HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

We're headed to New York today to see Rufus Wainwright in Radio City Music Hall.

May this day bring you, too, a joyful journey to the stars!

Ralph and Steve

The Peace Corps, part 2

Above: with my friend Dick Kimmins at his mother's house in Springfield, Tennessee, 1965.

I left you yesterday secure in the knowledge that at the age of 34 I had finally found myself a permanent job. I've made previous reference to a period of "floundering," making do with that state via TM, etc. Since I've come this far, it seems now I should tell you about some of the things that led up to this celebratory landing of mine, finally, on my feet.

I never had the slightest idea what I wanted to "be." Growing up, I "enjoyed" things: writing, music. Languages. But these were simply external activities, things that grew out of innate talents from which for some reason I never imagined making a living. I've given much thought over the years where this ambivalence about jobs came from. It could be from my father--he had a successful journalism career, but his essentially pessimistic nature never seemed to make him very excited about it, or proud of it. He seldom brought his work home; he communicated no enthusiasm to me about how he made his living. I grew up thinking a job was just a means to a life, a necessary thing everybody had to do in order to keep body and soul together. With that as a model, the question of what to "be" became redundant. I already "was" something. I was me! Somehow that seemed enough. Skills and interests seemed periferal, just extensions of Me. "Me" would get by somehow. That's how life was lived.

The permanent backdrop for all of this was the military draft. It was always there looming as I was growing up. It scared the heck out of me from my first awareness of it, and as Viet Nam first appeared on the horizon and then grew, it became less and less a desired option. So there was at least something I could point to and know I didn't want to be: a soldier.

The Peace Corps was begun in 1961, when I was 15, and all of a sudden I had something I really enjoyed imagining myself being: a Peace Corps volunteer. It was a relief finally to have a goal. The idea remained in the back of my mind through my high school years and into college. There, Joe Kimmins, the older brother of my dorm neighbor and best friend, Dick, took a big-brother interest in me and adopted me as an intellectual pen pal. It was the Kimminses in general and Joe in particular who taught me how to think and planted the seeds of adulthood in me. In the course of our correspondence, in 1965, Joe told me he was applying to the Peace Corps. If I ever needed confirmation that my own idea had been a good one, there it was. Joe went to Morroco in 1966 and I read his letters voraciously, identifying with every second of his two-year service. My own chance inevitably came and I took it as a matter or course, fighting Uncle Sam's other ideas all the way but in the end, succeeding.

And then it was over. In 1972 I was 26 years old and the one goal I had set for myself, being a Peace Corps volunteer, was behind me. There was no "next"; I was right back where I started before the Peace Corps had been invented, at zero. The obvious answer was to get a job with the Peace Corps, but that seemed like a copout at the time. I had a mantra: "there has to be life after the Peace Corps."

In college, I had changed majors literally every semester, finally landing on French in my junior year because I liked it and it was easy. (Not French education, mind you. Just French language and literature. I added no practical skill to the merely social one of making conversation in another language. The thought of teaching for a living was not appealing.) I gravitated to the music department to make friends and music and had a wonderful time there. But again. Me, a music teacher??? Please.

Everyone expected that I would be an entertainer because that's what I was best at. I like standing on a stage, I love an audience, and I had the requisite pretty singing voice to make standing there meaningful. So after the Peace Corps, I decided that's what I would do. I had begun writing music in preparation for a career. I went to Boston with that express purpose, and set about things. I auditioned at a Back Bay coffee house and was picked up for a weekly gig. It was at that point I made a pivotal discovery: I had no ambition. I still liked singing and the communion with the audience, but I realized much more than that was necessary. You needed boundless ego. You had to want to make yourself a product, like sliced cheese. Just digging down into myself to find the spiritual wherewithal to perform was a huge chore after being dead all day, marking maps for the AAA, and, worse, that deadening job was paying the bills, not the music.

With mix of guilt, disappointment and relief, I gave up the gigs. I sang at parties for friends and was still known as the Guitar Man, but I no longer tried to pretend I had it in me to pursue a show business career. I went back to that familiar old acquaintance, zero, and kept marking maps. Boston friends, meanwhile, knew how frustrated I was, sitting there with AAA green ink-stained fingers, fresh from that life-changing Peace Corps experience, and asked me the obvious question: "why aren't you recruiting for the Peace Corps???" The mantra just repeated itself: "there has to be life after the Peace Corps."

Out of nowhere one gray, cold, Boston April day, my old college friend, Dick Kimmins, gave me a call. By then he had left Lexington, where we had gone to school together, for Louisville. He told me that the local PBS station was auditioning entertainers for a childrens's show they were going to produce and I should come and try out. Hmmm...another stab at this game? But it made at least a little bit of sense, and it seemed somehow easier, being part of something bigger, than trying to carve something out all in my own. For sure, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I flew out to Louisville to audition. It was clear from the time I entered the studio, however, that I was not what the station was looking for. I sang my song (Buffy Saint-Marie's "The Piney Wood Hills") and left for a visit with Dick. I had been realistic about my chances and wasn't really all that disappointed.

Where Boston had been cold, gray and wet, April in Louisville was beautiful. Spring was burgeoning with its inimitable green, the breezes were warm and fragrant. I felt some life returning to my numbed soul. Dick and I went sightseeing to beautiful Churchill Downs. We chatted and strolled the grounds, making our way into the infield. There we lay down with our backs against that luxurious carpet of bluegrass and looked into the clear blue sky. I unburdened myself to my old best friend and told him about the trouble I was having getting started in life. As I spoke, the words came to me as if I'd never heard them before: "why aren't you recruiting for the Peace Corps???" The mantra, for once, was gone. With my best friend, in Churchill Downs on that beautiful day in 1974, I came back to life.

Well, that's what I thought at the time.

The Peace Corps, part 1

Above: me as a skinny Peace Corps Volunteer, 1970. The other two guys are fellow teachers. Those shorts? More tomorrow!

My thoughts never really stray too far from the Peace Corps, for so many reasons. For one, I, like most of the other nearly 200,000 returned volunteers, will tell you that the volunteer experience was a pivotal, defining period of my life which set me on the course I am still on. (By the way, we refer to our status as "returned," rather than "former," because we still consider ourselves volunteers, nothing former about it. We've simply "returned" from our countries of service. The acronym used throughout the Peace Corps universe is RPCV.)

Another reason my thoughts are often with the Peace Corps is that I spent the bulk of my working life there. I am a creature of the institution; if there hadn't been a Peace Corps I'd have had to invent one. There was certainly nothing else at which I could have made a decent and honorable living. And therein lies a story. But first, a peek behind the bureaucratic curtain:

The Peace Corps is an independent executive agency of the federal government. It has a director and a layer or two of upper management appointed by the President, who is their direct boss. As such agencies go, the Peace Corps is barely a blip in the radar. Only about 600 people work at its headquarters in Washington. Another 200 or so US citizens work overseas in directorial and adminstrative positions, supervising operations and programming in the countries where the Peace Corps is invited to serve. The rest of Peace Corps staffing is filled by overseas nationals, people seeking to develop their own countries by working as programmers for the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps budget, $330.8 million for 2008, is infinitesimal--not even a blip in the radar. It is less than half the cost of one Stealth bomber.

Written into the legislation which originally created the Peace Corps is something unique in the federal government: a rule which states that no one can work there more than 5 years. Work time at the Peace Corps is divided into 2 1/2-year tours; most people get two such tours and that's it. A certain percentage of employees are extended for a third tour, thus making their time with the agency 7 1/2 years. If anyone wants to work there again (and most do), they cannot be considered until they have been out for as long as they were in. Those who come back are called "recyclers." Since, once bitten by the bug the addiction appears permanent, there are always lots of people recycling themselves through. This "five-year rule," as it's called, keeps the agency vital, with a constant turnover of new blood in the form of people fresh from volunteer assignments overseas, very dedicated to the agency's mission and eager to work hard to advance it. It also happens to keep the agency cheap, since hardly anybody stays long enough to make an extremely high salary, and virtually no one retires from it.

But as you know if you've been following me for a while, I had a full-fledged, 27-year career at the Peace Corps, and I did retire from it. How did I manage that? Lucky timing, nothing but.

The Peace Corps was a Kennedy invention, by far the highest-profile legacy of that administration. Richard Nixon did not like the Kennedys and so wasn't all that fond of the Peace Corps. His fondest wish was to get rid of the agency altogether, but it had too many friends among the general public, as well as on Capitol Hill, to do that, so he decided to "streamline." Nixon created an umbrella agency, ACTION, to administer all of the Kennedy-Johnson era volunteer programs. The Peace Corps, VISTA, Foster Grandparents, and all the others, were brought into ACTION. This move had the desired effect of drastically lowering the profile of all of these programs, to the point where many people during this period really believed that the Peace Corps was no more. It also happened to create two tracks of employees within the bureaucracy at ACTION headquarters: Overseas and Domestic Operations. Generally, Overseas Ops people were still hired under the five-year rule; folk in Domestic Ops were not.

After many temporary positions, my first permanent job with the Peace Corps was in its travel office. That was in 1980. Travel was considered part of Domestic Operations, so I was hired as a permanent career employee, a very low-level one, but permanent. When Jimmy Carter came into office, he did away with ACTION and freed up all those programs to regain their former individual identities. This was great news for the Peace Corps--unless you happened to have been hired during the Nixon years as a permanent career employee and had advanced to a level of some responsbility. Suddenly in 1984 a 5-year clock started ticking for those people, who became known as "the class of '89." But lucky me, since due to my utter lack of ambition I was still hard at work at my measely little travel office job in 1984, I was allowed to stay.

Maintenance Man

I trust you'll pardon my French if I say it's just cold as crap here today. Winter blustered back in to these parts last night with a vengeance; we woke to temps in the teens, too cold for my walk, and also too cold to do the next steps on the un-wallpapering chore....I mean, project. The photo above shows the progress we made yesterday. In six hours, we did one room. Come to find out, wallpaper has two layers, the decorative layer, which peels right off like sunburned skin, and the sticky layer, where the real work resides. If you don't know about these two layers, you think you've cut yourself a nice piece of cake when that first layer just comes right off. Oh. But then what's that brown layer underneath??? The sticky layer requires soaking with water and scraping, repeatedly, in that order. Dropcloths, rags, putty knives, paper scraps. I'm showing you the clean version up there.

To finish the job, I have to get a ladder, a bucket of water, and some rags to wipe off the residue of glue that stays behind. I also need somehow to smooth those brown spots down so Steve can come behind me and apply drywall mud, then paint. It's so cold in the house I can't entertain the thought of sticking my hands in water to do that job. It can wait, since Steve can't do his thing until the weekend.

No, Ravel, we will never do wallpaper again! The wallpaper was always Steve's idea, anyway, and I, able to see the charms of both solid paint and patterned paper, just went along with the paper and was happy with it. It was great fun to hear Steve say, again and again yesterday, "never more wallpaper!!!" And, just to drive the point home, I'll say one more time, ever so gently, it's the whole damn house!

This do-it-yourself, handyperson thing was never an activity I was attracted to for myself. I'm used to being around such people, though, because my father was a great do-it-yourselfer, having finished our basement into a beautiful rec room with knotty pine (including a little knotty-pine bar that fit under the stairway), tile and drywall. He went on to design the waterfront house he and my mother retired to. He hired a contractor do the main structure, but together my parents did all of the internal and external finish work. My mother was great with wallpaper and paint.

Steve is a handyman par excellence. He could have made a handsome living as a contractor had he chosen the profession. He has made my life immeasurably more beautiful with his skills. Together, we have literally re-created this house we live in, inside and out. The odd thing about living with someone like that is that he takes these skills for granted and assumes that everyone has them or has an interest in cultivating them. He thinks nothing of repairing electric switches, plumbing, carpentry--things that most normal people would pay good money to have done for them. His creativity is expressed through these projects, though, and my life is enhanced. Not a bad deal.

I once read one of those things that purport to divide personality types into categories, and this particular one had resonance with me: the "maintainer." The one in a group who smoothes the rough patches, the one who finds the humor in a situation, the one trying--not to please people for its own sake, but to make sure they are happy and comfortable. For better or worse, that's me. Somewhere along the line I became aware that we all complain, all the time, with the slightest opportunity. I know I'm a great kvetcher. It seems to be human nature to want to tear down things that don't meet with our approval. But the opposite rarely applies. If things are going well, or if we like something, we rarely voice those positives. "No news is good news." When I made that discovery, I consciously decided to balance my all-too-ready sarcastic criticisms with vocal support of what I think is good. In a competitive office setting especially, you see this happen all the time: a young person just starting out discouraged by general disappoval of the results of some sincere effort. The results may have been lacking in some way, but some very hard work went into them nonetheless. Not to congratulate the effort itself and encourage more of the same seemed short-sighted to me, and unfair. More than once I have even congratulated couples on finding the courage to divorce, knowing how easy it is to put up with the status quo in the face of a difficult but necessary step. I've been rewarded with surprise and gratitude for being, sometimes, the only supportive voice.

It wouldn't be life without disappointment. Sarcasm and the wiseguy putdown are so easy and fun, for some reason more so than a sincere recognition of the positive. It takes a little work at first, but after a while looking for something good becomes second nature. Praise is unexpected, so rare, in fact, that it usually comes as a surprise. The grateful smile that greets it is the best reward of all.

Wallpaper

I'm turning this page over to you today, dear reader, while we begin the dreaded task of Taking Down The Wallpaper. We'll see how it goes on whatever gets done today and then decide whether we will hire someone to finish the job. We have the whole damn house to do! Can't bear to think about it--just do it.

I would love some feedback. How am I doing? Writing too much? Is there any subject you want more of? Give me some ideas to play with. I love doing this but hearing back from you would make it even more fun. Please fill my inbox.

At Liberty

Just to get it out of the way: I hate the word "blog." It sounds like somebody's struggling for a last breath before drowning. Victims of waterboarding probably make the sound. "Blog." AArrgghh. Yuck. Ugly.

Since I started this (excuse me) blogging thing I find that I've basically given myself a new job--but for the first time in my whole life it's a job that I love, no qualification. It answers every criterion I have for an occupation: I can do what I want, when I want, and decide to do not much if I feel like it. True, I'm not getting paid for this, but the satisfaction I get from simply putting some words and music out there, and knowing you even seem to like them, is proof that money ain't everything when it comes to work. You always hear artists who've made a big financial splash say, "I can't believe I'm being paid for this." I may not be an artist but I can say I know what they mean. The love for what they do is enough--the money is icing on the cake.

I'm taking a little a break from the vacation series. I'm working on Australia and New Zealand photos. (The photo above of Mt. Cook in New Zealand is a teaser.) As you can imagine, there are thousands of them. Once, they were all organized, even in web albums, at a now-defunct place called Photosite. When Photosite was pulled down, my albums went with it. I am loading the original discs into Picasa, and in the process discovering the quirks in this mostly great Google product. Hard to combine photos from different discs into one album, for starters. I got to a hurdle this morning and decided I didn't feel like jumping it. So cool....I can do that!

Sounds coming from my open window at the moment are very pleasant. This February morning we are blessed with temperatures in the 60s and are headed for record-breaking 70s. I'd say "global warming," but in these parts we often do get the odd February heat wave. (But oh, yes, there is global warming.) Winter will blow back in with thunderstorms this afternoon. It's overcast now and will remain so, but the birds are showing their thanks for the warmth with wonderful song, and it's very nice, a harbinger of the real thing just a couple of months away.

I have plenty of computer sitting to do today. I'll need to tackle those pictures. I'm also completing the process of loading CDs into my itunes software. I did most of that a long time ago, but there are about 20 CDs--a collection I made of all the number-one hits from the 1920s to the 1960s--yet to be done. It's a big job because itunes doesn't recognize the songs on self-made CDs--you have to put the titles in yourself.

I am very glad I didn't have to vote yesterday. (Hundreds of people in DC and the Virginia and Maryland suburbs called their local election boards complaining that their polling stations were closed--all that Super Tuesday hype had some people thinking every state was taking part. Hell, some of them probably think it's the presidential election...) Anyway, the "Potomac Primary," as it's being called, takes place next Tuesday, the 12th. It's nice to have another week to decide who I think can carry a race all the way to the White House. I'll be doing lots of watching and listening.

Have a wonderful Wednesday.

FOOD FRIDAY!

YUGOSLAV VINEYARD VEGETABLES

Since there is no longer a place that is called "Yugoslavia," I guess the name of this dish gives away its age. I collected it in 1974 from the now defunct American Weekly, the Sunday supplement magazine in one of the local Durham, North Carolina, newspapers. I based myself in Durham as I traveled my little pocket of the South recruiting for the Peace Corps. It's amazing the things you pick up along the way, even when you are in a place only occasionally and for a very short time. I've turned to this recipe on innumerable occasions over the years when I needed a delicious side dish for a crowd. It's simple but festive and showy, a great accompaniment for any meat, and it also makes a good one-dish vegetarian meal.

Even though the portions of the individual ingredients don't look like a lot, this dish takes up a lot of space. Use the very biggest high-sided baking dish you have.

2 cups potatoes, cubed
1 medium green bell pepper, chopped
¼ cup chopped parsley
1 lb. eggplant, cubed (peel if you prefer but it's not necessary)
½ pound zucchini, diced
2 cups carrots, chopped
1 10-oz.package frozen green peas
3 tsps. salt
Black pepper to taste
Tabasco to taste
½ cup raw rice
½ cup water
1/3 cup plus 3 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
2 Tbsp. red wine vinegar
2 lbs. tomatoes, sliced 1/4 inch thick
1 cup jack or Muenster cheese, grated

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Oil a flat 3-quart casserole dish. Using a large bowl, combine all vegetables except tomatoes. Add 1/3 of the cup olive oil, salt, pepper and Tabasco and stir to coat vegetables with liquids. Cover bottom of casserole with half of the sliced tomatoes. Top tomatoes with half the vegetables. Sprinkle rice over evenly, then add remaining vegetables. Top with remaining sliced tomatoes. Drizzle remaining 3 tablespoons olive oil, vinegar and water over all. Cover tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, until rice has absorbed all moisture. Uncover, top with grated cheese. Place under broiler for 2 minutes or until cheese is lightly browned.