write to say it

Is it May already--again?

2011-05-20T17:10:00.003-04:00

I thought I'd better post something now to let people know I'm still "among the quick"; it's been a year since my last post, and that's too long. I'm not sure why I stopped exactly, but I feel like starting up again now. So who knows? maybe I won't wait another year to post the next one.

Is it May already? or Shakespeare was right

2010-05-12T10:04:00.008-04:00

"Growing old ain't what it's cracked up to be," Barb's mom used to say, rest her soul. "But it is, that's the problem," Barb and I sometimes say today.

At this point we can appreciate what she meant, though--especially me. I've got ten years seniority on Barb. Our grown sons have their busy lives, families and careers to keep them getting up quickly when they get knocked down.. Our grandchildren probably have the most going for them and bounce back from elemenetary and middle school pressures and upheavals the fastest of our family generations. They also tend to "get over it" the fastest, forgive, forget, and move on with amazing resiliency.

But I am the oldest of us by about ten years, and retired, and my moxie isn't always so quick to come back. Barb is still a working elementary school media specialist and keeps up her fitness most of the time with diets, workouts, and the daily bustle of her job. but this year has put "new wrinkles on my brow", figuratively and maybe literally. I can't tell that my wife, my children, or my grandchildren seem any worse for wear, but any of them might feel otherwise; they're living in their "ages" as I am in mine. We've all dealt with our situations with what we had to work with.

Robert Herrick said of life, "the best age is the first, when youth and blood are warmer/not the last, when "worse and worst times still succeed the former." He had his own motives, of course, in "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" ("Gather ye rosebuds while ye may'", remember?) But Shakespeare said of life's stages we are left upon life's seventh stage, "...sans teeth, sans hair, sans eyes, sans everything...." I haven't reached that stage yet, thank Goodness, but I can certainly relate to those who have.

What Is A New Year?

2010-01-01T16:41:00.005-05:00

What's new about a new year? And why do we stay up till midnight to count down to it and celebrate its arrival so giddily? It's only time, artificially segmented, after all. It's not any part of nature, except as it's named and measured by man, the same way we name an eagle or a grasshopper, for there's nothing inherent in the thing we name, or period of time we name, which suggests very much about it by its naming.

A new year isn't about the world; it's about people. It's about how we see the world, and how we see each other, and how we see ourselves. It gives us a timeframe for our experiences and our memories, hopes and dreams. We can put them into the timeframe together, at any particular longitude or time zone we are on December 31 at the witching hour each year. The new year is the essence of the clean slate in our lives, the new chance to embrace living , working, striving, planning, coping and pursuing what goals we set for ourselves and call our new year's resolutions. A new year is a new period time we have agreed to name and perceive together and live together, as individuals, families, communities and cultures, nations and peoples, for better or worse, on our planet Earth.

In looking back upon the previous year as the new one approaches, we evaluate and codify it and in many instances make our peace with it, for often many things have happened we need to remember and deal with so we can move on afresh. Many other things. conversely, we will carry forward with us gladly and with a renewed sense of appreciation and adventure, gratefully.

New Year's Eve isn't only about Auld Lang Syne and memories of the past. It is above all about expectation and hope, the expiring of the former order of things and the birth of the new. It is the time above all other moments in our 365 days when we sense the future opportunities most keenly as we stand on a threshold and step forward into our destinies together.

Glorious Autumn

2009-09-30T15:04:00.004-04:00

It's the last day in September. We're into our packed fall schedule heading into October, November, December and the run-up to Christmas and New Year's. But this year feels different. I can't quite put my finger on why, but it seems somehow meloncholy.

Maybe it's the events of the past twelve months which tore our economy apart and left us all to try to stay above water till things returned to "normal." But this recession-depression-calamity hasn't seemed like others I remember. This time I could see the pain on faces, feel the panic of friends and neighbors, and finally be affected personally by Barbara's lessened support for her teaching work and more cutbacks at her school. I'm sure that's part of what I feel now as September Song comes to an end.

And also maybe it's the loss of both Mom and Dad within six weeks of each other a year ago beginning at Halloween. We flew to Indiana for each funeral, of course. On October 31 the fall foliage was ablaze and glorious. Dad loved the leaves and took many beautiful photos and videos of them for decades around our county and down at the Salamonie Reservoir and State Park. Glorious, glorious autumn. Crisp, pumpkin weather, a bright sunny chill in the air, the old brick Bingham farmhouse now converted into a flower shop. I thought at the time as so many old friends came to pay their respects, "Well, you did it, didn't you, Dad. You brought us back to our autumn and family and friends we hadn't seen for years. It was a shame it had to be like this, but it is somehow your hand in it all, and I'll bet you are smiling down this day. Dad treasured family and friends above everything.

Mom died at the start of January, and when we flew up for the funeral it was snowing everywhere, and very beautiful and very cold. Mark and Scott made snowmen and snow angels at the motel parking lot, and we got some snow disks at Walmart and slid down the big hill at Memorial Park, grown men turned ten again. We gave the snow disks to some real children when we left for the airport; there was nowhere left in Huntington for our possessions then, with the house long sold, we couldn't pack them for the flight home, and what would we do with snow disks in South Florida? The stark maples and elms and firs were black and twiggy against the glaring white blanket that covered all as we laid her to rest beside Dad's grave, barely settled and still fresh earth. And again the good friends and family made their way to pay their respects with us and renew our stories and our bonds. Mom and Dad had planned their final arrangements years earlier, and done so well it was inspiring.

Barb's brother, Stephen--my firstborn's namesake--, had been the folks' living will executor and taken care of just about everything for many years as they fell victim to Alzheimers and the infirmities of age and needed nursing home care. He lived with his wife just 22 miles away, and everything fell to him to care for them, sell the house, pay the bills and manage. He did a Herculean and wonderful job of it, and his city manager skills of balancing many things at once served him well. There was little we could do but try to be supportive of his decisions. We were 1,200 miles away in Florida and could only visit the home town Barb and I both grew up in once or twice a year.

This summer for the first time in many years we didn't go to Huntington. And now a year has passed since the sweet sadness of autumn and winter of the previous October and January.

We are headed for Mackenzie's ninth birthday party this weekend, and we'll be with Dr. Steve and his lovely wife Rhonda, Christopher, who just turned twelve in August, and the birthday girl. who just may be the most beautiful granddaughter in the world.

Then we're flying to New York this Halloween to see the Central Park's autumn at its peak, which is supposed to be the last two weeks of October and the first week in November. Scott is looking forward to some fall foliage photography with his new high resolution camera. (Sound familiar?) Something pulled at me to go also, something hard to explain. Something abiding. Family. Love. Continuity. Circles unbroken. But I really wanted to, and talked Barb into it. She can scarcely afford the two days off work, but one's a teacher workday. She'll go, with our middle son Scott and me over Halloween weekend and we'll be together with Mark, our youngest, with the family again, in autumn. Glorious, glorious autumn.

Senator Kennedy's Services were Historic and Inspiring

2009-08-29T17:53:00.005-04:00

I thought till very recently I was very lukewarm at best toward liberal causes and parties, Though I have always had a strong sympathy for the tribulations and terrible sacrifices of the Kennedy family, my initial response to Senator Kennedy's passing was gratitude his suffering was ended, after a long and accomplished career, and he alone among the brothers had lived long enough to die of natural causes. As with the recent deaths of Michael Jackson and other icons, I realized the news services would spend many hours honoring and celebrating his life--hours I would probably tire of. But as the tributes and services continued into the weekend I found myself drawn to them. They spoke of a man I really didn't know, or only knew one side of, and a most remarkable life. In it I found enduring values. Loyalty. Love. Patriotism. Adventure. Compassion. Wit, humor, grit and determination--this man grew throughout his life as I would hope to grow, despite his shortcomings and unbearable tragedies. In the end he reached a personal character and stature that might have been impossible in a normal life.

Senator Ted Kennedy's passing closes a long history of steadfast service to the nation he loved despite its toll on him and his family. I did not embrace his causes, but I was very moved by his funeral and memorial services. At his funeral came his colleagues from both sides of the aisle to pay homage and tribute to a truly great American, family head, friend, colleague, father, brother, son, uncle, grandfather, and remarkable human being. His Democratic colleagues from the Senate were there of course, but so were Senators John McCain and Orrin Hatch, among many other Republicans. It was the first time I can remember seeing so many political rivals together in civility, common sympathy, and cordiality in many years, and one commentator remarked that Kennedy began his career at an age when political rivals still could view their opponents as fellow patriots.

Teddy wasn't perfect, but he was larger than life in both his accomplishments and shortcomings, and his concern for his fellow man was legendary. He was a champion of political accomplishments, but even more a champion of human compassion, so much so , eulogized by the President and honored by the presence of three former presidents at his funeral, including Carter, Clinton, and Bush. Placido Domingo and Yo-Yo Ma were among the musicians to perform, and to hear his children speak of their father, and the children of Robert and Jack Kennedy of their uncle, to hear so many touching stories of courage and humor, love and concern from one's own family made me weep with many others.

Regardless of one's politics and philosophy, from a human standpoint I hope that every American will one day listen to what has been said of this remarkable man, because it contains inspiration and lessons for us all to emulate. Perseverance. Compassion. Family. Faith. Love. It wasn't just about Ted Kennedy and partisan politics, liberalism or conservatism. It was about how to live and how to treat others. Teddy Kennedy's life had lessons for us all.

What a Trip!

2009-07-13T18:55:00.004-04:00

We left steaming South Florida for Branson, Missouri, camping in our used 2004 RV in its second long trip. I had gotten the potty valve replaced and a new carbeuretor on the generator, silicone-caulked the shower skylight, had a tuneup and replaced a leaky tire valve, and gotten the old lizzie really roadworthy, and we'd carefully packed and loaded up. When we left Coral Springs it was raining cats and dogs. But our spirits were high. Even with rising fuel costs replacing staying in motels, it's still cheaper to go camping when we take a summer trip, and for us, more fun. And though we'd used our "Ritz" for a spare bedroom on holidays and taken it around the state the past couple of years, this was to be a major test of whether we could still enjoy a nice out-of-state, non-Indiana-bound vacation trip living and traveling in it.

We planned our trip this year to travel to places we'd never been before and were curious about. Rather than following our usual route up through Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky to Indiana, we peeled off to Birmingham from Atlanta and enjoyed visiting Alabama, Mississippi, and finally Memphis, where we'd cross the mighty river into Arkansas and eventually head up to Branson.

But before we went west we visited Graceland. Who hasn't got a rich memory trove of associations from Elvis's life and music? And Graceland, though it has been widely publicized and filmed and featured from the beginning of his fame, was very different from what I had known of it beforehand, and much more impressive. I was especially interested in how much Elvis had done to make it a family home he could share with Priscilla, Lisa, and his parents and friends, and how proud he was to be able to share a mansion with his parents in such contrast to their humble little house where he was born in Tupelo, not far south. He was never so happy as when he was home with his family, we were told. By the looks of it, that may have been true. He built in a lavish billiard room, studio, lounge, formal dining room, several music rooms, a handball court, stables, car collection loggia and riding meadow. A large modern office for his father Vernon to later run his worldwide affairs following his death was converted from space in an adjacent garage, and the huge collection of The King's career memorabilia, trophies, gold records, famous movie outfits and other items had subsequently been displayed very efficiently in lighted-cabinet-lined halls converted from around the handball court.

What impressed me most, I think, was the very well done, even ingenious design of making it all of it available and enjoyable for the endless volume of tourists and visitors that flock to Memphis' leading landmark. We were given to understand that that is mainly thanks to Priscilla's personal hand in the planning and design. For example, there's nothing "touristy" about the estate. To look at it from the street, you'd think it was just a spacious, attractive home. But across the street is a Disney-sized parking lot, two personal full-size jet airplanes you can tour optionally, an air conditioned, modern visitor center, themed souvenir shops, photo lines, and shuttle busses whose only job is to move the throngs forty yards across the street in manageable size groups, each carrying a comfortable, personal headphones that feed comments in the ear as one moves from place to place in the mansion and grounds. Guests aren't allowed above the first floor, but there is plenty of access to all the rooms there and in the lower levels and adjacent buildings and grounds, and the tour ends at the columned family memorial garden sloping to the south of the mansion where he, his parents, and other family members are buried.

But for Graceland, the street is unremarkable on Elvis Presley Boulevard. Neighboring homes are average, and even the mansion wouldn't draw comparison to larger estate homes elsewhere. But one feels the presence of a remarkable life, a vibrant love of life, a warmth and an exuberant, generous spirit throughout. It's been very well maintained with a combination of respect, love, and memory. I was most impressed with Graceland, our first vacation attraction, and one I'll never forget. The family, to their credit, seems to have realized that their beloved and iconic leader belongs not only to them but to hundreds of millions of others worldwide, and to be eager to share what he was and what he gave with those many others.

We drove to Hot Springs, Arkansas that evening and camped at a mountainside KOA, then went in to visit the baths and spas the next day. Again, we were very unused to what we found, totally surprised at the large hotel-style bath houses in a row, with inviting Adirondack chairs reclining across wide, white-pilastered porches and cool spa chambers discretely segregated into male and female facilities by the prim morality of their heyday in the '30s and '40's. They even had separate elevators for men and women on the two halves of the buildings so the genders wouldn't accidently mingle in their spa-ready immodesty.

We had looked in vain for Hot Springs National Park until we found we were in it! The city spa area is the national park. I had always thought a national park was undeveloped, pristine woodlands and lakes, with only the occasional log building, but not so this one. I have always scoffed at buying bottled water, but in the gift shop here I bought only an empty bottle, labeled, for nearly three dollars, then took it around to the back and filled it from hot water coming straight out of the rock, clean and clear--and free. It's in our refrigerator now. We'll drink it on a special occasion.

As at Graceland, I felt the presence of many spirits here as I moved silently through the bare gray marble and porcelain baths, elaborately-fitted showers, and massage rooms. FDR had treated his polio-racked body here, and many arthritic and neuro-muscular diseased souls found healthy improvement--real or imagined--in this Lourdes-like place over the years. The theme of images and statues from ancient Egypt was frequently found on walls and stained glass--anks, Ramses and Nefertiti heads, gold and jeweled statuettes on shelves, etc. Mysticism and faith intermingled to convince the body the mineral hot spring water somehow cleansed their ills. I've never visited such a place before, like Graceland, and I'm very happy I did.

Driving up to Branson later that day took most of our time, but we found the best campground of the trip--a private one at that--and an office calico cat that we could have easily mistaken for our own Dixie, left to the care of the vet back home while we "dared to go where no man has gone before"--at least not us. That night brought the first rain of our trip, then woke us with violent wind and rain turbulence about five the next morning. We thought overhanging branches were banging against our camper, but it was our outstretched awning wrenching, flapping and twisting and threatening to rip off the supports. We ran outside to find one of the owner's sons hurriedly helping us furl the awning and secure it before it was ruined, a gesture we really appreciated. No harm done, but it was one doozy of a storm that hit. No damage, fortunately, by morning.

We saw a show that night--a pop music review variety show at the Osmonds dinner theatre. The Osmonds, as most other name stars, were not in their theatres that night--Andy Williams' Moon River Theatre, Dolly Parton's Dixie Jamboree, etc.-- but we got a taste of the over one hundred nightly shows competing for the tourist dollars of Branson. There weren't that many of us in the audience, however--perhaps 70 or 100 at most, no more than enough not to cancel the performance. I realized the shows were hurting. Too many, and not enough people. I also realized the mounds of high hills of Branson, Missouri weren't very grid-friendly as I got lost more than once in a one-street town and went the wrong way. Branson wasn't what we expected. I couldn't easily find my pickin' and grinnin' bluegrass and country music except where we paid for it, we didn't really find that many RV's, and there weren't many adjacent stores except in the malls and riverfront, with its tony shops and Hilton waterfront fountain-and-flame displays. We cruised on an old-style riverboat and invited Geoff, an accountant from Manchester, England, to chat with us, in what was to be what we best liked about Branson.
And it did fill our memory coffers with new experiences and interesting people.

But Branson wasn't what any of us expected, and that's the thing, you see: when you go somewhere new or try something different, you may not always like what you find. But that's the adventure of it. Would it have been better to retread our Indiana vacation routes of many years one more time? No. We were doing something different this year. I didn't know how different it would become.

We left Branson after three days and headed for--of all places--Gatlinburg. Maybe we'd just lost our Lewis and Clark adventurism. But we quickly got lost in the twists and turns of the Ozarks and drove through eight of the ten Mark Twain National Forests that blanket the state of Missouri in huge patches. And the highways, though good road, have nowhere to turn around and steep side ditches that make even pulling off impossible for many miles. In an RV it was torture, and went on for hours and hours. Barb said if she had drunk cream it would be butter! We dubbed that the quote of the trip.

Finally we crossed the mighty Miss again (and immediately again across a second span). I thought it was just an island in the river. It was instead the confluencing Mississippi and the Ohio. We were at the juncture of two of the great rivers of our nation! I had seen it on maps many times. Now I was there. And we were in Kentucky! We camped at a KOA when we reached I24 shortly thereafter, in the only campground where we built a campfire and had a "patio party" as we call our late night family discussions outside.

Next day we drove to Gatlinburg by way of Nashville, and from then on we were done exploring new routes. But we weren't done with having new experiences. It was a mistake on my part to think going to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, would be a good way to experience a July 4 weekend. We fought for a campsite in a Pigeon Forge loaded with camps and got the last one at Rivers Edge, one of over two hundred fifth wheels, Class A's (bus style), Class C (overhead cab on a small truck chassis), and Class B's (van conversions). It took us a half-hour to get off our exit ramp, and another hour just driving through Sevierville and Pigeon Forge while we burned up our cellphones phoning KOA's that wouldn't even answer and several campgrounds in a 2007 Woodall's, the campers' bible. But we finally got set up and stretched our newly-bought semicircle of red,white, and blue bunting across our Ford grille like a big happy smiling car character. The place was packed.

We didn't know how packed it was until Barb and Scott walked two miles at 11:00 from the Trolley stop rather than wait for another trolley that night. With so many vehicles on a one-street town, only trolleys were crawling around town and into Gatlinburg, and the service was badly overloaded and poorly managed. Schedules were way off. Scott and Barb had tried in vain to reach the Christmas Palace before it closed, only to be interminably stopped by their trolley to grab off another 50 cent fare here and there. They got to the store ten minutes before it closed. Barb was devastated. The Christmas Palace is her holy grail of Gatlinburg area shopping, as our sundry-decorated christmas tree gives testament to. Even worse, the Bob Evans next door was shut down for good--another unwelcome surprise. How could a major restaurant like that go out of business in a place like Pigeon Forge? The economy really is bad.

But the next day was far worse than even the night before. There was no way we could heft that RV of ours into Gatlinburg against the sea of cars clogging all the lanes. Why I thought we had to even go is a mystery to me now, but go we did, to the stop for the trolley to take us the other direction from what we wanted to go, the trolley central hub, where we had to board a Gatlinburg-bound, nonstop second trolley to take us to the Aquarium trolley hub in Gatlinburg. And that one wasn't air-conditioned, was packed in its 30-passenger posted maximum capacity with a standing-room-only 50-passenger overload. I've ridden some jarring New York subways, but that trolley had them all beat. I had to not only stand the whole trip but had to strain on tiptoes to grab onto too-high rails to avoid falling. But for the crowded aisle I might have ended up on another passenger or three. When we finally debarked I was nearly nauseous, and we whisked up the street to a Wendys I knew of, in the Mountain Mall.

That lunch helped a lot, but where was the pickin' and grinnin' I was sure we'd find? Nowhere! No "Rocky Top", no cloggers, no local washboard bands on the streets, no music except what the storefronts played. Not like last year at all. The economy again, we thought. Cities couldn't justify hiring entertainers with jobs at stake. Oh, it was bad, bad. We continued up and then down the street shops and Scott and I rode the aerial lift to a great overlook of the city, which we really loved. But the trolley ride back was only a little better than the trolley ride there, and overall we were really miffed. Supper was a long waiting line at the trolley stop hub nearby restaurants next to Liberty Park, where the fireworks would soon begin, if you can imagine. Another dream down the tubes. If I couldn't depend on Gatlinburg, where could I find a balm for my country soul?

The fireworks later were nominal, but at least we had good seats. As the last site in the camp, we were the first in line for viewing, it turns out--that is, at least till some pickup trucks pulled in across our bow and their viewers set up lawn chairs in the truck beds. Oh well....

Following Branson, the plan now revised had been to head for Gatlinburg, then Charleston (Scott's never been) then Savannah (same) then home. When we left Gatlinburg, however, our collective wanderlust was gone. We started for home, but got restored enough that we salvaged a quick tour of Savannah at least. And we all had a good tour trolley (we had sworn we'd never get on another, but this was an uncrowded tour trolley with points of interest map and interesting comments by the guide/drivers, on/off stops at our pleasure, and good organization and execution. It restored our faith a lot. Charleston would have been interesting also, but it required more of us and was more out of our way. We were ready, when we left Savannah about three in the afternoon, to come home. We pulled in about eleven that night. And over the next several days we began to mythologize what a wonderful time we had, as we're prone to do with the passing of time. In a few more weeks it may seem like the best time we ever had.

Two Loves Have I

2009-06-21T16:20:00.005-04:00

The French produced a song in the war years of Marlene Dietrich: "Two Loves Have I." At heart I also have two passions: music and writing. I suppose thinking and feeling are more valued to me than even music or writing, but my two passions express what I think and feel, so I try to find outlets for each.

For music I play the keyboards I have bought over the years and the $10 piano I bought from a lady in Aventura whose condo got flooded in Hurricane Wilma. I call it my $10 piano, though I paid her $100 for it because I'm a softie, and paid the movers another $100 to get it up here to Coral Springs. She was, however asking $10 for it, so I insist on calling it my $10 piano.

Unlike the electronic keyboards, I can really whack the heck out of my $10 piano and do so several times a week. There's nothing like the feel of pounding a true piano to release my hostilities and express myself emotionally. It's been a lifelong passion, one I used to make my living doing back in the day. I grew up with music, and I suppose met my wife through music. I must have it. I don't think I could live without it.

Between writing and music it's a hard call which passion I love most, but I know it tilts toward music when it comes to expressing feeling. Suzanne Langer, the American philosopher, called music "the sentience of feeling." I think that's very true.

Writing undoubtedly provides a wonderful outlet as well for expressing my feelings, but it's greater strength is for expressing my thoughts and reflecting upon whatever interests me. I usually do this through exposition, but at times through lyric poetry or fiction if my imagination is so inspired. Such inspirations are becoming less frequent as reality tends to dominate my attention more the older I become.

But it wasn't until very recently I began to appreciate that there is a great divide in my writing needs between writing to myself and writing to share publicly. In my private, handwritten journal I am able to jot down ideas more or less at the speed they come to me, unedited and with no concern for sharing them in blogs or anywhere else.

The mistake I've long made is believing I could transfer to the internet what I write strictly in my own journal, with the same lack of self-consciousness that I enjoy writing to myself alone. I simply cannot say to others, no matter whether family, friends, in a classroom or online, what I can say to myself. The moment I try, I begin to edit. I immediately feel the need to make sense, for one thing, to write coherently in reasonably standard English sentences, and not to just jot wordplay or nonsensical snippets as I feel free to do in my journal.

For another difference I find that I sometimes pray in my journal, which I would never feel comfortable doing online. Prayer, I have found, is nearly the only kind of expression that I can be totally honest doing. It would be absurd tying to be less than honest in prayer; who would I be fooling? Myself I might deceive, but not God. I believe deeply in prayer, but I don't feel comfortable praying online. I do, however, in my private journal.

There are many other differences as well, but no need to go into them here. My subject for this post is still about expressing myself through writing and music, and as I try this venue and that I find I don't need another place to write online. I have my blogs to express what I can publicly and my handwritten journal to express what I only can express privately.

And speaking of my blogs, I began another a few days ago as what I hoped would be a fresh approach, having gotten a bit tired of Writetosayit's look and feel over the years. I began it on Blogspot after trying a couple of Wordpress blogs I was using over at my commercial site, pageamonth.com. And I began it out of spite.

Let me explain:

I read in someone's new Wordpress blog how happy he was to be at Wordpress and to be rid of Blogger and Blogspot, which he said was "like living in the '50's" When I read that, I bristled. I doubt the fellow was even alive in the '50's, but I understood why he felt as he apparently did. Blogger is, in fact, a bit of a conservative dinosaur as a host, and definitely not "hip"--a bit long in the tooth, as they say. Browsing blogspot's typical posts it's rare to find the kind of f-word, in-your-face ranting and insulting language that sully many other sites of other hosts in this age of Twitters and tweets, MySpace chats, Craigslist crud, messaging and other gatherings which abound on the net. Blogger was one of the first to enable free blogging and built it to by far the largest hosting site in the world for many years. I don't know if Wordpress or any other host has matched its numbers yet, but that's beside the point.

I do know this: people on Blogspot tend to be more mature than the tennyboppers and frenetic professionals at Wordpress and other community-oriented hosts. Not necessarily more mature in years but seemingly past the rebellious stage of their lives. The people who run Blogspot also seem to provide sensible help menus and not get carried away with geeky techtalk to bloggers who just want a lay answer to a simple question. Blogspot menus make sense to me and the personality of the templates remains as attractive as anywhere.

The only thing I still find annoying at Blogspot is the hoops set up that force us all to do nonsensical, illegible word verifications for most posting and commenting. Other sites have managed to make this process--which I admit is a necessary one--less confusing and still be effective.

Oh, Blogspot also has a few quirks like producing thousands of duplicate copies of blogs I didn't write to clog up my editing lists. I gave up trying to delete them all after a few hundred. And Blogspot still has a long way to go for those after wider syndication. I suppose they don't want spam creeping in, but other sites syndicate widely in a range of formats through notification services like technoratti and ping-o-matic, and I miss that. Blogspot's still in the '50's that way.

In any case, I like the '50's and liked living in them. I like visiting Disney/MGM in Orlando with it's '40's and '50's themes and art deco buildings. It's what I grew up with. So that young man, who never lived during those times, disparaged what I value, and for that, I won't blog at Wordpress.com (plus the fact that they slap ads on your blog over there without asking your permission, which is why I quit them a few years ago.) If anyone is gonna pay any bills with my blogging, it's gonna be me. Sometimes spite feels good, and Hello Dolly, I'm back home where I belong. It's cool here, man, reeeel cooool....

Spring Housecleaning

2009-06-21T14:28:00.003-04:00

It was time, I decided, to do some spring cleaning on my growing venues of expression. I scrapped the former blog "NBK Stuff" and saved only its former space on Blogger under the temporary title of "Summitsummers." But that blog didn't succeed in distinguishing its purpose or tone from this one, "Write to Say It," so I deleted Summitsummers also. I still maintain several blogs with my main expository journaling Writetosayit, my fiction and poetry writings, Inner Elves, and now a new blog on my commercial website, Pageamonth.com, in support of my spreadsheet budget product. That's really enough to catch ahold of whatever I feel I can say publicly.

I scrapped NBK Stuff because it outlived its purpose: to try Adsense ads on a blog and see if it made me a millionaire overnight. It didn't, and so out she goes. But why did I try to start Summitsummers?

It had to do with the way Blogspot is set up. When you delete a blog, the dashboard keeps it around in case you change your mind and want to reinstate it, and also asks you to create another blog on the spur of the moment to take its place. In fact, it doesn't even let you leave the page until you type in the name of that new blog. So I did, and called it the first word I could think of, "Summitsummers." Where that came from is beyond me. But it got me off the page.

Everybody Blogs Today

2009-06-21T14:07:00.002-04:00

Everyone takes pictures today, so why ever hire a photographer? Everyone sings, so why pay to hear a Pavorotti or Sinatra? Everyone also blogs, so why read another's posts?

Yes, we can all do lots of things, but we recognize there are some who can do them better than we can ever hope to.

Now we blog, and it seems today people around the planet are posting away with feverish abandon, pouring out whatever they think for the world to read. But we don't have to go far to find that some are more widely read than others. Why?

Having posted for several years on several sites, I'm convinced the main reason some blogs are more avidly read and others read only by friends and family is a sense of the writer's authenticity. That's a complex thing to define exactly. But it comes through whatever is written, from choices about site design and lauout to a "feel" of the template and look of the font, what the writer says and how he or she says it, the style, the sound, the rhythms of speech and imagery, the choice of words and so forth. Some writers seem more authentic than others, to have more to say, or to say it in a memorable way.

As a student I had a fascination for the writing of William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair. While classmates found his writing a slog, I just loved to hear whatever he said. Garrison Keillor, author of the Lake Wobegon Days and A Prarie Home Companion on NPR is another such idol of mine. I never tire of listening to or reading his work.

That's authenticity, personality. So if everyone blogs today, who will read them? Actually, many will, if readers sense in their words an engaging authenticity, if they feel the author has something to say in an engaging way.

We Lost Our Compass

2009-06-21T13:03:00.003-04:00

We're getting ready to take a Ritz trip, and we're not sure where. It may be one of those existential junkets where we move around as the spirit moves us and the weather seems inviting. When we get our of Florida and head west, it's often flooded around the Mississippi. When we go north the rains or heat waves can be intimidating. When we go to the eastern seaboard we get eaten alive by giant mosquitoes. And we can't go much further south.

My inclination so far is to head for Branson, Missouri. We've never been there, but we've seen some features of it on television and it looked like somewhere we'd enjoy, kind of a laid back country music mecca like Gatlinburg, Tennessee which we like, or Nashville. We saw the Grand Ole Opry there a year ago and loved it. So with an RV and our informal tastes we ought to fit right in at Branson.

One year we headed for the Rockies and got close enough to Denver we could see the mountains, even though we were still in Kansas. Thunderheads rose up over them into a blue sky, and we knew we were in for it. That night it rained so hard, with hail beating down on our poor tent pull camper, that we had to run for our lives into our van to wait it out. It lasted for hours, and we slept in the van. In our haste we didn't have time to slide the beds back in under the roof and they got sopping wet.

The next morning we drove about six miles into Lawrence, Kansas with our clothes, our sleeping bags, our pillows and our foam mattresses all soaked with water even after we wrung them out and tried to mop out the camper. Fortunately, we found an open laundromat and began drying things out.

The operator of the laundromat listened to our tale of woe about the night before, and said he'd never seen so much rain there, nothing but water, water everywhere. It reminded him of his years in the navy, which, he said, was the reason he moved to Lawrence, Kansas. He said he never wanted to be near so much water again, and he had taken a ruler and a US map and calculated that Lawrence was the furthest point in the Continental US from any ocean, so that's where he'd live. Now that's quite a reason to live somewhere, I think--to get as far away from something you hate as possible.

We won't go to Branson for any reason so dramatic, but it seems far enough from South Florida that we'll feel we got away from our routines for a time. We'll see.

And from there we might go on further west up the Missouri valley, or over to Memphis and see Graceland, or up the Mississippi to the Dells, or over to Virginia's Shenandoah, or down to New Orleans, or who knows where. We don't.

In most years we didn't have this freedom. Lots of years we didn't have a special destination in mind, but we knew we'd be going to our hometown of Huntington, Indiana, because that's where the folks were. For the forty-one years of our marriage we might go west, east, north, or south from wherever we were living at the time, but we'd need to catch Huntington either going or coming back. For many years we'd stay at the house, but when dad and mom needed to go into nursing homes, we started staying at a motel. Living and working in Florida, we got to see them only a couple of times a year at most, often only once. We treasured those visits because we feared each time we might not see them again.

So this is really the first summer in forty-one years we're free to go wherever we'd like, because for the first time, sad to say, we have no living parents to visit. Barb's dad, then mom, died within about two months of each other this past fall and winter. We still have other relatives and friends in there, but they're apt to be around for awhile so we don't feel the same pressure to head for Huntington.

Maybe that's why we have no real destination in mind this summer. Mom and Dad in their Huntington nursing homes were like a compass, charting every summer trip for four plus decades. Without that compass, we're kind of lost, I think. We don't know where we ought to try to go.

The Donald's Amazing OPEC Greed Index

2009-05-12T08:26:00.003-04:00

When the economy fell off the cliff last fall, Donald Trump predicted, "I'll tell you one piece of good news: you will see the price of oil drop like a rock!" And he went on to say, "I hate OPEC. Every time the stock market goes up, OPEC raises the price of a barrel of crude and takes the profits. Every single time!"

He was right. Within days gasoline prices followed the price per barrel down, down, down from the high over $4.00 a gallon last summer to a little over $1.00 at its lowest point in the depths of the stock market decline. But now, with the market improving, up, up, up goes the oil price again, creeping up through the dollar-something range to just over $2 at the pump. Then, yesterday, here, ka-boom! Up suddenly 16 cents per gallon all over town! They couldn't even wait for Memorial Day weekend.

Some say they're just responding to increased demand for summer driving. I say balderdash, they're following OPEC's deathlock stranglehold on the Dow. Summer driving's actually predicted to be lower this year, but the oil companies and station owners are gleefully jumping the gun on declaring the recession over, I guess. (Odd how they all seem to agree on the same amount to hike their prices in one day in our "free market system" isn't it.)

But The Donald's insights may provide a convenient index to how much we've grown the economy since the pits last January. If gas has gone from about a dollar to about two dollars per gallon, then the economic recovery, by the Trump Index, has come back about 50%. Similarly, if it fell from about four dollars per gallon to about two dollars, it has fallen about 50%.

Forget about the Dow, the Consumer Confidence Index, the Gross Domestic Product and all the other imposters that attempt to tell us how well or how poorly we're doing. Trump's OPEC Greed index may be all we need.

pageamonth.com lives! (but it's lots harder than blogging)

2009-05-09T18:33:00.006-04:00

My budget spreadsheet enterprise, formerly at nbkauffman.com (see previous post below), has a new home now at pageamonth.com. I gambled that a more descriptive domain name might better facilitate searches for budget programs. And I set it up with justhost.com, ranked number 1 in Best Web Site Hosting reviews, chose my domain, and set up shop.

This time I'm not just referring potential customers to affiliate sites as I did before because I had no way to accept payments conveniently on my former site. (Snail mail, checks or money orders, etc. ". . .went out the window with the cracker barrel cask and demi-john," as the song says. Today's buyer expects instant access for digital products, and rightfully so.) So I set up a Paypal purchase button on my homepage that accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, or Paypal accounts and triggers an instant download. Most of the rest of my pages provide help with setup, use, budgeting advice and faq's.

Next I needed to try to get listed in the search engines and directories which could help steer traffic to my website, and of course soon got overwhelmed with offers from the legion of advertising and Search Engine Optimization companies who all promise the moon. It's odd that anyone trying to start up an online business of any kind would believe they could move a new budget spreadsheet product, which lists on average about 70,000,000 sites each wanting the user searching for "budget" on Google to click on them alone, into the top ten listings in two days, as many promise and often guarantee.

The hardest part of setting up my new dot.com has been waiting for the various search engines to send their robots to my website and crawl my content, set up my listings, and announce my birth to the world wide web of ecommerce. When I was creating the site for a few weeks, I always had things to be done, and I worked in "terrier mode," as Barb calls it, till it was ready. After I installed my Paypal system, I bought my own spreadsheet twice, once each with my Visa and my Mastercard, to make sure the customer experience was smooth. It didn't cost me very much, about 80 cents each, to test these. I quickly got my spreadsheet onto my own desktop as ordered.

But for nearly a week, while the search engine bots have had their way, I have tried to occupy myself tweeking, refining my pages and my product, and strategizing my marketing. But I hate to wait.

This afternoon about four pageamonth.com finally popped up on MSN's Live Search, my new site's first listing on a major search engine. And this time my search for "pageamonth" didn't direct me to nbkauffman.com, but to pageamonth.com. I've rejected trying to redirect or add nbkauffman.com to my pageamonth.com site as too expensive. To register a second domain for the sake of a redirect almost costs more than the first name. Besides, as I whined in the previous post below, no one besides family visited nbkauffman.com for a whole year when it was on my previous hosting company. There's no reason to think they would on a new one. I'll just have to make sure pageamonth.com moves ahead of it in the listings with use, which I think will happen since anyone who clicks on the now defunct nbkauffman.com will get a 404 page not found error.

I notice Google and Yahoo have now both sent their robots to index my site, so their listings should follow MSN's soon. But I still fear what every ecommerce "startup upstart" fears: no one will visit the shop, no matter what tags we use, no matter where or how much we advertise, no matter how many links to our site we beg from our friends and relations, or even in desperation subscribe to link farms to push up our rankings. Visitors won't come, because of a simple reason: they won't know about us. We'll get lost in the hundred gazillion trillions of other sites doing the same thing, offering similar products, and people won't have the patience to find us after the first ten pages of trying higher-ranked budget sites first.

My original problem, as I see it, remains: No one knows what a pageamonth is. I thought of pageamonthbudget.com instead but concluded it was too long. Now I'm having second thoughts, because at least the latter tells a potential buyer what my product is, and that it's not what the only other pageamonth listed seems to be: a wedding planner.

Unless and until I throw up my hands and end this torture yet again, I'm sure I'll have more perils of pauline to relate about my plunge into ecommerce again through the summer. But this much I can assure my blog readers: ecommerce isn't for the faint of heart. It's not a blog, and you're not going to get curious visitors like a new blog, or higher rankings from creating more posts, text, and photos like a blog. Anyone who expects to get rich for little effort as an online merchant is just nuts. And the only good reason to try it, the one that drives me still, is that he believes in the usefulness and value of his product. I do. I wrote my budget spreadsheet and have used it rather than Quicken or MSMoney or the more sophisticated software packages for many years, wish others would try it, and invite anyone interested to visit the emerging pageamonth.com and have a look, tell your friends, spread the word, buy one for your graduate, and let me know what you think with any suggestions you might have, in comments here or at my email, nbkauffman@yahoo.com. I'll "get a hit out of you," as another song says, and move up my ranking a notch from 69,998,762.

My Dotcom Is Gone, But Not My Budget

2009-04-21T19:30:00.051-04:00

After a year of trying to sell PageAMonth, a spreadsheet budget software file I wrote and still find is better for keeping track of my bottom line than any program like Microsoft Money or Quicken, and not selling even one of them during that whole year despite lining up two vendors, I had my nbkauffman.com site removed from my webhost today.

A year ago I spent a lot of time building up charts and help pages, but I had to admit I had committed a fatal flaw from the getgo: I had set up a commercial website to sell a product by using my own name for that website instead of something suggesting what I was selling, a site name which had no chance of attracting hits from anyone looking for a budget program.

I call my spreadsheet PageAMonth Budget, and I should have started a website called pageamonthbudget.com instead of nbkauffman.com. Had I done so, I might have been able to attract enough traffic through the search engines to interest someone in trying it. But in the past year I only got a few hits from random users, and I wasn't going to spend even more money on the host's offers to increase my traffic with their wonderful expertise.

I screwed up. I screwed up by letting my ego get in the way again. What will I now do with the budget? Well, I'm not sure. I'll continue to use it personally, of course, as I always have. I wouldn't use anything else, frankly; it has worked great for me for many years. And it's still for sale as Mybudget.xls on spreadsheetmarketplace.com for $19.95 if anyone wants to take a look at it. But I'm not going to hold my breath; they haven't sold any in a year either.

As for nbkauffman.com, I didn't bother to move it to another host. I just let it disappear into sitenotfound oblivion. I felt there was no good reason to use it anymore. It was just an ego site, and I don't need it any more. But I was thinking about writing a small book instead, on how to start a home budget using the experience I used to develop PageAMonth. Maybe I could peddle a manuscript more successfully than I did a spreadsheet file.

Hmm. Maybe. Or maybe I should try eBay. People buy Virgin Mary patterns on burnt toast on eBay. Maybe someone would buy my nifty spreadsheet budget.

I Bynn At Lynn

2009-04-05T09:24:00.001-04:00

Just as I was getting used to retirement two things happened: the economy collapsed and I was asked to return to the classroom, both of which knocked me off my stride.

At first the economic crisis just made me wary, then worried as it spread and I watched the For Sale signs sprout in our relatively well-heeled neighborhood, then right up and down the block, observed our neighbors move quietly out and know not where; I could guess why; watched in amazement as name brand stores died off with a whimper: Circuit City, K Mart, many mall stores going dark, not to mention so many construction firms and manufacturers. Our eyes were so shocked at the rocking and reeling banks and investment houses and the threat of losing our entire auto manufacturing industry that we hardly kept up with all the other smaller stores and services that were quietly going under everywhere.

When I finally got notified by my 401k that their directors had voted to pay 30% less interest and dividends on my savings each month I felt the downturn firsthand for the first time. It wouldn't sink us but would limit our options for sure.

By that time, however, the second retirement-stopper had happened: I got a call from my former employer asking me to return to teach two art appreciation classes. They had terminated the instructor in mid-semester for reasons I was not told nor cared to know. The reality was they were in a rather desperate need to staff the courses, which met a total of all five weekday afternoons, immediately, with a qualified instructor . Since I had taught those classes for years, I was ready to go and agreed to do it for the students' sake.

So I adjusted my mindset to a schedule again, got my dress shirts, trousers and ties out, and headed back to the campus five days a week. Fortunately when I had left for what I thought was forever last summer, I had kept a key to the lock on my old equipment cabinet when I turned in a duplicate--"just in case" I'd need to use it again someday. My equipment, my slides, my textbook, and my other course materials I had left for the next guy were all there and ready to go, and I revised my syllabus, cobbled together midterm grades from the scant information I could gather for the students' work to date, and resumed the course the way I teach it. It took the students a few weeks to readjust to my style and methods, but they have done so, just as I've adjusted to their learning needs. We will finish out by the end of this month.

In light of shrinking pension incomes, I have since agreed to return for a section again next fall and have been listed, so it looks like my next "retirement" will probably be after next Christmas again at the earliest. Maybe the economy will begin to generate better times by then, but I'm not going to hold my breath. No one knows how long this crisis will go on, or how severe it will get. As I write, things show some signs of improving on many fronts, but whether it will sustain a true recovery remains to be seen, as does my degree of retirement for the near future. I'll have to wait and see.

March Was Harsh

2009-04-04T18:16:00.050-04:00

March lived up to its reputation as a windy, blustery month. I think it began to blow like heck by the third and didn't stop till today, a month later.

And I have this theory that the weather is somehow made to order for the events that happen in our lives, like a well-scripted movie. So in keeping with the storms, we have had situation after situation for a month, each challenging us to handle it.

I hurt my left ankle working on ladders. First painting the front trim, then installing an attic access ladder in the garage and flooring in the area above. I thought I was up to it. I wasn't. I twisted my foot badly and it hurt for a month like hell. Today, finally, after wearing a brace for most activites and trying to stay off it as much as possible, and taking a mountain's worth of painkillers, I can do without both the brace and the painkillers for the first.

In the meantime, however, I picked up a really nasty head and chest cold from the March winds. Normally I don't pay a lot of attention to such occasional colds, which come every year or two and bring on a few days' worth of discomfort then get sweated out and are gone. This one, though, brought on at various stages chills, fever, hypothermia, dizziness, and other symptoms, and it didn't seem destined to go away by just letting it spend its course. By Tuesday I heeded Barb's advice and went to the doctor without an appointment, waited two hours to be seen by the nurse practicioner, and went on antibiotics, decongestants and an inhaler.

As I pulled out of the drive Monday morning in another gale force tempest, I thought I heard and felt the sickening thump-flop, thump-flop of a flat tire, and sure enough, the passengers' rear tire was resting on its rim. That was one of my more fevered mornings, so changing it wasn't easy, I sweated mightily and feared my cold would turn to pneumonia without much more March weather. Later that afternoon at school I had to walk to my car parked in the back lot, and the sky emptied on me. I drove home wet and cold.

Barb, meanwhile, came down with my cold as well. So we're going through the Kleenex boxes like crazy and hoping to get in good shape for our trip Thursday to New York to see Mark's new apartment over Easter. Scott's coming up from Orlando as well, so we're hoping to have a good time. But at this point I think we'd settle for just being well, being over injuries and other maladies, and above all having this insidious flu-like cold way past being contagious to the others.

Earth to NBK, Earth to NBK...

2009-02-18T16:10:00.002-05:00

Remember George Orwell's "other" novel, 1984? I remember when folks kidded that the futureworld, Big Brother state the book described was the punchline of a joke about what might happen to the country if we elected John F. Kennedy to the presidency over Richard Nixon in 1960. If the former had his way and Shanghaied the 1964 election as well, he'd serve till 1968. Then his brother Bobby would serve eight years till 1976, then Teddy would inherit the privelege for eight years, and--wait for it --do you know when that would bring the country to? 1984! Har har har.

I bring this up because it suggests something near and dear to my heart: the great ignored adverb among the Who What When and How descriptors is When. Check the news stories. They tell us what happened, usually where, and who was involved, and if space permit, how it happened. Rarely does when it happened get more than a brief mention. We're really not that concerned about time. Events, yes. People, yes. Location, sure. Even the grim details of process. But When is the least of our concern.

George Orwell sealed the irrelevance of his book with his dated title, and in our sophomoric humor of that day that I and my buddies thought was so clever, I couldn't foresee the joke would become so outmoded as the years passed. The year 1984 came and went without any Orwellian events to speak of that I'm aware of, as have most years since.

We set another date for Armageddon, or at least a year of Great Significance, as the new Millenium approached, in the later 1990's. I remember when I married at age 28 in 1968 I had wondered if I and my peers would live to see the year 2000. Lord, I'd be 61! That was nine years ago, and I don't feel any different. I look different, no doubt--more gray hair creeping around to the back that's still black, less thickness to my top combover in the morning mirror--but I feel the same, basically, as I did ten, twenty, or even thirty or forty years ago. Ageing doesn't proceed in a straight, linear fashion for me. It's more like a series of fits and starts, more of a spiral. And sometimes I actually feel I'm getting younger, like what's his name in the movie.

I was 61 in 2001 when the Times Square Ball dropped on New Years' Eve as the true new millenium began, and guess what: nothing changed then either. Not really. Not the things that count. I'm still the same, Barb's still the same beautiful bride I married in 1968, our sons have grown and left the nest, but they're still the same to me they always were.

So what am I trying to say about time? Well, I'm not Henri Bergson who held that time is merely the illusion of a continuum, that it's actually a succession of moments. And I'm not Albert Einstein, who believed time could be slowed or sped up through theoretical physics. But I am convinced that the perception of time, at least, is very changable, seeming to fly by at lightning speed when I'm stuck in a computer problem and seeming to crawl along like a slug when I'm not busy or when I'm waiting on something or someone, or watching a slow download meter creep by.

In my latest fascinations, I'm speculating there may be no real past or future, that all is contained in the present moment, because that's the location for my sense of the past as I remember, or my sense of the future as I imagine. If that were true, it would help me grasp some big concepts like when God began, if he had no beginning in time, and how it could be that some things could always have been and will always remain. Would it be possible to imagine something outside time and space as we know them? I think so. It doesn't strike me as any more farfetched that all time could exist in a moment than that all matter in the universe might have existed in a nano-speck, packed so densely light could not escape it--i.e., a black hole.

In any case, I'm getting hungry now, so that just explodes my universe theories. I have to fire up the grill. We're having pork chops tonight. Let's see now, how long do you cook pork chops?

New Normal Needed?

2009-02-18T12:01:00.051-05:00

What can possibly turn around such a world-wide economic crisis as the current one? Everyone is worried now, not just those who have lost their jobs or their homes or both. Everyone is threatened, it seems.

We've moved beyond trying to find out who caused this monstrous mess, because it's getting closer each day to our house. Godzilla has leaped off the B movie screen and is swishing his powerful tail through our neighborhood. And we don't care how the beast got here, just how to stop him!

The federal government is now trying to turn things around with the power of money. And most of us are hoping that will do the trick. But few of us think we're going to regain our prosperity with just the latest trillion or so; it may take several trillion more to restore the American Dream we thought we were living and everyone felt entitled to.

Well, there's nothing wrong with the American Dream. The problem is in not looking at it in total. To many it is synonomous with wealth and property. And it is attainable as soon as the wet foot becomes dry, as soon as we "arrive" on this land, whether as high school or college graduates seeking instant high-paying jobs or homebuyers taking out mortgages they can't afford or immigrants seeking a better life. To too many, The American Dream is instant, material success. Never mind that most have to work for it over a lifetime. Never mind that even then many will never be able to have it as fully and completely as those whose talents, intelligence, labor, skill, ingenuity and drive or even plain luck propelled them to realize the dream and others to fall short despite their best efforts.

As with so many components of human aspiration, the American Dream is an ideal, not a practical guide for living. It is like justice and love, freedom and equality. It is an ideal to be strived for, a beacon. Unfortunately, the government has led the American people to believe it can and should solve all our problems and needs. And now it finds itself in the unfortunate position of not being able to deliver, no matter how many stimulus bailouts it throws at the problems.

We will, I'm afraid, soon learn this the hard way. Many have suffered grievously and many more will suffer before our faltering economy rights itself. But when it does, I suspect it will come from the ground up, not from the top down. It will begin when people realign their ideas about how much they are entitled to for doing so little actual work, when they begin to accept responsibility for their own choices and actions, when they begin to help their neighbors and their communities again and treat each other with fairness and compassion and good will instead of asking for more, more, ever more for themselves and to blazes with everyone else. I think there is a moral flaw in the naive expectations that everyone should deserve to have everything and something is wrong with the American Dream if they don't get it without doing anything to earn it.

It is said that people come together in adversity. We will see in the coming days if that is true. And if it is true, we may emerge a better nation, a better people, than we were when we thought things were "normal," having a better grasp of what the American Dream really is about: it is about freedom and opportunity, not about guarantees and the same level of wealth and material success for everyone.

I think it so ironic that so many people want to "get back to normal," as if that were such a wonderful thing to get back to. We need to temper our economic engines with oversight and accountability no matter what political party is in power in the future. We didn't before, when things were"normal." We need to readjust our expectations to reflect the realistic productivity of our labor, our innovation, and our resources and skills viz-a-viz the rest of the world. We didn't, when things were "normal." And probably we need to regain a respect for learning instead of looking for shortcuts to quick wealth. Again, that kind of respect has not been "normal" in recent times. If we do these things as a result of the current crisis, then perhaps a new "normal" can emerge based on more solid stuff.

"Coffee Breaks" Different Now for Many

2009-02-09T11:23:00.004-05:00

I did something this morning I've been thinking of doing for a long while: have a coffee break out. Usually after my early cereal, I take my morning Constitutional then have my second cup of coffee around nine while I catch up on the news. But for many years I went out for coffee with my colleagues and friends. The midmorning pick-me-up was one of the high points of my day, almost sacrosanct over the years. My friends and I called it "observing the amenities."

So today instead of coming back home after I picked up a few items, I stopped in at a McDonald's around ten and splurged on a Big Breakfast. And no coffee break is official for me unless I take along my notebook and jot down whatever's on my mind. So I put a few remarks on a page or so and felt like life was pretty good. As usual, nothing came to mind to pursue into a poem or story, but experience has taught me that I'm not very creative at coffee breaks. After a page or so of mundane journaling I cleared my tray and came home.

It wasn't till I got nearly into my drive that I noted anything remarkable about what I had seen at McDonald's, for it had been nearly empty at midmorning. There were a few individuals in scattered booths and chairs, some reading the complimentary morning newspapers one finds at such places, some just sitting with their thoughts like me. A few teens were chattering, then they left. A mother came in with three small children in tow, went to the counter, then abruptly came back and left. I wondered why. Maybe she changed her mind about ordering or decided they needed to be somewhere else.

Engaged as I was in my journaling, I didn't notice much else. A man finished the paper and left, another returned my glance looking a bit nervous, I thought. But after I came in my own home and put away the groceries, I knew what was possibly remarkable. All the patrons at McDonald's were young adults, mostly male. All were alone like me. But none of them had Big Breakfasts in front of them as I did. Some had a cup of coffee or other small item. And all of them were very possibly recently unemployed. Some were scanning the papers for jobs. Others seemed just trying to gather their wits about them and decide what to do next. Maybe their coffee break wasn't at all borne out of a desire for a break from routine like mine was. May theirs was an attempt to regroup or get ahold of a sense of provision and normalcy in a world that had recently fallen apart for them.

We don't usually notice the recently laid off or fired or foreclosed on or otherwise victimized by the economic crisis we've fallen into. Maybe we think being unemployed means looking like the stereotypical wino or skid row bum, unkempt, unshaven, the "Brother, can you spare a dime" panhandler or homeless refugee we normally only see in the bigger city streets. We don't notice a guy at McDonald's who looks just like us, dresses normally and is cleanshaven, scanning the want ads by himself in the middle of the day.

The recently unemployed still have their pride. They may even be professionals--engineers, software designers, bankers, accountants, writers, retailers, office workers and other white collar types--skilled and highly educated who until one day recently had a good, high-paying, steady job they thought they could count on to pay the mortgages and feed their families. Those who kept their jobs as the hell of layoffs and foreclosures deepened barely noticed as the guy down the street fell into the abyss. And the lady who sold real estate a few doors down moved. Where did she go? I wonder.

Six hundred thousand new unemployment claims filed since the first of January. Three and one half million jobs lost since the crisis hit last fall. Not just the big banks and brokerage houses, not just the bankrupted Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac government-backed giants and big insurance firms like AIG, but every sector of the economy has been hard-hit, and the crisis is worsening worldwide. We read about it, we hear about it on the newscasts, but it's still not obvious in our streets and stores, groceries and offices.

People don't usually look like they're in trouble. They don't look desperate yet in their faces. Maybe they have some reserves or are finding enough alternate work to stay afloat. Maybe they're hoping for a miracle or counting on the government's series of draconian "stimulus plans" to throw enough money hard enough and far enough that the cleverer thieves throughout our commercial fabric can't make off with it before it gets through to the broader masses.

Maybe--probably--I'm reading too much into the furtive looks of those fellow customers up at Mickey D's this morning. I'm prone to do that, suspicious by nature. But I think it's unlikely those younger folks were just there for a coffee break like I was. And I suspect we'll see a lot more like them scrambling for the morning papers in the near future.

Thoreau said that "Most people lead lives of quiet desperation." How true that is today.

My Mother-in-law, My Friend

2009-01-06T17:27:00.054-05:00

I grew up with mother-in-law jokes about the overprotective, interfering, always siding with her son or daughter mother of the bride or groom, but none of them applied to mine. Dorothy was the best friend I ever had, always in my corner, always rooting for us in our marriage from the first, helping us raise our three sons in Huntington, Indiana and never complaining about the many impositions we inadvertantly thrust on her during hectic times.

When I started dating Barbara, ten years my junior, it was Dorothy who thought I might be the right man for her despite my chequered artist-musician, twenty-jobs-a-year past. I was a high school teacher now and had a steady future. And it was Dorothy who nudged her Barbara my way, and was thrilled when we asked their blessing of Dexter and her. We announced our intentions in their living room, and Dorothy broke out in a whoop and a smile ear to ear and clapped her hands. "We'd like your blessing," I said.

She leaned over to Dexter and said, "Well, what do you think?"
"Sounds like a fait accompli, don't it?" Dexter grinned.
"Well--" I chuckled.
"Sounds fine by me," Dorothy said.
"Don't think she could do any better?" Dad kidded with his characteristic dry humor.

We got a ring and got engaged, and set a date for the following March 17, ten days after Barbara turned nineteen. I had already taught at the high school her senior year and we had begun dating near the end of that year, going to Ft. Wayne to movies and getting together at her house to watch tv. Our courtship had been low-key and a little furtive till she graduated, but I knew she was the girl I wanted to settle down with and hopefully start a family.

And Mom was the best friend our marriage had. When we'd quarrel or get upset, I'd ask Dorothy's advice and she'd step in and smooth out the bumps; she was always there for us. Dexter was a frequent presence also, but I never knew what he might bring over. One morning in late spring he showed up with a tiller and plowed us a garden to tend, On the lot next to another house we move to later he started several rows of corn.

Dexter died this late October just before his Halloween birthday, at ninety-three, after several years in the nursing home. We went to his funeral in Huntington just eight weeks ago.

This afternoon Mom died as well, very quickly. She was eighty-eight, and again, only a few weeks away from her birthday February 22. She had "left us" for all intents many years before, poor soul, with acute Alzheimers, and in recent years she often couldn't recognize us for a time when we'd visit, then not at all. But when we went up for Dad's funeral eight weeks ago and visited her, she recognized some of us and even laughed a little when Stephen told her jokes. We got it on videotape, that last visit, to hold onto now. It was the last time she showed any spark of the woman we have loved for so many close years together. By yesterday she had stopped eating and drinking and was taking on fluid in the lungs, and they put her in hospice in Fort Wayne. I got the call to expect the worst within hours earlier today, and by the time Barb got home from school her brother called with the confirmation of their mother's passing.

No, I can't think of any of those mother-in-law jokes I heard growing up. Dorothy basically erased them from my memory with all her friendship, kindness, and love. I feel like I've lost one of the best friends I ever had.

Worlds of Warcraft and Supermonitors

2009-01-04T18:16:00.051-05:00

This is my first blog this year, so I wonder what to report. I guess I'll just express thanks for a great Christmas and New Year's holiday period to my incredible family, whose visit these past days made Barb and me so happy and full of cheer!

I got to see my sons and daughter-in-law, and spend some time with my grandson and granddaughter too. I even got to speak with my New York son because he's a major game-player of World of Warcraft, the incredibly imaginative game from Blizzard corporation of California that produces mages, gnomes, healers, dragons, mechanical chickens to ride around on, shapeshifters and other medieval spirits galore. Since both Scott and Barb play it many hours a day and Mark joins the raids whenever he's not designing sounds in Manhattan, I got a lot of ear time.

This year might be called the year of the big monitor. Barb's always looking for a bigger screen for her WOW quests, and I had already returned the wide screen HP monitor that came with her computer to her desk before Scott arrived and wired in his even larger 21" monitor. Then we bought him a flat panel high-def 32" Visio, and after hooking in a slingbox so he can get cable channels slung to it, he used it for a WOW monitor! That meant Barb got to use his 21" one, which she loved.

We also got Steve and Rhonda a big 52" tv for their new house, which they richly deserved. Their help for Mark's back surgery since June saved us all many thousands in costs. But Scott seized the first chance he got to set it up as even a more humongous 52" high def monitor for WOW, sending his 32" Visio over to Barb to use and making his originally very large 21" monitor look like a handheld toy screen.

They all went home to Kissimmee and Hernando in central and northern Florida today, taking all the big, beautiful, colorful WOW tv/monitors with them, alas. Barb went into shock to see her puny widescreen HP back on her desk. I think she wants a wall.

Lessons of the Holidays

2008-12-10T09:30:00.002-05:00

Christmas season used to be so much fun, especially as a child. But as an adult--a senior adult at that--I'm beginning to empathize with the Grinch. I haven't reached the "Bah-Humbug!" state yet, but in racing all over South Florida looking for those gifts I suspect everyone wants, I'm getting old enough to wish it hadn't become such a frustrating thing.

I can appreciate why more people shop online, but even that can be a chore. Grandpa, God rest his soul, gave up the shopping frenzy after reaching age 75 or so and just gave cash in envelopes at the family gift-opening on Christmas Eve. "Ehh, what's that up in the tree?" he would say and point, and we'd all stare up at some small white envelopes with our names on them which he'd tucked away in branches earlier. We'd try to react with total surprise and delight each year. I thought about doing that, but it seemed like a cop-out since I'm still able to get around like everybody else. Someday it may come to that.

One year he introduced a novel wrinkle to this tradition that spiced things up a bit: he put up the envelopes sealed without any names on them, and let us choose one in turn. One had a twenty-dollar bill in it; one had a ten, another a five, and if memory serves me right, one had a one-dollar bill. He got a real kick out of our greedy reactions as one of us hit the jackpot opening the twenty-dollar envelope, and one got the booby prize one-dollar gift. This casino-style game wasn't very well-received by everyone, however, and he didn't repeat it the next Christmas. But he was just expressing the frustration of holiday shopping we all feel.

This year, as usual, we started off trying to get relatively modest gifts others could match without going into bankruptcy, but we always manage to overspend. We ask all the family members to keep it sane, but they want that "wow!" factor from our reactions when we open their gifts just like we do from them, and they get us too much.

One thing Scott came up with that helps all of us, however, is setting up a Wiki web page we can each access with our own passwords and post what we'd like for gifts, and each family member can change and edit the lists at any time right up through the holiday. Most of us post a variety of things we'd like, some kind of reaching and expensive, some pretty modest, many in between. So shoppers can choose what range they have in mind to give, knowing each gift will be appreciated. Its only disadvantage is the risk of duplications, but discreet phone calls usually help to avoid that. I still try to get one gift for each of them, though, that they really want, something they'll really like. Nevertheless, I end up buying more than one so we'll each have something to open around the tree besides an envelope.

The thing about Christmas giving is it comes but once a year, but it challenges us in many ways like no other holiday. Birthdays, being for only one person at a time, have so much more focus on what we ought to do and are much easier to prepare for. But Christmas is the only time we're expected to consider everyone simultaneously--each family member, each generation, each special friend--all at once, with some token of our love and regard.

So the holidays challenge us financially, personally, spiritually, emotionally, and certainly physically. Expectations are often unattainable, and the stress can be as severe as a job loss or divorce, moving, or an auto accident. It's no wonder Grandpa just had enough of it at some point and the tree envelopes solution made a lot of sense. But the rest of us know it's not as much fun to get a gift so easily given. When we open a present we suspect a lot of thought went into, and maybe effort, frustrations and sacrifice as well, we really do appreciate it, because we know the secret ingredient is love. And any gift given from love is the elusive link we hope for in all this--celebrating Christ's birth.

So Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas one and all.

New Day

2008-11-16T09:01:00.004-05:00

As I look out on a beautiful, crisp morning, I marvel that the sun, indeed, has again had the unmitigated gall to rise on yet another day, despite the world's financial crisis, despite the callous greed of corporate barons, despite the crimes and wars, despite all the sufferings of humanity and prophesies of doom and despair. Doesn't the universe understand how bad and hopeless everything has become?

The sun also rises, the persistent earth still glides silent through time and space, oblivious to all that advises against it, as it has since the world's beginning. Where can a better renewal of hope be found?

Once Burned, Twice Shy

2008-10-22T10:53:00.050-04:00

It has taken me a long look at the policies, promises, and personal characteristics of the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates to finally decide whom I will support this election. To no one's surprise in my family, I will vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin. And I am at the same time very proud of those in my family who strenuously support Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Voting is a personal right, privelege, and patriotic duty of every qualified citizen, and each should vote for whom he or she believes will be the best President, regardless of other pressures.

That decision, however, has not been easy for me. Obama is clearly the more reasonable, relaxed and skilled organizer and facilitator. I expect him to be very adept at building support in Congress for his agenda and effecting major changes in the political landscape, and to administer with grace and alacrity. And I expect him to win, and win big. The reality of the financial crisis of October has handed Barack Obama the American Presidency on a silver platter, and there is nothing McCain or anyone else can do to assuage the angry wave of voters eager to punish the Republicans for it, though the blame goes back a lot farther than the Bush tenure. When the economic recovery comes, Obama will take the credit, though he will have done little, I fear, to bring it about.

The biggest problem I have with an Obama presidency is that I have too vivid memories of another recent silver-tongued orator who could, like Obama, charm the leaves off the trees with his reasonable tone and sincerity, whom several of my loved ones enthusiastically supported for his two terms, and whom I came to view as an out-and-out scallawag, liar, and man of shallow convictions, changing his positions with the polls of public opinion for political expediency instead of acting out of principle.

I readily admit President Clinton was a likable, warm fellow and a gifted politician. But his vaunted economic surplus after eight years came at the cost to me of most of my money. As a teacher of modest income struggling to raise three children, I saw what had been a slight tax rebate each year before Clinton change to a tax bill of several thousand dollars each year of his tenure in the White House. Bill Clinton, I found out to my chagrin, had his hand in my meagre wallet from day one, and I didn't appreciate it one bit, nor his claim to "feel my pain."

Obama, like Clinton earlier, has promised me the moon this campaign, and McCain has not. Barack says he will give me a tax rebate, affordable health care and much more. McCain tells me straight up he will try to keep the war going, lower entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and tax my health benefits if I have any. But I believe McCain and I don't believe Obama. I'm not buying Obama's rhetoric as I once did Clinton's. Once burned, twice shy.

Oh, I wish so much we could find a moderate, sensible person to lead the nation instead of pitting flamboyant personalities against vacuuous demagogues. I don't care about color or gender, or even that much about ideology. I just want a decent, honest, fair-minded person with a little humility who's not out to redistribute the wealth or present an unyielding hardheadedness to the world. Maybe it's asking for incompatible qualities in the same person.

But lacking that person, I will vote for John McCain and hope like the dickens that if by some fluke he is elected that he stays healthy for his first term. I'd hate to entrust the Presidency to Sarah Palin, who seems so gosh darn something to the right that she can't learn to be politically adept in Washington--or at least it would take a while. Biden, on the contrary, would be great, but I'd hate the tragedy it would take to have him step in. Of the four figures involved, I probably admire Joe Biden the most. Had he been the Democratic candidate instead of Obama, I think I would have voted Democratic this time, because despite my ideological disagreements with him, I trust and believe him and have respect for his ability and experience. Why must we always seem to elevate the wrong candidate to the top of the tickets? Is it possible we vote for the best campaigner or the best speaker or the best entertainer instead of the best President? I wonder.

Ben Stein Right On about the Financial Crisis

2008-10-04T08:59:00.057-04:00

I've tried to speculate on what caused our October financial crisis from various writers who sought to blame the Democrats or to blame the Republicans or the Bush economic policies or greedy investors, lenders, banks or other groups. I was looking for a single cause, a single group to blame.

But the best comment I've found so far was Ben Stein's commentary this morning on CBS's Sunday Morning show. It seemed so insightful and on target that I taped it and transcribed his main points pretty much verbatim below:

Liberals pushed lenders to make loans to clearly unqualified borrowers.
Conservatives demanded no regulation of financial markets.
Wall Street lied like mad about the true value of securities they were selling.
Toxic bonds were sold all over the world.
Speculators used fear and massive capital to drive down markets further then sell them short.
Congress was unwilling to investigate or punish fraud.

The blame, then, was shared by both political parties, banks and investment houses, securities exchangers, investors, and both the executive and legislative branches of government.

I agree that all the above were probably culpable. But I would add the insatiable spenders and borrowers who sought to live the American Dream of big houses and expensive lifestyles bought entirely on credit and loans by others instead of by the fruits of their own labors and skills.

After all, no one makes anyone else buy anything. The buyer or borrower himself bears the ultimate responsibility to make prudent choices, and if he does not he has no one but himself to blame. A democracy demands people think intelligently for themselves. If they let others do their thinking for them, they aren't living in a democracy.

The Incorrectness of Political Correctness

2008-10-04T08:59:00.056-04:00

It was a warm and fuzzy feeling to feel the nation's smug satisfaction in having nominated the first African-American Presidential candidate this summer. We were good folks after all, and it looked like maybe we were ready for a real change--until he started beating the sox off the white candidate in the polls following the financial crisis last week.

The financial crisis unleashed an even uglier crisis as crowds showing up at McCain's rallies calling Obama every evil name they could think of: "terrorist", "Arab" (I still don't understand what's demeaning about that) among others, and forcing McCain to defend his opponent's Americanism, honor, and patriotism at the very time he seeks an advantage through encouraging political mistrust of his opponent.

In other words, it was clear there are limits to what many Americans are willing to keep quiet about. The racism and bigotry hasn't disappeared at all. It has merely been held quiet for the sake of political correctness while all seemed under control. Now that Obama appears to be a breath away from actually being the next President, those voices have surfaced in all their ignorance and secret bigotry.

It will be interesting to see how the campaigns handle this newly-vocal, hard-to-believe element among the electorate. Racism has always gone into hiding when threatened to be exposed for the evil it is. That's why klansmen wore sheets. And it's why Hillary supporters, upset when Obama defeated her for the nomination, complained they'd vote for McCain before they'd vote for Obama. But people thought that was just sour grapes their candidate got beat. Maybe those who said it tried to see it that way as well. After all, none could admit they're just not ready to elect an African-American as President. But many would be more honest to admit it.

For all our "progress" in race relations, for all our surface cooperation with politically correct utterances, when things aren't going the way the white majority of this country thinks is to its liking, out come the slurs, the threats, the names and the racism in all it ugliness. So I wonder how far we've really come after all. If things reverse politically and McCain pulls back ahead before the elections, we may never know. After all, everyone wants to feel they are not prejudiced. But I suspect Obama--the uncannily effective organizer, speaker, fundraiser and campaigner who seems certain to win by the electoral numbers no matter what McCain does, He may even have to win by a Supreme Court decision in his favor. For I suspect there are more bigots among us who will claim they support Obama but will vote for McCain in the privacy of the voting booth than anyone imagines. I suspect Obama may win with a substantial electoral vote victory but a very lopsided popular vote minority.

So I wonder if political correctness is really better than unfettered truth, even if it hurts or offends. Maybe it would be better for ignorant bigots to be voicing their ridiculous slurs all along and be shouted down by more rational voices than to put a lid on their views till they won't be contained any longer. I've long believed people have to internalize their values for themselves; they can be encouraged by others but not forced. The proponents of political correctness have gotten legislatures to legally ban prejudice and bigotry in all its public forms, but I fear all they have done is just force it into the secrecy of the heart.

Who Has the Old Maid Now?

2008-10-04T08:59:00.052-04:00

My apologies to any matrons I might offend, but the erstwhile popular card game of Old Maid is surely no more insensitive to mention than the now-politically-incorrect lyrics of Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home" or Mark Twain's common racial slurs in Huckleberry Finn.

The Old Maid in the card game was the one card you didn't want to hold at the game's end, or you lose. Many games have a jinx or gamebreaker property that defeats all the strategies and holdings a skilled player may otherwise amass throughout the game. In pool, for example, you must sink all the balls, but if you inadvertantly sink the 8 ball before the others, you lose, as your opponents cheerfully yell "Scratch!" in derision. Other games of acquisition like Uno, Monopoly, orEuchre penalize you for your properties or card values held at the end of the game. I'm not sure where the expression someone was "left holding the bag" came from, but it represents the symbol of scorn, the "white elephant" no one wants in the end.

And now we come to the sudden, staggering financial crisis of Wall Street, Main Street, New York Washington, world markets--everywhere--coming out of nowhere, taking all the banks and financial firms of Wall Street and all the politicians of both parties (and both Presidential candidates, who were apparently clueless as well) by total surprise and without apparent warning rearing up to ruin our credit, plunge us into homelessness and joblessness, general destitution and deep recession--perhaps depression, perhaps the end of capitalism and free market economy before it's over. We're being forced close to socialized medicine and health care, pushed toward government-controlled energy policy and production and, and now we may be pushed into socialized, government-run economic policy as well, if the trillion-dollar bailout mess doesn't buy the Old Maid card.

Make no mistake, the Old Maid card is the toxic, overvalued mortgages banks greedily made as loans-for-a-day to anyone with a pulse. Never mind whether the sub-prime, low-to-average income borrower understood them or had the faintest hope of making mortage payments; the lender quickly sold them to thirsty investment banks in bundles, passing the Old Maid around the table to somebody else, and getting more money to make more bad loans every week. There was no bad conscience in the lender's heart; the borrower got a nice big home, the mortage company got some good mortgages in the bundle along with the chancey ones and spread the risk, quickly rebundled them and sold them off in mortgage-backed securities to Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, and the Old Maid went on around the table. Everyone was willing to overlook the unattractiveness of the Old Maid in the bundle they held, everyone was willing to say she was beautiful and continue to increase her dowry to suitable suitors as if she were the most beautiful card in the deck.

Then came the mortgage meltdown, the failure of the mortageholders to be able to make their house payments in the face of skyrocketing gas prices along with higher property taxes and insurance premiums based on inflated home prices. Ten thousand homes per day go into foreclosure; two million homes nationwide in foreclosure, jobs lost, factories closing, unemployment lines growing--. It's not that sudden, this crisis. It's the coming to a head of many crises since 9/11. But it was happening to someone else. Someone else had the Old Maid, not us.

Finally someone decided the Old Maid wasn't worth putting more asset risk into and stopped the credit flow. The effect was devastating as one investment firm after another sheepishly admitted they held Old Maids in their hands, and we witnessed the fall of giants: iconic firms like Bear-Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill-Lynch, AIG, and finally Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae themselves, which were created after World War II to make sure home loans would be available to everyone, especially GI's returning from the war. They all failed, and their CEO's scurried off with the good cards in multimillion-dollar golden parachutes.

It took the fall of these giants to awaken the stock market to the crisis the rush to pass on the Old Maid to someone else had caused. And when the Congress failed in its frantic call by the Treasury Secretary to pass a 700-billion-dollar bailout to purchase all the Old Maids from all the banks left standing so the credit could flow again, the stock market lost over a trillion dollars in one day with the largest single point drop in history.

It took a week to make the timid representatives come around and rescue the plan, and they still did so reluctantly, only because of pork sweeteners they could offer their constituents to appease their anger with their own re-elections looming, and only after reassuring themselves about their own careers and fortunes. I think many realized it would be better to face the loss of their political seats than the loss of their own derrierres and personal fortunes in a financial armageddon.

Friday the House of Representatives passed the modified bailout. What it did was agree to take the Old Maid cards from the banks and investment houses--the federal government would hold the bad card through purchase of the toxic mortgage-backed securities from any firms which wished, for a discounted price which would provide immediate relief to revenue flow so that credit could once again flow freely and the nation could avoid a total panic and collapse into another Great Depression that might make the 1929 one seem pretty mild.

When times got better (?) the Treasury could sell them at at least the value paid or perhaps greater price, for after all the homes did not disappear and many had very substantial value and would be attractive to private and institutional investors to buy and sell and live in again, and the revised mortgages could enable many to refinance, stay in their homes, and stem the tide of foreclosure by overanxious, credit-strapped banks and other lenders. The Government was the one place which could afford to wait for several years for a chance to pass the Old Maid on back to the lenders which had originally created her, with a much-improved chance the game would not end before she could be paid off. The bailout this past week bought time for the game to go on, for the Old Maid isn't a threat to anyone so long as the game continues. Only if the game ends does she obtain.

But in the meanwhile, who holds the Old Maid in the deck? Every taxpayer. Welcome to the mysteries of the financial world, neighbor.

Reality Speaks Most Eloquently of All

2008-09-24T17:32:00.050-04:00

First I admit my bias favoring conservativism in government. But that bias doesn't translate to a party affiliation. I have registered as an Independent for decades, and find no reason to change that this November because I jealously guard my right to vote for whomever I feel would make the best President.

To decide whether to vote for Senator Obama or for Senator McCain, I have followed whenever possible all the speeches, news articles, newscasts and opinion pages I could find on the campaigns, the issues, and the candidates since the primaries. And I have seen, with the external realities of world and national events and issues, each of the candidates attempt to grapple with the rapidly-shifting, complex issues facing the nation how each has wrestled to present his positions.

As November approaches, no one could have designed a more dramatic script of crises for both Obama and McCain to confront. Gone are the free and easy days for Presidents to simply memorize and spew forth their party line spontaneously at one whistle stop after another across the land. First there was the underlying issue of a war on two fronts continuing many years longer than anyone imagined or wanted to support. Although most Americans had supported our war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and search for Al Queda leaders wherever they exist, for several years the country has become more divided on whether to support the administration's continuation of the war in Iraq,

The war in Iraq was issue one in the last election and the midterm Congressional elections. It swept George W. Bush back to power for his second term, and within two years wrested both houses of Congress from Republican control. As early as a year ago it seemed the U.S. was losing the war and there was little hope of winning. Voices rose against further funding the war through a succession of several expensive bills as cries of "Bring them home now!" became a chorus.

Then came the troop surge, and it began to succeed, just as the primary season began as well. The war became the main campaign issue for both camps, Obama insisting the war must end regardless, McCain insisting the war continue to the victory the surge had begun to suggest might be possible after all and see it through to the end. John McCain had stood behind the administration's surge nearly alone in the Senate, and his courage was rewarded by a resuscitation of his flaggging campaign, which had seemed nearly lifeless and insolvent last July, and a succession of primary victories which had seemed impossible mere months before, and eventual victory in becoming the Republican nominee.

The war in Iraq was, however, soon to take a back stage to reality again as a succession of hurricanes smashed our Gulf states and focused everything on what to do for timely and effective response. As late as Monday night of the Republican National Convention, as Hurricane Gustav hit New Orleans, the convention had to be postponed--or at least reduced to administrative issues. President Bush and Vice President Cheney stayed in Washington to monitor the federal response. John McCain arranged for his plane to fly Gulf states delegates and their families where needed, and again campaigns took a back seat to real events. No sooner did that storm pass up through the nation's spine than Hurricane Ike came and caused worse. Again, the campaigns could only posture and lament in empathy. Threat, destruction, angst, loss of homes, jobs, and property heaped atop ever-worsening finances on Wall Street, loss of credit, inflated debts and inability of millions to meet their expenses.

The addition of Senator Biden and Governor Palin to the campaigns each caused a flurry of interest, and it seemed the race for President was finally on track for each party to put its best foot forward. The debates were approaching, and I looked forward eagerly to hearing what each had to say about the issues and help me decide my vote--for as I said despite my conservative preferences I recognize the individual is at least equally as important a deciding factor as his political stance. I look for how each decides small matters and speaks and reacts, not just what their scripts say on the hustings. I look for what I hear in the voice and see in their eyes, and the sense of passion each shows, and sense of grace and humor as well, for I will have to live with the next President's manner and speech for the next four years.

Then, it seemed out of nowhere, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve informed Congressional leaders in the late evening urgently convened meeting last Thursday that Armageddon was, effectively, only hours or days away. The United States of America was about to crash in the greatest collapse of the entire economy since the Great Depression. The only way to postpone the collapse was to legislate nearly a trillion dollars of bailout money for purchase of toxic mortgage-related debts from the big financial houses--all of them! And to do it without qualifications or wrangling, immediately! Because the house was on fire, and there was absolutely no time to argue: we had to get out NOW!

This, of course, came in the midst of a tightening Presidential campaign, and on the watch of the most unpopular President since Coolidge, whose credibility for crying wolf prohibited speaking of it to those leaders himself and forced his getting his treasury secretary and fed chairman to do it for him.

Predictably, even those august persons couldn't convey the urgency to the do-nothing Congress, and hearings were instantly arranged to discuss the matter instead of deciding it too quickly. After all, Congress surely had the rest of the week before the break began, and they had to measure the ramifications carefully. And if they had to delay a bit longer, well, surely the markets wouldn't collapse as predicted. It boggled the mind too much. Further, almost to the man and woman, both houses of the legislature were instantly beseiged with an angry, disbelieving constituency that their representatives even dared consider passing such a draconian giveaway to the fatcats of Wall Street to bail out their years of bad loans and mismanagement.

Still, no one wanted to be caught looking indecisive or bringing down the entire economy. Everyone agreed something had to be done. No one agreed what, or when, or how much, or under what conditions. Not much surprise there, sadly. What would these leaders have done in 1775 on July 4, I wonder, with the emerging nation's founding in the balance.
Once again, suddenly no one cared a whit about the Presidential campaigns, or about Barack Obama or John McCain--or even the always-fascinating news and views of Joe Biden or Sarah Palin for that matter.

It's all coming together for Act III now, it seems. And the candidates have agreed to disagree on even whether to suspend their campaigns till the financial crisis is dealt with in Washington, which McCain has decided to do, or to continue to campaign and speak out on what they see as the big issues, which Obama has declared he will do while keeping a watchful eye on unfolding events in Washington, each trying to appear more Presidential in so doing. McCain has said it's no time for politics and speeches or partisan arguments, and has cancelled participating in the scheduled debate Friday night, saying that it's time to deal with a vital real issue as senators and senate leaders, which both are.

Since both McCain and Obama view the financial crisis with similar ideas about what is needed, surprisingly, the only distinctions between the two I can make out are about how they conducted themselves in their decisions. McCain quickly raced to embrace the issue and return to Washington to join his colleagues in forming a response. Obama insisted on restraint and deliberation and called for concerted action in a joint statement plan which McCain jumped out ahead of with his unexpected, unilateral announcement.

Which do I think acted more Presidential? Decisive but impulsive? or cautious but noncommittal? In the face of the urgency claimed, it would seem McCain wins. But in the reality of the nation's overwhelming opposition, it would appear to be Obama. Again, I couldn't see any daylight between their behaviors that would seal my vote.

But I did catch a glimpse of something, I think, in the way McCain raced ahead and in solemn patriotic tones pre-empted his agreed-upon joint declaration with Obama, whereas Obama honored his and refused to make a big deal out of it against McCain. That, to me, seemed more Presidential.

It would also seem to me that this financial crisis, on top of the horrible economic state of affairs we have suffered through for many months now, and the draining wars on our national psyche, or what's left of it--would hand the Presidency to Senator Obama on a silver plate! I'm not sure any Republican could overcome the entire nation's dissatisfactions with the plagues of locusts and dust which have ravaged this land of late.

But I have learned that events not of any candidate's making, or even his political positions and ideology seem to shape the nature of the race more than the candidate himself, perhaps. Reality speaks most eloquently. And forty days is time enough--for Noah to sail the world and for something else--some other unforseen crisis--to happen. But it will be hard to top this one.

It Is Mete to So Do

2008-09-11T18:57:00.050-04:00

I got up today focused on tomorrow, September 12, my son's birthday, his last in his '20's. I was miffed about the way the New York post office blew the express mail delivery of the presents his mother and I sent. They got it there in twelve hours alright, but since he was working in the city, just left a notice to come get it at the post office. That's not what I paid $16 for, so I was "plenty hoo-hoo," as Hawaiians sometimes say when steamed.

Then I turned on the morning news and realized it was September 11. But in a real sense there is no more September 11. There is only 9/11, a day that will, like December 6, live in infamy as one of the most tragic days in our history.

I didn't want to get wrapped up in the commemorations and ceremonies at Ground Zero in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and the field near Shanksville, Pennasylvania. But I couldn't turn away. I couldn't turn away because I saw the faces of my countrymen and was riveted in the solemnity of the moment. As an American, I could not put 9/11 behind me, not this year, nor last year, nor any other of the seven years since September 11, 2001.

At 8:48 that morning I had just entered my humanities classroom at the university and was preparing to teach my 9:00 class when a colleague stepped in at the door and said, "CNN says a plane just flew into the World Trade Center!" It was terrible, I knew--a terrible accident, like the light plane that flew into the Empire State Building some years before. But when my friend opened my door again a few minutes later and cried, "Another plane just flew into the other tower!" everything changed in my mind. It was no accident. We were at war. My nation was under attack, on our soil, for the first time in my life. I didn't know by whom, but I immediately suspected terrorists, who had threatened us repeatedly and attacked our embassies abroad, our Marine barracks in Lebanon, the U.S.S. Cole and other targets around the world but had till then never succeeded in launching an attack on our soil.

My students were frightened and wanted me to cancel class. I said, "Anyone who wants to can go, but I intend to stay right here and teach this course. If I get scared off, the terrorists win." It was a pathetic false bravado I guess, but no one left. The horror of the full scope of the attacks unfolded after classes when we learned of the attacks on the Pentagon and United flight 83 over Shanksville en route to Washington when brave men charged the cockpit and saved an attack on the U.S.Capitol, or the White House, or other key target, readily sacrificing their own lives to save other Americans.

Yes, it was indeed a day that will live in infamy. But I also had a personal link to the events of that day, and I didn't find out till a couple of days later when I opened my morning paper and saw the face of a man I passed by in our Publix Supermarket aisle not more than a month or two before, peering out of a sinister black and white head and shoulders shot on the front page. His name was Mohammed Atta. He piloted the first plane into the north tower.

As I had approached and passed that man in that aisle we were alone, but so shaken had I been when I glanced into his intense eyes that I sought my wife in the next aisle to tell her, "Barb, that man in the next aisle there looks evil! I mean, really evil. He gives me the creeps!" My reaction was not unique. Residents of Tara Apartments where he stayed during his months in Coral Springs before the attack said he always made them uneasy also. I guess we had good reason. To this day I do not believe in judging people by their looks and recognize that appearances are often deceiving, but I am convinced that the hatred for this country and its people that that man carried in his heart could not escape notice in his face.

Today, though seven years have passed, I felt the need to listen, to watch, and at times to pray. I was very impressed with the ceremonies dedicating the amazingly fitting Pentagon Memorial, the Ground Zero reading of victims' names, the gathering on the site of United Flight 83 near Shanksville, and the solemn honoring of all Americans who perished in the attacks of that day.

When I had begun watching I was worried I would just get depressed. But the more I watched, the more I felt uplifted and proud of my country, its courage and bravery, its refusal to set aside the past and its lessons, and the sensitivity it showed to so respectfully honor the lives of those who perished that day. I saw today that America I grew up in with such pride, and felt the spirit of 9/11 once again which drew us all so close together as a people.

Here comes G through J

2008-09-02T18:59:00.050-04:00

The bowling alley of hurricanes and tropical storms heading our way is in full operation: Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike, Josophine--they're all lined up for their turn to try to wipe us off the low-lying sands of South Florida. My community is on a mountaintop at 16 feet above sea level. That's because I'm almost 20 miles inland. But some of the oldtimers here tell of rowboats and canoes rowing and paddling on Sample Road, my nearest main street only 50 feet away.

Since moving here in Coral Springs in 1998, we've experienced probably twenty named hurricanes, some of them like Wilma, Katrina, and Andrew severe, ripping out our screen room and toppling our tall ficus trees. Now we can only watch what the tracks bring us and hope to dodge the hail of bullets this month. Three years ago, the year Katrina hit New Orleans, we had so many named storms the National Weather Service ran out of alphabetical names and had to go into the Greek alphabet to name them all. Remember that? I think the last English one was Hurricane Zebulon.

Then, by late October, just as suddenly as they had formed, they were gone. Our hurricane season begins June 1 and lasts till November 30 each year. But we very seldom get any major action till late July or August. When we do, they form off Cape Verde at the African coast and drift across the tropics westward. When they get into the Caribbean, however, they try to organize themselves into waves that hang around with nowhere to go till they decide to spin up into a tropical storm or hurricane and try to head north.

The natural track of hurricanes is to circle the Atlantic Ocean basin, which in normal times is surmounted by the Bermuda High, the humongous high pressure system that is the main guiding pressure for these storms. The hurricanes try to go up off the east coast of America and circle around until they cool off and dissipate in more northern latitudes. But this arrangement is often interrupted, especially at these peak times of September into October, by low pressure troughs that come across the continent. When one of these displaces the Bermuda High, whatever storm spins under Florida gets sucked right up to the north following that trough, and voila, we get hit. Sometimes the Bermuda High expands its high pressure westward to the Gulf, and voila, Katrina, Gustav, and other storms can't curve north till they get into the Gulf head north or west to the Gulf coast.

All these patterns are very cyclical, and we've had years where hurricane after hurricane sweeps up off our Florida peninsula and smacks the Carolinas silly, one after another. Other years the most ferocious-looking systems appear to be headed straight for us, only to be blown to bits by upper-level wind shear caused by El Nino or La Nina. Every once in awhile we get a hurricane that loops around all over the place and even returns to hit somewhere again. And Fay, our most recent to hit Florida itself, made no fewer than four separate landfalls as it curved up from Key West, headed east across to the Atlantic, curved back into Jacksonville and across to the west, emerged into the Gulf again, then came ashore one last time at Tallahassee and Pensacola. The only major areas of the state Fay didn't hit were Miami and Tampa. We felt her winds here for a week.

Hurricanes and Tropical Storms are part of living in Florida. We don't take them for granted, but we realize they are part of nature and forces to be reckoned with. We prepare for them all and hope for the best. But we realize they are nature's way of transferring billions upon billions of cubic feet of warm, moist tropical air for cooler, temperate air of northern latitudes. They are nature's air conditioners/humidifiers, and the exchanges must be made to avoid cataclysmic disruption of the climate worldwide. We stand in awe of these storms and respect them. But we'd still just as soon they do their mighty work offshore and in unpopulated areas, and steer around us.

Timid forecasters don't help anyone.

2008-08-16T18:17:00.051-04:00

This weekend the first credible threat to become a hurricane headed our way appeared last Thursday as a disorganized tropical mass east of Puerto Rico. Unsure how to report it and not wanting to panic the public unnecessarily, our local NBC weatherman tried his best to ignore it completely. The other South Florida weatherpersons at least said we'd need to monitor it closely.

By Friday afternoon several stations reported the storm had reached 40 mph, and Tropical Storm Fay was officially the sixth named tropical system of the season. Though still very disorganized and slow-moving to the west, Fay was expected to brush south Cuba and head into the Gulf as had the past several systems, But Fay had a different potential track: a low pressure system centered over Denver was on the move south and east. The National Hurricane Center had projected it could arrive as a trough which could curve Fay north into Florida.

Friday afternoon my NBC timid friend acknowledged Fay but again refused to push the button that it posed any danger to us or we should begin to prepare for it. He reported only the facts of the present moment: Fay was now a tropical storm, moving West at 14-16 mph across Hispaniola. On to the local forecast.

I switched to Fox. A lady weatherman was urging the public to make preparations this weekend. Buy bottled water, batteries, gas, and any needed non-perishable foods, lumber or medicines--whatever would be needed to last about three to five days without power, should Fay curve our way. The cone of possible track of the storm's center, at that time, included the entire state.

I turned to The Weather Channel. A meteorologist reported Fay had the potential to "go right up the spine" of Florida, from the tip to the top.

Today our NBC timid soul finally got on board. Yes, we'd better get prepared, just in case. When I went to the grocery this evening people were hauling out cartsfull of bottled water and other supplies, trying not to appear panicked but not very successfully; their purchases belying their fear. I've seen that look in my fellow citizens' eyes before, several times. It says I can expect to drive in a community of total pandemonium if the power goes out, dodge the terrified fellow dodgem drivers as we play chicken at every dark intersection's automatic 4-way-stop mandate, grab every item on the grocery shelves like a Macy's supersale, and expect to hear the chorus of chain saws and generators all through the day and hot night till civilization is restored a block at a time.

School starts Monday, if Fay lets it happen. The districts won't let the children stand out in a storm, so if Fay comes close, this school year will begin with an extra day or two's vacation. We're used to this situation in South Florida; several years' first days have been postponed or interrupted by the approach of threatening weather.

But Monday doesn't give us much time. We have only Saturday and Sunday to prepare, board up, buy our supplies, set up our plans and get ready as best we can. I would have hoped that my NBC meteorologist would have been a bit more forthcoming about the possibilities of Fay coming our way. TV weathermen can go too far the other way, admittedly, and panic the population into a needless run on the system, but "We'll keep an eye on it for you" just doesn't cut it. At least report what the National Weather Service is predicting, and the National Hurricane Center is forecasting as the possibilities, given the interaction of pressure systems and trends. I think my NBC guy just looked out the window at the hot, sunny day, like most, and concluded nothing was amiss.

As I write, Tropical Storm Fay is projected to become a category one hurricane shortly after turning north over open water in the Florida Straits between Cuba and the Keys, continue north as a category one or category two hurricane, pass over Key West, and Tampa, and move up the entire state's west coast, curving further inland and eventually exiting into Georgia or Alabama.
Several years ago Charlie, a similar storm came inland before expected and curved right up the I-4 corridor. It decimated Kissimmee's streets, where my son, Scott, huddled alone in his dark apartment and watched neighbors' roofs blow off, street lights crash to the pavement, storefronts and signs blow to pieces and trees fall so thickly you couldn't even tell where the streets were. The city looked like a war zone. And Charlie was only a category two, they say.

Tropical Storm Fay could, with only a minor deviation, move up the Eastern side of the state instead of the Gulf side, as a category one or two hurricane just as easily, taking out half the metropolitan population and property without surprising anyone here. Or maybe the center of the state, or just as understandably, pass harmlessly northwestward into the Gulf and fizzle out.
With hurricane tracks it's impossible to know for sure.

I've seen hurricanes head north toward the Carolinas, do a complete loop, and return to S. Florida for another punch, like Katrina did several years ago, returning as a category one and crossing from east to west into the Gulf before curving north once more and eventually intensifying into the category four or five monster that devastated New Orleans.

One thing obvious to all who watched and most who reported, is that we were certain to feel the effects of Fay in South Florida no matter where she decided to go, or how weak or intense she would become. That much was clear last Thursday and should have been on every station then. Weathermen who don't have the courage to push the button and say "Look out, everybody, here comes trouble!," even at the risk of being labelled a Chicken Little, shouldn't be on the air.

Comments Appreciated

2008-06-22T15:53:00.000-04:00

As an occasional blogger I've come to accept that a lot of visitors drop by for a minute or less and move on when they find no pictures or rants of interest. But I've also come to treasure a few non-family fellow bloggers who regularly read this blog and sometimes offer comment. My recent paeon lamenting changes going on at my university (and effectively cancelling core English and Art Appreciation requirements I'm qualified to teach) apparently touched a nerve in two favorite readers, by the thoughtful and passionate comments they offered (read in two posts below). They are friends and I view them as colleagues, though we've never met outside our blogs. I appreciate what insights they've given me about teaching and higher education very much. Thanks, Pat and Carol Anne. I'm keeping my mind open to returning to the classroom if I get antsy, and it would probably be at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton or Broward Community College if I do. I, too, have taught and administered in four-year universities, private colleges, and community colleges; and I, too, enjoy the latter perhaps best. But for now, I'm kind of looking forward to a semester of down time this fall to try some other ideas. At 69, with gas prices making driving even across town regularly a pain in the wallet, and with SoFla drivers all but running one off the road or shooting one if he looks askance at them, I'm in no hurry to jump back into the fray.

Grand Ole Opry-- Super Show, Super Folks

2008-06-22T12:54:00.051-04:00

On our way to Indiana to see the folks this June, we stopped in Nashville for a Grand Ole Opry show. Last year we tried to see the fabled show, but there was no performance the night we were in town. We made up for that by watching some of the regulars of the Grand Ole Opry like Jeannie Seeley perform in Nashville Nights supper and show near our campground. But this year we made it on a performance night, and we loved the experience.

On Briley Parkway the main building (there are four Grand Ole Opry sites) sits next to a huge Gaylord Grand resort hotel on one side and a big shopping mall on another, so parking was no problem, and our tickets of $39 each for Mezzanine front row seats were very reasonable, I thought. Outside before the show we posed with Minnie Pearl and Hank Williams and Roy Acuff live lookalikes, browsed the souvenir store, and listened to a warmup band on the front plaza.

Inside, the seating is surprisingly on long curving benches rather than individual armrested seats, but the padded benches were comfortable for the two-hour show. As in any broadcast studio, the wood stage had equipment strewn about everywhere, with cameras. cables, microphones, lighting and props skillfully manouvered by operators and stagehands who pirhouetted about in an intricate choreography. Talent waited in the shadows diagonally downstage left to await their call, and at eight o'clock on the dot a brief history of the Grand Ole Opry, its stars, novices, and rich traditions flashed over three jumbotron screens left, center, and right. An announcer approached the podium and introduced Jeannie Seely, hostess for the first segment (sponsored by Cracker Barrel.) Other acts whom she introduced were Jimmy C. Newman, the Whites, and Carolina Rain.

If we'd paid closer attention to past Opry broadcasts on radio and tv more, we wouldn't have been surprised. We weren't just watching a closed musical show. We were involved in a live network tv and radio broadcast, syndicated worldwide as part of the studio audience du jour. The show was in four thirty-minute segments, each with two to four different acts, commercial pauses and its own brand sponsor.

The second half-hour (sponsored by Bass Pro Shops) was headlined by the venerable pint-sized cowboy crooner Little Jimmy Dickens, all of 87 years old this month and still going strong. His only complaint: something in his ear was bothering him, and he went to the doctor, who retrieved a suppository. "Oh thank goodness," he told the doc, "Now I know where I lost my hearing aid." The Little General Cloggers from Kennesaw, Georgia clogged away onstage and Mountain Heart bluegrass band completed the segment.

9:00 to 9:30 featured Jean Shepard, Bobby Osborne and The Rocky Top X-press, hootin' and hollerin' out "Good Old Rocky Top, Tennessee," with Bobby's son on bass fiddle (sponsored by Humana.)

But the last half-hour was for me the best. The curtain rose on Riders of the Sky singing the Rawhide theme they recorded originally for the hit show, and they did Roy Rogers' "Happy Trails to You" and Gene Autry's "Back In the Saddle Again" with warm audience participation. Connie Smith and Kathy Mattea closed the evening with performances sponsored by Johnson Controls.

I have to admit that country/western isn't always my favorite style of music, but overall it is more tuneful, foot-tapping in its rhythms and listenable in its harmonies than a lot of other more popular genres. I think everyone has a little bit of country in him or her, and some of it I really enjoy. It's a national music, the closest thing we probably have to a traditional American genre. Jazz is American as well, but not perhaps as enduring and unchanging. The country/western music we heard this night was the same fifty years ago, in style and instrumentation, themes of love and heartache, patriotism and courage, religion and family. And far from its lyrics bashing the society and everything in it like rap's often trash-talking obscenities often do, country/western is unabashedly patriotic and proud to be an American. I like that--a lot.

As we left for our motel, I couldn't help but be impressed with a couple of things about Nashville's stars, and the overriding impression was one of honesty and openness, no guile, no phoniness, no pretentiousness in any of them. They seem totally at home onstage or off, willing to share their lives and talents with anyone and anxious to help newcomers make it to the top. Unlike the superstars of Broadway and Hollywood, they don't seem to have the giant egos that make them like planets in orbit, avoiding the pull of other planets and stars, isolated in their own groupies and fans and very lonely. These performers--some multimillionaires--are seemingly comfortable in their own skins with all levels of society and with each other.

And why not? After all, there are thirteen hundred and fifty-two guitar pickers in Nashville, according to Lovin' Spoonful in "Nashville Cats." Everybody is a singer-songwriter, and they write about their lives and feelings. It's one of the few non-phony professional groups I've ever met, and I felt right at home. I remembered last year when we saw the Opry stars and regulars perform on their off-night, they waited on us, served us our dinners before they took to the stage to do the show. I remember the drummer bringing me my iced tea, and our waitress joining in onstage for a couple of numbers.

On our way back to South Florida we stopped in Gatlinburg for some Christmas shopping and the local ambience, and heard some more country/western local bands performing on the streets. So we had fun despite the straight line route this year, and counted ourselves fortunate. There are far fewer travellers on the roads this year than we've found in years past. People are taking "staycations," as the travel editors call them on network news.

USA Today reported Americans drove thirty billion fewer miles in the first quarter this year than during the same period last year. Yet that amount represents only 3% of our annual fossil fuel consumption, I believe it said. That is a staggering figure indeed.

No Teaching beyond Christmas?

2008-05-17T10:52:00.002-04:00

My college is changing its core curriculum and is basically no longer requiring things I teach: English, Literature, Humanities and Art Appreciation. They say the accrediting body, Southern Association, has changed its distribution requirements, and a consultant has assured them they can do it. It puts my continued teaching there at risk. But I'm doing the art apprec. this summer term--probably for the last time, and a "shadow English II Lit" this fall for those who have already completed English Composition I and will need it.

Whether they are risking re-accreditation, I don't know. I've been retired fulltime and out of the information loop for several years, teaching part-time only. But I can't imagine parents putting out the kind of money they charge to send their sons and daughters to a university that doesn't require English, math, humanities or public speaking courses. They say they're replacing them with interdisciplinary "dialogues" that students will begin in their sophomore years, and all faculty will teach.

I think they're crazy, and I predict that rather than enhance enrollment they will find students leaving in droves and not being able to recruit new ones. Who in their right mind will go to a university whose credits will no longer transfer, and may not continue to be regionally accredited? But I may not understand the issues, as I said, being on the outside now.

I had hoped to continue teaching at least one more year before I turn away from the rigors of the classroom altogether. I realize I will need to at some point. But I'm not looking forward to retiring completely. And I know I don't want to do the usual things well-meaning relatives and friends suggest to keep busy: volunteer work, golf, tennis, involvement in clubs, groups, church work, part-time work here or there. I'll be damned if I'll be a Walmart greeter or help people find galvanized nails at Home Depot. I'm a teacher

It looks now like I'll be able to keep teaching through Christmas, enough to stay out of trouble. I only need one section a couple of days a week to do the trick. Two is better, but at this point I'll take one. There's not much distance between one and two, but there's a vast distance between none and one. I'm hoping the university will come to its senses at some point and scrap the changes to the core. But I don't think it will happen for a year or two at the earliest, and that may be too late. If I run out of teaching opportunities before I'm ready to call it quits, I may try to get a class at one of the community colleges within driving distance. "Hello and welcome to Walmart" is not for me.

Parade of Shames

2008-05-06T19:22:00.055-04:00

I could hardly believe my eyes and ears as I witnessed the evening news cover a limosine full of prospective home buyers being paraded from foreclosed home to foreclosed home in South Florida by realtors hired by the lenders to unload the seized properties. The video was festive and the mood bubbly. Here were bargain basement prices for many homes of much greater value than the asking price, and the sellers and buyers alike were drooling. One clip showed a small group of them toasting the occasion with champagne.

It made me ill. The apparent attitude was as if someone in a monopoly game had landed on a high-improvement property of theirs and they now got to seize all the opponent's properties, cash, and other assets and put him out of the game. How could people be so crass! Don't they realize they are dealing with people's former homes? With their lives? With what remains as all they had to live in? With what, but for the hasty greed and avarice of unscrupulous lenders, they would have been able to still be in until this horrible recession passes?

Millions, we're talking about, Millions of families have lost their homes across the nation to foreclosure, even as they have lost their jobs, in many cases permanently, and the government just drags its feet trying to do something to slow the process and get the banks and finance companies to work something out so people can stay in their homes. What's the rush? Those houses are not going anywhere. What's the rush to ruin lives? It's not like they will make more money by seizing and selling them for pennies on the dollar, for gosh sake.

And as for the parade of shames (not the parade of homes), if those champagne-tippling philistines have the money to bargain-shop for houses they don't even need for themselves but undoubtedly want to flip just for a fast fat profit, why don't they use it instead to try to help those foreclosed people stay in their homes and ride out these tough times? They're the ones who need help. And for that matter, the banks who created the crisis with their sub-prime loans, the government who refused to regulate it, the rich oil companies who have exascerbated the poverty of those poor families with their obscene gas prices, big corporations, the churches, synagogues, mosques, charities, and anyone else who can afford to offer assistance should do so as well. This is an unprecendented human crisis, not a time for bargain shopping. There aren't many things that are worse for a family than to lose its home. It's bad enough when it happens from natural disasters or accidental causes, but to look out your window and see a limo of greedy vultures drive by sipping champagne and eyeing your house is enough to push one over the edge.

At the very least, lose the champagne and lose the limo. If you can live with the idea that you have a home that was basically stolen at the misfortune of another, then at least have the decency to buy it quietly and discretely.

If an infinite number of monkeys and typewriters....

2008-05-01T08:22:00.001-04:00

Discouraged by no sales of my spreadsheet budget after a couple of weeks' trying, I turned again to internet publishing to renew my hopes of rewarding enterprise. I'd like to call it internet publishing because blog sounds so blug, though it's just a lazy word for weblog, but internet publishing sounds like a respectable use of my time.

I quickly decided I'm too old to fight the code for setting up my own site from scratch with Frontpage or MySQL or Perl modules, etc., which younger geeks seem to take to like ducks to water, and my best bet would be to either use this space on Writetosayit or start afresh with another blog. The thing about blogs on established host sites is that they're so easy to set up and maintain that I can get a lot of bang for my buck with minimal technical hassle. So I went shopping for another space to vent my angst.

There are many free and low-cost blog hosting sites out there, and I've tried several over the years. But one which was still on Google's directory of weblog hosts was BlogHi. BlogHi used to be very appealing to me. Along with Writetosayit, my nbknotes blog there attracted me to write well over a hundred posts, and offered several strengths I haven't found either here at Blogspot or anywhere else. Not only was it a free blogsite, it was the best-syndicated and best-set-up site of any I found, and within several months I found my posts reaching hundreds through the rss links and the site itself.

Out of curiosity I clicked it again, and was amazed to find my former blog still just as I had left it when I took my portrait avatar and my xml file of posts I'd written, and migrated to wordpress. The posts were gone, but the notebook template, header, and other sections and choices I'd made earlier were still there, all ready for me to just write another post! In fact, since I still have that .xml and .jpg, I realized I could quickly restore everything to my former BlogHi blog and continue as if I had never dropped out! Maybe my search for a "new" blog was over.

So I wrote and posted a little blurb welcoming myself back after a few years' hiatus, and felt really good about using BlogHi's comfortable and efficient, user-friendly and intuitive features. I was home again, in a sense.

In fact, with its advantages, I couldn't think why I left in the first place. I remembered a rough patch when the owner, an engineer at a Munich company, got out of it and sold it to someone else. I had scrambled to save my posts and migrate to another site before BlogHi closed up shop.

But what I had forgotten was the real reason I left BlogHi. And as I proudly reviewed my page as published, I scrolled down and instantly remembered. There, at the bottom, was what appeared to be some sort of box ad for a GPS device, with a button to push for more information. Foolishly, I pushed it, and made a few cents for the new BlogHi owners through Google's AdSense. You see, at BlogHi, the writer benefits from a free space to blog and post all he wants, but the company gets the money that accrues from advertising on the published pages, not the author.

I was livid. In fact, I remember blogging against that unfairness at BlogHi itself when I was getting quite a number of hits, only to find many of my fellows commenting, "Hey, it's a win-win situation, isn't it? We get free blogspace and syndication; they get some revenue to defray their costs."

That's not the way I saw it. I figured if I wrote it and chose to let Google put some non-intrusive ads on my pages through AdSense, I should get the revenue, or at least the bigger part of it, not the host. I felt like one of the proverbial infinite number of monkeys chained to an infinite number of typewriters, pecking away endlessly to see if all the great books would be written. That, I realized, was what really drove me from BlogHi hosting. I didn't want to feel like an employee every time I sat down to enter a post, with someone else reaping the profit of my efforts.

It's not that I expect to get rich at blogging or "internet publishing" of any kind, and I recognize that few personal blogs attract that kind of traffic to generate more than a pittance of revenue. But it's that the policy of BlogHi taking the potential pot with no way to reward the writer kills the hope of tangible rewards. And every writer hopes for tangible rewards in time, no matter who he or she is.

A host can't just give us a ream of blank paper and say, "Go to it, Bubba." We write and we publish our ideas because we hope that over time somehow we'll attract readers. And we hope that if our words attract enough readers, we'll be able to make some money at it. AdSense is the most accessible way a writer has to do that. Take that collection plate away, and the hope of income goes with it. We're left with only the rewards of seeing our ideas in print and receiving readers' comments--significant rewards to be sure, but not tangible.

I haven't tried AdSense here yet, and I doubt I will. There's something about spotting some ad for a GPS on my blog page that raises my dander. But I may try it on another blogsite, just to keep the hope of tangible reward alive.

Going Down to the Office

2008-04-30T18:21:00.050-04:00

When we were selling our hillside house in Huntington, Indiana, we were in frequent phone contact with our realtor, Marcellus Scher, and he'd always say when he'd be available "down at the office" next Tuesday morning or this Friday after four o'clock, etc. Sometimes when we'd call his wife would answer and say he was "down at the office," and we should call there, and repeat the number. But we never knew exactly where that office was. He had been with a big Realty office downtown for several years, but wasn't currently.

Finally one day we got an offer that he wanted us to drop by his house out on Stults Road to hear, and we drove out of town to the address.

I knew the house well. My parents' friends had lived there years before--a nice little Cape Cod box with a finished dormered second floor upstairs and a finished paneled basement. It was a comfy country cottage I'd been in in several times previously. Scher greeted us at the front door and sheparded us through the front hall directly into the down staircase.

"I went down to the office this morning," he said, "and I got an offer on your house--just a second." He fumbled with some keys and found the one he wanted, unlocked a solid door and stepped into "the Office," inviting us to follow and sit down around a big round antique table.

Thirty minutes or fewer later we had accepted the offer in writing and sold our house, and Scher locked up his "Office" as if it were located in the most insecure part of town instead of at the foot of his basement stairs, and we all climbed back up and were seen out the front door, with a nod to Missus Scher who glanced at us over her shoulder from the kitchen.

We've often chuckled at how serious Marcellus was about keeping a professional demeanor as he went to work on definite schedules by going ten steps down to his basement. Here was a man who kept his work separated from his private life with a zeal.

Now, as I try to feel my way into more internet publishing and marketing activities, I find it remarkable my "business," my "office," is sitting here on my laptop computer that I normally work with on my family room couch. When I go online to try to increase traffic to new sites or write some more help menus for the spreadsheet budget I'm trying to sell online through affiliate sites, I laughingly tell Barb "Well, guess I'll go on down to the office today," and she knows exactly what I mean.

We Can Hide but We Can't Run.

2008-04-08T16:24:00.053-04:00

I'm not sure what the main industry is in South Florida, but advertising is surely right up there. People who don't live here don't know what they're missing when they open their SoFla mailboxes. When I open mine I find layers of sundry ads of various sales and promotions, all unattached and slipping over each other so that only someone with a strong grip can keep them together long enough to get to the trash. These fillers clutter the mail and hide the first class items so well in their unbound, unstapled, loose-fitting, varied-size sheets and folds that we've more than once tossed something we really needed. Surely the military would like to know what their printers coat these thinner-than-newsprint flyers with, that makes them slicker than teflon or jewelers' oil.

And these nuisance ad bundles are there anew every day. The idea of them flying apart is so you have to pick them up, and presumably in doing so have to look at them. And it works. Frequently one or more of them slips out and falls on the grass, and despite my attempts not to look, I'm visually drawn to some sale price for some product or service before I can crumple it in my hand.

Today I learned from one that "I'm too busy to clean my own house," and that "Bertha and Crew Maid and Painting Service" would do it for me, for only-- . And from another I learned that "Loyalty like mine should be rewarded," therefore I should drop my cellphone carrier and switch to AT&T. Well, that doesn't seem very loyal, does it.

The magazines we get that seem so thick and meaty with reading when we carry them inside and open their pages dissolve into limp little pamphlets as they empty their loose ad insert cards onto our table. Barb then goes through and finds the glued ones and rips them out and throws them on the floor in disdain. What's left is a flapping mess with many jagged pages, and of course most of those are filled with ads also.

One particularly irksome new wrinkle has popped up on the front page of our Sun Sentinel newspaper, which now uses stick-on ads right over the front page headlines! Similar to sticky notes, these thin little three-inch square pests with their thinly-gummed backs can be gently peeled off and removed, but they still take some of the day's top story with them. Barb sticks them on our table items and vitamin bottles, where they continue to work their magic every time we reach for the Equal or pop a Stresstab. Again, the idea is to force me to notice something I didn't want to before the Sun-Sentinel will let me see something I did want to. Bad on them, say I, shame shame.

But advertisers are a shameless species. Some have promoted putting large ads in geostationary orbit so we are involuntarily urged to "Eat at Joe's" every time we try to look up and enjoy a pretty sunset. Others want to plaster their commercial messages over the inside of public restroom doors so we have something to read while--well--something to read, other than the graffiti. Still others want to decorate our shopping cart handles or force us to walk over their ads underfoot as we wheel through grocery aisles. If there were any way to invade our sleep, or even our eternal rest, I'm confident they would try. I'm wondering how long it may be before we will stare down at a dearly departed viewing and see "Betty's Beautiful Bouquets" tastefully arranged on the pillow next to the remains.

Sometimes we try to revolt against the onslought, but it's like shadow boxing with the rain. We join the national "Do Not Call" list, but of course the politicians exclude their causes, so we're swamped with electioneers' calls this year with its heated contests. Charities are also exempt from exercising self-control, and there are always those that just don't comply. We still get a barrage of calls from our college alumni associations every evening, and the "frat of police," as our caller I.D. announces. Fortunately, the caller I.D. works, so our super-cellular voice-announcing, coded-color-and ringtone phones all go off and broadcast "PFRATF OF POLIZ" with a loud, obnoxiously-instrumented tune so we don't inadvertantly bite out of habit. I guess we have barricaded ourselves about as well as we can against the commercial world. But I'm equally sure they will forever strive to find a way to wheedle and twist their way around our defenses.

imposed upon by most indirect causes

2008-03-25T16:03:00.050-04:00

Lest we forget how affected we can be by those myriad things that happen even continents away, consider my poor student from Venezuela who went home for her spring break. While there, she learned that her government refused to renew her visa to return to Florida and finish her semester at our university.

I seem to recall reading something about Hugo Chavez's threats to withhold visas to the U.S., among his usual rants against us "Yankee Imperialists," which are so frequent I hardly pay attention most of the time. But this time it affected me directly. My student's predicament led her to contact my administration, who promptly contacted me to arrange online work with her so she can continue to meet her requirements in my course and earn her credits. I'm also asked to report back to the administration as I proceed so they can monitor the situation.

The extra workaround isn't difficult but is time-consuming, as with any individual needs outside the regular class meetings. It's not really part of my responsibility as an adjunct instructor, but I'll do it, because it was no fault of the student--nor any fault of my university or even me. It's Hugo Chavez's fault, as I see it. Yet there's not much any of us can do otherwise, in fairness to the student.

I'm sure she flew down without her texts or assignments--it was her spring break after all--expecting to fly right back. But all her stuff's up here in her room, and I have no idea how or when or even if, she'll ever get it back.

The incident reminded me how fortunate I am to live in a free country which offers me at least some protections against the infantile whims and pouting gestures of a despotic leader.

The Ties That Bind

2008-03-14T10:49:00.051-04:00

Once again my state, Florida, has bolixed up an election process, and once again it has managed to appear foolish in the eyes of the nation, and once again it's citizens are all a-dither for something to be done to set it right--without paying for it, of course.

In a pushy attempt to pre-empt the national Presidential primaries, our ex-governor Jeb and the Republican-dominated legislature moved up our primary by a couple of weeks, over the objections of just about everyone else in the country, including the candidates. Not screaming so loudly was Michigan, which made a similar cut to the front of the line by moving its own primary earlier as well. The Republican Party and the Democratic Party quickly levied punishment for breaking the rules: Florida's Democratic delegates were denied seats at the national convention, thus disenfranchising the state's democratic voters and rendering their primary votes moot. The state's Republican delegates were divided by half at that party's national convention. No delegates campaigned in the state, by their mutual agreement (though Hillary came down to crow over her victory briefly after the vote).

So the move to increase influence in the primary selection process backfired in spades. Not only did the state receive far less exposure to the candidates, with the chance to influence issues and positions, but they got next to zip. And worse, even with the primary taking place January 29, its results didn't alter anything at all. And worse still, Florida's delegates were unseated and the electorate punished with their votes not counting at all--surprise surprise.

Now both Florida and Michigan are scrambling to undo the damage and rush through a Democratic party do-over, either in actual balloting or a mail-in choice, but even that has the devil in the details and no one can agree on how it would be feasible or fair, or affordable. The national party won't pay for a repeat, nor should they.

What the legislature did not foresee--besides the foolhardy thumbing of noses at the national rules--was the tie. The tie between Obama and Clinton--or potential near-enough tie to make the super-delegates a factor going into the convention, and the very real possibility that neither can win enough delegates to capture the nomination outright. That effective tie means that something has to give. Someone empowered to elect the Democratic party nominee for President has to switch his or her vote. Actually, quite a few have to, to assure the number for victory.

But wait! Isn't each delegate bound by law to vote for the candidate the voters elected in the primaries and caucusses? Actually, not exactly. It's not against the law to switch. But wait! Isn't each delegate bound by moral obligation to reflect the will of the people's votes? Guess what. This is what is called hardball, friends, and anything goes.

So it turns out that the ties that bind, where elections are concerned, are not binding very firmly, that the back-room deal-making and phone call deal-breaking has already begun, both candidates promising the super-delegates the moon many times over to switch to their side.

And ironically, with Pennsylvania coming up in its primary in a few weeks, that state and others which follow, which kept their place in the pecking order of traditional primary dates, are now the ones which are apt to actually have the greatest impact on the election, not Iowa, not New Hampshire, not even Texas and Ohio. And certainly not 'lil ole Flawda, which in its reckless gamble just lost its clout entirely. The latest state to vote may actually be the one to put Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton over the top. He who laughs last,....

Oh well, at least we got to see a lot of Rudy Guiliani. He campaigned here and nowhere else, and came in last, and quit. The ties that bind aren't very firm.

Are We Getting Dumber?

2008-02-19T08:32:00.050-05:00

This morning's Today show aired a segment asking if American youth were quickly becoming dolts, and citing as evidence that fewer than one of four college graduates could identify Iraq on a map; that ditsy Idol contestant Kelly Pickler, during an interview, did not know France was a country and Europe was not; that fewer than forty percent of American high schoolers had read a fiction or nonfiction book during the past year, and other eyebrow-raisers.

For years Jay Leno has sidewalk-interviewed "dummies" for us to chuckle at sadly. One, who said she was studying to be a teacher, couldn't recognize a picture of Bill Gates but instantly identified another of Harry Potter. Some couldn't name the nation south of Canada. The culprit, according to Matt Lauer's technology advocate, an NBC employee, was benign, not sinister--simply a changing lifestyle, a higher importance given by today's youth to "knowing how to use computers and the internet than to knowing Proust." With the internet's efficiency mere facts could now be instantly Googled or gained on Wikipedia--no need for tedious reading searches. Lauer's other guest, advocating for her book's position that yes, indeed, our youth are dumbing down significantly from previous generations, descried the technology monster which, she suggested, had made today's youth believe that learning basic traditional knowledge in wideranging fields of the languages, the social, natural, and physical sciences and mathematics, geography, history, philosophy, religions, the arts and literature was unimportant. What was important was what Paris Hilton wore to last night's party. Now that's knowledge that can be used, messaged and gossiped to posses and friends.

Another culprit cited by the dumb-and-dumber theorist was the media, who almost never attempt to raise the intellectual store of viewers but eagerly capitulate to the lowest forms of entertainment--inane reality shows as an example--sought by the greatest numbers, in a total sellout to commercialism.

Ah, Rome, Rome--are we so different in our decline from you? I have always been amazed at how quickly "civilization" can disappear. We falsely assume that knowledge once gained can never be lost, that law and order once established cannot be destroyed, that future generations, raised with the blessings technology has brought, will be better, live longer and stronger lives, become smarter and wiser, than their forebears.

It takes about two generations--perhaps only one--to nearly wipe clean an entire generation's knowledge and social memory, and along with that catastrophe to replace previously-held values. To do so requires only mindless entertainments, lowering of expectations and requirements, socially expedient promotions through grade levels, parental neglect and abandonment of any curbs on tv and computer use, the failure of the generations to interact collectively, and a sellout by government at all levels in order to get and maintain power, giving the greatest number of voters the ease and comforts they want rather than the challenges and opportunities for growth that they need.

Are we getting dumber with each generation? I'm not ready to say we are, though what a young adult today is expected to know is certainly different than it was twenty or forty years ago, as any employer can attest. Nor do I believe the fops paraded on tv by Leno or the gross ignorance suggested by books and articles is necessarily proof of decline. There have always been those who have learned more basic knowledge, always been those who have from lack of education or experience not become "smart" in this field or that. Such displays don't indicate whether young people today are better or worse at solving problems, at interacting in socially cohesive groups, at organizing purposeful activity, at living effectively and competitively in a complex world or instilling needed values in their children in turn. Nor do such displays of factual ignorance indicate much about the state of their conscience or their capacity to love, their sense of right and wrong, or their moral and ethical judgement. To me, these areas of the person are more important than whether or not someone has mastered Proust.

But it is worrisome that our expectations of what young Americans should be expected to know have become so low that I'm not laughing so much lately at the screened interview tv "dummies," not as entertained by the idea that ignorance is something to be proud of. It's not necessary for youth to turn away from technological gains--quite the contrary. Technology is a tool like fire or firearms that can be used for good or ill What people need to learn is how to use it wisely. Nor is it necessary for youth to read the entire canon of literature or master any other field of knowledge revered by their parents, in order to be considered "smart." But I do believe that parents, teachers, government, the church and other social institutions, the commercial sector and the media must share the blame for someone becoming an adult who cannot find his nation on a world map, and who is unconcerned that he cannot.

Fairness and Justice Demand a Hereafter

2008-02-06T15:31:00.000-05:00

In the aftermath of last night's terrible storms, again I am reminded how fragile life is, and how we must treasure each day. Life is neither fair nor just, if awareness ends in death. The hereafter must continue awareness if only to restore what is lost, to mete out the fairness and justice this world does not, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked, for in this life too often the innocent suffer and the wicked prosper. There is too often neither fairness nor justice.

I know not the spiritual state of the fifty-plus souls whose lives were so suddenly and horribly ended, destroyed by the horror of the fierce tornados which swept through Tennessee and other states from the Gulf to Minnesota last night, but I know that they did not deserve such an end. It was just so unfair, so unjust! It is a terrible thing to realize that all those men, women, and children were cut off forever from their loved ones and friends in a few violent seconds. They had no chance, no choice, could not protect themselves from it, and certainly did not deserve to die.

Each man's death diminishes me, as John Donne said. I grieve for them, and for myself. The only way I can reconcile these things is through my faith in the rightness of a divine plan which I trust will restore the balance.

Truly Super Giants among men

2008-02-06T15:14:00.050-05:00

For once the Super Bowl live up to its billing. What a game! going right down to the wire with valiant, inspired play by both teams throughout. I still can't believe Tyree's incredible helmet-catch and hanging on to the ball long enough that made the Giant's final score possible. It ranks up there with Franco Harris's legendary "immaculate reception" of the Bradshaw years--perhaps even surpasses it, because Tyree's catch was deliberate and fought for fiercely, not just one of opportunity or a lucky bounce. Sometimes we get to see an attitude emerge that a player or a team simply refuses to be denied the victory. That was the Giants last Sunday.

Oboy Oboy, Super Bowl and Super Tuesday!

2008-02-01T21:59:00.011-05:00

This is the life. Super Bowl weekend, primaries and speeches running up to Super Tuesday’s twenty-two state primaries when we may get clear winners heading into the conventions--or may not. My guess is it will be McCain and Clinton, but I’m loving the dynamics of the candidates’ and their spouses’ interactions. It’s getting interesting.

And if the nominations are interesting, wait till the guessing heats up about running mates. I think if McCain gets the nod, he’ll tap Lieberman or Guiliani—possibly even Huckabee if he needs more conservative votes. If Romney wins, I’ve no idea. Mitt seems like more of a lone wolf than any other candidate running this season, and I haven’t seen any notable political friends campaigning with him. Huckabee can’t win unless his convention deadlocks and he’s the compromise, but that’s highly unlikely.

On the Democratic side, if Clinton wins, don’t look for her to tap Obama despite many feeling it would be the dream ticket, unless she can’t avoid it and still carry the black vote. She’d rather tap someone like Edwards or other Washington insider she’s worked with who could be appeal to the blue collar base. If Obama wins, there’s no way he’d pick Hillary for a running mate unless he had to have her aboard to carry the establishment faithful. As I wrote earlier, I’m afraid Bill’s going to scare off most potential veeps, relegating them to even less influence in decisionmaking than the White House chef. Of the four leading candidates, only Hillary has that albatross around her neck. The other spouses are gracious and appealing. Michelle Obama’s a little gregarious and outspoken, but within most folks’ tolerance levels.

And as far as race goes, or gender, I don’t think either matters as much as it did even eight years ago. I think America is ready for a female President or a black President, or even a female black President, if that person is perceived to be the best candidate for the job. What America is not willing to do is to elect a female President for the sake of change or a black President for the sake of change or the omigod, really? wow! factor, or because it would be historic. That happened with Nancy Pelosi’s election to Speaker of the House, and people quickly shrugged. If the novelty candidate can’t get things done, it doesn’t matter if they’re a Siberian yak, people will quickly abandon their support.

I am worried, however, about a charismatic candidate like Obama. Historically, charismatic leaders from the Kennedys to Ghandi to Martin Luther King, and most recently Benizir Bhutto—idealogues whose inspiring and eloquent words have made vast crowds passionate to follow them in their crusades for social change--have inflamed the worst elements of society’s fringe and drawn assassins’ bullets and bombs. It’s almost as if some people can tolerate anything but a really popular leader, someone they perceive could change things too drastically to suit them. I hope I’m wrong.

By the way, Go Giants! The Patriots are just too--too something. I want a new champ.

The Field Is Narrowing--Thank Goodness

2008-01-22T21:26:00.000-05:00

Okay, I don't want to be a spoilsport and pooh-pooh those Presidential hopefuls who threw their hats gleefully in the ring over the past year or so in both parties. But let's be honest, did many of them even bother to gauge their support or chances beforehand? I mean, at least Ross Perot had some support to show for his effort, and stayed with it till the end. But why did Tancredo or Duncan Hunter even bother? And why did Fred Thompson let himself be pulled into it if he didn't want it any more than he apparently did not, if his lackluster campaigning was any indication?

To me, it meant the early debates had to give time to candidates who really had little to distinguish themselves from the leaders. Ron Paul is at least a refreshing and consistent point of view, as his internet fundraising appeal demonstrates to everyone else's consternation. He hasn't a snowball's chance in you-know-where of being his party's nominee, but the others have had to allow and accomodate his debate time. Some, like Governor Bill Richardson, had impressive experience and skills to offer, but couldn't inspire the mainstream to get behind them with the votes or the funds to go very far into the primaries.

Today Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson have thrown in their respective towels after poor showings in the early state primaries. But the race, as Mike Huckabee said in conceding the South Carolina victory to John McCain, is far, far from over. Who will be the ultimate nominee in either major party isn't clear yet, but the time draws near. Florida's ego-driven, ill-advised early primary that got their delegates barred from their conventions as of this writing backfired bigtime, with major candidates refusing to campaign in the state by a like advance date, and then we have Super Tuesday coming, when we'll probably get some sense of who's going to get the prize.

But I wouldn't be surprised if Guiliani, who has pinned all his hopes on a huge Florida victory, comes in second at best or even third or fourth behind McCain, Huckabee, and Romney, simply because they've kept themselves in the public eye and made the headlines and Rudy hasn't. Why he passed on every primary to date is mind-boggling to me, and that strategy alone, the poor decisionmaking, takes the lustre off his once-leading candidacy for me. If I am like most voters I want to hear what the leading candidates have to say about the issues, whether they're in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina, or anywhere else. I don't want to have to wait till they build a base on some state down the road somewhere and not learn their views about the regional issues of earlier contests. Rudy seems to think all those ex-New Yorkers down here in Florida will vote for him. I think they may have if he had shown some spunk earlier. All he's shown me is he won't fight. He wants a sure thing. I want a fighter.

What may happen, if Rudy comes in less than a close second, which I think is likely, is he'll pout and drop out like no-show Fred, and Mike Bloomberg will jump in as an independent and scoop up support from the democratic side primarily, split the vote in that party and hand the election back to the Republican candidate again. He has the potential to be the Ralph Nader or Ross Perot that can't win the election but can make others lose.

On the Democratic side, I must say I was impressed by the well-informed arguments of Chris Dodd and the straight-shooting, direct answers of Joe Biden, though I doubt anyone so little willing to pander and primp to the voters as either of them would have much of a chance for a wide base of support. And Dennis Kucinic is, well, Dennis Kucinic. Good for him, but he's not a broad-appeal candidate for the same reasons as Dodd and Biden. No, the nomination will be won by someone willing to be more patient, considered, political and even-tempered to the sensibilities of the electorate at large. That, after all, is the art of politics. The winner will have that intangible ability to convince voters of almost every constituency, ethnicity, age, race and special interest that he or she will best represent their interests for the next four years.

It wouldn't surprise me if one or even both nominations went undecided clear to their national conventions--something almost unheard of in recent times. But I can remember some roaring ones from the past, let me tell you, and it's probably a healthy thing.

Nonetheless, I think if I had to bet on the nominees today, I'd bet on Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Hillary will finally win the Democratic nomination based on her greater national experience despite Barack Obama's inspired idealism and excellent speaking skills. The perception that he just doesn't have enough experience for the job will return at day's end, and all the idealism in the world won't overcome it. Hillary will run against John McCain, and McCain will win the election in a tight race, because, ironically, he will not have Bill Clinton, who will turn out in the end to be Hillary's greatest liability rather than her greatest strength. As the system showed when their roles were reversed, when he was in power and she was trying unsuccessfully to influence health care legislation, Americans don't want a shared Presidency, or even one which appears to be strongly influenced by a non-elected spouse of either gender. They want a single, clear, unequivocal leader. Well-meaning but outspoken spouses sank John Kerry and will sink Hillary also. In today's egalitarian mood between the assertiveness of spouses and the candidates themselves, the spouses would do well to remember the role of the vice president--golden silence publicly--and the fondness the country felt toward supportive but nonassertive first spouses of past Presidents: Mamie Eisenhower, Barbara Bush, Ladybird Johnson, and Nancy Reagan come to mind. Each championed noble causes effectively but non-politically and did not try to upstage their President in national affairs.

As the country slips into recessionary hard times, the economy will upstage Iraq, immigration, and every other as the deciding issue of this election, and will propel Mitt Romney to frontrunner status for a time because he will appear to have the best remedies and managerial skills. But ultimately John McCain will beat him for the same reason Hillary Clinton will get the Democratic nomination: experience, experience, experience. It's the intangible people consider in that moment they cast their ballots. For in that brief single moment they set aside personal preferences, prejudices, affiliations, special interests, and all the emotional clutter of the campaigns totally and vote their consciences: Who would be the best President for the next four years? Who would do the best job?

It's going to be interesting.

Same age? Don't bother me.

2007-12-03T10:17:00.000-05:00

I don't much like being around people my own age. They make me feel old. I didn't attend my high school class 50th anniversary reunion in Indiana and can't recognize those old people in the fuzzy group picture they sent me. At my school I'm used to being around younger people, and it feels just fine. Folks in nursing homes make me feel young and fortunate. My family are all at least ten years younger. But people my own age--especially men--make me feel old. I must see myself in their appearance, and I don't like the way we look: old as sin and twice as ugly.

Over Thanksgiving break our fam all went to Publix for a few groceries, and while the rest cruised the aisles, I went out front to a bench to wait. Pretty soon an old guy wobbled his bike up to my bench, dismounted awkwardly and tumbled himself down on the bench next to me. "Howdy," he greeted. I could smell the liquor on his breath like a slap in the face. He pulled out a 12-pack of Bud Light from a fridge pack and popped open a can. "Hey, I'm Jimmy. Have a drink. You're an old man, I'm an old man. Let's enjoy the day." He took a deep swig. "No thanks," I smiled. When he lit a cigarette, I'd had enough and got up. "Better find my family," I said. Jimmy took umbrage. "What? Well, do what'cha want," he piped after me indignantly, "but I'd advise ya to pull yer pants up."

He was right. My jeans were sagging down again, and I hitched them up. Damned if I wanted to look like Jimmy. It's one thing to be old, quite another to be reminded of it. I try to avoid situations like that.

Methinks they doth protest too much

2007-11-30T16:26:00.000-05:00

"Kill her!" screamed Islamic protestors in the Sudan, marching and waving machetes and knives, "No mercy!" Her unspeakably heinous offense? Letting Islamic schoolchildren name a teddy bear "Mohammed." Apparently it's okay to name many males after the Prophet, but to name a toy so was taken as an unforgivable insult to Islam and sufficient cause for execution. Only international pressure reduced her punishment to a few days' arrest and deportation.

Good grief. I've noticed that the more wrong and unreasonable people are, the louder they carry on. It's as if notching up their grimaces, their volume, and their violent gestures justifies their position. These protests everywhere in the name of this or that cause--sometimes I think the protesters themselves may not even know what they're shouting against but just like a good communal vent--are beginning to sound to me like a child's tantrum. Like children, they don't seem to know how to advance their position by any reasonable or peaceful means, so they just scream till they get their way. And if people try to ignore them or reason with them or calm them down, they just scream all the louder.

It seems like people make the biggest fuss to defend their position when they're dead wrong. When they're right, they don't have to state it hysterically, for it is usually evident. And I know of no instance when people in general have become convinced of the rightness of a cause just because it's been passionately screamed and menaced at them.

Good Lord, Marvin, Get on the Beat!

2007-11-15T18:18:00.000-05:00

We saw Marvin Hamlisch in concert last night at Ft. Lauderdale's Parker Playhouse. We were both excited about the chance to actually watch one of our favorite entertainers live. We'd played his "I Love A Piano" ragtime cd, and the cassette tape before that, going back to the early '80's on all our family vacation travels and often at home as well. Here was the composer of "A Chorus Line," "The Sting," "The Way We Were," and many other hits--an oscar winner and winner of several emmys, composer of over forty film scores.

I didn't know if he would bring a band with him, or at least a bass and drums, but he worked solo onstage at the Steinway and Sons concert grand. He did bring Stephen Lehan, a very fine tenor who sang several numbers for variety.

But the big surprise of the evening for Barb and me was Marvin's piano performance itself. From the first notes to the final ones some ninety minutes later, he rushed through song after song with no rhythm, no discernible beat, no chance to hum along in his crabbed-motion flurries, and it was a challenge to even recognize "Night and Day" and other standards in his frenetic renditions. Only on a few occasions did he fall into any meter--notably when he accompanied Lehan. It would have been impossible for any singer to sing along with the way he murdered everything else. It was a huge disappointment, partly saved only by his extensive and witty comments between the songs.

Why, Marvin, why would anyone with such obvious musical capabilities and talents do such a thing? It was baffling. After ten seconds everyone in the theatre was looking around at others helplessly, nervously, just as confused as we were. I wondered if several who left discreetly at the first chance couldn't take it anymore. It reminded me of the 1913 Paris premiere of Stravinsky's revolutionary ballet, The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) when the audience, accustomed to traditional tonal melodies, meters and comfortingly predictable harmonic progressions, actually rioted and threw seats and trash, stopping the debut performance, because they felt so assaulted by the polymetric, dissonant strained music they couldn't get ahold of any beat, anything familiar. That's what Marvin's jumble of notes and chords sounded like. Barb looked at me and scowled.

He's a composer, I said. He's not a musician, not a pianist. He's a Juilliard-educated, classically trained composer, and like many composers from Moussorgsky to Irving Berlin, that's how they often play. It's like they have this fabulous store of musical ideas that just spills out faster than they can control. It's the way the late George Burns used to scatter a song lyric at breakneck speed before returning to a puff on his ubiquitous cigars. There's no way anyone could sing along, with Burns or with Hamlisch--unless he deliberately imposed a meter on his musical rant, which he apparently didn't wish to do very often. For the first few bars of "The Way We Were" he actually did, but then sped ahead through the rest of it, leaving us all grasping at wisps of the famous melody he wrote for Streisand in his vortex. He knows how to play to the audience, but prefers not to. Why?

His selections had no titles; the program said he'd annouce them from the stage. They included a "Tribute to Richard Rogers," a "Tribute to Cole Porter," another to Scott Joplin, and music from Chorus Line and The Way we Were, which he composed. I'm wondering if his stylings and quotes, taking swipes at these songs rather than playing them straight, might have been for legal considerations and copyright/royalty performance requirements rather than due to his choice--though I think it unlikely. He did the same treatment to his own compositions as well.

Despite my disillusionment and initial disappointment at the program, however, I was still very glad to see and hear one of my musical idols live, in my lifetime. It in no way diminished the great regard I hold for his talents and works. As a former club keyboard performer myself, one who picks up the melody and harmony of most tunes after only one or two hearings as easily as breathing, I spent quite a bit of time trying to work through the harmonies of "One Singular Sensation" from A Chorus Line. I even bought the cd and marvelled at his virtuoso skills as a composer and librettist. The guy's clearly a genius. But I have to say, as a soloist performing the American Songbook, his renditions are almost unlistenable--extremely eccentric and discomforting. Like most genius, he has some glaring gaps in his musical psyche.

Comfortable with it, thank you

2007-11-12T11:52:00.000-05:00

As James Brown sang, "Ifeeeel good/Like Iknew I would." Here it is in the early throes of the holiday crazies already, and we're luvin' it. Just got a call from the Geek Squad, "Saving the universe, one PC at a time," as they bragged. Ha. Well, for a service they're set up pretty well, and they do show up when they say they will. Though they couldn't save me from my PC follies, their suggestions sent me to another solution that worked, which I wouldn't likely have thought of otherwise.

Re: my previous blog, how do I feel about it? [the not knowing]--hey, I'm not Faust. I'm content with my ignorance, if not blissful, and comfortable accepting my limits. It relieves me of the existential responsibility some feel when they sense they must achieve their "destiny." At some point in everyone's life he either accepts constraints or launches mighty battles to do more, be more, have more, know more, etc. As for myself, I made my peace at about age twenty-one when I sensed I probably wasn't going to set the world on fire, despite some talents and aptitudes in my favor. I simply didn't love money that much, or fame, or public admiration, and didn't have the drive it takes to reach great heights as defined by others. So I decided a nice family campfire would generate about the right amount of light and heat for my resume. Don't get me wrong; I still admire those who achieve great things by public definition, but I don't desire to be like them. One of my colleagues told me they thought I was "self-actualized."

My perspective wasn't shaped by accident. I've had a lot of help. Literature, the most formative area of my education, art, music, philosophy, history, and religion have all shaped it dramatically, as have life experiences, love, family, friends, travel, and a wide variety of careers. In a way I actually pity the doctors, lawyers, moguls and movers and shakers who never had the chance to step off their breakneck-speed success tracks and look around. I tend to most enjoy the chance to sit on a rock and think (and join my sons for late-hour bull sessions we call patio parties--did you know a hippopotamus has twenty-four teeth?}
"I've been around the world/From London to the Bay-- ".

Yes, I know?

2007-10-19T17:06:00.050-04:00

I'm afraid I don't know very much, despite the advantages I've had in education and experience. I've learned a lot of names of things and read a lot of books, but the things I feel I know best aren't the things my head has learned. They are the things my heart has learned. I trust my reason most of the time, but I probably trust my feelings more when it comes to knowledge of things that reason or science hasn't yet proven.

It is said that man's distinct advantage over other animals is language, yet many animals have complex communication skills like us (whales, dolphins, even ants and bees, for example). It is also said that man alone can reason. Well, maybe. We can try to confirm our hunches and to avoid known fallacies through Greek logic, inductive and deductive (and I don't think whales and dolphins, ants and bees have had the pleasure). But what is invented by man to try to organize our thoughts logically is, well, still invented by man, isn't it. It's not really knowing.

The Eastern mind relies much less on rational thought and much more on intuitive grasp, on perceptive rather than reasoned truth. In that sense, Zen and Tao are much closer to what I mean by "knowing" things with my heart, or "trusting my feelings." As creatures we can reason, but we can also feel. Surely there is a function for each faculty as part of our biological and survival equipment; neither ought to be totally suppressed by the other.

But again it is said, reason must ultimately be the master over feeling, for the latter can mislead. Our feelings are after all based on our perceptions, which can be faulty--even dead wrong. To follow our feelings blindly can lead to disastrous actions. Well, maybe that's true. Many's the time I've found out my "take" on a situation was really wrong, especially when I thought I knew someone's intentions or motives but totally misread them. And the most insidious thing about strong feelings is that they tend to be self-justifying: "I feel so strongly that such and such is true, so it surely must be so." That's when reason and evidence needs to assert itself. Feelings are the result of what we interpret to be true, not the evidence, and not the cause. But reason, similarly, can be incomplete or faulted. It is at least limited, for all our faith in it. I suspect we as creatures simply cannot really Know much of anything, absolutely.

Since neither reason nor feelings are totally reliable all the time. I guess each has to be tempered with the other, and if reasons can't always be found for feeling a certain way, it doesn't mean they don't exist, only that they're not yet discovered. Similarly, if reasons or evidence for a certain conclusion aren't supported with the feelings of the heart, it doesn't mean that the heart's response isn't valid, only that caution is needed. The important thing, I think, is to try to keep the mind--and the heart--open to change, and to recognize that what we think we know isn't always the full story. We all see through a glass darkly. And when we close the circle on truth and don't permit change, that's when we get into trouble.

and on the seventh day...

2007-10-08T20:38:00.050-04:00

Even God got to rest after creating the world for six days. Not me. I've been going nonstop for nearly two weeks now trying to reconfigure and reinstall tons of hardware and software on these blankety-blank computers trying to fight every verschnizle the hackers and their corporate counterparts throw at me in their ever-more-Byzantine OS's.

It began when my cams server went down and I couldn't get a reinstall to fix it, even after reinstalling Windows. So I went deeper to a clean reformat as is my wont, foolish though it may be. And the further I scrubbed the hard drive clean, the more problems I created. Since that time I have simultaneously tried to piece that functionality together on three different machines, all with the same negative results.

So far I've bought a new cheap-o E-Machines desktop, failed to get past the Vista blockages, failed to get my video capture program to run, and taken it back. I've also tried to resurrect the old Dell by reinstalling XP and still failed to make my program run. Tried a new video capture card and many reinstallations, user forum advice, attempted fixes from far and wide, to no avail.

Ah, the hapless consumers. We're caught in the middle of a war of cataclysmic proportions. The virus-creators and trojan-mutators vs. the frantic attempts to keep them out of our computers by the security police, aka hardware and software engineers.

How much operating system code is commandeered for this battle, I wonder? It's got to be over half the total, and every new version that comes out ups the ante. What's it all for? So one side or the other can play "gotcha!"? Is it really all about security, or is it maybe about ego as well? Who's da Ubergeek? It all reminds me of the endless military weapons escalation, the perfect armor-piercing bullet, cyber-speaking, vs. the perfect tank armor to stop it.

I've never been able to understand what is the "rush" for some sick mind who's compelled to design a computer virus. There's no money motive, usually, but the perp must get something out of it. Is it just a sophisticated version of cow-tipping, window-soaping, or other juvenilia of less technological days? Is it just for the private chortle? Maybe it's just for the sake of the game; I can defeat your best attempts to stop me. Oh no you can't.

Of course in the middle of all the fuss, I lost my access to my school email. It seems they glitzed up the website and moved some things around, and in the process required that we all reset our passwords. And how did they notify us what they were doing? With emails, of course. And who couldn't get the word because he couldn't access his email? I think it's called Catch-22. It's also called the modern world.

Lost Honor

2007-09-16T12:26:00.050-04:00

Character, it is said, is what you do when you think you won't get caught. In light of the New England Patriots' alleged electronic spying and dirty tricks against opponents such as secretly videoing opponents' signs, jamming coach-to-quarterback frequencies, planting spies in locker rooms and stealing blackboard plays, keeping a library on each defensive coordinator's playbook actions, etc., I am reminded that honor is a concept being widely ignored today and readily sacrificed in favor of winning, bottom line success, and public perception.

In sports, winning is everything. Players are evaluated, rewarded and punished based primarily on their records, not whether they beat their wives at home, take steroids and other performance enhancers, or get arrested for barroom brawls or drug possession. Coaches' jobs are almost exclusively judged on their won-lost records, regardless of their demeanor, their player relations, or their practises.

In the business sector, profit seems to be the only measure that counts as well, and corporate dirty tricks are well documented. Nothing else matters unless you get caught and bring disgrace upon your firm. And when cheating is discovered, as in the lead-laden paint on millions of toys made in China, then the bottom line suffers and high level executives, borrowing from Japanese tradional honor perceptions, commit hari-kari--but only because the scandal is revealed, not because the practise was wrong or shameful to begin with.

I wonder how much we are willing to sell out our personal honor for the new public definition of success. Maybe it's easier to live with a less-than-honorable guilt if one has a big house and a fat bank account, easier for coaches and players to live with misdeeds they got away with if it resulted in winning. And the excuse offered widely that "everyone else does this all the time" seems really empty.

Life has rules, but there will always be those who find ways to get around them in the pursuit of some goal. The real issue, to me, isn't whether people can cheat and get away with it but whether they hold their honor dear. It seems many today, sadly, do not. And when honor is sacrificed, there's not much difference from stealing or lying or any other injury to our fellow men we choose to commit to achieve our goals.

When I began teaching college around the mid-1960's, there was a lot of talk about situational ethics and moral relativism. Whether something was right or wrong, it was thought then by many, depended on who got hurt and the situation, not any absolute measure. I fear that attitude may be returning today.

My father told me when I was a boy that right was right and wrong was wrong, that things couldn't be "a little wrong" or "a little right" but were right or wrong, period. He wouldn't have had much regard for situation ethics or moral relativism. I think some "wrong" things have fewer or worse consequences than others, or may be mitigated by circumstances, but they are all equally wrong. Otherwise it would be very hard for me to believe in a God-defined good or evil, and I could only look at social consequences to define them. I happen to believe man doesn't define right and wrong. It's too bad that he is so vain that he insists on interpreting it based on his personal preferences.

No, I agree with my dad, right is right and wrong is wrong. It doesn't "depend" on anything, not whether others do the same thing or whether you can get away with it or whether no one gets hurt or lots of people may even benefit. Avoiding an act that is wrong because you know it is wrong, regardless of whether you might get away with it, is a matter of honor.

Simple Pleasures

2007-09-13T12:16:00.050-04:00

When Barb and I married, our big Friday Night in the City was to cross the street to the bait shop, purchase a bottle of pepsi to split between us while we played a few games of pinball, then head back across the street to the trailer and call it a night. That's if we were flush with a couple of dollars between us after we paid the bills. If not, we probably couldn't splurge on more than one or two games of pinball and we'd take turns with each ball.

Although a lot has changed in the thirty-nine years since then--now we go to Disney Quest in Orlando with our sons and grandchildren for our pinball fix, where we can bang away on several dazzling-lighted, blazing-action boxes to our hearts' content, game after game for free--other than the hundred-dollar year's pass each, of course--we're still kindred souls in our love for simple, sometimes silly, usually cheap pleasures.

This morning we both had the day off so I took her to the Hess station for coffee. It happens that there's an extensive, sit-down Dunkin' Donuts in the west room, offering a full breakfast menu, but we'd never been there and it was fun. Since she'd come with me at my urging with no questions asked and fair's fair, I then followed her directions up to a different part of town and parked in a shopping center lot. She led me into a store neither of us had been in before nor had any idea what was sold.

It turned out to be quite a surprising array of sundry things, similar in some ways to a Dollar General store but with much greater variety, and pretty high prices. This was not a bargain store, though the bare-rack grab-bins and askew boxes of bric-a-brac seemed like it should have been deep-discounted. They had a lot of seconds and junk, frankly, but they had also a lot of electronics that kept my attention. Some imports, some lamps and furniture, rugs and barstools, laundry baskets and mirrors, framed prints and small appliances, paper items and eyeglasses we might have expected. But then I spotted a flute. A real, honest-to-gosh band flute ("beginner's", it said) in a hard, cushioned case, for $99. In another shelf I found the ultimate gadgeteer's delight: a mirror ("fog-proof", it claimed) for the shower, with a built-in am-fm radio with stereo speakers (about a half-inch each) and a digital clock (less than an inch across the lcd) under the oval reflector. All for $9.99. How could I resist? But I did.

I never could figure out their pricing. Any given item's cost seemed based on whether the stock boy thought it looked classy or common. So a wrought-iron grate might cost $20, but a gleaming, brass, free-standing toilet tissue valet might go for $99. Barb bought a new fry pan. Ours are getting the teflon wearing thin and starting to stick the eggs and stir-fry stuff to them. Though we walked all the aisles, we left wondering if we'd missed some unusual, hard-to-find treasure buried amongst all the motley piles and high-stacked shelves. I thought it had the feel of a garage sale.

"Well, what did you think?" Barb asked.
"Hey, that was different," I dodged. "Unique."
On the way out I learned the store wasn't unique at all but part of a national franchise. I guess lots of people must like to just shop for whatever surprises they can discover. But the point was, we had fun, did some different things for a couple of hours on a day off, and didn't spend much. We had our big spree in the city, our pepsi and pinball as it were.

We're lucky both of us seem to enjoy simple pleasures. Maybe it's our shared small-town upbringing.

I'll watch but not listen

2007-09-10T10:22:00.050-04:00

I have trouble finding my caring or not caring balance when it comes to supporting my sports teams. So much so, in fact, that I've taken to muting the tv volume when my teams are playing badly, as if I could handle bad play watching but not listening also. Radio can be pure hell for me, but I'll just lower the volume. It seems the only way I can hang onto my sometimes tenuous grip on the real world and things that really matter to me and still follow the ups and downs of the game. As with dramas, I can follow a story with sound only much better than with visuals only. Sound is the real narrator, so my only option short of turning off the game altogether and wondering what's happening--unacceptable, if I can get the game at all--is to lower or mute the volume.

Generally I begin by watching and listening, but if things go south I turn things down. Usually this happens when my team goes on defense. I can stand to watch my team's offense not make running yards or muff passes, even get intercepted or fumble. But defensively I can't stand to see the other guys run through my team's line like butter and scamper past my flailing linemen and linebackers, blow by would-be tacklers and scamper through the last defenders, break tackles and catch passes away from futile-grasping corners and safeties. When the offense stalls, I blame poor playcalling. But when the defense crumbles, I blame the players.

Both of these things happened this weekend as I listened to my Gators rack up a big first half lead against Troy, then crumble on defense in the last half and all but quit scoring while Troy completed pass after pass, scoring every few minutes and darned near getting close to making a possible upset akin to the Appalachian State/Michigan debacle, had not time mercifully run out. I couldn't get the game on tv and was too cheap to order pay-per-view, so I suffered through the radio broadcast the final half helplessly. Next day I watched the first half's delayed telecast, but I wouldn't watch the second.

Sunday afternoon I watched my Dolphins bumble their way through the season opener and lose to the Redskins in overtime, 16-13. So much for our big hopes with a new offense-minded coach and rebuilt line. The South Florida press builds up such a great picture of the newly-minted team each spring and summer with player drafts and interviews that they sound invincible, then every fall we get our bubbles burst with lacklustre preseason losses and opening games hitting us with the reality: our team isn't bound for the Super Bowl again. Probably our team isn't even playoff caliber potential this season.

I was so disgusted from the first batted down passes and three-and-out possessions that I turned the volume off. I could still watch the inept lack of a running game, the collapsing inept offensive line, the butterfingered receivers the press had touted so highly all summer drop pass after pass, but I couldn't bear to listen as well. The announcers are so deflating to my tribal ego with their derisive but deserved comments, (which I notice are subject to instant revision the moment things change on the field, so they always look like fortunetellers) that they echo my own dark thoughts too closely. I don't need their excited confirmations that my team sucks. I can see it all too plainly for myself.

Clearly the sports fan in me is demented. I just hope the dementia hasn't spread to the rest of my mindset, but I have decided it's just something I have to work on each fall. I can't just give up on being a football fan and trying to care about my teams' fortunes altogether and not watch the games on tv or live when I have the chance, or listen on the internet radio (which is far superior, by the way, than broadcast radio--thanks, Barb!) That would be giving away a major chunk of my autumn recreation and entertainment! Come fall, I look forward to the college and pro games very eagerly. But I have to work on being able to stand the disappointments if I hope to savor the victories.

I think what I have to remember is that no matter what the play and what the outcomes, these are games, not reality, and in the end it makes no difference at all who wins or loses. As fans we watch an artificial, surrogate contest we have created to mirror the real-life struggles we all face, but it's just a game after all. We have to stop short of believing that somehow we win or we lose. We don't do either; our teams do. Similarly, when a great season shapes up and a particular city's Mighty Marauders or certain university's Fighting Woodchucks win a national championship and its citizens or students celebrate their victory and the community posts highway signs with pride for being the "home of the champions," it does not mean that that college or that community is somehow better in any way from their vanquished opponent's city or university, or that their supporters should be envied and admired more than the losing supporters. None of the above had anything to do with it, other than hoot and holler, and there's no glory in any of it, really.

Sports are just organized, artificial contests we set up to challenge our wits and test our mettle and cleverness against each other, war games which we have invented and nurtured to try to sharpen how we should deal with real struggles that do matter in our actual lives. Ideally they should teach us how we should best approach our own tasks and confront our obstacles, deal with gains and adversities, handle our own victories and defeats as we move toward our actual goals.

President Who

2007-09-05T09:45:00.050-04:00

What is that saying about it being better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt? That seems apt as the political season picks up steam and candidates attempt, or are forced, to speak their minds on every issue under the sun, more or less spontaneously. The debates and unrehearsed interviews interest me more by far than the planned speeches we hear later on, which are meticulously crafted by wily folks to bump up the polls. Candidates find themselves often speaking off the cuff, and that's when, to me, they are apt to let slip what they really think, under pressure of the moment.

So who looks good to me so far? Probably on the Democratic side, surprisingly, Hillary Clinton. I like the way she has come across as much more levelheaded, knowledgable, and sensible in fielding questions and dodging bullets than most of her male counterparts, and I find it refreshing that she isn't easily flustered or phony, not given to empty platitudes or sure-to-please slogans. She has stood by her record unapologetically and refused to resort to cosmetic backpedaling, even when it has cost her in the polls. I think she's head and shoulders better prepared for the office than the others, in experience, temperament, and character. And she has, again surprising to me, the ability to recognize her own foibles and even poke fun at them with us. That's something John F. Kennedy had, and we called it grace. Best of all, I think she understands the complexity of issues and people and sees the world realistically. I disagree with her basic liberal positions often, but respect her reasons to hold them. On the minus side, I don't believe she is the best public speaker running. She often comes across as strident and too full of herself, whining this and that at too high and pompous a timbre. Ted Kennedy couldn't avoid the same problem when he tried to run and couldn't avoid the solemn vapors when he got going good, and pretty soon here came the vibrato and tremulous thunders no one wanted. Hillary should learn from her husband's masterful soft delivery. The content carries its own weight, if it's good. It only gets weakened by getting louder and begins to sound like hysteria, the last thing she needs.

Barack O'Bama has been the most impressive candidate in convention speeches and as a spokesmen for liberal causes. He doesn't quite have the lyric poetry of a Jesse Jackson or the clever wit of an Al Sharpton, but he can be a stemwinder nonetheless. Where he breaks down is in his one-on-one interviews and unrehearsed question and answer sessions, because unfortunately he doesn't have good answers, and he's not yet knowledgeable enough or sure enough of his convictions to supply them. Further, I think his vision is somewhat limited to social issues he understands from his experience, and he doesn't understand enough of foreign policy or economics to be an effective President. He is, however, shrewd and astute as a fundraiser and effective organizer. I don't yet sense whether he's a good judge of human nature, but if he is, he could be an effective arm-twister in the mold of Lyndon Johnson in moving legislation forward as a vice-president.

John Edwards seems stronger right now than O'Bama to me, and better experienced for having run in '04. He's an effective speaker and champion of social liberalism, and labor especially should love him. He seems so passionately anti-big business, however, that I don't think he's electable in critical borderline states. His mission is to fight for fairness, for justice, and a break for the little guy, and he does that very well. But I don't think he has the gravitas or understanding to be a world leader. I like his refreshing honesty, keen sense of irony and quick wit though, and I'd like to know more about his positions on economic and world issues before I make up my mind about him.

Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinic, and other democratic contenders are worth further attention as the debates heat up, all practised and experienced politicians, each with some impressive strengths but not front-runners at this point. However, I am reminded of what happened to the Kerry campaign early on, when he as a dark horse seemed on the point of collapse then won big in later primaries and pulled it out, almost taking the general election. It could happen again for one of these candidates, but it would take the right external events occuring that played to their strengths to give them a catapulting issue.

On the Republican side, I like Rudy Guiliani best right now. He might not get husband- or father-of-the-year honors or the Firemen's Hero award, but in terms of what a President needs, I think he's probably the best bet. He's a proven leader and pragmatic politician, not so full of himself that he's blinded to needs and realities, self-deprecating enough and even-tempered enough to run a steady ship of state despite criticism. I'm a little disappointed Michael Bloomberg is sitting this one out, though. I think he has an even better presidential character and judgement than Rudy.

I find John McCain to be the most honest and realistic candidate running, sticking by his convictions and statements regardless of popularity or unpopularity with any constituency and polls be damned, and most capable of understanding the complexities of the world and a brilliant student of human nature. Unfortunately, he is also the most thin-skinned and volatile, and perhaps the least politically effective candidate running in either party, I'm afraid. He isn't a good administrator, can't manage even his campaign finances, and is prone to self-destructive candor and offhand gaffes and attacks that can destroy his support from independents, conservatives, and liberals alike, his only hope of nomination as he seeks to build a center coalition. I would miss him, but I think he'll do a fast fade after disappointing early primaries this time around.

Mitt Romney is a candidate I'll have to learn more about before I'll be ready to pass judgement. I like some of the things he's said but wonder if he has thick enough, or slick enough, skin to stay compatible with the press or the critics, or would he become another Nixon, battling the fifth estate to the death--his. And I wonder if he has the political skills to build consensus for his vision, and for that matter, wonder what exactly his vision is. I see him right now as kind of a John Edwards of the G.O.P.--likely as a vice presidential pick but not having the character or convictions to garner the trust needed from enough segments of society to win the nomination or general election.

Fred Thompson entering the race this week, I think, will be interesting. I don't know a lot about his views and don't watch Law and Order, but I believe he is viewed as a Reagan Republican here to save the day. He will be embraced like no other candidate by the right wing conservatives, but I think their influence in the '08 race will be far less than it was in either of the past two elections. Silent majorities are silent for a reason: they prefer to remain in the background unless they perceive the country going to the dogs in a fit of hedonistic liberalism. I think even the most staunchly conservative of voters are prepared to shift more to the center this time around, after the scandals of corporate executive misdeeds, massive financial bailouts, badly bungled adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and several cycles of big oil profiteering at public expense. There is after all such a thing as excess, be it to the right or to the left, and we've all seen what can happen when it things tilt too far either way. Though I'm open to being convinced otherwise, I'm afraid Thompson's simply running at the wrong time of history.

What I look forward to most in the upcoming debates is revealing the candidate with the best grip on present realities as well as the best vision for the future. If I perceive that he (or she) has the character, skill, and experience to lead effectively as well, I'll certainly vote for that person regardless of party or gender. After all, despite my conservative leanings, I'm still a registered Independent.

What's a Turk?

2007-08-29T08:29:00.050-04:00

Ah, August, when we men sometimes grease up our faces and hairy chests in our team colors, don wigs and masks worthy of the most elaborate African tribal traditions, attach various rubber and plastic animal parts around our heads, and head for the stadium, the favorite sports bar, or only the TV of our choice to whoop and bellow and support our team in the preseason games, renew our word by word attention to the slightest mutterings of coaches and players in the sports pages, and generally gloat that "our time" of the year, as real men, has arrived at last.

"It's that time of preseason in the NFL again, time for a visit from the Turk," the sports reporter glibly announced on Channel six, NBC's local channel. "Ah, the dreaded Turk," I echoed knowingly.

"What's a Turk?" my better half asked innocently. "He's the guy who comes around to tell a player he's being cut," I said, through a covert "Duh." Everyone knew who The Turk was, at least every sports fan.

"Why is he called 'The Turk'"? she persisted. "Where did they get that name? How do they designate who's going to be The Turk?"

"Well, em, r--, dunno," I had to admit ala Harry Potter, influenced by just having finished reading his final novel. Who cares? It wasn't my job to bring my wife, who originally thought the football-shaped "C"'s on Chicago Bears' helmets were supposed to be Teddy Bear ears, up to speed on my fraternity of real men's sportslore gained over many seasons. If she really cared, she could learn all those things herself. Hoo hoo, I pounded my chest and dismissed the questions out of hand.

Then I thought about it, and realized I might not know as much as I assumed I did. I looked up "The Turk" origins on the internet and found rather little to explain its origins or mechanics, other than each NFL team designated someone, often an assistant coach or other assistant, to knock on a player's door and ask for his playbook, and tell him the coach wants to see him--in other words, he's been cut from the roster. The Turk is therefore aka as The Grim Reaper of the team at issue. "Why doesn't the coach do it himself?" "You tell me." Where did the name arise? Ditto. What other esoterica is there to be known about the term? Ditto again. Like most slang, having shortcut standard dictions and meanings, it doesn't stand up to much logical scrutiny.

Gradually it dawned on me that not only didn't I know much about The Turk, but also I didn't know squat about terms like "weak side/ strong side," the difference, really, between a corner back and a safety, "the ole' hook n' ladder har-har"--always muttered in tandem-- or even why someone needs to be designated as a "franchise player." "Aren't they all franchise players?" "No." "Well why not?"

"M, er, duhnno." It's embarrassing to be exposed as a know-nothing by the innocent quizzing of a non-sportsfan.

Pottered and Planted

2007-08-24T19:40:00.050-04:00

I'm the last in my family to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but once I began reading, I finished in under three days, straight through. I was amazed how quickly it read, since I'm a rather slow reader usually. Perhaps I'd overheard enough chatter among the rest of my family that I had a pretty good idea of what I would find. But still, it really read quickly and seemed to flow well, with chapter breaks about every 25 pages or so.

J.K. Rowling seems to have done a really good job with her final Potter book of the series, I think. She managed to tie up all the loose ends of previous ambiguities of characters and still write a childrens' story. I especially appreciated the flashbacks explaining the motivations and passions as well as foibles of Dumbledore and Snape, the most complex of Rowling's protagonists. And she managed to weave in a masterful, totally unexpected but plausible surprise re: true ownership of the elder wand. Without giving anything away, I was a little bored with some of the episodic near-certain-death escapes and deux ex mechina devices which seemed at times a little too glib for my tastes. Whenever J.K. appeared to be writing herself into a corner, it was just too easy to press the vanish button and have the terrific trio suddenly rematerialize at a safe new location somewhere, or if in hostile traffic, duck under the invisibility cloak. But I was very glad for the rising action and final battles which rose and fell then rose again before the real climax, and the epilog chapter of the new generation of wizards and families. Over the course of so many novels she had quite a task making so many subplots and characters come to a head in a coherent way, but she did it up right, and with grace, humor, suspense till the very end, and a lot of style.

For me, it was a good way to end the summer break, and got me used to reading lots of words again after a summer of more physical than intellectual pursuits before I begin teaching again next week.

Waiting

2007-08-16T15:00:00.050-04:00

There are times when we do whatever just to get through the day. We're waiting for something to change externally, some new opportunity to appear, perhaps, or a shift in the many patterns which play out in our lives. We know we're not moving toward anything important in any dramatic way, but at the same time we're doing useful things so we don't feel the time is wasted. We're waiting. And I imagine we do it a lot.

This week--actually this month-- has been like that, at least most of it. No major epiphanies of thought, no breakthroughs of understanding or accomplishment. But I've kept myself busy during each day by doing something I knew needed to get done: tending to the lawn, trimming the back ficus bushes so they don't get out of control again like they did when we had Wilma roar through and topple and uproot several, costing me a couple of thousand dollars to remove.

Today I tuned my ten dollar piano. I call it that because that's all the lady I got it from wanted, just to get it out of her hurricane-drenched second floor apartment with mold all over the walls. She had tried to protect the Kimball spinet with a tarp, but it still got soaked pretty well. I reglued several felts and tuned it several times, and eventually it dried out enough that we can play it normally. But every piano needs to be tuned, especially with the changing seasons and humidity levels here in south Florida. We have a 5-watt damp-chaser plugged in that keeps the soundboard air ambience reasonably dry, but it still gets out of tune over several months. Anyway, it was worth doing, and went well.

But it was something I did while I waited, and I knew it as I did it, just like I knew mowing and trimming the property, fixing the various things that needed fixing, and busying myself with self-assigned tasks each day that I was basically waiting. What I don't know is what I am waiting for.

I assumed I was waiting for was my fall semester to start so I could get into my class routine. Barb went back to her media center each day this week, and her students return next Monday. I have the NFL preseason games to look forward to now nearly five of seven days per week, and enjoy those, but I don't watch as many as I thought I would. The college games will explode all over Saturday within a week and we'll be swamped with that scene, always a kick for me. But those things aren't what I'm waiting for. At least I don't think they are.

Am I waiting for Godot? Waiting for the A Train? Waiting for the hurricanes to come at us from Cape Verde like a big hooking bowling ball across the Atlantic and wonder if each will hit us, in the head pin position, sticking out six hundred miles toward doomsday into the ocean? Hurricane Dean was born today, three-fourths of the way to us, but it looks like he will bowl by as a gutter ball to our south and smack the Yucatan. I'm pretty sure he's not the last, just the first this season. Dr. William Gray has been so wrong so often in his predictions of hurricanes during the past several years that I have little credence in them, and no one else's predictions either. No, I'm not waiting for the weather drama. It will happen or not soon enough.

Maybe I'm waiting for that "great idea," like Hjalmer Ekdol in Ibsen's "The Wild Duck" who would undertake no tasks or necessities which might distract him from the Great Idea if it came. I think most writers suffer from that delusion, that they always need more space or time or fewer things to do so thay can get inspired better. But no, I'm not waiting for inspiration. I've found that comes best when I'm busy as hell at something else anyway. It never comes from invitation or meditation.

Truth is, I don't know what I'm waiting for. That's the problem I have when things are basically going so well that I don't have much I need to do. Normally, we feel like we're running behind the curve, that there just aren't enough hours in the day to get done those things we need to attend to. But what about those rare times when it feels like the reverse is true? That we're actually ahead of the game?

Then we wait. Wait for the universe to catch up with us. Wait for our dreams and goals to clarify. Wait till the stores open (since when did everyone start opening at 10:30 or 11:00 am?). Wait for the eggs to fry. Wait for the mailman to bring the junk and bills. Wait for the wagon. Wait for morning. Wait for night. Wait for rain. Wait for the sun. We're ahead of them all sometimes, and we must wait.

I don't know which is harder, to wait or to try to catch up. But I suspect waiting is harder, because it's the negative, the non-action, the grinding halt. Our dreams outrace our means. It's why we can't get to sleep at night. If we're behind, at least we can act to try to catch up, and that's positive, purposeful, rewarding even if we don't quite finish all we tried to or even if our labor makes us tired. Rest comes sweet to the weary--not so to the waiters. Yes, I think waiting is the hardest part.

This trip was about family most of all

2007-08-06T19:24:00.050-04:00

The big Ritz trip was everything we had hoped for. We returned Saturday after 19 days and nearly 4,500 miles that took us to Nashville, Wisconsin, Indiana, New York, and Gatlinburg, and the only casualty the Ritz RV suffered was it took a round from a truck tire's stoneshooter treads, right in the windshield. They're replacing it tomorrow.

During those days we saw a Nashville Nights show, met Cousin Bob and Nancy, saw the folks and visited Aunt Lillian and Ellen in Huntington, and went to the 4-H fair twice. We met Mark in New York and got to tour where he works his magic sounds at Heavy Melody and play with some of their stress-reliever toys like Guitar Hero. And we saw his apartment for the first time live, and went to the piers for a sail he'd given Barb as a Christmas gift, but got rained out. Even so, it was great to visit him in our Ritz, and he came out to the campground with us for two days and nights of cookout camping and the good life.

When we left New York for a surprise rendezvous with first-born son Dr. Stephen and his beautiful, charming wife who remains forever young, Rhonda the Great (knew you'd read it, R.) in Gatlinburg, they took us up to their mountaintop rental cabin retreat. And up. And up. And around. And how that vertical trail could be driven up without a funicular or cable car I'll never know. Egad, what a grade! I thought San Francisco had steep hills for driving, but it was no contest compared to the Smokies.

We did Dollywood with our grandson and granddaughter the next day and had a wonderful time. And we began and ended our trip with a night at Scott's Kissimmee apartment, which was a great way to ease into our trip and ease out of it. One big advantage of his living in Kissimmee is that they have a fabulous Camping Center full of goodies we need and want, like some drawer latches that broke from the pounding our unit took from the buckled, pothole-ridden interstates of Illinois and New York. But if the latches couldn't hold the drawers shut, good old duct tape could. We were very comfortable throughout our trip, both travelling and stopped. And we really enjoyed "pimping our ride" with lights and doodads and little niceties that are probably silly to everyone but trailer trash. Like the 6'x9' astroturf mat for outside the door. Okay, so we're giddy with our personalizing our ride, but darn it, it's ours. And if we want to put the Florida Gator magnet on the door, we can.

This trip was, looking back on it, about family. We got to see all of ours, going as we did basically where they each now live, and even got to expand our family contacts by meeting my newfound first cousin Bob Kauffman of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, who has written a great book on our Kauffman ancestry and geneology that he gave me copies of for each of my sons. On this trip I got to give those copies to each of my three sons. Mom and Dad are nursing-home-bound and not alert most of the time now, but at least we got to see them and be with them again. And Aunt Lillian, who never ages, is busy as usual, this time quilting gift quilts for three graduating grandchildren. We got to take her out for a root beer at the drive-in in our Ritz, which she seemed to really enjoy. And we got to do the 4-H fair with Uncle Steve and Thi-Thi, who hadn't been to one for many years.

Yes, it was the family time I enjoyed most. And I appreciate our good fortune in getting a good RV that managed even the most strenuous roads with relative ease, and our good health throughout the journey. We both used muscles setting up and tearing down that we didn't even know we had, and by the last few days we remarked that we were getting things down into a routine. Whatever came up, we found a way to deal with and resolve, and I guess that's part of the fun of it.

When we finally came home Barb cleaned the Ritz in and out, top to bottom, and I caulked up the few leaks over the shower and lined up a windshield replacement for the errant truck tire slingshot that pinged me. Now we're getting back to "normal," whatever that is.

Barb said it best, I think: "Life is problem-solving." One damned thing after another, I believe Mark Twain remarked of it, but I like Barb's conciseness. If you want to visit her trip journal with some neat pix, go here. Nice going, Sweetheart.

RV There Yet?

2007-07-12T16:58:00.000-04:00

I swear, trying to launch an rv trip is like trying to launch a space shuttle. There's a big checklist to go through, seemingly endless scheduling delays, unexpected repairs and adjustments, crew training and practise, bottomless tank fueling to feed the mighty engine, systems trials and initializations, supplies loading, an anxious countdown at just the right phase of the moon when all systems are go, and finally...

Gypsy's gone but not forgotten

2007-07-09T20:16:00.050-04:00

Today our cat, Gypsy, died. Just a couple of weeks ago she was chasing lizards and leaping up on the outside bar to drink out of a glass of water we put there to throw at T.C., her nemesis tabby, who as an outdoor cat must remain away from the screen room. Gypsy drank from it leisurely to spite T.C. and loved to do it when the latter sat on a rock and watched enviously.

It was so strange how this very smart tortoise cat, so fit and trim, a great leaper and very playful to the end, met her demise. One day about two weeks ago we noticed her left eye was completely dilated, though the right eye was fine. Then she began pawing at the top of her head and shaking her head from side to side like she was trying to bat something off. But it wasn't on her head; it was in it. It was a brain tumor, and in cats they grow on the brain surface and crowd down, shutting down senses (the dilated eye, then the other dilated also, blinding her for the most part), making her unable to walk, jump, balance, and ultimately even eat or drink water. She kept her purr to the end, though, and loved to be petted and brushed.

We tried steroids the vet gave us, and it seemed to help briefly, but the tumor progressed. Only brain surgery might have helped, but it would have had to be done much earlier and would have been prohibitively expensive and unlikely to prolong her life more than a few months. All we could do, this week, was try to keep her hydrated and eating, and when that stopped, we couldn't help at all. Last week went by and she stopped eating and drinking her water, and each day she moved around less and less, sometimes just staring at a wall or wandering from room to room, and finally just laying for hours and hours and barely breathing. Then the weekend came. I had already asked for another appointment Friday to see if she would be well enough to board. Saturday and Sunday were agonizing as she got weaker and weaker. By then we were trying to force water into her mouth with a medicine dropper. Finally the vet opened early this morning and we rushed her there. We were going to insist on ending her suffering, which we both felt terrible over. But she spared us the guilt; she breathed a few heavy, rattled breaths as we pulled into the parking lot, then no more. She was gone when we opened the office door.

I still can't believe she's gone. She was my constant shadow at home, spending all fourteen years in our house since she was eight weeks old. Whatever I did, my "little furry girl" was by my side, putting away the clothes (she always jumped in the basket), packing (jumped in our suitcase), typing (stretched out on the keyboard), trying to write checks (she would bat at the pen), whatever I did, she usually got in the way, wanting me to pet her, and I always did. At seven every morning she stomped all over us to get up. By ten every evening she led us to get ready for bed. And often she would just stare back, and purr, and come over for a nice confirming pat or stroke.

Sometimes I thought she was just a pain in the you-know-what, but it was always because she wanted to be noticed and involved in whatever we did, and now I see her everywhere and miss all of it. Oh, and did I mention she was my number one fan when I played the piano in the living room? She loved to get up on top of the studio spinet and look down at my hands on the keys, and seemed to love to listen and feel the music's vibrations. I've long known that animals respond to music, often seeming to enjoy it. Even with her eyesight gone and no taste or smell, seemingly, she could still hear. Last night after brushing her, with her nearby on the rug, I played a set of tunes just for her. As usual, she seemed to like it--but I'm probably just wishful thinking. There wasn't anything else I could do. I knew it would be the last time, and I'm glad I did.

Oh, how attached we got to our kitty, especially as our sons moved out to begin their own homes. Despite all the problems she caused breaking out of the screen room many, many times and forcing us to install reinforcing barriers. Despite her feral ways smashing into the front windows in the middle of the night and screeching like a fight trying attack T.C., and scaring us to death from our sound sleep. (We had to put up big corrugated cardboard screens so she couldn't see outside before she would settle down.) Gypsy was not always an easy cat to live with, but she mellowed the past few years and became fiercely loyal, friendly, obedient and adorable, with those soulful eyes that followed us everywhere. And she seemed very happy, contented in her home, so long as we always came back before we were gone too long. Funny how big I thought she was, but how small she looked sitting there waiting when we returned.

We always get cats that show some spunk, that like to play, that are most likely to drive us nuts. We don't prefer the calm ones, it seems, no matter how pretty they are. I don't know what that says about us. But we got the spunkiest cat we ever had, the wildest and most feral, in Gypsy Rose. And ironically, she turned out to be the most loving and fun of them all, and the best companion for us all these years--and we've enjoyed several for over 16 years on average. We're good to our cats and they live a long time, usually. They fill a need in our lives and bring us joy. We'll get another when we get back from our traveling. We'll love raising a new kitten and watching her (him?) grow and adapt to us and our household and our ways. But I just hope it's half the pet our Gypsy was. She raised the standard.

This Is My Front Porch Now

2007-07-03T21:55:00.050-04:00

This is my front porch now: this couch, this lamp, this view outside. Here, mostly, I read, and write, and journal and blog, and watch tv and study and grade when I have those things to do.
There was another porch, fronting against my childhood Indiana home. And in it, a cushioned glider, an art deco floor lamp, the view of the front sidewalk and street shaded by the big maple tree.

The sights and sounds of the front street world I now get electronically, through the tv and radio and housecam monitors (my actual view looks through the patio to the back yard, canal bushes and western sky, but I like to see what's happening "out front.")

It's a busy street here for a residence, as it was there on my former porch. Lots of cars and trucks go by, and people walking and jogging, exercising their dogs, riding bikes and skating (but now on rollerblades, with helmets and knee protectors). I never knew who might be coming down the street, and the same happens here.

Service trucks, vendors, delivery vans roar by, lawn trimmers and roof cleaners, an occasional patrol car or code enforcement troll parks and scrutinizes the property--. The world goes by, life goes by. From my front porch I see what I see, hear what I hear. But I never cease to wonder what's next, as I did six decades ago on the former porch.

And I note the hour and the day, the changing air, the angle of the summer sun, and wonder at the constant flux and variety. And as then, I have so many questions and so few answers. As then, I have so much to learn. What is? What should be? And why?

So many things to consider, plans to plan, dreams to dream--a whole life ahead of me, and a whole life behind me. A whole family gone now, and another whole new family emerging. Wondrous, wonderful things to marvel and appreciate.

I think most people have a favorite place, a favorite chair perhaps, from which they like to cast their gaze upon the world. I think every soul has a home. Perhaps mine is here, as it was there some sixty years ago.

Endearing Artifacts

2007-06-20T12:06:00.050-04:00

Vestiges of our family-raising days are still around to remind us how reluctant we are to accept the empty nest left by our three sons years ago. We still find the golf clubs in the closet, the Ninja Turtles and Castle Grayskull in another bedroom, the cd's and records that got out of date and not taken in any moves, and the drawers full of old trumpet music and old class notes and texts. And in the garage we still shift around old fishing tackle boxes and piecemeal casting rods, an old skateboard or volleyball knee protectors, an old baseball and first baseman's mitt, an abandoned foot-operated air pump or bicycle tire repair kit.

In another bedroom remains a boombox that still works despite a broken plastic dial cover, and stuffed away in the closets are old band hats and trophies, certificates and yearbooks, loads of old toys and models, computer peripherals and disks, old electronics galore: cd players, walkmans, tape players, storage crates, and desktop miniatures. We still have Transformers and Super Heroes! I found Buzzoff! Remember him from the old Super Heroes action figures? Bet he'd be worth something on E-bay. Only last year did we finally get rid of the bowling ball and bag we kept kicking around in the garage, and the last of the kids' old bicycles finally got picked up by the curb a couple of years ago.

So why do we have these vestiges, these artifacts of our child-rearing days? When a son or daughter moves out, to go to college or try living in a different neighborhood or city, or heads off to military service or whatever makes them leave the homestead, they usually can't take everything they've collected or amassed, all their personal paraphrenalia and clothes, furniture, gifts, purchases, and effects of a lifetime with them to their new digs. There isn't room. And they're not usually prone to toss out or otherwise dispose of the things they probably will never touch again, just in order to clear out their former rooms and closets. They like to leave things they don't want to clutter their new place at home in their room. (They still consider the room they occupied in their parents' house as their room, more or less forever.) If they get married and raise a family of their own, it's still their old room to them. And they feel justified in leaving their stuff there forever as well. The parents didn't need the space when they lived there, so they surely son't need it now.

But it's not just our children that perpetuate these vestiges of former times. We, the parents, are just as reluctant to change a single thing, most of us. We say we'll make a son's or daughter's room a sewing room now, or a perfect den or workroom, or some such claim; but it seldom happens. More likely we try to keep it just as it was, right down to dresser-top items just so and the same pictures and posters on the walls. We'll need it, we say, when they come back to visit, and at holidays, for a guest room. The worst of us try to build a shrine out of the child's room and never move the least item from the way we remember it when the child occupied it. Maybe it's our way of coping with the empty nest, or keeping our children close to us psychologically, by keeping their possessions close to us. We couldn't wait till they grew up and moved out. But then we couldn't really let go of them, either. In keeping these vestiges, we keep them close to our hearts and don't really mind it, despite our churlish occasional complaining about them, because we need to. They're still our children, no matter how old they get, and always will be.

Summertime...And the Livin' Is Easy

2007-06-15T10:45:00.000-04:00

It's summertime. In South Florida, that would seem to be anytime, but it's not. There's a different feeling in the air--more tropical. It's the same kind of air mass that breeds hurricanes, unfortunately, but it is mostly just very humid, usually sunny, tropical air, coming up often from the south.

It begins to settle over us about the first of June and lasts well into October, with showers and thunderstorms people can set their watches by, beginning about 3:00 p.m., usually firing up from the west, and ending by 3:30. The rain soaks into the sandy soil like a sponge, and things dry off quickly as the sunshines returns.

Visitors are often surprised to find how local and defined these downpours can be, literally raining hard on one side of a street and remaining dry and sunny on the other. Down here, one can actually see a curtain of a rain coming down the block, then get soaked a few minutes later as it reaches the observer.

As for discomfort in the South Florida heat, the objection one hears "It's not the heat, it's the humidity," is true. Having lived here since 1976, I am still amazed at how quickly the beads of sweat form when I'm outside doing the least little bit of work or activity. Even my morning walk of a few blocks leaves me soaked by the time I return home, and I have to change clothes.

But what can one expect, living on the tip of a peninsula that juts out six hundred miles into the Atlantic Ocean? We're going to get some rain, to put it mildly. The fact that we haven't had enough of it this whole year has left us in a severe drought that threatens our drinking supply and shuts down our lawn watering despite the fact that we're two weeks into our "rainy season," but I have no doubt that the wetness will return as we cycle through.

Despite the extremes of humidity and drought, heat and hurricanes, lightning (Florida is the lightning capital of the world most years) and other phenomena, however, I think our climate to be much easier to live in than many other parts of the country. I remember Indiana heat waves that had us melting and Chicago and New York heat waves that actually killed many of those unfortunate enough not to have air conditioning. And every summer, as high pressure domes of heat park over the midwest and cities from Dallas to Clevelend just broil in 100-plus degrees that lasts for days or weeks with no relief, I thank my lucky stars I'm in the mid-eighties and lower nineties here in South Florida in the summertime.

Post or Perish? It Depends

2007-06-14T19:23:00.050-04:00

I'd like to post a few thoughts about the ups and downs of blogging, particularly to the new blogger. And I'm not exactly an old-timer at this subject, but I've posted a few hundred times on about two dozen blogs I've started and stopped, amassed a few thousand visits and some interesting comments from fellow bloggers over a three-year period since I began this one, and remain committed primarily to the power of words to entertain, inform, and stimulate the mind and heart every bit as much as the ubiquitous digital photo or video or sound clip does on so-called "blogs" elsewhere. I'm a word blogger. I like the challenge of trying to create pictures and sounds in the imagination, and I leave the digital pictures and sounds to others. I'm a Greek, not a Roman, and I seek thought, not spectacle.

Blogging, in its simplest form, is so easy that anyone can do it. But that's not to say that anyone can attract growing numbers of visitors. It's a maxim for new bloggers that the best way to attract attention is to post readable, topical entries and post them frequently, tagged with keywords on interesting subjects, then follow up by reading other's blogs and commenting on them when you have something to say and inviting those writers to visit your site at their convenience as well. Make links available to your blog and invite subscribers. Then contact the search engines and wait for their spiders to crawl your entries, usually within a few days or weeks.

But even if you do all these things faithfully and begin to build visitors of a few per day or week, then a few more, chances are that if you do not keep posting, your stats will quickly level out and stagnate until they get "fed" again with a new post or three from you. This is because the engines and watchers that are keeping an eye on you as well as nearly countless other new blogs hitting the internet every day are waiting to see how you do, waiting to see if your blog has the power to pull a visitor with increasing frequency, to draw a subscription link without resorting to buying one, in effect, from many sites who will gladly sell you their admiration and promise to splash your blog title all over Google's masthead as Number One in the Universe--for a fee of course.

And if you don't post for a few days or a few weeks, it tells the watchers that you may be among the unwashed multitudes who just like to set up a site then abandon it in a few days. These "been there, done that" bloggers are the curse of every host, wasting bandwidth and refusing to "improve the land" in any way, till they're finally cleaned out of the hosts' servers at no small bother.

So if you don't want the world to think you're another dilettante blogger just passing through the fickle attention span of cyberspace, post regularly. You don't have to post every day or every hour, but post at least every several days to a week, at least once. This applies especially to new blogs. If you do not, if you want to rest on your initial fit of inspiration that filled up a couple of pages, then sit back and see who visits, be prepared to see goose eggs on your statcounters after the initially curious pass by.

However, if you do post regularly, it will trigger the quicker visits of the search engine spiders, the links you need to build your rank, and within a few months you may reach a few hundered to a few thousand visits from all over the world, and that is very satisfying. Then, having reached a certain "critical mass," you may be surprised and gratified to find that you do not really have to post as often to keep growing, and your visitors will continue to increase without daily need for attention on your part.

I think the biggest problem for new bloggers is the unrealistic expectation that the whole world is waiting with bated breath to hear their immortal thoughts via a new blog, and when they don't see a thousand visits the first day, the next day they quit. It needs to be understood that just because the internet is free and open to all readers, and your blog can be read around the globe the instant you hit "publish," it doesn't mean that everyone on the internet knows or cares that your words are there at "ohgolly.myspot.com," or would rush right over to read you even if they did.

Think of it as if there were a book, a hard copy, published tomorrow bearing your same immortal thoughts, and that one copy were sent, somehow, to every bookstore in the world at the same time. Now, who would happen upon it? And if a few did pick it up, who would read it? And if a few did read it, who would discuss it? Comment on it? To whom? Until someone reviewed your book, discussed your book, assigned your book or created some buzz somewhere about your book, chances are it's not bound for the New York Times Bestseller List, right?

The internet is no different when it comes to the need to market your product. But it's done electronically now, through search engines, keywords, comments, and the same hard scrabble work that print marketing requires. You have to be patient, and you have to pay your dues and build up a few readers who want to follow your ideas as you offer them, then if you're lucky, in time there will be some buzz generated, and voila! one day you get the shock of your life that 48 people read something you posted, all at once, and pretty soon you're hearing from the host of your blog nagging you to consider selling ad space and other corruptions so he can cash in on your emerging authorship fame as well!

That happened to me, once, so I know it can. (Didn't sell the adspace, though; I hate ads on blogs. It's so crass.)

Write to Say It (or to Sing It)

2007-05-10T11:36:00.000-04:00

Inner Elves is up and running, my "other voices" blogsite offering about 80 posts so far, although I still have about 35 stories, poems, and miscellaneous items I'll probably post, including some I like the best. I have to do them a few at a time so the servers don't have a hissy fit and make me validate myself with "qzieh" or "foziyuts" in order to publish my own post. Actually, it's a good feature in helping to keep out machine spam.

I want to especially thank Rhononymous for suggesting I indicate when I wrote each piece. I've put the year at the end of each and grouped them above the archives. Good idea, R!

So I've syndicated through all the search engines, who will in time now send their little arachnids to crawl inside my head--they enter through the ear, you know--and index the elves' works. I've chosen a serviceable template for starting up, and configured in some pingers and statkeepers and other feedback widgets, so I am quickly approaching the end of the startup.

Now I just hope somebody reads some of these. In any case, I'm glad I put them out there where anyone who wishes can access them instead of letting them continue languishing unread in computer files and mss on my stack, or stuck away in ringbinders.

Creative writings are meant to be read. Maybe nonfiction thoughts can benefit from being set down in journals and diaries and kept private, or blogged about, if the writer wants to communicate them; but creative writings--stories, poems, sketches and other forms from the imagination--definitely are meant to be read. It's a shame when they are kept hidden, for whatever reason.

So now I have this blog for my rant and the other for my rave. I'm looking forward to writing in each mode, expository and creative, and being able to share on both venues. But I still have my journal, and that's just for talking to myself. Its pages are legion. I'll never stop journaling, above all. It keeps me sane. (?)

One new blog, One refurbished blog, and Two dead blogs

2007-05-04T17:54:00.000-04:00

I'm making some big changes in my blogs overall: a new look here, with updated links, and a whole new Blogger blog I'm really excited about: inner elves I call it, and invite everyone to check it out. It's where I've decided to post my more creative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from most of my manuscripts going back over fifty years but just gathering dust. I decided I never was going to try to market them and they'd just get tossed if I didn't do a vanity collection (which would also gather dust in the copies I would spend a lot to publish and I wouldn't sell anyway). The more I thought about it, putting them out to the world in their own new blog here made a lot of sense. And I'm having a lot of fun putting it together.

Furthermore, it also makes a lot of sense to me that I didn't need two other blogs I've posted to in the past besides this one: nbknotes and nbk2. Those were languishing without new posts for many moons, so I deleted them today. Two blogs will be fine, because I basically have two selves in my writing : my creative side and my expository side, each looking for expression. In the past, I've found they don't mix very well for me in the same venue, so now each has its own.

Good Lord, what have I done! each screams at me. Oh well, too late now. (Besides, I saved all the stuff from the other now-defunct blogs as .xml's and will edit them into the one or the other new ones. There. I think that's going to work just fine.

On the brighter side

2007-05-01T16:27:00.000-04:00

I just noticed my recent blogs are pretty intense. Think I got caught up in the war, the shootings, bad student (and other) behavior in the schools, and the horrible things in the news generally and was trying to make sense of them in my mind. But not to be negative, I want to sign on to my blog and see something a little more positive, without being Pollyanna about it.

So here goes. It's a beautiful day, just great. And I just finished classes for the spring semester and have the grades all ready to submit. The students overall did themselves proud on the papers and last test, and for the first semester in a while I was pretty impressed with their efforts. It's good to feel like I made a difference in their lives and learning. I'm teaching summer session and already have nine or ten enrolled, so it will "make," and we'll get a nice start on our vacation budget.

And things seem to be falling into place. Our youngest sons are touring Europe in June, and it looks like Barb will get the foot surgery she needs by early June and be ambulatory by the time we can head out. We've mitigated some of the big doubling of our property insurance by taking higher non-hurricance deductible and getting a very favorable insurance inspection that should bring us closer to a mortgage payment we can live with, and if it doesn't, we've gotten an alternative quote lined up that will.

Everyone is busy and healthy, I already have my classes lined up for fall teaching, and if we can just get some rain to fall down here before we all have to ride camels in the South Florida Desert, we should be in good shape for a rewarding and full summer.

Cynicism's Dark Quicksand

2007-04-30T09:31:00.000-04:00

President John F. Kennedy hated cynicism and frequently chided the complainers in his administration. His mother, Rose, had read to him as a child of knights and heroes and brave deeds in the face of adversity. He grew to manhood believing that if one didn't like the way things were, he should try to do something about them rather than just complain. As a public servant he wrote the Pulitzer-winning Profiles in Courage to inspire others to act for change, not to simply accept the slings and arrows life's outrageous fortunes fling at everyone.

And it struck me today as amazing what one individual can do when one takes hold of almost any issue. I admit that much in our lives seems to visit things upon us we'd rather not face, and sometimes it's tempting to feel we really don't have much control over events and outcomes. But it's very rare that something happens that we really can't do anything about at all. When those things do happen, St. Francis of Assissi had the best response in his famous prayer, "Give us the courage to change what we can, and the strength to accept what we cannot."

The psychologist Robert Butler wrote that the human mind is programmed to think toward one goal, and that is to act. "The end of all thought is action," I read from him as an undergraduate, and it rings still in my ear today. Every thought tries to move toward a response, not just an acceptance of a status quo. It is ingrained in the species and is an imperative for survival. The mind of man is not given its intelligence, its reasoning abilities, its many faculties of memory and imagination, insight and intuition simply to mull things over and over and never conclude anything, or to wallow in self-pity, bitterness, or a sense of despair or helplessness. To do so, to harbor and cultivate resentments against others instead of trying to take positive steps to correct perceived wrongs, to the point of delusion and paranoia, is the quiet prelude to tragedy, as happened at Virginia Tech, Columbine, and countless other sad events of our times.

No one should allow himself to feel helpless in the face of life's challenges or victimized by circumstances, because no one can control what will challenge him each day. What we can do, however, is control how we respond to those challenges, and in those choices become not victims of fate but the masters of our own destinies. Someone once said, if you believe you can do something, you may be right; but if you believe you cannot, you are right. So long as you choose to feel that way, you are a victim. But it is your choice whether you accept it and remain so. As JFK said, if you don't like something, try to change it.

The Killer Within

2007-04-18T09:26:00.000-04:00

Cho Seung-Hui, the South Korean senior English major who methodically and calmly executed thirty-two of his fellow students and teachers at Virginia Tech University Monday morning before killing himself, is a compelling study in evil hatred, depression, depravity, and horror of the human mind utterly disintegrated. Some students trapped in his killing rooms described his icy calm and coldblooded silence. Others spoke of his maniacal laughter as he fed upon the slaughter, returning again and again. His obscene and violent writings scared his instructors into warning others who might have intervened earlier in his silent rage, but their hands were tied because he made no overt threats, spoke to no one. He hated so many so blindly that he was convinced all hated him, and he became so paranoid that he acted out the rage within. In hindsight, his bloodbath was probably predictable, but perhaps not as preventable, for the killer in Cho Seung-Hui is, frighteningly, in each of us.

Nearly all of us control our killer rage all our lives, but some do not, and the killers capture and destroy the names of the individuals they feed upon, and blight their names and memories in infamy: the road ragers who pull their guns from their glove compartments and fire into another car, the suicide bombers whose killers within surrender their hosts to fanatic, senseless, indiscriminate murder of as many innocents as possible in the name of some misguided cause or movement, and all the rampaging, sick killers who have come to hate this world and its people beyond endurance, including themselves, and have determined to quit their human participation and break the social contract that binds us all: to live, to somehow live together, and always to respect human life.

So abhorent was Cho's hatred and so terrifying to contemplate Monday, that it was an uplifting, beautiful thing to find, as that day went on into Tuesday and into today, that Cho's legacy of hatred and death was more than matched and completely overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and healing at the candlelight vigil, at the memorial convocation, at the arrival of thousands of messages of sympathy and comfort. His infliction of pain and suffering for moments of a few dozen and of a lifetime of pain and loss for many hundreds more was more than matched by the heroism of so many at the scene and in the hospitals, the law enforcement communities, the entire campus and town which came together as one to grieve and support each other, by the shock of an entire nation who responded with messages of support and offers of help. I first felt Cho's hatred and the horror of evil, then felt the surging power of love and the healing peace and joy of goodness. It is the way humans are. In tragedy, grief and despair, we comfort and reach out to one another.

What I did not feel, I was amazed to realize, was hatred for Cho Seung-Hui. Not in the victim's friends and families' remarks, not in the officials' and authorities' remarks, not in the remarks of fellow students and professors he sought to destroy. It was so ironic that he felt everyone hated him, because he hated them. That they wanted to kill him, because he wanted to kill them. And that instead of destroying others, he could not destroy who they were in the hearts of those who knew them, could not sully their memories or recast them as the villains he saw in his sick mind and wrote of in his obscene, violent plays, but rather elevated their memories to the status of heroes cut down by senseless evil, to be remembered and honored as are fallen warriors and the victims of 9/11 and others.

Cho Seung-Hui sought to weaken and destroy his world. Instead he only brought it closer together and made it stronger. I have sensed that instead of a desire by anyone to destroy him, there is and will remain simply a profound sadness for him, a profound regret that no one could act to save him from his killer within. I think we realize that he, as the others who died, are in some way in us as well.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

2007-04-15T19:52:00.000-04:00

As so many of us part-time college instructors have found, night teaching is often more rewarding than day because the higher motivated, working students seeking career advancement opportunities tend to pay attention and get their work done on time, and are less likely to cheat or plagiarize, I suspect, as well.

Carol Anne has written an excellent blog on the subject at It's Five O'Clock Somewhere, but the part that really hit home for me was her frustrations not only with some unruly afternoon students who were disruptive, but the administration's hogtying of her hands to deal with it. When did the teacher's authority get so usurped by politically correct rules that took away any ability the teacher had to maintain order and accountability in her or his classroom? I've been victimized by it myself, and I've blogged about it before here (February 14: "The Most for the Least"). I think it's even worse now than in the free-for-all '70's counterculture days. No one seems willing to recognize that within a classroom, the teacher's authority must be respected--and backed up by the administration, even if it is unpopular with parents, politicians, or school boards of the system. It doesn't take very long for students to sense when the instructor's hands have been tied, and to act accordingly.

Society tends to ultimately get what it wants. If it wants its educational system to succeed in teaching its students effectively, it must support its teachers' authority with policies and procedures that engender respect. Anything less continues the mediocre, expediency-driven weakening of certifications and degrees, to the point that society, which wants college degrees and certifications to mean something, can no longer believe those degrees have any merit.

Hey guys, mind if I use my own computer?

2007-04-07T19:55:00.000-04:00

These constant updates every time I turn on my computer are making me wonder whose machine it is anyway. Microsoft, Java, Real, Macaffee, HP, Apple, and half a dozen other denizens of cyberspace want to grab hold of my operating system every time I log on and tell me new updates are ready to download or install. I can only stall them off from their nagging for so long. I don't want most of them, and they all use the security scare to try to frighten me into letting them do whatever they want, for as long as they want, while I twiddle my thumbs or plod along side-by-side with my slowed-down system trying to do what I wanted to do when I logged on, while they tinker under the radar.

It's a little like driving with your hood up while your mechanic fiddles around in the engine compartment and won't ever let you start or operate your vehicle without him reaching back in to adjust some little frammis or kree. I hate it. I especially hate it when I'm trying to get on the net for some information, and here comes the danged popup nags again, despite my having turned off every automatic update option I can find. And when I do try to turn off any of the "security essentials" they have defined, ooh-ooh--ooh, can't do that! your computer may be at risk! flash-flash-flash.

So eventually I do take a look at what these guys want to install to make it all better, and often it's not that altruistic. Often it's a self-serving update for the company instead of something I need, like Microsoft's latest gimmick that they just want to check to make sure I'm running a genuine Windows operating system--are there non-genuine ones? What the heck else is there that could have taken over my XP I've run since I bought the machine, pray tell. Or Mcaffee insisting I "validate" my antivirus software or I can't use it till I do. Who do they think is using it, since I bought and paid for it, if not me?

Moreover, I've found that most of these wonderful free update packs come with clever little things attached that I have to opt out of manually or they'll install automatically alongside what I maybe do want. One package wanted to install a Google Toolbar in my browser, for instance. Phooey. I don't want another menu bar under everything else crowding my main window space even more like a permanent popup ad. When I want to use Google or Yahoo, I'll go to Google or Yahoo fast enough. I don't want them "available" staring at me in my Word screens or my Internet Explorer or Firefox screens or my media player screens too.

The latest Microsoft "update" wanted to put in their latest browser, which I don't want, and didn't make much announcement about their intentions. It just came through the same pipe as the little "Security Updates" that never seem to end--you know, the ones that scroll down page after page in your control panel's "installed programs" screens after the "real" software list?--, only this one was a mega-megabyte, fullfledged new edition of Internet Explorer that took over everything I was doing for about a half-hour while it infiltrated every aspect of my machine, putting in a browser with tabs that I found anything but intuitive. I had one heluva time pulling that one all out.

Maybe I have a distorted view of what I as an end user of software and hardware I purchase gives me the right to do. I like to think I can control what I do with my own stuff, and when I do it. They, on the other hand, seem to believe they still own everything and control everything forever, and I have only leased the right to use what they have licensed me to use under certain conditions, the main one being when they don't want to mess around with it. Whatever I want to do with it, as far as they're concerned, can wait. I understand their right to nag me till I buy their product for its full price, but after that, go nag someone else. I'll take my chances with the gremlins you keep trying to scare me will take over. They can't be any more bothersome than you have become.

Don't Overlook the Obvious

2007-04-06T12:18:00.000-04:00

I once read a news item about the struggle a moving company had physically moving a big two-story house across a city to a new location. They got it up on big cushy wheels okay and through the streets and down to a bridge. But then they ran into a problem: the house wouldn't clear the height of the bridge by four or so inches. The workers struggled for some time wondering whether to weaken the bridge structure by trying to remove trusses temporarily or weaken the house by trying to lower its roof crown, and things were at a standstill till one of the workers heard a boy, watching nearby from his bicycle, say, "why don't you just let some air out of the tires?" They did, and the house slid through nicely. In their zeal to attend to details, they had overlooked the obvious.

I tend to do the same thing. A born worrier, I try to imagine whatever surprises Murphy has in store for most projects I undertake and prepare to deal with them. When we got our new refrigerator I went over and over checking with both yardsticks and tape measures the height to clear the overhead shelves, the width and depth, and cleared thoroughly the path through the garage into the house, making sure the car was parked tight against the wall to make a wide run for the refrigerator applaince dolly. We got our automated call Wednesday night that they'd deliver it Thursday morning between nine and eleven. I knew I'd be working at school; Barb would have to handle whatever came up. But I had confidence we'd done all we needed to prepare. I'd brought in cooler chests and storage bins sufficient to receive the food. I worked the icemaker faucet back and forth a few times to be sure it wouldn't stick, and taped the excess line coiled against the back of the old unit so they wouldn't run over it. I'd protected some security cam wires where they'd be run over, possibly, by creating a valley for them between two lengths of yardstick and taped everything down good. I was sure I'd thought of everything.

But when I turned on my internet quad picture of my house cams between classes, I was appalled to see one cam, the one on my front door, askew viewing the blank door jam, instead of the cul-de-sac and house across the street. I knew immediately what had happened: the delivery men had brought the fridge through the double front doors instead of through the garage. Aargh! That meant they'd probably sever my through-the-door wiring and mess up my new door cam against the house, and I'd have to repair or replace about a hundred dollars worth of equipment. I called Barb. Yes, they came in and out of the front double doors.

Well of course they would, I realized. It was obvious--the easiest way to deliver the item and remove the old unit. But in my obsession with details, I had overlooked the obvious.

Probably the worst non compis mentis I ever committed was when I once made breakfast in my Chicago near north side apartment one morning. I was trying to make up some orange juice from concentrate, and in my still-half-asleep fog I couldn't get the frozen concentrate to shake out of the large-size cardboard cylinder even after I pried off its metal lid. So I ran some warm water around it and shook it again. The vacuum was too great on the bottom; it wouldn't come out. So I had a can punch in my hand and--you guessed it. Holding the cannister upside-down over the floor, I punched a nice triangular hole in the bottom. That worked. With the vacuum broken, the entire cylinder of frozen Del Monte Premium 100% Orange Juice concentrate fell to the floor with a squishy thud. I had overlooked the obvious.

But wait, there's more! After gathering up what I could of the orange juice glob and spooning it into the pitcher, I went for the necessary can of waterto the kitchen sink and--you guessed it--filled my big cannister to the brim with cold water, crossed the kitchen to the pitcher on the table, and poured in the few drops left in the cannister which had not streamed out the triangular hole I'd made in the bottom all across the kitchen floor. Twice in two minutes I had again overlooked the obvious.

With a Ph.D. and sixty-seven years of life experience, I would like to believe I'm not just plain stupid, but sometimes it's hard to be convinced. If I've learned to respect one thing, it's that all the expertise in the world, or the intellectual accuity, or the experience, or the wisdom, or attention to details, is no substitute for the best of all smarts: what they used to call "common sense." I think maybe it's the sense nature programmed in us that enables the human race to survive, despite all the warped, airy thinking we too often, in our folly, embrace instead.

Overcoming our comfort zones

2007-03-31T09:55:00.000-04:00

In the late '60's the Information Age which continues to explode today had already begun, and Alvin Toeffler wrote Future Shock prognosticating what might happen to us as we became increasingly drenched and bombarded with information of all kinds from all media: our beliefs would be fragmented and fractured, our puny human brains couldn't handle it all, we wouldn't be able to recognize what to embrace from what to reject, to separate the important from the unimportant. We would generally be overwhelmed and shocked by the future we created.

Nearly a half-century has elapsed since that vision, and it seems to me Toeffler was right. We can't handle all the information we are exposed to each day--at least not in the way we used to. Our emails alone number in the hundreds for many, and we've all learned to speedread and scan most of our reading, toss out the spam and the mailbox crammed with ads and junk mail, speedflip through the hundreds of channels the tv tries to wedge into our heads, and so forth. Our mode of discriminating what to keep from what to toss, what to focus on from what to ignore, has become faster and faster, and less and less considered, mulled over, than ever before. We realize we still ought to think critically, but every pressure is instead to think automatically and efficiently in our high-speed sort of the information flood. We are riding the crest of the information tidal wave on a very short board, and trying to keep our balance however we may.

So how do we cope with the dilemma of too much information and too little time to consider it critically, assuming none of us wants to fall prey to the ostrich response and simply ignore the problem? The answer varies, often by generation and circumstance. The tendency of many seniors like me may be to turn to the past for our familiar ideas and cling tenaciously to our outmoded but comfortable ways. Our comfort zones become our Capuccin monastaries, our protected enclaves of the spirit, where the confusing, fast-paced world outside our needs won't bother our tranquility. The cost, of course, is that we sacrifice living in it, growing, and experiencing more than we had.

Surprisingly, the tendency of young adults is somewhat similar in insulating the psyche from the perils to the mind and spirit which the information flood threatens. I've noticed as a college teacher, that students are blissfully unaware of most current events, prefer not to worry about the world very much, to not make commitments which are far-reaching and to instead be very flexible to change, to not hold onto much of anything very long if it becomes inconvenient. They will sign up for yearbook or newspaper staffs, dramatic productions and other activities, then think nothing of simply not showing up before the first edition. I've seen cast quit at the dress rehearsal--just not interested anymore. This establishes a comfort zone that protects itself against consequences by evading the need to accept responsibility.

The entertainments of the young are typically to accept the sensational and spectacular and loud over anything of substance or subtlety or depth, to settle for the Wikipedia summary of an idea, to avoid complexity or extended study of almost anything, and to ride that wave forward in such a way that leaves all problems and troublesome issues behind, including conscience, mistakes, morality, social responsibility--troublesome issues all that are best left unconsidered.

I asked a colleague, reading the morning paper in our coffee lounge, if he read the paper and followed current events when he was in college. No, not at all, he answered. Did I? No, I realized, I didn't care about the world beyond my family and the campus till much later--except for the big headline events like President Kennedy's assassination that had everyone shouting on the streets. But not issues. Not trends. Not opinions or ideas. If it wasn't required in a course and I didn't have to be tested on it or write a paper about it, I didn't want to know it. My head was being rewired by my professors and friends enough, then.

So when, I wondered, do we begin to care about what's happening in the world at large, if not by college? Perhaps it changes when we get out on our own, into our jobs and careers, and begin to navigate our own lives. For the first time, probably, what to do next isn't always clear, and we realize we have to make decisions that will have consequences for quite a while, and we gradually realize that what's been happening "out there" in the big, scary world has importance for us to know in order to make those decisions intelligently and from an informed perspective.

From then on, we are forced to expand our comfort zones. Reality demands it. And we begin to voluntarily change some of the ideas we used to cling to for the sake of seeing things as clearly as we can. Today's vast communications explosion has made ignoring inconvenient new truths and living in a bubble of comfortable ideas much more difficult than before the information age began, but the fact of it has created an imperative, I think, to accept that things are not so fixed and knowable in many cases, that life is change and flux, that there is seldom certainties that we should try to cling to at all costs for the sake of validating our preferred beliefs, if new evidence suggests we should adapt and change. If we accept that imperative, perhaps, accept change and do not fear its challenge, we will probably be more comfortable in the long run.

Post Number 101: Dedicated to My Three Sons

2007-03-19T15:42:00.000-04:00

I notice I've published a hundred posts here, so this one's for and about generations. You have probably heard that we've discovered a living first cousin of mine on my dad's side, my dad's nephew, his brother Jesse's youngest son, Robert. He lives with his wife, Nancy, in Wisconsin, and we hope to drop in and meet him this summer on our trip north. And he has researched and written a wonderful history of the paternal side of the family, and sent us a copy. I hope to get another for each of you to hang onto for that time when people start to wonder where they came from--no, not that way, the geneology way--if they live long enough.

In Cousin Bob's book he talks a lot about your great-grandfather, John Yoder Kauffman, who lived with him in Ann Arbor, Michigan till his passing at age 89 in 1935. Reading about what this man did is astonishing. Son of an Amish-Mennonite minister, he raised his family in a log cabin near Bellefontaine, Ohio on their farm. They had five sons and two daughters from 1880 to 1893. The older children were born in that log cabin, but the younger ones were born in a three-story big farmhouse he built nearby with his own hands.

Together they worked hard and farmed the land. John Yoder and Ida Christine managed to put every one of their children through college. Then they fanned out, some to missionary work and preaching, some to teaching and education, some to engineering, medicine, forestry and other fields. Some, however, stayed and helped with the farm.

But John Yoder wasn't content with just farming after the family was raised. Eventually he sold the farm and started a metal products manufacturing plant in Bellefontaine, making wheels and rims for Detroit carmakers where he moved. Some of the sons helped him till he retired and moved to Ann Arbor with Cousin Bob in his final years. One day in May of 1935 , at age 89, your great-grandfather picked up his golf clubs and walked two miles across the university city to a municipal golf course and played nine holes. On his way back he stopped for ice cream, Bob writes, and by the time he got home he was finally tired. Deep-down tired. He told them that night in bed, "I am very tired. I don't think I will make it through the night." And that night your great-grandfather John Yoder Kauffman died in his sleep.

The things that man did, considering the times that he did those things is, I think, amazing. Reading about my grandfather's enterprising, God-fearing life, progenation of more than twice the number of children your mother and I raised (and we thought we had our hands full with only three!), no special benefit of education or training himself beyond what he learned from his father and from experience, it made me feel like a real slaggard myself, despite my humble achievements. Kind of makes you realize what's maybe possible in one life, doesn't it. And Grandfather Kauffman is just one of many in Cousin Bob's book whose lives, character, and achievements we can be justly proud of.

O Ye of Little Faith

2007-03-04T18:36:00.000-05:00

The discovery of ancient "Holy Family" ossuaries in Jerusalem tombs recently has unleashed the predictable "told 'ya so" from the humanist atheists, and tonight's ABC News had them parading around Washington and calling for the end of all religion and a new age of reason.

The world's religions, they said, have in their fanatic fighting against each other, caused the fracturing of the world, pitting Jews against Muslims, Catholics against Protestants, and Hindu against Buddhist. All human misery would vanish if only men would embrace modern knowledge and science, use their own human reason, and eschew ancient religious "superstitions."

What these rationalists may be forgetting is that such a world as they are promoting was tried, before, and it didn't work very well. It was called the Age of Reason, and ironically came to fullness at the time of the founding of America, at the end of the Eighteenth Century.

The Christian Church was at its lowest ebb of influence since its formation. In France, following the French Revolution, Napoleon, having been elected by plebiscite, seized Notre Dame Cathedral from the Church, threatened clergy with torture and death, and rededicated the famous structure to "the Goddess of Reason." He then forced the Pope to crown him within its walls, which he had ordered redecorated as a Roman temple with round arches rather than the pointed vaults of the Gothic age, Emperor of the French Empire (modeled after ancient Rome). He built the Arc de Triomph atop the Etoile and the Vendome Column on the site that had recently guillotined nearly the entire French aristocracy in the Reign of Terror, forced the citizens of the new Age of Reason to wear Roman togas and refurnish their homes with torchiere lamps and chaise lounges as had the Romans, and enjoy the fruits of liberte, egalite, and fraternite, the same ideals the French had supported in our own revolution a decade or so earlier.

When things didn't work, he reverted to type, invaded most of the rest of Europe, and caused quite a ruckus until stopped, finally, at Waterloo by sea and Moscow by land. So much for the "Age of Reason."

But most Americans today believe, mistakenly, that America was founded by Christians persecuted in Europe and driven to the New World by religious intolerance. The pilgrims of Plymouth and Jamestown colonies came for many reasons, but they weren't necessarily Christians, and some century and a half later, when the signers of the Declaration of Independence met in 1776, after the fullness of the Enlightenment had produced some of the finest thought since the Classical philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had argued by dialectic in the Greek Academy and Lyceum, there was hardly a Christian to be found among them. As were most men of the Enlightenment, Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, Monroe and others were Deists, not Christians. They placed their faith in reason, not religion. And they had the wisdom to keep religion separate from matters of the state.

Notice I did not say keep religion out of the social order, but separate from matters of government. Freedom of the faith and practice of one's religion was, in fact, guaranteed by the Constitution by these same founding fathers, these Deists. And one must ask why.

I believe that those men of reason, unlike Napoleon, must have recognized that religion is based not upon physical realities but upon the reality of the spiritual that infuses with meaning the physical existence we are so much more aware of, that spirit is the essential force that has inspired man since the dawn of time to struggle, to persevere, to tolerate, to love, to forgive, to endure, to continue forward against a flood of scorn and doubt by others, and ultimately to triumph over a purely evidentiary physical environment. And from religion, if we are extremely fortunate, we might even learn to love others we might otherwise hate. There is nothing in reason to account for that. Love our enemies? Preposterous! Do good to those that seek to harm me? Ridiculous!

The tomb discoveries mean much to those who have no belief in spirit, for it proves to them, logically, that the Resurrection never happened. There are the bones, they say. Jesus lived, married Mary Magdalene, had children, died, and here he is; here, in fact, they all are. They are the same thinkers who dispute the divine creation of the world, the existence of God, the Ark of the Covenant, the Flood of Noah, the raising of Lazurus, the healing of the blind, the parting of the Red Sea and all the miracles of both Testaments, on the basis of only physical laws, historical records, archeological remains and reason. Holy objects can't kill by touch, the Earth has never flooded entirely, the dead can't be raised, the blind made to see, nor the seas to part. It is just not reasonable.

These people completely ignore the reality of spirit, which by definition cannot be apprehended by reason nor proven by science. I happen to be a Christian, but not because I know the historical proofs of the miracles. My faith doesn't hinge on the physical truth of the Resurrection or whether or not Jesus's life according to the gospels was accurately remembered. My faith is based not upon what Jesus did but upon what he preached: love, forgive, and always have faith. Be kind, be giving, be helpful, be patient, be humble, be respectful, be slow to anger and be tolerant, for no one is perfect. Admit your shortcomings and try not to repeat them.

Show me how a world that would reject such things as these in favor of a code of conduct based purely on human reason and natural laws, without any measure of right or wrong, and stripped of any divine authority or purpose for human life beyond survival at any cost could create a better world, and then we'll talk.

RenFest '07

2007-02-18T11:08:00.000-05:00

We enjoyed Renfest again this year despite the deforestation around the lake due to Hurricane Wilma. Our favorite part of the "forest" is shown here in 2005 and currently. It's where we try to get a good picture of the troupe coming through the path with their royal processions several times daily.

The Most for the Least

2007-02-14T11:07:00.000-05:00

It usually happens like this: I see them at the first or second class of the semester, then they disappear for several more and no longer respond to attendance. Within a couple of weeks I review and test the first material, which they don't show up for either, and I assume they have dropped the course.

Then a few days later their sponsor, or mentor, or coach, or other wetnurse (everyone has some sponsor, it seems, lurking behind the bench in loco parentis) emails me to assure me that they are vitally concerned about Johnny or Suzie's progress in my class and will do all they can to be sure they are successful, and how has their attendence been, and are they meeting their assignments, and please contact them all about the course and their protege's progress. These emails often coincide with a meeting with parents the next day and may be accompanied by other emailed excuses from the parents themselves about what a rough time Johnny or Suzy has been having healthwise or personally, and how he/she really wants to do well and must have an A to pull his/her cumulative grade out of the cellar and graduate in May, and I'm the only thing standing in the way, and would I work with them closely to make sure their budding scholar gets back on track and passes.

When those emails descend on my campus inbox, I can almost guarantee that the longlost Johnny or Suzie is about to reappear in the next class and request to make up the entire term's work posthaste. If I offer to let them make up the test on the spot, however, they "couldn't possibly do that; I haven't studied for it at all," they say. What they want is time to ask a classmate what was on it, since we've already passed it back and gone over it. That's why I collect and keep all copies and change the test.

Somehow we have trained an entire generation to believe that they have a right to succeed in everything and have everything and do everything, without earning it. Rules are for fools, and if they run into obstacles or problems along the way, there are always others to run interference for him, always ways around requirements, and always someone else to bail them out of their jam. Their only object, it seems, is to do whatever they want to do, whenever and wherever they want to do it, for there's a good chance they won't be caught or face any penalty for their misdeeds. And the idea that somehow they must take responsibility for their actions and that there are consequences and a price to be paid for their sidewinding slither through life's challenges is simply lost on them. All they must learn is the art of the excuse, and all will be smooth sailing through life.

Something's Changed around Here

2007-02-09T15:59:00.000-05:00

I went shopping for a replacement ps2/usb adapter today, and on the way I swung in to Hess to fill my tank. The Hess station had worn-out instructions and labels on the pumps, so it was hard to tell which way the credit card slot wanted me to position my card from the partly-worn drawing. The "start" button I was supposed to press had been completely erased and looked like a bullet hole in a plastic square. More than once the pump speaker has blared out at me "Other way!" but this time I was unmonitored. I looked up.

"Wrong way," the lcd said. "Insert card again." I did, another possible way. "Card inserted wrong" the lcd said. The pump wasn't going let me use my credit card, telling me instead to "pay inside." I didn't want to pay inside. I wanted to pay at the pump, as I'm used to. But I went in, got in line behind another guy, and waited my turn to pay in advance. No clerk in sight.

"He's coming right back," the other guy said. Okay. Wait, wait, wait. Five minutes later. "He's coming right back," the other guy said again. After ten minutes, I decided he wasn't 'coming right back,' so I left and drove to another pump. Same message: "Pay inside." I decided to drive on.

Office Depot didn't carry my adapter, but they thought Walmart might, so I started for there. Then I saw the Big Beautiful: the new Best Buy was now open, right across the street! I jockeyed my way into the newly-paved lot and entered the Promised Land: Best Buy of Coral Springs!

Before I was halfway through the door, the deep boom boom boom of the car stereo gear's bass amplified speakers which bounce customers of most electronics stores these days rhythmically along the aisles assaulted my ears and vibrated my knees. "WELCOME TO BEST BUY!" a kid barely out of high school wearing a Best Buy Blue teeshirt shouted over the din, thrusting a sale flyer at me as a winsome, matching-teeshirted girl in a ponytail gyrated to the beat and smiled like Vanna White as she worked a cellphone display, blocking my further progress. "Welcome to Best Buy," she mimed, though I couldn't hear a word. I tried to work my way to a section with shelving high enough to block the bass. There was none to be found.

Yep, it's a Best Buy alright, I marvelled, borne by each beat further along the aisles, scanning for the cables and connectors section. The new store was filled with eager young helpers who typically clustered themselves around computer islands in small groups and talked excitedly. Finally a manager, or at least a young fellow who seemed to be at least twenty-one and who wore a tie, asked "May I help you find something?" I showed him my broken adapter. "Mm, this isn't good," he said, pulling it apart. "I don't think we carry anything like that by itself." It was what I expected, so I reached out to take it back. "Wait," he withdrew my item," I'll check with the Geek Squad." The Geek Squad are the Green Berets and Navy Seals of Best Buy and other such stores, the creme de la creme of techies; they actually know something about computers and parts. So elite are they, in fact, that even my presumed "manager" dared not interrupt their commisserations around a computer register. So I waited some more.

Finally one tall geek squadder turned his head, flipped away my manager after a disdainful glance at my lowly broken adapter, and returned to his cybercrowd. My manager handed me the pieces and announced triumphantly, "I was right. We don't have it." with a wide smile.

So I marched out of Best Buy to the boom boom boom of the thousand-watt trunk speakers and headed for Walmart. On the way, however, I was able to fill my gas tank at the 7-11 across from Hess (and to use my card!) Of course, I now had to add my zip code at the pump, "for protection against unauthorized use," the lcd said. And surprise surprise, Walmart didn't carry my adapter either. I finally found it online for $2.50, but had to add $3.45 for postage and another $4.00 handling fee for "orders under $10." Wonder if that guy ever came back to the counter at Hess.

The Vital Lie

2007-01-24T17:45:00.000-05:00

Bertolt Brecht wrote a play about denial, among other themes, called Galileo. In one scene a small boy is energetically engaged, like his playmates, in stoning the hut of an old woman. "What are you doing?" Galileo asks. "Why are you throwing stones at that hut?"

"She's a witch!" the boy responds, "everyone knows it." "A witch? Well, let's investigate," Galileo says, raising the boy to the hut's window. "Now, what do you see with your own eyes?"
"Just an old woman stirring porridge," the boy reports. Pleased, Galileo lowers the boy, who runs off to join his friends. "She is a witch! she is a witch!" the boy cries.

As the real Galileo Galilei found from personal experience, people are capable of denying not only what is proven to them, but even what they see with their own eyes or hear with their own ears if the truth conflicts with what they wish to believe. Given that we all want to feel that we are reasonable and open-minded to new evidence, why is this so?

There are many reasons we cling to our perceptions, right or wrong. Sometimes the truth is too painful to admit, or we fear that its consequences might be more than we think we could handle. Other times we might deny to protect our ego, if the truth might force us to admit we are guilty of something, or weak, or lacking in talent or ability, or wrong about something we hold dear. Whatever the reason, it amazes me to what lengths people will go to protect themselves, their families and friends, against truths they don't want to admit. Sometimes it might be a child's not winning a dance contest to a stage mom, or accepting a son or daughter really was disruptive in class, or a third really started that fight. Few of us seem to need truth so much as our own protections and rationalizations.

We will accept only as much truth as we can while still protecting our self-image and retaining our self-respect. We must, to live. We will believe whatever we must to survive, physically and emotionally. Otherwise we can turn on ourselves. So we deny, and spare no means to prop ourselves up with our "vital lies"--the false but cherished perceptions that keep us happy. That is why I am convinced that I'm only forty-something when I shave and brush my thinning hair just so, to one side so as not to see too much scalp shining through; that I'm really about six feet tall instead of five-nine and shrinking; that my waning mental age, which my wife's new Brain Age game tells me is eighty, is only a parlor game and has no basis in fact. It is also why I'm often absolutely convinced I'm right about something when I'm not.

But these things are well-known. Most people realize deep down that we all try to hide our weaknesses and blemishes, that we all kid ourselves. We know it just means we're human. And we still accept one another and care about one another, with all our delusions faults, warts and all and hope others will respond in kind and treat us the way we'd like to think we are. When it arises from good intentions, Denial--and her handmaiden, Tact--provide the balm that keeps us going.

What may not be as well understood is the role of emotion in these false perceptions. If I want to believe something badly enough, if I feel strongly about it, I am apt to believe it because I feel it so much. If I feel it so deeply, I reason, it must be so. The feeling itself creates the "resonance of truth" much the way the mind resonates when a reasoned proof is perceived through argument, or a fact is proven to us scientifically that we cannot deny. Emotion, in fact, is a very physical thing, not just an internal phenomenon. When we feel strong emotion, our galvanic skin response changes, our heartrate and blood pressure change, and our "feeling" can be measured and identified to the trained eye. So a false perception, like an accurate one, can produce the same strong feelings as far as the mind is concerned. Reality is what we perceive it to be, in other words, and we can prove it to the machines and technicians. Is it any wonder, then, that ewe create "our" own truths, and cling to them in the face of nearly every challenge? Denial, in that respect, is simply the affirmation of a different truth: the one we choose to believe, the one we really "feel" is true. Watch the big screen--and pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

No-yes, Yes-no, and Engineers

2007-01-15T08:38:00.000-05:00

English teachers caution against expressing a double negative. My English department head told me this story:

A man ran out of gasoline and was stranded on the roadside when another car stopped. "What's the problem?" the driver asked. "I don't got no gasoline," the first replied. My department head told me this story and added the punchline, "Only a fool or a grammarian would conclude the first driver had gasoline."

To that story today I would add "...or a computer engineer." Engineers don't think like I do, and I spend half my computer time trying to figure out what they were thinking when I run into snags running my programs. Much of the time my misunderstandings are semantic, and when I do realize what a certain thing meant to the engineer, it makes sense--but only in the most Byzantine (to me) of ways.

When one says a statement like "The woman said 'no,'" to me it is a negative statement. Not to a software designer, who might see it as 1) a declaration was uttered ("yes"), that a woman said something ("no"). Yes, she said no, in other words.

My son got me some remote control plugins which enable me to turn lights on and off automatically from my desktop computer. The program configures an a/c interface to send signals into the a/c house wiring itself which can be picked up in any room by plugins. However, there is one house circuit which doesn't carry these signals due to the way the house was originally wired. To make a lamp turn on in my living room requires an RF (wireless, broadcast) signal, and in addition to configuring the module itself in my computer, I must configure a separate "macro" to turn it on, and another to turn it "off." Each macro, in turn, must create its own timer to tell the "on" one exactly when to signal the switch module to activate, and another timer to tell the "off" macro when to signal the switch module to switch the lamp off.

So within the first macro, I needed to select "on" to activate the macro and "on" to signal the switch to turn on the lamp. So far, so good. But within the second macro, I need to select "on" to activate that macro but "off" to send a lamp switch-off command to the module. Yes-no, in other words. To an engineer, that makes perfect sense. To me, it's bad semantics. I think activating the macro should be termed not "on/off" but "activate/deactivate" or "enable/disable" so as not to confuse that selection with the "on/off."

When I run into this kind of engineer's logic, I get very frustrated trying to second-guess it. At such times I have to remind myself how stupid these machines really are; they do exactly what they are told to do, and they can't interpret things in any but one way. They can't understand the human intentions behind what is said, or the feelings or emotions behind the commands which most people can, intuitively. People can often sense what we really mean behind the words, and can often sense when we don't mean what we say, or are kidding or lying or being sarcastic. Computers, unfortunately, "believe" everything we say, and can "understand" only the very precise meaning of each word. Yes, they cannot, no.

Ma Coat, Ma Hat, Ma Gandhi

2007-01-12T10:21:00.000-05:00

It is said that one of the world's most influential philosophical and political figures of all time, had in his possession at the time of his death only a few meagre items. Other than his personal effects--spectacles, a loincloth or two--he "owned" only his small, low writing desk, pens and papers. Yet Mahatma Gandhi, father of nonviolent resistance, was to move mountains as India's leader and an inspiration to Martin Luther King's social preachings. His spartan existence begs the question of how many things we need to acquire in order to feel fulfilled.

Acquisitiveness is a disease nearly all of us carry most of our lives, and Americans, in particular, have this malady in abundance. We each pursue our American Dream in our own way, but acquiring (and parading our trophies) more and more things in a constant stream of purchases seems a vital part of it. And why shouldn't we? In this amazing land of unlimited personal opportunity and availability of a seemingly infinite supply of new products and gadgets, we get and spend, get and spend, and get some more.

I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with acquisitiveness per se. We all admire those who have become materially successful--especially if they share their wealth with others, but there aren't many Gandhi's among us, happy with only "a few nice things." To criticize acquisitiveness, which it seems has become almost synonymous with our Constitutionally guaranteed right to pursue our happiness in our own way, might even question patriotism. If everyone in this society were a Gandhi, consider the economic collapse as the stores would close, the factories stop making so many things, and most jobs would be lost--in short, without our acquisitiveness, we couldn't sustain our lives as we know them. But given Gandhi's life and legacy, it is interesting to consider what we really need.

The results of our constant acquisition are that we gorge ourselves externally, in the same way that we seem to gorge our palates internally, and have nowhere to put all our stuff. Our living space has grown from an average 1,500 square feet residence of our parents to an average 2,500 square feet, though the size of our families has shrunk, largely due to the need for more places to put all our stuff. And without enough space in the house and the closets, we take over the spare rooms, the garage, the attic, the basement, and keep on going by getting sheds to store more stuff. Out paths inside the house are shrinking from clutter and basically crowding us out! Yet still we are loathe to part with one item we "own." We might need it someday. The children might want it. It always meant so much to us sentimentally. It's still perfectly good. Our excuses are always ready and sufficient to overcome our occasional remorse for our material obsessions. America is one of the few societies in the world to spawn an entire industry of storage facilities that have sprung up in every state, just to have someplace to handle the overflow of our stuff.

The tendency to create clutter, interestingly presented in last December's issue of the AARP's magazine Modern Maturity, may be in part hereditary. But it's probably more sociological. Our fast-paced lives and limited interaction with family, friends, and neighbors may contribute to our need to acquire more material things, to reassure ourselves that we've got something to show for our efforts, because we can see and touch our "trophies." And we don't let go of anything, because it represents a sense of continuity of who we are, as we bring the past--as much as we can drag of it--with us into the present. Perhaps it gives us as well a sense of control, because let's face it, without our "stuff" we have no idea who we are.

But when we confront who we are independently of our possessions, our trophies, our bank balances and our net material worth, we can begin to see those things that really are important, and they're within us, not without. Our selves, our health, our values, our relationships, our friendships, our characters and honor, our choices and experiences, our service to others, our faith and our loyalties--those things Gandhi had and didn't need much else.

The Paradox of Scopes

2006-12-28T16:37:00.000-05:00

Telescopes, as everyone agrees, extend the vision, bringing what is distant near. But in direct proportion that they enable us to see what is in front of us at a distance, they reduce the vision of what is in front of us directly. Microscopes, conversely, enable us to peer into the smallest spaces. But in doing so, we leave the macro world around us behind. What appears to increase our view, then, paradoxically decreases our view of that which is immediate, of that which is at hand.

Perhaps that phenomenon is why God put our eyes in the front of our heads instead of on the back. The rest of the body is oriented toward the front, in the use of the arms and hands, legs and feet. If we were more in need of looking backward, or manipulating and affecting what is behind us, we would probably look much different.

Think of telescopic and microscopic views in terms of time, of distance as time. Again, that which is in immediately in front of us is now, the present. That which is at a distance is some time removed--in the future, or in the past, for we have moved from where we were at a previous moment.

I guess that what I'm getting at has to do with the design of machines that can multitask (we aren't designed to) and take us from here to somewhere else in time and space in some way. We can't act directly upon tomorrow or yesterday, only now. And we can only act most directly on what is most immediate and proportionate to us, what is in front of us in our "eternal present." When we attempt to extend our influence upon the distant, the future, without or within, we reduce proportionately our influence upon the now, and lose our opportunities rather than increase them.

95% Sex before Marriage? Something's Bogus Here

2006-12-20T15:36:00.000-05:00

I read today that 95% of adults, men and women alike, admit to having had premarital sex, "calling into question the federal government's funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12-to-29-year-olds...which have received hundreds of millions of dollars under the Bush administration...." Further, the study found the same percentages going back to the 1940's; nearly everyone, it seems, has been doing it--or freely admits to it at least.

The surprise, it seems, is that it had been assumed people of former generations had been more chaste than people growing up today. But I wonder if the study considered the later age at which many now wait to marry, than a few decades ago. Several factors, in fact, seem to have been ignored in this report.

For one, the biological age for childbearing, for most, can be said to begin at puberty and not end till perhaps middle age or even later. Since the continued propogation of the species depends upon sufficient sexual attraction between males and females to assure sex, sexual activity is going to take place regardless of laws or mores or whatever taboos society places upon those who participate.

But being sexually active and getting married are very different things. If people in the 1940's--especially women--got married, as they often did, right out of high school or before their mid- twenties, that is one thing. It might have been easier to have waited a few years till marriage to have sex. But if people today wait throughout their twenties, and perhaps their thirties or even their forties to tie the knot, I don't find it so surprising that they wouldn't hold off on sex as well. That's a lot of time to be a single adult with an active social life and normal urges.

Further, the more recent appearance following the AIDS epidemic of more effective birth control methods like the widespread acceptance and availability of condoms and other contraceptives, the morning-after pill, the protections of Roe v. Wade under the law, and the possibility for adoptive placement of infants into loving homes, all mitigate worries about unwanted consequences of being sexually active for today's generation. Sex and its former taboos are not the scarlet-letter-branded issue of shame they once were, nor is it considered something that one should keep as secret as it used to be. Quite the opposite seems true today, in fact. The norm, now, is to freely proclaim that one has lost his or her virginity as a badge of honor, and to have remained a virgin till one's later years is now the cause for social shame. One's sexual status has completely reversed itself!

Is it any wonder, then, that a study done today concludes that almost everyone claims to have done the deed? Do, in fact, 95% of single Americans have sexual experience? Or are some too reluctant to admit they have not, like in The Forty Year Old Virgin and are just lying? And if 95% have indeed found sex before marriage, has that had an effect on pushing the bonds of matrimony and responsibilities of child-rearing further and further into later life? No, I think something's not quite right in this report.

Ready...Set...SHOP!!!

2006-11-11T14:24:00.000-05:00

The excitement's building as Thanksgiving approaches. The whole family is coming down for turkey, pumpkin pie, parades and comraderie, and of course the main reason: Black Friday! Got to get down to the stores super early to get those "things that make the season bright." We're usually well represented, some years camping out three or four together plus an extra curious friend or two in front of Best Buy all night. The best spots are already lined up by midnight. South Florida techie shoppers are an intrepid bunch and hard to beat to the bargains. My fam takes naps Thanksgiving evening before rising for the all-night annual vigil.

Then when the doors finally open about five or six am, everybody races through the stores grabbing whatever's close, as they head for those special items on their list they read about in the ads for a week. It's an amazing race worthy of reality tv.

By ten or eleven in the morning, it's all over. The gang drags in, smug from their bounteous booty secured in their car trunks, and crashes into their beds or just sprawls out on couches and floors for a catchup nap, exhausted from the vigil of the past twelve to sixteen hours and the hell-bent-for-bargains shopping melee of packed stores. The goal is to make it to all four nearby megacenters: Best Buy, CompUSA and Circuit City across the street, and maybe even BrandsMart around the corner at the Sawgrass Mall. We have begun a push in ernest here in South Florida to create the biggest, best megacenter shopping mecca in the world in Sunrise, and the huge, sprawling Sawgrass Mills Mall is already world-famous. They're even building twenty-story condo's that overlook it, as if it's the gem of all views, with prices modestly starting in the mid-half-millions. Don't want to miss those bargains, nosirree.

Christmas shopping? Well, I guess the Black Friday gold rush is the beginning of the total mayhem that then continues all over our region till Christmas Day. Maybe it's just our way of playing a warped adult musical chairs. If you don't hustle, you don't get the prizes--or even a place to park. Kind of makes online shopping more appealing each year, as our cars stay in the only guaranteed parking spots left south of Disney World: our own driveways.

But I'm still looking forward to it, all of it. The arrivals, the festivities, food, parades and games, shopping, running around, and finally by Sunday afternoon putting up the Christmas tree and outside lights while the kids are still here to enjoy it. Thanksgiving, this Thanksgiving, is probably the only time we'll all be together for a year. By Christmas we all scatter and have our exchanges in several cities. But there's something special about having the whole family together at our house, even if it's only for a few days or hours. Something I'm really thankful for.

The Fantum Fam

2006-10-27T13:19:00.000-04:00

Since most of the folks who read my blogs are family, and others who nearly always drop by my posts seem like family (Hi there, Carol Anne), I'll speak like family and call us all out for our lazy ways.

Barb (Iris Blue, Mom, Grandma K, Sweetheart) said to me yesterday, "Our whole family has just quit blogging." It's true. Last night I read something Scott (Tall Penguin) recently posted, and an email that Mark (Ninja) sent me saying he was looking for new postings from me but finding none. Favorite daughter-in-law Rhonda (Lazo land) did phone to tell us she got a new phone and emailed Barb a photo from it to see if it worked right, but the whole fam damily have been strangely silent in the blogosphere of late.

I can't speak for the others, but I have no excuse. Sure, I've been busy--busier than I need to be, really--but we probably all have been. I think we all write more on our summer breaks when the livin' is easy, and there comes a time in the middle of autumn, about now, when things we began in September snowball on us, and we just quit blogging for awhile. I doubt this is a permanent condition; however, I do suspect it's an annual one. Looking back at last fall with all the hurricanes, I didn't blog as much as I had that summe either.

Whatever's keeping us from the flow and fun of sounding off, I hope it diminishes so we can wax eloquent again soon. I hope to write up a storm by Christmas at the latest, and hopefully before. This is a fun time of year, and we need to blog about it.

Something Just to Move the Screen Down

2006-10-08T12:47:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I feel like I need to write a post just to move the preceeding post down below the startup screen. That's how I felt when I opened my last "Write To Say It" screen and stared at my filched dissertation tirade; I'd forgotten all about it and moved on, but like graffiti, posts are stickynotes. They hang around on walls and telephone poles like last month's primary posters, and they persist at the tops of blogs until the lazy blogger moves them down. Thus, this:

Sunday mornings have evolved as my preferred time to grade papers. It's usually calm around the house, and the phone doesn't usually ring. The lawn's mowed by Saturday, and the neighbors are often gone. There's nothing pressing to be watched on television, and any weekend project I've taken on (this weekend I set up an ip-addressable server on my desktop computer so I can access and monitor my house cams; it works!) has usually reached a point I've either given up on it or finished it. So the Sunday a.m. hours are the best time for me to grade and prepare for the Monday classes. In the autumn months, I like to get the studies out of the way for the much more looked-forward-to exercise of watching my Dolphins try to win a game, and seeing if there's anything they can do to try to get on a winning track after starting off 1-3.

my unpublished dissertation gets rave reviews

2006-09-19T12:14:00.000-04:00

The other evening my wife Googled my name just to see what would come up, and boy did we get surprised! My doctoral dissertation which I wrote for my Ph.D. in Comparative Arts at Ohio University in 1975 but never published, it seems, is for sale on Amazon! Its bogus "Reviews" even claim to reveal its ISBN number!

Even more amazing to us was that it has been reviewed on Amazon by at least two bogus "Customer Reviews" by "readers" who claim to have received it as a gift and praise it highly as being "very attractive" and "cool." They go on to say, in broken English and computer-generated generalizations, how happy it made them to receive it as a gift and read it, and they each highly recommend it to their friends.

I'd surely like to know how they got it, since the only copy I know of is buried unbound in a cardboard box in my closet here at home. When I wrote my study, The Aesthetic of the Veil: Conceptual Correspondences in the Nocturnes of Whistler and Debussy in 1975, I had to submit a copy to the department of my Comparative Arts major and another to the Ohio University Library. I was also required to submit a brief abstract of it to Dissertation Abstracts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the national repository of doctoral abstracts. Outside of those places, to my knowledge no other copies have ever existed. I guess I'd better put a better lock on my closet!

As Barb and I pursued the two Google pages of seventeen references to this work, apparently now offered for sale without any knowledge or consent on my part, we learned on the Amazon listing that it was "not currently available", but could be ordered as an e-book. No price was given. It even included a selectable question asking if I was the owner or author of this work, and inviting me to relinquish digital permissions to publish it online as an e-book. Further, it had been cross-listed on Classical Music and Classical Art sites and offered for sale at Lowcost Books.com and Classical Music Books in the UK. One of their pages invites readers from the UK, US, Canada, Germany, or France to order it by clicking their country's flag. An attractive Editorial Review of the work by title and subtitle is set up also but not written--not yet, at least. I guess the theatre critic left the play before the murder in the third act. I didn't realize I was such an internationally known author! All this, it appears, was set up for marketing my thesis without anyone bothering to contact me or seek permissions or make any offer of publication.

This is marketing without product of the most flagrant piracy, I feel. My dissertation is featured by title on attractively-illustrated advertising pages on a number of sites along with many books and recordings, and it's never even been published or reviewed. The fake reviews Amazon included, I strongly suspect, were computer-generated and totally bogus. If I were among the affluent, which I am not, I'd sue their socks off, even though I suspect they've got themselves covered legally somehow.

I don't think I'm alone in this theft of intellectual property. I suspect all the dissertations which we doctoral candidates labored over for years to get our Ph.D.'s are probably already pillaged and pilfered by the e-pirates who are hyping them in their sites all over the place without our knowledge or benefit, and if someone actually orders one, they may or may not be able to cob a pirated copy to sell them. Since I wrote it in 1975, any copy rights I may have had have probably expired, which may be why that dissertation of mine is now getting the royal Times Square treatment in lights.

I don't know how my work ended up on Amazon, but I'm pretty certain of one thing: if it ever gets sold, I won't see a dime of it. And to the bogus "reviewers" who concocted those lame comments, I have only this to offer: at least I didn't plagiarize my dissertation; I wrote it myself.

Let Katie Be Katie

2006-09-14T19:08:00.000-04:00

I keep watching Katie Couric in her new role as CBS Evening News anchor, but it's painful. I've seen people uncomfortable in the wrong job before, and she surely is in this one. Maybe she has chosen to take on the personna of gravitas that I see, but I get the feeling it's not her natural choice; someone seems to be coaching her--maybe lots of someones, and they're coaching her all wrong. It's just not Katie. It's some woman trying extremely hard to deliver the world news in all its seriousness and not make light of anything. Not even lighten up about anything. Not even in the moments between stories or at the end of the program after the goodnights are said. The dour, rather furrowed brows remain till the fade to black. And that's not the Katie Couric I know, not the Katie of the Today Show, which isn't surprising, nor the Katie of the silver screen or tv guest appearances. Katie Couric has a smile and an impish, giggling laugh that is irrepressible and iconoclastic. Whenever Matt Lauer would try to get too serious, Katie could break the chill in an instant with her gentle barbs and puncture the pomposity of nearly everyone. Now, however, she has been thoroughly made over into THE FIRST FEMALE NETWORK ANCHOR, as if the title carried with it some kind of royal responsibility to maintain our composure and dignity at all costs--for the good of--who? the nation? the network? the ratings--ah, that's surely it. It always is, isn't it. But whoever is behind the new Katie should be fired. This very lovely, smart, talented and warmly human lady can do this new job in a wonderful way if she is allowed to bring the Katie we all came to love to the task. Let Katie be Katie. She won't giggle at the wrong times. And if she did, it couldn't be worse than the sad-faced, over-serious, furrowed mask she's affecting now.

Acting's hard!

2006-09-05T19:16:00.000-04:00

On Labor Day my New York sound designer son had me read some scripts for voiceovers in an upcoming video game. He turned to me because he doesn't know any "old men in New York," as he explained, and needed someone whose voice had "matured" with the rasp and crackling punctuations of middle age. Fine by me, I said, and while his brother recorded me in his school media center studio in Kissimmee, I read the lines in the the best characters I could muster as an amateur.

I don't know if they'll actually use what we sent up electronically, but I got a congratulatory cellphone call on our way home from the Disney parks saying I did a really good job. If they can't use it, it will be because of the limitations of our recording equipment and ambient studio noise rather than my lack of good stuff. It made me feel just great.

What was revealing to me was how many ways there are to say the shortest dialogue lines in a recording. One of my characters spoke only three words, but I had to record it dozens of times and learn background motivation and the situation for the utterance to get it anywhere near "right." It gave me a new appreciation for what actors and actresses have to do, involving not only all of what I did but with action and expression as well, and without the script in front of them, by memory, scene after scene. No wonder they're so exhausted with their long hours and so flamboyant in their escapes and relationships. Acting's a whole lot harder than I ever realized, and so is production in general.

Good technical writers in high demand

2006-08-22T10:34:00.000-04:00

Young people, consider a career as a technical writer. It pays well (though not as well as engineers or doctors), offers solid work and good promotional tracks, and because your work is much needed, you'll have steady employment opportunities your whole career. When you retire, you can still do it part-time or independently, and if you're good at it, it can be very satisfying.

Why are tech writers so needed? Consider that just about every product or service made and offered for sale must offer clear instructions/information/labels/warnings perhaps to the buyer/consumer on the nature of the product or service, its description, its features, how to put it together and take it apart, how to operate it, maintain it, service it or replace parts of it, etc. All of this information must usually be written and read.

But the people who design, manufacture, and sell the product often don't have a very good skill at communicating about the product to other people. So they hire technical writers to write the user manuals and instructions clearly.

What happens when poor or confusing instructions go out with the product? Their phone lines and emails get clogged with befuddled consumers seeking clarification and assistance, and that costs the company much more to staff and maintain than the good tech writer's compensation.

But why can't anyone write good instructions? It's in the way the person thinks. Engineers think in highly technical and precise ways, often quantitatively. They may do that naturally or by training and experience. But it's not natural for them to try to speak to the end user of their designs and systems directly in unambiguous, "layman's" terms the user is apt to understand clearly. Executives and sales personnel think in qualitative as well as quantitative terms, and again seldom understand the engineering/manufacturing complexities of their products. They are concerned with results and bottom lines, markets and features of products that work as intended, not with the inner workings of such products.

But technical writing is mainly concerned with bridging the gap between those with specialized knowledge of the product or service and consumers. Technical writers, ironically, usually don't need technical knowledge. But they do need curiosity and the ability to learn from the engineers and marketing people those things which the consumer needs to know. Above all they need to know how to ask the right questions and couch the answers in plain language.

I taught both technical writing and creative writing at a technical university, and I well remember the main difference I had to try to stress between the two: creative writing tries to suggest many meanings, connote rich associations, offer more than one interpretation; technical writing tries to eliminate all meanings except one. One clear, exact, singular meaning is what the technical writer hopes to convey to each reader, with no other interpretation possible, in every statement, every instruction.

With the society becoming more and more dependent upon sophisticated technology and communications, the future is bound to be bright for a good technical writer.

Escape the heat to Florida? Actually, yes

2006-08-02T09:48:00.000-04:00

The heat waves this summer over most of the nation are horrific, but worst in the north where such heat isn't normal and electric grids aren't up to handling the extra loads. And when the transformers and feeder lines blow, so do tops and tempers.

We used to stay at Barb's parents' house when we visited in northern Indiana each summer, and bake in the heat waves that came through, even in June. They had no AC till grandpa finally broke down and got a window unit for the living room a few years ago, but it wasn't able to cool or dehumidify the living quarters. Since we slept upstairs, it was so stifling even with window fans that we moved the mattress to the floor, and sometimes just sacked out on the living room carpet to get into the feeble stream of cooled air.

We've travelled in some of the super heat waves that killed several hundred people nationwide over the years, with temps well over 100 or even over 115, all the while praying the car unit wouldn't poop out on us, which it often did on our older vehicles. And this summer's cookers for days or weeks on end have turned St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Dallas and other megacities into griddles with no escape.

We've come into Las Vegas in 120 degree heat and abandoned our VW camper for the only night in an AC''d motel. We've camped in Tennessee in 108 degrees and spent nearly the whole day in the pool. But it's always worst where these kinds of conditions are not normal, where tenements are without air conditioning and where people uncap the hydrants to get into a spritz of relief.

That's why I can't complain about living in good old South Florida, where the rest of the country assumes we'd be the worst off in these heat waves but are not. Our daytime highs are in the 90's but not unbearable because there's AC wherever we go, in all our homes and all our cars and trucks, trains and busses. Air conditioning opened the South to development, it is said--made the southern states tolerable places in which to live and work, not just someplace exotic to visit. Because it's the norm to need conditioned air more or less all year long here, we're prepared for it.

But it's not the heat that drives us all to the refuge of our air conditioned spaces; it's the humidity. Ask anyone who has been here in July or August and they will all say the same thing: it's not the heat, it's the humidity. And the humidity is caused by the fact that our state juts out 600 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. Surrounded on three sides by water, we always have that moderating sea/land breeze to keep the air moving slightly and avoid the force-air highs, domes of fire which sit for weeks over other states and literally cook everything: crops, structures, animals and people. But the humidity, which make it impossible to work outside for more than five minutes at a time without coming in with your clothes soaking wet, is the very thing that keeps our temperatures lower and more moderated than the drier, blowtorch heat waves plagueing the rest of the nation. So our humidity is our great blessing in disguise.

I walk each day, usually before nine. But I always come back in with a perspiring brow and spotted tee-shirt. So this morning, in celebration of August, I changed from my usual jeans to shorts. It didn't help that much. I still spot-perspired through. But I was not uncomfortable, and a few minutes in the air conditioned drier air inside made everything hunky-dory. That's why I'll take the humid heat here over the dryer heat waves elsewhere every time. It's hard to believe, but if you want to escape the heat, come to South Florida!

Hey there, all you long-lost kin!

2006-07-28T11:43:00.000-04:00

My wife's genealogy project hit a gold nugget last night when practically my dad's whole side of the family, whom I never knew, all showed up at once on a Mormon search engine.

I grew up thinking my dad was one of several boys and one sister, Aunt Marie, whom I only heard about sometimes because she had moved to South Africa. Now I learn I had also an Aunt Ann, who was a missionary to China. And instead of a couple of brothers, my dad was the youngest of five boys: Ray, Jesse, Harry, Stanly [sic], and John William, my father--"Billy" as they called him. Only Aunt Marie was younger.

And they were all born near Belfontaine, Ohio in the west Ohio farmlands of Logan County, not in eastern Ohio near Mansfield where Dad took me as a boy once and showed me the old homestead. Turns out the old farm, south of Canton, was probably where they moved. John Yoder Kauffman, my grandfather, died in Michigan in 1935 before I was born in 1939, so I never knew him or Ida, my grandmother.

When I grew up, moved to Chicago and went to art school and played piano bar downtown, I was contacted by my cousin Dr. Jim Kauffman, a surgeon who practised in Cleveland, and he took me out for a meal and to get acquainted. That was after my dad had died of a heart attack in 1955, and Jim's dad, I think Harry, had also died of heart failure. Apparently most of the brothers suffered the same coronary problems, so Dr. Jim cautioned me we'd both have to watch our hearts closely as we got older. The only other contacts with the Kauffman side of the family I remember vaguely was that we got together with the descendents of some of them once at a hotel in Cleveland and once at a lake in northern Indiana. There was a woman among them they called Connie and another, I think, called Laddie, but I don't think I ever saw any of them again.

What Barb discovered, though, really made me feel good, like Alex Haley finding his "Roots." What vexed me was that even though I tried the same genealogy sites she did, I couldn't find them. I have to admit that she's a better genealogist than I am, that she has the ability to follow clues and hunches better than I can. Mine got me nowhere. "Well," she reminds me, "I am a media specialist, after all." Grrr.

I learned also that Nelson, my first name, was a family name, not just given me by my brother after meeting Nelson Rockefeller as family legend always held--my mother, like me, was prone to exaggerate to make a good story-- and that there were many family names in the tree, and variant spellings. Barb's traced us from the farming Mennonites of Ohio back to the old German and Swiss farms of our European ancestors. And the further we go, the more surprises we find, folks we never heard of before.

For me, the curiosity ends with what she's already found. But for her and Scott, who gave her the software for this summer quest, it may go on to Eden. It is surely amazing how many of us there are, and were before us, and how difficult and Byzantine a search it can be to try to find them. There are many sites that charge a fortune for their access, and many government sites full of misinformation. Even some public county and state libraries guard their collections like Fort Knox or won't let you search their records online.

But Barb says women tend to be more concerned about genealogy than men, generally, and she's probably right. I don't know what that means, but I tend to agree. The main thing it has taught me is that I now realize that I am one of many, many people who found themselves on this earth and came to think they were one of a kind. I now realize that yes, I am unique in many ways; but more importantly I am only one of many, many others who comprise the rich, wonderfully diverse human fabric.

Brothers of the Brush, Sisters of the Swish

2006-07-20T17:27:00.000-04:00

Barb's working on our geneology now, so I tried to help look up some old names and dates amongst the family albums. I use the term "albums" generically; they're really several big boxes with a few albums of prints, some old cardboard covered unframed portraits, and hundreds of loose photos jammed together without rhyme or reason. But while I rummaged through them, I ran across an old black and white photo that brought back some meaningful memories.

When I was nine, our Indiana hometown celebrated its centenial, and for a small town of only 14,000 or so, they put on quite a show. They hired a New York director to come to our small city for a couple of months and put on a pageant of our history, and the whole community got involved. The centenial celebration actually went on for about three months.

Far ahead of time the menfolk in town were asked not to shave, and contests were organized for the "Brothers of the Brush" who began to sprout everywhere around town to judge the best mustasches, sideburns, and beards. The women in turn were asked to make and wear oldtime costumes and bonnets, judged by others for their creativity and effect as the "Sisters of the Swish." And everyone, nearly, in the city got into the spirit of the thing. And for those few who resisted or tried to ignore the new/old looks, they did so at their peril. Mock trials were set up and conducted on Jefferson street sidewalk by the local circuit court bailiffs, sheriff, and judge, and men were stopped on the street if they were cleanshaven, tried immediately, and asked to serve "time" in mock public ridicule if found guilty (which all were). And if someone wanted to take it to a higher court, a stepladder was produced and the sentence repeated from a higher platform.

Within a few weeks, Huntington began to take on the look of a frontier town. A scripted dramatic history of the city was written. Parts were chosen and assigned to townspeople for the big pageant and parade culminating the celebration at Kriegbaum Field, and my brother, Roger, was excited to be one of the narrators. My dad was chosen to be a canal boat captain, and I was a frontier boy. I still have a picture of Daddy and me in our buckskins Mom made for us. Practises were held for several days beforehand, and it was no mean feat to organize as the cast of hundreds of local folks were put through our paces through the two-hour-plus show.

After a huge parade, in costume of course, the big show was finally produced at night, and it was really spectacular. It went off without a hitch, as I remember, despite the numbers involved and nonprofessional participants. As with school musicals, if you weren't yet "onstage," you were in the audience, and the audience groups were always coming and going to cue up for their scenes. I wish they had today's film and video technology back then, but no visual record of the 1948 pageant exists that I know of. Only newspaper photos and writeups preserve the flavor of those days. It was as if we stepped back in time one hundred years.

But perhaps the shock was greater when the celebration ended, and all the beards came off at one mass shave, and the women shed their 19th century bonnets and long skirts and suddenly began dressing in contemporary fashions. It was as if Brigadoon had disappeared back into the mist for another hundred years. The Brothers of the Brush and the Sisters of the Swish were gone in an instant.

I don't know if such an event would even be possible today. Certainly not in a large city. And it would only happen if people would support it. I'm not sure folks still have that much sense of community now in very many places, and it's kind of a shame I think. We don't know each other's names if we live more than a house or two apart, we interact through third parties of our employers or governments or church groups and clubs, and we have to lock our doors constantly against the rest of the "community" we don't even know. We didn't usually, then.

Welcome Nigel--Love, Jules

2006-07-16T14:33:00.000-04:00

When my son Scott (Tall Penguin) took Spanish in high school, he had to make a language arts project. So we blew up a balloon, covered it with papier mache, painted it black, attached a short clothes line "fuse," and labeled it la bomba. That was long before 9/11, so it went over big and he got an A. Today we don't dare call things bombs so casually or we'd have the Homeland Security folks all over us.

Hypersensitive now to theft or political incorrectness when we travel, we try to call our laptops, camcorders, and digital cameras by nicknames so strangers don't know what we're referring to. I'm typing this on Nebs2, for example, and my wife, Barbara's, digital camera was originally called La Bomba. But when we flew to New York last September, we thought we'd better give it a different nickname. It just wouldn't do to shout across the boarding line, "Hey, do you have La Bomba?" or "Now where did I put that Bomb?" So La Bomba became, in a new bright orange foam case for easy visibility, "Orange Julius" or "Jules" for short. Everyone in my family keeps a watch out for Jules, and Barb uses it to take and load all those snappy photos for her blog, Iris Blue.

But Jules, alas, is getting older by digital standards, and has a tendency to blur unless held rock-steady. I messed up my pix of Grandpa Bingham whom we visited in Indiana this June, for example, when I couldn't hold it steady enough even sitting around a table. So my family all chipped in and bought me a fabulous, compact digital camera with excellent anti-shaking settings for my July birthday recently, already pre-nicknamed Nigel (Barb's idea). Nigel got a gray foam case with straps like Jules, and of course gets to be used by everyone who went in on it. I get to keep it, however, in my custody and care.

So welcome, Nigel, to this intrepid photojournalistic blogging family, and may you record and publish many an excellent image on all our posts. Live long and prosper!

Trip Day 12

2006-07-05T07:33:00.000-04:00

Savannah: A Great Finish to a Fun Trip

2006-07-04T19:51:00.000-04:00

When you reach a certain age, summer vacation means going to see the folks. And this goes on for many years, if you're lucky. Even if you're headed in the opposite direction for your wished-for destination, you have to make sure you include the hometown visit or your name will be Mud for the following year.

So we made the pilgrimage to Huntington, Indiana, where both Barb and I were born and raised, met and fell in love, married and had our firstborn and secondborn, saw the folks, joined up with the firstborn's family and did Cedar Point, the Sandusky, Ohio amusement park we've visited many times before, and were just about ready to call it a vacation and return to Florida.

But the two to three days it takes us to drive home from Indiana never seems quite fulfilling unless we cram in a little layover in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, another favorite hotspot for us. And we did. Barb got to shop at her Christmas Place store for a few hours before we headed on over the mountains and down to I-95.

Somewhere along the way I realized I really wanted to visit Savannah, Georgia as well, and I calculated that, even starting from Gatlinburg at 1:00 pm, I could make it there last night, the third of July, spend the fourth touring the city, and leave for Scott's new condo in Kissimmee on the fifth, then home to Coral Springs.

Neither Barb nor I had been to Savannah, the Belle of Georgia, with its rich history and vibrant old streets, mansions, and mossy shady squares and streets. We visited Charleston, North Carolina three years ago, but never seemed to make it to Savannah.

Well, we did it. Barb reserved us two nights, last night and this one, at a Hampton nearby, and today we toured on a trolley with on/off priveleges all day and had a ball. By late afternoon--we decided to skip the live fireworks display on the riverfront due to the crowds and watch nationally from our motel room--we felt like Savannahians (honest to goodness, that's what they call themselves here.) and that we'd seen and photographed and videoed plenty of memories.

To me, we beat the system again this year. We didn't get trapped in the obligatory pilgrimage again but launched out into new vistas, and to me that's what vacation means. Now I don't have to spend yet another year wondering what Savannah is like and if I like it as well as Charleston, which I really loved. Savannah isn't Charleston, though they share much in common historically and culturally. Savannah is unique in its layout and squares, its stately ironwrought mansions and beautiful shady live oaks Charleston doesn't have. But Charleston is a city of great mystery, history, and character with a bigger feel and area that I am still very intrigued by. These sister cities are like two beautiful but entirely unique southern belles, each lovely and fascinating but totally incomparable with the other.

The only thing I miscalculated and wished I'd brought along on the trip was my old laptop, so I wouldn't have had to compete with Barb for blogtime. She has done a great job of documenting our vacation day by day, with pix, here. Next trip I'll put it on my packing list.

June 12: Anniversary Edition

2006-06-12T19:13:00.000-04:00

One year ago today I began this blog. This was my first post (and comments it got):

personal journal: nirvana or manuscript stifler?

I used to write lots of short stories and poems till I began a private journal. The stories and poems never got published. The journal, which I began as a notebook to help my writing, became instead a freewheeling, uncensored, unrevised forum for whatever I wanted to say: ideas, feelings, gripes, interests--anything that came to mind.At first the freedom from editing or rejection was liberating. And I loved the easy fluency I found, the flow and unselfconscious style I developed. But I found that the more I wrote in my journal, the less I wrote for submission. In time I lost interest in writing for publication completely. The journal became my only writing outlet, a substitute for any stories, poems, or essays I had written so easily before.I wondered if others had a similar experience. Is personal journaling always a good idea for a writer? Or can it stifle creativity and become a too-easy-to-please listener, insulating its author from challenges he may need more, like feedback from others, disciplined structure, focus and development of ideas, fleshing out of detail because it's needed for others to visualize, even though I might not, since I'm writing it? I honestly don't know.Online, it seems everyone promotes journaling as therapeutic and stimulating for ideas and creativity, great for hatching great writing to share. Privately, I'm not so sure. For me, it seemed to erect a writer's block like the Great Wall of China to anything I tried to write outside it.In any case, that's why I started this blog. I'm tired of just "talking to myself" in my journal and looking for ways to be read--not necessarily published or paid. At least I'm ready to listen.
posted by nbk @ 9:37 PM 2 comments

Since that first post was published I've received about 1,100 visits from all over the world that I know about and published 75 other posts. It's been very rewarding. I especially appreciate my regular visitor from Arizona (oops, sorry, New Mexico), Carol Anne, whose own It's five o'clock somewhere is always a delight to read and whose encouragement and insightful comments have sometimes kept me going when I got lazy. And I'm grateful to have had the chance to interact with a fascinating, very intelligent young museum researcher from Queens, Jill Pazereckas, who began commenting here nearly a year ago and whose own blog, Jill's Room, is a model to me of provocative social and historical issues.

But I feel most proud of the blogs my family have started this year and quickly diverged from this one, in both content and style. They all comment here frequently and really keep me busy trying to keep up with them, and they're bookmarked in my right column: Too Tall to Be a Penguin, by middle son Scott, the elementary school media specialist and part-time Disney ride operator--oops, cast; Iris Blue, my incredible wife, gifted photojournalist blogger, and love of my life; Underwear Ninja Comes With Space Suit, by youngest son and new york sound designer, whose photographs are amazing; and Lazo Land, by my gifted favorite daughter-in-law, Rhonda.

Thanks for a great ride, everyone!

Fight or flight and the river rocks

2006-06-07T20:38:00.000-04:00

There aren't many things that really get to me, but having work done by others on my property ranks right up there. From the time they clamber out of their pickup trucks to the time they leave for the day, I'm in full vigilante mode, peering between closed blinds and hiding in the shadows.

But after a while of watching the work clandestinely, I can't stand it anymore. All the clanging and banging makes me too nervous to just sit. I have to do something physical. So I jump into my yard clothes and spend time busying myself around the lot weed-whipping everything to death even if it doesn't need it, or mowing, or my latest exercise machine: hauling rock.

See, when we got the house seventeen years ago, the screened patio had a pool surrounded by chattahoochee and river rocks around the pool edge, with a big river rock fountain at the far end. This might have looked quite exotic if we had an outdoor pool surrounded by lush vegetation, but inside, with nothing but ferns and leafy big philodendrons, it looked out of place. So when we decided to resurface the badly eroded pool and pitted chattahoochee patio all at once, and the contractor offered to tear out the fountain for an extra $300, as well as the river rocks around the pool we had contracted for, we said yes.

Perhaps I should have asked for more detail. It turns out the price didn't include hauling them away, just removing them. They all got "removed" into a big heap against my outside bedroom wall, and it was up to me to do something with them.

Well, there was my excercise machine. Every day I'd go in and teach in the morning while the workers jabbered and clunked and banged around on my pool and patio, then when I came home I'd jump into my yard clothes and start in hauling that rock pile around the property with my lawn tractor and yard cart. And I placed a couple of hundred river rocks weighing from about fifteen or twenty to over sixty pounds each around every tree, hedge row, walk and cranny all over my property.

This was my stress response. Selye said years ago that nature's response to danger or fright or stress is to "fight or flight," but when one is stressed and does nothing to either fight or run away, bad things happen. I can't sit in my fortress while the huns batter the gates and hurl flaming projectiles over the ramparts. I've found hauling fifty-pound river rocks till I'm dog-tired to be just about right.

Bring back two-pocket shirts!

2006-05-29T19:51:00.000-04:00

I don't know exactly when men's shirts with two pockets were last made and sold and worn in America, but I do know that they have all but disappeared from stores great and small, and I can't figure out why, and I resent it. I would like to request the world's clothiers to return to making TWO POCKET MEN'S SHIRTS as God intended.

Perhaps some might say a single pocket looks neater, sleeker, more chest-flattering on a man. Well, may be. But I doubt if men prefer them. Since we don't carry purses (most of us), we need two shirt pockets, bulging or not. And how many men fuss about such things? I mean, we stick pencils behind our ears for gosh sakes. Or maybe the two-pocket Hawaiian god-awful baggy sport shirts worn under a cigar, mustache, and dark glasses of the '50's and '60's just gave them a bad name. But I still doubt it.

No, I don't buy the aesthetics argument. One could argue the second pocket is needed for balance. In fact, for the life of me I can't understand any reason for making single pocket shirts other than simple greed. It probably costs a fraction of a cent less to not make the second pocket, and some lazy child labor cheeseball somewhere is making a few more bucks from the accumulated miniscule savings. But it's not like these rags are hand-tailored; second pockets aren't labor-intensive. They're all computer-manufactured by the hundreds of thousands in big machines in seconds anyway and shipped all over the world. And it doesn't cost any appreciable amount more to tell the computer assisted seamstress design to sew on a second pocket, or the square centimeter seamstress to allow the extra material. How much more material is in a pocket, after all? I mean, heck, take an inch all the way around off the length, if that will be enough for the second pocket. The bottom doesn't show anyway; it's (usually) worn tucked inside the trousers.

I last remember buying some seersucker two-pocket summer white dress shirts at a K-mart in my Indiana home town about fifteen years ago, and I haven't seen any since. As a teacher, I always carry too much for one pocket, and teaching in South Florida's often steaming heat, I don't wear an outer sport coat any more than I have to, so I always face the same problem: whether to face the world with a bulging single shirt pocket or stow some of my gear in my trouser pockets till I look like an equipment-challenged photographer, swinging his big genie pants from side to side around my thighs as I walk. I sometimes tear that single shirt pocket, it gets so full.

Okay, I'll admit that over the years, I've come to carry too much junk with me for my own good. And I suppose I have no right to complain unless I fess up to that junk: a cell phone of course, and a day-minder approintment book, pen, reading glasses, chewing gum (I quit smoking in 1997; the gum's my smokes now), and usually my insulin pen, since I'm diabetic. Which of these would I prefer to stow in my pants pocket? None. I reach for them all when I drive, for one thing. Ever try to wrestle stuff out of your pants pocket when you're strapped down by a seat belt, or get your change ready at a toll booth or drive-through window?

Lately, the only two-pocket shirts I've located are on Jungle Jim safari outfits that look like they should come with a pith helmet, and a few on heavy medical-looking uniforms that look like they should be worn under a stethoscope. Oh--and one I found in Orlando that just didn't look like me. I don't do fiesta shiny black and silver stretch fabric with pearl buttons--not that I have anything against those who do.

But things may finally be changing, albeit ever-so-slowly. I found a few two-pocket sports shirts at Penneys in various colors and scarfed them up, and a couple of others at Old Navy. I still haven't found any lightweight ones or dress ones anywhere, but the fact that someone is trying to make and sell them again at all is encouraging. Surely the two-pocket shirt will return someday. Sure hope it's before my few threadbare ones left wear out completely.

It must be summer

2006-05-21T19:05:00.000-04:00

What a weekend! All three of my adult sons had big deals cooking.

Mark absconded from Orlando to New York last August to find his fortune but forgot to renew his Florida license before he left. Leaving his car here in Florida, he managed to live a year in Manhattan by not driving on his expired license, but it caught up with him when he came back to Orlando to visit last weekend. Not by driving and getting pulled over, but at the airport where he got delayed from boarding his return flight and double-searched. He finally convinced them he wasn't a terrorist or ne'er-do-well despite his growing hair and got to board, but the experience convinced him to renew. It arrived here, good through 2011, and I forwarded it to him.

Doctor Steve somehow sold me his generator, bought for the hurricane season from hell last year but never used, so he could buy a more powerful unit he needs for working at the lot he and Rhonda hope to build on one day, during the tax break period till June 11 in Florida. The state is suspending state taxes (6%) on hurricane-preparation items before the new season begins (sigh) June 1. He's a tough customer to bargain with, but I got him down by $1.00 from what he paid. Guess I showed him who the smartie is in this family, huh. This one generates 3500 watts. He wants at least 5000. Since we won't be air conditioning even one room with it, just keeping the food cold and running a few lights and the tv if the power fails for days as it did last year, I think 3500's about right for us, and I was probably going to shop for one anyway.

But media specialist Scott stole the cake by springing for a new condo. He got tired of the annual raise-the-rent letters. Last year they hit him for new appliances and more rent on top of it, and this year they socked on an added $150 per month. He's paid faithfully for about five years and been a stable, responsible tenant. So much for loyalty. He began looking at getting a house or condo since he got that letter a couple of weeks ago, found financing favorable to educators through a bank, educated himself from scratch about buying a home and sought advice from us as his parents who have been through the process several times, his fellow teachers, and his homeowner bro and his invaluable, tireless homespotter-dealsniffer sister-in-law, who came down to Orlando and helped him find the best little condo he could afford in this market, in a great area. I'm very proud of his comparison shopping and decision-making process. He takes his time and "sleeps on it," as he says. But yesterday he put down his deposit and made his move. Way to go, Scott!

Every year I say, surely this year no one in the family will be moving this summer. Last year Mark pulled out to NY to take an internship and bounced around till he found his niche and a small apartment, and finally a great job in his field. This year it's Scott's turn at the moving bug. Who will be next? I wonder. I guess it just goes with the season. Fall, winter, and spring we store our acorns and do our jobs and live our schedules, but summer is clearly when the whole planet seems to play musical chairs.