My week...

…was really fun!

Last weekend, Mary and I got a LOAD of yard work done.

I’ve been to the gym several times this week. Did some really good reading and even some writing on my book project. I played guitar several times, if you can call what I do playing the guitar. It’s gonna take a lot of practice to get those chops back.

I zammed through some projects at work that made me feel like I actually accomplished something. I frequently feel that way in my job and yes, I do count myself lucky.

Had a couple of good conversations with Daughters One and also Two and reflected on how much I envy them both for following their dreams at their young ages. Also had some good conversations with Mary, mostly centered around her first foray into being a consultant. She’s excited about the prospect and it excites me to see her excited.

I made some chicken soup, not my best ever but it worked. Last evening, Mary was taking her friend out shopping so I decided to surprise her with a deep clean of the middle level of the house while she was away. But lo and behold, when I got home from work, she surprised me with freshly mopped floors and vacuumed rugs. Now, that was cool in sort of a Gift-of-the-Magi way!

I got to bed early most nights and so was able to haul my carcass out early enough the next morning to spend some time reading over coffee before heading out for the bus.

This may not be the most exciting or inspiring blog entry you’ve ever read but I sure had a good time this week!

We’re making plans for our Spring’s adventures in building sweat equity and looking forward to meeting Susan’s new guide dog.

Life is definitely good!

More on reading

I frequently find myself reading more than one book at a time. Now is one of those times.

Usually, the books I have open are contrasting themes, styles, genres. I’ll have a crime novel going on the bus while a biography occupies my night stand. I’ve always carried a couple books on business travel because I never know which one I’ll be in the mood to read.

Using an electronic reader greatly facilitates this habit.  A few days ago I started This Explains Everything, a book of essays collected by a guy named John Brockman. I’d never heard of the gentleman, which is apparently evidence prima facie that I am not a deep thinker. You see, Mr. Brockman is a “cultural impresario,” if the bio on edge.org is to be believed. And we shouldn’t fail to believe it simply because it’s basically his own website that says so, right?

Edge.org according to its own description is an “online science salon.” True to this somewhat hyperbolic description, you have to be willing to wade through a fair amount of self-satisfaction on the part of many of the folks whose essays appear there. After all, these are “the most complex and sophisticated minds” to be found. Just ask ‘em.

The Edge chooses one question each year and then seeks out the people John Brockman considers to be his intellectual peers and asks each of them to provide an answer in a short essay. For the year covered by the book at hand, the question was, “What is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?” Since Brockman himself is so clearly full of, well, himself I fully expected the folks he brought together to be similarly filled up.

So I approached  This Explains Everything with tongue in cheek. But reading  the first essay - Evolution By Means of Natural Selection by Susan Blackmore - I found myself caught up in the clarity of her thought. I read it in the first ten minutes of the bus ride and then spent the remaining thirty minutes staring at my feet, thinking about what I’d just read.

On the way home that day, I read Life Is a Digital Code by Matt Ridley. And again, I had to pause to think for awhile. By the time I’d read The Power of Absurdity by Scott Atran, two things had become clear. First, while John Brockman may be a prig, he’s done a good job of pulling together some really interesting correspondents. Second, this is not a book I’m going to skip through in a few days.

So I opened the next book on my list, Sh*t My Dad Says by Juston Halpern. I thought from the liner notes it would be a comic waltz through the author’s reminiscences of his father. Which in fact, it is. Some of the things that came out of Halpern pere’s mouth are outrageously funny. Outrageous. And funny.

Many of them are also profound.  Halpern Sr. is frequently profane, sometimes unreasonable and always pretty sure he knows what’s right. And he’s in many ways the kind of Dad I hope I’ve been but I’m not at all sure I’ve measured up.

So, I have these two scripts running through my head. On the one hand, the essays of some really stellar thinkers who have been invited on the basis of extensive and impressive academic credentials to offer their thoughts on an interesting question. On the other hand, the extemporaneous comments of a regular guy whose son found him both amusing and profound enough to share with an audience, including moi.

I’ve never thought that the ‘great thinkers’ of any age were necessarily brilliant. In fact, before the age of generally available and publicly funded education, many of the ‘thinkers’ were chosen not on the basis of innate intelligence but rather as an accidental function of birth into a family that could afford time to read and discuss and ponder the great questions. (Sure, Plato was brilliant but was there an even smarter guy in his household who never read a scroll because he was born a slave? Could be, right?)

In our day, education and information is shared with a wide cross-section of people, so that a much broader sampling of our population has the opportunity to learn and think and have their thoughts found and considered by others. The world according to Mr. Halpern is right there in my Nook, right alongside those essays by ‘great thinkers.’

I’m learning from both books, neither more nor less from one than the other.

I love this century!

Consider...

I was thinking the other day about lots of things.

Why people will text a third party while in the company of a second party with whom they’re ostensibly holding a conversation. Why ‘tweeting’ is of interest to anyone. How the pound / number sign came to be known as a hash tag which is used to precede ludicrous non sequitirs.  

It all started with a guy who cut us off in a parking lot while texting instead of, you know, watching where he was going. So perhaps I was predisposed to feel negatively toward texting at that particular moment.

But then I calmed down and got to thinking on a somewhat different plane but still about the same basic topic. I got to ruminating about the compression of communication that arises from the availability of ‘instant’ methods of exchanging thoughts.    Of a sort.

My thinking morphed, as idle thinking is wont to do, into a consideration of the power of consideration.

Consider.

Consideration.

Considerate.

Look before you leap.

Breathe…

All terms that encourage thought before action or in the case at hand, thought before speech. It seems to me that the common thread isn’t empathy or insight or introspection, although it winds through all of these.

The common element is time. The taking of time to consider. And that’s what’s missing in so much of what passes for communication these days.

Joyce Kilmer was right

I took down a tree today. Cut it down to a stump, corded the wood, set aside the small branches for kindling or chipping.

I felt very studly, wielding chain- and pole-saws, loading the pickup, earning sweat hog status as I soaked through both shirt and hoodie. I showed my inner ‘real man,’ although now having showered and changed to clean clothes, I’m not entirely sure how long it will be before I can overcome inertia again.

The tree really needed to come down. Over the years, it had grown up splitting a hurricane fence as the effects of wind and competition from larger trees forged it into a gnarled, off-kilter runt. But even a runt can be dangerous when you're talking about hardwood.  It reached over the neighbors’ driveway and we were afraid that it was going to fall on their young children, so it had to go.

I know I did the right thing today.

So, someone tell me why I’m so sad to see it go. The tree doesn’t even know it’s dead yet – won’t until it’s time for sap to move in the spring. But I do and I feel guilty for being the agent of its demise.

For me, cutting down a tree is like taking a beloved pet on that final trip to the vet. The fact that it had to happen doesn’t make it enjoyable.

More from the bus stop

Interesting things happen at the bus stop. And you sometimes learn a lot more than you’d care to about the lives of strangers.

I’ve heard about people’s operations and drug deals and stolen property and any number of odd – by my estimation – political, religious, or business philosophies. But most of the oddities that assail me I hear at the block-long stop in Seattle where I wait with scores of other riders for our various coaches. You expect that sort of diversity in the downtown of a big city.

Only rarely am I exposed to surprising situations at the little stop around the corner from our house. Occasionally I have to deal with the denizens from the illegal homeless shelter at the Lutheran church. But generally, we’re a pretty boring group at the corner of 146^th and Eastgate Way.

One fairly reliable source of entertainment is provided by the high school students who catch the 241 three minutes before my 210 appears on the scene. They clearly don’t consider an old Fudd like me to be, you know, part of their world and they will talk about just about anything within my earshot. I don’t matter in their world.

Accordingly, I get to hear all the best gossip. I know who asked Alex to Homecoming and who is the biggest $)&*^!! on the football team. I mean, I don’t know the people but I know the names because the kids at the bus stop are not even a little bit shy about naming names.

So I wasn’t all that shocked when one of the group of girls who meet at the stop each morning proclaimed Mr. (teacher’s name deleted) as the biggest (women’s hygiene product)-bag in the school. What did take me aback was her announcement to her friends with neither chagrin nor shame that Mr. XXXXXX-bag had inadvertently left his classroom unlocked and she had found the questions and answers for the term final on his desk. She then allowed as how she had emailed a copy to several of her friends in the class.

Now, I’m not so naïve that I don’t know cheating is rampant in many of our schools. And from its reputation, I’m especially not surprised to learn of cheating at this particular school.

What really knocked me back was how casually the girl announced her cheating and that the other girls accepted it as a boon to studentdom. And I couldn’t believe how willing they were to talk openly about it in front of me.

Please, someone tell me that this is unusual. That these were particularly clueless girls and not representative of how low academic honesty – hell, just honesty – rates on the modern student’s mind.

Please tell me I’m not just a clueless Fudd.

A list for the New Year

I happened upon the official web site of the U.S. Library of Congress this evening.

Okay, okay, so it maybe wasn’t such an accident - I am nerdy enough to actually spend an hour drooling over their lists of collections, what of it? Never mind what you think of my sick-day Internet trolling habits! Herewith, my latest list, which I am brilliantly labeling…

Stuff I’d like to see at the Library of Congress:

·         The James Madison Papers

·         American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Folklore Project, WPA Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940

·         The Hannah Arendt Papers

·         The Frederick Douglas Papers

·         Letters of Delegates to Congress

·         The whole Quotation Book Collection

·         The whole of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division

·         The odd nooks and crannies of the Fiction Collection

·         The American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Printed Ephemera (in part, I admit, because it includes the word ‘ephemera’)

·         Broadside Song Collection

·         Miniature Book Collection

·         Reserve Storage Drama Collection

·         And others…

Here’s how I see it: I camp out in the Main Reading Room with my list (and more lists to be drawn up as I actually, you know, look at the collections) and a seat pillow while Library of Congress functionaries keep me supplied with hot tea, chocolate bon-bons and the occasional alcohol wipe, lest I transfer choco-prints to the rare books.

Think they’ll do this for me?

Learning

The last month has been one of almost overwhelming engagement with other people, ranging from travel with Mary and our daughters to visits with extended family, and capped off this last week with  professional training in the company of some of the people I most respect in terms of what we do for a living.

The time with Mary and One and Two was maybe the best vacation I’ve ever had – not without the occasional family spat but all in all, a loving, thoughtful and downright fun sojourn. The time spent with Mary’s family will probably prove to have been a watershed for me in terms of my relationship with my in-laws. Mary and I both come from large families in which any gathering of siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles requires a large space and a commercial kitchen. So we each tend to see the world through a fairly well-defined familial lens.

Mary’s family is rooted in the very strongly defined cultures of Italy and Lithuania, while mine arises from the largely more assimilated children of Irish émigrés of potato famine vintage. Her family is very East coast whereas mine is very West coast. Many differences in outlook and familial personalities, political and religious beliefs, etc. have made it difficult at times for this Son of the Sod who grew up on meat and potatoes to fold into Mary’s family that celebrates every gathering with the formal sharing of Capoletti-in-broth.

This time, although I steeled myself for what I expected to be another weeklong exercise in smiling through gritted teeth, the visit was entirely different. From the start, I felt accepted and welcome and for the first time, part of the Jonardi family. It was a wonderful visit in which we shared both common and individual experiences and the few rough spots were neither more nor less significant than standard family stumbles.

Our time with our daughters was very much a gathering of four adults – to the extent that you can consider a guy whose favorite toy is a whoopee cushion an adult – and I believe we each gained new perspectives on each other. Parents think a lot about their children transitioning from the family to defining and embarking upon their own lives. But we frequently neglect to understand how much our own lives are being redefined during this time of exodus. I think this time Mary and I saw ourselves reflected in our daughters’ gazes, and as we move forward, this additional perspective will help define our lives together going forward.

I spent the last week in the company of other teachers and course designers who all work with essentially the same audience but from different angles. Some focus on strictly business topics, others on regulatory matters, still others on disabilities advocacy and rehab / accommodations. Some focus on training for skills development and others on education around strategic and policy matters. It was a diverse group of perspectives, brought together by our common mission of working toward leveling of the playing field for persons living with disabilities.

In past ‘summits’ of trainers I’ve always felt an undercurrent of competitiveness. My topic is more mission-focused, mine is higher level, mine is more useful to our constituents, yudda, yudda… There’s always some sort of jockeying when you have people filling a similar role, but separately. This time was different. Every person there seemed to be focused on ‘how do we make our offerings the best they can be?’ The whole three days we spent together, including an impromptu dinner for four that turned into a marathon discussion of Khan and TED and online vs. brick-and-mortar that was so chock full of ideas, I found myself spending the first fifteen minutes back at my hotel room frantically writing notes for future use, was phenomenal. I take part in lots of training events, both as teacher and learner and sometimes both and I learn a little more each time. But this one left me with a staggering load of new ideas for making my own teaching better.

I don’t need to beat you over the head with how this relates to introspection. This last month convinced me that age 60 is no time to be resting on laurels or coasting toward retirement. I learned a great deal from Mary and Angela and Rachel and the Jonardis and my colleagues, but perhaps the greatest lesson I learned is most powerful in its simplicity:

I have so much to learn!

Stay tuned, ‘cause I ain’t done yet. Not by a long shot.  

Phil Everly

An even dozen reasons I’ll miss Phil Everly, although I never met the man:

·         Bye, Bye Love

·         Wake Up, Little Suzie

·         All I Have To Do Is Dream

·         Bird Dog

·         Let It Be Me

·         Cathy’s Clown

·         When Will I Be Loved

·         Lucille

·         Don’t Worry Baby

·         Carolina On My Mind

·         Love Is Strange

·         Crying In The Rain

And more. I was never a big radio listener but when I did, an Everly Brothers cut never came on without catching my attention and my imagination.

Thanks, Phil. Never met you but you and your brother added to my life.

Bumf

Bumf is a shortened version of the colloquial ‘bum-fodder’ which most directly refers to toilet paper or any other ‘stuff’ used for the same or similar purpose.

In recent times, bumf or bumph has generally been used to refer to unwanted or useless documentation and in particular to pamphlets of the advertising or political varieties. One can easily conjure images of the stacks of bumf through which one must dig upon return from vacation. It’s not bad enough that the vacation is at an end, but now I have to go bumf-diving!

Harrumph I say (re: bumf)!

I really like this word except that in relating political pamphlets to toilet tissue, it elevates the one and denigrates the other.

Toilet tissue, after all, is eminently useful.

Interesting quotes...

… gathered during our recent holiday (with attributions):

“… and did it quickler…” – Daughter One

“Why won’t this light?” – Daughter Two (while addressing an electric stove)

“I just had tea with your sister!” – Alice (of Wonderland fame) to Two

“Da-a-a-ad!” – Daughters One and also Two, in response to various things I said in the company of strangers

“Risking your life is not fun!” – Al, regarding my penchant for cold weather kayaking

“Oops, sorry!” – Me, an unfortunate number of times and in various situations