TheSecondKing

Chiropractic & Exercise

2011-10-31T12:11:00.000-07:00

Chiropractic & Exercise

I am a chiropractor because I have had back problems from the time I was eleven. We lived at Hickam AFB, on Oahu, when my back first began to hurt. I was in the 5^th grade. The doctors we consulted were ones assigned to the base dispensary. The 3^rd one finally got around to taking x-rays – a precaution the 1^st one might have reasonably taken. Number Three could not see any blatant fractures or gigantic tumors, though, so he asked me how I was doing in school. Even at age 11, I understood that he suspected I was either malingering or psychosomatic and I was infuriated by his implication. I answered him rather rudely. As he was a grown-up and an officer (although junior in rank to my father), I got a reprimand from my mother, but in fact, she was as irritated with him as I was. In the doctor’s defense, after 30 years looking at x-rays, I can understand why the base doctor came off as a dullard: the human spine is a puzzling landscape for general medical practitioners. It’s full of lumps, bumps, shadows, and lines that course right through the middle of things – all of which look like they might be malevolent. Chiropractors feel that way about lung fields: gray, nebulous expanses of film concealing fatal goblins that only radiologists can spot.

After doctor number three, no more medical doctors were consulted and I grew into manhood with periodic pain. The first manipulative treatment I ever received was when I was 18 and attending Western Washington University, (State College at the time). I don’t remember what set off the episode but I could barely walk. The campus health center sent me downtown to an osteopath. I had a car and why I didn’t use it that day I don’t recall. What I do recall is that the trek was so painful I had to stop and lean against buildings every few yards and wondered at times if I was actually going to make it to my appointment. After my osteopathic manipulation, I felt better and the walk home didn’t require leaning against buildings. I saw the osteopath four times, but although I had periods where my back hurt and pain even went down my right leg, I didn’t suffer the debilitation I had during the incident in college and I didn’t seek treatment for another 10 years. Working in they hay fields produced another severe bout and I began seeing a chiropractor in Ferndale. I was so impressed with what he was able to do for me that it was not much of a leap for me to embrace his suggestion that I go to chiropractic college and become a chiropractor, myself.

Candidly, I admit that I’ve never been an athlete but throughout my lifetime I’ve engaged in athletic endeavors that probably should have involved some athletic conditioning, just for my own safety. Swimming, sailing, handling cattle, riding horses, and other activities were approached in the manner of an evening or weekend warrior and I was rewarded with the injuries that came with my foolishness. Only in karate did I follow a fitness program – and I was pushing 40 by the time I started that. Now, looking back on it all from ‘the end of middle age (63),’ I’m convinced that both chiropractic and exercise, together, are essential for a healthy, active life.

I tell you why I say this. We’ll talk about illness vs. wellness in terms of stuck vs. movement. We move every day, mostly doing chores or work, and these activities (we convince ourselves) give us adequate exercise. I’m as guilty as anyone else in this lazy rationalization. This exercise, however, doesn’t always ‘do the trick.’ Have you ever noticed how one task that you are fit for does not always make you fit for another? This is because our chore and work activities are not balanced from a muscle-use perspective. The chore and work movements do not equally utilize all the muscle groups in our bodies. The muscle groups we overuse complain from wear and tear, and the muscle groups we underuse complain when they have to deliver more effort during activity we normally don’t engage in. To achieve a balance, which will optimize movement and maximize health, we all should take advantage of the synergism of chiropractic and exercise. What is synergism? It is ‘the action of discrete agencies whose combined effect is greater than their separate and individual effects,’ or ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’

I want you to understand how chiropractic works. Most people don’t – even the ones who have received chiropractic treatments for years. Chiropractic is joint mobilization: the articulation of a patient’s spine or peripheral joints by the doctor. Many different disciplines practice joint mobilization and claim it as their own by giving it a proprietary name. Chiropractors mobilize joints by ‘adjusting’ them, either by hand or by instrumentation. Within the profession, many different techniques are practiced – different strokes for different folks. ‘Diversified Technique’ is a grab bag of manual manipulative moves that are generally perceived by the public as ‘good, ol’ time chiropractic.’ ‘Activator Technique’ and ‘Toftness Technique’ are rendered with instrumentation. In the former, a light rapid force is delivered; in the latter, a light prolonged force is applied. ‘Receptor Tonus Technique’ is the axial ‘milking’ of the belly of muscles to ‘reset’ their tension neuropathways.

To speak of neuropathways permits a segue into why joints become demobilized. Most people think chiropractic addresses bone alignment. You may be surprised to learn that nothing could be farther from the truth. Bones only do what muscles direct. And muscles only do what the nerve system commands. The commands are sent by impulses going out or coming in over neuropathways. Joints become stuck because the nerve system wants to demobilize an injury by means of a ‘neuromuscular splint.’ Neuromuscular splinting occurs to some degree in every illness or injury. Chiropractors most commonly treat sprain/strain injuries. Although the terms are used interchangeably in conversation, sprain and strain are clinically different. A sprain is ligament damage. Ligaments attach bone to bone; the intervertebral discs are ligaments; the rotator cuff is, in part, a ligament. A strain, on the other hand, is muscle/tendon injury. Tendons attach muscle to bone or to ligaments.

Both types of injury generate a clinical entity called ‘the inflammatory response.’ The inflammatory response occurs in all illness and injury. Its components are Redness, Heat, Swelling, and Pain. (We learned them in Latin: Rubor, Chalor, Turgor, and Dolor.) Nerve receptors responsive to these four elements around an injury or an infection send signals which cause splinting by muscles to immobilize the area. These nerve receptors are the end organs of neurological pathways leading to and from the brain in ‘feedback loops.’ There are two types of feedback loops: one governs motion, the other inhibits it. The two feedback loops oppose one another. In health, they’re balanced and work together to produced normal movement and maintain normal posture. In injury or illness, the balance is altered to favor inhibition and splinting. Chiropractic adjustments reduce inhibition and splinting by jumpstarting the motion neuropathway. As nerve signals are repeatedly sent along a neuropathway, the signals move increasingly easier with repetition. It’s a little like the cutting of the groove in an old-time phonograph record when the record is being made. So when the chiropractor moves the joint during an adjustment, he is shifting the neurological balance between the two pathways back to the motion side of the equation. Also, the chiropractic adjustment reduces inflammation. Redness, Heat, Swelling, and Pain are chemically mediated. That is, chemicals in the tissue act upon nerve endings to produce these responses. By introducing and increasing joint movement, these chemicals are literally pumped away from an injury, allowing components of the immune and repair systems to come into the area, a bit like an army displacing an enemy.

And this is the conceptual point at which chiropractic and exercise are synergistic. In the acute phase of an injury, chiropractic treatment should be complimented by exercises which duplicate the chiropractic adjustment and extend the benefit of the treatment. The motion pathway facilitation that the doctor imparts with the adjustment is continued by the patient doing exercise; and the pumping-away activity is repeated. In chronic or long-term care, exercises specifically selected to balance the entire musculoskeletal dynamic are prescribed.

In work and play, some joints and muscles are underutilized and some are overutilized. Overutilized joints always have underutilized neighbors, and vice versa. An exercise program designed for long-term or chronic care should address this inequality and even out the activity spread. That’s why exercise often looks a little silly: one has to engage in movements that are not normally done. Balancing the activity spread is best managed by chiropractic and exercise combined. This is because we sometimes ignite inhibition neuropathways by carrying exercise or activities a little too far. We re-injure ourselves, a little or a lot. It’s then that the motion neuropathways have to be re-engaged chiropractically to return nerve and muscle performance to balance.

On C. S. Lewis

2011-05-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

On C. S. Lewis

I’ve gone through several authors that I embraced as ‘favorites’ at one time or another in my reading life. In grade school and junior high, it was Herman Melville. I was captivated by his page-length paragraphs and wondered how he managed to avoid having these enormities broken up by his publishers since they (the paragraphs) appeared to violate all I was learning about correct paragraph structure. My attempts at diagramming his freight train sentences failed after producing structures that looked like curtains of the Aurora Borealis meandering across the limited expanse of my paper. I eventually spurned Melville as I concluded that he had small regard for the attributes of good writing. However, upon this judgment, I have since recanted: I was required at some point to delve into portions of The Federalist penned by Alexander Hamilton. That these were ever published as Hamilton wrote them caused me to marvel; that they were originally put out in a newspaper for digestion by ordinary citizens left me with the suspicion that the paper’s publisher printed them without editorial surveillance. Even now, after college and graduate school, I cannot divine Hamilton’s meaning in some passages. Winston Churchill occupied the favorite’s pedestal for a time, until I grew impatient with his reluctance to apply commas in places that would have made sentences more understandable. Winston was never requested to stand down from the place of honor entirely: some of his more famous passages, especially in his speeches, have such a King James Version ring to them that punctuation is transcended. And John Milton, whom I read at about the same time, proved a tonic for Winston’s ‘comma anemia;’ but Milton is a very heady draught: on him I readily became ‘comma drunk.’ And his prose and poetry have a ‘massive’ quality that renders either genre unsatisfactory as a model for modern writing. I cannot deny that C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian have ranked among my favorites for their respective Hornblower and Aubrey/Maturin romans-fleuves. But on them, my favor was bestowed more for what they had to say rather than how they said it.

‘Then along came C. S. Lewis’ would be a dramatic sequitur but to say it would be inaccurate: I cannot recall my first encounter with him. I suspect that my mother must have read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe to me early on. Over the course of my life, I’ve read part of his total writings, but certainly not all. I hope I may be able to say I’ve read it all before I die and some of it twice, for he has been called the greatest Christian apologist of our time – perhaps of any time. That statement I must take on faith for I do not spend much time reading Christian apologists other than Lewis. I probably won’t, either, because just getting through Lewis will be a monumental endeavor. And then, of course, he’s to be reread: Lewis, himself states that a book that is meaningful to an individual should be read more than once.

Lewis was not an enthusiast for anthologies of excerpts from major works. He felt that excerpts merely convinced people that would not like the whole book to not read it, or convinced people that would like it to toss the excerpts and move on to the book. His point is well taken but I can’t embrace it entirely. At the moment, I’m reading The Quotable Lewis and I am enjoying it thoroughly. It’s an encyclopedic selection of quotes from Lewis’ complete published works. Without a doubt, I will be enthused by it to move on to the books excerpted but I want to finish the anthology first. It may serve as an index – and as a daily devotional, as well. In fact, it does the latter now, during this first read. For a long time, I used Oswald Chambers as a devotional but Chambers’ perspectives on all that we lump up as Christian, or faith, sometimes soar into the ‘o-zone’ (for me, anyway). Chambers has a very firm grasp on his faith; Lewis’ grasp is equally firm. And one must wonder where both got such profound understanding: was it in some sudden Pauline epiphany on their respective roads? Or was it acquired in hours of prayer, reasoning, and building ‘line upon line, precept upon precept?’ Lewis was a scholar and teacher at Oxford and at Cambridge; Chambers was a teacher and preacher in pulpits all over the world. To say that both were widely read does not do justice to the literacy of either. The substantive difference is in style. Lewis is always conversational; Chambers is oratorical. Chambers’ oratory is superb but Lewis’ conversation is more engaging. Chambers walks briskly with Isaiah; Lewis has his arm crooked in St. Luke’s. Chambers wrote and spoke about God, drawing upon a great many things for references; Lewis wrote and spoke about a great many things, with God as his constant point of reference.

Lewis married later in his life and had a good marriage until it was cut short by his wife’s death from cancer. He never had children of his own but was a very successful step-parent to his wife’s two sons, continuing to care for them for three years after her death, until his own death. Perhaps it was his experience with his step-sons that gave him the knowledge of children he so captivatingly demonstrates in The Chronicle of Narnia. This is conjecture on my part prompted by my own life and writing: I was never able to write anything credible about marriage until I my marriage with Rachel, and I couldn’t write anything but drivel about children until I had parented Rachel’s and a few others for a number of years. The fact that I haven’t been moved to write anything worthwhile about God despite having lived with Him all my life is a contradiction I cannot explain. I anticipate being able to explain it in future, however, and I am hoping it will be Lewis that unlocks the door for me. Not the door to writing, mind you; the door to a deeper understanding of my relationship with God. I think in this regard, Lewis had the advantage of losing God for a while. He was raised in the Church of Ireland but became an atheist when he was 15, not to return to Christianity until he was nearly 30. A trudge through a desert will always give one a fresh perspective on greenery, and his desert years certainly made Lewis’ appreciation of God vivid. I’ve never been an atheist and, at 62, I have no desire to become one: to rely on Lewis’ experience suits me down to the ground.

Lewis died of a renal disease a week before he turned 65. My initial reaction to such an untimely death is to think, ‘Oh! Too bad! He was cut short in his prime. What more he would have loved to have given us.’ Yet, not so: Lewis, himself, admitted prior to his death that he was running out of steam. He penned to a friend that he was glad he was beginning to be short of the energy for writing before he lost his ability to write. Perhaps it was his illness he was starting to feel that prompted the remark. At any rate, it harbors a sentiment that as a writer, a teacher, and a lecturer, he was nearing the end of his tour. That there is a season to everything, however, was a perspective he held even in health and declared openly in The Chronicles of Narnia: the Pevensie children, High Kings and Queens, were by turns sent out of their kingdom forever by Aslan when they’d grown too old for Narnia and when they’d learned all they were to learn by being there. Lewis never says so directly but it’s to be understood that this life is Narnia. And Lewis was sent out when he had learned all there was for him to learn and when he had given us all he had to give. Like the Pevensies, I expect he went to Aslan’s Country, which lies beyond the edge of the world. I expect that Lewis was just as happy as they were to go there. With his example then, I brace myself to my own duties, ‘to strive, to seek, to find – and not to yield’ (Tennyson): for one day I, too, will have learned all I am to learn here and will be sent to meet The Great Lion in his own country, face to face.

A Dolphin's View

2011-04-01T11:37:00.000-07:00

A Dolphin’s View

Dolphins and porpoises are among my earliest and my most vivid aquatic experiences. I say ‘vivid’ because, mostly, I have seen dolphins and porpoises. Certainly, I have heard them ‘speak’ and have even had the privilege of patting and stroking one. Of my five senses, though, sight has given me most of my impressions of them and most of these have been views of their backs. The first I can remember is watching porpoises accompany the car ferry across Aransas Pass. We took that ferry every time we drove down to Rockport, Texas from San Antonio for a weekend or a vacation of fishing. I must have been about three, for you can’t remember much before the age of three. Later, when we lived in Delaware and I was around the age of twelve, we vacationed at a place called Fort Miles. It was on a small peninsula in Delaware Bay, and around the end of it schools of porpoise would pass. Their dorsal fins looked like shark fins to me and I asked my father how I could tell the difference. He said the fins were shaped differently, the porpoises’ being more hooked and sharks having more triangular fins. And he told me they swim differently: sharks swim flat along the surface and porpoise bounce along. As sharks and porpoises never swim together, I was never able to make a scientific comparison. I also knew that porpoises breathe but Fort Miles was usually a bit windy and enjoyed one-to-two foot surf, so I could never hear them exhale. During that time, we occasionally fished for shark on Chesapeake Bay from a friend’s lobster boat. As we made our way out to the fishing grounds one day, two large dolphins breached off our starboard beam, heading straight for us and passing close astern. The pair was not swimming leisurely but cracking on for all they were worth, bounding clear of the water when they came up for air. One of them jumped over our wake when he surfaced, no more than sixty feet behind us. I was amazed at his size: he seemed huge. Years and years later, while crossing the tide rips north of the San Juan Islands here in Washington, I was stunned to see two smaller Dahl’s Porpoises in the vertical concavity of a cresting four-foot wave, framed as if behind an aquarium glass. They were beautiful, marked like miniature Orca.

These encounters have assured dolphins and porpoises of a preferred status on my radar screen. If there is anything on television about them, I usually watch it; if I come across an article in a magazine about them, I usually read it. Many of these documentaries and editorials focus on the dolphin’s sonar system. Aside from being a language of sorts, the intricate sounds a cadences of a dolphin’s voice provides each animal with a radar system of amazing complexity. Coupled with very capable eyesight, a dolphin’s ‘sonarsight’ very often allows him to see inside what he is looking at. A human, for instance, would visually appear to a dolphin just as it would to another human. Added to this, however, would be the detail provided by his sonar: ‘visualization’ of the liver, stomach, lungs, brain, fetus carried, bone density, metal clips from surgery, prosthetic hips/knees/shoulders. Humans have long joked about acquiring ‘x-ray vision;’ dolphins come naturally equipped with ‘ultrasound vision.’ Whether it is in black-and-white, like a diagnostic ultrasound image, I can’t say. I certainly hope the resolution would be better!

Our human interaction would take on a different spin if humans had sonar:

Mother:
Johnny, do you have to go to the pottie?

Johnny:
No, I already went.

Mother:
You did not! I can see it. Go to the pottie now, before we leave.

Or:

1^st Old Lady:
I’m worried about Agnes’ left carotid artery. Don’t you think the blockage is getting worse?

2^nd Old Lady:
Lands, yes! It’s starting to look as if she’s got a pencil stuck in her neck! What that doctor of hers can be thinking, I can’t imagine!

Or:

Gentleman 1:
George! They certainly let you out of the hospital quick! What’s that thing right there that sounds like metal, though? Did they leave a tool in you?

Gentleman 2:
No, no. That’s supposed to be there. It holds me together.

Or:

Grandfather to grandmother regarding grandson:
Howard’s putting on too much weight. You can hardly see whether he’s had breakfast anymore!

And the necessity for security scanners at airports and in government buildings would be considerably lessened, I expect.

If you think about it, we humans have a pretty sophisticated ability to integrate, segregate, and process sensory stimuli from other humans to tell us what is going on inside their brains, even if we can ‘see’ into them. Interpreting brain activity is more important to us than looking at people’s brains, or their breakfasts, for human society is more complex than dolphin society on many levels. Not all levels, maybe, but on many. Take lying, for instance: I heartily doubt dolphins lie to one another. What would they lie about? Everything in their lives depends upon collective behavior. Humans lie to each other all the time and, if the lie is ‘loud’ enough, the one being lied to will often know he’s being lied to – not by what’s being said but by the visual, auditory, postural, and even olfactory stimuli he’s receiving from the liar. I think it’s not unreasonable to suppose that some of the same brain structures dolphins have developed for sonar interpretation have been retooled for human sensory interpretation. In fact, all things considered, to suppose the contrary would be un-reasonable. On the other hand, reading and interpreting subtle facial and gesture communications would not work to advantage among dolphins: their faces are frozen in perpetual smiles, their arms are housed within their bodies, and their hands are encased in fins.

My favorite television program is The Good Wife. It’s one that you must watch; you can’t just listen to it. Much is conveyed in subtle alterations in the actors’ faces, body postures, gestures, etc. They really act; it is not a televised radio show. Another program, Lie to Me, is actually based upon this faculty in human perception and communication; and, in a broader manner, so is The Mentalist. The Good Wife isn’t about this faculty, however; it just requires you exercise it. But I think the driving intent by the producers is that you do so, which makes the ‘illusion’ very ‘real’ and calls you back each week for more. And this ability is what makes our human interactions so gratifying and desirable: we can ‘read’ the mind and the heart, even though the organs remain cloaked in secrecy – our own ‘dolphin’s view.’

A Wine for the Tasting

2011-03-24T09:22:00.000-07:00

A Wine for the Tasting

My association with wines goes back to my early adolescence. At dinners of celebration, we kids each were allowed a glass of wine for toasts and to make last through the meal. This introduction was made nearly a half century ago and it’s regrettable I have not made something more than I have of my acquaintance with wines during the long interval. Lamentably, a nodding acquaintance is probably all my friendship with wines will ever become. That’s not to say I don’t consort with wines on a daily basis, for I do. We have a three-glass companionship, wine and I. But, alas, it is not an intimacy; it’s a working relationship: I usually have my three glasses while I am cooking, to sharpen my nose. And they’re just work horse table wines, nothing lofty. Water becomes my companion for dinner, as more than three glasses of wine annihilate my appetite. (The possibilities for a fad diet of wines to promote weight loss tantalize me. Who would care if it really worked? The book would probably sell quite well. I may seriously consider it.)

Before I went off to college, I encountered refinement in wine society at dinners in my Uncle Bill’s house. He was entering upon his hobby as a wine connoisseur – he eventually became a creditable one – and better than average wine was usually a component of the meal. Most memorable for me was one Easter-tide dinner. The main course was blanched asparagus, cooked by the serving just before it was served. There was a great deal of it, which kept Aunt Phyllis in the kitchen during most of the dinner. There were two sauces for the asparagus, a red and a white, and this warranted two wines, a red and a white, and a glass upon the table for each. There was also water in a stem glass so you could rinse your mouth and go between sauces and wines. While I was at college, nothing like the asparagus dinner happened. In college, I was introduced to over-date potato chips and wine ‘flips.’ Flips, if you’ve never had them, are made with half a glass of very cheap wine topped off with half a glass of very cheap soda pop. Red and white do not factor. Sometimes slices of citrus, also over-date, are dumped in for ‘class.’ Flips are the reptilian ancestors of wine coolers and sangria. Some wine coolers and sangrias are quite refreshing; others are quite atavistic.

During our boating years, we had ‘boat’ wine. It was several steps up the evolutionary scale from flip wine. Boat wine comes in heavy-duty boxes with stout plastic bladders inside. Most of the boxed wines during that period of the world were everyday table wines. Nowadays, some very refined and very expensive wines are to be obtained in boxes – for boaters with more discriminating palates. This is a discerning response by the vintners to the wine-buying boating public in the present economy: only the well-heeled can afford either boats or good wines. Our boat wines were functionary, both in the drinking of them and in the stowage of them, for in a sailboat, a modest wine in an indestructible box is highly desirable.

We still buy boat wine, even though we sold the boat. But we’ve expanded our horizons and have gone with friends to a local vineyard for summer wine tastings. The friends are invited by the winery every year and they invite us. At the outset, each taster is given a wine glass – a nice glass with a clear ring when you thump it, not some thick thing that greets you with a dull thud. These are the tools-of-the-tour for the rest of the event. Hors d’oeuvres are served with three initial wine offerings. After these, we are taken in groups to three different functioning parts of the winery to sample three different wines at each – without hors d’oeuvres. This is all followed up in the great hall by dinner in three courses with recaps of the wines we have sampled. After dessert, everyone is invited to the sales office to buy cases of wine. Our friends buy cases; we buy a couple of bottles: that is why the friends are invited by the winery every year and we have to be invited by the friends. Truthfully, I have not found any of the vineyard’s wines to be of such exalted character that I could invest with a clear conscience in an entire case. They are ‘good’ wines, however, and we are motivated to buy one bottle each of a red and a white, against the possibility of blanched asparagus, and in the spirit of the occasion. This is not to say that our friends that buy the cases are over enthusiastic in the spirit of the occasion; it is to say that they have more money to spend on ‘good’ wines.

Blaine Bouquet entertains the town with a monthly wine tasting. The business began as a flower shop, and remains a flower shop, but on the excuse that wines as well as flowers have bouquets, they have expanded into wines. The ‘winery’ portion of the shop occupies roughly 30% of their showroom floor and is attractively laid out. In fact, it is more handsomely done up than the sales office of the winery that we are invited to by our friends. For Blaine Bouquet’s tastings, three or four of their inventory are featured, usually hosted by the vintners. I butler these events and I find them to be capital fun. The Bouquet’s tastings are very well attended and, as everyone is acquainted, they’ve become a convivial small town social tradition. Cheeses, crackers, and sausages are laid for snacks. There is no stinting on the small ‘tastes’ of the wines poured into each guest’s glass, but no one ever becomes ‘blotto’ and none of the guests has ever spilled. I have, though – spilled, not become blotto. Twice I have snagged the edge of my tray on my vest buttons while attempting to negotiate a tight passage between tasters. Both spills were reds. The first went mostly into a lady’s overlarge handbag; the second cascaded down my tailcoat front. Both were sensational. I fear if I spill a third time, it may become an event expectation and I will have to incorporate it into my service.

Wine tastings and vintners have led me to the conclusion that refined palates where wine tasting obtains are more fabrication than fact. A vintner, enthusiastic over his grape and year will enlarge upon his wine thus: ‘The wine suffuses the nostrils with honeysuckle, mingling delicately with a faintness of cayenne. Upon the tongue’s tip it alights sensuously with the hint of black pepper occasioned by the rich and fruity redolence of the pinot noir grape. As you savor before swallowing, you will discover an intriguing whisper of peach. Once swallowed, the memory of a sun-dried apricot reclines lazily in the back of the mouth.’ That’s the fabrication. The truth is that the bouquet of a wine, because of chemistries inherent in grapes, will allow the sniffer to experience a variety of scents. And for the same reason, the taste of the wine will involve multiple flavors, both before and after swallowing. Where imagination comes into play is in naming the scents and tastes. What the vintner expresses as ‘honeysuckle’ may, to me, translate as ripe cantaloupe. He may be calling sun-dried pears apricots because the overtones of ‘intriguing’ peaches have bamboozled his taste buds. ‘Pepper’ to his tongue may be astringency or acidity, two polemics in pH. In fact, during the last wine tasting, I disagreed with the vintner’s wife over the matter of ‘pepper.’ She was describing her 2008 claret blend to the tasters as ‘peppery.’ I didn’t find it peppery at all: the bouquet was extremely flowery and the taste was very mild. On the other hand, she was painting a 2007 cabernet sauvignon that I found quite pleasantly peppery as ‘smooth and fruity.’ A poll of the guests around us produced divided returns. I have no doubt that in a crowed of serious wine tasters, such a discussion could become as hot as any religious or political debate.

For most of us, a wine is really not for the ‘tasting.’ It is not for describing. It is for enjoying because of the way it looks and savors, without words to clutter up the pleasure it provides. It is for complimenting food and friends or for solitude and a single glass. A fine $28 Spanish wine or a variety of ‘Three-buck Chuck’ produces the same effect: a little celebration of life. I will proudly carry either on my tray – or wear either home on my tailcoat.

Sea Gulls or How to Hold a Fork

2011-03-16T15:45:00.000-07:00

Sea Gulls

How to Hold a Fork

Gertrude and Heathcliff were sea gulls. Not actual birds, of course. They were skit characters, created by Red Skelton for his television program. To portray them, Red would cross his eyes, wad up his mouth to protrude his upper lip, and tuck his flexed wrists into his armpits. The caricature was complete when he flapped. Red’s act is recalled to my mind whenever I eat next to a ‘sea gull’ who requires two vacant places at the table to accommodate his elbows.

Twenty-four inches is the standard width for a place setting. Some ‘sea gulls’ attempt to fit into twenty-four inches by folding one ‘wing,’ resting the elbow and forearm on the table between their shirt-fronts and their plates. This saves spatters on shirt-fronts but is messy for sleeves. Others will fold both wings and rest the forearms on the table’s edge, midway from the elbows. They must slump down to their food as the cutlery can only be elevated to the degree wrist rotation allows.

When the girls were young, I encouraged them to eat ‘Buckingham’ fashion. ‘Buckingham’ fashion is a very pretty way of eating and easily permits the eater to fit into the prescribed twenty-four inch space because it allows the elbows to remain at the eater’s side at all times: no gull wings. Let me coach you in this. Go get a fork, a knife, and a spoon. I’ll wait.

The fork is held in the left hand, the convexity of the tines turned upward. To achieve the proper grip, hold your left hand as if you were holding an imaginary derringer. Place the heel of the fork handle against the hollow of your palm and rest the shaft on the top finger of the three that are doubled back ‘around the derringer’s handle.’ Next, lightly pinch upon the fork handle with your index finger and your thumb. Now, try rolling the fork through about 30 degrees of arc with your thumb, index finger, and great finger. See how nicely it articulates? Raise it to your mouth: notice that your elbow moves along your ribs but never leaves your side.

The knife is held in the right hand in the same manner and articulated exactly the same way. Food is cut and pushed onto the tines of the fork with the knife. If the food requires a fist-grip upon the knife, well, chastise the cook: it is either burnt or raw. Wrist action working the knife like a saw will usually be all the movement necessary. Elbow movement may come into play but, again, the elbow will move along the ribs, never leaving your side.

Spoons require a different technique. They are right-hand implements and held like you would grip a pencil: in the first three fingers, with the butt of the spoon’s handle resting upon the web of the thumb. The spoon can be rolled in the same manner as the knife and fork. The soup bowl is tipped slightly with the left hand, when necessary, toward the center of the table, allowing better access to the spoon. Elevating a spoonful of soup to your lips requires no departure of your elbow from your ribs.

The girls practiced eating ‘Buckingham’ fashion for a while but went back to eating like sea gulls, assuring me that they could eat properly if occasion demanded. The occasion came during their first Caribbean cruise. Happily, they deployed their cutlery as if they had been ‘to the manner born.’

Sea gulls, real ones, tend to swallow things wholesale. I’ve watched one spend part of an afternoon working down an entire starfish with the legs stuck out. (You may wonder at my devoting time to that, but I had to see whether the gull could actually do it. He did.) People tend to eat that way, too, as if what they are eating is the first food they’ve had in a while or the last they’re going to get. Small bites, though, are de bon ton. Using the fork ‘Buckingham’ fashion dictates smaller bites: the convex side of a fork simply will not accommodate a great pile of food. This lends the eater an aura of refinement not obtained by overloading a fork held ‘barn mucking’ fashion.

If you are dining on something that will not permit of eating in the manner I recommend, either your meal is not well planned, or the proper cutlery is not laid – or you are working down a starfish.

A Seamless Service

2011-03-12T12:04:00.000-08:00

A Seamless Service

When I was in my teens, Arthur Treacher/Reginald Jeeves was the most famous butler in America. Arthur, of course, was an actor who played more roles than that of a butler, and he played more butlers than Jeeves. Jeeves was a P.G. Wodehouse character who was actually a valet. (The difference is that a valet serves a man while a butler serves a household.) It was during these years that the notion of becoming a butler seized my mind. It was not, however, my only seizure: I also considered Navy Officer and Episcopal Priest, combined.

During my junior year in high school, my favorite English teacher decided to produce the play Charlie’s Aunt, by Brandon Thomas (1892). He asked me to take the role of Brassett, the butler. It was a very minor role, certainly, but I mimicked Arthur Treacher and carried it off successfully – so successfully that my English teacher advised I go to butlers’ school after I graduated. He said I had ‘the bearing for it.’ We did not have internet then (and computers of very limited capability were as big as refrigerators and full of bales of red wires). I was completely clueless as to how to find a butlers’ school and the guidance counselor at Stadium High was only interested in sending people to teachers’ colleges. Hence, I did not go to butlers’ school. Today, with the internet, locating butlers’ schools is easy. From the comfort of my laptop, I find butlers’ schools all over the globe. The major ones are in the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia. The school in Australia leads the pack in demand for its graduates. Most of them go into government service. The bulk of graduates that go into private service serve in the Middle East. If I had gone to butlers’ school, government service would have suited me fine; private service in the Middle East would have probably motivated me to become a chiropractor.

Most people really have no idea what a butler does. Butlers are generally thought of as crafty but discrete household functionaries that extricate their silly employers from hopeless social jams, or as dignified ornaments that announce guests at society balls. A first-class butler will do both, of course, but he will do much, much more. In a great house, he will be an administrator; in a more modest home, he may walk the dog, do the laundry, and unstop the toilet, if necessary. Very often, he is the one who handles the mundanities of his employers’ lives if that is a region they do not know how to manage: they can be clever at earning money but they may know nothing of successfully operating a coffee maker. Thus, a butler will do whatever his employer requires. And he will do it with little apparent effort and no disturbance to his employer. The flowers will always be fresh, the carpet will always be track-free, and the shopping will always be done – as if by magic. This capability is expressed very nicely by one of the butlers’ schools in its statement of purpose: they train their students to ‘provide seamless service’ to their employers. ‘Seamless service’ is only achieved by possessing the skills of service coupled with the faculty of anticipating what service needs to be rendered and providing it with such spot-on timeliness that it may be taken for granted. This is an art. But it is not an art to be pursued if you don’t have the heart for it. In fact, without the heart for it, you won’t even see it as art.

I first began my life ‘in service’ as a chauffeur. I was in high school and worked at my ‘uncle’ Bill Gill’s Lincoln-Mercury dealership, Saturdays during the school year but five days a week during the summer. Very often, Uncle Bill would come out on the lot or down to the shop and give me my afternoon instructions: ‘Take that station wagon. Fetch Dan and Tim from school and Susan from ballet and take them home to Phyllis (his wife). Pick up John and take him to the tennis club for his lesson. Then pick up Gretchen and take her to her piano lesson. Then go back for John and Gretchen and take them home.’ Sometimes, it was drive kids to camp out in the boonies or pick them up from camp out in the boonies, or take them to the Puyallup Fair. Always, it was stay for dinner in the evenings. I was both servant and family member. It was a nice arrangement.

When I went away for my second year of college, I remained in the car business, but I had to leave my chauffeur’s position. Not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I took a vacation in my fourth year from both college and the car business and went to work at The Chuckanut Manor Restaurant, as their wine steward. Cup bearers and wine stewards were the butlers of ancient times. Their badges of office were oversized keys, for with the wine cellar key, one guarded both his lord’s life and part of his wealth. Our word ‘butler’ is derived from French: ‘embouteiller,’ which means, ‘to bottle up.’ I really didn’t guard the restaurant owner’s life or wealth; I sold and served wine. Moreover, when I took the job I didn’t know anything about wine. I learned very quickly that the service I gave was actually more important to the customer than the wine I served. None of the wines we offered were particularly good wines, as wines go. (Two of our most popular wines were rather horrid.) The customer actually wanted a ‘wine with experience’ rather than a wine with any particular quality. And that is what I served them.

Without working in an oil sheik’s house, I decided to become a chiropractor and went off to school in Missouri. While there, I made my living mostly by doing janitorial work, but I did put in a one-year tour of duty as valet to a wealthy Jewish man in a nursing home outside St. Louis. He required 24-hr attendance; fortunately, my shifts were never longer than 12 hrs. If ‘anticipation’ is a butler’s watchword, I certainly refined it as Mr. M’s valet. He lived mainly in his memory and his imagination. His world, for the most part, didn’t have much to do with reality. Anticipating the needs and wishes of an employer who functions ‘in real time’ can be taxing enough; anticipating the needs and wishes of an employer whose reality can only be seen by him is very much an adventure – not Dungeons and Dragons, precisely, but there are similarities. Carrying a full load in school and attending Mr. M wore me down after a year. I returned to janitorial work. Dirt was real.

In 1991, I married Rachel and her four kids. In the course of the following 19 years, we also acquired four add-on kids. All of them moved out; some moved back; some moved back more than once. Rachel decided to return to college. At first, college was a start-stop-start endeavor for her because of the migrations of kids; when she became free enough to go at school seriously, it became a 16-hr a day business. The kids required a fair share of ‘butling;’ when Rachel returned to school in earnest I became a butler in earnest. She will tell you so. Having acquired my ‘time in grade,’ I decided, on a whim, to hire out as ‘An Occasional Butler.’ This has not proven to be lucrative any more than butling ‘in house’ has, but it’s fun. Potlucks are my event of preference. Sit-down meals have an inherent timing-and-stress factor that makes them less enjoyable. Afternoon teas are all right but they are less demanding than potlucks and therefore less interesting. After all these years, with all the variety of parts I’ve played, is my service now seamless? Well, it must be: I’ve not been allowed to retire.

An Encouragement to Writers

2011-03-07T11:29:00.000-08:00

An Encouragement to Writers

In this day and age, when we are inundated with information, why would any of us choose to write? After all, there are considerable incentives to NOT write. The most salient is that anyone who writes anything immediately becomes the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The wilderness is the vast, undulating sea of written work waved at the reading public by writers who want to be read; the writer is crying, as in tears, because of the impossible odds against attracting a following.

Writing should be approached with the same attitude one adopts for fishing. A fisherman enjoys catching fish, and he occasionally does – just often enough to whet his appetite for catching more. Inside the head of every fisherman, though, as he sets out on a fishing expedition, is the nagging whisper of the pessimist – or the realist – that says, ‘You’re not going to catch any fish today.’ And what does the fisherman reply? He replies, ‘That’s okay. I’m going to tramp through blackberries to the pond, fiddle with my new gear, change baits, untangle my line, and be bitten by bugs. If I catch a fish, it will be a bonus.’ In the same spirit, a writer should be content to enjoy the adventure of his craft. If anyone reads it, well, that’s the fish he catches, the bonus. If they actually like what they’ve read, well, that’s two fish.

Writers new to the art are cautioned, especially in advice given by famous and established writers, to keep in mind for which they are writing. I have always been a bit puzzled why this point is made. Is it possible for a writer not to know the readership he or she is addressing? I don’t think so; I think having something to say is impossible without having someone in mind to say it to and a reason for saying it. Blabbering to no one for no reason is insane. Certainly, we all have read things and thought, ‘Who’s the author talking to? This is irrelevant to me.’ It’s quite possible that everyone may say that about a particular piece: the author may have written it for him/herself alone. I do it, and I’m continually asked, ‘Why did you write this?’ or ‘Who are you writing this for?’ (Especially regarding this blog.) My most serious literary effort, my novel, inspires the same curiosity in readers. Honestly, I wrote the story for me and ‘put it out there’ to see if anyone else would like it as much as I do. Every writer does this at least some of the time. It’s allowed, you know.

There is a species of expert that obtains to writers, sometimes desired, sometimes not. These are editors. I have desired friends or family members to edit for me if I’m uncertain about a character or a scene. Magazine and newspaper editors number among the undesirable variety and seem to be unavoidable consequences of writing for magazines and newspapers. Their job is to make things fit into spaces left over from advertising, even if passages don’t make sense afterward. I don’t write for newspapers or magazines any more. A writer that seriously studies writing should work just as hard to learn to edit. Sculptors and painters do not have editors: why writers should require them I have never fully understood. And there’s really only one quality required for the function: ruthlessness. To edit your own work, just set it down for a day, reading it after some time has passed, when you are no longer certain the passage is the best thing you’ve ever written: the errors will light up. So, dispense with editors: they are a fast track to clinical depression.

A child learns to speak by listening. A writer learns to write by reading. Every writer should have his/her roll models, idols as it were – the writers you learn from. If you can string your words together with some semblance of the nicety with which your writer idols do it, you probably can count yourself good – or competent, anyway. Roll models, though, are generally great writers, not just good or competent ones. What makes them great is not the just way they string together the words. That is the how in their greatness. How helps, of course, but it is what that ultimately sets them apart. Long ago, I ceased to read for what was being said only. I now read for how it is being said, as well. What and how are my constant teachers.

Occasionally the balance between what and how is off, even in writers of renown, and two remarkable examples spring immediately to my mind. The first is novelist Georgette Heyer, the fountainhead of the Regency Romance. How she told her tales made her great, not the tales, themselves. She captured the expressive and amusing speech of English society during the Regency Period. Georgette’s dialogues were meant to entertain; her story lines were simply vehicles for her dialogues. The second example is Alexander Hamilton, who gave us The Federalist. He was a terrible writer. His syntax was appallingly convoluted, even for his time. What he said, once you get the coils sorted, framed our national government.

As a rule, though, what is the Great Divide. Many can string words together handsomely; only a few have anything really remarkable to say. These latter are the ones that are noticed, published, read, and earn their livings by their art. And they become our idols, if their how and what resonate with our own. We, for our part – if we are really writers and love our craft – learn contentment within our competencies and, like my dear old Granny, take pleasure in our art, even if we only paint by the numbers.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds or How to Dress a Duck

2011-03-03T10:06:00.000-08:00

Four and Twenty Blackbirds

How to Dress a Duck

The English are a most economical people in the matter of game birds. They are disposed to eat every kind of bird that can be captured – excluding birds that feed on carrion. Even in that, I’m not certain they adhere to any sort of kosher rule. They might if they’re Jewish, of course, but I’m talking about gentile English. Pigeon, woodcock, snipe, finches, and who-knows-what-else: all come under the gun and can be served up for food. Even blackbirds, if the old nursery rhyme is to be believed. What I always wondered, even as a child, was how small birds were dressed for cooking.

When my brother was about 10, he decided he wanted to study taxidermy. Saving enough allowance, he ordered a kit and a manual with which he could work on small animals. To obtain the small animals, my parents took us to a pigeon farm and bought two pigeons. In the course of the transaction, I asked the farmer what he did with all the pigeons: he had hundreds. He replied, without elaboration, that he sold them to hospitals. He was quite occupied with expanding to my father on the different breeds of pigeons and pointing out examples of every breed, but I did manage to pry out of him that the hospitals wanted the birds for food, for patients on very restricted diets. At this, like Jesus at the centurion’s faith, I marveled greatly. And I still do, for I have been in hospitals, have had my diet restricted to green Jello and applesauce, and I have never glimpsed one pigeon. In the course of my brother’s skinning the birds for his taxidermy work, I was impressed with how small the bodies were and, although he did not clean the body cavity, it did not take much extrapolation to estimate that it was not capacious enough for any but a baby’s hand.

Years later, on the ranch, we had chickens. At one time, we had both Bantams and Rhode Island Reds. The Reds were quite large and, consequently, easy to clean. Easy – well, that’s a relative term: my hand fit into them nicely to pull the entrails out. The Bantams were more of a challenge. The body cavity of those birds would admit a child’s hand but mine did not fit. They were larger than pigeons but not much. Cleaning Bantams reinforced my wonder at how the tiny birds the English eat are ever prepared for cooking. Cleaning Bantams was 40 years ago. I’ve just now found out.

Shortly before last Christmas, a friend gave me five ducks – dead ducks. They’d been shot by another friend who is a duck hunter. I was delighted to have them as I had watched a Martha Stewart program about cooking ducks. Unfortunately, the program was about cooking only, not about getting the feathers off and the insides out. With a wealth of five, however, I figured I had ample material with which to learn. And I took the precaution of asking my father-in-law and my stepson how they dealt with ducks, for at one time or another, both had shot them. Both said that they’d never plucked ducks but always skinned them. They also said that only the breast meat was worth troubling with, that the rest of the duck had very little meat on it. This last makes sense: the only muscles that work hard on a duck, or any wild bird, are the breast muscles that beat the wings downward. The wings are lifted by their own airfoil. And wild fowl don’t walk a lot, so thigh meat is minimal.

Martha Stewart was lodged in my brain, however, so I scalded the first duck, determined to pluck it and cook it as I had seen Martha do. I immediately discovered that duck feathers are 1) more numerous per square cm of skin than are chicken feathers and 2) more securely attached. The skin tore but the feathers would not come loose. Changing tactics, I decided to skin the bird and made a slit down the center of the breast. Pulling the skin laterally toward the wings and legs was tough going and I almost had to shave it off in places to avoid tearing the meat. This resulted in another plan change for, I could see that skinning the entire bird would take forever and would not produce the handsome piece of work Martha Stewart had made her dinner from. So, once the breast muscles were exposed, I attempted to ‘bone them out.’ Ducks are really well-built, let me tell you. Lifting the breast muscles was tougher than clearing away the hide. After 45 minutes of labor from scald to wash, I produced two fine boned duck breasts. And I had 4 more ducks to go. And it was cold in the garage where I had set up my butcher’s shop. And it was 9:30 on a Sunday night.

For the second duck, I decided to considerably revise my strategy. If all I wanted was breast meat, that would be my circumspect target, forsaking all others. With my cleaver, I chopped the head off quite close to the body. Next, I proposed to remove the wings by severing the ‘shoulder’ joints – because the wings were in the way of my coming at the breasts. This required considerable surgery, for ducks’ wings are attached as stoutly as ducks’ skin and muscle. Next, I separated the ‘hip’ joints – because they were in the way, too – even more time-consuming. Next, if I were going to lift the anterior ribs to take away the breasts wholesale, the entrails would be in the way. I chopped the duck’s tail off close to the rib cage and squeezed: the gut cluster popped halfway out and it was but the work of a moment to help it the rest of the way. Working the cleaver (it’s wonderful sharp) from the opening toward the neck, I separated the breast half of the bird from the back. To my delight, I then discovered that, peeling from the sides toward the center of the breast, the skin came off like a tangerine rind! And there it was, after only 2o minutes work: a beautiful breast of duck, ready for roasting! Trimming around the edges with the kitchen shears made it perfect.

It was now 9:5o and I had 3 ducks to go: still an hour’s work, unless I could be more efficient. It was the wings and legs that had slowed me. For the next duck, I simply chopped them off with my cleaver, like necks and butts. No surgery. That duck, from neck-chop to breast trim with the scissors, took only 7 minutes. And so did the next and the next. Eurika! I had discovered how to clean all the wild little birds the English eat. Four and twenty blackbirds, blackbirds being considerably smaller than ducks, might be a doable pie, if I can get the process down to 3 minutes per bird. I’m not talking about crows. I’ll be after Starlings: the blackbird that some well-meaning but misguided Englishman imported to America to eat crane flies. They’ll probably dress using no more than the kitchen shears! (Unless, of course, they’re as well built as ducks).

Homo Ambulus

2011-02-28T07:37:00.000-08:00

Homo Ambulus

We call ourselves Homo sapiens sapiens, the hominid that knows that he knows. We could call ourselves with equal validity – maybe with even greater validity – Homo ambulus, the hominid that walks. I am uncertain in my Latin here, but I doubt I’m much off the mark when I assert that, throughout our long history, man has done a great deal more walking than knowing. We were walking when our skulls held smaller brains and we knew a great deal less. We are still walking (those of us not riding in cars) and using only 20% of our larger present brain capacity. It would appear that walking has always been favored over knowing for Homo. But laying aside speculation where cognizance is concerned, our anatomy certainly enables us to walk better than to do just about anything else. Our legs are as long as our torsos and endowed with plenty of muscle for carrying around not only the torso but other loads, as well. Our ability to shift our center of gravity to accommodate a load and still walk effectively gives us a migratory advantage over all other hominids. Walk we did and do, carrying our babies and our stuff, all over the habitable world.

Man has two gaits, walking and running. Both break down into subcategories but the great watershed is ballistics. In running, humans go ballistic – that is, both feet leave the ground and the runner is airborne. In walking, one foot is always on the ground. A second difference between walking and running is how the gravitational center of the body moves in each. In walking, as the legs diverge, the body’s center drops slightly. The center is then vaulted upward and reaches maximal height as it passes forward over the supporting leg as the legs approximate; it begins to descend as the legs diverge again. This is a double pendulum dynamic. The first pendulum occurs as the leg leaves the ground and swings forward. The second, an inverted pendulum, occurs when the heel strikes the ground and the torso is carried forward over the heel. Running contrasts this in that the arc of the torso’s forward trajectory actually sags at its midpoint because the torso is ballistic: there is no leg on the ground to force it upward. Its trajectory begins to fall.

Energy is handled differently during walking and running. In walking, the body’s forward kinetic energy converts to potential energy as the center of mass is forced upward over the posted leg and reconverts to kinetic energy as it descends again. The energy to move the torso forward, and hence upward, is produced in the muscles. Sixty percent of the muscles’ energy expenditure can be recovered because of pendulum dynamics and ground resistance. Walking, for Homo ambulus, is very economical. Running, however, is a different energy dynamic. At the end of the torso’s ballistic phase, when it comes in for a landing, energy is absorbed in the muscles and tendons of the extended leg as it bends when it strikes the ground. This converts kinetic energy into potential energy, which is reconverted to kinetic when the leg unbends. Just to make the concept muddier, the energy absorbed by the muscles and tendons is termed ‘elastic energy.’ Common experience tells us that it is not as energy efficient as walking.

People who walk or run barefoot do so differently than people who wear shoes. Only heels that are covered by shoes can endure being slammed repeatedly onto the earth. Without the synthetic padding of shoes, walkers and runners must shift their gaits to make contact with the ground forward of the point of the heel, rolling onto the outside of the mid-foot sooner in the stance phase of the gait to ameliorate the shock of contact. In reality, even people with shoes should do this to avoid excess jarring forces on the ankle, knee, hip, and low back. Certain venture capitalists have developed a shoe that looks like a bare foot to capture the best of both worlds: it is a barefoot shoe. It may be just the ticket. At any rate, the luxury of shoes has contributed to lazy walking and running which has accelerated our orthopedic degradation.

When I was a boy, my father told me that a man in good condition and used to walking and running could out-travel a horse. That assertion is probably put forth in every country that has horses. In Wales, in the tiny town of Llantwrtyd Wells, a publican overheard two of his customers arguing on that topic and decided to promote his business and the town by holding a yearly ‘marathon’ of 22 miles, over every sort of ground, pitting men against horses. The first race was held in 1980. They’re still doing it. Since 1986, only two humans have won. (I apprehend that nothing was written down before that.) Lately, there’s been some controversy over subtracted time. The horses are given a delayed start, which is not subtracted from their overall times, and they’re made to stop halfway for a vet inspection, which is subtracted. I can understand the rationale for the vet inspection; I don’t see why the humans should be given a head start. With or without the head start, though, the event busts the myth that men can out-travel horses.

So, Homo ambulus is not the champion walker of the world? Well, I didn’t say he was. I said he walks better than he does anything else. A horse’s walk is analogous to a human crawling on all fours. A horse’s trot is more like our walk and a man has to jog to keep up with a trot. And when a man moves into his last gear, his run, the horse still has an in-between: his canter. The horse doesn’t go ballistic until he runs, which leaves the man in the dust. The horse ends up covering more ground in an equal amount of time but he’s not as efficient as a man: Homo ambulus can keep it up for longer, if he’s mostly walking. And Homo ambulus can carry things. Oh, sure, a horse can, too; but he has to have Homo ambulus put the load up for him.

Swords in School: Part the Third

2011-02-26T09:10:00.001-08:00

Swords in School

Part the Third

At some point in my karate career, I joined the sword class taught in our dojo. It was Iai-do: practice in quickly drawing the sword, making a single strike, and return the sword to its scabbard. One strike, one kill. I also joined the short-staff class. That attracted me because fighting with a short-staff contains many elements of ‘theater fencing,’ the flashy battles we love in movies like Peter Pan and Prince Caspian, and translated – in my mind, anyway – into a form of sword training. In sword class, we did not fight each other; we worked exclusively on strike technique but in short-staff class, we staged practice matches. Some were choreographed, others were extemporaneous. The extemporaneous matches were conducted at ¼ speed. The rule was, once you initiated a strike or a parry, you had to follow through with it: there was no changing midstream. If it was the wrong strike or parry, you had to live (or die) with it. If you were ‘hit,’ you lost. Segments of our technique drills were done at speed and power, but we did not have padding and gloves that permitted fighting that way. If we had had armor, the sum of our physical exertion would have been on a par with karate. As it was, it required considerably less.

Sword and staff work, like all martial arts, demand a lot of foot work and lower body capability. Proper step and stance patterns are repeated, slowly at first, to learn them. Speed is increased as less conscious thought goes into performing each pattern. Eventually, the steps and stances become reflexive. Manipulating the sword/staff is largely upper body work and is learned the same way. Throughout training, every thrust, cut, or parry is executed carefully for form at slower speeds, then with power at higher speeds. Types 1, 2a, 2x, and 2b muscle fibers are called upon according to the demands of the training. Aerobic capacity, however, is not greatly improved with it. Aerobic capacity needs to be addressed through aerobic training, which we’ve touched upon previously.

When I watch my grandchildren playing in the churchyard with the other kids after church, some among the lot are usually sword fighting, using sticks broken off trees on the church property. They testify to the reach of the sword going back a long way our cultural memory, and to the fact that swords are part of our present-day consciousness. Swords are part of who we are, who we were, and who we need to be – a romantic part, a gallant and brave part, one that lodges deep within us. As a romantic pragmatist, I ask, why not capitalize on that? I think we should. Let our school curricula embrace sword training. If sword classes had been offered in school when I was young, or if there had been intramural fencing teams, I would have been ‘all over it.’ I might not have then grown up relegating Type 2x and 2b muscle fibers to the ash heap of my development. The boredom of physical training and the confusion of ball games might have been circumvented for me. If I had embraced physical activity and fitness through swords, I might even have moved on to conquer the vast narcoleptic wastes of ‘ball’ sports, exercise regimes, and weight trainings – especially if I had come to realize that excelling in those bas-relief endeavors might have made me a better swordsman.

I saw a bumper sticker several years ago that read, ‘When guns are outlawed, can we use swords?’ I appreciated the sentiment. I was also teased by the double implication of the word ‘can.’ One was, of course, ‘May we use swords?’ The other was, ‘Do we have the ability?’ Even if the constitutional right is retained, we will not have the ability: not without training, anyway.

Swords in School: Part the Second

2011-02-24T07:11:00.001-08:00

Swords in School

Part the Second

My physique certainly improved during the five years we had the ranch. Not that ranching did a lot for my Type 2x and Type 2b muscle fibers: keeping beeves and horses fed is no more than glorified lawn care – mow hay, rake hay, bale hay, stack hay, and feed hay. Instead of baskets of beans, I schlepped sacks of grain. My endurance increased with the long hours and I became stronger, but I think most of that strength was in 2a fibers, which assist the weak but enduring Type 1. Muscling big animals around can require immediate power outputs but they aren’t required more than once or twice a day. Hence, ranch work is not really a body-building Type 2 fiber activity. I was in my early 20s then and had a 35” waist but I did not have a ‘six-pack’ belly. Some sprinting was occasionally necessary but the sort of running that might produce aerobic improvement was not generally called for. When it was, I became winded pretty quickly.

The one aspect of ranch work that lawn mowing did not obtain to and that made ranch work infinitely more tolerable was that it required thinking. It provided exercise for my brain as well as for my body. After all, the only way to get an animal that is bigger than you are to do what you want it to do when it wants to do something else is to out-think it. You certainly can’t out-muscle it, even if you have all the capacity for endurance in the world. (Even in cases where I had to ‘wear down’ an animal to achieve compliance, it was a mental victory, not a muscle victory.) And unlike lawn mowing, ranch activity was extremely varied: cows presented challenges that were different than those horses presented; building a barn was completely different than either. The challenges all came with a variety of physical and mental demand. But they weren’t aerobic demands and they did little in the way of bulking up my 2x and 2b fibers.

For me, it was karate training that came closest to beatitude in the muscle fiber/aerobic/brain activity line. Karate requires one to move in non-walking modes. Standing like a stump in a fight is the surest way to be knocked down. In training to fight, Type 1 (endurance) and Type 2a (auxiliary power) muscle fibers develop. Aerobic capacity improves because Type 1 fibers run on oxygen. Bursts of speed at maximum power engage the anaerobic participation of all three Type 2 muscle fibers, but most heavily the 2x and 2b. Capacity is incrementally built up by repeatedly engaging in activities like punching, kicking, and blocking. And the mental exercise? That comes into it because you have to learn everything at slow speeds, thinking it all through; then you speed it up until it becomes reflexive and you don’t think at all.

I got into karate because of the movie, The Karate Kid. A lot of people did, actually. The first Karate Kid movie swelled dojos around the country like Bruce Lee never could. Why? Because Daniel Larusso was just an ordinary guy who found himself in the position of an underdog but came out on top in a very near-run win. Part of that victory was his mental and physical endurance. Part of it was his mental and moral rectitude, which is what endeared him to movie-goers. And part of it was his ability to deliver the Crane Technique’s front kick with more speed and power in one short burst of Type 2 muscle fiber than Johnnie could defend against. All the fibers of Daniel’s being went into that kick – mental, moral, and muscle. But the explosion that won the match was not a stand-alone event: it was the product of endurance training, power training, and mind training.

(Part the Third is to follow and will treat upon . . . Swords!)

Swords in School: Part the First

2011-02-22T09:49:00.000-08:00

Swords in School

Part the First

This is a rationale for incorporating sword training into the PE curricula of all educational institutions, from grade schools to colleges. Although my argument could be presented incisively and pointedly, I recoil at the thought of doing it in such an uninteresting manner. I take my opinion seriously enough: I just can’t be too serious writing it out.

Fitness is all right, in its way. In saying that, I do not mean that I downplay the advantages of being in good shape physically, for that has never been my attitude. No, I think being fit trumps being unfit every time. I have been both. The rub for me is that the work of becoming or remaining physically fit is unremitting drudgery. Circuit training and calisthenics never became my paramours: in neither have I ever figured out what to do with my brain. And aerobic exercise in a gym has been nearly as numbing. Jogging or ‘power walking’ over difficult ground have offered me more cerebrally, but occasionally I have found myself paying the price of a tumble for the minimal mental stimulation either endeavor afforded. Have, then, I become deconditioned as a result of ennui? Unhappily, yes, I rather have.

When I was young, I was not particularly athletic. Baseball, football, and basketball held no attractions for me. I liked to swim, to row, and to sail, but those were not things I could do during the week, although we lived on Oahu. It was at that time, however that I first began to mow the lawn. Lawn work became my year-round, even if limited, platform for physical development. My father bought the heaviest lawnmower he could find, being possessed, as he seemed to have been, of the notion that thickest was best. The engine of the brute was no more than a 5-horse Briggs and Stratton. It was the body of the mower that was exceptional: it was not a sheet metal body formed by bending, which is customary; it was cast. He got it at Sears, in Honolulu, and I’ll bet it was the only one they had, given away at a fire sale price. It said ‘Craftsman’ on it, in letters cast in high relief just behind the engine. My suspicion has always been that, somewhere hidden from view, another tiny set of relief lettering read, ‘Acme Boilerplate and Anvil Foundry.’ The wicked thing had the specific gravity of a black hole. It didn’t come with a grass catcher either. So, between groaning it round our pretty extensive lawns and raking up after it, I got plenty of exercise. I did about an hour a day of either mowing or raking up four days a week. Plus, at least once a week, a ‘Kona’ wind would knock the bean pods from our trees and I would spend at least one hour raking up those.

Any exercise is better than no exercise. Mowing/raking/schlepping grass and beans is not a complete exercise routine, though. The effort developed my Type 1 muscle fibers, those that provide endurance, and it recruited enough Type 2a fibers, which provide some endurance coupled with some strength, to condition me to lawn work. But it certainly did not require anything of my Type 2x or Type 2b fibers – those which provide speed, power, and a good-looking body. Neither was the work-out aerobic. More horribly, it did little more for my mind than circuit training. In fact, it was circuit training, in disguise: I went round and round the lawn, mowing, then raking, then carrying basket after basket (yes, a big, round woven, bushel basket) full of grass and beans. It produced in me all the physical attributes of a healthy, sunburned, otherwise sedentary, and rather bored boy – a legacy in which I have been blessed to this day.

(Part the Second is to follow and will treat upon the exercise benefits of ranch work and karate.)