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

Biomythography, Note 52

Stand By Your Woman

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

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

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

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

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

"How can she be both?"

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

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

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

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

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

“Well she can’t come here.”

“Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s not the same thing.”

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

 

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

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

"When?"

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

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

"Hey, mom."

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

"Yeah."

"All right, then."

#

Not Even Not Zen 302: Never Mind

Nevermind

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

Over many a slide and colored spreadsheet of financial kind,

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

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

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

Barely words and half a mind.”

Distinctly, I remember it was in that warm September

And every sharp and lying member of the board had underlined

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

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

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

Nameless blame is what they find.

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

Fresh from ruined plans that even she cannot rewind,

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

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

Or a stranger beered and wined, arriving drunk

Or simply rushed and misassigned."

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,

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

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

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

Of callers there were none to find.

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

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

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

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

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

Merely this, my doubts enshrined.

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

Soon again I heard a rapping like before remind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost sightless but for glasses of the thickest kind.

On my chair he perched his stately, wide behind.

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

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

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

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

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

Then quoth the buddha, "Nevermind."

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

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

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

Simple wrong and right had ages past been well defined

And now this office drone could too simply true Nirvana find

With such a phrase as, "Nevermind."

So the buddha murmured lightly and tried my patience most politely

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

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

His buttoned shirt was collar open and most distinctly pinstriped lined

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

With coffee breath of, "Nevermind."

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

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

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

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

His refrain is oft repeated by those workers unrefined

Who live whole lives of "Nevermind."

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

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

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

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

Do your greatest deeds for those whose souls have shined

And all the rest, just nevermind."

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

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

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

Those members were among the brightest apes in humankind

And some agreed with, "Nevermind."

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

Than he expected, his one eyebrow high or misaligned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s why your deeds sometimes have shined.

And I thank you for being kind.

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

In everything you do, intent and results get intertwined.

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

Than all the others for this past month combined. 

A better project makes you stronger

While a stupid one leaves you disinclined.

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

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

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

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

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

Take yourself home to let the tensions unwind. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

My footsteps halted.

I glanced into the lighted window of my mind. 

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

Near my office in his beanbag chair reclined

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

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

By laziness of work and laughter intertwined.

And all that's needless, nevermind.

  -- Eric Gallagher

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

Biomythography, Note 51

Command Line of Doom

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

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

"It's Adam," she said.

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

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

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

"The Usenet server crashed."

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

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

Everything was faster, bigger. Different.

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

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

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

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

"Okay," I sighed.

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

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

$ df -k

and read the usage report.

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

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

"Did you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$ cd comp

$ du -h

16M

$ du -h ./graphics

15M

$ pwd

/usr/local/bin/usenet/comp

$ cd ..

$ cd alt

$ du -h

92M

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

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

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

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

Finally, his expression eased into a tentative smile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$ pwd

/bin

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

$ cd /usr/local/bin/usenet

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

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

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

$ rm -rf *

$ cd ..

$ cd lang

$ rm -rf *

$ cd ..

$ cd sys

$ rm -rf *

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So? There are two of us."

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

$ cd /usr/local/bin

$ pwd

/usr/local/bin

$ ./doom -net 192.168.0.4 192.168.0.6

 

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

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

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

/usr/local/bin/usenet

"Oh, shit."

"What's wrong?" Adam said.

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

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

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

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

He sighed. A moment later, he shrugged.

"Oh well."

"Your boss won't be mad?"

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

Hey, that was me. "Why?"

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

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

"I meant to do that," I added and Adam mouthed it at the same time. The Pee-Wee Herman show had been off the air for a couple of years but every now and then, he referenced it like a pop culture reflex. And I had developed those cultural reflexes from him. 

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

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

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

$ rm -rf *

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

 

$ ./doom -net 192.168.0.5 192.168.0.6

 

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

Biomythography, Note 50

Harbingers of Doom

"How do you feel about a consulting gig?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I configured TACACS for Hood College."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hourly rate looked amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think we should load test the servers."

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

"Did you bring the game disks I mentioned?"

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

He chuckled again.

"Ooohh!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biomythography 49

Deliberate Awe 

 

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

And I decided to remember. 

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The effort sort of worked.

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are we okay?” asked the younger girl. 

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

 

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

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

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

 

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

 

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

Aren't these incidents all basically the same?

No. Every awe has its own flavor. 

Every moment is different. 

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

Biomythography 48

Observing, Appreciating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Even Not Zen 297: Biomythography - Note 47, Breathing and Observation

Biomythography 47

Breathing and Observation

She had a beautiful face with an upturned nose and long, dark hair. Sometimes I caught myself staring at her smile. She flashed one at me as I helped her into the Mustang. 

When she sat, she grabbed the back of her hair and pulled it around to her front right shoulder. It was a move she made without thinking. I hardly noticed it myself, anymore. She had to make sure neither of us could close the door on any part of her waist-low tresses. When I walked around to the driver's seat, she told me how much she liked the color of the car. 

"Oh yeah," I said. The comment made me pause to think. She'd told me once before. I dimly realized her father was a mechanic. She probably knew more about my car than I did. "The Mustang has been pretty great, really. The steering is kind of crap. But the engine has been reliable. The ride is going to be loud, this time. I need to replace the muffler but I couldn't make myself empty my emergency fund."

My budget was near enough to zero that I begrudged filling the gas tank. I'd been putting off needed repairs, as usual. To take a closer look at this particular problem, I'd shimmied underneath the vehicle to check the rust on the muffler. I'd seen how bad it was. Where the pipes connected and held the muffler to the frame, the rust had not only eaten through the metal from front to back but it had left holes. That was why the pipe sounded like a steamboat. I'd jiggered it with a wire coat hanger, which effectively became my muffler bracket. 

When I turned the key, the young woman's smile faded.

"That's pretty bad," she said. She had an educated ear, unfortunately. "You may need to spend the emergency fund."

"Yeah."

"Probably carbon monoxide is getting in." She sniffed. For sure, all sorts of fumes were flooding us. 

"I'll crack a window," I replied.

"Okay." She settled back into her seat and beamed me another smile. Her judgments about me were probably as bad as mine about cars. 

I'd known her for a couple of years at this point. She was an old girlfriend who had decided to visit me at college. I'd expected the days with her to be awkward. Somehow, though, she made it friendly and romantic. She had arranged her visit while I was between girlfriends at school. It seemed like she and I were going to stay friends for a long while. 

"Why were you just sitting still this morning?" she asked. 

"I didn't think you noticed." I'd done it while she was brushing her hair, which took a while. 

"Well, you weren't doing anything." She gave me a concerned glance. "You looked like the Kung Fu show. Sitting like that, I mean. It was weird."

"I was meditating." I'd known it would look odd to anyone else. I usually meditated alone.

"Do you do it a lot?"

"A few times a day." Every morning, at least. The other times I chose were random. If I had time and I thought I needed it, I sat down to clear my mind. "Not during your visit, though."

"You didn't have to stop just for me." Her brow crinkled. "What is meditation, anyway?"

I tried to explain. My practice was my own, though. I didn't know anyone else interested. I'd started out with a method called envisioning. It worked well but I knew it was falling out of fashion. I'd moved to calmness meditation. In fact, I'd spent three years with a heartbeat-based method of clearing my mind. I'd learned to slow my pulse. I'd gotten pretty good. After that, though, I switched to breathing meditation, which was more popular. The breathing style had an opposite purpose to it, which made it hard at first.

At the start of breathing meditations, I found myself interfering with my breath. My awareness met with a conditioned reflex in me. I tried to try to control my breathing. After all, I had just been controlling my pulse. The whole point of the popular style, though, was to achieve naturalness. Breathing meditation encouraged self-observation including the ability to observe without exercising any conditioned responses. In the last year or two, I had partly tackled it. I could keep a clear mind for a long time. I could let my body work naturally despite my awareness. I practiced every day. Sometimes I got overly conscious and started affecting my breath or other parts of my body. But mostly I'd ditched my trained reflexes. I was observing my heartbeats and my breaths without asserting any changes. 

"You're looking flush," she said after a while. "Do you feel okay?"

"Yeah." She was looking pale, herself. We were both wondering about how the engine fumes were affecting us. 

 

"How long is the ride to Logan Airport?" she asked.

"Two hours," I sighed. 

"How long has it been so far?"

"Twenty minutes." I pulled onto Interstate 90. We headed east.

She had a good reason to be concerned. But the ride back was the part I dreaded more, since I'd be alone and bored. For now, maybe we were taking in some carbon monoxide but we'd be fine, a little woozy at most. She popped a Prince album into my tape deck. I listened to the music and to her descriptions of the problems she was having with one of her sisters. Sometimes she shared the dramas involving other members of her family.

Years in my future, we would go on similar drives. She would call to ask for a ride to a different city. She would accompany me on travels from state to state as groups of us went rafting or saw concerts. Once, she called at noon to ask me to come down to the courthouse to witness her marriage. She had been dating the guy for a week but they'd known each other for years and, to her surprise, he'd asked. Their ceremony was at three. My managers at the bar where I worked were so surprised, they broke their usual no-excuses rule and gave me the afternoon off to attend. 

Six months later, she called me in tears from three states away. She wanted a ride to get rescued from her husband. 

That morning in Massachusetts, though, she mostly talked about her family. The topic of my car kept us busy, too. The muffler noise ramped up. It started to rattle. She said I had turned from flush to pale. She rubbed her head like she was getting a headache. For my part, I had to admit I was feeling dizzy. I rolled down the window another inch. 

"These car fumes can't be good for you," she commented. "Are you going to be okay for the drive back?"

"Sure." 

A minute later, we felt a thump. I glanced at my rear view mirror. I saw my muffler in my limited field of vision as it went tumbling along the highway behind us and off onto the shoulder.

I rolled down the window some more. 

"I'm already feeling weird," she complained. "And now I'm cold."

"Sorry."

I was right about us being fine with the window down, though. We made it to Logan Airport with twenty-five minutes to spare. At the terminal, we hugged and kissed a little. 

"Make sure you stay awake the whole way home," she warned me. "You had me to check on you. Now I won't be there."

 

"I'll be fine."

Before I got in the car, though, I took a look at myself in a bathroom mirror. Given it was the early 1980s, I thought I was fine. I had tight jeans, a dark t-shirt that women seemed to like, and my hair was cropped tight on the sides in a lazy, partial mohawk. My skin looked a little pale, maybe, but nothing worse. Fine. I looked healthy.

If I was getting carbon monoxide, it all came down to math, didn't it? I'd breathed it for two hours. Obviously, it had been only a little per minute, far below the critical dose, whatever that was. I was going to have about a forty-five minute break from it. That was time enough for my body to heal up. Next, I had to breathe more carbon monoxide for two more hours. 

Deep in the garage, I turned on my car. Three other people in the concrete enclosure spun around in alarm. I smiled and waved. My window was already down.

As I pulled out of Logan, it occurred to me that I hadn't driven for long in this car with a broken muffler. I'd kept the windows open every time, too. Truthfully, I didn't know how much carbon monoxide was adding up in my system. 

I decided it was time for my new form of meditation to come to the rescue. Even before I got to the highway, I eased into better awareness. To my surprise, it wasn't harder to drive. It was different. Maybe my reactions were better. Unfortunately, right away I started breathing harder. My intense awareness made my desire to control each breath kick in. When I started getting light-headed, I had to wonder if I was simply doing it to myself with strained, shallow wheezes. I had to fix the attempt to control my body. 

Can you meditate better if your life depends on it? Of course you can. At least, my decision then was to improve. Why not get better at meditation at this very moment? 

Previously, I had been able to keep my awareness without accidentally invoking my self-consciousness for what seemed like a long time but was probably less than a minute. I'd lose the correctness. Then I'd adjust my mind. I'd achieve another half-minute. And so on. The state of my process wasn't good enough to keep my head above water, metaphorically, but I could keep getting back up to the surface for a while. Already, I'd developed the ability to turn attachments on or off (mostly keeping to the off because I was concerned about my lack of control when allowing re-attachments). Now it was time to exercise the same ability with my observational powers.

The problem was that my observational powers were crap. I felt intensely aware of it. 

After half an hour, I felt my breathing reverting to a natural pattern. My awareness remained. I felt different. I knew some of it might be carbon monoxide. My hands and face tingled. Even with normal breathing, I could feel the fumes dragging on my body. I pulled over to adjust the windows, carefully hand-cranking all four to the give me the coldest breeze I thought I could stand. Then, back on the highway, I remained in my aware, relaxed, meditative state. 

A few years later, I would discover new realms of observation. I'd come to feel it was its own thing, an important aspect of life. During the carbon monoxide drive, though, my extended moment of practice merely opened the door. For two hours, minus a second stop to adjust the windows for maximum air and minimum cold, I subsisted on awareness meditation. My body felt sick. But I felt good. Very good, very aware. My nose rebelled at the strong odor of burnt oil and other fumes. The tingling in my hands and face worsened. My light-headedness meant I had to concentrate a bit more. My body didn't care for the cold air, either. But my spirits improved. I accepted the freezing temperatures without shivering. When my lungs seemed to slow almost to a stop on their own, I pulled over and got out for a minute. I walked away from the car. I felt better. I got back in and drove the last half hour from Springfield to South Hadley. 

"Hey, this really works," I thought. I had been practicing in my dorm room, yes, but not with any urgency. This was the first time my awareness had seemed to be a practical skill. I was surprised to discover that, when I felt my life depended on it, I could improve. When it was important, I could be aware and natural. 

Not Even Not Zen 296: Biomythography - Note 46, Forced to Notice

Biomythography 46

Forced to Notice

At six in the morning, a mile into my run, a monster passed over me.

The shadow's wingspan looked twice my size in the weak morning light. It was an unmistakable shape. Anyone who has seen a great horned owl in flight knows. Owl wings are built differently than those of other raptors. The beast crossed a dozen feet above my head. It dove across the road and came to rest in a tree. 

Then it was gone. As large as it was, the owl became invisible to my glance when it folded its wings. Logically, I knew it had perched on the high bough of an oak tree. 

It was one of the things you see when you're alone at an unusual hour. Most of the uncommon sights are wild animals. They are going about their usual business at their customary time. There are no humans in their landscape. Then you blunder in. You catch a glimpse of their life.

At three in the morning, on a similar run, a herd of deer ran alongside me. You can forget how large they are until they're an arms-length away. I was sprinting down the middle of a dark, lonely, country road. The herd of twenty deer ran by on either side. A barrier of brambles kept most of them away. A few large males danced through and back over the underbrush as if to make their point: I was slow; I was outnumbered by powerful beasts in the dark; they were many and they stayed together. They thundered by for half a minute. A dozen crossed in front of me as the herd veered away from its parallel path with the road on their way to elsewhere. In twenty seconds, the sound of them had faded.

Not every strange event is an animal. Once, while hiking across a wide-open field, I spotted a flicker in the sky. I marched toward it. The object in the air turned over and over. It half floated and half fell until it hit the ground a yard in front of me.

It was a piece of white bread.

The bread was perfect, not a bite taken out of it. There wasn't a condiment in sight. Nor was there a crow in the sky, nor an eagle. There was a plane above in the distance, a jumbo jet. It had taken off from Dulles to my west. White contrails streaked out behind it. Otherwise, there was nothing above besides the sun and a few clouds. I saw no indication of the origin of the bread. It simply arrived.

These are the facts you don't expect. When I was a father, I cut down a tree in my yard. Months later, I returned to chop and pry out the stump. When I started removing pieces, I discovered a wonderland of small tunnels. Beneath the roots of the willow-oak I unearthed a labyrinthine colony of bright, golden ants. I'd never seen golden ants before. They are rare, apparently. I don't dig up the ground very often, either. Maybe I'll never see them again. Right in the middle of my life, they made their home where I discovered it.

But I'd exposed the colony. I covered the divots over, trying to make their situation good, but nonetheless, by the next afternoon they were gone. Naturally, I checked.

Some of these opportunities may not be available to everyone. I have often been happy to wander far from other humans. Even when you think there's no one else, though, sometimes you meet other stragglers. That can be uncomfortable. I've run into drunk marines. I've talked at length with homeless men at their campsites. Once as a young teen I ran into a tall, middle-aged woman early in the day. We were each hiking a few miles inside the borders of the Seneca Creek State Park in a section without rangers or visitors.

She put her hand to her chest when she saw me. It was clear she was more surprised than I was. At least I lived close enough to feel the park was mine. My proprietary sense had drawbacks because it didn't match what anyone else thought but, still, I was aware that the forest, from time to time, bore trespassers upon my solitude. She was one, another in an unfortunate list of them.

For her, it had to seem strange to walk alone in an abandoned state park, deliberately as far as you could get from anything, and discover nonetheless there was someone else.

"Do I know you?" she said.

"No." I stopped and frowned at her. She persisted.

"I'm sure I do." She wore sensible hiking clothes and a hat to keep off the sun even though we were in a forest. "Do you go to Sidwell Friends?"

We were thirty-five miles from my school, a private school.

"Shit," I said.

"Excuse you," she replied. "I think I've seen you with my son."

We talked for a few minutes. As it turned out, I did in fact go to school with her son. He was a year older than I was but a nice guy. We didn't hang out much because he wasn't in my year. Her impression of her son, I came to understand, was that he felt insecure, which might have been true. But I felt violent and insecure myself, so he was the target of my reserved sense of friendship. Because he was nice. And fairly smart. She was, too.

"I'm here to look at the orchids," she announced.

"Are those flowers?"

Her mouth pressed tight into a line. In retrospect, she had to feel I was being deliberately dense and trying to get rid of her. She was right. But my desire for solitude battled with my sense of politeness.

"Do you live near this park?" she asked.

"In it."

"How wonderful for you." She gave me a hearty smile.

"No." When I caught the stern look on her face I backpedaled my emotional response. But only slightly. I was still a teenager in the midst of a teen life. "Not really, ma'am."

"There are orchids in this park that exist nowhere else in the world." A breathless tone crept into her voice with the revelation. She clasped her hands together with an emotionally-collected sort of pleasure.

"Flowers." At thirteen, I couldn't fathom why anyone would find such things interesting.

"Yes." In an instant, she made up her mind that I was both harmless and in dire need of an education. "Come with me."

Now it was worse than running into a stranger. I had spoken with a friend's mother. If she grew comfortable, she would try to take me back to my house for a friendly chat with my parents, who weren't actually at all friendly this morning, or she would dragoon me into a chore she thought was fascinating. As we walked together with me a half-step behind, I mulled over my excuses to leave. 

She led me a tenth of a mile to an unimpressive purple flower growing out of a bed of moss. I'd seen spiders with more color. She made hushed gasping sounds as she stared at it from afar.

"Do you ever pick up plants here?" she asked with an appropriate sense of suspicion.

"All the time." I destroyed them out of a sense of boredom, mostly. I didn't want to say so at the moment.

"Please don't hurt this one."

"Okay." It was important to her, I could tell. I crouched next to it. "If it's the only one in the world, why not save it? Transplant it. Take it home."

"It's not that type of flower, I'm afraid." For the first time, her expression turned grim. Most of the time, she was so determined and cheerful I thought no one could stand it. Yet I found myself liking her fortitude. "No one knows what makes it live and bloom, not precisely. It seems to need other plants. Or perhaps certain animals in the soil. Or something. If I dared to transplant it, I'd likely kill it. Others have tried. They've killed the only specimens they could find."

"Take a yard of dirt around it." I'd done it while transplanting bushes for my mother during my chores. It almost always worked, even when I tried in my lazy way to ruin the bush so I'd never be ordered to transplant it again.

"That fellow who killed the last one? That's what he tried."

She remained standing, staring at the plant and its partners for a while. I stayed crouched not far from it, a couple yards closer than she was.

"I'm glad I showed this to you," she announced.

 

"Thank you, Mrs. Wirth."

She regarded my sullen politeness with her hands on her hips. I'm fairly sure she thought something encouraging about me, like perhaps I would come to appreciate plants eventually. Or I would remember some part of what she said.

Not Even Not Zen 295: Biomythography - Note 45, Cycling Through the Clouds

Heron and Bicycle by Metro Centric, Wikimedia Commona

Biomythography 45

Cycling Through the Clouds

I was told to go out and play although, in my neighborhood, no one my age was allowed to come out that day. Their families were all busy. My solution was to get on a bike.

After I pedaled around Acredale Park for a while, I headed east on Metzerott Road. At the end, I reached a one lane bridge. I had to walk the bike up the last few steps of the bridge incline because it was too steep to pedal. When I finished, I came out on Route One. The road is known as Baltimore Avenue to some folks but to my parents it was always Route One.

Cars whizzed by along it and on University Boulevard nearby, on Greenbelt Road, and on the other thoroughfares around College Park.  The streets were always busy. They had sidewalks alongside them, though. As I regarded the bowling alley, which got boring without money, I vaguely remembered that Vit Babushka lived somewhere in Berwyn Heights. My mother always drove me. But I thought I knew how to find Vit's house on my bike. It became my goal for the day. I was sure I could find Vit wherever he was and get him to play outside.

I knew the direction. I was pretty sure his home wasn't any more than five miles away, maybe eight at most. I would recognize the neighborhoods my mother drove through to get there. So I headed off along Greenbelt Road until I got to a sign saying Berwyn. The sign didn't look quite right. I looked for another that said Riverdale. That was a road I needed. I was pretty sure my mother had taken a shortcut through Berwyn before, though, so I took the right into the Berwyn neighborhood and hoped I'd figure it out.

After a few turns, I got frustrated. The houses had started out seeming familiar but then they became strange. I couldn't find my way back to any right-seeming place. When I tried to take a cut across the development going further east, the road circled back almost all the way around. It didn't lead me to where I'd thought at all. The suburban landscape was turning out to be a maze of small switchbacks and streets ending in identical-looking cul-de-sacs.

At some point in my drive, I noticed a boy playing alone in his yard. He was about nine. I was nine, too. He watched me cycling from behind his backyard fence. A few minutes later, he watched me pedal by him again. 

The third time I showed up, he came out from behind the beam-and-chicken wire fence. I paused my bike and put my left foot down to wait for him. 

"What are you doing?" he asked. He had a wide-eyed face. He seemed remarkably unathletic with no muscle tone visible anywhere but he wasn't fat. Mostly, his body looked like he stayed indoors a lot and his hair looked like it grew flat and black in a natural bowl cut.

"Trying to bicycle to Berwyn Heights," I said.

"That’s a long way from here," said the boy. His eyes got even wider.

"Yeah." I slumped a little. I knew I'd wasted a couple miles of effort. But I had hope. I wasn't off course by those miles because I'd gone roughly in a circle.

"Are you gonna go play?"

"Where I'm going? Yeah."

"Why don’t you play here?" He turned and swung his arm toward his back yard. "You’ll have to stay outside, though. My mama don’t let strangers in the house."

I parked my bike next to his backyard fence. We talked for a while and I decided I might as well take a break in his yard. He seemed quiet but friendly. His yard had a standard set of toys in it, all of them too small as if his parents didn’t understand how old he was. He had a doll next to his sandbox. The sandbox had no sand in it. His baseball bat wasn't real, only hollow plastic. He had a baseball glove but it was tiny, meant for a first-grader. 

We played for a long time anyway, mostly games that didn't need toys like freeze tag, hide and go seek, marco polo, tic tac toe drawn in the dirt, and others we made up like long-jumping contests. The other boy moved slowly. He managed to seem lazy even while jumping. He got tired fast, too.

After an hour or so, we got to lunchtime. Sure enough, like the boy had said, his mother wouldn’t let me in to eat. She wouldn't even come to the screen door. She wouldn’t fix food for me. And she wouldn’t leave the house to meet me in the yard because I was a stranger. I hadn't ever met an adult quite like her except I wasn't sure I'd met her. I'd barely heard her quiet, firm voice from a distance.

"I know how to do it," said the boy. "Stay right here. It’ll take a minute. Don't leave. Please don't leave. I’ll have her make me twice as much for lunch."

I played on his swing set for a little while. I laid down to wait on his side-yard stoop. He came out with a sandwich and two apples. He started on his apple and I ate the rest while he talked.

"My momma is praying," he said. "Do you think there is a God?"

"No, I guess not." The sandwich was dry. It was like a peanut butter and chalk sandwich. 

"You’ll go to hell then." He took a bite of his apple. The apples were sort of mushy. He didn't seem to enjoy his much. 

"Maybe," I allowed.

"Aren’t you worried? Don’t you believe?"

I shrugged. Sometimes, of course, I wanted to believe. Most of the time, everybody said I was good. I was the best behaved of boys. It would be nice to think I'd be rewarded for being good. But I didn't believe it. 

"My grandma is mad," he continued, "because she says there is no heaven, not really, not like she was taught when she was a girl."

"Why is your grandma different?" I asked. It had become plain over these hours that his parents were very religious in a hushed and fervent way. 

"When she was little, they said heaven was up in the clouds. But then people could fly. People flew in airplanes."

I nodded.

 

"They could look down on the clouds. And they didn’t see no angels."

"I hadn’t thought of that," I said. I wouldn't have, either.

"All grandma's brothers and sisters and everyone she knew was mad like her," he said. "The preacher lied to them. There weren't no angels in the clouds."

"Did she really think heaven was in the clouds?"

"Uh huh." His big round eyes seemed entranced by a vision. "She said everyone did. I do, too."

"You do? What about the people who can fly?"

"I don’t know. Maybe flying isn't right." He frowned as he considered his next thought. If flying wasn't right, it would still be hard to stop people flying.

 

After we finished eating, I asked for a glass of water. I needed it even more than the food. It had been a long morning of cycling and playing. 

"Let me see," he said. He headed back in with a sandwich wrapper to throw away. When he came back, though, he said,"Mama won't give me a glass of water for outside. I'm only allowed to drink inside."

"That doesn't make sense."

He raised an eyebrow. He felt he and his mother were very sensible.

"I thought of something while my mama was talking," he allowed after a few seconds. "We have a hose. You can use it."

"Okay, yeah." 

We struggled to use the hose, though. He had turned it on by himself only once before and he got in trouble for leaving it on. So I did it while enduring constant checking from his watchful eye. Even after I wiped off the nozzle, I found the drink from the hose was bitter. It didn't taste like the stuff at home. There was a lot of liquid ice, though, and that was the main thing. When I ran it for a minute, it was cold. 

"Don't have too much," he warned. "You'll get sick."

My grandmother said things like that all the time. I knew to nod and agree but I made sure to feel full of water before I stopped. 

We spent the afternoon playing. And fighting. 

"You have to let me win because it's my house," he said as he tried to sit on my shoulders and hit me. The argument worked on me for a few seconds. His punches weren't as forceful as slaps from my younger brother. But I got tired of lying there. I rolled him over, grabbed his bowl of hair, and slammed his head into the ground a couple of times.

"Is that enough?" I asked. I let go of his hair. 

"Yeah, I guess so." He had been sullen when he started the fight. He seemed fine with losing it, though. "Let's get on the swings again. That was best."

"Want me to push you?"

"Yeah!" 

Later in the afternoon, though, he started to get anxious.

"You have to leave now," he said. 

"I suppose so." My parents might worry. Reluctantly, I had to acknowledge how biking home was a good idea. I didn't relish the long trip, though, or the prospect of finding my way to Greenbelt Road again. If I could only find that main road, I'd be fine.

"No, I mean, you have to leave before my father gets home."

Both of his parents didn't want me, then. After I slurped another long drink from the hose, I walked through the gate. I kicked up the stand and hopped on my banana-seat five-speed. Part of me thought it was amusing how the other boy watched me in awe. 

As it turned out, though, I ended up back at his house. 

"I wondered," he said. He was standing in front of his gate as if he hadn't moved for ten minutes.

"Do you know how to get out of here?" I rested my forehead against the chrome-painted spider handlebars. I'd pedaled another two circles through the neighborhood. "Does your mother?"

"It's mostly just my daddy what knows, I guess."

So I met his father. He pulled up while we were still talking outside the gate. 

Although I don’t remember what the man looked like, I recall his concern. In a stern way, he seemed genuinely alarmed that I had come so far from home and gotten lost. His son did most of the talking and he painted me, somewhat unjustly, as a brave and noble figure. His father gave me directions out of the neighborhood and, if I'm remembering correctly, he also followed me in his car for the first turn or two to make sure that I wasn’t getting lost again. Pretty soon I was on Greenbelt Road. 

There’s no reason to remember any of this. The day wasn't special. I had other one-time meetings with boys my age. But I do remember. The story the boy told about his grandmother stuck with me. 

He had been convinced that everyone once believed heaven was in the clouds. Heaven was angels standing on puffs of wet air. Literally. As I grew older, I tried to rationalize the memory of his grandmother's disappointment. I tried to tell myself almost no one but her believed. After all, it wasn't a popular delusion that showed up in history books. I tried to rationalize it even though I'd met some of my relatives and Pennsylvania and the older ones had told me about angels in the clouds and other beliefs of their generation.

As I grew older still, I realized I should take my relatives' testimonies at face value. They had believed heaven was literally on the upper side of the clouds. Practically everyone had. The boy with his troubled grandmother had been right.  It was weird to keep believing it after airplanes got invented but he was a kid.

My own relatives in the Pond and Light families of Pennsylvania had fallen for evangelical movements in their youth. They had believed in the presence of heaven in the clouds. At least one of them had refused to use the telephone (for her whole life) because it was a tool of the devil. A handful of them thought planes were sacrilegious.  From them I also heard how, in the generation before, others of my ancestors believed the world would come to an end in 1869, 1872, 1874, and 1881. The world kept not ending but they kept believing. 

A lot of Americans, maybe most Americans, believed in angels standing on the upper side of the clouds. It's not a part of history that gets written about. I'd say it's forgotten. Yet we're not far removed from it.

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.