ANNIVERSARY Countdown (Count-Up?)

Today is Friday, March 7th, 2014. We were married 986 days ago, on June 25th, 2011.


Sunday, January 29, 2012

Unconscious

So it's Sunday afternoon.  I've been off to play pool (poorly today), Nora's on a bus on the way to New York for her class tomorrow, and I'm waiting around for the phone to ring.  Chewing on my own liver.  Stuff like that.

But I was watching a video the other night of Robin Williams being interviewed on Inside the Actor's Studio, and James Lipton was name-dropping as he always does.  He reported that Mike Myers, on the show, had talked about how shyness is a common trait of comedians.  Apparently, Myers had described himself as a "site-specific extrovert."

I understand that perfectly.  I talked with twenty people yesterday morning, and had a great time.  A GREAT time.  And then I had to go off and be by myself for a little while.  A quiet breakfast, a fortunately early flight, and then home. 

It's a funny thing.  I love teaching, and performing.  I love talking to dozens, or hundreds, of people.  When I finished my time at the high school that was the subject of my first book, I could have written a report.  Instead, I did two nights of a 90-minute monologue, followed by a 30-minute improvisation with some of the students in the drama program who had become friends.  Three or four hundred people in the room both nights.  And it was terrific. 

It's not unlike pool, when pool goes well.  You lose self-consciousness; you lose almost all consciousness, actually, and become completely and totally focused on action.  That's why I played poorly today; I was never able to leave the world or my self behind.  I was always looking over my own shoulder, not able to surrender.

The episode of Inside the Actor's Studio that has the Myers quote above is not available on YouTube, but a second visit eight years later is.  And in it, he has another memorable idea. 
First you are unconsciously incompetent.
Then you become consciously incompetent.
Then you become consciously competent.
Then you become unconsciously competent.
Today in pool, I was at stage 2.  Yesterday morning, I felt I was at 4, though my interlocutors may well have circled all the way back to seeing a 1; they aren't far different.  Now I'm at 2 again, sitting around the house.  Time to read (another form of unconsciousness); it's better for my liver.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Quiet Nights and Quiet Stars

Quiet Nights and Quiet Stars...[You can click on that title].
When H and I are in Medford, we work in different spaces of the apartment. He uses the second bedroom that we have laid out as his office. It has a raspberry plush rug and the dining table, repurposed as a desk, with the best speakers and a row of book cases. There are three windows overlooking the alley between this two family house on a narrow street, and the next one, but the venetian blinds are generally drawn.

I work in the tiny space at the back of the apartment-- a sort of closet without doors. It is maybe 4 feet wide by 6 feet long. It has a window high over the back deck. It provides little more than indirect light, but there is something cozy about it, and it has the desk made of a door suspended over two file cabinets. There is an ancient orange wool scarf on the melamine desk/door surface and an assortment of cards and memorabilia from the wedding tacked to the wall.  We still have the remnants of our taste test of champagnes for the wedding on the white board. 

This is our home here.


In Vermont, we rent a 19th century cape that was added onto by the landlord in the 1970s or '80s. There is a garden in the backyard, and a main traffic road at the front. We never use that door. There are some plywood planks set up as an "L" on file cabinets and an old dresser that we use for a desk. When Herb is in VT, he uses the desk with the speakers, and I move to the upstairs study, a small room with a pair of high windows overlooking the garden. It is oddly like this space, though there, there are wood shelves on cinder blocks for a book case under the eaves.

It is odd that in some ways, the home we have created in these two rental spaces is defined by our work, by the books and the computer and the papers piled high and in small vortexes at our feet.

I used to live in a  place of light and airy open rooms, and then my home was in the outdoors, in the Orchard Road that I walked each day with my beloved dog, Argus.  I knew seasons and had a network of friends to whom I would wave, as they passed down West Street. I knew them by the cars they drove. But now, here, I have turned inward.  And home these days, is increasingly the pixels on a screen. It is a hard thing to say, but I had two conversations last week - both with people in VT that I feel close to. Both said in their own ways, that I am not around much these days. It was a passing remark, but it struck deep. It felt like a violation of a kind of covenant I had made with that little town where I have lived for some 12 years now.

H says that he sees our community there as the one strong leg that we stand on, while everything else is in flux, and he is right. We know that E and K will have plowed the driveway and watered the plants when we return. We know that the postmaster will have held our mail. But as I sit at the desk in Medford, I feel as though I have pulled deeper than I'd like into the little room with the high window and indirect light, into the pixels.

There is something seductive in the doing of the work that is before you, in reducing the number of messages in the in-box below 100, then a few more, and a few more, and by the end of the day, I no longer trust the weather outside the door. I have traded it for the occasional ticking of the steady-state radiator that needs no attention, no monitoring.

Writer Lisa Heschong wrote a book called Thermal Delight in Architecture. I use it in my classes. She says that as a society, we have moved away from an understanding of the power of thermal changes to link us to places. She points to the manner in which we are fond of the diurnal patterns of light, to Solstice and sunrise, to dusk and moonrise as markers of the passage of the day. Our attention lingers for a moment on a tree  or the reflected orange of the sunset in a skyline building, and we become part of the place in which we live and work. H and I once pulled over to the side of a Boston highway to watch an enormous yellow moon rise from the waters of the  Charles River into the sky. Just so, Heschong says, the power of  thermal currents in the lobby or breezeway of a commercial building, the movement of air across the skin on a humid summer day, while rocking on a porch swing. But in the steady-state places of computer-glow and steam heat, there is no thermal change as the sun goes down, nothing to draw our attention to the places in which we live.

In Vermont, where we supplement the oil heat with wood, the little room upstairs can get quite cold when our attention is drawn to the pixels on the screen which flicker constantly with that bluish glow that knows no day nor night. We can remedy the cooling room by throwing some more logs on the embers in the woodstove. Eventually, we need to go outside and get some more, stack it on the wood cart, drag the cart through the sliders, letting in the cold air from the outside. We need to remove and re-stack the wood inside, and brave the cold, taking the cart back outside again.  Sometimes the deck is icy, and we have to be aware of our footing, though not much this year.

The wood stove needs to be fed and tended and we can't withdraw into the bluish glow.

And there is a metaphor in this. Communities require tending, and as we focus inward, we lose track of the needs for stacking wood. I wonder whether there is a moment when the transition is made and we become outsiders in the places of the heart. I wonder how we recalibrate the balance, tend to the home fires, keep the stove from going cold. If we don't, we'll be just another couple of part-timers standing with only one foot on shaky ground.

Road Trip!

So today, I'll be re-attempting my ill-fated trip to DC.  Remember that last one, the one that resulted in me leaving Logan Airport feet first on a stretcher?  Yeah, that one.  Let's try that again.

It's a stressful trip in any regards, but I have to say that I'm calmer about this trip than I was about the last one.  And the weather on the east coast is really springlike.  It'll be in the upper 40s or low 50s here today and tomorrow, and mid-50s and clear in DC.  As pleasant as that is, it's not right... but for the weekend, it'll be relaxing.

I had a phone call with a friend yesterday afternoon, in which we needed to talk about some serious things.  But she hadn't charged her cell phone, and she was in the third sub-basement of the monster conference hotel I'm going to tonight, so I was hearing literally about every tenth word.  I hate cell phones anyway. When I get a new one, I always tell the Verizon worker that I don't need a camera, I don't need an MP3 player, I need a telephone with good voice quality.  That's it.  Usually they look at me as though I was asking for a replacement axle for my stagecoach, but the last time, the guy was really nice. "Yeah, you want a flip-phone, because that puts more distance between the earphone and the mouthpiece.  And Samsung makes really good phones."  He could have stopped there, but he continued.  "And it's got the extra-large keypad, and the one-button 911, and the one-button emergency contacts..."  Oh, I get it.  The old guy phone.  Thanks, sonny.

I'll be back home tomorrow night, just a quick down-and-back. 

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Stress Test

When I was at Mass General Hospital a couple of weeks back, they did a lot of testing.  Hourly EKGs, blood tests, chest x-rays.  But the big one, the sort of final exam as it were, was the stress test.  They put you on a treadmill, start you off at 1.7 MPH and a 10% incline, and go for three minutes while they look to see what your EKG and blood pressure are doing.  At three minutes, they increase the test to 2.4 MPH and a 12% incline.  Three minutes later, 3.0 MPH and a 14% incline.  And three minutes later, 3.6 MPH and a 16% incline.  Lance Armstrong could have stayed on there for another three hours, but by that point, I was about done.  Then into an armchair, watching the EKGs and blood pressure decline back to resting state, another seven or eight minutes.

I passed that test just fine, which is the biggest reason they sent me home.  If you can do all that and recover quickly, then your heart is likely strong.

But they missed a test, a different kind of stress test.  You've probably seen them; you can do these things online and get a sense of how much stress is occurring in your life.  In fact, here's one, taken from the Job Center of Wisconsin (very smart of them to think about the stress of unemployment instead of just the economic implications).  Why don't you all play along at home right now?


Have you had any of the following things happen to you during the past year? If so, simply circle one of the numbers preceding each of those items. Score only the items which apply to you.

Point       Life
Value      Event


15          Change in social activities
15          Change in sleeping habits
20          Change in residence
20          Change in work hours
20          Change in church activities
25          Tension at work
25          Small children in the home
25          Change in living conditions
30          Outstanding personal achievement
30          Problem teenager(s) in the home
30          Trouble with in-laws
30          Difficulties with peer group
30          Son or daughter leaving home
30          Change in responsibilities at work
30          Taking over major financial responsibility
30          Foreclosure of mortgage or loan
35          Change in relationship with spouse
35          Change to different line of work
35          Loss of a close friend
40          Gain of a new family member
40          Sexual difficulties
40          Pregnancy
45          Change in health of family member
45          Retirement
50          Loss of job
50          Change in quality of religious faith
50          Marriage
50          Personal injury or illness
60          Loss of self-confidence
60          Death of a close family member
60          Injury to reputation
65          Trouble with the law
65          Marital separation
75          Divorce
100         Death of a spouse

____        Grand total

Your total score measures the amount of stress to which you have been subjected.
  • A score of 150 or less is normal.
  • With a score of 150-250, one-third of all persons will experience illness or accident.
  • If you scored 250-300, you have a 50:50 chance of accident or illness.
  • Above a score of 350, you may be 75 percent sure of trouble in the months ahead.
Look again at that bottom statement.  "Above a score of 350, you may be 75% sure of trouble in the months ahead."

When counting these things up conservatively, I'm at 505; Nora's at 485.  And none of those points come from the big ones that get you 65 or 75 or 100 points at a crack.  It's just a wild accumulation of all the small and middle stresses.

THAT's the health concern we're both focused on right now.  It's not like we're going to retire and head for Florida (its own sets of stressors, anyway), but we have to make some pretty serious decisions about how to either eliminate some stress or to accommodate it differently.

Thank god we don't have "problem teenager(s) in the home," and that Nora's not pregnant...

[Editor's note: Well, as far as Herb knows! ]

I give my students a sort of stress exam in my Year One Seminar, using the calculation of stress in a beam as a metaphor for managing stress in your life.  The equation is (load x beam length) / (beam width x beam depth squared).  So let's look at the metaphor:
Load — all those stressors we just identified
Length — the expected duration of each stressor.  Having a cold for two days is one thing, having pneumonia for two weeks is another.
Width — the breadth of your social support network
Depth — your depth of purpose.  If you're really morally committed to the work you do, for instance, you can bear up to a lot more than if it's just a job.

So you can reduce the size of your stress equation by either shrinking the numerator (reducing stresses or stress durations) or by increasing the denominator (turning more often to friends, re-examining the fundamental mission behind your work).

But then I look at this number — 505!!! — and I think, what the hell am I doing teaching anybody anything about stress management??  And the coming ten days are likely to be momentous on at least three fronts, and we'll be pushing toward 550.  WTF?

I think of the ones we could eliminate, and there aren't many in the short term.  But maybe we could at least stop adding more.  A "perfect score" on the Wisconsin test, being able to say yes to every item, is 1405 points, so we've still got some things we could avoid.

[Editor's note # 2:  Do cats count as kids? Especially when our intimate morning was interrupted by crashing glass downstairs?  And what about outstanding personal achievement?  Please, friends, I can't handle any rewards! And one more... for those of you who are more religiously inclined than I, please understand that a sudden conversion to religious faith would add 70 points! ]

Friday, January 20, 2012

Today's song

I picked up a new CD today for the drive to VT.  Peter Gabriel's New Blood, which is a set of orchestral workings of many of the songs he's written over the years.  He's made some really surprising choices about which songs to include, like Intruder.  Never would have guessed that one.

I usually cringe when rock musicians do orchestrated stuff (or worse, when some pay-for-play orchestra "interprets" their material).  Part of why rock music works is because of its urgency, not because of it's sophistication and density.  But PG's stuff is dense; every time you listen, you can pick out some other thing that's going on.  Plus, he's been doing movie scores for a decade or so, too, so he's got the gift of rich textures. 

New Blood really works.  The lyrics stand forth even more than in the originals, and his choices as a singer are different in the new settings.  Even though some of the songs are 30 years old, they really are new ideas in this circumstance.

I heard a song of his on my drive today that had never quite been one of my favorites before.  I liked it well enough, but today I heard it in a different way.  In Your Eyes.  Thanks, Pete.

Love, I get so lost sometimes.
Days pass, and this emptiness fills my heart.
When I want to run away, I drive off in my car.
But whichever way I go, I come back to the place you are.

All my instincts, they return; and the grand facade so soon will burn.
Without a noise, without my pride, I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes
I see the light and the heat
in your eyes
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light
the heat I see in your eyes


Love, I don't like to see so much pain.
So much wasted, and this moment keeps slipping away.
I get so tired of working so hard for our survival.
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive.

And all my instincts, they return; and the grand facade so soon will burn.
Without a noise, without my pride, I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes
I see the light and the heat
in your eyes
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light,
the heat I see in your eyes

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

What are you doing the rest of your life...?

It's funny what obsesses us. Herb is intrigued by pool, and by music, and by "story" or the way people talk about what matters to them. It is this that brought us together; our work lives overlapped. We are both good listeners (which should make our times together pretty quiet!), but we are also story tellers, each of us in different ways. Hence the blog. But the thing that has obsessed me for many years is the notion of "home." I have studied the places we choose to live and the relationship we have with those places, throughout my career. You would think I would tire of it eventually, and while there are ebbs and flows, I am now so saturated with stories that it is hard to know how to get the backlog out on paper. But I have turned back to it in these past few weeks, after a long period of damming behind a wall of debris.

I come from an academic tradition which focuses on the Norman Rockwell stories of streams and tree forts, suburban idylls under a tree in the backyard. My professional mentors have talked about the barbecues in the backyards of two story SFDs (single family dwellings) and the family secrets overheard by children who listened from the top stair, when they were supposed to be in bed. I have listened to stories at the other end of the continuum--the stories of loss and homelessness, of violence and fear, of the rejection of home, and of longing so profound that it is palpable, visceral. But now as I begin to release the valve on the dam, I have heard a new story--new to me anyway. A colleague and friend is moving to an "airpark community" in Florida. Their house will be on a "grass taxiway a few streets from the paved runway." I suppose they will walk out the door, get in a plane and drive the plane to the supermarket. I imagine a place on the plane will have to be established for the grandkids' diapers. And I suppose they will relish listening to the sounds of aircraft engines at night. I wonder what a community potluck will be like.



My friend married a colleague who is also a pilot. She has learned to fly planes as well and has built part of her business by working with women pilots who, I guess, are a relatively rare breed.  She grew up in a suburban community which was based around a car culture, so I suppose this is what passes as moving up in that world: "That's a hell of a big car you are driving, missie!" But I can no more imagine living in a place based around planes than I can .... well, wait....

Another old friend spent most of a decade or two living on a boat and traveling around the world. They were enmeshed in boat culture, which if I had spent the appropriate time taking notes, I could tell you about. Alas!

There is a whole culture of people that live out of their Airstream trailers, or their motorcycles with sidecars and back-ends that can hold everything from a tent to blueberry pancake mix.

These are all communities in some sense, but what are the circumstances that bring neighbors together? Or are they part of a virtual community that does not require that they help out when one of them is sick or another on hard times?

Then, the other day, I discovered that there is an architectural firm that specializes in the development of retirement communities for gay men and women.
"The high-design space geared toward LGBT senior citizens is the result of a collaboration between principal Matthias Hollwich of the New York architecture firm Hollwich Kushner and nine other architecture firms...Each firm was given a piece of the 100-acre plot and total freedom to inject their personal style into the space. The only requirements for the architects were that their structures had to epitomize high design in order to fight the stereotypical look of retirement communities, and that none of the firms could have ever done work around aging before, so they could come to the project with fresh ideas."


OK I will have to do another blog post on architects hired because they have NO experience with the population they are serving. And a blog post on an architectural firm designing a retirement community that "ignores those stereotypical architectural motions...a ramp here, a wide doorway there...because inconvenience will empower residents... and get them to do a little bit more activity than they think they can,"   but that will come later.  [Breathe deeply... calm down...]

For now, it's about community and home.

I understand the draw to live with those of similar values and sensitivities. I understand that California and Florida are a kind of  frontier of warm weather fun and few restrictions on the right to live as we choose.  But I can't help but feel that there is a certain loss in the development of micro-communities that screen out those who don't believe as we do.

In any case, it would seem that there are two parallel threads that are emerging these days in the search for home. Theorists like James Howard Kunstler  and Christopher Leinberg would have us believe that rural and suburban communities are dying as people are fleeing toward the cultural life and diversity of the cities. But I am hearing more and more about these playgrounds for those who can choose to see only others who value what they do.

And I am worried.

Worried that our politics will continue to reflect an opting out of the diverse set of values where seniors also pay taxes to support the public schools. I am worried that in the drive to build single purpose communities, we are also building single issue politics and the PACS that drive out the discussion of shared concerns, in the effort to protect self-interest. (And that Florida frontier has been a hotbed of self-interest politics.)

As the damming of the stream of consciousness is leaking, I am exploring what it is in us that draws us so deeply to these ways of spending our aging days and nights...to the sounds of those we recognize, and the pacing of a day that mirrors our own.

I grew up spending summers at the beach where everyone slept late, and walked to the beach at late midday, showered and started fixing the hors d'oeuvres in the late afternoon, and sat on each other's decks until it was time for the walk to the tiny hard-seat movie house in the center of town. Ice cream followed the movies and then.... But these were people who were weekend escapees from the city, people who were there as singles to mingle, and seniors who had spent their lives at hard work and had found this little bungalow place near their jobs on the mainland that they could afford. And everyone shopped in the downtown and went to the Community House for the movies. It wasn't possible to ignore neighbors whose houses were close enough to throw an extension cord through the window for the phone or for extra power for the blender. But this place too has changed, and is now a place of hard core identity politics though it is still relatively welcoming to moneyed families with children, and to the singles who mingle.

I suppose I am wondering how what is shared in these communities can be tapped to support what is needed outside them. I suppose that there are networks formed on the tennis courts or golf courses or swim clubs. But I can't help wondering how we build community in places that we can leave behind at the turn of the key in an engine. And I am wondering whether this is what underlies the dichotomies in the political sphere and in the  impacts on social (in)justice.

And I am wondering what else I think I know as the dam is beginning to leak, even in places where I have not yet removed the debris. And I am wondering where H and I will land when we are done with what occupies our days.   What are you doing the rest of your life?   [You can click on this link!]

I still think we belong here in the place that married us, in the place that allows for people who don't quite fit, in the place that (so far) supports its own school financially and in the annual Living History event that turns the entire town into a history classroom.

A friend told us yesterday about the loss of the downtown commerce and the services in the nearby town of Proctor. He said that a town which seemed stuck in the 1950s, with all the community interdependence and small town lifestyle that that represented, now sported boarded up store fronts and the electric company had merged with the big dogs. Our friend thought about moving there with the granddaughter he is raising, so she could have kids on the streets to play with. But they are thinking of moving somewhere else now. Not sure where. Someplace their child can play outside with other kids. Someplace where he doesn't have to confront the politics of working and living in the same town. Someplace that will welcome them and support their growing grandchild, someplace to walk at the end of the day, someplace that is accepting, someplace like here..

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Manley. Suave Manley.

As part of our celebration of Nora's birthday, we drove (on the first really snowy day of the year) down to Manchester and our favorite bookstore, Northshire.  Not looking for anything in particular, really, but any day spent in a bookstore is just a good day.  (Nighttimes, too, apparently...)  In the end, Nora got a candle and a big Moleskine notebook, and I got a book and a CD.

This is a nicely literary bookstore.  It's not just Plumbing for Dummies and this week's People magazine; there are aisles and aisles of ideas.  And chairs, so that you can comfortably think about some of those ideas even before you leave.  Nora was sitting in one of these chairs in the Fiction section, and we happened to look straight across the aisle at... the romance books.  Not the skinny little Harlequins that all had the same red cover, but significant, multiple-day books (lots of Nora Roberts and Danielle Steele, for instance).  I pulled a couple down to have a look, and they all still have Fabio or his peers on the cover, shirt open to the waist.  Kind of like this guy, for instance.

So Nora, literary purist that she is, immediately stopped the very next defenseless Northshire employee who crossed our path, and semi-seriously expressed horror and outrage that a) such things existed, b) they would exist at a bookstore like Northshire, and c) they were placed directly across the aisle from serious fiction by Kenzaburo Oe and Joe Coomer and Barbara Kingsolver.  The ambushed employee did a nice job of defending people's right to read as they choose, and explained that the store was trying to consolidate their different genres of fiction into a related place.  (The romances had been over with the science fiction/fantasy books and graphic novels, which frankly is the REAL reason why they were moved; the women who read romance novels and the guys who read sci-fi and comic books would both make one another a little uncomfortable...)

After the Northshire, we went for Nora's birthday dinner to a nice little restaurant outside Manchester, down a side road and overlooking the river.  It's the kind of restaurant that caters to the comfortably well-heeled, country-clubby retirees who want to be fawned and fussed over.  We were seated at a very nice little table in the corner, directly overlooking the snowy landscape behind the river...

And then our waiter arrived.

Friends, this guy could have been on the cover of any of the romance novels at Northshire.  Six feet and a little bit, chiseled jaw, broad shoulders, tapered waist, mid-30s, impeccably groomed.  And a voice that would make NPR newsmen weep with envy—deep, resonant, calm, reassuring.  His arrival at tableside probably provides the only moments of sexual excitement that most of his female customers have; and they DO ask him a lot of questions, to keep him near a little longer and to get a few more words from that voice.

Nora asked about the salmon canneloni stuffed with lobster.  "There isn't any pasta at all in this dish.  The salmon filet is wrapped around the lobster, and it resembles a canelloni."  Had I been the waiter, I might have added, "It's about as big around as a toilet-paper tube," but that would have been gauche.  Besides, I think our waiter was comfortable with the size of his... servings, and didn't need to lower himself to those terms.

After a bit, he got to see that we didn't need him to be formal, and he even laughed a few times and described some of the strategy around how they seat different parties in different parts of the restaurant.  But he never got too comfortable; he remained Suave Manley, always on duty and ready to serve.  He DID keep his shirt buttoned, but even with that, he could intimidate George Clooney into early retirement.

I'm not revealing the name of this restaurant, because it's a bit of an embarrassing description of our waiter.  But if you contact us in person and let us know when you're coming to southern Vermont, we'll send you over there so you can have the Manley experience.

The dinner was wonderful (Nora had the salmon canelloni, and I had a terrific risotto), the ambience was lovely, and the birthday was a success all around, concluded at home with a really great phone conversation with Grazyna and Howard until the wee hours of this morning.

Today is cold, with real snow on the ground; it actually feels something like Vermont.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Talks

Nora and I had a nice talk with a friend last Sunday morning, about long-term possibilities.  
We then had a nice talk with Mom on Sunday afternoon, about long-term possibilities.  
Tuesday at lunch, I had a nice talk on the phone with friends, about long-term possibilities.  
And Tuesday afternoon, I had a nice talk with my doctor, about long-term possibilities.
A lot of talking about the future lately. 
Nora and I had a nice talk with a friend last Sunday morning, about Middletown Springs.
We then had a nice talk with Mom on Sunday afternoon, about MS and about New York.
Tuesday at lunch, I had a nice talk on the phone with friends, about Washington D.C.
And Tuesday afternoon, I had a nice talk with my doctor, about Boston.
A lot of talking about places lately. 
Nora and I had a nice talk with a friend last Sunday morning, about land and construction.
We then had a nice talk with Mom on Sunday afternoon, about support and satisfaction.
Tuesday at lunch, I had a nice talk on the phone with friends, about management and strategy.
And Tuesday afternoon, I had a nice talk with my doctor, about how bodies do and don't work.
A lot of talking about ideas lately. 
It's nice to have these talks.  Each one of them expands my thinking, expands my possibilities.  But we often allow ourselves to become suspended in possibilities and avoid the material world of choice.  At some point, possibilities must be left aside in favor of a decision made.

I wrote a book a few years ago about a young man who was trapped in that web of possibilities, and saw no clear choice to be made.  He preferred to have the vicarious, imagined pleasure of what could be instead of the real struggles and joys of action in the world.  And he knew that he was making that choice, and that the choice had its own costs.  He knew that he was living in the world of imagined rather than real satisfactions.

Nora and I had a nice talk with a friend last Sunday morning, walking through a Vermont forest.
We then had a nice talk with Mom on Sunday afternoon, sitting together next to the wood stove.
Tuesday at lunch, I had a nice talk on the phone with friends, taking notes over the phone.
And Tuesday afternoon, I had a nice talk with my doctor, sitting in his cluttered office.
A lot of talking about the future lately.  And because our emotions are autobiographies of the future, all of them felt a certain way.
Any decision we make will carry costs.  And we focus on those costs rather than the possibilities.  What might go wrong rather than what will be good.  Todd Rundgren once wrote a song called "Can't Stop Running," in which the course of a life was described in four verses.  The first two verses were framed with the line "I was running to something."  The last two were framed with the line "Now I'm running from something."  It gets easier to see what we don't want, and harder to see what we do.

Time to clear my eyes, and remember toward what I hope to run.

Monday, January 9, 2012

Uphill Both Ways

I was meeting with a former student, now one of our teachers, this afternoon, and I was recommending a particular article for her work.  (Murray Silverstein and Max Jacobsen, "Restructuring the Hidden Program: Toward an Architecture of Social Change."  Highly recommended...) Anyway, I was finding the citation, and I said, "It's pretty old, it was written in 1985.  That feels recent to me, but I know you were only like two when it was published."  And it's true.  I'm working with a new teacher, just having finished her master's degree, who was born in 1984.  That's just not right.

One of the most difficult things about getting a little older is that I never know whether things were really different back in the day or whether I'm just getting crotchety, recalling bitterly the way in which I was sent walking six rocky uphill miles to school barefoot in the snow after a breakfast of Melba Toast, yesterday's newspaper stuffed inside my t-shirt for warmth and a stick in my gloveless hand to fight off the jackals and vultures.  But tell you what, I am SICK TO DEATH of graduate students telling either Nora or I that we give them too much work.  I used to spend $15 or $20 a week on photocopying my readings for Jerry Weisman's course, at a dime a page, so that works out to 150-200 pages a week.  For one course of three.  Sherry Ahrentzen's research methods reader was about 500 pages, along with the additional article we had to critique for bad methodology every week.  And Mark Fenster's statistics course had huge amounts of math homework, a final project, and three exams.  Plus I was auditing a course because I was going to be teaching it the following year.

It was grueling, but it was also invigorating.  I was literally bombarded with new ideas every single day.  Nowadays, it's wah wah wah you're so mean every time some students have to read an article with a single word they don't recognize.  What part of "graduate school" is hard to understand?

This little rant is spurred in the longer range by Nora having had a couple of students blaming her for their inability to keep up with the "unreasonable" workload last semester (which, trust me, is nothing like what she or I had to keep pace with).  But in the shorter range, I got a phone call today from one of my students who had an independent study with me and another colleague in Spring 2011.  She's plenty smart, but she finished the semester having read two articles (TWO!!!) and written a response to one of them, and asking for an incomplete.  That incomplete dragged on and on, and she built out a workplan for reading and responding to ten pieces by this Wednesday 1/11, plus writing a two- or three-page summative essay.  Anyway, this phone call today was a request to finish the course with five responses rather than ten, so that she could register for classes next week.

It's a pass-fail course.  What the hell do I care?  She's going to get a job as an architect and never have to read anything again for the rest of her life.  But as I sit and think about it, I think what bites me is feeling disrespected.  This student had the services of TWO really terrific scholars who were interested in her topic and volunteered to coach her into critical thinking about something she claimed to be passionate about.  And she took advantage of almost none of it.  When I asked for an independent study with Judith Kenny in 1992, I KNEW what a resource she was, and I read and wrote responses to three or four articles or books a week—some of which she chose, some of which I chose.  When was I ever going to get the chance to study cultural geography one-on-one with Judith Kenny again?  Never, that's when, so I'd damn well better wring that one opportunity dry.

If I had a sponsor, I'd go back and do another Ph.D. tomorrow.  There's so much to know, so much to read and to write... but the economy's got everybody scared, and if a student has two classes plus a full-time job and wants to get a handful of marketable nuggets instead of an education, who can blame them?
UPHILL BOTH WAYS, I tell ya!  Gaddam kids don't know how good they got it, with their Pods and their Pads and their pants hangin' down around their asses.  My old man woulda had a switch on me if I wore crap like that.  An we didn't have no Interweb thing, neither, we hadda go to this place you call a library (like these kids would walk four feet out of their way to get a book). 
I don't think I'm just being a curmudgeon, but this experience combined with my screed last week about money being properly sequenced and oriented makes me think I'm being just a little bit brittle these days.  Blame the full moon...

Friday, January 6, 2012

"Walkin'-Around Money"

It used to be that newly married couples stereotypically argued about whether to squeeze the toothpaste tube from the end or from just any old place in the middle (and by that phrasing, you can guess my preference...)  But now that toothpaste comes in plastic tubes that rebound instead of the old aluminum tubes that stayed compressed when you compressed them, that argument has waned.

We've found one to replace it.

We were leaving the hospital Wednesday afternoon, and stopped by the parking garage cashier's counter to pay our tab before going to the car.  It was cold out, and Nora was wearing a down parka over a down vest, which meant a) she was pretty warm, and b) she had a LOT of pockets to stuff things into.  So she began her search for the parking ticket.

Friends, it was like watching a magician pull eighty yards of scarves out of a shot glass.  Every pocket contained a great melange of money and tissues and Post-it notes and the missing tenth copy of the Magna Carta, a vast and blooming garden of paper materials.  She was probably warmer at least in part just because of the insulative value of all that paper.

I started taking some of it, both so that she could have hands free to explore new pockets and because I just wanted to see whether there were squirrels or budgies living in all of it.  And as part of that, I took the money I found, straightened it out, oriented it so that it was all facing the same direction, and arranged it in denominational order, with ones in the front and twenties in the back.

There are ten or twelve people around us watching this circus (we probably looked like Penn and Teller, the gregarious and exuberant one paired with the stoic and orderly one), all of them trying not to be too overtly interested in the amount of bills being flashed around.

Now, one of the nice things about being a guy is that I have fairly few carrying destinations, and I know exactly what goes into each one.  For instance, guys always have pants with four pockets.  Starting from the right front and going clockwise, they are keys, comb, wallet, and change.  The shirt pocket is for glasses.  Inside the wallet, there are credit cards and insurance cards and ID cards, each of which has its designated and unchanging location; and some amount of paper money, arranged in denominational order with ones on the front and twenties in the back, all with the presidential portraits facing upward.

I know that some amount of my psychological energy goes into maintaining that kind of order, energy that might otherwise be used to solve subatomic physics problems, but it makes me calm and happy.  If I had everything everyplace, I would just go berzerk. 

Let me say here that I try to be careful about judgments.  (No, really, I do, all evidence above to the contrary...)  For many years, I was in a relationship in which I was the comparatively disordered one, and I heard endlessly about the right way to do things.  I know how much that chafed, so I try to be conscious about accepting that each of us do things differently than the other.  It's more a sense of surprise, a kind of anthropological wonderment at the varied expressions of material culture.

I ultimately found the parking ticket in one of those fistfulls of paper, gave that to her, and quietly finished arranging the bills before handing them to her so she could pay the parking fee.

I wonder where they are now...


[Editor's note: Beware...H is about to go play pool and this may take longer than he wants to allot... but here goes. I got a call at 5:30 p.m. that my newly minted husband was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital from the airport, and I got the cats and the cat food and the sweaters and the keys in my hand (more-or-less) so that I could be by his side by 11 p.m. with the cats in the house and fed, and I didn't have an accident on the black ice. And I had to stop for gas since the tank was low, and the aforementioned husband had lent / given me $40 for emergency money several days before, and I had paid for the grange calendar and had something less than $40, so I had to stop at the bank for cash.... so there WAS cash in my pockets. And if YOU had gotten that call? You might not have stopped every time you went to pay for something when it was 8 degrees outside and put the bills in size order!  But I digress... When we needed Grand Marnier for the martinis we made at New Year's, who had it stashed in the hall? And when there was a glass jar at hand that remained from the salsa that we had used and the newly minted husband had tossed the lid away in garbage-who-knows-where, and we filled that jar with leftovers, who, I mean WHO, had a Ziploc under the sink with every size lid known to humankind and found one that fit that jar perfectly?  And when we needed a left handed monkey wrench who had one in blue and one in red? I mean... when you live in the country, you have to be prepared! And by the way, he just edited my typos before I had even hit "save!"  And who is it that deals with the insurance company / phone company / computer repair geeks on the phone and builds a meaningful relationship with each one? Huh? I mean I AM "she-who-speaks-with-doorknobs!"  Harumph.

One last note... Many years ago, I heard a story that may be apocryphal but I like it. It concerned a particularly nasty divorce. The husband had all his record albums (remember those?) in order alphabetically and by the type of music. After the divorce, the wife went in and put Willie Nelson in the jacket for Harry Manilow. And Souza in the jacket for Elvis.  Just you wait Henry Higgins, just you wait!] 


[by the way, Wanda, if you're reading this: this is the 200th published post in the one-year history of Nora and Herb's Wedding Blog.  So there.]

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

"Sweet"

[Re-posted with updates, 6:30 p.m. Jan 4]

Remember what I said about clouds on the horizon and how what you bring as gifts to the marriage with a new year may be greeted by something unexpected? First, know that we are ok. Really. Don't you hate that? People always say that before they tell you that there was some crisis.

Well, ok. H was at the airport yesterday on his way to D.C. He called to say that instead of being on the plane, he was at Mass General Hospital having come there by ambulance with heart pains. He prefaced that with, "now, I don't want you to freak out, but..." Right. In any case, I flew over black ice and through the coldest temps yet this year, to Boston. I dropped off the cats at the house, and found him awake, aware in a hospital bed in the ER observation unit, down from the main ER after the first of a series of EKG's. There have been several more, and a "blood draw" at 1 a.m. We are awaiting the results of the stress tests and the multiple EKGs which will be read some time between 2 and 4. Presumably they will let him leave then, since the tests seem to have shown no heart damage or changes in the night.

Then we are on to figuring out what this was.

So, he's ok it seems for now. So here are my observations... See? Always the observer...

1. He's ok

2. Life can change in a heart beat—literally.

3. The opportunity for great medical care in a hospital like this one, where the nurses are competent, efficient, responsive and smart ( I'll explain that later) is a real luxury. And it is not available to people in many other places. And it should not be a luxury. It should be available to everyone as a human right.

4. I am getting older. I know that, because as I rode up the elevator to his floor this morning, I knew the sound of major equipment that hums constantly in the background in a hospital. And I knew the huge elevators that accommodate a stretcher. And I knew the wise, distant, weary, ironic, and somewhat pinched faces of the staff. You get to know that after you have been in a hospital enough times. I have been in a hospital enough times.

5. Great nurses bring visitors a recliner at midnight in case you might want to stay over, and they supply a sheet on the recliner, a pillow, and a blanket without being asked. They can draw blood in the light of the darkened hospital room without turning on the lights to disturb the patient.

There ought to be a word for that light. It's the light of computer monitors and lights from outside the window and something else indefinable. And the only place you see that light is in a hospital. Did I say I have been in a hospital enough times? 

H and I listened to the interview of the new patient on the other side of the curtain. He arrived this morning. He says he fell. Landed on his face. Wrecked his only good right eye. He had had cataracts twenty years ago, and when the anesthesiologist refused to give him general anesthesia for the surgery, they pierced his eye administering the local. He didn't go back for some years, and by then it was too late. He is in his 60's, single, and he told his sister not to come today. She lives nearby. Yes, he has a few drinks a day. Stopped smoking. Doesn't need the proffered nicotine patch. He quit. "Sweet." Great nurses ask in several ways and at various times, how it happens that when you just happened to fall, you landed on your only good eye. But they don't ask it that way. Then they bring water to clean the blood off the eye that wasn't cleaned in the ER. So I probably will have a few more stories before we get to put this behind us, as the bad start to a new year, that could have been much worse, we think. But so far, we are ok and not freaking out. "Sweet."

[Late-day addendum:  We're home, cleared of all heart and lung suspicions.  Appointments to come in the next couple of days to do a more definitive diagnosis.  A false alarm.  But probably an important one anyway.]

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Clouds on the horizon

H and I just came back from Rutland. It was an aimless sort of drive that began with a purpose but whittled down to merely being together under sunset-edged cloud-filled skies. He returns to Boston tomorrow and I stay in VT for a few more days with a vacuumed living room, new mat on the kitchen floor and a clean bathroom. The bathroom and the vacuuming are fringe benefits of having people over. I need to do more of that in order to keep the cobwebs at bay.

In any case, I am sitting now in the tiny room upstairs where the windows are black with night.The rain is hitting the slate roof and there is a lamp on the desk and I am writing in a pool of soft light. It is a reflective time, and I am struck by something that is not news; we think we know what the pattern of our days will be; we think we know that tomorrow will be Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday, and that is dump day and there will be time to pick up the mail at the post office. We think we know that there will be time to respond to the phone call that has lingered too long on our voice mail. We think that we know what we will have for dinner, what challenges await us at work, and how we will answer them, or we churn thinking that we know what it is that we bring to the task, and what is missing. And sometimes everything we know is wrong.

I started the day with a call from an old friend, one I speak to every 6 months or so. We have known each other since I was a graduate student, but we probably knew each other as children, though that is too long ago to be sure. His life has been tuned upside down in ways that no one should confront. His life has been taken hostage by circumstances beyond his control, and he is left coping with trying to "arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic."

Another friend is struggling with a tense marriage and one with the conflicted feelings of an identity turned inside out by the very thing she had wished most in the world. And H and I are coping too, confronting what may be some momentous changes in our lives in 2012. I wrote earlier of the resolutions, and they are part of what we bring into 2012 - our dowry for the marriage to a new year. We bring the things that we value most as gifts to a year, like the Magi to a blessed child. We bring our demons as well, pushing them along like Sisyphus up an endless hill. But we will also confront the things that come unbidden, as gifts and challenges, from a year that is not even one day old. Some are familiar; some serendipitous and some arise like clouds on the horizon. It remains to be seen whether they are edged with sunset, filled with rain or betoken a whiteout to come.

We will be warming ourselves for a few more hours beside the wood stove. We hope you too are warm.