A Pontifical Refrigerator

Pope John XX (sometimes XXI because the numbering gets confused), a Portuguese scholar trained in France who taught Medicine in Italy before becoming the pontiff during a time of political crisis in the church, found peace in intellectual pursuits. After being enthroned in 1276 he ordered the construction of a private study at the papal palace in Viterbo for study and scholarly work. You might say that he had a man cave added on. But he didn’t enjoy it for long. In 1277 the plaster ceiling collapsed with him under it. He died from injuries on May 20 that year. 

Every apartment or house in which we dwelt during our decades in Taiwan had cracks in the walls. Construction there is done with brick, concrete and steel. Buildings are somewhat flexible, partly to cope with the shaky region of the earth’s crust upon which Taiwan sits. Taiwan’s people don’t feel more than a few earthquakes a year, seismometers all over the nation pick up more than 20 temblors every month. When felt, they become “news”. When someone gets hurt, they become headlines. 

Returning to Pope John and why he matters in the here and now.  There’s been a lot of construction on the street near our retirement home in Holland, MI. Underground water, sewer and storm drain infrastructure has been replaced. The sidewalks and curbs and street pavement disappeared in May. Now if you walk, you traverse neighbors’ lawns. If you drive, it’s in over sand which has been ground to dust. Some processes of doing the work while homeowners and renters get into and out of driveways have occasionally involved use of vibrating compactors. Our whole house has been shaken again and again.  That didn’t sit well with the plaster ceiling in the kitchen, which first cracked, then began to come loose from the lath above it. 

As I write there are chunks missing. Peering up through the holes makes it apparent that lath has come loose from rafters. This might be the result of past water damage from bathroom overflows upstairs. Or, it could be that the nails put there in 1925 to hold things up have, like me, retired.

Unlike Pope John XX, I’m not a scholar. That kitchen is neither my study nor my man cave. But getting a beer from the fridge has begun to feel pontifical.

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

 

Imagine: no right to sing

When I first took up residence in Taiwan, in 1976, the USA was celebrating the Bicentennial. At that time Taiwan was listed as one of the “not free” nations of the world. There were freedoms to believe and practice any religion that one wanted, but under a martial law dictatorship that didn’t begin to bend until late in the 80s, there was no freedom of assembly, press or speech. One of the joys of living in Taiwan until I retired to Holland, MI a year ago was seeing it become one of the freest nations on earth today. As previously, people are free to believe and practice any religion they want (or no religion at all if they don’t want to), but people in Taiwan, including immigrants and non-citizens, are also free to join in groups, to publish newspapers, and to say or sing, anything they want without restriction.

Holland, MI is not such a place, at least not when it comes to singing.

Imagine this, a Christian youth musical group from out of town puts on an inspiring program at a local church. Afterward, several local youth, filled with the Holy Spirit, walk home singing songs they’ve just heard in church.  They’d better look over their shoulders for the police as they walk, though, because they will be breaking Holland’s Ordinances against religious songs being sung on Holland’s streets without permission from City Hall.

Or imagine that Holland’s fine American Legion Band presents a program of patriotic music in a venue like the Civic Center. Following the concert, many US Military Veterans decide to have an after-party at one of Holland’s brew pubs. As they walk along 8th Street to the party, they sing something like “This is My Country”. But if they do so, this group of veterans will have broken the city’s regulations against patriotic songs being sung on the street without permission from City Hall.. 

Or imagine a popular Hispanic musical group offering a concert. Too many people arrive for the place to hold, so the organizers, obeying the fire codes, don’t admit any more than are allowed. But it’s too hot inside anyway, so windows are thrown open to the wonderful breezes off of Lake Macatawa.  Concertgoers who could not get inside begin to sing along with the music that is coming from the open windows. Blue and red lights begin to flash, because a violation of Holland’s ordinances against ethnic music being sung on Holland’s streets without permission from City Hall has occurred.

Or imagine a Vietnamese opera troupe putting on a program of nostalgic songs. Elderly Southeast Asians residing locally are transported back to their youth. Leaving the event with tears streaming down their cheeks, they stop in a municipal park as melodies long suppressed burst from places deep in their hearts. The years fall off their faces just as the police show up with the handcuffs, because this group of people who left their homes across an ocean and settled here in Holland, enriching the cultural life of this town, will have fallen afoul of municipal ordinances prohibiting ethnic music being sung on Holland’s streets without permission from City Hall.

Imagine these things, and how strange they seem to a person who has recently relocated here from Taiwan.

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

 

Sometimes, Guys, Size Matters

About half a year ago my son, Grant, and I installed new flooring in one room. To do so we purchased a power saw that is variously known as “radial arm”, “miter” or “cut off”. The materials we used are known as “laminate” flooring, which just sort of snaps together and lays there looking good. The planks were about 11 inches wide.

As winter turned into spring, the time for opening the windows on this old house began. I discovered a few things: 1) the windows in every house where we lived in Taiwan opened sideways, and that was true whether the frames were wood or aluminum; 2) the windows in this old house open vertically, and most of them been painted shut over the years; 3) the cotton ropes connecting the sashes over pulleys to counterweights had mostly rotted away; and 4) without counterweights, open windows could and did close themselves with a loud slam. I needed either to replace ropes or find some sticks. Leftover flooring planks met my fancy power saw, and soon every window that could be opened sported an 11 inch stick at its side. “Lift with the right hand, place stick with the left hand”, and ventilation resulted.

http://www.peakpx.com/471927/red-wooden-window

July has brought summer temperatures. The bigger windows open as much as 24 inches, the smaller ones up to 18. It was time for a trip back to the woodpile. This time flooring planks wouldn’t do. Enough longer sticks were found and trimmed to length. The drill is still the same, “lift window with the right, stick with the left”. The open area now available for air passage is now about double the previous condition. It feels downright breezy in here.

Taiwan was so safe, our windows upstairs and down were only closed during storms or when we turned on an air conditioner. One morning going downstairs I even discovered that we had forgotten to close the front door the previous evening. Our security had been a plastic screen. Alas, we are not there any longer. At night here, the reverse window drill will be in order: “hold window with right, remove stick with left, slowly lower.” That, and make sure the doors are locked, too.

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

Bit by Bit

Across our many years in Taiwan we watched newspapers change, a LOT. Freedom of the press did not exist when we first set foot there in the 1970s. All papers had to pass censorship reviews, and none were more than 12 pages long. Newspapers owned by the ruling Nationalist Party or by media companies friendly to that party were most common.  As Taiwan transitioned to democracy in the 90s, the 12 page restriction was dropped. They got livelier, fatter and more colorful. The party owned papers, like the Central Daily News and the Youth Daily News, withered. In 1999 the large Liberty Times, an opposition paper, began publishing an English language edition to compete with the Nationalist Party’s China Post and the independent Taiwan News.  Around 2010, facing competition from internet news providers and advertising vehicles, all of Taiwan’s  newspapers began to shrink, and many disappeared or went to “electronic only” editions. 

Relocating to Holland, MI last year, one of the first things we did was to take a subscription to the local paper, which publishes 6 days a week (no Monday edition). It typically has 12 to 16 broadsheet pages per day with lots of color and a focus on high school sports in this and nearby cities. The sports editor likes doing profiles of female athletes, accompanied by at least one posed cheesecake photo (sometimes two). Front page headlines deal with things like city council meetings and upcoming cultural events. Sometimes there’s news of things elsewhere in Michigan on page 3, and an occasional article about President Trump on page 5. The editorial page is lively and not at all what I’d expected. Left and right battle it out on alternating weekdays. Saturday’s paper is full of religion. 

Last week’s paper looked different. The print was smaller and the lines were farther apart. The margens, were wider. I wondered what was up.  This week, the other shoe dropped. Tuesday’s paper was a size smaller. No longer a broadsheet, but not yet a tabloid. Line spacing and margins feel like they used to. The amount of content hasn’t changed, just how it all sits on the now shrunken pages.

Life feels like that, too, now that I’m retired. I’m afraid of what might shrink next. 

 

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

President Ahoy!

Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen,  is coming to the United States! It’s neither a state nor an official visit. Taiwan is certainly a customer of US weapons manufacturers and has loaned a lot of money to the US Treasury, but this visit is merely for “rest and comfort” on her way to and from official visits to two nations in the Caribbean. Heading TO those visits, she’ll stop in New York City for a couple of nights and a day. Heading FROM those visits she’ll be in Denver overnight. 

Hearing the news of the trip, I wondered how I might get an invitation to any events connected to it. So, in a way similar to how I nominated myself for a veterans’ award in the local newspaper, I wrote to Taiwan’s consular office in New York City and volunteered to attend. It didn’t hurt that a YouTube video of a short news spot about me on a Taiwan TV network in 2018 is still around.  I got a courteous reply from ot one, but TWO people in New York City and a formal invite. 

Having succeeded at that (success is so rare these days), I prodded my daughter, who was born and grew up in Taiwan, to ask a similar favor of the consular office in Denver, where she lives. Now she’s invited, too.  After the events, we’ll share notes. If nothing else, these will provide opportunities to speak languages other than English for an evening.

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

Missing the Mark

Stage actors and opera singers must do more than deliver their lines convincingly and artfully. They must deliver them from the right places on the stage. Otherwise they might as well just be on the radio!  To have stood in the wrong spot or faced the wrong direction when acting (or “singing while acting” as is done in the opera) is to “miss the mark”. 

Across my several decades I’ve been comforted by preachers who have reminded me that I haven’t done something terrible when I’ve sinned, I’ve merely failed to hit the bull’s eye on the target. But then, from the other side, I’ve been terrorized by preachers who have held up the ‘bull’s eye’ metaphor and have insisted that I hit that mark on every try, and that doing anything less is SIN! (and damnable sin at that).

When translating it into Chinese centuries ago, the word chosen to express the Biblical concept of sin, unfortunately, was the same one used in Chinese to denote crime punishable by law.  Once in 1978 a young man asked me about some enthusiastic Christians he saw at a bus station handing out tracts. They wore vests upon which it was written, “I used to be a sinner, but Jesus has washed me clean,” (or something to that effect). As he had not yet been convicted of any crime or imprisoned, he wondered why he should accept any tract they were passing or follow in any way they would want him to go.

Having missed the mark so regularly in life, and all too often when delivering what I thought was a sermon, I’ve little leg upon which to stand when critiquing another person or preacher. But I was at an event last week when what I and others mostly needed was comfort, and we got an artful discourse about salvation instead. We were instructed, invited, entertained, educated and informed. Facts, metaphors and structures were laid before us. The style of the orator was spot-on. But the mark was missed. 

I’m sure I’ve done worse. And that, in itself, is little comfort. 

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

Washing the Car

For a couple of years while he was in high school, our son, Grant, was at boarding school a hundred miles north of home. He wold come home one weekend per month, and during that school’s various seasonal breaks. Of course, a school on the “American Schedule” does not observe the same vacations as the those on the “Taiwan Calendar” where we worked. Sometimes his being “home from school” coincided with our being “fully engaged.”

photo from wikimedia commons

On one such occasion, Grant joined the students and faculty of Tainan Theological College for the weekly community meal. I was involved with international students then, so we sat at a table with them. I recall with joy the very matter of fact way in which an African man turned to him and casually asked, “and, have you washed your father’s car?”

I write this on a day when Grant and his wife, Katelyn, are visiting. Our street is dug up for construction, so things are quite dusty. This afternoon he washed his car. I had the privilege of helping him. What goes around sometimes comes around.  

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

Where Has All the Freon Gone?

 

I had operated in spoken Taiwanese for years before reading ability in Chinese characters did any catching up. Desperate to be literate, “meanings” of characters preceded understanding their pronunciations in ANY kind of Chinese.  And even then, I’d likely get them wrong. In Mandarin is difficult enough, but at least the characters don’t change their pronunciations in different contexts. Taiwanese is “situation-dependent” when it comes to how words sound when coming across the teeth and lips. Look at the following sentence:  阿香說香港的香很香。 You don’t have to be able to read Chinese to note that one character is repeated four times. In Mandarin and in Cantonese, that character is pronounced identically each time (although the Mandarin pronunciation differs from the Cantonese). Reading the sentence in Taiwanese, however, calls for four different pronunciations, each one specific to how the word is used in the sentence. I’ve digressed. 

Somewhere I picked up the character that means “cold”, 冷。Driving along city streets I saw it on billboards advertising air conditioners and other “cold-related” things. I also saw it on car repair shops, especially from May to October. It often appeared with the character for “augment” and another one that I didn’t recognize. Slowly I put two and two together and realized that this was the place for getting the car’s AC system recharged when it no longer blew cold.   The third character had something to do with “gas” or “fluid”.  

Such a problem has manifested itself with our current auto, here in America. I took it to a shop for a recharge and learned that of the original 14 ounces of freon in the system, only 3 remain. There’s a leak someplace. The mechanic traced it to the condenser. The guy who phoned said, “Parts, labor and more freon will run you $545.” There are do it yourself air conditioner recharge kits available from car parts stores (and, no doubt, online), but even then, one should not allow whatever has remained in the system to leak into the atmosphere. And, besides, with a leak in the system, it will soon enough be “freon gone” again.  At times like this, a credit card sure comes in handy. 

 

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

Bird Named

For an online course in which I enrolled a couple of months ago I’ve been making imitations of works by 1950s abstract expressionist painters and others associated with them. A couple of weeks back I did a faux Agnes Martin.  The lesson on Agnes set me musing on Taiwan memories.

There was a year or two in the late 80s when I assisted an organization called Studio Classroom to run some weekly events in Kaohsiung, where they had opened a south Taiwan branch office. The staff there did things at schools and at businesses, and offered a weekly “English Bible Class” for free. The event included a lot of singing, a “lesson” that was translated line by line into Chinese, and the chance to be part of a small group led by a member of the foreign staff. I was invited to “offer the lesson” each week for a month. When I asked what I was to teach, they left that up to me (a risky thing to do). After a month I returned as a small group leader and someone else taught. After hearing him hammer hard core preaching on the people who came for a couple of weeks, I volunteered to do some lower key fun stuff and wrote up a quarter’s worth of lessons. 

All that aside, the resident volunteers interested me. Among them were a couple of young single women, between 25 and 30 years of age, who had never met until they arrived in Taiwan. The surname of the first was Starling, and the second Martin. Upon introduction, the “birdiness” of their names was apparent.  When I began the lesson on Agnes Martin last month I felt the same way.

I did a poor imitation of Agnes’ style on a board that had come from a door I’d sawed apart. After photographing it for class, I leaned it against the wall where it gathered dust. A week later I acquired boxes of picture frames from a thrift store. None of the frames fit my board. So today I sawed my imitation Martin into several pieces and framed four of them. Hanging on the wall now, they are a flock of birds inhabiting the garage.  

I could’ve retired to the golf course, but this is proving to be much more fun. 

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

Sic transit…

Sic transit

Part of why we retired WHEN we did had to to with our continued usefulness to the schools we served in Taiwan. We had lived right up to the cusp of ineligibility. It was time to make way for younger folks.  Part of the reason we retired WHERE we did (in Holland, Michigan) had to do with where Char’s mother was residing. But now she’s been gone for slightly over 24 hours.. Gen Bos, my mother-in-law, died yesterday morning, June 30th, at 6AM. 

     Gen was born in Muskegon, MI in 1926. Her father, Nicholas Duiser,  owned a tool-and-die shop that served the industrial giant that Muskegon was then. They were members of Unity Reformed Church, where Gen met Jim Bos. Gen studied at Hope College in Holland, MI, taking a music course and graduated in 1949.  Jim had finished his undergraduate degree there (starting it at Dartmouth while in the Navy during the war) and enrolled at Western Theological Seminary from which he graduated in 1949. They were married that summer. The customs of the time in the churches they served from 1949 to 1987 meant that the “Pastor’s Wife” didn’t work outside the home. Gen used her musical ability as church pianist and organist. She also did the main share of raising the three children who were born to them, in 1950, 1953 and 1958. 

In 1987 Jim took an early retirement to be nearer to his own father, who was living alone in the house where Jim had been born in 1924. Jim and Gen moved “home” to Muskegon, where they spent 30 more years. During those years, Gen continued playing piano and organ in churches. In 2017 they sold their home in Muskegon and moved 35 miles south to Holland, where their eldest resided and where their second-born promised to retire the following year. They rented an apartment in a senior-citizens’ complex. Jim was heard to say, “We should have made this move years ago.” Within a year, he was gone. Gen stayed on in the apartment. When her second daughter and son-in-law retired to Holland later in 2018, a lot of dinners were shared and more outside events attended. 

Gen had been under several decades of drug treatment and observation for congestive heart failure. In mid-April she was admitted to the hospital with breathing trouble. It was not pneumonia. She went home after 3 days. Two weeks later she was back in hospital with the same trouble, but returned home the next day. A week later a brief emergency room visit brought a diagnosis that offered no particular hope of significant recovery. She began living with an oxygen tank, and was enrolled in the home Hospice care regimen.

Visits from nurses, therapists, a social worker and a chaplain followed. Her daughters set up a rota that had someone with her every night and, with the exception of an hour or two during some days, most of the rest of the time. As medications got adjusted she had better and worse weeks. By mid-June she was doing pretty well.

On June 27 she complained of abdominal pain, which led to some in-home treatments that and the following day. The evening of the 28th she slept uncomfortably. Everyone attributed that to exhaustion from the previous day’s therapy. On the 29th she could not get comfortable at all. She took to her bed that evening. Early on the morning of the 30th the hospice nurse was called. Family gathered soon after 5:30 AM, and Gen died just before 6:00. 

People remarked that less than 48 hours previously she had been joking with health care providers. We will miss that joking. 

Gen was a woman of Christian faith all her life. The funeral instructions she left were, everyone knew, on some pages kept in the front of the bible by her bedside. Her faith carried her through. We trust that such of that faith that resides in us will carry us through, too.

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