Getting Wired & Wrapped

Moving all my accumulated goods from point A to point B will involve a heap of physical work starting with the packing of boxes and probably requiring the physical stamina of a college athlete. That part of the upcoming move to the country hasn’t started yet and I can only hope that when the time comes in a week or so, my own stamina doesn’t fall short. Some moving companies offer a deal where they come in and do all the packing for you, but in my neck of the woods that kind of pampering is not a part of the basic package and would add considerably to the bill. Not even sure I could really trust others to handle and pack some of the more precious or breakable items. But I haven’t reached the packing point just yet and my concerns now are more along the lines of setting things up, scheduling movers, installers and the necessary paperwork of stuff like insurance.

I’ve been thinking about television out where I’m going and someone told me the TV antenna with artfully wrapped tin foil ears sitting atop my set will prove inadequate out among the bears and possums. So I called the Dish Net cable company recommended by friends and asked what the deal is out where wireless networks are stranger than fiction and TV remotes have only four buttons.

Wilderness doesn’t stop the folks at Dish Net and within a minute I was hearing offers of 200 channels, premium bonus channels, free movies from Blockbuster and popcorn on Friday nights. The telephone reps have the sales spiel down pat and I wondered more than once when friendly Imogen was going to take a breath and give me an opening to say, “Basic plan without the frills, please.” Hearing that I would only be connecting one television, I could almost see Imogen’s mouth drop open. After a moment’s silence she asked if it was an HD television. I had some fun with her and said it was a black & white console model from Motorola. 

The next call was to HughesNet to arrange Internet hook up. Service in the southern part of Oak Hill where I’ll be living is either via satellite or not at all, and the neighbor I spoke to said HughesNet will do the trick and the prices aren’t bad. On the telephone I was swamped by the enthusiasm of a young woman who spoke 630 words per minute and never ran out of script. If she hadn’t sent it all to me later in an email I might not have known what I signed up for. It all looks good. After the free installation on May 3 I should have a fast and continuous hardwire connection with Wi-Fi inside and out—a lot more than what I get here at the beach.

One thing alone sold me on Two Men And A Truck, the company that will move my furniture and books on May 2. I have to think they learned it from the Japanese: running from house to truck and back again. My guess is the running part will come on the empty-handed leg of their back and forth trips, because who other than the Incredible Hulk could run with a 300 pound sofa on their back? I was also told by the company that it isn’t necessary to remove things from drawers in desks and chests of drawers, that they will shrink wrap anything with drawers and carry it to and from the truck with the contents still inside. Would be great if they could shrink wrap the books into manageable bundles, but I’m guessing that would take too much time.

Dressing the Part

One of the more pleasant aspects of life at the beach is the long established and widely accepted custom of casual clothing anywhere anytime. Even the better restaurants are filled with diners in shorts, T-shirts and flip flops—what passes as dressing up for dinner—and many of the people seen walking down the street are in something more casual: a swim suit, maybe a faded and well-worn shirt over it. With all the sand and warm sun typical of a beachtown, leather shoes, dress shirts and ties are definitely out of place.

From my first day here, shorts, T-shirt and a pair of Crocs became a uniform. Give me a chest of drawers with three pairs of shorts, a pair of jeans, a drawer full of T-shirts and another with underwear and I need little else, maybe a baseball cap. Sure, the colder months call for a sweater, a pullover or two and maybe a jacket, but even in chillier times shorts will usually do the trick. As for socks, I’ve forgotten what they feel like, and in the shoe department a pair of Reeboks and the Crocs fill the bill just fine. On rare occasion when I feel the need to be a little less casual, I replace the shorts with a pair of jeans and the T-shirt with a polo shirt, but at the bottom I am still sockless.

I’m going to miss all that.

The day I decided on moving to the house in the country I realized it would call for a few new items of clothing, something casual but in a different direction. Shorts may be fine inside, but outside is a place where long pants, socks and high top leather shoes bring more peace of mind—peace of mind in the arena of safety. In Oak Hill you don’t want to step on anything in bare feet or brush up against unfamiliar foliage with bare legs. And rather than a baseball cap, a wide-brimmed hat will do more to stop the hairy caterpillars from dropping down a shirt. Though I’ve always disliked them, gloves for working in the yard might also be a good idea.

Walking over the acre of property with the realtor a couple of weeks back, he suggested, with a small adjustment to his Daniel Boone attire, that it was an area where having a gun in the house would be wise. I couldn’t imagine he was talking about crime in the form of robbers or kidnappers, and I looked at the ground around me with new eyes, expecting to see something slither under a log. For a moment my head was filled with the vision of me as a rugged pioneer uncovering a nest of rattlers in my garden at the edge of the woods. A moment later I told the realtor I had to leave, that I had an appointment at the gun shop.

It’s still a couple of weeks before I move out to the house in the country and I’m still enjoying my shorts, T-shirts and bare feet, but I have been to Sears for a pair of sturdy shoes and while there I thought maybe a Bowie knife would come in handy, something to hold between my teeth in a wrestling match with unwelcome critters. I’ve seen Animal Planet and the scenes of anacondas released in the swamps of Florida. I just want to be prepared.

Blue for Green

Okay, so I’m trading a house at the beach for one in the country. My first thought was, “How does that work?” What will replace the constant background murmur of surf tumbling to spill itself on the beach, the slushy rumble of collapsing waves? In place of the blue and white outside my windows now what will greet my good morning eyes in this new home twenty-one miles south and marginally inland?

Oak Hill, on the Atlantic and southern edge of Volusia County is home to barely 1,800 souls. An early sixteenth-century map shows it as the site of an Indian village called Surruque el Viejo. Before the long-running Seminole Wars starting in 1814, northern timber cutters arrived and named their camp Oak Hill. The name stuck but the timber cutters were eventually driven off by the Seminole. At one time commercial fishermen and citrus growers found the area promising but these days most residents of the town commute either north or south for work.

My current knowledge of the area is slim, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of study to see that Oak Hill’s biggest draw nowadays is fishing. Looking for a grocery store, or God forbid a bookstore, Starbuck’s or McDonald’s is a waste of time in a town no more than a blink along the side of US 1. On my first visit there I spotted the local library, a quaint little building along an oak-shaded lane, but it didn’t require a look inside to tell me that it likely houses fewer books than my at-home library. But there is a hardware store and a weekend flea market, along with a Dollar General and the Country Kitchen Family Restaurant. Among the scatter of bait shops and fish camps is another restaurant named Goodrich’s Seafood & Oyster House. This one has a good reputation and attracts diners from areas outside of Oak Hill. Uncertain if it is still the case, but at one time the restaurant was owned and operated by Larry Csonka, a well-known ex-fullback for the Miami Dolphins football team.

The thing is, I am not exactly moving to the Oak Hill described above. Leave all the excitement behind, head south for another seven miles and at the bottom edge of the county make a left onto a dirt road leading off into nowhere. Somewhere down that road is another left turn and another dirt road leading to Indian River Lagoon. A few hundred feet shy of the lagoon is the place I will soon be calling home sweet home.

Moving On

Things change. October’s bliss is January’s headache, and the thrill of 2010 can always turn to disappointment in 2013. Most of us are aware of the changing nature in all things human but depending upon the person or change, metamorphosis arrives either with surprise or a groan:  “I saw that coming.”

I made the decision in 2010 to leave Japan after many years and make my home on Florida’s east coast, less than 200 feet off the Atlantic Ocean. A tremendous change and one layered with possibilities both good and bad. One thing was certain: I was trading a crowded city life for one in a near paradise of ocean, surf, sand and cloud-filled blue skies—a place as different from Tokyo as the moon—and my first thought on looking out at the stunning vista outside my Florida windows was that living in this environment could go either way.

Newness, novelty and grand scenery always make change easy to bear. Some things at first seem difficult or unreasonable, but whatever the gripe it is soon painted over by the overwhelming scale of living on a beach. And though you’ve read a few books about life along a coastal environment, they are nothing to the experience of walking out your door every morning and encountering firsthand the power and diversity of nature. One morning walk on the beach can be colored by seashells or baby turtles, a burst of red-orange from a carpet of wildflowers growing on the dunes, an expanse of sand and water empty of even one other person. The next morning may find that same beach a dangerous place to be, lightning splitting the sky and wind-driven rain turning everything into a waterworld. 

I have catalogued a great many of those wonders over the past three years in the pages of this blog and most of those posts were fueled by the joy of living in an endlessly fascinating place. But like I said, things change.

The time has come to leave this beach and make my home in a place with different qualities, another setting calling my name. I’ve been defeated by the popularity of Florida beaches and the noisy throngs of vacationers they attract. These days I hear mainly the shouts and screechy frolicking of too many children and endure the ill-behavior of inconsiderate strangers inflicting their holiday activities on me and my home. Beer cans in the flowerbeds, randomly tossed cigarette butts, the midnight hoot ’n holler of college boys, the horrified screech of schoolgirls encountering a harmless sand crab on the walkway…

The sale of this property on one of the state’s golden beaches has not been difficult and to make the process even easier, moving out to make way for the new owner is unhurried. Time aplenty to transfer furniture, books and art to the new house. 

Moving from Japan back to the US in 2010 was one thing, and like that move this one too will involve new experiences and a different set of challenges. It promises to be interesting and as time allows I will try to keep a record of it all here on Scriblets. Come back another day to read about well water and wild turkeys.

Eating With One Hand

On another of those annual returns to the Aubrey-Maturin series of books by Patrick O’Brian, I recently came across the passage in The Reverse of the Medal (Book 11) where Dr Maturin, along with his good friend, Sir Joseph is engrossed in a preserved collection of snakes, frogs and insects. Their fascination is interrupted by the housekeeper announcing dinner…  

  

  ‘If the gentlemen would like to eat their dinner while it is hot,’ said Sir Joseph’s housekeeper in a carefully restrained voice, ‘perhaps they will come now.’

  ‘Heavens, Mrs Barlow,’ said Sir Joseph, peering at the clock behind a heap of preserved serpents, ‘I am afraid we are late.’

  ‘Could we not eat it in our hand?’ asked Stephen. ‘Like a sandwich?’

  ‘No, sir, you could not,’ said Mrs Barlow. ‘A soufflé is not a sandwich. Though it may be very like a pancake if you do not come directly.’

  ‘People say unkind things about Lord Sandwich,’ observed Stephen as they sat down, ‘but I think mankind is very much in his debt for that genial invention…’  — Patrick O’Brian, The Reverse of the Medal

These days it is hard for people anywhere to imagine life without sandwiches. Who doesn't sometimes eat at a desk, or grip a sandwich in one hand, a steering wheel in the other? We all have our favorites as well as the restaurants, bars, delis or cafés that serve up a limitless variety that the Earl of Sandwich could never have imagined. I grew up eating mayonnaise between two slices of bread, working my way up to fried Spam sandwiches and years later discovering the incredible Watterson sandwich at Beef O’Brady’s—a double handful of roast beef and Swiss cheese on grilled rye with mayo, lettuce, tomato, pickle and onion. During the time I spent in Japan I often encountered a trio of sandwiches that always jangled my thoughts on the art of combining ingredients. The first was a potato salad sandwich, and then a noodle sandwich and finally a strawberry and cream sandwich. Eventually I tried all three, but let’s just say that once was enough.

The Dutch were eating something resembling a sandwich in the 17th century, where tavern owners hung beef from the rafters, cutting it into thin slices to lay over bread spread with butter, but the sandwich didn’t get its name until 1762 when British statesman and 4th Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu got hungry during long hours at the poker table. He asked his servant to bring him something to eat that wouldn’t interfere with the game. Hearing the Earl’s request, the cook took slices of roast beef and put them between pieces of toast. For a card player it was the perfect solution—a hearty meal eaten with one hand and still able to hold cards in the other. The Earl being an influential man, other players soon began calling for “the same as Sandwich.” We find this anecdote in the eighteenth-century travel book Tour to London, by Pierre Jean Grosley, but there is little more than rumor to substantiate the claim. Sandwich’s biographer offers an alternative, that the Earl’s commitments to the navy, politics and the arts make it more likely that the first sandwich was eaten at his work desk.

Dr Maturin's comment above that people said unkind things about Lord Sandwich, is based on historical fact about the man and his habits. Montagu (1718-1792) was well-known as a man of promiscuous habits and a love of gambling. During his lifetime he held a number of military and political offices, being at one time Postmaster General, First Lord of the Admiralty and Secretary of State. Sandwich was a great supporter of Captain Cook, who during his exploration of the Pacific Ocean named the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) after his patron. Montagu retired from public life in 1782 and many might have hinted that it was a retirement too late in coming. His incompetence and corruption were broad enough to prompt a suggestion that a proper epitaph would be: “Seldom has any man held so many offices and accomplished so little.”

An Extraordinary Life

DONALD RICHIE

APRIL 17, 1924 — FEBRUARY 19, 2013 

‘Winter 1947… Tokyo lies deep under a bank of clouds which move slowly out to sea as the sun climbs higher. Between the moving clouds are sections of the city: the raw gray of whole burned blocks with the yellow of new cut wood and the shining tile of recent roofs, the reds and browns of sections unburned, the dusty green of barely damaged parks, and the shallow blue of ornamental lakes. In the middle is the palace, moated and rectangular, gray outlined with green, the city stretching to the horizons all around it.

The smoke of early household hearths, of newly renovated factories, of the waiting, charcoal burning taxis, rises and with it the freshness of late winter, the bitter yellow smoke of burning cedar shavings, the smell of breakfast: barley, sweet potato, roasted chestnuts. In the houses the bedding is folded into closets and tatami mats are swept.

18 April 2004… I wander into the future—Roppongi Hills, an enormous complex of high-rise buildings, including a mighty tower near where I used to live. This is the new Japan—gargantuan, expensive, and wasteful. There are, to be sure, concessions to tradition (trad but mod) in the transplantations of zelkova and gingko trees, all of them expensively mature, and in such touches of the Japanesque as a pocket garden here and a teahouse there. But Keyakizaka Street is lined with Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Gucci, Bulgari, and other high-priced merchants. These are matched by the kind of restaurants now called cutting-edge, which are far too expensive to eat in. People who work in the tower complain that they have to leave the Hills and walk far away to find a place to have an affordable lunch.’                                  — Donald Richie, The Japan Journals 1947-2004

During almost thirty years in Japan one of the greatest influences on my understanding of the country and its people came from another American who devoted more than a half-century to living in and writing about the country. Beginning on January 1, 1947 and continuing over the next sixty-six years, Donald Ritchie’s voice and eye penetrated every aspect of the Japanese experience. From the homeless and destitute to the honored and privileged elite, Mr Ritchie’s observations and insights penetrated everything from art to film and literature, on down to back alley porno shops and ten dollar prostitutes. As much as conversation with the celebrated Kurosawa Akira and Mishima Yukio, he was just as happy to sit on a park bench and talk with someone living in a cardboard box who never rose above the drudgery of manual labor.   

Donald Richie was born in Lima, Ohio in 1924. After graduating from high school he traveled to New Orleans where he was working at the time of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. He was spared the Army by entering an officer training program with the US Maritime Service where he served as an ensign-purser and medical officer during the war years. In 1946 he found work with the US Civil Service and on January 1, 1947 arrived in Japan. For the twenty-two year-old neophyte it was love at first sight.

Except for the years spent at Columbia University from 1949-53, and another four years in New York as Curator of Film at the New York Museum of Modern Art from 1969 to 1972, Richie spent the remainder of his life in Japan. His writing on Japan includes books, articles and stories too numerous to count. There would be little exaggeration in calling Mr Richie Japan’s single greatest cultural bridge to the west.

In his 1971 landmark book, The Inland Sea, the writer observes early in his travels…

‘A journey is always something of a flight. You go to reach, but you also go to escape. I am going to see the islands and all that they seem to promise, but, at the same time, I am going to escape the mainland and all that I already know it contains. I find less fault with Japan than with the century that is destroying this country along with all the others. Now, to escape is no sentimental gesture, it is survival.’

Standouts among the more than forty books by Donald Richie

Three Donald Richie Books

E. coli & Your Smartphone

At last, the ultimate accessory!

Some, perhaps many are aware that E. coli is a common bacterium found in the intestines of all humans. Normally harmless, rare strains of this nasty little bugger can cause severe food poisoning. Now, Takara Tomy, a Japanese toymaker has me wondering if those dangerous and rarer strains of E. coli have discovered an environment more inviting than the human intestines. So, between programming my iPhone to turn on the coffeemaker and start the washing machine, I have to worry that digital age E. coli has taken up residence on the touch screens of both my iPhone and iPad. Sound crazy? Not too crazy for Takara Tomy who has come up with a health threat advertising ploy to stir enthusiasm for their new product. 

For some time now we’ve had to rely upon small microfiber cloths to quickly buff the fingerprints, E. coli bacterium and anthrax spores off our smartphones and tablets, finding some comfort in knowing that ninety-nine percent of those frightful nasties have at least been transferred to the little cloth we carry around in a pocket. 

March 28 will see the release of Japan’s giant toymaker Takara Tomy’s answer to the E. coli threat and the backbreaking work of cleaning our gadgets with a mere cloth. Their small, palm-sized AutoMee S will take off on its own battery power to buff away the dust, fingerprints and other smears by wandering around your smartphone or tablet screen spinning its brushes and ricocheting off the edges until the entire surface is clean. 

Coming in white, orange, pink and blue, the AutoMee S weighs less than three ounces, measures 2.75 inches in diameter and runs on a single AA battery that will keep it going for three hours. The price is listed at ¥1,575, or about $17.00. Granted, most can clean their devices by hand in a couple of seconds, but there is always the risk of inflaming a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome, and that’s no fun. If you are willing to sit back and relax, the AutoMee S will do the job on your smartphone in four minutes, your tablet in eight.

Way back in 1986 Takara Tomy produced a small cleaning robot called the Dustbot that featured a built-in vacuum cleaner. It also had sensors to prevent it from falling off a table, but the most memorable feature was its tiny arms that swept a tiny broom back and forth as it moved. Somewhat larger than the company’s latest invention, the Dustbot was designed to clean desks and tabletops. Another impractical gadget but one that captured the imagination of those looking for cute, clever and oddball.