From Oil to Othering: A Peanut Butter Journey

You know how sometimes you start off with a jar of peanut butter and end up in deep thoughts about humanity, social justice, and diversity? Of course you do! We've all been there, right?

I like peanut butter. It's not like I must have it or fall into a depression, but it's a food I enjoy. So we bought some peanut butter here in Albania. But they don't have Skippy or Jif or Peter Pan. This is Nancy's Peanut Butter with only one ingredient! (Let's hope it's peanuts.) But Skippy or Jif or Peter Pan would have more than one ingredient. They'd have sugar probably, but in particular, American peanut butter would add an emulsifier.

There is a fascinating mix of languages going on here

It's like oil and water. Everyone knows that they don't mix. When you grind up peanuts, the peanut oil and the peanut mush (that is the butter) separate. They don't mix well, and even though I stirred, it did little to reintegrate the oil into the peanut butter. An emulsifier is an extra ingredient that makes oil and water mix.

So after trying to mix the oil back in, and then spreading the peanut butter on my toast, I ended with a very oily knife. And very oily hands. I do not like that sensation. I remember working at a children's museum in Wisconsin and in setting up for a scout program we had to coat pine cones in shortening. My hands were coated in shortening, it was horrific. And water does nothing to get it off, because shorterning is just solid oil, and it won't mix with water. Luckily, there's soap. That's another ingredient, like an emulsifier, that can make oil and water mix.

So I go from peanut butter to oily hands to being thankful for soap, and that, combined with something I noticed last week in Vienna, leads me to this question of humanity: separation vs. inclusion.

Europe is a very interesting experiment. The countries here are truly nation states. I don't mean nation as in a country and its boundaries. I mean the real word nation from the root nat meaning birth. (Think of nativity or natal or native.) Right now I'm in Albania, and the Albanians are distinct ethnic group who are descended from the same ancestors. This is their nation state. Much of Europe, especially post Cold War, is built on this idea, let each "nation" be its own "state."

So they are all separate, right? But on the other hand, they aren't. There are immigrants in many European nation states from other European nation states, or from other continents. How does a nation state balance the idea of "our land for our people" and "inclusivity and diversity are beneficial"? It's a struggle that Europe is still figuring out. They do a lot of it well. But you can look at Kosovo, Brexit, or the French banning hijabs to see that it isn't all working seamlessly.

America has similar, but different, problems. We don't think of ourselves as one nation in the traditional sense. We recognize that all of us are from different places, with different ancestors, different heritages, and what unites us is just our sense of being Americans. But even knowing we are all different, we still have a lot of othering based on skin color, religious beliefs, number of generations that have been in the country, or even just the way we each speak English (or worse, some other language.)

Thinking of "othering," it put me in mind of something I saw last week in Vienna. I visited Votivkirche. This is a beautiful church in the French neo-Gothic style. The front facade is incredibly reminiscent of Notre Dame aside from being bright white. There are peaked arches above the doors and in those arches are statuary of luminaries from the Bible and the post-biblical Catholic world. I noticed one of these statues in particular: Moses.

The Votive Church

You know it's Moses because he is carrying the tablet of law, he has just received the Decalogue (today called the Ten Commandments). But there is another distinguishing feature: he has horns. They look almost like extra bunny ears or something, but they are horns.

Moses, tablet and horns included

I've seen Moses with horns in other places. And I heard tales, as a kid, of people in America who honestly believed that Jews have horns. But where does this come from? I decided to find out, and what I found is a fascinating mix of translation, church politics, and good old-fashioned othering.

In the book of Exodus, the Lord visits Moses to deliver the Decalogue. But he's warned, Moses can't look on the face of the Lord. It would kill him. So he goes into a crevice in the rock and he only sees the Lord's back. And even that is enough to change Moses's appearance. When he comes down the mountain, he doesn't realize he looks different. But the Israelites at the bottom notice it right away. His face is radiant, as if rays of light are shining out from him. That's how it's described in the original Hebrew.

Jump ahead to the fourth century CE and a monk named Jerome is translating the Jewish Bible into Latin. This translation is knows as the Vulgate. (Even though this ends in "gate" like every American political scandal since Nixon, it has nothing to do with special prosecutors.) Jerome didn't have a Latin word that precisely described rays of light shining from the face. The word he chose was cornuta, which literally means horns are sprouting from Moses's face. (Cornuta meaning horned corresponds to our use of "corn" for horn. Think of unicorn or Capricorn or cornucopia. But don't think of popcorn. I dare you not to.)

The Vulgate became the most popular translation of the Bible in the Roman Christian world. Generations of Europeans read a text which told them Moses had horns coming out of his head.

But the elite, the theologians, the church elders, they knew the original meaning, they didn't understand Moses to have horns. And for centuries, artwork that depicted Moses did not include horns. In those early centuries of Christianity, an effort was made to associate Jesus with Moses, to help legitimize the idea of a miracle worker. But then we get to medieval times, the historical period and not the dinner theater with people on horses, and things changed.

Christians wanted to distance themselves from Jews. The church, though still using the Jewish Bible as the foundation for its scripture, declared in 1215 that all Jews had to dress differently, they weren't even allowed to go outside during Holy Week. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from the entire island of Britain. In many European kingdoms, Jews were not allowed to own land. And even though the church's leader knew the original meaning of the story in Exodus, it is in this time that art depicting Moses starts to show him with horns. He's still a pretty major character of the Bible, you have to depict him. But let's make sure he looks different from Christians.

Because words matter, images matter. What's the difference between an illegal immigrant and an undocumented immigrant. Nothing, but one sounds worse. What's the difference between a Moses without horns and one with horns? Maybe just a mistranslated word, but I suspect most people don't do any research into why they see Moses with horns and don't know it's about translation. They just make their own judgment about what it means. (And we don't tend to associate horned people with the good guys.)

I understand that we evolved to be very social creatures, to feel part of a trible, and have the us vs. them mentality. But we need to find ways to broaden the us category to include everyone and shrink the them to nothing, or we will always have strife, discrimination, and injustice. And we're humans, we can do better. Ghandi is often quoted as saying "Be the change you want to see in the world." He didn't say that, but he said something with a similar sentiment. Regardless, I would like paraphrase:

No more us and them, no more oil and water. We can do better. Be the emulsifier.

Fly Like an Eagle

It's a tale of a hero, a city, a name, and the next step on our adventures. Onward to the Eagle's Land!

I refer to Albania, which Albanians call Shqipëria and they call Albanians Shqiptarët. The name literally means "Eagle's Land." The stretch of the Balkan Mountains in Albania is said to be particularly impassable. Not even the crows could live or travel there. Only the eagles and the bold, superhuman Shqiptarët could possibly manage it.

That being said, there are crows in Albania and the land has been conquered throughout history by several non-superhuman, non-Shqiptarë empires including the Ottomans. That will be important to the story of our hero.

What's crazy is how long the Albanians have been in this land. There are definitive historical records from the second century CE, but older records from the second century BCE that may refer to them. The Albanian language is nothing like the Slavic languages of Albania's Balkan neighbors. That's because the Albanians were in the Balkans long before the Slavs arrived.

Still, the Greeks did conquer this land, and later the Romans, and later the Ottomans, and later the Hungarians, but the Albanians have held on to their culture and language.

Alrica and I are in the city of Vlorë, Albania, but we got to spend a few days in Tirana, the capital. It is a lively city with a very modern city center. But in other parts of the city, the old ways still live on.

In the center of town is Skanderbeg Square. This is named for the great Albanian hero, Gjergj Kastrioti. Wait, Erich, was is it called Skanderbeg Square instead of Kastrioti Quadrilateral? Okay, let me get there.

Look, Skanderbeg's got a sword!

 

Gjergj Kastrioti was a nobleman in a time when the Ottomans ruled the region. He was sent to the Ottoman Empire as a boy as a hostage. He went to Edirme, Turkey. Here the Ottomans converted young Gjergj to Islam and gave him a new name: Iskander (which is their version of Alexander.)

Gjergj/Iskander was sent to military school, literally a school to learn to be in the military. He did very well, and after graduation, the Ottomans appointed him as the bey of the Sanjak of Dibra. This, by the way, is where the name comes from. Iskander the Bey, became Skanderbej, or in some spellings Skanderbeu, or in some spellings Skanderbeg.

So far, so good. Skanderbeg proves himself to be a more than capable military leader. He is sent with other Turkish forces to fight in present day Serbia at Niš. Play the dramatic music!

Here, Skanderbeg abandons the Ottoman Army, joins up with fellow Albanians fighting, rejects Islam, returns to Christianity, and fights against the Empire that educated him. He returns to his homeland, reclaims his principality, forms an alliance with other regional princes, takes command of their combined forces and repels 13 Turkish invasions during his lifetime. He's such a good military leader that Pope Calixtus III (I didn't even know there was one Calixtus, let alone three of them) named Skanderbeg the Captain General of the Holy See. Then after Calixtus III died, the new Pope, who realized Calixtus was a mouthful and so took the name Pius II, proclaimed Skanderbeg would lead the Catholic forces in a new crusade. But Pius II died before they got the armies all gathered, so that crusade never happened.

Still, Skanderbeg is the greatest hero of Albania, and the main square in the capital city is named in his honor. Surrounding the square are the Opera, the International Hotel, the National Library, the museum of culture, and more.

There is the beautiful Et'hem Bej Mosque. Inside men are preparing an enormous tapestry that will one day adorn the Kaaba. The Kaaba is the huge cubic black building in the city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia that devout Muslims walk around during the Hajj. The Kaaba is decorated with these tapestries which are embroidered with thread that has gold and silver in it. The man working on the tapestry explained to us that when this was done it would have over 500 kilograms of gold and over 600 kilograms of silver in it through the thread. That's a lot of thread! (I'm also impressed with the gold and silver, but can you imagine 1100 kg of thread?) 

Within the mosque

 

We went to the Pyramid of Tirana. Here you can climb the steps to the top and get a lovely panoramic view of the city and the mountains that surround it. In some ways it reminds me of Reno, surrounded by mountains. But the Balkans are greener than the less lush mountains of the Sierra Nevada on the rain shadow side. And the Balkans have these sheer vertical faces where no plant life grows and you just see the black exposed rock face.

We also visited Checkpoint, which is an old bunker from the times when Albania was communist during the Cold War. There is a piece of the Berlin Wall there, a gift from Berlin. And there are several monuments to freedom. The Albanians haven't forgotten what it was to be ruled by autocrats and they don't want to go back.

Alrica emerging from the bunker

 

The Wall formerly known as Berlin

The food in Albania is crazy good. Because of where it is situated, there are Turkish and Greek influences, Italian influences, and Balkan influences. We've enjoyed souvlaki and durum, delicious pasta dishes, and fantastic gelato. I had a traditional Albanian dish called fergesë which is made of bell peppers and a cheese something like cottage cheese. It's very flavorful. And we had some of the best pizza we've ever enjoyed. It has a sausage on it that they call sallam pikant, which translates as spicy sausage. But it isn't spicy meaning full of capsaicin. Rather it had almost a curry like flavor. 

Fergesë pronounced fair-GEH-zuh

The Albanian people are very friendly. They appreciate even the few words of Albanian that I know, and most of them, especially anyone young, speaks pretty good English.

I am sure I will have more to say as we spend more time in Vlorë, but that will have to wait until I fly like an eagle into the future.

Visitation After the Divorce

When I was back in school learning my geography, there was a country in Europe called Czechoslovakia with capital city Prague. And now, well past my school years, I finally got there. Except I didn't. Because there is no such country any longer.

Czechoslovakia formed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it was made up of two distinct ethnic groups who considered themselves different from one another, the Czechs and the Slovaks. The Slovaks wanted their own country with their own capital in lands that were peopled by Slovaks. And so an independence movement began.

But unlike many other places in Eastern Europe that wanted a split, this one happened peaceably. No blood was spilled, no forces were marshaled, no musicals will be written of the bloody revolution. The two sides just agreed to separate. It was so harmonious, and so unusual, that this event got its own name: The Velvet Divorce.

So what was once Czechoslovakia is now Czechia and Slovakia, two separate countries. And I visited Slovakia, namely its capital city, Bratislava. (Not just me, Alrica was there too.)

Bratislava has an interesting past, having been controlled by various empires in the past. For a long time it was part of the Hungarian empire. Did you know that Bratislava was even its capital for awhile? You see, what we consider Hungary today was captured by the Ottomans and the Hungarian rulers moved their seat of government to a land they still controlled. Rulers of the empire held their coronations in St. Martin's Cathedral in Bratislava. There are these tokens in the flagstones that show the path of the procession that monarchs took to their coronation.

It's a crown. Get it?

Bratislava has an old town, the part that has existed for centuries. It was once surrounded by an entire city wall, but much of that is gone. There were four gates you could use to enter the city. Today, only one of those gates remains: Michael's Gate.

Showing it from a distance so you can see most of the height of it

The Old Town has flagstone streets (which didn't stop people from going about with rolling luggage.) One site I enjoyed was this large building that was originally built to be a convent. The order of nuns believed in things being very plain, including their building. But there was one exception, it has one spire which is architecturally leagues ahead of the building it is attached to.

One of these things is not like the other one.

We ate the national dish of Slovakia, bryndzové halušky. It is a sort of potato dumpling (think gnocchi) with a white cheese sauce (the cheese is called bryndza) and bacon. It's a hearty food, not my favorite, but not bad either. I'm glad to have tried it.

Now you've seen it, not the same as trying it, but something.

The trip from Vienna is very easy. Normally you just take a quick train ride from one city to the other. But due to recent flooding, we had to take a bus from Vienna to Brück and then take a train from there. (It was train first and then bus to get back.) And at the train station in Vienna you can buy a ticket called The Bratislava Ticket. This not only covers your ride to and from Bratislava but also covers your use of Bratislava public transportation for the day you bought the ticket. (You can actually use the train part to come back up to two days after you left Vienna, but the Bratislava public transportation is only for the first day.)

So Alrica and I have now been to 36 countries, and as I type this I am sitting in the airport waiting to head to our 37th, Albania. More on that, presumably, soon. But, unlike Slovakia, Albania was a country back when I was learning my geography as a kid.

Hot Dog!

A hot dog, as everyone knows, is an American born name for a sausage originally called a frankfurter. That's because it is a type of sausage that has been made in Frankfurt, Germany for centuries. And no, I am not in Frankfurt. But the hot dog is still relevant. Because the other name used for a hot dog in the United States is a wiener. These days we use wiener more to refer to things with a certain hot dog like shape, such as a dachshund or a piece of male anatomy.

But did you know that wiener, like frankfurter, is named for a city? It is a type of sausage traditionally made in Vienna. And that's where I am now, which is why hot dogs are relevant.

Look at that elegant hydrant

The Viennese refer to their city as Wien. And in German, the "w" has a "v" sound. So it sounds like Vien. And things from Vienna are Wiener. The system of public transportation is the Wiener Linien. A famous composition by Stauss is Wiener Blut (Viennese Blood). Here wiener is not a reference to anything phallic. Or is it? It could have a double meaning.

Leaning into the phallic side of Wiener?

Vienna is fantastic! This is a city rich in culture. There is art, architecture, and so much music. It has beautiful churches, castles, and governmental buildings. And the public transportation is beyond reproach. You can get to so many places. They have the U-bahn, which is trains, sometimes underground like subways, sometimes overhead like elevated trains, and that requires sometimes they are at ground level. (That's the intermediate value theorem, people. MATH! Oh, sorry, I'm in Europe. I mean MATHS!)

Baroque style, am I right? Neo-baroque?

There are also buses, light rails, and regional rails. It is so easy to get from one place to another in Vienna. We are about halfway through our time here, and I know Vienna is someplace we will have to return to sometime. Last night, Alrica and I went to a concert inside a beautiful building. There was a string quintet accompanied by piano, a baritone, a soprano, and works by Mozart, Rossini, Vivaldi, Lehar, Kalman, Monti, and Strauss. (In German, the double s is written as ß so his name is Strauß.)

We have ridden around the city on a hop on/hop off bus. We visited St. Stephen's Church, which is fantastically beautiful.

The inside is beautiful too, but harder to get good pictures.

And the food is varied and fantastic. Vienna has immigrants from all over the world. So we've had a mix of traditional Viennese foods like Schnitzel and from all over the world like phơ, durum, buruk, and le mien (which in America is chow mien.) And yes, you can get hot dogs too. And brats, and currywurst, and, well, a variety of hot dog-esque offerings.

One surprise has been how common English is here. I don't mean people speaking it, though that's pretty common too. I mean on signs. You see it in advertisements, store fronts, store names, internet video ads, and all over. And I don't mean translations. Yes, sometimes at a site there is a panel with the history of the place and it also translates that into English. But here, you often see English alone in those more commercial ventures. Also, and I suspect this is primarily designed to make Alrica crazy, they don't always know how to spell English words.

If you are hungy, maybe go for a wiener

There was an old commercial in which a child sang, "I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener." Well, I don't know about the Oscar Meyer part, but I wouldn't mind being a Wiener. (Which some of my readers will say I already am, in the less geographic way.)

Leaving Circadia

Ptolemy had a problem to deal with. Here I am not talking about Ptolemy the son of Cleopatra, but instead the famous mathematician/astronomer. In his ancient society, and in many others of his time, the consensus said that the Earth was the center of the universe, literally. Everything rotated about the Earth.

To a casual observer, that might make sense. The sun took one day to go around the Earth. You could see it move. The stars also seemed to go around the Earth, and it took them close to a day to do so. If you didn’t know the Earth was spinning, this idea that everything else is orbiting the Earth isn’t so bad.

There were some commonplace things that it didn’t explain without some fixes: Why do we have more hours of sunlight in the summer and fewer hours in the winter? The sun isn’t going in a circle that is perfectly east/west, but wobbles north and south too. Why are there phases of the moon? Same as the answer even after the heliocentric model, it is because of the shadow of the Earth. But what about the wanderers?

The wanderers are the planets. The word planet comes from the Greek word for wanderer. They’re called that because they messed up the system. If they were just circling the Earth, they would always be going the same way, like the Sun is always going west. But there were these five bodies, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn that sometimes turned around and went the other way. How could that be? (There are more planets than that, but until the telescope was invented, nobody knew that. You can’t see them with the naked eye.)

So Ptolemy had to explain this crazy phenomenon. Today, with the heliocentric model we can explain this. The Earth moves around the sun with a different period than the other planets. Imagine we are "lapping" Mars in our relative orbits. Then from our point of view, Mars is heading backwards. It’s like when you pass a truck on the highway, if you are just looking at the truck and not the trees behind it, it looks like you are still and the truck is moving backwards. But Ptolemy didn’t imagine a solar system with the sun at the middle.

So his solution was more complicated, but it explained what was going on. Each of those five planets was moving in a smaller circle that had at its center some point that was orbiting the Earth. There was nothing at that center point, nothing solid. It was just a point in space. (Remember, this is way before Newton and an understanding of gravity.)

I know readers are wondering what Ptolemy has to do with anything. But if you’ve read enough of my blog posts, you probably aren’t too worried about that. You already know: Frequently I have no point! Why should I start now?

Okay, it’s not a random non-sequitur. I want to ask this: Any flat-earthers out there, how do you explain time zones? Why would we need them if the Earth were flat? Wouldn’t the entire Earth be lit at once (probably all the time)? Or even if the sun did “set” by going under the disc, wouldn’t the entire Earth go dark at the same time? But that’s clearly not what happens. And I know because I’m living through the effects of time zones right now.

You see, I just had twenty-four hours in which I did everything I could to mess up my own body’s circadian rhythm. I’ve slept (but not enough) at wrong times, eaten (I had enough) at wrong times, and taken care of other biological imperatives (let’s not quantify their enoughness) at, you guessed it, wrong times.

To explain, I started those twenty-four hours in Virginia, USA, and ended those twenty-four hours in Vienna, Austria. Now those out there who have some idea of how planes work might think, "how did you make a plane go that slow?" Those of you who have traveled already know the answer: It wasn’t a direct flight!

Dulles Selfie! Not a great picture, huh?

We flew from Dulles Airport in Dulles, Virginia to Keflavik Airport in Iceland. That was the long flight, six hours. But it took us from 6:50 PM to 4:55 AM, which is way more than six hours, right? That’s time zones, baby! I did manage to get some sleep on the flight, but only near the end, when it seemed late enough to my body to sleep. (And at great peril to the muscles in my neck and shoulders.)

Keflavik Selfie! I don't really look much happier, do I?

Then we flew from Keflavik Airport to London Stansted in the UK from 6:40 AM to 10:40 AM, though that was only a three-hour flight. (Much like the three-hour tour of the Minnow, but we didn’t end up stranded on an unchartered desert isle. Also, I’ve watched Gilligan’s Island, and it seemed to have fabulously lush flora for a "desert" isle. Why wasn’t it an unchartered jungle isle?)

Stansted Selfie! At least I have something like a smile here.

So based on the time we landed, we got "lunch". But my body thought that 11:30 AM was 6:30 AM, so this was breakfast. In fact, it was a much earlier breakfast than I normally eat. (If I normally ate breakfast, which I don’t. Normally.) And we were stuck in London Stansted for about eight hours. So we ended up having "dinner" which was "lunch" as far as I could tell.

The last flight was short, only two hours long, but our takeoff was delayed for over an hour while we were sitting on the plane. So the 6:20 PM to 9:30 PM two hours became a 6:20 PM to 10:50 PM more than three hours. Honestly, that’s fine. Given the state of air travel today, I’m thrilled to have only experienced one delay of just over an hour.

Vienna Selfie! Wow, I really suck at taking selfies.

But in the interest of trying to get into the pattern of Vienna (which is where we landed and we will stay for a week), this was way too late for dinner. Besides, by the time we caught the train and the subway train and go to our place and got our key and got inside, it was after midnight. But to our bodies, this was just after 6 PM, and though our sleep had been fitful the previous day, we couldn’t get ourselves to sleep.

As you can imagine, my body is a bit miffed right now. This morning and beyond, I slept until 12:45 PM. (Though I don’t think I fell asleep until after 2:00 AM.) Now it isn’t even 8:00 PM and I am already yawning. I ate my lunch, if we’re calling it that, at close to 3:00 PM. My brain says, "Mission accomplished, we have transitioned our time zone understanding," my body is more like, "We? Don’t say ‘we’ brain. Cause most of ‘we’ isn’t with you."

I’m very excited about that previous sentence because my wife is a stickler for using single quote marks only for quotes within quotes (the American way) and I got to do so, appropriately. (At least I think it was appropriately, but we’ll see what she says when I show it to her. I will keep the single quotes, so this paragraph still means something. But you will have to ask her if I am sleeping on the metaphoric punctuation couch tonight.)

Anyway, the point is we made it safely into the next phase of our adventure. And while my brain is excited, my body is letting the excitement build in more of a slow burn. I wish everything in me worked together as seamlessly as Ptolemy’s circles orbiting points on circles orbiting Earth. If only Ptolemy were still alive, I could ask him to come up with a model to deal with the anti-circadian perils of modern-day travel for the weary wanderer. But hey, that makes me a wanderer, a planet. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Erich! (All right, and Alrica.)

Which Shall Not Be Named

I haven't posted in some time. Not since February, and you can read why by looking at that last post. Since then, we've been to a lot of places: All over Oregon, Seattle, the Bay area, back to Reno, Denver, West Des Moines, Cheyenne, Ithaca, outside Cleveland, and now near Charleston, West Virginia. So maybe there is a lot to cover in that time frame.

Maybe there is, but I don't want to cover it. I'm thinking about something in the future, not so much about the past.

Next week, Alrica and I leave the country. We move on to an international lifestyle, and who knows when we will come back. Okay, that's only partially, true. We know we will be back in the states in summer 2025—we have two weddings to attend—but really it is more like we will be visiting the USA, not living here.

In some ways I am excited to start this adventure, traveling abroad and this time without kids. It will be a different experience. But in some ways I am nervous about it too. I know we did this before, but somehow it doesn't feel the same.

But there is one object which exemplifies my nervous energy at the prospects before me. It's The Car Which Shall Not Be Named.

Don't you dare name this car!

 

For those who don't know, The Car Which Shall Not Be Named is the Hyundai that Alrica and I still own, which has taken us all around this country (and into Canada.) But also the name of The Car Which Shall Not Be Named is not The Car Which Shall Not Be Named. Because The Car Which Shall Not Be Named has no name. You see, it shall not be named.

Let me explain more fully. Personally, I am a big fan of naming cars.

• The first car that was truly mine was named Little Red Car. Yes, it was a little, red car. And yes, that wasn't my most creative name. But that was its name. It just felt like its name.
• The first car that Alrica and I bought together, while we still lived in New Jersey, was Primal.
• In West Des Moines, we got a second car which did have a name, but I can't write it here, not because it must be censored or bowdlerized, but because it can't be spelled. The name was two percussive beats. What do I mean by that? Take your hand and tap a table or wall nearby twice. That was the name of the car. I recognize that name comes across as a bit crazy. But right after I got the car, I was going somewhere with Carver in the backseat. And I asked him what we should name the car, and he slapped his hand against the door twice. So that was the car's name. Sure, Alrica pointed out that Carver wasn't even one-year-old yet, and maybe he wasn't qualified to name the car. But no, it was a great name. Again, it just felt right, it was the name of that car.
• Eventually, when we lived in Pennsylvania, our two percussive beats had to be replaced. Alrica had been driving Primal, but when we got a new car, that became hers and I started driving Primal again. This time Syarra named the new car, and yes, she was old enough to give it a verbal name which can be spelled: The Magical Car.
• We sold both Primal and The Magical Car when we left to travel the world for two years. But when we returned to the USA we bought a used car. It's very first trip was a long one. It traveled from Boynton Beach, Florida (where we had been staying with my parents) to Lancaster, Pennsylvania (to visit friends from our life before travel) and then to West Des Moines, Iowa (to visit some of my family), and then to Harper, Texas (to visit some of Alrica's family), and finally to Reno, Nevada (where we would make our new home). So we looked up the longitude and latitude of each of those locations. We took the arithmetic mean (yes, the average, but I'm a mathematician, so get used to me being mathy or mathic) of the longitudes and the arithmetic mean of the latitudes. We then looked up that location on a map. It was in the Ozark National Forest. And so the car was named Ozark.

For awhile we only had the one car, but that became impractical. So eventually we got another car for Alrica's use. And of course, I wanted to name it. But Alrica isn't totally on board with naming cars. And she insisted that for a car to be named it had to earn its name. The problem is that no one (except maybe Alrica, and maybe even including Alrica) knows the parameters involved in "earning" a name.

We had a string of unfortunate cars there. The first car for Alrica in Reno didn't last terribly long. The kids and I called it "Her Car" or Herc for short. But of course, only when not discussing it with Alrica. The second car for Alrica in Reno didn't really last much longer. The kids and I called that one "Your Car" or York for short. Again, not when talking with Alrica. But the third car lasted! It is the very Hyundai that was and is the whole point of this post.

Even now, though we have sold Ozark and only have the one car for more than a year, we still are living by Alrica's rule that the car doesn't get a name unless it earns a name and only Alrica can determine when such a name has been earned. No worries, because the kids and I have always called it The Car Which Shall Not Be Named.

Alrica will then scold us, saying we shouldn't call it that, because that is not the car's name. And we all agree wholeheartedly, the car has no name and realistically never will. That's why we call it The Car Which Shall Not Be Named. It's not a name, it's a condition. It's a state of being.

And this past 13 months, it has been a state of being. It has been the only consistent "place" we have. Jumping around the country and house sitting is exciting. But there is a security in knowing that if anything goes wrong, a home owner cancels or the internet goes out or a meteor destroys the house—one of those is more far-fetched than the others, I will leave it to you to decide which is which—we can always hop into The Car Which Shall Not Be Named and get to a hotel, public library, or fallout shelter. (Yes, I suppose a car could also be destroyed in a meteor strike, but really what's the likelihood of that?)

In a way, The Car Which Shall Not Be Named is a safety net or a security blanket, even though it is a car and not a net and not a blanket. (Though it has a heater if we're cold, so, you know, it shares some qualities with a blanket. It does not, however, easily spread over a bed. Or so I would assume. I haven't tried.)

Before we fly out next week, we are going to sell The Car Which Shall Not Be Named. And honestly, that is the psychological barrier I can't seem to overcome. Yes, a day of flying is going to suck, but it's just a day. Selling the car, wow, that's the end of an era. That's the last string that ties us to a previous lifestyle, even though it is a car and not a string. Metaphorically cut that string and we're free-falling. Each time I think of it, my heart rate increases just a little bit. Am I scared? Not exactly. Maybe I'm anxious, here not meaning eager but instead having a smidgen of anxiety.

I guess this blog post, the first after such a long dry spell, is a salute to a fine vehicle that has driven us through storms, over mountains, on snow covered highways, and the occasional nice stretch of dry road under sunny skies. So goodbye four-wheeled friend.

I guess you'll never earn a name now. But you know what? Maybe that's the way it should be. Then you can always remain, at least in my mind, The Car Which Shall Not Be Named.