Happy Roman New Year1 MMXII

Well, it’s been a quiet year in Davis, California, my hometown, deep in the heart of The Valley.*  And now it’s time to catch up.

THE STATE OF THE STATE

California, like the rest of the country, has been suffering economically.  Stagnant wages, unemployment & underemployment, home foreclosures.  School tuition is going up, municipal budgets are going down, towns declare bankruptcy, taxes…it’s not good.  Services are getting cut--my local libe has closed a couple of times to save money.  There’s legislative gridlock.  And the future will be even worse. 

But looking on the bright side. 

THE STATE OF DAVIS

The weather remains pleasantly Californian and the town remains civilized and very livable.  This is a great place for bicyclists.  Paths and lanes all over, plenty of parking, motorists who comprehend co-existence with us two-wheelers. 

However there are 33,000 students in Davis, maybe 25,000 bikes. The roundabouts and bike path crossings can require a fair bit of attention to negotiate and you need to stay alert.  According to local lore university athletes are not allowed to ride bikes for the first two weeks of the school year, until the newbies learn how to get around campus without running anyone down. 

We have an Occupy Davis movement as well as an allied but separate Occupy UC Davis movement, scene of the pepper-spray incident you may have caught on YouTube. 

THE STATE OF BILL

He’s not as hip as the students around him, whose ink, piercings, couture, and coiffures are always creative and sometimes astonishing. 

I have not acquired any tattoos or piercings.  Mostly wear shorts and t-shirts in the summer, sweats in the winter, sandals or running shoes all the time.  Shave my head and try to grow a beard every few months but always give it up after a couple weeks. 

Diet

Tastes change as you age.  We oldsters are…milder.  Nowadays I don’t tolerate French roast coffee as well as mellow roast.  Yellow mustard & wonder bread are more palatable than Dijon and whole wheat.  The taste of Velveeta beats out Gorgonzola, and the Velveeta melts better too. 

Odd culinary cravings assail me.  I might subsist for a week on beef, tuna, and chicken potpies with sides of mac & cheese.  Next it’s liverwurst & lettuce on rye plus lots of dill pickles and chips.  Then perhaps fried eggs and spam. [Recipe]  Have resisted stocking up on of cases of Ramen.  Do you know how much sodium is in that little flavor packet?

Entertainment

My viewing tastes have changed as well.  Lately have been watching retro TV like Lawrence Welk, Alfred Hitchcock, and The Antiques Road Show.  Often wonder if all that stuff I donated to Goodwill might have been worth a minor fortune. 

Religion

A confession:  My move to California caused first a crisis of faith and then an outright apostasy.  I no longer celebrate the solstices and equinoxes.  It’s not that I’ve been proselytized, it’s that the climate here is not conducive to my frigid North Country Paganism, which now touches neither mind nor spirit as it once did.  My incipient loss of faith should have been evident when (as noted in my Winter Solstice 2010 message) Bill’s Traditional Medieval Winter Solstice Menu turned Mediterranean. 

The weather here is too pleasant.  Summers are not as hot as expected.  Winters have relatively warm days and delightfully cool evenings, lots of rain and dense Tule Fog.  Maybe a bit of frost, no snow unless you head east up the mountains. 

But “one swallow does not a summer make, nor two light frosts a winter.”  Sitting next to a blazing fire with a glass of mulled wine would be…climatologically inappropriate.  This winter was so mild I decided not to get a flu shot for the first time in twenty years and therefore caught the flu for the first time in twenty years. 

Now I’m both a fallen-away Catholic and a lapsed pagan. There exist West Coast Pagans whose sunnier faith honors the summer solstice but that’s not for me.  Yet. 

My current religion is Hedonism and my theodicy is “…malt does more than Milton can/To justify God’s ways to man.”3  This philosophical stance is facilitated by the fact that a number of local bars have Pliny the Elder4 beer on draft.  

Getting around?

Don’t get to The City—-San Francisco—-often.  Museums and restaurants.  Made a couple of pilgrimages, the Beats and the Haight.  Enjoyed great music at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival (an annual multi-day event in Golden Gate Park). 

One outasight outastate getaway was Colorado in July, a writer’s & mountain biker’s retreat with a couple of friends.  Brought lots of sunscreen because the sun’s pretty strong at 8600’.  Didn’t think about the thinner air but acclimated pretty quickly. 

Our program was:  1) write intensely all morning, 2) mountain bike fiercely all afternoon, and 3) chill out & carouse a bit in the evening.  We wrote, rode, ate & drank, and on the last day took a ski lift up the mountain then biked down.  I flipped once but survived, exhilarated and relatively uninjured.  We all returned with completed masterpieces and hope to repeat the event this year. 

THE HOLIDAYS

Christmas

Being now neither Christian nor pagan I had to decide anew how to celebrate The Traditions.  Listened my favorite Christmas CDs--Cusco, The Chieftains--and watched A Child’s Christmas in Wales. 

My original plan was a Yuletide retreat at the New Clairvaux Trappist monastery a couple hours north.  Unfortunately the place was fully booked, no room at the inn. 

Thus Plan B.  Physical renewal rather than spiritual:  several days at a Calistoga (Napa Valley) spa where I would swim in the pools, lounge in a 104-degree hot tub, work out in the exercise room, and eat light healthy meals at the town’s many restaurants.  

But. 

It was unseasonably, unreasonably cold in Calistoga.  Frost-on-the-car cold.  Most days I’d head off for a substantial (unhealthy) breakfast, read the paper at a café, walk around town a bit.  Then back to my room to fortify myself for those healing waters into which I seldom ventured until well after noon.  Even then, though the waters were warm the air was nipppppy.  My daily immersions required a substantial  (unhealthy) dinner afterwards. 

Should note that other guests were unaffected by the weather.  Each morning at 8 am women of a certain age--garbed in bathrobes, flip flops, and scarves or turbans--would stride briskly to the pools and ease in with nary a shiver.  They’d spend the day there, chatting with friends, reading, enjoying snacks, reclining on chaises longues, nothing but a towel to keep them warm.  When the sun went down they’d head back to their rooms and primp for dinner.  Probably a light healthy dinner. 

I did have lunch at the CIA.  That’s the Culinary Institute of America, which has an excellent restaurant.  Ordered risotto because my efforts at that dish have been unpleasantly soggy.  The CIA version was of course perfect.  Christmas dinner was at the Calistoga Inn and I had roast lamb since mine tends to be dry.  That too was perfect. 

The spa retreat did not turn out precisely as planned but it was restorative. And one should adapt to climate and circumstance. 

New Year’s Eve

There was room chez Trappistes.  Retreats are self-directed.  No facilitators, advisors, or spiritual counselors, you create your own program.  I spent hours walking the vineyards--these Trappists produce wine not beer--memorizing poems for future readings.  And spent more hours in my cell-like room reviewing the past year, both the good and the bad of it.  Then progressed to considering how I might make the most of the coming year. 

Spoke to no one during the several days of my retreat.  Everyone was on a personal quest and there were virtually no interactions between us except a curt though cordial nod when we passed each other on the paths.  In the dining room we silently consumed the mostly vegetarian meals (maybe a bit of fish on Sunday) then returned to our individual journeys. 

The monastery has a church, a chapel, a silent meditation room, and a small library.  Most of the offerings are religious (duh!) but found The Third Wave (1980) by Alvin Toffler of Future Shock fame.  Had not read the work before and found it an interesting trip back in time to a near future quickly becoming the recent past. 

For those unfamiliar with the book:  The First Wave was the Agricultural Revolution, the Second Wave the Industrial Revolution, and the newest wave is the Information Age, about which Toffler was mostly optimistic and often prescient.  He anticipated a “blip culture” when information would arrive in “disembodied blips”--fragments of data streaming at recipients faster and faster all the time.  But he was confident that Third Wave media users (and that would be kids like us, right my fellow boomers?) could handle the constant input without suffering overload. 

Toffler foresaw “electronic cottages”--totally wired homes that would permit telecommuting and much more but he was overly sanguine about the possibilities for worker decentralization and autonomy. 

And he wrote (remember this is 1980) “Despite delays, five space shuttles may soon be moving cargo and people back and forth between the earth and outer space on a weekly schedule.”  

On the same shelf was Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (1970), a celebration of 1960s counterculture.  Reich was even more optimistic than Toffler, though his Consciousness III mostly concerned psychological transformation more than technological advances. 

On New Year’s Eve I stayed up till midnight TST (Times Square Time--even Midwesterners know the New Year really begins in New York) watching the arrival of 2012 live on my laptop, brought for that sole purpose.  No doubt thereby committing an unforgivable mortal sin. 

And so monkishly to bed. 

The next day it was back to Davis with an agreeable feeling of accomplishment, insights gained and significant decisions made. 

Super Bowl Sunday

Planned to attend a party but that’s when I got the flu.  Stayed home and watched the game alone, no party at all. 

General Retrospective

I had expected to be way more active here in Davis, CA.  More involved.  Engagé.  Despite the relative irrelevancy of old people in college towns there are lots of opportunities here for seniors. 

Compared to the lives chronicled in annual updates received from correspondents (thanks), my life seems tame.  Slackadasical.  Others take long road trips and voyage overseas, volunteer for local charities, attend reunions, work part time or go back to school, serve on condo committees and garden clubs.  Still saving the world after all these decades. 

I haven’t done much of that.  On-going projects include researching my parents’ service in WWII, taking refreshers on Roman history and the British Raj, and of course poetry. 

Social activities have been sketchier.  Searched around for groups of compatible folk.  Am now a member in good standing of Garrison Keillor’s Professional Organization of English Majors (P.O.E.M)--i.e., I bought a t-shirt. 

But there’s a Shakespeare reading club here in Davis that I still haven’t joined.  Tried the Mac users group but quit.  Joined the Club Français to speak French & play petanque then realized my skills in both have seriously eroded.  Tasted Toastmasters.  Considered a “free thinkers” get-together but judging by their website & Facebook links members define themselves more by what they are not (believers) than by what they are (agnostics?).  Plus they all look very young and seem to be heavily into karaoke. 

One reason for relocating to a college town was culture.  Went to a number of concerts when I arrived but that tapered off.  Seems too much hassle to go out in the evening. 

There are many good things about being in Davis.  I see my sister (a recent first-time grandmother) fairly often and have visited my brother several times.  Have friends in the area.  I bike almost every day, hardly use the car. 

And you gotta love autumn here, it’s a treat to look at the trees. There’ll be a maple in full fall plumage next to a palm tree, with a row of towering cypresses off in the distance.  Not to mention the allées of olive trees and black walnuts. 

But something is missing.  Have been thinking I should relocate to a more…dramatic locale.  A place with mountains.   Or a desert or the ocean...or...??? 

One friend has opined that this is the classic geographical escape syndrome:  “If I move to [insert place name here] my life will be perfect.”

I see it as a midcourse correction.  The move from Maryland to California was a good first step but I have not reached my final destination which may be just down the road. Or many miles beyond that.

There is another reason for a move, a more mundane reason:  allergies.  Had some mild problems in the past but those were predictable, seasonal, and brief.  Here in California people sure do grow a lot of stuff.  Green stuff.  Stuff that produces pollen.  In a year with a mild winter (like this one), the allergies don’t stop.  And I want them to stop. 

The best state for pollen sufferers is said to be Alaska but that’s not on my list.  In California coastal areas are recommended, as the cleansing offshore winds blow pollen and other irritants east.  (Watch out, Chicago, here it comes!)  San Diego and up the coast a bit seems promising. 

So dug out my old Coastal California book and am now poring over maps and doing pollen counts, seeking a more exciting and less pollinated domicile.  Looks like there’s another road trip coming up.  Good thing I enjoy living out of my car.

Will let you know how it goes when it does.  Meanwhile stay well and be happy.

That’s the news from Davis, where all the women are younger than you are, all the men ride their bicycles with éclat, and all the children are university students with brilliant futures.*

Bill

NOTES

1 The Roman year originally began in March, not January.

2 Statements in this section have been exaggerated for rhetorical effect. 

3 A. E. Housman (1839-1936), A Shropshire Lad

4 Roman statesman and scholar (23-79 CE)

*Adapted from A Prairie Home Companion, an American radio show