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FIRST COLUMBINE,THEN AFGHANISTAN-NOW AURORA

President Obama spoke eloquently today in Florida about last night’s senseless and tragic shooting here in my hometown of Denver.  Aurora is not far away. From my balcony I can see the silhouette of buildings in Aurora, I have driven past the theater (then, it was just another multiplex theater) on a number of occasions; now the Town Center of Aurora will never be just “another” part of Denver’s urban sprawl any more than Columbine will ever be just “another” school.

Obama had this to say to each of us as we reflect on this tragedy and think about the meaning of our own lives:

“What matters at the end of the day is not the small things, it’s not the trivial things, which so often consume us in our daily lives. Ultimately it’s how we choose to treat one another and how we love one another.” 


The President–the man, the father, the husband, the human being–hit the nail on the head.  He’s right, and indisputably so.

At the same time, I confess that I have more than a little interest in (and confusion about) why we Americans rise up in outrage, when yappy news coverage blankets all media with the sensational and instant reporting of the deaths of 12 or so people, the serious wounding of maybe 40 more who were watching a violent, pop culture, midnight movie event at a local theater–and then, at the same time,  we (and the media) are able to sit back pretty calmly with our lattes as we read about the deaths in Afghanistan of over 2000 men and women (also human beings, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, but de-humanized in the media as “troops”) who have been killed fighting for a less than obvious or noble cause–but who have nonetheless performed their dangerous duties (no soda and popcorn involved) admirably on behalf of all of us Americans. There is a cognitive dissonance, I think, in our (my) reaction.

Today I am outraged. I find it very hard to “love one another” when that “other” hates my guts and wants to kill me, or rob me, or lie to me, or cheat me, or treat me like ignorant trash. Today I am going to have to work very hard to love my fellow humans.

Actually, I find the admonition to “love one another” very difficult every day of the year, not just on this “day after Aurora.” But as the Romans observed,  each day begins anew with a sunrise, an aurora. Maybe this Aurora can become a new beginning or dawn for me as well, and motivate me to become a better lover of my fellow man even while I struggle to forgive those who are intent on ending life or increasing suffering.

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NEBRASKA: KOOSER CHALLENGES MY DRIVING HABITS

So This is Nebraska

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.

On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.

You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,

clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like

waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.

“So This Is Nebraska” by Ted Kooser, from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
* * * * * * * * *
I have driven through Nebraska several times, mostly on the way to somewhere else. For this reason, I have not looked as carefully as I might have at what the State had to offer.  Kooser made me see what I had missed seeing before in Nebraska–as I travelled there–but always going “through.”
I wander how much of my life has been spent that way,  just “driving through,”  so to speak, on my way to somewhere else, a “somewhere else” defined by my parents, my ego, my family, my colleagues and friends, my society, my employer, my religion, my political party, my avarice, my need for control, for power-money-prestige, the temptations to have or be “more,” my need to feel secure in a world that I see (often in desperation) as unchanging, immutable, and subject to my ‘wise’ manipulations (or magical thinking).
The other morning when I heard Garrison Keillor read Kooser’s poem on  The Writers Almanac (sent to my Email daily by PBS), I was brought up short–not so much by pondering what I had missed in my various trips through Nebraska as by what I had missed in my life while so busily, and often blindly,  speeding “somewhere else,” often at breakneck speed. This, in turn, caused me to reflect on and suffer for the folks I may have hurt along the way, intentionally as well as by neglect. And my ponderings then led me to wonder–tinged with momentary regret–about how much richer my life might have been had I lived it with the poet’s sensitivity to what was happening beside the road–off in the fields–in the barns and homes and stores that I passed while speeding off to destinations that I deemed to be so important at the time.
I guess I am compelled to rethink both the experience of the routes I’ve taken as well as the value of the destinations I targeted. It may not be too late to make course changes.
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PALE BLUE DOT: CARL SAGAN

I love this view of the earth and, therefore, of myself from millions of miles away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Lm6pEhykhs 

About the time I get upset because the power goes out in my apartment building, and the elevators and my computer cease to function, I need to think of this pale blue dot.

Any time I hear people railing about Obamacare or Justice Roberts or Romney’s Mormonism, I should try to think about this pale blue dot.

When I join with my fellows in mourning the loss of their homes and valued possessions in our forest fire–“things” they value and rescue from the flames and take to a new home, there to fall victim to the ravages of time and disinterest, I need to think of this pale blue dot.

What is important?  What makes a difference? Republicans, Democrats, health care, the color of bridesmaid dresses, Syria v. Turkey, pollution clouds hanging over China, glamping with Bieber, a new model Android, the death of an old tortoise, the calories in my evening ice cream, a new App, detritus from Japan’s tsunami washing up on Oregon’s coasts, Miley Cyrus and her dog Ziggy, the oil change my car needs? Think of the pale blue dot, Mark.

Perspective–I find that I need to spend more time considering my life in the context of the pale blue dot and its history, and savoring my place here and the miniscule duration of my allotted time.

Oops–must go: the microwave timer just buzzed– my leftovers are ready.

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PEOPLE WHO LIVE BY THE SEA: NOW I LIVE BY THE MOUNTAINS

People Who Live

People who live by the sea
understand eternity.
They copy the curves of the waves,
their hearts beat with the tides,
& the saltiness of their blood
corresponds with the sea.

They know that the house of flesh
is only a sandcastle
built on the shore,
that skin breaks
under the waves
like sand under the soles
of the first walker on the beach
when the tide recedes.

Each of us walks there once,
watching the bubbles
rise up through the sand
like ascending souls,
tracing the line of the foam,
drawing our index fingers
along the horizon
pointing home.

“People Who Live” by Erica Jong, from Becoming Light. © Harper Perennial, 1981. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

I love this poem by Erica Jong. I confess to an off-on relation with her because she was a early and fairly strident feminist who often made me angry and uncomfortable mostly because I was not ready for the rhetoric, maybe because of the guilt she made me feel–perhaps this was her self-appointed role!  Whatever! Enough said about that because this poem is impressive.

The sentiments and ideas really touched me in lots of ways.  I lived many years at or near the Connecticut shoreline. And, yes, the sea did help me better understand the concept of eternity. Every time I was on the beach or in a boat, my mind expanded to contemplative thoughts–ponderings–about what all the earth’s seas must contain: living things like whales and krill and manta rays and dolphins and tuna and starfish; the inanimate contents like newly formed structures where tectonic plates meet and clash and slide over or under each other; fortunes in precious metals and gems that have been formed miles below the bottom of the sea and erupted out; or sunken U-boats and galleons, the bones of millions of sailors and swimmers and suicide and murder victims, the currents of fresh water mixing with the brine.  What stories the sea would tell, if it could, of what was hidden there, dissolved there, floating there.  I would love to ask it where its water came from originally and why it maintains its salinity, its buoyancy, its clarity, its softness when poked with my finger and its rock hardness when I misjudge the entry angle of my  “showing-off-jack-knife-dive” and hit the surface  flat.

Exposing “sore-wisdom,” Jong teaches that I will learn that the “house of flesh is only a sandcastle.” What a wonderful image.  And it complements the knowledge I gained from Professor Renton  who teaches my video geology class (“The Nature of the Earth: An Introduction to Geology” available from The Great Courses). The mountains I see out my windows are, of course, subject to the same wasting forces as the sand castle, except that the process is infinitely slower–bringing to mind at least another hint about the nature of eternity–a concept that takes on meaning for me when I consider the 14,000 ft. peaks I can see out my window and know that over endless time, natural processes (frost, thaw, wind, rain, snow, heat. plant roots, etc.) will eventually flatten them out and eventually wash their rock, now fragments of sand, into the sea.  And my own “house of flesh.” Well if rock turns to sand and mountains are flattened, then…Eternity begins.

The processes of creation and destruction on the shore are generally more observable than here in the hard rock mountains because the changes are comparatively rapid. But in both cases, mountains and shoreline, the primary agents of change are the same–water as liquid and solid, temperature, wind, vegetation, aging or the passage of time. All of which  calls to mind the people I know best, including myself, in whose bodies and lives and relationships, (as well as biological processes), change is constant as well–some of which is observable, some less so; some slow, some rapid, some creating and sustaining, some destroying.

Finally, the recognition that we only “walk t/here once” has come to me with blunt force only in my later years.  I heard and understood this truth as a young man when it really had little existential meaning for me; but now, as I look in the mirror or see old photographs, it does; and I wonder if it is too late, if I have traveled  too far down the beach, to make constructive use of my a-ha moment. Those who love me say it’s not too late, and they urge me on.

In any case, I marvel at the tenacity and fragility and mutability of all the seen and unseen forces that have made–and continues to make me…Me, and you…You.

PS:  Just read the final column written by Marina Keegan,  a ’12 graduate of Yale, and published by the Yale Daily News just after she was killed in an automobile wreck. Here’s the except I read. And I feel shamed to have felt that “it might be too late for me…”

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”[my emphasis]

I confess that it’s hard for me at 75 to keep and nourish my “sense of possibility.”  However, I do stand corrected by this wise young woman, and will try again.

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MEMORIAL DAY: DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI

Memorial Day is always a sad weekend for me, especially so since I moved to Colorado–away from my Connecticut family–in 1997.  For more than 30 years, Memorial Day weekends were a time for family gatherings, usually at Sachems Head, Guilford, Connecticut,  at my wife’s family’s homestead on Long Island Sound. What a beautiful, idyllic site–the wide expanse of the Sound dotted with sailboats, whitecaps, gulls diving and shrieking, the smell of clams roasting on the beach mixing with the salty aroma of hot dogs and hamburgers smoking on the charcoal grill. My wife’s extended  family attended in droves, so so this was a time to laugh, tell tall tales, show off new babies and spouses and “dates,”  and do lots of catching up on general family happenings.

Presiding over the event were two formidable women, sisters, Millie and Winnie,  nee Gustafson (full blooded Swedes),  who had married Harrison Stevens and Carleton Winslow, consummate New Englanders and first cousins. These women, like their mother Ida Carleson Gustafson (a former premier “presider” at these events with her husband Art), were born with “food prep for mass gatherings” as part of their DNA. They and their female children (same DNA) covered the tables with endless supplies of deviled eggs, fruit salads, potato salads, cold cuts, sliced onions, olives, mustards and mayonnaise, catsup and chili sauce, pickles, relishes, grilled burgers and dogs with all the fixin’s, pies and cakes and cookies, iced tea, soda, beer and as much bourbon and scotch as the occasion demanded.

There were Frisbees to be spun, rocks to be thrown at imaginary targets on nearby tree trunks  or hurled with shoulder-dislocating strength to see who could hit the water just off the distant beach, occasional footballs and baseballs to be tossed around, and a homespun, competitive family contest that involved  a racket-hit tennis ball soaring skyward, almost out of sight, and then its return to earth in the spotty fickle breezes testing even the most keen-eyed “catcher” below–especially toward dusk when tennis balls were easily confused with darting bats.  These were emotionally warm and memorable halcyon days indeed.

So now, living in Colorado, away from all that family, on Memorial Days I feel mostly empty and alone, a little sad as I reminisce about those “good old days.” I try to put them in their place among other memorabilia on my mental shelves. As balm, I slip easily back to a trip that I took on my fiftieth birthday with my brother in law, Tom, who was turning forty the same week. I had been reading a lot of history about World War I, so I planned a European trip for us to view some battlefields of the Great War (an oxymoron if I ever heard one).

From Paris we drove East to Verdun, stopping at military cemeteries along the way. We saw the final resting places of hundreds of young men, most of whom were less than twenty when their lives were cut off, boys who were adolescents really, the age of the students I taught in prep schools. The kids in these graves (because we were touring the Western Front) came mostly from America, England and her colonies, France, Germany, Russia, and Italy. We saw only a minute part of evidence (what could be found at least)  of the carnage that produced the detritus of war.

The total figures for war deaths in that conflict are staggering, mind-boggling.

To wit:

“The ‘Great War’, which began on 28 July 1914 with Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war with Serbia, and which ended with the German armistice of 11 November 1918, produced a vast number of casualties and deaths – and similarly vast numbers of missing soldiers.

The precise numbers remain shrouded in the passing of time compounded by the incompleteness of available records.  In the heat of action accurate records were not always kept, and where they were, these were not uncommonly lost in subsequent actions, such were the conditions of trench warfare.
Thus the figures reproduced below cannot be regarded as definitive but are a fair reflection of the scale of losses country by country.

Note too that these statistics reflect military casualties only; no reliable figures are available for civilian casualties throughout the world.  Attributing civilian casualties to the effects of war is a subjective process at best; the scale of the First World War certainly resulted in an absence of even the most approximate figures for affected nations.
Caveats aside – on to the figures:

Country Dead Wounded Missing Total
Africa 10,000 – – 10,000
Australia 58,150 152,170 – 210,320
Austria-Hungary 922,000 3,600,000 855,283 5,377,283
Belgium 44,000 450,000 – 494,000
Britain 658,700 2,032,150 359,150 3,050,000
Bulgaria 87,500 152,390 27,029 266,919
Canada 56,500 149,700 – 206,200
Caribbean 1,000 3,000 – 4,000
France 1,359,000 4,200,000 361,650 5,920,650
Germany 1,600,000 4,065,000 103,000 5,768,000
Greece 5,000 21,000 1,000 27,000
India 43,200 65,175 5,875 114,250
Italy 689,000 959,100 – 1,424,660
Japan 300 907 3 1,210
Montenegro 3,000 10,000 7,000 20,000
New Zealand 16,130 40,750 – 56,880
Portugal 7,222 13,751 12,318 33,291
Romania 335,706 120,000 80,000 535,706
Russia 1,700,000 5,000,000 – 6,700,000
Serbia 45,000 133,148 152,958 331,106
South Africa 7,000 12,000 – 19,000
Turkey 250,000 400,000 – 650,000
USA 58,480 189,955 14,290 262,72″

Tom and I finally staggered into Verdun and took the measure of what had transpired there. It was even more grotesque than I remembered, more horrifying than the accounts in my history books:

“Verdun resulted in 698,000 battlefield deaths (362,000 French and 336,000 German combatants), an average of 70,000 deaths for each of the ten months of the battle.[5] It was the longest and one of the most devastating battles in the First World War and the history of warfare.”

Returning West along the trench lines from Verdun to the English Channel, Tom and I stopped to view the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge, the resting place of more than 10,000 Canadian boys and men who were killed in three days fighting over a relatively miniscule parcel of barely-elevated land. Their deaths had been preceded months before by the demise of several hundred thousand French and British boys and men. None of these people would ever whistle a tune, or see their homes again. We were on sacred ground, once killing fields.

When we began our European adventure, Tom and I were both feeling a little glum and depressed about our birthdays which were blatant indicators of our advancing ages, our “over-the-hill-ness” as it were. We were feeling on the edge of being put out to pasture. After the trip, and having confronted the brute reality of the millions of deaths–and in only one war— deaths of men and boys much younger than ourselves, we both were humbled and eternally grateful that we were still alive, that we had been given the years that we had already lived (old farts though we might be becoming), and that we still had futures to contemplate and savor. So many of those graves contained the remains of kids who did not even make it to legal voting age. I can’t exchange joy of any sort about being alive for the deep sorrow I feel for those countless kids whose memory is marked only by white or gray gravestones.

So, I’m not surprised that now, in 2012,  pathos and sadness return to me; and  involuntarily my thoughts expand to include visions of other times and places, of the countless millions of men and women all over the world whose lives were cut short by other wars, and the attendant disasters they brought on; men and women who will never again able to read a book, or taste sweet milk or smell a broiling  steak, bite into a crisp apple, or to go on a picnic with their families;  and who will never have a chance to feel the ocean breezes, or see the yachts with their colorful spinnakers billowing, as they surge downwind toward finish line, hoping to hear only the report of the race committee’s innocuous cannon signifying the end of the first competition of the season.

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LIFE’S UGLY SIDE: MY GARDEN SECRET

The good, the bad and the inconvenient

Gardening is often a measured cruelty:
what is to live and what is to be torn
up by its roots and flung on the compost
to rot and give its essence to new soil.

It is not only the weeds I seize.
go down the row of new spinach—
their little bright Vs crowding—
and snatch every other, flinging

their little bodies just as healthy,
just as sound as their neighbors
but judged, by me, superfluous.
We all commit crimes too small

for us to measure, the ant soldiers
we stomp, whose only aim was to
protect, to feed their vast family.
It is I who decide which beetles

are “good” and which are “bad”
as if each is not whole in its kind.
We eat to live and so do they,
the locusts, the grasshoppers,

the flea beetles and aphids and slugs.
By bad I mean inconvenient. Nothing
we do is simple, without consequence
and each act is shadowed with death.
   

“The good, the bad and the inconvenient” by Marge Piercy, from The Crooked Inheritance. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

I was taken aback when reading this poem because I have entertained many of the same ideas in the past; I figured that I was the only one who might have entertained such almost sentimental thoughts.   In the “old days,” when my family was  involved in growing food from seeds, I used to agonize inwardly when I had to “thin” out a row of any vegetable seedlings.  I wondered about the implications for the plant of choosing which little seed’s thrust toward life and reproduction I would terminate and which I would  allow to flourish.  I honestly felt badly every time I scraped a little green baby plant out of the soil to make room for its neighbors to thrive with more abundant space, soil, nourishment, and water.
In the same gardens, of course,  lived thousands of little insects and vermin  (pests) of various sorts because we didn’t use chemical pesticides. Often the organic solutions we employed for pest “management” didn’t work or were relatively ineffective, so the very existence of our vegetables was jeopardized by tiny creatures that were only seeking to sustain their own lives and then reproduce in kind. I regularly took their lives more mindlessly than I did the plants, wanting to thwart their destructive tendencies. Maybe I saw them somehow as “lesser” life forms as well as horticulturally undesirable. Through the course of the garden’s annual life–its season from frost to frost–I was very aware of the curious life and death relationship and of my role in it.
In a sense, by planting a garden, we had, for what seemed good and noble reasons, altered the natural or normal relationship between flora and fauna. We had artificially added plants and vegetables to the food supply chain and, unwittingly, encouraged and supported an imbalance of supply and demand in the miniscule natural world of our little garden. From planting to thinning to fertilizing to harvesting, our human judgement and actions supplanted–and were inserted into–natural processes. In this microcosm, our human activity–even though it was comparatively benign and contained in scope–made an incredible life and death impact on the little world of our garden.
Thinking back on this agrarian enterprise causes me to be even more aware and horrified–yea depressed and angered as well– by the often thoughtless impact of human activity on our earthly home. From my 11th floor apartment window, I can see acres of roof tops and miles of asbestos streets and highways, all built for our convenience and comfort, and with little thought to how we were changing where rain fell and water drained, where snow-melt flowed and stored, where leaves dropped and rotted to form new top soil, where the heat and cold stored by solid masses of roads and buildings changed the climates immediately around them, where root systems were covered, fauna habitats and chemical compositions of soil were destroyed or altered forever, and on and on. 
Just think about it. What I am seeing is just me and my limited view from one window here in South East Denver, a vista that encompasses an area perhaps as large as a square mile. Recalling  the impact that I had on my little garden (maybe 1/8th acre), I shudder when Google tells me that the land area of the earth is about 197 million square miles bigger than the square mile  I see, and that it is populated by over 7 billion people like me, acting as I have acted,  whose numbers are increasing by about 20 million a year; and I extrapolate from my limited garden experience to all this immensity and ponder what this most likely means for the planet…for my children and their children…for humankind…

“Nothing
we do is simple, without consequence
and each act is shadowed with death.”