Feet and Fingers of Clay

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

We are all fallible beings. In a moment of crisis we vacillate or perhaps instead we turtle up. Sometimes withdrawing into our shell will save us. Sometimes retracting into our own dark safe sanctuary will cause us greater pain. With all the book knowledge in the world we never know how we will react to that moment when we are called to give our best measure.

Sometimes our failure comes in being too tied to someone or some thing or some idea that we can’t view our world existing without. We can define ourselves by the person we date or marry. We can define ourselves by the home we picked and the neighborhood we live in. But all things fall apart. All things have flaws. To quote Joni Mitchell, “Our perfection will always be denied”. And then entropy will kick in.

So how do we move on from our failures? Ah there is the rub. Familiarity provides us with comfort. Routines prop up the artifice of our personality. Fear limits what we are willing to reach for. To quote another old popular song, “Life is change, how it differs from the rocks”. Well, it differs from the rocks primarily in the short duration of life and the constancy of unending change that buffets our lives that short span.

Last night the news was challenging.  A piece of a discussion cloaked in a clinical monotone provided some bad, if not already suspected, news.  No my cancer has not returned.  But it was information that carried that kind of connotation.  Hearing it gave greater weight to a pain already present.

How I respond to the news will say a great deal about the world I live in and as to who I am.  Funny thing the clinical voice talked about acceptance.  Good golly, has that not been a topic I have been struggling with for literally ever?

The human heart can be warm and loving. The human heart can be cold and hurtful.  The human heart can be so confused by the real ways of fallible mortals that it does not know what to do next.  Conflicted and baffled, the human heart may not see the many paths forward. My hope is that my heart has the chance and capacity to be a guide to those in need.

 

Life is Change How if Differs from the Rocks

We are usually living our life in the vain hope for something or someone to make our life easier, to make our life better. The joy of our life must come from bearing what must be borne, from doing what must be done. It is not so much that it has to be done; it is simply there and so we do it. …[O]ur vain hope for a resting place somehow makes us ignorant and unappreciative of what is here right now. – Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen



Light rain in the pre dawn grey. It can hardly be called rain. As I enter my building I see signs that the green space next to my office will soon disappear. It is on this lot that I have photographed so many little weeds/little wild flowers over the past few years. It is across this lot that I have observed the steeple of the Korean Baptist Church in morning mist and fading evening light. I am a little sad to see this space go. The view of that church steeple amid the green of summer brought me peace.



Change is a constant in our living of our only life. Change must be borne especially as in this case when I don’t own the property and therefore don’t own the view. To have believed the space would have remained green forever was a vain hope. Modern life in the modern west does not work like that. For the time it was allotted to me this formally green field was a resting place, but now it is time to move on.

On the Cross of High School Expectations

Damp dark morning it be as I survey the sky; our family ritual begins. Drop Secundus off to school first, then grab coffee, then drop me at work. Approaching the back door to my office I see my wife leave as she purportedly goes to her marketing job.

 Standing at the edge of the high school parking lot today the boy waved us good-bye for now. To me his day seems to be nothing big, it is just high school. To him emotionally it is akin to climbing the heights of Mt. Everest. Recently it seems he is trying to climb its iciest face without pitons or a rope. 

 40 years of living since I picked up my diploma have dulled my perception of the high school years. My memory of what was my real agony in those days has been papered over, slights have been forgiven and dispatched and the outright indignities have been buried really deep. I set aside the fact that when it got to bad I got really, really stoned. 

 His world is filled with those real pains of social anxiety and awkwardness. His world is a minefield of insecurity. In some ways I fell he was not served well by the justice and meritocracy driven years of Montessori. He just wasn’t prepared for the bruising back lot playground of America’s public schools. 

 I have told the lad, tough it out because college will be better. The best response from any of my little talks was a “Dad I don’t want to know,” when I told him I had a number of other girlfriends before I met his mother. 

 I have tried to tell him an anecdote or two about how life can play out in unanticipated and sometimes negative ways for the “cool” kids, but he doesn’t want to know about those tales. As far as he is concerned my experience was in a different world. Truth be told insults and slights are immediate today. Back then the person who called you a retard at least had to do it in person or within earshot to make it hurt. And the circle in travelled in only went as far as the four walls of your school. Now with Facebook and Twitter the hurt is mass media-ivied.

I get his pain but I can’t connect with him about it. High school for me just blew. I remember the agony of trying to get the hang of dating and it never, ever worked. I went to my prom but it was a Dutch date. My date and I agreed to go together because we didn’t want to be the ones who didn’t go. We negotiated the details on the back of Mr. Dietrich’s school bus. Nothing felt right; nothing was without pain. Hell it was only when I was suspended for running about the school sans cloths that my social life improved. But today with the zero tolerance policies at schools that would not work for him. 

 From my rolodex of buried agonies I remember one person who meaning to be kind tried to explain to me that my parents dressed me funny. But kindness intended or not, hearing that I wore “ragged assed goofy clothes” really stung. Oh and I had no self confidence whatsoever having gone from being grossly overweight to being a bit of a bean pole, all 140 pounds of my six foot frame. Hell because I couldn’t get a date I wasn’t even sure of my sexual orientation and that was pretty damned confusing. 

The lad is struggling, mightily. He is not sleeping and he is always at the verge of tears. Intellectually he knows it should get better but viscerally he knows that it really, really sucks right now. I will try to be open and without judgment. I will try to approach him knowing his world is filled with pain and with peril to his personal integrity. It is in places like schools that we see how thin the veneer of civilized behavior really is.

When Language Fails me

Words are such weak things when we need them to carry the truth. The strongest of words things like, “You will be okay”, bend when placed abutting modifiers or when the tone in which they are spoken conveys any hint of a question. Words fail us when we need them to be a stone embankment against fear, doubt and anxiety. I wish my words were enough sometimes, because there are moments when my heart and soul cannot raise the standard of the whole truth.

Rain Falling in the Midwest

Summer has now fled. Today the highest the temperature will reach is said to be 50 F. For my non U.S. readers that is 10 C. It being October 21, 2013 there is little chance we will see a string of warm days again for many months. We might get a surprise day of 60 F sometime before late November but there is no real promise of that. 

 Above this place the sky is filled with light rain. With cooling air and a moderate drizzle the overall impact is one of impediment. No, I will not describe this state of affairs as gloomy. I don’t view rainy days as gloomy, I actually quite like them. To state correct the issue rainy days cause us extra activity, the falling drops cause us impediment if you would.  

On rainy days we generally have to wear things that cover our clothing so as to insure we don’t get soaked. Hats, coats and umbrellas are taken out of the closet. Ugh, there is extra time spent putting these things into use and then storing them after use. 

 Our vehicles don’t stop as well on wet pavement. We are forced to use additional systems, lights, wipers and the like. Time is stolen because we must slow our travel. As I said every aspect of dealing with rain is an impediment. 

 On the plus side rain thins out the population walking the streets. It washes the detritus off of the curbs and into the storm sewers. It cleanses the air. If it were a summer rain it would be joyful. It would bring green back to brown lawns and provide fruit plumping moisture. 

 But this is a late fall rain and it will pull down the colored leaves from off the trees. It will bring a chill to the bones. In the end like so many things this rainy day is neither good nor bad. It just is. I peer out at the grey sky and the slow drops. Life has rain.

Today

Fall morning wrapped in reds and gold leaves has met me here as I climb the steps to my office. This day feels like it is beginning bright and crisp. Leaves on the trees are golden now. Now, October 11 is the mid-point of the cycle of their turning. In this season I came to this place. In this season I came to love this place. 

 The turning of the leaves leads to the turning of the year; it is only a short stroll the time from October to late December. The walk from a season I associate with young love to the shortest darkest days of the year is but a marker in a life I have been afforded the opportunity to live. 

 As I move forward on this one way path my earnest desire is that the choices I have made are appropriate and valuable ones. I want my life to have helped when measured on balance rather that to have been a hindrance. 

 On this crisp day I turn to coffee, one of my sinful pleasures and I savor it. Pounding away at the keyboard I reach for a cup of black Biggby’s Best and remember those early cups of coffee when I was first experiencing the dark, exotic smelling beverage in the dorms at MSU; it was black coffee, eggs, bacon and a cigarette to finish off the whole experience. 

 Now it is the warmth of the cup that matters. The air temperature is so much more real to me now. At 19 years of age a thin jacket was good enough for a 40 F day. Today I need a little more in the way of a shell. Fleece is good. Coffee, fleece and standing on the loading dock locking east into the climbing sun’s light. I think I can face today. I really do.

Life - we cannot hide

We cannot run for long. Oh we can run at a strategic moment such as when someone has a pistol pointed at us or when an animal is chasing us, but in the long term we cannot run from the things that are most present in our existence. I was reading Everyday Zen this morning and Joko Beck made a comment I really liked. “And as we get more sensitive to our life and what it truly is we can’t run away. We can try for awhile, and most of us will try for as long as we can. But we really can’t run indefinitely.” Yeah, I think that is right.

Facing East

Over the years I have been reading Proust’s Swann’s Way in small bits. Each time I reach a new section I compare it to the passion he seemed to have had describing the church he attended when he was at Combray. Proust had his small cathedral and the light upon its steeple to contemplate as he revisited that rural setting in his writings. I am no Proust. Still, I have the Korean Baptist Church that lies just to the east of the back door of my office. 

 As I enter the back door of my office each morning I struggle to juggle my spare pair of shoes, my bag lunch and my purse. But no matter how Ed Wynn I might look, I take a moment to cast a glimpse over my shoulder at a simple spire rising up above the trees. 

 A solid row of quick growing pine planted to demarcate the boundary at the rear of the small church frames the bottom of the image and today wispy clouds the top. While there are the ugly reminders of the brute way humanity has adapted to our environment present, read telephone and power wires, the spire is there almost a prayer unto itself in the morning light. By looking at bell tower I feel closer to the divine. 

 As I gaze at this small, simple churches image I understand why Proust was so taken with the church at Combray and how the light hit it. It was visceral. It was holy.

Hard Hat

Some nights you just hang up on the nail and forget. The latter portion of last night was like that. At about nine in the evening I sat down in front of the giant freaking plasma television to be irradiated with inanity. I don’t know what drivel was on. I watched about 10 minutes flipping between three stupid and insipid shows and then I woke up in the middle of a police procedural at 10:30. 

Another victim of the ZZZZ monster that is what I was. Through my bleary eyes and while rubbing the rug burns I had incurred from drooling in my prone position on the carpet beneath this huge panel of banality what I saw was an anti-hero making a series of convoluted deductions. Next thing I remember I woke up again at about midnight while a late night talk show host was engaging in weird shtick. 

At that point I shuffled/shambled off to bed. I didn’t even both to use my iphone to go to Huffington Post to look at today’s best side-boob photos. (I am old but I am lecherous in a circumspect way.) When it first commenced as an online media source I would read the Huffington Post because it was akin to an e-media version of Mother Jones. Now Huffington Post has gotten just plain weird. It is the Fox News of the left. All HuffPo seems good for is ranting and demonizing conservatives and showing celebrity lifestyles (oh and side-boobs). Meh. Mother Jones is still okay and I would recommend it to you if you really like muckraking journalism. 

The earlier part of the evening I had been at a groundbreaking ceremony for the addition of a 6th grade wing to our middle school. It took a long time to get to this point but we have commenced. The idea is that the 6th graders will be slowly merged into a middle school transition. They will have a wing of their own but they will share lunch facilities and the like with the older and clearly more tormented kids. The worst two years of American life are 7th and 8th grade, really. Studies go both ways as to the best models for the elementary to high school transition years. We tried 5-6, 7-8 buildings for the last ten years. But nobody got connected with the schools due to the short stays of their students in the buildings. Me I went to a 1-8 Building and I thought it was the way to go. DINOSAUR ALERT!!!!! 

At the end of the groundbreaking I got my fourth bit of remuneration/graft for taking on the task of being a school board member. I got a hard hat. The other pieces of “compensation” I have gotten are an annual pass to the school’s sporting events, a briefcase with the school district’s name on it, and a series of Jimmie Johns sandwiches and cookies when the board meets so close to the end of my business day that I cannot grab a healthy meal in between the office and the start of the meeting. 

My kids made fun of the hardhat. I didn’t say anything negative to them but it was a hardhat that got me to where I am today. My father worked in what was if not the largest at the time, one of the largest chemical manufacturing plants in the world. He worked at the Chambers Works located along the Delaware River in southern New Jersey for DuPont. From 1965 on (that is the year he bought the little white Mustang that he loved) I would l often climb into the passenger seat of that care to see a hard hat in the back seat. He also had steel toed safety shoes. As I remember he had protective safety glasses that had protective vented hard plastic wrap on the edges of the lenses that came flush up with his skin. This is the stuff that you wore in a factory to help keep yourself safe. 

Back then there was nothing dishonorable about working hard in a factory. It was a way that offered a path to a good living. With the current skewing of the wealth in this country there isn’t the same value put on that kind of work. We are heading back to an era when the worker is nothing more than a body being used as a tool, to be discarded when it is bent or broker. But this is a digression. 

The hard hat reminded me of my father and his hard work. It reminded me of his aspirations for each of his children. He expected us to want a better life and to work for it. He expected us to give honest measure. He believed a good life had the potential to be rewarded. 

Thirty years slips by in the wink of an eye. On October 5, 1983 my father passed away at the age of 72 years old. He had a heart attack. It was relatively quick. Based on some reports the symptoms may have been occurring over several hours, but he fell dead at home in a manner that seemed sudden and at the same time unequivocal. I can remember the ripping and tearing of my soul on the day I learned of his death. I was 27. 

Yeah the hard hat took me back to that day, that time. Seeing that construction wear brought back to me an image of my father. Wearing that trinket from the construction company (who was happy to get the work), reminded me of a time when there was a greater commonality of values across this country. My father believed in acting together with others as a community for the greater good of all. My father believed you should expect the best of your family and of the people you lived with and worked with. He did not let cynicism pervade his every thought. Yeah, I was raised in a different time.

There is a light beyond these trees.

Today is not a day I will be dilatory. A coworker is out ill. Sickness here means that everybody must take on the pieces of that person’s daily assigned cases. If you have an adjournment, if you have any openings, you pick up the slack. Pitching in like this is how it should be. The people we are set to see are taking off time from work and making plans for travel to the hearing site. Sometimes these plans to get to the hearing site can be very convoluted and involve asking ex-spouses to drive a person there. At this point I have an opening and thus I am thinking it will be filled. No catch up time today. 

Right now I must go out to a server and pull down old case files to prepare for tomorrow. What this means is that someone, a clerical staffer, has seen that we held a pervious hearing and that a decision was rendered. If it has been handled correctly, and that can be a big if, the sheet I have in the current case file jacket will have a reference number that will lead me to the prior Order. Problems with this assumption can include, the film may have not actually been created, the document was destroyed in the microfilming process or the film ordered is not the correct one. Any number of problems may exist with this search but I have to check. 

Over the years there has been a reduction of clerical support for my job. The net result is that about 30-35% of what I do now used to be done by someone making 1/4th my salary. But in government it is all about headcount. If you reduce the workforce by 20% that number is touted. The fact that you are using higher priced resources for lower valued tasks is not brought to the fore. The reduction of the workforce by a 1/5th with a reduction of efficiency by 1/4th and a reduction of costs by at best a 1/10th is an equation that just does not make sense to me. 

Large organizations are just inherently flawed.