Happy Holidays, Family & Friends

As we look back in appreciation of the abundance around us, we are looking ahead toward new growth and more sustainable perspectives. Join us in taking a break from the struggle and acknowledging the people who matter the most. It’s like a balancing act between glasses half-full and half-empty.

The changing seasons have been abrupt in central Swingstate. I’m looking out at a snowy garden teeming with birds. Our dog Ruby bounds around the yard keeping the squirrels at bay. She is a two-year-old golden retriever-Irish setter mix, and we adopted her just after Gven’s birthday in May. Ruby has her own room (cage) in the corner of the living room, and she has made herself thoroughly at home.

The major event of the summer was a gathering of the Golly clan to celebrate the patriarch Chas’s ninetieth birthday. Anabanana, Jeaniebeanie, Jojo, Sven, Rocko, their spouses, children and grandchildren joined Helena, Chas, and dozens of their Fairfield Glade neighbors for golf, boating, and a big party in his honor. For good measure, we celebrated Helena’s eighty-ninth birthday and their sixty-seventh wedding anniversary too. It was an awesome weekend for older kids to appreciate their parents and younger kids to catch up with each other. The stairstep age distribution of Sven's four siblings, eight nieces and nephews, two adult children is a tribal wonder to behold.

It has been an eventful year for Scott’s parents. After years of macular degeneration, Helena’s right eye had become painful as well as nonfunctional, and they decided the best treatment option was a prosthetic eye. The process of making and fitting an acrylic eyeball was fascinating and a little scary, but the surgeon and the ocularist who built and painted the eye are an impressively skilled pair. The support team, especially our sister-in-law Cindylou Who-Golly, helped manage the logistics, and the new eye looks perfect.

Jessi’s custom builder and handyman business in Brooklyn is keeping him busy when he isn’t working for the electrician at an event space in SoHo. During visits to Ohio, he spearheaded our long-planned bathroom renovation by doing new plumbing, wiring, framing, and tiling with help from Gven, Zelda, and Sven. In October, Jessi and three housemates moved to a new apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant that allegedly has an awesome view of Manhattan.

Gven and Sven will be in New York for a few days after Christmas, so they will see whether you can really see the Empire State Building from the kitchen. They weathered a rainy July weekend in Michigan exploring corners of Antrim County we hadn’t seen in a long time. Our meandering led to Camp Maplehurst, where Sven worked briefly in 1973 with his traveling buddy Scott Hastings. By pure coincidence, campers from the last 50 years were having a reunion that day, and they welcomed us as though we were one of them.

Zelda gets smarter and more beautiful every day – just my opinion – as she approaches her four-year anniversary at Half Price Books. It’s an additional bonus that she lives close enough to drop by for an occasional Sunday dinner. Zelda took a vacation in April to visit her friends Anton and John in Chicago. She balances the demands of work with passions for baking, knitting, hiking, and spending time with her cat Nora.

Sven made the challenging transition to production coordinator/grumpy old man at McGraw-Hill – and he likes it! Adapting to change is the name of the game, so he looks forward to learning a lot more about digital publishing as the industry morphs into a whole new definition of textbook. Thanks to the expanding taiji classes at the rec centers and the good folks in the drum circle, Sven has ample opportunities to get grounded, find a rhythm, and sometimes even shoot baskets.

Gven teaches yoga at police and fire academies, the county courthouse, a major insurance company, a recreation center, and her home base at the Yoga Factory. She joined her sisters and cousins in September for a fun reunion weekend in Helen, Georgia. Sad news came in November when her Dad and the Surratt family suffered the sudden loss of Gven’s stepmother Mavis to a heart attack.

Jessi and Zelda are home for the holidays. The tree is up, and there is a fire in the hearth. We’ll have lutefisk, mashed potatoes, and peas. Some things don’t change so much. Have a fertile, cautious Year of the Rabbit.

Peace on Earth & Peace of Mind,
Sven and Gven

Recipe for a successful Xmas

1. Shop for tools at Sears Hardware, books at Acorn or Half Price Books, shoes at Macy's, food at Weiland's and the Clintonville Community Market. If they don't have it, you probably don't need it.

2. Appetizers: egg nog (alternative: Brooklyn brown ale), herring in mustard sauce, aged gouda, sharp cheddar, wheat crackers.

3. Dinner: lutefisk baked with garlic and butter; mashed potatoes with garlic and cream cheese; pork-beef meatballs with garlic, bread crumbs, pine nuts, parmesan, romano, and parsley; peas; tossed salad with poppy seed dressing; braided bread; sauvignon blanc.

4. Dessert: apple crisp and tea while watching a movie and dozing off in a comfortable chair.

5. Go outside and do qigong in a light snowfall.

6. Stay up late. Sleep late.

7. Breakfast: coffee with Bailey's, walnut-date bread, smoked salmon, cream cheese, blueberries, yoghurt, apple crisp.

8. Open presents slowly. Try on the new wool socks, new boots, new jacket. Read the first chapter of the new book. Listen to music that everyone likes, or at least music that nobody hates.

9. Go off to separate rooms for awhile and take a break from each other. Bring in more firewood. Take the dog for a good long walk.

10. Dinner: flank steak marinated in Jamaican jerk rub, baked sweet potatoes, green beans with garlic and slivered almonds, pinot noir.

11. Attempt to watch a movie but doze off in a comfortable chair. Go outside and revive by hanging from a trapeze and doing qigong briefly because it's getting cold. Must be that nor'easter that's about to slam into the whole Eastern Seaboard.

12. Don't stay up so late. Don't sleep so late.

13. Get up, read the paper, meditate, eat a spartan breakfast of bread and apple crisp; clean the kitchen and den; dispose of all the wrapping paper, boxes, and miscellaneous packaging materials.

14. Supper: leftover sweet potatoes with salmon, leftover mashed potatoes with meatballs and peas. Marshmallow fudge for dessert.

15. Go out to an actual movie in an actual theater; engage in complex four-sided negotiation whether to see Black Swan, The Fighter, or The King's Speech, and end up seeing True Grit instead. Not bad.

FRD

It's File Release Day. Leave the tracking, forecasting, and documentation until Monday. It's all about jack, according to Bill. We talk about books, families, co-workers, a former student who can scat like Ella, and the small connected world.

Because I am celebrating the cramp leaving my left calf, the tension exiting the row of cubes I share with four other production workers, and the completion of a project, I am buying another Red's Rye Ale before we go our separate ways.

If your past is in print, your future might be in digital files sent out from a server to a wider world. Our parents, raised on radio, could not have imagined the network we navigate, and we have no inkling of the wonders our kids will know.

So I speed home and eat turkey noodle soup, sit in my favorite chair, and scratch the dog's eager ear. My wife re-starts a movie called "The Time Traveler's Wife," bittersweet but not cloying, and I sleep the undisturbed sleep of a glass half full.

Incrementalism

Attitudes change over time. Beware of the lightning conversion experience, the sudden flash of enlightenment, and the born-again felon/politician/celebrity who is ready to move on and put this all behind him/her.

Bodies grow, develop, strengthen, and mature gradually. Bodies also age, slow down, weaken, and deteriorate gradually. That growth spurt in adolescence or health crisis after retirement might have been building for some time.

Trees have growth rings, some thicker or thinner than others, reflecting the rate at which new xylem and phloem cells add themselves to the vascular structure of the trunk or branch.

People develop new habits and skills little by little. They don't rid themselves of old behavior by swearing it off, going cold turkey, or putting themselves in the hands of a higher power, although any of those courageous acts might be a step in the right direction, followed by practice, practice, practice.

Healing happens cell by cell.

If I learn anything from reciting this set of facts, I will learn it in the same manner, slowly.

Mulligans league founder retires

A nice article appeared on page 9A of the Crossville Chronicle, Friday, September 24, and the clipping eventually found its way into my hands. I would provide a link to it here, but the Chronicle doesn't make back issues accessible on the web, so I'm taking the liberty of posting excerpts.

Charles "Charlie" Duncanson, leader of the Fairfield Glade Mulligans Golf League, has retired after 19 years of dedicated service. As the founder and as the league's organizer, Duncanson has approached his duties (with) a zest for success, just as he's done in (other) aspects of his life.

If you happen to know my Dad, you are aware that references to dedicated service, being a natural and gifted organizer, and zest for success are understatements, and that understatement is his style. But I digress.

There are now 32 members and countless subs who will definitely miss having this gentleman at the helm, but they were happy to learn that he'll still be golfing with them occasionally.

Duncanson revealed his secret to keeping all of those accurate schedules and records for which he was known. Every meticulous bit of information was handwritten by Duncanson, who has never relied on a computer for assistance.

I can testify that Dad would spend some time every day at his desk in a nook off the kitchen, updating the scores, standings, averages, dues, and upcoming pairings of every team in the Monday morning golf league. Again, meticulous and accurate do not begin to describe the discipline and care with which he accounted for every stroke, every tee time, and every dollar of every golfer in every foursome on every Monday. He could also shoot his age for 18 holes.

In his youth, recognition as a multi-sport athlete earned him letters in baseball, football, basketball and track during his collegiate career at Winona State University.

...Duncanson served two years in the U.S. Navy, and then two and a half years in the U.S. Air Force. He taught aviation maintenance and repair in both branches of the service, after which he launched a successful 35-year career in the insurance business....

An appreciation luncheon honoring Duncanson was held Sept. 7 at the Phil-ing Station. Mulligan members summed up their feelings with a heartfelt statement, "To know Charlie is to love the man."

My heroes: Allen and Violet Large

When they won ten million dollars in the lottery, they gave away $9,800,000 of it, according to the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. Are these Canucks plain loony? Or do they know something the rest of us don't?

He is 75 years old and she is 78. He worked as a welder in Ontario for 30 years before retiring to Nova Scotia. She worked for cosmetics and chocolate companies. They have an old house that they like.

She was being treated for cancer on July 14 when they hit the lotto. She underwent her final chemotherapy treatments a week ago. It took them about a week to figure out what to do with all that money.

The Larges donated their winnings to the local fire department, churches, the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and the hospitals in Truru and Halifax where Violet received treatment. Some of it went to family members. They said they felt fortunate to be able to help. "It made us feel good," said Violet. "And there’s so much good being done with that money."

Steal This Education [but Buy This Article]

[Headline teaser in the Chronicle of Higher Education]

Abbie Hoffman said a revolutionary's first duty was to get away with it. Now you can.

[Byline]

By Dalton Conley

[Snarky lead paragraph]

It turns out that the yippie activist Abbie Hoffman was born a few decades too early. In his 1971 counterculture classic, Steal This Book, he devoted considerable space to discussing how to live for free. He provided survival tips, such as how to take advantage of furniture pick-up day in your neighborhood, how to Dumpster dive, and how to enroll for food stamps or for clinics to get a venereal disease cured gratis. But Hoffman went beyond that: He counseled the reader on how to get

[Rude awakening to unsuspecting reader]

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[Hint: It's yet another self-serving article about the wonders of online courses. Wouldn't Abbie be proud? I doubt it.]

Still Life with Coffee

Woke up this morning,
Put on my slippers,
Walked in the kitchen and died.
And oh what a feeling
As my soul went through the ceiling,
And on up to heaven I did ride.

John Prine has the amazing gift of telling a story in a simple, straightforward song. Verse, verse, chorus. Nothing too intricate; some of the tunes sound a lot alike. They're put together like country songs, two guitars and bass, plenty of twang. They're from Nashville, and he looks comfortable in the black suit and black shirt. But in my book it's poetry.

I went to see Prine last night at the Palace Theater, kitty-corner from the stately Ohio Statehouse, and ended up having a sort of spiritual reunion with some old friends who used to appreciate the same stuff. It's not easy to distinguish the work of art itself from what I was going through at the time. How could anyone separate the song, the album, or the artist from their concurrent personal adventures in life as we know it? So my response to about three albums worth of John Prine songs is heavily tied to people I knew at the time who were sharing that appreciation on some level in their own idiosyncratic way.

I'm guessing Prine connects with a lot of people that way. The bass player asked me what songs they didn't play that I wished they would, but there was really nothing missing. What I most wanted to hear was "Hello in There," and I did. I hoped he would do "Sam Stone" because it is so devastating. I had no complaints. I was just there to enjoy the moment.

When my friend whisked us backstage to watch the encore from the wings and then through a labyrinth upstairs to the little room in the old movie house, we thought we might get to meet Prine himself. Turns out he left immediately to go back to the hotel and didn't go back to the dressing room to hang out, but I did get to express to the band, the promoter, my daughter, and my friend who got us tickets that Prine reaches some deep, soft, emotional place, and that was about as much earnestness as anyone could take.

We had an apartment in the city.
Me and Loretta liked living there.
It's been years since the kids have grown,
Lives of their own, left us alone

He didn't do a lot of talking between songs, but he did introduce that particular story with another story about when he was helping a friend with his newspaper route. They would deliver the Sun-Times to a nursing home, taking a paper to each subscriber in their rooms, and some of the old people would talk to him and pretend he was a grandson or a nephew. So he's always had a connection with old people, he said, "and now I am one."

Old soul maybe. He looked fit as a fiddle onstage, and he moves well with the guitar. His voice is as strong as ever, though he has never had operatic pipes. It's a little rough, like an uncut diamond, and his range covers just enough notes to tell the tale. He's a little thick around the middle, but he always was chunky. He never was a prettyboy, and the ordinary workingclass face has only gotten more beat-up looking with time.

But the songs are even more gut-wrenching now than they were in the early seventies when I first became an admirer. And I was ecstatic to witness Prine's two-hour set in yet another provincial capital on yet another stage in yet another old theater and see him holding his own in the battle against the brutal fact that sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.

Sam Stone came home to his wife and family
After serving in the conflict overseas.
And the time that he served had shattered all his nerves
And left a little shrapnel in his knee.
But the morphine eased his pain, and the grass grew round his brain
And gave him all the confidence he lacked,
With a purple heart and a monkey on his back.

Prine writes about death a lot, and about love, of course, loneliness, despair, betrayal, peaches - all the major themes. There's plenty of religious imagery - God, angels, Jesus, pearly gates - some of it tongue-in-cheek and some definitely not. I guess like many of us who were raised to be patriotic, god-fearing middle-Amerikans, he continues to cast a jaundiced eye on the damage done by his own cultural baggage. Yet wonder of wonders, he maintains a hard-working and indispensable sense of humor.

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper,
Go to the country, build you a home.
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches,
Try and find Jesus on your own.

So in a way he wrote part of the soundtrack of a certain version of my life during a crucial formative stage before I was set in my ways, and it was fun to share a little of that magic with Zelda at a crucial formative stage before she gets too set in her ways. These opportunities don't come up every day, and rumor has it there's a time limit.

Butterfly Effect

When a butterfly flits its wings in the Amazon basin, they say, it affects the melting of the polar ice cap. How does it do that? Through a vast chain of multiple causes and effects too complex for anyone to fathom. How do they know this? Inductively.

An individual person who is a member of multiple, sometimes overlapping groups at work, at home, in a family, among friends, in schools, churches, and informal circles transmits and receives hundreds of signs, signals, and messages every day. Spoken, written, postural, gestural, performative, functional, aesthetic. It would be neat to discern exactly what led who to do what.

Why did you do that? People can be very creative when called upon to justify something.

I dreamed about owls. Not one owl, but three owls landing one by one in quick succession on three difference branches. Three big owls flying in from left to right, then landing right to left. Then I forgot about it, but it came back so I wrote it down. I can't tell you what it "means" except that my sleeping mind had owls in it.

I dreamed I was driving in a rainstorm and all of a sudden the windshield wipers blades shredded right before my eyes, splitting into long useless strips hanging by a thread while I stopped the car to try to fix them. In a rainstorm. In a dream. You tell me.

Chuang-tse famously dreamed he was a butterfly and awoke wondering whether he was really a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang-tse. An epistemological conundrum. Who can say for sure. For myself, I am reasonably certain that I am not an owl in this lifetime.

Sitting and forgetting is another big theme in Chuang-tse. He suggests sitting and forgetting as an antidote to strife and trouble, as a way of letting internal measures address the distress brought about by external matters. At least that's how I remember reading it. Sitting and forgetting is the same as meditation, if meditation aims toward tranquility by letting go of thoughts that arise and trouble the mind. Forgetting is just a negative, characteristically Taoist way of calming the mind.

Forgetting is a favorite issue of mine because of my own predisposition (or habit or talent or fatal flaw) for losing track of one thing while focusing on another. I multitask well - one thing at a time. The hard part is switching from one thing to another at the right time, like keeping track of the conversation without missing your exit on the interstate. Period. New paragraph.

Some people are exceptionally gifted at sitting; others have a penchant for forgetting. Rare is the bird who intuitively knows how to do both, and rarer still is the sage who can do both at once.

I'm pretty good at getting so absorbed in what I'm doing over the weekend, without a thought of the work I left on my desk on Friday, that by Monday morning I have no idea where I left off. I'm in the 99th percentile at letting my right brain take over temporarily, so my left brain retains nothing - or vice versa.

There was more I could have said about this momentous topic, but I forgot what it was, thank goodness.

Why I love the rec center, Part two

A warm, clear October afternoon. The qigong class is practicing outside under a big maple tree. Kids are playing on the playground nearby, and a hum of activity pervades the space. Pretty soon the rec center staff are setting up tables next to bales of straw for their Fall Festival.

Our little circle of six is joined by a mother and daughter for a few minutes. They mimic our movements and move on to other forms of play. We're a mixed bag of younger and older, male and female, hipster and nerd, in other words a really cool cross-section of everyday people. We finish our form, talk about next week, and Miss Connie from the rec center comes over to offer us cider and donuts, now that we're all one with nature.

It's too nice a day to just get in the car and go home, so I take a walk past the playground full of kids climbing and watchful parents sitting on benches or standing around talking while keeping one eye on their babies, out to the ballfield, where teams of young adults wearing matching T-shirts play a spirited game of kickball. Some of the twenty-somethings run fast and kick with power; some of them are just starting to get the hang of the eye-foot coordination thing, but they are out there playing anyway, among friends in a safe social environment, doing something physical without having to be athletic.

Pinch me. This is what I want to do when I grow up. This little corner of the park is a little bit of heaven on a Thursday in October.

The next day is a workday, another opportunity to get something done, try to communicate effectively, solve some problems, and get paid for it.

Saturday morning has recently become another classtime in my week. I drive across town to another rec center and do my best to convey to adult students how to practice what I practice, and to my enormous satisfaction they seem to get it. This group is smaller - three instead of six - and a slightly different really cool cross-section of everyday people.

On my way out, I pass an empty gym. There is a leather basketball on the floor calling my name, so I spend half an hour practicing another ancient movement form. Right hand, left hand, legs and back interacting with the ball, the floor, the backboard, and the hoop. Muscle memory kicks in big time, and I discover to my mild surprise that I can still do this meditation form I've been doing for going-on-sixty years.

I'm not alone in the gym. A couple of neighborhood kids are shooting at the other end. The rhythm of their movements with and without the ball show that they know what they're doing, and a lot of their shots go in. At another basket a young man and his son toss the ball back and forth. The dad looks like he's more familiar with the soccer field than the basketball court, but he's getting it too. Dribble, pass, shoot. The drum-like sound of the ball on the hardwood.

What would it be like to live alone?

I really don't know. It's been a long time. And a four-day weekend by myself is not about to show me in any real way what living alone would be like, although it does prompt the question, and it's a question worth asking. Not that I'm planning on living alone any time soon, like in the next 30 years, but eventually almost everybody lives alone.

I've done it a couple of times. I grew up in a moderately big family - five kids, two parents. Even then I spent a good bit of time alone, but I never ALONE - existentially alone - because I was always surrounded by my family. Then I had roommates for two years in one dorm, Apple Hall in Kent, and one year in two apartments in Ann Arbor. Those were good times and good places, and I enjoyed the company, mostly.

Then I came back from a trip to Europe and got a room by myself in a rooming house for a year. Nice quiet street, come and go as I please; friends would come over. It was okay. It was better than okay, it was great, but it didn't last very long. I moved out and moved on, living in other people's places for a couple of years - a spare room here, a spare room there, Lower Peninsula, Upper Peninsula - in a house, a cabin, a tent, and finally moved south and found a roommate who eventually became a wife.

Of course that changed everything. For the next 33 years I managed to find time by myself, and over the years I have gotten better at making space for myself within the shared space of apartments and houses. Even with kids, it has always been possible to find time alone and create a space for being alone. But that ongoing balancing act is not the same as living alone, which makes the occasional four-day weekend a useful and revealing experiment while Gven Golly takes part in a sisters-and-cousins reunion in scenic Helen, Georgia.

One makes one's own coffee in the morning; walks the dog in the morning and evening, feeds the dog, and makes sure the dog has water in her bowl. This is not part of my routine normally, so it's a new and different part of my day that would take a serious decision to commit the kind of time a dog requires, that is, if it was just me and the dog. For now, since it is just me and the dog, it's still a major responsibility, as the dog needs and expects my full attention, at least a couple of times every day. Now if she would just learn to heel instead of yanking the leash - and my shoulder - this way and that.

One makes bean soup and arranges lumber in the shed. One watches tennis and football on TV. One reads a story in McSweeney's and articles in the New York Times. One goes for a longish bike ride out Dustin Road to 3Bs&K Road. Have you ever been out that way? West of the interstate, east of Alum Creek Lake, a quiet rural part of Delaware County, quite lovely if you have the time.

I've had an surprisingly active social life this weekend, aside from all that time with the dog. Saturday night I went to a gallery opening - Gven's friend Evangelia's gallery with Gven's work in the show - where I ran into a few people I knew - friends of Gven. Sunday I went to the temple and meditated, stayed for the teaching, went out for coffee, and drummed with the regular Clinton-Como drum circle in the park, where I ran into several people I knew - independently of Gven. She has her circle, I have my circle, and our circles overlap like a classic...Gvenn diagram. Sorry.

One finds things exactly where one put them, cleans up one's messes, and eats what one cooks. There is an increased sense of control, inhabiting a house by oneself. Everything is right where I put it. Nothing gets done if I don't do it myself. There will be no chicken dinner on Sunday. Nobody's going to clean up those dishes but me. Who am I gonna blame when something goes wrong? Why are we are out of coffee? Who left all this stuff lying around? Oh, yeah, that would be me.

I don't know how long it would take for all this glorious solitude to get old, but it would get old. There is no one there in the evening to unload all the day's baggage of disappointments, misdeeds, unmet deadlines, and crises du jour. And there is no one occupying the couch and the TV the entire evening with inane hospital shows and sitcoms, so I can catch every update on every ballgame on SportsCenter if I feel like it. Or not. It's mixed.

On realignment

If the Big Ten is going to expand, and they are, let's do it right. If that sounds like I have skin in the game, maybe I do and maybe I don't. When you've grown up breathing the air and hearing the language of midwestern college sports, it feels like it all matters deeply, because it does. Herewith some gut responses.

1. Keep the name. The 'Big Ten' brand transcends the actual number of universities in the conference, so don't get hung up on 11, 12, 14, or whatever the business arrangement becomes. It's the Big Ten, and it shall remain the Big Ten.

2. Screw Notre Dame. It would be like marrying the biggest prima donna in the senior class. Better off without her.

3. Organize the expanded conference into divisions based on geography AND history AND economics AND mob psychology. What is this, social studies? Yes, as a matter of fact, it is.

Now make a graphic organizer comparing the market size, football bowl appearances, basketball tournament record, academic research funding, and level of alumni fanaticism in each of the following:

East: Penn State, Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Indiana, Purdue.

West: Northwestern, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska.

4. While you're at it, add Missouri and Kansas. Not right away, because the Big Ten doesn't make impulsive decisions like those other, lesser, mercenary enterprises to the East, West, and South that lack our sense of history, decorum, stodginess. Hrmph. Give the current configuration 20 or 30 years to make sure its a prudent move, then see if Missouri and Kansas are worthy. By that time, the Big Pac WAC Tex Mex 18 will have morphed into any number of Frankenleagues.

Come to think of it, that recent interloper Michigan State, which joined just the other day in the 1950s, is really still on probation, and the jury is definitely still out on this new outfit from State College.

5. Not Pittsburgh, not Syracuse, not West Virginia. Not Connecticut, not Rutgers! Let's not get carried away. Okay, maybe Pittsburgh and/or Syracuse, at least they're not coastal, but wait until some time in midcentury. Or Kentucky! Why is Kentucky in the SEC anyway? But no.

Of birds and bees

It's a Saturday morning, already warm but not yet hot, as I enjoy my coffee at a steel and tile table on the terra cotta patio. About a dozen bees move from flower to flower on a sprawling old multi-stemmed salvia. When they latch onto a flower and feed, the weight of a bee shakes the whole stem, and when the bee moves on to another flower, the stem rebounds like a spring. The mass of a bee's body hanging on the salvia stem must be like boys climbing trees in an orchard to pick apples, going out on a limb to grab the good stuff.

It's my idea of a good time just to sit out here and watch the yard come alive.

Last weekend I was sitting right here enjoying a quiet morning, and I heard a big bird swoop in past my left shoulder and land under a rose bush right beside me. All I could see was its black and white tail feathers for the minute that it rested under the roses. Then it took off and in two seconds was in the middle branches of a maple tree in the corner of the yard. I could just barely see the tail twitching under the branch that obscured its body. When I walked closer to get a better look, the hawk flew away, and for a second I could see its white belly shooting across the parking lot to another maple. Not a red tailed hawk, maybe a sparrow hawk, and whatever you are, you can see me a lot better than I can see you, so thanks for stopping by.

When Jessi was here in July working on the house, he made a number of trips to the hardware store to get tools and materials. A drill bit here, a section of PVC pipe there. On one of those trips down the bike trail from Summit to State Street, he was riding past the South High School baseball field, and he saw a hawk caught in the netting of the batting cage on the far end of the field. The big bird must have randomly flown in one end of this long, narrow net and gotten tangled up trying to find its way out of the 65-foot tunnel of rope.

Jessi being Jessi, he got off the bike and into the cage, trying to shake the net to free the bird. It took some doing, but finally the hawk got unsnagged from the net and flew out the open end.

That was the week that was

It started out on a Sunday, as many weeks do. I was spending the weekend doing things I like to do - cleaning up the branches of a fallen tree, transplanting some raspberry bushes, getting a few chores done in preparation for a bike ride. But when I went to the garage, the bike was gone, stolen from under my suburban nose in broad daylight while I was oblivious in the garden a few feet away.

I was bummed out. Worse things can happen, it's true, but I had grown attached to the dark green Trek in the year and a half I had ridden it, and I was really looking forward to riding it that day. With it disappeared a nice little rechargeable headlight and taillight and a toolkit containing Allen wrenches, tire irons, and a spare tube. It happens every day to somebody; that's life in the small city. I suspect that the perpetrators have no idea what they're doing.

No doubt my downcast attitude colored the other events of the week, which had already looked challenging. I had rescheduled some vacation days to focus on getting a new project launched, and I had some other, nonwork-related schedule issues to work out. And who doesn't have decisions to make in the course of a week?

"Return," said The Book of Changes, "brings exit and entry, somewhere to go with firm strength, going out and coming in without trouble." A few days later it said, "Advance and illuminate virtue by reflecting it under stress, going to three meetings a day." That sounds about right.

What's remarkable now, in retrospect, is how quickly things got checked off my list of problems, as if compartmentalizing the sources of stress and irritation made it easier to address them individually, take a breath and move on to the next one, as if each was separate from the other, which they never are. But I can only do one thing at a time, so I had to take each item of unfinished business out of context and treat it as a single entity. No calls yet from the Nobel committee on my amazing discovery.

So I hastily put together the launch that I couldn't put off any longer, and lo and behold all the key people came to the meeting, which of course raised a bunch of additional issues for all the key people to start working on, and since I'm the production coordinator, each key person's problem is, at least indirectly, my problem.

I'm still without a bike, and wouldn't you know, now the truck is running rough, misfiring in low gear like it suddenly needs a tuneup, when two days ago it was running fine. Normally I would drop the truck at the shop in the morning, ride my bike to work, and pick up the truck after work, but no. So I called the trusted mechanic, and he suggested I try a can of Sea Foam motor treatment, which I picked up for nine dollars and poured in the gas tank in the hope that this stuff will clean up the fuel injectors until I can get a real tuneup.

Sometimes it's the little loose ends left hanging that are most annoying. Not that each question isn't important in its own way, but the plethora of unresolved issues was clouding my thinking. Just make a decision, okay? Yes, I will schedule a new Saturday morning class this fall on the Westside, and yes, I will continue to practice on Thursdays in the park even if no one shows up, and no, I will not make the switch to Wednesday nights when the old men's group changes to its new schedule.

I called my son and learned a lot about his new gig maintaining an event space in SoHo for Red Bull. Everybody in his house is moving out and finding new places to live, so he will likely have a new address come October. He commiserated on the loss of the bike.

I called my parents and heard about some of the adjustments they are making, such as cooking more for themselves instead of getting meals delivered. They're picking lots of tomatoes, and we compared notes on how our gardens are doing. They were delighted to hear that their grandson Max is getting married.

I met my friend John for a beer after work, and among other things we discovered that we had met 23 years ago when we were both in school. Neither of us remembered the other when we reconnected on a church committee a couple of years ago, or when he gave me a can of Fix-a-Flat when I had tire trouble, or when he and his daughter took my taiji class, but we had been in another taiji class together in 1987, and I had the class roster to prove it.

Finally, at the end of the week, I couldn't stand it any more, so I found a pretty good bike on Craig's List and paid the man cash on the barrelhead for a black Schwinn. It's not as jazzy as the dark green Trek; it has wider tires and narrower handlebars, but I'll get used to it, and at least I can ride again.

It's a luxury

You go somewhere other than your usual digs to do something other than your usual gig, and things happen, not exactly as you imagined, which might be the whole point. You make the necessary course corrections in order to have a good time without exhausting your resources. You come back.

Time passes. Memory persists during re-entry, reconstructing events, places, moments of unusual brightness and clarity. The urge to chronicle the experience comes and goes, competing with the need to get things done in the here and now. Travelling seems to spark that memoirist impulse; maybe that's why people take their cameras and bring home the obligatory photo gallery of their trip. I have my hands full getting from Point OH to point MI, so I can't balance the going and doing with the recording and capturing. And even if I could, do I really want to spend my precious vacation time taking pictures and writing in my journal?

So when I got back from our very short northern lower peninsula sojourn, I scrounged a surface to write on while the memory was still fresh. It's a luxury to have a day at home to clean up the kitchen, do laundry, water and weed the garden, read the paper - the usual weekend things - before going back to work on Tuesday. So I put a pen to paper and scrawled a couple of pages without much self-editing; the good news and the bad news is that this happens on vacation because it doesn't during the routine everyday rhythm of home and work.

It was a luxury to be able to pack the car and take off Friday morning, arrive that evening in a campground where we are known, and for twelve dollars a night sleep in a tent, cook over a fire, meditate under a humungous pine tree, and breathe the air of the north woods.

It was a luxury to get up in a dry tent Saturday morning and drive to Mancelona for breakfast, read the local paper while drinking coffee and waiting for our sausage gravy and biscuits. The young couple from Ann Arbor at the next table at Bo Jack's Bakery Cafe was envious as they busily minded the manners of their two little girls, four-year-old Ava and two-year-old Lydia. Especially when we told them that our grown-up daughter was dog-sitting for us back in Ohio.

The early morning rain had not let up, and we found just the map we were looking for at the gas station, so we took off west on M-88 to see what we would see. What we discovered was the cute little town of Bellaire and a string of small lakes on our way around the northern tip of Torch Lake, a big beautiful body of water just inland from Grand Traverse Bay. On a lark, we turned down Cairn Road to try to find Camp Maplehurst, where I worked and played for a short time in 1974, before moving on to the U.P. and other adventures.

To my surprise, we found it largely unchanged, the lodge sitting up on a knoll about a mile in from the highway, with cabins lining the path down to a little lake. On a whim we stopped and asked if we could look around. As luck would have it, we had walked in on a reunion of campers and counselors from the 55 years of the camp's existence. That explained all the Cadillacs and Volvos in the parking lot. The proprietors, Lawrence and Brenda, son and daughter-in-law of Tom, who ran the place back in the day, graciously invited us to make ourselves at home.

So Gven Golly and I looked around the big old house and took a self-guided tour of the grounds, down to the lake, past the dock, around the ballfield and the basketball court, through a cherry orchard and back to the lodge. Old campers were singing camp songs and eating lunch together. I had never met Lawrence and Brenda, but they had known the people I worked with, most of whom have since died or become hermits, and it was cool to make that connection.

That little side trip gave us plenty to think and talk about the rest of the afternoon while driving around the hills east of Traverse Bay, past dairy farms, orchards, fields of sunflowers, and houses with fieldstone porches. Even with a good map we managed to get a little bit lost between Elk Rapids and Kewadin before getting our bearings again, rounding the southern tip of Torch Lake, and making our way back to Bellaire for a cup of good Ethiopian coffee and some serious fantasizing. Just enough exposure to the local culture to whet the appetite.

When we got back to our campsite it was still drizzling, not a heavy rain but not weather for a bike ride and a swim. We made do with a charcoal fire and cooked our pasta, which we enjoyed with some cheese, an avocado, cherry tomatoes, and an Oberon ale. The charcoal fire gradually dried the wood we found, and the fire kept going until bedtime.

Next morning the sun came out, so we made breakfast and rode our bikes to Pencil Lake for a swim. The road was smooth, with pine and poplar and ferns on both sides, and we passed the occasional house along the way. The water was clean and clear. A man and his two grandchildren got there just as we were leaving; other than that we had it to ourselves.

This was Sunday, our return-home day, so we decided to go to Traverse City and see what was happening. By midday the awesome weather and a film festival had drawn throngs of people to the beach and the streets. We did the streets first, which were packed with film geeks and tourists. Gven found just the right restaurant for lunch, Poppycock, and the food was almost as good as the people-watching. She faced out and I faced in; it's a toss-up who saw the better show.

A walk on the beach confirmed my suspicion that a fairly wide socio-economic cross-section of midwestern humanity flocks to this bay at this time of year. And who can blame them? Of course there are the high-end tourists, who have a summer house on the water, and the low-end tourists, who pitch a tent in the state park, and everyone in between. And my slow realization is the high-end tourists don't have a monopoly on education and good taste in art, food, drink, clothes, or water sports.

We took back roads almost halfway home and got to see a different view of that part of Michigan. Because we indulged our senses all morning and most of the afternoon, it was a late night before we got home. We were spent but it was worth it.

The Four Ordinary Truths

1. All life is subject to the blues.
2. The nature of the blues is feeling really good some of the time and really bad some of the time.
3. The reason for these crazy, unpredictable changes is that things don't always happen the way we want them to happen, and that can be disappointing.
4. There is a way through this mess. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.

I didn't say I knew the way through this mess, I just said there is a way, and in the meantime, breathing is recommended. You got a better idea?

Coming soon: The Eightfold Path to Relative Contentment in the Midst of Absolute Ambivalence.

The Good, the Bad, and the Cute as a Button

She doesn't have a name yet, but we found ourselves a dog. She's part golden retriever, part Labrador, and maybe a little Irish setter. She has the long wavy hair and medium size of a golden but a reddish brown almost like an Irish setter, and a big head like a lab.

She likes to prance around the back yard checking out the flora and fauna, leap up at the bugs, stalk the squirrels, and wallow in the mint, lamium, and strawberries. She's gradually adjusting to our house, figuring out where to lie down, where the humans do what they do, and how to fit into the new pack. You can see her start to move, hesitate, change direction, and go somewhere else. Most of the time she's following Gven, the Mama.

It's settled. Her name is Ruby, or Rhuby, aka Rhubarb, Rhube, Mrs. Rubenstein, Rubiks Cube, and occasionally Pookie, just cuz she's so cute.

All this came about during a whirlwind search online by the Mama of our pack, who decided it was time to find a dog. Our house has been without nonhuman animals since last fall when Dali and Isabel died. It's spring, it's Gven's birthday/week, and both kids are here, so it's time. And she found the right dog.

On writing badly

It's refreshing to read something well written once in a while, even if it's this article about bad writing.

Good writing makes you keep reading. It's like good cooking. It draws you into the act of reading (eating), makes you not just enjoy reading but want to read and imparts an increased appreciation of the content and substance - but also the craft of making it. So satisfying, how did they do that?

Bad writing makes you wonder why they even bother to put random words on paper, as if they gave a damn how a thought comes across to the poor disrespected reader. An overly generous response to bad writing is: well, it's better than not writing at all.

Sorry, I'm not that generous. Bad writing does more damage than not writing. Like bad music, it inflicts pain on the senses, but it also conveys false, confused, or distorted information in the guise of facts and explanations, one step forward, two steps back.

Worst of all, bad writing numbs the senses to language the way bad architecture can make people hate their house. Bad writing in the jargon-laden, formulaic mode of most business and academic dreck, conveys the impression that this is all there is, information is dull by definition, and you can only get used to it. Just kill me now.

The trouble is, most of us have to do a lot of bad writing before we have the chops to do any good writing. It's a practice like any other. How are you going to play good basketball, chess, or piano unless you put in a lot of time playing bad basketball, chess, or piano? I wish it were otherwise.

Maybe I'm overlooking the difference between bad writing and novice writing. The neophyte or the uncoached player can easily be forgiven a multitude of sins. The craft takes practice, and the first few thousand attempts are going to fall short of excellence. It's a neophyte critic who is too harsh on the early attempts.

It's the careless, inattentive player who won't make the effort that is intolerable. If the first draft doesn't measure up, well too bad. You can't understand what I'm trying to say? That's your problem. With extremely rare exceptions, every first draft is badly written. It follows that everyone who refuses to rewrite (and rewrite and rewrite) writes badly.

The opposite problem can be just as infuriating. In contrast to the George W. Bushes of the world, who don't care enough to construct a coherent sentence, we have the terminally self-absorbed writer who finds every line flowing out of his or her mellifluous pen or word processor incredibly poignant and precious.

I plead guilty. Why else would anyone write, then write some more, and come back repeatedly to keep on writing without getting paid for it, unless they just love the sound of their own amazing writerly voice? Give me a freaking break and get over yourself. I'll try.

Golly Plumbing

"This Old House" it's not. We don't use only the best tools, wear designer flannel shirts, and speak in Boston accents. And we don't make everything look easy like on TV. But we git 'er done, eventually.

First, you grab a bunch of screwdrivers, wrenches, a hammer, and start taking things apart. Take the handles off the hot and cold water valve to the tub. Unbolt the tank from the toilet, drain all the water, and unbolt the bowl from the floor. Oh, don't forget to shut off the incoming water pipes before you start taking things apart. That would be a mess.

And it's a mess regardless. Get used to it. But this outfit cleans up frequently (I almost said continuously, not true) if only to breathe a minimum of dust and dirt, keep track of the tools lying everywhere, and see a semblance of the room this will eventually be. The back bathroom of Om Shanty has been in some stage of slow transformation so long that no set of before-and-after photos (which I haven't taken, sorry) would do it justice.

Once we got started in the demolition phase of the project, it was only slightly more complicated to detach the drain pipe from the tub, accessible from either the other side of the wall through a removable panel in the adjacent kitchen wall or from underneath in the dim and dank cellar. It was a big nut, so the pipe wrench came in handy, and once it was off, the whole tub lifted right out of there. Tub gone, toilet gone, sink long gone, it's easier to see how much (or how little) room there is in this room.

Then it's time to reconfigure the space. In this old house, that involves taking down lots of old plaster, some drywall, and a few studs I had put up when I recessed the fridge into a former doorway into the bathroom. This experiment a couple of years ago sort of worked for a while, and now Gven and I are rethinking the fridge placement, moving it a few inches to make better use of space in the transformed bathroom.

Tearing into the plaster and lath on two ancient walls was big fun. For this, Jessi Golly and I donned our handkerchief masks, gloves, wielded hammers, and did a convincing imitation of Samurai cowboy plumbing train robbers. It took awhile, but we got it down to the original 1884 brick wall and 1925 framing. Let the wiring begin.

Jessi did all the real work; I consulted, fetched tools, cleaned up, asked questions, and offered uninformed suggestions of improbable alternative solutions to the inevitable problems that come up. He's the one with the skills, the mind-set, the analytical ability, the physical strength and agility to crawl around in the attic, drill holes through old 2x4s that are actually two inches by four inches and pull old wires from an old switch box across the room to a new switch box mounted next to the door where it should have been in the first place.

Wall Street buzzes: Golly Plumbing merges with Jessi Electric, construction futures soar!

Are you happy?

It must be the zeitgeist. Have you heard? It's all about being happy.

Popular magazines, academic research, and religious messages are full of descriptions and prescriptions about happiness. Just this morning, Slate referred its unwitting readers to a TIME magazine article informing us that "The Internet is a key to happiness." No kidding. Now I know. What I really want is to be happy AND that going online will make me happy, according to unbiased research by that well-known authority on my happiness, the Chartered Institute of IT.

Yoga Journal, for example, has always had lots of pretty pictures of pretty people (You want to be just like them, and if you do yoga, you'll be pretty too!) performing amazing postures while wearing big smiles and chic yoga attire. But lately the articles too, rather than providing information about, like, you know, yoga, are about that most amorphous of subjects, 'happiness'.

My Buddhist friends seem to be unanimous in the assumption that everyone - Buddhist or not - ultimately wants the same thing - to be happy. Not wise, enlightened, virtuous, or powerful, just happy. Apparently all other human goals, aspirations, and drives are subsumed in that one nebulous, undefinable word. People's behaviors, beliefs, and justifications for doing what they do vary widely, but it's a given that we all really want the same thing.

And there's the rub: if somebody says they want something else - let's say health, wealth, freedom, sex, drugs, rock and roll - that aberrant desire can be attributed to the notion that it's only a means toward what they really want, you know (the H word).

What's the purpose of living? To survive, mate, procreate, and raise children? No, it's to be happy. What's the goal of all successful people? To advance to greater responsibility in a productive career? No, you idiot, it's to be happy. What is it that everyone has in common? A genetic predisposition to communicate, use tools, build things, and maintain relationships? Hell no, those are just placeholders, substitutes, or sublimated outlets for the one true desire, let me guess, to be happy!

What's the ultimate measure of your educational growth, parental influence, work ethic, perseverance, social standing, and lovingkindness? Altogether now: Are you happy?

But I protest too much. I'm no different from anyone else. Of course I want to be happy. But I want a lot of other things too, and they're not reducible to any single unit of currency that conveniently fits under the sugary category of 'happiness'. Have we all seen too many B movies in which boy meets girl, a bunch of unpleasant conflict occurs, and after 100 minutes of mild predictable plot devices, they live happily ever after? Does anyone really want their life to reflect that formula?

If so, you stopped reading this rant six paragraphs ago. If you're jaded, faded, and overrated enough to have read this far, join me in beseeching the Universe. Please, let there be more to life than smiley-faced signs of everyone being nice to everyone all the time, lest they be found guilty of that most heinous of crimes, being unhappy for even a minute.

Some obscure sources say that it's possible to be a responsible, somewhat intelligent person and not be absolutely giddy with joy every waking moment. I have a number of valued acquaintances who actually frown quite often. From their behavior, body language, and conversation, I discern that they have things on their minds that concern them, perhaps worry them, make them wonder about things going on around them that might not be just hunky dory. What's wrong with these people?

In fact, at last count six out of six co-workers with whom I share a row of cubicles, could be described as borderline suspects of harboring less-than-happy thoughts. Every one of them is smart, funny, interesting, complex, witty, even erudite and highly skilled in their work, yet they seem to suffer that awful malady of occasional - and recurring - unhappiness. People say there's a cure, so maybe they should get a prescription.

Or maybe it's just me. They're all happy as clams, and I'm just not picking up on it. They recognized me early-on as the resident Knight of the Woeful Countenance, and they humor me by feigning deep existential concern for the dark undercurrent of horror in everyday life. Or not.

I have a confession to make. I'm not happy. I'm ecstatic.

Is there a god?

Of course there is. In fact, there are lots of them.

Look around you. Jews have a god, although it's difficult and/or contentious and/or forbidden to pronounce the name of said creator/lawgiver/covenanter. Muslims, being their fellow patriarchal Abrahamic monotheists, of course have a god known as Allah. One of the few things most Christians can agree on, I think, is that there is indeed a god, and in a truly remarkable moment of unanimity, if not creativity, they even agreed at some point to call their god 'God'.

In short, ample empirical evidence exists to support the proposition that god(s) do(es) exist(s).

If that isn't convincing enough, we can look to the ancient Greeks, who were blessed with a number of colorful, if flawed, gods. The Romans had a pantheon full of gods and goddesses endowed with a wonderful array of humanlike qualities. Those human qualities of gods could make them either appealing or repellant, depending on one's attitude toward humans.

My ancestors the Norse had their own amazing and quirky assemblage of deities, and they were generous enough to share some of them with other Germanic folk in a loose kind of early pagan EU. Hindu tradition has a rich array of gods from Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva down through a plethora of lesser divine beings, embodying for our benefit a mind-boggling range of aspects of our own complex, amazing, and troubled existence.

I'm undoubtedly leaving out many gods and goddesses that exist in a number of cultures of which I am unaware, and I hope members of those cultures will forgive us our omissions (as we forgive those who omit against us). The fact that I don't know about your gods in no way implies that I deny their existence.

Silly question, Is there a god. Clearly there are gods and goddesses all over the place. If it's metaphysical questions you are interested in, you might as well ask, Is there a tree? Is there a mountain? Is there a language? Is there a story? Is there an insect? How many do you want? How much time have you got?

It's not like I lie awake at night wondering about these things, although I do admit the question has come up in dinner-table conversation. (You had to be there.) I bring it up now because I ran across a book recently with the intriguing title 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction. I was intrigued as much by the subtitle as the title, but I'm sorry to say it has been a bit of a disappointment both as fiction and as theology.

But I went ahead and read it, and every time I was ready to give up and return it to the library, I'd start to care about the characters, some of whom are well-drawn, a few of whom seem like interchangeable foils for the protagonist, and some of whom are caricatures of the kind of people you love to hate.

It's a valiant literary attempt to do something really extraordinary in a single book, and some of the intellectual questions the author hamfistedly wedges into the narrative are interesting, although, as you might expect, those discursive asides tend to slow down the action just a bit.

It's a great idea to collect a whole bunch of cogent arguments, either for or against a controversial proposition, and use them as the bones of a novel. Here is a sampling from the Appendix, not for your edification but as an indication of the weighty tone that Rebecca Newburger Goldstein brings to her tale:

1. The Cosmological Argument
2. The Ontological Argument
3. The Argument from Design
4. The Argument from the Big Bang
5. The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants
6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws
7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences
8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences
9. The Argument from Answered Prayers
10. The Argument from a Wonderful Life
11. The Argument from Miracles
12. The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness
13. The Argument from the Improbable Self
14. The Argument from Survival After Death
15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation
16. The Argument from Moral Truth
17. The Argument from Altruism
18. The Argument from Free Will
19. The Argument from Personal Purpose
20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance
21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity
22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics
23. The Argument from Holy Books
24. The Argument from Perfect Justice
25. The Argument from Suffering
26. The Argument from the Survival of the Jews
27. The Argument from the Upward Curve of History
28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius
29. The Argument from the Human Knowledge of Infinity
30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality
31. The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal’s Wager)
32. The Argument from Pragmatism (William James’s Leap of Faith)
33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason
34. The Argument from Sublimity
35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza’s God)
36. The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments

You get the idea. She's a Serious Writer.

Postrelativism

"'Relativism' only makes sense in a realist epistemology." - Patty Lather

An article in the New York Times describes the strange position of Western filmmakers in North Korea who, in exchange for the privilege of filming in North Korea, must adhere to authoritarian Pyongyang standards of form and content. In order to reveal an informed view of the state control of the arts and society that is their subject, they have to play by the rules and thus show the absurdity of the rules. Go along and get along.

Very few Western artists have found their way through the obstructionist maze of official oppression to make a documentary film about the extremities of life north of the 38th parallel. The intention to subvert the system could only succeed ironically, by adhering to its restrictions and pleasing the approving authorities. Not biting the hand that feeds you, just obeying it with a straight face.

In the good old freedom-loving USA, paragon of democracy, diversity, and dissent, we don't have to resort to such duplicity.

In the Art World as the eminent critic Arthur Danto defines it - you know, galleries, museums, collectors, agents, buyers, sellers, critics - there is a (desperate) need for standards of high art and low, 'fine' and 'folk', this school and that, uptown-downtown, etc., and those distinctions of course serve many purposes. For one thing, the market appears to require them in order to set the value of the products it buys and sells.

If you buy into that worldview, as Danto, et al, clearly do and want the rest of us to do, then you become eligible to belong to the club - or not. [Note: eligibility does not guarantee membership, but buying in is a prerequisite to eligibility; let's get that straight.] It's a realistic view of art and artists, producers and consumers, supply and demand, goods and services, you know the drill. Qua realism, it is what it is; the world just works that way, so if you don't like it, get over it.

Besides, I read it in the New York Times, so it's true. Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, CBS, CNN, whatever. Don't you watch The News? These people make the news. They're professionals in a serious and competitive business. Whether they take themselves and the content they produce as seriously as their target audience does is another question. I'm guessing that the news biz is rife with ironists.

What several friends have tried to teach me on several occasions over the years - I'm a slow learner - is that this realist paradigm is not necessary or even helpful in understanding the world or getting by in it. On the contrary, it is liberating to take a peek outside it as often as possible, to think and act other than what expert opinion makers agree upon, and above all to not waste your life stoking the star-making machinery behind a popular soooong. Yet there are consequences to opting out of the dominant paradigm, and as a young poet once said, to live outside the law you must be honest.

My old friend Nancy tried to convey something like this to me back in Ann Arbor when as a callow lad I was desperately trying to be unique and special and extraordinary - at something, anything. She was as patient as humanly possible, but I was a slow learner in my own poetic and alienated way.

Another friend, Dazey, a couple of years later, was much more direct in setting me straight about art and life. Yes, there is a difference between theater and everyday life, and no, there is no difference between famous people and ordinary people. There are talented, cool, regular people all over the place doing amazing and groundbreaking work, so what if you haven't seen them on TV.

Professor Lather's statement several years later, uttered impromptu in response to my simple-minded assertion on behalf of 'relativism' during her qualitative research class, resonated in a similar way with respect to science, valid data, and education. What counts as 'true' is not the property of the institutions who fund the research. What counts as beautiful is not the property of the record label, the movie studio, or the publishing conglomerate. What counts as good is not the property of the church, the university, or Major League Baseball.

If you've heard all this a hundred times before, I beg your pardon. Like I said, I'm a slow learner, and it helps me to belabor the obvious every once in a while just to remind myself where I am.

Relativism was simply my favorite term du jour for the much more fluid and mutable view that nobody gets to determine for everybody else what the facts are, what is valuable, and whose work is most interesting and consequential. Realists want to stop the world and nail down once and for all what is the case and claim that it's just objectively so (because they said so).

Given that kind of categorical claim, you know someone will make the contrary claim, and since they don't want to be in the 'realist' camp, they have to call themselves something else. So along came the 'relativist' stance, an attempt to undermine realism by taking nothing as given. Okay, fine. That worked for about five minutes and generated a lot of theses by people who repeatedly told each other, "No, no, you don't understand."

But the more radical truth that Lather did understand is that you can't be a relativist without a realist to disagree with. That's like buying into the realist's argument in the first place, so never mind, might as well skip that step. Forget about relativism, because it's barking up the wrong damn tree. Kind of like trying to be all radical and alienated according to the rules of the New York Times and Arthur Danto, because they call the shots about who's hot and who's not, right?

Easter is

Redbuds blooming; daylilies and hosta poking out of the ground, peonies sending up thin tendrils, ajuga and lamium waking up, peach and pear trees budding out.

Transplanting chunks of overgrown thickets to areas of bare ground to fill in spaces; moving a few flagstones to make a better path between two rooms in the garden; pulling a few weeds to free up space for flowers and rocks to be visible; leveling off a couple of square-foot spots in the back corner to mark the last stop of Dali and Isabelle.

Grilling salmon, eating with potatoes, asparagus, and white wine outside with Zelda and Gven.

Great Dilemmas of Our Time

1. To read the entire front section of the Sunday paper or get to church on time? (did/did not)

2. To get coffee or tea during the break after open meditation and before the teaching? (coffee, then tea)

3. Where to park in Grandview? (on the street after going around the block twice)

4. To sit facing in toward the room or out toward the street while enjoying coffee and a scone by oneself at Stauf's? (inward by a window, best seat in the house)

5. To take matters into my own hands and use the plunger to unclog the toilet in a busy cafe after someone put paper towels in it, thus risking an overflow upon flushing? (I did/it didn't)

6. To begin our home bathroom renovation this spring instead of waiting until after we put new flooring in the dining room? (do it now)

7. To deceive/manipulate one friend in order to help another friend pull off a major coup? (no)

8. Does "Sunshine Superman" prove whether Donovan stands the test of time as a pop songwriter/performer? (it does/he does)

9. Does "Peaceful Easy Feeling" prove whether the Eagles stand the test of time as pop songwriters/performers? (it does/they don't)

10. Is it better to ask forgiveness than permission? (no, it's just easier)

11. Is it "tough love" or selfishness to withhold material support from one's adult offspring? (hmmm)

12. Is Stauf's hipster heaven for hipsters of all ages? (yes, but that's not a dilemma)

Jane Burns

I lost a good friend this week. I hadn't seen her in over a year, but prior to that we had spent many hours together, spread over several years, mostly in a second-floor classroom at Westgate Recreation Center. The thing about Jane was: she was present every minute.

Officially she was a student in a taiji class, and officially I was the teacher, but with Jane all bets are off. We were a group of people who met every week to practice and learn together. No one was in charge, no one was entitled to any privileges that others did not have; no one was excluded, degraded, or marginalized. We learned about movement, we learned about health, and I think we learned a little about respect.

Jane stood out as the senior student who never had a senior moment. She was a warrior who gave no quarter and expected none. She was one of a kind, and I will miss her.

When she was a beginner in the art of taiji in the mid-1990s around age 80, Jane was modest to a fault. Her way of dealing with this novel situation was to immediately befriend a shy young woman in the class, making both of them more comfortable doing something new and somewhat difficult. Jane always showed up on Tuesday nights, and it was clear that she practiced diligently on her own between classes. She uttered words of encouragement for her new friend Sue, and when Sue dropped out after a year or so, Jane adopted another reserved young woman, and they became fast friends.

Jane also befriended me. She went out of her way to do me favors, such as buying bulk whole wheat flour at a bargain price and delivering it to me after class. She knew I was a baker and simply found a way to help. Having retired some time ago after a career in the military, she volunteered for many years as a bookkeeper at WOSU radio. She lived with her two Siamese cats in a condo on the far west side.

Once we had known each other for a while, Jane asked me if I would help her trim the trees and shrubs in her yard. We set up a time on a Saturday morning, and I showed up at her gate with my lopping shears. She showed me around the little garden, pointing out her neatly designed assemblage of growing things, and I worked for an hour or so according to her directions. She gave me a glass of iced tea and a sandwich, and I met her cats - or the one who liked stranger, the one who wasn't hiding under the furniture.

So I would come over once a year and cut back the oakleaf hydrangea or the pieris japonica or the star magnolia. We would talk about this and that, and then I would see her next week at the rec center. On one of my visits, Jane enthusiastically showed me where her pacemaker was, just under the skin on her upper chest. "Here, feel it," she said, taking my hand without any self-consciousness and placing my fingers on the round disk just below her left collarbone. She was so happy to have the little electrical device attached to her heart and explained how effective it was in regulating her heart rate.

Jane had mentioned her cardiologist a few times and wasn't shy about discussing her health issues. Following a mastectomy, another doctor had recommended some exercises for upper-body strength and range of motion. Maybe that's what got her starting in taiji. She took up qigong, too, and made that part of her everyday practice. She liked living and being active, so she did what she could to keep going. She also mentioned her late husband Tom a few times. I think he was a career naval officer too.

When city budget cuts forced schedule changes, I stopped teaching at Westgate, so we didn't see each other every Tuesday, but still talked once in a while. I didn't get a return letter after sending her a Holiday card this year, and in February I received a note from her neighbor Mendy, informing me that Jane had passed away in November. She fell and injured her hip, leg, and arm a year ago and went from the hospital to a rehabilitation center, then to a nursing home, and apparently she never quite recovered. According to Mendy, "She simply wasn't happy being in the environment she was in," and truth be told, I can't imagine Jane sitting all day while other people took care of her.

When Lauren Bacall made a brief appearance on camera at this year's Oscars, my first reaction was: that's really great that Lauren Bacall even bothers to go to this event. My second reaction was: she looks just like Jane Burns. And they would be about the same age.

Lost & found

What are weekends for, if not to clean the kitchen, make French-press coffee instead of Mr. Coffee, sweep the back room, scoop the ashes from the stove, bury them under the snow, and turn a few heliotropic plants to face in instead of out? But this is no ordinary weekend.

It snowed again, but it only took a few minutes with my trusty shovel to clear off the back walk once I had secured the broken handle with a long nail and some electrical tape. That and other chores left enough time to start a batch of bread, and by the time the dough was ready to knead and rise again, it was time for the drum circle at the rec center.

They say things can either go very well or very badly in the Year of the Iron Tiger. What elemental forces are at work in the natural world and in human society? I did a reading for the incoming lunar new year, and the Book of Changes, in a new translation by Alfred Huang, was as cryptic as ever. Whether 'splitting apart' like firewood, or 'peeling off' like a banana, or 'falling away' like the husk of a seed, the imagery still gives me something very abstruse to work with. Something solid is eroding, but seeds will sprout and push against tough resistance. Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

I got to the drum circle late, as usual, and once I settled in, time passed all too quickly. Rhythm is not the same as time management. Ten or twelve drummers fed off each other's energy in 20-minute jams that just kept going, and a few steady hands knew when to bring it down to a close.

On the way home I stopped at the flower shop at Schrock and State and bought flowers for the three women in my life - my mother, my wife, and my daughter - and went home to knead the bread and build a fire. It isn't easy choosing just the right gift for someone important, someone with certain likes and dislikes, someone who sees everything as a symbol of something. It keeps it interesting. Then it's reassuring to do something you know how to do, something immediate and tangible.

While picking up an armload of firewood, I found my lost glasses under a big piece of split maple and put them in my pocket, possibly the same pocket they fell out of when I bent over while stacking wood back in October. Somehow I knew they would be there, it just took a while to use up that much wood. While the fire warmed up the den, I sat at my desk and bent the twisted right rim back into a shape that would hold the lens that popped out, cleaned the lenses, adjusted the nose pieces to sit on the bridge of my formidable nose, and put them on. They still fit better than the backup pair I've been using these past four months.

Now what? Plans A and B just didn't seem right, so we went to Cafe Istanbul for lamb with rice and okra, Turkish wine, and coffee. Yes, I think that's what weekends are for.

Just venting

The clothes dryer wasn't working because the heating coil quit Thursday night. I could tell, thanks to my keen powers of observation, when the cold, wet clothes I put in were still wet after tumbling around in a cold dryer for an hour and a half.

I consulted with my trusted sidekick Dr. Watson, who confirmed my suspicion that, yep, it's the heating coil alright. She did the real work of calling the repair shop, then calling the supply store to find out whether we could just buy a new coil and replace it ourselves, and finally getting it done by a professional from Apex for a reasonable amount of money.

The cause of the problem was unclear, but it might have had something to do with a clog in a low spot of the long and circuitous path that the hose took from the dryer to the vent outside the house. Venting warm, moist air in or underneath the house isn't recommended, and we don't need any moisture issues with our 120-year-old foundation.

So we chose to change the outgoing path of dryer air from the twisting, turning diagonal vent, made mostly of flexible tubing, that I cleverly devised when we moved in six years ago to a straight shot to the nearest exterior wall, as any rational person would have done in the first place. It took a while to determine which path to take from the back corner of an interior room to one of two outside walls, and my able assistant was very helpful in reducing the three possible options to the one obvious choice: straight back. Hamlet should have had her to help him cut through his endless deliberations.

While Dr. Ophelia Watson bought a couple of sheet metal vent pipes at the local Home Despot, doing our part to help Arthur Blank buy players for the Falcons and contribute campaign funds for Republicans in Georgia, I set to work making holes to vent through. Soliloquy (aside): Everyone has a special calling in life, and this is mine. Given enough practice, almost anyone can increase their skill at making holes in wood or a variety of other materials, and then going about the important work of venting hot air from their own chosen interior space to the relative safety of some nearby nontoxic exterior space. What can I say? It's what I do.

A little work with the jig saw succeeded in cutting a nearly round hole in the floorboards in the back corner of the laundry room, providing access to the shallow crawl space below. Meanwhile, there was enough of a break in the snowstorm for me to hunker down next to the back step outside and shine a light in the foot-square opening to the crawl space, piecing together exactly 13 feet of metal tubing (with an elbow), and feeding it in through the crawl space to the hole in the floor, in the snow, in the dark. You could cut the dramatic tension - and the duct tape - with a small utility knife.

To make a short story long - again, this is what I do; if you want snappy AP style, go read somebody else's boring blog - the vent hose from the dryer hooked right up with the upward-turned elbow just below the hole in the floor, and we dried a load of clothes that night, edified by the whole learning-by-doing experience.

Shoveling snow is much more therapeutic than fixing broken household devices, besides its obvious utilitarian value. So when the whole venting thing got frustrating, I would just take a break and shovel snow for a while and then felt better.

The next day Zelda came over for dinner, and the three of us watched the Superbowl together just like a regular Amerikan family. Actually two-thirds of us focused primarily on the badly crafted, unbelievably expensive and ill-conceived advertising that used the game as a carnival sideshow cum visual facade to sell snake oil to us rubes in the provinces. The other one-third of us watched very big, very fast men clad in armor bedecked in gang colors knocking each other down and preening for the crowd of like a hundred million consumers of goods and services.

Somewhere in that unlikely domestic scene, triggered by an ad for something - I don't know what - that referenced a YouTube clip about a little kid coming home still half-anaesthetized from the dentist, the three of us found ourselves in conversation about, how shall I say, our own youthful experiences under some form of medication. You can't plan that kind of parent-child disclosure, and it was good to get it out.

I am not Holden

So the moon is almost full, and I have a relatively minor birthday coming up in the rear-view mirror, and I'm feeling a nostalgic wave of emotion with the reappearance of a lost-lost friend through the fiendish magic of Facebook, and in the midst of the usual everyday ups and downs comes news of the death of a long-disappeared but still resonant literary hero. So I join just about everyone I know in celebrating the work and mourning the passing of J.D. Salinger.

I cannot think of a more poignant coming-of-age story than Catcher in the Rye, yet there is nothing I can say about it that hasn't already been said - and said badly - in a thousand freshman English papers. For starters, I'm betting Salinger would hate that word poignant, which I added in the second draft, and I'm using it anyway.

A literary critic on NPR praised Salinger for writing "with all his stars out," whatever that means. Actually I think I know what it means, but I can't tell you, and if you don't get it, well, never mind. It's a metaphor, damn it, a linguistic bridge from an obvious, so-called literal, statement to a truth beyond the literal, and either it speaks to you or it doesn't. It's something Salinger accomplished with remarkable, even breathtaking honesty. That's why Holden, that slightly snotty, sophisticated preppy antihero, hit home so well with so many less self-aware midwestern kids like me and every single one of my friends.

When I arrived in the rec center parking lot, I wanted to keep listening but I had to turn off the car radio because it was time for class to begin. One by one the students filtered in, and the circle in the middle of the room gradually expanded from three to four to eight, and the shakuhachi music in the background only made it more conducive to surrender to the lapping of the internal wave machine and to dedicate this evening's practice to an old man who valued privacy yet had contact with millions of fortunate readers.

There isn't much people can do for each other on a cold Thursday night in January in Ohio, but we can stand in a circle and try to keep each other from walking off a cliff. I had some time after class, so I went to the library just to see if there were any Salinger titles still on the shelves, and to my surprise found two copies of Franny and Zooey, so I checked one out, got a cup of coffee, read a few pages, and immediately fell back in love with the voice that so many young readers cut their reading teeth on. I wish I could write dialog like that.

What can you do? You go to your next meeting, where a few of the people in the circle are on the same page and some are not. You can listen respectfully and go home with the candle wax drying on your sleeve and answer the phone when it vibrates in your pocket. It's my parents on the phone, wishing me a happy birthday and disclosing, because I asked, the latest wrinkle in their ongoing struggle with the inevitable challenges of aging. Which I can relate to, but in comparison I have no idea, so there isn't much you can do but listen and bear witness.

Zelda came over for dinner the next night like a breath of fresh air on a cold night. She has read some, if not all, of Salinger's fiction, and she knows the characters well enough to correct my pronunciation of their names. So there is that. She and her brother are not Phoebe and Holden, but they have made their acquaintance and possibly gotten together for cocktails on occasion.

Haves 5, Have-nots 4

On the face of it, this week's Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited campaign spending is another major step toward institutionalized oligarchy. Or maybe it's just an open acknowledgment of what has long been the case in the United Estates of Amerika.

The myth that "our" democracy - of the people, by the people, and for the people - counts the votes and opinions of the rich and the poor equally has long been challenged by the practices of both major parties, by electoral irregularities, by lobbyists and fundraisers, and by selective news reporting. Nobody really believed that poor people, women, or people of color received equal treatment under the law or had equal access to the levers of power.

According to five old men in robes, the law of the land now confirms the widely held suspicion that person-like business entities with greater resources not just do but should have greater rights than others to shape policy and influence the composition of the public sector everywhere from dog catcher to Congress.

No one should be too upset by this officially validated state of affairs. You don't have to be a nineteenth-century Spencerian social Darwinist, a twentieth-century Ayn Rand egoist, or a gun-toting wilderness survivalist to know that the strong get to do things that the weak don't get to do. Although the degree and brazenness of their natural advantage has varied over the 250-odd years of Amerikan history, this disparity of power is built into the formal and informal structures and functions - the gesellschaft and gemeinschaft if you will - of this country.

By birthright or by the privilege of their position, rich white men founded the nation and directed its development into the military-industrial superpower in which we live. So it's no accident that rich white men have reaped the greatest benefits of a political economy set up to serve their interests. Despite the noble Jeffersonian rhetoric, the Framers did the self-serving Hamiltonian thing and made the new nation safe for bankers and merchants at the expense of common yeoman farmers.

Yet this is still the land of opportunity. The long list of exceptions in this historical materialist account has made it more interesting and open to fanciful interpretation by idealists of many stripes. De jure changes like the Fourteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts of the 1960s leveled the playing field on paper by granting equal rights to groups that had been disenfranchised by law.

Some were entitled to own property, to vote, and to have a lawyer's representation in court, and some are not. It hasn't been long since blacks and women were granted the status of human beings and gained the privileges of citizenship. And these legal reforms have had substantial de facto consequences, reflected in a more diverse ethnic and gender composition of local, state, and national government and culminating in the dramatic ascendance of Barack to the presidency. You've come a long way, maybe.

This inspiring triumphalist reading of Amerikan history is only one of many layers of text on a time line that also includes a series of wars fought largely by poor provincials on behalf of captains of industry; an Industrial Revolution that profited enterprising robber barons on the backs of immigrants and other exploited workers; income disparities that dwarf the aristocratic social hierarchies of Europe from which egalitarian Amerikans self-righteously distance themselves; health and social services that systemically exclude more of the population than any other so-called civilized nation. These things too make Amerika special. No, I'm not bitter. I'm just the last common yeoman farmer to wake up and smell the coffee.

Whining about the hypocrisy of judicial conservatives engaging in the heresy of judicial activism does little to address either the intention or the consequences of the Court's ruling on campaign spending. In theory, it equates dollars with free speech and corporations with persons, but the practical intent could be something akin to the Founders' compromises in 1789: to create a stable social order in which to do business, while hedging against the fickle desires and unreliable opinions of the ordinary rabble by placing real authority in the hands of those who know better and have the most to lose, should anything upset the applecart, and the most to gain by controlling the size, shape, location, contents, availability, and access to the applecart.

The consequences of the ruling are a little harder to discern, especially after the financial collapse of 2008 and the sense of denial with which the bailout and recovery have been managed by and for the parties who perpetrated the collapse in the first place. Rather than tamper with the very business practices that nearly brought down the system, while making them very wealthy, the oligarchs in New York and their minions in Washington bought themselves an escape hatch from accountability for large-scale mistakes, while increasing the accountability of the consumers, borrowers, and taxpayers who work for them. And yes, we all work for them.

Don't like it? Then move to Russia, where an authoritarian government in league with a small group of wealthy industrialists makes the rules that every Ivan and Nina has to abide by at their peril. Sound familiar? Or move to China, where a centralized ruling elite decides military, economic, and social policy while flouting the masses' civil liberties and access to information in the name of national security.

Clearly the differences in the material conditions of life in the three countries are significant, and the methods by which deals and made and authority is maintained are perhaps less blatant in the U.S. than in Russia and China. It's all done under the guise of due process and equal protection, and that gives patriotic Amerikans the right, by jingo, to call other countries corrupt. Our government is for sale, and it's all Constitutional and squeaky clean. Five old men in robes just said so.

A View with a Room

The upstairs studio becomes a bedroom; the downstairs bedroom becomes a living room; the downstairs living room becomes a studio. Everything has to be moved out of one room into another, so for a while, the only place to sit down was here at my desk while everything else was turned upside down. Most of the furniture that had to be shuffled around is at last in place, at least for now. We can sit down for a meal, and we can even watch TV in relative comfort.

The cable guy showed up late Saturday afternoon and connected the northeast corner with the internet and the southeast corner with the TV. He didn't balk at going into the crawl space during a snowstorm to drill a hole through the subfloor, and I got to use the new outdoor outlet. So the new living room is on the grid, and we've restored our connection with the outside world.

The changes in Om Shanty are making an amazing difference in our use of space. The sight lines are much improved, and suddenly looking from the dining room into the living room suggests connected spaces that you might want to inhabit. I can sit in the rocking chair watching TV and turn my head to see the fire in the den adjoining - which is still the best room in the house.