forms have been obeyed. The bus rolls on to the next stop.

At which, a man with crutches hobbles on board.

“This bus don’t move until the man sits.”

Nobody gets up this time. Nobody.

The driver rises from his chair, stares down the line of O‘ahu’s finest who are hale and hearty and sitting in the seats that are supposed to be for the elderly and infirm. A young (ahem) man stares back. “I’m not moving, and you can’t make me.”

This is (what oughta be) the medal part. The driver grabs the callow fellow and, in mere seconds, puts him off the bus. He never knew what hit him.

Check that. As the bus pulls away, he’s heard to call out, I got your bus number!

See “lawsuit”, supra.

So I’m listening to Quilly tell this true story, and the first thing that pops into my mind is …

Iraq.

Where We the People have spent thousands of lives and billions of dollars to bestow unto the Arabs of the Fertile Crescent, a people who are among the most hospitable and well-mannered of all the denizens of this polluted sphere, the wonders of The American Way.

Yeah.

   - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

First posted on the late, unlamented Felloffatruck Publications site on 1 November 2007. Pulled out of the recycle bin in honor of our friends at Waking Ambrose, where rabbits are always good luck on the first of the month. Especially if the dog catches them.

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

What’s that? Rabbits have fur? Not hare, um, hair? Hey. How do you know I’m not praising rabbitkind in Hindi? Hare Rabbit, Hare Rabbit, Rabbit Rabbit, Hare Hare.

No, Potter, I was not calling you.

But since you’re here, I’ve gotta tell you something. You could’ve dealt with that Voldemort character a lot more quickly and cheaply than you did. All you needed to do was turn yourself into a hare, Harry, dive into a top hat, and make him have to pull you out. Voldemort would have died of embarrassment at having to resort to such a cheap magician’s trick, and your buddies would all be around for the sequels that Rowling will eventually wish she’d been able to write, without her having to break every known law of thermodynamics to get them back.

I’ve been hearing a lot about rabbits lately. Especially on the first of the month. Y’see, a bunch of the blogging buddies with whom Quilly and I hang out have taken to shouting Rabbit, rabbit! at each other with their first posts/comments on said first days of the month. Supposed to bring good luck, it is. Like carrying around a rabbit’s foot. Which, I suppose, is good luck for the person who bagged the rabbit. Not so good for the rabbit who got bagged.

Now, as most of you know by this time, I am a scientist. And one who isn’t much on superstitions. Knock wood. So when the first of the month comes along, I tend to make myself more unwelcome than usual by tweaking the bunny talk somehow. Like saying Kuniklo, kuniklo. “Rabbit, rabbit” in Esperanto. Or Lapaki, lapaki. Hawai‘ian.

I was surprised to find that there’s a Hawai‘ian word for “rabbit”. Hawai‘i hasn’t got any rabbits, and, if it weren’t for the missionaries with their Easters, followed by the soldiers and sailors with their Easter bunnies for their wives and kids, a Hawai‘ian wouldn’t have a clue what a rabbit is.

And – trust me on this – they wouldn’t want to know. They didn’t know about rats and mice and pigs and cows either, until they all got imported by the whiteskins and proceeded to rip up the ‘uala, along with just about everything else green and edible.

There would have been nothing lucky at all about a rabbit infestation on these islands. Except maybe for the rabbits. Which typically know a good thing when they find it, and how to take advantage. Quickly. Like when Bill Cosby’s Noah complained to God about the animals that were getting into the Ark:

Two rabbits. Only two. Only two.

The rabbits did get loose in plenty of places they didn’t belong. Like Australia, for instance. When I lived there, oh, a few decades ago now, Volkswagen was marketing a car called the Rabbit in the USA. The same car on Australian roads was called the Golf.

Now, I have nothing against golf. Hell, I owe my college education to golf, or at least to working on golf courses – Tiger Wood’s supremacy on the links is under no threat from me. But I thought “Golf” was a funny name for a car, even if the club with which you typically hit your first shot on every hole is called a driver. So, like the naive Yankee I was, I asked a guy one day, while we were sitting at a bar in Adelaide, “how come you don’t call that car a Rabbit?”

I nearly got the beer mug in my face. And since beer is sacred in Australia, and not to be spilled, that was a measure of the joker’s irritation with me. About the only intelligible words in the torrent of noise thrown my way (along with the beer) were “damned rodents!” And as I became aware of the damage that rabbits can cause to pasture, I got to calling them “damned rodents” too. Lumped in with those rats and mice and beavers and groundhogs, and all those other buck-toothed menaces to grass and trees and corn and beans.

Until … I told you I am a scientist, right? Studying the diversity and evolutionary history of life on earth, right? Along with a bunch of other guys and gals of like mind? Some of whom decided, one fine day, to ask “is a rabbit a rodent?” So they got a lot of rabbits, and a lot of rodents, and they did a lot of DNA sequencing. And when they were done, they decided that the rabbits belonged, not to the rodents, but to the lagomorphs.

Which means, Gertrude, that a rabbit is … wait for it … a rabbit. Is a rabbit is a rabbit is a rabbit is, yeah, you can stop now.

Oh. The Hindi word for “rabbit” is khargosh. Hare Khargosh. Khargosh khargosh, hare hare. Doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Want to watch me pull a hare out of my hat?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Over on Quilly’s blog right now, you can read about how, when she was young, she and some of her friends climbed a tree and lived to tell the tale. Somehow. Danged if I know how. But it occurred to me, as I was reading this story, that there’s a party to this conversation that, up ’til now, has been silent …

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

I heard that!!

Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you. Yeah, you. Sittin’ there lyin’ in my shade with your fat head up against my trunk and thinkin’ that bein’ a tree has to be the laziest life there is.

You think it’s easy bein’ green? I’m tellin’ you, pal, that blasted frog of yours don’t know the half of it. He only has to worry about pigs and bears and forks in the road. Me? Floods, and fires, and thunderstorms, and droughts and … You get dandruff, what do you go do? Take a shower and shampoo your hair. Right? I get gypsy moths, what do I get to do? Sit there and take it, that’s what. Have you got any idea what it’s like to come down with a case of bark beetles, and you can’t scratch nothin’?!?

Leave that pine cone alone! It’s hard enough getting’ any new trees started around here without you messin’ with the production line. Sheesh. I put out thousands of those things every year, and what with the weevils and the worms and the birds and the squirrels, most of the babies – my babies – don’t even make it down to the ground. What did you think all this pitch is about? Huh? Huh?? And then, the ones that do make it … well, which one of you yahoos was it that came up with the idea of lawnmowers?

Somehow, when we were young, we made it through all that. Damned if I know how. It certainly wasn’t any thanks to you or your kind. ‘Cause just when we thought we were going to grow up to make cones of our own, and even get big enough to prop up the fat heads of people lying in our shade, these kids of yours came along.

I remember it like it was yesterday. We were still skinny and supple. We needed to be because, if we weren’t, we’d snap off in the first big wind, and that would be all for us. Not that your verminous brats cared. They’d clamber up us until we bent over double, and then jump off. Bwoooinngg!! We lost Cotton and Wally when they just broke under the strain. They weren’t even around long enough for the Alders to tell them about the birds and the bees and the (God damn you) chainsaws. But did they care? No! They didn’t care. They just laughed and squealed and climbed right back up for another go.

I almost got one of ‘em. Yes sirree. Proudest day of my life. Or it would have been if the damned dog had done his job. ‘Course, I should have known. Dogs sold out to your kind when my great-great-grandmother was a sapling. I don’t know what I was thinkin’. But one o’ them kids thought she was goin’ to just hang on when the others jumped off. I gave her a ride, yes I did. And I gotta tell ya, she flew through the air with the greatest of ease, that white little girl with no flying trapeze. But when she came down, she didn’t break her spine. I was hopin’ I could send her shade to join Cotton’s and Wally’s. No such luck. And then the dog didn’t eat her. She lived to ram two more of us with her bicycle. Somebody somewhere must love her more than us, I tell you. And I tell you, that still burns.

Well, why do you think you and your kind decided to call us pine trees?

Yeah, right. Run off home like you’ve seen a ghost or somethin’, and don’t believe a word I say.

I hope your house gets carpenter ants!

   - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This tale, a true story of my fitness for the profession I now hold, first appeared on Felloffatruck Publications on 3 January 2007. Folk seemed to enjoy it at the time. Perhaps you will too, even if you’ve already seen it.

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

I am a scientist. Yes I am. You can look it up. Have been all my adult life. And I have wanted to be one for as long as I can remember.

At almost any other time and place in the history of the planet, I would never have become a scientist. Science was not a paying profession until the 20th century, and even then, entry to the fields of science, along with most of the other “intellectual” spheres, was (is) restricted to people with money. And the family into which I was born didn’t have much.

But in the aftermath of Sputnik, they were taking even impecunious folk like me. And I had all the other prerequisites. An ability to remember arcane facts. A consuming interest in things no one else even saw. The social skills of a pithed frog. And the common sense of … well …

It is 1974. I am about to embark on a six-week field course in the out islands of the Bahamas, to study the biology of the desert and the coral reefs. I selected my college because they had such courses. Little did I know that the charismatic teacher who taught them was about to lose his bid for tenure because he didn’t publish, and his teaching was more fluff than substance. I might have known this if I’d paid any attention to the records of the people on the faculty of the Biology Department. I might also have known that the Biology Department was so seriously overloaded with students, the degree program was on the verge of collapse.

But if I had actually based my life’s choices on common sense, I would have gone into accounting, or driven a semi, and I’d actually have a few bucks in my pocket now. And you wouldn’t have an amoeba looking up at you from the bottom of the tree of life.

Back to 1974. I have never before traveled outside of New England. I have never before traveled on a commercial airliner. And I’m sitting with my ticket in the departure lounge at Boston’s Logan Airport, waiting for my classmates and my professor to show up.

Which they don’t. They all left for Nassau yesterday. I have no clue that this has happened.

So I get on the plane, fly to Nassau via Miami, and go to the hotel I’ve booked, expecting to catch up with them.

I don’t. They’re all in another hotel. I have no clue that this has happened.

By this time, I’m in a panic. I figure I’m late and they’re all wondering where the hell I’ve gotten to. Remember, this is 1974. No cell phones. Not that I could have afforded one. The college took my life savings and said “Tuition payments. You sucker.” I should have told them right then and there to take their school and shove it. National Merit Scholarship or no National Merit Scholarship. I didn’t. I am a sucker.

So now I’m alone and scared in a foreign country. I get myself on a plane to Long Island, our study site. The airstrip is on the north end of the island. The study site is in the middle, some twenty miles away. There are no buses, no taxis. As if I had money for either. I start walking. Me and my bags. In sneakers. No hat. No water. In a desert. People have died of exposure walking the roads of Long Island. I have no clue that this can happen.

I don’t get very far before a fellow stops and offers me a lift. This is a plot complication. On the one hand, I desperately need a ride. Especially if the driver knows where this place is that I’m supposed to be going. On the other hand, I am violating a Commandment. Thou Shalt Not Hitchhike. Thou Shalt Not Accept Rides From Strangers. I violated the rule once, back in Boston. He was gay and looking for pickups. I never ran so fast in my life.

Somehow the dude convinces me that it’s safe to get in the pickup. I am not molested. Not least ’cause I’m sitting in the back. We drive to the camp, where I expect to meet the professor and my classmates.

I don’t. They have taken a boat to Long Island. I have no clue that this has happened.

I do meet the couple who are in charge of the campsite. We are expected. “Where are the rest of them?” I dunno … They show me the place we are to stay. It’s got four walls, a concrete floor, and a roof. That’s it. No heat pump. No feather beds – there are a couple old mattresses shoved in a corner. No showers. No running water. The toilet’s a long-drop outhouse out back. The prof promised “primitive”. He delivered. What’s more, the place looks like it hasn’t been occupied since the course was last taught, two years ago.

It’s still early afternoon, and there’s nothing else to do, so I grab a broom and start sweeping up. I don’t touch the mattresses. There are visions of centipedes, scorpions and tarantulas dancing in my head. Especially tarantulas. We will be returning to the tarantulas.

I don’t recall what if anything I have for dinner that night. I must at least have gotten water from somewhere. What I’m mostly concerned about is nightfall. Having nothing in particular to sleep on, and wondering what might be crawling out from under that pile of mattresses. And realizing that, sooner or later, I’m going to have to go out, in the dark, and use that outhouse. It was spooky enough in the daylight. At night? Those mattresses will be sterile by comparison.

It’s midnight. There’s no longer any help for it. The outhouse it has to be. And I’m going to have to park my can on the can. With great trepidation, I grasp my pathetic little flashlight and head out the back. I enter, scanning the premises carefully for signs of life. There don’t seem to be any. So I make the usual preparations and have a seat.

Suddenly, right underneath me, there is frantic scurrying and rustling. I pop off the hole like a Mexican jumping bean on a griddle, grab the flashlight and look back at where I’ve been. The rustling gets louder … and a long jointed leg sticks out of the hole …

Tarantula!

On a shelf of the outhouse there is a can of insecticide. I snatch it, aim the nozzle at the seat and start spraying. I empty the whole can in that outhouse, behaving all the while like the last American soldier on the Bataan Peninsula, emptying his machine gun at the Japanese Army that is descending on him. If I’m going down, you’re going with me!! At last both I and the can are exhausted. I dress, reeking of Raid, and escape back to the relative sanctuary of the concrete floor of the cabin.

The next morning, I go back into the outhouse intending to examine the wreckage. Nothing. It’s as if the previous night had never happened. Not so much as a dead fly. I learn later that the leg in the night probably belonged to a land crab, which wouldn’t have been affected by the insecticide, rather than to a tarantula. I also learned that the natives consider the tarantulas to be harmless. But they were scared to death of the centipedes. Which can take you out. I have no clue that this can happen.

About midday, the prof and the rest of the students show up. With the food and the gear. The place is transformed almost instantaneously. They tackle the pile of mattresses as if there was nothing in them. There isn’t. By nightfall, the class is well underway.

It was a great time. We bonded and shared – well, most of us anyway. And practically everybody in the class was going to honor our soon-to-be-departed prof by going on to graduate school and becoming famous marine biologists in our own right.

What most of the others eventually became was restauranteurs, or insurance agents, or truck drivers. I’ve lost track of several of them. Like the one I was assigned to “buddy” on a skin-diving trip one day. Five hours this guy stayed out in the water on a hot tropical afternoon, with me tagging along begging him to return ’cause I was getting fried, but refusing to leave him because that would violate a Commandment.

He returned to base unscathed.

Me? I spent two-and-a-half of my precious six weeks in the Bahamas flat on my stomach, nursing severe second-degree burns across my neck and shoulders.

Years later, one of the technicians working in my laboratory – who graduated from the same college I did, but two years later – was fond of saying that, in order to get a Ph.D., you have to check your common sense at the door.

I didn’t have any to check.

– O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Another repost from Felloffatruck Publications, this one from 30 March 2008. Two reasons for bringing it back to light. One, Quilly’s posts on our visits with sea turtles get visited from time to time, and they link to this one. Which now you can read again (once the links get fixed). Two, a lot of people on O‘ahu are up in arms right now about an idiot (I hope only one) running around killing sea turtles for no apparent reason. I mean, it wasn’t too long ago when Quilly was swimming in a North Shore lagoon and felt a bump on her side.

Anyway, it just seemed like a good time to resurrect this story.

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

On our recent two-day trip to Hawai‘i Island (the haoles call it the “Big Island”, not realizing – or, perhaps, not caring – that the kanaka maoli don’t necessarily appreciate having a name that means “homeland” dissed in this particular way) …

As I was saying. On our recent trip to Hawai‘i Island, Quilly hoped to see turtles. So, on the one day of the two on which I wasn’t working, and as she’s already related, we went to a place where we expected to find some – the promises made by our hotel’s advertisements having gone the way of most promises made in advertisements.

And it came to pass, as we were walking along the shoreline near the heiau, I was able to stand and point and say:

“Sea turtle!”

“Where turtle?”

“There. Turtle.”

The embarrassing part of this story (not counting the Young Frankenstein ripoff) is, the two of us, including yours truly, The Amoeba, the Grand Protistan Master of Marine Biology, walked right past the spot where the turtle was – while other people were watching it – and never saw the thing. If I hadn’t happened to look back at a moment when the animal had its carapace above water, and watched the rock move …

For the next half hour, we sat and watched while this turtle, a mere fifteen feet away (it’s illegal to get any closer), paid attention to nothing but feeding its face. It’s illegal to get any closer, because the Green Sea Turtle is an endangered species and is protected by international, Federal, and Hawai‘ian State laws. Not that those laws stopped one kid from grabbing a turtle while we were there, and hoisting it into the air for his dad – and any wildlife officers in the vicinity – to see.

That face-feeding looked like hard work. There didn’t seem to be much more than bare rock for this oceangoing herbivore to eat. While we were considering this observation, I happened to look down into a crevice that was too small for a turtle to stick its head into. And saw this.

Most of the seaweeds growing in this crevice were limu aki‘aki, known to scientists (for the moment anyway, see *FOOTNOTE) as Ahnfeltiopsis concinna. Limu in Hawai‘ian means “seaweed”, and limu aki‘aki is one of the types favored by both sea turtles and humans. Though the humans usually prefer limu manauea, limu huluhuluwaena, or ogo with their ahi.

Where the turtles couldn’t reach, the limu growth was luxuriant. Where the turtles could reach, however, all the limu stalks were bitten off at the base:

Fortunately, this limu can form new growing tips from the bitten ends, and also can grow new stalks from a flat base that’s stuck like paint to the rocks. They must grow just fast enough to keep the turtles fed.

Around the corner, we found a sandy beach where turtles had hauled themselves up on the beach to bask themselves. There’s a lot more to this simple sentence than meets the first reading.

For one thing, sandy beaches are not all that common on the shoreline of Hawai‘i Island. Hawai‘i Island has, not one, not two, but three active volcanos on it. Most of the shorelines are black volcanic rock, from the lava flows that these volcanos spew out from time to time. A natural sandy beach is a thing to be cherished – and the one at Pu‘uhonua o Honaunau certainly was. So cherished, in fact, that the ali‘i claimed it for themselves. Only the nobility were permitted to walk it and land their boats on it. To the common people, the beach was kapu.

It still is. Ropes and signs prohibit the mere tourists from striding the sacred sands. Not only as a sign of respect to Hawai‘ian culture, but more importantly (given what Americans have historically felt about anybody else’s, especially English, nobility), as a sign of respect to the turtles, who will only haul themselves up on beaches where they feel they won’t be pestered while basking in the sun.

Apparently, the “basking in the sun” business is something of a mystery to people who study the Green Sea Turtle. Of all the half-dozen sea turtle species, the Green is the only one that indulges in sunbathing. I searched the Internet for awhile, and found nothing other than arm-waving explanations (such as “they like getting warmed up in the sun just like us”) for this practice.

I venture to suggest something.

Here’s a shot of our friendly grazer with its back out of water. You might notice that the back of the shell (carapace) looks less clean than the rest of it.

In fact, it looks like there’s stuff growing out of it.

Well, there is. Algae. Quite a bit of it. And it’s not like the turtle can reach back with a wire brush and scratch itself there to get rid of it. In freshwater environments, there are algae (for example, in the green algal genus Basicladia) that grow only on the backs of turtles. And their growth can get kinda frightening.

Like this.

So what’s a poor turtle to do, if it doesn’t want to turn itself into a floating seaweed garden? It can’t bite the algae off, it can’t scrape it off. What’s left?

Burning it off. That’s what. Hence the basking.

And the need for people to leave the blessed turtles alone while they’re basking. So the beaches where the turtles haul themselves ashore are kapu. Which is fine with me.

Time constraints prevented us from getting into the water with these turtles. I understand that’s quite an experience. Maybe next time.

*FOOTNOTE: The scientific name of living thing X is supposed to serve both as a label with which to identify X, and as a clue to the other living things to which X is related. With many forms of life including algae, this practice causes lots of problems. Mainly, because most algae were given scientific names based on what they look like, and in recent years we’ve found that algae which look alike may be no more closely related to each other than you are to the pineapples you just had for dessert.

I looked up DNA sequences that have been obtained from algae identified as Ahnfeltiopsis concinna, and compared them to DNA sequences from other closely-related marine algae. I found that species placed in the genus Ahnfeltiopsis are not all closely related to each other. Which means that at least some of the algae now assigned to the genus Ahnfeltiopsis need to be placed in some other genus – in other words, they need a new scientific name.

It turns out that, according to the DNA sequences I investigated, Ahnfeltiopsis concinna belongs to the same group as Ahnfeltiopsis linearis, the “type” (more or less, the first-named) species of Ahnfeltiopsis and therefore the “benchmark” for correct assignments of species to this genus. So it looks like I can keep Ahnfeltiopsis concinna as the correct scientific name for limu aki‘aki, right?

Wrong.

Because that same group of species also includes plants identified as Gymnogongrus griffithsiae, the type species (benchmark) for the genus Gymnogongrus. Which genus was first described in 1833; Ahnfeltiopsis was first described in 1992.

That means that I need to throw away the name Ahnfeltiopsis entirely, because it’s a synonym of Gymnogongrus and was published later, and change the scientific name of limu aki‘aki to Gymnogongrus concinnus [sic] …

If and only if the specimens from which the DNAs came that were assigned to Ahnfeltiopsis concinna and A. linearis and Gymnogongrus griffithsiae were in fact correctly identified – an if that is by no means a sure thing. And if and only if other kinds of analyses (including those from other DNA samples) give the same answer as the one that I looked at.

There are smarter and better informed people than I working on this question as I write. Meanwhile, I’ve got a headache. I can just imagine what you’ve got, dear reader. If you got this far.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This blog entry was first posted on Felloffatruck Publications on 23 February 2008. It’s the only review that ever appeared on this site. I reposted it on 27 July 2008, firstly ’cause it attracted a fair bit of interest at the time, including from a person at Lexmark, and secondly ’cause, after six months, things had only gotten worse. And traffic on this post and elsewhere on the Web suggested that lots of other people were having trouble too. Naturally, after more than 10 months, we finally got the thing to work. If you’ve found this post while searching for up-to-date comments on this printer, read this post first. And if you’re having connectivity issues, be prepared to check, and possibly replace, your wireless router.

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

First, the review. Then, my explanation for why I’m doing it here.

The Lexmark X4850 Printer is one of those “inexpensive” (a duke’s ransom instead of a king’s; the street price would still, even with what’s happened to food and fuel prices lately, buy a couple of week’s worth of groceries for a family of four) 3-in-1 jobs – copier, printer, scanner. Its extra wrinkle is that it’s supposedly wireless. Set it up and send your print jobs from anywhere within the range of your wireless network. Sounds like a great idea if your home or office has a wireless network already going, eh?

BZAAAAAT!!!

After two weeks of wrestling with it, with both a Mac OS10.4 and a Windows Vista system, I can safely tell you, that, if you’re in the market for something like this, buy something with a good old fashioned USB or Firewire connector, and forget about spending the premium for a wireless connection that DOES NOT EXIST.

I must have tried to install the printer driver for this thing about seventeen times. The actual driver installation was flawless, so far as I can tell. The problem came with the wireless setup. Half the time, the Setup Utility for wireless would tell me that the configuration failed. OK, back up and start again. Uninstall, reboot, reinstall, fail, uninstall, reboot, reinstall. Oh, it worked! Cool. Print something.

Y’think? “Word cannot find the printer.” If Word (or any other utility that will allegedly print a page) doesn’t just simply hang. Force quit, uninstall, reboot, reinstall. Troubleshoot. Computer in wireless mode sees the IP address of the printer, all other systems are supposedly GO. Fine, machine, so Print something. Nothing.

OK, it’s the router. Don’t know where the router instructions are, don’t have the patience to dig them up. Bedtime.

Which is where the situation got left until Quilly tried to print with her Windows Vista machine. Same problems, same conclusion. Until she hooked up her computer to the printer via USB, printed a page, and two came out. The printer had read the file in wireless mode and placed it in the print queue, but refused to activate the queue until it was wired to a computer.

It so happened that Quilly’s problem was solved by rebooting the computer and the printer enough times so that both machines stopped standing at opposite ends of the room, arms folded and looking anywhere but at each other, and condescended to communicate.

But meanwhile, my Mac got a case of the dreaded flashing question mark and had to go to the shop, from which it returned with a new hard drive, a new Mac OS 10.5.1, and not much else. It didn’t need all that ruddy inconvenient data and software anyway. Including the 4850’s printer driver. Which I reinstalled. For all the good it did. The computer and printer still won’t talk to each other via wireless. And now, they won’t talk to each other over the USB cable either.

Just maybe some one of you out there has a high enough geek quotient to understand what’s happening and what to do next. My experience with people paid to have such a geek quotient can be summarized by “ka-CHING for him, wasted time and money for me”. And a recent websearch suggests that I’m far from the only one who has had this experience lately. The only thing I’ve worked out to do that doesn’t spit in the face of the law of diminishing returns is:

a) Don’t buy Lexmark products again.

b) Tell everyone not to buy Lexmark products – certainly not this one.

Now, silly me (the “explanation” part of this post starts here), I thought the place to post this review was, not on my blog, but on one of the many “product review” sites that are out there. After all, type in “lexmark X4850 review” on your favorite websearch engine, and these sites are what come up first. And, begging your pardon, I don’t want to tell just you regular readers “Don’t buy this piece of crap”. I want to tell everybody.

So I start writing down on one of these sites just what I told you.

Then I looked down at the bottom of the page …

“Please register to post your review.”

Oh no you don’t, donkeybottoms. I know a ka-CHING when I see one. Not to mention a spam gateway. You can keep your filthy, sewery hands the [string of expletives deleted] out of my pockets. You’ll disturb the moths.

I must have looked at half a dozen of these sites. Same thing every time.

So, fine. The review gets posted here. For all the good it will do. Might as well be a gnat in the basement of the Lexmark corporate offices. But, for all you “glass half full” people out there, I guess I got to tell somebody. Lucky you.

Why do we put up with this stuff anyway? I mean, how many times do we have to hear about people making more money than most countries from computer products that don’t work?!? In case you didn’t know:

Bill Gates, according to the 2007 Forbes magazine estimate, is worth, by himself, around US$56 billion.

The 2006 gross domestic product for the State of Hawai‘i – the entire frickin’ state – was $58 billion. Fourteen US states – and 125 countries – had 2006 GDPs less than that of Hawai‘i.

The If Windows were a car gag has to be a decade old now if it’s a minute (see also here, and tell her Quilly sent you), but what’s changed from:

Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

Eh? Especially the “you would simply accept this” part?

Quilly and I had a conversation not long ago about a blog post from a person who was complaining bitterly about the price for her season tickets to some sports team or other – not to mention the parking, the concessions, the this, the that. “When”, this person asked, “is this all going to end?”

The two of us came up with the same answer at the same time.

When you stop buying the tickets.

Excuse me while I shut this blog down, turn off the computer, toss it in the bin, and go look for pencil and paper.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2008 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This two-part story was first posted on the late, unlamented (trust me, I saw the stats) Felloffatruck Publications blog on 20 February 2007. I’m reposting it at the request of a friend. Who knows, maybe I’ll start a series. OFP’s Greatest Mis-hits. Why not? There’s a precedent.

Read the first part of this story

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I grew up in permanent green-eyed envy of kids who had asphalt. Their Tonka trucks rolled true. So did their marbles. And their Superballs actually bounced.

We had dirt.

My Superball, when it had been evicted from the living room (the floor area of which might have been big enough to hold a postage stamp; it certainly wasn’t large enough to hold a Superball, the two good lamps, and an imperious maternal unit all at once), didn’t bounce. It hit the dirt of our driveway and sat there, arms folded in sullen disgust. Or struck an embedded rock and careened off into the mountain laurel. If I was lucky. If I wasn’t lucky, it bounded away and crazybounced, like Superballs do if they actually get a surface they can work with, down the street and into the next county. And since the street was verboten, I would have to wave “happy trails” as the rubber hit the road, and hope to find a replacement in my stocking next Christmas.

Our benefactors next door had a blacktopped driveway. Our neighbors across the street had a blacktopped driveway. All of our neighbors down the street had blacktopped driveways.

We had dirt. In that neighborhood, it was a badge. Maybe not one you wanted.

But I didn’t know this at the time. I had more important things to deal with, anyway. Like learning to shovel snow off a dirt driveway without shoveling the dirt too – or, if the dirt was frozen, learning to scrape off the snow without having the shovel strike an embedded rock and drive its handle through my stomach.

And, learning how to ride a bicycle on the driveway’s uneven, shifting surface.

Which I did. Slowly and painfully. I did mention that was one heavy machine, didn’t I? Just checking. Didn’t wish you to forget just yet.

And finally, I was ready to leave the driveway and head out into the world.

Only one problem. The road to the world was paved, and led into the next county, where that Superball went. The street. But the street is verboten. Here I am, all dressed up, wheels at the ready, and noplace to go.

Well, not quite.

Our Benefactor’s family owned a large parcel of land. It’s all been sold off now, and it’s got houses on it. But forty years ago, it was covered with forest, and dotted with the holes that the antique bottle hunters had dug in it – a large part of it had been a dump in the early 20th century. It was crisscrossed with fire trails. And it backed on to what had been the railbed for the Old Colony Railroad, long abandoned and now a dirt road.

It was onto these trails that I ventured. Each day a little further. Until finally I took my courage into my hands, and exited the forest onto the old railbed.

At last! A long straight stretch of track on which I could work up some speed without having to worry about verboten roads, or curves in the winding forest trails, or inconvenient trees. Endless vistas stretched before my eyes – which for the moment forgot about that sled jump and the lessons it taught me.

Alas.

For that apparently hard-packed trail through the sand and gravel of the eastern Massachusetts coastal plain was deceiving. It was, after all, early spring in eastern Massachusetts. That period of time between the melting of the snow and the burgeoning of the summer grass. When the sand and gravel, and the silt and the clay, unbound by the new roots of the vegetation to be, still holds all its winter’s water.

Mud season.

That lovely straight, hard-looking dirt railbed was a morass of sand piles, swampy puddles, and embedded cobble boulders. And after my initial burst of energy, I was soon laboring.

Trouble was, that initial burst of energy had taken me well into uncharted territory. I didn’t know where I was, but I was unwilling to struggle back the way I came. That would be work. There had to be an easier way. I kept on going, hoping something would turn up.

And behold, it did. Off to my left, the road back to my house appeared. The blacktop road. The verboten one. But it was asphalt. Hard. Immune from waterlogged sand and gravel. The parental units would understand, especially after seeing the evidence of mud season with which I was already thoroughly spattered. All I needed to do was cross this flat expanse of sand between the railbed and the road, a mere 100 yards, and I was as good as home.

Alas.

That dead-flat, easy-looking path to my salvation wasn’t sand.

It was mud.

Deep, sticky, miry mud.

It wasn’t immediately obvious that I’d been had. The first 50 feet or so wasn’t awful. The surface was slimier than I expected, but, well, it was mud season. And then, I started getting into the real mud. I could no longer pedal the bicycle, I had to dismount and try to drag myself and the bike along. The mud went up to my shoetops, up to my ankles, up onto my calves. I kept on slogging, thinking just one more step and I would be out of the mire and back onto something resembling terra firma. But it kept getting worse.

And that bicycle was heavy. Remember? See, it pays to remember things. It was bad enough clean. Now it was slimed and caked with mud. Mud on the tires, mud on the wheels, mud on the fenders, mud on the frame. That sucker weighed a ton, and was getting heavier by the second.

I am smack dab in the middle of that 100-yard expanse. Mud to the left of me. Mud to the right. Mud in front of me, and mud behind – scarred with the tracks of a pair of feet and a pair of wheels. I am stuck in a bullseye of mud. Or quicksand. I had just seen, on television, an old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movie. One featuring a pit of quicksand, in which a number of characters had met their demise. And I saw myself in that pit, going down for the last time.

And I responded.

I cried. I screamed. I wailed for my mommy. I wailed for help. Somebody. Anybody. I racked up enough man card violations to last any self-respecting male three lifetimes.

And a self-respecting male responded.

I don’t know who he was. If I’d met him before or since, I can’t call it to mind. Doesn’t matter. Whoever he was, he came, an apparition out of the wilderness, complete with divine aura, slogging through the mud and mire to get me and my bicycle out of that plain of death and onto Ferry Street. And he didn’t even call me on the man card violations. Needless to say, I thanked him profusely, then whacked as much of the mud off my machine as I could and made my way home.

The red Columbia survived the mud ducking and lived long enough for me to be the last guy in my class to still be riding a bike with coaster brakes. My younger brother had already discovered the Sting Ray family of bikes, and wouldn’t be seen with me. (Years later, he met his Maker astride his cherished Harley.) Everyone else, it seemed, had a bike with at least 5 gears and drop handlebars, road-racer bikes being all the rage at the time.

I finally was able to convince the parental units that I needed a new bike. After all, by this time I was biking 3 miles each way to the golf course to caddy and, eventually, mow grass. I had the opportunity, if not to keep up with the Joneses, at least to keep them somewhat within cooee.

I chose a Schwinn Collegiate. Heavy. Five speeds (the absolute minimum possible in derailleur gears). Upright handlebars.

A complete absence of cool.

   – O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This two-part story was first posted on the late, unlamented (trust me, I saw the stats) Felloffatruck Publications blog on 20 February 2007. I’m reposting it at the request of a friend. Who knows, maybe I’ll start a series. OFP’s Greatest Mis-hits. Why not? There’s a precedent.

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By now, I reckon most of the regulars here have discovered Quilldancer’s bicycle story. If you haven’t, go check it out. I’ll wait. It’s an important part of this story.

Besides, it’s a howl. There she is, our Quilly as Marlene Brando, the Wild One, Leader of the Pack at the ripe old age of nine, the coolest kid with the coolest bike, and prepared to prove it right to the edge of existence in the raspberry patch at the bottom of the cliff. Makes you wonder who’s really writing Quilly’s blog. I mean, this person survived childhood, like, how?

Me? I would have been at the top of that cliff, watching. Maybe. More likely still, I would have been the kid yelling at the pack from the safety of his own backyard, “You’re going to get in trouble!!” Yeah, that’s a man card violation. As if I’m going to worry about that now. I’ve got so many man card violations on my record, I’m surprised I wasn’t sentenced long ago to wear a lace dress for the rest of my days. Most probably, the sentence was commuted to blogging, so I don’t scare the neighborhood dogs, to say nothing of the children.

I vividly remember my first bicycle. Also my last one. (Author’s Note, 25 July 2008: I still haven’t replaced that last bike. Basically, that’s because O‘ahu spells ‘bicycle’ S-U-I-C-I-D-E; we’ll come back to this another time.) But you know that story already. Back to the first. I was nine, I think. The bicycle was an all-red Columbia 5-star or something like it. One speed, coaster brakes. And bigger than I was. Not to mention heavier. Remember that “heavier”, we’ll be coming back to it.

I don’t recall having any say about the bicycle. I think I would have preferred to get an American Flyer steam engine, if anyone had asked me. It just showed up one spring day, and I was expected to learn to ride it.

First challenge was getting on. Now all the rest of you, I’m sure, know how you’re supposed to get on a bicycle. You get on the left side of the bike, plant your left foot on the left pedal, then push off with your right foot, hiking it over the frame and onto the right pedal in time to start pedaling before you lose momentum and fall into the lilacs. Now this maneuver isn’t too terribly complicated, but it does require you to have some confidence in keeping that left pedal still long enough to perch your foot on it.

As far as I was concerned, that left pedal may as well have been a cake of soap on a skating rink. I’d plant my foot on it, and the damned thing would shoot this way or that way, and I’d wind up in the mountain laurel with the bike on top of me, before I even got my right foot off the ground. I did mention the bike was heavy, didn’t I? Don’t forget, we’re not done with that yet.

Now, unlike a certain lady of my acquaintance, I’d already, by age 9, developed a certain feeling of sufficiency when it came to pains inflicted by the infernal machines we had the damned gall to call “toys”. Already, three years previously, which was the last time before this winter that I could recall being able to walk on top of a snowfall without falling in, I had had enough.

The offending object this time was a sled, a device for killing children on snow that I haven’t seen in years and years, it having been replaced by plastic sheets and unaided body surfing, sometimes intentional. In what was to be my last effort at daredevil antics (remember, I was six), I had, the previous summer, built a little mound in the middle of the sled run we had in the back of our house, down a pathetic little slope we called a “hill”. It was actually a fossil sand dune and it might have been thirty feet high. Anyway, I now had a sled jump, and I was so proud.

Came the big day. We had ice on top of snow. Perfect for sledding. I’d really get some speed going now. Today, Marshfield. Tomorrow, Nordic ski jumping on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. I scampered to the top of the run, slammed down the sled, ran three steps and jumped on. Just as I hoped, the sled roared down the hill, hit the jump and went airborne. Wheee!!

The sled came down on the other side of the jump. Its front runners punched through the ice crust on the snow and plunged into the powder beneath. And the sled stopped dead.

I did not.

Memo to naïve kids making their first sled runs on ice-covered snow. Frozen crusts make excellent sandpaper. Especially when applied to the face. I slid twenty feet, mostly on my nose, and made a first acquaintance since the age of cognition with the sight of my own blood.

When I realized what had happened, I did some more running.

Moooommmmyyyy!!

That’s the man card violation at the bottom of the stack.

And it meant that I had precious little patience with having a bicycle land on me all the time because of a left pedal that would not stay still. (Were you wondering when we’d get back to the bicycle?) I didn’t have that kind of patience then, nor ever again. To this day, I get on a bicycle by hiking my right foot over the frame and onto the right pedal, with my left foot firmly on the ground, and stabilize that right foot on the pedal before pushing off with the left foot.

It took me an awful long time to learn how to ride that bike. But I finally managed it. And I’ll say this much. I might be a slow adopter, but once I get something going, I stick with it. That red Columbia was the absolute opposite of cool. It might define stodgy. But I didn’t care. There were no kids in my neighborhood to worry about being cool for. The school kids had already written me off as a walking dictionary, so who cared about them anyway. This bike was transportation, and I was going to use it as transportation. Half a dozen years later I would still be using it as transportation, mostly to get to the golf course where, from age 10, I earned money caddying.

Only one problem. I was still nine. The bike was still bigger than me. And it was spring in eastern Massachusetts. Which means spring thaw. That period of time between the melting of the snow and the burgeoning of the summer grass, that New Englanders since the Pilgrim Fathers have learned to know and love. Well, learned to know, anyway.

Mud season.

[Continued]

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.