I am proud of my boy.

Alex graduated today. That night, he went on a road trip with his friends to a Slayer concert in East Rutherford, NJ. I am glad he went, but they planned not at all. I had to give them this map. I think their plan until that time was to just go north.

Here the graduates come into the hall. Girls in blue; boys in red. It was a beautiful day, warm but not too hot. We walked around DC near the Whitehouse after the ceremony.

Alex is happier now with the HS pressure gone. He is working at the local mulitplex and learning about the world of work. I think that going back to school will soon begin to look better.

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Returned from the annual family get together “Chickenfest”. Jerry and Tony Bozich do the cooking. My cousin Dorothy organizes the party. It has become a big event that a lot of people look forward to (how about that for great grammar dangling.)

It all starts with the chickens. Jerry seasons them from the inside out and then puts them on long pipes. They kind of get their heads stuck up their asses, a kind of Abu Ghraib for chickens. You can see from the picture. The machine is a local design. Jerry got some old man friend of his to make it. It is literally made of junk – pieces of metal that the old guy scavenged up. But it works well. The chickens cook slowly and the meat remains juicy. The result is chicken as good as I have had anywhere and better than most.

I personally still feel the pain from last year’s Chickenfest revelation when I learned that my grandfather was NOT a brew master, as I had always believed. He was, in fact, a candy maker. Beer . . . candy? Candy is not as cool. It wasn’t even famous candy like M&M, Three Musketeers or Milky Way. He made caramels and hard candies of dubious trademark. I really believed he was a brew master. Why? I thought he was a brew master because when he took the glory road he left a bottle of “Meisterbrau” (or brau meister – don’t recall exactly) beer in our fridge. My mother never threw it out and it dwelled permanently in the space between the catsup and mustard for at least twenty years. When we replaced our gas fridge with a new and improved electric one, the beer moved too. It was a fixture of the fridge. For as long as I could remember I saw that bottle every time I needed some cheese or coke and I ate a lot of cheese and drank a lot of coke. Meisterbrau was grandpa’s beer. I started associating Meisterbrau – brew master with my grandfather. We lived in Milwaukee, the most famous beer city of North America. The leap of imagination was a short one. Grandpa was a brew master. Meisterbrau, as I learned later, was not a good beer and not even made in Milwaukee. Its little known claim to distinction is that it was the precursor of all light beer. Meisterbrau tried unsuccessfully to make a light beer in the early 1970s. Miller bought Meisterbrau, tweaked the formula a little and created Miller Light. Anyway, I blame Meisterbrau as the source of my confusion. A lot of family histories are like that, I suspect. I am thinking of going with the original legend, maybe even embellish it with scandal to explain how we lost whatever great fortune we once enjoyed. Why tarnish the beauty of the thing with unnecessary accuracy.
Whether the old guy was a brew master or not, Beer was and is still a big part of family gatherings, but beer drinking is a declining art among us. The older generation failed to pass the torch. In days of yore, the men (they were real men in those days) would sit around a keg of beer and drink prodigious amounts of the liquid bread. Past, present and future blurred into a soft amber glow. In the parlance of the time, they would all get a snoot full. Now the our gatherings are relatively sober affairs. We still have our share of characters, as you can see from the pictures. Everyone is healthier, however, and that is a good thing. The beer now comes in bottles and cans and there is greater variety. You count cans and bottles individually. Bottles slow the drinking. The keg tended to facilitate sluckin it down, as cups held more than a standard can and you tended to fill it up again before it was empty. In other words, you never really knew how much you were drinking because you had a bottomless cup.

Milwaukee was especially pleasant during my visit, with highs in the seventies with low humidity and a breeze off the lake. I drove around a little and ended up near Whitnall Park. I used to ride my bike to Whitnall Park along Grange Avenue. I don’t recognize most of the way any more. What used to be a country road is now a suburban street, but some is preserved as park. Just past 76th Street stands Jeremiah Curtin’s house and an old lime factory. Jeremiah Curtin was a moderately famous linguist, who wrote a history of the Mongols and translated Szienkeiwicz (for those less up on Polish culture, he wrote “Quo Vadis” and won a Nobel prize in literature about 100 years ago.) Above are pictures of the old lime farm. It is that quintessential Wisconsin style. The house is made out of crème city brick, the kind you can find only around Milwaukee. The other building is stone. It would be nice to make a community in a place like that.

I went down to my old running trail in Grant/Warnemont Park. It is a really nice running trail with a little roll but nothing a reasonable person could call a hill. I ran the distance in 24:21, which is 25% slower than I used to run it when I wore a younger man’s shoes, but it was still fun. That trail was a solace through the worst of my unsuccessful job searching back in the early 1980s. I think I applied at every major firm in North America. They were amused, but not interested. The more rejection letters I got, the farther I ran. I was probably in the best aerobic condition of my life. Sometimes I ran all the way through Grant Park to the Root River Parkway, about 12 miles. I am fatter now and I can't run that far. I blame the economy. The economy has not been that bad since then, so I have no compulsion to run very far. The trail has changed a lot since I started there. A very big oak tree that used to guard one of the kinks in the trail died some time back. Most of the birch trees have died and even the stumps have rotted into compost. A birch forest is ephemeral everywhere, but especially around here. Individual trees don’t live long and won't reproduce naturally in southeastern Wisconsin.

The trail used to run through a mixed meadow and forest that looked like the ecosystem you would expect 100 miles farther north. Whether through indolence or design, the park system has let some places return to nature. I used to think that letting things return to nature was an unmitigated blessing, but on reflection I recall a beautiful view of the lake around the second trail bend, kind of a v shaped field with wild flowers framed by tamarack trees. It looked natural, but was not. It takes a lot of planning to be spontaneous and somebody planned it well.

Tamaracks are not native to this part of Wisconsin, so they must have been planted about forty years ago. They backed up against the native basswoods and maples and looked really good especially in the fall, when their gold needles burned against the crimson of the maples. The park system also planted some Austrian pines “randomly” in the fields about the same time. They stayed dark green through the year. It was a work of art. The tamaracks and pines are still there, but you can't see them unless you look closely in the bushes. The exquisite interaction of tamarack, maple and pine is now replaced by the pea green banality of the box elder. Some of the box elders and ash reach about 20 or 30 feet. Box elders are nice in their place (generally next to rusty railroad tracks and pushing up through the ruins of abandoned warehouses next to rusty railroad tracks) but I never did like their unique fragrance and they block the view. That’s not good. I loved to watch the lake and the joys and sorrows of its changing face. Natural succession won't stop, of course. The box elders are transition species. Some of the ash trees will remain but in about fifty years maples, basswoods and maybe a couple of beeches, will cover the whole place. I won't see that and nobody will see the lake through them.

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Happy New Year!

A lot has changed since last year when I wrote from Warsaw. We moved from Poland to New Hampshire via a trip across the U.S. I documented the trip on other parts of this webpage. This is what we are doing now.

We have been living in Londonderry, New Hampshire since September. Londonderry is an exurb, i.e. it has the population density of a rural area, but the demographic characteristics of a suburb. It is a good mix for us. I like the forests and fields, but we are fundamentally a city people. Our house overlooks a pond surrounded by a mixed white pine - maple forest. The water is dark because of geology and soils similar to northern Wisconsin’s. In the middle of the day the sun reflecting off the ripples turns the water into liquid sunshine and near the end of the day it reflects the trees like a mirror. It reflected the green leaves of summer and the crimson fall. Now all except the pine trees are bare and the pond is covered with snow. We got more than two feet of snow on December 7. It melted, but it snowed a couple of feet the next week. Now that has melted. I bought cross-country skis on December 6. I had to break my own trail, but it was good to get into the winter woods between melts.

These are some pictures from our back door showing the pond in some of its aspects.

Family Notes
Mariza is doing well at Mary Washington College. She got all As this year, except for one B. The teacher told her that he does not believe in grade inflation. I thought that was a good principle. I went over to McDonald’s and told them that I did not believe in inflation, but they still would not give me a hamburger for 15 cents. The class she got a B in was sociology, ironically the subject that invented grade inflation. I am proud that she is taking the hard classes. She got 93% in her calculus course. The school is very small and homogeneous. That is what we thought would be the good part, but the college and Fredericksburg are a little too small, so she is now considering moving to a bigger place. UVA is the leading option.

Alex is doing well at his new school in Londonderry. He evidently feels confident enough to argue academically with his history teacher, who seems to be a bit of an uninformed leftist. Alex is less enthusiastic about geometry and Spanish, but he is doing well in chemistry. A couple years back, at the American School in Warsaw, he had a tough science class. A lot of what he learned then is serving him now. He has been lifting weights regularly and is getting very beefy. I want him to start running, to get the other part of conditioning.

Espen is getting As and Bs. He seems to have the easiest time learning Spanish and the saxophone. I think the music and language skills are related and he is doing very well in both. The sweet music of the sax filters up from the basement. Often I can actually identify a melody in the cacophony and he is becoming noticeably better each day. The sax is actually a fairly complicated instrument, with lots of valves and holes. As a completely talent free individual, I am impressed by anyone who can make music in any way beyond whistling.

Chrissy has been working on the house and it is getting much better. She has been patching, fixing, painting and even some plumbing and electrical work. She is getting very good at these things. We still are not sure whether we will sell the house or try to rent it out. Either way, it is better to have a well-maintained house. One of Chrissy’s favorite TV show is “Trading Spaces” where neighbors change houses and renovate each other’s rooms. Professional designers, who generally inflict appalling designs on the unsuspecting homeowners, advise them. I worry sometimes that CJ likes some of them, but she has shown exemplary taste so far in our house. Below are house repairs. We put in a new tile floor. It was a lot of work tearing it up.

My assignment at Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts is great. I often wonder why the USG is paying me to do this. I have access to courses at Tufts, Harvard and MIT but don’t have to take the tests. I am learning a lot, some of which will be useful to the State Department but most of it is just – well – general education. In the last couple of days, for example, I attended a presentation on weapons of mass destruction, more or less related to my job, but I also attended a talk by a psychologist on how machines (and pets) can be programmed to mimic human emotion and spent a couple of hours at one of the Harvard museums learning about Rubens and his contemporaries. I will earn some of my salary spring semester, when I will teach a course on the U.S. image abroad. I have been reading and talking to people about the subject. I am recruiting a mix of students from various places in the world to make the discussion provocative. That picture of me is from the Fletcher webpage. They took a picturesque group, I think.

You can get a good education just living in the Boston area because of the free lectures and historical sites. I have been recruiting for the State Department. It is not too hard. We have many more applicants than places. I was a little surprised at the extent of the interest even at places like Harvard and Yale, where students have excellent job prospects. Students want to serve their country and they seem to like the fact that they have to pass a difficult test to get in the FS. (The only problem for the Department is that not enough “diversity candidates” pass the FS test.) Don’t believe the negative stories about today’s youth. Compared to my generation, they are smarter, harder working, healthier, and more tolerant. The drug and booze culture of my college days is considered old fashioned.

One of the most interesting things about living in NH is the primary election. All the candidates come up here and I have been going to see them. I am volunteering for the Edward’s campaign. I don’t think he will win the nomination and I intend to vote Republican, but there is no Republican race. Edwards is the best of the Democrats and it is good experience to participate in a campaign. Howard Dean will probably win. I really don’t like Howard Dean. We went to see him in Manchester. He is one of the few people who I like less after I got to see him in person. He is an angry little man. Literally a little man – he is about Espen’s size and build. People sitting next to me gave me dirty looks when I didn’t cheer for some of the stupid platitudes he repeated. When you get beyond his anger against George Bush, there is not much left. I don’t think it will be a good thing if he is nominated. The country needs both parties to be strong. Bush will beat Dean like Nixon beat McGovern. Such lopsided victories lead to arrogance. Edwards could appeal to a wider constituency, but it is not his year.

I got my next job lined up in Washington. I will be “Director for the Office of International Information Programs for Europe and Eurasia (IIP) – Eurasia just means the former Soviet Union. My group does speakers, digital videoconferences and Internet for the region. I also broadly oversee (in State Department jargon, I am the reviewing officer) regional information resource centers in Europe. I am hoping to get to do inspection tours – maybe Norway and Ireland in the summer and Italy, Portugal and Spain in the winter. That would be sweet. I am hoping to use some of what learned at Fletcher to improve the U.S. image.

I will get back to Washington on June 21. I will miss New Hampshire and Boston, but Northern Virginia is more like home. The kids are looking forward to seeing their old friends. Summers in Washington are hot and horrible, but spring and fall are really nice and winter is mild. We will probably move back into the townhouse in Vienna, VA.

Below are mixed photos. Top are Londonderry crossroads. CJ and Alex walking among the stone walls so common around here. Below are the kids at Christmas and Mariza taking her usual naps. Mariza has asked me to clarify. She was not merely taking a nap because she was lazy. She had her wisdom teeth pulled. Even with today’s modern dentistry, that is uncomfortable and tends to make you want to sleep off the pain.

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We visited Mariza's future school - Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg. It is a cute place (pictures below). Everything is neat, clean and well maintained. It looks exactly as you would expect a college in the middle Atlantic south to look. There are only about 5000 students at the school and all the courses are taught by professors, not teaching assistants as we used to get at the big Midwestern universities I attended. (I lost a lot of respect for teaching assistants when they gave me that job at U of M. I knew less than some of the students I evaluated.)

The city of Fredericksburg is also cute and historic. It reminds me of Alexandria. It is about as old as Alexandria, (founded in 1728), although not as aristocratic looking. It was more a working or commercial town. The city originally handled sea commerce that sailed up the Rappahannock River, until seagoing boats got too big for the shallow river harbor to accommodate. Fredericksburg is best known for the battle that took place there in December 1862. Wave after wave of Union troops attacked Confederates well entrenched behind a stone wall. Many of the deadliest battles of the Civil War took place within a short distance of the city, which made the mistake of being about equal distance between Richmond and Washington. According to what I read, about 100,000 men fell in the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania and the Wilderness, all within a long hike from each other. The armies passed this way many times and battles were fought over the same ground. Soldiers in 1864 had the unpleasant experience of coming across the remains of comrades from the last conflicts. It is hard to envision the carnage now on the peaceful and pretty forests and fields.

Chrissy and Mariza try to decide who is taller. I think the contest was long ago decided. This is one of the buildings on campus. Most of the others look similar - red brick and white pillars. They could use some ivy on the walls. Everything is "Gone with the Wind" style. This is a pleasant campus. I think you can walk from one end to the other in about ten minutes, so it should not be too hard for her to get to classes.

These are dorms. They are much nicer than the dumps I had to live in when I was in college. There was also a lot of snow in those days and it was colder. I had to walk many miles to class - up hill both ways. Kids today have it too easy.

A street scene in Fredericksburg. This city has more antique shops per foot than any other place I have ever seen. Parking is a problem. Fortunately, Mary Washington does not allow freshmen to have cars. The town center is about a ten-minute walk from the campus.

The stone wall. It was not so peaceful in 1862. I would not want to run up that hill while people were shooting at me. The battle took place in December. Virginia is not a particularly cold place, but it is frozen in December. Some of the injured men froze to death on the field in front of the stone wall.

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