Xmas Wrapup

'Twas the night after Christmas and all through the day
There were signs that the children had done more than play.
Of the living room rug we had long since lost sight
As its burden of paper grew, morning till night.
And the ribbons and bows that had graced every gift
Lay scattered and splattered, too many to lift,
And to tell who gave what we were no longer certain
Except when a label popped out from a curtain.
To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall
There was plastic and paper and boxes and all.

With his motions impeded by oceans of plastic
The Grinch who lives with us might do something drastic,
Absent some effort to clean up the place,
To pick up the boxes, to clear out some space.

He no sooner had vowed not to do it himself,
When someone stepped forward: a right jolly elf,
And smiling and waving, she came on the scene
With a sack she held tight that was plastic and green,
Then she spoke not a word but went straight to the floor
And she picked up the papers, the ribbons and more
And she stuffed the sack with them and giving a nod,
Handed them off to her deer partner, T__d.

It was good while it lasted, but far from complete,
For the plastic still catches the old Grinch's feet
There are pieces of toys that belong in a box
That somehow get caught in the toes of his socks,
And sharp things that pierce through the sole or the heel
That none but the Grinch who lives with us can feel,
And things that are larger and easy to trip
And fracture a thigh or a hip or a lip.
Though no one else sees them the Grinch knows they're there,
So he's painting a sign, "Let the traveler beware".
And he's staying confined to his dark, tiny room,
For no matter how dank or how musty the gloom,
He prefers to be thought somewhat iconoclastic
To ending his days as the victim of plastic.

Bah, humbug

Well, here we are again, the last three days before December 25th. During the run-up to this festive occasion, every member of the tribe has been sick with a flu variation that seizes hold of the stomach and lower digestive tract with ramifications that are unpleasant both to experience and to relate.

It does take the edge off one's desire to celebrate a season notorious for egregious menus and involuntary gluttony. And that's a good thing. But the whole notion that somehow the meal must go on, despite the fact that the preparer herself is a walking virus farm is perhaps worthy of re-examination.

Far better, it seems to me, to celebrate the fact that this season offers the gift of about four days in a row off work. This is time that can be spent, sick or not, in allowing the body to relax from the daily grind of getting up at an unnatural hour to satisfy the demands of the workplace. Modest reason though it may be, the gift of time is the one that universally returns the most benefits.

Two-day weekends are only a partial luxury, given that the first day is barely long enough to spin down from the weekly trance, and the second is over too soon. Sunday night is not the best night for sleep, because the mind ramps up to deal with the upcoming fresh and/or unfinished business of the week at hand. Saturday, for those of us who are fortunate enough not to have to work it, is ideal because it begins without the tyranny of the alarm clock, and ends with the promise of yet another day devoid of the same.

Thus, a gift of four mornings without a rude awakening is a rare treasure. Why spoil it by eating egregiously and indulging in seasonal gluttony? Why mess it up by slaving for the better part of a day over a massive menu that will end up in overconsumption and discomfort, with the attenuated aftermath of same-tasting leftover food that must be dealt with in the ensuing days?

Back in the day, consumption meant one thing: tuberculosis. Now it means consumerism. Which disease is more destructive?

Press Delete

Is writing one of those "riding a bicycle" skills: Painful to learn, but once you get the hang of it you never forget how to do it even if you seldom do it?

Or is writing one of those "setting your digital watch" skills: You did it once by accident but that was last year and this is this year and damned if you know how to do it this year?

Writing indeed could be like a whole variety of other things we learn how to do, but some of us don't, as Eeyore said sadly, simply because there is a whole variety of other things we like to do. "Priorities", Eeyore might have muttered, had he known the word, which probably he did but was too depressed to think of it.

Back in the day when paper and writing instruments were all we had, writing in the sense of literary endeavor as opposed to penmanship was not for Everyman. It was, for the most part, one of the delights of the leisure class, who happened to have much of the education and most of the leisure. When Gutenberg developed moveable type, as everyone knows, the promulgation of literature to the masses became possible. And so it continued, with every new development of technology tending to lower the common denominator of who could be published and/or popularized.

As "recycled electrons" becomes the medium of choice, the blog and the wiki and all their variations are supplanting the book as the medium for delivery. The language is changing more rapidly; shrinking through the elision of vowels and by the return to phonetic spelling. Sink your Bluetooth into your Blackberry and you have instant earphonic communication. hu nedz vwlz?

So what is the future of writing? Who can say? If laws are written and promulgated in text message format, they will be impossible for the older generation to understand, but if they are not, they will be too archaic for the young. Will a work of literature have to be translated to l33t in order to be appreciated?

Another associated and equally disturbing trend is that which decrees that everything written, photographed, said or thought must be archived and preserved for future generations unknown. What distinguishes the archivist from the librarian in this regard is the subtle thought that the archivist strives to preserve everything because it is not possible for us in the present to know what will be important in the future. The librarian seeks to arrange everything currently available for the best possible retrieval, and recognizing that space is limited, seeks to keep the best of what is current at the expense of discarding the deadwood. I would hope that writers generally take the latter view.

Amazing strides are being made in the field of storage and retrieval of information. The next big thing is probably holographic storage although nanostorage solutions (manipulating storage at the subatomic level) are also field of intense interest. So perhaps storage capacity won't lag behind need as much as it does now.

In the technologically advanced countries we are largely unable to erase any trace of our personal histories because we have no idea where it is stored and in what format and who has access to it. And since mistakes are inevitable and all systems break down at some point, the record we leave behind may not even be wholly ours or may be only partially true, or could be altered to serve some undesired purpose.

So the question remains: how badly do we need to record everything about everything? If the population of the world in just forty years from now is 9 billion and climbing, will there be answers to the problems of supply that our progeny would otherwise not be aware of had we not kept all the archives of all the agricultural enterprises of our own day?

There certainly will be problems if we don't preserve the seeds from today and plant them tomorrow, since engineering of crops diminishes the diversity and thus disease resistance of our plants. Is the same true of our culture? Will the generations to come somehow be unable to cope because we failed to record everything we did? Smhw i dnt thk so.

There's snow way around it...

Today's snowfall put new meaning into the second syllable.

It was one of those heavy, wet snows that come when it's not terribly cold. The stuff clumped and layered over the tarp on the car shelter that I had constructed this summer and reinforced with chicken wire this fall in anticipation of one of those heavy, wet snows that come...

When I came home tonight, I saw that the center peak of the car shelter I made out of those thin metal tubes of a former dining tent had collapsed down onto J's car. I got out a stepladder and a rake and removed as much of the snow as I possibly could. By the time I finished, the general roofline was flat, but at least not sagging onto the car.

This, of course, means that any further snows will simply repeat the process. And on the 50 degree days that are forecast to follow later this week, the water will pool in the tarp, and flow down through the slits that I had to put in it this summer when it rained and remained undrained.

A real, honest-to-gosh car shelter would have cost upwards of $800, which is money that only the government has at this point. So I'm forced to consider how I am going to cope with having a saggy, baggy tarp that has to be harder to shovel off than the car would be if I just took the whole thing down. But such is the problem with designing for assisted living.

There may yet be hope. This weekend, weather permitting, I shall betake me to the local domicile improvement emporium in the hope of finding structural reinforcements. A couple of two-by-fours artfully fastened by plywood braces should do it, wouldn't you say?

Byron Katie

I confess: I like days off. For the most part, Saturdays are not days off, because the accumulated and regular tasks tend to take a largish bite out of the available time. The laundry, the dishes, vacuum cleaning and generally picking up are just the beginning. Sometimes the housecleaning extends to carpet shampooing, since the Law of Baby Feeding Gravity is in resurgence. And then there are the special efforts required on days when a cooking and baking frenzy has left the sink invisible under the overburden of assorted tools, pans, beaters, whisks, measuring devices and platters. Needless to say, I am not the original user of this type of gear: as they say in baseball, I follow in the cleanup spot.

It's not as if I'm the only one engaged in these activities: we have a shared schedule that works fairly well for the most part. Before we put this in place by consensus, there was a sense of resentment which would rise to considerable heights when a string of days went by with little evidence of cooperative effort. It's amazing how formalizing a schedule can lead to better habits while reducing excuses.

Sundays, however, are more like it. Once having freed myself from the family-based historical guilt feelings associated with failure to attend a place of worship, I found out how beautiful the seventh (or first) day of the week really can be. What a gift to be able to sit around in pyjamas (rather than office duds) and explore new worlds of sound and sight on the internet, at my own pace, without any particular objective except to find worthwhile things that have been unknown to me until that moment.

I've always felt uncomfortable using the phrase "I found ... on the internet." That's claiming too much credit. What I "found" is not a discovery so much as an uncovering of what has been there for some time.

Example: TheWork.com. Many thousands of people know of Byron Katie and her simple, four-question method that results in turning around the direction of lives.

I came upon this amazing woman and her story while watching an unrelated video on YouTube.com. There are dozens of videos of interviews and sessions that she has done over the course of 20 years or more, but the essence of her presentations is always the same. It involves identifying the issue (say, resentment over dirty dishes being left in the sink, or toys on the floor), examining how I feel about and react to that issue, and then questioning what life would be like if I did not have that feeling. The objective is to see whether or not what I am thinking is true. Katie believes that we are so attached to the truth of our own thinking and assumptions that we don't think to question them, to see what the truth really is.

The end of this process comes in the turnaround, when I see that the resentment is something that I generate, rather than the people who leave the place messy, and once I free myself of this belief, I can calmly and more appropriately deal with it. Over time, she says, this process of questioning becomes automatic whenever confusion (which is the source of suffering) occurs.

There are many others who have found their own pathways out of their suffering and have shared their experiences and ideas with the rest of us. A day off is a good time to explore them and find out which ones work for you.

Thanksthinking

So here we are, on Thanksgiving eve, thinking about how nice it will be to not have to pay attention to the alarm clock for one extra day this week. And then we remember that we have grown so used to getting up before the clock alarm so as not to disturb the partner that we can't really enjoy the prospect of a late lie-in, even though the alarm will not be set.

And of course, there are the dogs across the street, who seem to be let out into the yard to give voice to their discontent as soon as the sun begins to rise. What annoys them, perhaps, is their electronic collars which respond in some semi-painful fashion when they cross the buried transmitter boundary wire in the front lawn.

So, to calm the wearied and over-active mind, I turn to Shoutcast.com, to Otto's Baroque on 1.FM while the rain begins. The windows remain open just a smidge because the predicted cold front has not yet pushed into the region. But just as I settle back and my eyelids begin to flutter toward total closure, I remember that the laundry has to be moved from the washer to the dryer.

While performing that minor chore, I think of the enormous distance we have come over the past two generations. From the crystal radio to the satellite radio. From the washtub to the washing machine. From the 8 mm black and white silent film camera to the high definition home theater digital video. From the evening newspaper to the web log. I'm thinking here only of the field of communications. All other fields, from astronomy to zoology have made similar discoveries, mainly because of new technologies.

It has taken enormous inventive, creative engineering and manufacturing skills achieve this kind of technical-mechanical progress.

Not only do these manifestations of creativity make life easier, on the whole they make it more enjoyable, interesting, educational, healthier and longer. Outrageous claim? Not really. The potential, at least, is there to stimulate the mind, the body and the spirit. At the most basic, we are vibrating cycles of impossibly small matter and impossibly huge energy, which is probably why I resonate with Otto's Baroque in such an elementally refreshing way.

So this Thanksgiving...

The primary ordeal

Everyone in the house is sick at the moment, except for me and the cats. What is it about cats that seems to let them mosey along through life without succumbing to the general unhealthiness of humans? Of course, when you look this up on Google, you find that the difference is whether the disease is contagious (from one to another in the same species), or zoonotic (from one species to another). And if you look farther, you can get fairly worried, not about the lifespan of the cat so much as that of yourself, from just the latin names of the things they can give you: Leptospirosis, Echinococcosis, Ebola fever...

The problem with most things that don't go down well with human beings is that of being "too soon old, too late smart". Things that we should discover early enough to do something about end up killing us. The newly discovered adenovirus 14 seems to offer a case in point.

It's generally true, too, that it's not the big things, like the nuclear bomb, that are going to kill us. There's too much at stake for any country to start a nuclear war. Back in 1945, that wouldn't have been true, but with the sophistication of weaponry today, the deterrent effects are pretty obvious given the "assurance of mutual destruction" that nuclear weaponry guarantees. Self-interest is keeping us from launching the war to end all humanity, at least so far.

But it's the small stuff, and anyone who tells you "don't sweat the small stuff" is a maxim-izing meathead. Viruses and bacteria and decomposition have always waged war for supremacy on this earth, and the viruses are getting smarter while we...

A study I heard about today on NPR says that Americans average two hours of TV a day and only 7 minutes of reading. What a difference. TV, generally speaking, stimulates somnolence and passive acceptance, while reading triggers thought and imagination and creativity.

So dumbing down is not a myth. It's as real as global warming. And, should the trend continue, and by the law of inertia it seems likely to continue, the next generation will be stupider than we are, and so on down the line. At some point the viruses and bacteria will be well positioned to take over and become the dominant species. Just as they were in the primordial soup. Welcome back, Rotter.

Cats have (ring)masters?

There is actually a Moscow Cat Circus with one Russian ringmaster and 120 cats. He says that the secret of his protégés' performance is that he watches them, gets to know what they do, and builds their acts around that. He also acknowledges that you can't make cats do what they don't want to do.

He has discovered two simple principles, both of which could be the basis of a whole new approach to a better world for all.

Consider. The first point is observation. Quietly watching other beings as they go about doing what they do, without interfering or trying to spread democracy on them. Refraining from intervening to achieve one's own ends. Withholding criticism of their way of life, their beliefs, their preferences and their way of doing things. Admiring them for being who and what they are, and seeking to understand them better without criticism or complaint. Offering encouragement and applause for a job well done.

The second point is acceptance. Realizing that cats have staff, not owners. Understanding that cats dictate the terms on which you shall live with them. Knowing that cats will respond to open hands and arms and laps: that an occasional can of tuna will restore their faith in human kindness and you in particular.

Ah yes, but is the Moscow Cat Theatre exploiting the very nature of cat life for monetary gain? If the cats are as happy and cooperative as they seem to be, who can argue that anything cruel or untoward is happening? It must cost a fair amount of money to maintain 120 cats. They earn their keep, and the entire enterprise probably never has to deal with mice.

Our cat, Kaboodle, has always greeted me at the door after work. Lately, she has added a couple of tricks to her repertoire of attention-getters. In addition to meowing in response to my verbal affirmations, she sits back and raises her right paw. I take this to be her offer to shake hands, but if I'm not very quick, the paw is replaced on the floor.

The circus-worthy moment, however, comes when she stands on her back feet, even for only a few seconds, and extends her front feet into the air. So far as I can see, she does this in response to my bending down slightly, reaching out, and offering to scratch her ears.

One of these days, Kaboodle, you'll be ready for the Big Top. But please, don't run away to join the circus. We'd rather you be a barn cat than a Barnum cat.

The Evil Eye and the Susceptible Ewe

Whenever Dusky, the senior male cat in the household, decides that he wants a particular place or seat, he simply jumps into it. Usually, the place he lands is on J's lap. But whenever the place has an incumbent, he takes a different, much more subtle approach: he gives the occupant the Evil Eye.

Invariably, staring at the opposition with an unbroken gaze is sufficient to force the abandonment of such a prized location. The loser, usually Kaboodle, slinks away, scarcely daring to glance backwards, but clearly mortified and somewhat angry at having to relinquish the venue. The more comfortable the resting place the more resented the victory.

What is most intriguing to me is that more often than not, he will stay in his new-found eyrie just long enough to establish his seniority. Then he will jump down again and wander off in search of new conquests. It is not that he particularly wanted the spot in the first place. It is more likely that he needed to boost his sense of self by maintaining his rights as he sees them.

His method, however, does not transport easily. I have tried it once or twice on the grandchild, but the fact that I have eyes of slightly different colors tends to fascinate rather than intimidate. It does not work on the cats, because they either do not know what I'm trying to do, or they are such excellent practitioners themselves that they are immune to its effects, or they get bored and look away.

According to Wikipedia, the origin of the evil eye is in the envy that one feels when others have good fortune. You may be casting it unintentionally on the person whose good luck you envy. But there is a defense: paint a blue bullseye on yourself or your house, and the Evil Eye will be rendered powerless. But you may feel a bit sheepish when people ask you about your decorative tastes.

It's about time.

OK, so now we're goin' down Route 66. Today's birthday boy is your obedient scribe.

What's it like being 66? Well, for one thing, it's like being twice as old as you were at 33, and three times as old as you were at 22, and six times as old as you were at 11.

Before we try to figure out what it feels like to be sixty-six times as old as you were at age one, let's just stop and think for a moment. Do you remember what it was like to be one year old? If you do you must be a phenomenon.

Actually, it's not too bad. Speaking for myself, I'm more settled now than I was at any of those other milestones. Different things annoy me now from those that annoyed me then. When I was six, I wasn't particularly easily annoyed by children. Well, mostly I was afraid of them. But at 66, interacting with kids has become one of my least sought after activities. I think this is partly the result of attenuation of hearing. As I lose the range of upper frequency response, I am less able to make out what kids are trying to say, particularly at the early stages of child development. And what I can understand, in most cases, is not something that offers much in the way of subject interest. Perhaps as I grow older, they will too, and some moments of effective communication are to be anticipated whenever that may happen. But it is likely to be a brief window indeed, given that I'll be nearly 80 when the granddaughter is a mere 16-year old, assuming we both survive.

What, then, you ask, are the joys of being on Route 66?
They are, at a minimum, three in number.

1) To have survived for another year is a fine thing. Much preferable to the alternative.
2) Some people seem to take note of my age and appearance and show a certain, perhaps undeserved, deference. I no longer have to do all the dishes and all the cleaning. Which is a good thing because
3) Time has become a valued commodity. It's amazing how much there is to do each day, and how little of it actually gets accomplished. When I was twice as young as I now am, I could remember to do things very easily. It didn't mean that I did them, but at least I was aware that I needed to do them. Now, my best friend is a to-do list at Google Calendar.

And so, as life progresses toward unavoidable eventuality, knowing that it's highly unlikely that we'll someday be twice as old as we are today, let alone three times as old, we take the time to reflect on our turning off the freeway to follow Route 66 for a year. May this be the road less traveled by, making all the difference.

Mess-merized.

As you get older, does time seem to move faster for you or slower? If, like me, you are still working for a living, chances are it seems to move faster. There are not enough hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the month nor months in the year to accommodate all that you have/would like to do. When you were younger, you had time to waste. Now, wasting time seems like a waste of time.

But then again, perhaps it is really a simple matter of being disorganized. It's not that I forget to write things down that I need to do. It's more that I forget to look at the list. Or maybe that I forget where I left the list. Or maybe I can't find my glasses to read the list.

Millions of philosophical nuggets have been authored over the years on this business of time and energy and work. Most of it falls into the Get Organized school of thought, which seems to suggest that if only you get into the habit of thinking ahead, you'll be successful. Hang up the clothes you'll need for tomorrow where you can easily get at them. Make your lunches for next week on Sunday evening, and freeze the ones for Tuesday through Friday. Keep a list of the foods you have in your freezer by date so nothing will go past its best by date. Set aside a specific time to do laundry, to vacuum, to do the dishes, to read, to meditate, to pick your nose....

The wonder of it all is, it works for some, and not for others. By the time I've read the self-help stuff on getting organized, there's no time left to get organized: another week is upon me.

Complicating all of this confusion is the environment of living in a house of three generations. I swore I would avoid this eventuality at any cost, but the Robert Frost's Law of Returning Offspring ('Home is the place where, when you have to go there/They have to take you in') has resulted in a kind of compound interest effect when it comes to disorganization.

Although I was brought up in a house that was probably less than 800 square feet on the ground floor, I now believe that children cannot be raised in any house that is less than 2000 sq. ft. in floor space. Why is this? Because of the proliferation of plastic. We live in a polymer paradise. For every phase of childhood, there is now something made out of plastic or encased in plastic that is vital to their well-being; something without which the young person will inevitably be unable to achieve a wholesome adulthood. And the best of these creations, such as play saucers and cribs and storybooks, will turn out to have been the ones that required alkaline 9-volt batteries for their operation.

Part of the function of these devices and the flotsam and jetsam that bobs in their wake is to slow me down, to make my progress more arduous. A simple walk to the door in the morning typically requires navigation through the treacherous shoals of multi-geometric shapes which fit inside some sort of octahedron that is not currently in the same room. It has not, in fact, been seen in this room for some time. These plastic triangles, rectangles, stars and squares have cleverly-designed thin edges that are guaranteed to immobilize any unsuspecting instep for at least several minutes.

In a similar vein, the closet doors are often wedged open by shoes belonging behind the opposite door. Because they have stepped out into the pathway and taken up a position, the range of movement of the door to my side of the closet is severely limited.

There can be only one karmic reason for this mode of living. I am meant to slow down. It's time to set my eyes toward the earth, to be more grounded, to notice what is around me for the sake of my own well-being. I cannot forever be rushing forward in hot, heedless pursuit of what captivates me at the moment. The time to achieve goals is past. The time to take note of where I am and what I am doing is upon me.

I need no more self-help than a good pair of glasses. Now where the hell did I leave them?

I hear ya

Last night we went to a party where there was supposed to be live music. A group of four older guys with guitars and a drum kit were slated to play 50s songs, which is one of the two genres that I really enjoy, the other being classical instrumental from the baroque period.

When I got inside the venue, and saw the size of the speakers and the amplifier console with its upward curving red line of LEDs, I knew it was going to be a noisy night.

In anticipation, I had brought with me a pair of compressible foam earplugs that I sometimes use when the going gets too enthusiastic in our drumming rehearsals. With the first crash of the cymbals and the thwanging of the guitar, I could hear nothing but the shattering high frequencies that sounded like glass being broken. The bass guitar could not so much be heard as felt. As fast as I could, I rolled up the little cones and stuffed them into my ears. As the foam gradually expanded, the extreme noises died back, and I began to recognize the songs the band was playing. It actually became enjoyable as the crystal-shattering, floor-shaking ends were cut off while leaving a subdued middle.

I looked around at J who was busy trying to make herself heard and to respond to other people at our table. It occurred to me that the others might be experiencing this same pain. I got up and went to the car where I had stashed a package of these wonderful earplugs and brought them back to the table. Everyone took a pair.

I have tinnitus, as do many of the older people who were at the party. It manifests in my case as a high-pitched frequency that is constantly present, although not (thankfully) constantly heard. It does interfere with my enjoyment of orchestral music, primarily live, but also for several years now on CD and DVDs. The violins in particular trigger my awareness of this background noise. As some wag said, "The trouble with this music is there's too much sax and violins."

During the (mercifully short) evening, a young boy, perhaps seven or eight years of age, was the only dancer on the floor. I didn't think of it at the time, but since he was a mere ten feet from the band, in front of a large speaker array, there could be no doubt that his hearing was being damaged. Nevertheless, he did his moves for about ten minutes with his sneakers flashing those little red lights near the heels as he pranced around. It was cute and amazing.

When he has trouble later in life making out what people are saying, or cannot enjoy music because of a persistent ringing, will this young fellow blame his parents or the band or a society which is deathly afraid of silence, yet whose most popular catch phrase is, "I hear ya"? Or will we by that time have developed aural implants that instantly clamp down sound bursts that threaten our audiological well-being? Or will electricity have become so expensive to produce that the rock or country band with the thousand watt amplifiers have gone the way of the dodo?

An ice idea.

I don't usually (ever) write about sports. It's not that I'm not a sport fan. If you're born Canadian, at some point you become a hockey devotee. It's in the genes. But there's been a breakthrough in the technology of the game that is going to take it in new directions.

As anyone who has ever skated can tell you, it's punishing work, learning how to skate. Your rear end takes an incredible beating as you struggle to master the balance and the starting and stopping. In fact, I found that I never did.

When I ice skate, I can only turn in one direction. I'm ideal for those outdoor and indoor public skating hours when everyone goes around and around in one direction and nobody has to stop (because many can't). I learned how to avoid crashing into people by crashing into other people. And when you stop, you're supposed to turn sideways on your blades and drop down so that the leading edge of your blade cuts into the ice evenly, sending up a flash of white snow that is really a cloud of ice chips. It looks so, so, suave. In fact, you can't play hockey if you can't hockey stop.

I'll never forget the time I decided to save ten bucks and sharpen my own kid's skates. I guess I was just ignorant enough of skate sharpening to think that you could take an ordinary grinder and run it over the blades. Trouble was, after all the trouble of lacing R's skates up, and pushing him out onto the ice, his feet shot out from in under him like Bambi's, and he couldn't even get himself back up again.

The secret, of course, was that the professional skate sharpening machine has a very thin, convex profile grinding wheel which they constantly keep formed by running a special profiling diamond dressing tool against it. The result is that the sharpened blade is slightly hollow-ground, giving two edges to it. It is these edges that determine whether you'll start, stop, slide or slip on the ice. So skating is like dancing on four knife blades pointing downward.

But of course I went through the era of the bobskates that strapped on my winter boots, so I never started out the hard way. You can stand on bobskates, and if your brother pushes you along from behind at a reasonable pace, you can pretend you're skating. That's kind of my style now, too, although at some point I did learn how to turn around 180 degrees and skate backwards until stopped either by the rink boards or by someone coming the opposite way (known in hockey parlance as a "check").

The big problem till now for anyone playing hockey is the extreme expenditure of energy in chasing after the puck. It requires exceptional skill to be able to follow the rubber around the rink, given that it can come from any direction at high speed. So a hockey player is a major anticipator: exceptional hockey players recognize and anticipate plays, using their peripheral vision to great advantage in positioning themselves on the ice to minimize the amount of energy they have to expend.

The physics of frozen water is such that as you skate, you're actually melting the ice through the pressure of your own weight on the narrow blades. But recently, after some years of testing, a Canadian inventor has developed a heated blade. This device has been shown to save energy and offer quicker starts and stops because it doesn't freeze up like the ordinary blade. Instead, it keeps the ice at a constant temperature slightly above freezing, because, as everyone knows, the friction is reduced between the steel and the ice by the thin layer of water. So, less energy is needed to skate.

So I guess I'm really not writing about sports after all, but rather about physics. Heating the skate blades is just another example of fundamental laws of physics with a practical application that would not have been possible without the invention of microchips and the improvement of battery technology.

My understanding of the physics of skating is very simple It's the Law of Levity. "What stands up must fall down."

Better buy the dozen

With all the unfair, despicable, cowardly and brutal things going on in the (political) world around us, you'd be excused for not wanting to hear about another.

This is just a reflection on something that comes up time and time again in the course of my daily work. When I teach classes, sometimes I get to hear little bits of stories about the people who come to them.

Tonight, I had a dozen people, eager to learn the basics of Microsoft Word. I was into it for about ten minutes when a burly gentleman arrived and apologized for being late. I set him up with a computer, and got him caught up to the point I had left off with the class. In a few minutes, he was a bit lost, so I went over to him and helped get him back on track. During that minute and a half or so, he told me that he had just lost his job, a desk job in law enforcement, that he had held for 30 years, because he lacked the computer skills required by changes in the department, and was given no time to pick them up. He needed to climb the mountain of the learning needed to become competent in Windows and Office skills, because that was now a requirement. Fortunately, he had a working wife.

After the class was over, I got talking to another of my students, a man in his 40s, who lost his job as a machinist, because he had apparently had a back condition that was undiagnosed from birth, resulting in a deterioration that made him no longer capable of doing the kind of operations that machinists do. He too wanted the Windows and Office skills to make it possible to re-enter the workforce. Fortunately, he had no family or dependents.

There have been many others, especially during the last eight years, who have felt the sting of layoff, firing or unemployability, and they pass hopefully through our classes, which are probably too general to do them much good. In all this time, I have not heard of more than about three people who have succeeded in getting a job that paid a decent wage. One person solved the problem by working for his brother, but that is rare indeed.

This America is not a worker-friendly country any longer. There are no real breakthrough ideas as to how to deal with the older, hard-to-employ worker. There are few good jobs for mothers returning to the workforce, or starting for the first time since their children left home. There are no solutions that haven't been tried by thousands. And there is no compassion because there is a common perception that there are no solutions that aren't basically socialist in nature. And socialism is a four-letter word.

What would it take to change this country into a nation that actually cared about the poor and the powerless? Cared enough to try to change so that everyone is treated fairly?

Some form of the 12-Step Program should just about do it.

1. Admit that life in America has become unmanageable because of addiction to consumerism, power and the accumulation of wealth.
2. Realize that a Power beyond anything we have experienced can restore us to sanity. That could be, for example, the power inherent in an unrigged election system.
3. Make a decision (i.e. vote) for someone who is undeniably moral, decent, honest and open, who has the best interests of the world's people at heart, not just "what's good for GM".
4. Take stock of what exactly we mean by "morality" and develop a global perspective on what morality means in the context of our common existence on this blue ball.
5. Admit to the current and past (and in the case of Iran, future) "enemies" the exact nature of what we have done wrong to them as a nation and part of the world as we know it.
6. Become entirely ready to remove all these defects of character, attitude, and posture.
7. Humbly ask them to help remove these defects. For those who think God, however understood, has any interest in this, well, we need all the help we can get.
8. Make a list of all the countries and nations and peoples that we have wronged and publicly and as a matter of policy prepare to make amends to them all.
9. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Releasing the wrongfully imprisoned at Guantanamo would be a good start.
10. Continue this process of moral and political inventory, especially through the rehabilitation of the mainstream media, which would long since have awakened from their acquiescent stupor and pernicious collaboration during the reign of the current administration.
11. Sought to improve our conscious contact with our conscience, both public and private, such that the right thing would always be done whenever there was a choice.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, then try to carry these principles (freedom, equality, opportunity, compassion) to others and practice them in all our affairs.

While I realize that "in a perfect world none of us would be here" (thank you, Eric), I also think that it is the lack of personal effort even to stop and think that there may be a better way than the one we're going now that causes so much indifference, fear, cruelty and self-indulgence. Every minute of every day is a great starting point to create a better world. So come on, let's do it. We need to heal the nation's addiction to greed and self-preservation. We can. We must. It's the right thing to do.

Oh my Gourd!

Our duties as djembists and balafonists took us to the Darke County Fairgrounds in Greenville, Ohio on Saturday. For someone who only occasionally eats pumpkin pies, this was a revelatory experience. There were thousands of gourds of every shape, size, configuration and color. So what is a gourd anyway?

Apart from the scientific definition which you can find on the internet, a gourd is a cello, a flute, a drum, a banjo, a whole orchestra, really, judging from the amazing ingenuity with which these instruments were constructed. It is a table lamp, a bowl, a spoon, a water fountain... in fact, it can be almost anything that time and talent can make it.

Part of the musical entertainment tied in with this theme at the annual Gourd Show was an Indian musical group whose featured instrument was a sitar. The leader pointed out that the resonating chamber of a sitar starts out as a gourd, and in fact many sitars have a second gourd at the top. The spiritual aspect of the sitar's gourds was explained by a charming story of the rescue of the god of music from drowning in a river when a higher god tossed him a gourd.

What I think makes the gourd so fascinating is that it is as individual as we are. All shapes and sizes, all thicknesses and weights, and all different color shades and hues populate the world of gourds. In the hands of someone who respects the gourd, a gourd can take on a beauty or radiate a sense of humor that reflect the crafts-person's own.

And as a balafon player, I can testify that the graduated gourds that resonate under the bars of the balafon make it possible to be heard even when the drummers are in full flight.

If you teach it they won't come

In my line o' work, I have 12 seats to fill three times a week in a computer lab at the local public library. When I started out five years ago, I filled them five to eight times a week, teaching how to use Windows 2000, and the basic how-tos about Microsoft Office programs. Now, into the sixth year, there are evident signs that I've done a good job: five people will sign up and two will come. And sometimes one of them won't have signed up for the class.

Of course it's possible that I've just become old, doddering and tiresome. Some days I really am tired, and it's hard to work up the enthusiasm of youth. But on a normal day, teaching is still what I like to do, because over the years, I think I have evolved from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side.

There's a wonderful social side to all this, too. Some of my "students" have attended over 100 classes (in a few cases almost 200). They haven't mastered the computer, but they love to forgather and "learn something new every day".

Personally, I think they learn the most from each other. Some classes begin with one of them talking about something that they've just recently learned, or something that has happened to them, or someone they know. One gentle former teacher hands out vitamin C candies to anyone who wants them. And if one of them has a bout of hospitalization, they all want to know the details. This is not an ordinary class. Where else could you have someone talking about rehabilitating a goldfish that got speared by a great blue heron in a garden pond and can't swim because of a punctured swim bladder, and then everyone looks up Ardea herodias and becomes an instant expert on the subject?

I've been told that the attendance issue would be resolved if the library charged, say, $10 a class, refundable if you show up. No doubt it would be. Nobody would come. Many of the people who attend can't afford that money, because they're out of work, and the reason they're enrolled with me is that they hope to learn enough about spreadsheets to compete on the job market with the hundreds of twenty-somethings who have grown up with computers. Some have worked for thirty years of loyal office drudgery only to be downsized, laid off and not qualified for the kind of computer work that involves knowing Office and other programs. Windows is a mystery to them.

One older woman attended about eight classes before she sold her computer. But her daughter wouldn't let her off so easily. The lady showed up again a year later for another few sessions because her daughter got wind of the situation and gave her a computer for Christmas.

Most of my seniors would agree that you can't learn from a relative. My wife has learned not to ask me too many questions for exactly that reason: I'm the soul of patience with the library crowd, but I become short-fused when I have to come home and work through similar stuff with my nearest and dearest. I'm not sure why that is, but it's typical.

When I ask my students if they have anyone who can help them with their home computer, they'll say, "Oh, yes, my son/daughter installed the whole thing for me, but then, you know, they said 'You just press this and click that and move this over here and you'll be fine'. And you know, I STILL don't know how to get on the Internet or do email."

Some of the job seekers actually end up taking whatever I'm able to give them initially, and going off to a community college to do more detailed work. But for most of the rest of us, I suspect that the computer eventually begins to gather dust like an old doily, and when they pass on, the offspring dispose of the computer rather than being burdened by it.

Well, in the Cincinnati area at least, there is the Cincinnati Computer Consortium, and they recycle the old stuff so that eventually nobody will have to teach seniors how to use a computer. And, apart from the loss of social contact and interaction, that might be a good thing. When you're over 65, it's not necessarily fun to learn all this new technology, but it does open up possibilities for your declining years that may just keep you interested, and therefore alive. And that is a good thing.

I started out as a child

We all started out as children. There is much to be said for the childlike attitude of wonder and discovery, which support investigation and learning and creativity. Some of us, however, don't apparently get much beyond that stage. The downside is the personality trait of someone who has the other childlike characteristics, such as showing off, and demanding immediate gratification, and possessiveness and controlling.

Much of our adult life, I think, is spent in learning how to deal with people who have experienced lopsided development, overcompensating for some perceived weakness by exaggerating the opposite trait. Most often this results in an obsessive need to control.

All of us have a need to control whatever we can in order to reduce the pain or irritation elements of daily living. But some of us put control before understanding. At his trial for heresy, Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Controllers suffer either from an excess of self-examination (leading to recrimination and guilt) or from an excess of denial. "We have seen the enemy and it is us", said Pogo.

In our drumming group from time to time, we have new people joining. Some of them are modest hangbackers, who are fascinated by what they hear, and gently try to emulate it until they become more confident. The opposite are the people who come in, think they understand the language of the piece, and end up beating the crap out of it to their own perception of the rhythm. The worst case is the dundun (bass drum) player who thinks he understands the rhythm, but soon loses it and ends up beating the drum at his own pace, or putting in accents where the song begs for silence.

Perhaps one of the most revealing aspects of learning how to perform in an African drum circle is the fact that over time, you begin to realize, if you have any sensitivity to the culture at all, that music is not performance. It is innately spiritual, and it is all about communicating within a group. It is about cooperation and perception, about reigning in your normal need for control in order to appreciate the contribution of others: it is about melding into a whole in order to create a greater. A drum circle is a symphony, or else it's a cacophony.

Some days you just get a little tired of people who don't get it. But then you have to remember that maybe that was how you started too.

Anything but humdrum

We went up to Oxford to take up a position at the mouth of the Drum Barn driveway, early, early in the morning. It was the morning of the State-to-State Half Marathon, and by popular demand OGADE (or at least those of it who were awake) was to play as the runners and walkers progressed toward Indiana and back.

And play we did. It soon became clear that we could only occasionally match the actual footfalls of the runners, for some were serious marathoners who looked straight ahead, concentrating on their own internal rhythms and shutting out all other distractions, while others moved to a different beat.

The ones who won our hearts were the many who, upon coming within range of our drumming, smiled and grinned and waved and high-fived and yelled "Thank you" and "You're the best" and a few actually shifted their pace to match our relentless thumping. And then there were the ones who were serious enough about their running that you had to look carefully as they passed, but you could see the grin or the tiny uplifted hand motion, or the V-sign with the fingers.

These were throat-lumping moments. Momentarily we beat the drums a little harder, or threw in a little extra syncopation: you couldn't keep from doing it: energy became synergy and the runners and the drummers connected ever so briefly in a meeting of spirits. Then, as the runner or the group passed, we kept our own rhythmic marathon going, for we felt that if we stopped we would somehow break the bond of rhythm, even for those who were no longer within the sound of our drums, gourds, balafon and shakeres.

Special mention must go to Pete, our intrepid leader, whose skill at tuning and playing an array of empty coffee cans is near kin to the finest Caribbean steel drum craftsmanship.

Pool closing weekend

It is a sad affair. The 16-foot plastic pool with the inflatable collar must be taken down at the end of the season. And the season ends once the nighttime temperatures hit values that are low enough to prevent daytime temperatures from building up to a comfortable level (even with a solar cover). And so, even though the current temperature is 92 F, and the pool is around 86, the comfort level of 89 degrees is no longer sustainable.

Thus, out comes the portable electric pump with the garden hose. This year the weather has been so dry that the water runs off faster, without being absorbed as in years past. But even as we write, a pop-up thunderstorm is muttering its tentative growls. The cats in the window seats are on the alert, which is to say that when a rumbling is heard, their ears twitch, but so far only one eye is open amongst them.

The garden hose will take probably 16 to 18 hours to drain some 2500 gallons; water that has seen considerable action, both human and chemical. Yes, we know that there are test kits and such that allow proper maintenance of pH levels, but in an informal way, the bleaching of a bathing suits and floating toys or the greenish strands of algae have served equally well as harbingers of lack of balance.

On the down side, the pool was a great entertainment center for the younglings. And when they weren't there, it was a fine place to float around and savor a Blue or a Blue Light (none of that wishy-washy American stuff for me).

As in other seasons, this was actually the second pool of the season. In the past, we had cat claw damage on the inflatable collar which rendered the pool unusable, so we went to a metal frame version. This one developed a serious hole in the bottom, probably from the efforts of a mole who came up in the wrong place. The result was a second pool of the inflatable type, because no metal frame ones were locally available by the time the damage became unrecoverable.

I suppose that if you were to amortize the cost of the pool, supplies, electricity and water you'd end up having to charge the swimmers about $3 each for every swim. But it's been a long, droughty summer, and when you're floating there, toes up with a Blue in your hand, you don't think mercenarily. Life is too good, and so short.

Barbecue: it's the pits

Ever since our ancestors huddled together in caves blackened by fire and smoke, trying to keep warm while trying to reduce a mastodon ham-bone to something other than leather, there has been a handing down of knowledge about fire. So important was fire that the Greeks claimed that Prometheus stole it from the gods who were hoarding it as one more sign of their superiority. Superior firepower, I suppose you might call it. They rewarded him by chaining him to a rock and letting an eagle devour his liver once a day for eternity. The liver, of course, unless soaked in alcohol, regenerates itself.

Somewhere along the line of Western civilization, the knowledge and fear of fire was supplanted by the taming of fire. When we wash our clothes, we can hang them out to dry, or, much more conveniently, bundle them into a dryer with a cloth that makes them smell as though we hung them out. The furnace replaces the soot-blackened firepit. And if it's not warm enough for you, there are many different kinds of heaters.

And so the last vestigial bit of knowledge about firemaking is dying out. As, for example, today when my next door neighbor's grandson, early twenties, dragged out the smoker kettle and prepared to set a barbecue dinner for his beloved. Sitting in the Zinn Center, I observed only his hands and feet through the wide boards of our deck. But that was enough to tell the whole story.

First, he poured in a fairly generous portion of a new bag of briquets. So far, so good. Next came about a quarter of a spray bottle of firestarter. Then came the wooden matches. About two dozen of them.

The wind was up a bit, and Grandson had a lot of trouble getting a flame to catch. He's close to six feet tall, and it's a long way for a match to fall and retain its flame. Some matches indeed fell into the firepit, but landed in such a way that they could not catch the fuel. Some fell across the grill, and so other matches had to be used to push them into the fire. Bending over would be dangerous if your reaction time is factored by your height.

After a time and a tussle and the addition of more starter fluid, a fairly decent plume of orange flame shot up, and G went inside to get the chicken breasts. After carefully applying at least four different doses of dry seasoning to the topsides, he went back to find the fire had left no discernible trace of its existence. The occasion called for more fluid and more matches, and apparently more wind.

Eventually, another dozen matches later, he saw flame, and encouraged it by spraying the starter stuff directly into the cauldron. He was rewarded by the heavy smell of refinery and a generous flare. At this point, he put the chicken on the grill.

Covering the grill, he went back inside. Upon his return, the flame perversely had died down again. He treated it to several fresh infusions of starter spray, around the outside edge. Some additional flames burst up, but apparently not enough to suit the recipe, for he then began lighting matches and tossing them onto the unburned briquets. Back into the house for a few minutes, and soon out again to turn the birds.

At this point, he added equal amounts of condiments to the conflagration for the second side, squirted a bit more starter, and threw in a few more lights. Then the cover went on again, while the neighborhood began to smell like the Esso truck had just made another delivery.

Finally, the chickens gave up, and he replaced them on the grill with hamburgers or buns: it was difficult to tell through the smoke. And then, at last, the reason for this labor of love, this multimatch extravaganza, his girlfriend arrived.

I do not know how the meal turned out. I can only guess. It might have been the original or the crispy. I speculate that it was historical, in any case. It had to have tasted like one of Ogg's attempts at mastodon meat when he tried using tar pit blobs as briquets. That was before Ogga took over and forbade him to enter the kitchen ever again. And just think: it could all so easily have been otherwise, if the ancient knowledge of the mystery of fire had been passed from father to son just one more time.

Unintended Coon Sequences

So just one raccoon, although it might have been two, blew my whole weekend, and there's still more to do.

I deconstructed the Zinn Center just enough to be able to wrestle with a 14 by 14 foot chicken-wire top, made by joining four strips of what the manufacturers elegantly term "poultry netting" with wire ties (also called "zip ties") every foot. It took about four hours to staple the netting in place and clip the individual wires to remove the extra footage. The next problem was to figure out how to fill the 3.75 inch gap between the Zinn Center and the side of the house, which, to make it more complicated, has clapboard aluminum siding.

The Zinn Center is not straight vertical, because it follows the slight slope of the deck. It had to be this way to make the six foot wide screen cloth wrap evenly around it. So there's a gap at the top that tapers to almost nothing at the bottom. Add to that the serration of the clapboard, and you have a very unwelcome combination of incompatible surfaces. An open door, you might say, for flies and mosquitoes.

The previous solution was to stuff the joints with insulation rolls. They occasionally slipped, but could be held in place by cardboard and duct tape. But when the raccoon(s) started throwing the stuff around, I had to consider other techniques and materials that would be more resistant to vandalism.

I've settled, I think, on a spray concoction that is like the foam insulation you can spray into cracks, but this stuff is not supposed to expand into huge grotesque beige puffballs that have to be trimmed with a saw. The only time I've ever used that material, it called to mind those horror movies where a whole town is overwhelmed by an endless rolling ball of goop.

And then, of course, there was the cleanup, which is only partly done as of this writing. Vacuuming the deck would have gone more quickly had not the sweeper suddenly ingested a label or something that caused a total embolism in the hose. Another fifteen minutes of disassembly and reassembly made the day seem even more tedious.

The toughest part is yet to come: to fold the chicken-wire into disposable packets that can be dropped into a garbage bag without ripping it to pieces on the way in. Meanwhile, two raccoons have already been back up on the deck, checking on the new configuration, or maybe just scouting for more green tomatoes to pull prematurely off the vines. Let's hope they regard the chicken-wire as a boundary, rather than a challenge.

Reality shows.

Well, the raccoons have, as they always do, won.

I built a screen room 8 x 8 near the back french doors of our dining area, resting on the deck, but not actually attached to the house. It's a "Florida Room", in a sense, which we call the Zinn Center.

J's love of everything raccoon has finally encouraged them to bolder moves. Starting with the nightly feedings of whatever was left over (and J's leftovers are as good as some restaurant's entrees), the bandits moved in. They would walk right past us when we were sitting around the firepit, on their way to the bar and grill. Eat at Joe's.

Next, they found there were tomatoes: bright red orbs that looked like Christmas balls. And even better, if you followed the vines up to the deck level, there was the intriguing sound of a fountain in one corner. Of course, ascending the tomato vines has its dangers. On two separate nights, the damn things broke off in a cascade of raccoon fur and greenery.

Arriving at the fountain, they found fish. Carpe diem. At least they looked like fish, but when they got them in their mouths they chomped down on plastic. And raccoon rage being what it is, they bit the nose and mouth off one of them, shredded the plastic water lilies, and flung the fish to the far reaches of the deck.

Tonight I took a closer look at the Zinn Center. I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but it was obvious that the torn and battered paper lantern that formerly swung from the center of the Center and now rested on top of one of the ceiling screen panels could only have gotten there by something breaking through the other screen and reaching in to haul the lantern to the top. Only one screen panel remains still firmly attached to the frame. The other is the same panel I had to repair when one of our temporarily adopted cats decided to have a sleepover.

So plans are afoot to replace the top with a new screen, then build a framed roof with clear acrylic panels that can be raised to let the heat dissipate, and the whole to be covered with the tarp to act as a heat shield when necessary. If not, then at least some combination of materials that will let heat out, cool air in, and provide a visual path to the wonders of the summer sky. It was 110 degrees in there late this afternoon.

Raccoons are not to blame, of course. They are cute, intelligent, curious creatures with a love of anything new or shiny or food-looking. They pull things apart in order to better understand them.

They're so much like grandchildren.

Maybe I'm all wet, but ...

Saturday afternoon, J and I returned from a drumming gig at the Oxford, Ohio farmers' market. It was hot and humid, and when I finally joined her in the pool, the afternoon popup storm was waiting to begin. It reminded me of a long-ago visit to Puerto Rico, where the saying is, "If you don't like our weather, wait a minute."

J climbed out to attend to other matters, but I decided to stay and see what might transpire. I put up a lawn umbrella at the side of the pool to sit under, and turned off the normally turbulent pool pump. As the current died away, the sprinkles began.

I sat in the pool with my eyes as close to the water as my nose would permit. Each raindrop splash instantly created a bubble about half an inch across. At first, I could count them, but very quickly, it became an impossible task. And as the rain became steadier, the bubbles were burst immediately by the drops that came more frequently. Soon, I saw no bubbles at all, but only small columns of water popping up, sporting tiny spheres on their tips.

The ripples generated by the pelting rain countered across each other in patterns of interlaced diamonds and circles. I submerged to listen to the music of the showers as I had many times in my childhood at the lake. This time, however, I could no longer hear the soft, high singing of the raindrops that I loved so much as a youngster. But I could hear the pinging and popping that is heard nowhere else in our lives as the rain dented the surface and the waves fanned out.

As I emerged, a sudden menace of thunder reached my hears. It turned out to be the only rumble of the afternoon, but it sent me back to the garage to change into my clothes. I went upstairs to the Zinn Center (named after a beloved friend of ours in Florida) which is essentially a framed, screened 8-foot cube on the deck with a tarp on top. The pattering and then pounding of the rain on the canvas brought back memories of what J refers to as my "two camping trips".

It was a day to be savo(u)red. If I had a waterproof camera, I could have taken one picture, which would have saved a thousand words.

Your moment of Zen

One of the incentives we use at work is a website called the "Good Job Blog". On it are listed members of our staff who have shown some initiative that goes beyond what is normally asked or expected. Anyone can be cited, and anyone can propose a citation.

It's a nice touch, I think, in terms of not merely motivating people to go the extra mile, but also because it shows people where opportunities exist to do extend themselves.

Many organizations use the same type of public exposure with their employee of the month awards. Some schools have signboards on their lawns that name a particular teacher, or a student, as an example for others.

As a Canadian, I have generally been uncomfortable with this kind of publicity, because we have a certain reserve about us, very like the British. A British comedian put it this way: "We don't talk about ourselves, you know. That would not be polite. Of course, we'll talk about anybody else..." And so, when I get the occasional mention in the Good Job Blog, I shuffle my feet, say "Awww, shucks" and go on about my business, even though there's a certain undeniable buzz that comes from seeing your efforts publicized.

In America, the saints and the scoundrels get unending exposure. With their enormous communications infrastructure, Americans never seems to tire of bringing people in front of a microphone or a camera, or plastering their picture (especially in the news media) on any convenient TV channel.

Why this need to publicize? Why does everyone have to know what everyone else says or does or thinks? How does that improve the life of the listener or watcher?

In some cases, it does. It is always worthwhile to hear or see the Dalai Lama. There are just some people who are wiser than the rest of us. But who the hell cares about Paris Hilton's jail time or her determination to sort out her life now that she's on probation? I won't even mention American Idolatry.

The internet has made it possible to have instant access to millions of people, most of whom are of little or no interest to the people who look them up. With new storage technology, it is possible to maintain records on almost anyone forever (or at least long after they die). Today I was reading about an FBI program that can locate, identify and record every keystroke on any computer that they want to examine over the internet.

America has been panicked by its government into trading privacy and liberty for security. We all know how this has been done over the last six years. And we also know how limited the security is, and how easily it can be breached. As Bob Dylan put it, "The times, they are a-changin", and not for the better. Where in Canada, do you walk into a public library past a sign that lays out penalties for carrying a concealed weapon?

There is hope, of course. But the way things look at the moment, the lame duck is still the top dog, wielding unconstitutional power as it suits his purposes, which, in the end, come down to oil and profits. The only instrument he trusts to ensure a constant supply of both is war.

J has a saying I like: "When the love is gone, there is only the money."

I would apply this to contemporary America. An administration that is as money-mad as this one is surely does not love America. But as the Dalai Lama put it so well: "If you have a situation that you can do something about, why worry? And if you have a situation that you can do nothing about, why worry?"

One more box

The other day, I came across one more box.

A good part of my family history has been captured on videotape. My first camera weighed about 15 pounds. It was a used one that we bought when our firstborn boy was at the stage where the proud parents want to capture every breath, twitch and burp. The camera was a used one in the Sony Beta format (remember how VHS won that battle?). It produced pastel colors in all lighting conditions, but through force of imagination, I could convince myself that they were vivid. And the viewfinder was a tiny TV monitor inside an eyecup, in black and white.

Then we graduated to a compact VHS format that produced a very high quality picture but sound, not so much. So we now had two different formats, neither one compatible with the other. However, with the aid of a special adapter, it was possible to play the new format in a standard VHS player. The old camera got thrown out somehow.

Then came DVD, and the need to convert the old formats to the newest and greatest. To handle the original betas, of which I had many, many hours, I eventually found a working Betamax on eBay for $100. I went through all the tapes and dubbed them and did a bit of editing, ending up with about three dozen DVDs. The compact VHS was a little easier, because the camera had outputs that would connect directly to the DVD recorder. And for those old movies that I had already converted to VHS, I bought a combination machine, one half VHS and the other DVD burner.

The Betamax stopped rewinding fairly early, so I hastened through the task and ended up completing it just as the machine gave up the ghost.

Without going into more tedious detail, let me say that I was well satisfied with these amateur conversions, and made a few copies for my progeny (after all, it was mostly their hockey games that were featured) and other interested parties.

Then, the other day, I came across one more box.

My grandparents would have disbelieved if confronted by the archival capabilities of today's digital technology. My parents would have been thrilled to be able to have sound instead of silent 8mm recordings of their young. Sound film did come in during the latter half of my childhood, but they would not indulge in the wasteful practice, because it cost more and involved special projection equipment. I remember them as having only one Kodak projector for their entire lifetime, and how hot it became to the touch after an evening of shows. Sprocketless film handling was a new feature that they never experienced, and that was a shame, because as the films got older they became more brittle and intermissions became more frequent as Dad spliced the films, often in mid-show. At first, it was a special acetone-based cement, but later, little tabs of splicing tape took its place. And who could forget those sudden bursts of circular color wheels which receded to white as the film became stuck and melted in the fierce Fahrenheit fire of the bulb?

Not all memories can be kept. Not all should be kept. But still, I have to wonder, as I gaze into that one more cardboard box, what have I forgotten that I am not likely to see again? A child spitting up some offensive baby food? A father and son building a snow bear? A Doctor Snuggles cartoon?

The generation that follows will not have the luxury of forgetting. It will all be there on YouTube.

Dancing to a different drummer

Last night, the OGADE band performed at the Fitton Center for the Performing Arts in Hamilton, Ohio. In the darkened theater, about a dozen of us took our drums and flutes and rainstick and crammed into one dimly-lit corner of the stage area. The dundun player had to be careful not to whack the djembists on either side.

Despite the constricted space, the local troupe of belly dancers who call themselves the "Circle of Rhiannon" danced into the center and performed a series of group and solo dances that had everyone fascinated and wanting more.

Obviously the aesthetic and primal appeal of this performance is very strong. The insistent beating of the drums takes hold of the heart rhythms of the audience, and the swirling of colorful costumes and the liberated, sexy movements of the dancers draw the eyes of everyone. As a drummer in the back row, I could see that the entire audience was intent on the action on stage, and many were swaying to the beat.

It is good to have these occasions. Especially, it is good that audiences in the conservative world of Cincinnati have so many occasions to be exposed to live world music and dance.

When I drive around Hamilton with my moonroof open, I am assaulted by country music, country rock, christian(!) rock and hip-hop crap with indistinguishable lyrics played by cars that thump obnoxiously at intersections while waiting for lights that seem never to change. Though I close the moonroof, I cannot escape the monotonous, unimaginative thumping. It is enough to rattle the metal signs that say, "LOUD STEREO: Penalty $500".

Public exposure to live dancing and live music of other cultures helps to broaden the cultural awareness of the local citizenry. The current political climate, in which all things Arabic/Muslim are equated with terrorism demands to be countered by whatever means are available. Multicultural music and dance are powerful ambassadors for acceptance, appreciation, and understanding.

Mister Resister

More often than not, when I sit at the dinner table with J, the repast ends with an attempt by our cat, Kaboodle, to sit on my lap. Sometimes I rebuff this action. These are times when the day has been long, I am tired, or otherwise preoccupied by some project that remains unfinished.

Other times, I welcome the visit. Quality time with a cat is not something to be taken for granted. Of the four cats, only Kaboodle finds the time to sit on me, or make the attempt, on any regular basis. Evil, the gray cat and master of perverse behavior, greets me in the morning, but only because I am the first one up, and he thinks there is a possibility that I will feed him some treat that I would not dare to give to the others. Even so, his greetings are confined to touching my calf with his tail, and walking between my legs as I try to navigate the kitchen. If all other methods fail, he plops down across what he knows will be my path, and waits.

Kaboodle knows that I am not to be trifled with in the morning. I have an early start in order to get to my job to check the computers before the staff begin to arrive and use them. There is no place for trivial pursuits, such as opening cans of tuna or spreading treats on the floor.

Evil's behavior is in no way endearing. It is a sign of a desperate attempt to gain mastery. He has conquered others in this house. On more than two occasions I have stepped in a bowl of milk that I didn't see, placed on the floor under the overhang of the kitchen cabinet. Once, a can of some kind of meat by-product flew down the basement stairs as a result of similar unfortunate placement. And, since I am the one who spills these victuals, it falls to me, morally at least, to clean them up, thereby subtracting even more minutes from the total available to complete my autopilot morning rituals.

I learned that the milk was a distraction offered up in order to allow the giver a chance to prepare food in relative peace, which is to say, without having to step over a recumbent cat several times.

Given these circumstances, perhaps I should lighten up a little on Kaboodle. She does wait until dinner is nearly over, or my legs are uncrossed, whichever she notices first. She keeps her distance in the morning but greets me with her tail a furry question mark and summons up a squeaky meow whenever I come home. And she is very soft.

But answer me this: why do cats seek out and suck up to the person in the family who is most allergic? I guess they understand that our immune systems are already weakened, so our resistance is lowest.

To each his zone

I used to think that one day all songs would have been written: all the possible combinations of the chromatic scale would be used up, and all that would be left to do would be to recycle the old stuff, maybe by putting new words to it. Not being mathematically inclined, I would further wonder about the number of meaningful permutations and combinations of English words. Wouldn't there come a time when nobody could copyright a song or a poem or story because they'd all have been written? Ecclesiastes (Koheleth - The Preacher) certainly said so.

That was B.G. Before Google.

Now, we are awakening to the fact that there is a vast amount that is not known, that has never been seen by most of the world's eyes, or heard by most of its ears. It is only our limitations of imagination and creativity that put bounds to our experience. Defensively, we enter the comfort zone, where the strange and the challenging are filtered out.

The urge to pressure others to adopt our beliefs and philosophies and customs, I think, comes from being outside our comfort zone, rather than wanting others to share it. "Mission" comes from the Latin "mittere", meaning "to send". When we are outside our zone, we feel the need to enlarge it to feel safer, so we send out missionaries of one sort or another. Some are people, some are simply messages of various kinds. The main opposition to missions of this type arises when other people are in their own comfort zones, and do not wish to be disturbed, let alone challenged, and definitely not converted.

So in all this time, we have not, apparently learned or accepted that most people like to be left alone, or at least helped to cope with life on their own terms. What is true of individuals is true collectively. Nations do not appreciate being invaded, occupied and despoiled in the guise of being "helped". People get upset when their world is turned upside down by the intervention of power over which they have no control.

It is not that we don't know all this. Deep from within that tiny place called "conscience", there is a voice crying out to us to do what is right; to respond to human need, not human greed. But years of being in a comfort zone of having everything we could possibly need and most of what we could possibly want have deafened the inner ear to that voice. Walls have been built, and continue to be built, to keep out those who annoy us. A wall of bureaucracy is stronger than a wall of concrete. The wall of indifference is strongest of all.

All walls eventually fall. The energy we waste in building them could have been used to eliminate the reasons why we build them in the first place.

Getting Centered.

Last evening J and I went to a local building on Main Street which serves as the center of Zen Buddhist activities in our city. On the first Friday night of every month, those who like to drum, play flutes or shakers or whatever foregather to exercise their creative muscles.

Symbolically perhaps, the tall old building has a very tall and steep staircase, with a landing half way up for those who may be wish to stop for a while and contemplate the possibilities. There are two: go up or down. To reverse directions would be to give in to the laws of aging and gravity. Onward and upward.

At the top, we entered a room with a sofa, desk and some people from our group. After unpacking J's djembe, I sat for a while thinking about stairlifts and catapults and oxygen masks and pitons while the group discussed its next gig. In the absence of either of the two instruments I usually play (the dundun or bass drum, and the balafon or xylophone) I decided to get up and poke around and discover the Center.

There were two back rooms: one a kitchen with a small cubicle containing an empty cabinet (appropriate) on which a small Buddha sat, a box of matches and some incense sticks. The kitchen proper had a refrigerator and microwave, a huge coffee urn and a poster about how to make donations. A doorway led to the HVAC system/cleaning closet.

Retracing my steps, I passed by the drummers into a very large, high-ceilinged room with large windows facing the street with blinds drawn. A rectangle of mats and beanbag cushions was laid out before the benign gaze of a second, larger Buddha on another cabinet.

No lights were on, but the setting sun provided enough to see a parchment divider screen to the left. Behind it lay a large supply of mats and beanbag cushions.

Like Goldilocks, I decided to try on a few for size. I soon discovered that proper placement of these devices induces a very deep state of meditation, one that some cultures call "sleep". Meanwhile, the drummers beat out a number of patterns, some classic and some improvised. When you lie on the floor like that, the bass beats become particularly pervasive and hypnotic.

Time passed, and we made our way slowly down the mountain.

And from The OaklandNews comes this bit of Zen wisdom: Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. Just leave me the hell alone.

We were taken for a ride

Last Saturday, May 12, 2007, was just one more in a series of anniversaries. This time it was the 12th reminiscence of J and The Old Guy getting married on the beach at Treasure Island in Florida's St. Petersburg area.

So we went out and bought a car.

Neona the Canuck Neon finally croaked. She had transmission problems: couldn't get out of second gear. She couldn't run her engine fast enough to sustain the effort, and even when she got revved up, it didn't last. Slow down and she'd shift back to a more comfortable second gear at 40 miles an hour.

Her steering was starting to falter, and her rear struts had long since been bent out of shape by The Old Guy's habit of carrying too much home improvement material in her trunk. Take her over a railway track and you bent your sacroiliac.

Perhaps worst of all was the total lack of air conditioning. The medical report was that they'd have to remove her dashboard to get at the non-functioning heat exchanger. So to get her to where she could be considered roadworthy again was estimated at around $1900 US.

Well, we did lay out $200 about three weeks earlier to replace a leaking oil pan gasket, but that was where the bucks stopped.

We didn't start out on Saturday to buy a car. We went to look at a Scion, the boxy offering that J wouldn't find fitting, but fortunately, the new models were coming in but hadn't yet arrived. So we moved on, past the Toyotas to the Hondas. And whaddya know: the salesman found a 2004 Honda Accord with a mere 40,500 miles or so on it for us to test drive.

It was love at first flight. I had forgotten what a real car felt like. Power to spare, but a gas sipper, and working air conditioning (an impressive selling point in these parts). Electric windows and, get this, an electric sunroof. So THIS is how the other half has been living all these years!

So now the Honda Automobile Corporation is down by one car, but the Honda Finance Corporation is rubbing its hands at the beginning of a five-year relationship. Or to put it more ironically, TOG has to work for five more years to pay off the car he needs to get him to his job.

And Neona? Well, her trade-in value boiled down to $500 US. I guess that's the floor price they're willing to pay anyone who brings in a junker. So she has been replaced in TOG's heart and soul by a brand new girl: Wanda Honda. How fickle he is.

Even though the new car is a thing of beauty and a toy forever, J topped it when she presented TOG with a small radio-controlled sailboat. That was right on Target! What presents of mine! Perfect fit for the 16-foot swimming pool that has yet to be reinstalled for the summer. On windless days, we can take out one of our floor fans to the water's edge and keep on tacking.

Just trying to keep a roof over our heads

So, yeah. Here we see The Old Guy (TOG) sitting in a nearly-completed “florida room” on the back deck of the house. How did that happen, you ask?

Well, since the dawn of time, we’ve had dining tents or gazebos of one form or another. Each year we have to replace them. The tops rip, or the plastic deteriorates, or somebody stumbles while trying to operate the door zipper and shreds the mosquito netting.

Each year, we go out to find a new dining tent. But alas, this year, none was to be found at an affordable price. This awakened the Spirit of Carpentry in TOG, and soon he was haunting the local Lowes home improvement store. The idea was to reuse the last tent, which was 8 by 8 feet, as the cover for an 8 * 8 dining tent frame made of 1 by 2 inch furring strips.

A couple of weeks and much sweat equity later, a sturdy frame of 2*4s emerged, and screen cloth that was six feet wide by 24 feet long was wrapped around it and stapled down. The tent idea was discarded, as was the tent, when it was noted that it wouldn't fit over the frame.

A door was devised that had magnets embedded in the edge to ensure that no cats could leave the compound. At the suggestion of interested family members, rafters were added, and the entire roof area was first screened beneath them, and then the whole assembly was covered with a retractable plastic tarpaulin.

Back in the day, Dad built various features of our cottage, including putting it together out of a "prefab" delivered kit. We thought prefab meant "pretty fabulous".

Perhaps that was where the carpenty bug bit (followed closely by the black fly). At any rate, trying hard to adhere to “measure twice and cut once” and other tribal memories, TOG made a couple of errors that were mainly inconvenient, and so perhaps a better name for the unit would be “the Leaning Tower of Pizza”.

The main discrepancy is that the original dining tent flared at the bottom, out to ten feet square. So we had 100 sq. ft. to accommodate us. But by making the sides vertical (the way Dad did it, using a level), that total floor dimension shrank to 64 square feet. So the maximum occupancy sign will have to read “Four adults or four cats”. But then, if the sides had flared out at the bottom, the screen cloth wouldn’t have fit. So you see how torn The Old Guy was at times in trying to meet all the group’s needs. And how he now understands how an architect feels at a planning meeting.

Of course, the first night found the Grey Cat Who Personifies Evil up on the rafter, presumably by climbing up the screens. But that was before the top was screened in. Now he is content to lie across the path of anyone who dares to use the Catbana.

The best idea of all came about 75% of the way through the project, from J, of course.

“Why not fit it right up against the patio door, so we can leave the inside doors open and the cats can go out anytime they like and sit in the screenhouse with us?”

And that, Dear Reader, explains the batts of fiberglas insulation between the exterior wall of the house and the abutting wall of the Catbana. We may not have black flies in season but we sure have mosquitoes. As the saying goes, “Once bitten, twice shy.”

The finesse fish I tasted

Did you ever enjoy grilled fish, fresh from the furnace?
I did.
When I was a teenager in Toronto, we had an Armenian next-door neighbour, Ed, who was a man of all talents, and a well-respected carpet merchant. His wife, Winnifred, was a classical pianist who gave lessons to a number of students, most of conservatory-level talent, on a baby grand piano which was large enough to fill the dining room of their 1.5 storey 1940's house. The piano stood on a very fine maroon persian rug, of course, leaving just enough room left for the student and her master to sit at the keyboard, metronome ticking. But Ed always saw to it that there were fresh flowers on the piano.

Everyone called Ed what sounded like "Hopar" to my ears, a term of endearment and respect meaning "uncle", I was told. He adored his wife and her music and her students. He would sit in the kitchen for hours over an espresso and absorb the many repetitions of Schumann and Brahms (and the Liszt goes on) whom most pianists would find difficult to perform, waiting for Chopin and Mozart. If neither of these was forthcoming within a reasonable time (two espressos), he would disappear to the basement, where he had built a darkroom.

In his country of birth, Ed had been a professional photographer. That is, he took the pictures (often using a view camera with its enormous plates) and processed them whether in color or B&W, the latter being his creative favourite.

When he came to Canada, he was mentored by a previous immigrant who was a rug seller, and in due course, opened his own shop south of the 401 highway on Avenue Road. None of these merchants were in competition with each other: they were a community and most were directly related, so they would lend a hand when one was needed.

Hopar and I became great friends: I spent many a summer leisure hour in conversation with him in the back yard. He planted a mulberry tree (later to be known as "that damned mulberry"... a term my father coined when out in his garden rooting up the weeds and the unstoppable progeny of the tree, even though it was on the far side of Ed's yard.)

One summer, Ed gave me a job at his store for two weeks while his regular help was on vacation. I typed invoices, confirmed installations with customers, kept payment records and when things were slow, tacked down expensive rugs on the floor of the shop and sprinkled dry cleaner and vacuumed them. New shipments would arrive, and we would wrestle them into the storage area. It was fascinating, tiring and he even paid me, although I would have worked for him for nothing.

Ed's accent rendered the "i" as a long "e" in English, and the reverse. So one day I found myself puzzled for a moment or two when I saw him spreading fertilizer on his extensive border garden. I asked what it was, and he said, "The very best ship sheet."

Nevertheless it was Ed's tending, care and advice that nursed a sparse wisteria vine on his side of our back porch from a pathetic trellis of six or seven vines to an impenetrable forest of violet cascades and dark green leafiness. And his roses and cucumbers were paragons of their species.

One summer day, Ed invited me to dinner, and said that we were going to have greelled feesh. I knew it would be good. We went inside, but rather than to the stove, we descended to the basement. Ed opened the furnace. Inside was a steel tray of coals, sitting on the big circular burner that was part of the typical coal-to-gas conversion. On it was a grill, and on that were three white fish, that from my cloistered experience of mainly breaded fish sticks, I failed to recognize.



Hopar turned them over gently, closed the door, and went into the darkroom to show me his latest work. From the drying line he unclipped this picture. Five minutes later, we retrieved the perfectly grilled whatever-it-was, repaired to the kitchen, and with certain fresh additions from the garden, sat down in the guest bedroom, now converted to a dining area. Beethoven thundered from the music room. The metronome ticked relentlessly. But the furnace fish was finesse fish. I have not tasted its like since.


New owners inhabit our houses now. The music and the strong Armenian coffee are long gone. I have no idea what transpires in the neighbourhood these days, except that the price of those houses has increased more than tenfold. But I have no better wish for you than that you may enjoy neighbours on all your boundaries like Ed and Winnie.

(I wrote this with Canadian spellings in honour of my favourite neighbour who did me so many favours.)

Drumming up support for the newlyweds

So let me share with you my impressions of a wedding we attended today.

This was the first time I can remember being the wedding band. And we were golden! The couple had requested that the OGADE group provide background music for the guests, although African drumming is not, by nature, a background type of activity. Far from it.

The day started out raining and dreary and progressed from there to dreary and raining. The location was at a farm and wilderness preserve some 20 km west of the city of Hamilton, Ohio. Although J and I were almost the first of the band to arrive, almost every available parking place was occupied, so I was directed to a space behind the drive shed.

After unloading Jo and her djembe as close as I could to the pavilion (a massive white plastic tent at the margins of a very large lawn), I drove around as instructed, but lost my nerve when I put the car into reverse and the wheels turned and spun in two ruts made for and by the occasion. Neona and I solved the problem by parking her behind another car on the lawn. No ruts for the wicked.

Entering the tent, we located our spot in the far corner, next to a very large white box with a vent on the bottom. The family had rented this massive electric heater to blow hot air into the tent. There was another one at the opposite end.

At least a hundred people were convening as the rest of our group rendezvoused and began to noodle on the various instruments. L had brought a melodious metal balafon which he had made at a workshop in Ghana. It has a beautiful sound and plays easily, enough to be heard over the thumping of the djembes and dunduns and bucking up the courage of the quavering flute.

One of our members lives up the road. He had the sense to drive his tractor, should any of the guests' vehicles require extrication from the muddiness. He is also a fine gourd and scraper player, never breaking the rhythm, which helps when you are striving for syncopation.

Our first number was a hot one indeed. The massive electric heater was working at full bore, and although the tempo stayed constant, the temperature shot up. However, this was only a temporary problem, since during the next piece, the heater failed, and only cold, moist air blasted us. Through it all, great artists that we were, we kept the beat.

Then, it came time for the ceremony. Everyone stood up throughout, which meant that nobody could see properly. Some knew how to use the sound system while others did not. The usual stuff, although I must say in retrospect that this was the first time I had heard someone read "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss as a wedding blessing or whatever it was. Other magic moments were applauded enthusiastically as well, and to our surprise and delight, one of the valedictorians read the lyrics of Leonard Cohen's "Dance me to the end of love". Then came the vows, accompanied by the ring falling in the mud (as I later learned), and the circle of life moved on.

At that point the thumping of J's lone djembe invited us to ramp up the celebration again. Quickly the Billyphon joined the fray, and soon all the drummers, shakers and scrapers were in the thick of it once again. Finally hunger prevailed and conversation resumed.

The reception food delighted everyone, the vegetarians in particular. Have you ever experienced a spinach salad with parmesan and strawberry slices?

I believe I inadvertently shared my hot dog with the family springer spaniel. I accidentally dropped the other half of it, and he, a member of a noted family of conservationists, determined that it not be wasted. The numerous bottles of free wine were not wasted either.

At the end of it all, packing up and heading home, we said our goodbyes. Our leader reminded us that Monday night we were due for one more rehearsal with the belly dancers. I'm so glad he didn't say, "Billydancers". I don't dance. Don't ask me.