A Gorgeous World of Water in Motion

I had the pleasure of meeting Rebecca Fogg today. Although, like many of us, she works at a "real job" by day, she is an artist who had made a career of exploring flowing forms of water. Her versatility is manifest in her beautiful work in etching, painting, photography and computer graphics.

Besides the tempting sample to the left, you can view a generous sampling of her work on her blog.

Rebecca has exhibited throughout the United States, as well as in Japan and Venezuela. But I'm looking forward to seeing something locally. She and her husband, woodworker Will Tait, have a show at the Hayward Regional Shoreline Interpretive Center through March 20.

Mixed Race People - Growing Like Crazy

The New York Times published a story about how college campuses have unprecedented numbers of multi-racial students. The Multiracial and Biracial Student Association at the University of Maryland is highlighted in the story.

I know about this--I live with a multi-racial college student--my son. His mother is African-American and I'm white/Jewish. This is a fine and attractive young man who is living in a time when he has something in common with the president of the United States.

Race is not necessarily ethnicity, as is brought out in the article and in my experience. My wife and I are not especially enthnically identified, which perhaps made marrying and living together easier. We have had nothing but acceptance and welcoming from both sides of our family in our 24-year relationship. We don't feel like anyone is looking at us oddly when we go places. Actually, I don't think a whole lot about it, unless I read a story in the New York Times and understand how much things have changed in the world.

Our son identifies himself as Black--and would likely be categorized that way by someone who meets him, but ethnically he's just a middle class American--not any particular color.

My other son is married to a beautiful woman who is half white and half Asian, which makes my granddaughter a quarter Asian. That's my all-American 21st-century family and I like it.

Eichler Homes--Midcentury Modern

I was driving by the local Eichler development and saw a sign--so I drove up the hill to the Greenridge development. There I saw a 1963 property available. It "needs TLC" but is reduced 90 grand below it's comparable models. Well...

I'm not looking for a new house, but I spent four years living in an Eichler home when I was a teenager. They are noted for being open plans, with lots of glass--but it wasn't in front, it was inside. Think Frank Lloyd Wright for the masses. Eichlers were often no more expensive than ordinary boring tract homes but gave a particular style.

We brought our colonial style furniture out from Connecticut and plopped it down into our brand new Eichler and it looked a bit out of place. But we got used to the flow of the glass walled atrium (garden). I spent some of my weekends washing windows with a squeege and a bucket. That's my stingray bike parked in front of our house in the photo.

Check out an Eichler if you have a chance (and live in California). Joseph Eichler developed thousands of them during the 1960s and 70s.

A Greenridge development Eichler

What's So Smart about Wisdom Teeth?

My son had his wisdom teeth pulled yesterday. Yowch! He took it like a man, no complaints, and now has chipmunk cheeks and is sipping yogurt smoothies instead of eating double quarter pounders with cheese.

I never had any wisdom teeth removed--only one showed up and the other three, well, they're still in there somewhere. I think at this stage of life I have accepted that I'm only 1/4 wise.

But I am visiting my dentist today to get my sixth crown. So my son and I will be dental buddies this weekend.

Yes, they're WAY back there--and nobody needs or wants them anymore.

I Remember the Challenger Disaster

It's hard to believe that the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up 25 years ago. Like anyone who was around then, I have memories of where I was when I heard it and how I felt afterwards. It's that sick feeling that I associate with a few other unnatural disasters in my life, including the Kennedy assassinations, John Lennon's murder and, of course, the most horrible thing to happen (to Americans) in my lifetime--the World Trade Center destruction on 9/11/2001.

I was getting ready for work in San Francisco. I was watching it on TV (as I recall) and saw the sickening "wrongness" of the spacecraft in flight. You know, after 25 years maybe my memories are unclear. I may not have seen the images until later. I do know that we all felt stunned during that workday. I just read that in that pre-Internet, pre-cell phone time, almost everyone knew about it almost instantly. Thank TV and radio, and lots of calls on the land lines.

I'd watched numerous other NASA space flight liftoffs, including John Glenn on our old black-and-white TV. Watching launches become a ritual familiar to my family. Early morning, groggy by the set, waiting and waiting for that one small event. "T-minus X minutes and counting" became a familiar phrase.

Astronauts are genuine heroes, even as they have become NASA employees doing various jobs in space today. They were especially heroic in the early days, when the risk was so extreme. We didn't expect these "routine" flights to ever go wrong, but as we all know now, two shuttles have vaporized in space.

So sad, so shocking. And we went on to launch many more, successfully.

Gordon Lightfoot Lives On

I have loved Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot's music since 1975, when my first wife bought me his Summertime Dream album. It contained a song I liked, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a lengthy maritime ballad of the loss of an iron freighter in a storm in Lake Superior. I later collected every LP I could find, and then CDs. Today, I listen to him on my iPod.

Lightfoot is a survivor. He drank in earlier years, but cleaned up and became quite healthy later. Good thing--it helped him live through an abdominal aortic aneurism that nearly killed him a number of years ago. His voice has faded considerably in recent years, but the man still puts on a great concert, and is still touring at 72. Live, he shows his warmth and humor--something his serious album cover portraits never brought out.

A big favorite is Song for a Winter's Night, recently covered by Sarah McLachlan.

In a book by Bob Mercereau, The Top 100 Canadian Singles. Lightfoot placed three songs in the top 20: If You Could Read My Mind at #7, The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald at #15, and Sundown at #19.

I Heard a Herd of Camels

It seemed innocent enough. I created a "camel noise" by squeezing my nostrils closed (as camels are famous for doing in sandy conditions) and emitting a loud snort with my head turned towards the sky. My first wife and I thought it was hilarious. (Well, maybe only I did.)

To celebrate this talent, she bought me a small ceramic figure of a seated camel--with two small packs containing, as it were, salt and pepper. Cute. I set it on a shelf at home.

Well, that's when the herd started forming. I found a camel here, a camel there. There were Camel cigarettes promotions, books about camels, posters. One Christmas/Chanukah holiday, I received nothing except camels from my relatives and friends. It was getting WAY out of hand. We even had a cute stuffed camel (Mr. Camel) who "talked" to our baby and had a position of honor on the sofa.

Before long I had a three-tier shelf bursting with camels of all kinds. If I had not separated from my wife a few years later, I might still be adding to my collection.

That original camel sits today in my kitchen window. Most of the rest are packed away. However, a couple of days ago I ran into a wonderful ceramic camel teapot at Molly Stone for only $14.95 and was tempted to start the whole thing over again. I have resisted (so far).