A Tribute

My wife and I bought our home on 26th Ave East, adjacent to the Arboretum, in 1970. We paid peanuts for it, even in those days. It has sheltered us. It has grounded us among many wonderful friends. It has provided parks, and water, and urban amenities, and cultural diversity and academic opportunities, all within walking distance.  It has sustained us financially during several periods when we lived away from here. I cannot conceive of a more perfect place for us to have made our lives.

Often when a large group of people cooperate to achieve some good end, it is possible to identify one or two particular ones upon whom the enterprise truly depended; people without whom the end would not have been achieved. Maynard Arsove was such a person in the battle in the late sixties to halt construction of the R H Thompson Expressway in Seattle. Those off ramps to nowhere that we know so well are Maynard’s work. The Arboretum, as we know it, free of a North-South freeway, is also Maynard’s work. But when I think of Maynard I don’t think of him as the guy who stopped the R H Thompson, I think of him as the guy who saved my house. Without him, this place where I sit at this moment tapping on my computer would be a spot on the south bound lane, probably crammed with cars crawling home from work.

Here’s to you Maynard, with my eternal and heart felt gratitude.

Maynard passed peacefully on November 14th.

The Answer to an Important Question

When I arrived at the gym today to do some yoga and cardio, I found a sign announcing an opportunity to get one’s body fat measured by the submersion method which is considered the best. I bit. An hour later, after expelling all the air I could from my lungs and lying on the bottom of a tank of comfortably warm water for a moment, a guy informed me that my body is about 19 % fat. He also provided a chart, calibrated by age, that indicated about five categories of this value ranging from life threatening up to healthy. (Just below healthy was good which is to say if you are only in the good category you are less than healthy in your percentage of body fat. How good is that?) 19% it turns out is just at the bottom of the healthy range, just above the not so good “good”.



Conclusion: I interpret this result as meaning that somehow I have managed in my life to eat just the right amount of ice cream. Any more and I would not be healthy. Any less and I would have gone without for no particular reason. What a relief.

The First Wednesday in November 2010

Really the only thing wrong with the United States is that it is run by homo sapiens.

Get ready bugs.  Your time can't be more than a couple hundred years away.

Gravity, The Real Winner

You have to really respect gravity.  It is so patient, so subtle, so unassuming yet ultimately so victorious.  It's going to get you, you know.  Eventually.  Not only will it swallow you into the earth, or at least clutch your remnants in tiny pieces flat to the earth's surface, it is going to do the same to everything you ever created.  And not only you of course, but everyone including God, if you think God made the mountains.  Good old gravity.  Just sitting there tugging gently, unnoticed against it all.  Well, I guess that recently there have been a couple of escapes, but a few cans of wire and metal tossed out of reach, hardly count against gravity's over all record.  It's pretty impressive.