Two Ways of Remembering

The train from Chicago to New York (or from New York to Chicago depending on which way you’re going), passes through several towns in northern Ohio that have “railway museums”. There’s an even more extensive one in Utica, NY. Fascinated as I am with all things “transportation”, I used to take delight in such displays (though I’ve never gotten off of the train in either Ohio or Utica to poke around). On reflection, however, I find that “railway museums”, like “aviation museums”, are mainly just collections of old stuff that gets progressively rustier and dustier.

In Wishful Thinking (1975), Frederick Buechner notes that there are two kinds of remembering. The first, which he calls “nostalgia”, is making an excursion from the living present back into the dead past. If I would do that at a railway museum, it wouldn’t mean climbing aboard a caboose or locomotive (I’ve never been on a train crew) but sitting in a coach seat. There’s no thrill in that. At an aviation museum it would be even less exciting. My experience with flying around didn’t begin until I was 18. Except for a few military transport flights I took when a soldier in Vietnam, everything has been on commercial airliners. Not one flight has been worth the effort it would take to remember it.

Buechner’s other way of remembering is to summon the dead past into the living present. He likens this to a widow, dreaming that her deceased husband is with her, and feeling him at her side. He compares it to what happens at Mass in church. When we “do this in remembrance”, we’re not taking a trip down a memory lane that stretches back longer than we’ve been alive. In very present time we are experiencing living communion with something that happened long ago.

Seeing old railway coaches in Utica, I’ve no desire to ride or to have ridden in a single one of them. Old dining cars in Ohio to not evoke memories of meals enjoyed while riding the rails. When current Amtrak equipment is deemed to be no longer usable and gets replaced, I hope all of the current stuff gets scrapped and the pieces get recycled. But… speaking Taiwanese, which used to be how I lived from day to day, brings a past which is no longer operative into my current awareness. Waking in the morning with a fresh memory that “sometime last night” an already forgotten portion of what I dreamed had been in Taiwanese is a great way to start the day.

Later this year I’ll attend the 50th reunion of my high school graduating class. In preparation for being part of the party, I’ll hope to focus on “making something live again” rather than “remembering what it was like.” There’s enough rust and dust in the transportation museums. There was enough sadness in adolescence. I hope not to add to any of those in 67-and-68-year-old crowd I’ll be joining.  

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

A Letter to my Soul

Originally written in 2016.  (Revisited and revised once or twice since)

Dear Soul of Mine,

We’ve been living together, sometimes comfortably, sometimes uncomfortably, for 67 years now, and it may come as as shock to you (as it was to me) to learn that you never really existed. You’ve been either a figment of my imagination or a cultural construct foisted upon me by a religious culture. Considering your demise saddens me.

When I was a child in Sunday school, and the teachers kindly introduced me to things like dropping pennies into a plastic birthday cake during the week that I turned 5, or singing songs about a God who loved me through in a bearded guy named Jesus, I felt good inside. Maybe it was their earnestness, maybe it was because they had been trained in mind-control and how to deceive little kids, or maybe it was because at Sunday school we were in age-differentiated classes and I didn’t have to compete with either of my brothers. Anyway, because my teachers believed in something, I wanted to, too. I came to identify that “something”, in part, with you, O my soul!

Eventually I learned a few things, some by experience (a faulty way to learn), others through direct education (faulty too) and still others by introspection (more faultiness). Among what I learned about culture, family and myself, which included things explanations and theories, I came to understand that you, my soul, were personal and eternal . You and I had an eternal destination. Eventually the religion in which I was raised moved from being my parents Sunday school teachers’ religion to being my own. I stuck with it through parents’ loss of faith, siblings’ departure from practice, and culture’s increasing indifference. Something in me held onto belief.

So it comes as a shock to learn from cultural anthropologists that you only emerged when human beings began to settle into agricultural communities. It disturbs me to learn from brain scientists that you are nothing beyond the connections between neurons in my own head, and to hear scientific evolutionists tell me that nobody created you. As a CONCEPT, you are nothing but a chemical delusion of my mind. It hurts to think that you will not survive the demise of my physical body.

This kind of goodbye is not easy to write. So I won’t.

I’m going to hold on to believing in you, even in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. I have no argument with the science, but my belief in you isn’t based on science, nor is it based on anything in anyone’s scriptures. I can let go of the claims of scriptures and traditions, especially of writings that emerged from pre-scientific cultures penned by people in particular contexts about things far beyond their ken.  

I hold onto my belief in you, my soul, in part because of the kindness and earnestness of those wonderful Sunday school teachers in Los Angeles 60 years ago. Though they were poorly trained and set up, they lacking the wit to psychologically manipulate me. More than anything else, they were kind. They acted toward me with love. They believed in their own souls and in mine.

I hold onto belief in you because experience testifies to the times that you have comforted me, fortified my resolve, protected me when hurt by “soul-less” human and cultural manifestations of unkindness, greed and ill-will.

I hold onto belief in you because of how often, in the guise of conscience, you have called me back from the brink of behaviours and actions that were or would have been injurious to other people and my relationships with them. More than once you have deterred me from what would have resulted from my own selfishness, carelessness and foolishness.

I hold onto belief in you because of the many times becoming “soul sick” has shown me that certain habits of thought or directions of endeavor have been harmful to my relationships with other people, each and every one of whom has a soul not unlike you.

If you never existed and never will exist beyond the date of my physical demise, then death will be no loss to me. I will have lived a rich life, richer because you have been my companion every step of the way.

Sincerely, and hopefully eternally,

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

A Solid “C” in Soldiering

In 1969, when I was 17, I joined the Army. I’d done better than average (though not star-quality) in high school, but found soldiering a challenge. If they’d given grades I might have managed a C. After basic training I was trained to operate an earth moving machine. During the first week of 1970 I arrived in Vietnam and was assigned to a heavy construction company that worked out of Fire Support Base Apollo. I was put in line for the machine operator’s slot held by a man soon to finish his deployment. My first month was spent in physical labor or on guard duty. Eventually the other guy left and I found myself on wheels.  

I did some things right, but continued to maintain my “C” grade. Fire Support Base Apollo was home to an artillery battery and not always quiet at night. I learned to distinguish loud booms of outgoing artillery from softer explosions of incoming mortar fire. One kind meant “go back to sleep”. The other meant, “get up and get your gear on.” One night while on guard duty on a tower overlooking the perimeter, a mortar round fell in the motor pool behind me.  I heard hissing sounds and interpreted them as indicating that tear gas would soon waft my way. I regretted the laziness that had resulted in my not taking my gas mask from beside my bunk onto the tower. Had I been a better soldier, I’d’ve been prepared. I worried about tears, coughing and a runny nose before realizing that the hissing was from shrapnel-punctured tires.

On a trip to fetch new equipment I had to spend a night at battalion headquarters. Because they were NEVER attacked, I left my rifle, helmet and flak jacket on a truck. That was the only time in 1970 that mortar rounds fell there.  Unequipped to do any soldiering, I quietly dressed and climbed under the bunk where I’d been sleeping;. Nobody noticed me in the dark. First thing the next morning I fetched and donned my gear.

Once some Vietnamese soldiers were sent for on-the-job training. I was assigned to teach a guy how to run the earth mover. At first he rode along and watched. We had no language in common. The next day we switched sides. A lot of finger pointing, head shaking, nodding, smiling and frowning ensued. Afterwards I mostly rode. I insisted, though on driving through the crowded market town on the way to and from the job site. One afternoon the sergeant in charge sent us home earlier than expected. The trainee was still in the driver’s seat as we went through I learned from him both how to get through a crowded street and what the horn button was for.

One evening at the enlisted men’s club a Vietnamese trainee stood in line like everyone else, with money in his hand to buy a beer.  The GI behind the bar ignored him, serving only the Americans. I spoke up because this guy had worked all day just like the rest of us. Service should be given to all in the order that we had lined up. A racist slur addressed to the Vietnamese soldier and condemnation of me for defending him came first, but grudging service followed.  

I left Vietnam on Thanksgiving day in 1970. My next assignment was to an engineer company at Fort McClellan, Alabama, where the army gave basic training to women. Then the United States realized that the army was too big. Everyone got a 6 month early-out. Instead of having to wait 36 months, I was a free man after 30.

I went home to Los Angeles and used GI bill benefits to obtain associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees. In 1981 I accepted an invitation from the Reformed Church in America to return to Asia as a missionary in Taiwan. Though I was a well-below-average soldier in 1970, by the time I retired in 2018 I had developed into a half decent teacher, preacher and worship leader. I aspire in such years as remain for me,  to become an artist and a poet.

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

Lost in the Flood

This morning’s statewide weather report included flood warnings in some eastern and several western counties. I was personally (and somewhat greedily) glad to hear that the country where I reside was not on the list. But even so, there are many floods, and much gets lost in them.

High water isn’t the only kind of flood. Life is sometimes be flooded by love, sadness, hatred, troubles and tasks. We may prefer that life be flooded with cash, but that’s true for few among us. No matter what constitutes the flood, it’s more than we or our environments are equipped to cope with.

Rivers around the world have created flood plains into which they move when the water gets too high and the banks don’t hold them in. In some places rivers cut through mountains. The Colorado in Arizona, the Snake River in Idaho, and the  Delaware River long ago cut, and continue to cut, gaps through mountains and ridges. A lot of rock becomes sand and eventually silt, in these processes. The Mississippi River is bounded for much of its length by levees designed to hold it back from the rich farmland that periodic flooding created before it was controlled. Still, it breaks through from time to time.

When rivers flood, things are lost. Docks, boats, cottages, roads, bridges, crops and lives. In 1938 the Nationalist Chinese Government blew a hole in a dyke on one side of the Yellow River to stop the advance of the Japanese Imperial Army. Half a million Chinese civilians died in the resulting flood, and millions of others became refugees.

When love floods, wonderful things happen. We may be unable to cope with them all, but who cares, it’s love! When sadness or troubles flood a life or the lives of communities, that’s an entirely different thing! Of late (the spring of 2019) it seems that things like racism, religious intolerance, hatred, attacks on people of color and unwillingness to listen to others’ points of view flood the social and spiritual environment in which we live. Are these the flood, or are these the results of things that have been lost in some previous flood?

Maybe the levee we need begins with a control structure (like on a river) on the flood of information that comes in our direction.  Long ago a wise man, or more likely woman, wrote, “The more you know, the more it hurts.” Less news, more music!

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

Subtitles for Name Cards

In addition to a person’s name and contact information, a name card may identify their  organization with a logo and name, and perhaps add a job title. Cards I carried and exchanged in Taiwan were like that. Over there, name cards sometimes appear to be small versions of  curriculum vitae. Once I found a card in a vacated office of a professional man. The work for which he had been trained professionally and had done in that had nothing to do with it, but his card proclaimed that he had obtained his BA degree from the forestry management department of a particular university. A local politician I visited gave me a card which declared him to have once (though no longer) been a member of the board of a the alumni association of his elementary school.

Retired now, and no longer in Taiwan, I’ve occasionally mused on what title to put on a namecard. I know they’re not so common here as in my former home. And, anyway, people now just exchange smart-phone contact information, so name cards are unnecessary. But, just to be quaint, what would I put on one? Here are a few guidelines:

1). Offices are functional.  “Former” before a title or “retired” after one is just boasting. Once you no longer do it, drop it: Governor, Senator, Admiral, Alderman, Judge or Reverend.

2). Jokey things like “Retired, no job, no money, no life” get old SOON.

3). Few ongoing identities do have ar place, very few: Parent; Grandparent, Godparent, etc.

Like a unique stone or object of art on a side table, a name card might become a conversation piece.  Somewhere along the line I was given the impression that my birth brought joy to my mother. So I’ve considered following “making women happy since 1951.”  Of course, there have been times when my spouse (let’s call her “C”)  has been less than happy with me. When that happens (alas, all too often) I wonder whether “disappointing C since 1980” might be applicable.

If it’s really to become a conversation piece, though, it ought to be about the person who receives the card. So maybe it has to end with a question, like “So far, so good. What about you?”

David Alexander. So far, so good, What about you?

 

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

Ramadan Mubarak

May This Ramadan be as bright as ever.
May this Ramadan bring joy, health and wealth to you.
May the festival of lights brighten up you
and your near and dear ones lives.
May this Ramadan bring in u the most
brightest and choicest happiness and
love you have ever Wished for.
May this Ramadan bring you the
utmost in peace and prosperity.
May lights triumph over darkness.
May peace transcend the earth.
May the spirit of light illuminate the world.
May the light that we celebrate at Ramadan
show us the way and lead us together on the
path of peace and social harmony
Wish you a very happy Ramadan Mubarak

The Problem is WAY over THERE!

Long ago and far away, when the CIA still owned Air Asia (an aircraft repair & maintenance business with a service center in Taiwan), I met a guy there who supervised a US government contract for care of planes used in the central Pacific. Among the things he taught me was one about fuel leaks. He said that when fuel drips out of one part of an aircraft it’s futile to seek a leak nearby. Fuel, he said, can run far along the edge of something before finding its way out. Anyone who has gone flying knows how bouncy the ride can be. It’s no surprise that shaking sometimes leads to fuel leaks. It doesn’t take much to imagine how seriously leaks of things like fuel and hydraulic fluid can be. No matter how much work it takes to find and repair what’s leaking, it MUST be done. Planes get names. Nobody wants to go up in “Old Leaky.”

Human bodies, likewise, are prone to problems, and even to leaks. Body fluids that get “outside” are often traceable to nearby lesions. Sources of body fluids in the wrong places “inside” require more work to locate and patch. But human beings are more than mere bodies. We’re not just “thinking meat”. Beyond the physical, we are intellectual, psychological, emotional and spiritual beings. In any and in all of these areas we can have problems that make a fuel leak in an airplane look simple. In any and all of these areas, as in a fuel leak, the source of the problem may be located far from where it presents itself. It may even be found in one of the other areas.

Electricians recently did some rewiring in my old house. After updating the circuit in one downstairs corner, the outlets and ceiling lights in separate rooms had no power. The problem, it turned out, was found above the second-floor ceiling.

Pay attention to persons older than yourself. See the hearing aids, canes, walkers, wheel chairs; hear about the aches and pains; sense the loneliness, frustration, disappointment and dissatisfaction with “the way things are going lately in America and the world;” feel the anger. Those are REAL problems. But is that where they come from?  Experts in medicine, child development, psychology, and medicine might all “source” the problems in different places. As a preacher, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that many of my sisters and brothers in this trade would locate the problem in areas where our own arcane knowledge offers insight.

All of us are going to experience problems, defects and deficiencies. In addition to our personal ones, problems will evince themselves in the people and institutions among which we live, move and have our being. None of us, and few of our friends, acquaintances and organizations, is all that airworthy. Patient and careful inspection may be in order. None of us need go around nicknamed, “Old Leaky”.

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

Land of Hope and Dreams

The “rule of three” guides a lot of writing, suggesting that a trio of events or characters makes for a better story than other numbers. Three adjectives modifying a noun also offer a stronger description of whatever is under discussion. A lot of things also come in twos: “Bubble and Squeak”; “Ham and Eggs”; “Laurel and Hardy”; “Sweetness and Light”.

Pairings are often applied to territories. Early in the Bible there’s mention of a “land of milk and honey”. Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory is sung in the UK like America the Beautiful is sung in the USA. Both fill the role of secondary national anthems. After the Icelandic banking crisis in the early 2000s, Oddný Eir wrote a novel entitled, Land of Love and Ruins.

Across the decades I spent in Asia, I met many people who were there for a while, and then gone. Some were on time-limited contracts, but not a few had relocated TO the land and city where I resided with intentions to spend an entire career or even a lifetime there. Some departed because family situations “back home” cut their time short. Others left because career opportunities were not so enriching as they had imagined, and others for health or children’s special educational needs. The phenomenon of culture shock, common among people who relocate to where language, way of life or both differ from what has always been “normal”, generally moves through four different phases: honeymoon, frustration, adjustment and acceptance. It takes time, cycles back, and can wear people out. Getting stuck somewhere happens. Throwing in the towel for physical and mental health reasons frequently makes the best sense.

One “land of hope and dreams” that many people enter is marriage. That’s not a “rule of three” situation. It’s a “pair” thing. Whether heterosexual or same-sex, marriage is for two. People get married with a lot of hope and not a few dreams. Like folks relocating overseas where the culture is different, entering into marriage is also a situation of culture shock. For a brief time In the 1980s in America the divorce rate for first marriages hit 40%. That number got stuck in a lot of minds, but it has dropped. Now it hovers at around 30%. The younger, poorer and less educated a couple is, the higher their chances of a marriage not lasting. But as age at first marriage, economic stability and educational achievement rise, marriages become more stable. Among college-educated women who first wed at age 25 or older and have an independent source of income, the divorce rate is only 20%.

Because Holland MI is the home of Hope College, it can be seen as the “Land of Hope and SOMETHING”. Having chosen to retire here after decades in Asia, I’ve begun to look for the dreams.

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

An Alien in the Front Yard

When the snow melts, as it did here several weeks ago, things “appear”. In most yards those things include leaves not raked last fall, sticks fallen off of trees, single mittens, and souvenirs of passing dogs. This year, next to our front steps, a set of three attached asphalt shingles with a holes where they’d torn loose from their nails emerged sat among winter’s detritus. Peering upward to the top of the roof ridge, I surmised that the shingles had blown off of the topmost, easternmost corner of our house. I began planning a route by which I would climb up and nail them back into place.  

On many counts, I thought wrong. This first became apparent when the route was announced: out the bedroom window, across the porch roof, upwards to to the ridge and across to the corner. Such a feat, I was told, is for persons younger than myself. In seeking a second opinion I was pointed to the westernmost corner of the ridge, which similarly lacked shingles at its peak. Then I was turned to look at houses across the street; similarly roofed. Eventually it demonstrated that the alien shingles were not even the same as those on our roof, or even those of nearby houses. Strong winds that tear things off of houses carry them a distance before leaving them for the snow to cover. Like the project to replace them, the shingles went into the bin.

How much of time and bother goes into problems that, if given a second look, might turn out not to be at all problematic? Melting of the snow that drifted up against the fronts of peoples houses and shrubbery also revealed little signs in many yards informing malefactors that “this property is protected by XYZ Security.” The local police log, published in the newspaper a couple times each month, shows far more mis-parked vehicles and “mental health walk aways” than home invasions. There IS violent crime in this town. News stories report romances gone bad, with terrible results, gang on gang violence, and family stuff that make one sad, sad, sad. Yet we hire security companies to protect us from what home invasions.

What look like bits of our own houses blown off in blizzards and lost under the snow until spring lead us to all sorts of suppositions and even to actions. Yes, somebody out there needs a roof repaired. Not you. Not this week. Be glad that you didn’t have to climb out a window, cross a porch roof and ascend to the ridge and corner to find out it wasn’t yours.

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

Unsqueak

Free stuff doesn’t always come at no additional cost. Here in Holland, MI there’s a custom of putting unwanted furniture next to the street where people can take it if they want it. It’s not supposed to happen, but so long as you don’t leave anything out there too long the city doesn’t seem to mind.  Either someone takes it, or you take care of it yourself. Last year I found a wonderful “glider rocker” that way. I took it home, dusted it off, washed the upholstery, and it became my favorite chair.

When we began furnishing our new place, my chair didn’t match. Replacement cushions had to be custom made in Canada for $200. Since it was my favorite chair and it had been free to start with, I ordered them. No sooner had I given my credit card number than the chair began to squeak, loudly! I made a cursory inspection and tightened a few screws. When that led to a piece of wood cracking, I borrowed power tools and made a replacement. I drilled some new holes and installed some additional screws, but the squeaking continued, getting louder. It became “not-my-favorite-chair”, but with $200 invested in good-looking new cushions, I wasn’t willing to give up on it. I developed theories, including one about the wood drying out when the forced air furnace came on for the winter. Ideas like that lead to “just wait, and with different weather the situation will sort itself out.” Like many “just wait…” theories, this one was false. Intervention and drastic action were required.

Last week it was disassembly and rebuild time, either that or turn the Canadian maple chair into kindling for a fireplace we don’t have and sleep on the cushions. Close inspection and use of  quality (rather than cheap) tools led discovery of SEVERAL loose screws that I hadn’t previously been able to turn, and some broken ones that hadn’t been discovered. Reassembly involved new screws, glue, torque and time. But the squeaks disappeared. It is once again “my favorite chair.”

Would that unsqueaking my character were so simple.

 

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