Those Books Before Facebook

In her latter years, my mother often seemed to be engaged in an on-going conversation with herself.  Her streams of thought flowed like a hidden river, subterranean and unnoticed until a few words bubbled to the surface, spilling over and inviting response.

We were folding freshly laundered towels one afternoon when she surprised me by breaking the companionable silence to announce, “We had Facebook when I was in school.”  “What?” I said. “Facebook? There wasn’t any Facebook when you were in school.” “Of course there was,” she said. “We just had another name for it.”

Bemused, I asked if she meant her high school annual, and heard the slight intake of breath that always signaled impatience. “No, we didn’t have those. I just can’t think of the word right now. I’ll think of it.”

Keepers of the Light

After more than thirty years, the place names of South Texas feel familiar as my own. Boca Chica, Cavallo and Copano. Carancahua. Tres Palacios. Espiritu Santo. The bays and passes, the long southward slope of the coast, the gritty beaches and wind-bent oaks embrace and hold the history of a rich and complex world.

There are stories and legends, told and re-told by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who lived them. Artifacts of an earlier time lie bleached and scattered like bones across the landscape. Spanish anchors turn up behind plows. French cannons surprise ranch hands in the field.  Tiny settlements cling to life, rooted in and named for the explorations of such men as René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, shapers of a land they barely understood.

At the water’s edge, the shadow of Indianola lingers. Wiped off the map by twin hurricanes, the port’s ghostly tide of immigrants ebbs away into forgetfulness.  Marvelous ships sleep mired in the bays and the Matagorda lighthouse, that great, silent sentinel, offers relief and guidance to those uncertain of their course.

A Gunkholer at Heart

It’s a shorthand we use, these preferences that define our lives. We’re morning people, or night people. We drink coffee or tea.  Some favor the sweet things in life; others seek out the tang of salt or the sharpness of spice. Entire advertising campaigns play to people’s passion for the PC or Mac, and in the sailing world there’s no avoiding the question: are you a cruiser, or a racer? How a sailor answers that question will determine a good bit, from choice of boat to the weekend schedule.

Racers generally commit themselves to light and fast, preferring Kevlar sails and carbon masts to canvas and wood – if the budget allows. Spending hard-earned dollars on new technologies, they push technology to its limits. Others, coping with older and heavier boats, ponder their PHRF ratings and do what they can to maximize performance.

Still, whether their vessel is a Sunfish, a J-Boat or a fully-fitted cruiser, racers share a few characteristics.  They’re tweakers at heart, constantly adjusting sail trim, seeking the currents and anticipating the wind.  Demanding of themselves and one another, they’re often focused to point of obsession. In the end, their goal is simple – to get from point A to Point B first, and in the shortest possible time.

Getting My Clock Cleaned

Stealing pears. Stealing watermelons. Smoking cigarettes out behind the barn. Tying together someone’s little sister’s shoelaces. Throwing crabapples at old man Wozniak’s house. It just was what boys did when I was growing up, and whenever they decided to do it again, whatever “it” was, any old folks who happened to notice would shake their heads knowingly. “Sure enough,” they’d say. “One of these days those boys are going to get their clocks cleaned.”

I wasn’t sure what the expression meant, or why stealing watermelons should bring about a clock-cleaning. Living as I did in one of those cleanliness-equals-godliness households, a clean clock sounded pretty good to me. But no one ever suggested a girl could get her clock cleaned, so I didn’t give it much thought. Eventually, the boys grew up and the old folks dissolved into the mists of time and memory, taking the phrase with them. I hadn’t heard it spoken for years until last week, when Ralph arrived at my door and said, “Howdy, Ma’am. I’m Ralph, from Chappell Jordan. I’m here to clean your clock.”

A Trip To the Land of the Great Serendip

As Thomas Cristensen puts it in his introduction to Horace Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales, the British art historian and man of letters was “about as odd as you would expect”, an exemplar of what Christensen calls a long-lived and somewhat peculiar strain of British tradition distinguished by “absurdity, ridicule, wordplay, wit, wickedness and plain madness”. Walpole’s most well-known work, The Castle of Otranto, is considered the first gothic novel, though at the time of its publication it was passed off by Walpole himself as a translation from the Italian.

Clearly, Walpole had plenty of energy and a taste for imaginative high-jinks.  When he wasn’t busy shepherding tourists through Strawberry Hill, his home outside London, he wrote  letters – volumes of letters, of all sorts.   One of the most famous was written in 1765, when Walpole faked a letter to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,who had fled persecution in Geneva and taken up residence in France.  Supposedly written by King Frederick of Prussia, the letter offered Rousseau refuge-with-a-twist. “I will cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take pride in being persecuted,” it said.  Rousseau first attributed the letter to Voltaire. Later, in England, as his paranoia increased, he suspected even his friend David Hume, and the letter played a role in a spectacular falling out between Hume and Rousseau.