When Sandra Day O’Connor Visited the Island of Ghosts

Yes, that’s my wife Felicia and me with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman named to the United States Supreme Court. You might reasonably assume this comes from a little cocktail party in Washington, DC. In fact, the photo shows us in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, often referred to by the Malagasy themselves as The Island of Ghosts. And I’m the host.

You might well ask what in the world she was doing there. In fact, she was a good friend of our ambassador, Patricia Gates Lynch, who invited her to come visit in order to establish ties with members of Madagascar’s Supreme Court. This would greatly improve the image of the United States in a country where the government had tended to keep us at arm’s length, but was becoming more approachable. Probably, it had begun to occur to them that having the Soviet Union and North Korea as their closest allies put them on the wrong side of history.

The visit came on relatively short notice and I was teamed with my good friend Liam Humphreys, head of the embassy’s political section to arrange the schedule. It proved a lot harder than we had anticipated. While we needed to give the Justice’s a full slate of events, and we were getting all kinds of positive noises from the Malagasy government, no one wanted to commit to doing a particular thing in a particular place at a particular time.

Soon, Justice O’Connor was due any day and Ambassador Lynch was politely breathing down our collective neck, while we were getting nowhere. The Ambassador was a very good sort, but this was important to her and we knew we had to get it right. I mean, we couldn’t very well meet Justice O’Connor at the airport and say, “So, what would you like to do?” (A news story from Washington had recently recounted how, at a formal dinner, a famous football player, who had been drinking way too much, shouted across the table to Justice O’Connor, “C’mon, Sandy baby, loosen up a little!” Liam and I were daring each other to hold up a hand-painted sign to that effect when she arrived. The Ambassador would have executed us on the spot, but it might almost have been worth it.)

By the end, we were nervous wrecks, but it had all turned out well. Everything fell into place at the last moment and Justice O’Connor proved a great trouper. She must have been reeling with jetlag after two very long flights, but she never showed it and was a delight to work with. On her last night in-country, I hosted a party for the embassy staff, giving us all a chance to chat and have our pictures taken with her.

While the party was going strong, Felicia took out a camera and asked Liam and me to pose for a picture. While we sat with appropriate diplomatic dignity, she said, “No, show me how you really feel.” The photo below is the result.

By the way, if I look a touch thin in the top photo, it’s because, after a bout of stomach amoebas, my six-foot-three frame was down to 145 pounds. And if Felicia appears more slim than usual, she had just recovered from a near-fatal case of malaria. Don’t let anyone tell you life in the Foreign Service is easy – especially on the Island of Ghosts.

As I say above, the Malagasy themselves sometimes refer to their home with these words. It is difficult to describe how different their world is from ours, how mutually incomprehensible our customs and culture.

I’ve tried to capture something of this in my suspense/thriller “Madagascar,” telling readers that the main character may not be Robert Knox, an American diplomat who has driven his life, his career and his soul into a hole so deep that he has drilled right through the center of the earth and emerged in Madagascar.

Here’s a slightly edited sample from the second chapter in which I try to catch something of the feel of this enigmatic place, and a hint of why it’s called the Island of Ghosts. Knox, head of the embassy’s political section, has been threatened with disclosure to the embassy of his mounting gambling debts, which would end his career, such as it is.

 Excerpt from Madagascar

In the unlighted parking lot of the Hotel Continental, I steady my shaking hands and mutter to myself. “The bastard. Let him write his goddamn letter.” But my chest feels tight and it takes a couple of tries to draw a good breath.

The night air tastes of exotic flowers blossoming in the dark and carries a promise of rain. In a couple of months the jacaranda petals will fall like lavender snow.

I put the car in gear and drive along the small lake bordering the hotel. The boulevard leads through a tunnel that separates the upper town from the lower, and comes out along the sad and faded Avenue de l’Independence, the city’s main boulevard, its shops shuttered and dark, the marketplace and its sea of white umbrellas folded up. The street is empty, deserted even by the children who crawl up to the cars at stop signs, begging for change, their faces eaten by leprosy or their spines deformed by congenital disease.

On the overbuilt slopes that rise above the rows of dilapidated colonial facades, dim lights glow in the tall mud-brick houses. I think of their lamplit rooms, crowded with the ghosts. For most Malagasy, the spirits of their ancestors hover forever just over their shoulders, squeezing into every corner, tapping at the windows, haunting the doorways until there's not enough room for the living.

It only takes a few minutes to drive home. I turn up the short drive in front of my place and flash the headlights. The night guard, Monsieur Razafy—like many Malagasy, he has only one name—swings the gate open, touches the brim of his cap and gives me a chin-up nod to welcome me home. I pull into the carport of the large two-story house I merit as head of the political section. Costs the taxpayer all of a couple hundred a month.

When I get out of the car I don't go inside right away but wander into the back yard, dark and quiet at this hour, and take a deep lungful of the clean, thin air—the French describe the climate up here on the central plateau as pleasantly unhealthful—and try to exhale the tension from my meeting with Picard.

On the quiet night air I hear the snick-snick-snick of Monsieur Razafy cutting the grass with hand clippers. I once bought him a gas-powered mower, but Razafy, a serious, solidly-built man, refused it, saying, “I have always done it this way.” I tried to tell him the mower would save him a lot of time. Razafy looked at me with an expression that asked, “What is time—your kind of time—to me?”

A gust of wind rustles the trees and I look into the sky. Flashes of lightning light up the great thunderheads stacked up to the east, the lightning bolts not striking the ground but leaping from cloud to cloud, blinking like some kind of celestial pinball machine. It's all silent, the thunder swallowed by the miles, the storm like a distant battle, weighted with unreadable portent. When I start thinking like this it's time to go inside.

Want to know what happens next? Click here to purchase Madagascar or any of my books.

Announcing a New Book

Hi, Friends – I’ve had some good news. Amphorae Publishing has agreed to publish my newest novel, tentatively titled “To Live and Die in the Floating World.” It is scheduled for publication in fall of 2021.

The story is about Kip Weston, a young American on the run, who lands a job on a small tourist barge on the canals of France. He soon finds, though, that in trying to run from his actions he has landed himself in a web of intrigue and murder.

People sometimes ask where I get my ideas. This is one where I can only hope the book rises to the level of a good story.

Back long ago, when I was kicking around Europe, I chanced onto a job working on the Wirreanda, the kind of tourist barge I describe in the book. You can see the boat – a beauty, I always thought – at the top of this post.

The other members of the crew and I became very good friends. One evening a couple of them told me of an incident from a couple of years earlier. While the boat usually took on a group of three couples for the three cabins, this time their guests were two men and an attractive young woman. While they knew each other – something, Diane, the owner, always insisted on – there seemed no warmth among them. Well, none of her business, she figured. The young woman took the middle cabin, with the men taking the cabins to either side of hers. 

As I say, she was attractive, and one of the crew members started to go up to her cabin at night to do what came naturally. If Diane had known, she would have fired him on the spot and thrown the guests off the boat.

The crew member would have been better off if she had, because the other crew members, who had found out about their little liaison, told him there was a rumor that she was the mistress of a Mafioso capo from Marseille, and the two men were her bodyguards and handlers. If they found out what he was doing, they told him, he’d be in more trouble than he could handle. He laughed it off, saying, correctly, that they didn’t know this for a fact and, perhaps also correctly, that they were just envious.

Then, one evening, someone came by the boat from the nearby village, telling the randy crew member that there was a message for him at the local post office. Given how French communications worked back then, this wasn’t as odd as it might seem now. The crewman took one of the bikes on board and rode off toward the village. He was never seen alive again.

His body was found at the bottom of the canal the next morning, drowned. He’d had a couple of beers and it wasn’t impossible, though unlikely, that he had simply ridden his bike into the canal. But the crew was certain he’d been found out and murdered by the two men on board or by someone called up from Marseille for the job.

The story had always stuck in my head – as you can imagine. And I thought I could use to someday. While nothing in the book matches this story exactly, I use the situation as the basis of what I hope you’ll find to be a good suspense thriller.

More About Elephants in Sri Lanka

As I mentioned in my last post, Sri Lankans love the island’s elephants. Up in the rugged hills, heavy with dense forest, they have even established an elephant orphanage in the village of Pinnawala, halfway between the capital, Colombo, and the city of Kandy.

Here, roughly one hundred elephants are raised and cared for. The village has become something of a tourist attraction because the elephants run down to the river to bathe and get washed by their mahouts, who scrub them with long-handled brushes. The elephants seem to love it.

The excitement comes from the fact that the orphanage lies on one side of the village and the river on the other. So, twice a day this huge herd of elephants comes storming through the little village on its way to the river and, an hour or two later, comes storming back toward home.

Here’s a photo of the elephants on their way down to the river. Why did I take this picture from behind them? Because, when you’re standing in the road and you see a herd of elephants running toward you, you get out of the way. Then you take your picture.

Sri Lankan Elephants

Sri Lankans love their elephants with an almost religious fervor. They attribute to them not only the strong memory of legendary fame, but great intelligence, and deep and complex emotions, much like our own. They can show great affection to the mahouts (elephant handlers) who treat them well and have been known to kill those who treat them cruelly. During the country’s long civil war, pitched battles sometimes paused as both sides waited for elephants to pass.

Here are two photos I took that show something of the range of their roles. In one, you see a shot of the Perahera religious festival, held in the city of Kandy each year. It features, among its many dancers and other groups, elephants in elaborately lighted costumes (the lights are operated by batteries). They are truly—almost literally—the stars of the event. Thousands of people line the street of the old capital to see them pass. The curious thing is that you can smell the elephants coming long before you see them. A bit like cattle, the smell is not a bad one, but earthy and pungent.

The second photo shows them in their more day-to-day role as workers, carrying large loads and helping in logging operations.

Here’s a passage about the city of Kandy from my novel, “Sri Lanka” (the bit about the headline in the Kandy newspaper is true):

(We) topped the last forested ridge and looked down on the town of Kandy, lying within a bowl formed by the surrounding hills.

A lake dominated the center of the town. On its shore stood the island’s most revered Buddhist temple. In the days of the old kingdom, before the British had come, Kandy had been the island’s capital. Here, the old palaces and offices of state still crowded around the temple’s thick walls and flaring rooflines, dissolving any distinction between spiritual and temporal order—or, more accurately, lending the government the mandate of heaven by its proximity to the temple complex. For the island’s Sinhala majority, overwhelmingly Buddhist, the temple represented the navel of the world, its physical and spiritual center.

Because Kandy remained an important regional capital, I had booked two days of appointments with local government officials, civic leaders, and administrators of the local university. My last appointment, however, was the one I looked forward to the most: a visit with the editor of one of the few newspapers published outside of Colombo. I enjoyed the paper’s small town feel and admired its earnestness even as I puzzled over its syntax, coming to cherish such quirks as the headline for a story about an activist civic association that read, “Kandy Ass. Deserves Respect.”

A Visit to a Dead City

These are two photos of the ruins of the Roman city of Volubulis, not far from the Moroccan city of Meknes. The ancient Romans have always fascinated me, and we visited many former Roman sites around the country. This, though, was our favorite – a site isolated, evocative and beautiful, about two hours from our home in Rabat. For what it’s worth, part of the movie “Patton” was filmed here.

I had fun setting a section of my novel, “Tangier,” here. I’d tell you more about that, but the passage comes late in the book and, for the life of me, I can’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t be a spoiler.

The first photo shows the remains of some buildings at the center of the city. You can see the difference between the solid Roman walls and a portion reconstructed later.

The second shows the Mosaic of the Four Seasons. If memory serves, the lower two figures are Summer, on the left, and Fall. Two rows above that are Winter, on the left and Spring. At one time the mosaic would have formed the dining room floor for a wealthy Roman family. Now it’s entirely exposed, open to the elements and covered by dust, surrounded only by low, uneven stonework, the last remains of the grand dwelling that once stood here.

On one visit I was showing the mosaic to visitors and took out a water bottle to wash away a bit of the dust and let its still-brilliant colors shine through. A guard on the site shouted at me that water was not allowed on the mosaic. I looked up in the sky and asked him, “So, what do you do when it rains?” He too looked up, thought about it a moment, and said, “You’re right. Go ahead.”

When I Married Rosalynn Carter

Yes, that’s a picture of a much younger me with Rosalynn Carter, back when I worked for a member of Congress and she was First Lady. And, believe it or not, this ties into a novel I’m writing, based on my time working on a barge in France.

Back to me and Mrs. Carter . . .

I was working in the district office when Mrs. Carter came to Portland in the fall of 1979. Along with others, I helped out a bit on her visit, meaning, as she left, I could line up to have my picture taken with her on Air Force One. Cool. There were a lot of us, so the line would move very quickly. I would only have time to come in through the curtain you see behind us, pose quickly and move on. (I’m trying to excuse my upcoming faux pas by saying I was in a hurry.)

As I came through the curtain, there was Mrs. Carter with her arm extended. I quickly tucked myself in, put my arm around her and got, I think, a rather nice pic of the both of us. Great. 

It was only when I got my copy and compared it to those of my friends that I realized they had, of course, stood at a respectful distance and simply shaken hands with the First Lady of the United States. I felt like an idiot – though it says something very good about Mrs. Carter to say that she didn’t so much as bat an eye to make me thing I was being a little presumptuous.

Fast forward a year. 

After five months of kicking around Europe, spending all the money I had saved as a Congressional staffer, I landed a job on a small—six passenger—tourist barge in France. By this time, I was looking pretty ratty. Hadn’t had a hair cut in months and had nothing to wear but an old pair of blue jeans and a raggedy shirt or two. Diane, the owner of the barge, so pitied me that she gave me some clothes left behind by wealthy guests. I’m sure I was the only barge crewman in France going around in old jeans and a two-hundred dollar formal tux shirt. 

The crew was a great bunch and we got very tight, exchanging stories of our previous lives. I mentioned that, despite my current appearance, I had once held a responsible job and had actually met some well-known public figures. The others were too polite to make faces behind their hands or roll their eyes, but I saw a certain skepticism.

I returned to Oregon a few months later, and stayed in touch with my old friends via letters. In one of these, I mentioned I had met my future wife and told them of our engagement. I also enclosed a small version of the photo above to show that I had indeed once hobnobbed with famous people.

Diane mentioned to her guests, Americans all, that she had received a letter from a former crew member back in the United States. But she had perhaps read my letter a little too quickly. She happily informed the guests that I had written to say I was engaged, and had even enclosed a picture of me with my fiancée. When she handed the guests the photo, Diane was puzzled by their startled reaction. Finally, one of them put the picture down and said, “I believe this woman is already married – to the President of the United States!”

So that’s how I (almost) married the First Lady and, through my work on the barge, got a great idea for an upcoming novel.

A Drug Problem in Paris

Diplomats at post must occasionally take their turn as Duty Officer, dealing with issues that come up after hours. Usually, things are quiet and the job doesn’t amount to much. During my first year overseas, though, I found that being Duty Officer in Paris at Christmastime could be plenty busy.

The most memorable call came from a man we’ll call Mr. Hudson, a young American living in Paris who called the embassy with, well, a drug problem. In a thick New York City accent (don’t ask me what borough) he told me that, while he was at work, the police had come by his apartment to talk to him about an envelope of marijuana that had come from the United States, addressed to him.

“Some friend probably sent it to me as a Christmas present. I didn’t ask for it. Dis isn’t my fault.” He told me he wanted to go down to the police station and straighten things out.

I wasn’t sure his was a good idea. “Mr. Hudson, stay home. If they really want to talk to you, they’ll come back.” Frankly, my thinking was that he didn’t seem terribly bright and somehow, after five years living and working (illegally) in Paris, he still didn’t speak French. Any attempt to explain things would likely only make them worse.

“But I really want to straighten dis out. I’m going down to da station.”

I told him that, much as I would like to, I couldn’t stop him.

I thought that would be the end of it, but he called back an hour later, using a phone at the police station. He complained that no one understood what he was trying to say. I wanted to tell him that this is what happens when you can’t speak their language. “I just want to tell ‘em that I didn’t ask for dis stuff,” he told me again.

“That’s admirable, Mr. Hudson. But at some point they’re going to understand, ‘Marijuana, mail and me,’ and they’re going to arrest you.” I didn’t add that if I were in the country illegally the last place I’d want to bring attention to myself was at a police station.

“They’re telling me dat a guy is coming soon who speaks English. I’m gonna wait for him.”

I told him I thought this was a very bad idea, but he was adamant.

He called back half an hour later, “Dis guy hasn’t come yet. I dunno what to do.”

I’d lost my patience. “Get out of there, right now, Mr. Hudson! Go to the nearest bar, find a phone booth and call me from there.”

“Well, I dunno . . .”

“Go! Now!”

Grudgingly, he said, “Okay.”

An hour went by. Not a good sign. Worse, when he called he was weeping. “Mr. Holgate, dey arrested me!” He sounded astonished.

Naturally, he wanted the embassy to help him. I thought of telling him that the embassy, in the person of me, had been trying to help him all day.

The police would release him conditionally, he said, but he would be facing trial in a few weeks. This was a Saturday. I told him to come by the American Citizen Services section of the embassy (ACS) on Monday, and they would explain to him what we could and couldn’t do.

Normally, I would have let it drop at that point. He was ACS’s problem now, not mine. But I really wanted to meet this guy. So, I asked ACS to call me when he came in, which he did later that morning.

Hudson was maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight, tall, gangly, long black hair. He was talking to one of the ACS officers.

“They can’t send me to jail, can they? I’m an American.”

This is a common delusion.

“Yes, they can” the woman ACS officer told him. “And if you’re convicted you’ll do five years, hard time.” Maybe things have changed, but that’s how it was back then.

He was a nice guy, you could see, not used to getting in trouble, and this shocked him.

“You guys’ll defend me in court, woncha?”

Another common delusion.

The ACS officer said, “No, we can’t do that. We can give you a list of lawyers who speak English.”

He was having a hard time taking it all in. “Dey can really convict me?”

“Yes.”

By now, he was shaken. “What should I do?”

The woman, long experienced, sat at her desk, lowered her head and said quietly, “If I could tell you to leave the country I would. But I can’t.”

Hudson shook his head, lost. “Then what should I do?”

Did I say he wasn’t very bright?

The ACS officer shot me a longsuffering look. “I don’t think you’re listening to me, Mr. Hudson. If I could tell you to LEAVE THE COUNTRY, I would.” A beat. “But I can’t.”

The light went on. “You think I should leave da country?”

“I didn’t say that.”

It was a sad sight to see Hudson’s world collapse around him. He’d made a life for himself in Paris, may have been living his boyhood dream. Now his choices came down to fleeing or perhaps remaining as a guest of the French Republic for five years.

I had introduced myself when I came in, and he’d seemed happy to meet me. Now I had to say goodbye. I never saw him again and don’t know what he finally did.

Is there a lesson in this story? It’s hard to fault Mr. Hudson for his willingness to straighten the matter out. Maybe they would have arrested him anyway, even if he hadn’t gone to the station and more or less demanded it

I can only suggest that if you’re living overseas and Christmas is coming, tell your friends to just send a card this year.

The Courtyard

This is the courtyard of the American Legation Museum in Tangier, Morocco.

Those who have read my first novel, “Tangier,” may remember that a good hunk of the book was set here. It was the first piece of overseas property owned by the United States, and was used from 1821 until 1961 as the home of the American diplomatic mission in the city. As I say in the book, the city of Casablanca is nothing like what we see in the great Bogart film – but Tangier is. During World War II, the setting for much of the novel, Tangier was an independent city. No government claimed possession of it. This made it a paradise for spies of every country, which serves as much of the background for the book. Among the many fascinating features of the building, one I used in “Tangier,” is its famous closet. Yeah, closets can be famous. In the middle of a hallway you can open the door of the seemingly nondescript closet. But, then, if you press against the back of the closet, it opens out on invisible hinges to reveal a large hidden room. American OSS agents used the room to, among other things, plan the Allied landings in North Africa in November of 1943. While I served in Morocco in the early 90s, I met a former OSS spy named Gordon Browne, also in his early 90s. He’s the model for the character of Gordon Sands in the book. An energetic and charming man, he was full of fascinating stories of his wartime adventures in Tangier, several of which I used for the book.

The Accordion Player

In “Madagascar” I mention the blind accordion player who unnerves the novel’s main character, Robert Knott, by knowing who he is as he passes by. As in the book, the real accordionist sat nearly every day at the bottom of a long flight of steps near the American embassy, accepting donations from passersby.

A Post About Blather and B.S.

It’s been a while since I posted a blog on the writing process. People seemed to like the one I wrote a few months ago about my need to edit and rewrite almost every sentence I’ve ever written. I hope I won’t be trying your patience to go into a little detail about how I do this.

In this brief section from a work in progress entitled “Martin Dayson,” the title character, a former governor of Oregon, is testifying to a legislative committee in opposition to a bill that its supporters have claimed is non-controversial. 

Dayson watched the members of the committee squirm in their chairs, and he knew he was losing them. They didn’t buy his argument for the simple fact that there was too much work to be done, and done too quickly, to afford Dayson the possibility that he was right. “Despite what you’ve been told, there’s no rush on this thing. I know this won’t be a welcome suggestion, but you need to delay consideration of this bill until next session, when the governor’s office will have to make clear to you what this bill really does. It’s been put off before, back when I sat in Governor Gilkey’s chair. It can be put off again.”

The paragraph is sorta kinda okay, but no better than that. And, knowing me, I’d already edited it a couple of times before it got this far. Anyway, I thought it needed clarity and a reminder of his motivation and an indication that he understood the odds against him. So, I rewrote it (again), and it came out like this:

Dayson watched the members of the committee squirm in their chairs, and he knew he was losing them. They didn’t buy his argument for the simple fact that, given their lack of time to consider the bill, they couldn’t afford the possibility that Dayson was right. He had known from the moment he and Mattie left Topping that morning that he stood virtually no chance. But he’d come at Mattie’s urging to keep faith with his neighbors, and would see it through. “Despite what you’ve been told, there’s no rush on this bill. I know this won’t be a welcome suggestion, but you need to delay consideration of this bill until next session, when the governor’s office will have to make clear to you what this bill really does. It’s been put off before, back when I sat in Governor Gilkey’s chair. It can be put off again, and I ask you to do that.”

I’m trying to remember why I thought this was better. It’s certainly longer – a dangerous sign. Fortunately, as so often happens, as I went to type up my handwritten edits, I realized this para was even worse than the first one. I’d already made the points about his motivation and the odds against him, or, if I hadn’t, I should just give up.  By piling on too many words I’d actually managed to make things less clear. I finally saw that I could get to the core of things much more succinctly. Here’s the final version: 

Dayson watched the members of the committee squirm in their chairs. As a legislator he had sat on the other side of the dais, listening politely through countless hopeless cases, and he could see he was losing them, had in fact already lost them. They didn't buy his argument for the simple fact that they didn’t have the time for him to be right.

Yeah, that’s it. I finally got it more or less right. I had managed to take a paragraph of 115 words and blow it up to 154. Not good. But by seeing the blather and B.S., and cutting it out, I’d got it down to a 64-word paragraph that actually does what I want it to do.

By going over every one of the manuscript’s 82,000 words and countless paragraphs as I have over this passage, I’ve got a book called Martin Dayson. I’m pretty pleased with. If, after I’ve worked on it for two years, my agent likes it, and if a publisher wants to take it on, it will be the editor’s job to show me how much more work I need to do.

Justice Ginsberg

The death of Justice Ginsburg this past week saddened me, and brought back memories of the one time I spoke to her on the phone – and how it made my mouth go dry with dread.

While serving in Washington between my assignments in Morocco and northern Mexico I helped to make arrangements for an exchange of Supreme Court justices from the United States and India. This would give them an opportunity to get to know each other personally and professionally, to study the strong similarities between our two judicial systems, and to strengthen ties between the world’s two largest democracies.

As was our policy for such high-ranking participants, we bought business class tickets for all of them. Spouses were invited too, though they would have to pay their own way.

A few days before the program was to begin I received a call from Justice Ginsburg’s office. The woman at the other end of the line said that Justice Ginsburg’s husband had some health problems and that flying first class would make the (very) long journey from Washington to Delhi much easier on him. The Ginsburgs would, of course, pay for his ticket, the woman said, but asked if it wouldn’t be possible for us to upgrade the Justice too so that she could be with him. I explained to her that, as much as we would like to help, we weren’t allowed to do that. Impatient and clearly seeing me as a recalcitrant bureaucrat, she pressed harder. I hated to turn down someone as respected and prominent as Justice Ginsburg, but I had to say no.

I knew this would be disappointing, but I wasn’t ready for what she said next.

“Will you hold for Justice Ginsburg?”

That’s when my mouth went dry.

Aagh! Now I’ve cheesed off one of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Just great. She’s going to send a missile over the lines straight into my ear, then berate me to my agency head, then to President . . . At that moment I couldn’t remember who the president was. She’d probably find a way to get me indicted for something.

My professional life passed in front of my eyes. I was much younger then and it didn’t take long.

As the call transferred, I heard the click on the line with the same trepidation as a French aristocrat heard the click of the revolution’s guillotine as it began its fall.

Actually, she was quite sweet.

For a moment, when she thought maybe I was simply being bullheaded, she was a bit firm. But when I explained to her that this wasn’t a question of my wanting to be difficult, that I was only doing what the law required, her attitude changed entirely. She was very nice about the whole thing, even thanked me for my help in arranging the exchange before ringing off.

Saved. I exhaled with relief. It had all turned out well somehow. But, man, there for a moment I was pretty stressed out.

Talking to reporters...

This is a rare photo of me actually working for a living. As a gesture of friendship with the Sri Lankan government, a U.S. naval ship made a port call in Colombo during the country’s civil war. Immediately, rumors began to circulate in this conspiracy-prone country that, that despite our policy of lending no lethal military aid to the government, we had brought the ship to Colombo to blast away at the Tamil rebels. The fact that the rebels were a hundred miles inland and we’d made clear the ship was not there in any kind of combat role didn’t seem to make any difference to the rumor-mongers. So, your humble servant, trying to appear utterly casual, is at dockside explaining to a camera crew that the ship is in port for only two days and would take no role in their war. I don’t think they entirely believed us until the ship left without blasting away at much of anyone.

Close up of the comic

Hi, Friends -- After I did a short video on the Malagasy cartoon in my study a couple of people mentioned that they would like a closer look at it. I hope this photo shows it off well, with all its color and humor. 

As I was saying in the video, the building in the background is the American Cultural Center that I supervised when my family and I lived there. As always, there's a lot of foot traffic in front of the place. Its library and English-language classes were big draws and, in a city with few cars there were always lots of people walking by. I believe the fellow in the green suit in the center of the drawing is supposed to be me. The skin seems to be a little more pale than that of others, and a suit was a rare thing. The glasses are another giveaway. And, you will notice the car at far right, with U.S. on the license plate and a corps diplomatique sticker on the bumper. And, yes, that fellow at the far right right with the fiendish smile, who for no particular reason I've always taken to be the artist of this cartoon, seems to be pissing on my car. 

Best to all,

Steve

The Comic From Madagascar

Bernard Sexe and the cartoon from Madagascar

Books on the shelf. A few of my favorite friends

Office Tour part 2

Office Tour

These days I can't invite much of anyone up to my study to see where I work, so I'll bring it to you. Truly, everything there -- even Dr. Evil -- helps create an atmosphere where I can be relaxed and creative.

It's Safe to Go Back in the Water -- and to order online

Hi, Everyone – I wanted to let you know that the problem with defective books from Amazon has finally been solved. You can order from them or any other online source without worry now. Turns out Amazon itself was printing them, so if you ordered from anyone else you got a good copy. Any defects you get from here on out are purely mine.

I want to thank all of you who wrote to let me know there was a problem. I would be so pleased if those of you who returned your books to Amazon will order a new one. My publisher has been very patient with me as we try to build some readership for my writing. I’d be more pleased for them than for me if we get increased sales – I think.

I’ll start getting some more interesting blogs out to you soon. Maybe a video reading of a kid’s book and a video tour of my study. If there are other topics you’d like me to treat, let me know.

Best to all,

Steve

Concerning printing...

Hi, Everyone – Yes, me again. I need to give everyone a quick heads-up about buying “Sri Lanka.”

It seems that at least some of the books being sold online have defects, with missing lines on multiple pages and other misprints. We’re not sure of the extent of the problem, but will do everything necessary to correct.

Kindle and other e-book formats seem to be fine, so if you’re ordering the book that way, there appears to be no problem.

To be on the safe side of this, if you haven’t ordered a copy yet, you might want to put it off for a few days, until we’ve solved this problem. If you have already received a defective copy, I’m sure you can ask your seller to exchange it.

In the meantime, as I say, e-book versions appear to be fine. If you live in the Portland area, you can also contact me and I’ll sell you one of the copies I have here at the house. They all seem fine.

Sorry to bring bad news, but I thought everyone out there would want to know right away.

Best regards,

Steve

Chapter 1 Reading

Hi, Folks -- I decided to do a little reading from the first chapter of "Sri Lanka." I hope you enjoy it. Only lasts about nine minutes and, what the heck, most of us have plenty of time on our hands these days.