Ching-ching!

Presidents and presidential candidates try their best to control their public image, but somehow the “truth” always comes out.  Let me qualify my statements by saying I wasn’t a huge fan of George Bush’s policies, but I liked him as a person.  I think he was a principled man.  There were lots of people who disagreed with his principles and frankly, that’s OK.  At least you knew where he stood.

Barack Obama is another story altogether.  You don’t know where he really stands on anything, because he says one thing and then says another.  His religion is the most recent example.  Polls show that one-fourth of Americans think he’s a Muslim.  It really shouldn’t matter what religion he practices.  It’s just the prevarication about it.  In one breath he says he’s Christian and then he bashes people who cling to their God and their guns.  Then he has said that the most beautiful sound he can remember is the Muslim sunset call to prayer in Indonesia.  That’s not something the average American Christian would cite as an important life image.  It reinforces the perception that we have bought a “pig in a poke.”

Anyway, all seriousness aside, you can tell a lot about a person by the things he does.  You can tell a person by the way he treats children, pets, and the hired help.  You can tell a lot about a person by the car he chooses to buy and drive.  You can tell a lot about a person by the house he buys and where he lives.

For example, a friend of mine worked in the White House under Gerald Ford.  He told me that the permanent staff at the White House (the people who wait on the President, cook, clean, etc.) loved President Ford.  He was extremely personable to them.  He knew them by name and remembered the details about their families.  He took time to inquire about their loved ones and showed a very caring, human persona.  Apparently, the staff hated Richard and Pat Nixon, who were just the opposite of Gerald Ford.

The media remembers Gerald Ford as a brief “stand-in” while American politics “reset” after Watergate (and as the guy who fell down the steps of Air Force One).  Ford’s chief accomplishment–healing America’s confidence in the Presidency–was directly related to the kind of person he was.

I always consider it curious that Republican presidents have homes that they go back to during their time in office.  Nixon had his place in California (I think it was in San Clemente).  Reagan and George W. Bush (43) had their ranches.  George Bush (41) had his home in Kennebunkport.

These presidents liked going home–partly because they had a home to go to.  Reagan rode horses, chopped wood, and cleared brush.  George W. Bush rode his mountain bike with the Secret Service and even the Chinese cycling team.  George Bush liked to cruise in his speedboat.  I’m not sure what Nixon liked to do–maybe he walked around the beach in big old shorts and a metal detector.

In the years since Jimmy Carter, it seems that the Democrat presidents don’t have homes.  The Clintons didn’t own a home.  They had lived in the Arkansas governor’s mansion for a long time.  They made a big deal about buying a home in New York so Hillary could “carpetbag” her way into the Senate.  I thought it was odd that they didn’t have one.  When they went on vacations, they went to the homes of celebrities, or George Soros, or other important elites.

The Obamas appear to be the same way.  When he takes time off, which is like every other week, he doesn’t go home.  Does he even have a home to go back to?  That’s kind of creepy when you think of it.

Home ownership is part of the American dream–and the American nightmare.  Every American ought to have to occasionally call Roto-Rooter and pay them $150 an hour to come and snake out your drain.  Every home owner ought to have to paint the bathroom ceiling,  fix the dripping faucet, mow the yard, rake the leaves, and clean the decomposing leaves out of the gutter.  If he doesn’t do it, at least he  should have to pay somebody to do it for them.  If a president doesn’t have a place, an actual dwelling he calls home, he’s disconnected from the people he governs.

Last of all, you can tell a lot about a person his hobbies, the games he plays, and the sports he likes.  I spent a lot of time on a bicycle as a Mormon missionary many years ago.  My backside still has a permanent contour from the seat of a nice French Motobecane touring bike.  So, when I saw these pictures and compared them, it tells me a lot about these two presidents.  The first one is President Bush riding his mountain bike with the Chinese Olympic team.

The second is President Obama on a bike in Martha’s Vineyard on one of his bi-weekly vacations.  Yes, I’m aware he likes to play basketball, but this is just discouraging!

If this picture included sound you can just imagine what it would say.

“Ching-ching!”

Falling in love with a place

I moved around a lot in my life.  My dad was in the Coast Guard and every time he got a new stripe and a little more money in his pocket, my parents would move to better quarters.  When I grew up, I continued this pattern in the Air Force and even afterwards.  As a result, as I’ve said previously, my life ended up getting divided into little one-, two-, and three-year increments.

Along the way, there were a few places I fell in love with.  I’ve lived in Virginia, Alaska (twice), Colorado, California, Texas, and Germany.  I’ve visited 39 out of 50 states in the USA.  For some reason, I’ve connected with some places better than others.  It has nothing to do with the people there, the friends I had, or even what I did there.  Some places, I only visited very briefly while traveling.  Others, I lived there for a time and developed some roots.

Ketchikan and Deer Mt.

The first place I ever fell in love with was Ketchikan, Alaska.  Although I had good friends and many experiences in that town, there was just something about the place itself.  I was trying to explain this to my wife the other day.  Even before I had the friends and the experiences, the place itself connected with me.  It’s like it adopted me and changed me just by being there.

I remember the day Ketchikan took “ownership” of me.  I had been there about three weeks.  I was beginning to get settled in school in the 10th grade.  I was beginning to make friends.  I had previously lived in the suburbs of Portsmouth, Virginia and I was never allowed to stray too far from our neighborhood.  I suppose my parents figured that, in Ketchikan, it really wasn’t possible to wander off too far, so they gave me lots of freedom to move around.

One Saturday, about three weeks in, my dad gave me some money and told me to go get a haircut.  He said there was a barber shop in town.  I was amazed.  ”I can go to town by myself?”  In a few moments, I was on my way, happy as I could be.

I enjoyed the sights, the sounds, even the fishy smell of Ketchikan.  My mother hated it at first, but I liked it.  There was something adventurous about it.

As I wandered down Tongass Avenue, I enjoyed the view of Gravina and Pennock Island across the Tongass Narrows.  I relished the site of the fishing boats and the float planes taking off and landing.  A flatlander from Virginia is always amazed by big mountains.  I marveled at how the houses rose up from the street and were built on lots cut out of the hillside.  I wondered how the acreage for a lot would be calculated when it was nearly vertical.

I made my way into town, past the bars, saloons, and churches.  I soon learned that tiny Ketchikan had almost 200 bars and 200 churches.  Eventually I arrived down by Front Street and turned the corner where I could see the “Gross” Theater (Yes, that was the name of it!) and the barber shop next to it.  But when I turned the corner, I literally stopped in my tracks.

It was mid-October, if I recall correctly, maybe even towards the last weeks of the month.  There, behind the town, I could see Deer Mountain and the broad ridge that stretches out to the left of it–and it was covered with snow.  I had never seen anything like it in my life.  It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen!

It was at that moment that Ketchikan took ownership of me.  It always holds a special place in my heart because of that.  I still have dreams of walking those streets and seeing that sight, even now.

Muncho Lake

When I returned to Alaska in the Air Force, one of the places we stayed in Canada, along the Alaska Highway, was Muncho Lake.  We had driven a few hundred miles that day and stopped to overnight there.  We stayed in a log cabin and ate dinner in a lodge.  We went to the lake and skipped stones and we saw a herd of Dall sheep on the nearby mountain.  It was a fun day and I recall how deep and blue the water looked.  It was amazing.

A little slice of Haines Junction

Another place in Alaska that grabbed me was called Haines Junction.  We simply drove through there–didn’t even stay overnight.  It was one of the most beautiful places I ever saw.  I got out of the car and tried to take a picture of the towering mountains, but the view just wouldn’t fit in the camera!

Other places that have grabbed me include some places where I’ve never lived, but only visited.  Nauvoo, Illinois is one of them.  This quaint historical town on the East bank of th e Mississippi River is where Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church is buried.  It is the city he and other latter-day saints raised up after being driven from Missouri under the threat of the infamous “Extermination Order” in 1838.

The rebuilt Nauvoo Temple

These refugees from religious persecution arrived in the area destitute, many of them desperately ill and poor.  In seven years, they built a city that was larger than Chicago was at the time.  They built a beautiful temple there.  Eventually, their enemies killed the Prophet Joseph and drove them from the city.  They regrouped and migrated to Utah under the direction of Brigham Young.

Much of historic Nauvoo has been rebuilt.  The temple, which was burned by anti-Mormons and later destroyed by a tornado, has been rebuilt.  It has the wonderful spiritual “presence” of a place like Salt Lake City, but it’s beautiful, and lush green.  A spiritually perceptive person will sense that the spirits of those who were driven away from their homes at the point of guns and cannon brood over the place.  You feel a sense of satisfaction that their sacrifices were not in vain.

Mount Rushmore

Another place that owns my heart, though I’ve only been there a few times, is Mount Rushmore.  I love the drive to get there, through the Badlands.  Then you get to the Black Hills, which is a beautiful area.  I have a picture my parents took of me holding my little sister in front of the presidents’ heads.  Years later, I returned there with my children and I have a picture of me there with my kids, and I’m holding my oldest daughter (the youngest one at the time) in my arms, just like I was holding my sister.

The Young Wests in Monterey

I enjoyed living for a brief time on the Monterey Peninsula in California.  I fell in love with Pacific Grove and Big Sur.  A fellow folk musician, Alisa Fineman, and I did a concert at the Portofino Cafe.  I used to enjoy biking through the streets in P.G.  I spent an afternoon playing guitar at a place called Nepenthe out on Big Sur one weekend.  On the wall of the bathroom, there was a chalkboard for people to leave their “graffiti.”  The last occupant to make use of it had written, “Radiate-Manifest-Be!”  That really summed up California for me.

The last place I wanted to mention was Beatty, Nevada.  I spent a few weeks out there, on the edge of Death Valley with a team of Air Force Electronic Warfare Specialists.  Every day, for several weeks, we drove out to an electronic warfare range—two hours out, two hours back–from Beatty.

Beatty, Nevada and the mountain I climbed

Most of the time, the guys just sat around their rooms watching TV and drinking beer.  I explored a mountain behind the town and spent some time playing guitar while enjoying the desert views.  When the first Sunday I was free to go to Church came around, I told the team where I was goingg and that I’d be back in the afternoon sometime.  When I arrived at Church, you’d have thought I was a long-lost relative or something.

This was right as the first Gulf War was dying down and maybe that’s why they reacted the way we did.  A family invited me out to their ranch.  They fed me a steak dinner and showed me the family pictures and we spent a wonderful day together.  I had been away from home for about four months at that point, so being in an LDS home was a treat.

I came back to the place where we were staying after being gone for something like eight hours.  The guys asked me where I’d been and I explained all that had happened and how nice they treated me.  The whole team said, “We’re going with you next week.”  I think they were more interested in getting a steak dinner, but it was fun to see their reaction to how Mormons treat one of their own, even though he’s a total stranger.

Alma and Jessie with chickens

The last place to mention is home now.  I enjoy living here on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.  I’m not a big fan of my house, the yard is a lot of work, there’s an ugly old shed that needs to be torn down someday.  Nevertheless, the first day we moved in, my son Alma came bounding across the yard doing (or trying to do, at least) cartwheels.  It’s the kind of place a kid can make good memories.  Here’s a good memory.  Our second summer here, a neighbor behind us raised “free range” chickens.   They used to like to come over to visit.  The picture was taken about four years ago.

I’m grateful for the places I’ve been able to travel to in my life.  I’m thankful for the places that have “adopted” me and made an impression on me.

A romantic in a practical world

OK.  I’ll admit that I’m somewhat of a romantic.  I’ve never been the practical type.  I’ve had to learn to deal with a practical world where real things have to get done.  I’ve been accused of being a dreamer.  Another person once accused me of “magical thinking.”  Yet I persist because any other way would not be true to myself or the universe around me.

It takes all kinds to make a world.  The practical people build things.  They repair things that break.  They invent new things for people to build and things that will break at some future time, thus requiring people to repair them.  The practical world is the world of things.  I really have very little of myself invested in that world.

If you could see the car I drive, you’d know that this is true.  Our old, but nice van caught on fire a while back and the repairs would be more than the value of the vehicle.  Thus, I’m driving a 1991 Pontiac station wagon that has pieces of trim falling off it.  A lady at work the other day told me, “It takes a confident man to drive a car that looks that bad!”  I’m not necessarily confident–I’m just not attached to material things in the way most people are.  It would be nice to have a nice-looking car with a working air conditioner and windows that roll down, but as long as it runs, I’m content.  It’s paid for.  That’s its most desirable property.

I woke up early this morning, as usual, even though I have the day off.  I have the day off in anticipation of a crummy tomorrow in the world of things.  My boss has to go out-of-town for the next week.  That leaves me to handle the things he usually does, which are things I generally don’t know much about.  Hopefully it will be a quiet week in the world of things.

I have had to become a practical person to some extent just to survive to the age of fifty.  It’s not by any desire on my part, but out of necessity.  When I was just fourteen years old, I began to learn the guitar.  I was inspired to do so by a very impractical example.  A friend’s cousin (he was 18, in the Navy, and free of parental supervision — something we celebrated and envied) bought an expensive Gibson acoustic guitar to learn to play with.  He didn’t do the practical thing and buy a beginner’s guitar.  He bought a fine instrument, knowing that he would learn to play it.  How impractical!

Although I marveled at his audacity at the time, I was even more amazed when, in six weeks’ time, my friend’s cousin was actually strumming tunes we could recognize by the Beatles and Neil Young.  I dug an old no-name guitar that was hidden in my attic and followed our mentor’s example.  In a few weeks, I could also strum a few recognizable tunes.  It wasn’t practical in the least.  With no instruction, having only a chord book, I taught myself how to play the guitar.

From the moment I first strummed a full E major chord, I was hooked.  It was my calling in life.  It transformed everything about me.  From that time forward, I wanted to make my living as a musician.  Unfortunately, most of my life has been spent being practical.

My parents were convinced that the guitar was a big waste of time.  I begged them for music lessons for about 18 months as I did my best to learn what I could from library books and picking out songs by ear.  In those days, cassette decks were not widespread.  I had an eight-track tape player.  For those of you unfamiliar with such antiquated equipment, suffice it to say that eight-track tape players had no rewind capability.  If you were learning a song, and you missed the part you were trying to pick up by ear, it would be another 20 minutes or so before the tape looped back around to the same point.  As a result, I learned to have a quick ear.

I figured out the rudiments of music intuitively and discerned the rules of music theory without being able to put a name on the principles I understood.  When my parents finally agreed to give me music lessons, my first guitar teacher called my mother and said, “I can’t teach this boy.  He knows more than I do!”  She was dumbfounded.

My practical father sought to teach me practical things.  He had me help him with all sorts of household chores.  I learned how to change out a light switch, clean a drain, fix a toilet, and do some minor work on automobile engines.  I hated all those things, but they were necessary, as all practical things are.  He never saw much sense in pursuing music as a job.  A job is something people pay you to do, either because they don’t know how to do it, or its unpleasant and they don’t want to do it.  This defined my conception of work.  If something was fun to do, they’d charge you admission to do it.  If it’s work, they pay you to do it.

As I mentioned, I awoke early this morning and I didn’t have to.  Upon realizing this, I slipped quietly out of bed to get my MP3 player and I slipped quietly back under the covers.  Among the music that appeared randomly on my playlist were songs by John Fahey, Strawbs, Renaissance, and King Crimson.  This led my thoughts to the impractical nature of music.  John Fahey lived in humble circumstances almost all his life, even though he co-owned a record company.  His first recordings were made under the pseudonym “Blind Joe Death” because, in 1959, nobody would buy an album of fingerstyle guitar roots music by some middle-class white guy with a master’s degree in philosophy.  Strawbs and Renaissance were both British prog bands.  They wrote fanciful lyrics and swelling melodic themes that are the hallmark of the dreamer’s life-soundtrack.  When King Crimson popped up, I turned off the random play mode and listened to the entire “Lizard” album.

I first bought the “Lizard” album back in 1976.  It was not new at the time, but I was amazed at the ambitious attempt to fuse rock, classical, and free-jazz music.  Critics mostly panned it.  Even the composer, Robert Fripp, never seemed to be very fond of it.  His genius was a victim of the practical world.  While recording the album, the band broke up and he had a deadline to deliver an album to the record company.  Deadlines belong to the practical world.  With some very creative hirelings, he managed to put together a record that, in my opinion, outshines anything he ever did later in his career–and that’s saying a lot.  Because of the emotional baggage from the unpleasantness of the process, Fripp seems to have suppressed what is arguably his greatest artistic statement.

As I lay there listening to the angular guitar jabs and the gentle strains of an oboe against the soaring Mellotron, I considered it amazing that King Crimson never made a dime on their first several albums.  They were young romantics who were taken in by the shrewd managers and executives of the practical recording industry.  They toured, made albums, and lived the life of rock stars for a brief period, but they were broke.  If anything, they ended up owing money to the record company.

That’s the practical world.  It’s the world of predators and prey.  The hunter and the hunted.  It’s a world of competition where someone smarter, faster, and more cunning will take your stuff if you are not careful.  It leads most people to live their lives clutching to material things, working in unfulfilling jobs, paying their bills, and living up to the expectations of their neighbors.  In this quiet desperation, they long for some brief respite, which they find in drink, drugs, and tawdry entertainment–all of which is produced by practical companies that make money from its production.

Deep down inside us, there is something that tells us that this practical world is an illusion.  We are more than the time we spend gathering substance to ensure the next day’s survival.  There is something in us that rises towards the light.  However, only the most determined seem to find it.  Most of us succumb to the demands of the practical world.  The dreamers among us are few.  Yet somehow they manage to find each other as they wander seeking the light.

I count many of these closet dreamers as my friends.  One of them is the director of a large city’s information technology department.  He is a very practical man, successful in the practical world, yet he is profoundly spiritual.  The marriage of his practical skills and his spiritual tendencies made him an obvious choice to be called as a bishop in the Church.  Another one of these friends is a mayor of a town who shares his poetry with friends on Facebook.

The practical world of information technology seems to attract many of them.  I blame that on the fact that computers offer amazing creative opportunities, yet they break frequently.  Closet artists, poets, writers, and musicians don’t have the funds to pay for frequent computer repairs.  In the same way I taught myself the guitar, many of us taught ourselves how to fix computers that break so our creative urges can continue.  We ended up having a practical skill that we can sell to others, even though it was not our intent at the start.

Some of my impractical friends found careers as artists, teachers, lawyers, doctors, carpenters, plumbers, and mechanics.  Their romantic, impractical side is like a secret identity.  They are creative superheroes masquerading in an assumed personality.

Most assuredly, there are practical things to be done.  We must eat.  We must have shelter and clothing.  We have to work.  Yet Jesus reminded us of the lilies of the field and that God clothed them.  He reminded us that God fed the sparrows.  When faced with problems, his solutions were not always the most practical.

Peter once came to him with the dilemma as to whether his master should pay taxes to support a temple that had been built to honor himself.  Jesus proposed an impractical solution.  He sent Peter to catch a fish.  He told him that the first fish he would catch would have a coin in its mouth.  It would be enough to pay the tax. It kept them out of trouble with the law and taught Peter that Jesus was above the constraints of earthly law.  No one needed to know where the coin came from.  It was a witness to Peter, and later, to the rest of us.

I long ago came to the conclusion that this creative, romantic side is one of the most valuable aspects of our lives. God is the ultimate Creator.  He knows everything practical there is to know, yet he has subordinated all of that practical knowledge for the purpose of creation.  He’s the greatest Romantic of them all.

When this mortal life falls away and we return back to the spiritual world from which we came, what use is there for the vestiges of the practical world?  In a place where there is no war, what will become of those who have become skilled in soldiering?  When people don’t get sick, what need have we of healers and doctors?  When love reigns in the hearts of people, what will become of the lawyers and their lawsuits?  When our souls are free to roam the cosmos, what use is the ability to repair a car’s engine?  Who needs an electrician when the light of truth is what illuminates our universe?

However, there will be creation.  Art, music, poetry and all other forms of creative endeavor have a place in the eternal world.  Practical knowledge will be secondary to the power to envision, to realize, and to feel.  In a place where the elements themselves delight to respond to faith’s command, the dreamer finds himself at last at home.

In essence, the test of life is to see if we will transcend the practical world of things and exercise faith in the unseen.  It is ironic that most of humanity struggles along daily in their efforts to increasingly cement their fates to the success of the practical world when all along, it is the dreamer, the singer, the painter, and the poet who are the closest to reaching the mark, aiming for a spot just over the horizon, just barely out of sight.

The soundtracks of our lives

I believe each of us has a “soundtrack” to our lives.  Songs, like certain aromas, are strongly linked to our memory.  We often recall events, places, special moments, or just random moments when our brains connect a song to the remembrance of those times.

My father was an enlisted man in the Coast Guard, so we always lived in working-class neighborhoods of the Hampton Roads are of Virginia.  There always seemed to be an abundance of kids to play with.  I recall a summer when I was maybe eleven years old.  My friends and I spent most of our days riding our bicycles on the sandy, unpaved roads in a new development adjacent to the subdivision where we lived. Eastern Virginia consists of flat, coastal plains.  Due to the construction project, there were several large mounds of fill dirt that we enjoyed riding our bikes over.  There was one semi-elevated area with a gradual rise towards the top of it.  At the top, there was the remnant of one of these large dirt piles.  In effect, it made for a modest “jump.”

We would ride around the block racing one another and pop up over the top of this jump at the end of our climb.  You would have thought we were “Evel Knievel” or something.  One evening after dinner, we were engaged in this activity.  Nearby the construction area, there were some apartments in the project that had been completed and had residents living in them already.  There was also a swimming pool nearby.  From the clubhouse, from the flared, conic speakers, the Paul McCarney tune, “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” was playing.

Coming over the top of the jump, I recall hearing that chorus, “Hands across the water–water, Hands across the sky…” with the ascending guitar figure at the end of the line.  To this day, every time I hear that song, the image of that wonderful, carefree, joyous summer day comes to me.

In my high school years, my father was stationed in Ketchikan, Alaska.  In the mid-1970s, the only radio stations in town played oldies and country.  Sometimes, when the weather was just right, I could pick up the Canadian Broadcasting Company broadcasts and hear some music, but it was pretty rare.  I lost track of popular music to some degree.  That took me down a peculiar path for my life’s soundtrack.

In Ketchikan, there was a record store called “The Warehouse of Music.”  The manager of the store was my friend Halli’s brother, Don.  Don was a college student and all of us high school kids thought he was just as cool as could be.  He also had very eclectic tastes in music.  Many times, I would walk into the store with money in my pocket from my part-time job and I’d see what Don had playing.  There was a small sign suspended from the ceiling with a couple of clothespins on it.  The sign said, “Now Playing” and the album that was on the turntable at the moment would be displayed.

I ended up becoming a fan of progressive rock groups like Yes, Genesis, Gentle Giant, King Crimson, and others.  I also bought many jazz albums at the suggestion of my band teacher and Don.  As a young high school student, I became well-acquainted with Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Parker, and other jazz masters.

My guitar teachers turned me on to Leo Kottke and John Fahey, which strongly influenced the guitar music I came to write and perform later.  I became a fan of Celtic music and Appalachian music.  I discovered Carnatic music from India and became fascinated with it.  It’s not quite the music one would expect for the life of a teenage boy, but that was what became my soundtrack.

Ketchikan is known for its rain (nearly 200 inches per year) and some days were just to nasty to go outside or to meet up with friends after school.  I often found myself lying on my bed, daydreaming while I enjoyed my favorite music.  One of my all time favorites was a band called “Strawbs.”  The Strawbs had begun their careers as an acoustic trio doing folk music.  Their albums became increasingly sophisticated and hard-edged until they arrived at being a full-fledged progressive rock group. I loved following the progression of their music from beginning to end as I collected their albums.

With the advent of the Internet, I have followed up on the Strawbs and what became of them.  I was surprised to find that they’re still performing, mostly as an acoustic duet, but occasionally as a full-scale electric band.  They are all old men now.  I’m 50, so they have to all be in their 60s by now.  The voices have faded with age somewhat, but the songs are still powerful.

I tell myself that they would be pleased if they knew that an obscure 16-year old boy in Alaska seized upon their music and deeply attached it to his life’s soundtrack. Last Saturday, nearly four decades later, I was riding around on my lawn mower in rural Virginia, rocking out to the sounds of their songs “Ghost” and “The Life Auction” on my MP3 player.  I’d say that 40 years qualifies as a long “shelf life” for music.

What’s really weird is that my oldest son took interest in prog-rock also, probably from hearing me play it around the house.  It’s funny to see him play King Crimson melodies on his guitar when I go to visit him.  I’m sure the song “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part III” is wired into his DNA somehow.  He’s now the bass player in one of America’s few remaining prog bands that are worth calling “progressive.”

As I’ve grown older, I’ve traveled back farther in “musical time” to music that was popular long before I was born.  I’ve developed a thing for Bing Crosby, especially his recordings from around 1938 to 1941.  Al Jolson was amazing.  I also have come to love old bluesmen, like Bukka White.  The soundtrack gets more eclectic as life goes on.

What are the songs that evoke your memories?  If you were to make a soundtrack album for your life?  What songs would you pick.  It’s fun to consider.  Maybe it might be worth burning a CD to leave your kids for when you get old and frail.  I wonder, when I’m dead and gone, if I could get them to play Bing’s “Blue Hawaii” or maybe Yes’ “Siberian Khatru” at my funeral?  Just make sure, when they stick me in the ground, put the earphones on and hit the random play button!

Whatever happened to summer?

Summer Fishing Fun

It’s odd how synchronicity works.  I’ve been thinking lately about how summertime has changed since I was a child.  Then, out of the blue seemingly, comes an article in the Washington Post that links into some of the things I had been pondering.  Here’s the link to the article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/09/AR2010070902341_pf.html

The article has a politically correct “green” overtone to it, but on a deeper level, I believe the writer was feeling some of what I’ve been feeling.  “Whatever happened to summer?”

I don’t approach this from a “global warming” perspective.  I think it’s a question of mankind’s love of money and the insatiable desire to acquire possessions.  In the pursuit of those things, we’re losing something special.

When I was a boy, summers were time of carefree fun.  There was no school and I got to sleep in.  I recall the golden rays of sunlight streaming through the blinds in the morning, signaling another day to enjoy life as only a young boy can.  I’d eat cold cereal for breakfast, put on some shorts and sometimes a t-shirt, and out the door I’d go.  Shirt and shoes were totally optional.

I grew up in a mix of urban and suburban environments.  We lived in the city of Norfolk during part of my childhood, but my grandmother lived in what was once rural Chesapeake.  In the city, the Parks and Recreation Department operated little recreation centers in the parks.  We kids went to the park and we could check out a croquet set, horseshoes, or some other kinds of outdoor games to play.  They also had board games and, when it was too hot, we’d check out games and go play on the picnic tables in the shade.  I learned to play chess, Chinese checkers, and other fun games there.  At lunchtime, we’d all scurry home and eat a quick peanut butter and jelly sandwich and we were back as quick as we could.

My favorite times were in the evening, when the heat and humidity of the day began to abate somewhat.  Neighbors emerged from their homes and gathered on the front porches and stoops of their houses.  They’d socialize and enjoy cold, sweaty glasses of iced tea.  They’d sit around and talk.  We kids would play nearby.  Sometimes we’d pause to hear an especially funny story.  And people tended to tell stories back then.  There was television of course, but we’d rather be outside than stuck inside the stuffy house watching TV.

As I look back, we’ve stupidly allowed television to supplant the telling of stories as a way to transmit our culture from one generation to the other.  I taught school for a couple of years and I came to realize that children today have no “organic” culture that comes from their parents and grandparents.  They live in the homes with adults, but the adults have abdicated the responsibility to teach their children their morals, their religion, their heritage, and their culture.  In our family, we still sit down and have dinner every night.  We take time to pass on the stories.  Our kids get ample TV time, but we offset its influence by sharing our lives and our memories with them.

I vividly recall the evenings where the air hung so thick and humid, it felt like a transparent fog.  The haze would glow around the streetlights.  Along with the sound of the adults voices and the children’s chatter, there would be occasional rumbles of thunder and heat lightning would flash in the sky from cloud to cloud.  Crickets chirped.  There were rustling sounds of birds roosting their nests for the night.  Those nights were almost magical.

I would often go to visit my grandmother and stay a few days at a time.  Back then, Chesapeake–beyond the Hodge Ferry Bridge–was the boundary dividing town from “the boondocks.”  Nowadays, this area is surrounded by interstate off-ramps, and is congested with traffic to the mall.  Where that mall now stands used to be open fields where my friends used to go to hunt grouse and pheasants.  We used to go down to the creek with chicken legs and strings to catch crabs.  One of my favorite memories is of me and three friends spending a whole day crabbing.  We caught nearly 50 crabs with chicken legs on strings and took them home.  My friend’s mother steamed them for us and we had a crab feast.  It doesn’t get much better than that for a 10-year old.

One of our main projects in the summer was building a “fort.”  The neighborhood boys would find a vacant lot or a place out in the woods and begin construction.  The suburban areas were just beginning to develop then and there was a lot of homes being built.  In those days of plenty, construction materials were cheap and a lot of the scrap wood and materials just got tossed out.  We kids would gather up scraps of two-by-fours and plywood and build treehouses in the undeveloped properties.

On one occasion, we decided to build an underground fort.  A half-dozen boys joined the project as we dug a large hole in a vacant lot near my grandmother’s home.  We dug for days with garden spades, rakes, hoes, and whatever we could find in our parents’ or grandparents’ garages.  Eventually, we had a hole that was about four feet deep and eight feet across.  We then dug tunnels that led into the fort on three sides.  The tunnels were barely wide enough to get your shoulders through.  It was scary to crawl through them.  As I look back on this now, it’s a miracle nobody was buried alive.  It was terribly dangerous!

Eventually, we found some boards and covered up the top and then put dirt and sod back on the top of it to hide the place.  It was like a grave inside.  Creepy.  During that project, our mothers fussed continually about how dirty we got and inquired about what we were doing.  We just said we were building a fort.  They’d have had a fit if they knew what kind of fort it was.  We abandoned the fort and the weeds grew and grew in the vacant lot, way over the head of an adult man.  One evening, whoever owned the property sent over a man with a big tractor to mow the lawn.  We all gathered around to watch as the tractor reached the place where our underground “bunker” was hidden.  We watched in amazement as the tractor’s back tire broke through the fort’s roof and tipped over on its side.  Then we all ran for cover, certain that we would all be in big trouble.

I told my wife and kids that story long ago and I’m not sure they believed me.  They think I just make stuff up to amuse them sometimes.  They were surprised when an old friend, one of the “fort-builders,” showed up at my father’s funeral.  I hadn’t seen him in nearly 30 years.  As we reminisced, he mentioned the story about the tractor.  I think my wife and kids were surprised to find that the story was true.

A lot of those experiences occurred because air conditioning wasn’t widespread in those days.  Air conditioners were expensive and most people I knew could only afford a window unit.  Even if you had one, they sucked so much juice that, even if you had one, you only ran it when company came over or if there was some special occasion.

One such special occasion was the day the first men landed on the moon.  It was July 20, 1969.  I got up early and started watching the special reports on early in the morning and I stayed glued to the TV all through that hot, sweltering day.  It was a thrill to hear the astronauts voices and the words, “Tranquility Base here.  The Eagle has landed!”  A few hours later, as a celebration, my grandfather turned on the air conditioner and he went down to “High’s Ice Cream” and bought us all chocolate milk shakes.  I got to stay up until after midnight to watch the astronauts walk on the moon.

Before air conditioning became widespread, summer was a time where people slowed down.  I’m not talking from a “tree hugger” perspective, but a quality-of-life one.  Today, people work, work, work.  Technology allows them to work from home, from in their cars, on the commuter train, etc.  If you’re not working, you’re not making money.  And if you’re not making money, what’s the point?  At least, that seems to be the attitude.

In the old days, people who worked inside as well as outside slowed down their pace in the summer.  We used to start work when the sun came up and work until it went down.  Now, people work 24/7 in Wal-Mart.  One upon a time, people took vacations.  Factories closed for the hottest month of the year and everyone took vacation at the same time. People actually took a vacation!  Now, one’s time off is spent running errands and playing catch-up on all the chores neglected because work got in the way.  There are time-saving devices everywhere, but none of them get you any extra leisure.

Our pioneer forefathers strove to make a living farming, trapping, trading, hauling freight, or whatever.  They worked hard.  Working hard is in our blood.  Americans have a work ethic line none other.  What we’ve forgotten is the down time.  The Mormon pioneers exemplified this.  As they made their way across a continent, pulling wagons and handcarts, they traveled 18 to 20 miles a day.  Families walked along on foot.  At the end each day’s journey, they had to fix meals, feed the teams, care for the livestock, and all the other chores that were needed.  Then, with the work done, they’d sing and dance to the sound of a fiddler or a brass band and have fun.  There was a time for play amidst all that work.

Today, play consists of surfing the web or plugging into a video game.  I told a visitor’s kid at church yesterday that we were having a picnic next Saturday and that there would be games.  He asked whether there would be a Nintendo Wii or an X-Box 360.

Air conditioning has robbed us of all this.  We work in climate-controlled cubicles or in shining glass towers where you can’t so much as open a window to feel the breeze.  We have allowed work to take over everything.  The AC has disconnected us from the cycle of the seasons and with the earth itself.  I don’t advocate that everyone quit their job and join a commune of “sprout-eaters.”  Just go outside sometime!  Feel the breeze.  Sit in a lawn chair and pet your cat.  Let the dog bark at a bird or a rabbit.  Watch a bird gather sticks to build a nest or a squirrel gather nuts.  Take your shoes off and wiggle your toes in the grass.  Listen to the frogs and the crickets and the cicadas.  Feel the heat as the sun bakes down on your head and shoulders.  Grab a rake or a hoe and dig in the dirt.  Plant something that will grow and take joy in watching life at work.

Now, I like my AC as much as anyone.  Yet it is so much more enjoyable after going outside and doing something.  I have a feeling that the changes coming in America will force us back to a simpler time, one much like the time I grew up in. To some folks, this may feel like a hardship.  To me, it will be a return to something we never should have let go of in the first place.  Whether that time comes because of economic distress, a worldwide collapse in the markets, social unrest because governments have failed, the best course is to return back to those things that worked for us as children, or perhaps what worked for our grandparents.

This week, I invite my friends and readers to go outside.  To do something outdoors.  Take your kids and your family with you.  Brave the heat (with proper precautions) and go play, have fun, and just be together.  Play a game, have a party, or just sit in a lawn chair and tell stories you once heard long ago.  You will find a healing, restorative influence in doing these things.

A long way down “the road less traveled”

I’m feeling somewhat wistful tonight.  That wistfulness was brought about by Google Street View.  I found out tonight that Ketchikan, Alaska is now on Street View, so I took a virtual stroll around my old town for a while.  I saw the places where I lived, how the high school I went to looks so different, and went up and down the streets where I roamed for three years.  What a treat!

There’s that famous poem by Robert Frost about two roads diverging in the yellow wood.  When I was a kid, I loved that poem and I imagined myself taking that road “less traveled.”  In some ways, I think I did.

Facebook has put me back in touch with some of my old high school friends.  It is a blessing to catch up with them and renew acquaintances.  I grew up as a “military brat” and my life is divided into little two-or-three year segments.  As we moved around, I made friends and repeatedly had to leave them behind.  I don’t feel sorry about that.  It’s just the way life was and I didn’t have anything else to compare it to.  I just got used to being the new kid, breaking the ice, making friendships, and then saying goodbye.

When I was in high school, my father was sent to Ketchikan, Alaska by the Coast Guard.  That’s where I finished high school and graduated.  I had a wonderful experience there that has blessed my life every day since that time.  I had wonderful friends and inspiring teachers.  I developed my musical talents there and that alone enriched my life in many ways.

Five days after graduation, I boarded a big ferry with my parents and my sister and we sailed off into the dawn.  It was probably the most “cinematic” departure I could have made.  I stood on the stern of the ship trying not to show the tears that were welling up in my eyes, waving to my friends on the dock, who were waving back at me with tears in their eyes.  Teenagers tend to be melodramatic, but leaving your dearest friends as you sail off on a ship is REALLY melodramatic.

I always hoped I’d get the chance to go back and visit, but life has kept me moving in ever more distant paths.  As I have renewed the friendships with these wonderful people, it’s interesting to see how life changed us.  A year out from graduation, I ended up encountering the Mormon Church and I converted.  My friends all knew me to have had some spiritual angst all through those high school years.  I was definitely looking for something.  I just didn’t expect to find it among the Mormons.

I think my friends were somewhat shocked by this event.  They could have easily imagined me going off to a cave in India with a guru or in a Tibetan monastery.  The last thing they expected was their buddy heading off to France to ride around on bikes wearing a white shirt and tie, preaching Jesus to agnostic Frenchmen and devout Muslims.  Talk about a “road less traveled!”

When I came back from France, they were finishing up their educations and going into their careers.  I got married and went into the Air Force.  As most high school students are, we were a pretty liberal bunch.  Over the years, my religion and my military career made me more conservative.  It’s funny that, even though they are all Alaskans, they hate Sara Palin–yet my wife and I love her!

While my friends became teachers, musicians, chefs, editors, artists, and one of them the mayor of my beloved Ketchikan, I became an Air Force intelligence specialist and lived my days in windowless buildings full of computers, monitors, and all kinds of high-tech goodies.  I watched East Germany and the Soviet Union collapse from a very unique perspective.

My Air Force career brought me around to Alaska after the Cold War ended.  I had moved on to the new field of Information Warfare, which was in its infancy at the time. Although I was stationed in Anchorage and I lived in Wasilla, that’s still a long way from Ketchikan.  I never made it back there again, though I always wanted to.  I had the opportunity to run into one of my old buddies as I played guitar in a coffeehouse in downtown Anchorage one evening.  I was excited to see him again.

We made arrangements to have him and his wife over to our home one evening.  It was nice to get together.  Like we used to do, we listened to our favorite music and visited awhile and then, the conversation kind of dried up.  We made small talk between awkward silences and then, they excused themselves.  The opportunity never came about again.  I always felt a little bad about that.

In the years since I left the Air Force, we’ve seen four of our five children enter the adult world.  Two of them served missions for the Church.  Three of them have married and the fourth is engaged.  We still have an eleven year-old at home.  He keeps me young, coaching him on how to play guitar riffs on songs I’ve never heard before.

Our lives have increasingly revolved around our church and last year, I became the branch president of a small congregation on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.  That’s like being a pastor, but you don’t get paid.  I work in Information Technology for a system of health centers that takes care of uninsured people, migrant workers, etc.  That’s what pays the bills.

The passion in my life, which used to be music, has settled into the challenges of helping people with their spiritual and temporal needs.  To do that, it takes inspiration.  I spend a lot of time praying, pondering, and meditating to try to get that inspiration.  I am always surprised that it comes when it is needed.  I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.

My Ketchikan friends might have imagined me chanting away in a Buddhist temple way back when.  I wonder if they find it as strange as I do that my spiritual fulfillment comes from helping a needy single mother pay her electric bill or taking a jug of kerosine over to the widow whose husband died last winter.

My friends would be surprised to know that I have actually seen miracles take place.  I was there when a Mormon bishop in Norfolk laid hands on a child with encephalitis at the hospital.  The doctors had told the parents of this boy that they had done all they could do and that it was just a matter of hours or maybe a couple of days before their son would die.  That kid walked out of the hospital two days later with no sign of illness whatsoever.

If that weren’t enough, I saw the very same scenario repeat two years later–same bishop, same hospital, same disease, different kid.  Same result.

I’ve had over thirty years of experience seeing and participating in those kinds of experiences.  I’ve come to know in a very personal way, the reality of Jesus Christ.  I have seen and felt his power in my life.  It’s marvelous.  I would have never imagined that I’d be part of something like that.

Sometimes, life takes you down a road and, in the back of your mind, you think you’ll somehow get back down the road to where you started–but it never happens.  The road just keeps going forward.  Life has new and pressing demands and you just keep responding to the present situations.

I always wished I could tell my friends how much their friendship meant to me.  For them, I was just a “blip” on the radar that passed through three years of their lives and then disappeared off the screen.  For me, they lived in my memories, as young and vibrant as I remember them. Well, technology can now grant my wish.

To Dave, Kelly, Kim, Leslie, Halli, Arthur, Lane, Roy, Christa, and all the rest: I’m grateful for the wonderful memories and the times we shared.  I hope life has been good to you all and that your joys have outweighed your sorrows.

Our roads seem to keep diverging, but maybe we’ll have time one day, one year, to sit down and do one last song together.  Be well!

Greg

My day with Verizon

I spent a good part of my day today on the phone attempting to talk to Verizon’s customer service representatives.  If you’ve ever dealt with the United States Government, you have some idea what talking to Verizon is like.  At a certain point, when an organization reaches a certain size, it simply becomes inefficient and its employees are no longer responsive to customers.  Their job is simply getting through the day with as little effort as possible.  Customer satisfaction?  What’s that?

If you’re old like me, you remember the time when there was just one phone company.  It was AT&T–the Bell System.  There was no competition.  Growing up, we had a sturdy, nearly nuke-proof telephone in the kitchen.  My parents also had a “princess phone” in their bedroom.  The call quality was clear.  The phones had a dial instead of push buttons.  You could hear and you could be heard without having to yell into the phone.  If you had a phone problem, there was only one place to go to get it fixed.

Back then, you also got one short, easy-to-read phone bill.  Now, our phone bill comes in a box.  For one our health facilities, there are nine phone numbers that are divided up between three separate bills.  One of them, a fax line, is deemed by Verizon to be a “large business account” while the other eight are just regular business numbers.  A few weeks ago, some Verizon account reps came through and combined accounts for us to simplify the billing and save us money.  How many accounts did we have if simplifying it took us down to three bills for nine phone numbers?  Why not just one?

AT&T, because it was big, earned a reputation for being unresponsive to customers.  Anti-trust action was initiated and the Bell System was broken up into regional “Baby Bells.”  Those companies broke up and became Verizon, Singular, AT&T, Sprint, MCI, and whoever.  Through mergers and acquisitions, they’ve all changed a dozen times.  Unfortunately, the service still ranks right up there with the Post Office and the DMV.

Three weeks ago, I put in a request to Verizon to have several telephone numbers at work to be moved to a newly built medical facility from the old one.  Just barely two weeks out from the critical day of the move, I have yet to hear any confirmation from Verizon that this is going to happen.  I’ve called them twice since that time and spoken with uncaring, unconcerned, indifferent, and downright rude Verizon customer service reps.  None of them can answer a question.  None of them can give a date or confirm anything.  They won’t transfer you to a supervisor.  They won’t let you speak with anyone in authority to get something done or at least allay your concerns that their indifference is going to have a negative impact on a new medical center that sees thousands of patients a week.  When I asked if they could give me an estimate when the order will be confirmed, the rep simply replied that “It’s in the system.”

“In the system” isn’t really an answer to the question.  It doesn’t tell me anything.  It’s like the kind of answers that Robert Gibbs, the President’s press secretary gives when someone asks him about Obama’s birth certificate.  It’s just “in the system.”  Their job is just to put things in the system.  It doesn’t matter what happens to it once it gets “in the system” or what’s going to come out at the end of the process.

After spending nearly a half-hour on hold to get nothing but a runaround, one of my co-workers came to me and complained that they were having a problem reaching another employee’s cell phone.  When calling the local cell phone number, they received a Verizon recording saying that they were required to dial the “one” and the area code for numbers outside the local calling area.  When the person redialed, including the “one” and the area code, the same messages was received.

Once again, I called 1-800-VERIZON and went through the rigamarole.  The computerized voice tells me to enter my 10-digit phone number, which I do.  It tells me to do it again and again before letting me proceed to the next voice menu prompt.  I’m presented with five options, the second of which is to “report a trouble.”  Option number one is “billing and payments.”  Option number three is to inquire about an open service request (that’s the one I spent all the time with earlier this morning.)  I forget what numbers four and five are, but they don’t have anything to do with getting a service issue resolved.  I selected option two.

After some automated clicks, bleeps, whirring, and snippets of music, I’m welcomed by yet another voice to DSL support.  The menu didn’t ask me if I wanted DSL support or if my DSL was the issue?  It didn’t offer me any options to select voice services or wireless services.  It just dropped me into DSL support.  The voice then begins to ask me if I’m in front of my computer and if I’m using a Windows computer.  It won’t let me proceed or transfer to anywhere else from there.  I hang up and begin again.

Again, I dial 1-800-VERIZON.  I go through the the same steps, listening carefully for some other option that I might select other than report a trouble.  Hoping that it was just some glitch in “the system,” I select option two again and I end up in the same place.  Again I dial the number, enter my ten-digit phone number, say “Yes” to confirm that the number I entered is indeed the number that I entered, and I’m back at the options one through five.  I select something else.  It doesn’ t matter at this point what I select.  I know that option two, “report a trouble,” is going to dump me into DSL support.  I hope that I’ll get to speak to a real person who can connect me with the department I need to speak to.

You see, Verizon has a secret phone book that only their employees get to use.  It has all the departments whereas, all you get when you call is an automated voice and five choices.  The Verizon customer service reps have hundreds of numbers to send you to, if they really wanted to help.  The problem is that they don’t want to help.

I get a lady who answers and listens to the problem we’re having calling local verizon cell phone numbers.  She transfers me to a department with another set of automated voice prompts that wants me to provide my Verizon cell phone number.  Since I’m not on a Verizon cell phone and I’m calling from a business line to a Verizon number, they can’t help.  I can’t get a real person to help until I provide a Verizon cell phone.  I hang up and start all over again.

After jumping the requisite hurdles: wait for the greeting, ignore the prompt to press #2 for Spanish, enter the ten-digit phone number followed by the pound key, and say “Yes” to the confirmation of the ten-digit phone number, Verizon’s automated voice tells me that they appreciate me as a valued customer.  (At this point, I laugh out loud!) I am then given the same five options I began with.  This time I try hitting zero.  Five times it asks me to choose something and I just keep hitting zero.  The system cuts me off.

I dial in again and jump through the same hoops all over again.  At the menu with the five options, I don’t do anything.  I sit there like a lump and let the voice badger me to press one of the five options and I refuse.  After the fifth time it asks me to enter a choice, it transfers me to a real person.  This lady is in residential support.  How or why residential support is the default choice to someone not pushing one of the five options is a mystery.  She explains that she can’t help me (Why am I not surprised?), but she can transfer me to someone in the correct department.  ”Thank you, Jesus!” I think to myself.  The nice lady gives me a number to call in case the transfer doesn’t go through.  She transfers me and the phone goes dead.  She cut me off.

I mutter something unintelligible under my breath and I begin dialing the number that she gave me to reconnect in case the transfer didn’t go through.  The number was 1-800-837-4966.  As I dial the number, the pattern under my fingers seems awfully familiar.  Sure enough, it spells 1-800-VERIZON.  I feel like I’ve been played for a fool.

At this point, there’s no reason to call back.  We simply can’t tell if the problem dialing the local cell phones is in our system or if it’s in the cell tower down the road or in the innards of Verizon’s labyrinth-like “system.”  Add to that the uncertainty about whether or not our order to move the telephone service from the old medical facility to the new one will take place on the dates we’ve requested, in the manner that we’ve requested, and I’d have to give Verizon a big ZERO for customer satisfaction.

Somehow it makes you long for the days of telegrams or telegraphs.  Maybe pony express would be better.  At least, if the messages didn’t make it through, you could suspect that Indians had attacked the wagon train or that the rider was held up by outlaws.  The real question is whether all this technology makes things any better at all?  I long for the days when there was one phone company, one phone bill, one number to call for service issues.  At least there was less of a runaround.  Having spent three hours on the phone trying to get support and coming up empty, I decide it’s just as productive to spend the rest of the day surfing the web.  Now, if the Verizon DSL will just stay up, I’ll be fine in a couple of hours.

A lesson in a tube of toothpaste

If you’re open to instruction from the Lord’s Spirit, you’ll find lesons come in a lot of unexpected ways.  Take, for example, a nearly depleted tube of toothpaste.  In our house, thift is a way of life.  A tube of toothpaste is never completely empty until it’s physically impossible to extract another molecule of toothpaste from it.  Over the years, I’ve noticed that, when the tube is full, the contents flow freely.  At that point, we probably tend to use more than is needed to accomplish the job.  After awhile, the tube gets squished down to the point that it’s flattened all the way up to the little flange at the top near the part the cap screws on to.  Time and experience has taught me that, even once the toothpaste reaches that point, there is still about two weeks’ worth of toothpaste still left in the tube.

Although I grouse about it, it is possible to keep extracting toothpaste from the container long after a reasonable person would call it “empty” and toss it.  In fact, it seems that it lasts nearly as long from this point as it did to use the other 95 percent of the toothpaste that was in the tube to begin with .  I was in a philosophical mood the other day as I was attempting to extract a tiny pearl of toothpaste from a tube in its last throes, when a sudden flash of inspiration came to my mind.

In many ways, we’re like the tube of toothpaste.  We never know how much “stuff” is in us until we’re down to the last of it.  Sometimes, we discover that there is still more to give, even long after we have surpassed what we supposed were our limits.  Taking care of a family, a demanding job, church callings, health issues, a financial crisis, or many other things can quickly drain our spiritual reserves.  During the first part of these situations, we tend to lean upon our own strength.  We give without pain or sacrifice, assuming that our resources are sufficient to outlast the problem or that the problem will be resolved by our resources.

Every now and then, a crisis comes along that drains the “easy” toothpaste out of the reservoir.  At that point, the need still exists and we have to keep responding, giving, and extending ourselves.  We are surprised that, under pressure, there is still something there to give.  We don’t know how that can be.  We can feel overwhelmed by the circumstances and our efforts can leave us exhausted.  Yet, when we really need it, there’s always one final “squeeze” we can manage.

It is only in those moments that we transcend our own strength and come to lean upon God’s strength.  We find reserves we didnt’ know we had.  Perhaps we didn’t have them, but God provided them as the need presented itself.  If we are faithful, we will discover we can endure and overcome more than we might have imagined.

Faith gets manifested once we cease to lean on our own strength and begin to lean upon the Lord for help.  Faith appears the moment we envision an outcome that is beyond our ability to realize in the present moment.  It becomes active the moment we begin to expend effort to bring the envisioned goal to pass.  The fullfillment of the goal is the manifestation on a physical plane of those things we created spiritually.

The next time you squeeze a nearly empty tube of toothpaste, make a mental note (and not just to buy a new tube.)  Consider how we often underestimate the limits of our own abilities.  We have more to give than we think.  We have more power than we imagine.  We have a source of strength that goes beyond our mortal limitations. When the pressure is on and you’re being squeezed, hang in there and exercise faith.  It’ll all turn out alright.

In praise of the stick

I work with technology.  Every day, I field calls from computer users who need assistance.  They’ve lost their wireless signal.  Their printer has stalled on them. They’ve lost the carefully worded e-mail draft that they had composed with a poet’s angst.  In between panicked calls, I scan the servers and workstations for spyware and viruses like a sentinel, only to have a user call me and tell me they’ve clicked on a pop-up ad that tells them their computer is infected and, as a result, it actually is infected now.  I change the backup tapes, I restart the spooler service, I unjam the copier, and I coach executives and senior leadership through the complexities of how to turn the computer on again after a power outage turned it off unexpectedly. (No, it’s the round button…no. the round one…in the middle….)

The Apollo astronauts used to joke, at liftoff, they were sitting on top of seven million pounds of explosive hypergolic liquids held together in lightweight containers, connected by miles of pipes and wires, all of which were assembled by competing contractors who got the job for the sole reason that they were the lowest bidder.  Miraculously, their stuff worked.  Or at least they could work around it.  If you recall, Neil Armstrong’s computer kept running out of memory and gave him a bunch of errors when he was trying to land.  He ended up flying by the seat of his pants, landing with mere seconds of fuel left.  To get off the moon, the Lunar Module pilot, Buzz Aldrin, had to shove the end of a government-issue Skilcraft pen into a circuit breaker to launch from the lunar surface.

Today’s computer users just don’t get why their stuff doesn’t work.  To them, the screen sitting on their desk is just a kind of television.  Television just works.  They ask, “Why does this break all the time?”  Like the Apollo program, you’ve got a bunch of parts and pieces that were designed by various companies who are competitors.  Years ago, a friend of mine told me he called Microsoft for help with a problem he was having.  The Microsoft techs talked him through an elaborate process of deleting files and registry keys.  After more than an hour, his computer worked again.  It wasn’t until a few hours later that he realized that his Netscape web browser was also AWOL after Microsoft’s help.

Computer users often attribute malice and resentment to their computers.  ”It doesn’t like me,” they complain.  They cannot accept that, although it takes virtually no skill to operate a television, it takes considerable skill to operate a computer.  That is, unless you’re a child of about nine years old.  Kids just seem to figure it out.  They don’t need a manual–not that you get a manual anymore, mind you.  I guess people did read them anyway.

I’ve had doctors become so flummoxed trying to use the electronic medical records, they start asking me for diagnostic advice–not for the computer–for the patients!  People with advanced medical degrees often feel reduced to near-idiot status by the infernal devices we have given them to record their encounters with patients.  Some of them have literally punched out their computers.  Curiously, it seems that computers are fighting back.

Earlier this year, a guy in a SAAB factory was killed when a robot “attacked” him.  (http://www.thelocal.se/19120.html)  Another guy nearly drove off a  steep cliff because his Garmin told him to go that way.  (http://www.gpsmaniac.com/2009/03/gps-drives-british-man-over-the-edge/)  I can’t imagine living on the International Space Station, which is operated by two souped-up Unix laptops.  I don’t know that I’d want my air supply dependent upon a computer.  The image in my mind from the book 2001 Space Odyssey, (not the movie) where HAL opens the doors to evacuate all the air out of the Discovery would give me nightmares if I had to live on the station.

Today I read an article where a Congressman is worried about the United States’ vulnerability to an attack with an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) weapon.  This would destroy our electrical grid and fry anything in range that has an integrated circuit in it, which includes almost everything these days.  It would instantly send us back to around 1850.  I can just see it now.  All the lights go out.  There’s no electricity for lights, to pump water, or gas.  Refrigeration becomes a thing of the past along with air conditioning.  Cars become useless.  Planes won’t fly.  Trains won’t run.  Then, I envision some Amish family come clip-clopping by in their black wagon looking at us mournfully.  ”We tried to tell you!” the old man is thinking as he looks at the rest of us.  ”You should have stopped in 1850 like we did.”

Sometimes it feels like everything I do depends on some microchip.  An alarm clock with a digital readout and a CD player woke me up this morning.  My shower depended on an electrical pump.  The milk in my cereal came from a refrigerator.  my car has an electronic ignition.  The traffic lights depend on electricity.  I’m writing this on a laptop.  The TiVo box stored my show on a hard drive to watch later.  I cooked my lunch in a microwave with a digital timer.  I’ll listen to music later on my MP3 player.  Then, with the AC on, I’ll snuggle in to my comfy bed.  All of this leads me to my point.  Sometimes, you just have to take a break from it all.

Several weeks ago, I went camping with my almost 11 year-old son’s scout troop.  The most modern pieces of technology we used were a flashlight and a knife.  While we were out there, we used sticks for everything from staking down tents to starting the fire and cooking hot dogs and marshmallows.  The best part was that, when your’re using a stick, things just seem to work.

The stick is a fully developed piece of technology.  You find one about the right length, width, and diameter, and you’re in business.  There are no upgrades, service packs, or patches needed.  It’s fully functional from the moment you get one.  It has an intuitive user interface.  It doesn’t take a lot of training to operate one.  Best of all, it doesn’t plug in to anything or use any electricity.

There are lots of uses for a stick.  You can use it to hold yourself up when you walk.  You can hold things up with it.  You can extend your reach with one.  You can frighten away a predator or whack some animal on the head as the first step in its becoming your dinner.  You can use it as a plow to plant a crop.  You can use it as a projectile to skewer some small animal and then roast it over a fire. You can hit somebody with one to defend yourself. You can use it to make fire! Tie a string on the end and you can go fishing.  You can make a  bow or a snare to catch something to eat. You can use it to become an integral part of a shelter.

Having taken care of various survival needs like food, shelter,and personal protection, the stick allows you to move into higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  You can join a club with other stick users. You can play a game.  No one has ever bested the combination of a stick and a ball to have some fun.  You can strike two sticks together and make a rhythm instrument or hollow one out and make a digeridoo or a flute.  You can sharpen one end of it and scratch out a message in the dirt or make a picture.  And, if telling stories about the fish you caught doesn’t inspire the spontaneous development of fiction, I don’t know what else will.

Suddenly art and writing are within your grasp.  You could make a notch in the stick or scratch in an effort to keep track of how many sheep, chickens, oxen, or children belong to you.  You can track how many days you’ve been stranded on a desert island with a stick. Mathematics and accounting become possible.  As a final step, you could carve some kind of runes or symbols in your stick or carve it to make some kind of totemic design and devise a mythology or a religion around it.  The sacred stick becomes a shamanic symbol for the entire tribe.  The stick becomes a vehicle for self-actualization.

The best part of all of this is that the stick just does what it’s supposed to.  It doesn’t lock up. It doesn’t crash.  It doesn’t get blue screens of death.  Just give a bored kid a stick and before you know it, he’ll be having pirate battles or light saber duels or building a fort. He doesn’t need a tutorial.  He doesn’t need lessons.  He doesn’t even need a safety manual.  He just needs one rule: “Don’t hit your sister with the stick!”  Take a bunch of those kids camping, and you’ll be surprised what they come up with.  Watching a bunch of kids with sticks is a study in ingenuity. With all the technological advancement that mankind has devised, sometimes the most therapeutic thing we can do is just go back to using a stick.  When nothing else goes right, it’s hard to go wrong with one.

So take my advice.  If you’re a person like me who often ends up way over his head, buried in computer technology that just doesn’t work right, take a break and go back to the stick.  If for no other reason, you can always use it hit your computer!

Reach out and touch somebody — why men always have to have the remote

There’s no frustration like sitting down to relax and watch television and not being able to find the remote control. It just drives me crazy. In our house, I’m ashamed to say that there are five, no make that six televisions. There is one in every room except the bathrooms and the music room. However, at any given time, the remote control for the TV in the room I happen to occupy is nowhere to be found.

It’s not like we’re TV addicts. My kids are home-schooled and they play outside after their studies are done most of the time. In the rooms of the two younger children, the TVs are used primarily to play Nintendo, since they’re not hooked up to the satellite dish. I spend most of my “downtime” on the computer or playing music. My wife shuttles from room to room during the day with the TV on for some background noise. We watch TV together as a family on some evenings, depending on what’s on. The entire family loves American Idol, so we watch it each week. My kids and my wife like Fear Factor, although I excuse myself when the contestants have to eat the gross stuff. I don’t find it entertaining to watch a pretty blond vomiting after eating a cocktail of sheep entrails and hissing cockroaches. We never miss 24, although we’ve developed a strategy for watching it. We wait 20 minutes after it starts and then we go play it back on the TiVo. That way, we can skip through the commercials and watch the show almost uninterrupted. We’re also big fans of CSI (the original one). It has a chemistry that the other CSI spin-offs don’t quite capture.

Pardon my digression. Back to the remote. There is something innate in male humans that makes them desire to “reach out and touch somebody.” The ability to affect something at a distance holds fascination for us. It probably stems from the first time a caveman figured out that he could throw a rock at another guy and get a rise out of him. Or better yet, he could whack a parakeet or a wombat and get something to eat. (By the way, did you know that the word parakeet comes from an aboriginal word that means “tastes good to eat?”)

Once this concept was firmly grasped by men, an inevitable escalation occurred. It was only a matter of time before we tried throwing bigger rocks. The slingshot added distance. David found out you could topple a much larger opponent with a rock and maintain a respectable degree of “standoff” distance. The rock gave way to spears, then arrows, then crossbows. Somewhere along the way, men got organized enough to figure out that, with a little cooperation, you could build a device that could hurl a rock bigger than a single man could pick up. (This was a significant development, because your adversary couldn’t pick it up and throw it back at you without considerable organization and effort on his part.) The catapult was born! Military organization significantly advanced the cause of civilization. We learned to work together, bound by the mission of destroying the other guys’ stuff.

Catapults eventually yielded to progress. Bullets and blunderbusses were invented. Gunpowder and cannons allowed the capability to “reach out and touch” a lot of people at a considerable distance. An inescapable race to fling an object further and faster eventually produced modern artillery, battleships, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Then came the ultimate challenge: to throw an object so high and so fast that it wouldn’t come back down again.

These concepts were known from at least the time of Jules Verne, when men figured out that, if you throw an object high enough and fast enough, the ballistic trajectory would match the curvature of the earth’s surface. As the object fell, the earth curved away beneath it and it continued around and around and around endlessly. Orbit became the goal. The Russian Sputnik was the first man-made object to achieve the orbital velocity of 17,500 miles per hour and become an artificial satellite of the Earth.

Not willing to rest upon our laurels, it then became a challenge to hit the Moon. In the early 60′s we sent rockets to do just that. They didn’t land. They didn’t take pictures. They simply crashed there to prove we could do it. Later, we sent spacecraft to the moon, orbited it, studied it and eventually landed men on it. (If you recall, astronaut Al Sheppard actually hit a golf ball on the moon, sending it for “miles and miles and miles” in the airless, low-gravity environment.) The quest continued on to Mars and beyond. Computers able to do vastly complex mathematical computations were able to figure out vectors and relationships between moving celestial objects. Unmanned probes have made their way to Jupiter and Saturn by using “near misses” to accelerate around Venus, the Earth, and the Sun to achieve speeds necessary to reach the outer planets. The ultimate “throw” is immortalized in two Pioneer spacecraft. After making a pass through the outer planets, they continue to glide into interstellar space and will continue onward long after the earth has been transformed into something entirely different.

In modern times, our scientific age has begun to imagine new ways to try to “reach out and touch somebody.” War of the Worlds brought us the concept of the “heat ray.” Star Trek brought the idea of the “phaser.” Instead of hurling rocks, we could perhaps hurl energy at a distance and influence an object. Police and the military are testing microwave guns that create an intense, temporary burning sensation on flesh. The goal is to use it to break up a riot or use it as “less than deadly force” against an adversary. Another experimental device uses electromagnetic pulses to disrupt the flow of electrons in a targeted electrical system. For example, police could theoretically shoot an electromagnetic pulse at a fleeing felon’s car and shut it down without resorting to a car chase that might endanger civilians.

All those remarkable ideas, however, are just conceptual. The limit of technology available to the average man today is the remote control. In our modern day civilization, there’s too much glass to throw rocks without causing property damage. You’d get sued for so much as throwing a dirt clod at your neighbor’s dog when he pooped in your yard. Slingshots, BB guns, and fireworks are illegal in most municipalities. Gun registration laws discourage many men from owning firearms or engaging in recreational shooting. Some guys resort to playing paintball, but that can get expensive. We love to watch football, baseball, golf, and hockey (all of which are sports that involve hurling objects to or at something). We gain vicarious satisfaction at watching the home run, the touchdown, and that little white ball falling into that hole in the ground. The only instrumentality left to the average man, whereby he can exercise the innate desire to extend his grasp with godlike power is the TV remote.

TV brings out the hunter-gatherer-explorer instinct in men. We ask, “Is there something better than this on?” The hunt begins. From his secure and defensible armchair position, a man can scroll endlessly through the channels seeking greener pastures. Newer systems allow us to block out shopping channels and weight-loss infomercials. Picture-in-picture technology allows the search to go on while watching the program that currently provides the most satisfaction. It means freedom, choices, options, and satisfies the urge to make important split-second decisions:

“Do I stay with Fox News or jump over to Discovery Wings and the documentary on the B-2 bomber?”

“Is it worth getting involved in watching Places in the Heart when Ghostbusters comes on in a half-hour?”

“Golf, football, baseball, hockey…golf, football, baseball, hockey…golf, football….”

The remote is important to the man’s role of protector to his family. When inappropriate commercials come on, like Victoria’s Secret, it’s up to the Dad to nobly grab the remote and change the channel to protect the virtue of his offspring. It also keeps him from having to sleep on the couch if he’s unsuccessful at averting his eyes away from the screen for a full 30 seconds while Tyra Banks gyrates around seductively. The remote is our buckler and shield, an indispensable component of the breastplate of righteousness.

So ladies, have pity on us and understand that it is in our nature to “reach out and touch” those horizons that are beyond our grasp. Be grateful that the remote control satisfies these primal urges and keeps us close to home. If we didn’t have this deep, innate need, mankind might have stayed in the caves. David may have never slain Goliath. Rockets may have never flown into space. We might otherwise be, at this very moment, sitting in a cave with a squirrel on a skewer, turning it over an open fire, staring at cave drawings of saber-tooth tigers, wondering if there was something better to watch. Hand over the remote, ladies! Civilization depends on it.

By the way, where is that darn thing anyway! “Honey? Have you seen the remote?”