Breaking the Sour Cream Barrier

I am that rare individual who possesses a California birth certificate and yet does not care much for avocados. I'm often asked, and these are the exact words, "How can you be from California and not like avocados?" Well, I only lived there full-time when I was a wee tot, and back in those days, Angie Dickinson had not made those 1970s commercials that resulted in the avocado becoming an object of culinary desire. In later years, when I would spend summers in the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County, I was more enamored of Thrifty ice cream and whatever nibbles I could pick up around town while riding my Spyder bike. Food was an afterthought -- sunshine was first on my mind.

Over the years, there have been certain foods which have just never had much appeal to me. In some cases, I downright fear a food, but that's getting better as I get older. And it's about time, since in many senses of the word, I guess I am a senior citizen. My latest personal victory has been sour cream. I've wondered for years why people like to dabble this appropriately-named concoction onto otherwise delightful Mexican food, but it took a to-go order mistake for me to acquire a taste for it.

One day during the height of the pandemic, I placed an online to-go order at my local Chipotle, during a brief interval in which it was not shut down because of lettuce or salsa contamination. I ordered my usual: a bowl with black beans and cilantro-lime rice, with barbacoa for the protein, and corn salsa, grated cheese, and salsa verde. When I picked up the order, I didn't check the contents, and I arrived home with a chicken bowl, pinto beans and white rice, pico de gallo, and a topping of SOUR CREAM. In a bout of both horror and hunger, hunger won out, and I started eating, realizing that I actually liked this, so much so that on my next online order, I intentionally ordered what I had been served in error. And that was the beginning of my sour cream fascination.

Now, a year or so later, I cannot order the #1 combo at Taco Bell (three crispy Supreme beef tacos with a beverage of your choice) without sour cream. In fact, I've started saving the little bits of taco that crack off as you're eating and using them to scoop up more sour cream. In so doing, I tell myself that I am actually eating a taco salad, which is kind of healthy, I think.

This experience with crème fraîche makes me wonder what else I may be missing. I recall vividly sitting in front of an order of KFC mashed potatoes one night in the 1960s and being told by my mother (an otherwise gentle and caring individual) that I could not leave the table until they were finished. I sat there for an hour, probably missing much quality television, until I finally dipped my spoon into the potatoes and gravy, put it in my mouth, and experienced what can only be described as a religious awakening. Since that evening, I have been a huge fan of mashed potatoes, and also now enjoy many other foods that I once feared, among them broccoli, asparagus, cauliflower, carrots, and even tater tots. I try not to even think about all the years without tater tots.

One day last summer, I was having lunch with my daughter Hannah at Mi Vida on the waterfront in Washington, D.C. It is referred to online as "Celebrity chef's high-end Mexican fare in a glamorous bi-level setting with killer waterfront views." Without my even thinking about it or paying much attention, Hannah ordered guacamole. When it arrived, I took a bite and found that I actually enjoyed it. This meant that in a sense, I had achieved something major, since guacamole contains more than a little avocado. Hannah was elated and immediately snapped my picture while I sat there smiling and eating the guac. She then forwarded it to our whole family, including our daughter Sarah, whose homemade guacamole I had often refused. I was reprimanded by Sarah, who said something like, "Oh, sure, you won't eat mine, but you'll eat it there. Fine."

I really do try to keep an open mind about things, but I know that food remains a weak point. My kids tell me I eat like a teenager, but I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, I tend to favor those things that McDonald's has on sale in the mobile application, not just any random old thing on their menu. And I almost always, practically never, ok, maybe once in 2019, order large fries.

Wait a second. Can you put sour cream on top of guacamole?

Doing Shots with Mickey Mouse

For some unknown reason, I can remember events that happened many years ago with remarkable clarity. I cannot recall exactly what it is that I need to pick up this afternoon at the grocery store, but I can remember exactly where I was, and what toy I was playing with, when I heard that John F. Kennedy had won the 1960 Presidential election. It makes no sense, but it comes in handy sometimes.

Back in 1959, when I was one month shy of my fourth birthday, my parents and paternal grandparents decided to take a car trip from Tennessee to California to see my uncle, aunt, and cousins. My mom and dad had lived in California when I was born but had moved back East several years later, so in addition to visiting my dad's brother and his family, they also wanted to get back out West to see some of their favorite places. My dad had recently purchased a 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air, shiny yellow with lots of chrome and a big old V8 under the hood. It was a powerful, yet comfortable car, but it was also produced during a time when air conditioning was a relatively new thing, and our car didn't have it.

And so it was, on a sunny morning in April, 1959, we headed west from our home in Dyersburg, Tennessee, with my dad driving, my mom in the front passenger seat, and yours truly in the back, sandwiched between my grandmother and grandfather, who by the way, were always impeccably dressed. We crossed the Mississippi and headed into the wilds of Arkansas.

My parents were savvy about car travel, having crossed the country many times on their own, so before we left, they purchased a couple of toys for me to play with on the trip. One, designated as the westbound toy, was a doctor's kit, and the other, which I was supposed to keep wrapped until the return trip east, was a plastic toaster that could be disassembled and reassembled. Once we had gotten some miles behind us, I pulled out the doctor's kit and got to work.

It's worth noting here that in those days, just about every other child born in the United States had some type of allergy or respiratory issue, and I was no exception. I was constantly being taken to the doctor, a wizened older fellow in downtown Dyersburg who would give me a shot in my buttocks (as Forrest Gump would say), then "allow" me to go home until the next poke session. The shots never seemed to do much, but I started to take them for granted as part of life.

Since our California trip would clock in at nearly 1,900 miles each way, and given the fact that I had no siblings, I brought along the only friend that would fit in the car with me and everyone else, a little squeezable plastic Mickey Mouse. He wore his trademark red pants but had long since lost his shirt, which was a good thing, since a) the car had no air conditioning and b) we would be driving through the desert. Almost immediately upon opening the doctor's kit, I started giving Mickey shots. I was concerned for his health, and it kept my little brain occupied knowing that I had to care for him on a regular schedule. In effect, it made the miles tick away. Mickey got a shot about every hour or so, and this amused my parents and grandparents alike.

We had many adventures on that trip. Mickey and I saw Hoover Dam, a vestigial version of Las Vegas (I still remember the old Sands and Golden Nugget signs), and the Grand Canyon. We even survived a flat tire in Needles, California, which is notable for often being the hottest place in the United States. Finally, after several days of driving, we made it all the way to Los Angeles and marveled at how anyone could grow a palm tree right in their front yard. We watched TV the night that my mom and dad went to see Lawrence Welk, and we saw, right there with our own eyes, my mom dancing with Mr. Welk. Mickey seemed to be doing well in California, so I pulled back on the shots schedule to give him a little room to enjoy himself.

After a couple of glorious weeks, it was time to head back East, so we said our goodbyes, and I resumed Mickey's shots, just to be on the safe side. I also opened the plastic toaster and began disassembling and reassembling it between administering shots. I was one busy guy, just let me say.

Everything was motoring along well until we got to Needles, where once again, upon entering the city, we had a flat tire. We got that fixed and left town, then headed east. It must have been about 30 or 40 miles before I realized that Mickey was missing, so my dad (and I will never forget this) turned the Bel Air around on an Arizona highway and headed all the way back to our motel in Needles, where I found Mickey safely nestled in the bed sheets. We got back out of town with no further tire damage.

I don't remember much about the trip back home, other than the fact that my grandmother put sheets of comics from the newspaper up on the windows to shield us from the desert sun. My grandfather, never a stitch out of place and almost always in a good mood, would make sly observations from time to time that would keep the rest of us reasonably happy, given the close proximity of our seating arrangements. My mom and dad seemed to have gotten their fix of California, at least enough to sustain them until their next trip out, which, as it happened, wouldn't be for another ten years.

I guess we often take family time for granted when we're younger. But I still remember so much of that trip, the joy on my parents' and grandparents' faces when we got out of the car in Los Angeles and saw our family. The moments we shared were all ours, and even Mickey was a part, thanks to some good proactive health care on the part of his owner. The trip was so worth it.

If you're headed out of town this summer, be safe, and I hope that you experience, to borrow an old Esso phrase, "Happy Motoring." I also hope that you can make some memories of your own, so that one day, you'll have some stories to tell, regardless of whether regularly scheduled preventive healthcare and appliance maintenance are involved.

The Eyes of Art

I really didn't expect to find his name. I had Googled my old company during a free associative search for something or the other, but when I saw Art's obituary, I stopped and read it, and then I promptly lost interest in whatever it was I had been researching.

Way back in 1980, I was offered a position as the data processing manager for a Chicago carbon paper company. It had all happened rather quickly, when the small, family owned consulting company that I had been working for suddenly collapsed, leaving its customers stranded. One of those customers was American Tara Corporation, which was quite the player in the carbon paper business at that time, with revenues in excess of fifty million dollars a year. For those of you too young to remember carbon paper, it was the manual precursor to modern copiers -- it allowed you to make multiple copies of documents by interleaving carbon-coated sheets of thin tissue-like paper between regular sheets. You would then write or type on the top copy, and the pressure would be transferred through all the lower layers, generating what were known as "carbon copies." Even though the mechanics have long since disappeared, that expression has remained in our lexicon.

Because computer networks did not yet exist at the time, I was constantly on the road among the company's five divisional offices, supporting their systems by applying application or operating system upgrades, installing hardware, and meeting with management and end users. (This was all before frequent flyer programs, or I would have made out like a bandit.) About one week every month, I found myself at offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago or Los Angeles. I didn't mind the travel, because in those days, airlines offered comfortable seating and real food, and companies were quite generous with their expense accounts, especially smaller companies like ours.

Art, in the late 1970's

And so it came to pass that one day, I made the acquaintance of a certain Englishman named Art, who was the divisional controller of our Los Angeles office. Art, probably around 60 years old at the time, was in Chicago with several of his staff members to meet with us about an upcoming payroll system upgrade. He was very knowledgeable about accounting practices and could describe complex California payroll requirements in great detail, but he maintained this particular sparkle in his eyes that revealed his ready sense of humor. I took an instant liking to him.

In those days, I generally traveled to each divisional office for several days at a time. In the case of my West Coast trips, I usually took a weekend on one end or the other to visit with my aunt, uncle, and grandmother, who lived about fifty miles up the coast from L.A. in the city of Camarillo. The work weeks were demanding, partly because our American Tara office was located in the heart of South Central L.A., in an area where we were advised to leave no later than 5:00 PM for our own safety. Because of this, the office officially shut down around 4:45, and it was therefore imperative that we finish our work early each day. All our equipment including adding machines, check embossing machines and the like were wheeled into a walk-in safe and locked up for the evening to prevent theft. This was not unwarranted -- one evening, several of our late shift factory workers observed two men attempting to wheel our entire rack-mounted microcomputer system, which was in a room with its own lock, out the front door of the office and down Beach Street. During daylight hours, the area was fine, but when darkness descended, it was dodgy at best.

On my first trip to our L.A. office, I traveled with my friend Sam, who worked as an industrial engineer at our office in Chicago. One evening, Art asked if we would join him for dinner. We agreed, and Art said he would pick us up at our hotel. Decked out in a bright, bold Hawaiian shirt that was impossible to miss, Art appeared at the appointed time in his trademark Buick Riviera and whisked us away to Canard de Bombay on San Vicente Boulevard for an outstanding Indian dinner and some lively conversation. He brought us back to our hotel at a reasonable time, and we were able to get a decent night's sleep before heading back to South Central the next morning. That was the beginning of my dinners with Art.

Bognor Regis, Sussex

I learned fairly quickly that Art's wife Marie suffered from poor health, so after work, he would head straight to his home in Downey to take care of her. On nights when he had dinner plans, he would get her set up with dinner before he headed back out. It was obvious from the way he talked about Marie that Art was extremely devoted to her, and yet, I also got the sense that he enjoyed getting out once in a while and sharing stories. Art was an outstanding storyteller. When he spoke, his bright blue eyes sparkled, and his regal English baritone would make even the most mundane story take on a life of its own. He had many stories to tell.

Art had grown up in the English coastal resort town of Bognor Regis and had enlisted in the Royal Air Force, where he served as a decorated flight sergeant during World War II. He had participated in the Battle of Britain. It was during a six week layover that he met Marie, who was living in New York at the time. They fell in love, and Art proposed to her in a letter he sent while he was stationed in the Indian Ocean. Marie accepted his proposal, and they were married in England in 1945.

Although he had served extensively in the RAF, war stories were not Art's stock-in-trade; rather, he preferred talking about time he had spent in Billings, Montana, Marie's hometown, to which he had moved with her in 1950. In 1953, Art and Marie had a daughter named Barbara Anne, and in 1957, Art became a naturalized citizen. In 1970, they moved to Los Angeles.

By the time I met him, Art had lived in L.A. for about ten years, and he had learned his way around the city fairly well. Karen and I lived in Chicago at the time, and being a dual-income-pre-yuppie couple, we were always exploring local restaurants, so any time I traveled, I enjoyed sampling the local fare. Art was an excellent dinner companion, and we had a regular set of places that we frequented: Lawry's Westside Broiler in Beverly Hills, Castagnola's on the Redondo Beach pier, and The Warehouse in Marina del Rey.

As a divisional controller of our company, Art managed a small staff of administrative employees, and he was well-liked by everyone. I remember clearly how one week, the division's entire accounts receivable system collapsed due to an issue with the computer hardware. Art and I discussed the problem at length, and when we had exhausted all the automated recovery options, it became apparent that we would have to manually re-enter the sales data from all customers for the preceding month. On Saturday morning, the entire staff appeared, and we made it a data entry party. In the afternoon, Art found the Dodger game on the radio, so we tuned in to that. We came back in on Sunday and finished the task, and never, throughout all this, did Art lose his cool or his sense of humor.

Castagnola's, years before it was
destroyed by a storm and fire

For some reason, even though Art was 35 years my senior, we had a lot in common, and talking to him always seemed more like talking to my father or uncle than to a work associate. Art loved to talk about Billings, and he told me that he and Marie already had plans to move back there when he retired a few years down the road. He liked the remoteness and openness of Montana, which stood in sharp contrast to his neighborhood in Downey. So I was not surprised to hear, years after I had left American Tara, that Art and Marie finally made it back to Billings.

Once back in Billings, Art and Marie resumed the life they'd had years before. They reconnected with friends, and Art became very involved with the Optimist Club. From all indications, he and Marie had a wonderful life there, but Marie passed away in 2003, and shortly thereafter, Art relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he lived with his daughter's family for the rest of his life. He passed away peacefully on an evening in May of 2015.

I was extremely touched by Art's obituary. We had not communicated since the mid 1980's, but reading it brought back so many memories of the few short years that I was able to explore fine dining and conversation with this gentle man, to hear his stories, his contagious chuckle, and watch those sparkling blue eyes as he told a story. I know this may be a bit out of the ordinary, but I would like to leave you with a quote from Art's obituary, because it is so beautifully written:

This is the chronology of a fulfilled life, but does not describe the character and temperament of a wonderful man who was loving, kind and tolerant throughout his life. If there was a silver lining in any situation, Art was able to find it. If there was good in a human being, Art saw it. He was a wonderful, warm and loving husband, father and friend. We shall miss his twinkling blue eyes and love of horse racing and silly puns and unfailing loyalty. 

He also leaves a tremendous legacy which, as is the fate of so many others, will likely never enter the history books or grace the television screen. Yet, with his help, the war was won, two great nations were strengthened, and many, many lives were made brighter, happier and more hopeful. His was a life well-lived by a man who enjoyed living life to its fullest. 

Art, you were the epitome of a gentleman. Thank you ever so much for being my friend.

"Lunche-r-r-r-r-o!"

"Lunche-r-r-r-r-o!" The announcement would come over the tinny loudspeaker in our South Central Los Angeles office at precisely 9:30 every weekday morning, when the food truck made its first appearance of the day. It was good to know that people were thinking ahead.

Of the many pleasures in life, my perennial favorite is lunch. I really have a thing for it. I guess many people do, but I'm a morning person, so by the time lunch rolls around, I'm ready to rock and roll, whether it's a weekday or the weekend. It's more than just food to me -- it's a chance to get out and immerse myself in the rest of the world, and I find that if I don't take that break, I'm generally frustrated by day's end, a little out of sorts and feeling that I've missed something. I realized some time ago that the roots of my lunch obsession run pretty deep and that they can be traced back to my early days of weekend work at my dad's grocery store.

Ladies lunching at National Cash Register, Dayton, OH, 1902

My father managed a store on Lamar Avenue in the city of Memphis, and it was patronized by a broad cross-section of the citizenry. Most of my dad's friends were salespeople or food brokers, and they usually arrived a little before lunchtime. After doing a bit of business, they typically would offer to take my dad, and sometimes me, out to lunch at any of a number of local favorite spots. One-of-a-kind cafes and restaurants were abundant in those days, and many places offered plate lunches consisting of homemade specialties and scrumptious desserts. People in sales seemed to know both the new places and the classic establishments, and in their company, we sampled everything. I always looked forward to these forays, and the sales people were usually lively conversationalists who didn't exclude me from the proceedings; indeed, they often kept two threads running: one for the shop talk with my dad, and the other asking me about school and outside activities. I liked the idea of being around adults and eating good food while being made to feel a part of it all.

When I began working in the late 1970's, people still did serious lunches. It was not out of the ordinary to find myself sitting at a hotel restaurant, sipping a before-lunch alcoholic beverage (scotch and water with a twist was my favorite), at the mercy of whichever manager had decided to take us out. Back in those days, talk about work issues rarely made it to the lunch table, and instead, we traded stories about movies, concerts, family, politics and home repair, in no particular order.

One of my favorite memories from that time was dining at the Golden Gate Restaurant, a family owned business on West Randolph Street in Chicago. Our company's CEO, a kindly elderly gentleman whom we referred to as "A.M.", would invite three of four of us to accompany him almost every week to the Golden Gate, and once seated, we would be presented with a generous basket of bread and butter, into which we would all dig with abandon. The food was predictable and good, and the prices were very reasonable. Going to the Golden Gate with the "big boss" really made me feel part of the working world.

The Beef-Eatery, on the other hand, was our quick go-to greasy spoon. This tiny establishment, just around the corner from our office, featured a selection of burgers and sandwiches, all prepared in a dark, low-ceilinged kitchen. Once the staff had prepared your order and placed it into a brown paper bag, you either took the bag with you back to your office or headed up a rickety flight of stairs to a "dining area" which could only be described as spartan. If you chose the takeout option, the bag would usually be spotted liberally with grease by the time you got back around the block.

We had many other favorites in Chicago: Burger Baron, The Off-Center Cafe (A.M.'s quote about Off-Center was, "I could make better chicken salad at home"), some Irish pub whose name I do not recall...the list goes on and on. I never tired of heading out for lunch, regardless of the schedule or the amount of snow on the ground at the time. Sometimes, we would head to my boss Al's brother's cafe on the West Side, where we would be greeted with something like "Yo, Al...you brought all da guys!", then treated to a hearty hot plate lunch. Of course, there was always Diana's, which had absolutely no signage on the building but was a favorite of the Chicago cops, who would park in a somewhat hidden lot around the corner from the entrance. We always felt safe there.

When I started traveling to Los Angeles for work, I carried on the tradition I had started with my dad and made friends with the company salesmen, who would always take me to their favorite Mexican restaurants. We usually ended up at any number of places in the community of South Gate, just a little east of the Harbor Freeway. The guys knew when my morning flight was arriving, and by the time I had driven from LAX to the office, I had just enough time to put my briefcase down before they were ready to head out to lunch.

When I moved to Atlanta in the early 1980's, I reacquainted myself with Southern delicacies such as barbecue and Brunswick stew. At the time, Atlanta had a local Mexican chain called El Toro, and I wish I had a dollar for every "Speedy Gonzalez" lunch I had at one of their many locations -- I would have retired ten years ago.

For two brief periods in the 1980's, I broke tradition and became religious about bringing my lunch. The first time was when we were saving up a down payment for the house we planned to buy when we moved to Atlanta. The second time was solely for the purpose of saving money. Both periods were successful but marked a real departure from the typical midday break.

Back when CD players had just been invented (yes, I'm dating myself), many lunch excursions culminated with a trip to one of our local Atlanta stereo stores, where we would listen to the various players and push the eject buttons, just to watch the CD drawers slide in and out. A few of us had made the leap from vinyl to CD's, but for most of us, this was window shopping. In those days, stereo stores were staffed by people who could seamlessly launch into a discussion of frequency response, wow and flutter, or the merits of Dolby C over Dolby B. Sadly, those days appear to have vanished into the ether of flawless digital reproduction.

One of my favorite lunch traditions became known simply as "Tsu's". One day back in the late 1980's, a small group of my friends headed to a north side cafe called North Peking and sampled the General Tsu's dish which, of course, goes by about twenty names: General Tsu's, General Tso's, General Chow, etc. The original group reported back to the office that they had discovered something quite grand, so the next week, a larger group headed out to North Peking. This tradition continued every Monday for four years, with the crowd gradually increasing in size to over a dozen participants. Only when several of us moved away or to other jobs did the tradition finally come to an end. I still drive by the place and have a hankering to go in.

Nowadays, we try a little bit of everything: new places, old standbys, "meat and three" cafeterias, sandwich shops, pizza joints, cheap Chinese, and occasionally, the high spice of Indian or Thai. We tend to look for value, and Atlanta is pretty good in that respect. I've never really gotten into the "power lunch" thing, because a) it's too expensive, and b) it requires too much focus and concentrated thought. I'd rather just go out and be surprised by whatever happens on that particular day. And besides, lunch is our chance to reconnect, catch up, trade stories, and resolve crises. It is a sacrosanct time, and my friends and I tend to become rather annoyed when others do not respect the noon hour. So many fascinating things have occurred during lunches: emergency whiskey acquisitions, random power outages, even insects falling from the ceiling onto us. The list goes on and on.

In this new year, I'm thinking that I may want to economize a bit more, because after all, there may come a time when I want to do something drastic, like being able to retire. I consider it now and then, and I guess retirement would be okay, as long as I could maintain some semblance of my lunch habits. Without lunch...well, I don't even want to think about that.

Until later, bon appétit, my friends. Maybe I'll see you at the next table.

The Birds

It was the summer of 1969, and I was in California with my aunt and uncle at their home in Camarillo, a Ventura County community about an hour northwest of Los Angeles.  Camarillo was a pretty town with a gentle Mediterranean climate -- it was possessed of an unassuming, natural beauty.  On any given summer morning, I would awaken to the smell of fresh eucalyptus and the soft cooing of hundreds of pigeons.  My uncle, a Methodist minister, had raised pigeons since his teens.  During his tour of duty in World War II, he had even raised pigeons to be used as message carriers.

Back in 1969, I was still bicycle bound, and generally by eight or nine in the morning, I had made my daily pilgrimage up Anacapa Drive to a small parking lot outside the local elementary school.  From that lot, I could look down on the entire Pleasant Valley. In those days, development hadn’t quite made it over from Thousand Oaks and past the Conejo Grade, and all the houses in town were forties to sixties vintage, some marked by creative scrollwork and soft pastel colors.   Landscape plantings were generally tasteful, and in a few cases, somewhat extravagant.  The fog would burn off by about 9:30, and then, looking down over the valley, I would marvel at the beauty and peacefulness of it all.   A great time and place to be a kid.

Some days, my uncle and I would leave the placid neighborhood for a little bit of adventure.  Among the many varieties of pigeons provided for by my uncle were the racers, who had to be trained in the fine art of flying back home from afar.   Getting up well before sunrise ("before day", as my uncle always said), we would place all the birds fit to fly into four to six specially made wooden crates, each with a little trap door for inserting or removing the unwilling participants, and then we would load them into the bruised but reliable old white Ford F-100 pickup and clamp the tailgate shut.

Most days, we headed toward the community of Ojai, then through the backcountry to Goodenough Road, which ran alongside a lively little mountain stream leading into the Sespe Condor Sanctuary (in those days, only a handful of condors remained).  We would hop down from the truck, pull out the crates, and then give the birds a couple of minutes to acclimate to their surroundings before opening the carriers.

Once the birds were released, they circled the immediate area for several minutes, and then they headed off in the general direction of home.  Some birds were leaders, others were followers, and still others were stragglers.  There was, of course, no way that my uncle and I could ever consistently reach the house before the birds, so we took our time getting home.  Sometimes we would stop for a cold, frosty glass of A & W root beer at the little stands on the fringes of the smaller towns.  On other mornings, we might stop and chat with a perfect stranger out doing some morning field work at the Julius Goodman egg farm.

As the birds became progressively more experienced navigating the route home, we would take them farther away.  Eventually, by the end of the summer, we were heading up into the coastal mountains.  A favorite release site was Mount Pinos, with an elevation somewhere between eight and nine thousand feet.  This was truly wild, spectacular country, with crisp, clean air and almost ethereal light and color.  I always felt as if maybe we were just a bit closer to heaven.

There are several theories addressing how pigeons return home.  At least one of these involves the birds’ ability to map spectral contours, following patterns of visible and invisible light.  Now, looking back on summers with the birds, it occurs to me that on those crystalline mornings, the world looked so pure and bright that I could almost see that light myself.