Tag: family

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We Shall Not Soon See Their Like Again

Chrissy’s father died today.  He was ninety-three and had a full life.  

A lot happens during a life that spans almost a century.  It is hard to imagine life on a farm in the hills of western Wisconsin in 1915.   The work was still done mostly by muscle – human and horse – and the world after dusk was lit only by fire.  Electricity wouldn’t come out to the farm until the rural electrification program during the depression.

Arnold Johnson served in Patton’s army in World War II.  He was injured in battle and spent time in a hospital in Britain. After the war he returned to the farm that had been in his father’s family since they immigrated from Norway in the middle of the 19th Century.  He married Pearl Olson and they built a life together. Seven children followed.  Chrissy was number six, born when Arnold was already forty-five.

Pearl and Arnold enjoyed the kind of life you cannot have anymore.  They grew up in the green valleys (coulees formed by glacial melt waters in an area not glaciated) of western Wisconsin among generations of friends and family.  People didn’t move as much back then.  They didn’t have the kinds of opportunities we have now, but there were compensations.  They were held in place long enough to create multigenerational communities.

I was always impressed by how many people they knew and how many people knew them.   Into his eighties Arnold would do “meals on wheels” to help the “old” members of the community.   He helped mow their lawns and make their lives easier.  Community was important.

You should not mourn for the life well led and Arnold Johnson led a good life.   He did his duty to defend his country in its time of need.  He raised cows and crops that helped feed our people and lived his long life in a green, peaceful and pleasant corner of the world.   He and Pearl raised a family of seven children.  Their hard work provided enough to launch all of them into successful adulthood.   There are now fifteen grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren so far.   And when he died in old age, he was loved and missed by many. 

We should all wish to accomplish so much.

After they are gone, we always regret not paying closer attention to what the old folks tried to tell us.  We lament that we didn’t listen as well as we should have or get to know them as well as we could have. I talked to Arnold about the history of his farm and about his experience in the war, but not enough. There are things I would like to know that are now unknowable.  Young people don’t usually ask.  It is difficult for them to appreciate the experience of the older generation until they have reached an age where they have experienced some of the same sorts of life changes. By then it is too late.  Memories fade or are lost entirely.

Arnold was the last of his generation in our family. The “greatest generation” – the one that survived the Great Depression, fought World War II and rebuilt the country after those challenges – is passing away.   We shall not soon see their like again.  Now we are the old folks. 

We may never again visit Holmen or the old farm.  That part of our lives is finished.   The kids have vague memories of Wisconsin and the memory will disappear entirely in the next generation.  Young people have a hard time understanding that old people were not always old.  They also won’t listen until it is too late.  That is just the way it goes.  Old men forget and yet all shall be forgot.

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The Simple Life

Mariza moved to a new apartment.  It was not far from her old place.  Espen and Mariza’s boyfriend – Chris – helped.  Alex had to work.  We had to make a few trips in the pickup truck.   I told her that she has too much stuff, but I don’t suppose that it true in comparison to most other people her age.

I retold the story that when I moved to Madison, I carried everything with me in a duffle and backpack.   It wasn’t really a completely valid comparison.  I didn’t have any furniture because I had apartments that had furnishings.  Mariza doesn’t have too much in the way of clothes or other things.   She is good about not having too much more than she needs.   The big thing is that she doesn’t yet have a car and uses the light rail system or walk.  

Mariza’s street is below. It is a nice renewing neighborhood.  Not too far away, the nice houses like those you see in the picture are still boarded up.  The second picture is taken from Mariza’s back window.  The neigborhood declines literally on the other side of the tracks.  Espen and I drove through some of these neighborhoods on the way home.  Espen told me about the Dave Chappelle routine on the subject.  Chappelle can be offensive, BTW, so viewer discretion is advised on the link.

Simple is better

A simple life is better. When people get too much stuff it begins to oppress them. It is sad to see so many of those storage places popping up. I understand that you might store your possessions that you use seasonally or episodically, but that is not what is usually going on. 

You just cannot own enough to make you happy.  Of course, it is possible to have so little that you live in misery.   This is not really a problem in the modern U.S. anymore for most people.   Most of us have the opposite problem, although sometimes we are so busy grabbing more that we miss what has happened. 

The really good gift a person can give himself or others is examined experiences  You are better off spending that money on something where you do or learn something new.   I think the examined part is also important.  Experience is a great teacher but only if you pay attention.   

I am not a proponent of recession, but it does have some useful effects.  People are becoming more frugal again.  The economic boom times really lasted from 1982 until the beginning of last year.   The two recessions were mild.  We all got used to having more and more.    Pew Research finds that people say they “need” fewer things than they did last year.  This is a good trend.   Of course 8% think a flat screen TV is a necessity and 23% say the same about cable TV and 31% evidently figure that a life w/o high speed internet is not complete.    I guess we didn’t know how poor we really were before these things were available.    

Below – sic transit gloria mundi.  The overgrown monument was set up by one of Baltimore’s mayors, one John Lee Chapman. The original was set up in 1865.  It was renewed in 1915.  It probably was not on a freeway on-ramp at that time.  Now it is isolated by roads and a bit overgrown.   Notice in the background are trees-of-heaven.   Those are the invasive species I have to fight all the time on the farm. They are okay in the disturbed ground of the city.   The thing that makes them invasive is the same thing that makes them good city trees:  that they can grow fast in almost any conditions.

One more thing – this is the Mormon Temple.  I see it as I drive by on 495 on the way back from Mariza’s house.   Usually I am going too fast to take a picture.  We hit a traffic jam today long enough to get a shot.  It is more impressive than my picture shows, but this is the best I could do w/o endangering myself or others. 

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Espen @ George Mason

Espen will go to George Mason next fall.  He is excited about a program they have in gaming and simulations.  All that time in the World of Warcraft may yet pay off.   Gaming is much more than games, as I have written before.    Games will be the future on online collaboration and learning.

George Mason has the advantage of location.   They are in easy contact with all the government and government support activities as well as the high tech in N. Virginia and the biotech along the 270 corridor in Maryland.   It really is a superb area to work and learn.  Housing prices are a little high, but once you have the house there are lots of opportunities.

I appreciate being in Washington with all the history and monuments, but I often forget about the dynamism of the suburbs.  N. Virginia’s tech and services produces more jobs for the area than the Federal government, but the presence of the Feds makes us recession resistant.  

Sorry my picture is blurred.  Think of it as impressionistic art.  This is the Patriot Center.

George Mason went a little over the top with the welcome.   They evidently have a successful basketball team and they were using the sport excitement methods.   The Patriot Center is also hosting the Ringling Brothers Circus, so they took the opportunity to put on a show with a band and ring master.  It was interesting the difference with the orientation at University of Virginia. Virginia emphasizes tradition.  They remind you that Thomas Jefferson founded the place and laid out the plans and that the university has been there a long time.   Mason talks about the opportunities of the future.   It is much more of a competitive feeling at Mason.   I suppose they are both playing to their strengths.    Virginia is established and everybody knows its value.   Mason is hungry.     I was glad that Mariza went to UVA and I think it will be good that Espen goes to Mason.  You can get a good education almost anywhere if you work at it.   The world is full of opportunities. It is up to you to take them.

Espen got a summer internship with Lockheed-Martin.  He will be working on computer engineering 40 hours a week and they are actually paying him to do it.  I think that will give him a jump start on his future.  Those are the kinds of opportunities available around here.  I talked to a guy from Lockheed on Friday about a different matter and mentioned the internship.   He told me that they probably liked it that Espen had A+ certification (whatever that means) and that he probably understood online collaboration – again with the gaming.  It goes to show that value can be added in unexpected ways.  

The GMU program in gaming sounds good, but one reason you go to college is to expand your options and ideas.   No eighteen year old really knows what he wants.  I always thought that any kid who graduates with the same plan he came in with lacks imagination.   I am glad Espen will be close.  We still want him to live on campus for the experience, but Fairfax City is not a long way off.

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Happy Birthday Mariza & Alex

Today we had the Mariza/Alex birthday party.    They were born two years and two days apart.  Mariza came down from Baltimore for the event.  We went to Outback Steakhouse and had some cake.    They are both full adults today, as Alex has now turned twenty-one.   It has been a long time, but  the time flew by when I look back.

Mariza was born in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.  She was born on a hot fall day (seasons are reversed down there).   The hospital was a nice place built by Germans many years ago.   It was on a beautiful street lined with jacaranda trees.    But it was old fashioned.   It didn’t have air conditioning and the windows didn’t have screens, so it was not the most comfortable place.  Mariza was very blond as a baby.  Well… blond but not much hair in general.   Chrissy sometimes taped a bow to her head to tell the world she was a little girl.  Mariza lived her first two years (almost) in Brazil and her first words were Portuguese.   Brazil was a good place for babies and toddlers.   The Brazilians are very child friendly and there was easy access to play groups and day care.  

Below – I carried the kids on my back all over the place.  This is Mariza in the Brazilian pine forest.

On the down-side, there were shortages.    Mariza was born about the same time the Brazilian government set up the Cruzado Plan, which imposed price controls.  Predictably, goods disappeared from the store shelves, including pampers, baby formula and related products.    Big bugs were annoyances.   They have giant tarantulas in Porto Alegre and we were careful that Mariza didn’t try to play with them. 

We had a little pool on the roof of our apartment.   Mariza always liked the water and was never afraid of it at all.  She couldn’t actually swim, however, so we had to watch her closely. 

We chose a Brazilian name for Mariza, since she was born there, but we spelled it with a z instead of an s (Marisa) as they do.   Brazilians pronounce the  “s” more like the way we do “z” (not exactly of course, but closer).  For example, they spell their country’s name Brasil.  We hoped that people would pronounce it with the “z” sound, as they do in Brazil.   Most people still call her Marissa at first, however.

Alex was born in Lacrosse, Wisconsin.  He is the only one of the three kids born in the U.S.  Chrissy and Mariza had to go up to the U.S. earlier.  I had to stay down in Brazil and finish my work there.   They stayed in Wisconsin with Chrissy’s parents.  Chrissy’s sister in law, Barb who is a nurse, was very helpful.  I was in Washington for Norwegian training, but I was lucky enough to get to Wisconsin exactly the right time for Alex’s arrival.   He arrived right on time and right fast.

Alex came to us during a disrupted time.  I was in Norwegian training and we were on TDY in Washington living in temporary housing.   By the wacky definition they use today, we were “homeless.”   All joking aside, it was stressful to not have a permanent place.   Alex was a good baby.   Our apartment had only a bedroom and the living room.  Alex had a crib in the living room, so he was always with the family.

We moved to Norway when Alex was six months old.   Getting to a “permanent home” (we stayed there four years) helped calm Chrissy and me and it had an effect on Alex and Mariza. 

I used to take Alex to the swimming pool at the NATO element as Kolsas, not far from Oslo.  I would wrap him in water wings and floaters and he would paddle around the pool.  He developed a lot of endurance.   

We had a townhouse in Norway, with a big room downstairs that opened onto a small yard.   That room became the playroom for Alex and Mariza.   Alex always loved dinosaurs and teenage mutant ninja turtles.  He seemed to like these things before he could talk.   We had a lot of educational tapes.    I suppose he saw it on them.

Norway is one of the most beautiful places in the world, but it is a strange place for a new baby because of the winter darkness and the midnight sun.   In the middle of the summer, it never gets completely dark.  It was hard to get the kids acclimatized.  During the summer they did not want to go to sleep until it got dark and it never got really dark.

Below is Alex at Gettysburg in 1993. He has always been interested in history.

As I said, all that was a long time ago.    It is a strange wonderful thing being a parent.    Past and present mingle.  When I look at the kids, I see them as they are now, but I also have images and feelings accumulated over the previous decades.   

I didn’t have a blog back when Mariza graduated from UVA and I didn’t make a web page. We are lucky in Virginia to have such a good public university system and I was glad that she went to Thomas Jefferson’s university.    It is not easy to get into the University of Virginia these days and I was proud that she got in and thrived there.

Below is Thomas Jefferson looking over our family.

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Happy Birthday Espen

Below is Frogner Park in Norway, where Espen was born.

Today is Espen’s birthday. The youngest of the kids is now eighteen. I remember the day he was born eighteen years ago.   Espen was born in Baerum Sykehus near Oslo. It snowed the day before he was born.  The snow mostly stays on the ground in Norway between November and March, but I remember looking out the hospital window at the fresh coat of white.  

Espen was named after a little Norwegian boy who we hardly knew.   It was one of Mariza’s classmates at the preschool and evidently a brat.    Mariza would come home complaining about this Espen.   “Espen slo pa mai.” (Espen hit me) Espen kastet jord pa mai.” (Espen threw dirt on me.)   My apologies to any Norwegian readers for the mistakes I made in spelling and grammar.   We liked the name.    All of the kids names are associated with countries.  Mariza was born in Brazil, so she has a Brazilian name.   We spelled it with a z instead of an s so that Americans would pronounce it closer to the Portuguese and not call her Marissa.  Alex’s  name was chosen when I expected to go to the Soviet Union.  Espen is actually a Norwegian name with a Danish origin.

The third kid in the family gets the advantage of having the first two break in the parents, so Espen developed fast.   He really loved a kind of bouncing swing that hung from the door frame.   I taught him to swim at the Kolsas pool before he could walk.   Like all kids, he could climb before he could walk, but he was especially good at it.   Our house in Norway had three floors, so he could make us nervous on several levels.

Espen only spent a year and a half in Norway, so he doesn’t remember it, but Norway was a great place for little kids.   It is safe & clean and there are lots of parks.  I am sure it made an impression on him, although the detail is forgotten.   

We moved to Silver Spring, Maryland for Polish training when Espen was about 1 ½ years old, so his first language was American English.   We got a house with a big yard and a fence.   Espen learned to climb over the fence right away. We moved to Krakow about a year later.

Espen adjusted well to Krakow and went to a Polish pre-school up the street.   He called it “two cats” because the woman who ran the school had two cats.  He learned Polish w/o knowing what he was doing and I got a great insight into language learning from him.   I heard him speaking to the cleaning woman in Polish, but he denied being able to speak the language when I asked him about it.   He told me that he didn’t speak Polish.  “Those are just the words I have to use with her,” he explained.  

We bought a house in Virginia after we came back from Poland in 1997.  Espen went to Strevewood Grade School.  Espen and Alex had a lot of friends during our three years there.   Espen played on the Fairfax County little kids’ league. His team was called the little wizards and they were good.

We moved back to Poland in 2000, this time to Warsaw.   Espen and the other kids attended the American School in Warsaw and they were lucky enough to get a brand new school building.   The American School in Warsaw was a very posh place.  It is hard for working diplomats to have kids in this sort of school, because many of their local classmates are fabulously rich.  The government pays for our kids but those local guys who can afford the tuition themselves are very well off.    Espen went to one birthday party where they drove around in little Mercedes go-karts and got helicopter rides.   He wondered why his birthday parties were so pedestrian.   The locals think that all American diplomats are rich, but we just can’t play in their world.   

Below is our home in New Hampshire.

We came back to the U.S. in 2003, but lived up in New Hampshire, as I got the job as State Department Fellow at Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy.   Espen attended the Middle School in Londonderry, NH.   It was hard for the kids.   Many of the families have been established there for generations.   It is hard for newcomers, especially since we knew we would be there only for a year. 

We moved back to Virginia in 2004, same place where we lived before.  Espen went to Kilmer Middle School and then George C Marshall HS.  He still had some friends here and made new ones.  As I write this, I hear them all downstairs talking.  Parents can’t compete with friends at that age.  Virginia is home now.

These are my brief thoughts about my son on his birthday. Of course, there is a lot more than I am writing.  Suffice to say, I am thinking about the last eighteen years.  I miss the baby and the child, and I love and I am proud of the young man he has become.  

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Cranes of the Southwest

We lived at the Oakwood temporary apartments near Waterfront Plaza in SW when I was studying Norwegian in 1988.  The area didn’t change much over the next two decades, until a few months ago. Now it is a forest of cranes and new construction is going up all over.  The crane above, BTW, is on the frozen river.

A lot of the change is related to the new Metro. Development follows the Metro, even if it takes a few years, even in bad neighborhoods.   But the neighborhoods have also improved.   Back in 1988, this area was not so nice. That was the time of the crack epidemic.   During my year in Iraq, I never heard a shot fired in anger.  During my six months in SW in 1988, I heard several.   DC also had that horrible mayor back in 1988. I couldn’t understand how he could get elected and reelected, but his constituency evidently viewed honesty, law & order with less enthusiasm than I did. That Washington is just a bad memory and things are getting better.

SW has lots of advantages.  You could see that even in the bad old days. There are lots of parks. The waterfront is pleasant and features restaurants and shops selling the harvests of the Chesapeake and other seafood.   You are within walking distance of the Capitol and the Smithsonian museums, as well as the Library of Congress.   Now that the Green Line connects this neighborhood to the rest of the Washington Metro region, it has everything.  

Below used to be the Oakwood Apartments where we lived in 1988.  Now they are condos.

Places can bring back memories and this place reminds me of Alex and Mariza when they were little.  Alex was born while I was taking Norwegian and we brought him home to the Oakwood.   I remember walking with the kids over to the Waterfront Mall, the one that is now torn down and rising from the rubble.  It was a sad place back then and we didn’t go after dark, but it had a Roy Rogers, Pizza Hut & a Blimpie and it was within walking distance.   We used to walk the kids.   Alex was a happy baby and Mariza was cute.  

Below is just after dawn on the Mall.  I am taking pictures more or less from this same spot to look at the changes of seasons.

I was posted in Brazil when Chrissy got pregnant with Alex.  Mariza was born in Brazil, but Chrissy and Mariza were medivaced to Wisconsin for Alex’s birth.  They left in mid-January because after that time it would not be good for Chrissy to fly.  I had to finish my duties in Porto Alegre and stay until March, when they sent me to Washington for Norwegian training. I had to take annual leave and pay my own way up to Wisconsin (the FS was less into those family rights in those days). I was up there for Alex’s birth, but then had to go back to Washington to finish Norwegian.   Chrissy stayed with her parents and came down a few weeks later with the kids. Mariza was just over 2 years old.  A few weeks is a long time in the life of 2 years old and when I met them at the airport she was a little shy, but then she stood next to me and followed me around.  I remember those times fondly, but it was tough. I don’t think I could learn a language under those conditions today. 

Below shows the tough market.  A couple years ago you couldn’t find a rental. 

I developed a system for language learning, not very original or subtle but effective.  I just memorized about ten minutes of useful generic sentences, things like comparisons (on the one hand … on the other hand) or intros (Considering the conditions five years ago …) etc.  When I would walk around or run, I would just repeat the whole story. Over & over.  Language is a physical skill.  You just have to keep saying it out loud until it is driven down into the subconscious. From the basic words and phrases, you can branch out with variations. People think you are crazy talking to yourself, but it works.  For weeks I talked to myself constantly. When I finally passed my Norwegian exam and went silent, I felt strange.  I remember running around Haines Point and noticing how lonely it was with nobody to talk to. 

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Animals

Fang

The picture is our first dog, Fang.   Springer Spaniels are supposed to be gentle and he looked sweet and docile, but he wasn’t.  In those days before the dog whisperer, he was an incorrigibly bad dog.  He got increasingly out of control.  If you left him alone in the house, he would chew up whatever he could reach.  He knocked over the fish tank and scratched holes in the rugs.  He once even chewed up the metal Venetian blinds.  You would have thought that impossible, but you would have been wrong.  You had to literally fight him off to eat your lunch.  He would sit there growling and lurch at your food if you made eye contact or gave him an opening.  As I think back, it is amazing how long we tolerated his aggressiveness.  He bit everybody … except my mother.  He was afraid of my mother, but one day he bit her too.   After that he bit no more. We were sad to lose our dog, but it was good to be able to eat w/o having to watch for the rushing dog.   The vet told us that he was a “fear biter.”  I don’t know what that meant.  I think he made that up.

Our next dog, Sam, was the most docile dog in the world.   He never bit or growled.  He would bark at visitors, and it was hard to get him to be quiet, but then he hid in back of us when they came in.   I was locked out of the house once, so I climbed in through the bedroom window.  I didn’t hear a sound from Sam, except I could hear his claws on the linoleum kitchen floor as he backed up.  I still couldn’t find him, until I saw him hiding under my father’s bed.  As soon as he saw me, he came out bravely.  Everybody liked Sam.  He was a good looking dog, a Chesapeake Bay retriever.  He had some of the instinct.  He used to point at rabbits and squirrels, although he never bothered to pursue them. 

Our last dog was Xerxes.   He was the dog of my father’s later years and he reflected some of the infirmities of old age.  Xerxes was even more cowardly than Sam and not at all aggressive.   He is cringing in most of the pictures, because he was afraid of the camera.  If he heard a loud noise, he would go crazy.  Thunder storms and the 4th of July were not pleasant times.  My father treated him with a gentleness bordering on deference.  “He has rights too,” my father would say.  Probably as a result of this, Xerxes paid no attention to my father and would not come when he called.   

I have seen the “Dog Whisperer” on TV a couple times and it is clear to me now that we just didn’t know how to treat dogs.   Dogs are pack animals.   They need to know who is master.   We were always ambiguous about that, so the dogs personality and natural inclinations came to dominate the relationship.   Sam was my favorite dog and gave us no reason to complain except that he was too timid.  But compared with Fang, who you constantly had to hold back, it was a better situation.    I think Xerxes just got corrupted.  My father spoiled and indulged him.    We used to have cats until I was around five years old.   They were not really our cats; they just sort of moved into our house sometimes, sort of community cats.  They all had the unimaginative name of “Kitty.”  It made it easier to remember their names and there really is no use in naming cats anyway, since they never come when called.  In those days it was considered cruel and unnatural to keep cats in the house and they wandered the streets.   You “put the cat out” at night.  Sometimes they would come back.  In between, they would enter cat society and alternatively fight, mate and kill birds & mice. They came back when they got hungry and/or when they couldn’t find a better offer.  Cats have no sense of loyalty.  Once Kitty had kittens.  One of them had six toes, so we called him “six toed Richard” after one of my mother’s similarly endowed cousins.  We got rid of the ultimate Kitty and never permitted cats again because she scratched my sister once too often.  My sister was a toddler+ at the time and wanted to play with the cat in a way independent felines evidently didn’t appreciate.  I got along well with that particular cat and even once gave her a bath, w/o getting scratched up.  I guess it all depends on how you approach things. 

My cousins Luke & Irma and their son & Tony, who lived upstairs from us, had the meanest cat I have ever seen.  I don’t remember what its name was, but we called him “Heathcliff” after the obnoxious comic book cat.  He was the Fang of the cat world.  One Christmas, my sister and I were watching Tony while Luke and Irma went to midnight mass.   We didn’t know where the cat had gone until we saw the tree shaking and found the cat climbing inside and batting at the ornaments.   I chased him away from the tree and he ran off and disappeared.  Soon he reappeared.  He had climbed up the back of the couch and was attacking my sister.   I drove him off again and he went and hid in the basement. 

His sojourns in the basement were his undoing.  He didn’t care to use his litter box and preferred to crap on the basement floor.  He did this with monotonous regularity until my cousins got sick of cleaning it up.  That, plus his unusually ornery temperament, doomed him.  I was sorry to see him go, since he was unfailingly entertaining, but I could see the logic in getting rid of him. 

The only other pets we had were fish and salamanders.  We never were very good with fish, so we raised guppies.  They require no care.  I had a green salamander, a newt that sat on an island in the fish tank until once we filled it up too much and he crawled out.  My mother thought that it was my fault because I used to take him out and let him crawl around where he got a taste of freedom.   He didn’t savor it long.   We found him a few days later dried up under the radiator. I subsequently had a red and black salamander that fared better.  He too escaped, but he survived in the basement, where it was damp and where he could eat spiders etc. We had an old house and part of the basement still had a dirt floor.  About a year after his escape, my cousin spotted him, much bigger and apparently thriving.  I don’t know how long those things live, more than a year, evidently.

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Thanksgiving 2008

Thanksgiving is the best holiday.  It is the one where you make a conscious effort to think about and be thankful for the good people, things & experiences in your life.    No matter how hard we think we have worked, none of us achieves happiness or success by ourselves, and all of us are lucky to live in a society that gives us so many chances. 

Below – my parents on their wedding day.

I had trouble learning to read and in first grade my teacher put me into the low group.   My mother convinced the teachers that I was not stupid, just bored and a little stubborn.   To placate my mother and probably teach her a lesson, they jumped me into a higher group.   I did well there.  W/o that intervention, I think I would have been a failure at an early age and then continued down that road to earthly perdition.    I am thankful for my mother’s confidence and flexible teachers.

My father dropped out of school when he was in 10th grade, but he nevertheless saw the value of education.   He just assumed I would go to college and because of that and because of him, I did too.   My father didn’t have the experience to understand what college meant, but he knew enough to launch me in the right direction. 

Below I am standing in front of Medusa Cement Company in Milwaukee.  The picture is from 2006.  My father worked there for thirty-six years in the dust and the noise.  I put in four summers, which gave me only a small taste of the hard work he did to support the family.   His work helped put me in a position to get a great job where they pay me to do what I would pay to do.

I was seventeen when my mother died.  My sister was only fifteen and my father didn’t know what to do.   My mother’s sisters stepped in to help.   I am thankful for my aunts, who carried us through those hard times.    They took turns and one of them came over every day.  My whole extended family has been good to me.   I still always have a place to go and a home in Milwaukee. 

Speaking of Milwaukee, I was lucky to grow up in Milwaukee & Wisconsin, with the wonderful parks, nice museums and inexpensive education at the University Wisconsin system.   I am also thankful that it was easy to get into university in those days.    With my grades and habits when I was eighteen, I am not sure they would let me in these days.  There is way too much for me to say about Chrissy and the kids and besides it is too personal to put on the blog.   No matter what you achieve in your professional life, you need good family relationships to be really happy.  

Below is angel oak in South Carolina. 

My list is of good things is long.  I sometimes cannot believe how lucky I have been and how many people & events have helped me along.    Good fortune in important.   We should pray not merely to be fortunate, but to be able to do the things that make us deserve to be fortunate.

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Bolton Hill Baltimore

Below – Mariza on her street in Bolton Hill

Mariza rents a house along with some roommates in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill district.   I was a little apprehensive when Mariza got her job in Baltimore.   I remembered the crime and squalor.  But the city has improved a lot in recent years and there are some really nice and neighborhoods.   The Mount Vernon area, right next to Mariza’s area is very nice.  A lot of her co-workers live in Federal Hill, evidently a yupifiying district.   We walked around there.  It is not that nice, IMO, but it does have large numbers of restaurants.  It reminded me of State Street in Madison. 

Mariza moved her last year.  She started out by looking for apartments in the Inner Harbor area, which is superficially attractive but too expensive and a little artificial, sort of like living in Disneyland.    Actually, I have to admit that it was our advice that she look there.  It was the only area of Baltimore that Chrissy and I knew.  Her further investigation turned up other, better opportunities.   

Where she lives now has lot of parks and museums and the Maryland Institute College of Art is there.    Many of the old buildings have been recently renovated and it is a mostly intact 19th Century neighborhood.    It is within walking distance to restaurants and stores and has good access to public transportation and the light rail system, which is important because Mariza doesn’t have a car.   It is a nice place to live and seems safe.   

I like the fact that she has roommates.   She has the usual roommate woes.    The landlord forgot to pay the electric bills for the previous period and they were about to lose power, so Mariza had to pay.  The others owe her money.  This is not a big problem; she is in touch with the landlord and can just deduct it from the rent, but she is now in the position of managing the landlord relationship.    They have the mirror image problem with water bills.  Mariza and her roommates were supposed to get the water bills, but they went to the landlord instead.   Now he wants to be repaid for those bills.  It looks like Mariza will again have to front the money and get it back from the roommates. 

Below – We were a little worried about some Baltimore neighborhoods.  Mariza didn’t look for houses where we saw this rolling bail-bond truck a couple summers ago.

I had six roommates one year when I was in college in Madison, but we had trouble after two women moved out and went to Florida.   We had a joint lease and we all had the responsibility to pay our shares of the rent, so we had to find new roommates.  In a college town, there is usually something wrong with anybody looking to rent an apartment in October or November, but we were desperate and got some real weirdoes.  Some were more responsible than others in paying.   I got the enforcer job.  One of my roommates, Marcus, didn’t pay until I threatened him.  This I had to do two months in a row.  After that, he claimed it was a hostile environment and he moved out with one day notice just before the third month’s rent was due. 

These pictures are from our town house complex in Vienna, VA.  The trees are turning nicely.

Marcus was slob who didn’t use sheets on his mattress and it was stinky and dirty.   When I came home the day after Marcus moved out, I found the house full of smoke.   One of my other roommates, Tom the stoner (this was the 1970s), was sitting around with his friends in the living room.   I asked them what was going on and Tom just said, “I don’t know, man.  It’s been that way for about an hour.”    I thought it a good idea to find out where the smoke was coming from and found it was coming from under the door in Marcus’ room.   When I opened the door, his bed burst into flames.   Tom had wanted to get the smell out of Marcus’ mattress, so he put some incense on top it.   It burned through into the mattress and was smoldering inside so that when I opened the door, the rush of air ignited it.   I expect it would have started flaming soon enough in any case and I believe that had I not come home when I did, Tom would have burned the house down and he and his friends would have been caught in the conflagration and become literally burnouts.  When he saw the flames, Tom just said, “Wow!”  I beat the flames out with my coat.   We dumped some water on the mattress and got rid of it.  Roommates can be challenging, but they provide interesting stories.    The stories are funny when you look back; not so much at the time.

Our complex again.  I just like the trees in their fall colors.

Back to the present, I like Baltimore and have been pleasantly surprised by the charm. 

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Useless Activities & Useful Idiots

Potlatch

The Pacific Northwest is blessed by nature with great fisheries, fertile soils, ample resources and a moderate climate.  People are drawn by that and by the natural beauty you see everywhere you look.  Living is good in the Northwest and it has been that way for a long time.  The Indians of the region were prosperous.   It didn’t take much effort to gather nuts & berries, hunt or fish in such a rich place and the inhabitants developed a fascinating custom called the potlatch.    The potlatch was a big feast where the host gave away, wasted or destroyed his possessions.    

Anthropologists have studied the phenomenon.   I first heard about it when I studied Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class.”   He used it as an example of a wasteful custom practiced by rich people to show their status.   According to the theory, the rich demonstrated their status by wasting what others don’t have. 

They are actually doing more.    The individual consistently doing the giving uses his ostensible generosity to establish dominance over the habitual recipient.  That is one reason why chronic recipients are often not very grateful for the largess they receive.   The potlatch demonstrates this too.   The rich chiefs made great public shows of generosity but they kept control of the productive assets.   The potlatch was a perverse variation of the old saying “give a man to fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for life.”  The fat-cats gave away fish but carefully kept the fishing grounds.   In a society w/o good storage facilities, giving away nature’s surplus bounty was about as generous as a tree shedding its leaves in fall.  

We find the same thing in today’s society.   Rich celebrities make big deals of their generosity, but they usually don’t change the equation.   There are exceptions.  The late Paul Newman was clearly a good man and it seems to me that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are really trying to do the right thing, but very often the rich assuage their consciences and demonstrate their status by holding high powered fund raisers and concerts for politically correct good causes.    It is more than ironic when they hold a million dollar gala to fight world poverty.

Useful Idiots

Back when some people still thought communism was a viable alternative to the free market, Kremlin leaders used to call them useful idiots.  They were people  in the West who went along with their communist aims w/o really understanding them .  In the current American context you have people who act as foot soldiers in the various anti-whatever demonstrations set up by radicals.    

The good thing about Portland is that it is tolerant and easy, but that also means that it has more than its share of listless young people with no visible means of support or obvious places to be.  They hang around the center of town and beg for money.  They even do this listlessly.   One woman complained to Mariza that she would be working but was being prevented by the Republicans.   I saw a lot of these sorts of young people gathering to protest against the war in Iraq.   I started to talk to a few of them but soon gave up.   They just don’t have the capacity to understand the nuances.   I felt like the character in the movie “the Time Machine,” the original one from the 1960s.   In one frustrating scene the guy tries to ask some questions and talk about serious issues but the vapid people of the distant future are just interested in their hedonistic pursuits.   Everything is provided to them and they have no idea where it comes from.

Most of the kids (a few of these “kids” BTW are still left over from the 1960s) hanging around the streets are probably harmless most of the time.   It is sort of like a “big Lebowski” club.   They don’t really do much of anything that smacks of effort besides Frisbee and hacky sack.   Mariza and I got a cup of hot chocolate at a local Starbucks and as we drank it watched a couple guys play hacky sack.  They were good.  You know that skill at hacky sack is inversely related to success in life.  Think about the time it takes to get good at something like that.   The same thing goes for lots of those sorts of things.   I had a colleague once who was the best player of minesweeper that I had ever seen.   She was not promoted.