Porpoise on My Tail

“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail,
“There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.”
    —Lewis Carroll, “The Lobster-Quadrille,” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I finished my walk about two minutes faster this morning than I have the past few mornings, in large part because there was a porpoise behind me. (Actually, I thought of her as a lobster because I was remembering the quotation wrong, but that’s neither here nor there.) I’ll get to that later.

It was a reasonably pleasant morning, and there were quite a few other people out running, walking, biking, and airing their dogs. I find it interesting to observe the reactions of people as they meet or overtake other walkers, runners, bikers, motorists, etc. I have noted the following:

By and large we’re a friendly bunch. In general, almost all walkers, as well as most runners and bikers, will at least wave or nod or at least smile to acknowledge others they encounter. This includes neighbors working in their yards or sitting on their porches and most motorists, though the latter usually on faith, since tinted windshields make it impossible in most cases to know whether or not the driver has responded (or in fact may have waved first).

Walkers encountering one another will usually exchange a word or two, “Good morning” (or just “morning” if they’re out of breath) at minimum; sometimes the exchange will extend to a few brief pleasantries about the weather. In most cases walkers don’t want to break stride, so the window for remarks is small, but the mood is cordial.

I’m usually surprised when a walker doesn’t respond. There is one woman (I call her “the crooked woman” because, although quite young, she is a little bent to one side) who assiduously avoids eye contact, keeping her head down and averted. I’ve never been sure whether she’s aloof, meditating, or just painfully shy. Very occasionally she will nod or mutter a word or two, but this is very rare. Mothers strolling infants, on the other hand, tend to be especially responsive.

Bikers sometimes come along in twos or threes, but most walkers and runners I encounter are alone. There’s one large group of runners that I believe must be part of a track team, but they’re the exception. I find that pairs and couples are somewhat less responsive than solitary walkers. Married couples are usually not too wrapped up in each other; sometimes they’re chatting desultorily but more often silent. (There’s one couple in which the woman is always striding out front and her husband, red-faced and panting, doing his best to keep up with her. I don’t know whether she’s promoting his health or trying to kill him.) Such couples will usually greet me, but I often find myself entirely ignored by a pair of women walking together. There is an ideal distance at which to make eye contact, to avoid the necessity of having to speak prematurely (it’s early morning, so we don’t want to have to raise our voices too loud), but these people avoid eye contact up to and entirely beyond that point. I’m sure they don’t realize they seem unfriendly; they’re just carrying on a conversation they have no desire to interrupt.

But meeting people going in the opposite direction is an easy situation compared to overtaking or joining people going in the same direction. For the most part, I find that we almost universally try to avoid it. Most of us have our established routes, and many of us, like me, are walking for exercise and trying for a bit of speed (invariably, though, on a day when I am bidding fair to beat my personal best, some motorist will stop and ask me for directions, or a neighbor will want to strike up a conversation, or a long line of motorists will decline to stop for a crosswalk). Walking with another person requires some amount of adaptation—walking slower or faster, possibly going a different route, engaging in perhaps more conversation than acquaintance warrants. So if someone is walking past my house in the direction I intend to go when I get to the front door, I’ll hesitate a few seconds before going out. If a walker in front of me turns left, I may decide to turn right instead (I do have some decision points where I can vary my route). There’s nothing more awkward than having another person walking just in front of you or just behind you. In both cases I find myself speeding up to either outdistance or overtake and pass the other person.

This morning, as I headed into the home stretch, I passed a woman I had seen fairly often, but until I ran into her at a neighborhood fundraiser recently, I hadn’t known where she lived. Our conversation there had been brief and fumbling. Now here she was, in her driveway, just setting out on her walk. Although she was bent over doing something with her socks and didn’t acknowledge my passing, I think she had to have seen me out of the corner of her eye, and that’s probably why she took a few extra seconds to adjust her socks before hitting the street. Then she stepped out behind me, and I was very conscious, especially every time I turned a corner, that she was just a few yards behind, “treading on my tail.” I’m not sure where I lost her (she evidently turned off before I reached my street), but she certainly spurred me to unusual speed!

Celebrity, Neologisms, and the Weirdness of Dreams

For a number of years I’ve been corresponding fairly regularly, first by mail and now by email, with Gene Owens, a journalist formerly with the (Mobile, Alabama) Press-Register and now semi-retired and living in South Carolina. Gene writes a column that is published in our paper as “Bubba’s English” and elsewhere as “Greasepit Grammar.” As a frequent contributor, I’ve achieved a modest amount of local celebrity. Even people I’ve never met will recognize me by name as “Bubba’s Fairhope friend” or know that I am a “grammar maven.” Whenever Gene uses one of my contributions, I can count on at least a couple of people mentioning it to me. Once even my husband (who I thought never read the column) startled me by saying, “Well, I see you made it into print again today.” This can add a certain fillip to an otherwise dull day.

Apparently now this celebrity is extending to my nights. Twice lately I’ve had dreams in which someone pointed out to me a newspaper article in which my name came up in reference to a question about the meaning of the word “nezerity.” In at least one case, the word seemed to be in some way related to Star Trek. The more awake I become, the more preposterous this word appears, but in the dreamlike semi-wakefulness that followed the dream, I seem to have decided that the word meant “a non-zero amount.”

As I walked today, I considered further how absurd this notion is. In the first place, I hasten to say that there is no such word as “nezerity.” Although Google turns up two hits for the word as a name, it’s extremely unlikely that I would have run across it this way. It doesn’t even look like an English or Latinate word. And, to the extent that it (to me at least) seems more likely to suggest a quantity rather than a number or amount, it doesn’t make sense, since “zero” is a word related to number, not quantity.

So where on earth (or outside of it) did the word come from? The human brain is mysterious enough even when it is conscious, but the things we come up with in our dreams can still astound us. I suppose it is a good thing, overall, that our capacity for self-entertainment seems to be unlimited, and it is probably also a good thing that our dreams give us such oddities to wonder about.

Between the Lines

This morning while walking I noticed how I was automatically stepping over all the seams and cracks in the pavement, unconsciously shortening or lengthening my stride to do this. Why do we do this? I know why I do it. Early in life I was told, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” To this was sometimes added “Step on a line, break your mother’s spine.”

This lesson was no doubt reinforced by hearing the poem “Lines and Squares” from A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young (published 1924), in which the narrator (assumed to be Christopher Robin, i.e., Christopher Milne) says:

Whenever I walk in a London street,
I’m ever so careful to watch my feet;
    And I keep in the squares,
    And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street
    Go back to their lairs,
    And I say to them, “Bears,
    Just look how I’m walking in all the squares!”

And the little bears growl to each other, “He’s mine,
As soon as he’s silly and steps on a line.”
And some of the bigger bears try to pretend
That they came round the corner to look for a friend;
And they try to pretend that nobody cares
Whether you walk on the lines or squares.
But only the sillies believe their talk;
It’s ever so portant how you walk.
And it’s ever so jolly to call out, “Bears,
Just watch me walking in all the squares!”

Given my obsessive-compulsive nature, it is not surprising that I am still avoiding cracks and lines, even though my mother died in 2002, her back somewhat deformed by osteoporosis but otherwise sound. That’s why I do it. But how did this superstition get started?

Naturally, Google has a number of answers, most of them inconclusive. One suggestion, repeated verbatim in a number of places but entirely unsupported by references, implies racial overtones. Several sources describe it (again without any documentation, not to mention logical explanation) as an outgrowth of the “corner bears” superstition. This is interesting, since it is not clear whether Milne invented this superstition or merely recorded it.

A Google Books result for Miss Mary Mack: And Other Children’s Street Rhymes, by Joanna Cole and Stephanie Calmenson, expands the familiar rhyme as follows (p. 48):

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.
Step on a line, break your mother’s spine.
Step in a hole, break your mother’s sugar bowl.
Step in a ditch, your mother’s nose will itch.

Although this could plausibly be a jump-rope rhyme, it seems to be more closely associated with hopscotch. A Canadian source adds, “Step on a nail [in a wooden boardwalk], you’ll put your father in jail.” A ListServ exchange documents references to this superstition in print as early as 1917 (quoting someone reminiscing about childhood), so it’s not too much of a stretch to assume it was current in the late nineteenth century, if not earlier.

But where does the whole concept come from? It seems reasonable that the “game” (as some describe it) or superstition or ritual would not predate pavement; most people don’t seem to associate it with natural cracks in unpaved earth. But could it perhaps derive from such cracks? As I walked this morning (before doing all this googling), I wondered if perhaps some primitive instinct warns us that where there is a crack, a crevice or even a crevasse might open, that a crack might indicate some instability in the earth, a fault line of some kind. If one stepped on such a crack, one might suddenly find oneself down in a hole. I suppose this is pretty farfetched, but it is what I was thinking!

I’ve Been Thinking…

Really I have. Unfortunately, none of the things I’ve been thinking have been worth writing about. Or at least I can’t seem to make them “jell” into a reasonable blog post. Since no one is reading this blog, anyway, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

Walk/Don’t Walk

Although Fairhope is a small town (population about 15,000), it is not so small that we don’t have traffic signals. Indeed, some residents might say we have too many “stoplights.” We also do a very nice line in tree-shaded, flower-bedecked sidewalks and handicap-accessible crosswalks. What we do not have, however, even at the busiest intersections, is pedestrian crossing signals. So it was a novelty, when walking in Portland, Oregon, to encounter the latest high-tech version of these Walk/Don’t Walk lights.

There is probably no reader who has not seen some version of such a signal, whether it had just the words WAIT (red) and WALK (green) or icons (uplifted hand vs. “walking man”). To tell the truth, I hardly noticed what sort of icons the signals in Portland had, as I was so distracted by other phenomena. One is evidently intended to aid the vision-impaired. When the way is clear, not only does the light change, but a speaker somewhere begins to blast, “The walk light is ON! The walk light is ON!” This continues for a (very) few repetitions, invariably ending, “The walk light is—”

Despite all Portland’s accommodations for the disabled, only the fleet of foot should attempt to cross a street while the walk light is ON. The cycle is quite short. To make matters even worse, some signals almost immediately begin a countdown from 10 to 1, the numbers displayed on the signal. One might argue that this gives one fair warning of the time remaining, but it just made me more anxious.

Even a walk signal doesn’t ensure complete safety for pedestrians since there is always the chance that a motorist will be turning right or left across one’s path. Fortunately, however, as mentioned earlier, Portland motorists are (as they are legally required to be) considerate of pedestrians. And of course, even in Portland, pedestrians will chance a crossing against the light when traffic is clear (bringing to mind the adage that in New York City “Don’t Walk” means “Run”).

Here in Fairhope, the walk/don’t walk decision has a different meaning for me: Do I walk today or not? I’ve already said that I don’t walk when it’s raining. I could state that I don’t walk in inclement weather, but that would be foolish, as no reasonable person would consider the weather here “clement” in summer (approximately May to September). With temperatures rising into the high 90s (F.) during the day, it behooves one to get out early, but even that doesn’t help when the overnight low is 80° and the air outside feels like soup. The inside temperature may be exactly the same but feel ten degrees cooler because of the reduced humidity. One can break a sweat just going out for the morning paper (and yes, I know that horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow, but here on the Gulf Coast in the summer, everybody sweats).

It was a relatively mild 75° when I got up this morning, but I will not be walking today anyway. I try not to slack off for trivial reasons, but I paid $70 for a new permanent yesterday, and I don’t want to spoil it. Although my hairdresser knows how I feel about hairspray and usually uses a light hand, yesterday she lacquered my new do into a stiff shell that I can hardly run a comb through, and I am not inclined to mash it down with a cap or inundate it with “glow.”

So my new perm will make a more or less undamaged appearance at my Rotary meeting today, my ballet class tomorrow morning, and a Microsoft Word Q&A session at the library tomorrow afternoon, and then I’ll get back to the morning grind on Friday. Perhaps that will give me something new to report here.

Walking and Agility

“Monday’s child is fair of face / Tuesday’s child is full of grace…”

As a child born on Tuesday, I kept hoping someday I would be graceful. By the time I learned that the rhyme referred to spiritual grace, I had pretty much accepted that physical grace was going to be an unattainable goal. In junior high, my P.E. teachers rather cruelly told me they’d voted me the Second Most Uncoordinated Girl in School (the Most Uncoordinated actually had a physical disability). My clumsiness was probably due at least in part to nearsightedness. Having grown up in an era before contact lenses, I’ve worn glasses since third grade, and, between lack of peripheral vision and worry about breaking glass lenses, my childhood was spent avoiding sports as much as possible. Allergies and asthma, which developed in my teen years, didn’t help at all. I took tennis for three quarters in college and never did get to the point where I could return the ball, though I frequently got completely out of breath running after it.

Now, even after more than twenty years in a ballet class, I am not and never will be graceful. But I used at least to be able to walk without falling down or running into things. Alas! encroaching age has affected not only strength and flexibility but also balance, and now I seem to lurch from point A to point B, almost guaranteed to trip over anything in my path. There are many more hazards in my cluttered house, though, than on the streets and sidewalks where I take my daily constitutional, so it’s pretty safe. Walking neither requires nor particularly develops physical agility, but I would like to think it might promote mental agility, providing time for me to mull things over.

“Agile” is quite the buzzword these days. A Google search for “agile technology” takes 0.22 seconds to find about 297,000 results. There are companies named “Agile Technologies,” “Agile Technology Solutions,” and even “Agilent Technologies,” where “Agilent” presumably is meant to imply agility. The ability to turn on a dime is vital in today’s rapidly changing economy.

But flexibility, or spontaneity, is valuable in many aspects of life. Life frequently doesn’t go as planned, and the ability to alter course and keep pressing toward the goal, or to change the goal as required, is certainly a valuable one. The first is something that GPS systems evidently do well: take a wrong turn and the GPS plots a new course and, in a calm voice, instructs you on how to correct your error. (If the GPS were as human as it sounds, there are some direction-challenged or impetuous drivers who would undoubtedly try its patience!)

I thought about this a lot yesterday. It was a ballet day, so I wasn’t walking. As usual, I was running late for class, with barely enough time to dress and run out the door, when I got a call from a client. What he needed was unreasonable (not his fault—unreasonable demands were being made on him by his client) and was going to throw a monkey wrench into my plan for the day. So I headed off to class already irritable, reminded of the poster at the top of the stairs in the studio: “I might as well exercise—I’m in a bad mood anyway.”

As I approached the studio door, however, one of the other students came out, reporting that class had been canceled (for reasons that are still unknown). Well, great! I had made an appointment for 10:30, intending to go straight from the studio to my late father’s house, where I was to meet some men who would collect a sofa we were donating. Now I had over an hour before that appointment.

This actually worked out pretty well. I was able to shower and dress and get some other work done, and then my husband and I went by the house at 10:30 on our way to other places in the same general direction, thus combining trips and saving gasoline. But I couldn’t get over the feeling that my day had been knocked into a cocked hat. It didn’t help that this was the third straight day on which such events had occurred, and I was getting pretty grumpy about it. Times of constant interruption and distraction such as I’ve had this past week are what my father used to describe as feeling “nibbled to death by ducks.”

Although my physical flexibility lessens constantly, I’d like to see an increase in mental flexibility and spontaneity. I’d like to be better able to roll with the punches. I’d like to be more open to new ideas and techniques. I’d like to learn new technologies and not so bitterly lament the passing of familiar ones (Word 2003’s toolbars!). I think I am improving somewhat in spontaneity, at least: I’m much more likely now to be willing to go somewhere on the spur of the moment. In fact, I almost prefer it, since having more lead time just causes me to overplan and fret. Don’t expect me ever to welcome a surprise party (Please! Let me be sure my hair looks nice!), but even though my initial reaction to any proposal is usually negative, if you just wait a while and ask again, I’ll usually come around. After telling you all the reasons why what you ask is impractical or even impossible or too much trouble, I’ll just do it—and then brag about how easy it was!

House Plans

One of the benefits of walking (as opposed to running, which my husband does and I might do if my arthritic knees would permit it) is that I am able to observe changes in the neighborhood. Someone has planted new flowers or is adding a fence. Someone’s house is being painted or his roof repaired. People move out; other people move in. But one of the things I most enjoy is following the progress of new construction. I’ve always been fascinated by housing construction, dating at least back to age nine when we lived in a new subdivision in Louisville, Kentucky, and a house was going up across the street from us. I loved to watch the carpenters (who used real hammers and hand saws then, not nail guns and circular saws) and other workers as the house took shape.

In my neighborhood, by rights there wouldn’t be any new construction. When we moved here in 1980, there wasn’t, as far as I know, a single vacant lot (except for those next to houses built on a double lot). Recently, however, there has been a massive redevelopment effort. When we moved into our house, previous owners had added onto it several times, and it was probably the largest one on the block. Since then our neighbors on both sides (and others farther down the street in both directions) have essentially doubled their houses with additions. Of the thirteen houses on our block, five have been added onto, but five have been totally demolished (one after it had been added onto) and been replaced by new construction.

Our block is by no means unique in this respect. Our town was founded in 1894 (though there was settlement here earlier than that), and most of the houses in our neighborhood were built in the early to mid-twentieth century, many of them as vacation cottages but most as fairly modest single-story homes on relatively small lots. Now this area, which is on a bluff overlooking Mobile Bay, has become extremely desirable, and people with more dollars than sense are paying half a million dollars or more for these small houses just to tear them down and replace them with two-story houses built as tall and as close to the property lines as the zoning regulations allow.

Many of the houses thus destroyed are no real loss—architecturally undistinguished and with no historical value—but the neighborhood occasionally still gets up in arms about the McMansions that supplant them. To be fair, most of these new homes are quite tasteful; many of them reflect the vernacular architecture (to the extent that there is any) so well that within a few years they appear to have been here forever. Others are monstrosities. But they all intrigue me when they are being built.

As soon as the slab is poured or the foundation built and the walls laid out, I like to explore the new homesite and try to figure out the layout of the planned house. As the framing goes up and plumbing and wiring are added, I get additional clues. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to find actual builder’s plans. But often there are rooms whose purpose remains a mystery. One of the houses on this block has a second-story room with no windows and plumbing for a lavatory but no toilet. So not a bathroom; I wondered if perhaps it was intended as a darkroom. I don’t suppose I’ll ever find out.

My current mystery is a room that contains all the breaker boxes (three) for the house. One might think it would be the utility room, but the connections for the washer and dryer, as well as access to the furnace or heat pump, are in an adjacent room. Possibly the room will be an office or sewing room. If so, I think more than two electrical outlets would be desirable. Or perhaps it will be a pantry or butler’s pantry (it’s near the kitchen). I’m hoping time will ultimately tell. I’ll continue to explore the house (usually on Sunday mornings when work crews are not present) until I can no longer do so (luckily door locks are usually among the last finishing touches on new construction).

I tell myself (as I used to do when I cut out house plans from the Sunday paper) that I am collecting ideas for my dream house. At this point, it’s pretty clear we’ll never move or build, and I’m stuck with the house we’re in (though perhaps we’ll at least get around to some sort of massive renovation), but I still love seeing what people are doing in their new houses. Large bathrooms are currently much in vogue, almost all with a separate shower and whirlpool tub. All the master baths have separate lavatories for Him and Her, but what I liked even better were the entirely separate His and Hers bathrooms in one house built (by a building contractor for himself) several years ago. To me that would be real luxury!

The Elephant in My Head

I’ve been thinking about elephants a lot lately.

Elephants are so massive (one might even say “mammoth,” but I’ll resist the temptation) that it’s not surprising that they make a memorable impression on anyone who has seen one. Not only have they left their mark on history (Hannibal crossing the Alps) and entertainment (what would a circus—or a circus parade—be without elephants?), but they have entered the English language in several colorful idioms. An unwanted and unusable gift is a “white elephant,” and we supposedly see pink elephants when we’re tipsy. The unpleasant fact that is staring everyone in the face but no one wants to talk about is “the elephant in the room.” And we tackle an overwhelming task by “eating the elephant,” one bite at a time.

At the moment I’m facing a lot of elephants that have to be eaten, but the elephant that has captured my thoughts lately is the one the blind men visited. Until I googled the subject, I wasn’t aware that this tale is an ancient Asian fable or parable, the moral or point of which, as expressed by Wikipedia, is that “reality may be viewed differently depending upon one’s perspective, suggesting that what seems an absolute truth may be relative due to the deceptive nature of half-truths.” My familiarity with the story, however, came from the nineteenth-century poem by John Godfrey Saxe, which begins:

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

Each of the six men explores a different part of the elephant and comes to a different conclusion, pronouncing that the elephant “is very like” a wall (its side), a spear (its tusk), a snake (its trunk), a tree (its leg), a fan (its ear), or a rope (its tail). Although each of the men grasped a part of the truth of the elephant, none of them saw the big picture.

What has brought this to mind lately is reflecting on the nature of personality, personal history, and autobiography. Throughout our lives we have many experiences and meet many people. We share certain experiences—and certain types of experiences—with certain people. If we have siblings, we share a large body of family history with them, experiences that no one outside the family can truly appreciate. If we are married, we have another tremendous body of shared experience in common with our spouses. Our work colleagues may be very familiar with our work projects but know nothing about our personal life. Some acquaintances we see only in church or on the soccer field or at PTA meetings. Our neighbors we may know only enough to wave to, perhaps to exchange pleasantries with. Each relative, friend, or acquaintance may know a great deal about us (our family, our history, our accomplishments), but no single person knows us as we know ourselves, and by the time most of us start thinking about writing an autobiography, those few people who may know things about us that we don’t personally remember (our parents and other elders) are usually past being consulted.

It’s probably a good thing that no one knows everything about us, but as we start to write an autobiography, we have to think about what things we want people to know and remember, what sort of historical legacy we want to leave for our heirs.

In many ways autobiography is harder than biography. The biographer, especially of a long-dead subject, has a finite amount of source material to work from. Interpreting it may be problematic, especially if the subject is a controversial figure, but the problem is primarily one of collecting data. If the subject is still living, or recently dead, the writer may interview people who knew him or her, but, like the blind men, each of these relatives, friends, or acquaintances will have known the subject in only a given context, and the writer’s job is to put all these details together. The task of the autobiographer, on the other hand, who theoretically knows everything about himself, is to winnow out the superfluous details and present a consistent picture.

It is practically a given that I will eventually write an autobiography. Both my grandmothers wrote them; they also wrote biographies of my grandfathers. Both my grandmothers also wrote about their fathers-in-law and one about her father and grandfather. My mother wrote her autobiography and would very likely, if she had lived long enough, have written a biography of my father as well. I’ve already written several short autobiographical essays, thinking perhaps to collect them at some point. It’s a family tradition, and the desire to preserve our memories is evidently in our genes.

I definitely have ample source material. I am in the dubiously enviable (and I think relatively rare) position of having not only every single letter I ever wrote my parents (mostly from 1962 when I went off to college, but a few scattered earlier ones from summer vacations spent away from them) but also every single letter my mother wrote to her parents, in which she describes me and my younger brothers and recounts our activities (sadly, these letters don’t cover my first year, when my mother was living at home; the equally detailed letters she wrote to my father, who was with the Fifth Army in Italy, went to the bottom of the China Sea in a typhoon; luckily Dad was on a different ship!). Although my letters to my mother ended when she and Dad moved to Fairhope in the spring of 1991, in the fall of 1992 my son went off to college, and I have copies of my letters to him and later to my daughter, through 1999. Obviously a wealth, perhaps a surfeit, of raw data to supplement my own memories.

“Eating the elephant” in this case requires deciding what picture of myself I want to present and selecting the details that will help to portray this. To get to that point I will have to figure out what my life was “about,” and I don’t think I’m at that point yet, but from time to time I read books on writing autobiography and continue to collect ideas for presentation. One influential book I read several years ago was Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story: Writing the New Autobiography, which helps writers find the “story” their lives have to tell, making the autobiography read like a novel. Currently I’m reading Writing from Life: Telling Your Soul’s Story, by Susan Wittig Albert (one of my favorite mystery writers), which takes a topical approach, suggesting a number of broad themes to explore, and I find that quite appealing, as it is not entirely unlike the way I had begun.

Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying exploring and transcribing the original material my parents (and grandparents) left in the form of letters and diaries, which give a vivid picture of their lives, their thoughts, and the world around them. But that is a subject for another post.

White Nights in Portland

One of the aspects of Portland that took us by surprise (though quite unreasonably since it’s not as if we were ignorant of the phenomenon) was the length of the days. Afternoons seemed to stretch on endlessly, and although our body clocks should have been telling us it was two hours later than clock time (we’d traveled back in time by two time zones), it always seemed an hour or two earlier by sun time. One night as we returned to our third-floor hotel room after a late supper or shopping excursion, my husband commented on how incredible it was that we could look out our (west-facing) window from a lighted room and still see a glow on the horizon at nearly 10 p.m.

Having arrived relatively late on Wednesday, June 25, we figured we’d wake up bright and early the next morning since our body clocks would not yet have been reset. And we certainly expected it to be light just as early as at home (although a west-facing window was a disadvantage), so we thought the sunlight would wake us. The morning of June 26 dawned overcast, however, and the skies did not clear till midday, so it was not till Friday that we experienced a normal sunrise, though it took a while for the sun to peek over our building and fall on other structures we could see.

Back home in Fairhope, the sun was rising at 5:52 a.m. and setting at 7:58. In Portland, it was rising at 5:24 (only a little earlier) but not setting till 9:04. The daylight in Portland was actually more than an hour and a half longer than in Fairhope (15:39 hours compared to 14:06). Variations in the time of sunrise and sunset are of course affected to some extent by longitude: 15 degrees of longitude are equivalent to an hour’s difference in time; although time zone lines don’t exactly coincide with lines of longitude, Fairhope, at nearly 88 degrees west of Greenwich, is close to the 90-degree mark, while Portland, at 122.675° W, is on the other side of the 120-degree line. The difference between their offsets, a total of nearly five degrees, would make a difference of about 19 minutes.

Latitude, of course, makes a much greater difference. Everyone is familiar with the “white nights” experienced above the Arctic Circle in summer, when the sun never really sets, and our daughter and son-in-law had actually lived for a time in Norway, “Land of the Midnight Sun.” So it should not have surprised us that, so close to the summer solstice, the days were quite long, but we still found it confusing to have so little idea what time it really was and were surprised every time we looked at our watches in the late afternoon.

In discussing this with my brother from Cincinnati, who was also in Portland for my son’s wedding, we established this benchmark: I commented that Fairhope’s Fourth of July fireworks display always starts at 9 p.m., as that’s when it can be counted on to be good and dark. In Cincinnati, he said, the fireworks start about 9:45.

Following up to my previous post on sunrise and sunset, I found a page at the U.S. Naval Observatory Web site that explains this phenomenon. I don’t claim to understand it, but it does confirm what I was saying. The USNO Data Services site is also the source of other data in this and other posts. I can’t say enough good things about how useful this site is. One really cool page is the one that shows “What the Moon Looks Like Today,” and if you’re a writer and want to be sure you get your phases of the moon right, you can reference the “Phases of the Moon” page. And of course you can get sunrise/sunset or moonrise/moonset times (for a specific day or year) for any given location in the United States (or the world) from other pages at the site. The FAQ page has a wealth of other information, including links to pages at other sites.

Walkable Portland

I was relieved to look back at my last post and see that I had written that I wouldn’t be walking “tomorrow” (i.e., June 25) because we’d be flying to Portland. My recollection was that I’d said I wouldn’t be walking for a while because we’d be on vacation, and my reaction was “What was I thinking?!” I was fervently grateful that I’d thrown my walking shoes in the suitcase at the last minute, as I walked my little tootsies off!

We didn’t have a car in Portland, and I have to say, if you have to be somewhere without a car, Portland is a great place to be. There are other cities that have good public transportation but possibly none with so much respect for and encouragement of walkers and cyclists.

We were staying in a hotel near the Convention Center, on the east side of the Willamette River, chosen specifically because it is right on the MAX (light rail) line, which provides easy (and free) access to downtown Portland. We could hop on the MAX behind our hotel and ride to town without a ticket. Portland has a “fareless square” within which all the MAX trains, the streetcar, and buses are free, which greatly facilitates travel to and around town. The only time we needed to pay a fare was when we took the MAX to the airport.

The trains, buses, and streetcar don’t go everywhere, of course, but even when you are reduced to shank’s mare, travel is a pleasure because there are sidewalks, crosswalks, and (most important) rigorously enforced laws about stopping for pedestrians. Although the laws may be meant to apply only at crosswalks, we found that motorists stopped and waited for us any time we wanted to cross a street (even once when we were guiltily jaywalking). In fact, on a previous visit, when we were exploring the South Park Blocks, we found that we had to be careful not to stand too close to the curb while consulting a map and dithering over where we wanted to go, as motorists would stop if we even looked like we might be considering crossing the street! Quite a contrast to Fairhope, where drivers seem bent on running you down if at all possible.

Cyclists are equally well treated, with marked bike lanes on many streets and hooks on the MAX trains for hanging bicycles during transit. And people do actually walk and ride bikes downtown. There are enormous parking lots at the outlying MAX “transit centers” to encourage commuters to park and ride, as many evidently do. I’m sure many people also drive to work if they have a guaranteed place to park, but I wouldn’t want to be looking for a parking place just for shopping or sightseeing.

In our case, we were combining shopping and sightseeing. My son-in-law was in search of shirts with French cuffs, which entailed visiting many stores (he finally lucked out at Macy’s), and my daughter had never been to Powell’s Bookstore (a must-see attraction for anyone visiting Portland), so of course we had to go there. At one point we found ourselves within easy walking distance of Washington Park, so we decided to go see the International Rose Test Garden (which was at its peak); our map lied, and we were pretty footsore by the time we got there. We later learned there’s a MAX stop in the park (and free shuttle buses around it), which the kids took advantage of later when they went back to visit the Japanese Garden. We also strolled along the riverfront in Governor Tom McCall Waterfront Park. And we wandered endlessly (on foot and by streetcar) looking for REI, which was not on the map and about whose location various members of our party had varying opinions.

We also did a fair amount of walking in the area of the hotel—to the hotel several blocks away where our daughter and son-in-law were staying and to the Lloyd Center Mall (which I’m told is the largest in Oregon). My husband made repeated trips to the Barnes & Noble store at the mall, to succumb each time to at least one more book than he had intended to buy. Also, there was a Mac Store between our hotel and the mall, and after browsing there one day, he went back the next and bought an iPod (and later sort of wished he’d gotten a laptop as well). Shopping in Portland is such a delight (and a novelty for us) because there is no sales tax, which makes a considerable difference on big-ticket items such as these.

All in all, we did enough walking each day to offset the effect of a Grand Slam breakfast at the Denny’s across the street from our hotel, but I was not sorry to return home and hit my familiar streets to check on the progress of the local housing construction, which adds interest to my daily peregrinations.