Walking a Black Dog in the Dark

Marv, our black Lab, likes to begin his morning walk in the dark so he can watch the sun rise. He  dances in small circles and fetches one toy after another until finally he finds the totem that will lure me away from the smell of coffee and buttered toast and into the misting rain. There are no streetlights where we live and cars seldom travel our road after midnight, so when the moon retires for the night, it leaves a pre-dawn darkness as deep and cold as black water.

As soon as we step out of the door, the darkness slips over Marv's sleek coat like a cloak of invisibility. Beyond the narrow beam of my head lamp, his glowing orange collar floats, unsupported, above the ground.

When we pass out of the wooded area where we live onto prairie of the neighboring national park, Marv gallops in arcing circles, and chases winding scent trails – tracking weasels or foxes, or perhaps a Snuffleupagas. If his collar disappears, a short whistle brings it back over the top of an unexpected hill, bouncing toward me until the head of a dog finally appears in my small bubble of light. Marv takes a treat off the palm of my hand with a wet swipe of his tongue and checks to see if I need anything else before he brushes past my leg, back into the darkness where he can shed his body again.

Curious amber eyes reflect the light of my headlamp as we follow deer trails across the prairie. Some eyes blink out quickly, others float eerily above the ground, circling us, until Marv's orange collar begins to bound toward them. The eyes of a fox become a streak of light that disappears with the whoosh of soft fur brushing a thicket.

Deer amble by, their neon green eyes almost at my eye level. During the day, Marv will run with them if they dare him, but in the dark they respect each other's invisibility.

Heavy wings whumpf in the dark. Owls are bulky, powerful creatures wrapped in an unsettling Zen-like calm. Surprise an eagle and it will shriek its battle cry and take wing in an explosion of feathers and talons. Surprise an owl and it will stare you down, silently.

Walking in the dark with a black dog is an act of faith, if faith is belief in things you cannot see. Belief that the terrain that is there during the day exists when it can't be seen. Belief that the glowing orange collar dancing in the darkness is still around the neck of the creature you put it on, that the wings beating overhead belong to a bird, not to a demon searching for a soul.

Things chirrup and bark, and sometimes crash and scream in the brush. A rooster crows in the distance like a banshee with a toothache. Raccoons tussling over ripe figs sound like fighting wildcats.

As the rising sun melts the darkness, Marv materializes inside his orange collar. Darkness clings to Mount Baker and the Olympic Mountains while the horizon lightens behind them. The colors of the day begin their dance across the Salish Sea.

Marv has watched the world reappear and he is ready to go home. There will be another day – more things to sniff, a trespassing cat to chase, perhaps a friend will drop by and challenge him to race. A day at the office lies ahead for me.

But sometimes the sun comes up before we're ready. Darkness is a playground for the mind and leaving it can be hard. Maybe that really was a demon that passed overhead; and those neon eyes could have belonged to a herd of camels, or perhaps unicorns that are as invisible by day as they are by night.

Marv probably believes his early morning dance and the offerings from his toy basket are what opens the door to a place where magic is still possible and the world is reborn every day.

He may be right.

Crazy

Last week I shouted a couple of unacceptable words in the hallway outside my office, hung a bright red “Danger” sign on the door to my office and closed it for nearly an hour.

A few minutes later I was one of the half-dozen recipients of a terse email from an attorney. It read, in its entirety, “I want a conference call Monday.”

I hit “reply all” and responded, “And I want a pony and a bunny rabbit.”

What I found interesting were the repercussions from my childish behavior: None.

True, nobody knocked on my door while the danger sign was up, but otherwise – nothing, nada, no comment, business as usual.

This isn't the first time nothing happened. Several years ago on another job, I responded to a particularly egregious act of managerial hubris by screaming a passage from Revelations and throwing my desk chair down a stairwell. I spent the next several months working on the floor of my office, using a toy robot to carry papers out to my secretary.

I got some sideways glances, not so many invitations to lunch, but mostly it passed without comment. To her credit, my boss did offer to buy me a new chair.

Don't get the idea that I act crazy often. It's actually pretty rare, but I can see why it happens and how some people get addicted to it. I fully subscribe to the Star Trek wisdom, “In an insane world, the sane man must appear to be insane.” My crazy fits happened because I didn't know how else to act. What do you do when you find yourself in a world where the familiar rules of the game disappear?

Imagine, for instance, you are quarterbacking a team in an ordinary football game when you realize the scoreboard says it's 5th down and 10 light years to go, and the referees are riding camels and are waving bratwursts at you. What play do you call? I don't know about you, but I'd say junk the SALT agreements and go nuclear.

There have always been a few people around who never quite understood what was going on. Ever since I can remember we've had a colorful, slightly scarey, lunatic fringe that added spice and – occasionally foresight – to our society. For instance, I never believed the conspiracy buffs who thought a multi-national corporation, owned by a foreigner, could overtly put American politicians on its payroll and dominate the news and opinion business. That was ludicrous in light of the rules as I understood them.

The so-called “J-Curve Theory” describes crazy behavior by much more than just a fringe. It's the product of historical studies that found revolutions don't happen while things are getting worse, they happen when things start to get better. People get disoriented, sort of catatonic, when everything is falling apart. But when the scoreboard is re-set, the camels are gone, a new set of referees come in and the quarterback finds out it's really 3rd down – but there's still a lot of tough yardage needed for a first down; that's when the players start kicking the refs.

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you," said Carl Jung, the man who invented modern psychoanalysis.

I say, show me a crazy man and I'll show you somebody who's had the rules pulled out from under him.

I did dial into the conference call last week. But as of today: no pony, no bunny rabbit.

Words to Live By

I was about 500 words into my column this week 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 dreadful. As I tried to decide whether I should attempt to repair it or just scrap it and start over, 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.


To me, a perfect phrase is a breath stopper. I have to stop and savor it. The best are re-quoted so often they, unfortunately, become cliches.


I am not a carpenter, so instead of trying to straighten out the column I had written, I'm going to start fresh and I can share 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. 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 (shared in a previous column): 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.


That'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 those words, tore the ball away from the kid and carried it and him into the end zone. Forty-plus years later, saying “that's my ball” still seems to help when I confront a competitive 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 year. It's your ball.

Who's the Orangutan Now?

I've quoted the line, "Orangutans are suspicious of changes in their cages" from Paul Simon's At the Zoo a lot during my lifetime. Usually it's about someone who is fighting an inevitable and benevolent change.

But now I'm starting to use it to describe my own feelings about change.

When I was growing up, new ideas and products were always  better. "New and Improved" was slapped on the front of nearly everything in the grocery store. I thought the original stuff must have really sucked if it left so much room for improvement.

By inclination, I've always been a fan of change, even just to break the monotony. But as I look back at the time when I got serious about being a grownup - around age 30 - I've started questioning how many things we've changed really deserve the label "New and Improved."

Before deregulation, flying was expensive, but even the cheapest seats gave passengers enough knee room to be comfortable, and flight attendants served real food to all of the passengers for free. What's more, you could show up at the airport ten minutes before flight time, run to the gate and get on board your plane without having someone tackle you and check what you're packing in your undies.

In those pre-personal computer days I never had problems staying organized because I had an assistant who answered my phone, typed and proofread my letters and kept the files organized.

It was easier to keep equipment up to date because nothing doubled in speed or capacity every 18 to 24 months.

Food and drink were evolving, but still simpler: There were two kinds of wine: Red and white. You ordered red with beef, white with everything else. (There was also pink for those who were having a seafood appetizer and steak for an entree.)

The political atmosphere was comfortably similar to professional wrestling. Plenty of posturing and demagoguery at show time,  but after hours politicians on opposite sides of the aisle kicked back, and drank whiskey together while they figured out how to divvy up the tax dollars.

When a scandal or problem was reported in the newspapers or on television, most people were inclined to attack the problem rather than the people who discovered it.

And nut cases that called for the armed overthrow of the government were not called patriots.

Communications have been revolutionized. Mailed, handwritten letters have become vestigial relics of a past millennium.

Five years ago I first got an inkling of the sheer breadth of the change when I realized that day in-and-day out  my local assistant was carrying on a running cell phone text message conversation with her boyfriend. He was in New York, we were in a village in Eurasia, sharing the road with horse carts and wagons pulled by oxen.
I think that was when I realized I had fallen a step behind the technological curve, and started to question how badly I wanted to keep up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in turning back the clock. I love digital picture frames, paying my bills online, the clock that sets itself and projects the time and outside temperature on the ceiling of the bedroom, this year's flu vaccine and the little blue light I shine on my face early in the morning to keep me from getting suicidal.

However, I have never Twittered or signed up for MySpace. I enjoy  Facebook - but I worry that 25 word epigrams and "Likes" have decimated thoughtful email exchanges and even family phone calls.

And some technology just seems excessive. Fifteen years ago I bought a network file server with the largest hard drive I could afford. It held  financial and contributor databases for more than 50 political campaigns and had room for more. Last week I saw an advertisement for a portable hard drive with 2 million times as much storage capacity. Price? $98.

I sort of wanted to buy one, but - for the life of me - I could not think of what I would do with two thousand-billion bytes of storage space, except lose track of things.

I am profoundly amazed that not only do I not own an iPad, I can't think of anything I'd do with one that I can't do better on my laptop. Perhaps there's an app for that.

So as society continues to rock, roll and lurch forward, I have found myself settling into my age-appropriate role as ballast, questioning the new wisdom and hanging on to a few anachronisms.

After recent airplane/airport experiences I've decided that - unless there's absolutely no option - I will never fly again. Call me old fashioned, but I don't think anybody should grope my junk without at least springing for dinner and a movie.

Truth be known, I'd love to have a Kindle, but I'd feel like I was slapping the face of the nice woman who smiles at me every weekend when I walk into her bookstore.

I know that someday I'll own a small device that takes care of all of my communication, data and entertainment needs. I don't know what it will look like or how it will work, but I do know that I will purchase version 2.1 of the device at a year-end clearance sale.

Hello. My name is Stan M, and I am an orangutan.

Now You Hold the Gun

There's an old story I used to hear when I was growing up in the Ozarks, about a hillbilly that accosted a stranger walking along a narrow country road up in the hills. He pointed a rusty pistol at the man's face and said what hillbillies always say in these stories, "Hold it right there stranger."

Then he shoved a jug of moonshine into the stranger's hands and ordered him to take a drink. Half scared out of his wits, the stranger unstoppered the jug and took a mouthful. The instant the white lightning hit his throat, molten wax shot out of his ears, tears gushed out of his eyes and he felt his tastebuds trying to commit suicide.

"That's awful . . . worst thing I've ever tasted!" he gasped.

"Yeah, I know," said the hillbilly. "Now you hold the gun on me while I drink."


The problem is self-discipline. How the hell am I supposed to work on my novel when people leave pencils that need sharpening and books that need re-shelving around my keyboard? A prominent 19^th century author claimed that he'd ordered his housekeeper to lock him in his library every morning and refuse  to give him food or drink until he slipped a specified number of completed pages under the door.

In campaign season, which is damned near always these days, politicians have an essential task called "Dialing for Dollars." They sit in a comfortable room at a comfortable desk, put on a headset, go down a list of people who are able to give them substantial campaign contributions, and they dial and schmooze and beg for money.
Almost all of them hate doing it. I knew one elected official who said he would rather stand by a freeway exit with a cardboard sign and beg for change than make that first phone call of the day.  So to insure that they do what has to be done, political candidates - in effect - hire their own hillbilly to keep them at the desk until they finish their phone calls.

In civilian life, military style boot camps have become big business. In lieu of self-discipline, people fork over a sizable chunk of cash to have someone force them to exercise, eat right and get enough sleep.

In Young Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein is not behaving that outrageously when he makes his household promise  not to let him out of the monster's cell until he tamed the monster, "No matter how cruelly I may beg." Of course he starts begging as soon as the door is closed, ". . . it was a joke for God's sake . . ."

But, when push comes to duck and cover, politicians are in a class by themselves when it comes to the desire to avoid anything that might offend one of their supporters. Once when I was staffing a candidate on a campaign trip, she took me aside before a fundraising coffee sponsored by a rich but obnoxious supporter, and said, "Get me out of here in 20 minutes, no matter what is happening."

Twenty minutes to the second after we arrived, I gave her a nod and started wading through the crowd  as if I had received a message from God. She turned to the people she was talking with and say, "uh oh" and gestured toward me.

When I reached her she gave the people around her a look as she was about to be wrenched away from her closest friends. "Sorry," she told them."Sometimes my staff is just relentless."

I took her arm, smiling and apologizing, trying to look as if I had to get her to the mouth of a volcano to prevent a catastrophe of biblical proportions.

Thank you, smile, step, step,  she pulled loose and hugged an old guy who was wearing a really great suit. I leaned in, touched her elbow and whispered that the magma was burbling closer to the surface . . . she nodded and start moving again.

At the door she stopped and gave her apologies to the group and dispensed one more hug while I looked worried and glanced at my watch. She continued to smile and wave through the window of the car as we pulled away; then she turned to me and said, "What kept you? If I'd had to stay there two minutes longer, I would have set myself on fire!"

Okay, your turn to hold the gun on me.

About Time

Relativity is considered scientific fact now rather than theory. If you are traveling really, really fast, time will appear to move more slowly for you than for people remaining at your departure point. Your kid brother could graduate college, have a career, raise a family and retire to Sun City in the time it takes you to play a hand of gin rummy on your speeding space ship.

For those of us in the second half of our lives, relativity in the passage of time is obvious. I got a big dose of it during the holiday. I get to see my granddaughter about every two months. The effect is like a time lapse video where the camera records a few frames every minute, then it plays back at 30 frames per second so that a seed appears to germinate, grow, and blossom in just a few seconds.

In my eyes, Amelia has grown from a hairless, funny-shaped, pink bundle of cute into a walking, talking, curious little girl almost overnight.

But from her perspective, everything outside of her fast-changing mind and body moves at glacial pace. After all, a year is half of her life. It's just 1/60th of mine. During the time she's tripled in size, learned to walk, and use words, I've lost a few hairs and the lines on my face have deepened a smidge.

I remember once asking my own grandmother if she had always been old. When she told me no, that she'd started out pretty much like I did, I didn't believe her. I had never noticed her changing at all.

Now I am seeing things from the perspective she had. Sometimes the world seems to change as if I was living in that time-lapse video. And I find myself doing what television producers do during a live program - tracking the time remaining until master control takes over and fades to black.

Nothing in a live production ever goes exactly as planned - an interview runs long or short, a segment is cancelled at the last moment because of a technical problem, something unexpected preempts something that was planned - so the producer is constantly comparing how much time remains with how much content remains. Good material has to be dropped because there isn't enough time.

I've already used up more than half of my time on earth, and there are a lot of things I'd like to cram in before I fade to black.

Some options disappear sooner than others: How much longer will I physically be able to cross-country ski? How much longer will Amelia be content to sit on my lap and let me read her stories?

And some things I'd like to do would take too long. I always thought it would be fun to live in Chicago for a few years, in a neighborhood with a good bar and a softball team. Back timing . . . I've already slipped something else into that time slot.

I've also learned the hard way that even the best plans can fall apart, and it's a good idea to have something to back fall on. Stretching the TV show analogy: I still wake up some nights remembering the time I was the guest-host of a live, television show where - after I had been made up, installed in the host chair and attached to a microphone - I was informed that every scheduled guest had cancelled. An instant later I heard the theme music playing and a voice in my earpiece saying, "Live in 5-4-3-2 . . ." When plans fall through and you don't have other options, each passing minute dies a slow, agonizing death.

But finding creative ways to consume time becomes less of an issue as we see the time remaining in our lives shrinking. I have starting taking the expression "spending time" literally, and find myself less tolerant of people who waste it.

A couple of years ago I was traveling with a translator and a young project coordinator who, while being consummate professionals during working hours, consistently arrived fifteen minutes to a half-hour after the times they set to meet for meals or recreational trips.

After the third or fourth time it happened, I told them they were insulting me and I was angry. When they decided not to make the effort to be on time, they were telling me they thought my time had no value. And the fact that they knew I had much less time remaining in my life than they had made the insult event greater.

They were scrupulously on time for everything for the remainder of the trip.  But . . .

A few months later I had coffee with a trainer who had recently worked with the same project manager. She made a point of telling the story of how she had been very late for a project meeting one day, and the young manager had said something to her that made her feel really guilty. The manager told her that by her tardiness, she had told everyone who had to wait that she thought their time was worth less than hers.

I had arrived at the coffee shop ten minutes late. I felt awful.

Show Your Intelligence - Say You are Ignorant

The first challenge any mentor or trainer faces, even when confronting people who've paid for the instruction out of their own pockets, is convincing the trainees to shut up and listen. Fifteen minutes into journalism workshop I was leading last year, I stepped to the side of the podium and shouted, "I know you are all smarter and better at this than I am, but please pretend like you aren't. I'm a long way from home and you are hurting my feelings." 

At a writing workshop I attended a few years ago, I asked a highly regarded editor and writing coach what his clients expect when they hire him to edit their work. His answer: "In reality, most people just want me to sanctify their manuscript. They want me to fall down on my knees and thank them for the opportunity to read the product of their genius, and tell them that I would not touch a single letter in any of their beautiful words." 

Like many boomers, I've had several careers, ranging from journalism to politics to computer programming, so I understand why people just starting in a new career, are anxious to show their peers and superiors how smart they are. But many go about it the wrong way because they don't understand the difference between intelligence and knowledge.  

Knowledge can lose its value as abruptly as a mortgaged-backed security. I was pretty good with a slide-rule in my college days; it was considered essential in my line of study. Then one day it wasn't.  

My generation grew up thinking that everything was made out of atoms that look like little solar systems.  Now physicists tell us the world is made out of teenie little strings that dance in  eleven dimensions - much like Bristol Palin doesn't. 

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Intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge and take advantage of new ideas.

As my software business grew, I didn't look for programmers who knew it all. I looked for people who could learn quickly enough to keep up with constantly evolving programming languages and computer hardware. Change is not always good, but it is inevitable.  

How can you demonstrate your intelligence when you move into a new job or new career that may not even have a name yet? Here's one common sense way: If someone starts to teach you how to do something, even if you think you already know everything you need to know, LET THEM TEACH YOU. 

 Don't protest, don't try to impress them with how much you already know; lean forward, pay attention, ask a question or two and let them know you are paying attention. If the opportunity arises, compliment them on how elegantly they do the task, but above all watch and learn.  

If you let me teach you how edit video and your first project is better than anything I've ever produced, I am going to think that you are a genius. As a side benefit, you will make me look good and I will remember that. If your project does not turn out well, you'll have a reservoir of forgiveness to draw on because you are just learning the ropes and, as your teacher, I bear some of the responsibility. 

On the other hand, an employee who claims to know it all, then  turns in bad work, looks like someone who needs to be kept on a short  leash and given a chance to learn humility. Even if you perform well, your would-be trainer may turn into a competitor instead of an ally. 

As our generation ages, society seems to be growing more resistant to new ideas. If Copernicus was alive today, a Congressional panel would likely demand that he disavow his sun-centric view of the solar system, and Darwin would be lucky to avoid being locked up in Gitmo. 

But in the business world's real-life system of natural selection, people who cannot handle change are at risk. I know an information technology person whose expertise was in a computer system that became obsolete. Instead of learning new systems, he spent his time writing long, jargon-filled memos listing reasons why his employer should not upgrade to the new industry standard. The story does not have a happy ending for the IT person. 

The lesson? Be prepared to surf on the wave of change, or risk drowning in your comfort zone.