My San Antonio Childhood

Today my memoir of growing up in San Antonio in the 1950s and 1960s was published by Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon. Here's the link:

The whole process was very simple and straightforward. Amazon provides all the tools and instructions, and all the author has to do is write the book. The hardest part was the editing and proofing, and learning to cope with all the intricacies of Microsoft Word again. I struggled with the formatting on numerous occasions, but that was probably because I kept insisting on making alterations and tweaking what KDP provided in their templates. 

And, so, now it's done. What will I do next? Well, I'm already working on the next installment, more memories and essays to follow. 

The Romance of Trains

I seem to be losing track of time lately, although if I'm honest, my sense of time passing has been a bit distorted ever since I retired nearly ten years ago. But our forced isolation from the corona virus pandemic has certainly contributed to the Groundhog Day sensation of doing the same thing over and over. But as Steve Miller once sang, "time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin', into the future." And I've been amusing myself along the way. 

The subject of this little blog post is inspired by the book my Men's Bookclub discussed last month, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1963-1869 (2000), by Stephen Ambrose. Like most of Ambrose's histories, this one is a great yarn although not entirely to be trusted in every one of its details. This was also the second book about the building of the transcontinental railroad that I've read recently. My friend James, who was a devoted railroad buff, put me onto John Williams's The Transcontinental Railroad (2019), which was published in the year we were celebrating the 150th anniversary of the of the driving of the famous golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah. The two books are very different, and for detailed history Williams is probably the more reliable, although his narrative isn't perhaps as gripping as that of Ambrose. In any case, it's an amazing story and our group had a great discussion of the building of the first great transcontinental railroad as well as of railroads in general.

And as I was listening to my book club friends reminiscing about the first time they had traveled by train, and their experiences of trains in various parts of the world, I began to think about my own adventures with rail travel. I've always been fascinated by railroads. I grew up just a block away from tracks owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad, and I can remember going down to the end of our block twice a day to watch the local freight trains coming and going. At first they were hauled by enormous black steam locomotives, driven by engineers who never failed to wave as they chuffed past on a slight grade with smoke puffing from the smokestack. Sometimes they could be induced to blow the whistle, which was an added thrill for us kids. But before very long those relics of an earlier era of railroading were replaced by sleeker more efficient diesel locomotives, less romantic, but still exciting as they roared past and blew their horns. For a long time that was about as close as I came to trains, but I often wondered what it would be like to get onboard and see where those rails would take me.

That never seemed to be a practical option. The roads and highways were good and the automobile was king, and where we were going the trains no longer seemed to be running. But not very long after J and I moved back to Austin, while J was helping me get through graduate school, we decided we would travel to our first foreign country and take the train from Laredo to Mexico City. That was sometime around 1970, when the Mexican National Railroad was still rather impressive. The passenger service was something from an earlier era of rail travel, with first class Pullman cars, sleeping compartments, a dining car, as well as more modest second and third class options. We drove to San Antonio and took a Greyhound bus down to Laredo, which actually took us as far as the border, where we then crossed over to Nuevo Laredo to the station where we boarded the train. The journey took a little more than twenty-four hours. We left in the late afternoon and arrived the next evening in Mexico City.

The journey was all we imagined. We reserved our own first class compartment with sleeping accommodations and a private restroom. Not long after boarding we went to the dining car and ate a leisurely multi-course meal. It wasn't exactly like an old 1940s movie, but close. It felt almost like we were traveling back in time as well as into the interior of Mexico. The next day we watched the scenery changing as we traveled further south, eventually approaching the capital city in the evening. Along the way there were frequent stops in smaller cities and towns where local passengers boarded, many in second and third class, and small groups of children gathered to watch the train arrive and depart hoping for a handout from the tourists. When we arrived we took a taxi to our hotel and had dinner. The next day we saw as much as we could cram into a single day of sightseeing. Then that evening we boarded an express bus back to Laredo, but that's another story.

A few years later we moved to Baltimore, and I frequently took an Amtrak commuter train down to Washington, DC, to spend a day doing research at the Folger Library, a foretaste of what I would experience when we moved to Alexandria many years later. Our next long distance railroad journey, however, was in England, when we took an overnight sleeper train from London to Edinburgh. That was also an interesting experience of what seemed an earlier era of transportation, but I was a little surprised that the British Railway rolling stock and sleeper compartment were not as well kept or as comfortable as the Mexican National Railroad. We had intended to do a lot more traveling by trains that summer, taking full advantage of our BritRail Passes, but the railway workers were out on strike for much of our stay, so we ended up going on only one day trip from Edinburgh to St. Andrews and then later taking the train from Oxford to Gatwick to catch our flight back home. Of course, we also rode the London Underground on numerous occasions, but that's a very different kind of travel by rail.

As I mentioned, while we lived an Alexandria, Virginia, and worked in Washington, DC, both J and I rode the rails on our daily commutes for many years. When we first arrived we would have to ride a bus from our condo to the Pentagon to catch the Metro train, either the Yellow or the Blue Line. But after a few years a Blue Line station was built in our part of Alexandria, and I could ride our condominium's shuttle bus to the Van Dorn Metro Station, where I could catch a train that would take me all the way to work in the Old Post Office, just across 12th Street from the Federal Triangle Metro Station. During my time working in Washington I also made many rail journeys to New York City, and sometimes to Philadelphia or Newark, on Amtrak's Metroliner, and later on the Acela.

We did take one other long distance train trip, from Washington, DC, to Chicago on Amtrack's Capitol Limited. I had to attend a meeting in Chicago one November and we decided to make it a mini vacation to revisit some of our favorite Chicago places and also experience an overnight train journey. Once again we reserved a small sleeping compartment, or roomette I think they called it. We relaxed in the comfort of our compartment and ate our meals in the dining car, where we met some interesting fellow Amtrak travelers, each of whom seemed to have their own personal story about riding trains instead of some other way of traveling. We also rode for a while in the observation car and watched the midwestern landscape rolling by, catching snapshot glimpses of people and places as we traveled toward Chicago. This time we also took the train back home, which was something I really enjoyed, although I suspect J had by then experienced all the railroad adventures she wanted for a while. 

Traveling by rail is not usually the most efficient way to get anywhere, unless you are fortunate enough to be riding Amtrak's Acela, which gets you from Washington to New York in under three hours and is way more comfortable than other options. But for those of us who love riding trains, efficiency is not really the main thing. Yes, it's a shame we've let our passenger service deteriorate the way it has in this country. But there is still something romantic about taking a long journey on a railroad, taking in the distance and changes in landscape and climate as the train carries you to your destination. You experience your passage through time and space with leisure to reflect on yourself and the journey. But for me the attraction is also the feeling I get of stepping back into an earlier era and getting a brief glimpse of a different reality, the one we see from the windows of trains. 

Strange Days

As the world descends into some sort of death spiral, or at least that's how it appears if you pay any attention to the news these days, I'm happily closing off most access to the outside world and concentrating on the things I enjoy. My reading, for example, has been going well. I've now read seven of Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse mysteries. One, Death Is Now My Neighbor (1996), I read twice, because (on my recommendation) it was the August pick for our Men's Book Club. After reading the first three books, because I already had them on my Kindle, I read three of the later ones leading up to the one we read for the book club. J and I have also been re-watching the PBS series, which I now realize offers slightly altered plots when adapting the novels, making for some interesting comparisons between the books and the TV versions. John Thaw, however, is the embodiment of Morse, especially as the book series progresses and Dexter falls more and more under his spell. And Kevin Whately is, of course, perfect as Lewis. But, as I suggested, the really important thing for me with both the books and the television series is the setting in Oxford. I've even been inspired to revisit our first time in Oxford in one of my little memoir essays on my "Works in Progress" blog.

Our July book club discussion was all about Alexander Hamilton (2004), Ron Chernow's massive biography. I don't think any of us had fully appreciated how significant Hamilton had been to the nation's founding. Even though we knew he'd been a force behind the Federalist Papers and was largely responsible for founding the Treasury Department and the National Bank, it was still a revelation to see his influence on so many other aspects of the birth of the country, including the emergence of political parties. In fact, the toxic partisanship that dogged the early days of the republic, including the many examples of inflammatory journalism, character assassination, and egregious examples of outright lies and fake news made one wonder how the country has held together for so long. But, of course, it nearly fell apart more than once, even before the Civil War, although we tend to gloss over those episodes and treat them as unusual, when in fact the history of the United States has always been about just how fragile that union really is. Now as we seem to be experiencing a low grade civil war, with armed citizens shooting at each other over what each side perceives as life or death issues, it appears we've come full circle. The only thing that strikes me as truly ridiculous, is how incredibly stupid and uninformed some of our latter day patriots appear to be. Or was that always the case, and we've just glossed over that as well?

One thing that will not yield to partisanship or fake news is our little novel coronavirus pandemic. Here we are now more than six months in, more than six million infected, over 180,000 dead just in the US, and you would think, from the sorts of stories that are making the rounds on social media, that it's all about the election or the economy or it's a hoax or just about anything but a new infectious disease that we don't have a cure for. I guess it's not really so surprising that people are making up their own reality, when the government appears to be doing the same thing. My prediction, although I'm notoriously pessimistic about homo sapiens, is that we are experiencing a true inflection point that will alter human society going forward. I don't expect there will be a cure for this (remember the common cold is a corona virus), but we will learn to live with it as an ever present but very unpredictable threat: some will die; some won't even know they've had it; the rest of us will just be very ill for a short or a long time. Meanwhile, we may see the end of the great democratic experiment we've all been so proud of. But part of that may simply be the realization that much of what we "believed" was never true in the first place. Will any of it make any difference going forward? I doubt it. If we didn't have such short memories and brief attention spans we would have realized by now that the more things change, the more they stay the same. All except for the weather. That's going to just keep getting hotter and hotter. But then, I like it warm much better than cold. If we can just not run out of water and air conditioning. I guess I will miss the Post Office. It was always fun getting mail. In fact, I think I'll go see if I got anything today.

Muck, The Overstory, and Lakota America

There has been a lot of blood under the bridge, and (as Dylan says) a lot of other stuff too, since my last post to this weblog. Seems like I've been living the same few days over and over. Self isolation and social distancing, which are the big things now, are pretty much my modus vivendi anyway, so I'm used to it. One day perhaps we will look back on this and figure out what really happened, but right now it just seems like the plot of a rather unimaginative science fiction horror movie staring a feckless president who's only real concern appears to be getting back to holding massive rallies, starring in his own press briefings, and getting re-elected so he can keep being president. Social distancing in such a world is not such a bad idea, especially if it involves staying away from the news and social media as well.

Since my last entry I've been reading a rather desultory collection of books, including Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy, Jerry Pournelle's 2020 Vision (originally published in 1970), and three more books for my Men's Book Club: Dror Burstein's Muck: A Novel (2018), Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018), and Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (2019). I started Tristram Shandy mainly as a diversion, but had to abandon it about half way through to finish reading Muck, a book I found hard to relate to. We had been set to discuss Muck in March, but then the pandemic put everything on hold, so I stopped reading it and started in on Tristram Shandy. It was great fun, and halfway is still a major accomplishment. I hadn't read it since graduate school, but found it as entertaining as I remembered. Then when it became clear that self isolation, especially for old folks, was going to last a while, our book club decided to begin meeting again via the Zoom conferencing app. We discussed Muck in early April and The Overstory in early May.

I may be inspired one day to say more about Muck, which is a retelling of the Biblical Book of Jeremiah set in a fantasy version of modern day Israel. I could see the imaginative skill of the satire but still found myself not enjoying the effort of reading it. I guess it just did not resonate with me. When I finished I read Jerry Pournelle's now classic collection of science fiction stories imagining what Earth would be like in the year 2020. There are many SF stars among the authors (Ben Bova, Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, A.E. Van Vogt), and the stories include some of the things we've become used to, such as drones, artificial intelligence, advanced computers, cell phones, and others that are not quite here yet, such as holographic projection, high speed rail, and ubiquitous surveillance, although the latter is getting closer all the time. And although pollution and overpopulation are mentioned, no one foresaw that 2020 would become known as the year the novel coronavirus pandemic began.

The Overstory is an impressive narrative linking a disparate group of characters who share a common fascination with and passion for preserving what is left of the earth's old growth forests. Powers does a pretty good job of telling his story about human folly from the suggested centuries long perspective of trees. The novel is separated into sections titled Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds. When I first started reading I was curious to see how the various parts would come together, and for the most part I was impressed by Powers's skill at weaving together the many strands of narrative that he introduces in the first section of the book. It seems to get away from him a bit toward the end, when he must bring about a resolution to such a complex story, one that gestures toward the very uncertain future humans are fashioning for themselves, even as they are destroying the habitats for so many other species as well. I was impressed that the book does not suggest a very hopeful future, but then that would be hard to make convincing even in a work of fiction.

I've moved on now to the next Men's Book Club assignment, Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (2019). It's a very detailed history of the Sioux Indian Nation, their emergence as one of the most dominant as well as largest of the tribal confederations that came to dominate the American west. But the book begins with the earlier stages of their development as the Lakota people struggle for their own identity among the tribes inhabiting the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys and tributaries. We see how they are transformed by their eventual mastery not only of the fur trade, but also of horses and guns and warfare. It's a fascinating story, very densely documented not only with the usual historical sources, but also with details that have been sought out and interpreted from the historical records that the Lakota tribes and bands called winter counts, summaries of the year's notable events kept in the form of descriptive pictographs skillfully drawn and preserved on animal hides. It truly is an alternative history of America, and one that reinforces again and again the vast gaps in understanding that essentially insured that the Europeans, not only the eventual Americans, but the French, and Spanish, and English, would find it almost impossible to understand, let along share a continent with America's indigenous people.

The books I've been reading have given me much to ponder as I try to adjust to living in a new normal. As I follow the news it becomes more apparent that no one really knows when or even if we will ever return to the existence we had come to take for granted. I've often mentioned in this blog that change is inevitable and that nothing remains the same for long, and now I seem to have been proven correct. Of course, health experts have warned us that something like this was probably inevitable. But the reality of it is both more and less amazing than any movie we might have imagined. This pandemic has swept across the entire world, reaching even relatively isolated tribes in South America. But it has so far affected only a few million people and although it seems very infectious, the numbers of deaths are thankfully not yet like the plagues of history. Still, there is much that even health experts do not understand about the way this virus seems to affect different people. We've been told that old people were likely to be the most vulnerable, but now it appears the virus can strike younger people with serious symptoms as well. With time perhaps we will know more, but it is also likely that we will simply learn to live with this very infectious disease and accept that it is but one more of life's challenges. After only a few months we have already seen that people have grown weary of following the various restrictions recommended to reduce the spread of the virus. Certainly some are simply unable to accept the economic hardship that comes from closing businesses and telling everyone to stay home. But some also seem to feel either that the fears are much exaggerated or that there is actually some political conspiracy at work to force us to wear face masks and to destroy our economy. In any case we are living in a changed world and perhaps we will see even more and greater changes before this comes to its inevitable resolution.

How to Live: Montaigne After Morse

As I suggested in my previous post, I began the new year reading two of Colin Dexter's early Inspector Morse mysteries: The Last Bus to Woodstock (1975) and Last Seen Wearing (1976). I enjoyed seeing Morse before the influence of John Thaw, and while there are certainly similarities, the earlier Morse seems to have a bit more whimsy (for lack of a better word) than the later iterations, as well as a bit more indulgence of Sergeant Lewis's perceived shortcomings and dogged adherence to proper police procedure. But those are small details, really, because Morse is definitely Morse in all of his unorthodox approach to solving crimes and indulging his love of elaborate puzzles and heady brews to stimulate his brain. But perhaps what I find most entertaining in these novels are Dexter's descriptions of familiar settings in Oxford and London. It's true we were there a few years after the time in which these particular books were set, but little had changed by the time we arrived, and I can certainly picture many of the specific places, especially in Oxford, including a little snack shop next to the Bird and Baby Pub (The Eagle and Child). Of course, the best things about these novels are the ingenious stories and all the curious characters, most of whom eventually figure as suspects in Morse's mind. But as Lewis points out, Morse's approach may seem unorthodox, but he always seems to solve the puzzle in the end.

After this entertaining diversion, however, I've returned to a book I read some years ago and recommended to friends, Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: or a life of Montaigne, in one question and twenty attempts at an answer (2011). One of those friends has now suggested Bakewell's book to our Men's Book Club as our February selection, so I've returned to it again and am being reminded why I thought it was such a good book when I first read it. First, Bakewell writes well, and she accomplishes from the first pages a fascinating and original approach to biography, while also nudging her readers rather insistently to go directly to the source in Montaigne's marvelous Essays. She explains with ample quotations from his work why Montaigne was a very unusual human being, especially in the sixteenth century when he was experimenting with these rather remarkable prose exercises that introduced the world to a new kind of writing.

Montaigne may not have been the first human being to examine his own life, his thoughts and feelings, his fears, anxieties, and motives for his actions, but he was the first to record and examine them in this fashion. He called his little prose pieces essays, by which he meant something like attempts or tests. He would posit a topic or question, some bit of lore or received opinion, "Of Sorrow," "Of Liars," "Of Education," and then proceed to look at it from a variety of perspectives: what did the classical authors say about it, what is the conventional wisdom, what is his own experience? And it is really that last question that sets Montaigne apart. He would often reject, or at least question, received opinion or classical authorities on the basis of his own experience. In fact, one of his most interesting essays was the late one titled "Of Experience." But this description hardly captures the method of Montaigne's essaying. He followed his thoughts, in a stream of consciousness, as they took him from perception to perception, often by way of rather whimsical leaps and fanciful asides. And as the years passed, he returned to his earlier essays and added (but never subtracted) additional thoughts. Some readers are mystified by his writing and find it hard to follow his progressions, for his notion of the essay is far different from what we were taught in school. But if we surrender to his method, we will often find ourselves astonished by his insights and sometimes convinced that he has thought the same thoughts as ourselves. And that has always been the appeal of Montaigne. In concentrating supposedly only on himself, he has managed somehow to strike many universal chords in the minds of readers throughout the centuries.

Bakewell does a great job of explaining all of this, and also of making her readers understand why it is so important to read someone like Montaigne. He teaches us to regard ourselves and to understand how to go about being human.

Postscript
When I began this Weblog, I wrote a few early entries about the new literary form of "blogging," and made a few references to similarities with Montaigne's Essays. I wondered then if some future scholars of literature or genre would find in these blogs a new kind of self expression. Certainly blogs have offered humans far greater access to "authorship" than we have ever had before. And for many of us there has been something like the motives that drove Montaigne to record his thoughts in his essays. It's too soon, I suppose, to answer in any definitive fashion such questions about the form. But for anyone curious to see what I thought nearly fifteen years ago, when I wrote my first blog post, there is the blog archive in the sidebar. I sometimes return to those early posts to remind myself what I thought it was all about. I'm not sure I knew then, and I'm even less sure that I know now. But once I start something, as my wife of many years will confirm, I tend to stick with it. Don't ask me why. It must be some flaw in my character.