Pets

   My family hasn't had successful experiences with pets.  For one reason or another, each—although much loved—had a short history with us.

  We got our first dog after my son David begged for a pet when he was about five.  Helen bought a Yorkshire terrier, which David named Sugie.  She was a wee thing—so small that when she jumped off a curb just a week after we got her as a puppy, she broke a knee and had to walk in a cast for months.  Despite her Lilliputian size, she dutifully sat by the stroller of David's baby sister Abby, defending her from the neighborhood's large dogs if they dared to come near—she would ferociously chase them off by yipping and nipping at their heels.  
  

David and Sugie

  Unfortunately for me, Sugie had a propensity for getting into poison oak and soon sensitized me to that weed, whose effects I'd never previously suffered—I got successively worse cases of it.  Nor was Helen's asthma helped by Sugie's dander.  After a few years, Helen left her at her mother's when visiting Utah one summer.  Sugie's memory was superb, though: when I visited Utah two years later, she immediately jumped onto my lap.  I was thankful that the homestead didn't seem to harbor poison oak.

  Our next animal lived in an outside cage: a husky rabbit, BunBun, which we inherited from friends.  He was allowed to wander freely in our back yard during the day, where the kids played with him.  "Dumb as a bunny" had no meaning for him, for he would endlessly play hide and seek with them, and would always win.  The only way to attract him from his well-chosen hiding places was for David to lie on the ground and play dead; then BunBun would hop up to him and sniff at his head to make sure he was alright.

Abby and BunBun

  Alas!  BunBun didn't always hide so effectively.  We had hired a neighbor girl to feed him and release him to run free in the yard each day during a month's vacation we took.  The day before we returned, a dog managed to get into our yard, and dispatched BunBun to rabbit heaven.

  Abby begged for another rabbit, so we got a little Dutch one, for which I built a hutch on our upstairs deck, where she could roam freely, away from marauders. Abby pledged to take faithful care of her, but I ended up doing most of the work.  Once, after a week of doing it all, I asked Abby if she had fed the rabbit.  She blanched, for she hadn't, and now feared that the rabbit must have died.  After running to the hutch, Abby was relieved to find the bunny in good health.

  This rabbit hadn't heard of "dumb as a bunny" either.  Although the walls of the deck are more than three feet tall—some ten times the bunny's height—and opaque, she soon figured out that freedom must lie on their other side.  She somehow managed to get to the top of them (probably via one of the lounge chairs), scramble over our roof, and spring to the nearest garden wall, never to be seen again.

  We thought a dog would engage Abby more, so we bought her a Cavalier King Charles spaniel, which she called Buttons.  Abby was indeed totally enamored of this pet, and the feeling was reciprocal.  One of his tasks was to awaken Abby each school-day morning, and he would wait anxiously in the kitchen until given the go-ahead.  When told "Go wake Abby," he would scramble lickety-split down the wood floor of the hallway, make a noisy, skidding turn into her room, then jump on her bed.

Abby and Buttons

  Helen's asthma regrettably intervened again, even more so than with Sugie.  To the sorrow of all, a year or two later we decided to return him to the breeder, who lived in Washington state.  It fell to me to send him off at the airport.  I still remember his baleful eyes looking accusingly at me through the door of his cage as he was driven off on a cart to be loaded onto the airplane. 

   It must be karma.  My family seems not to have been meant to live symbiotically with pets.   Balancing the karmic equation, I note with some satisfaction that we don't eat any of their four-legged cousins, confining ourselves to fish and fowl.  That must give us some standing among quadripeds, if not exactly for longevity of relationships with them. 

La Bella Italia

  Although I've written here about my experiences in Britain, Russia and France [1, 2, 3], I've so far neglected Italy, a favorite.  Despite my surname, I have no ancestors from that country that I know of, although I feel an intense kinship with it.  I cannot be other than rhapsodic: Italy cooks the best cuisine; lilts with the most musical language; sparkles with some of the world's most verdant countryside and beautiful towns and cities; stuns with its gorgeous classical art, churches and monuments; beats the world in modern design; overwhelms with the loveliness of its people.

  I won't prattle about Italy's museums, monuments and other tourist attractions, dazzling though they may be. Because of its foundational place in Roman and Greek antiquity and the Renaissance, Italy has more of these than most, and you've no doubt seen them.  Rather, I'll reminisce about some of the personal experiences that enamored me of the country.

  An earliest memory: Helen and I were visiting Rome in 1967 with David, who was not yet two.  We'd arrived at our hotel at about 7:30 pm, tired and with David becoming cranky.  The concierge recommended a nearby trattoria where he said we could get a quick meal; but it was Friday night and we found a long waiting line.  We joined the line, imagining it was the best we could do.  Soon the maître d' came by and scolded us: "You can't let the bambino wait for food at this hour!  Come with me."  He seated us, brought a roll for David, and said he would immediately bring a plate of pasta for him.  "The two of you can wait for your food, but he must eat."

  A later memory, this one concerning Abby:  We were driving with her through the Veneto in 1983; she was 12 at the time.  It was foggy—I could  barely see the road ahead.  As we rounded a curve, the fog broke in patches and Abby shouted, "Stop, Daddy!"  Fearing that I was about to hit something, I brought the car to a quick halt.  But Abby had yelled because she had been staggered by suddenly seeing the 16^th-century Villa Barbero, a Palladian masterpiece, through a gap in the fog.  Luck was with us: the villa was open that day, so we could feast our eyes on its marvelous architecture and its still-vibrant Veronese frescos.  It was then, I am sure, that Abby decided to become an architect.

Villa Barbero

    Still later, when visiting Abby in Florence in 1992, where she was studying on a college semester abroad: Abby had absorbed Helen's and my love of Italy and the Italians.  As she took us to the many out-of-the-way sights and restaurants that had become her favorites, I was charmed by how patiently everyone encouraged her to speak in her adequate but still-faltering Italian, urging her with smiles to finish her sentences.  The Italians must be the most child-centric people in the world.

  There are so many more threads in the pastiche of my memory:  The infinite variety of pasta dishes; pasta is surely the primordial tranquilizer, which must partially account for the serenity of the Italian soul.  The delight of participating in a national pastime— watching opera—especially in provincial opera houses like the beautiful one in Trieste, a mixture of La Fenice on the inside and La Scala on the outside.  The surprise that even I—an inveterate hater of shopping, especially in big cities—actually enjoy the experience in Milan, where focused boutiques limn the elegance of Italian clothing design.  The joy of staying in small towns like Asolo, a jewel of the Veneto.

  Our favorite spot in the country?  That has to be Portofino, which we visited time and time again.  It was to be Abby's wedding site until the 9/11 catastrophe struck just a few weeks before, and the wedding plans there had to be canceled.  Helen often said that she wanted her ashes to be strewn in the hills above that lovely town, although I haven't been emotionally able to accede to that wish.  

Portofino

  A final, wrenching memory: a last boat ride with Helen and Abby in Venice in 1998, on the way to the airport just before returning to the U.S., where Helen died a few months later.  I am so glad that she got to enjoy la bella Italia once again in her final days.

Helen's Farewell to Italy

Constructivitis

  "One of the stove burners isn't working."  With that innocuous statement, my wife Helen launched us on a three-and-a-half year trip to hell and back. 

  I didn't realize at the time that she was coming down with a serious case of  constructivitis.  It is a virus-borne illness, usually caught from an aging house.  The symptoms: abnormal ingenuousness and optimism, often crossing into euphoria, stoked by the exuberant visions of architects and contractors.  I should have recognized it: friends of mine had had the affliction, none having had the slightest initial understanding of its virulence.

  Helen and I were living in the only house we ever owned, of mid-1950s vintage, which we bought in the mid-1960s.   It was at this time about 30 years old.  My natural reaction to Helen's announcement was to tell her that I would replace the burner—nothing could be simpler.

  Unfortunately, the virus had already infected her, although she was then showing only minimal symptoms.  It caused her to speculate that, since the kitchen appliances were all three decades old, it might be worth while to replace them.  Because they were built in, removing them would be so destructive that we should probably consider renovating the kitchen altogether.

  My own immune system was still in perfectly good working order.  I suggested that her idea might be a bit of overkill in the face of the failure of a single burner.  She persisted, so in one of those weak moments that make us susceptible to disease, I agreed to hire an architect to advise us on the incipient project

  Those of you who have yourselves succumbed to constructivitis will know what is coming.  The architect pointed out that some of the appliances took up valuable exterior-wall space, blocking a full view of the rear garden—that wall should more naturally be all glass.  Moving the appliances to an interior wall would require closing off the kitchen's door to the living room and redoing its entry to the dining room—that would mean reworking some of both those rooms.  The virus was already establishing its presence outside the kitchen.

  By this point, Helen was feverish.  "Of course!" she said.  "I've never liked the walnut-veneered walls in those other rooms—I'd love plain white walls to display our art on.  And I hate that their doors and windows are framed in aluminum, not wood, and that the floors have rustic planks."  I estimated her temperature to be at 105° and rising.

  Hearing this was a booster shot for my own immune system.  I frenziedly protested that a $25 burner replacement had already escalated in cost by more than a thousand-fold.  (Another symptom of the disease: a great underestimation of potential costs.)  And, I objected, the veneered walls and planked floor ran into the entry foyer, the floor extending beyond that into the hallway to the bathrooms and bedrooms.  The virus, I realized, was being given yet another beachhead.  Unfortunately, Helen was now in delirium, so there was little I could do to stanch the infection.

  We chose one of the architect's plans to renovate the kitchen, living room, dining room and foyer, and to replace the hallway floor, and hired a contractor.  Soon the whole rear of the house was terre interdite; we were reduced to cooking in an electric wok in the downstairs laundry room and using the adjoining family room as a temporary living/dining room.  According to the contractor it was to be for no more than six months, so it seemed not too much of an inconvenience.  (Yet another symptom: a naïve acceptance of contractors' time estimates.)

  By now the virus had indeed spread to rooms abutting the hallway: the aluminum-framed windows in them—in fact those rooms in general—would look very shabby when compared with the rooms under renovation.  A little sprucing up wouldn't hurt them, would it?  And shouldn't my upstairs office and the downstairs family room also be brought up to the new standard?  By then I was frantically searching for a powerful anti-viral spray with which to douse the house, and Helen too.  None was available, so the virus kept efflorescing before my horrified eyes.

  I'll spare you further Dante-esque details of our time in purgatory.  Enough to say that the virus, in successive stages of outbreak, eventually invaded every nook of the house's interior and most of its exterior, including the gardens.  Even I succumbed to it, abetting its spread.   During pretty much all of my daughter's high-school career she rarely had a home not torn up somewhere in which to entertain her friends.

  When the virus eventually played itself out after three-and-a-half years, voila! we had our thoroughly renovated castle—at three to four times the original cost of the house when we bought it.  Helen and I were happy with the result, although much chastened by the purgatorial and fiscal torture.  Fortunately, memories of our trip to the underworld receded into the dim past.  Unlike Persephone, we had eaten no pomegranate seeds whilst there. 

  I still live in that house and love its embrace and the memories of Helen that live with me in it.  I am a bit concerned lately, however, because my architect daughter has been suggesting that, after an additional 25 years, the house needs just a wee bit of grooming.  As an aside, she mentions that I might want to consider installing an elevator to carry me up from the street level to the main living area.

  I am not sure if once having had the virus bestows lifelong immunity.  To be safe, I have been stockpiling modern anti-viral medications and sprays.

Songs of Thrushes

O thrush, your song is passing sweet

   But never a song that you have sung,

Is half so sweet as thrushes sang

   When my dear Love and I were young.

William Morris (1834–1896)

  I've drawn twice in this blog from a memoir I wrote about Helen and me after she died [1,2].  The memoir was meant for our children, its contents mostly family lore and photographs, not designed to be of much interest to anyone else.  Yet those two excerpts spurred enough response to show me that what I wrote has more general appeal.  I shouldn't have been surprised—much of the purpose of writing is to share thoughts and feelings with possible strangers, especially when the writing crosses between generations.  It re-assures the younger among us that they are not the first to feel as they do, that there truly is nothing new under the sun.

  So I'll dip once again into the memoir, this time into the chapter about Helen's and my courtship, which was prefaced by the verse above.  For those who know me now as an octogenarian, to read that I once was in the throes of love may challenge the imagination too far.  I had an advantage in reading William Morris' poem: it froze him in time for me as a young swain, not the aged writer he became.  Perhaps strangers who read this essay will likewise be able to see me in my thirties.

  I first saw Helen in 1963 while I was ringing a doorbell: not exactly her, but her partial, backlit image, mottled and ambered by an antique glass door pane.  It was like an Impressionist painting, soft-brushed and romantic.  The image is still with me, fifty years later; I can even now feel my heart skipping a beat.  She smiled as she opened the door.  Beautiful blue eyes, I thought.  Flashing smile.  We exchanged a few insignificant words, and I watched as she went down the stairs, on her way out from visiting my cousin, with whom I was to dine.  I’d rarely felt as engaged as this on a chance encounter.  I remember asking myself,  "Could this be the One?"   I was 33, no youngster, so I was amazed by my gushiness.

  I wheedled Helen's telephone number from my cousin, and soon dated her, anxious to know if my first impression was accurate.  It was.  She was lovely, vibrant, a little wacky.  She wore her hair rolled up behind her head in a French bun, severely accentuating the beautiful bone structure of her face.  Her nose had a funny twist in it, the result of a skiing accident, I later found out.  She smiled with her whole face, wide-mouthed, her eyes laughing too.

  As we exchanged information about each other, I thought It’s like we’re from different planets. Maybe opposites really do attract: magnetic north and south poles, electrons and protons.  I was from the megalopolis of New York City, she from a small town in Utah.  I was Jewish, she Mormon.  I was scheduled, organized to the point of rigidity, always—except perhaps after a few drinks—reserved and uncomfortable with small talk.  She was impetuous, unscheduled, people-oriented.  I was an engineer, mathematically analytic; she a psychologist, immersed in the understanding of emotions.  Mars and Venus.

  Many dates later, those differences spawned an inevitable first argument.  Never much bound by the clock, she kept me waiting for the better part of an hour as she prepared to go to dinner with me.  I, a devoté of Chronos, ran by the clock.  My annoyance showed— even if it hadn't, the psychologist in Helen would have sensed it.  The date was a disaster.  Helen, incensed by my unspoken animus, blew up at the end of it, throwing back at me the earrings I had given her some weeks before.  I was stunned by her vehemence.

  Weeks went by without a word between us.  When we did talk to explore our rift, Helen asked if I was afraid of anger.  In fact I was, as I was afraid of most emotions.  I had learned well from my family that spoken words take on a life of their own, never to be recalled, always hanging in the air as a ghostly reminder of the sometimes regretted emotion that launched them.  Helen's family, when they were angry, had at each other, then made up, the venomous words disappearing as if never spoken. 

  “Don’t you know that expressing anger, getting it out of you, is good?” Helen said.  “What’s worse: bottling anger up—leaving it to the other person to figure out if and why you’re angry—or expressing it so as to leave no doubt, and then working it out?  Who benefits from keeping feelings to yourself?”  My response was, “Who benefits from speaking hurtful words without first thinking about them and perhaps suppressing them?”  That interchange, I more and more understood as our relationship developed, characterized our different psyches.

  Given the polar extremes of our personalities, I agonized about whether to propose to Helen, trying—true to form—to be scientifically precise about my feelings.  On one side of the scales I placed the many ways in which she and I differed; on the other side I put my growing love for her.   In the balance, was a life-long commitment tenable? 

  In the end, rational analysis didn't matter at all.  One evening, after a romantic dinner, I looked into Helen's eyes and could see in them the question, "When are you going to ask me to marry you?"  Thrushes sang in my ears, and I blurted out my proposal over their song.

  I imagine that bookies would have given long odds against our marriage being successful, and certainly there were naysayers among our friends and families [2].  But sometimes, when strong magnetic north and south poles meet, they clamp together so tightly that they can't be pried apart.  And so it was as we melded during our 34-year marriage.  Again, always looking to literature for the right words, I can do no better than the Bard:

So we grew together,

Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,

But yet an union in partition.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Act 3, Scene 2

          

A Montague and a Capulet

Then plainly know my heart's dear love is set

On the fair daughter of rich Capulet:

As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine;

And all combined, save what thou must combine

By holy marriage: when and where and how

We met, we woo'd and made exchange of vow,

I'll tell thee as we pass; but this I pray,

That thou consent to marry us to-day.

Romeo and Juliet,

Act 2, Scene 3

  After Helen died, I wrote a memoir for our children giving an account of our lives until we met, our married years, and her death.  I started each chapter and sometimes each section of a chapter with a quotation from the literature.  Especially when in deep mourning, I found those a balm for a sore soul.  (See Writing and Reading as Balm.)  Yet even in more normal times, when I'm not assuaging raw pain, literature comforts me, letting me know that I'm not all alone here, that I'm part of a living human fabric which comfortingly enwraps me.

  The chapter on Helen's and my marriage started with the Shakepearean passage above.  Unlike Romeo and Juliet, we were of course not from long-feuding family clans.  Still, our problem was one of clannishness, for religions are simply very large clans.  Substitute "Jewish" for "Montague" and "Mormon" for "Capulet" and you have a suggestion of our story in the couplet "… but this I pray/That thou consent to marry us to-day."

  My mother and Helen's father were against our marrying because of our difference of religion—we were caught in a tribal conflict.  Helen was less religious than I was then, so she had no misgivings when I suggested that we be married by a rabbi, thus possibly assuaging my mother, if not her father.  (Two of her siblings had already married outside Mormonism and a third was about to, but all to Christians; perhaps I was beyond the pale.) 

  Helen doubted that I would be able to find a rabbi who would agree to marry us.  Nevertheless, I set about trying to find one.  It was a disturbing revelation to my then-naīve self that none I initially asked would do so, unless Helen converted first.  I finally found a liberal rabbi who said he would require only that Helen take six weeks of lessons on Judaism and agree to raise our children as Jews.

  Although Helen was willing to meet those requirements, I couldn’t agree to placing conditions on her as a premise for our marriage, and told the rabbi so.  He responded that he felt himself bound by his own rather minimal interpretation of his duties, and reasonably pointed out that a civil marriage was available as an alternative.   I quarreled that rabbis were constantly decrying the falling away of Jews from the fold because of intermarriage.  Weren’t they concerned that their rigidity actually accelerated the trend?

  The rabbi cited the Book of Ruth: “Remember that Ruth converted,” he said, in defense of the traditional outlook.  I was stopped short by this argument.  My vague remembrance of Ruth from my Hebrew-school days was that Ruth, a Moabitess who had married the Jewish Naomi's son, had declared her conversion—famously saying to Naomi “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”—not in advance of her marriage, but only after her husband had died, when Naomi was preparing to return from Moab to Judah.  The marriage itself had had no strings attached; Ruth's later conversion was entirely voluntary.  Wasn’t the moral of the book one of toleration and acceptance, not of exclusion?  Only the next day, on re-reading Ruth, did I find that I was correct.  I was angry at the rabbi for having played the sophist, and chagrined at myself for not having had a response at my fingertips. 

  In the event, as the negativity from Helen's father and my mother increased, I became more and more nervous that we might not be able to withstand it, so I suggested to Helen that we immediately get married in a simple civil ceremony.  She agreed, and within days we were married in the San Francisco Superior Court, with only two close friends attending.  Ironically, the judge was the son of a rabbi and performed a touching ceremony.

  It was all an eye-opener for this ingénu.  Although Helen and I did raise our children as Jews, that personal brush with the mischief of religious tribalism was just one more spur in my long trek of distancing myself from my own "tribe"; it might also have contributed to my already growing atheism.

  E. O. Wilson says in a book I previously discussed that the tribal instinct was already deeply inbred into hominid ancestors of Homo sapiens well before our species emerged.  It led early humans to form clans to underpin their needs for identity, security and well-being.  That may be so.  Yet of all the tribal associations in which we immerse ourselves, perhaps the most pernicious is religion, possibly the cause of more pain and destructiveness than any other form of tribalism, even more than nationalism. 

  Will the clergy ever abandon their stultifying doctrines, which serve only to maim our psyches, constrain our humanity, and oftentimes lead to religiously induced mayhem?  Probably not.  I find it encouraging, though, that a few parts of the world, particularly the democracies of Western Europe, are becoming more secular.  Those countries have discovered that all of the moral and ethical behavior claimed by religions as possible only through their auspices can also be fruits of secular democracy, without any of the pitfalls.  Would that the rest of the world follow the example, including our still hyper-religious America!

Following Rules

  I've several times written here about how complementary my late wife Helen's and my temperaments were.  She was ebullient, extroverted and social; I am reserved, introverted and, if not exactly anti-social, at least not a mixer.  We were also extremely different in our approach to the rules of officialdom.

  I grew up in New York City, where there were official rules galore, emanating from an elaborate bureaucracy.  I learned as I grew up that observance of them came under the rubric "Don't fight City Hall"—one just lived with them.  My mother for much of my youth managed the then-famous Luxor Hotel and Baths in midtown Manhattan, which had plenty of rules to follow.  I remember her annoyance at the sometimes-incomprehensible and pettifogging application of them by city inspectors.  Her bile would rise further when those same inspectors appeared at the holiday season to collect their "gifts,"  disregard of which would result in the discovery during the next year of yet more-minute "infractions," many  of questionable authenticity.  She would choke on her anger, but then she would shrug and accept the "rules" as they were.

  Helen grew up in a town of a few hundred people in Utah.  There the rubric was a pioneering "Don't tread on me!"  Her father, not a good driver, would frequently get traffic tickets.  He would appear in court and chastise the judge: "I've known you since you were a boy.  Don't be so high and mighty now that you're a judge!"  (The judge once in response threw him in jail for contempt of court.  The family story goes that one son, trying to visit him in jail, found him instead polishing brass handrails in the courthouse.  Going over to chat, all he got was a growled, sotto voce, "Hush!  I'm getting time off for good behavior!")

  Two examples in Helen's and my life together show how these different backgrounds brought us into conflict. 

  When we married, we honeymooned in the Caribbean, hopping for two weeks among a number of gorgeous islands.  In those days, passports were not necessary in returning from some neighboring tourist locations, but a proof of U.S. residency was required.  Helen had no passport, but she had been to Mexico, and her driver's license had always done the trick.  I didn't think that would work this time, so I pestered her to get a copy of her birth certificate, and she eventually (and exasperatedly) asked her mother to go to Salt Lake City to get one for her.

  When we returned to the U.S. through Puerto Rico, we found ourselves in a long, slow-moving line.  Immigration officials were carefully examining documentation and shunting some people aside.  I nudged Helen to show how right I had been to insist that she have her birth certificate with her.  But when we reached the head of the line, the agent's face lit up with a bright smile as he said, "Helen Green!  What are you doing in Puerto Rico?"  They had gone to high school together in Utah!  What are the odds against that?

  The second example also concerns foreign travel.  About two years after we were married, we headed to France for a year-long sabbatical.  I, still the rule follower, called the French consulate in San Francisco to find out whether we would need visas for that length of stay.  The answer was yes, so I got one.  Helen, now having a passport, refused to follow suit, saying that it would involve her with the French bureaucracy, of which she wanted no part.  She was right again.

  When we got to French immigration control at the Paris airport, Helen breezed through a different line than I, declaring that she was on a tourist visit.  I, with a visa in my passport, was interrogated at length about the purpose of my stay, whether I would be earning money in France, and so on.  When asked whether I had a radio with me, I dutifully produced an early $5 Sony transistor device from my luggage, for which I was later billed a 50-franc ($10) radio tax.  I was told to report to a police station within a week to get a carte d'identité (three hours of shuffling through lines, plus a visit to another police station when we moved from our initial hotel to an apartment we rented).  When I went to pick up the Peugeot I had ordered, one look at the visa in my passport led the salesman to delay delivery of the car until I had my carte d'identité, and prompted him to get different, more expensive license plates than had already been mounted on the car.

  The landlady of the apartment we rented was on the same page as Helen, although in a much more aggressive book.  When I asked her what I should do about the radio-tax bill, she looked at me in amazement and said, "Ignore it!  Don't ruin it for the rest of us."  When I got my first parking ticket and asked how to pay it, her answer was the same.  She showed me three cubby holes in her desk.  One was filled with a thick sheaf of blue parking tickets, the first notice; a second was filled with a thinner sheaf of orange notices, warning that she would be subject to arrest if the original fine, now increased, wasn't paid; a very small sheaf of red notices said she was now subject to arrest.

  "But," I asked, "how can you possibly ignore the red notices too?"  Her face showed that she was astonished by my naīveté.  "Look," she said, "the bureaucrats have done their job by sending out three notices, and they don't always do even that much.  Now there is nothing left for them to do, so that's the end of it."

  Helen looked on bemusedly at the annoyances my visa caused me, especially since she lived in France for the year without any repercussion for lacking one.  Even though I admit that her attitude turned out to be better, or at least less aggravating, to this day I haven't rid myself of the habit of rule-following that was ingrained in my youth.

  Damn it!  I'm due for a makeover.  I think I'll become a libertarian.

Getting from A to Z

  Some of us, very methodical in solving problems, get from A to Z in 25 diligently organized steps.  Others get there in intuitive leaps, from A to K, then to Q, then to Z, perhaps backtracking a bit along the way when confused.  Neither process is definitively better, for methodical and intuitive people can be equally creative and successful in working things through.

  I am reminded of the two sons of good friends of mine—call the older S₁ and the younger S₂.  S₁ is  systematic in the way he tackles tasks, S₂ is instinctive.  Many years ago, when S₁ was about 10 or 11, he got a new computer for Christmas.  As he unpacked it, he immediately went to the instruction manual, not only to check whether all the components were there, but to prepare to assemble them.  S₂, three years younger, simply started to plug the parts together and had the computer operational before S₁ was even a few pages into the manual.  The two are equally smart.  I used to fault S₁ when he wrote an essay because he would assemble more information than he needed to sustain his theme.  I used to fault S₂ because he left out convincing arguments that were obvious to him, although maybe not to his audience.

  I am one of those who likes eventually to visit every letter in the alphabet.  If I make an intuitive leap over some of them to enhance my understanding and project my path to Z, I then force myself to go back and systematically fill in the gaps to verify that my intuition hasn't led me astray.  That used to drive my late wife Helen crazy.  If I'd gotten an answer intuitively, she would wonder, why did I waste time shoring up the result analytically?  For her, intuitive leaps sufficed.

  I most assuredly endorse intuition as a method of attacking a problem, especially if it is preliminary to deeper investigation.  One of my postings in March, Intuition and Expertise, was indeed an essay in praise of it.  However, as I said then, I believe that intuition must be informed by expertise, and expertise comes only through arduous practice.  A chessmaster can in a flash intuit the course of a game many moves in advance by just glancing at the board, yet only because of years of hard effort.  An amateur's intuitive move is likely a mere stab in the dark.  Even my friends' son S₂ assembled that computer so quickly because he had spent years of his earlier youth plugging electrical circuits together just for the fun of it, so he knew what made sense.

  Helen would also complain when I carefully plotted a route through a strange country, usually planning a fast, minimum-distance drive along autoroutes: A to Z in a trice!  "Why not wander along byways and get lost?" she would say.  "Maybe we'll see some lovely, unexpected sights. We are, after all, tourists!"  Impatient as I habitually was to get to Z, I still had to admit that she had a point, at least for tourism.  When she prevailed over my sense of efficiency, we often did come across beautiful vistas, towns, churches and the like.  It's what I call discovery by meandering.

  Transposed to problem solving, discovery by meandering—in a usually vain hope for serendipity—is an ineffective heuristic.  I liken it to jumping through the alphabet at random, guided neither by method nor intuition, placing one's faith in a stroke of luck.  Even then, one must have a well-honed ability to recognize luck when stumbling upon it, an ability that is itself part of intuition.  Without it, an amateur chess player may miss a lucky opportunity in front of his eyes.  Being truly lucky is largely a matter of preparing one's intuition to take advantage of Fortune when she smiles, not of simply praying that she does.

  In my earlier posting on intuition, I described a grand old professor of mine at MIT, Professor Ernst Guillemin, a master of the intuitive method of teaching and learning.  I remember his presenting a paper at a symposium at a time when younger members of his field had turned toward proving results through methodical sequences of theorems.  He said, "I'm not going to try to present a series of theorems and lemmas to get to my results—I wouldn't know how.  But I'm pretty sure that I will be able to convince you of my results by showing you how intuitively reasonable they are."  And he did.  Because he was a grandmaster with decades of experience, he likely knew that his results were correct because his brain had flashed through all the intermediate steps subconsciously.  And even if he stumbled on a result by sheer luck, he immediately intuitively recognized its worth.

  Few of us are purely methodical or purely intuitive; most are a combination of the two.  Although some at the intuitive extreme, like Professor Guillemin, will be inclined to leave it to others to fill in the gaps to their satisfaction, most will themselves backfill with careful analysis.  Those toward the methodical extreme will usually be unsatisfied with a result unless it also appeals to their intuition.  I like to think that I fall about halfway along the spectrum, mixing intuition and method in equal measures. 

  Were Helen alive today, I imagine she would disagree with my self-assessment, instead placing me squarely among those who address life systematically at every step.  Luckily for me, that's probably one of the reasons I was able to catch her in the first place—I guess she intuitively wanted someone she could count on to methodically conduct our affairs.  If so, it was a good trade-off, for I much needed the spontaneity she brought me, which I now sorely miss.

A Tale of Two Campuses

  I spent my first 26 years on the East Coast—the first 17 of them in New York City and nine in the Boston area.  Anyone who has lived in both knows how dissimilar they are.  New York is a frenetic, stressful, 24-hour-a-day place. Boston is relatively staid and laid-back, rolling up its sidewalks at 11 pm.  After a youth spent in New York's maelstrom, I really cottoned to Boston's relative tranquility.

  For the next 56 years, my home has been in California—49 of them in the Bay Area, the remaining seven, in two periods, in Los Angeles.  LA is a turbulent, can-do city, full of color and zest, having the tone of Hollywood.  San Francisco is more decorous, having the tone of its business district.  After spending my initial four years in California at a company in hurly-burly LA, I was glad in 1960 to move to the more-measured north, where I took up a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley.

  The campuses of the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles reflect the same north/south differences, each adopting the flavor of its surrounding area.  UCLA is a pulsing, can-do organization; UCB is much more constrained.  I was particularly well placed to make an apples-to-apples comparison between the two, for while I was chairman of UCB's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in the early 1980s, I was recruited to be dean of UCLA's School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS).  Which campus did I prefer?  Read on.

  An initial experience at UCLA quickly drove home its difference from UCB.  As the 1983 holiday season approached, my first at UCLA, I decided to give a party to introduce myself to several of SEAS' constituencies—faculty, staff, alumni, donors, industrial friends, etc.  At UCB, I knew that an expenditure for such an event would be limited to a relatively small maximum amount per person, so I asked my Associate Dean how much I could spend.  He was puzzled.  What did I mean?  Apparently there was no cap at UCLA other than what reason might dictate.  (I believe that the UCLA Foundation could be counted on to subsidize such events beyond whatever University-wide constraints may have existed, on the assumption that they helped draw in donations.)

  My wife Helen asked the Chancellor's wife to suggest a caterer; when contacted, he said that as a ***special introductory offer*** to SEAS he would serve hors d'oeuvres and wine with a wait-staff for only $25 per person, but I would have to buy the wine separately.  I blanched (remember that this was almost 30 years ago) and quickly went back to the Associate Dean for a sanity check.  "No problem," he said.  "That's normal around here."  So I decided to go for broke.  I brought in roulette, blackjack and craps tables and their croupiers, and gave everyone scrip to gamble with, offering prizes to those ending up with the most scrip.  I invited about 500 people.  I strove for the sheer LA razzle-dazzle I saw all around me, and people loved it.  I was exhilarated by the splash it made.

  The party cost about $20,000, probably more than ten times what I had spent on entertainment during my entire three years as chairman at UCB.  (In the University's current straitened circumstances, I doubt if anyone could get away with that amount now, even at UCLA.)  More telling, I can attribute some two to three million dollars of contributions to SEAS over the next year or two directly to contacts, relationships and the "go for it!" image I created at that party.  Not a bad return on investment!  Would that money have flowed in anyway?  I believe not, for annual contributions to SEAS had traditionally been very much smaller.  I was learning a Los Angeles truism, that money begets money.

  Other activities at UCLA had the same can-do attitude.  When I had an idea that needed funding, I had almost immediate access to the Chancellor.  If he liked it, he would turn to one of his vice-chancellors and say, "Let's find the money and get this done!" and we would be off and running.  In contrast, I'd found the usual response to a novel idea at UCB, after working it through a deep hierarchy, was a list of reasons why it couldn't or shouldn't be done.

  Nothing is perfect, though—there's always a flip side.  In this case, I felt that UCLA's procedure for appointment and advancement of faculty members was deficient.  At the time, and maybe even now, initial appointments to the assistant professorship and biennial in-rank step increases were approved by deans.  Fuller evaluations by a committee made up of faculty members drawn from the campus at large were widely spaced—the first when a candidate was up for tenure, as much as eight years after hiring, and later ones only for promotions between ranks.  Contrarily, at UCB every appointment, in-rank step-increase and promotion case is stringently reviewed by a campus committee, which thereby imposes a tough uniformity of hurdles that must be jumped by all faculty members campuswide.  In my view, UCLA's largely localized screening procedure led to a weaker faculty, which had to affect the quality of teaching and research and the recruiting of the best students.

  Another downside was personal: the impossibility of buying a house near UCLA as good as the one Helen and I owned near UCB.  Such a house would cost three times what the Berkeley house was worth, at a time when prime rates were over 10%.  Even the can-do UCLA couldn't cut that problem down to size, so my fantasy stay in La-La Land ended after three years, when I decided to return to Berkeley and UCB.

  In my memory's coloring book, I have painted UCLA with magenta, chartreuse and cyan, and used muted shades of gray with hints of pastel for UCB.  Perhaps the vastly different approaches those colorings represent are what makes the University of California system as a whole such a variegated power house.   After all, what can be more impressive than the fact that five of the nine UC general campuses are ranked among the top ten public universities in the U.S., with UCB and UCLA ranked first and second, respectively? 

  I count myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity of working at both campuses.  Did I have a preference?  Well, I loved both the razzmatazz of being an administrator at UCLA and the cloistered serenity of my teaching and research days at UCB.  All said and done, it was a draw—my times at the two campuses were equally great chapters in a cherished academic career.

The Anticlan

  I wrote last week about the life-long damage that discrimination inflicts, a result of the clannish, "us vs. them" behavior that is all too normal in human affairs.  Today, I write about the antithesis of such clannishness, a "we, all of us" mindset that is embodied in a group I know, which I'll call The Anticlan.  (I won't identify it for fear of embarrassing its core members.  Many readers will recognize it anyway.)  The Anticlan is surely not unique.  It is no doubt like other outreaching groups that you may know, but let me describe its operation so I can make my final point.

   A traditional clan is exclusionary, membership obtained on a limited basis, usually through birth or marriage.  It views other clans with suspicion, often hatred.  Contrarily, The Anticlan is obsessively inclusive.   It is as if it were a giant planet like Jupiter, sweeping into itself everyone who comes near.  Originally comprising a nuclear family that still forms its core, The Anticlan has grown for many years as others came into its gravitational field.

  I was drawn into orbit decades ago through a business colleague, himself a member by marriage.  Others were captured by living on the same block, having gone to school or done business with other members, or chance meetings.  Each new member in turn attracts additional members in the same manner.  This growth is not at all by active planning or proselytizing, merely by happenstance and an unspoken credo of inclusion.

  An initial introduction is followed by a warm embrace: one is asked to various Anticlan events.  The invitations are sometimes quirky.  In my case, my business colleague would call up and say, "Sunday's dinner is at 6 pm."  Just that.  I would scramble to my calendar to see if I had forgotten something, but I hadn't.  Yet such invitations were so charming and sincere in their idiosyncrasy that my wife Helen and I would attend if we could.  Others in the extended Anticlan would be there too, likely invited in the same abridged manner.

  Often the invitations are to more significant events than dinner—weddings, graduations, even vacations.  On one occasion, Helen and I were informed that The Anticlan had rented a compound in Hawaii, at which a milestone birthday of The Anticlan's matriarch would be celebrated.  We were told by my colleague that seats had already been reserved for us on such and such flights; we only had to make the final arrangements.  We were again enchanted by the warm but eccentric inclusiveness, and found ourselves going. 

  While in Hawaii, a signal event occurred.  One of the matriarch's sons, as a surprise to his parents, flew his new fiancée there from Russia, where he had met her, in order to introduce her to them—and, incidentally, to the assembled horde from The Anticlan.  Poor woman, I thought.  She could barely speak English at the time; Hawaii and The Anticlan must have seemed like another planet!  Yet that planet was the self-same Jupiter I have mentioned, and she too was captured by its strong gravitational pull.  When she married into The Anticlan, her parents, who lived in Moscow, were also swept into its orbit, embraced by it on their own trips to the U.S. 

  On another occasion, a year or two after Helen died, I almost magically found myself on a sailing trip in the Caribbean—ten glorious days of hopping between islands, sharing nautical tasks with other Anticlan members I'd not previously met.  The boat charter, every detail, had already been arranged, and I was simply told when and at what gate to appear at the airport.  I, a loner (especially after Helen's death), had still after all those years not quite gotten used to the zaniness of such arrangements, but was again quite literally captivated.

  To this day, I have thus been drawn out of my shell.  Recently, I attended the 90^th birthday of The Anticlan's patriarch.  About sixty people from all over the country were there to pay him honor.  Although I knew most of the attendees from previous Anticlan occasions, there were again new faces.  One couple had not long before moved from Australia to settle in the Bay Area.  They had been introduced to the core family by another son, who—although himself living on the East Coast—had thought that the new arrivals would need a network of friends as they adjusted to California.  The woman of the couple told me that they had been adopted by The Anticlan, which made their transition so much easier.  I had heard the same story many times before by migrants to the Bay Area from the world over.

  Why do I tell this collection of anecdotes?  Because I think they well illustrate how The Anticlan's infectious inclusiveness runs counter to the normal human trait of clannishness—a trait I believe must be a genetic legacy of the cave man's need for self-defense, 50,000 or more years ago.  Although recent millennia of human history have led us to ever more inclusiveness, our genes still often reflexively tell us to flock with birds of our own feather, a conduct that even now splinters the world.  The Anticlan flocks with birds of many feathers in a lovely symbiosis.

  That leads me to my point.  I cannot help wondering:  Is this Facebook generation, with its obsessive "friending," the germ of a new norm of inclusiveness, an Anticlan on steroids?  Will the age of digital hyperconnectivity be a turning point in human social organization?

  In a previous posting, Neurons and the Internet, I quoted Jesuit priest and media scholar John Culkin as saying, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."  That was in a pessimistic context: the possible deleterious neuronal effects of multitasking.  More optimistically, in the present context, could social networking be rewiring our neuronal networks toward a more inclusive nature?   Could even a genetic adaptation start to take place?

   Of course, I am wildly speculating here.  A connection between multitasking and neuronal rewiring in individuals at least has some basis in observational data, as discussed in the Neurons and the Internet posting.  I'm unaware of any scientifically established connection between social networking and reduced clannishness, not even a hypothesized neuronal rewiring of individuals, much less a predicted evolution of the species.  However, if there were a beneficent evolutionary force at work over generations—if belonging to extensive social networks confers a competitive advantage over belonging to just a narrow clan—one can only hope that its fulfillment won't take another 50,000 years!