Journal of a Sabbatical

January 6, 2001

lists not of boats and firewood

Today's Reading: Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian by Sara Anna Emery

Searching other people's lists of goals for things I've done seems to be a good springboard to get me writing a little bit. I thought I'd run out of ideas but Monique's escapades list gave me plenty more.

Monique's escapades list :

2. Own a boat.

Depends how you define own. And how you define boat. BiB and I built a row boat from plans in Popular Science (or was it Popular Mechanics?) in our high school years. Andrea seems to think we did this in the 4th grade too :-). BiB did most of the woodwork, cutting and bending the marine plywood into the right shapes. My major contribution was the fiberglass seams. I sealed every seam with fiberglass tape covered with some kind of glop that I now don't remember the name of (this is over thirty years ago and I've never been called upon to make a row boat watertight again). I also painted it. Gray. Very unimaginative but waterproof. When we finished, we had no money left for oars and oar locks so when the boat took its maiden voyage in Lake Denison (central Mass.) we paddled it like a canoe with a board from the woodpile. After that, my Dad sprung for oars and oar locks so we could row it like normal people. I think he was amazed we built the thing at all. Most of the credit goes to BiB, but I have fond memories of that boat. It sank on a church group camping trip sometime not too long after it was launched. That's what happens when rowdy Catholics fill a boat with rocks. :-)

8. Be in a musical or play.

I was always being in plays whether I wanted to or not. I had a deep voice and could speak clearly and loudly so the nuns made me be in all the school plays. I don't remember the names of the plays I did in grade school. I have one vivid memory from those days of playing an elderly woman with gray hair and carrying a birthday cake on stage. Getting the powder out of my hair was a bitch. More notably, I experienced my first kiss during a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. At least I think that was the play, all I remember is the kiss, onstage in front of an audience. We had faked the kiss in rehearsal and I was not expecting his tongue in my mouth during the actual performance. Not your average first kiss story. We dated for awhile after that. More plays through high school and college ensued before I realized I'm not a very good actor. Then again I successfully portrayed a straight woman for many years. Wait, did I say successfully? Yikes. I was surprised at how many people were not surprised when I came out. Guess I was right, I'm not a very good actor. But that wasn't a play that was life. But then again "all the world's a stage and the people merely players" as some Dead White European Male wrote.

10. See the redwoods in Northern California.

Seen redwoods: with family as a kid, with Joan-west, by myself. And this was way before I met the conifer guys. I think my favorite Northern California redwood experience was at Orr Hot Springs with Joan-west. When we weren't soaking in the hot springs we walked among the redwoods and discovered that little tiny fungi grow on very big trees. My biggest disappointment the first time we trekked to California to visit the California half of my mother's family was that they didn't live near the redwoods and we didn't get to see any. I think I had a compressed map of California in my head then. Now that I've driven the entire length of the coast, I have a better perspective. I could probably make a whole entry out of redwoods. Better make a note to do that sometime.

11. Work in retail or food service.

Retail, not food service. Age 14 and 1/2. Children's clothing store. Learned what a layette was. In those days prices were put on the items with cardboard tags held on my metal pins sort of like common pins. I learned how to work the "ticketing machine" into which you loaded a huge roll of pins. They came in rolls of paper that mounted on a spool and the machine sort of shot the pin through the cardboard tag. I loaded the tags into another part of the machine, and my favorite part was setting the type for the tags. I'd find out what the price was supposed to be and get the appropriate slugs out of the type drawer and arrange them in a little rack that slid into the bottom of the machine. I'm sure I also had to put ink in the machine but I have no memory of that. I think I wasn't allowed to work the cash register until I was 16. Mostly I kept the shelves stocked, the merchandise ticketed, the store neat and clean and the inventory sort of up to date.

18. Go to Seattle, Washington and see the Seattle rain forest.

Seattle and Olympic peninsula in the mid 70's with the parents and Donald. Temperate rain forest very beautiful. Would probably appreciate it more now that I've discovered the vital importance of conifers. Obviously conifers have been my destiny for a long time.

24. Volunteer for a political campaign.

See Tuesday's entry. (Speaking of Tuesday's entry, the photo credit for Guy Boily should have had a link to his URL, now it does. Oh, and while I was at it, I fixed the link to the Shackleton entry too.) This also appears on Miriam Nadel's list , Douglas Shumaker's list, and Joanne's list. I predict a huge upsurge in political activity coming soon. I wonder if this has to do with the strangeness of the presidential election just past, or there's some other wind of civic involvement sweeping the country. Not that four lists constitutes sweeping the country, but I have heard more conversation about political issues everywhere not just on the national level.

32. Serve on an awards committee.

If you bitch enough about how the committee is wrong, sometimes you wind up on the committee and discover how hard it is to be right. I bitched for years about the Society for Technical Communication giving an award to the VT100 manual, the prettiest useless manual ever to come out of Digital. The manual was gorgeously produced with wonderful graphics but did not tell you how to turn the terminal on nor in any comprehensible way to use the nifty escape sequences that gave you special characters, control of the video display, primitive graphics ... So years later in another context the local chapter of STC asked me to be a judge for the annual awards. Wading through piles of technical manuals about products I was clueless on, with a tight deadline, I discovered how easy it is to be seduced by a content-free manual. Anyway, this isn't the kind of awards committee I think any of the list makers who included it meant, but that's the memory that came up for me when I read it.

36. Do a feature poetry reading.

Well, maybe not a "feature" in that I wasn't the headliner because there was no headliner. Everybody on the program was a featured reader. I read Bone Tide and several other poems at a reading Ned organized at North Parish. Also at a smaller reading that Tom and Ned organized the year before that - although I notice my journal entry makes no mention of the fact that I read at that one. Anyway, I've always been on a program with other poets, never a one woman show.

38. Learn a programming language.

Languages I've learned: FORTRAN, Bliss-10, Bliss-11, Macro-10 (PDP-10 assembler), Macro-11 (PDP-11 assembler), BASIC-PLUS-2/20 (had to learn it because I wrote the test system for it and implemented much of the I/O - OK, some of the I/O).
Languages I've programmed in without actually being able to say I've learned them: C (well, OK maybe I learned C but I never had any formal training in it, I just read a s____load of C code), SNOBOL (I took over a set of SNOBOL programs that ran the aforementioned test system and had to figure out enough to maintain them and modify them). I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. Do sed and awk count as programming languages? What about TECO? (Hmm, here's evidence that TECO is considered a Turing complete programming language.) I'm ready for the old programmers' home any day now. We can sit around and reminisce about that time we sat around Andy's dining room table 'til the wee hours figuring out how to implement DBMS in TECO. True story. I think we were smoking something at the time. It was the 70's after all.
Languages I have dreamt in: I have dreamt in FORTRAN and in Macro-11. I have dreamt in TECO. I have never to my knowledge dreamt in C.

39. Give an autograph. (also on Douglas Shumaker's list)

Book signing. Circa 1988. A guy asked me to sign his copy of Writing a UNIX Device Driver. That's not weird since it was a book signing. What's weird is he claimed getting my autograph was second only to meeting (and getting autograph of) Dennis Ritchie as a peak experience. Me and Dennis Ritchie are not exactly in the same category of UNIX gurus. Me not invent nuthin'. Me sit and read entire UNIX kernel and figured out device driver interface while pestering TomT who eventually became my coconspirator in this folly with questions. It's weird being famous for doing something I attempted (and accomplished) because I was too dumb to know it couldn't be done.

45. Teach a class.

QES. Basically a Quality brainwashing class. Think I've taught other things too that don't leap to mind.

54. Watch a sunrise.

Many a sunrise on the way home from working all night. A few sunrises seen while deliberately seeking a spiritual experience.

56. Go skinny dipping in a river, stream or lake.

A couple rivers, one lake, two ponds, one ocean. Hey it was the 70's. People did that. The fact that I did it into the 80's is, well, interesting.

71. Watch a meteor shower.

Best meteor shower watching experience was an August night in 1969. I was a camp counselor supervising an overnight for what was normally a day camp. We settled the kids in their sleeping bags and sat around watching the meteors streak across the night sky for hours. I'm not sure I slept.

82. Have a meal in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Many Chinatown meals in SF. Best broccoli at a dim sum place I went to with friends of Nancy's whom we visited in 1995. Best fake meat (it's a style of Buddhist temple cuisine that uses vegetarian stuff to create things that resemble meat dishes) at a place I went to with Joan-west in the early 1990's.

85. Learn how to use a darkroom.

See yesterday's entry.

86. Be in a parade

See Tuesday's entry.

87. Buy some type of real estate.

Bought current residence in 1978. Have not bought any type of real estate since.

88. Drink something with an umbrella in it, on a Caribbean beach.

Hmm, first Caribbean trip was during one of my previous sober periods. Second Caribbean trip was not, and did feature umbrella drinks I think. I used to have a collection of little plastic swords from the Mai Tais at the Maui Kai in Westford. Not the Caribbean. Not very tropical. Not umbrellas. But the memory leaps to mind. Gave away the plastic sword collection in 1989. Have not collected tiny plastic swords, tiny paper umbrellas, or headaches since.

Greyson's list

14.Have a book published

See number 39 above.

28.See killer whales in the Ocean

In Antarctica. See entries for January 26, 2000 and subsequent entries.

35.See Crater Lake, Oregon

Mid 1970's with the parents and Donald. I remember loving being up on the rim looking down on a red-tailed hawk circling over the lake.

39.Visit Iceland

See Iceland travel journal.

54.Go to the Galapagos Islands

See Galapagos travel journal & bird list

64.Walk on the Great Wall of China

See China travel journal.

89.Go to Cannery Row in Monterey, California

1994 with Nancy.

104.Visit Salem, Massachusetts; research witch trials

OK, maybe it's not fair to claim this as an accomplishment because I live in Massachusetts in the hotbed of the witch hysteria. As regular readers have probably grokked by now, Andover (which at that time included North Andover) accused more witches than Salem. One of my coffee buddies is a historian who happens to have written a book and three plays about the witch trials so I kind of can't help but absorb it. Also, my cat played one of Martha Cory's cats in The Crucible (the movie) but that whole scene with the cats was cut. (He's orange by the way. A thing I still don't understand is why witch kitsch depicts the familiar as a black cat - the actual trial transcripts refer to a yellow cat. But that's something Greyson can research I guess.)

115.Spend New Year's Eve in Times Square, New York

The 1988/89 transition with Donald and Michael. An amazing experience but I have no desire to do it again.

124.Visit Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Again, I live in Massachusetts so this isn't a gigantic accomplishment. I do love the Cape though, especially Provincetown. Funniest weekend on the Cape story is the time I took Nancy on a "seal and seabird" cruise out of Hyannis for her birthday. We saw exactly zero seals, but had amazing adventures. See 12/28/96 and 12/29/96.

125.Visit Yellowstone National Park

With the family on a cross-country family camping trip in I think 1966, maybe '67.

127.Go to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire (windiest place in America)

Last time I hiked Mt. Washington was in 1972 with my Dad. It snowed. It was the first of September. On the list of life goals that I did and can't find, I know I listed spending a night on Mt. Washington in midwinter as a major goal. Better get cracking on that.

135.Visit Patagonia

OK, so I didn't see nearly as much of Patagonia as I'd like and definitely want to go back, but the stopover on the way to Antarctica was excellent.

Meanwhile, the nutty neighbor is out there clearing today's snow out of the parking lot with her hands and it hasn't even stopped snowing yet.