No Overtime On Worrying For Me

Everybody is worried about everything just now. Worrying is more than a full time job these days, but I have decided not to go to overtime on worry.

Well, except for the “chicken little” behavior by our leaders in Washington…the ones who tell us something bad is about to happen, but they can’t or won’t tell us what it might be.

Haven’t they figured out that most of us assumed that another piece or two of the sky might fall down the road, that the attempts on our way of life weren’t going to cease and desist as from the 14th of September? I guess not, but the strategy of increasing our nervousness to the sticking point just isn’t working.

Then the news media try to whip us into a frenzy about the horror of the day, and there isn’t enough time left to worry about the bombs that keep falling on Red Cross buildings and civilians in a country far from our terrors.

I was thinking about all this today and getting close to a couple of serious conclusions which would distance me from the Zeitgeist, when I got a call from a company which wanted to replace the windshield auto glass on every car I own, all one of it. The female on the other end of the line was, I thought, ready to persuade me that hurling a rock through my own windshield would be a patriotic activity, so I volunteered immediately to drive to where her car was parked and to contribute my services for her good and the good of her company by hurling the rock through her windshield. Seemed only fair, but she thought I was kidding. At least the conversation brought my brain back into some sort of focus.

I did decide to devote a little time to worrying about the economy, because when I hear from the stock broker boiler rooms and the auto glass people, then I figure it’s time to switch to light beer, fluorescent light bulbs, and a lower temperature setting on the thermostat. (I’d already given up ground beef for soy burgers, so there was no relief in that quarter.)

It is good to see the sun rise each morning. Some days it’s enough, but the leaves have fallen, and winter is not far away. Just so it’s not winter in my heart, I guess.

Or yours.

A Festival Of Nine Lessons and Carols, Twenty Five Years On

Most children, if asked, would say that their favorite day of the year, with the possible exception of their birthday, would be Christmas – or a day like it in other of the world’s religions, when families gather and gifts are exchanged.

If you asked me now, I would say that my favorite day is Christmas Eve, because that is the day of anticipation, a state which is always more tantalizingly enjoyable than the day of realization which is just around the corner. But there is another more important reason.

Twenty-five years ago, I was lucky enough to be part of beginning what appears – now - to be an American holiday tradition, with the first live broadcast in the United States of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” from the chapel of King’s College at Cambridge University, in the old and very beautiful town of Cambridge, about an hour’s train ride North of London.

On Christmas Eve afternoon at 3:00 pm in England (10:00 a.m. in New York), in the chapel commissioned by its founder, King Henry VI and finished by King Henry VIII, the choir of fourteen men and sixteen boys sing carols, interspersed by lessons from the Old and New Testaments read by members of the community and by prayers offered by the Dean of the Chapel.

In 1979, it was not clear that such a presentation would find an audience…a live broadcast from another country and a service not widely known in our country, at a somewhat difficult hour, by a choir of men and boys which produces a sound somewhat alien to American ears, and lessons read in strange accents.

Moreover, we had to surmount technical challenges from AT&T, difficulties in funding the broadcast, and the challenge of our first international live relay.

But we were blessed (and I mean blessed) with assistance from a variety of sources. Charles Watson of AT&T pushed his staff to solve their technical problems; Joe Gwathmey, then of National Public Radio and now of Texas Public Radio, arranged NPR’s fiscal support; an old friend , Walter McCarthy made another significant contribution, and NPR’s technical staff solved all the international linkage problems. (Minnesota Public Radio’s staff took over the following year and have overseen the broadcast since…from the days of transatlantic cable, then satellite, and now ISDN lines.) John Haslam was the BBC producer with whom I laiased (that loverly Brit term) who could not have been more helpful and has become a very good friend.

That first broadcast ran long, but as there was nothing scheduled on NPR’s single line distribution system after the presumed end of our program, we managed to present the whole service. As I remember, 78 stations took that first broadcast; most of them liked it, but there were a few doubters.

From the letters which poured in after Christmas, I was able to develop a sense of hope that the broadcast might have attracted enough interest and support to continue. One woman in Minnesota wrote that “I turned on the radio while doing meal preparations for Christmas Day. I was so enthralled I burned the sweet potatoes. I didn’t care.” Another wrote about listening to the service as she drove from her family to her parents’ home. Her mother had died the night before, and she was going to be with her father for a very sad Christmas. The broadcast was her Christmas service that year. (A year later she wrote to say that her father had come to her home, and they had all listened to the broadcast.) A Californian wrote to say that he listened to the broadcast while he meditated on world peace on a beach in Malibu. Over the years I was involved with the broadcast, there were many letters like that, and they, along with the response from radio stations, made it clear that for a large group of people, Christmas with the broadcast had become not just a tradition, but an important, nearly essential, tradition.

There are have been other more subtle results of the broadcast from King’s. One can find many more local versions of the King’s College service offered throughout our land, some of the English carol tunes have wormed their way into our voices, and - in Cambridge – the number of attendees from the USA at Evensong and Sunday services seems to have increased enormously in the last several decades.

A broadcast tradition, however long lived, is never a guarantee that it will continue. So enjoy the broadcast and then support your public radio station by way of appreciation.

Each Christmas Eve, I am grateful for having been part of the American beginnings of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols “ broadcast in the USA, thrilled that so many people have taken the service into their hearts, and deeply appreciative of the friendships which have been a great indirect benefit of my involvement with the broadcast.

Whether you listen to the service, celebrate another kind of holiday, or just remain undecided about it all, I hope your participation in the festivities of the season bring you great joy.

President Kennedy, Four Decades Removed

It doesn’t seem forty years on since the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Time passes more quickly with each decade of life, and the distance of years brings with it a certain residue and altered light which affect one’s perception of those events, and under no circumstances is it easy to feel the same awful feelings in the gut and and head and heart after hearing the news and watching the sequence of events through that weekend, the funeral and the aftermath of it all.

That late autumn day, I was teaching at a school in northwestern Ohio, and it was during sixth period that “the news” began to race around the building. The reactions were those of numbness, tears, a few people laughing – almost hysterically (we hoped) for reasons we never understood . surfaced.

The head of school called for a special assembly. I don’t remember what he said, and I don’t remember the rest of that day. Like everyone else, I was in shock, but we knew it was our job to keep things on an even keel for the students. We did, but only barely.

I had only seen John Kennedy once. He came to a meeting at Harvard shortly after his election. He had been on holiday in Florida and arrived in a black Cadillac limousine with a few Secret Service people. He announced that he was there to get our grades raised, laughed with us, and disappeared into University Hall. He was young, tanned, the picture of good health, and he was our hope for the future. The campaign had been long, grueling, and was not decided until the middle of the next day.

As one of the few admitted liberals in my family, I had supported Kennedy and could not imagine anyone voting for Richard Nixon. My mother reminded me that she cast her first vote for the Socialist Norman Thomas, and my father, wisely, said nothing it all. I considered both responses some sort of forgiveness.

But now Kennedy’s short tenure had come to a tragic end, and Lyndon Johnson was – almost unimaginably – our President….from Texas, rough and ready, with a complex, if not devious, political history of his own.

Most of us in America spent the weekend stuck to our television sets watching events unfold in Dallas, Washington, and Virginia. It was horrific, depressing, and yet there was something noble in act, fact, and restrained grace in the transition from one administration to another under such difficult circumstances, thanks in large measure to the quiet leadership of Jacqueline Kennedy.

One memory haunts me from that weekend. I am convinced it is true, but it is so unbelievable that I wonder about it still. Richard Nixon, by then back in the legal profession in New York, was interviewed at an airport on his way to Washington for the funeral. Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, had just been shot by a then unidentified person, and the reporter gave Mr Nixon this shocking news and sought his reaction.

Nixon looked into the camera with a serious expression and said, “Two rights do not make a wrong….I mean, two wrongs don’t make a right.” I turned to the neighbor watching with me in my apartment and asked him whether we had both heard the same thing. He agreed that we had, and we fell into a long silence.

Something broke in America with the death of President Kennedy, and it has never been fixed. In truth, I doubt it can never be fixed, and after all these years, I cannot say for certain what that something was. Perhaps a sense of hope that with hard work and by working together, we could construct a just and fair society for all Americans.

One should be grateful for the clarity of youth; it is far different from the clarity one finds decades and decades later.

Good Therapists Can Be Found In Surprising Places

My mother loved dogs, and when she would take “the challenge of this decade” to the veterinarian for a check-up or shots, upon her return she would be positively ebullient.
“Trig got a shot, and I had a chance to visit my therapist.”

She was not referring to a local mental health practitioner but to her dog’s veterinarian. It seemed that a visit to old Dr Palmer provided Mother with an attitudinal boost of some sort, something beyond what the companionship of her four-footeds brought to her soul.

Old Dr Palmer, as he was universally known, was in practice with his son, from whom he was quite different. The father was a Scot – no, not a Scottish descendant, but a Scot – and he abhorred scientific language and any show of pretense. I remember once taking a dog to be seen, and Old Dr Palmer examined him carefully and then said in his deep brogue, “ Aye lad, he’s stook.”

“What?” I said.
“He’s shtook.”
“Shtook, what’s shtook” I asked.
Stook..con--sti--pated,” responded Dr Palmer, making me feel like the village idiot – something I was then when it came to the dialects of the Scots.

But to get back to my story. In my late teens I was quite amused by my mother’s view of her veterinarian as therapist.

Decades passed, and then one fine day, a friend gave me a gift certificate for a hair cut and related activities at a local beauty salon. Full of trepidation, I darkened the door of this place and was placed into the hands of another Karen, a young woman from North Dakota.

If you’ve looked at the picture of me on the home page of my company’s web-site, you’ll see in a nanosecond that I have no hair to cut. I might as well take on the career of “Friar Tuck” in any production of “Robin Hood.”

Undaunted, Karen gave me a shampoo and cut my hair, all with a straight face, and finished up with a facial. I looked into a mirror and notice that many of the gray hairs had disappeared and that I appeared energized, and I felt terrific.

On the drive home, I thought of my mother and her therapist old Dr Palmer and realized that I had found my equivalent. Karen cut my hair for a number of years and then moved with her husband to the West, and I returned to the inexpensive old-time barber shop across the street from my office with its aged copies of Popular Science and such. It was OK, but not OK, if you know what I mean.

Last year, "Karen of My Scalp" moved back to the Twin Cities, and even though there’s less hair to cut and it’s still expensive, the benefits far outweigh the costs.

And if the day comes when there is no hair on my head, I’ll still make my appointments with Karen for a dome facial and polish, because the therapy she provides will still be worth it.

Mother was right, as usual – there’s nothing like a good therapist, especially when they’re not in those “helping professions.”

On Computer Glitches

Most of us who’ve been around computers for a long time – let’s say 10+ years – are familiar with the following: Your computer has been behaving like a champ, and one morning, you sit down in front of the keyboard and discover that everything has turned to a combination of suet and cheese.

Nothing makes any sense, so you start down the familiar trails of detecting what might have gone wrong. In many cases, this takes hours upon hours, and when the glitch comes to light, you are embarrassed to confess to yourself that

a. you hit the wrong key or
b. you dumped the wrong software or
c. you should never have let Uncle Charlie check his email on your machine or
d. you operated the machine while under the influence and should have arrested yourself or
e. you might just have taken a second or two to read the damn manual (or download it

and read it, the more common situation nowadays.

What’s far worse, far far worse, is the realization that the solution was right there, fourteen inches from the end of your nose, and you didn’t see it until you had raced around all the well-trod “paths of fruitlessness.”

When you report this problem and its solution, you never, repeat never, talk about the amount of time expended in the search for the solution. Rather, one talks about the elegance of the solution, the incredible (and nearly instantaneous) detective work required.

One never admits that one was like Miss Marple lost in her own village, Poirot on a bender, or Lovejoy unable to identify an east Anglian antique. As the probable villain in the cause, one chooses to be the hero in the solution…easy when one works alone.

Or am I the only one who suffers from this occasional affliction?

Something similar happened yesterday. I had a new satellite dish installed last week. Because it’s still winter here, the crew used a dish in a bucket of concrete as a stop-gap until the ground thaws, and a permanent installation can be made. Worked like a champ, it did…until yesterday morning.

I made sure the dish hadn’t blown over and then began blaming myself, pretty much working through a through e above, just in a slightly different context. After hours of looking at satellite azimuths and transponder assignments, I was getting absolutely nowhere, and frustration was mounting rapidly.

Time for a break, I thought, and I walked out to the end of the drive for the mail. It was a pleasant day, and I noted that much of the winter’s snow had melted as I came back to the house.

Ba-dum- bum!

The snow had melted, changing the position of the dish, and throwing it out of alignment. Ten minutes and some compass work later, the problem was solved. (OK, so it was thirty minutes – give me a break, would you?)

Fifty years ago, I had a math teacher who thrummed the following into our heads: “RTP,” he said. “Read The Problem.” We generally got this when we couldn’t figure out how to structure one of those algebra problems involving freight trains going from Atown to Bville at certain rates of speed. “RTP” was good advice then, and now, and thought I haven’t forgotten it, I occasionally believe that it can be ignored on occasion. At my peril.

The teacher is gone, but the good advice remains. I had let what I thought the problem was define my possible solutions. I hadn’t read it with sufficient clarity to understand all of it.

“RTP. Read The Problem.” Pass it on.

Remembering Paul Wellstone

A year ago this week, the senior Senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash, along with his wife, daughter, several campaign workers, and the flight crew. He was approaching the end of his re-election campaign and decided to attend the funeral of a friend in northern Minnesota.

It seemed that people either loved or hated Wellstone, reminiscent of the feelings many of my parent’s generation had about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I realize that hate is a strong word, but I thought about it and decided it was the right word.

The reasons for hating Senator Wellstone were (and very sad to say, are):

He was a politician.

He was a liberal.

He was an inveterate optimist.

He was Jewish.

He was balding.

He was short.

He was a former amateur wrestler.

He was a former college professor.

He was enthusiastic about damn near everything.

He enjoyed being with people.

He liked the give and take of the debate.

He stood up for what he believed in.

He never gave up.

Like Roosevelt, he was “a happy warrior,” and like it or not, we are the better for having had both of them pass through and affect our lives.

It appears that we live in a country where debate has two colors – black and white. No room for gray, for complexity, for subtlety. Maybe one day we’ll realize that our lives are not thirty second tv commercials, that we need to think about the issues facing our families and our country, and that we need more than another “suit” to pour the clichés of the day into our ears in the perpetual search for our vote.

Wellstone was an original, and we are still searching for his successor. Sad to say, it looks like it’ll be a while.

Preparing For Winter

We had a very dry summer, followed by a somewhat dry autumn; the leaves lacked their usual brilliant color, but under the circumstances, they did exactly what they were supposed to do – warn us that “it” was coming again.

“It” is the cold and the snow and all the little things which hurry along under their skirts, and these have to do mainly with warmth and safety. If you’ve lived here long enough, you don’t think that much about doing: A day arrives, there is the barely audible “click” in your brain, and everything changes.

The garage is organized so that an automobile will actually be able to fit inside it. This is made possible by moving herbicides to the warm basement of the house so that they will be “safe,” and useable again next Spring when you move them back to the garage so that you can find them again in the autumn to put back in the basement. Unless they have reached their “use by date,” in which case you throw them out recycle them appropriately.

Back in the corner of the garage, the snow tires have sat since the Spring. Now is the time to get them into the back of the car to take them to the tire place where a husky lad will put them on the car and place the “summer tires” in the back of the car. This gives you an early season opportunity to hurt your back or at least say that you hurt your back. What brings relief to your back is to find someone else to do the snow blowing or shoveling. Money is likely involved, but this is a good investment – in fact, among the best.

The same goes for removing the fallen leaves from the yard. Find somebody who will do it for you. Write the check. Complain for no more than three days about the cost, and give daily thanks for the fact that you have chosen to provide employment in our difficult economy and no longer choose to do it yourself.

I have some driveway markers, basically green poles on a spring which help keep people on the driveway. They are an attractive dark green color until you try to find the base in the grassy ground – also dark green. If you wait until the grass is no longer dark green, the ground may be too hard to dig the hole for any new markers. There will come a point when you leave the markers in the garage next to the tires and await perfect installation conditions which never seem to arrive.

The winter clothes which may have been properly stored in the basement (or may not have if summer cold weather arrived as the clothes were finding their own way down a couple of floors). If the latter situation applies, be sure to check the laundry and other nearby locations. Once the clothes are returned to their winter locations, check them for wear, newly observed design and styling flaws, and then put them in the place where they probably should be all the time anyway.

Shovels, ice chippers, bags of sand, and similar tools of the season need to be placed by the front door, and when this happens you are reminded to turn off the outside faucets. In order to do this, one frequently has to step over the winter clothes which were not put away, so one must be careful.

Winter requires an array of footwear for warmth and safety. When I was a kid, we had black galoshes with metal buckles. Ugly and cold, but at least they kept your feet dry. Nowadays you can choose between ugly insulated boots, boots with felt insulation, so big you have to walk like a giant in them, slip-on boots with hearty soles, thingies with sharp points that slip over boots for walking on ice. Beyond that, there are walking sleds (“Sparks, as they call them in Scandinavia), walking poles, cross country skiis, snow shoes.

Others who live here believe that engines are essential in the winter – snowmobiles and similar contrivances. Many of us believe that these provide too much pleasure in the winter and are creatures of the devil, environmentally wasteful, and so, in a word, purposeless. I’m sorry to report that these machines and their brethren seem to be a very popular way of dealing with early darkness and perennial cold and snow – there is almost always the so.

The furnace needs to be checked and tuned, supplies of cocoa and whisky to be aggregated (part of blizzard prevention), extra blankets put on or near the beds, the battery powered radio located in case of power failure), the safety supplies for the car (blankets, ice scrapers (several for different kinds of ice and as back-up), sleeping bag, small shovel, bag of sand, coffee can for individual relief. Inside the house those of us without a lot of hair look around the nightcap to be found, second only in importance to blankets and duvets. Hot water bottles are also a good investment. Not only are they warm, but if you are surprised by them, you can learn the difference between first and second degree burns.

Lastly, the winter vocabulary returns to active use. This is aided by a lot of preparatory discussion having to do changes in the weather – looks like snow, could be unpleasant tomorrow, have to change the oil in the car, better tell the cat, bring in the brass monkeys – all that discussion which is really the way we warn each other and assure each other that we are prepared and prepared to endure it together.

Our vocabularies change, too, so that windchill, black ice, turning into a skid, braking distance, blue wax, kitty litter (a sand substitute), and a whole host of curse words not required the rest of the year arrive as though freshly minted. Other words used during this time are Florida, Mexico, Vegas, California, the Caribbean, Hawaii, even Iowa.

But of course, we never are completely prepared for winter, not even for the gray day when the first white flakes descend from the sky, land, linger for just an instant before the last heat of the ground melts them. That experience is as old as we are, but new and simple and beautiful each autumn.

And then, alas, experience starts to accumulate and linger on our roads and sidewalks, and steps. Outwardly we continue to complain, but secretly we just look forward to crawling into our beds, snuggling under the covers with a good book, surrounded by the quiet of a winter’s night and being grateful just for being warm.

Categories Shmategories....

Last Saturday morning, I was struggling to combine drinking coffee and reading the newspaper after a night that was too short. Because of my condition – fatigue and nothing more, I can assure you – it was easy to ignore stories about war, politics, the economy, so decided to focus on the sports section.

Unfortunately the sports section doesn’t take long to read, and so as the level of coffee descended in my mug, I looked for something else.

Sure enough, there was a perfect Saturday morning column about a young man who had been elected “Homecoming King” at his high school. For those of you not from these parts, “Homecoming,” at least in my youth was an excuse to throw off normal strategies of dress and attire, go to a football game which was followed by a dance. Normally, this sequence of events took place after the team had played an “away” game, but now Homecoming occurs when it occurs, very much the way national holidays now occur on Mondays when a holiday is more convenient, but that’s another topic for another time.

Anyway, the young man in question attends most athletic events, has taken time to learn the names of hundreds of his fellow students, and enjoys attending school.

The point of the column was that he was described as “developmentally delayed,” and so his being chosen by a vote of his peers was seen as an acknowledgement of the contributions of someone who is classified as different in some ways from most other students. And so our hearts are warmed, and we turn the page and life goes on.

But wait a minute.

Every day we allow categories to simplify our lives too much. In the first paragraph, I said I was tired, but you might have thought I was dealing with a hangover. Big difference, and in my book two glasses of wine and four and a half hours of sleep makes you tired, not hungover.

We’ve all heard the terms - dummy, retard, handicapped, challenged. Or how about spic, dago, fag, faggot, queer? Or the derogatory racial terms? Or perhaps liberal, conservative, communist, fascist, socialist? Or terms that describe learning disorders along a nearly endless continuum…

We are all more subtle than the words others might use to describe us and that we might use to describe ourselves to others. The late John Gardner was once asked in what pigeonhole he might fit. His reply was that he didn’t really know, just one with his name above it.

Returning to our young man, the homecoming king, I wonder just who might be “developmentally delayed” – It seems he and we both lack certain talents and skills we might like to have, and the only difference is that some of us have may more of a choice in the matter.

Time to rethink that pigeonhole thing we do.

How's Your Grammar? Fine, How's Yours?

While I’m aware that our language is constantly changing and understand that intellectually, I have a great deal of trouble with it emotionally. As a whippersnapper I was put through the paces of English grammar and usage by a teacher of the old school…no, that’s not right…he was of the older school, and I am of the old school.

If you’re younger than I am – and I’m not saying – then perhaps your heart might twitch upon hearing any of the following:

Between you and I…
You going out with me makes me angry…
Like, we were studying, you know, and, like, his father really got….
If I was you, I wouldn’t do that.

These errors are all grammatical, and the type of error is described at the bottom of this brief homily.

What’s got my blood moving today is the rather curious way we become lemmings of usage and by doing so separate a word or a phrase from actual thought. Here are some examples.

You go, girl.
Don’t go there.
She has issues.
Aw, go (blank) yourself.

The first appears to have been assimilated into our language from a subculture, and it appears to be a statement of approval for having done something wondrous, unlikely, or contrary to character.

The second constrains discussion so that a sensitive area is declared to be out of bounds by the speaker.

The third appears to have the same effect as its predecessor, except that now another person’s situation is almost, but not quite, out of bounds.

The fourth phrase and its innumerable variations can be heard almost anywhere these days and reminds us how any word can lose shock value unless you hear it/them in the company of a child or a sweet old lady, in which event you are…well, don’t go there, because even thinking what I’m thinking gives me more issues than I can handle just now.

Don’t be diffident…try out new words and phrases, vary your vocabulary, create new words.

Last year I came up with sphinctitude and its adjectival and adverbial forms, sphinctitudinous and sphinctitudinously. The noun is a combination of sphincter and attitude, and I’ll leave it to you to define it. I also came up with drivelous and drivelousness, but I can’t find my copy of the Oxford Universal to see if it’s a new word. No matter, I’ve had fun just playing with the language.

As we all should. If you come up with anything new

The grammatical errors above are:

1. Pronoun object of preposition should be in objective case, therefore “me.”
2. “Going” is a gerund (verbal noun) so you should be in the possessive form “your.”
3. This is an excellent example of a simple sentence with interruptions for both continuation and emphasis.
4. Condition contrary to fact takes the subjunctive. In this case, “were.” But compare to “If the train was late – and it was – you would have been late.”

The Stone Philips Effect

The dog days are here. I can tell, because I want to scratch myself in odd places, and I circle the sofa before collapsing on it for a wasted hour or two watching bad television.

August is the best month for bad television. You can see the junk that you missed during the rest of the year, and your mind is in precisely the right kind of condition for it.

Why is that so?

A number of reasons – it’s the time when you begin to accept the fact that the yard work you’d promised yourself to do since April won’t be done, the winter clothes at the bottom of the basement stairs to be put away have contributed to the well-being of the resident moths, and anything that does survive does not have to be unpacked…just dragged back upstairs for the long stretch of darkness and cold here in Minnesota, holes and all. You can write letters to yourself in the dust on any table in the house, the kitchen looks like a Crime Scene Investigation team has just ransacked the place, and Labor Day is fewer than three weeks away.

Much better with a cold beer on the sofa, and you can learn stuff. The other night on public tv I learned about the Spartans, and Queer Eye For the Straight Guy has me thinking “neatness really does count.” Baseball is always good for a nap or two during the nine innings, but then I’ve known that for years.

But the Big News for this August is that I have both discovered and named a new television phenomenon which I call “The Philips Effect,” names after Stone Philips, of NBC’s Dateline program. Every time the camera opens on Philips, he does this quirky little up and down nod, like a little kid….looks like his chin is just falling down the last three stairs.

It conveys a sense of involvement, commitment, agreement with whatever random thought might be firing up your neural synapses – did I leave the stereo on, what was the name of that woman I met at last night’s art opening, boy, how about that navel lint.

The Philips Effect became particularly noticeable during the early stages of the present conflict in the Middle East when correspondence waited to hear and to comprehend the questions being thrown at them from Washington or New York. Now it’s leaked to local news anchors, weather and sports people.

By golly, you can sit right in front of the tv in your underwear and have a handsome or pretty television person agreeing with you and encouraging you to agree with them by nodding a lot at you.

Another tv discovery in their constant drive to replace content with style. Maybe Robert Siegel and Bob Edwards do it in front of their microphones at NPR, but I doubt it, what with their relentless interest in content.

The Philips Effect…another reason to watch television. Yeah, right.

Uncertainty And Belief

Last Friday I was completing my morning ablutions when there was a knock on the front door. I put on some clothes and went to the front door to find that it was my neighbor Betsy who suggested in no uncertain terms that I go down to the lake…something about a goose she said.

My old farmhouse is on a small lake, so I headed out the door to the deck and was amazed to see about fifteen kids from the near- by exercise club and their leader, a guy with a kennel crate covered by a towel, a woman taking pictures of it all, and Betsy.

It seems that in early May, a Canada goose had been hit by a car along our road as s/he was trying to shepherd the goslings across the road to the lake. The driver had not stopped, and when Betsy came upon the scene, she got the goose to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center at the University of Minnesota.

The goose had mended successfully and was now ready to be liberated. The door to the kennel cage was opened, and after a short wait, the goose walked out, and slid into the lake.

We all waited to see what would happen next, and we didn’t have to wait long. The goose swam out about twenty feet and then flapped its wings and once airborne flew just above the water off to the East.

The group lingered, chattering away about this rare success – most creatures wouldn’t survive an injury like this without someone like Betsy – about the insensitive lout who had struck a living creature and driven on, and about whether the goose would find its mate and their goslings again.

It was one of those cool, quiet, and sunny summer mornings, like the ones you treasure from childhood, a morning suddenly filled with optimism and hope. A few minutes later, silence had returned to the shore.

Later on in the day, I was busy repainting the front door; I declared a coffee break and poured myself a cup in the kitchen and was taking my first sip when I looked out over the deck toward the shore.

And there at the edge of the lawn was a pair of Canada geese and eight goslings, all foraging for food.

Now I don’t know whether this was our injured goose with his newly found mate and their flock. I’ll never know.

But what, exactly, do I need to know? After all, does not uncertainty help create belief?

On Mother's Day Phobia

Me: My Name is Nick and I’m a Mother’s Dayphobe.

You: Hi, Nick.

Me again: I don’t know when these negative feelings started….decades ago, and I adored my Mother. Maybe it was the day I realized that McDonalds’s, Disney, and Hallmark had decided to take over our psycho-emotiono-culturo-familio world.

Now you can add to that Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Starbucks,….well, you probably have your own list, but you get the idea.

We are whipped into a frenzy of brunches, and little bouquets, and very expensive cards with somebody else’s poetry instead of our own words, and so when Father’s Day rolls around we’re ready, and by Halloween, we’re really ready, so that by Thanksgiving we are in a positive frenzy, to be sure that by Christmas the rate of neural transfer in our brains cannot be measure by any machine on this earth. There is a brief respite until Valentine’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day seems like just a bump in the road of life. And then, there’s Mother’s Day.

In parts of my family, the definition of conflict can be measured when Mother’s Day is on the same weekend as “the Opener,” which, in these parts refers only to the first day of legal fishing for the serious game fish, and that conflict will erupt again next weekend. In another part of the family, that particular Sunday reminds us, uh, them that outdoor drinking has resumed , and that never, repeat never, and especially never, stands in the way of Mother’s Day. In fact, it probably helps some of us deal with it.

My mother and I had this unwritten agreement. I called her the day before Mother’s Day to remind her that yet again, I was not celebrating with the rest of America. We would have a nice chat (so much better than a card with poetry by a stranger), and she would thank me and head off to think about what she would be wearing the next morning at brunch.

So on Mother’s Day, I think of my Mother and all the others who’ve helped us paddle through our lives – parents, teachers, step-parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, social workers, doctors and nurses, therapists, ministers and rabbis, social workers, and all those who take it upon themselves to care about and for others formally and informally (including four footed creatures and other pets, and I celebrate them, too).

In spite of my trying to be inclusive, I thought about putting politicians on my list, but upon reflection decided to take the Fifth….and on Mother’s Day maybe drink some of it. (Well, we can each celebrate in our own way, no?)

There isn’t a day that I don’t think about my parents, both gone now, but our conversations continue in their own way, and one day a year will never be enough to honor what they – and others - have done for me.

Thank you.

Some Of The Loons Are On The Lake

I was taking my regular constitutional around Birch Lake last week, mulling over the state of my world: The winter was long and gloomy, punctuated by stretches of genuine blackness involve war, famine, pestilence, corporate greed which more and more resembles the behavior of the mob but without the barber shop “rub outs,” venal and small-minded politicians, misbehaving members of the clergy, a press dependent on governmental and military hand-outs, increasing intrusion on our private lives by government bureaucrats, and stupidity creeping across the land to the point where one wonders if anybody is thinking anywhere.

At about this point, I begin fantasizing about moving to a cottage on an island off the coast of Scotland, but without The New York Times at my door each day and Diet-Rite in the fridge, I’d say the chances are slim. I have always admired Huck Finn but can no more light out for the West than ply a raft down the Mississippi River.

As I came to the Northwest corner of the lake, I had achieved a state of darkness which was making me angry – angry at the world and angry at me for being angry during a perfectly decent walk around a smallish but attractive lake.

Then I saw them. A pair of loons diving just off the shore. Loons, our state bird here in Minnesota, plumage of black and white in varied patterns, incredibly adept in the water, clumsy on land, and linear in the air. Birds with an air of mystery because of their diving abilities, but most of all, their strange and haunting calls which come echoing across the eons and the water into your core, unrelentingly unforgettable.

He was alert and protective while she continued to dive around him. Gradually, they moved off toward the center of the lake.

We’ve had a nesting pair of loons on the lake since I moved here twenty-five years ago. Most years, there is a baby loon, and once in while, two. Sometimes in my kayak I can drift quietly within fifty feet of them before they disappear under the waves, and every once in a while a loon will come up from a dive within a few feet of me – we are both equally surprised, and the loon disappears back under the water and pops up some distance away in a few seconds.

The fact that the loons were back on the lake was the best news bulletin I’d gotten in weeks. I doubt any of the inhabitants of the cars speeding by me took note of the loons – too busy on the cell phone, eating breakfast on the move, chatting with a passenger, thinking about work to see that the loons had returned to the lake.

But the arrival of our loons was the best news I’d gotten in months, and I was grateful. So I went home poured myself a fresh cup of coffee, sat down at the dining room table, looked out at the loons as they moved off to the East, and felt some of the accumulated tension of the recent past begin to ease its way out of my body.

Walked By A Dog

On a balmy Spring day, there is nothing better than taking a stroll with a small child or a dog. In those few minutes, you might learn more about the natural world than you would if you were on your own for an hour.

In my case, I walk with Gus the thirteen year old Scotty; we head down the drive, take a right at the street and wander for a couple of hundred yards down the bikeway/walkway next to the lake.

We do this twice a day, and during the cold, dark winter months we get up a head of steam: Get out, do your stuff, and head back (being environmentally responsible to bring any, uh, debris home with you). Speed and performance are our criteria.

Now, the walks have become more like a royal progress. Because dogs can perceive something like 70,000 different smells, Gus takes the considered view that each smell must be absorbed, analyzed, categorized, and – sometimes – marked in that wonderful way which dogs do.

He also observes the ducks, loons, and geese on the lake. Each Spring when we go through this transition, I suffer from a short stretch of impatience. It dissipates as Gus meanders from smell to smell because I have time to observe the buds on the trees changing each day, to see the loons and listen closely to their tremolo call, to speak to the geese, all of whom are interested in talking right back. In the morning especially, the sunlight strikes the skin and the soul with equal force.

Meandering is good, but you can’t be listening to the Walkman or ordering your day on your PDA or chattering on your cell phone. I can’t smell the smells which intrigue Gus, but there is enough to remind me that most of what I do is not nearly as important as this all-to-brief contact with the natural world.

Having said that, I am delighted to report that unlike every dog I’ve known, I still have not developed the urge to roll in something revolting as part of my “rite of Spring.” Next year,
perhaps.

Walked By A Dog

On a balmy Spring day, there is nothing better than taking a stroll with a small child or a dog. In those few minutes, you might learn more about the natural world than you would if you were on your own for an hour.

In my case, I walk with Gus the thirteen year old Scotty; we head down the drive, take a right at the street and wander for a couple of hundred yards down the bikeway/walkway next to the lake.

We do this twice a day, and during the cold, dark winter months we get up a head of steam: Get out, do your stuff, and head back (being environmentally responsible to bring any, uh, debris home with you). Speed and performance are our criteria.

Now, the walks have become more like a royal progress. Because dogs can perceive something like 70,000 different smells, Gus takes the considered view that each smell must be absorbed, analyzed, categorized, and – sometimes – marked in that wonderful way which dogs do.

He also observes the ducks, loons, and geese on the lake. Each Spring when we go through this transition, I suffer from a short stretch of impatience. It dissipates as Gus meanders from smell to smell because I have time to observe the buds on the trees changing each day, to see the loons and listen closely to their tremolo call, to speak to the geese, all of whom are interested in talking right back. In the morning especially, the sunlight strikes the skin and the soul with equal force.

Meandering is good, but you can’t be listening to the Walkman or ordering your day on your PDA or chattering on your cell phone. I can’t smell the smells which intrigue Gus, but there is enough to remind me that most of what I do is not nearly as important as this all-to-brief contact with the natural world.

Having said that, I am delighted to report that unlike every dog I’ve known, I still have not developed the urge to roll in something revolting as part of my “rite of Spring.” Next year,