After The Fact

I am mad at my dad.
This is news because I haven't really been mad at my dad since he died. I was mad at him right about that time. It was all a part of that grieving process. Being mad at him for leaving before I had a chance to show him all the things that I would do and be when I grew up. He was around long enough to see me get married. And move to California. And start a new career.
That career was managing a book warehouse. I worked my way into management within a year of the date I started as an entry level box packer. A year after that I found my way onto the board of directors of this employee-owned company. My father's comment at that time was, "That says a lot about you, or it says a lot about the company." Which I chose to take as a compliment. And since he tended to support what I was doing with enthusiasm even when he didn't fully understand it, that was probably the case. So I wasn't mad.
When he died, I knew that there would be a lot of chapters in the book of my life that he would never read. My move to teaching. The birth of my son. The kid who ended up with his name. The house we bought with the down payment supplied by the insurance and inheritance that came in the aftermath of my father's untimely demise.
Which makes me wonder what a timely demise might be.
Today I am not mad about my father for dying. I am mad at him for leaving my mother. That made so many things in my life and those around me so much more difficult that I really wish he would have thought to check in with me before he did it. There was a lot of talk after the fact, mostly with me attempting to bridge the gap that he had created with our family and friends. There were plenty of awkward moments, like my college graduation party, and all the attendant gatherings brought on by getting married. And I know that there are plenty of families that suffer through divorce and contend with all the lack of comfort that comes with having that solid nucleus of mom and dad. But that wasn't supposed to be me. My mom and dad were the mom and dad that everyone else wished they had.
Until they weren't.
And today that bugs me.
A lot.

Honky

I would love to be able to travel back in time to have a chat with the inventor of the car horn. Wikipedia would like me to speak with Miller Reese Hutchison, an electrical engineer who found himself in the employ of Thomas Edison and borrowed the notion of a squeeze bulb horn from bicycles and smaller vehicles and adapted their use to motor cars. Electricity made it possible to generate a much louder and piercing noise with the hopes that it could be heard over the ever-increasing sound of traffic. This lead the the eventual need for louder motors to be heard over the sound of horns blaring.
I am not a fan. This might be because I don't drive as much as others, and I tend to look at the time I spend behind the wheel to be more contemplative and protected compared to my bicycle commutes. I can vary the temperature. I can listen to music or check traffic. If it begins to rain, I can roll up the windows and turn on the windshield wipers. If someone jumps out in front of me, I have brakes.
I don't use the horn. For me, the warning that might be associated with that sound has long since been replaced by the anger. It doesn't mean, "Look out" as much anymore. Now it means, "What's your problem?" Then there is the very favorite add-on which involves rolling down the window and screaming some vile epithet or obscene finger gesture.
Which brings me to my overall philosophy about traffic. We are in it together. I understand the challenge of being stuck in a line of cars, waiting for that one person in front to decide that he or she must have left their ticket to the parking garage on the table at the California Pizza Kitchen, but I have also been that person. Not the California Pizza Kitchen part so much as the misplaced parking validation. With all the other thoughts and concerns going on in our collective heads, from the climate control to the radio station to the kids in the back seat to the navigation helpfully routing you through an open pasture, it's a wonder we get anywhere safely. Those three thousand pound chunks of metal and plastic that go flying past and around us that manage to stay in their own lane and avoid impact should be the outliers, the exceptions. Instead, we all do a pretty amazing job of controlling our conveyances from one point to the next.
All of which is to say that the gentleman who beeped at me when I was turning left, with a proper hand signal, on my bicycle might want to reconsider his choices.

Another Place

Twenty years ago, my wife and I stood in the drive way of our new house. It wasn't a brand new house. It was new to us. We were brand new homeowners of a slightly used house. A house that was built in the late nineteenth century. But this was not the history upon which we reflected. Instead we looked back up the driveway to our garage.
Our garage. The idea that we would own a separate building in which we could park a car was confounding to us. Not that we tended to park our car in that building. On that particular day we were looking at our "empty" garage, and noticed what was still inside. There was a kettle barbecue. There was a lawn mower. As we stood there gaping, we wrestled with this new reality that this previously young couple was now the owner of a barbecue and a lawn mower. Neither of these items belonged to us ironically. We used them both, sometimes with even more dedication and purpose than the car we might at times find room to park next to these items.
Over the past couple of decades, the contents of our garage have shifted a little. We have had a couple different iterations of lawn mower, and we have upgraded our kettle from a twenty-two inch grill to twenty-six. Along with that we have collected a wide array of power tools, expanding greatly on the lone cordless drill which we brought with us from our lives as apartment dwellers. A sander, a circular saw, a jigsaw, a reciprocating saw, who knew you needed so many different kinds of saws? Mostly to deal with the jumble of lumber that periodically stacks up before, during and after home improvement projects. In the rafters are boxes for appliances that have outlasted the appliances themselves. And a giant paper clip. A big red three foot long paper clip which made the trip from the old apartment to our garage. In case we get some ten foot long papers that need to be clipped together.
From time to time, we have parked cars other than our own in that garage. We have to move the punching bag that hangs down in the middle out of the way, but in a pinch, we can use our garage for its intended purpose. Or a Vespa, bought on a whim by my wife's brother. Or a child's workbench, ready to ship to the next junior woodworker since our son has moved on to owning power tools of his own. Our son has left car parts of various sizes and conditions, but has conscientiously returned to move them along to a better place.
Like his own garage. 

Another Day

I write about it somewhat frequently. I try and imagine myself to be a steely-eyed veteran of this urban school. I try hard not to be fazed by the events of the day. On Tuesday there was a shooting outside our school. We were on lockdown immediately. Children screamed. Children ran. Children cried.
I was in my classroom with a group of kindergartners. When the announcement came over the PA system, some of them moved via instinct to the floor, away from the windows and doors where I was starting to gather them. Others needed to have the moment impressed on them, and as the moments passed I know that my tone became less gentle and more firm. I had no idea what was going on outside my door. I knew that all these five year olds were my responsibility and the ones popping up hoping to use the computer left vacant by their classmate were not increasing my calm. I tried to couch all my instructions in terms of staying safe, and not telling them that there was danger. But those children who had been paying attention in the first place knew. They were looking to me for answers because they had listened during our drills, and now they wanted to know: Is this practice?
Is there a bad guy out there?
Is there a gun?
What I told them was we were doing just like we practiced in case there was a bad guy. I didn't know if there was a gun. I hoped that if there was a gun that it had gone far away from where we were. Guns and elementary school children are a notoriously bad mix. Not that I said that, because I busied myself with all the song and dance and puppetry I could muster to keep their attention on the cluster of classmates huddled together on the floor.
And the one or two that kept squirming toward the door. Or the window. Naturally curious. And me without a clue about what or where the danger might be.
Until the announcement was made: All Clear. Which came as a release to everyone in the room. In the school. Business as usual could resume. We could once again return to moving our penguin friend across the screen to conquer math concepts. The danger outside was gone.
For now.
It took me a few more hours to process all the ways things could have gone wrong. Then I decided to put them away. We were all marked by the experience, but we were going home.

Monday Motivations

You: why is my balance so low

Bank account: make coffee at home

Bank account: eat the food that's already in the fridge

Bank account: you don't need a cab, it's only three blocks

You: I guess we'll never know

Bank account: seriously?

This was the clever little tweet released on the twitterverse last Monday by the friendly folks at Chase. You remember them, right? Chase of the twenty-five billion dollar bailout. Chase of the CEO getting paid nearly thirty million dollars a year. 

I'm guessing that JP Morgan Chase & Company's James Dimon doesn't check the fridge before calling up Grubhub. I expect that he probably has someone making coffee for him just about where and whenever he wants it. As for the ride-sharing thing, I would imagine it's been a while since James has driven in his neighborhood's casual carpool, and walking? Well, let's try an avoid the image of trampling the proletariat under his feet. 

Maybe for a moment the folks at JP Morgan Chase & Company imagined themselves as the good old Building and Loan in Bedford Falls. Like George Bailey frantically reassuring his customers during a panic. We'll get through this if we all hang together. 

Except JP Morgan Chase etc. aren't really the George Baileys of the world, are they? Mister Potter? That seems a more appropriate comparison. Mister Potter grew rich off the backs of others. He wheeled about his empire rather than walking anywhere. And while he was dining on pheasant under glass, the Baileys were celebrating their honeymoon in a great wreck of a house with a fire in the hearth and leaks in the roof. 

And we all remember who the richest man in Bedford Falls was, don't we? At least that's the way we would like it to be. 

Game Over

Many years ago, some friends of mine introduced us to a game that my family played on many road trips. For the record, this one was long enough ago that it was a family game that could be played with small children. This is not the one that involves reading the names off the side of recreational vehicles and altering them slightly. That one is a favorite, but not the one I am addressing currently. So thank you for your interest and maybe someday I will get around to explaining how that one works.
The game which I am referencing here was simple enough: Humvees versus Hybrids. It was my ecologically aware friends who suggested that you could learn a lot about a community by checking out that ratio. This was back in the day when the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle was first being introduced to the general public after years of military use. "Humvees" were the big, wide reminders that we "won" the Gulf War and to the victor go the spoils. All that oil that we liberated was going straight into the gas tanks of these babies and never mind that there no parking spots painted in any mall lots large enough to hold them, they would make their own. Thank you. That was back in 1992, and owning a Humvee was a way to show just how proud an American you were. 
Around that same time, scientists were developing the antithesis to this beast. Yes, there is still an internal combustion engine in these little devils, but they rely on an electric propulsion system, hence their name. While there have been larger vehicles equipped with this hybrid drivetrain, you could expect to see smaller cars with odd shapes buzzing about the highways and byways, zipping into those spots where other cars dare not go.
Believe it or not, there was a time when this was a contest. There were also plenty of places where you might find row after row of Humvees, lined up as if there might be a parade of some sort at any moment commemorating our energy dependence on the Middle East. For many years, spotting a Hybrid in the wild was an exultant moment. Some right-thinking individual had chosen to take on the establishment and save the planet all by themselves. 
Nowadays, you don't see so many Humvees. Care and feeding of their kind fell out of fashion once the full discussion of carbon footprints stretched outside the city limits of Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. These days, if I do see one of those GMC monsters, I get a little wistful. Remembering the days before the Terminator was our Governator and there was some status left in over-consuming. Now even Arnold is exploring hydrogen-fueled cars and electric SUVs. 
If it looks like we won, keep looking. 

There's A Hole

It's out there. Right now. Making all that noise and spreading all that misinformation as if it were the gospel. The gospel according to the "President's" mouth. 
In Green Bay, Wisconson last Saturday night, here is what fell out of that particular and peculiar orifice: "The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully, and then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby. I don't think so."
And that is precisely where we do agree: That "I don't think so" part anyway. In order to stir up his base and bring the focus back tot he fiction in which he lives, the "President's" mouth spouted lies about late term abortions. The fabrication came in response to Wisconsin's current governor, a Democrat, saying that she would veto proposed legislation from that could have meant life sentences in prison for doctors who intentionally did not provide medical care to babies born alive after a failed abortion.
Like so many of the expulsions that dribble and drop form the opening in the front of the "President's" face, this provided a jolt to the dulled senses of his followers who seem to need fear and anger to keep them moving from one rally to the next. This is the same maw from which slithered such timeless classics as, “I’m not denying climate change. But it could very well go back," and "Mexico will pay for the wall." And even he can't stay away from the hits:  "If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly. I was talking about people who went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general." It was backing up over his mouth's assertion that the events of 2017 in Charlottesville, where he said there were "very fine people on both sides." 
So I am suggesting here that all would be fine if we could just figure out a way to keep things from crawling out of the "President's" mouth. Things that might incite or defame. Things that could impact or infect lives outside of his mouth. Like the rest of the world.