ANNIVERSARY Countdown (Count-Up?)

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


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.

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:
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..

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....