Sunday, February 9, 2025

Not Zen 202: Mercy Release

Mercy Release

"I don't understand it," the fisherman told his wife over the dinner table. "This spring, the backwards island is better. Their sea is healthy."

"Well, keep it to yourself," she warned. Most of the fishermen in their town had been forced out of business. They had sold their boats and gone to work in the city. Some had moved to the mainland, a trip they'd sworn they wouldn't make.    

"Of course." He nodded. He knew it would be wisest to keep his observations quiet.

The fisherman and his family lived on a slope in a tract of hills bound by the sea and a single river. It was one of a chain of islands not far off the coast of the mainland. His low-mountain territory was the best in the archipelago, he thought. His people were the most sophisticated. They had large schools, roads, temples, churches, medicines, and modern technology. The next island over was poor and the people were backward. The same tribe had inhabited its lands for a thousand years.

The modern island and the backward one were too far apart to see each other but, in good weather, a sailor could travel between them in a day. That's how the fisherman discovered the difference in their waters.

Four years earlier, the mainland fishing fleets had swept through. They had wiped out the fishing grounds. They'd scraped out every shoal that harbored shrimp. They'd netted every school of fish. They'd dredged up every clam from the seabeds. They'd taken every turtle. They'd slaughtered the dolphins and seals. They'd done it all in a single season.

"Will you go back tomorrow?" his wife asked as she drew a portion of her fish dinner to her mouth.

"There's no choice," he replied. "It's the only place."

She bowed her head.

"I"ll take the boy," he announced.

"He's got school," she warned.

"This." He tapped his finger on the table. His wife sighed but she bowed her head again. “This is the thing he must learn.”

In the morning, the fisherman enlisted his son to carry equipment to the boat. They talked about the sailing they would do. The boy said he understood. He didn’t mention school. Then the father let his boy nap as they sailed north around the coast. They needed to avoid the eyes of other fishermen. No one else in his neighborhood had brought home a full catch on any day in the past four years. He knew his neighbors would hear about his success and try to follow. Fortunately, he noticed only one boat in his wake. It kept its distance. Soon, it faded from sight.

By sunrise, he reached the north end of the island. Here, the mouth of the river met the sea. He stared at the city for a while. It was the largest on the land by far. His boy rose and, rubbing his eyes, watched the businesses of the city start their day. Trucks and carts rolled on roads and ramps near the water. Dock workers lined up next to the biggest ship, which had moored next to the widest dock.
 
"What's that?" the child asked, pointing. His father followed the gesture to the city center. In it stood a tall building with a rounded top.

"It's the stupa," he answered. "Monks and priests stay there. Their home sits beside the temple, which is just a little closer to the coast. You can see the temple but it is farther away, next to the river."

"There are priests at the narrow dock near the stupa," the boy announced.

The fisherman strained to see. He could make out robed figures on a wooden pier. They pulled a train of carts behind them. On the carts, they carried eight kettles of baked, red clay. The kettles, each as big as a man, sat two to a cart. Behind every cart, a pair of monks pushed. In front, a priest pulled and steered. As father and son watched, the priests made their procession from the base of the pier to its end, far out over the water. A group of the eldest led the way, swaying and chanting.

The fisherman couldn't hear the chants but he was sure they were words of prayer, loud and slow. This had to be the weekly ceremony in which the priests showed their compassion. When the procession reached its end, all the monks joined in with the waving. Finally, two of them reached up to a clay kettle. Each man used both of his hands to grip it by a handle on the neck. They managed to lug the kettle down from the cart. They carried it two steps. They tipped it and let water spill out. A second later, they learned it even more. Fish began to fall out. They were large, although listless. The scaley bodies landed hard in the sea. Half of them wiggled their tails and swam away.
 
"What are they doing?" his son asked.

"That is the mercy release," he replied. "The priests say it is evil to eat meat. They gain merit by buying living fish in the market on the mainland. Then they release the fish instead of eating them. You see?"

"But we eat fish."

He nodded to his son.

"It's a ritual," he said. He wasn't sure how to explain it although he thought it was high-minded of the priests.

The boy suddenly pointed to an outrigger sailing north out of the mouth of the river. "That boat has the same clay pots."

The fisherman squinted. His son was right. The primitive outrigger, the fastest of the types of craft sailed by crews from the backward island, had been laden with kettles. They appeared identical to those used by the virtuous priests. These kettles, however, sat between the knees of the native sailors as they rowed. When the outrigger caught a hard wind, they lifted their paddles out of the water. The hardest part of their job, aiming into the easterward breeze, was done.

The fisherman watched them for a while. He turned his sail toward their island. They were leading the way for him.

For most of the day, they cruised east. The fisherman tried to lose sight of the natives ahead. Several times, he succeeded, once for several hours. But it was hard to lose them completely when they were going the same way.
 
"They bought fish, like the priests," concluded his son.

"It could be." He had reluctantly come to the same opinion.

"Are they religious?"

"Not like priests, I think."

They sailed through the night because the skies were clear. Stars like pearls shone through the darkness, each glowing fierce and strong. The boy slept for hours. When the moon came out, he woke. Father and son sailed over the blue-black sea in a shimmering silver light. They caught a glimpse of the catamaran to the northeast. In half an hour, they glided by it, sweeping ahead of its resting crew.

Before dawn, they found their fishing spot. The nets caught a full haul of game fish on the first cast. They were mostly young adult hake and trout. The boy screamed with delight. He danced on the deck with a pair of flopping, coral trout. It made his father reflect, for a moment, on how young the lad was. He couldn’t possibly remember a normal catch before the mainland fleets had wiped out the area. He had seen those catches come home, maybe, as a toddler. He might recall something about them. But he hadn't been big enough to sail, back when things were more normal. He'd never stood on deck during an ordinary-sized haul.

The boy laughed and continued to dance for a few minutes. He didn’t settle down until his father put him to work bucketing the fish into the hold. Earlier, they had half-filled two of their hold compartments with sea water. They had been ready. Even so, it took them half an hour to sort the fish and toss out the by-catch, which was mostly adolescent mackerel and hake, too small for the marketplace.

Their vessel had eight compartments, in total. They had room for more hauls. Their only limit was their tolerance for slow sailing. The fisherman knew the limits of his craft. It didn't steer well with full holds. At least, it hadn't years ago. He doubted anything on his aging vessel had gotten better since.

He wandered along the deck, set up his nets, and considered the distance to home. He studied his boy playing with an adult mackerel in the best by-catch compartment. He inhaled the scent of the holds. He gazed to the west, where he saw no clouds. His hands on hips, he pondered filling six hold compartments. The vessel would respond like a lame ox, then, for sure, but he would get home easily enough in this clear weather.

That's when he saw the other craft. It was the catamaran. The natives had spotted him.

They were rowing toward his ship. For a moment, he wondered if he should turn and flee. His more modern fishing vessel could make it, maybe. But he had done nothing wrong.

As he waited a few minutes and the natives closed in, he saw they had their bows strung and spears out. They had weapons pointed in his direction. He wondered if they felt differently about their waters than they had years ago. Or had he offended them somehow? His skin prickled. At that moment, his son hopped up on deck to see why his father had stopped moving. He spotted the catamaran, too. The native sailors changed their body language in response. As they watched the boy studying them, they lowered their spears.

"Ah," he breathed.

"What?" asked his boy.

"Nothing." A moment later, he changed his mind. "Prepare for guests."
 
The oldest man clambered aboard first. He carried no weapon except a knife at his belt. Four other men followed, all young and strong. The last pair of them brought spears on their backs. The five, in total, were too many for the boat's cabin, where two people could talk if they were both standing. The hosts had to invite their newcomers to sit on barrels tied down at the gunwales and, in one case, a seat they contrived with a rolled-up fishing net.  As the talks began, the boy ran to fetch everyone drinks of warm tea.

The discussion took an hour. The native sailors, even their leader, barely spoke the mainland tongue. They had just enough vocabulary, the fisherman suspected, to buy their pots of live fish. Their anger at seeing a fishing boat in their waters came through well enough, though. They insisted the fisherman swear oaths of secrecy.

When he gave his word in the mainland tongue, they didn't trust it. They made him speak again, repeating phrase after phrase, in their own language. At that point, he wasn't sure what he had agreed to. The men stood and nodded. Their leader insisted that the two of them follow the catamaran as it sailed into the mouth of the nearest river. Not seeing much choice, the fisherman agreed.

The natives left one of their men aboard during the trip but he seemed more jovial than hostile. He and the boy amused themselves by poking a spear into one of the holding tanks while the fisherman did most of the work.

"You must share in our labor," the leader explained when the boats reunited. They tied down not at a proper dock but at stumps and rocks near the mouth of their island's river. "Your boy, he must work."

"We will," the fisherman agreed.

From the start, he found it easy. He and his son took part in the toil of moving the live fish kettles. They hauled them onto the nearest beach. There, they joined a gathering tribe of women, children, and old men.  

To his surprise, the natives chanted as they released the fish. He was sure they were saying prayers. He had the sudden sense of living a second life. This, too, was a mercy release ceremony. The men and women were showing their compassion to the fish. Eventually, as they chants paused, two men reached up to a clay kettle. They gripped it by the handle on the neck. They tipped it down into the stream and let the water and fish spill out. These were mostly adolescent fish inside, full of life. They were eager for the brackish water. They darted in different directions, all of them gone in a few seconds.

Next, the young men from the catamaran released turtles. This must have been a difficult purchase. They didn't want anyone else to choose the places for them. Instead, every onlooker touched a turtle on its shell and said a few words of blessing before the release. The fisherman's son did the same, although he had to be prompted for the words. The fisherman did his turn.

When they were set, the turtles crawled from the sand into the rocky stream. A shout went up. Maybe the bought turtles didn't always make it.  

Finally, two men pulled a wet box from the catamaran and opened it to reveal a selection of snails. The natives released these, too, but with a more playful sense of care. The fisherman and his son found themselves at the front of a crowd of women, mostly. They worked alongside pre-adolescent girls. Everyone involved placed snails on stones, on water reeds, and on fallen trees, lumpy with algae. Every girl said a blessing every time she released her charge. The fisherman tried to repeat it. His son, he noticed, spoke the phrase perfectly. He made the mothers smile and some of the daughters, too.

That night, they stayed in a village by the sea. As they sat around a communal fire, the father and son again pledged to keep the secrets of the tribe. The boy didn't even seem to know what secrets he was keeping, but he gave his solemn oath.

Finally, they were allowed to board their trawler in the morning and haul one more catch. It was a special one, the fisherman thought. The final lift of the nets involved men from the catamaran watching and chanting prayers.

"Can't we stay?" his son asked as they finished packing up the nets, closing the holds, and pointing the bow of their craft toward their island.

The fisherman felt they had already hauled up as much as the natives liked.

"Your mother expects us," he said.

"Oh, yeah." The boy nodded. With that, he scrambled off to the cabin because it was his turn to steer.

For a day, they tacked back and forth into the wind. It was hard going. They caught the west-bound current, which helped. A squall caught them and blew them northward, too, which didn't hurt their progress west so much as it drove them off course. Eventually, they brought the trawler home to the dock just as a storm was looming on the western horizon. There was time left in the day, so they sold most of their catch while it was fresh. The fisherman's wife met them in the marketplace. She had watched the boat come in.

They marched home together, laden with money and with the best of their fish piled into barrels on the family cart. As they plodded up the great hill, their son told his stories. He started with the priests in the great harbor. He dwelled on the release ceremony of the natives on their island. But he returned again and again, to his favorite part, the huge catches his nets dredged up.
 
"So many fish!" his mother said. "The backward islanders have been very lucky! Or was it really luck?"

As she spoke, she turned to address her husband.

"It's odd," he said, giving voice to her feelings. His push-cart thwarted him a little but he let his footfalls carry him closer to her side. "Our priests buy and release fish. They pray and pray. But our island has not had a resurgence."

"The priests think they do it to attain merit." She scowled and bowed her head to their stony road for a moment.

"Do they not attain merit?" he asked her. At times, he thought she was quite religious. She visited the nunnery in the city and the temple, too. She liked him to act pious in front of their son. He tried to please her.

"They do their mercy releases for selfish reasons, to show us they are good." She raised her head. She smacked her hands together, one fist in a palm. "On the other island, they did it to save the fish. They didn't show anything to anybody. They didn't need to, because they truly are good."

"They did more." He set down the handles of his push-cart with a sigh. He wiped his brow and caught his breath for a moment. He knew his wife was right.

"Only because their motives were better," she insisted. She pounded her palm one more time. "We have proof. We can see the difference."

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Not Even Not Zen 387: Biomythography - Note 124, The Y2K Bug in People's Minds, Pt. II

The Y2k Bug (in People's Minds)
(continued)

For a couple months, I roamed the off-white tiles of the facility, finding machines on desks, shelves, and floors, figuring out what fixes they needed, and grinding through the process. For some, I had to install new software. For others, I had to edit configuration files. (Some applications had prepared for different date formats - there are different calendaring styles around the globe, after all.) For others, I needed to write shell scripts. The easiest part was running patches. The vendors supplied those. All I needed to do was follow instructions. Sometimes, though, I discovered problems like, a) the vendor had no patch, only a promise to write one, b) their patch didn't work, or c) the company responsible had gone out of business. When there wasn't a vendor fix, I'd research to find a rival vendor with a compatible fix or a hobbyist who'd written a script. A few times, I went to the source files on the disk and edited them.

It was fun work, in its way, but it was clear that our facility would get hit hard by the year change unless I took the needed steps. In all, I fixed around seventy systems, which I tracked in a list, and a dozen or so applications I tracked in a separate list.

"Are you worried?" my boss asked me as the end of December loomed.

"Nah." I folded my arms and surveyed the machine landscape. I was accustomed to the construction dust and the human smells from clinical trials, patient rooms with their antiseptics, the bright yellow-and-black warning tapes and signs, and the dull roars from air handlers down the halls. We also got occasional animal odors from the area of the future mouse imaging lab, where the vet techs were running tests, walking the landscape with blueprints in hand. They kept failing to install network wires for their instruments. I paused for a moment to feel irritated about having to catch their design flaws so often. In four months, I'd corrected four floor plans. "I've gotten everything."

"Really, everything?"

"Pretty sure." I harrumphed. The specialty medical apps had not been easy, some of them, and only the week before I'd caught someone using one I hadn't seen. We didn't have a software inventory list so I had to search each disk, sometimes each drawer, and watch the scientists in action.

At least our network was a stack of white-bodied, unmanaged hubs. They were dumb packet repeaters. They didn't log anything. They didn't manage packet traffic. I didn't have to upgrade them because, in fact, it wasn't possible.

My boss had me check again. I reviewed all the systems, moved the dates forward on one of every machine type, and declared it all fine and all verified. I went home feeling good about Y2K. On New Year's Eve, I spent the night with my friends, three-quarters of whom were also computer admins. We complained about the work, drank or smoked, watched the fireworks on television, listened to broadcasters panic about Y2K, complained to ourselves about the public Y2K complaints, and heard from one another that we were sure we had gotten it right.

When the next Monday came around, I drove in early. All the lights were on in the research facility. All the computers were humming. I ran one of our science applications as a test. It worked fine. I ran another, less popular analysis program. It performed precisely as it should.

I popped into SSH and connected to a remote machine. It worked fine. Our dumb network was all right - even though I couldn't upgrade it.

At around eleven in the morning, I added a couple of incoming staff to our user directory. I set their default passwords, configured the accounts to require the users to reset their password immediately after login, sorted them into their appropriate lab groups, and ran a backup of our Network Information Service (NIS). Since we didn't have anything better than tape backups, I kept a spare NIS server. That was what I used as my hot-swap failover. It doubled as the spare copy of all our user information.

The job got two lines into my backup script and crashed. When I pinged the backup server, I found it had gone offline.

"What the hell?" I pushed myself out of my chair by the armrests. I knew the old Sun SPARC 2 had been bought in 1994. Someone had placed it on a corner shelf of the next door office. In all my months, I hadn't bothered to move it. The little box was ancient but reliable.

When I got to it, I scrounged a grey, centronics cable and a monitor to login. I had to stand on one of the desks to work. The SPARC2 graphical interface crashed and dumped me to the command line. Above the system prompt, I saw an error about an "unknown date." I was pretty sure I knew what to do. First, I had to change the date to 1999 so it would boot normally. Then, well, we had another SPARC2 I'd patched. I grumbled my way back to my office for an external disk and the correct software.

"What happened?" my boss asked. He knew something was wrong by my scowl.

"The backup NIS server crashed."

"Was it the Y2K bug?"

"Yes." I sighed, hands on hips, and faced him to apologize. "Sorry, I thought I'd gotten everything."

He waved it off. "Can you fix it?"

"In about half an hour."

He nodded and marched away. Twenty minutes later, he strolled back to my desk, where I'd returned after getting the SPARC2 running with network ports activated. At this point, I could work on it remotely and fix the rest of the configuration.

"I've been testing everything," he announced. "The other equipment, I mean. All the instruments. They're good. It's all good. The whole place is fine except for your backup. Is the NIS server the only thing that broke from Y2K?"

"Yeah."

"Not too bad," he concluded. He set his hands on his hips and gazed out into the busy facility.

#

A couple days into the new year, the American media concluded that Y2K for computers was no big deal after all. I wasn't convinced because I'd been there. I'd done the work. I knew the talking heads were wrong.

Clearly, we had a bug in humankind.

An ever-present glitch in people's minds is that they don't give themselves credit for preventing a disaster. Like the steps taken to fix the ozone layer, the Y2K event was a pretty good victory for humanity. In the environmental case we didn't actually fix the problem. Instead, we managed to stop destroying part of the atmosphere for a little while. That was good enough. Our Y2K victory was a smaller one but hundreds of thousands of system administrators and programmers around the world united, at least for a while, to keep our infrastructure running well. We managed to avoid collectively shooting ourselves in the foot.

The glitch is, we didn't give ourselves any credit. Even when we made the right decisions, collectively, we compared it against some imagined ideal of an unachievable outcome; and so we regretted doing our best. We downplayed our successes.

We pretty often still do. The Y2K bug was a small victory. But it was a victory.

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Not Even Not Zen 386: Biomythography - Note 123, The Y2K Bug in People's Minds, Pt. I

The Y2k Bug (in People's Minds)

When the year 1999 arrived, I was not employed on a moon base. The television show Space 1999 lied to me. Instead of driving a spaceship, I piloted a desk in a facility that supplied scientific services to eleven research institutes. The place seemed as good as a moon colony, though, in some ways. The air was dusty from construction. The technology around me was interesting to learn, it made for exciting problems to solve, and always, it was new. We invented some of it on the spot. Plus I could carpool home, which wouldn't have been as easy from the moon.

A few months passed between the previous system administrator leaving and the facility hiring me, which meant I arrived barely in time. Things were starting to break. The tape backups had stopped working and my first restore test from them didn't work. We hadn't needed them so no one knew. Also, the previous sysadmin built the facility network from nine unmanaged 10BaseT hubs. One of the hubs had failed. I had to rewire the network closet and pull in a separate power cable. In the walls around us, I found old twisted-pair phone wires. They supported CAT3 half-duplex connections, nothing more, so I knew I was going to upgrade the building itself.

"Get up to speed fast," announced the co-worker who trained me. "You supply all the computer services."

"Just me?"

"And the Y2K bug is coming."

Everyone knew. I leaned over my Sun SPARCStation 20 and felt its warm hum. It was a wonderful machine but, even then, the pizza-box style of computer was a few years old. No one had patched it. I'd rescued it from a shelf, found the fattest CRT monitor available, grabbed a clone keyboard and mouse, scrounged a few SCSI cables, attached an external drive, and called it a workstation. With a little shell programming, I could control all the other computers in the facility from my desk.

From room to room, I logged in on workstations and set up remote procedures. I configured situation monitoring on each so I could know before anyone else when a job was overclocking a CPU. X Windows was my friend because no platform was the same. I connected to SGI workstations, Macs, Linux, Sun, and Solaris clones. Each office room had grey paint and padded sections on the walls where patients sat waiting to get screened. Even in those rooms, we didn't yet have a Windows PC.

The hallway floors were white tile, marked with yellow and black hazard tape where the magnetic fields of the NMR, MRI and fMRI instruments exceeded the dimensions of the rooms. The shielding around the instruments wasn't good enough to contain the power of the magnets. You couldn't carry most metals around there. Bronze was okay; I had a set of bronze tools. With regular metals, you had to never use them or, in a paranoid way, you had to dodge the hazard markers. If you miscalculated,you could get stuck to a wall by your toolbelt or worse. Magnetic objects could reach the MRI at speeds faster than a bullet, so you could kill yourself or someone else in a careless moment.

I always grabbed the non-magnetic tools as I made my rounds.

Within a month, I had not only taken inventory of the equipment but I'd tested every computer. Some of the firmware in older models needed to get an upgrade to be compliant with new date formats. Fortunately, the manufacturers of Sun, SGI, and Linux workstations had already posted firmware for installation. Beyond the motherboards, though, I could see the operating systems, databases, and specialized medical applications also used dates with only two numbers, like 10-12-99. When 12-31-99 turned to 01-01-00, a lot of the systems were going to stop working.

"How do you know these are going to break?" my new boss demanded. He wanted me to work on the research instruments. He studied me as I tested our firmware.

"If you move the date forward, you can see which computers have services that stop." One of the first things I did in October, as I started Y2K preparations, was assess which systems were going to crash. The answer was: all of them. In some form or another, all our systems had internal applications that would break down when confronted with the year zero.

"What about mine?" he asked. That was quick, I thought, from skeptic to concerned scientist.

"I already upgraded your Macintosh desktop."

"But I have two Macs. I have a laptop."

"Oh." Well, crap. Folks were bringing up this sort of thing more and more. "Can I make an appointment to upgrade your laptop?"

"You can do it right now," he replied.

And so I did. Maybe thirty of our machines were shared workstations; they were capable of supporting four or five scientists running their calculations simultaneously. (Most of the scientists logged in remotely. Some of them liked to run six calculation jobs on six workstations at roughly the same time. Their jobs took hours, sometimes days to calculate what they wanted to know about a flattened CT brain map or a study of fMRI data.) I upgraded the smaller, personal machines, too, whenever they came to me. Unlike the workstations, they were mostly new.

Well, our oldest Macintosh computers couldn't support firmware fixes. They were done. After Y2K hit, they wouldn't be of any use to anyone. But the recently-bought Macintosh computers could run a date patch to upgrade their AppleOS. And the Apple utilities and apps mostly understood the year 2000 was not 'nothing.'

#

(to be continued - here

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Not Even Not Zen 385: Biomythography - Note 122, The Heist

The Heist

Her name was Scrapple. She was a weird-haired cat.

Seen at a distance, Scrapple made houseguests blink. Her hair was neither long nor short. Her parents had been one of each. Her fur offered cropped patches, longish patches, and samples of stuff halfway between. Overall, she was grey-brown colored with flecks of orange. The effect was similar to spices in pork scraps and cornmeal, which is why we named her after the breakfast food. She was a real-life camera lens blur. 

It was Scrapple who instigated the PBS Nature documentary of a Three Stooges routine. She marched up to the sliding glass door on the back deck. She mewled for me to let her in. Our dog, Sam, trotted up behind.

Sam was young and puppy-handsome, a Brittney Spaniel, brown and white. He often walked with his mouth open, panting a smile. He was, apparently, the sort of dog who gets abandoned in the park - although maybe he ran off, he had so much energy as a pup. When left to his own devices in the woods, he started to starve. Well, he didn't try to eat the cats or raccoons in the neighborhood. Or he didn't have any success. Instead, he ate the neighbors laundry off the line. Natural fibers were the closest thing he could find to food.

Our neighbors, the Ganleys, ask my mother for help. They tried to contain the stray, to no success. She offered to take him in. In a few hours, my father had named him Sam because “he looks like a Sam” and, the next morning, I trained him. Someone had to teach Sam not to eat our laundry, after all, and then he was our dog. He followed me everywhere.

“Fine,” I said mostly to myself although a bit to the dog and cat outside. “I suppose …”

Scrapple mewled louder, impatient. I nodded and grabbed the sliding door latch. When I took a look at her, though, I hesitated. I leaned in for a closer look. She had a mouse in her mouth, motionless, freshly killed. It was dark and brown-grey, not easy to see against the background of Scrapple's mottled coat.

I couldn't stop myself from opening the door just a little. My arm had the momentum of my original thought. But I remembered what my mom said about letting bleeding or dead animals into the house. I'd have to clean them up.

"Nope." I slammed the door closed.

“Rrroowww!” Scrapple yelled in protest. I suppose she had a customer service complaint to deliver. But she found herself interrupted.

The mouse dropped from her jaws and came alive at the same instant. Its paws started churning in the air and it hit the deck running. It bounced, once. Scrapple tried to put a paw on top of it but it hopped forward and sideways.

The creature dodged to scoot behind the cat. It ran across the deck between the legs of the dog, the only path of escape. So far, everything had happened in half a second. Sam's reflexes took another quarter-second. He was faster than the cat or rodent. He scooped up the mouse in his jaws as Scrapple spun around to find her prey.

Our cat started patting down the area, searching the deck like someone frantically looking for a dropped treat. Sam froze while his feline housemate let out frustrated peeping sounds, peered between the floorboards, frantically patted the outdoor rug, smacked a cluster of leaves apart, checked a flowerpot, and finally gazed down between the boards of the deck again.

Only the dog's eyes tracked her. He held his limbs still. Even his tail waited, slightly raised, unmoving. 

Scrapple let out a final peep of disappointment. With a glance at at the closed door, she turned away. Her padded paws took her off on a hunt for another mouse.

Sam wagged his tail. He approached the glass pane. After a moment of staring into my eyes, he let out a polite bark.

"Okay." I slid open the door. 

As Sam crept in, I stopped him. He wagged his tail. With my right hand, I patted his head. With my left, I cupped his jaw. I put my fingers into his open mouth. He gave me a knowing look as he panted, dancing and happy. My fingers found nothing. His mouth was empty.

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Not Even Not Zen 384: Biomythography - Note 121: Yesterday, In Fact

Yesterday, In Fact

When I emerged, I saw the cluster of people. They stood at the edge of the sidewalk, next to the road. 

There's something about the way people move after an accident. Every step is deliberate. Their hands elevate. Their fingers spread and get ready to grip. Their gazes drift to the area where they saw it happen. In this case, four citizens advanced to the edge of the curb, closer to the asphalt than people normally stand. Among them, a man held himself back, poised, fingers slightly spread, unsure of what to do. My wife strode over to join them. 

I had emerged onto the street a few minutes after we finished dinner. I'd paid the bill and slipped on my coat. Taking those steps made me slower out the door than anyone else. As I paused on the doorstep to comprehend the scene, the owner of the restaurant rushed past me, headed back in. He muttered something to himself. His gaze darted to me with a wide-eyed look of alarm. A moment later, I walked forward to join the group at the edge of the street.

One of my sons met me. Steam puffed out from his nose and lips as he spoke.

"An old lady fell and hit her head," he announced. 

"Okay." I joined the crowd. Everyone else had surrounded the body. There was nothing for me to do. 

Sometimes I arrive on the scene early enough to administer care. Other times, I'm so late there's no question of helping. This evening, I seemed caught in an in-between state. My wife had knelt next to the fallen woman. She was part of the inner circle of care. Members of the woman's family had occupied the other spots. An oldish man, salt-and-pepper haired, stalked off with his mobile phone in his hand. He was trying to place a call for an ambulance with an urgent tone to his voice.

In about half a minute, I understood I would need to wait. I had to look for my chance to help. Fortunately, it didn't take long. 

"Get the blanket from the trunk," my wife said. However, first she spoke to my daughter. It took her a moment to notice me. "You've got the key. Go get the blanket out. We need to elevate her legs."

Later, I would learn it was my youngest son who had noticed first. When he saw the woman was bleeding, he tried to tell to tell her family to elevate her legs and keep oxygen flowing to her brain. Her family wasn't listening, really. Only my wife heard him. 

The old woman didn't seem able to move. She was slipping in and out of consciousness. Beneath her, the sidewalk was hard and freezing. Keeping her conscious and maybe warmer seemed like a fine idea. 

My car was only a few steps away but two of my grown children beat me to it. After I opened the trunk, my daughter took the blanket out of my hand. She scurried back to the scene of the fall. 

When I returned to the sidewalk, I learned that the woman who had fallen from her walker was ninety-seven years old. She had reached a tilt in the concrete. It signaled the beginning of the driveway to the restaurant parking lot. The incline was too much for her. The walker had pitched forward and to the left. She had tumbled, backward and to her right side, perhaps as she was trying not to fall face first. She had slammed the right side of her head above the temple. Someone in her group had heard her skull crack. 

A few people muttered about how fragile her bones were. Then someone said, "Can we stop the bleeding?"

"I don't think we can move her."

"That sounds like a bad idea," my wife said. She was probably imagining what could go wrong if someone tried to apply pressure on a fractured skull. Although she was kneeling, she put a hand on her own hip for a moment. Someone said a few words about the blood getting in the woman's eyes. 

"Get napkins," my wife decided. She took her hand off her hip and pointed to my closest son. When he didn't move right away, she turned to my daughter, then to me. "Help them find napkins in your car. Find anything to clean up the blood."

"Napkins, right."

As I headed to our little Chevy Cruz again, I realized I was out of practice in lending care. I should have thought of getting napkins as soon as someone mentioned blood. Or maybe I was standing to far on the edge of the scene, not really getting a view of the problems up close, not seeing the blood dripping into someone's eyes. The distance made me passive, so I had let someone closer to give me a realistic sense of direction.

And the direction was: get napkins. So I did. As I pulled them from the glove compartment, my grown children took them from my hands, three batches each in their turn. By the time I returned to the scene of the accident, Diane was using them, sopping up blood. The inner circle of helpers were trying to keep the woman comfortable on the frigid Christmas Eve sidewalk. Her son, the man with the phone, informed us an ambulance was a minute away. 

During the minute, which took at least twice the time, my wife covered the woman's legs again with the blanket. Underneath the blanket, she rubbed the woman's calves. I think that was at the request of the victim, who was in pain and immobile yet still conscious. 

When the ambulance arrived, I guessed our duties to assist were coming to an end. A pair of youngish men got out with a stretcher. They had a clear idea of what they wanted. For a minute or two, I simply watched. They rolled the woman on her side so she wouldn't choke on her vomit. They strapped her to a stretcher.

"Where are we going to put all these things she dropped?" someone in her family asked. 

"We need a bag."

"Honey!" Diane raised her hand. She turned and found me with her gaze. "Go back into the restaurant and get a bag for the family. They need to carry her things."

"Okay." I nodded as I headed back through the door I'd exited earlier. My youngest son followed me. As it turned out, I was able to get bags promptly. The owner helped, wide-eyed, but with speed. My son took the brown to-go bags from my hand and headed out before I could do more. 

Out in the cold again, I watched the helpers and the ambulance crew work in parallel. I realized I hadn't seen my wife in quite this level of response before. I had been with her for ages, it seemed, starting when we were different people - when she'd panicked in emergencies. I'd given her directions and had her assist me in  urgent situations. We did our best, sometimes with friends, sometimes strangers, parents, and our children. Parenting is sometimes like that. This time, many years after our first opportunity to help together, she was perfect. My adult children moved to assist her faster than I did, too. My daughter was first with the blanket and napkins. My youngest son got there early with the bags. I felt I'd done some small part but it was entirely by lending assistance to the assisters.

There was a little more, I realized. I'd done something, who knows what, to help get our family to this point. We lent aid to an injured woman, as good citizens should. We accomplished our deeds in a competent manner, not over-reaching, just finding a few useful things to do. Then we watched the ambulance take the elderly woman away.

"We've got her things," said a middle-aged woman. She raised one of the bags we gave her. "The restaurant won't take the trash."

In a second restaurant bag were wads of our napkins, now sodden with vomit and blood. Maybe it was no surprise the place didn't want it back. They had refused to touch it, even to dispose of it. 

"I'll do it," my wife volunteered. She took the bag for us to throw out at home.

When we want to help, it’s never about us. But I'm so full of the idea of leaping into action, it's a surprise when my wife saves the day before me, when my daughter strides ahead, when my son moves faster than I can. In such times, the best we can do is help the helpers. Bystanders must occasionally stand by. We may not even know if the small part we played did any good. Maybe our best deed was only, in conjunction with others, to give it a good try.

We got in the car, dark and cold. My grown children rocked the suspension beneath us. My wife slammed her door. She placed the bag of vomit and blood at her feet. And I turned the ignition. 


Sunday, January 5, 2025

Not Even Not Zen 383: Biomythography - Note 118: Depression

Depression

I didn't want to write about this. But if I'm going to put my stories and thoughts into a family book, it's irresponsible to avoid it.

Everyone deals with depression at some point. Everyone spends time designing or enacting their suicide. Or so I suppose. I became obsessed with it starting at age five. That may have been excellent timing, too, even if it made me a little weird. As with many things from childhood, my morbid drives were poorly focused, apathetic, and easily derailed.

The suicide mindset could have come from my environment. On television, I watched the World at War series complete with the emaciated bodies stacked high. Then the prisoners burned and buried the bodies in mass graves under the watchful eyes and guns of the concentration camp guards. I saw Vietnam War photos of executions and other atrocities - children crying as they ran from a bomb blast, a man with a gun to his head the moment before another man executed him. The world offered lots of examples of pains and cruelties. In my regular (not televised) life, relatives died in manners that I would have expected if I weren't a child. My pets did their jobs in teaching me about death, too. I had plenty of chances to think about mortality. I had reasons to seek it out.

We always have reasons. As I write, I simply no longer have the mindset to care for them.

My childhood frame of mind feels like an alien world. Of course, everyone undergoes a series of personality changes over time. Some of them are profound. Even though I still feel a useful death is important if you can get it, like it's a bonus track to the album of life, I've moved away from contemplating suicide. I'm probably at an opposite extreme now, wanting to die slowly, naturally, and remain conscious to the end. And I've been that way since my late teens. It's part of why it's so odd to contemplate the depressing aspect of my earlier self. I'm leery about this writing and these thoughts.

1. For one thing, dwelling on the past gets overdone.

2. In particular, spending time on the subject of suicide is worse. There's a strong correlation between suicide as a cultural concept and the actual suicides committed in a culture. The more it's part of the discussion, the more some people think of it as their solution. And that was me as a child. And it makes me leery.

Since I've left the mindset behind, I find it hard to recreate. The best I can do is illustrate it with a couple stories.

In fifth grade, despite being in the midst of a crush, drawing in my school books, sparring every Saturday for fun, getting elected to student patrol, and traveling to Russia, I had lots of spare time. Time when I was tired even from trying to read the encyclopedia. In those long bouts of boredom, I planned my suicide. One of my recurring ideas was to make a noose in the curtain cord, jump hard, and strangle.

There's something about a little brother coming into the room while you're giving it a try, though, and punching you. Then it feels dumb. I guess no one wants to partly strangle while getting playfully hit.

I knew then I needed a more competent process. I had to learn to make a noose. One autumn day in a hall of my school, I encountered my friend Greg tying a noose in a piece of string. I halted, amazed. Someone understood how to make the knot I wanted. I backed up, sidled over to him, and studied his practice sessions until I was sure.

When I got home, though, I discovered I hadn't really learned it. I fooled around trying nooses in a clothesline, coming close, and failing. Most of my noose-looking knots wouldn't open or close at all. Once, I stuck my head through what I thought was a noose and the knot fell apart. Obviously, I needed to study more. Days later, back in school, I located Greg in his green blazer jacket. .

"Show me those nooses again," I said to Greg. I moved my empty hands as if I were tying a knot. "I've almost got it."

"No." He stepped away from me.  

"But it's cool!" I protested. Coolness was the thing Greg cared most about. It was almost the only thing he wanted in fifth grade: to be cool. Any mention of it made him fold. Here in the hall on the way to lunch, I knew he had to be as concerned about it as ever. He even looked as stylish as he could be in our school uniform. He had on a white turtleneck beneath his green blazer.

"No." He'd had a string in his hand. Now he put his hands in his pockets.

"Why not?"

"Just no." This time, he wasn't caving in. And that was weird. It felt like someone had gotten to him. He had talked with a classmate and fallen under their influence. I caught him looking behind me and to my right. I turned to see who it was, but there was no student there, only the principal, Mr. Cohen, off in the distance.
 
Had the principal warned Greg not to show me how to make a noose? I couldn't think why Mr. Cohen would care. Had Greg decided for himself? He was a strong-willed boy, so I knew it was possible. But if he made his own decision, then somehow I had given myself away. That worried me. In fifth grade, I was becoming aware of how I kept giving away my thoughts. Other people knew my plans.

I hadn't figured out how they knew. 
 
Over a span of days, maybe weeks, my problems with Greg continued. He had never refused me anything before, partly because he was so concerned with being cool. But he declined to show me how to tie nooses. He stopped bringing twine to school. Eventually, I gave up. I had the sense that someone was watching me, maybe a teacher. The rest of life kept interrupting my suicidal explorations, too. I forgot about nooses. I had the trip to the Soviet Union to prepare for, then endure. I had a crush on Leslie, who was smart and cute and with a bright smile. Eventually, the rest of life gave way to mooning over her. I wanted her to touch me but also I avoided her touch. I thought about her constantly.

By sixth grade I'd admitted to Leslie I liked her a whole, whole lot. I'd said it to her face. And it turned out she didn't hate me. So that was good. Plus, for some reason, I ended up being named valedictorian for our sixth grade graduation instead of Leslie. That didn't make any sense to either of us. I had all As in sixth grade. So did she. But she was just a better, more diligent student. We agreed on it. If you went back to fifth grade, she was better by a fractional point in her scores. How did the administration pick  me instead? Neither of us were sure. Leslie suggested it was because I'd been in the school since pre-kindergarten. She was a newcomer, relatively speaking.

At the time and even now, I wonder if she was judged differently because she was a girl. The teachers often openly loved me and said so. And I loved them back. They seemed skeptical of Leslie. I was never sure why.  

At any rate, I spoke at the dinner before the sixth grade graduation. It was part of the valedictorian job. The next day, I got up in my white shirt and green tie to be introduced as the valedictorian for my class at the graduation.  The school only taught up to sixth grade, so this was it. This was the big deal.

"In his eight years here," said the principal, counting my time correctly to include nursery and kindergarten, "I have never seen Eric smile."

In retrospect, it's a dramatic thing to say. He must have written it down and practiced it. He meant it. Also, I knew it was true. I was not a happy boy. In a very steady way, except when Leslie held my hand, I thought about how I could die and how I should, too, and no one would miss me. The principal had noticed. He may have been trying to tell my parents something with his comment.

He spoke for what seemed like ages, a half-minute of it in praise of me as a student. Even though I had returned to my seat, I felt uncomfortable. Thankfully, he moved on to praise the rest of the students, each and every one as individuals. Then he gave glowing remarks to the teachers, the whole school, and our bright future.  

"Why did your principal say you never smile?" my father asked me after the ceremony. It was an accusation.

I shrugged. "I dunno."

"Well, smile." 

My father's sense of "make yourself smile!" might not have a bad way, at least for some people, some of the time. If you can fake being happy, maybe some part of it will stick with you. Most of the time I received those orders, though, I couldn't manage it. I couldn't even put on a false grin. Sometimes, I could be beaten or threatened into trying but something about it, something in the faking, made me break out in tears and ruin it.
 
This is probably why I was such a joy to pose in pictures.

#

It was a popular theme song. I wandered from my bedroom, humming and singing it. 

The game of life is hard to play
I'm gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I'll someday lay
This is all I have to say:

Suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.
and you can do the same thing if you please.

"Stop that," my mother said. She looked up from tending to a plant in the hallway and gave me a worried scowl. 


Sunday, December 29, 2024

Not Even Not Zen 382: Biomythography - Note 120: I'm With the Band

I'm With the Band

I was playing with our high school garage band, the Misfits, on a Friday night. We had a rare, paying gig. It was at a party held by one of our best friends, Sharon. And we had a lot of fun. There were no parents in the house that evening. There were a few beers. There was dancing. We provided the music ourselves, of course, with cover tunes and originals. And around us, it seemed like a good time was had by all. 

The band played late into the night. I banged on the keyboard and sang. For a couple numbers, I got up and crooned the lyrics into a ball microphone on a stand. I danced and leaned sideways with the mic stand in my arms. And at the end of the evening, I headed home with a girl. She drove me to her house. We crept downstairs. She folded out the basement couch into a makeshift bed.

We had sex in her home with her family upstairs, although she assured me it was just her mother. I wasn't as uptight as I'd been when I was in this situation before. For her part, my girl seemed to be rolling in the flow of the moment. She forgot about being quiet or she didn't care. Afterwards, looking flushed, she held me close. She drifted off to sleep before I did, still partly dressed in the bits of clothing that neither of us, in our haste, had taken off her body. She looked warm. She felt it, too. She made me feel cozy. I drifted into dreamy half-consciousness while staring at her basement ceiling, satisfied and warily affectionate about being in someone's embrace, naked under the makeshift covers.

Hours later, I woke to light seeping between the leafless backyard trees. The ruddy glow shone through the plate glass. The basement of the townhouse had been built with floor to ceiling windows and a sliding, glass door. In here, facing southeast, it got bright early. Over the span of half a minute, however, I became aware it wasn't the luster of morning that had woken me. It was the sounds upstairs.

Above my head, someone strode across the floors wearing hard-soled shoes. The steps clacked from the tiles in the kitchen, to the rug next to the hall closet, and back into the kitchen again. Someone opened a drawer. A kitchen implement rattled. A pan hit the burner on a stove top.

Dimly, I remembered how seldom anyone's parents ever seemed happy to see me. I'd never met this girl's family. I'd wanted to. She hadn't introduced me, though. Even if she lived with only her mother, I wondered how unhappy a parent would be to find me, a stranger, in the house. Would her mother scream and throw things? Should I try to sneak out? There was nowhere to go. This place was a long way from home. I had no car and no money. Besides, the fast-paced movements upstairs signaled to me that slipping out would be difficult.

The pattern of footfalls changed. Next to me, my girl murmured something in her sleep. I must have moved. In reaction, she curled closer into my shoulder. She had been resting on my arm. Now she occupied the whole left side of my body.

The hard-soled shoes clicked into the hall. They paused. Someone had to be standing near the top of the padded stairs that ran from the ground floor down to the basement. How well did this young lady get along with her mother? Suddenly, that seemed important. Would her mom want me to introduce myself or would she rather knife me? For that matter, had I heard quiet footsteps on the stairs, earlier? I'd stirred. Was it from the padded, quiet sound of feet? Maybe her mother had already crept down and seen us lying on the fold-out couch. Maybe some barely-aware part of me had taken note.

The person at the top of the staircase decided to come down, maybe for the second time. I jostled my left arm. It seemed smart to wake my girl, just in case we needed to move fast. Step, step, step, the footfalls approached. The blonde head next to me turned. The blue eyes blinked. They followed my line of sight - or more accurately, they tried. Her eyesight wasn't so great without glasses. She'd told me. I'd forgotten.

My eyes were perfect. I could see brown, low-heeled office shoes on the stairs. I could see shoes and blue slacks. I could see the torso of a middle-aged woman.

Finally, I saw the woman herself. She was brown-haired and looked a little rumpled, although in business-style clothes. She wore a plain blouse. She stopped on the stairs when she saw me studying her. In one hand, she held a spatula. The other hand, she rested on her hip.

"How do you like your eggs?" she said.

"I'm sorry?" I thought I had misheard. I turned to the girl next to me. She couldn't see the situation but she knew her mother, surely. She would understand what was going on.

"Well?" she prompted.

"The eggs?" repeated her mother from the staircase.

"My mom is making us breakfast," she explained.

"Oh." This was so far from what I had expected, I had to replay the conversation in my head to make sure I understood. "Sunny side up?"

"Are you sure?"

"Yes?" Well, I was sure my girl and I were teenagers. And that her mother was the calmest parent I had ever met.

Sunday, December 22, 2024

Not Even Not Zen 381: Biomythography - Note 119: Lemon Twist

Lemon Twist

My mother had already gone to work. When my father walked out the door, he left me alone with my nanny.

"Stand on the chair," she told me.

She was a short, strongly-built woman. It's hard to look severe in a floral dress but she managed. She was a very serious person. When she pointed, it was with her fist. Her stubby finger at the end was merely an ornament to provide emphasis. I knew what to do when she indicated the dining room chair she had pulled away from the table. Minutes earlier, as my nanny placed it at the corner of the kitchen tiles next to the adjoining room, I expected the order to come. Now I climbed up onto the padded seat. I rose with one hand on the wall, the other on the back of the chair.

She started to vacuum. Her motions were brusque and efficient. She did her chores with strength. With narrow-eyed disdain, she dumped grey powder and flakes from the ashtray into the garbage. She moved plates into the sink and scrubbed them. She finished her washing in thirty seconds. She strode to the chairs and carried them back into the living room, two at a time, except for the one I was in.

She gave me a calculated glance. She was too far away to slap me, but her expression put me on alert.

"How would you like to go on a train ride?" she asked.

I rose on my tiptoes. It was all I could do not to jump off the chair. I started vibrating up and down. Trains were fun. I loved them and the noises they made, the rushes of air, the sights out the windows, the bustle of the people, and everything else about them. Better, I knew it was unusual for my nanny to take me anywhere. I couldn't be silent enough or hold still long enough for her tastes. Sometimes, though, she allowed these fun trips to happen.

"Well, if you want to go with me," she said. She pointed a finger in my direction. "You must do as I say. You must be quiet. And very polite."

I nodded and kept nodding.

"You must go use the bathroom now. And you must not wet yourself where we go. I won't bring diapers, understand?"

I nodded more deeply. For a moment, I started to climb down from the chair. But I remembered. I looked for her nod of approval. After a moment of consideration, she gave it. We started on our mission.  
 
Our preparations passed in a blur. I didn’t understand a lot of them. We stopped at the market, I remember, and my nanny picked up a couple bags of items, mostly meat and fruit. The shopping was tedious. My legs started to hurt. I wanted to whine about it, as I might do with my mother, but I glanced at my nanny's face. She glared me a warning. I took a deep breath.

One of the butchers offered her a couple of sausage samples. She handed me one under the benevolent smile of the stall manager.

Finally my legs grew so hot and tired, I started to stumble.

"My arms are full!“ she warned. I knew that tone. I tried to stand up straighter. "I won’t pick you up.“

”How much farther?” I whispered.

“We are close,” she conceded. “We are almost to the train station.”

At the station, the cashier tried to sell her a ticket for me and she refused. She shouted at him for a minute or two, then she got her ticket. A few minutes later, she turned and showed me off to her fellow passengers waiting for the train. She did the same with the ticket taker when we got on, too. She produced only one ticket and her eyes dared the man to demand one for the child with her. He declined the confrontation and sent us down the aisle.

The train had berths. At least, that's how I remember the longest portion of our travel. Sure, at least one or two cars held rows of benches. My nanny led me through one. But other train cars had a corridor wide enough for two grown people to pass. Alongside the corridor were rooms where passengers could lounge in relative comfort. They sat on padded benches, as with the more crowded arrangement. In the berths, the passengers had privacy of a sort. Only a few people at a time could sit facing one another.  

I accepted our seat in the higher-class booths as a normal mode of transport even though it wasn’t how my parents usually traveled. Most things adults did were inscrutable. How they decided on seats was a mystery. I didn’t question it. In retrospect, I wonder if my nanny, so possessed of her sense of place in her society and so saturated with her determination, simply seized the opportunity to upgrade. She had already coerced the ticket booth man and the conductor. Maybe it was how she operated.  

On the train, I stopped with my face against a window to see as much as I could. The sight of buildings passing by thrilled me with the speed and the largeness of the world. After a while, I talked with the other passengers. Some of them were women my mother's age. Some were businessmen. There weren't many children. People came and went. I can't remember most of them although my nanny explained to some of them that I didn't know German because my parents were Americans. At the time, I knew enough German to get a general sense of what she was saying about me.

When she talked with other adults about adult topics, I had no idea what was going on. I have no visceral recollections of those spans of time.

I do know we kept occupying the same booth. Other people on shorter trips came and went. We stayed. Our ride lasted long enough for me to get hungry. That's when I discovered my nanny had brought us no snacks. I was young enough to feel the physical discomfort in a self-absorbed way. Once I felt hunger pains, tears welled up in my eyes. My nanny seemed to sense the impending outburst. She reached into one of her bags and pulled out a lemon. I grabbed it with a smile.

Lemons were sweet fruits I knew from the drinks in my parents house. How I encountered them was through our house guests. My mother would make her friends sweet tea with squeezed lemon. She served drinks on a tray. Couples would hang around the coffee table and talk. When the guests were done, the group would usually head to another room. I would stay and toddle from glass to glass. My stubby fingers could muddle around in the ice to find the fruit. Then, one by one, I would suck on each sweet lemon. The pieces were mostly devoid of their natural juice but they were filled with droplets of syrupy tea and heavy sugar.  

The circumstances of my eating the lemons may have misled me as a toddler. When I bit into the half-peeled lemon on the train, I shivered. Involuntarily, I put out my arms to keep my balance. I shivered again. My eyes widened. The fruit had tasted so sweet but so tart, it made me befuddled.

The expression on my face made my caretaker burst out with a guffaw. She bent over at the waist.

"Nanny?" It was such a strange thing to hear her laugh that I turned to stare. I was still wobbling, a little. She kept laughing.

After she wheezed to a halt, I turned away. I noticed the lemon in my hand. I pulled it close to my face and took another bite. Startled, I gave a yelp. She laughed again. The memory of my own surprise remains so clear. The pulp was so bitter, so tart, and yet sugary enough to pull me back to it. I kept going. I got determined like it was my sweet, sweet enemy. I got down to the rind.

My nanny’s hand appeared. She took the soggy rind away. 

"No more for now," she said. She wiped her hand on her skirts. "Why don't you sleep?" 

It was not quite an order. But there would be consequences if I didn't try. So I tried. I closed my eyes and held still. I must have napped at least a little because my next memory comes as I'm out of the train, walking. From my sense of balance and my plodding legs, I must have been stumbling at first and waking as we got nearer to our destination. 

Our first destination was a wide expanse of concrete, a bit like a town square or a trolley car crossing. The pale sunlight turned bright, here. My nanny appeared to be talking to a pair of guards in uniform. One of them was taller and bolder than the other. I knew what guards were. We had them at the base where my parents taught and where I went to nursery school. They never paid attention to me. To guards, I was invisible. But to my surprise, the tall one now spared me a glance. It was because of something my nanny said. Both of the men motioned toward me. They said something in German. My nanny chuckled. They chuckled. Finally, the guards motioned my nanny through. 

"Schnell," she said. She grabbed my hand and marched. I sprinted to keep up. We didn't maintain the brisk pace for long, though. My nanny met someone. We slowed to a stop. The two women looming above me exchanged severe nods at first, then made friendlier sounding noises. Then, for a moment, they embraced. I had never seen anything like this from my nanny. Even when the women backed away from each other by a step, they held hands. 

My nanny turned her head and glanced down to me. Her hair had grey in it. The other woman's hair was brown although she kept it in a severe haircut, the way some did.

"This is my sister," announced my nanny. 
 
As a group, we started to walk. The conversation switched back to German. We may have taken a trolley or maybe we hiked all the way in the pale sunshine but, wherever we went, it didn't seem to take long. We arrived at a pale, yellowish brick building. At the door, my nanny shook me by my arm to catch my attention.  

"We are going to visit," she said. "Behave."

For a long time, as the two women sat down in one of the apartments, I concentrated on behaving. I moved from place to place as silently as I could. I didn't ask questions. The adults spoke only German. I spent my time studying my surroundings. I looked at walls. I gazed out a window. When I had explored the small apartment, I found a footstool near the women and sat. 

They talked and talked. It took so long and happened so much in German, I couldn't understand any of it. I tried my best to behave. I'm not sure what I did wrong but something in the way I got up and strolled around the room grabbed my nanny's attention. I put my hands behind my back. She didn't like me to fidget. But I had been playing with my fingers. 

She leaned close and asked her sister something, maybe about food. The women studied me. Her sister shook her head. If it was about food, she didn't have anything. On an apparent impulse, my nanny reached into one of the bags she had deposited in her sister's apartment. She pulled out a lemon.

Her sister gasped. She said something to object. 

Despite her sister's outrage, my nanny gave me another lemon. After I fumbled as I tried to bite into it - this one had a tougher rind than the one on the train - she even helped me by peeling it. I think her sister protested the whole time. Still, the two women started to laugh as I bit in. I ate the peeled fruit with fury, anger, hunger, determination, and with clearer-minded expectations of the bitter and the sweet of it. I could hear myself struggle. A noise poured out of me as I ate.
 
I think the shock of the two lemons, the one on the train and the one in the apartment, are the key to me having memories of this. Everything ends here, with the second lemon. I have no clear images of coming back to my home. Even now, after several rememberings, the explosion of the luscious, almost candy-coated and tongue-curdling sourness makes me shiver. Everything else is a mental slideshow of sorts, a set of brief but connected vignettes, images, smells, distant sounds and words. But the taste of lemon - it's clear. It rings my body like a bell.  

Our family lived in Frankfurt, Bitburg, and Hamburg while my parents taught at army bases. I'm guessing this occurred while we lived in Hamburg.

#

Years later, I told a shortened version of the lemon story to my parents. My father gave me a narrow-eyed look, like I was a liar. I couldn't figure out what I'd said that was wrong. I thought the story was about sour fruit and a mean nanny (or, more accurately, a strict one). The incident seemed amusing to me in retrospect. I had anticipated chuckles about it from my parents. At the least, my reaction as a three year old to the taste of the lemons should have been amusing to my father.

It was my mother who turned to me and said, "No, you must be mistaken."

"But I'm not not." The recollection had been utterly clear and based on the taste of those lemons.

"No, that one had a sister in East Germany. She wouldn't have taken you there."

There was a long pause as we all thought about the possibility. I remembered the guards and the laughter about me. Had I crossed the border in Berlin? Later, I looked it up on a map. It would have been a long trip from our home to the big city. I can see my parents' point. Still, this is what I remember.

"Anyway," my father said, still shaking his head. "You liked that nanny."

I'm pretty sure I trembled in fear around that nanny. I did and said everything she wanted, probably including telling my parents whatever she wanted them to hear. But they would have presented a different viewpoint, of course. 

Sunday, December 15, 2024

Not Even Not Zen 380: Biomythography - Note 117: Persistence

Persistence

In the 1970s, at the top of a small mountain near the Finger Lakes, my parents drove our stations wagon into the entrance of Wig-Wam Harbor. For at least six years, Wig-Wam was our vacation destination every August. The place had been a farm. Now it was an upstate campsite with sparse woods, a view overlooking Keuka Lake, a couple of grassy hillsides near the top, and a pond nestled close to the underbelly of the tallest of the lush Wig-Wam slopes. 

The family-run campsite had installed a pool as well. It sat half in the ground and half above. The owners kept pool pumps running most of the time but the water turned frigid overnight, probably because the mountain nights got down to forty-five degrees. On many mornings, we swam anyway. We splashed around until our our lips turned blue. Sometimes that took half an hour, sometimes less.

When we couldn't bear the pool, we played on the tetherball pole next to the pond. After we whacked the tetherball until our hands burned and we staggered, drunk with effort, we hiked up to the recreation center.

In theory, the recreation center had things to do. You could buy worms there to use as bait in the stocked fishing pond. You could buy gumballs from machines. You could buy plastic toys from other, neighboring machines for a dime. Mostly, though, the place was a low, one-story farm building converted into a holding area for sterile equipment that was decades old, didn't work, and could almost seem interesting for a minute but not really. The main reason we ventured into the center was it had a ping-pong table at the back. (It had a pool table, too, but it cost a dollar to play, so no one could afford it.)

Next to the ping-pong table sat a gumball-style dispenser with a few white, plastic spheres inside. For a quarter, you could turn the crank, buy a ping-pong ball, and play games while it lasted. 

Once, I found a quarter on the street during a visit to town. 

"Did someone just drop it?" my parents chided me. "You should make sure no one's looking for it." Apparently, I had gotten suspiciously good at finding lost change. I wandered along the nearest street for a minute, looking people over, deciding they were unworthy, and finally I pocketed the quarter. 

"I'm going to play ping-pong," I told my cousins and my uncle. My parents had been stingy with their quarters because we kept breaking the cheap, plastic balls. 

Still, we played whenever we had the money. We preserved the balls for hours, sometimes for days, but eventually, after hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of whacks, smashes, pokes in the eye, accidental kicks, drops against the concrete floor, or finger-smashing cracks between two paddles near the net, the balls broke. They didn't simply give up all at once. Usually, they acquired a critical flaw and we could massage the wounded plastic sphere with a blip of tape. Sometimes we played with a jagged, crazy-bouncing ball until we exploded it with a smash that sent bits in multiple directions, sometimes as hostile chunks, more often as delicate hemispherical curves that floated in the air like feathers, twirling, before descending, to our sighs and to their ruin. 

Sometimes we could find one or two pieces but not a critical missing chunk. We had been warned to keep the rec center clean and to throw away the broken stuff. Once, after yet another sad ending to our game, we couldn't find any pieces at all. My little brother said a part had flown outside but we didn't see where in the grass it might have gone. The other piece or pieces must have rolled under the shelves of the camping stoves or the racks of fishing lines and poles, we guessed. The disappearance made the older kids laugh. 

It was my idea, I think, to hold a ping-pong tournament. 

Usually, we played doubles. More kids could play that way. Plus, I hated waiting for the others to finish a game. We played 'winner keeps the table' style, so losing meant sulking at the edges of the rec center or sitting on a stool, kicking the air. Joining in teams of two to a side kept our idle times to a minimum. 

"We should draw lots if we're going to have a contest," said my uncle. He was tall, thin, and fair minded. (He was still two years away from discovering that he could win endlessly in tetherball by keeping the ball too high for my short, jumping-bean self to reach.)

"Fine." I felt strict about fairness, too. If I got an older cousin I couldn't beat, that was fine. I wanted to try. 

Unfortunately, I got my girl cousin, Annie, as my first opponent. She was too happy to let me win because I was trying so hard. After that, the tournament memory is a blur. I think I won but, toward the end, it simply didn't matter. We only played for two hours and I wanted to keep playing. I tried to make my cousins skip lunch with me. They shook their heads and left. My younger brother stayed with me the longest. 

Eventually, even he shook his head, said, "I'm getting hungry" and put down his paddle. 

That afternoon, I persuaded everyone to try a doubles tournament and we kept going until dinner. When we started that week, I had not been anywhere near as good as my older uncles and cousins. I improved, though. We all did. The more we trained ourselves during the long, summer week, the better our games progressed. Once, our volleys had lasted a few seconds. Now, they lasted for minutes. We ran to get the longest shots. Often enough, we made them. 

At a certain point, I noticed that the more we played, the more tired and discouraged the others got. If I played my older cousins in the morning, I couldn't win. If I played them after an hour of games, I often did. I could outlast the people who were better than me. 

"Again?" my cousin asked. 

"Yes!" I shouted with glee. Because it had become my strategy. Soon, although I didn't know it, this was going to become a favorite tactic throughout my teenaged life. 

Not everyone was used to playing alone, one to a side, but I was ready. I tried to keep long, long volleys going. I liked the action. And I could force other people to make mistakes. Once I noticed I could wear people down, it became my favorite method. Soon I would apply it to tetherball, tennis, and anything else requiring endurance. It wasn't simply a matter of being in better aerobic shape. My mantra inside my head became, 'I can out-care them.' (Out-caring does not, as I found out in tetherball and basketball, make me six feet tall. It does not solve every tactical problem.) 

I realized I could be a steady winner by virtue of being fanatical. Extremism was my path to success. This was not the same as being the best at something, of course. I simply cared so much that I stayed on the field when all my competitors left. 

By the time I was a teenager, I could out-care anyone who had a modicum of sense. (Unfortunately for them, most people do have some.) Too often, I cultivated a militant streak that came naturally to me. That's a dangerous thing. When coupled with my discovery that I was better at fighting than talking and better at taking a punch than most people were at punching, I became, just a little, someone who wouldn't let go of arguments. Even people who liked me, even my best of friends, clearly thought at times I was a bit much. 

But I loved my friends anyway. And when they were irritated and told me to fuck off, I wouldn't. Because their anger was temporary. And my persistence was not. I still loved them; I would out-care them. I could wait through a minute of punches, an hour of scowls. I could hear insults, scowl back and, eventually, make them laugh. 


Sunday, December 8, 2024

Not Even Not Zen 379: Biomythography - Note 116: The Credits (Some of Them)

The Credits

After the first month of wedding preparations, I started getting concerned about pulling off my half of the duties. Sure, I sometimes worked on the reception or helped with the rest of the preparations, such as driving Diane around to look at wedding dresses, paying for the tailoring of a donated dress, and so on. Often, though, I concentrated on corralling the groomsmen.

I wanted Sharon, Adam, Barb, Dave, my uncle Mark, and my brother Dylan to stand for me. I wanted my brother Galen too but he didn’t seem enthusiastic, which made sense given our relations at that point, and I wanted my old best friend Tucker but he had stopped replying to me years before. I wanted Richard, too, one of my best and definitely my longest-lasting friend. He was backpacking his way through Europe, though, and I had a marriage deadline.

Anyway, six groomsmen seemed like plenty. It feels good to invite half a dozen of your best friends to witness your most courageous blunder or your most interesting mistake. I knew Adam would be a solid Best Man. He was good on stage, at his best in a crisis - and if a wedding isn't a series of crises, it always has the potential - and he had been my friend since I was sixteen, when we discovered we were the only two people with good musical taste. Of course, all of the groomsmen contributed in their way, but Adam and Dylan took charge of others more. That is, they helped me with corralling other people who needed attention. Mark didn't need any. But Adam made sure Dave was good and Dylan, as it turned out, helped Barb. Of course, everyone did more than their parts in the ceremony. They wrote their testimonials beforehand. They rehearsed them. They stood up and testified. They moved furniture, moved drinks and food, and made the reception.

Credit to Sharon: She stepped down from giving a speech on stage, where she didn't feel comfortable, to take charge of other aspects, especially the wedding cake. She made one from scratch, a hard thing to do competently. (Wedding cake is not like other cake. See the Internet for references.) Sharon also helped organize the receiving line, the reception, and the other details of the event where she saw a chance to help us, including with her husband Steve.

Credit to Steve: We had a professional jazz guitarist play at our wedding. It was Steve Herberman. He played brilliantly for most of an hour before the ceremony, I think. The best part of the setup in Baker Park was him. He sat in the bandshell and gave a concert. He played during the ceremony, too, of course. He was our wedding music. He played for the reception line. He was the best part of the aural experience. He played for probably two hours, total.

Credit to Carol: It's an odd position to be in when you're the Maid of Honor but you dated the groom. Diane had decided Carol was one of her best friends. So it made sense to have her in the wedding. Carol rolled with being chosen for the job. She gave a fine speech. We already knew she had a great speaking voice and, that day at least, she held herself with a composed and smooth stage presence. We've mostly lost touch with Carol but not entirely. We're in the position of wondering how she's doing fairly often.

Credit to Adam: He enjoyed himself on the stage. He was good-humored and knew how to handle himself. He'd given a lot of thought to his speech. Moreover, he assumed the Best Man role months before the ceremony, which meant he organized the bachelor party and he did his share of managing other details when I was frazzled. It was in his usual character to do his best under pressure. In high-profile times, he increases his concern for doing right and being proper, so he was pretty much ideal.

Credit to my friends and parents: A lot of people came from West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and from across Maryland to see a very low budget wedding and to eat what was essentially a potluck reception. Diane's professors came. My co-workers came. Friends drove in. Family, of course. Don Thornhill funded a lot of the details. One of our relations, our sister-in-law Sue, essentially made the event possible by watching Dylan Kyle, who was then a month-old infant. Sue managed to hold her own for the duration of the day's preparations and the ceremony. A newborn is a tough assignment. But she did it.

Credit to Laura: Although we didn't know her as well as we eventually would, Laura came to town when Adam did. She took Diane out to restaurants and kept her company while I was out at my bachelor party. It did Diane a lot of good and she still remembers it.

Credit to Barb: She traveled the farthest to be there. (I forgot to mention New York State; Barb drove from its farthest reaches.) Again, this could have been a weird position to be in as someone who had dated the groom and who the groom had decided was one of his best friends. But she clearly took it from the angle of 'one of his best friends' and made it fine. I had offered Sharon and Barb the opportunity to wear formal, inexpensive black dresses if that's what they wanted. Barb wasn't interested in anything but a tux. She laughed and said, "I'm really looking forward to wearing one."

She seemed tired at first, from the drive. It's good she gave herself a day to recover because she experienced a slight costume malfunction/mishap for the photo shoot. She had forgotten the tuxedo we'd picked up the day before.
 
Credit to Dylan: My brother really looked after not only his role in the ceremony, but checked in on his wife Sue, looked to help elsewhere, and found a solution to the crisis of Barb forgetting her tuxedo. Like a lot of my friends, my brother Dylan rises in pressure situations. He immediately saw what he could do for Barb. He drove her off in his car to my townhouse. We lived in the next town over, so they were under some time pressure. At my home, the two of them discovered the townhouse was locked. They broke in through the storm doors out back - well, Dylan managed it really - and then Barb got on her tux and together they drove back to Baker Park. In fact, they ran back through the fields in their tuxes to get to the gazebo for the very last photos of the session.

In their photographs, they both look great.

Credit to Dave: I've mentioned how plenty of my friends are their best in a crisis. That's not everyone, though. Dave was one of the most pleasant, fun-loving guys I hung out with but I noticed how he often seemed flustered in pressure situations. He had a habit of mistakes when pressed, especially with everyone's eyes on him. What's better for that than giving a speech to a hundred and fifty strangers in a public park? Yet on the afternoon of the ceremony, he was smooth.

Credit to Mark: He was a friend to me from the day I was born, really. We played together for entire summers as young kids. I'd spend weeks at his house. This was partly a product of him being family, of course, as my uncle while only three years older than me. But it wasn't all being related. We enjoyed hanging out together. As much as we saw each other, we would undoubtedly have done it more if our houses had been closer. As it was, I spent weeks in a row at his place, usually in the summers when we were small. Later, he vacationed with my family. Despite how we grew more apart as we aged - sometimes we were living in different states, after all - we never quite forgot the bonds of friendship. He traveled pretty far to us and spoke well of us both.

Credit to Geri: She was a friend of Diane in college and seemed surprised but happy to be part of the wedding party. Most significantly, she customized her testimonial for us. That week, our original officiate fell ill and dropped out, meaning we had to hire a substitute. The backup officiate, a conservative church pastor, refused to read the Wiccan or the American Indian (mostly Algonquin) spiritual references included in our ceremony. Fortunately for us, during her speech Geri re-inserted the language we wanted. Those restored passages gave our ceremony the egalitarian spirit we were aiming for. It was a very good deed on her part.  

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Behind all the help from friends and family must be many hidden stories of how they did it, why they bothered, who else helped them, and what they had to overcome. Naturally, I can't know most of those tales. None of us are in the position to understand more than a fraction of the histories of others. We don't even comprehend our own stories all the way through.

I'm sure many of our friends and family did more than I can remember for our wedding. And by that I mean, more than I can know even when I was in the room at the time. It's just the way it works for me (and probably for you) as a human. But I am aware, at least slightly, of being unaware of all the good deeds. Some of them, I'm sure, were done not for us or for the marriage, since some of our relatives disapproved of it, but they were done nonetheless. Help was given in the name of decency, friendship, or family peace, and for those deeds, too, we are grateful.