So, um, it will come as no surprise that I'm not staying very active as a blogger here. But I'm still blogging, and I'm lucky enough to do it with my faraway friend Megan, who used to write a blog I admired a whole lot, called From the Archives. Our joint project is a new blog called Rhubarb Pie, and it's here. I hope you'll come visit, and that you'll stay awhile.
How many lawyers, mathematicians, and engineers does it take to change a light switch? Apparently, it's a lot. NBT and I were trying to do something simple: change the off-white switches to white one, to go with our new paint job in the front hallway. Turns out we bought two-way switches instead of three-way switches, which we realized after we wired them up. And when we bought the right switches, we had to figure out which wire went where. You'd think it would be easy, but we couldn't find the right combo through trial and error, with me running down to the basement and shutting the breaker off between each iteration.
Our friend 517 had the occasion to have dinner with two certified genius mathematicians -- an American Academy of Sciences distinguished professor and a PhD student in some kind of advanced algebra. Oh, this is a very simple problem, they told him. I've written a paper about three way switches, one of the mathematicians volunteered. But it turns out there are something like thirty-six squared possible combinations, if you don't know whether the power source goes to the light, to the upstairs switch, or to the downstairs switch, and you don't know which is the common wire. That made me feel a little better about our failure to figure it out. Finally the mathematicians acknowledged that it wasn't such a simple problem after all, although they did insist that there was no need to turn the breaker off when fiddling with the wires. ("It's only dangerous if you touch the ground wires together.") 517 finally obtained a continuity tester, and we found a wiring diagram on the web that was a pretty helpful map. I ran up and down the basement stairs turning the breaker off each time, and now we have light.
I'm reading Full Fathom Five, by Mary Lee Coe Fowler. She's a terrific writer and also, coincidentally, my mom.
I'm obviously not an objective reader, but I can say that I'm really digging the book. It's about my grandfather, a man I never knew. My mom never knew him, either -- he was a submarine captain, and he died at sea before my mother was born. Her mother, my grandmother, remarried quickly and tried to move on, urging her children to do the same. So for most of my mom's life, she obeyed, and didn't ask questions about her father. For the first twenty-six years of my life I never thought about my grandfather. I didn't have any stories about him, and because nobody had ever talked about him, it didn't occur to me to be curious.
But my mom got curious about him about 9 years ago, and her curiosity started her digging into archives, learning about submarines, making friends with WWII veterans, and re-tracing the steps my grandfather took while he was alive. And she wrote this book, about him, and about what it was like for her to learn about and grieve a man she never got to know.
I'm struck by how thorough she has been in her research, and how brave. She's learned all kinds of things about submarines, about WWII, and, indeed about war itself. She's questioned her own biases (a pacifist, the process of war research forced her to reconsider her own notions about war, duty, and honor). She asks uncomfortable questions: was her parents' marriage a good one, was her father a gambler, did he take unnecessary risks with his mens' lives? She's assembled what seems like a pretty clear picture of a man, a life, and a time in history, from interviews and scrapbook excerpts, old letters and war accounts. It's her past she's discovering, and mine, and it's really compelling to realize that I did want to know about this, all along. I'm learning a lot about submarines and WWII history, and about its impact on family life in the years immediately following, and this is probably the most universally appealing and intellectually interesting part of the book from an objective point of view. But for me those are incidentals -- I'm reading to learn something way more personal.
I can see traits in myself that I probably inherited from this grandfather I never knew. I'm gregarious; I like to work a room; I'll strike up a conversation with a stranger without hesitation. It isn't learned behavior. My parents are friendly but introverted. They'd just as soon stay home and read, or, if they go out, sit at a corner table with good friends. I've wondered over the years where my urge to reach out comes from. I think it's from Jim Coe. There's something really neat about getting a gift from someone who died 65 years ago. And of course my mother gave me this gift: she gave me a second grandfather, another one I can be proud of. I didn't know what I was missing. It turns out it was a lot.
It's the best color because it has the best smell.
My dog friends remind me to pay attention to now, this world and all of its wonders -- the feel of a mudpuddle on a spring day, the fascinating mystery of a rustle in the underbrush, the joy of running through a field. I need a big dose of their company, or else I forget that. And they sleep with the satisfaction of the truly relaxed.
I spend a lot of time with college students, too, and they too remind me to live in this world, the one right here and now, full of its fascinations and mysteries. In small ways college students make me feel wise, because I've already learned some of the things about the grown up world, people and relationships and identity, that they're busy discovering. But when I think like that I am being foolish. Like all of my other friends, they have more to teach me than I have to teach them. I spend car rides asking them all the questions they'll put up with, about how they see the world, about what is true for them.
I am a huge admirer of Clay Shirky. What I admire most is how willing he is to unlearn all his assumptions about the world so he's able to see how it is changing. What I admire second most is how he uses stories to explain big ideas. That's how I learn and remember things.
I have a new laptop, and I've just opened a new financial institution account, and the combination means I've had about a million opportunities to choose from among selected "Secret Questions" that are designed to prompt me to give my chosen answer and confirm my account identity. Who thinks these questions up, and what sort of people do they know?
I find the choices of "Secret Questions" terribly offensive. When I was still single, I remember how crappy the "Secret Questions" made me feel -- who was the best man at your wedding? In what month did you meet your spouse? What is your spouse's middle name? Damn, I thought. Even my bank thinks I'm a loser for still being single.
Now there are bunch of similar children questions: "In what month was your eldest child born?"
If you aren't married, or don't have kids, you've got to talk about your car or your pets. I have friends with neither. Or about high school -- who was your prom date, for example. What was your high school mascot? Which cheerleading squad did you first belong to?
Turboglacier and I were talking about some alternative questions, that don't assume quite such a middle-America, white-picket-fence childhood. Which of your tattoos do you regret the most? What was bail set at in your first arraignment? What is the first name of your elementary school tormentor? Which Black Sabbath album did you buy first?
With chocolate buttercream frosting. Mmmmm. It's not as hard as you think, and it tastes better than you remember. Why not bake one, and invite your neighbors over for a slice and a glass of milk?
The first sign of spring in this state is that the blue-white of snow and shadows changes to grey and brown. The snow is melting but all the winter's accumulation of sand (sprinkled down by plow trucks to give traction in snowstorms), frozen decomposing dogpoop, and miscellaneous trash begins to show itself. The ground is freezing and thawing in daily cycles, leaving it alternately muddy and hard. The grass is visible as yellow-grey-brown patches, layered with mud and sand. The remaining piles of snow are the color and texture of concrete. It's a bad time to come visit.
Generally my rule as a coach is, we sail in the rain, but we don't sail in the snow. But this season is too important, and practice time too precious, to skip a day because of a few flakes. Brrrrr.
We get good breeze here, and good practice sailing in waves and lumpy water. And it's warm enough that you don't mind getting wet.
No sunburn yet. I'm hiding underneath layers of sunscreen, plus my Columbia UPF 30 hat and shirt. Love them both.
