N is for New England

My wife and I grew up there, so it's natural that we have a lot of New England photographs. This is a lighthouse with picket fence in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I took it in the summer of '04, the year before we heard the siren call of the Southwest.

M is for Mount Shasta

Until well into middle age, my wife and I had never been to California. Since '99 we started making up for it, visiting San Francisco, Yosemite, Napa Valley, and much more. A few years ago, we drove our RV up the west coast as far as Oregon. On our way back we stopped near the utterly gorgeous and how-could-you-possibly-miss-it Mount Shasta. When we registered at the local RV park, I asked the clerk where I could get the best view of the mountain. She told me she had no idea, that she had lived near the mountain for so many years, she had stopped seeing it.

L is for Little Bighorn

View from the top of Little Bighorn

We visited Little Bighorn National Monument in eastern Montana in the summer of 2009. Here in 1876 a band of Lakota Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne led by Chief Sitting Bull annihilated the outnumbered U.S. 7th Army cavalry regiment led by General George Armstrong Custer. The photo is taken from the top of the hill where the battle took place. Later, markers were placed where bodies had been found.

K is for Kerouac Park

Beat poet Jack Kerouac lived in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the city created a small downtown park in his honor. It has beautiful granite slabs such as this one with his poetry and excerpts from his prose. It's free and open to the public. Kids enjoy skateboarding there.

J is for Johnson City, Texas

We discovered Johnson City on our long drive from Las Cruces to Austin back in 2007. A very nice lady there bought a whole passel of my books to sell in her gift store. She sold them all and asked me for more, and then did it again. (And then, alas, the recession hit.) Can you understand why I am partial to this pretty town? The photo shows a Halloween hay bale just outside of town.

Incidentally, it was the boyhood home of President Lyndon Johnson.

I is for Idaho

Idaho Falls, Idaho 2013

I don't know much about Idaho, but we drove through last year and found it beautiful. In particular we enjoyed the city of Idaho Falls. This photo taken near the downtown shows why the city is so aptly named.

H is for Home in New Mexico

Home. There's no place like it.

Oddly, I didn't come up with many interesting places we've been that begin with H. Luckily, there is always Home. We moved into our little adobe abode back in aught-six, and barring our winning a lottery we don't even play, I expect we'll happily stay here. We do have our windy season, though. Maybe one day a Mega Millions ticket will blow into our yard. I will pick it up to toss into recycling, never realizing it is the unclaimed billion-dollar winner. Alas, because of our missed chance we will be relegated to living out our pleasant lives in our pleasant Home.

G is for Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon, South Rim 1998

We've been lucky to have visited the Grand Canyon at both the north and south entrances. Whatever praise you may have heard lavished on it is amply justified. My daydream is to ride down into the canyon on a burro, but I'm probably a little to heavy for the animal, and I confess to be a bit squeamish. I can imagine the awe Ferdi Grofe must have felt that inspired him to write the Grand Canyon Suite, which nearly does the canyon justice.

Grand Canyon, North Rim 2010

F is for Front Yard

Here's a place other bloggers haven't been, although many of you would be welcome. Today, F is for my Front yard, which I selected only to show off this lovely cactus Flower next to my driveway. This is one of many reasons I love the Southwest, even while I miss Massachusetts for its greater floral variety.

Since you've stopped by, please leave me a note in the comments section. I'll make a point of returning the favor.

E is for El Paso

Copyright  © 2010 by Maritza Neely

E is for El Paso, the West Texas city that until my retirement I had never expected to see, let alone visit once per month for the El Paso Writers' League. To its north, it's smack up against the Franklin Mountains; to its south, the Rio Grande and Ciudad Juarez. My friend Maritza Neely painted this wonderful impression of the city back in 2010, and it captures the essence of El Paso and its cultural connection to Mexico.

Since you've stopped by, please leave me a note in the comments section. I'll make a point of returning the favor.

D is for Deming

D is for Deming, New Mexico, an hour's drive west of Las Cruces on I-10. It's small and quiet, and exists, I believe, because it was a convenient place for trains to stop for water. On the outskirts of town are the remnants of an old WWII army base and POW camp. Nothing much of it remains. But the city has the Deming Luna Mimbres Museum, which is worth an hour of your time if you're passing through town.












Since you've stopped by, please leave me a note in the comments section. I'll make a point of returning the favor.

C is for Chihuahua Desert

Poppies in bloom near Deming, New Mexico
March 2012

Since 2006 we've lived in the Chihuahua Desert, which extends from the Mexican state of Chihuahua into west Texas, New Mexico, and eastern Arizona. No one photo captures a typical scene, but the photo on the right suggests both its harshness and its beauty. It's a far cry from New England, where I lived most of my life.

Since you've stopped by, please leave me a note in the comments section. I'll make a point of returning the favor.

B is for Beantown

John Hancock building, downtown Boston

Continuing with the theme of places I've been, there are so many possibilities: Bedford, Beverly, Billerica, Burlington, all places I knew in my salad days. But I'll go with Boston (aka Beantown), Massachusetts. Boston is called Beantown for a reason I had to look up, and it has something to do with the city's part in the 18th-century slave trade if you believe the Internet (and who doesn't?).

The city has changed a lot since as a 12-year-old I took the B&M train into the city to meet a pal. There was a hole-in-the-wall diner called Joe and Nemo's, the combat zone with its offerings we didn't dare approach, Scollay Square where we heard the burley shows were. We were both too poor and innocent to check out any of those places. But we did eat lunch at Durgin Park, where the food was plentiful and the waitresses infamously brusque.

The streets downtown are rumored to have been laid out by cowpaths, which seems as good an explanation as any for the lack of a sensible grid. Today the city has a new look with buildings like the Hancock and the Pru. The old Boston Garden is gone, where the Celtics and Bruins used to play. But Fenway Park hasn't changed in a century, and the Boston Pops still gives free summer concerts along the Charles River.

Now we live more than 2,000 miles away, but Boston will always be my favorite city.

Since you've stopped by, please leave me a note in the comments section. I'll make a point of returning the favor.

A is for Arizona

Zzzz...Huh? Oh, hello. I'm just waking up from hibernation in time for the A to Z Challenge. Actually, I'd originally been planning on writing about books, but at the last minute I changed my mind. It should be more fun to write about places I've been because the pix will be prettier. Okay, I haven't figured out Z yet, but there's time.

Sedona

Arizona was the first Southwestern state I ever visited, back in 1997. We went to Tucson in February of all months, and the temperature was warmer in our home city of Boston. Television weather reports said that the roads to Sedona were snowbound. We went into a Burger King in Apache Junction, a city noted for its retirees, and all the customers seemed to have white hair. There was a news account that a young kid tried to rob a Burger King (not while we were there), and an 80-year-old man took out a gun and shot him.

At Sky Ranch in Sedona

Welcome to the Wild West. But we were still entranced by what we saw, and we came back in better weather. It was the beginning of our love affair with the
Southwest; less than a decade later, we moved to next-door New Mexico and take fairly frequent trips to Arizona. We've parked our RV next to orange and grapefruit trees ripe with fruit, and we've seen breathtaking landscapes. No doubt we'll keep going back for many years to come.

Since you've stopped by, please leave me a note in the comments section. I'll make a point of returning the favor.

A to Z theme reveal: Books, Books, Books

This is my second year at the A to Z Challenge, and the theme is novels I've read and reviewed over the last decade. I had to improvise for U and Z, since nothing seems to fit the criteria.

This is going to be fun. I look forward to visiting people's blogs to see what they come up with.

A is for All Necessary Force

B is for Brotherhood of Fear

C is for Crimes in Southern Indiana

D is for Dark Side of Valor

E is for Eyes Wide Open

F is for Fighting in the Shade

G is for Ghosts of Bungo Suido

H is for House of the Hunted

I is for It Happens in the Dark

J is for Journey into the Flame

K is for King’s Man

L is for Love Among the Particles

M is for Mastering the Art of Quitting

N is for No Way Back

O is for Our Frail Blood

P is for Papers in the Wind

Q is for Quinn

R is for Rain Falls Like Mercy

S is for Sandrine’s Case

T is for Tatiana

U is for Uncle Tom’s Cabin

V is for Visitation Street

W is for Wendell Black, M.D.

X is for Exit Plan

Y is for The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Z is for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A visit to Columbus and Palomas

La cabalgata binacional--the binational cavalcade

Last weekend we went with friends in our RV group to Columbus, New Mexico, for Camp Furlong Days. The event commemorates the raid on Columbus by Pancho Villa and his men in 1916, but the focus is purely on the friendship between the United States and Mexico. Riding on horseback from Deming to the north and Chihuahua to the south, Americans and Mexicans join together in a cavalcade, bearing the flags of both nations as well as New Mexico and Texas. Then gaily dressed people put on a show of singing and dancing in the small plaza, surrounded by a small audience of couple hundred people. And then after a few hours, Columbus reverts to its sleepy self.

Our RV in Pancho Villa State Park

A few steps away from the center of town is Pancho Villa State Park, where we hooked up our RVs. If you go to Columbus, plan on bringing your own entertainment. There is a small museum, but there are no motels, no theaters, and only two or three small restaurants serving Mexican food. Yet if you enjoy solitude, you'll enjoy Columbus.

Ceramic frogs on the wall in The Pink Store

Columbus is right on the border with Mexico. If you have a passport, drive the three miles to the border and walk across into Palomas. You'll want to visit The Pink Store--La Tienda Rosa--which you can't possibly miss. It has lots of ceramic crafts and gewgaws, inexpensive liquor, and a decent casual restaura
nt in back.

Señoritas waiting to dance

A couple of minutes' walk takes you to a dentist and a pharmacy. I have no experience with the dentists, but news from my friends has been mixed. At the pharmacy, they once sold me Mexican meds they said was the same as what I asked for. It wasn't. I walked past a barber shop where a young man stood in the doorway offering me a five-dollar haircut. The second time he asked, I agreed--what the heck, I needed one. Well, he went at my scalp with gusto. My friends were amused at the result, which was shorter than I'd have liked, but it will grow back.

There are some colorful people in Palomas, and many of them ask for a dollar if you want to take their photo. That's fair. There is a small group of very young children who dress up a few yards from the Customs office specifically hoping for tourists to pay them for photos, or just to pay them.

Musicians entertaining diners in The Pink Store

Columbus and Palomas are good places to visit, although they are out of the way of almost everything. If you're traveling through the region on Interstate 10, they're about a 60-mile round-trip detour.

Waiting for the poppies

We've had an exceptionally long, dry stretch in southern New Mexico, but very soon the poppies will be due to bloom. I hope we've had enough moisture. Here is a photo of poppies from last year, looking toward the White Sands Missile Range.

My Year in Alaska

Fire Island AFS in 1962 (Wikipedia)

In February 1968, an Air Force helicopter ferried me across Cook Inlet from Anchorage, Alaska, and dropped me off at nearby Fire Island Air Force Station. My title was Air Surveillance Officer, with a duty to watch for any Soviet Bison bombers that might attack from the north. We were part of NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, which expected ICBMs to be the primary threat in case of World War III. The bombers would come after the missiles.

Fire Island AFS was part of a ring of radar stations stretching across North America and Greenland, designed to defend against such a doomsday. The island is three miles wide by six miles long and is surrounded by the world’s second-highest tides after the Bay of Fundy. Moose commute to and from the mainland at low tide, when they can muck their way across mud flats.

We saw no Bisons in 1968, the Cold War staying mercifully cold. But we often saw moose, which coexisted peacefully with the island’s humans. On a summer walk one day, I came face-to-shoulder blade with one of them. It had enormous fuzzy antlers, and brown eyes that gazed at me from a couple of feet away, perhaps wondering whether to walk over me or around me. While it chewed its cud, I stood stock-still, hoping to convey that I was a trifling biped unworthy of its attention. After a couple of minutes it ambled into the woods.

For anyone stationed at one of these remote outposts, the basic reality was boredom. One day I slept for 17 hours. In the Officers’ Lounge, drinking was the number one activity. Officers had an ongoing game called Dead Bug. The person who was “it” waited until the lounge was crowded, then called out “Dead Bug!” Everyone had to fall on the floor, and the last one to do so had to buy a round of drinks. Then he got to call “Dead Bug!” the next time. A few of us hated the game, but the commanding officer mandated that we either play or stay out of the lounge—and in winter, there was nowhere else to go.

But the boredom was punctuated by several frightening events and by news from the outside world. One day, I heard a loud explosion. A woman piloting a small plane had tried to land on the narrow beach on one end of the island. Her struts caught a power line, and her plane flipped over and exploded. The next day I saw the ghastly scene: the airframe mangled and burned, shattered glass, a dried-up lake of blood that stank like death.

The outside world seemed no better. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were murdered that year. The Democratic Convention in Chicago turned grotesque and violent. LBJ had lost control of the Vietnam War and announced he would not run for re-election. Richard Nixon announced “a secret plan to end the war.” In Vietnam, American infantry were calling in air strikes when their positions were being overrun the enemy forces. I read a Life magazine article reporting on a visit by General Westmoreland to his combat squad after a battle. The gist of one passage was this:

Westmoreland: “Did you kill any of them, soldier?”

Soldier: “Yes sir, I killed one.”

Westmoreland: “How do you know he was dead?”

Soldier: “My bullets cut him in half, sir.”
Westmoreland: “Good.”

In the winter, the days were short. With two fellow officers on a three-day pass, we rented a car on the mainland to explore the beautiful fjord called Turnagain Arm. We stopped at frozen Portage Lake at the base of the Chugach Mountains. At the far end, perhaps a mile away, sat a glacier where two mountains met. Temperatures had been minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit for at least three days, and we guessed the ice to be a foot thick. Wearing arctic clothing that included heavy white “bunny boots,” we decided to walk across the ice, to see the glacier up close. As we walked, we saw ice floes frozen in place, the sunlight scattering through them in the full rainbow spectrum. Beneath our feet, the ice seemed to capture a million tiny air bubbles above the black depths. We had heard that the lake had been carved by the glacier to a depth of 800 feet.

Portage Lake (photo by johnlofgreen.blogspot.com)

Partway across, we began to hear long, low snapping sounds of the ice protesting our weight. We spread out and continued, the glacier looming larger with each step. With only a hundred yards to go, we suddenly noticed what none of us had expected: a puddle at our feet. The ice was giving way. We had to get out of there.

We turned around, hoping to find secure footing. We agreed that one of us would lead, and the other two would follow in his boot prints. I went first. But then our boot prints filling up with water. We turned around, and I was last. It looked too unsafe to step in their slushy boot prints, so I decided to find my own way. I took a couple of steps, and a large puddle formed all around me. In seconds, the ice gave way, and I was chest-deep in water. I tried to pull myself out, but I couldn’t. The ice was too slippery, and my soaked clothing felt as though it weighed a ton. I called to my friends, who came back to help me. One of them alone couldn’t pull me out, and he risked falling through the ice himself. So the two men lay flat on the ice and eased me to safety. On the long walk back to the car, warm water sloshed in my bunny boots, which were rated for minus 40 degrees. But ice coated my jacket and pants. My friends both helped me walk back, concentrating our weight and causing more cracking and groaning of the ice. Still, they stayed with me all the way.

By then I was becoming a short-timer, due in a couple of months for discharge. One of our comrades on the station was a US Army lieutenant from California named Murphy—I forget his first name, but we all called him Murph the Surf. His main base was nearby Fort Richardson. I chatted with him in his room just before he returned to his base. A few days later, the Anchorage radio station broadcast the news that a military plane had crashed in the Aleutian Islands. Lieutenant Murphy’s boss was supposed to be on that plane, but he had a cold, and Murphy went instead. The airplane disintegrated in mid-air and landed in pieces in minus 60-degree temperatures. Everyone died.

My departure from the island and the Air Force went smoothly. I mustered out at McChord Air Force Base in Seattle, where I received my final pay: over $2000 in twenty-dollar bills. The wad of cash made me nervous, but I made it home to New England in good shape.

Postscript: Fire Island Air Force Station was decommissioned in September 1969, less than a year after my discharge. Wikipedia states that by 2005, civil engineers had "remediated" the island--returned it to nature--and nearly all traces of the station's presence have disappeared.

Cairn Rodrigues and The Last Prospector

Cairn Rodrigues

Cairn's excellent book

Today, I'd like you to meet my cyberfriend and fantasy writer Cairn Rodrigues as we chat about her new novel, The Last Prospector. In its compelling opening, a runaway slave dies while giving birth in a desert on the planet Solstice. Despite the bleak setting, there is beauty in the planet's light stealers.

Me: 
If Earth had light stealers, how would it be a better place? And could we keep our incandescent light bulbs?

Cairn:
If Earth had light stealers it would be a better place for many reasons.  1)  They beautify  2)  They generate their own light, and the power saved from the decrease in street lamps would be phenomenal  3)  They make people feel safe  4)  They're pretty.

You are allowed to keep your bulbs, but a few strategically placed 'stealers around the homestead will add a romantic glow to the property.

Me: 

Okay, Cairn, The Last Prospector is being made into a movie, and you are writer, director, and casting director. What lucky actors get which parts, and why? And of course you are casting yourself. What character do you play, and why?

Cairn:

Wow, I'm such a control freak.  You know me far too well!  I would cast Henry Ian Cusick as Prospector, Monica Belluci as Holema Gialle, Jeffery Dean Morgan as Awnyx and Joseph Gordon Levitt as Skawt.  I've been trying to cast the part of Tonyo in my mind for 2 years with no luck.  So there will be a world wide casting call for him.

As for myself, Cairn will play Endra the Dreamer.

This was a lot harder than I anticipated!

A Last Prospector Lunch Box prototype

Me: 

(To myself: Who the hell are these actors? Mustn't let on that I don't know.)
That sounds perfect! And where will you be filming?

Cairn:

Primarily in front of a green screen, I imagine.

Me: 

Really? No location shots in the Kalahari Desert?  How about merchandising? Can you see plastic light stealers in kids' McMeals? And what's the significance of the eye on your cover? Of course, if that would be a plot spoiler, maybe you can tell us a few things it doesn't mean.

Cairn:

The meaning of the eye on the cover is revealed towards the end of the book, so I wouldn't want to spoil that for you!  My desert scenes would probably be shot in the Mojave or Sonoran deserts because those are the landscapes I saw in my mind's eye when writing.  I'm sure you can understand that my heart lives in the western Americas.  As for merchandising, I totally want a Last Prospector lunch box, Prospector is a man who respects the sanctity of a good meal.

Me:
You have a character called The Boss. By any chance is he from New Jersey?

Cairn:
According to Bruce Springsteen, New Jersey is called the Garden State because that's where the Garden of Eden was located.  The Boss is named for the Boss, one of many homages to Springsteen and the E Street Band.  For instance, the cat's nickname of Mighty Maks is Mighty Max Weinberg, the drummer, and Jyanni from the south side is Southside Johnny.  I'm guessing those are two people you never heard of before :)

Me:

Bingo.

And finally, a serious question. You clearly have put your heart and soul into this novel. In what way was writing The Last Prospector a journey for you?

Cairn:
It's an ongoing journey, that's for sure.  Conceiving and writing the series was a lesson in thinking big, going big and rolling my eyes at the naysayers who don't understand that some of us aren't content to live inside a snug box.  Publishing is one of the hardest things I've ever done, but the lessons learned along the way are invaluable.  Since most of my professional life was centered around food and cooking, writing was a giant leap into the unknown.  It's a journey of living with fear, angst, apathy and a whole bunch of optimism.

Me:
So what's everyone waiting for? Pick up or download a copy of The Last Prospector!

The hardest thing I've tried lately

Writing prompt: "Describe your last attempt to learn something that did not come easily to you."

My most recent and ongoing attempt to learn something hard is learning Spanish. My Dad seems to have been the first in his long Sanchez family branch to grow up knowing no Spanish, and I inherited his ignorance. In college my only language courses were French and Russian--Dad had suggested Spanish, but I had no intention of doing anything he wanted. What do parents know, anyway?

For eight years my wife and I have lived in New Mexico, where one might be hard-pressed to get a service job without being bilingual. The cashier at the local Wendy's will speak to us in English, then turn around and speak Spanish to her co-workers. Often I have overheard rapid-fire conversations that switch in mid-sentence from Spanish to English and back again, no problema. Our best friends speak Spanish, and we've traveled with them to Mexico.

So what am I doing, speaking English only? A year or so ago, I bought the Rosetta Stone Spanish CDs and joined a Spanish-speaking conversation group. It turned out that I wasn't ready for that, so I signed up for a class in basic grammar instead, supplementing my Rosetta Stone. No, learning Spanish isn't muy difícil, but it's plenty of work with plenty to remember. At age 69 I started late in life, so this learning project will occupy my brain cells for the rest of my days.

But I'm fine with that.

Let's chat about global warming

With most of the United States in a severe cold spell and TV watchers introduced to the term "Polar Vortex," this seems like a good time to talk about climate change and global warming.

Goodness, where to start? A young woman reporter stood somewhere in the blowing snow and announced that she was freezing in places she didn't know could be frozen. (Comic Jon Stewart had fun with that.) An expedition investigating the disappearance of Antarctic ice became stuck in Antarctic ice. I have seen two separate comments suggesting that  Al Gore's"fat ass" relates somehow to the global warming "hoax." A recent football game was played in the cold.

The climate issue isn't new. Long ago, back in the '70s or '80s, we had a bitterly cold January, and Time magazine ran a cover story asking if we were entering a new ice age. Since then, we have had some of the hottest summers on record. Anecdotes, anecdotes, anecdotes. You can find them to support whatever position you like. The trouble is, we can't base long-term conclusions on daily or even annual weather. That's like standing in the middle of the Sahara and concluding that the whole world must be a desert.

I'm not a climate scientist, but I respect what they have to say. They've been gathering data for many decades, and that data is incredibly complicated. Al Gore's presentations on global warming moved me not one iota, but I am even less interested in the mockery that comes out of Fox News. I would rather listen to scientists directly and tune out everyone else who looks only for data to support their conclusions.

So here's my understanding, after imperfectly filtering out a lot of noise. The climate is changing. It has always been changing. We did not get the Great Lakes, billions of smooth boulders and countless other geological features from a static climate. We got them from ice that covered the continents and then shrunk. So without human interference, we would likely be transitioning at Earth's own pace toward another ice age. But in the 1800s we humans launched the Industrial Revolution, changing the mix of chemicals in the atmosphere and affecting the climate. Are we getting warmer or colder? Warmer, apparently, if we credit scientific measurements of ocean temperatures over the years. Yet we keep getting spikes both hotter and colder. We have summers with dozens of hurricanes and summers with nearly none. Ocean levels appear to be rising, and polar bears appear to be losing their habitat. Indicators suggest to me a general warming trend, but that doesn't mean I "believe in" global warming. I believe in science and in data. Lots and lots of data.

Should we thank the Tsar?

Did Tsar Nicholas II lead us to
the Information Superhighway?

Have you ever contemplated the debt we owe to Tsar Nicholas II? No, perhaps not. But as I showered this morning, the connection came to mind.

Like tsars and tsarinas for centuries before him, Nicholas was a despot who despoiled the Russian peasantry. He and his family lived in grand isolation, living off the labors of millions of miserable serfs who were barely more than slaves. Then along came war in 1914, and Nicholas decided to fight the forces of Kaiser Wilhelm--with the blood of his serfs, who eventually objected and overthrew him. But there remained numerous conflicting interests, allowing a small group called the Bolsheviks to wrest power. They established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), withdrew from the war, and inflicted untold additional pain upon their own countrymen. Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin and their ilk were godless communists.

From afar, America looked on the USSR with a combination of fascination and dread. Even as our allies in World War II, America's establishment hated them. After the war, they got The Bomb. Would there be a World War III? When in 1957 Sputnik circled the Earth, Americans saw the vivid threat and the space race was on. Throughout the 1960s we fretted over potential nuclear attacks from ICBMs and Bison bombers. If the Soviets destroyed certain of our mainframe computers, they would leave us defenseless. So in 1969 we (and not Al Gore) created a network of computers across the country and called it the Internet. That way, our defense never depended on the functionality of one specific computer.

So the space race brought microchips and satellite technology to the world, along with less memorable innovations such as Tang. The Internet eventually became public and birthed the World Wide Web, which truly boomed with the continuous advent of smaller and smaller devices processing more and more data at faster and faster speeds. Thus the iPhone, Microsoft Windows, and blogs such as this one.

In the 1970s a PBS series called Connections attempted to establish historical links between, say, cow pox and nuclear energy, or the Magna Carta and agricultural policy in Kansas. (I made up those examples, but you get the idea.) In that spirit, it seems reasonable to ask: If Tsar Nicholas had only shown a little more compassion to his people, would Google exist today?

A firing offense

I entered this in the El Paso Writers' League's annual writing competition and won Honorable Mention. 

Bang! Bang! The sharp gunfire frightened me. Was someone being murdered here in the office?

My employer was CGI, a well-established company that supplied software and support to automobile insurance providers such as Progressive Insurance. My colleague Lorraine and I were the only technical writers in our division, so we were attached to the Underwriting department. We worked in separate cubicles and were surrounded by sporadic noise as we churned out customer bulletins about product updates.

Bang! There it was again. The loud shot came from down the hallway, along with muffled conversation.

I hunkered down while others carried on with shouting and laughter. Our manager Patti was not a writer, and she relied on Lorraine, who was senior to me, for all editorial judgments. Every bulletin I wrote had to go to Lorraine for review. She marked it up and graded it in pencil—if she found typos, she graded the bulletin -1, -2 and so forth, then reported to Patti, who ignored my vehement objections. She told me it was nothing personal, but she was data-driven. “I’m anal retentive,” she liked to say.

No one screamed at the gunshots, but I heard a muffled conversation, so it seemed safe to stick my head out and see what was going on. Frank Chapman stood in the hallway, smiling as he showed a woman colleague what appeared to be a .38-caliber pistol. When he noticed my slack-jawed look he said, “Don’t worry. This is a starter pistol for races.”

That was a relief to me, although no one else seemed concerned. It was just one more part of the general office cacophony. I grumbled and went back to work. Frank and his friend finished their conversation, and he went back to his cubicle. It was next to mine, although he worked in another department. Thank goodness that’s over, I thought.

A few minutes later came another loud bang! from his cubicle, and by then I’d had enough. I stood up and looked over the cubicle divider and saw Frank at his desk, still playing with his pistol. I shouted at him, “Will you cut that out?” He looked embarrassed. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, and he put the pistol in his desk drawer.

The next day, Patti called all of her department into a conference room. “There’s been a company reorganization,” she said, “and I’ve been promoted to Director, effective immediately.”

That was fine, but who was our new boss? “Your new manager is Frank Chapman,” she said. Then she gleefully recounted to us what I’d said to him the day before. Clearly she thought it a great joke on me. I thought the company should have fired Frank instead of promoting him, but I kept mum.

Once Frank took over the department, he apologized to me once more, and then we stopped talking about the gun incident. Then he learned about Patti’s policy of Lorraine nitpicking my work. “That’s demeaning,” he said. “That stops immediately.”

When I thanked him he replied with a wink, “I trust you to do your job. But if you disappoint me I’ll shoot you.”