Pickleball and . . . literature?

 For 75 minutes on Saturday morning I practiced PB with a friend, volleying, serving and returning, and backhands. "Yes! " would ring out in mock triumph as she put yet another slant shot off to one side of the court causing me to run way over there for a weak, lunging return, and then hit the wide-open court as I desperately tried to reverse course and run back into the play. I would hit volley shots at her that would handcuff her between forehand/backhand stabs at the ball and laugh as she quixotically looked at her paddle that had just failed her by trying to return a chicken-wing shot off its narrow banding edge. In between faux triumphs we would discuss Rick Atkinson's fascinating opening volume in the Revolution Trilogy which we both are reading, The Redcoats Are Coming. "Atkinson has a felicity for turning history into literature," says the Washington Post. No score was kept, only momentary scores were settled. I love pickleball.

Sunday, as showers threatened and the sky spit raindrops, I showed up at general PB Drop-In and filled out a 4-some on a water-slicked court hoping to quickly get in a couple of games before a deluge made playing untenable. I thought I was being handy by immediately filling out a 3-some even though our two opponents were half my age and the best players (one by far) of the 12 toilers playing on three courts. The game went quickly as Pen put his wicked spin serve onto the wet court where it sliced wickedly away off the moist veneer of the hard court and weak lunging rally returns were put away decidedly by Player at the Kitchen Line with triumph aplomb. We went up for faux "good game" platitudes at 1-11 and I drolly said, "Work up a sweat, you two?" The losing two of us expectantly waited for Pen and Player to split up with us in some more equitable matchup that would, you know, be more fun but Pen and Player wanted to remain together. Okay. We became a mere ballboy and ballgirl for game two chasing down smashed winners so they could thereupon perform more spectacular kitchen putaways and spin-serves that actually curved wickedly in the wet-laden air from "out" to "in." Quickly dispensing with the false platitudes at the net following the 0-11 shellacking (Pickled!) I kept on going, got into my car and drove home to finish reading my depressing Thomas Hardy novel where the heroine gets hanged for murdering her rapist and her husband, the perfect man, runs off with her sister, equally beautiful but half his age, at the exact moment that poor Tessie is strung up for her "crimes." "'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess." There was more profit in reading those lines than playing those games. I hate pickleball.

Lists

Yeah, I write lists.  I started my list of Books Read when I was a senior in high school and now I'm somewhere between 1500 and 2000 books read since then.

Actually, when I mention this (not very often) to folks, many seem amazed.  Perhaps they don't read many or any books and would be embarrassed, or perhaps it never occurred to them that this records their scholastic, mental and intellectual ebbs and flows during their lives.  I mean, if you read Uncle Tom's Cabin in college for a course, it would remind you of the inclinations and persuasions of that professor, wouldn't it; and if you read Nietzsche for pleasure, that would indicate your mental or perceived intellectual state at that period in your life, because nobody would read Thus Spoke Zarathustra for pleasure, right, or don't you know even who wrote that?

Book Read number 1000 decades ago was Moby Dick I remember, a great American novel (a top five), although it stalled adding to my reading list for four months while I plowed through it (while working and raising children long before my family was utterly destroyed by American divorce wars . . . well, that's another Western civilization story), because that was a momentous number and I wanted it to be a momentous book.  I'll die soon enough and take my book list to St. Peter's gate, where it'll be my ticket of admittance showing a life well lived, or maybe it'll show a life squandered.

Mostly I read history, especially of WW2 because my dad fought in that war and he was the greatest man I ever knew, but I try to read literature at least once each year.  This year it was Animal Farm because some animals are more equal than others, like, you know, Republicans.  I read at least a book a month and my next post, I'll let you know what the best dozen books were and what I thought about them.

Year in Review II

I listed the dozen books I read this year that had the most effect upon me, leaving six reads off the list.  None are bad books, and here is the list:

The Raft by Robert Trumbull.  Written in 1942, it's about 3 American fliers stranded on a tiny rubber lifeboat when their torpedo plane went down in the Pacific during the war.  They were adrift over a month before being picked up by a passing American ship.  A tale of privation, resourcefulness and determination, I read it as a boy and was mightily impressed by it.  It was okay as a re-read half a century later.

Fire by Sebastian Junger.  Junger's The Perfect Storm is one of my favorite books.  This book, a collection of stories about wildfire firefighters, several of whom lost their lives, is also okay.

Micro by Michael Crichton and Robert Preston.  Ghost written by Preston from an unfinished book by Crichton after Crichton died, I think it's about tiny robots that attack humans by getting into their blood stream and saw their way out with minuscule scalpels.  But I really don't remember, and can't remember how it came out, beyond that the world didn't end.  How many more unfinished manuscripts did Crichton leave behind?

Harbor Nocturne by Joseph Wambaugh.  I've read all of Wambaugh's books about cops so I read this, his latest effort.  If you haven't read Wambaugh before, start with The New Centurions (fiction) or The Onion Field (factual) instead.

Tin Can Man by Emory J. Jernigan.  The wartime experiences of a sailor aboard a destroyer in WWII, written 50 years after he lived through them.  Interesting details about the daily wartime experiences of sailors, and some of the personal incidents the author relates might even be true.

Iwo by Richard Wheeler.  A standard battle book about the most savage fight of WWII, excepting, perhaps, only Stalingrad.  The ferociousness of this fight to the last man between the Marines and the Japanese had a lot to do with the decision to use atomic bombs to end the war finally.

I'm always interested each year to tally up the types of books I read each year.  Of the eighteen, three were literature (A Tale of Two Cities; Walkabout; Food of the Gods), two were biographies (John Paul Jones; Kesselring) seven were histories (Glittering Misery; Retribution; Iwo; Tarawa; Japan's War; The American Revolution; Lincoln and His Generals), one was political science (Wilson), two were novels (Harbor Nocturne; Micro), and three were true action (Fire; The Raft; Tin Can Man).

I don't watch a lot of movies but sometimes I check DVDs out of the library.  I enjoyed The Last Stand with Arnold Schwarzenegger made a couple of years ago because, actually, it was well written and Arnold was at his understated best.  The absolute worst movie I have seen in a long time was The Little Fockers, a terrible, pointless waste of time despite a great cast including Oscar winners Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand.

Year In Review I

Books.  My house is filled with more books than I could read before I die.  Is that a bad or a good problem to have?  And my friends want me to use my Kindle and start queuing up electronic books.  Naw.  Paper works just fine.

This year I read 18 books.  It could have been more but I'm currently mired down in a biography of Winston Churchill during the war years.  I'm going to finish it--he was a great man--but I'm juggling library returns of the volume between the Arlington and Falls Church systems as I read about 10 pages a night.  Anyway, that leaves choosing my top dozen books of the year more like deciding what half-dozen do I discard.  How many books did you read this year?

In order of importance to me:

1.  A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.  I read this in 9th grade but that was decades ago.  Perhaps then it was my opening into what a rich world adult reading was.  I never forgot the open and the close (I'm paraphrasing)--It was the best of times, the worst of times…It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done.  I just didn't remember much in between.  What a fabulous book.  I also think it's prescient for the ultra rich in America as they unconcernedly allow societal inequities to become ever more prominent.

2.  Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace by Arthur Link.  Almost a great president, but not quite.  Am interesting time in America as we slumbered and almost awoke to our world-wide responsibilities one generation before we actually did.  Wilson was a pedantic, smarter always than anyone else in the room, who didn't listen to anyone in that room.  He promulgated the 14 points which have caused trouble even down to today, most specifically about the right of national self-determination.  Think Scotland and England, or Quebec and the rest of English-speaking Canada.  The British Prime Minister during the peace treaty negotiations to end WWI sniffed that the almighty Lord had ten commandments and Wilson had fourteen.

3.  Walkabout by James Vance Marshall.  A tale of 2 city children surviving in the outback of Australia after a plane crash, with the help of an Aboriginal boy on his walkabout, a coming of age solitary trek for a male reaching puberty.  It doesn't go well for the native boy despite, or perhaps because of, his concern for others.

4.  John Paul Jones by Samuel Eliot Morison.  This biography won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize, one of two Morison won.  His short volume, The Two Ocean War, is an excellent summation of America's naval war during WWII.

5.  Lincoln and His Generals by T. Harry Williams.  A little dated (c1952) but interesting expositions on McClellan, Pope, Meade, Grant and the other eastern theatre Civil War generals.

6.  The American Revolution by Bruce Lancaster.  Part of the American Heritage survey of America's wars, an interesting read on how and why one third of the colonists managed to create a new nation (one third pretty much remained neutral and the other third was pro-crown and decamped to Canada when the Americans won, without their property mostly).  Think George Washington.

7.  Japan's War by Edwin Hoyt.  A long slow slog through how Japan rose to militarism in the twenties and thirties and were at war years before the Germans invaded Poland to "start" WWII.  An unwinnable war, a developed country trying to pacify China.  Think Vietnam.

8.  The Food of the Gods by H.G. Wells.  Not his best work, but I enjoy the writing of Wells.

9.  Glittering Misery: Dependants of the Indian Fighting Army by Patricia Y. Stallard.  Life on the frontier inside of army forts for adult and children dependents of cavalrymen in the 1880s and 1890s.  An interesting glimpse into the hard lives of boys and girls and wives of men on the point of the spear as Americans pursued its "manifest destiny."

10.  Kesselring: The Making of the Luftwaffe by Kenneth Macksey.  It would help if you knew that Kesselring was the German general who stymied the Allied advance in Italy during WWII for two years.  He apparently commanded the Luftwaffe (Nazi air force) in the early good days for the Germans in WWII.  Do you want to know why the Germans (Nazis) were so hard to beat?  They had great technology and great generals, and Kesselring was one of the best.

11.  Retribution:  The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 by Max Hastings.  Americans poured fire and brimstone upon the resolute Japanese during this period as they advanced across the Pacific, in retribution for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  We had to nuke 'em to make them quit.  My Dad fought in this terrible conflict and surely would have died if we had had to invade Japan in 1945 and 1946.  Does that tell you where I stand on the controversy about whether the Americans should have dropped the bombs, or were racist in doing so?  (The Germans had already quit.)

12.  Iwo and Tarawa by Richard Wheeler and Robert Sherwood.  Two Pacific War battle books, tied for twelveth on my list, written a generation after the conflict (Iwo by Wheeler) and during the war (Tarawa by Sherwood who was there), two of the worst battles the Marines ever fought and won (did they ever lose a battle?)  What did your daddy do during the war?

  

2013 in Review, Part One.

2013 in Review.

Here are the dozen most noteworthy books I read last year, in the order of their importance to me.

Richard II by William Shakespeare
The First Salute by Barbara Tuchman c1988
A Rumor of War Philip Caputo c1977
Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan by Ronald Spector c1985
Shrapnel In The Heart by Laura Palmer c1987
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown c1970
Gettysburg by Stephen W. Sears c2003
Lost Triumph: Lee’s Real Plan at Gettysburg by Tom Carhart c2005

To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsular Campaign by Sears c1992

Chancellorsville by Sears c1996

Antietam by James M. McPherson c2002

Exposed: The Secret Life of Jodi Arias by Jane Velez-Mitchell c2013

One Great Literature (R2), a heartstrings book (Shrapnel--stories on the Vietnam Wall), seven history books (four civil war battle books, a WW2 history, an Indian wars recounting and a Revolutionary War era history), a fantasy (what was Lee's plan at Gettysburg?), an autobiographical sketch (Caputo as a young man in Vietnam) and a guilty pleasures book (sex & murder--true crime).

I don't know why but as you can see, 2013 was a lean year for me in entertainment. I went to no movies and only read seventeen books. I don't watch TV, really, besides some NFL football, a few baseball games and the Military Channel, which endlessly recycles reasons why the Allies won WW2.   My slight curtailment of costs with the cable company removed the other channels I used to watch, the History Channel, Discovery and a couple of other shows.   My 1900 cable channels are a true wasteland.   I don't have an I-phone so I can't claim that I was outside walking around at 2/3rd speed very distracted, riveted to intently watching my palm every second.   I think I'm fretting about acquiring enough money to retire now that I'm in my 60s and it's totally distracting.

The Tuchman book was the most eye-opening because it placed the American Revolutionary War in its proper place on the world stage at the time (Great Britain lost to us but beat the rest of the world by ultimately defeating the powerful French coalitions arraigned against it).  I didn't previously know that the British placed more importance on the sugar-producing isles in the Caribbean than on the querulous thirteen colonies.

Richard II was the most pleasurable reading experience because even though Shakespeare plays take awhile to read, the language laced throughout each one is an endless source of rumination and application.  When my father died after a wasting illness when I was in my thirties, I thought of and found applicability in Richard's famous speech as his own doom approached--I hath wasted time and now doth time waste me--suddenly he saw that, incredibly, he had just run out of time.  That can, and will, be you and me someday.

The Carhart book was the most interesting, speculating that Lee actually had a grander plan to annihilate the Union army at Gettysburg than merely butting against its center, uphill, on the third day.  Perhaps Lee meant to send Stuart's 12,000 cavalrymen around behind the Union lines to suddenly strike the rear of the Union center at the appointed hour, a maneuver perhaps foiled by, of all historical figures, George Armstrong Custer.  There was a spirited cavalry battle to the north of Gettysburg in which Custer's troopers played a prominent role about the time that Pickett charged the Union lines.

The other nine books on my list were various gradations of good to better to excellent (Antietam to Gettysburg to Rumor).  Of the five additional books I read last year that didn't make the cut, two were military memoirs ( a Pacific War remembrance and the WWI experiences of a Canadian) and three were alternate-scenario military posers mostly involving WW2 (Hitler's only chance to win WW2 once he invaded Russia, it seems, was to reinforce Rommel in North Africa, take Egypt from the British, drive through to the Caucus oil fields to secure them for Germany and then perhaps even link up with a Japanese thrust into south Russia or head off towards India).

A Small Step

JFK said, before he died, that America would put a man on the moon in the same decade.  It did. 

I remember July 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong descended the ladder from the module on live TV to set foot in the Sea of Tranquility to proclaim American dominance.  He said, "One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind."

I went outside at that moment to look at the bright moon and exult.  I exult no longer, because America is no longer dominant, and that was almost half a century ago.

Armstrong died today at age 82.  So many hopes, so unfulfilled.

Life As A Pizza

Last year I finally fulfilled my lifelong desire to visit the remote battlefield of the Little Big Horn, known when I was a child as Custer's Last Stand, where about 212 troopers perished to the last man on June 25, 1876 in Montana when five 7th Cavalry troops under General Custer attacked a huge Indian encampment of up to 10,000 Sioux and Cheyenne, of whom perhaps 3,000 were warriors who came swarming out of their village like angry bees when provoked and annihilated the soldiers in about 90 minutes. A few miles away Major Reno with the other seven troops of the regiment barely held on in a hedgehog defense atop a hill for two days before he was rescued by General Terry arriving with reinforcements. (Left: Pizza for two last winter at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover on my youngest son's birthday. No, he didn't show up.)

It was the stuff of American lore, Remember the Maine, Send More Japs, I have not yet begun to fight, Nuts!, The Shot Heard Round the World, the Alamo. The reality, a hillside leading down to a meandering stream. impinged upon the heroic nature of the historic record, especially since it took me thirty-eight hours to drive there and back, alone, from my sister's house in St. Paul, but the memory in my mind's eye of the swirling fight, imprinted there by books, pictures and reflection, lives on. (Right: Homemade broccoli and tomato pizza last summer.)

That was my big trip last year, I thought, spending three hours wandering from the Custer site to the Reno site and back again in what is basically wasteland ranch land. Now at almost sixty, having seen almost every important thing I have wanted to see in America, I am free to cut the bonds of North America and go abroad.

But on my FB page lately I have been posting a photo each day of various izza pies I have had in the last year. The most spectacular picture shows an eighteen-inch supreme pizza pie I ordered for dinner, alone, the first night of trial in Dallas last month. (Left: An "everything" pizza in Dallas last month.)

My stay in Dallas to attend a seven-day trial was a typically intense litigation experience. Looking at the snapshot made me realize that that was my big trip last year, a work-detail of three months duration, off and on.

Looking at other pizza pie pictures taken last year showed me that the pies sort of defined my year that just passed, sort of life by pizza analogy. So I decided to post the photographs here also, for what they're worth. (Right: Neapolitan pizza at Orso's right here in Falls Church. Yes, that's an egg on top.)

Running Through History

I went to Dallas on business last week and asked the concierge at the downtown Sheraton for a 3-mile running route. She pulled out a map and traced a route with a marker.

"Go out the north door and turn left, follow the tracks down Pacific Avenue and go a mile, loop down around the Grassy Knoll here . . ."

I interrupted her. "Excuse me, the Grassy Knoll? You mean the site of the JFK assassination?"

"Yes," she said.

At 5 a.m. the next morning, in perfect weather for running, I altered her route slightly and ran through history. I went out the north door, ran west a block to Harwood, turned left and ran by the magnificent Majestic Theatre on Elm Street and continued on to Main Street. Turning right, I ran through the stillness of the early morning thinking about November 22, 1963 and President Kennedy's last few minutes of life.

Perhaps I was running down Main Street at the same speed as his open-air limousine was travelling along the same roadway as his presidential motorcade crawled towards its history-altering meeting with fate at Dealey Plaza, still half a mile ahead of me. I had no noontime sunlight or cheering crowds to spur me on, only my somber thoughts in the early morning darkness and the presence of little groups of silently moving homeless people on the sidewalks.

I passed over Griffin, Lamar, Austin and Market Streets. I ran by Founders Plaza on my right as Houston Street loomed ahead, on the corner where the motorcade made a torturous right turn and passed by the very building which housed the jail where assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have been taken when he was executed in the basement of the courthouse a few blocks behind me.

I made the same right turn. Forty-eight years ago the unsuspecting President Kennedy had less than a minute to live.

I ran a short block and yawed left onto Elm Street, right under a tall fortress of a building, the Texas School Book Depository. I ran down the hill directly away from the Depository and entered the killing zone.

An X painted on the roadway in the middle lane marked the spot where the first bullet struck President Kennedy. This "magic bullet" fired from the corner sixth-storey window of the Depository by Oswald using a twelve-dollar mail-order rifle passed through both President Kennedy and Governor Connolly and inflicted seven wounds upon the two men.

I stopped and looked back. I instantly saw that a man with a rifle in that window could easily kill me, even if I was desperately darting about.

Ten yards further down there is another X painted in the roadway, the site of the fatal head shot. I looked back and the window still seemed so close.

That spot is directly in line with the magic-bullet shot, leaving the shooter to only have to train the rifle barrel slightly downward without any side-to-side movement. The assassination spot was obviously carefully chosen and previously sited in.

I glanced to the north thirty feet and surveyed the infamous grassy knoll. I could see no obvious place for a shooter to hide over there, and it would be a much harder shot since the target would be passing across the shooter's sights and not merely away from him.

I ran the rest of the way down the hill and under the triple underpass where the vehicle bearing the mortally stricken president went. Now I had gone too far on my run and I got lost within a maze of elevated restricted-access highways.

After fifteen minutes of adventuring which included a trip through a homeless camp, a climb up a steep hillside and a trek along an elevated railroad track, I found my way back to the hotel. Inside I went by the workout room and glanced in to see half a dozen guests toiling away in place on dreadmills, ellipticals and stair masters, a mere mile away from a run through momentous history.