Dawn Relief

“Got a minute?”  I shrug and follow him outside; this has something of the flavor of an impromptu performance review.  As we wander out into the sun (is that what it is?) my glasses, like the peril-sensitive sunglasses of Hitchhiker’s Guide, turn dark — who says that the future isn’t now?

“So, you know, rumors have reached me.”  In other words, I’m sure I’ve been shooting my big mouth off again; when you’re at the hub of the wheel you keep turning turning turning until up and down seem the same.  What. Did.  I.  Do.  I have a strange sense of premonition as the familiar refrain ensues.  “You know, there are other jobs here,” delicately pausing, “that sound like fun.”

In an instant, the satori moment hits; I spend so much time plonked down in the chair that it feels like I’m rooted  in place; in another flash, me-as-tree brings up another image:  spreading my branches over the group and showering wisdom down.  That’s jumped the shark — internally I snort derisively and the images are swept away as I interrupt.  “Just so I’m educated about what else is out there — it’s not all good times and young kids; there’s something to be said for regular schedules and no one knowing your home phone number.”

Relief spreads like dawn on his face.  “Exactly!  Because, you know, I’d just heard …” It’s all perfunctory at that moment and we’re just marking time until we go back inside, until the peril dissipates to let me see clearly again.  Despite having taken position having to stare into the sun, if only I could bottle that desperation I’d be rich the next time I’m out of work.  Meter it out in small doses, lest your head swell into mistaking invaluable for valued (there’s the picture of the shade tree again), but keep your heart open — for life, and for life:  take as needed.

– Lumic Lütcher

Now Log

Dear J-

We’re walking around the neighborhood looking at the lights (this is Thanksgiviing week here in the States, after all, and a lot of our neighbors have thought it easier to put their strands up while taking Halloween decorations down) pointing a few out here and there to figgy, who promptly responds, “Yeah, lights.”  I can’t help but think of last year when the only word we could get her to reliably repeat was “mee-mee” for the Christmas lights; she would walk, and point, and no matter how we said “lights” it came out “mee-mee.”

The whole vocabulary has expanded dramatically and with it her awareness of the world; her favorite sentences all begin with I:  “I want” (sticker, band-aid, mac’n'cheese, pasta, rice, TV, tissue), “I don’t want” (bath, lunch, clothes, new diaper, go outside), or “I can do it.”  She’s lost the invented words, but does a very good facsimile of what we say, and has learned, somewhere along the way, colors and basic sequences.  I have particular guilt, as I have guilt over so many aspects of my life, that I’m not doing more for her learning:  again it’s another opportunity to marvel at my parents for their patience in exerting a firm steady pressure to embrace knowledge despite our protests.

Some day — probably soon — we’ll start setting down memories she’ll be able to recall as an adult; though she still calls out for Bean occasionally (not as much as that odd first week:  “Bean, come on,” reliably though there was no comforting answering tags jingling as we were getting the leashes ready for the walk) I’m pretty sure she’ll look at pictures of him and ask what kind of dog he was (we’ll say a good one, you must realize he was getting old and crabby but under it all good, happy, and patient).  Yet that will be the same sort of projected memory that makes sense only when you stumble across old albums and a parent to explain it; our job is to catalog the now and keep it.

Mike

Glutton Season

Dear J-

Once you get past Halloween your reward for overindulging in trick or treat candy (the kids have it all wrong; you could either go out and pick up collect candy, or you could stay at home and snack on candy, turning off the porch lights at strategic intervals in order to extend the shelf life of certain favorites) is the collection of pumpkin-based treats awaiting you like certain land mines along the path through the holidays.

Pumpkin pies and pancakes (it’s a seasonal treat, despite the year-round availability of canned pumpkin); one time, while waiting for a pizza I picked up a pie sweetened with the non-sugar maltitol as a treat, but the resulting hyperactive toddler was enough to make us hide the leftovers. We now look for the full-flavor equivalents, dripping with sugar and butter enough to make cookies with the leftover crumbs. People decrying the death of creativity have no idea of the things crossing through the kitchens at the end of the month.

Every year we’ve got another treacherous road to travel, these holidays, littered with good intentions of restraint and exploding with overindulgence. I find at some time during the holidays I’ve eaten so much that I’ve lost the will to live, choosing instead to nap off the excess in a food coma. Every year I think it’ll be different, and I manage to prove myself wrong without fail. There is hope every year for the recidivist gluttonists out there, but only just.

Mike

Sharing Caring

Dear J-

You can admonish me any way you like later but here you go: Cal 34, Stanford 28; it’s always a big deal when our alma maters play. And this despite the Cardinal running it up against two teams that pounded Cal earlier this year, Oregon and USC. Yes, Stanford had a chance to pull it out in the end and next year, who knows? But for me, I’m curious why I should feel a sense of accomplishment when a team wins or a gnawing sense of disappointment when they lose: it’s not as though I’m personally responsible for them — they are unlikely to hear me yelling at them through the television, and it’s not as though I ever suited up to do battle on the gridiron. All I know is this: after the giant swoon of 2007, all is forgiven (for now), let’s not dwell on the three losses, let’s trumpet the win over a nationally-ranked Stanford team and sing praises for the role of spoiler. By the way, it looks like Oregon’s going bowling for Roses; here’s hoping that the Buckeyes find out how tough the Pac is.

It’s the second day of my weekend, which found me out of sorts early — impatient, crabby, tired (figgy pulled the same early-morning trick on us again — either we need to keep her up later or find some way to graft the sleep habits of a teenager onto her); we revived a bit with breakfast (figgy with her first, voracious taste of egg) and crashed a bit back at the Zoo over little things. It’s always the little things that dismay me: one week she spilled some water, which for some reason brought me to unthinking rage (it’s not as though there aren’t drinking fountains and drink vendors all over the place, so a little spilled water is no big deal in the grand scheme of things); this week, it was her runny nose, perhaps from the flu shots she got yesterday, causing her to completely deplete my stash of napkins. Again, I’m not paying for them, they’re ubiquitous and yet seeing the last one go because she doesn’t like to reuse brought me to some impatient snappiness.

Point is that there’s so much in my life that’s out of my control nowadays; I used to hate my parents hosting parties partly because it meant that I’d be in charge of the other kids, but more, I suspect, because that meant they’d be touching my stuff. MY stuff. It’s not that I never learned to share; I never learned the joy in it, and I find myself going slightly crazy now that there’s a life and a will I can’t control. Guide, yes; control, no — and it’s going to mean that the things I do aren’t necessarily going to have any effect, but somewhere between the futility of cheering at the television and creating a clone is the right mix to raise a child (crazy daughter that she is); it is perhaps the most fascinating experience (experiment?) I know.

Mike

Daylight Revelations

Dear J-

“She calmed down, like, five minutes after you left.”  It was the most reassuring thing I’d heard all day, this weird long day.  The story starts yesterday; as we’re sitting there watching television (a prerecorded episode of Glee, pleasing as always) figgy came trotting up hesitantly — hand to mouth, as though to shush her way past the ever-vigilant cats guarding the long hallway from bedroom to television.  Though she’s been able to escape the bed for at least a month, she had, until then, reserved that ability solely for early morning snuggles.  theVet turned around, hearing me greet her, and we shared a quick double-take as we realized that there was a third person in our midst — after 7:30 it always seems like we’re back to two.

She followed up that late-night preview with an early show this morning, crawling into bed somewhere in the dark between the “do you know what time this is” hour and the “go back to sleep already” hour.  After putting up with various thrashings and gnashings, I got up to let theVet sleep, knowing that she had to work and I’d have a chance to nap later; we shared some cereal in that dark center of the day before light.  Then on to the main attraction — doctor’s appointments, one for me (hepatitis vaccinations) and one for her (allergist and then flu shots; she is as allergic to peanuts as ever) and then the trauma of dropping off at day care.

I remember when my sister-in-law was dropping off my nephew at day care; I’d never seen the little guy get quite so weepy and sad and I silently, foolishly resolved to not be that person.  Forty minutes later, as I held her for what felt like the umpteenth time I called theVet out of desperation:  what do I do, she’s gotten to the spasmy-diaphragm breathing that comes after a long solid crying jag — and the answer — to just leave her — seemed so heartless, especially when it wasn’t to go off to do something productive.  I spent the next few hours wandering around various thrift shops feeling hollow inside — the man who just wanted an afternoon to himself, and who would abandon his child to an uncertain fate; was that truly who I’d become?  I’ve learned to never say never, but am I learning fast enough?

Mike

Of Letters

Dear J-

I suppose it’s the nature of work relationships to be transitive, especially in a place where the site population is so large:  there are those folks that I recognize by sight, but not name, even in my own building, and then there’s the voices on the phone (occasionally competing with the voices in my head) where I know the name but not the face.  Still, besides the folks in the office it’s the remainder of the vanpooligans that I know best, and watching them go is like having to switch schools between grades:  the setting is familiar, but the people are not.

Although the internet makes for easy connections with folks from your past (from the scary-good networks that Facebook pulls up to the overload of minor knowledge and trivial connections of Google) I’m not convinced that it’s more than a superficial link unless you work at it, like any relationship.  “Ya hey,” you say, “we’ve got pictures, we’ve got videos, what more do we need?”  We live in an era of drive-by information:  staccato pulses of words substituting for thoughts, conversations reduced to chats and texts.  It’s all very easy; now how do we make it meaningful?

Whenever you hear about authors’ estates bequeathing their papers to libraries and collections I always scan the article to see if those papers include a collection of letters and correspondence.  Inspirations and plotlines don’t just appear from a vacuum, and writers have lives of their own that informs and shapes their output.  And not so many years ago the correspondence in their lives was inherently archival and unique:  short of carbon copies, letters written in longhand are tangible and impossible to precisely duplicate.  Yet the electronic equivalents have the advantage of swifter delivery and reproducibility, which lessens the thought process required, at least for me.  I’m not saying that all electronic forms of correspondence are inherently bad; I’m just saying that the easier the media, the more thought should flow into it:  after all, if you can type fasterthan you can write and don’t have to spend time looking up physical addresses, then that’s more you can invest into a thoughtful letter.

Mike

Rich Time

Dear J-

Perhaps the sun seems brighter here in Southern California because of the lack of shade trees — sure, you see the palm trees all over the place, but they provide precious little shelter and are prone to  dropping large, tough fronds at the slightest provocation.  Whereas you look out at the side of the roads here to see the occasional tree, for the most part there is no significant native growth here aside from low scrub — no forested canopy stretching away into the distance.

Whenever we would visit Canada we would remark on how it seemed just like home — only greener and politer; part of that was hopping the border over to Vancouver, on the rainy coast, but everywhere we would go west of the Cascades seemed to have thick stands of forests lining the roads — it’s the difference here between, say, Crescent City amidst the sea of redwoods, and Redding, a dusty station along Interstate 5.  No trees means little shade here, and it also means no shuffling your feet through leaves (no whispering crunch) as you walk along the sidewalks.

There are compensations; raking is an occasional chore, rather than a once-weekly morning lost.  I find that the older I get real luxury comes from being able to spend time the way I want, rather than as I need — there are days I’m convinced that the endless ennui I had those summers before college was the real reason folks like to say that youth is wasted on the young.  With no trees in the way of the sun, though, summer here seems to stretch into an eight-month season, and we’re all the richer for it.

Mike

Special Prep

Dear J-

Chalk it up to another one of those random stories you hear about — supposedly, the executives at GM flew out every quarter or so to try out the new vehicles being rolled out; the test drives would take place in GM’s Arizona proving grounds (and if you’ve ever had to live through a muggy Detroit summer, the dry desert heat must have been a treat).  Instead of pulling typical vehicles off the line, though, they’d be in specially-prepped vehicles, hand-massaged to sweat the details:  panel gaps, fit and finish,  squeaks and noises all carefully tweaked to perfection.  GM can make world-class vehicles; they just can’t do it for anyone but the top brass.

Besides blinding the executives to typical quality control issues, I wonder if they ever figured out what was happening; is what we present to our bosses an honest face, or have we all been guilty of sweeping issues under the carpet when company comes calling?  For all I talk about management transparency and letting information percolate down the ranks without impedance, it’s a closed feedback loop:  if the front-line reports are all uniformly good, of course the generals will believe victory is imminent.  GM executives were dumbfounded that their product was unappealing (for the most part, any mid-size not named Camry or Accord doesn’t have sufficient name recognition to be successful) after having driven some of the cars and seeing the published reports of Nüburgring trials where GM products were world-beaters because of their insulation.

There’s a difference between telling the truth to be honest and to be brutal, though; the former is meant constructively, and the latter, as a kind of torture:  let’s watch them squirm.  How would you have changed GM’s executive test drives, for instance?  If you read car magazines regularly, one of the features is always spy shots (many times by the estimable Brenda Priddy or her associates) featuring shakedown drives, where extreme conditions are used (heat, cold, altitude) to iron out any kinks over multi kilo-mile drives; I say have the executives spend a day riding along — mutely, and without jeopardy to the test drivers/data loggers’ jobs.  One culture supports the other; proverbially walking (or driving) a mile in their shoes, so to speak, brings us into closer understanding of daily pressures, and knowing more people has never been a detriment, in my experience.

Mike

Stool Pigeon

Dear J-

I was thinking about the expression “dropping a dime” on someone in the context of informing on them, wondering about etymology and how a light dime could have caused much damage (there is the classic urban myth of the penny, in falling from the top of the Empire State Building, turning into a deadly projectile), or the alternative meaning of dime being a tenth or ten of something (hints, tips perhaps) when I figured out that it probably meant putting a dime in a payphone and making an untraceable tip.  “Dropping a dime” is redolent with meaning;  a public payphone, well-trafficked and difficult to pin down one user — a whispered secret, maybe through a handkerchief, and then back out into the crowds.

Nowadays the closest we have — after all, wouldn’t it be more suspicious and memorable if someone did use a payphone? — in this age of cell phone ubiquity is the prepaid phone, but I don’t see hard-boiled detective fiction using the term “mobile virtual network operator” any time soon.  More efficient, sure; more poetic, no.  Much has been made of Twitter, Facebook, and other various social media — by the way, the sell-by on Twitter-is-the-death-of-reasoned-discourse jokes expired, oh, six months ago — but it’s just another way life keeps evoloving.   I’m still old enough to prefer my albums as physical discs rather than downloads, although it’s hard to resist the appeal of instant gratification; in the end efficiency wins out, doesn’t it?

It’s important to know the new (you knew the now), but it makes the past seem so old-fashioned, doesn’t it?  If I had to explain “dropping a dime” to figgy, I’d have to start with explaining what a payphone was, and then, possibly, what coins and cash were (there are whole weeks that I hardly ever see any bills lying in my wallet), and then why someone would want to call instead of send e-mail.  My teachers always told me that the world we grew up in was so different:  ours was amongst the first few classes that grew up with a computer in the home — but those were days when 1200 baud was a luxury, and getting online meant Compuserve or a BBS, not the Internet.  Today’s world has changed with the always-connected computer, no house an island, nobody alone.

Mike

Time Squall

Dear J-

It took me roughly an hour to change the inner tube on my bike this evening, between prying the bead off the rim (I’m thinking that something like this is an amazingly good idea) — I resorted to using a screwdriver instead of the tire levers I keep buying and snapping in half — and feeling around for various sharp pointy objects that may have found their way past the tire liner and goo-filled tube I installed last time. I was half afraid of what I might have found, as the goo has been remarkably effective — if it seals punctures, what happens to all the extra stuff that leaks out?

We spent a brief spell at the Zoo this morning, as theVet had to head off to run a vaccine clinic this afternoon; there were a few new animals, but nothing too remarkable besides counting on riding the tram back from the far side of the Zoo (it was down for annual maintenance, and the tight schedule meant bearing figgy up and down hill at rapid speeds as she wailed the injustice of a short trip). Time drives us all in different ways; is it an investment, or is it something we can’t help watching tick by helplessly? Where do we choose to spend it?

Mike