From lesson 13:
Listen to this conversation between a tourist and a shopkeeper. Ascolta questa conversazione tra un turista e un bottegaio.
Turista: Quanto le devo? (How much do I owe you?)
Bottegiao: Quanto hai? (How much do you have?)
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Wintery Mix
When I was a kid, this was one of my favorite jokes.
Man on phone: Is this the weatherman?
Weatherman: Yes, it is.
Irate Man: I just wanted you to know that I just shoveled two feet of partly cloudy off my porch!
I've always been interested in weather prediction. Ever since the Kalamazoo TV station hired a meteorologist instead of a weatherman, I've been captivated by those big patterns on the map, and the ways that the Hs and Ls and curved bumpy lines could pretty well tell you what was going to happen tomorrow and the next day. And now, after forty years of Al Roker and The Weather Channel and wunderground.com, we've all become some moderate connoisseurs of tropical lows and the jet stream.
And like any map, weather maps can be pretty, too.
So, as I was getting ready to do the weekly road trip from home to not home, I looked (as I always do) at Weather Underground and listened to NPR. They both called for some combination of rain, snow, and ice pellets. The Vermont Public Radio forecaster specifically called for "a wintery mix," another one of those terms I never heard of even though I grew up in a wintery place.
Well, to paraphrase a certain grade school joke, I just drove through 188 miles of wintery mix. The various forms of computerized traction control in Habanero were all employed at some moment or another, from driving up Spruce Knob Road to retrieve the mousetrap I'd left this morning (long story...) to the long climb past the ski resorts at Killington to the very-not-plowed I-89 across New Hampshire. Periodically, someone would pass me, expressing a desire to maintain the posted speed limit, but for the most part, my compatriots and I were all content to travel at 43 miles per hour on the Interstate and considerably less through the back woods of eastern Vermont.
I have a standard set of stops along my way, based on my periodic need to take on or leave behind some tea. I stop at the Maplefield's Market in Woodstock VT; at Simon's Mobil in Enfield NH; and at the New Hampshire Rest Stop/State Liquor Store near Hooksett NH. The guy at the Dunkin Donuts at Simon's Mobil now automatically gets me a large iced tea, black no lemon, while I'm using the rest room; I guess that makes me a regular. The woman who runs the gas station store counter was mopping slush off the floor while wearing a Santa hat with "Bah Humbug!" in green glitter across the white fur band.
This marks the first driving snow of the year. Which also means the first time walking around the car and kicking all the mudguards to knock the slush out of the wheelwells, the first time using the rear window defroster, the first time getting the snow brush out of the trunk. Seasonal rituals.
We've started to learn the early parts of the winter rituals in the house, too. How to bank the fire so we can light it quickly the next morning; how much wood to bring in from the garage; where the cats will sit to warm themselves. We'll soon figure out when to call our friend to plow the drive; where to shovel and where to use the snowblower; which windows get packed in with snow and which are blown clear by the wind.
The house makes a little more noise in cold weather — not merely because the furnace and the pellet stove auger and the water heater run more often, but because the wood frame shrinks a little when there's no moisture in the air, and everything creaks just a bit. Of course, I make a little more noise in the winter too, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
Man on phone: Is this the weatherman?
Weatherman: Yes, it is.
Irate Man: I just wanted you to know that I just shoveled two feet of partly cloudy off my porch!
I've always been interested in weather prediction. Ever since the Kalamazoo TV station hired a meteorologist instead of a weatherman, I've been captivated by those big patterns on the map, and the ways that the Hs and Ls and curved bumpy lines could pretty well tell you what was going to happen tomorrow and the next day. And now, after forty years of Al Roker and The Weather Channel and wunderground.com, we've all become some moderate connoisseurs of tropical lows and the jet stream.
And like any map, weather maps can be pretty, too.
So, as I was getting ready to do the weekly road trip from home to not home, I looked (as I always do) at Weather Underground and listened to NPR. They both called for some combination of rain, snow, and ice pellets. The Vermont Public Radio forecaster specifically called for "a wintery mix," another one of those terms I never heard of even though I grew up in a wintery place.
Well, to paraphrase a certain grade school joke, I just drove through 188 miles of wintery mix. The various forms of computerized traction control in Habanero were all employed at some moment or another, from driving up Spruce Knob Road to retrieve the mousetrap I'd left this morning (long story...) to the long climb past the ski resorts at Killington to the very-not-plowed I-89 across New Hampshire. Periodically, someone would pass me, expressing a desire to maintain the posted speed limit, but for the most part, my compatriots and I were all content to travel at 43 miles per hour on the Interstate and considerably less through the back woods of eastern Vermont.
I have a standard set of stops along my way, based on my periodic need to take on or leave behind some tea. I stop at the Maplefield's Market in Woodstock VT; at Simon's Mobil in Enfield NH; and at the New Hampshire Rest Stop/State Liquor Store near Hooksett NH. The guy at the Dunkin Donuts at Simon's Mobil now automatically gets me a large iced tea, black no lemon, while I'm using the rest room; I guess that makes me a regular. The woman who runs the gas station store counter was mopping slush off the floor while wearing a Santa hat with "Bah Humbug!" in green glitter across the white fur band.
This marks the first driving snow of the year. Which also means the first time walking around the car and kicking all the mudguards to knock the slush out of the wheelwells, the first time using the rear window defroster, the first time getting the snow brush out of the trunk. Seasonal rituals.
We've started to learn the early parts of the winter rituals in the house, too. How to bank the fire so we can light it quickly the next morning; how much wood to bring in from the garage; where the cats will sit to warm themselves. We'll soon figure out when to call our friend to plow the drive; where to shovel and where to use the snowblower; which windows get packed in with snow and which are blown clear by the wind.
The house makes a little more noise in cold weather — not merely because the furnace and the pellet stove auger and the water heater run more often, but because the wood frame shrinks a little when there's no moisture in the air, and everything creaks just a bit. Of course, I make a little more noise in the winter too, so I shouldn't be too surprised.
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Lesson Nine – A Cautionary Tale
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know I can be a tad heavy at times, so I thought I'd share a moment of shared hysteria as H and I were returning from the house of some friends.
We are (sort of) at tape 9 in the Pimsleur Italian 1 series of CD's...in preparation for our trip to Venice. Most of it is pretty rote: a phrase, the enunciation of syllables starting at the end of the word, and then repetition two or three times. As you advance, you have to come up with the phrase itself; the speaker repairs the botched effort you have made, and there is more repetition. We have focused on eating and drinking, and the words for "when" (quando), "what" (che chosa), where (dove), want (vuole), would like (vorrei), understand (capisco), speak (parla), and an assortment of locational words for here (qui), there (li) and a few others. (Please note that my spelling may be way off since I am only hearing these words.
So CD#9 launched us off on telling time with numbers thrown in seemingly at random: one (una), two (due), eight (otto) and nine (nove). But as the lesson progressed it became clear that there was a method to this, and all of a sudden we were in the middle of high drama....
Io capisco l'Italiano un po adesso, e lei? Sono le nove e vorrei biere del vino adesso. State bene. Buona Notte.
We are (sort of) at tape 9 in the Pimsleur Italian 1 series of CD's...in preparation for our trip to Venice. Most of it is pretty rote: a phrase, the enunciation of syllables starting at the end of the word, and then repetition two or three times. As you advance, you have to come up with the phrase itself; the speaker repairs the botched effort you have made, and there is more repetition. We have focused on eating and drinking, and the words for "when" (quando), "what" (che chosa), where (dove), want (vuole), would like (vorrei), understand (capisco), speak (parla), and an assortment of locational words for here (qui), there (li) and a few others. (Please note that my spelling may be way off since I am only hearing these words.
So CD#9 launched us off on telling time with numbers thrown in seemingly at random: one (una), two (due), eight (otto) and nine (nove). But as the lesson progressed it became clear that there was a method to this, and all of a sudden we were in the middle of high drama....
Say 'one oclock': l'una[Huh? I thought we were telling time! We already have some history, by the way, with Marcello being a bit forward with Alessandra. "I'd like to have lunch at your place" might be another of those instances...]
Say 'nine oclock': le nove
Say 'at two o'clock': alle due
Say 'I'd like to have lunch at your place': vorrei prantsare da lei
Ask 'at what time' : a che ora?[She hasn't agreed to anything, but Marcello is insistent...]
Ask 'at one o'clock or at two o'clock': all'una o alle due?
Say 'at eight o'clock': alle otto
Say 'at nine o'clock': alle nove
Ask 'at what time' : a che ora?
Say 'I don't know at what time': non so che ora
Say 'at two o'clock, agreed?': alle due, d'accordo?
Say 'alright, at my place': daccordo, da me[Why is it that there is something in the invitation to have lunch "at my place" that seems ...what...vaguely lascivious, leering... They didn't conflate time telling with sex when I was learning French in elementary school....Maybe there's something about Italian...]
Do you remember how to say at the hotel?: a l'hotel
Try to ask 'where is the hotel Via Veneto please?': Dove l'hotel Via Veneto, per favore?
Answer 'it's over there on Via Veneto street': e li a Via Veneto
How would you ask her if she would like to drink something with you?: Vorreibe biere qualcosa con me, signorina?[See what I mean? That rogue!]
How does she correct you and say 'not "Miss"; "Mrs."?': Non signorina; signora[Sorry, I understand you're an adult and you DID say you are married, but hey, what the hell. Would you like to drink something with me anyway? You are lovely and I am a male and this IS Italy after all...]
Say 'sorry ma'am': Scusi signora!
Say 'but would you like to drink something with me?' Ma vorreibe biere qualcosa con me?
How does she say 'no thank you'; non grazie; grazie; grazie; non grazie signore[Alessandra is polite, most often, even in the face of Marcello's assertive rather...tone-deaf, one note, insistent ways. But "No thank you. Not now, and not later" feels like a pretty closed case. Not to Marcello, though...]
Say 'not now': non adesso
And how does she say 'not later': e non piutardi
Ask 'but at one o'clock agreed?': all'una, daccordo?[You bet I will say it! No sono daccordo! Are you listening Marcello? ]
Listen to how she says: 'It's not all right with me': no sono daccordo
Now you say 'it's not all right with me': no sono daccordo.
She says, 'no thank you, I do not want to'; Use 'I' for emphasis." Io non voglio.[Okay, so in the last five lines, she's said, "No thanks, not now and not later. It's not alright with me. I DO NOT WANT TO!" And in Italian, there seems to be something of real intensity about using "want" instead of "would like" and adding the pronoun "I" or "you". Most mortal men would have slunk away by now. But the indefatigable Marcello presses forward.]
Say 'later? at eight o'clock?': piutardi? alle otto?[OK so you know that H and I have been finding every possible excuse to look at each other and say 'assolutamente non!' By this time, we're doubled over with laughter, barely able to drive the car home. This is the first time in nine lessons that Alessandra has stood up to Marcello's testosteronic insistence. I can hardly wait to get to Venice and try my turn at 'assolutamente non!' It will feel as though I am a native speaker!]
She says, 'no thank you': non grazie
Say 'or at nine o'clock?': o alle nove?
She answers "certainly not". Listen and repeat: assolutamente non!
Ask 'at what time'?: a che ora?[H has taken to adding "baby" at the end of these plaintive sentences. A che ora vorriebe biere qualcosa con me, bebe? Per favore, bebe?]
Tell me, at what time?: midica, a che ora?
At what time would you like to drink something with me?: A che ora vorreibe biere qualcosa con me?
Note that in the next few sentences the 'you' and 'I' are used for emphasis. How does the woman answer, ' I do not want to drink something with you?' Io non voglio biere qualcosa con lei.[Okay, baby, so you don't want to drink with me, I get it... but you want to eat with me at the restaurant, right? One o'clock or two o'clock, baby?]
Say, "Ah! I understand now.': Ah, Io capisco adesso. Io capisco.
'Va bene. Lei capisce adesso.'
Say, 'you don't want to drink something with me': Lei no vuole biere qualcosa con me.
'But you would like to eat something with me': Ma lei vorreibe mangiare qualcosa con me.
Add 'at the restaurant': al ristorante.
Ask 'at one o'clock or at two o'clock'?: All'una o alle due?
She says 'not at one o'clock and not at two o'clock: non all'una e non alle due.[How do you say "go girl" in Italian? When a woman says "I don't want to drink something with you, certainly not! Not at one o'clock or two o'clock, nor at eight o'clock or at nine o'clock!" she's probably not hoping that Marcello finally guesses at the right answer that she wants to go drinking with him at 10:45....]
She adds for good measure 'not at eight o'clock and not at nine o'clock': non alle otto e non alle nove.
Ask 'at what time': a che ora?
She says 'you don't understand, sir': Lei non capisce, signore[I can't wait for unit 10! If there are any Pimsleur-ites out there in blog land, please let me know whether unit 9 in Serbo-Croatian or Hindi or Tagalog is similar. I am assuming that only the Italian and French scripts get to wine and beer in the fourth lesson....but how universal is this??? Is there a hidden subtext to watch out for Italian men when on vacation? Assolutamente si! ]
Ask her 'what don't I understand'? Che cosa non capisco?
She answers: 'You don't understand Italian, sir'; Lei non capisce l'Italiano, signore.
This is the end of unit 9.
Io capisco l'Italiano un po adesso, e lei? Sono le nove e vorrei biere del vino adesso. State bene. Buona Notte.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Verklempt - redux
Herb challenged me to a second blog post in one day, so here it is... a short one....
There were three things in the Fire Island house that MATTERED in the big ways things matter to us: a Danish teak table that I planned to put in the office, and two vintage Danish chairs with woven seats. They were supposed to be placed here, beside the wood stove or with the table in the office. In Fire Island, all had been in two feet of standing water, but I had used some bleach on them to knock back the mold and unknowns. I would have brought them back with me, but the table was two inches too big for the back of my car, and the chairs would have fit without anything else, and there was all that "else" to bring here. So I hired this kid I sort of knew before he was born (political correctness aside I sort of knew his mother when she was pregnant). He has a reputation as a "good kid."
He agreed to truck the salvageables here but he seems somewhat....ADHD if you know what I mean.
I told him that while there were things I wanted, these three things were the crucial ones and there were blankets aplenty there for wrapping them....I told him that several times. I told that to his brother-in-law who brought the new truck without salt water in the engine block from Colorado. I told them that they could stay here over night if they needed to.
Do you know what's coming?
Can you tell?
Do you remember the post from June 30th about Midnight Movers here in VT?
Well, we got a "good news and bad news" call at about 12:30.
"We got to Bayshore (the mainland). That's the good news. But those two chairs you wanted? They blew off the truck on the bridge. A good carpenter can probably put the pieces back together. I forgot my truck mesh on the mainland and the wind got under the rope that was tying the leg to the truck. "
Let's see ...twenty minutes in and the chairs are blowing off the truck...And he has another 5 hours of highway driving.
Oh well... It's only stuff. And I know that. I even believe that. But there is something in that stuff that is the embodiment of those childhood routines. And of what we believe childhood to have been. Or at least what we were told childhood was. The family myth is a powerful drug. So I am a little addicted even though I have gone "cold turkey".
Anyway, it's 7:13. I spoke to the "kid" about an hour ago. His brother-in-law is still driving. First the "kid" said he was close. Then he said his brother-in-law was still in Massachusetts, about two hours away. "He'll be there around 8:30 but if that's too late for you, he can find a place to crash." Not a word one wants to hear under the circumstances.
Have I told you the story of the load of my belongings that were in storage when I returned to Vermont after 6 months living in Fire Island (!!)??? The guy who was trucking them 25 miles from the storage locker to the rental house stopped while crossing the train tracks, and the truck was hit by a train.
No I didn't make that up.
The most important lessons are the ones we have to learn a thousand times...
There were three things in the Fire Island house that MATTERED in the big ways things matter to us: a Danish teak table that I planned to put in the office, and two vintage Danish chairs with woven seats. They were supposed to be placed here, beside the wood stove or with the table in the office. In Fire Island, all had been in two feet of standing water, but I had used some bleach on them to knock back the mold and unknowns. I would have brought them back with me, but the table was two inches too big for the back of my car, and the chairs would have fit without anything else, and there was all that "else" to bring here. So I hired this kid I sort of knew before he was born (political correctness aside I sort of knew his mother when she was pregnant). He has a reputation as a "good kid."
He agreed to truck the salvageables here but he seems somewhat....ADHD if you know what I mean.
I told him that while there were things I wanted, these three things were the crucial ones and there were blankets aplenty there for wrapping them....I told him that several times. I told that to his brother-in-law who brought the new truck without salt water in the engine block from Colorado. I told them that they could stay here over night if they needed to.
Do you know what's coming?
Can you tell?
Do you remember the post from June 30th about Midnight Movers here in VT?
Well, we got a "good news and bad news" call at about 12:30.
"We got to Bayshore (the mainland). That's the good news. But those two chairs you wanted? They blew off the truck on the bridge. A good carpenter can probably put the pieces back together. I forgot my truck mesh on the mainland and the wind got under the rope that was tying the leg to the truck. "
Let's see ...twenty minutes in and the chairs are blowing off the truck...And he has another 5 hours of highway driving.
Oh well... It's only stuff. And I know that. I even believe that. But there is something in that stuff that is the embodiment of those childhood routines. And of what we believe childhood to have been. Or at least what we were told childhood was. The family myth is a powerful drug. So I am a little addicted even though I have gone "cold turkey".
Anyway, it's 7:13. I spoke to the "kid" about an hour ago. His brother-in-law is still driving. First the "kid" said he was close. Then he said his brother-in-law was still in Massachusetts, about two hours away. "He'll be there around 8:30 but if that's too late for you, he can find a place to crash." Not a word one wants to hear under the circumstances.
Have I told you the story of the load of my belongings that were in storage when I returned to Vermont after 6 months living in Fire Island (!!)??? The guy who was trucking them 25 miles from the storage locker to the rental house stopped while crossing the train tracks, and the truck was hit by a train.
No I didn't make that up.
The most important lessons are the ones we have to learn a thousand times...
Verklempt
I am in VT. H just left for the dump. I am awaiting a fifth call from the guys who are bringing a truckload of damaged furniture from Fire Island, to let me know that they are on the road. They once said they would be leaving at 3 a.m.; it's now 11:30. We'll see what can be salvaged and refinished when it gets here, IF it gets here. Remember the saga of "Midnight Movers"?
In a kind of poetic turn, it is snowing here...the first real snow in our home. The furniture that is water logged will arrive to a white cold landscape. The pellet stove does little to warm the living room, and the wood stove is cranking away, but I turned up the heat anyway. It is the first real test of our radiant heating in the kitchen and in my writing "nook".
H and I were at the dinner table last night, catching up on the week and we began to create a new list of things that are part of this new life. Back in January, we had created two lists when we finally reached agreement with the sellers on a price for the house: "things we won't miss" and "things we are looking forward to". The new list is "things we have now done for the first time and won't have to wonder about this time next year." It is a way of remembering the newness of this place, and of not taking for granted all that has come with finding "home". Of course there will be the perennials that will come up in the Spring that will be new. There will be the first green of the leaves that will eventually swallow the horizon line of mountains. People write paeans to the discovery of a clump of snowbells in March, or the smell of the sugaring arch (me among them). But this is a different kind of list....
But there is some irony in the fact that the furniture from my childhood will be arriving here eventually...the chest of drawers that was in the dining room and held the bed sheets which are already here, the rocker that was my grandmother or great grandmother's. It is easier to transport our memories as they are held in objects, than it is the rituals that make up the embeddedness of home. At the moment, I am carrying both within me and feel a bit "verklempt".
In a kind of poetic turn, it is snowing here...the first real snow in our home. The furniture that is water logged will arrive to a white cold landscape. The pellet stove does little to warm the living room, and the wood stove is cranking away, but I turned up the heat anyway. It is the first real test of our radiant heating in the kitchen and in my writing "nook".
H and I were at the dinner table last night, catching up on the week and we began to create a new list of things that are part of this new life. Back in January, we had created two lists when we finally reached agreement with the sellers on a price for the house: "things we won't miss" and "things we are looking forward to". The new list is "things we have now done for the first time and won't have to wonder about this time next year." It is a way of remembering the newness of this place, and of not taking for granted all that has come with finding "home". Of course there will be the perennials that will come up in the Spring that will be new. There will be the first green of the leaves that will eventually swallow the horizon line of mountains. People write paeans to the discovery of a clump of snowbells in March, or the smell of the sugaring arch (me among them). But this is a different kind of list....
- There's the valve that turns off the outdoor spigot for the hose. H traced the pipe to the likely valve, but we couldn't turn off the flow. Derrick, the young man who does odd jobs for us, turned the same valve, presumably harder, and the flow stopped. We will know that valve is the right one next year and we will be more assertive.
- There's the storm windows - some are the triple track kind and I got most of them in place, but H worked with our friend Jonno last summer to take the full size ones off the dormer windows upstairs, and Derrick put them back on earlier in the week. It was a task that was familiar to H from his childhood, but he had never done it, and now, he has. It is, after all, part of owning a home.
- We split about 3 cords of wood earlier in the year. Neither of us had ever used a splitter before, but with the help of our friends Emmett (and his splitter), Grazyna and Howard, we split and stacked the wood from two standing dead trees that our friends the Teers brought down in exchange for sugaring our trees.
- There's the lawnmower saga of course...finding where the hills and divits are and how to remove the towing canvas with metal teeth that wrapped itself round the axle.
- And the figuring out of which switch controls which light.
- There's learning not to micro-manage the pellet stove, and learning how to clean it, and learning which pellets we prefer - soft or hardwood or a blend, and the nature of "fines" and ash
- There's the learning of which rooms we use a lot, and which ones rarely, and which chairs feel better here than they did where we lived before.
- There's the attic vent thing....Our friend and contractor Matt, put in two new vents in the barn/ garage / pool room yesterday. He bought two pre-made boxes with louvers, but he described the way he makes a kind of box behind them so that the snow that blows in, doesn't melt into the insulation and stain the ceiling. He removed two of the battens on the outer wall, leaving a whitish area, but he will pre-age the siding so they don't show as much. Next year we won't be thinking about the attic vents at all.
- And Matt showed me how to take down the light fixture in the shower so I could clean it (flies!), and identified the third switch as a night light rather than a defective heater....
But there is some irony in the fact that the furniture from my childhood will be arriving here eventually...the chest of drawers that was in the dining room and held the bed sheets which are already here, the rocker that was my grandmother or great grandmother's. It is easier to transport our memories as they are held in objects, than it is the rituals that make up the embeddedness of home. At the moment, I am carrying both within me and feel a bit "verklempt".
Monday, November 26, 2012
Io non capisco
I grew up in a family for whom "travel" was done only in cars and trucks — a weekend to see one of my brothers, a week with Aunt Martha and Uncle Willard in Berea, the camper loaded onto the back of one or another pickup and driven up to Silver Lake State Park.
Over the course of my life, I've spent some meaningful amount of time in 42 states, missing only Hawaii, South Dakota, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Iowa (I've driven through all of those except Hawaii, too, but didn't much get out of the car except for gas). But my "travel abroad" has been limited to a four-day train trip from Vancouver to Toronto, and about six hours in Tijuana while on a conference trip to San Diego.
I've seen a pair of ferrets washed on a Christmas afternoon in a drinking fountain in Thunder Bay, Ontario, but I've never seen the Louvre. You tell ME which is the more meaningful cultural experience.
That is about to change. Nora and I have been invited by friends to spend New Years with them and travel to Venice. They've been there many times, almost a second spiritual home, and they're looking forward to sharing their city with us. And I'm looking forward to being there, being with them and with Nora, and experiencing ten days in a carless, walking city.
Nora bought a set of Pimsleur Basic Italian CDs, and she and I spent some of the past few days driving around and repeating conversations. Pimsleur has an interesting way of dealing with pronunciation: they speak a word at normal pace, and then start with the last syllable and have you repeat that, then the last two, then the last three, until you have the whole word.
Arrivederci.
Chee.
Dare chee.
vuh Dare chee.
Ree vuh Dare chee.
uh Ree vuh Dare chee.
Plays havoc with your spelling, I know that.
Anyway, in Lesson One, they've got us telling lies as soon as we're under way. Io capisco l'Italiano, for instance. Well, I've just finished lesson four, and trust me, io non capisco l'Italiano. They try to beg their way out of it by then helping you say that you understand a little Italian, but that's like me saying that I understand a little subatomic physics.
I think that no matter what anybody says to me in Venice, I'll reply "Io non capisco." Menus, street signs, rude gestures, the taxi bill; I'll just shrug apologetically and say Io non capisco.
Also, the people on the lessons speak like diplomats: relatively slowly, perfectly enunicated. Imagine our mirror images, the Italian turisti who study the Pimsleur Basic English and then get off the plane at Logan. They may have mastered "What do you want?", but they're gonna hear "Whadda yuwan?" And they also won't know that if it's pronounced "Whadda YUwan?", it's a threat rather than a request to name your choice of services.
I do like Pimsleur's insistence on full sentences, though. Most language lessons start with nothing but nouns. Cat. Dog. Street. School. Pencil. After six months, you're not prepared to do much more than point at something and say its name, like Dustin Hoffman sitting on a park bench. Although, as a vegetarian, it's important to be able to look at a menu and know the difference between prosecco (yummy) and prosciutto (raw ham), that my panini shouldn't have pancetta, that you eat orzo and drink ouzo, and that I like arrosto di cavolfiore and Nora prefers cavoletti di Bruxelles.
Mama mia. Troppo. Io non capisco.
Over the course of my life, I've spent some meaningful amount of time in 42 states, missing only Hawaii, South Dakota, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Iowa (I've driven through all of those except Hawaii, too, but didn't much get out of the car except for gas). But my "travel abroad" has been limited to a four-day train trip from Vancouver to Toronto, and about six hours in Tijuana while on a conference trip to San Diego.
I've seen a pair of ferrets washed on a Christmas afternoon in a drinking fountain in Thunder Bay, Ontario, but I've never seen the Louvre. You tell ME which is the more meaningful cultural experience.
That is about to change. Nora and I have been invited by friends to spend New Years with them and travel to Venice. They've been there many times, almost a second spiritual home, and they're looking forward to sharing their city with us. And I'm looking forward to being there, being with them and with Nora, and experiencing ten days in a carless, walking city.
Nora bought a set of Pimsleur Basic Italian CDs, and she and I spent some of the past few days driving around and repeating conversations. Pimsleur has an interesting way of dealing with pronunciation: they speak a word at normal pace, and then start with the last syllable and have you repeat that, then the last two, then the last three, until you have the whole word.
Arrivederci.
Chee.
Dare chee.
vuh Dare chee.
Ree vuh Dare chee.
uh Ree vuh Dare chee.
Plays havoc with your spelling, I know that.
Anyway, in Lesson One, they've got us telling lies as soon as we're under way. Io capisco l'Italiano, for instance. Well, I've just finished lesson four, and trust me, io non capisco l'Italiano. They try to beg their way out of it by then helping you say that you understand a little Italian, but that's like me saying that I understand a little subatomic physics.
I think that no matter what anybody says to me in Venice, I'll reply "Io non capisco." Menus, street signs, rude gestures, the taxi bill; I'll just shrug apologetically and say Io non capisco.
Also, the people on the lessons speak like diplomats: relatively slowly, perfectly enunicated. Imagine our mirror images, the Italian turisti who study the Pimsleur Basic English and then get off the plane at Logan. They may have mastered "What do you want?", but they're gonna hear "Whadda yuwan?" And they also won't know that if it's pronounced "Whadda YUwan?", it's a threat rather than a request to name your choice of services.
I do like Pimsleur's insistence on full sentences, though. Most language lessons start with nothing but nouns. Cat. Dog. Street. School. Pencil. After six months, you're not prepared to do much more than point at something and say its name, like Dustin Hoffman sitting on a park bench. Although, as a vegetarian, it's important to be able to look at a menu and know the difference between prosecco (yummy) and prosciutto (raw ham), that my panini shouldn't have pancetta, that you eat orzo and drink ouzo, and that I like arrosto di cavolfiore and Nora prefers cavoletti di Bruxelles.
Mama mia. Troppo. Io non capisco.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
The Planner
... when it came to filmmaking, Goro was a pro through and through, and he wouldn't begin storyboarding until the cast had been completely decided and the production had reached the point of starting principal photography. It could be that Goro wanted to make this movie, but he thought it was impossible given the current circumstances, so maybe he put together this sort of detailed treatment as a substitute for actually making the movie. That's what I was thinking, anyway.I've been reading the latest novel by one of the writers I pay attention to, Kenzaburo Oe. (I wrote that last sentence three times. I was going to say "one of my favorite writers," but that's not true. "One of the writers I enjoy," but that's not true either. Oe's writing, which we always read in translation from Japanese, is not rhythmic or detailed, and his characters go through WAY too much exposition, mainly because nothing much is happening. All of his work, for fifty years, has been about people overthinking their circumstances, thinking about how they think about what they might or might not do. Which is one of the reasons I pay attention to him.)
When I was a young boy of ten or so, I dreamed of the future. Given a pencil, a ruler and sufficient paper, I could keep myself busy for hours and hours outlining vivid and detailed plans. I drew retail store facades, often, a center door bracketed by two display windows. Sometimes they were record stores, and sometimes they were sporting goods stores. But I never, as far as I remember, named any of those stores. There was no text on the windows proclaiming "Herb's Records."
It could be that Goro wanted to make this movie, but he thought it was impossible given the current circumstances, so maybe he put together this sort of detailed treatment as a substitute for actually making the movie. That's what I was thinking, anyway.I've been asked, during a phone call with an important person, to put together a plan for a curriculum. The rationale, the lit review, the implementation plan, the partners, the timeline. I've done this many times, both personally and professionally. I'm a meticulous planner. No detail goes unconsidered. I can do a first draft that gives order-of-magnitude feasibility, then move into very fine grained analyses and projections.
Those plans are pleasing when I consider them and create them. I get to prospectively inhabit a lovely future for a few hours. But they more often substitute for action than launch it.
Nora's spent today out at Mom's summer house on Fire Island, coming to terms with what two feet of water inside a house can do. I spent the day proofreading curricular sheets, completing accreditation data reports, managing personnel strife. Neither of those are part of the plan. The plan awaits the right circumstances, circumstances that will never perfectly exist.
Do, or do not. There is no try.(In case you didn't recognize that last quote, it isn't Kenzaburo Oe, though they share some similarities...)
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
The View from 1614
It was a whirlwind of a week. On Tuesday, we had friends over to watch the election results; we had a bottle of prosecco in the fridge in case of a win, but didn't tell them — we didn't want to jinx things. Turns out we got to open it after all, a little before midnight.
I drove back to Boston on Wednesday, leaving home at 6 am so that I could get most of a workday in before packing and leaving for Kansas City early in the morning on Thursday. But as I was getting to work at about 11, the phone rang. It was the conference organizer for the KC meeting; she'd heard from New York colleagues that the winter storm was keeping them grounded, and she wanted to make sure that I'd be there to give the opening keynote address on Thursday night. She'd already had one horse shot out from under her, which is why I got the invitation to do the keynote less than a month in advance; now she was worried that her second steed would also come up lame, and that she'd have to just make the assembled 600 people watch TED videos on YouTube or something.
I called the airline and was told that anything after 4pm Wednesday was in danger of not leaving Boston; my Thursday 9am was looking pretty unlikely, certainly nothing like on time. So we re-booked my flight for 2:45 that very day (by that point, it was already past noon), I called the organizer and said "get me a room for tonight," and drove straight to the airport.
No luggage. No clothes. No computer. No phone charger. Just me and my script and a flash drive and some business cards and two hours to get to the gate.
Got there. Flew to Charlotte NC and then on to Kansas City, getting to room 1614 of the Downtown Marriott at about 11pm Central.
The next morning, I went over to the conference registration desk, and found my host, who was effusive with thanks over my arrival. I checked in, saw nothing in particular that I wanted to attend that afternoon, and went back over to the hotel. I asked the concierge, Robin, if there was anywhere in the neighborhood where I could buy a sport coat and a couple of shirts. He immediately went to his little black book and looked for a business card. "Please let my man be in today, please!" he said while dialing.
His man was in, and Robin handed the phone to me. We talked, I walked four blocks, and I met Bruce Jerwick, the owner of Slabotsky & Son Tailor, Ltd., Since 1914. (Bruce had bought the business from Son a decade ago.) Within minutes, he'd marked up a suit for alterations, picked out a couple of ties, got shirts for Friday and Saturday. It was his tailor's day off, but he said he'd get it done in time for that night's presentation, no problem. And after his heroic efforts, I met him back at the store just before 6pm as he was walking back in from his car with my suit over his arm. I tried it on (perfect fit), and strode more or less straight to the lectern at 7pm, my new red tie gleaming in the stage lights.
Slabotsky & Son Tailor, Ltd; 1102 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64106; 816-842-3445. Highly recommended. And a great storyteller.
Anyway, I spent most of the next two days walking around the Garment District and the Power and Light District of Kansas City. The neighborhoods are filled with buildings from 1890 to 1930 or so. Buildings that have mass, buildings that are more wall than window, buildings that tell you plainly how they stand up and make a living. It's a foursquare and forthright neighborhood, a neighborhood that can meet you at 10 and have your alterations done by 6.
I took my walks in lieu of going to very many of the sessions. Those that I did go to were uninspired. One of my favorite teachers at Berkeley, the architectural historian Spiro Kostof, had been a theater major as an undergraduate at Yale, and it showed. We used to bring friends visiting from out of town to his lectures, where he and his two slide projectors held a room of 400 completely rapt. If you go to Spiro's Wikipedia page, you'll find at the bottom a link to a video archive of all 26 lectures of Architectural History B. And even now, on a small screen, twenty years after his death, those lectures are wholesale delight.
Another Berkeley teacher, David Littlejohn, won the Berkeley distinguished teaching award in 1985; in his essay of acceptance, he wrote:
Having grown up in the 1960s, I spent many hours listening to comedy records. Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Woody Allen, Tom Lehrer, Bob Newhart, Andy Griffith (a brilliant comedic storyteller before he started acting). Later, watching Robin Williams and Richard Pryor and Whoopi Goldberg and Margaret Cho and Bill Hicks, and Spalding Gray in his own tragic fashion. They'd stand on stage, alone, and do an hour with no strain, and that hour hung together... but if you looked at the record, you'd see that hour was made up of a number of discrete bits, each several minutes long. Storytellers understood that you have to have some pacing, you have to build and release and build and release. You can come back to an idea after not touching it for half an hour, and if it was memorable the first time, it would become even more memorable for seeing it in a new context.
I'm impatient with bad conference sessions and bad teaching. It's not an attractive characteristic, but I'll admit to it. And one of the great problems in higher education is that we lock doctoral students into a laboratory for 24 hours a day for five years, attaching antibodies to exposed proteins, and then suddenly give them a PhD and say, "here's your lecture hall, here's your students, good luck." Talk about the Peter Principle... two wholly dissimilar skill sets, and being good at one is absolutely no predictor of being good at the other.
I'm weary with higher education in general. I feel like we expend enormous energy on questions of tiny importance; we serve the organization more than the students. (This is true of far more than education, of course; think of your bank or your insurance company, in which extraordinary layers of bureaucracy inhibit customer service people from serving the unique needs of customers.) The poet Andrei Codrescu once wrote that poetry is the loveliest of all arts because all you need is your wrist, a razor blade, and a wall. Teaching is like that, too; it's really just you and a student and an idea. But the infrastructure that it takes to bring that teacher and that student and that idea together in space and time takes up the great majority of our efforts, like the 80% of a corn plant needed to grow the 20% of edible corn.
The drummer Bill Bruford has written wonderfully about his working life; after reading his autobiography and thinking it over, it seems like about 30% of his career was music, and the other 70% the music business. So maybe the education proportion isn't as far out of line as it feels, but I can't help wondering what teaching and learning could be like if we thought less like middle managers and more like Garrison Keillor and Lily Tomlin, just inviting people to come walk with us through some interesting stories.
I drove back to Boston on Wednesday, leaving home at 6 am so that I could get most of a workday in before packing and leaving for Kansas City early in the morning on Thursday. But as I was getting to work at about 11, the phone rang. It was the conference organizer for the KC meeting; she'd heard from New York colleagues that the winter storm was keeping them grounded, and she wanted to make sure that I'd be there to give the opening keynote address on Thursday night. She'd already had one horse shot out from under her, which is why I got the invitation to do the keynote less than a month in advance; now she was worried that her second steed would also come up lame, and that she'd have to just make the assembled 600 people watch TED videos on YouTube or something.
I called the airline and was told that anything after 4pm Wednesday was in danger of not leaving Boston; my Thursday 9am was looking pretty unlikely, certainly nothing like on time. So we re-booked my flight for 2:45 that very day (by that point, it was already past noon), I called the organizer and said "get me a room for tonight," and drove straight to the airport.
No luggage. No clothes. No computer. No phone charger. Just me and my script and a flash drive and some business cards and two hours to get to the gate.
Got there. Flew to Charlotte NC and then on to Kansas City, getting to room 1614 of the Downtown Marriott at about 11pm Central.
The next morning, I went over to the conference registration desk, and found my host, who was effusive with thanks over my arrival. I checked in, saw nothing in particular that I wanted to attend that afternoon, and went back over to the hotel. I asked the concierge, Robin, if there was anywhere in the neighborhood where I could buy a sport coat and a couple of shirts. He immediately went to his little black book and looked for a business card. "Please let my man be in today, please!" he said while dialing.
His man was in, and Robin handed the phone to me. We talked, I walked four blocks, and I met Bruce Jerwick, the owner of Slabotsky & Son Tailor, Ltd., Since 1914. (Bruce had bought the business from Son a decade ago.) Within minutes, he'd marked up a suit for alterations, picked out a couple of ties, got shirts for Friday and Saturday. It was his tailor's day off, but he said he'd get it done in time for that night's presentation, no problem. And after his heroic efforts, I met him back at the store just before 6pm as he was walking back in from his car with my suit over his arm. I tried it on (perfect fit), and strode more or less straight to the lectern at 7pm, my new red tie gleaming in the stage lights.
Slabotsky & Son Tailor, Ltd; 1102 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64106; 816-842-3445. Highly recommended. And a great storyteller.
Anyway, I spent most of the next two days walking around the Garment District and the Power and Light District of Kansas City. The neighborhoods are filled with buildings from 1890 to 1930 or so. Buildings that have mass, buildings that are more wall than window, buildings that tell you plainly how they stand up and make a living. It's a foursquare and forthright neighborhood, a neighborhood that can meet you at 10 and have your alterations done by 6.
I took my walks in lieu of going to very many of the sessions. Those that I did go to were uninspired. One of my favorite teachers at Berkeley, the architectural historian Spiro Kostof, had been a theater major as an undergraduate at Yale, and it showed. We used to bring friends visiting from out of town to his lectures, where he and his two slide projectors held a room of 400 completely rapt. If you go to Spiro's Wikipedia page, you'll find at the bottom a link to a video archive of all 26 lectures of Architectural History B. And even now, on a small screen, twenty years after his death, those lectures are wholesale delight.
Another Berkeley teacher, David Littlejohn, won the Berkeley distinguished teaching award in 1985; in his essay of acceptance, he wrote:
I believe that a teacher's own energy, dedication, and conviction can be the most effective means of engaging, persuading, and exciting students. I believe that every class, whether a 12-person seminar or a lecture to 500, should be a kind of theater, an intellectual scene more charged, more shapely, and more rewarding than most hours we spend in "real life."When we ask for 30 minutes or 60 minutes of someone's attention, we owe it to them to craft an experience for them, not merely deliver content.
Having grown up in the 1960s, I spent many hours listening to comedy records. Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Woody Allen, Tom Lehrer, Bob Newhart, Andy Griffith (a brilliant comedic storyteller before he started acting). Later, watching Robin Williams and Richard Pryor and Whoopi Goldberg and Margaret Cho and Bill Hicks, and Spalding Gray in his own tragic fashion. They'd stand on stage, alone, and do an hour with no strain, and that hour hung together... but if you looked at the record, you'd see that hour was made up of a number of discrete bits, each several minutes long. Storytellers understood that you have to have some pacing, you have to build and release and build and release. You can come back to an idea after not touching it for half an hour, and if it was memorable the first time, it would become even more memorable for seeing it in a new context.
I'm impatient with bad conference sessions and bad teaching. It's not an attractive characteristic, but I'll admit to it. And one of the great problems in higher education is that we lock doctoral students into a laboratory for 24 hours a day for five years, attaching antibodies to exposed proteins, and then suddenly give them a PhD and say, "here's your lecture hall, here's your students, good luck." Talk about the Peter Principle... two wholly dissimilar skill sets, and being good at one is absolutely no predictor of being good at the other.
I'm weary with higher education in general. I feel like we expend enormous energy on questions of tiny importance; we serve the organization more than the students. (This is true of far more than education, of course; think of your bank or your insurance company, in which extraordinary layers of bureaucracy inhibit customer service people from serving the unique needs of customers.) The poet Andrei Codrescu once wrote that poetry is the loveliest of all arts because all you need is your wrist, a razor blade, and a wall. Teaching is like that, too; it's really just you and a student and an idea. But the infrastructure that it takes to bring that teacher and that student and that idea together in space and time takes up the great majority of our efforts, like the 80% of a corn plant needed to grow the 20% of edible corn.
The drummer Bill Bruford has written wonderfully about his working life; after reading his autobiography and thinking it over, it seems like about 30% of his career was music, and the other 70% the music business. So maybe the education proportion isn't as far out of line as it feels, but I can't help wondering what teaching and learning could be like if we thought less like middle managers and more like Garrison Keillor and Lily Tomlin, just inviting people to come walk with us through some interesting stories.
Friday, November 9, 2012
A day in the life...
It has been a quiet day. And I find myself typing on my old laptop even though the new one is at my right. It is force of habit I suppose. And I don't quite like the position of the CapLock key on the new machine; I keep hitting it inadvertently. Habit is a strong taskmaster. It is why I always transpose the "h" and the "t" when I type the word "hte"; it is why I like ice cream before bed, and it is why I keep going back to look at the Facebook pages related to Fire Island. Herb says it isn't good for me and he is right, but there is something in it that feels like scratching a persistent itch.
I have watched the footage of the news helicopter's flyover of the island several times. I have read the notices regarding the evacuation orders, and the cautions not to try to access the island. I have reviewed the photos that are posted on the Facebook pages several times...
I have avoided calling those I know who are full-timers....it has seemed like pouring salt into the wound, though I am not sure whether the wound is theirs or mine. But I finally broke down and called the woman who had befriended me as I was clearing out mom's houses. She makes a serious pasta with meat sauce--not a surprise for someone born in Sicily. There was a "mailbox full" message on the only number I have for her. I don't know whether the phone was damaged in her house, or whether it is the failure of the cell phone system or whether she lacks power to charge the phone, or whether in fact she is indeed fielding too many calls from friends and family to keep up with. She was having headaches the entire week that I was out there. She speculated that her Coumadin dosage needed to be adjusted. I wonder where she is tonight and whether she is ok.
I think I wrote earlier about someone else I spent time with when I was out at the beach packing mom's things. I instinctively liked him, even though I only know him in a limited way. He was kind and generous when I was out there. Turns out he's the Mayor of the town and there is footage of him on every video and facebook page related to the disaster. "Please don't come out here," he is saying. "It's not safe."
I broke down and called him. "There's probably 4 to 5 feet of water in your houses," he said. And then we talked about nothingness... What is there to say? There is a foot and a half of water in his house and his place of business. He has been staying in a hotel on the mainland with his wife, and his daughter and son-in-law, and their kids, and the dogs. They were staying in one place and then had to move because that place lost power and water. And he is going over to the island every day.... He sounded tired. Thrashed. I offered him an escape to a dry place with flannel sheets and a wood stove, and told him I'd feed him. He asked how our cats are.
Our friend Matt was here working on the room over the garage for Herb's pool room. He has been working for a friend with Parkinson's who wants his house finished before he is too immobile to use it. His wife wanted it finished by their anniversary which is two weeks away. It isn't likely to happen.
I filled the wood box twice and looked again at those pictures.
I had a difficult phone conversation with a close friend who wanted the election to go the other way. He is worried that he will have to move if the health care plan increases his share of medical coverage. He is worried about the purported "death panels" and about immigrants who are straining services that "we" have to pay for. He is worried about a country where kids spend more time communicating electronically than in person. He thinks that the severity of the storms that we have been experiencing, is some kind of wake-up call to belief in his god. He is convinced that the Social Security that he paid into will be broke because of the people coming from somewhere else. And then there is the military...."It's like someone coming in and sitting down to your table and expecting you to cook them a meal. And then they bring their friends and you don't even know them..."
I wanted him to know that even though we have vast differences in politics, we share a lot of common ground on what we want to have happen in the world we live in. I don't think I did much good.
It snowed here and I got the news of a weekend meeting in New York of residents and homeowners to share pictures and information.
It snowed 6 inches on top of the two feet of water in the downtown of the beach community where I grew up. There were 65 mile an hour winds. The town looks like Venice without the vaporetto or the architecture (ok ok, so there isn't much of Venice left without those... but just so, I am not sure what is left of the beach community I once knew....)
*****
When H and I were together last week, we talked about the last 500 days and the fact that it has seemed more... what shall I call it?...more dramatic than most people's lives...but maybe that's because we don't see the way people live until disaster hits.
Some of us are on Coumadin and have headaches all the time. And some of us are living in a hotel, even though we own a business, and play a role in town politics. We are suddenly homeless, not because we don't work hard or do community service.
Herb is even now giving a presentation in Kansas City. He was invited to do so, after a successful presentation a few weeks ago for one of his professional organizations. He got an email saying that the transcript of the earlier talk had "gone viral" in Washington D.C., and that some of those who had seen it had sent it on to the White House. (I wonder whether my mother had a hand in this from "the other side".)
Herb is talking about "wicked problems" which are the challenges we face, where solutions can't ever "fix it" but we cannot ignore them and hope they will go away. He is talking about climate refugees and sustainability, homelessness and shrinking cities that have depopulated but have vast areas of uninhabited housing. He is talking about the need for citizenship, and leadership and collaboration in a warming wicked-problem world, and about architecture and urban planning and the role of other disciplines from mathematics to physics to chemistry, and yes, liberal studies, in addressing those problems. He is talking about the need to include students in real world problem-solving rather than training them to be slot-fillers in vocational tracks. He is talking about the need to develop curricula that address the increasingly high stakes problems that all of us face.
But I find myself thinking about more personal wicked problems. I find myself thinking about how we help a friend feel safe and "heard" when he believes only the bogeymen of false media prophets. I find myself wondering how we help someone we barely know, who is thrashed by his efforts to stick a finger in the dike of erosion and climate change. Should we rebuild second homes and businesses on a sand bar stuck out in the ocean when they are wiped out by the storms of a warming climate that we have created? And what are the consequences for those who are caught in the crosshairs of the insoluble?
I wonder whether there is something abnormal in all this or whether this is the new normal. I wonder whether the extreme storms that have come with global climate change have parallels in the extreme events in our lives, and whether we are experiencing a human equivalent of global climate change. We know that our wars have resulted in massive increases in birth defects and cancers in children in Iraq as well as a record amount of post-traumatic stress disorder. We know that our financial industry and the housing bubble has made tens of thousands of people lose their homes and there are economic and social service implications to that. But there is also a deepening sense of incapacity that impacts which political candidates we support, and our reliance on religion and community to get us through. There is a conviction that we can't influence the outcome and a distrust of others who seem to have gotten their "entitlements" when we keep scratching a persistent itch.
We aren't talking enough about the emotional impacts of these wicked problems. One friend has asked whether there is data on what it is like for a child to grow up on the stripped and depopulated streets of industrial and economic disaster in places like Flint, Michigan. There isn't. We could also ask what impact a string of climate disasters has on the children of agricultural and rural communities. If we are challenged in solving wicked problems to build coalitions of experts who can take on the insoluble, how are we to support the First Responders and the children of disaster, and those who live each day afraid of losing the battle they have fought so hard to win?
Makes habit seem attractive sometimes. I think I will go out and get some more wood for "hte" fire..
I have watched the footage of the news helicopter's flyover of the island several times. I have read the notices regarding the evacuation orders, and the cautions not to try to access the island. I have reviewed the photos that are posted on the Facebook pages several times...
I have avoided calling those I know who are full-timers....it has seemed like pouring salt into the wound, though I am not sure whether the wound is theirs or mine. But I finally broke down and called the woman who had befriended me as I was clearing out mom's houses. She makes a serious pasta with meat sauce--not a surprise for someone born in Sicily. There was a "mailbox full" message on the only number I have for her. I don't know whether the phone was damaged in her house, or whether it is the failure of the cell phone system or whether she lacks power to charge the phone, or whether in fact she is indeed fielding too many calls from friends and family to keep up with. She was having headaches the entire week that I was out there. She speculated that her Coumadin dosage needed to be adjusted. I wonder where she is tonight and whether she is ok.
I think I wrote earlier about someone else I spent time with when I was out at the beach packing mom's things. I instinctively liked him, even though I only know him in a limited way. He was kind and generous when I was out there. Turns out he's the Mayor of the town and there is footage of him on every video and facebook page related to the disaster. "Please don't come out here," he is saying. "It's not safe."
I broke down and called him. "There's probably 4 to 5 feet of water in your houses," he said. And then we talked about nothingness... What is there to say? There is a foot and a half of water in his house and his place of business. He has been staying in a hotel on the mainland with his wife, and his daughter and son-in-law, and their kids, and the dogs. They were staying in one place and then had to move because that place lost power and water. And he is going over to the island every day.... He sounded tired. Thrashed. I offered him an escape to a dry place with flannel sheets and a wood stove, and told him I'd feed him. He asked how our cats are.
Our friend Matt was here working on the room over the garage for Herb's pool room. He has been working for a friend with Parkinson's who wants his house finished before he is too immobile to use it. His wife wanted it finished by their anniversary which is two weeks away. It isn't likely to happen.
I filled the wood box twice and looked again at those pictures.
I had a difficult phone conversation with a close friend who wanted the election to go the other way. He is worried that he will have to move if the health care plan increases his share of medical coverage. He is worried about the purported "death panels" and about immigrants who are straining services that "we" have to pay for. He is worried about a country where kids spend more time communicating electronically than in person. He thinks that the severity of the storms that we have been experiencing, is some kind of wake-up call to belief in his god. He is convinced that the Social Security that he paid into will be broke because of the people coming from somewhere else. And then there is the military...."It's like someone coming in and sitting down to your table and expecting you to cook them a meal. And then they bring their friends and you don't even know them..."
I wanted him to know that even though we have vast differences in politics, we share a lot of common ground on what we want to have happen in the world we live in. I don't think I did much good.
It snowed here and I got the news of a weekend meeting in New York of residents and homeowners to share pictures and information.
It snowed 6 inches on top of the two feet of water in the downtown of the beach community where I grew up. There were 65 mile an hour winds. The town looks like Venice without the vaporetto or the architecture (ok ok, so there isn't much of Venice left without those... but just so, I am not sure what is left of the beach community I once knew....)
*****
When H and I were together last week, we talked about the last 500 days and the fact that it has seemed more... what shall I call it?...more dramatic than most people's lives...but maybe that's because we don't see the way people live until disaster hits.
Some of us are on Coumadin and have headaches all the time. And some of us are living in a hotel, even though we own a business, and play a role in town politics. We are suddenly homeless, not because we don't work hard or do community service.
Herb is even now giving a presentation in Kansas City. He was invited to do so, after a successful presentation a few weeks ago for one of his professional organizations. He got an email saying that the transcript of the earlier talk had "gone viral" in Washington D.C., and that some of those who had seen it had sent it on to the White House. (I wonder whether my mother had a hand in this from "the other side".)
Herb is talking about "wicked problems" which are the challenges we face, where solutions can't ever "fix it" but we cannot ignore them and hope they will go away. He is talking about climate refugees and sustainability, homelessness and shrinking cities that have depopulated but have vast areas of uninhabited housing. He is talking about the need for citizenship, and leadership and collaboration in a warming wicked-problem world, and about architecture and urban planning and the role of other disciplines from mathematics to physics to chemistry, and yes, liberal studies, in addressing those problems. He is talking about the need to include students in real world problem-solving rather than training them to be slot-fillers in vocational tracks. He is talking about the need to develop curricula that address the increasingly high stakes problems that all of us face.
But I find myself thinking about more personal wicked problems. I find myself thinking about how we help a friend feel safe and "heard" when he believes only the bogeymen of false media prophets. I find myself wondering how we help someone we barely know, who is thrashed by his efforts to stick a finger in the dike of erosion and climate change. Should we rebuild second homes and businesses on a sand bar stuck out in the ocean when they are wiped out by the storms of a warming climate that we have created? And what are the consequences for those who are caught in the crosshairs of the insoluble?
I wonder whether there is something abnormal in all this or whether this is the new normal. I wonder whether the extreme storms that have come with global climate change have parallels in the extreme events in our lives, and whether we are experiencing a human equivalent of global climate change. We know that our wars have resulted in massive increases in birth defects and cancers in children in Iraq as well as a record amount of post-traumatic stress disorder. We know that our financial industry and the housing bubble has made tens of thousands of people lose their homes and there are economic and social service implications to that. But there is also a deepening sense of incapacity that impacts which political candidates we support, and our reliance on religion and community to get us through. There is a conviction that we can't influence the outcome and a distrust of others who seem to have gotten their "entitlements" when we keep scratching a persistent itch.
We aren't talking enough about the emotional impacts of these wicked problems. One friend has asked whether there is data on what it is like for a child to grow up on the stripped and depopulated streets of industrial and economic disaster in places like Flint, Michigan. There isn't. We could also ask what impact a string of climate disasters has on the children of agricultural and rural communities. If we are challenged in solving wicked problems to build coalitions of experts who can take on the insoluble, how are we to support the First Responders and the children of disaster, and those who live each day afraid of losing the battle they have fought so hard to win?
Makes habit seem attractive sometimes. I think I will go out and get some more wood for "hte" fire..
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Interesting times....
There is that famous phrase attributed to the Chinese as a curse: "May you live in interesting times." I don't know if it is truly Chinese, but I do know the sense of having lived in "interesting times" in the past months. H has posted the stress tests which we have "passed" with flying colors, and we have both chronicled our challenges in the past 498 days of marriage, but I find myself, this weekend, with a slower, more contemplative path ahead.
There are certainly still tasks to be done in the new/old house we have found to be our home. Last week, I was changing out a screen in one of the old windows, for a storm window, and the old wooden window came down on my head. My skull is sore to the touch, but I am ok. And I am going to get H to help me with the last few windows that need to be changed out. There are some things that make a marriage a pragmatic benefit rather than "merely" the finding of one's romantic partner!
And the perennial beds need work that has taken a back seat to the work in the house of allocating files to the office, and purging excess, and folding sheets in the cedar closet. I have even taken to ironing the multiple pink napkins that my mother left, and there is something pleasant about being able to do that in a space which accommodates the ironing board and iron without my having to make other things fit around it.
And the status of Fire Island is deeply uncertain. I know only what I see on Facebook - the photos that year rounders and police and firemen have posted. I have never much liked Facebook, but this has made me a fan. I can at least have a sense of the status of the marina (under water), the downtown in the tiny village (under water), the streets (under water) and the houses (under water). The dunes are gone, and with a nor'easter predicted for next week, the town itself may well be gone. The things that I had packed are likely....under water. But I can't get there, as the ferry has no place to land and the ferry terminal on the mainland is ....under water. They aren't allowing private boats or water taxis to access the island. They aren't allowing cars along the internal stretch of sand road, known as Burma Rd. It isn't clear that that would be possible anyway as there are new breaches in the island where the bay and the ocean met. Some may be permanent.
So I can't allocate hours to unpacking. I can''t allocate hours to restoring the hurricane lanterns or placing the books on shelves here. I can't focus on the "what-shall-I-do-with-all this-stuff" of the past months. So I am left to contemplate the present and what it offers. And that feels quite new.
I know this about the present:
1. we have an election which I am worried about but completely and utterly clear on who I want to have win. I am hoping that if there is another life after this one, my mother is working her powerful ways to be sure that the voting machines count the way the American people want, and not the way of the corporations that have made them.
2. I have a number of friends who are coping with illnesses, and maybe that's a marker of my stage in life, but I am determined to get more physically fit and lose weight. You heard it first here! I have new orthotics coming next week and expect to be using them to get reacquainted with the out-of-doors.
3. I began this week to refocus on my writing... to say that that is long overdue is a vast understatement, but I have begun reading again, and the writing is emerging like toothpaste from a tube that has been uncapped too long... some of it is a bit brittle, but eventually it will flow more smoothly.
4. And I will be celebrating my 500th anniversary with my husband in two days. And that "h-h-h-h-usband" word is easier to say now. And more important, it is easier to believe. We have come a long way in the past 498 days. And we are still committed to the path ahead....
Interesting times indeed....
There are certainly still tasks to be done in the new/old house we have found to be our home. Last week, I was changing out a screen in one of the old windows, for a storm window, and the old wooden window came down on my head. My skull is sore to the touch, but I am ok. And I am going to get H to help me with the last few windows that need to be changed out. There are some things that make a marriage a pragmatic benefit rather than "merely" the finding of one's romantic partner!
And the perennial beds need work that has taken a back seat to the work in the house of allocating files to the office, and purging excess, and folding sheets in the cedar closet. I have even taken to ironing the multiple pink napkins that my mother left, and there is something pleasant about being able to do that in a space which accommodates the ironing board and iron without my having to make other things fit around it.
And the status of Fire Island is deeply uncertain. I know only what I see on Facebook - the photos that year rounders and police and firemen have posted. I have never much liked Facebook, but this has made me a fan. I can at least have a sense of the status of the marina (under water), the downtown in the tiny village (under water), the streets (under water) and the houses (under water). The dunes are gone, and with a nor'easter predicted for next week, the town itself may well be gone. The things that I had packed are likely....under water. But I can't get there, as the ferry has no place to land and the ferry terminal on the mainland is ....under water. They aren't allowing private boats or water taxis to access the island. They aren't allowing cars along the internal stretch of sand road, known as Burma Rd. It isn't clear that that would be possible anyway as there are new breaches in the island where the bay and the ocean met. Some may be permanent.
So I can't allocate hours to unpacking. I can''t allocate hours to restoring the hurricane lanterns or placing the books on shelves here. I can't focus on the "what-shall-I-do-with-all this-stuff" of the past months. So I am left to contemplate the present and what it offers. And that feels quite new.
I know this about the present:
1. we have an election which I am worried about but completely and utterly clear on who I want to have win. I am hoping that if there is another life after this one, my mother is working her powerful ways to be sure that the voting machines count the way the American people want, and not the way of the corporations that have made them.
2. I have a number of friends who are coping with illnesses, and maybe that's a marker of my stage in life, but I am determined to get more physically fit and lose weight. You heard it first here! I have new orthotics coming next week and expect to be using them to get reacquainted with the out-of-doors.
3. I began this week to refocus on my writing... to say that that is long overdue is a vast understatement, but I have begun reading again, and the writing is emerging like toothpaste from a tube that has been uncapped too long... some of it is a bit brittle, but eventually it will flow more smoothly.
4. And I will be celebrating my 500th anniversary with my husband in two days. And that "h-h-h-h-usband" word is easier to say now. And more important, it is easier to believe. We have come a long way in the past 498 days. And we are still committed to the path ahead....
Interesting times indeed....
Monday, October 29, 2012
Floating
It is nearly 4 months since my mother passed away. In many ways, she has been as present as when she was alive. I know that isn't a popular sentiment or something one is supposed to say, but my days have been filled with the detritus of what was left behind. The garage is filled with clothes and artifacts of her life; the living room has her beloved china hutch filled with her objects and some of ours. And at last, I can say that I have a system that appears to be forming - the things that will be given away, the things that will be sold, and the things that will be kept. The garage doesn't look much different than it did before, but at least I know what things are where. Or at least I did. I spent much of the past two days organizing, sorting and labeling, and then that system was thrown into a cocked hat (what does that mean anyway?) by the pending hurricane. I decided that I had better get my car into the garage and so everything was moved again so I could make enough room. It is pretty much the nature of life these days--moving things only to have to move them again. The mavens of organization say that you should only move things once. I do it three or four times. Doesn't make a lot of organizational sense, but it isn't efficiency that is lacking exactly.
I spent last week on Fire Island at the beach house, packing and posting and putting aside the things that needed to come back to the mainland. There shouldn't have been much stuff but because we are selling the places, I assumed we needed to clean everything out, so I packed for emptied houses, leaving only the small dressers and beds. A carter was due to come on Saturday to move everything onto his truck and then get it to the mainland and then to Vermont. So everything was piled in the middle of the living room floor and on the porch. Some of it was pre-wrapped to protect it from dings and dents. My mother's beloved teak coffee table was on its side because I had failed to remove the screws that held top to the legs, and I thought it would be easier to wrap if it was so upended. There were two large boxes of fabrics and linens, a suitcase that I almost brought with me by car, but decided to leave for those more capable of doing the heavy lifting. It had a very large bread board, and the whale bone I mentioned before and a box of drinking glasses. There were the bottoms of the hurricane lanterns ( I asked a friend to transport the globes to my car on the mainland when she left, sure that they were too fragile to be "carted" off). There was a wall-hung bathroom cabinet that would work in our laundry room. There were several rocking chairs. There were two ladders, a hammock, some art carefully packed in cardboard. There were some photos and dishes and our beloved wood wagon with our late-dog's name etched in its back.Oddly, I decided to bring the wood frog that was partly decayed from living on the back deck. I don't know why that was the thing I chose to bring with me on the boat, but it is. I garbage-bag-wrapped a rusty dog sculpture that several people on the beach had been eyeing: "You taking that?" There was a handful of shells that I had packed with my phone and computer chargers and brought with me. My spare clothes wrapped much of the fragile dishware and were packed in stacked milk crates..
Sometime during that week, the man who wants to buy the houses came by with his wife. He said he wants everything. I could have left it all there (except for the wagon and the frog). He will probably tear the houses down to build his "dream house" but he says he wants to live in one while he builds the other, and "it is sooooo hard to get things here. You can leave it all!" But by then, I was in far too deep.
Cut to the present....Hurricane Sandy is coming with 70 mile an hour winds and storm surges on the coast up to 12 feet. The houses are at sea level. Thirty six hours ago, a friend said there was already a foot of water on the paths, and his electric cart was up four feet where the garbage trucks are kept. He can't go anywhere, but he isn't planning to evacuate. The carter called on Friday and babbled about not wanting to take the risk of carting everything when it could rain....Saturday and Sunday were beautiful days. Then he said something about wanting to protect his own equipment.
I imagine that the wagon, that my mother used as a kind of coffee table in her bedroom, is now floating. Perhaps it will land on my mother's bed when the waters recede.
On the day before I left the island, I walked to the beach. I sat at a spot that my mother liked between two communities, and a place where there are no houses. I sat there until the sun began to set. The tide was going out, leaving a small sandbar parallel to the beach and an inlet separating it from the beach itself. There were seagulls and sandpipers that I haven't seen since I was a child. Their habitat is being restored and they are making a come-back. I talked for a few minutes with someone I barely knew over these years, but who had been friendly. I have a vague sense that I like him though I barely know him, and I was glad to have had the chance to pet his dogs.
The sun set further, and I distributed the remainder of my mother's ashes at sea. At dusk.
EE RIP
I spent last week on Fire Island at the beach house, packing and posting and putting aside the things that needed to come back to the mainland. There shouldn't have been much stuff but because we are selling the places, I assumed we needed to clean everything out, so I packed for emptied houses, leaving only the small dressers and beds. A carter was due to come on Saturday to move everything onto his truck and then get it to the mainland and then to Vermont. So everything was piled in the middle of the living room floor and on the porch. Some of it was pre-wrapped to protect it from dings and dents. My mother's beloved teak coffee table was on its side because I had failed to remove the screws that held top to the legs, and I thought it would be easier to wrap if it was so upended. There were two large boxes of fabrics and linens, a suitcase that I almost brought with me by car, but decided to leave for those more capable of doing the heavy lifting. It had a very large bread board, and the whale bone I mentioned before and a box of drinking glasses. There were the bottoms of the hurricane lanterns ( I asked a friend to transport the globes to my car on the mainland when she left, sure that they were too fragile to be "carted" off). There was a wall-hung bathroom cabinet that would work in our laundry room. There were several rocking chairs. There were two ladders, a hammock, some art carefully packed in cardboard. There were some photos and dishes and our beloved wood wagon with our late-dog's name etched in its back.Oddly, I decided to bring the wood frog that was partly decayed from living on the back deck. I don't know why that was the thing I chose to bring with me on the boat, but it is. I garbage-bag-wrapped a rusty dog sculpture that several people on the beach had been eyeing: "You taking that?" There was a handful of shells that I had packed with my phone and computer chargers and brought with me. My spare clothes wrapped much of the fragile dishware and were packed in stacked milk crates..
Sometime during that week, the man who wants to buy the houses came by with his wife. He said he wants everything. I could have left it all there (except for the wagon and the frog). He will probably tear the houses down to build his "dream house" but he says he wants to live in one while he builds the other, and "it is sooooo hard to get things here. You can leave it all!" But by then, I was in far too deep.
Cut to the present....Hurricane Sandy is coming with 70 mile an hour winds and storm surges on the coast up to 12 feet. The houses are at sea level. Thirty six hours ago, a friend said there was already a foot of water on the paths, and his electric cart was up four feet where the garbage trucks are kept. He can't go anywhere, but he isn't planning to evacuate. The carter called on Friday and babbled about not wanting to take the risk of carting everything when it could rain....Saturday and Sunday were beautiful days. Then he said something about wanting to protect his own equipment.
I imagine that the wagon, that my mother used as a kind of coffee table in her bedroom, is now floating. Perhaps it will land on my mother's bed when the waters recede.
On the day before I left the island, I walked to the beach. I sat at a spot that my mother liked between two communities, and a place where there are no houses. I sat there until the sun began to set. The tide was going out, leaving a small sandbar parallel to the beach and an inlet separating it from the beach itself. There were seagulls and sandpipers that I haven't seen since I was a child. Their habitat is being restored and they are making a come-back. I talked for a few minutes with someone I barely knew over these years, but who had been friendly. I have a vague sense that I like him though I barely know him, and I was glad to have had the chance to pet his dogs.
The sun set further, and I distributed the remainder of my mother's ashes at sea. At dusk.
EE RIP
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
The Paperless Office
I've worked for the same college for over six years, and had the same computer since I first arrived. I don't do the same kinds of high-powered graphics and animations that some of my colleagues (and almost all of my students) create for their daily work, so my 2005 Dell workstation keeps up with me just fine. (I got a new keyboard yesterday, which is like getting new tires for the car — everything feels just a little bit sharper.) At home, I'm using a 2009 MacBook, a dinky little laptop. Both are more than adequate, though I must say that I've gotten VERY comfortable with the addition of an oversized monitor both at home and at work. It's a real luxury to have two windows open on two different monitors, since I'm always working on data reports in Word from data stored in Excel or Access. No more toggling back and forth between documents.
I back up both machines about once a month or so, onto a little shirt-pocket-sized hard drive that cost less than $70 but holds six thousand times as much data as my first computer. Most of my working archives would be well protected in case of disasters like computer theft or network failure.
But still, although almost all of my work takes its native form in either spoken language or in electronic pulsations, the output is often mediated through sheets of paper. Many, many sheets of paper. And the inputs! Every day, I get catalogs for publishers, brochures for conferences, flyers for assessment services or software, invitations to join some group of college administrators or another. Every week, I get 49 pieces of student homework, agendas for a dozen meetings, handouts of other people's progress, policy proposals. I get letters from accreditation agencies, forms to complete, bills.
At home it's no better. I get The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, bills from National Grid gas and National Grid electric and Verizon Wireless and Comcast and Commerce Insurance and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, statements from Sovereign Bank and the Duke University Credit Union and TIAA/CREF and Social Security. Plus weekly ad flyers, pizza and Chinese restaurant menus, and injunctions to vote for or against some candidate.
I was looking for some paperwork this morning at home, before heading in for a long day (thesis review tonight from 7-9 pm). And although I moved and filed (or recycled) 487,219 pieces of paper, I couldn't find the ones I wanted. Maybe they're at home in Vermont, which produces its own daily paper harvest.
In 1975, Business Week predicted that through the use of leading-edge technology such as magnetic tape Selectric typewriters, display text editors, facsimile machines and electronic mail, the use of paper in offices would decline drastically — in fact, IBM copywriters created the phrase "the paperless office" way back in 1964 to indicate the opportunities that could be had by letting IBM sell you every piece of business technology they could muster. Instead, the use of paper has more than doubled in the US since then.
And I have most of it.
One of my favorite parts of the Business Week article is the discussion of how technology will disrupt the secretary-executive relationship. We don't remember how much secretarial work was like dating back in the day, but girls started out in the steno or ten-key pools (extra points to anybody who remembers what a ten-key was), and only through talent and dedication (and personal grooming and charm) rose to be an assistant to some junior exec. Business Week was clear about the social changes of seemingly neutral technology: "...word processing is a tough sell, particularly since it so often changes the traditional secretary-executive relationship. 'The biggest problem we face is the office wife,' says Lexitron's Pugh. 'She likes giving total loyalty to one boss, and he likes getting it.' " Yes, I'm sure he does.
And don't even get me started on books. Between Nora and I and what we've brought back from New York, we're probably in the ballpark of 5,000 or so. Most of which we've actually read, which means that the big ideas have been converted into neural impulses. They're backed up, as it were, and could perhaps be discarded. But they act, individually and collectively, as totems. They mark us as members of the tribe of serious readers, and the symbolic value matters greatly. Just as the logic of word processing was resisted by the emotional life of the office, the logic of paperlessness is resisted by the reassurances offered through paper.
I back up both machines about once a month or so, onto a little shirt-pocket-sized hard drive that cost less than $70 but holds six thousand times as much data as my first computer. Most of my working archives would be well protected in case of disasters like computer theft or network failure.
But still, although almost all of my work takes its native form in either spoken language or in electronic pulsations, the output is often mediated through sheets of paper. Many, many sheets of paper. And the inputs! Every day, I get catalogs for publishers, brochures for conferences, flyers for assessment services or software, invitations to join some group of college administrators or another. Every week, I get 49 pieces of student homework, agendas for a dozen meetings, handouts of other people's progress, policy proposals. I get letters from accreditation agencies, forms to complete, bills.
At home it's no better. I get The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, bills from National Grid gas and National Grid electric and Verizon Wireless and Comcast and Commerce Insurance and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, statements from Sovereign Bank and the Duke University Credit Union and TIAA/CREF and Social Security. Plus weekly ad flyers, pizza and Chinese restaurant menus, and injunctions to vote for or against some candidate.
I was looking for some paperwork this morning at home, before heading in for a long day (thesis review tonight from 7-9 pm). And although I moved and filed (or recycled) 487,219 pieces of paper, I couldn't find the ones I wanted. Maybe they're at home in Vermont, which produces its own daily paper harvest.
In 1975, Business Week predicted that through the use of leading-edge technology such as magnetic tape Selectric typewriters, display text editors, facsimile machines and electronic mail, the use of paper in offices would decline drastically — in fact, IBM copywriters created the phrase "the paperless office" way back in 1964 to indicate the opportunities that could be had by letting IBM sell you every piece of business technology they could muster. Instead, the use of paper has more than doubled in the US since then.
And I have most of it.
One of my favorite parts of the Business Week article is the discussion of how technology will disrupt the secretary-executive relationship. We don't remember how much secretarial work was like dating back in the day, but girls started out in the steno or ten-key pools (extra points to anybody who remembers what a ten-key was), and only through talent and dedication (and personal grooming and charm) rose to be an assistant to some junior exec. Business Week was clear about the social changes of seemingly neutral technology: "...word processing is a tough sell, particularly since it so often changes the traditional secretary-executive relationship. 'The biggest problem we face is the office wife,' says Lexitron's Pugh. 'She likes giving total loyalty to one boss, and he likes getting it.' " Yes, I'm sure he does.
 |
| SHE could find my Vermont Health Care Proxy, I'll bet... |
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Abundance
Are you wondering where we are? Where I am? It has been a long time since I posted though H wrote eloquently of what has consumed us. Actually, most of that is him. I am merely the little angel on the shoulder puttering along in his shadow.... Ok Ok stop laughing. Truth to tell, I too have been working hard, though not in as public a way. My work will receive less attention, but I am not complaining...exactly. I am closing down mom's house at the beach. Not for the winter but for good, or as best I can. You thought I was done when I finished the apartment in New York didn't you? Alas. I am sitting in the middle of the living room surrounded by... well, surrounded. I have taken milk crates of things to the street hoping that someone would find that poster of carousel horses compelling, or the glass hand juicer, or the coffee pot --oops, I dropped that putting into the glass recycling container. Or the pillows, or the teddy bears or the three bags of clothing - well, no. I stopped at t-shirt number 32 (that's the clean ones I was counting - not the ones with one coffee or rust stain). They are in bags to be taken to the Salvation Army or another non-profit on the mainland. To do that, I had to call the local contractors who have permits to drive on the beach and ask if they would do it. They agreed. I hope the bags don't end up in the ocean.
I am going to donate the 8 or so sets of sheets as well. All usable. All in need of a new home.And the fleece blankets in green and red.
I tried to donate the books to the local school library, but they can't take donations - of books or money. The last librarian was purging the collection and sent the books to be destroyed; they couldn't sell them. Something about taxes that are supposed to pay for services. Maybe the PTA would take them she said. Maybe they could store them in the library til the PTA has its big garage sale in the Spring. And there are two kids in Islip who are collecting books to give to charity. Maybe she can contact them for me. And she carries a tote bag on and off the island if that would be any help. (You know that line about the proverbial drop in the bucket?) So there is something about a librarian destroying books that sticks in the craw, know what I mean?
It has been an interesting if arduous process to examine what I value enough to keep it. There are small stacks of folding plywood architect-designed tables. They will be good end tables on the porch. There is the coffee table and chairs that came from Mom's office. They are useful, comfortable and will see many years of service once they are refinished with some sand paper and teak oil. There is a whale vertebra from an old boyfriend. There are blankets and linens that we don't need but that I appreciate because of the craft involved in making them. It is craft that has no value in today's world. Women's work you know. On the day when the chief of Citigroup resigned his $15 million job, I m keeping some beautiful calendar pages that I will use as wrapping paper next Christmas, following in a friend's footsteps who wrapped our wedding present in calendar pages. It was beautiful (as was the teapot inside). And I am keeping the whale windvane and a small corner cabinet that will sit on top of a chest of drawers somewhere.
But most of all, as I snuffle aimlessly through trash bags and refill other trash bags and am paralyzed with fear that I won't "get rid of it all", I am struck by the fact that I grew up with abundance. If my mother wanted three of everything to stave off her fear of being poor; if she lived with every light bulb lit in every room of the house; if my mother had more than 32 t-shirts at her summer place at the beach, the impact on me was one of abundance. And now I am dealing with the consequences of excess. I am watching a transition occurring in my heart. It is happening slowly and with some pain. I went to the little grocery and bought soup today, even though I had had some in the freezer. I wanted something different. Something that would make me feel that I had a choice. I am a product of abundance. I have always lived with many options - things to choose from. There are consequences to learning that abundance and choice can be a paralyzing place to live. And that sometimes, there is freedom in leaving it behind.
I am not there yet. I am getting better, knowing that someone who needs the t-shirts will wear them. I hate the idea of sending them to a landfill. I am getting better, knowing that someone will use those fleece blankets to stay warm. I am still worried about those books, but it is getting easier to put the cookbooks on the street...
I am going to donate the 8 or so sets of sheets as well. All usable. All in need of a new home.And the fleece blankets in green and red.
I tried to donate the books to the local school library, but they can't take donations - of books or money. The last librarian was purging the collection and sent the books to be destroyed; they couldn't sell them. Something about taxes that are supposed to pay for services. Maybe the PTA would take them she said. Maybe they could store them in the library til the PTA has its big garage sale in the Spring. And there are two kids in Islip who are collecting books to give to charity. Maybe she can contact them for me. And she carries a tote bag on and off the island if that would be any help. (You know that line about the proverbial drop in the bucket?) So there is something about a librarian destroying books that sticks in the craw, know what I mean?
It has been an interesting if arduous process to examine what I value enough to keep it. There are small stacks of folding plywood architect-designed tables. They will be good end tables on the porch. There is the coffee table and chairs that came from Mom's office. They are useful, comfortable and will see many years of service once they are refinished with some sand paper and teak oil. There is a whale vertebra from an old boyfriend. There are blankets and linens that we don't need but that I appreciate because of the craft involved in making them. It is craft that has no value in today's world. Women's work you know. On the day when the chief of Citigroup resigned his $15 million job, I m keeping some beautiful calendar pages that I will use as wrapping paper next Christmas, following in a friend's footsteps who wrapped our wedding present in calendar pages. It was beautiful (as was the teapot inside). And I am keeping the whale windvane and a small corner cabinet that will sit on top of a chest of drawers somewhere.
But most of all, as I snuffle aimlessly through trash bags and refill other trash bags and am paralyzed with fear that I won't "get rid of it all", I am struck by the fact that I grew up with abundance. If my mother wanted three of everything to stave off her fear of being poor; if she lived with every light bulb lit in every room of the house; if my mother had more than 32 t-shirts at her summer place at the beach, the impact on me was one of abundance. And now I am dealing with the consequences of excess. I am watching a transition occurring in my heart. It is happening slowly and with some pain. I went to the little grocery and bought soup today, even though I had had some in the freezer. I wanted something different. Something that would make me feel that I had a choice. I am a product of abundance. I have always lived with many options - things to choose from. There are consequences to learning that abundance and choice can be a paralyzing place to live. And that sometimes, there is freedom in leaving it behind.
I am not there yet. I am getting better, knowing that someone who needs the t-shirts will wear them. I hate the idea of sending them to a landfill. I am getting better, knowing that someone will use those fleece blankets to stay warm. I am still worried about those books, but it is getting easier to put the cookbooks on the street...
Friday, October 12, 2012
Riding the Scree
Struggling down the slope
There's not much hope
I begin to try to ride the scree
But the rocks are tumbling all around me
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Rain Man II
One of the great things about being male is that it's culturally acceptable for us to wear pants with pockets in them.
Every day for thirty years, I've had the same things in my pockets. Front right, keys. Front left, change. Back left, wallet. Back right, comb. Every morning, I touch all four pockets before I leave the house, making sure that my life equipment is present. (I know what you're thinking, that I probably have to count how many Cheetos are on the paper plate while I watch cartoons, too... you and Nora have been talking about me again, haven't you... I know you have...)
One of the things about moving into a new home is that it takes a while before you know naturally where things are. There are 55 light switches in the house (don't say anything... I know what you're thinking... how does he know that there are 55 light switches, 48 of which are standard toggle and seven of which are paddle-style... that doesn't include the three pull-cords or the four garage door openers, two for each door... I just do. And I keep my food separated on my plate, and I always have the current computer window maximized so that I don't see any of the desktop while I'm working. Leave me alone.) I know where all the light switches are, but I don't know what any of them do yet. It's like playing three-card monte; if I want to turn on the porch light, I have a one-third chance when I turn on one of the three switches in the mudroom, but I guess right about one out of twenty times.
Being that today is Saturday (265th day of 2012 [leap year], 101 days remaining...), we slept in a bit, only to be awakened by a call from the internet provider's field technician, letting us know that he was coming to the house to check on our complaint of slow service. Nora got up, performed ablutions, and came back into the bedroom to dress for the day. She opened a drawer. She opened another. She said, "Where are my underwear? I don't have any rituals that can help me find my underwear..."
Yes, she laughs at me, but she too needs rituals in order to find her underwear. (Mine are in the upper right drawer, folded into thirds, in stacks of no more than four pairs. My socks are in stacks by color, folds to the back and toes and ankles to the front. And my phone goes into the dashboard cubby by my left knee, I never put my cue case onto the table, and I always push the slits for the straw on the plastic top of the Dunkin Donuts iced tea cup open with my finger first because they're too tight and they crush the straw. Leave me alone.)
It takes a while to learn how to live with a house. Nora and our friends hung some pictures while I was away, and one of the hangers pulled out of the wall. So I put in a new, heavier gauge, hanger, which has a longer hook, so to keep that picture level, I had to put the nail in higher. But it still wasn't level, so I stretched the wire a little, but the wire was old, so it snapped and I had to get new wire from the tool box and tie that onto the eyelets on the frame, and I had to adjust that five or six times to get it the right length so that the picture would be level with the one next to it. And finally I got it level, and then I got down from the stepladder and stepped back and looked at it and it doesn't look level from the floor because the heavier gauge hanger holds the picture out a little further from the wall.
There are places on the lawn where the grass grows faster than other places. I don't know if there are dead bodies buried there and the soil is richer or what, but there are patches of grass that need to be mowed twice as often as the areas immediately adjacent. And when I drive the mower back and forth, I try to keep the grass cut level and the mowing lines straight, but between the terrain and the dense grass areas and the trees and shrubs and the property line angles you have to make some adjustments. Why aren't property lines straight, and aligned with the cardinal directions? That's what I would do.
I wrote checks for the gas bill and the Comcast bill last night, and I used the pen that Nora had left next to the computer. I can use any pen that's handy, but I prefer a uni-ball Vision Elite rollerball, 0.5 mm, blue not black. And when I teach, I carry a box that has one of each color of dry-erase markers and an eraser because you never know what you're going to find in the classroom, and if I have ten minutes allotted to make a presentation at a conference, I've practiced half a dozen times with a watch and know that I can say what I want to say in nine.
Nora sprayed bug spray at the porch lamp this morning, because the wasps started yesterday to build a nest up under the flange at the top of the chain. You can spray them in the morning, because it's cold and they haven't warmed up enough to be active yet. We had no idea how many wasps were up there, but the poison spray resulted in several minutes of dead and dying wasps falling from the light fixture. Nora looked at the carnage on the porch floor and said, "I can't believe how many there were up there. There's thirty of them!"
Thirty six, actually.
Every day for thirty years, I've had the same things in my pockets. Front right, keys. Front left, change. Back left, wallet. Back right, comb. Every morning, I touch all four pockets before I leave the house, making sure that my life equipment is present. (I know what you're thinking, that I probably have to count how many Cheetos are on the paper plate while I watch cartoons, too... you and Nora have been talking about me again, haven't you... I know you have...)
One of the things about moving into a new home is that it takes a while before you know naturally where things are. There are 55 light switches in the house (don't say anything... I know what you're thinking... how does he know that there are 55 light switches, 48 of which are standard toggle and seven of which are paddle-style... that doesn't include the three pull-cords or the four garage door openers, two for each door... I just do. And I keep my food separated on my plate, and I always have the current computer window maximized so that I don't see any of the desktop while I'm working. Leave me alone.) I know where all the light switches are, but I don't know what any of them do yet. It's like playing three-card monte; if I want to turn on the porch light, I have a one-third chance when I turn on one of the three switches in the mudroom, but I guess right about one out of twenty times.
Being that today is Saturday (265th day of 2012 [leap year], 101 days remaining...), we slept in a bit, only to be awakened by a call from the internet provider's field technician, letting us know that he was coming to the house to check on our complaint of slow service. Nora got up, performed ablutions, and came back into the bedroom to dress for the day. She opened a drawer. She opened another. She said, "Where are my underwear? I don't have any rituals that can help me find my underwear..."
Yes, she laughs at me, but she too needs rituals in order to find her underwear. (Mine are in the upper right drawer, folded into thirds, in stacks of no more than four pairs. My socks are in stacks by color, folds to the back and toes and ankles to the front. And my phone goes into the dashboard cubby by my left knee, I never put my cue case onto the table, and I always push the slits for the straw on the plastic top of the Dunkin Donuts iced tea cup open with my finger first because they're too tight and they crush the straw. Leave me alone.)
It takes a while to learn how to live with a house. Nora and our friends hung some pictures while I was away, and one of the hangers pulled out of the wall. So I put in a new, heavier gauge, hanger, which has a longer hook, so to keep that picture level, I had to put the nail in higher. But it still wasn't level, so I stretched the wire a little, but the wire was old, so it snapped and I had to get new wire from the tool box and tie that onto the eyelets on the frame, and I had to adjust that five or six times to get it the right length so that the picture would be level with the one next to it. And finally I got it level, and then I got down from the stepladder and stepped back and looked at it and it doesn't look level from the floor because the heavier gauge hanger holds the picture out a little further from the wall.
There are places on the lawn where the grass grows faster than other places. I don't know if there are dead bodies buried there and the soil is richer or what, but there are patches of grass that need to be mowed twice as often as the areas immediately adjacent. And when I drive the mower back and forth, I try to keep the grass cut level and the mowing lines straight, but between the terrain and the dense grass areas and the trees and shrubs and the property line angles you have to make some adjustments. Why aren't property lines straight, and aligned with the cardinal directions? That's what I would do.
I wrote checks for the gas bill and the Comcast bill last night, and I used the pen that Nora had left next to the computer. I can use any pen that's handy, but I prefer a uni-ball Vision Elite rollerball, 0.5 mm, blue not black. And when I teach, I carry a box that has one of each color of dry-erase markers and an eraser because you never know what you're going to find in the classroom, and if I have ten minutes allotted to make a presentation at a conference, I've practiced half a dozen times with a watch and know that I can say what I want to say in nine.
Nora sprayed bug spray at the porch lamp this morning, because the wasps started yesterday to build a nest up under the flange at the top of the chain. You can spray them in the morning, because it's cold and they haven't warmed up enough to be active yet. We had no idea how many wasps were up there, but the poison spray resulted in several minutes of dead and dying wasps falling from the light fixture. Nora looked at the carnage on the porch floor and said, "I can't believe how many there were up there. There's thirty of them!"
Thirty six, actually.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
All In
When Nora and I go down to NYC through New Jersey, there's one particular stretch of highway that's elevated about forty feet above ground, is five lanes across, and has an entrance or exit every quarter mile, so that the right half of the road is a constant merge. Don't ask me which highway; I'm too busy avoiding buses and delivery trucks to know what the name of the road is.
Anyway, there's some furniture store along the side of this elevated highway, and its name is painted on the upper end of the six-story warehouse. But what I remember most is the sign hung next to the subsequent exit, which says "You've Just Missed the Exit for Williams Mattress Warehouse!"
Well, thanks for the news. I'm going 40 miles an hour wedged in between a Peter Pan bus, a produce truck, a taxi and a station wagon whose driver is texting and drinking a Big Gulp at the same time, and you're going to scold me for missing your exit?
I was reminded of this when I got a call from one of my colleagues this morning. We were talking about how the new curriculum satisfies no one fully; the design media instructors all want more design media content, my colleague in history and theory wants more courses in design history, the studio heads all want nothing but studio, the head of Practice feels like hands-on learning is marginalized, and I of course bemoan the lack of liberal education in a professional school context. I said that the only way we could really fulfill everyone's desires would be to make the curriculum five times as long, so that students would start when they were 18 and graduate when they were 35. He replied that he only wanted to teach students when they were between 21 and 22, and then again when they were between 30 and 32. "There's research to show that a lot of learning and growth takes place during those two periods."
Given that he and I have already gone past both of those exits, I said, "Do you think there's another one like that during your 50's?"
"I sure hope so."
I actually used both of those earlier exits at their appropriate times. At 21, I'd dropped out of college and was learning independence; at 31, I started a doctoral program. In both cases, I committed to something I had never done before and had no empirical evidence that I could do, and I left myself no alternatives. I didn't do them with one foot in and the other out; I was all in. I was stretched to do things I hadn't even imagined possible, and proved myself capable. And it was fun, both times.
I think that home in Vermont is the next exit. I now belong to a place in a way that I haven't ever allowed myself to belong anywhere else. Do I have the courage to go all in? It's worked twice before...
Anyway, there's some furniture store along the side of this elevated highway, and its name is painted on the upper end of the six-story warehouse. But what I remember most is the sign hung next to the subsequent exit, which says "You've Just Missed the Exit for Williams Mattress Warehouse!"
Well, thanks for the news. I'm going 40 miles an hour wedged in between a Peter Pan bus, a produce truck, a taxi and a station wagon whose driver is texting and drinking a Big Gulp at the same time, and you're going to scold me for missing your exit?
I was reminded of this when I got a call from one of my colleagues this morning. We were talking about how the new curriculum satisfies no one fully; the design media instructors all want more design media content, my colleague in history and theory wants more courses in design history, the studio heads all want nothing but studio, the head of Practice feels like hands-on learning is marginalized, and I of course bemoan the lack of liberal education in a professional school context. I said that the only way we could really fulfill everyone's desires would be to make the curriculum five times as long, so that students would start when they were 18 and graduate when they were 35. He replied that he only wanted to teach students when they were between 21 and 22, and then again when they were between 30 and 32. "There's research to show that a lot of learning and growth takes place during those two periods."
Given that he and I have already gone past both of those exits, I said, "Do you think there's another one like that during your 50's?"
"I sure hope so."
I actually used both of those earlier exits at their appropriate times. At 21, I'd dropped out of college and was learning independence; at 31, I started a doctoral program. In both cases, I committed to something I had never done before and had no empirical evidence that I could do, and I left myself no alternatives. I didn't do them with one foot in and the other out; I was all in. I was stretched to do things I hadn't even imagined possible, and proved myself capable. And it was fun, both times.
I think that home in Vermont is the next exit. I now belong to a place in a way that I haven't ever allowed myself to belong anywhere else. Do I have the courage to go all in? It's worked twice before...
Friday, September 7, 2012
Departure Board
Bad news comes fast.
In the past month, we've had six departures from work; five within the past week alone.
There's no good place in any organization to do the basic work of grieving. But workplaces take up more time in our lives than family, and regardless of job title or institutional effectiveness, I now have six friends who no longer work with me, and that's hard. The rest of us have quiet conversations in the hall, we sit in one anothers' offices and share our thoughts, but what we need is an old Irish wake, where we laugh and drink and tell stories and curse at the sky.
Beannacht, a chairde. Feicfidh mé chailleann tú.
In the past month, we've had six departures from work; five within the past week alone.
There's no good place in any organization to do the basic work of grieving. But workplaces take up more time in our lives than family, and regardless of job title or institutional effectiveness, I now have six friends who no longer work with me, and that's hard. The rest of us have quiet conversations in the hall, we sit in one anothers' offices and share our thoughts, but what we need is an old Irish wake, where we laugh and drink and tell stories and curse at the sky.
Beannacht, a chairde. Feicfidh mé chailleann tú.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Rural Decathlon
It's Labor Day weekend, and as I was driving to VT yesterday, I came through Rutland. It was busier than normal, with a large motorcycle rally and the opening night of the Vermont State Fair.
I used to go to the Humboldt County Fair, which was full of household crafts competitions — best pickles, best eggs, best quilt — and hundreds of earnest FFA kids (Future Farmers of America) showing their cows and sheep and rabbits.
Nora and I were thinking this morning about the kinds of things that are shown at the fair. In most cases, it's the pros and semi-pros who win the awards — the best-in-show photo comes from a professional photographer, the best-in-show woodwork comes from a pro woodworker. It seems counter to the spirit of the old-school state fair judging, in which a farmer's butter or beer or pie wasn't competing with some commercial outfit.
So we devised a decathlon of rural skills, and the winner would need to do strong work in each of the ten categories in order to be competitive. It would be open to whole households, so that it wouldn't be divided into traditional men's and women's fields. So, ready? Here goes.
Event 1 — Heat the House. Four cords of firewood, self-felled, self-split, and stacked for drying. Judging based on uniformity of size, evenness of stacking, and number of remaining fingers among all team members.
Event 2 — Feed the Guests. A dinner for eight consisting of nothing that was not grown or raised directly by the household. Extra points for having built the table and chairs or woven the cloth for the table.
Event 3 — Start the Tractor. A 1971 John Deere 7020 diesel tractor will be disabled in unknown ways by a professional mechanic, and the contestant must diagnose and repair the problems without the use of off-site parts. However, unlimited amounts of wire and welding gas will be allowed.
Event 4 — Breakfast Treats. Each team must produce fifty gallons of maple syrup, two hundred pound of honey, and three cases of quart-jars of wild berry jam, all from lands owned by their neighbors. Extra points for having negotiated harvesting rights with more than ten landowners.
Event 5 — The Whole Shebang. Three deer and ten brook trout will be field-weighed, and prizes awarded to the teams making productive use of the greatest percentage of total weight. Extra points for taking the deer during bow or muzzle-load seasons.
Event 6 — Shroom Lab. Each participant will be presented with a bushel of assorted wild mushrooms, and must successfully identify which are edible. Participants will then make and eat a mushroom risotto from their selections (accompanied by a glass of red wine), and will be observed carefully for ill effects over the two subsequent days.
Event 7 — This Old House. Teams will be assigned a house built prior to 1825, and must successfully install code-compliant heating, electrical, water and septic systems for less than $10 per square foot.
Event 8 — Off-Road Driving. Teams will show skills at lawn mowing, driveway plowing, backing utility trailers between barrels up narrow paths, and driving a volunteer fire truck up the ridgeline to some flatlander's vacation house.
Event 9 — Kit and Kaboodle. Participants will raise and shear a fiber animal (goat, sheep, llama, alpaca, or rabbit allowed); clean and separate the fleece; dye the wool using only home-concentrated natural dyes; spin and ply 500 yards of triple-strand yarn; and a) weave an 8' x 10' kitchen rug, b) knit two sweaters, two pairs of socks and a union suit (flap optional), and c) make Christmas presents of their choice for at least ten family members. Extra points for knitting Lambie Jammies for an animal that the fleece was originally from.
Event 10 — The Community Member. Participants must show involvement in each of the following areas of service: help with planting and/or a harvest, help with a barn raising, help with a funeral and/or wedding, a minimum of eight potluck dishes and six bake-sale contributions, run for town office, play a musical instrument at a town fair or similar event (and being invited back to play that instrument the following year), march or drive in the Memorial Day parade, and provide a minimum of four meals for a family experiencing significant illness.
Nora and I know more households than we might have imagined who could actually qualify by doing decent work in all ten of these areas. It seems like a competition more suited to rural life than just making a really nice apple pie.
I used to go to the Humboldt County Fair, which was full of household crafts competitions — best pickles, best eggs, best quilt — and hundreds of earnest FFA kids (Future Farmers of America) showing their cows and sheep and rabbits.
 |
| Lambie Jammies, the FFA equivalent of a car cover before the show-ring judging. |
So we devised a decathlon of rural skills, and the winner would need to do strong work in each of the ten categories in order to be competitive. It would be open to whole households, so that it wouldn't be divided into traditional men's and women's fields. So, ready? Here goes.
Event 1 — Heat the House. Four cords of firewood, self-felled, self-split, and stacked for drying. Judging based on uniformity of size, evenness of stacking, and number of remaining fingers among all team members.
Event 2 — Feed the Guests. A dinner for eight consisting of nothing that was not grown or raised directly by the household. Extra points for having built the table and chairs or woven the cloth for the table.
Event 3 — Start the Tractor. A 1971 John Deere 7020 diesel tractor will be disabled in unknown ways by a professional mechanic, and the contestant must diagnose and repair the problems without the use of off-site parts. However, unlimited amounts of wire and welding gas will be allowed.
Event 4 — Breakfast Treats. Each team must produce fifty gallons of maple syrup, two hundred pound of honey, and three cases of quart-jars of wild berry jam, all from lands owned by their neighbors. Extra points for having negotiated harvesting rights with more than ten landowners.
Event 5 — The Whole Shebang. Three deer and ten brook trout will be field-weighed, and prizes awarded to the teams making productive use of the greatest percentage of total weight. Extra points for taking the deer during bow or muzzle-load seasons.
Event 6 — Shroom Lab. Each participant will be presented with a bushel of assorted wild mushrooms, and must successfully identify which are edible. Participants will then make and eat a mushroom risotto from their selections (accompanied by a glass of red wine), and will be observed carefully for ill effects over the two subsequent days.
Event 7 — This Old House. Teams will be assigned a house built prior to 1825, and must successfully install code-compliant heating, electrical, water and septic systems for less than $10 per square foot.
Event 8 — Off-Road Driving. Teams will show skills at lawn mowing, driveway plowing, backing utility trailers between barrels up narrow paths, and driving a volunteer fire truck up the ridgeline to some flatlander's vacation house.
Event 9 — Kit and Kaboodle. Participants will raise and shear a fiber animal (goat, sheep, llama, alpaca, or rabbit allowed); clean and separate the fleece; dye the wool using only home-concentrated natural dyes; spin and ply 500 yards of triple-strand yarn; and a) weave an 8' x 10' kitchen rug, b) knit two sweaters, two pairs of socks and a union suit (flap optional), and c) make Christmas presents of their choice for at least ten family members. Extra points for knitting Lambie Jammies for an animal that the fleece was originally from.
Event 10 — The Community Member. Participants must show involvement in each of the following areas of service: help with planting and/or a harvest, help with a barn raising, help with a funeral and/or wedding, a minimum of eight potluck dishes and six bake-sale contributions, run for town office, play a musical instrument at a town fair or similar event (and being invited back to play that instrument the following year), march or drive in the Memorial Day parade, and provide a minimum of four meals for a family experiencing significant illness.
Nora and I know more households than we might have imagined who could actually qualify by doing decent work in all ten of these areas. It seems like a competition more suited to rural life than just making a really nice apple pie.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Culture Crash
Nora and I are both educated in a field that studies the ways that objects carry meaning. Small objects, the size of a robin’s nest; large objects, the size of a neighborhood. We invest those things with meanings based on their associations — what we were doing when we found them, the relationships we had when we lived there. We invest those things with meanings because of the cultures they’re associated with — the menorah, the Coke bottle, the Goth trenchcoat. And because we invest things with meanings, they talk back to us in powerful ways. “If this is what I have, or what I want, this must say something about who I am.”
No surprise that Nora and I have books and magazines everywhere. They say something about who we are. But also no surprise that Nora has a dozen or more containers of fleece waiting to be spun, and that I’ve spent a lot of time planning the coming pool room in our home. We don’t yet have time or space to spin yarn or play pool, but we believe that we are people who do. Even inert, the spinning wheel and the sample scrap of Simonis billiard cloth speak reassuringly to us.
We’ve been in our home for almost exactly two months, and have spent much of that time deciding which of our things go where, what is prominent and what is background. I think it means a lot that we’ve privileged things that allow us to have friends over. The guest bedrooms, the nice dishes, the table on the patio and the chairs on the porch, all of those things have come before building out the office or arranging the garage.
So the past couple of days have been deeply disconcerting.
Late on Saturday, the movers drove away into the night with the turkey sandwiches and Gatorade that we’d sent them off with, and Nora and I sat down in our house and reviewed the suddenly revised layout.
The china hutch doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in the living room. The marble dining table and the chairs don’t feel at all right in the kitchen. The sideboard is the wrong color, the wrong shape and size, the wrong historical period. The coffee table dominates the conversation in the living room, not letting anything else get a word in edgewise. The end tables, pressed into service as nightstands in the two upstairs bedrooms, are as comfortable as a princess at a potluck. And the hundred or so boxes in the garage weigh (literally, about three tons worth) on our future plans.
On Saturday and Sunday, we both, at different moments, talked about our engagement with these objects in terms of violence. I referred to being invaded; Nora talked about being held hostage. In both cases, the metaphor is one of meaning. When a nation is invaded, it’s not merely that one’s land is being held; more important is that one’s values are subservient to alien values. When someone is held hostage, it’s not merely that their mobility is restricted; it’s that their freedom is subject to demands that may not be met.
Mom’s things, each taken on their own, are lovely. The quality is high, the utility intact, the design done with care and craft. The problems we face are not material; they are cultural. The farmhouse has been overrun by a high-rise apartment; self and community shadowed by family duty.
But Nora and I both recognize the fact, and the meaning, of the invasion, and I feel the stirrings of an insurrection. We are not helpless bystanders. We can respect the life without devotion to each object of the life. (And as I was driving back to Medford on Sunday afternoon, I was thinking seriously about what aspects of my own past I can jettison without disrespect to my past itself. Do your children a favor and throw some things away today!)
In New York, part of the response to material overabundance was that we should call fine auction houses. In Middletown Springs, the response has been that we should have a big tag sale. Again, similar logistical and material practices described through different kinds of associations, different cultural color.
We’ll face this again when we take in some things from Mom’s vacation house, and when we take in other things from my apartment in Medford. In each case, things of value and use -- even affection -- will be found alien, not absorbed into our lifestreams. We'll work to help someone else make use of them, someone who may find them to be reliable narrators of their own lives’ goals. These were all things that have effectively provided reassuring and nurturing stories for decades, and for someone, they will again.
No surprise that Nora and I have books and magazines everywhere. They say something about who we are. But also no surprise that Nora has a dozen or more containers of fleece waiting to be spun, and that I’ve spent a lot of time planning the coming pool room in our home. We don’t yet have time or space to spin yarn or play pool, but we believe that we are people who do. Even inert, the spinning wheel and the sample scrap of Simonis billiard cloth speak reassuringly to us.
We’ve been in our home for almost exactly two months, and have spent much of that time deciding which of our things go where, what is prominent and what is background. I think it means a lot that we’ve privileged things that allow us to have friends over. The guest bedrooms, the nice dishes, the table on the patio and the chairs on the porch, all of those things have come before building out the office or arranging the garage.
So the past couple of days have been deeply disconcerting.
Late on Saturday, the movers drove away into the night with the turkey sandwiches and Gatorade that we’d sent them off with, and Nora and I sat down in our house and reviewed the suddenly revised layout.
The china hutch doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in the living room. The marble dining table and the chairs don’t feel at all right in the kitchen. The sideboard is the wrong color, the wrong shape and size, the wrong historical period. The coffee table dominates the conversation in the living room, not letting anything else get a word in edgewise. The end tables, pressed into service as nightstands in the two upstairs bedrooms, are as comfortable as a princess at a potluck. And the hundred or so boxes in the garage weigh (literally, about three tons worth) on our future plans.
On Saturday and Sunday, we both, at different moments, talked about our engagement with these objects in terms of violence. I referred to being invaded; Nora talked about being held hostage. In both cases, the metaphor is one of meaning. When a nation is invaded, it’s not merely that one’s land is being held; more important is that one’s values are subservient to alien values. When someone is held hostage, it’s not merely that their mobility is restricted; it’s that their freedom is subject to demands that may not be met.
Mom’s things, each taken on their own, are lovely. The quality is high, the utility intact, the design done with care and craft. The problems we face are not material; they are cultural. The farmhouse has been overrun by a high-rise apartment; self and community shadowed by family duty.
But Nora and I both recognize the fact, and the meaning, of the invasion, and I feel the stirrings of an insurrection. We are not helpless bystanders. We can respect the life without devotion to each object of the life. (And as I was driving back to Medford on Sunday afternoon, I was thinking seriously about what aspects of my own past I can jettison without disrespect to my past itself. Do your children a favor and throw some things away today!)
In New York, part of the response to material overabundance was that we should call fine auction houses. In Middletown Springs, the response has been that we should have a big tag sale. Again, similar logistical and material practices described through different kinds of associations, different cultural color.
We’ll face this again when we take in some things from Mom’s vacation house, and when we take in other things from my apartment in Medford. In each case, things of value and use -- even affection -- will be found alien, not absorbed into our lifestreams. We'll work to help someone else make use of them, someone who may find them to be reliable narrators of their own lives’ goals. These were all things that have effectively provided reassuring and nurturing stories for decades, and for someone, they will again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)