Baggy Paragraphs

The route from Tamarindo to the 6200-foot volcano Rincón de la Vieja leads first over the forested hills that separate the coast from the inland agricultural valley of the Río Tempisque. Traveling on the narrow but well-paved highway are semi-trucks loaded with sugar cane. Numerous roadside stands offer watermelons and cantaloupes. One business specialized in seeds for rice growers. The district’s major city is Liberia, and Costa Rica’s second international airport is along the highway a few miles before it. The edge of town offers lots of service businesses and office parks. The road to the volcano issues out the backside of Liberia. Finding it isn’t so hard, but the downtown streets are crowded and the driver also wants to be the tourist and look at all the shops and—right between the traffic lanes—the bronze statue of El Sabanero, the rancher who has run cattle over these savannahs since the Spanish arrived around 1520. After a few blocks, we saw the sign to the village of San Jorge and turned right on a residential street. The houses wear lavender and even chartreuse hues, and the tropical limes and oranges sometimes achieved day-glow intensities.

We were following a garbage truck out of town, so it made sense that we would soon come to the dump. For at least a kilometer beforehand, passing over a road that was cut through thick white clay, we were presented with an ugly mess from plastic bags that had blown everywhere and stuck in the branches of trees. It would shock the tourists who come to Costa Rica for la pura vida in the all-inclusive form that shields them from any ugliness.

Susan provides the scale, but this is one of the smaller anthills.

Rincón de la Vieja National Park is 20 kilometers up the road, which climbs the volcano’s flank. The name is said to refer to an old lady who used to live in a cave; I’m told it translates as “the old corner.” The park is barely developed at all, and there were only three other cars in the small parking lot at the Santa Maria sector office. A couple of old wooden buildings are evidently left over from some sort of sugar making operation. We had to pay $10 each to hike. A young man named Lenin—“Como el ruso,” he said—gave us our permits. Lenin lives and works up here fifteen days at a time, and then he enjoys six days off at home in Liberia. He first said it’s a nice town, but then changed his mind and said there are drugs and crime. At any rate, everybody was in a different world down there.

Whereas we had broiled inside our little Daihatsu bucket of bolts while crossing the Tempisque valley, the air up here was cool, not much more than 70 degrees. We were just at the edge of the clouds that shrouded the volcano’s peak and briefly thought about putting on our rain jackets as heavy mist blew in sheets, but the cloud stuck to the peak and we went away from it on the 2.75-kilometer trail to the hot springs. The footing was often terrible because of slippery wet leaves and red clay. I went down hard once on my butt and almost sprained my shoulder by reaching back to break the fall. Every few hundred meters, a stream crossed the trail and we had to step over the taller rocks and hope our footing was sure. A little trail off to the side took us through the Bosque Encantado, or Enchanted Forest, with some huge trees and a tremendous cataract of about 20 meters. Rejoining the main trail, we came to the Río Negro. Watching four hikers ford this river from the other direction was enough for Susan, who really didn’t care to try it herself, and we turned back. After retracing our steps a ways, we chose the trail to Pailas de Agua Fría. After laboring 900 meters up a steep trail, we came to a field of weird volcanic mineral buildup with bubbling cool water. A large clump of bamboo sealed off one end. The sulphuric air made us want to take the next express bus out, so we didn’t stay long. We were also starving and wanted to get back to Liberia and have something to eat. We descended to the main trail, again going over unbelievable anthills that would make the most ambitious gophers jealous. Long processions of leaf-cutting ants carried torn pieces of green leaves up the trail against us and into the hills. We were dazzled by a black butterfly with two equal circles, one white, one vivid pink, on each wing. A most bizarre rodent, the agouti, which looked like a huge guinea pig, emitted an “eep” upon seeing us and loped ahead on the trail before disappearing into the forest.

Driving back down to Liberia, we found a típica restaurant and ordered fish platters, and mine came with black beans, rice, spaghetti, and a small salad. Susan’s had cooked vegetables. These were priced at about $6 each. The waitress, Jessica, told us they have karaoke night every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night: there’s a screen for a slide projector that displays the lyrics. I’d love to go back and see it.

El Sabanero statue: http://www.liberiacostaricainfo.com/LiberiaPhotos/sabanero.html 

Agouti: http://www.nicoyapeninsula.com/wildlife/rodents.html

Leaf-cutting ants: http://www.planetpapers.com/Assets/455.php

We set out for beach at 6.00 a.m. Just after stepping onto the hard-packed sand of low tide, we heard a warning. A tall Englishman called our attention to a baby turtle crawling toward the sea. I looked at it and exclaimed, “Breakfast!” The Englishman actually cracked a smile. And it was a buffet breakfast: Susan found another tortoise. In all, we found five.

The impulse was to pick them up and carry them to water, but we’re not supposed to interfere. Nature doesn’t need us. For once I restrained an impulse.

The tortoises had crawled out of their nest in soft dry sand beyond the reach of high tide. Like a fat bicycle tire, they left a track of three parallel strands. The tracks wended irresolutely. The power of instinct? Overrated, it seemed. Maybe turtles are hatched craving immersion in saltwater, or maybe the draw of French fries at beachside restaurants exceeds that.

The Englishman, from Nottingham, had lived in Tamarindo 12 years after coming here with an American company. He had never seen turtles on this beach. He had to chuckle about the irony of the construction ban in buffer zones to the turtle sanctuary, which includes Tamarindo. The Costa Rican court recently halted development projects until an environmental review is completed. Light pollution, our Englishman said, messed with the turtles’ brains, so they weren’t nesting on beaches where people are doing karaoke in surf bars as a way of warding off the darkness. Yet, as we were witnesses, turtles had hatched right near half-naked bums sleeping on the beach, which is bordered by houses and restaurants. As big a surprise, according to our Englishman, was the fact that locals hadn’t dug out the eggs and eaten them.

Then he surrendered to fancy. “Imagine a 150-year-old tortoise coming up here to lay eggs,” he said. “Starting a family at such an age!”

Yes, almost as heinous, or stupendous, as octo-mom Nadya Suleman’s accomplishment.

One turtle made a beeline for the water, but a couple of others turned right, then right again, back to their birthplace. Career counselors should have been summoned to the scene. As the sun came up, more and more people arrived at the beach, and unless they paid close attention, they couldn’t have distinguished these turtle hatchlings from stones. We warned away joggers wearing sunglasses and ear buds. Had they only come from Jersey, Lauderdale, The Woodlands, for the sake of variety in a workout? We turtle cops busted their asses. Soon a German couple and a man from New Hampshire helped to guard the straying babies.

Another Brit, from Bristol, wandered up. Nick was fair-haired, in his late-50s, a bit pudgy, and clutched a mass-market paperback. He’s lived here a year. As for our leathery wards, he expressed pessimism. The sun would rise and they would expire before reaching the water. They were stragglers, should’ve started earlier, that’s nature for you. But we teamed up on the joggers while continuing our chat. He said these turtles were unprecedented, and he would be ringing up his friend who edits the Holwer, a monthly news publication. I asked about life in Tamarindo. Nick winced and said it’s a double-edged sword. There’s nothing to do, particularly after dark. He’s never been one for much TV, so he reads a lot. People (foreigners, we took it) tend to drink heavily after sundown.

Finally, a Tico of about 60 , wearing olive and camo, advanced from the sand 150 meters away to the right. He exhibited a turtle that nearly filled his hand. The eye sockets goggled inward, and the forelimbs were an orthopedic overstatement. He went to the water’s edge with this dear little creature and put it in. When he turned back, I said there were several others. Did he think they would the sun would kill them? Indeed, he did, and he scooped up the one that had made the greatest progress. This issued license to the German woman, to the New Hampshire man, to me, to Susan. We scooped up a turtle. Mine, mostly docile, sometimes scraped against my palm. Just chill, I thought. Where would you go? We conveyed our parties to the water. The first inrushing wave turned a couple of them back toward Greenwich Mean Time—but more human assistance was availed.

These six turtles, hours-old, had escaped ransacking by human nest raiders and stomping by blindfolded joggers. Now they were now at sea.

Four were probably devoured by the voracious pelicans that waited seventy-five yards offshore.

Tamarindo News link to court decision: http://tamarindonews.com/Tamarindo_Community_News/315.html

The Howler: http://tamarindobeach.net/thehowler/index.html

Monday morning we set out over a rocky road for the Cabo Blanco nature preserve, seven kilometers away. The first such preserve in Costa Rica, it was established in 1963 through the initiative of Nils Olof Vestberg, a Swede, and Karen Mogensen, a Dane, who had a farm near Montezuma but were appalled to see the climax forest disappear as the government promoted agriculture. Having been here in 2005, Susan and I could hardly wait to show Marianne and Leif. Dozens of trees are named and described along the “Danish trail,” and there’s a great hike over the “Swedish trail” to a secluded beach. What we hadn’t anticipated is that the preserve is closed Monday and Tuesday. A Swedish girl who’s volunteering at the office for a few weeks was the only person around. She said we could stay for a while and look at the white-faced monkeys that were right there in the trees. As we returned to the car, howler monkeys were fed on leaves of trees at the parking lot’s perimeter, and Leif got pictures of them, too.

Marianne, me, Nena, and Susan. Photo by Leif.

On the way back to Montezuma we stopped where a placard advertised Nena Marmalade, the very same stuff we were consuming with the homemade bread at Amor de Mar (the four of us shared Casa Luna there). The Swedish woman who supervised breakfast at the inn mentioned Nena sold her marmalade directly to tourists, and Marianne spotted the sign and we shared a sense of accomplishment in having tracked down the jam. We turned into the dirt yard and parked. Nena greeted us without indicating she spoke any English, so I said in Spanish that we were interested in her jams, and she beckoned us inside. We crossed a beautifully tiled porch and a small living room adorned with the poster of a singer. The couple of rooms off the short hallway were closed off by curtains. The kitchen was rather large with tiled counters, above which Susan noticed coffee mugs hanging from hooks on a sort of mesh screen. Nena opened the refrigerator door, revealing jars of different sizes, and then started to set them out one by one on the table. Coconut-mango was succeeded by pineapple and papaya in brilliant hues of yellow. What she called limón looked more like lime. One dark jar contained mora, a blackberry. Another flavor was unrecognizable by name, and after I repeated it, she picked up a paper bag filled with plumlike fruits. Marianne selected a couple of flavors and Susan said she wanted limón, but I protested and we ended up with coconut-pineapple. Nena reminded us, as the sign at the road indicated, that she also sells coconut oil. Slender bottles were kept in a cupboard. She said the oil was for cooking but also for application to the hair and skin. We paid her 2500 colones per jar, equaling about $4.33. Despite our lack of interest in coconut oil, she threw in a smaller jar of mango jam with each purchase. Nena told us she’s 52 years old and had lived down the road for 35 years and right in this house the last 17 years. During tourist season she spends her days in the kitchen. She asked what countries we came from and we were just telling her when her cell phone rang, so we shook hands and went outside, noticing her setup under a metal roof supported by sturdy poles.

Marianne checks out Nena's bubbling pot.

A blackened pot was brimful of syrupy yellow-orange mash that bubbled languidly atop a burner fired by a couple of pieces of wood. A dozen or so pineapples clustered in a rack just beyond this cooking station. Throughout the rest of the shed, I noticed lots of toys, like a green plastic pedal tractor. Nena finished her call and came out to stir the pot. We got into our BeGo and as crossed a bridge immediately after turning out of her yard. The white ducks in the water of the shallow creek were undoubtedly hers. We went away thinking about the marmalade pot bubbling near Cabuya, on the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula. While space satellites collide in orbit and drug cartels spread chaos across Mexico and economic collapse makes a zillion dollars of personal wealth disappear with a giant slurping sound, jam is eternal verity.

Link for the Cabo Blanco natural preserve:  http://caboblancopark.com 

Link to Montezuma hotels, with a page for Amor de Mar: http://www.montezumacostarica.net

The sea, aquamarine in the foreground, deepens to ultramarine at the horizon, where haze obscures the main body of Costa Rica across the Gulf of Nicoya. Cobalt dabbles the vault of heaven. At the shore before us, black volcanic rocks that are seamed white make the small breakers froth almost blithely; their sound Saturday night was like heavy rain drumming the roof. About seventy-five yards offshore a brow of rock is the nighttime roost and daytime redoubt of pelicans, a few of which linger during the morning, watching the occasional smug show-off glide past, wings held back, bellies inches from the water. Three placid loafers bob around. Inward from the shore, a sprinkler rotates lazily on the grass. The lawn—dotted with a few coconut palms and divided by a mass of dracaenas from which a large, thorny, leafless acacia rises (itself half strangled by the vine of a philodendron with enormous yellow and green leaves)—is of a thick, thirsty type of grass. A closer inspection of the grounds turns up various ferns, succulents, gingers, bananas, mangoes, and even a wispy, waving thing with neat rows of tiny leaves and every so often a brown dangling seed pod: a tree looking suspiciously like a locust. The lone conifer with branches spaced at regular, airy intervals could be a spruce.

Casa Luna

A couple of loras just flashed past and landed where the tasseled jays have been castigating everybody since today’s dawn. Possessing the camp robber gene, they mingled with us during breakfast on the patio, stealing a cube of melon whenever an unsuspecting guest rose from the table. One of this little troupe was missing its tail feathers, and the Swedish woman who manages the restaurant told two Swedes at the table beside ours that a cat had acquired the feathers, but the jay still demonstrated remarkable agility. Drifting in and out of view higher overhead are a frigate bird and four smaller yet formidable gray-white birds with sharply pointed straight wings.

Every so often someone goes by: the auburn-haired Swedish girl with a straw bag slung from her shoulder brings a cup of coffee out to a hammock and sits in it. Now she’s walking barefoot on the rocks, her faintly pink sarong stuffed into the bag. She sets her bag down. A seam in the rock admits inrushing tidewater. She carefully steps into it using a ledge that leaves her shoulders and head visible, but then she disappears. Every so often her tan cap pokes out of the little canyon. When she finally climbs out again, she reclaims her shoulder bag and leaves, stage right, behind the dracaena thicket. The birds are silent now. The breakers keep up their murmuring and the sprinkler still chatters away.

The whiskered man was missing his front teeth, and those at the corners of his mouth were crooked and yellow. His closed right eye suggested injury. A red T-shirt billowed from his bony torso, emphasizing the whole shaky way he had approached us from across the highway, where the gas station was flanked by a tiny soda shop that featured the mural of an iguana and a tortoise looking at the sunset as a swordfish bursts from the water.

Arriving at the driver’s window, he asked, “Do you need any help?”

Daihatsu BeGo bucket of bolts

Supposing it was as much English as he knew, I replied in Spanish that we were just waiting for friends. But he continued, “Where are you from?” When we answered, he said the United States was a very big country, unlike Costa Rica. “Canada, States, Brazil,” he elaborated. We agreed that Costa Rica is big on friendship, and then I asked about his English. “I learn it in the streets,” he said. “I never went to school.” He offered his hand. “My name is Alex.”

Now that he had our confidence, he showed us the scabbed inside of his left wrist. Some trouble with his wife had led to his sleeping under the Rio Diria bridge, two hundred meters behind us. The scabs formed after ants bit him.

“Hormigas.” I said, bringing a big smile to his lips.

“Very good! Hormigas.” Alex proceeded to explain about his eye. He was sanding a floor when a particle lodged. Drawing apart the lids with his fingers and exhibiting the bloodshot pupil, he waved his other hand in front to prove that he couldn’t see it. How was this said in English?

“Blind,” I told him. “Blind in one eye.”

The clinic here in Santa Cruz couldn’t help him. He needed laser treatment at Hospital Mexicana, in San José, but couldn’t get there. “I’m broke. Could you help me out? I’m hungry.”

I handed over 2000 colones: what we had paid for breakfast at a tipica restaurant in Tamarindo. I couldn’t remember the name but said it was near a better-known beach place, El Pescador. With a tottery bon vivant’s air, Alex said he knew it. Then, sensing I wanted assurance the money was really going for food instead of beer, he pointed down the highway, where a restaurant that was just out of sight would assuage his hunger in plenty of time for him to catch the 12.30 bus home. His wife might take him back. He wobbled away on the road’s dusty shoulder.

In a restaurant we were asked whether we preferred regular or bottled water. I asked the waiter what he drinks. “Beer,” he said.

It amazes me that Susan and I can work out arrangements with Marianne and Leif, who live so far away in Denmark, to meet on a February Thursday afternoon in Tamarindo, Guanacaste province, Costa Rica, which is the third and very distant point in the triangle, and despite traveling separately yesterday from different starting points within the country, we arrived at Hotel Chocolate within fifteen minutes of each other.

Boarding for a tour of the mangroves. From left: Susan, me, Marianne, Leif

The drive on the Interamerican Highway from San José to the Pacific was as harrowing as the two previous times we’ve done it, with drivers executing crazy, potentially suicidal maneuvers, but there were fewer chuckholes this time. The highlight had to be the semi that was passing some cars on a downhill stretch leading into a curve. Having a truck flash its headlights to indicate “I’m coming” discomfits to a high degree. Once we turned west for the Nicoya Peninsula, the trip became much pleasanter. We were very impressed with the nice bridge across the northern tip of the Gulf of Nicoya, which is the Friendship Bridge with Taiwan. We stopped as soon as we had crossed it and read the plaque with all sorts of figures about length of span and bearing capacity. Ours was the only car in the parking lot, and one of the two men sitting at a little vender’s wagon came directly up to us and asked if we cared for an empanada and then pitched us on a two-hour boat tour to see crocodiles and monkeys. I claimed we had to meet friends for lunch in Nicoya. “Other tourists?” he asked. “You bet your boots,” I said. Or maybe I just nodded. To Susan I mentioned that most Americans wouldn’t appreciate having a rather scruffy fellow come right up to the car like that.

We stopped at a MegaSuper or SuperMaxi, at Nicoya, and bought camera batteries and sat at the lunch counter to consume ham sandwiches and Fanta orange sodas. The store is Wal-Mart’s enterprise here, but only a fraction as large. At lunch counters like this I’m used to paying right off the bat when they shove the food at me, but it’s the other way around here, so when we had finished and stood up to leave, the attendant figured us for crooks and demanded, “Señor!“

Tamarindo isn’t quite as hectic as last year. And the streets are exhaling dust for lack of molasses application to suppress it. The ocean water seemed colder than I’d remembered but we quickly got used to it during our late-afternoon swim. Marianne and Leif were seeing pelicans for the first time, and we all marveled at how they glide along just inches from the water’s surface without beating their wings. At 6.30 a.m. today we saw loras, the small green chattering parrots of these parts. A highlight of our beach walk was seeing innumerable crabs on one stretch of tessellated sand; they disappeared into their little burrows and we thought maybe we had been hallucinating. Of course we collected plenty of shells.

Beachcombing just after sunrise on Tamarindo Beach.

In mid-morning there was business to attend at the bank and then we four stopped in the sales office of Pacific Park, the monstrous curving high-rise with 34 condo units from $475,000 to $1.4 million. The top two floors offer ocean view in all seasons, with the fifth floor gaining the same in the dry season when so many trees shed their leaves. We looked at video images in a virtual tour and I came away chagrinned by the energy intensiveness of this style of life, by the incongruous luxury of the apartments. Yesterday we talked to the fellow who supervised the bache around the corner from Hotel Chocolate, where several dozen men live in a long shed made of plywood walls and zinc roof. He said they’re almost all Nicaraguans. They’re building the opulent structures that people like us are supposed to buy.

We came back to relax before departing at 2.30 p.m. for a boat tour in the estuary to see crocs and monkeys and maybe tortoises. Alberto, the manager here who made the telephone call and booked our little tour, says the tortoises will be on a private sanctuary and therefore we’ll be able to photograph them. I wonder if they’re also available for taped, one-on-one interviews.

Something striking about Costa Rica is the number of people who do menial jobs. We walked one block over to the AM/PM store for bottled water and a package of Bauducco Dulce de Leche wafers, and this meant passing through several ranks of bellhops (one of whose given name is Wilson) and security guards. At least two holstered men stood on the sidewalk near the store. The booth in the hotel parking lot is occupied by an attendant who manually raises and lowers the barrier, whereas Susan and I are used to automation in such circumstances. (Of course, he’s also guarding the cars against emissaries of Midnight Auto Supply.) The hotel restaurant had more staff than patrons, multiple levels of personnel, and a shift change seemed to be in progress, which meant the people who saw us in were seen out by the time we finished. For a while we had a waiter named William, a wiry guy with a shaved head, who said he is from Colombia and has been in Costa Rica ten years, working in the San José suburb of Escazú, where the U.S. embassy is, until five months ago when he started here; and it was hard to imagine this being a step up the ladder. The restaurant is on a veranda with clear plastic curtains to shield guests in case of rain (it’s the dry season, anyway), and when I complained about the odor of sulfur that occasionally wafted by, William said it’s from a coffee processing plant nearby.

Susan took this picture of the lacy bedding at our first night's hotel.

Another thing I observe is how the TV shows the victims of accidents and crimes. The camera gets right up to the wound or the cuffs as the pedestrian who suffered the broken leg is wheeled away or the perpetrator lies in the street with his hands bound behind his back. There was a story yesterday about a horse that had been electrocuted after contacting a downed wire, and of course it had to be shown.

We’re about to go for our complementary breakfast. The restaurant was supposed to open at 6.00 a.m. but the staff was making itself scarce. Then we get into our little BeGo and head for Tamarindo, which will probably be eight hours on the Panamerican Highway (called Interamerican here).

Breakfast report: The kid who set out the buffet of fried eggs, fried bananas, cooked rice, and all the delicious ripe pineapples and papayas and the cinnamon rolls with jellied fruit apologized for being late, but he was the passenger in a taxi that collided with a motorcycle, and the rider had been injured, with serious abrasions at least, and it was necessary to wait for the ambulance and police. We admired the table runners instead of place mats and the Corona hotel porcelain from Colombia.

A quick hey from Costa Rica. Eve B. showed up on time, a few minutes before 4.00 a.m., drove us to Detroit Metro, and we easily made our 6.00 a.m. flight and no weather problem, as feared. The connection in Miami went smoothly, so here we are a short distance from the San Jose airport, already with our rental SUV, a Daihatsu BeGo, and all checked into our motel near the airport. We were just out for a short walk and ended up in Oscar Moore’s American Thunder Motorcycles, located in the nearby Los Arcos shopping plaza, and it turns out that Oscar used to work for Holiday Inn and opened their Washtenaw Avenue location in Ann Arbor in the late-1970s. He’s binational and actually says he works for the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security and has this shop as a sideline. I went in to see what he was asking for a BMW 1200 dual-purpose bike: $26,000 USD. It has 11K kilometers. “The guy didn’t like it. He bought a Harley.” Such a bike would sell new for around $15K in the States, I think. Taxes drive up the price of vehicles, clothes, shoes, and trinkets such as chrome accessories for Harleys. Anyway, it was an incredible coincidence and his gracious daughter showed us around the T-shirts and accessories department upstairs, where grandma was sleeping on the couch. “She’s very, very old,” the daughter said in Spanish. I’d guess about 70 years old, in fact.

Now, feeling a little antique ourselves, we’re having a nap and then dinner and tomorrow on the road to meet Marianne and Leif in Tamarindo.

The time has come to take the leap to an iPod and one of those cute little docking stations. After eleven years of service, our Sony MegaStorage 50+1 CD jukebox with five speakers and the coveted Variable Attenuation Control System, whatever the hell that means, has gone brain dead. The on/off button only actuates Cassette A. It beckons, “Come out, come out, it’s time to play!” But in response, Cassette A flashes a message across the panel, saying, “Eject,” and then the unit shuts itself off. Before that happens, there’s no selecting another function: the radio tuner or CD player. No command button has any command. It’s a case of electronic recalcitrance that came about vengefully and without warning. So we’re playing CDs in the laptop and listening to the radio in the kitchen. As for the basket of cassette tapes, we don’t even know what’s in there any more.

Last night I took the fifty CDs out of the Sony and put them in their cases and thought about all my old vinyl discs that have disappeared from this world and all the old record players and hi-fi’s that have come and gone. When we bought this Sony for about $400, we were moving up from cassette tape to CD. Now that CD is an outmoded format, I’m wondering what to do with items like the one that’s hand-labeled “The Teenage Emigrant,” by or perhaps from Frank and Kieran Coyne, which no one domiciled within these walls has ever listened to. There’s also the Michigan Opera Theater’s “Casualties of Love” preview of the 2008-2009 season. The cover offers no clue as to the selections on the platter, at least not by name although there are small inset photos, one showing a woman with a rose in her teeth, another with a butterfly, and another with a baby and a lily, and yet another with a vial of poison, and I know it’s poison because no one would pour balsamic vinegar into her mouth with that abandon. Some season at the Opera!

It would be no easier to part with “NPR Driveway Moments: Radio Stories That Won’t Let You Go,” which came home with Susan and may never have been played. On the other hand, this is the perfect opportunity to conserve our meager resources by putting Janice Kapp Perry and Joy Saunders Lundberg’s “I Walk by Faith: Values for Youth” on an ice floe and watching it drift away toward the North Pole.

But here I am ridiculing my wife’s choices. The strangest thing that has come into our collection through my hands is Phillip Kent Bimstein’s “Garland Hirschi’s Cows,” which samples a southern Utah farmer’s voice talking about his cows over a goofy, repeated electronic rhythm. At least, that’s what I remember, having only listened to it twice. Janos Starker’s solo cello recordings haven’t been played too much, either, and the same is true for Hilary Hahn’s Bach partitas and sonatas—although looking at the cover reminds me that we witnessed the sixteen-year-old prodigy perform the Brahms concerto early in 1997, demonstrating impressive fluency, and Amy the Philosopher, who had accompanied us with her young son, said afterwards, “I was thinking she probably hasn’t even had sex yet.”

While I might not have the CD around here too much longer, I still possess the ticket stub from that concert, but it only mentions “Andrew Massey, Conductor” and offers no word on whether young Hilary had taken up with a horn player.