You can't go home

Heraclitis is attributed to have said that you can not step in the same river twice.  Supposedly this is a comment on the changing nature of the river and even yourself in that time necessitates change.  Going home for the holidays makes me question that logic sometimes.  One of the aspects of growing up in the deep rural south is that you have a very clear idea of what consistency is.  What some call tradition others see as stagnation.  I call it an unsettling feeling of nostalgia.  Can you call it deja vue if you really did do it before?  Strains of Jeff Foxworthy monologues play to my ears as I visit local establishments.  So I collect here some tidbits of info for the outsider that they should know.

Country folks are not dumb.  They may not know what's playing on Broadway or what Facebook is but they are extremely clever and visitors dismiss their intelligence at extreme peril.

You are expected to wave to or at least acknowledge everyone.  Growing up in the sticks you are taught to hold your head up and look others in the eye.  If a man can't do this he is obviously up to no good.  The wave to a stranger is a simple way of saying, 'I see you and I know you see me and I have nothing to hide.'

During introductions it is best to identify local relations.  Who you are is intertwined with who your 'people' are.  When I go to church with my mom, we always sit on one side because another clan sits on the other.  If given the option though, you will want to emphasis the more upstanding members of the family over the black sheep.  In a small town everybody knows that the mayor's brother is a drunk but which one you claim relation to first says something about what you value in a relative.

Expect that everyone will have heard of your visit within a day.  As a visitor, you are exotic and an interesting topic of conversation.  Eventually something else will replace you on the front page but never be surprised that seeming strangers know quite a bit about who you are.

Respect personal property.  Just about anybody you talk to will gladly let you borrow this or that or pass through a pasture but outright trespassing and theft (and also slander of another man's cow) will more often than not get you shot at and these are a people who generally hit what they aim for.

When I visit home I often find myself wondering if I am right to not live in the town that raised me.  It's a kind of sadness that I cannot repay the intangible education of my experiences to a community that needs good smart people.  Eventually I come to the same conclusion that I could not live there.  My career wouldn't exist and I would not have gone and seen the many things I have but that dread sense of responsibility remains.

Gratitude

In the run up to Thanksgiving I, like many others, am inclined to reflect on the things I am grateful for.  I'm not so full of sunbeams that I can do a grateful thing each day set but I can at least give voice to what I find meaningful.  I am grateful that I have the luxury of being able to write what I think in an online forum.  It doesn't cost me anything, I have the time to do it and I don't have to worry about the police at my door if I say something controversial.  This ability has become so mainstream to the American way of thinking that it is hard to imagine places that this freedom doesn't exist.  We have heard of these places but really I think it is hard to truly picture it.  I am grateful to have had the opportunity to live in a developing country for a period of time and be able to get a brief taste of what true poverty is.  A place where keys are worn as a status symbol because they indicate that you have something worth enough to go to the trouble of locking it away.  A place where dissident groups are known more for their murderous raids than pithy signs and slogans.  The luxury of having a pantry is hard to comprehend for much of the world.  By luck of birth I get to live in a great place.
I am also lucky to have a great family.  Both the what  I was born into and what has been born to me.  While my childhood was not devoid of drama, it was of a far less sinister quality than many friends.  I am not sorry to have any of my relatives.  Further, where so many people I know  have to struggle with special needs children or infertility, I have been blessed here as well with bright capable children.  I know that they love each other to which sadly seems to be becoming more the exception than the rule in or not so civil society.
I am also grateful to have been employed in one of the more stable professions in this volatile time.  Even our company had to deal with certain new austerities but through it all, I was confident in a job.  How uncommon is that today? 
I look forward to Thanksgiving for many reasons but for the reasons listed here I get to look forward to each and every day.

Confessions of an Anglophile

I must admit to a weird little predilection of mine. There is something absolutely fascinating to me about the Brits. Their culture is so alien to our own yet the shared language and many common values give a sense of Deja Vu. (on a side note, I find it very entertaining that I use a French term to describe my feelings about the English) I love the feel of received pronunciation on my ears but even a strong cockney accent or thick brogue makes me smile.

It probably started in my formative years early morning Saturdays. I usually would wake up too late to catch the normal cartoon fare. I would typically watch what would become my favorite three shows; This Old House, Victory Garden and Doctor Who. The first two fueled other interests of mine but watching the Doctor was great entertainment. I came to identify with the Intrepid Doctor's sidekicks as they saved the day on whatever planet, battled various forms of evil in the galaxy and then whisked off to some other place and time. When I would visit my Dad, who had cable TV (oh what a wondrous joy that was), I would also enjoy the Cosgrove Hall masterpiece, Danger Mouse. I can't tell you how happy I am that I am able to share Danger Mouse and Doctor Who with my own kids in DVD form as well as the beautifully done ongoing Doctor Who series. Other early Anglo TV influences include the BBC comedies Fawlty Towers, Monty Python Flying Circus, Good Neighbors and To the Manor Born whenever they appeared on local broadcast PBS. It was more than just TV. I also remember following the royal wedding of Charles and Diana sitting in a hotel room with my family and learning about Lord Baden Powell, founder of scouting, at our scout camp which was named after him.

I've come to love other current BBC shows like, As Time Goes By, starring Dame Judi Dench and Geoffery Palmer. My love of cars led me to the great show, Top Gear and a friend turned me on to watching Quite Interesting with Stephen Fry. The Sherlock series was peerless and makes me excited to see Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in the new Hobbit movie.  Other more recent loves include BBC4 radio podcasts like In Our Time, Thinking Allowed, Material World and Gardeners Question Time which I use to entertain me on long drives or plane rides.

So as you may have noticed, I have gone to the trouble of dropping a bunch of links.  This is all part of my nefarious plot to create new Anglophiles.  Click on the links at your peril.

Many to One (/Rant on mobs)

 A lot of oxygen has been expended recently related to the self-proclaimed Occupy Movement.   I am particularly fascinated to hear that many people identify with this modern Woodstock and may believe it to be the great hope for civilization.  I don’t.  Even the most sympathetic news coverage depicts a chaotic band of hollow rebels whose unifying complaint is a nebulous idea that they have been unfairly deprived of something.  Claims of being Anti-greed are laughable since they are the embodiment of covetousness, who lives in the same apartments as greed.  It seems more of a, “I want you to not be greedy and give your stuff to me,” argument.  I am inclined to think that this is a result of societal changes in the way that we no longer reward the truly deserving.  Instead, we are led to believe that we should value everyone the same; no losers; everyone is a winner.  This generation has grown up being told constantly that they are to be valued the same as everyone else and are shocked to discover that the workplace reality is that buskers, baristas and barnacle scrappers can not lease a new Mercedes every 60 days just like the late head of a particularly popular technology company.  Further, the Lord of the Flies culture in these encampments is not the enlightened ideal I would want to see raised to the national or international norm.

I despair that anyone would think that the road to a better future is beaten down by the feet of a mob.  I believe that as a general rule the combined intellect of a group is inverse to the number in that group.  Said another way, I believe in individuals and fear collectives.  This I know to be an unpopular idea.  We like to imagine that humanity must work together to achieve greatness.  While it is true that no man can move a mountain alone, it does take an exceptional person to conceive, organize and achieve such a goal.  The result of broader representation in governing bodies has been increased deadlock and stagnation.  Our leaders no longer lead because they aren’t sure who they are leading from day to day.  They have to poll their constituents to get the pulse of the community and maximize their chances for re-election. 

I don’t know if this system can be repaired or not but one idea may be to lengthen terms but limit all elected officials to one consecutive term.  These have to be done together since the length of the interim term has an affect on the nullifying power of the single consecutive term.  There would still be powerful people who would shift positions around government but I would rather that than the zombification of the legislature.

I suppose I feel about the current movement (which makes me think of other less glamorous movements) much like the never ending calls in social media for this or that cause.  I do not believe that clicking ‘like’ on a webpage or copying a ‘status’ or standing in a fetid park barking received diatribe at passersby will make any impact on the world except to add to the clutter.

Therapeutic

I had meant to update the blog much earlier this month.  It was going to be something along the lines of a retrospective at or around my birthday.  Well that came and went and I find myself here wondering what could possibly be interesting enough to string a few sentences together. 
As for my birthday, it was nice.  That evening I went with Doug on a scout camp-out that has become a sort of tradition in which we launch pumpkins with various mechanical devices.  None of those participating made many changes to their entries other than simple bulking up in some key areas and such.  My floating arm trebuchet had the best launches and we got some smaller pumpkins lofted about 60 - 70 yards.  The next night we had a combined party with some friends, one family of which has a one year old baby with the same birthday as me.  My much appreciated birthday gift was a large cutting board which is great for mu growing interest in developing good cooking skills. 
Something else I had been pondering writing about was a phase of my life that in retrospect has had more of an affect on me than I had given credit for.  After my parents second divorce, my mother was convinced by school personnel that I would benefit from therapeutic counseling sessions.  Apparently this was based on some writing assignments I had completed which seemed overly depressed or focused on the current status of my home environment.  I honestly do not recall these at all but it did seem to concern mom enough to go ahead with the counseling.  This may not seem all that out of character so I have to explain that being from a rural background in the 80s, this seemed to me at least to be a really big deal.  In looking back on it I think I may have been more emotionally traumatized by the thought of being considered 'abnormal' or 'crazy' than by the divorce itself.  I immediately did not trust the counselor and endeavored to prove that I didn't need to be there.  I don't even remember her name but I do recall carefully considering my every word in those sessions.  I don't know if I was especially difficult compared to others but I wish I could apologize to the counselor for who I was then.  That said, I do recall the one thing that stuck with me from those otherwise fruitless meetings.  She would invariably start our conversations each time with the question, "How do you feel today?"  My response would always be, "Normal," to which she would follow-up up with, "What is normal?"  This happened every time.  At first I had to pick and choose how to respond to that follow-up but very soon came to expect the question of what is normal and would be prepared for it.  She was probably never aware of the impact that repetitive set of questions would have on me.  Even after I no longer went to see her, I would find myself wondering what was normal and found that this would lead me to question why something was normal and to realize that normal could be defined very differently for different people and finally, that I could define normal for myself. 

Garden Update

We pulled out first harvest this week and as you can see the carrots are pretty impressive.

The Garden of Eating

This is my second year for a vegetable garden and I am overall pleased with the progress so far from our first attempt last year. Last year we planted what we called a ‘Salsa Garden’ which consisted of Roma tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers and Cilantro. These were planted in a semi-traditional row pattern along a fence line that got a lot of sun. We had a lot of tomatoes and hot peppers come out but the sweet peppers, cilantro and some onions we attempted in some patio containers didn’t amount to much.

This year I built four shallow raised beds of the square foot garden style. They are cheap treated plywood 4’ X 4’ with 6 inches of depth. I filled these with the free compost I got from the City organic waste department and set down a grid pattern with twine to make 1’ squares. Having had the winter to consider it at length, I had a more complex plan for veggies and planting schedule that we kept to fairly closely. I also put in potatoes in some spare bins and a sweet potato in the ground that had sprouted on its own, 10 blueberry seedlings along the back fence line and also two apple and a peach tree. Further discussions with my wife had me plant some sugar snap peas later than I typically would have and also allowing some garden volunteers of tomatoes and cilantro to grow where they were as the ground was not planned for other things.

In the actual beds I again had the tomatoes, peppers and onions but added beets, carrots, chard, garlic, basil, eggplant and acorn squash. I also allocated a square in each bed to marigolds because I had heard they served as a natural insect repellant. Significant April and May showers followed by some real heat in June have turned out some really crowded beds. The squash in the beds were threatening to take over so I had to put in some trellising. I also used trellising for the tomatoes which were overshadowing the peppers. I also pruned about half of the tomatoes to see if that had a good or bad affect. The chard and carrots are much taller than I anticipated so I am wondering if having it all so close together will cause more problems than it solves.

I am pleased though that some early damage from rabbits did not seem to have a lasting impact. The worst of it was that they were attacking the apple trees which looked like someone had hacked them with scissors. The nibbling out of the garden corners was annoying but doesn’t seem to have had too much of an effect on the final outcome. I ended up putting netting over tomato cages to protect the apple trees (for some reason they aren’t interested in the peach). This seems to have worked but I am disappointed it took me so long to figure it out. I think next year I will build much taller boxes (around 2’ tall) for the veggies that will keep them further away from the rabbits and also not require so much kneeling down.

Attached below are some pictures of the garden. See if you can identify the plants.

In Memoriam

This is a rare thing to post so soon after my last but I find that I am compelled by recent events. My first 'real' boss recently passed on and I am left in a nostalgic mood. I had other employment prior to meeting Ed Gresh in the early 90s all of which where your typical fair of High School jobs including shop boy (I believe that was the official title) at a NAPA store and flipping burgers. In each I obviously had supervisor(s) but I always think of Ed as my first boss. I had recently graduated High School and was naively looking for a job in Gainesville closer to the University I would eventually attend. I was lucky really, a friend of a friend had heard that Ed was looking for people and that I was looking for work and arranged for us to meet. Having never interviewed before I had no clue what to expect or prepare for but had a short pleasant conversation with Ed about what he needed done and if I was willing to do it. It seemed like a good fit and so I went for it and never since regretted it.

Along the way I met probably the most diverse cast of characters imaginable. That group became a family in a very real way. To this day we remain brothers both unique as individuals and linked by common bonds. Ed was our patriarch and we even had a crazy weird uncle Jim.

Ed introduced us to in-office politics but at the same time shielded us from much of it. Through my association with Ed I was able to meet the players in Tigert Hall. Even if the University President couldn't recall my name immediately , he knew I was one of 'Ed's guys'. I will not forget going to the home of the Department head of Architecture in the Duck Pond neighborhood for the departing Provost's son's wedding reception. I also have to wonder if Prof. Auxter ever figured out we had went ahead and wired his office anyway while he was out.

We had access to some pretty interesting areas of campus and in many cases foreknowledge of changes coming down the pipe. UF became more than the school I attended but a sort of second home that I still feel an odd sort of ownership in because it was 'our' campus.

Car 285 may be long gone to the scrap heap but back in the day it was the chariot of the gods as we descended on whatever unsuspecting department with power and authority to bring them the gift of being connected to the campus network. We parked wherever we liked no matter if it was paved, marked or was simply a sidewalk. It was as if fear went before us and with good reason with Jim at the helm of our very own Millennium Falcon. Somehow the motor pool kept that sled going long after the original engineers would have pronounced her dead and every dent was a badge of honor. That didn't stop us from trying to pull out some of those dents but we had more success on the other random cars in the parking garage in our incarnation as the mysterious marauding dent pullers.

Ed always wished the best for us. When I left on my mission to the Philippines he wished me luck and told me stories of his time there in the Air Force. When I came back and I had a lunch with all the guys, he asked when I wanted to come back to work. I told him next week and that was it. We picked right back up as if there was never a question or doubt that we would.

I learned what a dumb terminal was from Ed and by insisting on lugging 3278s by myself I earned the nickname 'Moose' from him. The name only came into use when we were moving those boat anchors. We were so excited to move our collection of old iron terminals from the practically haunted Flint to our batcave in Norman hall. It was here that Ed could now hold court.

We had a fridge and space to hang out and call our own. We kept soda in the fridge communally that Sean would crank the cap on so tight we needed pliers to get them off. Ed once tried to shoot a cap off an empty 2 liter bottle at me by jumping on it. I think he got the worst of it when the bottle rolled and he ended up on his back with his feet in the air. As our family grew and the cast of characters moved and changed, it was back to Norman hall basement we would return to see and be seen by those who remained. I wonder if the concrete walk in front of the basement entrance still bears our inscription.

Our significant others knew the secret knocks as well and on more than one occasion my girlfriend/fiance/wife Cheryl would go there either looking for me or some of the other guys when she needed a hand. The two best men for my wedding and favorite friends were in that crew. Sheard, Sean and I were in two weddings that year, we just shifted spots. It was from Ed that I got my most memorable and practical newlywed advice. It was from Norman hall after a day of work that Cheryl was picking me up from that she confirmed her pregnancy with our oldest.

I know that we will never forget Ed or the time that we shared. I am grateful to have known him. Perhaps now that this is written, I can get back to real work.