***
I've been self-conscious writing any more about our family's current and most recent health experiences, since those topics have so dominated these pages for the last 18 months. But it is simply a fact that the most interesting things happening to us now are, well, mostly medical.
So... Here goes another one of those stories.
1
First, it was me. We were beginning to count the days until my daughter's baby was due in late February. We had the suspicion he (we knew it was a boy) would not come until sometime after that but it was a tempting reference point anyway. In the middle of one night a few days before the preset date, I woke up with serious chills and fever. By morning I had diarrhea big time, which lasted all day. The temperature calmed down soon but the intestinal disruption continued for pretty much of 24 hours. Then, in that second day, I appeared to have outlasted the virus and was merely tired... But really tired. My wife A---- had nursed me and was still feeling fine.
By the way, we had both had our flu shots earlier in the year. But that just didn't defend anyone against the onslaught of this Noro virus monster.
Sure enough, there was no sign at all of the new baby as yet.
2
A couple of days passed as we congratulated ourselves on A----'s having managed to dodge the Noro bullet. Then ... Well, the slow-motion melodrama did resume, and in no time at all, I found myself on the phone to A----'s Primary Care Physician (in the 19th century - or was it the 20th? - we called this doctor our "GP"). I said: "First I had a virus involving a high temperature and then diarrhea, and now my wife has both nausea and diarrhea - no fever - and we're finding it impossible to keep her hydrated."
I thought I was going to go on to describe that she was now so weak she couldn't even sit up on the bathroom floor, she wasn't as lucid and logical as usual, and so on and so forth. But as soon as I said "dehydrated," the nurse practitioner in the PCP's office said to call 911 and get A---- to the Emergency Room. She would call ahead.
This happened to be the same hospital where our daughter was planning to go to in order to have her baby. If it had been a race, we were going to win.
3
The two EMTs with the ambulance - which surely resembled a fire truck, by the way - were fast. pleasant, and efficient. A----- had made it as far as onto her knees in the bathroom by the time they came in. But when the big guy asked if A---- could help them get her standing up and onto the gurney, she said loudly and in no uncertain terms, "I can't do it!"
Anyway, in a jiffy they had her up, out the door, and into the truck. I was to drive myself and meet them at Emergency. Perhaps I was a bit excited. I had been in the Waiting Room almost 15 minutes before the Ambulance/Fire Truck arrived. Using the back-roads route we had planned for the baby's arrival, it was a 28-minute drive. (The EMTs had used the main roads and no lights or siren.)
Within minutes of the I-V setting the fluids straight and a few minutes more for the anti-nausea medication to get going, A---- was her usual self, although she didn't remember much about the last two or three hours. They kept her overnight and then another day and night. She was hooked up to the I-V much but not all the time. In the second day, we did a few laps slow-walking the corridors. One more day in her own bed at home, and A--- began to slowly resume ordinary activities.
Two weeks passed. Still no baby.
4
Our daughter L------ was very sad to learn her body was not yet showing signs of impending delivery. Then, she had a 24-hr bout with Noro Splats herself. She was well cared for in the hospital and seemed to recover somewhat. The drug they'd been considering administering to stimulate labor was begun, and then stopped again to allow her to recover more fully from the dreaded Noro. The baby was waiting patiently.
Our son W-----, who had planned to come from his home in the big city for one of the baby's first weeks at home, arrived while his sister was still recovering from the virus in the hospital.
When the obstetrician started the birth process again, labor seemed on the way. One of the delivery nurses looked hard at our son-in-law R---- and ordered him to the Emergency Room. She told us later she had talked with her colleagues there to say it was up to them to get him back for the delivery, holding mean old Noro at bay.
5
R---- made it back in time to help all through a grueling delivery. Our daughter struggled long and hard for 24 hours, with little progress. Ultimately the baby-to-be began to show signs of stress. The decision was made to deliver by C-section.
That process went as expected, and our grandson was born. L------ was united with her new baby and started to nurse him, and R---- dashed home to be sick. Like me, he was not known to have vomited in many years. He made up for lost time that day, as the Noro diarrhea did its work too.
Our children L----- and W----- have always been close, but never any more so than the next three or four days when he more or less substituted for L------'s husband, even staying overnight twice to help with the baby in L------'s room with her. R---- kept in close touch with the action from home by phone. A----- and I visited the hospital often.
6
The long labor, preceded by the intestinal flu, had weakened our daughter considerably. She would not have been able to have the baby in the room with her, except for feedings, if one of us hadn't been on hand to help. We took turns, but W----- took the night shifts. The baby was doing great.
And the fifth morning after delivery, the new mom and her baby were able to go home at last. My wife and I had spent the afternoon the day before decontaminating the youngsters' apartment - Lysol all around - sending ol' Noro packing once and for all. R---- had got the car rigged up for the baby carrier. He was reunited with his wife and new son, and he drove them and W----- across the city to their second-floor walk-up. A----- and I followed.
L------ was still laid up from the surgery for a week or so, but W----- flew back to his home and work. R---- had a few days leave, and we grandparents helped out a bit. By the one month anniversary visit to the pediatrician, the latest arrival was doing great and his whole family was right as rain again.
Whew!
***
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
The Old Guy Arrives at His Final Destination
***
To himself: 'Bout as hot as Harlingen. Or maybe downtown Dallas.
Hey! How'r ya doin'? Yessir. And do we say, uh, Mr. ...Lucifer? Is that it? or is that right, sir?
Yass, well. Quite a place you have here. Not just anyone can come in, if I understand correctly. Oh no, not just anybody. I mean, am I right?
You know, it took a long time to climb that big ol' mountain. At the last stop, I mean to say. What's the name? Purr...? You know what I mean? That cloudy, dull mountain island. Where was that? Scandinavia?
And you couldn't rest much, oh no, oh no no no. Keep on plugging away. I had my say about that part, I'm telling you. Yes, I told 'em what's fair and what's not. They didn't get it. No sense of Justice, if you follow me.
And, yes AND... it sure seemed like we were going up. Up., you know? on the mountains stairs? And now, I mean, well. Now, one has the sense we're down - I mean - down... low. Am I right?
Surprised? You mean me, was I surprised? Well, let's say this: were you surprised when you got your orders?
Hello?
Yikes!
***
To himself: 'Bout as hot as Harlingen. Or maybe downtown Dallas.
Hey! How'r ya doin'? Yessir. And do we say, uh, Mr. ...Lucifer? Is that it? or is that right, sir?
Yass, well. Quite a place you have here. Not just anyone can come in, if I understand correctly. Oh no, not just anybody. I mean, am I right?
You know, it took a long time to climb that big ol' mountain. At the last stop, I mean to say. What's the name? Purr...? You know what I mean? That cloudy, dull mountain island. Where was that? Scandinavia?
And you couldn't rest much, oh no, oh no no no. Keep on plugging away. I had my say about that part, I'm telling you. Yes, I told 'em what's fair and what's not. They didn't get it. No sense of Justice, if you follow me.
And, yes AND... it sure seemed like we were going up. Up., you know? on the mountains stairs? And now, I mean, well. Now, one has the sense we're down - I mean - down... low. Am I right?
Surprised? You mean me, was I surprised? Well, let's say this: were you surprised when you got your orders?
Hello?
Yikes!
***
Monday, March 3, 2014
Byron's Android
***
I have heard my savvy wife A------ say to some supposed expert on the phone or in a retail store, "I am not a Luddite, but..." And so I have learned what a Luddite was and that in some ways I could be mistaken for one. Moving to St. Louis brought this to light once again.
1
In our home in central New York I had developed the firm habit of listening to a local FM station playing classical music all night long. The only problem was that at 5 a.m. this particular station stopped the music and started the morning news show. I coped by having an appropriate CD available in the boombox through which I listened to the FM station. That worked out fine. When the news came on an hour before I wanted to get up, I switched on my CD for a while. I was looking forward to re-establishing a similar system in my new home.
But, guess what, in St. Louis there are no regular FM stations that play classical music all night long! Even my best CDs playing on Random tend to get old after two or three hours; I can't be changing CDs three or four times a night... My well-established sleep pattern was in jeopardy.
A glimmer of hope was the fact that a small FM high definition station plays classical music 24/7. The least expensive HD radio I could find, however, cost $120 or so, and it didn't play CDs. I didn't want to give up ever listening to any of my great CDs, and I certainly wasn't going to spend over $100 when I already had everything I should need... Besides my bedside boombox is an old, tried and true friend.
2
In the run-up to Black Friday last fall, we saw a new device, marked down to under $50 that showed promise. On that Wednesday, A----- pushed and pulled me into Radio Shack to find out more about it. The store manager seemed to think we old ignorami were a worthy project. He didn't know anything about streaming classical music live through the night and was interested in my checking out I-Tunes and Pandora and something else for kids; but I knew enough about that side of it.
He was able to show us generally how to work this little thing. It's a 7" android tablet. It comes with a little transformer that is used to recharge the battery. It's easy and cheap to get ear buds to use listening to it.
In other words, we could tell that it would fit on by bedside table (next to the standard boombox), and I could listen to it with the ear piece without disturbing A-----. We went home planning to return at 8:30 a.m. Friday to get one of the three this store right around the corner from our house had in stock.
3
Late Wednesday, I thought I'd check it out one last time on the Radio Shack website. There it was, and whatever last-minute thing I'd wanted to look up was good... And by golly, it was already available for the Black Friday sale price. Sorry, Mr. Sales Manager. I ordered it: Trio, Stealth Pro, 7". I could lay it flat on my bedside table, plugged into the wall outlet saving the battery, and not disturbing my boombox which I can use for CDs or the AM broadcast of Cardinals games.
Naturally, although I'm not a Luddite (did I mention that?), it did take me a few days putzing around with my new device before I could be sure how to call up a Google search, where I could enter the call letters of an appropriate station so that a page would appear where I could punch "Listen Live" or "Live Stream" before the music would begin. Yes, it took a few days, but I did it.
4
It felt pretty good when I first punched in to the St. Louis H-D FM station that plays classical music all day and all night long. It's just what the doctor ordered.
But that's not quite the end of the little story. First, I noticed right away that this "new" station (to me, new to me) played a wide range of classical recordings but - unlike WSKG in Central New York - did not give a national news summary at the beginning of every hour. I hadn't quite realized that I liked that: usually, its 4 minutes or so didn't wake me up but if I were between dozes, I enjoyed getting a sense of what was going on. I took a wait-and-see stance on that issue, preferring to be glad just to have an opportunity to hear classical music through the night.
Also, though, I ran into something else. I have always plugged in to my ear piece a little after midnight, after a first round or two of sleep. I did that with WKMU-HD3 and went happily off to Wynken and Blynken land (Eugene Field's house is right downtown near Cardinal Stadium). Sometime around 2:30 or 3, though, I awoke to find that my android's screen had gone dark and the music had stopped. I was able after a few minutes to turn it off entirely, restart it, Google WKMU, and punch in again... but this shut-off or shut-down thing continued to occur.
...Which, of course, ruins the whole thing. I can't be spending a couple of minutes three or four times every night rebooting my music system.
5
Batting around some more, I found the setting for my machine going to sleep. The online manual says one can set Trio to go to sleep "NEVER," which sounds attractive. Only, on my machine, the longest period visible is 30 minutes. (It's never shut down that soon, in fact. Maybe the screen goes dark after 30 minutes, while the music continues; I don't know about that... because I don't care.)
I emailed Trio support. They said my query was too complex for email. So I telephoned MachSupport. The young guy was nice... Reminded me of the Radio Shack store manager. But he was stumped and said he was sorry but I would probably have to live with it.
I emailed the Webmaster of WKMU to whine about their throwing me off after 1 hour, or sometimes after 2 1/2... She said they wouldn't do that...
6
While banging around on my laptop trying to figure out how to get to the WKMU live stream in the first place, I had become familiar with several other stations who stream classical music through the night. In fact, there are apparently two nationally available services with which local stations can contract to have "Music Through the Night" (American Public Media) or "Classical 24/7."
Guess what? Although once in a while one or another of these others throws me off after two or three hours, sometimes they don't. They also play good music... In fact, the station in my New York home contracts with "Music Through the Night" just as WKMU does!
7
Now, I have at my disposal several different stations. One of them runs their own music show, and another uses "Classical 24/7." There's even one I have found that gives a national news summary on the hour. For a week now, this station has not thrown me off during the night, no matter when I first tune in. When they start their morning news show at 5 a.m., I can quickly punch in WKMU - which has the advantage of giving me the current weather report for right here in St. Louis.
Oh, and that other station I plug into when I want, the one which only rarely, if ever, has thrown me off, and who gives a news summary every hour....
Yes, it's WSKG from central NY!
***
I have heard my savvy wife A------ say to some supposed expert on the phone or in a retail store, "I am not a Luddite, but..." And so I have learned what a Luddite was and that in some ways I could be mistaken for one. Moving to St. Louis brought this to light once again.
1
In our home in central New York I had developed the firm habit of listening to a local FM station playing classical music all night long. The only problem was that at 5 a.m. this particular station stopped the music and started the morning news show. I coped by having an appropriate CD available in the boombox through which I listened to the FM station. That worked out fine. When the news came on an hour before I wanted to get up, I switched on my CD for a while. I was looking forward to re-establishing a similar system in my new home.
But, guess what, in St. Louis there are no regular FM stations that play classical music all night long! Even my best CDs playing on Random tend to get old after two or three hours; I can't be changing CDs three or four times a night... My well-established sleep pattern was in jeopardy.
A glimmer of hope was the fact that a small FM high definition station plays classical music 24/7. The least expensive HD radio I could find, however, cost $120 or so, and it didn't play CDs. I didn't want to give up ever listening to any of my great CDs, and I certainly wasn't going to spend over $100 when I already had everything I should need... Besides my bedside boombox is an old, tried and true friend.
2
In the run-up to Black Friday last fall, we saw a new device, marked down to under $50 that showed promise. On that Wednesday, A----- pushed and pulled me into Radio Shack to find out more about it. The store manager seemed to think we old ignorami were a worthy project. He didn't know anything about streaming classical music live through the night and was interested in my checking out I-Tunes and Pandora and something else for kids; but I knew enough about that side of it.
He was able to show us generally how to work this little thing. It's a 7" android tablet. It comes with a little transformer that is used to recharge the battery. It's easy and cheap to get ear buds to use listening to it.
In other words, we could tell that it would fit on by bedside table (next to the standard boombox), and I could listen to it with the ear piece without disturbing A-----. We went home planning to return at 8:30 a.m. Friday to get one of the three this store right around the corner from our house had in stock.
3
Late Wednesday, I thought I'd check it out one last time on the Radio Shack website. There it was, and whatever last-minute thing I'd wanted to look up was good... And by golly, it was already available for the Black Friday sale price. Sorry, Mr. Sales Manager. I ordered it: Trio, Stealth Pro, 7". I could lay it flat on my bedside table, plugged into the wall outlet saving the battery, and not disturbing my boombox which I can use for CDs or the AM broadcast of Cardinals games.
Naturally, although I'm not a Luddite (did I mention that?), it did take me a few days putzing around with my new device before I could be sure how to call up a Google search, where I could enter the call letters of an appropriate station so that a page would appear where I could punch "Listen Live" or "Live Stream" before the music would begin. Yes, it took a few days, but I did it.
4
It felt pretty good when I first punched in to the St. Louis H-D FM station that plays classical music all day and all night long. It's just what the doctor ordered.
But that's not quite the end of the little story. First, I noticed right away that this "new" station (to me, new to me) played a wide range of classical recordings but - unlike WSKG in Central New York - did not give a national news summary at the beginning of every hour. I hadn't quite realized that I liked that: usually, its 4 minutes or so didn't wake me up but if I were between dozes, I enjoyed getting a sense of what was going on. I took a wait-and-see stance on that issue, preferring to be glad just to have an opportunity to hear classical music through the night.
Also, though, I ran into something else. I have always plugged in to my ear piece a little after midnight, after a first round or two of sleep. I did that with WKMU-HD3 and went happily off to Wynken and Blynken land (Eugene Field's house is right downtown near Cardinal Stadium). Sometime around 2:30 or 3, though, I awoke to find that my android's screen had gone dark and the music had stopped. I was able after a few minutes to turn it off entirely, restart it, Google WKMU, and punch in again... but this shut-off or shut-down thing continued to occur.
...Which, of course, ruins the whole thing. I can't be spending a couple of minutes three or four times every night rebooting my music system.
5
Batting around some more, I found the setting for my machine going to sleep. The online manual says one can set Trio to go to sleep "NEVER," which sounds attractive. Only, on my machine, the longest period visible is 30 minutes. (It's never shut down that soon, in fact. Maybe the screen goes dark after 30 minutes, while the music continues; I don't know about that... because I don't care.)
I emailed Trio support. They said my query was too complex for email. So I telephoned MachSupport. The young guy was nice... Reminded me of the Radio Shack store manager. But he was stumped and said he was sorry but I would probably have to live with it.
I emailed the Webmaster of WKMU to whine about their throwing me off after 1 hour, or sometimes after 2 1/2... She said they wouldn't do that...
6
While banging around on my laptop trying to figure out how to get to the WKMU live stream in the first place, I had become familiar with several other stations who stream classical music through the night. In fact, there are apparently two nationally available services with which local stations can contract to have "Music Through the Night" (American Public Media) or "Classical 24/7."
Guess what? Although once in a while one or another of these others throws me off after two or three hours, sometimes they don't. They also play good music... In fact, the station in my New York home contracts with "Music Through the Night" just as WKMU does!
7
Now, I have at my disposal several different stations. One of them runs their own music show, and another uses "Classical 24/7." There's even one I have found that gives a national news summary on the hour. For a week now, this station has not thrown me off during the night, no matter when I first tune in. When they start their morning news show at 5 a.m., I can quickly punch in WKMU - which has the advantage of giving me the current weather report for right here in St. Louis.
Oh, and that other station I plug into when I want, the one which only rarely, if ever, has thrown me off, and who gives a news summary every hour....
Yes, it's WSKG from central NY!
***
Monday, January 27, 2014
The Faded Wheelbarrow (poem)
***
so little depends
upon
a faded wheel
barrow
marked with dust
veins
beside the quiet
coop
so little depends
upon
a faded wheel
barrow
marked with dust
veins
beside the quiet
coop
***
Sunday, December 29, 2013
The Old Guy Finally Meets His Maker
***
"Yo! Somm-Beesh!
"You couldn't do better than this? Scoliosis, really? Is that the best you could do? What? Did you leave your ruler in your locker that morning? You couldn't draw a straight line any more from A to B? Was that it, pal?
"And those allergies? What's up with that? That drippy nose?
"You wanted to push more business toward the Kleenex people? Is that the only way you could think of? You made it that way, because...?
"And then... Yeah. And then...
"The what? Brain?
"Well, yes. On that part, pretty amazing, really. Yes! Good on you there all right, you betcha.
"Except lately, you know? People like it for you to call them by name, by their first name, you follow me? Like you know them, personally, you know?
"But if you can't remember their names, after twenty or thirty years of seeing them just like every day or something... like they suddenly never had first names. You know? That was your precious brain work too, fella! Ya get me on that one, do ya?
"What? I mean, What? Oh...
"What's deserving got to do with it?
"Anyhow and anyways. What's up with you?"
***
"Yo! Somm-Beesh!
"You couldn't do better than this? Scoliosis, really? Is that the best you could do? What? Did you leave your ruler in your locker that morning? You couldn't draw a straight line any more from A to B? Was that it, pal?
"And those allergies? What's up with that? That drippy nose?
"You wanted to push more business toward the Kleenex people? Is that the only way you could think of? You made it that way, because...?
"And then... Yeah. And then...
"The what? Brain?
"Well, yes. On that part, pretty amazing, really. Yes! Good on you there all right, you betcha.
"Except lately, you know? People like it for you to call them by name, by their first name, you follow me? Like you know them, personally, you know?
"But if you can't remember their names, after twenty or thirty years of seeing them just like every day or something... like they suddenly never had first names. You know? That was your precious brain work too, fella! Ya get me on that one, do ya?
"What? I mean, What? Oh...
"What's deserving got to do with it?
"Anyhow and anyways. What's up with you?"
***
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Travel à la mode, OR aux modes (reminiscence)
***
In 1960 when I finished high school in central Texas, intercity and interstate travel was completed by car, by train, or by bus... Some could afford to travel by air, but that was expensive and air routes were rather limited. For a kid on financial aid 1,100 miles from home (undergraduate years) or 1,700 miles (first grad school), air travel back and forth was out of the question.
But in one particular trip home - for a summer break during my master's work - all three other modes of travel came into play. This must have been in 1965.
I'd always been attracted to the idea of traveling by train, and after living a year in Europe, the attraction was stronger than ever. On the other hand, in the early 1960s American railway companies did not want to run passenger lines. There were too few regular passengers, traveling to too few cities, to make enough money to keep the cars clean and in good working order or to pay the extra staff that were needed to look after the dwindling number of passengers. The government - who had provided the rail lines themselves and was providing continuing subsidies - insisted that passenger service be maintained, in order to support full employment. The rail companies responded by allowing frequent passenger train breakdowns and huge scheduling delays.
So the attractions of rail travel were considerably weakened.
Still, when I got started working in a large Eastern city on the famously "reinvented" New York Central Line, I gave in to my inclination and bought a ticket. I had to take a taxi from my neighborhood way out to the suburbs to climb aboard - at about 2 a.m., I think - but I'd paid my money and I was taking my chance!
I went to sleep right away, of course, despite there being no sleeping accommodations - a thing of the distant past on U. S. trains. I don't remember stopping at the station at Buffalo or Cleveland, but we may have done so. I was concentrating on Chicago, where the "New York Special" ended and where I had to transfer to a southbound train. Then, at St. Louis I would be transferring from the New York Central Line to the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Line, which used to rip by my family's home two or three times a day just at the end of the block (the station being in downtown Austin by the river).
Shortly after sunrise, though, our train began to slow down. There didn't seem to be any reason for doing so, but after a gradual slowing process, right there in the middle of an empty field, we came to a dead stop.
It was quiet. There was no one around to ask what was going on, but after twenty or thirty minutes, the word had circulated among the passengers that our train had evidently been going too fast, and now we had to stop until a big ol' freight train could motor on by us... It was understood that getting freight to its destination on time was more important than getting us to our destinations on time. I was scheduled for a three-hour layover in Chicago anyway, so I wasn't worried about missing my connection.
Sure enough, after what seemed an awfully long time another train blazed by us, going impossibly fast, headed in the same westward direction, on our right side. After five or ten minutes, we slowly began to follow...
So I was pretty nervous about ten p.m. when we pulled into the St. Louis station two hours or so after the "Katy" train was supposed to have left. And, yes, they had waited "a full half hour," the ticket master told me, before departing. Next train? Well, you see, there's only the one passenger train headed to Texas every day. The man helpfully pointed out that St. Louis has lots of good sites to visit...
I told him I'd probably just spend the night there in the waiting room, but he said No, it was cleared and locked at midnight.
I took my little grip and wandered to the exit. I was beginning to remember having passed through St. Louis on a Greyhound bus sometime a few years before. Right there at the curb was a taxi. I told the man to take me to the Greyhound station.
He looked at me a moment, and then drove me one and one-half blocks to the Greyhound station. That was silly, but what happened next marked the turning point on this trip home. As I came through the outside door, I noted on the sign just below the ceiling that a bus was scheduled to leave for Laredo in about thirty minutes. I knew that the regular route was Tulsa-Dallas-Austin-San Antonio-Laredo (with some intermediate stops too, of course).
What a stroke of luck! (What a smart guy I was!)
There was a short line of folks waiting to buy tickets. I took my place. After a couple of minutes, a young couple lined up behind me saying they were headed to San Antonio, where the young woman lived. (So I was indeed in the right place.)
After I had moved only one or two places nearer the ticket window, a man came through the big entrance doors. He seemed a little out of breath and in a bit of a hurry. He asked me, in a quiet voice - I clearly seeming to be the authority figure on the scene - if this was the line for the southbound bus. I acknowledged that it was.
This man - middle-aged, with a mustache, brown check sports jacket and tie over his dress shirt - looked up and around at all of us in line and shouted: "Excuse me! Excuse me?" he said. People looked politely his way.
"Would anyone like a ride to Tulsa?" He gave his name and offered to show his driver's license, and said he lived in Tulsa and just had to be home for an important business meeting by tomorrow morning. But he was getting sleepy, and he was wondering if one of us might be willing to drive him home while he napped, in return for a free trip that far south.
I must have asked him a question or two. He said it was a clear shot right down Highway 50, no turns at all. His station wagon, parked at the curb outside, was all gassed up...
Anyway, we were not even all the way out of St. Louis before this fellow was asleep in his back seat, and I was motorvatin' over the hill.
And I drove. And he slept. And I drove.
The outskirts of Tulsa were just beginning to appear on the horizon as the first glowings of daylight began to light up the wide sky, when Mr. Auto-owner began to stir, right on cue. As we approached town, he swung his legs around and leaned forward over my right shoulder. His breath smelled strong, but did not reek of alcohol. I never thought he had been drinking; he had just been sleepy.
After confirming that I wanted to go to the bus station, he guided me to the proper exit. I believe he said it was right on his way home. Once we got remotely close, in fact, the cityscape began to look familiar. The bus station was on a corner in a residential district. There was a Greyhound just beginning to load. It was somewhere around 4 a.m. if I remember correctly.
I had agreed to make the to make the trip for nothing, but as he came up to the driver's door and took the keys back, the man gave me $10. I didn't complain.
And, yes, when I asked the driver checking people's tickets, he said his bus was on the way to Laredo, stopping in Austin - as well as other places - along the way. He said I could buy my ticket at the next station.
The man was gone, almost home by now. I had a bus seat to myself and could settle right in to a snooze myself, with a straight, sure shot ahead of me to my chosen destination.
Late that afternoon I called my mother from the Austin bus station. She came to pick me up in a half-hour or so. When I got my refund on the train ticket from St. Louis on, this turned out to be the least expensive trip home I ever made. It was not as cheap as hitch-hiking in Europe, but for the U.S., it was a real deal.
***
In 1960 when I finished high school in central Texas, intercity and interstate travel was completed by car, by train, or by bus... Some could afford to travel by air, but that was expensive and air routes were rather limited. For a kid on financial aid 1,100 miles from home (undergraduate years) or 1,700 miles (first grad school), air travel back and forth was out of the question.
But in one particular trip home - for a summer break during my master's work - all three other modes of travel came into play. This must have been in 1965.
1
I'd always been attracted to the idea of traveling by train, and after living a year in Europe, the attraction was stronger than ever. On the other hand, in the early 1960s American railway companies did not want to run passenger lines. There were too few regular passengers, traveling to too few cities, to make enough money to keep the cars clean and in good working order or to pay the extra staff that were needed to look after the dwindling number of passengers. The government - who had provided the rail lines themselves and was providing continuing subsidies - insisted that passenger service be maintained, in order to support full employment. The rail companies responded by allowing frequent passenger train breakdowns and huge scheduling delays.
So the attractions of rail travel were considerably weakened.
Still, when I got started working in a large Eastern city on the famously "reinvented" New York Central Line, I gave in to my inclination and bought a ticket. I had to take a taxi from my neighborhood way out to the suburbs to climb aboard - at about 2 a.m., I think - but I'd paid my money and I was taking my chance!
Shortly after sunrise, though, our train began to slow down. There didn't seem to be any reason for doing so, but after a gradual slowing process, right there in the middle of an empty field, we came to a dead stop.
It was quiet. There was no one around to ask what was going on, but after twenty or thirty minutes, the word had circulated among the passengers that our train had evidently been going too fast, and now we had to stop until a big ol' freight train could motor on by us... It was understood that getting freight to its destination on time was more important than getting us to our destinations on time. I was scheduled for a three-hour layover in Chicago anyway, so I wasn't worried about missing my connection.
Sure enough, after what seemed an awfully long time another train blazed by us, going impossibly fast, headed in the same westward direction, on our right side. After five or ten minutes, we slowly began to follow...
2
Despite what you may have been expecting, I did make the connection in Chicago. But our train from New York was late enough for me to scoot right over to Track #9 (or whatever it was) without taking a break even to look out the front door of Union Station.
...Only to discover that our departure had been delayed, so that we could wait for some passengers making connections from the north (Minneapolis?) or the west (Des Moines?) Oh! I must have thought. I didn't have to worry. When you were running late, they held the connecting train for you. Didn't they?
Only, after about thirty minutes I began to realize I had only an hour scheduled in St. Louis to make my connection to the San Francisco Zephyr heading south.
We pulled out of Union Station Chicago about 40 minutes late, I think it was. It wasn't dark yet, so I could tell that we hadn't even left the metropolitan area before we stopped again.
3
So I was pretty nervous about ten p.m. when we pulled into the St. Louis station two hours or so after the "Katy" train was supposed to have left. And, yes, they had waited "a full half hour," the ticket master told me, before departing. Next train? Well, you see, there's only the one passenger train headed to Texas every day. The man helpfully pointed out that St. Louis has lots of good sites to visit...
I told him I'd probably just spend the night there in the waiting room, but he said No, it was cleared and locked at midnight.
4
I took my little grip and wandered to the exit. I was beginning to remember having passed through St. Louis on a Greyhound bus sometime a few years before. Right there at the curb was a taxi. I told the man to take me to the Greyhound station.
He looked at me a moment, and then drove me one and one-half blocks to the Greyhound station. That was silly, but what happened next marked the turning point on this trip home. As I came through the outside door, I noted on the sign just below the ceiling that a bus was scheduled to leave for Laredo in about thirty minutes. I knew that the regular route was Tulsa-Dallas-Austin-San Antonio-Laredo (with some intermediate stops too, of course).
What a stroke of luck! (What a smart guy I was!)
There was a short line of folks waiting to buy tickets. I took my place. After a couple of minutes, a young couple lined up behind me saying they were headed to San Antonio, where the young woman lived. (So I was indeed in the right place.)
After I had moved only one or two places nearer the ticket window, a man came through the big entrance doors. He seemed a little out of breath and in a bit of a hurry. He asked me, in a quiet voice - I clearly seeming to be the authority figure on the scene - if this was the line for the southbound bus. I acknowledged that it was.
This man - middle-aged, with a mustache, brown check sports jacket and tie over his dress shirt - looked up and around at all of us in line and shouted: "Excuse me! Excuse me?" he said. People looked politely his way.
"Would anyone like a ride to Tulsa?" He gave his name and offered to show his driver's license, and said he lived in Tulsa and just had to be home for an important business meeting by tomorrow morning. But he was getting sleepy, and he was wondering if one of us might be willing to drive him home while he napped, in return for a free trip that far south.
5
I must have asked him a question or two. He said it was a clear shot right down Highway 50, no turns at all. His station wagon, parked at the curb outside, was all gassed up...
Anyway, we were not even all the way out of St. Louis before this fellow was asleep in his back seat, and I was motorvatin' over the hill.
6
And I drove. And he slept. And I drove.
The outskirts of Tulsa were just beginning to appear on the horizon as the first glowings of daylight began to light up the wide sky, when Mr. Auto-owner began to stir, right on cue. As we approached town, he swung his legs around and leaned forward over my right shoulder. His breath smelled strong, but did not reek of alcohol. I never thought he had been drinking; he had just been sleepy.
After confirming that I wanted to go to the bus station, he guided me to the proper exit. I believe he said it was right on his way home. Once we got remotely close, in fact, the cityscape began to look familiar. The bus station was on a corner in a residential district. There was a Greyhound just beginning to load. It was somewhere around 4 a.m. if I remember correctly.
7
I had agreed to make the to make the trip for nothing, but as he came up to the driver's door and took the keys back, the man gave me $10. I didn't complain.
And, yes, when I asked the driver checking people's tickets, he said his bus was on the way to Laredo, stopping in Austin - as well as other places - along the way. He said I could buy my ticket at the next station.
The man was gone, almost home by now. I had a bus seat to myself and could settle right in to a snooze myself, with a straight, sure shot ahead of me to my chosen destination.
8
Late that afternoon I called my mother from the Austin bus station. She came to pick me up in a half-hour or so. When I got my refund on the train ticket from St. Louis on, this turned out to be the least expensive trip home I ever made. It was not as cheap as hitch-hiking in Europe, but for the U.S., it was a real deal.
***
Monday, December 9, 2013
Class - Is as Does (story)
***
The Right Reverend Stanley Patmore, known as "Pastor Stan," found the story below in the In-Box in the narthex. In the first months of this congregation (Pastor Stan's third), two or three messages were received each week. Now that the congregation has grown to 4,500 or so, only one or two messages are left each month.
The Executive Secretary and her boss met them all, took them all to dinner, the best and... well, the rest too.
Sallie was good at the intuitive part, the personality traits, values and attitudes, so while they waited for the waiter, or over their meals or coffee afterward, Sallie would be asking about hobbies, favorite vacations, maybe clothes or foods. Often the candidates would speak of their spouses or children or pets, of their age or even their health. The Dean focused on the professional side: why were they interested in moving? what was a typical work day? current scholarly interests? favorite class size and why?
And by the way, all of this was in the mode of pursuing the most important objective of the on-campus interview: to recruit the candidate. It's so much better for the university to be able to be making the choice, from among three or four good people, all of whom like the university!
Pastor Stan used to wonder why people turned in what they did. Did they think there was a possible sermon idea in there?
So after dinner with Teri Underwood, as usual, both Sallie and Dean D--- were right there on the same page. "Classy" was a word that each of them leapt to. Teri was tall with thick hair cut pretty short, like the twenties' "bobbed" style. Tweeds and plaids, very preppy. Professional, not formal. She moved gracefully and spoke well, looked you in the eye. A nice person to have dinner with, in fact.
The Director of the Speech Therapy program - the redoubtable Sophia - was a little cooler on Teri than I would have expected, given the one or two other candidates we had considered over the two years we'd already been looking. But she signed Teri up willingly enough. Sophia was a feet-on-the-ground, no-nonsense kind of a woman, more focused on results than on how she and her team appeared while getting the job done. D--- thought maybe that was why she was not as enthusiastic as Sallie and Dean D---. Teri might have been Sallie's cup of tea, but not Sophia's "cuppa joe."
Another picture began to emerge after a couple of semesters, however.
D--- had been asking the routine "How's Teri working out?" for six or eight months, with Sophia - in her regular meetings one-on-one with him - giving the obligatory, "Oh, fine."
At one point, though, a little comment began to follow the usual response, like "Well, she likes to do things her way..." But this wasn't presented as a real problem. Teri was teaching what she was supposed to teach. The students liked her. She was exploring the possibility of adding a certification we'd like to have, and she was continuing a community health project on her own time that she'd begun before coming on board.
No complaints.
And Pastor Stan wondered who had turned in what. He was never sure... and he never based a sermon on the In-Box.
In the mean time Sophia had been going through one test after another for a considerable period already, hoping to rule out cancer. But finally, everyone had to face the fact that she had it. D--- wasn't sure she took real time off, as her various therapies got started. She lost her hair, but got a great wig and kept on keeping on, slogging it out most of most days. She was the bravest person anybody ever saw, and - even more impressive - she was the most determined too. She just wouldn't give in.
The cancer was apparently in her blood, and she was taking lots of drugs, every day. She went about 100 miles to some specialist about once a month too.
And she kept the program rolling along just as it should, everybody pitching in. Most people at the college didn't even know about Sophia's cancer in the first years.
The Speech Therapy program had more bother than most departments do of extra work, keeping up with Health Department regulations and that sort of thing. In holiday periods and over summers, when faculty in other programs are busy on personal scholarly projects or working or re-working class plans, Speech faculty divided up various sections of self-study reports, gathered data, filled out forms and wrote up reports. Sophia mentioned early in Teri's second summer that she was hoping she didn't have to nag Teri so much as last year to get her share done. (It didn't need to be said that Sophia herself would be somewhat less available to step in and take over herself for anyone having trouble getting the job done.)
It was early that summer that Sophia took off her first substantial block of time yet. She went up to the City for bone marrow transplant therapy, which was then still in the experimental phase; she had been lucky to have Health department colleagues who got her into the trial. It was going to be a grim experience, Sallie learned from the senior faculty member in the department, but Sophia expected to be running things at the college from her hospital bed, using her laptop and telephone.
And she did. As usual Sophia planned carefully, monitored closely, and things got done... even though there were always unexpected and unwelcome surprises along the way.
As for colleagues, Sallie co-ordinated an eager group's individual cards, letters, flowers or fruit-baskets, and the like, so that Sophia knew we were thinking about her (and her husband, who had taken the whole time off too, to be at her bedside), thinking of her routinely and not just in the first day or so. Sallie ran the little plan as efficiently as Sophia might have done herself...
More than anything, Pastor Stan asked himself, every time: "What's the point?"
When D--- (and Sallie) next saw Sophia she had lost some weight, and her color was a little odd. Skin-tone maybe a little gray, or green? Or maybe it was just the absence of a little of the usual rosy vigor. Anyway, you couldn't say Sophia looked her usual self, but she was certainly behaving normally. Showing up for routine one-on-one's as usual, never presenting a problem without a proposed solution, or sometimes two. And so on.
She was a brick. Come to think of it, she was built a little that way too, solid, stocky, muscular. As her hair began to grow back in a little, the wig was sometimes a little askew but Sophia was still keeping on.
This experimental therapy and drug regimen worked too. Her blood count improved, as her husband quietly mentioned in the margins of some formal event, and she got back up to speed and her customary robust demeanor. The possibility of the cancer's return was an anytime thing...
The third year of a faculty member's appointment at the college is an important time. Colleagues, the program director, and the Dean all have to go on record saying whether or not the individual is making satisfactory progress toward tenure. In positions that are hard to fill, to be honest, one is inclined to give the individual second or third chances that might be denied someone in a more crowded field (like History or English or one of the fine arts). But Teri didn't seem all that close to the knife edge of a year's notice. She was not very accessible to her students, who did not seek her support as their academic or professional advisor either. She was doing the minimal - or less than the minimal - scholarly work, was not much involved in faculty committee work or that kind of college service, and although Sophia did not mention it particularly, when D--- as Dean asked if Teri was pulling her full share of the unusual paperwork load the preprofessional program faculty had to produce, Sophia was noncommittal.
Still, Sophia's recommendation was unenthusiastic, and the Dean's concluded with the line intended to rattle the cage: "If the decision were to be made today, it would not be for tenure." Teri asked to speak with me privately about my evaluation, but she just listened politely to my re-hash of the written review. She talked about some professional goals, which - as D--- told her - were perfectly appropriate, but that she would have to make demonstrable progress toward one or more of them in the next two years in order to succeed.
Our personal bond renewed, she left graciously enough, head held high.
Just catching Sallie's eye as Teri let the outer office, D--- knew she was again thinking "classy." And I was too. I was relieved there didn't seem to be real ill-will on either side of whatever little division there was between her and Sophia.
Pastor Stan was now moving into fast-scanning mode, always seeking "What's the point?"
From the memorial service for her four or five years later, D--- learned that Sophia was not only respected, admired, sometimes feared a little... She was also loved. Yes. Even though that term seems totally out of keeping with her personality, looks, and character. You knew she was someone you did not want to get crossways with, a person whose judgments were not lightly taken or easily challenged, who seemed to operate using reason and practicality more naturally than idealism or emotion. A classic professional. Competent. Efficient.
But many of her colleagues did not know of the students to whom she had given a ride when they couldn't wait for a bus and couldn't afford a taxi, whom she'd treated to a pizza or a burger when it was particularly hard to make ends meet, whose tuition she had silently subsidized with private scholarship deals she'd quietly arranged through the college's Financial Aid staff. And that kind of thing.
It had seemed entirely out of character, and out of keeping for our their working relationships, one day when Sophia was telling the Dean in June that she didn't know whether she could carry her normal load and fulfill her usual duties the following September.
She talked stoically enough, as always, and detailed how she would decide, and when, and how. Her tone of voice was flat, businesslike as usual. She was sitting bolt upright in the chair across from me, and her wig was just a little askew: all the typical Sophia.
But it astonished D--- to realize inside that when they stood at their meeting's conclusion, he was going to give her a hug. That was just going to be the right thing to do. This, you know, was not what one normally did with Sophia.
But D--- stepped toward her with his right arm a little out to the side, and she walked into the hug. It was just three or four seconds, but it was a real hug. They smiled a little as they separated; she turned on her heel and opened the inner office door. She waved as usual at Sallie as she turned down the hallway and plodded out.
When Teri's tenure swam into sight, even rather far out there on the horizon, it was real clear she couldn't make it. The fact is, she hadn't met even one of the standards we had reviewed that last time the two of us had met. It didn't look as though she had made any attempt to do so.
Sophia had even quit covering for Teri's refusing to do the extras required by the professional standards self-study reports. Only once, but once, she had admitted that the other faculty in the program were pretty disgusted with the extra effort Teri's laxities required from them.
In short, it looked as though Teri had surveyed the situation and had made the decision that, if we were serious about all we said we expected of her, this wasn't the right place for her. But she was going to make us be the ones to take the responsibility to say so. Okay, fine, D--- thought. I can handle that.
As the next academic year drew to a close, Teri called Sallie to ask for an appointment to see the Dean and Sophia together for an exit interview. That was unusual but not a bad thing in itself, and besides the non-reappointment process the year before had gone smoothly and Teri's terminal year had been problem-free too... So, why not?
Sophia was already with D--- in the inner office, having arrived precisely five minutes early, when Teri herself strode through the hallway door. Sallie ushered her in, and they all took a seat.
"We want to thank you, Teri," Dean D--- started, "for having completed your contract this year coolly and professionally," adding "That's an anxiety I as the dean have in such situations, and - like most folks, I have to say - you did well."
"Do you have your future plans all laid out?" Sophia asked, keeping up the conversational tone.
Teri did not seem her usual serene, above-the-usual hullabaloo self, despite her normal preppy suit and slacks and just-so hair style. "I know what I'll be doing," she said, then with a harder edge looking at Sophia: "no thanks to you."
"Well, that's fine then," I tried to get us back in the chit-chat mode.
But Teri wasn't having any part of it. She had come with a mission, and she was going to get right to it. "You're a miserable tyrant," she said to Sophia who looked back at her calmly. And before the Dean could wedge in a cautionary word, she went on. (Maybe it was a set speech she'd been rehearsing.)
"You know everything. It's always what you say that matters. You don't care about others, who have real lives and families and community obligations."
D--- was stirring but Teri just raised her voice so he couldn't intervene. "You don't even like yourself! So you're sick? You deserve it. You deserve to die. You - deserve - to - die!"
Dean D--- had stood up. Teri had, too. "That's what I have to say, and I've done it," she turned on her heel, pulled open the door to Sallie's office and stomped away out the door. Sophia was standing now, next to D---, side-by-side,
12
D--- asked Sallie to close the hallway door and come into his office to join him and Sophia.
"Sallie," the Dean said, "I have just witnessed the most despicable human behavior of my lifetime."
Sophia was sitting quietly again, looking impassively at the two of us.
"Oh gosh!" Sallie exclaimed. "I'm so sorry, Sophia." Then to D---, in a sort of stage-whisper: "At first, I kind of liked that girl."
D--- couldn't keep from laughing. Sophia sort of chuckled too.
"At first," Sophia said, "she seemed perfect."
*
Midway through his scan, Pastor Stan had stopped wondering who had been in attendance Sunday morning who might have written this thing. He didn't know of anyone who worked at the university...
It didn't matter, though; it was destined for his trash can. Would it be recyclable?
***
The Right Reverend Stanley Patmore, known as "Pastor Stan," found the story below in the In-Box in the narthex. In the first months of this congregation (Pastor Stan's third), two or three messages were received each week. Now that the congregation has grown to 4,500 or so, only one or two messages are left each month.
1
The Executive Secretary and her boss met them all, took them all to dinner, the best and... well, the rest too.
Sallie was good at the intuitive part, the personality traits, values and attitudes, so while they waited for the waiter, or over their meals or coffee afterward, Sallie would be asking about hobbies, favorite vacations, maybe clothes or foods. Often the candidates would speak of their spouses or children or pets, of their age or even their health. The Dean focused on the professional side: why were they interested in moving? what was a typical work day? current scholarly interests? favorite class size and why?
And by the way, all of this was in the mode of pursuing the most important objective of the on-campus interview: to recruit the candidate. It's so much better for the university to be able to be making the choice, from among three or four good people, all of whom like the university!
Pastor Stan used to wonder why people turned in what they did. Did they think there was a possible sermon idea in there?
2
So after dinner with Teri Underwood, as usual, both Sallie and Dean D--- were right there on the same page. "Classy" was a word that each of them leapt to. Teri was tall with thick hair cut pretty short, like the twenties' "bobbed" style. Tweeds and plaids, very preppy. Professional, not formal. She moved gracefully and spoke well, looked you in the eye. A nice person to have dinner with, in fact.
The Director of the Speech Therapy program - the redoubtable Sophia - was a little cooler on Teri than I would have expected, given the one or two other candidates we had considered over the two years we'd already been looking. But she signed Teri up willingly enough. Sophia was a feet-on-the-ground, no-nonsense kind of a woman, more focused on results than on how she and her team appeared while getting the job done. D--- thought maybe that was why she was not as enthusiastic as Sallie and Dean D---. Teri might have been Sallie's cup of tea, but not Sophia's "cuppa joe."
Another picture began to emerge after a couple of semesters, however.
3
D--- had been asking the routine "How's Teri working out?" for six or eight months, with Sophia - in her regular meetings one-on-one with him - giving the obligatory, "Oh, fine."
At one point, though, a little comment began to follow the usual response, like "Well, she likes to do things her way..." But this wasn't presented as a real problem. Teri was teaching what she was supposed to teach. The students liked her. She was exploring the possibility of adding a certification we'd like to have, and she was continuing a community health project on her own time that she'd begun before coming on board.
No complaints.
And Pastor Stan wondered who had turned in what. He was never sure... and he never based a sermon on the In-Box.
4
In the mean time Sophia had been going through one test after another for a considerable period already, hoping to rule out cancer. But finally, everyone had to face the fact that she had it. D--- wasn't sure she took real time off, as her various therapies got started. She lost her hair, but got a great wig and kept on keeping on, slogging it out most of most days. She was the bravest person anybody ever saw, and - even more impressive - she was the most determined too. She just wouldn't give in.
The cancer was apparently in her blood, and she was taking lots of drugs, every day. She went about 100 miles to some specialist about once a month too.
And she kept the program rolling along just as it should, everybody pitching in. Most people at the college didn't even know about Sophia's cancer in the first years.
5
The Speech Therapy program had more bother than most departments do of extra work, keeping up with Health Department regulations and that sort of thing. In holiday periods and over summers, when faculty in other programs are busy on personal scholarly projects or working or re-working class plans, Speech faculty divided up various sections of self-study reports, gathered data, filled out forms and wrote up reports. Sophia mentioned early in Teri's second summer that she was hoping she didn't have to nag Teri so much as last year to get her share done. (It didn't need to be said that Sophia herself would be somewhat less available to step in and take over herself for anyone having trouble getting the job done.)
It was early that summer that Sophia took off her first substantial block of time yet. She went up to the City for bone marrow transplant therapy, which was then still in the experimental phase; she had been lucky to have Health department colleagues who got her into the trial. It was going to be a grim experience, Sallie learned from the senior faculty member in the department, but Sophia expected to be running things at the college from her hospital bed, using her laptop and telephone.
And she did. As usual Sophia planned carefully, monitored closely, and things got done... even though there were always unexpected and unwelcome surprises along the way.
As for colleagues, Sallie co-ordinated an eager group's individual cards, letters, flowers or fruit-baskets, and the like, so that Sophia knew we were thinking about her (and her husband, who had taken the whole time off too, to be at her bedside), thinking of her routinely and not just in the first day or so. Sallie ran the little plan as efficiently as Sophia might have done herself...
More than anything, Pastor Stan asked himself, every time: "What's the point?"
6
When D--- (and Sallie) next saw Sophia she had lost some weight, and her color was a little odd. Skin-tone maybe a little gray, or green? Or maybe it was just the absence of a little of the usual rosy vigor. Anyway, you couldn't say Sophia looked her usual self, but she was certainly behaving normally. Showing up for routine one-on-one's as usual, never presenting a problem without a proposed solution, or sometimes two. And so on.
She was a brick. Come to think of it, she was built a little that way too, solid, stocky, muscular. As her hair began to grow back in a little, the wig was sometimes a little askew but Sophia was still keeping on.
This experimental therapy and drug regimen worked too. Her blood count improved, as her husband quietly mentioned in the margins of some formal event, and she got back up to speed and her customary robust demeanor. The possibility of the cancer's return was an anytime thing...
7
The third year of a faculty member's appointment at the college is an important time. Colleagues, the program director, and the Dean all have to go on record saying whether or not the individual is making satisfactory progress toward tenure. In positions that are hard to fill, to be honest, one is inclined to give the individual second or third chances that might be denied someone in a more crowded field (like History or English or one of the fine arts). But Teri didn't seem all that close to the knife edge of a year's notice. She was not very accessible to her students, who did not seek her support as their academic or professional advisor either. She was doing the minimal - or less than the minimal - scholarly work, was not much involved in faculty committee work or that kind of college service, and although Sophia did not mention it particularly, when D--- as Dean asked if Teri was pulling her full share of the unusual paperwork load the preprofessional program faculty had to produce, Sophia was noncommittal.
Still, Sophia's recommendation was unenthusiastic, and the Dean's concluded with the line intended to rattle the cage: "If the decision were to be made today, it would not be for tenure." Teri asked to speak with me privately about my evaluation, but she just listened politely to my re-hash of the written review. She talked about some professional goals, which - as D--- told her - were perfectly appropriate, but that she would have to make demonstrable progress toward one or more of them in the next two years in order to succeed.
Our personal bond renewed, she left graciously enough, head held high.
Just catching Sallie's eye as Teri let the outer office, D--- knew she was again thinking "classy." And I was too. I was relieved there didn't seem to be real ill-will on either side of whatever little division there was between her and Sophia.
Pastor Stan was now moving into fast-scanning mode, always seeking "What's the point?"
8
From the memorial service for her four or five years later, D--- learned that Sophia was not only respected, admired, sometimes feared a little... She was also loved. Yes. Even though that term seems totally out of keeping with her personality, looks, and character. You knew she was someone you did not want to get crossways with, a person whose judgments were not lightly taken or easily challenged, who seemed to operate using reason and practicality more naturally than idealism or emotion. A classic professional. Competent. Efficient.
But many of her colleagues did not know of the students to whom she had given a ride when they couldn't wait for a bus and couldn't afford a taxi, whom she'd treated to a pizza or a burger when it was particularly hard to make ends meet, whose tuition she had silently subsidized with private scholarship deals she'd quietly arranged through the college's Financial Aid staff. And that kind of thing.
9
It had seemed entirely out of character, and out of keeping for our their working relationships, one day when Sophia was telling the Dean in June that she didn't know whether she could carry her normal load and fulfill her usual duties the following September.
She talked stoically enough, as always, and detailed how she would decide, and when, and how. Her tone of voice was flat, businesslike as usual. She was sitting bolt upright in the chair across from me, and her wig was just a little askew: all the typical Sophia.
But it astonished D--- to realize inside that when they stood at their meeting's conclusion, he was going to give her a hug. That was just going to be the right thing to do. This, you know, was not what one normally did with Sophia.
But D--- stepped toward her with his right arm a little out to the side, and she walked into the hug. It was just three or four seconds, but it was a real hug. They smiled a little as they separated; she turned on her heel and opened the inner office door. She waved as usual at Sallie as she turned down the hallway and plodded out.
10
When Teri's tenure swam into sight, even rather far out there on the horizon, it was real clear she couldn't make it. The fact is, she hadn't met even one of the standards we had reviewed that last time the two of us had met. It didn't look as though she had made any attempt to do so.
Sophia had even quit covering for Teri's refusing to do the extras required by the professional standards self-study reports. Only once, but once, she had admitted that the other faculty in the program were pretty disgusted with the extra effort Teri's laxities required from them.
In short, it looked as though Teri had surveyed the situation and had made the decision that, if we were serious about all we said we expected of her, this wasn't the right place for her. But she was going to make us be the ones to take the responsibility to say so. Okay, fine, D--- thought. I can handle that.
11
As the next academic year drew to a close, Teri called Sallie to ask for an appointment to see the Dean and Sophia together for an exit interview. That was unusual but not a bad thing in itself, and besides the non-reappointment process the year before had gone smoothly and Teri's terminal year had been problem-free too... So, why not?
Sophia was already with D--- in the inner office, having arrived precisely five minutes early, when Teri herself strode through the hallway door. Sallie ushered her in, and they all took a seat.
"We want to thank you, Teri," Dean D--- started, "for having completed your contract this year coolly and professionally," adding "That's an anxiety I as the dean have in such situations, and - like most folks, I have to say - you did well."
"Do you have your future plans all laid out?" Sophia asked, keeping up the conversational tone.
Teri did not seem her usual serene, above-the-usual hullabaloo self, despite her normal preppy suit and slacks and just-so hair style. "I know what I'll be doing," she said, then with a harder edge looking at Sophia: "no thanks to you."
"Well, that's fine then," I tried to get us back in the chit-chat mode.
But Teri wasn't having any part of it. She had come with a mission, and she was going to get right to it. "You're a miserable tyrant," she said to Sophia who looked back at her calmly. And before the Dean could wedge in a cautionary word, she went on. (Maybe it was a set speech she'd been rehearsing.)
"You know everything. It's always what you say that matters. You don't care about others, who have real lives and families and community obligations."
D--- was stirring but Teri just raised her voice so he couldn't intervene. "You don't even like yourself! So you're sick? You deserve it. You deserve to die. You - deserve - to - die!"
Dean D--- had stood up. Teri had, too. "That's what I have to say, and I've done it," she turned on her heel, pulled open the door to Sallie's office and stomped away out the door. Sophia was standing now, next to D---, side-by-side,
12
D--- asked Sallie to close the hallway door and come into his office to join him and Sophia.
"Sallie," the Dean said, "I have just witnessed the most despicable human behavior of my lifetime."
Sophia was sitting quietly again, looking impassively at the two of us.
"Oh gosh!" Sallie exclaimed. "I'm so sorry, Sophia." Then to D---, in a sort of stage-whisper: "At first, I kind of liked that girl."
D--- couldn't keep from laughing. Sophia sort of chuckled too.
"At first," Sophia said, "she seemed perfect."
*
Midway through his scan, Pastor Stan had stopped wondering who had been in attendance Sunday morning who might have written this thing. He didn't know of anyone who worked at the university...
It didn't matter, though; it was destined for his trash can. Would it be recyclable?
***
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Prime (poem)
***
Prime
Prime
Some of you will remember
The eccentric schoolteacher who
Liked to speak of the prime of life.
The prime, she would say, or
One’s prime or my prime or yours.
And to us and the children, it may have
seemed
She herself was passed what
May have been called her prime,
Passed and on the declining side,
down
From the apex, the summit, the
mountaintop...
But who’s to say she was not right
And that was in fact
Her prime, after one or more
Her prime, after one or more
Aborted lift-offs, scrubbed
missions,
Abandoned dreams.
Or even that
Any time or every time has
A prime, if we can see it or sense
it
Or be it or live it? Who
Could say that, for sure?
Heading what may seem to some
Down, or just starting up
Or upward,
Who’s
to say?
From this little hollow, this
quaint
Modest valley or dale or depression
only,
Looking ahead, up I suppose,
I have entered, let me say, the
prime
Of my old age. Yes, Miss?
***
***
Friday, November 15, 2013
A Man and His Work
***
Not hold
His Audience.
I hated him.
Distant, safe
Twists
Remembering.
Others do.
I hate it.
They are
Very good
Poems.
***
A Man and His Work
I saw him
Not EngageNot hold
His Audience.
He dominated
Intimidated. I hated him.
Even now
Forty years Distant, safe
I hate him.
My stomach Twists
Remembering.
I don’t read
His poemsOthers do.
Very good
Poems.
***
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
...And I Almost Died Then, Too!
***
It was a beautiful summer that year. I was awfully busy at work, but was spending every minute I could find seated on the back porch soaking up as much of the vitamins D and K that Ol' Sol had to offer, maybe reading a detective novel or a baseball biography or maybe just having it at my side.
A team of VP's and other senior administrators were working hard to put together a dynamite overnight retreat in August, for team-building, group revitalization, and tightening our focus on a slightly new approach to making further progress. We'd done one five or six years earlier, and it was time again. That was the extra factor, making it a particularly busy time.
I had a regular, formal meeting on Wednesday mornings with my chief associate. We checked signals, chatted, crossed paths and the like several times every day, of course, but she was also taking care of some special projects of her own that we needed the set-aside time to discuss in some depth.
Well, one Wednesday morning my associate didn't seem her usual robust and energetic self, so I asked: "Are you okay?"
"Didn't sleep well last night. I think maybe I've got a touch of the 24-hour flu that's been going around."
"Ick," I said, drawing back just a bit. "Look, why don't you just take off? We can re-schedule Friday or so...."
"I want to finish up the morning and then go home for the day," she said, with characteristic determination.
So, we got right to it, and we did at least run through her little stack of papers and notes in less than the 90 minutes allocated. I shooed her out, made a call or two, and took off for lunch.
For a few months already back then, at my heart doctor's suggestion, I had been taking a little 20-minute nap each day after my sandwich and apple for lunch. Nothing seemed unusual either to me or to my wife that particular day as I slipped off to the bedroom and found some white noise on the television sufficiently lulling for the nap thing to take hold.
Only, when I woke up a few minutes later, I didn't feel all that normal anymore. I told my wife I was going to take another 15-20 minutes but not to call the office.
By that time I was feeling a little chilled. It was summer, remember, but I put a light blanket over me. I told my wife I must have picked up the flu from my associate. She call my secretary, who confirmed that I didn't have any meetings scheduled. I dozed again.
Maybe I dozed again, but I wasn't comfortable. My temperature was over 100, and my wife was beginning to talk about the doctor. When my shivers began to shake the whole queen-sized bed, I agreed she should call to see if I could come in for a quick exam.
During my cold-hot-cold-hot travails, I tired to pay attention to her side of the conversation. It turned out - as apparently everyone in town knew, but us - the doctors all took Wednesday afternoons off in the heart of the summer, presumably to play golf!
My doctor's service didn't have anyone "on call," as they say. "When you say, Go to Emergency," I heard my wife saying, "Do you mean go in at sit with my shivering, groaning husband in those hard chairs in the waiting room for 4 hours until someone can fit us in?"
Then she said, "Yeah, I thought so!"
I made do with a warm bath, an ice pack and an electric heating pad, and she launched into an attack on that list of household chores that we never got around to. Anything to keep her busy as she muttered about golf-playing doctors while their patients suffered. She checked on me from time to time, of course. We both felt the same about Emergency, but weren't happy about having to wait all the way to Thursday morning.
I kept dozing off and waking up to change from heat gear to cold gear. After a couple of hours, I hauled myself to the toilet. Afterwards, I propped myself up on the vanity and looked into my eyes... Only, what I noticed was a total surprise! My right jaw had suddenly swollen up as if I'd had a tooth extracted without benefit of any drugs.
Now this is a surprising development for someone who thought he was suffering from flu. Flu doesn't make your jaw puff up like that. My problem instead had to do with my teeth, despite the fact that I'd had no mouth pain, no gum bleeding, nothing like that. Was it, my wife and I wondered, an abscess?
The possibility of my having a tooth abscess may not sound like good news, but at least there was a chance that - even though it was a nice summer Wednesday afternoon - all the dentists in town might not be out of their offices.
My wife was back on the phone in an instant, as I limped back to bed. She got through to an oral surgeon we knew. He was booked up in an office in another town, but his staff got to him and got back to us how best to manage through the night, and he would see me before any other patient in still another little nearby town at 7:30 a.m. Thursday.
Just to have some of the uncertainty removed was a relief.
I don't remember how tough it was getting through to seven that next morning, but at that time, my wife had me hunkered down in the passenger seat as we slipped out the driveway and headed west.
We hadn't been to Dr. C-----'s office next to the hospital before, but it wasn't hard to find. The parking lot was empty, but the door was unlatched, the lights were on, somebody was looking out for us. I was ushered directly int0 the dental chair in the first office, and Dr. C----- himself was at my side.
Both his nurse and he said, "Oh my," or something of that order in a tone of voice that didn't instill confidence. I was a little blue, I understand.
Blood pressure: 60 over 40.
That's low. There was a little exchange of views about the Emergency Room, but that idea wasn't pressed. Dr. C----- explained that I clearly had a bacterial infection in one of my lower right side tooth cavities, that by now had spread into the rest of my body. I learned the term "septicemia." Anti-biotics were in order: an all-purpose one immediately, and tomorrow a more focused one determined on the basis of lab tests.
The doctor explained that he needed to extract from my jaw all the... well, all the pus he could get out, both to relieve the pressure on the spot and to provide the same for the lab tests. The needle he held up to show me looked about the size of a baseball bat. There was just a little spurt when he first slipped the point of it into my gum.
They phoned the 24-hour pharmacy and sent us on our way.
So that was the scary part. The recovery part started as soon as I popped the first antibiotic pill, and started getting a lot better when the lab report helped to determine a more specialized antibiotic. But after than pervasive an infection, I found, it takes a long time to fully recover.
Dealing with the abscessed tooth, the root canal, and all that seemed superficial compared to the effort my whole body seemed to have to make to get fully healthy again. I slept a lot, stayed in bed when I wasn't sleeping too, and - yes - sat reading or dozing for hours on the back porch soaking up the healthful rays.
And all that extra work? Somehow, it seemed to be getting done. I spent lots of time on the phone with my staff. My associate had not gotten the flu, by the way, and missed only that one Wednesday afternoon at the office. By Tuesday, I started tottering into the office for half days. I would typically go home around noon, have lunch, and then lie down for a nap... but the nap wouldn't be for 20 minutes or so. It might be for a couple of hours.
Fortunately, the group work for those of us planning the big August Retreat was already finished before that fateful Wednesday. I was scheduled for two important roles myself. A dozen or so of the participants were to be people who reported to me, so I was a key member of the team we were hoping to "build" (or re-build); it was important for me to be participating in the Retreat activities as much as possible. Then, I was charged with giving a final wrap-up speech designed to review key points made during the whole event and to help everyone leave charged up and ready to take the next hill.
The event was all set to start two weeks after my little adventure, and although my preparation work was pretty well done already, I was far from feeling the strength and energy I would have expected of myself during the Retreat itself... What could be done?
All my colleagues were very patient with me. As it turned out, I slept at home instead of spending the long evenings socializing with everybody at the Retreat. I'd show up after breakfast and jump into whatever we were doing... for a couple of hours. Then, I'd go find a quiet corner, lie down (more than once on the floor), and take a nap, after which I'd find a way to re-insert myself into all the hoop-la and group discussions. It was still a strain, but I could take it.
And I managed to get through my own wrap-up message still standing, although the razzle-dazzle must have been a little the worse for wear.
Afterward, that back porch was even more inviting! But on Wednesdays, I still thought resentfully about the doctors strolling around the fairways while their ailing patients talked to their answering services.
***
1
It was a beautiful summer that year. I was awfully busy at work, but was spending every minute I could find seated on the back porch soaking up as much of the vitamins D and K that Ol' Sol had to offer, maybe reading a detective novel or a baseball biography or maybe just having it at my side.
A team of VP's and other senior administrators were working hard to put together a dynamite overnight retreat in August, for team-building, group revitalization, and tightening our focus on a slightly new approach to making further progress. We'd done one five or six years earlier, and it was time again. That was the extra factor, making it a particularly busy time.
I had a regular, formal meeting on Wednesday mornings with my chief associate. We checked signals, chatted, crossed paths and the like several times every day, of course, but she was also taking care of some special projects of her own that we needed the set-aside time to discuss in some depth.
Well, one Wednesday morning my associate didn't seem her usual robust and energetic self, so I asked: "Are you okay?"
"Didn't sleep well last night. I think maybe I've got a touch of the 24-hour flu that's been going around."
"Ick," I said, drawing back just a bit. "Look, why don't you just take off? We can re-schedule Friday or so...."
"I want to finish up the morning and then go home for the day," she said, with characteristic determination.
So, we got right to it, and we did at least run through her little stack of papers and notes in less than the 90 minutes allocated. I shooed her out, made a call or two, and took off for lunch.
2
For a few months already back then, at my heart doctor's suggestion, I had been taking a little 20-minute nap each day after my sandwich and apple for lunch. Nothing seemed unusual either to me or to my wife that particular day as I slipped off to the bedroom and found some white noise on the television sufficiently lulling for the nap thing to take hold.
Only, when I woke up a few minutes later, I didn't feel all that normal anymore. I told my wife I was going to take another 15-20 minutes but not to call the office.
By that time I was feeling a little chilled. It was summer, remember, but I put a light blanket over me. I told my wife I must have picked up the flu from my associate. She call my secretary, who confirmed that I didn't have any meetings scheduled. I dozed again.
3
Maybe I dozed again, but I wasn't comfortable. My temperature was over 100, and my wife was beginning to talk about the doctor. When my shivers began to shake the whole queen-sized bed, I agreed she should call to see if I could come in for a quick exam.
During my cold-hot-cold-hot travails, I tired to pay attention to her side of the conversation. It turned out - as apparently everyone in town knew, but us - the doctors all took Wednesday afternoons off in the heart of the summer, presumably to play golf!
My doctor's service didn't have anyone "on call," as they say. "When you say, Go to Emergency," I heard my wife saying, "Do you mean go in at sit with my shivering, groaning husband in those hard chairs in the waiting room for 4 hours until someone can fit us in?"
Then she said, "Yeah, I thought so!"
4
I made do with a warm bath, an ice pack and an electric heating pad, and she launched into an attack on that list of household chores that we never got around to. Anything to keep her busy as she muttered about golf-playing doctors while their patients suffered. She checked on me from time to time, of course. We both felt the same about Emergency, but weren't happy about having to wait all the way to Thursday morning.
I kept dozing off and waking up to change from heat gear to cold gear. After a couple of hours, I hauled myself to the toilet. Afterwards, I propped myself up on the vanity and looked into my eyes... Only, what I noticed was a total surprise! My right jaw had suddenly swollen up as if I'd had a tooth extracted without benefit of any drugs.
5
Now this is a surprising development for someone who thought he was suffering from flu. Flu doesn't make your jaw puff up like that. My problem instead had to do with my teeth, despite the fact that I'd had no mouth pain, no gum bleeding, nothing like that. Was it, my wife and I wondered, an abscess?
The possibility of my having a tooth abscess may not sound like good news, but at least there was a chance that - even though it was a nice summer Wednesday afternoon - all the dentists in town might not be out of their offices.
My wife was back on the phone in an instant, as I limped back to bed. She got through to an oral surgeon we knew. He was booked up in an office in another town, but his staff got to him and got back to us how best to manage through the night, and he would see me before any other patient in still another little nearby town at 7:30 a.m. Thursday.
Just to have some of the uncertainty removed was a relief.
6
I don't remember how tough it was getting through to seven that next morning, but at that time, my wife had me hunkered down in the passenger seat as we slipped out the driveway and headed west.
We hadn't been to Dr. C-----'s office next to the hospital before, but it wasn't hard to find. The parking lot was empty, but the door was unlatched, the lights were on, somebody was looking out for us. I was ushered directly int0 the dental chair in the first office, and Dr. C----- himself was at my side.
Both his nurse and he said, "Oh my," or something of that order in a tone of voice that didn't instill confidence. I was a little blue, I understand.
Blood pressure: 60 over 40.
That's low. There was a little exchange of views about the Emergency Room, but that idea wasn't pressed. Dr. C----- explained that I clearly had a bacterial infection in one of my lower right side tooth cavities, that by now had spread into the rest of my body. I learned the term "septicemia." Anti-biotics were in order: an all-purpose one immediately, and tomorrow a more focused one determined on the basis of lab tests.
The doctor explained that he needed to extract from my jaw all the... well, all the pus he could get out, both to relieve the pressure on the spot and to provide the same for the lab tests. The needle he held up to show me looked about the size of a baseball bat. There was just a little spurt when he first slipped the point of it into my gum.
They phoned the 24-hour pharmacy and sent us on our way.
7
So that was the scary part. The recovery part started as soon as I popped the first antibiotic pill, and started getting a lot better when the lab report helped to determine a more specialized antibiotic. But after than pervasive an infection, I found, it takes a long time to fully recover.
Dealing with the abscessed tooth, the root canal, and all that seemed superficial compared to the effort my whole body seemed to have to make to get fully healthy again. I slept a lot, stayed in bed when I wasn't sleeping too, and - yes - sat reading or dozing for hours on the back porch soaking up the healthful rays.
And all that extra work? Somehow, it seemed to be getting done. I spent lots of time on the phone with my staff. My associate had not gotten the flu, by the way, and missed only that one Wednesday afternoon at the office. By Tuesday, I started tottering into the office for half days. I would typically go home around noon, have lunch, and then lie down for a nap... but the nap wouldn't be for 20 minutes or so. It might be for a couple of hours.
Fortunately, the group work for those of us planning the big August Retreat was already finished before that fateful Wednesday. I was scheduled for two important roles myself. A dozen or so of the participants were to be people who reported to me, so I was a key member of the team we were hoping to "build" (or re-build); it was important for me to be participating in the Retreat activities as much as possible. Then, I was charged with giving a final wrap-up speech designed to review key points made during the whole event and to help everyone leave charged up and ready to take the next hill.
The event was all set to start two weeks after my little adventure, and although my preparation work was pretty well done already, I was far from feeling the strength and energy I would have expected of myself during the Retreat itself... What could be done?
8
All my colleagues were very patient with me. As it turned out, I slept at home instead of spending the long evenings socializing with everybody at the Retreat. I'd show up after breakfast and jump into whatever we were doing... for a couple of hours. Then, I'd go find a quiet corner, lie down (more than once on the floor), and take a nap, after which I'd find a way to re-insert myself into all the hoop-la and group discussions. It was still a strain, but I could take it.
And I managed to get through my own wrap-up message still standing, although the razzle-dazzle must have been a little the worse for wear.
Afterward, that back porch was even more inviting! But on Wednesdays, I still thought resentfully about the doctors strolling around the fairways while their ailing patients talked to their answering services.
***
Friday, October 18, 2013
“Good Boy” (poem)
Good
job!
She says.Why not, I wonder,
Good boy!
As you say to a dog,
Having mastered
How to
“SIT”?
Ms Therapist says it
To me,
Having successfully
Tied My shoe.
***
Sunday, September 29, 2013
FIRST Principles
********************************************
I.
All sentient1 beings need to feel2 order3 and meaning4 in their lives.
This is the first basic principle. It will be analyzed phrase by phrase.
1. Sentient
A stone, presumably, does not have a need to feel that its existence is meaningful, that its surroundings would be different if that stone did not exist in the ways that it does. We could be imagining it, but we seems to think a pet dog or cat does sense such a need, and many of us would find it natural to extend that observation to all animals in their natural state, from wolves and deer to birds and even insects. About plants we may be unsure...
So... the less a person seeks to find order in - or to impose order upon - her or his existence, thereby giving it meaning - the more that person resembles a stone.
We could ask why it seems to be such an elementary impulsion for sentient creatures to expect to find their world meaningful, but whatever the cause of the impulsion, it is truly present.
2. to feel (order and meaning)
Let's not exaggerate. Few individuals are motivated to seek order and meaning in their lives in a conscious or comprehensive manner. Observing how others around us routinely behave is enough for most of us to satisfy our need to sense order in what we are doing, since we can either do likewise or do something different.
But living with the feeling that one participates in senseless chaos would lead one toward an uncivilized, inhumane, irrational life.
3. Order
Just learning the facts is usually not enough. Something in us seems to require knowing Why things happen.There are two kinds of answer to the question Why? One is historical, and the other is logical, causal or philosophical.
"Why?" one may ask, to which another may reply, "First, X happened, then Y, and finally Z." Putting X in its historical or chronological sequence seems to show that even if X is unexpected, it nonetheless fits into at least one kind of order.
OR one may ask, "Why?," to which another may reply, "The occurrence of X was caused by the interaction of Y and Z." As the outcome of a causal process - the presence of Y and Z being the cause, and X being the effect - X fits into an understandable order.
Finally, the answer to "Why X?" may be "X is an A, and Y is a B; an A and a B together are the same as Z." In other words, through reason alone one can find the order in a set of circumstances.
Reassuring ourselves that we live in what is at least most often an orderly universe is something that apparently all of us seek to do.
4a. Meaning
Without order, phenomena do not have meaning. The pre-biblical version of Job's story dramatizes this situation. Job thinks - as many do - that the order in our world is a moral order. If one is immoral, one suffers. On the other hand, it must also be true - he assumes - that if one behaves entirely in accordance with moral principles, one will not suffer but will prosper. Job behaves morally, and he prospers. QED. All makes sense.
But then suddenly, although Job's moral behavior has not changed, his success and prosperity desert him.
When given the opportunity to speak with the divine creator who is responsible for order and meaning in life, Job asks Why? But God does not reply.
That is the whole story as it was remembered for many generations in many cultures. Apparently, it is possible to behave entirely in accordance with moral principles and still to suffer.
Later those who were gathering the most important spiritual literature together, which eventually became the Bible, apparently felt so great a need to find order and meaning in life that they invented an introduction to the story, creating the fiction that the random disasters that one by one befell the good man Job were part of a contest between two spiritual powers. They were not meaningless, as they seemed to Job himself.
Like Job, most of us cannot find meaning in random occurrences.
4b. Order and Meaning
And not all order is meaningful. In other words, order is a necessary prerequisite for meaningfulness, but order alone does not confer meaning on events or situations. Doing the same thing every day, in the same order, may be efficient or may simplify decision-making, but routine in itself is not meaningful. Most of us find that mere routine does provide order, but we remain unfulfilled. Both order and meaning are what we seem to need to feel in our world.
Religion promulgates the sense that a relatively clear order, giving us meaning, exists externally, independent of any human mind. Science seeks an order and a somewhat limited kind of meaning that does exist externally. Art is different, but also is one of the indications that we seek order and meaning.
Art, for both its creator and its perceiver - provides good practice creating order and meaning, but which by definition are separate from that which exists outside itself.
Like artists, each of us must create values, or thoughtfully adopt values created by others, resting on observation and reason from which each of us can derive the principles necessary for civilized human life.
In order to have a sense of order and meaning in our lives, we need to guide our actions by moral principles. Since such values do not exist in nature, like things, they must be created so that from them, civilization may develop.
II.
The second principle is:
Civilized social life1 is based on humane moral principles2 derived from values3 created from facts4 as perceived by5 verifiable observation6 and unbiased reason6.
1a. Civilized social life:
It's not only that living alone is not the same as living as one of a group. It's not only that groups of individuals living together have a natural and inevitable tendency to get organized to some degree and in some ways. It's more than that.
No, a "society" - like a single individual - can be organized but uncivilized. Our basic first principle, though, is that our society will be civilized.
So what does that mean?
Perhaps at its essence, a civilization - or a civilized society - recognizes a principle of fairness or justice. In practice, fairness is not a sophisticated concept that anyone finds hard to understand. A child, for example, seems to develop a sense of fairness quite early in the maturation process. One of the first things you might hear a child say, it seems, is "That's not fair!" when it has seemed to her or him that he has done the same thing his friend or her sibling did but was rewarded when he himself was criticised for the very same action. At an early age, the child knows this is not right and that what is not right about it is that it is unfair. The problem is not the inconsistency; it's the injustice.
The key point, though, is that in civilized social life fairness and justice are defined with reference to everyone - not only to members of one nuclear family, or one extended family, or one clan or one tribe, or one gang or club or any one organization, or one religious sect, or even one nation. Family feuds, tribal or imperialistic wars, crusades are not instruments for exacting justice, establishing fairness, or making things right. Since it is not the purpose of such actions to treat outsiders fairly and since those treated "fairly" or "justly" in such conflicts are exclusively members of a particular group, such conflicts are uncivilized. The ancient Greek tragedies of the Oresteia dramatize the transition from a culture based on revenge (from tribe or clan culture) to a culture whose system of justice is based on impersonal laws.
In civilized social life, in other words, justice is based on principles, not on affiliations or kinship or any other personal feature, but on abstract standards that are applied to behaviors without regard to personal characteristics.
1b. Civilized social life
What is "uncivilized" social life?
Uncivilized social life is characterized by disorder of various kinds. In a society in which an absolute ruler rewards some and punishes others not according to principles more or less consistently applied but according to whim, fancy, or caprice, life is "uncivilized": unpredictable and intolerable.
Also, a social group characterized by individuals competing with each other with the results entirely indeterminable is "uncivilized." The strongest, most ruthless, and luckiest wins in such contests, with significant or possibly terminal results. Success in such societies is generated by chance and neither for just cause nor according to rational principles. That is an uncivilized way to live.
2. Humane moral principles:
The moral principles on which a civilized society is based grow from a respect for humanity: for other human beings, for all groups demonstrating respect for human individuals, for all who avoid inflicting pain on other beings (or on themselves, for that matter).
2. a.
Religious sects that emphasize the unworthiness and powerlessness of human beings, emphasizing instead the power and glory of the divine, sometimes do not positively espouse humane values. On the contrary, this sort of zealot believes that a person has no intrinsic worth and that no human life has any real value. People may be pitied, at best, but not admired or even respected. Is it "humane" to pity weak individuals who cannot help being worthless? Yes, but such a sentiment cannot be the basis of humane moral principles, which embody positive assessments of human value.
2. b.
We need to keep in mind that we are talking here about moral principles rather than metaphysical principles. Morality has to do with behavior. If one is speaking carefully, she or he will not say a person is "immoral" (or "moral"); only behaviors are either moral or immoral. Spiritual principles or concepts - even those emphasizing the might and authority of the divine as opposed to the fallibility and weakness of human beings (not to mention human mortality, contrasting with the deity's immortality) - do not necessarily impose inhumane moral principles on their followers. But such beliefs do not in themselves exclude inhumane morality.
3. Derived from values:
Moral values are the source of moral principles; logically, values come first. Values are concepts, which may be applied by actions; principles attempt to guide actions so that they embody or actualize the values an individual or a group upholds.
For example, if every human being is intrinsically valuable, then it is immoral to kill someone. (Incidentally, since a contradiction is easier to see than a confirmation, negative moral principles telling us what NOT to do are easier to articulate than positive principles telling us what to do.)
It is possible to extrapolate backwards from an action to the principles it exemplifies or the values it does or does NOT embody. If an individual has killed a number of others, for instance, the motivating principle might be "Kill those who... [are like those killed in this case]." And the value from which this principle is derived might be "[Such people] should be removed [for some reason]."
If an individual risks his or her own life to save some stranger in trouble, we might infer that among this person's principles is that all human beings should see the safety and welfare of others as her or his responsibility. This principle would presumably be based on a value system instilling every human being with value.
So, like other moral principles, humane ones are derived from values (humane values in this case).
But where do we find "humane principles"?
[Note: Relevant to the following section are the two parts of my discussion of the question, "Can moral statements be true?" below: http://byronderrick.blogspot.com/2012/04/can-moral-statement-be-true-part-one.html and http://byronderrick.blogspot.com/2012/04/can-moral-statements-be-true-part-two.html,]
4a. [Values] Created from facts:
If we see the sky growing dark late on a winter afternoon, we may say it is a fact that night has come. If we observe a person doing one thing or another, we may say it is a fact that he or she did that. If we feel our foot falling unexpectedly below ground level and pitch forward onto our knees, we may assume there was a hole in the ground that we had not seen. We hadn't seen it, but it was there; that is fact, we may say.
All of these facts exist external to us, or at least we behave as though they do; by definition, a fact is out there. (We may, of course, wrongly identify a phenomenon as a "fact" when it is not, when it is nowhere because it doesn't or didn't exist apart from someone's imagination.)
In this respect, a fact of course is different from an idea or a concept. A fact is different in this way from a value. In other words, values do not exist out there in the world, for us to get to know through our senses. We do not find a value the way we discover a fact. Values cannot be found because they do not exist in themselves.
When we see a person working hard to defeat a competitor even though such a defeat is clearly humiliating to the other person, while it makes no real difference to the individual we are observing, we may infer that the relentless competitor values winning for himself over making someone else feel good; but that does not mean that such a value exists, like the fact that the other competitor is being hurt. It shows only that the observed individual holds such a value.
People behave according to values they hold. Their actions upon analysis might reveal the values they hold. The only truth or "reality" values have is that they are believed by people and that they are sometimes inferred from human actions.
Naturally, just because "He" holds a certain value and behaves according to a certain principle has no necessary connection to "My" actions, my principles, or my values.
So I don't discover "true" values by looking around, and unless I decide to imitate someone else, I will not find my values and extrapolate my moral principles from others. So where will my values and principles come from?
4b. Created from facts:
If values are not real, existing in the world like facts; that is, if values - the source of moral principles - cannot be found... where do they come from?
They come from your imagination.
Values can be learned from others. Common experience and, I understand, many research studies have demonstrated this; values are not inherited like height and eye color, but the values parental figures live by as an infant grows up with them are likely to become his or her own. On the other hand, it is usually believed that a critical developmental experience for a young individual eventually is to consider her or his values independently. And, no matter what else we may say about this issue, we may state clearly that in a civilized society having a conscious sense of one's own values and the moral principles embodying them is encouraged and in fact is considered essential.
So, one cannot be content from simply reproducing the values of one's dominant culture. It is possible to do so. But such blithely accepted values from others are rather easily tossed aside in times of moral or ethical stress, which is when they are most needed.
Rather, in the final analysis, individuals create their own values from their own experience, using their own imaginations, informed to a reasonable degree by experience of others but making choices for one's moral base by oneself alone.
5. Perceived:
Most of us have had the experience of perceiving an event or situation and later discovering conclusively that the event did not in fact happen or the situation was not in fact what we had thought. "I know I left my keys on the dining table," you say as you look around your home preparing to go to work. Then you find them in the pocket of the slacks you wore the day before. OR "Wasn't it outrageous when X did Y," you think, and then you discover later that X had not done what you'd thought at first. It happens to all of us to think the facts are one thing when they were not; in other words what we perceive is not always "factual."
But what we perceive, balanced with what others tell us they perceive, and confirmed (or corrected) by later perceptions... what we perceive is the best we have. In creating our values system, we will be as careful as we can be to be influenced only by what we are reasonably sure are the relevant facts, knowing all along that just as we are creating these values ourselves rather than finding them in the external world, and knowing also that there is a small chance we have perceived the world incorrectly. (Even if values are created, in other words, dogmatism about them is inappropriate.)
We can be more certain of the worthiness of our values than we can of others' values because we cannot be as certain of the nature of their perceptions as we can of our own. It would be like thinking you know what joy is from someone else's description to you of it, rather than knowing what joy is from your own experience of it!
6. [perceived by] Verifiable observation:
It is well known that perceptions that are verifiable by other people, or by oneself more than once or under various circumstances are more likely to be "facts" rather than mere fantasies. Apparent perceptions that are unverifiable because they lack substantive content ("Jesus loves me") are also unsuitable as the basis for the creation of one's moral values.
7. Unbiased reason:
So we invent our values from facts, using reason. Just as we must do what we can to avoid fantasies (such as those based on fear - "The Devil is after me!" - and those based on hope - "If I strive to be good, I will live in bliss forever") as we seek relevant facts, just so we must do our best to avoid bias in reasoning about what is good and what is not good, what we should strive for and what we should avoid. The difficulty here is that bias itself is a value judgment. Most bias results from taking one's values from others, rather than from one's own experience and judgment.
So, if bias can be as much avoided in our reasoning process as illogic, if we can sufficiently separate relevant facts from fantasies, we can construct humane values for civilized living and derive from such values appropriate moral principles. Along with those around us, we will have a chance at building a civilized society.
III
Thus, the first two basic principles are -
All sentient beings need to feel order and meaning in their lives,
and
Civilized social life is based on humane moral principles derived from values created from facts as perceived by verifiable observation and unbiased reason.
*********************************
Sunday, September 15, 2013
A Different Sort of Credit Problem
***
1
My wife (L-----) and I lived in Grenoble, France, from October 1970 to June 1971. I was working in a one-year position; we had just been married on October 3.
My salary was automatically deposited each month for me in a checking account at the Banque de France. The salary seemed low, even lower than some U. S. internships despite the fact that it was in fact for a fairly high-level, full-time professional position. But there were generous benefits and government salary supports - such as small a monthly payment to allow us to buy milk and another monthly payment to support my particular profession... And in France at that time, the cost-of-living itself was remarkably low, too.
The result of all this was that at the end of the year, we found we'd actually saved almost half my annual salary.
2
I'd been lucky enough to land a good job in Washington, D. C., starting in fall 1971. A nice little nest-egg for getting started in our new home - which turned out to be a two-bedroom apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland - was just waiting for us in our Banque de France account.
But there was a little problem.
The exchange rate between the French franc and the US dollar, which had been frozen for a long time, was freed up just as we had been preparing to leave France in summer 1971. The amount of French money we could take with us in cash out of the country was severely limited, but the folks at the Banque de France had led us to believe that the exchange rate would stabilize in a few days, at which time we could write a check (cheque) on our foreigner's account (comte etranger) for the full balance so that we could set up a new account in America. By the way, it was clear that the franc was losing against the dollar at that time, so that the Banque de France was losing a little more every day they held onto our money - and we gained a little more - but, never mind, because the rates were in flux, the funds could not be moved.
3
Before we'd left the U. S. in 1970 we'd sold my wife's car, putting the proceeds in a savings account we could use to buy another car when we got back. That process worked fine, and because we were going from her big gas-guzzler (as they said back then) to a subcompact, we actually had enough cash to buy the new car. We got a particularly good deal from my wife's Uncle Pat who worked for a Ford dealer in the Midwest.
We also had a few items of furniture each of us had accumulated and stored during our single lives, so we could sort of camp out in our unfurnished apartment... temporarily! But we'd planned on fitting the place out right away so that we could be more settled and more comfortable... And then, we had this nest-egg that we could spend...
But wait a minute! We couldn't spend it because it was being held in France!
4
It seems like it wasn't until we actually moved our few things into our new apartment that Mr. Fogarty, the building manager, got around to mentioning, well, you know as everyone does, don't you, that there's a code that says 80% of the floor area in any apartment has to be covered by carpetting.
No, we hadn't known that, which meant we were going to have to take on still another expense, without the cash which was still over in France that we'd thought would cover everything we would need to get settled.
Anyway, it seemed only logical to buy the carpeting first, before we got any real furniture that we would just have to put on top of it. So, we looked at Yellow Pages or something and figured where there was the biggest collection of discount stores where we could get the most for every dollar. We'd have to just give up on our commitment to pay cash for everything. No one else did that, after all. So we would just buy it on credit.
I had a Visa Card deep in my wallet since I hadn't used it in 10 months or so, along with my Texaco card from even longer ago. Same kind of thing for my wife.
5
We thought this carpet-buying thing would be one hairy big deal. But we measured every room two or three times and figured out just what we wanted. And for a while it looked as though negotiating the heavy car traffic to the stores would be the hairiest part of the deal.
We went into this one big place, and a guy came over to wait on us. L----- said, "We've just moved here, and we discovered that it's a code that our apartment..."
"--Has to have 80% of all the floor space covered by carpets," he said waving an arm around. "And let me guess," he added. "The floor is parquet, parquet flooring, right?"
That was right. He knew his business, our business. "I've got just what you need," he said.
L---- was telling him the basics we'd been talking about as he led us over to some big rollers along one wall.
So after the carpet had been selected and written up for the order, The salesman asked for my credit card. I gave him the VISA I had dusted off before we set out that morning. The salesman disappeared into a rabbit's warren of little cubicles at the back of the showroom. After a moment, he beckoned for us to join him. We settled into a couple of chairs near his desk, as he stared into some little machine. He said the card had been discontinued; did I have another?
"Well," I said, "only my Texaco card, which we haven't used for nine or ten months." By this time we'd explained that we'd been living in France and that if our funds were not temporarily frozen in the Banque de France, we'd be making our current purchases in cash. He accepted the gasoline card, explaining that all they needed was to show we had a good credit record.
L---- was relieved at that. "Neither of us has ever missed paying in full our monthly credit card bill," she correctly explained.
Of course the Texaco card had been discontinued too, as had L-----'s credit cards. "Why don't you just verify that we've always paid the monthly bill in cash?" we asked. No luck.
The salesman was by now fully engaged in trying to make this sale. He pondered one thing or another. Then, he had a bright idea: "Oh yeah!" he exclaimed. "Do you own a car?"
Yes, we did. It was right out front.
6
So after the carpet had been selected and written up for the order, The salesman asked for my credit card. I gave him the VISA I had dusted off before we set out that morning. The salesman disappeared into a rabbit's warren of little cubicles at the back of the showroom. After a moment, he beckoned for us to join him. We settled into a couple of chairs near his desk, as he stared into some little machine. He said the card had been discontinued; did I have another?
"Well," I said, "only my Texaco card, which we haven't used for nine or ten months." By this time we'd explained that we'd been living in France and that if our funds were not temporarily frozen in the Banque de France, we'd be making our current purchases in cash. He accepted the gasoline card, explaining that all they needed was to show we had a good credit record.
L---- was relieved at that. "Neither of us has ever missed paying in full our monthly credit card bill," she correctly explained.
7
Of course the Texaco card had been discontinued too, as had L-----'s credit cards. "Why don't you just verify that we've always paid the monthly bill in cash?" we asked. No luck.
The salesman was by now fully engaged in trying to make this sale. He pondered one thing or another. Then, he had a bright idea: "Oh yeah!" he exclaimed. "Do you own a car?"
"Who financed the deal?" the salesman asked triumphantly. "CASH?!" he burst out when we told him. "Nobody buys a car with cash!"
So after a minute, equilibrium recovered, he asked: "How can I verify that?"
8
Uncle Pat was at work that afternoon at Friederich's Ford several states west, and he confirmed that we had indeed paid cash. Our salesman strode away murmuring to himself, but when he came back from his boss's office, the deal was made.
By the time the carpet had been delivered and was rolled out on our parquet floor, which meant we could look for furniture, we'd found that Texaco and L-----'s gas card company had been more than happy to renew our old credit cards on the telephone.
We didn't have any more trouble, despite the Banque de France. But from then on, when out shopping, we always kept Uncle Pat's business card with us, just in case!
***
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)