Prove it All Night

There’s a neighborhood forum online in this town. Recently someone beset by a neighbor’s loud music (emanating from a parked truck) inquired about municipal noise rules. One response said to call the district representative on the city council. Another cited chapter and paragraph of the city code about what is and what is not permitted. As you might imagine, there are both “volume” ” and “time” limitations that apply. It’s not quite as simple as “don’t ever be too loud, and never be loud at night”, but that’s the gist of it.

These rules do not apply to trains. Amtrak’s morning train to Chicago leaves before 7 and returns between 10:30 and 10:45 in at night. It’s equally loud in both directions. A couple weeks back the weather turned warm. I slept with the bedroom window open. Sometime around 3AM a freight went through. With the window closed, the morning and evening Amtrak is a pleasant reminder that Holland, MI has a train. With the window open, the passing freight felt like it was right next to my bed. I’m grateful that the weather has cooled, allowing me to close the window. I can imagine having it open some night or nights during the summer. I can imagine the noise.  I don’t plan to contact my city council representative about the noise.

The city’s noise rules don’t seem to apply to road construction.. In preparation for trenching to put new sewer pipes in the street where I reside, the water table had to be lowered. When diesel engine operated pumps were installed at either end of the block, I was mildly interested in the process but unbothered. It was only when a similar pump was stationed in front of my house on a Friday, then  turned on and left running for 5 days, that things got serious! What had been a “hum in the distance” became noise. As with the middle-of-the-night train, I doubt the city council representative can do anything.

There’s a skill we learn in life for these times. It’s not taught in classrooms. We pick it up on the playground or on the street:  coping. When something unpleasant comes into the atmosphere, we’re forced to cope. The legislature in Georgia recently passed a bill outlawing abortion there. The governor of Georgia signed it into law. Coping is going to cost people wishing to avail themselves of safe and legal abortions to go out of state. The law is under legal challenge.The prosecutor in Macon, a large city 80 miles south of Atlanta, has decided to cope by never enforcing it, even if it should stand.

A ban on loud noises in the middle of the night doesn’t apply to all noises in this town. The CSX railroad proves that all night. The proposed ban on safe and legal abortion services in Georgia may not ever apply, and even if it does come into force, the prosecutor in Macon won’t prove it, night or day.

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

Fade Away

Memorial Day last month was marked with a fairly typical collection of photos from the Second World War in the local newspaper. It’s not hard to see that many of these were from private collections of snapshots that had resided in photo albums or shoe boxes for decades. Many, even when reproduced today, are faded with age.

We age, and all of us will die (though that’s not something you’re welcome to shout out as your airliner is on approach to landing). None of us wants to fade away. Douglas MacArthur was being overly dramatic and pointedly political when he claimed that old soldiers simply fade away. We die, and most of us will be forgotten or not thought of.

Someone from the high school that I attended 50 years ago has dedicated a certain amount of his time to necrology. He maintains a website listing the names of members of graduating classes of many past years who are “no longer with us.” He doesn’t use that euphemism.  He writes bluntly about year of death, and, when known, “cause of death.” Were it not that their names were on that list, I might have expected to meet some of them at an upcoming reunion.

Card catalogs no longer occupy central locations in libraries. That opens space for more books. The books remain on shelves, or are moved to “off site storage”. The cards, tattered and faded, have been recycled.

I recall a cemetery near the center of New Brunswick, New Jersey that was overgrown with a pile of broken headstones in a corner when I resided there in 1979. On a recent trip back I glanced up the side street to that corner view of 40 years ago. It was open and airy. Trees had been trimmed and the fence repaired. The broken headstones were gone. They didn’t fade away. Like high school classmates on that necrology list, they are no longer with us. Their place had been taken by light. May we also.

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

Just to Keep the Silence at Bay

Though he certainly wrote some good and long ones, Ernest Hemingway was famed for his short sentences. Sometimes I yearn for others whom I read to be more like him. I enjoy Frederick Buechner, but at times I wish his editor had been more persistent in getting him to shorten some of his thoughts. A phrase in one of his sentences prompts this missive. To set it in context, though, requires adding several words, and even sentences, of my own words..

We use the sound of the words we speak to conceal ourselves from, more than to reveal ourselves to, the people whom we encounter. Silence is uncomfortable. When we’re stripped of our verbal camouflage, we feel unarmed against the world and vulnerable, so we start babbling just to keep the silence at bay.  (Paraphrased from Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark, 1985,  p.75)

The biblical story of Job, a marvelous piece of fiction,  begins with many disasters that befall him. Then three friends arrive to comfort him. What “gets me” is that they first sit with him in silence for 7 days. Reading this detail, you KNOW it has to be fiction. After all, the silence not for 7 minutes or hours, but 7 DAYS!

Time with other people is time for interaction. Certainly we can spend time together in silence, but there are social niceties to be observed, and conversation is enjoyable.  A tragedy of this smartphone age occurs when people in restaurants seated together at ignore each other in order to interact with the information on their devices. Busy posting and responding to posts, they utter not a word to the person across the table.  Keeping your mouth shut while reading and posting things on “social” media is not the same thing as keeping silence. The phone shouts, even when it is muted.

Buechner, or course, was writing in 1985, before the age of smartphone ubiquity. His readers were talkers. He was advocating for something like the characters in Job’s story experienced, availability to listen. As a “babbler” with decades of experience behind me, I am among those need his rebuke. What I don’t need is a smartphone where I can babble soundlessly.

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

Faux Jackson Pollock

I’m taking an online class from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Week by week my classmates and I are learning about the work and techniques of the New York School of abstract expressionist painters in the 1950s.  I’ve already done a fake Barnett Newman and a Willem De Kooning. this week it was a Jackson Pollock, which I knocked off in about 15 minutes (though I spent a lot of time thinking about it all day.

Materials:

Corrugated Cardboard (old car parts box from Taiwan)

Masking tape

White Latex Wall Paint

Black Latex Wall Paint

Cherry red tint lacquer in spray can

Soft blue tint lacquer in spray can

Tools:

box cutter

Plastic drop cloth

Broom

Turkey baster

Rubber spatula

Process:

Trim cardboard to size and eliminate staples, etc.

Use masking tape to fill in gaps where box used to fold

Lay drop cloth on garage floor

Position cardboard in center of drop cloth

Pour a generous portion of white paint into center of cardboard

Use broom to spread white paint

Fill turkey baster with black paint intending to squirt it, but only getting drips and splotches.

Switch to rubber spatula and wide gestures to get lines. Pour from about 4 feet up.

Spray cherry red tint on one corner from 6 inches height.

Spray soft blue tint near center from 6 inches height.

Quit before doing too much.

Notes:

While dripping black paint , Bruce Springsteen 10th Avenue Freeze out was playing in the garage.

Conclusion:

In this endeavor, as in all, Springsteen is very helpful.

Out on the Street

 

Michigan’s roads are bad.  A 2018 study found them to be the worst in the USA. https://www.michiganautolaw.com/blog/2019/01/30/michigan-has-worst-roads/ But things are improving. A more recent report elevated them from #50 to #47. It seems not to matter which party occupies the executive branch of the state government, the legislative branch blocks both creative and mundane proposals to fund repairs. Car owners do not pay obsessive road taxes to the government, but lay out cash for  additional “road use fees” in the form of purchases at repair shops for tires, wheels, suspensions, alignment repairs, and replacements of the bits that fall off after driving through deep potholes. I understand that in some states, getting onto the road is like freedom. So long as one proceeds safely and not too much faster than the speed limit, one can drive the way you want to drive. That is not the case around here.

Late last year the municipal government announced the complete rebuilding of the street in front of my house. The project includes replacement of water mains, sewer pipes, storm drains, curbs, sidewalks, driveway aprons and a new road surface. Work started in April when the trees along one side were cut down to facilitate installing the new storm drains. That made things look pretty bleak. They got worse. In mid-May the roadway was taken up. Driving for several days over what had become loose stone was slower, but not appreciably more difficult than what had been the broken pavement of the past. Then it got even worse. One day the curbs and sidewalks disappeared, and digging began. The loose stone is now covered with dirt that came out of the holes. Things will get worse before they get better.

They WILL get better. A friend who lives a few blocks away, where the project began on April 1st, told me last Sunday that on her block all of the digging, piping and concrete work was finished by Memorial Day. She was hoping for paving soon. That’s encouraging news for our end of the street. When we’re eventually out on it, we’ll be able to drive the way we want to drive.

But this is a city street. Out on the highway, it’ll still be Michigan.  

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

Be Each Other’s Medicine

Nutritionists have long proposed schemes for classifying food to help us guide our eating. Easily mentioned food groups, sometimes as many as eleven, have coalesced into “the four food groups” because we like alliteration (like “car keys”). For 19 years the US Department of Agriculture diagrammed them in a pyramid fashion. In 2011 it switched to the “My Plate” logo, which includes five groups.

We eat what we like, and when challenged on bad habits we respond by creating new essential groups. You’ve probably heard people claim pizza, chocolate, beer or soft drinks as vital. And though a healthy diet is sufficient to provide all we actually need, many among us consume vitamin tablets, nutritional supplements, and tonics. Doctors who pay attention to medical conditions that cannot be assuaged through better nutrition occasionally prescribe medicines to help us get or live better.

We are more than bodies, more than individuals. Four hundred years ago John Donne put that thought into verse from which we carry two lines forward by themselves: “No man is an island…”  and “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee”. We are part of society, vital members of community, which is a living organism. Even as our flesh needs the nutrition we receive through the food we eat, (I’m partial to pizza and beer myself), our community life needs and thrives on nutrition received through shared spaces, shared celebrations, shared responsibilities and shared resources.  Roads, towns, parks, houses of worship, sports arenas, convention halls and cemeteries are among the spaces. The celebrations include parades, concerts, festivals communal worship and political rallies. Voting, jury duty and safe driving are a few of the responsibilities. Air, water, land and the sonic environment are among our resources.

Any source of nutrition can also be an arena of affliction. Neglected roads and parks are places of danger. Abandoned arenas and shopping malls are a blight on the landscape. Overgrown cemeteries are just plain sad. Parades that are not celebrations so much as commercial events lose their allure. Toxic religion has ruined community life from Jonestown to Srinigar. Manipulated voting and dishonest juries distort politics and justice.

As the “four (or how ever many you prefer) food groups” at the base of nutrition are supplemented by medicine to deal with affliction, the endeavors that lead to healthy community life often need “medicine” to deal with social affliction. Though I’m not a doctor, I prescribe a healthy dose of “each other”, taken with meals and again at bedtime.  Be each other’s medicine.

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

Eid Mubarak

May the blessings of Allah fill your life with happiness and open all the doors of success now and always.

Empty Banality

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

A cliché  is anything that has become trite or commonplace through overuse. At a place where I sometimes dine on BBQ ribs, I’ve often heard that “the meat falls right off the bone.” It matters little whether that means it’s tender, or easy to chew, or overcooked, it’s a cliché there. True enough, that meat does fall right off the bone. You can depend on it. It’s not only tried and true; it’s TIRED and true.

We are starved for what is new and different. A complaint about California weather voiced by people from the center of the continent is that there’s no variety. “If you want to know what the weather will be tomorrow, look out the window today.”  Living in a place where the temperature or humidity might soar or drop within the next 30 minutes is thrilling. California is not. The chance of change provides a non-controversial and non-confrontational topic for conversation. You can’t do anything about the weather, but you can sure talk about it.

On Friday our local paper carries a page or two of church news and religious commentary. I find myself wishing that one of the columnists would write something new. The atmosphere is such that even the “Mostly Secular Alliance” group spouts banality. Not everyone has to agree on religion. Disagreement might even foster thought and expression renewal. What’s sad is to see good words like righteousness, sacrifice, salvation and even sin rendered emptily banal by the ways they are thrown around. These words and others are robbed of meaning. They become devoid of freshness or originality. They are hackneyed and trite in many religious conversations.

In a way similar to how people leading public prayer need to pay attention to their “justs” (as in “Jesus we just want to praise you, etc.) we need to pay attention to how we use words. We might even consider keeping each other accountable for what we mean by the ones we use. That applies to religious conversation, political debates, sports talk and even complaining about the weather.

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

Getting Value for Money

Ian Poellet [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D

If you watch a major league baseball game that’s already been lost by the middle of the 7th inning, you might observe people leaving early. Many claim to be attempting to beat the rush out of the parking lot, but I suspect that they’ve decided to cut their losses and use  the time they’d otherwise spend on waiting for the final out of the ninth inning in a more interesting way. But there are also those who stay to the very end, be that victory by or defeat of the team they are supporting. After all, they reason, we paid for these seats, and we’re not going to give them up early.

A classic cartoon caption is set at an all inclusive resort where people have paid in advance for a week’s stay. “The food is so bad, and the portions are so small.” Many of us, as young children were urged or even required to clear our plates. Have you ever eaten all of something that you knew was bad for you just to avoid being wasteful?  We’ve transferred that pattern over to other endeavors. We rarely walk out on something that we’ve begun. After all, we paid for it. That goes for a disappointing movie, a poorly performed concert or an objectionable sermon in church. We stay, to the very end. A man I once knew related having attended a “Destruction Derby” at a county fair. It was noisy, dusty and, in his opinion “boring and pointless.” But he stayed because someone had given him the ticket.  Sometimes we do that even when something is free.

Recently stuck in a hotel room with nothing to read, and about 200 channels on the TV, I found a rerun of a program that HAS to be more than a dozen years old. It was apparent that general program quality has improved since I’d first seen the program. Having started to watch, I committed myself to see how it ended partly because I hadn’t seen this episode before when it was new.  Though it dragged, and I continued to look at my watch as I endured, I kept watching. Then “a light came on inside my head.” I didn’t need to stick with it. I shut it off and did something more useful, slept.

It’s got me started thinking about resort meals, ball games, movies, concerts and sermons.

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

Adaptive Cruise Control

 

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Adaptive cruise control slows down and speeds up automatically to keep pace with the car in front of you. When using it, you set a maximum speed and  a radar sensor on your car locks onto the car in front of you and instructs your car to stay a safe distance back. Adaptive cruise control was considered “extreme tech” as recently as 2013. By 2019 it was common and “cheap” enough to be almost standard on economy cars. It’s a wonderful device for life on the highway, and a great metaphor transferrable to other areas of life.

It’s sometimes seen on Youtube videos of foot races run by students in special education classes. If one classmate trips, others adapt their speed, stopping to raise the fallen friend so all finish together. More of us could use adaptive control when tasked with committee or group work in our jobs, associations and churches. People with great ambitions for advancement might look at the debris they leave in their wake: broken friendships; failed marriages; soured parent/child relationships and lack of neighborly feeling because moving “up” has often meant relocating “away” before getting to know the folks across the street or next door. .

The system works through a radar sensor that controls how close one car gets to the one in front. Would that the certificate of ordination received by clergy came with a distance monitor. The same goes for the kinds of certifications granted to child care providers, youth counselors and prison workers.

Adaptive conversation control might help people who want to share religious testimonies. Whether one is the customer or the barber, without an early agreement on openness to hearing another’s religious testimony, conversion is unlikely. The simple question, “I’d like to talk about my faith. Would you care to listen?” is like radar that sets the distance between cars. Two parties holding similar faith might find the conversation. If their faiths are oppositional, a poor haircut or transfer of business could result. If the question is answered negatively, the talk could turn to the Cubs, the Bears, the Bulls, but not the Patriots.

Given enough time to think, we could come up with LOTS of places in life where a “adaptive cruise control” could be beneficial. It might be a field in which people could develop and market new APPs for smartphones.

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