crdahlberg

The Next Bigger, Better Version

Being successful entails making changes: new mindsets, new goals, new promises. Like the ever-increasing bottle sizes on display at California’s Niner Wine Estates near Paso Robles, they are new, improved versions. Each one is bigger and better than the one before. Obsolete systems and old versions that have grown clunky become obsolete.

The personal computer industry is replete with examples.

The evolution of the great cats began with Cheetah, at least according to Apple. Every so often, this computer company convinces its users that its software operating system, with each successive version named after one of the great cats, has morphed into a newer, more powerful version of its former self. Cheetah begat Puma, which began Jaguar, followed by Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion, soon to be followed by Mountain Lion. If this keeps up, I am concerned for Apple. One evolutionary cycle too many, perhaps not long from now, and they will run out of cat names. I fear Feral Cat could be the final, dissatisfying version of their evolutionary software.

They could, of course, begin a new evolutionary track for their software updates. Invertebrate sea animals might be catchy. This tactic would lead them to fearsome and memorable creature names such as Giant Squid and Giant Octopus. But where would they go from there? Cuttlefish hardly inspires software prowess, suggesting instead a soggy romantic embrace. Starfish could pass muster, but after that, there’s no where to go but down. Eventually, Apple would wind up with versions called Sea Biscuit, Sea Worm and Sea Snail. It’s difficult to imagine software geeks hovering over their Starbuck Frappuccinos comparing the outrageously cool features of Apple’s latest Sea Slug operating system.

Better find a different evolutionary trail to follow.

No matter what they are called, when old systems become outdated, they need to be replaced. Times change. Needs change. Strategies change.

Likewise, newer versions of our lives should evolve. How long has it been since we’ve rolled out the next version of the personal operating system governing our lives, employing new mindsets, new goals, new promises.

At a recent conference I attended, I realized that I was probably the oldest guy in the room. I also recognized that my function and purpose had changed. No longer was the activity centered around me; it was all about them. They were the team. I was a cheerleader of sorts, older, more experienced. Simply being there—showing up—helped give credence to the others that this event was, in fact, worth doing. I had entered into a newer version of the expectations governing my life’s operating system.

We need updates to the long-ago life goals scratched in our high school year books. Perhaps we’ve been running Operating system Sophomore beyond its intended useful life. To re-tune our current endeavors and re-think our future plans, maybe it’s time for a system upgrade to discover the next version of our bigger, better selves.

A House in Underwear

The gigantic lettering on the white background should say Hanes instead of Lowe’s. The house has been caught in its underwear. But a house is neither a plumber, stooped to do his job while displaying three inches of peek-a-boo underwear, nor is it the slouched and sloppy wannabe gang banger with his barely-hanging-on undies. Typically, one doesn’t see what’s beneath a house’s siding, its protective exterior veneer.

In this case, a contractor has surgically removed the house’s damaged skin. Over time, it succumbed to dry rot, which gradually ate away the wood siding like a cancer. The disclosed vulnerability invited the appetites of hyena-like termite invaders, patiently awaiting their opportunistic feast.

The house, which we entrust to shelter us, is now in its most vulnerable state. Without outside protection, the Lowes underwear merely hides its shame against total indignity.

In a few short weeks, the house will again be fully clothed in new, high-tech siding, boasting new energy-efficient rebate-worthy windows throughout and upgraded air conditioners surgically implanted into the walls instead of crazily hanging onto window frames. The foliage, trimmed back to the extreme for this reconstructive surgery, will recover and bloom, calling home the temporarily displaced honeybees and hummingbirds. Soon, it will stand out as the most gleaming house on the street.

And I will be proud because this house belongs to me.

One day, inevitably, I will move on to my Permanent Home, and this house will no longer belong to me. The new owners will have no memory of its kindly, welcoming days of service, providing lodging for my guests. Nor will they recall the rowdy noise of laughter, the boisterous joy of holidays, and even the occasional weeping, all of which left their indelible marks within its walls. They will know nothing of the hospitality of its front yard—the children’s Slip ‘n’ Slide gatherings, and later, for those same children, the wedding receptions.

The blueprints will tell the new owners it is the same house, but it really won’t quite be the same house for them.

They will have missed this parental-like connection; they will not have seen the house at its most vulnerable, standing in its Lowes underwear, with the labels showing. They will not know of our efforts to save her from decay.

For each of us, the place we call home harbors significant events and memories of our lives, secreting them from others, selfishly enshrining them as our own private treasures.

1-1-3

Working in a parole office, there are moments to suspend belief. Or perhaps there are rarer moments to actually engage belief. It depends upon which side of belief you start on.

Life stories stretch and relax with no logical explanation. You pick up some and discard others.

Last week, two new students who are on parole began the interminable paperwork required for each new student to enroll in my literacy class: name, address, social security number, parole agent’s name, birthdate…

Wait. What? Birthdate?

One student’s birthdate was January 13, 1979.

I reviewed the other student’s data. And his birthday, amazingly, was also January 13. Even more astoundingly, the year was also 1979.

Two students registered for my class at the same time, on the same day, who were also born on the same day, the same month and the same year.

What are the chances?

How many of us have experienced similar weird circumstantial encounters in our own lives? And, perhaps, we have narrowly missed other up-to-chance events that we will never find out about. How could we know if we passed a first grade classmate, thirty years later, walking just beyond our sight on our hurried way to the post office?

Oh…one other detail. My own birthday is also January 13. So three of us sat together, joined together by a common birthday, and that was all.

Two fellows on parole and one teacher. All joined by January 13. Numerically expressed, the date becomes 1-1-3.

We held up our fingers to mark the circumstance. In some small and weird way, we bonded over something so apparently trivial as our birthdays.

I wondered how many other “one-one-threes” are waiting to be discovered in the people right around us. “Something-something-somethings”—they are the small things that can remove barriers.

In a world shredded by criminal backgrounds, race, religion and social class, we may find ourselves repeating the seemingly inane quote by the late Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?”

By discovering more 1-1-3s in the weaving of our lives, perhaps we can.

Mega-Stretchfabric Man

In retrospect, it probably wasn’t the best time for me to enter the candy and soda pop store, just when Mega-Stretchfabric Man was on the prowl, examining the goods and consuming the high-calorie, caffeine-injected junk food lining the shelves. The store was being held hostage by this super-villain gone bad. He is a superhero gone astray, a powerful force who used to advocate for a the low fat, low sugar lifestyle. Not any more.

But still, he’s Mega-Stretchfabric Man. He can do as he pleases.

What happened to him can become the fate of any one of us when we pursue destructive, self-indulgent behavior. In our own thinking, we can do no wrong. All is justified.

We can easily list political leaders, spiritual leaders, bankers, business folks, even physicians who have, over time, become their own version of Mega-Stretchfabric Man. They’ve fallen.

Somewhere on that list we can probably add our own name because change can happen gradually. Self-interest seeps in, drowning our nobler aspirations. We can all fail to live up to our aspirations.

Slowly we devolve, morph, change into that which we do not wish to become–and we may become our own version of the irritating, crimson-suited, Mega-Stretchfabric Man, an unwelcome transformation that is apparent to everyone else but ourselves.

But hold on. The End has not arrived. Remember, in Comic Book Land, there are heroes to counterbalance every villain’s influence. Every hero has equally powerful choices to make to turn things around. Heroes conquer one thought, one action, one attitude at a time.

Put on your stretch suit, hero. We’ve got work to do.

“I’ll Have Another”

The horse pictured above is a locally-stabled equine. It is not the horse that is so much in the news these days.

No, the current horse of renown, named “I’ll Have Another,” has already won two of the three horse races required to earn the fabled Triple Crown. Will he gain horse racing’s highest honor by winning three in a row? In a few days, we’ll find out.

Those who keep up with such things will recall the last Triple Crown winner, in 1978, named Affirmed. He was only the eleventh such winner, dating back to 1919. That’s an average of one Triple Crown winner every 5.36 years. Statistically, we’re way overdue.

Three days ago, at the Los Angeles International Airport, I heard the luggage belts creak under the combined weight of suitcases and sports bags, the unloaded belongings of thirty-five giant players of the triumphant Belmont Shore Rugby Club returning from Colorado, where these hulks had demolished the other national rugby championship contenders. There were winners’ medallions around their necks and high fives all around.

More sports victories–ice hockey fans are tumbling from obscurity into sports bars to observe the newly-minted triumphs of the Los Angeles Kings. This year–if the playoff finals go their way–they may win their first-ever Stanley Cup victory, the highest achievement in ice hockey.

I’m no sportster. I don’t generally attend sports arena-based athletic events. Most of this is beyond both my pocketbook and my personal interest.

Nonetheless, I experienced my most salient encounter with a professional sports personality during high school in 1969 on a Detroit freeway. A friend and I were sailing along in my very first car, a white 1962 MGA convertible, with the top down. In those days, the gas in my tank cost me 19.9 cents a gallon. We owned the road.

We were, quite logically to us, pretending to be flying in an aircraft, our hippie-era hair blowing freely, our arms extended outside our doors on either side of the car to imitate wings. We spoke back and forth to one another on pretend microphones grasped in our fists, checking altitude, wind velocity and destination headings. We were alone in our own world on the freeway.

Suddenly, the car ahead of us inexplicably slowed and pulled into the lane to our right. I looked up at the enormous automotive hulk. When the driver’s window got next to ours, his electric window descended, and he peered down at us. Our arms were still extended in airplane-flying mode.

A handsome, middle-aged man appeared from behind the lowered glass in the neighboring car, staring at us. Suddenly his hand emerged, grasping a big black object. On my second glance, I saw that in his hand he held a very large wingtip shoe, which he had extricated from his foot. He held it there, in the car window, toe to his ear, heel to his mouth, beaming gleefully back to us, pretending that it also was a microphone. Through his wingtip mouthpiece, he pretended to converse with us through our imagined fist-microphones. We were astounded. We were confounded. We were delighted that an adult would take us seriously–or playfully banter with us in our imagined world.

After a few moments, he was gone with a wave of his hand. The window rolled up, and he passed by us, our arms were still extended as wings.

As his car pulled in front of us, I read the personalized license plate displayed upon the car’s chrome rear bumper, identifying the car’s owner, and our freeway aircraft co-conspirator, as–Gordie Howe.

Yes, we had been trading antics with none other than that Gordie Howe, the Detroit Red Wings 23-time National Hockey League All Star. He is recognized as the greatest all-around ice hockey player in history, and, incidentally, the owner of an impressively large wingtip shoe and a generous sense of humor.

Whether “I’ll Have Another” or another horse yet to be born will eventually win the next Triple Crown is an open question. As for me, my wish is that I’ll Have Another life-long memory with the likes of an athlete like Gordie Howe, a man of generous heart who, on a Detroit freeway, inspired me to also live life generously.

Snap Judgments

It’s a pitiful scene–an obviously homeless guy staring longingly in the store window at the goods that he cannot afford. He hopes for better days ahead. His bags contain all his worldly possessions.

At least that’s the way I see it; that’s my snap judgment.

Maybe that’s the danger–it’s the way I see it. I have no way of knowing what the truth really is.

On my way to work this morning, my own pack was flung over my back containing the necessities for my day: lunch, coffee thermos, a book, iPhone charger, train schedules, camera, dental floss.

One missing essential from my backpack is an extra pair of clean underpants (in case I “were ever in an accident,” so I’ve been advised). But I believe if I go down that road, I’m concerned that I might actually consider undergoing a refreshing underwear change prior to an accident. Then the unexpected accident event might occur, and my rescuers would discover inexplicable dirty underwear in my backpack; that’s why I leave the clean underwear out of my pack.

So I was on my way to work this morning, hiking to catch the train, a podcast speaking through my Klipsch earbuds. Just ahead of me, a shabbily-dressed middle-aged man with a healthy head of black hair crossed the sidewalk.

Then he stopped, and he spewed his observations in my direction.

“You people catching the train always look like third-graders, wearing your backpacks to school!”

I removed my earbuds to hear him more clearly.

“Oh, yeah,” he continued, “and you people always have your cool earphones on!” He pointed to his ears and made a grimace.

Maybe he was looking for a fight. If so, I disappointed him. I kept walking. Nonetheless, the diatribe of this obviously imbalanced individual flustered me.

Maybe he hated me for no reason. Maybe he hated the lunch in my backpack. Maybe he hated all train riders.

Maybe he hated all third-graders. I examined myself and concluded that I did, indeed resemble a schoolboy, light-blue plaid shirt, tidy black pants, and newly-cropped hair.

Then I realized it: I looked successful, and he didn’t. And I received his snap judgement, just as I had judged the homeless vagrant staring in the store window for the things he could not afford.

A prominently-placed doorbell is installed on the wall next to the door that opens from the parking lot into the building where I work. When pressed, the bell rings directly into my room, requiring that I extricate myself from my chair, terminate my other activities, and launch myself down the hallway to open the door. This occurs despite a sign above the doorbell that gives clear directions for who may use and who may not use the bell. Instead, the doorbell’s presence appears to be a sanction for all would-be building entrants to disturb my workday as many as thirty times a day.

By the time I arrive at the door, I have had time to create a full-dossier snap judgment of the demented person standing on the other side of the door.

Instead of peering through the peephole to see who is there so that I can frame my attitude, I fling the door wide open, eyes aflame and staring, mouth corners drawn downward.

And each time, after I regain my composure, I realize just how vast the judgmental swamp really is.

One Year of Life

One year ago, when our first grandchild was born, we entered the Grandparents’ Club.

The first chore was selecting a grandparenty-sounding name. So far, I’ve come up with nothing clever or memorable to compare with Boop-pa, Opa, or Papaw, so I’m stuck with the traditional grandfatherly names: Grandfather, Grandpa, Grampa, Grandpappy, Gramps, Granddad, Granddaddy, and Grandpop. Maybe it would be a grand time to just give myself that name I’ve always dreamed of having. How cool would it be to have my grandchild call me Elvis, Dean, Jerome, Connery, Nash, Bronson, or Samson?

By now, I’ve fully entered the slow-motion process of baby-discovering-the-world, in which the baby carefully hand-selects tiny morsels of food, which are gingerly hoisted mouthward. There, the tongue fishes them from the tiny fist, or the finger foods are relentlessly smashed into cheeks, shoved up nostrils or implanted into ear canals.

The baby explores all body parts–whether belonging to the baby or a neighboring adult–eagerly investigating with the fascination of an early explorer setting foot in the New World.

There’s much to admire in a baby. When it comes, giggling arrives genuine and fresh as unspoiled spring water from an aquifer. A baby is still unable to imagine contrivance or fabrication to produce a desired manipulative effect.

Why do we feel so good when we’re with a baby? In their presence, we have entered a welcome Small World, where we can understand and mitigate the consequences of their apparently modest choices. We can offer solutions in this miniaturized world, something we are less confident to achieve in our own larger, intimidating arena.

Perhaps most importantly, we can make happy and fun faces to the baby, and we will not be judged for it. We are free to sacrifice appearances to give them happiness.

And the doing of that–our creation of a joyous countenance–in turn, that generates the very same emotions within ourselves. The intentional, joyous emotion we present to them with our face reflects back to us from the child, penetrating our own heart and giving us joy.

No wonder we enter our night of sleep exhausted and weary, yet with the rewards marked by creases carved deeply by smiles and laughter, further identifying our furrowed faces as–grandparents.

Hawking Peace

It’s the same every week–go where the people are and infiltrate them with peace. Fortunately for him, his warfare-imposed disabilities do not impede this practice. And the months, now measured in many years, don’t diminish his efforts. He is a man transformed by his faith. He is a peace hawker, an oxymoron he likes to attach to himself, provocatively linking his passion for peace with an ardent commitment to activism.

He had weathered the Just Give Peace a Chance idealism of the ‘60s that greeted his stretcher as he was carried off the hospital ship. The chanting demonstrators that surrounded the gangplank were a curiosity to him more than a threat. This was all new. Three years previously, the din of the enthusiastic well-wishers for the brave young lads departing to Southeast Asia had cheered his heart. But all that had changed.The jeering was not the worst of it. The worst of it was two buddies cut nearly in half by machine gun fire. The worst of it was a girl who had decided she could not wait for his return. The worst of it was the sniper bullet that had ripped open a lung and opened his intestine.

He spent years looking for “the best of it,” the redemptive outcome of it all. It evaded him for a very long time. Peace had left him during the war, and he had never gotten it back.

His epiphany followed him late one night into Charley’s Bar, a dive identified by a dingy purple neon sign. Its flickering, burned-out script lettering resembled unintelligible Arabic scrawl.

Unlike the emptiness in his heart, he could spin his empty mug down to the bartender for a refill. This was familiar turf. He knew the pattern of the grain in the wood of the bar and the speed the mug needed to reach its destination.

But this time something in the emptiness of the mug and its spin on the bar grabbed his eye and his heart.

Yes, he had yearned for peace–longing for the absence of war had never left him.

But today, he realized it was different. He recognized, for the first time, what he had been hoping for–no war and no pain–was not enough. Peace, defined as the absence of warfare, still felt empty.

Peace, he recognized, is not only the absence of war. It is not simply a vacuum. It is not a neutral placeholder like a stalemated demilitarized zone.

Instead, it is the presence of something far more powerful. It is an active and penetrating force. Peace is a substance that steals domains and imposes goodness like a conquering army. It chases evil, conquers it and banishes it.

Today, in this crowd and for this crowd, a veteran of warfare again collaborates to give Real Peace a chance.

It is his opportunity to help rout wickedness and redraw the turf of good and of evil one more time.

A Dummy’s Guide to Walking on Water

The ability to walk on water doesn’t quite share the top echelon of human aspirations, such as being able to fly like a bird, travel through time, or (for a girl at least) fit into Cinderella’s glass slipper.

But it’s an ambition that might be up there pretty close to these other passions. After all, the Apostle Peter is reported to have done so—he walked on the water toward Jesus, until he looked down and panicked, losing his faith over what he realized he was actually doing—walking on water!

This video discloses that apparently the freak-out factor can be mitigated by inserted oneself into a plastic bubble and then bouncing out onto the surface of a small swimming pool, thereby approximating the water-walk minus the fear factor. If Peter had simply used an inflatable bubble, he could have spun his bubble all the way to Jesus without the need for faith.

Or, presumably, he just might have kept spinning and spinning like a hamster in an exercise wheel, going nowhere fast.

Remarkably, a short time ago historians unearthed a previously unknown writing by the Apostle Peter. This epistle didn’t make it into the New Testament canon because of its recent discovery. It consists of one chapter, which contains a scant three verses, and was evidently written soon after Peter’s own water-walk experience. Without a formal title given by the Apostle Peter, it is affectionataly referred to as A Dummy’s Guide to Walking on Water. Here, then, is the brief three-verse epistle in its entirety:

Find someone or something that is worth risking everything for.
Decide whether you want to risk everything for that person or thing.
Risk everything for that person or thing.

Bear-ly Making It

Ellen (not her real name) was a long way from home, wherever home used to be. Since she exhausted her savings after being laid off her job in 2005, home becomes anywhere in Sacramento that she can find to lay her head.

On this wet and stormy night, she would lay her head near the river, where I found her playing a card game she invented herself. Since she was playing it alone, I presumed it to be a derivative of solitaire, seven piles of cards being flipped and arranged in an indecipherable sequence. She had two names for the game, neither of which would appear in an English language dictionary.

I settled in on the neighboring bench to listen to her. The narration that followed was at times difficult to follow. I learned that Ellen had studied computer software and knows five programming languages. After being illegally dismissed from her previous, final employment, she sued them for wrongful termination. A flurry of unsuccessful lawsuits depleted her resources. Ellen bounced from couch to couch until she wore her welcome threadbare. The streets alone welcomed her.

Ellen’s verbal articulation and expressive voice made the veracity of her claims hard to dismiss, yet the warm shimmer within her voice showed she was not tired of life. She possessed a vibrant glow, as if, despite being encrusted with grime and worn with wear, at any moment she would uncover the golden nugget to forever change her fortune.

If she appeared on the Homeless Elocutionist of the Year television game show, she would bring tears and a standing ovation from the crowd, and even the most berating, hardened judge would cave in and give her a compliant thumbs up. This, despite her caked-on street muck and the impressive odors that accompany those with limited accessibility to bathing.

I probed, “So how are you managing to eat, Ellen, with no income?”

Her answer was oblique. Apparently foragers makeshift from a variety of sources which are difficult to easily enumerate.

Suddenly she dug within the plastic bags that apparently housed all of her worldly belongings, extricating a battered teddy bear with two bug-like antennae inexplicably sprouting from its forehead. A faded pink ribbon hung around its neck.

“We’re bear-ly making it!” she confessed, the bright tone in her voice contagious. Her widened eyes were eloquently expressive, with the easy capacity to grab me by the throat.

I squirmed uncomfortably, increasingly cognizant that my own life was stacked unaccountably in my favor.

One advantage of hearing a stranger’s story is that it leaves the option of our own opinions. Sure, Ellen’s story was gripping and persuasive. It challenged me. It bent my stereotypes of a homeless, down-on-her-luck woman.

If it were true.

With no way to establish the veracity of her story, it could all be fabrication. Aren’t the Homeless born manipulators, just waiting to hit up their audience with “The Ask” for a dollar or two? Sure, Ellen seemed accomplished and talented. But she might just as easily be delusional or conniving.

My mental arguments and counter-arguments were like the quick tides of water sloshing in a bathtub. I wanted to walk away, but I felt stuck.

Slowly and quietly, I pulled my wallet from my back pocket, realizing with a start that my choices were limited–I possessed only one dollar and a twenty dollar bills. I awaited a confirmation of which bill to choose, with no result.

But just in case those gripping eyes were telling the truth, I pulled out the twenty.

I thanked her for the time together. “Maybe this will help with your next few meals,” I nearly apologized.

I stepped into the dark and rain of this stormy night, and all the way back, I wondered whom I had really met–and what she had seen in me.