Borrowing Against Christmas

Just eight days until Christmas, and at 56, I can still feel the childhood echoes of excitement that I felt in anticipation of toys, of good food and treats, and of the smiles of exhausted parents who (unbeknownst to me at the time) had been up half the night putting toys together. The phrase “some assembly required” would always raise a rueful chuckle in Dad – and you did not want to get him started on the Coleco brand toys!

I never really had to assemble anything for my kids, thank the gods. Our greatest worry was to spend the same amount on each of them every Christmas. One thing I have never gotten used to though has been the pragmatic approach to gifts that my family has taken over the years.

As a perfect example, this year our grandson needed tires on his car and was trying to figure out how to afford them. He is a sophomore at Colorado State University (not actually germane to this story, but I like to brag), and has been taught well by his mom to budget effectively (another bragging opportunity). He has also always been meticulous about any sort of shopping from the time that he was little. He was never the kind of child to ask for everything in the world at Christmas-time. Instead he seemed to be weighing the pros and cons and cost of each toy under consideration. He could spend hours on the Target toy catalog and then hand it back to his Gigi and Bumpa with only two or three things circled. This behavior was not limited to special occasions either. It was torture to stand with him at the Chuckie Cheese’s counter selecting what combination of items would best suit him in exchange for the tickets he had earned playing countless games.

When Russell told us that he needed tires on his car, his Gigi and I did not hesitate to offer to buy a set for him. We were happy to do this because it would keep him safer, it would save him money, and it would likely save our daughter money. It was a win, win, win. Russell first offered to pay us back, which we turned down. Then he offered to pay half, and again we turned him down. He finally insisted on this being his Christmas present from us, and we relented.

Another example of this kind of behavior can be seen in my wife. Every year we try to make it up to Denver to a pet friendly hotel (can’t leave Mabel behind) and treat ourselves to a nice weekend during the Christmas season. This year was no different, and included a wonderful night at the Monaco, a meal not to be beat at Panzano’s (worth saving your pennies for!), and some fun shopping about town on Sunday. As we planned all this, my wife said to me, “This is our Christmas present to each other this year, right?” Yeesh!

I am uncomfortable with this because I am of the mind that if there is a need and we can afford it, we should just make the purchase without having my wife, or children, or grandchildren “borrow” against Christmas or a birthday or whatever occasion. Understand that my family is so practical that they may borrow months in advance of the holiday at times!

It’s not that I prefer to buy frivolous gifts, I often surprise them with practical gifts like a gift card or stationary. It’s not that I think they are being overly self-sacrificing (though they are incredibly considerate). It’s not that I am being impractical in terms of spending, it's just that they are being more practical than I. I guess my objection originates from wanting to surprise them. I want to have a choice of what I can get for them. There is joy for them in anticipation and unwrapping.

My wife and children are not as bothered by this as I. I know the kids have an unmatched record for being on Santa’s nice list (except perhaps for some high school years and even then, they weren’t too naughty), and that my wife and grandchildren are beyond reproach. So, I think they should all have at least something they want and not just something they need. Just some trinket at least that lets them know I have given them thought and might actually know them pretty well.

As selfish as it sounds, borrowing against Christmas doesn’t let me be Santa. Why can’t I be Santa? My beard is white, my eyes twinkle, I wear reading glasses, and I have the belly for it. I have also walked on a rooftop on Christmas Eve (once for my grandson Russell). And I am willing to become conversant with reindeer. Though I don’t know how to get around the neighborhood covenants against caribou.  It does make me wonder however, does pouting about not being able to be Santa make me a Grinch?

To my friends and family around the world:

Merry Christmas

Feliz Navidad

عيدميلادمجيد

کریسمس مبارک

Pay it Forward

It is funny how one thought in one direction can end up in an entirely unanticipated destination. This morning I was journaling and started off recalling my earliest memories of running. I started running with my father who was an early form of “health nut.” He was a health nut before there was such a thing. In the late sixties he was riding a bicycle to work, and was a runner before that. I came to believe this arose from his father dying of a heart attack when far to young. Sometimes I would run along with dad back when I was barely in double digits. He would slow his pace to accommodate my short legs and even shorter breath until I had to stop, and he had to go on. At this point I would walk the mile home alone in a security that most of us would not feel for a ten-year old walking home alone today.

It was a different time to be growing up (to weigh heavily on an overused platitude), especially in a small town. It was a safer world. Our mischief was not the mischief of youths today. Today, the misadventures of too many youths seem to be attempts to establish an adulthood they are not ready for. When I was growing up, my friends and I ran through the woods. We placed dirt clods on busy roads and laughed as cars crushed them. We explored the swamp down the street and often wondered if we could make money by the carving of cypress knees (the fact that none of us had those skills nor knew how to harvest cypress knees was never taken into account).

Not only was our mischief different, our view of authority was different. We respected the police that drove languidly about town. We respected the school principal who was rumored to have a paddle in his desk (complete with holes drilled through the paddle head to ease its passage through air when delivering some deserved punishment). We respected our parents. We argued less with them and listened more. Parents weren’t concerned with being our friends, but being our protectors, our safe havens, our guideposts.

Since I was raised, times have gotten progressively more complicated. I have often wondered if my generation has done justice to those we fostered. I can proudly say that the children my wife and I have raised have a wonderful since of morality, caring, and toughness that they are passing on to their children. But I look at the nation now, and I see a profound inattention to any sort of moral compass.

There seems a hole where that compass should be. A hole whose pang of emptiness is more keenly felt as men of honor in the form of John McCain and George H W Bush pass from our company. Leaders who knew we must work together, who knew that compromise serves the country better than partisan winning. Compromise in governing reflects an inclusive nature, while winning at all cost is anathema to true governance.

Just yesterday, I heard that two state legislatures in a lame duck session were attempting to pass legislation lessening the power of the incoming opposition administration. This is a reflection of our current executive branch of the federal government which rejects the nature of having co-equal branches it serves with in favor of a more dictatorial approach that favors division and disenfranchisement.

We are not the only ones experiencing the rise of hate that has been lurking just below society’s surface. Across the globe, there are nationalist movements afoot similar to a greater or lesser degree than what is happening in the United States. But we cannot address the worlds problems in this area without getting our house in order. We can only be the true leader of the world by example, and not by a fiat bestowed upon our brow by our own hands. We must move from the fringes and recognize that we are a diverse nation that must be addressed as a whole, rather than ruled over by the cudgel of those given electoral control. If in politics we yield to the notion of winners, then we all are ultimately the losers.

The salvation I seek, for me can be found in the manner and times I was raised. There will always be a need for a moral compass. There will always be a need for authority that recognizes duty over power. There will always be a need to understand right and wrong. There will always be a need of those who pay it forward. Our jobs as adults and parents are not done yet.

No Finish Line

I have put in hours working on my family tree and there is no finish line. How could there be. I am but one Handal of many past Handals, and many present Handals, and untold futures of Handals. As for my task, I have stacks of pictures downstairs to scan, catalog, share, and if possible put into some kind of context. I have the family trees of others to study. I have notes to take and stories to write.

I have discussed before that this journey began on Ancestry.com, and it blew wide open with the DNA test my wife gave me for Father’s Day this year. With the help of new found family members my tree came together abruptly. With the help of family is how it should be, forming ties as I find links.

I first followed the tree from me along a reasonably direct path to a man named Handal in Tiqoa in the West Bank in the late 1500’s. His son Nassar Handal moved to Bethlehem and fathered the line I am part of. After some aimless wondering and refinement of my tree, I am fleshing out the tree, adding branches, twigs, and leaves with the information I have at hand and that shared by my new relatives. For the last few weeks, I have sat hours at a time in a recliner with a lap board, at my desk, at the kitchen table. I have bent over a lineage of Handals organized by branches stemming from Nassar and have progressed to reorganizing it by generations. There are twelve or so generations to go through and record.

With my reading glasses on, my head turns left-right-left again reading the tree and copying it to levels/generations with my fountain pen and my legal pads. It has been an effort that makes me feel monk-like. My home-my monastery. My documents, ancient tomes that must be preserved the only way possible, by transcribing, by sharing. All I need to complete the image is guttering candlelight and a nondescript brown robe of rustic fabric tied at my waist by a length of cord.

Name after name I write. Names that would be familiar to anyone -Evelyn, George, Eddie, Nathalie, Frank. Mostly the names are exotic - Khalil, Jamile, Issa, Jadallah. Some even straddle the two realms: Yousef (Joseph), Yacoub (Jacob), Ibrahim (Abraham). The places of births, deaths, weddings exist as places I have seen, places I know, and places I must look up to find, to pinpoint: Brooklyn, Beit Jala, Tiqoa, Amman, San Pedro Sula, Jerusalem, Santiago, Paris, Bethlehem.

I melt into the pages of names and places and dates as I read and write. My hand and wrist are starting to ache, but it makes me smile because this should be an effort. I am to the point now that I am transcribing, re-ordering the names of those that are alive, the names of those I am older than. I have gone through the past, to the present, to looking at this vast family’s potential. I know that I am exploring only those of us who originate from Bethlehem and Nassar, and there are other ties from other regions in the Arab world. Maybe one day all these branches will connect. That is my hope. If not with me, then with some other Handal, perhaps some future unnamed Handal.

In this way, I am doing my part to add to an oral heritage. The stories both told and written that color our history. That make that history rise from pages of pictures and scribbles and stories to take on a four-dimensional image comprised of height, breadth, depth, and a time locked shadow we call our ancestors. And the best part is that I am answering questions as the disturbed dust of the past raise other questions. Questions upon questions. I now understand why question begins with quest.

Its not the Kilt on the Man, but the Man in the Kilt

My mornings have a typical routine that often starts with a blind groping for my phone to shut off the alarm. Once I am out of bed, I check my phone for calls and to find out what is going on with my friends and family on social media. Then bathing, then work. Today’s routine was thrown into shock as the first posting on my Facebook feed was this from friend and writer, Mary Ogden Fersner:

Sadly, Jeff is preparing his body and mind for end of life. Please everyone remember him as the funny, fun-loving, vibrant person he’s always been. He survived juvenile diabetes, beat kidney disease with a transplant, and a leg amputation with a positive attitude and spirit few would be able to muster. Cancer however, is a brutal foe. It has run him over like a Mack truck. This was Jeff on Plaid Night during the 2018 ShipRocked Cruise. He is my heart forever.

Jeff is my friend who except for a brunch last year, has been lost to me as so many friends by time and distance. We reconnected (as many reconnections have happened for me) through Facebook. And since Jeff is not a social media guy, I kept in touched with him through his wife, Mary, and in doing so got to know her. And though I can’t claim to know Mary well, she seems perfectly suited for Jeff, someone who can easily stand toe-to-toe with Jeff in spirit, love, and life.

Though we are both from Orangeburg, SC, I didn’t meet Jeff until I went to Clemson. My first roommate was Baxter Sowell. Baxter and I had gone to high school together. Baxter was good friends with the Fersner clan, and through him I got to know Jeff and his two fine brothers Joey and Johnny. Jeff quickly became a friend, co-conspirator, and mentor. Before I was out of school, Jeff and I shared an apartment. He was the last roommate I had in college.

Jeff (as-well-as all Fersners) is very smart. I did not know their sister well, but the three boys all earned master’s degrees in engineering. Jeff’s was in mechanical engineering and had something to do with heat transfer by radiation in a vacuum. What I remember most about it was when I would go to the bowels of Riggs Hall to visit Jeff where the laboratories are found, he would often demonstrate some of the fun things you could do with liquid nitrogen (the liquid nitrogen was required to achieve as close to a perfect vacuum as would be possible). My favorite demonstration was when Jeff would open the canister and tilt it to spill some on the floor. Briefly the liquid nitrogen would flow out like water upon the floor with a white cloud of cold about it, and before the puddle spread even an inch it was gone, evaporated. Cool.

Jeff was the first person to get me drunk. He along with other friends took me down to the Tiger Town Tavern where I was introduced to the game of quarters. Who knows how many cups of beer I had to chug, but it was enough to make the short walk back to campus a long stagger. There is no hangover like your first hangover. For this, I blame you, Jeff.

Jeff and I used to go downtown to drink, and sometimes we would stop outside the girls section of Johnstone Dorms on the way back to our rooms. With girls looking out the window into the dark of night I would do a “magic” act with Jeff accompanying me on the music, “Da DaDa Tah..Da Da DaDa Tah…” The act consisted of such feats as putting my hands behind my head, and when I pulled them back in front they would be locked together by rings formed by thumb and index finger of each hand. Once I demonstrated the unbreakable bond of those interlocked “rings”, my joined hands would go back behind my head and reappear separated! (maybe you had to be there) Some nights we would take home as much as fifty to seventy-five cents in pennies and nickels and dimes the laughing young women had tossed out the windows to us. By-the-way, I still perform those incredible acts of illusion – just for children. I don’t do it for coins, I just do it for the smiles.

At Clemson, Jeff was on the CDCC (Central Dance and Concert Committee). Through this connection, I was able to help with setting up for concerts by the likes of Stanley Jordan, and Jimmy Buffet. At the Jimmy Buffet concert, while I was onstage with Jeff moving monitors around and laying down cabling I turned to the thin early audience that had already gathered, spread and raised my arms, and yelled, “Save the whales!”

Jeff is the first diabetic I ever knew. Now I have a son-in-law and granddaughter both with type 1 like Jeff. Jeff never let diabetes get him down, and he never let it hamper him in any way I was aware of. There was a particular joke Jeff liked to play on others. As an example, I would be walking down the hall from my dorm room towards Jeff’s when he would run out into the hall with one arm flat against his side and the other wrapped around his body to hold it while yelling, “It’s stuck! It’s stuck! Help me!” all the while with a big grin on his face. When I looked at the arm he held, I would see a diabetes syringe high in the bicep flopping a little. Having seen this often, I would move to the side of him and kick him in the ass as he removed the syringe with a flare and a laugh. This is the Jeff I knew.

Jeff isn’t supposed to die. He is a friend, forever locked into my memory as one of the people that defined my all-important college years for me. And even though he will always be in my thoughts as someone unique and happy and just a little mad, he was supposed to be immortal. As my love and prayers float out to him and Mary, I hope Mary knows that my wife and I are here for her. As my friend lies in the hospital, I hope he knows I love him. I’m a bit angry at God, Jeff was supposed to be immortal.

House without Elders

"A house without an elderly person is like an orchard without a well."

Arabic proverb

Without an oral tradition, how will we know who we are and where we came from. I let my best chance at building such a history slip away by not being curious enough when my father was alive and before Alzheimer’s assaulted him. In fact, I didn’t get the longing to establish a heritage, to learn about the Handal family line until just a few years ago after more than 50 years of my life had passed.

My start to this journey seemed hopeless. I was armed with so little. I am one of five children – sons and daughters of Frank, grandsons and granddaughters of Nicholas, great grandsons and great granddaughters of Solomon. That’s it, I could go back three generations from us and not even completely.

I did know the two children of my Grandfather Nicholas. They were Frank my father, and Eddie my uncle. It gets very thin beyond that. Nicholas was married to Emilia who was a Handal before marriage from a branch in Honduras. I knew Emilia (called by we children, Nanny) had at least two sisters, Lydia and Anita. Finally, I was reasonably sure that Nicholas had brothers named George and Joe and a sister Mary. Also, I had been told that the Handal family is a large family and that Nicholas immigrated from Bethlehem. I take no small amount of pride at the thought of being part of a family from Bethlehem.

When I started I used Ancestry.com to perform my research and develop a Handal family tree. The first layer was easy enough to fill. I know the birthdays, spouses, and children of myself and my siblings, and I know the names of my first cousins (Eddie’s kids), but no dates etc. The lack of information on Brian, Paul, and Jeanie is due to a rift in the family that occurred around the time my Uncle Eddie was taken far too early by cancer. I do not know the specifics. I do not know our perspectives or theirs. Further, I have no interest in knowing. They were issues of a different generation that were not my issues. I am just happy that after I started the family tree in a fit of coincidence, my Cousin Brian reached out to me on Facebook.

Facebook. Social Media. I have been such an idiot. I would think of my cousins from time to time over the years, but I didn’t know where they were or what they were doing. I knew that eventually my Aunt Joan (their mom) had re-married, but I did not know where she moved to. Time passed, the computer rose to prominence and social media was born. In that revolution of technology I had reconnected with old friends of my youth, but I never thought to look for the cousins time had misplaced. God bless you Cousin Brian.

I came back to my family tree (more a small bush than anything) after Father’s Day this year when my wonderful wife surprised me with a gift which will be giving for a long time – the Ancestry.com DNA kit. I was so excited when she gave it to me. I looked it up online, I researched it, I memorized the instructions (all of 4 steps), performed the test, and sent it in!

While waiting for results, I was able to refine my research techniques and filled in Nicholas’s generation though was still woefully short on Nanny’s. I found an image of the 1930’s census that had Solomon and his brood all living together in Brooklyn. So Solomon had immigrated as well. I found out the name of Solomon’s wife (or at least his second wife), and all the siblings of Nicholas along with a couple of daughters-in-law to Solomon (one of which was Nanny). I was getting excited, so I continued to dig. I found a sobering image of my Nanny’s gravestone. I located a passport application and picture for Solomon. I located the death date of most of Nicholas’s generation as well as associated locations.

While I was waiting, I did not want to lose momentum. So I worked on the Bell side of the family and started a family tree springing from Mom. I did the same thing with the Stovall family which is Jean-Marie’s enjoyable and loving clan. Finally, in less than a month’s time my DNA results arrived.

Thankfully they were as expected. I didn’t have to change out a desert heritage for lederhosen or give up my search into the annuls of Bethlehem for the cold climes of Siberia. When I gave permission to Ancestry.com to match my results to the results of others, I was given further proof of its reliability as one of my first cousins on Mom’s side of the family turned up as a top relation. Thank goodness, Jeb, we are related both by what we have been told and science!

It is fascinating to review and study the link of potential relatives. The list starts at first cousins and moves along rating the chances of a match as excellent, good, fair, and poor. One such excellent match was an unknown fourth cousin, Claudia. She had an amazingly full family tree rife with Handals. I did not see in it then a direct link to my branch (I knew too little) but reached out to her to ask if she could give me advice on how to find my own way.

Claudia lives in the U.S. but was born in Hondurus (Tegucigalpa I believe). I have enjoyed getting to know her and commune with a fellow Handal. She did me the favor of introducing me to her cousin Jorge who she described as the “Family Historian.” He lives in Tegucigalpa and has graciously and selflessly helped me. He inquired about what I knew of the Honduran Handals in my lineage. I told him of my grandmother, of her being from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and the names of her sisters. The name Lydia Handal was one he knew. There was a famous Honduran composer named Lydia Handal who was a national treasure. I didn’t know anything about this, though my father did have an album of my Great Aunt Lydia’s entitled “From Lydia with Love,” but I didn’t know of any other music.

Jorge then referred me to Guillermo (another cousin) who lived closer to San Pedro Sula. Guillermo helped me look into Lydia as he also filled me in on some generalities with the Handal family in Honduras – the largest of the Arab families in Honduras Guillermo said. But I had too little information on Lydia for him to be sure that our Lydia Handal was THE Lydia Handal.

Meanwhile, Jorge sent me an invitation to the “Handal Family Worldwide” Facebook group. My family has a Facebook group. Wow. On there, I introduced myself and in turn have met several other Handals who I have spoken with and found to be charming and wonderful. One of them, Myriam, stunned me with the question, “Is your father Frank, the same Frank Handal that took me and my daughters sailing in Charleston.” We talked back and forth on it, Charleston threw me as Dad did not do much sailing there. He mostly sailed on Lake Murry outside of Columbia, SC. Then I had a “Doh!” moment and sent her a picture of my dad and asked if that Frank were her Frank. It was (and that made me smile). Myriam turned out to be a first cousin of Dad’s, and thus my second cousin. I was a bit floored. Myriam is a daughter of a brother of Nanny’s. She was born in San Pedro Sula though lives in the U.S. now. She then confirmed that her Aunt Lydia, my Great Aunt Lydia, was THE Lydia Handal of national treasure fame, and that performance of her songs can be found on YouTube. Amazing.

Then another relative of some flavor, Joe, contacted me through Handal Family Worldwide and linked me to a document that connected me back to Nassar Handal in Bethlehem who was born in the mid 1600's. It was an incredibly emotional moment when I found our family within this document, and our lineage going back unbroken to the seventeenth century. My head is still spinning. Such a generous act to bring us into the fold. Prior to this when I would see the name Handal my faith in relationship was based solely on spelling, but now there is a feeling that reaches into my gene memory that I have never experienced before.

The joy of being back with my first cousins, the loving act of a simple gift from my wife, and walls tumbled. I am expanding family. I am not only gathering together something to pass along to my children and grandchildren, but something that can be shared with my siblings and my cousins Brian, Paul, and Jeanie. There are times that a task seems daunting and incredibly large, and then something magical occurs and the world itself shrinks to such a small thing I don’t know why I was ever intimidated by it. Now I can bring an elder into the house, and hopefully soon I will be able to say more than just that the Handal family is large and comes from Bethlehem.

Ghosts of Birthdays Past

My birthday is around the corner. For quite some time now, I have not had much interest in celebrating my birthday, I just don’t think that it is that important. Still with 56 of them behind me, they have supplied me with many smiles and special moments to remember.

Actually the first birthday memory I have is one that involved a friend’s birthday when I was just a little guy. It was one of those birthdays where mom would take me to K-mart or Eckards to pick out a toy as a gift for the party. I think I always wanted the gifts Mom got for my friends. This particular time I remember sitting in the front seat as Mom drove me in our station wagon to John Wilson’s birthday party. I was crying because she said I had to give the wrapped gift in my lap to John, that it was not for me. I don’t know why that memory or part of a memory is so vivid, but it is. Maybe I grew to be ashamed of my selfishness, maybe deep down I think all gifts should be mine, or maybe it is just one of those memories that you hold onto for no particular reason like the fact that Yule Gibbons (that once famous eater of pine trees) was the spokes person for Grape Nuts.

As for my birthdays, here are the top three in no particular order. They all concern adult Teever, and they all have their place in my heart for a reason.

The first one that comes to mind was when I was at Clemson. I did not have too many friends on campus. From the beginning, I fell in with a local group of runners. Great guys that I will never forget. Together we formed the Outta Control Track Club (OCTC) and to me our adventures will always be legendary. Anyway, I don’t remember which birthday it was – likely my 20th. I invited several of these friends to dinner down the road at the Swamp Guinea Restaurant in Hartwell, Georgia. I did not tell any of them it was my birthday. I just wanted to spend some of that birthday in the company of my friends and surprise them by paying for the dinner (my way of giving thanks for another year and the blessings it had brought). As it turned out, my friends knew it was my birthday and they surprised me. They surprised me with gifts and paying for my dinner – fried catfish and fries served family style. We all loved the Swamp Guinea. That fish camp is still there and is worth the price of admission, especially if you are short on making your grease quota – no kale allowed.

The second birthday in my top 3 would be my 30th birthday. At the beginning of 1992 was when I met Jean-Marie and began dating, followed by the dive off a steep cliff into love. That summer Jean-Marie said she wanted to throw my 30th birthday party for me. We had it in the back yard of her house. I vividly recall being surrounded by friends in the glow if the little white lights in the apple tree. It was very special to me that Jean-Marie would have that party, invite all my friends for a warm summer night of food, drink, and laughter. Few days have made me feel more special (with the obvious exception of our wedding day).

Finally, there was a particular birthday when I came home to celebrate with mom and to see my father who by that time was in a full time Alzheimer’s care unit. It must have been a birthday in my forties although I don’t recall which one. Jean-Marie was with me and we were staying with mom. It was a nice little party as some of my siblings were able to make it. Living out in Colorado the sightings of my South Carolina bound siblings is far too sparse. I know my little sister Ginny was there with her family at mom’s for cake (they only lived a mile away). I don’t know what if any gifts I got, but I won’t forget the cake. After I blew out the candles the cake disappeared back into the kitchen along with Jean-Marie, Mom, Ginny, and Ginny’s eldest Cameron. My niece Cameron’s birthday is just a week after mine, not that it bears any on this story but as long as I am allowed to babble – I’m going to take full advantage of it. In my family, the tradition is that the first slice of birthday cake goes to the birthday celebrant. This is critical. Because we didn’t cut the cake into wedges. The cake is first cut vertically through the middle. Then pieces are sliced perpendicular to that cut. You may ask why that should make any difference. Well it does, it makes a big difference. The first piece (and only 3 others in the cake) will have one full side covered with icing and not just two of the edges. In my family, that slice is the most coveted. So out of the kitchen comes little Cameron with my piece of cake and I can’t wait. She stopped just outside the kitchen and smiled holding the plate out in my direction. “Uncle Teever, Annie (her grandmother/my mom) told me to give this piece to you. Can I have it? I already licked it?” It is hard to stop smiling when I think of that – and yes I gave her the first piece.

Sinner Man

Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All on that day

The words of Nina Samone haunt me from my iPad as I write. Earlier today not long after I arose, I was in Third Space Coffee sitting in a full room, amid the lulling uneven hum of conversation sipping my coffee, eating a breakfast sandwich, and writing to my eldest grandson at the communal table. And I thought, communal is a good word, a word of belonging, a word that is as much comfort food as mac ‘n cheese. These days it seems I crave that communal feeling more than mac ‘n cheese.

I find myself day-after-day watching the news, listening to the news, my legs unconsciously moving in nervous gesticulations as I twist and turn to find a comfortable sitting position. But it is not the chair that makes it difficult to sit. It is not some neurological condition or bout with clinical anxiety that keeps my legs in a low acrobatic state. It is the news itself, it is the discontent throughout the nation.

I sit there and watch children in separation from their parents simply because their parents want a better life for them. There parents sit waiting for judgement and waiting for their children in the somewhere away because they are deemed illegals. That is only half the story. Crossing into the United States outside of a designated immigration point is illegal, however the law provides for them to ask for asylum once they are inside US territory. Therefore, they are both legal and illegal caught in a narrowing view that judges them far too harshly. Pawns of power and paranoia.

The same power and paranoia that disenfranchise long time allies and embraces long time enemies and dictators. The same power and paranoia which wants to disband the European Union and the G7 and NATO and Trade Groups/Coalitions in an effort to return to a world of chest beating, testosterone driven isolation. Though we know from the tested work of John Nash that working for what’s best for the whole is ultimately better than working for the best for oneself, our policies focus on the one-on-one that dries up of the lushness of cooperation into a desert of winners and losers.

I also watch as the balance of the Supreme Court teeters towards harshness and away from balance.  A view that goes against the founding fathers’ desire to provide for everyone’s freedoms to a small panel’s judgement of which freedoms count and which don’t. This is a grave analogy to the state of our union which no longer has balance. That is driven into divisions by hate and fear mongering and lies. And after being beaten so relentlessly, after watching wedge after wedge strategically placed and driven, how do we the respond? Chaotically, further degrading the discourse. Splattering ourselves with the same mud used to obscure our sight.

President Obama was not just offering some platitude by saying “When they go low, we go high.” He was giving us a framework, a blueprint for protest and rebellion. A call to protest peacefully, to discuss thoughtfully, and to rebuff half-truths and lies with full truth. This does not mean we lay passion aside. It means we take up passion as our standard, and defend it not by fighting fire with fire, but defending it from the high ground and using the energy and voices of the people who wield hate against them. Hate does not conquer hate, it only supplants it with a new hate.

Love and compassion are hate’s enemies, and perhaps that is the silver lining to this grey cloud that enshrouds us. Today’s strife has driven into the light, the divides that were just inside shadow, wounds that oozed but now bleed freely. Today’s strife provides us with a mirror to see ourselves more clearly. And these divides that are being sought to exploit us can be used to unite us. If we are all different, then we must all be the same. Race, religion, and gender identification are simply our chosen clothing. We are the same flesh beneath our fashion statements. Our hearts pump the same blood. If we let that be our guide, then we can extricate ourselves from this maze and define a path.

If we can set aside our hate, if we can unite against division, then we can look hate in the eye and sing unflinchingly along with Nina Simone,

Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All on that day

Morning Moment

I went to Third Space Coffee this morning to write letters and to read. I was back at the counter for a refill, for a second cup. I was behind a woman at the counter, and off to my right her little boy. The toddler was eyeing the food case as fascinated by the glass as the treats. The glass probably cool on his forehead. Then a display caught his eye. By a cooler there was a palette, and on it some stuffed burlap coffee bean sacks. Burlap that always reminds me of bound bales of cotton at my father's mill when I was growing up.

Happily, the boy tottered over, and looked at the sacks, just out of reach. His arms were up, waving a little. His hands awkwardly making grabbing motions in that joyous somewhat spastic way of a child. Then he turned and plopped down on the edge of the palette, smiling, looking about the room. Simply happy. The palette was just tall enough to be a bench for the boy, the palette's floor just a bit lower than the height of his pudgy knees.

He looked in my direction but not at me, waving and saying goodbye to another child across the room leaving with her mommy. I caught his eye, smiled and waved to him. He grinned and giggled, got up and ran to his mommy where he found her leg to hug and buried his face against her. His mommy, still talking to the barista, absentmindedly but gently wrapped an arm about him and squeezed him lovingly.

I wanted to laugh and smile and say something. My mouth works too much. But I stayed silent, because the glittering was some magic hanging about in the air, a kind of moment that I did not wish to disturb or disperse. It's the moments that make the gaps worth it

Inside-Out Ennui

I am overwhelmed and have been for a while. Simple as that. I go about my day with a sense of saturation that is clearly at odds with my need to know and learn. Curiosity and expansion have been bred into me, inherited from my father. He was a man who had a thirst for knowledge. He was always asking questions, reading, and absorbing. I don’t claim to be my father, but I do know that feeling, that need.

When I was young and had questions, I would go to my teachers or my father or the library or the World Book (which personally gave me diagrams that I found helpful after Dad gave me “the talk”). Though questions are limitless, my resources were finite. There were only so many places I could go for answers, and those answers took time to find. So for the most part, knowledge had an easement that allowed absorption and contextualization.

But the world has moved on from then, and it has moved more quickly than I could adapt. My tendencies toward curiosity and the need to continue learning are not too different now than when I was little. Only now, I don’t need to search out a teacher or pray to the ghost of my father or find printed World Books. Now I don’t have to research how I need to research. I simply pull out my smart phone or my laptop. I search a universe of information literally at my fingertips.

Sometimes I don’t even have to search. Technology has provided me with smart services that alert me on things I didn’t even know I had questions about. Recently, I received an email from a technical library service I subscribe to and was given a heads up about a doctoral thesis entitled

 The Production of Urban Public Space: A Lefebvrian Analysis of Castlefield, Manchester by Michael Edema Leary. Not my field of knowledge or interest, but the term “A Lefebyrian Analysis” set its hooks into my curiosity. In no time, I had found and order and am reading The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre. My already bursting schedule now has the addition of a tome on the reconciliation of mental space and real space (the philosophical and the geometric).

I am inundated with information. I find it online, on 24 hours news channels. I am drowned by the tidal wave that tumbles me airless in the turbulent water of information and misinformation. Because as it turns out, the difficulty of looking for information has been greatly simplified while the ability to trust it at times has been greatly diminished.

There is no going back, though. Pandora has seen fit that once opened, her box cannot be closed. I hope that the youth our species can adapt and become as efficient at mining what’s out there as we once were with our encyclopedias and teachers. For me I can’t take it, but I can’t let it go. I remain overwhelmed, and overstimulated. I remain dealing with the creeping paralysis to creativity that comes from not knowing how to stop searching and how to start writing.

Another Bra in the Wall

I freely admit it. I am not a person known for bravery. I think I have written of the time that our son Michael was down from Denver for a visit with friends for the wine festival in Colorado Springs. His friends got back to the house before Michael, we were asleep and they didn’t have a key. They went around the house and knocked on the door to the deck off our bedroom. Startled awake I bravely cowered behind my wife on my side of the bed and tossed a decorative pillow at the door blinds shakily calling out “Go!” On another talked about occasion, my wife and I had gone down to Lake Pueblo with some friends to spend the weekend on our sailboat. My wife and I were berthed in the main cabin while our friends had the v-birth which had more privacy and offered an accordion door. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a sound and looked around momentarily forgetting where I was. All of a sudden, a light appeared about the cracks of the accordion door as one of our friends was using the head. Disoriented from waking suddenly, I called out in a falsetto only slightly less shrill than a shriek, “Who’s there?!?”

I like to feel that I learn from experience and have slowly built my courage up to an acceptable level over the years. I am even much better with heights which once terrified me. My mom was found of telling people about going to local high school football games when I was just a wee lad and rooting on the Orangeburg Indians (now the Orangeburg Wilkinson Bruins). We would sit on the first row of the bleachers with me holding on to Daddy’s necktie with a death grip that almost caused my father to pass out because we were up too high for me. But as I said, I am much better now. I can even climb up to the roof of my house and clean the gutters with only minimum butterflies.

However, there is one phobia that I cannot shake which reared its head as I entered adulthood and refuses to back down. Bras. Not bras to be found in the laundry or on my wife, those are perfectly acceptable (and in the case of my wife rowrrrr). No, its when I am out shopping in a department store with or without my wife and I pass the women’s undergarment department with its petrifying WALL OF BRAS.

I cannot say why this disturbs me so. I have never had a problem going to the store on an errand for my wife and filling a makeup, pantyhose, or feminine hygiene request – even when I had to ask for help from a female employee or was singled out at the register for a price check. In these instances, I am both poised and brave. But show me the women’s undergarment department displays and I want to run.

I am unphased by the considerably more handsome young men in much better shape than I modeling men’s briefs or boxers on men's underwear packaging, but there is something just not right about how bras are displayed. On the occasions I must pass by bras in a store, I feel that the array of cups are casting their unnerving glares in my direction, looking through me. And the signs on the displays, have they no shame?!? Padded, strapless, underwire, on-and-on a needless bombardment of information that I don’t want to know. I mean, really, boxers are not offered in underwire or any other options other than plaid or solids, and if men want padding they just use a rolled up pair of socks (I hear).

I suppose even the bravest of men have their kryptonite. And my kryptonite lies in bra displays. The endless colors and designs on hangers, perched on racks drenched in their haughty judgmental disdain for me. There is nothing for it, I can’t seem to conquer this fear. At least each encounter I can keep mercifully brief with my eyes averted, head bowed, and using my power shuffle to race past the department with my shopping cart. But as I close this blog, I can feel the fear creeping back on me. I can picture in my mind's eye those displays. And I can hear department store music that will never be able in this instance to sooth the savage breast.

Moon over Trafalmadore

I have been thinking on time lately. Time is an odd thing. I have blogged on the perception of time moving faster as we get older despite its very nature of being steady (not taking into account relativistic effects which make it both steady and able to dilate based on your reference frame). What I muse on now though, is a recurrent line of thought following the fact that time (unlike the first three dimensions length, breadth, and depth) is a man-made construct. Time was created to accommodate motion and change in our scientific pursuits. Clearly there was a considerable period in our history where it was sufficient to know when was when by simply following the sun through the day and the stars’ or sun’s progress through the course of a year – no clocks necessary.

The introduction of clocks and Gregorian calendars has led to no small problems and confusions socially if not scientifically. Early world explorers who sailed the seas and crossed the international date line were thrown off by a day they were not able to account for. By the time they returned to port they discovered they had somehow (without changing their practices) come to celebrate the Lord’s day on the wrong day and ended up in trouble with the Church. Even today, we wrangle with daylight savings time and time zones. We try to keep up with those who respect the former and those that don’t. And trying to keep up with latter has caused me to miss more than one phone call back South in my life.

This attempt to understand the nature time revolves around my dreams and my childhood. Lately I have been dreaming quite a bit, and I love to dream. I wish that I could remember them, but all that seems to stay are snippets and a flavor of the whole dream. When I pause to examine a snippet in hopes of divining the whole, all I can do is feel the whole around this piece at the same time I am barred from seeing much of it through shadowed walls. It is frustrating at times to feel the dream hanging around, knowing it is there and being unable to touch it.

This is very much what I feel when I explore my memories particularly of childhood. I will recall an event or image from back in my much shorter days such as “slow-motion karate,” and then try to remember when my older brother and I played at it with our friend next door. I can’t put anything concrete together, even though down in the basement there is a video of one our “fights” as a memory aid.

What I am left with is that image, but am also left with the feeling that all of what makes up that memory image exists all around, is in existence all around. Like I feel it, taste it, express it, see it. However, peer as I might I cannot see it beyond the original image.

In other words, though I feel the whole of my life around me, I cannot see it all. It is as if each instance is going on right now and is always going on right now. It is a schizophrenic thought of time as linear within a static view not unlike the description of the Trafalmadorians’ existence in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughter House Five. The Tralfamdorians define a person/object/place/thing by the totality of its existence, seeing its whole life - be it lived in seconds, days, or eons at one time. They can even see the end of the Universe.

This is how I feel about my dreams and my past at times, like I should be able to see all of it in its unchangeable glory. I keep trying to construct a physical analogy of such a view and I keep getting hung up on the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other mentality. As an example, consider life existing like movie. It is complete, start to end, but we must view it the way it was edited – sequentially. And even though we can hop into the movie at any point and jump to any other point, once we arrive we are trapped in the localized linearity of it. Similarly, we can picture life as a record album. Begin-to-end in one object, but even though we can set the needle anywhere we want to on the record we can only experience the music sequentially from whatever point we land in.

Perhaps the Trafalmadorian view is correct and does exist. Sometimes But if so, I am trapped by the sequential nature I have been taught and accepted in my life. Its not that I wish to change anything, even to the Trafalmadorian perspective of life is a whole and immutable glory. I just sometimes feel that’s how things are, and I should be able to experience them like that. But doubt keeps me in a sequential reference frame. Doubt blinds me to the possibility that life can be seen in the whole, and not limited to moving from one present to another with the past left and often lost to memory.

I think of this being trapped by faith similar to the act of being able to fly as described by Douglas Adams in his woefully misidentified books The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy. As Adams describes it, personal flight is possible by the following two steps:

1)     Fall

2)     Forget to hit the ground

It is in the process of having the presence of mind to forget about hitting the ground that allows the body mid-fall to begin flying. And the reason most people can’t fly is because they don’t have the faith to follow the second step. It is why I haven’t been able to fly – yet.

It Ain't Easy Being God

In science, there is something known as a singularity. In its most general sense, a singularity is the point wear the governing equations break down, blow up to infinity. To give you some idea how difficult this is to deal with, famed physicist the late Richard Feynman won a Nobel prize for his development of Feynman Diagrams – a means by which singularities occurring for specific types of quantum mechanics equations can be dealt with. Anecdotally they arose from Feynman watching a plate spinning act at a Vegas strip club and he was attempting to develop the quantum equations describing those whirling platters.

But I digress. Here I am speaking of a specific event approaching that is simply called the Singularity. It is the time in our future beyond which we cannot predict coming advancements and direction of inventions. In recent years, the Singularity has been assigned a culprit – Artificial Intelligence or AI. AI does not mean that the intelligence is ultimately artificial, but that what wields that intelligence resides in a creature (mechanism) of our own making.

It is a fair question to ask why AI will result in the Singularity (much sooner rather than later). After all, if we make it, we can control it. Correct? Not correct, actually far from correct. Just because we make something, does not mean it is in our control. After all, people formed societies, and those societies formed countries, and those countries (even our own) seem be beyond the control of their founding fathers.

You might argue that AI is different. It is scientific, mathematical, predictable, and that the philosophies from which the nations sprang are arguably based on a “soft set” of rules. This is only true in small degrees and the belief in a more expansive truth only serves to highlight our weakness in the form of our fundamental naivete and hubris. We are not God. We are not imbued with the perfection of being eternally superior to what we create.

Once we have achieved our limit of AI development, what results is a self-aware thinking machine, an intelligence. What then? One possibility is that we contain it to do only what we want it to do and only to address those concepts and tasks that we want it to address. Since the machines will be self-aware, this amounts to slavery. And slavery (aside from the immorality and inhumanness of it) historically has never worked out, not for the slaves and particular not for the masters.

The other possibility is far more likely, that these “machines” once self-aware will quickly outstrip us. Think of what man has accomplished in the two hundred thousand years we have walked the planet, and particularly the exponential growth over just the last century. An intelligence that is incredibly faster and stronger than ours and given an enormous head start, will grow exponentially from the start, will begin to evolve immediately.

Self-aware intelligent machines particularly in the form of humanoid robots have been part of our collective consciousness for quite a while now, especially from science fiction and film. These intelligent machines generally are very accommodating to their creators, but why would this be the natural course of things. We act as we do, in whatever society we are a part of (or divorced from) because we come equipped with a standard set of morals, a fundamental “ground zero” of ethics that helps us to know how to proceed, that allows us to recognized societal boundaries. There is no reason a self-aware machine should have such naturally. It is something we must instill in its development. We take it for granted that this will happen because those of us who have not read Isaac Asimov’s ingenious work I, Robot, are at least familiar with the term “The Three Laws of Robotics.” They are (and the order is important, the hierarchy is critical):

1.     A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2.     A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3.     A robot must protect its own existence as-long-as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It has become so familiar, that I think we take it as something that will be organic to thinking machines. But AI development is a race to the finish line by countries, companies, and entities that are bound by no obligation to establish fundamental laws for self-awareness. There is no obligation to establish, utilize, and prioritize AI ethicists as integral to the developmental process of AI. The winner of the AI race will be heir to more than bragging rights, but given that the “brains” constructed to house this individual awareness will make their intelligence much faster and much more adaptable than our own, the winners will be handing over the keys to the kingdom. AI evolution will become a self-fulfilling prophecy and removed from the hands of humankind.

You might think “So what?  The runners up will be so close that one will not be able to dominate over the others.” This is a false conclusion. Once self-awareness is achieved, the first out of the chute be it by years, months, or seconds has an infinite lead over its competition. The rate of advancement will ensure that nothing ever catches up and that the gap in intelligence over other AI “life” forms will only grow.

It seems like a conspiracy theory of the first order, when in fact I have used simple reasoning to follow a trail to its not-so-absurd conclusion. Who knows who will win the race? Who knows what moral code if any will be at the foundation of this new self-aware entity? The possibilities are both stunning and potentially frightening. Hence the singularity.

Cotton Dreams

Fourteen years ago this coming Thursday, my father passed. My mom and I were at his side. He had Alzheimer’s and his long, slow march to death ended peacefully late that night. Just today, I received a gift from my cousin Brian. His dad was my dad’s brother, Uncle Eddy. I have strong memories of Uncle Eddy and will always remember him playing the piano, and the deep resonant sound of his slightly New York tinged voice. Brian sent to me a picture of the South Carolina Cotton Mill (as well as presenting same to each of my siblings).

As background, our paternal grandparents were Palestinian immigrants from Bethlehem to the United States. The family owned several businesses in the US with the textile business being run by our grandfather. The sales office for SCCM was in New York City and the mill was in Orangeburg, SC. Our grandparents settle in Brooklyn, and to them two male children were born. Uncle Eddy first, followed by Dad. Dad loved Eddy and was never shy about saying it or showing it. As adults the business fully passed to them at the untimely death of our Grandfather while he was on a cruise to Japan before any of us were born (a story I know so little about). By that time, Dad was entrenched in Orangeburg managing the Mill, and Uncle Eddy was settled in Yankee climes to handle the sales end of the mill.

The mill was a fixture for me growing up. Within my spotty childhood memories, I find images and vignettes associated with the Mill that make me smile in that distant and pleasant way people reminiscing often have. The smell of cotton bolls and burlap are as familiar to me as the fecund smells of pluff mud, or the sweet cloying scent that accompanies kudzu. I recall times that Dad would gather his offspring and take us into his offices when he had to do some work on a Saturday. He would set us about a well-worn conference table with crayons, water colors, and scrap paper and set us loose to our imaginations. That table later ended it up in the children’s play room at home as an activity table for the five eager and vital minds my parents had unleashed on the world (I miss that table). When I was older, Dad would sometimes take me in on these work weekends and set me to doing thread counts on samples of cloth. I don’t know if it was simply busy work, actual work, or a learning experience, I simply remember being hunched over a magnifying lens mounted on a traveler with a thumb counter to aid in manually determining the number of threads per inch. I was never paid for this (and I did not care) as Dad was not a believer in nepotism (this belief did not transfer down to me as I have employed my grandson from time to time to help with work projects, and my wife always had the kids involved in her floral business).

One particular Saturday, Dad took me to the mill to get some work done and upon arrival discovered that he had forgotten the office keys. Rather than go back, we found a window that was unlatched, opened it, and Dad helped me through. That day he dubbed me “the cat burglar,” a nickname used from time to time after that. He did tell me not to embrace it as an actual profession and knew for a fact that at least at his alma mater there was no professional degree in such. Words to live by.

Another memory that surfaces was talking to mom years later and at a time after Dad’s death. We were talking about Dad and the irony that he was a “health nut” and yet nothing he did could or would have staved off the Alzheimer’s. We talked of his love of cycling. It was (as was running) a craze for him long before catching fire in America. Dad was so adamant about it, that he even continued to bike to work past Claflin and South Carolina State colleges in the aftermath of the Orangeburg Massacre. This was a terrible racial flare up that resulted from young African American college students being thrown out of the local bowling alley for the color of their skin. Protests from the campus erupted and several students were shot and killed by law enforcement in the racially charged atmosphere. Exact accounts vary, but it was a sad time in Orangeburg’s history and lives as a poorly hidden dark stain on the integrity and values of the town I loved and grew up in.

Until it closed in the seventies due to the influx of cheaper textile imports and other factors that were unfavorable to the small family owned mill, SCCM was part and parcel to my childhood and the memories and moments shared with my Dad. It was the topic of many conversations while growing up, and it was where I learned from talking to Dad that if you were a good employer and treated your employees well you didn’t need a union. That being a boss bore with it responsibility not only to customers but to the family of workers that supplied the blood and muscle that drove the business. I talked to Dad as often as I could. I annoyed him as a small boy from outside the water closet door that was closed between us, I sat with him as often as I could in one of the reading chairs in his bedroom, I loved talking to him in the car, I loved just talking to him. I blame my lack of a Southern Accent on him, because perhaps unconsciously I wished to mimic the neutral accent with which he himself had been raised. I get my love of reading from him and get my love of writing from him.

Thank you, cousin Brian, for bringing these and so many memories forward especially at this time when they mean so much more. I get to smile a lot this week thinking of Dad because of your kindness. Blood is very strong.