Monthly Archives: March 2006

Happy Birthday, Big Al

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“I had a frame of reference,
I set it on the fence,
Along came relativity,
ain’t seen the damn thing since.”

From “Einstein the Genius,” by the Cranberry Lake Jug Band.

Today is Albert Einstein’s birthday (he would have been 127). It took just about all of the math skills I have to calculate that number so it might seem strange for me to be pointing out this occasion. I like Albert well enough, but what I really appreciate about this day is the chance to flog one of my all-time favorite books, Einstein’s Dreams.

The book, written by MIT physics and writing professor Alan Lightman, is a collection of 30 short, beautifully written vignettes (plus a couple of interludes) describing a series of imagined dreams Einstein had leading up to publishing his theory of relativity. Each dream describes a different mind-stretching world in which time operates – or is perceived – in a different manner. In one world, for example, people living at higher altitudes age more slowly than those closer to sea level; in another world all possible consequences from any decision are lived out regardless of the original decision; in a third the passing of time naturally brings order rather than chaos and degeneration. Each vignette is written in language that is both as ornate as a Swiss cuckoo clock — and every bit as functional and tightly crafted. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s prologue:

In some distant arcade, a clock tower calls out six times and then stops. The young man slumps at his desk. He has come to the office at dawn, after another upheaval. His hair is uncombed and his trousers are too big. In his hand he holds twenty crumpled pages, his new theory of time, which he will mail today to the German journal of physics.

Tiny sounds from the city drift through the room. A milk bottle clinks on a stone. An awning is cranked in a shop on Marktgasse. A vegetable cart moves slowly through a street. A man and woman talk in hushed tones in an apartment nearby…

… In the long, narrow office on Speichergasse, the room full of practical ideas, the young patent clerk still sprawls in his chair, head down on his desk. For the past several months, since the middle of April, he has dreamed many dreams about time. His dreams have taken hold of his research. His dreams have worn him out, exhausted him so that he sometimes cannot tell whether he is awake or asleep. But the dreaming is finished. Out of many possible natures of time, imagined in as many nights, one seems compelling. Not that others are impossible. The others might exist in other worlds.

The young man shifts in his chair, waiting for the typist to come, and softly hums from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

Most of the dreams are described in no more than two or three pages, yet this isn’t a book to rip through at lunch time. I suggest reading no more than one dream per day, and taking the time not only to revel in the quality of the writing and story-telling but to imagine yourself in each world as it’s described and to picture the effect that that version of time would have on your life.

In addition to the enjoyment and inspiration I’ve received from reading this book (and re-reading sections at random from time to time), it was also the basis of a very interesting creative writing program I put my oldest daughter through as part of her home-education. Finally, while the book is not “Christian” or obviously spiritual, it did help me get a deeper understanding of how God inhabits my past, present and future. Make time to read this book and I can guarantee that you won’t ever look at time the same way again.

Anniversary of the 1918 flu pandemic in the U.S.

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I’m resolved to be brighter and more bubbly this week, but I’ll pass this on from last Saturday’s The Writer’s Almanac for historical perspective:

It was on this day in 1918 that the first cases of what would become the influenza pandemic were reported in the U.S. when 107 soldiers got sick at Fort Riley, Kansas.

It was the worst pandemic in world history. That year the flu killed only 2.5 percent of its victims, but more than a fifth of the world’s entire population caught it, and so it’s estimated that between 50 million and 100 million people died in just a few months. Historians believe at least 600,000 people died in the United States alone. That’s more than the number of Americans killed in combat in all the wars of the 20th century combined.

No one is sure exactly how many people died, because it wasn’t even clear at the time what the disease was. One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic in this country was that it was barely reported in the media. President Woodrow Wilson had passed laws to censor all kinds of news stories about the war, and newspaper editors were terrified of printing anything that might cause a scandal.

So as the flu epidemic spread across the country, the newspapers barely commented on it. In large cities, people were dying of the flu so rapidly that undertakers ran out of coffins, streetcars had to be used as hearses, and mass graves were dug. In the fall of 1918, doctors tried to get newspapers to warn people in Philadelphia against attending a parade. The newspapers refused. In the week after the parade, almost five thousand Philadelphians died of the flu. The flu might not have traveled as quickly across the country if troops weren’t being mobilized and shipped from base to base.

Among the writers affected by the flu pandemic was Katherine Anne Porter, who grew so sick with the disease that her family had already arranged for her funeral when she managed to recover. The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy got on a train with her parents on October 30, 1918. Her father died of the flu before their train reached Minneapolis. Her mother died a day later. The novelist William Maxwell lost his mother to the flu that year. He said, “It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it … the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood swept away.”

The 1918 flu is considered to be very close genetically to the current strain of avian flu decimating bird populations throughout Asia and now into parts of Europe. Go to this blog for daily updates and aggregations from a scientific (as opposed to sensational) point of view on what the avian flu is, what is known and what is being done about it.

Challenging Word of the Week: cavil

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Cavil
(KAV uhl) noun, verb

To cavil is to carp or quibble, to raise picayune, inconsequential, and usually irritating objections, to offer gratuitious criticisms, to find fault for the sake of finding fault. As a noun, a cavil is that sort of annoying trivial objection, a bit of pointless carping, that adds nothing but irritation. In Latin, cavillari means to “scoff” or “jeer,” the nouns cavilla and cavillatio mean “raillery” and a cavillator is a quibbler; cavilla gratia cavillae (like ars gratia artis, as it were). In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (Act III, Scene 1) there is a furious argument between Hotspur and Owen Glendower about the division of some land, and Hotspur cries:

I do not care: I’ll give thrice so much land
to any well-deserving friend:
But in way of a bargain, mark ye me,
I’ll cavil on the ninth part of a hair.

Note cavil on; nowadays it’s cavil at or cavil about. The Irish statesman and writer Edmund Burke (1729-1797) condemned “cavilling pettifoggers and quibbling pleaders.” Lawyers are known to cavil tirelessly and endlessly at the terms of an agreement.

From the book, “1000 Most Challenging Words” by Norman W. Schur, ©1987 by the Ballantine Reference Library, Random House.

My example: In today’s White House, the press corps and Howard Dean cavil while the world burns. In being married to Hillary, former president Clinton was also known to have received cavillatio while in office.

I post a weekly “Challenging Words” definition to call more attention to this delightful book and to promote interesting word usage in the blogosphere. I challenge other bloggers to work the current word into a post sometime in the coming week. If you manage to do so, please leave a comment or a link to where I can find it.

I’ll do my llevel best to llive up to the llink

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Welcome, readers of The Llama Butchers blog and thanks to Steve for the link. I’m not sure just what it was about this blog that caught his attention: the scalding analysis, the piercing humor, or perhaps he just found this to be the most morose blog of the week and he wanted to cheer me up.

As a special thank-you to all of you who made the trip from the butcher shop, here’s a link to a great llama flash file.

Friday Fundamentals in Film: Intermission

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I’m taking a little time out to watch some more movies and to try to get a little ahead of the pace I’ve set for myself with these reviews. I’ve got a couple of films queued up and should be back next week with a new movie for the series. This week, however, I want to focus on a subject that I see as being closely intertwined with this series: educating boys.

As I’ve said before, this series started out as a way to illustrate positive character traits to teenage boys in an entertaining way. I think one of the greatest failings of the modern U.S. education system is the way it suppresses boys’ natural behavior and instincts through its educational orthodoxy and even with drugs, simultaneously dampening their natural desire and ability to learn in their own manner. At the same time a further disservice is performed by our culture of entertainment that, instead of suppressing boys’ instincts, plays to the basest of these. Alternately numbed and overstimulated, we have a generation of young men who may be easy to manipulate but hard to educate.

I’m not a distinguished pedagogue, but I am male and I have followed this subject for some time. I am also sympathetic to the impulses of the schools. There are many times in the youth group my wife and I lead where if I had a tranquilizer dart gun I’d be seriously tempted to use it on the young teen males in the group. I’d rather have them rambunctious, however, than sitting in a stupor because it’s easier to engage them during the former. I know that boys have high energy and learn kinetically, often by doing rather than listening. Sitting still disconnects something in their brain, yet “sit still” may be the thing they hear the most in school.

Since I was in college, much has been made about how schools have to do a better job in creating a “safe” learning environment for girls where boys don’t dominate the lessons, or unintentionally intimidate girls from participating in class. If this premise was ever true, it seems that the enforced solution has been effective if you look at the statistics offered by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens, co-authors of “The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life.” Using data from the Department of Education, the State Department and other sources, they report that boys:

  • Receive the majority of D and F grades given to students in most schools, as high as 70 percent.

  • Create 80 percent of classroom discipline problems.
    Account for 80 percent of high school dropouts.

  • Represent 70 percent of children diagnosed with learning disabilities and 80 percent of those diagnosed with behavioral disorders.

  • Are an average of a year to a year-and-a-half behind girls in reading and writing skills. (Girls are behind boys in math and science, but to a lesser degree.)

  • Represent 80 percent of schoolchildren on Ritalin or other medications used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

  • Make up less than 44 percent of America’s college population.

In this article from the January 22nd Washington Times, Guerian and Stevens say that a key reason boys are not performing as well as girls is that there are neurobiological differences that are not recognized by most teachers.

“We have an industrial schooling system to educate the greatest number of people, and this system — with its emphasis on reading, writing and talking — is set up for the female brain, not the male,” Mr. Gurian says. “And this verbally motivated environment will leave out large groups of males, who are not very verbal.”

He says boys cannot benefit optimally in an environment where they are under tight control.

“When boys sit down, their brain shuts down,” Mr. Gurian says.

Some boys need to be more active in the classroom, and because of this, they are more likely to become discipline problems, he says. Although Mr. Gurian acknowledges that not all boys will be lost in the current system, about five boys in a class of 30 will be left behind.

(Read the whole article for some more great insight into this subject. Also, I think one of the reasons Calvin and Hobbes was so funny, poignant and successful is that people could relate to Calvin’s imagination, energy and rebelliousness, especially as counterbalanced by Suzie Derkins.)

My observation from growing up and from hanging around young men now is that boys see through false “self-esteem building” exercises that are too easy, but they can be challenged to excel by appealing to their competitive yet cooperative natures and by holding out an inspiring and chivalrous ideal. Credit for that idea has to go to King Arthur, and the British certainly understood the value of what was learned “on the playing fields of Eton.”

An example that occurred to me once was to picture an island in the middle of a raging river. Imagine the island has arable land and a small population of men and women. It is capable of supplying enough food for everyone until the population grows. The women might suggest a method for equitably rationing food, but the masculine response would be to think, “If I can just build a bridge across this part of the river, we can find more land to feed our families. Oh, and you say I might die trying to build that bridge? Cool!” Sure, that’s the kind of thinking that leads to war sometimes, but it’s also what has pushed exploration and civilization forward. It’s not exclusively the province of the male chemistry, but it shows what can happen if you harness, rather than benumb boys.

This “Fundamentals in Film” series isn’t a solution to the problem, but my hope is that it can help provide part of that virtous inspiration in an engaging way and that it will be helpful for parents, home educators and youth leaders who want to counter the media’s portrayal of men as either mindless brutes, mindless slugs or — if they have a mind — as nerds. Illustrating and encouraging strong character and channeling your strength for the benefit of others is beneficial not just to the boys but to society as a whole.

(Along the same lines is a great on-line program meant to encourage boys, young men and even older men to read. Called Guys Read, it has a fantastic understanding of what kinds of stories interest males of all ages and tries to use these books and stories to kindle a love of reading that will also ultimately lead to more academic success. Check it out.)

Loops in the mortal coil

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I’ve written about the deaths of two people this week. There was 40 years difference in age between Kirby Puckett and Grandma Dolly and one’s passing was a sadness and the other a celebration, but they both put me in a reflective mood — not that that is hard to do anymore. Funerals will do it, of course, but so does the time it takes in the morning for my brain to re-establish effective communication with my feet when I get out of bed.

I’ll be 48 in a few weeks and I’ve been mentally approaching old age in much the same way as I’d approach a skittish animal: slowly, with minimal eye contact — and no sudden movements. Old age is relative of course (especially if you have old relatives), but it really wasn’t that long ago historically when people my age would take their hand off the plow, clutch their heart, fall to the loam and people would say, “The old boy had a good run; you lookin’ to sell them horses?”

Today my parents are just hitting their 70s with an assortment of maladies and medications at hand, but both look positively spry compared to their respective mothers who are in their 90s. As C.S. Lewis said, “How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.” (Oh well, at least no one in the family has gout.)

I called home the other day and spoke first to my father, who had a pretty wild year health-wise last year, including undergoing major heart surgery. His voice was familiar but thin and tired-sounding. I asked how he was feeling and he said, “Oh, okay, you know. I get up in the morning and feel pretty good and then I take my meds and feel like I need a nap.” A pause, and then much stronger: “And that’s a bunch of shit, so I just go out to my shop and get some work done.” Normalcy restored.

My parents live in what used to be my grandparents home. My dad’s shop is in what used to be my grandfather’s garage. Off of the back corner of that garage there used to be an apple tree. Shortly before my grandfather died I was allowed to go through his desk and found in his papers an essay he wrote about that apple tree — and life itself:

Our apple tree has grown old and awaits Father Time’s delivery of the coup de grace. It has been a good tree. Each season it has defied the odds and produced a bountiful harvest even when most trees failed. It has been a tree of unusual stamina, battered at times by vicious winds to which it sacrificed some branches, but come harvest time it never failed to deliver. The fruit wasn’t of an exotic flavor such as those advertised in nursery catalogues; just a tart, appetizing flavor. It has been many years, if ever, since its branches exemplified the form and beauty ascribed by the poet’s pen. This has not been due to deliberate neglect, but rather from a lack of knowledge of the necessary care that a tree should have. Thus its life has been a challenge.

During the years children played in its shade and climbed among the branches. Rambunctious boys would gather green apples to use as ammunition in apple fights. Never did a season pass without birds making it a place to nest and raise their families. Year after year it defied the elements and continued to explode in a burst of pink and white blossoms, followed with branches bent to near breaking with apples. Never has a season passed without it sharing its bounty with birds that instinctively knew when to move in at the right time to steal the choice red fruit.

Later in his essay, my grandfather related the story of Johnnie Appleseed, the itinerant tramp who took as his mission the spreading of appleseeds throughout the country. Johnnie Appleseed was a man who had a perspective on posterity and his place in it and duty to it. Ultimately, this may be the best description of my grandfather. He knew the importance of the seeds he was sowing and the need to nurture, tend and on occasion prune the saplings that grew as a result.

His essay concluded:

The demise of our tree came to pass earlier than expected. Only one day after putting the foregoing tribute to paper I gazed across our back lawn at the cloud of pink and white blossoms and remarked to my wife that it was only a matter of time for the old tree. Only a matter of time until a strong gust of wind would claim it. In spite of the magnificent display of blossoms it had reached a state of frailty that could not withstand much more abuse.

My remarks were to prove prophetic. The morning following my prediction, the picturesque scene that had been a tree in full blossom was no longer. A strong gust of wind during the night had done it in. It was a crumpled mass on the ground between the woodpile and the neighbor’s fence.

With a saw and an ax and nearly a half day of labor the tree was consigned to the eternal orchard where it would never again be subjected to the elements. Even though its demise did not come as a surprise, it is missed. Our back lot where the tree stood in plain view from our breakfast nook now has a vacancy that had not existed during the quarter century that we have made this our home. The tree and view was taken for granted; it was not missed because it was there. Little attention was required, little given. The tree is missed now more than it was appreciated.

My grandfather probably wrote that essay in the weeks just before the stroke that sent him into a final but lingering spiral, and in his eulogy I drew the comparisons between his life and that of the apple tree. Now, even as I flex the stiff fingers of my mouse hand, his words bring perspective and I know that while pausing to reflect is okay, stopping altogether to do so is not acceptable. There’s much still to be done, and future harvests that must be prepared for, and then my father’s coarser words remind me there’s no time for napping.

Finally, I remember the words of my eldest grandmother, from back when she was in her mid-80s. “So many of my friends have gone on to be with the Lord,” she said. “They’re probably all wondering what happened to me!”

See ya later, you little chicken!

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“Grandma” Dolly passed away last Wednesday, or as we like to say in some Christian circles, “went home.” She’d had 85 amazing years, few of which were easy and some that were filled with unbearable-sounding tragedy, yet she was just about the bubbliest and most positive person I’ve ever known.

She wasn’t really my grandma, but probably 90% of the people who called her that weren’t actually related to her. She was simply grandmother to our church and one of the first people to welcome me in when I started coming 20 years ago. You knew you’d been blessed when you received a “Dolly cake” or cookies. She liked to greet women she knew by calling them, “little chickens” and often when passing by me she’d reach out and pat my shoulder or back and say, “John, I love ya – and I kind of like ya, too!” A few minutes later I’d hear her say the same thing to someone else further down the hallway. She was best friends for 60-some years with Della, who died a few years ago, and we chuckled last week when we realized that Dolly had passed away on Della’s birthday and was going to make it to heaven in time for the party. Her visitation last Sunday afternoon was as happy and chatty as a graduation open house, and for many of the same reasons.

2DANGQT

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I have some big news. Ready? Here goes:

I’ve got a new cowboy hat. I know! Isn’t it exciting? Here are some a pictures of it.

By the way, I am not deathly afraid of graven images. They just make me nervous sometimes.

Rounding third, and heading for home, it’s a brown-eyed handsome man

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I loved Kirby Puckett the way most of us come to love anyone or anything: for what I saw, and for the way he made me feel. I loved the energy, the enthusiasm, the apparent happy-go-lucky, irrepressible bouncing Superball of a player, the way it seemed that he made everyone around him better, or at least happier.

I suppose by now I’ve learned there are a lot of things you shouldn’t trust. Politicians. The media. Hollywood. Agendas. Maybe even your eyes.

It’s been a long day with some lingering projects that have kept me from posting on Puck until now. I suspect there has been a lot said elsewhere already (yep – I didn’t have to look very far; a quick check and Doug has thoughtfully provided a list). Truth be told, part of the reason it has taken me awhile to get to this is I’ve been wondering what to write. Not if I should write, but what.

The first time I saw him in person was when he debuted at the Metrodome in ’84. He’d been called up from the minors and joined the team on a West Coast road trip and had been an immediate sensation. I was working as a scoreboard operator at the Dome then and it was my luck to draw the new kid’s first home game. As a kid I’d been at Busch stadium when Bake McBride made his debut as a late-season call-up with my Cards and always remembered the stadium announcer informing us of the fact as I watched McBride’s solid career go on. I remember thinking of that when Puck was introduced and went out to centerfield. Could he be something special, too?

It wasn’t long before a ball was lined into center and the unlikely looking kid, knees and elbows pumping, came charging in to field it on the hop. We all watched with interest as he snatched and threw … and saw the ball bounce eight times before it got to the cut-off man. Even at that, though, there was something likeable about seeing a guy so excited to be getting a chance. Of course, it soon became clear that he was the real deal. As he motored around the outfield and the basepaths as improbably as a turbo-charged bumblebee in flight he always seemed to be to be a size larger than life. I grieved the sudden glaucoma that ended his career not just because it robbed me of the chance to keep watching a once-in-a-generation player but because I knew it hurt him even more. Even then, going out, he was Puck; upbeat, smiling, saying don’t be sad for me, I’ve had the greatest opportunity a guy can have, be sad for the ones who never got a chance.

Next it was on to the Hall of Fame, and shortly after that it was the Hall of Funhouse Mirrors – twisted, distorted images at once familiar and bizarre. The stories, the allegations, the time when “touch ’em all” went from being a celebration to being an accusation, to the trial, to the acquittal and to the bitterness, and now he was larger and larger, and ultimately larger than life, or what life could sustain.

At the time of the trial, I wanted some assurances, some opportunity to say, “Say it ain’t so, Joe” to Puck. Strangely enough, the article that stuck with me, the one that touched me, was by Ralph Wiley, then writing for ESPN’s Page 2. Ironically R-Dub, too, would be another great talent taken too suddenly and too soon from us. Wiley didn’t even like Puck that much, but offered a piercing, bittersweet turn on the whole affair. I went to ESPN earlier this evening to search the archives so I could read it again and I didn’t have to dig; it had already been re-posted.

Another fair writer, William Shakespeare, had Julius Caesar say that a brave man dies only once, but a coward dies a thousand times. There’s got to be another category for superstars, though, where even the greatest leaves the field at an age where everyone else in the real world is still trying to prove themselves. For some of these there are more deaths to come: of reputation, of respect. I wasn’t quite sure of what to make of the things that happened and were said about Puck. I was sure of what I’d seen on the field but then I didn’t need a sportswriter to tell me what happened, or to create the drama. Later there was too much drama, and too many opinions, and apparently no arguing with the Umpire of Society when you get tossed.

If you sit still, however, and listen, you might be able to hear the echoes all the way from Baseball Heaven as the late Bob Casey leans into the mike and says, “Now entering, KIR-beeeeeeeeee PUCK-it!”