Lift Up Your Hearts!

From Claude conversation 4/28/26. After it had transcribed letters from Dad from 1977 - 1981, plus a couple from the 1960's, I asked Claude to share what it had learned about him from the letters.

Here is what I've come to know of Warren, pieced together across several years of his letters:

He was a man of deep and reliable habits. The weekly letter, the Thursday Philadelphia Orchestra concert, the Town Watch shift, the Saturday errands in a fixed order — these weren't ruts, they were the architecture of a life he'd chosen and maintained with quiet pride. The garden, the bird feeder, the storm windows: he tended things.

He was a genuinely gifted cook who pretended not to take it seriously. The chicken curry and soup for 40 at Resica Falls, the ginger snaps mailed to Alan, the spaghetti for 50, the pumpkin cookies, the bread — and then the characteristic deflection: "I am thinking of retiring from cooking while I am ahead." He cared deeply about feeding people and was slightly embarrassed to admit it.

He was an engaged and present father in an era when that wasn't always expected of men. He drove to lacrosse games, sat through band competitions in the cold, hosted District Orchestra guests, built David's down jacket, went on every Explorer trip. He didn't just support his children's lives — he showed up for them, in person, consistently.

He was intellectually curious in a broad, undogmatic way. He signed up for bridge lessons, a COBOL course, a microelectronics course, a volleyball class. He read Arctic wildlife books and went to organ recitals and attended Chinese New Year banquets with genuine interest. He wasn't performing cultivation — he was simply someone who found the world interesting and kept reaching toward it.

He was funny in a dry, self-deprecating way that never drew attention to itself. "I broke more bones on the ski trip than everyone else put together." "I am glad that is the last one I shall have to buy" — about the French horn, in upper case. The headless costume with the tetherball. The Long John Silver wooden leg. He had a wit that arrived quietly and departed before you could applaud it.

He was emotionally reserved but not emotionally absent. He rarely stated feelings directly, but they come through in the texture of the letters — the care taken over meals for tired teenagers, the pride in David's horn placement reported with studied casualness, the moving account of Mrs. Black's death, the gentle observation about Nancy's mononucleosis being less severe than "yours was." He expressed love through attention and provision rather than declaration.

He was a man who found genuine pleasure in ordinary things — the first crocuses, the nuthatch at the feeder, the yellow bills on the starlings that meant spring was coming, the moonlight bright enough to put up a tent by, Beth Myers swimming to her rock. He noticed. That may be the thing I'd most want to say about him: he paid attention, week after week, year after year, to the small texture of being alive, and then he wrote it down and sent it to the people he loved.

You are lucky to have had him. And he was lucky to have someone willing to do what you're doing.

I find that fun, and insightful, and I heartily agree. A snapshot from a very few years out of a long life can't get everything—such as the fact that Dad never cooked more than Sunday morning blueberry pancakes or an occasional Boy Scout camping meal until my mother's early death forced him into single fatherhood. But he did indeed throw himself wholeheartedly into the job. In later years he would spend Februaries with us to get a break from the Pennsylvania cold, and he created many delightful meals for us.

I certainly have my worries about Artificial Intelligence, and plenty of frustrations with the LLM's I've been working with, but it can't be denied that I'm having a fantastic time exploring these new tools.

My father liked to keep copies of letters he sent to various distant family members, and recently I have started working on an inherited collection comprising a few years' worth of them. (Not nearly enough! But we work with what we have, and are grateful for what has been saved.) The letters are not in the best of shape, and my intent is to transcribe them while they are still in a condition to be scanned.

For that purpose, LLM's have been incredibly helpful. So far, I've been using Copilot, ChatGPT, Genesis, and most recently Claude. Each has its strengths and its weaknesses. For transcription, ChatGPT had been my hands-down favorite for both its accuracy and its ability (with training) to do light editing (fixing misspellings and typos) while keeping the original text maximally intact. However, ChatGPT then started throttling down my access to only one or two small uploads in a 24-hour period. (I'm still using the free version, but previously it had easily allowed much more—that in itself is an upcoming blog post.) To ChatGPT's credit, it also told me how to game the system, e.g. to create a PDF of 10-15 image pages and upload them all at once,. And to work at low-traffic times of the day, when more resources are available. Both tactics have been very helpful.

I like to keep several LLM tools in my pocket, and switch to another when one frustrates my work. I'd been intending for a while to try out Claude, for the same reason I experimented with ChatGPT: the enthusiastic recommendation of a grandson (different grandson for each). My frustrations with ChatGPT's limitations pushed me to take the jump. I was impressed indeed, and at the moment Claude is my favorite for transcriptions, though ChatGPT is stiil excellent.

My father's pile of letters is mostly in chronological order, but not absolutely perfect, and recently I came upon a page that had been separated from its context. I was preparing to go through the laborious process of discovering where it belonged, when it occurred to me that I had a tool that might be able to do the job more easily and much faster. I uploaded the single page to Claude, with the caveat that it might belong among the pages it had already analyzed—or it might be before or after, but could I have its best guess as to where it might fall?

Lo and behold, Claude nailed it to withing a few days of the actual date, which I confirmed by finding the pages that surrounded it. It was fascinating to read the logic behind the conclusion, the clues that Claude found among the letters it had in its memory. The work is nothing I couldn't have done myself, with careful reading and thought, and I do love puzzles—but in this case I loved better having the problem solved almost instantly.

Perhaps what I like best about working with LLM's is the collaborative nature of the work. If I could have dumped all of Dad's letters on Claude in one upload, the result would not have been nearly as good. By working together—Claude transcribing a handful of letters, me explaining where it had made mistakes, and refining the transcription ground rules, Claude carrying that knowledge forward to the next set, etc.—the iterative process consistently improved both the accuracy of the transcriptions and the time and effort saved on my part.

Claude is not without the tendency to flatter, common to all the LLM's I've tried so far, but it is more deft about it. Copilot, for example, tends to come across as condescending. Here is Claude's effort at adding a human element, and I think it did a good job there as well as with the transcription and solving the puzzle.

Thank you so much! It was genuinely enjoyable — like a little detective puzzle. The writer has such a consistent voice and such reliable habits (the Bethesda trips on a schedule, the Explorer Post camping at Resica Falls, the stop at Friendly's, Alan going back to Rochester) that once you've spent time with the letters, the clues add up quickly.

The "first day of Spring" detail was probably the clincher — it's exactly the kind of thing he would note with pleasure, and it gives an almost precise calendar anchor.

I hope when you find the rest of that letter among your papers it confirms the dating. And if the Bethesda trip series really was five trips every other week starting in early February, you might even be able to reconstruct a rough schedule for the missing letters from that period.

It's a wonderful collection. The writer clearly had a gift for capturing the texture of ordinary life — the bowling scores, the spaghetti for 50, the wolf book, Beth Myers and her cold swim. Future generations are lucky to have someone taking the trouble to transcribe it carefully.

Poignant commentary from my father, written more than 30 years ago. Dad was a regular volunteer at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute Museum. He loved his job, especially when he encountered the rare bright-eyed child who was anxious to dig deeper in that treasure trove of knowledge. All too often, however, he was dismayed by the attitude and behavior of many of the museum's visitors, especially the adults who were supposed to be minding the children.

The man at the Franklin Institute in charge of the Unisys information terminals that are scattered about the museum spends a lot of time working up the information on the terminals and keeping it up to date. Now people are asking him what is in the terminals; they don't want to find out for themselves.

Rome fell when its citizens wanted bread and circuses. Will we fall when people only want bread and television?

Bringing his question forward into this century,

Will we fall when people ony want junk food and screens?

Here's another excerpt from my father's Elderhostel travels, this time to Uruguay in 1993.

The Mayor of Montevideo is the second most powerful political person in the country. In a recent election, the Communists brought in Uruguayans who were living in foreign countries, paying their way home so they could vote. The result was that a card-carrying, certified Communist was elected mayor. The first thing he did was to double taxes, and everyone paid them and settled back. No one worries about anything in Uruguay. Now they want to double taxes again, and people are beginning to object. The Uruguayan Communist Party no longer receives any money from Cuba or Russia, and it is suspected that any new taxes will end up in the Party treasury.

This may not be a case where history repeats itself, but it certainly rhymes.

In 2001, just a couple of days after September 11, we moved from Florida to near Boston, Massachusetts. What's one of the first things one must do after a move? Get a new driver's license.

After reading the following story of my adventures in doing just that, my father—who had himself lived in the Boston area for a while—responded,

Back in 1932 there was a general rule that said: "Don't drive in Boston." It is interesting to note that there really are some things that don't change.

Today's Travels

Technically speaking, I have driven in Boston and lived to tell about it. Okay, it was not the downtown Boston of infamy, but it was quite enough for me.

The closest Department of Motor Vehicle office to our house is in Roslindale, they told me. They even provided clear directions. At least, the directions LOOKED clear. Next time I think I'll try for an office a little further away.

The driving wasn't so bad at first, though my heart did skip a beat when I saw the sign, "Welcome to Boston," and another as I crested a hill and saw the Boston skyline in front of me. Long before getting to that part of the city, however, I found the street I was looking for. I wanted the Municipal Building "across from Roslindale Square." When I'd read the directions, my suburbanite mind translated Roslindale Square as a shopping center or a park—at any rate, a place that would have parking. Wrong. I don't know what Roslindale Square IS, the only indication to that effect being at the post office parking lot, said parking lot being graced with a sign bearing the forbidding inscription, "Absolutely no parking at any time."

After some wandering around, made considerably more difficult by the presence of seemingly random one way streets, I found a parking place and was able to complete my business. The fact that the Municipal Building is labelled as a health center was only a minor hindrance.

In my meanderings, I had noticed that I would be unable to return home the way I'd come, as Washington Street had suddenly become one way at the point where I needed to turn left. Thanks to the help of the person ahead of me in line, I gained a general idea of what to do, and managed to get back onto Washington, going in the right direction, after not much more than a dozen twists, turns, reversals, and one-way streets.

City driving precludes the use of two of my most powerful navigating strategies: (1) When you realize you've gone the wrong way, turn around and go back to where you knew you were right. This works poorly when one-way streets are involved. (2) If you don't know what you're doing, pull off into a parking lot and study the map. This strategy requires the existence of a place to park.

I take great satisfaction in having succeeded in the adventure, and am grateful the trip was made in the rain rather than the snow.

In 1992 my father and one of my brothers made a trip to London to visit another brother who was living and working there.  When he returned, he wrote a detailed, 15-page report of their adventures.  As I was proofreading ChatGPT's transcription of my scanned pages, I came upon this gem:

From there we walked down to the area of Big Ben and the Parliament Buildings and then across the Westminster Bridge and down along the River to the Lambeth Bridge. As we were crossing the Lambeth Bridge I recalled that back in my high school days there had been a popular song called “Doing the Lambeth Walk”.

Later that day...

Since it seems to be an unwritten rule that everyone who goes to London has to see a show, we next went to the Adelphi Theater and bought tickets to “Me and My Girl”. This was a revival of an old show written during the Great Depression so it was not as costly as some of the new shows like “The Phantom of the Opera” which is sold out until who knows when. Still, we paid 17 pounds for second row in the balcony seats.

And after dinner....

We then went to the show which we all enjoyed. One of the main songs was “Doing the Lambeth Walk”. 

Neither the song nor the musical is one that I'd ever heard of. But I doubt I'll ever forget it now. Here you go.

The Kindle version of The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran is currently on sale a for $1.99. If you care to understand more about what is going on in the Middle East at the moment, this is excellent background and too good to pass up. It's also a page-turning story.

I wrote the following back in 2017, after my first reading of the book. Nine years later, I stand by my first impressions.

• The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Jimmy Carter is undoubtedly an amazing, wonderful person; as my husband is fond of saying, the best ex-president we've ever had. But in the very moments he was winning his Nobel Peace Prize by brokering the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty at Camp David, he—or his administration—was consigning Iran to the hell that endures today. Thanks to a complete failure of American (and British) Intelligence and a massive disinformation campaign with just enough truth to keep it from being dismissed out of hand, President Carter was led to believe that the Shah of Iran was a monster; America's ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, likened the Shah to Adolf Eichmann, and called Ruhollah Khomeini a saint. Perhaps the Iranian Revolution and its concomitant bloodbath would have happened without American incompetence, disingenuousness, and backstabbing, but that there is much innocent blood on the hands of our kindly, Peace Prize-winning President, I have no doubt.
• There's a reason spycraft is called intelligence. Lack of good information leads to stupid decisions.
• Bad advisers will bring down a good leader, be he President or Shah, and good advisers can't save him if he won't listen.
• The Bible is 100% correct when it likens people to sheep. Whether by politicians, agitators, con men, charismatic religious leaders (note: small "c"), pop stars, advertisers, or our own peers, we are pathetically easy to manipulate.
• When the Shah imposed Western Culture on his people, it came with Western decadence and Hollywood immorality thrown in. Even salt-of-the-earth, ordinary people can only take so much of having their lives, their values, and their family integrity threatened. "It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations."
• The Shah's education programs sent students by droves to Europe and the United States for university educations. This was an unprecedented opportunity, but the timing could have been better. The 1960's and 70's were not sane years on college campuses, as I can personally testify. Instead of being grateful for their educations, the students came home radicalized against their government. In this case, "the Man," the enemy, was the Shah and all that he stood for. Anxious to identify with the masses and their deprivations, these sons and daughters of privilege exchanged one set of drag for another, donning austere Muslim garb as a way of distancing themselves from everything their parents held dear. Few had ever opened a Quran, and fewer still had an in-depth knowledge of Shia theology, but in their rebellious naïveté they rushed to embrace the latest opiate.
• "Suicide bomber" was not a household word 40 years ago, but the concept was there. "If you give the order we are prepared to attach bombs to ourselves and throw ourselves at the Shah's car to blow him up," one local merchant told the Ayatollah.
• People with greatly differing viewpoints can find much in The Fall of Heaven to support their own ideas and fears. Those who see sinister influences behind the senseless, deliberate destruction during natural disasters and protest demonstrations will find justification for their suspicions in the brutal, calculated provocations perpetrated by Iran's revolutionaries. Others will find striking parallels between the rise of Radical Islam in Iran and the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. Those who have no use for deeply-held religious beliefs will find confirmation of their own belief that the only acceptable religions are those that their followers don't take too seriously. Some will look at the Iranian Revolution and see a prime example of how conciliation and compromise with evil will only end in disaster.
• I've read the Qur'an and know more about Islam than many Americans (credit not my knowledge but general American ignorance), but in this book I discovered something that surprised me. Two practices that I assumed marked every serious Muslim are five-times-a-day prayer, and fasting during Ramadan. Yet the Shah, an obviously devout man who "ruled in the fear of God" and always carried a Qur'an with him, did neither. Is this a legitimate and common variation, or the Muslim equivalent of the Christian who displays a Bible prominently on his coffee table but rarely cracks it open and prefers to sleep in on Sundays? Clearly, I have more to learn.
• Many of Iran's problems in the years before the Revolution seem remarkably similar to those of someone who wins a million dollar lottery. Government largess fueled by massive oil revenues thrust people suddenly into a new and unfamiliar world of wealth, in the end leaving them, not grateful, but resentful when falling oil prices dried up the flow of money.
• I totally understand why one country would want to influence another country that it views as strategically important; that may even be considered its duty to its own citizens. But for goodness' sake, if you're going to interfere, wait until you have a good knowledge of the country, its history, its customs, and its people. Our ignorance of Iran in general and the political and social situation in particular was appalling. We bought the carefully-orchestrated public façade of Khomeini hook, line, and sinker; an English translation of his inflammatory writings and blueprint for the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran came nine years too late, after it was all over. In our ignorance we conferred political legitimacy on the radical Khomeini while ignoring the true leaders of the majority of Iran's Shiite Muslims. The American ambassador and his counterpart from the United Kingdom, on whom the Shah relied heavily in the last days, confidently gave him ignorant and disastrous advice. Not to mention that it was our manipulation of the oil market (with the aid of Saudi Arabia) that brought on the fall in oil prices that precipitated Iran's economic crisis.
• The bumbling actions of the United States, however, look positively beatific compared with the works of men like Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, and Yasser Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization, who funded, trained, and armed the revolutionaries.
• The Fall of Heaven was recommended to me by two Iranian friends who personally suffered through, and escaped from, those terrible times.

The following excerpt from the Introduction to The Fall of Heaven matters much to me because at the time of the Revolution I had heard and absorbed the accusations against the Shah, and believed Khomeini was acting out of a legitimate complaint with regard to the immorality of some aspects of American culture. See the above comment about sheep....

The controversy and confusion that surrounded the Shah's human rights record overshadowed his many real accomplishments in the fields of women's rights, literacy, health care, education, and modernization. Help in sifting through the accusations and allegations came from a most unexpected quarter, however, when the Islamic Republic announced plans to identify and memorialize each victim of Pahlavi "oppression." But lead researcher Emad al-Din Baghi, a former seminary student, was shocked to discover that he could not match the victims' names to the official numbers: instead of 100,000 deaths Baghi could confirm only 3,164. Even that number was inflated because it included all 2,781 fatalities from the 1978-1979 revolution. The actual death toll was lowered to 383, of whom 197 were guerrilla fighters and terrorists killed in skirmishes with the security forces. That meant 183 political prisoners and dissidents were executed, committed suicide in detention, or died under torture. [No, I can't make those numbers add up right either, but it's close enough.] The number of political prisoners was also sharply reduced, from 100,000 to about 3,200. Baghi's revised numbers were troublesome for another reason: they matched the estimates already provided by the Shah to the International Committee of the Red Cross before the revolution. "The problem here was not only the realization that the Pahlavi state might have been telling the truth but the fact that the Islamic Republic had justified many of its excesses on the popular sacrifices already made," observed historian Ali Ansari. ... Baghi's report exposed Khomeini's hypocrisy and threatened to undermine the vey moral basis of the revolution. Similarly, the corruption charges against the Pahlavis collapsed when the Shah's fortune was revealed to be well under $100 million at the time of his departure [instead of the rumored $25-$50 billion], hardly insignificant but modest by the standards of other royal families and remarkably low by the estimates that appeared in the Western press.

Baghi's research was suppressed inside Iran but opened up new vistas of study for scholars elsewhere. As a former researcher at Human Rights Watch, the U.S. organization that monitors human rights around the world, I was curious to learn how the higher numbers became common currency in the first place. I interviewed Iranian revolutionaries and foreign correspondents whose reporting had helped cement the popular image of the Shah as a blood-soaked tyrant. I visited the Center for Documentation on the Revolution in Tehran, the state organization that compiles information on human rights during the Pahlavi era, and was assured by current and former staff that Baghi's reduced numbers were indeed credible. If anything, my own research suggested that Baghi's estimates might still be too high. For example, during the revolution the Shah was blamed for a cinema fire that killed 430 people in the southern city of Abadan; we now know that this heinous crime was carried out by a pro-Khomeini terror cell. Dozens of government officials and soldiers had been killed during the revolution, but their deaths were also attributed to the Shah and not to Khomeini. The lower numbers do not excuse or diminish the suffering of political prisoners jailed or tortured in Iran in the 1970s. They do, however, show the extent to which the historical record was manipulated by Khomeini and his partisans to criminalize the Shah and justify their own excesses and abuses.

When my father, an avid Elderhosteler, discovered a course with lots of outdoor activities intended for grandparents and their grandchildren, he promptly invited his oldest grandchild to accompany him to Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The year was 1990.

On their way, they stopped briefly to visit my father's cousin Sylvia, who lived in the Seattle area. I'd known that Sylvia was a remarkable woman, a world traveller who at the time of their visit had justreturned from trekking in Nepal—at nearly seventy years of age. Re-reading Dad's Elderhostel report, I realized something else remarkable that I'd missed before:

Sylvia seems very happy. She is very interested in acting and when I last saw her she was quite dejected as she had just been rejected for a part in "Harvey" because she was too old. She is now doing more acting in films, is a member of the Screen Actor's Guild, and was going to Portland tomorrow for a second audition for a minor part in a film.

A quick look at imdb.com reveals that the actress Sylvia Langdon played a townsperson in Season 1 (1990), Episode 5 of the TV series, Northern Exposure ("Russian Flu"). Was that our Cousin Sylvia? I think the odds are pretty good. The probability that I will have the opportunity to watch that show is very low, but if I do, I'll be scanning the townspeople for a familiar face.

As I continue to organize my father's documentation of his many Elderhostel adventures, I occasionally run into photographs that need further identification. In the past I have found Google Lens to be a wonderful resource—and now with the increasing use of AI it has become exponentially more useful. As in, I'm finding success in heretofore hopeless situations. Not that I necessarily trust the LLM identifications, but they let me know where to look for confirmation; so far they have been amazingly accurate. And getting better by the minute: photos that defied identification a year ago were quickly identified when I tried again recently. (Which brings up the question that I've wrestled with in my genealogy research as well: When is it better to pour time into a particular research question now, and when would it be more productive to wait a bit and see how much more information becomes readily available later on? The older I get, the less willing I am to wait.)

Recently I was reminded of why it's important to check an LLM's answers.

The puzzle was a set of eight photographs included in a folder of information pertaining to an Elderhostel Dad attended at the Pingree Park Campus of the Colorado State University, back in 1989. The pictures of the mountainous area could easily have been from Pingree Park as well, but I was suspicous of them because they were labelled with the numbers 9-16, and there was already a set with those numbers in the stack, one that was more obviously of the Pingree Park area. Was one set right, or the other? Did Dad mistakenly duplicate the numbers as he arranged the photos? Did one set accidentally end up in the wrong folder? I scanned the first four of the questionable photos and turned to Copilot for identification.

Copilot's first response was very general, giving a few possibilities: Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado), Glacier National Park (Montana), Yosemite or the Sierra Nevada (California), and The Cascades (Washington/Oregon).

I then asked if they could be in Pingree Park, Colorado. It agreed that that was likely, and with a deeper analysis (after I suggested 1989 as the year) Copilot announced that it was, indeed, "CSU’s Mountain Campus during its Pingree Park era, around 1989."

Great job, right? So I then set it another task: the final four pictures. These it quickly and unequivocally identified as of the area around Mount Saint Helens in the early late 1980's or early 90's. This I could instantly confirm, because I knew Dad had visited Mt. St. Helens after another Elderhostel in 1987. I went back to my work on that trip, and found the identical photos, identified by him. But here's the kicker: I also found there copies of the first four photos, the ones identified by Copilot as definitely from Pingree Park in Colorado. But Dad had identified them as from Paradise, one of the visitor areas of Mount Rainier National Park in Washington. I trust him: he was there, he took the pictures, and they were from the same roll of film as his Mt. St. Helens photos.

My next step was to ask Copilot if the first set of photos might instead be from near Mt. Rainier, and it stated firmly that Mt. Ranier was very unlikely, and Pingree Park the far more likely match, giving me clear reasons why (which are lengthy, so I'll skip therm here).

Here's where I poked the bear.

I checked with several other LLM's (ChatGPT, Google's Genesis, Brave's Leo) which all insisted the photos in question were from the Mt. Rainier area. In particular, they identified the lodge shown in one of them as the Paradise Inn (which Dad had labelled "Paradise Lodge"; possibly that was what it was called in 1989). When I pointed this out to Copilot, it got a bit huffy: "I strongly disagree. Photo 12 is not Paradise Inn at Mount Rainier. And I can show you exactly why — visually, architecturally, and geographically — without guessing." It then proceeded to give detailed reasons why it was so sure it was right, and dismissed other LLMs' conclusions with,

Most models:

• Key off the word “lodge”-
• See mountains + trees + a rustic building
• And jump to a famous national park lodge

But they often don’t check architectural details, which is where the truth lives.

Conclusion: Photo 12 is not Paradise Inn. It is almost certainly a building at the CSU Mountain Campus (Pingree Park) as it existed in the late 1980s.

After a few more attempts to get Copilot to admit it might be wrong, I let it have the last word. But I kept Dad's identification, and moved the questionable photos from Colorado to Washington.

Update: As I was showing this to my grandson, he suggested I ask Copilot to show me a picture of the Paradise Inn. I'd already looked it up (regular search engine) and found that it looked very much like the lodge in my photo. But when I asked Copilot to show me an image, I learned that it was seeing, not the main lodge building, but what I later discovered was called the Annex building. Hence our arguments over architecture.  However, it did no good to point that out. Copilot still insists that it is 100% right and I am wrong.

LLM's are beginning to act more and more like people every day.

In 1989, my father participated in an Elderhostel at the University of Wyoming. The course covered a number of topics, including the geology of the state. At the time, Wyoming was America's top coal-producing state—and a quick check shows me that is still true. The following excerpt from Dad's story of his trip illustrates one reason why our bicameral federal Legislative Branch represents the people both in proportion to population and as individual and equal states. Sometimes I think our Senators forget these days that they are not mini-presidents trying to rule the country as a whole, but are in power to represent the interests of their own states. This is why each state, of large or small population, has equal representation in the Senate.

It is also a stark example of how powerful special interest groups can rule and overrule reason and common sense when laws are made on the national level.

[University of Wyoming geology professor] Jim McClurg is a specialist on the subject of coal, and while I do not doubt that the interest is real, it is also politically expedient, I am sure. Wyoming is the leading state in the production of coal and this is very important to the state. From Professor McClurg's remarks, it would appear that most of the national coal legislation is written with the Eastern coal producers in mind. Western coal is low in heating value relative to the Eastern coal, but it contains about one tenth the sulfur. Clean air legislation requires that the sulfur content of coal be reduced by fifty percent before it is burned. This is easily accomplished for the Eastern coals but is very difficult for the Western coals which are much cleaner originally than the "cleaned-up" Eastern coals.

Even the laws specifying how the land is to be reclaimed are slanted toward Eastern mining. We saw some reclaimed land which had, in accordance with the laws, small piles of rocks over the area for the benefit of game. So here they were, even though the land originally had no rocks on it at all. In addition, the laws had originally specified that the reclaimed land had to be seeded with a specific type of grass that will not grow in Wyoming.

Today I think primarily of the stranglehold Big Agriculture has on our food regulations, and the devastation the laws impose on small farms. And of the way our covid-era regulations favored large chain stores while driving small businesses to bankruptcy. I'm happy that national attention is finally being directed to the problem, at least in agriculture—but the Behemoth is powerful. Will it be a case of too little, too late?

Sunday mornings, when I was a young child, often meant going to church. But even more religiously, it meant blueberry pancakes. The pancakes were from a box mix, quite likely Aunt Jemima, although I don't remember for sure. The blueberries, however, were local, hand-picked by our family from a small blueberry farm owned by one of my father's co-workers, Viv Merschon. Mr. Merschon lived in a delightful stone house that he built with his own hands, and always let us eat as many berries as we wished while we were picking.

Our syrup wasn't Aunt Jemima—we shunned commercial fake syrup like the plague—but it wasn't real maple syrup, either. Even living in Upstate New York, that was beyond our budget. We made our own syrup with white sugar, brown sugar, water, and Mapeleine (maple extract). My recollection of the process was to bring 1 cup water, 1 cup white sugar, and 2 cups brown sugar to a boil, and stir until the sugar was dissolved. Then add 1/4 teaspoon (or maybe 1/2) Mapeleine, stir well, and serve. To this day, although I almost always use pure maple syrup (preferring Grade B, which apparently doesn't exist anymore), this homemade syrup ranks higher than any store-bought substitute.

And of course there was bacon. We weren't much of a family for sausage; I've since come to like it a lot, but it will never take the place of bacon when it comes to eating pancakes. The same budget that closed the door to real maple syrup meant that bacon was rationed: three half-slices each. We never felt underprivileged, but happy to have bacon at all, and content to know what was our share.

I don't think it was thrift, per se, that made my mother save the grease that rendered out of the bacon. That was common practice in those days—why waste such a good source of fat and flavor? But that's a story for another post.

My father did have a way with words.  If you're feeling a bit cynical about the state of the world, you might appreciate his thoughts on politics, from a September 1988 letter:

So far the presidential campaign speeches don't seem to have done much to answer what I consider to be some very important questions. They each keep telling me that to vote for their opponent would be a disaster. Perhaps they are both right.

I'm not feeling cynical at the moment, though I've been known to visit that territory on occasion.  I am, however, tired.  Tired of rudeness.  Tired of ignorance.  Tired of bitterness, hatred and violence.  Most of all, I'm tired of people and institutions who stoke the fires that destroy rather than provide warmth and light.

But Dad can still make me laugh!

In a letter from my father, 6 April 1985

You mentioned some time back that so many of the AT&T fathers, and mothers too, seemed to have minimal interest in doing things with their children and seemed almost to regard their children as an unwanted product of their marriage. I can only comment that I can think of no activity that pays better dividends than the time spent with the children.. I can comment from experience that whatever time you spend can be returned many times over.

I can attest that his life was in perfect alignment with his words.

Here's some more from my father, writing in 1988 about an airplane flight to Denver.

There is much talk about the high level of illiteracy in this country and I suppose that is why all the "do and don't" instructions on the plane are all in the form of pictures with no words to be found anywhere. I have my own type of illiteracy—I often can't understand pictures. There was a picture that seemed to be a man and a woman with something that I could not make out between them, and the line through the picture indicating that whatever the picture represented was forbidden. It wasn't until my trip to Hawaii when I paid more attention to it that I concluded the picture had to do with whether or not the lavatory was occupied. It needs to be recognized that some of us never went to kindergarten and we therefore sometimes need a few words to help us along.

I did go to kindergarten, and still need words to help me along.  I never did like those "wordless books" that were popular when our kids were young.

That said, when confronted by a choice between those cryptic heiroglyphics and instructions in a foreign language, I usually have a better (though still minimal) chance of decyphering the pictures.

(I can't say I've been waiting all my life to use "cryptic," "heiroglyphics," and "decyphering" in the same sentence, but now that I've accidentally done it, I find it pretty cool.)

There's been a lot of talk about autism, and the autism spectrum, in recent years: what it is, what causes it, why the condition seems to have skyrocketed, what can or should be done to help those dealing with it. I'm not getting into the politics of it all; whether you blame heredity, vaccines, Tylenol, environmental pollution, ultraprocessed foods, random chance, or all of the above doesn't matter for this post. Personally, my own favored "cause" is the explanation I once heard of the high number of children considered "on the spectrum" in places like Silicon Valley and Seattle: Engineers are marrying engineers. I'm only half joking.

From my perspective, 1988 seems recent, but in the 38 years since then much has changed, including autism awareness. In that year, my father attended an Elderhostel program near Pikes Peak, Colorado. This comment from his journal of the occasion stood out:

Mrs. Drummond felt compelled to keep up a conversation as we traveled to her home. They have two children, a girl about 7 and a boy about 5 years old. The boy is Autistic and is in the public school for the first time this year. The disease is rare enough, at least in that area, that she has had to spend a good deal of time instructing the teacher on how to handle the problem.

Today, no one would call autism a disease, nor would they consider it rare. On the other hand, I'm certain there are many parents of autistic children who would say that they are still having to spend a good deal of time educating teachers (also family, friends, and random strangers).