Macinstruct

Rollin’ on the River(s) and Other Doings of the Summertime Sheas

mcone — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:09:29 +0000

Jerome Shea
Saturday, August 28, 2010

The old wonker is back, after a very busy summer of traveling. I think the Long-suffering Diana and I—or at least I—were gone more than we were home, and I appreciate Matt’s having suggested that I take the summer off.* It was a good break, but I look forward now to banging out more wonks, teaching my classical tropes course, and, since Albuquerque persists in turning into Phoenix, getting a break from the summer heat.

So park y’r carcass right here for a bit and I will regale you (if you have lost your gale…hahaha.)

Briefly, I went to Kentucky for the annual Advanced Placement Reading; then the two of us drove out to SoCal to see Dan and our Laguna Beach friends, Bob and Brenda; then we spent a couple of nights back at the earth ships (see “Sailing the Mesa”) northwest of Taos with our daughter and her family; and then (drum roll!) we cruised the Danube from Budapest to Nuremberg (sandwiched between a stay with Diana’s folks on Cape Cod). Whew.

I (heart) Louisville, and the thought of going back June after June warms my cockles. I had never been there before. In fact, I had never been in Kentucky before, and the first reaction from friends was, “Poor you: Kentucky in the summer!” Not so.

But a word first about the reading. I had not been a table leader for about a dozen years and was nervous about that. But I had a wonderful table of readers (when will I get the “reader from hell” that is part of AP lore?) and got back up to speed pretty quickly. And the question was good if not great. Essentially it asked if humorists, who seem to be able to get away with saying things that the rest of us can’t, serve a vital role in society for that reason. No surprise that most of the comedians the kids cited I had never heard of (I’m not just old; I don’t even get cable). I was too embarrassed to ask why none of these youngsters mentioned Bob Hope or Milton Berle or Jack Benny. And I realized that I really must wear my hearing aid next year. The years go on and so does Shea.

Yes, it was hot and humid, but the convention center and our suite in the Galt House were air conditioned. Bobby Caughey, a friend of my son’s, was there (Bobby is a sometime bartender and full-time high school teacher north of San Diego) and we took a short run one evening in Waterfront Park. The humidity was actually a nice novelty, although the salt sweat really burned my eyes: next year, a headband. Special thanks to Bobby because his group, the Literature and Comp people, have been there for three or four years and he was happy to show me around town.

Louisville is on the Ohio, a serious river. It is about a half mile across to Indiana and deep enough to float real boats (unlike the Rio Grande here in Albuquerque, which often comes up only to your ankles). Educational Testing Service sprung for us table leaders to have a dinner cruise on a genuine riverboat. The Belle of Louisville was built in 1914 and is still a steam-powered stern wheeler. It was a grand evening aboard that grande dame. We churned about ten miles up the Ohio and back down. I wondered what it must have been like on a real river journey when young Sam Clemens was learning the ropes, or, rather, the shoals. “Mark Twain,” as they used to call out.

There is probably not twice as much to see and do in Louisville—Churchill Downs, the Mega Cavern, scads of museums and good restaurants, etc.—as in a comparable city, but the tourist board certainly makes it seem so, and I would like sometime to spend a real vacation there.

But there is more to Kentucky than Louisville and I had an old friend to see. So one evening I borrowed a car and went off to visit Judy Moffett (aka “Sally”) out near Lexington. At her suggestion I left I-64 and dropped south on KY 395. There is green and then there is…Kentucky, I thought, as I rolled through Waddy and Harrisonville and past the graveyard where generations of Baptist Moffetts await the final trumpet. Two lane and twisty, it was the perfect introduction to where Judy lives with her two dogs, Fleece and Feste, hidden away at the top of an impossible long driveway. I firmly believe in visiting old friends every forty years or so and after an awkward Stanley and Livingstone moment, we remembered why we were such good friends and fell to finishing each other’s sentences on into the evening. Judy Moffett is another excellent reason to get back to Kentucky year after year.

*Note: that’s “Matt’s having suggested,” not “Matt having suggested.” My latest peeve is that hardly anybody uses the possessive case with the gerund anymore. What’s up with that?

Postscript. I’ve been advised that Unmlive will no longer be posting my selected wonks, which they deem not academic enough. Well, it was a good run, and I am told that I will live forever on You Tube—a cheesy sort of immortality but the only one that your wonker expects to have, so he’ll take what he can get.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Jerome Shea is an emeritus professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where he still teaches his classical tropes course every fall and his prose style course every spring. He has been the Weekend Wonk since January of 2007. His email is shea@macinstruct.com.

We're Sorry

mcone — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 23:04:08 +0000

We've temporarily removed our mailing list and volunteer registration webpages.

If you would like to volunteer or register for the mailing list, please email Matthew Cone at matt@macinstruct.com.

Madison

mcone — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 21:41:45 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 30, 2010

The other day I discovered a wonderful cache of old letters, and I would like to share some with you. This one has to do with Diana’s family’s place in Madison, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie, where we went every year when the kids were growing up. It seems a wonderful celebration of summer. I hope you enjoy this wonk, and enjoy this other summer that has come round again.

7/2/99

Dear Cos and Bren,

You asked about Madison. That deserves a real letter. What do we do there? What’s it like? Oh dear, oh dear.

This morning, we were at WalMart and I made the happy blunder of holding both Madison images and Yeats’s lovely “Lake Isle of Innisfree” in my mind at the same time. You will not be surprised to learn that I began to puddle up, right there in the kitchenware aisle (isle?). Well, if anybody noticed maybe they chalked it up to allergies or my fear of falling prices. I hope so.
(I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree…)

A day at Madison is very, very low key. I get up. I pull on my shorts and mocs. I plug in the coffee pot if my mother-in-law hasn’t already. I mosey down to the Lake. If it’s roiling, I shout “Good morning, Canada!” If it’s silvery calm, mirror-like, transparent (what a sight!), I sit quiet on the jetty and watch the gliding fish. I wonder if someone, some happy, lucky grandson-in-law over in Canada, is sitting entranced just as I am. I grin. Maybe Diana comes down. I give her a squeeze and we watch together. (And I shall find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…)

If my father-in-law hasn’t beaten me to it, I run (figuratively) down to the little store in Chappeldale and get the Plain Dealer. And maybe some sticky breakfast goodies. Since it is roadworthy again (it was just the shocks, we found out), maybe I will have borrowed the old Jeep.

Back again. Most people are up and about now. The serious readers divvy up the PD. I plop into the old chaise lounge on the front porch (that’s the LAKE side, not the road side). I thoroughly digest the PD, one of this country’s better newspapers. If I am lucky, Dick Feigler, their best, has a column that morning. Then there’s chatter and catching up with whoever is around—Pat and Bob Dinsmore, or any of D’s sibs and their families. If my brother-in-law Andy and my sister-in-law Bonnie are there, the three of us tag-team the crossword puzzle. (Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings…)

Now most go off to swim; maybe some bro-in-laws go off to play golf up the street. I read for an hour or so, maybe desultory school stuff, maybe escapist stuff. Then I bethink myself of chores. Does Bob have anything in mind? So maybe we repair some screens or clean some gutters.

Time to run. I have a seven-mile out and back course. It’s not the best, but the roads aren’t too treacherous. Turn-around point is Arcola, a little park pointing out the iron works that used to be there and the wetland (estuary) that still is. Seven miles isn’t far, especially that near to sea level, so I set a brisk pace. If I haven’t started training for the fall marathon, this is my last chance.

The late afternoon works that special magic that comes only in an old house on an old place: clocks ticking, dust motes in the sunlight—the most powerful counterfeit of eternity that you are ever likely to find. And those huge silver maples sheltering the house, dappling everything.

Big dinner, probably on the front porch but maybe a cookout on the beach. Kids back in the lake one more time, intrepid grown-ups with them. And looking for the “green flash” as the sun finally (we’re at the far edge of the EDT) slips beneath the water. (…for always night and day / I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore / While I stand on the highway or on the pavements gray…)

Almost time to turn in. I pop a Genny Cream Ale and saunter down to the lake bluff (this is where I miss Moxie the Wonderdog the most: she was a good watcher and ruminator). With luck, I can see the lights of a lake freighter on the horizon, churning toward Buffalo. The ghost of Moxie tries to catch the ghost of a lightning bug.

I knock out my pipe, scrunch the Genny can, trudge back to the house and my bed. And that, my dear friends, is a day at Madison. (I hear it in the deep heart’s core.)

A couple of years after Grandma Reid died (at 100, in 2000), Madison passed out of the family. The new owners professed to be charmed by the “Cottage,” as the Reids always called it. Later I learned that they had the Cottage and its sheds razed and ripped up half the towering trees, so that they could slap together a McMansion. I have never had the stomach to go back.

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Mappa Mundi

mcone — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:23:56 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 30, 2010

“Map” is a strange word. Broad-voweled but abrupt, it rhymes with yap, zap, slap, clap, and so on. It might be an acronym (Mercator Area Projection?) or the call of an ill-tempered tropical bird (“That infernal mapping kept us awake all night!”). In fact, it comes from the medieval Latin mappa, meaning a napkin, a cloth. Mappa Mundi means map of the world.

To put something on the map is to make it famous; to wipe it off the map is to obliterate it. Anything with physical features can be mapped. You can map the heavens. You can map the ocean floor. You can map your lover’s body. Maps rule.

For many of us, the romance of maps began with the pirate’s treasure map: “X marks the spot,” and all that. We probably did bury stuff in the back yard or, better, in the woods next door, then drew an elaborate map with appropriately ragged edges. “Thirteen paces due west from the big twisted tree with the secret sign carved in it….” Or we drew imagined treasure maps. Always on a desert isle, and the seeker had to skirt the monster’s cave, rappel down a sheer cliff, swim a raging river, and so forth. Half the fun was in embellishing those maps with spouting whales, mermaids, and all the rest. What started out as a route to buried riches became a child’s work of art. I remember spending whole summer days lost in my map-making until the map itself became the treasure, a wonderful bit of alchemy.

Roads likely started out as game trails and became more packed down as native hunters followed those trails. Here in the States, settlers in wagons followed, turning the trails into rutted roads that were often quagmires. Then came the imperious automobile. The dicey roads got paved, gas-stationed, and motelled (or perhaps “motor courted,” a lovely seductive phrase). Our classic American east-west routes—US 20, US 30, US 40—all originated that way. Daniel Boone strode west through the shadowy forest and then in a trice, historically speaking, came a family in its ’34 Ford, the kids wailing, “Are we THERE yet?”

From a city map I have highlighted the ditch trails that run all through our North Valley (see “Water in the Ditch”). I have mapped the bosque trails and, with help from a friend with a GPS, I have assigned accurate mileages to each leg. The bosque trails originated, we think, when people ran cattle in there years ago. The cattle are gone but the trails keep changing anyway. A cottonwood falls in a windstorm so runners have to go around it. After a couple of months you don’t even remember the original piece of the trail. The trail heals itself, as it were, and renews itself.

That Kentucky map I mentioned in the last wonk has an exploded inset for “Bluegrass Country” with all the big horse farms noted. I have a roadmap of “Indian Country,” that big chunk that includes mostly Arizona, but also parts of New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. Specialty maps abound, a map for every purpose under Heaven (which, unlike the heavens, has not been mapped yet as far as we know.)

I can look at a map and the memories come flooding back. Sitgreaves Pass on old 66 in Arizona. Skinny road like an arthritic snake, sheer drops, no guardrails, and the rising sun making you functionally blind. Wonderful! Framed in my study is a map of Florence (see “A Grouch Abroad”) that rode in my back pocket for a sweltering week. It is worn through at the four-fold point, which happens to be exactly at the Duomo. I still have the European roadmaps that I used a half century ago and can pinpoint where my old Vespa seized up on a rainy Sunday morning in Belgium and sent me skidding. And there is the spot along the French coast where I had that espresso, just me and the sleepy counter man, on a March morning that sparkled, like the Mediterranean, with all my life’s promise.

Last wonk, I asked which is more important, the journey or the destination. I suggested that you can have it both ways, and I still believe that. Surely to toggle between the one and the other is no great feat. But if I really had to choose? Well, I am looking at a map right now (I won’t tell you where, but I’ll be off soon) and I can imagine every little town, every chintzy motel (singles $24.95, weekly rates available), every indulgent greasy breakfast, every stop to keep my coffee cup filled, every patch of fog, every dip and rise and twist…and the Little Red Beast laughing with me all the way. And I think not of the White Rabbit but of another character in another children’s book:

Mr. Toad.

And the open road.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Maps

mcone — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:36:22 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 23, 2010

I love maps. I don’t even have to leave my recliner to haul up my eight pound world atlas (oof!) or my USA/Canada/Mexico road atlas. Should I see some place mentioned in the morning paper—Storm Lake, Iowa, say—I will grab the road atlas and have a looksee. Just to see, and maybe imagine my being there, imagine the Hawkeyes who live there, imagine what the campus of Buena Vista University looks like and wonder how a town of 9973 (in 2006) can support a university. And wonder why in the world a school in Iowa would be named “Buena Vista.” I might not get back to the Albuquerque Journal at all that morning.

Maps. Think of those maps one finds in old, old books; I mean the ones with the cherubim’s cheeks puffed out to represent each of the Four Winds. Those rococo maps look silly to us now. They are usually far off the mark, and the best part are those terra incognita spaces warning “Here be dragons!” Ooooo! Still, they are testimony to our need to find things out, to explore the unexplored, to map the world however crudely. We should not be smug with our satellites and global positioning devices. Accuracy gained but mystery, enchantment, lost. There is a reason why those old maps often fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Maps are guides, of course. They try their best to get us from here to there, which is why to be “all over the map” is to be in a kind of indecisive paralysis. This summer I will be visiting my friend Judy in Kentucky one evening. She can email me directions: “look for the junked old truck and turn right about a hundred yards farther on; then I’m the third driveway on the left.” Or she can provide me with a map (or, these days, I can Google up a map myself). I always go for the map. I crave pictures (maybe “diagrams” is a better word), not words. A couple of weeks ago I sprung for a more detailed roadmap of Kentucky instead of relying on the smaller map in my road atlas. It was as if a microscope adjustment had brought everything into focus. Now I see just the route I want to take, and it is not the one I previously had in mind. I stare at that loopy line and imagine myself now on a muggy summer evening, tooling through the bluegrass greenery on that twisty old road, wondering what is beyond each bend, over each rise.

And maps give choices. Some years ago, William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, his first book, rocketed up the bestseller list. The title comes from the fact that on roadmaps way back—before interstates, children!—primary routes were printed in red, secondary routes in blue. Least Heat Moon decided to take only blue highways around this land of ours. The book has become a minor classic, for one thing because Least Heat Moon is a first class writer (a poet, really) and for another because something in all of us wants to get off the interstates or even the proto-interstates. Get off the red and mosey along on the blue, pilgrim.

More people, more towns, more roads, more choices. A look at a roadmap of the whole USA will show this starkly. The East is swarming with roads, with choices. If you can’t get there from here in New Jersey, it’s not the fault of the highway department. The Midwest continues to hold its own. But then you get to the West and you realize what we mean by wide open spaces: darned few roads. One of the disappointments of the West is that for all practical purposes you often can get there from here only on endless, shimmering interstates, cruise control heaven. You have to get to California before you have more choices again (and, ironically, even more interstates and expressways).

Maps are only terrestrial. By that I mean the crashingly obvious point that there are no roads in the ocean (“whale paths” notwithstanding) or in the air. There are routes, I guess, routes determined by compass bearings and more sophisticated methods that are beyond me. But only dry land lets us put our imprint on it. There is another side to that coin, I suppose. At sea, as long as I keep an eye out for icebergs and shoals and whatnot, I can pretty much steer whatever course I want, even as my “road” closes up behind me. On the other hand, maybe if I had the world’s most formidable tank I could go from here to El Paso by dead reckoning, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. Roads call the tune. They give us freedom but it’s a restricted freedom even if we seldom realize it.

Should one savor the journey or the destination? That old trope has been kicking about for years. I think one is supposed to plump for the journey and all its attendant virtues: take your time, smell the roses, don’t be like that crazy, destination-obsessed white rabbit. I suppose that is true if you really are traveling aimlessly, something we should all do at least once. But a road map can be like a treasure map, too. Oh, you don’t have to dig around to find South Laguna. It’s there in plain sight, just north of Dana Point. But South Laguna is where our old friends Bob and Brenda are waiting for us. They’re the treasure. It’s all one and all good as far as I’m concerned.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Pandora

mcone — Wed, 12 May 2010 13:14:04 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 8, 2010

Quite often there is something new at the stump in the bosque. Last week it was that rosary; on tomorrow’s run I’ll probably find something else. About a month ago, I found this note, protected from the elements with plastic:

Letter to the Cross Remover

To the person who removed the cross from our stump and who may or may not be the person who removed an earlier cross from the stump that a trail worker carved years ago to remember a fallen loved one and to create a place for others to meditate and pray.

This is not to admonish you or threaten you, but to inform you that your act is one of the most reprehensible inhumane actions others have done for centuries and, regrettably, still do. You did what some Spanish settlers did when they came upon a Kachina.

To my Trail/Stump Comrades: I’ll replace the cross with one more difficult to remove, and I’ll say a prayer for you and yours in Church on Easter. [By the way, for full disclosure, I have not been to church for ten years, am not a “religious” person, and have limited my prayer places to our stump, where I feel spiritual healing.] Amor Love/Esqh, GP*

Well. Now I knew a little bit about the history of the stump, and I knew that it had a fierce guardian. I trotted on in a brown study. I knew that the little stump was nothing if not ecumenical. We had the crosses and New Testament verses, the mezuzah, the smudge sticks and dream catchers, and the Buddhist prayer flags. I wondered why we hadn’t heard from the Druids, though a Druid could claim the stump itself, I suppose. But here was discord in Paradise. A Christian squaring off against a putative atheist, by the look of it. Rodney King’s plaintive words came to me: Can’t we all just get along? A couple of weeks later the letter was gone and an appropriately rude cross—two bosque sticks wired together—was in its place. More mystery, but something—peace, I hope—had been restored.

About two weeks ago now, I was nearing the stump at a trot and saw two men chatting there. I stopped, bade them good morning, and made some remark about the stump. I wound up talking for at least twenty minutes to George Peknik, the guardian of the stump and writer of the letter. He is an interesting—no, a remarkable—man.

The first thing one notices about George—although his speech is clear enough—is the twist to his mouth, typical evidence of nerve damage, and the story was not long in coming. About three years ago, when the Pekniks lived up in Colorado, George went out in the yard to clean up after a windstorm. As he stood under the three big cottonwoods in his front yard, a microburst occurred and “ a half ton of limbs and branches from high in two trees fell on my head and shoulders.”

An event like that is either life-ending or life-changing. George was lucky. He spent weeks in a coma and months in recuperation. He became ambivalent about trees, especially cottonwoods, the defining tree of the bosque, and who can blame him? But about six months ago he and his wife moved to Albuquerque, where their son and grandsons live, to a place right on the edge of the bosque. He could no longer afford the ambivalence. He became a Trail Watch Volunteer and a denizen of the bosque. He became a mystic, a poet, a philosopher. He became the Druid that I had been musing about! In his writings—yes, George is a writer, too—he refers to his “rewired brain and reinvigorated heart.” A decent man before the accident, be became an even more spiritual and caring man after it.

There is a special part of the bosque that George has dubbed Pandora, after the forest planet in Avatar. It is easy to see—literally—why. The bosque has been cleared of underbrush to lessen the fire danger and those cottonwoods seem to writhe and dance before your eyes. To say they are living would be understatement. The stump is the epicenter of Pandora. And I think George’s pique at whoever removed the cross was more spiritual than narrowly religious: when people leave things on the stump, they are meant to stay there. No one gets to edit the stump! Oh, and I was wrong about the stump’s being the Bank of the Bosque. A fellow whose old dog is in bad shape collects whatever money is left on the stump once a week, adds to it, and gives it to the Animal Humane Society.

The origin of the stump is a bit of a mystery. Some people say that a forest worker first put a cross on the stump five or six years ago to honor a (fallen?) friend and that act inspired others to add their own offerings, their own mementoes. I guess we’ll never really know. And that’s as it should be.

* “Esqh” means “love” in Farsi. George and his wife spent many years in the Middle East.

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Holy Mackerel

mcone — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:25:03 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, April 25, 2010

The bala haunts me.

I mean the bala shark I wrote about last week. For twenty years he has resided in our living room fish tank. Twenty years. Back and forth (or, in a daring reversal, forth and back; actually he just hangs still, mostly). Think what has happened in that time. Four presidential administrations. The fall of the Berlin Wall. 9/11. Our two kids’ growing up, suffering through their adolescence, and leaving the nest. And still the bala just hung in there, staring glumly. A cloistered monk is a cosmopolite compared to poor Bala.

Sometimes one would like to be a bird, to revel in the freedom of the skies. Or a grizzly bear, monarch of the North. Or a galloping steed. But I can’t imagine anyone aspiring to be a fish; no one, I’ll warrant, has piscine dreams.

Just for starters, what kind of life is it without arms or legs? Oh, fins, yeah. Big deal. And can fish make any vocal noises, aren’t they forever mute? Ah, enchanting whale song, you say—forgetting that whales are not fish.

Consider those fish that live in the abyssal zone, the very deepest parts of the oceans, five, six miles down, at enormous pressure and temperatures hovering just above freezing. Grotesque, they are, most of them—the stuff of fever dreams. Most if not all are blind. But shed no tears for them. No light ever penetrates this abysmal inky black, so there is absolutely nothing to see. They live their whole lives in the dark and cold.

Or consider the benthic fishes, specifically the flatfish. “Benthic” in this regard means that they spend most of their time lying on the bottom instead of cruising above the sea floor, like your shark or your haddock. The halibut, sometimes called the cow of the sea, is a good example. (Halibut actually means “holy flatfish,” because it was favored for meatless holy days.) Like the flounder, it begins life on an even keel, so to speak, just like a bass or a salmon. But then, when it hits the equivalent of piscine puberty, its eyes begin to migrate to one side of its head! And you thought your adolescence, your voice squeaky and zits breaking out, was traumatic! Ha! A halibut then spends the rest of its life mostly lying flat on the bottom, making just occasional forays to the upper reaches, awkward and, well, floundering. And to top it off, it has to endure that tiresome pun, “I did it just for the halibut.” Oh please.

Spare a thought for the salmon, while you’re at it. Magnificent fish, the salmon. We all know the life story: how the young salmon leave the spawning ground for the open ocean and then after a time the urge to procreate becomes so overwhelming that they head hellbent for wherever they had started out, swimming upstream in multitudes, leaping over obstacles with balletic grace and power. An epic journey indeed. And if they don’t become lunch for that grizzly in the second paragraph, they do finally, exhausted but triumphant, arrive home. Where they procreate and then more or less promptly die. Not for me, thank you.

One often sees the fish symbol on Christian cars—I mean cars owned by professing Christians—these days. Fish and Christians go way back. (I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the phrase “Holy mackerel,” but Irish immigrants were called “mackerel snappers,” because they were Catholics; it was not a compliment.) Tradition has it that most of the apostles were fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Christ, always quick with a metaphor, promised that he would make them fishers of men, and he blessed the five loaves and two fishes in that famous miracle. Until fairly recently, Catholics ate no meat (i.e., flesh as opposed to fish) on Fridays. During the early days of persecution, it is said, the simple fish shape—two curves intersecting at one end—identified Christians to each other. A (closet) Christian would draw the top curve and another would draw the bottom curve, revealing himself. Often this was drawn in the dirt so it could be quickly erased. Thus evolved the fish symbol that you see today on the back of your neighbor’s SUV.

And then them smart aleck Darwinians come along and stick feet on it. Fish don’t get no respect.

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Stump

mcone — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 01:54:22 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 2, 2010

Along my current running route in the Rio Grande bosque, not far from where Borghi, our late cat, rests, is a modest little stump. A foot and a half high, perhaps, and maybe seven inches across. It is not even cut cleanly through: though it definitely was sawed, the sawyer seems to have got discouraged at some point and tried again from one angle and again from another. I assume it is the stump of a young cottonwood.

What sets this little stump apart from all the others in the bosque is that it is festooned with…stuff. Most of the stuff is of a religious or at least spiritual nature. Other contributions—many people have contributed to it, and continue to—are more secular and mystifying. For example, there are several of those little pink flags that I think landscapers use. And there is the odd nickel or dime or quarter. Someone actually seems to have done an accounting and left a record of the money (about $8.75 at last audit). Is this a kind of bosque bank, a rustic credit union where some make deposits and others take out loans, all on the honor system? Beats me. Not a bad idea, though.

Here is a partial inventory of articles found on top of, draped around, or leaning against, the stump: little sea shells, including some cowry shells; colored yarn; smudge sticks; dream catchers; rude crosses; holy cards and medals; Bible verses, printed or in longhand; Tibetan prayer flags; earrings; cuff links (I think); secular medallions; a small abstract statue (a broken chessman?); a couple of door keys; key chains (fobs); and dog tags (for real dogs, not GIs). On my run this morning, I noticed a rosary, a new addition, though I will bet it is not the first rosary to adorn the stump. Also in this secular/religious clutter is, if I am not mistaken, a mezuzah case, the kind that holds a rolled up scripture and is found on the door posts of Jewish homes. (The Star of David and Hebrew letters are unmistakable, and there are small holes at each end for the fastening brads.)

I almost forgot: also a very clunky man’s wristwatch—I mean the wristwatch is clunky; I haven’t a clue about the man (well, from his taste, maybe I do). Big steel expansion band and, on the dial, a photograph of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Allen has his right hand raised (a blessing for the wearer?). The watch ticks no more, I should add. Neither, of course, does Allen.

“Almost forgot” #2: a shell casing, Smith and Wesson 40 caliber. Serious firepower. But spent: maybe that’s the message, though I suspect there is no message.

I do suspect that many of these contributions mean nothing at all beyond a kind of magpie spirit that lives in all of us (though it is always tempting to try to supply a meaning, and anyone can play). Is the Ginsberg watch some homage to the Beats? Or maybe, rather, to the god Chronos? Is the shell casing an eloquent commentary on violence, or non-violence? I doubt it, in both cases. All of us magpies collect stuff, and the shinier the better. I pull out the drawer in this desk and, lo, there are a fifty pence piece, some trolley tokens, a single prism from some trashed chandelier, an angel medallion (shoot! I meant to take that down to the stump!), the world’s tiniest bubble level, many old rabies tags, the spare key to our unlamented Dodge Aries, and so on. When our kids pore through these drawers after the funeral, they will probably say, “What a buncha crap the old man saved!” But I think—I hope—they will say it with wry grins. We all have these silly troves, and somehow I think they do us credit.

And what of the crosses, the smudge sticks, the mezuzah, the holy cards? Well, they are clearly religious or at least spiritual (we can wrestle with that distinction later). And the bosque is the obvious place for them. How many philosophers, after all, have said that nature—make that Nature-- was our first church? The folks who have put the spiritual symbols on the stump, the same, I would guess, who stop there when they and their dogs walk that peaceful, secluded bosque trail—they “get it,” as we say these days. They know what the bosque means.

This morning I was communing beside the Rio Grande, just a few yards from the trail, when I heard this guy yammering away loudly with one of those Bluetooth devices stuck in his ear. He was walking his two dogs, but the poor animals were being pretty much dragged along, so absorbed was he in some inane conversation. At first I got really angry—I’m Irish, after all—but then I thought, “You poor bastard. You think you’re so wonderfully ‘connected.’ But here in this holy bosque you are not at all connected with what matters. And you don’t even know it.”

Meet Your Macinstructor

Something Fishy This Way Comes

mcone — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 04:00:53 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, April 11, 2010

Lately I have been thinking about fish. Maybe you should too. We pay too little attention, I think, to what goes on in the deep blue sea and even in the aquarium and the fish pond. On the other hand, what goes on may be little more exciting than watching algae grow.

A case in the last point is the fish that the Sheas have: a dozen or more goldfish in the fish pond in the back yard, and our bala shark in the living room aquarium tank. Suffice it to say, there is not a drama queen in the lot. Truth is, we seldom know they are there, except perhaps for the bala shark, which we pass on the way to the john.

I dug the fish pond over twenty years ago and lined it with enough cement to build a highway overpass (a sign of the true amateur engineer). The goldfish are the very common variety, the ones you win at the carnival (and eventually flush down the toilet) or feed to your caiman (which, thankfully, I don’t have anymore). I like to think they are grateful that I rescued them. The pond has no inlet or outlet but I try to keep it clean in the summer, when I muck it out and rig a pump and makeshift fountain. We are supposed to sit beside it in the morning and enjoy its Zen-like tranquility, but we seldom do. Come October, the leaves fall in and I do my insufficient best to rake them out and flush the pond to dilute the crud. In the winter I chop the ice out—sometimes it is about four inches thick, which leaves precious little room for the fish, who are patiently waiting out the winter. But they are always still there in the spring like poor relations, hungry for food and the attention that they will never get. Actually I did find a deceased goldfish yesterday, which quite surprised me. First casualty in three or four years. I will chalk it up to old age—the fish’s, that is--although I have only the haziest idea of goldfish longevity.

The bala shark is not a true shark, as any fish fancier knows. It is, rather, a balantiocheilos melanopteros, native to Southeast Asia and a very popular denizen of your 50-gallon aquarium. It is called a shark, I imagine, because of its streamlined shape and very prominent dorsal fin. I can tell you that balas live longer than goldfish. I checked with the Long Suffering Diana. She says we got him about 20 years ago! For 20 years that fellow has swum back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, with, sometimes, a couple of algae-eating plecostomusses (plecostomi?) for company. For quite a while he had a silver dollar for a tank mate, a dollar, alas, no longer in circulation. He looks to be about eight inches long, and he is actually quite handsome, with dark edging on his elegant, feathery fins.

Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Or floating mid-level like a becalmed submarine (I just checked on him; he gave me slim greeting). It is tempting to cobble up a romantic story of his being scooped up in the Mekong Delta by an old Vietnamese fisherman who instantly deemed him too special (and too small) to eat and sent him to his grandson’s pet shop in Albuquerque. I suspect instead that he never saw the wild at all, but was born on a factory fish farm. Maybe that was a kindness. And something tells me that it would not be a kindness to smuggle him out the Rio Grande and release him. (Never underestimate the mischief that a guilty conscience can make.)

What I am trying to do—a fool’s errand, yes—is to get inside a fish’s head. It is so hard to get out of one’s own (human) head. You’ll have guessed that I find that poor bala’s life absolutely intolerable (back and forth, back and forth…). But maybe it’s not. Maybe he has such a low-wattage brain (now I’m insulting the poor scaly beast!) that such a life is just hunky-dory with him. Hell for me, heaven for him. Food every night, and if he has other urgings of the flesh he is not very demonstrative about them.

I guess there is just no empathizing or even sympathizing with fish. I’d put them somewhere above daffodils and oysters but far below the acumen and sensitivity of, oh, your average frog.

On the other hand, maybe his intellect and awareness are far superior to mine. Perhaps in his little piscine brain he is writing, line by tortured line, an epic of bala sharks since their beginnings. Perhaps he is composing deathless music (a new pantheon: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bala!). Perhaps last weekend he discovered the secret that still eludes our most brilliant nuclear physicists. And then promptly forgot it and went on to ponder more profound mysteries.

Back and forth, back and forth…. Lord knows he has little else to do.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Sic Transit

mcone — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:24:39 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 28, 2010

A friend died last week.

But because there are so many ways to leave this life, let me be more specific. Hector Torres, my friend and colleague in the UNM English Department, was murdered. This happened because his girlfriend, Stephania Gray, had an ex-boyfriend who shot them both dead. I don’t feel constrained by the legal nicety of referring to him as the “alleged” killer, because he turned himself in the next day. Had things gone differently—the police, the courts, and other involved agencies are, too late, blaming each other—this horrible thing might not have happened. Now, too late, we are seeking justice. But that’s a wonk for another day. Right now I haven’t the stomach for it.

No one gets out of this world alive runs the platitude. But when I got home from Hector’s funeral last Saturday, I emailed a couple of old friends. I don’t know if I wanted to relieve some of the emotional pressure of the morning or perhaps—and I don’t think this perverse—keep the morning/mourning alive. I certainly was in a mood to reflect upon death and loss and last things. Judy emailed back, allowed as how she had never attended the funeral of someone who had been murdered and surely that must have added a powerful extra ration of sadness and outrage for the mourners. The saddest funeral she had ever attended was that of a child who died of a brain tumor, and after much suffering. That’s sad, too, of course; the death of the young and innocent always has a special poignancy. One can imagine the parents, hollow-eyed and drained. But “much suffering” struck a chord with both of us. When someone suffers a long and painful and irreversible illness, something in us wants to shout, “Free at last, free at last!” and rejoice in that person’s deliverance. We even have a phrase for this: to be out of one’s misery.

My mother’s death was like that. For two years she suffered more pain than I can imagine. In an awful irony, her pain helped us through her death. Everyone at the funeral was quick to say that she at least suffered no more, and that was true. We all grabbed hold of that. Had she died in some senseless traffic accident, or from a sudden heart attack, toggled in an instant from vibrant life to death, that would have added another layer of bewildered rage. Nonetheless, my father was never the same again. The dead do leave us, after all, and at some unconscious level it is hard for us to forgive them that.

I guess what I am struggling with here is the old concept of the “good death.” Is there such a thing? The traditional picture I suppose, right out of Hollywood or Dickens, is of the old patriarch slipping away, in his own bed and attended by his old wife and his children. He has lived a long life and lived it honorably. He murmurs his last, wise, words and is gone. A good death for a good man. If I say that such a death is devoutly to be wished, you will probably respond with the flippant, “Yeah right, you wish!” and so would I.

We have to accept death, having no choice, but we are under no obligation to accept it gracefully. “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned,” wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay, and then, in one of the most beautiful headlong lines I know: “More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.”

Death is contemptible.

Which brings us back to Hector Torres and Stephania Gray. There is absolutely nothing you can come up with to mitigate the evil that was visited upon them. You can’t use the cancer scenario and squeeze a hard comfort from that suffering. You can’t put it down to randomness, to being in the wrong place at the wrong time (even a drunk driver doesn’t intend to kill, let alone to kill specific, targeted people). This man, this monster, said—Sweet Christ, I don’t know what he said, except that it clearly was all about himself, he being his own death-dealing god.

We did the best we could at the funeral. We sang the good, healing hymns, Hector’s kin and a couple of close friends spoke simply and eloquently about the man they had known, and the priest was the best lobbyist that the afterlife could have. On the way out, we cried and hugged.

After all, what else could we do?

Meet Your Macinstructor

What Mac Brazel Found, or What Would We Do Without Weather Balloons?

mcone — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:48:05 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 14, 2010

The Longsuffering Diana and I spent last weekend staying with friends in Roswell, New Mexico. We breezed through Roswell many years ago, but this time we discovered a little city with a lot to offer. Roswell is home to the venerable New Mexico Military Institute and to the Roswell Industrial Air Center. It boasts the Roswell Museum and Art Centre, and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art. (Don Anderson, a capable artist in his own right, and his brother Robert founded the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company. With those hefty profits, Don sponsors ten artists a year who live at his compound and paint or sculpt to their hearts’ content, the only stipulation being to create something to leave behind for the museum.) The Roswell area also contains probably the largest concentration of dairy farms in the Southwest, and those thousands of milk cows feed a huge cheese plant that churns out mozzarella and Parmesan like that mill that grinds salt at the bottom of the sea. Their only customers are Kraft Foods and Domino’s Pizza.

So there’s a lot going on in Roswell. But unless you have been living under the proverbial rock all your life, you know what Roswell is really, indelibly, and internationally known for. That’s right: the “Roswell Incident” back in 1947. As if the conspiracy bloggers and the X-Files types haven’t given it robust life, Roswell itself has got into the act. Our first visit was to the International UFO Museum and Research Center, on North Main Street in the old Plains movie theater building.

Here, briefly, is the story. On 4 July 1947, there were violent thunderstorms in east central New Mexico. On the morning of 5 July, Mac Brazel was checking for damage on his ranch near Corona, about 75 miles northwest of Roswell, the nearest town of any size. He found a lot of mysterious debris strewn about, the result of some kind of crash. He gathered up this mysterious metallic stuff and took it to Sheriff Wilcox in Roswell the next day. Wilcox took it to the folks at Roswell Army Air Field, and then the fun began.

The army sent investigators to Corona, and the crash area was cordoned off. In a grisly turn, they asked a local undertaker, Glenn Dennis, how many child-sized caskets he could lay hands on. A nurse witnessed doctors performing autopsies on what were clearly not human life forms. She was hustled away. In a move that really astounds me, Col. William Blanchard, commanding officer of RAAF, then told his Public Information Officer, Lt. Walter Haut, to issue a press release (8 July 1947) to the effect that a “flying disk” (aka, a flying saucer, a UFO) had crashed up in Corona. Either Blanchard was incredibly naïve about army procedures or pathologically credulous and honest. At any rate, before you could say “Fox Mulder,” the “flying disk” had turned into that old standby, a weather balloon. (I swear, if half of New Mexico witnessed a huge flying saucer with aliens waving out the portholes while singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the authorities would say it was a…weather balloon.)

Well, things eventually died down. Several people said they were crudely intimidated. That nurse was transferred to England. Brazel never talked about it again (but refused to believe it was a weather balloon). Then, thirty years later, people began to come forward, people who said they had indeed seen the bodies, and so forth. And these were reputable people, not loons. Best guess on the bodies now is that they are in a sub-basement cooler up at Wright Patterson AFB in Ohio or sequestered at that wonderful catch-all of the extraterrestrial, Area 51 in the Nevada desert. In the early 1990s, Haut and Dennis spearheaded the effort to establish the UFO museum.

So what do you think? Or what do I think? I pride myself on being skeptical in such matters. Lord knows we have had our share of dubious UFO sightings and of alien abduction stories from people who are clearly unstable. But too many very stable people are coming forward now. Col. Blanchard appeared to believe whatever it was that his investigators first reported. Glenn Dennis did not dream up that request for child-sized caskets. And then there’s that nurse. And the more the army—later the Air Force—tried to explain it away, the more desperately absurd, even contradictory, their explanations got.

Something truly weird happened out there. Something.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Teacher’s Testament II

mcone — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:51:18 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 28, 2010

One of the best things to happen to my teaching has been my wonking. I said last week that a writing teacher should be a writing practitioner. I don’t delude myself that my weekly wonks are high art, but I like to think they show care and craft, things that I can pass on to my students. It has given me a valuable lesson in humility, too. Try as I may, a couple of typos inevitably slip through (“Matt, can you PLEASE change ‘chose’ to ‘choose’ in the second paragraph? Sorry. Again.”). This has made me a lot more understanding than I once was. I can share their suffering for working under the gun, too. Finally, I like especially to show them a sentence that nagged at me, and how I fixed it (“Do you see how ‘to magic back that dream’ sounds so much better than ‘to magic that dream back’?”). The important thing is that my students know that Shea doesn’t just talk the talk: he walks the walk.

Inspiration. I still recall an incident from my undergraduate years. Professor Smith one day got exercised in spite of himself, and we juniors and seniors “gazed at each other with a wild surmise.” Medieval literature, we assumed, was just something one studied to pass the final. It was inconceivable that one could get so stunningly excited about it, but the pro(o)f was pacing back and forth right in front of us, wild-eyed as any cartoon professor, a lesson in the etymology of “inspired.” We all got a shot of education that day. I am blessed because I really do love what I do. And when that love ambushes me as it did Professor Smith, I know that I am doing what I was born to do.

I always impute to a student more intelligence and good will than he may have, rather than less. (“Always assume,” someone once said, “that in every class you teach there is a student who is your superior in head or in heart.”) Hokey as it sounds, this attitude usually pays off in the way that students, in turn, respond to me. If the real reason for some rule or other diverges from the party line, I give the real reason. I try, too, to separate the trivial from the important for them, to provide some perspectives that will stand them in good stead. Most simply put, I try to remember how I felt as a student and act accordingly. Actually I try to be two things at once which any good teacher will recognize: a fellow human being but, nonetheless, a teacher, not a dorm buddy or soul mate. Buddies and soul mates they have in abundance. It’s teachers—humane teachers—that are rare.

None of these ideas and observations are groundbreaking (or “seminal,” as we academics like to intone) and many of them have been used and are being used by good teachers everywhere. If there is a common thread here, it lies in the prescription to narrow rather than widen the gap between “teachers” and “students.” I have become convinced that a deliberate blurring of the distinction or, perhaps better, a cavalier disregard for it is a very healthy thing.

I became a professor emeritus after spring semester of 2007, but I still teach my classical tropes course every fall and my prose style course every spring. I hope to continue to teach those courses until they pry the chalk out of my gnarled dead hand. Closing in on fifty, these have been wonderful years. I would not have missed them for the world.

Postscript. The prose style course and the classical tropes course (an outgrowth of it) are both my own creations, my special babies. They are not just good courses but, I would argue in a messianic way, courses that all students should be exposed to, courses that will remodel one’s head. Someday, I suppose, I should begin casting about for a protégé, someone to fill my size nines. But not yet.

This time around, my prose style course almost got canceled for low enrollment. We did squeak by, but the experience really shook me, shook me more than I could have imagined. When things looked most bleak I appealed to the department chair to fight for the course, to persuade the dean not to kill it. “It’s not the money, Gail!” I cried. And that is when I realized to my surprise that it really wasn’t about money. It was about Shea’s soul.

What has been happening over these last years is that I no longer teach the other courses, like the grammar course and the mid-level composition course, that used to be my recruiting tools. So I made a pitch to the current crop of E220 teachers: “Let me give you a day off. I will come in and teach your students how to write with classical tropes (hoping, of course, that some will sign up for the tropes course next fall). They win; you win; I win.” So far, about half a dozen teachers have taken me up on the offer and I am crafting the best guest lecture I am capable of.

Cross your fingers. Please cross your fingers.

Meet Your Macinstructor

A Teacher’s Testament

mcone — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:15:34 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 21, 2010

I first stood on the other side of the lectern, the teacher’s side, close to a half-century ago. You will agree, I hope, that that constitutes a long ride—Lord knows how much chalk I have gone through in almost five decades—and it ain’t over yet. So, with your indulgence, perhaps the time has come for old Shea to wax profound and expansive, at least for one wonk.

In all that time, what have I learned?

But first, some background. I am a writing teacher and have taught it all: from developmental writing (a no-no to say “remedial writing”) to freshman composition to grammar to more sophisticated composition courses to classical tropes to prose style (with a change of pace stop-off at the history of the English language). But I sometimes joke with my students that it is all the same course (Shea 401?) because all of my courses are in service to the word, to this wonderful language that we have been vouchsafed. My mantra, always, is “Rub your nose in the prose.” I want my students to be excited, passionate, about the word, about language. And judging by the students who give me very high marks year after year on the course evaluations, who sign up for two, three, or even four of my courses, and who have, over the years, nominated me for teaching awards (In 1991 I was named a Teacher of the Year at UNM), I am doing something right, I am making a difference.

If I had to put my philosophy in a nutshell, it would be this: the best teaching is not teaching at all. This is really just a rephrased half-truism, but it is worth thinking on. What I mean is that the best teacher is not so much a teacher as he or she is, still and profoundly, a student of the subject. My dictionary happily translates the Latin studium as, among other things, “zeal,” and the truly great teacher is the truly great lover/student of the subject. The more we can make the other students realize that, the better off we are and they will be.

Let me quickly add that the best teacher/student should be just as expert as possible, should know the subject inside and out. But that learning should be worn lightly and never used to intimidate. I used to tell my freshman students that if I could not write a good impromptu essay in ten minutes (more on this below), then I really didn’t belong on the teacher’s side of the lectern. Nor does that mean that one’s expertise should be trivialized or denigrated. It should be advertised for what it is, a wonderful tool for learning more, for doing better, and for appreciating more fully. Unless you intend to make a living on quiz shows, expertise should not be an end in itself.

To come at it another way, and a way that affirms a broader application, I hope it goes without saying that a good teacher will make the (other) students work hard. But it is equally important that those students get the chance, often, to see the teacher/student at work, to see him actually working something out in front of them, be it a knotty sentence diagram or a good example of bdelygmia. One day many years ago I made a desperate leap into the obvious. My writing students were all in a funk, resentful of my nagging and, even more, of my fatuous cheerleading. A mutinous mutter began to bloom darkly. “Ok,” I said,” Somebody give me a topic and somebody clock me.” Thus was born what I came to call “Put Your Chalk Where Your Mouth Is” and I have been refining it ever since. Sometimes I would race the clock and try to turn in a virtuoso performance, preening and strutting. Sometimes I would accept shouted criticisms and suggestions. Sometimes I would chatter incessantly to myself. But always, to their great glee, I would be putting myself on the spot, showing that I could take it as well as dish it out.

And it was not just in front of the class. I used to—I have fallen a bit from grace here—do every writing assignment myself (i.e., if Shea assigned seven hundred words on shoes or ships or sealing wax, he would write the same essay himself). At any rate, I am always writing for my students (“Throwing Xerox at the problem,” a student once said). When a question comes up in class, be it on causative verbs or metadiscourse , I will quickstep back to my office and pound out a single-spaced gloss—and write it as well as I can. A writing teacher should be a writing practitioner, in other words.

Reading over this, I realize that I do have more to say (the old being notoriously garrulous) than I realized at the start. I see, too, that I am coming up on my usual two pages, so I will take a break for now and hope that you are sufficiently curious to come back next week. See you then.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Jerome Shea has served at the University of New Mexico in various capacities for over twenty-five years; in 1995 he joined the English Department as a tenured associate professor. Shea's expertise and interests are in general composition, traditional grammar, stylistics, classical tropes, the history of the language, and professional rhetorics. Email him at shea@macinstruct.com

Names

mcone — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:34:53 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 14, 2010

A couple of weeks ago Leslie Linthicum, one of my favorite Albuquerque Journal writers, did a touching piece about Spanish first names—“given” names, Baptismal names— in northern New Mexico. You are probably thinking Carlos or Juan or Miguel, but you would be wrong. No, these are names that I had no idea existed until I settled in New Mexico: Eustaquio, Dionicia, Epifanio, Procopio, Estanislao, Tranquilino, and a host of others. Why especially in the mountains of northern New Mexico? Because many families up there trace their roots back centuries, when el norte was still part of Mexico, and even before that, before those families left Spain. These names have Greek, Visigoth, and even Moorish origins. Sadly, as a rule the people who bear such names are very old themselves (Leslie’s hook was the announcements from Espanola’s funeral homes). As the people die off so also will the names, probably. Grandchildren are likely named Carlos or Linda, Jose or Maria. Great-grandchildren will likely be christened Robert or Susan, even Aidan or Ashley.

All of which got me, Jerome Paul Michael Shea, thinking about given names. (A couple of months ago I told a young woman that my name was Shea. “That’s my name, too!” she chirped. I guessed correctly that Shea was her given name, not her surname. I am bracing myself to someday meet a perky Shea Shea.)

Names are serious business. Not for nothing is “handle” the slang term for one’s name: that is how people first grab onto you. And most names have some kind of cachet, some sort of mysterious something that clings to them like ectoplasm. How often have you heard someone say “He just doesn’t seem like a ‘David’ somehow” or heard someone exclaim that a friend’s name fits her like a glove. There are, evidently, some women who should be named Daphne and others who shouldn’t. Or sometimes a name is just right for a child but an embarrassment when that child becomes a dowager (Britney?). Or vice versa. According to one source, the most popular baby girl’s name in this country in 2008 was Amelia. That strikes me as a name that takes several years to grow into, a name redolent of horsehair sofas and antimacassars. But perhaps that is what the parents were aiming at. “Madeline” has made a surprising comeback. To me, that name has “great aunt” written all over it.

Some common words would make wonderful, euphonious names. For years I have been suggesting to friends in the family way that Diarrhea would be a lovely name for a girl child (“Step with me into the garden, Diarrhea”). So far, no takers.

Names go in and out of fashion. Back in 2001, according to one source, the top five boys’ names were Jacob/Jakob, Michael, Matthew/Mathew, Joshua, and Christopher; the top five for girls were Emily, Madison in various spellings (remember the movie Splash, which made a big splash?), Hannah (starring Darryl Hannah—coincidence?), Ashley in all its spellings, and the regal Alexis. In 2008 we have Aidan/Aiden/Aden, Ethan, Noah, Cayden/Caden/Kayden/Kaden, and Caleb/Kaleb. Liam was moving up fast on the rail that year and would be number three in 2009. For girls we turned, seems to me, old fashioned: Amelia, Isabella/Izabella, Madeline in various spellings, Emma (Jane Austen here?), and Abigail. There is often a riot of different spellings. Madyleyne, Madalynne. Ashleigh, Ashlee. Madysyn. Anything, I guess, to give your little bundle of joy a distinction over the other little bundles named Madison. Where Cayden came from I have no idea. And I used to deride Chad as the ultimate silly preppie name until I found out that there is actually a Chad (d. 672) in the calendar of saints. Who knew?

The Puritans named their offspring to instill virtue. The names Prudence and Grace were common as rocks in the pasture, but Ever Vigilant Winslow, now there was a moniker, bested only by Shun The Devil Cabot. We did not see such a flowering until the hippies came along centuries later (Moon Unit, Flower Petal, Rainbow Rider).

Names beget nicknames. I am Jerry to all but my wife and a few close friends. Seemed easier just to bow to the inevitable. But some resist. I know two men who were christened Charles. One is a Chuck; call the other one Chuck at your peril.

Some names, like some topcoats, are reversible: Marshall Brandon, Brewster Curtis. These drive me nuts when I am reading the class roll. And then there are gender ambiguous names: Leslie, Kim, Kelly, Tracy, Stacey, Taylor, and so forth.

A name can make or break you. Percival was one of the greatest of Arthur’s knights, a hero to be reckoned with. Naming a kid Percival today would be almost child abuse. Remember Ernie Kovacs’ fey poet, Percy Dovetonsils? One’s name can hold one’s fate.

Just ask that boy named Sue.

Correction: In the last two wonks I used the phrase “three in the tree” to describe a certain stick shift arrangement. Son Dan says he has always heard it as “three ON the tree.” That makes much more sense. I do try to get these things right, but sometimes, to borrow from the great Fred Allen, you just feel like sticking your quill back in your goose. Three on the tree it is.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Makeshift

mcone — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:50:58 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 7, 2010

Interesting word, “shift.” Or perhaps I should say a word with interesting variations and connotations. “Shift for yourself” connotes a hardy resourcefulness. On the other hand, “shiftless” connotes laziness. The entry takes up over three column inches in my dictionary. “Makeshift” suggests crudeness but also ingenuity. Day shift. Graveyard shift. Shifts and stratagems. And certainly to describe someone as shifty is not a compliment. (Shift as camisole can’t possibly have the same etymology [can it?] but it is right in there with the other definitions.)

Last week I was singing the praises of the stick shift (aka the standard or manual transmission). I have a few verses left to sing before I grudgingly give the automatic transmission its due. With a stick, you have more control over the movement of the car, for one thing: I would much rather have a stick shift in treacherous road conditions. And should your battery die—or your starter—you can ask a willing stranger to push you. You put the car in second gear, depress the clutch (so that the car will roll freely), turn on the ignition, and then, at speed, “pop” the clutch, so that the drive wheels turn the engine rather than vice versa. Voila! The car bucks once, the engine coughs into life, and you’re good to go to the repair shop. Much less bother than the jumper cables you have to use with an automatic, and if the starter in your slushbox Beemer goes kaput, your only recourse is a tow truck.

Now for a shameful disclosure. I did not learn to drive on a stick shift. I took my driver’s test in my father’s ’56 Olds. Hydra-Matic. Only two pedals to worry about, which is probably why I passed. But I knew that I wanted to learn to drive a stick,* and I took no half measures. The car at hand was my brother’s 1931 Chevy coupe, a wonderful car with a rumble seat, and a stick shift that was not even synchromesh.

Synchromesh, probably the greatest advance before the automatic transmission, would not come in until five or six years later. You can thank the synchronizers for the fact that it is almost impossible to grind the gears in a manual transmission these days. A “crashbox,” as in Steve’s Chevy, was another matter entirely. You started out in first gear as usual, and then you depressed the clutch, slipped the stick into neutral, RELEASED the clutch, goosed the gas ever so slightly and cocked your ear, hoping to get the engine and transmission turning at about the same speed. Then you depressed the clutch, AGAIN—this is called double-clutching and, yes, it will be on the test—and ever so subtly tried to snick the stick into second gear, without your passenger grinning and saying “Hey, grind me a pound of that, too, wudja?” That, believe me, is a trial by fire. Later I used to drive a big Reo dump truck that was also a crashbox. I never did get really good at it. Incidentally, if your clutch linkage breaks, as the cable used to do with depressing regularity on our poor Dodge Aries, you can actually drive to the repair shop without a clutch. The technique is very much like driving an old crashbox.

Ok, let me throw a bone to the automatic transmission partisans, shiftless though they be (sorry, couldn’t resist). The skunk in the woodpile here is the clutch. With no clutch there is no linkage to break and no discs to wear out and need replacing. Although a clutch will last a long time nowadays, a clutch job will set you back a very pretty penny. But most of all with an automatic, you have only two pedals for your two feet to engage—a level playing field, as it were. And you can yak on your cell phone, scarf your Big Mac, or put on your make-up without that annoying shifting. (Yes, I have driven these so-called manual override automatics. Sorry—just ain’t the same.)

Once you are cruising along, a stick shift is no big deal. It’s the delicate interplay between the clutch and the gas pedal from a dead stop that struck fear into the heart of sixteen-year-old Dan Shea and his father, riding shotgun. Too little gas and you stall out, ignominiously. Too much gas and too quick on the clutch and my little Metro convertible would bolt ahead like a demented Brahma bull, a rictus of terror on old Pop’s face. (We will not speak of trying to start out on an incline.**). But Dan has been in the club for years now, wheeling his little 5-speed Civic with aplomb. For that, among many other things, old Pops is proud of the boy.

He can shift for himself.

*I have found out that in some countries if you take your driving test with an automatic transmission, it is so stamped on your license. You have to take the test again on a stick shift to get that extra endorsement.

**Years ago some cars had an ingenious device called a “hill holder.” When you depressed the clutch in such a situation, it also activated the brakes, so there was no danger of rolling back into the guy behind you. Sadly, it seems to have gone the way of the dodo, although rumor has it that it survives on some Subarus, and good on them.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Shifting for Yourself

mcone — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:27:56 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, January 31, 2010

I’m driving through my neighborhood the other day and come upon an old Honda hatchback with these cautionary words soaped on the back window:

Learning 5-speed
Keep Distance

Well, that forthright admission tickled me all the way home, where I raced to my computer and emailed Dan and his sister, passing along my find and adding, “Ah, the memories came flooding back to old Pops.” And indeed they did. I made it a point that our progeny learn to drive a stick shift, a transmission by which you have to use a clutch to shift gears. The Little Red Beast and his garage mate, Wanda Honda, are both stick shifts (or “have stick shifts”: the expressions seem to be interchangeable).

I don’t have the figures, but I would guess that most cars in this country today have automatic transmissions. This was not always so. (A discussion of transmissions can get incredibly complex; let
us just note that in any car you have to transfer power from the engine to the drive wheels, and a transmission is what does that.) Automatic transmissions (i.e., clutchless) came out just after WWII with the Hydra-Matic* in Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs. The automatic transmission was arguably the most significant advance in technology since the automobile had been invented. Hydra-Matic was followed by variations that were marketing poetry: Dynaflow, Powerglide, Torqueflite, Ford-O-Matic (a tad prosaic, that one). By the mid-50s, it was rare to find an Olds, or a Buick, Chrysler, Lincoln, or other mid-level or high-end car with a stick shift, and Chevys and Fords were quickly following suit. It wasn’t long before the first urban legend took hold, the one about the moron who thought that the “R” on the gear selector stood for “Race,” with predictably disastrous results. The diehard stick shift aficionados derided automatics as “slushboxes” and still do.

Many, I’m sure, thought the stick shift would go the way of the buggy whip. But then the Volkswagen Beetle became a surprise success and ushered in a slew of other economy cars, practically all of them with stick shifts. Stick shifts get better mileage (though automatics are catching up), are less expensive to produce, and are more efficient in getting power to the drive wheels. This made a difference—to cite an extreme example—in a three-cylinder Geo Metro which could muster only 57 horsepower! And, if you ask me, sticks are just more fun and give the driver more say so in the driving, which is a very liberating, empowering feeling.**

These new 4-speed (most are now 5-speed) stick shift “econoboxes” had bucket seats, so the gearshift got moved back onto the floor (“four on the floor”) where it had been until the mid-30s, when the gearshift got moved up to the steering column. Because 3-speed transmissions were then the rule, this arrangement became known as “three in the tree.” “Three in the tree” allowed for three people to squeeze in more comfortably on the bench seat. (More important, it allowed your honey to snuggle up to you without accidentally kicking the car out of gear.) The bucket seats/floor gearshift arrangement caught on to the extent that many car makers have now put the automatic gear selector on the floor also. Your Buick sedan is not a sports car by any stretch, but the cockpit gives a pleasant illusion of its being one. Three in the tree required more complicated linkage, which was a good reason to phase it out. The linkage was so worn on my ’51 Chevy that frequently I would be shifting confidently through the gears and get hung up in second gear. Wouldn’t go into third, wouldn’t even go back into neutral. The remedy was simple if bothersome: pull over, pop the hood, and re-align the “fingers,” the levers that were farther down on the steering column. Then you were good to go again. Until the next week. And don’t forget to wipe the crud off your hands.

The automatic transmission also effected changes in the emergency brake (or “parking brake” or “hand brake”), both in where it was located and how it worked. This may seem trivial, but quite often it made a big difference in the delicate accommodations that a stick shift driver has to make between the clutch, the (foot) brake and the gas. Having three pedals and only two feet puts a driver at an obvious disadvantage, as we shall see next week.

I know people—not just teens but twenty-somethings and even thirty-somethings—who cannot drive a stickshift and likely never will. In the grand scheme of things this hardly matters a whit anymore, I guess. Even the cheapest rental cars are slushboxes, at least in this country. Still, I salute our intrepid teenage neighbor with the amusing sign on the back of her old Civic. She is learning a very useful skill. I think she will be a better driver because of it, and I know she will have more fun.

*Yes, the Hydra was that many-headed serpent in Greek mythology. Whatever were they thinking (or smoking) at GM?

**Wanda Honda, our CR-V, has a 4-wheel drive system that is completely automatic. If she slips into or out of 4-wheel drive (at the urging of her computers), you never know that she has done so. I resent that, too. With our old Mazda van it was a major project to switch into 4-wheel drive, and I gloried in it!

Meet Your Macinstructor

And Another Thing…

mcone — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:59:05 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, January 24, 2010

So, as I predicted in “Juggernaut,” along comes, electronically, my invitation to this summer’s high school essay reading, my ticket to beautiful Louisville, Kentucky. I am very happy about this. Almost happy enough to still the terrors that strike at my vitals when I realize that this means another forced march through Cyberland. Stay tuned. With luck there will be no “electronic signature” to contend with.

Have you noticed, by the way, that to get your package redelivered or your stove fixed by a national outfit, you don’t call their local people anymore? In fact, you can’t find the number for the local freight warehouse or repair center, giving “unlisted number” a new poignancy. No, you dial an 800 number to a call center located Lord knows where. The people at the other end of the phone line are the new intermediaries (gatekeepers, truth be told). They contact the local outfit (telepathically?) which, you are assured, will contact you within the next few days. This means that you had better sit by the phone, because you cannot negotiate an appointment through your voice mail. I’m sure this goes under the heading of convenience. (I rebelled and called a local handyman to fix my oven. He was at the door in fifteen minutes and did a bang-up job. Since we are always told that small businesses are the backbone of our economy, I was not just smug, but proud.)

It is a good rule of thumb that when you hear the word “convenience” or one of its cognates, it is not your convenience that the minions of XYZ Corp. are talking about, but theirs. If, indeed, the word has any meaning at all; usually, it doesn’t. Thus: “For your convenience, all our customers will now be strip-searched” or “For your convenience, these premises are now patrolled by Rottweilers.” Such a powerful, narcotic word, convenience. I long to walk up to the grinning manager and say, “For your convenience I have just poured STP into your cash registers.”

Technology is such a mixed blessing. I realize that that is a truism, but sometimes it hits home so starkly. These things start off innocently enough. How could the cell phone not be an unalloyed blessing? The world will have instant access to you, you can call for help if your car breaks down, and so forth. Well, ask any high school teacher what she thinks of cell phones! Or how do you feel about the guy that rear-ends you because he was gassing on the phone to his brother-in-law? Such abuses aside, I am not the first to wonder if you want the world to have instant access to you in the first place.

But these questionable improvements keep coming. I don’t know who came up with that electronic signature nonsense that I described last week. But I can easily imagine the salesman. He looks and sounds like Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. He has a spiel that mesmerizes the folks at XYZ Corp. The future—a future of bigger profits and even more satisfied clients—blooms before them. And of course Prof. Hill can demonstrate the electronic signature feature such that a baboon could easily accomplish it (after all, he does it three or four times a day: he should have it down pat). So these poor fish take the bait, and clients start emailing them death threats. Who knew?

You could make a list of technological improvements that have been unalloyed blessings, I guess, but it would be a short list. The high speed dental drill would be on my list, car seats for kids, I suppose, and certain pharmaceuticals, but not all of them. Some advances really do advance us, and most seem to be in the medical field. But speaking of pharmaceuticals, the drug companies can now push their pills over the public airways, as we all know. Thus, we are hearing much more about intimate matters than we would like (“Mommy, what’s “erectile dysfunction”?). What tickles me is that they are required by law, evidently, to list possible dicey side effects. You can almost see the voice-over guy squirm as he races through the embarrassing list: “Hexigloppen is not recommended for pregnant women or the ambidextrous. Possible side effects may include dizziness, nausea, renal failure, impotence, incontinence, and hives.” But he always recovers and adds chirpily, “Ask your doctor if Hexigloppen may be right for you!”

Brave new world? I have my doubts.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Juggernaut

mcone — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:40:27 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, January 17, 2010

Yet again I have been almost brought low by technology. I say “almost” because I haven’t given up yet, though it may be a near thing. A certain outfit that I sometimes work for has sent me an on-line form to fill out for them. It wasn’t always this way. These people and I used to communicate by snail mail. I would get hard copies in the mail and I would fill them out and send them back. Simple. But now, more and more, it is all done on-line, and the point is that I have no choice but to play their demonic game. I think there is something very wrong about this. I feel myself being squished under the wheels of a Juggernaut and, worse, I see no hope of reversing—or even stopping—this trend.

Here is an example. I was asked in this on-line form to designate an emergency contact, should something happen to me at one of their far-flung functions. I referenced the Long Suffering Diana, as I always do. But I did something—I still am not sure what—to anger the computer program. It then told me to correct whatever I had filled in. I did so, as near as I could guess how to do it. It still was not satisfied, and kept badgering me over and over until, in a frustrated rage, I gave up. I will skip several other snafus and tell you that after some emails and phone calls I finally got near the end of the form, to a place that called for an “electronic signature.” Here I was way out of my depth, and beyond the capacity of my antiquated eMac (remember those?). Not to worry. I forwarded the stuff from my study to the kitchen alcove where Diana reigns with her almost state-of-the-art Mac. You should know, also, that Diana is very computer savvy—maybe not as much as a twenty-something, but not shabby by any measure. We actually got the electronic signature accomplished (!), but then this pop-up popped up: “An error has occurred during the submit process. Cannot process content of type/html; charset=UTF-8.”

Yeah, I know, that “charset=UTF-8” trips me up every time. I’m sure it catches you, too, huh?

This is not only madness but rank bullying, and an electronic way of saying “our way or the highway.” Maybe they should just put us old farts on an ice floe. What really gets me about this is that they hold all the cards: you play their game or you fold, go away, don’t bother them any more—get out of the way, you old relic! And I know there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Well, if I cannot avoid being squished, at least I can squeal, so I fired off a rather intemperate email. A few days later—while I was composing a more temperate email, hoping to get out of this limbo—the phone rang. It was a nice lady from company headquarters in New Jersey and the exchange went something like this:

“Jerome Shea?”

“Speaking.”

“Jerome, I have your latest email here on screen, and you are clearly stressed and frustrated.”

I babbled some sort of apology for my heated email, but she then said, in a voice like honey:

“No, we quite understand, Jerome. You had every reason to be frustrated. But—Jerome?—no more stress, no more frustration, no more on-line stuff. I am going to attach that document to an email right now. You download it, print it out, sign it with an ordinary pen, and FAX—no, snail mail—it back to us. How’s that, Jerome?”

“How’s that”? “How’s THAT”? Tears welled in my eyes. It felt as if his own sainted mother had awakened little Jerome from a bad dream and clutched him to her bosom. I began to gibber and squeak. (Here it should be added that this “electronic signature” nonsense is evidently not ready for prime time: they must have had bushels of irate complaints, we peasants threatening to take up our pitchforks.)

Of course, that was a wonderful outcome, better than I had dared dream. But when the euphoria passed, I realized that this was only an example of what I have come to call technoblesse oblige. They can afford to show us mercy because they have the power to show us mercy—and the power to take it away. If I am lucky, they will be contacting me again soon to invite me to an essay reading session next June. And if I want to read those essays, all the arrangements will have to be made on-line, including my travel arrangements. (It used to be that you simply told them when you wanted to leave and come back, and they did the rest. No more. As a friend said, “Why should they pay underlings anymore when they can make YOU their underling?”)

Welcome to the future, I suppose. Thank goodness for the help that our for-now-up-to-date Mac and my savvy wife can provide. Otherwise I suppose that I would have to go to the local library and try my luck with a PC (good luck with that). Or I could swallow my pride (just a light snack in these matters) and pay one of my bright students twenty bucks do their bidding—twenty bucks that would come out of my pocket, not theirs.

I told a friend that I should probably instead write a wonk on anger management.

But not yet.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Face the Music

mcone — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:19:18 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, December 20, 2009

I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write this wonk (the first line on my note pad reads, “Is Techno Guy worth it?”). But this week the UNM Chorus, the Dulce Sueno Chorus, and the UNM Orchestra, under guest conductor Stephano Miceli, performed Brahms’ German Requiem, one of the masterworks of the Western world, and the contrast was just too stark to ignore. At the risk of compromising my modesty—faithful readers know that I have sung in the UNM Chorus for years—I will tell you that the performance was truly professional-grade, a stunning and transcendent experience for all. I am still sung out and wrung out but profoundly grateful to have been a part of it.

Against that background, I will now describe a recent flap on the UNM campus, chart the fallout from it, and add your wonker’s sagacious reflections.

Four or five years ago I was walking to class on a fine September morn when music—loud music—assailed my ears. It was what I would later learn is called “techno music.” I stopped, turned, and beheld this rather tall and nattily dressed young fellow standing beside a big boom box and bopping away, swaying and tapping his feet. This was not some kid with a guitar strumming softly and hoping for tips. You could hear this din fifty yards away. And Techno Guy* was not looking for tips, which, come to think of it, would not have been appropriate. No, we would later learn that he was actually proselytizing: he saw himself as an evangelist for this techno music, bringing it to the yearning masses! After that I seemed to come upon him once a week or so. The students were unfazed. Some seemed to like the music, jiggling a bit themselves; others just went about their business. I was nonplussed. I really didn’t know what my reaction should be.

An aside. I stopped listening to “popular” music back in the early ‘70s when I was still a twenty-something. For most of my generation, good music died (as Don McLean put it) with Bob Dylan, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Three Dog Night…you get the idea. I cannot tell you the difference between heavy metal and punk rock (or techno music) to save my soul. I am not proud of this ignorance—I think one should try to keep up with things, even strange new things. But I do suspect that I would not be able to distinguish Heavy Metal from Strangled Cat, should I make myself listen to it.

Anyway, Techno Guy finally got challenged early last month by a faculty member whom we will call Professor Killjoy. Prof. K. asked Techno Guy to tone his music down. Eventually the case got to the Dean of Students and it was decided that Techno Guy should crank his amp down to a third of what it had been. Killjoy was happy, Techno Guy not so much, but resigned for the time being.

Then the students got into the act, via the Daily Lobo letters page. To my surprise, the respondents were pretty much split on the issue. I would have expected them to pile on Prof. Killjoy. Some did, of course, saying that he came off as arrogant and on a power trip (oddly, and to their credit, I don’t think the word “fascist” ever came up). Others saw this as a free speech issue (music as free speech?), so that Techno Guy was being denied his right to expression. Others, though—even some who enjoyed Techno Guy’s music—saw a difference between freedom of expression and aural assault. These people backed Prof. Killjoy, even if reluctantly.

An issue that didn’t come up but seems obvious is the generational divide. Prof. K. and I are products of the ‘60s (see above: Bob Dylan, etc.) and the older generation has always seen the younger generation’s tastes—in music, in dress, in language, in anything—as a cultural travesty and the Death Knell of All We Hold Dear. But I guess because Prof. K. never said that he objected to the quality of the music (just that it was too loud), that whole issue was happily skirted.

Another issue is that of venue, this being, after all, a university campus. I don’t just mean that it is hard for most people to study or hold serious conversation with music drowning everything out. I mean that a university setting should promote a certain gravitas, and music blaring on the campus is an assault on that gravitas. This lays me open to a charge of old fogyism, I suppose. UNM isn’t Oxford, my critics would reply, and I should join this loud and vulgar new world.** Well, I’m willing to be called an old fogy, a mossback, a fuddy-duddy. Let Techno Guy find a street corner or a city park and blare away the livelong day.

All in all, Techno Guy handled it pretty graciously, and I find it oddly charming that he saw himself as being on a cultural good will mission. Far less do I respect the jerk next to me at the red light who thoughtlessly assaults all of us around him with his hip-hop music or, worse, that bone-rattling bass sound that is now so pervasive. I often fantasize that I have a concert quality sound system crammed into the trunk of the Little Red Beast and that I can blast back with, oh, Rossini’s Stabat Mater.

But (OMG! as the kids twitter) suppose Jerko likes it? What then?

*His real name is no secret, but he quickly became known as Techno Guy, so we’ll stick with that. Same with Professor Killjoy, a name I made up.

**Even Oxford isn’t Oxford these days, I’ll wager; surely today’s Oxford is far from the romantic, sepia image that most of us have always had of it.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Whales

mcone — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:26:26 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, December 6, 2009

Ever notice that some animals seem to have real trouble following the script? Take your penguin, for example. As a bird he is a disgrace (I’m sorry, but it’s time somebody said so and if it has to be me, well there you are then). Your penguin could pass muster as a portly butler in a whodunit, but where he really shines—if you have ever seen him gracefully cavorting under water—is as a fish. What’s—as they say—with that? And if penguins insist on behaving like fish, at least they do a better job of it than the ostrich, another bird with suspect credentials and ugly into the bargain. Speaking of fish, I learned just yesterday that some of them are warm-blooded. Now that’s plain wrong, and how am I going to break that news to the goldfish in my backyard pond, gliding numbly under the ice, semi-comatose till next May? Then we have fish who, tiring of one pond, can trundle awkwardly to a neighboring one. “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly”? Don’t bet on it.

And don’t even start with me on marsupials.

But I come today to talk about whales, another major disappointment. We all know—Aristotle noticed and noted the fact over two millennia ago—that whales and other cetaceans are not fish, but mammals. They are warm-blooded, birth their calves live, and produce milk to nurse them. They even have vestigial body hair in the form of whiskers around the snout, the skeletal structure inside their (front) flippers is clearly mammalian (they lost their hind legs, and flippers, millions of years ago), and they have horizontal, not vertical, tails.

We all know that life began about a gazillion years ago in the primordial ocean, a sort of amniotic fluid vaster than we can imagine, the Great Womb of Life. We know, too, that some life forms elected to stay there, and I am sure that sharks and salmon and whatnot had their good reasons. I have no quarrel with our finny brethren. My goldfish are much more attractive gliding under water in the pond that I dug for them than stomping around in the compost pile looking for food. More power to them, I say.

But who can forget that awe-inspiring parade in your old biology textbook where the first restless marine critter seeks a better life for herself. She develops a primitive lung, her fins get more and more stumpy, and there she is, ambling awkwardly up the beach. (You go, girl!) In a trice, geologically speaking, she is transmogrified into a lizard, a dinosaur, a lemur, a proto-ape, a homo erectus, and—voila!—your grammar school teacher or Dolly Parton (and her husband, of course). We did it! We became mammals! And as mammals we voted overwhelmingly for the life terrestrial.

So why in the name of all that’s holy did the ancestors of the whales decide to do an about face and go back to the briny? Because that is precisely what they did. Purple mountain majesties and fruited plains just didn’t seem to do it for them: oh no, they decided to go back to the Great Womb. Slackers.

This has always fascinated me. Not just the arresting fact that they decided to return to the sea, but just what they looked like before they slowly became the whales that we know. Paleontologists think they have a pretty good candidate in the mesonychid, a creature that walked the earth back in the early Paleocene epoch. The mesonychid was about the size of a wolf, an ugly beast that you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night. It fed on carrion and was a proto-ungulate, which is to say its claws were slowing evolving into primitive hoofs. (Going way, way back in the family tree, zoologists think that whales and hippos are pretty closely related.) Try to imagine this animal slouching silently through the dripping ferns, always hungry. Perhaps it developed a special taste for marine carrion? Perhaps an idea finally glimmered in its brain: why feed on dead scraps when, wading farther and farther into the water, you might wind up at the main buffet? Maybe that’s how it happened. Just a thought.

And if that doesn’t awe and intrigue you, consider that this inconsiderable animal evolved into, among other species, the blue whale, the largest creature that ever lived on land or sea. How did that happen, you ask? Beats me, but I am not sure that the experts agree on how it happened either. Consider first, though, that with enough time almost anything can happen, and that we are talking about more than 70 million years. Two other things come to mind. One is the buoyancy that water, especially salt water, provides. You don’t have to depend on legs to support you, so that particular design element is now irrelevant. Secondly, of the two sub-orders of whales, those with teeth and those with sheets of baleen instead, the latter are the real giants. With their ability to sieve their way through clouds of krill and schools of herring, anchovies, sardines and other small prey, they can ingest meals of truly prodigious proportions. Again, just a thought. But with those two factors in play, the sky is probably the limit.

So there are Shea’s ruminations on whales. You’re welcome.

Meet Your Macinstructor