Some Musical Instruments I've Made

©2015 by John LaTorre

As some of you know, I’m an amateur luthier (someone who makes stringed instruments). I’m not good enough at lutherie to do it professionally, but it’s given me a lot of entertainment over the years. These are some of the instruments that I’ve made. They are the ones I still have around the house.

Bottom row, left to right:

A cedar top OM guitar, built some years ago. It was my first OM guitar, and it’s still one of my favorites. The mahogany neck warped last year, and I replaced it with a cherry one which, I hope, will last a bit longer.

Acoustic Bass. This started out life as a half-finished dreadnaught (box only) that somebody gave me. I finished it but was never very happy with it. I took it apart again, redid the bracing and replaced the bridge and bridge plate. Now it’s a very-short-scale bass which doesn’t sound bad, except that it does need amplification when more than one more instrument is accompanying it. (It has two piezo pickups inside it.)

A spruce-top 000 14-fret. This is the first guitar I built to be played amplified. It has three piezo pickups inside.

A six-string "church" dulcimer. This is the first instrument I built, in 1980. It was a kit from the Hughes Dulcimer Company, but the top and fretboard have since been replaced. That black thing hanging from one sound-hole is a clip-on microphone for use when I’m playing through an amplifier.

A 12-fret 000 with a cedar top. I built it this year. It has a Baggs Lyric pickup inside. This will probably be my go-to finger-picking guitar.

This "lute-like object" is actually a rather odd classical guitar. It has a bowl-back, a "moustache" bridge, and pegs for tuning. It was designed to look as much as possible like a medieval lute, for use in medieval re-enactment venues. When people ask what it is, I say, "It’s a guitar, but its persona is a lute." People in the SCA get the joke.

I built this OO a few years ago. It’s my main travel guitar. I’ve found that this size is about as small as you can go and still get a decent sound with the style of music I play.

Top row, left to right

This violin was made from a kit, so most of the work was already done. However, I took it apart and re-fashioned it into a left-handed violin, for reasons that are too involved to explain here. The modification required removing the back, switching the tone bar and the tuning pegs from one side to the other, and then reassembling the violin.

A mandola. This is essentially a large mandolin, tuned a fourth lower. If I put a capo on the fifth fret, it has the same tuning and scale length as a conventional mandolin. It has two passive pickups.

A mandora (not to be confused with a mandola). This bowl-back instrument is the ancestor of the mandolin. It has four gut (well, synthetic Nylgut, actually) strings tuned to the modern mandolin scale. The "pegs" are actually geared tuning machines. Don’t tell anybody.

Concert ukulele. This little guy was made from scraps of wood I had left over from larger projects. It’s a fun instrument to play, although I’d have been better off had I built a tenor uke instead. I had enough wood for that, but not the plans.

A-style mandolin, made from the Siminoff plans. It has a slightly arched top and back, which I bought already formed. That was a bad move, because the top eventually cracked right at the glue joint. When I took the back off to repair the crack, I took the opportunity to install two passive piezo pickups inside.

Another A-style mandolin with a flat top and back. The neck actually came from another mandolin, which I’d built from a kit. The body on that one didn’t hold up, so I made a new body with a very different bracing pattern. It’s my primary travel mando.

A bowed psaltery. I made a bunch of them for friends. This is my brother’s, and it’s standing in for my own instrument, a nearly identical one currently on loan to a friend. By the way, the bowed psaltery is often passed off as a medieval instrument, but it’s not. It was invented less than a hundred years ago, in fact.

Finally, we have a "Symphonia" style hurdy-gurdy, based on plans by George Kelischek. A simple three-string model with a diatonic keyboard, it’s used in medieval re-enactment venues. The design dates to the 13th century. Just below it, hiding behind the neck of the lute-like object, is the monkey that travels with the hurdy-gurdy. Why a monkey? Because people expect one, that’s all.

I’ve made other instruments that are not pictured here because they’re on loan to friends, sold, given away, or donated to charities. They include an octave mandolin, a larger hurdy-gurdy, several hog-nosed psalteries, three lap harps, another mandolin I built from a kit (mostly to test the kit for the manufacturer), and the aforementioned bunch of bowed psalteries. If there were others, I’ve forgotten them.

What are all these instruments worth? Damn little, since they are all home-built. But they don’t sound too bad, and I’ve learned a little more about lutherie from each one of them. So their value is mostly sentimental.

For the record, I also own a 1960s vintage Oskar Teller classical guitar that used to belong to my father, a Yamaha 12-string guitar, an Oscar Schmidt autoharp, a Black Mountain four-string dulcimer, and a Saga lap harp with twenty-five wire strings. Plus numerous penny-whistles, which I play badly. And, to complete the "Oscar" trilogy, a genuine Oscar Meyer Wiener Whistle, obtained from the friendly crew of the Wiener Wagon when it last passed through Sacramento.

Two Scrapbooks

©2015 by John LaTorre

I recently ran across two collections of memorabilia from my boyhood, one compiled by my mother and the other by me. The first was an album of some of the various landmarks in my life that seemed important to her. There are old report cards, a certificate of vaccination from when I was eleven months old, various reports and essays I’d written for school, a handmade Mother’s Day card, and other memorabilia. It’s a thick book. I’m not exactly sure how it ended up in my bookcase; I must have received it from my father when she died in 1994, or from my father’s effects when he died ten years later. Most of the items were taped in with pieces of cellophane tape, which lost their stickum many years ago and now fall like snowflakes as I turn the pages.

I wonder if my mother intended this collection for me or for her. Most of it is stuff I would never have saved on my own. Was it an attempt to freeze in time a child who was growing and changing before her eyes? Far better than I did, she knew that these scraps would soon be all that was left of my boyhood, and she resolved to save them from posterity … whether my posterity or hers, I don’t know

There are pictures of my first, second, and third grade classes. It’s easy to spot me. I’m the kid with the shockingly white hair and a toothy grin, usually in the back row. Despite the grin, the eyes convey a sort of anxiety or insecurity; my smile is meant to elicit approval rather than express confidence.

These classes were the product of the post-war baby boom, so they are large. The schools I attended, I found out later, had just been built to accommodate the multitude of children that sprang up after World War II. It was probably the biggest school-building boom in American history; until I went to college, none of the schools I attended were in existence when I was born. I doubt if my father or his siblings could say the same. I doubt if many of today’s students could, either.

There is a certificate of my having completed kindergarten. It looks like a diploma. There is an “Honor” sticker with a blue ribbon attached to it. I wonder if all the “graduates” got a sticker like that, or if I had in some way been singled out for distinction, such as my proficiency at nap-time. It is signed by one “Virginia L. Stine.” I have no memory of her at all.

The second-grade class portrait identifies my teacher as “Mrs. Wood.” I don’t remember her, either. It appears that she taught two grades – second and third – in the same classroom. (Chalked on the blackboard behind her are these “New Words:” Bozo, smell, eyes, loved, strange, chase, and together. I’m trying to imagine what the reading assignment might have been.) Not only is the teacher a stranger to me, but every one of my twenty-seven classmates is, too. I could run into any of them tomorrow and not know who they are, because I moved away the next year and never saw them again. That’s the “military brat” life-style in a nutshell.

I see a picture of my first communion class at the Holy Family Catholic Church in Hillcrest Heights, Maryland. My mother thoughtfully drew an arrow pointing to me on the border of the picture, showing which of the eighty-odd children I was. And here is a report card from my third grade at the Wyngate Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland, signed by my teacher, Gertrude W. Robertson. I don’t remember her, either. If she’s still alive, she probably doesn’t remember me, although I was a pretty good student, getting mostly A’s and B’s. The grades for the fourth quarter are missing, because my parents pulled me out of school that spring when we moved to Frankfurt, Germany. That, too, is not uncommon among schoolchildren of the military.

Mom saved some of my artwork from those years, the sort of artwork that stereotypically ends up on refrigerators nowadays. It includes a comic strip I drew at age nine, featuring “Sam the Scarecrow.” Sam’s adventures must have struck me as hilarious then; now they’re just crude drawings without humor or punch lines. Since it’s not likely that she saved them for their artistic value, I can only assume they were reminders of those pleasant times when I was quietly scribbling away at my drawing board and not pestering her for something. Those rare, blissful times must have been altogether too short for her, and I'm not surprised that she would have wanted to remember them.

She also saved some of the plays, poems, and stories I wrote back when my major writing implements were crayons. Some of them are typed, though, so I assume that she was the one who typed them up. They don’t show much literary talent, but I guess everybody has to start somewhere.

There’s my report card from “Religious Instruction” class in the fifth grade. I got straight B’s in “Attention in Classes.” I was a very devout little boy back then, even doing a short stint as an altar boy. I attended catechism classes all the way through high school, and didn’t stop attending Sunday services until I was in college.

And here is an artifact of a moment in my life when my mother must have been proud of me, at least at first. It’s the program for my first (and last) piano recital. For me, it is one of the worst memories of my childhood. If I had been the one in charge of keeping or discarding this stuff, this document would probably have been the first thing to get tossed, but now I’m glad she kept it. At the recital, I was playing the traditional air “Long, Long Ago” from page four of my piano primer. I got lost somewhere by the twelfth bar, and my tempo deserted me. I still remember Herr Nesswetha, my piano teacher, furiously whacking his baton on the top of the piano in an attempt to get my timing back on track. Somehow I managed to finish the piece and the ordeal was over, but Herr Nesswetha evidently lost faith in my musical future. He simply stopped coming to lessons. But then, I had been skipping a lesson or two at that time; to a twelve-year-old boy, a piano lesson was simply no match for playground on a sunny spring day. Those piano lessons were the only music instruction I ever had, although I came to be familiar enough with other instruments to play them without embarrassing myself. I can even play “Long, Long Ago” on the piano, but not very well. So please don’t ask.

I find two large photographs of me when I was a junior in high school, probably taken by a friend of mine in my Explorer post who was learning photography. The first shows me in a leather jacket, scowling at the camera, doing the best impersonation of a juvenile delinquent that a pimple-faced kid could muster.

The second shows me in a hospital bed only a few months later. I am in traction with two broken thigh-bones after having been hit by a car.

My face still has the pimples. I was wearing that jacket when I was hit by the car. When I was in the emergency room afterwards, I remember being conscious just long enough to plead with the orderlies to spare it when they were cutting me out of my clothes. They let me wriggle out of it without harming it. That jacket meant a lot to me, although for the next eighteen weeks wearing it was out of the question, since I was either in traction or a full body cast, and I wasn’t going anywhere.

I remember something else about that hospital stay. When I was laid up, Herr Nesswetha came to see me. I hadn’t seen him in five years. As we talked, he kept glancing at the guitar my father had given me, now leaning against the bed. After a while, he said, “You know, I teach guitar, too.” So maybe he thought that there was hope for me, after all. At least, he may have realized that a student couldn’t skip a lesson when he was in traction.

The remainder of the album mostly consists of playbills for the dramatic productions that I’d worked on in high school and at the neighborhood amateur theater, and newspaper clippings that mentioned me in passing: a scholarship citation I won, a couple of “man in the street” interviews printed in some military publication, wherein I provided viewpoints of your Typical Teenager on the subjects of the Beatles (still in, or now passé?) and cosmetic surgery (nose jobs: good idea or not?).

The other collection is also a scrapbook, but this one consists of stuff that I collected, not my mother. From the looks of it, I must have started it when I was twelve or so. It contains things like a ticket stub to a concert, Mass cards that were given to me at relatives’ funerals, and souvenir programs for historic places I’d visited. There are ticket stubs to rugby game in Northampton, a brochure on London’s Baden-Powell house for Boy Scouts, and various other mementos that bear witness to a visit I’d made to England in 1964.

One thing that startled me was a mechanical drawing of a “mountain tent” much like the pup tents we used to camp in when I was in the Scouts. Did I somehow sense that, some thirty years later, I would be a professional tent-maker? Or did I have some memory, when drawing up plans for my later tents, that I had done something like this years ago, and that it was, in a sense, just more familiar territory? I also made a detailed floor plan of a two-room cabin that consisted of a kitchen and a bedroom. The kitchen was to be heated by a wood stove, the bedroom by a fireplace. There are no provisions for an indoor bathroom. It was a cabin intended for one person, drawn at a time when its confines would have been room enough for one person.

Another thing was a pair of essays I’d written in high school, showing a decidedly conservative political bent: anti-drugs, pro-Goldwater, and pro-war. I suppose that my upbringing in a military-base environment had a lot to do with that. It took two years of college to bring me out of that mind-set, after which I became a dope-smoking hippie involved in anti-war protests, running a coffee-house, and learning the songs of Phil Ochs on the same guitar that I had in the hospital.

I also saved a few humorous articles and cartoons (mostly Peanuts) that amused me. Those things amuse me now, too.  My taste in some things apparently hasn’t changed much in fifty-some years, even though my politics have. And I saved a long letter my older brother wrote me when he heard about my accident, along with two get-well cards. One was from my chemistry teacher, who typed out the poem Invictus by W. E. Henley in the inside of the card. The second one was from a couple whose names I don’t recognize at all.

Apart from the photos in my family album, these albums are now all that remains of the boy I was. I don’t know whether to keep them or throw them away. They mean nothing to anybody but myself. But the first album is a better testimony to my mother’s love for me than anything else I own, better than the photographs, better than the few keepsakes of her that I have. They call out to me over the years to say, “This is the child you were. I loved that child. Please don’t let him be forgotten, because this album is all that’s left of him, and my children are all that’s left of me.” How could I throw that away?

The second book is a little easier to dismiss. The only link I have with it now is a realization that these things meant something to me at one time. They are the landmarks of the valley I see below me after I have climbed the mountain and know that I will never be returning to that valley again. I have left these things behind along with my youth, and now they have no more value to me than the clothes I don’t fit into anymore.

They do give me a little perspective, though. I never did make that mountain tent, but I ended up making hundreds of other tents. I never built that cabin, either, but for months at a time I have lived in an even smaller Volkswagen camper, which also lacks an indoor bathroom.

By a curious coincidence, the last items in that scrapbook were added in the mid-1960s. That was roughly when the first commercially successful hang glider was being developed in Australia, a half a world away, an invention that would shape a great deal of my working life and much of my recreational life and my personality, as well. As I sit now on the pinnacle of my life, I reflect with some awe and not a little puzzlement how I ever got here from where I was, and how I ended up treading paths that I never dreamed existed.  The boy who collected those mementos long ago probably had a good idea of where he would be heading, and what he would find when he got there, and who he would be. He would go to medical school after college and become a doctor, like his childhood role models. He would have a large, Catholic family and take them to church every Sunday. He would probably have lots of money, and vote Republican. 

My mother never got that son. She got me instead.  There isn’t much left of that little boy in the school pictures. The only thing I can do about that is to try to keep something of that little boy inside me, and let him not grow up too much. Let him not be so well hidden inside the man that nobody will ever see him again. Let him come out and play once in a while, so people can get a glimpse of the child my mother loved. I think she might have been satisfied with that.

Oh, Baltimore

©2015 by John LaTorre

Google’s Streetview service is, for me, the most addictive thing on the Internet. When coupled with a browser’s ability to search for any information on the places I encounter, it guarantees that I’ll spend the next few hours in front of the computer screen as I cybernetically navigate streets I used to travel every day.

But these trips down memory lane are not always pleasant. Neighborhoods change. Landmarks disappear. For instance, I noticed something else while prowling my old neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland, with Google Streetview. There’s a monument to Johns Hopkins on the grounds of the university named after him. The monument, at the western end of Thirty-third Street, shows two nude bronze figures seated on marble thrones, a male and a female, representing Knowledge (the university) and Healing (the Johns Hopkins Hospital). Or at least it used to. Apparently the female figure is gone. That is a shame, because the Hopkins fraternity boys used to polish the lady’s bare breasts with loving care when I was a student there in the sixties. On a good sunny day, it was said, you could see them gleam from a half a mile away. I don’t usually condone tampering with public statuary, but I must say that I sympathized with those lads; if their social life was anything like mine as a student, polishing up those boobs was probably as close to intimacy with the female form as they ever got. I sincerely hope that the lady is temporarily absent, undergoing restoration, and that she will soon be back in all her shining glory. (I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that those college men were also responsible for slipping rolls of toilet paper under the left hand of the copy of Rodin’s Thinker that stood outside the Baltimore Museum of Art, just adjacent to the Hopkins campus. Look at the statue with an unjaundiced eye, and you’ll see why.)

When I moved to Baltimore in 1966 to attend college, it was the first American city I’d lived in as an adult. It was a different place then, and each time I visit it, there seems to be a little more that’s slipped away from me. Gertrude Stein once famously remarked of her home town of Oakland, California, that “there’s no there there.”  She didn’t mean that there was nothing there of consequence, as has been thought; she meant that the Oakland of her past no longer existed. She couldn’t go back there, because “there” wasn’t there anymore. That’s kind of how I feel about Baltimore.

I recently heard that Obrycki’s crab house had closed down after more than a half a century. A crab house was a special kind of restaurant, where you’d sit at long tables covered in newspaper. You were expected to make a mess, and you did. The steamed crabs were brought out and your pleasant job was to dissect them, extract the meat, and leave a mound of shell fragments on the table. You’d wash the food down with pitchers of National Bohemian beer, a local beer that was specially formulated to be the perfect complement to crab meat, or so I was told. There are still plenty of places you can get steamed crabs, I’m sure, but do any of them have the ambience of the authentic crab house experience?

Another restaurant that passed from the scene was a Chinese restaurant called Mee Jun Low’s, on Mulberry Street. You walked up a flight of stairs to find a big room, which was divided into two sections: a kitchen area, where wizened Asian men cooked food in enormous woks with the economy of motion that comes from years of doing the same thing over and over, and a dining area with a dozen tables or so. A waist-high barrier separated the two areas. There was only one waitress. She was the only Caucasian on the staff, and her name was Irene. She’d take your order and sing it out to the kitchen staff, who would repeat the order and have it cooking before she had time to take the next one. The whole place had an aura of pandemonium under light control, and it was a great favorite with the college crowd and what in future years would be called Young Urban Professionals.

And then there was Haussner’s, a German restaurant on Eastern Avenue that my wife and I would visit when we had a little money. They were famous for their crab cakes and desserts, as well as the fine art that hung from their walls, an art collection that any museum would have been proud to own. And there were other restaurants whose name I don’t remember, such as the cafeteria on Baltimore Street just a block or two from my office, with its steam tables and stainless steel trays, a favorite with downtown workers who didn’t have much to spend on lunch. It was also on the second floor, the first floor being all offices and storefronts on that block. I think the first floor was a stationery store … or was that down the block? And there was a little shack at the foot of Broadway (where Broadway Square is now) where you could get the best crab cakes in town, even better than Haussner’s to my mind.

It’s odd that the things that spring to mind most readily are foods. There used to be a local hamburger chain called Gino’s. It served the Gino Giant, which looked like a Big Mac but was far tastier. I found out later that their “secret sauce” was Thousand Island dressing. They’d use fresh potatoes for their French fries, too. The owners built the chain up to over three hundred restaurants and then sold it to Marriott’s, who never figured out how to run it properly. The chain is all gone now, although there are a few restaurants in the region that are trying to revive its menu.

A few blocks from my apartment on North Calvert Street was the B&M Sub Shop, in back of a basement convenience store. They’d take a fresh loaf of Italian bread, hollow it out, pack the cavity with meat balls and marinara sauce, and use a piece of the discarded bread to plug the top of it. It was the best meatball submarine I’ve ever tasted. Of course, I was hungrier then, and hunger makes the best sauce.

There were also the White Castle and the White Tower, two separate (and bitterly rival) chains selling identical tiny hamburgers you’d buy by the bag. One of them – I can’t remember which – had a restaurant on Greenmount Avenue and Gorsuch. It was within easy walking distance of Johns Hopkins and was open all night long. I made that walk many a time, both when I was an insomniac student and later on, when I lived in Charles Village. Neither chain operates in Baltimore now, although White Castle still does a brisk business in the Midwest and even sells its “sliders” in supermarkets nationwide. Maybe they taste as good as the ones I used to buy, as long as you eat them at three in the morning.

That neighborhood was once a working-class community. By 1966, it was past its best years but still had supermarkets, garment shops, a Woolworth’s, movie theaters, surplus stores, several bars, and a news-stand that was open twenty-four hours a day and stocked newspapers from all over the country. When we’d be looking for apartments or cars, we’d go down on Saturday night and buy the “bulldog” edition of the Baltimore Sunday Sun. Then we’d call up the advertisers in the classified ads, thereby getting the jump on all the people who waited until Sunday to pick up the Sunday paper. That kiosk is gone now, along with most of those businesses, and many of the storefronts are boarded up or begging for tenants.

There are so many places that don’t exist anymore – not only the businesses, but the structures themselves. In 1971, some friends and I started a print shop in the basement of a row house on West 25^th Street. There’s now a CVS pharmacy where that block of row houses used to be. The little house on Susquehanna Avenue in Towson that my wife and I rented in 1973 was torn down years ago. When I went by there twenty years ago, all that was left was a set of concrete steps that connected our front porch with the sidewalk in front of the house, steps I would ascend every day after walking home from the bus stop down the street. Now there’s a new brick building on the site, occupied by Chesapeake Teleservices. There are concrete steps in front of it that look an awful lot like those steps I walked up years ago, but they are probably as new as the building.

What I remember most about that trip in 1994 was getting lost in downtown Baltimore, only a few blocks away from where I used to work on Baltimore and South Streets. When I moved to the city in 1966, most of the buildings that were built downtown in the early years of the twentieth century were still there. It was then that Baltimore undertook a massive urban renewal project, leveling most of the buildings around the harbor to create Charles Center and the new Inner Harbor area.  A few years later, much of the area south of City Hall was also demolished, including Baltimore’s famous fish market, where you could park your car all day for a quarter. Near the fish market was Baltimore’s infamous “Block,” which once extended several blocks and comprised nightclubs, burlesque halls and porn shops, a haven for sailors who berthed in Baltimore. By 1994, almost all of that was gone, except for a few strip clubs.

None of the above will make much sense to those who were never part of Baltimore’s scene, except for those who seek parallels in their own lives – spaces that have changed, buildings that were demolished to make way for other buildings, landmarks that have been obliterated. It’s the same in every city. A year before my father died, I drove him around downtown Syracuse and had him point out locations that he used to know … the school he went to, his first job as a machinist, the Franklin automobile factory … now largely vacant lots or abandoned buildings. And there have been numerous books on the metamorphosis of cities like San Francisco, New York, London, and Paris. These were once cities with a full spectrum of working classes, but they’ve become residences, playgrounds and workspaces for the affluent, while those in the service industries that support them have to live far out of town.

There is a Baltimore in my memories that is far different from the real one in Maryland. It is a city frozen in time, a day long past. Maybe if I’d been living in Baltimore for the last forty years, the changes there wouldn’t have seemed so glaring, or so extensive. There would still be a “there” there. Maybe there’s still a “there” there, and all I’d have to do is walk its streets again, and visit the landmarks that still stand, and smell the grass being mowed in Wyman Park, and hear the bells of the neighborhood churches. I’m sorry, Google, but I just can’t do that with Streetview.

The Green, Green Grass of Home

©2015 by John LaTorre

I am happy to report that my front lawn is finally turning brown.

Ever since last fall, my front lawn has been a brilliant, nearly iridescent green, the shade of green that one sees in pictures of Ireland, or Kauai, or Thailand. In most parts of the country, this would be considered a Good Thing. But this is California, where things are a bit different.

California is now in the fourth year (or fifth year, depending on whom you ask) of one of its worst droughts in history. The government has been imploring citizens to cut back on their water usage, and strict regulations on water use are now in force. Our cars have not been washed since last year, and look as if they’ve just been over three hundred miles of dusty roads. We keep them unwashed to demonstrate our commitment to saving water, because people around here notice these things.

When one of the underground sprinkler pipes in our front yard broke a couple of years ago, it caused an excess of water to well up from under the lawn, cross the sidewalk, and trickle into the street gutter. I found something dangling from our front door knob when I got back from the supermarket. It was a “fix-it” order from the city, which is not unlike the sort of thing you get from a cop who notices that you have a taillight out. It warned me that unless the problem was found and eliminated, I could expect a stiff fine. So I made the repair the next day. I never saw the inspector who wrote out the order, but I’m sure that he or she was back to check on the situation. At any rate, I didn’t have to pay the fine, but I was convinced that the Water Police really existed, and they were paying attention.

As it turned out, the front lawn wasn’t finished with me. There are two distribution areas in the sprinkler system for the front lawn, each governed by its own regulator. The regulator is an “anti-siphon valve,” which is the sort of thing that you might expect to find mounted on your car’s fuel filler, to prevent the neighborhood punks from stealing your gasoline, but in fact it is not. It is a gadget that is connected by wires to a central programmable timer in the utility room. In some way I am not able to fathom, it responds to signals from the timer and actuates the sprinkler heads at pre-set times, and for pre-set intervals. My wife, who is a computer programmer, is given the task of actually setting up the times and durations, since she is used to communicating with devices like this.

These valves are not immortal, and I have had to replace two of them –one in the front yard and one in the back yard -- over the course of the last twenty years. The second valve in the front yard, which was the oldest surviving valve and possibly the one originally installed in the system, finally gave up the ghost sometime over the winter. But this one failed in an insidious manner, as I shall explain.

As usual, we turned off the sprinkler timer last fall, relying on winter rains to keep the lawn watered. It seemed to work well, but in May or so, we noticed that the back lawn was starting to die, so we turned the timer back on. We also began a program of giving the red maple sapling in our front yard a couple of hours of trickle irrigation twice a week, because it had been stressed by last summer’s drought to the extent that it dropped most of its leaves in July. Trees are an important part of Sacramento’s plant life; one of the city’s nicknames is “the City of Trees.” Whereas on the east coast, every clearing marks a spot where trees have been removed, here in Sacramento nearly every tree has been planted by hand, in a place where trees are not the default. They give much needed shade against the fierce Central Valley sun, and we’d planted our tree where, when it matured, it would shade the house from the sun and save future residents a fair chunk of money in air-conditioning bills. And the leaves turn a brilliant red in autumn, a fond reminder of my childhood in Virginia and upstate New York, when entire hillsides would be a riot of red and orange and yellow in the fall.

When we turned the sprinkler timer back on in the spring, we (by which I mean my wife) also re-programmed it to meet the specifications of the city’s latest watering ordinance: twice a week instead of three times a week. We also cut the watering times in half. The front and back lawn seemed to be happy with this regimen. In fact, the front lawn seemed as green as ever. That should have made me suspicious, but it didn’t.

Eventually, our front lawn became the greenest lawn on the street. As our neighbors’ lawns became gold, then brown, ours prospered.  I wondered what they thought of us. Didn’t we know that there was a drought on? Didn’t we read the papers? Or listen to the radio? Although they couldn’t catch our sprinklers working on off-days, it was obvious that our lawn was getting the VIP treatment, while theirs were slowly changing to a virtuous gold, which is how they describe a dying lawn in these parts. It would probably have done no good to point out that our back lawn was hanging on to life by its fingernails, or what ever blades of grass have to hang on to life with. Ironically, the back yard isn’t visible at all from the street, so we could have watered it to our heart’s content, seven days a week, without anybody being the wiser.

One morning, I went out to pick up the paper from the front lawn. Yes, we still get the daily paper. It’s supposed to arrive on our front porch, but our delivery person’s aim can be a little off at times, and we have found it in the bushes and, a couple of times, sitting on the roof of the porch. So its arrival on the front lawn, where I could at least see it, was well within the tolerable margin of error. On this particular day, I noticed that the lawn was wet. And so was the paper. And this wasn’t even a watering day. I checked the sprinkler heads. There was water oozing out from all the heads on one circuit, but not from the other.

It turned out that there was a little “bleed screw” on the offending anti-siphon valve that had stripped, and could no longer be tightened down properly. This is the screw that you unscrew when you want to actuate the sprinklers and, in effect, bypass the regulating timer. It had been allowing a trickle of water to evade the valve twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No wonder the lawn looked like Ireland. Our particular street is not supplied with water meters, so there’s no telling how much of California’s most precious resource had been squandered.

Our local hardware store had replacement valves in stock, and I bought one and installed it the next day. To do so, I had to saw through the plastic inflow and outflow pipes, glue some extensions on, and then fit the new valve over the extensions. After hooking up the wires, we tested it, and found that water was no longer welling up from the sprinkler heads when it wasn’t supposed to. Problem solved.

A week later, the front lawn is starting to lose its iridescence, except in the area right around the tree, which we’re still watering with an extended trickle twice a week. We don’t want to lose it, and if watering it means that part of our lawn will still be an embarrassing shade of green, so be it. It’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make. It’s for the tree, you see. Really. I mean, just look at our cars!