Words of Wisdom

I was about 500 words into an a column couple of years ago, when I stopped to get a cup of coffee. When I came back and glanced over what I'd written I realized that it was awful -- so awful that it could tarnish the reputation of all poorly thought out drek. As I stared at it trying to decide whether I should attempt to repair it or throw it away, I flashed back a few decades to the time I helped my Great Uncle Rudy build a fence. I held the boards, he drove the nails.

After a while he hit a nail wrong and bent it. He straightened it and tried again. It bent again. He straightened it and bent it twice more.

“Why don't you just get a new nail?” I asked.

He stood up, braced one hand against the fence post, stared at me from beneath his magnificent, bushy eyebrows and said, “Anyone can drive a straight nail. It takes a carpenter to drive a crooked nail.”

“I wish I'd said that,” James Whistler once told Oscar Wilde.

“Don't worry, you will,” replied Wilde.

For me, a perfect phrase, is a breath stopper. The best are re-quoted so often they become cliches.

I am not a carpenter, so instead of trying to straighten out the column, I decided to assemble some of my family's words of wisdom that have not yet become cliches.

Don't feel like you're making progress just because you're moving forward. My grandfather said this after watching my brother trying to mow the lawn. He had taken the blade off the lawnmower to sharpen it and accidentally bolted it back on backwards. The mower was flogging the hell out of the grass, but it wasn't mowing.

You don't follow a furrow that's crooked as a hound's leg. I was about 12 years old and my grandfather had put me on a tractor and told me to disk up a part of a field that he wanted to plant. I tried to keep a wheel right next to the previous furrow, as he'd told me to; but by the time he came back to check on me, my furrows were looking like a longitudinal graph of President Obama's approval ratings.

If they could suck as hard as they can blow, they wouldn't have a problem. That was my father's reaction when I told him I'd attended a meeting of governors from southwestern states that wanted to pipe irrigation water down from Canada. The problem: The cost of pumping it over the Rocky Mountains.

Be cautious, but don't live in fear. This came from my mother-in-law. I don't know the original context, but I love it. I tend to repeat it whenever someone suggests that we Americans need to compromise our values so we can protect ourselves from people who hate us. Perhaps they hate us because we keep compromising our values.

Just circle around, fire a couple of shots in the air and head home. My wonderful, octogenarian Aunt Daphine, down in rural South Georgia, said she does that when her daughter calls at night and says she's home alone and hearing funny noises. Aunt Daphine isn't speaking metaphorically; she actually grabs Grandad's old pistol, climbs into her golf cart and heads over to her daughter's farmhouse half a country mile away. Daphine has been living alone on the old family farm ever since Uncle Ben died a couple of years ago, but she claims she doesn't worry about her safety. “Everybody knows I'll shoot,” she says. I believe her.

You can sleep when you're dead, old man. When my daughter was still in elementary school, she used that line to get me out of bed on Saturday mornings and to keep me from napping on Sunday afternoons. It's the perfect antidote to my grandfather's observation: If you just lie down for a few minutes, the notion that you need to run out and do something will pass.

I'll close with one of my own, the shortest of the lot.

It's my ball! I screamed that at the top of my lungs during a high school football game. It was late in the fourth quarter, we were close to the goal line, I hadn't caught a pass all night and the oversized kid who'd been kicking my butt since the opening whistle had my jersey in one hand and the pass I should have caught in the other. Then came an Incredible Hulk moment. I shouted, “it's my ball”, tore the ball away from the kid and carried it and him into the end zone. Forty-plus years later, saying “it's my ball” still seems to help when I confront a challenge. Shouting it seems to help more.

So as the new year rolls out before us like a blank canvas, I humbly offer these few words of wisdom:

As you move through the year, don't feel you are making progress just because you are moving forward; look ahead and make sure the furrow you are following isn't as crooked as a hound's leg. Be cautious, but don't live in fear. If you do become fearful, just circle around, fire a couple of shots in the air and head home. Everyone needs to know that you'll shoot.

Have a great 2013. It's your ball.

That New Job Smell

The best jobs I ever had were the new ones –  every new one. Since college, I've had 16 different jobs with 11 employers, and on the first day of every new job it felt like the best job ever. The first week is magic; make a wish and it is fulfilled: a special desk chair, a new dictionary, a really cool staple remover . . .

The answer to every questions I ask comes with an exclamation point. 

Can I re-design the website? “Sure!” How about we start a weekly newsletter, I can edit it. “Go for it!” How about we convert everything to touchscreen apps. “Great idea!”

Then comes month two when the foolish enormity of my bravado becomes apparent and I realize that Superman, Green Lantern and Steve Jobs combined could not fulfill the promises I've traded for the honor of having a new stapler.

In a few days I'll become the head of the IT/IS department for an entire county. The data under my control is measured in terabytes. We have servers with 16 multi-core processors capable of sifting through tens of thousands of records in nanoseconds.

I'm getting a new X-Pad, mobile Wi-Fi and the self-inflicted expectation that I will do nothing less than revolutionize document management, video conferencing and remote customer service; and usher in a new era of transparency in government.

The challenge has some quirks. The county consists of an odd collection of islands where high-tech entrepreneurs retire and Luddites take refuge. A place where the latest Gen wireless technology is considered mandatory by some, while others protest any new source of radio waves is a threat to livestock and human health. Not surprisingly, cell phone coverage and high speed Internet is as unreliable in the county as a brother-in-law's lawnmower.

Nevertheless, my 17th new job looks like it's going to be exciting, challenging and fulfilling. Maybe I've been around this block a few times, but whenever I walk into an office and breathe in that new job smell, springtime blossoms in my soul.

Shampoo - a Short, Short story

Joni gave a great shampoo and an okay haircut. I'd been to her often enough that we'd adopted the comfortable barber/regular customer tone that invites intimacy. So, on this particular day when I sat down in her chair and asked what was going on in her life, I expected a good story. Joni did not disappoint. She smiled a slightly wicked smile and reported that she'd had a blind date.

“How'd it work out?”

She leaned the chair back, laid a towel across my chest and set up her tools and shampoo before answering. Finally she said, “He seemed nice enough; so I let him kiss me good night and all; but when I went back and parked across the street from his house the next night, you know what I saw?”

“You had a date with him the next night?” I asked.

“No, I just wanted to check him out, you know, just to see what he did when he thought nobody was watching.”

She was shampooing my hair and she had very strong hands.

“About 8 o'clock he brings this woman back to his house, can you believe that? This was one night after his date with me.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, I went up and knocked on the door and when he opened it, I told him that I didn't like sloppy seconds and he should never to call me again or I'd have my father pay him a visit. I said it real loud so his new girl friend was sure to hear.”

“You'd slept with him?”

“Do you think I'm the kind of girl that would go to bed with a guy on the first date?”

She stopped what she was doing and stepped around so I could look at her. She was in her mid-thirties, trim and had a pretty face, but there was something about her that reminded me of that line from Jaws where Quint says, “The thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes.”

As Joni used a straight razor to square off my sideburns and shave the back of my neck, I wondered how many second dates she'd had in her life, but I didn't ask.

A Matter of Life & Death

        I'd rather die fast than ever live slow
            --Melissa Etheridge, The Shadow of a Black Crow

The great thing about depression is that it takes away your fear of death.

In the heart of winter, living just  half a degree latitude below Canada, it's dark when I go to work, often damp and gray all day, then at 4:00 P.M., it starts to get dark again.

During my first couple of winters on San Juan Island, I couldn't understand why darkness kept gathering inside my head. At times even trivial problems and setbacks made my life feel almost hopeless. I was never  suicidal, but if the grim reaper had walked into my library, on some evenings I'd have offered him a comfy chair and a brandy.

Luckily, a friend recognized what was going on and, with light therapy, exercise, vitamin D and meditation, winter depression is now little more than a nuisance. But the darkness did leave me a gift: the ability to think more dispassionately about death. And on reflection, the distinction between life and death doesn't seem as simple as it once did.

People who do data processing are familiar with a concept called fuzzy logic. They use it to make sense out of things that don't fall into neat categories. Is an apple with a bite out of it still an apple? Perhaps so, but at some point, as it is being eaten, the apple ceases to be an apple. Fuzzy logic provides a system to estimate how much appleness exists at any point in the transition; so if your challenge is to report how many apples there are in a room where people are eating apples, fuzzy logic can help you come up with an answer.

Applying fuzzy logic to human life, one might define a 100% live human being as a self-aware creature, capable of locomotion, taking care of its basic needs, rational thought, and understanding and communicating abstract ideas. Using that definition, a new-born baby would score fairly low for humanness, but most will progress to perfect, or near-perfect scores within a few years.

At the other end of life, the humanizing process starts to reverse itself, and we start shedding those human characteristics, often one by one.

Franchised “retirement communities” apply their own brand of fuzzy logic to the aging marketplace, promising to take care of us in the most appropriate surroundings as we go from a time when our needs are primarily for golfing and bridge partners until, at the end, the time when we need a safe environment where our physical creature can survive, while our essential humanity –  ability to understand, communicate and care for ourselves – fades away.

A couple of thousand years ago, the Stoic Philosopher Seneca, contemplated his own impending suicide and proclaimed: “A wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.”

I choose to believe that a wise man will keep living until he can't truly be alive. If we linger on the fact that the light is fading, we squander the light that remains.

Hope is the light in our lives and fear the darkness. The statement, “Where there's life, there's hope,” raises the question: “Does life continue after all hope is gone?”  Some people radiate hope, others are so afraid of losing it, they they are afraid to use it.

I recently found a great on-street parking space while visiting Northwest Portland. It's right in front of where I was staying and there is no meter or time limit. It's a parking space of such amazing quality and convenience that most mortals will not find such a place in a lifetime. Once I possessed it, my inclination was to not move my car during the whole visit, because if I used the car, I'd lose this incredible space. I actually walked, in the rain, to a couple of places I might have been inclined to drive to because I was afraid of losing my great parking space. For all the good it did me, my car might as well have been impounded.

My own fear in life is not that death will come and take me; it's that I'll park my hopes and aspirations somewhere safe and comfortable until it's too late to set them out on a new adventure.

At funerals I find that my emotions correspond to the amount of life the guest of honor still had when death came. When someone filled with life and hope dies, a light goes out of our lives. But there is only relief when a heart stops beating inside a body whose humanity had long since departed.

My own hope is that when the final words are spoken over my ashes, my loved ones will be able to follow Dr. Seuss's advice: “Don't cry because it's over,” he said. “Smile because it happened.”

The Granny Test

I had a client tell me once that he had decided to retained my company for a computer job because, when he asked how fast an Internet connection he needed I answered, “You just have to make sure that you can blow as hard as your customers can suck.” He said that was the first thing a computer person ever told him that he could understand.

I sympathize. I recently inherited responsibility for an Information Technology department and now I'm receiving commercial emails with subjects like: “ERP for Growing Companies”, and “Best Practices for Managing 3PAR Thin Provisioning.”

I'm hardly a babe in the digital woods – but the subject lines of those emails are gobbledygook before my eyes. That's not to say that the content is worthless or incomprehensible. Computer technology is just one of the multitude of professions that use jargon that is a combination of verbal shorthand and shibboleth – it facilitates communication among the initiated while being incomprehensible to outsiders.

Unfortunately jargon also helps mask incompetence or laziness. An alarm should go off whenever someone says, “It's too complicated to explain to someone who doesn't have training in the field.”

When I was a journalist I heard that sort of thing a lot, but I was struck by the fact that I didn't hear anything of the sort from any of the group of Nobel Laureates or particle physicists I interviewed at a conference on sub-atomic physics, or for that matter from any of the scientists I spoke with who had done groundbreaking work in a particular field. 

Albert Einstein famously said, “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.”

Most people feel that they have a stake in making other people believe that what they do is difficult and requires a lot of skill and intelligence. The irony is that, as a rule, the people with the most knowledge, skill and intelligence, make what they're doing look easy.

Do Cows Go to Church?

As I was making breakfast this morning I looked up to see a house wren fly up and perch on the bird feeder we have affixed to our kitchen window. It looked at me for a moment, then took off in a wild, noisy flutter of feathers. It took me a minute to realize that the bird had seen me frying an egg. I'm just glad it hadn't seen me carving our Thanksgiving turkey.

That got me thinking. What goes through a cow's mind when it sees someone drinking milk? What would you hear if you could sneak into the back pew of a bovine church? Perhaps it would be the lowing voice of an old bull reading from 2nd chapter of the Book of Holstein:

“Beware of consorting with humans. They may say they only want to play with your teats, but they will get you pregnant, drink your milk and EAT YOUR CHILDREN.”

I've always been leery of anthropomorphizing animals. Both sets of my grandparents and all my great-grandparents and great uncles and aunts were farmers. I once helped my uncle butcher a hog and often helped load steers onto trucks and looked into their big brown eyes, knowing that they would soon be steaks and roasts and hamburger. But at the end of the day, I have to say that they were mighty tasty.

I've been away from farm life for a lot of years now and I rarely come face-to-face with livestock or poultry unless it's shrink-wrapped and labeled something like “flank steak” or “chicken strips.” It's easier it ignore the obvious if you don't know your main course's real name was “Pedro” (the pet turkey that became Thanksgiving dinner in Giant) or “Eddie” (The delivery boy who became dinner in The Rocky Horror Picture Show).

On a day-to-day basis now I see cartoon cows and pigs more often than the real thing, and somehow these silly images of humanized animals makes thinking about killing and eating the real ones a little uncomfortable.

Of course we know animals feel pain, show affection and – if you've ever watched lambs leaping about in the springtime or a horse or dog running across a field all-out, ears laid back and  dust flying, for no apparent reason – you know that animals have a sense of play and of joy.

Do animals have souls? Does God get ticked off when we kill and eat them? It's certainly food for thought.

For the sake of our own souls, I believe we must treat all of God's creatures with respect. But after we pay our respects, I think it's okay to eat them.

There is a real circle of life, though sometimes it seems cruel, inappropriate, illogical and poorly thought out. Perhaps the Almighty rushed it a bit at the end of the sixth day, while looking forward to a well-deserved Sunday off – but it's the way the life survives and renews itself.

All of that said, how would you like your eggs this morning? We can draw the curtains.