Wrestling With Angels

I never liked doubt. When I learned about medieval Japanese culture, I imagined myself becoming a super samurai, who could solve problems, write novels and, possibly, impress females, with a single, direct and unhesitatingly lethal sword cut.

Alas, when a problem arises, I’m like that clueless klutz wandering about Home Depot searching for the part, the piece, the tube of goo, the great grand and all-powerful tool. And I never seem to find it. Or, if I do, I fumble around so much, banging this, scraping that and making a mess that it’s only when I’m just about finished that I finally remember what direction to turn the screwdriver. I have the greatest admiration for those who can fix things, but also I disagree with those who preach goal-oriented behavior, or who equate intellect with problem-solving, because the only thing worse than finding yourself incapable of solving a problem (world peace, anyone?) is dealing with the cosmic let-down that descends just have your turn on the water and discovery that, yes, you’ve replaced the stopper in the toilet and it works okay but…the sink is still clogged up.

Or, as I like to put it, you pray to heaven for a sandwich with hot corned beef, Russian dressing, sauerkraut and a slice of Swiss cheese, and it’s delivered on white bread.

As for impressing females, I confess that I will never figure that out. I blame this on  myself. I remember that scary time in middle school when girls transformed themselves from pesky annoyances to the most important beings on the planet whose approval of me was a matter of even greater importance than life and death. Between my heart-thumping, face-burning, swoons and pratfalls, I noticed that I really couldn’t expect myself to appeal to every female because not every female appealed to me. Whenever I tried to drag myself up from despair and systematize and catalog exactly what would be the ideal object of affection, I was surprised by how this person (to whom I am now married) was, to put it honestly, beyond category. Love really is the most important thing that happens to us, and, even if we try to explain it away as an evolutionary evolved practice by which we further the species, nurture the weak and keep florists in business, we’re not supposed to understand it as much as be grateful for what love helps us become.

Writing novels has never been a single sword cut. Not once. I start with an idea of a scene or situation, or a character with a challenge, and then I go backward and discover how this scene arose. Then I go forward to find out what happens next, only to skid to a halt and spin my wheels for a while because I have absolutely no idea what will happen next.

Then I become frustrated and depressed because, even though I once gave some simple, easy plot-boiling strategies when I taught novel writing, I am incapable of following my own advice. So a rapidly sink into despair because I can’t just sit down and POUND IT OUT. I need a flickering beam to light the way ahead and, when I’m in the dark, I become dark.

I don’t turn to drink, or coffee, because I tried those during my misspent youth and they don’t work and they make you feel even worse. I’ll turn the computer on and play entirely too much solitaire. Just when I’m certain that my mood will never change, I get some kind of great idea. The way ahead is as bright as an airport runway! Pull back on the throttle and up we go!

This emotional power glide fades as soon as I admit that what I really want to happen next in my story is impossible, or, at best, highly unlikely. Now, this, in itself, is not a bad thing: readers turn to fiction because they don’t want it to be like real life. They want to experience vicariously situations that would normally send them running for Mama. They want to meet people who might typically scare them, intimidate them, or send them into a tailspin of envy. They want to fix the toilet and unclog the sink!

So I have to go back and figure out how I can either endow my character with the ability to pull off this unlikely thing, or play a card that I call “H.G. Wells’ Rule.” Wells, one of the grandfathers of science fiction, held that a reader will accept one miracle in a story, but not two or three. In practice, a reader will accept just about anything that is impossible if the reader wants to believe that the impossible can happen, should happen, must happen, will happen in the world you’ve created.

A technique that can be employed is similar to a that of a live magic show: you set up the illusion (the magician explains what will happen with “patter” or build up to it with a series of more intricate, interesting and beautiful illusions) ” employ misdirection (that is, involve the reader in an exciting, emotional moment with your hero, or an important character, so the reader doesn’t have the chance to question what you’re up to) and then unveil the illusion with a bit of dazzle. The impossible happens, dreams come true, your hero beats the bad guy at his own game, not because these are the conventions of story-telling, but because these things make “sense” in the world you’ve created.

Again, it’s hard for me to follow my own advice. I muddle through. I try all kinds of things. I wrestle and…if you believe there is a muse with sacred powers, or a God that watches over the tormented souls of struggling writers, you cast your imagination forward to that wonderful moment when you hold your finished book (printed and bound is FAR better than some digital blur on a reader) and…nobody can see the parts where you were paused, faltered, doubted yourself because you had absolutely no idea what to do.

Your book is almost like life itself: one thing happens after another.

But it is better than life because the right things happen, for the right reasons.

 

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Labor Day

My cousin, a retired labor law professor, never tires of reminding me of the importance of Labor Day. I did not need a reminder, because I’ve learned some of the unbelievably violent and bloody history of the movement. I let him tell me anyway.

I live in a “right to work” state, which limits union activities. I call it a “right to be fired” state. One of the many things a union is supposed to do is protect you, or help you survive, middle managers who impose layoffs to create numbers that might please analysts, stockholders and executives whose pay is tied to such numbers, but weaken the company, reduce the quality and reliability of the products the company makes or services it provides, and, most specifically, leave the human beings who have given their lives, their health and the future of their families to the company, with little or nothing for their contribution.

I support unions even though every time I needed one to back me up, it failed me.

The first time I agreed to teach a semester in the English Department at a community college with a very powerful teachers union.  What made the gig appealing was not the union, but the fact that the college was so close to where I lived at the time that I could walk to it.

That, and, from teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers and Temple universities, I knew that community college students really needed help with basic skills that they did not develop adequately in high school. I imagined that I could provide that, as an entirely self-taught novelist and journalist, I could provide that help.

Though I only had a bachelors degree, I offered a copy of my first published novel as proof that I knew something about my subject matter. That my work regularly appealed in Philadelphia newspapers also spoke in my favor.

I was given remedial English classes. I asked to share a faculty office so I could meet privately with students. I wasn’t given that, so I met my students before and after classes in the dining hall.

Teaching is always a two-way street: you learn as much, if not more, from your students as you hope they are learning from you. I’ll never forget the guy who couldn’t stop himself from sleeping in my class. When I asked him why, he told me that he used to be a drug dealer but gave it up after one of his friends was killed. Now, on top of the education he was trying to acquire, he had joined a church, married and was holding down two jobs to make less than half of what he took in illegally.

I told him I was so proud of him for turning his life around, I wouldn’t bother him any more about it. He made a renewed effort to pay attention and ended the class with one of the top grades.

Before that could happen, I was called into the office of an associate dean and accused of teaching without a masters degree. I told the dean I never claimed to have a masters degree and that the English Department had hired me because of my skills. The Dean further accused me of fraud and demanded that I provide a transcript from my Oberlin B.A.

I went to the union and was told of a war going on between administration and the English department that had nothing to do with me. I asked the union rep to intercede between the dean and me. The rep told me she wouldn’t do that and, “just to be on the safe side,” I should get a copy of my transcript.

Thank you very much not doing what a union should do: solve difficulties between labor and management so labor (me) can continue to labor in a way that best meets the needs of the company (the college) and its customers (the students).

I got the transcript and submitted it but the dean still accused me of misrepresenting myself. I decided to end my association with the community college at the end of the semester. Later I heard that the dean had been fired.

When the Philadelphia Inquirer was experiencing one of its periodic strikes, I was approached by a reporter I knew and asked about joining the Newspaper Guild. Up until then, the Guild would not admit freelancers. In truth, freelancers were considered the enemies of staff reporters (all of whom had to be Guild members) because freelancers tended to produce more copy, be more agreeable during editing sessions and more grateful for assignments.

At least, I was.

The idea of being part of the Guild appealed to me, because it would settle the inevitable rivalry between staffers and freelancers. Though rules had been established about how choice assignments were given, the rules were not enforced reliably and equitably.

So I joined the union. I wasn’t charged dues. I was just told not to write for the Inquirer or Daily News while the strike was on. Because I didn’t have any outstanding assignments, and plenty of work from other publications, I had no difficulty complying.

Within a few weeks the strike was settled and I discovered I wasn’t a member of the union. Instead, the union played me, and other freelancers, correspondents and contract contributors, to increased the pressure on the newspaper’s parent company to settle the strike

My third and, I hope, last union disappointment happened when I again thought I would be able to help students with their writing. I went into a high school and, as those who have read this blog know, I did not get along well with the administrators. They forced me to attend humiliating “remedial” teaching meetings, delivered insultingly negative evaluations, and accused me of saying and doing things I did not say or do.

This time I had paid my dues to join the union and I managed to meet with a union advisor outside of the union offices, who told me to “brown nose.”

I didn’t understand.

“Kiss ass. Tell them how much you love working for them and teaching in their school.”

But they’re trying to make me so annoyed that I quit.

“They’re trying to get rid of you. They’re creating a paper trail that will justify whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it.”

I insisted that I had good relations with students and parents, my classes were doing well and–

“They don’t care. They want you out.”

What could the union do to get them to lay off?

Nothing, I was told.

I heard later that the union may have made a case for me, if I was someone they “knew,” or valued in some way. As is typical with human organizations, the group’s resources, which can mean everything from funding or battles worth fighting, are apportioned for reasons other than the mere fact of membership.

It’s possible that some may read this and judge me precisely the kind of person who shouldn’t be anyone’s employee. I like to do things my own way. Instead of following instructions, I improvise to find out what works and what doesn’t in a given setting, then I build on that, learn from that, refine that.

And, from being a journalist, I’m skeptical of those in power. Just because they’re above me in status, influence, salary, duties or perks, does not mean that I will dedicate myself to pleasing them. I’ll try to get along, because it’s the right thing to do in a group setting. I’ll do my best to resolve conflicts and restore harmony.

But the job is more important to me than how it reflects on their opinions of themselves, or their careers.  When teaching, the job is much more than the acquisition of knowledge or skills. It’s about helping students discover how they learn, and then giving them every opportunity to learn as much as they can.

So, after so much lousy treatment by unions (as well as a time spent covering a violent Atlantic City strike by the hotel and restaurant workers), you’d think I’d turn my back on organized labor, and join the mob of anti-unionists who believe that workers should be eternally grateful for the management/ownership class for providing work, at whatever pay and conditions management/owners see fit.

I don’t. Labor and management have had plenty of opportunities historically to get along, to create positive environments where everyone prospers. Most of the time, that hasn’t happened. Management has broken strikes for better wages and better working conditions by hiding the forces of legitimate law and order, in the form of police, and state and federal militias, or by hiring armed guards, the infamous Pinkerton detectives among them. Invariably, those weapons go off and workers have died.

Nowadays the managers or owners are trying even harder to eliminate human labor from their companies. They have many reasons, and some of them are worth considering. Some that are not are so-called efficiencies that transfer labor from the company to me, the consumer. When I call up a company, I have to navigate a phone tree, then wait for the “first available” person. When I fly on a commercial carrier, I have to print my own boarding pass or pay a fine.

When I see someone who is employed having a dispute with management, I am grateful that unions exist, because, even if the union ultimately doesn’t do its job, at least the employee has someone to turn to and, when those employees come together to strike, they can make a difference, not just for their jobs, but for many others.

 

 

 

 

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Finding Satisfaction in What You Do

I admit: I’m not good at it. When I finish a piece of writing, or any task that requires dedication, concentration, improvisation or decisive action, I rarely get an endorphin rush, a contented feeling of completion or–best of all–that thoroughly irrational notion that my effort, no matter how small, has improved the world.

I almost immediately begin thinking of ways I could have done it better, or differently, or–if things don’t meet the expectations of the person I did it for–if I should have not even tried.

Some people don’t have this problem. They ascribe to goal-oriented behavior. They set a goal, achieve it, or not, feel good if they do, good if they don’t, and move on to the next goal.

My constant second-guessing, or overthinking, used to annoy my son. We’d be in the car, driving to a restaurant I suggested. On the way, I’d come up with three to five other restaurants. Minutes later, he’d demand that I pick one, and stick with it.

As a child, teenager and young adult, I would behave this way when taking standardized tests. I’d stare at the answers until more than one could be correct. I learned later that test-makers craft their torturous inquisitions with assumption that those who know the right answer will select it rapidly, without doubt and thus have more than enough time to conclude the test and go back to mull over answers of which they may not be sure. So much of Western culture skews toward quick and effortless certainty, or its blithe appearance, that we associate this with self-confidence and authority. Those who hesitate, or see more than one possibility, are dismissed as insecure, timid or socially inferior.

And yet, too much hesitation is just as fatal. Some battles are won by commanders who can quickly identify advantageous situations and exploit them.

Some, but not all.

I once had a fellow educator tell me “fake it ’til you make it,” as if this were the path to success. He thought I should tell the nervous students in my public speaking class to pretend they were confident, so that they would have a better chance of becoming the kind of performer they aspired to be.

This may make you a better actor, but I’d rather not have the person who fixes my car, designs the bridge I drive over, or diagnoses my illness and tells me how to return to health, be anything less than honest about what he knows that works, and what doesn’t.

Though I was rarely nervous as speaker (performing for me was a way of transcending social anxiety) I understood why many people are. So, before anyone said a word, I taught the entire class the virtue of compassion, of helping each other by empathizing, actively listening and offering non-judgemental suggestions that might help every speaker improve. Once students could trust that they were accepted by the group, that they could feel reasonably safe even if they made mistakes, forgot their speeches or delivered a less than stellar performance, they could loosen up and accept whatever happened to them when performing as an activity from which they could learn.

We all know that one of the keys to being satisfied with what you do is to give yourself permission to make mistakes and, if possible, learn from them. And yet, as Lady MacBeth says after she and her overly ambitious husband murder the king of Scotland, “what is done cannot be undone.” Some mistakes you wish you never made.

I know therapists, and spiritual people, who advise that, while it is true that you can’t go back in time and undo your errors, there are no unforgivable mistakes, and that forgiving others helps you forgive, and ultimately accept yourself as someone more than a person who succeeds or fails.

I get into moods in which this understanding of myself becomes possible. Don’t regret the roads not taken, the targets missed, the appointments I failed to keep, the toilet I couldn’t fix, the love, honesty and generosity I could have given to so many people but, somehow, did not. Forgive yourself, accept yourself and be more like the person you’d rather be.

But I still come up with different restaurants to visit. I’ll print out what I’ve written and see a dozen things I should have changed before the page emerges from the printer. I’ll  fret over different ways, possibly better ways to say what should be said.

Another strategy for coping with this comes via Robert Fripp, who has often repeated in his on-line diary “Honor necessity. Honor sufficiency.” I interpret that as understanding what you must do, or must have to survive, and then understand when you have enough, or have done enough.

I’ve employed this when I was writing newspaper articles on deadline. You have only so much time to gather the information and put the information in a form that is congruent with the newspaper’s style, values and point of view. How your work is to be used can determine how it is constructed: articles in the Style section must be written differently than those in Metro or on the op-ed page.  When the deadline arrives, you must surrender whatever you have, in whatever condition it is in, and consult with the editors so it arrives where it is intended to be.

Seeing my work in print has always been a dubious pleasure. I see ways I could have done it differently. I see mistakes I didn’t make, such as entire paragraphs deleted to make room for a last-minute advertisement, but, because my by-line is up there, will be blamed on me. I cringe at the headline. I wish a better photograph or illustration may have been selected.

Then, a few weeks, a few months, sometimes a year later, if the publication hasn’t gone out of business, or been sold to a buyer who decides not to honor obligations incurred by the previous owner, I’m paid.

The money never compensates the work. But I honor necessity, deposit the check and pay the bills.

A third strategy comes from sacred, wisdom literature. As God makes the universe in Genesis, He appears to stand aside from his creation and judge that it is good. Though we like to think of the Deity as omniscient, omnipotent and the closest thing to perfection we can imagine, we cannot help but notice that creation, as it seems to us, isn’t as flawless as it could be. But, when a storm isn’t flooding your town, when your loved one isn’t suffering cancer, when you find that parking space, you bite into a sugary donut, stand on a mountain peak and admire the view, it can be good.

Like the crucified faithful at the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, you, too, can sing cheerfully “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

And, as God commands, after you’ve ticked off the tasks on the list, you can devote a day, or some period of time, to rest. That means, NOT doing whatever it was you did before. That means, giving yourself the time to find a way back to who you were before you did all that stuff, and who you will be when there’s no stuff left to do.

I did yoga for ten years. For a while I could put touch my forehead to my knee, twist here and there and scratch parts of my back that I never could reach. Every so often in a posture I’d get strange, unexpected thoughts and memories. Sometimes my entire being would go spronggggg and, with a grateful sigh, I’d let go.

But the best of all was the relaxation at the end. Some instructors put on tranquil “New Age” music. Others gently asked that I relax my toes, then move to my foot, the arch of my foot, the top of my foot, my ankle, and, eventually to my over-thinking brain.

And then, the stretching I couldn’t do in that yoga session, the stretching that OTHER person did (there’s always a show-off who can twist himself into a pretzel and make it look so easy), the strange memories, the little bit of dust on the floor at the edge of the mat that I wanted to brush away but couldn’t because my hand was way over on the other side of the mat–

I let all of that go.

And I notice that I no longer have to wonder why I don’t find satisfaction in what I’ve done.

Whatever I’ve done is…done.

And that’s good enough

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bringing the Donuts

Early in the morning–earlier than I’m normally out of the house–I am on a mission: I am bringing the donuts.

That means I’m not merely venturing forward on wet roads into the dewy mist in my white SUV with the dog hanging out of the window, noise pointed forward, the wind flattening her fur and widening her eyes, to bring back an assorted dozen toroid glazed and sugar dusted fried cakes. I am also buying coffee, one of those big boxes that will sit on the cluttered kitchen counter like a fuel canister.

Painting continues inside our house and my wife, who once supervised an army of contractors on a custom-built abode, decried that people who work for you should feel that you value them for more than a job well done. She has supplemented this nutrient-poor offering with industrial muffins, fresh fruit and, a nod to her Celtic origins, scones.

Of course, I won’t be eating much of that. I’ve been told repeatedly by a physician half my age that I could “probably do to lose” about twenty pounds. That and I hear my father’s voice, announcing that donuts are “not substantial,” that they do not contain enough of what is necessary for survival. To eat one is to surrender to the insidious dangers of sensory gratification. Why, would happen if we ONLY ate sweet, gooey food?

My smart-alecky answer: we’d die smiling.

His reply: Without any teeth, who would know if it was a smile?

And so, I am sugar averse. With the exception of four wisdom teeth removed in my youth, I have never had a cavity and, to the endless disappointment of my father (whose brother-in-law was an orthodontist) I never needed braces. I find the taste of most chocolate, including the chocolate mustard I sampled at the Hershey Hotel during a Chocolate Weekend, a bit bitter. I didn’t eat ice cream until I was four years old, hours after my tonsils were removed. My throat was sore. I could barely opened my mouth. One spoonful of French Vanilla, and I could swallow anything.

My mother was a chocoholic. Late at night, she’d fill a tumbler with a finger of dehydrated chocolate milk beads, stir in a splash of milk, stir it into a paste, and shovel it in while watching television.

My father didn’t have a tooth cavity until he turned 50. I have never had one. My mother just had to think about a dentist and a cavity formed.

But, in the same way I read stacks of comic books in summer camp, when I went to college, I discovered whole wheat donuts.

Gibson’s Bakery, a family business for several generations, sits in the center of the commercial district across Oberlin College’s beautifully green Tappan Square. Many a night, when I was uplate studying, or not, I’d put on a raincoat, set forth into dreary, dismal Northern Ohio gloom  until I saw the bright, chrome sign and the warm, Edward Hopper-esque glow from inside, and felt the warm, dry, bakery interior air on my face, and smelled…whole wheat donuts.

I don’t know where the Gibson family found the recipe. I don’t know why they decided to make these from whole wheat flour. I didn’t believe such a delicacy was worth leaving my dormitory room until a fellow student handed me one and I bit into a heavily glazed, intensely sweet cake-like toroid which, my over-educated companion assured me, was not only the shape of a fusion reactor but also a model of human consciousness.

I went to college and I learned: there is a place in the substantial universe, for donuts.

When I graduated, I did not seek donuts to comfort me in my humiliation. Why, it can be astonishing how many industries, companies, going concerns that could use an English major –I had two majors, English and Religion, with minors in classics and history– and might even profit from the labors of an English major, turned me down.

As for that Religion major, well, when I’d call God, I’d get a busy signal.

Lo, I labored in a Georgetown, Washington DC supermarket, where I made sandwiches behind a deli counter. I worked every job in a natural foods restaurant, and took home the strangest leftovers. I sold fancy lamps at a lamp store.

One day I became so beaten down in spirit that only spoke in rhymed couplets, morning to night, no matter who I met or what situation I was in. I acquired a reputation from such desperate behavior, but I never left my sad world for the parallel universe of a glazed donut.

Until I tried teaching high school. I had taught college for many years as an adjunct: English literature, short story and novel writing. I had taught history at senior centers. I thought I could light up the sky with my wit, charm and fascinating lecture style.

Until I got my teaching certificate and became a full time teacher of 10th grade “academic” English. Academic was the school district’s code word for the lowest skill level, the dim, burn-out bottom of the pyramid that rises with Honor’s English and peaks at Advance Placement.

I looked out on a bunch of kids who could barely pull their eyes away from their cell phones. Here I was, an award winning professional writer of seven published novels, two non-fiction books and four thousand articles and cultural reviews that had appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Art & Antiques and forty other national and regional publications, and these kids did not want to hear about William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (most didn’t know who the historical Julius Caesar was). They didn’t care about British poetry. They didn’t want to wallow in the vile doings on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. They didn’t care who or what the Lord of the Flies really was. They had been made miserable by English teachers who insisted that poetry was an encrypted screed that had to analyzed, picked apart and otherwise autopsied to reveal rhyme schemes, metaphors, rhythmic meter, themes, tone and point-of-view.

I had written poetry. I knew published poets. On one thing we agreed: poetry was the heart singing. Look for anything else.

So, one morning I woke up a little earlier. The streets were still wet and I could make left turns and cross intersections without wondering when the traffic would pause. I went into a supermarket so empty of customers that I could hear every note of the music. The few employees who weren’t staking or unpacking were happy to see me. I went to the bakery counter and began to count the donuts.

The woman behind the counter asked me how many I needed. “Wait,” she said, “I’ll give you fresh.”

I brought the donuts, and napkins, for every student I had. One per person, I told them. You don’t have to eat one if you’re concerned that you might be allergic or diabetic, or if you’re training for sports, or if your parents would rather not have you eat one.

But, if you do, tell me how it tastes.

GREAT!

I agreed, licking the glaze off my fingers. I explained that English lit can be seen as a big meal that you’re going to eat. But…what would happen if, instead of beginning with the appetizer, which sometimes tastes so good that you don’t want to eat anything else, we went right to the dessert?

Teaching from bliss? Why not? We live in a time that is overflowing with great art, most of which is easy to understand and enjoy. Art should not be easy all the time. Works that do not yield their meanings quickly can provide lasting value to those who are willing to give the time and attention. Why not look for what is easy to understand and enjoy FIRST in literature, and then, when you’ve had dessert, start on the stuff that takes a little bit of time to chew?

I went on to say that one of the things that makes Shakespeare worth all the chewing was that there are so many things to enjoy, and many ways to enjoy them, that you always find something new. I confessed that both Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies have passages of clumsy writing, but they are still important works for what they say about humanity, government, the use of language to control, and good intentions gone bad. So, lets look at these works differently. When the going is tough, or confusing, BRING THE DONUTS.

During my third year of high school teaching, all food was banned in classrooms. No, my donut-fueled pedagogy wasn’t cited as the reason for the ban, but it was one of many reasons I decided never to teach high school again.

Earlier this summer, on a cross-country road trip, my wife and I dropped down from Interstate 80 and went down the two lane roads leading to the town of Oberlin. My wife had never seen the campus. We parked next to Tappan Square. The commercial strip now buzzed with restaurants. The movie theater where I saw Roman Polanski’s MacBeth (while exiting the theater, I saw one of my English professors waiting to go in and I told him the book was better.) was still there. And so was Gibson’s Bakery.

When the woman behind the counter assured me that the recipe hadn’t changed, we nervously bought a dozen whole wheat donuts. With so much that has happened to me in 40 years, how would they taste? Would that alternative universe welcome me again?

To mangle a line that Shakespeare didn’t put in his play: We came, we ate, we were conquered, again. The sugary, gooey, blissfully delightful donut universe opened itself to us, and said, what took you so long?

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A Moment for Houston

Let’s pause and give a moment of our day to think about Houston, Texas, a city I’ve never visited, whose plight has visited us.

It does us no good to ask why a storm of this size came ashore in this place, but we ask anyway, because, in an era in which we pretend we’ve banished superstition, we want to have reasons. I’ve heard one: unseasonably high Gulf surface temperatures that put more water vapor in the air. Okay, but couldn’t all that rain go back where it came from?

I also read a report of a college professor who has since lost his job after posting, and then deleting from social media that the storm was “karma” for the state’s politics. Though I admire some of the gratuitously tasteless film comedies of Mel Brooks, such a statement is so crass as to be obscene.

We can depend on prophets and pundits, educated and ignorant, to find blame, and that blame can have consequences. Though we have been told that God speaks to us in “signs and wonders” I don’t hear a voice in this storm telling me why it had to harm so many people.

When I went to New Orleans–which may suffer again from Hurricane Harvey’s landward progress–I found a city that seemed to have fully recovered from Hurricane Katrina. But people told me otherwise.

Years before that I wandered through Coconut Grove, and saw an iron fence with a twenty-foot long dent–an “impression” left after Hurricane Floyd slammed it with an uprooted a palm tree. In Philadelphia, close to where I used to live, flood waters from Floyd undermined a street and shattered its pavement. It flooded a tunnel under the railroad tracks of the fabled Main Line. People and animals were swept away, their twisted remains emerging after the water subsided.

I once lived a block from the beach in Margate, a Jersey shore town on the same barrier island as Atlantic City. We were warned a terrible hurricane was coming, powerful enough rip away entire neighborhoods, and told to evacuate immediately. I put what few possessions would fit in my car, drove across the meadows between Absecon Island and the mainland, and spent the night at a friend’s house in Egg Harbor Township, about 15 miles inland.

We spent most of the night watching TV news and Charles Bronson videos. My friend had just about every movie Bronson ever starred in, including the filmed version of Elmore Leonard’s Mr. Majestyk. I remember enjoying Hard Times, a brooding, cynical Great Depression drama in which Bronson plays a pick-up fighter managed by a delightfully sleazy James Coburn. I never forgot that movie, and what I heard on the news: that most of the numerous toll bridges that linked the barrier islands to the mainland–MOST, not a few–charged evacuating residents a toll as they fled for their lives.

What is it about imminent doom that brings out so many human virtues and vices? As an undergraduate at Oberlin College, I thought that if I ever wanted to get a Ph.D., it would be in what I called Ground Zero Ethics, a moral, philosophical, historical and anthropological inquiry into how we behave when we believe the end is near. One of my professors warned me that my thesis would be brutalized by the academic ethics establishment regardless of how accurate or astute my findings were, and that would help me find a job. A few months later, to my surprise, I was offered admission to a graduate school where I could begin a Masters in Ethics and work on my Ph.D. thesis. I turned it down because I thought it would be better for my writing if I stayed in the “real” world.

A Ph.D. in Ground Zero Ethics remains one of my life’s roads-not-traveled.

My alternative to academia was a winter on the Chesapeake Bay. My father owned a summer home that backed on to the water in a town named Gratitude. Wintering in a summer home has its exigencies: the pipes would freeze once a week. A plumber would come and, after taking several gulps from a whisky bottle under the sink just for him, he’d crawl under the floorboards and turn his blowtorch on the waterline.

The house lacked a washing machine and I had no car, so I stuffed my dirty laundry in a backpack and bicycled a mile and a quarter past shuttered vacation homes and the shrink-wrapped hulls of sailing yachts, to the rattling, rumbling coin-operated machines in Rock Hall. Sometimes a neighbor would drive me into Chestertown, where we’d get coffee and Spudnuts, donuts made with potato flour.

My purpose in this self-imposed solitude was the opportunity to write the stuff that would move me into the fellowship of science fiction and fantasy writers. I don’t know how many times I rode my bicycle though snow and ice to a real estate office, where I paid to make photocopies of a short story manuscript, then buy two envelopes from the stationery store, and send my creations off to do their best. They all came back, rejected.

One way to raise myself from despair was to watch spectacular sunsets over water that would freeze into a flat, glossy gray plain of ice. You could walk for miles on that ice, but never in fog. The fog could be so thick it would eliminate the horizon. Head in the wrong direction on the ice and, in these days before cellphone GPS apps,  you could be lost forever.

The place was so beautiful that I began to get that solipsistic notion that everything I was seeing, hearing (the cries of waterbirds, the faraway cracks and pops as warm weather shattered the ice) and feeling was a gift just for me.

Until a storm came after the ice had melted. I sat in front of the window that, just a day or go, had showed me a perfect Claudian sunset. Now rain blasted the glass. I saw some water birds flapping around, riding the gusts the way I’d body surf on a strong tide at the beach. But I wasn’t at a beach. I imagined the seawall of rip-rap–a long pile of big gray stones–and a concrete embankment I hoped would keep Mother Nature in her place.

Then the gray water leaped over the seawall and came closer and closer to the house.

This wasn’t an up-on-stilts house that you see where vacation homes are built on a flood plain. I cowered in a two-story, concrete block cottage with wind-rattled windows and bay water licking its foundation. The water, and the roaring storm above, did not–could not care that I had sacrificed a potentially cushy berth in academia to write thrilling tales of spaceships and memory machines. What, in all of human creation, could persuade it to go…somewhere else?

The storm blew away the porch screens, but the water stopped at the back door. Soon the wild pounding against the rattling windows died down. Within hours the water drained from the back lawn. Before the sunset, I walked along seawall and saw huge, tangled piles of driftwood, bleach bottle floats that the watermen used to mark their crab traps, tarnished beer cans, a plastic sandwich container lid, a single pink flip flop sandal, bits of styrofoam coffee cups and, at the very end, the body of a dead deer, that smelled so bad I had to hop on my bike, come back with a gallon can of gasoline and a book of matches that I used to burn the corpse until I could see its bones. As the flames curled over its body, I felt I was inside a William Faulkner story, a shorter, quicker version of The Bear, in which the naive hero does not realize that he is inextricably a part of the wild and dangerous forest that surrounds him, but, rather, sees that natural world can be reduced to a narrative of what must happen before and after death.

The seagulls, and the following morning’s tide, took away the remains.

So I think, now, how so many people along the Gulf and East coasts felt when the storms came and the water did not stop at their door. They must have experienced a few seconds of panic as it swamped their carpet, shoved their furniture aside, invaded, subverted and submerged the facts and fantasies of home-sweet-home. What did they try to take with them as they left? And where could they go, with water rising around them?

And what waited for them when they returned after the storm and saw what the water left them?

I’ve visited Bermuda several times. This pricey northern Caribbean paradise is proud of its distinctive, boxy architecture of pastel painted cottages with white, stepped roofs and louvered windows. The structures cling to the tree and bramble shrouded slopes of the chain of tiny islands that mark the caldera of a dormant volcano.

All the cottages, and the majority of Bermuda’s commercial buildings, are built so solidly that they can withstand and survive the hurricanes that blast the island regularly in the spring and fall.

If only we made our houses like they do in Bermuda…

But we don’t.  And, from what I hear about what has happened in Houston, it wouldn’t make much difference if we did. No matter how strong your walls, no matter how thick the roof over your head, water goes where it will.

So let’s give a moment of our lives to the people of Texas, and whoever else may find themselves at Ground Zero, and hope that it will bring forth their only their best.

 

 

 

 

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Stuff

I am now in the second day of watching paint dry. We are living between boxes, near ladders, over drop cloths. We walk on dusty, crusty things. What I need, I carry in large pockets in my shorts. If I need anything else, it’s easier to go out and buy it rather than find which contains it.  Some of our stuff is still in chests of drawers, which have been shoved up against chairs, tables, plants and more boxes. Finding a handkerchief requires effort.

We were led to believe we could leave the kitchen cabinets as they were. Yesterday we were told that they had to be emptied because they had to be sanded before being painted. Eight hours and thirty-five boxes later…

George Carlin’s famous “Stuff” routine goes through my head. It is a brilliant example of comedic art. For those who don’t know this brilliant piece of comedic art, here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

I told my wife she could put what she didn’t want in a box, and I’d take it to the local used clothing store. She filled the box. I picked it up–one of thirty-five I had to lift and put somewhere that wasn’t near a wall or a door. What was inside clinked and clunked spitefully–our stuff doesn’t like being rejected anymore than we do.

I couldn’t help but wonder how much money I’d have, or how much freedom, if I hadn’t acquired so much. When I was an adolescent and I went to college, you could fit most of my possessions into a car–my father’s Cadillac, which broke down on the eight hour interstate highway trip. I remember his skepticism at the fact that half of my stuff was music: vinyl records and black boxes adorned with little lights, knobs and gauges.

My father did a few years as a traveling salesman before he practiced law. He loved the job and, from what I hear, was a one-suitcase kind of guy.

I remember him looking at all my audio gear. My generation equated access to “our” music with taste and personal freedom.

What’s wrong with a radio, my father wanted to know.

On my last move, I needed a truck. Thanks to dubious improvements in technology, my audio stuff had been reduced to a speakers, a computer, an Ipod and several boxes of CDs. My books comprised about 80 percent of the truck and no one asked me “what’s wrong with a library” because writers accumulate books and some of those books had my name on them. Other boxes contained copies of articles that I’d published.

But the majority of the books I had to put in boxes, carry to the truck, and then carry off the truck, had not been read yet. I had acquired them at different times in my life, for different reasons, and I intended to read them, sooner and later, even if the pages of the paperbacks were growing brown.

I threw out my back while hauling the books out of the truck. How is that boxes you load into a vehicle are far heavier when you take them out? I struggled to stack them into a geometric mountain in the garage, where they became a dark, brooding minimalist sculpture until we went to Ikea and bought Billy shelves. A piece of furniture named after me! What could be more fun?

As anyone who has bought anything at Ikea soon learns, putting that austerely cool, highly designed stuff together is not always fun. What looked so cool in the store, when you slide it all out of the box, what appears to be Lego for adults turns out to be a jumble of cardboard, particle-board, wooden pegs and Allen wrench screws that do not inspire confidence.

Ahh, but there are printed instructions! You lay out all the parts and you panic because there’s a part that you MUST have that you don’t, and you really don’t want to go back to the store and join the long line of indignant, exasperated people (most of whom are secretly embarrassed that they couldn’t put the damned stuff together) that you passed on the way out. Then you squint for a third time at the illustrations and find this teensy thing stuck in a corner of the plastic parts bag. Could THIS be it?

So you put a screw into a hole and give it a twist with your Allen wrench until, about five or six steps in, you discover you put it the section together backwards. Instead of seeing smooth, cool, modernist geometry fitting seamlessly, you’re glaring at mottled brownish-gray backside of the particleboard. All those screws that were intended to go in once, have to come out and go in again.

It takes you a lot longer than you thought, and you hope that nobody ever sees the back of it, but, at least, you have a place for your stuff.

Until you decide to move again, or fix up the house a little bit. That’s when you notice that every item you pull off a shelf, or take out of a cabinet–especially the things you forgot you owned–connects to a narrative. Where were you when you found this? Did it respond to a need? Was it souvenir of an adventure? Did you pay full price when you bought it, or did you get a bargain?

Among the items from our kitchen that went into boxes were two Orval glasses, from the days when drinking Belgian, craft or delightfully strange beer was interesting, stimulating and fun.

Perhaps lighting up memory neurons in the attic of our brains is why people horde things. I know it can be a sickness. I never saved copies of letters I wrote. I’ve thrown away most clippings and copies of my journalism. Manuscripts of novels and most early misfires are also gone.

I saved clothing because I wanted to wear it out. I saved music because music took me to other worlds. I saved books because books took me places before music did.

And, during that long part of my life when I was nearly broke all the time, I discovered all these cheap coffee mugs at Goodwill and Salvation Army. When that was comfortably behind me, my wife bought the Starbucks Quebec City coffee mug during our trip north to celebrate my 60th birthday. That old hammered aluminum pot came from my college days: the guy that owned the group house I was living in was going to throw it away. I scrubbed it out and have cooked with it ever since.

It all had to go into boxes. My wife strained her shoulders and I had a better work-out than I would have had at the gym carrying all those boxes up to a room, where I assembled another minimalist mountain.

On the way downstairs, our dog at my heels, her eyes asking me why we had to mess up a perfectly good house, I thought about Bishop Berkeley’s axiom, which everybody gets in Intro Philosophy: esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. How we understand our possessions makes them more than just stuff to haul up and down the stairs in a box.

How often do we think of the stuff below us, that supports our world? What about the stuff above that extends so far that we would never reach an end?
Just by perceiving it, our stuff can become magical talismans. And, thanks to even more sneaky technological developments, we don’t have to put some of it in boxes anymore.  Our digital acquisitions can go into a data storage center.
I wonder, though, if our seemingly limitless Internet will finally develop dark alleys, slums, spots of corrosion and industrial wear and tear? Will there be a cost for so much free stored stuff?

Music comes from up from below, from a digital music source that, presumably, is making it easier for human beings to change the color of our walls.

And the paint continues to dry.

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Block’s Plots

At a book signing, Lawrence Block, the prolific mystery writer, offered a strategy for plotting a novel. “I do my best to get lost.”

Block has written somewhere close to 100 novels, under his own name and ten pseudonyms. Two of his mystery series, that of the recovering alcoholic Matthew Scudder and the “gentleman” thief Bernie Rhodenbarr, are considered genre classics (both have been filmed). Add to this screenplays, a book on writing, a memoir and who knows what else.

I began reading Lawrence Block when I discovered that my first published novel would be a police procedural set in Atlantic City. The police procedural is a mystery subgenre. I was never much of a mystery fan, so I decided to read a few to learn what I could from what, beyond Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, has gone before.

I visited a mystery bookstore in Philadelphia called Whodunit. The proprietor, Art Bourgeau was a mystery writer, mystery book collector and judo black belt. Art also had a shelf of science fiction. I had a few years of aikido and was on my way to a shotokhan karate black belt. We got along.

Art loaded me up with a stack of books, most of them by genre masters that, because I lived in the spaceships-and-robots section of bookstores, I did not know. Among them were Joseph Wambaugh (the cop turned novelist), James Elroy, Ed McBain (whose 87th Precinct series, in my opinion, constitutes the best police procedural ever written), Nero Wolfe, Dorothy L. Sayers, Robert Wright Campbell, P.D. James, Sue Grafton, several others and Lawrence Block’s Eight Million Ways to Die, a Matthew Scudder book.

Among Block’s many superlatives are his outsider heroes. Ever since Sherlock Holmes, the crime solving detective has been typically an outsider, whose personality, inclinations, eccentricities, physical or mental difficulties deny him the busy turmoil of a normal life (or regular employment in law enforcement). As an outsider, he or she is better able to see things that others miss. Also, outsiders tend not to be plugged into a steady job, so they have the time to go down dark alleys, knock on doors and visit suspects in their lair.

Because the fictional Scudder is a recovering alcoholic, he can hang out in bars but not drink. He also inhabits the hidden world of Alcoholics Anonymous, which Block describes with a fascinating mix of compassion and intrigue: we do SO want to find out who some of these people are. (According to a persistent rumor, Scudder’s experiences are somewhat autobiographical: Block has hinted about boozing in his past).

What I found fascinating about this book, and others I read by Block (including the superbly suspenseful short stories in Block’s Hit Man series) was not just Scudder himself, who is everyone’s friend, feels everyone’s pain and, unlike the rest of us, can’t drown his sorrows in drink–but the plotting. Block’s has a way of leading your attention and expectations down a straight forward path until–they go astray, or something comes from an unanticipated corner. The surprise is almost always a thrill.

Plot, of course, is the flow of events in a story, and we all have read stories with wonderful characters in interesting settings, that we put down unfinished because we stop caring what happens. In Block’s stories, you can’t guess the ending because–as he has said–he has no idea where the story is going when he begins to write.

Plenty of writers work from outlines. They sit down and, in one quick burst, go from alpha to omega, and stick to that outline. Others see the end first, and chart events that make the ending meaningful. Both may be tempted to wander away from their planned plot, and sometimes they will give in and see where inspiration leads.

But most stick to their outlines because it makes writing a long project easier. It’s more likely that you’ll finish around the time of your deadline. If some readers claim that you “telegraphed” the ending, that is, set up situations so readers could guess the ending accurately, well, you just hope they like the next one better.

I’ve never been able to stick to an outline, no matter how much I’ve promised myself I will. One reason is that I love the process of discovery that happens when you follow the flow of your writing. Another is that, after a few pages, I notice that what I want to happen in the outline may not be appropriate, or even possible, given what I’ve written before. I spend more time on the book than I planned and, instead of cranking ’em out as Block and so many others have done, I’m grateful if I can finish a novel in a year or so.

Block has said that he not only doesn’t know where a book is going when he begins to write, he deliberately “gets lost” somewhere in the middle: he creates a situation in which he has absolutely no idea what will happen next.

Then he always finds his way back. How he does this is part of the mystery of imaginative labor.  You can be sure that Block won’t telegraph an ending that he himself didn’t know when he began writing.

Block also employs an unusual technique: though he has lived in New York City for many years, he tends to travel when he writes. I can only guess where he goes, though the anonymous roadside motels that the hit man Keller inhabits are rendered with excellent detail.

He insists that his writing must be finished when he returns.

I have tried writing while traveling and it doesn’t work as well as I’d like. For me, traveling is a vacation, a deliberate movement away from home to a place of scenic splendor, great restaurants, excellent museums, theater and concerts, cozy (if a little swanky) hotels. After so much civilized stimulation, picking up that hotel pen and scrawling a few lines is…difficult.

What I admire about Block’s writing, and what I’ve heard about his methods, narrows down to one point: an extraordinary faith in himself as a storyteller that, no matter where he is, or how deep a hole he digs himself into, he has the confidence in his ability to see his work to the end.

Frankly, I could use more of that, because, when I write myself into a hole, I panic. But I’ve learned that the panic leads to one understanding: it doesn’t matter how I pull myself out, only that I know I’ll do it.

Thanks, Mr. Block, for that, and so much more.

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White Car

Sometimes we stand in the parking lot, hit the unlock button on our key fob, and head toward the car whose headlights blink.

We didn’t intend to buy a white car but my wife wanted leather seats and this one had them. I wanted a car that wouldn’t break down as often as my old SAAB. My brother, a fan of vehicles made by this company (notice how I’m avoiding product promotion?), said he hasn’t had any in several years.

We didn’t want the gadget that yells at you if you wander out of your traffic lane. My wife didn’t want a key fob that could start the engine from a distance, or via our cell phones. She liked turning a key.

We thought we’d buy a station wagon, but the engine configuration of the version on the lot had been judged by Consumer Reports to be under powered. The SUV had a different, more capable engine. The difference in price was almost insignificant.

I sat at a traffic light and watched so many white cars go by.  Some were SUV’s. Some were small sedans and crossovers. Some were old, some new. They seemed outnumbered by the miscellaneous silvery grays. After a while, the differences among the cars blurred. I felt as I did when I watched a long freight train at a grade crossing: after a while, the novel, colorful, practical, clickety clackedness of the train cars changed into a thing in my path that temporary blocked my way.

Then the train left. I watched the gate rise and I said to the cars in front of me: “Go.”

We’ve owned the car for more than a year but we still have difficulty finding it in a crowded parking lot. The exterior of this car seems to have been a knock-off of another company’s. I don’t fault that: if you look closely at popular culture, you’ll find the production of successful knock-offs is far more imaginative than the creation of the boldly original. You want your product to appeal to a specific demographic, so you include what has appealed to that demographic previously, with something extra, some tiny characteristic that says this is…something else.

I’m sensitive to hues and shades now because most rooms in our house, except the one in which I write, are about to acquire new paint. My wife has agonized over the colors. I agonized over the relative discomfort that such a change may bring. Today we took the television screen off the living room wall and packed away some books and so many other things that reside on, or near walls. For a week, people will come in and, during the day, rain or shine, will apply differing colors.

The strategy of color varies in a house. Usually, you want to feel it more than see it. You want it to “go” with whatever you put in, especially if you change your mind about an old thing, and bring in something new.

It’s been less than a century since people throughout the world decided they wanted cars, and set about changing the landscape of the planet to accommodate them.  Cultures shifted to embrace, and condemn the automobile. Soon we may have cars that drive themselves, and temporary lease situations so that your car won’t slumber faithfully in the driveway in front of your house when you aren’t using it. If you need a car, you summon one, and it takes you where you want to go.

I’m sure there will still be people who want to drive themselves, and own vehicles outright. Like the cowboys on horseback, they will seem to the rest of us a romantic ideal of freedom on a dangerously beautiful landscape.

Until the gate rises, and we go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Tale of Two Shirts

See the folded knit shirt, its cotton threads washed and worn until its color has faded into a welcoming pale blue, its surface a comforting, reassuring landscape of hollows and pills that you would expect from a favored garment you’ve had for a long time, that has shared with you many weekends, days of rain and bright sunshine.

I remember the advertisement perfectly: the shirt in the foreground, with some gently out-of-focus dark wood behind it, what you might find in an seaside summer house or a darkly masculine armoire. I don’t recall the magazine where I spotted this image, but who can forget the words along the bottom of the page?

Ralph Lauren Polo.

I’m not so much a fan of fashion, or an historian of clothing, to say with authority how effective this advertisement actually was. I do recall that after this advertisement appeared, the Ralph Lauren Polo shirt began to edge aside the Izod Lacoste Tennis Shirt as warm weather leisure garb for those who wanted something a little bit dressier than a white T.

More pre-washed, stone-washed, artificially aged shirts appearing in the discount department stores in which my family shopped. For more than a decade, Ralph Lauren became an apostle of the “pre-washed” look. Legend has it he tested ways of giving his clothing that worn but not worn-out look by running over samples in with the numerous automobiles he collected.

We all know that the pre-washed trend appeared first in blue denim jeans. American middle class hippies borrowed the style from the Beat Generation, who wore them because they were cheap and didn’t show stains of the bleached khaki’s favored by 1950s hot rodders. The hippies imagined they were rejecting the bright, thin, synthetic fabrics of the 1960s for something “natural,” durable, practical and eminently anti-fashion that farmers wore.

But farmers didn’t shrink their trousers until they hugged their legs and bums like a second skin. They didn’t streak their trousers with bleach, adorn them with patches or rip holes in them to make them appear as if they had been used forever.

After Ralph Lauren’s advertisement, it seemed that the entire suburban American middle class fell in love with the idea of “classic” clothing: things that you bought and owned for years because they never went out of style. If the clothing was faded or showed a bit too much wear and tear, that indicated that you, and the garment, were both built to last.

Of course, things go in and out of style all the time, but blue jeans, T-shirts, polo/tennis/golf shirts, canvas sneakers, leather jackets, sport coats with lapels and button down dress shirts have been a part of the suburban male uniform for longer than I can remember. The idea of holding on to clothing for a long time is almost a masculine American, anti-elitist virtue: who wants some designer forcing us to buy new every season when that perfectly good “classic” stuff that our mothers/girlfriends/wives picked out for us is all we really need.

Especially when you’re trying to survive on your writing, which pays like professional sports: the people at the very top are making more than any human being in history. The people in the middle, at the bottom, who might be just as good as those at the top but haven’t won enough games or aren’t celebrated in the sports media, are struggling to survive.

So I was comforted when, during an interview with L. Sprague de Camp, the science fiction and fantasy writer told me that the great thing about writing as a career was that you have the opportunity to wear out your old clothes.

At the time he was wearing a tweed suit that was made before I was born.

I have an unbranded cotton short sleeve shirt that is at least thirty years old. My mother bought it for me new, when it was a dark hunter green, in a South Jersey mall, because she wanted me to wear something new. The label says it was made in Sri Lanka.

Over the years it has faded to a weathered aqua, with little patches of white showing inside the color where the dyed fabric has worn away.  It has that Japanese quality of wabi sabi, its age and imperfects have become interesting, beautiful, evidence of character and resilience. Some buttons have had to be resown, but the shirt has held up wonderfully.

I don’t wear the shirt often, but when I do, the “vibes” feel very good. The shirt is an old friend.

Two years ago my wife bought me a pre-washed azure blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt at an outlet store. Now, after less than a dozen trips to the washing machine, and mostly hang drying on a clothes line, small tears have appeared in the side seams that, this being a Ralph Lauren style, end in a Y, with the front flap of the shirt being slightly shorter than the back, to remind us that this was designed for people who ride horses.

If you’ve ever acquired a polo shirt, you know that, depending on what you’re doing when you wear it, it will develop the kind of deterioration that is definitely NOT wabi sabi, in the underarm seams from close arm movement that rubs cloth against cloth, and the side seams.

Because I read the Wall Street Journal, I know that Ralph Lauren has been one of several branded American clothing designer who are foundering on the retail shores. There’s talk that Ralph is over exposed, that the clothing has lost its American psuedo-old money vibe, that he’s taken some body blows from “fast fashion,” and that millenials don’t want to wear a brand that reflected their parents’ aspirations.

Because an outlet mall is a short drive from my home, I also know that clothing sold in outlet branded shops is only incidently similar to what you find in department stores and full-priced branded shops. A sport jacket may have half the inside lining, or none. A shirt may lack a pocket. The fabric may be thinner.  The buttons are uniformly plastic.

But everything either is, or seems to be, made in some awful factory in China. You go to an outlet store because you want the brand’s prestige, and you want to think you’re saving money.

I wonder, though, if someone at Ralph Lauren listened to one of the common complaints lobbed at the rag trade: that, ever since Wal-Mart became the world’s largest bricks-and-mortar retailer, American clothing is made too well. Our duds aren’t dying fast enough to force us to buy new ones.

I’ve had other Ralph Lauren garments, purchased in department stores, full-price Ralph Lauren shops and outlets, that haven’t deteriorated this quickly. Maybe this specific line was a cheap-out. Or someone is Ralph Lauren wants to put the word out to outlet shoppers with their big branded shopping bags: “you get what you pay for.”

Alas, we almost never get what we pay for, in retail, in restaurants, in hotels, in health care, in college educations.  Or maybe we do, about as often as a slot machine jackpot hits. Yes, some things happen more or less frequently when the cost goes up, but why must this be related to cost? In a country where we believe all are created equal, why can’t everyone be treated at the same high standard of courtesy and civility?

Because we don’t.

Even before the airline industry found new ways to make travel miserable, hierarchical, inefficient (if you’re not flying to a hub), humiliating, degrading, claustrophobic and punitively expensive, we could not help but notice the value we received from monetary transactions is complicated, contradictory and nearly impossible to determine with any certainty.

So why is it that a brandless shirt has stayed with me for so long, and the one that became a symbol of class and timelessness is signalling that it’s on the way out?

A fashion industry person could probably answer this question, discussing materials, workmanship, profit margins, how Chinese manufactering varies as much as Sri Lankan, etc.

I’m not expecting an answer.  Instead, I’m thinking about my right knee, which has been hurting off and on for about a month. My eyes are developing cataracts, but I won’t have to worry about them for a few years.

I hope these, and other good friends stay with me for a while longer.

 

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A Conversation with an Immigrant

Optimism: I don’t hear much of that anymore.

The word is an invention to describe a theological attitude popularized by Gottfried Leibniz, the brilliant German scientist, mathematician, philosopher and theologian. Attempting to solve the problem of evil in a world created by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God, Leibniz declared, in effect, that God fashioned us, and the world we inhabit, to be the best of all possible worlds. Even if it didn’t seem that way all the time, we would come to realize it sooner or later, and should behave in both our quotidian and spiritual pursuits as if it was.

Voltaire, the great French cynic, lampooned this in his novel Candide, ou l’Optimisme (which means either Candide: or All the Best; or Candide: or The Optimist). Despite all the terrible, dreadful, unreasonable, ludicrously awful things the characters suffer, the pedantic Dr. Pangloss maintains that ours is the best of all possible worlds, if we could only understand that.

Of course, if you’ve read Candide, you know that Voltaire concluded the novel with Candide saying we should all go home and tend our gardens. Was Voltaire being sarcastic here? Or did he, like so many of the rest of us who try to find some reason for unreasonable tragedy, throw up his hands in defeat?

I remember a brief period in my childhood when I was optimistic that I would grow up, write science fiction and see my work on the same shelves with those authors who were so important to me as a reader. Then three things happened that I really, really couldn’t understand.

  1. My parents separated and eventually divorced.
  2. My high school girlfriend, whom I dearly loved, broke up with me and married some other guy.
  3. My science fiction was rejected so much that, when I finally got that “if you do this and that and revise it a little bit, I just may publish this” response, I couldn’t do it. I was exhausted, defeated by the people who are paid to say “no” most of the time.

I became pessimistic because I felt really bad when my expectations weren’t met (who doesn’t?). It was rational, I concluded, to expect the worst, because you could gain the satisfaction of being right more often than when you were wrong, or, when bad things didn’t happen, you could at least feel relieved.

But life is not merely messy with disappointment. It is spiced with the occasional miracle, which I will define here as akin to serendipity: a favorable occurrence that either has no adequate explanation, or seems accidental, a product of chance.

Among those that happened to me are

  1. the fact that my long lost high school girlfriend and I not only met each other later, but we were able to marry and, for the last seven years and counting, live as close as either of us have been to “happily ever after.”
  2. My recovery from two heart attacks, and my wife being cancer free. For us to be able to say so far, so good, without knowing precisely why is…pretty good.
  3. Becoming a correspondent for the New York Times, even if the experience was not what it may be cracked up to be. One day when I had other things on my mind, a section editor called me on the telephone. Though I had been writing for the Book Review because the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s book editor became editor there (and she liked my stuff enough to bring me in), getting a regular gig with the greatest newspaper in the world, without asking for one or going through any of the hoops that would produce such a result, is considered miraculous by most journalists. I would also agree, though I must add that such a position does not do what all the Times editors insist it must (to justify the newspaper exploiting people for low compensation), and that is take you to a great place professionally. The correspondent for the New York Times became a former correspondent for the New York Times.

A person of faith would say, a la Leibniz, that there are certainly more miracles in my past, everything from finding a parking space in the right place at the right time, to not getting jumped walking in a dreary part of Atlantic City, and other near misses with calamity. Our sons are healthy and secure. The car starts. The dog likes me.

For all that, and more, I am grateful, and a major reason for writing this blog is nurturing and maintaining that gratitude. It’s too easy to forget how much there is to appreciate, savor and enjoy in the short time we strut and fret upon the stage.

This said, I don’t hear much optimism these days, in the news, in my conversations with friends, from politicians. The previous president made a point of speaking about the wonderfully courageous possibilities of hope. The current president speaks of different things.

The country is more than merely divided over political issues, free speech, civil rights, gender discrimination, environmental science, the role of religion, income inequality, the high murder rates among inner city adolescents and children and moral quandaries. We are at the point at which we are like motorists who slow down even further to look at the horrible car crash that apparently caused all the traffic on our highway to come to a crawl. We not only can’t look away from the catastrophe of the hour, we know too well that another is waiting just around the bend.

On top of that is a longing for all of it just go away in fashion that makes sense. We yearn for a playground monitor to come in, break up the fight, send the naughty kids to opposite ends of the playground and tell us to go back to what we were doing.

We don’t have much faith in ourselves to see these difficult times to a moment when we can feel grateful about who we are, where we live and what we want to do with our lives.

Well, not all of us.

Though I have been born and raised in the United States, I know that, if things had been a little bit different in Eastern Europe, I would have been some other country’s citizen.

Most of my relatives come from Austria, Poland and Russia. My grandmother, who left her Russian village when she was seven years old, once told me of people asking the village sorcerer for help locating a missing horse. She said the sorcerer made a small circle on the ground with barley grains, touched the center and announced that the horse would be in the center of a barley field, eating its way out. According to my grandmother’s account, the villagers searched the fields and found the horse exactly as the sorcerer described.

She married an accountant who bought stocks during the Depression. My other grandmother married a window washer.

My grandparents came here, as most immigrants do, for a better life, and they found it, though they never stopped speaking their language, using it to have conversations that I was not intended to hear.

I have lived in three communities in which immigrants formed an obvious constituency. The first was in college, where students from other countries frequently gathered socially so that they did not feel so much alone. The second was in a part of Wynnewood, a suburb of Philadelphia, where every second person I met was Israeli. The third is in Northern Virginia. Just about every day I see someone from another country, hear a language I can’t understand, and notice styles of dress that were not common where I was raised. During the brief years I taught English in a public high school here, I was fiercely proud of students from Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa who were motivated, not just to get good grades in my classes, but to understand how different this country is from theirs.

Because my wife and I are doing some simple upgrades around our house, and I am the opposite of a fix-up, D.I.Y., handy type. I’ve noticed that most of those who have painted the walls, trimmed back the tree, set the kitchen tile, wired lighting fixtures, repaired old appliances and delivered new ones, either speak with a foreign accent, or use a language I can’t understand.

Are they immigrants, as my grandparents were? If so, I share some concern. Depending on where you live, how you dress, how you speak and the nature of your employment, you may find yourself a target for animosity that you did nothing to create.

It’s never been easy to be an immigrant in the United States. There is no street paved with gold leading to social acceptance, economic self-determination and a “pursuit” of happiness.

Best of all possible worlds? For some, who could look back on what they experienced as a defining, character building struggle.  But for those who did not experience success? What happened to them when their families shattered, they were torn from their loved ones, their best efforts were relentlessly rejected?

I had such things in mind when I talked to a person working on my home who quite freely told me he was an immigrant. It took him nearly twenty years to become a citizen and he had mixed feelings about voting in his first Presidential election. “It was not a good choice,” he said.

He told me about jobs he held in different parts of the country. In one city, he said, “they don’t care were you come from, as long as you show up and do the work.” This country, he insisted, was so much better than the place from which he came “because of the people here. They will teach you a trade. They will give you a job. They will help you become a citizen so you can have a family and raise your children with better than what you had.”

Was he as concerned as I was about the mood in our country, especially toward immigrants?

“It will work out,” he said. “That is what I have learned in the twenty years it took for me to become a citizen. People will find a way to make things work. That’s the way it is in America. Here you have a chance to find the way. Other places…not always possible.”

So maybe there’s another “use” for our immigrants, and that is as a reminder that what they value about our country is still there, right in front of our dour, cynical faces.

Here we really can make things better. Here we really can work things out. We may not find the best of all possible worlds, but we just might make our own worth living in.

You don’t have to call that a miracle, but if you do, I won’t object.

 

 

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