Every Saturday I hit the neighborhood Goodwill thrift store for a good look-round. There’s much to find; wealthy areas have the best thrift stores, and in the aggregate this city is pretty wealthy. Though the swag’s not a patch on what it was seven or eight years ago when you could score a two-hundred-buck Aran wool sweater for $3.75. Sometimes I miss the housing bubble.

Yes, we’re wealthy here in the aggregate, but less so in the particular. Living costs are high. Respectable citizens like myself routinely shop Goodwill, to stretch those precious dollars. But we don’t socialize; when I spot an acquaintance, they rarely want to talk. They seem uncomfortable, as if I’ve learned something I’m not supposed to know.

And yet today, somebody tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Can you help me with something?”

I turned to face a lean, older, African-American woman in a gray pants-suit. She pushed a shopping cart; in it she’d laid out a man’s gray suit with several shirts and ties.

“I’ve been here for two hours, and I can’t make up my mind,” she said with some frustration. “I’m putting together an outfit for my husband to wear for when my daughter comes home from India next week. Can you help me pick the shirt and tie?”

Why do these things happen to me? I have barely the awareness to walk in a straight line, but on occasion total strangers will pick me out of a crowd to ask for life advice. Or directions on getting to Highway 17. Life advice is the easier of the two.

And today I wore faded denims and a Dickees cop windbreaker. Hello, Mr. Fashion Maven.

The woman had not a lined face so much as one of cords; cords moved in her cheeks, her neck, her wrists. Her suit was neat, but older and well-used; she’d probably bought it here. She looked to me like a decent person who’d worked hard all her life for not a lot of money, and never complained. But felt that a little help wasn’t too much to ask.

It wasn’t. I’m good with colors. I’m partially color-blind, and I’m good with colors. Go figure; but my wife rarely makes color choices without checking with me.

The suit was deep gray; not ultra-dark, but rich. Maybe a little blue to it. A good choice. All three long-sleeved shirts were also shades of blue, ranging from washed-out sky-blue to a medium sapphire. The sapphire was one of those thick-fabric non-wrinkle jobs; it retained its body, even used. The others were limp.

“The dark blue,” I said, meaning the sapphire. “But none of these ties work. You need one with blue in it. The greens and yellows don’t match the shirt.” Each tie included a bit of grey; she’d matched them to the suit. But they weren’t the right grays.  And in any case, you can’t omit the shirt from the equation.

“I’ll come back with more ties,” she said decisively.

“I’m not going anywhere.” I’d been working my way down a 20-foot rack of t-shirts.

I felt confident about the shirt; dark-skinned and olive-skinned people like her family and myself look good in strong colors. It’s you pale people who favor earth tones, blacks, and pastels.

“So, is your daughter on some educational trip?” Trip, India, homecoming: I was trying to make sense of it.

“Yes, she’s a business student, and she went to India for her studies.” The woman looked like she had the means to maybe send a daughter to St. Louis.

“She’s coming home, and I want my husband to be in a suit to greet her,” she said. “She’ll be so surprised. Because usually he dresses sort of Santa Cruz.”

She wanted her daughter’s home-coming to be special. Santa Cruz is the name of our town, a casual seaside community. “Dressing Santa Cruz” means that you think a t-shirt and denims will do for an anniversary dinner at Le Haute Spot. And, if the weather’s cold, an O’Neil hoodie. I neither joke nor exaggerate.

The woman left, and returned promptly with several ties that were less ghastly — marginally. I chose a faded tie that had at least some blue in it, though not a shade that especially matched the shirt. Still, it could work.

The woman in gray thanked me, and went her way. I had questions, but let them lie. So I made purchases and, without meaning to, walked out the front door just as the woman did. Night had fallen with a thud; and we both turned into the same dark alley. My home and her car lay past the other end. I unlimbered a flashlight and offered to escort her.

And, given another chance, I asked my questions:

“So, where does your daughter go to school?”

“Stanford.” Whoa. The rich kid’s school. Yet they’re not shy with scholarships for exceptional students of any price range.  The upper echelons of society can always use fresh blood — in small doses.  

Stanford’s still quite a leap for a family of modest means.  But it seems that Daughter was sharp as a tack (“She got her first ‘B’ at Stanford,” her mother told me) and had applied for every scholarship in the universe.

And so Daughter’s graduating in spring with a master’s degree in business —  $50,000 in debt. Strangely, that’s not bad at all. Recruiters are eager for Stanford MBAs. The daughter will leave school to face a vast row of open doors.  She’ll know a lot of things — and a lot of people who can help her. Doors could open for her all her life.   

“Well, there’s nothing like a full ride scholarship,” I said to her mother.

“There’s a full ride, but plenty to pay for besides,” she answered. “And we’ve been paying it.”

We got out of the alley and back into the light, and went our separate ways. I wish her well.

I really do. Because her daughter’s story reminded me of a friend who’d gone to Stanford, too, forty years ago.  He, too, was of modest background.  He, too, bucked the odds. His name was Mike Garcia.

Mike’s parents and mine were friends, so I spent a lot of time with him and his three brothers. Mike was the only one I could stand; we had a lot in common, but he was the improved version: better-spoken, more confident, more physically able, gifted in both the sciences and the creative arts.

And he dreamed big. Mike was the kid who went to Europe as an exchange student. Mike was the high school class valedictorian. And, somehow, though his family had no money, Mike was going to become a doctor.

And he did. He earned a full-ride scholarship to Stanford, where he majored in chemistry and hob-knobbed with the children of the wealthy, the famous, and convicted Watergate conspirators. That’s Stanford.

But because he was exceptional, and frankly very likable, Stanford took care of him; among other things, it got him jobs on campus and summer work that paid the rest of his expenses. When Mike graduated, he joined the military; it has its own medical school. He got in. He graduated, then interned. He became an officer and a doctor.

I’ve omitted one fact: Mike was gay. He never really came out, certainly not to me. He discretely navigated his sexuality through Stanford, into the military, and through medical school. And then, out the other side and living off base, he felt that it was time to be himself.

And it was the early ’80s, and he was himself with a partner with AIDS, before AIDS was widely understood. Mike died relatively quickly. The military was civilized about it; perhaps more civilized that they would be later.

And what does this have to do with a hard-working woman of modest means who’s putting together a celebration for her own brilliant child? Who plans to stuff her slovenly husband into a Goodwill suit just to make it clear to her daughter  how much they both love and care for her? And whose husband probably will let her?

This has nothing to do with that woman.  But it has everything to do with her daughter.  Her daughter may come to move among the elite in America.  She may meet and work with people whose names the newspapers venerate as geniuses, as movers and shakers.  She may become one of them. She may come to believe that talent and hard work are all it takes for anyone to rise to the top. So she’ll be told by the other people who inhabit society’s lofty peaks.

And if she does believe that, she will be wrong.  It’s luck.

The luck of the draw for parents, resources, contacts,  school, physical ailments, a million things. Mike’s luck ran out, disastrously; but he went as far as he did thanks at least in part to an exceptional public high school: heavily subsidized by the paternalistic company that dominated the town’s economy.

The daughter of the woman in gray got good genes and talent. But where would she have gone without the kind of parents she has?  Without that exceptional woman, and her husband, who gave her the values of hard work and persistence and study? And beyond that, gave whatever money they could raise to get their gifted daughter into the nation’s hottest business school? That daughter is her own person; but equally, she is her parents’ achievement.

So why didn’t the woman in the gray suit go as far in life as her daughter did?  Good question; but if genes, hard work and grit alone were all it ever took to reach the top, I’d be watching her on TV.   And George W. Bush would be a small-town insurance agent attending AA meetings and working on his third marriage.

I hope that her daughter knows this.  And knows that she will never find, among any future cohorts of the mighty,  a person more worthy or exceptional than her mother, the  woman in gray who flagged me down in the t-shirt aisle of a thrift store for the use of my fashion sense.

There remains Mike, the ghost raised in that aisle after so many years of silence.  Mike, who’d done everything right, as it’d been explained to him; who only wanted what other people had, and didn’t understand what he was risking. We are all Mike.

For Mike, to the young woman, and to her mother, I include a stanza from a poem that I’ve always respected. Nothing in it, I expect, would be news to the woman in gray.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,

I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:

Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

 

 

On Saturdays, Rhumba and I just get in the car and drive.  We generally have a couple of errand that we want to run; and along the way, we stop for coffee and remember a few more errands and obligations.  We roam all over town: inspecting, buying, considering, visiting.

Then it’s time for lunch, or a late-late breakfast at our favorite dive ‘way over on the East Side.  Then, who knows? Sometimes I think we’re the world’s oldest teenagers.

But we’re never sure exactly where the day will take us, and what makes a better Saturday than that?  Last Saturday took us to the Elk’s Lodge, a place more foreign to me than some destinations requiring passports.

The Elks are one of those fraternal clubs where, 50 years ago, leading white male citizens of the town met to drink, smoke, play cards, eat cheap dinners, do deals, give money to youth sports, and perform fraternal rituals.  Even today, there’s a parking space at the Santa Cruz lodge labeled “Reserved for Exalted Ruler.” It’s not a joke.

Come the twenty-first century, people still meet and eat and drink at the Elk’s Lodge, though in much-reduced numbers.  Reduced so much, in fact, that women are now welcome as members.  The many photos on the walls showed no members with dark skin, however. I could be overly naive and say, well, perhaps they just didn’t want to join the Elks.  Because, it’s true that few people do.  We’d only stopped by to visit a craft fair the Elks had staged; not a very good one, either.

I idly checked out the building. The lodge was quite large and well-equipped. It featured a canteen with bargain prices, a billiards room, a card room, a  large bar (which was emphatically open), and lots of function space. There was even a swimming pool, I was told.

What the lodge lacked was many signs of life, aside from the craft fair.

Still, I picked up a membership application.  Its date of last revision may have been 1954:

Did I believe in God? Would I promise to uphold the Constitution of the United States? Was I a veteran?  Was I a member of the Communist Party or any organization which sought the  violent overthrow of the United States Government? Had I ever been convicted of a felony or a crime of mortal turpitude? Was I  foreign born, and if not I was of course a naturalized citizen, wasn’t I?

Mmmmmm…. tastes like… Dwight D. Eisenhower. The entree for last Thursday’s dinner was deep-fried macaroni and cheese: perhaps another reason why Elks decline in number.

The Elks and I live in alternate realities.  You see that a lot in these culturally-polarized times.  I still have the application, but all that ideological baggage trumps cheap food, billiards, and a  pool. I just don’t think we’d get along.

Rhumba and I chatted up a few people at the craft fair and hit the road again, this time for the Church of the Holy Dividend, the house of worship for the upper classes (lower classes welcome if hard workers).  We were members once and still have a few friends there, plus a couple of acquaintances I wouldn’t mind never seeing again.

This was the day of Holy Dividend’s 150th birthday bash, and we’d stopped by to see what they were up to. The first person we ran into was Regina: former head of the altar guild, wife of a retired priest, former college instructor, former stock-car racer, military veteran, and retired special education teacher.  She’s been around — she even lived in Eastern Europe when Americans didn’t do that. She takes no guff from anybody, she has a theatrical manner, and she likes to keep you off balance.  How are you, Regina, we asked?

“Well, my BONES are melting thanks to the chemotherapy.  But fine, thank you very much.”  That’s pretty much a Regina answer.

She’s suffered cancer for many years, and it or the chemo is going to finish her one of these days.  But I can’t say that her condition ever got her down.  Regina just soldiers on.

Regina’s 20-something daughter Hope is much like her; so of course they fought like cats when Hope was growing up. Hope turned into a quirky, sulky, intelligent, judgmental teenager who aspired to spend her life clerking in a video store.

With a hundred thousand of Regina’s money, Hope instead got a master’s degree in library science as a digital archivist: a profession that might resemble clerking in a video store, but on the grand scale. Hope never got a job in her field, though; too much competition and not enough work except internships and “work for experience” (never money).

After college Hope served a year or two with Americorps down in New Orleans; she loved the town to death.  After Americorps she returned home to more fruitless job hunting and more “work for experience.” She finally got a job that paid actual money, working with developmentally disabled adults. And she was good at it.  When last we saw her, Hope had snagged the offer of a similar job back in her beloved Nawlins, and was happily packing.

Although Hope’s expensive education got her no employment, I consider it anything but a waste. It helped her become an intelligent, broadly-educated young woman who can speak and argue clearly and thoughtfully on most areas of culture and life and the human condition.  Nobody puts anything over on Hope. Aren’t those all the qualities that a college education is supposed to impart?

“So,” I asked, “How’s Hope doing in her new job?”

“Oh, she got FIRED,” Regina said breezily.  “She showed up at the school, and it turned out that they had one teacher for every 16 disabled people.  There was no support staff at all; they were just warehousing them like animals.  So Hope told the board that what they were doing was all wrong, and she told them what they needed to change. And they fired her! Honestly, I wish she could be more diplomatic.”  Like mother, like daughter: I didn’t laugh.

“So Hope went right out and got jobs in two different supermarkets to get by.  And she’s started reading KARL MARX!”

Intelligent, quirky, well-read, hard-working, adventurous, cognizant: and now, based on her post-college experiences, looking for answers from the Great Boogeyman of global capitalism.  You can see why America’s not really serious about education for all.  Smart, educated people might cause trouble.

Hope’s not the only one reading the wrong books. Lately at the university I work for, the student have been rioting again.  Well, call them gentle riots.  The students hold a rally with megaphones and chants, then stream across campus and encircle a building or two.

In response, the administration floods campus staff with email about what to do if the students decide to occupy their office: endless contingency plans, do’s and don’ts for dealing with obstreperous demonstrators, and options for working at home.  Campus security monitors the movement of every demonstration and broadcast current status and location minute by minute.

And all the students want is tuition that they can afford.  It costs ever more to get an education, while many students and their families have less and less money. Rhumba and I just kicked in cash to buy food for students who, literally, lack enough money to eat regularly.  This is not a poor area, either.

So the students demonstrate, and the campus bureaucracy hunkers down warily. Demonstrations have become more frequent, too; I thought the students would back off as finals week drew near, but instead they just kicked it up a notch.  Who knows what next quarter will bring?  Who knows what lessons the kids will learn about what the world is really trying to do to them, and whether the world really cares whether they’re educated or not?

So here’s the question I have for the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks: can you be an Elk if you belong to an organization that seeks the non-violent overthrow of the United States government?

And can you join if you believe that “defending the constitution” means rewriting it in the name of economic equality?  As Karl Marx looms in the distance, holding a stein of beer and nodding sagely.

I doubt that the Elks would have a ready answer.  But I hope they’ll take their time to think about it, perhaps over a sizzling plate of deep-fried mac ‘n cheese.

My first clear memory is of storm. And Walter Cronkite, but mainly storm.

I was all of two years old, sitting on the living room floor of our cracker-box house on the waterfront in Petropolis. It was a stormy weekday morning, around 9:30. I know this because the CBS mid-morning news was on the air, hosted by Walter Cronkite. Walter was not to be missed, even on a black-and-white Philco with a four-inch screen. Was I already a news junkie, or did I just like his voice? It’s tonal qualities lay somewhere between your favorite uncle’s, and God’s.

Rain battered the house, and wind. Suddenly the power failed, and the lights. Walter vanished into a dot of light, and thunder crashed towards us from all sides. Mom scooped me off the floor and fled to the bedroom, where we hid under the covers. She feared lightning and the sound of thunder with all her heart. But I found it exciting.

In those days of poorly-insulated houses you could really hear the rain on the roof, feel the wind shoot between the window panes and shake the house. As a child and teenager, I looked forward to those nights when the elements would sing me to sleep.

There’s line from a zen teaching story: “I am the sound of the rain.” It always calms me.

I own my own house now in which, thanks to modern insulation and double-paned windows, I can no longer hear the rain or wind from our bed: only, faintly, traffic. It’s not the same. Rhumba refuses to leave the bedroom window open when the rain comes, on some general wifely principle.

Besides, we’re in a drought. There’s been very little rain to hear these past three years.

This past week all the talk has been of a powerful storm that’s headed our way at last: a big, swirling monster with tentacles that reach past Hawaii to draw in warm, moist air and squeeze the water out of it right over our town. “It’s a bad ‘un,” the weathermen said. “We need the water, but the wind and water will bring wrack and ruin and roofing bills to many.”

And so I feared it, a little. I thought of our leaky rain gutters, sagging fences, aging roof, and dry rot. And I thought: let it go by; let it miss us. Let nothing fail in this house. Let nothing go wrong. For I’m old and full of worry, and want no trouble.

And yet this morning the wind rose as I knew it would. Squat street trees danced and swayed in its grasp. Awnings of stores and restaurants snapped like pennants.

Out on the streets, months and years of yard trash — bark, leaves, twigs, mulch — caught the wind and skipped down the pavement like little elves. Storms of them paced our car on either side, blowing ahead of us at stop signs which we had to obey but they did not.

The wind died by mid-morning, and then the rain came: a hard, steady soaking rain of the sort that I remember from childhood. The kind of rain that comes for the day and brings its own lunch. It’s been with us for twelve hours now.

And a few streets flooded, and the power’s out in the mountains above town; that’s just a given in this place.

But the roof didn’t leak and the gutters hang in there, and dry rot’s for another day. The back fence fell down, but I’ll push it up again tomorrow and call the contractor.

As I write this, I’m sitting downstairs in the dining room; from this space, I hear the rain clearly. It patters on the glass and drums on the ground. And it brings me its own form of peace.

Bedtime is near; the rain’s song can’t reach my well-insulated bedroom, but I’ll hold it in memory.

And I will be the sound of the rain.

When you’ve got a new pocket camera, there’s no happier place to be than at the window table of a cafe during a thunderstorm. To observe and record all the ways that people react to unreasonable sheets of falling water.

Some cringe and bear it. Some make the best of it. And some glory in it, especially children. A dash through pouring rain is a walk on the wild side for a proper six-year-old.

Though I would have liked to see what the child did after entering the restaurant. Small children and water have a hate-love relationship. They hate being wet, most of them. But they love getting wet. Because they love water: throwing it, kicking it, pouring it, and especially jumping in it.

I understand: I remember being little. To a six-year-old, water is Mother Nature’s video game. Water moves, it splashes, it makes sounds, it catches the light. It’s interactive — you can make it do things. Before X-box, there were puddles. And squirt guns.

When he was three or four, one of the neighborhood children would stand on the sidewalk with a hose and pour water straight down the storm drain. For a half-hour at a time. He would stare at the water gravely as it disappeared into the slot in the concrete, as if trying to figure out where water went when it died.

We never found out what he got out of it. He wouldn’t say a word. Maybe it just seemed…. awesome.

Most kids — especially boys — can’t pass a puddle without stepping in it. If you give them water for a class activity, two or three or five of them will fling water drops at each other, giggling madly.

Because water is fun to play with and — best of all — your parents and your teachers don’t want you to. “Not in your nice clothes,” my mother would screech. As then, so now: forbidden fruit is sweet.

Though once little children do get wet — even if it’s their fault — some of them turn into little drama queens who insist that the world stop while every hint of moisture is removed from their bodies and clothing. I usually respond by acting out the “I’m melting!” scene from “The Wizard of Oz.”

When kids reach age 10 or so, they become ‘way too cool to jump in puddles. Their interests shift to gaming, media, cars, cliques and, just maybe, their first cell. But…

A few years back, I worked as a teacher’s aide for awhile; and for a short time, I assisted an old man who taught science in the primary grades. He was a year from retirement, and he’d seen it all. One day he demonstrated various properties of water to a group of ten-year-olds. And when he finished, he turned to me and said, “I will now make a fifth-grade class laugh by pouring water into a plastic bucket. ”

He poured the water from a bottle, gently; it drummed in the bottom of the bucket, making precisely the sound of a man pissing.

“HEEHEEHEEHEEHEEHEEHEE” the class shrieked. The old teacher raised an eyebrow at me. Kids. Water. The forbidden. I’m sure they all rushed home after school and tried it themselves.

As a card-carrying adult, I suppose that I should be annoyed when children get rowdy with water. But I don’t. Water is a great teaching tool for consequences: play with water, get wet. You don’t like being wet? Then be careful with water.

And anyway, they love water. They need it: water is the way to be “bad” without really hurting anything. While still really being good. Your mother may rag on you for getting your new clothes wet, but never too hard: because, really, no harm is done than ten minutes in the dryer can’t cure.

I have a memory, from back when the neighbor kids were tots, of washing the car in my driveway on a notably warm day. A steady flow of water ran down the drive and into the street.

Three small children, all siblings, happened to be patrolling the street on little silver scooters. It’s a dead-end court with no traffic.

One of them, perhaps only three, diverted from her flight path and stopped just short of the stream of rinse water. She looked at me gravely, looked at the water. And  deliberately rolled her scooter into and across it. Then she sped back down the street, leaving a black track of moisture behind her.

A minute later her older brother, all of five, made a bee-line for the stream of water and also rolled across it. “MY scooter got wet, too,” he called to his siblings, speeding away.

Kids. Water. The forbidden. Rebellion. Competition. Life. And no harm done.

At the front door to a Target discount store, a sign asks the approaching customers ‘Are you reusable bag ready?”

Personally, I have no idea. But I do know that someone’s playing games with English again. Actually, everybody plays games with English; but nobody invited me to the match that sanctified that sentence.

“Reusable bag ready” is a compound modifier made of three words. If you placed it before the object being modified, hyphens would join the three words: “He’s a reusable-bag-ready kind of guy.”

But placed after the object, current custom holds that hyphens are not used. This rule produces abominations like the sentence above. Is he a reusable bag-ready guy? Or a reusable-bag ready guy? And what does it mean to be “ready” for reusable bags?

As an aside, know one thing: there are no hard and fast rules for hyphens, and never have been. You can do whatever you want, and no grammarian can stop you. Just make sure that them in the cause of good, which is to say, clarity. I used to do clarity for a living:

I am a former technical editor. No, that’s a lie: there’s no such thing as a “former” technical editor. Once you’ve beaten other people’s English into shape for a living, you never stop doing it. You edit the world, even if the world won’t listen.

I’m the kind of guy who drives past a sign that reads “GIANT TRUCK SALE,” and asks, “Okay, so where are the GIANT TRUCKS?”

In my world, a sentence can be read in only one way. Because if it supports multiple interpretations, some computer user might delete four hours of work when he thinks he’s actually saving it. Or waste time looking for the “any” key, as in: “Press any key to continue.”

I’ll bet you think that didn’t happen.

At any rate, even hyphens can’t really fix “reusable bag ready.” When English sentence structure fails to provide clarity  and it so often does — you rip your sentence apart and start over from a new angle. How about:

“Did you bring a bag for purchases? New city ordinances prevent us from providing bags for you.”

Why didn’t Target write their notice that way? Apparently, it was intentional: Target was, the newspapers said (yes, this made the papers) putting a “wink and a smile” into the message.

How cute; I’m glad that tens of thousands of people were suitably puzzled for the amusement of Target’s marketing communications staff. It is my thought that if said staff ever go to the hospital for open-heart surgery, the user’s manual for the surgery robot be peppered with small jokes that obscure the correct operating procedure.

Note to Target: you’re going to communicate, communicate. Leave the attitude behind. Or leave the job of communication to sour-faced, over-serious individuals like myself who boldly wield the common hyphen, among other weapons, in the name of clarity. And of slightly less confusion in the lives of the masses.

You just have to look at the thing to know that it was a serious piece of work. Side-mount color viewfinder/eye piece, interchangeable lenses, digital video recording, onboard sound mixer, three different external video interfaces including digital, eight or nine preset video modes or full manual if you preferred. It could even receive audio line-in from an external mixer. The power was yours.

If you wanted a high-end “pro-consumer” camcorder in 2001, this was the one you lay awake dreaming of: the Canon XL-1. List price over $4K. No flimsy plastic construction here, no endless scrolling through menus in the viewfinder:

The plastic casing was thick; the chassis, all metal. It had so many functions that there was four separate control panels and two LCD displays on the camera body: endless buttons, pop-up knobs, jacks, and pots, labeled and unlabeled. I only somewhat knew what I was doing with the XL-1. But they were the mainstay of indie filmmakers for years.

And why am I writing in the past tense? The XL-1 is still here, 13 years later. It works fine, too.

Rhumba and I videotaped church services with it, back when we attended the Church of the Holy Dividend. We’d tape the weekly service, edit it in the computer, and send a disc to the public access TV channel, who’d play it on the air for the shut-in parishioners or those who couldn’t come that week, or even those who wanted to hear the sermon again because they couldn’t believe what they’d heard the first time. Or anybody, really, who happened to tune by. Throw a message across the airwaves and you never know who it’ll land on.

Sound was our big problem; even a good camcorder’s onboard mike couldn’t pick up a sermon from 30 feet away across a crowded room with no amplified sound. But the XL-1 could take external sound input. Rhumba operated a little sound mixer fed by two stage microphones for the church at large and a couple of DJ mikes we mounted on the pulpits. Her board cabled the sound into the XL-1, where I made sure that the onboard mixer wasn’t being overdriven.

And steered the camera and tried to keep the image in focus and not give the tripod a good wallop whenever I had to scratch my nose. There was no good spot for a cameraman at Holy Dividend. I had to sit in a pew, second row, with the center tripod leg on the floor between my legs, and the other two, half-collapsed, on the seat of the pew to either side of me. Once I assumed the position, I couldn’t move until the service finished.

Holy Dividend was a dark old Gothic wooden pile, but the XL-1 could pierce the gloom if I cranked up the video gain to nuclear levels. And then, inevitably, I’d have to track the minister walking in front of a stained glass window and the light would go nova until i twiddled the right knobs.

It was serious seat-of-the-pants video; not high quality, but we got what we were after. Later at home, I’d do what I could do to clean things up in the computer.

This went on for some years until we left Holy Dividend– or it left us. Opinions vary. Church is like politics; when money is the most important thing, how good can it be?

But we still had the video equipment, and Sundays were free. We wanted a new church — eventually. So we pitched a new show to the videoheads down at the public access channel: we’d go to a different church every week and tape a service. Our secret motto was, “We church-shop, so you don’t have to.” Public Access liked the idea, but they didn’t like my proposed title, “Church of the Week.” I changed the name to “Communities of Worship” and they gave us a time slot. I thought of it as “the CoW.”

We ran the CoW for a couple of years. At first we hoped to simply patch into the church sounds systems and leave all the audio to them. But church sound systems proved as idiosyncratic as church wiring, and in the end we brought our own mikes and stands and mixer, duct-taped our cables to the carpet and carried on. We picked up a nice shotgun mike for those times when we had to set up in the very back of a church — which was most of the time.

The mega-churches wanted nothing to do with us — they had their own paid AV staff — but other than that we saw all the stripes of church that there are.

It was fun. In a way, it was anthropology: a new community every week, each with its own history and taboos and social order. A surprising number of churches were excited to see us; and a surprising number were suspicious, or surly, or indecisive. Some of the ministers were amazing people; others less so, but doing their best; and a few were too busy being holy to be good.

But the XL-1 never let us down, no matter how much we knocked it around. And every week we showed whoever cared to know, what happened inside those boxy stucco buildings that only filled their parking lots on Sundays.

In theory, Christianity should be pretty simple: two commandments. Love God; love thy neighbor. One asterisk: by the way, God lives in all of us. So, loving your neighbor is loving God; and the love of your neighbors is the love of God.

If you’re a Christian agnostic, and there are a ton of us, it all collapses down into the immortal words of Bill and Ted: “Be excellent to each other.”

That’s all there is to it; everything else is tradition and ca ca. But there’s a lot of ca ca. As soon as Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” some smart-ass in the crowd asked, “So who’s my neighbor?” “Everybody,” the man answered. His disciples nodded wisely and wrote it down; and, for the next 2000 years, Christians have searched assiduously for exceptions and loopholes.

There was ca ca wherever we went; but also at least some good people who “got it,” people who didn’t let tradition or ca-ca get in the way of doing the right thing. Sometimes they led the church; sometimes they were the underdogs. Church has always been like this; every religion, every sect, everywhere. But there’s always hope. For everybody. You may say that religions are hypocritical; I say, churches are run by people, not gods. How could it be different?

We finally found a church of “got it” people who had the same style we did, and settled in. We retired our TV show, and the XL-1. It sat in its carrier for years: meditating, I suppose, or waiting. During service, Rhumba and I run PowerPoint slides of the hymns up on the wall with a media projector. That’s the extent of our video geekery these days.

We’re cleaning house this week, and I pulled the XL-1 out of its tomb for a look. It’s a dinosaur, but it still lights up; and it still has a few tricks that are beyond even this year’s low-end camcorders. I emailed the video production instructor in the high school vocation education program and asked if he wanted the XL-1, some tripods, and the microphones. He jumped at it. The kids always needed good camcorders; thirteen-year-old state-of-the-art would be more than fine. He was hungry for video tripods, microphones, everything. No matter what I had, he said, there would be a use for it. He thanked me profusely.

I tried to drop the stuff off at his classroom day before yesterday, but high school was canceled because of terrorist threats — most likely made by a bored teenager, but the administration dared take no chances. I stopped by again the next day, but I didn’t want to convince the armed police at the main entrance that the longish cases I was carrying weren’t full of shotguns and pipe bombs. I finally made it into school today and dropped off the equipment.

There it is, public education today: underfunded, fearful, kind of desperate, written off by the few and well-to-do who send their children to private schools or exclusive charters. There doesn’t seem to be the money to help the next generation to thrive. And I guess that the smart-ass question I have to ask is, “Who is your neighbor?”

I’m not expecting people to stream back to church to find out. But I can hope that some eighteen-year-old will heft the Canon XL-1 onto her shoulder and stride forth to record an answer.

 

My supervisor on the new job is getting married this week.   As a modern career woman, she’s managing her own wedding; the chore seems only slightly less a challenge than the Invasion of Europe.  Except that the weather will be better; I hope.

Weddings have always interested me.  They can be the fulfillment of a fantasy, an assertion of wealth and power, or an honest celebration of new beginnings and old relationships. Or, all of the above.  A wedding reflects who you are, or who you want to be, or merely who you want others to think you are.

In short, weddings can be minefields of hubris, illusion, neediness, and baggage.

And hope.  But more on that later.

I vividly remember one wedding in San Francisco in the early ’80s. The happy couple possessed what some might daintily call “baggage,”  both individually and collectively. And when the minister asked, “If anyone knows why these two should not be joined together in holy matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold their peace,” there was a moment of complete silence.

And then the wedding party and both sides of the aisle burst out in maniacal laughter.

After the air cleared, the minister married the two of them anyway.  They’re still together.

A minister of my acquaintance once walked out on a society wedding on rehearsal night when he learned that the bride and groom were spending $75,000. On flowers.  He told them that God had little to do with what was going on there, so they had no need of his services.

I’ve attended numerous weddings; nothing unusual in that. But I’ve also seen a few weddings from behind the scenes.  You see, my wife Rhumba has an interesting side vocation: she’s a priest of a tiny but legitimate Anglo-Catholic sect that, I guarantee, you have never heard of. She has a well-established Internet congregation, but no physical church.

And yet back in the ’90s, she’d perform a wedding ceremony for anyone in the vicinity of Santa Cruz, California who wanted a “church-style wedding,” but couldn’t get one.

The business directories were full of wedding officiants — a Brother Bob or a Mandala Starspirit and the like — who’d whip you up a nice secular wedding with a spiritual homily and any DIY touches you’d like.  But in those days it was harder to find Christian clergy who’d marry you in a traditional Christian ceremony if you weren’t connected to a local church. Even on the then-primitive Internet, people had to hunt around.  Rhumba knew this from her online ministry.

Somebody had to step in; so Rhumba took it on as another ministry. And there was demand; she put a couple of notices up on the Internet, and people began to call: residents, visitors, people who wanted to get married in Santa Cruz.  Not a torrent, but… not a trickle, either.

She met them, she counseled them, and if they seemed prepared, she donned the cassock and the alb and the stole and married them: in a standard Methodist/Episcopal ceremony, or whatever Christian ceremony they preferred. In some venue they’d picked, or wherever she could arrange a space to do it.  When she had to, she married them in the front yard.  Payment was always optional, and “whatever you care to give.”

I often came along as a sort of general gofer.  I found it all very interesting; but a couple of ceremonies stand out for me:

One  stormy New Year’s Eve afternoon, Rhumba and I drove up the coast to a wind-blasted beach where two people hoped to be married.  We were greeted by a sight worthy of a music video: a florist, waiting alone by the side of the road with bundles of wind-whipped flowers.  Twenty yards further down the road: a wedding photographer, weighted down with cameras, bags, and a big fedora.  And twenty yards past him: a man with a bagpipe.  In a kilt.

The principals had organized the wedding by email from Quebec; among this pick-up squad of wedding workers, only Rhumba had even set eyes on the happy couple, the day before at their hotel in Santa Clara. They were Canadians who’d lived in Santa Cruz at some time in the past and had decided that for their spiritual satisfaction they must be married on this particular beach, at sundown, on New Year’s Eve.  The groom was a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the happy couple was moving on after the wedding to his new post in British Columbia.

The wedding plans were unwise on several levels.  On that beach the wind blows endlessly; squint, or you’ll get an eyeful of sand.  And that December had been the rainiest in recent memory.  It had rained that day.  It would rain again.  The question was, would it rain during the ceremony?  For now, the rain held off.

The groom’s party arrived first; the groom and best man wore RCAF dress uniforms which strongly resembled high-end waiters’ uniforms.  I stopped myself from saying so — but the best man said it for me. He confessed to me that, in the lobby of their hotel, another hotel guest had handed him a used drinks glass and walked away.

Eventually the parents and the bride’s party arrived. The bride stepped out of the van in ten or twenty yards of white satin which the keening wind immediately caught and spread wide, like the sails of a clipper ship.  The wind almost knocked her backwards. But she fought her way forward to the groom’s side and then, well, we had a wedding.  A Seventh-Day Adventist ceremony, performed in English by Rhumba and translated into French by the father of the bride.

And as Rhumba approached the final vows, the air went calm. And the clouds slid aside, and there on the horizon shone a crimson sun. The bride and groom raised their heads toward the light, like flowers.  It turned their faces golden, and they smiled with wonder, and were married.

They came three thousand miles for a moment in the sun, and by grit and guts and meteorology, they got it. I just hope that, in the long run, it was helpful.

And yet, that wasn’t Rhumba’s most memorable wedding ceremony:

He delivered bottled water; she worked in a deli.  Together they had hardly a dime to their name.  But they wanted to marry, and they wanted a wedding. Relatives and friends scraped up about $500 and set about making it happen.  Somebody’s mother in Oregon became the spider in the web, firing off endless phone calls to mobilize volunteers, seek out cheap venues, organize a potluck reception.  And find a minister.

It was a simple ceremony in a simple building: an quaint former one-room schoolhouse in a public park (very affordable).  Their relatives and their many friends were there.  The bride and groom dressed simply; Rhumba performed the ceremony with aplomb. The deed was done, and all cheered and threw appropriate things.

Then all the guests, every one of them, set to tearing down chairs and rearranging the hall for the reception.  Potluck food and dishes appeared from nowhere.  Food was served; toasts were given and returned.  Modest presents were presented. And when all was said and done and celebrated, the guests again rose as one to stow the chairs and tables, clean the hall, and put everything back in shape.  The best man and the groom’s father competed for the privilege of paying Rhumba.

If a wedding ceremony launches a couple into new life, how better to launch them than with the massed support of their friends and relatives: not simply as passive well-wishers, but as active supporters working to make the dream happen?  What greater affirmation of love and support could you desire?

And yet, even that wasn’t Rhumba’s most memorable ceremony. There were a number of others. Before it was legal, or accepted, she married same-sex couples – a lot of them – in the name of love. Which is the name of God. As I’ve said, somebody had to do it.

And not many did.  It was the ’90s, remember? Any mainstream clergy who performed a same-sex wedding ceremony would shortly lose their jobs, and maybe their collars.  Sure, same-sex couples could put together DIY ceremonies.  But the religious among them wanted what their own churches wouldn’t give them: a wedding confirming their bond, conducted in their faith tradition by a real priest. Rhumba, master of all liturgy, could do whatever they needed.

And Rhumba’s bishop, up in the Pacific Northwest, sent nothing but encouragement and support. And love and kisses from his husband.

So Rhumba married same-sex couples on the same terms as the hets: in whatever location was available, with whatever service they desired.  I particularly remember a ceremony in the City Hall plaza (surprisingly affordable):   a Roman Catholic service complete with mass and two gigantic and supportive extended families.  The happy couple were slim and nervous — and grinning like fools.  I believe they were both Asian.  You could see a new world cresting the horizon.

Her same-sex couples were mainly young and of modest means; one or two were middle-aged and comfortable. But they all had one thing in common, one thing that was not so prominent in “straight” ceremonies:

Hope. That unspoken hope, hanging in the air, made those ceremonies stand out from all the others.  It was the hope that some day their bond would be legal in the eyes of man as well as God.  Because the eyes of God grant you grace; but the eyes of man grant you joint health insurance, joint child custody, primacy over your partner’s relatives. And the respect and acknowledgment that a lasting bond between two people deserves, from everyone.

And for many of them, all these years later, that hope came true.  Most churches still lag in their acceptance of true same-sex marriage.  But civil marriages are forging ahead in many states. More states will come along soon, and more churches — eventually.  Sometimes you just have to wait for a generation to turn.

As for Rhumba, she got out of the marriage ministry after a couple of years.  The Internet matured — perhaps society as well — and there were suddenly online directories and sites and packages that made alternate weddings of any sort much easier to stage.

I would like to think that at least a few of the same-sex couples that Rhumba married all those years ago still remember those ceremonies as their “real” weddings. We surely thought so.

But what’s the moral of this story: that weddings are crazy?  Well, of course they can be, especially if you get caught up in the symbolism and the trapping and forget the reality behind them. But when love is uppermost, even the most lavish wedding — or the simplest — cannot fail.

And there’s another matter:  back in the ’90s, same-sex marriage was impossible.  And then it wasn’t.  I can’t help but think that Rhumba, and all the others out there who married the people who couldn’t be married, helped move society’s mind by just doing it and doing it and doing it.  Until same-sex marriage became so mainstream that it was impossible to deny.

They say that lasting change comes from the bottom up; from a lifetime of observation, I would agree. And we live in a world of unacknowledged needs.  So when you see one of them, and the thought occurs that “somebody has to do it,” consider that “somebody” might be you.  And that by doing so, you, and ten thousand like you, just might be shaping the future.

I don’t often laugh. You might hear a dry chuckle from me, occasionally a snort.  But not a full, vibrant chest-deep laugh.

My humor hotspot is absurdity; I enjoy the world turned, unexpectedly, upside down, so that the “smart” decisions aren’t smart anymore. I laugh loudly when truths that are never told, are suddenly out in the open.

Popular entertainment largely avoids absurdity.  Absurdity ruffles the feathers of the important.  Absurdity makes the sponsors nervous. And worst of all — it’s hard to write well.

So the funniest thing I’ve found lately, the thing that makes me laugh out loud, is a public defender blog called What the Public Defender? There you’ll find things like this:

When you tell a stranger that you’re in law school and you want to do criminal defense and they launch into a moral rampage and say all prisoners should be put to death.

A public defender has the hardest, most poorly-paid job in world of lawyers: he (or she) defends criminals who have no money, only the right to representationl. The caseloads are staggering, the clients are not always wonderful people, and having the law on your side isn’t always enough.

The DA doesn’t bother to show up for motions argument; I argue for 15 minutes; the law is on our side; and the judge responds, “Your motion is denied.”

To be a good PD, you’ve got to care about the rights of others.  You’ve got to have ideals — it helps to be young. And when things go wrong — or, sometimes right — you’ve got to vent.  This blogger vents well.  She (I suspect) takes situations from her own work, or situations sent to her by other PDs, and illustrates them with an animated GIF, as you’ve seen. And maintains complete anonymity because, y’know, too much honesty is bad for the resume.

When someone says, “you’re a public defender? so does that mean you defend criminals?”

The life of a PD is full of highs and lows and cringe-worthy moments.  It’s an emotional roller-coaster of a career, with people’s lives on the line. And those people aren’t always helping.

When the victim doesn’t identify your client and then he looks at you and says a little too loudly, “that’s because I was wearing a different shirt.”

When the DA threatens to jury demand a case because you quoted her taunting you on Facebook…

When a Texas Judge sentences a wealthy defendant to probation after killing four people in a DUI accident the same day my client gets jail time for stealing a jar of salsa.

When you find an obscure section of your state’s constitution specifically outlining that your client had a constitutional right to be where he was arrested for trespass and therefor the drugs they found on him have to be excluded.

 When the prosecutor asks me when I’m going to switch over to the “good” side:

When the jury has been out for almost two hours on your dead dog loser trial.

The public defenders win and lose, but the best of them care.  The work’s too hard to stay long for any other reason. And sometimes there are triumphs, or at least humanity.

When you walk your client (who was facing life) out of the jail as a free man for the first time in a year, after the judge dismissed his case with prejudice, and he just stands there for a minute looking at the sky and letting the sun hit his face?

When your in-custody client starts sobbing at a plea hearing, so you wipe her face with tissues because she can’t reach her face due to her shackles, and the first thing the DA says after the client exits the court room is “Do you need hand sanitizer?”

When after being advised numerous times never to speak in court, your client stands up and yells, “Damn, your honor, doesn’t my attorney look hot today?”

When a police officer tells you he thinks you’re the devil.

 

When I finally get the crime scene tech’s photos and they prove the lead officer was lying about seeing the evidence in ‘plain view’

 

Anyway, do take a look at this blog.  If it were only humor, I wouldn’t mention it.  Rather, it is humor in the face of hardship and despair: This may be one of the highest things that our sorry race possesses.

When you get your very first not guilty!!

This healthy and delicious recipe for lentil soup is a favorite at our house, and costs only $150 a pot!

Ingredients

3 cups red lentils
2 28-oz cans of diced tomatoes
4 medium onions, diced
2 medium potatoes, diced
1 16-oz can garbanzo beans
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tbsp minced garlic
1 tbsp sage
1 tbsp cumin
1 plombier
red pepper sauce
salt to taste
10-12 cups water

Cooking Instructions

1. Place water in 3-gallon pot.
2. Rinse lentils in a colander in small batches until the water runs clear. Spill 1/2 cup dry lentils on the kitchen counter (inevitable).
3. Note warning on lentil packet: immerse red lentils in water (in pot) immediately after rinsing or they will stick to one another and form hard, rocky clumps that cannot be separated.
4. To lentils, add tomatoes, onions, potatoes, olive oil, garlic, spices, and tabasco (to taste)
5. Cook at high heat for 20 minutes until mixture boils.
6. While heating, flush spilled dry lentils down the sink; run garbage disposal briefly.
7. When soup boils, turn heat to low and cook for 40 minutes. Add garbanzo beans, salt to taste.
8. Clean up workspace; run peelings through garbage disposal. Note that the sink will no longer drain.
9. Plunge sink for 40 minutes; note that it still will not drain.
10. When lentils are fully cooked, decant and serve. Serves ten, or freezes well for five days of meals.
11. Continue plunging. Water level will refuse to drop.
12. When arms tire, call plumbing contractor and order a plombier. Wait 36 hours.
13. When plombier arrives, direct him to the sink.
14. After 45 minutes, plumber will produce a cleared drain, a quarter-bucket of red lentils, and a bill for $125.
15. See Step 3.

Bon appetit!

 

 

I enjoy walking around campus on my lunch break. Much of the university is a redwood forest; the paths between buildings wind and intersect among titanic trees. Buildings don’t appear until you’re practically on top of them, like hidden cliffs. Ravens glide overhead, croaking; come round a curve and, perhaps, find the path blocked by deer. It’s all very primeval.

Or it seems to be. In truth, streetlights and call boxes lurk unobtrusively, here and there. Some of them are even stapled to the trees; silver conduit pipes run down the trunks and vanish into the duff.

The paths are blacktopped; steps and railings appear in the greenery for your convenience. And although you may not be able to see it, there’s no doubt a clean rest room within 50 yards.

Call it a free-range Disneyland, with classrooms standing in for thrill rides. When the kids crowd the paths around noontime, laughing and talking, I see a gentle parade of sorts: with Davy Crockett and Winnie the Pooh as grand marshals, sharing a near-beer from their thrones on the Bank of America float.

As obtuse and impulsive as young adults can be, they all seem so — innocent to me now. I’m three times their age; the proposition that age brings wisdom is good PR for old people, but too often untrue. Yet with clear eyes and a good memory you can look back down the path you walked through life and figure out how you got where you are now. And why.

I look down that path and see them striding over ground I covered 40 years ago. Ahead of them lie pitfalls that didn’t exist when I walked where they walk now. And yet if I look back to those days I find that I regret more what I didn’t do than what I did.

It’s nothing to dwell on, and I don’t; but if I’d been a little more adventurous, less timid, I might have explored the other paths that branched off the main route. Who knows where they might have led?

So it bothers me that, among all the talk on campus about helping young people fulfill their potential, there’s a certain amount of fear-mongering. Signs in the bookstore warn young people not to shoplift because “it will stay on your record FOREVER.”

The young are informed that any blemish in their behavior, even a rude Facebook page, will offend the mighty corporate employers and leave them, in the end, with an unused degree and a pile of debt.

When the grad students went on strike because of underpay and overwork — they were not left enough time to complete their own studies — they were threatened with arrest and academic ruination and other retaliations that, they were warned, might stunt their lives forever. They won; but the pressure to take the safe path, to rock no boats, is high.

Youth has one advantage: it does not know what it cannot do. And sometimes it accomplishes great things. But it will never do that if it simply toes a line drawn for it by its elders.

It’s my fervent desire that at least some of the kids deviate from the blacktopped path and strike out into the trees in search of something more profound than a clean restroom. Though a roll of toilet paper in the backpack is always a sound precaution.