P.S. A Column On Things

Musing on Reincarnation

I am no expert on the subject, but the discussion that led to the recent poem (see above) got me to thinking: what if reincarnation is a version of Groundhog Day; in the immortal words of Edna St. Vincent Millay, “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another—it’s one damn thing over & over.

Of course we can never know about reincarnation, because of the unfair built-in restriction―no explicit memory of past lives. One of the great things about Groundhog Day is that Phil could remember all of the previous days he had lived through, and he could learn and grow as a result.

Clearly you could learn and grow (and we do) without that knowledge, but it would be a slower and harder process. If I am in a time loop, I’ve been through it a few thousand times, because my decision-making has been pristine. In GHD terms, I’m not getting my face slapped anymore. If it’s just a multiverse, this is a great timeline, one I hope to stay on. I think this is probably the best of all my alternate universes, but I’m sure all the other Pauls think the same thing.

My brain hurts, I’m going to take a nap.

Expose Yourself To Art

An iconic, amusing poster shot on the street downtown in my home town of Portland, Oregon. Was talking about it the other day with a Californian and realized not everyone in the world has seen it.

High School Alternative

I’m aged out of the demo that cares, but if you and your high schooler liked remote learning and are not looking forward to a return to the daily grind, consider Living Wisdom Online International High School. A good friend works there. I have no direct experience, but speaking as a teacher, the principles look fantastic. This in no way diminishes my support for public schools, but they aren’t for everyone, and there are more interesting education models out there.

Here is a blurb for the school: “Come join our holistic, spiritual high school! Broaden your horizons by learning with high-minded teens around the world. Classes are small, live and interactive. Our students, so far, have come from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America. The normal academic curriculum is enriched with yoga, meditation, cultivation of personal expertise and an annual, in-person Service Adventure. In 2021 our senior class scored in the top 3% of schools in nationwide standardized testing.  All welcome. Fully accredited by WASC.”

Different Lives

The day I was born, my parents buried two bodies in the backyard: the people they might have been, had they not been 19 and 16 that day. I don’t think my mother yearned much for whom she might have been―at various times she wanted to be a lawyer or the mother of ten; thanks to her decades-long work in childcare, I suspect she was a little of both. I know my dad did wonder who he might have been had if he’d had the time and money to attend college in the years when, instead, he worked 40 hours a week of overtime as a milkman to support his family. He lived on the same block and had the same job his entire life. He never saw Europe.

I know they never regretted having me, because they told me that. Abortion, while rare and difficult in 1952, was suggested to my mother, who declined. They both loved me every day of their lives and mine.

How different was my life? My dad lost his virginity at the age of 18 and 10 months, two months younger than me. At that age I was a technician at KGW-TV, in between my freshman and sophomore years at far-away MIT, wooing my first lover by mail.

(Having never been to college, Dad had only one piece of advice on the day I left: “Don’t propose to the first woman you sleep with. I did, and I’ve always wondered…” When he met my first fiancé, he found her charming and intelligent, and didn’t berate me for ignoring his advice until after we’d broken up.)

When I was the age he was at my birth, I was living in Boston, an MIT sophomore, working full-time as a technician at WBZ-TV, producing comedy at WTBS radio, and working at The Tech. Dad was sweeping up broken milk bottles and dodging dogs.

My dad was 37 years old and change when I graduated from Benson High School. When I was 37 I had two lovely daughters, had been on two game shows and was a regular on The Computer Chronicles. He still lived next door to the house he was born in.

He was 41 when I graduated from MIT. When I was 41, I was playing tenor saxophone in a brass band, while Dad was dreading the heat of summer and the icy roads of snow days.

I sometimes wonder, in a light and wistful way, what other paths I might have taken, but given where I ended up, the exercise has never been more than wistful. I have been loved by several wonderful women, lived in multiple interesting places all over the country and loved my work every day of my working life. And, of course, I ended up with an amazing family of loving women, all Francophones with Masters Degrees.

I don’t regret a single decision I’ve made. My life was made possible by the love and support of my father, while, as he told me, he was, “hating work every day of my life.”

My Brief Career As A Puzzle Constructor

The only crossword I’ve ever constructed, “Rodents Everywhere”.

If you don’t have the NY Times puzzle ap Across Lite, you can work the PDF version, just be careful not to look at the third page.

My mother did the New York Times crossword puzzle (reprinted a week late in the Oregonian) every day of her adult life. She did it in pencil, and worked hard to finish it without help from the dictionary or her friends. I think she’d have enjoyed the electronic version, with its “one square” fill-in option.

Much of who I am and what I do came from observing her, but while Dad successfully passed on a disinterest in the sports section, Mom failed to pass on the crossword bug. I do remember her complaining bitterly when Will Shortz took over the puzzle editor job in 1993 and started allowing multiple word answers. She fumed about that until the day she died 20 years later.

I did not start playing crosswords until the summer of 2007, when I began to prepare for my appearance on Merv Griffin’s Crosswords, (video here, journal of my appearance here) a short-lived syndicated game show. I was a first-week contestant/loser, but had worked through several crossword puzzle books and started working the New York Times puzzle online every Monday and Tuesday (they are too hard after that day; the Monday puzzle is the easiest, the Saturday puzzle the hardest). Perhaps my loss was not a surprise, since the show claimed to be calibrated to “Wednesday crossword difficulty.”

When I discovered crossword construction software in 2012, I wrote my own puzzle and shared it with mom, who was not enthusiastic.

Nonetheless, I sent it to the New York Times. Shortz’ assistant for rejecting submissions informed me that it wasn’t completely symmetrical (a requirement I hadn’t noticed) and so couldn’t be considered.

Can you spot the one clue I should me mildly ashamed of?

I did begin one other puzzle, but never finished it. The theme was “Cliches.” After just a few years of playing the crossword, I realized that Ott, Orr, ewer and Ono, along with a few other words, were very frequently used.

A Thought For Teachers, And Others

 

(Repeated from Jan. 24, 2005, back when I was still teaching)

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. --Maya Angelou

The other day it was finals at CHigh School, which means last year's freshmen get out early enough to come over to JM, where I teach. One of the girls smiled at me and told me a long elaborate story about how good I made her feel on the first day. She looked deep into my eyes and said, "You don't remember, do you." Well, no I don't. I mostly remember spending the year at cross-purposes with her. But she remembers that first day, and, I suspect 20 years from now, when the tumult has faded, the good feeling will remain.

Much the same thing happened to me with NM, a friend from college days who looked me up when we were both adults because I worked for Information Systems News and he worked for a computer vendor. He told me a long elaborate story about how nice I was to him the first day he showed up at the main MIT newspaper, The Tech. Again, hard to remember. I was nice to everyone who showed up at the newspaper--in reaction, in part, to the snarky way I was treated on my first day, when MF was cruel enough to drive me to a competitive newspaper for six months.

The moral of the story, I guess, is that I try to be as nice as I can to everyone, every day, because I believe Maya Angelou is right. As my master teacher once said, “What are you trying to do with the grade you put on their work?” Sometimes it is communications--assessing their work, letting them know if they meet or exceed expectations. But ask yourself, do you want them to feel bad, or to learn and try harder. I hear her voice in my head (and that of my mother the ex-teacher) every time I grade a paper. It makes it more complicated, but ultimately more satisfying, and it helps me understand what to do with papers, tests and students that are on the bubble.

My Favorite Year… and a half

I wasn’t expecting this. In the immortal words of Total Eclipse of the Heart:

Every now and then I get a little bit nervous
That the best of all the years have gone by.

Fact is, I wasn’t really expecting any more peak experiences as I neared my 8^th decade, despite my firm belief that this is the best moment of my life. Now this is. Now this is…

Then on March 17, 2020, my daughter and son-in-law asked my wife I and I to do daycare for our grandson for the month we expected the Covid quarantine to last. Given her work schedule, Vicki took Monday and Wednesday from the end of breakfast to the start of naptime; I took Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. After 323 work days, Vicki had spent 480 hours on duty, while I had the pleasure of keeping my grandson (from age 15 months to age 31 months) company for 720 hours. Next week he starts daycare.

It’s not that I won’t see him anymore, but I will see him less.

I am at the point where mindfulness meets melancholy. (actually, we have agreed on the word wistful) I am melancholic that my regular three-day weekly visits are through. Intellectually, I know we will still see him regularly, and baby-sit him frequently, just not as often. We are moving from a motion picture of his life to time-lapse photography.

Mindfulness teachers us that suffering is not about what happened, but how we react to and process what happened. I am working on adjusting my attitude. Not sorrow at the lost contact, but joy for the time we shared. It’s going to take some work.

Cheerful, Optimistic and Upbeat

Speaking of the rule of three (here and here)…

I have been cheerful, optimistic and upbeat since the day I was born, according to reports. Those of you who have met me know it is true; I sincerely hope it comes through in this column.

The good cheer started at birth, so it’s probably genetic, but in addition, that’s how my mother raised me. After a few rough spots in my 20s, I came to realize that happiness comes from within. I saw too many cases of two people (sometimes one of them was me) in objectively identical situations, one of whom was happy and one who was not. I made a conscious choice to be in the happy group.

I enjoyed Garrison Keillor’s recent discussion of the subject:

I have my off days, for sure, but I believe cheerfulness is something you set your mind on in the morning and hang on to for the rest of the day. It feels like an essential American virtue, found in Emerson, Whitman, even Emily Dickinson, and surely in Mark Twain: Don’t get bogged down in the past, the bonehead mistakes, the tragic losses, the betrayals of trust. Look ahead. If necessary, leave town. Do what you can to improve the day. We are resilient people. Disaster strikes and the next day people get up and go to work. Buoyancy is what you need. Power and influence are illusory. Charisma is a fiction. Brilliance depends on who’s writing the test.

I also found myself visited by a touch of l'esprit d'escalier, when I realized I could have described myself as chubby, cheerful and chatty. Alliteration!

I was mildly disappointed that none of you offered me three adjectives for yourself. Several offered adjectives for me; I was surprised that none alluded to my corpulence. Apparently it looms large in my self image, but doesn’t appear in the image of me held by others. One sweet, kind correspondent offered “whip-smart and interesting” to describe me, but couldn’t come up with a third. I was touched.

Enlightenment

“Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky (via Daily Calm)

There are only a few days I wish for wings. And, I find the prospect of accepting my own disappearance to be unnerving.

50 Years Ago: The Summer of 1971

(see throat-clearing introduction)

Of course, all of us are moving through time, one foot in the past, one in the future. And we are not typically blessed with the ability to see inflection points, except in retrospect. In any case, I can see now that the summer after my freshman year at MIT, starting 50 years ago this month, was a point of demarcation.

It was a fecund time of writing. I know a lot of you marvel at the quantity of my output today; I am a piker compared to young Paul. That summer, while working full -time at KGW-TV and part time at KKEY radio, I wrote a love letter every day to the woman, thousands of miles away, who would be my first lover―meaning it was my last summer as a virgin.

I condensed a 500-page journal of my freshman year to 35,000 words (available on request). I wrote my last three radio scripts.

I looked back fondly on my first two non-romantic female friends who, unbeknownst to me, I would never see again. I had my last date with the girl I took to the Senior Prom, who taught me a few lessons that made me a better lover for her successors.

It was my penultimate summer living in my childhood home with my parents.

Some things were going on that were clouded in the mists of the future, and so, unknown to me at the time. My future wife had recently moved back to LA from Germany, where she lived on and off with her lover of five years; they broke up. In Des Moines, Dayton and Chicago, the three best friends of my life were preparing to arrive at MIT and meet me in the fall. All of them attended my wedding a decade later, one as my best man.

I attempted to make some deliberate changes in myself that summer; I tried playing tennis left-handed to see if I could be ambidextrous. I tried to consciously lower my voice. I rode my bike five miles to work every day and went on the Stillman diet to lose weight. By summer’s end, I’d lost weight.