Homecoming (sort of)

I had an evening fall free while working in Omaha this week and so I started checking maps to determine whether I was within visiting distance of my friend Evelyne; alas, it was not to be. However, whilst scanning the maps I found I was but an easy drive from my father’s birthplace of Oto, IA (current pop: 108) and decided to go check it out.

My father’s folks emigrated from Moville, County Donegal, Ireland at a time when economic conditions and subjugation by the Brits made it advisable for Irish of the Catholic persuasion to skedaddle. John B McDermott, my father’s grandfather founded the town of Moville, IA (current pop: 1,618) by the simple expedient of agreeing to the siting of the local U.S. Post Office in his front room.

I know, you might be wondering how the McDermotts, having come all the way from Inishowen Peninsula and the shores of Lough Foyle and having founded a town that is prospering to this day, failed to evolve into a dynasty. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind knowing that my own self. Seems like the McDermotts of my ancestry have always been more interested in raising children than money and we have succeeded admirably over the years in both child production and the avoidance of accumulation of wealth. In fact, given the numbers of McDermotts currently residing in the U.S. and figuring the birth rate based on the relatively small number who originally made their way here from the Old Sod, one might reasonably infer that the making of babies is a singularly McDermott-ish talent.

We have a coat of arms, with the primary imprint including profiles of three boars’ heads. (Me Da was not impressed when I wrote a report about this in the fifth grade, in the course of which I referred to our ancestral heraldic emblem as featuring “drawings of The Three Pigs.”)  No one these days seems to know why my father’s ancestors found boars’ heads representative of their clan. On the evidence of provable affinities, we might more accurately and descriptively have opted for a drawing of diapers, but perhaps they didn’t have those in the days of coat design.

It IS emblematic of our tribe that the town (Oto) of my father’s whelping is both small enough to erase any delusions of grandeur and thriving enough to prove the hard-working bull-headedness of the inhabitants. You can look up the township for yourself using your favorite search engine. It does show up, barely. Unfortunately, the street-view availability stops at the intersection where one would turn right to go into, you know, the town. Mayberry is a megalopolis by comparison. Even so, this is part of where I came from, however distantly or indirectly, and it was a very cool evening’s sojourn.

All hail, mighty Oto, forever may your banner wave! (Okay, so they don’t have a banner; what of it?)

A perfect word

Some words are just meant to be. One such is ‘magnificent.’ I can’t imagine it meaning anything other than what it does. It could never swap meanings with ketchup, say or bucket. Neither sandstorm nor pickle could mean what magnificent does.

I was flying from Omaha to Seattle yesterday afternoon and the diagonal route meant that we were over mountains for a goodly portion of the trip. Not mountains like the puckered up hills they call mountains in Kentucky or Virginia. Mountains worthy of the title. Valleys and peaks, canyons and crevasses, dry alluvial fans and bowls filled with pristine, above-the-tree-line snow. No roads or rails, just forest and millennial-carved stone, the impossibly sharp knife edge with the glare of snow blindness on the sun side and deep, mysterious shadow on the other.

Plateaus cut by fissures that gave way to canyons cut by snaking rivers flowing out of sight. Endless scrub that from 35,000 feet looks soft as the down on the back of a newborn fawn.

How could a word like ‘magnificent’ mean anything but this?

 

 

(not) Pondering last moments

On Monday, the day I began this trip the big news was of an airplane that crashed into a mountain for what at first seemed no good reason. I usually check CNN or Reuter’s online evenings when I’m away from home and so I learned in due course that was misdeed as opposed to mishap.

Another instant mass murderer has taken his fifteen milliseconds of fame. Another hundred-plus people with no unifying theme more compelling than a common choice of conveyance shared their last moments together, probably in the mounting panic that accompanies a rapid descent from the heavens to oblivion.

So I have to wonder how many of the people with whom I share this plane, my flight home from Omaha paused to think as they boarded whether they would end up collecting baggage at SeaTac or being collected from a lonely ridgeline in the Rockies.

I didn’t. Worry about it, that is. Except that it clearly crossed my mind; hence this missive. I don’t wonder what it would be like to hang from my seatbelt in an inverted plane, trying not to understand just how final this trip had become. Because I can’t.

I can’t dwell on this sort of thing and still do what I do. And what I do is more important than what some crazed individual might do.

Or, so I tell myself…

Portcullis

I came across this word the other day while reading and was reminded how much I like it. Feels great on the tongue, does it not? Portcullis. I’ve always enjoyed this word but until now I don’t believe I’ve ever found a place for it in my everyday usage.

To save you a trip to the OED, a portcullis is the massive vertically-drawn iron gate with wicked sharpened appendages at the bottom that is raised to allow one to enter the sally port of a medieval castle or a nineteenth century fort. The proverbial castle gate at the end of the drawbridge. You’ve seen them in movies or if you’ve ever been to the castle at the Mouseland. Castle designers (castle-tects?) usually employed two of the buggers, so they could trap baddies in between and kill them by means of arrows or hot oil delivered through slots they charmingly called murder holes.

Not to worry, I haven’t become murderous in my old age.

I received in the mail yesterday an editorial review of the beginning of a book I’m working on from one of the women who agreed to look it over for me. Sruthi offered some very good (if somewhat hard to read – sniff!) ideas for improvement. That’s the way it goes with editing. A good editor is both skilled and honest. Which leaves one no way to turn if what you’ve submitted can stand a bit of tweaking.

She is one of two writers among the six or so folks I’ve invited to read and make comments. All women. No offense men, gentle- and otherwise, but the protagonist is a woman so I most value women’s points of view at this point.

I knew when I sent out the samples for these friends to read that a couple would go down black holes, some would try to be gentle and some I hoped and believed would give me the straight skinny. Sure enough, Toni and Sruthi have chimed in with precisely the feedback I needed.

By putting my writing in the hands of these folks I have bared my soul in a way that I’m not sure folks who don’t write will quite understand. I have entered the tunnel and let the portcullis slam down behind me.

You see, these are people I don’t want to disappoint and they will know for the rest of our lives if I don’t finish or if I write half-assed or dishonestly. I can’t know at this point if this work will ever gain a larger audience than this little group of intelligent and thoughtful friends. And the only way to satisfy them (and my ego) is to produce as good a finished product as I possibly can.

Sending off those six envelopes was an exercise in both brilliance and insanity, dependent on confidence and subject to abject fear. I could not have continued to write the book without knowing that the basic idea might make sense to a reader. Sending it out sucked. And was profoundly liberating.

I would ask Sindy and Larry, how did you do this for so many years? Except for the fact that I guess I know the answer. Because you have to. Because it’s what you do. Because having searched for and found and then fleshed out the idea it is impossible to just leave it lying by the side of the road.

The portcullis has rung down behind me and the only way to open the gate ahead is by cranking it up one rung at a time. No going back and hesitation might be fatal.

Damn!

Rainy evening

Too many gone of late. Two young suicides at MIT. Four teens on a stretch of road not meant for partying. A dear friend’s son in the final days thanks to a cancer that the doctors just could never get ahead of.

I have seen death before. In person, violently and not. And at a distance. Due to old age, disease, once a fire, a road accident, at their own hands. And these latest deaths follow the pattern of my experience.

It won’t surprise most of you that my offering this eve will be neither profound nor cheering. Not if you know me. And certainly not if you’ve known death among the young.

The only thing I can think to say, and to do, is to make good use of the time I have. Not the time remaining. The time I have. It’s not a continuum of which there is some percentage behind and some ahead.

There’s only what’s ahead. And I’ll be damned if I’ll waste any of it.

Hollis and Lana

That’s all it said, Hollis and Lana.

Well, actually it was more like HOLLIS and LANA, since the names were rendered in block letters. Surrounded by a gorgeous mural, but the letters didn’t intrude on the artwork.

I’m not generally much of a fan of graffiti – I consider it vandalism, pure and simple. But I have to admit that while I can’t officially approve, this bit of scribing (scribery?) got me to thinking.

I found myself wondering about Hollis and Lana. Are they star-crossed lovers or teenagers professing their newly found devotion largely to convince themselves of the truth of their declaration. They might be a married couple larking during a walk around the block.

Since I’m not inclined to set up surveillance and Hollis and Lana probably won’t repeat their artwork in the same location anytime soon, it doesn’t seem likely I could catch them in flagrante, as they say.

But I am curious about them. And maybe a bit proud. You don’t see this sort of message all that often. It seemed a lovely expression and it made me smile.

I sure hope Hollis and also Lana are good to and for each other.

Pi Day

It has become a well-settled tradition that the admissions decisions for MIT are announced on March 14^th (Pi Day – get it?) and already, the blogs and twitters relating to that institution are filling up with the anxious comments of potential students. Mary and I will never forget standing in the background with fingers and toes crossed in the moments leading up to the moment of truth for Two. That the decision went well for her in no way erases my memory of the stress and hope and fear that accompanied the spool up to that announcement.

Pi Day has become something of a landmark event in my mind in the years since; each early March, I find myself drifting to the blog comments of students awaiting their fate.

It would be easy to dismiss this fascination as a byproduct of my natural affinity for events affecting one of my daughters. But it goes beyond that. I have watched these kids during the applications and acceptance (or not) process and seen them arrive at the school with high hopes and focused intent. These students are different from your usual college freshmen. And not because MIT is such a great learning place, although it is.

I think a big part of the angst vested in the MIT decision is the realization that for many of these kids, in their highly functioning minds it is the only place where they feel they are assured of fitting in.

While some of the prospective Beavers of the Class of ’19 will be drawn from the rarified ranks of the privileged who already attended top prep schools, others – a majority, actually – come from regular old secondary schools. Many of them rose to the top of this year’s high school crop not because they were carefully nurtured in a system with the best of everything, but because their own raw intelligence and drive to understand allowed them no other path.

That second group of kids come from situations in which they were the ‘smart kid’ madly treading water in a sea of the rest of us. And many of them spent their most formative years feeling misunderstood, different, unwelcome. For those, the choice of MIT is much more than the simple matter of getting into a really good college.

For the off-charts-smart kids of this year’s application pool, getting into MIT or one of the other four or five institutions in the world dedicated to the education of one-in-a-thousand minds, the acceptance decision is a signal event in the cultural and social, as well as academic realms. For many, way too many of these kids, getting into MIT or Cal Poly of Rose Hulman or Tsinghua or Harbin means that for the first time in their young lives, they will be surrounded by people – other students as well as profs – who understand them.

It will be a coming home and for that reason, for those who are not admitted or those who are admitted only to find the rigor beyond their abilities, there will soon be the realization that for them, there may be one more denial of the human need to Just. Fit. In. This realization can be soul crushing and I wish I could hold each one of them and find a way to help them find a way.

I understand that an MIT or a Berklee or a Kings College can only admit so many students. And I understand that the admissions process is inexact. But I’m bothered that the decision has to be so binary. Admitted / rejected. Included / excluded. Learn / languish. Fit in / remain outside.

One of the signs that we have at last matured as a society will come when our system allows for differences in a non-binary way.

We need to find a way that works for every one of us. Not only for the incredibly intelligent but also for the pretty smart. For the average kid, yes, but also for the kid who comes with labels. Autistic. Artistic. Exceptional. Odd. Different.

A week from tomorrow, many thousands of potential Beavers will receive the news. And for over ninety percent of them, it will not be the news they seek. Think about that – over ninety percent of the students who did well enough in high school to harbor thoughts of admission to MIT will find themselves rejected. There’s something very twisted about that.

I hope they can somehow understand how badly we as a society need for them to keep on keeping on. I hope they each and all find their way. And I hope that someone will be there to make each of them feel not only different, but special.  

Off the grid (sort of)

I am out of town. Which is not to say I am not in any town. I am in fact in A town, just not MY town. Which means, of course that I am not at home with access to our home network. Which further means I don’t have internet access.

So, you can fairly assume that this missive will be posted, if it all, sometime after I wrote it. I can’t call it in like the old time reporters who would dash to a pay phone, shoving all the other reporters out of the way as they scramble for the scoop (as though getting to the phone a few seconds faster would make a difference to a print news organization) cradling the headset between ear and shoulder, then shouting that riveting line, “Hold the presses!” And then the reporter, with his cheap hat with the press badge in the band would dictate the story to a harried copy boy at the other end of the line (completely off camera so they don’t have to credit another bit player) and punctuate the urgency with “Got that? Okay, read it back!”

So anyway, that’s what my writing and posting of this missive was NOT like. So I am just typing it out and hitting save and waiting until Pat finds the password I can post this.

Which now he has done and now I shall do.