A Space True and North

This is a Test

2012-01-24T21:43:00.001-05:00

My iPhone now has an and application that allows me to post whenever and wherever I want to. I am thinking that this will be a good thing. In addition it has a vocal recognition program. Therefore this is a test. I want to see if I can post easily using that vocal recognition program.

All but the first sentence of this post was done using the vocal recognition software. It took me less than two minutes to dictate and correct this post. Cool beans.

Mulligan

2012-01-18T08:18:00.000-05:00

The following was generated as a response to a question about whether I should of remained single given the challenges I often depict with my children in this blog.
In responding to my post you ask if I would get married again, if I had a mulligan. The real answer is I don’t know. In my life I have made choices, some good but many poor. But they all add up to make me what I am today. Could I improve on who I am, yes I think so. Am I trying to improve on who I am, yes every single day. Would marriage make the difference between being something better and what I am, I doubt it.
The God’s honest truth is that I need a person in my life to balance my excesses out. Without a significant other I would be a raging alcoholic, perhaps a drug fiend. Without children I would have no compassion for those burdened by life. I am not saying my children are a burden, I am saying they make me think outside myself. The dispassionate perspective of another’s needs, of caring for their growth can really show itself in a parenting setting. It can occur in other relationships but for me parenting has been the catalyst.

If I had it to do all over again I would have exercised more intellectual rigor in each and every subject I undertook to study. Hell, I would have exercised more and taken better care of my body. If I had it to do all over again I would have been the archival tech as opposed to the liquor store assistant manager. If I had it to do all over again I would have slept around a great deal more just to have memories of their hearts and passion . If I had it to do all over again I would have lived by the maxim if it ain’t scary you aren’t going fast enough.

Ah if I had a mulligan that is where I would be, living with compassionate open hearted intensity driving fast to the next best future somewhere. Chances are I would be with someone on that journey a wife or a lover but they would be there because they too wanted that particular journey.

You know what where I am is okay, I am comfortable in my skin. It is frustrating, it is challenging, but I am who I am and we don't get mulligans. Be here, be now.

Norman Vincent Peale Made it Look Easy

2012-01-17T08:17:00.002-05:00

Motivation isn't easy, ever, not when you are trying to be Dale Carnegie to two diametrically different audiences. Motivation is illusive for teen. Motivation plumb eludes an ASD teen. Enthusiasm escapes into the ether for an ADD teen. Their future is thus what?
In trying to suss out this disparate duos hopes and dreams and to maybe get a idea that would spark some impetus toward studying, I played a Dad generated twenty question game. Where do you want to live? What kind of job do you want? Do you have a particular car you favor? What would it take for you to live comfortably?
Primus wants to live in an urban environment but and this is the key without many people. Secundus wants to live a life out on the stage. One never looks inward. One never looks outward. One never sees trauma or turmoil or worries about it. The other is frozen by what ifs and what should be and what should have been.
I posed the question to Primus do you want to ever get married? The answer was unequivocal. No. Why not I inquired? What do you have against marriage? His reply was that it is too boring! You think Mom and I are boring? Oh yeaaaah. Low hanging fruit, I should never have left that one out there.

So I ask the other one do you want to get married. The answer was a little different. “Like I would ever tell you.”
To the ASD child that is Primus I suggested his choice of locale leaves you certain areas of Detroit or the warehouse districts in most cities in which to reside. You will be living among the muggers and ne'er do wells. Shrug.
I continued, “You understand Mom and I will not be letting you live here after you graduate from high school right? We'd like to get back to some of the things in our lives we lost when we had you like camping.” The ASD child asks, “Is that what they call it when they let you visit each other in your separate rooms at the home.” “Will they let you put up tents inside Shady Glen?” he inquires.
“You are changing the topic,” I say. I ruminated you don't get to go anywhere if you don't have the grades. You get to be a bagger at a hyper mart. You get to ask Regular or Menthol and let me see your ID as you press down on the button and say "Pump one, your card didn't clear you have to prepay."
Arggh.
If you haven’t guessed it Martin Luther King Day was motivation for finals day for Primus and Secundus. It was the onset of major depression for Dad.

Sunday Morning Just Past

2012-01-16T06:51:00.002-05:00

Sunday morning came. White snow lies sleeping outside. Cold air has finally come. Years and years of living with this season of cold and it is still hard to find a way to approach it. Snow seems to have overtaken the world as I look out at it through my bay window. Better brew some coffee.

Sunday morning on this occasion is a midpoint in the weekend. Yes, a long weekend is upon me and all the usual frenzy of Sundays can be stretched out over the daylight hours and even into Monday morning. Maybe this will be a day for sledding on the hill, or shooting pucks at a brick wall in addition to the normal mundane tasks.

Pour the water, grind the beans (today I through in some flakes off a cinnamon stick), hit the orange button and the gurgling sounds begin. Standing barefoot in my kitchen I feel the cold creep under the door to the breezeway. Someone must have taken recycling out to the garage yesterday and the draft doggie is not in place. With my toes I push the long pliable fuzzy fabric cylinder decorated with pine trees and moose back into place. The cold current slows. I turn to another task but soon the coffee is smelling strong and is enticing me to pour a cup. Cream yes, sugar no.

My hope is that someone else will cook breakfast. There is movement around in the house. Taking all the socks I folded last night upstairs I see my wife is checking Facebook. Primus is rumbling about in his room looking for clothes. I put the socks in a drawer.

I pause and look out the window. The sun is bright but the air is cold. I can tell these facts to be true because there is no water dripping off roofs, angles of shingles that are already heating from the sun. I can tell this because there is absolutely no activity at all to be discerned on the street. If it were even a little warmer somebody would be out and emptying a waste bin into the garbage can at the edge of the garage. Somebody else would be walking the far too large dog for this neighborhood. The dog walker would be dressed in some ungodly shade of spandex.

My wife must have taken up the cooking I smell bacon, our once only weekly treat. I smell something else too. It might be pancakes or waffles but there is definitely a third note to the mix of coffee and squealer delight. I had best go get the rest of the folded t-shirts into peoples' drawers now and head downstairs now.

What Yesterday Cost My Soul

2012-01-11T08:26:00.002-05:00

Each day I listen carefully and try to really hear people as they talk about change in their lives. I really want to know what they have experienced and what is left inside of them afterwards. Often a single being sitting inform of me will recount a specific incident that led them to whatever purported redemption they have found.
Many individuals will detail very precision a specific act like their traumatic failure in providing for the needs of a spouse or a child as the catalyst for their transformation. Sometimes the tale I hear is one oft told on the big screen. You’ll know it I am sure. While lying in a county’s holding cell they sober up to the reality that prison time probably awaits them. Surrounded by concrete and steel the individual inventories what they have done, what they have done wrong and then they balance it against their hopes and aspirations. I do believe some of these tales and there are other tales that I do not find valid.
Sometimes the tale is nothing more than just “Meh, I dunno it just seemed like I should change.” Obviously the last response carries little weight with me. To me meh doesn’t carry a great deal of weight for me as a change catalyst.

No matter what is said, what particular story is told there is an emotional cost I experience listening to each and ever story. It is like I have to give up a thousandth of a per cent of my soul each time I weigh the claims of redemption against the record of failures. Over time that erosion of my moral being adds up. Without a doubt I pay a price and my family pays a price for the bit of heart inside of me that disappears or grows hard and cynical.
Last night in my role as a school official I had to sit in judgment of a case involving sexual impropriety amongst high school students. I had to read police reports, affidavits, and narrative statements. Then I in conjunction with my fellow officials had to listen to testimony. For 3 ½ hours my colleagues and I debated about what the actual nature of the offense was and what sanction if any should be involved.
Our debate was heated and tinged with issues of race, the role of authority, questions as to what constitutes acquiescence or consent, the reliability of the depictions, the internal consistency of statements made at the time of the incident versus statements made at the hearing.

Ultimately I cannot hint as to what the outcome was or why. I cannot divulge to you or my wife or my closest confidants anything that would unburden me except to talk about the experience in the most general of terms as I am doing now. My obligation is one of confidentiality and that obligation is as sacrosanct as the confidentiality mandate imposed on my in my status as a lawyer.

What I can tell you is that I believe as I have believed since I was at university that sexual crime against women or sexual crime against any non consenting person is one of the most heinous behaviors a person can engage in. I can tell you also that while we can argue about the meaning of gestures and the ambiguity of words in the context of a sexual encounter in the end the fact that any ambiguity remains speaks volumes about the lack of respect we as a society have for the integrity of a person. In the end the decision I made last night was right, and just. However may soul has lost forever a bit more of it essence than a normal day costs me.

Out of the Mud

2012-01-10T08:08:00.002-05:00

The fact that life is change has been noted by so many writers, poets and singers over the years that the concept of transformation and alteration has become wallpaper to our reality. Such a state of affairs is very, very dangerous. The reality of change becoming merely background noise in a popular series of couplets deludes us into thinking there will be another time, another opportunity to say hello or goodbye, to act to ameliorate a hurt or to give a helping hand. But today or maybe even this moment might in actuality be the only chance or the last chance or even the last best chance for the action contemplated.
As I sat in my governmental meeting last night amongst those with agendas so divergent as to make our discourse seem like a John Cage piece, I thought of acts I left undone or things I have left unsaid over the years. I cannot make any difference on the vast majority of things I cataloged as I watched the political theatre play out before me. However I can again make a promise to myself this day to do the thing that needs to be done in a timely way. If only one thing is improved so long as nothing is made worse I will have made the world a better place.

Kurt Vonnegut said and I am paraphrasing here is the thing that makes us different is that we made a choice to get up out of the mud and to do something. Makes sense to me. My hope is that the something we do will be moral and good.

Tired..

2012-01-09T08:03:00.000-05:00

Right now I have arrived back from Alpena, Michigan. It is a small city with no easy was to get there located in the northeastern portion of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. My eldest son, Primus had a hockey tournament and we went.

My major feeling from the tournament was exhaustion. Four games in less than 36 hours took a toll on players and parents. The team did not prevail but they did become what appears to be a team. Probably the moment I realized this was happening was when they had taken the pool balls and cues and began playing mini golf using pool equipment. It was sight to see six foot tall man children lying upon their bellies lining up shots into an indoor putt-putt hole with a cue stick.

When I find the adapter necessary to put a photo with this entry I will. Right now I have a ton of work and so this entry must be short. I will offer this, our lives are shot and everyone has a story. Listen to those stories, it will tell you a great deal of what the person next to you is made of.

Weight Watchers, Dharma and the Avoidance of Suffering

2012-01-06T08:28:00.001-05:00

Breaking the chains that bind us to suffering

One way to handle the impulses that bind us to suffering is through cognitive intervention. If we’re behind the wheel and another driver cuts us off, leans on his horn, or otherwise drives provocatively, we can construct a narrative to explain his aggressiveness: “He’s late for something, and probably not for the first time. He’s desperate to get there, and you know yourself what that’s like!” The same line of creative speculation works in the face of any form of hostility: “She may have just lost her job,” or “He just had a fight with his wife.” These kinds of stories, even if fanciful, offer us some breathing room, interrupting the reaction chain that binds us to suffering.

- Bodhin Kjolhede, "Pain, Passion, and the Precepts"

Lately I have been dabbling with an American distillation of Buddhism. Input on this comes to me through places like Tricycle Magazine and various English language translations of Buddhist texts. As of yet I am not a Buddhist however I find things in Buddhism that are congruent with my innermost belief system. How is that for a confusedly enigmatic viewpoint?

On a daily basis I get a blurb from Tricycle called The Daily Dharma. A simplified Anglophone definition of dharma would be “the truth about the way things are and will always be in the universe or in nature.” For years I have read Thomas Merton most mornings. Occasionally I will go out to a site run by hard line old school Catholic monks on an island off the Irish coast. Most days of late I have liked The Daily Dharma most of all.

For years I have battled with the American disease of borderline obesity. I am inert, inactive and snack constantly. My metabolism slowed down long ago.

At one time I went to Weight Watchers for a year it was effective. I shed fifty pounds or so. It wasn’t hard going to Weight Watchers for me. I was about the only guy there and well I have never liked really skinny women. (Chuckling would be appropriate not ewwwwhs.) Anyway Weight Watcher eventually stopped working for me. I think what happened is that WW does not do a good job of reinforcing maintenance of a health weight. When you lose weight you get lots of applause. Once you hit your goal weight you tend to slack off going because it just isn’t the same to have the person at the scale say no weight loss as opposed to congrats you are 2 ½ pounds down. There are no hurrahs for stability. I have found a great number of areas of life where there are no hurrahs for stability.

In one version of Weight Watchers (and the programs are always evolving) they were big on 8 Techniques to Address Food Challenges. The two I remember were storyboarding and reframing.

Storyboarding was thinking about food challenges you would be facing in the next day or so and working out mental flow charts of what you would do to avoid the challenges. An example would be if it was a holiday gathering and cousin Bob gave you a plate of meatballs (because he always gives you unhealthy food) while someone else handed you a beer what you would do. One storyboad strategy would be to add healthy things to the plate and just nibble on them. Another would be to put the plate in the kitchen and walk into the living room declining food offers because you already had a plate waiting back in the kitchen (which was out of sight and thus not tempting you). The beer would be set by the plate and you would get some ice water “because I am really thirsty”.

Sometimes reframing worked better. In such a case you would have to work up a story about the meaning of the interaction, diet sabotage or misdirected love on the part of cousin Bob. Using reframing you could construct an inner rationale to abandon the plate. Reframing would leave you with a rationale that would not leave you with cognitive dissonance. Ah cousin Bob loves me but if I give in to this misguided attempt at showing love (in American food is always love) I won’t be around much longer to share the warm familial affection with Bob and others. Be polite but do the right thing. Hey it isn’t the best example but you get my drift.

Looking at the dharma today it seems to me that the piece is urging a regular use of reframing of situations where we could allow negative emotions and impulses overcome us. I liked the thought that a story even if fanciful might be enough to avoid negative emotions that would bind us to suffering, especially in situations where there is no need to know the whole back-story of events. The clearly negative grunt of another coworker in response to your morning greeting can be cast in an understanding light based on assumptions that their ride in today was unduly rough. You don’t really need to know what the cause is; you just have to be able to avoid being sucked in to the negative emotion they have shared that if you internalize will lead you to suffering.

Yeah reframing moments consciously knowing that reframing is what you are doing, can give personal spiritual growth some breathing room. It can allow your spirit access to a space where it will not be overwhelmed by unneeded and unnecessary suffering.

Feeling Better Now

2012-01-05T08:22:00.000-05:00

A winter most welcome is viewed from this silent sunlit room. So far this season the snows have held back. One day we had six inches of snow fall suddenly and then it was gone. Today the temperature is set to reach 45 F (7 C) in early January. Within the past eleven years we have had 30+ inches (76 cm) on the ground that would remain close to the whole winter through. At my age I do a mental calculation. It runs like this. In some years it has snowed as early as late November and at the latest I remember measureable snow on May 4. I have thus cut my exposure to snow imperiousness by 2/7ths. Yeah.

Last night almost made up for yesterday morning. Secundus came home with a list of homework and did seem to work on it. I will send off a note to several teachers to find out if the work made its way in. He ripped into Empire Falls with a passion. He pointed out literary and historical allusions that I had missed. The allusions were real. His attitude in general seemed improved. Primus worked on his homework too. He was able to identify the work clearly and articulately. Yeah.

I did not get to read much last night. I have a Buddhist work buried in my brief case. Maybe tonight. This morning I forced myself to revisit Merton. Dipping into his thoughts was as always quite refreshing. The monk in talking about the mundane of winter’s cold communicated an emphasis on his joy at just warming by a fire. It wasn’t a cracking wood stove he spoke of but rather the blue flame of an old freestanding propane heater that used to be some common in southern cabins. Sometimes just coming in on a cold sunlit winter day can bring an awareness of the wonder and joy of life.

Ah the Morning has Not Lived Up to My Expectations

2012-01-04T08:29:00.000-05:00

I blew it this morning. My tinnitus was bothering me and I awoke at 5:30 a.m. about half an hour early. I lay in bed trying to decide whether to get up or not. In the end I just lay there and waited for the radio to come on. Sometimes the only news I get is from the first 3-4 minutes of National Public Radio’s morning edition. No real news today, just more of the same.

When I got home last night I spent the entire evening cleaning. Pine needles in the arch of your foot suck. All the Christmas decorations went to the basement, the floor was swept and the furniture was put back into place. The kitchen was organized. We have shifted to a closer to vegetarian than not diet and I was looking for something, I am not sure what but I could not find it. An hour and half later and the cabinets were organized. After all this and after the first full day back at work I was tired.

Foolish me, later on last night I had made Secundus recount his grades to me. Abysmal would be putting it mildly. A child with immense talent, a child who used to have spark has changed. His sole purpose now it seems is escaping into his computer. He was sent off to read a novel.

Next Secundus came down to assert I was tormenting him because the main character in the novel had no backbone and was filled with vacillation and ambivalence, Secundus’s words. He then accused me of making him read the book to torment him with a character that was his double. I told him I asked him to read simple to show he still possessed that skill and that all of his mental function hadn’t been shifted to allowing his fingers to tap, tap, tap on the arrow keys of his computer not to confront him with a possible future like one of Dickens’s Christmas ghosts. Oh the book is Richard Russo’s Empire Falls.

When he came down for breakfast he didn’t want what was being served so I made him his druthers, toast, jam and egg over easy. But then it became a confrontation over the minor things and that grew into a confrontation over bigger issues.

My cool was lost very quickly. The lunch bag ripped not his fault, nor mine either. Also there is a plumbing problem and due to my external hard drive having died I don’t have my good plumber’s number. Finally both of my kids who had all of Christmas to do some remedial work on their plummeting grades did nothing. This of course resulted in a communication from school yesterday about where some assignments were.

Weekly counseling, constant questions about assignments, nothing seems to bring about a change. Yes I want to be accepting. Yes I want to be compassionate. But dammit there is such a thing as personal responsibility.

Sorry to vent but I am only human. I am one with the universe. I am one with the universe. I guess this means I am the proud parent of teenage boys.

There Tearing Old Grove Street Down

2012-01-03T23:42:00.002-05:00

Sometimes just hearing a song can open up an empty space in your heart. There is not a song on Steely Dan’s Katy Lied that doesn’t bring a little bit of a tear to my eye. Once there was talent and a raw life force that carried us all along onward and upward. I lost track and with the exception of one conversation in a parking lot rushing to or from some meaningless urgency I never saw him again. And then he was gone. This is a memory in song to somebody who changed the course of two lives and probably many more.

Get Slow Today for a Reason

2012-01-03T08:07:00.000-05:00

Last night I finished devouring a Sookie Stackhouse mystery. It was called Dead…in Dallas. These books are popcorn reading. Starting at page 1 it took me about four hours to read the entire book.. Sookie Stackhouse stories are soft core porn and almost Harlequin in their very nature. True Blood on HBO is based on these tales. Still a tale of vampires versus shape shifters and the pluck of a frequently naked blond bombshell can be fun. The metaphor focused on today’s political climate using fundamentalists versus the vampires made me chuckle. There is nothing like a nude heroine humping a vampire talking about the politics of the undead to give rise to a good laugh.

Yes I could have been writing a story to post on the blog based on memory, or based on my interactions with my children, but this licentious escape was nice. Sometimes your mind just has to get to a state of emptiness. Giggly emptiness.

Time wise it was January 2nd and a college bowl football game was one; my team versus some other team. But I couldn’t watch it. If I had the Green and White would have lost. It is a superstition I hold most sacred. It can be stated very succinctly. If I care about a team in a sporting event they will lose. This is more that doubly true if I watch the game. With triple overtime involved for a final outcome my eyes on a single play would have doomed them. Better I be immersed in vampire going ons than watch.

Well this brief time before I have to work has elapsed and now to face the proverbial music. I am listening as I am always listening to Gregorian chants as I work. It drowns out the tinnitus. Ah if only I had seen that Iggy Pop, Clash and Who concert. I think that was the one that did it to me.

In the morning I check my non-work e-mail before the clock starts at 8 a.m. This was in my inbox. I liked it so I will share.

The Value of Slowing Down

We can afford to drop our defensiveness and listen to our colleagues; we can afford to be imaginative and open. If we slow down and drop our resistance to work’s unpleasantness, we discover that we are resourceful enough to be daring, free from fear and arrogance. Such confidence enables us to know instinctively which situations need to be confronted, which should be nourished, and which can be disregarded. Mahakala (a Tibetan deity-please use your own source of divinity or spiritual strength here--JTT) reminds us to sharpen up during times of conflict, to be mindful and pay attention. With such alertness we can in fact preserve the sanity of our workplace even during extreme discord.

- Michael Carroll, "Mahakala at Work"

Happy New Year Y'all

2012-01-02T13:31:00.000-05:00

No resolutions here, just a goal. My plan is to post on a regular basis, not less than weekly, to A Space True and North. To do this I will have to maintain a focus that has eluded me over the past several months. However I think it is possible to do such a thing. Sit down, put fingers on keys and write. Grab the time early in the day or late an night.

In recent days I have engaged with people from my old home town on Facebook(FB). It has been kind of odd for me to do this. When I left my home I was in full fledged flight. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want any thread of my being to be tied to the place. I wanted pure and simple to be gone.

The departure from one’s home is not pure and simple; it is anything but. Every bit of your being is infused with the zeitgeist of the time and the emotions, the rituals, the fears and the hopes of the place you are departing. In my youth I spent 18 years in one house with a stable two parent family. No matter how I have tried to deny it I am made up of their genetic predispositions. Molded by their hopes and their fears based on their life experiences I still opted to go into the world.

When I was younger I really believed in behaviorism. B.F. Skinner was an idol. Everything about a person was environmental. Now that I am a parent I am pretty sure I was as close to totally wrong as I could be on this point. Watching my children from their earliest days they have had familial behavioral traits that I have and that my father and mother before me had. My wife sees behaviors that mimic her family. These behaviors came too early to have been from the environment of living with us. The behaviors came so strongly that they had to be hard wired.
Somewhere I heard that phrase, “No matter where you go, there you are.” I think in reality it is something like no matter where you go there go the genetic patterns you are predisposed to live out. I have digressed.

In approaching my old hometown mates I decided to share one of the seminal experiences in my life. I had posted it on this site a long time ago but that raw form wasn’t right for the hometown audience. In my redraft for the hometown crowd I took out some names, dealt with some nuances that might be hurtful and just generally cleaned up the writing. I took out a bunch of epithets and toned down the drug use. But given the era of the piece the drug use could not go away in any significant manner. When only one word would do I left it in. Sometimes you just have to say fuck or shit. They just work.

I decided providing a link to this site was a bit risky. I mean the Buddhist ramblings, the depraved talk over the years and you lot who make comments, well it just didn’t seem a good match. I am at 300+ posts and some of them are quite tawdry. I actually had to create a new blog just for the hometown FB crowd. But it was fun. However A Space True and North is still my first love when it comes to writing. I promise (to Chris especially) I will try and say something meaningful as this New Year progresses. My love to all of you who read me on this 2nd day of January 2012 in this my 317th post.

Grey is the Color of the World Today

2011-12-01T08:14:00.002-05:00

I feel closer to the beginning of my learning now than ever. Clearly I am closer to the end than the beginning, so funny how life works that way. Each time I wash a dish or cook a meal my mind wanders to thoughts of how fragile all of these moments are. While I wish I was somehow savoring these actions, in some way making them grand learning experiences, touchstones on the road to in enlightenment, I am merely setting the table or cooking an omelet. However the fact that I am aware of the short time I will spend doing this seems important.

Seeking the Good

2011-11-16T08:11:00.000-05:00

We seek good but we find disturbance. We cry for peace but there is none. We trust too much in ourselves really. It is time to let go and trust in the divine. Seek the holy.

Another day will fly by today. Sitting in a suit and tie I will be listening to people tell me stories (some credible, some not believable and most falling in a very murky soup between the two), of redemption from addiction. I will hear man of the same phrases again and again repeated as if they were part of a catechism of recovery. One day at a time, you are only as sick as your secrets, meeting makers make it and a plethora of other maxims will be recited in my general direction.

And then the day will be over.

Another night will then fly by with “events”. Sunday was hockey in metro Detroit, Monday was the school board meeting, Tuesday was my wife’s investment club meeting, tonight will be hockey in Jackson, tomorrow will be psychologist & young men’s choir & a Michigan Tastes dinner, Friday will be hockey and so will Saturday. Sunday will be Thanksgiving at the church. Then the cycle will reset except that there will be a bit of time spent on the road for the feast of dead bird.

It is hard to seek the holy in the endless rush between “stuff”. Still, you have to do it.

Last night at 11 p.m., I stopped the rush and committed to making a Vietnamese noodle soup to serve my family for breakfast. Rice noodles soaked, star anise, cinnamon, beef stock, onion, and ginger boiled. Pork was sliced thin. This variation on Hanoi noodle dish became breakfast today. As it cooked for the hour it took to make last night the house smelled of wonderful oriental neighborhoods in big cities. Taking each step of food preparation in its due time I stepped into the holy. The stock boiled until midnight. As I changed the water in the noodles to continue to allow them to soften I was lost in doing the job right.

I search for good. Sometimes I find it in simple acts for others.

Take a Moment and Exhale

2011-11-10T08:33:00.000-05:00

Thursday, November 10, 2011

What must we do to break through the undifferentiated and uninterpretable noises of our modern life?

Merton has said a grand gesture (his example was a Vietnam protester who immolated himself) while riveting becomes contestable in three days and forgotten in ten. I think in 1965 when he wrote this he was right. Merton however was writing when the news cycle consisted of a morning paper and the evening news cast. Then the local news broadcast was about 15 minutes and the national feed was ½ hour. The home delivered paper could be dispensed with comics and all in under a half an hour. Now six hours is the time frame for contestable and 24 hours maximum for forgettable. We are inundated with media; cable, internet, radio are all pumping information non stop.

My concern is that the blaring noises drown out or ability to clear our minds. If we opt to unplug and tune out we lose hold of the cultural fabric and become irrelevant. If we hold on we become overwhelmed, our attention spans are lessened and our direct one on one interaction with others becomes muddled or lost. Maybe that is why I am drawn to mediation right now. We have to establish a ritual of silence.

Sitting in quiet trying to empty one’s mind is then when real perspective returns. The act of clearing one’s mind allows the clutter to dissolve away to the point of relative importance each piece of that jumble should hold. Let go of the world’s madness for a few minutes each day, don’t be the monkey holding the banana in the empty gourd, trapped by your own inability to let go.

The problem is that we must make time for the quiet. We have to disconnect manually and regularly from the world at a time when our mind is still active. Seeking quiet is not something we should be doing just before bed when we are tired. It can be morning, midday or evening but we must have something left of a spark in us when we sit down to meditate.

We make time for our bodies at gyms and by running and walking. We need to make time for our minds.

Kindness wins

2011-11-09T10:37:00.000-05:00

Today’s start played out like this. My younger son Secundus, who is in an advanced English program at the local university, had to be at the university by 8 a.m. My older son contrary to his normal behavior slept in. Having made breakfast and put it on the table, biscuits and condiments, I wanted decaf coffee. None was available at home because I brew Kenyan Roast MAXIMUM caffeine for my wife and oldest son each morning. Primus’s teacher’s view this as a fair alternative to his sleeping through hour one and two.

The oversleeping by Primus derailed the well oiled machine of ritual. Confusion and kafuffle ensued. He was rousted while Secundus was already in the car. Primus was decked in rain gear and sent on his way by foot to the high school. Luckily we live close. I was dropped off at the coffee shop about 14 minutes walk from my office. Wife and Secundus sped off to pick up my son’s mate who is in the class with him and who also needed to be at the U by 8 a.m.

Once inside the coffee shop, that place of rich aromas I ordered my coffee. I added skim milk to this hot brown water. I stepped outside ready for the day. At that moment the rain was beginning to fall somewhat harder. Looking about because I was carrying an unopened umbrella, a brief case and a cup of coffee I placed the coffee on a ledge by the door and commenced to open the umbrella. Right then someone else exited and the vibration caused to coffee to jump off the ledge. As the paper cup hit the ground it exploded spilling hot decaf on my walking shoes. Distracted by free fall of Biggby’s best decaf my focus was on the ground and I missed the oncoming tine of my umbrella. The expanding umbrella poked me in the eye causing me to flinch and almost lose my balance.

Wet with ran and coffee I refolded the umbrella and picked up the empty cup and its now distended lid. I walked back in the store refilled and got a new lid. I walked back out and commenced the walk into my office.

It was only after I crossed the large and busy intersection situated between the coffee shop and the path to my office I realized the cup had been damaged and the lid would not stay on and was not preventing the hot coffee from dripping onto my hand every so often. Youch. Despite wanting desperately to sip some hot coffee for the cold rain had picked up I couldn’t because the lid would pop off and the contents would pour out on my garments. So on I trudged grimacing at each uneven spot on the sidewalk as coffee dripped onto my hand.

By the time I reached work the coffee was cold. Ugh. I threw the cup in the micro warmed it and put it into a real cup I have at my desk.

The only thing that made it all better was opening my e-mail and finding a daily inspirational blurb from my Buddhist magazine. I attach the blurb here. Reading such an affirming piece was like a cosmic kiss on the boo boo that was the day’s start.

During a lecture while I was interpreting for the Dalai Lama, he said in what seemed to me to be broken English, “Kindness is society.” I wasn’t smart enough to think he was saying kindness is society. I thought he meant kindness is important to society; kindness is vital to society; but he was saying that kindness is so important that we cannot have society without it. Society is impossible without it. Thus, kindness IS society; society IS kindness. Without concern for other people it’s impossible to have society.

– Jeffrey Hopkins, "Equality"

No matter the rushing, the spilt coffee and the general aggravation I feel today I have vowed to say please and thank you and to offer an empathetic ear. Kindness wins out over mere aggravation.

Refreshed/Not Refreshed

2011-11-07T13:32:00.000-05:00

My wife was gone for the weekend. We have friends who have a gorgeous and spacious “cabin” on Lake Michigan by Elk Rapids. She went up and met with her female cadre that used to get together once monthly for a “bitches brunch”. This was ergo the “bitches weekend”, their terminology not mine. The weather was perfect and she came back refreshed and invigorated. Ugh. Might I be fighting off some jealousy? Yup. Could envy be involved? Sure.

As for me I was with the kids and it was as you might imagine a battle of will and wits. Secundus had to work on a paper. Being in an advanced English program he has a 3-5 page paper due each week in English. This week his mission was to compare and contrast the behaviors of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with current psycho-medical thought on multiple personality disorders. Such work requires online research. Online research means Secundus was using a computer. Using a computer leads to gaming. Gaming leads to Dad getting apoplectic. Arggh. Did I in my envy mention that my wife was enjoying one of the most beautiful weekends of several recent falls sitting on a beach by a campfire watching the horizon on Lake Michigan. Drinking wine with good friends too.

On Thursday Primus got the word he did not make the hockey team for our local high school. More on this will follow in a subsequent post. There is bitterness involved.

On Friday before my wife left to go eat ambrosia and walk long stretches of beautiful beach I got on the horn and started searching for somewhere Primus could play stick hitting hard rubber biscuit on ice. The local league refused to put a midget team on the ice this year. The cause might have been the dope smoking by several team members last year. Or the brawling amongst ourselves and without teams or maybe it was just the pain in the ass factor of it all.

Having no local teams we had to look elsewhere. Most midget teams are either in Detroit metro or in Grand Rapids. I got lucky in that there is a team in Jackson half the distance to Grand Rapids that needed bodies. From what I saw of them on Saturday they can use a little muscle. Many e-mails and texts followed. Eventually I got another kid to sign on to play who also got cut from our local high school. Thus we will have a plan of transport for alternate weeks.

Primus and I went down to Jackson with the other kid’s family on Saturday night. We watched the last few minutes of their game. Turns out a couple of players used to play in our league but when they realized they wouldn’t make high school they shifted to a less expensive league than our local one. It was good to see some familiar faces.

Sunday was spent waiting to see if the kids got rostered. If you aren’t on the roster you can’t get on the ice. There was a game Sunday and if they were rostered they would have played. They didn’t so we have to wait until Wednesday to hit the ice and it will only be a practice. Such is life. But the waiting and calls and texts burnt up half the day. The other half a day I spent weed whacking and doing winter prep on the exterior of the house. I ache today.

Back to my wife, with her new Iphone 4s she came home refreshed showing me the well shot and quite lovely video of the warm wonderful campfire on Lake Michigan at sunset. She talked about how invigorated she was. She looked at me and said you really do need a night away from the kids. Double Argggh.

Life and nothing but. I need some time away. Triple Arggh.

Okay I am better now.

Sometimes You Have to Let Go and Let the Wheel Throw You Where it May.

2011-11-04T08:05:00.002-04:00

I believe that we can dream and that we ought to dream things writ large. I believe that we can try to and in fact ought to act to make those dreams real trying with every fiber of our being to obtain or to make something better.

If we fail after hard work and honest effort we should learn something from our not attaining, not achieving, not finishing. We are sinew, blood and mind for only a short time and some knowledge should be taken from every moment that fate or the fates or God or Gods allow us.

If we succeed let us hope the reward was worth the cost.

The Clouds Over Me

2011-10-14T10:19:00.000-04:00

Life and death, as my teacher used to point out, are just different names for different states. These are not permanent states. If we have to give it a name, Life with a capital "L" is the basic reality. Ours is not an inert universe, it's an alive universe; so what we call birth and death are just temporary states, temporary transformations, names for our true self at one time, and in one situation.

– Philip Kapleau Roshi, "Life with a Capital "L": An interview with Philip Kapleau Roshi"

Friday, October 14, 2011

Most of the time I get to think about anything that is not a perceived urgency is when I am waiting for a bus. It is almost a time of meditation for me. Today the clouds were moody in the way Joni Mitchell described them in a song on the work Hejira. Let me look up that lyric quickly.

Ah I couldn’t grab the lyric but here is the link.

Today I was thinking about just the ritual of life, the cycles that nature imposes on us. Day falls into day. Bus ride follows bus ride. Work is what work is. Existence does not allow for easy enlightenment. It takes work, it takes practice. To transform what we do with this “L”ife we have to work at freeing ourselves from the easy capture of our minds/our souls in ritual. Just saying.

Don't Let This Beautiful Day Slip Away

2011-10-13T11:47:00.000-04:00

I have reached that point in life where glorious perfect days seem a thing of the past. My memory will hold onto a few for a time and then they will be gone.

Imperfection surrounds me, at home, at work, in my public service. In the past couple of days I have been dealing with the skullduggery of the political world I haven chosen to inhabit. In the background I have been hearing a conversation somewhat akin to Bill Clinton and the mother of all political parsing, “ it depends on what the meaning of is is”. Also I have been sorting out/motivating a child to sort out an E in Geometry. What happened to F? I liked F. Got a few of ‘em, those bad boys were drawn in red Faber pencil and they were motivators to me. My feet hurt. My brother is in recovery from cancer surgery still. An uncle I like is in hospice. In reality I think all the perfect days are gone.

But it is okay. Jimmie Dale Gilmore summed up what I feel most days as I awaken. No matter what has occurred or will occur I will accept it eventually.

Tell me now that you know how to greet the dawn each day.
Fearless and unfettered, stand before the sun and pray.
There's no controversy, let silence judge your plea
For justice or for mercy, they both will set you free.

It's a braver, newer world you've found,
Rolling 'round and 'round and 'round and 'round
It's a braver, newer world you've found.

Show me know that you know how to play the winning game.
Laughing 'til the sky stands still with neither praise nor blame.
There's still time for heaven, though we're already there.
The daily bread will leaven all hope, all pain, all care.

Jimmie Dale Gilmore appears from what I can to be a Buddhist influenced cowboy singer. While his stuff is hit and miss for me, when it hits it is really awesome. This song every single time I play it takes me to a different far calmer place than the one I occupy before I sit back and listen to it. It is that last lyric that rings so true. The perfect days may be gone but there is still time for a kind of heaven with acceptance.

In searchof connection

2011-09-23T08:32:00.002-04:00

Paying attention provides the gift of noticing, and the gift of connecting. It provides the gift of seeing a little bit of ourselves in others, and of realizing that we’re not so awfully alone. It allows us to let go of the burden of so much of what we habitually carry with us, and receive the gift of the present moment.

-Sharon Salzberg, "A More Complete Attention"

Walking in a Dark Alley

2011-09-21T08:48:00.000-04:00

In the past several days I have been in a bit of a pressure cooker. Against all advice last year I ran for an elected position. I won. The position has turned into hell. Do you know how many people are willing to say I told you so in such a situation? A great number really. They usually begin with a “Thank you for serving, I would never do it, it is an untenable spot you are in.” The I told you so you come in the second burst of conversation after this.

Two nights ago I endured a public hearing where I was called a racist, was compared to a Nazi and was told I was the agent of white privilege. C’est la vie. I won’t take my time here to spout my leftist credentials but they exist. Okay I will spout them a little. I had my own “red” file back in the day when the state’s attorney general maintained them. I have my arm bands from numerous marches for equal rights. I studied equal protection from one of the drafters of the government’s brief in Brown vs. Board.

The core issue for me is one that is a much larger one than the particular battle I find myself caught up in. It is an issue of the stratification of class in America and our inability as a public to deal with that. We as a people have lost all perspective and it seems we have lost all our common sense as well. Somehow we have to deal with providing education to our children at a high level of quality, provide infrastructure for the conduct of civil society and care to those who cannot care for themselves. Raise taxes, cut spending, do one or the other, but don’t just let the issue sit.

I do believe that lobbying has screwed us up. Just saying. Both parties have claimed they were going to clean up the system in the past few rounds of elections but neither side has done squat.

One thought I return again and again is that maybe Vonnegut was right, as a nation we are too large. Maybe we should be divided up into a number of smaller countries that are more responsive to the individual needs of the geographic region’s peoples. Maybe not. Maybe the red state and blue state regions should divide and provide libertarian and socialistic governance styles to their respective approving populi. We could mutual commit to fund defense and interstate highways and not much else.

My choice that I am facing is to whether or not to close a school and if a school is closed to pick which one it will be. I will make a choice and live with the consequences because that is what people have elected me to do. Personally I think I have to vote to close a school, maybe more. Remember I am a socialist and this is a hard choice to make.

I don’t believe it is all for nothing it isn’t written on the wind to quote Jamie Robbie Robertson. We take on the job of public service because it needs to be done and because we all owe an obligation of public service to the commonwealth we reside in. Just because I make a decision that does not satisfy you doesn’t make me comparable to those who relocated the Jews of Europe to the death camps.

Now I have now gotten that off my chest. I will not speak of it again. Soon I will go back to ruminating on the ill advised adventures of my youth or perhaps the surreal moments of living with an ASD child, an unnaturally bright child and two demented cats. The vote is a few days off and so I may not be posting or e-mailing much before then.

Doing this job has really been turning me toward Buddhism. Today from the Tricycle’s daily motivation blurb I offer the following small part:

We can receive teachings on the nature of suffering, compassion, or emptiness, but when we sit down to practice, no one can show us how to integrate these teachings. What we end up doing with the wild and unruly character of our thoughts and emotions still remains a question for us. How we bring the practice to life is something personal, and it can’t be taught.

– Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, "The Power of an Open Question"

A Darn Good Quote on Religion

2011-09-15T08:26:00.003-04:00

I recieve a daily comment from Tricycle a quarterly periodical on Buddhism with a tie to how American approach this "faith". Today's quote was:

Right Speech and Religious Diversity

Right speech is a vast, important topic in Buddhist training, and nowhere is it more important than in delicate conversations across religious lines. In our current context, arguments or debates about religion are counterproductive and only produce more sorrow and anguish. As Buddhists, we want to avoid participating in or contributing to the contentious atmosphere that permeates much public discourse about religious diversity

I liked this quote but it was in the comments section I found this quote and I really like it. Thus I share.

Let us never forget that the purpose of all religious techniques should be about liberating ourselves from suffering. Which tradition or traditions they come from are largely irrelevant, as the teaching itself will either hold water and be adopted or not and be discarded. The whole where it came from and who thought of the technique first debate is interesting intellectually but from a skillful means perspective is largely irrelevant. Does the man dying of thirst question the religious pedigree of the water before, probably not or he dies.

Buddhabrats

The Boy Abroad-For a Day

2011-09-14T07:38:00.001-04:00

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The mysteries of the teenage mind or otherwise; they so define the changing being that is my son. There are so different from the mysteries of the minds of the old.

Primus was placed on a bus this morning to head off to Stratford, ON to see Richard III by Wm. Shakespeare. It was part of a high school English class boondoggle. Primus has been to Stratford on many occasions. Into his pocket I shoved $25 CDN and gave him advice on the exchange rate. We are on the losing side of that proposition right now.

Despite his numerous stops in Stratford he had no clue as to where he was headed. I mentioned the odd five point intersection. No recall. I mentioned the high street and the river street and the stairs that ran from one to another betwixt the store facades. Nope that didn’t jog any remembrance. It was not until I mentioned two places, the science store Quark Soup and the toy store with the bugs and air cannons. Restaurants, ice cream stores, etc., did not jog the memories but a toy store that sold some miniature plastic ants and a science store where he bought a plushie of the mad cow pathogen these illuminated his memory. At that point he knew the place.

It was at this point he did remember the lamb curry they served in Bentley’s. Ah the synapses must first be fired by the joys of toys and then the food memories come back. Although I didn’t think of it until know if I had mentioned the fine china shop with the five or six cats that roam freely among the plates and tureens that too might have awaked him to a sense of place.

I am old. The stars by which I steer and remember the paths of my journeys are restaurants and pubs where good repast was had or museums and places deemed by others mostly to have “significance”. My son is young and he steers by reminiscences of simpler joys.

Autism-A Starting Point for Parents

2011-09-13T12:37:00.002-04:00

I am attaching below a link to a website tied to Michigan State University's ASD-Michigan Project. It is a good starting point to find resources to help face the challenges of Autism.

http://autism.educ.msu.edu/parents.html

2011-09-13T12:14:00.002-04:00

It is important to realize that Autism Spectrum Disorder is a growing reality for many Americans. Teachers, educators, parents, coaches, the police and people in every walk of life need to be aware of and be proactive in dealing with ASD persons. If you are a parent and suspect your child is on the spectrum follow up. If you are a person in a position of authority over such a child, educate yourself. The impact on your life and theirs will be immense.

http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20110913/NEWS05/109130313/MSU-study-Autistic-students-needs-sometimes-overlooked

Hope Brought by Song

2011-09-13T08:22:00.002-04:00

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

On the way into work today I was listening to K.D. Lang sing. It was beautiful. I will post the link below of the song that I was hearing. Methinks I will also post the lyrics because they are so hopeful, so right for a moment with so many dark currents swirling about.

The music came from Hymns of the 49th Parallel. So moving, so wonderful are the tunes contained on this shiny round piece of plastic that the dashboard of my car swallows and then aurally renders. The four song cycle that this song sits in the middle of includes, After the Goldrush, Simple, Helpless and I Could Drink a Case of You. All of these songs are wistful, longing, romantic and ultimately hopeful. There is a shininess to them that lifts me out of any funk I might be in.

Three of the four of these songs were created by 1970 when the zeitgeist was a belief in unlimited possibility. It was a time when freedom, justice and love were the touchstones; well they were the watchwords at least. I think we did okay on the justice part but we really bungled it badly on how we handled the love and freedom part. Still, when I can tap into that moment as when a song like this and its mates touch those memories of the era I remember what we, what I was striving for. When I feel that feeling again it is easier to face a day filled with the petty grievances, the failed schemes, the greed and the myopia that so surrounds us.

Motivated by a lyric sung high and hopeful I can focus again on love and justice and freedom in a world that seems to have lost its way.

Flawless light in a darkening air
Alone...and shining there
Love will not elude you

Love is simple
I worship this tenacity
And the beautiful struggle we’re in
Love will not elude us

Love is simple
Be sure to know that

All in love
Is ours
And love, as a philosophy
Is simple

I am calm in oblivion
Calm, as I ever have been
Love will not elude me
Love is simple
Be sure to know that
All in love
Is ours...
Is ours...

That all in love
Is ours
And love, as philosophy
Is simple...
And ours...

Manic Day

2011-09-12T08:38:00.000-04:00

Monday, September 12, 2011

I can hear the lyrics of that Prince penned tune ringing in my ears, “Just another manic Monday…”

Starting the working week is like practicing for an imminent disaster at my house. Lunches are being shoved into bags, people are asking for coffee stat and books and papers are being sought out with frenzy. Freshman, Junior, Director of Marketing and lawyer; all are running about searching, packing and ranting. I don’t think we all actually sit at the table for breakfast at the same time. Might be an overlap occasionally but it is not something that usually happens.

My commitment to the American way, my valiant effort, is to insure that Monday’s breakfast is a decent one. My wife this morning got grits with cheddar cheese and heirloom tomatoes mixed. Secundus received dry toast and a bowl of raspberry applesauce (homemade) and Primus got a mini-melon fresh from the farmer’s market. I scooped out the seeds from that puppy and they are drying in a paper towel for next year. Me I had oatmeal with walnuts, currants and half and half. 3 of the 4 bleary eyed maniacs got black Kenyan coffee and one opted for milk.

The two moments of the weekend that stood out. First, while having dinner at a Chinese restaurant my oldest borrowed my iphone. When I told him to given it back after about 10 minutes he let me know he was in the middle of his physics homework. Apparently it is all math and all online. With the iphone’s scientific calculator and the web interface he was good to go. My how the world has changed, if the parents’ conversation turned boring do your physics homework online.

Second was the issue of the artistic temperament thing we have been dealing with. On Sunday I found out Secundus was trying out for a role in the Scottish play. Banquo, Duncan, McDuff would all be good parts. But as a frosh he might just get to be one of the assorted murderers. The way it came out was that he had an opportunity to audition for the MSU children’s choirs.

For years Secundus has wanted to be in the choir. But yesterday he seemed to just not care. ADHD/Depression whichever it is he was in a funk. In the end it came down to cajoling him by couching his audition as a dry run for auditioning for Mackers. While others were told the choir master would be in touch Secundus was accepted on the spot.

It is hard to watch a child with talent struggle so. To see why he was accepted so readily into the choir, see below.

Dream

2011-09-11T13:33:00.000-04:00

There are moments when I dream images of a café somewhere exotic.

This phantom bistro is probably not France; the language is too harsh too many consonants are crashing one into the other in the staccato speech I overhear. Also it is not France because it is at the end of what should be summer the air on my exposed skin is a little too crisp. Horse draw carts pass motorbikes on cobblestone streets. Little Vespa-like rides bob this way and that. Under a bit of an overcast sky I sit outdoors at a street side table and listen to the noise of life as it is building through the morning. My time here is measured in leisurely hours.

My assumption in this dream is that this is all taking place on a Sunday morning. Some people sweep in front of shops that are not opening today. The boulevard before me while broad is not packed with persons traveling too and fro, however it is not empty either. The auguries of traffic patterns aside what really makes me think it is Sunday is that there is a certain elegance to the dress of those who are passing. Maybe they are on there way to, or perhaps, from mass. Dark haired and swarthy of complexion wearing black suits and cream colored blouses the people here convey a firm and solid beauty.

Colors on the buildings have faded. Once this place must have been prosperous for marble arches can be found in many building entrance ways. The marble is dirty with soot and grit now but there is still the elegance of a dowager refusing to accede to her fall in status. The city is neatly kept if worn and tired.

The air smells of the nearness of large water. There is a cleansing from the saline quality the air acquires near the ocean. Perhaps that is why I am here. Could it be I have come for my health? Whatever the reason I am in this place I am alone as I sip strong coffee and eat a breakfast pastry. I read as I observe this world. What I am reading is old, a battered copy of The Return of the Native. I know I have read it before but maybe it was all that I could find in English here in this place.

Sipping the dark strong roast I hear a seagull. Looking up I see it soaring up and over the roof of the row of buildings across the boulevard. I hear other birds erupt into screeching once it has cleared the roof-line.

And then I am awake and the place is gone. I feel a sense of loss at waking.

Tumult in a Small Town

2011-09-11T13:31:00.000-04:00

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Grey morning today. It seems warmish but the overall feel is one of melancholy. Fall is waiting just around the corner, waiting for the page to be ripped off my Dilbert comic of the day calendar. Some leaves have fallen but they are not enough to motivate me to do anything in the yard, not yet at least.

My life is filled with turmoil right now. Last year I ran for the school board. Little did I know I would be the swing vote on a number of issues. My last name has a consonant near the end of the alphabet and when vote time comes, I am the last in the roll call. Thus when the vote for the board president occurred I was the deciding vote. Again when the vote to close a school occurred I was the deciding vote.

Each of these votes was significant and I think the first vote has played a part in many of the decisions of the board since it occurred. I think the second vote being another 4-3 split had coloration from the first vote. It is a shame too. Everyone on the board has commitment to the welfare of our students but we all bring with us the resonating vibrations and emanations of experiences past.

An Axe was Found in the Barn amongst the Crates of Vienna Sausages and Vanilla Scented Candles. So was a Copy of Darwin's Origin of the Species

2011-09-09T08:44:00.000-04:00

In Which Part Our Half Naked Hero Newly Arrived on the Scene Wearing Just Pajamas and Peanut Butter Obtains a Working Set of Correction Department Handcuffs

Zen practice isn’t about a special place or a special peace or something other than being with our life just as it is. It’s one of the hardest things for people to get: that my very difficulties in this very moment are the perfection. “What do you mean, they’re the perfection? I’m gong to practice and get rid of them!” No, we don’t have to get rid of them, but we must see their nature. The structure becomes thinner (or seems thinner); it gets lighter and occasionally we may crack a hole right through it.

Joko Beck, Everyday Zen p. 138

Last night I voted to close a school. It is a decision that has been percolating for a long, long time in my community. The decision was not easy; the vote was 4-3. The outcome was not satisfying. But life in these times in schools in every district across our country is not easy nor is it satisfying.

Our country is facing challenges brought about by our national myopia, greed on a scale not seen in generations (both individual and corporate) and by institutionalized hubris. While the dismal state of our economics seems to be the focus of the pols and the news dissemination services, our core communal morality is at risk. We collectively seem to have lost sight of values that were instrumental to our moving forward as a nation, as a people.

While those short statement set forth in the paragraphs above may sound conservative, I am not conservative by tea party or Republican standards. Duh. Not a xenophobe, homophobe, social Darwinist, libertarian, or a socialist (although I claim to be) I am merely an average citizen truly worried about what happens next.

I believe in some basic constructs:

• We should live within in our means,
• We should expect a solid effort from all of our citizens to the extent of their abilities,
• We should engage in democracy and not simply be observers on the sidelines,
• We should take care of those who cannot take care of themselves,
• Education is a core value,
• Taxes are not inherently evil,
• Taxes are not a panacea,
• We should accept people for who they are,
• No one has a right to a free ride,
• No one should be expected to carry more than they are able to,
• No one is entitled to privilege by some right of birth,
• The middle way or the golden mean, Buddha or Aristotle, is what we should be striving for, neither excess or deficiency, and
• We should live the golden rule.

Maybe a nation of 300+ million people is too large to be manageable. Maybe Kurt Vonnegut was right and we should be Balkanized, that is cut up into small countries. In a smaller nation state maybe a individual voice has a greater chance to be heard and individuals have a greater more direct stake in the outcome of political decision. I just don’t know.

In Which Part Our Half Naked Hero Newly Arrived on the Scene Wearing Just Pajamas and Peanut Butter Obtains a Working Set of Correction Department Han

2011-09-09T08:42:00.001-04:00

Zen practice isn’t about a special place or a special peace or something other than being with our life just as it is. It’s one of the hardest things for people to get: that my very difficulties in this very moment are the perfection. “What do you mean, they’re the perfection? I’m gong to practice and get rid of them!” No, we don’t have to get rid of them, but we must see their nature. The structure becomes thinner (or seems thinner); it gets lighter and occasionally we may crack a hole right through it.

Joko Beck, Everyday Zen p. 138

Acceptance is hard. For me it is a daily struggle. Last night was rough. More to follow in the next post.

Another Summer has Come and Gone

2011-09-05T10:02:00.001-04:00

Monday, September 05, 2011

Labor Day in Michigan is like hand reaching out to a wall mounted light switch and flipping the switch down. Labor Day clicks off to summer invariably. Looking upward and to the west the sky is grey. Today the temperature will struggle to be in the sixties. Many days will follow like this.

As I took about a 40 minute walk through the town, empty now with those celebrating the holiday gone to points north, there were trees that had gone from green to red. So quickly the color will fill in the rest of what is green in the picture now with yellow and orange and dusky shades of brown. One day not too far off those colors will be gone and the trees will be bare. There may be a couple of warm days between now and mid-October but the switch has been flipped.

Journeys to apple orchards and hockey rinks await. The transition of clothing is coming too. First will be the hooded fleeced shells and light denim jackets. Next there will be the addition of a down vest to the ensemble. Shortly thereafter will come the use of gloves and hats. As early November rolls in the bulkier coats will come out of the closet. I joke not. Halloween is always a dicey proposition with the gear ranging from costume alone to full winter jacket over the clown outfit. Sleet, snow or Indian summer; October 31 can be any and all of these things.
Summer has vanished like a quick afternoon.

All the months of my life are now like fleeting hours. Just a moment ago I turned to do a few simple tasks and when I turned back from my work my life has flown by.

Can't Sell You No Beer

2011-08-29T08:12:00.004-04:00

The weekend flew by. On Friday night there was a high school football game for my community. Both my children are now in high school. Secundus is in the band. His membership in this organization has motivated my attendance at the mini war. Our team won. Under the lights last Friday it was a great moment for the blue and white colors of the uniforms. We beat the read and black (I think).

During the time I was at the game I spoke to about thirty people. I saw the head of the school district, the principal, the vice principal, the dean of students, the head of the band boosters, the school districts bond counsel, a former client from my days in private practice, the athletic director, another former client, a political activist I worked with on John Kerry’s campaign and a fellow school board member. As you might guess I did not really see the game.

3/4ths of my time was spent talking about the need for/how to get money to build the school new buildings. Some of the time was spent talking about band events like the party afterward. Secundus went. He loved it. Some of the time was spent on the fact that the thug who was long term suspended last use for a interaction with a law enforcement officer and who was banned from school activities was present. Most of the time I found myself talking to any person that took a moment to grab my arm and bend my ear.

It was a great thing, okay a good thing that our laundry prevailed this time. But it is in moments like these that you figure out how small a world it is. My first old client was at the game because he played college football with the coach of our team. The bond counsel was at the game because her daughter plays in the band with my son. The same was true of the second old client. The political activist is married to the bond counsel. Etc, etc.

There is an old song by James McMurtry called small town and the lyrics are apropos.

Blue Sky Meditation

2011-08-10T08:16:00.001-04:00

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

What do I need is the question Thomas Merton asked of me this morning as I picked up his book instead of the Zen one. A simple question this one like the questions of most sincere seekers has no ready pat answer. The question was posed on a beautiful Kentucky morning as the monk wrote in his personal journal.

Merton’s answer, at least on that day as he wrote long hand into his moleskin or spiral bound there in his hermitage was, “If necessary I can get by with plenty of mornings like this. Seriously, I need silence, though and solitude to enter into myself and see and touch reality, to live a contemplative life.”

I can agree with some of what he has said. The air today right now is 63 degrees F, the air is pale blue and absolutely free of clouds and there is no humidity anywhere. As I look up I am filled with the thoughts I had as a young boy thinking of travelling great distances in spaceships and of kite flying and of going swimming to “waste’ an afternoon. I can get by with a morning like this. It is not enough my spirit wants something more but there is value to being here/being now in a day like this. We don’t get many like this in our lives now do we?

Staring into the pale blue morning sky is a Zen meditation in itself. It is also a prayer to an almighty God in his goodness giving thanks for all this is right with this world. It is an act of openness to possibilities that lie outside of my self.

One of my struggles with Merton is a thin line that I think exists in the realms of those who would live apart from the “world”. It is the divide between solitude to clear away the clutter of the world and allow us to focus on the core essential aspects of being or of the divine and solitude that becomes self absorption taken to its ultimate narcissistic conclusion. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think Merton crossed that line but pulling back from the world can easily result in the world becoming the boundaries of your own ego.

Like Merton I want solitude so that I may have a time to meditate, to think about the broader aspects of life and its meaning. I must guard against misdirection and complacency. I don’t want those times I find solitude to create my own little world. Sitting on a stoop, surrounded by a cacophony of sounds, staring into a blue sky with an open soul beats sitting on a mat in a dimly lit room where I am trying to clear my mind but instead refocusing again on me and my issues.

Monday, August 08, 2011

2011-08-08T08:11:00.000-04:00

No illusion, no deception, I remain aware of all the wrongs I have done. In moments of meditation all my masks must fall away with a noisy clattering sound. These masks are of odd material some hard some pliable but all have been constructed with years and years of choices. As a result of the accretion of poor choices made over time they have become quite heavy.

It is in the solitude of meditation that I strip away the masks, the grinding burdensome weight of the years. Silence alone with your soul does not tolerate lies. Quiet contemplation is akin to walking with a pebble in you shoe. You cannot countenance the irritant long and so it must be cast out. You stop, you consciously search for what is wrong and then you throw the pebble away. To take a few moments each day to sit quietly emptying your mind is to cast out the pebbles that stop us from being fully empowered, fully away, fully in acceptance.

No Coffee for You!!!

2011-07-14T08:23:00.001-04:00

After some chest pain the other week I went and saw my cardiologist. My bike and I had trouble getting up a hill. The quack and I talked and he told me that the chances were that it was not my heart. However once you are in a doctor’s office you will not leave without a test. We did a stress test, well actually two one without isotopes and the other with. Afterwards he okayed me to travel and do all the normal stuff.

As has often been the case when I visit my cardiologist I was read the riot act regarding caffeine. “G Manitou” he said with impatience, “You have got to cut the caffeine out totally”. Urggh I thought. Caffeine is my life blood. I am not a coffee drinker mind you but I have since about 10 years old consumed copious amounts of ice tea. Urggh I thought. Ice tea equates to the happy days of my youth as much as Tastykakes and cheesesteaks did.

Right now I am at two weeks without caffeine. I am making do with drinking dirty brown water in the form of either decaf ice tea (it I make it at home) or decaf McDonald’s coffee (once a day). At least the smell awakens memories.

It is only when you fall outside the norm you see the existing paradigm. As the Manitou family travelled last week I discovered how hard it was to find decaffeinated beverages. Once you are below the mid-point in Indiana it is impossible. America is addicted to this common stimulant to the degree we don’t even converse about it anymore. Opting to not drink caffeinated products is like making a choice to ride a bicycle to work or to wear only union made/American made clothing. You pretty much stand out as a freak.

On the road you have 20 or more choices of caffeine based products. Coke, Pepsi, diet colas, energy drinks with beastly sounding name cram the walk in coolers. If you want something else you have two or three choices at maximum, Sprite (or its variant produced by Pepsi or the local bottler), highly sugared sweet soda pop like orange or plastic bottles filled with water. I don’t need the calories of Sprite, I don’t like fruity drinks and I don’t want to add to the land fills so I don’t buy bottled water. Most of the time I went without a beverage to quench my thirst on those long ride segments.

One good thing that has come of it is that I am sleeping better. Without question when my head hits the pillow I am ready to take my rest. Also I am hitting the sack earlier. When you hit that wall of tiredness at 10:30 I have no reserves and so I just hand the day on the nail and pack it in.

In the long run I will probably be better for this. But for right now I miss my caffeine.

On a Hot Morning a Search for the Good

2011-07-12T08:20:00.000-04:00

Blazing hot stuffy air, barely moved by a little breeze…
Meadowlark sitting quietly on a fence post in the dawn sun, his gold vest bright in the light of the east, his black bib tidy is turning his head this way, that way. This is Zen quietness without comment.

Thomas Merton

On those mornings that I do not read something spiritual I find myself lost during the course of the day. It need not be a holy text but it must be focused on something beyond the day to day demands that our urgent world places upon us. Thoughts about meaning and value or simply directions to practice zazen that is silent meditation these prepare me for those challenges I will see in any given cycle at the office.

Prayer, meditation and ritual all faiths seem to involve one of these. Many a person without faith has ritual. A morning stroll for a paper and coffee or an evening beer on the back porch these can be as important as a vespers service. Maybe we are hard wired for this stuff. Maybe it is something we need intrinsically.

Dance in Light-Gratitude

2011-06-15T08:55:00.001-04:00

One of the Buddhist maxims I stumbled across last night said that as a part of ritual to start the day I was to look at someone with gratitude. Other things involved in the ritual for commencing the day involved carefully preparing my meal, washing my bowl afterward, meditating and reading something silently.

Most of the stuff I do already. It is funny but one can be very mindful when preparing oatmeal and tea at the start of a day. And I usually read something spiritually/morally focused before I begin my first case.

When I first thought about the suggested look of gratitude I wondered how difficult it would be. Conveying gratitude is conveying appreciation or thankfulness. While I have contact with many people during the day, their acts carried out toward me are just done in the normal course of the stream of existence; they aren’t favors or kindnesses. Most people are just part of the world and on a basic gut level it doesn’t seem like I owe them thanks just for being.

As I thought about this I circled back to the concepts of mindfulness and acceptance. Each person I interact during each day is a sentient being and I owe them respect. Their lives are as fraught as mine with sadness and pain, struggle and doubt. In many cases the people I deal with are more tormented than I am. Many have sought refuge from the burdens of this world in chemicals and have allowed addiction to overcome their selves. Still it is easy to think that I don’t owe them thanks.

The people I work with as coworkers are just trying to make it from sunrise to sunset. They do what life has trained them to do in giving their effort. For the most part they are not overtly hostile. Sometimes they are downright helpful. Okay sometimes I owe them thanks but it is not a continuous thing.

However as Pablo Neruda said in his Noble Laureate acceptance speech we are all doing this clumsy dance of life together before a fire in a great unknown wilderness in an infinite night. Life is the fire itself in my mind and the dark wilderness and night is all that lies beyond this life. Using this metaphor I can appreciate that each and every person I come into contact with is doing the same dance that I am. I can look at them with gratitude for I am grateful they are willing to dance with me in the light and warmth of life’s fire.

Do not speak- unless it improves on silence.

2011-06-14T10:35:00.000-04:00

Ah my soul felt empty this morning. The kids are home from school and camps have not begun. Things that might benefit them like reading books or riding their bikes are not even on their radar. Instead the allure of computer gaming draws their focus. The house is disheveled. My school board meeting last night was brutal so I spent the hour between its end and my going to sleep by watching a weird science fiction show that I really don’t care about. But I was drained. When I got up my soul was empty.

When that happens I have to pull out the tried and true resources, the Bible, Merton, Portals of Prayer, Moon in a Dewdrop or maybe my new read Everyday Zen. Merton won out this a.m. Merton’s reflections today in my Year with Thomas Merton were tied to a visit from a fellow monastic who was versed in both Christian and Eastern faiths. As Merton noted the visit he noted his perturbation with a loud tractor in a field near the monastery. It seemed to him that this year’s model was louder and more aggressive sounding.

To paraphrase Merton, our new machines, our bright shinning “improved” tools represent our fury, our restlessness, our avidity and ultimately our despair. Around and around both our machines and our “paths of progress” go; he viewed it as so many meaninglessly pieces of clanking metal on a giant circular path. In search of something better we travel on an empty sad path.

Our desires to get the next thing to fill a hole in our life never actually fill it. And we have repeated the cycle often enough to know at least at the subconscious level that the new boy or girl friend, the new blouse, the new car will not change us and make us happier. So often our attempts at making “it” better leave the problem (or perhaps a better term is the emptiness) worse than it was before.

There is an ad out now trying to sell an upgrade program at a big box electronics store. In essence the advert goes like this, if you buy a computer today the computer with the x factor will be released tomorrow and the little kid next door will make fun of you. If you buy into the optional upgrade program you will get some allotted portion of your current purchase price applied to the next best thing when you buy that. Did I mention meaningless clanking? In this case the meaningless clanking becomes ritualized. What we need is acceptance of ourselves in place in our world.

I guess this is just a long winded way of getting to the point of acceptance and mindfulness as a way to approach the day. What is mindfulness? “Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn't more complicated that that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.” Sylvia Boorstein said this. Take today on its own terms mindfully you don’t need to fill any holes. Maybe it is better to say lose the passion to fill the holes.

The beauty of life is, while we cannot undo what is done, we can see it, understand it, learn from it and change.

So that every new moment is spent not in regret, guilt, fear or anger,
but in wisdom, understanding and love.
Jennifer Edwards

Stuff in our Father’s Drawers-Performance

2011-06-01T08:26:00.001-04:00

According to my child’s psychologist and his physician my youngest son is suffering from moderate depression. There have been suggestions that the relationship with his brother with Aspergers may be playing a significant part in gestating the depression.

This is a difficult time for me. Trust me when I say I too understand that living with ASD as part of the household, almost a family member in and of itself, can be hard on the psyche. Many a night I have lain down to try and take my rest only to find my mind racing with what ifs of now and of the future. Only when I take a stance of mindfulness, that is letting my mind empty and simply watching the wild thoughts fly by, do I ever find rest.

Since the diagnosis of depression has come to light I have been trying to address some things that are challenging to my youngest son’s life. While I thought I had been making time for him in the past I am clearly setting aside time for him and him alone. Being with him alone and talking to him seems to have had some benefit. Some days now when in response to my questions about how did school go, the words “suck” or “sucked” don’t come out in the first sentence.

Secundus is a fledgling pianist. For whatever reason he has ditched learning classic tunes. In the past year he has moved into the study of what we call the standards. These songs are the compositions that Nelson Riddle arranged around the voice of Frank Sinatra that made women just want to jump his bones backstage at clubs in New York. These songs are the pieces that Nat King Cole and Miles Davis each took to completely different but very beautiful places none the less.

How we got here was a one of those flukes. A couple of years ago when Halloween rolled around Secundus could not come up with a costume. He searched magazines, he looked on the internet, he confabbed with Mom. It was only when he was surfing You Tube that he saw a clip of Sinatra singing “Fly Me to the Moon”. He knew he could pull off that style. He grabbed an old rat pack hat and an old jacket and memorized the song. As he went from house to house he would sing the fist four or five lines while adopting a hipster’s pose. He pulled in more candy than anyone. At that point he knew there was something to this.

Last night was his spring recital. He had opted to play “It was a Very Good Year”. His piano teacher encouraged him but had her doubts. In practice his use of the pedals was on the mark but transitions between parts of the song were not fluid. He would almost get it right, but in reality the piece was never quite right. Even up to the moments before we left the house for the recital he was seemingly struggling.

One of the last acts before we headed out was to get him dressed. He put on some chinos and pulled out a white French cuffed shirt. I don’t remember where we got the shirt but he had never worn it before we had never gotten him cuff links. With the performance imminent I had to drop back and begin the search for links. Through drawers and boxes of knick knacks stuffed in my highboy I rampaged. I knew I had some cuffs from when I was his age. In the 1973 French cuffs were all the rage. I believed I had at least one set because they had been my father’s and had set on his dresser in ashtray with pins pulled from new shirts for the majority of my life. When he passed they become mine. They were nowhere to be found although I did find an old hash pipe, a beer stein from my German trip in 1972 and my ticket to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

Never did I find a matched set. What I came up with was one blue and one ruby red cuff of completely different styles. Secundus loved ‘em. Putting the cuffs on him you could see he was ready to perform.

It wasn’t the cuffs that made the difference and I know that. Secundus is a performance junkie. Whether it is debate or singing or recitals the rush of being in the public eye charges him and changes him. I know in my heart of hearts he loves the spotlight and that he cranks it to level 11 each time he walks out onstage. The cuffs were nothing more that a thread connecting him to the men of his family through the years none of whom shied away from the spotlight. Not Dad, not Granddad, not uncles; this larger than life onstage persona is probably genetic.

My thought is that so is depression. While Secundus’ challenges are impacted by his environment all the men in my family have had dark moments, dark periods. Nobody stepped up early to help us manage it. Nobody had a name for it, or a course of treatment for it. Me I went for positive thinking ala Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and years of reefer therapy. Eventually I came to sober quiet reflection/meditation/writing and I am okay with that. My hope is that by using a psychologist I am doing the right thing. My hope is that with some external insight emphasizing positive approaches to life Secundus can come to a point where he knows how to get back to balance when things start to grow dark.

I don’t want him to lose the joy of performance. Neither do I want him to have to travel the dark roads I have seen in the past. Being a parent is a balancing act and while others can offer suggestions a parent is ultimately the person who has to make the tough calls.

My Oasis

2011-05-31T08:21:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Another month has sped by. Memorial Day the first holiday of the summer has come and gone. Time is taking me quickly to that indeterminate place called old. My good friends’ last child just graduated from high school. Oh how that makes me feel aged.

As I said the first holiday of the summer passed and I did very little. I watched a movie; I watched part of a TV marathon. I cleaned my desk about 2/3rds of the way toward functional. Oh there was that hiding in the basement for the tornado warning thing, I did that too.

In the silence of the afternoon all is present and all is inscrutable. –T. Merton

On one of the three afternoons of this long weekend I did spend a few moments reading out by the fountain in the backyard. I sat at a chair and listening to the bubbling of the water for a time. Shifting locales I lay in a hammock for an hour or two also.

Being there in the small space behind my home I can offer that there is no silence in either nature or in a suburban locale. However there is a sense of presence in the world. I can’t put my finger on why sitting in my backyard reading about losing anger feels right but it does. Maybe the distance from the world I sense in my act of focus on the article while hearing background birdsong is what Merton was talking.

Bicycle Moment

2011-05-20T14:07:00.000-04:00

When I was young I was fat and socially isolated. My situation was not helped by the fact that due to nystagmus I was nearly blind. What social skills I possessed were abysmal. No matter what I did the outcome never seemed right.

Only when I learned to ride my bicycle did I find a place of respite. Living in a farm town there were miles of empty roads to ride about on. Some were smooth, some were bumpy and some had big dogs that chased you. When you rode down those roads your butt bounced, you wheels slid and you lifted you feet up to the handle bars so the dogs in pursuit wouldn’t get a nip of your ankles. Most of those dogs would chase you no farther than the edge of the yard in front of the farm house that was their abode.

Every day unless it was pouring outside I rode my metal flake purple W.T. Grant sting ray bike about two miles. I really didn’t have a destination I just had a duration of time to be spent on the road. One route went down and across Oldman’s creek and back, another took me out to Lerro Lane and then to B.F. Goodrich and then the Baptist church and home. Or maybe I would ride to the church first and then down Straughn Mill Road over Freed Road and then up the Pederickton-Woodstown road home.

Whatever way I went I knew every divot in the macadam and every stone that would fly out from under my wheels. I knew when to pedal like a madman and where to coast. Time passed but I am always in that moment on my bike free of my daily worries. Time does not just fly away in the passage of hours and days.

If time’s flight were its only function then you would be separate and distinct from time. You are not. Understand the time being is not time just passing you by. All things in the world are linked with one another in moments. All moments are the time being. All of these linked moments are your time being.

Vigorously abide in each moment in the time being. Lift your feet up and fly past the dogs of existence.

Where I Am

2011-05-19T08:49:00.001-04:00

Equanimity, poise, and a state of calm composure I am trying to develop these. Each day I dip my toe into a little aspect of Zen. I read a passage here or there. Either I go out to the Tricycle online Buddhist community or I read a bit more from Master Dogen’s writings. Some of the things I find are as odd as you would find in any other organized religion, maybe even odder. But there are small bits about non attachment and awareness that just draw me into a sense of wonder. At my age a sense of wonder about anything is good. Take a lungful of air slowly and let it gently escape.

Next to where I work is a little exercise store. The other day I went and bought a mini workout mat. It is simply a little piece of foam. Each day at noon I lock my door here in my office. I turn off all but one of my lights. I turn on some ancient hymns and I sit legs folded on the mat. All I try and do is clear my mind. For 10 minutes I simply try to think of nothing. Thoughts fly by but I try not to grab them and I let them pass. It isn’t real Zen I don’t think but it sure does seem to help the day seem more manageable. $8 of foam rubber and 10 minutes of time can and do make a difference.

Magic

2011-04-27T13:00:00.000-04:00

I picked up a card the other day at small store in the Old Town section of Lansing, Michigan. The card states it is a tree free greeting implying only recyclables have been used in its creation. Such a thing is a plus.

What really caught my attention was that the exterior envelop contained the following inscription:

THERE ARE STILL A FEW REMNANTS OF MAGIC LEFT IN THIS WORLD

What a great thing to say. What a hopeful thing to say.

Do I believe in wizards wielding wands, crones stirring despicable ingredients and hope against hope kids turning time back magic? No. Do I believe in a twinkle in the eye do a good random deed magic? Ubetcha. Do I believe in the magic of a word well spoken? Yes, yes I do.

The magic left is this world is a combination of the passion and good that is within our hearts; it is manifested in the good we act on. A kind word, a hopeful (hope-filled?) note or an act that is for the betterment of the world no matter how small and unseen; these are all magic.

Dig out that remnant of magic within yourself. Act with magic before the sun sets.

A New Tweak

2011-04-22T00:12:00.002-04:00

Blogger has come up with a new tweak. If you want to follow by e-mail and just get updates when I post I gather you just type an e-mail address in and viola, when I post you get it. Given my sporadic posting this might be a better way to go to really see what I am saying. The gadget is to the right side of the blog.

Day 2 Max and Trauma

2011-04-21T09:03:00.002-04:00

April 22, 2011

My grand vision for this blog currently is to finish my stories of the beach and reviewing the components of On Caring by year’s end. With my having taken on the role of school board member in a community with a large multi-million dollar budget deficit my time at the computer will be sparse. At least the time I spend at the computer for my own purposes will be rare. Thus while it is my vision, it may not come to be.

I will however note here things in passing that catch my attention. On Tuesday of this week the episode of Parenthood on NBC dealt with a teen being involved in a drunk/drugged driving accident. After the wreck she was taken to hospital. The family gathered together at hospital to await word. I have been at a number of these gatherings being part of a large extended family. (Someday I will talk about the pot luck at the funeral home during one of my family funerals, it is both one of the saddest and most wonderful memories of what family means for me.)

While the Braverman television family awaited word from the surgery on the prodigal teen Amber, Max the child with ASD lost it. He had a complete raging meltdown in the waiting room. Max to the untrained eye, that is someone who doesn't live with Asperger's on a day to day basis, became irrational. The story developed that he had been promised pancakes as a motivator for him to go and wait at the hospital. When the hospital stayed exceeded what he could tolerate he lashed out in a logical but clearly inappropriate manner. Max even implied that whether his cousin Amber died or not should not stop his trip for pancakes because he and his father were not doctors and their presence was therefore of no aid or relevance. Strictly and clinically speaking this was true. Obviously this was viewed as hurtful by all the non-ASD folks in the room.

The character of Adam who in the story is Max’s father struggled with this and with many other issues during the hour. There came a point however when he tried to explain to Max what the gathering in the waiting room had really meant and tried to explain empathy. My eyes filled with tears. The disconnect between what I define as empathy and what my oldest son Primus understands as caring for others was once as wide a gulf as depicted on that show. Eventually Max asks his Dad if he is mad at Max for having Aspergers. I misted up again. I have lived this argument in my own head many, many times.

Time has changed my son. He seems to have reached a point where he has created scripted responses to emotional situations to try and work his way through them. He has learned patience and he has learned to remove himself from situations where he might get caught up by miscues in reading others' emotions. The hope is that the television series will deal with Max’s approach to living in a world of neurotypicals who sail the world by the constellations of emotions.

I guess what I am trying to say is that in the moment when Max asked his Dad “Are you mad at me because I have Aspergers?” I felt the barb wire pull tight around my heart. You try and try to reframe constantly and knowingly work with the situation and with the aspects of who your child is. Still there is always the fear that you are reacting to the condition and not the person. More importantly there has always been the fear that my actions no matter how well intended somehow might be perceived by my son to mean I somehow think less of him because he has Aspergers. This is something that is as far from the truth as it could be. My life and feelings are painted broadly and his are much more nuanced and exacting. I hope we always find ways to bridge our two worlds. I think more than anything that is what Adam is seeking in Parenthood.

Day 1

2011-04-21T08:38:00.000-04:00

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Yesterday I turned 55 years of age. I was born in a time when the apex of technology was a large rectangular TV screen that got three channels and a party line telephone. I now have a cellular phone that streams video and can search the internet. When I was a kid I wandered the fields behind my house and played army often recreating what I had seen on Combat or some other battle show that had been on television the night before. Now my kids play video games until their thumbs are ungodly strong and their bellies match the guys at Moe’s bar.

The surface of the world has changed but the world itself has not. It remains a rock in space with life forms tentatively clinging to its surface. I am a part of this rock and it is part of a larger series of rocks and together with more rocks and gases this existence spreads far beyond the imaginings of even the brightest of my fellows here. My being is while not for naught, it is damn close to naught in any real sense of the immensity of creation.

In aging I am challenged with the question of meaning in my life. What I can tell you is that I feel best when I have acted selflessly. Really. Such acts don’t happen often. My goal for this year is to make those acts just a little larger part of my life. This is day 1 of my year of being 55. My hope is to make this year matter.

Discernment, truth, relinquishment, and calm.

2011-03-23T17:02:00.000-04:00

As I sit and listen to Stile Antico singing ancient church music I am mentally taken to a place that is akin to meditation. It calms me. Mentally it moves me into a cool stone edifice filled with light from stained glass windows. If you are standing in the beams of the royal hues of red and purple the sun warms you.

In my mental calm surrounded by an ancient hymn I let go of the world and its problems, just for now. My breathing slows and I feel real rest coming to my bones and sinews. With my thoughts clearing I can see, I can discern something that lies partially within me and partially beyond me. It is a real truth that stretches out forever and compresses into the smallest space of a heart. I cannot put this truth into words. I cannot assign it a name. It isn’t a philosophy, a theology, an ism or any method or path. It just is. Discernment, truth, relinquishment and calm these are the things needed to touch what I perceive in this sacred space and these are what this larger force offers. It is a conundrum isn’t it.

TV Top Five-Aspergers Edition

2011-03-16T23:35:00.002-04:00

I am not running apps on Facebook anymore. By making the choice to get low and into the background of America’s favorite anti-social addiction means that I can’t use that Social Living program anymore. You know the one I am talking about; it lets people list their five favorite foreign films or five favorite books by Latin American authors, etc. But I miss that one application. Telling people about entertainment you like is fun. The mental selection process takes you invariably to the good that you remember about the contenders in whatever category you are picking the top five in. So I decided I would jot down a list of my five favorite TV programs right now and do it as a note. The result was surprising to me.

My current favorite choices were in no particular order Bones, Parenthood, Big Bang Theory, Justified and Fringe. After I had jotted the list down I had to go over it a second time and think about what qualities these shows had that drew me to watch them. Reviewing those titles what struck me was that there were two unifying thread among the batch. The first thread and this covers all of them is that they are fluff. My time is not spent watching news wonks or shows on how to build stuff on the cheap. These are stories, mostly episodic and mostly light as air. Television for me is escape and I make no apologies for using it that way.

The second thread only covers three of the five series. The first three programs listed are shows that have prominent characters with ASD/Aspergers. My life is not defined by ASD/Aspergers but it is impacted by it. For three shows on three different networks to have an ASD character is pretty amazing. I should say to have three shows with positive (mostly) ASD characters is amazing. Shows like CSI, Criminal Minds and other police procedurals often trot out an ASD character as a soulless, conscience lacking villain. Really is that how we have to define people who are different than ourselves?

In Bones the Temperance Brennan has made optimal use of the clinical precision of her exacting mind and limited (by neurotypical standards) emotional attachments to others to prevail in her field. It is a popular myth that because a number of persons Aspergers have an inordinate (by neurotypical standards) focus on specialized areas that savant like behavior is rampant in their population. The writers of the show have imbued the Brennan character with a focused genius status. The writers take care to make the degrees she hangs off plumb from the norm seem quaint. They resolve stories without real estrangement from those around her due to her ASD. This is accomplished by surrounding her with highly educated understanding people. Real life isn’t necessary like that. Still for the odd person out dramedy the show is fun.

On the other hand Big Bang is a typical Chuck Lorre production with oversexed people mouthing double entendres left and right. Sheldon like Temperance Brennan has climbed well into the firmament of the scientific community based on the edge ASD has given him in the intellectual arena. He is however a total social buffoon. This gives Lorre’s writers the chance to play the awkwardness of ASD for all that it is worth. The lack of Sheldon’s due interpretation of social cues coupled with his obsessive tics and irrationally patterned behaviors are worth a belly laugh from time to time. Sheldon may be ASD but he is way not real. (I do have to say that the episode when Sheldon ordered Penny off of his spot on the couch is a guilty pleasure of a memory for me. While watching this episode Primus was in my home almost simultaneously ordering Secundus off his spot on our couch so he could sit down to watch Big Bang. All the while he was laughing a Sheldon’s buffoonery. It was meta-hilarious beyond words for me.)

Parenthood is just about people, pretty people (this is television), highly sexed people (this is television) of whom three or four have to deal with the realities of a clearly identified Aspergers child. God sometimes it feels like the writers have hidden camera in my home. I hadn’t checked in with the show for a couple of episodes because the plot line of having one brother sleep with the hired specially trained aid for the ASD child thus compromising her continued employment just seemed a little too icky for me. I sped the DVR through that and the subsequent episode stopping only when it was clear a major expository moment was happening.

On this week’s episode Adam the father of Max the kid with Aspergers gets into a fight at a grocery store. The start of the fight was Max reacting poorly to the person ahead of them in the quick check out lanes being 7 items over limit the 10 item limit. Eventually Max is sent on an errand elsewhere in the store to defuse the situation. Know that strategy well. The aggrieved cheater mutters about Max being a retard and Max’s father belts him. (I did hold back from cheering out loud others in the house were asleep). When Adam finally discloses to his wife what has happened he is ashamed and he admits he is angry. His anger is about not being able to do more for his son. For being stressed at work. For being lost in life.

Watching the episode was cathartic for me. I get it 100%. I will never punch anyone but I can get my hackles up verbally and have in meetings with teachers and others who don’t want to factor in the Aspergers when dealing with my son. I know I can’t be sure that I will protect my child from the fate of Sheldon and I know Temperance Brennan is a fantasy. She really seems to turn her ASD on and off or dial it down or up in different episodes and it just isn’t that way for Primus. All I can do is work with my son to try and teach him ways to meet the neurotypical world in a manner that he won’t threaten its peoples and in a way they won’t take advantage of him.

Yeah that is why I watch Parenthood. It is a good story for me and for my family. It is well written and it gets how the issues of Aspergers impact on a family. Bones I watch because I am drawn to seeing how many gross ways the special effects guy can make a corpse fall apart. Big Bang I watch because everyone including me likes to watch geeks screw up. And as to Fringe I watch it because I like good science fiction with characters that are not just two dimensional. Did you know that the guy who came up with the theory of an infinite series of universes arising from every decision point we act on was the father of the lead singer of the Eels? True fact.

I guess I watch Justified because it is an emotional release. I like seeing angry rednecks from Kentucky talk in rapid word play crafted in the style of Elmore Leonard. When they shoot people and brawl my angst and anger dissipates. Plus I wish I had Timothy Oliphant’s accent.

Anyway these are my current picks for good television.

Bite Me Earl

2011-03-02T08:48:00.001-05:00

Last night I left the office early. Departing before 5:30 I left so as to avoid having to be the person to activate the alarm. Going out early meant I had to walk about 10 minutes to the nearest Panera Bread Company, a chain sandwich, coffee and pastry shop. My wife was going to meet me there.

On the way to our meeting point I had to walk through a park. As I took the paved but cleared path from one side of the park to the other I saw a small Kroger shopping cart. Wheels up it sat in a snow drift. I pulled the cart out and decided to be a good doobie. My thought was that I would take over to the front of Panera. Panera and Kroger are three doors apart with a World Market in between. My hope was that the Kroger cart kids would round it up at the end of the business day.

I have no vested interest in Kroger. Moving the cart closer to the store from whence it came just seemed like a nice thing to do. Like Earl and his list of wrongs maybe I needed to work out some karma. I mean thirty years ago I took a Kroger cart from this self-same Kroger and loaded my very loaded wife in it and pushed her back to the dorm. It was after an evening at the long gone, often lamented Boom Boom Room. The name of the bar should tell you what kind of place it was.

Whatever the reason I took the cart back. Ah, but I am sure now there will be consequences and not the ones I intended. As I pushed the cart back I took my briefcase off my shoulder and put it in the basket. From the point I picked the cart up I had to traverse the park, several store front facades and then a large parking lot. It didn’t click to me until I was almost to Panera that some passing cars were giving me the once over as they went by. Limping with my bag in the cart I looked well odd. The looks were beyond glances but didn’t really reach the level of glares.

How long will it be before my wife gets that first call about whether I have gone insane or become homeless? I can hear the call, “Mrs. T. I saw your husband shuffling through the mall parking lot with his belongings in a grocery cart. Is everything okay?”

I guess that is the thing about large scale spiritual forces. Trying to do the right thing isn’t like putting your money in a soda pop machine and pressing a selection. In the case of the drink machine you hit Diet Coke and you get Diet Coke. On the spiritual side when you try to do the right thing, when you try and address the deficits of the divine in your life what comes to you in return is not an automatic pass for something you did wrong that day (or thirty years earlier). Often the response is enigmatic or more likely it is a sideways response.

A simple act is like a stone thrown in a pond. The ripples move out and touch things you never contemplated. I hear you thinking but nobody has called yet.

I have been at this long enough to know they will. It may not be a call but someone will bring it up, I promise.
Last night I left the office early. Departing before 5:30 I left so as to avoid having to be the person to activate the alarm. Going out early meant I had to walk about 10 minutes to the nearest Panera Bread Company, a chain sandwich, coffee and pastry shop. My wife was going to meet me there.

On the way to our meeting point I had to walk through a park. As I took the paved but cleared path from one side of the park to the other I saw a small Kroger shopping cart. Wheels up it sat in a snow drift. I pulled the cart out and decided to be a good doobie. My thought was that I would take over to the front of Panera. Panera and Kroger are three doors apart with a World Market in between. My hope was that the Kroger cart kids would round it up at the end of the business day.

I have no vested interest in Kroger. Moving the cart closer to the store from whence it came just seemed like a nice thing to do. Like Earl and his list of wrongs maybe I needed to work out some karma. I mean thirty years ago I took a Kroger cart from this self-same Kroger and loaded my very loaded wife in it and pushed her back to the dorm. It was after an evening at the long gone, often lamented Boom Boom Room. The name of the bar should tell you what kind of place it was.

Whatever the reason I took the cart back. Ah, but I am sure now there will be consequences and not the ones I intended. As I pushed the cart back I took my briefcase off my shoulder and put it in the basket. From the point I picked the cart up I had to traverse the park, several store front facades and then a large parking lot. It didn’t click to me until I was almost to Panera that some passing cars were giving me the once over as they went by. Limping with my bag in the cart I looked well odd. The looks were beyond glances but didn’t really reach the level of glares.

How long will it be before my wife gets that first call about whether I have gone insane or become homeless? I can hear the call, “Mrs. T. I saw your husband shuffling through the mall parking lot with his belongings in a grocery cart. Is everything okay?”

I guess that is the thing about large scale spiritual forces. Trying to do the right thing isn’t like putting your money in a soda pop machine and pressing a selection. In the case of the drink machine you hit Diet Coke and you get Diet Coke. On the spiritual side when you try to do the right thing, when you try and address the deficits of the divine in your life what comes to you in return is not an automatic pass for something you did wrong that day (or thirty years earlier). Often the response is enigmatic or more likely it is a sideways response.

A simple act is like a stone thrown in a pond. The ripples move out and touch things you never contemplated. I hear you thinking but nobody has called yet.

I have been at this long enough to know they will. It may not be a call but someone will bring it up, I promise. Really I just wanted to get to Panera to read a little more from Tricycle the Buddhist monthly.

Midwinter Joy

2011-03-01T09:15:00.000-05:00

A few days back mid-winter’s oppression broke for a day or so. Snow melted. Birds sang. Hearing a bird singing and trilling a song carried across warm air had a way of lifting even my darkest thoughts.

Clear high notes aflutter in the heavens, at least for me, cleansed all corners of my soul from winter depression. The break did not last long. Snow has returned and chill air remains. Still, I am holding that memory of that aural joy close to get me through the waning weeks of this season away from the sun.

In a bird’s song I became part of creation, I was a thread in the divine world. Joy lived if only for a moment.

Interlude in Silence Before a Challenging Day

2011-02-23T08:04:00.000-05:00

Without a focus on the divine life is trivial, distracted and not in a place of balance. We can allow ourselves to think that this errand or that cause has meaning but if we don’t have a tie to the deeper well our lives while busy will become arid places. Today my hope is to be in the moment struggling to stay connected with the universal.

Aspergers and the Rink Revisited-Beat Down Epiphany

2011-02-13T22:06:00.004-05:00

A week ago after another nothing hockey game Primus was on his way off the ice. The game had been chippy. Geez the boy’s team has averaged less than a goal a game, well less than a goal every three games in reality and the scores are usually double digits to zip. Frustration was high on the team. Eventually this was going to boil over.

As I understand one of the 15-18 year olds (I don’t know which team) called another of these testosterone driven boy-men a “homo”. A player on our team also offered up the “finger” during the end of the game handshakes. Then a punch flew. Within seconds the ice surface was a donnybrook. I was at the gate letting players off the ice when all hell broke loose between the boards. Players were in clumps of twos and threes all wailing on each other and engaging in pro wrestling moves picked up off SyFy network. I swear to God I saw the camel clutch come out of retirement. (And yes I know what the camel clutch looked like I represented the Sheik years ago).

Until helmets and gloves come off a hockey fight does not pose that much relative risk for injury in a normal youth game. The greatest risk comes if you end up on the ice and parts of your arm and leg get exposed to errant sword-like skates thrashing about.

My problem was that from the gate I could not see Primus. Eventually one of the other dads, a team representative holding a coaching card pulled Primus off and led him to the door where I was standing. At that point the whole of each team was trickling off the ice. I ordered Primus whose helmet was half off and who seemed to be nursing a whack to the solar plexus region over to our locker room door.

Between one of the team mothers and me we used our outdoor scary crazed adult voices and sent the players into each of their respective locker rooms. It was tense and it was daunting because some of these kids still wanted to go at it. On skates these kids were way bigger than we are but with the right tone of psycho in your voice you can make almost anyone cowl and cower.

After the kids were in the locker room the coach came out to find me to tell me my son had been suspended for two games for fighting. I was a little pissed because the buzz I had gotten from people who had seen the fight was that he had not started the fight he just responded in self defense. Of course I was talking to parents from our team.

It became clear when the names of the others on our team and the numbers of the players on the other team were know the refs had simply done what refs are wont to do, suspend the big guys. Six players on each team got two game misconducts. Our goalie deserved it and so did one of their players whose number I heard mentioned. However there were a number of other names and numbers I had seen involved that got nothing in the way of penalties they much deserved. Once you are like Primus six foot one inch tall and 200 plus pounds you get tagged for whatever crap happens near you on the ice.

As a father of a child with ASD this situation gave me fear because of one thing, his lack of proportionality. When an aspie gets hit and harassed his tolerance level is way high. Primus with his version of ASD puts up with it, puts up with it, puts up with it and then he blows. I know Primus’s tolerance level is far higher than mine but I also know that when he goes he goes all in. Apparently from the coaches it wasn’t that way this time. Primus and the other kid had each other in a headlock and were just trading shots but it never got close to totally nuclear.

When I finally had the chance to talk to Primus I began my commentary with the phrase “I am not proud of you but neither am I angry with you. Fights happened in hockey. What happened?” What came next was, as all things are in these situations, so filled with mixed messages and emotions that it was hard to respond with anything other than an “I see”.

According to Primus as he was coming off the ice the melee commenced behind him. He words, “Dad, I looked behind and saw one of my team mates getting a beat down. I couldn’t ignore that.” Holy shit Batman, my kid-the universe until himself-made a choice based on what was happening to another person and came to that person’s aid. As a Dad I view this response as a huge, really, really huge milestone in personal development. He didn’t know who it was but it was “his team mate” and he wasn’t going to let that beat down happen.

Sitting stunned I mulled over what to say next. Eventually I offered this. “Primus, you have Aspergers, you know that. You also know that you have trouble stopping your anger once it boils over. Right?” Nodded agreement happens here. Me continuing, “You always have to think about consequences. In this case you got involved in a fight not of your own making, most likely started by someone on your team that you don’t even like or care about. You put yourself at risk and it cost you. There are six games left this season and you have thrown away a 1/3 rd of them. Does that sound like the best and most rational course?” A head shakes no.

As I continued I told him that it was okay to use his size, to make clean but board rattling checks and to defend himself if someone was acting with a real intent to injure him. But I also told him if you get into a fight in this day and age being who you are you have already lost. Then I ran down the list of good plays I had seen during the game that day and told him that I was proud of him for who he is. Period.

All I can say is that the feelings I get from this are truly conflicted. I see the danger but I see the growth.

Several nights later when he and his fellow suspended team mate stood at the glass watching their team play without them, they talked nonstop for the entire game. This is a child that three years ago wouldn’t say hello to a next door neighbor he had known his entire life if he saw them outside in their yard. Killing time at the rink today he talked in extended conversations with three or four team mates. Wow.

This is one suckfest of a season if you measure in wins (if only there was one) and losses. But if you measure it in Primus’s building bridges to a world outside himself it is pretty darn awesome.

Of Books and Beach VIII Glowing Waves and Trust

2011-02-12T14:24:00.004-05:00

Nature is present in beach world at every moment. All the artifices that humankind employs cannot deny nature its due. No matter how modern and wonderful a structure built of sticks and wood is, or even if that mansion is made of the newest composites sand will pound the cracks, edges and crevices. Eventually those countless grains will erode the façade enough to create a way in. People tracking in and out of the house will also bring with them the sand from the alley ways, the beach and from the street. Sand is nature at its most elemental.

Moisture is another part of nature that will not be denied in beach world. No matter how efficient the air conditioning the humidity will find its way in too. Any pillow used down at the shore will become a rock within a few weeks. Soaked with sea air those feathers become leaden, it is just the way it is.

If you go out into the ocean you have to risk crab bites, kelp and various sediments thrown at you by the churning waves. It you body surf your snot will mix with the saline water. If you don’t respect the water’s power you will die. ‘Nuff said, swimming can equal death in a rip tide. But once and again you will be greeted with a moment when nature will show you a moment of wonder.

One night when Don and I went for the 25 block each way walk of cosmology, that is we would smoke four or five cigarettes apiece and talk about the meaning of life and what the universe is really composed of. On one of those kinds of nights we saw a once lifetime thing, luminescent jellyfish.
On that moonless night as we walked down the strand the waves seemed to shimmer as they crashed. At first the odd light was very, very faint. But as we walked further the waves grew brighter. There was no natural illumination of the water that night. As wave after wave crashed we had trouble believing our eyes. The Atlantic was glowing.

Don and I walked down toward the water’s edge. As we reached that part of the beach where the waves had already hit and then receded it looked like lightening spreading out in all directions. Faint electrical pulses shot off in every direction from where our feet fell.

We stopped and with our toes gently poked at the sand. There were hundreds of silver dollar sized jelly fish lying in the shallow ¼ inch of water that remained from the last wave. Any pressure on the sand near the jellyfish and they lit up with little lightning strikes heading out in ever directions of their little circular bodies. We stopped and really looked out at the waves hardly trusting our senses. Each time when the waves crashed the jellyfish lit up all down the length of the crest. There was a cool mint green light that spread out as the water rolled and roiled along the shore’s edge.

We had to stop and step back to insure we understood what we were seeing. It was something so unexpected on the Jersey shore that we didn’t believe our own eyes. We didn’t trust our visual sense. We simply had to let nature be what nature would be and let it show us what was true and real.

I don’t know who this fits in with Section 8 of On Caring-Trust. This section focuses on trust. In some ways it might be possible to try and tie trust to our doubts about our experiences that night but it really doesn’t work. I guess in this case the story stand alone. The analysis too stands alone.

Trust is in the way the author first structures his discussion a bit of a misnomer. It is a continuation of knowing and honesty. I trust the other to grow in his or her own way and to make mistakes. Inherently I have certain knowledge that mistakes will be made or divergence from what I view as the path of growth will occur. But if I am honest about growth being the goal I will allow these things to happen.

I must know and have faith that I learn and grow from experience and mistakes. I must be secure in my judgments. If I am always second guessing my choices then my trust in the other to likewise learn and grow will be tentative and tainted. Trust requires I have a sense of balance as to what is an isolated problem and what requires a course correction in the other’s growth.

The other having knowledge that we are allowing this process is liberated to grow. Trusts frees the other to make choices and then to return and discuss the resulting experience and be subject to examination and potentially criticism. Risk and unforeseen consequences may follow but growth requires choices be made and experiences accumulated.

A failure to offer trust, to be overprotective means we are not being responsive to the needs of the other. This stifles growth. If we wish to dictate every course of behavior and outcome we are really trying to protect ourselves from pain and disappointment.

Trust is not an abdication of responsibility. It is not undertaken indiscriminately. We do what we can to insure that the conditions exist where trust is warranted. We offer opportunities to learn and experience but we watch to make sure the other is not unnecessarily at risk in trying to grow. This is a delicate balance.

Of Beach and Books VII-Kurly Kustard and Honesty

2011-02-12T13:52:00.005-05:00

Dear Reader,

Please be aware that I am not slacking off in pursuing my guide to Milton Mayeroff’s On Caring. What is actually occurring is that I am working on this piece in a roundabout way. I have had to go back and listen to the music of the era to put my mind in the right place spiritually to conduct my ramblings. You might want to listen to these tunes first to get you in the mood of the time. Open a second window in the background and let ‘em play while you read on.

Over three months between June and Labor Day 1974 in a physical space that was at most 20 foot by 15 foot my world was changed, rearranged and reoriented. Four people occupied that space for those three months, Nan, Larry, Andy and me. We were the Kurly Kustard crew. Larry and Nan would shape my world for years to come. I didn’t know that in June of that year, but foreknowledge wouldn’t have changed the facts.

Before Labor Day came I would fall in love helplessly and hopelessly with Nan. On the other hand Larry would show me that the world was broader than I ever thought it could be. He would teach me that decency and personal integrity count, I admit now that these were lessons I learned only when the biggest part of our friendship was in the rear-view mirror.

In addition to our four bodies the Kurly Kustard operation also contained a soda fountain, an ice cream novelties cooler, a pretzel oven, a double sided soft serve machine and a slush puppy dispenser. There was a cash register too. If the electricity went out you could operate that puppy with a crank and on occasion I did.

The store façade was about three foot high on the board walk side but on the inside it was just two foot high with a raised floor behind the aluminum counter. As a result of this differential we were always looking down at our customers and bending over to serve them their desert treats. From 10:30 a.m. to about 11 p.m. or midnight we purveyed sweets, ice cream, pretzels, soda and other refreshing eats slightly stooped over. When you walked the back door and walked down the wooden steps to the beach level your feet hurt from the concrete floor and you back ached from being bent over all night long. Just stretching at midnight after a full shift outback and in the misty ocean air was a release.

Kurly Kustard did not have air conditioning. Although we were only a couple of hundred yards from the Atlantic the pretzel oven corner of the store would get up to 110 F for hours on end. When it was a busy night each time a row or two or three pretzels would drop out the machine they would sell. On those kinds of nights the person working pretzels lived in their own little replica of hell. Over the course of the night despite drinking endless soda from our personal cups, Heroin, Morphine, Marijuana and Cocaine (novelty items the boss was never able to see in his beach sundries store located next door) you lost pounds. By 10:30 p.m. your clothes were drenched in sweat. You prayed for a breeze to wend its way around the whirring custard machines, the containers of sprinkles and bubbling fudge dip and the oven itself. Cool air rarely got that far. If the heat got too much you walked into walk in cooler and literally chilled. You stayed there until you refreshed enough to get back in the mix.

To break the monotony of the machine noise, that omnipresent electrical metal rumble and hum, we had a cassette player to play tunes. It was not a Dolby noise reducing cassette player. It was what was scrounged up. My guess was that it came from Radio Shack, it was Larry’s. It had one speaker. The noise coming through that cone roughly approximated the sound from an A.M. radio played through the front speaker of a 1963 Ford Falcon. In 1974 we were so used to this sonic quality. We chipped in and book two tapes from the really overpriced record store on the main drag through town. (Hey it was the beach, EVERYTHING was overpriced).

Two of the three tapes we shared were by David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory. These were the ones we bought. He was what was hot and on the only radio station that mattered, WMMR. Our summer’s soundtrack was provided by David Bowie and another tape was an odd mixture of Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits II thrown together by Larry. It shouldn’t have fit it, but it did. The tapes played nonstop. The tape got worn, the tape stretched. The music warbled as we played ‘em at maximum volume through that Radio Shack tape machine. The slow distortion and destruction of the tunes didn’t really matter we knew all the words to every song. Our loud singing covered any defect in the source material with our own partially semi defective singing. Some favorites emerged. First and foremost was….

Life on Mars

It's a god-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling "No"
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she's hooked to the silver screen
But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause she's lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on

Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the Lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

Bowie was sui generis. Nobody and I mean nobody was like him at the time. The rock press was filled with speculation on his sexuality, bi-, gay or straight? We searched the lyrics for meanings overt and implicit. But that voice was so beyond what anyone else sounded like right at that moment. For my mind only Marc Boylan of T.Rex was pushing the same boundaries.

With a vocal styling that was camp, dead on and nihilistic all at once, Bowie enthralled us. His voice was so perfect for 1974 as we waited for Richard Nixon to resign. Like Bowie wrote in a song he handed off the Mott the Hoople we were all bored with that revolution stuff by then. We all just wanted to smoke pot and fuck. Nothing else, our hormones were so out of control it is amazing our button fly jeans didn’t just burst with a staccato ricocheting of their metal fasteners.

Kurly Kustard’s crew was an interesting mix. Larry was a co-op student at Drexel working in physics and hard theoretical science. I have hung out with physicists over the years and the joke was that they all wear oversized shoes so as not to fall through the fabric of the universe. I mean they know nothing is solid. But Larry wasn’t like that he was a down to earth guy. He was struggling with bug lust just like I was. He obviously was smarter than most but still he liked beer and pussy as much as the rest of us.

Andy was younger that Larry, Nan and I. He seemed to have a bit of a dark side. Seemingly he was headed to that place in life were the strange turns ugly. I can’t tell you for sure he didn’t end up a preacher of the Gospel but I wouldn’t bet on it. While the rest of us would smoke pot Andy would eat almost anything that came his way in pill form. All of the rest of us had tried acid once or twice and had pretty much said fuck this pill shit. We stuck with good old Columbian.

But there were days when Andy was so jittery, so shaky that you knew he was as Lou Reed put James Dean for a day just speeding away. But back then the credo was do you own thing as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else so we didn’t feel any need to intervene. We shook our heads a bit and figured his parent’s would bust him but we didn’t meddle.

Andy’s stories always had the edge that something was being left out. They got murky at points and you could only assume that something had happened there and the reality had gone really wrong or whatever had been done was beyond the pale of what any of the rest of us would have been involved in. The rest of us might be criminals because we bought and smoked weed but were didn’t steal or strong arm anyone.

Still Andy had his good qualities. Andy loved Bruce Springsteen. In 1974 he was quoting all the songs that would be on Born to Run two years before the album was even out. He would always be humming and singing a lyric from Jungleland.

Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge
Drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain
The Rat pulls into town rolls up his pants
Together they take a stab at romance
And disappear down Flamingo Lane.

Larry, Andy and I we were all the products of working class dads and moms. We heard the stories about the hard times and struggle each meal when we said we weren’t going to eat scrapple, broccoli or kale. The depression stories got old. This was the 1970s the world was ours for the taking. It was America on the upsurge. We were punk assed kids expecting to do better.

Nan wasn’t like us she had grace that you didn’t find in the homes of South Jersey factory rats. We were scruffy. She was beautiful. We were all asses and elbows incompetent and she exuded cool. Our tongues tied at moments when she was funny and fired off that quick quip.

She was a beauty and proud of her sensuality. She wore amber aviator shades that just said “I am hot”. She wore tube tops promoting those perky puppies of hers. When she bent over to serve ice cream the Dad’s lingered a little too long at the window for the Mom’s liking. If you watched you could see the come on let’s go tug on the hand, the sleeve or the shoulder material. Nan’s cup was Heroin. Mine was Morphine. We were toxic together.

From the first day we worked together at Kurly Kustard there was some kind of connection between us. I may be wrong but I thought there was. We laughed at the same shit. We riffed about right and wrong and the injustices being inflicted on us by our evil overlord. When I looked at her she had a golden aura. Teen love/lust does stuff to your vision. Mostly it stuffs your head up your butt. Still, she was one of that less than a handful of women I ever really fell in love with, God’s honest truth. For me the time I tried to be in her life was disastrous, but it was a memory.

There were moments of absurdity at Kurly Kustard. For example there was this French Canadian dude that insisted on trying to pay me in Canadian funds. No bank in 1974 Ocean City would take the old Canadian one dollar bills with the Queen on ‘em. I refused when the folding foreign money was offered to accept it as currency. I stood my ground and demanded he pay me in American script.

Let us call this guy Jacques. Jacques had the Canadian currency in his right hand. When it clear I was not going to accept these bills he pulled out the America cash from his pocket with his left hand. That left mitt was the most deformed hand I had ever seen. It was Hunchback of Notre Dame deformed, twisted and gnarled and it was clear the sucker had gone through this exercise on purpose. He knew I wasn’t going to take the Canuck money and he wanted to make me deal with his weird two thumbed left hand. Arrgggh. Another life lesson learned. People will screw with your mind on purpose.

We had celebrities come by. I remember waiting on John Facenda the voice of NFL films. Man his voice was as deep when he ordered a coke as when he was describing the Packer’s greatest game. Other people were working at the stand the night Princess Grace came by. I never saw her but everyone who had been at the store made sure I knew they had. I saw Princess Stephanie but not Princess Grace and she was on the beach in a bathing suit. Nayh, Nayh, Nayh Nah.

As I have been writing this I have come back to one image again and again. In the pale blue light on a low volume boardwalk day Nan stands near the front counter. With her hair pulled back and with her hands on her hips she is looking at the late afternoon ocean. Her hair blows a little because it is a sea breeze coming in and she is smiling. A quiet moment standing there absorbing the remains of the day in almost a Buddha like stance she remains an iconic image, mistress of the beach world universe. I think what ultimately kept our connection alive for years after Kurly Kustand had ceased to even exist was an innate honesty. When you care honesty matters, (as always I have to have a segue into the analysis of On Caring).

The author spends a little time of this section laying some background down before he gets to the role of honesty in caring. He tries to make sure when we are considering honesty we are not focused on something that is not the honesty he is talking about.

“In caring honesty is trying to see truly”. Honesty is not imposing an image on the other of what you want them to be or what you dream they are inside. To be honest in caring means stripping away the illusions we impose and the other asserts as reality and see what is true “even when the facts are unpleasant”. The illusions that must fall include my illusions about who I really am and what my real motives are. The question must be repeatedly asked, do I really want the other to grow or do I want to manipulate the other for my own selfish needs? If I work at honesty in seeing the other and seeing why I am caring about this particular other when I make mistakes the error will be easier to correct.

You cannot be there for the other if you are not genuine and thus you cannot pretend to be something you are not. I may not be perfect but caring doesn’t require that I exist without imperfection and flaws, only that I continue to look inside and honestly perceive what my real motivations for the other and myself are.

Like everything in this little book the concept of honesty seems so intuitive, so easily understood. But to take the time to look inside yourself to see your actual motives is as hard a task as any I know. I think to do this we have to give ourselves space, a moment for a mental breath. Creating this space may require time or it might require us to silence our mind’s never ending make work thoughts. Maybe it will require both but I think the effort will be worth it.

The Joy Found in a Notecard

2011-02-03T19:50:00.004-05:00

In bright colors my cares evaporate.

Brilliant hued exotic flowers shout celebration to me,
of life, of wonder and of full awareness.

Peacefully I lay down in a their radiant bed,
I am cradled with delicate petals and stems.

As I breathe in the fragrant air I am freed
from the normal,
from the monotonous sameness that others relish.

Nestled softly here I
Have hope that today
and tomorrow will be allow me to be
all those good things inside of me that I know I am.
Have the patience and honesty to grow
as each of these blooms has grown
into something radiant and beautiful beyond words.
Have humility that I am as frail as these blossoms
and as short lived in eternity.
Have trust that there is something greater.
And have the courage to face whatever will come.

There is no guilt in taking a respite in this beauty.
There is no crime in experiencing joy.

In bright colors I find a constancy of love.

Of Books and the Beach VI- Water-skis, Myopia and Camp Sunshine

2011-02-02T10:40:00.001-05:00

On those mornings when I wasn’t lying on the beach and when the sun was shining and when I wasn’t too wrecked still from the night before I engaged in the one physical endeavor of my life that might qualify as sport. Might is emphasized here. I water-skied.

At the time there was a triumvirate that was my real social circle, Don, Bill and me. Don had the boat and the skis and was my faux cousin. He was the grandson of one of my father’s best friends. Bill was my cousin but he was actually related to Don. Don and Bill if I remember my tables of consanguinity correctly were second cousins. These tables are important to a family from Kentucky. If you know them well you also know who you can sleep with at family reunions without going directly to hell.

If it was a calm morning wind and mental wise we would all jump into Don’s car and head over to his father’s place. There we would transfer cars and grab his Dad’s boat and set off for the Great Egg Harbor. The Great Egg Harbor lies between the mainland and the barrier island that is Ocean City. It amazes me that we didn’t just scrap this most days because of the time involved. But when you’re 19 time is forever and definitely relative.

The first time we headed out I didn’t realize what a bunch of fuckups I was throwing in with. I felt okay with the prospect of being in a boat because I was a decent swimmer; I had been swimming since I was five. Had I known that we were heading out with bogus equipment and two guys with a bit of a sado-masochistic attitude I might have hesitated.

If you have never water-skied I got to tell you there is a bit of a learning curve. On a normal pair of skis you kind of bob about in the water and get pulled along in a crouching position. Normal skis have a small fin on the bottom of them to help keep your feet aligned in a straight path. The crouching position brings with it a spray that aims directly at your anus. When skiing on the estuaries of an ocean this can best be described as a high pressure salt water enema, really.

Everyone who starts skiing has to endure to a greater or lesser degree this saline high colonic. However that assumes you are skiing on normal water skis. Banana skis are not conducive to getting upright on a 1st time out for the novice water skier. About 2 foot long and 1 ½ wide using banana skis is kind of like setting out with garbage can lids tied to your feet. Have you ever seen a Bendo® toy figure? Yeah my skinny legs were kind of like that all akimbo and twisted in the wrong direction as I tried to get up again and again. It took two or three days of saline colon washing before I got to actually to “ski”. But I did and I got better over time.

Maybe determination was something my move to beach world gave me. I wanted to be normal despite my myopia. I wanted to have fun behind the boat. My friends were willing to give me the chance. Despite the aquatic violation of my lower bowel system (really this was quite memorable it you haven’t figured that part out yet), my aching ankles and my wrenched forearms and wrist (sore from way too tight a grip on the rope and not anything else thank you) being part of the three loons or whatever we three tanned northern wahoos called ourselves was important to my growth.

What was really important was that Bill and Don were willing to invite me into this world. They didn’t really know me from Adam when I first got to Ocean City except that I came across as a snot who was out of his element. But Don who was so mellow back then, clearly had the patience to let me sort out how I fit into this whole picture. You know that the act of waiting for me to get ready, to start and to watch me fall 25 or 50 times could not have been fun except to a sadist. But for whatever reason they thought it would be fun to get me up onto skis. It was this and a hundred other acts of kindness that bonded me to them for life.

It can’t be said that waterskiing on the Great Egg Harbor didn’t have its downside especially for the normally sighted. People who voluntarily go to nudist camps are not people that I and most probably you would want to see naked. We are not talking super models there to remove tan lines. We are not talking Christian Bale and Jude Law engaged in a Women in Love wrestling match. What we are talking about is older people with names like Miriam and Floyd who while their naughty bits and pieces might be pleasing in the dark are downright scary in the light. In fact Floyd has a restraining order against a disabled guy with one leg goes by the name of Ahab and carries a harpoon. But these naked folks do have that certain lack of inhibition that lets them lay about on the dock out by the edge of open water ostensibly to soak up the rays while getting a cooling breeze off the water.

So there I would be on those full bananas tooling along the mainland side. I’d be jumping the wake, skiing sideways and trying all kind of goofy stuff. It was a blast. But routinely Bill and Don would take the boat a little too close to the sandbar. The problem with that side of the water was the shallow over near Camp Sunshine. As we whipped over by the shallow water the feel of the bay’s surface changes. I don’t know causes this, maybe it is because the water is so much shallower the drag on the skis is different. Every time I rode the skis over near the sandbar I would trip, stumble and go down. After I dropped the rope the guys in the boat would have to circle back slow to retrieve me.

Now a slow pass by Camp Sunshine didn’t mean shit to me. My vision is 20/50 with glasses and without them the world is a Monet painting. To the guys in the boat the situation was much different. As they would slow to almost a stop to make sure I got the rope and got ready to be pulled to upright all the naked folks over on the dock would stand up. Floyd, Miriam and three or four others would stand up and wave. When I say wave they would really wave using anything that would swing.

Sputtering profanity Bill and Don would threaten me with abandonment if I ever fell in front of the nudist colony again. Like I cared, but then again with my vision I don’t have to have the vision of naked Floyd surgically eradicated from my memory.

Don and Bill’s patience on those days we spent on the water was immense and gracious. Their efforts to help me get up onto the skis provide a good segue into Section 6 of On Caring. Repeatedly and with only good natured kidding they gave me chance after chance until I finally got up into a crouching position on the skis. My struggles to get up and actually ski probably cost them two or three mornings of their lives. But they were friends and they cared. I don’t know why they cared but they did. Maybe it was the brotherhood of the beach, or maybe they thought they were helping a fellow social cripple, a dorkus maximus.

Patience is the focus of Section 6. Patience means we give space to the other that person you wish to aid in growth. Impatience steals the time that is necessary for growth. Being patient is a necessary component of caring. Patience does not require action but it does require awareness. Patience is not passive; it is a state of watchfully allowing another to grow and develop. Patience is not just time focused but also context focused.

Allowing another to make the errors and take the wrong paths that lead to growth is a balancing act. Tolerance and knowledge are the watchwords. The tricky part in this balancing act is letting the other learn by trial and error but having the honesty to confront/approach the other when by making the wrong choice again and again nothing has been learned.

Of Beach and Books V

2011-01-30T22:25:00.002-05:00

On the way to Ocean City we would take the boulevard from Route 9 and over a white cement bridge built with money from the flush sixties. On your way to 34th Street you will pass through and over brackish marshes. Seeing the marshes really isn’t the most apt verb. What hits you here is the smell. Brackish water just smells off. It has a taint of sulfur and a whiff of decomposition. But it is heavy with moisture and oxygen. If you are a newbie to the beach world this olfactory blast as you cross over the boulevard causeway is worrisome. You think to yourself ‘is this what the whole place is going to smell like, crap?’

The trip over the marsh lasts five or six minutes top and then you are out on the barrier island. The closer you get to the beach itself the smell of the air changes. The aroma shifts to something almost pure. While you can clearly smell the salt from the froth of the water at its edge there is something that is hard to pin down. My guess has always been is that while the sand that churns in the water and the aquatic life that lives and dies in the water add a few scents that what you really sensing is something that is missing.

In the cycle of rain into the earth into the ocean I am sure that the sea water is taking pollution and impurity from the air. On a stretch of beach away from traffic and human contamination like the smell of hot dogs and fries the air is about as pure as it gets. Cleansed and renewed. When the traffic has gone for the day at that time when people are just shuffling about at the water’s edge your lungs are getting healthy highly saline infused air both refreshing and invigorating.

During the years I spent at the water’s edge there were two other smells that stood out beyond the smell of the water. These were the smell of raisin sticky buns freshly baked and of fried seafood picked up hot and to go. The raisin cinnamon rolls meant morning was undeniably upon me and the seafood meant end of a day and the end of the weekend. Who needed a clock or calendar when you had Dot’s Pastry and Campbell’s Seafood?

Dot’s was what the old man brought back after one of his early morning walks around the beach. Dad would be sneaking out to have coffee and that first prohibited cigarette of the day. (He was told to quit and they would kill him but he just couldn’t give up the habit.) Grabbing the cigarettes from his hiding place outside the apartment when he secreted them from Mom would walk for blocks and blocks along the water’s edge. On each of these early morning walks he would have a cigarette cradled in his hand. He had a terry cloth beach jacket with oversized pockets and baggy shorts. He would walk and smoke and pick up interesting shells and rinse them off and pocket them. Shells went in one pocket the packet of Chesterfield’s went in the other. After a good long walk he would turn and head back to the house. Stopping at Dot’s he would get sticky buns.

Dot’s sticky buns were densely packed with cinnamon, raisins and covered with a hard crunch amber glaze somewhere between pure honey and pure sugar. If you walked into Dots the smell would short circuit your brain with cravings for treats. The smell of fresh baking would make you shiver and twitch. Even when the old man opened the box back at the apartment, where my Mom already had coffee on in one of those old time percolators with the glass at the top where you could watch the coffee perk, the smell of the sticky buns was strong enough to walk the dead; the dead well that was me.

Trust me I would smell the sticky buns but I would try and ignore them. I would roll and shift under the sheet and the cotton bedspread that were all that you needed on most island nights. Really I would pull the pillow over my head because I did not want to get up. But that sweet warm spiced smell of the soft gooey bread, the raisins and the crunchy crust was too hard to ignore. It was more of a motivation to get up than even having to really, really take a piss was.
Coffee did not come into my life until I was in my thirties. It didn’t move me at all as a motivator for waking.

After taking a leak pulling on my shorts and a blue t-shirt that bore the inscription “Zap” I would make my way to the refrigerator. My parents would already be on their 2nd cup of Maxwell House and I would pull out a gallon of whole white milk from the Acme Market. Reaching the table I would lean over and pull a cinnamon sticky bun off the half dozen that were there in the white rectangular box. If it were a good day the buns were still warm. This was pre-microwave and there was something really special about a warm sweet roll. Cold, cold whole milk and that roll and I knew the day was started.

On the other end of the clock was Campbell’s Seafood. It was reserved for once a week as a special dinner. Again the meal was served in a white rectangular box pretty much the same as the sticky buns came in but oh the flavor was different. Inside the seafood combination was a crab cake, a piece of flounder, fries, a scallop, a clam cake and I think a shrimp. Campbell’s was real honest to God seafood. No Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks here. The take out store was a block and a half’s walk from our apartment. My parents would sit on the porch of the apartment while I was given some money and sent to Campbell’s to place the order and wait the 10 or 15 minutes until it was done.

The place wasn’t air conditioned and it was hot, but damn did it smell good. After standing in line with other people in various degrees of beachwear you ordered, paid and were given a claim check. It really was too hot to stay inside so you walked the parking lot or grabbed a seat on the porch or just found some way to occupy your time. However the whole time you were there the smell of fresh frying seafood was hanging in that salt air. I am salivating now just remembering it.

As you leaned against the telephone pole out front you kicked some grass that was popping up out of the sidewalk. You looked at the cars zooming down Asbury faster than they had any right to go on that narrow street. Asbury was the main street and heavily travelled but if someone opened their driver’s side door when someone was passing by the door would be gone.

Each person would go in once, twice three times to see if the food was done. The college girls in their white service worker uniform would check the receipts on each stack of boxes that was twinned together and then shake their head no. But eventually after you had walked the block one last time the food would be there, they’d take your receipt and off you would go back to the apartment to eat.

Flounder freshly fried is the food of the gods. It isn’t a strongly flavored fish. But it is crunchy and there are no bones to worry about the way Campbell’s made it. With ketchup and horseradish you made up an extra batch of cocktail sauce and then you dug in. It was heaven. The fries were crisp and each piece of food tasted real. Tell me how many times in a week do you sit down to a meal in a fast food place and somewhere in the back of your head think something like, “I wish this was really barbeque or chicken or whatever”. Ice tea washed seafood down, milk was not permitted. Yeah it wasn’t just the salt air smell that made the beach a place so burned in my memory.

My sense of On Caring is that its depth is such that any attempt at approaching it is almost from the start doomed to failure. It is like a chocolate torte, no matter how much you love and savor it; it must be digested in small almost wee bits. Sitting down at the table with a “mission” to devour the torte in a single sitting will waste it and wreck havoc on the entrails of anyone attempting it. Sometimes you grab a bite here and there in a non sequential place but it is still so very rich. I am reading this cover to cover right now but maybe that doesn’t work for you. Feel free to nibble in the dark when you’re hungry.

In section five the author points out that caring is never routine, never rote and never accomplished by “sheer habit”. I act in furtherance of caring, that is helping the other to grow, and then I monitor what has happened and reset in response to the results. If I know the other and myself as I should I will be able to decide whether action or watchful inaction is the best course. Sometimes I will be wrong.

Sometimes when I am deciding what is actually an act of caring I will have to balance the big and little pictures. Is what I am seeing and experiencing from the other something transient that is best ignored or is it part of something deeper that needs to be addressed? Having the ability, experience and knowledge to decide if an act must be viewed in isolation or as part of a larger fabric and to react aptly requires being in tune with the rhythms of a caring relationship.

Of Beach and Books IV (Night Ride Home)

2011-01-30T22:23:00.000-05:00

There is a smell to the ocean that is unique. What you sense is not one smell. Each cove and bay and bit of open shoreline has its own scent. The sea grasses that hold the dune in place in North Carolina smell different than the various reeds and runners that serve the same function in New Jersey. Every beach after a storm smells different that it does during a hot dry 10 day stretch. Still the smell is very visceral, very primal. When I travel I can tell when I am about 10 miles from the beach because the air changes in a palpable way. I don’t know if everyone senses this but I can feel the shore approach.

One of the strongest memories I have of the years on the beach was of the smell and feel of the sea air at midnight. After I would close down the store, Kurly Kustard to be precise, I would get on a 10 speed bike and wheel down the wet boardwalk. It was about a twenty minute ride home.

Shutting down the store wasn’t an instantaneous process. It took a bit of time to break down the store. You had to disassemble the custard machines and drop the blades and gaskets and knobs into sanitizer. You had already blended the sanitizer if you were smart. All remaining dairy product had been drained and put away for the night in the walk-in cooler. The fountain heads had been removed from the soda fountain and the store's awning rolled up. The windows had been slid across the opening onto the boardwalk and locked into place.

After stashing the cash I would go out the back door. At the base of the back steps I would pick up my bike. If I was lucky and had a roach I would burn that mother crushing it at the very end and swallowing the roach. I was a weird fucker that way. It just seemed to me better to get all the THC in me and not to leave any evidence on the ground just in case the gendarmes were about. I would throw my chain and lock into my backpack and off I would fly.

The rules of the boardwalk prohibited me riding my bike on it at that hour. A few blocks down south of the store the cops stopped enforcing the rules. Reaching there I was free to leave the surface streets and tool down the damp and sometimes quite wet boards at whatever speed I deemed safe. On the right night I was free and I was flying.

On a late summer nights under the influence of cheap assed Mexican reefer if the moon was up the ride became a religious service with its own sacraments. My muscles would flow smoothly and the bike was just an extension of my desire to be moving. Riding wouldn’t require thinking it would just require being. On those nights as I swooshed down those blocks elevated over the ghostly illuminated white sands of the beach I would glance out at the reflection of the sun’s little brother over the water. The air was cool but comfortable as I split its molecules on my ride.

Invariably I would stop near the end of the boardwalk and just stare out at infinity.

The water was dark except where the moonlight bled across it. The air smelled of sea rocket dune grass and of damp sand. I would breathe in deeply and just listen to the waves. At that spot the beach air was somewhat sweet and soothing, breathing was like drinking some Thai lemongrass soup refreshing and cleansing. Every sense was alive from the endorphins my muscles were producing to my eyes to that sound of waves in my ears. It is almost like my life began and ended at that moment.

You got the beach and the bicycle in the paragraphs above, now it is back to On Caring

Mayeroff shifts gears just a little bit when he moves into Section II. Having identified caring as helping another to grow he lists and discusses traits of appropriate caring. When you read each of the attributes of caring they sound for the most part a great deal like a Boy Scout oath. The qualities he cites are knowing, alternating rhythms, patience, honesty, trust, humility, hope and courage. The funny thing is that while these sound simple and easily understandable the reality of each characteristic is deceptive. It is like an old bumper sticker I remember, “Live Peace”. As we used to opine about that sticker, easy to say, hard to do and life changing if you try.

Section II of the book commences with the attribute of knowing. The author begins by saying caring is neither good intentions nor warm regards. (The Buddhists say one small good deed is worth more than the greatest of good intentions.) Caring begins with knowledge. Knowledge is not a monolith or a single granite direction marker.

Knowledge in caring according to Mayeroff breaks down three ways. One way is breaks down is a requirement of knowing what the other needs and knowing what you can really provide. The next breakdown of the attribute is what you know explicitly about the other and what you know implicitly. A final delineation is being aware that knowing can be direct and indirect.

Huh, what? This is all too murky. No it isn’t. To care I must know the other’s needs. I need to know, really know who the other is, not just to have a surface knowledge about who them present themselves as. I have to take the time to understand the other’s strengths and weakness and what will move the other to real growth before I step into a task of caring.

While Mayeroff only cites it quickly in one line a critical theme of self knowledge arises on the bottom of the first page of this section. I must know what my own powers and limitations are. In almost every section of this book Mayeroff talks about being aware of what you are, being secure in who you are, realizing your limitations both as to yourself and as to your relationship with others. What he keeps saying is that you have to be at peace with yourself and know what you are trying to give the other and what growth you are trying to motivate in the other and in yourself.

I think the fact that Mayeroff accepts that we know things about who we are and what we can give to another on an implicit or gut level shows he really understands us humans. Sometimes we can put this stuff into words but other times we can simply know it without the words. I think his comment at the end about limiting caring to only things that we can put into words is arbitrary is dead on the mark. We may know more than enough to care when we know ourselves and when we are aware of the realities of the world than we could ever communicate with words, even after 3 or 4 beers.

Of Beach and Books III

2011-01-30T22:17:00.001-05:00

It is weird how tied On Caring is to my memory of that one specific place and time, 1970s Ocean City. Each time I pick up the book I can almost feel the sand on the pages and hear the ocean and the seagulls in the background. Even some of the smells of the suntan oils and perfumes of the day come back. Please forgive my little digressions into memory as I talk about the book.

To any person who has ever met me it is not secret that I am not a clothes horse. Hell, if my shirt and tie match it is a good day. I just don’t care about that stuff. I mean clean is important to me but not style. Well I may have one red tie that I just love that has a little style to it.

When I was at the beach my focus on style was different. During those 5 or so summers I was the consummate teen beach dweller. My clothes always aimed for boardwalk chic. When I could I wore white linen trousers and Mexican wedding blouses. On my feet I had leather sandals. My hair was long but not too long. By August it had turned auburn from the sun’s beating down on it all season. (I did not use lemon juice to lighten my hair although I knew those who did.) White linen looks good on a really tanned body if I do say so myself. Those soft clothes felt good too.

The separation from my home in Pedricktown let me focus on some weird funky sense of cool. The beach was a new world filled with new people. I wasn’t cast into the mold or rules that had governed my younger years in the rural farm town. I was free to be a cosmic hippie wannabe with a weird intellectual bent. I reinvented myself and I grew as a person. I cared about who I was and I cared about the world around me.

The time spent staring at the endless sea changed me and imbued me with a sense of what is possible in life and what is not. The sea is immutable and I had to accept that, in any battle with the Atlantic I would lose. However in the world of me, change became possible and remains always possible.

Now as to section 3 of On Caring (there is a bit of overlap of my beach memoir and the gist of the section). I think the following three paraphrased sections are the key. These as I have phrased them deal with human caring and not caring about an idea. I think if you read the section you will see the distinctions Mayeroff wants you to get on that specific point (caring for a person vs. caring for an idea) but my focus is on human beings primarily. What seems to me to be the most important lines of the text are:

• The minimum component of helping another grow is to help them care for something/someone apart from themselves. This means encouraging and helping someone find something to care about.

• I grow by becoming more self determining, by choosing my own values and ideals grounded in my own experience, instead of simply conforming to the prevailing values or compulsively rejecting them.

• A person grows by becoming more honest with him or herself and becoming more aware of the natural and social order of which she or he is a part with a minimum of illusion…

Being objective and living without illusion takes focus and I think it is a daily struggle.

Of Beach and Books II

2011-01-29T21:05:00.004-05:00

On those rare days in beach world when I did not have to work in the evening I would stay late on the strand. My family’s apartment was 1 ½ blocks from the water. As a result it was nothing to come back to the apartment mid in late afternoon to have a snack. After a quick shuffle over Central Avenue and a couple of houses down Asbury I would just lay about inside out of the sun for a few minutes with an ice tea and the daily paper. The ice tea was a little different. Mom brewed it up from a southern brand Luzianne and she would dice up an entire orange into each gallon she’d brew.

After 15 minutes max I’d grab my towel and head back to the water’s edge. The sun would be dropping in the west but the air temperature would be in the low 80s on most of those summer days. In August it could be about 98 F even into early evening but August was a world until itself.

By the time I headed back to the beach in that warm but waning late afternoon light the day trippers (or we called them shoe-bees because they brought their lunches in shoe boxes) were streaming off the beach in droves. The wire waste baskets at the edge of the beach by the last service drive before the breakwater were filled a mile high with trash. With these easy pickings the seagulls were flying and screeching picking at dead fries and leftover sandwich pieces. A quick glance both ways up and down the beach and you saw maybe 10% of the people who had been there an hour before remained. These people were deeply tanned; these were the folks renting for the full season.

Making the weird schlop/klop noise that comes from cheap beach sandals I would walk across the hot sand. If the tide was going out I would grab a spot as close to the water as I could. Reaching the water’s edge I would lay my towel down, drop my sandals, t-shirt, glasses and hat and would jump in the ocean for a few moments of body surfing. With fewer people around me on the sand I would pull out one of the harder books I had picked for the summer and dive into it. It was easier to concentrate at that hour of the day.

The life guards were still on until six. Often I would get to watch them pack up their gear and leave. Beach beefcake and pinups, there were no ugly lifeguards. The people remaining after the guards left were mostly beach walkers. These were the folks that strolled for miles up and down the beach just to walk. I was a beach walker too but I would do it late in the evening with a pack of Marlboros in my beach shirt pocket. It takes a special talent to light a cigarette on a windy beach at night.

My favorite part of the day’s end was watching the light disappear. When you are looking at the Atlantic you don’t see brilliant colors from the sunset. You have to be on the other side of the island to see that. What you see is the color of the ocean changing. It goes from bright reflective blue, almost the image of a broken mirror, to a white gray to a dark green black over about two or so hours.

It is that shift to the point where the water is reflecting the pale light of mid twilight that I loved the best. I always thought I was as close to God and I ever would be at that time. Sometimes I would just walk out into the water and let my mind go blank just experienced the warm water and warm air and a complete lack of self. It wouldn’t last long but it was an amazing moment because even to this day I can remember the peace I felt.

Reading On Caring required me to go searching for a clearer meaning of one term actualization. If that isn’t psychological jargon speak what is? Getting an explanation of a key term was essential to mentally getting access to On Caring. The term actualization is really/kind of/sort of an adaptation of a guy named Maslow’s term self actualization. Self actualization is a wonky jargon word to express a real straightforward concept. Back then sorting out the phrase sent me to the used book store to look at psychology books (but not for too long or they want me to buy). This time I cribbed and tweaked the following off the Internet.

Maslow loosely defined self-actualization as "the full use of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc.” He set this out in his book Motivation and Personality. Self-actualization is not a static but it is rather an ongoing process in which one's capacities are fully, creatively, and joyfully utilized. One of the sites I looked at implied this was a direct quote from Maslow himself, "I think of the self-actualizing person not as an ordinary person with something added. An actualizing person is an ordinary person with nothing taken away. The average person is a full human being with dampened and inhibited powers and capacities"

Self-actualizing people see life clearly. They are less emotional, more objective and less likely to allow hopes, fears, or ego to distort their observations. Self-actualizing people are dedicated to other people, to vocations and to causes. Major characteristics of self-actualizing people include creativity, spontaneity, courage, growth and hard work. This is the tie to On Caring.

Lying on the beach sand waiting for the water to change to silver I tried to grok this.

Of Beach and Books I

2011-01-29T13:46:00.003-05:00

It was probably in 1975 or 1976 that I first reading On Caring. My memory is that I picked the book up after hearing about it in a class at Michigan State where I was at that time an undergraduate of unspecified and diffuse focus. Most likely the course in which I heard it mentioned was one in communication theory or maybe I learned of it via an odd reference made in a sociology class. The used paperback copy I picked up at the Student Book Store was very slim about ¼ of an inch thick. It consists of 30 short sections and 104 pages. The cover was sky blue.

While the first actual copy I bought was used it wasn’t highlighted with garish orange markers that were popular back then. On Caring apparently had been an assigned text in a psychology course. I grabbed it right at the end of spring term before I headed back to my summer life. I threw the little book in the top of the stuff I had crammed in my footlocker. In this one foot by one foot by three foot rectangle I carried the whole of my life back and forth with between New Jersey and Michigan. It was right on top so I could get easy access to it when I got home to the ocean. The sea and reading (and girls in bikinis) these were the most important things in my world. And I am dead serious about this the edge of the ocean will always not matter what be my home.

My summer life was spent working nights on the boardwalk, drinking excessively, smoking dope and playing cards when the shift ended until 2 or 3 a.m. and then crashing until about 9 a.m. I would them make my way from my bed to the beach (if it was a sunny day) spread out my towel. After slathering on suntan lotion (not sunscreen-I wanted a tan) I would pull my hat down and slip back into sleep. For just a little while longer I needed to be in lala land.

When I woke up I would roll over and lie on my belly and prop up on my elbows. I would then read for about 1 to 2 hours. That summer I got suntan grease on the pages of On Caring first thing. My memory is that I probably read it twice that year because I would keep going back over sections of the book. There was something calming and invigorating about the simple phrases in the book. It was kind of weird because the whole book was written in this odd third person voice. But little phrases would stick out. In the copy I had the printing seemed to bold on little sections of good words. Now I have a reprinted copy and there is nothing bolded, but those sections just seemed to jump out at me back then.

I usually reread this book about once every eighteen months. It is one of two books I do that with. The other is Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. What can I say; I am a child of those years that were the cusp of the sixties and seventies. Mayeroff had an incredible intellect. Dipping your toes in the water of this book will show you that clearly and distinctly. On Caring is written in a deceptively simple style but the concepts are not simple at all.

This will be the first in a series of posts about the beach and about On Caring. As I reread it and as I plumb my beach memories I am going to try and combine them into a series of short posts. It may not work. But hey you don’t know if you don’t try. I mean as Steve Forbert said “You cannot win if you do not play”.

A Prelude to the Coldest Silence Ever

2011-01-21T12:08:00.003-05:00

A disagreement? Is it something more? A lapse of memory perhaps?

He says he last had a drink three years ago.

She says he last had a beer at Freddy's picnic at the lake last summer. Having said this under oath she looks imploringly for a sign. First she glances at me and then at her "husband". Even their marital status isn't clear to me from the testimony so far. There might be a glitch due to a divorce that wasn't done right.

Her “husband” shifts in his chair and she leans slightly forward and twists her head in his direction. They are both still wearing their coats because it is cold in her. No tensing of muscles can be seen but her hands open and tip slightly upward in question. She doesn't know the rules. At this point I offer the admonition that there will be no crosstalk.

In response his feet shift and the tips of his work boots form the base of a v. He tips his head toward her and smiles. He smiles because he knows I am watching him and his every move. I look carefully. Does he twitch, does he sweat, does he sigh, grunt or do his shoulders tense. I look very closely at the edges of his smile does it looked forcibly stretched? Oh yeah. If his facial muscles were contorting under any more pressure they would rip apart. Still, he smiles.

A few more questions get asked about whether he had just one beer at the picnic and does she remember what kind of beer was it? She realizing that once this door has been opened it can't be closed by saying she might be mistaken. Maybe it was a Sharp's or O’Doul’s? But it really does not matter what it or even if it was just one. She has dropped to almost a whisper now and she says they didn't stay long at Freddy's cause his wife is such a pain. She just thinks she is too good ya know?

I thank her when the questions are done and ask her to take a seat in the lobby.

His arms are crossed now and he has slumped in the chair. His feet no longer form a v. Now his crotch is the base of the v with his legs rigid and straight and his feet are sitting about two and half to three feet apart. He will not make eye contact with me for the rest of this meeting. His eyes are focused at the center of my desk where his papers lie. Lie clearly has a double meaning here. Is he going to "man up" and admit he hasn't really stopped drinking? This is a long shot.

What he does is what most men in this situation do he disparagers her. "She doesn't know what she is talking about dammit. There were a lot of people there that day. I had a diet Pepsi and it was sitting on the table next to Floyd Parnell’s beer. It wasn't mine." She made a mistake. Look at the other stuff it all says I am not drinking.

Look if I don't get my license back my job is gone. They have kept me on for this year because I promised I would be able to drive right after this hearing. Look she has fibromyalgia and if I don't work we don't have coverage. Can't you see how important this is for me? Man I really, really don't drink."

No question this is important to him, the desperation shows on his face. I really, really believe bad will come down on him if he doesn't get his ticket to operate some vehicle. But he has been down this road too many times before. I know I have seen his record. If in the face of this he couldn't even get his story straight with his "wife" how is he going to control anything, especially his personal demon of a habit of sucking down that 12 pack of beer per day. How’s he going to address his lack of control that has given him two DWIs, a pot possession charge and four days in jail for turfing the town square with is friend Gentleman Jack?

Politely I ask the last question "Is there anything else you would like me to know?" He draws his knees up and with his head bent he says "No." Most people at least thank me for giving them the time to plead their case. Odds were it wouldn’t happen this time and it didn’t.

As he has left the room I organize the papers on my desk into a neat stack and turn to my computer and keyboard. I begin to type and then I stop. Whenever one of these proceedings has ended like this I wonder what the ride home is going to be like, fire and fury or long, long, stony cold silence.

A List

2011-01-21T10:39:00.001-05:00

When I first wake there is a bit of clarity to my thought. Such lucidity will become lost very fast in a normal day. Don’t we all wish that we could bottle that first hour or so of clear-headedness and energy up and sip from it throughout the day?
Rumbling from bed to shower I have ten or twelve things right off the top of my head that I just know I have to do, or address or respond to. If I am lucky there is a Post-it pad nearby and I jot the first three or four down. Pens lay everywhere in my house (and my office). With luck I capture maybe another two or three must dos after I dry off.

From listing these items to acting on them is another thing. My routine is to take the Post-it and fold it over so that the sticky stuff does not cause a problem. When I say a problem I mean I don’t want the not inadvertently adhering to something and then becoming lost to me for the day. Folded the note takes up residence in the top pocket of my oxford button down shirt.

On the bus on the ride in each day I usually journal so I don’t look at the list then. Staring out at the blackness of night now fading I will pull out a pen and try to not just diary but clarify my thoughts on a particular topic. A typical entry would be:

12-07-10

This is turning into a very depressing winter. It seems all the news regarding the wars and the economy is bad. Each day I get up and listen to the radio news. It seems my values, values of respect for others and cooperative behaviors are assailed as being un-American or as being nothing more that liberal pipe dreams.

And then there are the little things in my life. By 7:18 I have to be in the car for the 3-4 minute trip to the bus stop. The weather is cold and I don’t want to make the 12 minute walk. Can I get anyone moving to allow this to happen? No. Well, at least not in any reliable manner. If I miss the bus I try to catch the next one at a different stop. Today is too cold to be standing outside.

Arriving at my office my lunch goes into the refrigerator. I hit the men’s room and take a leak. Washed up I walk to my office and set my brief case down. I hit the computer and turn on some ancient church music most often Anonymous Four’s Mass for a New Millennium (that Millennium being the year 1000). I lug out my own laptop computer and set it to steal network connectivity from the Chinese restaurant across the square. When I get my breaks I like to check e-mail and blog posts. I don’t want to do this on the state’s equipment. Then I empty my coat pockets into a bowl on my desk, keys, pens, dollar bills, yesterday’s receipts and notes all come to rest. Finally I draw the note out of my shirt pocket and put the little yellow scrap on my desk. Finally wasn’t quite right I do go and hang up my coat.

When I get back to my computer I check for e-mails with the “!” mark meaning in Windows-speak urgent. If there are no crises I look at my note and mentally prioritize. If it is a good day I will get to three of these usually important things. On a not so good day maybe my focus will settle on one or maybe none. It doesn’t take long to get derailed. By the second cup of coffee the plan of holding a hearing, then make a call on the yellow list comes off the track. All it takes is someone with a tough case or a coworker with a crisis.

But that is why we keep lists right? If I don’t get it done today it will be unfolded and posted with a push pin on my cubicle wall. It will be there tomorrow.

Clear Your Mind

2011-01-20T12:46:00.000-05:00

In deep snow everything becomes both ordinary and silent. A chance to return to reality occurs in this white hushed world. Our place of balance is always there if you think to look for it in the cold colorless stillness of a winter’s day. Right now we need very much this silence and this snow.

Day 3 (or John Prine was Right-Blow up your TV

2011-01-19T22:10:00.001-05:00

I disabled the TV on Monday. My children had pissed me off beyond words. Grades and attitude were at an all time low. In the course of one half hour I unplugged the cable box, reset all the computer’s passwords and locked down the hand held games. The Wii is no in a box along with all of its games taped with the Dad equivalent of crime scene tape.

Clearly I should have taken these actions sooner. Since switching off the box I have made my way through another 30 pages of Swann’s Way. The kids have completed assignments that they have been dilatory about and the woodstove has been working overtime. Watching the flames flickering is a more than adequate replacement for the pixels of plenty. How long this can last I don’t know but it sure is refreshing.

Proust is very weirdly beautiful. Not having the sensory short circuiting of TV allows me to read at leisure with the cat in my lap. About the only thing missing is the wine and croissant. To experience his depiction of the appearance and existence of a cathedral’s steeple for page after page and have it remain interesting is a delight. I even had to look up a word, benignant. Kind and gracious, a good word to know this one.

Grinding Gears

2011-01-05T08:48:00.001-05:00

Over the past several days I have been writing a short story. Most likely I will not share it here. Fiction, especially my skanky fiction doesn’t work in a blog format. However crafting the story jogged memories and memories are what make writing this thing fun.

The day was Sunday after New Year’s. Using www.onetwofiver.com I started out typing some thoughts about the snow blowing around outside my window. So often these little sights caught out of the corner of your eye take you mentally to places you haven’t been to in years. Watching these little paisley swirls of white it reminded me of bus trips I used to take between Farmington and East Lansing. Often these dusting swirls would be visible out the Americruiser’s windows as I made those weekend journeys to see my then girlfriend. Bundled up in my brother’s old 101st Airborne army coat I would hand the Greyhound driver my ticket and be off.

Most of the story was focused on the giggling bliss of new love and the way two people could see two entirely different realities despite using common words and expressing seeming agreement on about every topic under the sun. After I pounded out the 888 words that the writing exercise demands I kept thinking about the ride itself. Surely people of a certain age (that is 45 and over) remember similar bus rides. My struggle was trying to describe the experience of almost two hours spent pressed against the cold glass window trying to avoid contact with the various damaged goods that were travelling with me on that common carrier.

What you wanted to do on the local run from East Lansing to Farmington was to take yourself to a state close enough to sleep that you could hear when they called out your stop out but deep enough to be removed from clear reality. Oversleeping would end you up in Southfield or downtown Detroit going east. Overshooting the right stop was problematic. Southfield was barren and Detroit was funky. However if you stayed awake you had to talk to the poor crazies who were on the bus there because their family didn’t want to ride in the same car with them and thus they were shipping them off to Aunt Mae’s on the hound.

If you are thinking I am being too harsh on this point I offer the following. One time I had a guy talk to me about his invisible 6 foot tall stuffed dog for the whole hour and 45 minutes of the ride. Said invisible dog was plush and colored brown and while like a beagle. It was sitting in the empty seat across the aisle from us. Geesh. No, it was not named Harvey.

You really wanted to go far enough down into sleep that you did not have to talk to or smell the other passengers. There was a certain odor on those buses that remains in my mind unto this day. If you sat too far back you got a whiff of the blue sanitized water of the lavatory every time the bus lurched from lane to lane.

Most of time Michigan’s skies remain gray. Without direct sun it was easy to wad that old army coat up against the window and drift off. It you trained yourself well, and you could train yourself if you did this trip on a routine basis as I did, the vibrations and shaking the bus would make downshifting for an exit would wake you enough to assess where you were and how much time was left before your stop. If your stop was just a few minutes away you might even go to the back three rows of the bus to have a cigarette and wake up. Man that was ages ago wasn’t it. If it was a little warmer you could get the group W bench guys in the back to crack the window a little and share the sacred herbs. My girlfriend’s parents were a little intense and taking the edge off helped.

The trip was an exercise in Zen awareness. I am sure that as I tweak this part of the story more details will come back. Like one of my favorite site’s on the run was a drug store it Williamston or Fowlerville. It was called Fate’s Pharmacy. How cool and absolutely spooky story perfect is that?

A New Year

2011-01-03T08:49:00.001-05:00

The bus ride in this morning was quiet. The bus was full with many people returning to their jobs the holidays having come to an end. No one seemed grumpy but nobody seemed pleased either. The talk offered by our new governor this past weekend was of sacrifice. Sacrifice if you have not heard the word in the context of government employment means employees taking a reduction in salary and health care. Nothing specific has been placed on the table yet so we simply wait silently for the appearance of the axe.

After the warming spell this weekend there is very little snow on the ground. This is a bit unusual for such an early date in January. While a winter in Michigan may ebb and flow early January is usually well covered in white. As the bus rolled along today the route was merely frosted. The neon signs showing a cannabis leaf inside a glowing red cross reflected on the pavement, the squares outlined in white.

I have been going back over Milton Mayeroff’s writing lately. I have been trying to rework what he said into an even more common parlance to aid my own understanding. I know there is danger in such action. I am not as smart as Mayeroff and I may be missing his nuanced meaning. Still rendering his thoughts in a form that is accessible to my mind is of some benefit because I have to think of what he really meant. Here is the section I have tried to parse most recently:

My life is understandable and knowable if I live my life in place in the current moment. When I keep myself aware of what things are relevant to my life and what I need for the purposes of my life I move toward real growth. These “things” are not abstractions. If I am not in place day to day my mind will easily become confused and the world I live in will cease to make sense. Awareness is an ongoing process and requires that I care for both myself and for those who have relevance in my life.

Snow Fell White Last Night

2011-01-02T08:25:00.001-05:00

It is hard to be a parent when I am an imperfect person. So many attributes that seem necessary to be a good parent are absent in me. I am slothful, I am impatient, I have a temper and I am inconsistent. Oh I could go on and rattle off a hundred other failings that are probably causing my children to grow up warped. About the only thing I have going for me is that I do feel love for them.

Snow fell last night, not much just a dusting. Over the past several days the temperature has been unseasonably warm and all but the dirtiest and most densely piled snow has melted away. Looking out on the street scene nature has on the night of the 1st day of the year given use a clean crisp skin for the world.

While I made no real resolutions the snowfall is reinforcing something I feel everyday before my children get up. With each new day there is hope that I will push back my failings and provide them with a real parent's care and wisdom. Today, tomorrow and a hundred other tomorrows I will try and be the best parent I can be for them.

Joy In Odd Places

2010-12-09T09:15:00.002-05:00

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Simple Joy

Sometimes you go to an event and expect nothing. Sometimes you are surprised by getting way more than you had a right to expect. Serenity exists and should be savored.

As a parent I have gone to probably 20-30 local school concerts all told. My presence at these performances was required because of participation by my children. First there were the 5th and 6th grade cello renditions. Next came the 7th and 8th grade bass workouts. In the bass years, because child two, affectionately known as Secundus came into his own musically, there also came the Suzuki piano recitals and the French horn concerts. At some point I had come to a Zen like attitude as to the passage of time. I can tell you how many slats of wood line the wainscoting of each of East Lansing’s auditoriums.

Last night I attended what I though was to be the 8th grade band’s performance cum French horn go round. But it was different. The school had combined the orchestra and some of the brass and created a symphonic orchestra of 8th graders. An 8th grade symphony, isn’t that amazing? In a time of declining funds, enrollment and general apathy the music staff had the stones to create a symphony. My hat goes off to them.

Dressed in black with frilly shirts and bow ties they shuffled onto stage. No incidents of poking or pushing were observed. The lights went down and it began. The music played included about five pieces. One was entitled Into the Storm. But the rest were from the Nutcracker. It was a delight.

Clearly what I was hearing was not the Boston Philharmonic. However the performance by the 8th grade symphony orchestra was joyful. It was clear they were proud and were playing to show this could work. They hit the notes, they played fluidly, and they sounded (for the most part) tight. I hate the Nutcracker with a passion but even with that in mind the performance was aurally pleasing. Instead of a band concert I got a symphony. Kudos to Dave Rosin director of the East Lansing 8th grade symphony.

Take joy where you can find it. It was a good night.

Let the Mystery Be

2010-12-08T12:44:00.001-05:00

Eventually you learn not to look too closely. If you do you just keep finding things that bug you and you’re never at peace. (A nod to Brian A. here)

On November 23, 2010 I started using a new journal. Opening a bound volume with line after line awaiting my musings and memories is both daunting and exciting. I began the new journal with the following:

Belief is tricky. I hold some things as true, some as false, some as relevant (but without a definite resolution) and some as irrelevant. Philosophy and religion have structures of belief well worn and intricately constructed. My beliefs don’t necessary align with the main themes of the currently predominant sects and schools but they don’t necessary contradict them.

I believe in life. Cognito ergo sum really makes sense to me. If I didn’t have existence then what is dithering about being and not being. I also believe in the corollary, not life. As the preacher said, there is a time for everything including a time to be and a time to be no more. For the short time we are here there is an awful long eternity to be gone.

There may be a transformation of essence, a continuation as it were of existence but as far as I can tell empirically the odds against that are pretty big. If it were not for the exception to two phone calls that creep me out to this day I would peg the odds at 1,000,000,000 to 1 against the ethereal sphere of existence. As far as I can tell based on tangible fact, the who of whom I am ends when I shed this skin.

As a result while I am among the living I believe I must act appropriately. What this means is that I need to do good, to be an aid to and help my likewise doomed fellow travelers. The golden mean, the do unto others mantra makes sense to me. I must confess that I am not good at it but it does make sense. I think we are compelled to do more that the medical profession that is we have an obligation to try and do good, not to simply avoid doing harm. We must act with compassion and reason.

If there is a knowing being a knowing essence my appeal would be, “Source of being and existence bless this world. With grace and mercy ameliorate pain, relieve deprivation and gently resolve conflict. Provide bodily integrity, space, shelter and sustenance for our persons. May my life be blessed but not at the expense of others. May others be blessed but not at my expense. Let me be genuine and effective and an aid to others.

Winning by Losing

2010-12-07T14:56:00.002-05:00

In dealing with my oldest son I am often surprised by some of the things that we encounter in our shared lives. One of the most difficult things I have had to deal with is the very clear disconnect between his perception of how the world works and how I see the world working. Because of his Aspergers he often doesn’t size things up the way I do. His world view is not necessary wrong and I acknowledge that How he sees reality tends to be more clinical and more black and white than me. But in life and death situations it may be better to go with his dispassionate analysis.

Often big things for other kids don't seem to bother him. Normally a loss on the ice for his hockey team isn't a big deal. Other kids will be playing blame games or agonizing about what went wrong or what could have been done. There are times when his lack of exaggerated passion may be interpreted against him. It would appear to somebody who is unfamiliar with Aspergers that he isn't committed or doesn't care about the team success. Reaching such a conclusion would be wrong, dead wrong. But the lack of demonstrating the same emotions as standard kids can be counted against him on the calculus of who is really with us on this team.

Recently however the lack of emotion mode didn't hold true. Last Saturday his team had its collective butt handed to 'em. The score was double digits to zip, zilch, and nil. Me I chalked the loss up to the way the hockey program has progressed for the team over the years. I didn't blame the players but rather the system and decisions made by the league that had brought us here. The scoreboard stopped at 7 to 0 early in the second period. The real score was significantly more than double that.

I held the door off the ice open for the team. When Primus came off the ice he had tears in his eyes. His face was flushed and he just seemed torn up. This surprised me. It worried me a little bit because it meant to me that he was at an extreme point of his tolerance. I opted to wait for him to come out of the dressing room to see how he was. Normally I would have gone out to the lobby and commiserated with other parents.

When he walked out of the locker room I asked him if he was upset. He told me that he was and he asked me how he could not be because the game was an embarrassment. I asked him if he was upset with his play and he was. (In my mind he did all he could. He took the puck in the opposing teams end twice. If we had it there six times in the whole game I would be surprised.) He had a shot on goal. I believe it was our team’s only shot on goal. There might have been another when I was looking away.

Standing there was my son and his ASD I saw clear passion. He was emotional but controlled and he was doing self evaluation directly comparable to what other kids on his team were doing. This was something different. It was a step to acceptance in a world that just doesn’t get him.

Little Happy Moments

2010-11-18T12:44:00.001-05:00

Mostly I use this blog to reflect and recollect about things that I have experienced. A great deal of my focus for these pieces comes from looking backward. Wistfulness, bitterness, gauzy memories these are the things that I set down in what I write. Today I want to look sideways.

Good things have happened of late. I have reason for joy in my life. Joy no matter how small must be savored and celebrated.

For whatever reason my oldest son, the one that is ASD is doing well in school. The first marking period has passed and he has an A – average. I understand this could be better, but it is far better than what it was last year. It makes me really, really happy to see him excel. He also seems to be getting into the rhythm of dealing with other people. He still does not want to look people in the eyes but he can make some small talk working off a rudimentary script he has internalized.

These are good things, real good things.

Last night I received my election certificate in the mail. An election certificate comes in the mail to verify that the post you sought has been obtained. Why I ran is God’s own mystery but run I did. To come out on top is really a unique feeling. It wasn’t like I got a mandate I won my less than 2% of the vote but I won. This too is good.

While the giddiness over each of these things will not last, I am happy for now.

Winter Photo as Poetry

2010-11-17T20:52:00.001-05:00

Winter light poured over a cold landscape as I walked home this night. Silently the trees around me reached up against the darkening sky. As I glance skyward through these bare branches I was adrift in memory. Stopping I set my camera on the ground and I snapped the picture above.

When I was eighteen I loved an album cover with one bare tree upon it. While I never bought the album the band who made it became one of my favorites. The title was From the Witchwood. For years I assumed the title was From the Winterwood. My guess as the why of this has to do with my myopia and because of the bareness tree on the spare two tone album jacket. Only recently was I disabused of that notion when I decided to look the disk up and give it a listen. To me the Winterwood will always remain part of the title. It was apt to my mindset at the time. Michigan was the Winterwood.

The album cover’s fascination for me had more to do with my arriving in this north country inexperienced in the ways of winter as opposed to anything else. To me winter started in mid to late December and was done mostly by mid March or April 1 at the latest. That year, my first year here the time was not long before the autumn of late September turned into the Winterwood of late, late November. Golden leaves gone the spidery fingers of the trees reached up into the dark sky. They looked a great deal like the image on that LP.

No fear rose in me when I looked at those webs of wood woven skyward. Instead I saw the art of life. It was not long before I saw the beauty of black and grey branches coated with white crisp snow. The Winterwood was not something troubling or scary. It was instead part of life’s gallery of beauty.

East Lansing's Response to WBC

2010-11-17T09:51:00.000-05:00

C3173@aos-sharp.com_20101117_091134[1]

Tournament Helpful Info

2010-11-15T18:13:00.002-05:00

I looked up the rink based on the pamphlet for the tournament.

Here is the link and here are directions to the rink from the hotel.

http://www.arcticicearena.com/

Country Inn & Suites Edit

18315 la Grange Rd, Tinley Park, IL 60487 - (708) 444-4384

United States

1. Start out going NORTH on LA GRANGE RD/US-45 N toward 183RD ST/ORLAND PKWY. 2.9 mi

2. Turn LEFT onto W 159TH ST/US-6. 1.5 mi

3. Turn LEFT onto 108TH AVE. 0.1 mi

4. Turn LEFT onto 160TH ST. 0.2 mi

5. 10700 160TH ST is on the LEFT.

Arctic Ice Arena 10700 160th St, Orland Park, IL 60467 - (708) 403-4231

Hard Wired

2010-10-29T20:07:00.001-04:00

Walking to the bus stop the other day I found myself whistling/singing David Crosby/Graham Nash’s Wind on the Water. Penned many years ago the song decries humankind’s hunting of whales to the brink of extinction. Why this song over twenty years old is stuck in my head I really can’t say. Couplets about whale meat being used for ephemera such as lipstick and the like really shouldn’t be the default song in my personal RAM. Animal rights activism has not been a hall mark of my life, take kibbee for example.

There are other songs in the rapidly accessed storage portion of my brain. Most of them however are Merle Haggard songs. There is Momma Tried, God’s Own Singer and Sing me Back Home and they crop up all the time. Wind on the Water has an incredible hook. Still there should be for any number of reasons a hundred other songs that should be hard wired into my head.

I mean I get to some extent the why of the Haggard songs being stuck in my head. There are trains, mama, a misspent life and remorse at death woven into each one. About sums up the rural American experience that I wanted to believe was to be my life when I was fourteen or fifteen. Life did not head that way for me. My life is not rural and I am not in jail, mom is dead but my life has not been totally wasted. Still I get the mythology that keeps those songs inside me. What I don’t get is why Wind on the Water is there.

Maybe it was some lass that had it on a LP when I was in those psyche molding years of undergraduate studies and my infatuation with her wove the words and music into my mind. Maybe it is the real lure the ocean, the Atlantic Ocean holds for me that keeps it close. Sunset behind and the moon rising the water is always my image of my chosen home.

I assume other people have hard wired musical memories. I wonder what they are. Here’s another one….

Autumn

2010-10-12T22:45:00.001-04:00

Autumn is the best time of the year. Today I stopped for a moment and noticed Mid-Michigan is well into fall. With the demands of parenting the time just seems to fly by. As I walk I pray for a few quiet moments of awareness. I look into the blue sky and I know it will not be this way for long. Still and warm the morning snow cannot be far off.
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On the Capitol lawn the maples are gold and red. The red one I looked at was well past prime. About half the leaves had fallen. But there was an organic beauty to appreciate in what I saw. Life and it cycles.

1974-2010, 36 years I have watched this place as it changed from summer to fall and then onto to spring. There is a serene beauty in the maples that I will never comprehend. Maybe it is serenity I will never comprehend.

The sound track for this world is not George Winston, although his Autumn is a great disc to get laid by, or it was when I was in my late 20s. Me I am listening to a deep rhythmic groove called The Ghetto by Donny Hathaway. Deep vocals and kind of a mild afro Cuban feel and I keep stride in the wonder of golden autumn.

Beflore the Light

2010-10-12T22:44:00.002-04:00

When I am just about to walk in to pick up my morning caffeine this is the view I see. I won’t see it much longer because they are moving my office to a strip mall. Glancing down toward the east it is a typical urban view. Glass, bricks and concrete create a street canyon that leads straight to the river. I have been turning and opening the door at this store for a decade. Soon that repetitive act will end and the canyon will be a memory for me.

The manager of the coffee shop is a close friend. He too will be leaving soon. His wife will be taking employment somewhere else and he will follow. My conversations over the years with both he and his staff have been some of the most fun I have had. In a few weeks the canyon will remain but the world I have known there will be gone. Like a real canyon the place will be empty to me except for the wind blowing ever eastward.

Hope and Weakness

2010-10-12T22:43:00.002-04:00

My little Portals of Prayer devotional book has prayers printed out for reflection and recitation. Entreaties are set out for each morning and evening of every day in the week. Me, I don’t recite them like the ritualized prayers so enmeshed in the formal liturgy of my church. Lutherans, we bend and kneel on a hard floor reciting “we confess that we have sinned in thought, word and deed... In thy mercy forgive what we have been; help us to amend what we are…” As I mentioned in a prior post the things I read in the morning are the starting point for a meditation.

Today’s prayer opens with the line that the deity knows my every weakness. Continuing on it mentions that because of that weakness the supplicant (i.e., me) will disobey, fail to love, and otherwise be less godly. Today the prayer seems on point. As I am taking my desk today I feel weak, loveless and prone to failure.

Emotionally it has been a rough week. Both children have been buffeted by tribulations at school. My wife’s recovery is slow. My work feels like it is a stone ball, which like Sisyphus, I must push ever upward only to have it roll further back down the hill. When I listen to the news what I hear is all doom and gloom. Even as I type these words I shudder, stretch my shoulders and realize I don’t know if I can even take an appropriate cleansing breath.

The prayer ends with a plea for forgiveness, renewal and strength. Inherent in the closing entreaty is the plea for love and the reassurance of love. When I contemplate love and the love that I know from friends and family things always seem better. Most days I find my way back to the point where balance comes. Let a few hours pass and life will glow again. Weakness is a starting point but the day will lead to something better.

Sometimes the Light Just Plays God

2010-10-12T22:42:00.002-04:00

Failing to meditate early in the day means I will get lost in the day. By meditation I mean an act that focuses my being not just sitting around in the lotus position internally uttering the unspeakable syllable. Perhaps the better term in lieu of mediation is clearing my mind and contemplating something beyond the mundane minutiae of daily living. When I say lost in the day I mean my focus is drawn in a 100 directions and I don’t seem to accomplish anything. My prioritizations schemes all fail.

For me the act of centering my mind is as natural and necessary as taking a shower to cleanse my body. If I don’t take my shower say because I know I have heavy work to do that will require sweat and or exposure to gunky things (image cleaning a wet basement), my day is thrown off also. Showering just gets me to the starting point of the day. Maybe what I am saying is I like to start the day clean mentally and physically, a tabla rasa as it were.

Meditation can be as simple as walking about and just forcing myself to be in the moment. Look there is a tree. Smell the bakery. See the light glinting oddly off the windows up there. Other times it is reading a religious passage and someone’s commentary on it. Trust me I oft times find the commentary has missed the point or is agenda driven. Still the act of reading a verse and thinking about how it fits into my life in the world I occupy is refreshing and invigorating.

Today’s mediation, “ I must refuse all affirmations of what I do not fully and actually know, experience and believe myself.” It is from Merton of course. It argues for a simplified relationship between oneself and the world. Sounds like a good thing. Whether life in an organized society is possible utilizing this maxim is possible, I do not know.

A Shallow Grave in the Hundred Acre Wood

2010-10-11T20:30:00.000-04:00

Secundus and I tagged along with some of his friends to see a play. We say the Abridged Works of William Shakespeare. It was quite humorous and somewhat bawdy. Tit and penis jokes abounded. Methinks such jests are much in accord with the Bard’s original style. Secundus worked his way into the production. At one point he was doing the Macarena at center stage before one of Hamlet’s big soliloquies. Don’t ask. My eyes were filled with tears from laughing so much.

The play, while fun, is not the key thing in this post. The other two parents we joined at the production complimented me on how nice Secundus was. “He always shares,” they said. “He always plays nice,” they said, “ when he plays with younger children.’ “Look how the three boys are just having fun.” Foreshadowing.

In the van on the ride back the three boys that had attended the play were goofing around with the little kids’ books in the back seat. Together they had managed to wiggle into the third row in the back. One book was an apparent Disney Winnie the Pooh knockoff with another child other than Christopher Robin cavorting with Pooh in the illustrations. Secundus took real exception to this. Works like sacrilege and blasphemy floated up toward the front seat. At a point when the parents had stopped talking for half a second we heard this. “Hey on TV these days this imposter would be end up in a shallow grave at the far end of the 100 acre woods. Pooh, Tigger and Eyore would then set out on a trouble laden mission to find the real Christopher Robin.”

Secundus is 12. Dispatching a faux Christopher Robin to a shallow grave while in line with a Showtime storyline seems a tad bit harsh. We will have to talk.

Pulp Fiction Awakens My Foggy Mind

2010-10-10T18:32:00.001-04:00

Over the past week I read a book that I had shelved long ago due to lack of interest. In the mid 1980s and early 1990s I would join and quit the Quality Paper Back Book club on a regular basis. I would pay the three dollars for three books plus shipping and handling, buy one more book and my commitment would be terminated by a note saying “no more”. One of the books I picked up was called Glitz.

Glitz was an Elmore Leonard book and Elmore was hot at that time. Having recently seen Get Shorty again I decided maybe I should check out the source material that is something Leonard had written. Put most basically I was in need of mental floss. My mental floss is mindless reading filled with action and unambiguously good and bad characters; maybe some sex or sexual innuendo should be thrown in. Reading mental floss is a great deal like watching a Jason Bourne movie it only takes two or three hours more. Pulp novels move quickly.

Starting back into the book I realized why I had put it down. Set in Puerto Rico the first chapter makes it seem like the novel will be a Caribbean pot boiler. At the time I got the book I had no interest in such a tale. Miami Vice and its progeny had over-saturated the airwaves with tales of South Florida and the islands. This time because of my desire to just cleanse my brain of reality based thoughts I read on. To my surprise the book rapidly shifted to the stretch of the Jersey coast I know best, that is from Somers Point to Atlantic City. As the setting relocate I felt like I was taking a piece of chocolate out a tin on someone’s desk expecting a Milky Way knock off and finding out I was munching on a dark Ghirardelli chocolate with walnuts inside.

Reading about places like the Black Horse Pike and Shore Memorial Hospital made me chuckle. It was an unexpected trip back to the homeland. I could remember Story Book Gardens was on the Black Horse somewhere and Shore Memorial was where you went when you were banged up down at the beach. In the end I think I spent three evenings with the story, two sitting in my backyard hammock this warm October. It was just what I needed.

The fact that the tale was set in the 1980s reminded me of why I write this blog. A Space True and North exists to capture the stories of the places I have been and the things I have seen. Having read Glitz I am reminded more stories need to be told. I am really going to try and keep this blog current at least for the next few months.

With a Hat and Hair From Bob Dylan Circa 1977

2010-08-09T11:49:00.004-04:00

We were riding in the car the other day. This is not unusual we run around a great deal on the weekends. We run to the Farmer’s Market. We run to the recycling center. We run to the mega mart. We run to the pool. We run to pick up and drop off children. Sometimes it feels like we never stop running.

Back before the home computer died I used an older version of Roxio on it to create a ton of mix discs. They have names like the History of Rock #1, #2, #3. Some are simply called Road Tunes. Often if there is a beloved disc in the home collection it will get copied so that a.) The CD reader in the car will display the song titles and b.) So the master disc will not get dinged and thus become unplayable.

Saturday we were riding the other day with Primus in the back seat solo. Secundus was still at camp. Bopping down the road to a mix disc the opening strains of the song linked below came on. Without hearing more than the opening seed shakers at the start of the studio version he said “It’s Aztec Two Step-Dean Moriarity.” He then commenced to sing the whole song start to finish. When he knows the words he sings mostly in tune and has a pleasant voice.

It made me happy. At least part of the warm feeling was that he didn’t reject all of “my music”. Some of it was that he felt free enough in the confines of our car to sing along. Our rule is as long as you aren't being silly you can sing the song on the radio/CD player, period. This requires self editing for those Green Day songs.

I don’t know which of my children will be the next Dean Moriarity but I have no doubt that both have some of the basic traits.

Reasons to Like Lansing

2010-08-09T11:45:00.002-04:00

When I was a child in South Jersey we stopped and shopped at roadside vegetable stands. This is were our produce came from, the local farms selling a part of there crops direct on routes so far off the beaten track and to not even qualify as blue routes. Lots of people had good sized gardens too. I am not saying it was healthier because there were lots of chemicals used on that stuff. Hey though, it was fresher and it had real flavors unlike the rubber ball tomatoes you find in stores today.

In the area where I live I have never noticed roadside stands to be as common as they were "back home". Up in cherry country there are some. Just outside of Elk Rapids there a couple stands that I really like. But these are the exception not the norm.

Over the years when I have wanted fresh produce I found myself shopping at the Lansing City Market. In a long standing building some years the market looked lively. Some years not so much. Over the past two years the market has moved. The space is smaller but for some reason it seems more vibrant. With a relocation to a new space the place seems to just be more inviting. If you haven't made the trip yet and if you are local, go do it.

Yup, the Lansing Market is another reason to like Lansing

The Portable Nietzche

2010-08-09T11:42:00.001-04:00

Over the weekend I went into a book store. While there I found a dog eared copy of The Portable Nietzsche. It only took about half a page of reading and I had to buy it. In a letter to his sister he started talking about his search for truth. In essence the thing that caught me and sold me on the book was this quote. "Do we after all seek rest, peace and pleasure in our inquiries? No only truth, even if it be the most abhorrent and ugly."

My hope is that there is beauty and peace at the end of the search. But we must not be deterred if the answers point elsewhere. If we do not search ferociously and critically for truth we might as well take up the opium pipe.

From the No Good Deed Goes Unpunished File (or When did my Life Become a Seinfeld Episode?)

2010-08-07T14:09:00.001-04:00

This was written yesterday. Sorry I took so long in posting it.

To quote Earl karma is a bitch.

Yesterday was my wife Francie's birthday. In the regard of duly noting the event I am a schmuck. While I did take her out to dinner I did not buy her flowers. Karma I tell you.

Like the cheap bastard I am I tried to pick up a bouquet at Sam's Club. There we were picking up some toilet paper the night before her birthday. I grabbed one of those cellophane wrapped bunches up by the check out. Romantic aren't I? No go. The “impulse” purchase was vetoed by Francie due to a perceived wilt factor.

On Thursday her actual birthday I tried to set up an ad hoc quick birthday dinner. Alas I couldn't find most of our friends. Michigan must be the new France. Nobody working in August and thus no one remains in town. Wait, no Michigan is the new dust bowl. No one is working at all ever because there is no way to make a living here. Everyone seems to be leaving to find work elsewhere. In Newfoundland they talk of having to go “away” for work. Sure seems like we’re living on a new version of the rock here. In the end I did find one wonderful person to join us.

Okay enough of the grim. When I got home last night, Thursday night, my son had taken in some flowers. These from him comments were due and owing to one of our neighbors. The flowers were unwrapped, no cellophane, no tissue paper, nada. A colorful array of red and white with some purple stuff and baby's breath they were delivered sans protection, what is that about? Our neighbors were apparently not home and thus there was a problem due to the continued heat here in the northern tier. In order to keep the small but elegant bouquet from wilting and conveying something less than joy to the recipient the flower delivery person knocked on our door and asked our son to hold the flowers for the neighbor. Primus agreed.

Looking at the flowers when I got home made me feel bad. I had not come through with the floral affirmation of love for my wife on her special day. Schmuck. Double Schmuck. I wanted this thorn in my side gone.

Well I did not get the opportunity to drop off the flowers right then. As soon as I got home Francie, Primus and I had to run to the high school to sign up for the chance for Primus try out for the hockey team. Try outs will not happen until November but all sports sign up is now to accommodate the only real sport that matters, football. We dashed to the school, we did the signing and then we rushed home. When we got home our friend was already there and any chance to deliver the flowers was gone. Jumping in our friend's car, just in case the birthday girl wanted to have a dinner drink, we headed out. Designated drivers are wonderful people.

Dinner was good. We had Italian at Bravo. The conversation was first-rate and the food full of flavor. However for all it highfaluting airs Bravo did not have the right dessert for this birthday celebration. We had to set out elsewhere to find....creme brulee. All in all last night shifting between several restaurants we shot three hours seeking and eating celebratory food. All in all the experience was wonderful. Francie seemed to really like the crème brulee we eventually found.

It was 9:30 when we got home. The flowers were glaring at me with their air of evil accusation. Francie and Primus said I had better deliver the flowers to our neighbor Kim.

Here is where the tricky part comes in. We live in the middle of a block and we have neighbors on both sides. The two couples who are quite different, but who are both are quite nice bear the exact same names. Both couples first names are John and Kim. That is right we have John and Kim to the right and John and Kim to the left. I asked Primus or rather he may have told me the flowers were for Kim of John and Kim to the right side of the house (henceforth John and Kim-right).

Dutifully I carried the flowers to the home of John and Kim-right feeling somewhat ashamed I had not done so earlier. (And then there was the whole schmuck thing going on in my head because I had not given my wife flowers-but I am not going to obsess on that anymore.) Hey the bouquet might be late but it was not wilted. I knocked. No answer. I knocked again and John-right came to the door. Taking the flowers from as I muttered something like,” these came today for your wife and you weren't home...” John-right smiled. Me, I dashed off. At least the floral irritant to my conscience was out of my life.

But no!

It was a beautiful day today temperature wise so I left the office early. After mucking about a bit in East Lansing I found myself in Mackerel Sky a wonderful gallery of artfully crafted articles for everyday life. To my non-Michigan friends here is the link, check it out. It is a great store and Tom and Linda are great people. http://www.mackerelsky.com/html_files/about_us.html Linda as usual was giving me guff when I came into the store. Linda is my source of inspiration for gifts when time is tight. Mackerel Sky is open until 3 p.m., on Christmas Eve. I have availed myself of its services and wares dashing in as late as 2:50 p.m., on December 24. It would emphasize how pathetic I am to admit I have done this on more than one occasion.

Anyway I had just gotten into the store and my cell phone rings. Francie was calling to tell me that she had just gotten an e-mail from Kim-left asking if we had gotten flowers for her yesterday. In a somewhat concerned voice Francie inquired if I had checked the address on the flowers before I had delivered them. Sensing that I had no problem here I said no, you told me they were for Kim-right. Ah not to be touched with guilt on this Francie said no, “Primus told you it was for Kim-right”. She again inquired if I had checked the address. A mere 10 seconds had passed and even if it had been more the answer would still have been no. I was simply doing what I was told. Then came the trump card, “You know your son can be a little distracted at times. It is part of who he is.”

Have you ever seen Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) die in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Here it is. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giFoMYuy5b0 Owww, Ouch. Uhhhwwuh. Yeah the delivery of the flowers to the wrong address was on my head and I was feeling it. Francie at this point indicated she was deferring a few minutes before contacting Kim-left back. The delay was to allow me a way to figure out how to sort “my error” out. Yeah me!!!! Schmuck. This would never have happened had I sent my wife roses using ProFlowers. Really, I mean I am sure of this fact.

Dejected I hung up the phone and talked to the staff at Mackerel Sky. They were uniform in their agreement I was living a scene out of Larry David's life. Yup, they also indicated that this was really not my problem and perhaps I should contact the florist to set up a “make good” delivery. The communal logic was that it was the florist's error for the poor (really the absent) packaging and for leaving the flowers with my son. My actions were merely part of an inadvertent good natured bungle and retrieving the now day old flowers would not really be making the situation right.

As I left the store and proceeded to walk home the contacting the florist idea made sense. Using my iphone I looked up the number of the florist. It was local. With a local business involved telling them about the situation and setting up a “make good” delivery might be the best resolution. Wrong O Boyo.

When I tapped the screen and the number dialed I ended up being routed to a call center in Texas. The connection on the line was terrible. As I walked and talked I did eventually after repeated attempts convey the gist of the information to the clerk in Dallas or wherever she was. As I listened to the clerk I noted that her accent was so strong I found myself waiting for her to tell me to kiss off with Chief Brenda Lee Johnson's classic signature southern drawl infused line “Have a nice day” Click.

In the end the clerk did not tell me to kiss off and she indicated she would try and make arrangements for another drop off. To do this she needed a number for phone confirmation of delivery. She asked if I had Kim-left's number.

Looking in my cell directory I did not have Kim-left's number but I did have John-left's cell number. Giving her this number I chuckled to myself. It was clear to me that John-left wouldn't know what was going on when he got the call from the florist. Given what had happened this seemed par for the course. But at least I was doing the right thing.
Ah but the tale is not over yet.

As I walked down my street I saw the door to John and Kim-right's house open. I thought to myself ‘well I can at least explain what happened and in case the florist does not make good on the “make good” I can get the day old flowers and take them over to Kim left’. I knocked. I knocked again.

John-right eventually appeared. I started out with an “I have to apologize but I think I dropped off flowers to your wife last night that belonged to the other Kim.” At that point Kim-right came out of the hall going “Oh no, those were my flowers. They were a thank you from a former student”. I then explained that this state of facts was very weird. I went into how Francie had gotten a call from Kim-left indicating she that she thought we were holding some flowers for her. How odd was it I asked that we would have two deliveries of flowers to our house at the same time, one of which we could not account for.

At this point Kim-right said “Oh that must be my fault.” She then went on to explain that when she got home yesterday, after my group had gone looking for Italian food, see found a note saying something about there being flowers for Kim at 410 Ourstreet (not the real street name). Kim-right continued that her home had a lower number and so she assumed there must be flowers for Kim-left. As a result she then put the note on Kim-left's door. At this point I interjected that I lived at 410 Ourstreet and what the note had meant was that flowers were left for Kim at 410 Ourstreet not for Kim of 410 Ourstreet.

Giggles all around. Schmuck. Schmuck. Schmuck.

I decided that I would not call the florist back. I decided I would not call John-left back. What was the downside here? If the “make good” got delivered John and Kim-left get some joy (joy my wife did not get) by the delivery of beautiful flowers. Schmuck.

Geometry

2010-08-05T12:14:00.003-04:00

The light falls in odd ways on the modern buildings we create. Using small pieces of granite and large pieces of darkened glass we make monuments to modernism. Sometimes I wonder if anyone still really tries to act upon the maxim of letting form follow function.

On an early summer morning the light hits the window of the House Office Building for the State of Michigan. Stand in the right position and you see a geometry of light that playing out along the concrete sidewalk. Nothing grand but waiting to cross a street the gently differentiated rays can be a mild diversion. Today I snapped a shot of the web of light and put it up above. Maybe the fact that this dance of light caught my attention enough to snap a picture shows a little of how my mind works that this game of light caught my eye.

Over the past week I have been working on a piece about working in a vegetable packing house when I was 14. The work lasted only a month or two but it really opened my eyes up to the layers of this world. The hours I spent were key in defining what I wanted in life, that is to be doing something other than manual labor and to be somewhere other than New Jersey I want to get the piece right.

Writing this story is both hard and easy. I remember splintered bits and pieces with great, great clarity. But other parts are large soft fluffy clouds of feeling that I just can’t get my mind around so as to conjure words to capture what I want to say. I wrote a couple of pages of narrative and then stopped. Right now I am just writing vignettes about people and things associated with the place. In a few more days I will go back and try and integrate everything into a whole. We will see what happens.

Enjoy the geometry of daybreak.

Musical Interlude

2010-08-01T09:30:00.001-04:00

I like Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service. Here is a link to a live concert recording of Ben Gibbard the lead singer for each of these bands. I liked the cover of the Donovan song at the start and Silhouettes a little later on.

http://www.archive.org/details/bengibbard2007-05-09.flac16

Dogs and the Horizon

2010-07-29T12:51:00.002-04:00

Love, pain, watchfulness, fear, despair, exhilaration, exhalation and wonder; these are the emotions of a parent. A single minute, no, a mere fleeting moment can run you through the whirling wheel that evokes each of these emotional states. The cascade happens regularly as you stand watching your child. You understand what he is feeling but you also understand so many things that he doesn’t yet. Still no matter how much every piece of your being wants to intercede and help make every situation work out well you have to let him live his life. A parent prays a great deal. Entreaties are made no matter whether you believe in God or nature. You pray earnestly that if your child should fall that the pain will be bearable.

Primus is my oldest son. He is a moose of a boy. His music camp is over. Both the double bass and the moose boy are squeezed into a tiny Prius for the trip home. After a week of food largely ignored because every morsel has been drenched in mayonnaise and other unappealing binding agents, the moose is ready to forage. As we peruse the menu at this drive-in, this last vestige of 1950s American car culture, he has made his choice. Now he looks out the other window away from the menu board. Suddenly smiling. Primus yells a loud greeting. He has just seen a camp cabin mate walk by our car. The shout out was absolutely nullified by the closed car window. Sitting at the drive in carefully considering this order of dogs and fries the air conditioning is on and the window is up. Hot summer this one.

Realizing how special a moment this is when he says “I have to go over to say hi to Sam”, Mom and I say in unison “Go”. With that Primus pushes the door open and strolls ‘aw shucks’ hands in pocket to where the boy in the other blue camp uniform is eating hot dogs with his family. We watch as drawing close Primus leans back against a wall and starts talking and gesturing in a warm and friendly way. The boy's posture mirrors James Dean's in Rebel Without a Cause. In 14 years of life this was a first.

Aspergers defines who my son is. Sometimes sadly it also defines how people perceive him. Aspergers makes getting to know him difficult and challenging. But it also makes him interesting, if you take the time to make real contact. Primus comes at the world in his own way and he doesn't seem to care a whit about what you think. In some ways that is a true thing and a meaningful statement, but in others it is not. Primus wants to be liked but not necessarily on the terms and in the ways social convention delineate.

In the past year Primus’ teachers have told us that he is trying to make social connections. They say he is working hard to find ways to respond to social cues. He wants to act in ways that are at least consistent with the behaviors of other kids he goes to school with. Primus clearly wants to be part of the world of people. It is by his choice that he works to be on a sport’s team. But the hidden cues in our faces confound him. The unspoken rules are unknown to him. Vocal tones don’t carry clear meaning to him. Sorting these things just doesn’t come naturally.

But I must turn back to the incident at Dog and Suds with the boys in the blue shirts. The blue shirts are part of the uniform at the Blue Lake Fine Arts camp. The folks at Blue Lake must be different. This is the third year Primus has been and each time he goes we find something new and positive that gives us optimism.

The first year we were overjoyed when the kids after the final concert were saying things like, "Primus you are coming back next year aren't you?" Nobody had ever invited him back for an event unless they were forced to, or needed to for one reason or another. The comments in that informal moment backstage were different, it was clear these boys liked him.

Year two it was the banter around the cabin as he was packing to go. Again the kids seemed to genuinely care about Primus and what was up with him and his plans for the rest of the summer. The counselors that year told us how much they had enjoyed him. They made it clear that it really wasn't an issue that he had Aspergers and that he was a good kid.

Leaving the car to go seek out someone else to talk was watershed moment. Before our wide open eyes Primus instigated an outreach to another person because he liked them and because he wanted to keep a contact with them. Wow. My wife and I stared at each other as he opened the door and walked down the sidewalk. It was a moment we had wanted for so long. Reaching a point where social reciprocity was wanted is something.

Trust me the world didn't not turn upside down but it was a start. When we got home the first thing out of his mouth to his brother Secundus was "Be quiet you." But the command was warm, not just barked out in routine fashion.

Maybe it is just the maturing process. On the way to the car after his performance he carried his own instrument. About halfway up the path to the car I offered to carry it the rest of the way and he readily agreed. But he made the effort to carry the heavy instrument at least for the first part of the way. Taking responsibility was a change.

When we talked in the car on the ride home he tried to make conversation. The answers weren't much different than they usually are. What was the funniest thing that happened? I dunno. What did you enjoy most? I dunno. Did you have fun? Yes. I assume that some of this is just pure teenager. However I know that some of it is pure Aspergers. He doesn't rank emotional experiences the way I do. It just doesn't happen like that.

Sitting at Dog and Suds I looked out at the lake. The sky was blue and the air temperature was as comfortable as it had been in weeks. A tray of death dogs and greasy burgers and onion rings had arrived. The smell of such food is wonderful. The moment was perfect. Primus was happy and connected. I could have cried. Some days are better than others. Blue skies do come. Success can be attained. I felt so good that I went home and cleaned the garage. Sweating I picked through years o f accumulated crap. The work was hard I was motivated. It had a day to remember. This was worth much more than the price of admission to music camp.

Words and Voices

2010-07-24T00:55:00.000-04:00

My life is words. Spoken aloud and spoken not loud it seems my words carry a distance that is so very far. Language comes easy for me and my words are plentiful. Chuckling here I muse that many probably think my words are far too plentiful. Because of the ease I feel with language I may not think about what I say as much as I should. In reality more often than not I do not fully think before I speak.

When you have spoken out loud something that you are at the moment thinking and have thought on for a long time, people gain an insight into the essence of who you are. If you say the thought you have been nurturing too hastily others may not see what really is inside of you. Or maybe the problem is they see too well what is in you because the words carry out more of what we keep inside than was planned.

One would think that having let an idea gestate for a while in the back of your mind would season it. One would think that ruminating over the meaning of something you have seen or come to a conclusion about would refine the way it gets presented to your audience. It just isn't so.

We oft forget that what made us who we are did not make everyone else who they are. At best we are making guesses about the scope of common experience that we share with others. So many times we find that our guesses are just that and nothing more.

There should be no surprise in finding out that my words and your words, my world and your world are like that faux old timey picture of the two trains meeting six feet off center. Still I am surprised when my words do not convey what I mean.

At times I wish there were some common source like the tree in Avatar that we could all plug into. Sometimes I wish that the barrier that exists between myself and other people would just disappear for a moment and that I could be in their skin and they in mine with our minds sharing what we know to be true, what we have experienced and through that process reconciling and advancing on to a better form of understanding and human communion.

The hippies and hipsters of the 1960s wanted to do this with LSD. They failed. Monks have wanted to do it with celibacy and libertines have wanted to accomplish it with wanton copulation. They both failed and continue to fail. Churches want us to do this through their paths, their ways of redemption. If any of these ways was the one, including Paganism, Buddhism, Christianity, Tao ad infinitum why do we still fight religious wars, crusades and jihads?

I don't have an answer to my ultimate question, how do we move beyond the limitations of language. Living with an open heart is fine, but somehow you have to communicate what your idea of good is. Words seem to be the only choice available. I guess I will just strive for greater precision in my words.

A Sunday Should be Well Spent

2010-07-22T19:28:00.003-04:00

Lazy Sunday brings with it a vibrant feeling of life when it comes. In a sunlit room with wood floors I make time to read Prince Valiant.

Reading the old fashioned strip is not an obligation but rather a habit. I read Prince Valiant when I was young and thought things like, “Geez this is slow and boring” and “When will this every get to some action”. Now I savor the fact that I only have to read the story once a week and I am current.

By saying I “make time to read Prince Valiant" I mean I have the opportunity, the down moment in which to waste my time in an idle pleasure. Our world we live in is too fast. We have lost any sense that we can ever rest. Culturally we went from to hand to mouth existence to a time of leisure society in less than a century. In less that three decades we are now back at fighting for our day's morsels.

Still I think we need to carve out downtime. Rest beyond sleep is important.

The pictures are from a Sunday afternoon spent wandering about a county park on Vancouver Island. I think the shot of my youngest all those many years ago is a thing of beauty.

It was different back then

2010-07-21T19:19:00.005-04:00

I am cleaning up an old computer and this is what I found in the images. Forgive me if I posted it before. Yeah times were different back then. Looking at the typing I think it wouldn't have taken much to turn me into a Unibomber clone.

The Two Stimulants that are Always Visible

2010-07-21T12:07:00.003-04:00

The motivation for the posting of the Joni Mitchell song, the Three Great Stimulants was a walk in the alleyway behind my office. As I was departing for a lunch one day I noticed an odd bit of urban art. The piece had clearly been arranged by someone.

My mind saw this as an installation by one or more addicts in a private urban space. I snapped a picture to memorize the effort. The coffee cups were all precisely placed at an angle save one. The empty cigarette pack also seemed to be staged with care so as to complete this work comprised of lost/discarded materials. My mind gave it a title, Stimulants in Iron before Brick.

The only things missing from this shot are intoxicants and sex. Putting a woman in a slit skirt with a mostly empty microbrew bottle in her hand might be the answer to that. It would resolve the lack of completion that I see in this work. Maybe I will try and stage that and post the image.

Anyhow once the stimulants thing got in my head I started humming the Mitchell tune.

Faces

2010-07-21T12:06:00.002-04:00

Sometimes you see a face and just accept the emotion being conveyed as being open. Perhaps the person you gaze has caught is smiling. It may come from the twitch of a muscle near the mouth. Perhaps a bone in the cheek flexed.

A face can tell us so much. The arch of the eyebrow, the presence of “laugh” lines, these are the kind of nuances of facial features conveying who a person really is. Well it conveys this information to me and to other people of my ilk, neurotypicals. Clearly and without question my son doesn’t see these things; nor will he ever. His brain has been proven empirically per a series of MRI scans to be formed in a way that is not set up to read these cues. It is what it is.

For me reading a face isn’t about the complexion as much as it is the eyes and the mouth. Oh the complexion can tell you if the person has worked hard and thus has been weathered. Stress or the elements are a couple of causes for the aging of skin. My father’s face worked outside and worked with stressful situations. His face was as worn as an old leather jacket supple and wrinkled. His was an expressive face. The skin told you what he did. However the mischievousness or anger or confusion that is what you had to read in the eyes and the laugh lines. A complexion can also tell you if a person has sought refuge in a bottle or some other intoxicant. But skin tone can’t tell you what somebody is really all about.

For years now I have seen the above face behind the counter at the coffee shop I haunt. The image does not do her justice. It does not show the open joy she exudes in daily conversation. It does not show the love of life and the lust for knowledge she ebulliently exudes. What it does show is another human who can use her face as a canvas to tell us so much more about who and what she is.

The Three Great Stimulants

2010-07-20T20:22:00.003-04:00

I don't know if I would call this one of Joni Mitchell's great lost songs. I like it. The sentiment seems true when I think about it. Also how many songs can you name that use the word artifice?

Here are the lyrics in case you want to peruse them.

I picked the morning paper off the floor
It was full of other people's little wars
Wouldn't they like their peace?
Don't we get bored?
And we call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

No tanks have ever rumbled through these streets
And the drone of planes at night has never frightened me
I keep the hours and the company that I please
And we call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

Oh and deep in the night
Our appetites find us
Release us and bind us
Deep in the night
While madmen sit up building bombs
And making laws and bars
They'd like to slam free choice behind us

I saw a little lawyer on the tube
He said, "It's so easy now, anyone can sue."
"Let me show you how your petty aggravations can profit you!"
Call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

Oh and deep in the night
Appetites find us
Release us and blind us
Deep in the night
While madmen sit up building bombs
And making laws and bars
They're gonna slam free choice behind us

Last night I dreamed I saw the planet flicker
Great forests fell like buffalo
Everything got sicker
And to the bitter end
Big business bickered
And they call for the three great stimulants
Of the exhausted ones
Artifice, brutality and innocence
Artifice and innocence

Oh these times, these times
Oh these changing times
Change in the heart of all mankind
Oh these troubled times

Spinoza

2010-07-20T12:30:00.003-04:00

Our apprehension of truth can’t be passive at all, but active, a function of the exercise of reason-the same reason that exists in all humankind. Goldstein, Rebecca. Betraying Spinoza. New York: Schocken Books, 2006, p 208

A walk at lunch on a gray day passes quickly. Time spent this way gives a moment to reflect. Walking down the streets of a small city is a different walk than the one in the mountains I described recently. On the misty evening of the earlier walk I was seeking relief. Today when I walk at lunch I am seeking a moment to think.

Primarily when I have been striding abut today I am thinking about what Baruch Spinoza endured in his search for the truth. Being driven from his community of Amsterdam Jews, that is the entirety of the world he had known until his excommunication, could not have been easy. Today nobody is expelled forever from society except for sex offenders. Now even murderers can be rehabilitated. In our 21st century world you can challenge the existence of God and humankind in most places will not kill you.

Having been ordered to sever his ties with the Jewish community, and they having been demanded by the religious authorities to cut all time with him, Spinoza had to move into a more rural area. It was a place where he was isolated from the day to day world. He was left alone with his ideas. Alone isn’t quite right he had correspondence with persons engaged in similar pursuits, but some of these were clearly designed to trap him in acknowledging one heresy or another. Some seem to have been been sent with the hope he would say something in response with which he could be prosecuted. He entered a world where all of Christendom was suspicious of anyone other than the true believes; it could not have been easy.

I liked the above quote. In some ways it is my mantra. The search for truth must always be foremost in how we carry on in our lives. To probe for truth and challenge assumptions allows us to grow. However with growth comes pain. Spinoza really was an extraordinary being.

A Tree Resolves it All

2010-07-19T22:32:00.002-04:00

Sometimes you just need a walk. Putting your feet into motion feels good when your world is too intense and too in your face and when you just need to be anywhere but where you are.

On vacation recently I hit one of those moments. No single thing took me there; no single person brought me to that point. It was the accretion of a number of things that caked together made me want to go.

Let’s consider the situation. Sitting in a garage some 60 miles away was my car. As noble a beast as the Prius it for some reason it had started smoking on the long decline into Cherokee. Social dynamics on the child front were bad. The kids had been at each other in the back of my sister in law’s van for the better part of the day. We had been visiting historic sites and the Gameboys were mandated to be off. Lacking distraction teen fuses were short. Me I was just sweaty and tired.

Arriving back at the condo, I couldn’t find any reading material that would work to divert my mind. The TV did not work well and I really didn’t want to play cards. Lacking any other options I decided to take a walk. On the way out of the condo I noted our camera was sitting on the table. Grabbing it I headed out.

Despite the humidity the walk was exactly what I needed. As I headed down the hill I noticed a cloud rolling over the next hill/mountain. Stopping about halfway down a pretty steep incline I noticed how majestic the mist coming down over the green lush trees was. Looking up I spotted a single tree standing erect and very strong against the fading light. There was no hidden in the tree it was just beautiful to me. I took a couple shots of that pine and my mind cleared.

A walk on a country road took me out to a solitary tree. A solitary tree took me to a space beyond all the hubbub of the day. It grounded me and I was okay. Go take a walk.