Your Own Worst Enemy

Years ago, when temporarily housed in an employer-owned facility, I got some brackets designed for turning standard lumber into rickety sawhorses and used some 2×6 boards found in the garage to make supports for a table for some gaming things in which our son was interested. We moved out of that housing, our son grew out of gaming, and the brackets (and rickety sawhorses) got left behind. Last year, upon retirement, we were in that same facility again, and I scavenged those sawhorses as “mine” for our “new” home. I’ve been using them as the base for a workbench, particularly when using a table saw that I regularly borrow from the neighborhood tool library. The table is too high for convenient use. It leans and bends. At times I’ve had to grasp its edge to prevent it going over when pushing a long piece of lumber across the table saw.  It resides in the garage. I reside in the house, but just may be my own worst enemy.

Today I took it apart and reassembled the pieces without the brackets and with long screws. The legs are still scrap lumber. The top is still part of part of a door I sawed apart last year, and it still leans.

Perhaps I’ll need to bolt it to the wall or something. But then, that might lead to collapsing the entire garage on myself. Should you ever pick up the local newspaper and learn that someone managed to cut off three fingers in a table saw accident, it probably will have been me.

There’s one consolation. I haven’t yet tried to use a power tool while perched on a step ladder. At least, not yet…

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

Discovering You’ve Fallen

Getting used to receiving news and other content online, not just from newspapers and magazines, involved learning about paywalls, response etiquette, what never to post and what always to avoid. Each of these took me some time to learn.  Recently I’d looked at the web page of the Los Angeles Times to learn what was happening in the city where I was born and grew up. I didn’t realize how often I’d done that until I got a notice early in June that I’d reached my monthly free quota. I’m welcome to continue if I pay for a subscription, or to wait until July for another quota.

Early in my relationship with Twitter I realized that the “trending” column for my location in Michigan had resulted in me wasting a lot of time. Returning to Taiwan, I reset my location to Okinawa. The “trends” showed up in Japanese and were easy to ignore. I also learned to unfollow some people. Now I mainly get cultural stuff from Taiwan and gentle humor. I’ve no doubt but that I’ve been unfollowed by people, and even by bots, that eschew blandness.  

When one gets one’s news and opinions from print sources that come in the mail or onto the doorstep, the reactions of other readers, printed as “letters to the editor” are potentially “better” because the writers have had more time to reflect before putting pen to paper. Some papers insist on printing the names and hometowns of those writers, not permitting “name withheld at writer’s request”. Editors choose among the many letters received to put into the limited space available on the page. This is not the way with online responses. People write “off the cuff” and hide behind avatars. I’ve learned that a good principle to follow when reading online editorials is “don’t read the comments.”

It’s been almost three months since I began these daily blog posts. Last Thursday I learned another principle. “Don’t read your old posts.”  I got into this thing believing that I could recycle stuff I’d written earlier in a less “preachy” or “churchy” manner. I soon discovered that almost everything in my earlier writing had been excessively churchy, and extremely preachy. It was essentially unredeemable for a secular audience. I switched to writing fresh.

Last week I read some things I’d done during that transition. I hoped to be encouraged by how well they looked. What I found was sloppy thinking and bad writing. It only took 3 or 4 posts to discover that.  

I’m taking an art class online. Last week I learned about Agnes Miller, who is said to have destroyed more paintings than she sent to her dealer. She destroyed them because they didn’t live up to the idea she had seen when she conceived them. I may have to do an Agnes Miller on the blog posts. I should have done that before hitting “publish”.

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

A Beautiful Clock

Our time has run out. Today at its annual General Synod, the Reformed Church in America, which has employed one or both of us since 1979, bid us farewell. We’d retired last year on September 30th, but since the Synod (a legislative session of representatives from the US and Canada) meets in June, it took until now for the ceremonial aspects of our service to be completed.  It was wonderful to be recognized and celebrated. We each had a minute to address the full Synod. A resolution listing us with others completing years of service was entered into the official record.

Before we left the dais, we were given a large gift-wrapped box with a card attached. From our years in Taiwan we knew that gifts are to be taken home while still wrapped, then opened in private. The box was not light. We were half expecting a decorative plaque or framed piece of artwork. At home by the kitchen table we read the card to appreciate the sentiments which it bore. Then using scissors we cut the ribbon and removed the wrapping. The box contained a styrofoam box that cradled a mantle clock in a heavy crystal mounting. It’s beautiful. We will appreciate it for years to come. We’ve already found a place to put it in our “mantle-less” house.

In Taiwan, one does not give clocks. Upon this interesting practice there hangs a story. As an orphan state, though it has great commercial relationships with countries all around the world, it has few diplomatic allies and is not a member of the United Nations (China blocks that).  A few Pacific Island nations and small states in Central America and the Caribbean maintain diplomatic ties. When a president of Taiwan visits allies in the western hemisphere, “rest stops” in places like Texas, California or Hawaii are usually arranged.

In January of 2017, Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s president, stopped in Houston going east, and San Francisco going west. Federal government officers didn’t meet her, but state ones did under the rubric of “seeking Taiwanese investment”.  Gifts are exchanged. Greg Abbot, the governor of Texas, presented President Tsai with a wall clock in the shape of Texas. Gracious woman that she is, the gift was politely received. BUT, it was the wrong gift. Nobody in Hong Kong, Taiwan or eve Chi a would give a clock, because just to say “give a clock” in many Chinese languages is a homonym for “bidding goodbye to a deceased person.” If it’s not taken to that extent, it means “your days are numbered.”  The mayor of Taipei City, a man without the grace and charm of the president, was once presented with a pocket watch by a British trade delegation. He was taken aback, and said that he’d sell it for junk. He had to apologize.

We joyfully receive our retirement clock. It numbers for us the hours and years that we’ve spent with the Reformed Church in America. It makes our house more beautiful, and it becomes an heirloom that we will eventually pass on to future generations.

But, still…

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

Living Satisfactorily

At some point during my primary school years I came to realize that the thing I took home to my parents at the end of each semester was a report card. Whenever it was that I began to take an interest in what was printed on it, I discovered a key to the marks I’d received. For work habits and cooperation, there were E, S, and U (excellent, satisfactory and unsatisfactory). For the academic matters, there were A, B, C, D, and Fail. The key equated the letters, in order, to: excellent, good, satisfactory, poor, and failure.

In middle school, things got more serious. Reports were sent home every 5 weeks. At mid-term and final they had the letter grades. The 5 and 15 week reports had a straight line if there were no problems and comments if there were. Some years ago my sister went through boxes of papers in our parents’ closets and presented me with a bunch of those reports. If they’ve since gone missing it’s no big loss. I think they’ll reveal that in 8th grade I was getting by.

Periodic reporting periods with paper confirmation might be useful for many, if not all of us in the here and now. Are we getting by?  Whether we like it or not, commercial agencies issue credit scores. Insurance companies keep track of our risk profiles, setting car and homeowner insurance rates based not on our ZIP codes. Discount coupons for a supermarket where I don’t have a member card recently arrived in the mail. The store knew what I typically buy and found my address through the credit card I used to pay at the register. The presidents of Russia, China and Google know my internet browsing history.

Am I living satisfactorily? Algorithms used by credit reporting companies, insurers, stores and national intelligence services are no better than middle school teachers at rating that. We live for each other and through each other. Without each other, we’ve no way to live very satisfactorily. Growing older, seeing the number of friends and intensity of personal relationships reduced by the grim reaper and his/her assistant, Alzheimer, is a reminder to reach out to others, that we might live, and eventually die, satisfactorily.

 

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

Deerfield Park

In Isabella County, MI there’s a recreation area called “Deerfield Park”. When one sees a name of that sort, one’s curiosity is piqued. Is it an eponym, like Snowflake, Arizona? That town was founded by Mormon pioneers Erastus Snow and William Flake. Its name has nothing to do with snowflakes. Places called “Riverside” or “Palo Alto” are likely near to flowing water or lower hills. Terre Haute may only be relatively higher than the surrounding land. There’s a Jane Austen novel, “Mansfield Park”. I wonder, were men grown in the fields there?

Deerfield could describe most of Michigan, where there were approximately 1.75 million deer in the state’s “herd” in 2018. The number was going down for various reasons related to harsh winters and “harvest” by hunters. But the hunters and hunting licenses have been on the wane in recent years, too. Insurance companies look to an increase in claims for car accidents involving deer.

Ann Arbor, MI has its own “Deerfield” problem. Motorists do their best to keep numbers down, but other means are also in progress. The Humane society runs an active spay and release program (as if the deer were feral cats) and there’s also an annual cull. In city parks, on private land where permission has been given, and on the campuses of the University of Michigan and Concordia University the city employs sharpshooters to “reduce numbers” by up to 150 deer during the depths of winter.

New Jersey isn’t as “overrun” as Michigan, but it’s smaller and more densely populated. Parts of New Jersey have 120-140 deer per square mile! That population is also on the increase. Though about 110,000 of them are considered ‘huntable’, tens of thousands more are in places where hunting is neither possible nor allowed. In recent years there were over 30,000 collisions annually involving deer. Rick Suydam, the president of the New Jersey Farm Bureau, said, “… The only guys who want these deer are auto-body repair shops. God love them. They work hard.”

I take inspiration from the people of Isabella County, who seem to have thrown in the towel and named their recreation area for what it is,  a Deerfield.  I’m thinking of putting a sign in my front yard, naming it “Long Grass Acres” or one along the fence reminiscent of that Northern California town with the ZIP code 96094, named for its founder,  Weed.

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

High Heels

 

Even “highly skilled” workers are only semi-skilled. Not that they’re less than stars at the things that they CAN do, just that nobody can do EVERYTHING. You may be able to run a computer controlled lathe or milling machine to make parts for life-saving devices; you may be able to drive a road grader to perfectly shape and smooth a road base before the asphalt is laid; you may even be able to decoratively ice a wedding or anniversary cake. But you can’t do everything.  Among the many skills I don’t have (which include the three listed above), walking in high heels is on the list. Watching people who can do so; comparing them with those who can’t yet; makes it apparent that a lot of practice goes into getting it right.

 

Photo by Andrew Tanglao on Unsplash

It wasn’t until about 5 years ago that I first noticed.  A college graduation held in an amphitheater was the scene. My seat was at eye-level with the feet of those walking across the stage. Attending such an event, you might find the speeches and such to be of interest, but the presentation of diplomas can be boring. This is especially true when the name of the one you’ve come to celebrate comes early in the alphabet. I began to look for other amusements. That’s when feet presented themselves.

Under their robes, some graduates were in shorts and T-shirts, wearing flip-flops, tennis shoes or sandals. Nobody was barefoot. But some of the young women must have been dressed to the nines, including their shoes. The amphitheater was open air, so I doubt that the stage was slippery. Maybe these young women, about to enter the world of employment and adulthood, just hadn’t practiced this adult skill of walking in high heels.  More than a few wobbled their way past the dean and on to the college president.

That was five years ago. I was on a university campus in May this year, not for the university graduation, but many others were. Many young women were walking tall. Some of them were wobbling tall.  

I’m glad that I’m past the age of having to learn this skill.

 

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

DIY Rothko

Mark Rothko (1903-1970) arrived at his signature style around 1950. His experiments with colored rectangles on differently colored grounds appear, at first glance, to be simple to do. But they aren’t. Yesterday and today I attempted one of my own.

Rothko’s canvases are enormous. Four by six feet is not unusual. He used artist-quality oil paints. I’m more for pieces of plywood and house paints, but certain parts of the techniques are the same. My concession in his direction this time was to use oil-based (instead of latex acrylic) wall paint.

I started with a panel from a door I’d sawn to pieces. The door had been up in the rafters of the garage, so except for the portion of the house’s purchase price that it represented, it was free to me. The paint on it was a light green to blue mix. It was peeling, or at least, old and crackled. Yesterday I ran it under a tap to get the dirt off of both sides and chose one for painting. Once it was dry, I opened a can of some sort of stain, “golden oak”, and painted a thin coat of it on most of the board, wiping stuff off with an old shirt to create 3 rounded rectangles floating on the green background.

I opened a couple cans of oil paint that were years old. Like the door, they had come to me “cost free”. The green was all oil on top and all pigment on the bottom. I poured a lot of the oil into a jar to use later, and a little into a yogurt tub. Using a stick I retrieved some green from the bottom of the can, adding lots of solvent to make a “wash”, which I set aside. Then I attempted to do the same thing with a very small can of “Dutch Yellow”, but it was a different kind of paint, not amenable to solvent. Eventually by stirring I got a bit of yellow goop in another yogurt tub. I let this sit, too.

Today I used a brush in the green to tint a large bit of the panel, over the top of everything, including the golden oak and the spaces in between rectangles. A stick enabled me to smear some of the yellow goop over parts of the rest. Then I stopped.

Rothko started with better materials, better ideas, better skill and a better attitude.

It shows.

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

Don’t Look Back

Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

Orpheus, a musician, loved Eurydice, who died. He pursued her into the underworld where he played music that charmed all residing there. The gods who controlled it, Hades and Persephone, had mercy on the couple. They allowed Eurydice to return with Orpheus to the earth on one condition: that he walk in front of her without looking back until they had both left hell. He agreed and set off. Eurydice followed. Upon reaching the earth, Orpheus looked back. But, he had forgotten that BOTH of them had to be out before he peeked. She vanished forever.

OK, that’s Greek mythology. But warnings not to look back are common in other cultures’ and peoples’ legends as well. There’s that one in the Bible about a woman who, on the cusp of salvation, looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. It’s been used to scare Sunday School children for generations.

Sorting through things long left in storage while packing to leave Taiwan, and again while unpacking (Why did we bring that?) after relocating to Michigan, old high school and college yearbooks emerged. There was also a memorial book from the months I’d spent in Army boot camp in 1969. Paging through yearbooks for a few minutes, I recalled my time in high school and college, enjoying some, but not enough memories, to cause me to want to repeat any of them. As for the book from boot camp, NOTHING in there made me nostalgic.  If I should look back yearning for those 8 weeks, I’ll deserve to either vanish forever or turn into a pillar of SOS.

The “number candles” in the drawer for a relative’s recent 67th birthday candle lacked a “7”. A “1” was adapted for the sake of picture taking. As things were being cleaned up, the candles were on a plate. They’d been inverted, so it looked as if a 16th birthday had been marked. We all agreed that none of us present wanted ever to be 16 again, not even to have a peek at it.  

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

Eternal Stone

You’ve got to be careful what you name things or people. The Michigan-raised voice actor Tom Bodett once observed that a child will eventually come to hate you for giving him or her a weird name. An article at www.momjunction.com  lists 85 “Free Spirited and Quirky Names.  Included among them are “Liberty”, “Alchemy”, “Freedom” and “Ambrosia.” You can imagine a twelve-year-old with one of these names coming home from the first day at a new school and announcing that he or she is now to be called Libby, Al, Fred or Amber.

Being careful about names can go for churches, too. Sometimes the name is a give-away, “Our Savior’s” is Lutheran.  St. Martin in the Fields is sure to be Episcopalian. Something named for the street it is on is likely to be Baptist or Presbyterian, etc.  A lot of churches are named after places in the Bible. Increasing Biblical illiteracy has led to names like Bethel, Goshen, Rehoboth and Ebenezer losing their cachet. For a few years in Taiwan, I  was the pastor of a new church. It began in a hospital chapel, so we named it for the hospital, Hsin-yi Presbyterian Church. The problem is that “Hsin-yi” is the name used by Lutherans to differentiate them from other Christian groups. We were essentially calling ourselves, “Lutheran Presbyterian Church”. Later we moved to a different location about 2 blocks away and renamed our church for the street, “Four Dimensions Road.” We were “Four Dimensions Presbyterian Church.” I looked up the four. One of the four was “stinginess”.  When I questioned the choice, I was told that it really meant “thrifty.”

On a recent road trip in Michigan I went past a wooden building that was in the process of being re-sided. Things appeared to have stopped mid-job. The plywood on the walls appeared fresh, but the wrapping stapled over it had come loose in many places and was flapping in the wind. The business name on the sign at the roadside informed us that this was the local dealer for “Eternal Stone”.  Eternity, like the stone, had yet to arrive.

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

Us Dung Beetles

It’s one of those The Far Side cartoons. Because of copyright, I can’t post it here, so you’ll have to use your imagination. It places a couple of cockroaches in the roles of husband and wife humans in a 1950s style home.The husband sits in an armchair reading a newspaper. The wife looks out the front window and sees a couple approaching for a visit. “Criminy, Warren,” she says, “here come the Dung Beetles and they have their you know what with them.”

This specific insect comes in three basic groups: rollers, tunnelers, and dwellers. The rollers shape pieces of dung into balls and roll them away from the pile. They bury their ball to munch on later or to use as a place to lay eggs. Tunnelers bury dung treasure by tunneling underneath the pile they’ve found. Dwellers actually live inside dung piles, eating, excreting and procreating there. 

I was moved to think of dung beetles because I recently helped load the contents of a 34-year-old single man’s apartment onto a U-Haul truck. He was leaving the life he had been living for the past 5 or six years in one place and moving to a different part of the country to make a new start. Insofar as I was allowed to understand his situation it sounded as if his life had become rather crappy. At an age where many people of his social and educational background are already on the way up, he was stuck in a dead-end graduate school program. His funding had run out, and the job he had taken to support himself had evaporated.

Looking at the condition and quality of the stuff that he, some other helpers and I were carrying down three flights of stairs and across a parking lot, I wondered why he wanted to keep much of it. Like a dung beetle, he’d been living a life surrounded by crap, and he wanted to keep a lot of it. If he was planning a new start, I wondered, why carry all of this with him?

In my own transcontinental move last year, I brought NOTHING like that. I know that EVERYTHING I’ve acquired since settling here is of the greatest quality.  

Dung beetles: maybe it takes one to recognize another.

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