Ed's Marathon

OK sometimes men fail to see the potential in their children and need to be reminded that challenges can make one's strengths visible when there was no prior indication that these skills were available.


H is questioning Ed's skills at marathon running. I find this short-sighted. Focus instead on this....

A RABBIT obstacle course:

Or this... a shepherd bunny (please ignore the song):  

But these are mere rabbits!  Can you imagine what a cat can do?  Imagine a cat that needs to be a cross-cultural ambassador!  Try this:

 

Or a NASCAR cat like this!

And here in the Northeast where winter is a long proposition, and winter sports are an important part of life?  Try this...

Last but not least, the boys are going to be in training shortly. If their father wants to help, well fine... If not?  We will see you at the finish line! 

A Day at the Races

Over the space of a single week, we've gone from the ground completely snow covered to the ground almost fully bare. The only ice left is in snowplow piles and some places where the roof shed its load eight or ten times during February and March.  We can work outside in just long-sleeved shirts, and have started walking again on our newly re-navigable road.

You may remember our discovery last fall of the FitBit, the little walking monitor that you can stick in your pocket or clip to your shirt collar.  January and February were disappointing months for our FitBits, as we stayed in the warm house and wrote; it seemed like the only mileage I got was shoveling, carrying firewood, and a weekly stroll through the grocery.  But I had four 10,000-step days last week without even trying, so spring is here.

Anyway, we were discussing the FitBit this morning, and Nora suggested that we should put one on Ed (the cat) and see whether he'd get twice as many steps because he has twice as many legs.  He has a little harness that we put on him in unfamiliar locations, and Nora thought it looked kind of like racing colors, and it wasn't twenty seconds before she was imagining training him to run the Boston Marathon.  I replied that I thought his powers of concentration probably weren't sufficient to have him take on a four-hour run…

[cue:  fade screen and harp music to signal fantasy sequence…]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Middletown Downs for the running of the Vermont Derby.  [trumpet sounds]  They're called to the post… and they're off!!  Ed takes a quick lead, and then sits to clean his paw.  Simon veers cross-track to chase a moth, then returns to bite Ed's hocks, and now they're both on their way.  Ed is in the lead and looking back as Simon continues to bite the backs of Ed's legs.  Now they're on the ground wrestling, and now Simon has the lead with Ed in pursuit.  But Ed discovers a toilet paper roll, while Simon eats a blade of grass…

[cue:  fade screen and harp music to signal return to present…]

So no, I don't think this cat racing thing has a viable business model.  But I never would have developed the Puppy Bowl or Twitter, either, so what do I know.

We also had an extensive discussion of the Newman's Own empire, and of machines that put six-pack rings onto cans, and how pre-computing manufacturing relied on ingenious combinations of parts that could move only linearly or rotationally.  Just another morning on the hill...

Re-Framing, Chin First

The phone has rung a fair bit this week.  Some of it the usual, with news from far and near, telemarketers wanting to sell us credit-card processing software, friends with whom we could discuss cats and Ukranian history in the same call.  But there were extra calls on Wednesday and Thursday, with congratulations for being elected to the Middletown Springs Selectboard.

My first act on Wednesday morning was to walk to my bedroom window, look out upon my domain, and say loudly, "I am a Middletown Springs Selectman, and I command that this snow cease immediately!" I now have a humbler view of my powers, an experience that I'm sure will serve me repeatedly through the coming three years.

I had a lovely call from the fellow who had held the seat I won, and who had been running for it once again.  He wished me good luck, and I told him I'd be relying on his experiences and asking for advice periodically as I found myself stuck.

The school budget failed, the town building budget passed.  The fire company's repair and replacement budget failed, their operating budget passed.  I have to go down for a talk with the Town Clerk tomorrow morning to learn the procedures for getting sworn in and beginning board service.

And I have to make a pie.

The most important things I have to learn are the things I've already learned a thousand times.  I know what some of those will be.  I've been in a lot of meetings in the past fifteen years, meetings where simple statements are almost always based on deeper beliefs… but the statements are visible and the beliefs aren't, which I find holds us back over and over.  We think we're disagreeing about which course should come before another in the curricular sequence, or about where a building should sit on a site.  Really, we're disagreeing about what kind of experience we hope to provide—for our students, for our neighbors.  The details are just manifestations of some deeper purpose, but the details are a lot easier to talk about.

One of my colleagues at my prior school recognized through my body language when I was about to attempt to reframe the conversation.  She was able to mimic it beautifully.  I would lean forward with my elbows on the table, put my chin in my hands, and bridge my fingers up so that they formed a triangle above my nose and mouth.  I'd be that way for about three minutes (maybe trying to develop a carbon dioxide buildup that would calm me down) before finally offering my belief that we were headed down a blind alley unless we stopped for a minute to consider, and state, WHY we wanted what we wanted.  I wanted us to recognize that the simple path we were on represented a significant array of unspoken decisions, and that other decisions were possible.  Not even better, necessarily, but possible, and worth considering.

I'm in the middle of writing a novel, and Nora's in the middle of writing an essay/poem/book, and both of them are about this problem, as all writing is.  We act, and those actions seem normal and everyday, but they also simultaneously convey and reinforce our values.  How can we enact our best selves unless we consider the meaning of our actions?

As a developer, the town has to meet codes and be financially prudent.  But we also have to create an experience of arrival and departure, a sense of town center, an aesthetic experience.  As an employer, the town must consider the simple facts of dollars and cents spent on wages.  But we also provide for the welfare and stability of families, we build a community with reliable players.  Whatever decisions we make will enact some set of values, will both enable and portray the way we want to live.  Acting automatically, in any situation, simply means that we're locked into our unspoken values and aren't considering our larger meanings.

I'm sure that I'll have my chin in my hands regularly during the next three years, and beyond.

Incremental Rates

Everybody hates taxes, but a lot of that hatred is because the system is invisible.  Some pile of money goes to Montpelier, and some other pile of money goes to Washington, and it's hard to say what happens to it after that.

In a town of less than a thousand, the taxation system is more visible.  Middletown Springs doesn't levy a sales tax or an income tax, so everything we raise is based on a tax on buildings and land.  If you refer to our property tax rates as percentages, the numbers sound small: our tax rate rounds out to about 3% of the listed value of property, about three million dollars total against a property valuation of about $92M.  And we know exactly where that goes: the town report, delivered to every household last week, itemizes what we spend for road work and road salt, what we spend for early childhood education and for legal advice.  The budget actually makes use of the two digits after the decimal point: everybody's trying to be as careful and as responsible as they can be.  The difference between a tax rate of 2.74% and 3.26% sounds pretty trivial, until you multiply it times a $200,000 house (a little below Vermont's average) and see that it's the difference between property taxes of $5,480 and $6,520 a year, in a community where the median household income is about $45,000.  Frugality matters.

Everything costs more than it used to, and our standards are higher than they once were.  Over 16% of Vermont's school kids are deemed to require special education, as opposed to the tiny fraction when I was in grade school.  And that's good—a lot of kids in my grade school never understood arithmetic, but we had no term then for a "quantitative disability," and never really tried to help them much aside from telling them they'd never be any good at math.  Now we do, we have more tools at our disposal… and they cost money.

We expect that we can live on dirt roads, widely dispersed from one another, and yet travel easily to and from work and the general store and the post office no matter what season.  Back in the day, Middletown Springs was formed exactly because of the general expectation that such travel was unreasonable in the snow and ice and mud.  But now we have to, or want to, get any place at any time… and that costs money.

I was talking with a car salesman when Nora was having her car looked at, and we were talking about the things that are common on cars that never existed when we were young.  Some are terrific, like anti-lock brakes and traction management and electronic fuel injection instead of mechanical carburetors that never, ever seemed to be adjusted properly.  Some, although we did without them for a long time, are nice, like air conditioning and cruise control.  And some of them are trivial:  cupholders and better stereos and power windows and multi-adjustable heated seats.  Every one of those things, from the computerized brakes to the CD player, costs money.  And so even a pretty "basic" car costs more than it would have, because it has all of these little incremental charges built into it.  Town services are the same way: we live differently than we used to, and so we pay more than we used to.

We do a lot of things through volunteerism as well.  People invest a huge amount of time here doing things that support their community.  We don't consider the tax rate on our time, but it's there.  We have a volunteer fire company, and a volunteer planning commission, and selectboard members who make an annual stipend of about six hundred bucks a head, a far cry from the professional wages those roles might accrue elsewhere.  Those volunteer hours are all unseen taxes that fall more heavily on some than on others, and it isn't always easy to find those who want to give such a high proportion of their time:  nine of the 23 elected seats in Tuesday's town vote are going to go begging, left unfilled.  Only one is contested.  The other thirteen are filled by people who step forward over and over.

We have an informal baking tax.  We made food for the Building Committee's informational meeting two weeks ago, and we're making food for the Building Committee's fundraiser on election day, and we're making a pie for the Library's Pie for Breakfast next Saturday; each food donation costs us about two hours and six or eight dollars for ingredients.  And then we go to those events and spend another two or three hours and buy back the food, our own and others', for another six dollars.  And then we go home and wash our pie plate or casserole pan.

Our town fields a lot of requests for town support of various not-for-profit endeavors.  Some are small, like the ones that support youth sports in the next town over that our kids sometimes participate in.  Some are large, like the request for the new roof and furnace for the firehouse.  The town ballot itemizes each one, so that we all vote to separately approve or deny the request from hospice care or the women's crisis center, about twenty requests in all.  For every thousand dollars we approve, our property taxes and those of our neighbors will rise a buck or two or five, depending on the worth of our house.  The $50,000 for ongoing development of the new town office… about $57 per hundred thousand value, or about $125 for an average homeowner.  The road budget, the school budget, considerably more.

There aren't any right answers to any of this, no matter how much the pundits harangue us.  How much is the right amount?  How many hours should we work at the book sale, how many dollars should we contribute to the volunteer fire company, how quickly after the snow storm should a Class 3 road be plowed?  How many pies do we make, how many meetings do we attend, which community roles need us most?  The angels on our right shoulders tell us we're needed, see that we could be helpful and that our neighbors depend on us; the devils on our left shoulders say, "Enough already! No more cookies!"  And all of those individual calculations, the balancing between naming and judging and meeting needs and our own tolerance for yet another request for money or time or casserole, will come together in simple town-wide counts: how 400 votes will divide themselves, how much the Library raises through pies, how many people will stand up next year to make themselves candidates for public service.

Tomorrow night's town meeting ought to be interesting, the angels and devils in open discussion on the floor, and inside our own heads.

Travel Phobia

Good to be back.  I spent all of August through November immersed in writing about the arcana of higher education, and all of December through now writing about a pool hall in 1950s Saginaw.  When the spell takes me over, I just have to go along for the ride.

But like the groundhog, eventually I have to come out of the den.  The spring will be filled, like last spring was, with requests to travel.  DC in March, El Paso and Savannah in April, Baltimore in May, and DC again in June.  That I know of.  So far.  And those requests put me directly in touch with my greatest phobia: air travel.

Oddly enough, I'm not afraid of flying.  Getting into the airplane, leaving the ground, bumping around in the sky and landing are actually all pretty interesting experiences.  The seats are uncomfortable and long flights are really boring and confining, but I have no fear of actually being in a plane, even after having seen Denzel Washington fly one upside down.

My fear is actually the fear of buying the ticket.

As I've discussed a few times here, I have just a touch of "folk OCD."  I don't think I'm diagnosable, but I do have to check about thirty times before I leave the house that I have my car keys and my FitBit and that I know exactly where the cats are and can prove to myself that they haven't gotten out into the garage or something.  So going onto Travelocity and buying tickets is fraught with complication.

First, there's the dates.  I actually did buy plane tickets for the wrong dates once, for a job interview!  Luckily, I was onsite for a three-day window, so my mistake merely meant that I had to go to the airport immediately after the interview rather than be given a campus tour and lunch by the other postdocs; no one noticed my error, and I got the job.  So now, when I'm on Travelocity, I'm looking at the event dates that I've put into the calendar, but I'm also going back through the e-mail stream to verify the dates and times that my hosts have told me because I don't trust that I've put it into the calendar properly in the first place.

Then there's the destination.  Especially for DC, I always have to call or e-mail my host and ask whether I should come into National or Dulles, since they're like 600 miles apart.  But even otherwise… I'd never been to The Citadel before November, so I had to look at a map and convince myself that The Citadel really was in Charleston SC, and that the airport code CHS really was for Charleston SC and not Charlestown WV or Charlestown NH or the Chicago Hinterland Suburbs.

Now that I live in rural Vermont, there's a third problem, which is the site of departure.  When I lived in Oakland, I flew out of Oakland International (OAK).  When I lived in Milwaukee, I flew out of General Mitchell (MKE).  When I lived in Medford, I flew out of Logan (BOS).  No-brainers.  But now, I can drive two hours southwest to Albany (ALB) or two hours north to Burlington (BTV), or I could stick an extra leg onto the flight and go out of Rutland (RUT).

By the way, if you go to Google Images for all these other airports, the first photos you'll encounter are either the huge navigation towers or fields of commercial airliners.  The first photo in the queue for Rutland is two guys in t-shirts working on a single-seater with a tail wheel.

So when I'm on Travelocity, I have to price flights three different ways.  It takes hours.  And I have no particular airline allegiances, so I have to look at everything.  I'll fly Midwest when I can and Virgin America when I can, but they're really limited in terms of routes, so almost everything I get is going to be United or Delta or American.  I won't fly JetBlue again.

Now we've gotten to times.  If I have a 6 pm opening dinner and a noon conclusion of work three days later, I'd like to get a flight that arrives at about 3:30 in the afternoon so I can get my bags and get to the hotel and clean up a few minutes before the host arrives; and I'd like to leave on a 3 pm flight so that I can comfortably get from the conference hotel or the campus to the airport in plenty of time to go through security.  But the airlines aren't so interested in my preferences, so I end up with a 6 am outbound flight that arrives at lunchtime, and a 7:30 pm return flight that arrives home at 1 in the morning.  And by "home," I mean at an airport two hours from home.

And finally, there's the price.  I'm being reimbursed for all of these trips but one, but I'm buying them now and being reimbursed in dribbles throughout the summer.  It's like a farmer buying seed; I'm fronting a huge amount of money in the hopes that it'll come back later.

Grrrr.  I hate the whole thing.

So here's a thought experiment, based on my late March trip to DC.

• Flying Cost about $400: $265 for the ticket, plus $90 for mileage to and from the Albany airport and $15 for three days of parking and $25 for the SuperShuttle in DC.
• Flying Time (one way) about seven hours:  2:15 to drive to Albany, 2:00 at the airport to park and shuttle and check in and go through security and board the plane, 1:40 non-stop to DC, another 30 in the airport and 30 in the van to the hotel.
• Driving Cost about $600:  922 miles round-trip at 56.5 cents per mile, and $30 a day for three days to park the car at the hotel.
• Driving Time (one way) about eight hours, depending on traffic.

<sigh>  I guess I'll fly, based on saving my hosts $200.  But it sure would be nice to hop in the car, with my music and my pace and my choice of restrooms and refreshments on my demand… with no seatmate and way more legroom and a cupholder… with an entire TRUNK that I can put my luggage and computer bag into with no bag fees… and spend the same entire day-long trip the way I want.  I love to drive, and don't love so much being a component of the travel machine.

I suppose I shouldn't even consider driving to El Paso…

Loose Nuts

I am back on the blog, after a long time away. My blog skills are rusty, but I am drawn back today as I spend some time focusing inward and trying to make sense of the events of recent days. Herb is upstairs working on his professional commitments and I am sitting in a sunlit room beside the pellet stove, trying to stay warm.

It has been two months since we posted anything. 2013 is gone and 2014 has been here long enough for us to be able to make out checks with the appropriate date.

I have been back in the classroom and out again. I am working again in the online version of the educational world. And that is a blog post in and of itself. Herb has a new project pending which looks as though it will give him a chance to stretch his professional wings a bit further. He is also now a Justice of the Peace and can perform marriages. He is running for the Selectboard which is the governing body of our town.

We are both recommitted to our writing, but it is fragile enough - the writing, not the commitment - that we are yet hesitant to share what we are working on.

And as the old song goes, the wheel keeps turning.

But last night we heard some stories that felt like a flat tire. There were echoes of those dark stories this morning. They are not headline news, but they have shaken me.

Some years ago, one of our local officials had nails strewn in his driveway after a particularly ugly battle over local services.There are reports that someone sprinkled sugar into the gas tank of town equipment, and then the local official was blamed for not keeping the equipment safe. I thought that was about old grudges between hard-boiled men.

A year or two ago, a  disgruntled nephew stole a can of coins from his uncle. Word went out that a green Jeep had been seen around town and that we should watch for it. It turned out to be the car of the local appraiser who was making notes for tax appraisal time. The two events were unrelated.

There are reports of major drug problems in the town next to ours and some of it is reported to have slipped in here, though all I have seen so far is a very pale skinned, somewhat wild-eyed, pit-bull-paired, loose jointed couple buying a child's table and chair set at the local library yard sale.

And then I heard that the lug nuts on one side of a friend's Jeep had been loosened after a disagreement over a town issue that engendered some tax increases. She made it to the shoulder of a snowy highway, and the wheel made it across the lanes of oncoming traffic with no injuries.

This morning, I heard that  a friend who built a tiny "half-house" on land some few miles away had found out that  her windows had been broken though nothing was stolen. She is returning "from away" to repair the damage.

This morning, as I stood at the top of the stairs, Herb said there is a dark side to this town. It is something I've not seen or acknowledged until today.

I am stretching for the lessons in this. I am stretching to understand how a town that vaunts its sense of community, and its safety for the children can have such a dark side.

The friend who had her wheels loosened said she had been a newcomer at the time, and that people were angered by her stand on a local issue. She said she might have been scared but instead was angry. "If you want to argue with me, come up here and do it on the porch," she said. "If you want to punch me, come up here and punch me. Don't put my friends and my kids at risk when they could have been in the car."

A friend worried that a new town office building planned for the main intersection in this tiny town, on two county roads, should not house the library for fear that some disgruntled person would come with a gun and shoot the children there.

There are shadows here that I have not seen.

Some of those shadows are the long shadows of Newtown where the children were shot by a madman who had been someone's son. All of our towns are vulnerable to the loose nuts. Some of the shadows are of problems with economic disparities and a lack of jobs, and a sense that our lives are tenuous, and that just a little sip or a little snort or a little something in the veins will make it hurt a little less, at least for a time. Or that something small will make us feel stronger, as though our outrage has a place to settle, our anger, an expression in someone else's pain.

It is too easy to say that it is about newcomers and oldtimers which is what I've often heard. It is too easy to say (as I have) that it is about old grudges. Or kids with too much time on their hands. Or wounded men with a streak of violence.

Or of loose nuts.

It is of course all of the above...and more.

But I am spending time again, as I have before, looking at my own expressions of loss and anger and disempowerment, at the way I express my own rage....and wondering how to repair the damage. Mine and that of those I love.

A blog presumes that there is some discovery, some lesson to be shared. It presumes that what we have written, like a recipe blog that tells us how to boil an egg or make charlotte russe, has something tasty at the end. We have built a society that seeks an instant-fix googled answer to our questions.  In 2008, The Atlantic published an article called Is Google Making us Stupid?  The author Nicholas Carr wrote,

The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after.... But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought."

I find myself longing for the google-wikipedia answer, the recipe for something light, sweet, nourishing. Maybe it is my version of the shot, the sip, the little something in my veins.

Carr continues,

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies... Lewis Mumford  described how the clock 'disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.' The 'abstract framework of divided time' became 'the point of reference for both action and thought.'...
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

I find myself wondering whether we have become a googled community which seeks instant answers rather than the process of consensus building which takes time and the capacity for listening to other people's stories. We seek instant fixes and all-or-nothing responses. In a recent controversy, one of the members of the Historical Society insisted that instead of agreeing to disagree, all the members of the Board needed to come to consensus and since none could agree and the discussion was stalemated, any movement forward was stymied.

I am seeking to understand how to fix my own google life. I want to understand how to stop depending on instant fixes, all or nothing scenarios that leave people out and block movement forward.

Carr continues,

"In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas...If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture....

The work of community building requires time and work that is unaccustomed these days. We worry that a real record of the extended time spent by the committee planning the new town building (and responding to individual and group concerns) will be seen as time wasted, at the same time that we worry that others will contend we are moving too quickly ahead.  We worry that our efforts to make good policy will take too much time, alienate our friends. We worry that we should walk to town rather than risk the lug nuts on the car or the gas tank. But the roads at night in a rural place are dark...

Carr cites playwright Richard Foreman saying,

"As we are drained of our 'inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,' Foreman concluded, we risk turning into 'pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Have we become pancake people who are spread so wide and thin, by loss of jobs, and loss of respect that we no longer know how to build the layers of trust in each other and in a future that we can share, where we can agree to disagree, without having the wheels come off? 

Daydreams and the status quo

"Maybe your daydreams might find a home in mine."

That was the closing sentence of a friend's email yesterday. She is looking for new opportunities that will challenge her, that will broaden her already broad areas of competence. She is looking for something that will bring her into contact with more people. She has asked H and I to brainstorm directions for new pursuits.

It comes at a time when many people I know are hunkering down--for the winter, yes, but more for lives constrained by economic fact and spiritual imagination. I am not talking religion here, but the power to have something broader in one's life, the hope, the belief that we can dream.

It makes me wonder what my daydreams are. (And that's not to begin to take on the transfer of my daydreams to someone else.) It makes me wonder how our daydreams find a home with open windows or one with few doors and closed shutters. It makes me wonder when we give up daydreaming to walk between layers of need-to-do and how we bury desire to keep our heads down more than one might hope.

I had begun writing a post for another blog, inspired by the conflict in our town over the installation of equipment that would provide a WiFi hotspot at the center of town. I had begun writing in that blog about the manner in which we head-down keep fighting the old battles and forget to look to what can be. The local government worries about liability; the local historical society worries that it will introduce something unknown in the past; parents worry about access to the internet letting their children know things that they have not prescribed for them; the church worries about conflicts with god's waves over the town green.  And head down, we bull our way forward calling lawyers and building coalitions of outrage.

In the room that is made of anger and opposition, the doors and windows are firmly shut. There is no opportunity to daydream. No opportunity to imagine.

A childhood without imagination is a cramped and shriveled thing. A town without invitation to those "from away", that concentrates on our darker natures, our desire to assign blame for those things we cannot control is a poor place for civic values and the vaunted community we claim for this beloved place. A Historic Society that looks only to the past, cannot see what past paths have wrought in the now, or what is worth holding on to and celebrating. It becomes a place of dusty shelves with unseen artifacts rather than a place of learning that celebrates the shared geneology of the land and the shared home. And a church that worries that radio frequencies conflict with god's word has little faith.

In that other essay, I wrote about the way in which attention to the local can cramp our ability to see something larger. I wrote that I felt that I had been stuck inside the macro setting on a camera lens. There are deep pleasures in looking at the color and pattern in a leaf. There are lessons in the intricate weave of a vireo nest. I have always found that spinning a fistful of fiber into a lace-weight yarn is a meditation. But there are times when the neck-cramped position can make movement impossible. There is a cramp in my neck and my pedometer is silent.

That day of email, that day of focusing on the crisis at home, I happened to open another email from the management consulting firm, McKinsey. Please understand that this is not an endorsement. I haven’t even really read very far in the material they provided. But there is a post about the manner in which small towns in India are using technology for entrepreneurial access. There is a post about how important it is to make entrepreneurial acumen available in the US at the hands of the foreign students we have trained in our educational institutions and sent back to the nations of their birth. There is an article that describes the incentives for entrepreneurial work offered to immigrants to Chile in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. And I am struck by the manner in which my stuck macro lens hasn’t allowed me to think beyond solving the minutiae of local problems.

Now that is a dangerous row to hoe. I am a believer in the power of the local. I am committed to the importance of building sustainability in community institutions at ground level, and to understanding how local institutions work, and to talking with the power brokers who can make needed change or protect indigenous values and vernacular landscapes. But sometimes you can lose sight of the proverbial bigger picture.

Many years ago I studied with the founder of a field called Social Impact Assessment. He maintained that we needed to know the broad social impacts of change before we made planning interventions. It was a sibling to Economic Impact Assessment and the ever-popular Environmental Impact Assessment which attempted to assess how a new highway built below-grade level in New York’s Hudson River would impact fish spawning. That project timed out in controversy but we have since gotten one of the most splendid pieces of modern planning ever in New York’s High Line which reclaimed the old railroad bed and has turned decrepit warehouse districts into powerful public spaces and commerce. And yes, people were undoubtedly displaced.

My mentor Charlie Wolf talked about a radical idea—the no plan alternative. What if we did nothing, no highway, no commercial district, no social change. It was a radical way of re-examining who stood to benefit and who the losers were. It identified social costs and benefits of the perpetual momentum machine and the opportunities available to a steady close-up look at what would be lost if plans moved ahead.

It is perhaps where I learned to use the macro lens on community and on change. It was probably there that I learned that the vernacular was beautiful as is the veining in a leaf. Just so communities have midribs and veins that share resources and strengthen the whole.

But I find myself thinking about not seeing the forest for the trees. And that is an unusual perspective for someone so wedded to the particular.

As we concentrate on the minutiae of old feuds and allegiances, as we speculate on the potential for legal suit by people who fear change, as we champion the no-plan alternative, we lose sight of what can be. We lose sight of the children who can become entrepreneurs bringing new businesses to a cash-strapped economy. We lose perspective on the child who can find writers and musicians and artists who inspire their creativity. We lose sight of those who can find meaningful work and those who can make meaningful work. We lose sight of the character of a community that supports its best impulses rather than its fears. In a "visioning" process  on the new town building, there was no desire for space for the arts or for a library...just for what we already know.

As I stretch my spine and my legs for a walk on a sunny day after days of immobility, I don’t have THE answer of how to walk between the local and the larger of course, but there are times when I think we need something that is unfamiliar, something that stretches us and makes us think about what is possible rather than what we know. For an ethnographer that is a dangerous idea.

I am off, for now, to seek some daydreams.