Markers of Time Passing

Now and then there are reminders of how time is flying and that if other people are getting older, then maybe, just maybe, that is happening to me too. Yikes!

November is the month my oldest grandson was born -- 21 years ago. He is a young man; a smart, interesting young man who I will probably see even less in the years to come than I have in the years of his growing up. This person with a quantum of my DNA is going to college and learning things I would never have thought of studying, developing talents that are all his and seem to have nothing to do with me. I've seen him grow from a dimpled little baby to a cute kid to an awkward adolescent whose body parts grew at varying rates for a while, to a handsome young man who has yet to fill out quite all the musculature his bones can hold. What an amazement that such a person is related to me, at least genetically, for there seems to be little else we share just now. I would love a time to come when we can talk adult to adult about matters of interest and importance that we have in common.

And later this month, I am reminded for I didn't realize, my brother and his wife are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary ... and he is younger than I, though only by 22 months. They were married while I was in college. I remember playing the Mendelsohn wedding march at the church. But that is really all I remember; it seems so long ago. Indeed, it WAS so long ago. 50 years, half a century. This is absolutely staggering. Yes, I know a lot of people do manage to have these amazing anniversaries. I am stunned by the thought of living with the same person for fifty years. Intellectually I understand that two people can be happy with one another for that long, can make a life that works in sufficient harmoniousness -- and I think that is the adult way of looking at it for no two people can know each other so very well without areas of irritation, without periods of dissatisfaction. But sufficient haroniousness is a wonder in itself. Something I doubt I could have ever have managed.

So, here I am with an adult grandchild and a younger brother with a golden wedding anniversary. That means I can't be a spring chicken; it means I, too, must have experienced a lot. And, yes, I have. Yes, and we will not be marking special anniversaries -- beyond having paid attention last summer to my 70th birthday. But I think of it all those years and realize how many bits and pieces have eroded mostly from my memory or have simply become a part of the flow. A good many have said life is a river and certainly it's looking like that right now. There were rapids and waterfalls and eddies and floods and droughts and times when the river cut a new channel and so on -- all kinds of debris floating on the muddy surface at times and at other times calm and clear reflecting mostly the blue sky and a fluffy clouds and a few trees overhanging the banks. I have a good many of those lovely days now; I think I've earned them.

Ssasonal Change

The season is changing -- nothing new, happens every four months or so. Those of us who have always lived in the temperate zones are attuned, probably in more ways than we are consciously aware, to changes of light, temperature and nature around us. As the days grow shorter and the darkness longer, as we have many days of gray skies, chilly winds, leaves skittering underfoot, dampness not yet turning to snow, something a little like bearish hibernation seems welcome, even immanent.

This came to mind as I was drinking coffee a short while ago and thinking how very nice had been a long night's sleep. After a couple of restless nights, last night I went to bed a bit early, fell asleep quickly and awoke about eight hours later feeling satisfied as I listened to the voice on the clock radio that began saying it would rain all day and maybe all day tomorrow. I wish that weren't so but it's also okay. I have many indoor things I want to do. And then music began to play. I did not have to hurry out of bed for any reason so lay listening to music until something in my body said, "ready!" And I got up. I realize that for large, large numbers of people even those ten minutes or so are a luxury they rarely enjoy. They have work, expectations, necessities to tend to and have to get up and get busy.

I thought of Jame Smiley's big book The Greenlanders, well researched and enjoyable although it's not one of her most successful. I believe she was writing of how people actually lived a thousand years ago in a horribly harsh climate when she described those settlers who had very little food or fuelgot through the winter by essentially hibernating. They took to their beds for the majority of those almost endlessly dark arctic nights. So many images from that book, read many years ago, have stayed with me. I think many of us can feel that rhythmic instinct with the seasons that our distant ancestors going back to before civilization must have responded to.

A return to a thinking President?

On my other blog I wrote about the pleasure of continual education in a personal sense. Today I'm thinking about a wider view: Nicholas Kristoff, one of my favorite NY Times columnists, writes that we may have a return to the Kennedy era's idea of a President who surrounds himself with the "best and brightest." I sure hope so. It's needed in so many facets of American life. Right along side that op-ed pieces was one by Al Gore on how America can regain leadership in the world by dealing with global warming and at the same time create vast numbers of jobs which would be un-outsourcable -- which is to say they'd have to employ people living right here right now.

Won't it be wonderful to have someone who can make a speech using whole sentences and well crafted paragraphs? Because my every day work involves listening to people speak I can attest to how infrequently people can speak in whole,grammatically correct sentences -- let alone whether they have anything substantial, creative, interesting to say -- let alone whether the whole thing is graceful and truly intellilgent. Not that most American listeners know a proper sentence when it is spoken. I'll never forget my astonishment as a senior in high school when the boy who's name was alphabetically next to mine [so we had sat side by side all through 12 years of school) turned to me after 12 years of instruction and whispered, "What is a verb?" I'm sorry to say he is rather recently deceased and probably went to his grave not knowing or caring what a verb is.

I can't resist adding that Krisoff noted that few younger Americans think there is any reason to know where the various countries of the world are, and that Sarah Palin, like a great many of her countrymen/women didn't know that Africa is not a country but a continent. Really that kind of willful ignorance appalls me so that I become incoherent in my astonishment and regret and horror. I don't believe any President can undo willful ignorance among our ill-educated populace but I would rejoice if the tone of arrogant ignorance could be erased at the highest levels of our government.

History - looking back

When I graduated from college I was aware that there was just beginning to be a "Civil Rights" movement. In our college town a black man had dared enter a barber shop where only whites had their hair cut. It was quite stir in Indiana, birth-ground of the KKK. As my friend Ellen pointed out, in our adult lifetime we have seen the country go from not allowing many black people to vote, certainly in the South, to having elected a black man President It seems slow progress but as civilization goes, it wasn't so long after all.

We are now, in the so-called "developed" world, accustomed to rapid change, at least technologically -- since the last presidential election [only 4 years] we've gone from clunky auto cellular phones to everyone having a personal cell phone. Personally, I've joined the email world and use the internet daily which I did not then.

But people's minds and prejudices and political ideas do not change at the rate of LP to cassette to tape to Ipod -- although our mental synapses are still far, far faster and more powerful than any computer chip, we change our ways of acting, being, seeing the world VERY slowly ... but are being pushed ever harder to change ever faster. So in a single life time we here in the US have begun to erase our color prejudices. It is a good, good thing.

Historic Day

I think enormous numbers of Americans are united in the sense that this is an historic election and that they want to be able to say, "I cast a vote that election." As I write no returns are actually in yet and I'm not daring to say what's about to happen.

But I can write about my enormous surprise this morning at 7:20 a.m. when I went down to the school which is my polling place. In some 25 years I've never had more than 8 or 10 people ahead of me waiting to vote, no matter what election, no matter what time of day. But at that very early time, I was astonished to see that the line to get into the polling area was actually two cit blocks long! At first I couldn't believe it was the voters' line. When I realize it was I also realized that I didn't have sufficient reading matter with me to wait as long as it would take. So I went to work and came in the mid-afternoon with my fat book and comfy shoes, and it was not as long -- by about half, which is to say it was still 40 minutes of waiting. Ah, well! Like the others I'll say, "Yes I voted for Obama." [Still muttering, I must admit, "I wish it were Hillary."]

Now I hold my breath -- since the Gore/Bush election I've learned to take nothing for granted. I have spoken to no one who feels truly confident of what the outcome will be. No, I will not stay up late listening for returns [I am still television-less and don't mind] I am a bit anxious.

The New York Marathon

As all who care to know have heard, Kara Goucher, a English woman, won her third NY Marathon today, running more tha 22 miles in 2 hours and something -- amazing! The men's winner was from Brazil. It was a beautiful sunny day with a breeze that was a bit chilly to walkers like me but probably felt very welcome to the amazing people who managed to do the course, whether in two and a half hours or eight or even ten.

I wrote this poem last November. I won't apologize but I won't pretend it's deathless poetry.

MARATHON

They run
By the thousands
through the canyons
over the bridges
through the park.
News cameras look down from helicopters.
People look out tall windows
lean over high balconies
line crowded streets.

They
like once the bison ran over the grasslands,
like wildebeast still run over the savannahs,
like fabled lemmings run over cliffs into the sea,
like heroes ran the mountains in ancient Attica.

As they run
many thousand feet pound cement softly
their breathing is a mass sigh in a city
accustomed to sirens' screams.
The crowd's cheers drift softly to the sky
newscasters' chatter circles the globe.

They have been running
alone or in packs of two or three or a few
for months, years. They leave
behind home, wife, husband, children.
Silence is enough for many,
some reach for "the zone."

The run
to win, or bear a record, to follow heroes,
to prove something, "because it's there,"
"to do it once."
to be, this one day lost in the herd,
part of something big and beautiful,
massive and magnificent
independent individuals
who trained and paid and stayed the course.

Dream Job

For several years now I have been telling people about my dream job. I only dream, knowing that even if I were younger and more ambitious I would not take the steps to explore it's possibility. I think of it today because a I just read a blog showing a roadside sign that totally misuses the Welsh language. All around the world tourists sites have signs in the local language and in English; the English is often misspelled [okay a lot of us make mistakes too] and often says something so awkward it's not clear what it means. The most egregious example I've seen was at the high end of a long escalator at a Chinese nature park where a trail took one to the bottom of a river gorge. To get back up to the top the escalator had been installed for those not walking the hard trail up. A lot of Chinese characters were translated in English simply as "No Having Fun." We English speakers took photos [which was fun] and chuckled at Chinese ineptiness [also fun].

My ideal job would be as a language consultant, hired by various countries' tourist departments. I would be paid to travel [free, course] to tourist sites to correct the English on all local signs [while staying, free of course, in one of the best local hotels which might wish also to retain my editorial services at my standard additional fee]. Thus I could travel to many parts of the world, render a service that is much needed and even get to know some of the local people in the course of my work. So all I need is an ambitious booking agent to make the necessary contacts. Any takers? You'd get standard agenting fees, and perhaps the occasional trip as well.