Indelible ink

So the little guy became a Boy Scout on Sunday. I've already chronicled some of my conflicted feelings about the program, but on balance, I think that scouting teaches a solid set of values and skills that translate well into adult life. In my personal and apocalyptic view of the future, we will be stripped of our starter castles and forced to survive on our wits and survival skills. So those camping trips and first-aid merit badges will come in handy when we are out in the woods, once again. I think that I will miss hot showers most of all.

My son will at least begin the path to Eagle Scout – who knows whether or not he will persist. To be an adult with the Eagle Scout cred is a nice thing, but when you look at the kids that are getting their Eagles, it's a pretty nerdy group. Sure, the nerds rule in the end, but it's too late for my son. He doesn't have a nerdy bone in his body. I see him as terminally addicted to cool. I rushed out of the front door this morning to give him the lunch bag that he'd left on the counter, and I could read in his eyes that he was mortified that the kids at the bus stop would see this face-losing episode. "Just give me the lunch and move quickly away from me, Dad," the look said.

As I reflect upon my own scouting experience, I most often think of and share with others the great campouts (I was an Air Force brat in Germany then, and the campouts were tremendous), and the fun activities (lashing together signal towers and communicating via semaphore near the Maritime Museum in Newport News, VA). But if I think more deeply and honestly about the experience, I recall (but do not share) the less enjoyable, the more embarrassing, and the sometimes more painful moments of my scouting life.

Number one on that list revisits me periodically. A wince-evoking memory that recurs as a subconscious tool for counteracting my (occasional?) hubris. The scout troop in Germany was a pretty finely tuned machine - I attribute that to the fact that all of the scouts were military brats and all of the leaders were military men. I held the patrol leaders in high esteem, and I found many of the scouts to be "cool." Darshan Karkhi (pronounced car-key) was just so cool, I still want to be like him. Regular troop meetings included everyone, but there were other meetings held in the back room for leadership. I didn't go to many of these, as I was not a leader, but on one occasion, I was sitting at the large table, almost directly across from the Scoutmaster, listening with awe and respect as he went around the table delineating points of import. I see this Rembrandt-esque scene - the room dark at the edges, illuminated from the middle in a yellowish and sepia hue. The Scoutmaster looked directly at me, said my name, and continued "Quit your bitchin'!" I was stunned. Embarrassed. Speechless. To this day, I don't know exactly what I had done to evoke this from my exalted leader, but I knew at that moment, and I know today, that I deserved it. I think that I have complied with that directive innumerable times over these four intervening decades.

I'll be driving along a quiet stretch of road when a similar and equally vivid memory will play from my personal catalog of internal video clips, unbidden from the depths of my psyche, and I will sometimes gasp aloud from the intensity, the destestability, the pain. "What!?" the kids might say. "Nothing. I just thought of something. That's all." That's all, indeed.

“You forgot to carry the one”

I got up early this morning to do homework. Fifth grade homework can be pretty demanding, especially if you have missed some school due to illness.

My dad had to get up with me, because there was no freakin' way that I was going to do an hour of math before school without the proverbial gun at my head. So Dad held the gun, and I did my math. I also made sure that my dad's level of frustration met or exceeded my own, for that is my M.O. My dad calls it "pushback," but I call it justice. Why does my dad feel that it's his holy obligation to hold my feet to the fire on every stinking aspect of my life? Wouldn't I benefit as much or more by making some mistakes and suffering the consequences on my own? He would save us both so much grief.

I'm going out into the world every day, getting my head bashed in (not literally) by teachers and students, all with their own indecipherable agendas, and when I come home at the end of the day, there's my retired father, jumping my case from the get-go. "Wipe your feet!" "Practice the piano!" "Clean your room!"

Honestly, it never ends.

He has aspirations, my dad. He wants to be a writer and a successful businessman. He wants the admiration of adults and children alike. He's constantly on the go (except for when he's setting a new record on the pinball machine), and he's diverting way too much of his energy trying to make me something I'm not, or at least don't have the desire to be.

Jung stated, "The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents." Well, let me tell ya', I sure wish that my dad had done his homework when he was a kid, so that I wouldn't have to be going through this domestic hell on a daily basis. And if he'd practiced the piano more when he was my age, maybe I'd have a social life.

Granddad is okay, but when my dad was a kid, Granddad was a military officer, and I get the impression that Dad got his ass beat every once in a while. There's no hitting in our house (let's leave my sister out of this), but I think that I'd rather have my butt warmed a little than go through some of these after-school nightmares.

 

We've Got a Rock in Common

Undersized and plastic. Faux frets in Playschool colors. It doesn't sound like a recipe for success, but when the newest version of Guitar Hero comes out in March, there will be dads all over the world forking out another fifty bucks or so to keep peace in the house. Thanks to the magical convergence of rock 'n roll dreams with video game addictions, boys from 10 to 20 have become intimately familiar with the music that provided a backdrop for my formative years. I slide right into the enabler role when I hear "All Along the Watchtower" and "Hot for Teacher" wafting up from the basement. It's something that I never expected to have in common with my kid, and it brings us closer – no question about it. You could have kindly described my dad's feeling for my music back in the day as a suppressed gag reflex, and Rock 'n Roll was a scrim between our lives.

 

I took my son and his friends to the Carnegie Science Center this evening for their eight big screens and a stage of Guitar Hero World Tour. I didn't read the description too carefully, for I was under the impression that the boys would be enrolled in the local part of a national contest for Guitar Hero supremacy. The picture in my mind- and the minds of the pre-teens I was chauffeuring to the Science Center – was one of long pulsing lines of Rock God wanna-be's clamoring for the spotlight of "The Works" theater on the fourth floor – adjacent to the big room of physics experiments. The turnout, in fact, was so light, that the boys were hitting the stage about every third time – getting plenty of opportunity to show off their chops. They did pretty well, too, although the camera trained on the stage and projected onto four of the eight screens didn't excite the kids into movin' with the groovin'. They sat on stools and focused on the tasks at hand – it takes super concentration to rip out these songs at the "expert" level.

I would imagine that this gig will gain in popularity as the weeks progress. This incarnation of the promotion will take place every Saturday night through March, and I learned from asking the facilitators at the event that there were plans to have some nights of contests and perhaps some celebrity appearances. They also indicated that they would be ratcheting things up beginning in the summer by adding the drums to the mix – right now it's just two guitars at a time.

They have a snack stand set up outside, and you can sit on the stools and eat nachos and watch the kids throw down and try to answer Rock trivia questions from the emcees while the next set is loading onto the computer (I was reminded that Jimi Hendrix opened for the Monkees once – and to his chagrin).

The boys loved it, and at $8.00 per person ($5.00 member rate), I imagine that I'll be forking out some extra bling on coming Saturdays.

Trophy Room

I'm working on a small project to honor my son's completion of his Cub Scout career. It's a plaque with an arrow attached, which is painted with stripes corresponding to his achievements. It's a little over the top, but more presentable than most of his commemorative stuff. I hesitate to go the "kids these days" route, but I think that I got one trophy when I was a kid, for being a benchwarmer on a youth league football team – truly a painful period in my socialization process – and I am just as happy that I don't have that reminder about today. In thinking of it now, I recall the indignity of being the only kid on the team without a jersey, my gray sweatshirt a sharp contrast to the heavy blue nylon jerseys with the white shoulder accents and position-appropriate numbers stitched elaborately onto the chests of every other kid on the team. As if that weren't enough, a kid named Starly (I'd spit on him now, even after all these years) would grab my facemask during practice and twist me mercilessly to the ground, where I would occasionally devolve to tears, and thus add indelible shame to my physical pain.

So I don't have much in the way of past-life memorabilia, though I don't imagine that I'd display it now, if I did. Certainly an Olympic Medal would not be hidden away (I've never even known a person who has one – not even a "lowly" Bronze Medal), nor a Nobel Prize. I might even deign to tack my Pulitzer on the wall when I get it.

My kids are wonderful, but I would say quite average middle-American suburban white kids. Fairly talented, but fairly uninspired, doing little more than it takes to get by, but loved and loving. It would be greedy to expect more. They have trophies, though. I can only imagine how many they would have if they were even a little better at sports or academics, for their shelves are fairly bursting as it is with their various awards, certificates, trophies, ribbons, and plaques.

My son won the Pinewood Derby one year (a father-son project), which was a complete fluke, though I get asked all of the time how we did it, and it got back to me later that I was suspected of cheating by using non-regulation wheels. I was wounded by the notion, and as I thought back, I realized that while we were building the car we lost one of the wheels under the workbench. Rather than tear everything apart to find it, we just took one of the wheels from the previous years' cars (a losing car, btw), and slapped it on to the new one, never giving it another thought. I have to say, it took a pretty discerning eye on the part of the suspicious dad to pick up on that wheel. The difference had to be quite subtle. I have long suspected that people who see nefarious intent in others reveal much about their own iniquity.

So the boy is done with Cub Scouts. He enjoyed it, and he is good pals with several of the boys in his Pack, so there was plenty of goofing around and fun during the meetings. I was Assistant Cub Master, which is the perfect parent's job in Cub Scouts, unless you are really looking to add to your workload. We had a skeleton in our closet, though, in that we are Unitarian-Universalists. You may recall that it was some UU's that took the Boy Scouts to task for their anti-gay positions years ago. I was a Boy Scout myself, and I loved it, but I still cringe whenever we are funneled down a religious chute during some scouting activities. Happily, my son experiences no cognitive dissonance over it, and I, like all good atheists, have learned when to keep my religious disbeliefs to myself.

So, on to Boy Scouts. Lots of camping and perhaps, even an Eagle Scout in our future. I would be glad for him, but I frankly wonder if he will stick with it when he feels like it is considered uncool in junior high and high school. He likes to be cool. It's not easy to convey to a kid that what seems supremely important today will lose its bling so quickly in later phases of life. There are plenty of cardboard boxes full of trophies to prove it.

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." Anais Nin

Sham-wow

I was a guest of my dad's at a luncheon in DC with a bunch of other ex-military types cum consultants ("Beltway Bandits"). They didn't all exactly fit this mold, but close enough to give you the flavor of the group. A lot of the casual conversation centered around how easy it used to be to get money for the military. These guys spent a lot of time in the Pentagon working up their pitches to Congress and then becoming chum buddies with Proxmire and Stennet and a lot of other appropriations guys. One of the guys was telling an amusing story of how a bill got "disappeared" via some simple string-pulling, and the humorous reaction that it got from the befuddled writer of the legislation who could no longer locate his baby.

I wouldn't want to give the impression that these are bad guys. Quite the opposite. Very engaging, articulate, and accomplished the most of them, and good pals with my dad. There was a truly hot recently retired Air Force colonel(ette) that I will continue to fantasize about for some time.

This group gets together regularly and eats well, sips wine, and listens to a featured speaker. They all slap each other on the back and rattle off their pedigrees (really, some are impressive – I was unable to fix the exotic scientist's present position, but it was something like Director of Department of Applied Science – and he was all wild-haired and accented and truly Einstein-esque in every way).

The speaker this time was a tech guru from an American company in China (honestly, I am purposely leaving out so many details in deference to my dad's trust), and he goes to CES every year and then wows this older crowd with the gee-gaws and advances that he gleans from that trip. He has 5 or 6 PhD's, and I have to say that he knows his stuff. This presentation is a lot of everyday stuff for most of us Gizmodo/PersonalTech/PCWorld followers, but it really wows this particular crowd, and it was fun to watch him evoke the oohs and aahs from them.

The main thrust of his lecture is the convergence of computing platforms toward the sweet spot of computing. The old guys don't know a lot of this stuff, but they all carry around their smartphones, because they can afford to, and they tap into about 2% of the capabilities of the devices. It's only a short time before that smartphone is their entire computer. Input, display, and battery life are the rapidly advancing technologies that are breaking down the barriers to effortless portability of our comprehensive computer needs (and desires).

A couple of the gadgets seemed kind of yesterday to me (GigaPan for one, and a golf caddy that follows the golfer around the course, for another – although the new ones have enhanced obstacle avoidance), but when he talked about this new Canon EOS 180 mm lens (I looked it up – it's the EF 180mm f/3.5L Macro USM – used for taking macro shots from a distance), he included a discussion about the mathematical improbability of aligning 14 different mirrors and lenses into such perfect harmony, and it opened me up to a concept that I had never heard. The upshot in this particular case was that it had to be a serendipitous accident at some level to have achieved this level of perfection in a lens. He said that this lens costs about 1,300 dollars, but that to exceed its quality by the slightest margin, you would have to spend 35 thousand.

When I asked the speaker about the prospects for white band (this is where I discovered him to be truly on top of developments), he talked about how all of the investors in the WiMax and analogous technologies were writing down their investments because of the quickly advancing 4G technology, which is nearly as good and doesn't require the same (new) investment in infrastructure. Up to this point, I had considered holding out on a netbook purchase while I waited for WiMax, but it has me rethinking that whole equation.

At the end of the lecture, the general hubbub was something like "I got about a third of that!"

For me, it was more like "Hmm – I'd like to tap into that market niche where I get to go to CES and then wow a bunch of old guys for a lunch and a speaker's fee and be able to write the whole thing off.."

Drugstore Manqué

One of the tasks following my grandparents’ passing was to go through all of their things and dispose/disperse as appropriate. It was fairly straightforward as these things go – I would imagine that most people doing this chore are confronted with memories and mold in about equal proportion.

My grandparents were of substantial means, thanks to my grandfather’s successful home building career and their relatively modest appetites. They were children of the (first) Great Depression, and were thus averse to excessive expenditure (or at least the appearance thereof). There were exceptions over the years (furs and Cadillacs), but we noticed their parsimony most when we were ourselves feeling a bit short. They saved their largess for the estate. No complaints here.

As I went through their belongings, I reconstructed aspects of their lives that weren’t so apparent while they were living.

Although they had a modern house and a regular house cleaner (and my grandmother was often seen on her knees scrubbing the floors), I came upon (disgusting) evidence of a thriving mouse population.

They had an extensive library, but it was clear that they had devolved over the years from Faulkner to Updike to Michener to Grisham to (Harold) Robbins.

My grandfather’s tools were dated, as he had purchased these things in his younger years. Vintages ranged from a heavy Craftsman electric drill with attached chuck key to hand drills and bit braces. Screws and nails and the like were stored in baby-food jars (some even with their lids screwed to the underside of the shelves, just like in my dad’s shop). I inherited these things gladly and incorporated them into my own growing organization of hardware. I don't know if he ever really used these things, for he wasn't in least handy around the house. A Case Western Reserve scholar in Engineering. Go figure.

To me, their most astounding (and revealing) collection was amassed in their declining years, and was discovered in their spacious bathroom. I have to believe that you have never seen such a variety of band-aids and bandages outside of a drug store. If you were poor, or even if you were only frugal, you would find a band-aid, depending on how organized you were, in one drawer or another, and that would be it. I had to speculate that my grandparents must have rushed out to the store each and every time they required bandaging, and made sure on each visit to obtain every possible configuration of bandage upon each visit. From butterflies to plaster bandages, steri-strips, waterproof, sheer, knuckle, sport, knee and elbow, hypoallergenic, antibacterial, antibiotic, clear, fabric, blister, callous, non-stick, active, and extreme length. Not to mention Sponge-Bob or Stars and Smiley Faces. I must have found a dozen bottles of Campho-Phenique, and countless repetitions of Robitussin, Vapo-Rub, Alka-Seltzer, and Milk of Magnesia. The list would go on for pages. You can’t sell this stuff (although I once saw someone trying to sell their toiletries at a garage sale before I had context for this preposterous conduct). To make matters worse, although I figured that we’d save a reasonable amount of the stuff, its combined aroma is so revolting that it evokes a gag reflex. Whenever I open the large plastic bin containing our retained portion of this medical stockpile, I must be prepared to hold my breath while I dig for the required item. It’s a testament to modern packaging that you can walk down the aisle of a drugstore without experiencing the smallest bit of this miasmic discomfiture.

Every man serves a useful purpose: A miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.
Laurence J. Peter

I stopped paying the bills to write this...

Our piano tuner was telling me about her husband’s job. For twenty-five dollars an hour, Henry does pretty much anything you’d want done around the house that doesn’t involve getting dirty. He doesn't have many clients, but some of his clients employ him for a full day every week, so he carries a pretty full schedule.

Some of his duties include some pet care (but no child care), minor repairs around the house, transportation (for some elderly clients), and administrative duties.

Henry has a client who is an attorney married to an attorney. No kids, these two lawyers enjoy a very full schedule, and Henry is employed to attend to their household administration. He pays their bills, monitors their home maintenance, and schedules specialists (plumbers, HVAC, yard care, house cleaner, etc.). I’m sure that there are many other tasks that are shunted his way, but these fit into the description that the piano tuner gave.

All of this is nice, and it prompts reflection upon the ways that people earn a living, but for some of us, it may also induce immediate daydreams of the ways that this luxury could free up time for higher-priority dimensions of day-to-day living. Many of us who take care of these things on our own find that much of our “free time” is filled with maintenance-of-life issues, and that our true discretionary time is even less than we often calculate. I would imagine that Henry gets these things done more quickly than we do, as he is accountable to his clients for his time, and he approaches the tasks more as a job – less likely to be postponed by the persistent interruptions of life at home.

The kicker for me came after I speculated that Henry ought to have a backlog of clients based solely upon the certain recommendation that he would get from the lawyer client. She must be so pleased with his service that her acquaintances – likely of similar lifestyle and income level – would be eager to enjoy the same luxury.

“Oh, no,” replied the piano tuner. “He is sworn to secrecy. The lawyer wants everyone she knows to think that she does it all on her own.”

People find life entirely too time-consuming.
Stanislaw J. Lec