Fighting, Fighting

I have only fifteen pages left to translate out of five hundred fifty-five. I am towards the end (obviously) of the final, all-out Turkish assault on Eger Castle, October 14, 1552. That's about the fourth major assault over the thirty-nine day siege by some 40,000 Ottomans. The castle defenders number about 2,000. Or at least they did when the siege started.

The Women of Eger,
painting by Bertalan Székely

There is a great deal of mayhem in this Hungarian historical novel published in 1899, Egri Csillagok (Eger Stars). Most recently during this final assault — as I described to Shari yesterday afternoon, then again to Ray and Judy before going out for dinner — a widowed mother, Lady Balogh, her young son having just been killed in the fighting, grabs a sword and runs to the bastion. Meanwhile, the captain of the castle, István Dobó, wrestles with a giant Turk who falls off the platform by the bastion onto the cobblestones below. The Turk loses his helmet and gets up just as Lady Balogh is running by. Enraged, she swings her sword and, as the novelist, Géza Gárdonyi, writes, severs the Turk's head from his neck.

The siege takes up only the last half of the novel. The first half begins with two children skinny dipping, five-year old Éva and seven-year old Gergely. They are captured by a one-eyed janissary named Yumurdjak. What follow in that first half of the novel are descriptions of life in 16th Century Hungary and Constantinople. The last pages will surely complete the story of Yumurdjak. Éva and Gergely, now grown up and married, through a highly unlikely set of circumstances only a novelist can weave, are both fighting on the ramparts against the Turks, the husband not knowing his wife is there. It's a page-turner.

It is a historical novel. The siege of Eger really happened. Only two years later, Sebestyén Tinódi was composing ballads chronicling the heroism of the Eger defenders. The characters the novelist develops in the first half of the book actually existed and fought at Eger. Their names and deeds are known and were recorded, not just by Tinódi, but also in records kept during the siege by the aged castle steward, János Sukán. We know the names and deeds of soldiers and officers, blacksmiths, millers, the two priests, and the mayor of Eger, the inventory of supplies the castle steward maintained, and that the castle had thirteen barbers. Back in those days, the novelist explains, there were no doctors. Barbers washed, sewed and bandaged wounds. Someone counted 12,000 cannonballs inside the fortress, not including those embedded in the walls or those the defenders hurled down on Turks climbing siege ladders.

Granted, the first half is more novel than history, but even so the historical setting is accurate. The brutal suppression of the peasant revolt led by György Dózsa, the catastrophic Battle of Mohacs, and the Ottoman ruse to occupy Buda are all facts. And in the hands of a skilled novelist, which Gárdonyi certainly was, this brutal history is strikingly vivid.

The Siege of Eger Castle
painting by Béla Vízkelety

There is a great deal of mayhem. Gárdonyi is constantly weaving in colorful details that bring the medieval period alive, together with humor — sometimes black, sometimes almost slapstick, particularly his use of a gypsy character, Sárközi, for comic relief. But there is a great deal of mayhem.

And it's that mayhem that makes me reflect and write this blog post. It's the realization that we haven't changed all that much over the last six centuries.

I'm flipping through Netflx documentaries and see Rick Steves in Europe. I flip through his episodes, passing over four or five travel shows set in Germany, and stumble upon Bulgaria. ¿Bulgaria? It's one of those Balkan places loaded with centuries of animosity and bloodshed. Being raised Hungarian, I have such associations. I'm curious. The half hour program is delightful. You know, there is a lot of beauty and culture in Bulgaria.

So, someone remind me. Why do we hate and slaughter each other?

Eger Stars

Its fascinating to be immersed in another’s world; another’s fantasy world. The images, characters, costumes, and customs linger in the mind, if only for a short time, like a dream.

A good movie can draw me in. Each movie and TV program is someone's creation of a re-playable dream. Most are silly endless chase scenes, unnecessarily violent, unduly salacious, and/or simply boring. I prefer to go to bed and create my own dreams. But some movies draw me in, typically period pieces, foreign settings, intelligent dialogue, and gorgeous cinematography.

Nowadays we watch movies on a television with all the distractions of domestic life. When we were young, a trip to the movie theater was special: vivid colors projected onto a huge screen in a darkened theater supported by a sound system that moved across the walls. I remember receiving printed programs, even assigned seating, to showings of Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, and the Walt Disney Sydney premiere of Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Remember the after matinee surprise of emerging from the theater to see sunshine illuminating a familiar world that, for an instant, seemed very strange?

The fact that we were younger then is relevant. We are more impressionable before our imaginations became prejudiced with the familiarity of ordinary reality.

Think of reading books. They too are someone's creation of a dream, another world. Reading books is uncanny. What is it about reading that inherently triggers our imagination? They are only printed letters forming words that the eye reads and the mind silently interprets as sounds. There is no soundtrack and no moving images. Illustrations play a minor role compared to cinematography. Yet as abstract as the printed word is, and although reading requires more effort than passively watching moving images accompanied by sound, books are more engrossing. Images, characters, customs, even costumes and scenery, all conjured up with twenty-six outlined shapes symbolizing sounds, linger in the mind.

All art does that. Music, the most abstract and powerful form of human creation, painting, sculpture, architecture, jewelry, gardening, cooking, even straightening up the house are expressions of creativity and opportunities to be drawn into a different world.

But it's a book that is now lingering in my mind and competing with the ordinary around me. Actually, it's not just a book. It's a triple or quadruple whammy of a classic novel, a period piece, and an iconic Hungarian story in Hungarian, a language intimately familiar to me from childhood which, anymore, I use talking to myself or the dog, or composing emails to my cousins in Hungary.

I am laboriously translating Egri Csillagok (Stars of Eger) by Géza Gárdonyi and originally published in 1901. It begins in 1533 and ends in 1552 with a small Hungarian force defending the fortress of Eger from a large army of Ottoman Turk besiegers. It's required reading for a Hungarian education.

I have a bad habit with reading, I read quickly in order to get the plot. When I was in high school, I read Jane Eyre in one day; War and Peace in three. I rarely slow down to appreciate style or description. Which is why I do not read Hungarian. It’s a language I know from simple conversation. I was never schooled in it. I'm impatient. Sentence structure is different, the relationships of words are embedded in suffixes, strokes and dots over vowels change pronunciation and meanings, and my vocabulary is about third grade, at best.

Fortunately, many years ago my Uncle Zoltán gifted me with a two-volume Hungarian-English dictionary, each volume some twelve hundred pages of eight point font. It is invaluable. I relied upon it extensively to translate my father's memoirs. Since then, Google Translate has become most helpful, but one has to be suspicious and cross-check with a real dictionary. Still, Translate is a time saver for me because it helps with spelling and I know enough Hungarian to recognize when Translate is off base. I have a great story of my cousin's email greeting to Shari, kezit csókolom (“I kiss your hand”) translated as “I handcuff you.” In fact, I just plugged in kezit csokolom (no accent over the “o”) and got “hands with chocolate” in return. Well, if you know a little Hungarian, you would never confuse csokoládé (chocolate) with csókol (kiss), Hershy’s notwithstanding.

I tried reading Egri Csillagok in Hungarian decades ago and gave up after a dozen pages, and even then I barely got the gist of what was going on. I am too impatient to look up two or three words per sentence, then spend time figuring out how they are related: which word is subject, what is the action and what the object, and who belongs to whom. There was no English translation at that time.

As I approach my golden years of retirement, I need hobbies. Why not give Egri Csillagok another try? I looked for an English translation. All that is available are used, hardcover editions running thirty or more dollars a copy. The only available ebook was in Hungarian. I got it. My mind clouded over trying to read and understand. I realized that to read it, I had to take the time and the trouble to write down an English translation. Why not translate the entire book? I managed to translate my father’s writing, I have my dictionary and Translate, and I boast about using my Hungarian skills two years ago when I was in Budapest and visiting cousins in Hungary.

So off an on for the last fortnight I have been translating Egri Csillagok into English. Actually, it’s been more than off-and-on because when I am “on” it's very intense. I am immersed in Hungarian text for many hours at a time, figuring out the meanings of literary words, even medieval Hungarian words and archaic Hungarian expressions. Fortunately, Gárdonyi's prose is elegantly simple, often terse, but that still leaves plenty to decipher.

I was about a tenth of the way through when I decided to splurge and buy the hardcover English translation. I was apprehensive. For several days after the book arrived, I didn't open it, nor did I work with the Hungarian ebook. I was afraid that reading it in English would be too easy and would detract form my self-imposed discipline. In turn, I was afraid that the translation would take too long and have little value if there was already a good one. But I had already collected twenty or more Hungarian words highlighted in yellow for which I could find no translation. So I turned to the English book.

Fortunately, it’s a flawed translation. Although the Hungarian is mostly all there and translated, Mr. George Cushing felt it necessary to contribute his inventions to Gárdonyi's novel. At first I thought that maybe the Hungarian ebook I had purchased cheap from Walmart and Kobo had been dumbed down. I found another ebook version on a Hungarian library website and downloaded it. It is identical to the Walmart-Kobo version. Son of a gun. In addition to the pastime pleasure of translating an interesting Hungarian story, my translation would not only be more faithful to the original, it could be made available as an ebook.

I use Cushing’s version as resource to translate the occasional word (which I cross-check with my English-Hungarian dictionary volume) and, in the odd sentence, to occasionally check for relationships of who is doing what to whom.

What is amazing to me is becoming more familiar with reading Hungarian. My vocabulary isn’t increasing appreciably, at least not so far. I find myself looking up zarándók (pilgrim) again and again, but maybe with repetition and time, words and meanings will attach themselves in my mind. But it has become much easier for me to recognize and read familiar words whose sounds I know but whose spellings are unfamiliar with accented vowels and odd combinations of consonants.

Most amazing of all, I find myself immersed in a Hungary of the 16th Century with wagons, horses, swords and clumsy guns, castles and fortified village houses, children skinny dipping, peasant villages and paprikás stews cooking in cauldrons over fires, dusty, rutted cart trails, brutal janissaries and marauding akindji raiders, vitéz (heroic, Hungarian, of course) fighters, Catholic, Protestant and Moslem adversaries, and intrigues and names familiar from Hungarian history and geography.

It’s a fascinating world. The images, characters, costumes, customs and Hungarian words linger sweetly in my mind.

Reflections on Jason and Argonauts

Like Odysseus lashed to the mast, but perhaps more like Jason with his fellow Argonauts sailing through the Bosporus past Sirens and Crashing Rocks between Scylla and Charybdis on their journey through the Euxine Sea in their quest for the fabled Golden Fleece of exotic Colchis, I have passed through the Gates of Medicare and now the Gates of Social Security Full Vesting on my quest for the Golden Fleece of Retirement. Such is the passage of time marked by birthdays.

There are many more adventures ahead as I sail the Black Sea with kith and kin, wending by, through and around a cast of fellow laborers, restaurant servers, competing horseless chariot drivers, and innumerable extras towards my mythical goal.

The Golden Fleece of Retirement remains unattained as the habits and rewards of my professional if surreal labor, not to mention the daily chores of tending furry and floral children, constrain and bind. Ah! But to sever the knots! To be carefree and revel in pastimes of . . .

. . . not bloody likely.

The adventures, boredoms, frustrations, perils and decrepitudes of traveling life are without end. But I do have fellow Argonauts, heroic kith and kin with whom souls are interconnected, fellow characters who have cast ourselves together in this play of consciousness. They are my inspiration, sources for my astonishment, admiration and encouragement in this reverie we call life.

I hope to still write another book or two, marvel at the wonders of creation and our cultural histories, participate in foodie gatherings with the best of friends, record, edit and narrate more video documentaries, plant and nurse cacti and agaves, and cherish nieces, nephews, their creations and progeny. Hopefully, there will be less need to social-post expressions of disgust at the less wholesome aspects of our humanity. But the meaning of life remains clear: do something, anything.

And always, nourishing me from within, is the actual experience and subconscious certainty of the Divine Play which illuminates all phenomena as equally known and equally unknowable.

My sincere thanks to all shipmates on the Argo vessel: those who have already passed over to journey on other ships, and those who still enliven this one.

Taking Care of Things

Plowing the east forty, Ballard,
in anticipation of growing edibles.

The lord of a manor ought to take care of the estate. It's an idea that has evolved in me since the first house I bought, and even earlier. I would like to think it is not a possessive or a selfish thing, but a matter of stewardship.

Gardening, the most popular hobby in Merca, can teach the value of stewardship. Yes, the property is mine in fee simple. Yes, I can do with it whatever I want, land use regulations permitting. But working with living nature teaches humility. I am only a small part of the whole. As Shari often reminds me, the land talks to you over time and tells you what it wants.

Parking out the front acreage, Terra Bella.

Living at 5224 in the U-District, we got the idea of digging up the small, unkempt, weed-infested, sad excuse of a backyard lawn and planting a vegetable garden. Mind you, in those heady days of juvenile adolescence, the idea of taking care of anything took a distant back seat to being cool and having fun. Four boys fresh out of high school quickly ran that poor house into increasing states of dilapidation. But we did have our moments of clean-up and show-off. The vegetable garden was one such example. That first year we had a bumper crop of tomatoes the likes of which I have never since equaled.  Then, after that first summer of planting, distracted by the need to to be cool and having fun (a need exhausted only by growing up), we largely abandoned farming and the backyard restored itself to increasing states of dilapidation.

The front acreage, Terra Bella.

The Ballard house was my first possession in fee simple. It, like the U-District house, had a postage stamp sized lot with a backyard that had a strip suitable for growing edibles. Memories of that one successful tomato harvest propelled me to rent a cultivator and plant vegetables. I forget what we planted. Zucchini, tomato, green beans and the like, I suppose. Previous owners had graced the 1912 craftsman house with pretty ornamentals that bloomed over spring and summer: huge lilac bushes, honeysuckle, penstemon, and an apple tree. We planted annuals in hanging baskets on the front porch and in the half whiskey barrel on the back deck.

My move to Whidbey Island was cataclysmic. I had been a city boy. Shari was the Island Girl from the dense greenery of Puget Sound countryside, living on sheep farms, wooded acreage, and in island villages. She was already in tune with creating, maintaining, and savoring gardens: vegetable, fruit and floral.

Shari's garden, Terra Bella.

I became the lord of a much larger manor. My palette was five acres, later increased to ten. Most of it was forested with large, but not ancient, cedars with occasional Doug firs and hemlock. The land had been logged and clear-cut several times previously, but we inherited some pretty large trees together with lots of alder, blackberries and nettles. Stuff grows quickly in Lower Alaska. Some two acres around the house had been cleared and served as a lawn.

We enjoyed eight years on the aptly named Terra Bella Lane. Working the land became a full time pastime in addition to reworking the entire 4,200 square foot, eighteen room, three level house. We purchased Scotty the tractor mower to cut fields of grass, weeds and nettle fields. Over time, some three acres were parked out. We took out a shabby truck garden and rabbit cages that framed the grand driveway entrance. With the help of Randy, his son, their bulldozer, backhoe and lowboy, the hillside was terraced, the back acres partially cleared, and its swamp dug out to create a pond. On the terraced land, we deer-fenced about a tenth of an acre, used landscaping blocks and railroad ties to build raised gardens where Shari planted, grew and maintained everything from strawberries to espaliered apple trees and even grape vines. On the second five acres, I spent many an active summer day clearing paths to access, define, and enjoy our domain.

The pond in back, Terra Bella.

The second owner later, we had a chance to visit our old domain. Shari's and my purchaser was a trust fund baby with motorcycles, a civilian AK47, and houses in California and Mexico. He had neglected the garden and the park setting.  Everything reverted to an overgrown state, then he sold the property at a substantial loss. There was some hope. The young families that were living there when we visited were beginning to reclaim and rework the garden.

We moved to San Simeon where our little acre of the Sonoran Desert has become our domain. Thanks to the desert climate, we get plenty of opportunity to sit outside and contemplate nature. In my time as a lord of a manor, I have noticed how infinitely enjoyable it is to sit outside and watch things grow, listen to bird calls, and watch bugs fly and lizards do push-ups. Sitting inside for the same amount of time, even inside an attractively appointed space, is just staring at walls.

Ever wonder why we long to look out windows, and rarely in?
Looking out front, Terra Bella.

The illustrative story that comes to mind is from Terra Bella. Not long after we bought and fixed up our five acres on Whidbey, we invited my family for a day visit. It turned out to be one of those precious sunny days for which Puget Sound is justly famous. Inside the house, the conversation awkwardly turned to tape recordings. That is, the "same old, same old" subjects of conversation that dominated family dialogue for decades. It occurred to me to move the party outside onto the lawn. So we laid out picnic blankets on the parked-out acreage in front. People sat and relaxed. The need diminished to have to say something to keep a conversation going. Silence was not awkward. It was natural. And if someone did say something, it was relevant.

Gardening is working to evoke nature's beauty and abundance. For good reason, it is the most popular hobby. Gardening is a metaphor for everything in life. I wonder why we as a society have not learned good stewardship from gardening.

My idea of a nice living room.

Old White Bands & Fans

Anyu used to complain about old people at the Senior Center. Anyu was my mother. She was in her eighties at the time. She preferred being around young people.

As I enter my full Social Security retirement year, I am beginning to get a deeper appreciation of what she meant. There is a time lag between one's age and one's self-image.

It began auspiciously enough on New Years Eve with dinner and a dance with live rock and lounge music. The lead singer and the band members were old and grey. They played just fine, with all the enthusiasm of youth, but in my memories of rock musicians, there is no association with regular looking old people. Shari and I left early, but that was primarily on account of our table being outside and it being a cold and rainy night. We do have winters in the Sonoran Desert, but it was also past my bedtime.

Then last Saturday night, Shari and I went to a dance place to hear and dance to traditional and modern Louisiana French music by a group named BeauSoleil. The venue was the El Casino Ballroom, a 1200 capacity institution south of downtown, in Latino community neighborhoods. We had never heard of the place, much less been there.

I had no idea there were so many people in Tucson. The parking lot was filling up when we arrived early and the food trucks were lined up outside. We showed proof of admission payment and earned our florescent orange, hospital-style wrist bands. We entered a vast open area surrounding a huge dance floor in front of a stage. In back was a broad, raised bar area.

Everyone was white, old and grey. I kept looking for younger people or some ethnic diversity. Nothing. People kept arriving and finding seats among arrangements of folding metal tables and chairs. They were more of the same. Many were eccentric old hippies with thinning long silver ponytails and colorful clothes on plumped and aged bodies. There were a couple of motorized wheelchairs. Most were, well, folks who looked like they were in retirement.

In short, everyone looked like me: grey haired, wrinkled old white people. It was a bit nightmarish.

Shari and I like to go to summer picnic concerts at the Tucson Racquet & Fitness Club. There we can enjoy bands playing various different rock genres. One was Christian rock. It was okay until we made out the lyrics. A small crowd sits on the grass field by the swimming pool. Yes, the band members are all old white people, which is a little jarring, but the venue and music attract lots of young families with children. What we enjoy most are the little munchkins dancing and scampering around.

The crowd at El Casino lacked youth. Shari spotted one Latino couple and there were a couple of young bartenders. Otherwise, it was all people our age or older. They seemed like regulars familiar with the venue. The band members who cranked out energetic Cajun music were older, white, balding, and pudgy, just like the crowd.

Actually, it was a heap of fun. The dance floor was delightfully crowded with couples and singles, some jitterbugging, others hopping, shaking, and writhing in various rock-appreciation styles practiced and perfected over decades. People with no sense of beat were happily and unabashedly moving on the dance floor with their partners, and old trippy-hippies skipped around the perimeter like fairies.

It's just that I'm not used to crowds of older, grey haired people playing and dancing in a rock music setting. They remind me too much of the jarring feelings I get when I look in a mirror. I have this out-dated mental holographic image of myself as a kid, chastened only by the occasional creaks and aches of aging joints and sagging jeans on a sagging butt and gut.

Binghamton Cemetery

Just down the road from us is the Binghamton Cemetery founded by Mormons in 1899. The Mormons were an early Anglo presence in Arizona. They established a farming community by the Rillito River and named it Binghamton. The farming dried out as water became increasingly scarce, but there is still a Mormon church and community in town, and probably a dozen grave markers bearing the Bingham name.

"TO BE OPENED BY GOD"

I like to take Nazar the Wonder Dog there for walks because I can let him wander off leash and do what dogs do — smell things. The graveyard is a popular hangout not only for the occasional dog-walker and dead people, but also for local packs of coyotes.

I like to go there and reflect on the graves.

For a year or more our morning walks have been in the Finger Rock Wash, so it was with fresh eyes that Nazar and I recently wandered back into the graveyard. In addition to the fresh mounds of dirt evidencing the internment of new residents, there was evidence of upscale improvements.

"HANDCART PIONEER"
Contrary to wagon trains depicted
in Western movies, most people
could not afford a team of horses
or a covered wagon. They
pulled or pushed handcarts.

The main dirt driveway and the side ones that organize jumbles of graves into lines and rectangles had been marked with decorative metalwork street signs. The main driveway had been named Bingham Lane, suggesting the others were also named after illustrious pioneer Mormon residents: Webb Lane, Young Lane, Hardy Lane, Abegg Lane, and Farr Lane.

Additional land had been cleared of sage and creosote brush and a fifth side driveway, Nelson Lane, leveled out. Apparently, there is ongoing demand for cemetery plots.

Despite the recent improvements, and despite a sign by the gate warning that grave decorations require approval, the cemetery remains major funky.

The place is delightfully littered with sandy soil, desert scrub, the occasional mesquite, palo verde and acacia tree, plastic flowers, faded US flags and Christmas decorations, children's toys, and shiny marbles, souvenirs, mirrors and baubles like the trinkets Europeans used to trade for ivory and animal hides. There are lots of whimsical sentiments carved in stone. The overall effect is very organic, not at all as sterile and unreal as the usual manicured, regimented, restfully green, formal cemetery. Binghamton is a cemetery on a much more human level. Consequently it is a very inviting place in which to wander and ponder.

"MY IMMORTALITY IS IN MY BOYS"

Cemeteries are places that evoke metaphysical perspectives. The most obvious to me is the admonition in Ecclesiastes: all is vanity. Nothing in life is permanent. It is a sentiment that underlies all spiritual traditions; not just impermanence, but also that reality is an illusion and a delusion.

There is a joke about how to make God laugh. Tell Him your plans.

People generally do not deal well with reality. There are people, many people, who have a hard time with a reality that is impermanent, spontaneous and unpredictable, so they box it inside a conspiracy theory. Religion ends up catering to such people who want simple answers to questions that have none, at least no explanation that can be expressed in words.

Grave markers with one date.

Living people bring many different perspectives to a graveyard. Some bring sadness as they visit partners, parents, siblings and children. Even a casual graveyard visitor, like I am, experiences the unavoidable sense of residents who have been forgotten. Some mounds are marked "unknown." Others are untended and suggest abandonment. Understandably, we want lives with meaning, and to be remembered in life and beyond is evidence of meaning.

In Binghamton, it seems there are too many buried children. Some, sadly, have but a single date on their headstones. One was stillborn. Others died as teenagers or young adults. Their graves are the most tended and decorated.

Graveyards express our ideas and hopes about eternity. Most residents in Binghampton are of the Mormon persuasion. There are lots of Mormon beliefs carved in stone.

Mormons have very literal ideas about eternity. The Mormon Church teaches that its services are indispensable for a happy eternity. Followers are not just married, they are "sealed" in Mormon temples. Families, like a day in the life of Bill Murray's character in the movie Groundhog Day, are forever. Except even in the movie the repetitive loop ended. For Mormons, there is no such relief. According to their beliefs, they are stuck with family forever. Come some happy time after death, we all get back together again — at least those "sealed" by the Mormon Church — just like before.

One down, one to go for eternity,

The good is celebrated but "the bad is oft interred with their bones," wrote the Bard. Only positive sentiments are carved in the stones of graveyards. It is a fantasy, like our ideas of eternity.

"Dear Mommie, we love you and
we will see you in heaven"
"Good bye for just a little while"

"Families are forever." Which families? Aunts, second cousins, great, great grandfathers and descendants you will never meet?

"Forever young" is commonly carved on the graves of children. They are stuck in time. Residents whose lives spanned six, seven or eight decades are not marked with the sentiment, "Forever old" or "Forever deathly sick". Who decides at what age we live out an eternity? And, if your family is today's normal, why would you want to spend eternity with childhood traumas and sibling rivalries?

The thing is, even in Mormon graveyards there is evidence that eternity is not as tidy as a Mormon "seal" would suggest.

There a many grave sites set aside in eternity for the "sealed" couple. One spouse dies and the final date is chiseled into the joint grave marker. The temporarily surviving spouse is already named and birth dated. There are spaces for the corpse and the date of death.

Except, it seems, that sometimes the surviving spouse has a change of heart. The most obvious example is the modernistic sandstone grave marker for Mr. and Mrs. Mason. Sandra Beth lies buried. We do not know the name of her husband. His name was chiseled out and his plot lies empty. Did he find a new mate for eternity and remarry? One can imagine Mr. Mason stealthily entering the cemetery with hammer and chisel, then going to work on his side of the "Mason" marker.

The Durham grave, 2018

The Durham grave, 2007

More subtle, and now hidden by a clean-up crew, is the unknown story of Armond and Juanita Durham.

Their's is a beautiful site. There are only two hills in the cemetery. One is reserved for the U.S. flag and a couple of park benches. The Durhams' joint burial plot is on the other hill.

A decade ago when I first was wandering around Binghampton Cemetery, I saw the simple plots where Armond was buried in 1981 and Juanita's site was waiting for the inevitable. Whoever decorated the grave had planted a saguaro cactus at the head of each grave site. What I saw a decade ago was that the saguaro planted by Armond's buried head had withered and died. The one waiting for Juanita was healthy and growing.

Since then, a groundskeeper or whoever has cleared out the dead saguaro, and Juanita's saguaro has continued to flourish. It has grown unusually tall and bears many arms.

Now maybe those two saguaros were already growing when Armond was buried. Juanita's saguaro certainly seems older than thirty-seven years. Typically saguaros begin growing branches after fifty or seventy years.

"GONE TO THERAPY"

Regardless whether a Durham or God planted the saguaros, there is no escaping the observation that the fate of the two saguaros is reflected in the death and life of the Durhams. Armond is dead and buried. Juanita was nine years younger than Armond and was only forty-three when he died. If she is still alive, she is eighty-three. Maybe her time has not yet come to be buried beside Armond.

I prefer to think that after Armond died, she went on to live a happy and fruitful life, just like her saguaro.

I Don't Like It, but

"It's your mantra," jokes Shari.

It is my mantra. I sing the line so often, at least once a day, many days more often, "I don't like it but I guess things happen that way. Ududbadub, ududbadub."

It's from a Johnny Cash song, Guess Things Happen That Way.

Bond

It's always good when a new James Bond movie comes out. The movie channels play the old ones back to back. There are twenty-six so far. That's happening now, which is in addition to BBC America's periodic Bond evenings.

We like James Bond movies, particularly the older Bonds: [Sir] Sean Connery, of course, is tops. Pierce Brosnan, even Timothy Dalton, are great. [Sir] Roger Moore, who played Bond most often, is passable, but the franchise is loosing some of its innocence with Daniel Craig. It's not that Craig is a poor Bond, au contraire, but the movies have gotten darker.

Most movies, even the ones I like, I don't care to see again. The genre is different from music. If I like music, I'll play it often. With movies that depend on plots, once you know the ending, that's enough.

The Bond franchise, in the main, is different. Each improbable scene with its unlikely gadgets and escapes is a mini-movie. Great sets, on-location filming, beautiful costumes, and a constant thread of light humor make even the chase scenes fun. It's eye candy, light, with fantasy and a cast of comfortable characters because you know the good guys and the bad guys get the appropriate ending.

Escape is a major reason I watch movies. Unless the subject matter is something I want to learn about, I prefer escape. Each movie, after all, is another person's creation of a dream. Why would I spend time with someone else's dark dream? Brutality and endless tension are dark.

Bond films, like Star Trek Next Generation (also a weekly marathon on BBC America and another welcome opportunity to escape), and their characters somehow do not lose their charm and keep a sense of lightness, fantasy and even idealism.

A New Year

I don't know about others', but my New Year's Day was a lot like my Old Year's Day. True, from one day to the next, it became a holiday, the weather got milder, and there were even more gridiron games on the television. But the sun still came up, just like it did the year before, and I still took the dog for a walk in the wash.

In the last days of the Old Year I found myself web-surfing for Roman quotes. They fascinate me. Cicero particularly is a great source, not just because he may be the greatest statesman and orator of the Roman world, but also because so much of his writing has survived. The thoughts of two millennia ago inspire even today. No wonder the literate, Mediterranean ancients were the foundation and pleasure of Western education for most of twenty centuries.

The one Stoic thought that spun in my mind is that the goal is not a long life, but a deep one. That's a nice contemplation for New Year's, one that gave me permission to walk a little slower with the dog and take more time to marvel at my surroundings.

To Cicero is attributed the quote, "A room without books is like a body without a soul." Very likely, Cicero didn't write that, but he did write, "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

Which, on a New Year's Day as I slowed down to move rocks and trim brush in our little acre of the Sonoran Desert, reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from Star Trek. In a flash forward in time (there's that time thing again), an aging Jean Luc wearing a broad rimmed straw hat is tending a small vineyard.

So in addition to wishing everyone much happiness for Twenty-Sixteen, I also wish all the great depth and the sense of belonging that attend happiness.

Post script: There's another Cicero quote which surely is not his, but it made me laugh loudly all the same. "Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book."