The Hazel Street Amphibian

Last summer, shortly after the five 2-year old goldfish disappeared from the fishpond, Jackson sat by the pond. He said "Look, Grannie, you have tadpoles." At first I couldn't see them; they were much smaller than the tadpoles at the park. Were he not such a careful observer I wouldn't have believed him. We watched for frogs for a few months and then forgot about them. Over the year since I neglected the pond. The solar bubbler still bubbled away. Leaves fell into the pond; algae grew. Catherine's dog Cricket often drank from the pond.

Yesterday morning I decided to empty the pond and prepare it for new fish. Cricket and Sammy came into the back yard with me. I fed two young apple trees, one baby fig, a rose bush, St.John's wort, and my compost heap with the rich algae water. I scraped the bottom of the pond and took the last full bucket to a clematis plant. When I poured out the black murky water, a frog or toad fell out with the water. I quickly scooped her up with both hands and took her back to the pond; two inches of water were left in it. I left the frog; I am grateful that she inhabits the pond.

The frog had filled my cupped hands (say 4 1/2 inches); she was as dark as the water. As I carried her I didn't see her - I was looking at the ground so as not to stumble. I have looked in the reptiles and amphibians book and am unable to identify her. I hope that she can survive.

Computer Affairs

 Until I was in my late 40s I never sat in front of a computer.  On the first day of a required class, Computers in the Behavioral Sciences, our professor asked us to turn on our computers and follow the instructions on the screen.  Once booted the computer screen instructed “Please type your name.  I typed “Jennie.”  The computer said, “Welcome, Jennie.  How are you?”    I twitched and my mind crashed. 

The computers professor, who was behaviorally oriented, was a good teacher.  He led us step by step, from the surprise of being able to turn on a computer to the basics of the BASIC programming language.  I have seldom had so much fun.  Imagine – I could make a machine do something interesting.  More than that, I quickly realized that computers do well everything that I do poorly – they spell, they do math quickly and accurately, their handwriting is legible.

My favorite programming assignment was to create a subtraction program for elementary school children.  We were to post a math problem with numbers chosen randomly from numbers between zero and twenty, give the student two tries at it, and then, if the answer was still wrong, post the correct answer.  If on either try the student answered correctly, we were to post one of several congratulations.  I took it a little beyond and added a moving stick-figure cartoon and random musical phrase to the congratulatory messages and the sorry, wrong answer, messages.  I then made minor adjustments to the program to make addition, multiplication, and division programs.

I kept playing with the BASIC language after the semester was over.  My proudest achievement was a couple of simple ANOVA programs that would give correct answers.  Later, when I ran the data on my Masters thesis, my advisor made me learn the department’s UNIX machine.  The UNIX gave answers that matched my ANOVA program's answers.

In the throes of my thesis, I invested my teaching stipend in my first computer, a PC Junior.  It was to me an elegant little box.  It had, as computers at the time had, and as I have now, a pitifully small memory.  I knew a doctoral student who said that as she typed the current chapter of her dissertation into her computer, her earlier chapters were falling out the back of the computer’s memory.

Eventually the PC Junior died of old age.  At the time I was working for the University of Virginia and a friend told me the University held regular auctions to sell surplus furniture and electronic gear.  I went to one, and got, for the sum of $25.00, not one, but two computers.  When I got them home I discovered that neither computer had a hard drive.  This was one of the better things that has happened to me.  Because the computers were comparatively cheap, and because I had two of them, I had nothing to lose; I could play around with one of them with impunity.  I sent away for a hard drive at a reasonable price, a book on how to fix your computer, and an anti-static wrist strap.  Installing the hard drive was surprisingly easy (most computers were plug and play even then).  plugging things into the motherboard was as easy as building with legos.  At the end the computer worked well.  Encouraged, I sent away for the other hard drive, installed it and gave that computer to a friend.

The next computer was a Dell desktop, which we used until it’s operating system became obsolete and it lost anti-virus and malware protection.
 

The next to the last computer was a Dell laptop computer.  A few weeks ago it showed distinct signs of a failing hard disk.  I have said for years, on the misunderstanding that laptops were too tiny for my clumsy fingers to fix, that I’d worked on my last computer.  I got a new computer and paid someone to transfer documents and pictures on the old computer to the new computer.  After 18 days in my possession, two of the new computer's usb drives failed and I sent it away to be fixed.

But then, under the influence of computer withdrawal and curious about what a defter geek would do to replace the laptop hard drive, I searched on the  internet with my failing laptop for 'replace laptop hard drive.'  I discovered that it could be done from the outside and one didn’t need tiny fingers.  Once again I have little to lose.  I intend to try to fix the old laptop, maybe replace its dead usb port too (I must be hard on usb ports), and then figure out who needs an elderly laptop.  

Computers have been an entertaining and frustrating hobby for years.   I remember them all with gratitude and pleasure.

Terrorism in San Bernardino Revised

When my mother died in Redlands, I thought I would not return to the town again.   I returned one more time.

I was born in San Bernardino.  It was a beautiful city with a rich cultural mix of people.  I lived there until I was ten, in a block of houses across from a farm; because of the farm we could see the mountains from our front yard, especially Mount San Gregonio.  Although it was years before I saw and understood amber waves of grain, when I first learned the lyrics to America the Beautiful I knew in my bones what purple mountains’ majesty meant.  

Every spring my father suffered from severe attacks of sneezing caused by his allergy to the orange blossoms blooming on our favorite tree.  Its sturdy low branches made a great climbing tree. I remember the sound of my father chopping down the tree when I was about five. 

My kindergarten teacher lived at the end of the alley behind our house.  She kept chickens; our family’s dachshund sometimes dug under her fence and chased them.

The roots of one of the eucalyptus trees that lined the block buckled the sidewalk in front of our house; this made roller skating exciting and fun. 

I walked with my big brother three or four blocks to my elementary school. Later I walked with friends or bicycled alone to school.  

Parts of San Bernardino were laid out in a grid.  Long avenues of very tall palm trees lined the streets all the way to the mountains.

 

When I was ten we moved eight miles away to Redlands, then a small rural town nestled in the midst of orange groves.  As I grew up, many of the groves were pulled out, bulldozed over, and made into subdivisions.  The apartment where the San Bernardino slayers lived, on the north side of Redlands, had once been an orange grove.

Since last month, San Bernardino and Redlands have become synonymous with domestic terrorism and murder.  I grieve for the families and friends of those who were killed, and grieve for the murderers.  I am sad, too, that this place I love has become a symbol of loss and bitterness.

Because my life has been comparatively easy, probably at the expense of others, I am bewildered by the anger, resentment or rage that would cause a person to kill; I don’t understand. I don’t know if the San Bernardino slayers sought to end obscurity with notoriety, as some shooters do, or to revenge wrongs.  It is hard to believe they believed that they truly served God, although people of the book have violated the sixth commandment in God's name before.

 

I’d wish I could think that Daesh attracted the naturally cruel, the murderers, the evil, but I don’t.  I think the poor, the bored, the underemployed, the resentful, the obscure, find Daesh, and Daesh, for its own ends, skillfully turns them to harm.

These phrases from W.H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939 help me.

. . .

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

. . .

There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

First Footing at Mint Springs Park

My sister Nancy spent her last years in Perthshire in the Scottish Highlands.  Friends there celebrated the first hours of Hogmanay, New Years day.  They walked, or if not intending to drink, drove to each others houses where their friends refreshed them with food, drink, and Auld Lang Syne.  The first foot to enter the house on Hogmanay would visit the house often for the rest of the year.  Though friends vied to set the first foot in the house, anyone who came by on the first of January would be a welcome and frequent visitor for the rest of the year.

Ox and I slept late after our traditional quiet New Year’s Eve.  We spent a quiet day at home, Ox catching up on internet correspondence, and I trying to finish a knitted Christmas present.

In the evening we drove to Mint Springs Park to make 2016’s first footing.  It was five o’clock, already lighter at that hour than it had been at five in the weeks before.  We parked by shelter one and walked counterclockwise around the pond.  The sunset appeared first in the northeast.  Tree feathers on the hilltop brushed the salmon sky.  The shadow of the hill darkened the northeast half of the pond; it was topped with a richer salmon color toward us.  Then the setting sun’s reflection moved to the dam.  At last the real sunset showed in the west, in the valley between two hills.  For a few minutes the whole sky was salmon orange. The water looked like hammered brass from the south side of the lake.  Breezes and inlet currents crossed to make these shiny scales.

We met a woman leading three large dogs.  We had met the dogs before.  They sniffed our hands, wagged their tails, and dragged the woman toward the shelter.  We followed their wet footprints back to one large dark wet place on the path and then to another.  The wet footprints ended at this place where the dogs had first jumped in the pond.

From the dam on the east side of the lake we saw the goose flock (Ox counted 23) feeding in the grass by the cattails.  The water, moved by a stiffer breeze, took on the appearance of salmon stucco.  At our approach the geese moved silently toward the water; we split the flock on our path toward the car.  Gray erased the sky's salmon color. The chilly air turned cold. 

We left Mint Springs Park, happy in the notion that we would return there frequently in 2016.