Not Even Not Zen 241: Biomythography - Note 18, Free Range Dogs

A Biomythography - Note 18
by Secret Hippie

I Fought the Dog
and the Dog Won

The confrontation didn't change my attitude or the direction of my life. At the time, it seemed ordinary except for a brief moment. The setup for it started right after we moved onto Black Rock Road. One of our new neighbors got a Rhodesian Ridgeback.

“It's the kind of dog they use to hunt lions,” he explained to me proudly as he tugged on his suspenders. He announced it every time we met. He described how two Ridgebacks could take down a lion. Even though I was twelve and he was a grown adult with grey hairs and a mustache, I felt skeptical. His dog was big, yeah, but a lion is a fucking lion.

This was during the age of free-range dogs, which I guess is most of American history until around 1990 for the rural suburbs. When I was growing up in College Park, animals ran loose. It was the same in Darnestown. I had walked my dog on a leash to the creek plenty of times in Darnestown but I learned to take a heavy stick with me. I needed it to break up the fights. The dobermans and mutts downhill of us tried to attack my dog if she stopped to pee. I had pushed away a bunch of them over the course of the year, even the Ridgeback.

Then came the second dog.

Sixteen months after we had settled in with our dog-walking habits, our neighbor got a 'really lucky opportunity' in his words. A big, male Rhodesian Ridgeback had attacked other animals in Rockville. After the last of the attacks, the city told the owners to get rid of the dog or put it down. Normally, a purebred would have cost hundreds of dollars. The reason our neighbor, Warner, had one in the first place was that a work friend of his had gotten a runt female in a litter of Ridgebacks. No one else had wanted it so he pawned it off to Warner.

Suddenly, Warner discovered that he could have a breeding pair. What's more, the male, despite its behavior problems, had a fantastic pedigree. The dog came with papers and everything. Soon enough, he introduced the new Ridgeback to the neighborhood.

The male attacked the female Ridgeback immediately, Warner conceded a few days later. But he said he had gotten them to settle down.

"He needs to run," my neighbor explained as he walked by my driveway with his pair of Rhodesian Ridgebacks. He pointed his thumb at the male. It was, I noticed, pretty often lunging at the female. They weren't playful attacks. These were two big, muscular dogs and the bigger one was trying to drive the smaller one away.

Next month, the lunges started on humans. The new Ridgeback hunted us each day on our way to the mailbox. He bounced up and tried to knock us over. Sometimes he nipped at us. If my dog was with me, the two animals would hold barking fights. If the German Shepherd across the street heard the commotion, he would run to my defense because he liked me and my dog. That made for three dogs bouncing and yelling as I tried to sort the bills from the junk fliers.

My father stopped getting the mail. He switched to sending me out for it on most afternoons.

He never sent my mother but, often enough, my mother volunteered. Once she came back complaining about the male Ridgeback. I should have taken that as a warning. My mother never complained about anything. She loved animals. Often enough, she tamed feral ones.

"That dog is out of control, Bob," she told my father.

"Well, what am I supposed to do?"

They talked it over. My mother insisted the dog was dangerous. My dad gave in. He picked a time when both Ridgebacks had gone inside and walked to the neighbor to complain about the attacks as we got our mail. Amazingly, our neighbor apologized and agreed to keep his animals inside more often. The dogfights on the way to the mail slowed for a few weeks.

In time, the frequency picked up again. The male Ridgeback resumed hunting us. Technically, I suppose everyone was obligated to keep their dogs inside gated yards. It was the county law. No one in our area had a yard like that, though. I'm not sure it occurred to anyone to change things. For sure it wasn't in the minds of the four area teenagers. The most we did was trade warnings about which dogs were dangerous.

One night, I wandered upstairs for a snack. I had just turned fourteen, so I ate more or less constantly. If I wasn't working out or commuting thirty miles to school, I was helping myself to food.

While I was making a sandwich, my dog begged to go outside. I opened the door for her. It opened to a frozen landscape. That February, there had been a snow storm, followed by an ice storm, followed by a cycle of melting and re-frosting to create an inch-thick layer of ice on the hillside. Our house sat on a pretty steep slope so there was some danger that my dog would simply slide into our downhill neighbor's driveway. But she didn't. She carefully skated out, found a spot near a flower bed, and peed for a while. Then she roamed the yard.

I returned to my eating and reading.

A minute later, I heard a bark. I rose to let my dog back in. The bark was followed by an animalistic roar. It stopped me for half a second. I'd never heard anything like it. Then came more barking and a squeal of tremendous pain.

The pain made me move. I burst through the front door onto the porch. There, on the icy sidewalk lay my dog, on her side. Above her stood the male Ridgeback with his jaws around her throat. I only had a few seconds, so I charged. I forgot about the ice. My shoes started sliding as I ran. Luckily, I arrived down the steps still mostly vertical. I punched the Ridgeback in his neck. Then I tried to poke him in the eye. It was a revelation. The dog felt like it was made of iron rebar.

He growled louder. My dog whined more desperately. With an eye on me and my unsteadiness, the Ridgeback backed up off the sidewalk. He seemed to know I couldn't follow. Then he continued with the job of killing my dog. He flipped her onto her back and adjusted his grip on her throat. She screamed.

I kept slipping to one knee as I tried to move into the yard. That dog was right. I couldn't stand up on the iced slope. I backed up onto the sidewalk, then to the porch as I looked for anything to use as a weapon. Just something to get the Ridgeback's attention. Anything. Then I saw the ice hoe. That morning, I'd used ot to clear off part of the porch and the sidewalk. It was still in the corner of the porch, a six foot wooden handle with a four-inch blade at the end. I grabbed it and scrambled back down the porch stairs.

That January, I had turned fourteen. I'd won trophies in martial arts. I'd made the wrestling team. Someone I hit with the full swing of an ice hoe wouldn't be happy.

The Ridgeback saw me coming. For the first time, it really looked like it wanted to kill me. But it wanted to finish my dog. I slipped, which gave the Ridgeback a chance to dodge. Still, I managed to clock it on the hip with the blade of the hoe. A full swing. I had to do it on the ice, yes, sliding all the way and without good leverage. But I hit the dog in the thigh with the blade.

The blade of the ice hoe bounced. The Rhodesian Ridgeback glared at me, gave a surprised, angry growl, and pulled my dog downslope along the ice. Suddenly, I couldn't see the dogs. The light from the house cast shadows. The Ridgeback had pulled itself into them. On the slope of the hill, I had to hold onto a bush and flail with the hoe in one hand. I tried anyway.

The Ridgeback pulled my gasping dog further down the slope.

If I moved any further, I would need to fall to my knees to remain partly vertical. There would be no way to swing. I needed a different weapon. And, in the back of my mind, there was the idea that if I fell in front of the Rhodesian Ridgeback in the middle of its kill, that might be bad for me.

"What's going on?" My father burst out of the house. In retrospect, he might have come to yell at me for waking him up. What he saw stopped him, though. He didn't even step off the front porch.

"I can't reach it!" I yelled back at him.

"What are you doing?" he screamed. His gaze drifted. "Is that a bear? Wait, that's the ridgeback."

"Hold onto me," I said. "If you help me stand up, I can take another swing."

"No, come back to the house." This time, he did step down from the porch. He stretched his arm out to me. At the same time, he turned and called back to the house. "Ann, get Warner on the phone."

And so the problem was solved. Adults took care of it. Our neighbor picked up the phone on his end and came running when he understood what was going on. My father helped Warner find the dogs. Amazingly, he was able to separate the animals. He offered to take our dog to the veterinarian immediately, in the middle of the night, as an emergency call. He knew the vet from taking his female Ridgeback.

My parents accepted his offer. They couldn't contain their surprise, though, when the veterinary surgeon called us at four in the morning to announce that our dog was going to make it.

"No teeth punctures in the artery," I heard my father say to the handset in the hallway. "Wow."

"She's alive?" I asked.

"It was close. But yes, she's alive. She can't come home right away. But she'll be able to come home."

In a way, it was just another dog incident among many. A few months later, our neighbor Warner decided to put down the male Ridgeback after it seriously injured his female Ridgeback again. That solved a problem for the neighborhood. I resumed walking my dog down to the creek. I stepped into the middle of other, less deadly dogfights with a stick. But sometimes, even after jaw-clacking combat with tangled leashes and pushes with the stick, I remembered this particular one.

Something about the ice hoe bouncing off the thigh of the Ridgeback lingered. So did my slipping on the ice and the feeling of the consequences. Before, I had pictured myself as being able to hold my own against all animals. But with a sort of physical finality, I knew it wasn't true, not completely. There had been at least one predator big enough to shake off a direct hit. There were bigger, tougher creatures in the world than me.

The Ridgeback wasn't even a wild animal. But I remembered the feel of its strength.

Not Even Not Zen 240: Biomythography - Note 17, Getting the Job

A Biomythography - Note 17
by Secret Hippie

Getting the Job

"So you’re pretty good with computers now," Adam announced as he walked back into my room.

"Not really." It was a strange way to re-open the conversation. I knew he was up to something.

"Good enough to build a computer," he said.

“Maybe.” My hardware skills were okay. But I was working on my programming. Except for an assortment of scripts and batch files, every program I’d written had been for school. My skills hadn't been put to the test except literally.

Even as he brought it up, Adam had to know he was being modest about his contribution to the hardware side. He had helped me put together my first 286 computer. I had rebuilt it several times since then and I'd worked on others. But it didn’t amount to much compared to his collection. He owned a 286 machine that he'd updated with a graphics card and sound card, an Amiga that he had upgraded at least twice, and a brand new 386 into which he'd installed SoundBlaster. That SoundBlaster sounded pretty cool.

“Grad school hasn’t hooked you up with a job." He remained on his feet even though I was sitting in front of my computer. "And I know you can draw. Really draw.”

Now he was buttering up my marginal art skills. I couldn’t think of where this could possibly lead.

"You've upgraded Windows," he continued. "I think you could run real graphics."

Maybe this was it. Adam had cajoled me about my graphics before. Because to me, my command line programs were fine.

A single megabyte of memory, a modem, WordPerfect, a Borland compiler, and some BBS software seemed like plenty, or rather, it felt like too much for me. But Adam loved graphics. He sneered at my cheap paperwhite monitor until it ran Windows 3.0 and looked good doing it. A year later, he wanted me to install more main memory and a better graphics card so I could run Windows 3.1. I'd done it partly to keep up to date with him but also because it was an excuse to tinker with the hardware. I enjoyed seating the DRAM and swapping cards in and out of the motherboard.

I just didn't see what he liked about graphics so much. The games with better graphics weren't more fun than the text-based games but they seemed more addictive. They felt different on an intuitive level. I worried about increasing the heroin-power of my distractions.

"Have you ever done computer art?" he asked.

This could be it - he might have an art project in mind. We had talked about going into animation. Adam kept a bank of hobbyist copies of art generation programs. He had tried to give me some and I had politely put the pile of 1.44 MB disks in a case next to my computer. I hadn't installed any. Instead, I had gone with Norton Utilities and Stacker to make sure I had plenty of space on my hard drive for writing and that all of the bad drive sectors had been marked and tracked.

I loved sitting and watching Norton Disk Doctor. When it ran, it popped up an ASCII chart of sectors and colorized its progress around the disk.

"Computer art. Do you mean, like, in Paint?" That was the standard bitmap-based art program included with Windows. Otherwise, the only computer illustration I knew firsthand came through freeware (or adware, or nag-ware, or shareware, or whatever you want to call it) and none of those packages were any good. I understood there was more advanced stuff because I had a friend from undergraduate school, Alan, who had gone to Hollywood to do computer graphics. Personal computer hobbyists didn’t have access to that rendering level, though.

"Uh, no." Adam snorted. "Have you got something more sophisticated? Did you install the CorelDraw or Adobe Photoshop I gave you?"

"No."

"Well, you should." Finally, he sat down. Without quite looking at me, he said, "I think I can get you a job if you install the programs and train on them."

“Really? Shit.” This was it. His business proposal wasn’t what I’d expected. “What kind of money?”

“Decent. I mean, newspapers need ads. It’s art, so it’s fun. And it’s on computers. Lots of computers.”

“Okay." I took a deep breath. "I’ll install the stuff.”

That night, I began the process of training myself for the Express Newspapers art test. Apparently, the other job applicants had majored in art. They didn’t know software. My computer knowledge looked like my only advantage. I loaded every program even mildly related to the job. By the next day, I was working in CorelDraw and Adobe Photoshop and a few freeware packages of clip art.

At first, it was frustrating. The tools didn't operate like ink and paper. They required different thinking.

The best program at the time was Corel Draw 3.1. Photoshop 2.5 didn’t have layers. Corel did. It was vector-based, too. I could distort shapes, especially letters, to create attention-grabbing effects. Graphics that had previously taken artists half a day by conventional methods became five-minute jobs for me. The vectors could be resized in a few seconds, too.

That week, I taught myself to draw in vectors and layers. As Adam kept reminding me, it was a matter of creating backgrounds first and putting contrasting shapes into the foreground to build up a finished composition.

Have you got a special savings and loan offer to handle? Take the outline of a bank building, fill it with black, and add in clipart of people shown in silhouette. Suddenly the bank looks full. Smash the ad copy in white letters through it all. Ta da!

Got a mattress sale? Import a few dramatic 'Only This Week!' word balloons. Float the mattress over a party background with streamers, cake, and ribbons. Throw some confetti in there. Give the mattress a dramatic spotlight. It’s a star!

By the time the Express gave me my appointment, I was a day past ready.

“We’ve got four interviews,” Adam announced. “We’re running the mattress sale art test. I think you’re ready. And you’re contestant number four.”

Even though I studied, even though I did the best on the Express interview, I knew the reason I succeeded was that Adam prompted me. So what's the moral here? Do friends look out for one another? Well, yes. But there's more. Adam and I had met on the job as lifeguards. He had already worked with me for a couple months. We had hung out for years. He was pretty sure he could stand to work with me again.

That's not a small thing. Adam was doing a good deed, or trying, and I was living up to it, or trying. But it wouldn't have been as easy a decision for Adam if he knew me as 'that ass who never does any work.' No one likes to hire a friend who goes on to become the boat anchor of the office. That's difficult for everyone.

My approach to getting jobs had always been: be better than anyone else and get lots of certifications and degrees. That didn't cut it all by itself, though. Going through a side door as a computer artist was smart. Seven months later, I landed a paid gig doing VAX programming in exchange for course credit at Hood College. (So the school did hook me up after all.) Three months after that, I landed a full-time gig at Hood, also doing VAX/VMS programming.

For the full-time job interview, I sat down with the head of the department, who had rejected my application for a hardware position a year earlier.

"You have Novell experience?" she said as she read my resume. She shook her arm dramatically with the paper in hand. "Did you have that last year?"

"No."

"You would have come out on top if you had. How did you get experience with that?"

I didn't quite tell her that it was through a friend and computer art.

###

Over the years in technical positions,

At Terrex - I got the job through someone I knew in college
At University Publications - got in based on my resume and interview
At LLC Custom Cables - got in based on the recommendation of a fellow graduate student
At Montgomery Express newspapers - aced the process on the recommendation of a friend
At Hood College – got the programming job based on the recommendation of a fellow grad student
As a contractor with the NIH (CC) – based on my resume and interview
As federal staff with the NIH (NMRF) – based on recommendations of people who knew my work
As a contractor with the NIH (NIAAA) – based on recommendations of people who knew my work
As federal staff at the NIH (NCCAM) – based on recommendations of people who knew my work

In each case, I increased my list of bragging points from my jobs and also my certifications. Those certifications and advanced degrees often get you in the door. They might not be enough if the list of candidates is large, as it often is. It helps if, a) people know your work and, b) they want to work with you.

It’s an obvious point but I’ve had to rephrase it many times. Even computer science professors will say things like, “It’s all a matter of who you know.” That’s wrong. You can know the president but if she thinks you suck and hates you, it’s only going to hurt your chances.

It’s who knows you - and wants to work with you.

Not Even Not Zen 239: Biomythography - Note 16, Course Correction

A Biomythography - Note 16
by Secret Hippie

Course Correction

In March of 1990, I stood on the shoulder of route 695 next to the flat tire on my car. In my hand I held a tire jack that doubled as the lug nut wrench. The tool was both ingeniously designed and terrible. It was compact and cheap, part of the default emergency rescue set that came with the car. I could have bought a better, faster one for five dollars. And I should have.

I had a AAA membership but no access to it. The company had taken my money, nearly fifty bucks, but I was stranded on the highway and that meant I had no way to call them. Before, in situations like this I had hitched rides to call AAA from a payphone. On this day I didn't have the time.

As I knelt to change my tire, it started to rain. I was pretty sure it was because I had brought no coat. I pumped the car jack faster.

My main concern was not the weather. It was not even the heavy machine screw through my tire. It was that I had a hiring appointment at the Gaithersburg Gazette. I'd been offered a position as a copy editor - not a good offer. The salary was $17,000 per year plus my emotional resignation to having no financial future. Salaries for writers had flatlined a decade before. What's more, at this point in history, computer software had progressed far enough that I had to wonder why a newspaper was still hiring copy editors. Surely they had to wonder, too.

If I took the job, I would be accepting less than my previous offer to continue at University Publications, which I had turned down in favor of Control Data Institute, a technical school.

Contrary to the spirit of my school, I had left classes in Baltimore early that day with the idea of joining the newspaper. I'd worn a nice shirt and everything.

But I knew it was a bad decision.

My arms kept warm, first from pumping the jack, next from turning the lug nuts. The back of my neck and my stomach started to shiver in the cold rain. But I kept at it. While I did, I considered my prospects at the dead-end copy editing job. It was going to be boring.

In contrast, the technical school was fun in its way. I had enrolled in the computer hardware course, where I'd gotten to make JK flip-flop circuits like a kid in physics class. Since I was finishing their curriculum with months to spare, I had cracked into the school's Unix systems (all Xenix), with instructor permission because they'd forgotten the passwords. That let me run through most of the CDI operating systems course. To explore something unrelated to either hardware or systems, I had signed out all of the COBOL books. Doing the COBOL assignments made three technical courses all together but I reasoned that I'd already sunk my training money into the school. I might as well steal what extra education I could find. Besides, I liked it when my COBOL programs did what I wanted.

It's not as if any teachers objected. Like most instructors at any level, they were pleased and surprised to find someone who wanted to learn more than the mandatory minimum.

As I worked on my car, I started to shiver-sweat, hot and cold at the same time. There wasn't any way to hop into the vehicle for temporary shelter until I finished changing the tire. I'd lifted the rear of the auto body off the ground using the tiny jack system. I didn't trust it; I kept push-testing to make sure it was safe. Even when I put on the spare and lowered the car part way to tighten the lug nuts, I didn't want to take a break. I was nearly done.

Before I finished, I became aware that the traffic around me had slowed. On the highway ahead, someone must have had an accident in the rain. That was going to hurt my travel time.

After I tightened the replacement tire, a cold squall drove me back into the car. I still had the hubcap to replace. There were tools to put back into the trunk, too. But I couldn’t take the freezing rain for a minute longer. I tumbled into the passenger seat. Immediately, the windows started to fog. My gaze moved to the clock on the center console. It was twenty minutes to the hour. I stretched my back and sighed. I wasn't going to make it.

As I sat panting and opaquing the windows, I thought about the consequences of being late to the hiring appointment. It was a real failure. Even newspapers have their pride. I could arrive late and beg the manager or I could give up. There wasn't a chance of getting to a phone in time to call and explain. I had no money for a payphone. Calling AAA was one thing. Those phones were designed for toll-free numbers. Calling collect, meaning the charges reversed, to an employer's office as I tried to explain why I was going to be late was another thing - and it wasn't going to go well for me.

Over the course of sitting and thinking for a minute, I made an unusual decision. I decided to give up. Usually, admitting defeat went against my instincts. This time, it felt right.

Fuck correcting other people’s bad writing. Fuck the Gazette newspaper. Fuck my aspiration to join beat reporters who covered the town council, the 4H club, or the county fair. That was a stupid, halfway-to-nothing goal anyway.

I know, most stories are about positive decisions. Life changing affirmations. Newspapers are good. Working for them is romantic. Who would tell a story about giving up a dream?

But I had given up. That was the truth. It was a decision I needed to make. My real, material-world goals involved writing novels and poetry, plus maybe having some kids who would have to listen to my poems. I didn't need a newspaper job to do those things. What I needed was to earn some kind of living.

So I put my hopes on the technical school certificate. No graduate school or advanced degrees, no more class after class, no accepting subsistence wages as a writer, no needing to throw drunks out of bars or dismiss stoned waiters from my restaurant staff. Those ways of living were in the past. My technical school certificate and a job repairing computers would solve the living-wages problem.

As it turns out, I was wrong. The technical school failed to deliver. I aced the courses and the job interviews but I graduated in the midst of a recession. No one hired me.

So I made another course correction. I started on my a graduate degree a few months later, this time in computer science. For practical experience, I wrangled my way into a menial job as a custom computer cable technician. Another grad student got me into it.

Months later, I made another correction as Adam, my friend for a decade, got me a low-level position at a newspaper. It wasn't a writing job. It was in the advertising and art department. I assisted Adam in maintaining their Novell network, built new machines, and generated computer-assisted ad art. The small-town newspaper writers spilled coffee into their computer keyboards, broke their monitors, and lied about what they had done. I shook my head and fixed their hardware with a joke and a laugh. Because I was becoming a computer guy.

Not Even Not Zen 238: Biomythography - Note 15, Not Now

A Biomythography - Note 15
by Secret Hippie

Yes, Now

It was the spring of 1987. The underbrush in the woodlands around me had turned green. The tree branches above bore a few green buds. White, cabbage butterflies had made their first appearances. Girls in the neighborhood were trying out skirts despite the blustery day. Some of the guys strolled into their yards in their shirts, no jackets. One of them kept his jacket on with a collar up against the gusts of wind.

I drove past a few houses in my car, a metallic blue Mustang, with a young woman by my side. I'd been living Western Massachusetts for a few months. This was only the second time I'd had a woman over as a guest. In this case, she had invited herself to my apartment. She had insisted. I'd felt embarrassed by my place although it was nice, a room in a house that I shared with a former college hallmate. He had decided to settle in town.

He was dating someone local. Now maybe I was, too.

"This place is bigger than I thought!" The young woman gave me a sly smile as we strolled through the front door. "Nice kitchen. You kind of talked it down."

My roommate, Michael, strode up with a smile.

"Who is this beautiful lady?" he asked. Sometimes he could be awkward but, more often, he was genial and charming. He seemed pleased that I was starting to have a social life at last. As a roommate, he worried about me.

Soon after I made introductions, Michael got a call. He had started two small businesses. They kept him constantly on the phone. In fact, he was the first person I knew to own a cell phone. He kept two cars leased, each with mobile phone consoles. When he took his call, he waved goodbye and wandered through the living room into one of his offices. That's why he rented an entire house, so he could run his businesses. Immediately, the young woman took me by the arm and asked to see my room.

"Huh. Mattress on the floor." She put her hands on her hips as she stood in the doorway. "But how is it?"

"It's a futon," I replied. It had been my major expense upon my arrival in town. "I kind of like it."

With a smile, she threw herself against it. She pounded the pillows for good measure. We fooled around for a while, flirting and more. Then she asked me to get up and lock the bedroom door. When I returned to the futon, we got more involved.

I didn't have much sense of time passing. Mentally, I was occupied.

So it came as a surprise when Michael burst into the room. He stood there, mouth agape, for less than a second.

"Not now, Michael!" I yelled. And I raised my left arm to wave him away.

His face turned beet red. He stepped back and closed the door.

"Hah!" Fortunately for me, the young lady laughed. "What was that about?"

"Later." I put both hands on the futon again. "Later."

Although I felt focused on the fun we were having, later eventually arrived. I put on a fresh shirt, pulled up my pants, and meandered out to the kitchen to get some water.

"Sorry!" Michael strode up to the sink next to me. He was trembling. He could barely hold his phone.

"It's fine." I had already forgotten the interruption. If he hadn't reminded me, I might not have thought about it. "Sorry if I shouted. I was, um, surprised."

"Normally, I do knock. You probably should lock the door, though."

"I thought I did." I mused over my glass of water. For a moment, it felt like the glass was dirty. Or there was something wrong with the water. After a few seconds, I realized that actually I was having a problem with the air.  It stung to breathe. "Michael, what's that smell?"

"Oh." He took a deep breath. "The house was on fire."

He had burst into my bedroom in a panic. He'd meant to scream that we needed to evacuate. Instead, he saw naked bodies, got embarrassed, and left. That meant he had to do something about the fire. He had been running around, frantic, unable to think straight or find an extinguisher. 

Downstairs, he had seen flames burst from the electrical panel. They were spreading to the window sill. But he had a fire extinguisher somewhere in the house. He knew he did. His embarrassment proved stronger than his fear or panic. It made him search again. This time he found it.

Over the span of a few minutes, I got the whole story. I'm still not sure of the cause of the fire beyond that it was in the wiring panel.

I leaned back against the kitchen counter. We looked at each other for a moment.

"I put it out," he said.  

He shrugged.  So did I.  Then I emptied my glass of water into the sink.

Later in the evening, I tested the latch on my bedroom door. In his initial panic from the sparks and flames in the cellar beneath us, Michael had pushed through the strike plate without noticing. The lock bolt had shoved the plate forward. He hadn't ripped it out of the door frame but it was a close thing. The wood had splintered. I unscrewed the strike plate and screwed it back in so that it worked again. The door never latched quite right after that, though.

Not Even Not Zen 237: Biomythography - Note 14, Heights

A Biomythography - Note 14
by Secret Hippie

Fear of Heights

When I was five, I fell out of a dogwood tree.

When I was six, I fell out of a locust tree. That's what comes from climbing trees and rough-housing in them. The next spring, in my front-yard willow, I fell so far and hit so hard that I lay there on the ground for a minute. No one had pushed me. I had just slipped. My body tingled. The back of my head ached and I watched swirls of color in the corners of my vision. My friend, Joe Wood called my name. He clambered down from his branch. Eventually, his younger sister Rebecca jogged over. My younger brother ran up to look at me, too. I hopped back to my feet, embarrassed.

"Can I play?" my brother asked.

"Yeah, but let's not climb the dumb tree," said Joe. "Let's find something else."

I'm not sure when my fear of heights started. It may not have begun with that fall. Heights had caused me prickly sensations and fits of panic before. But about a year after the big willow tree fall, which was followed by falls from playground equipment, I started to get a sort of terror about heights. At that point, I was only eight and didn't know that I could do anything to fix the problem. I had to tough it out, as far as I could tell.

What made the problem seem sort of serious, even at eight, was that I could see my trend. I understood that the phobia was getting worse, year to year. When I was nine, I could climb the lowest branches of trees. By the end of that year, I stopped. I didn't tell anyone why - but I knew the reason.

At ten, I climbed up the ladder on the high dive at the pool and almost passed out over the concrete. I steadied myself, grabbed the aluminum bars tight with an adrenaline rush and visions of death, and pushed on. Maybe that's why my body waited until I reached the end of the diving board. There, I froze up and dropped like a rock. As if from a distance, I heard a loud smack. A spark of electricity lit my body. I was in the water. I could move again.

Burning with shame, I turned over onto my stomach and swam to the edge of the pool. I expected lots of pointing and laughter but only my younger brother was doing that. The lifeguard, in contrast, had turned rigid in his chair. The woman who had been chatting with him stared at me in open-mouthed dismay.

"You okay?" he called. He scowled as he noticed that my limbs wouldn't quite obey me. I had to take a second try at climbing onto the deck.

"Yeah."

"Right." His lips looked pale. "How about you don't go on the diving board for a while?"

"Okay."

I'd always loved bouncing over rocks or scrambling up and down muddy slopes next to a stream. By the age of eleven, I couldn't walk across the fallen trees over the water. I had to crawl across like a baby. My terror of heights was starting to get in the way. Soon, even standing on a tree stump made me dizzy.

This was getting intolerable. I knew I had to do something.

At the age of thirteen, the act of hopping over a foot-high rock was uncomfortable. My anger at myself over it had reached new depths, too (not heights, I guess). I had been getting worse for years and had thought about trying to do something but still, I hadn't.

At home, I'd read about exposure therapy. In the psychology textbooks of our family library and in the science and education magazines on our table, there were paragraphs, sometimes whole pages, about how therapists coached their patients to touch spiders or to ride in elevators. There was even a paragraph on therapy for acrophobia. I decided that exposure was the solution.

Visualizing New Heights

My start was not impressive. Mostly, I lay down and imagined being up high. Later in the process, I stood on rocks and pretended they were tall and unsteady. My commitment level was good for a thirteen year old but my real-life exposures, my self-hypnosis sessions, and my other forms of practice were as inconsistent as you might expect from a teenager.

Sometimes, I would be trying to fix myself but get jolted out of the process by someone who would ask me why I was standing on a rock or stump. I never had an answer. Usually I would mutter something evasive like, "Just wanted to," or "Why not?" or "Nothing, dummy." Then I'd step down and never repeat it around them again.

My visualization sessions were important because my exposures were so inconsistent. I didn't know it, but the process would take me six years. I'm sure it would have been faster if I'd been competent at the method. Nevertheless, it produced enough good results in the first two years that I started working at other problems in parallel.

I used the same visualization techniques on basketball, karate, emergency responses, and on letting go of desires. Of course, I actually practiced the sports, the tense situations, and letting go of desirable possessions, too, so the real-world experiences were essential. Visualization helped, though.

Hmm, I said six years. But after five, maybe a little less, I had no more functional problems with my fear of heights. What I wanted, in my sixth year of exposure, was a celebration. That’s how my self-imposed therapy ended in a static-line parachute jump.

Making the jump felt over-the-top, even to me. But it also felt completely right.

Letting go of desires was fine, my paralysis in clutch situations had been replaced with a lean into them, and I could walk on a balance beam. And jump from an airplane.

Not Even Not Zen 236: Biomythography - Note 13, More Than One

A Biomythography - Note 13
by Secret Hippie

Deciding To Be The One

The decision to have a purpose in life is not the same as a decision to take responsibility for others. When I made the latter choice, it was about becoming 'the one' in my own internal terminology. It was a determination about family, at first. Then it became more.

Family History

The decision started out with my awareness that I had to become a wage slave for the family. It wasn't an instant realization. I was reluctant to admit it. But the choice to go along with the concept seemed inevitable and it gained strength from my awareness of family history.

On my mother's side, three sons of the Stocketts sailed over to America in 1658 to claim their land grant from King Charles II. Two of those brothers died. One lived on with some success. In the next generation, three sons grew to adulthood. Two soon died. That again left one to carry on. The Stocketts kept dying, as a lot of American colonizers did, but they also kept having enough children to maintain themselves and spread out. In the line I'm descended from, however, they lost their family farm to taxes.

That meant my great-grandfather and grandfather spent their generations getting by with less. My grandfather had things especially tough, since he had epilepsy. At the time, epilepsy was treated like a contagious disease, so he found himself often shunned. And he went 4F in the draft. But that was okay. It meant that he could work in the shipyards during the war. For a while, he could afford a family. When the war ended, though, the Navy let go of their 4F men (along with the shipyard women) and my grandfather immediately became desperate for work.

He had never been able to afford a house or land. He had moved onto a patch of his uncle's property that no one was using. It was separate from the rest, which was good because this was the uncle who was cruel to everyone. He killed kittens, apparently just to put children in their place about their pets, and he killed his eldest son by pushing him off the roof during an argument. He had influence in town, too. Taking his land by simply squatting on it, even when it was left unused, was a risk.

My grandfather felt he had no choice. He built a house on the vacant lot by raiding the town dump for lumber and parts. Then, for years, he flattered the rest of the family as much as he could. He named his eldest son after the murderous uncle to whom he was indebted. Eventually, he got a grudging approval to live there. He continued to raise his family and farmed the neighbors' land because they weren't using it.

For a while, he got a job with the phone company. That was great but they kept sending him to work during storms. He followed orders because he was epileptic and everyone was sure he couldn't get another job. As a result, he repeatedly got hit by lightning while up on the poles. The first three times, he got away with it. Finally, he took a bolt so strong that it knocked him off the pole. The company retired him. My grandfather supported eight people in his house living on one disability income. Naturally, he kept farming. It was the source of most of their food.

So my mother grew up in decent circumstances. She had a home, enough to eat, and a large family. True, her father opposed her going to college. He said he couldn't afford it for a girl and that seemed likely enough. My mother's parents had also arranged a marriage for her when she was a child. To their surprise, she refused the marriage. She applied for scholarships, instead, and managed to get so many that she could return the ones she didn't need and still go to college. So she left Annapolis for good. When she graduated from University of Maryland and got a job as a teacher, she attained a genuinely middle class life for herself.

That was a significant achievement. Her siblings followed, too. Her entire generation took the family in a positive direction. They got back to an ordinary level of prosperity.

On my father's side, we never learned much about the history. We know that his Irish grandfather, George Earl Gallagher, came to America near the end of the famines in Ireland. He had an American child, my father's father, and then died at the age of forty-three. His son remarried late, fathered two more children, my Aunt Jenny and my father, and died at the age of forty-two.

June Pond Light, my paternal grandmother, grew up in an orphanage before her marriage. When she left, she lived in Philadelphia for a while. Then she married and became a Gallagher. She discovered that her husband had divorced his first wife. Since he was Catholic, his church didn't recognize the divorce. That meant Robert Gallagher, my father, and his sister Jenny, weren't recognized by the Irish side of the family. They refused to talk with June or her children, so our Irish history was lost. In addition, my father's younger brother Jack, always their mother's favorite, inherited everything from her - the English money, such as it was. Other relatives mentioned it to me on a few occasions, always bitterly, and that's how I knew. In their ways, both of my parents had descended from several generations of not inheriting anything, often because there was nothing to be had. They were the people who did not get the house. In some cases, they did not even get the tea set.

Why the One

It was in that context that I read books about how successful people achieved their status. In nearly all of them, they started from stable, upper middle class or wealthy, owning-class families. Those families provided the springboards for their dive into success.

When the time came to make my decision, I understood that I probably couldn't achieve a high level of material success. But maybe, just maybe, I could still be 'the one,' that is, I could become the somewhat anonymous and dependable provider for a family. I could accumulate enough advantages for the household that someone in the next generation might succeed better in material ways.

At first, I thought this meant I had to,

• grow the clan
• watch over it
• protect it

Soon I saw that it meant accepting I would be a person who gets taken for granted, who is a wage slave, dependable and thoughtful of others. The 'one' may number more than one, of course, since there could easily be a handful in a family - really, there should be - but each one of them is someone to whom a grandmother can go for help, to whom cousins and nieces and nephews can get guidance, and to whom caretaker chores may be given, whether for child care or elder care.

It is an ordinary decision.  Many people make it.  But I felt it was lacking in my immediate family.  And every tribe needs members who take on responsibility for others.  Maybe, in fact, it is the sort of ordinary decision that separates long-lasting families from broken homes.  It is a decision that extends into professional life because it can lead into a career.  The consequences can spill over into hobbies because, apparently, taking responsibility is a habit.  You can find yourself banging a gavel for the Loyal Order of Water Buffalos one day, wondering why it happened. 

Taking responsibility will, likely enough, affect your group of friends.  After all, sometimes even among casual acquaintances it's necessary to make the decision to be responsible, to gather people together, to feed them, to look out for the weak, to assist the strong, and to make the group a success.

The group's success might not belong to 'the one.'  It won't be seen as yours.  You might not get credit at all.  That's what happens in groups.  Sometimes the youngest grandchild goes out to take the bows as a famous artist even though most of her success is due to her grandmother.  It happens.  But her grandma is not a child.  She does not demand attention.  She made her decision to be 'the one' long ago.  She can bask in the success of others, nowadays.  And sometimes those others will understand, just a little, that they have depended on people who decided to be responsible for them and their welfare.

Those people made the decision to care and to act on their caring. For an entire lifetime, everyone around them feels the benefit.

Not Even Not Zen 235: Biomythography - Note 12, Purpose

A Biomythography - Note 12
by Secret Hippie

Deciding on a Purpose

You have to have a cause.

If you don't have one, you will be swayed in every direction. You might spend your efforts on many goals without giving enough to achieve a single one. Also, you won't understand one of the most important parts of life. Stoics understand. Daoists, too. There is a special experience that is available to people who are driven to fulfill their calling.

The world: here's a small accident, a stain on your shirt

Some people: oh no, my good shirt

The world: here's a small accident, a stain on your shirt

People with a calling: that has nothing to do with why I'm here

If your cause is Buddhism, Stoicism, Daoism, or a similar set of beliefs that emphasizes non-attachment, it's even easier to not have setbacks. You can let events slide away when they don't matter. You simply re-focus on your goal.

When I was fourteen, I read a book on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It was supposed to be a psychology text, I think, but it read like philosophy. That is, it relied less on the pseudo-science common in most psychology texts of the period. (There were a whole lot of assertions about human brains back then that were untrue but if you complained, especially in high school, you were told that you didn't really understand because you weren't an expert.) Maslow had some ideas that I liked, including "self-actualization," which sounded close to many ideas I had then about enlightenment.

1. In the first stage, take care of your physical needs.
2. In the second, stop worrying about your future or your safety.
3. Third, fulfill your senses of love and belonging.
4. Fourth, achieve some goals. Those will lead to a sense of esteem.
5. Fifth, reach a level where the first four stages seem insignificant.

Stories about self-actualized people seemed compelling to me. Historically, everyone knew about individuals who could be kind to others beyond all reason, who would give away their food when everyone was starving, run into a battle to rescue the wounded, help victims imprisoned with them in a concentration camp, or who could tend to the sick during a pandemic. Those people had become self-actualized. They could and did ignore their physical desperation, their safety, and the harsh opinions of others in order to better the situation of humanity.

(Maslow came up with his hierarchy due to his visits with the Blackfoot tribe, apparently, and he left off stages that the Blackfoot members considered vital:

Sixth, grow a community in which tribe members help one another self-actualize.

Seventh, expand the self-actualized community.

Maslow possibly thought of these last stages as bordering on sociology. Therefore, they were not fit for him to write about in the field of psychology.)

The concepts of self-actualization, sainthood, and enlightenment all seemed to point to what kind of causes a person might have that would allow for transcendence. They are not mundane ones. For instance, a passion for collecting model cars is not the best type of cause. Neither is making paperclip art, even though it may be very good art. However, making paperclip art that makes people laugh, cry, or inspires them with fantastic ideas, passions, and compassion - now we're getting somewhere. That's close to the sort of cause necessary. Intent matters. The whole process matters.

After testing ideas about transcendence against the historical anecdotes, I guessed there were basically two requirements for a driving cause that is fulfilling. They are,

1) It has to represent something bigger than an individual
2) It has to help others

There might be a third quality that's important as well. Personally, I chose a huge cause as a teenager: help everyone. But I found myself often implementing it by writing articles or stories as well as creating nice things for my friends. For many years, writing was closely connected to my primary cause. In retrospect, I wonder if the creative element led to a different result. For instance, when you decide to start a soup kitchen, you are making something. You may not think of it as inventive but, if you pay attention to the details like a sculptor, engineer, dress designer, or painter, it may give you (and the people around you) the same sort of benefit.

3) It should be creative

Adding this third aspect to the chosen cause requires the person choosing it to understand that they are being creative - that if you are arranging special trips for terminal cancer patients or repairing appliances for people who have no money to pay, you are still creating things (even if they do pay something, I suppose). At the very least, you are touching the hearts of people with a uniquely prepared moment like any other artist.

Intent is always key to the results, as there is no real separation between them.

What happens if you change your cause? That seems possibly dangerous to self-actualization but, whether for good or ill, I found myself doing it. My first cause was great for me but I had to adjust it when I started a family.

Technically, devoting yourself to a family meets all three requirements above. But, as you can immediately see, there is a fragility to having a smaller, less overarching cause. When things go bad in your smaller cause, it affects your world more strongly in proportion. Fortunately, the re-focusing was a natural process for me. It's not like I gave up on helping humanity in general. All of my choices, even when guiding my employment to provide for my family, were informed by the grander humanitarian purpose. I did pay more and more attention to my immediate relatives; young children have a way of forcing that to happen; but I was not too far thrown off by the death of a pet or a family member or a dear friend. When you expand your spirit and reach out to humanity itself as a cause, it keeps your world from being too small and your perspective too narrow.

That leads me to another important aspect.

Practice Letting Go

Periodically, you have to let go of your cause.

When I was twenty-one and very much a true believer in the process of enlightenment, a friend of mine, Richard, gave me a book by 'The True Believer' and told me I needed to read it. I did.

He was right.

Although it feels good to have a purpose and to let it give your life and other lives a direction that makes things better, that's not enough. In order to avoid the traps of being a 'true believer' you have to stop, occasionally, as if letting go of thoughts while meditating, and live without your cause for a while. Even if your chosen purpose is a religion or a philosophy, you have to let go of it. I'm sure devotees of Buddhism, Daoism, and Stoicism will see the irony. Still, it's true. You need to back away and gain some perspective.

Let your life sway freely from event to event. Look back on your cause and judge it. If it's not worthy, pick another. More likely, of course, your previous goal is still fine. But you may use your perspective to adjust your grip as you re-attach to the world in this way. This is a deliberate step, an emotional and mental and nearly physical skill. You should be able to repeat it, from time to time. Let go and pick a spot in the flow of life where you want to grab on again.

Not Even Not Zen 234: Biomythography - Note 11, Families: Do They Exist?

A Biomythography - Note 11
by Secret Hippie

On the Existence of Families

Sometimes my father, a philosophy major, raised the question explicitly: do societies exist? Or families and other groups? Or are there only individuals?

When I was a teen the obvious answer was that only individuals exist. In some ways, it was a very American response. But it was also due to how my father hadn't grown up with access to a big, extended family. His mother had been raised in an orphanage, far away from most of her blood relations. His father died when he was two. The result was that, except for his sister and an uncle, Jack, my father's family connections didn't exist.

For my part, I had also read about cultures in which entire families were punished for the transgression of a single member of their bloodline. That seemed immoral and it still does. So I came down hard on the side of individuals mattering, never groups.

Years ago a limousine convoy of Orthodox Jews in New York City hit and killed an African-American toddler. They fled the scene, which made their conduct unjust not only because of the moral crime during the accident but also after, from their evasion of personal responsibility.

When a gang of teens later that day isolated and beat to death an Orthodox Jewish boy in retribution, that was an immoral example of group justice. They killed an innocent as if the murder were equivalent to killing the person responsible for the toddler. It was group justice - traditional between tribes but not allowable in a system of laws primarily recognizing only individual moral actions. 

When the police responded to the incident by arresting African-American teenagers, they tried to assure the public that they had found the people responsible. That is, they needed to assert that they were not perpetuating injustices to individuals in the name of justice for groups of people.

Every step of this process seems like an example of how justice needs to be determined at the level of individuals. Yet a series of books and examples from my life led me to understand how group identities endure regardless. They are persistent and will always cause problems for perceptions of justice. What seems like a weak, almost tenuous, level of existence-by-agreement is actually tough to eradicate and it may be unwise to do so. Shared imaginations like "I'm part of a religious tribe" or "I belong to this corporation" are harder to end, in fact, than the people who compose them.

As everyone knows, when a worker in a corporation dies, the corporation hardly notices. That's even if we're talking about the death of the most influential leader of the organization. Many corporations, religions, fraternal organizations, and even hobby groups survive such events. Families do, too.

On one hand: our country exists in our shared imagination, so if everyone woke up thinking that it didn't exist, it wouldn't.

On the other hand: our country is going to outlast everyone reading this. Just because something is a shared imagination doesn't mean it isn't robust. That's a weird thought to many teenagers, I know.

Our families are smaller, more fragile organizations than countries. Unless you are the final branch of a narrow line, though, your little clan is going to outlast you. Even if you feel that you are the last, someone else counts you as part of their tree of relatives. Others have adopted you, mentally, even when you don't know it. The existence of your family is stronger than you. Really. And always.

Siddhartha - Nothing Exists

When I was twelve, I read a short novel by Herman Hesse based loosely on the life of Siddhartha Gautama. It's fiction, not biography, and it tells a story of enlightenment within the context of rebellion against state religions. Moreover, it describes a belief that nothing exists and shows how that idea can change meaning when seen from different viewpoints.

“How deaf and stupid have I been!" Siddhartha thought, walking swiftly along.

"When someone reads a text, wants to discover its meaning, he will not scorn the symbols and letters and call them deceptions, coincidence, and a worthless hull, but he will read them, he will study and love them, letter by letter. But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own being, I have, for the sake of a meaning I had anticipated before I read, scorned the symbols and letters. I called the visible world a deception, called my eyes and my tongue coincidental and worthless forms without substance. No, this is over, I have awakened.”

In a key transition point, Siddhartha moves from despising the impermanence of the world to adoring it, from hating the impurity in himself and others to realizing that love is the main thing.

Maybe it was due to growing up in a house full of philosophy texts but I read often about the impermanence of material things. In many Buddhist books, the authors assert that nothing exists at all. The sensual world is completely an illusion. Our bonds of friendship and family are parts of a dangerous snare. Such attachments to other people lead us into having even more desires and heavier sorrows.

Siddhartha, though, doesn't trust the lack of sorrow that has been promised by emotional detachment. Raising a son brings him frustration and unhappiness, as he had foreseen when younger, yet it brings him greater understanding of people and a stronger love for them.

Friends Exist

Unlike families, societies, countries, and other organizations, I never had any doubt about friendships. They are the most powerful influence in my life and probably most other lives. Unlike families and nations, though, friendships can't outlast the lifetimes of the participants. At most, they are part of a human web of friendships and pass on part of their spirit.

Also, love does not need to be returned so there are no people who need to be my friend in order for me to be theirs. Often enough, there's a bond of affection from both sides anyway. If it's not zen to be so attached, then it's not. We can give up part of our joy and freedom to love one another in our impermanent relationships in our imperfect ways.

Friends in Theory

Since I've mentioned how literature affected my perception of organizations, including families, I think it's worth mentioning the smaller influence of literature on my concept of friendship.

Most books demonstrate the basic rules of our affinities with others by focusing on the practical aspects. For instance, friends share adventures together. Or they sit in silence, happy. Or they give gifts to one other. They might come to the rescue. They might suffer together. In A Wrinkle in Time, the three main characters do all of these. In adventure books, friends protect one another more or less constantly like in the Hardy Boys, The Lost World, The Forgotten Door, and the Chronicles of Amber. When I think about friendships in story form, though, I keep returning to The Lord of the Rings.

Meriadoc says,

"You can trust us to stick with you through thick and thin — to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends."

He blurts out this sentiment at the beginning of their terrible adventure. Then he holds true to his words. The story he lives is informed by war. Tolkien wrote to this mindset because, after two world wars, he accepted it as natural: never abandon a friend; never leave anyone behind. Although in real wars we do sometimes leave behind dying friends or dead bodies, humans try to stand by the members of their tribes. Because they are our friends. And we are theirs.

Le Morte D’Arthur - How Brothers Exist

Brotherhood is more troublesome than friendship but only because siblings are raised together and are more defined by one another than friends, especially friends who meet after childhood. But my brothers are how I developed an intuitive sense of family. The are the reason I kept thinking more and more about what family means.

"Meanwhile Sir Launcelot watched from his ambush and just as they were leading the queen to the fire, shouted the word of command, charged with his followers through the spectators, and assaulted the guards.

In the tumult that followed, many of the guards were killed ... lastly Sir Gareth and Sir Gaheris, both of them unarmed, and whom Sir Launcelot killed without recognizing."

Before this part of the book, Sir Gawain had been the character that made the most sense. Unlike many others portrayed by Malory, he was fully human. That is, Gawain was not particularly virtuous but he tried to be. He made peace with King Arthur, his uncle, despite Arthur killing Gawain's father in battle. He aimed to be a responsible older brother and set a good example for Arthur's knighthood. When his younger brothers surpassed him in their achievements, he cheered them on. This was a character I understood. He seemed to live in a type of family I knew.

Everything about the revenge of Sir Gawain upon Launcelot and about his care for his brothers rang true thereafter. Brotherhood demands loyalty. It is bigger than individuals. It is bigger, perhaps, than families. It extends across political and religious tribes to even murderers like Launcelot, whom Gawain forgave as he lay dying from wounds inflicted by his brother knight.

It was my brothers who first taught me about families despite my father's lack of family tradition and despite his opposition to close-knit clans.

The Godfather - How Families Exist

Close-knit clans took some reading and living to understand, for me.

Even though I had grown up with glimpses of family structures, I didn't really comprehend the gulf between growing up without them, as my father had done, and living in them the way my mother had. In a stable clan, the cousins, second cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces, and nephews, and upward and outward for multiple generations, can take one another for granted. They can even be annoyances to one another. When I talk to people who have grown up in normal, reasonably close families, they never grasp all of the small interactions that would go missing without their relations.

All the friendships before, all the books, all the examples of families in my life led up to this book, The Godfather. It must seem odd that a book, not a family reunion, not a text about Chinese history, not a genetics class, nor a discussion in sociology but instead a particular piece of crime fiction gave me the emotional clues I needed. That's because, to me, The Godfather was a story about families.

How many times does Don Corelone talk about family? He talks about it even when he's playing up the idea of strong friendship. He says to his godson, Johnny Fontane, a singer who is losing his career,

"Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of friendship you wouldn't have to ask me to help."

He emphasizes the importance of fatherhood even to an enemy,

“Tell me. Do you spend time with your family?”

“Sure I do.”

“Good. Because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”

When his adopted son asks why he has to be the one to say 'no' to members of the family so often, not the great Don Corleone, Don reveals,

"You cannot say 'no' to the people you love, not often. That's the secret. And then when you do, it has to sound like a 'yes'. Or you have to make them say 'no.' You have to take time and trouble.”

Most of all to his sons, he emphasizes the need for togetherness. It's not just something that makes people feel comforted. Or rather, it is that but it is more. Unity in a family is a practical thing. It can be a life or death advantage over others.

"We are a family, and the loyalty of the family must come before anything and everyone else. For if we honor that commitment, we will never be vanquished - but if we falter in that loyalty we will all be condemned.”

So Don Corelone understands that it is all about family. Later, his son Michael comes to the same understanding. As he ages, he sees more of the uncaring world and compares it to the loving attention it takes to raise his household.

“Yet, he thought, if I can die saying, “Life is so beautiful,” then nothing else is important. If I can believe in myself that much, nothing else matters. He would follow his father. He would care for his children, his family, his world. But his children would grow in a different world. They would be doctors, artists, scientists. Governors. Presidents. Anything at all. He would see to it that they joined the general family of humanity, but he, as a powerful and prudent parent, would most certainly keep a wary eye on that general family.”

Michael comes to an understanding of a family loyalty that is separate from but nearly the same as the loyalty of friends. He sees that families can be defended like brothers. Naturally, he intends to grow his clan and to keep safeguarding it from harm.

Years after reading about it, I found myself entertaining the idea that it was possible - that I could nurture and grow a family.

Not Even Not Zen 233: Biomythography - Note 10, Learn Enjoyment

A Biomythography - Note 10
by Secret Hippie

Enjoy Your Work

"What are you doing?" I asked Tucker in disbelief. A stack of split wood lay tumbled to his right. Ten feet further, he had made a neat, long stack of firewood. It was his second row. The back row, already enough for two years at the rate they burned, stood as high as my head. He was adding depth to the family stockpile.

Tucker took another swing of his axe and finished splitting the log.

"Doing what I have to do," he replied.

Tucker's father had commanded him to split wood as a preemptive punishment. The order hadn't made sense. Tuck hadn't done anything wrong even according to his parents' strict standards. His family had already laid in too much wood. Some of it would rot. Even though I'd been mad at his father for the capriciousness of the command and the insulting manner of it, I hadn't taken it seriously for those reasons. It failed to occur to me that my best friend would, as always, serve his punishment because he'd been told. That's how he worked.

In a continuous manner, I had failed to understand for two years. Now it was the summer when I was sixteen and taking an order seriously simply wasn't what I would have done, not when it made no sense. I was struggling to understand Tucker's family dynamics.

"You were so mad," I said. I had seen Tucker protest the command, which of course led to his father yelling, which eventually led to Tucker telling me I should go. His father had lowered his voice to agree that I should leave and that I would be welcome back when Tucker was done, a small politeness.

"I guess I was," Tucker allowed with a smile.

He picked up another half-log. Then he turned his back, took aim at the center ring, and swung. For a minute, I watched him work. Tucker returned to his singing. That was a habit I think he had picked up from me. He was making it his own, though. Instead of a mournful chant like the ones I used for manual labor, Tucker sounded almost joyful. No, there was no 'almost.' He was happy. Distinctly so.

"Why are you suddenly pleased with yourself?" I asked.

He paused, gave the matter a bit of thought, and replied, "It's not that sudden."

"You're being punished. For nothing. How can you be happy?"

"Hey, man." He took another swing. The log split. One side fell over. The other, smaller piece traveled six feet before bouncing to a stop. "I know I'm going to have to do it anyway. Why should I let him spoil my day?"

I put my fists on my hips and I thought about it. I'd never heard anyone tell me anything like those words before. For my part, I stayed angry even while doing things that were my decision. I had recently fasted for two days, satisfied with myself spiritually but angry at my life. I had gutted through extra workouts recently, too, determined to reach my arbitrary goals. There were a lot of things I did as joylessly as possible.

"Haven't you noticed that he only gives me this chore when I'm happy? This is my punishment for smiling or, worse, for laughing. He always punishes me when I laugh at something."

"Yeah." The observation was straight on target. His father's instinctive anger at seeing his son being happy was part of what made the relationship seem abusive.

"Honestly, I think it drives him crazy to see me having fun chopping the logs for the woodpile. It's supposed to be my punishment. But I sort of like it. Come on, I know you like chopping wood. You said so."

"But that's me." It was accurate but something about it seemed unfair. "You said you hated it."

"I don't know how it is for you. But I take this attitude whenever I can with my chores now. You just find the part, whatever little part there is, that you like. Then concentrate on that part and let it make you happy. Man, you can be happy about any damn thing."

It had not occurred to me that I didn't have to be miserable just because someone else was making me miserable.

Tucker returned to chopping wood. After a while, he radiated so much joy that I started to smile. I stood there for five minutes, watching him finish. While I did, I tried out the idea of being happy about a chore that I had to do. It seemed to work for Tucker. I helped him lift the last log into place.

When he got down to the last quarter-log, Tucker stopped singing. He seemed sad that his punishment chore was almost over. I returned, mentally, to the idea of finding some part of a job to like - any job, any likable part - and I tried to imagine what it might do for me. And I hummed a mournful tune to myself as he took another swing.

Not Even Not Zen 232: Biomythography - Note 9, Maulball

A Biomythography - Note 9

by Secret Hippie

Normal Punch and Tumble

When you grow up in a neighborhood with older kids, mostly boys, you're going to get knocked around a bit in the maulball games.  At least, that was how it went for me in Maryland in the late 1960s and 1970s.  If you're bowled over in good spirit, though, in a game where your opponent picks you up and says, "Nice try, kid" the physical sting disappears. 

In fact, a lot of rough-housing in our neighborhood was like that.  Bigger kids could be mean, of course.  One kid in school had his eye cut out by an older boy with a knife.  Mostly, though, bullies used their fists.  If they lived in the neighborhood, they couldn't go too far with their aggressive behavior.  There were factors that held everyone back, namely 1) basic morality of a sort, 2) enforcement from older brothers who would take revenge against the bullying of their younger siblings, 3) parents, and 4) a hidden factor: practicality.  

The practical aspect was felt by bullies who picked on smaller kids but then needed those same kids to play in football, baseball, or kickball games.  They would end up begging from house to house.

"Why doesn't anyone want to play with me?" was the whine from a handful of boys, most of whom eventually figured out the answer.

In the midst of this comparatively weak level of childhood roughness (compared to earlier generations), my parents raised me in a mostly gentle way.  Theirs may have been the first generation to begin to break away from the "all stick, no carrot" approach of molding behavior.  Still, my father believed in corporeal punishment.  My mother suspected that it mostly wasn't necessary but of course it was an option. 

In my family, as in many others, the order of events in a conflict usually was:

Talking

Hitting

Shouting

This wasn’t a matter of philosophy. It was simply how things evolved. A level of communication took place through slapping and hitting.  Shouting, both with friends and in the family, was for emergencies.  Therefore, raised voices were treated more seriously and as a more violent gesture than a gentle "don't touch my knitting" slap on the wrist; that was nothing.  

Still, don't touch the knitting.

This was why I found it difficult to deal with people who skipped from talking about a problem to shouting about it. That felt like cheating plus it raised the issue, whatever it was, into emergency status, an elevation it never deserved.

I've got the same reaction nowadays to political fighting and other sorts of name calling.  As a child, I learned that those things were ungentlemanly.  It was better to fight and lose than to resort to cowardly tactics.  Yet all of the currently acceptable tactics now are cowardly ones (as seen from a viewpoint in the not-too-distant past).  Cowardly name calling is extolled, in its way, because physical fights are unacceptable.  Or just difficult across the Internet and across cultures.

Violence, except in self-defense or defense of others, really is unacceptable all over the world and in all or nearly all societies.  The definition of violence, though, seems to have gone astray.  For some people currently, violence could mean any sort of physical contact.  That seems unhealthy to me although I'm out of the mainstream now.  There is a moral difference between poking the cat away from the dog's food, which is really a form of communication, and an action that does serious or lasting harm.  

I think there's more harm caused by the name-calling than people realize. Demeaning others may be a form of violence that is more destructive than most rough-and-tumble contact. In a maulball game, you can lose and be hurt but never dehumanized.  Nice try, kid.

In a name-calling game, all sides can come to be seen as caricatures, not people.  That's how real human beings could seem unworthy of respect and reverence.  That's the harm; that's the excuse for destructive violence.