12.16.2023 – random roll of dice

random roll of dice
is potent force as any …
shift in the weather

In his book Then Everything Changed,” Jeff Greenfield writes:

“History doesn’t turn on a dime; it turns on a plugged nickel,” and that history “is as much a product of chance as of the broader forces at play.”

“Geography, topography, ethnicity, ideology, climate, natural resources, the search for wealth, mass migrations, all set the framework; but the random roll of the dice is as potent a force as any,” he writes. “A missed meeting, a shift in the weather, a slightly different choice of words open up a literally limitless series of possibilities.“

Forget history.

Take everyday life.

Switch.

Click.

And it’s a different day, week, year, life.

No warnings.

No gaurantees.

No google maps.

And its all wrong in an instant.

Don’t tell me about intentions.

As that bit of verse about the car wreck that goes:

He was wrong
and I was right
but I was just as dead
if he’d been right …

Sometimes its rocky and sometimes you don’t notice I guess.

I am reminded of CS Lewis and the Screwtape Letters where Mr. Lewis writes:

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Most times you just don’t see it coming.

12.10.2023 – no delete buttons,

no delete buttons,
no cut-and-paste, just the click
clack of history

Fun but unsatisfying is what I thought after reading, You Can Buy Hemingway’s Typewriter. But Would You Use It? by David Waldstein in the New York Times.

Unsatisfying because Mr. Waldstein did not tell the story on how this feller, Steve Soboroff, tracked down all the typewriters of famous people that he now plans to offer at auction.

Fun because it was fun to think about owning such a machine.

This past summer I was able to sit at a desk with one of James Thurber’s typewriters.

Maybe a musician sitting at a piano used by Stevie Wonder would feel something.

Mr. Leonard Bernstein is on film describing what it was like to direct an orchestra and standing what had to be standing somewhere near the spot Ludwig Beethoven stood when his 9th Symphony was debuted.

Something about a typewriter.

I haven’t owned one in years but I have a bunch.

The last one I got was a gift that had a small computer screen and could store up to three lines of text.

You could set it to type each letter or to wait and type out each line.

I never caught the rhythm of the line by line.

A funny thing, but the last typewriter I ever bought was vintage manual Royal typewriter I got at the Salvation Army.

The machine worked fine, but finding typewriter ribbon was a problem.

The place where I worked had just thrown out all there old adding machines, along with boxes of adding machine ribbon and with a little winding, these ribbons could be retro-fitted onto my typewriter.

Friends and neighbors let me tell you that when the time comes to move cross country, a 20lb manual typewriter quickly makes it on the list of things you don’t need to bring.

Mr. Waldstein writes, The machine has no delete buttons, no cut-and-paste. Just the click-clack of history.

Sitting at the Thurber machine, I imagined his fingers on the keys and a story coming out, letter by letter, return by return.

I could hear the click-clack and the bell and the grrrrrrrr of the carriage and the thump when the the next line came into place.

John Steinbeck said, “Sometimes just the pure luxury of long beautiful pencils charges me with energy and invention.”

There is much to be said for those pencils.

I cannot remember the source of line, but someone pointed out that the American Space Programs spent millions developing a pen that could insure the flow of ink and write in zero gravity while the Soviet Union sent their astronauts into space … with pencils.

I use a comuter.

I hear the rattle of my keyboard.

That qwerty keyboard that connects my typing with the old machines.

But I back space.

I delete.

I highlight and copy and paste.

I print multiple copies.

And …

I miss that old Royal typewriter.

no delete buttons,
no cut-and-paste, just the click
clack of history

James Thuber’s Typewriter … As I said before, the first person who would have ignored the signed and banged on the computer would have been James Thurber.

12.7.2023 – piled ice, snow, every

piled ice, snow, every
thing looked raw except when
you knew what it meant

There wasn’t even a trace of green in the landscape but then it smelled like spring in the fifty-degree temperature and the sight of the mounds of snow on the north sides of houses, shacks, and log cabins, and the drifts along fence rows, and the glistening drift ice far out on Lake Michigan and the ice piled on shore on the westerly sides of the forested peninsulas out into the lake.

It was more the contrasts in the present that attracted me to this paragraph.

Its a line from the fifth Brown Dog Novella, He Dog, by Jim Harrison.

I grew up in Michigan.

I grew up in West Michigan when the Lake Michigan was a 45 minute drive away and more times than I can remember, I made the drive out to see Lake Michigan covered in ice.

Trips to the ice do stand out though.

Once when my wife, then girl friend, said to me that I was going to get her out on the ice.

Then I pointed out to her that we had been walking out on the ice for a couple hundred yards.

There was also the time I went through the ice when I was about 12.

I yelled HELP, I’M THROUGH THE ICE and my brother Jack, who had driven us out to the lake so was nominally in charge yelled IS HE KIDDING.

My brother Pete got to a place where he could see me and his eyes bugged out and he yelled NO!

My point being that when I read, “the glistening drift ice far out on Lake Michigan and the ice piled on shore on the westerly sides.”

But that isn’t exactly accurate.

I mean I wasn’t reading.

I was listening.

I was listening to the audio book as I took a lunch time walk at work.

In my head, I was along the frozen shoreline of Lake Michigan.

My feet were making their way towards the Atlantic Ocean.

Both places were about 55 degrees.

I heard “… the sight of the mounds of snow on the north sides of houses, shacks, and log cabins, and the drifts along fence rows, and the glistening drift ice far out on Lake Michigan.”
I saw the December empty streets of a summer Resort and then the glint of the sun off the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

The beach was almost empty.

I don’t know what Kings and Presidents get paid or how much money those billionaires have, but I don’t think they get to walk along an empty beach at lunch time too often.

It was quiet.

I could see forever out past Tybee Island.

I could hear the waves.

I could hear the putt putt of a shrimper going past not too far off shore.

I could hear the gulls.

It all sounded a but raw except when you knew what it meant.

12.7.2023 – in small rooms, offices

in small rooms, offices
hallways, elevators, buildings
never knew existed …

Due to a medical crisis of no little impact that landed one of my children in the hospital for five weeks I found myself making many trips to the city of Charleston, SC and while in Charleston I have found myself in many small rooms, offices, elevators and buildings that I never knew existed let alone thought I would ever be in.

I was sitting in a large, sunlit waiting room yesterday and I looked around.

There were other people like me who were there because they had to be there to get something fixed or were waiting while other people got something fixed.

There were, like me, in a new place.

Then there were these people who inhabited this place.

The office staffers.

The medical staffers.

And the people who interacted with these people on a regular basis.

It came to me that that this room was a foreign to me as if it was in another country.

More than that.

It was another world.

The directions, the locations, the habits, the customs even the language were all different.

Normal is all relative I guess.

Bizarre is where my mind goes I guess when I am physically occupied and restrained while I can give free rein to just thinking.

I started to get a handle on my surroundings by thinking of CS Lewis and the final Narnia Book, The Last Battle and the phrase, “Come further up, come further in!”

Mr. Lewis writes, “… as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different — deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know.“

We drove to the city of Charleston.

We took a new exit and parked in a new location and walked on another ramp to a new building and took an elevator to a new floor to a new room filled with new people who directed us further up and further in to another room with new who people who directed us further up and further in again and again until we were deep inside.

In a small room, an office by way of elevators and hallways in a building I never even knew existed.

We met people along the way who sat at keyboards and typed out instructions that brought up information about my son that told his medical story.

Then we met Doctors who knew more about my son’s insides than they would ever know about him.

So here is the point.

All these things, this world, it all functions and exists even now as I type this.

Parallel worlds?

Parallel universes?

Sitting in this sunlight waiting room and thinking what fresh world had I landed in?

Sitting in this sunlight waiting room, it kind of creeped me out.

Who in the world are we to think anything about ourselves.

Then I thought of quote of Mr. Churchill’s.

Mr. Churchill was speaking on the topic of prison reform when on July 20, 1910, he said in a speech in the House of Commons, that there existed … “A calm and dispassionate recognition of the rights of the accused against the State, and even of convicted criminals against the State … a desire and eagerness to rehabilitate in the world of industry all those who have paid their dues in the hard coinage of punishment … and an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man — these are the symbols which in the treatment of crime and criminals mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are the sign and proof of the living virtue in it.”

I just wrote, “Who in the world are we to think anything about ourselves.”

Yet in response, I have to answer maybe we have … an unfaltering faith that there is a treasure, if you can only find it, in the heart of every man.

Couple that with For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21)

And I tell you something.

That was quite enough for sitting in a sunlit room that I had never been before let along knew existed.

12.4.2023 – it is silly stuff

it is silly stuff
that has some relevance with
nothing happening

Erwitt downplayed his role as a photographer, often shrugging off pretension or chalking it up to happenstance: “It is silly stuff that I think has some relevance with nothing really important happening, but somehow being able to communicate some kind of fun,” he once said. There’s a lightness of touch that characterises even his most serious images, and he was a master of ironic juxtapositions and comic charm.

From the obit for photographer Elliott Erwitt, Nixon, Monroe and cheeky male buttocks: the soul-affirming photography of Elliott Erwitt, by Charlotte Jansen.

Erwitt worked into his 90s, and was ever practical about his art. “Photography is pretty simple stuff. You just react to what you see, and take many, many pictures,” he told the Guardian in 2020