In the city, during the pandemic, sometimes this view is my best look at nature for the day. But isn’t it grand? A lovely sunny tree, a starling. In spring: flowers. In summer: cicadas. Throughout the morning, light catches it in different ways. Sometime in the next few years, a new apartment building will appear in this view, but I think the tree is meant to survive. I hope the tree survives.
Photo: Helen Fields
I like to run this post on Memorial Day; it first ran May 28, 2012. When I think about soldiers and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy, I’m not sure why — maybe because he stood so straight, not because he ever talked about the war, which he didn’t. Probably, though, it’s because of what this post says, that war, technology, and humans have been linked ever someone improved a stone into both the first hammer and the first spear. Uncle Bundy has since died — at a nice old age with his family around him, but still.
It’s Memorial Day in the U.S. but this is not a war story. It does have a little war in it, but the real reason I’m writing it is because of this ball bearing my uncle had. My uncle’s name was Leverne, some of his buddies called him Vernie, all his relatives called him Bundy – no reason for that – and he’d always been a mechanic. One summer day a long time ago, he was out in his garage working on a car and I was watching him. “Look at this,” he said, “it’s a ball bearing.” It was a grooved ring, and running in the groove were little metal balls. “I just greased it,” he said, “and look how pretty it goes.” He ran his finger over the little balls and, one after another, they turned smoothly and easily in their groove. “Isn’t it pretty?” he asked. No, it isn’t, I thought, but I didn’t answer. I was in high school and an English major. It’s greasy and dirty, I thought. Poetry was pretty, not ball bearings.
Bundy was a farm boy who went to high school, then in November, 1942, joined the army. He was sent first to the University of Utah, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the Fort Sill Motor School, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the 668th Field Artillery School, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the Schofield Barracks Motor School in Hawaii, and he learned to be a mechanic.
In 1944, he got on a Liberty troop ship, a little hollow tub short enough and the Pacific waves big enough that the ship went up one side of a wave and down the other while the seasick troops lined up along the deck and threw up over the side. The ship was headed for the Philippines, to the battle of Leyte in which 3,000 Allied troups and 10,500 Japanese troops were being killed. By this time Bundy wasn’t really mad at anyone any more and didn’t want to fight; and anyway Leyte turned out to need materiel, not troops; and besides the war was ending, so Bundy was just as glad when the Liberty ship turned around and went to Oahu, where he spent the rest of the war.
He came home to Illinois in November, 1945. He and Mitzi, his new wife, lived in an unheated upstairs room in his sister’s house. He got a job fixing cars and tried to figure out a place to live. He found a little octagonal house that had been built for either hired hands or pigs, and bought it for $2,300 which he borrowed from his mother. The house was too far from work so he bought a lot nearer by, and then he measured up the house and measured up the lot. Next he dug two rows of post holes and in the holes he stuck stove pipes which he filled with concrete, and this would be a foundation. Then he asked his two brothers and his brother-in-law if they’d be willing to help move the house; and next he asked a customer at work if he could rent the customer’s flatbed truck for a Saturday at the going rate of $3 an hour. His plan was to raise the house enough to back the flatbed under it.
He remembered seeing some 30-foot timbers somebody had left out along Route 66, and he and his brothers went out and picked them up. They brought the timbers back to the house and with two hydraulic jacks, jacked up first one corner of the house and wedged a timber under it; then jacked up another corner of the house and wedged a timber under it, then went back to the first corner and jacked up the timber and wedged another timber under that one; and pretty soon the house was perched on the timbers up higher than the truck. Then they backed the truck under the house, timbers and all, and headed out — Bundy stood on the roof to lift up any telephone or electric wires. When they got to the lot, they backed up to the foundation, unloaded the house, trimmed it up, and reversed the jacking-up process, removed the timbers, and rested the house on its foundations. It worked exactly as planned. Bundy paid the customer $9 for three hours rental, plus $1 tip.
Bundy and Mitzi lived in the house for five years, then sold it to his mother and moved to a house that could fit the six kids they eventually had, and where they lived the rest of their lives. Bundy kept being an auto mechanic and by the time he retired, he owned his own garage. He told me in the 1970’s to hold on to the Dodge slant-six but for my next car, give up and buy Japanese because otherwise Detroit wasn’t ever going to learn. At age 91, he was fairly creaky but as bossy, opinionated, righteous, and impressively, ingeniously, precisely competent as he ever was.
Four months before Bundy got out of the service, the war had ended with the atomic bomb. That bomb has famously been called “technically sweet.” Technical sweetness is the perfect match between form and function, between a technology and its purpose. Technical sweetness is the satisfying mental click of a thing that’s exactly what it should be and nothing more. Technical sweetness is highly aesthetic and utterly compelling. The U.S. has always been good at technical sweetness, both in training people in it and doing it, for both ill and good — because like other principles, it intrinsically has two sides.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed several whip-smart country boys who had gone into the service, had gotten a technical education, worked on one bomb or other, then come out of the service and gotten educated as physicists and gone on to stellar careers and even a Nobel Prize. I also interviewed ones who didn’t get educated but got jobs as lab technicians; or they got educated and became all kinds of engineers; or they did or didn’t get educated but they write scientific software.
That is, between the time I stood in my uncle’s garage and now, I learned to appreciate technical sweetness. And as technically sweet as a bomb and much, much prettier? A ball bearing.
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Photos: Bundy – unknown; ball bearing – Niabot
This originally ran August 4, 2017.
There is a difference between the two. In one you can’t get lost; one way in, one way out. The other is full of dead ends and false passages.
I take my kids to labyrinths. When they were little, we walked in socks along the path of a smooth stone labyrinth on the floor of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Inside the soaring bay of the cathedral, walking is like gliding, like leaving your body. We wound in and out of each other, the path sometimes bringing us close together, other times sending us apart as we headed from the outside to the center, and from the center back out.
This is a 35-foot-wide replica of the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth, built into to the floor of the French throned church in 1201. According to Labyrinth Guilds caring for these convoluted works of interactive art around the world, these are spiritual artifacts, “divine imprints.” Traveling along one involves three canonical stages: purgation, illumination, and union. Purgation is the entry, leaving the prosaic details of life behind. Illumination is reaching the center. Union is leaving along the same path, joining with God.
This is how my kids learned to do it, and nobody ever told them. They figured out if you spend half an hour walking to the center, you must spend another half an hour walking out.
Mazes, on the other hand, are made of alleys. They have dumpsters and knocked over trash cans. You can get cornered, and at times can’t find the way. I like these, too. Continue reading
The anniversary week of George Floyd’s murder is a good time to revisit this post, which first appeared June 10, 2020. We still have so far to go, in the United States.
Most people don’t adopt a new manner of speech in their 40’s, so when my husband recently started using the phrase “y’all” I wondered what was up. It wasn’t like his Swiss parents taught him to use this slang, and he’d grown up in Colorado, where y’all is uttered only by Texas transplants.
After hearing him say y’all for something like the tenth time in a week, I asked him why he’d suddenly adopted this word, which seemed out of place spoken by someone without a southern accent. He explained that he’d started using y’all with the college ski team that he coaches. Most of the skiers are women, and he thought it would be lame to refer to them as “you guys” — the phrase more widely used here in Colorado. “English really needs a plural you,” he says.
He has a point. All of the languages I’ve studied — German, Italian and Spanish — have a plural you, and while that extra pronoun was frustrating to me as a language student, I’ve encountered plenty of times when I’ve wished for a plural you in English that wasn’t gendered or regional.
According to Mental Floss, “y’all” is just one of eight ways to construct the plural “you” in English. Others include “you-uns,” “you guys,” “you lot,” and “yous.” None of the terms on this list roll off my tongue any easier than the others.
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After my disappointment last week I am so glad to say: The 17-year cicadas have arrived. They’re here! We have bugs.
The good people of the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang explained that the cool weather has hurt the cicadas. A lot came out when it was too cold for them to molt properly. And, because they’ve been coming in more of a trickle than a flood, predators were more or less able to keep up.
I woke up one morning worrying that maybe climate change has done them in. That the global phenomenon has come to disrupt my favorite biological event.
But they’re picking up. Monday evening, I came across a slow-moving mob of determined nymphs, struggling through the grass to the oak tree, the tallest thing around. Thursday morning I finally saw a bunch of adults, around another tree. I hope to see and hear many, many more soon.
Photo: Helen Fields
What’s something you used to love but have lost your feeling for? For me, in a world that looks a lot like science fiction, I have trouble with the speculative novels I used to love. I’ve suspended my disbelief already, even in real life, and I shrug at the magic imagined in these stories. This post first appeared in 2013.
In this year’s SXSW closing speech, futurist Bruce Sterling enumerated disrupted technologies that have been supplanted, or are soon to be, by the latest wave of GoogleGlass-era living. He gave longform blogging five years to live, in the face of microblogging.
As future shock morphs into present shock, the cyberpunk fiction for which Sterling was first known is no longer the way to tackle envisioning the future, he says. Why write a story about future living – why not just participate in it and create it right now?
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Consistent with my policy of running posts that take me, virtually anyway, out of the pandemic present to somewhere or sometime that’s interesting and wide-angle, I offer you the Chesapeake Bay: born in violence, growing up geologically and then sociologically, and now hitting the present with utter tomfoolery. And revelation. This first ran March 31, 2011.
The Chesapeake Bay was born as the Susquehanna River. Around 35 million years ago, an asteroid apparently smacked into what is now eastern Virginia and left a 50-mile-wide crater, a sink into which all the rivers – mainly the Susquehanna but also the Potomac and lesser rivers — coming east out of the Appalachians naturally flowed. Millennia came and went, ice ages came and went, and about 8,000 years ago melting glaciers raised the level of the Atlantic enough that, over the next couple of thousand years, it flooded into that old crater and on up the river valleys and created the Chesapeake Bay. I’m telling you this story mostly because I like it but please, bear with me, I do have a point.
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