Stunning, how inept...

... I can be

Before I elaborate on that statement in, hopefully, efficient detail, I want to note that my previous three blog entries (variations on "In the time that we have left..."), may not have been a good idea. Or, at least, advanced an idea that needed extensive elaboration, which I was not at all prepared to develop. Another time, perhaps.

Moving on, then.

This is a story about how inept I can be. It begins around 8:03 some recent morning when Brendan, who was probably already out uberring, texted me. "Hey, did you ever happen to get a new city sticker for my car?"

I read his text about an hour later. Reading sent my stomach to roiling. In my Chicago experience, going on 15 years this century, renewing the city stickers on our cars is a reliably fraught undertaking.

After writing most of the 130 or so words immediately preceding, I took my first writing break. I know. I write all of 130 words and I am so exhausted I need a break? Yeah, well, diligence is not one of my major qualities. Regardless, after I took that break, I wrote the paragraphs indented below:

I need to run out to the porch to check the temperature on the grill because I am trying to slowly smoke a slab of back ribs. And, having performed that check, I extend my break to take a shot of tequila. A reward I promised myself if I so much as began this post about my day in pursuit of a renewed city sticker for our Honda Accord. The one that Brendan takes uberring.

Tequila shots are not, of course, my usual practice. I drink beer moderately and rarely touch hard liquor. But that day was special. It was 40 degrees out and I was trying to smoke a slab of ribs on my grill. Lots of people can do that, although the cold day will increase the challenge of maintaining the grill temperature in the range of 180 to 200 degrees. 

And it was also the day that I had the set of experiences that led me to decide to write a story about how inept I can be, an ineptness that had me rueing bad decisions and incompetence. Hence, in the moment, I soothed myself with a shot of tequila.

Break over, I returned to the writing task. The tequila shot was a big one in more ways than one. 

Oversize shot glass. A Mark Twain souvenir from Hannibal, Missouri. 'Never refuse to take a drink--under any circumstances," it says, quoting Twain. 

That's not my style. But right now, I wish it was. Not because my especially inept performance earlier that day made me wish I was drunk. After all, that experience of myself as less than competent is in no way unusual and, at this point in my life, it's not very distressing. Overtime, one tends to get over harsh feelings about oneself. But from time to time I do wonder if I might have tapped a little bit more genius if I had gotten to the bottom of more bottles in this life.

After absorbing Brendan's text and moving on from the sinking feeling, I dialed the city information line. A polite and helpful phone operator answered almost immediately, giving me a number for the city clerk's office where, the helpful phone operator assured me, still another helpful city staffer would certainly tell me how to go about replacing the city sticker that I apparently had previously purchased, and then lost, in some unremembered fashion, and was never gonna find.

Thirty-one minutes later, I finally came off hold to engage a voice. Thirty-one. Minutes. Later. WTF, you're probably saying to yourself, you stayed on hold for 31 minutes? Couldn't you think of a better way to go about doing what you needed to do?'

Well, no. I just let the time slip away. Though while on hold I did get through two pages of comics in the morning newspaper. Some number of other people (many? most? all?) wouldn't consider that a very productive use of my time, but I am generally not inclined to think about my time in such terms.

Anyhow... "I bought a new city sticker for my car about two months ago, but my son just told me that we still have the 2022 sticker on the windshield. I assume we lost the last one, so I need to know how to get a replacement."

"Oh," the helpful voice responded, "I'm going to give you the number of the office that can answer that question for you."

"Oy," I kvetched, "you can't tell me how to do it?" I almost added that I'd been on hold for thirty-one minutes, then refrained from saying so. Because, really, nobody who takes the calls of people who have been living on long holds is likely to be motivated by a desire to provide whatever it is that might be needed by the person coming off hold, especially if they had been holding on the wrong line.

"Sorry," she responded, "this number is for fines and late fees."

"Okay, I get it. Can you give me that number, again?"

And she did. And I called the number and talked to a woman who told me that I just needed to come downtown to city hall, go to the police desk near the entry, get a "miscellaneous police report" from them, take it to the clerk's office on the first floor, and pay $5 to replace the missing city sticker.

I was good with that. I could take the Green Line from the 31st Street/IIT station near my house and get downtown in, oh, say, 30 minutes or thereabouts. And, before I could even consider riding my bike to the clerk's office (which, as it turned out, would have been a much smarter decision), I realized that I could read on the train. This is generally a good thing because I tend to not put aside time to read at home.

Brendan had offered to stop uberring for a bit and give me a ride downtown. But I'm thinking that he needs the money he's working to earn--he's in law school and near-broke most of the time--and I make a habit of walking or taking public trans whenever I can, even when it comes at a significant cost in time.

I should add that much of my adult life has been shaped by another "behavioral inefficiency," the guilty wish to be the direct cause of as few environmental-havocing, fossil-fuel-consuming, climate-changing, class-gender-and-race-privileged deeds, woke or otherwise, as I can manage. (This statement should also be the departure point for a future post about the privilege I was born with, and have never been able to outrun, despite struggling often, but perhaps half-heartedly, to reject. Privilege is, after all, the collective advantage of the caste into which one is born. Individuals can steer neurotically, or any other way they might wish, into calamity, and even sever themselves violently from their caste, but the privilege that is the property of the group, is not diminished. Until the revolution, maybe.)

By the way, Helen Oyeyemi is a pretty wonderful writer. I've been a writer, on and off, for the last 60 years, probably three times longer than Oyeyemi has been writing, but I can't touch what she can do. Why is my writing no match for Oyeyemi's. Not imaginative enough? Far less dedicated to the craft? Less disciplined in the effort? Who knows? But it's safe to say that if we were playing basketball, Oyeyemi would be dunking on me at will.

So, that's a good thing that happened that day. I read probably 40 pages in The Icarus Girl, in which Oyeyemi tells the story of Jess, the daughter of a Nigerian woman and a white Brit, an accountant, no less. Jess is a quirky, but loved child who visits her ancestral homeland and befriends a ghostly inhabitant of her grandfather's family compound.

Oyeyemi's control of her work creates numerous chances for her to digress in the service of enriching the story. She quotes Samuel Coleridge, making one of his poem's importance to Jess a way of deepening Oyeyemi's characterization of her 14-year-old character. "And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle around him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honeydew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise."

It is a bit of forewarning that Jess fails to process. I can confidently say that if I had somehow made myself read that Coleridge poem, I would have encountered those lines without any sense of what they might mean, or how they might make me feel. But reading those lines in the context of Jess's journey, I felt schooled. And moved. And, so, maybe it was a good idea to take the train.

But, no. The train and the book would turn out to be among the many ways I would waste time on the day that began with that morning text from my youngest child, whom I like to call Brendo. Or Mr. Potato Head. The child that Nate and Julie, his much older siblings, like to call Jumpin' (different story, another time).

At the police desk at city hall, I asked one of the officers for a "miscellaneous police report," as I believed I had been directed to do by the last voice I had heard. "No, you have to go to the clerk's office to get the form," the officer said. "Then bring it here and we fill it out. Go to room 107 around the corner and ask them for the form."

Okay. Room 107. Waiting my turn, I stand in line. For an extended period of time that I could only endure and knew, for a fact, that I would not be able to even estimate how m much time would pass, let alone measure with precision.

But finally, I stood in front of a real live person at one of the long line of teller's windows in the clerk's office. Vehicle-registration-and-neighborhood-parking-permit Department. Or Division. Who ever really knows the precise names of these offices, departments, divisions?

"I need the form for the miscellaneous police report," I said to the person before me.

"Oh," she side-eyes me. "You get that from the police desk in main lobby."

Oy.

"Really. They told me that I get it from you and bring it to them."

Nope.

I went back to the lobby. The police officer whom I had first encountered, a sergeant, no less, smiled a greeting. "Didja get it," he asked.

Nope. "They said I'm supposed to get it from you."

The sergeant was incredulous. "C'mon, I'll go back there with you."

So, we walked back to room 107 together. A polite guy, the sergeant signaled to the teller to whom I had spoken earlier, that he would wait to speak to her until she was done with the person she was currently serving. But, feeling that I had long since wasted all the time that any ordinary standard of public service would require me to waste, I spoke up without waiting my turn. A demonstration of class privilege, perhaps?

In the upshot, my impatience, my attempt to make the teller do what I needed her to do, had no effect. "I'll be with you in a moment," she said.

When it was finally our turn, the sergeant spoke, then the teller spoke, then the sergeant spoke, and on and on. I didn't fully understand what they were saying to each other, but it became clear that I had asked the teller for the wrong form and the fault was mine. In any case, she was prepared to give me the correct form, the one that I would take to the police desk in the lobby, hand over to the police and receive, in return, the miscellaneous police report that I would take back to her and hand over, along with a five dollar fee, and receive, in return, a replacement city sticker for our Honda.

"I just need to see your driver's license," she said.

But I could not show her my driver's license, because it was at home, sitting on our copier, where I had left it after having scanned it for the purpose of sharing it with a different city office in an attempt to get a city permit for an entirely different purpose.

"Funny story," I said. "I don't have it. It's at home on my copier."

"Well, I need to see some sort of state ID."

Oy. I sorted through a number of other comments I might make in that moment, but none of them seemed at all relevant to the problem created by the fact that I couldn't produce my driver's license.

I left room 107. On the way out of the building, I stopped by the police desk ion the lobby. The very cheerful sergeant, apparently eager to fill out a temporary police report on my behalf, smiled at me.

"Guess what," I said to him. "I couldn't get the form. I left my driver's license at home."

Determined to help, he suggested that I go to the Secretary of State's office across the street and ask them to issue a replacement driver's license. This did not strike me as a good idea, at the time. But on the way back to the Green Line, I stopped in the lobby of the state office where a number of people were in lines that snaked around corners and ended somewhere out of sight.

I decided that I would go home and get my driver's license off the copier and try again the next day.

Leadership on race

A new generation must take us where we need to go

In August 1965, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. Two months earlier, I had graduated from a large urban high school that was more than 90 percent African American. Most of the white graduates went on to college. Most of the black graduates did not. I've been thinking about race, and especially about the position of African Americans in the United States, ever since.

Race and racism, and what the United States has done to African Americans and continues to do--the reality of slavery, the race-based evil present at the founding of the country, the promises Americans have broken to themselves and their neighbors since, the history and present and future that we refuse to confront, the lies that we tell ourselves--is our original and continuing sin, is democracy and fairness unrealized, is lives tossed away, is the disability we have been unable to overcome. Or so it seems to me.

Next month, my son Brendan and about 25 E.L. Haynes high school classmates will be taking a week-long trip to Atlanta, Birmingham and Selma, where they will learn more about the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s. Student preparation for the trip includes watching parts of three different movies that illuminate various aspects of slavery, of Jim Crow and of the continuing oppression of African Americans.

The first of the three films, "Slavery by Another Name," documents the post-Reconstruction criminalization of joblessness, vagrancy and debt, which made blackness the face of crime for the first time, and allowed Southerners to continue the exploitation and treatment of former slaves under virtually the same conditions that had existed before emancipation. The biggest single difference lay, perhaps, in the fact that the ex-slaves were no longer owned as assets by plantation owners. They became more disposable than they had been on the plantations.

And just as slaves had been used to create a good portion of the infrastructure and great wealth that would put the United States on the path to becoming the wealthiest country in the world, sharecropper and convict labor would continue to be a means to build more wealth utilized by those in a position to benefit. U.S. Steel, the largest corporation in the world at the beginning of the 20th Century, is only one example of a corporate expropriater of the labor of African Americans, who were used to break strikes in Pittsburgh area steel mills, and to mine coal, build factories and operate the steel mills of Birmingham, Ala.; in reality, de facto slave labor after Reconstruction built the industrial center of the deep South.

"The Loving Story" the second in the series of films, screened at Haynes last week. The documentary tells the story of Mildred and Richard Loving, a mixed-race couple convicted in 1959 for violating Virginia's anti-miscegenation law. The Lovings were not activists by any understanding of the term. After their conviction, and a suspended sentence of one-year in prison, they moved with their children to Washington, DC, motivated exclusively by a desire to avoid continued persecution.

But Washington was too urban and distressing for the couple. For years after their conviction, the Lovings continued to sneak back into Virginia to visit family. Eventually, Mildred wrote Robert F. Kennedy, then U.S. Attorney General, seeking his help. Kennedy recommended that she contact the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed an appeal of their conviction. The appeal reached the Supreme Court, and in 1967 the court struck down the Virginia law under which the Lovings had been convicted and explicitly struck down the other anti-miscegenation laws still on the books in 16 states from Texas to Delaware (though it took until 2000 for Alabama to formally repeal the last remaining law).

The small-group discussions that followed the screening were guided by a series of questions, one of which asked participants to note the ways in which "whiteness" continues to be a protected condition today. The responses noted, in particular, the differential enforcement of drug laws and sentencing that send a disproportionate number of African Americans, young black men, especially, to prison. Other examples included failing public schools, particularly in urban areas where minorities live in significant numbers.

Watching the films, sitting down with teachers and parents and children, discussing what we watched and what we think, has made me, by turns, weepy and sad and angry. But listening to 15- and 16-year old Haynes kids express their feelings about the film, about the legacy of slavery and about the persistence of social conflict and problems that have their origins in race-based oppression and bigotry, also made me hopeful.

At about the same time as the Haynes discussion, I encountered this reflection, posted by Robert Reich on his Facebook page:

"I'm sitting here in the Toronto airport, after giving a lecture here last night. Every time I visit Canada I'm reminded what Canadians -- who look and sound almost exactly like us Americans south of the border -- don't have that we do (guns, the National Rifle Association, huge piles of money corrupting their democracy, withering poverty, strident and vitriolic politics), and what they do have that we don't (single-payer health care, affordable public universities, civil discourse, conservatives that would be called moderate Democrats in the States). Can any of you from Canada please explain why?"

I'm not Canadian, but to me, the single most important distinction between the United States and Canada, accounting for a good bit of our political polarization and contested social terrain, is rooted in our race-based history and culture.

• It's the kidnapping and murder of Africans. It's slavery. It's a constitution that made African Americans less than Euro Americans. It's a constitution that declared African Americans less than human.

• It's the Dred Scott decision and the Missouri Compromise. It's the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule. It's the fatigue that ended our national willingness after the Civil War to undo what we had done, and brought the end of Reconstruction and of black empowerment in the South for the next 100 years.

• It's the near-century in American history after the Civil War when no white person, anywhere, was prosecuted for the murder of a black person. It's the post-Reconstruction decisions that made blackness criminal and lynching endemic. It's slavery by another name.

• It's separate but equal. It's Jim Crow. It's Selma. It's the murder of black children. It's the Supreme Court decision in 2013 striking down key portions of the Voting Rights Act.

• It's the terrible disproportion between the percentage of African Americans in the population (about 12 percent) and their percentage in the prison population (approximately 40 percent). It's the collapse of public education in African American communities.

Race and the history of race in the United States, all of it, is the biggest single difference between the United States and Canada and explains, better than any other factor, why we are an angry and ungenerous people. But were we to confront that history, and look at how it has led us to where we are today, we could free ourselves, and make amends, and move forward. We would end up a different country and the future might find Canadians asking how come they don't have what we have.

During the discussion following "The Loving Story" Te, a sophomore at Haynes, asked how come it took so long (33 years) after the Loving decision for Alabama to formally repeal the state's anti-miscegenation laws. I'm going to presume to answer that question, too.

For the biggest problems, there are no easy fixes, Te. We should all be mindful of Martin Luther King Jr.'s formulation: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Yes, two hundred fifty years of slavery and another 150+ years of segregation and a continuing war, not on poverty, but on the poor, is edging toward a long time, a very long time, by human standards. Twenty generations, maybe.

But getting to where we are now, getting from the Middle Passage and the establishment of slavery in the British colonies in the 17th Century and getting through a civil war and to the passage one hundred years later of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, is no small accomplishment. And, in the process, the list of movements and heroes who have pursued and fulfilled some dreams, but nowhere near all of them, is no small accomplishment. New voter ID laws passed in many of the states of the Old South creating new obstacles for African American and other minority voters, the continuing impoverishment of historically black communities, the generation-after-generation imprisonment of young black men, and the daily murder of black children on the streets of some of America's richest cities, are all measures of how far we still must go to achieve the dream of a just society.

That will take more than the 33 years you asked about, Te. And it will take new heroes, perhaps you and Brendan and your classmates, to lead us, lead us with the kind of love for each other that kept the Lovings going when the odds were stacked against them. Pleased be assured that I will help.

The Incompetent Traveler and other updates,

including hatred of polytheists

Brendan flew unaccompanied to Detroit on March 27. Older sister Julie met him at Detroit Metro where they laid over for some six hours before catching a plane to Seattle. It must have been about midnight, maybe 1 a.m., east coast time when they finally landed. Older brother Nate met them at the airport and wisked them to the Seattle home he shares with partner Nikki. Cousin Abraham and partner Irina where there, also, having flown up from San Francisco to spend 48 hours or so in cousin adventures.

While Brendan was away, Marrianne and I planned to play. But sisters Dale and Teri, brother Mark and various nieces and nephews planned for a Pesach seder at Mom's house; given that this might be Mom's last Passover, it made sense to go, even if it would tear a chunk out of the time available for Marrianne and I to do fun and loving things. So, at Julie's instruction, I went to Priceline to seek an affordable roundtrip ticket to Chicago and back. It worked--going early Monday a.m., returning mid-day Wednesday would cost just over $200, a deal at today's prices.

Marrianne and I did squeeze in a date on Sunday night, but I had to get up at 3:00 a.m. on Monday to catch the Super Shuttle to the airport for my six o'clock flight (Metro trains don't start running until 5:00 a.m., that wouldn't get me to the airport and through security in time for my flight). Everything worked pretty decently except for discovering after I reached the airport dreadfully early that my flight wasn't Monday at six, it was Tuesday at six. My bad.

There was a time in Chicago when people would ride the Blue Line out to O'Hare to sit in the observation lounge and watch planes taking off and landing. The golden age of aviation, you know. Pan American Airways to the Orient. Good stuff. Brother Mark used to take son Abraham out there for a visual fix on wide open airport spaces and the wild blue yonder. It wasn't so much like that last Monday at Washington National. More like sleepy, droopy people, closed kiosks and stores and the dark before dawn. There was a Starbucks open to kill a little time until the Metro opened and provided a cheaper way home. And there was the astonished looks and dropped jaws of those around me who shared in the news that I had arrived at the airport the day before my flight. He looks normal, they were thinking, but maybe he's dangerous, or bad luck, anyhow.

When I got home, I put in a little time on a longer poem I'm working on, but mostly I was a sleepy, droopy shell of a man. A sleepy, droopy shell who knew he needed to get up at 3:00 a.m. the next day, also, so that he might get to the airport on time. I really wanted to get to the airport on time. And, after a quiet evening at home on Monday night, arrived on time.

Passover is the most universal of Jewish holidays, I think. It involves eating, it involves ritual that honors those who gather around the table, it reminds us of captivity and celebrates both liberation and fidelity to an ethical understanding of the world. It also teaches us a complete disregard for a fact-based understanding of history in favor of stories and legends that evolved to serve the institutional goals of a religious faith with which I have a complicated relationship.

Personally, my preference, above all, is for the commandment to remember when we were slaves in Egypt. In light of that memory, the Jewish declaration of "never again" after the Holocaust, should more appropriately be "never again to anyone, anywhere, including Palestinians. I recognize, though, that among American Jews there is a decided bias towards "next year in Jerusalem," rather than the remembering when we were slaves in Egypt thing. It is with some satisfaction that I note that African-Americans, by and large, see the Exodus story as having little to do with Jerusalem and more to do with slavery, which is one of the reasons for the universal appeal of Passover--that, and the fact that Jesus' last party with his posse was a Passover seder.

Anyway, since about 200-300 AD, the real underlying motivation for the seder, at least according to the learned rabbis of the period, is the commandment that the story of the Exodus and the rescue by God, working through Moses, of the Jewish people must be told every year to the children. This commandment was honored in detail by brother Mark, who planned and conducted a 45-minute seder which captured and maintained the interest of the very youngest cousins (going on 4- and 5-years-old) in attendance. Manu and Ollie, the sons of niece Stacy (mark's stepdaughter), knew their own parts (the Four Questions, as well as other bits of info Mark had rehearsed with them, visibly and actively anticipated the moments for direct participation, and hurled themselves in the most full-bodied way into the ceremony, delivering both questions and answers with awesomely good timing.

It should be noted that while Manu and Ollie participated with great maturity, most Epton family seders, at least since Dad's death and even before, border on chaos because of the behavior of Teri, Dale and I. OK, maybe, mostly me. All I know is, they get really loud and Mark, who always leads the seders because he's the serious one, obstinately soldiers on. Julie called during the seder because she and Brendan and Nate were thinking about Mom (Grandmother, as she is always called). I put the phone down next to Mom so they could hear what Grandmother was hearing. For her part, Mom was pretty much ignoring the chaos, smiling benignly at Mark and radiating affection for the better behaved, especially Manu and Ollie and Ethan, her one and, to date, only great-grandchild. I don't know how long the Seattle connection stayed open, but they probably heard Mark patiently leading and me bellowing. (Mom always used to say things like, "Jeffrey, stop bellowing," which, of course, I always saw as unfair until one day in San Francisco, during a champagne breakfast following the San Francisco Marathon, someone at another table turned to me to ask, "would you please stop bellowing?" at which point I yelled out "Mom!" and things deteriorated from there--but that's another story.)

Of course, there was an extra wine poured for Elijah, that stiff-necked prophet-warrior from about 700 BCE, the time of stiffest competition between polytheism and the monotheistic God of the children of Israel. I had hoped to be on the seder agenda, so I could do my pedantic best to remind everyone that we were slaves in Egypt and ought to recognize the aspirations of the Palestinian people, as well as tweak Elijah for his awful intolerance in regard to Jezebel who, as Phoenician princesses married to kings of Israel go, was not really so bad. At least not compared to Elijah, that rabblerouser who stirred up the Jewish hoi polloi, inciting them to murder 450 priests of Baal, the god of rain and sweet water, and a personal favorite of Jezebel's. Sure Jez was hot for Elijah's blood after that incident, but her murderous rage arguably paled next to Elijah's (and the one God's) hatred of polytheists. The longer poem I've been working on incidentally, is an attempt to resurrect Jezebel and cast a critical eye on Elijah.

Regardless, I probably could have injected myself into the seder anyway, but I was so impressed with what Mark had done, I restrained myself. It was a grand seder. Mark led with grace and competence and Dale cooked everything and did a wonderful job. Unfortunately, most Eptons don't care much about food--Audrey (Mom), Teri, Mark and I, at least--so Dale's efforts had to be appreciated more by in-laws who have a more balanced understanding of the role food plays in life than by her own siblings. Still, most of the rest of us do clean up after meals decently well.

Left Chicago on Wednesday. Brendan returned to DC on Thursday and Marrianne's mom (Audrey M., as opposed to my mom, Audrey E.) arrived the same day to spend the long Easter weekend with us. Between picking up everyone at their various arrival points and making other preparations, I didn't get back to the business of blogging, at all. And not for the next four days (through yesterday).

On Saturday, I called Mom (Audrey E.) to see how she was doing. Not so good, she seemed incoherent. On Sunday, she was suffering a lot of headache pain, so Teri took her to the hospital where they tested her for everything, but suspected a stroke or bleeding on the brain. As it turned out, it was neither one. She had a bladder infection, which frequently causes disorientation and temporary memory loss in other women. Though we all recognize that Mom may not have a lot of time left, it was very scary to talk to her and not have the conversation make any sense. But Monday she was better, released from the hospital with the infection under control, even though there's still no explanation for her severe headache pain.

Monday afternoon, I drove Audrey M. to meet one of her nieces living in the area, who would later get her on the bus back to Pittsburgh. It was a good visit, full of meal preparation and eating and easy conversation. And by the time I got home, the word from Chicago was that Mom was home and watching the White Sox Opening Day game. Mark Buerhle threw seven shut out innings, Paul Knoerko homered in the first and the White Sox won.

Mom says she's getting a lot of lunch and dinner invitations from friends. She jokes that they all think she's going to die soon and want to see her before she gets too weak. But she's not going anywhere, she claims, as long at the White Sox have a shot at winning it all. Most years that fantasy is pretty much finished by mid-July, but White Sox pitching is looking pretty strong. If the hitters come through, I think this is going to be a good year in Chicago.

Maya Angelou's Book

Continuums On Which We Live

I'm reading Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I'm certain that I should have read it earlier in life, but at least I'm reading it now. In the book, as James Baldwin said, Angelou "confronts her own life with ... luminous dignity." Baldwin's gracious endorsement seems an appropriate assessment of Angelou's accomplishment and though I haven't finished the book, there's a few thoughts on the way to finishing that I'd like to get down here.

In one particularly vivid portion, Angelou, who seems to have been a generally dour child (with good reason), describes the excitement of her graduation from elementary school in Stampps, Arkansas. After what seems to have been weeks of VIP treatment from Stampps' black residents, Angelou and her classmates suffer through the appearance of a white man as guest speaker whose comments remind everyone in attendance that they are second-class citizens with little hope of controlling the course of their own lives. The joyful optimism and gratitude with which Angelou started the day was dashed by a speaker whose "... dead words fell like bricks around the auditorium." The speech served to remind the audience only that they were "... maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous."

The enormous hatred inspired in Angelou as she sat listening--"I wished that Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner had killed all the whitefolks in their beds..."--quickly envelops everything and everyone. "We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other."

It is a dark moment, with no apparent hope of resurrected feeling. After the white man, who has no wish to mingle, leaves, it is time for the class valedictorian, Henry Reed, to speak. Angelou sits and listens, marveling that Reed would even bother to give his address, "To Be or Not To Be." She is unmoved. "I had been listening and silently rebutting each sentence with my eyes closed." Suddenly Reed begins singing, "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

The audience begins singing with him. Soon everyone has joined in.

"Stong the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope, unborn, had died.
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?"

Angelou describes the moment as the first time she had really heard the words of the song.

"We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered."

It is a transcendent moment for Angelou and everyone else in the crowd. Somehow the song, James Weldon Johnson's poetry has restored them all. "I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940," Angelou writes, "I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race."

"If we were a people much given to revealing secrets," she continues, "we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians and blues singers)."

It is enough. But Angelou's book has more and I am not done with it. But it has also stimulated this thought for me: Perhaps we don't name the continuums with which we measure ourselves correctly. We are all of us, black and white, rich and poor, ambitious and resigned, complicated people. But we don't really know how to think about ourselves or the people around us with any real subtlety. The challenge ought to be defining some real life standards by which we should be measured. Angelou has me thinking about this one:

At one end of a continuum is a question asked by Angelou's brother Bailey when he was, say, 13 or 14. "Uncle Willie, why do [white men] hate us so much?" At the other end of that continuum is the persistent determination with which Angelou pursued a job as conductor on a San Francisco street car. Getting the job would make Angelou, who at the time was not yet out of high school, "the first Negro [hired] on the San Francisco street cars." She did, indeed, become that person.

"During this period of strain Mother and I began our first steps on the long path toward mutual adult admiration ... She comprehended the perversity of life, that in struggle lies the joy."

So, where do I place myself on that continuum. I am certainly not much like the 13-year-old Bailey who asked his uncle a question that Willie didn't want to answer and probably didn't know how to answer. I have answers to Bailey's question. But how far along that path have I gotten?. How thoroughly have I comprehended that astonishing perversity that Angelou outlines: How much have I struggled and, in the process, how much joy have I wrested from this life?

At the end of her street car chapter Angelou says this:

"To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision. Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity."

I like that a lot. If I could, I would try and persuade my children, Nate, Julie and Brendan, that real standards for measuring oneself are subtle. Have you surrendered to the murderous pressure of adult conformity or have you continued the fight against the superior forces of maturity? I don't wish them lives of constant struggle. But I'm pretty sure that no sort of real peace is possible without it. And I'm inclined to believe that if we do not struggle, if we give in, we could become things that we never wished to be. People whose successes bring them no comfort or people who have forgotten about their own dreams and measure themselves by the standards of others or people who don't care about the questions of troubled children.

Father's Day

Ten-year-old gives back

Last year on Father's Day, Brendan (on Marrianne's initiative) gave me an Ipod Shuffle. Then, as planned with Marrianne, I turned around and gave it to Brendan. This year, as his gift, Brendan performed a little concert of four songs he had written. He also gave the Shuffle back to me.

The concert was great. Brendan can write and carry a tune and shows little self-consciousness in performance.

The Shuffle had become superfluous. Brendan graduated from fifth grade this year, the transition point from elementary to middle school. So, after a little bit of parental discussion and a certain amount of 10-year-old nagging, we decided, OK, the boy actually has been a dedicated, enthusiastic young scholar, he gets a reward. We gave him a Nano.

And so, for Father's Day, I got a Shuffle. I'm going to clean off Brendan's music, mostly rap, but some Chipmunks. His music's not all bad, but as I understand it, you've got to wipe the chip clean on a Shuffle. There is no way to select one file out of many, then delete.

So, I'll delete everything, then develop my own playlist. I think I'll start with something raucous, something rebellious, something that won't remind me that I'm old enough to be Brendan's grandfather. Maybe the Pogues.

Of Nate and Julie and Brendan

My someone's-growing-up trauma

Last night, Brendan went to bed without saying good night to me. He doesn't do that very often. I stewed about it a little.

It has been so long since I lived with Nate and Julie, but when they were around Brendan's age I was gone many evenings at city council meetings or for other stuff. Not saying good night to them every single night just happened, so I didn't particularly notice when it did.

And then other things in life happened, separation and divorce among other things. So the frequent and absolute separations from Julie and Nate had a different sort of painful and poignant quality. Not saying good night was such a small thing compared to being in Dayton, say, while they were in Ann Arbor.

But life with Brendan has a different sort of rhythm. I'm home almost all the time. It is Marrianne, who travels much more frequently than I do, who has to deal with the little separations, with not being able to read together at bedtime, with missing tender "good nights."

So last night, when Brendan was acting indifferent to the point of clowning around excessively while I was trying to say good night, I pleaded with him to chill out. When pleading didn't work I stomped out. That didn't work, either. If he felt guilty, he didn't act it out. There was no "sorry, Dad," no hugs. He and Marrianne read a while and they both fell asleep.

This morning, he was fine. So was I. But as I watched him preparing for school, getting dressed, sorting out his book bag, I saw a boy both on the cusp of adolescence and a child with eyes still way too big for his face and a book bag too heavy for his still small frame.

"I can't decide sometimes," I said to him, "whether you are a teenager or a little boy. How does it feel inside you?"

"Right now, I can't decide whether to rehearse my part in Hamlet or sit on the floor and watch Sports Center," he said. "I have to get my part right, but ESPN seems more exciting."

Given that watching ESPN seems to be a part of the lives of many adult men, I'm not sure if Brendan was defining the pull of two opposite poles, but his answer wasn't what I expected from a ten year old. To be honest, I think it's me who isn't keeping up here.

Marrianne Must Be Some Sort of Saint

What I Learned On Brendan's Way to School

This morning, pretty much at the last possible moment before heading off to school, something urgent suddenly appeared at the top of Brendan’s to-do list. He’s involved in a project at school with a few classmates; they are scripting and staging a television show of their own. Brendan decided that he didn’t fully trust that others would pull together the necessary elements of the backing soundtrack for their production.

As Marrianne was pulling on her coat and gathering her stuff, nearly ready to walk out the door, Brendan charged back up the stairs to fetch some of the items for his backup plan. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, not comprehending his plan, at all, and shouted after him.

“Get down here, Brendan. Get your coat on. Mom’s ready to leave,” adding, with a touch of anxiety, “What are you doing?”

In an impressive, but not untypical show of indifference to my mounting anxiety, he came down with a pair of mini-speakers he uses with his computer. “These need batteries,” he said, thrusting the speakers at me.

Despite my sense that we ought to be doing something else, I reacted in my own programmed fashion to the phrase “need
batteries". I ran up the stairs to get batteries (rechargeable, of course).

Meanwhile, Brendan proceeded on to the next step in his overambitious plan: burning, in 60 seconds or less, a few of the songs he’d already selected onto a CD he would take to school. I got the batteries and installed them, then rushed downstairs to try and get him back on track. But his computer had already sent him a no-go message about the CD he was trying to burn and he was off to test the disc in a different tech apparatus.

With a touch of desperation, he reported that he couldn’t complete the intended burn. In an attempt to both get him back on the priority task, leaving the house, and solve his problem, I said something rushed that hopefully sounded a little bit like “just-use-a-CD-you’ve-already-got and put-your-coat-on.”

“There isn’t one that will work,” he said, nearly giving up. Then he brightened. “Oh, yeah, the Timbaland CD will work.” And he was off again, running upstairs while I tried out a few deep breaths before I got to screaming at him.

Moments later, Marrianne and Brendan were out the door, coats on, speakers and CD packed, ready for the commute to work and school. I, meanwhile, needed regrouping. This, it turns out, I did quite effectively by washing a load of laundry in the bathtub.

Though it is a digression, I should note that I am eminently qualified to write about doing laundry, though my mother sees the fact that I do it by hand as a symptom of my insanity. “Please don’t tell anyone you do laundry in the bathtub,” she regularly implores. This is not because she is particularly affected by the thought that I am crazy. She just doesn’t want anyone else to know.

But doing laundry by hand gives one ample time to reflect. While I did the load this morning, I thought about Brendan’s last minute project and the wreckage he left behind.

A few blank CDs rejected by the computer were scattered around the desk on the first floor. The original contents of his backpack, unloaded to make room for the speakers, lay in a pile on the dining room floor. His CD index, Timbaland temporarily removed, was on the living room floor, snuggled up against a tripod and camera he’d gotten out for a previous project.

It all, I reflected, reminded me of myself when I get an uncontrollable urge to undertake a last minute project on virtually anything, which I should admit, is my favorite way to begin a project; riding on a surge of adrenaline, starting with a planning stage of, oh, say, 30 seconds, racing around the house pulling books from shelves and papers from files, and maybe, maybe, finishing the project before the next urge strikes (disables?) me.

As I type, I am sitting at our dining room table, a third of which, to Marrianne’s endless dismay, is littered with books and papers and newspaper clippings and receipts from project already underway. It makes me think, seeing myself surface that way in Brendan, that Marrianne, having lived with me and mostly loved me these last 20 or so years, must be some sort of Irish saint.

The Courage All Around

I wrote this with the audience at Bus Boys & Poet's Tuesday open-mic night in mind. I won't make it there this Tuesday, but I hope to recite it--performing would be more appropriate, but my skills in that respect remain rudimentary--the Tuesday night after next.

The Courage All Around

Late-night honest
with myself
My boy shames me
The courage he shows

drumming at the Metro
Spare change pours in
Folded bills drifting like
snow covering his lap

Ten years old first
sharing a buck with a woman who asks,
then shooing her away when
she won’t stop asking for more

He goes about his business,
a lionheart tending his
pride of intentions,
while I flinch at the work

before me, at stepping up
before you, at speaking
my piece But where he’s
heading, where heart and skill

and the company of others,
the company of you,
colleagues with the same courage
to be the change

we can believe in,
that place, that thought, swells
my heart The world
you will build beckons and beguiles

and because the heart is
a complicated thing
I feel no shame here
I feel the courage all around

All I'm Saying Is

-------------------

Brendan said
There’s too much bread
in the butt
And I was like
what
Too much bread in the butt
And I was like
oh
And Marrianne said something
But I was feeling the hurt
And didn’t hear
So I was like
what
And she was like
repeating
The crusts are very thick
The crusts are very thick
And then I was like
oh
That’s why Brendan’s trading
the heel of the bread loaf
to me
for a slice from the center
And I was like
cool
I like a lotta bread
in the butt

Note to Myself: Postless and Bereft

My gosh, it's been more than a month since I posted last and I miss it. I've been traveling, mostly, and managing Brendan's multiple schedule changes, including his traveling, as the school year ended. I was in Dayton, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Chicago, San Juan and, I think, somewhere else that slips my mind. Marrianne has been in even more places. This is fun, I guess, but it also provokes anxieties and a desire to avoid confrontations with oneself, making it more comfortable to displace such confrontations onto others.

I also had a week with actual real live vertigo. Talk about feeling elderly and disabled, I was there. But that, too, has passed.
And I've written some and thought some--no kidding--and should be ready to write, or try, with greater frequency after our family trips (which will include Julie, however briefly, and Nate, unfortunately, not at all) are over and Brendan starts back to school in early, early August.

Answer This

Watched “Swing Kids” last night.
Germany, 1930s, nervy kids with their
“Swing, heil!”
And loving the Count,
Count Basie, swinging, free, black—
not goose-stepping, angry, compliant and Adolph.

Brendan asked so many questions.
Why did Arvin kill himself?
Why did Peter let himself be taken?
Why did Thomas stop choking Peter?
Why did Thomas shout “swing, heil,”
When the Nazis took Peter away?
Why? Why? Why?

And Peter’s little brother, Brendan’s age,
Why did he shout, “swing, heil,” also,
When the truck disappeared with Peter?
So many questions.
What does resistance mean? Was Peter’s father a Jew?
Why? Why? Why?
We answered, we soothed, we slept.

This morning there are more answers to
How to deal with fateful choices,
With the moment when choices unfold.
How many moments for each one of us?
How many wrong answers? How many answer wrong?
Rest easy about this:

Right or wrong the moment returns. Always returns.
Always returns. Each of us gets to answer twice,
three times, an infinity of challenges in a lifetime.
No matter that we pretend that we did not hear the question,
that the moment has not come, that there is no choice, no
option, that we have not the power to do right.

We have only to ask if we have stood
with the least exalted aming us.
Do they know us for a friend?
Answer me that.

Love to Babies

Nathan Night Rain,
you were an infant with
apple cheeks and patience.

Julie Anna,
you were a witch baby,
wise with foreknowledge.

And Brendan Isaac,
you were king baby
with windmill arms and bicycle legs,
wailing your loud strong music.

As Isaac brought joy
to Abraham and Sarah,
with a handful of weight,
with the heat of new beginning,
with the scent of everything to come,
so have you brought
gift after gift after gift

of Nate asleep on my heart,
warm weight waxing,
innocent of his fierce protector;

of Julie at midnight recalled,
fresh weight needing nothing
but that which was freely given;

of yourself,
urgent and new;

all of you, gift after gift after gift
to a father stirred and grateful
that the elements combined as you.

Thanks to Arthur C. Clarke for Virtual Joy

In an obituary earlier this month, I read that one of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories, “Dial F for Frankenstein,” inspired a British scientist “to invent the World Wide Web in 1989.” This struck me as an unlikely story.

I have no doubt that a Clarke story may have inspired scientist Tim Berners-Lee (hyphenization courtesy of the obit’s author). I just question whether he, or anyone else, can be said to have “invented” the web.

Over the last couple of years, my son Brendan and I have had several conversations about such things. Brendan, now nine years old, has initiated these discussions with the regular claim that Bill Gates invented the internet.

His nearly habitual assertion would launch what became, in repetition, a conversation both tedious and infuriating. It is with some relief that I can say that it has been some time, six weeks or more, since he last made his emphatic Bill Gates claim.

He stopped, I think, because we found a book at the DC public library that helped to ground our discussion. The book, called Cyberspace and written by David Jefferis, is aimed at kids. Jefferis manages to write about the development of the internet without a single reference to Bill Gates.

The internet, it turns out, “developed because of the ‘cold war,’ a power struggle between communist and non-communist countries that lasted from 1945 to 1989.” Defense planners were looking for a way to maintain communications in the event of nuclear attack. They explored a network of connected sites that did not depend on a single hub.

“This first Internet, named the ARAPnet, was set up in the 1960s.” Apparently, it solved the planners’ problem. “From then on, there was no stopping the growth of the Net,” Jefferis wrote.

(It may seem to readers as though I'm not following a strict system for capitalizing words here. But this is the rule I’m following: If I’m quoting someone who capitalizes “internet” or “web,” the capitalization stands. But if I’m using those words to make a point—entirely my own or paraphrased—I’m not capitalizing. I don’t capitalize the word “god,” either. On this point, my Bill Gates/Microsoft-developed Word program disagrees. Word underlines, in red, every instance of my use of “internet” that I don’t capitalize.)

In any case, I used passages from “Cyberspace” to help make the point to Brendan that the development of the internet was a collective achievement. Gates, after all, hadn’t even been born when the cold war began.

Though he’d never been persuaded by me before, the notion that the “military,” another legendary entity in Brendan’s mind, might have a hand in inventing the internet, relieved him greatly and he was able to set aside his faith in the omnipresence of Bill Gates in the history of Everything. (In this paragraph, for reasons unknown to me, Word has begun underlining in green each use of “internet” that I fail to capitalize.)

So, when I read that Berners-Lee had been moved by Clarke’s story to invent the web, I persuaded Brendan to take another trip to the library with me (the Lamond-Riggs branch of DC public.)

Now, as Brendan settles in with a baseball book—“Rookie of the Year”—I have retrieved “Cyberspace” and am consulting it for a bit of info about Tim Berners-Lee. As it turns out, Clarke’s obit writer has not stretched the fabric of truth quite as far as Brendan did in his story of the internet.

There’s a small photo of this guy, Berners-Lee on page 10 of “Cyberspace.” The caption, which has done away with all hyphens, says Lee, “of Switzerland’s CERN laboratory, is thought of as the brains behind the World Wide Web.”

Of course, that achievement has broader roots than Lee’s brain, also. “Cyberspace” says that in 1945 American scientist Vannever Bush “proposed using a ‘memex,’ a machine that [could store] information. [And] lay a trail of related words and pictures.”

Vannever Bush, says the book, “is often called the father of the information age.” Further, writes Jefferis, “the memex was never built, but in 1960, programmer Ted Nelson was inspired by the idea to write the hypertext computer language. This used hyperlinks to take a user on a trail of linked information sources.”

All of this actually suggests that the web and the internet were “born,” ultimately from the fertile partnership of Metaphor and Hyperbole (caps mine), which themselves originated in once both ritualized and spontaneous social, cultural and collective activities like storytelling or, perhaps, originated in the domestications of grains and the brewing of malt beverages some 10,000 years ago.

Personally, I find that my own use of the internet (and my laptop and other related items) is a mixed benefit to me. Just two days ago—ironically or not, the same day I read the Clarke obituary—I composed several clever e-mails to my landlord and to other correspondents. And, even more cleverly, but mistakenly, copied those messages to two of Brendan’s teachers; people who had no interest whatsoever in the content or style of my e-mails about sewers and lunch.

In the process, I discovered that in the wake of the internet and the web, it is possible for me to sit at home, entirely by myself, and use these developments to embarrass myself publicly.

In a final connotative leap, I’d like to volunteer another tidbit from “Cyberspace.” A picture of a young man, posing near two large, now archaic, computers and staring bravely (visionarily?) off into space is captioned this way:

“Ray Tomlinson devised the electronic mail system in the US in 1972. He used the now-universal ‘at’ symbol to show an e-mail address: this person @ that computer.”

It is therefore thanks to Ray, Arthur, Tim, Vannever and countless other less well-known brains, "fathers of," and inventors—me, you, Al Gore, Emma Goldman, and millions of servants, serfs and slaves throughout history—that I can anticipate yet another time in the future when I might sit home by myself and somehow commit one more public faux pas.

It makes me want to both blush and jump for virtual joy.