I don't get worked up over Easter, perhaps because its secular aspects (new clothes and Easter bunnies) seem both self-serving and silly. The coordinating of the solar and lunar calendars is interesting. I'm fond of repeating to people how Easter is calculated. But it's possible to consider such things even in the absence of glazed ham and peas. For our first Easter together I rounded up bags of Bordeaux Easter eggs from See's Candies. They had to be Bordeaux. I drove from one See's to another, four different stores in three different towns, to accumulate them. My wife was just past midway in her first pregnancy. As I downed a late breakfast or brunch somewhat bleary-eyed, having worked past midnight the night before, she downed a pound or so of high quality Bordeaux eggs. The climax of this strange event was that she ran to the bathroom and threw up. When her head stopped spinning, she called her sister and sat there chattering with the phone in one hand and a nicely decorated half-pound Bordeaux egg in hand. I wondered if she thought — of course, thinking itself was at the core of this problem — that in the United States all Easter eggs had to be eaten before noon. She cycled through this process with and without calling her sister until every last crumb and globule of Bordeaux was safely gone, and then went back to bed. After many more trips, she showered, got dressed and was ready for Easter dinner. When I look back, I see nothing but warning signs, one after another, that I was too young, too inexperienced and too optimistic to heed.

But, this is Christmas, not Easter, the grand secular holiday of holidays. Nothing holds a candle to it. And yet, the single most wonderful day of the year is now the day after Christmas. What's done is done. What wasn't done can no longer be expected to be done. The presents are opened or missing or excused. The mystery and anticipation is put finally to rest.

On a side note, the Senate passed a health care bill this Christmas Eve to the consternation of many. I'm convinced it's the word Care in Health Care that causes so much trouble. Mandatory caring is something only a communist would favor. People should be free to care or not to care. When the House and Senate versions are harmonized, or rectified, or whatever they do, we'll find ourselves with some sort of national insurance program. If they're smart, they'll eliminate the words Health Care altogether, which would leave us quibbling over nothing more than monetary considerations, for which there is an easy answer. It brings us, oddly enough, back to Christmas.

If we change the nature of Christmas, its accepted nature, from a day of gift giving and caring for others to a day when people give to themselves the one thing or things they've wanted all year, if we bypass altogether the necessity to care either for or about others and add a December surcharge on all gifts with 5% payable directly to Goldman Sacks, we could easily fund an insurance program that would benefit… Well, that would benefit us. Without having to specify beyond us those who would actually benefit, the economy could be healed, doctors could charge what was convenient, the wars could go on, and almost everyone — except grandmother — could live happily ever after.

Under my plan, a plan that I expect to be far more successful than Easter eggs, the best day of the year could once again be Christmas itself.

To me, it's another day, though I always hope it will be more than that. I make an effort to stay in tune with the great themes of the universe, at least the solar system. It moves slowly enough, but also quickly enough that with a minimum of effort I can keep track of its changing character. The great theme of Christmas, however, turns out to be another Christmas. I suppose that could be something to be glad of, if quantity were the only issue. We could count our Christmases and be glad, or else count them and be weary. It's hard to say what the optimal response should be. This period of time, this portion of the year has long been associated with plenty — Saturn and Santa are very close relatives. But, just as Saturn was overthrown to make way for a new age, Santa spreads his token plenty in the leaden cold of winter. Christmas is the promise of things to come, not the reality of them, just as faith is the expectation of things unseen. The death of the Sun is also the birth of the New Year. What we mourn we celebrate, what we lose we anticipate, and for all such things we say,

     Merry Christmas

We all tend to get pale this time of year. The sun gave up working overtime months ago. So, a sign in the parking lot caught my attention this afternoon.

Unlimited Tanning S P E C I A L $20.00

It seemed too good to be true. The sandwich I was eating while I read the sign cost almost half that. A thought ran through my head. Maybe they're one of those fly by night operations that hope you'll be so disgusted by the place after your first visit that you never come back. I walked a bit closer to read the small print. At the very bottom it said: per month. Wasn't unlimited and per month somewhat contra­dictory? Then the sandwich kicked in and my blood sugar got back to normal. The special was $20.00 per month. The name of the business is Unlimited Tanning.

On further reflection, maybe I should open a business called Free Sandwiches.

On this day of Winter Solstice it seems appropriate to say something about the heavens and how we interact with them. If you already know why the days of the week are named what they are and why they appear in the order they do, I suppose you could skip this post. I knew for years that the days were named after planets, but never once wondered, for example, why Tuesday follows Monday. There are two separate though related explanations for the order of the days in the week, one far more interesting than the other. I'll cover both of them in this post. If I hadn't found it exciting at one point in my life to learn these things, I wouldn't bother you with them now. I hope to write more about them in the days or weeks to come. What I cover today is the ticket to things far more interesting. But, first we must know the days of the week.

Sunday is the easiest to start with. Sun + day = Sunday. Monday is Moonday. Tuesday… Here the problems begin. What possible connection could there be between Sun, Moon and Tuesday? Tuesday is named after the Norse god Tyr, but before that will make sense, we must know something about the classical planets.

Before the invention of the telescope — Galileo made the first scientific use of the telescope, but its fairly certain he did not invent it — there were seven visible objects that moved among the stars. These were the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. No Uranus, no Neptune. These are visible only through telescopes more powerful than Galileo's. No Pluto. Poor Pluto is no longer considered to be a planet. Of course, there were comets, but these were more like occasional intruders. So, while it may seem strange to call the Sun and Moon planets, they are exactly that — things that move (from an Earth-centered perspective) against the background of the stars.

The names Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn should sound familiar. They are the names of Roman gods, or the Latinized versions of Greek gods. You learned about them in elementary school. The Latin for sun and moon, by the way, is sol and luna . The Romance languages, the languages that grew out of Latin, make it much easier to see the planets, or their names, in the names of the days of the week. Everyone knows Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday). In Latin, Tuesday is dies martii, the day of Mars, which is easily seen in the French word mardi. There are similar derivations for the other days. But to get from mardi to Tuesday takes one additional step. The Roman historian Tacitus, in his Germania, provided a list of correspondences between the Norse gods and those that evolved nearer the Mediterranean. He did so in the belief or knowledge that the same principles that caused one also caused the other. He determined that the Norse god Tyr, a god of combat, was the equivalent of Mars. In Old English, Tyr was Tiw. From Tiw comes Tuesday. Thus, Tuesday is Mars day. That's a long way around, but that's how it is.

In the same manner, Wednesday is Norse Oðinsdagr, which in Old English became Wōdensdæg and is therefore, following Tacitus, Mercury's day. Thursday is Thor's day, Thor being Jove or Jupiter. Friday comes from Freyjudagr, by way of frīgdæg, Freyja and/or Frige being Venus. Which brings us back to Latin. Saturday is Saturn's day. So, even if it's no longer apparent, even in English the days are named after the planets.

The next order of business is the order of the planets, not the order of the days, but the classical order of the planets themselves. This seems tedious, but first we must know the planets and then the days. In school, I learned that the order of the planets was Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. I'm sure you learned exactly the same. Of course, that's their order from the Sun. It also neglects the Moon. In ancient times, distance from the Sun was poorly understood, if understood at all. Once we accept the Sun as planet, it's difficult to imagine it not being the first planet on the list. It's certainly the most prominent. But, the planets were listed by speed, not prominence. Not speed in the sense of velocity, exactly, but by the quickness of their cycles.

The Moon in this system is the fastest thing in the Universe. It completes one lunar cycle in only twenty-eight days. It returns to the same place in the heavens after passing through all the constellations in roughly twenty-eight days, or the same place plus one twelfth, give or take. It's the roughly and the give or take that keep things interesting. If you object that the Sun goes around the Earth in a single day, you're neglecting to realize that the Sun and everything else goes around in the same period. The Sun's cycle is one year. It takes a year to move through the months and finally return to its starting place.

Mercury is very difficult to observe because of its proximity to the Sun. It appears somewhat randomly at sunset or sunrise close to the horizon and then disappears into the light or sinks out of sight. Still, it was very well known even in prehistoric times. It's cycle is a hundred and some days. Because it's an interior planet, i.e. between us and the Sun, its cycle is defined as returning to the same place in relation to the sun, not the same place in relation to the stars. Mercury is the second fastest.

Venus, also an interior planet, is perhaps the most spectacular of the bunch. It alternates between morning and night star. At it's brightest, only the Sun and Moon rival it. It rises inconspicuously into the evening sky near sunset over a period of months. Eventually, it shines very brightly. It's the star people normally wish upon. Then, in a period of days, it falls from the sky and is seen no more. Its fall is the source of many myths. After passing near the Sun, it makes an equally spectacular rise into the morning sky where, over a period of months, it gradually disappears. It goes behind the Sun. Although its velocity is greater than the Earth's, the Earth is racing around in the same direction, so the apparent cycle of Venus is greater than one year. Venus is the third fastest.

We skip the Earth, because the Earth is the center of everything. It stays put while all else revolves, rotates or retrogrades. The periods of the outer planets, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, are very roughly two, twelve and twenty-eight years. If the skies were clear tonight — it's raining at this particular center of the universe — I could admire the conjunction of the crescent Moon and Jupiter. Something's always going on up there. So, we now have our corrected list of planets. It reads, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. If we place them on the Wheel of the Planets, they should look something like this:


Starting with the moon on the bottom left and moving clockwise, each planet in succession is "slower" than the one preceding it — until the jump from Saturn to Moon where the wheel starts over again. Now, replacing the signs with the days of the week that represent them and connecting the dots to form a seven pointed star, we end up with the following:



Long before you learned the names of the gods in elementary school, you learned to make five-pointed stars without lifting the point of your pencil. Seven-pointed stars are the same thing with different angles. Starting from the Sun, or Sunday, draw a line to Monday. From Monday, continue the line to Tuesday, then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and back again to Sunday. You have just drawn a seven pointed star. You have also discovered, whether you yet realize it or not, the secret to the order of the days of the week. What seemed random and meaningless turns out to be complicated, but precisely ordered. You can do the same thing in a very laborious and uninteresting way. You can start with the first hour of the day and call it Moon. After that, you can work your way through the planets three times and then add three more. You will have managed to go from Sunday to Monday and can continue in this manner throughout the week. The Babylonians did something like this to determine which planet ruled each hour, but if elegance has anything to do with truth, they discovered the seven-pointed star first and then copied out the rest.

There it is, the answer to why Tuesday follows Monday. I hope this will be helpful. I hope it will prompt you to see things somewhat differently. It's a truism that the marvelous lies behind and below the surface of everyday things. It's always there, always waiting. I would only add that if you know how and where look, even Mondays can be delightful.

Happy Winter Solstice

May your days grow longer and your heart be full.

I've noticed that the more people know me, the less likely they are to believe me. I've been accused of exaggeration so many times that I tend to ignore it. Occasionally, I'm accused of out and out dishonesty or untruthfulness. Generally speaking, the more humorless the individual, the more likely he is to quibble over precise amounts and descriptions. A thousand people, for example, is not nine hundred ninety-nine plus one, it's lots and lots of people. Enough people that it's hard to count, or enough that it was startling to behold. "I stepped outside and found a thousand people standing on the lawn." Well, that's not true. There isn't room for a thousand people in the front yard. There was maybe twenty-three, twenty-four. Let me see. No. More like twenty. If there was a thousand, they'd fill up the steet.

Actually, you could fill the street with no more than two or three hundred, so a thousand, in some ways, is not only more accurate than two hundred, it's also far more interesting than twenty, twenty-one.

The truth is arrived at by increments, not something one swallows whole. People assume, most people almost always assume that others see the world exactly as they do — as if there were only one set of eyes. Of course, even our own eyes sometimes deceive us. God knows what other eyes see. The French have a delightful expression, et encore, that tacks neatly on the end of that statement. It changes the sense to even God doesn't know, but only as an afterthought. Of course the French are notorious exaggerators.

I'm writing this as an introduction. I received a comment on the side from someone in a position to know. It speaks volumes, I think. "Your writing is always beautiful. It exaggerates sometimes, but not in a bad way. I just read your blog and found it very heart warming to hear the stories about your family. Any non-knower of Evan would think you were raised in the most wholesome house in town. Not the case." I appreciated the "beautiful" part. The rest is true. But, not a truth that stands easily on its own.

People of my generation are usually comfortable with the expression bad vibes. It may be dated, but everyone has gone somewhere, done something and felt uneasy about it. Bad vibes. Good vibes and bad vibes, however, seem very different from good and evil. Mention the word "evil" and people flee, as if there's a Bible about to be thumped. We've eased the word out of our vocabularies. Evil is now a fiction, something that propels chain saw movies and gothic novels. It's as two dimensional as Satan, and almost as lovable as vampires. But, as we assure ourselves, it does not exist.

That's the part of reality we do not swallow whole. Or, one of the many parts. The Gnostics believed, if we can believe their surviving traces, that the world is a great clash of wills between good and evil, light and dark, truth and deception — two equal forces and the play between them. The Hindus recognize something called asuric forces and represent them as demons. At the mythic level, there are Devas and Asuras, godlike entities representing good and evil. But, these are not primary forces of the world or universe, only aspects of it. Sri Aurobindo taught that there is no independent evil. Evil is a kind of vacancy, or the consequence of the vacancy created by the need to condense awareness or being into ego. In order to have individual beings, the Great Being must create the illusion or limited reality of separateness, thereby creating areas that are not truth oriented. As the need for separateness declines, evil will be reabsorbed. In the familiar picture of Shiva Nataraja, the dancing Shiva, he stands on a small demon. He does not slay the demon, he subdues it. In psychoanalytical terms, he sublimates it. As part of the dance of Shiva, evil is reabsorbed. Nor is this concept foreign to Christian icon­ography. St. George slaying the dragon is an easy example. Keep your eyes open and you will see many more. While he does eventually slay the dragon, he does so in the second half of the story, the one having to do with converting the kingdom. He slays it on condition that they convert to Christianity. However, the first and more authentic part of the story has him defending the fair maiden by subduing the dragon. He charges it on his white steed with a lance. He then borrows the maiden's girdle or belt to fashion a kind of leash. The maiden leads the dragon back to town or castle where the conversion takes place. Two stories merged into one. The saint's job is to subdue and integrate evil.

Some people are sensitive to such things, some very sensitive. But the truth does not go down in one gulp, nor does it often go down at all without a sugar coating. We are too wise, too mature, to scientific to see things as they actually are. So, an important element in story telling, an essential element in rubbing shoulders with people in an uplifting manner, and an absolutely necessary element in self-discovery, is to identify and to incorporate evil into good without calling undo attention to it. The good, after all, is all that will ultimately survive.

So, I like to think that my stories are the sugar coating. If successful, they also contain truth, or a tiny portion of it. At the very least, they prepare one for the next dose. The dull and the overly wise tend unknowingly to exempt themselves. The truth, as I've said a thousand times, is what you make of it.

Shiva from Google Images, Saint George from Wikimedia Commons.

Lot's of panic in the air tonight. I've just returned from the store — Albertsons, not the department store. People are grabbing things for dinner. They're also walking rather quickly on the wrong side of the isle and pushing their carts around corners without looking. A lady at the checkout stand who knows me as a regular customer shot me a look and said, "What's wrong with people?"

We have Black Friday, the Twelve Days of Christmas and Christmas Eve, not to mention Christmas itself. Perhaps we should also have the Three Days of Panic. The weekend before Christmas, Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, are a joyless time. People return from Black Friday victorious, having vast stretches of time to sort, wrap and feel smug about their trophies. The Three Days of Panic produce only panic and more panic as retailers offer rain checks for pink MP3 players. As if a rain check would do one damned bit of good. What the hell good is a rain check ? Have you checked the storeroom?

She turned her head from the other customers as she handed me my receipt. "I went shopping last night," she added, with a rather long pause. "This year I'm giving my husband groceries."

This is a slightly revised version of my answer to Christopher's comment concerning his Welsh Dragon tattoo. Now that he's had a chance to read it and discuss it with me, I've decided to move it into the post section. We had a long and pleasant conversation on the phone last night. It's always interesting to me that his taste in movies and actors is almost identical to mine. His approach is far less intellectual, which is probably a blessing, but we remember and laugh at the same scenes, the same dialogue, even from movies we haven't seen for ten or fifteen years. I'm a character in his life, just as my father and his father are characters in mine. In fact, my father is a character in his, only a very different one. He too absorbed far more than he understood, and is trying very hard to make sense of it. Perhaps the path is meant to be long and incomplete.

You make an interesting point about God giving you your first tattoo. When we left the hospital, I checked to make sure it was really you. You didn't require an identity tag, you already had one.

I wanted to mention that since your father is half Welsh, and your mother not Welsh at all, you are one quarter Welsh, which leaves three quarters unaccounted for.

On your mother's side is the odd fact that your mother's mother is half German. Her mother, your great-maternal-maternal-grandmother, had an affair with a German soldier, which was a very unpopular thing to do. Your great-grandfather stepped forward to marry her while she was pregnant, because he very much loved her, and also because he wasn't very much bothered by such things. I had a drink with him in a Paris café shortly after my marriage to your mother. At least, I think I did. He was well into his eighties at the time. I had just come from having lunch with his wife, your great-grandmother, and was so drunk that I had to be steered in the right direction. For her, it was just another lunch. So, if you're good with fractions, your mother's mother was one half German, your mother, therefore, one quarter German and, if I have all the right people in line, that makes you approximately one eighth German.

As for the French part, your mother's mother's mother, the one we've been talking about, came from the vicinity of the Pyrenees. So, barring the occasional Spanish traveler or Basque separatist, she was as French as anyone from the Pyrenees can be said to be. Which leaves your mother's father's side.

Berdard (pronounced "bear narr") was as Gallic as they come. Of course, there might have been a tiny bit of devil mixed in. He could be very charming. He was vague about his background. I do know that he spent several years in England as part of the French resistance, running missions behind the lines under Col. Keffer, waiting for D-Day. You have a book about that. Unfortunately, it's in French. There's a scene depicting his discovery in The Longest Day. The guns that 80% of his group died to capture were already gone. He's the one breaking down the door. When your grandmother agreed to marry him, or perhaps suggested it — the French are generally too polite to do the math — he had to travel back to England to make sure everything was OK, that everyone (not someone) was in agreement. Ever the gentleman. He worked for British Airways after the war. I remember a picture of him on the mantel standing next to a very youthful and happy looking Queen Elizabeth. (He had just cracked a joke.) Behind them was what looked like a DC3 with BA markings. So, we'll count him as completely French.

About the German, however. Before you run off and figure out which flag was flying for your German tattoo, I asked Bernard one day how a WWI German soldier found his way to the Pyrenees, or how a young woman from the Pyrenees found her way to a German soldier. He said, rather man to man, "Ah, well, you know. Maybe she exaggerates."

So, it's possible, if you read between the lines a bit, that you're half French after all. Anyway, half French, a quarter Welsh, and the remainder lost in the great expansion of America. Some ended up as Tennessee farmers, some followed the wagons westward with the Mormons. Generally speaking, they were a dull lot. My mother's great-aunt Delia, which would be three greats for you, was married to a Senator for a while and lived in a hotel most of her life. I suppose she was the least dull of the bunch. My mother, whose middle name was Delia, had memories of her in a Rolls Royce, rather spectacular back then. So, the American part has at least one interesting story. But, before you run off to find a State Flag of Tennessee, I met her when she was a hundred and something, rocking on the porch in Kelso, Tennessee. She was a tiny, frail thing at that point. She apologized about not serving lunch to her guests, but she couldn't find any niggers to do the cooking. "We'll have to make do with sodee pop," she said. And so we did.

It may be that a relative remembers you some day as that crazy, colorful uncle, or great-uncle, or second-cousin, or great-great-grandfather, if you ever have children of your own, who lived by the beach and designed t-shirts. It's more important, however, to be something distinct and separate, something not merely the result of others. Marshall Macluan said that we drive into the future with our eyes in the rearview mirror. How much more interesting it might be to keep both eyes on the road.

Once again, the answer to a short question has turned into a post.

I hope you mean two or three fingers on the side. There's probably a law against mixing Penderyn with tea. As a young boy, I was served tea with half-n-half and sugar, because that's how my grandmother drank it. Once home, I drank it black, because that's how we did things. My grandfather took his with milk, milk and sugar, or sometimes black. He was fond of drinking it in a manner thought very low class. The process of making tea involved rinsing the pot with boiling water. The pot was generally full of dead tea leaves, so the rinsing did two things: it heated the pot and got rid of the leaves. There was a very large and rather peculiar jade plant at the back door of my grandmother's kitchen that was covered in tea leaves. She poured hot water into the pot, swished it around carefully as she walked toward the back door and then rather indiscriminately dumped the water with tea leaves to her right. It wasn't clear if the jade plant appreciated this or not. On the other hand, it was very large.

I've heard lots of theories about how tea should be measured, or how much to use. My grandmother had a small collection of tea scoops, shallow disc-like spoons with stubby handles. They had pictures of Welsh women in costume, castles and the names of cities she had visited. They were something like National Park mementos. One of them had a picture of Queen Elizabeth and commemorated her coronation. They travelled home to coincide with it, and stood along the way with great enthusiasm to see her golden coach clop by. But the scoops were banished from the kitchen. She measured, my relatives measured and I for years measured tea by the pinch. A pinch uses the tips of all five fingers to bunch up as much tea as will easily stay. It's an art, really, because the saying One pinch per person and one for the pot is a very elastic saying. The Welsh were rather heavy handed with their tea and liked the strongest variety available. Today, Welsh tea is grown mainly in Africa. The Jewel Tea Company, which went door to door, made an Iced Tea Blend that was perfect. Presumably, it had to be strong and black enough to stand up to the ice cubes.

Then, boiling water — the kettle was left boiling until the pot was rinsed — a tea cosy and a short wait, which made for strong, black, very hot tea.

You may have noticed — maybe it's no longer true — that the saucers for tea cups are rather deep. Even after making the tea just right (adding milk and sugar, or just milk) it should still be too hot to drink. What my grandfather did was to allow the tea to dribble down the side of his cup into the saucer and then slurped it up from there. Eventually, it was cool enough to drink, so he drank the rest from the cup. I remember most of my relatives doing this from time to time. I also remember learning how low class it was. I'd be punished if I did that myself. Of course, as perhaps you've already guessed, I learned that from my mother.

I'm going to switch to another locale for a moment. When I was eighteen, I spent a summer in Denmark. I won't go into the details of it, which could fill a book, but one particular memory applies here. After my first dinner at the summerhouse on Fanø, my girlfriend and her mother went the very short distance to the kitchen to make tea. It warmed my heart. Another country that appreciates tea, I thought. Her father, who was proud of his ability to mimmic Americans, this time gave his best imitation of an Englishman. "Oh, wonderful," he said, "Let's have a spot of tea with the ladies." I was troubled by the irony in his voice. Then he added in his Coals to Newcastle voice, "Such a shame we will not be able to have cognac or Cuban cigars with our coffee." I learned almost instantly to love coffee.

So, to answer your question, black tea is perfectly fine. I've learned, however, that the tannins in tea like to be neutralized by milk. I say that I've learned that, but now that I type it, it seems like I'm making it up. A number of years ago I forced myself to add milk. The sugar is for drinking it alone, not by oneself but without biscuits. Once you've got the hang of milk, the sugar in the biscuit completely transforms the taste of the tea. As for whisky, especially a good whisky, among the very best I hear, if you really need fortifying on a damp but beautiful afternoon, I think you should look for coffee and, if you can find one, maybe a cigarette.

My older son Christopher has a Welsh dragon tattooed on the inside part of his lower arm. He mentioned it only afterwards, so I was unable to talk him out of it. Parents can be such boors sometimes. For the life of me I can't remember which arm — the patronymic one, I suppose. Of course, his father is only half Welsh, which makes him a quarter Welsh. Still, he was looking for a connection to the world, and there are far worse things than being connected.

I saw the exact same bright red tattoo on the upper arm of a gorgeous barista wearing a sleeveless blouse at Linaea's Coffee House in San Luis Obispo a few years ago. I asked if she was Welsh. "Am I what?" she replied. "Welsh. That's a Welsh dragon, isn't it?" "Oh, yeah," she said, sort of half-remembering. "They had a whole bunch of them, but I really liked this one the best."

A longwinded answer to another comment by JoAnn.

I have not been to Wales, though many of my relatives have made it back. To me, Wales was always a small house in Torrance and the wealth of experience associated with it. Many of my relatives have made it back. What they got from those trips has been sometimes dubious. My father, when he retired around 1970 — he was the Superintendent of a school district, or Head Master as my grandmother insisted — was given a trip to Wales by the PTA, a rather lavish gift, all things considered. He managed to take in Paris, London, and finish up with a round of golf at St. Andrews. He took with him a clunky cassette tape recorder from Radio Shack and brought back interviews from along the way. In Aberdare, he interviewed his cousins and second cousins. One of them told a typically long story about the morning he was on his way to work and an accident occurred right in front of him on the street. A policeman, who was not far away, heard the noise and rushed to the scene. He directed my cousin by many removes to stand right there and wait for the investigating officer. So, you see, he had no choice but to obey. As a result, and here follows the year, the month, the date, the day of the week, small reports on the weather and the commotion surrounding him, he was late for work. It spoiled his perfect record, but what could he do? At this point my father would hastily snap off the machine and say, "On his tombstone they'll write, HERE LIES RHYSE WILLIAMS / HE WAS ONLY LATE ONCE."

Aberdare is a short distance, perhaps a century or two, north west of Cardiff in the far south. Jan Morris comes from the northernmost part. Still, a Welshman is a Welshman. I was a member of the American Welsh Society for a few years, mainly so I could drive my grandmother to meetings and participate in tea and stories of the old country. The Great War, death, illness and poverty prevailed, but always in well rounded stories, vast quantities of detail, and long pauses shared by all where tears tended to well up and people fiddled with things — lost brothers and fathers and uncles mostly. And to sing songs and cheat at Whist. My grandmother thought that cheating was the second rule after hide your cards. I ended up with bruises on my shins, but I also learned something about the fine art of gestures in the midst of distracting conversation. Of all my relatives, I miss her the most.

My grandfather was a socialist and an atheist with a third grade education, but an autodidact to end all autodidacts. He was 5'3" tall and knew everything. The best picture we have of him — my aunt has it somewhere — is lying back in bed with a book held to the light in one hand. He turned the pages with his thumb. He took me to the Spit and Argue club in Long Beach one Sunday afternoon. People took turns standing on a box defending various points of view. All the way home he grumbled about their stupidity. He was a founding member of the Longshoremen Union and had cauliflower ears from all the fight's he'd been in. The people who knew him said that if he'd only been taller, he might have been content not to know so much or to back up what he knew with his fists. Of course, they generally took the union for granted. He was a baker by trade, the skill he brought to America, his way out of the mines. It was a small bakery in Harbor City that provided the wherewithal to raise a family. He died on my thirteenth birthday, in his sleep, on a trip home to Wales.

I have not read Jan Morris. Nor have I read How Green Was My Valley. Of course, everyone else has. Dylan Thomas came from just up the coast in Swansea. I can still recite many of his poems. Under Milkwood is a monument.

Alone until she dies, Bessie Bighead, hired help, born in the workhouse, smelling of the cowshed, snores bass and gruff on a couch of straw in a loft in Salt Lake Farm and picks a posy of daisies in Sunday Meadow to put on the grave of Gomer Owen who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she wasn't looking and never kissed her again although she was looking all the time.

The thing about Wales that most people don't understand, especially those captivated by its beauty, is that Welsh immigrants brought Wales in their heart when they came. It has many fine things to recommend it. But they came to be free from it. They came to escape the dismal lack of opportunity, the second classness of it all. They weren't dispersed into a diaspora. The old country they longed for existed almost as much at the dinner table as it did on a map. And the Wales they escaped seemed not to miss them in the least. It's a difficult equation, but the Wales I remember, and the reason I avoid books about it, is a Wales of old, very proper, warm-hearted oddballs, and the world is all the less for their absence.