picture gallery

After another night of coughing, insomnia and work at the computer, I woke Jan at 6:30 and insisted on leaving the hotel room where I was feeling imprisoned. She agreed and we walked slowly hand in hand down down to the Arno through quiet streets freshly washed by street sweepers, the only noise that of garbage trucks. The city is active and loud until 3 AM but then remains quiet till 7:30. We went to the middle of the Ponte Vecchio, usually a furious hubbub, with only the company of a man with a broom and a walkie talkie, and watched the light come up over the river. Seeing streets by now familiar, we appreciated more of the architectural details evident at every turn and took delicious cappucino and apple pastries at the brightly lit “New York Café,” served by a tall elegant man in a black vest, white shirt and yellow silk tie.

Back in the room around 8, we rested and showered and then set out again in pursuit of the neoplatonic beauty which the city offers to its lovers. But this time I wanted to see it pagan form, feeling a bit satiated with crucifixions and madonnas. We walked to the Uffizi to see if there was a chance of getting in, but the line was endless at 9:30 a.m. so we went around a couple of corners to the Bargello, which the green guide and Ricksteves said was underrated. The turreted palace, police station and jail was another civic museum, and provided just what I wanted: tits, asses, penises attached to beautiful bodies in three dimensions. There were marbles and bronzes and ceramics, many of them images of the God Bacchus, including Michaelangelo’s famous early work, and there were splendid sculptures of birds of many feathers produced by an artist I never heard of named Giovanni di Bologna. The building was uncrowded for the first hour we were there, and in most galleries one could take pictures, though not with flash and not in the ones containing the Donatellos and Michaelangelo.

We had a kind of quiche in a cafe and decided to head for more Michaelangelo in the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo, passing along the back of the Duomo on the way and appreciating its immense size through the web of scaffolding that covers most of it. Passing building after building branded with the ubiquitous Medici coat of arms, we paid a hefty fee to enter the Chapel of the Princes, which was also largely covered by scaffolding inside and out. Entering the tomb felt like entering a pyramid of the Pharaohs”overwhelming in grandeur but more in arrogance and morbidity. The chamber is not wide but hundreds of feet tall, lined in black marble inlaid with multicolored stone panels and illuminated only from the dome on top. Eight huge sarcophagi upon which stand 30 foot figures of their inhabitants are set into the octagonal walls. The whole things smacks of Darth Vader or the Lord of Mordor, and I found it more disturbing than tacky–an expression of dynastic wealth not humbled by but appropriating the power of Death. Ironic to have this all in a church where you worship a God of humility and compassion whose central mission was to cleanse the church in his time of materialism. Now I sound like the Florentine Savonarola, who left no monuments.

The adjoining New Sacristy designed by Michaelangelo and contains several of his sculptures. After the hugeness of the Chapel of the Princes, its more modest scale and muted gray and white colors were less impressive, and for me disappointing. I had studied this room in art history and been told how great were the sculptures by many authorities, but by this time I was less than sympathetic to the Medici family, and it looked to me that Giulio’s neck was too long, the figure of Dusk’s head was placed at the wrong place on his shoulders, Night’s feminine body looked like a male with breasts, and Day was unfinished. Compared with the many other Renaissance interiors I ‘d been admiring in Florence, the architecture of this chamber was overcluttered with familiar ornamental devices.

We had a nice lunch of pasta and a sliced beef urugula salad and then returned to the Fiorentino room for another rest. But despite the lack of sleep the night before and my continuing occasional cough, I was restless and Jan decided we should go to the Brancacci chapel on the other side of the river. We arrived at 4:30 and were allowed to remain 15 minutes by a beautiful young woman with a Maria Callas look. I seemed to remember seeing it when we had visited Florence in 1969, but the restoration and new lighting made the small chapel radiant with color and lively portraiture. The most famous image of Adam and Eve’s despairing departure from Paradise is a small unobtrusive panel, and the bright pink of the punishing angel’s cloak brightens up even this tragic episode with what seems to have been the young artist’s favorite color.

Since it was nearby, neither of us were flagging, and they were open later than any museums, we decided to head over to the Boboli gardens to get a view of the city and spend some time in a more natural setting. Fortified by gelato we passed through the gargantuan fortress of the Pitti Palace and climbed the terraced mountainside as the light got richer and more angled. The gardens are not as well maintained as they would have been under their owners, with unmowed lawns and untrimmed trees in many areas. The Neptune fountain with splashing water, artificial grotto and genuine mallards and carp, caught the changing late afternoon light and as we climbed higher grand prospects of the city of Florence came into view. Just as we were about to head back down, I noticed a terrace at the end of the path, and at the top of the stairs a splendid new prospect opened before us”the hills to the south of the city, including the Church of San Mineato, a crenellated tower on the horizon and a green expanse of olive groves and conical cypresses that looked like the typical Tuscan landscape we look forward to entering after returning from Venice.

We walked back through narrow streets filled with small opulent storefronts displaying original renaissance and ancient treasures for sale, and watched the sunset on the Ponte, where Jan arranged for us to exchange picture taking with a romantic young Asian couple. By the time we got back to the room there was just time to shower before Brenda showed up for our evening dinner engagement. I was tired and ravishingly hungry. It took quite a while to figure out dinner plans and Brenda wanted to show us a café that’s a famous poet’s hangout, but by the time we reached there at 8:15, I almost passed out, so she got me some leftover bits of bruschetta, and then we hiked on to our rendezvous point with her partner Don in ZaZa café in the Mercado square. Over a meal with mixed reviews, we enjoyed conversation covering 35 years of our pasts.

picture gallery

Monday morning brought relief from the sore throat. Jan negotiated with the concierge to give us two more nights in Florence, to delay our arrival in Venice and to postpone our visit with Brenda. We found some lovely coffee and brioche and panini in the square and stood in line to pay admission to Santa Maria Novella, the cathedral 20 feet from our window.

Those who come to pray can enter a special chapel free of charge, said the sign, and photography is forbidden. The side entrance, only recently reopened after having been closed off for several centuries, led us into an immense, light airy space, illuminated by stained glass and circular clear windows, the walls painted white, ornamented with widely spaced paintings and sculptures.

Opposite the door, a Massaccio fresco seemed to make the space grow deeper with its pronounced perspectival rendering of God presenting the crucified Jesus to his wealthy patrons in front of a hugely receding nave. To the right was a twenty foot crucifixion in bright yellows oranges, reds and blacks, hanging from a rod 25 feet above the floor and 150 from the ceiling. I averted my eyes in order to save the full impact of what I recognized as Giotto’s work, dazzlingly restored, for later, and looked down the nave to the rainbow colors of the floor-to-ceiling frescoes surrounding the central altar. Like the city itself, this church offered more than we could absorb. With help of our Green guide, we focused first on a raised chapel with early frescoes of the Divine Comedy–one wall Inferno, the other Paradiso, gaining orientation by identifying places and people we recognized from our memory of the poem. Then we descended to the Sacristy whose doorway was a combination of classical architectural stability, melted into an organic flower-like entry. Inside were huge wooden cabinets with dozens of large drawers to hold vestments, more paintings and a della Robia relief, all in late Renaissance style.

After two hours we decided to take a break from the church and walk to the central market for lunch, and return in the late afternoon. The mercado is a two story temple of food, just closing as we got there. We bought beautiful muscat grapes, olives, bread and “gorgonzola dolce,” (a soft luscious cheese), and ate on the steps of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, bothered by pigeons who wanted our food and blew ash into when we sushed them off. Instead of going inside we decided to come back for the free concert advertised to start at 9: 00 that night, and took an adjoining doorway into the courtyard of the Laurentian library, whose arcade we circled entranced.

Then we walked back to Santa Maria Novella and spent another two hours feasting on the art. First a chapel decorated by Duccio, which was, Jan noted in the guidebook just for this church that we had bought, the location of the start of Boccaccio’s Decameron where a group of young aristocrats meet to plan their escape from the plague in Florence. What sort of portent?

Then Fillipino Lippi, and Ghirlandaio frescos, a Brunelleschi Crucifix and the Giotto Christ. The wealth of beauty and of history in this randomly adopted church of ours is unbelievable. It in itself merits a trip to Europe.

Back in our room at 5:00, I started feeling bad again and Jan offered me the Z pack antibiotic she had gotten from the doctor in case she got sick. It was clear we wouldn’t attend the nine oclock concert. We went for a quick pizza meal in the square, and I tried to get to sleep.

Tuesday morning, I awoke and realized I was really sick. My cough felt like a rattle in the lungs, and I had sweaty fever. Jan met Brenda and her friend Kiki and went to the Pharmacia and many other places while I slept most of the day.She brought the two visitors back to the room and I made pleasantries for a few minutes, but I was so sick I asked them to leave. I took the second Z pack pill, along with vitamin C and the herbal remedy Jan bought at the Pharmacia, slept all afternoon, and went out with her to the square for dinner and a short walk. I couldnt get to sleep because of the cough so have stayed up till 3:00 A.M. writing this entry.

picture gallery

After 24 hours in transit we arrived at the Hotel Fiorentino Sunday afternoon. It was the lowest price place I could find on the internet. The guidebook said it was in a high crime neighborhood, the entrance looked seedy, the hotel clerk at first said he couldn’t find our reservation. But after we climbed three narrow flights of stairs and mastered the old lock and key, we gasped. The ceiling was fifteen feet and two corner windows gave out on the vast complex of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Novella and the railroad station. The stone balustraded balcony could have been where Mussolini harangued the crowds. It felt like standing on a rock in the middle of a fast flowing river of buses, cars, and pedestrians.

Despite jetlag and fatigue we were driven by hunger and curiosity to go out. We bought some bad sandwiches for a picnic in the adjoining square in front of the 14th century cathedral façade where a small band played in the warm and surprisingly quiet late afternoon, and then we started wandering toward the center. The city was full of people”mostly goodlooking and stylish Italians”but didn’t feel overcrowded. Some divine gelato made up for the sandwiches, and soon we were in front of the Duomo. We sauntered from piazza to piazza”each of which could be the center of a great city– admired the clothing on sale in shops and stalls, bought a new guide book, and came back to our little palazzo to shower and rest. Then we set out for dinner at the square near the central mercado, mixing with pedestrians, bicyclists, scooters, and people pushing their market stalls through the winding streets. We came out on a large square between the market and the dome of San Lorenzo full of lights, music and buzzing outdoor restaurants on platforms roofed with tents. It was 8:00 p.m.”time to celebrate dinner! The salad of urugula, fresh corn tomatos cucumbers and carrots and mozzarella, with bottles of vinegar and oil on the table was a fine overture. During the two hour meal, we drank a liter of wine, joked with the amiable waiter, and had an animated conversation with two young people from London at the adjoining table. We seemed to have the city in our pocket.

6:00 A.M. Monday September 26.

Still dark out but the noise of streetcleaners is deafening. I got up at 5:00 after an uncomfortable night of sore throat and insomnia. Once I rose from horizontal, took some vitamin C and started processing pictures, I felt better, but still apprehensive about the coming day: will I get sicker? Will we connect with our old friend Brenda who’s invited us to stay at her place outside the city for the next two nights or will we be forced to find a different hotel here in town? Will my digestion return? Such perils provide spice to the pleasures of travel.

Saturday September 24. Sitting on the floor in LAX international terminal next to the only electric outlet on a mile of concourse. Many wall receptacles have been removed and the holes spackled over. There’s no wireless internet connection here, so I will try to simulate the Blogger interface in Microsoft Word.

Here’s Jan in a chair across the carpet as this area fills with passengers waiting for a JAL jumbojet. I took her picture, downloaded it to the laptop, put it in here. With a camera phone I could have snapped and sent it directly to the blogger server. Once again I’m technically behind. A good consumer of technology, I find the new tools inspire creative play. How does this mesh with a primitivist preference of the simple and natural”in gardening, eating, economic exchange, and child rearing? How can I teach Ecoliterature as a web based class in which we exchange journal entries and photos about wilderness experience online?

Last night was insomniac again”I got up at 1:20 and at 4:00 and wrote emails. There was plenty of time to load up and lock down the house this morning before we left, but once we got to the airport I realized I’d forgotten the computer power supply chord. Between flights, we took a short cab ride to Fry’s, a huge L.A. electronics supply house near the airport where we found a replacement that would work with my Mac. Without it I’d have been unable to keep this journal.

Fossils in rock
Footprints in sand
Paths in a chamber of cloud.

To mark the beginning of early retirement, I’ve spent the summer clearing out shelves and file cabinets at home and in my office at the university. On a table in the hallway I left dozens of books bequeathed to me by my retiring predecessor in 1989–hardcover volumes of Shakespeare criticism he longed to have someone take off his hands, only one of which I ever read. This morning I said goodbye to a multivolume German gothic print history of European art packed into their lift van by my parents when they fled Berlin in 1937 and a 75 pound 1955 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica that I asked for as a Bar Mitzvah present. Our second hand bookstore proprietor had no use for them and told me that unlike junkmail, you cant recycle books, they have to go to the landfill.

I’ve written three books. When the first one–Youth against Age–went out of print, the publisher sold me the last 40 copies for five dollars each. Thirty five are still in the closet. Yesterday I went to the local Borders to try to get them to carry the two books that are still in print. The young store manager looked at me mockingly and told me to get in touch with his assistant, who would need to see hard copies before making the decision whether or not to order one of each.

A friend died of lung cancer a few years ago. He was my digital mentor. I was delegated to clean out his office to make room for a replacement. I filled a dumpster with stuff, and saved what I could on a website called Legacies When another friend was stricken with mesothelioma and given about a year to live, I said in his situation I would spend part of the time assembling an electronic archive of my life. Six months after he died, the college secretary gave me a CD which contained his memoir, easily uploaded. I expect to maintain this site until I become part of it.

Though disposing of the past has become a preoccupation since I turned 60, passing into a new stage of the life cycle excites me about the future and prods me to produce more. I take alot of pictures, especially of my grandsons. Not having a captive audience of students for six months of the year makes me look for other listeners. Prosperity and health send me on new adventures. And the end is always nearer.

In four days my wife and I will embark on a trip we have planned for a year–our Italienreise to Florence, Venice and Siena. At first I thought I’d leave my laptop home, save photos in a portable hard drive, and write in a journal. But instead I’m trying something different.

Louise Marx: September 6 1910”January 19 2005

I wake up at 3:30 am  praying for Lise’s smooth passage, knowing the end is near.  When the alarm goes off at 5:30 I feel weak and vulnerable from a lingering cold that  I suspect results from teaching anxiety,  stage fright about two presentations last week,  and unconscious stress from the impending end.  Instead of my regular swim,  I  take a hot bath to relax tense muscles and  reduce sinus pressure.  I decide to wear a white shirt, tie and sport jacket and carry a cell phone to work in case the call should come today.  My morning meditation brings a burst of tears when I think of Jan and the transiency of life.

I give my all to the morning composition class and a lecture on Shakespearean  tragedy. When it’s over at noon, I’m drained but exhilirated.  As students leave the room, the phone rings in my pocket.  A person at the nursing home reports that Lise has just died.  I say I’ll be there soon.  I phone Jan while walking to my office; she’s just pulling up to Cabrillo to check on Oma on her way to the gym.  I tell her the news and she comes to get me.  I reluctantly decide not to try to get back in time for my 1:30 class and ask the secretary to run a videotape of Othello for the students to watch.

We enter Cabrillo for what may be the last time, the odor more pungent than usual.  Josephine, the reserved  nurse’s assistant who tended my father Henry in 1995 and who has been with my mother for the last four years,  is tearful and gives me a hug.  Curtains are closed around Lise’s bed.  She lies flat, skin silken smooth, facial bone structure,  nose and closed eyes in fine relief: a perfected mask.  There is still color in her cheeks and warmth  on her brow.   She feels receptive to my stroking and comfortable with my presence for the first time in many years, the ever- thickening wall between us now departed along with her spirit.  I feel free to start replacing the resistant body and resentful soul that it irked me to call Mom with  memories of the delight I enjoyed in her presence as a young boy”the one she called “Schlumbie.” Those memories have been recalled lately when  I am with  Ian,  our three year old grandson.

We sort through the closet and nightstand, selecting the few items to keep, the rest to leave in the communal  pool of nursing home laundry, hearing aids and spectacles.  Long ago we’d liquidated Lise’s condo and then her unit in the Assisted Living facility at Garden Creek. While Jan takes a load to the car, I go to the storeroom to find the scissors I used to cut the stem bottoms off the flowers I brought every week.  I clip a lock of her white  hair, which is still thick and wavy.  The empty hearing aid box I place it in slips into my pocket.  By 1:15 we  leave  through the main lobby making no eye contact with  those remaining.

At home,  I collapse on the bed, sleep for an hour and then walk to Cal Poly for my 2:50 office hour.  Thankfully nobody shows up, and I meet Jan at the Benefits Office at 4:00 for a long planned conference with the retirement  counselor.  We spend an hour figuring out how to maximize the monthly sum we will receive until our deaths.  Neither of us mentions that we have just come into an inheritance.  Right now,  loss means gain.  May it be so too for Lise.

We walk home and I nap again,  then call our son Joe.  He knew this was coming,  and finds words to amplify the positive that  we  no longer need to think of her as the presence in the nursing home, the wraith awaiting transport across the river, but as someone we can remember fondly.  There will be no funeral or memorial,  though he’d be willing to come  for one.  He suggests a scattering of ashes on a mountain  in the Rockies, which she and Henry made their own, when we visit in March.

I phone our daughter Claire, who has asked about Oma at one of our infrequent encounters.  I leave a message suggesting this might be an occasion for her and Jan and me to get together for the first time in a year.

As evening comes on I feel briefly energized for the task of remaking Mother,  of undoing some of her last ten years.  It was at the memorial for Henry in November 1995 that she said her life was over.  A year before that she concluded her autobiography, “My Story.”  I will go back to it, add some scanned photos and print a second edition.

Jan and I go to Tsurugi’s for Sushi dinner and walk in the dark along the creek downtown.   We share our sense of the solemnity of the day, of our own mortality,  of the awareness that gain also means loss. Recent long-needed rainstorms have caused the creek to crest and wipe out a large chunk of the bank.  The fence protecting the natural riparian vegetation will have to be moved  back.

When we  get home there is a voice message: Ethan, our two year old grandson in Idaho, warbles  “Hello Boppa, Hello Boppa, I love you.” It’s the first time he’s spoken to me on the phone.  This is followed by expressions of sympathy from Amy his mom.  A few minutes later,  Claire calls and agrees that we three should meet.  We are,  as always during these conversations,  halting, guarded, over polite.

I open the packet that had arrived in the morning from British Columbia.  It’s Steve and Juliet’s Christmas letter and photo calendar loaded with pictures of  Lund folk– including three generations of Marxes–and news of deaths and grandparenthood among our contemporaries.

I dig in the closet and find the pictures that Jan had put together for Lise and Henry’s sixtieth anniversary showing them in their twenties and eighties,  radiant in both pairs.  I set them on the bureau and get into bed with “My Story,” which I havent  looked at since editing and typing it with her.  For an hour, I read and marvel  and pity and laugh.

[To view full book, scroll to bottom of this graphic and click on successive pages]

Back on the train to Santa Barbara, coffee in front of me, Ocean on the right, rocket launch towers on the left, smooth rocking.  It recalls the train’s passing during the concert last night in San Miguel mission where we celebrated Jan’s 57th birthday and sat with Eric G. who told me about this early morning ride. I’m carrying some sample page files for prefroofing according to Mary’s instructions.  The concert was memorable”an a capella performance of Mexican Baroque music sung by Chaunticleer, highlighted by Corey McKnight, a countertenor doubling as soprano whose soaring melismata took me on a flight with the dove painted above the altar.

I see flocks of snowy plovers on the beach as we stop at Surf.  No people for miles.  Offshore a towering oil platform.

Joe and Amy want us to buy a condo in Ketchum for 350K. Stock market is crashing.  I call broker and tell him to sell 100K. The market goes up 500 points.

Working all week at the computer lab on the Field Guide page layouts.  Mary sits next to Brian and points with her finger at the screen telling him precisely what changes to make in Photoshop and Quark.  Bob H., who wrote the book on Photoshop gives me advice on how to improve some difficult slide scans.  The confusion and misinformation  circulating among us is partially cleared up.  Brian working in the lab till 11:00 p.m. I pick it up there after the concert.

Claire is working as a “bookkeeper” for a friend’s garage.  I’m looking after Ian, whom I take to Laguna lake to visit ducks and playground and then to computer lab.

Train has just rounded Point Conception, heading east now, sun’s out, fog on mountain top, ocean white caps ignited.

Lunch under the Redwoods in the Arboretum, the tiny creek flowing in a shady wetland created and maintained artificially. Birdsong and sprinkler sounds.  I hope for another glimpse of the two western tanagers that darted by as I was thinking about the paragraph describing them by Johanna after three prompts and her claim that she’d never seen any on Cal Poly land.

I spend today and tomorrow with a printout of the second proof of the book, making corrections, writing notes and photo credits and the acknowledgements and table of contents.  Today Anna assembles the colored printout into a new comp and then Brian and Mary move forward with the page by page image processing and detailed layout. My meditations are consumed with the details and fears of more unforeseen pitfalls. I take little joy in the baby steps of progress, now that the thrill of scanning has worn off. I had no idea how many of them still lay ahead to realize Mary’s uncompromising plan.  All the organization and talent she’s devoted to this I regard with impatience.

I’m also coming down from the 60th birthday festivities that Jan orchestrated on the weekend. Friday night was the dinner party with Vicky T., Melody, Paula, Mike, Lindsey H.  The fresh baked Ahi and salade Nicoise were delicious.  Jan announced the occasion at 10:00 p.m.  After private festivities in the morning, we went to see Oma, who perked up after I found her hearing aid and a missing lens of her glasses. Back home I loaded mulch from the pile in front by bucket to the back yard.  At noon I heard a noise on the patio and spun around to find the silver-haired figures of Caesar and Penny. I hadn’t seen them in over a year”since Claire’s wedding. A fine surprise. Later came Ruth, then Claire, Dennis and the baby and a trip to Pete’s café for dinner.

Santa Barbara two days scanning slides into digital files for the book

Scanning my own photos taken with a professional camera in a professional lab with professional equipment.  All slides and negatives in a binder in perfect order with the complete comp version of the book to check against.  After many false starts and rescans, the procedure is now smooth.  Sky has been a wonderful guide and hostess, stopping in four times yesterday to give Mary and me moral support, taking us to lunch in her new Audi at Tutti’s in Montecito, where Mary wanted to go to see movie stars, then to dinner after a 13 hour day at another Italian restaurant in Montecito where we met Richard his his daughter and son.

The feeling now a little like at the end of writing a chapter or the introduction of a book¦things cruising, falling into place, producing better than expected yield.  Just the opposite of slogging through and getting delayed and needing to redo.

Richard insists on paying and then we drive to his and Sky’s new house”a palace, which reminds me of J’s house on Edna Ranch where Jan’s bookgroup Christmas party took place last year. Two-story roof and beams, stonework, light arch windows, stained redwood siding, three car garage.

Being in this place and having the help of these folks feels right at this stage of the project¦after years of begging and scraping and doing things alone and wrong, and redoing, and going backwards rather than forwards and not knowing what’s next and being humiliated by errors and delays.  How much unhappiness and discouragement and anxiety went into this project.  Not, as they say, a job for the faint hearted.

How will the book turn out? How will it be received?  Shakespeare and the Bible was best I could do, got some fine reviews, also panned.

Taking my own pictures for the book, as commanded by Sky and Mary, has gone from an ordeal to a challenge that I now hate to relinquish.

On the train back to SLO

Sun golden on the ridge of Point Sal.  We creep by the haunted junkyards of Casmalia on  a siding as the dominant freight passes on the right.  The seat is comfortable, the train almost empty.  The cost of taking me home with my CDS and Giggy, my portable hard drive filled with digital images is ten or a hundred times the twenty two dollar fare. I’m in no hurry for this trip to end, though I relish the thought of seeing Jan tonight. Reading “Headlong” by Michael Frayn, the novel she recommended, is a rich indulgence, the narrator like me an academic in constant dialogue with himself.  The gentle rocking movement and the insulated quiet unlike any other form of travel I know.

One slight breach in this contentment: when I met Sky at Armstrong she was pissed that I left scans for her to finish tomorrow morning, since she had so much else to get done and was jetlagged after her return from Thailand.  I had an excuse–I thought she and Mary had agreed to finish them together–but I could hardly bear the shame.

The pink sun was just grabbed by the gray fog.  The sound of the horn as we cross the Santa Maria Valley: muted, melodious, melancholy. Pink-orange glow behind the chocolate brown of fields of blue-green broccoli.  Diner, Eucalyptus, Forests, the Dune Lakes, the crop fields of Arroyo Grande at the base of Nipomo Mesa.