Shiver me Timbers!

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

As late as the 1970s it was still possible to find beds in motels with coin boxes along side. Paying the price named (25 or 50 cents) resulted in a vibration motor attached to the bed-frame going into action for a set number of minutes. Depending on whether those on the bed were treated to a relaxing massage or additional stimulation during other horizontal activities will be left to your imagination. The device was known as a Vibrabed. Should you wish to build and sell such yourself, the trademark is no longer registered.

 

I was moved to think of it today during nap time when a vibrating roller passed back and forth along the street in front of my house. The pavement had been ground off earlier in the morning to prepare for old pipes to be replaced. A lot of digging remains to be done. But before that, the road had to be made passable for those of us who reside here to get cars in and out as things are unbuilt and rebuilt. Heavily weighted steel wheeled or rubber wheeled rollers can be used for this work, but vibrating ones do the job more quickly. As the roller passed, the house shook.  I felt like a pirate, “shiver me timbers!”

 

Word historians trace the phrase “Shiver my timbers” back as far as 1795. Back then, “to shiver” meant to break into pieces. In 19th century seaborne adventures the expression was put into the mouths of pirates and others who sailed on wooden ships.  Pirate talk is less grammatical than normal people, and adventure novels need to be further hyped. The pronoun got changed. To shiver the masts or other timbers of a ship was a major disaster for a sailor or a pirate. The oath reflects the peril.

 

Our house is coming up on its 100th birthday. Various recent projects involving rewiring and insulation have given it many injuries. Having its timbers shivered today seemed an added insult. I was downstairs during the final few passes of the roller. The floor vibrated beneath me and the house roared. Most of the noise, it turns out, was the old sash windows rattling in their frames.

 

This is a feeling the house can do without in the future.  Neither I nor the structure “gotta get it back again.”

 

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

 

Punctuating Life by Choice

       

Following an online lesson about  “the linking function of the colon” a student posted the following question. “Ok, so can i use the colons like this? “My friend says school sucks: but thats because she hates math.”?  Someone seeking to respond in conformity with the website’s guidelines: “We’re teaching each other – so don’t just answer “Yes” or “No”, share your answer the way your favorite teacher would” soon posted the following:

There are three punctuation marks used to indicate a pause. The comma is the shortest, the semicolon is a bit longer, and the colon indicates a significant pause in speech. Each of these may indicate different and more technical things in writing, but the conventions on length of pause are similar. Let’s try your sample sentence with each different mark.

With a comma—  “My friend says school sucks, but that’s because she hates math.”

With a semicolon—  “My friend says school sucks; but that’s because she hates math.”

With a colon—  “My friend says school sucks: but that’s because she hates math.”

Which one best fits what you would say aloud when using this sentence? Use that one.

Set aside for a moment whether the details in the response were correct or not, and look at that final line, “Which one best fits what you would say aloud when using this sentence? Use that one.”  

Young students who take science, math, grammar and other courses online or in classrooms are often focused on getting things exactly right. Their motivation is the test scores they will receive and the resulting grades they will earn. It gets even scarier when the tests are styles as “objective”. In those cases, “right” answers are required. So much depends on being “right”.

Many things in life are contingent upon the choices we make between alternatives. Sometimes a choice made may curve the course of a life in a direction completely different from what would have come from choosing something else. Unless we are incarcerated or enslaved, we often have choices, even if those are merely between television programs or types of breakfast cereals. Like the student offered the choice between comma, semicolon and colon, we are free to determine what fits us best. The problem, alas, is living by and with the consequences of that freedom.

I’m choosing to revel in that freedom. I hope you are, too.

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

She’s the One

There are so many announced candidates for the 2020 presidential election that you could imagine campaign professionals running out of slogans. Rhymes, like the 1952 and 1956 “I like Ike” won’t work for several names. Recycling something like “Change We Can Believe In” may alienate some potential voters. And “Make America Great Again”, we’ve heard THAT before. If the candidate who emerges from the primary process is a woman, she and her staff might think twice about using “She’s the One.”

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

At the 1968 Republican convention, the Nixon campaign was competing with 3 other major candidates (Reagan, Rockefeller and Stassen) and 15 favorite-son candidates to grab the nomination. The campaign slogan they chose was, “Nixon’s the One”. All seemed well until a prankster hired several African-American women in the later stages of pregnancy to parade through lobbies of hotels in which convention delegates stayed carrying large “Nixon’s the One” banners.

Young couples deeply in love sometimes purchase matching T-shirts emblazoned with expressions of affection for each other. You can envision a pair walking down the boardwalk or sidewalk at a resort clothed in “I’m with her,” and “I’m with him” T-shirts, an arrow on one pointing right, and on the other left. It’s cute, so long as they stand on the correct sides of each other and not get mixed up in a group photo. Lovers must be careful of things like that.

A lineup is a technique in which crime witnesses or victims are asked to confirm whether a suspect merits further attention by selecting him or her from a line of similar-looking individuals. A statement like “That’s him!” or “She’s the one!” upon a witness’s first viewing a line of several people  can be a strong indicator of accurate identification. But it has to be done in a neutral way. Police must not steer a witness towards a “preferred” suspect. Care must be taken, or a defense lawyer can have the lineup evidence excluded at trial.  

Brides and grooms in varying gender combinations stand up for weddings making vows in which they declare before a judge, priest, rabbi or ship captain, “She’s the one,” or “He’s the one.”

As has been the occasional case in political campaigns and police lineups, pairings and avowals at weddings have sometimes been manipulated or coerced.

The coiners of President Nixon’s campaign phrase didn’t mean the same thing by it as was implied by the prankster who hired the women with the banners. Let us hope that when we declare somebody to be “the one”, whether that be a preferred candidate for president, a lover, a criminal or a spouse, we know what we’re saying.

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

Are four enough, is six too many?

Such commercial TV as I watch lately carries lots of ads for medicines. They’re the kind that end by advising me to ask my doctor about WONDERMED or some other thing to alleviate symptoms of a condition that I’d never heard of before because it’s been renamed. When I watched TV as a kid (and I watched a LOT of TV) the commercials were different. If about medicines, they aimed at mothers concerned about kids’ problems. In  a laxative ad that shall never be forgotten, the first mother mentioned her child’s condition and said that she wanted to give him some prunes, but she was unsure if four would be enough or if six would be too many. The second mother recommended a commercial laxative sold in a bottle, because you could be sure of how much was needed.

Recently I had the same kind of problem. Not one that needed a laxative, but one in which I wondered what might be too little or too much. It was my first experience of home brewing. The equipment came second-hand, and the beer kit was a gift. This being the first time, I wanted to follow all directions exactly. That meant purchasing even MORE equipment. Each instruction seemed to require a different widget.

 

Reminders of sanitation were most troubling.  Wash, rinse, sanitize, allow to dry without contacting anything. I’m sure that something “clean but not sanitized” got in there, a spoon or an item reused after having been placed on a surface. After the stuff had been mixed, cooked, cooled, decanted, and lidded it was set aside to ferment.  When no bubbles came out of the airlock, I was sure all had failed. I peeked through the little hole where the airlock went into the tank and espied a layer of yeast. So far, so good.

A week later I siphoned the mix into a big glass bottle for “second fermentation”. I’m most confident that pollution happened then. Two more weeks passed and it was “bottling day”. More things to wash, rinse and sanitize. More chances for failure.

About 40 bottles of home brew now rest in the basement. All the equipment is in the same corner. Opening day will be the first Monday of June. I’m wondering if 4 sanitations were enough, or 6 were too many. Will my brew taste of iodine? Maybe more importantly, will it have laxative qualities?

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

Substitutions that Aren’t

                                                                                                          

When you don’t have a vital piece for a project, you can abandon the task. When you can’t abandon it, you may have to delay until that piece is available, or you may have to go out and get the piece. OR, you may just be able to make do with a substitute.

In my final semester of college I enrolled for a course. Though it was required for students wishing to get a teaching certificate in California, it was merely an elective for me; I was interested in the topic. The assigned teacher had been at the school for decades, but I’d never taken a class from him. In the month before the term began he suffered a heart attack. The department scavenged around and found a qualified graduate student at a nearby university willing and able to substitute for the semester. On the first day she explained the situation. Nobody dropped the course. Some classmates were seniors who had left this course for their final year. If they would get their certificates “on time”, they were stuck. I didn’t have to stay, but she was kind of cute, so I did. In the end, though, she was no substitute for the experienced professor for whom she stood in.

When cooking family meals in Taiwan, where Western food emporia were not common, I often had to resort the the back pages of cookbooks to learn what to substitute for this or that ingredient that was not on our shelf.  Sometimes those lists include warnings that additional cooking time or different techniques need to be used, but generally things worked out.

A friend who was a regional coordinator for an international development organization once gave me some tips on public speaking about projects. He said that the pictures that accompany a speech don’t need to “accompany” what’s being said. Pictures can tell one story and give a set of impressions while one speaks along general lines about the work itself. When I asked where he got the pictures, he directed me to sources of stock photos.

I recently had to do some sandpapering work where I had patched plastered walls. People had warned me about dust, so I purchased a tool that attaches to the vacuum cleaner to suck up dust directly from a “sanding screen”. It’s about the same size as a power sander. Using it on a recent morning, though, I discovered that it’s no substitute for a power sander. It only sucks up dust. The action to CREATE that dust, the sanding itself, comes from the operator’s arms and shoulders. Mine are aching.

Substitutes can be like that:helpful and useful, but no match for the real thing.  Keep that in mind.

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

An Old Man with a Microphone

I was 14 the first time I was given unsupervised control of a microphone and public address system. That should have been a warning. I found every excuse I could find to repeat the same list of 3 or 4 announcements to a gymnasium full of people over and over (and over and over). It was years before I had the chance again, and thankfully, some things happened in between.

In college I took a course in public speaking. I got over the fear of facing an audience. (You can use a microphone and remain unseen.) But in college, the only audiences upon which I was inflicted were in classrooms. No microphones were used. Little damage was done.

When I was about 23 the first sergeant in my Army Reserve unit was handed a microphone hooked to a loudspeaker. When delivered without amplification, his remarks were always brief. That day, though, he went deeply into detail. The guy standing next to me whispered “Old man with a microphone.” I’ve kept that in mind.

Eventually I went into a “speaking to audiences” line of work in which microphones are ubiquitous. I learned to prefer something either affixed to a lectern or clipped to a lapel. Hand-held microphones are a nuisance because I gesture a lot. With a microphone in one hand, I can’t make a two-handed point. The kind of microphone that hangs from one or both ears and stretches around my face itches Apart from microphones, I also learned that I had to write out comments word-for-word before getting too free while speaking them. Because I LOVE my work, the good people who are forced to be in my audiences need to be protected from me.

I had a bit part on about 100 episodes of an unscripted TV program in Taiwan. It took getting used to the camera, but eventually I got pretty casual about the soliloquies that it was my privilege to deliver. There were no scripts, but the topics were assigned and the time was defined as “a single minute!” That limitation probably kept me on the air as long as I lasted. Longer wouldn’t’ve been better.

Recently I attended an event at which a man about 15 years my senior delivered the keynote address. He is an important man. Prior to retiring he was an orator both fiery and physical. No longer. Now he’s wheelchair bound, weak of eye, and weak of voice, and with a microphone in his hand, he can’t turn pages in his manuscript. Someone else did that for him. He gave the impression that it had been a long time since he had been in front of this kind of audience. His remarks were cogent and apt, but he didn’t need all the time he took to deliver them. Though the things he said were challenging, he has become an old man with a microphone.

As I age, should anyone invite me to speak to any kind of group, I’ll keep that in mind.

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

Gotta Get out While We’re Young

Like many people who grow up in a single place, I accepted the norms of my hometown, Los Angeles, as universal. People who spoke differently, whether it was their language or their accent, “talked funny.” I assumed that the rules of the road that I learned in high school drivers’ training class were the world’s rules.

In 1969 I left home for the Army. I lived in 2 different states (Missouri and Alabama) and served in a foreign country (Vietnam). I met people from all over the USA, Puerto Rico and Guam, but I still went back to what was “normal” as soon as I could. The view of Los Angeles from the Griffith Park Observatory was as familiar to me as the back of my hand. Ridge lines of the mountains around the San Fernando Valley oriented me in space.

In the summer of 1975 I was showing a guy from New Mexico, who was in town for a couple of weeks, around town. I took him to Hollywood and a few other places, and eventually up to that view from the observatory. I expected him to be astounded and impressed. Instead, I heard him say, “You must be crazy to live in a place like this.” I stammered back that I had a plan to leave within a year. I lied. No such plan was in my head. But that’s when it started.

A year later, not yet 25 years old, I was on the other side of the Pacific. I got out while still young. My New Mexico acquaintance had been complaining about the city’s pollution and crowding. In telling him that I planned to leave within a year, he may have understood that I, too, wanted a cleaner and more open place. But across the ocean I went to a city even more crowded and polluted than my home town. I stayed there or in crowded and polluted places until I retired last year. On visits to Los Angeles I could still orient myself in terms of the views and the ridge lines. I could still do that today. But, it’s no longer my home. Now it’s just a place where I once lived.

Visiting a Seattle-born-and-raised friend who now lives in a small town in central Iowa recently, I heard his dismay at young people from that area who go away to universities and graduate schools in exciting cities with the idea that they’ll eventually return home as doctors, teachers, bankers or whatever. As he sees it, they’ve gotten out while young, why would they want to come back?

Maybe getting out while you’re young is something for urbanites, especially those of us whose youth was spent on or near the West coast. Whether we go to rural or urban places, when we’re far from our “roots”, we’re free to be home anywhere, or nowhere.

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

If I Should Fall Behind…

Sometime in my early 20s I listened to an angry preacher inveigle against the culture of the time in Southern California. He saw the philosophical and religious environment there as “relativist” and pushed for return and adherence to what he called “absolutes.” Listening to him as native-born Californian in my early 20s, and seeing him as being both an outsider and old enough to be my father, I basically blew it off. Though I didn’t care for what he said, I liked the man. I was sad when he died in his early 50s. Later, from some guys even older than him, I learned that though he was a brilliant musician, he was not all that deep a thinker, nor all that creative in the pulpit. In fact, it was likely that the sermon to which I took exception had been either lifted mostly from a magazine or book he’d been reading that week or was a poorly done rehash of a sermon he had recently heard. It may have been the best he was capable of in the situation.

I’ve persisted in rather “relativist” ways into my 60s. It seems to me that most things depend on context. It’s May. During graduation ceremonies young people will be exhorted to do their best, reach for the stars and achieve their dreams. June is a month for weddings. During the ceremonies, couples will be admonished to walk together hand in hand. Though we admire people who reach to top in their fields, we dislike corporate and political “climbers” who reach the top of their fields over the ruined lives of people they’ve used and abused “on the way up.” 15 years ago a clergyman from Singapore related to me that many churches in his country honored senior pastors who led congregations to great popularity but ignored the underpaid, overworked and burnt out junior clergy in the organizations.

As refugees from oppression Eritrea and poverty in Nigeria make their way across the Sahara to Libya in the hope of getting to Europe, and as refugees from violence in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador make their way through Mexico in the hope of safety in America, which are the ones we are called to admire? Is it those who pursue dreams in the face of danger, or those who patiently wait and travel at the pace of the weakest among them. If a family in a poor or dangerous place scrapes together funds enough to “send the strongest one ahead”, is that more noble than the strongest one remaining with the family until there are resources enough for all?

In certain contexts, “I’ll wait for you, and if I should fall behind, wait for me” is absolutely the right thing to do. In others, “I’ll go ahead and when I get there, I’ll send for you” is more necessary. Each paradigm has its place. In one, maybe neither one gets far, but at least they are together. Somebody risks frustration. In the other, someone definitely gets left behind, and risks abandonment.

Which risk is preferable? That depends on the context. As in all situations, though, grace is needed.

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

Wrong Side of the Street

During the mid 20^th century many pyramids were constructed. They were theoretical rather than physical, but each rose from a base to an apex. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943), Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956), and Lawrence Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development (1958) were only three among many. Kohlberg’s theory came to me in practical terms before it even existed. My mother knew it instinctively. When I was 4 or 5 years old we resided in the 7300 block of Dalton Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles. One day someone visiting our neighbor parked a car on the street. That was not an unusual thing, but this one was pointed against the flow that traffic would take. Noticing it, my mother seized on a teachable moment and mentioned that the car was on the “wrong side of the street.” She added that should a policeman notice, the driver would get a ticket.

Getting a ticket from a policeman was a phrase she often used. In those days, there were no seat belts in cars. Wherever we went with my mom at the wheel, there were 3 or 4 loose children in the car. We were told that if we looked out the back window of the car while she was driving, a policeman would give her a ticket. When I started to ride a bicycle, I forget whether it was if I rode on the sidewalk or on the street, but a policeman could give me a ticket for doing the wrong one. Once when I was out on my little bike and a police cruiser came up the block, I dismounted and walked my bike until it was gone. I had learned to be afraid of getting a ticket.

As a young driver I collected my share of traffic tickets, including one that, at the age of 17, resulted in my license being suspended for 28 days. Subsequent tickets led to fines. Eventually, after having to pay an exorbitant amount for a year of car insurance, I learned my lesson. But because of what I’d learned from my mother when very young, I never got a ticket for parking on “the wrong side of the street.”

After I finished college I moved to Taiwan and lived there for 39 years. In Taiwan, it matters not if one is parking or driving a car, motorcycle or bicycle, there’s no “wrong side of the street.” The basic traffic rule is “don’t hit anyone.” There are laws, but so long as no one gets hit, no laws are broken. It can seem that only when accidents happen and have to be recorded by the police do the rules come into play. Oh, those were the days! Now I’ve retired in Michigan. Nobody seems to care upon which side of the street I park my car, but I’ve discovered that I reside on “the wrong side of the street.”

Soon after we purchased a fine, north-facing, old (1925) home, we learned that the city will re-do the water pipes, sewers and storm drains and replace the curbs, sidewalks and driveway aprons on our street. After that, they’ll repave the roadway. We’re thrilled because the road is rough and there are pot-holes at the foot of our driveway. Work began several blocks away on April 1^st. It should be finished on our block in the summer. Replacing the storm drain, which runs near the curb on our side of the street, has necessitated taking down several trees. A tree removal company from out of town did all 9 blocks of the project in the same few days.

One thing that attracted us to this house was a large shade tree directly in front and another next door. Now they’re gone. When the project is finished we’ll get a sapling. For now it looks as if the trees from one end of the project to the other were given tickets for being on the wrong side of the street. Other than that, they did nothing else wrong except grow where they had been planted decades ago.

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

The Right Tool

A lot of us are not at all averse to hard work. We may even find it physically and psychologically good for us. But there are times when we work harder than we need to. Sometimes it’s because the “boss” or “foreman” is just making it harder on us for reasons that even she may not be aware of. Sometimes it’s because the teacher wants us to “overlearn” something in pursuit of retaining only a little. In my own case, it’s because I often don’t have the right tools on hand. One time about 20 years ago I assembled a large piece of furniture with hand tools. It took a couple of hours. When the time came to take it apart, a friend loaned me an electric screwdriver. In 10 minutes the job was done. But I forgot that lesson until, last October, I was assembling another piece of furniture with defective hand tools. This time substituting better tools resulted in a job done with more ease and less cursing.

A few weeks ago a house-insulation team came to seal up this old house that we bought for retirement. Certain structural features made necessary the boring of several 3-centimeter holes through interior walls. The team’s job was to make the holes and blow in the insulation. We who own the house were left with the choice to either hire a plaster specialist or to patch the walls ourselves.

With time on my hands, and instructional YouTube videos easily accessible, I chose the DIY route, resulting in a trip to the neighborhood hardware store. Cheapskate that I am, I was only thinking of materials. I’m thankful for the “old guy” who helps customers there several mornings each week. He talked me into buying tools I didn’t used to have. I’d believed that the “almost right” tool was good enough, and that the best tool for lots of jobs is my index finger. After going to work, it didn’t take long to discover that the new tools, as much as if not even more than the right materials, made the project less onerous than it could have been. Originally the project dismayed me. Even the YouTube instruction videos scared me. But now, with the wise counsel of the guy at the hardware store and the right tools, I confidently patch and sand, sure that the patched walls will not look patchy.

How many jobs that I’ve done in my 67 years were more difficult because I either didn’t have the tools or chose to use something other than what was best for the job. Prideful of what I told myself were “improvisational” and “coping” skills, I did things poorly or spent too much labor in getting them even moderately passable. I ask myself how many lessons came from me in my role as a teacher that I just got through? In how many sermons in my role as a preacher did I miss the point entirely or make it poorly because of poor tools and bad execution?

Patching these walls according to the kindly advice of the hardware guy and competent guidance of the YouTube video may be good for me. Having the right tools will certainly make it easier. However, painting, when the time comes, may be an entirely different thing.

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