Gooseberry Observations; UPS and Lesbians; Dead Meat

I love gooseberries (Ribes grossularia) and miss them here. In Ireland in the late summer we'd prick our hands on the bushes of sweet furry red berries and tarter green ones, about the size of cherries or slightly larger. Each early spring I'd check the nurseries here in California for gooseberry bare roots, but never had any luck. Then, last year, I found that there was an International Ribes Society in

Boonville, 100 miles to my south in Mendocino County. Since Boonville is the headquarters of my friend Bruce Anderson, editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser (greatest newspaper in the world), I called him and asked for an intro. He said that Ribes Society supremo, Steve McKay, was outside the jurisdiction for various reasons, but that McKay's mother, Jean Nickless, would help.

She did, giving me the name of a Mr. Alexander Eppler in Seattle as a gooseberry man of the first rank. I was in Seattle last fall and phoned Eppler. A deep, melodious voice informed me that "today I am involved with church matters, but will be at your service tomorrow." I gave him my name. There was a pause, then he said, "We met in Bulgaria in the early 70s. You were with Angela Davis. I was the translator." I said that was unlikely, since I had never been in Bulgaria, and maybe he was confusing me with my friend Andrew Kopkind. "We'll see about that," he answered rather mysteriously and gave me directions to his house in West Seattle.

Driving through the 50s-feeling blocks of West Seattle overlooking Puget Sound the next day I pondered Eppler's memory. Could he perhaps be very old, and have met my father and mother in 1946, when they visited Sofia, being informally married by a jovial Russian general who anointed them with brandy? When my mother died in 1989 I found a certificate of a later ceremony they'd had performed in the 1970s in a London registry office, which noted sniffily that they had undertaken a "form of marriage in Bulgaria." Since I was born outside wedlock, never baptized and not confirmed, I suppose I class as a heathen headed for limbo, though St. Peter will have grounds to assign me to hell since I was undoubtedly aware of the possibility of Christian salvation and rejected it.

Assuming Eppler was at least 20 in 1946, that would put him at 74 now. His house was shaded, up a secluded driveway. I knocked on the door. After 10 minutes a man walked up the driveway, identified himself as the lodger and said, "He's in, maybe asleep." I went on knocking. Suddenly the door flung open and I stood facing a jolly Russian in his late 40s, with hair down to his waist and dressed in a brown monk's habit. "Come in," he cried, and led me to a sitting room. "Have some brandy." It was noon. I settled for white wine, and Eppler touched only briefly on the Bulgarian encounter. Yes, he had confused me with someone else.

His life story was exciting. His parents were from Siberia, but he'd grown up in Bulgaria, later going to Moscow to study at the musical conservatory. He led me to his basement where balalaikas lay around at various stages on manufacture. He also handed me a long-playing record featuring himself as a balalaika virtuoso. I played it later and it was excellent. Also in the basement in the process of construction were flutes, and as befits a ribes king, seven-gallon kegs of black-currant wine slowly maturing.

At the fall of communism Eppler had returned to Moscow to study to become a Russian Orthodox priest. He was now the assistant priest at an Orthodox church in Seattle with a congregation of around 200. Since then, he's graduated to overall command of this small flock. He also works as a studio conductor, with a specialty in Eastern European composers. And is in the process of writing a two-volume study of the Russian Orthodox musical liturgy, and is hopeful of a blessing from the Patriarch in Moscow, a city he visits from time to time.

As we toured through Eastern European history, music and Eppler's other extensive interests, I raised the matter of gooseberries. Yes, Eppler said, he had started a business selling ribes bare roots?gooseberries, along with black, red and white currants. His prime customers are emigres from Russia and Eastern Europe. We settled on a couple of hundred dollars' worth of varieties for delivery this March, and after lunch with him at a local Indian restaurant I went on my way.

In mid-March I called up Eppler and he said his associates in Salem, OR (apparently transplants from Alabama), had shipped the roots to me. Two weeks later, nervous about the roots desiccating in their box, I checked again, to hear the fateful news that the Salem crew had shipped them FedEx Ground.

Now, you may have seen vans with FedEx Ground painted in green, as opposed to the familiar orange or red. You may be under the delusion that this represents cheaper service, but still reasonably prompt delivery. Not so. FedEx Ground is actually the old RPS shipping service (a kind of subpar UPS in origin). I then discovered that my box had made its way slowly south from Oregon, in the FedEx Ground van, then been handed over to the U.S. Postal Service in Arcata, which had sent it on its way to me, 50 miles farther south in Petrolia. Total duration of journey: protracted. State of roots, very dry.

I called up Eppler to warn him about FedEx Ground. He said that I was not the only disappointed customer. FedEx Ground had been wreaking havoc with all his spring shipments. He had told the Salem crowd to ship again by UPS. Barbara the UPS lady (who drives what must be the longest daily route in the U.S., from Eureka, through Petrolia, Ettersberg, Whitethorn, Shelter Cove, Redway and back up to Eureka) delivered my roots two days later. I have them in the ground and they're budding out nicely. So, too, I have to admit, are most of the desiccated roots from FedEx Ground, except for two from a gooseberry variety called Whinham's Industry. They're sitting in the ground looking dead, just like the only other fatalities, four little specimens of Cornus mas, a Bulgarian dogwood that puts out a bitter cherry. Eppler says that in Bulgaria he used the hard wood of Cornus mas for flutes, though now he works with silver. These Russian priests are a versatile lot.

So soon the Cockburn estate will hopefully be rich in gooseberries and currants. I'll use some of the black ones for cassis, and the gooseberries for jams, sauces and a recipe for an interesting shin stew in Jane Grigson's book on fruit. As for FedEx Ground, in a kind of sinister echo of plans to privatize Social Security, it's now in the process of tunneling its way into the U.S. Postal Service, often unfairly maligned. Meanwhile UPS can boast of more or less singlehandedly having sponsored the Republicans' recent, successful assault on the ergonomic rules put out by Clinton in his final hours. The rules were intended to monitor and hopefully curb the sort of injuries that plague UPS workers, when they handle packages on the conveyor belts without any knowledge whether these packages contain a 15-pound VCR or an 80-pound car part. Some years ago, without any consultation with the Teamsters union, UPS management upped the weight limit to 150 pounds. Try handling that on a regular basis.

From time to time, a few years ago, I used to stay in East Detroit on Courville St., and had FedEx packages delivered by a very beautiful young black woman. I yearned for her daily deliveries and implored friends to use FedEx on a regular basis. It turned out that Courier Passion is a familiar complaint. For a time there was a gorgeous young UPS woman servicing the West Village. Lesbians found her irresistible, and took to sending themselves heavy packages, just for the pleasure of watching the young Amazon hefting the boxes up the stairs of their brownstones, eagerly inhaling the delicious aroma of her sweat as she lurched up the final flights.

Dead Meat

There's been much headshaking about the decline of modern taste, centered over the exhibition of human corpses currently in Germany, and already the object of a fierce bidding war by American museums. We await Giuliani's intervention. The art objects, or perhaps in the most literal sense, "pieces," represent a thematic extension of the cows bisected by the British artist Damien Hirst. (Given Britain's current travails over hoof-and-mouth disease we can hail Hirst as prescient in the selection of his thematic material.)

But if Giuliani's speechwriters are preparing the usual howl of outrage about publicly funded filth, let them study American history. They might pick up Donald Worster's brilliant new life of John Wesley Powell, the great 19th-century explorer, ethnographer and geologist of the American West.

Worster describes Washington, DC, when Powell was living there in the 1880s, when he was head of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology, later replacing Clarence King as head of the U.S. Geological Survey. (King loved French wines. Accoutered with lavender gloves, he would ascend peaks like Mount Whitney in the Californian Sierra and quaff the finest Bordeaux at the summit. King also had a taste for young Mexican women. Whether he also sported with them at high elevations is unrecorded.)

Powell would often hold staff meetings in the Army Medical Museum on Independence and 7th, which was in fact the old Ford Theater where Lincoln was assassinated. This had become a public facility known officially as the Army Medical Museum and Library. The Smithsonian had been using it to display "stray crania" of native Americans. By the late 1880s it was the most popular museum in Washington.

According to Worster, it had a "macabre display of army generals, the neck bones of the assassin Booth, various diseased organs pickled in jars, and a diverting sample of artificial limbs."

When the Ford Theater reopened, the Army's museum didn't go out of business, but moved and still exists under the title of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, at 6900 Georgia Ave. Visitors this week can savor such instructive exhibits as a display of live leeches (who must feel right at home in DC), of kidney stones, a brain still attached to a spinal cord suspended in formaldehyde, skeletons, skulls and a stomach-shaped hairball surgically removed from inside a 12-year-old girl.)

Years ago, when I briefly undertook a crime column for Esquire, I visited a similar sort of museum attached to a hospital on the east side in New York. At this distance I can't remember which one it was. I seem to remember that it wasn't exactly public but you could wangle your way in. In formaldeyde jars were the throats of people who had choked to death in restaurants on bits of hamburger and the like. There was also the very, very substantial penis of a black man burned in a fire. The penis was the only bit of the man left in anything other than charred form, and his wife was apparently able to make a decisive identification. There was also a window and protective exterior steel grill which some homeowner had hot-wired to his A/C, thus frying a burglar trying to effect surreptitious entry. The perp's shoes were still stuck in the bottom of the grill.