Why it's hard to climb Mt. Whitney

We weren't surprised that there was snow on this 14,496-foot mountain in early June, but there's snow and then there's rotten snow. Rotten snow is the kind you sink into because it's soft and melting. That makes for slow going, what with stepping carefully and poking with your walking stick to see if the snow will hold your weight. And of course it also makes it harder to see the trail. This part of California got lots of snow this past winter, so there was more to contend with, and more to melt, swell creeks, and refreeze at night. We had to think a few minutes to plot a path across a creek just 20 minutes up the path: the water was stunningly clear, cold, and rushing downhill in a hurry.

Another factor is sheer height. As mountain trails go, this one is not forbiddingly steep, merely long; it becomes more doable under better conditions. We backpacked for five hours up to Outpost Camp, the lower campground (10,300 feet), where we had a tent back-window view of a snow-fed waterfall. The deciding factor, however, was that one of us got sick. When that happens in the wilderness, there's no running to the urgent care clinic. The first rule of safe mountaineering is know your limits, and there they were. Most people we encountered on the trail did not make the summit; most of them also looked to be in their 20s, with really strong legs. In a spirit of prudence and disappointment, we turned back. (The picture is a placeholder till I load ours.)

The gospel according to Desmond Tutu

I recently had the privilege of interviewing Nobel Peace Prize winner Tutu. We talked about peace and reconciliation somewhat indirectly, as the subject was Tutu's forthcoming Children of God Storybook Bible, which will feature his favorite Bible stories and center on themes of reconciliation and forgiveness. But peace was certainly in the room. He has an infectious laugh and lots of personal warmth. I had read his brand new Made for Goodness, which answers the good question, " 'How do you keep your faith in people when you see so much injustice, oppression, and cruelty?' " The answer in the book takes more than 200 pages, so here is a summary that uses the bits I couldn't stick in the Bible story.

He said: "This is a moral universe. This is a universe where right and wrong do matter. When you look at the evidence of history, (Stalin, Hitler, and their ilk) end up being part of the flotsam and jetsam. At home in the darkest hours, that what's we used to say: 'the apartheid government has already lost. ' It's not just whistling in the dark. There is a heck of a lot of evil around. Where the heck is God in all of this? Yes, God is there. ... Yes, people are good and in the end that good will remain."

After spending only a brief time in his presence, I felt deeply encouraged. As much as his joy, his hope -- he doesn't consider himself an optimist, but does have hope -- is contagious.

Wee things

The temperature has gone beyond 80 degrees F in our cold frame and spinach, lettuce, and radish have all shown themselves, though not their true green leaves as yet. Word picture: spinach is skinny-leafed, radish is round-leafed, lettuce is little-leafed. What the camera sees -- they're the green things.

Imagine that

As a book reviewer and journalist who covers publishing, I sometimes think that everybody should read the same book I am, or, horrors, no one is going to be reading any books in the near future because they're all playing with their smart phones. Then I go to a Reading by a Famous Author -- Neil Gaiman as part of Naperville Reads -- and am seated in an auditorium with a thousand other people who like this author, and am enthralled to hear him read and it's all good. They sure sold a lot of books, too.

Gaiman reads his own work exceptionally well (OK, the English accent helps, but maybe he'll pick up a little ya-dere, hey-dere from living near Minneapolis) and is exceptionally able to write across media (scripts, prose, graphic novels) and audiences; he writes for kids and adults. In this day and age of narrowcasting to specific groups, he's broader than many and way more imaginative than most. Maybe the energy of his young fans was contagious, but imagination has energy too. A lot of us still and always love stories, never mind the form.

Lettuce pray

The Nelson garden got a jump on the season with a new cold frame on our south-facing second-floor deck. Bill made the box out of lots of leftover materials, including leftover insulation. We started lettuce, spinach, and radishes and installed a thermometer (the one new item) to keep track of the temperature inside the frame. It snowed last night over the frame, and the temp went down to 40 degrees inside. No one is awake yet.

Sto lat Irena Sendler

Sto lat is the song/greeting with which Polish people are feted on their birthdays or name days (the latter being more important). It means "may you live 100 years," and today would have been the 100th birthday of Irena Sendler, who was 98 when she died in 2008. Irena is a personal hero of mine; she was a social worker who smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto during WWII and worked with the underground organization Zegota until she was arrested in 1943 and tortured, but she managed to escape execution. She was recognized as a righteous person by Yad Vashem in 1965 and lived in relatively obscurity until she was "discovered" by Kansas students doing a history project. Sto lat, sto lat, niec zyje zyje nam.

Eat food. Mostly plants.

Wish I had said that, but Michael Pollan, who was on Oprah today, got there first. I'm amazed at how rapidly and thoroughly food production has changed. I live near the line between urban and rural. When I was a local news reporter, it always amazed me to hear about city kids coming to a local dairy farm to find out where milk came from. They didn't know. The store, right? I lived through this once already, going back to the garden in the '60s, before highly processed food was king and when Wonder Bread was just that -- a labor-saving wonder. Is cheap food all that cheap if it's making us fat and chronically ill? I'm up for a change, starting in my own back yard. The next revolution will be in the garden.

RIP Union maid Stella Nowicki

I attended a memorial service for Vicky Starr, a union organizer in the 1930s on Chicago's South Side, mother of my husband's very good friend, and a subject (she's Stella Nowicki, her "underground" name) of the Academy Award-nominated 1976 documentary Union Maids. Time passes, and that's history. In attendance, all these white-haired folks, singing the chorus of Union Maid by Woody Guthrie (as sung by Pete Seeger). These used to be dangerous Commie agitators; now they've got white hair and walkers and have outlived chief FBI paranoid J. Edgar Hoover and are a little forgetful of who is listening to their stories. We listeners forget that cops shot union organizers; we forget a whole lot. Union Maids is a great little slice of history, showing how history is made: somebody decides to do something, and that somebody is not a hero, just a mom of someone you know. Vicky did her job with dignity. Amen and thanks.

What I'm reading

The Zookeeper's Wife. Diane Ackerman.

If Hitler had a hierarchy of hate, Poles were somewhat better off than Jews, but not by many rungs. Ackerman's book is a truly fresh perspective on the Holocaust, from inside Warsaw (85 percent destroyed in WWII) and from the viewpoint of Antonina Zabinski, wife of Jan, keeper of the Warsaw Zoo. Animal life took a beating along with everything else in the war -- the zoo was bombed during the 1939 invasion. In a beautiful twist, the mostly empty zoo became a place of shelter for 300 Polish Jews during the war years. The Holocaust and WWII are so overwhelmingly evil and destructive that I am compelled to understand the resistance to Nazis. It is documented at Auschwitz, and documented here; at the Zabinski home, Jews lived in hiding alongside Jan (who worked with armed Resistance forces), Antonina, their little boy Rys, a chicken, a hamster, a badger, a muskrat, a rabbit (those were among the various house pets.) A wide circle of species, interconnected, learning survival.

My O-pinion

Oprah Winfrey had the temerity to announce the ending of her talk show in 2011 while this Oprah expert was otherwise engaged. It ain't over tomorrow, but The End Is Near. This is completely consistent with her style of doing things that are economically prudent and psychologically smart (she would say soul-smart); when you get the lesson, it's over. There are new worlds to conquer on cable; a lot of us can sympathize with the need for ongoing learning and new challenge. She sure doesn't need the money. She also has some time to cultivate a structure for succession that is not now in place. Ellen? Dr. Oz? Oprah already helps produce the latter's show. As the O-empire has grown, she has taken her hands off lots of things. The culture pundits say her influence will wane; I think it's morphing, going where the action is, with niche audiences and concerns.

Setting a place for a stranger

For the past three Thanksgivings we have hosted foreign students from the Illinois Institute of Technology who don't have any place convenient or special to go on the American holiday of Thanksgiving. It's always delightful to share experiences and lots of American food with our intrepid visitors so far from their comfort zones. Yesterday our guest was Long from Wuhan, China, who had never visited an American home before. Welcome to ours, which was clean, about the size he was used to, and filled with food and a lot of laughter that we sometimes had to explain to our guest. (We tried to explain what a pun was.) He wasn't used to turkey, and his mother had lost her job in China when she violated China's one-child policy and had his little brother. I've been a stranger myself in strange lands, and know that a lot can be learned over a plate of food.

Riding on the City of New Orleans

The trains do run on time these days, give or take 15 minutes, which is a lot better than most airlines can say about themselves. I took Amtrak's City of New Orleans from Chicago to the Big Easy for the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting. What a trip. Big windows, legroom (a lot better than most airlines can say...), space and time to work, space to walk. Easy access: I walked into the New Orleans train station less than half and hour before my train left and was aboard the train 10 minutes later, no security lines, no overpriced remote parking, no quarter-mile walk to the departure gate.

Then there's the view (when I'm not working, of course): the weird big waterbirds of the Louisiana bayous, pelicans and egrets standing stock-still or flapping their big wings aloft. Knobby-kneed cypress forest that looks a little primeval to my Midwestern eye. Shack dwellings made of corrugated metal and tar-papered roofs, landscaped with old cars and really old dead appliances. Little towns, big cities: Memphis, Jackson.

Then there's the company: my dinner companion was a woman returning from her class reunion at Xavier University in New Orleans, the only historically black Catholic institution of higher ed in the western hemisphere. We talked about her growing up years in pre-civil rights Selma, Ala. In the morning I met a couple from Atlanta. She had come from England in the 1960s and her interest in religions had led her to try Sufi dervish dancing. He was a vertical caver with a keen interest in Robert E. Lee (who founded a journalism school, which this journalist did not know) who ran a county dial-a-ride program for old folks. I can't remember having these kinds of conversations on airplanes or in airports.

I love the scale and I love going this slowly; I'll get there when I get there, pretty much on time. Hooray for public transportation and the train and the tune the City of New Orleans, the folk song made famous by Arlo Guthrie, but written by a Chicago folksinger, the late great Steve Goodman. I actually did say to the scenery: Good morning America, how are you?

The sincerest form of flattery

is when someone else's book cover looks a whole lot like yours.

Back to the '60s

This morning's Oprah Winfrey Show made the '60s look pretty innocent as well as pretty old. She remarked on how memorable the era's commercials were: "Cleans like a white tornado!" (Ajax, of course)This made me think of the huge role played by early television in forming Americans' material culture and giving them words and slogans to talk about it, or jingles to sing about it. This picture of the '60s made it look pretty innocent; not much on free speech, free love etc. It's the Mad Men version: nostalgia for nice suits. But keep my father's HA (Hair Arranger, green in a bottle), please.

The first anniversary of The Shack

(I rounded a little -- it has been on bestseller lists for 58 weeks) Although my contrarian streak often counsels me not to read Extremely Popular Books, it behooves a religion specialist, especially a religion books specialist, to know what this is about. My friends Jana Riess and Dave Nantais have led the way with their insights -- Jana's blog and Dave's article in America magazine. I was most struck by author William Paul Young's vision of the Trinity, which is not an easy doctrine for some monotheists (how can God be a three-in-one god?) His depiction of the Holy Spirit as an Asian woman who seemed to flit like a rainbow-colored bird is really no more odd or arbitrary than the time-honored bird imagery. What stays with me was his vision of the stars; it was positively Dante-esque, reminding me of the conclusion of the Paradiso, which invokes "the love that moves the sun and other stars." Not too shabby for someone who doesn't write that well.

Reports of the death of the book

appear to have been exaggerated, judging by the crowds at Printers Row Lit Fest yesterday. Even more gratifyingly, I sold nine books, gave away more (as an incentive), saw someone I haven't seen for years and had fascinating conversations about publishing, Oprah Winfrey (nope, didn't see her there) and life in general. People brought dogs of all sizes and tiny infants; rain only sprinkled while I was there. Books: low tech, portable, don't need batteries. Take one home today.

Happy birthday Will Shakespeare!

In Chicago it's officially Talk Like Shakespeare Day. Will is 445 today (more or less, the exact day not having been recorded). Last night at a laugh-out-loud performance of Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre we had our cake and ate it too, as rappers gave us some tips for talking like Shakespeare, forsooth and fare thee well, cuz youth's a stuff will not endure, but Shakespeare has.

True love and home grown

tomatoes. Neither can be bought, but both carefully cultivated. Being blessed enough to have the former, I began this year's crop of the latter today, on my birthday. Another year of Mrs. Benson, Old Flame, Peacevine cherry, Wayahead, Brandywine, Lillian. Every tomato name tells a story. Among the new ones I am trying this year is Wins All (photo, and seeds, from Totally Tomatoes), which got its name in a 1925 contest. Ponderosa Pink is a parent. Meantime, it's gray and raining on the frozen ground. Dream on.

What's an anchoress anyway?

Julian of Norwich was an anchoress. That means she lived alone in a little bitty room inside a church, living a life of prayer and meditation. She spoke to people through a little window into her room. The church was bombed in WWII, but the doorway to her cell was saved. It's believed she had a cat as a companion. For rat control.

Discipline and Lent

Giving up stuff sounds like a Drag, but being disciplined sounds Good. I'll be praying with Julian of Norwich during the season of Lent. I may be a Quaker, but the liturgical calendar was etched into me early in life thanks to 1950s-style Catholic spiritual formation. Today's thought from Julian has to do with growth in the spiritual life -- her quaint Middle English term is "forth spredying." God's love increases, as does ours for God as we grow spiritually. It spreads forth.