I also have this first hand from my great uncle Bobby, who drank too much, and was supposedly in the State Department (he really was in the State Department) but was also CIA and would, after he’d had too much to drink, BRAG about how American Oil put the Shah back in power while he was there in Tehran. My cousin Mark was born there in 1952.

Can’t, she wrote back. I’m a journalist. Have to maintain my supposed ah ha ha journalistic neutrality.
Write for your own sake, I said. I’ll paraphrase. We’ll make a site, okay, & you & me and everyone we know can post to it & you can help me do it b/c I’m electronically inept but you’ll be Anon, all right? but you need to HELP me, Sara, okay? you have to help us b/c most Americans don’t GET Green from Yellow from Red and WE REALLY NEED TO understand this, ok?
Two seconds later I discover myself to be Administrator of an FB site called Condemn Iran’s Sham Elections to which, three seconds after that, people all over the world are posting in English, French, German, and in Persian. It’s really wonderful, I have to say, to see people swearing American curse words in sentences that are otherwise made up of transliterated Farsi.
And I am so at among the FB furious, the righteously indignant, that I naturally cut and paste a quote from one of them to use as my own status update: Natarseen natarseen, ma hame ba ham hasteem!” — “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, we are all in this together!” I write this though I don’t speak a word of Farsi. I get to write this, I feel, because I am – in fact – a citizen of this brave new electronic world.
And we are, in fact — you and me and everyone we know –  using these fragile tools to carry the light to them, each in our own small way, and this light of truth and reason and it’s what leaks under the locked door the tyrants believed they had tightly sealed.
Then Sara had another idea: Could I ask my American friends — many of whom are writers and artists and poets to say a sentence or two — messages of hope from individuals, side-stepping the platitudes issued by governments and politicians, that would be directed to the students and young women and young men and gays and doctors and construction workers and the elderly, all those risking their lives and safety and good standing to walk silently in the street in larger and larger masses in defiance of a regime the horrors of which you and I have any clue?

Of course, I said, and the two of us then crafted the letter that I’ve sent to friends far and wide, who’ve then forwarded it on the bubble edge of this miracle that’s fragile but is expanding in that it enables these good wishes to shower down on me, as my email in-box dings to say here, here, here, more words of hope and encouragement for their bravery to all those out in the streets with their fingers up in what we called The Peace Sign, their green wrists wrapped, standing up to tyranny.
Then I forward these to Sara, who will translate them and beam them past the censors to those who need to hear them, Sara, whom I love and honor as a friend, a sister in this struggle, daughter of whom I am vastly proud, though she and I have never actually met.

And why shouldn’t Europeans love this place, the astonishing superlatives?  there’s nothing like this anywhere else on earth, the extremes of Mount Whitney, at 14,497 feet, the highest peak in California, an easy drive from Death Valley, which contains the lowest places in the U.S., which also registers the hottest temperatures.

You find the Bristlecones above 10,000 feet in the White Mountains along the eastern edge of the Owens Valley. These Bristlecone Pines were discovered and dated in the 1940s and ’50s by Dr. Schulman, a pioneer in the science of tree-ring counting, who went looking for the most ancient trees among the Giant Sequoias and found the surprisingly small and adaptive — an unkind person might say stunted –  specimens in several groves. Dr. Schulman died young, of a heart attack at age 49 in 1958. The grove we visited is named after him.

Towering clouds loomed over the desert, moving down from the north. You can see so far away through vistas great and various as the fronts move through draping their bands of rain.

We got to the Schulman Grove in a late sunny afternoon. We were lucky, the ranger said as it had been snowing, the road into Methusala Grove still closed due to drifting snow.

We walked the trail to 10,00 elevation — you can feel the thinness of the air — where trees live that are older than the pyramids. I touched the branch of one, held it. Palpable vibrations.

But the real shock came the morning after the election when what seemed impossible — that the majority of the voters of the enlightened state of California– would go to the polls and vote to take a legal right away from their friends, neighbors, colleagues.

We were horrified because we were completely unprepared for this outcome. NO ON 8 was very poorly run, everyone putting so much time and energy and money into getting Barack Obama elected that we IGNORED the Mormons of Idaho who were sitting in Ward houses dialing and donating their time and money, figuring they, well hell, while being RUN OVER at the polls as Republicans dropped like flies could at least win this one little battle.

Mormons Go Home. Ken Starr too.

We must be better organized this time. This time, we SHALL overcome.

At best this blog will let me process information about the subjects that interest me, that is (right now) birds, particularly black ones, the death by cat predation of songbirds, also the disappearance of the American newspaper.  I plan to organize my thoughts by blog posting on the subjects of Brevity (or how to say the most in the fewest words possible), Carry the Nine (which is a social experiment that I’m interested in organizing so I get to participate in it) and Ant Noise, the Real Way We Get the News.

I’m going to try to post more often and to make my posts shorter and see how that works, more like a Status Update on Facebook but limited (at the moment) to the topics described.

Meanwhile, we got word yesterday that our friend –and friend of book publishing — Heidi Benson has taken a buyout at the San Francisco Chronicle, which means she now will freelance for the Chron, without the benefits of regular and secure employment. Both Heidi and her partner work for the Chron so their household is, no doubt, in crisis mode. Each of them has an idea for a book project. We wish them well.

These are terrible times for our papers, in that their individual and individualistic personalities will be at least changed by their going to a ghosly and on-line only edition, which is the way it seems all this is trending. And the Alison Bechdel review, which was printed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, has been picked up and is carried along by bloggers, who do evidently reach bookbuyers, if the Amazon numbers serve to illustrate anything. The response to that review — which was almost entirely positive and which was done by a woman with natural sympathies to my tale — is by far and away the most dramatic.  Sales figures are delayed by a week, but we’ll see numbers in the next ten days or so, which will begin to tell us something about how all this is actually going.