Year-end Report - 2006

Casa Otra Banda

El Rancho, New Mexico

Year-End Letter December 2006

Every year for decades now I have composed a “year-end report” reflecting on the calendar year that is coming to a close, surveying both my own life and the world at large. This year I have been tied up in knots, wondering if I could or wanted to do the kind of wrap-up I’ve done so many times before, and then send it out to friends and acquaintances far and wide. There is the force of tradition, of course, but if my reflections are “through a glass darkly” should I really be sharing them? So take fair warning – I am not sure exactly how this letter will turn out as I think upon the year past, but it is unlikely to be the typical bright and cheery review. You might decide, and you would be perfectly within your rights, to stop right here, and be pleased simply that I am still “out there” and that might be entirely sufficient. I’ve lightly shaded my reflections on the world – they are not very uplifting, so you might simply want to skip that part (near the end of the letter).

This is also the first year I have not sent a letter inside a card to a core group of very long-time friends. I’ve noticed that by and large the sending of holiday cards with letters inside is a custom that is largely coming to a close, and if a letter is composed at all, then it is distributed electronically. So, for the first time, I have decided to go all electronic, with a couple of exceptions – hold-outs who still do not use e-mail!

In many ways, 2006 was a year of extraordinary contrasts in my personal life. A high note was the birth of my first granddaughter, Rosa Pearl Benjamin, born to my daughter Mara Hillary and her partner, Miryam, in New Haven, Connecticut, on February 1.

Needless to say, like every grandparent, I find Rosa Pearl immensely beautiful and intelligent, a delight to be with, and an infant with an ideal disposition.

To close the circle of new life beginning and old life ending, my father died in June at the age of 96. Ever since my mother died in 2003, he was inconsolable and wanted to join her, and this year he finally got his wish. His final decline lasted about 6 months – it could have been worse, but I always considered him indomitable, and it was very sad to see how he went downhill in his final months. There were a number of visits to Florida in the first part of the year, one with my brother and me dismantling and disposing of virtually all of my parents’ possessions. There are few experiences that give one such a sense of how transitory our stay on this planet is, and how quickly we are forgotten. This is the old story for almost all of us (Shakespeare excepted, perhaps), since time immemorial, and once we realize it, it is a good way to get ourselves grounded. In any event, the gravestone was unveiled at Thanksgiving, and now both my parents’ names are side by side on it, and underneath it they are reunited. In the most unpredictable ways and at the most surprising times, my thoughts turn to my mother and my father, and a wistful sadness comes over me that I suspect will continue for as long as I live.

This was a year of many other starts and finishes. The big project I had been working on at Los Alamos National Laboratory almost since I returned as a retiree contractor was launched in May. It was by no means complete even though “in production,” since there was a lot of training, debugging, and fine tuning to do. But launching it was a major success story, and entailed a lot of work by a first-rate team of colleagues. However, by September, the Lab ran out of money and I was rather unceremoniously booted out. Though initially I had hopes of returning with the start of a new fiscal year on October 1, it became increasingly clear that I wouldn’t be brought back. The Lab’s new managers (a consortium of several major corporations), who had replaced the University of California on June 1, greatly underbid on the operating contract (surprise, surprise) and then decided they needed to substantially reduce staffing, beginning with contractors. (The new management team is top heavy with very senior managers drawing very high salaries – needless to say, no cutbacks at that end.) So, despite my having many follow-on tasks in the works, and many more to take on, I discovered that I truly was retired, and it was time to get on with my life beyond the Lab. This I have slowly begun to do, as I will elaborate on a bit below.

Another area of lurching starts and abrupt finishes was the effort to sell our house. While everyone agrees it is a beautiful house in a beautiful setting, it turns out it is not such an easy job to sell it. First off, at least here in New Mexico, real estate law and regulations have tightened up considerably and the rather happy-go-lucky approach that we took as buyers in 1992 is now a thing of a very distant past. That houses ever get sold is quite amazing, since buyers are trying to protect themselves beyond anything we could ever have imagined. Secondly, we live in a rural area with some very complex issues relating to water rights, road access, and other matters not encountered in an urban or suburban setting. All the same, in the course of the year, we had a succession of three signed contracts, in June, July, and just at the beginning of December, and all of them fell through. It’s a long story, not worth going into, and fundamentally they don’t reflect on the house or property directly. That we had three buyers willing to sign a contract tells us that our house really is quite saleable. On the other hand, the emotional rollercoaster this has put us on has to add up to one of the most unpleasant experiences either David or I can remember. We certainly have come to the point where a signed contract means less to us than a piece of scrap paper one crumples up and throws mindlessly into the trash! We know the house will sell at a point – it is a very special place (we think) – but not knowing when it will happen, the impact in delaying our plans to move into Santa Fe and structuring our lives very differently, has been dramatic, to understate things a bit.

In yet another area, there were starts and finishes. David’s book, Classic American Popular Song: The Second Half-Century, 1950-2000, published by Routledge at the end of 2005, led to some very interesting developments in this, the first full year of its publication. Most exciting of all was its selection as best book on popular music by ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) – formally speaking, David and his co-author, Don Velsey, won the Deems Taylor Special Recognition Award. A big awards ceremony took place at Lincoln Center’s Rose Jazz Center in New York on December 7. Unfortunately, David could not attend, but Don Velsey did, and we got a full report. But regardless of sales (which are humming along quite decently) winning the Deems Taylor award was the best validation of the value of the book, and it has made David feel very good about his years of hard effort.

The book got some favorable mention, most importantly, a brief but very complimentary review in the June 4, New York Times Book Review. On a related note (no pun intended) David organized an absolutely memorable Sunday afternoon event at Vanessie’s, Santa Fe’s classic nightclub/cabaret, on February 25. It was a fundraiser for the Lensic, our performing arts center (a converted movie palace right downtown), with the hard work of making it happen shepherded by the owner of a local independent bookstore. David and two other fine local singers (one the daughter of Cab Calloway) put on a performance of some wonderful, but generally not well known songs that were analyzed in his book. There was an MC (the head of the City of Santa Fe’s cultural affairs office), some analysis of each song by the singer performing it, a great jazz trio back-up. Vanessie’s was packed, and it was clear that everyone in attendance was having a marvelous time. I found it one of the most exciting, thrilling experiences of my life. And so, David is moving forward for a repeat engagement on March 4 of 2007.

We continue to enjoy the house and the property, even though my gardening efforts have shifted primarily towards maintenance and selective renovation – for example, I overhauled the most prominent perennial bed this year. It was the one inside the courtyard walls, and thus the one that would be most apparent to prospective buyers. With the likelihood that we will still be here in the spring, I will probably go on to renew the perennial bed that is “outside the walls.” Though we had a terrible drought in the first half of the year, New Mexico got record-breaking summer rains, what we like to call the “monsoons.” And even though our Valley meteorologically misses out on many storms, even we did halfway decently, and as a result, our native grass meadows looked quite spectacular. (We don’t know what kind of winter is coming up – it has been relatively dry so far, despite forecasts of an El Nino winter, that is, a wet, cool winter.) In any event, as any gardener knows, even when you say you are cutting way back, not undertaking any major new projects, there are always a mind-boggling number of chores to do: watering, clean-up, trimming, dividing, re-planting, etc, so I still have a lot to do. But most gardeners are true gardeners because whatever it is they are doing, it gets them outside, and they just enjoy the connection with the natural world around them.

We did do some nice trips during the year. Right at the beginning (Christmas Eve 2005, actually) we drove off to the Mojave Desert and Joshua Tree National Park, in southeastern California. We camped most of the time, and though the nights were chillier than we had anticipated, but we found it a fascinating, very different environment and generally had a good time.

Most notably, was a return to Rome, this time about two weeks later (from mid-March to early April) than our visit in 2005, and what a difference two weeks made. Rome was winter in 2005 (though it is never terribly cold compared to more northerly spots in Europe), but utterly spring in 2006. We even had more time than we planned on, since an emergency stop on the way over that delayed our arrival became the basis for my requesting a rebooking for extra time, at no extra fare or penalty. This trip included more day trips out of Rome itself (to the Via Appia, Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa, Ostia Antica) and a two-day side trip to Arezzo and environs in southern Tuscany, to see some of the finest works of the great early Renaissance painter, Piero della Francesca, whom both David and I adore.

To get over the first, and the most emotionally draining, of our three house contract failures, David and I made a very last minute decision to simply get away, and from mid-July to mid-August, we took off for Newfoundland. That trip was covered separately in a report of its own, since we found it totally different from anywhere else we had been – it was culturally, historically, linguistically, geologically, botanically, scenically unique, and we were completely taken with it.

In October, we were off to New York City and New England, for a bit of culture, fall color, and visits to friends of David’s (and our granddaughter!). David’s friends were people he had generally not seen in many years. One highlight was that the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts (where David grew up), one of the premier small museums in the U.S., had received a gift of some of David’s master drawings, and a small exhibit of new drawings acquisitions had just gone up, with a majority of the drawings David’s gifts. They looked so different, and to better effect, on the museum’s walls. So the whole trip turned out t quite nicely.

And now, immediately after the New Year, we take off for a warm-weather beach holiday to Yelapa, a funky little coastal village not far from Puerto Vallarta that is only reachable by small boat from Puerto Vallarta, even though it is on the mainland. David had to have rotator cuff surgery in mid-November, and this forced us to push back a sea kayaking trip to Baja California that had been scheduled for late February, since he won’t be able to do any sea kayaking for quite some time. Yelapa became the consolation prize. Of course, there were numerous shorter trips in the course of the year – camping and explorations around New Mexico and Colorado.

We do have some ambitious plans for 2007, since both David and I have “big” birthdays. David turns 70 in June and I turn 65 in April. We decided that each of us gets to pick his “special” celebratory trip, and the other one accepts the idea. David’s is already nailed down (in that our flight is booked) – a trip covering most of May, to some of the special small cities of northern Europe that he has visited without me, and now wants to share with me – Colmar (where the great Mattias Grunewald triptych is located), Strasbourg, Basel, Lake Constance, Ghent and Bruges. We spend a brief time in New York, and then fly to Paris, returning from Amsterdam.

Needless to say, I am heading in a somewhat different direction – somewhere remote and adventurous and off the beaten track. The most likely choice is going to be a trip of about three weeks in August or thereabouts, to the Kamchatka Peninsula, a remote part of Russia’s Far East, north of Japan and west of Alaska. Why, you ask? It turns out that during the Soviet period, the entire 1,000-mile long peninsula was totally off limits for military reasons, and as a result, it is one of the most pristine natural areas on earth. The salmon runs, for example, are what they were pre-historically – millions of salmons returning to their spawning grounds. The provincial government, despite all the corruption that is endemic to Russia these days, is making some remarkable efforts to conserve its natural heritage I want to see such an unspoiled place, and a well regarded Russian outfit that leads trips into the country’s ecological reserves does a really nice (but rugged) trip there. We haven’t booked it yet, but I’ve been in touch with the outfit, and I think this is going to be ”my trip.” All the same, I have some other destinations rolling around in my head as well, so my trip is not a settled matter yet.

Speaking of big birthdays, and getting older, while I really feel quite young, regardless of chronological age, I find that news of friends and acquaintances who have experienced serious illness and/or have died does turn one’s thoughts increasingly to our shared mortality, our evanescent existence on earth, and the like. As part of that sense, I have gravitated to reading a number of books this year that relate to aging and death – to name a few, The View in Winter by Ronald Blythe, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, The Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn (more on this below) and Everyman by Philip Roth. One works hard to keep dark thoughts at bay, but death and life are inextricably mixed, and I increasingly feel that part of growing older is to make a certain peace with the inevitable.

As I indicated earlier, I am now, it appears, really retired, though I had officially retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory in June 2004. These first few months, I have been easing into it gradually, not rushing to figure out what I want to do. First off, it was amazing how many trivial little chores had to be dealt with, and how busy they kept me. That has quieted down, to a great extent. Many of those chores involved disposing of and closing out my Dad’s estate, even though he left his affairs in very good order. Then with David’s rotator cuff surgery, we figured I would be somewhat occupied as a caregiver (though David has been healing very well and functioning as independently as is medically prudent).

So, I am beginning to actually read books (as well as keep up with the too many magazines we subscribe to). I am taking up cooking again – preparing dinners, making various deserts that appeal to me (nothing really very elaborate, but it is a start). I also am doing physical exercises each morning while I listen to Morning Edition. In the fall I had sufficient time to put the garden to rest. I recently put in an intense week doing a variety of tasks as a volunteer for the Santa Fe Film Festival – box office, ushering, hospitality suite. I write more letters to politicians these days in the vain hope that it might make some tiny difference, when MoveOn or the Natural Resources Defense Council, or some such organization, sends me a frantic e-mail saying it is really important to contact my representative, etc., etc., etc.

I am now moving, gingerly, into a somewhat more serious phase. I have made contact with the collections manager of our International Folk Art Museum (a world class collection) to do volunteer work one full day per week on a multi-year project to capture digital photographs, and do related tasks, of the enormous folk art collection. And who knows, perhaps at a point, my professional background as an information manager/database designer will get me into some higher level work. If this moves forward successfully then I would like to explore doing some volunteer work for a local organization (there are many) that works in the area of crisis management (e.g., battered women, homeless families) and give something back to the community.

And of course, I want to continue our fairly busy travel schedule, camping and hiking, etc. In late September, just after I got “laid off,” David and I started doing more impromptu day hikes in the area and really enjoyed the spontaneity that we could take advantage of.

Once we move into Santa Fe, whenever that happens, I see many more possibilities of exploring volunteer activities, taking a much more eclectic approach to cultural events, and perhaps most exciting, taking courses and some of the local colleges. In short, we don’t seem to be lacking for activities. I am also thinking of some volunteer options much farther afield. For example, I learned that there is a three-month volunteer program out at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the far Pacific. It is an unspoiled tropical paradise, and once you get yourself to Honolulu (if you are accepted), they pay your transportation, room and board, while you do various interesting volunteer tasks for three months. Sounds pretty thrilling to me.

Turning my lens onto a wider field, perhaps most difficult of all about 2006 has been confronting the state of national and international affairs. It may well be, in part at least, that getting older means you are more and more exposed to the basic cruelty and uncertainty of life, of the fact that in reality, there is very little justice in this world, and when it occurs, it is as much a piece of luck as it is the triumph of good over evil.

So as I survey the wider perspective, I must say it is a depressing experience, and I find it penetrates my state of mind more deeply than when I was younger. I am utterly appalled at my own government, which in so many ways, has been a living nightmare, undoing everything that I treasure and hold dear and pride myself on as an American. First, because we cannot escape hearing about it, is the War in Iraq. Unprovoked, we invaded another country on a pretext of lies, and in essence, have so unhinged the entire country and the entire area, that the country is far worse off, and I believe we are far worse off. I do, indeed, mourn the many young American lives destroyed – both those killed and those horribly wounded. But perhaps even more, I am sickened beyond all imagining by the horrendous harm we have caused to countless millions in another country, all in my name! I simply cannot get it out of my head. Combined with the growing disaster in Afghanistan, developments vis-à-vis Iran, North Korea, much of South America, and many places elsewhere, we have seen our country, as a force for good, come to be seen in a totally opposite regard throughout much of the world.

Likewise, when I turn to domestic matters, I am mostly sickened and depressed by what I see – the destruction of our environment, the hastening of disastrous climate change, the perversion of science in the public interest, the weakening of regulations in the areas of health, labor, worker safety, environmental protections, privacy, corporate accountability, discrimination, the corruption of our lawmakers, the lack of intelligent discussion of the most pressing problems we face, the terrible deficits that will saddle us and our children with unimaginable future burdens, the attack on our civil rights, torture and disappearances, the mixing of militant forms of religion into our public life, aided and abetted by our government, our unwillingness to work cooperatively with other nations, our lagging social statistics. Our Congress has been corrupted by our approach to campaign financing, by extreme forms of lobbying and an unwillingness (for which all of us must assume much blame) to tackle the really big, pressing, structural problems. Economic inequality is reaching unprecedented extremes akin to what is typical in Latin American oligarchies and as a result, many aspects of day-to-day life in America reflect a situation in which 1/10^th of 1% of the population have unimaginable wealth.

Perhaps most worrisome is the weakening of our Constitution as the bulwark that has protected us for over 200 years. Not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve come to the conclusion that in looking at the spectrum of domestic and international concerns, our government is staffed, at its highest levels, by a gang of criminals.

As an American, I sometimes stop and think I am in a bad dream, but of course I realize it is not a dream. I also sometimes think that most Americans are not nearly as disturbed as I am – it makes me feel so lonely. In a place like Santa Fe – one of the country’s “hermetic bubbles” where you can delude yourself that most people think like yourself – you almost feel normal. Then you step out of the bubble and you feel you are in a different world.

I realize, in the process of losing so much (can we have retrogressed so much in just six short years?), how special this country has been and in many ways continues to be, but anyone familiar with history and the rise and fall of other empires, knows that nothing is forever. We seem to be headed on a collision course that is squandering all our greatest assets, material and non-material. And I am sad, extremely sad. Can we find our way back? It is unclear to me – so much damage has been done, and so much must be undone. We, as a people, are ultimately responsible for the government we have, and as a people, I think we have been inexcusably negligent – all of us.

We are constantly inundated, since September 11, 2001, with two topics – the “war on terror” and the war in Iraq. Probably the clearest, most succinct, most intelligent piece I have read to date on terrorism appeared in the November 30, 2006, issue of The New York Review of Books. It is a piece by Max Rodenbeck, titled How Terrible Is It? – it is totally at variance to the “common wisdom” and to our government’s simplistic, black-and-white outlook that has caused so many setbacks. I urge you to read it – it is available, online, at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19657. I normally would not get this specific in my annual letter, but our country is so consumed with the “War on Terror” that it behooves us to begin “getting real.” History is very unforgiving to those who barge ahead, uninformed.

Likewise, the piece that to me is the last word on Iraq and the U.S. invasion of that country also appeared in the December 21 issue of the New York Review of Book. It is by Mark Danner, and is titled Iraq: The War of the Imagination. If you want a clear understanding of everything that has been wrong all along about this war and how it has become such an unmitigated disaster, this is the one piece I think you should read. You can find it at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19720.

The more I read and become aware of human beings over the course of time, the more I find that our ethical goals, be they embodied in our own moral sense, the Talmudic commentaries, the Sermon on the Mount, represent a distant goal, not a reality in our world. When justice, fairness, and equity occur, we rejoice, because we know that such occurrences are fleeting at best, certainly not the norm. To the extent that goodness and justice triumph, it is the result of actions by specific individuals, not of political and governmental machinery. I think it is a very, very individual thing. Why some individuals embody our highest aspirations, I will never understand, but we can admire them and honor them. I just finished a powerful book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, by Daniel Mendelsohn. At one level it is “just another” Holocaust book, but it is much more – a reflection on family, relationships, the lessons of the chapters of Genesis, and how this all relates and helps us understand the individual lives that were “lost” in that incomprehensible event (one of all too many), the Holocaust. It raises some powerful and disquieting issues that ultimately are impossible to answer. What is the impact of our lives on this earth, what is memory, what is truth, why do some people do the right thing and some do very evil things?

Most of concern to me in the “big picture scheme of things” is how the human race is impacting the natural world – global climate change comes to mind first, but there are many other impacts. Each day it seems I hear another disturbing report – about the oceans, the forests, the upper atmosphere, genetic mutations, and on and on. Each report seems like one more piece in an intricate jigsaw puzzle letting us know that we are on a reckless course that in an accelerating fashion is moving towards world catastrophe. Is the human brain an evolutionary dead-end? That is, it could not adapt so as to sustain mankind and all other living creatures. There are so many positive, ingenious break-throughs we are capable of, but can they in the end sustain our world in the centuries and millennia to come?

Despite all these pessimistic reflections on the world at large, fortunately, David and I do have each other – a tremendous comfort and mutual enrichment – as well as friends far and near and a dwindling number of family members (all the more precious for that reason) – and when the world seems dark and chilly, the company of those we hold dear is a precious balm. I hope, likewise, you have the companionship of special people to cheer you as we all plod forward, hoping for the best, even when we fear the worst. On this somber note, I nevertheless bid you a healthy, happy, and rewarding 2007.

Love,

Ken