Not Even Not Zen 307: Vodka and Verse

Vodka and Verse

On the second drink

I swore to you I wasn't an alcoholic.

You laughed and nodded

And kept talking.

Twenty minutes later

You're still talking.

I'm pouring another drink.

If only you could have an interesting thought

Or a malapropism even,

So I wouldn't look like a liar here.

 -- Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 306: Biomythography - Note 55, Riva Road

Biomythography 55

Riva Road

When I was two, I got to fly in a commercial passenger airplane. At least, I think I was on a commercial flight. The seats were mostly empty. Industrial carpet lined the corridors. The seats were made of a light grey fabric. My mother and I had a row to ourselves. 

After takeoff, which is when my memory fragments begin, an older woman saw me in the aisle and offered to take me from my mother. At the time, I thought she was someone's grandmother. Maybe she had reached an age where she didn't have grandchildren but wanted them. In any case, my mother was eager to get a break. The older woman had games with her, or maybe she bugged the airline staff to provide a coloring book, and she encouraged me to talk and draw for a while. At some point, I started feeling tired. Scribbling colors felt exhausting. The woman noticed. She stood up and called for my mother take me back. 

Logically, that would have been a flight between school years, when my mother left me with her mother in Annapolis.

My recollections of early times in Annapolis on my grandmother's porch are spotty. Images sometimes come to me of people sitting in chairs to catch the breeze. Often, I can't see the people but I know they are there, resting in chairs at the far corner of my memory's vision.

One of my strongest memories of the Annapolis home is the smell. My grandmother's cushioned furniture and her linens carried a distinctive scent that, later in life, I learned was lilacs. There was a mustiness underlying everything, too, and that was due to the home not having air conditioning. Not many places did. Porches and pools played central roles in daily summer life in Maryland. I don't think that house on Riva Road ever got central air installed, not even late in my childhood. One or two rooms got window units.

Fortunately, the front porch had been carefully made, large and covered on three sides by screens to keep out mosquitoes. There, family members could relax with an iced tea at the end of the workday. People would sit in their various spots, me on a footstool or wherever my grandmother said, and we would break the sharp ends off green beans, pop open pea pods, peel onions, cut tomatoes, or if we were lucky, shuck corn. In my early years there, I wasn't allowed to use a knife. I wasn't encouraged to take part in adult conversations. But breaking bean shells, gathering peas, or shucking corn were real options, usually requirements. My grandfather, who often seemed angry or impatient, showed a great deal of care about whether my hands were strong enough to shuck.

"I think that's the best you can do," he said as he reviewed my early work with corn. He plucked a few threads of silk out of the cob, nodded in approval, and put it in the pot.

Elsewhere around the property, my grandfather farmed an acre of unused land. It wasn't his to farm, technically, but it provided his family with seemingly a lot of its food. The house fence and trellis provided grapes, which I ate from the vine. My grandmother scolded me to leave her some. Earlier in the year, I'd stuffed myself with their raspberries. I'd pulled up onions and eaten them from the ground. My uncles and I had spent an hour plucking and slurping honeysuckle flowers. In late summer, we harvested peas, beans, potatoes, rhubarb, cabbage, and lettuce.

"Save some for canning," my grandmother said about everything. 

I tried. Well, except for raspberries. Grandmother said she didn't like raspberry preserves. She didn't want to deal with the seeds. In contrast, I liked eating her grape jelly and yearned to see it made, which wasn't often. Usually, I witnessed the creation of mason jars filled with more mundane ingredients like green beans. Even beans became pale and mysterious during her canning process. They came out softer and easier to eat. 

#

When I was five or six, old enough to understand carpentry in theory, if not practice, I asked my grandfather about a screen on the porch. He had complained about it coming loose. 

"Can you fix it?" I asked.

"I built this whole dang house. Of course I can fix it. I can fix anything here."

Although I had been in the house for weeks or months at a time, he gave me a tour of the place. He showed me toilets and pipes he had taken from junkyards, cleaned, and installed himself. He demonstrated a hand drill, his hammer, screwdriver, and a hand saw. With those, a pair of snips, and a penknife, he had run scrap wires from room to room to provide power and lights. He had created joists and beams from previously used lumber or mis-cut unused pieces. We walked up a steep staircase, sized to fit the dimensions he could accomodate for the attic. He pointed from pipe to pipe down to the ground floor and into the septic tank, where he had set his own plumbing to drain. 

In the cellar, he showed me a fuse box, as ancient as his revived wiring. He licked his finger and stuck it in an empty socket above a nearby outlet. There was a pop and a spark.

"See? It's hot," he said. Then with a stern glance he added, "Don't you do that."

From these points of view - those of a child, of a man who had achieved enough to build a house, of the man's family members who grew up having enough food - the home had its part in a rural, middle-class existence. As I grew older, though, and became more aware of the family circumstances relative to other families, I began to feel differently. 

When I visited, seven people were living on one man's disability paycheck. It could grow to nine, ten, or more with other long-term guests. We slept two or three to a bedroom. My grandfather had squatted on someone else's property. He had built his house without permission, without permits, and without the required parts or tools. He fished and sometimes hunted nearby. He farmed the surrounding lands. No one stopped him. 

My mother's family doesn't like this point of view. My parents gave me shocked looks when I first expressed my thoughts about the wobbly foundations of my grandfather's rural lifestyle.

The Stockett family had considered themselves well-off. They had looked down on my father, who was penniless, without a father of his own, and often homeless during his childhood. From a certain point of view, though, they didn't have much more. My grandfather had squatted on his uncle's land because it was the forgotten holding of a violent relative who had killed his own son by knocking him from a roof during an argument. Living on the property was a risk. But my grandfather, nearly unemployable with epilepsy and fond of taking risks to prove himself, felt he had no choice. He volunteered for hard duty with the phone company, hanging wires where no one else would, taking risks in thunderstorms to meet deadlines.

After the fourth time he was hit by lightning on the pole, he was knocked to the ground and crippled long enough for the company to decide it was easiest to put him on disability. That gave him more time to build his house.

His was the self-made house in which I spent a lot of my childhood. 

To the Stocketts, my father was low born and poor, both true, but his poverty was worse than theirs mostly due to his homelessness and his lack of extended family. Their family was rich because it was connected to others, supported on its wobbly foundation by a community, and it formed part of a network of well-known people in their town.

 

Not Even Not Zen 305: Biomythography - Note 54, Getting Turned Down

Biomythography 54

Getting Turned Down

Three times in my life, I've been turned down for jobs due to race or sex. Well, at least three. There could be more. I could also have landed jobs due to my perceived race or sex and not known. It can be hard to understand what's going on in the minds of hiring managers although, in a some cases, they give it away. 

1. When it happened the first time, I had to be told. 

I'd graduated from Control Data Institute, an achievement that still makes me proud. The courses were self-driven, not to mention they were taught at an electrical engineering level minus the calculus. I finished the hardware course, including circuit design and repair, in time to take and pass the COBOL course. I also took the defunct (even then, no longer offered) Unix course, which was all in Xenix. The Unix courseware was sitting next to the COBOL course. I read it and found I liked Xenix enough to break into half the accounts of my long-departed classmates and do their unfinished assignments.

The hardware course included repairing supercomputers because Control Data Corporation was a mainframe company. However, the job interviews arranged by CDI included: almost nothing. In the Bush recession of the early 1990s, no one could find entry level jobs even in technical fields, even in the growing field of personal computers. 

CDI had campuses all over the country. My school building sat near Baltimore in an office park a couple miles outside the city. The CDI staff arranged for a single interview after graduation. In theory, they were trying to arrange more but they canceled all but one. The interview took place at a custom computer hardware contractor in Baltimore. 

We had to drive on a special trip to make the interview. When I arrived, I saw the contracting business occupied a brick tenement that had long ago converted into the cheapest sort of commercial real estate. 

"Wow, you have the best grades by far," the interviewer exclaimed early on. We sat down in a beige office at a beige desk. "You've actually done something with computers, too."

We launched into a discussion that I found entertaining. He had lots of questions. I had lots of answers. Then I had questions about his business's custom hardware. 

"You would have to get a clearance to do some of the work," the manager said. "But it's possible."

The business did a lot of fixes and custom jobs for the federal government. The manager, who wore a brown, two-piece suit and a Tom Selleck-style mustache, gave me a tour of the facilities, which looked kind of run-down. For some types of work, my home equipment was as good. The manager apologized for messes at the workbenches, the missing soldering irons, and the broken oscilliscopes. 

Then he sat down with me at the round table in the beige office again.

"I can't believe how much you already know," he said. "I want to be honest."

"Yeah?"

 

"We advertise ourselves to the government as a minority-friendly company. You know how it is." Although I had no idea, he continued. "We employ a certain number of African Americans and a certain number of women. We get tax breaks for it. Our contracts depend on it. The work is based on our minority status. For this job, the one you're applying for, we're really looking to hire a minority. Or a woman. A black woman, ideally."

Two interviews behind me on the CDI schedule, which I had read on the clipboard at school, sat a young, black woman who had earned the second highest grade average in class. She was as smart as anyone. Smarter, really. And beautiful. And she smiled a lot and had a great attitude, better than mine. If anyone deserved the job, it was her. She would get it, too. At least, I felt pretty sure. 

"I appreciate you letting me know," I said. 

"I didn't want you to think you had a bad interview." He reached out as if to punch me on the shoulder, realized that it would be unprofessional, and settled for a tap. "Crap, you had a great one."

"Thanks." I sat lost in thought for a moment about the black woman coming up. I had cozeyed up to her halfway through class to see if she were single. She made it clear, though, that if I wanted to date her I'd have to join her in church first. For me, the church-going was a dealbreaker. Still, she was seemed utterly fantastic.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I think I want to tell you about someone coming up two interviews from now."

2. The second time, I didn't have to be told. Well, almost.

Six years later, I had an interview in a large office building in Northern Virginia. The corporation had advertised for a technical writer. My resume was strong, hence my call to interview. I'd worked as a technical writer on historical subjects. I'd worked as a computer technician and programmer. I'd gotten a graduate degree in computer science.

The hiring manager seemed impressed. We skipped quickly to her selling me on the company. She gave me the tour. She sat me down for a close-out talk.

"Can I ask why you're looking for a technical writer position?" she asked. "And not an engineer? Most men look to be engineers."

"The writing pays well," I replied. It paid twice my current computer technician salary but I wasn't going to say that. "And I like technology. And I like writing."

"It's just that our technical writer positions are usually staffed by women."

"Yeah." For a moment, I thought back on University Publications. The atmosphere was different but the work had some similarities. "My previous writing position was mostly women, too."

"You had a strong interview. You have a good resume. However, we have strong minority hiring incentives."

"Okay."

"Okay." She let it hang there for a while to see if I would get the hint.

3. The third time, I was taken aside. 

After my first interview for yet another position, I got a call to critique my performance.

"The IT staff around the table loved you," he said. "But we don't pull much weight. All the people in suits? They're the ones you needed to impress."

"I guess I didn't, huh?"

"When the boss asked, 'What makes you special' and you answered, 'Nothing' I could practically see steam coming out of her ears. I loved that answer, by the way. You followed it up. I completely agree that lots of people do good deeds, good stuff. But 'nothing' is not what the suits were looking for."

"What should I have said?"

"That's your chance to brag. You must have got a lot of things to brag about. I even know some of them. You should have jumped in. Because that's your chance."

"Okay."

"And Eric? Do you own a tie?"

"Yeah, sorry. I drove to the interview after working seventy hours in four days on a firewall problem. Got it fixed, though."

"See? That's the kind of stuff you should brag about."

"Will I get a second chance?"

"Probably not this time. You don't seem to know but the job was set aside for a woman. You've probably noticed all the bosses are women and they are looking to hire another for this position."

"Oh, okay." That made my wrong answers seem less disastrous. 

But the next day, the fellow from the interview team called again. His voice sounded scratchy over the cellular carrier. 

"Remember I said the job was set aside for a woman?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"They made the mistake of telling her. Like, they said it outright before the interview. So she came to the meeting way too confident. She got in an argument with the woman hiring her."

"Now what?"

"Now she's out. You can't argue with the boss. Not this boss. So the position is open. And you're in the final list of candidates. I want to be forthright, Eric. Get yourself a goddamn suit. Act like you're a supervisor. Try to fit in."

"Got it."

So maybe this last time doesn't count. The fix was in. But it didn't stick. It proves something about the hiring process. Very likely, it's worth going through the motions and maintaining good form for some of the time even if everyone on the hiring team think they know the preferred candidate in advance.

In all of these cases, I appreciated being told. Or in getting the hint. Or in being told I should pay attention to the hint a few second back. Whatever it took. Getting the information meant not forever questioning what went wrong. Indeed, for some interviews where I wasn't hired, everything went right as far as I could see. I don't think there were always preferred candidates, either. The hiring manager simply liked someone better. That's the way it goes. 

Not Even Not Zen 304: Biomythography - Note 53, She'll Stand By Your Mom

Biomythography, Note 53

She'll Stand By Your Mom

I knew how bad the air in my parent's house smelled. When we arrived, I popped my asthma meds in my mouth and let them dissolve for a quick rush of antihistamines. I’d prepared my girlfriend, I thought. We paused on the front porch in the waning light.

"Oh my god," she said. "It even stinks outside."

"I did mention the cigars," I responded. I glanced at the screened window next to the front door. Unfortunately it was a nice day and the glass pane was open a few inches. 

“Pichi?” my mother said as she came to the door. She gave my girlfriend a warm smile and, for me, she lent a nod of approval.

The minute or two of greetings distracted us from the stale cigar smells, the cat urine, the greenhouse of plants, the dog odors, and the dragon's breath of a fresh cigar as my father lit up next to an ashtray where his old butts lay, one of them still fuming like a forgotten tugboat on a lake of gray ash. 

My girlfriend had a chance to adjust. My brothers came up to punch me on the shoulder and my father talked to distract me. While I tried to tell my brothers, still-blonde and blondest, about my semester, my mother and girlfriend behind me shared an earsplitting laugh. I turned, feeling bewildered. My girlfriend's dark eyes lit up the living room. My mother bore a broad grin, seeming very much at ease. I wasn't sure what they'd said but I was suspicious of how the tone seemed so different from when my mother came out steadfastly against me bringing a girl home. 

Then came a tour of the house and grounds. The inside of our place wasn't much in Pichi's eyes, I could tell, a mishmash of furnishings, different styles, different colors, many things homemade like the deck, the roofs, two of the rooms, and the sheds. She lived better than this. The grounds, though, sat in the middle of a forest, as advertised, and in our shaded one acre plot grew fifty or sixty of my mother's trees, shrubs, garden crops, and vines, which she showed off. Pichi seemed slightly lost in the terminology but pleased by the lushness of the tour.

Over dinner, we discussed the Thanksgiving meal preparations. Pichi expressed her amazement at the tradition ("It's just eating?"), which endeared her to my parents even more than her straightforwardness already had. My brothers showed some enthusiasm in their explanations, too. It was probably the first time either of them got to discuss events from our history books that everyone in the room didn't already know. 

When we wiped the table down, we persuaded Pichi to join us for round after round of card games. After a couple hours, she tossed her right arm back and yawned. 

"I'll go downstairs to rest," she said. She had already put her bags in my bedroom. My parents hadn't seemed to notice or care.

"She's supposed to sleep on the couch," my father reminded me after she left. 

I glanced to the living room. I shrugged. "Maybe I'll sleep there."

Twenty minutes later, I walked down to my bedroom and never came back up. 

"What do they think we've been doing all day, every day at the college?" she asked me. She curled up next to me on top of the covers and gave me a big kiss. 

This had been the plan. We had executed it as we'd intended. 

Not everyone has the same way of dealing with people. I had never questioned how similar Pichi and I were about this element of our lives. We simply were who we were. I didn't notice the good luck of our matching attitudes. Maybe I expected her mindset because she was a girl who had invented her own language so she and her sister could talk secrets in front of their parents. The openly defiant approach came naturally to her, with a smile. Her parents had been only moderately strict, less than mine had tried to be, but she hadn't been able to live quite within their rules. She agreed with me that my parents' more prudish regulations made no sense and she saw no problem with me defying them. 

I'd brought money for a night at a hotel. As I got ready for bed, I took my wallet out of my pocket and checked it, a habit. The cash was still there, handy if we needed independence.

The next morning, Pichi got me up early. She sent me upstairs first. There in the dark kitchen, out through the back window, I could see an orangish glow on the horizon. The sky above the barren tree branches looked purple. But in a few minutes, it brightened. 

While I was making omelets and pancakes for breakfast, my father stopped in. His footfalls were heavy. His eyes were so lidded as to be half shut. He didn't have a cigar in his mouth yet. He gave me a silent stare, shook his head, and trudged to his spot by the television. I peered into the living room beside him. There, the couch sat re-made into its former self, a couch, not dressed up as a bed. Last night, someone had removed the sheet and the pillow. The stack of blankets had doubtless gone to some hall closet. 

A few minutes later, my mother stopped in. As she helped herself to coffee, she said, "Your girlfriend is really nice."

"Yeah, she is." I paused to agree, partly because I had finished cooking another pancake and set it aside, mostly because I was switching my gears mentally. 

"Did she sleep all right?"

"Ah." It was an interesting question. I had already been given instructions on what to say. "Do you remember how a few years ago, I kept complaining about the mattress springs cutting me?"

My mother squinted, not at me, but through the back window. "That sounds familiar."

"Pichi has cuts on her hip and her thigh this morning." I set the latest pancake on a plate for myself and poured syrup over it. I'd kept up with my personal swimming workouts, two miles per day, so my cooking plans usually involved eating at the same time. My body stayed hungry.

"Why don't you have cuts?"

The question made my stop shoving pancake pieces into my mouth for a moment. 

"It's been so many years, now." I tested my ideas by rotating my body a little and imagining my bed. "Even in my sleep, I can roll over and avoid the sharp points. I know where they are. I don't have to think about it. That's probably why I don't get cut much."

"Have you turned the mattress over?"

"Five or six years ago. And back again. I keep the best side up with its worst springs near my feet instead of my head."

My mother considered the problem, hands around her mug.

#

After Thanksgiving, my young woman and I returned to Massachusetts. We got back into the routine we had developed with fun, work, school, food, and fun in roughly that order during the day. For the past month, Pichi had seemed to find the lack of grades in her courses to be difficult. Even though she said the Hampshire College system was fine, actually quite European and in line with her expectations, she had to double down on her emotional investments in a couple of her classes in order to finish them. 

One of my writing courses stayed good and busy. I sprinted to the end with sheaves of typing paper stacking up on my desks. 

As I fielded calls from home, I noticed my mother asking about Pichi every time. Once, I even put Pichi on the line for a moment at my mother's request. When she finished, Pichi handed me the phone to hang it up.

"I really like your mother," she confided.

On one level, I saw how Pichi had plenty of criticism for my choices in friends, the behavior of my brothers, my father's smoking, and my former girlfriends, some of whom she had met. That could have sounded harsh to my mother. It didn't. My mom laughed at Pichi's comments every time. The two of them seemed to be in sympathy over my habits or about my general situation. It wasn't what I'd expected. Also, Pichi loved our Danish furniture and said so repeatedly. The pieces reminded her of home. 

When it came time for the upcoming Christmas break, though, she missed her family, especially her sister, and she let me know. Often.

"This time, I'll have to go home," she said. "It's only a little too early in the year. My sister won't be free. Schools in Europe don't get out as early. As soon as they do, though, she and I will be together every day! I'll stay all of January, too."

Somehow, her attitude toward going home to her family got conveyed to my mom. My mother's reaction was quiet but I could tell she was disappointed. 

"Is Pichi not coming for Christmas?" she asked.

"She was pretty critical of my mattress, you may remember." This was a part of home that seemed safe to mention rather than her opinions about friends or family. "She got cuts from it."

"I didn't know a spring was poking you."

"Yeah." I'd complained about them for years but I had also given up, so I understood the point. "I got used to it, I guess."

"Well, she's welcome to come home with you. I bought you a new mattress."

We had a week left in the semester. When I hung up the call, I knew it was too late for Pichi to change her flight plans. She had decided to head home early and stay all January, too. I was scheduled for almost the opposite, returning for a January term class but leaving before the spring semester started. It was all part of my plan.

At the root of the plan was money. I had to take off time to make more so I could return to college. My DJ gigs were paying decently, though. If I'd thought about it more - and in advance - I could have stayed and turned up the activity on the DJ side jobs. Pichi wanted stay at Hampshire, for sure, and my leaving made it look like this was goodbye to our affair. 

I had planned for my college relationships to end this way. I meant to have a different fling, or more than one, each semester. Pichi had said the same thing. A couple boyfriends per semester suited her, another way we seemed alike. Yet, when it came down to it, I already missed her. She was next to me every day but I didn't want her to leave. 

"Well, my mom says she'll miss you." In my room, I flopped down in my office chair. I rested my arm on the desk and my chin on my hand. "She said to let you know she bought me a new mattress for my bedroom."

"She bought me a new mattress?" Pichi said. She sat up at the edge of the bed. She burst into a huge smile.

"Well, it's sort of for me, too." There was a chance it wasn't. This was the first time I was realizing it. 

"Now I have to visit," Pichi said. She ignored me for a moment and turned to the paperwork on her flight back to home. She flipped open the manila folder. She tapped her lip with one finger. "I'll work something out."

#

Pichi looked very Mexican. Once again in my life, it never occurred to me that anyone would have a problem with it. And they didn't.  

I'm not sure if the lack of race and/or cultural friction would always have been true in these past decades. In my two geographical areas with the friends I had, though, it was. If that means you, thanks.

Standing up for friends, which was how this started, wasn't something I felt I had a choice about. Yet it may be why this stands out in my memory. Sometimes I wonder why particular times stand out more than others. I think I was a little surprised by how much opposition I noticed to Pichi's presence. When I told everyone what was up, though, I was as surprised to find folks giving me the chance to stick by a friend. Not everyone in our group stayed friends. But everyone was willing to try for a moment. 

Not Even Not Zen 303: Biomythography - Note 52, Stand By Your Woman

Biomythography, Note 52

Stand By Your Woman

On the beige phone over the smelly brown carpet in the hall of my college dormitory, the matter seemed simple. I was going to take care of my best friend in the style I could afford. That's what one does. The call seemed to be turning awkward about it. But not for me.

“She should go to her own home, not ours,” my mother repeated. I could hear movement on the other end. She had to be stalking around the foyer at home. She only did that when she was upset. It didn't happen often. But this time, yes.

“Her family doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving.” This part, I wasn't sure I'd explained before. 

"What kind of family doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving?" she asked, too upset to think.

"She's Dutch and Mexican." I knew I'd described this part a month ago. Maybe my mother hadn't paid much attention. But it seemed more likely she'd forgotten. 

"How can she be both?"

"Her parents met at the United Nations, where they work."

"Oh, right." It sounded like my mother was starting to remember. She'd gotten at least two letters and two phone calls. She should know I was dating a U.N. child this semester. 

"She grew up in Denmark." I tried to give my mother time to think. But I could only give her a second because I was nineteen. "Where they aren't American. So they don't celebrate Thanksgiving."

"Not American." In her pause, I could hear the concept sink in. She had lived in Germany for a few years. “Oh, right. Thanksgiving is an American-only holiday.”

“Yeah. The college shuts down here for it. She's a foreign student, so they'll let her stay here on campus alone with no food. Or I can stay with her. Or she can come with me.”

“Well she can’t come here.”

“Okay.”

“What do you mean?” Her response was stern but, to me, pretty much expected. 

“I mean, okay." I glanced around the eggshell-colored walls and the nearby door frame with paint chipped off, "I’ll stay here for Thanksgiving. Of course I’m not gonna leave her alone. That would be horrible.”

“I don’t mean that we don’t want to see you for Thanksgiving. Your brothers ask about you. They're expecting you.”

That was probably an overstatement. Still, I missed my brothers and it was possible they weren't too busy to miss me at least for our card games. 

“I’ve written them letters,” I replied. The rationalization sounded a bit weak. 

“That’s not the same thing.”

I re-considered for a moment. In fact, I'd thought about the possible scenarios before the phone call. 

 

"Well, I can't afford a hotel." I'd foreseen the direction of the conversation enough to consult my bank statements. I'd also asked everyone who knew the Gaithersburg area hotels. The cheapest available were thirty bucks a night. I could afford one night. That wasn't enough to justify driving down to Maryland for Thanksgiving. 

"I'll write a letter explaining everything," I said.

"When?"

"Tomorrow." It couldn't be tonight because I was taking my girlfriend out to a one-dollar movie.

The next day, a Saturday, the phone rang in the hall. Of course, I never picked it up until seven rings had passed, which my hallmates were delightful about. (They sort of actually were.) At any rate, one of them walked over to let me know it was for me.

"Hey, mom."

"She's really from Mexico and Denmark? And you're bringing her home to meet us?"

"Yeah."

"All right, then."

#

Not Even Not Zen 302: Never Mind

Nevermind

Once upon a workday dreary, as I fumbled, tired and bleary,

Over many a slide and colored spreadsheet of financial kind,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a rapping,

A fool with untied shoes a-flapping, a sound so soft but misaligned.

“It’s the Fedex guy,” I muttered, “A teen with music unrefined,

Barely words and half a mind.”

Distinctly, I remember it was in that warm September

And every sharp and lying member of the board had underlined

The projects they had mired -- schemes they said that they desired

But when the costs had come, perspired or retired from the daily grind, 

Too faint to bear the price for programs they let fall behind.

Nameless blame is what they find.

And the dreaded thought that sticks in, there's my boss, an elder vixen, 

Fresh from ruined plans that even she cannot rewind,

And I shudder should she blame me or, even worse, just share her mind.

"It's a visitor," I mumbled, "with a package that needs signed.

Or a stranger beered and wined, arriving drunk

Or simply rushed and misassigned."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,

"Sir," said I, "or Madam, all my work you've undermined

When so faintly you came peeking, seeking for the undersigned.

Well, I'm not the one." I yanked the door and looked behind;

Of callers there were none to find.

Deep into the hallway peering, I stood there twenty seconds fearing 

That my boss would any second snatch me, in her grasp be porcupined

By fingernails that blood red guttered, stabbed by conscience quite uncluttered

But then a single phrase was uttered, the whispered words, "I've lost my mind."

This I muttered and an echo later stuttered, "My mind."

Merely this, my doubts enshrined.

Back into my office turning, all my acids in me churning,

Soon again I heard a rapping like before remind.

"Come now," said I, "only a few dollars pray for, it could be my office neighbor

and all he wants is me to pay for cookies of the minty kind.

He has a girl scout child, he says, and guilts me till my heart is burning.

There's no pocket he's not mined."

Open, then, I flung the portal. Before me stood a chubby mortal

With coffee cup and jelly pastry, which upon he neatly dined.

Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;

But, with mien of lord or lady, strode dignified yet worldly blind

Almost sightless but for glasses of the thickest kind.

On my chair he perched his stately, wide behind.

Then this birdbrain sat there, smiling, my thin patience he was filing

Under H for 'have none,' though he himself could calmness find.

"Though your beard be shaved to goatee, and you sit like Zen devotee,

I have work to do and cannot rest," said I, "no matter how I pined

For peace or cash reward, in hope or sorrow letting earthly pleasures bind."

Then quoth the buddha, "Nevermind."

"Those rewards are dust already," said the voice with hands so steady

And dismissed Samsara's pleasures with a gesture he'd long since refined.

Although his fingers flew like a pidgeon, of coffee he spilled not a smidgeon.

Simple wrong and right had ages past been well defined

And now this office drone could too simply true Nirvana find

With such a phrase as, "Nevermind."

So the buddha murmured lightly and tried my patience most politely

With one word, as if his soul in that one word defined

How my work habits were pathetic compared to his 'at peace' aesthetic.

His buttoned shirt was collar open and most distinctly pinstriped lined

As he to my colored spreadsheet pointed and then he much maligned

With coffee breath of, "Nevermind."

"Look now, Bob or Bill or Buddha, your advice is stinky gouda.

I can't solve my office headaches with a 'Nevermind.'"

Hands on hips, I faced this fellow, whom I saw as over-mellow

Or maybe just too yellow-bellied for the office grind.

His refrain is oft repeated by those workers unrefined

Who live whole lives of "Nevermind."

Startled, no, he was far from it; his calm had not yet reached its summit.

I tapped my foot and tried to plumb it while, with both mouth and hands, he signed,

"It's a spreadsheet from a torture master. There's no saving this disaster.

So take it from a still-hardworking bum who wants to save mankind.

Do your greatest deeds for those whose souls have shined

And all the rest, just nevermind."

So the guru, quite beguiling, clicked the keys for standard styling

And said the members of the board could kiss his fat behind.

The smart ones, they would hardly need it. The others wouldn't even read it.

Those members were among the brightest apes in humankind

And some agreed with, "Nevermind."

"What work, then?" I asked my censor. He gave a look like I were denser

Than he expected, his one eyebrow high or misaligned.

“Someone has a moral disorder if they give the same weight to every order.

This you know, and to this project you were not inclined

While on others, you seized the moment, and made them self-assigned. 

You’ve hesitated over wrongful asks and mentally, you triaged your tasks.

You don’t blindly do each one in the sequence that your boss outlined.

Not each list done just to the letter, you sense who is the moral debtor.

You judge astutely and then you mutely promote the best one better.

That’s why your deeds sometimes have shined.

And I thank you for being kind.

It’s why some days feel like outtakes and this project gave you headaches.

In everything you do, intent and results get intertwined.

This task was simply taking longer because in your mind it felt wronger

Than all the others for this past month combined. 

A better project makes you stronger

While a stupid one leaves you disinclined.

And you need to say then, ‘Nevermind.’”

"And now away!" The buddha smiled with arms upraised.

“There’s no shadow you should lurk in when you know I’ll turn the work in.

Everything done was once important and all undone can be declined.

Save your soul and flee the yuppies. Go make some soup. Go hug your puppies.

Take yourself home to let the tensions unwind. 

Or wind yourself up and play with all the friends you find. 

Just don’t get worn down by the grind.”

Minutes later, I left my department and headed for my dark apartment. 

As I walked alone, dealing with the details of the bleak remind,

I stalked again the paths I’d strayed, re-lived the mistakes I’d made

And reflected on how in samsara's tentactles I’d been serpentined.

My footsteps halted.

I glanced into the lighted window of my mind. 

And the buddha, as is fitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

Near my office in his beanbag chair reclined

And his eyes have all the seeming of the Om of holy dreaming

And he's beaming, simply beaming, with a joy that's been refined

By laziness of work and laughter intertwined.

And all that's needless, nevermind.

  -- Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 301: Biomythography - Note 51, Command Line of Doom

Biomythography, Note 51

Command Line of Doom

Sunlight had started to turn amber through our back window. The playground behind our townhouse still looked bright enough to play in. My son stared at it from his highchair. He banged his spoon on his plate.

Next to our dining area, the phone hung on the wall. Its handset was beige and cheap. It was sturdy. But I never answered it. I hadn't answered a call in years. When it rang as we were sitting down, Diane diverted from the path to her seat to pick it up. After a moment, she handed it to me.

"It's Adam," she said.

I put a sippy cup in my child's hand and rose from the dinner table.

"I've got a problem," Adam said on the other end. "I thought I'd share."

"What is it?" I kind of liked having problems to solve. Adam knew that although, really, he liked solving things too, so he didn't always share. 

"The Usenet server crashed."

"Yeah?" That was awfully fast. I did some counting on the calendar page next to the phone and saw we hadn't gone a full three weeks since we installed the node. Of course, I understood Usenet services had changed from 1991 when I'd first gotten to know them. The main thing was, the Eternal September had taken place.

During Eternal September, which began in the fall of 1993, Internet service providers started offering Usenet access to everyone who asked. That included Adam and me as of last month. But the explosion of nodes everywhere around the country, actually across the world, changed Usenet. The Usenet threads had been channels for semi-private chats involving professional academics. Now computer hobbyists and various other professionals were getting involved. In 1994, the AOL service decided to open a Usenet gateway, too. That added even more non-academics.

Everything was faster, bigger. Different.

"The stipend for the job was pretty good." Adam's voice took on a tone I recognized as leading into a set of logical statements.

"Yeah." It was true. I waited for his logic.

"I figure it should cover a session of troubleshooting."

Crap, that seemed reasonable. I didn't want to travel from Frederick to DC again but I was nodding even before he finished his sentence. I'd left the Usenet node running in fine shape. But maybe I'd created some sort of problem with my vanilla configuration. It was possible. Maybe I'd programmed the server to crash in some slow, non-obvious way.

"Okay," I sighed.

Since his office felt the situation was urgent, I agreed to report on Saturday morning. We made the same driving arrangements as before. After I got to Adam's place in Gaithersburg, we hopped into his car and he took us the rest of the way.

Once again, his offices looked dark but somewhat comfortable and well-used. We flipped on the lights. While Adam took care of other business, something about a color printer, I sat myself at the Usenet server. It didn't take much time to figure out what was wrong. The process table showed a bunch of necessary programs were missing including the Usenet service. Also, some of my commands to the server didn't work. Anything I ran that created a file seemed to fail. I checked the disks,

$ df -k

and read the usage report.

"The disk is full," I called to Adam. "Like, it's completely, one hundred percent full."

"Huh, well." The tone of his voice, even at a distance, told me Adam had suspected as much. "I know you said to keep an eye on it."

"Did you?"

"I was busy." His voice got testy. He stalked from desk to desk. Something was wrong with the office printer and he wasn't having a straightforward time with it. "This is where I work. I have other jobs." 

My fingers rested on the keyboard of the little Linux server.

"Yeah, but it's not just like you're supposed to keep watching and deleting whenever you notice it's getting full. You have to filter it. You have to edit the configuration files."

"Well, I don't know how to do that."

"You watched me do it. We wrote out notes."

He remained silent for almost half a minute. He shrugged.

"Okay," I said, doing math on a scrap of paper. "You've got seventeen days of the entire Usenet. That's the limit for this storage. The machine has got 180 megabytes of hard disk. Your real limit, one that gives you room for swap space, needs to be less than seventeen days. If you want decent swap space, I say you should keep ten days without any other filter setting except timestamps."

"Well, I had to buy all three machines the same."

"Yeah, but that means this is what you've got. One hundred eighty megs, unless you put in another disk. You can keep all the Usenet threads for a little while, but not for very long. Or you can filter out some of them and make the storage last for a month. But you can't keep all of the Usenet traffic forever."

"From what my boss has been saying, he wants at least three weeks."

His boss had business reasons, I figured. I started running directory usage summaries and doing the math.

$ cd comp

$ du -h

16M

$ du -h ./graphics

15M

$ pwd

/usr/local/bin/usenet/comp

$ cd ..

$ cd alt

$ du -h

92M

After a few minutes, the pattern of Usenet history began to emerge. I understood which threads used up most of the storage. I could see there wasn't much in the science directory tree besides a scattering of text files. The scientists at various research sites around the country were holding discussions but they weren't sharing microscope images or anything with large binaries to take up space on a disk.

"Do you know what threads you want to keep?" I called to Adam. When we'd configured it, he hadn't.

"Yeah." He wandered closer with a toner canister in his hands. "I think I do."

"Okay, then, I can tell you where most of the payoff is going to be. We can delete the big directories you don't need to save. And I can set up any filters you tell me."

Finally, his expression eased into a tentative smile.

"My boss probably wants to leave the social discussions and the talk threads about nuclear disarmament."

"Those are easy. They don't take up much room." I ran a du -h on the talk directory to make sure. It reported about what I expected, 9M of data, all of it in text files on the various threads. The same was sort of true with the computer discussion threads except in some of them, like /usr/local/bin/usenet/comp/graphics, people sent image files sizable enough that it would help to delete them. But Adam wanted to keep the graphics.

"That's the best part," he said.

"You know, I have to set up the filters for what to save. But really I'm asking what I can delete. If I can't delete comp.graphics I need to know what other big folders I can blow away."

"Let me see." He pulled up a chair next to me. When he launched into what to save, I tried to bring up a file editor for the Usenet configuration file. 

"Wait!" I raised my right hand. "Wait, wait, wait. I have to make room on the disk first. Deletions. I need some, at least. I can't edit the configuration until I blow away some Usenet files."

"Well, don't remove the stuff I want."

I checked what I was doing. I'd lost track for a moment. 

$ pwd

/bin

Somehow I'd ended up in the wrong directory. That happened all the time in the vanilla installation of Slackware. There was no customization of the command line prompt. Soon I got back to where I needed to be, though, and talked with Adam about the sizes of files, folders, and the details of the usenet directory structure.

$ cd /usr/local/bin/usenet

When I'd deleted enough files, I edited the configuration while Adam watched. He had to make decisions about what discussions his office wanted to participate in. He let me put a three week timer on the files, too. It was an option in the configuration he hadn't wanted to exercise before. With the decision made, though, whenever he wanted to archive a thread for his boss or a set of graphics files for himself, he would have to make the decision within twenty-one days. After that, the usenet service timer would purge the files and they'd be lost.

I had to go back and forth between changing directories, running pwd to make sure I was in the right place, and running rm -rf * for a long time.

$ cd /usr/local/bin/usenet/comp/VMS

$ rm -rf *

$ cd ..

$ cd lang

$ rm -rf *

$ cd ..

$ cd sys

$ rm -rf *

Adam's business wanted to save particular parts of the file trees. That meant I had to individually run recursive deletions in multiple spots. Each time I wrote 'rm -rf' I told the computer to remove files with the -r flag for doing it recursively (everything I specified and everything in the further along the directory path, too) and the -f flag (for 'force,' meaning I didn't want to get asked every time for ten thousand times about whether I wanted to delete something). Basically, I was telling the system to shut up and delete what I said.

Finally, after some negotiation, Adam decided alt.music could go. There was a ton of space used by the directory for it, so when I told it to delete, nothing happened for a while.

"How long is this going to take?" Adam asked. He'd been watching me for half an hour or more. He had wandered off and wandered back, too, announcing he'd fixed the printer. For at least twenty minutes, he'd done nothing with his hands. 

"A while." I'd already done the math in my head. At the rate the disk could clean itself up, the big deletions would take an hour.

"What does it take to fire up Doom?" Adam wondered.

"We'd have to play on the other two machines," I pointed out.

"So? There are two of us."

I scooted over to the web server, logged in, and ran,

$ cd /usr/local/bin

$ pwd

/usr/local/bin

$ ./doom -net 192.168.0.4 192.168.0.6

 

Adam laughed as he got it running on the mail server, too. Soon, we were each at our console and dashing around in the game arena. We blasted the hell out of each other with bazookas. Every now and then, after I killed Adam or I died, I'd hop up and run to the Usenet machine to blow away another directory.

After twenty minutes between deletions (I'd found a good sniper spot and crushed Adam for a while, both of us laughing because he couldn't take two steps), I dashed back to the Usenet server. Oddly, the drive light was flashing. The command prompt hadn't returned from my previous command, either.

I hit a CTRL-C to stop the removal. Then I ran a pwd.

/usr/local/bin/usenet

"Oh, shit."

"What's wrong?" Adam said.

I didn't answer right away. I was surveying the damage. My recursive deletion had been running without interruption on the main Usenet folder. I had been deleting everything in Usenet. Everything. Including all the stuff his boss wanted to save. Maybe. Probably.

"Sorry, man." I showed him the remaining folders. I tried to explain what had happened. Fortunately, the recursive deletions had gotten stuck in the alt folder, where there was too much to remove in twenty minutes. The routine had removed most of alt.binaries, though, something Adam had wanted to keep.

"It's all really gone?" Adam asked.

"Yeah, really. Until I fire up the server again, those folders will be empty."

He sighed. A moment later, he shrugged.

"Oh well."

"Your boss won't be mad?"

"Yeah, but no," He gave a sardonic smile. "He won't be mad at me. He'll be mad at the consultant."

Hey, that was me. "Why?"

"I'll just tell him you made the decision. It's not like you'll ever see him"

"Oh." Well, that was that. "True."

"I meant to do that," I added and Adam mouthed it at the same time. The Pee-Wee Herman show had been off the air for a couple of years but every now and then, he referenced it like a pop culture reflex. I'd developed my pop reflexes from him. It was no surprise to find him anticipating my use of the phrase. 

"Is there any directory left to blow away?" he asked. 

"A couple. The religion tree and the fido tree might as well go."

"Start on those. Then let's play some more Doom."

$ rm -rf *

A few seconds later, on a different window of the same computer, I typed, 

 

$ ./doom -net 192.168.0.5 192.168.0.6

 

Not Even Not Zen 300: Biomythography - Note 50, Harbingers of Doom

Biomythography, Note 50

Harbingers of Doom

"How do you feel about a consulting gig?"

I'd just picked up my office phone at Hood College. Those words were the first Adam said to me after 'hello.'
 
Both of us had taken side jobs before and we'd talked about getting more of them. It was more often a theoretical concept, though. We wanted extra work because neither of us were making enough. We needed money to feed the kids and the mortgages. But we were busy with our main jobs, too. Looking for other activities took more time than usually we had. His invitation to hustle as a consultant seemed alarmingly sudden. At the same time, I appreciated how he was getting right down to business.

"What's the deal?" I asked. My gaze wandered around my darkened room in the server center. I imagined where Adam was, he had gotten a non-profit connection to a tedious art task, or a session of cable-pulling to network computers together with Novell, or maybe a writing assignment no one else wanted.

"I want to get Usenet into my office," he said. "And email. And a web server."

This was going to be totally different than I thought. Huh.
 
"That's a pretty big project. And it's in your own office?" He was talking about three sizable setup plans. I'd built a few web servers at a time when hardly anyone had done it. Folks were just getting to know what the 'web' was. On the other hand, I hadn't configured a mail server beyond setting up auto-forwarding services.

A couple of times I'd gone into mail configuration files far enough to edit lines of shell code, TPU code, or the Pine setup parameters. That's as far as I'd gone. Those straightforward servers and clients came packaged with distributions, so my configuration skills with them could be, and were, primitive. We would have a home territory advantage in Adam's office, of course. But anything we screwed up would be more visible there, too. I worried I might create a mail configuration that didn't route.

"You won't have to specialize the setups. The mail server and web server are for me to play with. You just need to install three Linux machines to use as servers."

I'd already installed Slackware for myself on a PC compatible machine. It was great, way easier than Digital Unix or AIX. I knew Slackware would be perfect.

"Okay, I have a plan," I replied.

"Good." He took a breath. "You haven't asked about the money."

"Yeah." That was the down side. I figured Adam would want a special deal, hours or days of work as a favor.
 
"It's fifteen hundred dollars." Adam interrupted my thoughts. "I told them your rate was five hundred per server. And they went for it."

There was silence on the phone line for a moment because I didn't know how to respond. Adam waited for me to speak. The pores on my skin opened up in preparation for a session of nervous sweat. This was too lucky to be reasonable. Adam had cut a good deal. So there had to be something unsaid, something wrong. If there wasn't some element in this already steering us to disaster, we would be doomed for some other reason, some factor we hadn't considered.
 
"What about your ISP connection?" I asked, looking for the hidden harbinger of doom.

"I've already made a deal. I'll have to do the TACACS setup with them but we have a connection upstream."

"I configured TACACS for Hood College."

"I know," he replied, sounding exasperated. "You told me. But the ISP wants this done a certain way. I've committed to doing it with them. I'll call you if I need help."

He probably wouldn't need help. I wondered if I'd really have anything to do. It didn't seem enough to provide the basic Slackware Linux.

In 1994, personal computer hardware kits were starting to come with CD drives. But they weren't standard. When I asked Adam, he wasn't sure he could get his company to spend extra for the fancy drives. After all, the three servers would sit in closets, maybe with no monitors. They would never display media to anyone at the console. The CD drives in them would mostly go to waste. So I prepared a Slackware machine image on 3.5 inch floppy disks. The basic installation files took up twenty floppies. The number climbed higher with the optional driver disks. I didn't want to skip any.

With color-coded labels, I built my collection. My paranoia kicked in. I wanted to arrive with every possible hardware driver for Linux I could bring. All of them in existence, maybe. Non-standard hardware was the toughest part of installing Linux in 1995. At the time, even mainstream companies made personal computers with weird network cards or embedded graphics modules that made it impossible to find a driver anywhere except at the vendor. And the vendors never made Linux drivers. I'd always wanted to write a hardware driver, sure, but not during an installation job.

In the weeks leading up to the configuration and launch weekend, I got nervous and made an extra set of Slackware installation disks. I located more Linux drivers and made more sets of installation files. Plenty of times, I'd heard Adam say, "I know a guy." This was probably the first time I'd been the guy.

When the day arrived, I drove from Frederick to Gaithersburg to pick up Adam.
 
"I'll drive to my office," he said as he ate at his dining room table. Although I knew I would get carsick in the passenger seat, I agreed. After all, the place was in downtown D.C. On my own, I'd get lost or pay three times what I should for parking.
 
I started feeling better after a few minutes in the semi-dark, lonely offices. The place had a careless air of comfort. Plus, I had my plans about what to do. When I asked Adam questions, I had in mind particular steps in a particular order for my plans. To my relief, the steps we'd discussed in kind of an offhand way before made sense to Adam when I got into the details. He had his own set of plans around the hardware, the network, and the timing of the configurations. Our ideas seemed to fit together perfectly. When I started the first server installation, which was agreed would be Usenet, Adam was by my side handing me disks.

"We could do this in half the time if I start using your second set of installation disks on the mail server," he observed. And it was true. So we proceeded to cycle through the Slackware steps, each of us shouting the disk numbers across the office or trading disks as necessary. The hitches I expected to run into, like the driver choices, arose. But, time after time, we got through them. During the first installation, I was able to pick the most generic drivers or look up the hardware specifications to find a close match. There was only one device driver, the one for network cards, where I had to guess. I guessed right.

After that, all we had to do was duplicate the installation process for the web server. As I finished the third computer, Adam verified his TACACS configuration steps. I pinged his mail server from the web server. I pinged the Usenet server. So far, we had spent ninety minutes.

The hourly rate looked amazing.

"The mail server doesn't quite look like it should," said Adam. He checked the instructions with his Internet provider. As it turned out, I knew what to do to make Linux behave the way he needed.

Then, while he tested his mail, I configured the web server, a piece of cake since I'd done it a half-dozen times before. Finally, Usenet. Once I was running the Usenet service, though, I found the easiest setting was to let it grab every thread it could find from an upstream server.

"Yeah, that's fine," Adam concluded at the end of our Usenet discussion. "I'll decide what parts to eliminate later. The main thing is to start grabbing it. Is it really working?"

I could see it chugging away in the process table but I understood the sight wasn't enough. For Adam, I navigated into the Usenet directory tree and showed him the files and folders it was creating.

"Nice." He let out a sigh. He walked back to the last machine he'd been working on, the mail computer. His fingers rested on top. "How fast do you think these machines are, anyway."

"Brand new." I knew he understood the specs. He'd bought them. "As fast as you can get in personal computers, really."

"I think we should load test the servers."

"What does that mean?"
 
He was smiling. I knew I'd missed a hint.

"Did you bring the game disks I mentioned?"

"Oh, yeah." He meant the free version of Doom. I pulled out a separate box of floppy disks and waved it. He laughed and nodded. I repeated, "Oh."

He chuckled again.

"Ooohh!"

For another twenty minutes, we loaded Doom as a team, cycling through disks in the same way we'd done before with the more serious work. I felt giddy. The amount of money involved had made the stakes seem overwhelming. Server configuration and minor bits of coding were the kinds of things I did at work every day. But I'd never had this rate of pay.

In my mind, this was a scam. The company was willing to pay me. I was willing to take their money. That was the scam. But it was the sort of scam where I pretended to do the work and actually did it. And they pretended to pay me and actually paid me.

If I could pretend to work well enough, I would never get caught.

"Yes!" Adam shouted as we fired up the first copy of Doom and got the welcome screen, a fiery background with a fighter in greenish. Behind the fighter loomed the dramatic DOOM logo. In front of the entire set of graphics, the computer presented us with a menu: New Game, Load Game, Save Game, Options.

"Can you make yours be the server?" Adam called. "I'm almost done. Then I'll try to join."

I had meant to run Doom on Slackware before this but I never had. There were so many non-Linux machines around, I had always grabbed a DOS or Windows computer to play games. This time, I switched the Slackware version of Doom into server mode. It worked great.

We made sure the computers were fast. Extra sure, maybe. After we spent an hour shooting each other with bazookas, Adam leaned back in his chair. He let out a satisfied sigh and announced, “The network is fine. And the servers are fast."

Not Even Not Zen 299: Biomythography - Note 49, Deliberate Awe

Biomythography 49

Deliberate Awe 

 

On a mountain trail in West Virginia, I hiked, tired and slow. After a while, I stopped at a turn. I noticed a pair of eyes on me. I pivoted toward them. And I saw the gaze belonged to a stag. It was taller than me by half, at least. Its antlers were wide and pointed. The beast regarded me with a sense of calm evaluation. For a moment, we stared and waited for each other to move. The stag turned and walked on.

And I decided to remember. 

#

I sighed and turned the steering wheel. I'd been working my day job, taking contract work, and teaching college courses. I was returning home later than I wanted from the college gig. When I reached my development only a few yards off route 194, I circled the court. All the spaces were full. I had to park in the row of trade vehicles a block away. 

My back hurt from the cramped seat. My eyes hurt from the drive. When I'd started for home, my brain felt fine because teaching is fine, but the commute and the late hour had rendered me foggy. I'd spent part of the drive cursing myself for missing storytime with the kids. Maybe it wasn't too late. Maybe. The harder I worked, though, the more I missed out on time with the kids.

I had writing to do before I slept. There was a lot on my mind. As I parked my car, I glanced up. 

A bright, reddish streak filled an inch or two of night sky. Amazingly, the fiery object broke up into three pieces. I knew right then I'd seen a meteor explode as it burned up.

"Wow." For a moment, I turned the motor off and sat. When would that happen again? I had seen hundreds of meteors in the sky as a child and not one of them got close enough to have the vivid red color this one did. None of them were big enough or close enough for me to see their disintegration. The previous ones had all winked out like shooting stars usually do.

I yawned. Already, as I tried to remember the look of the meteor, it was fading. My memory was a blur.

As I hefted my tired body out of the car, I considered how quickly I was forgetting these things that once seemed worthwhile. This time, I was going to lose the memory of a rare event because I was too sleepy and mentally preoccupied.

I stood up straighter. With deliberate care, I woke my body and mind. I turned to face the spot in the sky where I had seen the meteor crack into ruddy streaks of light. I re-woke the memory. I tried to fix it in my mind forever.

The effort sort of worked.

Between my training in awareness and my maintaining the influence of an old friend, Kate, I felt a good and possibly correct difference take place. I sensed my possibility of retaining the memory. My brain was shifting it from short-term to long-term or whatever was going on.

#

I looked up from my Blackberry. In theory, I was walking to take a break from work. In practice, I was working from my phone on a trail near my office building. The way it often went is I'd answer an email, stroll a few yards between the trees, and notice the prompt of another email. After one of them, I glanced up. 

For a moment, I wasn't sure why I felt a difference. I waited in the shadows of the maple and mulberry trees. My gaze moved to a gap between the leaves and the natural wall of bamboo. There, I could see the brightness of the noontime sun on the far shore of the retention pond. 

The pond caught rainwater drainage from artificial hillocks created with the office buildings. Even the basements of the buildings were uphill from me, here. So it's possible the pond was required by local flood or drainage standards but the property owners had gone one better and tried to make it into a miniature nature reserve. For sure, someone had stocked the lonely pond. Hidden pipes aerated it like a large, goopy fish tank. A few times, I'd noticed frog eggs on the shores of the green darkness. Geese visited the waterside and made their homes. Ducks did likewise. 

A sign warned passers-by not to disturb the ducks. From the tales of office workers around me, though, it might as well have said, don't get attacked by geese. Although they had never bothered me, I sometimes paused to let geese pass or waited for them to understand I wasn't approaching their nest. 

Something was odd about the geese, this time. Through my window into the pond, I could see they had all moved to one shore. A glance to the opposite side showed me why. 

On the bank where I suspected the drainage designers hid an aerator stood an animal I'd never seen before. It was a bird with light, bluish grey feathers. The head bore a mark like a bandit mask, dark grey or black. When it lifted its neck, the creature looked at least five feet tall. 

Its beak was long and pointed. Dangerous. But it didn't have eyes for me. It was focused on the geese. The geese, for their part, formerly the terrorists of the pond, were looking the other way, not even catching the gaze of one another, just strolling back and forth aimlessly as if they couldn't acknowledge this thing had kicked them out of their home. 

Later, I found out what it was. For the first time in my life, I had seen a great blue heron. 

#

We'd ridden less than a mile in the Arizona desert. My hand held the reins of my roan horse, Django. I was patting the gelding's neck and paying attention to him. I wanted to ensure we got used to each other early in the day. Django loped carefully between rows of cactus. He didn't want stabbed by them. Neither did I.

Around me, I saw baked, hard ground when I spared my attention to it. I noticed yellow brittlebushes and a few tiny, desert chicory flowers. An Arizonan friend, Carol, rode ahead next to our tour guide. Carol gestured to the herbs and bushes. She knew the names the local life. Among the rocks and tough soil, she pointed out barrel cactus, prickly pear, ocotillo, and saguaro. We passed a pair of mesquite shrubs, stunted and dried out, and a thriving greenstick tree.

"Is that ...?" Our guide turned sideways in her saddle. She squinted against the angle of the sun.

I raised my head. She shielded her eyes and nodded at something not too distant, maybe thirty yards away. 

"Is that a coyote?" She leaned to her fellow tour guide. The other girl’s mouth fell open.

As the others followed her line of sight, I did as well and ended up staring at a tall saguaro. I didn’t see what they did, at first. The brown shape lay in the shadow at the base of the big cactus. Its body blended into the dirt and the background of a dry buckhorn cholla.

“Are we okay?” asked the younger girl. 

"We'll, we're on horses." The senior guide gave her companion a wry look. In fact, we had passed the coyote by on horseback. We must have come within a dozen yards. It hadn't moved.

 

The coyote rested in the shade, not quite motionless but not concerned with us either. We would have had to make the horses ride through cactuses to approach. 

“Let’s go,” said the guide. She had a schedule to keep.

Some people say a coyote is basically just a dog. In my experience, yes, it is. It's a nice looking dog. Smart. A wild sort of animal but at least right then, it was not very wild looking.

 

#

High overhead, dark winged figures shifted back and forth in the sky. Behind them I saw the blue backdrop of a clear, open sky. Occasionally, one of the predatory birds drifted in front of the tall butte of rocks that everyone called the Devils Tower.

We had come to Wyoming by driving from place to place, traveling on the cheap to see what we could. As I glanced up, I was standing in a crossroads of nature trails at the base of Devils Tower. The easy trails were populated by drivers like us who had gotten out to walk. The harder, higher, or more remote trails were nearly empty as far as I could tell, except for one, where a group of mountain climbers was gathering near the base. They had layed out equipment and nylon ropes on the stones.

After I looked up, I found it hard to stop watching the sky. Seven or eight of the birds looked like vultures to me. I'd seen plenty. One of the avian forms, though, looked different from the rest. Its wingspan had a more pointed shape. The sun filtered around the feathery edges differently. Its head was white, I guessed, although it was hard to tell from a couple hundred feet below.

The exceptional bird and the vultures danced in the air. The vultures had numbers on their side but they seemed wary of the stranger among them. After a few minutes, I understood. The other predator flying near the top of the butte was an eagle. The eagle flew differently than any vulture, despite how their wings and bodies were roughly the same size. 

My wife beckoned me to follow her across a strand of tumbled rocks. My attention returned to the trail. We followed the path widdershins and uphill. Around a bend, my wife stopped to point.

"Eagles," she said. She gestured to a tall pine tree. I counted nine eagles in the tree and four in the diseased pine next to it. None of them glanced our way.

 

#

As I crouched down, I made out the print on the ground more clearly. It lay partly in the summer snow, pebbly and off-white, partly in the layer of grayish mud beneath. This print came from a cat. It was a cat too big to be domestic, not that we were likely to find any of that variety this high up. It was also too small to be a cougar, or so I judged.

We'd gotten here by driving up Blue Mountain in the twilight dark. The journey had turned out to be its own adventure. Diane had grabbed my shoulder along the way as the road narrowed and she caught a glimpse of the path ahead. The mountain pass turned into a roller coaster, the kind of ride that slants toward the ground as if to throw you off. In this case, the slopes of the road led to falls from sheer cliffs. You wouldn't want to be in a car that skidded. There was no rail, no border of any sort, just dirt that dribbled away from the tires and bounced down the slopes into the treetops a hundred feet down. 

After a long hour of switchbacks and crumbling gully-filled gravel and dirt, we arrived at the base of the Blue Mountain trails. And then, after a hike to the peak, we found this cat paw print. 

"It's pretty big." I rose, hands on my hips, and considered. I turned to Diane. "Is there anything for a cat this size to eat?" 

"Squirrels and chipmunks. I saw plenty on the drive up."

So it wasn't a hallucination. It was a bobcat. Of course, I would never see the actual animal. Cats were too clever and quiet. I knelt and touched the edge of the print. 

#

 

I'm old. Yet it's not hard to feel awe at the most mundane of things. I'm collecting all these natural wonders together into one description because isn't finding our sense of awe somewhat repetitious? Each person, animal, and object around us inspires awe when we think about them. 

Aren't these incidents all basically the same?

No. Every awe has its own flavor. 

Every moment is different. 

Not Even Not Zen 298: Biomythography - Note 48, Observing, Appreciating

Biomythography 48

Observing, Appreciating

"Look at the moon," Kate said in an awed voice. But she said it every night. 

During the first few weeks of the semester, her enthusiasm for ordinary things seemed cute. After a month, I rolled my eyes when she said it. After three months, I enjoyed the moon. A lot.

We met and lived in a small college. At that point in life, I'd never thought I would hear an adult express so much wonder about ordinary things. Of course, the moon is different every night. I hadn't appreciated the changes in it since I was seven. They were there, every time. Sometimes the sphere would glow bright and clear, every crater starkly visible. Sometimes it would be fuzzy.

On occasions, the moon was yellow. At other times, it had a rainbow around it.

Kate had a natural awareness built into her. She noticed so many changes in the world around her, the extent of her perceptions astounded me. Needless to say, she perceived more of the sensory world than most, especially visual cues. I was infamous for not noticing things even while I was working on improving my awareness. Kate came into my life and showed me how far I had to go.

"That flower is missing a petal," she would observe. I'd turn my gaze to follow hers and take a minute to find what she'd spotted at a glance.

With her in my life, I started actually looking at the moon and the flowers. And the dirt. And the cracks in sidewalks. Reflections in windows. Bugs in the corner next to a smear of grit that had worn off a cinderblock. The world had a different sensory influence while I was around her.

A couple months after we'd started dating, she took things to a different level during breakfast.

"I had a dream," she told me in the dining hall. And she told me her visions of the night before.

She did the same thing after the next night. And the next. And I started remembering my dreams. I didn't know you could learn it as a mundane skill. I certainly didn't know you could learn it without any intent. Recalling dreams while I was awake wasn't a super-power like observing things others don't. Still, my increased dream control lent itself to insights. First I remembered the visions. Then I had months of lucid sequences I could consciously influence. Then I could wake myself and return to the dreams. This was Kate's world. And a little more. Kate couldn't go back to the same dream and I could. The point is, maybe, she was so different that being near her changed me.

For years I had concentrated on disregarding the sensual world. Most especially, I'd given up expectations and desires. Now I was learning to appreciate ordinary things in life. In the process, I discovered it wasn't the opposite of giving up desire. And I had worried that it was. 

#

Appreciation may seem in some ways like the opposite of abandoning desire. But if you've given up attachments, it's not. If you can allow yourself a desire and then detach from it, even better. For me, giving up my expectations was the most important part of my personal development process. And appreciation didn't endanger that. Rather, it opened me up to gratitude for life's experiences. I hadn't understood how deeply one could observe the world. I'd dismissed the idea of appreciation as a trivial enticement of samsara.

In late June after my time with Kate, I went out running at about four in the morning. On a country road without street lights, I turned a corner and found a celebration of sorts.

I stopped running to stare at it. On either side of the road in the underbrush, there was a display of small, yellow lights on the ground. Cautiously, I moved closer to the lights. I couldn't believe the phenomenon was natural. When I got close enough, I saw one of the lights move by a fraction. It was just a twitch. I leaned closer. I put my hand into the thorns and honeysuckle. I moved the leaves of the bushes aside. My eyes adjusted.

Finally, I could see. On the ground of the slope in front of me were fireflies. They weren't in the air, although the weather was perfect. They were walking on the ground. Their lights didn't blink. Were these a species of bug I didn't know? Should I think of them as glow worms? They clearly weren't worms, though. They had the beetle body in the shapes of the fireflies I normally saw aloft in the woods.

After a long while studying them, I let the leaves of the thorn bushes and honeysuckle move back into place. I ran on. And I never saw anything like it again. 

You can learn to appreciate. It takes effort when you're exhausted and sore. But you can.