[Content warning: Definitely not vegetarian]

Greetings, friends. This morning I woke up with irritated sinuses and a slight sniffle. The reason why will become apparent momentarily.

Besha and I went to Costco yesterday for $900 worth of staples, even though we are planning to move house in a few weeks, because I’m not entirely certain that the Trump regime won’t invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 when the Department of Homeland Security releases its report on April 20th. While it may seem far fetched now that the Federal government would occupy Portland with military force, I will simply observe that neither good sense, decency, nor the rule of law has restrained the current regime so far. That, and the foolhardy trade tariffs, make it seem worth the trouble to lay in dried staples and canned goods, while they are readily available. If we haven’t used them by next spring, we will donate them to the local food bank, and buy more. I’m also pricing out dual-fuel portable generators.

The most expensive item on yesterday’s Costco receipt was a bag of frozen salmon fillets, which is what passes for culinary luxury in this house. The second most expensive item was a Costco-sized bag of bully sticks for the dog. These are not a luxury — they are utterly essential for distracting her when she gets rambunctious and annoying.

Greetings, friends. Happy Imbolc to all who celebrate! And also a Happy Lunar New Year!

Yesterday was also Groundhog’s Day, which will always make me think of my mother, because it was unquestionably her favorite secular holiday.

I don’t think it was because she spent half her life living in Pennsylvania, the cultural and spiritual home of the holiday. Although I’m sure that didn’t hurt.

My mother was not always great with quotidian minutiae, but she loved a grand gesture. She was a big one for birthdays, because birthdays are a prime opportunity for grand gestures, like throwing a party.

Greetings, friends. We’re into the last few hours of the first month of 2025, and I’d like to do a bit of stock-taking. Taking stock? I just experienced semantic satiation writing this paragraph, which I was only able to break by investigating the etymology of the idiom “take stock”. Reddit says it was attested in English in 1736 with the denotation of “compiling an inventory of dry goods”. So there you go.

At the end of December, Besha and I used the long hours on the road to Joshua Tree, and the blessed respite of a few days holiday in the desert to formulate some goals for the new year.

One of the few broadly applicable ideas I acquired in my interminable years in Silicon Valley was the notion that no goal is truly a goal unless it is “SMART”: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. If it isn’t something concrete that you are likely to be able to complete definitively within a specifiable timeframe, it’s not a real goal.

Let us be charitable and call this sort of non-goal an ambition. It’s a thing you want to do, sure, but the means and/or plan is nebulous or lacking.

Greetings, friends. When I feel the need to write something that I don’t want to write, I am capable of the most astonishing things. Emails get answered. Plants get watered. Chores get done. Anything but writing the thing I need to get out of my head but don’t have the emotional energy for. This post is about a year overdue.

You may remember that I was posting to this journal by the day, right up until I packed the truck and left my mother’s old home forever. Part of it was that I was just exhausted by the experience.

But after taking the second half of 2023 off, I found I had another problem, which was that my journal was hosted on Substack, and they were making money off white supremacist content. They had terms of service but weren’t enforcing them.

Substack, basically, was turning into the punk bar that Michael Tager posted about so eloquently:

Greetings, friends. A few nights ago, I was lying in bed, eyelids getting heavy, while listening to my favorite soporific:

There are warnings of gales in all areas… The area forecasts for the next 24 hours: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire. Southerly 4 to 6, backing southeasterly 7 to severe gale 9, veering southwest gale 8 to storm 10 later, showers, rain later, good, occasionally poor… Shannon. Cyclonic, storm 10 to hurricane force 12, becoming west, gale 8…

My eyes shot open. Hurricane force 12?

In seven years of listening, I’d never once heard the phrase “hurricane force 12”. Holy shit. The Beaufort scale doesn’t go any higher than twelve.

Greetings, friends. Last time I attempted to honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by reflecting on some of his words and their relevance to our time. Today I will tell a story that would probably have made the Reverend Dr. King wince and shake his head in sadness.

As I have surely mentioned, I was not the most well-adjusted teenager. I came to public high school with a poor sense of social norms and not particularly good impulse control. I did have a handful of close friends, but I think most of my peers regarded me with bewilderment, when they regarded me at all. In my senior year, I was voted “most individualistic”... along with my friend Krista, may her memory be a blessing.

That all lay in the future. This was my freshman year; it was 1992, and I grew out my hair and wore flannel shirts and jeans torn at the knees. I idolized Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains and I listened to classic rock and an awful lot of Guns ‘n Roses. But I'd always been a big kid and had never really been a target for the physical kind of bullying.

Greetings, friends. For years, I have considered myself a utopian humanist. I believe that the greatest good is the permanent and sustainable actualization of the potential of as many human beings as we can lift up.

I believe that the surest way to achieve that is for society to provide its members with the foundations of their hierarchy of needs: Clean food, water, and air, adequate clothing and housing, complete health care, and education into adulthood.

I believe that anything less is a false economy: Anything less and some members of our society scrape to survive, in ways that make life worse for all of us.

For years, I was convinced that utopia was possible for all humanity, if we had the will and the inspiration to achieve it. Bill Hicks said it better than I could:

Greetings, friends. On December 11, 2016, a little over eight years ago, a guy named Eric Garland posted a long thread on Twitter that quickly became infamous. The thread started out like this:

What followed was something like 125 messages about, among other things, a speculative history of Russian interference in US politics, starting from the turn of the millenium, and running clear through the 2016 US presidential election and its immediate aftermath.

This thread took its author almost two full hours to write. It was regarded by some at the time as brilliantly insightful, but by others as utterly unhinged. Notably, Garland’s rant contained virtually no game theory to speak of. For this reason alone, its opening phrase became an Internet meme.

Greetings, friends. Besha and I left Joshua Tree yesterday, scooted across L.A., stopped in Camarillo for a burrito with Erin, and then hauled up 101 clear to Santa Cruz for the night. This morning we caught Jasmine & Kellan en passant for coffee & a stroll along the waterfront in Capitola, then set off for Oakland.

As we were coming into San Jose, Besha noted that we were due to arrive early for our respective social plans, and suggested mounting a side quest to visit the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum.

The what now?

“There’s a museum of Egyptian antiquities right here in San Jose. I’ve never been, but I’ve always wanted to see it. It’s just a couple miles up the highway.”

Greetings, friends. On January 1, 1925, exactly a century ago yesterday, Edwin Hubble addressed the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society to confirm the discovery of Cepheid variable stars in the Great Nebula in Andromeda. This announcement decisively demonstrated the existence of other galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and paved the way for our modern understanding of cosmology.

I still find it hard to believe that, in some sense, humanity’s most advanced conception of the true scale of the universe wasn’t even a century old until… yesterday. My grandfather was born into a world where even the most educated scientists weren’t certain that other galaxies existed. My paternal grandmother was only a few months old when Hubble’s bombshell settled a debate that had raged for years among the leading astronomers of the day: Just how big is our universe?

I am personally obsessed with this question. Not with the answer, I mean. I think, in this the year 2025 of the Common Era, that scientific consensus has a pretty good idea of the extent of the visible cosmos.

I mean that I am obsessed with the question. For as long as human beings have entertained abstract thought, some bright lad or lady out there has probably wanted to know: How big is the world? How far away are the sun, the moon, or the stars? Is there anything beyond them?

Greetings, friends. Happy new year! I celebrated, starting last night, and continuing as I normally do, by sending everyone I love the most obnoxious topical animated GIF I can find.

It really is festive, isn’t it? There, now I have shared it with you. I love you too.

It is Suzy’s birthday and she and Jared and his kids and also his mom are gathered in the guest room of the AirBnB we have rented in Yucca Valley, outside Joshua Tree. They are watching some children’s show on the TV.

Greetings, friends. I returned home Friday from a ten-day roadtrip to California, to my wife - my wife! - informing me that our bathtub faucet had developed a leak in my absence.

“It’s the hot water tap, so not only are we wasting water, we’re also wasting electricity,” Besha said. “I called the plumber but they won’t be here until Thursday.”

We examined the tub together. The hot water tap was plenty tight but the faucet dribbled a pretty steady stream of water. Besha had it running into a gallon kitchen pot, which was already overflowing.

“I hate wasting water,” Besha grumbled.

Greetings, friends. Today I got to see the Portland Thorns FC play their second home game of the season, against Racing Louisville FC. After giving up two goals in the first six minutes, they came back to tie it in extra time, 2-2. Not bad after having lost their previous two games, but not great for a club that sat at the top of the NWSL for much of last season, and who were league champions the year before that.

You could be forgiven for not knowing who the Thorns are; I had never heard of them before I moved to Portland, either.

You probably already knew this, but I’m vaguely embarrassed to admit that my favorite spectator sport is professional American football. Sadly for me, Portland isn’t much of a football town. (Before you bring up U of O, I will point out that Eugene is almost two hours from here.) Most NFL fans around here follow Seattle, but I lived in San Francisco too long to root for the Seahawks.

Greetings, friends. It’s been a while. Those of you who know me — and let’s face it, you all know me — probably are aware that my emotional health waxes and wanes over time. One key sign of depression for me is a tendency to fall off of maintaining habits that require sustained investment without providing an immediate dopamine reward, in favor of ones that do, like playing video games.

Contrariwise, one can tell that I’m doing well, mentally and emotionally, if one can answer yes to the following three questions:

1. Is Schuyler writing?

2. Is he running?

3. Is there something fermenting in his kitchen?

No joke. For the last couple months, the answers have respectively been, (1.) no, (2.) not really, and, (3.) actually, yes.

Greetings, friends. Yesterday was the first anniversary of my mother’s death.

A lot has happened in a year. The first half of the past year was dominated by the aftereffects of her passing. I thought I would spend the remaining half telling a little more of her story, and be done by now.

By all rights, I should be done by now. Jewish law and tradition do not permit us not to grieve forever. We get three periods of mourning when we are bereaved of a parent, each one a widening container to hold our grief, but each one also rigidly circumscribed in time. We are allowed to grieve… but not permitted to wallow.

Greetings, friends. In the last couple days, I’ve been trying to apply a lesson I’ve learned about my temper.

Years ago, I had the honor to have on my engineering team at work a colleague named Andy. Andy was one of the most brilliant engineers I have ever had the pleasure to work with.

One day Andy was complaining to me, as his manager, about something that he had been relying on me to do, I don’t recall what, but which I hadn’t done. I told him I would try harder to do it next time.

Andy said to me, “I don’t need you to try harder. I need you to try better. Tell me what you are going to do differently so that this gets fixed.”

Greetings, friends. My grandparents, though dead for many years, nearly caused me to make a grave error in my mother’s name this past weekend.

As I mentioned previously, when my mother passed back in November, we buried her in the Manchester Hebrew Cemetery, which is, incidentally, the only Jewish cemetery in New Hampshire.

How my mother’s final resting place came to be in New Hampshire, of all places, was a simple process of elimination. The rest of our family, including my grandparents and great-grandparents, are all buried in Old Montefiore Cemetery in Queens. My grandmother Lenore is buried in between both of her husbands, a fact which occasioned a wink and an elbow from my uncles during her headstone unveiling.

Greetings, friends. This past week, I went to San Francisco primarily to attend a day-long manager training at my employer’s office. This first session of this nine-week management training course consisted of an eight-hour kickoff workshop, during which the dozen or so of us management trainees were asked to put away our laptops and phones for the day.

If there is one thing I learned from having sat in this management training for the better part of eight hours, it is that I am not cut out for classroom learning.

Having recently re-read my grade school report cards, I realize this is not a surprise. In fact I have always been this way. Classroom learning moves too slow to hold my attention. I haven’t been subjected to this kind of mandatory learning in years. Even at professional conferences, I and about 85% of the other attendees all have phones out or laptops open. I watch most YouTube videos and listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed or faster, unless I am doing something else at the same time.

It wasn’t all bad. The day was peppered with prompted one-on-one and small group discussions which served to anchor the material in practical experience, and offered the chance to get to know some of my colleagues a little better. I just feel like the whole workshop could’ve been about two hours, and I’d have gotten the same amount of value out of it. All of my colleagues seemed engaged so I did my best to hide my considerable discomfort and look like I was paying attention.

Greetings, friends. Yesterday was my mother’s birthday, the first since she died. All I could think to do in honor of it was to text Adah and say hi.

I like celebrating birthdays and making a big deal out of them, which I learned to do from my mother. I like going the extra mile for my loved ones’ milestone birthdays. I think it’s nice to celebrate people and make them feel special once in a while.

When I look back, though, I sort of wonder if my mother’s emphasis on making a big deal out of our birthdays was about us or about her. She liked to make elaborate themed birthday cakes. Some of them were pretty impressive, like the time she baked a cake in the shape of a globe for one of mine, with the continents and oceans elaborately frosted into place.

Greetings, friends. Last Sunday, after visiting the graves of my great-great-grandparents, I continued on through my old ancestral stomping grounds.

Saturday’s rain had moved off elsewhere, and the day started out clear but cool. I drove north. On my way out of Sayre, I passed a cleaning supply house with my family’s name on it. Some third cousin, presumably.

Across the state border in New York, I drove through Waverly, where my grandmother Pippy was born. About a half hour beyond it, I crossed over into Schuyler County, for which I was named, indirectly.

Greetings, friends. My grandfather Luther Erle used to retell the family legend that his grandfather, who was also known as Luther, had ran away from home as a teenager, and lied about his age in order to enlist in the Union army during the American Civil War. At least, I had always regarded the tale as a legend, because stories like this are so common as to be almost cliché, from the ancient Roman legions clear down to Audie Murphy.

After reading Shelby Foote’s monumental history The Civil War: A Narrative over a period of months some years back, I became intensely curious about my family’s own participation in that conflict. I have already told the story of the elder Luther elsewhere, but I hope those of you have heard it before will indulge the reiteration.

My patrilineal great-great-grandfather was baptized Augustus Martin Luther Erle in 1847. He was the eldest surviving son of Carl Ludwig Erle, who was the first Erle in my family in America.

Carl Erle himself originally came from Hanover in 1824 by way of Ellis Island, and then settled in upstate Pennsylvania, which had a large community of German settlers. He became a Lutheran minister and preached entirely in German until the age of 70, when his parishioners petitioned for a pastor who could preach in English. For all I know, he may not have even spoken English.

Greetings, friends. I am writing this in a hotel room in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Since midday Saturday, I have driven or ridden 1,600 miles. I’m tired.

I left Epsom as mentioned after writing my last journal entry. Getting out of New Hampshire is slow if you are trying to go east or west. The entire state, as well as that of Vermont, are oriented north to south, following the Connecticut River and its tributaries, not to mention the passes in the White and Green Mountains. Getting from Concord to Albany involves multiple winding two-lane highways through the foothills.

My initial goal had been to pick up my co-pilot Suzy in Buffalo on Sunday. Suzy had been visiting her family in Ontario, and, being in between jobs at the moment, had graciously agreed to split the driving back to the West Coast in exchange for a free cross-country road trip followed by a flight home to the East Bay. On top of that, Suzy is excellent, easy-going company, and our musical tastes are both ecumenical and well-aligned. Suzy is not the type to object to a four hour Genesis singalong. I would have been a fool to pass up the chance to bring her along.

But the New York Thruway is boring and, moreover, I realized on pondering a map of New York State that my friends Christopher and Marina had recently moved to Elmira, which was only an hour’s detour. Amazingly so, given the geography of New York State. Truth be told, I am unsure when our paths will cross again, because, bless them, they live in Elmira, so I decided the extra driving was well worth it.

Greetings, friends. Everything is packed in the truck. Spoiler alert: It all fit.

Also, the Brooklyn Half Marathon is being run as I write this. Naturally, I am not running in it.

Of course, I am getting ahead of myself. Last Wednesday night, I took a red eye to Philadelphia on the first leg of my trip to finish the work of clearing out my mother’s house and packing everything worth keeping into Leto II of the House Atreides, God Emperor of Arrakis and the Known Universe, or Shai-Hulud for short.

The purpose was to meet up with Shipley in Reading PA, see Mastodon & Gojira double-headlining the Santander Arena, then drive to New Hampshire, spend an evening burning my old school papers, and then he would drive home the next day.

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about a few other things that Besha and I encountered in County Clare in Ireland.

First of course was the Burren itself, large as life. Sea creatures leech calcium from the ocean and combine it with carbon to form hard calcite shells. These shells deposit on the ocean floor, and over geological timescales, become compacted into limestone. Continental drift moves these particular massive blocks of limestone north from the Equator and up above the surface of the water, where they become the bedrock of County Clare. Glaciers and rain containing dissolved acids weather the limestone, causing it to cleave in enormous fractures. Then about 4,000 years ago, for reasons to do with climatic shifts and probably human habitation, a bunch of West Clare’s topsoil washed away.

The result is the Burren. Words don’t really do it justice. It’s karst. I love a good karst landscape. The interior of Puerto Rico where the steep sided valleys formed the dish of the Arecibo radiotelescope. The cenotes of the Yucatan. The green hills of West Virginia. Who doesn’t love a good karst landscape?

Greetings, friends! It’s been a couple weeks since I wrote to this journal. I let a slip become a slide. No apologies. Just getting back in the saddle to ride.

The big news here is that Besha asked me to marry her!

Besha had selected hiking the Cliffs of Moher as our activity for her milestone birthday, which was, after all, the main reason for the entire trip. I had been fairly aching to get out there, because we’d been in County Clare for about 5 days by that point, staying in Doolin just a few miles kilometers down the road. We took a day trip to Inishmore and we could just barely make them out through the haze from the ferry on the way back. I even did a training run at the golden hour one evening following a muddy trail along the ocean that climbed slowly up towards the cliffs. I could see them off in the distance! But we hadn’t actually been there yet.

Greetings, friends. Besha and I are in Ireland! Which is partly why I have not been writing much lately. The hard drop after getting home from New Hampshire was the other part.

On that note — we sold Mom’s house in New Hampshire already. The photos were taken on Thursday the 6th, and the house was put on the market the next day.

Saturday morning there was a kerfuffle with one potential buyer over the cellar drainage, which I already wrote about. Another plumber came and looked things over, again, the net result of which was that we decided to simply add the drainage situation to the disclosures, and let the new owners deal with it.

Sunday morning, I turned on my phone as our flight was landing in Dublin, to find a message saying “We have accepted a great offer!” Say what?

Greetings, friends. I wish a chag pesach sameach, a joyous Passover, to all of you who celebrate. Last night Besha and I did a seder at her house, just the two of us, her first.

We used Mom’s antique copy of Arthur Szyk’s beautifully illuminated haggadah for the proceedings, a thing I don’t think my mother herself ever did, although she did photocopy large sections of it to use in rolling her own haggadot, particularly the ones she made to use in authentic 18th Century replica Passover seders.

Because of course my mom re-enacted authentic 18th century Passover Seders, with dinner cooked over the walk-in brick hearth in her dining room. Because of course she had an 18th Century style walk-in brick hearth in her dining room. This is my mother we’re talking about.

Greetings, friends. I’ve definitely fallen off the horse a bit with this journal. I got back to Portland late last Wednesday and just… sort of crumpled.

Some of it was just the weather. I was in New Hampshire from mid-February almost to the end of March. Central New Hampshire had been in the midst of a brief stretch of mild weather, which broke as soon as I arrived and turned into multiple waves of typical New England winter storms. Nevertheless the six weeks I was there was actually long enough to witness the dead of winter trail off into a protracted thaw. By the end of my stay, much of the lingering snow and ice had melted, and it was actually 60ºF and sunny the day I left.

So it was with some considerable dismay that I returned to winter still in full progress in the Pacific Northwest — colder and more overcast than it had been in New Hampshire when I left. I found myself seriously doubting my major life choices for the first time in a long time… which is a sure sign that I’m depressed.

Over the weekend, I found myself so severely depressed, in fact, that even playing Kerbal Space Program felt like too much work. That’s how bad it was. Pretty much all I wanted to do was sit on the couch and watch history videos about the Napoleonic Wars on YouTube.

Greetings, friends. I’m back in Portland finally. The house in New Hampshire is mostly empty and ready for sale.

Today, I want to talk about how we see reflections of ourselves in the lives of our ancestors. This story has two parts, which hinge on the aftermath of my grandfather Sidney’s passing.

I found a box of mementos of my grandfather in my mother’s dresser drawer. There is an academic medal from Seward Park High School for achievement in science. There is also an identity card in his name from the New York City civil defense force, dated 1956. And there is a button with the Red Cross under the words “I Serve”.

When I stop to think about the disaster preparedness training I’ve done in San Francisco, or the disaster recovery work I had the privilege to do in Haiti — there is no mistaking from whence I come by this inclination. The contents of this box from my mother’s dresser drawer make that plain.

Greetings, friends. We’re down to the final phases of clearing and sorting and repacking.

Brian the Liquidator pronounced the barn finished today. He and his crew have filled two empty shipping containers with the refuse from my mother’s estate, wholly aside from all of the items they have carted away for sale or put by the side of the road.

Having finally identified every single object in the estate that I had any interest in keeping, and having suddenly rid ourselves of the rest, the time has come for me to start winnowing it down to what will fit in the pickup truck, and packing it up to get it out of the way of the real estate photography and subsequent viewing.

In fact, I pushed my flight to Portland back to Wednesday to have a little more time to get it all done. I spent a decent part of the weekend sorting through two 18 gallon plastic bins containing a variety of papers from the entire first half of my life, ranging from instructions from Pennsylvania Hospital to the parents of newborns under intensive care, to philosophy essays I wrote in university.

Greetings, friends. In the course of clearing her library, we found a slim notebook, containing a couple dozen pages, filled with our mother’s handwriting.

The title page reads: “Geese and Other Friends — poems by Sharon Ann Burnston.”

I will be honest. Most of these are not good poems. A few are in free verse, the easiest by far of all poetic forms to abuse. More are in genuine blank verse, which is at least a little better, though not much, unless you are Shakespeare or Tennyson.

My mother was neither. While the poems do read with her distinctive voice and diction, my mother was an awkward human being, and many of these poems are deeply awkward. There is one about me, which I have alluded to earlier, and another about Adah, and one about her therapist, that all demonstrate such a questionable sense of personal boundaries that it makes me wonder seriously if my mother had some kind of personality disorder.

Greetings, friends. Yesterday, Brian the Liquidator finished emptying my mother’s house, aside from the few things I asked him to leave behind, and went to work on the barn.

The house feels awkward now, empty, like putting on someone else’s shoes by accident. It is strange to watch what Nat described to me in an email as “this painful task of dismantling 99% of a life's record of existence.”

I am reminded of Rutger Hauer’s final soliloquy from Blade Runner:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Greetings, friends. Happy Vernal Equinox, and a Nowruz mobarak to you all. As I write this, the man called Brian is upstairs with his associates, very loudly destroying the bed that I slept in from the age of about 4 years old to almost 17.

This happenstance was, in some sense, foreordained, from the moment my mother and step-father divorced. There was no world in which my mother, on her own, was going to have the physical or mental health to want to die anywhere but in this house. There was no world in which she would heed our pleas, and deal with her effects before she became too infirm to do so. There was no world in which either my sister or I was going to want to keep a 40 year old small single bed, nor one in which an estate liquidator would have anything like a viable market for reselling it.

So here we are. The bed leaves the house, and our lives, once and for all, as kindling. Sic transit gloria mundi.

But Adah and I have spent a lot of time since November, but particularly in the past month, trying to dispose of our mother’s effects in accordance with what we imagine her final wishes might have been.

Greetings, friends. Today the estate liquidator got started on the house in earnest.

I say “in earnest” because, actually, Brian the Liquidator got started on Saturday morning, so hot was he to trot. He originally wanted to come at 8 a.m., and I was like, hell no, after last week, I am sleeping in. The garage is open, help yourself to the garage.

I padded out to the kitchen to make myself coffee at about 10 a.m., and the garage door was open and I could see that the garage was already mostly empty.

I grabbed a pad of paper and a felt-tipped pen and wrote “DO NOT REMOVE” in large letters, over and over, once per sheet, and took some gaffer tape and started sticking the handmade signs on things. The dining table my father made. The two cabinets in the kitchen with the cast iron pans and all the food I’m still eating and enough dishes and flatware to eat it with. The refrigerator and the stove, so help me God, but not the washer or the dryer.

Greetings, friends. I don’t have time to write a full journal entry today, so instead I will transcribe a handwritten draft of a letter from my grandmother, addressed to a Mr. Rubin Maloff, Principal, Seward Park High School. I found the draft folded up with other keepsakes in my mother’s dresser drawer. It is undated, but I would estimate that it was written in late 1974 or early 1975. I have edited the contents lightly for clarity.

Dear Mr. Maloff:

My husband Sidney S. Burnston (who may be found in your school records as Sidney Bernstein) had made provision in his will for Seward Park High School to receive a grant of five hundred dollars. We are not wealthy people but he felt a moral obligation to return to Seward Park some measure of what it had given him and what it had made possible for him to achieve.

He came to the United States as an immigrant boy in 1921 and was settled on the Lower East Side. His father died in 1924 and it was very difficult for Sid’s mother, left with three young children to maintain their home. She felt it was necessary, ultimately, for her boys to lease school and go to work. They had all held part-time jobs delivering packages to local shopkeepers, selling handkerchiefs at their stops, running errands and the like. But it wasn’t enough. It was a poverty stricken home.

Someone at Seward Park High, learning of the pressure on my husband to leave school, called on my mother-in-law, and understanding the problem insisted that my husband must remain in school to complete his education. To make it possible, somehow a stipend was arranged. it was explained to my mother-in-law that that the stipend of three or five dollars a week would probably be as much as any salary that could be earned at the time (1928 or 1929). There existed in this family a great reverence for education and my mother-in-law was easily persuaded.

In consequence, my husband continued in Seward Park and I believe your records, if they can be retrieved from your archives for January 1930, will show a high scholastic standing, editorialship of the high school newspaper, awards for English merit, particularly in Shakespearean drama, and a young man voted Most Likely to Succeed.

I didn’t know my husband then and these memories may be faulty. I met my husband at Brooklyn College in 1940. He had already been graduated from Seward Park in 1930, had entered Brooklyn College (Evening Session) before the present building was erected, darting around street cars and traffic in the Joralemon Street and Livingston Street area, racing to classes held in scattered office buildings while maintaining high scholarship and working at whatever presented itself during the day. He had been alternately a messenger in a law office, an apprentice in a commercial photography developing factory and occasionally jobless — it was the Great Depression era.

Through all this desperate scratching for a dollar, he completed the course of study at Brooklyn College with honors and awards. The credits listed after his name in the Brocklandian (the evening session graduation yearbook) are as follows:

[omitted: a list of about a dozen extracurricular activities and academic honors]

He continued in Brooklyn College, working toward his Master of Arts degree. It was at this time that I met him. He remained active in Brooklyn College affairs, the Evening Session Alumni Association, the alumni were separate entities at that time. He was editor in chief of the alumni newspaper: “THE ALUMNITE.”

He remained active in school through one means or another. He joined the civil service ranks in the late 1930’s and worked hi way up the steps to Office Manager in the Department of Social Services. In addition he taught adults at night. This delighted him. He taught basic education leading to an elementary school certificate. Later he taught pre-high school equivalent classes in the WIN program.

Through all these years he had maintained his association within his community, he was an award winning synagogue bulletin, he had the honor of being elected vice president of our congregation. His passing was marked by the entire congregation who attended his funeral and the love and devotion shown by our three children and our grandchildren.

So what have I given you here? An overwhelming document full of facts and figures. And where the man? And where the soul and the humor? Where the delight in a well-turned meaningful witticism? Where the endless unfettered curiosity and growth? Despite illness and eventual incapacity due to crippling arthritis, he never stopped learning, he never stopped teaching. Conversation with him was replete with bright facets, with verbal gems which piqued…

Here the letter trails off in mid-sentence, my recently-widowed grandmother probably overwhelmed then by her grief.

So, my grandfather Sidney, having been the beneficiary of a scholarship to allow him to complete his high school education, left a sum of money to his alma mater as a scholarship for some other worthy student in need. Worth about $3,000 today, the bequest wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing.

Greetings, friends. It has been a busy couple days. Yesterday, I finally got to meet the man called Brian the Liquidator.

Before he came over, Adah had solemnly informed me in no uncertain terms that, once Brian looked the place over, any price he offered for the liquidation was based on his ability to sell anything he chose not to junk. Which meant that basically nothing could be sold or given away from that point forward.

“We can’t bait and switch him,” she said. I agreed.

Brian came at bang on 9 a.m., not in a 30 foot high mecha, but a Hyundai Sonata or something similar. I met him outside. He turned out to be a burly, affable Yankee, and surprisingly garrulous. He swept into the house with impressive energy, appraising everything in sight with a practiced eye the instant we entered.

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about Mom’s words to live by, and a silver ring.

My mother died while I was en route to New Hampshire. Adah had called me on Friday to tell me that she was fading fast, and that I had better book a flight out. I left the next morning.

My flight landed at Logan airport in the afternoon. I turned my phone on when the aircraft landed. It buzzed immediately with a text from Adah, sent while I was in the air. I knew instantly what happened.

“Hey - I know you are in the air but I need you to know upon landing that she’s really taken a turn for the worse,” she had written. “Please call me upon landing. Love you.”

Greetings, friends. Today I started unpacking the mystery boxes in the barn. I didn’t get as far as I planned, and I want to take some photos of things. So I will write about that tomorrow. Instead, here are a couple personal updates.

Being in New Hampshire is not that great for me, to be perfectly honest. I have a full time job, which is fine, and then on top of that, there is the estate, which feels like a full time job. Subtract time dedicated to cooking, eating, sleeping, and bathing, and there is not much left over.

Which is probably good, because there’s not much here that I like to do in the winter time. I almost bought a pair of snowshoes at Job Lot when I got here, and in retrospect I almost wish I had.

The only really good thing about being here is getting to spend so much quality time with Adah and Keith, but virtually every moment of that is bent on winding up the estate. I have a couple friends I’ve gotten to see here, which is great, but everyone, you know, have lives and stuff.

Greetings, friends. Today we had the second and presumptively final day of the private friends-and-acquaintances estate sale. Four people showed up. Another one or two declined to visit when they learned that the items they were interested in were no longer available.

“This house has too much stuff,” Adah spontaneously remarked a couple days ago, summarizing in a single sentence the central fact of our lives for the past month.

So we have finally reached the point of diminishing returns. The estate sale, such as it was, was exhausting, but it put at least some of our mother’s belongings into the hands of people she knew, people who will appreciate those items of hers they selected, and who might remember her fondly when they use or look upon said objects. Many items we gave outright to people who promised to give them to historical sites for public interpretation.

Greetings, friends. Today I want to talk about hosting an estate sale, sort of.

We’ve had four visits from antique dealers, who offer us progressively less money on each go-round, in a neat and almost startlingly linear decline.

“Too bad you weren’t getting rid of this stuff thirty years ago,” one of them said earnestly. “The kids these days don’t want this olde-timey stuff.”

Well, yeah. That’s why Adah and I are selling it. Tack on the fact that the same dealer agreed to buy a set of hardwood filing cabinets only if I deliver them, and the whole endeavor very quickly ceases to be worth our time.

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about some things we are definitely not keeping.

My mother was extremely sentimental, which is where I get it from, because my father is decidedly not so. In spite of me and Adah referring to her as that woman with a roll of the eyes, while we dig through her immense stash of belongings, the reality is that she kept many things because they had meaning for her.

Some of those items are meaningful to others, which is why some of the replica clothing and most of the replica furniture are going to museums, while the rest of the reenacting kit is going to people our mother knew in that community. Some are meaningful to me and my sister, like the roughly half cubic yard of Burnston and Aronowsky family photos.

Other items were meaningful to my mother alone, like a box I found containing greeting cards expressing best wishes from her living history museum buddies at places like the Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation, when our family moved to New Hampshire. Some of the cards are very effusive.

Greetings, friends. Today I canceled my flight home.

The reason why is, simply, that there is still an unknown amount to do in my mother’s house in New Hampshire, and we now have a deadline: April 6, which is when the realtor brings her photographer. Once she has the photos in hand, the house goes on the market.

So I still plan to return to Portland, of course, but not before the house is ready to be photographed, and that means, basically, getting rid of everything in it. Sure, we can have tidy furniture type items in the photos, but basically everything needs to be out.

Now we work backwards through the dependencies. To be photographed, the house must be cleaned, which means hiring cleaners to come to the house after (almost) everything is removed. That has to happen no later than April 3 or 4, just to give us a couple days, in case.

Greetings, friends. Today the heat went out at the house!

This actually happened over the weekend, which went pretty well. On Saturday, I watched Clue with Lu, and then she introduced me to a TV show called Shoresy, which we binged while a blizzard came down outside.

Incidentally Clue holds up surprisingly well for a comedy from 1985. A lot of comedies from back then don’t. Its impeccable casting surely doesn’t hurt.

Shoresy is a new spin off of Letterkenny, starring Jared Keeso in the eponymous role. Now Letterkenny is one of my favorite television shows, but Shoresy is one of its worst characters, whose performance solely involves lobbing increasingly vicious insults at the other characters from off-screen, usually in the form of ribald claims about the target’s mother. Sometimes the sheer creativity of these gibes is impressive, but I find their quality is exhausted by their quantity.

Greetings, friends. Today I would like to thank a number of you for some gifts that you have shared with me recently.

On Friday, Matt and Kim invited me over for dinner. Matt made cocktails and a delicious home cooked meal. Their son Kaleb introduced me to the pastime of letterboxing, which has some similarities to geocaching:

Letterboxers hide small, weatherproof boxes in publicly-accessible places (like parks) and post clues to finding the box online on one of several Web sites…

Individual letterboxes usually contain a log book, an often hand-carved rubber stamp and occasionally contain an ink pad. Finders make an imprint of the letterbox’s stamp on their personal log book, and leave an imprint of their personal stamp on the letterbox’s logbook.

What’s more, Matt had shared with Kaleb the story of the bucket of fermented urine that I posted to this journal last week. Kaleb was inspired by (took pity on?) the photo of me in Mom’s cornuthaum and depicted me on a hand-carved letterbox stamp!

Greetings, friends. Today I’d like to talk about what we keep as mementos, and why.

Adah came early this morning to escort the antique and architectural salvage dealers through house and barn. She and I spent the afternoon combing through family photos and other such mementos, which is a great way to relieve the tedium and strain of endless bagging of garbage and giveaways. It feels like a treat we give ourselves when the work becomes a little much.

But it’s also productive work, in the sense that our mother took many photos of many things, quite a few of which no longer have any relevance to us today.

As an aside, our mother kept a lot of her archives in 135mm slides. Remember photographic slides? Dealing with photo slides is going to be the topic of a future journal entry. For now, imagine a lot of me and Adah holding up slides to the light, and squinting deep into a moment buried in the past, like examining a fly in amber. Only, like, several thousand times, because that’s about how many slides we found.

Greetings, friends. This afternoon found us working deep in the stuff mines, and by stuff, I mean my Mom’s stuff, and by mines, I mean the eaves over the second floor of her house. Only the cellar surpasses this part of the house in its wretchedness, but nothing is stored down there, because even the sump pump can’t clear all of the standing water.

The bedroom I had been staying in, which was once Adah’s, contains the two doors that provide access to the crawl spaces under the eaves of the roof. We’d cleared out the downstairs bedroom, so I started by moving my mattress and bedding and clothing and all my other gear down there, because we needed room to work, and I didn’t want dust, fiberglass, and mouse droppings all over my sheets and pillows.

My move downstairs constitutes a definite phase change in our endeavors. I am no longer living out of the upstairs guest room. This is no longer my mother’s house.

Adah and I geared up for the ordeal. Long shirt and pants, shoe covers, $3 shower caps from Target, nitrile gloves, and N95 masks.

Greetings, friends. Boy, it’s been a tough weekend. Adah and I have been hard at work, sorting through antique garments, vintage garments, replica garments, just plain old garments, textiles, yarn, sewing paraphernalia, knitting paraphernalia, jewelry making paraphernalia, academic research notes, opened mail, unopened mail, linens, towels, more garments, and, oh look, here’s another closet containing still more handmade garments.

Are they replica or antique? Are they valuable or commonplace? Are they useful in any sense or too worn to be of any use at all? Should they go to a friend, a re-enacting group, a museum, a thrift store, or the dump? Who can say!

We must. Every single item must be kept, sold, donated, or discarded. Sometimes the decision is easy, but, if it requires even a moment’s further thought, those moments add up. Many items we set aside for our mother's re-enactor friends to examine and hopefully claim. We work for six or seven hours a day with a short break for lunch, sneezing from the dust. My threshold for what is worth keeping or donating spirals upwards and upwards.

Decision fatigue is real, my friends. So is back fatigue. I am feeling both.

Greetings, friends. Today I would like to memorialize my old high school era stomping grounds, the Denny’s restaurant in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania.

The very first review of this restaurant on Yelp wrote in 2008 says it all:

No lie, all the kids I went to High School with would live at this Denny's. Even through college and afterwards they'd still go there…

Well, that would have been me, but about ten years earlier, years before Yelp ever existed. The reviewer goes on to add:

Greetings, friends. It’s the extra large edition of this journal! I’m kidding. Actually this post will be shorter than others, probably. I wonder when I will give up on using Roman numerals to sequence them.

I received a number of deeply sympathetic responses to my post about inheriting a bucket of fermented urine. I am grateful for everyone’s expressions of compassion and understanding.

It was hard to talk about. I told Adah I was going to write about the experience. She asked me if I was going to be explicit about what I thought the contents of the bucket were. I said I was not, because I was concerned that the details would be off-putting to the friends reading this. It’s just gross, ya know?

“But,” Adah said, “That’s what makes it so hilarious!”

Greetings, friends. I… well, I should just start with a content warning:

This post is mostly about dysfunctional family relationships but also about what might have been a bucket of aged urine. Please don’t continue if you are squeamish about either topic.

As I may have mentioned, my purpose in spending half my time in New Hampshire for the foreseeable future is to work together with my sister to sell our late mother’s house and generally wind up her estate.

I also may have mentioned that our mother was, shall we say, a collector of things, so this is no small task. Broadly, the job involves touching every last object in the house to determine if we wish to keep, sell, donate, or discard it.