“Pokey,” Original oil painting by Lois Stiles Edgerly, circa 1970

THE SECRET HISTORY OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

Dogs invented it –
to irritate cats mainly,
but the prank took on a life of its own.
A basset in Maryland
grew tired of sitting up on his rear
begging for hors d’oeuvres at parties.
He was the first one to see
the power for suburban disruption.
No one knows for sure
how that hound passed
his slow rhythm to the second dog
or what form the thump took.
All that’s documented is the whining
of the cats – jumping out
of windows all over America –
when they realized dogs
had the bomb and were willing
to use it. All any Abyssinian had to do
was connect the dots – dog to dog
then the whole world – an implosion
of teenagers at the other ends of leashes
taking that wagging and panting as if
it came from their own need
to start war and build malls.

– Leonard S. Edgerly

Published in Beloit Poetry Journal  Vol. 46, Number 2 (PDF), Winter 1995/1996  page 35
(Lois Stiles Edgerly is my mother, an author, painter and dog lover who at 84 still doesn’t think much of rock ‘n’ roll.)

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This is not the Iditarod. It’s a dog-sled sprint that starts and ends in downtown Fairbanks, Alaska.  I was there last week for a wedding and had a chance to catch the 68th running of the Open North American Championship (ONAC). It was part of why I fell in love with Fairbanks.

I missed the start of the race, when locals told me the dogs are crazy and jazzed up, rarin’ to go. It was -10 degrees, and downtown Fairbanks was full of people who seemed to think that’s normal weather for standing around outside drinking coffee. I walked further down the street and found a cozy deli and cafe named the Red Couch at 309 2nd Avenue.

The woman who served me said the racers would be back in about 20 minutes. The route ran right in front of the cafe. She seemed to know exactly where the unseen dogs were on the course. I finished my potato chips and bowl of chili quickly and walked outside to wait for the teams. After about 10 minutes of stomping my boots on the snow with my scarf tied around my face, I saw the first sled approach.

And then it was gone. That was fast!

The dogs were smaller than I had expected. After about 20 miles of hauling a guy behind them, the dogs were loping along mainly in silence. Their long tongues were hanging out as they ran.

I learned that the mushers aren’t just along for the ride. They turbo-charged their sleds with huge, sweeping kicks that left the kicking feet high in the air behind them. It might take years of yoga to build that much flexibility into your joints. It was impressive.

I walked back down 2nd Avenue to the finish line and admired the cool trucks with little hutches built into them for the dogs. Metal bowls were laid out beside each truck, filled with watery gruel to reward the racers. There was lots of tail wagging and celebratory barking in the streets of Fairbanks.

My iPhone weather app says it’s zero degrees this morning in Fairbanks, a day after the Equinox, when everyone on earth, from Fairbanks to Buenos Aires, experienced a 12-hour day of sunlight. Here in Denver, it’s a balmy 43 degrees.

My friends Kes Woodward and Dorli McWayne, who were joined in an artful and musical wedding ceremony in his studio five days ago, will probably be out today running on a trail through the birches surrounding their Fairbanks home. Zero degrees? That’s gotta feel like a heat wave!

I admire anyone who not only lives but thrives in a climate like that. It’s bracing. Each morning when I walked out of the Princess Riverside Lodge, the frigid air felt like an assault, or at least a warning. The blue electrical cable connecting my rented all-wheel-drive Nissan Juke to a post in the parking lot was stiff and brittle when I unplugged the heater. The air was brilliant and still.

Aurora borealis photo that I found at Destination360

As a reward for living in such a place, the sky sometimes puts on an awesome show. On my last night in Fairbanks, I drove with a fellow wedding guest, David Policansky from Washington, D.C., to a high ridge with a good view to the north. And yes, we did see the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights.  I was surprised at how quickly the eerie greenish shapes shifted in the sky, forming curtains of color, then twisting ropes directly overhead, then blobs of glowing presence that looked as if they were about to fall on top of us.

I nearly froze out there on the ridge and kept ducking back into the Juke for warmth while David snapped away with his camera. He focused on the thumbnail moon then turned to the aurora over and over again. My neck hurt from looking up for nearly an hour, and then we drove back to the hotel, stunned into speaking softly about what we’d seen.

Kes assured the wedding guests arriving from all over that March is a wonderful time of year to visit Alaska. He wasn’t lying. My visit there last week stirred me deeply. Fairbanks left me ready to stray from my rut, to try new things, to bundle up and race down the street on a sled with my leg kicking high up behind me.

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Darlene and I were at a cooking class taught by Warren Kramer in Brighton, Mass. As an aside, Warren made a statement that nudged me to action. All it took were four simple words. Here they are, perhaps arriving on a day that will nudge you, too:

Coffee is a drug.

Warren is a renowned macrobiotic chef who rules his kitchen with the confidence of a Navy SEAL.  Darlene has adopted macrobiotic cooking with her usual focus and intensity, which means our eating life has been transformed in the last six months. I am supportive but not rigorous in my following of the plan. My lapses included sips of Hood Golden Egg Nog during the holidays and occasional preparation of my favorite supper since childhood, Kraft macaroni & cheese doctored with chopped ham and frozen peas.  But like my father, I eat with relish anything put on a plate in front of me, so I have not had much difficulty adapting to a diet of beans, rice, vegetables, and tasty sauces.

I used to think I couldn’t write or read carefully without a cup of coffee at hand. My daily habit comprised three or four cups of home-brewed Starbucks coffee. I never became a connoisseur. I drank coffee for the effect. If the only thing handy was Dunkin’ Donuts, Tim Hortons, or the Flying J truck stop blend in Cheyenne, Wyoming, that was okay by me.

Leading up to December 5th, I had noticed how jumpy I was and how often I felt anxious, especially in the middle of the night. A few pages of War and Peace on myKindle Paperwhite 3G would usually do the trick, and I would fall back to sleep. But still. I wondered if I might be ready for another period of caffeine abstinence. Warren Kramer’s four words tapped my readiness in exactly the right spot. The next morning I packed my big coffee maker and bean grinder away, next to a far wall of the kitchen closet.

In Cambridge, my tools for making tea consisted of old boxes of Twinings tea bags and a stand-alone hot water heater. I’m not sure of the brand we have there, but here in Denver it’s a DeLonghi Kmix 54-Ounce Kettle. It heats up several cups worth of hot water in three minutes flat. I have several bags of loose tea a friend sent us from Virginia. I scoop dry tea leaves into the ball, then place it in a cup and fill with boiling water.

In replacing one habit with another, I find it helps to have details to attend to. That’s why I like the tea ball better than tea bags. The tea ball takes more attention and fussy work, which develop into a calming routine. For a similar reason, I used to love grinding the Starbucks beans rather than buying them already ground. Our Yorkie Claire for some reason would come running into the kitchen barking whenever she heard the coffee grinder go, and that added to the ritual. “Go get it, Claire!” I’d tell her.

There are no annoying sounds that provoke Claire in my tea ritual. So her life is a little calmer, and so is mine. I’m not sure how long this tea phase will last, but it’s well-established after the first month. My work on the Kindle Chronicles podcast seems to be less frantic, less jammed up against the Friday midnight deadline, and less interrupted by Twitter/News/email distractions. I can still be a jerk to my wife, but maybe less often and in milder doses.

Small changes make a big difference in life, right? As the new year picks up momentum, do you have any you are ready to make? If so, I hope you will leave a comment and let us know how it’s going.

[Cross Post from The Kindle Chronicles]

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The Harvard Band was in fine form after today’s victory over Yale in The Game, 34-24. It was a crisp, comfortable, sunny day for football at Harvard Stadium. I loved hearing the old fight songs and watching the antics of these spirited kids celebrating. Hope you enjoy it!

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My grandson and his stepbrothers have been cavorting here at Ocean Park this weekend. This cranks up the time machine for me, as I squint my eyes and imagine myself on the same beach at their ages. I sense it most when I see them running in or out of the water. Some part of me can feel the muscles move to the rhythm of uncontainable excitement about What’s Next. A great wave? A chance to splash someone? Digging for sandworms?

Since my family has been coming here for generations, there is also the pleasure of checking in with other branches of the family tree. They are strangers from all over, but we share a common link to my great-grandfather, a legendary Mainer who purchased the family cottage in the 1930s for his wife. She willed it to her two daughters, one of whom was my father’s mother. And so down the decades the cottage flowed, with the family presence amplified by later additions. It all adds up to years made visible here in Maine each summer.

I smell bacon cooking downstairs, which means breakfast with the boys and my daughter is coming up soon, followed by more beach fun and a train ride to Boston. How much fun can a boy of 61 stand?

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Claire looks out at the water on Day 2 here at Ocean Park.

This is that wonderful time of day for a dog when anything can happen. Someone may throw the ball for her. Another dog may walk by the cottage, prompting a frenzy of frantic barking. There may be food.

For her human companions, it’s the same. A day at the beach could go anywhere–or nowhere at all beyond reading our Kindles on the porch and taking a walk on the wet sand.

Let the games begin!

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Yesterday Darlene and I drove my parents to the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Sudbury, Mass., to decorate the family graves. My mother brought a red geranium for her family’s plot and one for Dad’s. Their parents are buried in the same row, about a block and a half apart on the orderly grid of the cemetery. Mom also brought a small, white geranium for the grave of my brother, Thomas Skelton Edgerly, who was born with a heart defect on the day after my fifth birthday and lived just four days.

My family are New Englanders, so there is not a lot of emotional hoopla on such occasions. My parents perform this quiet ritual every Memorial Day. I was so glad to be with them this time. I took a photo of my name on the granite marker at the Edgerly plot. I’m not sure if I will be buried by that stone, but it seems right that some of my ashes might end up there, with the rest at Darlene’s family plot in Belle Fourche, South Dakota.

I am grateful that I have been able to see my parents grow old. My Dad did not have that opportunity with his father, who died suddenly at the age of 53 while teaching an English class at M.I.T. In the photo above, my father is looking at the headstone of his Dad.

One of the benefits I have gained from accompanying my parents for so many years in this realm is to observe how character is destiny, a favorite saying of my mother’s. My father, 85, uses a cane to steady his steps, but the integrity and purposefulness of his life are as indomitable as ever. You can see his strength in the way he stands in the photo above: shoulders squared, feet planted firmly on the grass. He meets the indignities of aging with dignity and grace, without complaint. This is a motivating model for his son, I can tell you that.

My mother’s contribution to my appreciation of character is the infinite power of creativity and invention. She never gives a medical condition an even break. She will find a new gadget enabling her to outfox her MS. In her kitchen you will often see a small, white box labeled “live bees.” For years, the healing effect of bee stings has been part of her refusal to surrender to illness.

Afterward, we had a nice lunch in a booth at Friendly’s in South Sudbury. Mom and Dad each had a hot dog and a Fribble. They talked about how much Sudbury has changed since they were kids. This morning I’m thinking how much hasn’t.

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The real mystery, though, is how two married people can travel in a modest-sized car for six days and arrive still married. There is so much that can go wrong.

One person might like to linger at the Quality Inn each morning to write in his journal, work out on the cross trainer, and check blogs and emails. The other might want to walk the dog and get on the road–now! Or, one person might like to listen to a long, winding, romantic novel on Audible. The other might prefer mind-numbingly technical podcasts about Evernote or ebook formatting.

I won’t say that Darlene and I solved the mystery. But we are still married, and I want to jot down a list of steps to remember for our next trip. I will pretend that we actually followed these steps, but some are entirely fictional, based on 20-20 hindsight.

12 Steps to Arrive Married After a 2,000-Mile Drive

1. Make plans, but be flexible. It helps to plan your trip with lodging reservations along the way, but you can cancel and revise them if a better idea occurs to you.

2. Take a break from technology. Don’t check e-mail every five miles just because you can. If you are the passenger, enjoy the scenery now and then. Don’t use up your entire laptop battery connected to the Internet via your iPhone’s Hot Spot.

3. Resolve disagreements and clear the air using a simple dialoging technique that you learned at the Harville Hendrix workshop 10 years ago. Before leaving, reread his classic Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples.

4. Don’t eat junk. Bring a cooler that you can plug into the outlet formerly known as a cigarette lighter. Load the cooler with items purchased at grocery stores, so you can stop at rest areas for decent, affordable meals under the trees.

5. Before the trip, save up money in your Travel Fund. On the drive, write down everything you spend and transfer the total from the Travel Fund to checking when you get to your destination.

6. Bring a Monster Travel Power Strip, so you can charge your iPhones, Kindles, iPads, and laptop each night at the hotel. Also: thick rubber bands to keep all the power cables tidy.

7. Don’t drive more than 400 miles a day. Drive the speed limit.

8. Get off the Interstate System for at least one day of two-lane roads and a pleasant place you’ve never seen before, like Mansfield, Ohio.

9. Schedule in-person visits with interesting people you’ve only known on the Net. Enjoy how they are just what you expected, only more so. (For example, Jim Jones, Doug Lance, and Mark Pierce.)

10. If you have a Ford with Microsoft SYNC and SYNC Services, find the next day’s destination each night in Google Maps, right-click on it, then click on More, then “Send”, then click on “car.” The next morning, press the voice activation button in your car and say “Services.” When connected, you will be informed that Google Maps has sent a destination and do you want to download it. Say “yes” and wait for the destination to appear on the navigation screen. How cool is that?

11. Switch drivers every 100 miles.

12. Enjoy the ride. The destination will take care of itself.

I will make a note on iCal for late September, when we will drive back to Denver, to take another look at these 12 steps. If you have your own, please feel free to add them in comments!

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I just finished a Skype interview with Mike Shatzkin, a widely followed consultant, analyst, and futurist in the world of digital publishing. Our conversation will be the interview for TKC 195 this Friday. I have spent the last couple of days reading the book he published last year, The Shatzkin Files, Volume I, browsing posts at his Shatzkin Files blog, and watching YouTube clips of presentations he’s made at various gatherings. The clip above is the first of seven segments of a talk that he gave in December of 2009. In it I learned that he has only bought one book in print since buying an original Kindle in 2007, but he now reads exclusively on his smartphone because it’s so convenient to carry everywhere.

An early adopter of e-reader technology, way back in the Palm Pilot days, Shatzkin himself has 50 years of experience in the traditional publishing business and spends much of his time advising major publishers how to evolve in the digital era. He fears the dominance of Amazon in publishing and will be sounding the alarm during the next six weeks about the Department of Justice’s anti-trust suit against Apple and five big publishers. You’ll hear the reasoning behind his fear in the interview.

If the video above interests you in more of the 2009 talk, titled “Planning for a Long Career in an Industry That’s Changing,” presented to a packed house at Hachette, here are the rest of the segments: two, three, four, five, six, seven. Shatzkin is a lively, articulate speaker, and if you are passionate about the Ebook Revolution, I believe you will enjoy this account of where we’ve been and what may lie ahead.

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