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."

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.

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) 

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.

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. 

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.