Not Even Not Zen 294: Biomythography - Note 44, Through the Ice, Part II

Biomythography 44

Through the Ice, Part II

Joe agreed to move fifty yards east to play along Piney Branch Creek.  We peered into all the holes that might hide snakes.  We dug out two of them.  It took an hour.

He was right about our chances, though.  In the winter, snakes were rare. They only came out on the warmest of days. This wasn’t one of those. We bothered the fish in the water by trying to catch guppies. We skipped stones across the water.  We ranged up and down the river banks, pulled out sedimentary rocks, slithered partway into water pipes, and dared each other to walk across fallen trees above the water.

Eventually, the sun overhead told us the time was past noon.  Our stomachs agreed.  After we started to head back, Joe took notice of the pond again.  It was just sitting there, looking trustworthy, pathetic, and lonely for his company.

“Come on!” he yelled as he ran to the frozen surface and used his hard-worn, smooth-soled Keds to skate a few yards.

I had been reading children's adventure books about life in the wild.  They all dwelled on how falling through ice-covered lakes into frigid water would lead to a quick death.  The stories added an extra thrill of fear to my school films and scout training sessions.  Nevertheless, I joined Joe on the frozen pond.  This time, I felt bold enough to skate across the thickest, whitest sections.  These were the parts of the pond where I'd seen adults jump and land during skating session the week before.  I trusted them.  They covered the darkest depths of the water but, importantly, they didn't make noise under me.

We drifted and skimmed over the icy patches for a while.  Once or twice, we tried sliding our whole bodies.  The surface started to groan again.  I scrambled away from the weakest, most see-through sections.  In other places there were dirty puddles on the frosty covering and I avoided those, too.  Joe noticed.

"You're scared of the ice!" he shouted.

"It's cracking!" I called back.  With that, I headed for the north edge.  It was the best spot to head for home.  "We should go."

"We've been all over it."  He picked out a weak section and skated through.  "There's nothing wrong."

He aimed for another transparent sheet, one in the center of the north half of the water.  He skated into it.  He drifted to a stop.  Suddenly, he looked up at me.  He'd felt something.  

The surface exploded.  The noise, all by itself, made me flinch.  Around Joe, bits flew up like broken glass. Plates of the pond ice rose up around him, too, much bigger and more impressive than the barely-visible specks.  The ice plates dumped him into the center.  He disappeared into the hole they left behind.  

"Joe!" I yelled.  My feet took me out onto the ice.  There were huge cracks in it now, most of them leading to where my friend had gone.

"Help!"  Joe's head bobbed to the top of the water.  "Help!  Pull me out!"

There was no one else around to make a human chain.

Joe continued to scream.  For a minute, I ran around the shore looking for big tree branches.  I got the biggest I could find and dashed back with it to let Joe grab on.  I slipped as soon as I hit the ice.  The fall hurt but I didn't break the thick, white ice.  I didn't break the branch, either.  I scrambled to my feet and shimmied forward as close to Joe as I could.

He continued to scream.  He flailed at the ice floes around him.  He was making progress, in a way.  The hole in the ice was bigger because he kept breaking off sections of it in his hands.  I watched as he tried to heave himself back onto the frozen surface.  Another piece broke off, bigger than his whole body.  He sank with it for a second.  Then he bobbed back up.

"Here!  Can you grab on?"  The tip of the branch didn't come close, no matter how much I extended my arm.

"You've got to come out farther!" he yelled.

The ice was popping under me.  Water lapped up around my toes.  Where had it come from?  I didn't know.  My shoes were soaked through.  This didn't seem smart.

"You've got to swim to the branch!" I countered.

"I can't!"

After he tried to swim and didn't get far, he started to scream, not at me but at everyone, everything.  He hung onto the west edge of the ice hole and cried at the top of his lungs.

I remembered what the instructor said about there not being much time.  I threw down the branch where it was.  Maybe it would be good for someone bigger than me.  Then I skated as fast as I could for the edge.

"I'm going to get someone!" I vowed.  It was a long way to find any people, though.  

I put my head down and ran from the pond in a diagonal across the borders of the horse obstacle course all the way to the road. I ran until the world changed color, brighter, as I got out of breath. To my surprise, when I lifted my head, I saw someone walking on the side of the road.

It was John.  

“He’s fallen through the ice!” I yelled at him.

“Have you seen Joe?”  He grumbled, looming big and strong as he marched in his tense gait.

“It’s him!  He’s fallen through!”  Finally, I reached him.  I couldn't stop moving or huffing for more air.  I started hopping from one foot to the other.

“My mom wants him," John growled.  For the first time, I really looked at his face.  He looked more than irritated.  "He’d better not be in the woods.”

“He’s on the pond.  He's in the pond!  He’s in the water.”

John frowned.  “It’s too cold for that.”

“He’s going to die!  We have to make a human chain!”

Finally, my panic got through John's initial annoyance.  He didn't like being sent to look after Joe, especially since his brother had a habit of hiding or getting deliberately lost.  He'd been given the job of assistant parent without any pay or benefits.  But it was definitely his job.  His back straightened.  He studied me for an instant.

“Show me,” he said.

I had already turned back toward the pond.  Now I started to run.

Even before we got to the water, we could hear Joe.  We could see his head, too, as it bobbed above the muddy surface. Although I was running as hard as I could, John galloped by.  My vision turned spotty.  I had been moving at my top speeds for so long, I was starting to faint.  I tripped and fell before John reached the pond.  When John first put a toe on the ice, though, it cracked.  He stopped.

“Just climb out, Joe!” he yelled.  His voice had the power to cut through Joe's wailing.  “I can’t get you.  The ice is too thin.”

"I can’t," Joe cried.  His arms slapped at the edges of the ice.  He was continuing to enlarge the hole but he wasn’t getting out.

I staggered closer to crouch by the pond and try to catch my breath.  I was watching John watch his little brother flail for twenty seconds.  It seemed like a long time.  Joe looked weaker than he had after he'd fallen in.  He'd lost his hat.  His winter jacket had puffed up and elongated an inch or two in the sleeves, like it was losing shape.

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” said John.  He let out a deep sigh.  Then, with a look of steely determination he started to march across the ice.

The ice broke under him.  John almost slipped and fell. After a second of hesitation, he stared at the pond beneath his feet and stomped.  He put his boot through to the bottom. Where he was, in the shallows, the water was only a foot deep.

To me, it was like he was walking on water. Even Joe shut up about dying for a moment and stared open-mouthed at his brother.

Stomp, crack, fall.  Stomp, crack, fall. Each step that John took ended with a crunch on the level below, as if he was encountering a layer of ice at the bottom of the pond or maybe he was crushing the surface ice into a layer of semi-frozen silt.

With increasing anger and irritation, John thundered across the tiny lake.  The water got deeper and deeper, up to his waist, up to his chest.  He cracked the ice with his knees. He pushed floes to the side with his stomach. At chest height in the brown water, he grabbed his younger brother by the arm and shirt collar.

“Shut up,” he said, because his brother had started to howl again.

Horribly, the path back to the shore had filled up with ice floes.  It looked like a frozen surface.  John surveyed the obstacles in his way with a determined eye.  He smacked ice with his arms as he waded back.  He brushed away the small floes.  When he got to a big patch of fresh ice, the water came up only to his knees.  He stomped his way through it like he'd done on the way out.

Next to him, Joe was pale and blue.  

John set his brother down on his feet.  He looked intently, deeply into Joe's eyes.

"What are you going to tell mom?" he said.

"H-h-hot bath."  Joe's blue lips trembled.  "I need a bath."

"You fell in the creek," John announced.  "Or don't say anything.  Just go and change.  Get in the bath.  If she asks questions, tell her you fell."

"O-o-okay."  Joe would have agreed to anything.

John made Joe walk a few steps.  When Joe stopped, John pushed.  Joe clearly wanted to be carried but his older brother, just as clearly, didn't want to do the carrying.

"Were you playing on the pond after I told you not to go near the water?" John asked.

"Y-y-yeah."

"You two are idiots."  John spared a glance for me.  Joe and I stared at him, open-mouthed.  Joe bowed his head a moment later.  He huddled as he walked, then as he tried to run for home.  He kept shivering.  John stalked behind him, angry, steaming, and about half as wet, which was plenty.

#

In retrospect, the pond was no more than seven feet deep anywhere.  It was probably no more than four and a half feet where Joe fell through.  We were pretty small kids at the time, though.  And we panicked.

We made everything way, way worse with our panic.

Sometimes things are not as dangerous as they seem but we make them deadlier with our bad reactions.  John, who at the time I regarded as a bully, looks to me now like a put-upon older brother.  He understood the situation better than Joe or I did.  The two of us who were younger treated the tiny, artificial lake as if it were bottomless.  Because that was wrong, I think Joe could have flailed until he froze.  He didn't understand that a different sort of struggle might have helped.  Or maybe it wouldn't.   

Sometimes the best thing to do is simply be brave and determined to do what is right.  That was John.

Another lesson, I guess, is that sometimes your brother can’t stand you. But he still loves you.  And he is willing to risk himself to save you.  And he will.

Not Even Not Zen 293: Biomythography - Note 43, Through the Ice, Part I

Biomythography 43

Through the Ice, Part I

I was seven. Joe was eight. It was a winter day.

The half-foot of snow that had covered the ground on the weekend before was gone. Each morning and each evening, everything around us had melted and refrozen. This morning we saw it had happened again. The puddles in our yards had turned to ice. The grass turned greenish after a couple hours. By late morning, the soil alternated between feeling frozen solid and being spongy, dark and wet. 

Joe and I tried to play games inside, then outside, and eventually decided to do his favorite thing. We went to explore the creek. Permission from Joe’s mother came easy. She usually wanted her kids to make themselves scarce and his father liked to work at the University of Maryland on the weekends. Joe's father studied insects for a living, a profession I could only vaguely comprehend. 

 

I understood that Joe loving snakes was somehow related to his father’s job, though. Every trip in the woods ended up as a search for snakes.

That day, Joe and I hiked up Metzerott Road on the east end. This was a land where no cars ventured even though they could. The only destinations were vacant sections of the public park. We passed the baseball fields and the horse obstacle course. We passed the fishing pond to our right. At this time of year, it was also the skating pond.

The pond had been made when construction workers cut back trees to build our park sections. Someone among them had had the foresight to dig out a pond with an island. Although it was bigger than a baseball diamond and looked planned, it had been an unofficial accomplishment. It didn't appear on park maps. The water in it was shallow enough to freeze over for a month or two, when it became the neighborhood ice-skating rink.

Every winter, the neighbors would check the pond as it iced. When the surface was thick enough for use by adults, the neighborhood agreed it was allowed for children, too. Then scores of people would skate along the natural rink. Anyone who could find the pond and tie on skates was welcomed or at least not driven away, not even if they came from miles off. Some did.

Everyone skated with more or less equal skill. No one knew how to do any tricks more impressive than a figure eight and even then, most of those were done by teenage girls of a certain age and stylishness. They dressed like Peggy Fleming and skated as much like her as they could. Men and young boys, if they skated at all, met at the pond to rough-house on the ice or to play pick-up hockey games.

When Joe and I passed the pond that Saturday, we noticed the frozen glaze on top of it. A week earlier, we had been allowed to skate. We wanted to keep on doing it but my parents gave me a definite no.

"It's not safe," my mother said.

"Didn't you take the scout safety course?" my father asked me. "The den leader said you did."

In school and in scouts, I'd watched safety films on the dangers of falling through ice. They were dramatic in a black-and-white documentary sort of way. The voice-overs sounded authoritative. The holes in the ice looked wide and deep. Moreover, in the scouts, they showed us how to form a human chain. We practiced being heroic rescuers. We linked hands to ankles like in our film so we formed a human ladder of sorts lying horizontal across the ice, which was played in our drill by the den mother's beige carpet. When we used this method, our safety instructors told us, we wouldn't fall through the ice and we stood a good chance of rescuing someone who had.

 

"But it's still not safe," warned one instructor, who may have been married to our den mother.

"Follow the instructions of the nearest adult," added our den mother.

"Or the oldest kid." The instructor put his hands on his hips and shrugged. There weren't always adults around and he knew it. "You don't have much time. A few minutes, at most, when the water is near freezing."

In the films, schoolchildren lay themselves across the white expanse until the biggest and oldest of them reached a hole in the dark water.

 

“Let’s try it,” said Joe, meaning he wanted to test the warmed-up ice on our neighborhood pond. I opened my mouth to object. He ran to the edge of the water and slid a few feet across the slick surface. It crackled beneath him. I glanced down. Parts of the ice were transparent.

“My mom said no,” I reminded him. I put one foot onto the surface. It emitted a hollow sound. No cracks appeared, though.

"It's still fine!" Joe skated for three yards on his tennis shoes. Right over the deep parts. The ice made popping sounds but still no cracks developed.

“Your brother said no way.” His brother, John was eleven. Among the neighborhood kids, he was a figure of authority. He got as much respect as an adult.

John had brown hair, not red like Joe. He had muscles instead of being skinny. In all, John seemed like he had always been a much tougher boy than his brother. He also, it seemed to me, picked on Joe an unreasonable amount. When Joe complained or shirked on a job or just kept laughing and playing instead of listening, John hit him.

When I tried to intercede on Joe’s behalf, I discovered that John was effectively made of iron as far as my seven year old body was concerned. He would start pushing Joe down, and I would run in to fight. An elbow or even a mere shrug from John would send me flying. 

Once, we younger kids had wandered into the bedroom that Joe and John shared. We saw John was jumping off the top bunk onto the back of his neck and rolling flat. He was doing it deliberately to test his own toughness.

"I want to try," I said. I'd watched it twice. It looked fun, the way John did it.

"Absolutely not," he intoned. He hardly even looked at me.

"Why not?"

"Your neck is a matchstick," he replied.

I tried to come up with arguments in response. He refused to hear any. Except, oddly, he tried to persuade Joe to try the trick. Joe was a year older and his neck wasn't any stronger than mine, so it seemed odd. But John wanted Joe to be tougher.

"You've got to be strong, Joe," he said. "You've got to. You have to stop wimping out at things."

Maybe that was why, unlike the other big kids in the neighborhood who pummeled me when I came to Joe’s defense, John seemed to respect the fact that I was trying. Except for once, when I punched him in the nose, he seemed to think that my defense of his brother was proper. He still wasn’t going to permit it. But he made a sort of allowance that was the right thing for a friend to try.

"You two are idiots," he told us eventually. "Get out of here."

"It's my bedroom too," pointed out Joe. 

John gave him an annoyed look and stepped toward us. We ran.

We had seen John on that winter morning, too. He had been playing catch in one of the neighborhood yards. He'd noticed us. He’d ordered Joe to stay away from the water. He'd laid on an additional warning against getting lost in the woods. Their mom might want everyone home for lunch and John didn't want to come looking.

"You brother said don't do anything stupid," I told Joe.

"You're scared of the ice, aren't you?" Joe teased.

"It makes sounds, Joe." When it was thick, it never made a noise.

"It's fine." He ran, hopped, and glided for another couple yards to prove his point.

He kept playing on the ice. I kept sliding around the edges near the shore. The surface stopped making weird sounds but I couldn't bring myself to completely trust it. Inspired by a thought, I tried to lure Joe away from the pond.

"Come on, let's go look for snakes," I said.

"There won't be any. It's too cold." He knew what I was trying to do.

"But that's even better if we find them. We can bring them home and your parents will let you keep them. You said so." Joe had acquired knowledge on how to resuscitate hibernating snakes and he was eager to try it out.

“Yeah,” he breathed. His eyes got a faraway look.

Through the Ice, Part II

Not Even Not Zen 292: Love 2023

by Kgbo via Wikimedia Commons

Valentine Press Release: Love Version 11

Special Reporting by Secret Hippie

A Word to Our Users

from All Powerful Software Products

The Newest Release of Love (TM)

Product History

Love 1.0: By today's hardware standards, there were many deficiencies in the first release of Love, a product designed entirely with the New Parent market in mind. It was a strong, basic operating system -- completely adequate for its time -- but it has grown tremendously since. It should be noted that Love's basic foundation was solid, as has been proven over many years and billions of customers.

Love 1.1: Several features were added due to early consumer demand. These included Love for Pre-Adolescents, Love for Seniors, Love for Siblings, and Love for In-Laws and Other Relations.

Love 1.2: Due to complaints from users with special, problem In-Laws, patches were added to the 1.1 version code in attempt to fix the unsatisfactory situation.

Love 1.4: Love for Pets was introduced and became an instant hit. This popular feature has been carried forward in all releases. Further patches to the In-Laws code were issued.

Love 2.0: Critics applauded the new, friendlier interface for Love, which divided the program into five sections: Agape, Eros, Narcissus, Familia, and Platonia. Users found it easier to get all sorts of Love. This was the version which made the product a household word. There were, however, system crashes caused by certain users attempting to make the product achieve things the designers did not anticipate.

Love 2.02: Patches to the 2.0 code were installed to prevent affection crashes under unusual circumstances.

Love 2.03: An Arranged-Marriage module was added. Love for Pre-Adolescents was extended to cover adolescents.

Love 2.1: A same-sex "lifelong" feature was added. The In-Laws section was re-coded and renamed the Extended Familia module.

Love 2.3: This release was issued by mistake. (The version number is unofficial.) A tool in it featured several programmer shortcuts which, when abused by inexperienced Lovers, often resulted in complete affection destruction. It was briefly popular. Pirate copies of this version still exist.

Love 3.0: Single parents greeted this release with joy at the new Step Parents feature in Agape. This module (still recognized as superbly written, despite competitors' attempts to offer alternative arrangements in the same market) is in use in its original form in the most recent release. Unfortunately, this particular Love sold poorly and had to be pulled from circulation due to difficulties in the interface.

Love 3.1: Errors in interface design were fixed in response to customer complaints. A move toward standardization of the hardware situation (in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas) made stable code seem within reach to our programmers. The drive toward "perfect" code started.

Love 3.2: A safety feature was added to prevent Lovers from disfiguring themselves (a common occurrence with affection engines at the time). Additional safety features are now available in Love but no product can be perfectly safe. Caution with affections is always advised.

Love 3.3: Despite some inadequacies with respect to modern hardware, this version of Love has proven very robust; it was the result of the attempt (now recognized as impossible) to create perfect code. In fact, 3.3 is still in use in many regions of the globe. This was the most popular release of Love, partly due to pirate copies. All of the main features for which Love is famous are present in 3.3, though some special tasks may prove unreasonably difficult to achieve. Upgrade from this version is strongly recommended.

Love 4.0: The evolution of the user environment prompted an entirely new look at the Love operating system. Hardware began to last longer and require more intricate management. The Eros and Familia sections had to be modified. Twenty-three new modules were added in an attempt to supply Love to "expandable" systems designed to stand the tests of time. The overall package was revolutionary. Unfortunately, some copies (no one knows how many) of 4.0 were released with a virus.

Love 4.01: A patch was added in the form of basic virus-protection. This protection, it should be noted, is now regarded as inadequate in today's volatile environment. All Powerful corporation urges users to upgrade or to buy third-party protection if they intend to continue running any outdated release.

Love 4.1: The Extended Familia feature was disabled. A Distance Relationship package was offered in its place. (Mapping functions and travel recommendations were included.)

Love 4.4: A special War-Time Love edition. Very rare. Included are all the familiar Love features but the sum total was repackaged and offered to service families at a lower price. One notable change was the Distance Relationship module, which was expanded to include all possible permutations at the time (a feat made possible by the brilliance and dedication of war-time programmers and engineers). Distance Relationships are still an important affection market and Love is still its overriding provider.

Love 5.0: This is one of a handful of versions considered to be “classic.” It is very stable in most of its features. The new, completely-revised In-Law module failed under certain hardware configurations.

Love 5.03: This is the free upgrade version distributed to purchasers of Love 5.0. Special handlers in the In-Law module prevent most crashes. Some of the code in this section works slowly. Users are advised to be patient with In-Laws.

Love 5.5: In this edition, a special Commuter module was added to the Distance Relationship package. Contrary to popular rumor, this module was not 'stolen' from the Traveling Salesman package offered by a rival company. (Note: the company in question is no longer in existence. Love has acquired the Traveling Salesperson responsibility.)

Love 6.0: With changes in hardware becoming more frequent, Love stepped up to the speed challenge.

Love 6.1: Special Love Compression software arrived. With heart space at a premium, code reduction schemes allowed for the queuing and unpacking of various emotions necessary to run the new, more-complete In-Laws module. The lack of necessary affection channels in most hardware kept these modules from being practical before.

Love 6.2: Due to lawsuits involving the Love Compression engine, this version shipped without it. The In-Law module available in 6.1 continued to be offered but with a special disclaimer in the setup program as to the extra space needed to house the unpacked code.

Love 99: This release presented a radical change from previous versions. Lovers benefited from a smoother interface. Allegations arose that the look and feel were unfairly similar to the Adore (now iAdore) package. Fortunately, court decisions sided with the Love designers. The All Powerful interface to emotions continued to grow.

Love XL: A new generation of lovers required extra large devotion with additional features. As a bonus, the Love XL package came with the ability to troll for compliments at leading social sites like MyPassion.

Love Visa: Designers allowed for an improvement in touch interface. However, this version did not perform well with the newest generation of hardware. In this release, the company lost market share to iAdore.

Love 7.0: This release achieved “classic” status in the opinions of many reviewers. The new Love Expander module competed strongly with iAdore and won back market share. Thanks to a more efficient Nepotism affection engine, the In-Laws module cemented its hold in business relationships.

Love 8.0: In the era during which MyPassion gave way to LikeFace and gSpot, Love concentrated on reaching out via phones.

Love 8.1: Improvements arrived to Love telecommunications. Many of those found their way into traditional Love hardware. Popular business apps like Quickie and LinkedUp stimulated offices around the globe. Games like HeartRace and Lovey Birds made everyone's pulse beat faster. The developers made antivirus protection part of the standard Love feature set.

Love 10: Love was everywhere. Most especially, it was in the air with LoveCloud. As demanded by our business customers and as a free add-on feature for our single Lovers (with a small monthly maintenance charge), a new wave of technology arrived to spread Love even farther. With LoveCloud, affections grew shared more widely and more securely. Customers used LoveCloud in business, during official and recreational travel, and at home.

Love 10.1: Cumulative patches to the LoveCloud service allowed for more security. Users reported the benefits to having their Love tracked more precisely. Among them, advertising associated with affections grew more targeted.

Love 10.2: Some governments tracked forbidden affections too closely and, with this version, LoveCloud became unavailable in some nations and in some parts of the United States.

Love 10.3: Love as a service grew even more popular in this version. Terms of service changed. With this release, unsubscribing required a call to All Powerful to explain more fully. This was for the benefit of the service and other customers. 

Love 11: Introducing LoveAI! 

 

All Powerful corporation has heard the call of the public for Artificial Love. We acquired the LoveChat engine, which we have combined with our powerful LoveCloud to form our LoveAI service. LoveCloud (TM) now offers more intelligent matching, fun catfish games, special distance add-ons, premium services, and custom writing. The chat function is so good you may no longer be able to tell whether or not you're in love with a non-person! But you definitely are in Love! 

Anyway, the special person in your life deserves a handwritten, individual card. Does anyone care if it wasn't written by you personally? Almost certainly not. The LoveAI can take your ideas (or even a sketch) and generate cards that you would have written if you'd expended more effort. This service is available even in the basic package!

FreeLove is Not All Powerful

 

As always, we must issue this disclaimer: You may have heard of an open source product called FreeLove, originally produced by a former employee of ours using many modules of our original code. This hobbyist product is under legal dispute and it is not covered under All Powerful terms of use. It is strictly an imitation. You should be warned there have been complaints about the FreeLove line of affections. FreeLove has many design flaws and bugs in implementation. Of course, it is free and you may think it is a good bargain until it ruins some important relationship. Remember that you end up paying for what you get.

Not Even Not Zen 291: Poem - Longest Night

For Diane at Yule 2022

Put down your burden, rest your pack.

Straighten up your tired back.

All the things that you're achieving

Can rest upon the longest evening.

Ease your worries, smooth your smile.

Close your eyes a little while.

Take my hand and sit with me.

Rest beneath the green fir tree.

A pause to breathe, a moment to drink,

Time to look into a fire and think.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow we will lift our loads

and keep our promises

and hike our roads.

Not Even Not Zen 290: Biomythography - Note 42, Hating to Sing, Part II

Biomythography 42

Hating to Sing, Part II

Outside, the world was windy, cold, and wet. My parents didn't care to make me do chores. My brothers had been left to play. And so we had. We had battled each other in cribbage and rummy for hours. But the youngest had left the game. My middle brother wanted to read. Fortunately, I found there was going to be a Nova special I wanted to watch. I tossed down the curled-over TV guide and knocked on the door next to my bedroom.

Our house had two televisions. That Sunday, my father chose to watch Gunsmoke re-runs downstairs in the smoke-filled haze of his combination library and recreation room, which lay next to my bedroom. The air around him was so thick he couldn't see his show but it didn't matter. He didn't look up from his crossword puzzle. He'd seen every Gunsmoke episode dozens of times. He wouldn't let me switch to the Nova special.

"Not interested," he said. "Anyway, you've seen that one."

 

He wasn't curious to see a re-run of the Six Million Dollar Man, either, or the Muppet Show. It was too early in the day to lure him into Kojak or the Rockford Files, so I headed upstairs to the living room. There, to my surprise, I found my mother watching television.

"What is this?" I gestured to everything in the room. My mother never watched this television without my father's presence. She always worked outside instead.

"It's a rebroadcast of Pavarotti in an opera," my mother explained. She had a brunch tray in front of her, mostly finished. "I've been looking forward to it. I missed it when it was live. It's pretty good."

"Nova is doing a special on star formation."

"You can see it later. I'm watching this." Her tone was final.

For a while, I wandered around the house, banging on surfaces to have something to do, eating cereal, and eventually pulling cheese slices out of the fridge. I peered into my brothers' rooms as I ate cheese. One was asleep. One was reading.

I grabbed a tangerine and sat down on the couch in front of the upstairs television. As far as the house rules went, I was allowed to listen to classical music and to big band music if I could stand it. Radio shows from the 1940s were pretty much mandatory. Opera was permitted with the idea that it was classical. My father didn't care for it, though. I'd seen a ballet (well, I'd slept through four) but I'd never seen an opera performance.

We had an album of the H.M.S. Pinafore, which was passable enough, but no one referred to it as opera.

Partway through peeling the tangerine, I started to hate what I was hearing. Pavarotti looked like he was supposed to be playing someone young and poor but he was about two hundred pounds heavier than he should have been. He bellowed about the weather for a few minutes. He went on about an apple or a ribbon, too, or some other prop. The other actors pretended to chuckle for him. Everyone's acting was so bad that, aside from the fake laughter, I generally couldn't tell what emotion they were hoping to portray.

That was it for "La Bohème" and for all of opera, forever and ever as far as I was concerned. I grabbed another copy of the TV guide and thumbed through it. I noticed the Nova show would get repeated on a different PBS station in an hour. I could kill the time by re-reading science fiction books, probably. Or I could thumb through the library shelves and find something that had looked boring the first two hundred times. Sometimes it looked okay the next time.

Most of the hour, I spent in silence. I secluded myself in the back corner of my room, far away from the noisy televisions and the billows of cigar smoke as I read my books.

"Is that Nova?" I asked when I came upstairs. I'd gotten lost in the cheap novels so I was a few minutes late for my show.

I got no answer. I was in the kitchen, where my voice sometimes didn't reach my mother or where other people could pretend not to hear. I ambled into the living room. There, in front of the TV set, sat mom with a plate of cheese and fruit. She was watching an opera. For a moment, I thought it was the same one. I asked myself how long operas ran. But no, the guide had said this one would end before Nova.

"The cast looks different." The music sounded different, too.

"It's a better opera," said my mother. "This woman is a gypsy."

"Ugh." She had never watched opera before. It seemed horribly unfair, from my perspective as a perpetually-bored teenager, that my parents should take up new, even more boring hobbies. They enforced more than enough tedium already.

There on the living room carpet, I glowered at everything. I scowled at my mother. I cast mental balefire at the television. For a while, I listened to Carmen. My mother was right. It was better. But I wasn't going to be seduced. I made up my mind to oppose this somehow. Enough with the fancy arts. Enough ballet. Enough opera. Enough slow, repetitive big band music.

Then Carmen started singing a new song. It was the best piece I'd heard in my limited opera experience. It was called the Habanera and the vocalist was fantastic as dancer and an actor. I'd made up my mind, though. I took a deep breath and swelled up my grudge against all of life. Then I began singing. Angry and fifteen and no vocalist at all, I made up lyrics as I went,

This song is boring.

It isn't Nova.

I should be learning

about star formations.

It's really boring.

Did I say boring?

Because it's boring

It's so very boring.

I kept it up, a deliberately awful parody, and my mother ignored me for a whole minute, maybe two. The actress in Carmen was so good. The music enchanted my mother. Finally, though, she snapped.

"If you don't like it, leave!" she shouted. "Go on! Get out!"

Still sulking and actually, still singing, I stomped from the living room to the dining room, where I bumped into my middle brother.

(An aside: Nowadays, when people ask me if my kids were difficult because they cut themselves up or got in a fight or argued about doing their homework, my answer always seems to go through a comparison of things like this I did and much worse things I did, too, when I was their age. So I usually reply with something like, 'meh, they're probably better than I was.')

When I say I bumped into my brother, I mean literally. He moved into my path, not out of it, and he had no problem with physical contact. He didn't seem as angry as I was, or as bored. He'd probably been hungry and helped himself to another peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He'd been grazing on them all day. In fact, he did dodge a little at the last second. His gaze on me was wide-eyed and intent. His mouth fell open.

"What do you want?" I asked.

I moved past him into the kitchen. He followed me. His expression seemed even more focused, like a haunted child from a movie who hasn't got anything else to do but stare.

"Well, what?" I said.

"I think," he said as he blinked away some of the puzzled, unbelieving look in his eyes, "that you were singing."

"Huh." Come to think of it, I had seemed to be hitting the same notes as the woman in the opera. Well, an octave lower, maybe.

"Do it again."

"You're crazy." I pushed him on the arm, partly because he was reaching out to me and I wanted to keep him back with his weird, overly-intent expression but partly, too, because I worried that I had sung only once in my life. It seemed unlikely that I could ever do it again.

"Can you?"

"I don't want to."

"But can you?"

"Of course," I lied. My mind reeled a few minutes back in time to what Carmen had been singing. Her syllables were like notes on the piano. I could imitate the notes. Better yet, I could make fun of them. That was the thing. I'd forget that I couldn't do it as long as I kept being insulting, as long as I was pulling a scam by pretending to sing. Only pretending. All I had to do was parody Carmen and poke fun at my mother. I could do that.

"La da da dee dah, la da dee dah." I started dancing like a gypsy woman. My brother laughed. It was working. "La da da dee dah da dee dum dum dum."

"I've never heard you sing," my brother said quietly.

"La da da dee dah, la da dee dah. La da da dee dah da dee DAAAAH da dum!" I pretended to blow him a kiss even more exaggerated than the actress had done. He made a grimace-smile because he knew I was trying to be funny but he didn't necessarily agree that I was. I had to admit to him, "I didn't know I could do this."

"You couldn't last year."

"Yeah." Maybe he had heard me chanting into the forest. Or maybe while he was in my room, I'd tried to accompany a pop song on my transistor radio and he had been a reluctant witness.

"But now you can sing."

"Yeah." It was a weird change to acknowledge. "I guess I can."

#

Making fun of bad music was the only way I dared to perform for about a year. Parodies were how I could sing in front of other people.

Satires of opera led me to a similar mocking of the Bee Gees, which led to me wailing like Led Zeppelin, which led to me deliberately mangling Grease. However, lots of teenaged girls liked the musical Grease and didn't enjoy me making fun of it. Anything that made girls frown, I shut down pretty fast. Eventually, I loosened up and sang to Abba hits along with the girls. That made guys frown but I wasn't trying to kiss them so they were welcome to scowl until their faces broke apart or we could fight about it.

One thing led to another. A high school director asked me to sing in a musical. I started working my way through college and found an opera coach who directed a choir and liked my voice enough to stand me next to his star (who went on to be a professional performer in operas, as I later saw in the newspapers).

In another college, still trying to hold jobs and manage to get through it all, I sang with a more contemporary chorus. We did complicated pieces (four P.D.Q Bach cantatas were my first) but they were fun. When I was tired of the bass parts, I decided to make my voice transition from low to high like Freddy Mercury. I had mixed success but it was just enough for the director to move me to baritone, then second tenor, and to occasionally give me solo lines. Over the span of a few years, she gave me the impression that she trusted me to sing.

Not Even Not Zen 289: Biomythography - Note 41, Hating to Sing, Part I

Biomythography 41

Hating to Sing, Part I

When I was nine, I moved myself to the middle of my elementary school chorus. There were twenty-six of us standing on a grey carpet in front of three rows of wooden chairs. Sunlight through the side window made us squint. I máde my spot in the angle of shade given to us by a curtain. I could almost hide in it. But I couldn't sing. When I tried, the sounds came out wrong. I couldn't hold a tune. I hunched low in my school uniform shirt, collar high, head bowed, my voice a sigh. What I wanted most was for the teacher not to notice. My next thought was for Leslie, the girl I liked. I hoped she couldn't hear how I sounded. I tried to keep my distance from her but sometimes she tried to stand next to me.

The most frustrating part was that, two years before, I thought I could sing. When I'd chanted "Coming Round the Mountain" as a seven year old, grown-ups seemed to like it. The music teacher smiled at me, the only boy doing his part at normal volume. I ‘had promise.’ Then things started going wrong. The songs got harder. My voice got inconsistent.

In fifth grade, as part of the inconsistency, I saw I didn’t hurt anyone with "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog." On the other hand, I made the adults in the room wince when I tried "Cherokee Woman." For the school play, I could sort of serenade the audience with "One Tin Soldier." When the next piece came up, I had to mouth the words and whisper. I closed my eyes so I wouldn't see my own terrible acting. 

The worst part was the music teacher giving me looks of exasperation. On more than one occasion, she stopped conducting and stared in my direction with her hands on her hips. She knew I could play this stuff on the piano. She wanted to know why couldn't I sing it. And I had no idea. After a few years of inconsistent hymns and harmonies, I left elementary school behind. That was the end of my performances, which was a huge relief. No one ever asked me to do it again.

But secretly, I sang anyway. In the woods around my new home, alone and lonely, I wailed aloud to the burbling accompaniment of the creek, the cicadas, the frogs, and the wind through the tree boughs. I used no words for my completely-made-up stuff that was almost-but-not-quite music. Whatever I was doing created enough of a tune to carry my feelings. Sounds came out of my mouth, chants like I later heard from the Ojibwe tribe recordings of Sitting With The Turtle. Bellows poured forth from me, usually at dusk after a hard day. I sang in the deeps of the forest, where no one else could hear the melodies of the clouds, the spirits of the river, the deer, and the fox. No one witnessed my chants about the laughing soul of the crawdad-parts-littering raccoon.

That was the best way to let the feelings out. With no one hearing me.

One night when I was fourteen, I went to bed early, around ten, and woke up at eleven. I knew it was snowing outside. The storm had started at dinner time. I'd lain on the couch by the picture window in the living room and I'd stared up at it. The flakes were huge, bigger than my thumb, and they floated down like a parachute army. I wandered outside and stood without a jacket, gaping at the invading force. I crouched to the surface of the deck and ran my hand across two inches of settled sleet and ice. At the top, the snow felt soft.

The sight of the storm got me too excited to go back to sleep once I'd woken. Maybe I wouldn't have to go to school tomorrow, I thought. Then I could sleep in. For the moment, I could use my free time to read. 

Ninety minutes later, I'd finished my book, finished a stack of comics, and started to pace around my bedroom.  I searched for more reading. I cupped my hands to the glass pane and peered outside my basement window. A sheen of white glowed in the starry darkness. There were eight inches on the ground at least and the descent of the white flakes appeared to be relentless.

I stomped into the closet and pulled on my boots. I threw on my best jacket.

Ten minutes later, I was back inside. I had managed to avoid waking anyone but my clothes hadn't been adequate to the whirling snow. I didn't own a hat. Frozen flakes kept slipping down my neck. Some got under my tight, too-short t-shirt and down my pants. Shockingly, I had blundered into drifts that had gotten nearly two feet deep already, far above the protection of my springtime-ready rubber wading boots. I needed something better.

I loved my jacket. It was fur trimmed like the one Sylvester Stallone had worn in the Rocky movie. I imagined it made me acceptable to other teenagers. But it hung open wide at the collar. Its sleeves were wide, not tapered. It wasn't made for snow. I didn't have anything that was.

Except.

In the back of my closet, I found it. I swung everything else to the other end of the clothes rod and stared. My mother had bought this monstrosity out of a catalog. It was a real, genuine winter coat. It had a hood. No one I knew except my parents wore a hood or even a hat. The surface of the thing was nylon or something else plastic-like and shiny, and it was decorated in block-like shades of mustard and baby-poop brown with a sort of orangish trim. It came with thick, nylon mittens. Mittens. For adults. The surface was seamless.

I ran my right hand over it and felt its thickness.

No one would see me, I told myself. I would be in the dark, alone. I repeated the thought. Because I had to get out in the storm. I had to feel it around me.

A half-hour later, I was a mile away down by the creek. I was trying my best to get lost amidst the swirls of white-out snow, tromping in my double layer of wool socks, wading boots, extra jeans, two t-shirts, and the abominable snowman knock-off brand coat that draped down to the middle of my thighs in the most socially awkward way possible. I wore the hood I'd been sure no one would ever use pulled up over my head and tied down with brown nylon straps. I would have forgotten about what I was wearing except, every so often, I paused and found myself amazed to feel so comfortable. I hadn't known this was possible.

I'd already twice laid down in the snow just to be there. The unfashionable mittens felt better than the rest and put me in awe of how much better they were than my usual gloves. The hideous outfit was perfect. The forest was dark under the trees, though. If it weren't for the luminous, white carpet everywhere I'd have found it hard to navigate. 

As it was, I knew too well where every tree, every fallen branch, every stump, and every hidden rock lay. When I stepped on a random drift, I knew what depth of fallen leaves to expect in the crunch beneath. When I wandered out onto the rocks along the rapids, I knew the crayfish homes in the slow-moving pools and could study them by starlight. I stepped onto a snow-covered rivulet and laughed when my boot sunk into the frozen muck. It confirmed what I knew about the ugly world.

At one point, I got mad, I think because I was fourteen, and I started throwing snowballs at trees, turning over rocks, and breaking apart dead branches about the thickness of my arm but rotten. 

The forest remained quiet except for the hiss of falling snow. Every sound I made, every move, every grinding step echoed across the hard surface of the world. The defective log bark crumbled like mold in my hands. The wood crackled wetly as I bashed it apart. I got tired. I wandered closer to the creek. There, I sat on a rock overlooking the rushing water.

After a while, I began to sing.

The sounds came low and slow. I crooned a summons to the deer and the fox. I called to the raccoons who kept leaving their shellfish trash, to the one in particular I'd glimpsed, chubby and fast through the blackberries and underbrush. I chanted to the trees and hummed to the water. Five minutes was a long time to say anything out loud when I was fourteen. But when I paused, I became aware of some part of nature, a hiding animal or some other presence far off, listening. I sang again to reach those distant ears. Ten minutes, twenty, all slow and sad. And comforting. I knew the presence didn't want me to approach. But it was curious and paying me a sleepy sort of attention.

The snow that had started with the sunset continued to fall with flakes like quarters, like half-dollars, inch after inch, a blizzard somewhere else but not here in the forest, where there was no wind. The miles of treetops had reduced an awesome force of the world to a gentle spiral from above. I leaned back and sang to the twirling dust-devil that was dizzying itself down to me, to the bare tree branches, to the spirits of life and near-life.

There were no words. My voice gentled the loudness of the blizzard, the crackling of the millions of icy flakes hitting the forest floor cover. It harmonized to the creek racing along through the quick shallows, to the stray eddies of wind in the clearings, the tired brambles, the sleeping vines, the struggling willow tree on the riverbank, the pushy oaks knocking everything else over and jostling against each other. The crawfish tried to hide. But I sang to the distant presence, to the part that listened.

The world was perfect. It always was. I was the only imperfection. But no other human being could hear me. And I sang.

Not Even Not Zen 288: Biomythography - Note 40, When Encryption Was Illegal

Biomythography 40

Encryption Was Illegal, Punk

In the summer when I was sixteen, I made a friend lifeguarding at Williamsburg Square. His name was Adam. 

On the first day, we discovered we had a similar love for punk and new wave music. But we came from different backgrounds and knew different stuff about it. I had only mix tapes from the radio, where I had found WHFS playing songs by Bad Brains, Root Boy Slim, The Ramones, Gang of Four, Pere Ubu, and The Nighthawks. My recording quality was terrible. Adam had a paid-for collection, No Wave, with two songs I'd heard from Joe Jackson and the Stranglers but mostly it had tunes by bands I'd never heard before like The Police, Klark Kent, and U.K. Squeeze. We listened to Roxanne and Take Me I'm Yours until the other lifeguards screamed at us to stop.

We listened to those after the screaming, too. 

Adam revealed that he attended Gaithersburg High School. He had lots of stories about it. Coincidently, later that summer I discovered I was going to return to public school, probably at Seneca Valley. That meant we were going to attend rival schools. We laughed about it. 

Between the music and the high school stories, we shared job advice. Even though we both had our pool operators licenses and I had been a pool manager, it was illegal for us to be in those types of positions. You had to be eighteen to manage a pool in our county. That’s why we were working as regular lifeguards. We were waiting for the college kids to leave so we could take their jobs.

It was also against the county rules to have food on the deck of our pool, which is why I got nervous when Adam persuaded me to go halves on an extra large pizza. Our manager had taken off. Adam got me to say yes on the basis that we wouldn't get many chances when our managers were gone. So we ordered. The delivery man came. We ate. Against all odds, the county inspector arrived ten minutes later in a county inspection vehicle. Of course, we had no manager. 

We could see the car swing into the lot while we were eating pizza on the deck. Adam started wolfing his half down. I knew I couldn't finish. Nevertheless, Adam went to delay the inspector while I skulked to the back of the pool office and called the pool management company. Their phone rang.

“What should I do with the pizza box?” I asked while the line kept ringing.

“The trashcan.”

“There isn’t one.” There was no food allowed, so there wasn’t a need for one normally. 

“I don’t know," he hissed through a half-closed door. "Stuff it into a skimmer.”

The company didn't answer their office phone. Then I ran out, did a crap job with the box, and dashed back. When the inspector stepped into the guardhouse, I moved forward to talk with him. He demanded our certificates. Adam made his escape, however temporary, and he saw the edge of the pizza box I'd left poking out of the skimmer lid. He applied extra force to solve the problem.

After I delayed as long as I believably could with our paperwork and the chlorine test kit, the inspector pushed by us, clipboard in hand, and berated us for not having a legal pool operator on duty. Then he inspected the pool, testing the pH of the water and opening up the skimmers. 

He opened the first skimmer top easily. He opened the next. Then he stepped up to the one I'd crammed a pizza box into and pulled. The lid wouldn't come up. He grunted. He strained. He put down his test kit and used both hands. He popped the plastic lid off.

"Huh." He peered in. He put in his fingers and swished them around. "Not too bad."

Before he closed it, I strolled closer and peered in. No pizza box. Adam had moved it.

"Well, that's enough of that," said the inspector.

He switched to testing water in different places because we'd passed his first two attempts to find a violation. He never found the skimmer that was full of wet cardboard and crusts. We heaved a sigh of relief, agreed with the inspector that our pool manager was scum, and so was our management company, and so were we, and we agreed to shut down the pool. We waited a while after he left, opened back up, and returned to running everything in the illegal manner that earned us paychecks.

On the topic of job advice, mine to Adam was that being a pool operator was easier than being a lifeguard. Adam's advice was that the company had no damn choice but to make us managers when the college students were gone. And he was right. By the middle of August I was making more money than I ever had, twenty cents above minimum wage.

Even in the early fall, I kept in touch with Adam. I visited his house with my parents' rusty Ranch Wagon and I got acquainted with cereal in bright green, blue, or red boxes, almost all made from candied sugar that stayed crunchy even in milk. I saw bits of weird, new technology around his house. For one thing, Adam had a VCR next to the television. I'd read about them. I'd never seen one before. They weren’t popular enough to be in the news. Nevertheless, Adam’s parents owned a huge, top-loading steel model.

Then there was the TV service itself. Adam didn’t just have VHF and UHF reception and a VCR. His father had put a metallic dish on the roof of their house. He was able to pick up extra channels with it.

"He's just proving a point," Adam said. 

That seemed to be the case. The pictures on the screen were wonky, sometimes weirdly tilted, although I knew Adam could see all sorts of movies I couldn't, so I was impressed anyway. While I was there, I squinted into the occasionally slanted images and watched part of a Clint Eastwood film that had yet to be released to television. Adam got impatient. 

"Let's go," he said. We turned off the set and headed out. I didn't see satellite television again for months.

When I did notice it at Adam's house during one of my late fall visits, the service had changed. The signal from the satellite had been scrambled more effectively. I could see on the screen how the movies had gotten lost in snow. The receiver picked up no sound. I fiddled with the controls for a few minutes. Someone had changed the descrambler box, I thought. I traced the cables from it but I was afraid to move anything. I'd learned that satellites broadcast television signals to subscribers like hotels because the hotels can't get good reception in all rooms without a special carrier like a cable or satellite business. There were lots more subscribers than hotels but for all of them, they needed de-scrambling boxes from the carrier company. The boxes were essential.

“That’s illegal,” Adam’s father commented when he saw me looking at it. I turned. He was a big man with broad shoulders and a belly like a bowling ball. He had a head like one, too. But he was scowling at the equipment, I thought, not at me.

“Getting satellite service for free?” I asked.

“No, that’s goddamn legal." His voice often seemed angry and insistent. This time, though, his index finger got involved as he jabbed the air for emphasis. "They broadcast it everywhere. Anyone is allowed to pick up a signal if they can. That is the way the law works. It's the way radio signals work, too.”

“What's the illegal part then?”

“They're using encryption to scramble the signal. You have to be a subscriber and use the decryption box they give you to get the shows.”

“Scrambling the signal is illegal?” I was pretty sure it had been scrambled during the summer but Adam's family had descrambled it using the electronic hobbyist gear I didn't understand.

“No.” Adam's father got as exact as a physicist, which was appropriate since that was his job. “Every other kind of signal scrambling is legal except for the one they’re using. They're using encryption. And there is a law in the books that says only the military is allowed to do that.”

At the time, I had to take his word for it. Later, though, as personal computers got popular, I was able to research the history of encryption on FidoNet. There, other computer hobbyists verified the claims made by Adam’s father. They cited national laws. They debated the rules on encryption. The arguments raged on. 

Satellite businesses said the U.S. law about encryption exports didn't apply to them. They weren't sending the means of encryption or decryption out of the country. Everyone else pointed out that the satellite companies sold services to Canada and Mexico. Plus they were broadcasting their encrypted signals over the border. According to those folks, the satellite executives should go to jail. Even those people who thought satellite televisions broke the law, though, didn't necessarily think the law was right.

In an era when hardly anyone had access to a computer, amending the U.S. export regulations to treat encryption-capable devices like war technology made some sense. During the 1950s and 1960s, the rules must have seemed unremarkable. Then in the 1970s computers got smaller. Universities and colleges could afford more of them. Programmers got better at encryption. Keeping secrets got cheaper and better. Companies started to use cryptography to guard communications. 

In contrast, non-technical judges issued rulings that seemed to prohibit talking about cryptography. The courts treated encryption more and more like nuclear codes, which is something they understood. Lawyers took positions against thinking, essentially, or at least against doing certain kinds of very simple math. A lot of people outside the courts - like mathematicians - didn't like the way the rules were headed. The fight wasn't cooling down. It was getting hotter. Anti-encryption laws were coming up against the microcomputer revolution with all of its changes that made cryptography better. 

In the midst of all this, the satellite and cable television companies appeared to ignore the laws. At the very least, their actions pointed out how rules for large corporations and rules for individuals were proving to be enforced very differently. 

In 1989, the United States softened its stance against using cryptography for access controls and message authentication. Legislators kept encryption exports illegal but made cryptography acceptable. Finally, in 1992, the federal government added an exception in the export rules for use of cryptography and satellite television descramblers. 

Encryption had become legal. The lobbying efforts of the satellite and cable television companies paid off. They'd been breaking the law and claiming they weren't for fifteen years. Finally, they had gotten the law on their side. 

#

As far as I can tell:

In the late 1970s, satellites and cable television companies scrambled their signals with filters. They wanted to keep the customers' neighbors from watching shows on unscrambled signals. But their filter systems started breaking down pretty fast. Hobbyist magazines printed blueprints of the de-filtering boxes. Since determined television viewers could build their own, they didn't need to subscribe to the satellite or cable service to watch cool stuff.

The companies tried other techniques like inverting the signals or adding interfering signals to the video or audio. Hobbyist magazines caught on to those, too. Anything the businesses could make to de-scramble a signal for their customers, tinkerers could duplicate with time, patience, and a friend at Radio Shack.

In 1981, satellite television broadcasters brought out VideoCipher II, which had DES (Data Encryption Standard, a scheme designed to be broken by the NSA) at the heart of it. They encrypted the video to scramble it. This implies they used VideoCipher I even earlier, too. Adam's father was right. The businesses made their move to encryption a decade in advance of any changes to the law.

Not Even Not Zen 287: Biomythography - Note 39, Accused of Not Making It Up

Biomythography 39

Accused of Not Making It Up

When I was seven years old, I spent a day with my friend Richard. He was seven, like me, but with darker hair and glasses, and my visit was like a lot of others before and after. We played in his house for a while. His parents told us to play outside. We occupied ourselves, although not for long enough, and Richard's mother Mary revealed that we had plans. She drove us to the planned event.

I don’t remember the event and don't recall much from earlier in the day, either. The memorable moment, which was one of confusion and revelation, came during the ride back to Richard‘s home.

His family had a station wagon, the color of the trim fairly light. We were sitting in the back of it, maybe in seats that let us face each other. Or maybe we were lounging around and finding positions to talk. The sunlight was bright outside. After a while of looking through the contents of the seats and floor, we discovered we hadn’t brought enough to do on the ride. I decided to make up a story and tell it.

I’m not sure why. I'd been warned against it. However, I had recently written poems that appeared in a children’s magazine, so I might have felt encouraged to speak up. Also, something we had done or a remark from Richard, maybe both together, had given me a story idea. I thought I could tell it like my mother was reading to me from a storybook.

As I sat there with Richard and spun out the Aesop-like tale, I improvised events based on Richard's responses. He liked dinosaurs. So there was a dinosaur. There was a good boy. There was a mischievous boy to cause trouble. In a few minutes, I came to what seemed to me to be a funny and scary surprise ending. Telling it made me happy because it was like one of the kids' books I read. Those were toned-down versions of The Monkey's Paw or of Aladdin and the Lamp. With every victory, there had to be a catch, and I introduced one for the final outcome.

Before this, no one seemed to like the stories and poems I invented. This time, I got a unique response.

“Tell it again,” Richard said.

I stammered for a moment as I was trying to think why the request felt impossible. Then I decided to give it a try because he was my best friend. Right away, Richard called me out on an inconsistency in my retelling. I'd veered off to a different path of events. I remember realizing his objection was correct. If I kept on going, there would be no way to reach the same ending.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was making it up. I don’t think I can make it up the same way again.”

“You were not,” called Richard’s mother from the front seat. Mary's reaction was my realization that she had been listening to us. “You didn’t make up the whole story, did you?”

I had been accused of making things up many times. Often enough, if I were being pressed to give testimony against myself, it was true. I'd make up anything to escape consequences.

“Don’t make up stories,” my father warned me as he caught me in it every time.

“I think you are making up stories,” my grandmother would say in a similar situation, sometimes unfairly. 

This was the first time I could recall being accused of not making up a story. I'd even admitted beforehand that I was making it up. I didn’t know what to say. Mary could tell I'd fallen silent but her eyes were on the road. She started firing off questions. I tried to answer.

Her first thought to ask was about where I had read the story. But I hadn’t. Maybe, I ventured, it was like a kids' movie or something I'd seen on television. From the images in my head, the possibility sort of made sense to me. So Mary questioned me about TV programs. She included her son in the questions, too. Then she added more suggestions but we reached dead ends. The story hadn't come from kids' shows, cartoons, movies, or comic books. The only strong similarity was to the stories in an Aesop collection but my story hadn't been any of those. Mary's inquiries got gentler and gentler the longer her investigation continued.

“So." At a stoplight, she paused to take a different angle on the problem. She hit the gas pedal. "Do you remember the beginning of the story?”

After a bit of consideration, I told her what I thought was the beginning. She and Richard both remembered the actual starting phrase, though, and reminded me. I had to agree. They were right.

After a while, more quietly, Mary said, “I think you did make it up.” 

"Sorry," I said. "I won't do it again."

“No, no, you did a good job." Her voice grew higher and louder for a moment. Then she took a deep breath. "I didn’t mean to discourage you.”

Of course, lots of people did mean to discourage me, often in understandable circumstances. Apparently, at least one person was willing to allow me to make up stories, though.

"Does Ann know?" she asked. "I mean, does your mother know you make up stories?"

"Uh huh." She had been the one to send my poems to the kids' magazine, Kaleidoscope.

"Then she likes the stories. You're doing fine."

My clearest memory of the incident is almost precisely this moment. The horrible confusion beforehand, which you would think sticks out, doesn't. By itself, the panic would not have formed a lasting impression. After all, I spent a significant part of my childhood confused and upset. Another possibility, the paradox of being accused of not making up a story, didn't turn out to be unique, either. Little puzzles with little 'aha' moments are sort of frequent, anyway. When our lives turn on them, maybe they become important to us, but we have to realize their importance, too, or else we take a different direction in our lives without remembering why. We often don't remember, I think.

No, the lasting emotion was my sense of relief and of wonder as I witnessed an adult change her mind. And say so. That was the revelation, one of the ordinary but essential 'ahas' of my life.

 

Not Even Not Zen 286: Biomythography - Note 38, Driving the Morris Oxford

Morris Oxford Farina via Wikipedia

Biomythology Note 38

Driving the Morris Oxford

I was five years old, hot, and enjoying a cool breeze that circulated above me in the car.  My mother pulled into the Esso gas station on the north side of Greenbelt Road.  The avenue ran east to west, so it was an easy turn  off on her right.  She wasn't in her usual Ford Fairlane; she was driving my father's car, a Morris Oxford.

There were attendants in each Esso service lane. One of them jogged over to meet her as she got out of the car.  The young, curly-haired fellow wore a blue-gray jumper, his station uniform.  It zipped up the middle like an astronaut suit.  There was a dark, oval patch on the left side of his chest, which read 'Earl.'

“What can I do for you folks?” he asked.  He smiled at my mother and spared a glance for me in the car.

“Fill her up,” my mother replied automatically.

I had started out in the back seat but I unstrapped myself as soon as the car stopped.  While the grown-ups talked, I climbed between the bucket seats and tumbled into the driver side.

“Can I play?” I asked through the crack of the window before my mother could leave. By that I meant, could I rock the steering wheel back and forth and pretend to drive?  It's what I always did when she left.  Previously, we had a long talk about not honking the horn in parking lots because it wasn't polite.  I'd shown her I understood by exercising a couple weeks of tortuously difficult self-restraint, so she'd told me I was permitted to play again. 

“Sure,” she said.  She turned from me to remind the attendant to check the windshield wiper fluid because it was low. She asked him about redeeming her green stamps.

After a minute, she left to do adult things, maybe with the stamps, although I never quite understood what she did.  I remained standing on the seat as I played with the steering wheel. I twisted it left and right.  After a while, I grabbed the stick shift and moved it around until I pulled the car out of gear. Then the stick fell loose into neutral and I could pretend better.  I could steer, then shift, then steer.

My mother seemed to be gone longer than usual. The attendant finished whatever he was doing and he left me alone to attend to other cars. I bounced up and down in the seat.  I sat and pretended to be a jet pilot. When I did, I couldn’t see out the window, so I gave up on the idea and stood.  In a few seconds, I was bouncing on my toes.

I turned to the parking brake and tried to push it up and down. For a while, nothing happened. Then I remembered to press the button at the front of the brake lever the way my parents did. I pressed hard, and suddenly the parking brake went all the way down.

I discovered, as I jumped up and down on the seat with all my might and rocked the wheel back and forth, that now I could make the car move.  The Morris Oxford started rolling.  As it rolled, I bounced up and down harder and harder, more and more excited to actually be driving.

For the first few feet, the going was slow. The wheel became hard to turn because I was actually trying to turn it for real. The gas station was on a slight incline, fortunately, and I was facing the correct way.  After a few seconds, the Morris Oxford really started to move.

Around that time, I heard a yelp. It came from the attendant.

"Hey!" he sounded distant because the windows, except for the crack on the driver's side, were rolled all the way up. 

I barely glanced in his direction.  I wanted to face front because I was finally going somewhere.

“Hey!  Stop!"  Suddenly, Earl appeared by my side.  He spoke to me through the gap in the driver side window.  "Kid, stop!” 

He was a grown-up.  I knew I had to listen.  And the driving was starting to feel a little too fast.

“How?” I asked.

“Press on the brakes!  You know the brake?  Press the brakes.”

Of course I knew where the brakes were.  I was five, not three.  But I was standing on the seat. I sat down and immediately I couldn’t see anything out the window, which I didn't like. To show the attendant, I pushed my foot toward the brakes.  I grunted theatrically.  I flexed my feet.  My toes didn't even come close.

“I can’t reach the pedal!” I explained.  He didn't seem to get it.

“How ...” Young Earl looked totally befuddled. “Can you ... jeez kid ... steer!  Steer!”

Apparently we were going to hit something. I hopped up to my feet, so I could see.

“Turn left! Turn left!”

I didn't understand what we were going to hit, maybe another car, maybe a bike or the big, gray trash can, but I knew which way left was.  I pulled hard on the steering wheel.  It spun a little easier than it had a few seconds before, which meant by using all my weight I was able to budge it a few inches.

"Yeah!" He sounded relieved for a moment. But then apparently he realized we were headed for more trouble.

“Unroll the window!  Unroll it!  Unroll it!”  He repeated himself for a long time, looping around to the same request again and again, or so it seemed to me.  He really wanted the window down. 

That was something I knew how to do.  I hopped down and tried to swing the crank.  This time, I was grunting for real.  I got partway.  The crank stuck.

"Almost!"  The attendant tried to be encouraging.  "Keep going!  Unroll it!  Keep going!"

Above me, I could hear the attendant's footfalls pick up speed.  He was starting to jog.  I wanted to climb up onto the seat and see what I was missing.  I must have hesitated, then, because his voice picked up speed, too.

"Unroll it!  Kid!  Please!"

I backed the window up a half-inch, which caused Earl to groan in frustration.  He sounded almost cross.  But I knew what I was doing.  I had seen my parents use this trick.  When the driver side window crank got stuck, they backed up counter-clockwise for a turn and then started another clockwise run at rolling the window down.

"Yes!"  The attendant's feet skipped a step as he shouted.  This time, I got through the tough part.  Above me, a hand shot through the top part of the window and started to take control of the wheel. 

"Hey!" I protested.  He was getting grabby with my toys.  I started to clamber back up.

When I tried to brush his hand aside, the attendant didn't let go. After a second, the car changed direction sharply enough to knock me over, so that I sat down hard between the seat and the door handle. 

"Hold on, kid."  He sounded calmer for a second.  "Uh oh."

"What?"

"Oh, come on!"  He shoved the wheel hard to the other side.  My body flopped across the front seat.  "Damn, I mean shoot.  You didn't hear me say that, kid."

"Shoot?"  For a moment, I was able to stand up.  The view looked different.  The windshield faced the sun.  While I was working on the window crank, we had rolled past the garage and turned around to face upslope.  The car was drifting in a half-circle and slowing down.  But another car was turning toward us. 

"For Pete's sake!" yelled Earl. He turned the wheel pretty hard.  It knocked me down to the spot between the seat and the door handle again. It made me mad.  This guy kept playing with the car and there seemed to be a lot happening.  I wasn't going to let it happen without me.

"I want to steer!" I wailed.  I shot back up under his arm.

"Kid!"

"I want to steer!"  I planted both feet and grabbed the wheel.

"We need brakes kid."

I looked at him.  His curly hair flopped over his eyebrows.  His stubbly jaw needed a shave.  His blue eyes bore into me with a look of calm but definite intent.

"We're going to have to go downhill," he said.  "You've got to get down there and hit the brakes, kid."

I didn't know what he meant but I understood he was an adult and my mother would have told me to listen.  Reluctantly, I got down to the floor.  It happened more suddenly than I wanted because I slipped.  When I righted myself, though, I hit the brakes.

"Good.  Uh, shoot."

I felt the car turn.

"Hit the brakes harder.  Both feet!"

For a second or two, I was able to do it.  But my feet slipped.  My body, fully extended, was inadequate to hold the pedal while keeping the same position. The problem was the way the car lurched and drifted. 

"I want to get up," I announced.  

"Unroll the window more."  Earl sounded very, very sure of himself.  "Then I can pull the parking brake."

"But I want to steer."  His voice sounded urgent so I unrolled and complained at the same time. 

"Sure, sure," Earl replied absent-mindedly.

At the sound of his agreement, I popped up into the driver's seat.  I put my hand on the underside of the steering wheel, ready to take over.  At the same time, Earl reached across me.

"Sorry, kid."  His arm trapped me in the seat for a moment.  He pulled on the emergency brake.  The car rocked back and forth.  

"Now, please?"

"Uh, yeah."  He turned his head away from me as he let out a soft chuckle.  "Okay, it's your turn, kid. You're steering."

Slowly, I rose to my feet.  I noticed that Earl hadn't let go of the steering wheel.

"Can I help a little, kid?" he asked me with his most charming smile.

"No."

"Just a little."  He never let go of his grip.

"Okay."  While I was on my tiptoes, I gazed  around.  I didn't see the gas station anywhere.  "Where are we?"

It looked like we were on the highway.  Sure enough, this was Greenbelt Road.  I recognized it.  For a few seconds, I stared.  The car had stopped on the shoulder, next to a twenty foot drop down a grassy embankment. 

"Don't get out," he told me.  "Wait for your mother."

His words gave me the cue to turn myself around almost all the way.  I wasn't about to take my hand from the steering wheel but I wanted to see my mother.  There she was.  It took me a moment to recognize her.  She was forty or fifty feet behind us as she marched down the shoulder of the highway.  

#

That's where the story ends but it isn't quite where my memories end.  I remember the attendant and my mother politely but firmly arguing about the emergency brake.  The attendant carefully mentioned that she must not have left the car in gear or engaged the brake.  My mother said, maybe the car wasn't in gear, that could happen, but she always set the brake.  Always.  As I remember it, she always did.

I kept trying to find a way to tell them about the brake but they never seemed to want to hear me.  After a few minutes, I gave up.

#

Here's a note about power-assisted brakes and steering: someone has since told me the car might not have had them.  I haven't been able to find information on whether the Morris Oxford (specifically the Farina model) came with manual brakes or manual steering.  In any case, if my father's car was manual for either - if power-assist was an option he'd declined to pay for - it might explain why I had so much trouble.

Being five years old would have something to do with it, too, yes.

Not Even Not Zen 285: A Response to Addiction in Buddhism

Wikimedia Commons, kazan.vperemen.com

A Response to Addiction in Buddhism

In Thailand in the fall of 2022, the police arrested monks from a Buddhist temple. In fact, they closed the monastery. Buddhist authorities defrocked the monks, dismissed them, and sent them into a drug rehabilitation program. Every one of the monks had tested positive for methamphetamine.

Imagine their saffron robes thrown into a fire. That sort of thing has happened many times over because this incident was not an isolated case of monks behaving badly. Monks not only in Thailand but everywhere and over the span of history, have been convicted of corruption, murder, drug trafficking, and essentially all other crimes possible. Their arrests and convictions seem inevitable because there have been enough clergy and more than enough history for all those things to happen. The clergy, after all, are human. 

What strikes practicing Buddhists as the oddest aspect of drug addiction among monks, though, is the disparity between the actions of the clergy and the core tenets of Buddhism.

In a discussion, imi loa wrote: 

a core tenet of buddhism is minimizing attachment, with drug addiction being an intense form of attachment...

For me, reading with a sense of history makes these incidents more understandable. It's true that the difference between practicing non-attachment and acquiring a drug addiction is stark. However, not all official Buddhists follow what in the west would be called Buddhism or (by traditionalists) Western Buddhism. Instead, it might be more appropriate to say they practice their local traditions.

The history of Buddhism makes it different from many other major religions, as there was no event that corresponded to the Council of Nicaea that unified official Christian teachings. Instead, followers of the Buddha spread out; Buddhism received different sorts of emphasis in different countries; even today there's serious debate about whether Zen Buddhism is proper Buddhism.  As a philosophy, the teachings remain stable and coherent.  As a collection of temples, though, the organization of Buddhism allows a tremendous amount of diversity and differences in emphasis on the precepts. The differences include some temples conscripting young men from villages or temples recruiting children. It encompasses ceremonies left over from pantheistic religions of ages past. 

From NPR:

“The ultimate goal of Buddhism is for the people to get enlightened,” said Somboon Chungprampree, a social activist and executive secretary of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists. “But most of the society is learning that not all those who are wearing saffron can be a holy or respectable person.”

In all religions, there is a tendency for a subset of lay practitioners to be the real followers of the faith, while the professionals and religious authorities should be regarded as suspect. This is for good reasons, as noted above and, in fact, as seen throughout the course of human history.