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Letter to my son and his lady friend after a long and late night with

January 12, 2020 / chiselch

Dear Max and Hannah (please share this with her; I don’t have her e-mail),

We’re alive. Up, finally, and pouring coffee to the veins. Arrived home at 11:30, then decompressed with whiskey and snacks until 1, then bed. Ugh. Long day, but so worth it. Wanted again to thank you both for the lovely gift of art (performance art). It was magical, to see a live performance of the play, so well done, with such good company.

On that note, and linked back to your table thoughts on college education, degrees, BA vs MA/MS vs. … 3-month certificate. It’s a fascinating debate, a bit now of a pendulum swing, which is depressing interest in the humanities (which give us “Fiddler on the Roof”) to the favor of CTE (career and technical ed, as you must know).

Here’s a piece in today’s NY Times addressing that …

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/opinion/sunday/academics-humanities-literature-canon.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

and an earlier piece, if you’re a glutton for punishment, on the same topic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/opinion/oh-the-humanities.html

I’ve always been a humanities person, but got nudged toward a practical application (journalism), not exactly engineering, but clearly with a professional application in mind.

I recall the prof who thus nudged me noting that an English degree wouldn’t lead to a decent job. And, later, another English prof advising me that I could become a “hack” (i.e. journalist), or pursue art (i.e. literature, and … well, he didn’t do the economic calculus that his colleague had, which may have been why, no matter how much I loved literature, I tilted toward journalism). I should note that the latter gentleman was a lovely gent of Persian descent, who I knew as M. Zavarzadeh. I Googled him. His first name was actually Mas’ud.

Back in the day, there were no journalism degrees or programs. People came to it from the humanities, after studying all the things that go into good journalism — sociology, history, poli sci, literature, and (tech tilt here) economics.

For your world (K-12), there’s a case to be made that some students really may prefer a CTE track and get on with it. But who decides? And how do we decide? It seems a crime to deprive them of the opportunity to explore the humanities, to see if that resonates with them, before somehow (the test?) determining that they should take shop class. That’s how they did it back in my day — the kids with better grades and more dutiful attention to their studies got into the college-prep track. Everybody else took home ec and auto shop. Human potential is so mysterious. People who are really good with their hands and mechanically inclined can also be good thinkers on other topics. Farmer Wendell Berry comes immediately to mind. The duality is complementary, not competitive. It’s not either/or, but both/and more.

So much for a Sunday morning brain dump. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

Exit signs

January 10, 2020 / chiselch

My dog and I were out in the circle early this morning, when my neighbor emerged from her house with her dog, Lucky.

Jane had been laid off several months earlier from her admin job, the same day her husband was laid off from his drafting job, each from the same employer.

He got a new job, in San Diego. He stays in a condo they own down there.

We live 1,082 miles north, in Oregon. His wife stays in the house where their two kids are finishing school.

They get together, every so often.

She said she could move down there after the last kid leaves home, in two years.

“And keep your house here?” I asked.

“Probably,” she said. “If we sold, we couldn’t afford to buy another one if we decided to come back.”

Jane told me the same company that fired her as an employee (with benefits), is the company that rehired her on a contract basis (no benefits). She’s working at that company, but being paid through a staffing agency.

She wasn’t hired to do the same job. It was a new thing. She goes around the building and checks the EXIT signs to make sure they’re lit.

“That’s good,” I said, “so I know where to go if I ever need to get the hell out of your building.”

“Right,” she said. “Or the next time I get laid off.”

She turned and walked back inside with Lucky. She had to finish getting ready for work.

If you haven’t, by all means take time to read Alice Munro

December 21, 2019 / chiselch

I’m retired. Most of my time is mine to use as I wish. Odd, then, that I find (or carve out) so little uninterrupted time to just sit and read.

I love to read. I have piles of books and magazines on end tables and nightstands and the sofa and book shelves in my office, and yet it seems a struggle to set aside a good hour to just sit with one, to start and engage and finish a story or essay.

I need to remember, then, what happened today, when I finally picked up Alice Munro’s collection of stories, “Runaway,” tucked into the title story, and after a brief break for dinner, rejoined it and rode it to completion.

This was perhaps the third story of Munro’s that I have read, and I wonder why I have not read more. Perhaps because so much other excellence demands and deserves my attention, but I have let volume get in the way of engagement.

Munro takes simple people with simple dreams and extracts the complexity from their every thought, their every move. With Munro, still waters do indeed run deep. No fireworks here, just a prose master, taking us on a gallery tour in which we view her subjects from every angle, inside and out, wrestling with dreams and desires, fears and frustrations, simple charities and tragic reversals of will.

In a world so jammed with flash and volume, bright and shiny spectacles, I must suggest that you do yourself a favor and get to know Munro.

She was honored with the Nobel Prize for her work exclusively in the short story form. The talent leading to that honor lies in every word choice and finely crafted phrase, every description and mannerism through which her fictional small town Canadians live as large and wide as their sprawling landscape.

I regret many an hour wasted on some dizzy video extrusion. I regret nothing of my time spent with Munro.

Humbug meets a manchild from Santa land

December 16, 2019 / chiselch

Until Raven commented on my buffness, remarkable to him for someone in other respects to be obviously pushing well past 60, he was just another gym customer. His unsolicited compliment opened the door to a chat, scratching my pathology born of 40 years in journalism.

He and his wife, Christine, moved to our town from Texas six (or was that seven?) years ago. They’ve nudged their two kids through adolescence and off to college now. Raven works at a local mental health agency.

One of the first things he revealed was his love of reading. My ears perked up. A reader? In this day and age? Game on, buddy. We shared our love of literature and our favorite writers, of the ideal afternoon with nary a chore undone and no horizon on the landscape of time to read.

He loves speculative fiction. He told me I had to read XXXX. And then we went our separate ways, until I spied this couple attacking the machinery on a wintery Saturday evening. I caught his eye on the exercycle. We exchanged pleasantries, during which I said I was managing to keep the holiday schedule from going totally out of control.

Raven smiled, and in his Texas twang allowed as to how he was totally into Christmas. He and his bride had been that day to two different malls in the Portland area. Christine was less a fan of the holiday hubbub. I told him she sounded more like me, and said I would prefer a quiet walk with my dog in the woods.

The memory of the mall transformed him. He smiled, tilted his head back, returned to that place, the throngs, the atmospheric Christmas music, the decor and gaiety. It was like watching a drug addict recalling his last date with the needle.

Then he mentioned his encounter with Santa. He had gone up to our local Ace hardware store to get keys — “the kids are always losing keys, I need to get a bucket of them” — when he turned a corner and came face to face with Santa.

His face transformed, reliving that moment. “Oh, Santa, how are you?” he said. Santa had come down off his visitation stand, but stayed in character, and invited Raven to come get his picture taken with Santa.

“I know I’m psychotic,” Raven said, almost in apology for revealing his psychic tilts. “I love my wife, I love my kids, I love the mundane …”

“No, Raven, you are NOT psychotic,” I interjected. “That is so great. I love the mundane, too. Everyone can celebrate the mundane. Embrace grandiose dreams, and you set yourself up for failure.”

Raven is like a child besotted with childhood, simple things transformed into magic because that is likely all we’ll ever get. Complexity is the enemy of the simple, the innocent, the sweet and loving embrace of family.

We said our goodbyes. “God bless you, friend,” Raven said.

I have to slap myself. I never asked if he got his photo with Santa.

I gave my card to Debby

October 5, 2019 / chiselch

Not little Debby, the face of bad pastry. Debby, the Croatian immigre to Montreal, the barista who saw me standing outside her little coffee shop and brought a treat out for our dog and an offer to bring him inside. “We’re pet friendly,” she said. Truer words.

Debby loves dogs and took our passage as opportunity to lavish a little love (OK, a LOT of love) on Satchel.

“I love animals,” she says, squatting next to Satch and stroking his head. “More than people.”

We had stopped outside Structure with ulterior motives. Buy a little something, so we could feel comfortable asking to use the restroom.

Next thing you know, we’re inside, ordering lattes and a chocolate cookie and chatting with Debby. About her family, once scattered across Canada, now reassembled in Montreal. About Croatian food (lots of cruciers, stews, seasoning like that of Turkey). About her and her boyfriend’s plan to adopt a rescue pup next year, when they move in together.

She spoke of her love for the U.S., but also of her happiness being in Canada, where she came at 11 as a refugee of the Balkan civil conflicts.

As we approached departure, I thought how I would love to welcome her (them) to our home, should they ever pass that way. So I gave her my last business card. I do this. No one has yet taken me up on the offer. But I try, the least I can do to complete the knot of introduction brokered by my dog.

Brothers under the … sail

October 4, 2019 / chiselch

Visiting old Montreal today, and while standing outside the IGA grocery with my dog, Satchel, I caught the eye of a couple sharing the chill breeze for a smoke.

He looked a little like Joe Cocker in his heyday, wavy gray hair hanging down to his shoulders. She was blonde, a little pudgy, and smiled easily.

The gent eyed Satchel, made a few comments in French, and because I understood not a vowel, I nodded. He realized the language of incomprehension, and switched to broken English.

We talked about the dog and his mixed ancestry. He asked if we brushed him. The he commented on his wavy hair.

“Like yours,” I said.

He smiled, and asked our purpose. I explained our desire to “leaf peep” the fall colors, extending south from here to Vermont.

He told me we should slide east, through the White Mountains. Somewhere in the chat, I mentioned that we had come here from Oregon for that very purpose.

“Oh, I was a windsurfer,” he said. “I used to go to the Columbia River Gorge.”

“That’s where we live,” I said, always happy to find shared paths. “I still windsurf.”

He said he had quit, 20 years earlier, after moving back to Quebec and finding the inconsistent wind too much of a frustration. He said he never took up kiteboarding, because he liked to go out into the middle of the lake, instead of sliding along the shallows.

“So I quit, and I took up drinking,” he said, with a wry smile.

He smoothed his hand over his rounded abdomen and smiled.

“I have to go,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette and aiming toward the door. “Enjoy your time here.”

“We will,” I said. “And are. Thank you.”