Things Left Behind

You drive south on Maryland Route 235, through Waldorf and Hughesville. A little ways after you pass the Hollywood Volunteer Fire Department, you turn left at the Burchmart gas station. Bear left past the Hole in the Wall Tavern, continue until you pass Snellman’s store, and take the next right. After you go by Greenwell State Park, turn right on Ingleside Road, where there’s a house on the corner. Bear left at the T, pass Smith’s Nursery, and turn into the circular driveway paved with oyster shells.

You’ve arrived at the house my grandparents built to retire to, a modest two-bedroom cinderblock structure painted white. And when I say “built,” I mean that literally. There are photos of my dad carrying lumber over his head in a classic strongman pose, and of infant me sitting in what would be the living room while my grandfather laid bricks for the hearth. They’d bought the land from the farmer who lived next door, who still grew corn and soybeans in a field across the road. The property backed up on a body of water called a “creek” in those parts even though it’s 500 feet wide.


Helping my grandfather lay bricks for the fireplace.

By the time they moved in, they’d built a pier on the water and a set of concrete steps leading down to it. They would live in that house throughout my chilhood and teen years. We’d go—my parents, sister, and I—”down the country” to visit them regularly from our home outside D.C. We would catch crabs off the pier, swim in the shallow water, go out fishing in their boat. My sister and I would pick blackberries along the road and bring them back for my grandmother to make pies. In the warm evenings we’d all sit on the screened-in porch and watch the lightning bugs flit among the trees.

In those days the area was still mostly farms and woods. My grandfather liked to have friends and relatives come by for crab feasts or oyster roasts, depending on the season. During one of these, the other kids and I walked the half mile down the road to the T and made our way back through the woods. Nowadays those woods are filled with fancy vacation and retirees’ homes, but at the time—with the exception of Smith’s Nursery—there were just shacks and bungalows. We couldn’t get lost, with the road on one side and the water on the other, but we felt like Daniel Boone blazing a trail through the wilderness.

My turn

My grandmother died in 1974 while I was living in Massachusetts, and I flew home for the funeral. My grandfather died in 1976 while I was living in Los Angeles, which was too far to go back from. But not long after, my mother called to tell me that she and my dad were planning to expand the house and retire to it themselves, and that it would be a big help to them if I was willing to live in it for a while so it didn’t sit empty. “Are you asking me to come back and live there?” I asked. “It would be a big help to us,” she replied, which I took as a “yes.” (She may have also wanted to retrieve me from an environment where I had been arrested for the first time, but that’s another story.)

I moved into the house in November, just in time for the coldest winter anyone could remember. The creek froze hard enough to walk all the way across, something we’d never seen in all the time my grandparents lived there. The ice stuck to the pilings of the pier and the tides pulled them up and down, so by spring everyone’s piers were at crazy Dr. Seuss angles. The magnolia tree was shocked into submission; the existing branches never put out leaves and flowers again, though years later new shoots started growing from the trunk. I lived on Stouffer’s pot pies and miso soup with seaweed and accustomed myself to an environment where watching the trees leaf out once spring came was the height of entertainment. I even dug up the yard with shovel and pickaxe (learning why they call it “backbreaking work”) and planted a garden.

A couple of Mormon missionaries knocked on the door one day with their books and flip charts. I invited them in—I didn’t know anything about Mormonism and was starved for company. (I was in the habit of driving almost 50 miles just to go to a couple of bars and listen to a band.) For their part, they didn’t know anything about popular culture. We soon reached an accommodation: they would come by every week and spend an hour talking to me about Mormonism, and then we’d spend an hour listening to rock music and playing chess.

By that summer, I had grown tired of living so close to my parents, so when a couple of friends called me from Nantucket and told me they had a place for me to stay, I accepted the suggestion.

Next up

By that time, my father was ready to retire from his government job, and my mother had stopped teaching a few years before. They added a second, more formal living room and a dining room to the house and moved in themselves. Thus began the house’s next chapter.

I continued to visit regularly, taking the train down from New York, where I’d landed. But soon I moved to California again, to San Francisco this time, with the woman I would eventually marry. We kept going back once or twice a year—every Christmas at first, but eventually at other times after we got tired of only seeing the East Coast in the dead of winter. There still wasn’t a lot to do, and my mother’s declining health kept her mostly tethered to the house. On one trip, though, I arranged for us all to drive to Ocean City, MD, a place we used to go on family vacations when I was a kid. It was probably the last major trip my mother took.

Eventually, my son was born. As soon as it was feasible, we took him back to meet his grandparents (and for our parents to meet their grandson). I have a treasured photo of my mom holding my baby son on that same screened-in porch, with a look of deep satisfaction, wonder, and love on her face.

Mom gets to know her grandson

Not long after that, my marriage fell apart. I retained custody of my son, and we continued to visit the house every summer. Life at the house stayed pretty much the same, with a good portion of the conversation revolving around what we were going to have for dinner that night. I would sometimes employ my Calfornia-honed cooking skills to make something novel, like the time I made grilled vegetables with herbs and balsamic vinegar.

I also got to watch my son enjoy the same activities I had as a child—sitting on the porch watching lightning bugs, catching fish off the pier, using the riding lawnmower—with the addition of nightly Bingo games with prizes found by my sister at the dollar store. One summer he and I lay on our backs on the pier and watched a meteor shower light up the dark country sky.

My mom died when my son was 6. After the funeral, we had a reception in the house, attended by a lot of people I didn’t know. It was probably the biggest social event that second living room had ever seen.

The house’s only occupant after that was my dad, but that didn’t interrupt the yearly visits. He would argue with my son about who got to sit in the recliner in front of the TV, and he’d bait the hooks for my son to fish with.

Grandad teaches grandson to fish.

And then, when my son was 14, my dad died. He’d managed to stay in the house until the final weeks, when a sudden decline put him in the hospital. My sister and I started to have the discussions about whether it was time for him to move to an assisted living situation, but he never made it that far.

Final chapter

Now the house belonged to my sister and me. I still lived in San Francisco, while she still lived outside D.C. That meant it fell to her to manage the next steps, for which I am forever grateful. She cleaned out the house, retrieved the items we wanted to keep (including my grandmother’s rocking chair, which sits in her basement waiting for me to have it shipped out), and organized the estate sale. She also got the floors refinished, the kitchen appliances upgraded, and the walls painted.

But none of that answered the question of what to do with it. My sister had more mixed feelings about the place than me—for her it was associated with caring for my mother in her final years. And she told me that my mother once advised her to, after she and my father were gone, “take the money and run.” For me, the place had more of a rosy glow generated by my own nostalgia and idealized memory. I also thought a lot about how my son was the fourth generation to enjoy the pleasures of “down the country.”

We made some effort to rent it, but all the prospective renters fell through. Meanwhile, we were paying to have the yard mowed and the heater supplied with oil and holding our breaths every time there was a major storm. Finally, a few years after my father died, we acknowledged to each other that neither of us planned to ever live there, at the end of that country road in the cultural backwater of Southern Maryland. And neither of us was in a position to keep it empty as a vacation home.

We finally put the house on the market six years after my father died. Our agents fixed the place up even more, tearing out walls and cutting down trees to the point the property was nearly unrecognizable.

Redfin’s version of the house.

We’re not sure they got us the best price possible—we suspect they might have had an “arrangement” with the buyers—but neither one of us was in a position to monitor the showings and the offers. The sale closed in 2015, and it wasn’t our house any more.

I’ve been back once since then to say goodbye, parking on the road nearby to just look at the house and indulge my nostalgia. I drove away feeling like I did at my mother’s wake: it looked like the house I knew, but the spirit was gone. I still spend time with the old photos when I run into them on Facebook, and the end of the pier is still one of the places I choose when someone tells me to imagine myself in a “happy place.”

Unpacking the trunk

I have a basketball in the trunk of my car. I noticed it one night last year when I went to get my hat and gloves—it was a cold night, and I was walking to the restaurant to meet my in-laws for dinner. Of course I already knew it was there, but in that moment it started me thinking about how I’ve pretty much always had a basketball in the trunk since I was old enough to drive.

My basketball “career” started early, when my dad made a hoop and put it up in our back yard. The backboard was a piece of plywood painted white, and the whole thing was held up by a long pipe rooted in a chunk of concrete embedded in the dirt. It was the only hoop on my street, and the neighbor kids and I played whenever the weather allowed. (I was money from the raised flowerbed.)

The junior high and high school I went to was very small, but our basketball team punched above its weight. Not that I was on the team—well, I was at the eighth-grade level, but after only getting in two games all season, in garbage time, I saw the writing on the wall. The whole school was basketball-crazy, though, and we played in the gym at lunchtime, in our stocking feet. Once I began driving to school when I turned 16, I started keeping a basketball in the car at all times. You never know when an open court might beckon.

A couple of years ago, my girlfriend and I visited New Orleans around Mardi Gras. On our last day there, when I opened the trunk of the Lyft that came to take us to the airport, I saw a basketball. Suddenly I, a 60-something white guy from San Francisco, and the driver, a young Black woman from NOLA, had something to talk about and bond over, as members of the basketball-in-your-trunk fraternity/sorority.

Mural found in New Orleans, 2018.

During this pandemic year, I’ve been able to find pleasure and relief in trips to the basketball court to shoot baskets, sometimes by myself and sometimes with a couple of friends (socially distanced, each with our own ball). Pulling up to a court, getting the ball out out of the trunk, and settling into the familiar rhythm of jump shots and layups is an old, familiar, comfortable and comforting ritual.

Blues

My love for blues music goes back nearly as far. I don’t know when I “discovered” it or, more accurately, realized it was its own genre with a long history. The blues was baked into much early rock and roll, of course, but I didn’t know that yet. One of the ear-opening breakthroughs came with the release of Beggar’s Banquet in 1968 (I had just turned 16), featuring the song “Prodigal Son.” The local progressive rock station, WHFS, played the Stones cover and followed it up with the original by Reverend Robert Wilkins. I remember sitting in my living room in Marlow Heights, MD thinking, “Wow, that’s different—I like that!”

By the next spring, when I went with my girlfriend to her school’s junior prom, I knew a little more about the subject. In those days in my part of suburban DC, there were two opposing tribes, the “greasers” (dressed in baggy chinos and t-shirts) and the “collegiates” (dressed in tight, short jeans and button-down shirts). Along with the sartorial differences went the choice of whether you were into soul or rock music, respectively. This was the late 60s, so while greasers are traditionally associated with rock ‘n’ roll, “rock” by this point meant the psychedelic era, which made it a collegiate thing; the greasers stuck with Motown. At the prom, I was approached by a belligerent greaser type—I had sort of a Beatle haircut that probably screamed “collegiate”—who demanded “rock or soul?” I replied, “I like blues.” That confused him enough to let me and my date escape back into the dance.

The original record the Rolling Stones covered.

To this day, when I get tired of popular music, when I can’t think of what I want to listen to, when everything else seems tired or inauthentic or fluffy, I can always cue up some blues and refresh my love of music at the roots. This goes for pretty much all varieties of the genre, from Lead Belly, Robert Johnson, and Charlie Patton through Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf to blues-saturated combos like DC’s Nighthawks.

A guy I once worked with told me he made a hobby of collecting every version he could of “Lady is a Tramp.” That got me wondering what song I’d be interested in doing that with, and I settled on “Statesboro Blues.” There’s a problem in that a lot of the versions are what I call “NPR blues”—polite, well-played covers that wouldn’t be out of place or too disturbing in a nice coffeehouse. So I’ve only ended up with seven versions, but I’ll keep looking.

Comics

Another enduring pleasure that goes back further than either basketball or blues has been comic books. I don’t remember how this one started—I do remember my mother buying a few comics before a long family road trip and doling them out along the way to reward good behavior. She particularly approved of Metal Men because it taught me about the properties of different metals. (Did you know that mercury is the only metal that’s liquid at room temperature? That’s what the Mercury character boasted, anyway.) She also appreciated Herbie for its absurdist humor.

By the time I was maybe 12, I had accumulated a big stack of comics—big enough for my parents to suggest that maybe I was getting too old for comic books and push me to donate all of them to the city orphanage. Unfortunately, I wasn’t old enough yet to say “Are you kidding? No way!” I hope the kids enjoyed them.

The thrilling adventures of Metal Men.

I kept reading haphazardly through high school, but my relationship to comics changed in my sophomore year in college. Up till then, I’d always read comics as illustrated stories—I enjoyed the pictures, but mainly they just were there to support the words. But my roommate, Geoff, got me paying attention to the art for its own sake and noticing the styles of the individual artists and how the pictures worked in full partnership with the words. It didn’t hurt that this period coincided with a burst of creativity and exploration in comic art, with contributions from some of the form’s greatest: Neal Adams, Gene Colan, Bernie Wrightson, and many more, each with their own distinctive and recognizable style. I was hooked again.

The world has caught up to comics and graphic novels, but ironically, the increased attention has made it harder to find stuff I’ll like. Walking into a comic shop these days reminds me of shopping at used record stores: the shelves are overflowing, and I know there are a lot of things there that I’d love, but how to know what? Asking for suggestions doesn’t necessarily help—I once asked the shop owner to recommend a comic for grownups and was offered something with a lot of violence and sex but not much else.

Fortunately, my local libraries have good selections of graphic novels and comics anthologies these days. I’ve learned the names of a few authors and creators whose indie material is worth looking for—Brian K. Vaughan, Matt Wagner, Gregory Rucka, et al. They also work with the mainstream publishers, but I’m always disappointed in the results. I certainly don’t begrudge them making a living, but in those roles they’re constrained by established storylines and characters. It’s like getting Steven Soderbergh to direct an episode of NCIS: you’ll see the talent, but it’s still going to be about Jethro Gibbs kicking somebody’s ass.

Still, I remain steadfast in my belief that comics are one of the great American art forms. So are the other two, actually—the blues is undeniably one, and there are reasons basketball gets compared to jazz. The three of them are probably the strongest through lines in my life, connecting some of my earliest memories with enjoyable moments from just the past month. In a life of multiple residences, multiple jobs, multiple relationships, it’s nice to have these kinds of touchstones.

WTF, Dropbox?

I’ve been using Dropbox for years, from before I had multiple devices to sync or even fully understood how to use it efficiently. I don’t remember what got me started—collaborating with an editor? Sharing my son’s homework? Who knows, and it doesn’t matter. I ended up with it installed on two MacBooks (one at my house and one at my girlfriend’s), an iPad, and an iPhone.

At the same time, a key part of my workflow has long been custom icons to help distinguish different projects. I’m a freelance writer and might be working with 4 or 5 clients at the same time, and having each client’s work folder represented by their logo makes finding what I want to work on a lot more efficient.

Up until a few weeks ago, these two things worked together seamlessly: I could use custom icons for the projects stored in Dropbox, and while the icons wouldn’t sync with the folders, they were persistent on the machine I created them on. But then one day, I saw that all my work folders just had generic folder icons.

It took me a few days to figure out it was just folders in Dropbox that had turned generic—that it wasn’t some systemwide MacOS glitch. Once I pinpointed the problem, I went looking for solutions on the Dropbox support forum. Unsurprisingly, I found a fairly recent thread discussing my issue. But even though the thread was marked “solved,” the alleged solution didn’t work (“upgrade”), and new participants like me were still asking for answers.

What was particularly aggravating was that Dropbox started out denying that anything had changed. A support representative kept popping into the discussion to assure us that they’d be in touch via email, but everyone they contacted got some variation of the answer I did: “this is normal behavior from the Dropbox application” and “there is no process for the Mac OS to allow customized icons to remain upon syncing” (even though that had always worked before). Others were told they should get in touch with Apple to resolve the issue. The attitude seemed to be that custom icons were a special feature we were requesting, not just the restoration of a function that had always been there.

The baffling part for me was and is: doesn’t anybody at Dropbox use custom folder icons? Don’t any of the engineers or managers keep track of their projects that way? Didn’t this change bust a lot of internal workflows to the point that somebody thought “maybe this isn’t a good idea”?

Dissatisfaction grows Continue reading “WTF, Dropbox?”

The Map Is Not The Territory—But What Is?

My friend Lee recently attended a wedding held at a château outside the town of Sarzeau in Brittany, France. Her description of how she traveled there got me curious, so I went online to look at maps of the area. And as I zoomed in, I noticed a strange-looking peninsula north of the town. As I compared different maps, I discovered that Google, Bing, and Apple all disagreed on the shape of the peninsula, and even on how much of it was really land at all.

But before we get into those details, let’s get oriented. I’ve used Open Street Maps to give a general geographic overview of where we are—first, here’s Brittany, on the northwest corner of France, right below Normandy (the smaller peninsula at the top):

Now let’s zoom in on the area with our mystery peninsula. Sarzeau is located in the middle of the Rhuys Peninsula, about where it says Parc National régional du Golfe du Morbihon on the first map:

You see all those grayish areas with horizontal dashes in them? According to the Open Street Maps key, that pattern represents “Wetland (generic)”. The EPA’s definition of wetlands is “areas where water covers the soil, or is present either at or near the surface of the soil all year or for varying periods of time during the year.” In other words, it’s not always clear whether they’re water or land (and the answer can vary with the seasons, tides, weather, and so on). And that kind of uncertainty and variability poses a challenge for maps.

On to our mystery peninsula—that little protuberance right above the town name, the Presqu’île de Truscat (Truscat Peninsula). Here are the satellite views from Google Maps, Apple Maps (note: this link won’t work unless you have the Maps app), and Bing Maps, with Levels tweaked a little bit to heighten the contrast:

They all look pretty much the same, right? Apple Maps even labels a water feature, Calzac Pond, within the edges of the peninsula. Look closely at the areas surrounding the peninsula, though, and you’ll notice trails that look like streams within the “open water.” They’re examples of that uncertainty we talked about before—where exactly does the land end and the water begin?

The three mapping services disagree wildly on that question. First, Google’s version:

This map has apparently decided that Calzac Pond is actually open to the water on the west, leaving only a narrow strip of land connecting the tip of the peninsula to the mainland. The satellite views show something there, though, that looks different from the other water areas. Is it land? Well, it’s land enough that Open Street Maps offers it as a cycling route:

Okay, then what does Apple Maps think?

This rendering reminds me of Cecilia Gimenez’s “restoration” of the face of Jesus—I have no idea why it’s so crude, just straight lines and angles like a polygonal rendering in an old video game. (This is also the way it looks in an online Michelin map, whose data is supplied by TomTom, as Apple’s is. I guess we can blame TomTom.) And it does seem to have discovered whole new body of water, fairly large but unnamed. None of that makes it less accurate than Google’s, though, as long as the land shown west of Calzac Pond is actually terra firma.

To my eye, Bing Maps most closely represents the peninsula’s shape and balance of land to water as compared to the satellite views:

But whether that makes it the most accurate all depends on how wet those wetlands are. If you rely on Bing Maps or Apple Maps to plan a nice hike to the tip of the peninsula, you might find yourself up to your knees in marsh. On the other hand, Google Maps might convince you it’s basically inaccessible, and you could miss some spectacular birdwatching.

Probably Open Street Maps expresses the uncertainty best. I think its key calls the kind of dashes marking the cycling route “Track. Even amount of solid and soft materials.” That wording covers a lot of ground, you might say, and could serve as a warning that they don’t really know what you’ll find.

 

The Compleat Airbnb Host(ess)

We’ve just returned from traveling to the Pacific Northwest, where we stayed a few days in an Airbnb in Portland. It started me thinking about the amenities I’ve come to expect in someplace I rent—not a list of criteria I came up with on my own, but a list drawn from what we’ve encountered at places run by good hosts. Given that, here’s my list of what a makes a good Airbnb (over and above the comfortable bed, clean and convenient bathroom, etc.):

  •  A Roku hooked up to the TV—even better if there’s a Netflix subscription already connected to the Roku’s channel. This amenity is critical if you’re someplace that doesn’t have good TV reception, like the farm in Marin we stayed at one weekend—not that we wanted to spend time watching TV anyway, but sometimes you do find yourself in for the evening before you’re ready for bed.
  • WiFi, of course. That goes without saying.
  • Some kind of upscale coffee-making system. The place in Portland had an electric kettle and a French press (with ground coffee in the cupboard), the Novato farm had a Nespresso, and the Santa Cruz cottage had a Keurig machine. Even Mr. Coffee doesn’t have enough panache for the Airbnb crowd, and instant coffee is right out. Bonus points if there’s also a decent selection of tea; our place in Sydney set the bar for that one, unsurprisingly.
  • A way for guests to play their own music. The Portland place had a headphone cable plugged into the A/V receiver, and the New York place had a UE Boom Bluetooth speaker. This option isn’t that common yet, but it’s welcome when it’s there.

How about you? What do you like to see when you’re paying to stay in someone else’s house?

Clickbait and its discontents

An online friend of mine, an avid supporter of single-payer healthcare with little use for mainstream Democrats, recently linked to an article titled “Al Gore Breaks With Democratic Party Leadership to Support Single-Payer Healthcare” from a site called Splinter that claims to offer “news coverage for a new America.” Unfortunately, new America seems to enjoy sensationalistic news coverage, and it seemed unlikely that Al Gore would publicly go against the Democratic Party, so I decided to look further.

The Splinter story says, “Breaking with ranking Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi…Gore told the audience that private health insurance has failed to provide accessible coverage for all Americans.”

I hadn’t heard that Nancy Pelosi had come out against single-payer, so I took a look at the Huffington Post story the Splinter story is based on. It reads, “House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi…flatly said ‘no’ when asked in May if single-payer health care should be part of the party’s 2018 platform.” Hm, “flatly said no,” eh? I wonder if there was any context left out.

Turning to the New York Times story the Huffington Post vampirized, I find

“At a briefing with reporters last month, the House minority leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, replied with a flat ‘no’ when asked if Democrats should make single-payer a central theme in 2018. She said state-level action was more appropriate, though she said she supported the idea in concept.”

So Nancy Pelosi answered a narrow question about political tactics surrounding single-payer, saying that she supports the idea but doesn’t think it’s something to run on in 2018. Separately, Al Gore also expressed support for the idea, without offering his opinion on what political strategy the party should adopt next year. But after being passed through two clickbait filters, with the context strained out to leave only the essence of conflict, it’s presented as a major dispute in the Democratic Party.

And that’s how they getcha. Sites like the Huffington Post and Splinter rely on stoking outrage for their traffic. This story is a good example of how that works.