Reunions Good and Bad

Posted on June 23, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

It is the summer of my 50th high school reunion, an event I have elected to miss.  I have some modest curiosity about what everyone I once knew has done with their lives, but not enough to travel to Eastern Washington to find out.  My interest, after all, is mostly mild curiosity, and not strong enough to compel me to leave the Farm at a time when the days are long, the sun is shining, the birds are positively joyous with song, a mysterious large toad has been seen in the driveway, and my front porch is calling me to come enjoy these precious days.

Maybe I would have gone to the reunion had we not just been abroad for the last thirty days, since the trip left me desirous of putting down roots at home for the summer.  I have had all of the novelty of new places that I can take for this year, at least.  The view from my front porch never looks as good as when I have been away from it for an extended period.

But I doubt I would have gone to the reunion even if we hadn’t been away.  In accordance with their essential nature, reunions are surface-only events.  By “surface-only” I mean they are little more than one long cocktail hour extended over three days, at which gossip and abridged life histories are exchanged repeatedly and repetitiously with a string of folks who share with you only a common beginning rather than fulfilled lives.  Many of those you meet at reunions have so little in common with you after 50 years of lack of contact that they may well be the sort of person you’d dismiss as uninteresting on sight if you hadn’t once known them, with whom you wouldn’t begin a conversation if both of you were truly strangers meeting for the first time in some far-off, foreign venue and were the only Americans in the room.  These are folks you would only speak to at a reunion: where shared memories of long vanished athletic prowess, deceased teachers, formerly titillating events that seem tawdry in the afterlight, and the oddities of characters dredged up from the mists of time serve as the bare, essential minimum of commonality necessary to sustain the facsimile of a conversation held across the vast gulf of social and cultural differences lying between you.

I don’t do well in cocktail hour settings for the simple reason that I don’t care for the taste of alcohol or appreciate its effects, and I detest gossip.  I also dislike highly abridged life histories since they always prompt me to begin asking questions designed to elicit additional data, and cocktail party settings have too much background noise to discern the nuances of answer, are too short to spend significant time with anyone in particular, and are far too public a venue in which to ask necessary questions.

What I can recall of the few reunions I’ve attended is not conducive to tempt me into repeating the experience.  I don’t need to listen to recitations of long gone glories that have been enhanced in importance by the gloss given such memories by the passage of time.  I have enough trouble remembering my own life history through the fog of time.  I don’t need to spend time with folks who had a better life than you regardless of the life they’ve actually led.  You don’t even have to ask these sorts of folks anything, since everything is volunteered immediately upon re-introduction.  I don’t need to spend time with folks whose life has always been miserable and worse than mine, for I can’t stand being depressed while consuming alcohol in a crowded room.

I don’t need to travel 500 miles in order to stand in a corner of a room filled with strangers, for corners are where I always seem to find myself during cocktail parties because they are a place of relative privacy, a safe-house from noise and confusion, and great venues for people watching – something I enjoy immensely.  I suppose if the corner were in some exotic locale, it might be fun to go to my reunion.  But my home town is only exotic for those who drink wine in quantity and want to go to a remote location to drink quantities of it or visit wineries.  Since I don’t care much for alcohol in any form, there is little for me to think of as exotic in a town that looks exactly the same to me as it did 50 years ago when I was young and could hardly wait to escape its tentacles.  I am incapable of seeing the town with fresh eyes, for it holds too much personal history.

If there were an exotic venue where I could sit down with one or two former classmates and have a serious discussion about life, about the Vietnam War, about the pleasures of travel or reading, or about any other subject of more than passing mutual interest explorable in intimacy and depth, I might eagerly attend the reunion. For discussions of this kind with a selected few friends from long ago would be scintillating and interesting.  For we were creatures of the 1950s and early 1960s after all, a period in which a pervasive sense of safety gave way to dramatic, culture changing events.  By the time we graduated from high school we were on the cusp of a national climate fraught with drama, full of life changing events that affected all of us in some deeply personal manner.  How many of us were subjected to the draft, for example, and who ran from it, who fought it, and who served their time if taken?

But cocktail parties are about gossip and titillation.  They encourage only elevator speeches – those memorized bits of recitation that are designed to sum up a life in the time it takes to ride an elevator to the highest floor in town, and my home town hasn’t any buildings over 10 stories.  Elevator speeches are profoundly uninteresting, since they are marketing pieces designed to deliver an impression rather than substance, to be a door opener rather than a truthful recitation of a life story.  I can hear those from strangers right here in Seattle and save the gas it takes to travel to my home town.  Hell, I can even listen to my own!

If I were able, I would really like to talk to my high school friend Larry, the guy who went to the Air Force Academy and is now apparently an economic consultant in Boston.  But Larry won’t be in attendance, for he hates our home town and has never been back.  I would really like to have a female friend explain about the rather enigmatic email she once sent me hinting at a wild 60s life spent in the Haight/Ashbury district of San Francisco, but there wouldn’t be enough time to build the trust required for such a story to be shared.  I would really like to know what happened to my friend Jay who died in 1980 as a result, I believe, of the effects of his service in Vietnam, but it is the wrong venue in which to ask Jeanne, our fellow classmate who grew close to him before his death, about how and why he died and how he earned a bronze star.

In other words, I am not attending my 50th reunion due to a lack of interest, but for the lack of time for proper conversations, a lack of those in attendance of real interest to me, and a lack of opportunity for the type of discussions I always enjoy having.  Add to this that I have no wish to stand in my corner and watch former classmates enjoy the gossip I abhor; add to this the fact that many of my former classmates want each of us to be exactly the person we were 50 years ago when unencumbered by a full life, a condition to which I have no wish to return; add to this the fact that I don’t care for some of my former classmates and never did.  The resulting total lacks any significant attraction.

And so I am staying on the Farm to enjoy my front porch, the bird song, and these graceful summer days.  I would gladly share the peace of the Farm with any classmate who might happen by before or after our reunion weekend, but I realize that this notion is only the stuff of daydream.  But if they were to do so, I have an exotic venue to share.  For on our front porch we would have all the necessary time to catch up on subjects too awkward for large rooms where cocktails are drunk to excess, on subjects too intimate to be shared with a dash of titillating gossip.

So if any adventuresome former classmate happens to read this piece and has the courage and interest to have a thorough front porch conversation, just drop by unannounced some nice summer’s day and we’ll enjoy a glass of ice tea along with an exchange of life stories and mutually interesting ideas, whiling away our hours watching shadows steal across the grass as evening descends.

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Ah, The People We Met

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

And he was easily riled and likely to shout
Frequently wrong but never in doubt

Cheryl Wheeler, Frequently Wrong but Never in Doubt

I finished the thing; but I think I sprained my soul.

Katherine Ann Porter on her novel Ship of Fools (1962) in McCall’s magazine (August 1965)

We recently returned from sailing by river from Amsterdam to Constanta, Romania.  Our ultimate goal, Bucharest, was achieved by a bus ride through lands that were reminiscent of where I grew up in eastern Washington.  We visited 7 countries in the process: The Netherlands; Germany; Austria; Hungary; Croatia; Bulgaria: and Romania.  We are tired from our travels and still processing the memories and information received, but one thing stands out – the wealth and variety of the people we met and of the lives they lead.

The most intense relationships you can form in 30 days of sailing European rivers are with the crew of your ship and your fellow passengers.  Life aboard a cruise ship holding 153 passengers and some 40 crew members is intimate of necessity.  The cabins are small but big enough to move around in, and the public spaces are just large enough to find some measure of privacy if privacy can ever be truly achieved in full view of others.  In such an environment, privacy becomes a combination of a state of mind and the willingness of others to respect the space you inhabit and not to enter without consent.

This was a situation ripe for sharing.  Occasionally such sharing occurred by voluntary act.  All too often it occurred by involuntary means, by means of the habits and idiosyncrasies displayed by those aboard.  Sometimes the sharing was joyful and intense; all too often it was more of an imposition than a desired goal.

Our fellow passengers ran the gamut of personalities, but all were American.  While the passengers came from the four corners of our country and were unalike in accents, customs and outlook, they were all familiar because of a shared national culture.  Far too many of the Americans seemed to look down upon the residents of the countries through which we passed, a viewpoint that seemed to become increasingly common the further south we sailed and the poorer the countries became, especially those which so recently suffered decades of communism.  Since we had a plethora of retired teachers aboard, this all too frequently shared outlook on other cultures was, to say the least, not conducive to believing that American school systems are well equipped to encourage tolerance and understanding of foreign cultures.

There was a curious arrogance among many of the teachers.  We taught,” they seemed to say, “and since we were teachers, we know far more than you and always understand people and their motives better than you are capable of doing.”  One former community college professor shocked me by analyzing a friend of mine he’d never met according to observations gained in 1980 and 1990s classroom experiences about something that occurred in the late 1960s when education was a far different experience than it is today.  He was dead wrong in his analysis, but certain of his conclusions.  He and the others like him – of which there were far too many for comfort – are creatures of my generation that have spent their lives teaching the next.  This doesn’t augur well for young Americans learning their place in a world where borders are increasingly irrelevant.

Of course, not all Americans are ugly and not all foreigners are charming.  We met some lovely passengers on board and enjoyed wide-ranging conversations with them.  While I might not have agreed with all of their opinions, these were open-minded people who wanted to enjoy the give and take, to accept opinions, to argue with conclusions, but who were always prepared to change their minds if they thought you might have a valid point.  I can only hope that we fit into the same category, for I have always found life to possess few universal, unvarying truths.

The crew is universally a hard-working lot.  They work 12 to 14 hours per day, seven days per week, for months at a time.  They are well-schooled by their cruise line never to talk politics with the passengers, a prohibition that only makes sense from the standpoint of keeping passengers happy and maximizing profits, but which makes no sense whatsoever in light of the cruise line’s stated goal to expose passengers to foreign cultures.  Being of the sort that questions such spurious authority, we found ways to have political discussions with certain of the crew.  If one listens carefully for nuance and nods his or her head at just the right moment, it is amazing the amount of information that others will trust you with.

It was from the crew that we learned to admire the cultures through which we traveled.  We learned of the nature of respect from our first captain, who was a Slovakian unafraid to get his hands dirty by helping his crew do their work whenever an extra hand was called for and who exercised authority gently and with grace.  He, too, was a listener and a doer, nodding his thanks to me after an overheard conversation between me and an assistant purser who wasn’t about to get his hands dirty placing something over the deep puddle at the end of our gangway in Wertheim where the rain fell in droves.  As I was walking back through the reception area several minutes after the discussion with the assistant purser, I noticed that a rubber mat had been placed across the puddle and pointed it out to Helen.  It was then that the captain, standing at the purser’s desk, turned and nodded his thanks to me as I passed by.  No slouch, he.

We learned of familial duty from a Serbian waiter who, in a socially incorrect speech delivered at the awkward venue of a Croatian port where Serbs, including his father, had bombed, shot and killed Croatians and devastated the town, nevertheless captured our hearts by speaking lovingly of his father, obviously unaware of the incongruity of the intersection between setting and family lore.  Part of the story he told involved a tale of rescue of Serbs by means of gunfire in the very town in which we were moored.  He could not have known his father well given his present age as his father died in an attempt to save young Serb pilots when the waiter might have been 4, but there he stood, in Vukovar, reciting learned family lore, hands steepled as if in prayer, myth after fact spilling from his tongue, his face glowing in worship of the man many residents of the town would likely have called a murderer.  We didn’t have the heart to suggest he had committed a social faux pas of the worst, most boorish sort, not when the little child inside was so prominently on display.

We learned of joy in hard work from a Bulgarian cabin attendant who has been with the ship for many years and who had previously spent time in America.  When he commented to us in a casual conference on the ship’s sundew that everyone in Bulgaria worried about money, and when yours truly made the gauche reply that everyone the world over worried about money, he corrected me by means of the merest inclination of his head as if to say “Really?  You think your worries are the same as ours?”  When I quickly understood that their worries were about the necessities of existence while mine were about luxuries far beyond the common understandings of his country and apologized for my fatuous remark, we began a serious conversation in stark violation of cruise line crew rules about freedom, cultural disparity, and human life upon a common earth, a conversation that remains with me still.  Here was an educated young man working ungodly hours as a cabin attendant aboard ship to support his family and to ensure his and their future.  When he explained that communism had destroyed the Bulgarian middle class so that only the very rich and the very poor remained and I opined that perhaps he, himself, represented the beginnings of a new Bulgarian middle class, he looked at me in surprise over the suggestion, nodded his quick acceptance, and responded: “Perhaps so, but the effort involved is very tiring.”  And then, after a short pause, he smiled his brightest smile, the same smile with which he greeted all passengers every morning, the same smile that I somehow suspect accompanies each of his journeys up and down the rivers of central Europe, the same smile that I suspect will always accompany his journey through life.  For he is an optimist and a believer in the ethos of hard work, an ethos in which Americans have traditionally taken pride but seem bent on abandoning now as a way of life.

We learned from a Serbian bartender of the strength in fatalism.  When we asked about his hours and how he endured them, he became, for us, an icon of the stark contrast between the cruise line’s expressed goal of teaching passengers to respect foreign cultures and its own misuse of the very members of those cultures.  In response to our questioning whether the ship’s rules were the norm on the rivers, the bartender noted that the cruise line adamantly refused to use Swiss employment contracts for its crew members.  Swiss regulations forbid the long hours without significant breaks that the cruise line expects of its crew members, and are fast becoming the norm on these rivers, a norm the cruise line has, so far, refused to accept.  Mind you, the bartender was not complaining, just answering my questions and merely acknowledging a fact.  After all, as he explained, he didn’t have to stay on board and could always look for work elsewhere – if only he could find another job as a citizen of one of the poorest countries in the European Union.

And we learned from those ashore as well.  We learned that many spoke English while we speak nothing else.  We learned of pride in creation when buying beautiful lace table pieces from a Hungarian shop owner in a small riverside enclave, who proudly explained in earnest, but poor, halting, English that two women had worked five months to create the work of art which we were purchasing – his smile lighting up the small open-walled shop when he realized we had understood him correctly.  We learned graciousness  from the tired coat room attendant in a Budapest museum who took our sopping hats and coats from us after our walk through the rain to get to the museum, holding them at arm’s length with just two fingers, and then carefully hanging them on separate hooks to drip and to dry so that they might be worn again with comfort on our subsequent walk back to the ship.

And as I previously noted, not all Europeans are creatures of charm.  The Hungarian ‘pianist’ on board ship was a sullen man, not given to trying hard, not given to putting his soul into his playing, only given to going through the motions demanded of him by contract each night.  HeÂplayed “My Way” each night always as a funeral dirge, and we could well imagine Frank Sinatra spinning in his grave at its all too frequent repetitions.  If Paul Anka, the song’s composer, ever hears Istvan play it, he might well sue him for abuse of the child he so lovingly created as Frank’s anthem.

And by journey’s end we realized that people are the same the world over: some work hard, determined to get ahead, and some slide through life giving of the least possible effort; some are intelligent and willing to enter into meaningful discussions with the goal of sharing and learning, while some would rather look at the world through their own dark lens, always imposing their viewpoint on all that they see, never listening and never hearing; some are gracious and interested in cultural differences, full of empathy and understanding for those of differing cultures, eager to learn why those differences exist, and some are relentlessly negative, never finding anything good in something different and unknown and never wondering why certain behavior is the norm in a part of the world they dismiss out of hand; some are fellow passengers in life’s journey, good Samaritans who are always giving of themselves to help others, and some are always first in line with their hands out intending to partake to the detriment of others; some are good to have as friends, and some aren’t worthy of being an enemy, only worthy of casual disregard.

And we learned all of us are all of them at times, depending upon the day, depending upon the vagaries of the weather, depending upon the level of weariness experienced on any given day of travel.

Posted in Civics, Friendship, Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | 1 Comment

American Myths

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

We spent three days in Budapest recently, and, as we are wont to do, we got into a discussion with one of the crewman on our ship, a young man who previously lived in the United States for about three years.  Crew members are strictly forbidden to talk politics with passengers by company rules, but, like any regulations imposed from on high, there are always ways around such prohibitions.  To begin a conversation about political matters, it only takes a nod, a wink, a sympathetic ear, and an admission that you haven’t bought into the notion that all Americans are gods from Mt. Olympus who can do no wrong by self-definition.

It was clear from our discussion that this particular European, a Romanian by birth, believed Americans to be a homogenous, monolithic tribe of peoples akin to the Romans and their armies or Attila’s horde of Huns.  To him, we clearly are an aggressive people, a tribe who likes to throw its weight around for the sheer joy of having done so, constantly sticking its collective nose into things that are none of its business in order to prove that it can and that no other tribe is strong enough to prevent it from doing so.

Little does the crewman know that while we do, in fact, stick our collective noses into matters we have no business interfering with in the first place, we usually do so because we are a fractured society unable to communicate across political divides; because sticking our collective noses into others’ business is far easier than having a meaningful dialogue about our own internal business and priorities.  In other words, we delight in sticking our noses into other people’s business because it is far easier to do so than to take care of our own.  While we are busy going about the business of imposing democracy upon the rest of the world’s tribes, we have forgotten how to practice democracy within our own, preferring instead to practice imperialism abroad.

Can the lions and the Coliseum be far behind?

The crew member’s viewpoint is a sobering one, for America has given him, without charge, the building materials from which he constructed it.  His viewpoint is akin to many I see among our resident politicians – a viewpoint composed of equal parts predisposition to reach a certain, foregone conclusion, a ready willingness to disbelieve those facts that are inconvenient to reaching such a conclusion, and a self-comforting, certain knowledge that one’s personal beliefs are of the very essence of a holy, God-given Truth.  After all, why think when you already know?  In short, the crew member in question ought to seek U.S. citizenship and immediately thereafter run for Congress, for he is eminently qualified to serve in its halls.

Having said this, there is a caution in this tale that we, as Americans, should take to heart.  Our major failure in taking up our place in the world is that we are too self-absorbed with our own fractious democracy to listen to or care about what those abroad think of our behavior.  While we don’t see ourselves as a monolithic society, those living abroad often see us as a tribe known as “American” who have wandered into their territories bent on conquest.  They see us as they are predisposed to see all foreigners, preconditioned as they are by waves of invasions by foreign armies that helped shape their own cultures over the long centuries of human history; they wish to see us as invaders seeking to conquer new lands, to bed the women resident there, to pillage the stores of goods and grains, to enjoy the fruits of our conquest, and so they do.

And why shouldn’t they, for this has been the stuff of human history for centuries.  While Americans see themselves as spreading democracy to the unwashed, non-Americans see us as the most recent reincarnation of Genghis Kahn’s Mongol hordes.  We, as a society, fail to understand their viewpoint simply because we have no such predilection, simply because we are safe behind the vastness of our ocean defenses, simply because our forebears escaped all of those ancient, constricting beliefs by emigrating to the Land of the Free and somehow our foreign relatives should have realized this, should have somehow intuited through a process of osmosis what the lessons learned from that escape might be.  We forget that they are the ones who didn’t escape; we forget that we are descended from the ones who did.

In short, we have forgotten that non-Americans are just like us: narrow-minded; intolerant of any opinions unlike those we and they hold dear; beset by fears that predispose them and us to believe implicitly in our most cherished assumptions; willing and able to believe in the most improbable of conspiracies; ready to bend the facts to suit their and our convenient assumptions; lazy and bigoted and indifferent and deaf and blind to the assumptions of others not like us.

While we see the American myth as being that anyone may succeed if only he or she has the talent and the willingness to try, they see the American myth as being that of Roman armies silently on the move in the mornin’s mist, of invisible hordes waiting to strike at any moment from almost any direction when least expected to do so.

Or, at least, this specific crewman sees us this way, but I am willing to bet good American dollars that there are lots more like him abroad in the world.

For humans are herd animals: we live and thrive in congress; we communicate most formidably by broadcast; we share our fears through rumor; we define ourselves by community.  And if each grouping of humanity does so and, in doing so, feels right and proper, why shouldn’t another grouping of humanity do the same?

And so it is that we Americans should understand that non-Americans see us as a territorially cohesive tribe bound by common cause and ancestry, rather than as the fractious, fragmented, diverse society we believe ourselves to be.  After all, many of them see themselves in the same way.

Should they learn to see beyond their prejudices?  Of course they should.  And so should we.

 

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Stage Settings and Realities

Posted on May 27, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

We are approaching Vienna, a city to which I’ve never physically been but one which I, like many on this earth, believe I know well because of its continuous celebration in movies, in literature, and by song.  Vienna is one of those cities that belong to the world, not just to its country of location.  These are cities informed and ennobled by their unique local cultures, cities blessed with a physical beauty that transcends the common mud and filth of their alleyways, cities to which all humanity claims – nay, demands – citizenship.

The honor roll includes Paris, Rome, London, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Budapest, and perhaps others.  The name of each city on the list immediately conjures up a romanticized mental image for those unfortunate enough not to have visited it, evokes an impression of great physical beauty, produces a vision of human life flowering under the aegis of a singular culture so inescapably, inextricably associated with certain of its physical attributes as to be essential to its fame.  What would be Vienna be without the magnificent Danube or without a wonderful waltz by Johann Strauss, for example?  Both must have come together for Vienna to have flowered in humanity’s collective imagination, to have earned it a place on the list.

I have been fortunate enough to see and enjoy several of these cities and look forward to seeing and enjoying two more on this trip – Vienna and Budapest.  I have a visual as well as a mental impression of each, and it will be a delight to compare my expectations with their respective realities.  For no place is truly equal to a traveler’s romanticized expectation.   I am as certain as I can be, for example, that the Taj Mahal has blemishes the camera overlooks.  How could it not after so long a time on this earth?  But these blemishes, whatever they may be, are part of the heritage of each such place, are reflections of its great age, are badges of honor in the fight against the decay that began at the very moment of its creation.  So much so in fact, that rather than detracting from the renown of such a place, the blemishes blend into its reality to render it a truly human place as well as a romanticized ideal.

For these places are the greatest achievements of humanity, places where the human hand has wrought beauty through hard, grinding, constant, aching work, where backdrops of great natural beauty have been augmented by substantial human constructions, where human genius has created a physical setting so robust that it is impressively, undeniably real while simultaneously a mere stage setting composed of dreams, spit, elbow grease, illusions, and baling wire combined for magical effect.

So it is with anticipation that I await Vienna.  We are one stop away and will be there by evening, an evening we will spend listening to Viennese waltzes and classical music after having gained entry to the city via the Danube.  For our tickets are in hand and the ship is underway.  Our imagined romances and Vienna’s stark realities are on a collision course.

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Ghosts

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

I walked among ghosts yesterday in Nuremberg, Germany – many of whom were far more terrifying than those that populated my dreams as a young child or the celluloid whimsies that Hollywood and its offspring often produce.  For I walked among the ghosts of real people: the ghosts of real people who were steeped in and devoted to the worship of evil; the ghosts of real people who were dedicated to the emasculation of that very same evil.

A visit to the Nuremberg Zeppelin Field is all that is necessary to draw these ghosts out of their hiding places.  The Field is in a state of deliberately induced decay now, but it was once alive with blazing anti-aircraft searchlights drawing so much power that a special electrical substation had to be built to power them, it was once alive to the marching feet of thousands of party faithful entering the Field from three separate points in order to establish and consolidate the fear they sought to induce, it was once alive to the rantings of a monster with a small mustache and hidden horns and tail, a single, frail human monster who was the embodiment of all of the evil of which mankind is capable.

The ghosts of some 60,000,000 others are here too, having no other single location to haunt, having no other single location in which to express their warnings about what happens when evil is allowed to attain the center stage it so constantly seeks.  For evil is always waiting in the wings and seeking a starring role.  It is never gone from our lives, only waiting to be freed anew, to be blessed anew with the affirmation of men: hiding the while in the details; hiding the while in the rules and regulations issued by those seeking to bend others to their will, to their mad, idiosyncratic ideas of universal propriety, of universal Truths which only they can divine or proclaim; hiding the while in places such as Guantanamo, tempting us with illusions of safety, tempting us to beckon it to center stage while disguised as a rational act born of our collective fears.

But yesterday I also walked among the ghosts of the valiant during a visit to Courtroom 6 – ghosts such as that of Robert Jackson, a future US Supreme Court Justice who was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials which began in November, 1945.  He was already a hero when the trial began for having organized the trials, for having brought together four different nations with four differing legal systems and traditions in order to try those who had served as evil’s handmaidens as opposed to summarily executing them, to take up the burden of proof and carry it as far as judgment day, to legalize the means of execution of those Princes of Evil who remained alive after war’s end.  Ordinary men toiled in this courtroom as well, toiled to bring some form of justice to the 60,000,000 ghosts inhabiting the Zeppelin Field; and the ghosts of these ordinary men, these valiant ordinary men, also walk the halls of the Palace of Justice where Courtroom 6 is located, walk these halls even while their remains are interred in cemeteries spread among the four nations, spread over the fields of Russia, of France, of Great Britain, of the United States.

These were potent ghosts.  To sit in a room where Herman Goering once sat sweating, laughing, taunting fate, spitting in the face of truth is to know him after a fashion.  To stand in a field where Hitler held thousands spellbound with haunting, melodic idiocy is to experience the after-smell, the after-taste of rotten, foul decay.  To stand in the ruins of a Congress Hall dedicated to the triumph of one ogre’s egomania is to experience a profound inability of comprehension, to know failure in a quest to understand why an entire nation of seemingly rational people once allowed evil in, once allowed evil to hold sway while turning their collective heads aside in a futile attempt to avoid seeing its manifold, all too readily apparent manifestations.

I met many ghosts yesterday in Nuremberg, Germany – ghosts who powerfully reminded me of the lessons of history, of lessons that mankind never fully assimilates, never fully takes to heart; lessons mankind prefers to learn anew at erratic intervals after evil is allowed center stage yet again after having been banished to the wings for the space of but too few generations.

By day’s end, those ghosts left me with hope stemming from the great expenditures of my parent’s generation while achieving the last major triumph over unrestrained evil – even as these ghosts reminded me of the power that mass despair has to create the seed bed that evil requires for its parturition; even as these ghosts reminded me of the constant battle humanity must wage to marginalize the effect of the daily evils that men do, to avoid allowing these daily evils to accrete into their desired collective personification as Evil Incarnate, as evil in a starring role.

Posted in 'Tis a Puzzlement, Our Place in the Firmament, Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | 1 Comment

Sailing in the Dark

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

It is night.  We are sailing on the Maine River in Germany.  The lounge where I’m writing is deserted, the vessel is using its running lights, and the shore is slipping by without revealing itself unless we are passing a place of human habitation.  One feels the ship gliding, the engines giving the merest vibration until we reach another lock.

One always knows when we have arrived at a lock in the darkness.  If you were in the lounge with me, you would see the lights and, as they appear, the channel markers specifying the location of the entry lane; if one is in bed as I should be, the engines roar and grind as the captain fights the ship into a space designed for lesser vehicles.  This ship is 410 feet long and does not go gently into a lock: it fights and grinds and roars, but in the end it is always tamed.  Its fight is only for show, to establish its independence, to demand respect, and, in the end, the captain always prevails and the ship accepts the lock with equanimity.

It is the sense of gliding that is the strangest experience of the night.  You cannot see the shore in the stretches of the river where there are no lights, no humanity, but still you know there is movement, that we are skating on this swiftly flowing river.  Some of the sensation comes from the vibration of the engines, a gentle, calming vibration you can feel throughout your body. It is almost as nice as a massage from a loved one.  But the rest of the sensation is subliminal, almost primeval.  You know you are gliding because you are gliding.  A tautology?  Perhaps, but one somehow senses the shore, senses the life there, senses the slippage through the cool night air.

I find these times the most restful on board ship.  It seems strange that I should have to wake to find rest, but that is the truth.  Here in the lounge, here in the night, here on this ship slipping through the night, I can find peace for an overactive mind that wants to do something other than dream.

But perhaps I am still in bed, dreaming I am in the lounge, dreaming that I am watching or sensing the shore go by, dreaming of gliding through the night.

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The Rest of Us Ought to Listen More

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

During the late 1950s, there was a television series called The Naked City that always ended with the following tag line: “There are eight million stories in the Naked City.  This has been one of them.”  While a cliché, the tag line is, as is true of most clichés, a rendition of a universal Truth with a capital “T.”  For everyone has a story, if only the rest of us would just take a moment to listen, just take our turn at being the second necessary component of a good story, its audience.

Our unwillingness or inability to listen, to serve as someone’s audience, is generally the result of one of two things: we become so tied up by the distractions that beggar the hours of our day that we cannot find time to listen or to expend the energy necessary for good listening to take place; or we are so narcissistic, so self-involved, that we find listening gets in the way of a constant celebration of self.  This piece isn’t for those in the latter group, because I can offer those folks no words of advice other than to get over yourself, other than you should learn that a story without an audience is meaningless, admonitions that are singularly unhelpful to someone full to bursting with self.  For they missed Kindergarten’s most basic lesson.

To the former group, I suggest a long vacation of the type Helen and I are currently enjoying.  In our case, we are on the M/V River Aria, a 410 foot long ship owned by Grand Circle Tours wending its way from Amsterdam to the Black Sea by means of various canals and the Rhine, the Maine and the Danube Rivers.  It is, in essence, a floating hotel.  You check in, unpack, and your hotel then drives you to various destinations of interest.  This is our first cruise and we are only three days afloat, but we are liking the concept so far.

One of the blessings of this trip is that we have no daily cares to distract us from the stories that others wish to tell.  Everything we need is being taken care of by someone else, and we are free to listen without distraction, without impediment, to the other 7,999,999 stories – and even more if we wish.

The River Aria has proven to be full of stories.  To be technically correct, we heard our first story before we got on the board the Aria, as its telling began before we even left the Farm in Humptulips County.  Our driver proved to be a young Croatian man who began telling us about being raised in Croatia in the 1980s and living through the wars which occupied that region in the 1990s.  He was not of the narcissistic type and insistent upon telling us his story, but his was a story that emerged after a few gentle questions from Helen and myself that began with the classic “Where are you from?”  We exchanged many stories and thoughts during our 45 minute trip to the airport, and he left us richer for having heard his story and having learned much from him about the strength of human endurance under inherently terrifying situations, but poorer for the substantial tip we left him in thanks for the education.  We got the better of the trade, however, even if he was happy with his end of the unacknowledged bargain.

This morning I rose early and dressed so I could go up to the ship’s lounge to write, and found upon arrival a fellow passenger who was also without sleep.  I sat with him to chat for what was planned by me to be a few moments before engaging in my errand, but two hours later found myself still talking, still not composing.  For he was full of stories about his life as a government employee and a former, reluctant Marine.  Before meeting him, I would have thought the phrase ‘reluctant Marine’ an oxymoron.  I wrote nothing during the two hours of conversation, but I learned a great deal about life from my new friend and fellow passenger.  Our sense of mutual trust grew during that time to the point where he finally shared a concern with me about something he’d said while on board the Aria, and I found myself in a position to assure him he hadn’t given the offense he was afraid he’d given.  I learned as much about him from his fear of having given offense as I did from his stories of the University of Colorado in the early 1960s.

And then there are the lessons to be learned from the wealth of stories told by my 90-year-old friend, Bob.  Bob is always capable of surprising me, and frequently does.  Just when you think you’ve heard all of his stories, he surprises you with a new one and reveals yet another layer to the heights to which his soul extends.  Some of these surprises are about trivial matters, but some few are of startling significance.

Bob announced at dinner last night that he had arranged to have the crew waken him at 2:00 AM so that he might go out on the sun deck as the ship passed south of the town of Wessel on the River Rhine.  Bob wanted to on deck when the ship passed through the area where he first crossed the Rhine in a skiff piloted by a Navy Midshipman in 1945, while on his way from Normandy to Germany courtesy of the US Army.  His first visit to the area was done to the accompaniment of cannon fire, with him as the target; last night’s visit was to be on the safe confines of a river cruising ship.  The surprise for me was that he had yet another story to tell of those years and the life he’d then led – a life I constantly am reminded that I possess only the outlines of, and only the vaguest notion about.  That there is far more, far richer detail to that life, I am certain.  That I have much yet to learn from him is clear. And our voyage together goes on.  May it last for many more good years!

And so it goes.  On this trip we have met Serbs, Croatians, Austrians, Dutch, Americans of all stripes, and a few others we haven’t yet placed into a convenient box of geography for storage in our memories.  While it really doesn’t matter where any of the storytellers come from, their geography is a spice to enliven their personal stories.  And we find ourselves with the luxury of time to listen, to serve as a good audience, and to take our turn in the sharing of stories – a human tradition that began in the first shared and darkened cave well before the discovery of how to control fire; a tradition that is of the essence of what it means to be human.

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Hitting The Road

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

Helen and I are leaving Humptulips County this afternoon for a trip by river boat through Eastern Europe.  We are excited, nervous about airport security, but ready for an adventure to parts unknown – at least to us.  We fly to Amsterdam where the cruise originates, a city unknown to Helen and visited once for most of a day by me while on a business trip.  So I can’t say the city is familiar to either of us, although I do remember lots of bicycles piled next to the main passenger train station in the city center.  Everyone else I’ve ever spoken to about Amsterdam clearly recalls the same pile.  Helen and I will be looking for something more glorious to remember about the city, and will start looking by means of a canal tour on Thursday morning.

It’s a hard time of year to leave Humptulips County for other parts of the world.  The weather here has been spectacular until late Sunday evening when it turned cold, rainy, and windy.  That was probably the weather god’s way of attuning Helen and I to Amsterdam, for it, too, is rainy, cold, and windy and is forecasted to remain that way for our entire visit.  This, and the remembered bicycle pile adjacent to the train station,are indications that Humptulips County is mobile concept, rather than a physical place.

Still, wherever Humptulips County may reside during the next month, the Farm will remain firmly anchored where it is and will serve as its focal point, cared for by a plethora of others who will enjoy the rest of its May days.  We have a house sitter, a field mower, and a barn user to take the place of the two of us, to take care of our multitude of cats and love birds and to mark the days and nights, savor the evening shadows across the grass, enjoy time with a cup of tea on our front or back porches, read our books and enjoy our library, or otherwise sip of its ease.

I hope to post from the rivers of Europe on which our cruise takes place – the Rhine, the Maine, and the Danube.  There is a possibility that the scenery will deny me the time to do so, and, if it does, I will not feel cheated or morose, for the sights will hopefully serve to give me new ideas, new insights, about man’s place on this Earth.  For we are going to places far older in terms of human occupation than Humptulips County can boast. Â Western culture along these rivers is centuries old and rich in diversity of custom, language, religion, architecture, arts, and all of the other myriad attributes of humanity.

Leaving home is always a mysterious process for me – I want to go and see things I haven’t seen before, but I am always torn by leaving familiar comforts.  I feel this way this morning, but once the dread of airport security is behind us, once the long hours of flight are over, once we have passed through immigration and customs at Schiphol Airport, once we are safely in the custody of our tour guides at the airport and bound for the ship, the adventure will have truly begun.

Neither of us can wait for things to begin.  But we’re safe in the knowledge that the home fires will be kept burning by others on our behalf; safe in the knowledge that while the Farm is bigger than either of us, it is merely a geographical speck; safe in the knowledge that the comforts and concepts of Humptulips County are mobile, and will accompany us wherever we go.

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A Birthday Party

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Eliot Mentor

Ninety years gone by.  Not as many as 95 or 100, but still a long time.  An occasion for reflection and contemplation, a moment that is appropriate for a scan of the past and the present and also a look at what might remain of the slender future.

It is a period that stretches almost all the way back to World War One – the great war - and includes the Great Depression, World War II which was a war that really affected most of the world, many important technological advances that we take for granted today such as television, jet aircraft and the internet and the Great Recession which began near the end of 2007 and which many say still lingers.  Lots of “greats.”  In the United States that period also brought hithertofore undreamed of government programs with beneficial economic safety nets like Social Security, world-wide travel on a mass scale and cultural diversity to an extent never before imagined.  It also brought the ball point pen, the two (or more) car garage, daily hot showers instead of a once-a-week tub bath, a decline in the quality of public education and in the number of those finishing high school, the cell phone and texting, a tendency towards crude public displays and obscenities, a shift to getting rich on financial shenanigans instead of creating real businesses, making real discoveries and providing real services to others, a terrible increase in income inequality, the rise and proliferation of well-funded special interest groups, vicious polarization among political parties, more wars and increasing allocation of public funds toward military spending.  Medical discoveries and new techniques brought about a substantial increase in longevity. Those years also saw a profusion of cheap weapons with unbelievable destructive and killing potential and the rise of terrorist organizations that hate the United States and want to destroy it and its people, a very different outlook than that of anarchists and nihilists of earlier years.

It indeed was a remarkable and singularly transformative period.  In that almost-a century there were many good things that happened and many not so good.  It can make one hopeful or gloomy for the future, depending on one’s general disposition.  That is something I choose not to dwell on because I won’t be a witness.  Anyway, almost all those who make predictions – except perhaps for Nostradamus – miss the boat.  So why join that crowd?

A notion persists that age ninety should be celebrated with a lavish birthday party.  My dear lady decided that would be the thing for me.  A nice idea, I must admit.  A big party, however, entails its burdens and not only for the giver of the party, although those are certainly considerable.  Unless the party is kept as a total surprise, the person who is about to be ninety also shares in the burdens.  For starters, there is an address list.  Whom to invite?  Which of the many friends that are still alive will receive an invitation?  That can’t be left to someone else to choose. Good feelings about seeing old and true friends are diminished by guilty feelings about some that will not receive an invitation.  As an example, someone for whom you care very little but who is close to or a business associate of others who definitely will be invited?  If not invited, that someone will undoubtedly learn about the party and then…?  Friends and relatives who live far away and who are very unlikely to travel, send them an invitation?  What if a friend wants to bring someone whom you don’t know or don’t care about?  Winnowing the list to manageable size is a task.

But that isn’t all.  You know there will be little speeches at the party and maybe a toast or two.  You must respond graciously, perhaps even utter a word or two that bespeaks the supposed wisdom of being ninety years old.  So you lie in bed at night thinking about what to say, working over the phrases, repeating them over and over, somewhat like counting sheep, but repeating the phrases only keeps you awake whereas counting sheep might induce restful sleep.  You don’t want your words to be dull and boring, so what will liven them up?  A joke?  You can’t think of even one in the middle of the night.  Besides, what is funny about being ninety?  Oh, I know jokesters have put together ironic, sardonic little stories about old age that are supposed to be funny.  Every other day some of them pop up on the computer screen, often long lists, sent by some well-meaning friends, or more likely by some idiot with nothing better to do and who in his or her deranged way thinks that mocking old age is funny.  Well, being ninety is often being in the midst of a hard, cruel time, a time when pains inexplicably come out of nowhere, when you can’t do the things you used to do easily, when memory sometimes fails, when you dribble and spill stuff on yourself and when joking about those happenings is not a cure although it may provide a diversion. So you lie in bed and fumble with what to say.

That, as you discover, has a good side.  All that restless groping for words has really been about contemplating and reflecting on what ninety years of living have meant.  During that period has there been any event worth noting?  Is there any experience that might be helpful to others, that might make a difference in their lives?

I use the word “experience” rather than “wisdom.”  The capacity for wisdom, or a smart and intelligent mind, is like other gifts or talents.  It is something that a person is born with and with which a person may do great things with diligent application.  As the old saying goes, “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”  This despite the notion that is gaining popularity that a college degree can.  Therefore, memories and the stories that spring from them, “experiences,” are important and can serve as guideposts for those who will listen.

Lying in bed and thinking those thoughts brings many an experience to mind.  In some sense I have led a charmed and blessed life, the many pages of which include more than one event or story which might intrigue a listener.  If, however, at the upcoming birthday party I started to tell stories, I would become instantly boring.  Not every one of my experiences might  delight or have relevance for an audience.  I dismissed that notion.

Nonetheless, it was intriguing to think that there might be one story, one experience, which is more important than all the others.  The secret of life, if you will, encapsulated in a single slogan.  One neat, pithy phrase to live by.  Such as:

  • Why break your back digging for gold when you can sell shovels to the
    miners?, or
  • Buy late, sell early, or
  • Never give a sucker an even break, or…

Such slogans, however, are about making money, greed, cheating someone who is less fast on his feet or quick on the draw.  But as secrets of life?  Hardly compatible with the dictum to “lay up treasures not on earth where moth and rust corrupt and thieves break through and steal.”  Oh, no.

That elevating thought led me to more agitated turning between the sheets and probing the dark spaces around me as, if great thoughts lurk in the gloom of night.  As I lay there looking at the shadows on the ceiling I came to realize that what I had left was no more tangible than those shadows.  What treasures of a life remain as one grows to old age, becomes ancient, reaches ninety?  Of what does the residue of a lifetime consist?  Will it be material wealth?  A stamp collection?  Art?  Oriental rugs?  Photographs?  A classic car collection, real or in miniature?  Storybook dolls?  Old books?  A fine watch?  A glorious mansion?  Will any of those count?  Or is the real treasure more ephemeral, more representative of something else, like the sled in that movie?

The answer, of course, is not the same for everyone.  For some, the big house, the luxury car, the thrill of power will be everything.  The slogans set out above will be their fingerposts to life, and the imminence of death will not bring a different outlook.

But as I scanned the vague shapes overhead, my inner vision reached beyond as often happens when wrapped in darkness, sought out bits and pieces of that long lifetime and stitched together the many remnants that floated before me.  It had been a long lifetime, not uneventful, one that was filled with challenges, with many joys and some sorrows.  What remained were memories and the few surviving friends that support those memories.  Those, I realized, were my greatest riches.  They are truly abundant, a source of great satisfaction.

Scattered among the memories were times when I had made a positive difference in the lives of others.  Recalling those instances always gives an unexpected and special pleasure and sometimes a bit of humor, like the profusion with which a woman thanked me years after I had fired her.  She insisted that this caused her to embark on a new and different career.  The reward for making a difference in the lives of others is intangible.  It consists only of the knowledge that you may have given another human being hope, a path to a better life, even life itself.  What better reward?

Darkness eventually brought on sleep and in due course gave way to dawn and the day of the party.  The party, as such things go, was a huge success, lots of friends, a few speeches, a toast, my response and more than enough to eat and drink.  When all the guests had gone, we journeyed home clothed in a garment of goodwill, with warm feelings and a head full of memories of another happy time.

But there is always the future to consider.  The future comes to us whether we want it or not.  There is no putting it off or wishing it away.  I  asked,  “What’s ahead?”  No Delphic oracle, however, is lurking behind a large rock, or in a mountain cave, sniffing future’s fumes for an answer.  Moreover, I realized that even a Delphic oracle at the peak of her career could not provide a sufficient answer for me.  The reason is simple and straightforward.  Although an Oracle with divine ability might foresee future events, like whether I will perish in an earthquake or fall down a flight of steps and break my neck, that aspect of the future is not my concern.

Death, like the future, is inevitable, and I do not consider it, much less worry about it.  As a wise man once taught me, “worry only about things you can do something about.”  No, the inevitable is not my concern.  My concern is about the future that will be of my own making.  That is what I must explore and about which there must be a decision, or decisions.  Otherwise the future will be like a vacant prairie, a vast emptiness, perhaps not so vast if my days ahead are numbered and on the short side.

Some older men and women fill that remaining space with endless hours of card-playing, or television-watching, or theater-going, or idle chatter.  That, however, is not my inclination, vacuously pleasant as those things might be.  Someplace in the litter of my 90 years, I have a picture of myself as a very little boy, perhaps two or three years old, bundled in a heavy coat, a furry hat on my head and mittens on my hands to keep the freezing cold out.   The mittened hands hold a broom, and I am furiously sweeping a light
snowfall off a sidewalk, with a resolute determination marking my face, as if I were Hercules cleaning the Augean stables.

I must get to work.  There are many sidewalks to sweep, many stables to clean.  That is the future.

(This is a companion piece to A Friend of Mine Turned 90 This Week by Gavin Stevens, also on this blog)

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Musings From This Side of Morning’s Silhouette

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

The pre-dawn hour has arrived in Humptulips County, and the sky is just beginning to brighten.  The sun is still concealed behind the eastern mountains, but just enough sunlight is leaking over their tops to provide a red, rose and blue background for the trees and taller bushes, for anything high enough to reach these still vagrant rays of sunshine. The leakage of stray light beams has become strong enough to provide an assured outline of these taller things, but is not yet strong enough to reveal any of their detail, for this is the hour of morning’s silhouette.

Birds have awakened to cheer on the sun’s rising, to make it welcome by means of an earth song so ancient as to have been shared by my ancestors as far back as my particular string of ‘greats extends.  I can well imagine the first conscious soul within my ancestry, the Most Ancient One, similarly worshipping the sun’s rising to the cadence of  bird song, enthralled in wonderment at this conjoined majesty of sun, bird, song and life in all of its various forms, and worshipping this moment as the font of creation.  Whomever his gods may have been, whatever his gods may have stood for, the sun was surely among their foremost.

I, too,worship the sunrise on this early summer’s morning, sharing kinship with that long ago ancestor by means of this most basic and ancient of earthly glories.  How amazing it is that we two can share this moment together in my imagination, the dead and the living bound by this single shared experience, by our shared wonder, all the while divided by the vagaries of language, dress, culture, tools, religion, education, science, distance, and time, by our very different sensibilities as to what it means to be human!

And as the two of us, the Most Ancient One and I, stand here together, holding hands across the eons, all of those in between us come out from behind the silhouette’s edge to join in this daily celebration of bounty, of grace, of life: my father and mother waving to me from just beyond its boundary as if to remind me that while I, too, will all too soon share their side of the equation, it only takes one living person with memory to balance the weight of all their shades; to remind me that I am not to be dismayed by the prospect of death, for there, on the other side of the morning’s silhouette, lies just another kind of life.

I take comfort in knowing that my sons and their children have already joined alongside of the Most Ancient One and me in this daily celebration of sunlight, and that when I cross over the silhouette’s boundary they, in turn, will take up the Most Ancient One’s hand from across the eons, will assume the burden of bearing the memory necessary to balance the ancestral scales, will stand proudly in the sunlight as I wave to them from the shade.

Posted in Our Place in the Firmament, Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | 1 Comment