The shades are descending; they’re being pulled down. It’s the end of an era.
Today was the last reunion of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. The Association is being officially disbanded.
One Association member who survived the Japanese attack explains, “We just ran out of gas, that’s what it amounted to. We felt we ran a good course for 70 years. Fought a good fight. We have no place to recruit people anymore: Dec. 7 only happened on one day in 1941.”
The membership of the Association is gradually evaporating from the attrition of old age, poor health and death.
It’s an unavoidable reality. No matter what our age, change due to external influences presents its challenges, whether from age and health issues, or from job loss. We feel less in demand—less needed.
We may feel like out-of-print books. The contents are still useable, but the worn cover and bent spine are not so fashionable anymore. Our sphere of influence—if we feel we ever had one—is contracting still further.
That’s life. Over time, we sense our world eroding. Tasks that we performed with ease and skill are handed off to other folks we don’t know. No matter that we still can handle the tasks with the same ease and skill. Others don’t perceive it that way, and they are the ones now in control. It’s time for us to move on.
So…what’s next? Move on to what? Our ego feels deflated.
But it’s not like there’s nothing else to do.
There’s time to focus on relationships and the skills required to being a good friend. Listening more and talking less. Befriending those who have no ability to advance our own ambitions. Thanking them, aloud.
There’s time to focus on reinforcing our values. Relaxing one discipline in our lives seems to relax several disciplines. If we write down the things we would like most to change about ourselves, they nearly always relate to the lack of specific disciplines. Time to focus on our values.
There’s time to focus on undeveloped skills. A friend of mine is taking up writing. Always a good verbal communicator, job loss and health issues forced him to re-think his goals. He’s retooling himself to write promotional materials. He’s completed the coursework. He’s made contacts. He’s reinventing himself.
Maybe we should close the shades on the room in which we find ourselves, move on to the next room, and again eagerly raise the shades.
This year’s Thanksgiving festivities brought out the best in some of us.
Someone attached partially-completed notes to trees, a park bench, and anywhere else they could draw attention in front of one of our favorite little eateries.
The creators of the notes began many of them with, “I am thankful for…” with a blank space left for passersby to complete with their own words, while some were intentionally left blank, awaiting creative and heartfelt comments.
The note about friends is hard to beat.
But here are some other suggestions:
Perhaps it takes a purer faith to praise God for unrealized blessings than for those we once enjoyed or those we enjoy now. ~A.W. Tozer
O Lord that lends me life, Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness. ~William Shakespeare
Got no check books, got no banks. Still I’d like to express my thanks – I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night. ~Irving Berlin
Maybe your secret friend was someone who you thought others would not approve of. Or perhaps that person didn’t quite fit your style because he or she was quite different from you. It’s not an easy thing when loyalty confronts conventional expectations.
One of my secret friends is a student I teach in the parole office. Give him some hair and remove his head-to-toe skinhead tattoos and he’d be your best next door neighbor. Thoughtful. Kind. Caring.
But with tattooed skinhead symbols, skulls scrawled all over him, and “5150” (“a person deemed to have a mental disorder that makes them a danger to him or her self, and/or others and/or gravely disabled”) around his neck, and he appears to be a social persona non grata. Not the sort of fellow you might want to be perceived as being your friend.
I’ve known him for over two years. He struggles to progress toward the academic goals I’ve hoped for him in my literacy lab at the parole office. Medications cause him to slump over his computer terminal frequently. I wake him up. Sometimes he leaves the class in a drug-induced stupor.
If he stopped taking the drugs, he would resume cutting his legs with his pocketknife. His legs are numb from nerve damage, making it difficult for him to ride his bicycle, his only means of transportation.
He started taking drugs to control his psychoses at the age of five. Growing up, he regularly battled his violent father, who soon left him and his mother. Now he now lives with a girlfriend in a motel, which, because of his disabilities, is partially subsidized by the parole department. Ironically, his girlfriend works as a security guard.
At age 15, he was incarcerated. He served 15 years for attempted murder and for assaulting a corrections officer while in prison.
Once enamored with skinheads, he now disdains them, recognizing that he gave up much of his life to remain loyal to their errant beliefs. An iron cross now covers the swastika tattooed on the back of his hand.
My friend believes in God, in many ways to God, and in many gods. He asks me to pray for him, and I do. He is glad for it, and he tells me so, and he tells me he prays for me.
In time, our paths will inevitably part. And when they do, we both will have benefited from our journey together.
I should have known better. But my curiosity and emotions got ahold of me during that early morning trudge to meet my train—what could the clamor mean, these shouting voices echoing through this normally peaceful and quiet college campus? In the distance, the voices grew louder. I was onto the trail of a Happening! Could it be the beginning of yet another “Occupy” protest with folks sitting-in to rail against big banks and corporate villains? Perhaps I would stumble upon a breaking story, worthy of the evening news. And I was equipped with my video-enabled iPhone—I had to investigate! But I’d better be fast. I usually have a few minutes to spare before the train arrives. It would have to be a two-minute or less diversion for me to still be able to intercept my train.
I rounded the corner and came upon the marchers who had taken up their protest. I grabbed my iPhone and began recording the quickly-developing events. But wait, there were no police to control the gathering crowd. A lone security guard watched from his golf cart-like buggy, more amused at the event than concerned for my safety. What if this crowd should seek a target and take their anger against the system out on me, the news reporter? I didn’t exactly panic at the thought—but maybe I blanched—yes, that’s it—a full blanch.
It gradually dawned on me. This was no full-bore, nearly-getting-out-of-control protest. It was almost polite. And there were no slogans decrying “the Man” or “the System.” Instead, I learned that it was a student-led advocacy to improve the wages of the college food service workers, hardly the sort of event that would threaten my life or make the evening news.
I recognized I would have to move quickly. I concluded my video recording. My two-minute long diversion left me no time to spare. I launched into a shortcut to the train station to save time; I cut quickly to the back of the building to shorten my train trek. But wait! A large construction project blocked my path. I quickly found a way around it and squirmed through, only to have my path disappear behind a construction fence. I backtracked and then tried to go the long way around the construction, ending up nearly across the street from the train station. I walked quickly, relieved to have found a way out of my quandary. Just as I completed this detour, I discovered I had entered another cul-de-sac. Never mind. I would cut through the hedge to the street.
I failed to recognize that a hidden chain-link fence ran the length of the hedge. I broke into a trot inspecting for any way out. Unfortunately, I was moving directly away from the train station. Without finding a break in the fence, I came upon a tennis court. Surely, there would be a gate out of the tennis court area, and yes, there was! I hustled to it, backpack now jouncing smartly on my back, and found—a large padlock and chain barred my exit! I was stuck like a lab rat in a maze. There was no way out.
With few minutes until the train’s approach, I made a desperate, beeline charge back toward the site of the rioting students, where my shortcut path had first gone awry. The backpack bounced violently as I hit full stride, jostling my lunch and tumbling my coffee thermos. Would I make it to the train in time? Could my heart manage the unaccustomed and sudden surge of adrenalin? Would subsequent passengers find me, exhausted, splayed out in the shrubs?
As I urged my body toward a sprint, I passed a middle-aged couple, who politely bade me a pleasant, “Good morning!” as though my reckless flight, panting breath and galloping backpack were the commonest occurrence on their slow daily stroll.
I hurtled through the intersection, daring a passing bus or car to obstruct my path. The clanging bell announced the lowering of the crossing gates. I told myself I had to make it. Faster! Faster!
And then it was over. I seized the hand grab, bounced up the single step and tumbled aboard the train, the last passenger to alight.
Drenched with perspiration, I steadied my breathing, trying to hide my flushed and panting state. I eased into a seat beside an unknowing passenger lost in sleep.
Seconds before, I would have risked a coronary to make this train. But like many fleeting life goals, once I had achieved it, I was ready to board the next train to the familiar comforts of home.
An urgent voice came over the intercom: “All personnel evacuate the building immediately!”
Agents quickly stuck their heads into my classroom door at the parole office to see if I needed help clearing the students from the room. I grabbed my indispensable possessions—backpack, coffee mug, and iPhone charger—and despite the urgency of the message, casually stopped by to use the restroom on the way out.
This was our second bomb threat on two successive Tuesdays, so the novelty had worn off. That’s why I assembled my belongings and executed the evacuation at a leisurely pace.
Six months ago, we had our first bomb threat, and my evacuation tactics were far less polished. I had bolted from the chair, bruising my thigh on the low-hanging desk drawer, barely concealing my semi-panicked plea for students to exit—quickly, please! We had hustled to the far side of the parking lot, speculating about how long we would be outside, and was there really a bomb? If so, who had planted it and why? Creative conjecture ran rampant. What if the building blew up? Were we far enough away to not risk injury? To top it off, I then realized—I had to urgently use the restroom!
But there was no such anxiety this time. I was a seasoned veteran—an experienced bomb-scare advisor. I knew it would take two-and-a-half hours for the bomb-sniffing dog to arrive and run its course through the building with promises of puppy-treats dancing in its brain for a job well-done. A final rooftop sweep would signal the final “all clear.” By that time, I could easily hike the three-quarters of a mile to Starbucks, sip a Cafe Americano, check my e-mail messages, and leisurely return. So I did.
As I walked, I wondered. Who could have called in this parole office bomb scare? A discontented parolee? An agent threatened with job loss because of agency downsizing? A cleaning crew contractor, disgruntled by ongoing cockroach wars?
I was determined to discover who the culprit might be.
After my hike back from Starbucks, I still had time to kill. So I opted for pancakes at Dennys, where I discovered a glut of other refugee staff members from the parole office, killing time, sipping coffee, munching on selections from the Breakfast Specials section of the menu.
And then the obvious conclusion struck me.
I’m no detective. But I can sniff out a Denny’s manager who’s just a bit too eager to bloat a day’s profit from the misfortune of traumatized, bomb-threatened parole staff, fattening his income with my humble short stack of wheat pancakes and the surrounding sea of parole agents downing oversized three-egg Spanish omelets and greasy hashed brown potatoes.
The Denny’s manager – he’s the one calling in the bomb threats.
“Familiarity breeds contempt, while rarity wins admiration.” –Apuleius (124 AD – 170 AD)
Last Thursday, on my way home from work, my train missed my stop. Now I could have expected to possibly miss my stop from train-induced slumber, but never have I been on a train that missed a stop.
To be clearer, the train performed its customary stop, but the doors on my car did not open. Unable to disembark, the train soon carried on its way, with us, the unwilling passengers who were unable to disembark, still jammed behind the train’s closed doors. Our station quickly passed behind us.
“Press the black button!” someone from our end of the car yelled to those imprisoned behind the doors at the far end of the car. A yelling chorus soon began. “Press the darn button!”
Someone finally pressed the button, apparently alerting the conductor to our unfortunate dilemma, and the train halted in the No Man’s Land that was neither my stop nor the next stop, but somewhere between. Outside, there were only scrub bushes and the gravelly bed of the train tracks.
Eventually, the voice of the conductor came over the intercom, explaining that we would back up to the wayward station we had passed. But there was no movement for five minutes. Finally, the voice on the intercom again: “We do not have permission to back up. We will continue on to the next stop.”
Mild panic spread through the still-standing passengers. How would they get to their awaiting autos, parked at the train station behind us, quickly receding from view? How long would it take to catch the next train going the opposite direction? With some of the women wearing tortuous high heels, would they be forced to walk back to our distant, intended station?
I decided not to wait to find out. When the train finally halted at the next station and disgorged us like confused tourists, I disembarked and guided a blind fellow traveler to the westward-bound boarding platform of this unfamiliar station. Then I started walking homeward.
Fortunately, this station and my usual station were equidistant to my home; I would later measure both routes homeward to be an identical 1.9 miles.
Like ants on auto-pilot returning to their mound, our well-traveled routes always seem shorter than less familiar ones. Today’s path forced me toward new decisions. The homeward hike seemed far longer because of the choices along the way. Which red light would offer me the shorter wait to cross the street? Would the sidewalk or bicycle path be the more direct route? With no experience to inform me, I followed my heart. A broad wooden bridge stretched before me on the bike path. In the growing dusk, I was all by myself, and I stopped.
Construction workers must have left this wooden bridge for my use alone, at this time, on this day, to service my displaced homeward hike.
To my left, I heard the distant sound of the freeway. To my right, a partially-occupied condo complex waited silently for the arrival of the inhabitants at the workday’s conclusion. In the distance, a train horn heralded the arrival of the westbound train that would return the displaced commuters to their familiar surroundings, ants returning to the mound.
A fallen leaf blowing along the wooden bridge reminded me that there are some choices in life that we are able to select, like a well-worn path home. And there are some that we don’t get to choose, like uncooperative train doors.
And sometimes, the only choice we really have is whether we make a graceful transition between the two.
I first learned of the famed corner of Hollywood and Vine while reading a Dennis the Menace comic as a young boy. The famed Taft Building still stands here, once home to offices of the silent film era’s movers and shakers including Charlie Chaplin and Will Rogers. Nearby, of course, are other landmarks such as the Capitol Records Building, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Hollywood sign and Graumann’s Chinese Theater.
And then, there’s this. A few weeks before Halloween, these early celebrants paraded on this famous corner of Hollywood and Vine—in fact, the Zombies were on parade. They groaned, they grunted, they limped on wounded limbs. They stared their otherworldly, blank stare into my eyes. And then, to my relief, they moved on without capturing me to join in their ghoulish procession.
On Monday night, I escorted my wife to the hospital. She had somehow acquired an extremely painful and potentially very dangerous abscess. The emergency room was loaded with a riot of bacterial- and viral-infested and otherwise-wounded victims. Some displayed hastily bandaged injuries still seeping blood. An elderly woman moaned in her wheelchair, clasping a cloth over her face as she rocked back and forth, while her husband, supporting himself in his own walker, stared blankly alternately at her and the wall. There was rare seating available for emergency room johnny-come-latelies. I estimated 75 people crammed into this bin of ailing people. “Golly,” I thought to myself. “If it’s this bad in America, what’s it like in Bangladesh?”
Eventually, after completing multiple copies of forms each repeating the same questions, my wife’s name was called. At least, we think it was called. With no speaker system in the room, the hoarse yells of the hospital staff were barely audible above the ruckus of shrieking babies, the generalized sniffling, sighing, and moaning of the occupants, and the horseplay of those who obviously only accompanied the core populous of the emergency room.
She disappeared behind curtained glass doors. I waiting for her to be processed—blood- and urine-sampled, fingerprinted, name-and-birthdate-verified, mother’s-maiden-name-queried and the like. I passed the time chatting with my high school-aged neighbor about the perils of football while examining his purpling right ankle. More than two hours later, when my wife had still not returned, I asked about her progress. I was informed that she had been admitted into an Emergency Room, and, yes, would I like to go in? I wondered how long that I, like a hound dog anticipating his master’s return, might have waited along with the huddled masses of our fellow sufferers.
I found my wife in a non-private group room, leaning over the frame of bed ER #25, experiencing frightful pain and nausea that made it impossible for her to lie down. Mercifully, shortly thereafter we were escorted to ER #16, where she lay down and stared at the ceiling. Eventually, a nurse popped her head in, and told us our wait for a room would not be long. Six hours later, I had memorized every inch of ER #16. I knew which medical products were in short supply and had retraced the trail of the curious dried blood drops on the floor.
Finally, the long-awaited curtain pullback from the emergency room doctor! He informed us that he would create an incision to relieve the pressure and blood from the offending abscess. Unfortunately, the procedure preceded the administration of a stiff painkiller; only a weakly numbing drug wound its way through the clear plastic tubing to the needle dripping in her arm.
I’m glad I departed the room prior to the doctor’s medical procedure. Upon my return, my pale and trembling wife reported that the pain from the events–the slicing and enthusiastic squeezing of the barely-dulled abscess–rated right up there with childbirth. There were new trails of blood to track on the floor. I helped creatively arrange my wife on the gurney to best contain her newly inflicted pain.
Time passed slowly. The gurney was uncomfortable, not intended for extended lounging by the wounded. It was narrow and the plastic was slippery, contributing to the fall to the cold, tile floor that my wife incurred as she inaugurated a hazardous journey to the solitary men’s/women’s combo restroom. It was down the hall, hidden in the corner of the non-private patient emergency room receiving area, where patient beds lined the walls like fighter planes on the deck of a Navy aircraft carrier.
As the hours dragged on, we would each have opportunity to visit the restroom many times. I narrowly missed the pandemonium that ensued when one out-of-sorts patient yelled for help from within this restroom. He claimed he could not manage his quest for a successful “Number Two” experience alone; he needed assistance. When none came, his yelling continued until he finally exited the room, holding his prize feces aloft in his hand like a treasure-hound, for all of us to see. His triumph did not last long; nurses descended upon him from every corner, like—well—like flies on poop. I know this happened because my wounded wife witnessed it all during her long trek from said restroom back to ER #16.
The night lengthened, and I grew covetous of my wife’s little gurney and the brief naps it provided her. My chair’s legs protruded far enough that I could not place it close enough for the wall to support my head. I attempted several alternate variations. In one construction, I extended my buttocks nearly off the end of the seat so that my neck could barely catch the back of the chair. Another variant took the opposite approach, featuring the top of my head protruding over the top of the chair so my crown barely reached the support of the wall. The frailty of human anatomy proved both of these options unsatisfactory. I found myself fitfully alternating between one and the other, leaving precious little time for sleep.
ER #16 held us captive for nearly 30 hours. We greeted our first nightshift nurse for the second time at the beginning of her second night’s 12-hour shift. Doctors drifted in, all asking the same questions we had already provided the previous visiting M.D. My wife’s wound was un-bandaged, examined, and re-bandaged multiple times.
During all that time, I was preoccupied with sleep, until finally, regretfully too late, I figured out what should have been obvious. Borrowing a style from my fellow train-riding commuters, I decided to do the Train-Rider’s Head-Bob. I sat somewhat erect on the chair and allowed my chin to drift downward in slumber, risking a dangerous neck sprain should my head collapse to one side. But it didn’t. For 15 precious minutes that night, I slept; it was suddenly interrupted by the final doctor’s visit, telling us to prepare for surgery.
The purgatory of Emergency Room #16 finally concluded. Perhaps our release depended upon my eventual discovery of the successful, if brief, napping technique.
The doctor told me that my wife would be in surgery for an hour, and would I please stay in the surgery waiting room. Two and one-half hours later, in the middle of my second night without sleep, and with plenty of time for my sleep-deprived brain to conjure all sorts of visions of what was transpiring, I was informed that she was out of surgery and resting comfortably in her room, and would I like to see her. You bet.
Tonight we are home. We’ve been gone two days, which is 48 hours, or 2,880 minutes, and it felt every second of it.
Meanwhile, the waiting room at the hospital is likely still full.
The passing of Apple founder and genius Steve Jobs leaves a cavernous hole in the unrelenting technological race to be the First and the Best. Pundits question whether Apple will be able to keep cranking out cutting edge creations that others seem only capable of feeble imitation. Time will tell.
Well-deserved accolades honoring Steve Jobs will go on and on.
The rest of us are not Steve Jobs. So how can we leave our own small mark on our world?
Each time I hike from Santa Monica to Venice Beach, I pass the very first Hot Dog on a Stick stand. In 1946, Dave Barham bought the concession stand for $400, money he borrowed from his older brother. He named his new enterprise Party Puffs. Having discovered there were no chain store distributors for corn dogs, he developed the now-famous corn dog, which could easily be eaten while walking the beach. He renamed his enterprise Hot Dog on a Stick around 1960. The unmistakable waitress costumes were designed to invoke familiarity; customers perceived a familiar person each time they were waited on. Their tall caps were meant to suggest Las Vegas showgirls. To push the scale further, his servers stood behind the counter on platforms to appear even taller. Barham died in 1991, at the age of 77, and Fredrica Thode succeeded him as the corporation’s president. Barham had hired her as a receptionist in 1980. Today, the company is an employee-owned corporation with more than 100 locations.
Barham’s governing principle was keeping things simple and making it all entertaining.
A corn dog is no Apple computer. And Dave Barham is no Steve Jobs. But keeping it simple and entertaining are values they both promoted.
When our world seems to become more complex and less fun, there’s probably a lesson there for each of us.
We’ve seen these two Tweedledum and Tweedledee-like fellows before. Maybe not these identical fellows, but we’ve seen similar folks.
Here they are, minutes before they begin their performance, while they are still bendable, putting the finishing touches on their costumes.
Soon they will begin their street-side mime routines, becoming frozen and unmoving on the sidewalk, mimicking metallic sculptures stiffly locked in place, awaiting the monetary incentive from a passerby to grind into action. Until then, they will remain still and silent.
While in their static position, these two will appear to have been in the company of King Midas, who turned everything he touched into precious but lifeless metal by virtue of the magical gift he received, fulfilling his insatiable greed.
An uncertain child bearing a small gratuity for the street performers will eventually approach them hesitantly on tip-toe, coaxed on by an encouraging parent. At the moment the child’s meager coin reaches the performers’ basket, the frozen sculptures will leap into action, gyrating through a crazy series of excited moves, brought spontaneously, and briefly, to life.
Gradually, the robots will appear to run out of power and again hibernate, stiffly awaiting their next coin-induced spasmodic flurry of movement.
Other children’s touches will again break the Midas spell over the characters, periodically unfreezing them. During these moments, the children’s innocent, Un-Midas Touches will briefly assuage the urgent need and greed displayed by the metallic figures.
For a few moments, they, like ourselves, will shake off isolating temporal concerns and, once again, remember what it is to be fully alive.
