Month: December 2019

Mired in the midst of the holiday season we sometimes mark the moment in reflection, circadian beings that we are. But first we must deal with the feast; tables piled high with pheasant and grouse with large flagons of mead ready to slack the thirst of the mighty warriors who risked life and limb to…..to……oh wait that was the Middle Ages. Nevermind.

Turkey is the traditional centerpiece of the Thanksgiving and Christmas tables. Before you begin to roast the bird you must remove the little bag of, well, things which can then be used to make gravy. Generally speaking one should never eat organs unless it’s the zombie apocalypse and you are, well, a zombie. Nevertheless as a child I developed a taste for turkey liver, which sounds like a ceremonial dish served in an ancient rite of passage around a Serengeti campfire. As a point of grammatical order, the words “child”, “turkey” and “liver” should never appear in the same sentence, unless surrounded by protective quotes.

Anyway the next step is to pack the turkey carcass with a mass of bread and seasonings called collectively, stuffing, which will cook along with the bird. So popular is stuffing that dozens of recipes exist and it is possible to buy it premade to be prepared outside the bird. I was going to list some of the various kinds of stuffing but there are quite literally hundreds. In Hawaii, I used to have stuffing made with taro, the root vegetable used to make poi.

Stuffing is great and my favorite part of the feast. Surprisingly my taste for the turkey itself has lessened over the years, unless it’s part of a turkey club sandwich then lemme at it, and bring on the mead.

I didn’t start to play the game of golf until I was nearly 40 and living in Japan. Colleagues at Camp Zama introduced me to the game at the Zama Golf Course, and during the next three years I played various courses on military bases throughout Japan. I never took lessons, relying on the grip it and rip it style of the committed duffer. Mark Twain once famously said that golf, “Spoils a good walk”. I can assure you that I spoiled many good walks in my time in Japan.

On work days we would go out at sunrise and walk the empty, closed course, pulling our little bag carriers behind us. We would practicing our shots in first light without weekend pressure. The greens would be covered with early morning dew, and our putts would spawn rooster tails as they rolled along with the muted hiss of water droplets in their wake. Funny, the things you remember, the things you forget.

Over the next few years I played courses in Singapore and Malaysia, down in the equatorial heat. Once in Malaysia I hit a perfect drive right down the middle but when I walked to where the ball should be, it was not to be found. Apparently a large monitor lizard ate it and ran away.

Another time I was lining up a shot and realized I was standing in a fire-ant nest. Time to flee on foot whilst frantically batting my pants legs.

The rules of golf harken back to an earlier era, where, while your immediate opponent was another person, you are really playing against the course itself. Golf requires that you remain attentive at all times and remember all the details of the game in progress. I was very poor at this part of the game, the etiquette as it is called.

I knew these rules yet would become easily distracted by clouds, trees, squirrels, birds, those pesky monitor lizards and fire ants. Once, while playing in a foursome I spotted a nice ball marker on the ground and picked it up only to be told that the marker was actually marking the ball location of one of my playing partners. Duh. I sensed a not insignificant rolling of eyes. I had a habit of committing these silly breaches of golf etiquette, to the point where my playing partners would collectively release a critical mass of eye-rolling (Ew).

These days my lower back precludes me from playing golf, but I often have very detailed dreams of playing. In these dreams the course is a mashup of various courses I played and I can even picture a large and ornate clubhouse. I remember hitting shots, some bad some good, but then I am always losing my golf bag and clubs somewhere out on the course. I must walk back to find my clubs whilst the other members of the foursome continue on. I wander aimlessly amongst the greens and fairways, being able (for the first time) to enjoy my walk.

Most of us recognize the common chalkboard from school, even that terrible screeching sound it might make upon occasion. It turns out that sound, and other sounds we would call unpleasant have their basis in science, in particular the nature of the human auditory system. The ear and its ancillary nerve structure is designed to amplify sounds with frequencies of 2000-4000 hertz, and this amplification seems to give rise to this negative sensation. The reasons why this is so are not fully understood but might be related to the fight or flight response to imminent danger to ourselves or others.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes the chalkboard in the office or classroom. Many of these boards have been replaced by “magic” markers and whiteboards. Yet there is something time-honored about a teacher using a blackboard as the visual aid of the day. In the world of mathematics, professors often prefer chalk against the blackboard. Indeed watching a skilled mathematician construct a complex proof is nothing short of a work of art, and there is a need to stand and admire the beauty composed in symbols and logic.

I had a math teacher who liked to show off by holding a piece of chalk in each hand and writing his proofs as mirror images of each other, left hand moving left, right hand moving right. I mention this parlor trick because this same professor would roam around the lecture hall and stop speaking mid-sentence as he gazed out the window. He would pause for an unnaturally long time, so long in fact that we would begin glancing at one another in bewilderment and concern. Then he would start right back up and complete the sentence. We suspected that he was not fully human, but was capable of mimicking one quite well.

It is interesting this fanciful thing called a blackboard. Simple slate and chalk, like modern cave drawings, passing down knowledge one to the next.