Searching for summer

It’s June 9, and so far it feels like the most un-summery summer that ever (didn’t) summer. I wake up on June mornings, shivering and reaching for a hoodie, the same way I do on every other morning of the year, and although I’ve been swimming several times, I have to tell you that it’s not much fun because the water has been icy. Like cardiac event-inducing cold. Like break the surface of the water with an ice pick cold. I swam the very first day that the pool was open and afterward, it took me hours to warm up. That might have been a little bit of self-induced hypothermia, now that I think of it.

Like mostly every other place on the northern half of the Atlantic seaboard, we also had several days of smoky haze, the result of wildfires in Canada, which - look at a map - is NOWHERE NEAR HERE. At first, I ignored the warnings about the terrible air quality and took my usual walk on the track at the base, and then the next day I woke up feeling like I’d been attacked by every upper respiratory virus in existence. Scratchy throat, watery and itchy eyes, sneezing and coughing - I took a COVID test just to be sure but it wasn’t COVID. It was Canada. They need to get their forest fires under control. 

*****

It’s Saturday now, an early June Saturday, bright and sunny and warm, with a swim meet (time trials, but it still counts) in the morning and a graduation party in the afternoon and all seems right again with the summer world. It was cold this morning, cold enough that I needed to wear my team jacket while performing my refereeing duties. But I like my team jacket, so that was kind of a bonus. The water that splashed me as the swimmers dove in was freezing cold. Those kids are tough, I tell you. But the air is clear, the smoky haze all but gone. We’re on the brink of civil war and I still have to maintain vigilant situational awareness to avoid unwanted (is there any other kind) encounters with bears and coyotes, but at least one thing is normal. There’s no freedom like the freedom of a Saturday in June. 

*****

For weeks, every day  has dawned sunny and bright, though much cooler than I would like; and every afternoon has been just like the afternoon that surrounds me right now - balmy and nearly still, the trees just barely rustling, the skies a pale bluish pinkish golden glow, nothing but birdsong to disturb the peace. 

*****

Did I say that it hasn't seemed like summer? It's June 21 now, the first day of meteorological summer and it's raining and windy, which makes it feel like it's about 55 degrees.  It's 66 according to my weather app, so it's already stupid cold for June but the rain and wind are reminiscent of late October. I can smell the pumpkin spice. And I hate pumpkin spice. 

I also smell chlorine, because it's Wednesday night so I'm at a swim meet that should have been cancelled but wasn't because we're tough and we're not going to let a little rain and wind stop us, right? I feel like punching someone right now, but I won't. I'll just write about wanting to punch someone. That'll make me feel better. 

I'm wearing a hoodie and a rain jacket. So are all of the adults. The swimmers are in their suits, wrapped up in already wet towels, huddled under tents, hoping for thunder. "That was thunder, right? No, it was a plane." I'm all for an intrepid spirit of can-do gung-ho damn the torpedoes full speed ahead toughness but this? This is just crazy.  

*****

A day later, now a full day into official summer and it's still cold and raining but not as cold and not as rainy as yesterday. Things are moving in the right direction. Things are looking up. 

We finished the swim meet by 8 pm, cleaned the place up in record time and I was home in my pajamas with a cup of hot tea by 8:45 PM. That's the nice thing about being cold and wet. If you're lucky, you get to eventually be warm and dry and that’s a nice contrast. 

And so this crazy year continues, bears and coyotes roaming freely through the DMV suburbs (my neighbor scared the coyote out of her yard, where it was eyeing her chickens), wildfires raging and sending plumes of smoke thousands of miles south and east, boiling heat in Texas and early November weather in the smack dab middle of June here in Maryland. My youngest child graduated from high school and already attended his college orientation and we'll be packing him up to move out in no time at all. I swam last weekend but I think I'll be out of the pool for at least a few days. The water just keeps getting colder. 

Inviting the curate for tea

I cooked dinner last night. I do this all the time, and I suppose that’s why it’s worth writing about, because I do it all the time and what else should I write about except the things that I do every day? Anyway, this dinner didn’t involve a lot of cooking, so it would be more accurate to say that I MADE dinner. It was a Greek steak salad, so the steak, which I sauteed and sliced into thin, small pieces, was the only part that needed cooking; that and some store bakery naan bread that I toasted in the oven for a few minutes. 

It was a good summer dinner, very flavorful (kalamata olives and feta cheese make everything Greek, and everything Greek tastes good), easy, and healthy. But there was a lot of it. I had Greek steak salad for lunch today and I still have a ton of it left. 

But I also have some chicken that needs to be cooked today, or it will go bad. I worried a bit about this as I drove home from work. The salad needs to be finished today or it will go to waste but I have to cook the chicken and that’s what everyone is going to want to eat. What to do, what to do? 

To make a long story less long, I ate the salad one more time. The rest of the family ate chicken, and the chicken leftovers will still be good tomorrow. Everyone eats, and nothing goes to waste. This is the stuff that occupies my brain at least half the time, because this is the stuff that constitutes life. This is what being human is all about

*****

After two volumes of Bill Browder fighting with Putin, I needed a little peace and quiet, and so I returned to my now-beloved Barbara Pym. I’m not sure how I managed to live for over 50 years as an Anglophile and compulsive reader without reading Barbara Pym, but I am certainly making up for lost time. I’m right in the middle of the third novel of a three-volume anthology of Pym novels (A Glass of Blessings, Some Tame Gazelle, and Jane and Prudence) about genteel English ladies in the middle of the 20th century, ladies whose lives revolve around how to arrange the flowers in a manner that is artful but not too artful, and how to manage the complicated relationships with the domestic help, and what one should wear to the church picnic, and of course, what to serve the curate when one invites him to tea. 

*****

None of the ladies in this trilogy of novels has anything that even resembles a job, and the female protagonists of the first two novels (a rather spoiled married woman in the first and two “spinster” sisters in the second) also don’t have children, but they are busy from morning to night. Their households are managed with painstaking care, with every detail from food to flowers to cleaning and polishing to furniture placement to mending and laundry carefully planned and considered. When the curate or the vicar or the archdeacon come to supper or tea, there’s no danger that our hostess will feed her guest the same thing that he had the last time he visited, because she keeps a diary that includes details on who came to dinner and what was served. I’m not the best cook, but I have a small handful of recipes that I do well enough to serve to guests. It’s a very small handful. At my house, the vicar would get the same roasted chicken or chicken fried rice or turkey chili every time he came to dinner, and he’d like it because this isn’t a restaurant for crying out loud. I wouldn’t need to keep a list to keep track, is what I’m saying, but I do applaud the list-making impulse. 

*****

I read something about Barbara Pym, but I can't remember if it was part of an introduction to one of her books, or a journal article maybe? The former, I think, because I don't hang around the place reading scholarly journals. Anyway, her original publisher rejected An Unsuitable Attachment. It was the 1960s and apparently they thought that no one was interested in novels about English ladies and their clergymen and their housekeeping and gardening arrangements. Ridiculous, of course. After that, no one else would publish Barbara Pym’s work, and her literary career was all but over. But then in a 1977 magazine article, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both included Miss Pym on their lists of most underrated English authors, and she was in vogue again. 

*****

If you listen to people who don’t know what they’re talking about, then you might go into a Barbara Pym novel believing that nothing is going to happen. In fact, that erroneous assumption about nothing happening might cause you to avoid reading Barbara Pym altogether, and that would be a mistake. 

Read Barbara Pym, and you’ll find that things do happen. There’s no chaos or upheaval; at least not the overt, showy kind. At the end of a novel, a character might realize something about herself, and the reader will know that nothing will be the same for her after that realization. Or maybe the plainer and less vivacious of two unmarried sisters will receive the marriage proposal that the prettier sister expected, and the balance of power between the sisters will be altered forever. The things that happen in a Barbara Pym novel shake up just a few people, not the whole world. 

But before anyone gets shaken up, in all the events leading up to the quiet but cataclysmic change in a character’s heart and mind or in the relationship between friends or family members, Pym’s women will spend much of their time thinking about food and bed linens and shopping and furniture placement. They’ll think hard about whether to alter their old coat and wear it for another season or give it to the church jumble sale. They’ll worry about someone showing up for tea when there’s only a small piece of cake left in the pantry. They’ll check on the servants to make sure they’re not wasting the silver polish. They’ll be busy day and night. 

*****

During her time in the literary wilderness, Pym apparently considered changing her style, or trying to write about different kinds of characters and situations. But she didn't. She just kept working at her day job and biding her time. Maybe she felt that she couldn't write any other way, or maybe she knew that her stories would find an audience again because they're about the mundane, ordinary, routine, fascinating stuff that constitutes life. They're about being human.

Rules are rules for crying out loud

It’s 7 PM on a Thursday night and I’m on a Zoom call, which is exactly where I do not want to be. But it’s time to recertify as a swimming official, and even officials’ training is on Zoom now. 

This is my last referee / starter training clinic. I’ve been doing this since 2010 and have the training practically memorized now, but you have to recertify every two years and you can’t recertify without sitting through the training so here I am. 

The person who usually does this training is a lovely person, an older man who has been a swim official at every level up to national championships for many years. He’s not the trainer tonight, though. I hope he’s OK. I can hear his voice in my head as I look at the PowerPoint slides, the same ones that have accompanied this training for at least the last 13 years and probably longer. Many bullet points with many numbered and lettered sub-bullets. Each slide has at least four levels of bullets. 

A new development: Starters now say “Take your marks,” rather than “Take your mark.” This is because USA Swimming has adopted the practice of World Aquatics (formerly known as FINA) and the Prince-Mont Swim League follows USA Swimming’s lead. Now you know. 

*****

Every third word in this slide deck is enclosed in quotation marks. Quotation marks for emphasis are among my least favorite things. 

*****

My camera is on because they’re making us keep our cameras on. We also have to respond to poll questions that will appear at intervals throughout the training, just to keep us honest. It’s insulting, really. You’d think that they’d trust us to pay attention and not to sit here and write blog posts and text our friends who are also in the class and who are texting back. Insulting. 

*****

We’re running 23 minutes late at the halfway mark. 

*****

The thing is that you have so many other straight up legitimate typographic options for emphasizing text - italics, bold, underlining, even color - so why resort to the absolutely wrong and illegitimate use of punctuation for emphasis?

*****

I’m not the only one whose attention is wandering. One attendee is cleaning her kitchen. Several others are typing away and I will assume that they, like me, are not taking notes on the class material. Meanwhile, it is 9:08 PM. The call was supposed to end at 9. When you send a meeting invite for 7-9, you are absolutely obligated to end the meeting at 9. Maybe 9:05.

*****

The whole point of this thing, after all, is to teach people to enforce the basic rules of human decency and civilization. You enter the pool feet first during warmups. You touch the wall with two hands, simultaneously, at the turn and finish in butterfly and breaststroke. You don't misuse quotation marks. And you don't keep people on a Godforsaken Zoom call for more than five minutes past the appointed time. My God. 

*****

At least two of the more than 40 people on this call are actually lying down. Still on camera, pillows propped behind their heads - they are done and they don't care who knows it. Respect. 

*****

The class finally ended at 9 gosh darn 45 PM and not one second too soon. Let's just say that I was less than engaged at that point. I was texting with a friend who was threatening to drop some inappropriate comments into the chat just to shake things up and I offered her cold hard cash money to do it. She could have made bank, I tell you what. We're talking about one percent money. 

It's Friday now and I'm at a swim meet doing absolutely nothing official. I'm going to watch swimming and then I'm going to go home. Somebody else is going to have to wield the clipboard tonight. 

The small hours

It's 3:25 AM on Tuesday morning, and I'm quite wide awake. I'm almost always awake at 3. I usually read when I wake up in the middle of the night, or I scroll mindlessly, and then feel bad about myself.  Yesterday, however, it occurred to me that I could try to write my way through the nightly periods of unwanted wakefulness. And so here I am. Welcome to the insomnia chronicles, volume 1. 

*****

That was last night, or early this morning. It's 5:30 PM now, closer to my usual writing time. I worked at home today as I always do on Tuesdays. I was not productive. Distracted, scatterbrained, and muddy in my head, I floundered through the day, flopping like a fish from one task to the next, from one idea to another. I need a deadline. Deadlines make me panic, and nothing puts things in focus like a good solid panic attack. 

Did you come here for time management advice? Probably not a good idea. 

*****

It's Wednesday now, 2:33 AM. I don't have anything to say at 2 in the morning, so I think I'll read rather than write. Good night. Or good morning.

*****

The small hours can be bleak, you know what I mean?  I've had some of my best panic attacks at 3 AM. But of course I have mental health breakdowns during the day, too. Really, there's no bad time for an existential crisis.

*****

And don't come around here looking for mental health advice, either. Word to the wise. 

*****

But the pre-dawn hours aren't always bad. Sometimes I just get up out of the bed and get a head start on the day and then get back under the covers an hour before I have to get up.  Even if I can't sleep, I lie there feeling peaceful, knowing that my to-do list is a few items shorter. When I do sleep in that last pre-alarm hour, it's really concentrated sleep. Distilled sleep. Essence of sleep. If I don't feel like doing chores at 3 in the morning, I read. Either way, the small hours of the morning can be a very pleasant time.

Or not. 

*****

I wonder sometimes if animals are fearful in advance. Like are they anxious about possibly running into a predator, and do they consciously plan their activities with hiding places and escape routes in mind? Or do they only feel fear when there's something to actually be afraid of. The latter, I hope. 

Anyway, I wonder about this because a coyote - a COYOTE! - was spotted in our neighborhood and now I gotta figure out how to survive an encounter with a coyote because I always feel fear well in advance of an event occurring, whether or not it’s an event that is likely to occur. That I now have to plan a coyote-fighting strategy doesn’t seem reasonable, since I’m in Maryland and not Arizona. Why on EARTH should I have to evade coyotes. I arranged my entire life so as not to ever have to be within 50 miles of a coyote. But of course, I also arranged my life so as to ensure the widest possible berth between me and the nearest bear and look how that turned out. 

Well, yes, of course this has something to do with insomnia. It’s stuff like this that keeps me up at night. 

*****

I did some research, and it turns out that Maryland has been home to a small but resilient little coyote population for over 50 years. The call has been coming from inside the house this whole time. Not sure if that makes me feel better or not - that I’ve managed to avoid coyote encounters for the entire 24 years that I have lived in Maryland is a good thing, of course, but I’d prefer to have held on to my blissful ignorance about their presence, because now I’m sure that it’s just blind luck that I haven’t been attacked by a coyote yet, and good luck is always due to run out at some point. According to the Maryland natural resources site where I learned that coyotes and I have been coexisting for 24 years, coyotes are the most-disliked wild animal species in Maryland, held in “almost universal disdain” (disdain is the state of Maryland’s word not mine) by human Marylanders. Nobody likes an animal that preys on cats and dogs, let alone small children. Not to mention the coyote’s well-known habit of blowing up their victims with Acme Corporation-manufactured explosives or dropping heavy objects on them from great heights. I’m not a road runner. When that anvil drops from an overpass, I won’t see it coming until it’s too late. 

*****

So it’s Memorial Day Weekend now, or MDW as we summer people like to call it. Saturday morning, bright and sunny but at least 15 degrees colder than I would prefer the first day of summer to be. This happens now - we have unseasonably cold weather in late May which gives way very suddenly to real hazy summer warmth some time around the middle of June. It happens so regularly now, in fact, that the cold late May temperatures aren’t really unseasonable anymore. 

MDW usually brings with it some relief from the sleepless stressed-out mental health misery of spring. But this year’s crisis feels like it’s going to stick around for a bit. It has some staying power. Intractable, that is the word I would use. Intractable. It’s too cold to swim and despite the pale blue cloudless sky and the clear warm sunshine, I find myself uninterested in leaving the house today. 

But leave the house I must and shall. I have things to do that cannot be accomplished remotely, and I want to feel the way it looks outside. So I’m doing outside things this weekend, cold water and coyotes be damned. 

*****

I really didn’t think that I was going to swim this weekend. It was chilly enough just sitting poolside with my friends that I needed a sweater. But the crazy children were all in the pool, and then a few adults ventured in a toe at a time. When my neighbor and fellow lap swimmer started on  his usual mile swim (I don’t swim a mile), I thought about how silly it would be to have spent two hours at the pool and not to have actually gone swimming. Then another almost-daily swimming neighbor showed up, pulled off her swim cover-up, stepped into a lap lane, and started swimming. Well, I thought, if another middle-aged lady can do it, then I can certainly do it. And I did, and it was freezing cold, and even after ten laps I was still freezing cold, and even two hours later after a hot shower and dry clothes, I was still cold. Actually, I was freezing cold all evening on Saturday - that might have been hypothermia. But everything that has been worrying me, fueling the nonstop panic and anxiety, was gone, just for a short time in that clear sun-sparkling cold blue water. It was glorious, and I’m going to do it again today. And I don’t think coyotes swim, at least not in the lap lane of a neighborhood pool. 

Spoiler alert: Putin is really bad

Although I was already on board with this thesis, I just finished reading two more “Putin is the worst” books and I’m even more convinced than ever that Putin’s Russia is a giant criminal enterprise and that he is one of the worst threats to peace and civilization and just plain human decency in the world.  

The books are Red Notice and Freezing Order, both by Bill Browder. Browder was one of the first Western businesspeople to invest in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. The son of a brilliant mathematician and the grandson of a prominent member of the American Communist party, Browder decided early to pursue a career that didn’t involve academia or politics. Of course, he ended up involuntarily up to his neck in the latter. 

At first, Browder’s Hermitage Capital was very successful. And then he began to learn the hard way that the Russians didn’t play by even the bare minimum dog-eat-dog-but-with-a-fork rules of Western high finance. I won’t go into the details of the Byzantine theft of Hermitage-owned shares by corrupt Russian oligarchs, for two reasons - you might want to read it yourself, and I honestly couldn’t recount all the details even if I wanted to. Suffice to say that Browder learned that Russia wasn’t a safe place to invest. And then he learned that Russia wasn’t a safe place for anything or anyone, including Russians. 

*****

You have probably heard of the Magnitsky Act, which imposes strict financial sanctions on Russian oligarchs (and now other foreign despots and kleptocrats) proved to be involved in human rights abuses. Bill Browder was the person responsible for getting this legislation through Congress and then getting many other countries to pass similar laws. The Magnitsky Act is named for Browder's Russian attorney and friend Sergei Magnitsky, who was murdered in his jail cell for refusing to cooperate with Russian officials' attempt to frame Bill Browder for their own crimes. Red Notice (named for the Interpol arrest warrants that the Russians repeatedly used to harass Browder) tells the story of the crime, the story of Sergei Magnitsky's ordeal, and the story of the creation and implementation of the Magnitsky Act. 

It's a very compelling story, heartbreaking and infuriating and terrifying and inspiring all at once. Both of the books (more about Freezing Order in a bit) make very clear that once the guardrails are off, and people like Putin are free to operate with relative impunity, then anything can happen and no one is safe. 

If you are a person who hears about an abuse of power by a high government official or a wealthy and powerful person, and  thinks "They can't do that, they can't get away with that," then you should read these books immediately and understand that every time a politician pushes for less regulation on commerce and lower taxes on billionaires and fewer protections for workers and consumers and less support for whatever is left of the the social safety net, what they want is a country just like Putin's Russia, where they CAN do that, and they can and do get away with it, all the time. Given the opportunity, the strong will always use their strength to crush the weak. Always. Without exception. 100 percent of the time. 

*****

I have mixed feelings about Bill Browder. By his own admission, he exploited the early post-Soviet privatization schemes, buying shares of newly privatized companies that ordinary Russians sold for practically nothing, just so they’d have enough cash for food and other essentials. He represented the worst of exploitative capitalism, and his work helped to enable the runaway greed and polarizing wealth inequality that turned Russia back into a vassal state. And I don’t know that he ever really acknowledges his part in the exploitation of ordinary people. In fact, I don’t know that he ever really acknowledges that exploiting ordinary people for profit is a bad thing to do. He is an unapologetic capitalist. 

*****

On the other hand, he is a capitalist who believes in a certain standard of decorum and decency in which people who play by the rules are rewarded for their intelligence and hard work. Never mind that he either doesn't acknowledge or maybe just doesn't understand that the rules of this game are inherently unfair and that only the already-rich and already-powerful can really win. That would be a whole different book 

Without giving away too many details (and again, I couldn’t even if I wanted to), Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital, was victim to a stock-dilution scheme that almost bankrupted him. My only knowledge about stock dilution came from watching “The Social Network,” and I don’t know why such a thing is or ever was legal in the United States but as we have established, we’re not talking about the United States and it doesn’t seem that any kind of financial skulduggery is off-limits in Russia. Browder gradually pulled all of his money out of Russia but had already attracted the attention of criminals in and out of the Russian government. They figured out a way to frame Browder for a $230 million dollar tax fraud, and then tried to coerce his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky into testifying against Browder. Magnitsky not only refused; he blew the whistle on the real criminals and was arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and eventually beaten to death for his trouble. 

Bill Browder made it his personal mission - there’s no other way to put it - to avenge his friend, not by violence but by targeting the only thing that Putin and his thoroughly corrupt cronies care about - their money and their right to travel outside godforsaken Russia any time they want. He worked his many contacts in the US and around the world to write, refine, and pass into law versions of the Magnitsky Act, which imposes crippling financial sanctions on foreign dictators and anyone else involved in human rights abuses. The original US Magnitsky Act targeted only Russians, but its successor Global Magnitsky Acts here and in other countries impose sanctions on anyone implicated in human rights violations. 

While Red Notice tells the story of the Magnitsky Act’s creation, Freezing Order tells the story of Putin’s fury in the aftermath of its passage. Putin has been obsessed with the Magnitsky Act since the day it became law, and has worked relentlessly to try to overturn it and to get back at Bill Browder. Browder has been harassed, followed, surveilled, threatened, and even arrested under spurious Interpol “Red Notices.” Interesting fact - as retaliation for the original Magnitsky Act, Putin put an end to US adoptions of Russian orphans. And so when Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. claimed that their 2016 conversations with Russians were about “adoptions,” that is actually half true. They were negotiating with the Russians over repealing the Magnitsky Act, which was the price for allowing adoptions to resume. 

Browder’s self-described “obsession” with honoring his friend’s legacy has cost him a great deal. He cannot travel internationally without fear of abduction or arrest under another trumped-up pun-intended Interpol warrant. And at the end of Freezing Order, he alludes to family strife related to his frequent absences and his wholehearted dedication to the Magnitsky case. I’m sure that his wife has endured a lot. It must be hard to be married to a person who pours themself out so completely for a cause. But of course, those people tend to be the ones who get world-changing things done. 

Sometimes, I miss a book when I finish it. I miss the characters if it’s a novel, or I miss the author’s voice. That’s how I felt after I finished Red Notice and Freezing Order. I missed Bill Browder’s relentless intensity, his only-I-can-save-the-world-from-Putin bravado. I don’t think I could live with that level of intensity but I admire his courage, and I respect what he has accomplished. I respect his refusal to back down, and his determination to make sure that his friend’s death was not in vain. And I really respect his refusal to shut up, no matter what it costs him. 

99 problems

After a week or so of bleak and cold weather, we had almost - summer warmth and sunshine today. I walked around the track, which was very well populated after a few days when it was nearly deserted, not because of the weather but because of the bear. They shipped the bear to parts unknown where I very much hope he will remain. I harbor no ill will toward that bear - I wish him all the honey he can eat, as long as it’s at least 50 miles away from Rockville and Naval Support Activity Bethesda. This Navy base isn't big enough for him and me. 

I started to round the corner today, figuratively speaking. Most people love the beautiful month of May but every year I have a mental health crisis that  has May's name written all over it, and I can't wait to see the end of this most Godforsaken of months. Everything is always better in June and June is right around the corner. Less than two weeks really because June begins with Memorial Day weekend as far as I’m concerned. Once MDW arrives, spring is dead to me, and I have no problems that summer can't solve. 

Well that's not actually true. I have plenty of problems that summer can't solve but they don't matter that much in the summer. Everything is bathed in sunshine and things that look like problems any other time of the year look like clear water and blue skies in the summer. Come June, I got 99 problems but a problem ain't one. 

*****

It’s late Friday afternoon now and I’m contemplating a walk in the 85-degree sunshine. In just over two weeks, the pool will open and if the weather stays warm between now and then, then it might just be warm enough to swim on opening weekend. And I’ll swim even if it’s not warm enough, because that pool is only open for a few short months and during those short months I count the minutes wasted that aren’t spent immersed in clear blue chlorinated water. Just two more weeks, and I'll be free of May and its bullshit. I still got 99 problems but the countdown has begun. 

Suburban bear

A fire drill on a sunny warm Monday afternoon is a nice little break in the day. I work with friendly people so we had a pleasant little social gathering in the courtyard while we waited for the all clear. But fire drills aren't the most interesting thing happening on Naval Support Activity Bethesda. There's also a bear. That's not a joke, nor a metaphor. There was an actual bear sighting last week in the woods between the University and Walter Reed. I yield to no one in my respect for the Navy but they’re not trained to fight bears. 

The bear has been spotted at locations all over Rockville and Bethesda and Silver Spring, all close to one another and all places where bears do not belong. It's unnerving. I keep seeing social media posts offering well-intentioned advice from animal control and the Maryland and National Park Services. Don't run. Don't scream. Back away slowly. The don't run part is easy for me because I know that almost anything can outrun me. Especially a black bear, which can apparently run as fast as a race horse. You’d think that a bear would be a clumsy, lumbering creature, but apparently not. I learn something new every day, but this little factoid about the land speed of black bears is something that I would have been happy not to know. 

*****

I've been on guard on my walks around the neighborhood. I scan my surroundings and I maintain situational awareness. For what purpose, I don’t know because again, I have no chance of outrunning a bear and even less chance of winning a fight against one. Bear vs. Claire - Bear wins every time. But I’d like to at least see it coming, I guess. 

On Monday, I walked on the track on the base. It was a nice day - a really nice day - but the track was almost deserted. No students playing soccer, no PT, no one walking or running - it was disconcerting. I saw someone’s hoodie hanging on a railing, and I thought “Well, that’s it - the bear got someone, and left the evidence behind.” I thought for a moment about going inside, but then I decided to press on because they might never catch that stupid bear and I can’t stay inside all summer. And then a few other people ventured out and I wasn’t alone on the track anymore. I was still on my guard, but I felt much more at ease. 

*****

They got that bear (I can only hope it was the same bear and that the Maryland suburbs aren’t bear country now) in the most cartoon storyline way imaginable - they set a (humane) trap next to a beehive in a backyard where the bear had been spotted last week. The amateur beekeeper whose backyard it is apparently never considered that his beehives and the honey they produce might attract bears. And who can blame him? We’re in suburban Maryland not gosh-darn Wyoming. I’d never have worried about bears either. Of course, I also wouldn’t keep bees. 

According to the news reports about the bear’s capture, he weighs about 140 pounds. I saw a very grainy little surveillance camera video, and he’s really very cute. I don’t know much about bears but I imagined something ferocious-looking and Kodiak-sized, in the 500 - 700 pound range. I weigh more than 140 pounds, for crying out loud. I’m still pretty sure that the little bear would beat me in a fight, but he’d have had to work for it. I’d have gone down swinging. Anyway, he’s been relocated to a more bear-friendly location, probably somewhere in the Catoctin mountains. Maybe he’ll show up at Camp David. Then he’ll be the Secret Service’s problem. 

L'Air du Temps

When is the last time you smelled perfume - not from a bottle in a store, but just out and about in the world? One day at work last week, I walked down a corridor and into some perfume, just hanging there, lingering in the air. It hit me like a physical force. It had been years since I had smelled perfume - real, old-fashioned, lady-with-a-spritzer-at-department-store perfume - and it took me all the way back. I think I understand Proust and his madeleine now. 

The scent was maddeningly familiar; heavy on the Oriental notes, and a little bit floral but not rosy floral.  Something like Opium but not Opium. Maybe I should just Google a list of popular perfumes of the 1970s and 80s and then match a name with a scent. 

*****

Of course you understand that I actually did this, and I promptly ended up in a rabbit hole of mid-20th century beauty culture nostalgia, from which I emerged only days later.

*****

When I was growing up, lots of women - maybe even most women - wore perfume. The women in my working-class Philadelphia neighborhood wore Tabu or Charlie or popular Avon scents (if you’re young, then you might not know that Avon used to be known mostly for perfume - the cosmetics came later). When I was in high school and college and then a young person in the working world, I learned about expensive perfumes, classics like Chanel No. 5 and Joy and Arpege. Perfume was very popular among young women in the 80s - we favored overwhelming heavy scents like Opium and Lauren and Chloe, suitable for the aspirational luxury ethos of that decade. Every city still had fancy downtown department stores, marble floors and high vaulted ceilings and full-service restaurants and dressed-up salespeople and elaborate Christmas displays that families made special trips to visit. You couldn’t walk into one of those stores without being chased by a young woman wielding a spritzer of perfume. Just thinking about those department stores makes me miss my grandmother. 

*****

I read Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties early in 2022, and I started writing about it, but I never finished. Here’s a preview - if you were a young person in the 80s and 90s then you might remember that right around 1991, there was a very abrupt popular fashion 180, from glamor and high heels and big hair to hippie revival and grunge. In 1987, young women dressed up to go out - full hair and makeup, high-heeled shoes with designer jeans and dressy tops, and of course, perfume. In 1992, the aesthetic abruptly changed. This is not to say that young women no longer cared how they looked - they very much did care. But it was no longer acceptable to act or look as if you cared. It really took just as much time and effort trying to appear as if you didn’t make any effort at all as it did to look flawlessly put together. Perfume did not survive this fashion transition, perhaps because it was an obvious olfactory clue that a woman cared about being conventionally attractive. 

*****

When I was very young, age 5 or so, we lived with my grandparents for a time. I think we were there for about a year, more or less. My grandparents went out most Saturday nights and my grandmother would usually let us sit on her bed and watch her get dressed and fix her hair and put the finishing touches on her hair and makeup. Perfume was always the last step. 

Eventually, I realized that my grandparents’ nights out were not particularly glamorous - they went to movies sometimes, or to VFW or American Legion events, or mostly to friends’ houses to play cards. Perhaps it was that perfume, lingering in the air long after my grandmother left the room, that made grown-up life seem very exciting and romantic.

I never did figure out what last week’s perfume was, even after my internet rabbit hole research. It reminded me of Opium or Chloe, not because of how it smelled but because of how it felt. It was like John Wanamaker or Strawbridge and Clothier, circa 1980. It was like midnight Mass at St. John the Baptist, circa 1975.  It was like my Nana’s bedroom on a Saturday night in 1971. It was like my childhood in the middle of the American century. 

Pastime

I'm at my son's baseball game, one of the last few games of the season and one of the last few games of my son's high school career. I arrived midway through the 5th inning with Rockville up 6-2. It's the top of the 8th now. 

It's a fun game. The weather is perfect and the teams are evenly matched in on-field and dugout trash talk talent. They're all very funny. They affect a growly deep voice and they shout things like "He's a very healthy boy!" And "Where's the ball? Right field can't see so good!" The idea seems to be to say the most innocuous and inoffensive things possible, in a tone and timbre suitable for the vilest insults. My son is very good at this. It's very amusing. 

*****

The play of the game belongs to a Richard Montgomery outfielder, who just made an insane running, diving catch. A sick catch, as the young people say. A filthy play. The batter tipped his helmet to the fielder who had robbed him of at least a double, and the Rockville dugout applauded. Respect. 

*****

The game is over now. Rockville held the lead and everyone is going home happy. I'm sitting in the bright late afternoon sunshine waiting for my son to pack up his gear and say goodnight to his team. I haven't looked at a schedule but I think they have five games left. 

Book snob

I’m reading Snobbery: The American Version, Joseph Epstein’s very long (well, it seems long) book about the history of snobs and snobbery and snobbishness in America. I don’t know how I ended up with this. It was published in 2002, which was pretty much centuries ago in terms of social commentary. 

Epstein approaches the subject from a (not the, but a) classic American snobby perspective. He’s an academic and writer (and kind of a jerk) who can’t conceal his disdain for most aspects of American life, including democracy and egalitarian social structures, both of which he tries to convince us contribute to snobbery - in other words, the more “classless” a society considers itself, the more prevalent snobbery will be in that society. And maybe he’s right although he doesn’t really make a convincing case, but even if he is right, I think I can live with a few snobs as the price of democracy so the point is moot. 

I have been slogging - slogging, I tell you - through this book for several days now. I’m only about a third of the way through and at this rate I’ll throw off my whole reading schedule for spring.  But I feel compelled to finish it. I have no idea why.  

*****

During the pandemic, I used to order groceries through Instacart. I was a very good tipper so my groceries were always delivered quickly and correctly. Then I started to feel bad about making other people do my shopping - even though I was tipping very well - and it also just cost too much money. But last week, Instacart sent me a postcard with a $20 off promo code. So now I’m waiting for my grocery delivery, with a $20 tip courtesy of Instacart. I feel like a plutocrat, sitting in luxury while others perform my household tasks. 

If you’ve ever used Instacart, then you know that the app offers suggestions - sometimes helpful, sometimes less so - for additional things that you might need to buy. Today’s suggestions included items for my “charcuterie board,” including Ritz-style crackers and a processed cheese spread. I could hear Epstein’s voice in my head, expounding on the connection between taste and snobbery. Do snobs shop at Aldi? Does Instacart snobbishly assume that Aldi shoppers are so lacking in sophistication that we don’t know the difference between charcuterie and an after-school snack? I feel like he could easily take a simple thing like a grocery order and dissect it and examine it 25 different ways, and both explain why a person’s grocery order ranks them as an educated professional or a plebe AND why such distinctions are inherently contrived and artificial but he’s still going to write about them. 

*****

I finally gave up on this absolutely insufferable book when I reached the chapter on college snobbery, a subject about which I know a few things, being the parent of a college student and a high school senior. Epstein, a scholar and college professor, is actually in a position to offer some real insight on the subject of Americans’ obsession with the “right” schools, but he’s too lazy to bother, and instead spends pages sneering at Ivy League pretension with no attempt to examine or illuminate the topic. I don’t often abandon a book less than halfway through but I have limited time on earth and I find myself unwilling to spend any of it thinking about Joseph Epstein’s analysis (lack of) of American snobbery. I feel good about this decision. 

*****

Except that now I'm reading something else that's almost as terrible, but not quite. It's a novel, a much quicker read, and I'm almost finished, so I'll just suck it up and read it until the end. In the future, I'll be a little more selective. I'm a bit of a book snob. 

Squirrel snacks

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m just wrapping up my work week. I worked from home today, with the windows open, feeling the balmy breeze and listening to the birdsong. 

My husband hung a new bird feeder in the side yard, right in front of my office window. We’ve had a hummingbird feeder in that same tree for some time, and I have to think that the sugar water that’s been in there for some time and that I am pretty sure has not been changed for at least a month is fully fermented now. Maybe that’s why I never see any birds at that feeder - it’s a nighttime spot now. But the new feeder is very popular. Every time I looked out the window today, I saw at least one or two birds enjoying a seedy snack. That is what I call entertainment. 

Even more entertaining than the birds was the determined squirrel who ran along the x and y axes of the fences between my yard and the neighbor’s, with a few forays into the tree branches just above the feeder, sniffing and stretching and examining the thing from all angles, trying to figure out how to reach the feeder and snag some seed for himself. 

A few minutes later, I saw the squirrel again. He was on the ground, vacuuming up some seed that had dropped from the feeder. And that seed was delicious, I’m sure, because a minute later, the squirrel had climbed the fence again and was scheming and planning its route to the feeder. He sat on the fence (literally) for a few minutes; wondering, I think, if he had a chance at the feeder. It hangs about a foot or so from one side of the fence and at least two feet or more from the other side. The drop from the tree branch where it’s suspended is about 18 inches. All of these distances are longer than the squirrel’s body, excluding the tail, but he’s stretchy and agile and unafraid to climb, even upside down. And that’s what he did. He got up on a branch and calculated the shortest distance between the branch and the feeder, and then stretched himself far enough to grab onto the hanger. And then he made his move, a half stretch and half jump that landed him upside down and just able to sniff under the lid of the feeder. But not enough to actually get any seed. 

Did you think I was kidding? 

I felt sorry for him. All that planning and scheming, all that work - and he came so close. SO CLOSE! Do squirrels feel frustration, I wondered - was he furious? Was he cursing our stupid bird feeder and and our stupid trees and fences? Did he stamp his little squirrel foot or punch the top of the feeder with his tiny squirrel fist? That’s what I would have done, of course. But the squirrel seemed to maintain his equanimity. He sniffed for a few minutes and then climbed back up into the tree, giving up for the time being. 

Later, my husband drilled a hole into an old frisbee and attached it to the feeder to serve as an anti-squirrel barrier. It’ll probably work. The squirrel couldn’t get past a single obstacle between himself and the seed, let alone two. Some seed will fall out of the feeder, dropped by the careless birds who can have as much as they want, as often as they want, so maybe that’s the best the squirrel can hope for. But I’m rooting for him. Why should the birds get everything handed to them? 

Everybody agrees

I have so many drafts in various stages of completion or lack of, so what am I doing writing something new? Writing a new essay is like buying a new jacket. I have too many of both. I need to just wear what I have. 

But even though I have a ton of jackets (so many jackets), I can always find a hole in my jacket wardrobe, some jacket use case that I cannot address with existing resources. And because I tend to write about the same things over and over again (books, swimming, handbags; and of course, jackets) there are also lots of everyday life situations about which I have not ever written so much as a word. 

Like songs. I write about music a little bit here and there, but not very often. And one day last week as I listened to my new favorite song for the fourth consecutive time, I thought that I should write about falling in love with a song. 

Songs usually have to sneak up on me. I like to sing along with music, and so I tend to listen to songs that I already know and love. There are a lot of them, and it’s a pretty odd collection. Eclectic as it is, though, my favorite songs list is well established. It’s a comfortable little clique. It’s not easy for a new song to break in. 

But it happens. Sometimes, I fall in love with an old song that I’d never thought much about when it was a new song. A few years ago, for example, I happened upon the Richie Havens recording of “Here Comes the Sun,” and it became an instant top ten favorite song for me. I can listen to that song any time. Just a few days ago, I was driving home from work and heard the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” a song that was on the radio all the time when I was a little girl, and it threw me for a loop. That song is so great, and so radically different from the Temptations’ earlier work. That ominous bass line, the gradual build-up, the syncopated hand-clapping, the alternating solo vocals (especially the falsetto) - it’s all so brilliant. Seeing that my own papa was also a rolling stone, I didn’t like that song at all when I was young. Even at age 7 or so, I knew all about men who spent most of their time chasin’ women and drinkin’. I didn’t need to hear the Temptations sing about it. When I heard it last week, it didn’t seem like a throwback. It seemed brand-new

Other songs grow on me. When I was young, I worked for a self-important, pretentious little chain of stores. This little company was so full of itself that we, the ignorant and provincial staff, were not allowed to change the music selection dictated by the “creative director.” (But we did it anyway, all the time). I could tell you some stories about that place, but I won’t, because it still exists and it’s still full of itself. I have to admit, though, that if it weren’t for that stupid store and its stupid artsy pretension, I might never have heard Erasure and The Sundays. Erasure, in particular, drew me in slowly but surely. It’s been almost 30 years, but “Hallowed Ground” and “Heart of Stone” remain among my very favorite songs ever. 

*****

“At teatime, everybody agrees,” OR “at tee time, everybody agrees?”

It could be either, right? I drink a lot of tea and so in my life, any time could be teatime. And I wouldn’t set foot on a golf course unless you paid me, and you’d have to pay me a lot. So for my purposes, it would always be the former. But I looked it up, just to be sure.

*****

Then there are those songs that take many years - decades, even - to worm their way into my affections. I am not an Eric Clapton fan, and will pretty much fling myself at the radio to turn off “Lay Down, Sally.” But “Promises,” which was on the radio all the time when I was a little girl, and which I ignored because it wasn’t the Carpenters or John Denver or Fleetwood Mac or Olivia Newton-John, is actually a great song. After forty or so years, I’m a “Promises” fan, and will always stop what I’m doing to sing along with that song. Same for Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Southern Cross,” and Chicago’s “Searching.” Actually, I’ve come to love almost all 1970s Chicago, almost as much as I hate 1980s Chicago. This is a point of contention between my husband and me. He likes the garbage Peter Cetera “Glory of Love” years. There is no accounting for taste. 

*****

And speaking of the 80s - throughout that whole decade, I avoided hair band metal. Everything from Van Halen to Def Leppard to Whitesnake - especially Whitesnake. What kind of name is that, anyway? I hated all of those bands and all of their music. Until suddenly, I didn’t. Sometime around 2007 or so, I was driving somewhere with my then-little children, who were strapped in their car seats in the back seat of my Honda, and Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” came on the radio. And instead of reflexively hitting a preset button to switch to something else - anything else - I turned it up a little and sang along. I still sing along with that song. That song is awesome. Van Halen, Guns n Roses, even Def Leppard - I love them all now. Not every song, and not all the time, but 80s hair metal has finally, after 40 years, earned a place in my stone cold heart. 

*****

But the best thing is when I fall in love with a brand-new song when it’s still actually brand-new and not just new to me. When you turn on a radio and hear a song that you’ve never heard before and it just speaks to you, it feels like the world is wide open. It feels like anything is possible. 

It begins with a catchy melody, the kind that gets into your head so quickly that you’re singing along the second time you hear the chorus. Then a lyric, a turn of phrase that speaks to you for whatever reason - it’s funny, it’s beautiful or relatable, or maybe a little of all of those things. There’s that moment when the right melody and the right lyrics hit me at just the right time, and I know that a never-before-heard song will instantly be my jam. This is what happened to me the first time I heard Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.” The first time, I tell you!

“I have this thing where I grow older but just never wiser.” Yes, Taylor - I know exactly what you mean, because I have that very same thing! Witness - remember when I said that I have too many jackets? Well I do but I just bought another one. Older but never wiser. 

The house dance beat and that opening line drew me in, and then the hook: “It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.” Oh my gosh, it totally is - you have no idea. 

The lyrics so beautifully capture the rueful self-awareness (it takes real self-awareness to admit to your own “narcissism disguised as altruism”), the growing dismay as a still-young but maturing woman realizes that she is no longer the ingenue, no longer the “sexy baby.” She cleverly uses a young woman’s language (“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem”) even as she skips ahead 30 years to imagine herself as a rich old woman with a scheming, murderous daughter-in-law. It’s a brilliant song, and only Taylor Swift could have written it; not because there are no other brilliant songwriters but because it’s about her own particular peculiar preoccupations, which she’s unafraid to admit to and even sing about. It’s about her life, past, present, and future - the girl who was once the sexy baby pop star and who is now the “monster on the hill,” a star so big that she has distant admirers rather than friends; a woman so rich that someone is probably already scheming to separate her from her money - maybe a crooked agent or accountant or manager, or maybe a greedy future daughter-in-law. 

I liked Taylor Swift very much already, but this is the song that made me love her. Her earlier music, while often lyrically and musically brilliant, always seemed to belong exclusively to the young. I could hum along with “Blank Space” or “We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together” but I couldn’t claim them as my own. I’m way past the break up with a bad boyfriend stage, and I was never the romantic drama girl, never a nightmare dressed like a daydream. But the woman who will stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror? The person whose depression works the graveyard shift? Yeah, that’s me. I’m the problem. It’s me. Taylor knows. 

Current(ish) events

It’s been a while since I wrote about a book (really it’s been a while since I wrote about anything other than high school swimming and the cluttered inside of my own brain). It’s the day after the Trump indictment and I’m reading Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler: A Memoir. It seems appropriate. 

Defying Hitler is very much unlike any other first-person account of life in Nazi Germany that I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot of them. Haffner (born Raimund Pretzel) was just one of many educated, middle-class Germans who were first disgusted and then horrified by the Nazis; but unlike many of his compatriots, he not only left Germany, but spent much of his life afterward thinking and writing and speaking about what happened in Germany, and why, and what could and should have been done to stop the Nazis.  

*****

Jumping ahead a bit, Haffner escaped the Nazis and went to England, where he was promptly clapped into an enemy alien internment camp in Devon. He was eventually moved to the Isle of Man. In England, Haffner wrote about Nazi Germany, emphasizing not just crimes against Jews and political opponents, but what he saw as flaws in the German character that made Germans particularly susceptible to Nazism. Not just the things that we usually associate with “German-ness,” like discipline and organization and hyper-competence, but attraction to what Haffner calls “comradeship.” 

You would think that “comradeship” would be a good thing, wouldn’t you? But it’s not, not as Haffner describes it. Writing about his experience in a compulsory training camp for aspiring lawyers, he explains that by militarizing everything (including preparing for the German equivalent of the bar exam), the Nazis exploited the feeling of ride-or-die camaraderie experienced only by soldiers in battle. He further asserts that this experience - this comradeship under fire that exempts individuals from all individual responsibility and independence - is good and in fact indispensable in war, but inherently evil and corrupting in all other circumstances. Reflecting on his own experience in a Nazi training camp, Haffner writes that after a few weeks of training in quasi-military conditions, he and his comrades were no longer educated young men, but an “unthinking, indifferent, irresponsible mass.”

I’d never heard of Haffner until I found this book but according to the afterword written by his son, Oliver Pretzel, he was very prolific and very well known in both England and Germany, especially in the immediate post-war years. The manuscript for Defying Hitler was found among Haffner’s papers after his death, and his son published it, minus two missing sections, in 2000. It became an immediate best seller, much to Pretzel’s surprise. As Pretzel suggests, its success was partly attributable to its focus on answering, and not just asking the question “How could this have happened?” Haffner breaks it down in practical and philosophical terms, explaining exactly how and why a movement that was not universally popular and that was in fact repellent to many Germans, could still completely upend and destroy the country in practically no time. It is instructive and maddening and terrifying. 

*****

In less than 24 hours, the former President of the United States will face arraignment in a courtroom in New York City. As much as I loathe him and as much as I hated everything about his misbegotten presidency, I’m not looking forward to this, neither the arraignment itself nor the likely chaotic and violent aftermath. I think that Donald Trump is more than willing to upend and destroy the country to save himself or to enrich himself at the expense of his foolish supporters. 

*****

No, Trump isn’t Hitler, and 2023 America is not 1933 Germany. But it feels like everything could change in an instant, and if feels like we could all, a year from now, be asking ourselves how it happened, how it could possibly have happened, and so fast, too.