Not Even Not Zen 443: Biomythography - Note 149, People or Politics

People or Politics

We were socializing over the sort of game that doesn’t take much attention. We had time to discuss politics.

This was in college. Half of us were guests in a group living arrangement called the Prescott Mods that always looked to me like the sort of condos you would find around a ski lodge. The buildings had high-angled metal roofs. Inside them, the many-bedroom units were spacious and, despite the college furnishings and modular furniture, they felt comfy. Our discussions about politics tended to fill the common areas. Everyone walking through joined in for a little while. Our concepts remained idealistic, of course. I'd assumed we had all worked jobs for a few years, at least, but we were still young enough for us to imagine every political system functioning if people wanted it.

The ‘if people wanted it’ problem was larger than anyone knew. It is, essentially, the most serious problem in economics. Most of the fiscal judgments that appear to be about math are really about incentives and other estimations of human nature. But our judgments of other people were about what one might expect from college students.

“Communism does work,” a young man said from the sidelines. He hadn't joined the board game. He was a roommate on his way to the kitchen. His political contribution came from his experiences in his previous year, which he had spent in communal living. “Just because the Soviets are corrupt doesn’t mean the Czechs are corrupt. Or the Chinese. They're making things work.”

Across from me, my friend Al made a skeptical sound. He thought America was full of crooks. And we all, everyone around the table and elsewhere around the room, thought the Soviets were corrupt. The Chinese government seemed idealistic but also full of power-mad people at the top who were happy to murder one another and sometimes kill swathes of their own countrymen.

“It sort of works,” a couple of us allowed. I snuck a peek at my game cards.

“But it assumes people are honest,” Al commented. "That's the flaw."

At some point during our game, we ended up in a half-hour argument about capitalism, specifically the part where it eventually curdles into monopolies, like milk left out on the counter of Free Enterprise. Then we tried to tackle socialism, except nobody at the table could actually agree on what socialism was, which did not stop half the young men from having extremely strong opinions about it. This is, I believe, a requirement for being a college student: you must be prepared to argue passionately about things you cannot coherently define.

Eventually it dawned on me that the real design flaw in every political system ever invented is the people running it. Specifically, their tendency to get corrupted, which is basically a law of human nature on par with a law of physics.

This, I decided, is probably why the United States has muddled through as well as it has. It showed up to the philosophy party before capitalism, socialism, and communism brought in the serious drugs and ruined the nation-building vibe. Humanity had already spent several thousand years watching leaders get corrupted, so the founders had time to think about that part of things. Most of the political theories that came after our founding seem to operate on the assumption that people are rational and well-intentioned, which is an assumption I would not make about my best friends, let alone a large government.

Even today, actual functioning countries are basically political system smoothies - a blend of everything, yes, but with one of the main ingredients still being 'try to stop people from being terrible.'

As I sat with my friends, I had a sudden vision, as I often had back then, of moving parts, of organizations in action, and of the people in and around them. I realized I could make any political system work. It didn't matter if I had to implement communism, capitalism, socialism, anarchy (so popular then among teenagers), theocracy, or pretty much any other thing. The system didn't matter.

It was always about the people. Which, frankly, explains a lot.

If I had the right people, I could form a business. I could form a tribal government; run a farm; do anything constructive I wanted to do. What's more, the right people were always the same people. There are people who will make any system function because they're the hard workers who are willing to be responsible for themselves and others.

And I knew who they were. I built a list in my head with Al's girlfriend, Donna, at the top. The list totalled four or five people at most. That, I found discouraging. I could add a few others who weren't the right people, exactly, but who wouldn't go against the team effort. They could work under the influence of the great souls. The list grew to eight or nine people.

But for the ones who mattered most, there were at best five people out of the (roughly) thousand I knew.

In contrast, I was aware there are people who excuse themselves from responsibility under any system. They cause any politics to fail and die in corruption. I thought those were rare, maybe one or two out of a hundred. But that estimate made the great souls even more rare than the selfish ones. I tried not to think about those proportions.

I focused on the list and what it meant. It's the people, not the politics, that make efforts succeed or fail. Good people - not just well-intentioned ones, but folks actively working and doing good deeds - were at the root of every success I'd heard about. With good souls, I knew I could build any organization.

About a minute later, I realized it would probably all fall apart in the next generation. Any system that depended on good people driving it would fall apart on the next regression to the mean, on the tendency of children not to be quite like their parents.

The progeny of saints are not saints themselves.

So while it was obvious that a society built on good people is a good idea — right up there with "exercise more" and "stop eating the entire sleeve of Oreos" — I circled back to a slightly less comfortable realization: a well-run society can't just hope everyone behaves. It has to actively lean on people. It needs to reward the good citizens, ideally with something better than a certificate of appreciation. It needs to punish the bad ones. It probably needs public shaming. And corporal punishment, maybe, for people who can't be shamed but the society doesn't want to outright kill.

Basically, a society has to do all the awkward, unglamorous things that every successful nation has always done. Corruption, of course, never fully goes away — it's less a problem you solve and more a raccoon you continually manage — but in the early days of any effort, before the checks and balances are in place, success really comes down to the people involved. The quality of the people determines the quality of the victory.

It's a concept that could be deeply inspiring or deeply terrifying, depending on who you're standing next to at the time. For me back then, it was inspiring.
 

Not Even Not Zen 442: Biomythography - Note 148, Equations of the Sun

Equations of the Sun

It was a homework assignment. My professor was the curly-haired Herbert Bernstein. He liked to stride across the front of the classroom with chalk in his hand, and sometimes with both hands behind his back. As he thought about the assignment, his face broke out in a wide smile.

He turned and finished his set of equations on the chalkboard. Although we were only a couple weeks into his quantum mechanics course, I was finding his enthusiasm to be infectious. This was my favorite class.

"These are what we see, roughly, coming out of our nearest star, the sun," he told us. His eyes swept the room. He swiveled and tapped the slate next to what he'd written. "According to our best measurements, here it is. These are the results of whatever is going on in there."

"Nothing more?" someone asked, the young, blonde man who had dropped out of Princeton and returned to college here.

"Nothing of significance," Herb put his hands behind his back. He shrugged. "This is pretty much it. So your homework is to explore. Tell me, with equations, what you think is going on inside the sun to produce these results on the surface."

Dutifully, I copied the results. As I did, I started thinking backwards. What was the previous reaction step? Or really, what were the set of previous reactions that would produce this? Some of them could be simple. Maybe most of the results came from hydrogen and helium. The odds and ends in the equations could come from the traces of other light elements reacting in the plasma.

Next to me, one of my classmates, a young woman who spoke up with keen questions, pulled back her kinky blonde hair and jotted the assignment down on her page more quickly than I did. When she finished, she slapped her pencil down. She noticed me staring at her and flashed me a smile. I put my head down for a few seconds, embarrassed, and checked my equations.

It was my first semester at Hampshire College.

I'd made a few acquaintances but no close friends yet. And since I had a routine of working late into the night and getting up early to exercise, I could make lots of time for homework, especially writing. I was working on a novel, bit by bit. I was composing notes for my Division I linguistics paper. Naturally, I spent an hour on the equations for the interior chemical reactions of the sun. In fact, I spent another block of time on the problem on Saturday morning.

On Sunday, the young woman from my quantum mechanics class found me as we were passing through the halls. It was an odd chance, very welcome, but I had thought she didn't live near me. In our conversation, I found I was mostly right. She revealed her room was two floors up and two sections north of me, although conveniently we were both in the Dakin building.

“Did you make any progress on the homework?” she asked. The light in the hall was dim. It made her golden hair seem browner, but her blue eyes shone.

“Yeah.” I thought about where I had given up. I had not been able to make my forward-looking solution and backward-looking solution join together. “But it doesn’t quite balance.”

“Let’s meet up and go over it.” She gave me a determined look, based on the slight crease in her brow, but with a hopeful, uncertain grin beneath. It seemed like a challenge.

I had been thinking of her as the bright girl. She was smart and fairly quick-witted. She spoke in a feminine but slightly rough voice. For the first time, in the hall with her, I really looked at her upturned nose and her freckles and thought about how cute she was. She would later tell me she hated the bump in her nose although, if she had one, it was essentially invisible. As far as her freckles, she would tell me she hated them. She never told me she hated being smart. That, I think she felt good about.

In the afternoon, we sat down together and got out our notebooks. On hers, she had written a few lines. She appeared to have lost interest early. Maybe she figured out quicker than I did that we didn't have much of a sense of direction, in our group, about the chemical reactions in plasma even though we had spent most of a class on them.

So far, I had filled three pages with equations and maybe a sixth of another. I had given up, too, when I had gotten enough sense of the bigger problem. I had started to develop opinions about how the output from the sun should theoretically appear. I was able to contrast it with how the results actually appeared and see a significant gap. I suspected something was wrong with our starting point. Everyone was sure about the starting point, apparently, because we knew the proportions of elements in our sun, but I was starting to guess our picture had to be wrong somehow - or at least incomplete.

"Explain this," said the young woman. She put a finger down on the second step in my equations.

Line by line, we stepped through my work in the first two pages. She listened to my thinking. Twice, she jotted down notes in her own notebook. She checked my math. When she reached the middle, she tapped her chin. She sat, lost in her thoughts for a moment.

With awkward smiles and confusing body language, we said goodbye before dinner. On Monday, we met again in our quantum mechanics class. There, I discovered how little I had written compared to another student, a blonde young man who had dropped out from Princeton. He had returned to academics here at Hampshire College. He had filled page after page, nearly twenty pages, before he gave up getting the reactions to balance between the starting elements and the finished products. He seemed consumed by the project. However, he was kind enough to read my work a little and see I had tried a different direction, which seemed to frustrate him, please him, and make him want to resume. He really wanted Professor Bernstein to reveal the answer.

"There is no answer yet," Herb Bernstein told us. "No one has solved this."

That made everyone a little happier with how far we had gotten. This wasn't a trivial problem.

"The important part," Herb continued, "Is the thinking about it. The question of particle reactions in our sun is an interesting one. I think we can all see the math doesn't work out. Either it's tremendously complicated, more than humans can do, or there's something we don't know. And I think there's something we don't know."

Our classmate from Princeton seemed frustrated but he obviously felt happier, too, and more relaxed. I think he was discovering that he hated required courses and the pressure of exams but he actually liked learning. He loved the process.

I think I was coming to the same sort of understanding. When all the external forces and distractions were removed, as they mostly had been at Hampshire, I loved to learn. I wanted to figure out solutions to problems. And I wanted to make things.  

Not Even Not Zen 441: Biomythography - Note 147, Competitive Writing

Competitive Writing

The class was advertised as creative writing. We auditioned with stories about ‘an egg,’ each no more than five hundred words long. Everyone got the same story prompt for the audition. It was a decent way to limit class size. A year earlier in my quantum mechanics class, the professor let everyone attend. After two weeks, he enrolled everyone who hadn't given up. But in the arts, Hampshire College classes had to proceed differently. A professor couldn’t let a hundred students carry in their manuscripts about alienation, rain, childhood trauma, and eggs and then hope only twenty would stay.

Lynne Hanley, our newest writing professor at the college, had to know writing classes were the most popular type of course on campus. Even if she had been willing to punish herself with yards of typewritten manuscripts weekly, there were factors to consider like 'how many students will fit into this room?' For a host of practical reasons, including fire codes, Lynne had to impose a limit.

Submitting audition stories struck me as better than holding a lottery. Maybe I felt that way because I had already lost a class lottery. And with the auditions, I got in.

On the first day, the professor asked me to read my audition piece aloud. This was alarming, due to my previous writing class experiences. Those were workshops wherein the operating philosophy was: no sentence should survive. Students would go through a manuscript line by line as if they were members of a special literary police unit. Sometimes it was helpful. Sometimes it was a competitive sport. Sometimes, students would find flaws in great writing not because the sentences and paragraphs weren't strong but because finding flaws was what we were supposed to do. I think it felt even-handed, to some.

But this time, people liked the story. There was even a small burst of applause, the academic equivalent of being told by surgeons that they see no immediate reason for concern. I relaxed. At the end of the class, after the readings and discussions had finished, I thanked everybody and said I would keep their comments in mind when revising.

Professor Hanley's eyes widened.

"Oh, I almost forgot," she said. "We will not be doing revisions in this class."

For a moment, I opened my mouth to object. But that was me trying to stick up for the force of my habits. Writing and endless revision went together like college and debt, to my mind. I'd been trained to believe every piece of writing must be polished until it glowed like a jewel or it caught fire from the friction and burned the author's house down.

As the next couple of weeks went by, I started to understand the system. This class emphasized first drafts and momentum. Instead of spending six geological eras polishing one paragraph, we wrote new things. It was strange, but it was good. Compared to the earlier writing classes I'd taken at a faraway university, at Hampshire, and at Amherst, Lynne Hanley's class was speedier and more productive. The Hampshire writers remained enthusiastic, too. They were willing to work, including doing the kinds of work - and the sheer amounts - it takes to improve.

In the fourth class, though, Professor Hanley said we would do something different.

"Someone in our class has been writing songs," she said. "And I think we should listen to some of his writing and give him comments in the way writers do."

Inwardly, I winced at the announcement. I had written songs for high school and college garage bands but I knew I wasn't good at the arrangements. In my head, the instrumentation and harmonies sounded wonderful. On the page, I gave up. I couldn't make enough sense out of the musical notation. Nor, for that matter, could I play five or six instruments - and certainly not at once. Songwriting, I knew, was not just poetry with a guitar leaning against it. It required additional powers. It was the difference between being able to hammer one board into another and being personally responsible for the plumbing, wiring, roofing, windows, and whatever else it takes to make sure a house doesn't fall over.

After class, a couple of students and I talked about this development.

"You know his father," one young woman said, and she named someone famous. He was a musician whose songs I hadn't heard and yet, she was right, I knew his name. He was famous.

The other student reacted as college students do when celebrity brushes the outer edge of campus life.

"That's amazing," she said.

It was, in a way, but it didn't encourage me. Maybe our song-writing student would be relatively expert. But maybe not. Also, he might be self-indulgent and overly forgiving of his own flaws. I had known a few children of successful people. Some of them seemed driven to achieve great things, which was interesting, but some seemed to assume they had already achieved them, which was not.

The next time, as I walked toward the room in Prescott where our writing class met, I remembered I was going to listen to songs. I prepared myself emotionally to hear something terrible. I assumed there would be at least one major defect: clumsy lyrics, awkward melody, embarrassing instrumentation, or the general unfinished quality common to art made by people who are, after all, still teenagers and do not yet command a full studio orchestra with backup singers working for union scale.

After we took our seats, Professor Hanley started the class normally. We reviewed a brief slate of stories. Then she nodded to a dark-haired young man. He pulled out a boombox. After some problem with the power cord, which had gotten disconnected as people shuffled around during class, the fellow pressed play.

His song came out. And it was a finished one. Not "promising." Not "interesting." Finished. He had laid down tracks in a studio, somehow. This was not a guy strumming uncertainly to a single tape recorder in his dorm room. This was finished work. Within about a minute I realized I was not remotely qualified to critique the arrangement. I could barely scribble out partial versions of vocals and strum a few chords.

I strained to listen to the lyrics closer. Those, at least, I would be comfortable with. But it's hard to criticize words you can’t discern. And mostly, I couldn't. Lyrics on a recording do not line up neatly on a printed page. They do not give you a chance to scan ahead or return to an earlier verse to review a line again.

Abruptly, the young man pressed the stop button on the boombox. The song was over. What could I say? I didn't have even token criticism in mind. And then all the class poured in and gushed with praise.

As usual, I felt like I should pick through the words with a comb as if this had been any other piece of fiction writing from the class. But I realized, well, my response was mostly just my old habits. I was trying to do what I had usually done. With some relief, I saw everyone else was going to discuss the song. It was a good song. Maybe I could just shut up.

Sometimes when I need to be quiet or to be patient, I practice meditation. This wasn’t one of those times. I really was just trying to shut up. And maybe not be so competitive. I was growing aware I should not always try to re-write a poem or a song in my head. Mostly, for a few minutes, I practiced shutting up and trying to get with the supportive culture of Hampshire College.

Not Even Not Zen 440: Biomythography - Note 146, In Common

In Common

I stepped through the doors, first in line.

"Go on," said Roberta. The brown haired woman tilted her head to the stairs. With her not-yet-used hole punch in her left hand, she waved me through.

I was on the minimum meal plan at the Hampshire College dining commons, so I was usually hungry by dinner. Roberta knew it. She let me go through without punching my meal ticket about half the time if I was among the first to report. That way, she let me eat a few lunches during the week.

Every time she punched my ticket at lunch, it seemed to make her happy.

I put the meal pass back into my wallet and turned down the steps to the front-kitchen meal line. Unfortunately, I already knew from the eye-watering odors that I wasn't going to find anything I liked. There are only three things worse than eating a skunk, I guess, and those are: cooked squash, cooked eggplant, and cooked carrots. It's astonishing how carrots are transformed into a force for evil by the act of cooking. When they're raw, they're tasty.

Possessed by chaos spirits, the chefs had added carrots to otherwise fine spaghetti.

Tray in hand, I marched around to the back kitchen in the hope there would be something tasty and hot. The attendant waved me in. He gave me a big smile as I picked up a plate of spinach pie. (Other students called it spanikopita.) Then I smelled the pie. It reeked. I put the plate back where I'd gotten it. I crouched and squinted.

The pie was spinach and squash. Inedible.

A few minutes later, I found a place in the middle room of the dining commons. One drawback of arriving early was that I sat alone. A benefit, though, was I sat alone - sometimes with my writing pad or a paperback.

I was staring off into space, not writing, when a short, cute woman poked her head through the middle room doors. She spied me, gave an uncertain smile, and made a decision. She stepped in.

“Mind if I sit here?”

"Not at all!" 

She lived on the hall near my girlfriend. Her name was Annette. All I knew about her so far was she seemed smart, funny, and a little shy.

She started talking before she sat down. I tried to move a chair for her. She pulled up another. Her conversation seemed to come in bursts, each carefully measured, like leveled tablespoons of complete thoughts. When she gave me room to respond, she laughed at my responses. Her dark eyes seemed to sparkle.

To my dismay, Annette carried a plate of the forbidden spaghetti on her tray. She ignored it and took a sip of her drink. She eyed my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

"Why aren't you eating the dinner?" she asked.

I looked at the carrots in the marinara sauce. At this point in life, I sat quietly in meditation an awful lot and I didn't think I needed to use words, so I just gazed at carrots more meaningfully. You could smell them in the sour red sauce all over the dining commons.

“Well?” She indicated my sandwich with her water glass.

"Can't you tell how bad it is?" I replied after a few seconds.

She tilted her head to one side for a moment. She could smell it all right. She just hadn't thought it was as bad as I did. She chatted a while longer, hands pursed together. Her wit about her classes, professors, and life in general made me laugh. Finally, she picked up her fork.

"Wow." She chewed for a moment and, as if determined to prove me wrong, she swallowed. She looked me in the eye the whole time. I gagged a little as I imagined the taste. "Yeah, that's bad."

"The salad bar is the best thing in the dining hall." Today I felt particularly strongly about it.

She waved her arm and continued her thoughts on politics. I liked her gestures, graceful and quick. But her sarcastic opinions and general smart-assedness were even better. She paused at the finish of a complete thought and gazed down at her plate.

"I've never tasted spaghetti this bad," she observed. She gave her food a sort of disappointed smile and she was off again, conversationally, this time back to life in the dorms. As she described hanging out with her friends, I started to hope, just maybe, that I would fit in with them. They sounded great.

To my surprise, Annette stirred up another forkful of spaghetti, complete with a carrot. While checking me out to see if I was staring in horror, as I was, she popped it into her mouth. Again, she chewed - this time, slower.

"It really is awful." She frowned.

I stared in astonishment. She had eaten the cooked carrot.

"If you don't mind my asking." I put down my sandwich. "After you said it was bad the first time, why did you take a second bite?"

She barked out a laugh.

"To make sure I was right?" Her eyes sparkled. She got me laughing about this, too. "I couldn't quite believe it."

She stirred the spaghetti a third time.

"Fuck this," she said. She put down her fork. "I'm going to go make a peanut butter and jelly or something. Save my place?"

For the cutest smile and sharpest wit around? I would have been happy to wait as long as I could sit still. Longer, really, since that usually wasn’t long enough. 

"Sure!"

And when she walked away, I felt instantly bereft. Sometimes I felt lonely in the dining hall. This was a little like that but this time accompanied by a feeling of warmth, as if I could feel the layer of affection that underlies the world.

 

Not Even Not Zen 439: Poem - A Line of Children

A Line of Children 

Gently, I eased my car past a line of children
on a wide, white sidewalk in the city.
Each of them held to a colored rope as they walked.
A woman at each end of the line, front and back, 
hovered near, mother hens watching over 
their row of baby chicks.

And suddenly I was in a different age.

I was standing on a wide concrete deck,
like the wide sidewalk but at the edge of a pool.
Shielding my eyes from the harsh sun,
breathing in the chlorinated fumes.
I was wondering where my nephew Julian was.
The women watching him in the pool, 
how did they lose track of him? 

He was four years old. Four.

He was an articulate boy, a little shy, 
a gentle soul. He was kind to other children,
willing to share but happy to play alone,
a quiet touch with adults, and a great admirer 
of his cousin, my oldest son.

I remember the looks he gave my son.
his short, nimble fingers, his gestures,
his deep eyes, his walk, his smile.
Julian was going to be a great person.

This year, he would have been twenty-eight.




 - Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 438: Biomythography - Note 145, Getting the Job, Pt. 2

Getting the Job, Pt. II

My wife had needed a lot of support from me as she started her career. It took me four years of paying for her school, our house, and her hiring process for her to qualify for a full time gig. But after the big push, she had returned a lot of support for my job progress, too. It was how we lived - it's how a lot of families live. 

As soon as I started at the NIH, I was forced to accept a long commute. Ninety minutes, less or more depending on the weather, sitting in traffic developing middle-aged back pain. We got no paid lunch, so I spent twelve hours away each day including the car trips. Sometimes I spent more time from home when I stopped by the gym on my return. My wife supported my exercise - within the limits imposed on us by being two adults who needed to drive their children to events in the evenings.

Diane even encouraged me to try mock interviews as I applied for the new CIO job. She accompanied me when I made my appointments in the Hood College Career Center.

I'd worked at Hood College for six years. I had started, in fact, as the only computer programmer in the Career Center, one of four programmers on campus. It had been more than a decade since Hood but there was no doubt about the strength of the relationship. Even though most of my old friends there had moved on, the staff understood me as a former employee. They had heard about me working with their office to create their first two Internet sites. Now they were happy to help.

"How old are you?" said my mock interviewer, a woman who seemed unreasonably young. She dressed smartly in a gold-and-silver pantsuit. But when I was a graduate student, the staff had been older than me.

"Forty-five," I said.

"Perfect." She rapped her note cards against the table top. The cards were how she had been reminding herself of the interview questions. "That's the perfect age to move into leadership."

The concept escaped me but, when I met with Diane after the mock interviews, my wife heard the same statement. She turned to me and said, "Of course."

It was all part of her teamwork. On the way home, we talked about the concept of a promotion 'for the family.' We discussed it with the kids over dinner, even though they had no idea what was going on. We wanted them to understand the expensive suits. And the stakes. I practiced my interviewing in front of the kids in the hope they would learn something about the process.

Finally, the second interview rolled around. I drove down to the main NIH campus in Bethesda. On a large campus, it's easy to underestimate the time spent in marching from place to place. It's easy to get hot when hiking in a suit, too. After a mile or so, I wandered the halls of Building 31, lost, but cooling down, physically and mentally. I had plenty of time. When I arrived at the NCCAM offices, glass-walled and beautiful for a federal administrative space, the suite reminded me of the glass-walled meeting room where I'd had my first interview for this job

For half a minute, I talked with the receptionist. She directed me to the meeting room, where a woman in a suit stood facing the glass walls, studying the table. Even from behind her, I recognized she was my prospective boss. I had finally figured out which one she was. As I approached, she turned toward me. She did a double-take when she recognized me. She paused for a moment, stunned, and then beamed.

"You cleaned up well!" she exclaimed.

"Thanks." I put out a hand to meet hers as she reached to shake. "Sorry I was so tired last time. I had just finished a three day sprint of fixing a firewall. And I had to come right to the interview."

"Tell me about that." She glanced me up and down as if to make sure I'd dressed as well as it first appeared. "You were the Acting Deputy CIO?"

"Oh, yeah." I nodded. That had been an unofficial title but the work had been very real. I had done the job. there was no point in being modest about it now. I had accomplished projects at the NIH leadership level. In fact, I was known for it among the IT staff. My boss was not really in the computer business, though, so I needed to impress her with what I’d done.

We spoke for a few minutes. Then her deputy came to meet us. To both of them, but especially to my new boss, I tried to point out my advantages. In my roles at other institutes, I had learned how to do the CIO job in all respects except budget. I could launch into my work and produce visible progress from the first day. 

“What experience do you have with data calls?”

“Lots.” That was an easy question. Federal data calls got passed down to me a half-dozen times a year. 

Such higher-level requests hadn't existed when I started at the NIH - or at least they hadn't made it to the labs. One year, the HHS asked for a few spreadsheets. Next, the NIH got the idea to ask. Now everyone in IT around the clinic and labs spent a lot of time reporting upstream. 

I automated my reports when I could. Mostly, federal data calls involved spending, just stacks of columns without context, basically unusable for making decisions. However, lately you had to know the reasons for the spending, too, and write about them. Even some computer technicians didn't understand the difference between a 4-port firewall meant to protect a medical instrument and a 256-port firewall-switch meant to protect a block of labs. So the number of people who could report competently on everything was small. 

"The data calls have been taking up almost two full time people from my staff each year," she said. "I mean, it's a team of five, really, but it takes a lot of their time and they sure are complaining."

"That could be ..." I hesitated as I thought and as I wondered how my idea would be received, "because they don't have the right background."

"Yes!" Her voice rose with emphasis. "Exactly."

The discussion proceeded naturally (and energetically) from there. In my last few positions, I had been a member of IT teams with enough staff to share the workload of the data calls. Here, that wouldn't be the case. I was sure I could handle them on my own, though. My main worry was going up against the Deputy CIO (not an Acting title, I noticed) of Fannie Mae. Maybe that person didn't have any NIH experience and couldn't leap into action but I had no control over their prestige or the strengths they might bring to the job. All I knew, in the end, was I'd done well. 

Finally, a week later, I got called in for a follow-up. I wore the second suit. (It was being useful already!) This time, the Executive Officer introduced me to the Director of the Center. The Director had a fair bit to say. She and the EO interviewed me a little more but mostly the Director told me about the direction she was taking and how IT needed to fit into her plans. 

Afterwards, my boss took me outside to tell me that, as I suspected, I'd gotten the job. 

On my drive out of the NIH campus, I stopped at a light and thought about how this had become a family victory. I fumbled with my Blackberry. Diane deserved to know. She would want to hear right away. As I sat at the light, I dialed. My wife picked up after one ring.

"We made it," I said. "I got the job."

"Go team!" Diane shouted.

"Yeah!" Go team, I told myself. Well done, team. I took a deep breath and felt myself relax. Somehow this confirmed not being so taken for granted. I felt more supported as part of our team than ever before.
 

Not Even Not Zen 437: Biomythography - Note 144, Getting the Job, Pt. 1

Getting the Job, Part I 

At the first interview, I felt good. I was satisfied and relaxed. The feeling came from having finished a long bout of successful work, during which I reset my institute's firewall rules correctly, rescued everyone's network service, and restored the data connections for my three hundred people and for a few hundred others.

Now, I also felt underdressed and a little awed by the large, glass-walled meeting room. But I knew I was a good candidate for the job by its description. I solved these kinds of technical problems. I laughed at the government paperwork. I solved personality conflicts, too. And I fixed team problems - no problem.

The people inside ushered me in kindly. I paused, looking at them closely. I recognized the CIOs, two men and a woman dressed in office clothes with no ties. This seemed to be a surprising force of them for an untitled position. I didn't recognize the three women in suits. We took places around a long, pinewood table. It held room enough for twenty-four but even so, the seven of us sat close around the bottom half of the business table. A fourth institute CIO joined us over a phone conference line. I was heartened to hear he was someone I knew. 

For a while, the questions stayed formal. I learned, to my surprise, I had applied to an unlabeled CIO position. One woman acted like I wasn't ready, at least at first, and she delivered her questions in a hostile, challenging way. But this was all stuff I knew. After a while, I made everyone smile and relax. The group settled into a discussion with follow-up questions that felt natural, not quite so scripted. The CIOs seemed to like my answers. I wasn't sure about the interviewers in suits. 

After half an hour of addressing my work history and fielding a few questions about databases and federal data calls, one of the women in suits looked down at her list. She asked what sounded like a prepared question.

"What is special about you?" she said.

"Nothing," I blurted, to me the obvious answer. I could tell by her scowl I had said something wrong. Instantly, I tried to add on to it. "I mean, I get a lot of things done. I'm good with teams of people. I accomplish challenging technical projects. But there are a lot of good workers around the NIH and there are more like me."

"Well, then why should we hire you?" The scowl had never left her face. 

I had to fall back on my accomplishments. I described a few she hadn't heard yet. From the looks of the other CIOs, they hadn't known I was responsible for those particular achievements and it reassured them to hear it. After a while, everyone seemed calm. The CIOs cracked jokes. 

I drove home thinking I'd had a good interview, except for saying I was nothing special. But in my head, I told myself, that's the correct answer.

Two days later, the end of the week sprang up on me like a friendly dog, happy to rub up against me and promise we were going to roll around in the grass and relax. It was a sunny Friday afternoon. I was driving, window down, left elbow out the side, already calm. I got a call. When I saw who it was, a CIO at the NIH who I really liked, so I picked up.

"Eric, do you own a suit?" Those were his first words. 

"Uh." For this, I had to think. I had gained ten pounds. Did I still fit into my old suits? 

"There are three finalists for the CIO job. Or there were. Now there are two." His voice dropped in hushed, urgent tones. "This job was set aside for a woman. Yesterday, that woman argued with the interview team. You can't argue with them. Do you understand?"

"Uh, yeah." This was a team I had made angry by saying I was nothing special. For sure, they had definite ideas about their computer hiring. Anyway, who argues with an interviewer during a job interview? I wouldn't have done it except - and this is a computer thing, I suppose - over a factual matter about computers.

"Right there in the conference room, she argued with them. And that's crazy." On the other end, he took a deep breath. "Why did you say there's nothing special about you? They hated that."

"Sorry." Because there was nothing special about me, was the reason. "The question took me by surprise."

"Anyway, now there are only two finalists. All the CIOs on the panel voted for you. We like you. We even liked your answer about being nothing special. That's why you're in. But you're not going to make it if you don't get yourself a suit. Look good the next time, Eric. Look like you want to be an executive."

"Okay, okay."

"Good. I know you can do it."

As soon as we hung up, though, I wondered if I could. I got home and shared the problem to my wife. She responded loyally with, "Of course you can." She made plans for me to go to a men's clothing store - not a department store, nor a thrift store, nor an outlet or any of the other places we usually shop, but a store devoted to new clothing for adult men. They sold suits.

On a Saturday, we pulled into the parking lot. My wife and I talked to a clothing salesman, whose face lit up in a slightly disturbing way. He stepped back a moment to appraise me from different angles. I told him I wanted charcoal grey. It looked good on me. He said that was fine. Then he added, "Are you going to get the job? Will you need to wear suits sometimes?"

"I've got a good shot." It was a weird thing to say but I knew it was true. "And I would need to wear suits a few times a year during public appearances."

"Two suits, minimum." he decided. "Make one of them a conservative, dark blue."

“Two?" To me, the cost of my next interview just doubled. 

"You don't want everyone to see you always in the same suit," he assured me. I realized he was right. People would remember. Even if we had months between public appearances, they would remember. Photographs and videos from the public meetings would ensure that even non-attendees would notice me in the same suit every time. 

For a few minutes, I tried on suits and worked out the prices in my head. Our family was still losing money every month, not saving it. My wife knew what I was thinking.

"Isn't the job worth two suits?" she asked. 

I leaned closer to her. "There's no guarantee I'll get it."

"I'm not looking for a guarantee." 
 

Not Even Not Zen 436: Biomythography - Note 143, Parenting Languages

Briefly, Foreign Languages 

I have a clear memory of my father in the living room of our apartment in a German town (either Hamburg or Bitburg) saying to me, "Vo ist du momma?"

The interesting part of this, now, after years of this memory cropping up, is that I have taken a little formal German. Now I've learned that apparently, my father should have been saying, "Wo ist diene Mutter?" for 'Where is your mother?' I think I'm remembering the impromptu lessons from my father pretty clearly, at least in a fragmented way, but either his German was wrong (surely possible, as I imagine my foreign language skills would have been suspect in a similar situation) or he was speaking the way his Hamburg, Frankfurt, or Bitburg neighbors spoke (also possible, given what people tell me about the highly regional characteristics of German). I don't know which, whether he was generally wrong or regionally correct. And it doesn't matter, I suppose, except as a reflection on how crystalline some memories can be and yet, contrarily, how hazy or wrong they might prove to be about the facts. 

You can remember something correctly about what you were told. And yet the facts you learned can be wrong. 

As a third, reasonable alternative, my parents could have compromised their German language skills as they tried to teach me. Maybe they sprechened more Deutch than I understood at the time. After all, I was a toddler. They might have been happy enough that I'd learned a few German phrases. 
 

Not Even Not Zen 435: Biomythography - Note 142, Superstitions Pt. 3

Superstitions, Part III

"Ghosts?" snapped my grandfather. "What do you mean, ghosts?" 

His family sat around their long, white table with the extra leaf placed in it. The extra leaf allowed room for his adult children and his grandchildren, like me, to join the family meal. We were there so often in the summer, the leaf never left the arrangement. As I looked towards my grandfather at the head of the table, I saw Johnny's dark hair on one side, followed by Lois and Bill. On the other side sat Mike, Clinton, and Clinton's wife.

"Well, the doors open on their own, daddy!" said Johnny. He leaned toward the center to be heard.

"There are all sorts of strange noises," added Clinton. He was calmer and bore a sly smile. His voice carried better. "I heard them all the time while I was here. Once, a window fell shut all on its own."

"A window? A door? That ain’t nothing," snapped my grandfather. "That’s regular stuff."

The debate lasted a few minutes. I didn’t often see anyone in the family talk back to my grandfather. It was rare enough when I was a child that I remember clearly the two times it happened in my presence and this was one of them. One of my younger uncles, Mike, came down in favor of the ghosts. More importantly, maybe, the house got a cool breeze through the screens on the porch. No one wanted to go inside. We were comfortable where we were, continuing to eat and talk. Inside, as everyone knew, the house had no air conditioning. My grandfather had never gotten around to installing it. So in the hall or in the living room, you had to talk over the roar of a fan.

My grandfather had painted his porch floorboards light gray. He'd painted the frame of the porch white. The room often sat ten adults at once plus two or three children, so it enclosed a big area. It had screens on three sides, which meant everywhere except the actual front of the house.

After the list of haunting symptoms died down and the topic moved on, Johnny started it up again. He couldn't abide his father saying the house wasn't haunted. He knew it was. Oddly, my grandfather turned his gaze on me during the conversation. He seemed to notice how much interest I was showing. He knew I liked to believe in ghosts. There were a lot of them in the stories I read, even in the superhero comic books.

After his wife had put the dishes away, and after his older sons had left, my grandfather turned to me. He didn't let me help with the chores. He put his hand on my shoulder.

"I built this house," he grumbled. He nodded me to a spot on the floorboards in front of him. I moved to stand there. He leaned closer with his elbows on his knees. "There aren't any ghosts here. I know it. There's no such thing."

"But ..."

"That's comic books," he snapped. He knew how I was thinking. "Look, Johnny's a fool. Clinton likes to egg him on."

"Did people die here in this house?" I asked. Johnny had said so.

"No." He smiled and shook his head knowingly. "There weren't any people here to die and become ghosts before we moved in. I know because this place was a field in someone's farm before I came. It wasn't even a good field. The farmers before didn't clear most of the trees because of the marsh and the pond."

"What about the door that swings open?" I whispered.

"I built the whole house. So the door, too. It's a good door but, from the start, I saw it always swung back if it didn't latch right. The latch is loose. I know it. A breeze can blow it open. If someone opens a different door somewhere else in the house, sometimes the door pops open. It's just the way it is."

He got up. He stepped through the front door of the house and beckoned me to follow.

Inside, he started giving me a tour even though I'd lived in the house for months at a time when I was younger. He had given me a tour before, too. He talked about parts of the house he had built but this time he added in comments about the problems he'd had. In a minute or two, we came to one of the weird doors of the house. It had a knob that rattled.

"See? It's loose." He shook it. "But I got a bunch of these, all the same sort, out of the junkyard. I can't get another like it. I'm keeping it. It works. It's just loose."

He had me test the haunted door with him. First, he went to a nearby room. He opened and closed the door quickly. Next to me, the haunted door popped out of the jamb. Slowly, the oak board swung farther open.

"See?" he said. "The latch is loose. Also, the door isn't quite level anymore. I don't know why. The floor used to be more even."

Then we latched the door shut again. This time, my grandfather had me open the door down the hall. When I swung it quickly, sure enough, I felt a puff of air and the door down the hall with the loose latch popped free. I was fascinated. I kept doing it. After the fourth time, my grandfather lost his patience and said, "Okay, that's enough. You know how it works."

"What about the haunted window?" I asked.

"That's a trickier one," he admitted. "I think I can show you, though. Let's look."

On the way to the window, my grandfather pointed out that my uncles wanted to be haunted. They yearned for ghosts to be real. My grandmother, too. So they didn't really look at things too closely. He guided me to the window.

"This one sticks," he said. "I had trouble with it, getting it in. But the one next to it slides too easy. You can prop it up and think it's open. But it's still loose. The window can drop back closed. Go ahead and feel it."

I felt. It moved.

"Now try to push the sticky one down."

I tried. I barely moved the frame. I shoved again. Nothing, except a grunt escaped me.
 
"Tap on the loose one."

I followed his orders. The glass pane rattled. I tapped again and nothing much happened, so I stopped. My grandfather nodded for me to continue. I rapped on the top bar twice more. The second time, the window abruptly, and loudly, slammed closed.

"See?" He pulled the window back up to reset it. At first, it slipped closed. He cocked the bottom of the frame at a slight angle to make it stick. "All this stuff from Johnny and Clinton, it's nonsense. There are no ghosts."

"Can't there be ghosts somewhere?" I really wanted there to be a life after death - and a proof of it, too. I knew that was the crucial point. "Not here, but somewhere?"

"Test it." My grandfather shook his head. "Wherever you go, if you think there's ghosts, try it out. See if it's something else."

This was a lesson I had to learn more than once. Back in College Park, our family friends had to talk with me about the same sort of beliefs. In the Price family and the Babushka family, members of both repeatedly tried to teach me to be more skeptical. And in Annapolis, my grandfather was not a scientist but he had the attitude of testing things out. When you finally get in the habit of it - of seeing doors open on their own because they are slightly tilted or there is a breeze - you learn to observe your life a little more closely. Even though it can sometimes be sad to see things as they are, you learn to be suspicious of your biases.

I believed what my grandfather showed me enough that, instead of cowering in fear about his haunted house, I got up and looked more closely at it. I inspected loose shutters. I rattled latches. I watched how things worked and failed to work. 

Superstitions are never quite the same after you develop the habit of checking on them. 

 

Not Even Not Zen 434: Biomythography - Note 141, Superstitions Pt. 2

 

Superstitions, Part II

Sometimes our ancestors don't seem to have known many names. In my mother's family, if a name wasn't traditional or wasn't in the Bible, they didn't consider it. I expect the dialogues went,

Prospective mother: "What should we call the baby?"

Relative Uncle: "I don't know, what did we call the last one?"

Prospective mother, to her room of relatives: "Lewis."

Uncle: "Perfect."

The men in the room clutch their pipes in their mouths and nod.

Husband: "We’ll go with that."

When I was eleven, I charted my family tree on paper. We didn't know my father's grandparents. That part was over quick. But on my mother's side, we found what seemed to be an endless number of records. The Stocketts had a long tradition of naming their men John, Jack, Clinton, or Lewis. (John and Jack are the same name, I know.) The tree of names went back, back, and farther back, all the way to 1530.

There were probably a dozen men named Lewis in the tree, either directly in my mother's line or brothers to an ancestor in the line. My uncles had referred to a great-grand-uncle Lewis, I remembered. He had always been 'frightened of ghosts.' I wondered which one he was. They had refused to tell me his story, actually. My grandmother had stopped them.

The next time I visited, I asked about the Lewis names in the family. My uncles glanced at each other, noticed my grandmother wasn't around, and conspired to tell me about my great-grand-uncle.

“Lewis hated seances, skeletons …” Johnny began.

“And vampires,” one of my younger uncles, Mike, interrupted. Naturally, he brought it up because he liked vampires. His older brothers scowled at him.

“Not sure they had vampires back then. Anyway, Lewis hated anything about the undead or any people coming back to life," Johnny continued. He gave a wry smile. "Ghost stories made him cry."

They told the story in a disjointed way because they argued while they were describing it. This is how men tell stories, I realized at the time, or at least it was the only way I'd heard men talk in a group setting.

Arguments subtracted, Lewis lived in the 1860s. And he hated graveyards. He couldn't avoid them because he lived near a church. Every church had a graveyard. Most family farms did, too. Lewis refused to walk near the headstones after sunset. As a young man, he put his hands over his ears and fled when people tried to tell him ghost stories.

Of course, his reactions attracted the attention of his brothers, sisters, uncles, and cousins. They loved to tease him. Everybody loved practical jokes, too. They were living in practical times.

My ancestors brought ghosts into their stories whenever Lewis walked up. They made demonic sounds when they could get away with it. They jumped out at him from behind tombstones. In short, they made his life miserable. But if Lewis ran off and changed his name to Ebenezer or Elijah or some other, popular name, we wouldn't have gotten our family story.

The incident began with a death in the family. Lewis's grandfather got ill and died.

For decades, American society groups had felt a fear, almost a mania, about being buried alive. So Lewis wasn't alone in his worries. Getting buried alive had happened a few times. Newspapers had run breathless, horrified accounts. The New York Times reported on a man from Buncombe County, North Carolina named "Jenkins." His body was found turned over inside his coffin with his hair pulled out and scratch marks visible on all sides of the coffin's interior. Another case involved a girl named "Collins" whose body was found with knees tucked under her and the burial shroud torn into shreds. These cases and others caught the public imagination. People across the world, quite literally, adjusted their burial customs. Mortuary associations and churches inserted medical checks into their rituals.

This all brought about a resurgence of the custom of spending a night with the body. It had been something churches did long ago, usually as a service offered by professional clergy. But now, given the public mood, it had to make a comeback. That's why Lewis's small church required the dead man's relatives to stay with the body overnight. They were supposed to pray, of course, but it was partly to make sure the corpse didn't move.

Four men volunteered to stay overnight. Since they were Lewis's cousins, they pressured him to join. One of his uncles ordered him to do his family duty.

His uncle, however, saw another chance to tease Lewis. He talked to his sons and his other nephews about it. They agreed; it was too good an opportunity to pass up. All five of them committed to the prank.

The chapel of rest, where the body lay, was actually a wooden shed next to the church. Of course, that meant it also sat next to the graveyard. Lewis arrived early. He didn't want to cross the grounds next to the graves in anything like darkness.

Inside, the casket lay on a pedestal in the center. A pastor lit oil lamps for the vigil and hung them on hooks. Around the walls, even hung on some of the walls, rested the pastor's tools for the gravedigging. Shovels, sledge hammers, picks, wooden pry bars, and anything else that might be needed to bury a casket had been pushed to the corners. Someone had tied up the pry bars in a bundle along one wall. He had leaned shovels and sledges against the wallboards, too.

The rest of the family arrived, one by one, through the big, barn-like doors on the east end of the chapel. The pastor led them in a prayer. They knelt on the dirt floor. They rose and knelt on the wooden platform, next to the casket. Finally, the women who had come for the prayer all left. The pastor exited through the only other door, a small one on the southwest corner closest to the church.

The five cousins sat on stools near the lamps. Occasionally, they walked around or prayed next to the coffin. After a while, though, the cousins started to tell ghost stories.

This was part of the prank. Of course, Lewis knew they were teasing him. He asked them to stop. But they didn't and Lewis's imagination ran away with the stories. The morbid tales of demons and murders had the same effect on him they always did. After an hour, he had to go to the bathroom. For another hour, he held it because he didn't want to go out in the dark. Eventually, he asked his nicest relative, Jack, to walk to the edge of the woods with him.

"No, you go alone." The young man shook his head.

Lewis asked the others. No one wanted to go. His cousins knew it would interfere with their prank. He was so panicked and so insistent, though, one of them - the youngest, Jack - finally agreed.

As soon as he left, his uncle Jonathan came out from hiding behind the shed. He stepped through the southwest door with an empty casket in his arms. The rest of the cousins jumped up to help. They carried their grandfather's body in its casket to a spot behind the nearest tree. Then they rushed back to the shed to help their father. He had managed to set his empty coffin box onto the pedestal. They helped him into it, put on the lid, and arranged it to look as much like their grandfather's casket as possible. They spent a lot of time trying not to giggle.

They knew this was going to be the best prank ever.

Outside, at the northeast edge of the woods near the graveyard, Lewis refused to do his business between the trees. He didn't like the look of them.

"You won't go with me?" he asked Jack.

"No, I don't need to go."

"Well, then turn around." Lewis unbuttoned. He 'made a river' for about a minute. When he was done and presentable, he told his cousin it was time to head back.

While young Jack had been staring at the headstones of the graves, though, the he had gotten an idea. He could get a head start on his father's prank. As they wandered by the graveyard, he pretended to hear a noise.

"I'm going to look," Jack muttered.

"Don't!" Lewis realized what was happening too late. He couldn't prevent his cousin from entering the graveyard. And he wasn't willing to follow.

What happened next was, according to the tale, a wonderful acting job. Jack howled. He claimed that something had grabbed him. Then he groaned and struggled a bit more as he sank behind a gravestone. Finally, he called,

"Run, Lewis!"

Lewis ran back to the barn that was the chapel of rest. There, in a panic, he told his other relatives about their brother's disappearance. They chuckled.

"Not to worry," said the eldest, Clinton. "He'll be back."

They sat for a long time. Of course, the missing cousin Jack did not return. The rest of them prayed once or twice. They got up close to the coffin. There, Lewis heard scratching sounds. No one else heard them. He heard them again. But everyone acted like he was crazy.

A few minutes later, Lewis heard groans coming from the coffin. No one else paid attention to it.

"Well, he's been gone a while," said Clinton. "I've got to go take care of business, too. Maybe I'll fetch him back."

He grabbed a lantern and marched out. After a while, the lid of the casket seemed to move. Only Lewis noticed. He tried to point it out to the others. Every time he pointed, though, the motion stopped.
 
"All right," said one of the two remaining cousins. He rose from his stool. "I'm going to find out what's going on."

"Don't go to the graveyard!" Lewis demanded. He grabbed his cousin by the arm but the larger man shoved him away. He took another lantern with him, leaving the room in dim light even by the low lighting standards of the countryside.

For a long while, Lewis sat with his remaining cousin. Naturally, his cousin wanted to leave. He rose once, saying he had to go. Lewis stopped him. He got up again. Lewis grabbed him again.

"There are noises in the casket," he hissed to his cousin.

"Oh, you're always imagining things." The young man gave the chapel pedestal a dismissive glance. "We peeked in at the body earlier. Why don't you take a look now?"

Lewis stepped closer. He almost touched the lid. But he heard a scratching noise. He froze. The sound seemed to come from under the casket lid. He thought he saw the pine board tremble.

"No!" He backed up. He turned toward his cousin.

His cousin wasn't there. A breeze blew in through the big barn door front. Behind him, Lewis heard a groan. He spun around.

In the casket, his uncle Jonathan let out another, louder spooky groan. Then another.

Lewis panicked. The voice didn't sound to him like his dead grandfather. It sounded deeper, more haunted. He didn't want to run out into the graveyard, where the skeletons might be lurching out of the ground and grabbing people. He ran from wall to wall in the little building.

Finally, as uncle Johnathan heard Lewis getting more and more frantic, he decided to finish the prank. Slowly, groaning, he lifted the casket lid from the inside. In the dim light, he rose. He let out a theatrical, loud hiss of the undead.

That's when Lewis steeled up his courage. He grabbed a sledgehammer from next to the wall and beat the body back into the coffin.

So that was the end of the prank.

A few days later, a policeman came around to question everyone. He didn't arrest Lewis. He didn't arrest any of his cousins, either, who after all had just lost their grandfather and their father. The policeman gave them all a long talking-to and left - while, I have imagine, shaking his head so much he needed to shut his eyes.

Lewis didn't change his name or join the army or even leave the area. He married a bit late in life. He had one child. And he left behind this story.