Not There Yet

Travel Advisory

2011-12-18T14:05:00.002-05:00

Last week held probably the last day we will see above 50 degrees for quite a while, but then who knows these days? We are likely to be having a green Christmas hereabouts, which will be very disappointing to my niece Graciela (George's daughter) and her 4-year-old, the latter of whom is hoping to experience snow for the very first time this year; they are flying up from Houston. Going from Houston to anywhere else on Earth, including Darfur or Helmand province, is a step up. In fact, young Miranda's father Hector does work in Afghanistan and, if he doesn't exactly love the place, he sure does love the enormous loads of cash deposited in his account monthly.

Speaking of parts foreign, a funny thing happened to me in Bahrain when George and I were staying there, waiting for Papa's vacation to begin so that we could all fly together to India. On my last day (of five) in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, I was sitting at an outside table with George at a Starbucks. I tended to go to this particular place for coffee each day, because I had really hit it off with the guys who work there: Omar and Amal from Bangladesh, Zoros from Nepal, Othman from India and Marco from the Philippines. I would drop in each day at times they didn't seem to be busy and joke around with them. The Starbucks in Manama - the only one I know of, anyway -is on a very westernized street in Bahrain (although most of the streets are pretty westernized) - lined with all the usual suspects: DQ, Seattle's Best, Chili's, McDonald's, Burger King and slew of others. There are also some chains from other places such as Nando's from South Africa. Sitting in any of the outdoors areas, one sees as many Americans passing as Arabs, because the U.S. Navy has a large base nearby and this street is one of the popular venues during their off hours. Of the Arabs one does see, both men and women are doing their best to look American, men riding motorcycles and women in tight jeans and so forth.

Normally, I avoid areas frequented by Americans and Europeans in Third World countries, because these areas are so westernized I might as well stay home and go to a mall. In addition, in countries with a Muslim population or a population hostile to the U.S. government, places like this street and these restaurants are the most likely to attract the attention of suicide bombers. No one appreciates excitement on a vacation more than I do, but one must draw the line somewhere. I actually felt a tiny bit of discomfort when I would sit at Starbucks for any length of time, wondering if I would attract just such attention. Bahrain is one of the countries experiencing the current Arab spring-cleaning and there had been a bit of a dust-up the week before George and I arrived. The insurrection in Bahrain failed largely because King Hamid called in his Saudi allies, who rumbled across the causeway that joins the two countries in full force. The area where the action centered, the historic Pearl Square, was demolished and that area, when I was there, was blocked at all points of entry by the Saudi - not Bahraini - military, and was fully occupied by Saudi forces.

Like many of the Middle Eastern countries - pre-war iraq or Syria, for instance - Bahrain has a large majority of one Muslim sect (in this case Shi'a), but is ruled by a government entirely composed of people from a different, small minority sect (Sunni). I am not sure why this occurs so often in the Middle East - whether the disadvantaged are drawn to different religious practices from the advantaged and thus become different from the rulers, or whether a minority somehow imposes its government on the existing majority. In any case, the Bahraini majority, besides being Shi'a, looks to Iran as it natural ally, which is a fact of even more import to the Sunni majority in Saudi Arabia, than the heretical beliefs are.

So to continue, I was relaxing at an outdoor table with Ted at Starbucks, when a youngish Arab man and I struck up a conversation. He spoke fair English, but was impressed by my Arabic - and it is odd, but as soon as my feet hit the ground in Bahrain, a great deal of Arabic which I thought I had forgotten came flooding back - and soon he joined us at our table. He was a Saudi and very much a Bedouin by nature; he lacked some of the modern overlay that one often finds among younger Saudis. He brushed his leg against mine a few times, but Arabs, like most Asians, are far less jumpy about touching between men so I thought little of it. But when we went inside for refills, he suddenly threw his arms around me and said a couple of things, addressing me as 'habibi'. Habibi means literally, 'my love', but Saudi friends sometimes use it in a kind of ironic way - something like an American man calling his friend 'buddy'. But the hug was too tight and too long to be entirely innocent. Here was sad, saggy old me being hit on by a 34-year-old! I can tell you that bucked up the sadly eroded ego something fierce.

I have often said that "if a gay man can't get laid in Saudi, he can't get laid anywhere". Because Saudi had, in the days when i was there at least, virtually no way for men to date women, and in addition the cost for a young man to marry was so high, a huge number of Saudis are single and desperately horny. The result is much like the result of a similar deprivation in American jails, men turn to men for relief. Since there is an enormous population of foreign workers (I have heard that one out of two people in the Kingdom is foreign) and since word of this state of affairs has gotten around as such things will do causing foreigners who prefer men to take jobs there, it is common for amorous Saudis to turn to willing foreigners - less risk to the Saudi of shame or legal trouble and something to do for fun for the foreigner. (This is an answer, of sorts, to Laoch's query about what there is to do for fun in Saudi). The odd thing (to my mind) is that these men seem to find anyone from eight to eighty worth their attention, unlike the more enlightened westerners who rarely want to date anyone over 25. However, as is the case with American prisoners, most Saudi men prefer women and once the opportunity arises, they will return to the straight and narrow, or straight and female, at least. So my assumption is that when in Bahrain, a relatively open country where one can find female companionship safely and fairly openly, a Saudi man would be looking for girls, if he was looking at all, and if he were truly interested in men, he'd be looking for the young good-looking ones.

George left us soon after this hug (which he did not witness, having remained outside at our table) to grab a nap before our flight later that day and Khalid, for such was his name, invited me to see his room, which was "in walking distance". In fact, he actually had to rent a room after we arrived at the hotel, but I do not strain at gnats, as the saying is. We spent a lovely day together, and by the time I actually returned to the Desert Pearl, Papa had arrived and he and George were entirely panicked, thinking I had been abducted and would not make the flight for which we were due to leave at that very instant. Khalid insisted on driving me to the airport, and he was eager to help all of us with our luggage and so forth. Any time he and I were alone, he vowed his undying love, and his hope to be together at some future point. I took this all with a grain of salt, but he has been in constant contact with me ever since by Facebook, Skype and telephone. In fact, his messages in the public ares of Facebook have been so indiscreet as to pretty much blow open any remnants of my comfortable closet. The thing is, his Facebook page (which is under a pseudonym) has entries, including pictures of men, from prior to our meeting which indicate that his preferences are for men who exactly match me.

Naturally, I condered that he could be some young guy hoping for worldly gain from a besotted old man or a would-be immigrant looking for help in coming to the U.S. But he has actually offered to pay for me to fly back to Bahrain soon, and he cannot come to the U.S. at least for two years, because his elder brother took his passport and told him that he will not get it back until he finishes school. Khalid had been out of the Kingdom a number of times to New Zealand before this happened, and has even been married, so the school he is to finish is actually high school. He is taking physics and chemistry (among other things) so it seems he is really buckling down; even more indicative of some degree of seriousness is that he has told me that he can't call on certain nights because he is studying. Since he is open about other amorous adventures since my return, I don't think it is an excuse to cover a boy's night out. He also holds a job, though nothing lofty, so he does seem to have some sense that the future really will happen, an understanding I often found lacking in young Saudi men.

Khalid and I are not soul mates; above and beyond the language and cultural differences, we have different interests. i have met people who hardly spoke a word of my language or me theirs with whom I had a certain mental connection, people of whom I could say we got each other. This is not fully true of Khalid, but I like him and he likes me. Better, he likes the way I look, and the way I look pretty much has ME eyeing the arsenic in the morning. I cannot tell you how much this has bucked me up. I'll see how it goes, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find a vacation in Bahrain (the ticket for which I will pay) in my not-too-distant future. Khalid has all the virtues and faults of the Bedouin - he is generous, impulsive, bigoted, demanding, fails to see obstacles and is quick to judge. I am mostly the same (omitting 'generous' and hopefully less blatantly bigoted - honestly I think I am way less bigoted). By bigoted, I don't refer to racial bias so much as culturally, nationality-based and religiously biased. It is bias, in itself, to assume that other people's biases are based on the same factors (i. e. skin-color) as our own. I am making no big plans, but I must say that life is just a tad more full of possibility than I thought a couple of months ago. You can't ask more of a vacation than that. Travel is, indeed, broadening.

It's a Good Sign!

2011-12-10T09:39:00.001-05:00

The Bahrain hotel suite in which my brother George and I stayed for a few days en route to India contained two appliances which even here in America remain largely unknown quantities to me, given my slipshod lifestyle: a clothes washer and a dryer. George, however, is a far more tidy and orderly soul than I am, so he decided we must make use of this largesse on the part of the Desert Pearl hotel. And, in truth, even I could tell that, after a series of interminable flights, my clothing could do with a bit of cleaning. We set forth for the Megamart, a large supermarket nearby, which also sold clothing and various other useful items, to buy some laundry soap. There we found Tide which, when I lived in Saudi, was the brand everyone used, and next to it was a laundry soap called Omo. I vaguely recall seeing products from this brand when I lived in Saudi where I assumed it was some brand used in European countries, like Fa or Fairy. I do know that Tide was so popular that I literally never saw any other product used by Saudis or Westerners or anyone else from the highest paid to the lowest paid groups in Saudi. I commented at the time, more than once, that I wished I got a penny for each box of Tide sold in the Kingdom.

George and i were feeling bohemian and adventurous and we decided to try Omo, and I think we may have discovered a source of Omo's difficulty in competing with Tide. Right under every display, on each box, of the brandname 'Omo' was the company's slogan: "Dirt is Good". I do not kid; that is the slogan, printed proudly and repeatedly on every box. I have a box here with me to prove it.

One of the joys of travel in third world countries is the English signage. It is easy to make fun of these, although who among us can be at all certain that he could correctly advertise any product in a foreign language. When in Saudi, I saw "Big Sails" advertised and a shop that sold "grosseries". What is even more enjoyable for me is where signs are correct, but the usage is a little different that that which we might find here in the US of A. Whose heart would not be warmed seeing the Sincere Saloon, which is located right next to the Nice Bakery in one Indian village? And does amputation have to be a dreary affair; why not shop at the breezy Prosthetics 'n' Splints shop which we saw in one Indian village?

Our purpose in visiting India was, of course, to attend the wedding of Gopu and Sreeja. Gopu is the brother-in-law of Papa, my former room mate from the Saudi days, and my long-time friend. In order to dress properly for the big event, Papa, his wife, George and I went to Kochi (formerly called Cochin) to one of the finest clothing stores where Mrs Papa purchased a number of glorious saris while the three of us men bought kurtas, which are long overshirts with the old Nehru style collars, and lunggis, white sarongs with a decorative gold band along the hemlines. The hem band need not be gold - it can be another color - but ours were gold-banded though the lunggi George chose had a second narrow band of silver thread inside the gold band. The remarkable feature for George and me in this elegant multi-floored establishment called Jayalakshmi was to be found on the third floor where we waited drinking excellent coffee supplied gratis by the staff while Mrs Papa was selecting her saris. We sat on chairs near the elevator doors and on the wall above us was a huge decorative ad poster which looked very much like an ad from GQ or one of the upscale fashion magazines. Depicted in it was a sultry-eyed man in a white suit staring in that smoky fashion found only among fashion models, who was leaning against a white piano. The whole picture was printed primarily in a pale blue-green color and in white; the man looked like an Indian version of Johnny Depp with long dark locks fashionably rumpled. Clearly this was no locally produced poster; no clerk had been asked to run up a sign for the wall in his or her spare time; the whole presentation reeked of the highest degree of professionalism. What drew our gaze most was the title of the sheet music displayed clearly on the piano: Prelude to Fornication. (The piece was, if you are interested, in the key of D flat.)

We all know that that title is probably the best possible description of a wedding in such a traditional culture as that of India, but couldn't Jayalakshmi be just a little more reticent here? Or couldn't they, instead, focus on the true purpose of weddings everywhere, which is to display a family's wealth and (lack of) good taste?

Around the world (or halfway at least)

2011-10-19T11:54:00.002-04:00

I suppose it would behoove me to mention that next week I will be in Bahrain. Alas, I will probably not be mingling with the activists there - I haven't even been mingling with the activists here - but I'll be staying in a temporally rented apartment for a few days and then on to India.

I have mentioned, I am sure, my former room mate Papa, with whom I shared an apartment for about six years when I worked in Saudi. The company I worked for, a Saudi manufacturer, provided deluxe family housing for Western employees who were married, and modern, though Spartan, housing in a separate area for singles. Asian and African employees were paid much less and were given allowances with which they were expected to rent locally. The last thing I wanted to do was to hang about with a bunch of western ex-pats bitching about Saudi life and planning their next vacation. So when I met Papa at a company department goat-grab, which is the term westerners used for the type of Saudi celebratory meal which involves sitting on the ground or in a tent around a huge platter containing an enormous bed of rice flavored with oil, tomato, cardamom and the like atop which rests a whole roasted sheep or goat from which one pulls chunks to eat with one's hands, I soon wound up agreeing to share lodgings with him in the older part of town. I kept my company-provided apartment, which was a single room with a kitchen along one side and a private modern bathroom, but I shared half of the rather low rent on an apartment sponge in the middle of old Jubail. As the company hired more Indians to work with Papa as computer operators, they joined us in the apartment which had two bedrooms. Papa and Matthew (a Christian Indian) shared on bedroom and Martie (a Catholic Goan) and I had bunks in the other. The four of us remained roomies and good friends for my six years at the company.

I lost touch with Martie who married and emigrated to Australia, and in the last few years I have also lost track of Matthew. Matthew married and then, to his shock , his wife divorced him. He had brief stints in the USA but so far as I know he now lives in Mumbai. However, I have remained in contact with Papa who still lives and works in Jubail, though now he is a programmer at a private company with greatly increased wages. Papa married not long after I left Saudi in 1996 and he has visited me almost annually, twice with his wife and son. Papa wanted to return my hospitality and that of my brother George, who was also his host the last time Papa's family came with him and when his brother-in-law arranged a marriage for himself, Papa invited George and meet attend. In india, weddings are not the exclusive sorts of events that we have here, although there is a similar desire to spend too much. Indeed, the last time I was in India I attended the weddings of four perfect strangers; as the first Western man ever to visit the small village I was in, I believe I served as cheap entertainment for the guests. I was only able to speak with one of the four grooms at all because although none spoke any English, one man had worked in the Gulf and we were able to stumble through a few sentences in Arabic, which he spoke far better than me.

Anyway, now Papa is reasonably rich by Indian standards and George and I are to be his guests at a home he has built in Palakkad in the state of Kerala for a couple of weeks. We had hoped to get a visa for Saudi for a couple of days en route; Papa says Jubail - and Saudi in general - have changed beyond recognition and I'd have liked to see the new Saudi Arabia, although i kind of loved the old version. But visas are hard to come by, so instead we will spend a few days in Bahrain and then fly together with Papa and his wife and Bubba (we call the boy Bubba and have done so since before he was born although of course that is not his name) to Kerala. I had assumed that the plan was to hang out in Palakkad for a while, but no, Papa has booked us on a tour of all kinds of sights. He sent us an itinerary and when George went on line to see what these various places were all about, he was stunned to see we are in a 5-star sort of situation everywhere, staying where kings and film stars (which is the same thing, really) have stayed. This was slightly alarming because although it seemed like Papa had said he was hosting (i. e. paying), it had never been specifically stated. Up until we got the itinerary, I had assumed that the beaches and temples and forts were day trips Papa planned, but now, I find we are on some kind of grand tour. I delicately brought up the financial situation that George and I find ourselves in, and Papa said to worry not - everything was on the house. Oh my!

Is it churlish of me to mention that I loathe sightseeing? And I would never, on my own, book any kind of packaged tour, although it is not exactly 'packaged' in that we won't have a guide, but we will have a driver. My idea of travel is to go, stay in a cheap local hotel patronized by locals and to get to know a place by walking around and making a fool of myself. I always say if one is going to a five-star hotel one might as well save the airfare and stay at the one in the closest town because they are all the same. Although there is a smiling friendliness amidst all the staff, it is a bought and paid for experience and is as close to really having a friendly conversation with a local as the Disney Jungle ride is to a trip down the Amazon. But it looks like this is what I am going to have.

The right way to look at this trip is a visit to a friend, rather than as travel. A friend who, whether he is visiting me or I him believes that the hour not spent in strenuously doing something or seeing something or, preferably, buying something is an hour wasted. I already have 9 packages from Amazon sitting on my kitchen table, which Papa has had sent here for me to tuck into my luggage for him. Oy! And a week to go; what new surprise will be delivered to my door? So I foresee a high level of activity doing things I would not consider doing if I were on my own.

It should be fun, though. The scientific principle that best applies to me is Newton's law that a body at rest tends to stay at rest. I don't go to a great number of events because all I can think of is the parking problem or the cost of admission or the crowds or being out too late. I am a sad wreck of the adventurer I used to be. One thing that does appeal to the adventurer in me is another idea that Papa has proposed. He will be working in Saudi for the forseeable future - he is quite a young man compared to me. He is 47, but looks like a man in his twenties. He has built a house in Kerala, as I said, and at present his mother and one of his brothers live there. But the brother has bought his own place and the two will be moving to this, therefore Papa's home will lie vacant much of the year. He has proposed that I - or George and I, or whoever I want and I - live in it for a couple of months in the winter of next year. I see no downside to that. Because I am an eternal pessimist in some things - again, anything that requires me to move my butt - I am sure I will manufacturer a number of objections in the coming year, but , hey, right now it sounds cool.

I guess I might mention that my Cambodian cousin Warren, (well, half-Cambodian cousin - if he was all-Cambodian he wouldn't be a cousin, would he?), offered me a job teaching English in Phnom Penh a few months ago. Unfortunately it would mean teaching the sons of privilege, not just some village kids, and the sons of privilege everywhere are the same nightmare for a teacher. I used to hear a few horror stories from teachers in Saudi. Being a teacher when you are outranked socially by your students is not a picnic. People talk about the tribulations of teaching in rough poor districts, but there is a whole different hell with rich kids. They say it is hard to engage the parents in some poor districts; it is harder to disengage the parents in the wealthy sectors, parents who think that an A+ is hardly enough reward for little Bree or Buckleigh. And that A+ should arise from the beloved one's essence, not his or her work; and certainly that the child's playful nature should not be curbed just because there are others trying to learn. Nonetheless, I should have taken the job, because my life sucks big-time and anything would be better than drooling in front of a screen - which I am doing as we speak, yes, but usually I am drooling more passively than this (and usually there's more drool).

So anyway, if I don't write for a while, I will have a different excuse at least.

By the way, Marge, if you are reading this - I can't get to your site anymore because my computer informs me you've gone all high hat and are not letting in hoi poloi. And even when I could get through in the last month or two, none of my comments would post. Weird things happened. But now I get this message to ask for permission even to read, but how the hell do I do that when I can't get there to ask? So I am asking.

I wonder if I can get kidnapped in Bahrain? Now that would be different!

Preoccupied

2011-10-17T13:01:00.002-04:00

Am I the only one who has noticed how effeminate that pastor is - the one who said that Mormonism is a cult and then went on to throw his arms out toward Rick Perry in a gesture that must have been the envy of drag queens everywhere. I am guessing we are just about one lacy ruffle from our next clergyman scandal; I only hope drugs are involved. It's just more fun that way.

I listen less and less either to the news or to any of the talking heads, but there are a few things I have noticed lately from the little I have seen. One is that those who are not raging against the Occupy Wall Street folks with small flecks of foam flying from their lips, are nonetheless baffled at what it is, exactly, that "those people" want. I have also heard comments that ranged from gleeful gotcha-type snark to rueful bafflement as to why these folks who "can't be that poor" because they have iPhones or iPads (or both) seem to have so little resentment of Steve Jobs since they are "against the wealthy".

It is clear to me that first of all, the idea that they are against not the wealthy per se, but rather against those wealthy people who have not earned their wealth. Steve Jobs is eminently not among those. Old Habakkuk said it well in his own little book of the bible: "Woe to him who builds his house by unjust gain". Looks like Habakkuk had more going for him than a cool name.

In general there is now, as there always has been in the USA, three things going on. There is the legitimate disagreement about social issues - the place of religion, abortion, gay rights, marriage, parental rights and responsibilities, crime and punishment, gun issues, the role of schools and so forth. Secondly, there is the issue of spending - how much and whence the money to pay for it, and on what to spend public money. These are two separate issues - fiscal and social - which are constantly being conflated so that many people who have strong feelings about social or 'moral' issues find themselves willingly or otherwise, allying themselves with people who have a particular stance on the spending issue, and vice versa. Anyone who is socially liberal but fiscally conservative or socially conservative but fiscally liberal is reviled as a moderate, a fraud, or what have you. Many people who feel strongly about social issues but less so on fiscal issues, or those who feel the reverse, must actually become frauds to be heard or elected by espousing strong positions they do not actually care about as much, in areas they find secondary in their beliefs about how to 'fix things'.

As I said there are three, not two, things going on all the time. The third thing is the growing power of those who win either way and who make every effort to keep the public focussed on emotional issues and acrimonious debate, the gotcha commentary, the 'assault' upon 'our rights' or upon the poor or upon those who 'earn their money and don't go looking for a handout' or the decline of the middle class or whatever resonant phraseology is current. If every single congressman and senator were replaced by his or her chief opponent in the coming election, the effect would be miniscule. There is no difference, really, between George Soros' political spending and that of the Koch brothers.

In the antebellum South a small group of landowners oppressed both the poorer whites and the enslaved black population. After the Civil War, this group - with a few desertions by leaders who fell from power and a few additions from both Southern and Carpetbagging Northern opportunists - pivoted smoothly into the Jim Crow era, where the poor whites were kept in line by threats of what would happen if blacks got rights and the blacks, poor or otherwise, were kept in line by what they had to lose from the little they had if the 'poor white trash' gained control. The degree to which the poor whites had some awareness of their lack of real commonality with the aristocracy is reflected by the number of poorer mountain folk from slave-holding states who chose to join the Union army - there were rather a lot of these. In Virginia, the poor mountain people seceded from the Secession majority in the state and formed the state of West Virginia, which remained with the North. The passionate hatred between the "white trash' and the blacks was subtly stoked by those few who profitted either way; these poorer folk found themselves consistently supporting the lesser of two evils, as indeed we all find ourselves doing today with almost every vote we cast. The problem is that the lesser of two evils is increasingly not all that much different from having to decide whether you'd prefer to be murdered by a serial killer or by a guy who just lost his head that one time. Hmm; still dead.

It matters who wins an election in regard to the outcome of social issues, in regard to fiscal issues it matters some also, in terms of where the money will come from and where it will go. However, it makes much less difference - almost none - in terms of how much money will be at issue. In order to support our social beliefs we are sadly forced to accept the status quo politically and fiscally. People who vote Democratic lose, people who vote Republican lose and people who proudly proclaim that they never vote because it makes no difference lose.

There is only one thing that would make any difference. it is something that the wealthy government officials - which includes every Justice on the Supreme Court, all the decision makers in the White House and Cabinet and all of the Congress - (although a few of the newer Congressmen may not be wealthy yet, their future wealth is guaranteed by their ability to slide smoothly in lobbyist forms or to start charging four, five or even six figures for a single hour of speaking at various venues for the rest of their life). And that one thing is to add an amendment to the constitution divorcing the idea of spending unlimited money from the right of free speech. There is no seat in Congress that isn't beholden to some wealthy person(s) or other. None. We all know this. These wealthy few may be disguise themselves as interest groups or PACs or charities or any number of things, but in the end the money comes from people who had money to spare. It is obscene how much it costs to run for office, and how much time most office seekers and office holders must spend seeking funds. So much time is spent thusly that even the most conscientious of men or women must leave their research or decision making to a staff that has been largely chosen on an ideological basis or to a friendly lobbyist who will help him or her out by writing the legislation he or she is to present or vote on.

There will always be crooks in government but increasingly everybody is forced, by the cost of running for office and of countering expensive misinformation campaigns, into compromising independence and integrity if not into flat out dishonesty. Whether it is hope and change or 9-9-9, no candidate for President will ever deliver, because Presidents do not make law, Congress does, and Congress won't because no Congressman is entirely free of indebtedness to the wealthy, and by wealthy, I am not talking of those who have five or ten million socked away, I mean those few families wealthy enough to buy a state. Term limits don't help because two crooks are not better than one. Campaign reform laws are useless, even in the rare case where they are meaningful, because the wholly-owned Supreme Court routinely overturns any real reform. The one hope is a Constitutional amendment, because (so far) even the Court cannot declare an amendment unconstitutional. Unfortunately no amendment can be passed because the legislatures which would have to ratify it consist of men and women who are also beholden to the same wealthy few.

What the Occupy Wall Street people are reacting to is the complete powerlessness of most of us to get out of this awful bind. One of the last times such an all-powerful establishment was truly reformed a guillotine was involved. The longer reform is suppressed, the more cataclysmic the reform will eventually be. That is the way it has always been.

It is not envy of the wealthy that is fueling this latest protest. As I said, I have heard of few who begrudge the wealth of Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, or any of the others who actually DID something to earn what they have. It is the CEOs who get seven, eight or nine-figure bonuses and payouts when they ran their firms into the ground, or wealthy people who are using money they never earned to demonize poor people for using, or trying to use, wealth they never earned. People who do nothing but live well off the money some ancestor made should not be so quick to castigate people who receive medical care they cannot actually afford. It is disheartening that those who rob a bank of billions are all over the society pages while those who rob the same bank of a couple of hundred dollars are, if caught, doing hard time.

Poor people are notorious for not bothering to vote, but for whom should they vote? They should, perhaps, run themselves, but they'd only be spending money to do so that they don't have or can't spare - and if they raise the funds to run, they will be raising them from rich or at least richer people, and then here we are: back at square one.

I don't expect any improvement; I think it quite possible that we have passed the point where real reform can occur. But I shall be watching the protest movement with great interest.

By the way, the Blogger KING OF NEW YORK HACKS has talked to a lot of different folks in the Occupying crowd and has published some excellent pictures and commentary showing who's there.

In Other News...

2011-09-22T12:43:00.001-04:00

Periodically some bit of headline news excites comment all over the talk shows and editorial pages as to how whatever just happened proves once again what a great people we are here in the U. S. of A. and how it is all onward and upward and nobody since the dawn of time was ever so - goddamn it, let's just admit it, good - as us-here Amurricans. I recall one old news sensation years ago that received this kind of commentary when a toddler fell into a well in Texas or Kansas or some such place where folks are true Americans and love their Jesus. The entire community rallied round and as tense hours passed and people prayed and worked round the clock, especially the newsmen, to finally successfully get the child safely out. People stopped what they were doing; in Texas hundreds of black men were NOT dragged to death behind pick-ups for a full week as every thought was turned toward the safe extraction of the baby. It seems in my memory that the baby's name was Jessica, although I could be confusing that baby with some in vitro kid - it seems that all babies were named Jessica at the time, just as all the young actresses famed for their hotness now seem to be named Jessica Something-or-other. Implicit in all the coverage seemed to be the idea that if the baby had been Baby Indira in India or Baby Ingrid in Sweden, the locals would have passed heedlessly by on their way to work saying, "Hmm. baby in a well? Good luck with that!" But we were the wondrous, caring Americans and we, well, dammit, we CARED!

I have this attention span that is akin to that of a mayfly; I get sick of just about any news story somewhere around the second time I hear it (third, if it involves nudity) and I tend to read the OTHER news when one of these stories breaks (and breaks and breaks and breaks) which leaves no columnist or newsman or talk show host so filled with non-stop self-congratulatiory bloviation. So in my quest to find out what America is all about, I was following the OTHER news story that was going on about that time where every effort was being made in Florida to keep two little boys who had tested HIV-positive from going to any school where other decent children might come in contact with them. That deep faith in God's protection which Floridians are so wont to proclaim when somebody ELSE is at risk did not seem to come into play when the issue was HIV, so the good citizens of Florida felt that that do-it-yourself spirit, which is such a hallmark of the American character, must be relied on. What these enterprising parents and their allies did was burn down the home of the the two little boys. "If yuh don't live int this-heah district, yuh cain't send your kids to ouah schools!" was the general consensus. And, of course, who can live in a burnt-out house? So God's will was accomplished without God having to lift a finger.

This habit I have of reading ALL the news came into play again this week when I could hardly get within ten feet of an opinion spewer, if he wasn't on one of the Murdoch enterprises, without hearing about the triumph of the American spirit of fairness when the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy was scrapped. Apparently there are gay people who want to die for their country and - hey - at last we are going to let them do so. I shall leave aside the illogic of people who hate gays supporting a position which actually saves gay lives (if I felt that way, I'd FORCE them to join the military and to fight in the front lines). At any rate, as I say, my attention wandered after just a few minutes of these chatty folks pissing all over themselves in the sheer ecstasy of America once again showing the way to such countries as hadn't already integrated their gay citizens into their armed forces without nearly such a struggle or subsequent orgy of self-congratulation. So I looked at the other news to see where we as the greatest nation that ever lived under the special dispensation of a loving god, and lo! what did I see? Well, for starters, just down the road from me a piece another young boy was hounded to death because he was perceived to be gay. This boy, who was 14, had been bullied for years because he was gay. So let's say it started when he was 10 or 11. How gay can anyone be at that age?

The Catholics, Ku Klux Klan, Mormons, Focus on Families and similar Christian groups seem to take the position that being gay is a decision that someone makes at some point in his or her life. Outside of rape, having sex IS, of course, a decision, but that doesn't seem to be what I hear from these sects and organizations. Their position seems to be that a person decides what he or she will want, not just what her or she will actually do. One decides ahead of time what will flash across one's mind when one glances at a person or object. I was raised a pretty strict Catholic; in fact, I was a much stricter Catholic in my youth than my parents were at the same time (with my bi-polar Dad it was an off and on thing - one day a pagan hedonist, then next day sack cloth and ashes - but his median mode was slightly less all-or-nothing than mine was when it came to sin and issues of right and wrong). So I know a bit about this thinking.

The reason - I suspect the ONLY reason - I did not commit suicide when I was a teenager was because nobody seemed to know I was gay. I had a lot of friends, and my family, on down to the cousins once-removed liked me, or so I felt at the time. Kids who were uncontrollably and visibly effeminate had a much harder time than I did, but there were so few of them and the general awareness of homosexuals in my school was so vague and non-specific. Now there is such awareness at such an early age, that fewer kids can skate by the issue as I did. My belief, when I was young, was that were I to be exposed as gay, my family and friends and everyone else without exception would feel nothing but repulsion and disgust. As soon as I reached an age where I understood the concept of Judgment Day, my vision of it was of a horde of people I knew gathered in a vast arena (I visualized something like a great colosseum with people on rising tiers so they could get a good look) staring in horror at me standing alone in the middle as they saw written across the sky by celestial planes of some sort spewing the text in smoky letters like an ad for beer or suntan lotion, of a minute by minute account of what I had been thinking al my life. Not what I had DONE, because I hadn't done anything at that time, but of what I WAS. I recall that for some reason the faces I was always most aware of in this vision were not those of my family or fellow Catholics but of the Lomaxes, our neighbors who were a byword for probity in our town and whose five sons were popular and athletic and just such darn real men. I found this vision almost unbearable, but like those people who are scared of everything yet can't resist renting every horror flick that comes out, I couldn't turn my inner gaze away from it. To this day, whenever I hear a reference to Judgment Day that is the first visual that crosses my mind.

I just can't see that poor kid in Buffalo CHOOSING to embark so unpopular a course. And why would he? What would possess a 10 or 11-year old to be something that didn't even promise any physical gratification anytime in his near future? I know that if I made a choice as to preferences in my partner's gender, they were in place when I was three or four years old because I clearly remember what still feels like a physical yen for certain men in my surroundings. I liked a lot of girls, but there was never an erotic tinge to this liking; with many of the males there was that element, as far back as I can remember. I flat out KNOW, in short, that I had no choice and I am equally positive that this boy in Buffalo never had a choice either, as to who he was and what he was drawn to. And one of my great take-aways, the great gift that I was given by this knowledge, was that those who spake in terms of certainty on this topic were either lying or were willing to to state as fact something they did not actually know anything about. When someone tells me as fact a thing I know to be false, then I know that someone is not to be trusted in pronouncements of any sort. Maybe other races or other nations or other beliefs are NOT inferior, maybe I do not have to be in church every seventh day, maybe there is not some guiding - let alone loving - intelligence running the show and totting up my performances for later punishment.

It took years to work this through of course; more fear was instilled in me by Holy Mother Church than anything else and fear is the hardest thing to eradicate. I have heard the argument that the safe course is to believe because if you are wrong you get nothing, whereas if you choose unbelief and are wrong you get the Judgment and it ain't gonna be in your favor. Of course, this is a false hedge. If I choose to live as a believer in the unbelievable I give up entirely the only life I have for nothing. Maybe those beans WILL grow a giant beanstalk that reaches riches in the clouds, but this kid ain't betting his cow on that proposition.

So I am waiting for the next chapter in the breathless tale of the specialness and gosh-darned goodness of this here America and its specially selected by God - and designed just for us! - mission. And I'll fill the wait with all those OTHER news stories - the floods, the mothers killing their kids, the tornadoes, the coal mine disasters, the hurricanes, the fires, the droughts, the recessions. I understand that these little bumps in the highway to our apotheosis are there because we don't believe ENOUGH and so forth, but still, I am strangely unpersuaded to send my love offering (and nothing says 'love' like a cheque, we thank you and God thanks you) to the would-be chroniclers of this destiny. There is an urge in us all to be lackeys, to get that autograph, get our picture standing next to someone greater than ourselves, to be told what to think, but I am holding out for something just a tetch more comforting. And think of the special pleasure I will provide for all the godly when I am burning in the afterlife with all those gay kids and foreigners, while they can watch and withhold their help.

It'll be just like Earth all over again for them. Not just Earth: it'll be just like America!

It's Only Words

2011-09-13T13:59:00.002-04:00

I find that anything I say, do or write during or immediately after any experience is never representative of my final conclusions about the events or issues to which I am reacting. Often, while the the heat from the moment still lingers, I blind myself to any lessons, conclusions or accurate evaluation of any event. I think if one looks back at one's college career or high school or a job one left more than five years ago, one will sum up various personalities encountered, or one's own behavior very differently from how one would do at the time. It is much easier to evaluate a relationship long after it is over, and specifically to evaluate one's own errors therein, when the passions have cooled. I suspect many people who have an angry parting will acknowledge years later (if they are not still fighting over children or possessions - in which case the relationship isn't over, only the partnership is; and if they are not totally narcissistic) that there were plenty of faults on their own part which were not simply because "he (or she) drove me to it". Just because one got the other party to actually ask for the divorce that both saw coming does not mean that one tried harder to save the marriage; it simply means that one was the more passive aggressive partner or that one was better at gamesmanship. No one in a relationship is playing Solitaire.

My last entry was a fine example of exactly what i don't want to do, which is write a running commentary on my current life. And, since I brought it up, I probably owe some kind of resolution: my time with Diem did not go well. But my opening remarks here are an explanation, I hope, of why I am not going to explain what went wrong. I think I learned something, but it is not something I can articulate - at least not accurately - at the present time.

William Wordsworth talked about poetry (I can't recall his exact words) as being emotions recollected in tranquillity. I suspect wisdom could be described much the same way. There is no truth possible, no real understanding possible, until emotions have played themselves out. He is entirely right, not only about poetry but about any writing. One can write well re-living a peak moment or a past affair, but one cannot write with much insight or wisdom during that moment or affair. Think how tedious it is to listen to someone first in love when he or she is talking about the many virtues of the beloved; once is fine, but by the next day we really prefer to hear about something different. Or out of pure boredom with the topic we begin storing up parts of the catalog to mention back to the impassioned one when all his emotion is spent listing the deep black flaws in the now-discarded partner. We are at our least interesting and certainly we express ourselves least uniquely when we speak of someone we have just fallen for, or of the baby that has just been born.

The only useful way to look at any broken relationship, any lost job, any past disappointment is from the viewpoint that we ourselves are partly at fault - and not just by reiterating one of those 'horoscope' faults ("I am too trusting", "I am too generous", etc.). It is useful instead to think of those times one kept silent when one should have spoken, when one should have been helpful instead of letting someone flounder, when one tried to force changes to make a person 'better', when one should have done the difficult thing. It is self-defeating to catalog the faults of the friend or partner of boss after a separation; it is far better to examine that catalog of flaws before one plunges in. Anyone can love or trust a complete bounder once; if there is a second occurrence then, well, as Cassius said, "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves…". The second alcoholic or batterer or selfish prick or whatever that you love or marry is entirely upon you. This is actually good news, because that fault which is yours is the only one that you can do anything about.

It occurs to me that this also explains why the current style of candidates' debates is one of the worst possible ways to determine who is a good candidate for office. The old style of debate where people had time to listen an hour or so to each candidate laying out his positions followed by discussion might have been useful, but the format where a questioner tries to catch a candidate off-guard and unprepared and where opponents seize not on an idea but on the phraseology in which it is expressed, merely awards glibness (which may be the worst possible quality in an office holder). Whatever a candidate blurts out in a debate about an issue hardly reflects accurately how he or she will perform, even in matters pertaining to that issue. Who hasn't said something like "They ought to shoot them all" about one group or other, or made some similarly sweeping statement in a moment of passion, or during a moment of light humorous conversation among friends? I certainly have, yet I would be hard put to think of a single situation where I would attempt as president to push through any action (as if one could) remotely similar to such a statement. It is true that carefully vetted 'positions' on issues are supremely uninformative, but I submit that they are no less indicative of the behavior we can expect in office than are the quick answers to 'gotcha' questions in the heat of debate. Harry Truman is now much revered for his actions as President, but at the time he was in office he was famed for shooting off his mouth and having to retract later. Mom used to tell me of a famous comedy sketch showing an actor represent Harry trying to retrieve a letter from a public mailbox. It was funny to audiences because it captured this personal quirk so well.

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, wrote and spoke beautiful words, but his behavior in office was thuggish and undemocratic. Besides screwing the help, he schemed successfully to have his chief rival, Aaron Burr executed; attempted to impeach Chief Justice Marshall for opposing him in some matters; established an embargo during the war of 1812 with the chief purpose of destroying the arch-rivals to Virginian supremacy, the merchants of New England; and sent warships to try and quell the outbreak of democracy in the black nation of Haiti. Jefferson's idea of democracy is what we would describe as oligarchy: the only real objection he had to British Monarchy is that he wasn't the monarch. This is remarkably similar to the motives that set bin Ladin on his path, as a Yemeni by family origin he was limited in how much power he could amass in Saudi Arabia, hence he set out to overthrow the monarchy which would always outrank him. Originally he didn't give a shit about America, but like Jefferson, he was finely attuned to what sells with the people that he wanted to rule. Not only did Jefferson did not want the vote extended to blacks or the white poor, he wanted to prevent the French and Spanish inhabitants of every class in the Louisiana Territory from voting also, based on their inferiority to those descended from the ethnicities we now call WASP.

So words, especially those spoken on the fly or in the midst of passion, are mighty poor indicators of a man's fitness to hold office in a democracy, or his ability to frame policy in concert with supporters, opponents and the indifferent. Actions (like punching a wife or opponent) are far more telling at those times, because these show what a man might do in office when aroused. The ability of a man to speak dispassionately of his mistakes and of his own part in the failure of previous enterprises is, in my mind, one of the strongest indicators that he will be successful in the future. At worst he will err differently, and two examples of failure might just inspire someone else to find the true solution, or the better path.

And so back to the solitary life...

A light! Dim or Diem?

2011-09-02T13:22:00.000-04:00

O gosh - the first thing I see is that they have 'improved' Blogger. Not a good sign...

It is said that when you need something done, ask a busy man. I am reluctantly having to admit the truth of this, at least in relation to me. When I have nothing going in my life, I find I just can't sit myself down and write despite the fact that my aim here has never been to create a diary, "what-happened-today" type of blog and that there are plenty of people and events (and even a few ideas) that I have yet to write about. Boredom for me is probably my name for a mild to middling state of depression. When there are no people in my life - and by people in my life, I have found co-workers to be a big chunk o' that in the past - I have no oomph, no stimulation, no desire to get out of bed. Well, I always get out of bed, in fact I often do so at six a. m. or earlier, but the amount of time between that event and my first nap can be about the amount of time that it takes me to descend the stairs.

I began writing an entry when Marge's last nudge showed up in my 'Comments" section during a week-long visit in this area from my first cousin once removed Warren, he of the Iraq "hurt locker" service and my host in Bali last year. Warren inspires me (so does Marge) and he makes me feel I have something to say. I recently had a visit from another inspiring friend - a high school classmate and fellow altar boy from the past, a man who spent most of his life as a teacher, and who loved doing so. He always acts so admiring of me, that I am fooled into believing it myself for a bit. But the real reason I am back at the old keyboard is that I am all excited - unreasonably so - about a visit soon to transpire.

When I lived in Houston for six rather awful months something like ten years ago (give or take), I was, as usual, pretty much alone most of the time and I had the usual amount of social life: almost none. I dabbled in on-line dating, which for a person my age is the quickest path to a leap off a high bridge that I can think of. However, I did find one exception to the general lack of interest or wild mismatching. This was a man in his mid-forties whom I will call Diem. Diem answered my ad, we decided rather quickly to meet, not least because Diem's English was minimal; he had, it turned out, arrived from Hanoi only two years previous. I am nothing if not an optimist when it comes to dating, and I invited Diem to my apartment, which was in one of those horrible outsize complexes where one could be murdered and no one would know or care until they came to evict one because the rent was five days overdue, and where the murder would come as a welcome outcome (if it weren't too messy and one had the good taste to bleed on the linoleum area in the kitchen or bath rather than on the carpeting) because now they did not need to go through a lengthy eviction process, just a quick sweep and mop up. Diem, who proved to be an extremely traditional soul terrified that he would be discovered by someone to be gay had not posted or e-mailed his picture, so it was with a certain degree of doubt that I waited outside the complex gates for his advent.

Because of a series of errors and misunderstandings, mostly due to his poor English and my non-existent Vietnamese (these things work both ways after all), he actually was in the office trying to locate me while I was standing hopefully by an external gate. My niece Graciela also lived in that complex and she encountered Diem in that office and got us both headed in the right direction, so I finally met Diem. My first reaction was not negative, but not completely enthralled either. Diem considers himself to be quite ugly, I think, and I suspect that by Vietnamese cultural standards he would not be considered handsome. I have discovered that people who find those of other races attractive are often drawn to the extremes of such features as are deemed to typify that race. Thus many whites who prefer blacks like very dark skin and facial features that whites find 'different' about blacks - large lips, wide noses and so forth which blacks themselves often tend to find less attractive. Most whites can remember seeing stunning black men with white women who were, to white eyes, rather unattractive and certainly not 'in the man's league', as the saying goes. I have found myself that my pastiness and blue eyes have gotten me far better reception when I traveled in non-white areas than they ever garnered in white America. So I did not think Diem was ugly at all, and his sturdy frame was quite appealing; he was not fat, nor artificially muscular as a weightlifter might be but he was hardly the slim figure that one often sees with the Vietnamese. There is nothing better than finding someone I find attractive who thinks he's ugly.

When we were inside my apartment we hugged and then he threw back his head and gave me The Kiss. I have thought about it lately, and I realize there are five kisses in my life that I actually recall specifically, where I remember the time, the kisser, the place and the circumstances. The first was a greeting kiss from my Aunt Delia in her kitchen when we'd come to the city to visit her when I had reached the age that I was self conscious about kissing people -especially old people - on the mouth and right then I made the conscious decision that although I didn't like it, that she and Aunt Agnes were the two people for whom I would willingly make an exception. The second was the the last kiss I received from my Mom when I was young. We were in what we called the dining room although it was not adjacent to the kitchen and we almost never dined there, and Mom was making a happy fuss over whoever was the baby at the time. Mom was very affectionate with her babies, but our family was extremely undemonstrative and rarely touched affectionately when past the toddler stage. I had not been kissed by Mom for some years, but when she gave the baby a big, sort of a stage kiss, I said, "What about me?" and she turned and gave me a kiss. It made me feel kind of awkward, although I liked it a lot on one level, I pretty much knew I wouldn't ask again. It was a small odd moment, but I never forgot it.

My third remembered kiss was when I was in the mental institution, good old Maricopa State. There had come onto our ward a black man named Levi, much older than me, who was there I believe because his alcoholism had caused enough commitments to that institution for him to be considered too chronic or damaged or whatever for re-admission to the alcoholic ward. This was the progression at Maricopa State for alcoholics: the first few times people were admitted to the alcoholic wards, but frequent returners were determined to be mentally ill and were instead placed in the acute (i.e. people who were in a crisis that would require less than a year of hospitalization) mental ward. The alcoholics hated to go to the acute ward because people there were nuts, while those of us in the acute ward looked down on the alkie ward because they were 'hopeless' (in our view). Levi was a very good looking man of early middle age and as one of only two black men on the ward in 1966 or 1967, a time when black had not yet become beautiful in the popular imagination, he kept mostly to himself, although he was friendly and cooperative. Levi went on leave one weekend and he returned in the evening totally blitzed and barely able to navigate. I happened to be at the door when he entered and he pretty clearly was not going to make it to his bed. I put my arm around him to help him to reach his bed (our ward was a dorm of some 20 exposed single beds) and when I did so he kissed me. I never knew what to make of that, but I never forgot it. It was a little exciting and kind of gratifying; it made me feel that I wasn't being viewed as some asshole in the 'other race' but as a friend. It stirred some exciting fantasies, but I never showed any sign and Levi, though friendly, never was particular in his attentions to me again.

The last kiss I remember was in the middle of the busy street which runs past the al-Batha Souk in Riyadh. I had had an intensely passionate relationship with a Sudanese man named Mustafa when I was in Riyadh in the mid '80s and although Mustafa was largely illiterate even in Arabic, I had exchanged a few simple letters with him after I was sent home in 1986. Mustafa made me dizzy with love or lust or desire or whatever and I missed him terribly. When I got a job in Saudi again in the coastal town of al-Jubail, three hundred miles from Riyadh, I began traveling to Riyadh on the weekends and among other activities, I managed eventually to track Mustafa down. I reached him by telephone - I had gotten in contact with someone who knew him and who had a phone (which Mustafa did not) and we agreed to meet the following weekend in al-Batha Souk which is a large busy block of small shops where electronics, music and cheap clothing are sold, mostly to male Asian and African foreign workers, and which thus became a favorite meeting place for these people to socailize, as well as a busy pick-up area for men who preferred other men and who knew how to read the subtle hints being thrown out by some. I cared so much for Mustafa, but had no idea how he remembered me, or if he had any particular feelings about our relationship which in any way resembled those I had. When we finally spotted each other, the busy throng had spilled into the highway itself and Mustafa was out in the roadway. I hurried to him and to my eternal joy, he threw his arms around me and delivered a hearty kiss - on the cheek, to be sure (we could have gotten into real trouble for a mouth kiss) - but so spontaneous and welcoming and so much what I had longed for - and in public! That was number four of the five kisses that I never forgot.

Diem's kiss was the last of the kisses that I never forgot. It was as though he simply put his whole being into it. A guy who up to a moment before had been a 'maybe', suddenly became a 'wow - what a guy!'. We didn't even know each other yet - we had exchanged only a few stumbling sentences, but this was now a guy to be reckoned with. I saw Diem only a few times before my work required a move to Delaware. In my last months in Houston, Graciela and I had taken an apartment together because it made finical sense. Diem could not be disabused of his notion that she would hold him in contempt because he was gay; although he visited me occasionally, he was ever wholly comfortable. He was a very strict Catholic and believed completely in the teachings, yet alone with me he was completely open and very giving of affection. But he never shook the feeling that he was contemptible in the eyes of everyone but ourselves. He limited his visits because he lived with elderly parents and feared that too frequent visits would raise questions. His parents depended on him completely; they spoke no English and he was their single line to non-Viet America. He loved karaoke, and was provoked with me when I wouldn't sing. I can't account for the block I have about singing in front of people now, when back in the San Francisco days I performed in Jesus Christ, Superstar' and in other shows where I sang publicly. I guess without Tumwell's support, I just lost my mojo.

A couple of years after I left Houston, I had a job which led me take an apartment in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Diem and I had kept in desultory contact; he always sent gifts for me and my mother at Christmas and he always remembered my birthday with a card. He enrolled in college and struggled mightily with learning his subject matter on top of learning English at the same time. His English improved, but not quickly. We spoke by phone. He struggled to find work, and the jobs he held tended to demand a great deal of his time at unusual hours. He seemed to be saying (though I was never completely sure about any complex issues we discussed) that his married siblings were coming to live in the US and that he would be freed up somewhat from his obligations toward his parents. He was adamant that they had done everything for him and that he owed them everything. I finally persuaded him to visit me for a long weekend in Beaver Dam. He came and I enjoyed his visit very much. I began to think I could actually see myself in a relationship with him if only I could get him to garner the courage to admit to at least having me as a friend and to be willing to spend more time with me. I had to find him a church and take him there on Saturday as well on Sunday of his visit. He was genuinely religious, and is the most principled man i have known. Yet, somehow he was able to give himself over to a gay relationship and with me, live in the moment with none of the 'this but not that' reservations usually found in people so deeply conflicted. I sensed he was of that mentality where he would make a decision about a partnership with someone and then make the best of it, much as if he had been thrust into an arranged marriage. Although it would be his decision, not someone else's, he would stick it out once decided and make it work as if it were a marriage he couldn't leave. I also sensed that I was, if I were willing, the one he would chose - not because he loved me madly, but because I liked him, I was willing, and he wanted someone with whom he was comfortable and unashamed. He didn't want to kiss a lot of different frogs, and if I were not the prince, I was a frog with few enough warts to get on with it.

After that one visit, which he said he enjoyed, I never saw him again. I felt that it could be a good partnership, but that it wouldn't be, because I was stuck in whatever city I worked in, which never again seemed to be Houston and he was stuck with the parental units and a lifetime of shame. His mother constantly schemed and nagged about his marriage, while never seeming to give any thought to loosening the bonds at home enough to allow someone else in. In Houston I had worked with an American Viet woman who had started her marriage by moving in with her husband's traditional family, but who came to a point where she laid down the ultimatum "me or them", and 'me' meant a place of their own. The husband had moved with her to their own pace, but she was never forgiven by her MIL and though they interacted socially it was always a very negative experience for this woman, who was criticized at every turn. People often cite these third-world extended family relationships as some sort of ideal but I have met many people who are members of such families and I have never met anyone for whom it wasn't a deep and constant negative experience. Somebody is winning presumably, but it isn't the people with whom I have worked or socialized. It is all obligation and guilt and no joy whatever.

After Wisconsin I tried hard to get Diem to visit again but he never would. Either he had a demanding job with little free time or he couldn't justify another visit to his family. "They will wonder why I keep visiting this American man," he said. The siblings did arrive, but as with all married siblings, it was assumed that the single one had nothing to do so the parents continued to be Diem's responsibility. He did manage to get his own apartment but it was in the same building as his parents, so there was no chance for me to visit and stay with him. Once had I retired and had gained the time for a visit, I could not find the money to visit, since it would require a stay in a motel and rental of a car with no assurance that Diem would be brave enough to visit me there more than once or twice; there was no way I could stay with him. Finally I gave up. Although I still wrote to thank him for Christmas gifts and to acknowledge birthday cards, i didn't call or initiate any correspondence because when a man hasn't left home by the age of 50, he probably never will quite garner the courage to do so.

While I totally had put the whole thing into the 'never happen' category, I had this fantasy that it would be the most wonderful solution to my problem of loneliness and my wish to be part of a loving couple. When in Wisconsin together, we had gotten along fairly well. I find Diem very attractive and though we differ greatly in our desire to be active, the types of socializing we prefer, the entertainment that we enjoy, still, we seem to accommodate each other. He was washing dishes one night while I watched TV and felt a bit guilty about it; when I mentioned this, he said, "That's OK, I like doing this and you like to watch TV." Is that an angel come to Earth or what? He is scrupulously honest; if I left him alone in my house for a month with a million bucks on the table, I'd likely come back to find a million and one there. We accept each other's radically different views on religion. My fantasy of how great we might be could well be that typical 'if only' people indulge in when the proof is impossible. A woman I knew who worked in prisons told me once, "They all have this fantasy of the house with the white picket fence, but when they get out it is straight back to the action." I am aware of that phenomenon in my case. It kind of happened for me when I retired - a lovely setting is not enough; the relinquishing of of a perfect fantasy that I control absolutely for a reality that is - well real - is a whole lot less than it is cracked up to be.

A couple of weeks ago on a Thursday I got an e-mail from Diem saying happy birthday, but that he'd forgotten the exact day and would I send my phone number since he had lost it. I mulled my answer - not from a sense of strategy, but because i didn't find a good time to write and how effort much did I want to put into a lost cause - that weekend I had the usual Breakfast Club with Mom and MY extended family as well as a visit from an old classmate. I planned to respond on the Monday after my classmate left, but Diem must have found my number - well, obviously he did - because he called while my friend was still here. He wondered if there were any jobs up here. He couldn't find anything in Houston despite the Rick Perry miracle. He had completed his 4-year degree three years ago (his English was also vastly improved; my Vietnamese, in sharp contradistinction, remains nonexistent). There seemed to be some solution to the parental situation (I wasn't perfectly clear on this). I still believe it is rude to have one social interaction in the midst of another, so I didn't talk long, but I told him I'd call back on another day. On that Monday I got a birthday gift in the mail from him - a nice shirt which fit like a glove.

I called and the upshot is that he is coming for a two week visit during which he will look for a job here locally. He asked me to check around. I suspect that he is desperate enough for a job that he is finally willing to leave home for one. In short the dishonor of being unemployed is now trumping the honor of being an attentive son. If he is a cost to his parents, he is no longer the good son he was with a job. How much this is their thinking and how much his, I don't know. That this means a relationship with me may be either a cost he is willing to pay or an added treat that he finally gets to enjoy. I am not sure, but I hope and believe it may be the latter. He is not quite the man of my dreams, but I really do like him and respect him and he is attractive to me. I am certain I am not the man of his dreams in all respects, but i think he does like me and I think he is attracted. We set this visit up a couple of weeks ago and the plane tickets are not refundable and he certainly understands that!

I have called him a couple of times since, and one time Mother's spidey sense must have started tingling, because her health took a bad turn, which caused Diem to waver on the job front and say he didn't know how long he might be able to stay here. At my end, my longtime stalker (Tiko: I have written some about him) called all the way from Africa the same day Diem and I bought the airline tickets for Diem's flight on Sept. 6 and told me that finally after almost a year in Africa he would be returning to the USA - on Sept 6! We each have powerful forces arrayed against our successful outcome, but hopefully we will prevail. Since the wavering call, I have discovered a job fair here on the 13th, and Diem sent me his resumé and a cover letter for me to print out, so he does seem to have some thought of pursuing a job here; if he lands one, I think he will have a strong motive to stay. Working is all-important to him. I hope I am at least a pale second motive.

I am giddy down in the pit of my stomach with a buzzy kind of excitement. I know that we have actually spent little time together and I know I will be moved out of my comfort zone, (or lethargy as some will call it). I know Diem has a certain rigidity that might prove too much for me. But maybe - oh, maybe this could be it! I really am no good alone. I just don't move of my own volition. I need a kickstart, a cheering section, a willing ear. I know I haven't seen him, or he me, of a number of years - he is now 56, and we all know I am tottering at the edge of senescence. I just don't know - but that is half the fun, isn't it? There is realistically a 1% chance of this working out happily, but that is 1% more than I had of yore. And I really always secretly suspect the best will happen, when anything is in prospect. When nothing is actually on the horizon, I expect the worst. Neutral I am not.

In other news, Papa my old roommate from Saudi, whom George and I will be visiting in late October and much of November in India (did I mention that?) told me that his relatives are moving out of his house in Kerala and he is refurbishing the house, and that next year and during ensuing years I will be welcome to spend a couple of months there even if he is still living in Saudi, which he expects to do for some time. Winters in India as the snow piles up in Reedville? Where is the downside to that?

So all of a sudden I am writing again. Tuesday is the big day - will the fire still burn with Diem? Wish me luck. Suddenly i feel sixteen. In a good way.

Dipping My Toe Back Into the Water

2011-06-07T10:49:00.002-04:00

Well, whaddaya know! Me!

OK, there’s a shot that won’t even be heard around the house, let alone around the world. The fact is, in this world where a ‘friend’ is a few keystrokes and, maybe, a small photo of him or her mugging for the camera (or even possibly a photo of someone other than him- or herself who is hotter, younger or better groomed being palmed off on the unwary), that the presence or absence of one’s BFF in the blogging or Twitter or Facebook or web world is a moment of transitory consequence. In a world where every man has a full head of hair and a larger than average dick and every woman has a D-cup bra and a 19-inch waist, BFF means ‘Best Friend Forever’, but in the real world where there is more sagging and wrinkling than that found in the average herd of elephants, the full acronym should be BFFTM, which – wait for it! – would be Best Friend For The Moment. I think most people believe what they say when they are saying it (or writing it), but I am pretty sure that most people can look back on a conversation or essay or what have you, twenty four hours after it has been completed and realize that, well, maybe I said a little bit more than what I actually believe or feel or know. There are, I think, two types of people: those who realize that they have overstated the case when they look back on a conversation and those who are psychopaths. So long as one is talking or writing or communicating, one can remain in that happy (or angry) place in which one began the interaction, but given a few hours’ rest or a night’s sleep after the event, most folks can honestly say that they might have travelled a bridge too far.

A year ago in March, as perhaps one or less of you may recall, I joined a gym and worked out almost without a miss, three times a week. Then last August, I woke up and I just didn’t want to go any more. So it goes with me in so many areas. It is a matter of some astonishment to me, that, until about two months ago, I actually kept up blogging, usually one a week, or once every two weeks – sometimes oftener, sometimes less often, but with some degree of regularity, either here or on SpacesLive, since 2005. Wow! Yay, Me! I started out with a vague personal goal to tell as honestly as possible, the stories of my life. There is no earthly reason why anyone should care about any of these, particularly the facts – who cares where or when I was born or what my parents were like, or my school or my jobs or my loves or my hates or my travels? Who cares about those facts about anyone? The truth is that what happened to anyone, unless it was extraordinarily dire and involved ghastly death, dismemberment or intimacy with a farm animal (preferably all three of these), is of interest only to him or her to whom said facts of life happened. No blog that I have ever read (or book or article or TV interview or conversation) has been interesting because it happened to the writer or speaker. Events are interesting because of the way the story is told. If someone actually thinks of readers as readers rather than as fans or friends, one realizes this. I try writing with this in mind, but it is so easy to slip into thinking that one knows the people whose writing one reads or who read and comment on what one has written oneself. It is easy to think that one’s own opinions or travails, or the weather in one’s hometown this day is of intrinsic interest. This is a deadly error for anyone except, perhaps, a child or grandchild who is speaking to his parents or (gasp!) grandparents.

An adolescent, or a member of a family, or a member of one tightly-knit group or other, is often wont to tell a newcomer what a wild and crazy bunch his crew is. Um, no. Never, NEVER claim anything that is an awesome compliment when said by another about you, but which is sure to provoke, in a neutral listener, the desire to prove the contrary when one says it about oneself. Do not claim to be crazy – in either the fun or clinical sense. Do not claim that you are not racist or sexist or any of those –ists, because the first thought a listener will have (spoken or not) will begin with the phrase, “Well, what about that time you…”. When you say you are speaking frankly, you aren’t. Don’t say you are a good parent. Let the facts – or at least your admirers – do the talking. Remember someone famous saying, “I am not a crook!”? How’d that play out?

Holy shit, I am doing just what I set out NOT to do. What I am trying to say is that I have a hard time sticking to one particular overriding vision for my writing. Originally, I wanted only to record things that happened to me in the past which I recall with fondness or some other emotion, in a way that I hoped would be interesting to some. But then I kept slipping into reacting to news items – not so much political crap, but stuff like seeing something in the news that provoked nostalgia or outrage or a strong desire to mock or soundly slap the subject of the article. I originally hoped to say what I thought, not today, or about a single event, but as a result of a longish arc of my personal experience; less my thought than the conclusions to which I had come. Alas, one thing I know for sure: if I say I will never do something it won’t be a month before I do it. Most of my life, the last step I took before any act was to say that I would never, under any circumstances, perform that act. I HOPE I will never have sex with an elephant. But I am not terribly optimistic. Indeed, the fact (which I only noticed on rereading) that elephants have come up twice in these few paragraphs is sadly troubling.

I know one writes best when one isn’t still angry or shocked or in the first throes of reaction. But sadly, that is also when one is motivated most strongly to write (or blabber to anyone who cannot flee quickly enough). And one, when one is me, is a sadly weak vessel. As well as lazy and unmotivated in the normal course of the average day or week, or as you have seen this past Spring, season. I am shocked that Word did not put a squiggly green line under that last statement, because I am aware it is not a proper sentence. I must have turned some function off. No – that cannot be the case, because there is a green squiggly line under the sentence beginning with “Never, NEVER…”. And, as you see, that IS a proper (though hortatory in form) sentence. I have had occasion to purse my lips and raise my brow about Word’s idea of grammar before and I find myself doing so again. How I can know grammar better than an entire software corporation with multi-thousands of degreed employees is a mystery to me – or would be if I hadn’t read once that Bill Gates was upset the day that he found that the average age of his employees had risen to 31. My under-30 cousin Warren, a sometimes writer, told me a year ago while we were in Bali that no one cared about that stuff (meaning grammar, spelling, and quite possibly coherence) anymore. Reading my local newspaper and the national newsmagazines as well as most of the fiction on the NY Times best-seller list inclines me to believe he is on to something. Folks can tell a story, but they can’t write well.

As you see, I got nothin’. And yet, just at this moment in time, I felt like doing a little writing. Thus proving my point; just because one wants to say something doesn’t give that something value. And I see I am ending with a green squiggly line under the last two words of the previous sentenece. Really, Microsoft??? I need an elephant.

Justice Delayed

2011-03-11T10:14:00.000-05:00

The sun is shining brightly this early morning and, if the day continues as it has begun, my front lawn will be entirely snow-free for the first time since I returned from California in mid-December. While my attention has been focused on the snow and the general wintriness of the last several months, under the snow and ice and in the darkest reaches of the woodlands behind me, Spring has been quietly setting about preparing to strike. The receding snow revealed the first leaves of tulips, daffodils and hyacinths fully an inch or more high, a neighbor has tapped his maples and is hauling in quantities of sweet sap, and I noticed just now that two goldfinches on my feeder have begun to trade in their drab winter brown for their summer yellow.

My pal Marge has ever-so-gently chid me (chidden? chided?) about my relatively long blogging hiatus, speculating that some rise in my general happiness might have removed the general irascibility and discontent that makes me cranky enough to write. Sadly, this is true. I was intensely down for a while (and blogged copiously), and then, suddenly, about three weeks ago, an immense sense of contentment set in without warning, and for no apparent reason. I found myself reading and watching a trove of really excellent pay-channel series on TV (Has anyone seen Shameless, the new Showtime series about an Irish American family in the Chicago slums? It is wildly entertaining, and superbly written and acted). Then, on top of that, a few things began to happen. A former classmate – one of the popular girls, for no apparent reason, brought me cookies, soup and a blooming hyacinth plant. I sent in my taxes, pausing only to mourn the fact that I have thousands of dollars worth of deductions that I can't use and, that because I only had nineteen dollars withheld, I can only get nineteen dollars back. My brother Liam and his wife began a series of local concerts; apparently he also has been recently energized because he has written at least two new songs in the last week or two. And then I got called for, and was selected for, a jury in a murder case which has received some media attention locally. Last night, we rendered our verdict.

I have never before served on a jury, and I must say that it is quite an experience. I was surprised by a few things: the degree to which the 14 of us bonded (there were two alternates empaneled with the other 12 jurors); the seriousness and intelligence that each of the jurors brought to his or her participation; and the number of unresolved questions and nuances of doubt that were raised in what may have looked like an open-and-shut case in the press. I have read no coverage whatever before, during or since the verdict, so I can’t truly say how this case actually was portrayed, but my sense is that it might have been regarded as a slam-dunk because of those magic letters, DNA.

I was unprepared for the degree of sadness I would feel for the victim, and the degree I felt that I could imagine the embarrassment and shame the victim might have felt could she have known that strangers would be looking at her splayed out clumsily with her private areas exposed in a way that was decidedly not provocative or anything other than repellent. I was also unprepared for the empathy I would feel, as did all the other jurors, for the large number of family which showed up, especially for the last day of the five we spent at trial.

New York, some time ago, reformed its laws regarding juries in a way which I heartily applaud. In the past, there were a number of automatic, or almost automatic, exclusions, and those not excluded were subject to being called every three years. The caricature, possibly accurate, that juries were composed of full-time housewives and retirees, who might have little in common with defendants, was widespread. Nearly anyone could plead the slightest inconvenience and he or she would be excused. There was a conception – at least for me – that juries were a bunch of folks with nothing better to do, lightly leavened with a few folks who held strong feelings about their civic duty. The new rules make it relatively difficult to be excused if one is not acquainted with any of the principals or witness or investigators in the case. The trade-off is that one is not subject to a call to serve more often than every eight years. I think this is an excellent reform. As a result, our jury contained three black men, one quite young, one in early middle age and one probably over 60; there were teachers, women who were employed in both blue-collar and white collar jobs, a college student and, yes, some retirees, including yours truly. One of the black men was an immigrant who had been in the country for about 20 years. Counting the alternates, there were six women and eight men. I thought the jury, as well as the many others who were not selected simply because many more people were called to make up our pool than were seated, was very reflective of the county’s population as a whole. There appeared to be a range in the financial circumstances of the jurors, although none seemed to be nearly as poor as the victim had been.

The reason (I assume) that there seemed to be quite a bit of interest in this case is that the killing occurred in the early 1970s. In addition, the crime was particularly disgusting; the victim, who may have been sexually assaulted in her own home, was a mother in her late middle age who was blind. Basically, an officer – the son of one of the original investigators – was assigned to take a look at some old cases, and in doing so, sent a blanket that had been taken as evidence at the time to the county lab to check for DNA, and two spots of semen on the blanket were determined to have been from one of the ‘persons of interest’ in the original investigation. Therefore, this seemed to be one of those cases where an unsolved murder from the past was solved through the modern miracle of DNA technology. In fact, when the assistant DA recited the theory of the case in her opening remarks, this seemed to be exactly the case. The opening remarks of the defense seemed to be an almost pro forma “wait a minute here” type of pretty unconvincing quibbles.

And now, because this is a gorgeous late winter (almost spring?) day which is calling to me, I will leave the rest of this story for another day. And, I promise, I will be around to catch up on all the usual blogging suspects soon, but gee, SUCH a nice day...

My Military Career

2011-02-12T13:30:00.000-05:00

Back in those golden days when there were communists behind every bush and people knew what was what, my University made membership in the ROTC mandatory for the first two years of any male undergraduate’s academic career. The logic of training boys to die young when the ostensible purpose of paying all that tuition argued that they were preparing for a long and richly lived career escapes me, but being a Catholic institution, NPU drew on 2000 years of practice at illogical actions and at extermination of all signs of independent thought. Someone somewhere decided that training the undergraduates to march around in lockstep was an excellent idea, and it must have been someone to whom no one dared say nay. Actually, I think, although I am far from sure of this, that the US government sweetened the cavernous pot of the University’s treasury for taking this decision, and while Holy Mother Church might pause in matters of morals or dogma, there was no such hesitation when the seductive charms of gold lurked in the offing.

The rule was that the first two years of ROTC were mandatory and universal (universal, since one can hardly count the female students, a contingent that had not even existed for most of the University’s history; the University itself rarely counted females, in keeping with its thoroughly Catholic traditions), and if marching about in neat rows and barking orders were found to be appealing options, male students could take a third and fourth year of ROTC at the end of which they would emerge, with the cost of their education underwritten, as lieutenants in the Air Force. Viet Nam was, at this time, just a small cloud on the horizon, home of a guerrilla action against which the US was supplying a handful of advisors to ensure that a brazenly corrupt government remained in power. Fans of the Afghanistan War would instantly recognize the strategy. The rules for such hapless freshmen as me were that all was fun and games six days of the week, but that on Thursdays we lads were to emerge from our dorms uniformed and spit polished and ready, if not eager, to salute any upperclassman officer we might encounter. At a certain hour, all of us would gather on what had in glory days been a football field, in ranks and rows to be inspected, to say, “Yes, sir!” and to be marched to and fro, up and down, left and right, until we understood where we ranked in the order of things, which was dead last. (Again, I omit to include the standing of the ladies, who in the eyes of Holy Mother Church and the Air Force of those days, was pretty much where that gender today ranks in Pakistan.)

From the get-go, ROTC was the bane of my existence. Indeed, had I bothered to read the parts of the welcoming pamphlets which NPU had sent me, which dealt with topics other than location and fraternities and sororities and leafy green campus areas, I might have chosen another school based solely on this military requirement. I do not thrive in organized activities, be they army, sports, IT departments, churches or gay organizations. I don’t intend to ask, “why?” but somehow the word always intrudes and the type of person who rises to captain or clergyman or vice president in charge seems to be able to read in my mind the one question that ought never arise. I don’t even believe in my own ideas, let alone anyone else’s. Well, that is not quite true; I may believe in them, but never enough to rouse myself from my habitual sloth, and certainly not enough to march about, or hang posters or spend hours on my knees.

First and foremost, there was that creased trousers and spit polish thing. Some of the guys in my dorm actually seemed to enjoy sitting there by the hour, buffing and wetting and polishing their shoes until they reached unearthly levels of gloss. I was not one of them. In fact, once I discovered that common Shinola liquid polish (the very brand from which my father often mused that I could not distinguish shit) could create a shine which passed cursory inspection three times out of four, the amount of time spent on my shoes was reduced to seconds per week. Besides, those damn things were made from some kind of cardboard, and early in my inglorious career, before I discovered the beneficent effects of liquid Shinola, I had over-wet one spot on one shoe and it had caused me to rub up a roughened spot on that shoe that nothing ever quite repaired. So each inspection put me at risk of having that spot discovered, and could a perfect shine do other than highlight this early error? It is amazing what liquid Shinola could cover up. If Shinola still exists, and if it still makes the liquid polish, and if it is ever looking for a heartfelt customer endorsement, let it come to me. I haven’t polished a shoe in years and years, but I can heartily aver that their product is the cat’s meow.

There was also the question of “brass”. Brass referred to some metal insigniae that must be pinned to the uniform in exactly the right place at exactly the right angle. There are two kinds of boy in this world: those whose shirttails remain tucked neatly into their pants and those whose shirttails will not remain so anchored for love or money for longer than the half minute after they are first so tucked. I can tell you for a fact, that young men of the latter type are incapable of placing, or at least of keeping said brass at said location and angle. And, need you ask? I am one of the latter group. Moreover, nothing so delighted the spit polish guys as surreptitiously re-pinning their room mates’ brass upside-down the night before Thursday’s torment. Need I mention that my roommate Bigman, who was class president, who was on basketball scholarship (this was a time when these were given to white guys), who would later become captain of the team and fraternity president, bore the most spit polished pair of shoes e’er seen at NPU? The twinkling of his shoe tips in the Washington sunlight when forth he strode from the freshman dorm blinded anyone so unwary as to look directly at them. In short, he loved to mess with my brass.

Hair was another issue. I could not afford haircuts, to begin with. When I was in college, I genuinely functioned without a penny in my pocket or wallet or anywhere else most of the time. Merely keeping in beer took a superhuman effort and there was simply nothing left over for anything else. Moreover, I hated short hair. I recall the awe with which I saw the rise of the Beatles a few short years later; my first thought was how much I would love to let my hair grow so long, my second was that no one would ever dare do so in public. How little could I foresee. Boy’s – and men’s – hair, pre-Beatles, mattered very much and it must be very short. The only longish hair at all was that favored by the “hoods”: that slightly long, highly greased jelly-rolls that fell over the forehead and met in a duck’s ass in back, but even this hair was meticulously trimmed at the base of the neck, and around the ears. The length was all in the upswept sides and in the front, and unending care was required (remember Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb?) Every boy wearing this style carried a comb in his back pocket always. Part of the ritual of coolness was the constant pulling out of that comb and re-combing of the hair. The coolest guys had unbelievabl y cool methods for hair-combing. I shudder to think of the fate of any boy daring enough to leave his hair ungreased and let to fall down over the ears or onto his collar. My military days were a constant struggle between hair the way I wanted it, and hair the way my flight commander wanted it.

I have a couple of qualities, other than the aforementioned that render me a poor fit for the military life. One is that I am never sure I am doing things correctly. Another is that I hate, with a passion that surely has roots in some psychological defect that is better left unplumbed, to accord deference to people who do not seem to have earned it – or even to those who have,. I hate acts of self-abnegation, and to me saluting someone who is just another underclassman like myself, is deeply humiliating. So I hated saluting our ROTC officers, and simultaneously I always felt like I was making some blunder when doing so which was imperceptible to me, but blatantly obvious to everyone else. Wrong hand formation, wrong arm angle, wrong something. This generalized feeling, that there is some secret known to all except myself, has lasted my lifetime. It was why I never could, during school days, boast of female conquests; I was sure there was something about sex that everybody knew but me, and which would betray me as a liar. The real reason why I almost never lie about important things, and never cheat at games or steal, is that I can think of nothing more awful than getting caught out. I dread it with a physical feeling of dread. I bragged about something that wasn’t true in first grade once, because I couldn’t stand being the only one who hadn’t had an interesting adventure, and even now, when I recall it, I feel unreasonably ashamed and embarrassed, because although none of the kids knew I was lying, the teacher did and actually offered me several suggestions for alternative versions that would allow me to backtrack and I did not. It doesn’t matter now, I know, but it matters to me.

So the upshot of the above is that I would plan my routes from class to class on Thursdays with meticulous care to ensure that I would not pass any kid who was an officer requiring a salute. I’d go through building basements and up back stairs. It was an obsession to me whose depth I can recall but which I cannot quite believe now or understand. Saluting was like a small death. The only thing as bad as saluting – or nearly as bad – was the marching. At a certain hour, the whole freshman and sophomore class would gather en masse in the athletic field into the various ‘flights’ (which were a group similar to the groupings like ‘platoon’ or ‘squad’ or whatever group other military services have). We’d be all uniformed and hatted and gloved and one-arm’s length apart and so forth. And we’d be inspected (usually cursorily enough to miss my Shinola heresy), issued demerits as required, lectured on whatever needed to be said that day and then each flight was marched by his flight leader all about the field. I was pretty good at staying in step, although that quick half-step, sort of a semi skip, to get back into step when I had somehow strayed from perfection because I became engrossed in thoughts of things non-military, was not unknown to me. Since I can remember, I have endured boredom by just vanishing into my thoughts, a habit that allowed me to endure a 40-year career in Information Technology among other things. Oddly, I can often absorb information in this state, but one thing I cannot do is snap to it and stay in step with perfect ease.

There was one boy in my flight, however, who was utterly incapable of remaining in step. This boy, Barney Duck, was unusually tall – one of the very tallest boys in my class - and he possessed red hair of such brilliance – flaming, glowing, incandescent – that his head drew every eye. Like most tall boys in that era, he was gangly in build and appearance, and his walk was such a loose-limbed lope that he just bobbed up and down like a cork on choppy water. It wasn’t that he couldn’t keep up a rhythm when he marched, it was just that he was always, always bobbing in opposition to everyone else’s rhythm. Where we marched to ‘One two three four’, he marched invariably to ‘oneTwo three four’. He couldn’t help it. He’d get in step only to fall out of step again within three paces. And with that great red head, there was no missing the error. My recollection of marching is inextricably interwoven with the recollection of the chant, “One two three four, Mister Duck, get in step, One two three four.” I know it doesn’t appear to scan when you read it, but it did when the sergeant yelled it, which he did incessantly.

I, like Private Duck, had an insuperable problem when it came to marching. I could not, and cannot to this day, tell my left from my right. I can, actually, but I have to think about it. And the time it takes to do that thinking is the time during which every other airman left-faced or right-faced as I walked straight forward into the nearest one of them. For a time, my fate was to draw the ire of whoever was calling the cadence, but fairly early on in my career there came a day when we were to be reviewed by someone from the Pentagon. Since NPU was in Washington, there was always some dignitary or other available to come and do this sort of thing, and such occasions caused those upperclassmen officers, so different from me, to swell with pride and to vow to themselves (and for all I know, to each other) that never in the history of marching would any flights of men march so sharply, so perfectly aligned, so filled with martial ardor as would ours when reviewed by the lesser gods of the Pentagon. In pursuit of this lofty goal, there was only one solution to the Shaughnessy problem. Oddly, I am totally blank when I try to recall whether or not the Duck problem was similarly handled. I was reassigned to a desk job.

The ROTC at NPU published a newspaper for some reason or other. I don’t recall the name of this journalistic endeavor – probably the Rifle or the F-15 or something suitably fierce and as unlike the actual content offered as possible. Most of the content was as drab s one may imagine, but since the staff or the powers in control actually yearned for people to read the damn thing, I somehow persuaded the editor to allow me to create and write an advice column. This was most unoriginally entitled Dear Sophie and it soon became quite a must-read on the NPU campus. Although I endeavored to be humorous, and to actually have the nouns agree with the verbs in person and number and so forth, the real reason people flocked to read Dear Sophie was that the requests for advice which I made up referred to real relationships of real people on campus. It is hard to remember in these jaded days, but colleges – especially smallish religious ones – were, in those halcyon days, far more like today’s high schools or even junior high schools. Susie cutting in on Mary and Johnnie’s romance was the stuff of our conversation. We did not gossip about who was sleeping with whom – probably very few were sleeping with anyone there and then - or who had got the clap or whatever is the currency of today’s campuses. People talked about who was going with whom. Or if a girl would or wouldn’t get pinned by her fraternity boyfriend – ‘pinned’ having no sexual connotation (and, usually, no privileges) whatever. A lot of these girls were saving themselves for marriage, goddamit, and in those pre-pill days, a pregnancy meant shame and expulsion, no less in college than in high school.

I seem to have some quality which results in people telling me things. I also enjoy knowing everyone in any environment in which I function. A lot of people like to know the president or vice president of their group, but I find everybody just as interesting. I want to know the janitor and the nurse and the guy who only comes in on Wednesday. People are surprisingly interesting if you let them be. I remember once walking through the downtown area of Jubail with my supervisor when I was working in Saudi and all the coin sellers, and restaurant guys and street sellers and passing people from all different nationalities were calling out to say hello, and my boss said, “You know everybody here!” It was always that way for me. I don’t talk to people to be nice or to feel good about myself or because I felt some moral obligation; I do it because they are almost always interesting. At one of our class reunions, a girl like said to me, “You were friends with everyone, even the most outcast.” But I didn’t always realize that people were outcast. And I couldn’t stand to see people sad or picked on. I always felt like it was me, somehow, simultaneously by witnessing cruelty, I felt both complicit in the cruelty and in the shame. This is not a virtue, or a considered plan of action, it is how I cannot help feeling. I feel ashamed – a genuine slightly nauseated feeling – when I see someone being picked on. It is why I do not enjoy the early audition rounds of American Idol; I can’t stand seeing vulnerable people hurt. It is not funny to me that people are odd-looking or delusional. I think it is more a weakness than anything else; I always feel like I have some quality worse than that other guy’s which will become apparent if I speak out. I think I dread humiliation beyond all other things, and seeing someone else suffer it is as painful as if it were me. I have actually flicked to other channels when some of the more egregious contestants have embarrassed themselves. I feel sorry for them. Whatever is the cause of this sort of pathological empathy, the result seems to be that people tend to tell me things.

Using the information I was getting from everybody, I was able to construct fake letters for my column that hinted at real situations. I never exposed anyone, but I always conveyed I knew things, and people used to read half afraid they’d show up in Dear Sophie. I am not sure this column made any significant military contribution, but it sure contributed to my quality of life.

There was one boy who, from another context which I explained long ago, was called First-of-all. This lad was one of those folks whom life itself wanted to pick on. He was an odd mix of goody-goody and ineptitude. First-of-all loved ROTC. No one polished his shoes or aligned his brass more assiduously than he. And of course he drew the attention of all those like my roommate who delighted in jokes, often rather cruel ones. One day, after we knew he’d spent his usual solid hour of pre-Thursday shoe polishing, Bigman and another guy on the basketball team hoisted me through the transom of First-of-all’s room with a jar of Vaseline in my hand from which I gouged two huge gobs of salve and placed one inside the toe of each shoe. We all went snickering back to our own rooms. But, of course, I began thinking about First-of-all’s humiliation, and I began to feel sorry for him. Had our target been someone like Bigman himself, or the other basketball player, I would have continued to enjoy the joke, but there was something peculiarly vulnerable about First-of-all. For him, ROTC seemed to be bringing some weird validation that he was unable to find elsewhere. I just knew that it would be more painful than funny when he put on his military shoes Thursday morning.

Finally I slunk down the corridor and found a couple of fairly husky friends who I persuaded to hoist me back through First-of-all’s transom. I brought some tissues and cleaned out the inside of the shoes and never let anyone know.

A number of the boys who marched on that field with me in those later died in Viet Nam. As I have recounted earlier, I inadvertently dodged the draft and never found myself in that awful place, for which I am profoundly grateful. I would have been a complete casualty, one way or another, whether I lived or died. I know there would have come a time when I came face-to-face with an enemy. There I would have been, armed to the teeth with inadequately polished shoes, brass awry and hair longer than his. I would have been terrified. And when I looked at him, I bet I would see, or imagine, that he was terrified, too.

And I would have felt sorry for him.

What They Should Do

2011-02-09T10:48:00.000-05:00

Has anyone but me noticed that the people who seem most distressed over the possibility that the religious element will insert itself into the future government of Egypt are the very same ones most determined to insert religion into our own government? I’m just asking. For people who do not subscribe to any of the various creeds or sects or cults, there isn’t a hap’orth of difference between the rule of one and the rule of another.

If what is happening in Egypt were happening here, what a different attitude would be found among us! There are people who are quite fervent in their support of the mob’s dictum that Mubarak must go who will look back to the events of Kent State in the ‘70s, for instance, and believe that those children who were killed by the Guard had it coming. It IS a mob there; the term ‘mob’ does not apply only to those with whom we disagree. I personally believe the Egyptian mob is on the right side of the issues for the most part, and I believe that Mubarak has been running an increasingly repressive and tyrannical government. I also believe that we in America have been very glad to have him there, and have had him take care of a tremendous amount of dirty work that we don’t wish to be seen doing ourselves. We have been rather like Pontius Pilate in this, turning over troublemakers to someone else to handle, knowing full well that we are, in fact, sentencing them to death or torture.

I am somewhat of an admirer of Pilate, actually. He was an adept politician who knew better than to embroil himself in local issues whose outcome either way could do him no good. At some point in life, everyone of any intelligence asks Pilate’s famous question, “What is truth?” And I suspect that the majority does not want in the least to actually know the answer unless it is framed in a way that supports its pre-existing beliefs. The thing about truth is that, by its nature, it is the same no matter who is asking.

In this sense, the same is true of human or constitutional rights. If they don’t apply to everyone, then they aren’t really rights. It is not unreasonable to argue that one thing or another is not a right, but if one declares something a right, then it applies to everyone.

Nothing is easier than to feel that something which does not apply to me is less important or urgent or real than something that does. How often does one hear, or think, “They ought to do something about that,” when some injustice or need is mentioned. If THEY should, then I am pretty sure you and I should. There is no virtue whatever in sitting on one’s ass feeling indignant about things, although I hasten to add that I do it all the time. How easy it is to feel good because one’s heart is in the right place, even when one’s hands are not. So many people’s heart is in the right place in so many situations so much of the time that one is tempted to question the theory that an object can only occupy one space at on point in time. Our hearts must be expert multi-taskers! How fashionable we all must be!

Nutritious Slothfulness

2011-01-27T11:13:00.000-05:00

I cannot think of any more boring vice than sloth. However, when it comes to the seven deadly sins, this is the one in which I find myself firmly entrenched. A hardened sinner, and to such little profit. Lust just seems too strenuous nowadays, although I can and do lust in my heart from time to time. But pursuit of the objects of my lust – well, it is just too much effort for me with too little likelihood of success. Imagine if one had to mush from Nome, Alaska to, say, Fairbanks to purchase a lottery ticket, and one can pretty well make a fair equation for the proportion of effort to reward.

I have never been a huge glutton – unless liking beer a whole lot falls under that heading. And I let that little sinlet go on my fortieth birthday, if not for good, then at least for the last 28 years. I do like certain foods, and I do occasionally overeat, but I am more likely to forget to eat until four or five in the afternoon than I am to spend the day eating. As to avarice – well, I am not really clear on all that falls under that heading. I am certainly no miser, and if I do say so myself, I occasionally overdo on gifts for others, while being a bit ungenerous in a day to day sense. On the other hand, I really like having two of everything, and the more expensive and useless the better. Still, I couldn’t say that avarice is my sin of choice. I think I have faults in the avarice arena, but I would guess they are more faults of lacking empathy or imagination or – even more likely - laziness, which gets us back to sloth.

Pride is also a bit difficult to get a handle on. I know I can be all about myself sometimes, and I know that I occasionally – maybe more than occasionally – indulge in what can be termed ‘stubborn pride’. I am not sure, though, that pride in the seven-deadly-sins sense is the same thing as the quality that is commonly referred to as pride. It seems that pride in common parlance means too stubborn or too aware of one’s dignity to accept charity. I don’t see how that can be a sin – it would seem more like a virtue to me. To tell the truth, I don’t see how one could spend a lifetime with pride as its centerpiece. I mean, what would one be doing in a day-to-day sense, if one’s central vice were overweening pride? It would pretty much man sitting around glorifying oneself, and that seems way more like sloth to me. Does it mean that one puts oneself above God? Well, of course, I do have the issue that I think that I am real and that He is imaginary, but then imaginary beings nearly all seem to be better than I am. There’s Superman, for instance, or King Arthur, or Lassie: all much superior to me. Even Goldilocks seemed to have a great deal more intellectual curiosity and ‘git-up-and-go’ than I do nowadays.

I am pretty certain that I don’t practice envy to a mortally sinful extent. My understanding of envy is that it is more than coveting what one’s neighbor has; it also means wishing ill-fortune to the neighbor for having it. I don’t think that is one of my failings. I willingly confess to a touch of schadenfreud when someone who seems to me to be particularly undeserving or obnoxious, but gifted with goods or worldly honors, slips on a moral banana peel, but I wouldn’t say that I am envious in a truly hell-worthy sense. I can’t imagine myself working to bring down someone just because he or she had something that I wish were mine.

Let’s see: what is left? Oh (I actually had to Google to find the remaining sin) wrath! Well, I DO get pissed off. And the annoying entry in Wikipedia for ‘seven deadly sins’ points out that being ‘capital’ means they are the root sins that lead to all others (‘capital’ refers to the Latin work for ‘head’), and that one can be guilty in either a venial or mortal sense, and still be guilty of a capital sin; this certainly appeals to my old Catholic upbringing where you pretty much found yourself innocent of one sin when your we overly busy committing another. Well, there goes that. I guess I am guilt of all of them then. I don’t know if that is a relief (I am balanced) or cause for further self-recrimination. Either way, I do believe my really morally disfiguring sin is sloth.

Because I am slothful, while still desirous of being minimally healthy, I have found a number of ways to keep myself fed without raising too much of a sweat in food preparation. I do like things to taste good, if possible, and to be more healthy than not when it is just as easy either way. My sole use of sugar, other than the very rare times I try baking a cake (five times in my life by actual count!) is to throw in a tablespoonful or two when I make pasta sauce or chili or anything requiring massive amounts of cooked tomato in order to cut the acidity. My brother Rob has been going through my supply of sugar much faster than I have done merely by coming to the Breakfast Club on Sundays and using sugar in his coffee, of which he drinks copious amounts.

In the interests of public service for all the lazy folks out there, I will give a brief résumé of lessons I have learned in having the best possible food for the least possible effort. To begin with, none of these ideas is of any use if one has to run to the store, or prepare every meal from scratch. Therefore there are a number of things to keep on hand at all times – things which keep for a goodish length of time.

These are:

One of those huge bags of frozen chicken parts that one can find at the ‘big box’ stores. I prefer skinless boneless thighs (I hate skin, and if cooking chicken bone-in is easy, eating it is not. Let’s look at the big picture here.) Breasts (in chickens) are too darn bland for me.

Again from the big box emporia, I like to keep on hand those pork cutlets – you know, those thickly cut slices (nearly an inch thick) that look like pork chops without the bone and come about ten to the package – that is ten meals right there.

A bottle of some kind of marinade.

A BIG bottle or jar of that pre-chopped garlic.

A number of cans of crushed tomatoes, as well as a couple of cans of diced tomatoes. Pasta sauce or chili are always better with a can of the chunkier cut stuff thrown in.

A bag of onions.

A big bag of frozen peas – you can add a handful of these to anything.

A big bag of those small pre-peeled ‘baby’ carrots- - these keep forever.

A big bag of broccoli florets, or crowns – these will last two to three weeks, and are worth their weight in gold for the degree of virtue one feels in adding some of them to everything.

A dozen boiled eggs.

A bell pepper or two.

Every kind of spice you can imagine. Spices are god’s way of saying, “Relax: you can cover up everything one way or another). Although spices lose flavor over time, it is a good idea to slowly work out which ones you commonly use and get those in the larger sizes. The last thing you ever want is to start something and find you are out of a key spice. I make sure to have a lot of black pepper, chili powder, garlic powder, cumin and coriander. It is good to keep turmeric on hand. I throw it in most things – not so much for taste, but it is supposed to be amazingly healthy and it also makes things look golden and lovely.

Also, it is good to keep on hand bottles of Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, teriyaki sauce and balsamic vinegar. The whole point of all these sauces and spices is that you can keep making the same things over and over but have them taste different every time.

Olive oil – the BIG jars of a gallon or so. Also yellow mustard and mayonnaise

Several jars of pre made pasta sauce. The trick is to doctor these if you must (here comes that broccoli again!) without going thru the mess of actual ‘from scratch’ preparation. Pre-made alfredo sauces - even the store brands - are really good - and you can add a bit of the tomato sauce for variety. Also I keep a pre-made jar of pesto sauce - a spoonful added to almost anything is pretty darn yummy. OK, don't add it to desserts.

Lots of pasta. To cover the health angle, make these whole grain pastas where possible. For whole grain pasta, you want to get the shapes of pasta that hold the most sauce: rotelli is ideal. The more sauce the less you taste the difference between the good stuff and the healthy stuff. The worst pasta for whole grain is the thinner spaghetti forms, especially angel hair. On the other hand angel hair is the best for the lazy cook, because it cooks in just about three minutes. One place whole grain spaghetti is superior is in any stir-fry version of chow mein. I actually prefer whole grain in chow mein type dishes. If you are a fan of stir fry, one mixed spice that is absolutely wonderful is Emeril Legasse’s Asian Essence.

I do not tend to keep hamburger on hand because the taste goes off fairly quickly if you do not use it or freeze it, and if you freeze it, it is a hassle to either pre-form it into patties or usable quantities, or to get it unfrozen quickly when you want it. Thawing a huge chunk in a microwave also seems to cook the exterior of the stuff – so I have gotten away from keeping hamburger meat on hand. Anyway beef isn’t all that good for you, although it does have the virtue that, unlike chicken, no matter how bad it seems to have gone ‘off’ it is still pretty safe to eat.

To make preparation easier, it is always good to keep a shallow pan or bowl with some chicken parts or pork cutlets defrosting in a pool of marinade. It is nice to throw a tablespoon of chopped garlic into the marinade for extra taste.

Chicken or pork can be cooked in the oven while you work on your computer – the rule for me is when I can smell it, it is usually done.

Keep a steamer for vegetables. Once the water comes to a boil, you can put a bunch of the baby carrots in for 3-4 minutes (set the timer, so you can putter around doing other things.) Broccoli should not steam more than two minutes. So you can put the water on to boil, watch TV until it is boiling, then throw the broccoli in, once it boils at the beginning of a TV commercial break and it is steamed before the commercial break is over. Easy or what? And you get to miss the commercial without missing the program.

I recently bought a package of whole wheat ‘wraps’. I found that I could cut up one cooked cutlet of the marinaded pork (or some chicken), chop up a handful of broccoli and steam it, mix the two with some mayonnaise, dill, dried mustard or curry powder, and whatever spice seems to be my preference for the day. And the result was really, REALLY good. It is all about having stuff on hand, re-thawed and pre-marinaded, getting a feel for spices and mixing the same few things differently over and over.

If one wishes to use steamed broccoli as a side dish, it is really good with a small spot of yellow mustard dotted here and there amongst the florets. Then one can put any other sauce over it – or even none.

This sounds like a blog on gluttony, but believe me, it is all about sloth – once I got in the habit of keeping things on hand, I had to spend no more than half an hour in the kitchen per day – for all the meals I needed. And that can’t be a bad thing.

Wilt Thou...?

2011-01-24T11:48:00.000-05:00

I am actually seated at my computer a little earlier today than I usually am. I have fallen into the habit of watching Morning Joe which seems less polemic and a bit more even-handed than other cable shows which deal with politics. I cannot stand bumptious rhetoric whether or not I agree with the speaker. I want to hear right wing pundits who will admit that Obama does some things well, and left wing pundits who admit that there is merit in the argument that there are some beneficial programs that we cannot afford, or that conservatives are not just a bunch of crazy people. I usually complete my morning TV viewing with a bit of the Live show with Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa – or more than a bit of it, if the guests look like people I want to hear from. But this morning, there was a guest host in Regis’ place and after a bit of badinage, we were forced to see a video of this man’s marriage proposal.

This trend toward choreographed and over-the-top marriage proposals is one more sign to me of the trivialization of marriage, and of pretty much everything else. Whenever I see a public wedding proposal, I always know that the lady to whom it is aimed would be wise to respond with a resounding, “NO!” A public proposal is manipulative and the men who make them are precisely the kind of man who can and will manipulate friends and family of a woman who is fleeing an abusive situation into disclosing her whereabouts because he is SO sorry and loves her SO much and will never, ever do it again. These women are being placed in a position where saying anything except a happy and thrilled, “Oh, yes!” will publicly humiliate the would-be groom. Despite this being exactly what he deserves for placing her in this position, one assumes that she feels some affection for the poor jerk and doesn’t want to add humiliation to an already hurtful response, if her wish is to refuse or to request more time as a dating couple. These proposals are acts of aggression and I think the smart woman will recognize that. It might ease the lady’s conscience were she to reflect that in these situations, she is not the focus, HE is. In these self-absorbed times, this alone should be enough to give her pause: "What? This is not all about me?".

A columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle during the 70s whom I liked very much named Charles McCabe once wrote that those who can write great love letters are not capable of great love. I have often thought about this, and I am inclined to agree, although I suppose there could be exceptions. A truly great love letter in my mind would not be one which trumpeted great sentiments in beautiful language, but a simple one which spoke in words that meant a great deal only to the recipient. Similarly, is there someone in your circle who constantly takes pictures of every event to which he or she is invited? Regardless of how valued these pictures may be later, isn’t it also true that this person is never really participating in these events, but is far more consumed with recording them? One reason I have much valued and long-lasting friends of whom I now have not a single photograph is that I just cannot step outside happy moments and record them on a camera, and I confess a frisson of irritation passes through me toward those who do so. It makes everything seem not real for that moment, but just a performance. Although I own a camera, I rarely take any pictures with it, and on my three or four week trip to my niece’s wedding on the train, a trip that seguéed into Thanksgiving with my best friend, I took exactly two photos, both of a lake that the train passed by in the Sierra Nevada Mountains (which I took mostly because the some announcer on the train suggested we passengers might like to do so) and I have never looked at these photographs since, nor do believe I ever will bother to do so. If I do see them again, they will mean nothing to me at all.

I am, as usual, straying from my point, which is, insofar as I have a point, that we are moving toward aggrandizing events and rituals at the expense of actually experiencing the human transaction that is taking place. Call me a Romantic, but I think that when two people love each other enough to marry, it should almost go without saying that the marriage will take place. I don’t recall Tumwell and me talking about IF we’d move in together, but only where we’d move (we each had room mates) and how soon we could do it. Now that marriage seems to be just a phase in a life of serial monogamy, or a right to be demanded or defended, all the little rituals seem to have metastasized. It is so often all bark and no bite, smoke without fire.

I have never placed any value on someone making any special effort – or even noticing the date – for St. Valentine’s Day. (Does anyone even acknowledge that it is the feast day of a Catholic saint – one who is probably as fictional as most of them?) And I have cherished forever those little impulsive gifts or gestures that come now and then just because someone has seen something and thought of me. I think that part of any pre-nuptial agreement should be a clause specifying who will get the wedding album. My suggestion is that it go to the one who doesn’t get custody of the kids; this will accord nicely with the current feel-good sentiment in children’s competitions that the loser should also get a trophy. This is a great concept when we are speaking of the Special Olympics – but the benefit of everyone getting a trophy is doubtful when the people involved are not “special” in the sense implied by the term 'Special Olympics'. People of average intelligence or better know when they have lost, however much we pretend otherwise – and they should. It is called “learning” – a concept that has long since departed from anything that we currently term “Education.”

In general people do not think to insist they are telling the truth if, in fact, they are, because it doesn’t occur to people stating a fact that this fact is in question. I have never felt any pressure to make an official show of love toward those whom I actually love, because I am pretty sure we both know it. I need no public demonstration or concrete proofs from those who love me. If I doubt anyone’s sincerity, a public performance will not do anything but increase my doubt. When someone says, “I’ll be perfectly honest with you,” my one sure belief is that he won’t be.

While I am on the topic of overdone and relatively insincere ritualization of life’s little ups and down, I wish to ask the question, why is a wedding day so often referred to as “her day” or “her special day”? Isn’t the event supposed to be a union of two people? Just thought I’d ask.

OK, now I am done.

At Home in the Jungle

2011-01-13T11:53:00.000-05:00

I thought I would check out the premier of a new TV series last night because it was ten o’clock and I still didn’t feel like going to bed; because it had an actor whose character I loved on Friday Night Lights and I was curious to see how much it was the actor I liked and how much it had been the character; and because it was set in the jungle, my concept of which has intrigued me since the first time I heard of it. I am talking of the series Off The Map, about three young doctors recruited to work in a jungle clinic in a poor country. Whether I will become a regular viewer of this show is still a question, because as a rule I avoid “doctor” shows and it isn’t clear whether this is more a doctor show or a jungle show. I fear the former. I have an almost pathological revulsion to seeing opened-up people, or to seeing skin pierced. I have never watched the doctor insert a needle into me for blood tests or any other purpose. I squinch my eyes when a film shows an addict shooting up. I don’t at all mind the sight of blood, and I don’t mind shots at all, not even novocaine in the gums. Well OK, I mind novocaine a little, but only to a normal degree. Some of the bloggers I follow have mentioned liking – or loving – the series Bones, but I rarely watch it and I have never watched the NCIS series or CSI, and I have never seen a single episode of E. R. I will almost drive into a wall rather than run over an animal that is already dead – it even revolts me to squash one of the larger bugs. I am not a Buddhist, nor am I one of those folks who revere life in all its forms (last year I killed seven squirrels); I just cannot stomach the sight of broken bones exposed, or internal organs, or the act of skin being pierced. When I was in high school I was actually excused, in biology class, from the frog dissection (on condition that I learn all the parts from colored overlays in the textbook – I got the highest mark in the class on the subsequent test) . I simply cannot do it. I buy my chicken already cut up.

I am not here to talk about my psychoses or neuroses (they leak out in everything I write, anyway) but something completely different. There was, early in the show, a scene where the actor I mentioned – I don’t even know his name – goes to an open area where there are a bunch of huts and people doing jungly things to meet a boy who will guide him to a distant patient who needs help. I can’t really describe the scene nor put my finger on what, exactly, was the specific thing I saw or heard that did it, but something sent a thrill through my mind and the thought, “Oh God, how I wish that were me in that place.” It was the thrill of possibility, of starting out on the best vacation or job ever.

This morning I was watching something and I switched over to another channel which was at a point in an ad for a cruise line that showed a group of passengers approaching the ship and I felt nothing, except that this scene from last night’s show flashed across my mind and it occurred to me that people headed to their ship for a cruise, or people walking up to a grand hotel, or people headed to Vegas seem to have that exact feeling that I had last night seeing the village scene. I see a cruise as a thing I’d have to get through, like a wedding or a trip to the dentist or my job, when I had one. There might be fun moments or congenial people – there might be – but good moments would be like shiny beads strung among periods when my smile is fixed on my face, when I would be wondering what I should be feeling or saying or doing next, when I would feel out of place. I feel out of place so often in my life. Not unwelcome at the weddings or parties or jobs, not resented or disliked, but just like I am not quite sure what to do with my hands. I am sure many of you have had occasion to attend a funeral or wedding or event that you attended because of your affection or respect for someone involved – or a family event with your fiancé’s family before you knew them well – where you were acutely conscious of being foreign to the commonly agreed-upon rituals and behaviors among the majority of the attendees, where there were nuances which escaped you. This is how I feel most of the time in Western countries. Even when I love some of the folks involved dearly – even the Breakfast Club events with my own family where we gather with my Mom every Sunday at MY house, I have this undercurrent of feeling that I am stringing together moments that are smooth and fun with intervals of casting about for the next thing to say or do. And afterwards I sometimes wondering why I said this or did that, not cruel or foolish or rude things, but just things that I am not sure are in tune with the interests or mood or interests of the other folks present.

Why I am utterly comfortable when I am in a place where I don’t speak the language or where the customs are completely unlike those I am used to or where people dislike my government intensely, I can’t explain. I just am. And I love it. Maybe it is because there is nothing to live up to. Maybe because I am so obviously at level zero that anything I say or do is a move up the scale, even if not always in the right direction. As strange as everything might seem to most people, I feel like I am at last among people like me. I am playing with people who are my age. Nothing I say or do goes on my permanent record. The more people are unlike me in fact, the more they feel, in my gut, like me. It only applies to the general environment in these cases, or in one on one interactions, being invited to a home or to a meal can be acutely uncomfortable.

I was actually taken by surprise by the depth of my feeling during that one moment in the show that I have described. It wasn’t exactly like, “Oh my God, I’m home again,” but it was remarkably like seeing, in the opening footage of the Sean Penn film Milk, the front of the barbershop I used to go to. I had a tremendous gut reaction of meeting an old friend, of having a free day, of beginning a wonderful vacation.

Sadly, I think the jungle setting for this show is largely a pretext for having even more horribly gaping wounds and more grotesque injuries than the mere bullet wounds and car crash injuries on the medical shows set within the confines of the USA. That is too bad. I am perplexed at the pleasure a lot of folk must derive from close-ups of maggot-filled bodies or torn-open abdomens. If one brings these things up with any degree of description at a dinner party, one tends to get the same reaction as the proverbial turd in the punch bowl. It seems to be my curse: I don’t get what people do or when they should or shouldn’t do it. Pink Floyd has a song where the narrator says then he was young , his hands “felt like two balloons.” Me too. Only I feel like balloons all over, especially my mouth.

Maybe this is why I like films and books about people. Other folks, folks who get people, seem to prefer shows about speeding cars or injuries or poop and pee or guns. Real people to a lot of people are a big yawn. But I love something that makes me wonder how I would react or about how people resolve issues, how people cope with things. There is a film opening, called The Dilemma which poses the interesting question of what one would do if one saw one’s best friend’s wife cheating on her spouse. This sounds like it could really be interesting, and even as a comedy, could say some challenging things. I may well go see it. And I will hope, hope, hope that the reaction of the characters doesn’t involve farting or pooping.

I’m an idealist.

To Dream the Impossible Dream

2011-01-11T15:43:00.000-05:00

My brother Liam is a poet. I hadn’t actually put this thought into words, but someone else told me this and I realized that it is true. My sort-of sister-in-law Nellie (she and my brother Rob have been together for at least 37 years – possibly longer) is an accomplished musician. She has made her living from music most of her life. She and Rob lived together in Arizona until just a few months ago when her mother passed away and she inherited the mother’s house back here in the City just north of here. Music has hardly made her wealthy and this was too good a gift to pass up. Back in Arizona, an all-woman blues group of which she was a member won the state blues title (did you know there was such a thing?) four years running until they decided to stop competing. That group and her previous group have made a number of recordings, and she has played with a number of blues artists, or rhythm and blues artists, over the years including Bo Diddly.

Recently, at the Breakfast Club (I think you all know that is what we call the Sunday breakfasts with my mother, don’t you?) a song by my brother Liam came on my iPod speakers (Liam was not present) and the conversation turned to songwriting and so forth. Nellie said, “I have written some songs, but Liam is a poet.” And she is exactly right – about him, whether or not she might be underrating herself. Liam just seems to have a gift for saying things in such a way that you see the picture. In a song of his that many people like quite a bit, he tells of seeing his son get off the school bus during a snowstorm and watching him come up the driveway with his coat unbuttoned, and it was “like watching a tear sliding down from the night”. This song, The Loneliness Birds, (the title is from something someone else has written) is about hearing the news that this youngest son, at age sixteen, had been killed.

My favorite song of all that he has written is a meditation on the story of Hansel and Gretel which reflects on how children ultimately decide their own paths and define who their parents were, no matter how hard those parents worked or how deeply they cared. This song seems to me to encompass all the cares and worries of watching one’s children become independent: the driver’s license, the possibly dangerous friends, the parties where drink or drugs might be present, the person who will break his or her heart.

I can see the breadcrumbs

That you left to mark your trail,

And I see the loaf you tore

Them from grow grey and stale.

I see you moving on

Unconscious of the trap,

Not knowing of the crows behind you

Eating up your map.

All the warnings you have heard

Of strangers in the wood,

And all the lessons you have done

Don’t do you any good.

And as you hurry on, you drop

Your last small piece of bread

And walk in without knocking

To that house of gingerbread.

I go, “Wait a minute; have I mixed up my nursery rhymes?

Have I confused my heroes and my heroines?

Might I be thinking of some different dotted line?

Could it be me who needs the rescuing?”

But it’s you who writes the story

And you who turns the page.

Will I be the wicked witch

Who locks you in a cage?

And as I reach to touch you

Will you turn without a word

And hand me out the tiny bone

Of some small flightless bird?

Or will I be the woodsman

With bright and shining axe

Who searches in the forest

To find your scattered tracks?

After I have saved the day

And freed you from the jail

Will you find your way home

Or another aimless trail?

I ask you, does anything describe the fragility of your child in your heart better than ’the tiny bone of some small flightless bird’? Here goes this mere baby into the world, and that is his armor.

Liam called me last night, and we had one of the best conversations we have had in years. It was good because I ended it (actually one of our phones gave out and thus ended it for us) feeling really good and engaged and a bit enlightened. I passed on to him Nellie’s remark because I think people should hear all the good stuff about themselves that is said. This got us onto the subject of poetry and song and writing in general, and we agreed that the really great stuff has a quality where two and two make five or ten. Great stuff contains the kind of lines where what is said conveys more meaning than the words themselves actually say. I always think, in this context, of the description of Tom and Daisy Buchanon (which I may remember incorrectly) in Gatsby, “They were the kind of people who broke things.” These people were not vandals or vindictive, but merely sort of spiritually careless is my reading of this line. It says so much, and yet that mere sentence in another context could be said about somebody’s ill-behaved children and contain no emotional depth or nuance whatever.

I always think also of Dylan’s line “Just to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.” (Would that not be the best day of one’s life?) Or Eliot’s famous over-quoted line, “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.” which can read as a flat statement of fact, but which conveys such depths of boredom, such shallow artifice, incomprehension and waste of time. These are lines that sing in my head even though I have not heard or read some of them in a very long time. Dylan Thomas was “young and easy under the apple boughs/ About the lilting house/ And happy as the grass was green.” Isn’t that a wonderful image of childhood before you find out that there are people who don’t love you?

Anyway, this was among the types of thing we talked about – Liam also brought up the secret language of families with its loaded phrases that seem so innocent to outsiders and which are such deadly shots to the members thereof. There was no worse insult among us kids than “typical teen”. My Mom had a habit of wondering why none of us boys dated certain girls and she tended to describe these girls as “full of fun.” (In short, they were the kind of girl that other girls would love to have around). “Full of fun” became a deadly phrase among us boys, meaning a girl you wouldn’t date on a desert island where she controlled the water supply. Mom herself had these innocent-sounding zingers – god help the person she described as “sweet as a peach”. She used this roughly in the sense conveyed by others when they say “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth”. “And there she stood,” Mom would say, “sweet as a peach…” usually in reference to someone who had instigated a lot of trouble and who acted all innocent and, perhaps, even outraged by the resulting chaos. Kind of like, “Who, me?” There was no worse sin in Mom’s catechism than “troublemaking”.

What got me started here before my usual dilatory trip all over the place was something that clicked into place in my head near the end of our conversation. I have long known a few faults or characteristics or habits of mine, as we all do about ourselves if we are not borderline psychotics. I wrote an essay or entry or blog (what does one call these things anyway?) some time ago on my defunct Spaces blog about my love of going to out-of-the-way places (my first trip abroad was to Zambia) or of trying things that most people don’t try – or even want to try (hitchhiking across the USA; living in Saudi). And anyone who has the least degree of perception seems to see, as I most certainly do myself, that I have a big tendency toward depression and inactivity – the sin of sloth is my vice of choice, which is certainly the least attractive of them all, and the least fun, which is even worse. I have always attributed my tendency to end up sitting around doing nothing to the depression which has dogged me since my teenage years at least, and which once ended me up in a nuthouse for eleven months. So I have thought about this sloth at times and I have thought about the adventures at other times. The only way I have ever thought of them in tandem was when I felt lousy; usually I attributed this bad feeling to not being on some kind of adventure. Mostly though, like other things I think about, I thought of either one or the other, but not both at once. Suddenly, while I was talking with Liam last night, the two came together with blinding clarity, and when I said this sentence to Liam, he was equally struck by how exactly correct it seemed:

I would rather do nothing than do anything that is ordinary.

Like most things, this means more to me than it will mean to anyone else – but it somehow is a whole new way for me to look at what seems to be my current dilemma. A sort of corollary to this is that I hate doing anything unless I feel I can (and notice the word is CAN, not WILL) become very good – among the best – at that thing. I think this explains such things as my sudden complete revulsion toward going to the gym. I actually didn’t mind going for six months, and I originally went because it seemed to be a healthy thing to do, and I was concerned about an increasing lack of muscle tone and a real lack of stamina. I really had no goal other than to ameliorate my physical deterioration somewhat. But six months into it, something happened. I found I had lost two inches around my waist, I had reached a level of elasticity that allowed me to touch my forehead to my knee, I had gained an inch on my biceps and, most important of all, I noticed one day in the mirror that there was the tiniest hint of an indentation on each side of the place where one’s abs should be.

“Wow!” I can imagine many people thinking, “What a great reward for what really, after all these years, is not a huge amount of time!” How can this be a bad thing? But a this brought a very subtle change into the whole process; it is exactly the kind of thing that has often stopped me in the midst of other endeavors. (OMG, I just realized why painting my dining room has never been completed!) You see, for six months I was visiting a strange land. I wasn’t “one of them.” All about me were these serious people who worked out – either younger people who were building truly admirable bodies or seniors who were “keeping fit.” So long as it seemed like I was some kid wandering in and being tolerated by the ‘real athletes’, it was kind of fun. But now I was ‘one of them.’ At first I thought I was elated when I saw real progress. I could have a (smaller) waist again; I bought pants two inches smaller than my old ones and they fit perfectly. But shortly after this, I couldn’t make myself go any more; I really couldn’t figure out why. It seemed pointless and unrewarding. Although everyone there was friendly, no one became a friend. They weren’t there to make friends –nor was I – but I felt like I might have wanted to go if there was the subtle pressure of expectation by a friend of seeing me there. But whether or not this is true, that isn’t the real problem, I realize now. The problem is I was ‘getting fit’; I was becoming one of those seniors who would never, ever again look as good as the younger folks at the gym or the younger me, and this made me feel pathetic. I don’t want to look "good for my age", I want to look good, period, or else to hell with it. I was now only doing what a lot of old people do, and over time as I aged I was going to get worse and worse. It was pointless, because I didn’t feel ‘special’ any more. I was so ordinary, so predictable, so ‘still active in my golden years’.

There are so many things I can do a little; I am better than average at calligraphy, I used to draw well and I still draw better than average. I HATE ‘better than average’. I want ‘great’ or not at all. I don’t have to BE great, but I have to believe that it is within the realm of possibility to reach that point. When I was young, I loved to run. I would run across our pasture lot or across the lawn or through a field with complete joyous abandon. The joy arose, however, not from the feeling of running itself, or the exercise or anything like that. The joy was because I truly believed, with every fiber of my being, that I could run faster than anyone else on Earth if I wanted to. The day that no longer seemed true was the last day I ever ran. What was the point? This is why I don’t try learning to dance; I am too old to be the best. It is not a case of defeating others, but just of being really good. “By ‘best’ I don’t really mean better than anyone else so much as ‘as good as the very best’.

There are few processes I enjoy (writing is one of those few, however, so long as I can keep from letting it fall into that area where all things become futile). I enjoy the results of things. I don’t want to make curtains, I want to have curtains, really nice, unusual curtains, that I made. I enjoy knowing I can do things. I have a spiffy leaded glass window I made 30 years ago depicting the head of a Watusi warrior I modeled after a picture in a National Geographic. I kind of love it, and I am quite proud of it. I never made another. Because it would have had to be better. I remember in first grade we were each given a lump of modeling clay and told that whatever we made would be displayed for our parents at a forthcoming PTA session. Most of the kids began making those coiled baskets where they rolled the clay between their palms into long thin tubes and then wound the tubes into a basket shape, or else making turtles – essentially a big rounded lump of clay with five smaller lumps attached for head and legs. I, however, decided to make a giraffe. I couldn’t imagine why the others were going for stuff so simple and dumb and obvious. I can still see the giraffe as I pictured it then – and from the first I could picture how it should look very clearly. But my hands couldn’t seem to make it happen; to start with, the neck wouldn’t remain upright. I couldn’t believe I couldn't do it! Finally, I realized it was beyond me, so I set out to make something I thought would be easier – either a hippo or an elephant (I think I tried both), something thicker and sturdier. But my hands just couldn’t seem to make the clay take the desired shape. I kept wadding the whole thing up and starting anew, and of course, time ran out with all the other kids’ turtles and baskets perfect, as turtles and baskets go, and me with a big lump of nothing. Nonetheless, my oeuvre was displayed on a piece of colored construction paper with my name on it among all the other offerings.

My Mom, never one to pay in false coin made a funny little story out of it, when she told me about the PTA meeting. “All the other mothers,” quoth she, “were saying to me, ‘Look! My Ginny made this nice turtle!’ or ‘See the nice basket Bobby made! What did your Davy make?’ And there I was pointing to this lump of clay, saying, ‘Well…’” Mom wasn’t being mean, and she actually made me laugh and feel better by telling this story in the way she did. I was never one of those kids that could draw a picture and respond happily to something like, “Oh is that a doggie?” when the speaker was pointing to my depiction of one of my brothers. I know when I have failed and I do not gain anything from anyone else’s pretending otherwise; it only makes it worse, as if I am pathetic and beyond saving. If you have to ask, it isn’t right.

It is all very well to say that I shouldn’t feel this way – the ‘nothing or the best ’ way. Actually, ‘best’ is only one way that would be acceptably uncommon; even ‘worst’ would be better than ordinary. But I didn’t know I DID feel this way exactly. I saw bits of it, and perhaps I am only seeing a bit more of it now, rather than all of it. This whole linking of the ‘ordinary’ with doing nothing is somehow a new slant for me. Fear of failure? Maybe. My favorite film of all time, hands down, is Lawrence of Arabia. I suspect that the film assumed mythic proportions to me when, in response to the pleading of Prince Ali who cared deeply for Lawrence and was trying to persuade him to take a more reasonable, less risky and debilitating course than the one he was on, Lawrence asks, "Do you think I am just anybody, Ali?" Oh. My. God. Yes! Yes! Yes! That is a truly great person! As early as junior high or early high school, a time when I was deeply Catholic, a girl I liked said to me (after a friendly argument - she always liked to present herself as anti-Irish and anti-Catholic) "You will either wind up as Pope or Anti-Christ." Can you see why I liked her?

So this is why I feel so free, I think, in Third World countries. I will never be ‘just one of them’. I will always be different. I don’t have to DO anything except be undemanding and interested (because demanding and superior are ordinary ways to travel there.) I can relax and have fun. One of the greatest compliments I ever received was after I left Saudi when a Bangladeshi I used to chat with told Papa I ‘”wasn’t like the rest of them.”

It is hard to change how one thinks or behaves if one doesn’t know why one does so. It is impossible to change if one doesn’t even KNOW one does something. It is something to think about – and it is certainly a useful piece of information to have when I am thinking, “What next?” Maybe I’ll forget it all tomorrow, but maybe I won’t; I hope not. It seems kind of commonplace, so perhaps only I know how right and powerful this exact linkage between doing nothing, and doing something extraordinary is for me. So why should anyone even care?

Well the thing is: I went to all the trouble of writing this down; I might as well do something with it.

Brief - But Legendary!

2011-01-10T10:24:00.001-05:00

I just saw some sports figure – I don’t remember who, but I do remember that I didn’t recognize the name – described as “legendary”. It either saddens or maddens me, depending on my mood, to see the constant cheapening of language in this advertising age we live in. Nobody living is legendary; I cannot think of a single person in the world today that could remotely be deserving of such a term. One of the requirements for being legendary is having legends arise about one’s life. Wouldn’t you agree? When someone is alive, one can ask him or her if some story about him or her is accurate and get the facts. That would reduce this figure to the level of, at best “historical” and at worst, to “used to be famous”. Nearly anyone in sports comes much closer to the latter than the former. Surely, there is no one currently active in anything who is much more than “famous” or “prominent”. Next time someone uses the term “legendary” in my presence, I plan to challenge him to recount one of the legends surrounding that person. If the story is factual and verifiable, then we are dealing with history, not legend.

Of course, “historical” has been cheapened as badly as “legendary” has. Nowadays, it seems that “historical” is applied to something as trivial as a company painting a little color onto a two-dollar bill and selling it for $10. (Have you seen those recent ads?) Companies such as the Franklin Mint and others are constantly selling nickels and dimes for several dollars each (along with certificates of authentication!). It is clear, from the continued success of these companies, that there is no limit to the gullibility of the American public. Some of the people we vote for would bolster the same argument. Mark Twain based a number of story lines on the willingness of the public to believe the fantastic and to buy snake oil in large quantities. It would seem as if the desire to be deluded is so entrenched that it has given rise to both strange moments in history and to fictional tales which are cherished. In short, the gullibility of the American public is legendary.

Plumbing the Shallows

2011-01-04T17:33:00.001-05:00

I use Yahoo as my internet whatever – the first screen I see (whatever that is called) not from any strong preference but merely because that must have been, in the dim dark ages past, the first whatzit that popped up when I started on the internet. By now this has become, in a modest way, my preferred whatzit only because I am used to it. Actually, on my other computer, my Apple, which I bought when I had a lot more money and nothing much to do with it, Google is my first whatzit, which makes more sense in a way, because I often go online to Google to look up a word or person or thing which has come up in conversation and which I suddenly realize after all these years that I don’t know exactly who or what it is.

Yahoo seems to see itself, these days, as a sort of USA Today lite – and of course, USA Today itself is news lite in the first place – so when I first hit my computer in the morning or whenever I manage to get to it, I am usually presented with about six headlines concerning things that Yahoo assumes will interest me. At least one of these commonly begins with a grabber like “Six people that…” or “The ten best…” or “Fifteen horrifying…”. I canceled my Time subscription some time ago for offering me too much of this kind of headline. There are usually about two of the six headlines given over to some event in the lives of some film actor who should have known better even if he or she is not Lindsay Lohan. Today’s quota of actor-related headlines were about actors Pete Postlethwaite dying and Zsa Zsa Gabor having her leg amputated. What stopped me in my tracks were not the misfortunes of these actors, but the little note at the end of each headline displaying a camera icon and the word ‘photos’. Really?? For one giddy moment I thought I was being promised a close-up of a corpse and a stump, but of course, just like the ‘Ten ways to cut your taxes’ articles, the reality is no such luck. I have to say they had me for a minute there.

I’d like to say that Yahoo doesn’t ‘get’ me and that I am above clicking on articles about people I will never meet and lists that have nothing whatever to do with my life. (Have you ever read one of those tax-reducing articles, by the way? They have about as much relevance to me as does the AARP magazines agonizing over where one should buy one’s second home or which upscale getaway caters to such ‘Life-is-sweet’ seniors as myself. ) But, getting back to the thought provided in sentence one of this paragraph, I have to admit that I quite frequently do find myself idly clicking on these desserts for the mind type articles – though I hate myself for doing so - while I am just as likely to skip stories on the war and Washington. Partly my avoidance of the latter items is Yahoo’s insistence on giving no information that I don’t already know from last night’s two sentences with film footage on NBC or ABC. The problem with a world in which everyone is famous for 15 minutes, is that no one is allotted that fame in relation to his deserving of it. Probably nearly everyone has 15 minutes worth of depth in some area or other, but that is never what we get to read about. I wonder what kind of interesting stories we’d get if Yahoo omitted any ‘news’ article with less than ten sentences altogether, and for those longer than ten sentences, they arbitrarily picked sentence 11 of the article and had a writer do a whole article on that sentence’s topic alone. Such depth is why I love my Atlantic and my New Yorker. Either tell me a whole lot that I don’t already know, or skip it altogether.

So I have to admit, sadly, that Yahoo probably does have my number. It is embarrassing. On the other hand, while Yahoo is just guessing, and probably wouldn’t know me if it passed me on the street, my nearest and dearest should have a clue as to what I am all about. Each Christmas I am reminded anew what a mystery I am to all who know me. I wonder if the gifts I give are as unrelated to the people to whom I give them as theirs are to me. An Indian man, whom I worked with in Saudi for six months or less, and whom I have seen only once in the last fifteen years, dropped by the other day on his way from Toronto (to which fascinating city he has emigrated) to introduce me to his wife and three kids and the lot of them were kind enough to bring me a Christmas gift. How is it that this man had a better idea of what I like (a book on the latest findings on brain plasticity) than do my relatives, many of whom have known me since birth? Just asking. I like getting gifts – giving, I find, is much overrated – but I do find it baffling that people are so wide of the mark when they decide what I might like. Perhaps they see me as too narrow, and wish to widen my horizons. But an insulated coffee cup every Christmas? Still, the degree of difficulty I find in buying gifts for most of my near and dear would argue that I am as clueless as they are. But this is about ME after all.

What happened to bring these thoughts to mind was the fact that just now I opened the upper cabinet door where I have stowed the latest insulated coffee cup and, apparently feeling that I had enough of its ilk therein already, this latest gift leapt from its shelf and smashed a plate I had set on the counter below. I am not exactly looking a gift horse in the mouth here; I know that it is the thought that counts. But what baffles me, is what thought exactly is it that I am counting? Has anyone ever found me, for instance, serving or drinking flavored coffee? Yeah, I got some of that – and when I served a bit of it at the Sunday Breakfast last week, I got a resounding chorus of ‘Eeewww!” which kind of echoed my own reaction. To be sure, if asked, I wouldn’t know what I wanted either, so I guess I can’t expect anyone else to know. I have too much stuff already. The best gift I have gotten in the last several years was a gift certificate for iTunes. At least I don’t have to find a place for the resulting purchase.

As a special service, I offer the following (he said, changing the subject). If your eyeglasses’ lens keeps popping out, don’t try supergluing it to the frame. If you DO glue it and inevitably get some glue on the lens, don’t try wiping it off with your finger. And if you do smear it around with your finger, don’t try to clean it up with a paper towel. I’m not saying how I know this, or where bits of paper may be firmly adhering to my body, I am just being of service.

I am Actually Reading Right Now

2010-12-31T12:42:00.001-05:00

When one is alone a lot, as I am, one thinks about things. I mean, I might be reading an article and a word or a thought reminds of something and then that leads to something else and suddenly I find myself mulling something that has nothing to do with what I am ostensibly reading. Yesterday I got my latest New Yorker and, as is my wont, I began reading it from front to back – rereading all the synopses of current Broadway plays and films available at certain esoteric locations around New York City, and the letters to the editor and so forth, and today I started an article on the artistic director or whatever it is of a fashion house of which I have never previously heard. I read these things (the article preceding was on the Vatican Library) because the writers published in the New Yorker are so gifted that everything is interesting when one of them writes about it.

The first mental digression occurred right off the bat because there was a photograph of the subject of the article - a German named Tomas Maier, whose first name is really Thomas, but which he altered for reasons which he justifies one way, but which I suspect really boils down to an attempt to make himself interesting. The article described him as looking like a “hipster monk” (one trick of writing for the New Yorker is to master the art of oxymoronic descriptives), so I was interested to see the actual photo of the man, and, by gosh, he DOES sort of look monkish in a roughly good-looking way. What I noticed particularly, though, is that he has beautiful hands, and it was this that got me off into one of my usual tangential reveries.

When I was younger, I thought of beautiful hands as those which occurred in paintings, rather than the actual appendages of breathing humanity. I refer to those medieval depictions of the Virgin or saints with the gently arched fingers which give no hint of actual musculature within. There is the graceful hand of Michelangelo’s Virgin in his Pietà, or those various depictions of Jesus or of saints with hands having the two first fingers raised and the thumb extended. Sitters for portraitists seemed, before 1880, to drape their hands nervelessly in ‘beautiful’ formations. But some years ago, I began to realize that when I see someone whose hands look attractive to me, the attraction lies in the strength and utility that is exhibited. I like hands that look like they can – and do – perform actual work. Fingers should look strong and capable. Most people think, consciously or not, that their mother’s hands are beautiful; certainly I do. I like looking at my mother’s hands, there is history in them. Even now, I see the fingers that held Kleenex when she commanded me to, “Blow!”, that held the hankies moistened with her own saliva to wipe spots off my face, that sprinkled flour over the greased cookie sheet, that grasped the handle of the kitchen pump to draw water from our cistern; and they look warm and able and beautiful and alive to me. I like men’s hands to look like they can grasp things. People talk of the unpleasantness of a limp handshake, but I don’t much care about the handshake; what is a real turn-off to me are limp hands themselves, and tentative, ineffectual gestures.

I turned the page in my article, and there in a space embraced by the article I was reading was a poem entitled “Crepuscular” by Kimberly Johnson. Now, ‘crepuscular’ is one of those words I have to look up again each time I see it, because I never remember from one time to the next what it means – even in a general sense. It is certainly one of the ugliest words in all of English with its overtones of scabs and pustules and general crustiness, at least in the spelling and pronunciation. I am pretty sure it is nothing of the sort (I pause here to look it up AGAIN). There! I knew it! It means something beautiful: twilight – how did something so lovely as twilight (or the pertinence thereto) get an ugly word like crepuscular, which sounds like it should be applied to urban decay or gangrenous sores?

At any rate, as soon as I came to the end of my current paragraph, I read the poem which I rather liked. But there was a line that again sent me wandering – a tangent within a tangent – that spoke of autumn sunlight:

“…That’s what the sun does

In autumn, slanting southward and brownly

Between the hunched houses of the neighborhood.”

What struck me, besides the fact that I liked the poem, and this fit right in, was that I had been thinking just yesterday very specifically about how the light of winter was different and how the light of early morning is so full of hope and promise, while the light of late afternoon is so different, even though each is hitting the earth at the same angle, only from different directions. Is it because I know one is morning light and the other evening? They seem to look different; evening light seems to have more gold in it, as if a little blood had spilled into the silver gilt of the light that morning brought. Autumn and winter light (like the ‘beautiful’ hands of old paintings) seem to hold no power, no oomph, as though the sun had a headcold and was just going through the motions. In a larger sense, it seems eerie that something I think of one day out of a clear blue sky (so to speak) shows up in my reading or conversation or TV viewing the very next day. It seems to happen all the time.

When I think about things, such as the above, I find myself composing paragraphs about them. I am rather poor at visualizing things I haven’t actually seen, for instance picturing a forest or beach or whatever. (I can never picture my green summer yard when it is winter, or my barren winter yard in summer.) I have to think of a particular beach or forest, and then I wind up all tied up mentally with what happened there or with whom I went there. I think in words and although I see the people and places about which I dream when asleep, there is an element of narrative, of being slightly aloof or at one remove from what is going on. The lead character in my dreams, the “I” person, is frequently not me. I know the thoughts and emotions of the dreamer but he, or sometimes she, is not the me I know when I am awake – we differ in appearance and age, in motive, in our concerns, our remembered histories. I have attributed much of my descriptive or narrative abilities, such as they are, to the need when I was younger to hide, and to pose as someone I am not. In this sense, my past was a gift. Many of the painful periods of any life are gifts in disguise, very costly gifts, it is true, but once the rough stuff is past, there is a wonderful pool of awareness that is left in which to bathe. It seems to be every parent’s aim to shelter his child from the very things that made that parent so spectacular. “I don’t want my kid to suffer like I did,” is a two-edged sword. The desire that one’s child have a better life than one’s own kind of depends on the definition of ‘better’. People do not love chocolate for its sweetness alone. It is that tiny edge of bitterness that makes the sweetness special.

And now, if I am not to add this New Yorker to the guilt stack of those I have not finished, I must return to my reading. See how I never get from A to B without a detour? Now, Mr. Maier, if we may resume…

Oh and one more digression (in case I mysteriously disappear from Blogland). I am, as we speak, drinking coffee lightened by CoffeeMate from a huge can which, when I got it home, appeared to have been previously opened. I thought of all those articles about product tampering, and then I thought about all the hassle of returning this can or the cost of throwing it out, and I did the math. Besides, isn't it as likely that someone hid an emerald ring inside the can as a shot of anthrax? Live for the moment, say I, and the moment doesn't seem to call for a trip back to Sam's Club. So if I am not here tomorrow, it wasn't the emerald ring...

Touching on Christmas and so on

2010-12-28T10:23:00.000-05:00

For once, we here in Reedville were too far north to get hit by the big blizzard. All those folks who chortle smugly as we get our ‘lake effect’ snow most of the winter got to chortle out of the other side of their mouths and it serves them right. Yesterday we got an inch or so of snow, the kind that falls in big fluffy flakes like that which one sees on Christmas cards. A rather odd sight was to be seen in my very own back yard, where there is a spring of water which keeps right on seeping forth come hot weather or cold. This spring was lined with a flock of robins who apparently hadn’t heard about the migration thing. They were strung out along the area where the water movement leaves a line of earth visible in the snow and seemed to be eating something, but I can’t imagine what sustenance could be found in that cold water. Surely no earthworms could be abroad in these temperaures. Is it possible that they eat the forget-me-nots that seem to spring up in any patch of water around here? Actually I knew that robins don’t really fly south – or at least a lot of them do not, despite people believing that that is what they do. In winter robins retreat to woodlands and are rarely seen, giving rise to the migration belief. I read somewhere that old-timers used to say that if you just kick the bushes near a woods in winter you’ll find the robins. I am not sure who was out kicking bushes in the snow to discover this, but it sounds like he had a lot of fun. We here in the northern boondocks have our simple pleasures.

Christmas, which I generally dread, was not bad at all this year. As long as I lived on the farm, Christmas was magic. Then, after I moved to California, it was a lonely and sad time for me for a while – so much so that I scheduled some elective surgery over Christmas one year just to get out of the house. Then I met Tumwell and all the magic returned. Tumwell was a total kid when it came to the holidays. He brought the magic back for me. I had to watch him like a hawk to make sure he didn’t sneak a peek at presents before the appointed day. I am a purist; I want to open everything at once on the actual date. He always wanted to open gifts early. We finally arrived at what became our tradition: gifts were opened one minute after the midnight between the 24^th and 25^th. On Christmas morning we would rise late and go to Tumwell’s Mom’s house for Christmas dinner. She gave me the nicest gifts. One year she gave me a pair of tap shoes – the real deal. I still have a teak rocking chair she gave me. Each year the Christmas meal got more elaborate, because Tum’s mom always included every dish I had expressed a liking for among all the meals I had previously had at her table. Once Tum asked her why she was making something or other again for Christmas and she said, “Well, Dave likes it,” and Tum said, “What about what I like?” He was kidding of course, but it was true – she seemed to take me very much into account in her meal planning. As her youngest son, Tum was expected to eat what was he was given.

But then I went to Saudi, and Tum and his mom both passed away, and since then Christmas is more of a hassle than anything else. For the last several years Caitlin, a newly married niece (well, ‘newly’ when it first started) has invited all of us in the area to her home for Christmas. The first year this happened she was living in a house in the town south of Reedville where my Mom also lived, but she and her husband have since purchased a beautiful home on the main street of a village an hour’s drive east of us. This house was built in the 1890’s and then was carefully restored by its previous owner and is a perfect place for a Christmas. The problem is that more and more of my brothers have been returning to the area and this means more and more people for whom I must buy gifts with less idea of what to get them and far less money to do it with, now that I have retired. This year, I had a couple of things I bought in Bali that served as gifts, but then I was forced to get out and do some shopping for the rest of the gifts. I got out earlier than usual – that is TWO days before Christmas, instead of one, but actually once I got out and started shopping, I kind of enjoyed it. I felt pretty good about most of my purchases. I suddenly realized that I didn’t have to get the “perfect” gift, just something that fell into an area in which each recipient was interested. After that, it was relatively easy. I have a tendency to get caught up in a right-wrong axis in things, and to forget that the world doesn’t rise or fall on my choices. I did propose (and my proposal was eagerly accepted) that the adults exchange names next year and each would buy only one gift. That will make future years SO much easier. Besides, this year Zeke (Caitlin’s husband) has installed a pool table in the cellar of his home, so there was something fun to do. Do you know what the difference is between a basement and a cellar? When a basement is more than half underground, it is a cellar. I know you will thank me for this info, and you are free to act superior and correct others when they misuse the terms in future, as do I.

It looks like the weather will finally rise above freezing later this week and by New Year’s Eve it will be in the 40’s. By then the northern areas will have clear roads; the real north is remarkably efficient in clearing the roads. It is the border states that get overwhelmed and cancel everything when there is more than an inch of snow. I am debating driving to northern New Jersey to visit Freddie, a man I met a few months ago, for New Year’s weekend. Freddy is a very nice guy and his story is rather interesting. He married his high school sweetheart and they had three boys. When the boys were grown – or nearly so - Mrs. Freddie, who is quite an attractive woman who had received some flattering attention from men on the prowl over the years, began to fret that she had somehow missed out on all the fun and dating that other girls had. Eventually she left Freddy for one particularly attentive admirer and they got a divorce; however Mrs. Freddie found that these men on the prowl had no intention of doing more than tasting the honey and then flitting onward to the next flower, and she ended up somehow blaming Freddie for her subsequent unhappiness. To get out of a fraught environment, Freddie moved to a little villagedeep in the wilds of northern Jersey. One day a fellow employee at the company where Freddie has worked for more than 20 years invited him home. The man (for it was a man) came onto Freddie, and Freddie, who has maintained his youthful face and physique, says he thought, “Well, why not?” and thereby discovered that he liked the guys even better than he had liked the ladies, something that had not even entered his head previously. Thus the way was paved for my entry into his life.

Freddie likes to play music and is planning to trade his electronic keyboard in for a ‘real’ piano; he says he likes the feel of the real thing. Although I have not yet persuaded him to play for me, I noticed that the sheet music he had on the rack of the keyboard was very complex stuff. He had a large photograph of the Shirelles on one wall and when I said I really liked them and asked if he liked them particularly he told me that the lead singer was his aunt. He brought out the program from her funeral in northern California and some other things that he had acquired because of the relationship. So I am kind of dating a girl group by extension. Well, kind of dating. We seem to like each other, and he is a really nice man. He is intensely prosaic, though (other than liking guys), and very much a family man for his now-grown sons. The only thing ‘gay’ about him (other than the sex thing) is that he is very fond of Broadway plays. He regularly attends these with an elderly female friend who shares his interest.

I have only visited Freddie once, several months ago when it was still early autumn, but I have been thinking about him a lot lately. He said he wanted things to be an equal type thing; that he didn’t want me to be the one who always did the travelling (he is about 5 hours from me). I think he meant this, but he is a true Northern Jersey/New York City type who thinks anything outside a narrow radius centered in Manhattan is the back of beyond. He thinks I live somewhere within shooting distance of Sarah Palin, I think. So he is worried about driving in the winter so very far north. I thought this whole situation was languishing, but while I was in California, I found my thoughts turning to him more and more, so I e-mailed him and suggested I visit again. He sounded very eager to see me. I talked to him on the phone the other day and he is still all for seeing each other again. It makes sense for me to go there rather than the reverse because he works and I don’t. He views a trip here as a big undertaking, while I think a five hour drive is not all that big a deal, if the roads are clear.

We have nothing much in common – he is not a reader, he likes very different TV fare, he has no interest in the kinds of things I like, he will text several times a day, whereas I never text and only write e-mails – usually far longer than a text message. But he is a decent honorable man and we find each other fairly attractive. Maybe something will grow, maybe not. He is a creature of habit; he would have been glad to stay married and be Dad, then Grandpa. The gay thing came as a surprise, but now that he has discovered it, this is where he wants to be. He has been on the same job for 20 years; he plans to stay another six or seven years to qualify for a full pension. I never stayed on any one job for more than six years and that six year job was in Saudi where I had to sign two-year contracts. And I certainly never planned six years ahead for anything. There are a lot of reasons we are not a match, but maybe there are also a few reasons we can be. Either way, I am looking forward to visiting again. And then we’ll see.

Despite all the news about poverty and kids not having any gifts this year, I ask you, have you ever been in a house where there is a child, where that house is not jammed from one end to another with every imaginable brightly colored plastic toy? It seems almost obscene to me the number of toys a child has in the present era. And so many of them perform , leaving the child a spectator. Where are the Tinkertoys, the Lincoln Logs, the Legos, the Etch-a-Sketch? I am just asking; it was the toys that allowed me to build things that I loved – those and crayons and marbles – I made up more games using marbles than the manufacturer ever dreamed. When I was in Sam’s Club, I saw a huge super-size barrel of Lincoln Logs and I almost bought them – for ME. It seems to me that most parents awake each day and say, “Hmm- it is a new day, Kimmie needs a new toy!” Maybe it is just me, but I do know that the most pampered kids with whom I went to grade school never had nearly as many toys as has every kid I have seen lately.

And a Happy New Year to YOU.

A Touch of Dyspepsia

2010-12-15T08:24:00.000-05:00

It certainly seems that no matter how often I feel I am freezing my butt off, said butt never seems to diminish in any visible manner. Quite the contrary.

This thought occurs to me, since I have risen a few hours ago at 4 a.m. to a house that seems colder than the hubs of hell. I am still on California time – and apparently still on expectation of California temperatures. The thermometer reads about 20, although my eyeballs are frozen so I can’t be sure of that. It is just getting to be that time of dawn when the snow looks blue. And so do I.

I actually lay awake for some time before arising and thought about things. One thing I thought about is the incredible annoyance of those fake words that I have to type on most people’s blogs in order to post a comment. I have no objection to typing the letters shown; what bugs me to the last nerve is that these letters are often displayed distorted in such a way that I can’t tell which letters are showing. This irritation is such that I am often tempted to change “What a darling little peachy-weachy!” in response to someone’s posted baby picture to “Somebody ought to smother that uggo in its crib”. Usually my mental response to the picture of any baby (including those of relatives whom I love dearly) is that it looks like a lump of Play-Doh with eyes.

One must be cautious about such “honesty”. I once made the mistake of giving my honest opinion of the attractiveness of persons who are visibly pregnant, and I thought the walls would crumble, such an uproar did ensue. And this from GUYS! I am sorry but every time some magazine (always aimed at female readers, I notice) publishes revealing photos of pregnant ladies, I am grossed out.

I am equally grossed out by sonograms. Has no one any sense of privacy (I hardly dare say “decency”) any more? Jeez Louise! A perfect world for me would be one in which children were presented in public for the first time about the time they begin to resemble something recognizably human. Recognizable, that is, to the beholder who is not terminally suffused with the ‘awww’ disability which renders folks incapable of actually seeing what these squashy little bundles of flab and wrinkles look like. It is bad enough seeing my own collection of flab and wrinkles without the sudden shock of rounding a corner or entering a room and being presented with something like that.

I returned to NY to find a snowman built on my deck and the interior of my house clean and decorated with Christmas tchotchkes. I haven’t been able to find anything I needed since my arrival, so thorough was the cleaning, but it sure is nice to come home to someplace that looks like the dwelling of`a person who has evolved beyond the ape stage of existence, that is, someone who does not live in Kansas where such an evolution is banned, I believe. I ought to invite someone to visit quick before I mess it up again, although since I had to cook something last night that ship may well have sailed.

I have noticed that ships sailing have been in the news rather a lot lately. Last night they were yammering on and on about some Mediterranean cruise which hit rough seas. Passengers were rather miffed, I gather, and most of them seemed to have spent the time holding up their telephones and taking pictures, when they might better have engaged in taking cover. I am looking forward to the day the news shows someone gasping out his or her last breath while a streetful of people, including the emergency responders, record the process on their cellphones. What is it with people? What the hell is the use of a bunch of pictures of people you don’t know undergoing some sort of disaster? I am totally down with the secret satisfaction of watching someone else get the pie in the face that should have been yours, but it seems a little crass to stand there taking pictures while he or she wipes the fruit filling out of his or her eyes .

Anyway, I was wondering why the hell people go on cruises in the first place. I personally would do it for the adventure. If I just want to lie in the sun, I’d save a thousand bucks and find a beach. If I want to get from point A to point B, I’d take a plane. For several thousand years, people have understood that venturing out to sea was a risky proposition. There was a time when one had no choice; there were no other methods available for crossing the wine-dark seas. But now there are options for safe and convenient crossings. I have been watching irate passengers complain that their vacation is ruined and so forth. How is it ruined? Now they have something interesting to talk about. Hasn’t anyone noticed that a tale of an uneventful voyage puts the listeners to sleep – or if they are lucky, to flight? "The food was so delicious!" "The sun was so - well - sunny!" Here is a rule of thumb, people: A picture of you on a deck chair is not interesting, but a picture of a deck chair on you IS.

One of the rough voyages that was featured in the news this past week was one to Antarctica which encountered very rough seas. Color me naïve, but I can’t come up with any scenario wherein I would embark on a voyage in frigid polar waters and expect smooth sailing. I am just saying, here. I suppose anyone daft enough to travel to Antarctica in the first place is daft enough to expect comfort. I imagine half of them are hoping to book lodgings at the five-star Ross Ice Shelf Sheraton.

Are you dreading the next six months of Kate and Wills overkill as much as I am? I did notice, though, in the official photo that came up every five seconds on my news program, that old Prince W seemed to have a very fixed smile, rather as if Kate were standing on his foot with her Manolo Blahniks. The ones with the stiletto heels. I don't know why HE looks so pained - SHE's the one getting the balding guy.

Speaking of news overkill, am I the only one who thinks that the news media should ignore publicity hungry ideologues who use newsworthy occasions to get attention for their crackpottery? I see the fool that got all kinds of attention by threatening to burn some holy book or other has now been invited to London by some asshole or other. And don’t even get me going on the jerk that pickets any funeral which will get him more than two lines of news coverage. I do have to say, though, that anyone who gets that hysterical on the topic of homosexuals must be fighting pretty hard to keep his hands off any pretty young man who walks by. Whyever else would he care so much?

Those of you who do not live in the brackish backwaters of Northern California, and thus might have missed the news from that quarter, might like to be aware that the world is scheduled to end (or the End Times to begin, or whatever) this coming May on, if I remember correctly, the 20th. Round about then, anyway. This is a heads up for those who thought they had until 2012 when the Mayans calendar runs out to prepare for the end. Those wishing to divest themselves of their worldly belongings in order to purify their lives in preparation are invited to contact me to receive convenient shipping instructions for any automotive, gold or electronic non-necessities of which they may wish to dispose.

And now the day is upon me – whatever shall I do with it?

The Man in the Hat

2010-12-07T14:41:00.004-05:00

My grandmother had finished high school and begun a job of some sort when her mother died. As the eldest daughter, she discovered she was expected to abandon her job, which she enjoyed, as well as all hope of a 'normal' life, and to devote her life to caring for her younger sisters, her brother and her father. This was made clear to her in a most graphic manner; the time was just before Christmas and her father took her to her mother's closet, told her that henceforth she would be wearing the plain clothes therein, and she discovered that her name had been removed from all the Christmas presents intended for her, and her that younger sisters' names had been substituted. That is, at least, the story as my mother told it to me.

Grandmother had recently visited a friend in some small upstate New York village, and on the night of that day when her father laid out her dull grey future as spinster caretaker to her siblings, she packed a bag, sneaked out of her house and fled to the friend. She never saw her father nor most of her siblings again, except for a sister named Daisy who tracked her down years later and who resumed a relationship with Grandmother and her ever-increasing brood of girls. Shortly after moving to the village of her friend, Grandmother met her future husband and they were married. Grandfather was a good man, the marriage seemed happy, and they ultimately had 10 daughters and a son, of which 8 daughters lived beyond childhood. The son died shortly after his birth and two of the daughters died in the great flu epidemic of 1918, a year in which my Mom, the sixth daughter would have been two years old.

For some reason, my Grandmother had a restless streak which manifested itself in an odd manner; every year or two she insisted on moving to a new house, usually within the same small town where the last house stood. Grandpa apparently was unperturbed by this and his job didn't change; there was no apparent reason for these moves, at least none that my Mom ever knew. Eventually Grandmother had lived in all the available houses in the town where Grandpa worked, and she moved to a larger village some distance away, while Grandpa remained in the town where his job was. My mother hated moving with a passion, and at first remained with my grandfather, while her mother and sisters moved to the larger village. Eventually she joined her mother and, later, Grandpa ended up in the larger village also. I have never got a sense that there was any breach between my grandparents, and from tales Mom has told, they were people to whom others turned for help when someone needed bringing to the doctor or the like. Apparently the local doctor in the smaller town where Mom spent her younger years called upon Grandpa so often to collect or return patients to their homes that Grandpa acquired the nickname "Doc" which followed him all the rest of his life. I know Grandmother only from my mother's recollections; she died at the age of 49 , from complications of epilepsy the same year my Mom graduated from high school and when her youngest daughter was only two years old.

I suspect that I may have inherited my Grandmother's restlessness as evidenced by my desire, which is almost a lust to go someplace else from where I am at differents points in my life. Had Grandmother lived in my era, I suspect her moves would have been to far greater distances. A woman of her era was terribly circumscribed. I don't think the impulse to move was rooted in a desire to get away from either her husband or children - there was just an intense desire to try some new place. I completely understand this; I never leave things, really, instead I go to new things.

When my father asked my mother to marry him, she laid down one condition: from the start they must own their own home. So much had my mother hated moving all the time, she had no desire whatever to move ever again. Consequently, my parents purchased a three-story frame house at 512 Goodling Street, an important north/south street in the city, but not so busy as Main Street or other commercial avenues. This house had an apartment on the second floor which my parents rented to a childhood friend of my mother and her daughter Bunny who was my age, while the husband and father of this pair was off in the army fighting World War II.

So few men were at home during the war that there was a manless culture in the city. My father had been denied entrance to the service because of his age, although he had tried to enlist; he had married at the age of 41. This was a time when each neighborhood had its own commercial center, and neighborhood groceries were found every few blocks. Mom tells me that so many young wives were living alone, with no one to babysit while they shopped for groceries, that it was common for a line of infants in carriages to be left outside the larger grocery stores in the commercial district which lined the avenue a block north of my parents' home. Young mothers might come into the store and call out, "The baby in the blue jumper is trying to crawl out of the buggy!" or "The little girl in the pink dress is crying!" and the mother oif the child in question would hurry out to fix the problem. No one worried about abduction or mishap beyond the normal type of mishap which might occur at home as easily as it would on the sidewalk outside the grocery.

When I was three, my Uncle Bern who had inherited the family farm in Reedville, 15 miles south of the city, developed a severe heart condition which rendered him unable to continue the strenuous business of farming, though I believe that was the life he loved with all his heart. His wife, Aunt Delia, was the quintessential house-proud farmwife, who dearly loved Uncle Bern. It was agreed among the members of the family that my parents would swap their home in the city for the Farm.   Thus my mother, who had always been a girl of the towns and villages, came to be a farmer's wife. She had hoped for a life in the city and she had hoped to remain in the house she and Dad bought when they married, but I never heard her complain about the new circumstances in which she found herself. Late in life she said she felt it was much better to have raised nine kids - eight of them boys - on a farm in the country, rather than in the city. For my father, however, it was a bitter disappointment. He did not like the regulated life of a farmer with the never-ending morning and evening milking, the lack of time off, the lack of control over one's time, the endless round of planting, cultivating (i.e. weeding crops), harvesting and so on.

Frequently Aunt Delia would have me visit her and Uncle Bern in the city; they were childless and they loved me very much. Dad and Bern's sister Agnes (also childless) lived across the street from Aunt Delia, with her husband Mick who was a car salesman and who owned all the buildings on the short block of Opal Street between Goodling and Belhurst streets - the side of the block which faced Delia's house.  Uncle Mick's buildings consisted of three three-story houses which were broken into apartments and a long multi-car garage which looked like it had six parking slots - at least there were six square windows in the facade of the one-story wooden building. Aunt Agnes was my favorite aunt and she adored me. She was a wonderful aunt for a child to have, but she was a sore trial to any adult who knew her. I didn't know it for years but she was a severe alcoholic, whom I think may also have been mildly agorophobic. In a "Chap Record" I found at the Farm later, there was an entry that predicted she would end up tired and nervous, bent over a washtub. Chap records were a fad, something like autograph books, only instead of containing autographs, they had entries by the owner noting each person he or she met with a humorous note as to how they struck the writer.

Aunt Agnes loved having me to stay with her for short vacations. These visits were very odd times; she was a weird combination between a fussy guardian and a permissive one. She taught me how to behave and how to use every possible table utensil including shrimp forks and fingerbowls, without ever once giving any kind of meal except a quick one at the kitchen table at which I was never joined by anyone except my brother Gary when he was also invited.   Things not eaten at one meal showed up again at the next, not out of some form of punishment, but just because there it was and there we were. Gary and I learned early that Aunt Agnes would not hear us go to the back door and throw things off the back landing - Mick and Agnes' apartment was on the second and third floors of the corner building, so uneaten food made a most satisfying arc as it descended into the back area below. Often Gary and I would check on our next visit to see what stage of decay some of the larger bits of food had attained since we threw them.

Aunt Agnes - or Aunt Delia, for that matter - thought nothing of sending us to the shops which were a block north of Opal Street between Goodling and Belhurst. So long as we didn't have to cross a street, they saw no need to worry about our safety. The only street we ever crossed was Opal Street itself, since the two aunts, who had a bit of a rivalry over my affections, lived on opposite sides of that street and I had to (and wanted to) see plenty of each. On these forays of perhaps 200 or 300 feet, I was given all sorts of safety instructions: look both ways, don't dawdle, watch always for the automobiles which apparently were believed to lie in wait with drivers who neither saw us in front of them nor who had any other purpose in life than to mow down heedless children.

When I was six and had begun first grade, I was visiting one of the two aunts and I had with me the money to do some Christmas shopping for the first time in my life. I think I had to purchase a gift for the draw at my school at the local five and ten on the commercial block which had a selection of enticing toys on offer. On this occasion Gary was with me, and we were allowed to go by ourselves (as always) to do our Christmas shopping. The modern parent might think that my aunts were incredibly lax in their oversight, but at this time it would have been far more unusual for any child to be restrained from exploring his own block. Children seemed to live outside on the local sidewalks. We seemed to live in a world that cherished us; my aunts, especially Delia, from whose house Gary and I actually made our sortie, were actually more overprotective than otherwise, but protection of children in those days meant cautioning them about heights, cars, sharp objects and electricity.

At the five and ten, Gary and I separated and he was looking at one side of a toy counter while I was in the aisle that ran the length of the opposite side of the counter. Counters in five and dimes were generally like long tables; one could see across the store over them. Those stores did not have the high walls between aisles which block one's view as does Walmart or other stores of today. While I was looking at a bunch of hard-covered books on the counter, a man in a grey three-quarter length coat and a fedora-style hat - the winter uniform of any man in public in those days - came to stand beside me and opened a conversation. He asked my name and age and if I went to school yet. I answered everything truthfully and in a respectful manner. Although I had been cautioned about dealing with strangers, I always imagined strangers as being men or women on the street. This was in a store and thus the other constant injunction to always be polite and respectful to adults was in operation. The man asked if I had any girlfriends, and I recall being a little confused as to how to answer.  I kind of intuited, even at that age, that the cool young man always would reply, 'yes' to this question. I both knew and kind of didn't know exactly what was meant by the term 'girlfriend'. I knew that it meant something different from 'friend who happens to be a girl', but I salved my conscience by recalling that I DID have plenty of friends at school who fit the category 'girl' so I said 'yes'. I also was beginning to feel uncomfortable with this man - he stood very close and spoke in an undervoice. He seemed so old, and his voice held something different from the jocular tone in which my uncles, or my Dad's friends, spoke to me. I looked for Gary but he was engrossed in something in the next aisle.

The man then went on to ask me if I knew "what girls like." I felt a sort of sick fear slide down inside my chest to my stomach. I didn't dare move away - he was a GROWN UP - and I didn't dare lie, though I SO didn't want to know, because somehow there was an aura of - not really menace - but sort of sickness, like watching someone cut open an animal, so I said, "No." I never felt physically threatened, just a sort of horrified feel of the Earth shfting unpredictably under my feet. I have since had dreams - though they probably have nothing to do with this incident - where something is very wrong, but all around me people are unconscious of anything unusual and are proceeding with daily concerns and I can't seem to communicate the danger. This felt exactly like that dream. The man proceeded to tell me a number of graphic scenarios, about bodily areas in girls whose appearance and purpose I wasn't really sure about. I was in a panic. I felt smothered by this man. I desperately willed Gary to look up, but he didn't.

Finally a sales clerk started to come in our direction - not because of the man, but because she apparently had business near us. The man quickly stepped away, breaking the spell that had held me frozen. Quickly I darted around the counter to Gary and whispered urgently, "Come on!" I had already gathered a couple of gifts, and being the orderly and regulated child I was then, I felt I had to stop and purchase these before leaving the store. The whole time I was frantic with worry that the man would return to me and I couldn't yet speak to Gary because for some obscure reason it was imperative that the store's personnel not hear me, but the alternative to making the purchases was to return each item to where I had found it (it never occurred to me to just drop them anywhere other than where I found them), and doing that felt far riskier. It would have returned me to the man's proximity. As we scurried home, I told Gary all that had been said, and I think it scared him too although he was always much braver than me and I really don't recall his reaction.

When I got back to Aunt Delia, I told her the whole, word for word as I recalled it. If you knew Aunt Delia, or at least knew how she appeared to me, you would realize the extent of my shock. Aunt Delia was nice through and through. Such words as I was saying are not ones I would EVER have spoken to any adult, let alone her, under any other circumstances. Aunt Delia had grey hair which she wore in a bun, and wire rimmed glasses. Her character matched her appearance - a grandmotherly, kindly, sweet, decent woman who thought only of ginger cookies and family pictures, not of getting girls alone and touching them in dirty places. She was all that is meant by the word 'genteel'. Of course she was shocked and horrified, and happily she did not for a minute make me feel bad or as if I had somehow done wrong.

I don't think I was terribly marked by this incident, although I can still picture the man in his grey coat and his fedora. I can't picture his face, though. I became, perhaps, a little warier for a time and probably had a healthier - though not morbid - awareness of how to behave toward people I didn't know. I never ascribed those occasional dreams I mentioned above to this incident, and even if they were a result, they have not been a serious factor in my life. I think my relatives reacted exactly correctly - they were on my side, they didn't behave as if I had caused the problem, but I don't recall that they became markedly more protective, or stopped letting me go about on my own.

When I was in my first weeks of college, about a dozen guys in my dorm were having a bull session and somehow the topic of these kinds of encounters arose. All but one of us had experienced something similar. My roommate (who had become a six foot plus basketball scholarship athlete) had actually been knocked down and fondled briefly by a man who used to watch his little league games. He didn't seem terribly harmed. It seems to me that more harm is done by overreacting to these incidents in the child's presence, or by instilling terror. I speak, of course of boys, and of incidents that do not reach the level of abduction or actual sexual relations. Boys know this behavior is aberrant and they don't like it at all, but they should not (in my opinion) be terrorized into thinking every man will do this sort of thing. Reasonable caution, not vigilante gangs of men bearing torches and pitchforks, seems to be a reasonable response.

I wonder, though, what was this man's motive. He made no move to get me to go with him, nor did he talk about male privates; he spoke only of girls. Was he a bitter and angry man who saw a happy boy shopping and who wanted to spoil the boy's confidence? Is there a kind of thrill in having a conversation like this with a frightened and unresponsive boy? I never felt he would physically bother me (I could have been wrong), but I felt like my psyche or my view of the world or my joy was being besmirched. I didn't feel targetted: I felt, so far as I thought about it, that any boy standing where I did would have been equally a victim. I was very frightened, but not of being attacked. It was like things didn't make sense for a while. There was no order to things. I think it is like seeing one's guardian or caretaker being drunk; where is the safe certainty of life?

I am not complaining or regretting; I am more curious than anything. What was happening from the man's point of view? Was he mean? Envious? Destructive? Turned on? I like to know why people do things and how they see their own behavior, and I really can't fathom this man's motives or his reward, whether realized or anticipated. It was never a big deal later in my life; I don't even know why I wrote about it.  I was just thinking of that house on Goodling Street and my times there and then I thought of this and it was something to write about.

Catching Up

2010-12-01T16:37:00.001-05:00

I guess I need to post a new blog, if for no other reason than to give JennyD more space to comment. Yes, I have suddenly had such an upsurge in Followers that what to say I wot not. I know my Shaggers new and old know that 'wot' is a real word and not a mis-key, such a clever lot as they are.

As I said to OneGirl on her blog, a blog is a public forum and one has no control over the comments made. I wouldn't have it any other way. To Marge and JennyD who apologized for lengthy comments, more power to you! I love long comments which are mini-blogs in themselves - I do it all the time on others' sites. Hey, if it is TO me or ABOUT me or inspired by me, I just can't get enough. Fear no more.

I am feeling concerned about this current entry - I learned long ago to write on a text editor and then cut and paste into my blog, since I have lost long and wondrous posts by trusting blog websites not to delete all ere I published. But I do not wish to leave an entry inadvertently on this computer, since I am writing from my friend Emily's computer at her home in Northern California. As I have said before, I do not share my blog with people I know, nor do I use real names. This allows me to write things I don't care to have shared or picked over by my near and dear. Nor need I worry that someone will be offended by a misreading (or even a correct reading) of things I write. I have noticed that even such a canny lot as my Shaggers occasionally read something entirely different from what I thought I wrote - how much more likely for a reader who has exposed nerves and who still disagrees with me over whose pencil that was in third grade and who holds a grudge therefore, to do so.

I came to California from Western NY on the train with my brother Luke and his girlfriend Carol. It was all-in-all a nice trip. Just as we were about to cross the Mississippi River, Carol went downstairs in the observation car to a tiny snackbar/booze bar for a teeny-weeny double vodka, and while she was there, Luke and I heard a man shouting therefrom. When Carol returned, she told us that a middle-aged female conductor had observed a man stealing a number of items from a girl's purse and putting them into his own backpack. The man defended himself against the charge (rather weakly, I thought) by saying, "Just because I look like a derelict doesn't mean I am a thief!" As a defense, I do not think this will enter the annals alongside Clarence Darrow or Johnnie Cochran.

The conductress glommed onto the man's backpack and told him he was not leaving with it, and the man struggled to pull it away from her, whereupon Angela, the lady behind the counter flew out like an avenging Fury and told the man to leave her colleague alone. Angela is a lovely lady who looks about 35, and had told us she was 59. We spent a fair amount of time talking with her. She had been a magazine model when young (she had a beautiful face) and was quite an interesting lady, with a lively wit. Between them, the conductress and Angela managed to keep hold of the backpack, and after the train crossed the Mississippi into Iowa it stopped athwart a main street in a tiny town for an hour while the local gendarmarie boarded and removed the faux derelict, blocking a queue of traffic and leaving the drivers therein to wonder what malign impulse had led them to drive down that particular street in the middle of the night. Angela later told us that occasionally passengers are lulled into thinking that the quiet informality of a train makes it an easy target for the less-than-upright. "Au contraire," she assured us (although those are my words, not hers), there are undercover agents from the ATF and DEA on board, among others. Further, if one boards in Chicago with contraband and is caught in California, he can be (and might well be) charged in every state the train crossed. Our naughty derelict, by prolonging his efforts through the crossing of the Mississippi had rendered himself liable to prosecution in both Illinois and Iowa.

Our only other event out of the ordinary was having a freight that was in our way develop a flat wheel (!) and delay us two hours while the situation was remedied; happily this happened in the midst of spectacular Colorado scenery. The fine folks at Amtrak schedule the California Zephyr so that we see the Rockies and Sierra Nevada by day and cross Utah and some of Nevada by night, which is just as it should be. If you have two days (from Chicago) or three days (from NYC) and are in no hurry, do take the train. Bring a blanket, for sure. The meals are OK, and the rule is that you are seated with whomever has an open table. We had uniformly interesting tablemates - a man from NASA, two women travelling to see an ailing father and grandfather, a young man with a new job in Colorado. There was also a young seraphically handsome self-described ski-bum and snowboarder with whom I had a great chat about surfing and about books. I started talking to him because I saw he was reading Gatsby - it turned out that it was his second time reading it - and I got another lesson on judging a book by its cover, so to speak. And this man's cover was pretty darn awesome - he had a mass of blond curls and the face of a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

The wedding was not bad; although I did have to endure a Catholic Mass; the groom's family were quite convivial and I had a great time with his mother who was just a few years too young to have made the Hippie scene in San Francisco and who wanted to hear all about it - WELL! And she didn't even seem sorry she asked! There're manners for you! Many of my siblings - Lucy, of course (mother of the bride), Luke, Liam, George and Jack - were at the wedding with their various offspring, so I had a pretty good time - best of all, Jack did NOT bring his dreadful girlfriend. I had a date that didn't work out so well - although it was kind of fun and ended with a late meal at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Berkeley where I got to stammer a few remembered Arabic phrases to an interesting lady of Morrocan and Palestinian ancestry. I then came to stay for a couple of weeks with my friend Emily - my best friend whom I have known since my surfing days in Hermosa Beach many years ago. She went to a junior college briefly, back in the day, with Squeaky Fromme. How's THAT for a name-drop?

It is great being with Emily - some days we do nothing, and the town she lives in has a truly great used bookstore, as well as some nice places to eat. Emily is a great reader and we love to talk for hours about books, the old days on the beach and everything in between. We also have no trouble being quiet and doing separate things with no pressure to interact constantly. Being with Emily is like being at home, only with someone to talk to, and with someone else doing the cooking. Bliss, in short.

I realize I am departing again from my effort NOT to make this a diary-type blog, but I do feel that I should aim for at least two entries a month, especially since I am swamped by a tsunami of new readers. OK, a ripple. But of such quality. And I know, quality rather than quantity should be my motto when writing, but I fear I am not sufficiently miserable just now to plumb the recesses of memory for the makings of the better entries. And I have come up with one or two ideas for alleviating my rather blah existence of late - I hope these last beyond the return to NY and actually get put into practice. I should be home around the 15th, then there is only Christmas to get past and voila! - a new year.

A (Lack of) Vision Statement

2010-11-09T12:30:00.000-05:00

Back in the dark ages of 2005 when I started to blog, almost on a whim, as I do most things, I think (although I am not sure) that my intent was to talk about the past as I partook of it, or witnessed it. I guess that would be sort of my vision statement, which, like those of most companies, ignored the real motives, which in my case was to do something to alleviate the boredom of living in small-city Alabama, and in the companies’ case, to make a heap o’ cash. This latter aim, I hasten to say, was my purpose in being in Alabama in the first place, but had nothing to do with the blog. And the main two reasons that living in small-city Alabama was boring was because I was relatively new there and had no connections, and more importantly, because I am a person who just sits around and is bored, rather than one who seizes the opportunity to explore my surroundings and make new friends. It has nothing to do with the blandishments, or lack thereof, that Alabama offers.

As a vision or goal, this writing about What Happened has wavered some and has glowed mighty dim sometimes. Sometimes I get caught up in what is going on now, and sometimes I get caught up in issues, neither of which areas brings out the best in me, and both of which seem to extinguish for the moment my interest in what has gone before. I most emphatically do not want to blog as a diary of what I did today, and equally I do not want to talk about issues all the time, since when one does that, readers (sometimes even readers as bright and insightful as my Shaggers, all two of them) tend to snap into their pre-existing belief set and read only to agree, if they are so bent, or to nitpick if they are of a different view. Moreover, what could I possibly say that makes any difference?

It may or may not surprise anyone, considering the paucity of my entries lately, that I actually blog mentally several times each day. In the last day or two I have written a mental blog about a great blue heron which spent hours yesterday progressing majestically through and around my pond (Damn! they are big!) and about the ponds themselves, and about watching closely a video of Bush at Ground Zero and obsessing over how easily and naturally he kept his arm across the shoulder of the man in the hardhat (head cop? head fireman?) throughout his remarks via bullhorn and how different he is as a person from me in a way that makes me wish I had some of him in my make-up, and about buying my brother Luke his first computer (with his money, I hasten to add), and about my trip to Las Vegas with my former roommate from Saudi, and about my forthcoming trip to my niece’s wedding in California whither I am travelling by train.

I have not actually considered, until this moment, why the few who come here do so. Y’all have given me some very flattering comments, and since the majority of the tiny crew of readers who do come have been around for a very long time, I have to believe that some of it is true. It can’t ONLY be because then I’ll come and visit you, can it? That would seem too high a price for you to pay. I try to write as well as I can – at least in respect to using the English language I grew up with – although I hasten to admit there is no re-write or polish (or very little anyway – I do usually spellcheck, and in the good old fashioned way, by rereading, at which time I also check if my sentences actually make sense). No, I am not fishing here for compliments; I was just struck that I actually have never before thought about WHY such folks as jeankfl and onebeam and flooz and mizangie and Shana and the rest drop by. (I could mention some other faithfuls such as Gayle and Kittycatlane, but the former seems to be vacationing from blogging – and reading - for the nonce, and the latter is, I think, on a different site and is finding the navigation here a slog – besides, all those cats…) It would probably be useful for me to think about this, and then again, one of the reasons I do not use my real name – or the real names of my subjects - is to avoid writing FOR somebody, which for me means running a mental censor over everything and the whole point was to avoid that. But still, it is pointless to write things without some yardstick to measure, in my own head, whether those things were worth writing about, or whether what I wrote is worth anyone’s time to read.

I always knew (this is a segué, by the way) that there was something in my head that was highly counter-productive and that was the voice of my depression, or tendency thereto. And the other day, when I was walking away from the kitchen counter, leaving something or other lying there which should have been put away, I heard my head say, “I don’t have the time.” Since I had read the Sunday magazine that comes tucked in my newspaper this week (which I rarely do) and had found therein some words on the very topic of limited time by Diane Keaton, I was struck by how this phrase works for me so differently from the way it does for her. In discussing being older, and more aware that the time left to her on this Earth is limited, she spoke of stripping away the non-essential and throwing herself into the things worth doing. For me, limited time is a paralyzing thought, quite the opposite view from Ms Keaton’s. It is true that I strip away quite a bit of non-essential activity – and disposing of the food and utensils I was leaving on the counter could arguably been non-essential, at least for the nonce (and would also have taken two minutes, MAX!). But I find that I do absolutely nothing all day every day other than fill time with the least demanding activity possible, my nap (or naps) being the highlight. Anything that takes a foreseeable commitment of time is something from which I shy away. I don’t usually watch daytime TV (there are limits!), but I fiddle with repetitive computer games, read idly, wander about – anything that I can stop at any point without having to return home, clean up, or draw to a close one minute after I want it to be over with.

I thought during all those years of unrewarding work, that there was a certain legitimacy to the claim that I didn’t want to spent my off-work time doing that which I didn’t like doing. But now I have nothing but time – the Sunday breakfasts here with Mom are the sole scheduled events in my entire week and I do neither the cooking nor the clean-up for those. And I still hear nothing in my head, except variations of, “It takes too much time.” It takes too much time to make new friends, to try to reanimate old friendships, write letters, find congenial volunteer work and then perform it, mulch the garden, put up the deer-proof fence around my yew hedge, water house plants, finish painting my dining room (going on 5 years now on this project), straighten up this or any other room, set up my TV-cable-DVD properly – you name it, it takes too much time or effort or there are too many bits I don’t like about it. Do I know what I should do? Absolutely – at least in part. But I don’t do it. In the past when I have spun endlessly in ruts like this one, I have eventually revved up the energy or whatever to break away completely. I have hitched or flown or driven off to new, really different, places and that move in itself got the juices flowing for a bit. My friend Emily, the one friend I do call at least once a week, says that I am now reaping the whirlwind that I sowed by being utterly unable to commit to anything or anyone in my life. She is, I think, right. That doesn’t, however, seem to get me anywhere.

At the time, I thought I would have the Farm to live on forever, have my college friends forever, then I thought that I would surf forever (inept as I was), I would live by the ocean forever, then I believed I would do theater forever, I would be with Tumwell forever, and on and on. I never swore I would stop at any one of these places and stick it out through thick and thin, I just assumed I would never leave for something else, and even when I left each of these behind, I denied I was doing it – it was just a temporary respite, a quick foray into a new interest and that, unlike me, they –the friends, the places, the lovers - would remain the same, frozen in time, awaiting my return. I thought, I guess, that if I never closed a door behind me, that the door would remain open. But the portals of life are immune to the laws of inertia; the natural state of doors is closed and close they will if one does nothing to keep them open.

It is a grey day and I am having grey thoughts – and speaking of grey, the great blue heron looks grey to me; I don’t know where that ‘blue’ business comes from. And what do they eat all winter? The one out back looked like he was snapping up frogs or something, I am pretty sure he wasn’t having a salad. How many frogs can be found forging their way through winter's snowdrifts? I'd look into this, but I just don't have the time.

The Point of It

2010-11-03T12:50:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, I took back a book, very much overdue, to the library and then killed a little time by looking over the books they had available at the annual book sale. I came across a book of roughly a zillion pages called An Introduction to Literature and leafed through a few pages. It will give you some idea of the size of this book if I tell you that it contained all of the plays Hamlet and Death of a Salesman and twelve other plays, as well as a two complete short novels, plus essays, poetry, commentary, discussions of each of these entries and a good deal more. And pictures! I spotted the lyrics to Dylan’s Times They Are a-Changin'. I also noticed and was a bit intrigued by a short story by David Leavitt, who is known for, among other things, having published at the age of 20 in the New Yorker that magazine's first openly gay short story. I read a line or two of the short story of his which was included in this book (It was not the one from the New Yorker) and was somewhat intrigued – it just looked like it might interest me. As is my custom, when faced with something I should read, and which will forever after clutter my already filled-to-bursting home mostly untouched ever again by the warmth of a human hand, I purchased this book for a mere fifty cents - only 15% of the fine I had just paid for my lack of vigilance in the matter of the due date of my returned book.

I didn't know if I would even read this enormous tome beyond perhaps dipping into the Leavitt short story that had caught my eye and maybe one or two others but already this morning, worn by the elections, I sat down and started off at the beginning of the book for the hell of it and on page FIVE it has already earned back its cost by gifting me with a quote that says EXACTLY what I have come to feel about blogging - MY blogging, not other people's. It took a while to realize what I was doing for myself with this plebian form of writing – though only sometimes and only at the best of times. I had actually realized some time ago that it seemed to be giving me that awful word "closure" and allowing me to let go of times and places that were long dead. In regard to saying farewell to individual people, I had previously discovered a description that was emotionally exact in describing my feeling in a quote from Death of a Salesman, where the wife says of her failed husband, "Attention must be paid!”, because I feel exactly as she did, that neither my life nor that of a person who is subject of my writing, can be allowed to pass unmarked - even though she and I both know they will. But they will not go unremarked by ME. I, at least, will say, "Thank you" as best I can, even though in haste and poorly, and on the spur of the moment - or at least the spur of the hour or two.

The quote that rocked me with its exact perception as to what I feel and what I want (when I think about it - and I nearly always have to see what I have said and work back from that to discover what I feel or want), was from, of all people, a Japanese courtier named Lady Murasaki and she wrote it a thousand years ago about literature:

"Again and again something in one's own life or in that around one will seem so important that one cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, the writer feels, when people do not know about this."

So many people feel something of this nature; in its most mundane and annoying form it is that late night conversation (or monologue) after way too many drinks, where you hear some asshole saying of some song or writer or NASCAR winner, "But you gotta understand what this is about!" to the unmoved or uninterested or contemptuous.
When I think about writing something, I almost always forget this. And when I know what I am going to write about, I get caught up in facts and outrage and opinion and attempts to DO something or get to some thing or to make some point. But when I have just written something without thinking, and on re-reading find that I still like it, I get that this is what I was doing.

Fun in Surgery

2010-10-27T12:04:00.000-04:00

A kind of funny thing happened yesterday while I was getting my cancer surgery. (I subscribe here to the literary convention of leading with an attention-grabber.) The doctor carving chunks out of my neck and shoulder was a first year resident and her assistant, who was also a sort of oversight doctor, was a third year resident. (I saw him glance at himself in the mirror at one point and brush back his forelock and I said, "I saw that!" which discombobulated him somewhat. I live to serve.) Anyway, after my doc was done chopping away a couple of pieces of me which were a lot bigger than I had anticipated they would be, the third year guy left and she was busying herself about the office, cleaning up bloody gauze and the like. She took some plastic bottles and put a piece of my neck into one, then she started looking all around, into this, under that. She then left the office saying she would be right back, and left me lying on this folding table assembly swathed in a rather shabby blue robe that featured an off-the-shoulder style – or at least it did the way I wore it. She left the door open, so I could hear her talking to someone in the distance. And she said words no patient likes to hear, at least not in the tone of voice in which she spoke them:

“You won’t believe what I just did!”

I confess that I awaited her return with rather more interest than I might otherwise have done.

She came back with the three-year guy and a nurse and the three of them proceeded to scour the office. It transpired that she had inadvertently discarded or lost a piece of my shoulder. They looked high and low. My actual tormenter was beside herself.

“Don’t worry,” soothed the young nurse. “Everybody does it sometimes. Why, I,” she confided, rolling up her sleeves and slipping into True Confessions mode, “lost something right in front of Dr. Petrov!” One pictured this Petrov as an old tyrant whose crusty exterior concealed a heart that was pretty darn crusty also, as seen on every TV drama since 1946.

“I better not get home and find it in my pocket,” I said.

The three of them turned the hazardous waste bin upside down and picked through its contents. Affecting my best Brooklyn-mobster accent, I said, “Do ya want a piece of me?”

Then they went through the ordinary wastebasket. The looked under the table on which I lay in semi-deshabille. They went through everything again. They started looking in places that really were not possible candidates for receptacles of my discarded flesh; you know the kind of desperation searching one does when something is nowhere to be found, like maybe you had gone into a fugue state and climbed up and put something atop the refrigerator or above a ceiling tile. I mentioned that this procedure reminded me forcibly of Nurse Jackie, which none of them had seen and of which most had not heard. I was enjoying myself immensely. Eventually, the assistants in my doc’s search gave up and departed with an air that suggested she had best suck it up and admit defeat with, perhaps, a soupçon of relief that it was not them who lost it – or lost me, as the case may be.

She kept up the search, and I was beginning to wonder if the rest of my life was to be spent lounging, semi-clad, on a narrow table while busy poking and prying went on all about me. Finally, in her third foray into the wastebasket, she discovered the missing bit deep in the finger of a discarded latex glove.

So that was how I spent yesterday, and a lovely day it was, too. Now I am walking around with these humongous bandages here and there about my corpus. Because of the stitches, I was advised not to lift anything heavy or to do any exercise that might raise my blood pressure.

I could not believe my ears. “I never thought I’d hear a doctor advise me not to exercise!” I exclaimed. ”Far out! Could I get that in writing?”

But the doc said if she wrote anything she would definitely include an expiration date for the admonition. Still, I am sitting on my butt doing nothing on doctor’s orders and that suits me down to the ground. Normally, of course, I would be doing exactly the same thing, but it is nice to have this unwonted aura of virtue surrounding me.

And it is only basal cell skin cancer, which is hardly cancer at all.

Plain Folks

2010-10-16T09:04:00.000-04:00

Did you see where that candidate was mistakenly listed on an election tally sheet as "Rich Whitey”? Hope he wasn’t running in a heavily black or Hispanic district! Although I must say, in a way, he brought it on himself. There wouldn’t have been that much of an issue if he had billed himself as Richard Whitney, rather than Rich Whitney, even if the same error was made in spelling his last name. What’s with this “Jes plain folks” business of people running as Rich or Bill or Jimmy or Meg? People are always yapping about the “dignity” of certain government offices, yet they seem unwilling to elect anyone who shows any traces of dignity.

In the same vein, there is great antipathy, it seems, towards any display of intelligence in political candidates. I completely understand people not wishing to elect theoreticians to run things, but it seems deeper than that. There seems to be overt hostility toward anyone displaying above average intelligence. Do I want a candidate to understand what it is like to worry about bills and jobs and mortgages? Sure – but I’d kind of like him or her to have actually figured out how to handle these issues successfully. What is dismaying to me is that people who wouldn’t dream of voting for someone smarter than they are, seem to have no problem with voting for people who are putting a zillion of their own dollars into a campaign.

When people have a zillion dollars to finance a campaign, they have gotten it in only one of two ways: they either inherited it or they made it. If they inherited it, there is no way that they have experienced the same day to day problems as you or me. If they made it, there’s a damn good chance that they are smarter than you and me, even if they call themselves by a folksy moniker and say ‘he don’t’ and ‘I ain’t’. And they damn sure are not an “outsider”, either way. But I guess that if people can believe that Survivor represents reality, they can believe anything. Presumably these believers are on the lookout for their local ‘plain folks’ candidates in the produce aisle down there at Aldi’s discount grocery or when they are picking up a package of 4 T-shirts for $10 at Wal-Mart. If you believe that someone in possession of a zillion dollars is an average guy or gal, just like you and me, there is definitely a lot of stupid in the equation, but it ain’t the zillionaire who’s got it.

This antagonism toward intelligence is nothing new. I recall clearly that one of the handicaps that Adlai Stevenson failed to overcome in his campaigns against “Ike,” was the perception that he was an intellectual or “egghead”. (And why is an intellectual called an egghead? I have yet to perceive the slightest sign of intelligence in any egg I have encountered. Have you ever tried conversing with an egg? Dumb as a rock, take my word for it.) “Smart” and “elite” are not synonyms: neither are “educated” and “elite” the same thing. In fact, P. G. Wodehouse made a lucrative career satirizing how clueless the elite classes of England really are. There is no evidence that the elite classes of the USA are any brighter than those of the English. It is struggle that toughens and educates a man or woman. A smart person, rich or poor, learns from his failures and hurts and setbacks. A stupid person just repeats mistakes. The opposite of “smart” is “stupid”, not “nice” or “ordinary” or “jes plain folks,” although actually none of those three terms rules out being stupid also. It is odd that people dislike a candidate who shows his smarts, but at the same time no one seems to feel that “stupid” is high praise. You just can’t have it both ways.

As far as I can figure out, this large swath of the electorate is hoping for ‘dumb and lucky’. Maybe they should spend Election Day buying lottery tickets instead of voting. The rest of us might remain dumb, but chances are we’ll emerge a whole lot luckier.

God Calling...

2010-10-14T13:08:00.003-04:00

It is always heartening to hear that God has been in personal communication with one of his faithful. It is astonishing to me that what God has to say is so very much in tune with what the believer wants to do in the first place. God regularly advises various preachers to open large and remunerative ministries in high traffic areas, showing that God is a far better businessman than I am. The most recent testimony to God’s vigilance that I have encountered was provided by the wife of the man who was murdered while jet-skiing in the lake that the US shares on its border with Mexico. Whereas the wife had stopped to try and take care of her husband – or at least his corpse – she tells us that God was urging her (and, like good King James, I paraphrase here) to get the hell out of there and save her own ass. As someone who does not believe in a deity, I am struck by how remarkably the advice this lady received resembles the advice that my own more hell-oriented internal voices give to me. It is remarkable to me also that when someone was shooting at her, this lady actually required God’s advice as to what action to take. I suspect, if God were otherwise occupied and a bus was bearing down on this lady, she'd not think of moving without someone's advice. I have not heard any record of this lady speculating on why God didn't speak up an hour earlier with the same advice and leave her with a husband who was intact. God could even have thereafter suggested to her that she get a divorce; then, either way, she'd probably end up with the house.

Of course, it is hard not to think of Shakespeare’s dictum that “Conscience doth make cowards of us all” – you were thinking that weren’t you? OK, this isn’t exactly what Shakespeare meant (It isn't at all what Shakespeare meant), but I doubt that this lady could spell Shakespeare – quite possibly she can’t spell ‘God’ – much less quote him. It is very easy when making a choice that gives one qualms to suddenly hear the voice of God telling one to take the road one preferred in the first place. So many of us listen to some inner voice, and it is to be hoped that few of us are listening to the same voice that was cited by the Son of Sam serial killer. And how, exactly, can we identify the source of a voice when we are under fire? I’m thinking the lady to whom I am referring did not stop and asked for two forms of identification. But that’s just me.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

2010-10-12T10:24:00.001-04:00

When I heard that a New Zealand “presenter” had made fun of an Indian person’s name, an act that roused India to protest, my reaction was, “Is this guy (or woman) nuts? What a jerk!” As usual, knowing the whole story makes all the difference. The name in question is Dikshit. I ask you, who could possibly let a ripe target like that lie? Not me, that’s for sure.

It is an orange and yellow fall, this year. I haven’t seen a single maple that has turned red, they are all just the candy corn colors. I understand red leaves result when there is a sudden sharp frost early in the leaf-turning process. If fall creeps up slowly a degree or two lower each evening, the color is not nearly so vivid. And there is something a little depressing about an orange fall, like someone you love fading slowly rather than the quick shock of a sudden heart attack. Since I am not working, the days pass more quickly, and I really haven’t fully realized yet that spring is past, despite the Fourth of July and even Labor Day. Apparently my gardens feel the same – some bulb I planted and forgot has sent up leaves I don’t recognized, and finally has a cluster of buds which I think will never bloom at this late date. I have a couple of dahlia bulbs I planted this year and these too have not yet bloomed, and apparently never will, or at least they will not do so this year. And although I do have zinnias and cosmos higher than my head, and although these have brought forth some blooms, the majority of the buds are just forming.

I got to thinking of this business of sharp early frosts causing brighter autumns and it occurred to me that this is one more thing that I think I “know” without really having any independent awareness of it as a fact. Somebody told me that. The difference between this “fact” and many others that I assume I know is that I actually recall where I heard this one stated. The man my dear friend Marilyn married told me this in reference to liquidamber trees in Sacramento. I have never actually done any verification of it – and really why would I? But in the last few years I have realized more and more that the things I think I know – and take for granted that I know – are things I have just read or heard. I realized long ago that the real danger of the silly tabloids one finds at the checkout counters is that you read the false headlines about famous people and laugh, but a year later when a celebrated person’s name comes up you have a vague memory that they did one thing or another and don’t remember where you read or heard it.

Almost everything I know, is actually something I have read or heard. I’d say fully half of my knowledge is in this category – possibly more. I definitely know that hot water burns, because I have been burned by hot water more than once. But every single thing I have heard about, say, South America is something that I heard or read or saw in a film or on TV; I have never been there. Much of it is extrapolated from what I encountered in Mexico - a land that is definitely not South America, simply because the Mexican people look vaguely the same and speak the same language. I know from experience that Arabs are far different than the common American perception of them. I don’t even bother saying so any longer, when I hear someone who has been nowhere tell me what Arabs are like because my experience is that the speaker will dismiss my eight plus years of actual experiences in Saudi as ‘liking Arabs’ – in the same way many people once dismissed positive statements about black folks as not being true, but merely the deluded effusions of a n------- - lover. Some folks still do – and equally, of course, there are folks of non-white races who will not accept a single positive statement about anyone white.

I love history and I read it constantly, not really to learn anything, but just because I like it. And the more I read of English history, which is my favorite topic and the one about which I read most, the more I realize that almost anything anyone says is mere speculation, or only partly true. It is impossible to really enter into the mindset of an earlier era. How much more this is true of a people that is not as similiar to me as the English are. This doesn’t just apply to history, however. How often have I heard detailed descriptions of life in the inner cities from people whose only experience of them is driving on a freeway that cuts through them? It is clear that people who tend to read one set of bloggers and who prefer one cable news channel have a radically different set of ‘facts’ from those who get their information from another. It is easy for a person from the first group to believe that a person from the second group is being willfully obtuse. Some people merely want to have their own prejudices reinforced by anything they listen to (this is what we call “Faith”), but even someone wishing to hear all sides, and who listens to all the sources he can find is still reliant on other sets of eyes to know what really happened when he himself was not present. And as to knowing WHY something happened, that is not even within the realm of possibility to know. Most of us really don’t know why we like what we like in our own lives, or exactly why we do most of the things we do.

Dylan, who in my opinion, got so much right, nailed this whole issue long ago:

My guard stood hard when abstract threats too noble to neglect

Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect.

‘Good’ and ‘bad’, I defined these words quite clear, no doubt, somehow,

But I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.

Notice that even folks with experience and smarts such as those folks at Microsoft can’t figure things out. They think, for instance, that I wanted to space Dylan’s lines as if they were separate paragraphs. And they were wrong, wrong, wrong.

Don’t think for a moment, though, that knowing how tenuous, speculative and second-hand all my knowledge is will stop me from acting on (or writing about) facts of which I have no personal knowledge. If you think that, you just got another fact wrong.

Well, Guess What...

2010-10-09T10:16:00.002-04:00

I have suddenly become aware of the phrase “Well, guess what…” Has this always been around or is it something relatively recent? It is very specific in its use: the speaker relates some expectation from a third party or from the universe and then introduces a rebuttal with this phrase. The rebuttal is usually considered withering in its logic or truth and the verb thereof is almost always emphasized – sort of italicized. For instance, “They want me to pay a hundred bucks for a telephone! Well guess what, I don’t even like telephones!” “She said I was with her boyfriend at McDonald’s. Well guess what, I don’t even go to McDonald’s!” I am particularly hearing this phrase in sitcoms, and now that I have noticed it, I kind of enjoy it. See, people think I don’t pay attention. Well, guess what, I never stop paying attention. Sooner or later, I get there.

We had, this past Saturday, our 50th Class Reunion. It was quite a lot of fun and quite a bit more elegant than I had expected. Doing my bit, I gave a few after dinner remarks – by request. I also (he said, tooting his own horn) went above and beyond by volunteering to pick up and return a woman, a former Charlotte Harvest Queen, who lives down in the Southern Tier, that extremely rural line of counties that borders Pennsylvania. She lives about an hour south of me in a village that I had never previously visited. Of course everyone was all “That was so generous!”, but it wasn’t, really. As I have said before, I really love the people in my graduating class. And hello, people, she was a HARVEST QUEEN!

Harvest queens were an institution here in my part of NY from roughly 1947 through the early ‘70s. Each town hereabouts would hold a pageant wherein a number of girls aged 16 or 17 would compete, gowned in prom-style dresses. In Reedville, my town, they’d be led onto the stage from a side door of the gym/theater that used to grace our Town Hall by a town volunteer fireman who would be grinning in embarrassment and flushing a bright scarlet. The ladies were escorted from the side door on a path that threaded through the audience of friends and fam. Then up onto the built-in stage where they arrayed themselves in a semicircle of chairs set up for the occasion. The contestants usually numbered between 7 and 10, garnered by local ladies who furiously worked to convince enough girls to compete to make a good showing. Reedville is a very small town; its official population in the road guides of my youth was 384, although the actual count was probably quite a bit larger, since the guides only counted those within the rough outlines of the village of Reedville, whereas a majority of the town’s people lived in the houses and on the farms in the 80 square miles of the town outside the village limits.

The contest consisted of each contestant coming to a microphone and giving a brief résumé. Most of these speeches began, “I am Contestant number X and I am a junior at Reedville-Charlotte High School…” After these little speeches, the master of ceremonies would ask each lady a brief series of questions. Upon completion of this process, the judges would retire and select a Queen and an Alternate. I had always thought that the title of Queen granted a girl two privileges: the right to compete for County Harvest Queen and from there (if successful again) to represent the county at the State Fair; and secondly, the Queen and Alternate got to ride in the Memorial Day parade next May in an open car, blushing and bowing to the masses. I thought the Alternate, meanwhile, had no other function than to keep an eye on the Queen, hoping for signs of a wasting disease, so that she could succeed to the higher honor.

The girl (they will always be young in my eyes) who did most of the hard work arranging this reunion happened also to be the Reedville Alternate back in the day, and she told me that there was a great deal more to it than that. Anne, for such is her name, told me that there was quite a program of activities for the winners and that, other than competing for the next highest level, the Alternates were included in all activities as equals of the Queens. They met local celebs such as members of the Rochester Triple A baseball teams. There were a number of dinners and events, and the ladies were treated to various opportunities to learn and grow in social awareness.

In general, the prettiest girls won, although occasionally we all were shocked by a decision that was unexpected. Sometimes a pre-contest favorite would freeze up during her speech or the questioning by the emcee. Nearly all the contestants in Reedville were attendees at Reedville-Charlotte, but there were a few exceptions to this. The very southwest portion of Reedville fell into the Stratford school district and an occasional contestant might hail therefrom. In addition, a few girls in town attended a Catholic school in the city, and although I don’t recall any of them competing in my time, they were certainly possible candidates. Of course one year when a girl from Stratford High School won, there was a lot of grumbling from most of us, not least because her father happened to be the town supervisor (our local version of mayor) and we all felt the fix was in. The crowd normally divided between guys rooting for the prettiest and girls wanting to see a popular girl taken down a peg or two.

I don’t want to get all political here, but it is easy to notice that merely being pretty gave a girl entrée to a series of events where she could develop connections, poise and some social awareness. This was never questioned in the 1950s. But the thread of looks counting that still shines through so many areas of achievement was clearly in play. I ask those who watch American Idol, when was the last time a contestant made the top levels who was not at least above average in attractiveness, particularly the females? There has been a heavy gal or two on Idol, but, really, when you see a plain girl prepare to sing in the early phases, you can take it as a given that she will be both dreadful and slightly psychotic. Even the majority of successful female political figures at the highest level of government seem above average in appearance. Is this because people generally vote more readily for the attractive, or is it because prior experiences have given attractive ladies an edge in savoir faire, connections and experience? Life, as we all should know by now, is not fair.

I loved attending the Harvest Queen pageants. There was so likely to be great food for humor. I recall one poor farm girl who, at the required age, still retained the lissome figure of a pre-adolescent boy. This was coupled in the unfortunate girl with a face that was, to be kind, very plain. I remember, as she swept out on the arm of her red-faced fireman, my brother’s best friend muttering, “Toothpick!” which sadly became her sobriquet among us forever after (although not to her face). Naturally we all were giggling through the remainder of the proceedings. My favorite misadventure at the proceedings was the time that a girl known as “Manface Millie” competed. Unbeknownst to me and my friend Howie, the girl’s best friend and the best friend’s mother who doted on Millie were right in front of us. Howie was the nicest guy in the world, a kid who had dropped out of a junior seminary, and who never wanted to offend anyone, but he spontaneously muttered to me, “She doesn’t have a chance!”. Thereupon the friend and her mother, as one, whirled angrily around to face us, the mother saying, “I think she looks very nice!” Howie, the poor fish, blushed fire red and attempting to palliate his offense, promptly added his second foot to his mouth by stammering, “I meant in comparison with the OTHER girls!”

Toward the end of the Harvest Queen era, the county contests began to be televised. I remember the first time this broadcast occurred - I happened to be back in the area for a visit. In order to buff up the proceedings into a show that would dazzle the viewers, some entertainment was added. A former Reedville Harvest Queen was asked to sing. (She was a semi-relative, having a great-aunt by blood who was an aunt of mine by marriage. I am related, one way or another, to nearly everyone whose family has lived in Reedvile for more than 20 years.) Well, this young lady launched herself into a version of Fly Me to the Moon which distinguished itself from every other version I have ever heard by being off-key in every note from start to finish. One of the perils of live broadcasting on local TV!

On a different note, my sister Lucy’s only daughter is to be married in November, in California. The invitation arrived yesterday with an insert informing me that a bloc of rooms has been reserved in a local hotel. Ah, the joys of being filthy rich, which Lucy and her husband are! I suppose these rooms are well-priced, but gee! Doesn’t anyone remember what it is to be semi-broke? Luke and his girl Carol plan to go to and from the wedding by rail and I may go out with them. I really cannot afford this trip and moreover, I HATE weddings which seem to me to be one dreary set-piece after another designed to remove any little pleasure that might derive from seeing a few folks I like in an uncomfortable setting. But I do really like Lucy’s daughter who is a very bright and lovely girl with a great sense of humor. And one does attend these events, I suppose. I may take the opportunity to extend my time in California for a few weeks in order to spend time with my best friend Emily (and possibly other old friends). I have cadged an invitation from Emily, and I have only to arrange the details. An awkward feature of the whole thing is that the wedding is just before Thanksgiving, and if I am to join Luke and Carol on the train going out, then in order to spend a decent amount of time with Emily, I will have to remain with her over Thanksgiving, a holiday which I spent with her last year. Emily has three kids and divers other relatives in her vicinity for whom she provides dinner and I’d really rather not appear to them in the light of the gift that keeps on taking. But I really love Emily and I guess I can withstand a little discomfort for the pleasure of her company. She is the only person in my life with whom I can be entirely open, and for whom no topic is verboten. She is a very bright lady – probably much smarter than me, if such a thing is possible. She is a voracious reader, generally reading books several cuts in sophistication above those which I read, and her knowledge of movies is encyclopedic.

Also, Papa, my former Indian roommate in Saudi, will arrive here next weekend. I look forward to this with mixed emotions. For one thing, I am to accompany him to Las Vegas for a week during which he will be attending an advanced computer class and I will have to try to think of something to do in the meantime. I dislike Las Vegas intensely (the only worse fate would be to be stuck in Orlando). I wonder if there is some non-gambling sort of hip neighborhood such as can be found in other nicer cities, a local Greenwich Village. I do not like the glitz or the gambling or the vulgarity of any part with which I am familiar in that benighted city. Worse, Papa is an indefatigable tourist and will want to do everything. I am going because it is free (he has two tickets on the flight and his wife couldn’t come) and because I feel it is not healthy for me to just sit home all the time, even though that is what I want to do on any given day. I like Papa, but the mad desire to see everything and to shop tirelessly, all the time talking of computer-related topics, which are SO over for me is pretty daunting. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth!

And that is the news from Reedville on this sunny Fall day

School Days

2010-09-28T14:01:00.001-04:00

I went to the same school from first grade (there was no kindergarten in our district) through graduation from senior high school. It was a terrific school, state of the art, for those dark ages of the 1940s and 50s. When I arrived at college, there were kids who were far more cosmopolitan, far more aware of the arts, but there were none who would have had any educational advantage over me had I worked as hard in high school as those who had ranked higher than me in class standing, instead of indulging in the fooling around that I preferred. Even given this, the quality of my school was such that I was fully able, had I wanted to do so, to graduate with excellent grades from college. If I had lived in a different school district to the north, south, east or west of Reedville-Charlotte, I would have had the same quality of education.

During the late 60s, the 70s and later, people set about making schools ‘better’ and there were ways in which my school could have been better, I suppose. And there is no question that there were bad schools back in my era; the film Blackboard Jungle, as well as a number of other similar works in films and books were reflective of some conditions in some schools; in some of the rural, poverty-stricken areas of Appalachia and the South, for instance, schools were probably pretty bad. But in district after district in the North, Midwest and Far West, as well as the better off (white) schools in the South, education was damn good.

Of course there were great inspirational teachers – at every class reunion there are a handful of names that always come up – and there were those who were merely good but who are remembered with affection by a few students from each class, and there were mediocre teachers and there were bad teachers. But even with the worst of the bad, we learned – I learned - what I needed to know. There was no such thing in our school as a teacher who didn’t know his or her subject or curriculum; bad teachers were those who could not teach their class. They might be obsessed with discipline or too timid to maintain control or have some other failing and the very bad ones rarely lasted beyond a year. These, however, were a very small minority. I had one really bad teacher – my sixth grade teacher, who was gone after a year. I had one ineffective science teacher, whose problem was an inability to exert any control in class, but we did manage to learn the subject, even if we were not inspired at all.

A goodly number of the best students in my class went on to spend their lives as teachers, one or two are still teaching although they are beyond the normal age for retirement. I have kept in contact with a number of people with whom I graduated and many of them tell me that teaching was a joy for most of their career, but that every year did seem to get worse. I once asked my good friend who became a teacher – one of the guys that was my housemate during that wonderful carefree surfing year in Southern California – why it was that in this area of Western New York, where there was little school violence, little abject poverty, only a modest variation between the wealthiest and the poorest families, and where there was pretty decent parent involvement, why the schools just get worse and worse, and the first thing he said was, “Every time a parent sits across from you at a parent-teacher meeting, there is a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

He told me, for instance, that the parent of a “C” student sued when that student was not asked to join the National Honor Society – and won. He said that now in his school membership in the Honor Society is open to anyone who wants to join. When I was in school, those kids who got asked to join the Honor Society had to be top students as well as exemplary in behavior. I had the grades to be admitted, but I was not invited to join. Why? This was because I was a behavioral problem. I knew it and, although I was disappointed, I knew the failure to be invited was my fault, and I knew exactly why. My parents knew this as well (and were more than willing to pass this knowledge on!); they sure did not blame the school, the teachers, the times, the schoolboard or the school bus driver for this situation. I don’t recall my mother actually saying anything, but I know if she had, it would be some variation on, “What did you expect?”

My parents were pretty busy with nine kids, and they were not active in the school, although they did attend individual parent-teacher conferences when requested, and PTA at times and, very rarely, some extracurricular activity in which I was involved. I did well, though not spectacularly, in school, my sister was near the top of her class, while a number of my brothers failed to graduate, but they got damn good educations nonetheless. Gary did not join any activities and did not achieve the required grades in one or two classes, so he was not allowed to graduate. (He did later get a GED). He was elected Justice of the Peace in his town, as well as being a member of the volunteer fire department, the local volunteer ambulance driver and a scoutmaster. So even though he did not graduate, he got a damn good education, and was a far greater contributor to his community than I ever was.

I have been watching the news this week as the discussion has centered on National Education Week or whatever it is, and on the powerful new documentary film Waiting for Superman. I saw the filmmaker on Oprah, and I saw Governor Christie of NJ and Mayor Booker of Newark talk about changes needed. I have seen some footage of Michelle Rhee, the crusading superintendent of DC schools. And it is pretty clear the new demon in education is teachers’ unions, which protect incompetent teachers.

I know that this is a big problem and I do hope that the issue of tenure for poorly performing teachers will be torn from the control of the unions. But I also noticed that a survey showed that, when asked who caused the problems in the schools, elected officials and parents ranked above unions and teachers on the list. My experience is that my rare encounters with poor teachers did not stop me from learning or cause me to drop out, they merely made school attendance a miserable experience for that year, or for the hour each day in which I endured them. I still learned what I needed to learn even though I never was reliable about doing my homework. We did not have teachers’ unions, so it is easy to say that the rise of the unions must be the problem. But really, it is only one of the problems, and not, I believe, the biggest of them.

There are several bigger problems and I know what they are; thank you for asking.

First, although schools must now spend an inordinate amount of resources to teach the exceptional students – exceptional in terms of physical or mental handicap – for the vast majority there is a ‘one size fits all’ mentality now in schools. Like the “C” student who can now join Honor Society, there are kids who love cooking or fixing things or selling things or drawing or any number of ‘vocational’ type skills who are being pushed into college-bound scheduling and who are being measured against those kids who are drawn to college required subjects. The greatest teacher on Earth cannot make a boy who loves to fix cars change his passion to English Literature. And this greatest teacher should not try. If he or she is truly great, then he or she will NOT try and will thereby lose his or her job.

Previously in NY, there was a state Board of Regents who mandated a curriculum for students who wish to receive a ‘Regents Diploma,’ which qualified him or her to enroll in college. A third, at least, of the kids in my school opted to get ‘local diplomas’. These students went to school, had classes in English, math and so forth but spent much time in classes such as typing (who knew keyboard skills would be a college necessity one day?), shorthand, home economics, shop and agriculture. They were learning how things worked, even if they were light on why Heathcliff loved Cathy. My observation is that these kids tended, in later years, to remain in the local area and to become the local leaders, the driving force in volunteer work, the best members of the school boards; they opened restaurants and small shops such as local auto repair shops and generally became the small entrepreneurs that so many politicians extoll (and ignore). They became, like Gary, the local volunteers in all kinds of areas – areas which required practical experience and hard work toward specific useful goals. On school boards they are often the ones who want to make things work, rather than spend hours discussing ideological texts and better ways of doing what is already working beautifully. We do not need a ‘new math’, the old math works perfectly.

The vocational (non-college-bound) classes should be restored and made respectable. Even in my time, there was a whiff of ‘second tier’ to the shop and secretarial students. But these were the ones who stayed in the community, who made things work locally, who grew (or continued) to love their town. Many of them later did seek some further education, after they knew who they were and what they wanted to be and what they needed to get there. The college kids moved to cities and moved from place to place bringing to any school involvement new theories and a profound lack of any sense of what the local community was all about. They often want to improve what needs no improvement and are indifferent to what really brings in a paycheck for most graduates while he or she is waiting to be elected president. Taking the position that all kids must go to college is no different than taking the position that all black urban youngsters should aim for the NBA. The number of kids in a school who go on to college should be only ONE measure of that school’s excellence. Of course, a decent math and language performance, as well as some knowledge of history, are essential for all, but the college bound curricula are not.

Second: The parents, the community at large, and the school board supported the teachers in the 50s. The parents thought and acted in terms of ‘our kids’; now an inordinately large percentage of parents think only of ‘my kid’. I cannot think of a single instance where my parents did not support school or teacher decisions, even when that meant one of their kids came in second best. When I was expelled from school (twice) my parents NEVER questioned the decision, nor did they expect to override any teacher in that or any other matter. In this they were not extraordinary – this was the attitude of nearly all parents in our district. Parents' response (after making themselves highly unpleasant to the child in question) was to contact the school and ask what the child must do to improve the situation. And you damn betcha that child was the one who did the hard part – apologize, work harder, accept the consequences, stay after school in detention, repair the damage. Were the teachers ever wrong? – sure, although rarely. When I had that terrible sixth grade teacher, my mother’s response was, “It’s only a year; next year will be better.” That is a very valuable lesson – it has stood me in greater stead than all the math and science I learned that year.

Part of supporting a teacher is being very flexible when the teacher’s methods or behavior or material (within limits of course) are unorthodox. In my senior year, we had a young teacher who made a point of being somewhat of an enfant terrible. He would stagger in unshaven on Monday in the same clothes he had worn on Friday saying something like, “God! I need to sit down!” (OK – this happened once). He was definitely contemptuous of the normal class material. He made us read Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot, which were not in the curriculum, at a time when Robert Frost and Longfellow were pretty much the cutting edge. He taught drama and was pretty brusque when one did not perform up to par. He was not prone to break things gently. When two of us wanted to take a fourth year of Latin, he added us into his third year Latin group and spent part of his time with the third year kids and part of his time with the two of us. But you better believe we didn’t get away with just translating Virgil; we had to translate it into poetry. I will never forget his face when he learned that a substitute teacher during his absence allowed us to translate a line as “Say, Miss, why is everybody rushing to the river?” This man did so much to make me know and love good writing, even though he didn’t really single me out much or spent extra time mentoring. What he did do was make me know that doing OK, or merely being understood, wasn’t really very good. He is one of the teachers whose name always comes up at any reunion.

We also had a teacher whose political views were well known and freely expressed – a history teacher who was also passionate about his subject, and his students’ performance. Yet kids emerged from a year with him with wildly differing political views – most commonly kids’ views reflected their parents beliefs, not those of even the most ardent teacher. So vetting the classroom for subversion is a counterproductive, wasteful and foolish exercise. People who need everyone to believe as they do reflect only the weakness of their own convictions. If I am right, it really doesn’t matter what you say to me OR to my kids.

One thing I heard while watching these various shows castigating teachers’ unions was that we need to get rid of poor and mediocre teachers. I concur that we must weed out poor teachers, but I contend that a mediocre teacher will be perfectly adequate in an excellent school, with support from parents and the school administration. It would be impossible for every school in America to be staffed with nothing but superstar teachers. There are a lot of great teachers, but not that many. Just as any large company does, a school will perform perfectly well, and students will learn everything they need to know, when adequately performing men and women are intermingled in schools with superior ones. Expectations of, and insistence on, superior outcomes for a school as a whole, matters hugely. This is measured by a child knowing how to do something well enough to be a desirable employee or a successful entrepreneur, but that something need not always be math or science, or another college-centric discipline.

Third: Schools are too big. It is not so much that classes are too large as that schools themselves are too large. My old school district and a great many of the exurban school districts in Western NY encompass two townships or more. This was fine when it meant that a senior class might total 100 students or less. But now the same area provides hundreds of students at each grade level. The cost in transportation and logistical support, the inability of single families to impact decisions without resorting to a courtroom, the likelihood that school boards are composed of politically ambitious ideologues who are unknown personally to most voters and who are more interested in imposing their views than in all kids doing well. Even bullying would probably be greatly lessened, in severity if not in incidence, in smaller schools. To start with, the parents would be more likely to know each other and siblings are more likely to be aware of each other’s situations. When Michelle Rhee talks about schools currently being for the adults rather than the kids, this size issue is not what she seems to be addressing, but it should be a big part of it. Small class sizes are good, but they are not as important as small school size. In the one-room school days, there were a lot of kids in the care of a single teacher, and worse, they were split among several different grade levels, so that only an hour or two per day was given to any one grade. Yet, look at the graduates these schools produced – many of the greatest of the Greatest Generation came from just such schools. Would the sports teams in gigantic high schools be reduced in quality? Probably, but in high school this is not such a big deal (and a local Christian school near me, which is so small that nearly all the boys had to play in order to field a team, recently played to a very impressive level against much larger schools). The great ballplayers before World War II came from somewhere, even though these mega-schools did not exist then. School sports might even be fun again for the average-performing kids, which, I am here to tell you, they emphatically are not now. Somehow the same folks who applaud the ideal in Little League that everybody gets to play, are just as eager to restrict their high school teams from having any members who are not professional material whenever possible. Talk about school being for the adults!

I really suspect that the negative impact of teachers’ unions is not so much in its protection of abysmal teachers’ jobs as it is in conveying to the majority of good teachers that "it doesn’t matter how well I do". This is a crucial distinction. It is not that they are protecting the bad, but that they are not protecting the good in a sense. In every company I have worked, and as a consultant I have worked in many well-known companies such as Halliburton, Texas Instruments, John Deere, Greyhound, Textron, Timken, Toro, Bechtel, Allison Engine (even though I cannot remember if it is spelled with one ‘L’ or two!), PG&E, DuPont, Saudi Iron & Steel, Accenture and others, as well as governments – San Francisco, NASA, Royal Commission of Jubail, and even a college, it was not a problem for performance or for morale when there were bad employees who kept their jobs. The negative impact on both morale and performance was when it did not matter how well the good employees performed. It isn’t even a case of the best making more money. It was important that the best be listened to and that respect (and possible promotion) be accorded to the good performers. An emphasis on excellence and a recognition thereof, even if it did not mean more money, was the crux. The outstanding performers must feel that they make a difference, no matter how this recognition is expressed. There will always be super-performers and there will always be duds. But the great middle was moved toward excellence in the companies which had standards, not of dress and deportment or of time required in the office or on the job, but of excellence in the common result – the product and company's reputation for service. Where one merely had to meet goals – pieces output, programs written, hours in attendance – where ‘good enough’ was the standard – then the great middle was moved toward cynicism, time-serving and corner-cutting. It is essential that the top-level people in a company be subject to the same standards and rules as the bottom people. The worst places had the most inflexible rules, hours, dress codes, the greatest deference to seniority (this tends to cause the best young talent to leave), and often the most ‘official’ recognitions and rewards – such as service awards (although these latter also showed up at the best places). I recall at one very low-morale company (with a strong union), an employee threw her 'years of service' pin back at the supervisor because he had not presented it to her on the exact day she reached that level. This was symbolic of an overall malaise, not of a specific failure. It is also a very bad sign when a promotion signals release from some of the behavioral restrictions that apply to the levels below.

But I am digressing. And you are very likely sick of reading. Go forth and be strong.

What Were You Thinking?

2010-09-18T12:02:00.001-04:00

The latest seven-day wonder of a non-political variety is the story of a woman who threw acid in her own face and told police that she had been attacked by a black woman. I was torn between disgust and ho-hum in my reaction until this morning when one of the ‘news’ shows broadcast an interview with an ‘expert’ (expert in what, I didn’t notice), who placed this episode within the context of people hurting themselves to get attention and also within the context of self-mutilation, in general. By far the most common recognized form of this mutilation is the phenomenon of ‘cutting’ whereby people, mostly young, mostly female, cut themselves with razor blades or knives. This, too, I have heard about and I have been mostly irritated by the topic. “Screw ‘em,” has largely been my attitude, although I know if it were a girl I cared about - a niece of mine, say, or a daughter of someone I liked, I would probably be more concerned in that specific incidence.

This expert said that quite a number - I think he said eight percent, but I could be wrong - of people, or young people or of some population like that actually did things like this - he mentioned cutting and other forms of self-injury that I have forgotten already. And all of a sudden I realized that I was, when I was young, one of those people. It is kind of annoying to be contemptuous of a set of people, and then to realize that you are one of them.

When I was in college, there was a small spate of self-mutilation among a loosely defined group of my friends, and I would say that only one of the guys involved (it was a men-only phenomenon) was as deeply involved as I was myself. This took the form of challenging each other to an endurance contest where two guys put their forearms together and lay a lit cigarette between them to see who would move first. Most of the guys only tried this once or twice, and most of the guys were more than willing to be the first to pull away rather quickly. But if I recall, I always won (except when it was a tie by mutual agreement) and I was one of the contestants far more often than anyone else. The only guy who equaled me in this regard was a friend of mine who was one of the more unusual of my college friends, whom I will call Grady.

Grady came to NPU two years after I did, and we became friends rather quickly. He usually had to be the wildest guy in the crowd - something that always attracts me. His older sister was a year ahead of me, a pretty girl who was fairly popular, particularly with the guys in my fraternity. I hasten to say that popularity, even with a fraternity, at NPU in the early 60s had nothing to do with promiscuity or sexual availability - but had to do with attractiveness and personality. I didn’t know Yvette well; I probably never had a one-to-one conversation with her beyond a greeting or farewell. I heard later that Yvette had been born with a club foot (whatever that is) that had been surgically corrected. I never noticed anything unusual about her, however.

Grady, however, was afflicted from birth by a far greater burden: both his hands were deformed. His left hand had a single thick finger replacing what should have been his left index and middle fingers. This was, in the scheme of things, not that much of a handicap. However what should have been his right hand consisted of just two fingers, one of which probably was a malformed thumb and the other longer one probably was the entirety of what would have been his palm and four fingers. The whole looked vaguely like a lobster claw, and when he held something, the first impression was that he was holding it between his index and middle fingers until one noticed that these were all that he had. By the time I met Grady he was a master of somehow minimizing the appearance of deformity; my recollection is that I did not even notice his hands the first time I met him. I would like to say that deformity did not faze me, but the truth is that I had a severe and deep revulsion for physical imperfection - especially amputations or deformities - which I have overcome to a large extent, but which I still have to fight against to this very day. I don’t even really like ‘normal’ bodies all that much, I prefer not to touch others unless I am attracted to them. I am the last to hug or shake hands in any given group of people. And I cannot look at any open wound where the underlying flesh or bone is visible; I cannot watch NCIS or Bones or ER or any of the TV shows which make a fetish of showing close-ups of decayed flesh or open wounds. I hate even seeing unattractive people - old or wrinkly or fat or saggy - on the beach. The movie Cocoon was not a happy experience for me. And I loathe having my shirt off in public.

Grady overcompensated for his physical shortcomings in a big way. One might say that he overcame them and point to him as a shining example, like Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder or Stephen Hawking. One might find it hard to believe but he was an accomplished musician - he played trumpet and guitar well, and he played the piano so well that he actually got a part time job playing lounge-style music thereon at a local Holiday Inn’s lounge. Anything that required finger work was a challenge which attracted him. I never really watched his hands play closely, but I can affirm that if I didn’t know of his problems I would not have guessed from what I heard that he was different from any other pianist in any way. I suspect that to a person more versed in piano music there were some interesting substitutions in harmonies, but it sounded good to me. I know that he played notes quickly in succession; since he could press only a limited number of keys at once, I’d guess he compensated by breaking chord harmonies into their component notes and played the individual keys in rapid succession, but that is just my guess. Grady was quite good looking in that curly-haired Eddie Fisher/Cornel Wilde way that was popular in the 50s. In fact Grady, now that I think of it, looked like a paler slimmer Eddie Fisher. He tended to keep his right hand pushed into his back pocket, but upon being introduced to someone would quickly offer it for a hand shake. When we were better friends, I asked him once if he preferred that I prepare people for this before I made an introduction. He told me no, he liked seeing the look on their faces, but I don’t think this was true. I think he was determined to be defiant about his situation in this as in all things. Unfortunately, the impulse that made him challenge himself to become proficient at music, also led him to try to be the wildest of the wild, and to strive to outdo all others in anything that was self-destructive. In this, he was often joined by me; I realize, looking back, how vastly self-destructive I was in my younger days. I think both Grady and I were saved from involvement in drugs only by the times we lived in. I am almost certain that both of us would have jumped in with a glad cry had we been born a mere ten years later.

I really don’t know who was the first to think of the cigarette game; it may have been Grady himself, or it may have been my friend Tony who spent that week in the DC jail with me, or it may have been another of the gang that usually wound up at the local bar when finances permitted. And, as I say, most of the guys tried it once, and briefly, but Grady and I once let a whole cigarette burn its entire length as it lay between our arms because neither of us would back down. I have quite a number of burn scars on my forearms, as well as one or two on my calves and I even had one once, which has disappeared over time, on my forehead. I actually never, until this morning, equated this to the current teen fad of cutting, and even less so to the more dramatic forms of self-mutilation. For one thing, I never did any of this burning when I was alone - there was always some element of public spectacle; the actual appearance of mutilation was beside the point, except in that the effect was not reversible. But I realize that my curled lip when I read of these things occurring was a lip that would do well to uncurl itself and take a look within. So why, as any adult at the time would ask me, would anyone do something like this?

I wish I could say why I did this with any clarity or degree of certainty. There were a whole raft of feelings involved. Am I sorry now? Absolutely. I do not like being marked with scars. I did not really like the blisters and scars back then, especially when my peers looked at me like I was weird. The rewards, whatever they were, were in the moments of doing the burning. I was slightly shamefaced and defiant in the aftermath. It was an easy way of appearing brave to myself, and in my mind, to others. There was an element of control in a sense, I think. I know I thought of those of my peers who were critical of this practice as being more ‘grown up’ than me, although I might have denied this at the time and certainly framed their greater maturity in unflattering ways. I thought, in the moment, that I was somehow cool although I didn’t feel afterward that I was so cool. Among the loosely defined and inchoate group that also participated, I was one of the insiders because I always ‘won’ the challenge. The fact that we usually did the burning in a bar and were usually drinking had nothing to do with the activity; we were not drunk when we did it, or if we were, that was not really relevant to the ‘why’ issue. At most it removed that tiny hesitation at doing what we wanted to do anyway. "In vino veritas" is something I do believe. You may do something you would not do otherwise or may not think of otherwise, but you never do something that you do not want to to do on some level, in some way.

I think I always felt that there was an invisible barrier, thin but impermeable like cellophane, between me and other people, between me and what mattered, between me and what was ‘real’. I always felt like a wannabe, even though I didn’t know what it was that I wanted to be. Part of me wanted to be admired and noticed by others, but I never wanted to be like others. I never felt that anything that I read or heard really applied to me. This was not because I felt I was better, although sometimes that was the case, but because I never felt that anything fully covered all the facts as I knew them or felt them to be true. When I was burning myself in one of these contests, for that one moment that was the only thing that was happening, it was the full focus - it was completely and describably real. There was the fact of burning myself and nothing else had any relevance in that moment. It was a moment of complete clarity. It was something that could not be undone or explained away later. When someone says or thinks, "I'll show them!" it is really, "I'll show me!" or "Then I'll know."

I can figure a lot of things out; I have always been good at seeing patterns, but there is always a grey area that I can’t entirely erase. I do not have the gift of being absolutely certain about anything. This has kept me from ever finding a cause or career or religion or purpose or hobby or even life partner to which I can fully commit myself. Even if I find something to be completely true, I have a horror of someone responding, "But wait a minute. What about such-and-such?" When I was young this feeling was more pronounced; now it is a dull reality that forms the background of everything I think or do or feel. There seems to be a dictionary full of words that never quite mean the thing that I am seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking. I believe I know exactly what most words mean, and they never seem to cover the topic under discussion. Adolescents, by definition are in a state of becoming adults; that is the actual etymological meaning of the word. But in the eyes of the world at large, that word describes people of a certain age range. When applied to someone older than that age range, it is an insult. But I wonder: has anyone arrived? Is anyone sure of who he is exactly? It seems that most people have found something that describes them satisfactorily - it might be a racial description, or a gender description or a political label or a religious conviction or a career choice, or something else, but it is a final destination; they have become something and are happy (or unhappy) to have arrived. I certainly don’t think I am youthful, but I do still feel adolescent. I feel like I am still in the darkness of my cocoon waiting to see what kind of butterfly I’ll be. I am indehiscent, and it looks like I’ll stay that way. I am the fruit that never ripens, an apple still green on the leafless bough already covered by snow.

But I don’t cut myself or burn myself or throw acid in my own face now. So what is the difference? I don’t know. The only thing I know is that now that I have seen the acid thing in this context I get it. That the woman in the news accused a black of doing the throwing is harmful and unforgivable, but I kind of get the acid itself. There is the momentary throwing of the future to the winds. There is a certain glee in inflicting the scar, a glee that will not outlast the act itself. It is like getting drunk on Sunday night; you know you will be sorry tomorrow, but... I wonder if anyone has considered that tattoos and piercing are part of the same scenario. Those moments of sheer relief (which may include such things as accepting Jesus or Islam or coming out of the closet or whatever) which are crystalline in their clarity at the moment and which can never entirely be undone. It is like assuming your position onstage and seeing the curtains open, the moment that you do this thing which will mark you forever; the flood of feeling that you have finally done SOMETHING in all this vague unclear messy stew of facts that aren’t always true and words that don’t quite mean what you want to say - this is a split second of rest in the hurtle toward the end of a game that it looks like you will neither win nor receive honorable mention. And then your whole life will be some kind of defense of why you were such an ass, but at least it won’t be the same as it was before. You are forcing the issue, and hope that by doing so you will finally know what the issue is.

There are so few things that one can do and then say to oneself, “There! That’s done!” and know that what is being done is exactly that thing and nothing else. It is like a mini-suicide. Whatever was wrong, whatever was pushing at you, that may not have been gotten rid of but it has unalterably changed. The focus has been shifted, at least for a while, to something else. It never works, really; or at least not for very long. But that is tomorrow’s worry. For the moment, this is it.

Read, Jump, Eat, Read

2010-09-02T10:30:00.004-04:00

The Shaughnessys had a family reunion this July, and my sister Lucy stayed with me for two weeks. I think that during the last two years she and I may be coming to something of a rapprochement in our relationship. Certainly, the fact that my brother Jack and his chere amie of ten years standing, the Lovely Medea, also stayed with me for a few days helped put Lucy in perspective for me. On the scale of how awful a woman can be, the Lovely Medea scores so high that Lucy’s more annoying qualities shrivel into insignificance in the pitiless sun of Medea’s imperfection – in fact, Lucy and I may have bonded somewhat in our extreme distaste for her. The Lovely Medea, though a grandmother, is a trophy type of woman: platinum blonde and flawlessly made up and dressed at all times. This could be seen as admirable, I suppose, but the personality that goes with it is not. The woman emerges talking in late morning from her labors in front of the bathroom mirror until her final putting to bed at whatever hour. And her talk is divided into three categories: her friends, family and experiences, none of which have reached even the lowermost level of interesting; the many and divers men who have attempted to seduce her (all of them, all the time); and honeyed blades of poison inserted into the backs of any of my kin who is not present. The Lovely Medea is a rich topic for a lengthy entry, but she is not my topic for today.

My sister Lucy brought with her a quilt she has been working on for a year, which depicts various scenes from our days on the Farm. In one scene, she has my mother pinning up laundry on the pair of clotheslines that spanned most of our back yard. Sitting with his back against one of the anchoring posts that held the clotheslines is the figure of a boy reading from a book. Lucy says that is me; she says that Mom told her I used to sit and read to her as she worked. I don’t recall doing this, but certainly it seems like something I might do. If one wanted to picture me when I was happiest as a boy, one would have to show me reading a book.

I loved books. I read and re-read anything I could get my hands on. I can still picture our local library, which consisted of two rooms and an adjoining alcove on the first floor of the Town Hall, which was located a little more than a mile from the Farm. Entering the library to return books and to get more was one of the great pleasures of my youth; it was akin to the feeling I had when entering a theater. I would linger long over my selections; there were books that I considered and dipped into over and over again for years before I finally selected them. When I found an author or a genre that I loved, I would get a book from that source each time until the supply was exhausted. I read the dog books (Lassie, Come Home; Lad, A Dog), the horse books (Farley’s Black Stallion books, and the Island Stallion books), the Little House books of Wilder, the Moffat family chronicles by Eleanor Estes, the Lois Lenski books with their pen and ink sketches of children who always had a certain almond-eyed look – to this day I occasionally see someone on the street who looks to me like he or she stepped from the pages of Lenski’s books. I read boys’ series, girls’ series, and the tales of the talking animals in Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy, the Pig series. When I found The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, I was ecstatic. I followed the fortunes of this impoverished family through the several sequels, each centered on one of the children: Ben, Polly, Phronsie, Joel and one I distinctly remember being called Ned, but Google tells me he was Davie. Have I confused the Peppers with the Moffats or some other series family? The Peppers echoed the girls of Little Women or the plucky lads that filled the pages of Horatio Alger’s books in that they were poor people who managed to have the good (and plot-enhancing) fortune to attract the attention of a wealthy benefactor who was attracted by their virtue and unspoiled spirits.

As I moved into the more mature books – the Young Adult category, I believe it is now called - I only grew more entranced. Of course I read Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys (How I loved mysteries! What is more magic than a secret stairway, room, alcove or passage?) and Tom Swift and a host of series that are no longer remembered: the Mimi books, the Little Colonel series, the Go Ahead Boys, the Rover Boys, the Girls of Central High and so on. In fact, when I was introduced to Harry Potter by the daughters of a friend, two girls as book-crazy as I was, I realized that underneath the wizardry and magic Rowling’s books were exceptionally skilled ‘boarding school’ series books, with all the familiar and much loved trappings – the sports contests, the ‘good’ hero and his ‘chums’ versus the rival ‘bad’ boy (bully, braggart, spoiled child, whatever) and his ‘toadies’, the unfair burden on, or accusation against, the hero – a noble, plucky lad or lass who bore the bad with grace and who rose above adversity. Our side wins again!

For me, the absolute acme of young adult books was a quartet of books written by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, which I read and re-read and then read again. These centered on a life choice in the lives of teen-aged heroes or heroines, all orphaned, in exotic settings – logging camps of the Northwest, the circus, the old frontier West or ancient Egypt. Though on a recent re-reading, I find the Newberry winner Moccasin Trail to be better, my personal favorite, a favorite which led to a lifelong interest first in archaeology and then in history, was Mara: Daughter of the Nile. I don’t know how many times I read Mara’s story, probably twenty or thirty times at least. My goldfish were named Mara and Sheftu after the leading characters. Oddly, my best friend Emily tells me that she was equally a Mara fan and that she met a lifelong friend when she noticed that each time she borrowed the book from her school library, a girl named Kirsten had borrowed it in the interim and sought that girl out at her school. Ms McGraw also wrote some of the sequels to Baum’s Wizard of Oz (something I only found out recently). The high point of the school day for me when I was in third grade was when Mrs Holfoth would read the next chapter of the Wizard, and when the original was finished, one of its sequels. Occasionally she would try to introduce a different book, but popular demand always returned us to Oz. I was spellbound by the Oz books. Oz time beat recess time all hollow for me.

I read everywhere. In summer, one of my parents would see me curled up with a book in the house on a lovely day, and tell me I should be outside enjoying the weather. I would move, book in hand, to the porch or to a spot under a tree and continue reading. My dad would get very irritated because I would not hear him speaking to me when I was lost in some book. I can still quote from memory the entire first page of the first hard-cover book I ever read, The Tale of Betsy Butterfly. Losing myself in a fictional world was like settling into a warm bath.

I have lately realized that I am still that guy. While I can’t seem to find books I love like I once did or continue reading uninterrupted for hours, I am still a guy that is indoors on lovely days, reading or writing or watching a film. I feel guilty about it, and it is a part of a larger issue for me, that I have only begun to see clearly. There are two ‘me’s – the one I wish I were (and sporadically believe I am), and the one I actually am. I constantly plan for things as if I were Doing David and wind up way off the mark because I am really Reading David. There is nothing like a long period of isolation, which this first full year of retirement has essentially proved to be, for getting a new perspective, or maybe a clearer one, on oneself. I find that I planned my retirement, insofar as I planned at all, for the wrong David, for the David I wish I were. I had the odd idea that I would be this man who gardened faithfully: mulching, weeding, fertilizing; who made repairs and enhancements to his home, learning new skills as he went along; who went about visiting old friends and making new ones in his new-found open-ended leisure time, and who opened his home to friends and relatives for long visits. I actually imagined I was self-directed, and throve without a schedule to limit me as work had done.

It would be OK, in fact it would be wonderful, if I could say, “Oh, but I am Reading David, as I have been all along”, and could pick up a book or magazine or watch a film with unalloyed pleasure, as I once read through my young summers. But it doesn’t feel right; it seems like wasting time. I can’t seem to forgive myself for not being that elusive Doing David that occasionally put down the book and learned to surf and to box, or who went off to Saudi (though I spent a lot of time there seeking out English language books, it must be admitted) or who hitch hiked west to see what was there. I feel I should be doing something more active and useful, particularly during these truly beautiful summer days we’ve been having. Any time I actually do anything in the gardening or home fixing vein, it seems to be desultory and in passing. I am very much afraid that I have a commitment problem that makes Casanova seem like a solid family man. If life were a multiple choice test, my answer would be “E. None of the above.”

Even Reading David is not what he used to be. George Will wrote a column for Newsweek very recently which crystallized a lot of thoughts I have had about my attention span. He brought up something, however, that I had not thought about (or known) but the results of which I have experienced. He mentions that brains can actually be rewired (even at my advanced age) by constantly repeated experience. What I HAD noticed is that I have drifted into a lot more magazine reading and a lot less book reading. I feel more comfortable with the shorter attention span required. I read Newsweek every week, and I subscribe to Atlantic and read it cover to cover. Recently I re-subscribed to the New Yorker, a subscription I had allowed to lapse, because it has a lot of reading in each issue and is a weekly. I was pretty much backlogged, and with each week I was falling further behind, which created some kind of guilty feelings. But I find myself casting about for something to read often, without feeling like I want to plunge back into any one of the several novels I am halfway through. So I am back with the New Yorker– I guess anything that I’ll actually read, even sometimes, is better than computer games.

I just cannot read for long hours like I used to do. Occasionally I will come upon a book that is an exception, but for the most part I find I constantly interrupt my reading to get coffee, to go to the kitchen on vague errands, to check e-mail – anything to avoid long stretches of uninterrupted reading. I don’t know why this is, but I truly believe that it is related to the theory put forth to explain the growth of attention deficit disorder in children – the nature of current television programming. It is not the watching of television or movies in itself that is the problem, it is the way that more and more the fare is sliced into tiny bites of interwoven plot narratives. Back when we were watching Beaver or Lucy or Gunsmoke or Mary Tyler Moore (although the last named showed the beginnings of the trend), a TV show had a single plot line that played out over the course of the show. Incidentally, there were fewer interruptions for ads, and even these tended to be for a single product per interruption; shows were ‘sponsored by’ a single advertiser. Now, however, every show has a series of plotlines playing out, and the ad breaks are for multiple sponsors. In Modern Family, for instance, (or Parenthood or The Good Wife) there is an ensemble of actors who, in various combinations, play out three or four plotlines in brief interlaced scenes. You are here, you are there, you are somewhere else, and you are watching three seven minute stories at once. Crime shows have moved from the single star detective to teams on different parts of an investigation, or even whole squads pursuing different issues. Add the nearly constant commercial breaks, which many of us use to try and do tasks in the 90 second interval thereby provided and you are doing some serious brain wiring: move, move, move. I am becoming incapable of sustained attention to anything. I notice that even one of my favorite crime novelists – Robert B. Parker – keeps my attention by writing novels of 50 or more very short chapters – many only a page and a half in length. Compare that with something by Mark Twain.

I don’t like this development in myself, and I don’t like it in others. I resent people putting me on hold during personal calls while they take a second call. I resent people constantly checking a mobile device when we are together. I realize this is the world today and it will not change for me. I am trying to decrease the feelings of insult and anger that arise over something that is not personally or exclusively aimed at me. But most of all I resent that I can’t keep my own attention on a good book any more – I resent my own addiction to constant stimuli. I suspect I can only change this for myself if I stop watching TV and other modern electronica, and I am pretty sure that isn’t going to happen. So I guess I am watching the evolution of a third me – Jittery David.

I wish I liked him more.

In The Zone

2010-08-17T10:53:00.001-04:00

Three things seem to be absolutely written in stone: first, politicians will invariably bypass addressing any important or pressing issue by driveling on about anything under the sun so long as it is irrelevant to solving a real problem; second, religious people will always behave in provocative ways, and third, everyone will always say in any situation that this time is different from any previous occurrence of the same issue. So, illustrating all of these principles beautifully we now have an excess of bloviation concerning the expansion and renovation of a Muslim community center in Manhattan which has already been in existence at the exact same location for some time.

Zoning laws are the province of local governments, and the mayor of New York has clarified what the law is, as well what as the local government’s position is, in regard to this project. If the people of Manhattan do not care for the existing zoning laws, they can attempt to change them. It is really no one else’s business. But no, we seem to have to hear daily, at excruciating length, from politicians everywhere, from the prez on down to candidates for office in Florida (and that is pretty far down). Has the recession ended? Is the national deficit paid up? Are the wars resolved? Have we come to an agreement on immigration and the policing of our borders? Has the oil gone from the Gulf? Is New Orleans (or any other city) thriving? Has the nuclear policy of Iran been brought to a beneficial conclusion? None of these issues have, so far as I know, been solved; in most cases they have not even been discussed rationally with any aim other than to play Gotcha! with the opposition. So why are we wasting our time on zoning issues in one small neighborhood when the law is clear, the Constitutional issues are completely resolved and the government of the area in question has made a clear decision which is completely in accordance with both?

As to the desire of all religions all the time to be provocative – well that is common sense. When you hold the hearts and minds of your followers, their wallets and votes will follow. And nothing grabs the hearts and minds of followers like the illusion (or reality) of persecution. In Europe, in those countries whose Christians of any stripe have been free to worship (or not) as they please for the last hundred years or so, church attendance and religious affiliation is a ho-hum affair. I have read, for instance, that 3% of Church of England adherents actually attend church in Britain. But next door, in Ireland, religiosity is far greater (although in the independent portion thereof it is fast declining). And why is the religious feeling greater? Because as recently as when the grandfathers of the current population were alive, the practice of Catholicism was banned; Catholics could not have priests or churches, could not be taught reading or writing, could not own land. So naturally, Catholicism was strengthened and flourished in Ireland like the green bay tree. Similarly, religion is practiced even more virulently in the former Communist countries because the ban on it was lifted far more recently. I recall an American Catholic in the early days on my job in Riyadh coming up to me and, practically speaking out of the side of his mouth like a spy in a movie, telling me where I could attend a clandestine Mass locally; he assumed I was Catholic because of my surname. On some level, being persecuted is fun and exciting; if it goes beyond the level of fun and actually gets a lot of folks killed, well, so much the better in the long view, because this can be used as leverage, both for keeping the indignation (and faith) of the believers at fever pitch, and for getting special concessions from later, more tolerant regimes. Religions prize tolerance, so long as it is the other guy who must do the tolerating.

On a personal level, provocation is traditionally achieved by wearing funny clothes or hairdos (shave this, grow that) – very much as any teenager pursues the same end. If I were founding a religion, the very first thing I would do is try to come up with a hat that was sillier than a bishop’s mitre or the various turbans or veils of Asia or the ridiculous practice of some Jewish women of shaving their heads and then wearing wigs to achieve the appearance of having the hair that was just shaved off. Apparently a woman is less sexually provocative in a wig than in her natural glory – a piece of information that has evidently escaped Dolly Parton and her fans. Jews, in fact, having had a lot of practice both of being disliked and of making the little gestures that keep the intolerance going, have come up with the silliest headgear of all – the yarmulke, which is so insubstantial that it often doesn’t even stay on without being held in place by bobby pins or barrettes of some sort, and is too small to cover the bald spot, and it certainly doesn’t protect from sunburn. But one should never underestimate a religion so skilled at provocation: how many religions have parlayed their underdog status into the acquiescence of most of the world in seizing a whole country of its own? It was the anti-Semites in Britain – Balfour of the “Balfour Declaration” being notable for his dislike of Jews, for instance – who most strongly supported the creation of Israel; probably these men could be compared with the white supporters in the USA for the “Back to Africa” movement.

To digress a little bit: The greatest threat to the fervor of the religious is when power is combined with wealth among the majority of its adherents within a political entity. As with political parties, wealth and power combine to blind the faithful to consequences - or even to shame. The history of the medieval papacy is too well-known to discuss – the rise of the Protestants actually moved the popes to become better morally (eventually and after holding out as long aws they could) and instilled in the faithful of both sides principles of moral and ethical behavior (toward co-religionists only, of course) that lasted so long as religious leaders could credibly point to each other as existential threats. As soon as their existence and ascendancy was assured, the leaders returned to screwing the faithful in both the metaphorical and literal senses.

The greatest threat to religious leaders and to religious fervor is the growth in wealth and security of the average members of the faith. Although individual members of a faith may continue in devotion here and there, when a general rise in wealth and security among the devotees occurs, the falling off of religious fervor soon follows for the majority. Thus it is important to always keep the faithful feeling that they are somehow the persecuted group, the hated one, even when they actually are in control of all aspects of political life. This works with ethnicity as well as with religion. The old southern oligarchy in the USA maintained their wealth and status by constantly convincing the poor of both the black and white race that the other race was the cause of all their woes; the same folks continue to hold power by pointing out all sorts of threats to their way of life. When the “enemy” is demonstrably less powerful and numerous than the majority, then recourse is made to tales of wicked practices and secret plans or powers, as was demonstrated in Germany in the 1930s, or in the recurring warnings about Satanists or witches throughout American history. If the threats don’t exist, one can easily make them up, pointing to powerless old ladies with too many cats or mildly deranged misfits scattered here and there, as examples of The Enemy pursuing its evil ends.

In actuality, the use of repression towards a portion of a population can actually create a danger where none had previously existed. An excellent example of how dangerous a wealthy and secure follower can actually be when he is excluded from power in his own society is Osama bin Laden, who is of Yemeni descent in Saudi Arabia where this ethnic defect does not promote entry into royal power and prestige. Bin Laden’s target, at the time I lived in Saudi, was the Saudi royal family. He was utterly indifferent to the wiles of the Great Satan, until Desert Storm gave him an issue that he found resonated with the disaffected. Tammany Hall, the Mafia, the Bloods and Crips all arose when clever and resourceful people were excluded from full participation and the reaping of legitimate rewards in their own societies. There is a whole generation of powerless Saudis, many members of whom are actually rendered even more powerless by their own actions (failure to bother learning in school and so on), boiling with resentment against anyone who has it better than themselves, and much like the poor whites of the USA before and during the Civil Rights area blamed the Yanks and the Coloreds and the Jews – anyone except themselves for their own fecklessness - these lower class Saudis are blaming the Royals and the Westerners – and of course, the Jews. You have to admire the Jews, they seem to have found a way to always be perceived as part of the oppression; perhaps they ARE chosen.

As to my third point, I confess that I fall into the error of thinking this time is different on occasion, try as I will to maintain some sense of history. Of course each time IS different, but never in the way that is presented by demagogues. Since I was young, I have lived through a number of crises where a substantial number of people believed that certain principles should be abrogated because this time, this threat, this group of enemies is different. People will pronounce in great detail that continuing to extend the same rights or to follow the same principles that got us to where we are today will lead to our demise or will change everything. And, of course, at some level, the inclusion of a new group that is different does change things. The discrimination in the 1800s against the Irish because they were Catholic or poor or uncouth correctly saw that inclusion of Catholics in great numbers in a previously Protestant Anglo-Saxon culture would have consequences. Things DID change; prevailing customs were altered, at least subtly. But inclusion altered the Irish newcomers even more than it did their hosts. The descendents of these newcomers often lost or moderated their faith, they certainly changed many of their customs and ways of speaking. The same was true of the Italians and the Slavs who followed; and who, despite sharing the same faith, was right in the forefront of discriminating against them, arm in arm with their Anglo-Saxon brethren? The Irish, of course. The Italians and Slavs were happy, in turn, to prove their all-American credentials by holding the line against the inclusion of blacks or Jews, and so on. As I say, I have fallen for the ‘this time is different‘ line. When I was quite young, the red scare was in full force, and I (understandably I think, since I was in my teens) was persuaded that the Fifth Amendment was being used as a weapon aimed at my home and family as witness after witness invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions while testifying before the various committees on Un-American activities. I would have been, at the time, happy to have the amendment revoked to stop protecting these Commies who were threatening America and my very home out there on the farm. Later, during the civil rights struggle, I supported the integration of blacks, (although, shamefully, not at the very beginning), but I truly thought in my heart that it could not really succeed in the sense that one day a black would appear as just another man or woman to me some time in the future. They looked so DIFFERENT; how could I (or anyone) not notice? Yet, again, I was wrong – interracial couples are everywhere, I have had black doctors and co-workers, I have black cousins, I was half of an interracial couple myself for many years and it all seems so normal.

Now we are asked to view with alarm the presence of Latinos in great numbers, and worse, that of Muslims. This time it is different! The problem is, of course, that these people are HERE. Had we excluded them at the outset, there’d be no issue, or at least, the issue would be very different. But now that they are here in great numbers, what are our alternatives? We can discriminate, and ban them from neighborhoods or jobs or whatever. When we tried that with blacks, we got the Panthers; once the discrimination was alleviated (even though not entirely), the power and attractiveness and bellicosity of the Panthers waned. This is the way it works. It never, ever works differently. The first generation or two of a new group might acquiesce, at least tacitly, in their own mistreatment, but sooner or later their descendents will be radicalized. So, whether this time is different or not, in the sense that a particular group of people present a greater threat to the status quo, we really have no options except three: extend the existing laws and rights to the new groups, discriminate and thereby radicalize the new groups, or get rid of the new groups entirely by mass deportation or extermination.

We will, of course, take the second of these courses, as we have always done – at least at first. It is the one that is easiest, just as it is easier for politicians to talk about zoning laws in Manhattan than about substantive change in important fields of policy. Tolerance and having faith in our system is just too hard for people, especially when it is different this time, as it is every time. Sooner or later, the radicalization of the new minorities will increase to the point where some accommodation must be made, or their numbers will grow in concentrated areas to the point where they begin electing their own politicians to office and one or both of the major parties will discover that it is in its interest to begin catering to them. And very likely they will go from seeking acceptance to getting special consideration because of past suffering.

It is absolutely true that the minority group in every case practices its own discrimination: very frequently Irish were pressured to marry Irish, or at least fellow Catholics; there are black racists a-plenty, Muslims will give preference when possible to fellow Muslims, and similar things can be said of every religious group or ethnic group. The important issue is whether the law is being changed or followed, and whether the discriminating group is in power. Bad behavior should not be enshrined in the law.

Much is being made of the feelings of the families who lost members on 9/11 – that is to say, the majority of these families; no one advocates catering to the grief of the Muslim families who lost fathers or mothers or sons or daughters. What exactly is the statute of limitations on their particular grief? And what are the geographical limits to the grief area? I have heard many people suggest that the center be moved elsewhere in Manhattan. How far is far enough? Five blocks? Ten blocks? Can the center be located near where the survivors live or where the dead actually lived? Are the areas around the Pentagon and the crash site in Pennsylvania similarly proscribed? My brother was killed by a drunk driver in front of my house when I was younger. Should I be able to prevent drivers or drinkers from entering that stretch of highway? Would it be legitimate to ban Christian churches from Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

People who have been touched by terrible tragedy seem to respond in two main ways. One response is to try to make the world better, the other is to hold the world, or some portion of it, accountable and to require retribution of some sort. This latter response is entirely understandable when the tragedy first occurs and emotion is overwhelming. But to continue to hold this view leads to vendetta and blood feuds, to attack and reprisal and counterattack; nothing gets better. I understand that the Christian is required to forgive; apparently this only applies if the person to be forgiven is also a Christian. I guess I think I would be reluctant to declare that in honor of my loved one, I made the world a little less tolerant, and I lowered my country's standards just a trifle.

But that’s just me.

A New Me - or Was He Here All Along?

2010-08-05T15:35:00.001-04:00

Jim, a high school friend and fellow altar boy, recently wrote me when a predatory faux social website which I mistakenly joined sent him an invitation to replicate my folly. He was wise enough to decline the opportunity. We have maintained desultory contact since high school, moreso in the last 20 years than earlier.

I don’t remember when we met. It was at some point in grade school as our unified school district began collecting the pupils of small public schools in the area into larger groupings, culminating in my fourth grade year in the building of a single one-story sprawl designed to house all the kids from two townships in a single building, providing education for grades K through 12. Actually, there was no kindergarten before this big school was built, so I never had the doubtful pleasure of attending one, but was thrown willy-nilly into the shark pool of first grade untempered by any earlier exposure to other kids who were neither relatives nor neighbors.

I had ‘best friends’ in the earlier grades, but by the time I reached Junior High School, I really had no one that I would call a best friend – at least not in school itself. I did have a younger neighbor boy to whom I was passionately attached for about a year, after which he chose to spend most of his time with my brother Gary and his best friend Alex Westfall. But at best, in high school years, I had only what might be termed better friends and less close friends. There was no one with whom I hung out outside school other than my brothers and a neighbor or two. There was a loosely-knit group in my class that attended a few parties together – usually at the new suburban home of the Riggs family, which had an oldest son my age and his four younger siblings. We were hardly a collection of the popular kids, which would be the cheerleaders and other girls considered pretty, and the better sports guys: we were rather a collection of somewhat socially oriented ‘brains’, not quite the super-nerds, but close.

Jim was not of this group; he was more like one of the outer fringe guys of the popular group. He did not play sports – I found out recently that this was largely because he had a ‘lazy eye’. I had thought these were what is known as a ‘cast in the eye’ – that is, one eye wandered aimlessly while the other focused – a very visible problem that looks like, and sometimes is, crossed eyes. But Jim’s problem is not visible; apparently just one eye does all the work and the other just sits there matching the first in alignment, but not really doing much in the way of vision duty. He is, for all practical purposes, blind in one eye, which eliminated him from playing most sports. He was a little more refined than me, from a family that was better off financially, and he was less prone to follow extreme fads or to behave without forethought (or any thought at all) than me. So, if a girl on the outer fringe of the popular group had a choice between dating Jim or me, she’d choose Jim. All of this is kind of laughable in retrospect, because although I hadn’t a clue about this in Jim’s case, we were both gay.

I really got to know Jim more because we were both chosen to be altar boys at St. John the Ashamed, and both elected to be regular servers at the Sunday 8 o’clock mass. True, one could loll in bed and serve at 10, but the 8 o’clock mass was a low mass and therefore significantly shorter than the 10 o’clock high mass; besides, it got mass out of the way and left more of the day for the thin pleasures of our youthful Sundays. Jim and I were both in the “A” group at school. These were the college-bound kids who would take the New York State Regents exams in certain subjects at the end of certain school years – we were classed among the “Brains”. The “B” group kids were sort of the college-optional kids – they had the option of taking the Regents exams or not and were encouraged to apply for college, but no one was terribly surprised if they did not. This group held the bulk of the sports crowd, although some of the A group were on some of the teams. The “C” Group were non-Regents students. They took the core curriculum classes, but then had a lot of shop, agriculture and vocational classes for the boys, and typing, shorthand and home economics classes for the girls. In order to take typing classes, an A group kid had to stay after school and take it as an after-school elective. This turned out to be a bad strategy for training the brainy kids who were going to be launched into a world where computers would become important and keyboard skills would be highly helpful. Who knew?

There was also a “D” group, which consisted of those, nearly all boys, who would drop out of school as soon as it was legal. They were more or less encouraged to drop out, in that harsh triage of the 1950s where leaving a child behind was considered to be a damn good idea. They were dumb, or otherwise ineducable, and no one could see spending up resources on them, even in that era where nothing was too good for the educable children in the suburbs.

In the 50s, even before Sputnik shocked the country, people had no thought – at least in our area – of the arts as a career. I had a teacher, a wonderful woman who taught me English and Latin, who encouraged me to write, and I actually had a vague idea that writing could be a lifework, but I had not a clue how one went about making it so. Mrs. C would probably have been of great help in helping me through this, but I was way too immature back then to ask (or want to ask). A large number of the A and B group kids who finished college went on to teach, and Jim was one of these. He spent his teaching career in Chicago, but not, I gather from the little we have discussed it, in the inner city. He told me when he retired, as a lot of my other teacher classmates have also said, that toward the end each year got worse and worse. The constraints placed upon teachers to restrict innovation and individual style grew, and the mighty threat of lawsuits and politically-motivated activist parents and school boards intent on correct thinking in preference to open-ended inquiry reduced teacher flexibility to near zero.

Jim, I think, liked me better than I knew. He once said, much later in our friendship, that every so often he got a student that reminded him of me, and that these were the real reward of teaching. This was not meant in a personal or sleazy way. I think he referred (although I never look too closely at a compliment) to my somewhat untamed ways in school, and my slightly disruptive approach to classes. I know Jim thought I was a terrific writer. But I was a real disciplinary problem to teachers who expected – and got – the perfect patterns of behavior that made up the 1950s A groups. The boys in my class, to a man, had crewcuts or a short haircut brushed to the left from a part on the right (girls parted on the left; this was a STRICT rule), but I had the ‘50s greaser look, the elaborate front curl coiling its oily way (thanks to Vaseline!) to a point between my eyes, with the upswept shining sides. I couldn’t afford a black leather jacket, but I got a black jacket that came as close as possible. Today, I would probably be a Goth; in those days I perplexed my teachers by easily getting A’s – at least in English and History and courses I liked – like the other A group boys, but dressing and acting like D group boys did.

At our tenth class reunion, I saw Jim again and it was then that I became aware that he was gay as was I. He made some effort to broach the subject, but I was still deeply ashamed and embarrassed by the topic, although I had met Tumwell the previous year and lived with him, so I pretended not to understand what he was getting at. In fact, although we have each known about the other since that time, it is only within the last year that I finally wrote him a letter and referred to the elephant in the room openly.

What I am getting to is the fact that I got an e-mail from Jim the other day, saying that he thinks we are both happy people, and that is why he thinks we have stayed friends and had reasonably good lives. I hadn’t ever thought of myself as a happy person, but as a whole I think he is right. I am an optimist. I assume things will work out or change for the better, despite gloomy times (which usually happen to be when I blog the most) like the time I last wrote in my blog. Jim says he thinks that is why we make friends, and I guess he is right. I know people really do enjoy being around people who are more up than down. I certainly do. I just never thought of myself as being one of the up ones. However, my gloomy times are usually when I am alone. As soon as there is someone in my orbit to talk to, I can become quite the Pollyanna.

This is the latest in a series of – I guess you might call them insights – that I have been having lately which are leading me to realize that I am a completely different person than who I always thought myself to be. I have gone along since I was a kid with a certain image of myself, and with certain beliefs about the world around me, that I am suddenly realizing are not at all correct. About ten years ago or so, I began having these sudden new looks at life. I had always assumed until then, that if a person took the time to love me, and to become my partner or the like, that he was getting someone pretty darn good. I thought of myself as easy to be with. I am not sure what was the cause (maybe because Tumwell made it seem so easy), but it suddenly struck me that, no, I was a very high maintenance partner. I don’t mean I require gifts or a high-flying lifestyle, but that I am moody and changeable and have a big requirement for alone time when I want it and not when it is mutually convenient. I can hide or moderate some of this, but the more comfortable and secure I am with someone, the more I let those parts of me show that I know I wouldn’t like too well if our positions were reversed. I think that realization was the first time I was actually a little rocked by a new view of myself.

Lately the revisions in my view of myself and my world have come thick and fast. I realize I don’t really like a lot of the people that I am in the habit of thinking that I love. I am finding family functions more stressful than happy. I always thought I was exempt from that angst that so many people express about family behavior. I truly wanted to own a big place back in my home town and to have it be the gathering place for family when they are in town, or when a big event occurs. Now I have all that, and I am finding that I don’t really like these people all that much. Things I imagined to be peripheral behaviors and characteristics in some family are actually core parts of their personality. Even when I like family members, I am not that interested in their life choices. But this applies equally to me. I think a big part of denial in addicts or racists or whatever, is the belief that ‘well, yeah I do this or that, but that isn’t the real me.” Well, yes, that IS the real you (or me). We are defined by our behavior, not by the motives that lead to it. I have come to believe that we are that which other people see, not who we imagine (or ‘know’) in our mind’s eye. That damn Catholic upbringing that has made me look to my deepest, secret and most unsavory motives in any act has previously permeated all my self-examination. There is always an element of self-interest in even the most generous act. So what? It doesn’t define, mitigate or deny the generosity or the benefits of that act, and contrariwise, it does not sweeten our bad behavior. Consider if a serial killer said he only kills on Tuesday but six days a week his behavior is exemplary.

Anyway, this is where my thoughts are trending. Life-wise, the major events in la vie Shaughnessy have been that I joined a gym in March and have been faithfully (somehow) visiting it three times a week, with a single 3-week layoff, since then. I have more energy and feel better, not least because of the annoying sense of virtue that now attends me during every waking moment. And then a few weeks ago, out of a clear blue sky, I was contacted on a social website which I no longer even bothered to visit (an e-mail told me I had a message) by a man who found me interesting. This man turned out to be so far out of my league in physical beauty, not to mention being 27 years my junior, that I looked – so far, in vain – for a base motive, or at least a flaw. I actually have a friend with benefits! And he has a good job and a new car, and has shown no interest whatever in what I can do for him in any way other than the mutual physical relationship. He is a completely nice man. I know this is not “The One” because he has no interest in what the ads call an LTR and is quite honest about that, but it is damned pleasant to be found attractive and to have a partner, however uncommitted. I am getting quite above myself in my own esteem.

So forget all that angst that riddled my last entry. Whereas I know I am not where I want to be exactly, I am in pretty good shape. And it seems like there IS a tomorrow after all. What’s better than that?

Frustration

2010-06-22T10:06:00.000-04:00

My Aunt Belle once came to visit us at the farm bearing some rather expensive gifts. These consisted of two or three intricate, expensive, finely-wrought wind-up toys that I vaguely recollect were considered by the adults present to be special in some way – I think it might have been that they were imported from Europe, or were made by some renowned manufacturer. I remember one more clearly than the others; it was a model of a Ferris wheel which, when wound, rotated with its brightly painted little cars going up around and down, as Ferris wheels are meant to do. There was also, I think a carousel and possibly a third toy, which I can no longer recall or even be sure existed. Aunt Belle and my parents marveled at these fairly spectacular objects – I actually have a greater recollection of the adults’ sense of their specialness than I do of the toys themselves.

We kids were, of course, excited to receive these as we were excited to receive any toys. New toys were few and far between in the late forties and early fifties, and having these show up on a day other than Christmas or birthdays was a rare event, indeed. Even children far wealthier than we were, with parents far more indulgent than our own, did not seem to live amongst the constantly growing welter of playthings that create an almost pornographic excess in even the poorest homes I visit today. Pink, plastic and pornographic; it sounds like a magazine article, n’est-ce pas? But the problem was, once the adults had retired to talk of adult things, we were left with these expensive, seductive, colorful items with which there was nothing we could really do. One wound them up and then one just sat there watching. There was very little difference, really, between owning these toys and gazing at them in a shop window. Some instinct for survival warned us that our usual recourse with toys which no longer fascinated, either disassembling them to see what the insides looked like, or bashing one another over the head with them, were not options conducive to our continued happy co-existence with Mom.

So for a period of my youth these toys sat there giving rise in my young breast to feelings of impotence, frustration and a kind of anger. Did other, better children wind these things up by the hour and sit happily watching the wheels turn? Were other children inspired in some way by this expensive indulgence? Is it possible that other children – maybe city children or European children – actually wore these kinds of things out from constant happy playing with them? What was wrong with us (or with me at least), that we just had no idea what to do after about three wind-ups per toy?

I have no idea of what became of these toys; there will be no trip to the Antique Roadshow with happy ending for me. My clearest recollection of these toys is of the feelings of letdown they provoked; I can only vaguely visualize the Ferris wheel, and of the other(s), I cannot even recall how many there were.

I am very much afraid that Retirement is currently provoking feelings remarkably akin to those engendered by these toys. All the conditions are amazing; just now the weather is lovely, every seed I even thought about planting has sprung up, the expensive fixes I put in place just before I retired are all doing just fine – my fancy beveled glass front door, my just-in-time water heater, my flat screen TV, the new refrigerator. But I sit here amidst the luxury and I wonder, day after day, what can I do with all this? Don’t get me wrong, I would not for anything return to working. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but there just seems to be so much of it. It almost seems too precious to waste on anything I can come up with, especially on the sunnier days. I might put in a desultory hour weeding a flowerbed, but I can’t bring myself to commit to actually getting any one of the many plots into tiptop, weedless, well-mulched and fertilized perfection. I read a bit of this and a bit of that, but there are so many unread books I can’t seem to settle on one. I went for a brief canoe trip up the creek out back yesterday, and the difficulty I had untying the canoe from the tree to which it was anchored forcibly reminded me that I had not used this canoe for at least a couple of years. The rope had grown into the tree to which it was tied, (or I guess it was actually the other way around). And the canoe trip just filled an hour; even though the scenery along the creek was spectacular, like the toy Ferris wheel there was nothing I could do with it.

I have always been like this; I can travel to the most spectacular wonders, I can finally come to a castle I have read about for years, and then, well, there it is. What now? I have spent hours designing wonderful verdant bowers to which I can retreat for reading – and I have even spent some hours bring a few of these plans into a semblance of reality, but I never actually read in them and rarely even sit in them for more than a passing moment. There are mosquitoes or the stems scratch my leg, or I can’t lie down or the coffee pot is too far away and I have to keep getting up to get things, or the sun is too bright or the breeze keeps turning my pages or I just get bored, or I am not in the mood just now – mostly, the last. I get to thinking that I should replace or add some plant that I don’t have, or that I should build something that I’ll never build although there is a fifty-fifty chance I will spend a bunch of money I can’t afford to buy some or all of the necessary materials.

I am very good at purchasing for contingencies. I have not one, but two, Chinese brush painting sets. I have acrylic paints and water colors and sketch pads. I have a complete set of more than 30 wood-carving chisels which I bought in Bali, as well as some supplemental American blades, in case I should ever actually be inspired to carve or sculpt some wood. Oh – and I have the wood itself in great heaps. There is also a wall of firewood in case I ever want to build a fire, and an air compressor should I suddenly become a person who does whatever one does with those. I have a bike I rode once and a helmet I bought after the one ride in case I might want to ride again, although the latter is still wedged into the fitted cardboard construction that it came in. I have a calligraphy pen somewhere, probably more than one. I have a set of 100 bits for one of my two cordless drills, and several smaller supplementary sets of drillbits. For leisure, there is a hammock folded up in the garage. I am fighting an urge to spend $229 on yet another course in Arabic and I will probably lose the battle sooner or later.

I have planted a number of vegetables this year, but if history is any guide, it is very unlikely that I will cook, eat or even harvest most of them. If I do want to cook them, I have more than one set of pans, and even some canning jars, just in case I become a completely different person than I ever have been, and if, miraculously, this happens just at harvest time. What are the odds?

I am doing one positive active thing, and frankly, I am amazed at myself; I wonder how long it will continue. After I returned from Bali and found myself slogging through the Slough of Despond, during the first half of March I joined a local gym. I actually have gone three times a week (missing only once or twice) since then. I didn’t really anticipate meeting any convivial souls there – that was not my purpose – and it is well that I did not hope to do so because other than my trainer (you get a person assigned to you to start you out and to measure progress every 6 weeks or so), I haven’t met anyone. I tend to dread going to the gym as I once dreaded going to work, but it has provided a semblance of structure to my life and unquestionably has made me feel a little more energetic and I look a little better. At first it actually seemed to motivate me to come home and do stuff (hence the semi-weeded and fairly well planted gardens) – it probably provided the oomph to get back to the old blog. But lately the motivations have tailed off, and even when I do something, it has the feel of throwing a teaspoonful of dirt into a yawning bottomless hole. It filled that moment; it got that task completed or started, but nothing seems to be strung into an ongoing chain of engagement. I have looked up a number of old friends from long ago, but none of these have caught fire. I know I need desperately – especially before the onset of another winter – to engage myself in something that I care about. I have looked up a local writing group and am thinking about some form of workshop or class or the like. But my fear is that I will end up feeling like I have a series of assignments, that I will turn one of the few things that are pleasurable into work.

The trouble with me is that I have to connect with a person or with people to really enjoy anything. When travelling I will remember a friendly taxi driver long after I have forgotten what the castle or hotel or cathedral looked like. I need someone to impress, someone to please, someone to admire, someone to like. I have a horror of groupthink. I don’t feel like other people – or as I imagine other people do. If I go to Hawaii, I dread things like the arranged luau or the lei greeting. Schedules make me shudder – at 5 we meet for a preparatory drink, at 5:15 we board the bus for the Waikiki Tour. The world seems to be full of versions of those children who actually enjoyed those elaborate wind-up Ferris wheels. Whereas I don’t like people who strive to be different just to be different, I do like people who don’t mind being different. And I really don’t know where to find what I am looking for. I am not even sure what I am looking for exactly; well, yes I do: connection and passion. I want to find something that I stick with because I love it or love the people it brings in its wake, not things that make me feel scheduled or as if I have an assigned task or thinks that make me a spectator. I know that the kinds of things that I want are not all pleasure, there are always the hard parts, but I know from experience that there are things which the hard parts are leavened by the awareness of moving forward and of getting to the rewards.

My efforts to find love have bogged down and are, for the moment, abandoned. I am pretty sure that I am not one who can find a partner through writing or answering ads. People seem to like me well enough when we are engaged together on a job or activity, but I do not appeal to people in either the exchange of letters or in discussion groups. I am so impatient with common wisdom. I do not understand how highly irreverent comedy can be so popular (as in, for instance, the Seinfield show) while people are so put off by anything but the most bland platitudes in real life. Am I the only person who dwells in the area that lies between cute kittens and dead baby jokes?

I really could live, I think, without having the things I want; what is really hard to endure is not knowing what those things might be.

Oh, well, off to another damned day in Paradise.