Why the Pump Won’t Work

In Subterranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan used a phrase about a pump that didn’t work because “the vandals took the handles.”  I thought of handles the other day when I broke yet another.

When we departed Taiwan in 2018 I left behind the tools I’d accumulated over previous decades. These included at least two cast iron hammer heads.  There were two because either they were different styles, or because when I broke the wooden handles with which they came equipped, I couldn’t remember the precise size for replacing it the next time I visited a hardware store.

Hand tools in Taiwan are relatively inexpensive. That includes things like spades (for digging holes in the backyard). Repurchase of an entire item, rather than just a replacement handle, was usually the preferred remedy. The process of attaching an iron spade, or a cast iron hammer head, to a new handle can be done poorly, anyway. One result of easy replacement is the accumulation of iron parts without the handles required to make them functional.

A couple days ago here in Michigan I set about transplanting a peony bush from a corner where it is largely unseen to a location where it will be visible while standing at the kitchen sink. The weather had been rainy, and the soil was easily dug. At the place where the bush was to go, I “described” a square hole with my spading fork before leaning on it to lift things. My efforts were greeted with the handle snapping off. I’m thankful that no injury followed. But I wanted to complete the task, so used an unsuited tool to do so.  Well enough alone?  I really like that fork, so now I’m in the market for a 30 inch D-handle. The question before me is whether to act as if I were still home in Taiwan, and buy a whole new thing, or search out and order up a just the part I’m needing. On this hangs whether the eventual next owner of this property gets an entire spading fork, or, like those who got the tools left behind in Taiwan, some metal for recycling.

David Alexander now digs holes, or not, in Holland MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

A Dog Reminded Me

Unlike many of Taiwan’s older cities, Kaohsiung, where we resided from 1982 to 2007, was built to a plan. Streets follow grids that make sense. They’re not laid out along where property lines fell based on paddy field drainage systems of the 19th century. Broad boulevards separate neighborhoods in sensible patterns. Main main roads are numbered in a literary fashion: One Heart; Two Sages; Three Abundancies; Four Principles; Five Fortunes; Six Directions; Seven Tenets; Eight Moralities; Nine Possibilities; and Ten Completenesses. 

A long stretch of Four Principles Road is lined with Kapok trees, which have beautiful white and pink flowers. These emit a scent that attracts bats, which facilitate pollination. The trees are very fruitful, and each ripe fruit produces up to 200 seeds. When the fruit bursts open, the seeds, attached to silky fibres that resemble cotton, spread widely. In wild settings, kapoks colonize open spaces and quickly turn them into more forest. .

From 1995 to 1999 I attempted to start a storefront church under those trees. I wish I could say that it is still there, but it’s not. The project failed. I was sad about that for a long time. A passing dog caused me to remember it fondly last week. One Sunday after church the air outside was filled with cottony fibres from trees, drifting past on a gentle breeze. In places it rolled up into drifts strangely resembling snowfall.The dozen or so people who had gathered for church that day were all happy together. 

Walking along with a breeze at our backs last week, I noticed some white fluffy stuff coming by. It was too warm for snow, and there’s no kapok growing around here. It turned out to have been from a shaggy white dog out on a leash.  

David Alexander remembers his 39 years of life in Taiwan from a perch in Holland, MI.  

Inside and Out

Once you’ve given your name and address to a magazine publisher or not-for-profit organization, you get put onto a mailing list. In the runup to our son’s birth in 1991 in Taiwan, we accepted a free sample of baby formula (just in case) in exchange for our data. After that, though we moved a couple of times, we’d receive age-appropriate mailings from companies promoting their wares for our growing child.

Photo by Harlie Raethel on Unsplash

After retiring in the USA a couple years ago, I signed up for a health screening opportunity presented by a private company that would set up for a day in a Veterans’ Hall here or a church fellowship room there. I got several “valuable and otherwise pricey” scans at low cost and with little trouble. The printed report came in the mail a few weeks later, and I also landed on a mailing list. Now, whenever the team shows up in my own or an adjacent zipcode, I get a note or an email. 

Sometime in the late 90s in Kaohsiung City I began getting an annual physical exam at different local hospitals. Other than for the physical, I wasn’t registered there, so there was no file into which to put things like X-rays.  I’d go for the exam and the data would be collected. All physical records of it were given to me when I returned for the report 10 days later.  At least one place presented me with a large envelope that contained my chest X-ray.  What does one DO with something like that?   Of course, I took it home and stuffed it on a shelf atop a closet.

Packing up in preparation to depart Taiwan two years ago, that X-ray emerged from the pile. It didn’t make the cut for transport to our retirement home in the USA.  The report, cryptically included in a little booklet, is probably somewhere in the files. What I WAS 20 odd years ago, having little to do with what I have become since, and what I am now. 

Would that I could see into my soul.

David Alexander muses on the incomprehensible in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Approved by the Postmaster General

Unlike the USA, where only postal workers are legally allowed access to the mailbox at the end of the driveway or next to the front door of a private residence, anybody in Taiwan can put anything into somebody’s mailbox. Across our 39 years in Taiwan we resided in several different sorts of buildings, each of which had its own particular version of a “mail slot” or “mailbox.”

Letter carriers in Taiwan are skilled professionals. If something is clearly addressed, it gets to the mailbox there. If there’s no mailbox, it’s dropped onto the ground in front of the door.  People who don’t like their mail getting wet or trod upon get the idea pretty quickly, and mount a box somewhere near. 

In the USA, who may put something into a mailbox is not, apparently, the only thing over which postal authorities exert the power of approval.  I can’t speak for mailboxes affixed to house fronts, because I’m not in the habit of walking up them. (too many Americans have guns, and some are legally self-empowered to defend their front porches against home invasions).  But when walking in parts of town where mailboxes stand on posts near the roadside, I’ve noticed that many bear the words: “Approved by the Postmaster General.”

The power to approve these began in the 1890s when delivery to rural addresses began. Designs have been modified and updated over the years, but approval remains in the hands of the postmaster general and her local officers. People are free to build and install their own boxes without the “approval” statement embossed thereon, and many do.

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

 

 

So long as I get mail, I care little whether it comes by hand of an agent of the US government or whether it comes into an approved box. I just like to hear from folks. 

                                 Photo by Matt Green on Flickr                                                               

 

David Alexander notices stuff in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

International Signs

So long as the symbols are fairly representative, traffic signs in different countries can be understood by drivers from foreign lands. Arabic numerals represent speed clearly enough, and things like leaping animals or railroad tracks communicate clearly. Police tape, whether it’s used to cordon off a collapsed bridge, a burnt out building or a crime scene, is fairly international, too, even when it’s printed in traditional Chinese characters and bears the phoenix emblem of Taiwan’s constabulary. 

A few weeks ago on a walk through our urban neighborhood in the USA, we noticed a home not unlike our own with yellow caution tape strung between poles all around the front yard, which had been dug up in several places. My imagination began to soar.  “Why do you suppose the police have put up crime scene tape around that yard?” I asked.  “What do you think the police are digging for over there?”  “How many bodies, or pieces of bodies do you suppose they’ve found?”   “When did the crime happen?”  I was soon shut down and told to do my musing in private.  I wasn’t even allowed to cross the street to have a closer look. 

Reflecting on the positioning of the posts, tape and “diggings”, I’m thinking it was the installation of some underground sprinkling apparatus, and the contractor’s or homeowner’s insurance company was being legitimately vigilant. 

But buried body parts sure makes for a better story.

David Alexander now imagines vain things in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

 

Undue Influence

Kevin, a friend in high school, drove what I thought was the coolest car, a 1953 MGTD, which apparently was his father’s, but he drove it.  In contrast, I had “inherited” the use of a 1960 Ford Falcon that belonged to my brother, who had gone to serve in the Army early in 1968. I felt like (in fact, I was) a dweeb, and the car simply confirmed it.

After high school I didn’t wait. I went directly to the Army. 18 months later, returning from Vietnam, I bought an MG of my own, a 1956 MGA.  I set off for Fort Rucker, AL in that thing. Getting to Midland, Texas, where the crankshaft broke.My next year was spent carless, which probably saved my life.  

I returned to California in a 1946 Plymouth early in 1972. It died the next year. But I hadn’t learned my lesson. I bought another MGA, which was nothing but trouble. In 1976 I moved an ocean away, to Taiwan, and spent three more years carless.  Somehow, having no car and, particularly, not an MGA, meant I had money in my pockets for a change.

Automobiles have been into and out of my life at various times. I’ve been influenced by things like cost, gas mileage, reliability reports, and all kinds of things that have nothing to do with cool. Once again, as with the Falcon when I was in high school, I have a dweeb car, a 2008 Honda Civic.  But undue influence may soon rear its ugly head again.  My brother-in-law, typically a Subaru driver, moved to New Mexico 3 years ago. He’s 62.  Last month he bought a pickup truck. I’d better watch out. 

David Alexander currently dweebs it in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Naming

There are many names for bodies of freshwater in English and in Taiwanese. “Lake” is very grand. “Pond” is more tranquil.  “Reservoir” sounds downright industrial.   Merely changing how something is designated may change how we feel about it.  A reservoir, of course, is created by human action of some kind.  North of Los Angeles, CA there’s Van Norman Lake, which receives water from Owens Valley, hundreds of miles away, for distribution throughout the city.  Before it was built, it wasn’t there. Naming it by its function is inelegant. 

Photo by L N on Unsplash

It’s like that in Taiwanese, too.  There are many words for bodies of freshwater, at least two of which are used for artificially formed ones to make them seem more appealing. We lived near “bright and clear” lake in Kaohsiung City for 25 years. It was surrounded by parkland and a golf course, but it hadn’t always been there. It wa a reservoir created to hold water for agricultural and industrial use during the 5 decades that Taiwan was a colonial outpost of the Japanese empire. 

That’s also the case of “Sun Moon Lake”, in the central Taiwan mountains. Originally much smaller, the building of dams to raise the water level to increase hydroelectric generating potential have made this “industrial site” into a reservoir, though it is too beautiful for such a name. 

Photo by T. Bennert  CC  SA  3.0

Calling something how you’d like to think of it, rather than what it is, came into conversation in our house as the weather warmed with the change of seasons. A pair of attached rooms on the front of the house has set me to musing. My long suffering spouse wants to call them “the yellow porch” and “the white porch” based on the color of the paint on the walls of each.  I’m of the mind that this is too much like calling a body of freshwater a “reservoir” when there are other words available.  My suggestion has been for one of them to be “the solarium” and the other “the lanai”.   I’ll settle for “the verandah” though. But I’m not budging from that. 

Photo by Francesca Tosolini on Unsplash

David Alexander now spends time on the lanai at his stately Holland, MI home after 39 years in Taiwan.

Ducks!

Photo by JOSHUA COLEMAN on Unsplash

 

Out for a walk last week, we passed a pair of ducks waddling along about half a mile from the nearest open water. They were shiny iridescent green.  Quite a contrast from the thousands of white ducks being farmed around the southern Taiwan campus of Aletheia University, where I taught as an adjunct between 2010 and 2016.  The campus was out in the country, and every duck was snowy white. They were all destined to be eaten.

Though bunnies are called “little white rabbits” in the Taiwanese imagination, white is not the first color attributed to ducks. Not only the imagination. It’s not only the imagination, though. A dutch artist made a hit, first in Hong Kong (which is NOT part of Taiwan) and then in Kaohsiung (which IS) a few years ago. 

David Alexander now resides far from big and tasty white ducks after 39 years in Taiwan.

 

It Arrived by Registered Mail

We’d been living in Taiwan for 8 years before we got our first car, and that was only because a friend died, and his widow gave it to us.  Learning to drive in Kaohsiung included a shocking piece of registered  mail one day. It was a picture of my car from behind when I “inadvertently” made a left turn on a red light. I paid. In subsequent years we received more pictures, one of which clearly showed my wife speeding on a limited access road into town. Again, we paid.

Taiwan’s radar-equipped cameras grace high poles along freeways and city streets where there’s a temptation to speed or to  “extend the yellow light” or “rush the green light”. In the first years after these systems’ installation their cost was quickly recovered. As driving habits improve, the cameras still provide steady revenue streams to city governments.

We now live in Holland MI. The city has some portable radar speed checkers. They’re seen where drivers habitually exceed speed limits threaten safety. A fixed board shows the legal limit, and a lit display connected to a radar gun indicates the speed of approaching cars. No cameras are involved. No registered mail arrives. They operate like a front-door lock, which deters honest people but not burglars.

Registered vehicles in Michigan do not have license plates on the front. Ownership can only be ascertained from behind. Should the municipal government here wish to go beyond warning approaching drivers to admonishing retreating ones, it would need to install a plate reading camera and radar gun on the back of the sign, and connect these to the vehicle registration database. Though there are likely legal barriers to fining people, the deterrent value of being informed might be worth it.  No teenager or errant spouse wants to be asked at home, “What were you doing on Pine Avenue last Wednesday afternoon?”

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Learning to Read Devotionally

In 1997 I responded to a challenge about my lack of devotional Bible reading. For most of the next 10 years, I read almost compulsively (OK, compulsively). After moderating that practice, I still read at least one chapter every day.  In 2016 I found myself fighting with it. I responded by no longer reading daily, but spending my time in prayer and pondering.  After about six months I was able to go back to daily scripture reading, and continue that even now. I read a bit of the Bible almost every morning.  Usually it’s more than a few verses, but rarely as much as a chapter.  In the religious traditions I learned as a teenager, this is called “doing one’s devotions”. Devotional reading attempts refreshment of soul and enlightenment of mind regarding one’s relationship to God. I’ve been failing at that for a long time. My intellectual bent (if it can be said that I have one) tends toward interaction with the text, which often gets in the way of relating to God.  

To wile away the time during COVID 19 I’ve been taking online courses in writing. In a lesson from the Technical University of Munich I’ve been assigned to work on “coherence” in paragraphs. That often requires the subtraction of distraction to make things flow more smoothly.  Applying this to Bible reading meets with automatic resistance. There’s a curse at the end of the Revelation to St. John the Divine upon anybody who adds to or subtracts from this book. Since the Revelation is the final “book” in the Bible, that curse is often assumed to apply to the entire Bible, not just to the Revelation.  In the 1970s when The Readers’ Digest Bible was published, I denounced it without even opening the cover. 

Reading this morning, though, I was sorely tempted to do some trimming. I had begun in I John 4 at the middle of verse 15, with the words “God is Love”.  That’s a great place to begin, isn’t it?  I continued to the end of the chapter. What I found was a clear stream about love running from beginning to end, but like a mountain stream, it was interrupted by a lot of rocks on the way.  The exercise removes the rocks and sets them beside the stream. They are not discarded (we can’t do that with the Bible). Here it is as found in the New Revised Standard Version.  (If you want to do the same exercise and prefer another translation, that’s fine with me.) Maybe THIS is what devotional reading is about. If I can learn to do this, I’ll get over my “text centered” struggles.

The Whole Text

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.  Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters,[b] are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister[c] whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

The Clear Stream

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.  As he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.  We love because he first loved us. Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.