Back to Work, New Theater Season, and Beginning Sailing Lessons

I expect this to be a rather short entry, because I ought to go to bed in an hour. But this past week was so good, it deserves a mention before the moment passes.

First was going back to work after my summer vacation. Of course, I'd rather still be on vacation, but I'm also realistic! But it was great. I timed it so that I would get back a week before everybody has to be back, that way it's an easier slide back in. There were only a few of us there last week (just "us" so to speak), and it was the last week of our summer schedule, so the days were shorter and Friday was off--the last Friday off of the summer. There were a few teachers slipping on in, getting their rooms ready, and it was good to see them (hugs all around). By Wednesday of this coming week, they will all be back. We can still dress very casually, but then a week from Wednesday, classes will start so it is back to long pants, dress shirts, ties, and dress shoes. I don't think I'll buy any "back to school" clothes this time, though.

Friday, which was off, I did what was probably my last sunbathing-on-my-air-mattress-floating-on-the-swimming-pool of the summer. I did "put the air mattress away", but it is easy enough to pull it out again if weather permits. However, I probably will just get into "autumnal" things which the start of the school year lends itself to (regardless of the weather). September in L.A. is usually a "summer" month, but there is a big difference between summer when you are on vacation and summer when you are working full time.

Mostly what I did on Friday was study my sailing textbook. I started sailing lessons this weekend at the California Sailing Academy in Marina del Rey, so I was getting ready for Saturday morning. This was something I had expected to begin during my vacation, but it ends up they get booked up quickly so there weren't any open spots until now.

But meanwhile, I had a play to go to Friday night, the first musical of the season for Reprise, which I think is the best theatrical season ticket in Los Angeles. This will be my fourth season with them. In years past, they offered three musicals a season, but this year they have expanded it to four. Their shows are absolutely amazing in quality and enjoyment. I marvel at there being so much talent expressed in every avenue, but of course, this is Los Angeles, so there is way more fantastic talent than can ever be fully used! But what I see with Reprise blows me away every single time.

This play was a musical I wasn't familiar with, On Your Toes, although it ends up it had two songs I knew, the charming There's A Small Hotel that I only knew as one of my favorite songs played by deceased jazz trumpet great, Chet Baker (so I didn't know it had lyrics), and Glad To Be Unhappy that Barbra Streisand recorded only once, for her television special, Barbra Streisand and Other Musical Instruments. So it was a great to hear where these songs actually came from.

There was something else musically in the play that I was very familiar with, something I had loved ever since I was a child, but always thought it was a separate musical work; I had no idea it was from a Broadway musical: the ballet Slaughter On Tenth Avenue. Wow! As a child, I had always put Richard Rodgers's Slaughter On Tenth Avenue in the same category as George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue--maybe they were presented on the same record album in my parents's collection? Anyway, Slaughter On Tenth Avenue is the grand finale of the musical, On Your Toes.

This play was the first time classical dance was performed in a Broadway musical, and also the first time that jazz dance forms were introduced into a ballet. There was one utterly amazing dance number in the show (what the performers referred to as "the dance off") in which American music students are demonstrating their jazz and tap dance talents to a group of dancers from the Russian Ballet, who, in turn, are demonstrating their ballet prowess to these American music students. Seeing these different dance forms move back and forth, entwine, and interact was indescribably beautiful and powerful. And the choreographer for this production did an outstanding job.

Something I hadn't known about this production until I sat down in my seat and looked at the program, was that one of my favorite actresses and one whom I had long considered the most beautiful woman performing in television, film, and theater, Stefanie Powers, had a lead role in this show! And I also hadn't known that she was a singer and dancer, as well. Apparently she refers to that as having been a closely-held secret, but thank goodness, that secret is now out of the bag! And yes, it was certainly wonderful seeing her, she measured up to whatever might have been my greatest expectation, if only I had known beforehand that she was in the cast!

The Reprise series that I buy is one that includes a little party and reception afterwards in the courtyard of the Freud Theater on the UCLA campus, where Reprise presents its shows. This party is attended by members of the cast, as well, so it gives us a chance to meet and speak briefly with the performers. I usually use that opportunity to praise a more beginning performer who might have done a notable job in a smaller role...although at this point, I don't know if it is correct to refer to any performer in Reprise as a "beginner". Even though their name may not be generally known (or not known by me), they are often far from beginning. Anyway, more unknown performers are usually extremely pleased to obtain this recognition and I am always excited to give it. But with this reception, I was eager to see Stefanie Powers, although I figured the likelihood was that a performer of that stature would either skip the reception entirely (as others have done in the past), or else breeze through very quickly. However, most amazingly, Stefanie Powers was one of the first performers to come out through that backstage door! Of course, she was immediately inundated by other reception guests, so I held off on speaking to her and spoke with some other great performers, instead. And on this show, there had been several that I had been eager to talk to, so I got to do that and everybody was extremely gracious and, incidentally, shockingly beautiful in the close-up flesh. That is something, the effect of which, I seem to forget until I face it again and then I get to enjoy it "all over again for the first time". Very talented actors and actresses (and singers and dancers) in Los Angeles are almost god- and goddess-like in their appearance. I guess that's why they are here...this might be what separates them (those who "come to Hollywood") from those who maybe dream of it, but never get that impetus to actually come here and try it. I've never seen this anywhere else, although I am sure it is like this in New York, too. Well, I know it is...for one thing, many of THESE performers are actually New Yorkers.

Okay, now it was time for Stefanie Powers. She still had a circle of people around her, so I maneuvered into the outer edge of it and listened to her as she talked about an upcoming one-woman show she is going to be in. This was something I was interested in, so it gave me an opportunity to ask, "And it's going to be at the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts, right?" This brought Stefanie's, and the circle's, attention to me. Stefanie confirmed that was its location and I said that I would be sure to go see that. She said the tickets were going to go on sale in a couple of weeks. Then a man in the circle said, "We're members of a Stefanie Powers fan club, would you like to join it?" I said, "Absolutely, I feel like I am a charter member of it," and I said, to Stephanie, "I have loved you for such a long time and you are the most beautiful woman performing in all of show business." Everyone (including Stefanie) really liked that, and Stephanie smiled broadly and offered me her hand. Then one of the women in the circle asked me if I would like Stefanie to give me her autograph. That wasn't something I ordinarily would ask for, but since this woman made the suggestion, it seemed like it would be okay, so I said "Yes, please," and offered Stefanie the appropriate page in my program. One of the women dug out a pen, which Stefanie used to give me her autograph (after asking me my name), so I came home with that, certainly something I had never expected when that evening began! But it was exciting and I left there floating on a huge emotional high. I actually would have liked to have leapt across the UCLA campus to the tune of Slaughter On Tenth Avenue which radiated throughout my head, but I kept my (jaunty) pace as normal as possible.

The next day, I got up early and drove to Marina del Rey for my first sailing lesson. This was the beginning course (I signed up for the series of the first four) and this particular format was a weekend intensive. Emphasis on intensive. This was not a private lesson, but a group class, but the group classes are very small; they put no more than four students in a class. As it turned out, one of the four who had signed up never showed up, so we were only three, which gave each of us a greater amount of time in performing the various sailing tasks, such as serving as the helmsman, or trimming the mainsail, or sharing in trimming the jib. So we got more for our money, so to speak.

It was a varied bunch. There was me, the oldest one there. Then there was a woman, a nurse, who was probably somewhere in her thirties. She had taken the same course at another sailing school seven years ago, and now wanted a refresher. She asked everyone to treat her as a beginner. The third student was a seventeen-year-old boy from Oregon, but who lives with his mother in L.A. during the summers. It was actually his mother's boyfriend who had signed up for the lesson, but it ended up his workload didn't permit him to take the time for it, so he gave his lesson to his girlfriend's son. He was a quiet but smart boy and I enjoyed having him in the class.

There was also another guy there who had signed up for a private lesson, but the school had him join us for all the lecture portions. For the boat portions, he was with his private instructor. We more or less considered him part of our class even though he wasn't on our boat (but we'd see each other working out there in the marina channel and wave and shout back and forth, "looking good!"). And today, Sunday, I had lunch with him and he certainly was an interesting person to talk to. He was British.

There is an amazingly large amount to learn (and this class was only the beginning!) and it felt for all the world like working to get a pilot's license (as in flying airplanes). Sailing is working with an "airfoil" (the sail, whose curvature you have to learn how to shape and manipulate) that is vertical rather than horizontal, and you get a log book in which you log your sailing hours and into which rating stickers are placed after you pass certain tests. There are many levels, certificates, ratings, or standards: Basic Sailing, Basic Coastal Cruising, Bareboat Chartering, Coastal Navigation, Advanced Coastal Crusing, Celestial Navigation, and Offshore. It's also very serious business, as ultimately you will be able to skipper a sailboat across any ocean in any condition to any destination in the world, by yourself or with other people on board.

I enjoyed it very much, but it also fries your brain and all four of us (including the man getting the private lesson) would reach "check out" time in which we just could not process it any more. Still, I think everybody did really well, and, in this course, anyway, the growth curve was nearly as vertical as the sail. Just this weekend, we four have finished the 16-hours of course work for the Basic Sailing Standard, and once we pass the certified test (which each one can schedule to take at his or her convenience), we will be able to rent the school's sailboats and sail them by ourselves during the daytime, not far beyond the marina or away from the shore, in light to moderate wind and sea conditions. Do I feel comfortable doing that? Hum...I think so. But there are times that get scary.

Today we got to go out into Santa Monica Bay beyond the marina breakwater and it is a different animal out there compared with the relative calm of the protected marina waters and channel. I don't know, THAT is going to take some getting used to! The water was choppy and there were waves and a lot of the time you have no control of the rudder, because it is up out of the water. The boat doesn't sail smoothly, but jumps all around. If you are at the helm, it doesn't really feel very secure. I found it hard today to imagine even sailing the boat out to Catalina (a six-hour journey for a sailboat), let alone to Tahiti! But like everything else, it is something where your knowledge, ability, and feeling of competence and security continue to increase.

I'll tell you this, there are sure some pretty amazing and beautiful boats out there! Million dollar yachts in some cases. Just being out there among them and among ALL the other kinds of boats--everything from kayaks, Zodiac boats, and jet skiis through to every kind of powerboat, including yachts so big they seemed liked small ocean liners, to every kind of sailboat from little dingies with sails up to boats with more than one mast, this put me into a world I had seen from shore, but never before had been out in the middle of. Well, today we WERE out in the middle of it, and we were performing with a certain level of competence and I could be proud of that.

Well, oops it's now an HOUR past the time I wanted to go to bed and, well, I am pretty darn tired and it is a working day tomorrow. Everybody in the sailing class told me they conked out early last night (the seventeen-year-old boy didn't even have supper), so I know TONIGHT when my head hits that pillow....

Edisonian and Socratic

My long yearned for, anticipated, and held-up-on-a-pedestal summer vacation is all but over and I should feel a lot more depressed than I am. This doesn't mean that I'm not depressed, because I am, but not debilitatingly so. It's just great to have all the time off and I don't want to give it up.

Having been a student from about the age of 5 up to somewhere around 27 (with a few years off in there after graduating from college before I decided to go to law school and then dropping out of that two years later), these are all hugely formative years, and then having worked at Stanford University for something like five or six years in my mid-30s, and now, currently, that I have been working at an elementary school for nearly ten years, my inner clock definitely works on a "September to June" annual schedule, with what it presumes will be a long summer at the end before "the new year" begins again. Of course, as an adult (and not a teacher), I don't GET a long summer at the end, so there is always a period of shock when what is really the time of the summer blips by quicker than a blown flashbulb.

Children, no less than adults, or maybe I should say adults no less then chiliden, NEED that long, drawn out, nearly infinite time of freedom and I think it is harmful when they don't get it. I very much believe that it is those times that put you in touch with who you really are and why you are here. Of course, you ought to be able to maintain touch with that essential self no matter where you are and no matter what you are doing, but people are rarely able to, because there are too many distractions, too many obligations, and it takes too much concentration and effort. Perhaps the world is designed this way on purpose, because then it forces you to develop that strength and focus, and strength and focus are good things. One might say that a major difference between us and God is that God (whoever, however, or whatever you imagine this force to be) is infinite strength and eternal focus, whereas we all are very weak or scattered. So becoming stronger and more focussed about who we are and keeping to what our true purpose is in the midst of this "gymnasium of distraction" makes us closer to God.

Or maybe it is all part of some negative grand design to entrap and mesmerize a slave class who know nothing more than to shoulder the distractive burdens of a leisure class who themselves then have the time and freedom for individual pursuits. Sometimes for sure I think that and there is almost a preponderance of evidence to back that up, except there is also the tiniest chink of light piercing through that that shows that people DO have the freedom to break out of that, if only they would, and people definitely do. Particularly in the United States, still, but also in other countries, even if in the case of other countries in order to do so takes leaving there and coming here. The United States still receives more legal immigrants than any other country in the world, three times more than the country that is in second place, nine times more than the country that is in third place. And then there are all the illegal immigrants, sometimes estimated as many as twelve times our legal ones. So that's a heck of a lot of individuals choosing THIS country as their place on the planet to find freedom, and many, many of them do a better of job of securing that freedom than do our citizens (or maybe I should just speak for myself).

So, just as happiness is so often touted as a personal choice, so is freedom. But in order to have either, you have to know what you want and you have to have the courage to reach out and grab it. What was that fairy tale that as a child I always thought was very peculiar? It was something about a voice that kept saying, "Give me that bone!" and the person just hid under the covers of the bed. "Give me that bone!" the voice insisted (the person hid under the covers and quaked with fright). "Give me that bone!" the voice got louder (the person quivvered and shook under the covers). Finally the voice shouted at the top of its lungs: "GIVE ME THAT BONE!" (If that had been my mother speaking, it would have been "Goddam you, give me that fucking BONE!", but that's not what it said in the fairy tale.) So finally the voice shouts at the top of its lungs, "GIVE ME THAT BONE!", and the person shouts back, "TAKE IT!"

What on Earth does that fairy tale mean? I never knew. But now, maybe I do. There is some kind of very powerful force within you that WANTS something and all you are doing is hiding from it. "It's hard," I'm scared," "I don't know how," "I'm not sure that's what I really want," "I might fail," and so on. I know, because I have said them all millions of times. But finally, the desire just gets so insistent that you can't hide from it any more, so you throw off all resistance and surrender to it. "Take it!" Or another way of saying it, "Okay, I've so far failed, so why don't YOU just take over?" Probably a good idea.

So THIS time, instead of my using my summer vacation to go on a glorious trip (HOW many people said to me, "Are you taking a vacation this summer?", "Yes.", "Oh, where are you going?" as if "vacation" and "going somewhere" were synonymous), or doing what most people think is second best, "just relaxing" ("I've got some books I want to read," or "I'm going to do all the things in town I never had time to do before" or "I'm going to spend every day at the beach, soak up some rays, and improve my surfing skills", all very acceptable to the average questioner), I said, "I'm going to go within," knowing that answer wouldn't cut it, and it didn't. But that was my plan.

If anyone wanted a greater explanation, I would say that I felt like melted butter, a puddle so thin that I was almost nonexistent, and I wanted to use the time to coagulate into a recognizable shape again. But that was merely greeted by a blank stare. What, doesn't anybody need to get it together anymore, or are they already together? I must be the only person on planet Earth who doesn't feel together. Me and maybe the homeless people and the crazies in the mental institutions.

So, in all honestly, I approached this vacation with absolutely no set plan at all other than throwing the covers off and saying to the voice,"Take it!"

So how did it turn out?"

Very, very interesting.

One thing the voice kept saying was that I wanted all my stuff! Just like that, "I want all my stuff!" I was dead tired of having my possessions in gigantic spilled piles all over the floor, or in countless boxes buried in a storage unit or hidden in a closet, or under the bed, or in such a mess all over the couch that it takes an hour to find anything. I wanted to have it all, in one place, organized, and neatly put away where it belongs. But I couldn't do that here, oh no, I had been complaining for years that in this one-room studio apartment, there is no room to PUT anything, there is no room to DO anything.

The solution to that seems irritatingly obvious to the average stranger: "well, move to a bigger apartment."

No.

For one thing, when I moved into this apartment (which was probably lifetime move number 51), it was such a nightmare, it was the move that finally broke the camel's back, that I vowed, "I will move just ONE more place after this, because you can be sure that I will move out of here, but when I do, it will be to a house that I own and one where I plan to stay for the rest of my life." Now, of course, even I knew that I could never make a promise that would say that the house I moved into would be the one where I would stay for the rest of my life, but to simply move into a bigger apartment (ANOTHER apartment!), would be to violate very single element of that particular vow. So I just did not want to do it.

I had to buy a house, that was the only solution.

Yeah, right. This is LOS ANGELES! Does that mean anything to anybody? $700,000, $800,000, $1,000,000, $1,500,000 houses, unless you are willing to move to "drive by central", Compton, in which case it would be a hideous tiny shack with a razor wire fence around it for $350,000.

No, ain't gonna happen. Not now, anyway,

So hey, how about further out? Houses must be cheaper, there, right? I like listening to Books On Tape, two-hour commutes are doable, aren't they?

Well, yes, it is true, I found that there were pretty nice houses that I could afford in places like Taft, California (a bit west of Bakersfield) or California City (a bit east of Mojave), three hours away. Well, maybe I could just live in one of those houses on the weekends and commute to work from the apartment I have now. Is that affordable? Well, maybe, kinda. A bit of a pain, but that could be a solution.

Except doing a Zillow.com check revealed that those houses that are now selling for $250,000 were once upon a time, oh, say three or four years ago, selling for $35,000 or $50,000. Now, $35,000 or $50,000 I could do! But what on Earth economic fundamentals would make a house out in the middle of nowhere increase in value FIVE TIMES in four years? Absolutely nothing. That VIOLATES economic fundamentals. It is totally nonsensical, and I think I would be a stupid fool to get myself in 30-year debt for $250,000 in order to buy a $35,000 house. That's the way I see it. These are houses that nobody would buy for that kind of money except for the fact that they are desperate to live in Southern California and think it's either this or nothing and hey, they're going to go up in value anyway, right?

But I'm not desparate to stay in Southern California--not THAT desperate. I could see living in Florida, or North Carolina, or even Upper Michigan, say on the lakeshore around Traverse City (except for the winters...yikes!). Or maybe even a foreign country. (How about the lake region of Italy, say near Lake Como? I know, even less affordable than L.A. How about some island paradise in the South Pacific? Hum....) There ARE other options besides Southern California. But I DO have a good job here, let's not forget about that. But that takes us to problem number two, "why don't you just get another job somewhere else in a place that you can afford?" Well...I don't really WANT another job, not like this one. This gets into a discussion I don't have time for right now, but the gist of it is that along the lines of "I vow that I will only move to a house that I own and want to stay in forever" is the idea that "I vow I won't get another job, but next time want to be earning a living through some kind of enterprise of my own (such as making a living from my writing)." I've DONE the employment bit for way too long, now, and it was only meant to be "for survival". But now I actually could be retirement age, so it's time to finally grow up and be fully me.

So that REALLY makes it hard--I not only have to move somewhere else, but I also have to make a living there through some means other than getting hired and working for somebody else. But that's what that inner voice wants and I don't have a lot more time to keep on ignoring it.

So, sigh, I began this vacation feeling like I was living in a logjam and I thought about it and I thought about it and finally concluded that maybe, just maybe, I had to take just one more intermediary step...move to a nicer, bigger apartment where I would have some ROOM to get my head together and THEN I could work on manifesting the final solution. I could at least look, right, and see what exists out there.

Well, I tried, I really truly did. I devoured various apartment rental sites on the Internet. I poured through Craig's list. I studied the listings in rental magazines. I drove around looking at signs. Most of this effort was heartbreaking. In order to make the move at all worth the energy and cost, I made a list of things I had to have; without these, I may as well stay here. Air conditioning, a usable balcony (I mean by that that you can eat out there), a swimming pool, covered parking, two bedrooms, walk-in closets, a decent kitchen with lots of cabinets and counter space, and a fireplace. If this could be in townhoue mode (that means that the bedrooms are upstairs), all the better.

Oh, and it had to be "affordable".

Well, most of the elements were findable. The hard elements were a usable balcony (most of them were just narrow slips useful for only standing out there in the morning to determine if it were raining or not) and a fireplace. Covered parking was somewhat rare, too. At least that narrowed the looking down quite a bit...just scan for fireplace, which eliminated 99% of the offerings, then check out the balcony.

Price. Unfortunately, that had to keep creeping up. When I started this search, I wanted it to hover around $1,000 a month, with $1,300 my absolute top limit. (Right now I am paying $747 for the apartment, which includes a space in the parking lot, and $200 a month for a storage unit elsewhere, which I could eliminate by having my stuff WITH ME). Soon enough, that passed. It became clear that in order to get what I wanted, $2,000 a month made it easy, but keeping it down to, say, $1,500 a month was a chore. Basically, there was NOTHING decent at that rental range, and being in L.A. was about $300 a month more expensive that outer areas.

Finally, I found a place that seemed to be the answer, but it was more expensive than I wanted to pay, $1,650, but with all the other add-ons that were required (for example, you HAD to get renter's insurance, and in my apartment here, some of the utilities are included, which they wouldn't be at this new place), it would have gone up to more like $1,800 a month. It was a relatively new, glorious-looking immense apartment complex (they had something like 80 buildings and 4 swimming pools), in Santa Clarita, in the middle of about seven new housing developments in which all the houses were listed for $800,000 on up to a million and a half. I wanted it. I filled out the application, chose my renter's insurance policy, paid $35.00 for the credit check, gave them a $200 deposit to hold the townhouse I had chosen (an "Ibiza" model, which was three levels starting with the garage on the ground floor). This even had more than I wanted, such as full-size washer and dryer in the unit. And then left them all excited; they were going to run my credit check and call me later.

I called my friend Kate on my cell phone as I merged onto the 14 freeway, told her all about this gorgeous place and finally I would be able to have people over, I would have lots of room, now I could begin to live again. I purposely ignored the unmoving parking lot that I could see going in the other direction, from L.A. to Santa Clarita (and Palmdale and Lancaster), what would be my going-home-from-work route.

I was fine until I got home and waited for their call (which didn't actually come until noon the next day). It got to be 7:30 and they still hadn't called, so I thought I would go out to dinner "to celebrate". But instead I felt so sad. I noticed thoughtful little touches to the design of this apartment as I got ready to go out. Down in the lobby over the mailboxes, the manager had written one of her cute little notes on the notice board like she does. I was reminded at how clean, safe, secure, and well-managed this building is. As I walked by the swimming pool, I marveled over how clear and blue the water was, and how pretty the tropical garden in the courtyard was. A teacher I know (who works with disadvantaged kids for the L.A. public school system) approached me from the parking lot and I said, "How are you doing?" He said what he always does, which I like: "Can't complain about a darn thing!" We chatted for a moment about our respective school schedules and he told me some of his upcoming plans of what he was going to do with the kids. He's great, I love seeing him.

As I nosed my car out of the parking lot and down Franklin Street, and went past the coffee house, sidewalk cafes, and wine bar, I noticed with renewed eyes how "cool" and "funky" the neighborhood is and I was reminded of why I moved here in the first place. It's a place that draws a certain artistic and "film industry hopeful" crowd, some of whom actually make it, and regardless, their creative energy is good.

Then I arrived in Silverlake and went into Casita del Campo, a Mexican restaurant that I like and used to go to a whole lot, but lately hadn’t been to in over a year. The patio where I had hoped to sit was completely full, but as I was looking, a waitress that I like very much and am always happy to see saw me and said, “You want to eat outside?” I said, “Yes, but all the tables are taken.” “Here,” she said, “I’ll take you to another patio we have,” and she took me to one that in all the years I had eaten there, I never even knew existed. It was a quiet, beautiful space with nice lights strung back and forth overhead. It had a very private feeling. Besides me, there was just one other couple out there, over on the other end. I ordered a frozen margarita and started to feel better, although instead of a celebration, it felt like a good-bye.

The waitress took my order, but another waiter (one whom I also like a lot) brought it out to me. When he brought it, he smiled broadly and said, “It’s YOU!” Then he explained that the waitress who took my order had said to him, “Why don’t you take this outside to the side patio, you will be happy to see who is there.” When he asked her to explain further, she only said, “It’s a regular, just go see.” Apparently my presence there was a happy occasion, or at least, that’s how they were acting. That made me feel really good. It got me to thinking how often I would ever go there after I moved to Santa Clarita. Probably not too often, if at all. That didn’t seem right.

I enjoyed my meal and as I ate, I wondered if I could string lights overhead on the balcony I was going to get. That might be nice. But somehow I didn’t feel too excited about it. That whole evening after I got home, I felt that I was dreading my upcoming move, not looking forward to it. I looked around at the piles of mess surrounding me and instead of feeling relief that finally I was going to be able to straighten it all out, I felt like I had somehow failed in some kind of ancient dream. Moving just didn’t seem like the right answer.

The next morning I would have expected that I would have gotten up early, maybe even started packing for my upcoming move. Instead, I just stayed in bed until noon, when the phone rang and it was the guy from the new apartment calling, letting me know that my credit check had cleared and I could move in. “You are coming in to sign the lease today, aren’t you?” he asked. I said, “Yes, I guess so...do I HAVE to come in today?” “I thought you wanted to,” he said. “Well,” I responded, “you said that I couldn’t get the keys to the townhouse until I had gotten the electricity and phone turned on and had obtained renter’s insurance. I don’t know if I have time to get all that done today.” “Do you want me to change the move-in day to Monday, then?” he asked. “No,” I said, “I don’t want you to go into any trouble. I’ll come in today. Later.” Then I hung up.

I realized that I really didn’t want to move there. I felt like it was too expensive, more than I wanted to pay. I felt like I didn’t want to live out there in Santa Clarita. I felt like there was something wrong with the place, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I worried that the commute would be horrible. I felt like I didn’t want to go to the effort of packing up everything, having my Internet and phone moved, and changing my address everywhere. I also felt like I didn’t want to leave HERE, this tiny apartment, this neighborhood. At least, not NOW, not if I weren’t moving into my own house. This median transition suddenly didn’t make as much sense as it had at first.

But on the other hand, I had been more or less stuck here for over a decade, accomplishing very little, living only a partial life and blaming it all on these crowded conditions. What was wrong with me, was I just too lazy to make the effort of moving, or was I too phobic about change, or perhaps overly sentimental? It was time to move on, wasn’t it?

I really saw myself facing a fork in the road and I didn’t know which way to go. Finally I decided to meditate, really go inside and seek an answer to the dilemma. The thoughts that kept moving across my inner vision was that the truth of my life’s experience was that where I lived or how much room I had had been irrelevant to the level of my accomplishments. For example, when I lived in a DORM ROOM at U.C. Berkeley, I accomplished almost more than I have ever done in my life. And then in the apartment I rented when I lived in New York, that was smaller than where I live now, I managed to write a whole novel there, quite easily, in fact. To contrast to that, when I rented a three-bedroom house that sat on five acres of land in the mountains and that had TWO two-car garages, one of which, which I could have turned into a studio if I had wanted to, was, by itself, larger than the living area of this one apartment, I hardly ever wrote a word. So if I had argued with myself that SPACE was the issue, that argument was a lie. (After all, I know, for example, that J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book in a cafe, so where there is a will, there is a way.) I had to have a better and more accurate explanation for my problems.

I finally got out of the meditation with the idea that I ought to now take my mind off this issue and help somebody else for a while. I knew there would be e-mails from employees asking for help, so I logged on and saw that, indeed there were three people asking for help, so I took care of them. And then suddenly I got the idea to check out that apartment review site I knew about and see what the residents of this Santa Clarita apartment complex thought about it.

Boy! The site had 51 reviews of that townhouse complex, and the total positive score was 29%. If you took a test and scored 29 out of a 100, what grade do you think you would get? That’s probably an F minus minus minus.

Every single thing that can make you hate a place seemed to have been represented somewhere in those reviews. Noise all the time, all-night rap music from gang members, drug dealing, ex-cons, beautiful-looking but crappily-built apartments falling apart all the time (toilets flooding, doors falling off, refrigerators stopping working, garage doors stuck open, or closed, at least one security gate always broken so that nefarious strangers were always roaming around at night, this area of town, despite all the new million-dollar houses was, apparently, a ghetto); unresponsive management, noise from either the nearby freeway or else the Metrolink train that goes by several times a day and night, frequent burglaries (no wonder the management MAKES you get renter’s insurance), a sheriff has to visit the complex daily. Oh, regarding that sheriff, it’s funny, I remembered that while I was there in the office, a sheriff DID come. One of the office staff said to him, “You are here about the domestic disturbance?” “No, I....” “Then it must be to investigate the crack dealer?” Gee, somebody else was taking care of the domestic disturbance and another sheriff was taking care of the crack dealer, THIS sheriff wanted to pick up a map of the complex to keep at his desk. Without at first getting it, I guess that investigating something at this complex was the main task of this particular sheriff’s unit. And I was going to LIVE there?

While I was reading these reviews, I got another call from the guy at the apartment complex. He said, “I made a mistake when I told you how much move-in allowance we grant you. I had told you $300.”

I was sure he was going to say, “I am sorry, but it is really only $100”, and if so, that would give me the perfect excuse to cancel the whole thing. However, what he said was, “It is really $500.” My mind thought, Yeah, right, you picked up on the hesitation in my voice before and that is what you are instructed to do when people balk. Really, all they need to do is get you the sign that lease, then you are stuck. From the reviews I read, NOBODY wants to renew after their year is up, and many of them get out of there anyway, even when that means paying off the balance of the lease. So I didn’t fall for it. I told him I didn’t want to rent it after all.

“I suppose that means that I lose my $200 deposit,” I said, but no. He asked if I were coming in today to pick up my $200 check, and I said “Yes” and high-tailed it up there before he changed his mind or found out he wasn’t supposed to give it back to me. It kind of hurt me to go back to that place and see what it looked like and ask for my deposit back. It looks so appealing, but now I knew the truth of what was going on underneath the surface. Thank God I WASN’T moving in there!

After that, I completely gave up on the idea of moving to a larger apartment.

Ever since then, I have felt like that was the best thing that happened to me. I was saved from making a terrible mistake. But, much more than that, I got other benefits out of it.

At first, I did feel that I had ruined my precious summer vacation. Instead of going somewhere nice, I chose to devote my time to finding an apartment to move into. And I had failed in that. But then I viewed that as an “Edisonian” failure, which I take from that story of Thomas Edison’s lab workers complaining about the 1,000 experiments that FAILED to find the proper element to use in making the filament for the incandescent lightbulb [the eventually-found answer was tungsten]. “We have FAILED a thousand times,” they cried.

“No, we have NOT failed,” Edison said. “We now KNOW of a 1,000 elements that won’t work.” Wow, I absolutely love that attitude. “The cup is half full” has nothing on Edison! “We now know of a thousand elements that don’t work!” That is positive and useful knowledge despite the fact that so far, no lightbulb has been produced.

Well, now I KNOW that the answer is NOT finding and moving to a bigger apartment. And the positive knowledge of that has made a huge difference in my attitude about this one, and in what I need to do to move forward with my life. It’s funny how an obstacle doesn’t have to be real, but only an idea that you have, such as the idea that I could not function in this tiny, cluttered apartment (well, it’s not that tiny). Now it doesn’t seem so cluttered (and, for one thing, I’ve found the energy to do some cleaning up), but for another, I can see how clutter can be an advantage, or I have made it into one. I don’t HAVE to take the time to maintain a certain standard of appearance; “clutter” takes a certain level of pressure off of me. This is my own private domain, like an eagle’s nest, and the only person it has to suit is me.

Well, I really would like it to be much more organized, but suddenly now that I am not going to have to pay $1,700 a month in rent, I feel amazingly rich. There is lots of storage potential in this place if you build shelves high up around the upper third of the wallspace. Buying the wood to make those shelves, even buying a skill saw for cutting the wood, is cheaper than that extra rent would have been. Heck, I could even hire somebody to make them for me, if I wanted.

Okay, so I don’t have air conditioning (but suddenly air conditioning units seem cheap), or covered parking (the car will just have to deal with it), or a fireplace (not essential, anyway). True, I don’t have a balcony, but lately I have been enjoying the table down by the pool. I’ve taken to bringing a book or my laptown down there, and I carry along a plastic souvenir pool-side drink glass from my Carnival cruise filled with a vodka drink or whatever and it’s really quite acceptable for now.

I really don’t want to take up the time to write about other things I managed to accomplish during this vacation after the apartment episode came to an end, but suffice it say, things that I had procrastinated on for YEARS I suddenly found the desire and the energy to do. I’ve also hammered out for myself a plan (“new year’s resolutions”) on how to do my writing that I think of as publishable . It doesn’t matter now if I take a year, or longer, to make this place more liveable and to get stuff published--success in miniscule increments is fine if that is what it takes. Having the kind of a house somewhere that I want, making my living by what I am supposed to do instead of survival work, will be mine when the time comes. What it has taken is understanding myself better, and I am much more self-knowing, now, about my self and its tricks and foibles and fears and laziness. Socrates, who said, “Man, know thyself” would have been pleased.

There is a metaphorical image that I have long had, based on the San Francisco Cable Cars. Cable cars, you may or may not know, don’t have their own motive power. All that comes from a central power station (that is pretty fascinating to visit) that pulls cables that run in slots in the streets along the various cable car routes. How the cable car moves is that the operator manipulates a device that GRABS onto the cable (think, maybe of a beginning skier grabbing onto a cable at a bunny slope and then getting pulled uphill). A full-tight grab causes the cable to pull the car at full speed, but grabs with less friction cause slower progress. So the cable car operator doesn’t grab on tightly at first, that would make the car move with a huge jerk. Instead, it is a gradual process of tightening the grip on the cable and the car increases speed.

Stopping the cable car is a matter of releasing the hold on the cable and putting on a brake.

As individual people, like a cable car, we don’t really have our own motive power. Sure, we can move around and accomplish things and even cause a lot of havoc, but that’s almost like a cable car that has let go of the cable and is now running amok, perhaps crashing down the hill of a street in San Francisco. It’s MOVING alright, but is it in the proper direction?

Ultimately, to go uphill, to progress in the right direction, you have to grab onto the cable, and that cable is found inside you and IT’S motive force comes from a central generating station the identity of which I will leave up to you.

Think what I should tell people when they ask me what I did on my vacation was go to San Francisco and ride the cable cars?

It's Slavehood That's Inconvenient

People who know me have long heard that from the very beginning of my earliest baby memories, what I most wanted to do was learn how to read and write. I grew up in households filled with books--my parents and both sets of grandparents had huge libraries filled with books--whole walls covered with books from top to bottom. I remember crawling over to the bottom shelves of my parents' bookshelves where I'd routinely pull a book off the shelf, open it, and attempt to decifer the mysterious heiroglyphics that I could see there. When I was a little older and could manipulate a crayon or a pencil, I'd try to copy the tiny letters I'd see printed across the page. One of my grandmothers (whom we called "Ma") was fascinated by this interest of mine, so she decided to see if she could teach me to read, and did so in one afternoon with A.A. Milne's "Christopher Robin" book, Now We Are Six (when I wasn't yet). I can't explain how I learned it so quickly, although uber-educator John Taylor Gatto says that reading is extremely easy to learn and explorers and anthropologists in Africa were able to teach African children living naked on the veldt how to read in less than 40 hours. I believe the same experience was mirrored by South Seas missionaries, who taught Polynesians how to read the English Bible very, very quickly. There are those who say, "If you can talk, you can sing," well I say, "If you can talk, you can read." All you need is to learn the sounds of the letters and then vocally apply them to words you see and your already existing vocabulary will make the correlation. This task would be a lot harder if the words you are trying to read are in a language you don't speak, which is why I think it took "so much longer" for Africans and Polynesians to learn reading than it took me, who already at least knew the language that I was learning to read.

The way we teach reading in school, Gatto says, is purposefully designed to make it difficult and frustrating (he often quotes Plato, who said that once we start paying people to teach, they will make learning increasingly difficult--that's job security!). He's got a lot of more serious explanations for that other than one that is cynically against teachers (who, as a whole, are quite dedicated to their tasks, although often hampered by adminstrations and school boards--and remember, Gatto himself was a professional teacher), one of which is that the heavily moneyed class, who control the government by putting forward and marketing only the candidates who will do what THEY want (when was the last time YOU actually had a good choice of candidates, and don't go by what they promised, but but by what they ultimately delivered), and what they want is a severely dumbed-down population (who won't be any competition for the already extant moneyed class) of easily manipulated low wage slave-workers (who will not have the time or inclination to turn to reading complicated texts in order to learn outside of the box they are stuck in, but will be satisified to get their "news" and "opinions" from mass media owned and controlled by that very same heavily moneyed class). These educational limitations don't apply to the children of the moneyed class, of course, who attend special private schools who are generally prohibitive for those outside of this class.

I haven't been able to stomach television at all for the past decade (and now movies have pretty much followed along with that, too) and the only time I even (am forced to) take a glance at television is when some coffee shop or restaurant I might happen to go to has the blasted thing on right in front of my face with subtitles running across the bottom of it. And seeing even that little bit is enough to give me indigestion.

Nowadays, magazines are just as bad, and even the poor Internet is overrun by this kind of thing--do people really think that people in the media-owning moneyed class are going to leave the Internet alone? After all, Google, you know, prepared it so that China could filter out all the objectionable content that the Communist government didn't want the Chinese people to be exposed to. Google, of course, is in it for the money and don't kid yourself, "cool, wonderful search engine" that it is, this search engine (and the associated advertising revenue) was enough to propel its founders up into the financial stratosphere. Just for fun, check to see what Google stock is selling for, and how much it rose since its initial public offering. I didn't invest in it, because I won't directly invest in companies whose social conscience I don't approve of. While I, too, love money, I'm not IN it for the money. There is a difference.

I am sure that the process is NOT being used to mask and filter the content that Americans are exposed to. For one thing, while I am not certain, I am pretty sure China has only one government-controlled or approved internet service provider, so controlling content would not be all that difficult. In the U.S., it would be a lot more difficult--but NOT impossible. I don't know if people understand this, but remember how Al Gore was laughed at because he claimed to have "invented" the Internet? (I wonder how all those acolytes who now get down on their prayer rugs and pray to him five times a day would feel about this if the memory of it comes back to their minds?). Well, the truth is that he wasn't really wacko in making that statement, there was some kind of truth to it, although in typical Gore fashion, it was an example of limitless self-aggrandizement and also typically had contained within it a disturbing kernal of fascism.

The history of Gore's "inventing the Internet" was that in its infancy, what we now know of as the Internet, which was (and is) a linking up of individual computers across a wide geographic spectrum, was mostly in existence for the military and some universities. When I first heard of it and used it was when I worked at the Stanford University Medical Center. Stanford (uh, notice, private university now central to what was to become Silicon Valley) was involved in creating a national medical database through which surgeons and other doctors would be able to share mortality statistics and other medical data. (Nowadays, even some SURGERIES can be performed remotely, such has been the advancement of this particular technology.) But this technology was on the brink of exploding into a truly universal use and the federal government was quite concerned about it. Republicans point blank didn't want the people to have it. Too much empowering technology--the elites could have it, of course, and would, but they felt that otherwise this could be very dangerous for national security.

Democrats, on the other hand, felt like maybe there was a way to bring it to the people, most of whom, of course, (since they KNOW their consitutents) were already so dumbed-down that they would use it only for superfluous entertainment, gaming, communicating garbage back and forth among each other, and the like, and wow, what a marvelous new medium for spreading even more moneyed-class "propoganda"! Besides, it was clear that a TON of money was to be made here. (Even ultra-liberal Michael Moore once admitted, three of four propoganda films ago, that there was absolutely no difference between the two major political parties, who really do represent only the financial top two percent of constitutents, of whom Moore is now a member, I am sure.)

So Clinton, who was president at the time, assigned his otherwise-pretty-useless Vice-President, Al Gore, to "work on that issue," and "Jessie-Jackson-like," Gore more or less served as a broker between the computer industry and government security interests. The Internet that Al Gore "invented" was one that COULD be rolled out to the people, but had buried within its structure the ability of the federal government to shut off the tap whenever it needed to, and meanwhile, was able to spy on every user at will. President Bush gets blamed for all the spying on citizens that is apparently going on currently, and yet built into the very structure of Al Gore's Internet was the exact same thing from its infancy. (I wanted to actually throw up when, while watching Steve Jobs's hour-long infomercial on the roll-out of the Apple iPhone, Jobs blithely demonstrated that he had Al Gore's number on his auto-dial...but of COURSE he would! And oh, Gore is on the Board of Directors of Apple, in case you didn't know, so that was part of his "reward" for brokering computer industry interests.)

So, while the Internet could be for a time a somewhat trusted source (or, at least, an unhampered source...except in public libraries), one has to always keep their evaluative antennae up. You have to utiilize critical thinking all the time. What's shocking, though, is how few people actually do. It's easier to simply turn on CNN or catch the exact same news off of Yahoo (amazingly correctly named if you only knew what the name meant) or MSN (part of the corporate universe of the richest man in the world), or, for those who feel that they are making an "extra" effort, spend some money and go to the movies and watch a so-called documentary by Michael Moore.

Okay, so you have to read uncontrolled sources and utilize critical thinking. Mostly, that will mean reading books. And I have been reading them since before I even went to nursery school. And I don't mean I read "Dick & Jane". If the book was on my parents's shelves, it was fair game in my mind for me to read. By the time I was in first grade and other kids were learning how to copy two sentence "stories" off of the blackboard, the teacher would ask me to be the one to make up and write on the blackboard the stories that the others would copy. The teacher felt that I, being a kid, would write something that would interest the other first graders more than her own. I felt hampered by the "two sentences" limitation, but I think I did okay. Anyway, it was fun and I enjoyed it, and the other students seemed to, too.

I feel that this long background of involvement with books has made me phenomenally wealthy in the currency that books provide. When people are starting out in their working life and the concept of investing for retirement is first introduced to them, what is always pointed out to them is the advantage of "starting early." How much MORE money for retirement does a worker have when he starts saving in his early twenties than if he starts some time in his mid-forties. But when I see that, I think, "Yes, but imagine the advantages if he had started the day he was born?" For example, I gave my godson the gift of $1,000 on his birthday, with instructions to his parents to invest it for him and not even tell him about it until he turned 21. That boy is now 20 years old and he doesn't know that at this point he has approximately $20,000 dollars (what that investment has so far grown into). Next year, he turns 21 and can claim it all, if he wants. HOWEVER, if he's really smart and decides to simply keep that money until he retires (an unlikely choice, but just imagine if he did), at age 62, that money would have grown to be something in the neighborhood of $10,000,000! And all THAT from only one one-thousand-dollar investment begun on the day he was born. THAT'S the advantage of compound interest and starting early, VERY early!

I think of knowledge as working on a basis of synthesis; just as the two diverse elements of hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms combine together to synthesize a new substance, water, so do diverse elements of knowledge combine together to synthesize new knowledge. So that's what I think of as the "compound interest" element of knowledge--the synthesis of various discrete elements of knowledge that compound against each other. Now apply that to "starting early". And I started reading very, very early, and never let up.

I have to admit that I have to laugh when stupid and lazy people (who don't understand, for example, a simple logical argument that goes against the grain of some propoganda that they received) accuse me of being "stupid" or "unintelligent". They can't even imagine.

What goes on in the minds of such people can sometimes give me apoplexy. And it is horribly frustrating to have no way to counteract all that, it is such a tsunami of ignorance and intellectual failure that I fear for the existence of ALL truth. It seems that we really are on the verge of another very serious Dark Ages, one much worse than any we have ever had before, and this time that is apt to be global in extent. It is that IGNORANCE that could very well spell the end of all of us, not some political cypher like global warming, heavily propogandized by a POLITICIAN (gee, we all know how concerned and honest THEY are!).

Earlier today, I was glancing through my e-mail and saw that Roger Ebert's latest movie reviews had come out. While my interest in the mass-media of movies has been severely curtailed recently, every once in a while I glance to see if something interesting has managed to be made. I see that Ebert has reviewed some new movie about polar bears, called Arctic Tale. That one might be cute...but oh no, polar bears, there's bound to be something evidentiary about global warming in there, and sure enough, I read this line by Ebert in his review: "The documentary studies polar bears and walruses in the Arctic, as global warming raises temperatures and changes the way they have done business since time immemorial."

Since "time immemorial"? It was all I could do to keep from shouting at the computer screen. Ebert doesn't even offer a way to respond, not even an impotent "comments" section (which would do nothing but garner for me several weeks of hate mail from all the true believers--"it's a CONSENSUS!" they all scream, as if scientists even had a consensus on something important, such as what kind of foods make you fat!). Since "time immemorial"? You see, the party line on global warming is that right now the Earth is WARMER than it has ever been in its entire history, and all this is because of the carbon dioxide emissions of industrial countries and selfish western people who want to drive their SUVs, and presumably this warming is going to continue getting worse according the projections of a precipitously steep upwardly climbing curve, and unless humans REDUCE carbon emissions by 80%, all life on the planet will be destroyed.

Wow, how horrible! And this "truth" is branded "inconvenient." I'll say it's "inconvenient"!

However, what that really is is an "untruth".

This is where reading comes in, and the ability to synthesize understanding. I find that even the simplest WORDS can tell you a whole story, you don't even have to read more than that if you can think a little bit about what the words are telling you. Here's one of those words: "Greenland." What, or where, is "Greenland"? Greenland is a totally frozen-over, very large island in the northern reaches of the planet. Okay, so if it is totally frozen-over, completely covered in ice from one end to the other, why on earth did they call it "Greenland"? Was that some kind of ironic joke? Well, no, it was named that by the Scandinavian explorers who first were able to SAIL on over there, and who then later colonized it. They named it "Greenland," because it was, well, GREEN! It was lush and fertile and beautiful and there were sailors who were very excited about all that available vacant land there for the taking, so they decided to move there.

Why was currently-frozen-over Greenland green and habitable when the Scandinavian explorers first discovered it? Because the Earth was much WARMER then than it is today. Wow that's very important! The Earth was so much warmer then than it is today, enough for Greenland to be green and habitable, and yet the Earth wasn't destroyed! It looks like maybe we won't have to go back to the Stone Ages after all in order to save the Earth.

Other place names tell a similar story--even street names in London. There are many, many "Vine"-oriented names in London, going back to a time when the London area actually had vineyards. England doesn't have a wine industry now, it isn't the climate for it. But it was once upon a time. These vineyard names apparently date back from a period called "The Medieval Warming Period," which was also the time when all those gorgeous cathedrals were being built in Europe. It was a time of great wealth and leisure, because all that warmer climate made for a stronger and more abundant agricultural economy.

It is projected by some scientists that if our Earth once again achieved the same warmth of climate as the planet had during the Medieval Warming Period, then our Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway would be open for shipping all year around instead of freezing over in winter. This would do very much for the economies of our midwestern agricultural states and for all the Canadian cities along this route, and might even revitalize America's industrial might, because many foundry cities also lie along this route. Such warming would do wonders for Minnesota, Michigan, New York, Vermont, Maine, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Quebec. Think what this would mean to the fortunes of Duluth, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Detroit and Windsor, Buffalo, Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City.

Actually, that economic value would spread farther than just the areas I mentioned. While all the exportable grain output from the breadbasket states and iron and other minerals from Minnesota could now be shipped world-wide all year around through that "rails to the Great Lakes, by Laker Tankers to the rest of the world" transportation corridor, also included in that economic growth would be coal from Alabama and well, anything from the upper 2/3s, central 1/3 of the nation that could efficiency utilize this newly-opened up and expanded transportation corridor.

Another plus to the melting ice would be the opening up of the Northwest Passage, where the costs of commerce would lessen significantly due to not having to ship material through the Panama Canal, or else all the way down around the bottom of South America which the newer cargo ships that are wider than the Panama Canal can carry currently have to do. This would not only benefit the Seattle and Vancouver areas, but also Alaska, Japan, China, and for Russia, would open up the currently frozen, but phenomenally rich-in-resources Siberia. And NONE of this is detrimental to the Earth, because it has been that warm BEFORE. "Time immemorial?" How far back does Ebert's calendar go? Not very far back, apparently, and his personal library doesn't even include a geographic list of place names. And this man is supposed to be a WRITER! (Pesonally, I don't believe you deserve a wide public forum if you aren't smart enough to spew anything but lies.)

Words--real, honest, meaningful, and true words are the ticket...and books are full of them. They have within their mysterious shapes and meanings more answers than you think. Words, similar to ancient wise-people's tales, have filtered human wisdom down through the charcoal sands of time. What is left is pure, valuable, empowering, and liberating. Turn off the dumb-box of TV, stop reading the gutter press for the vicarious-living masses, pull a serious book off the shelf, open up your mind, and start synthesizing for yourself some REAL knowledge. Then you can break the chains of your slavehood and find that TRUTH is anything but "inconvenient--for you, it will be life, itself.

Summer's Nearly Here, But The Learning Never Stops

The kids are so cute, the kids are so cute, the kids are so cute. I wonder if it is getting to be a boring refrain? But I can’t help it, because the kids are so cute.

Actually, even though in many ways they are less cute, because the summer countdown is here and it really can be measured in so many days and hours--so they are absolutely off their gourd with excitement, frustration, inability to sit still and focus, and rabid rambunctousness--but I think this makes them more cute. This is being a genuine human and who can’t relate? After all, we aren’t really much better, just more heavily socialized. I mean, I feel that summer energy, and we aren’t even off for the summer! But we do have certain summer privileges and the atmosphere is infinite looser and anyway, it’s SUMMER!

We have a teacher here at school (who therefore does get the summer off) named “Jayne” and she has this thing that goes, “This will be the Summer of Jayne.” I don't know what it is supposed to mean exactly, and yet I really like it and I always feel that it is going to be the Summer of Jayne, too. So I figure out ways to honor it or celebrate it, because if it is a good summer for Jayne, then it is good summer for everybody. Maybe Jayne is the Goddess of Summer?

Anyway, two years ago, in support of the Summer of Jayne, I gave her a listing of all the beaches in this southern third of the state complete with evaluations on quality, cleanliness, beauty, and so on, and for those hidden gems, directions for finding them. This I had taken from a book written by a couple of middle-aged surfers who from their pre-pubescent years on up had swum, surfed, camped, ate, slept, beach-combed, hiked, and done every conceivable thing that you can do on a beach, so they really know their way around. Jayne, of course loved it, but I think she ended up spending most of her summer on a lounge chair by a swimming pool.

Well, last year, when people asked me where I went for the summer, I said “to my air mattress on my apartment building’s swimming pool”, and that, literally was the truth. Whereas several years prior I had gone on a wonderful cruise to as far south as the islands off the coast of Honduras, this past summer, I never went any further than two stories down and twenty feet horizontal to the swimming pool. I made my own heaven out there. There’s really no more patio space than three feet around the edges of our pool and it used to be that apartment residents filled up every inch of that space in the summer, but eventually all the lounge chairs were stolen or damaged, so now nobody goes out there any more.

But I wanted to, and just prior to the beginning of the summer I had gotten a book on the healing nature of the sun (people nowadays, who are afraid of everything because corporations or government or media want them to be afraid of everything, even if it is as natural as things like sunshine, air, and meat, think they will get skin cancer if they venture outside without sunblock slathered all over themselves), which explained that many more people suffered from diseases caused by Vitamin D deficiency than they did skin cancer, and besides, the chemicals in sunblock are cancerous, and I was eager to put this healing of the sun into practice. A gradual, careful build-up of exposure to the sun and avoiding burning was what was prescribed, but it was ridiculous to fight traffic for an hour, pay $7.00 to park, to only stay on a beach for ten minutes. So my own building’s swimming pool was the only reasonable answer, yet how to lay out there without a lounge chair or any room?

Brilliant mind that I have, I came up with the idea of using an air mattress floating ON the swimming pool. And that’s what I did every day I had off all summer, building up that exposure to the sun and meanwhile, getting a lot of swimming in, too. And while I soon enough became “the god of the swimming pool”, nobody else ever came out there except to walk by to the parking lot or to dump garbage in the dumpster. I know almost all of them were thinking, “Look at the fool, getting himself a good case of skin cancer.” Which was fine with me, because I didn’t want them out there, anyway. So it was MY pool all to myself!

So this year, my offering to the Goddess of the Summer, “the Summer of Jayne,” will be a copy of that book and an air mattress, just like mine. There’s nothing more wonderful than that, much, much more comfortable than a lounge chair. If you get too hot, you simply roll off into the cooling water, and then climb back on.

With the school year coming to an end, the lower school presented an appreciation luncheon for all the teachers in the lower school. In order for all of them to partake of the luncheon, volunteers were sought among other employees who wouldn’t ordinarily have lunch duty to do lunch duty for those lower school teachers whose day it was to be out there. I volunteered, so this put me out there with all the lower school kids. A couple of the kindergarten kids came up to me and said they remembered me from having been a mystery guest reader in their classroom at the beginning of the school year, and wished that I would come to read them again. Well, how can I refuse, especially since I really like to do it?

So I told this to their teacher, who invited me to come read the next week. I looked through the few children’s books that I have at home (which I buy for myself because I like them) and selected two different ones, Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch, and Look At Me, Grandma. "Mr. Hatch" is about a dull loner of a man who sticks to simple, boring routine and has no friends. However on Valentine’s Day, he receives a huge heart-shaped box filled with candy and a card that says “Somebody loves you.” Amazed to think that he has a secret admirer, Mr. Hatch comes out of his shell and becomes a joyful, generous, well-loved man at work and in the neighborhood where he hosts barbecues and parties and helps everybody. Then it is discovered that the box had been delivered to him by mistake, that he had no secret admirer after all. He immediately crawls back into his shell. But it’s too late, the true wonderful personality that was really Mr. Hatch had already been let out of the bag, so the neighbors throw him a special celebration, letting him know that EVERYBODY loves Mr. Hatch, so the story ends with everybody happy and Mr. Hatch playing the harmonica while everybody dances and parties.

"Grandma", on the other hand, is a sparsely-written, somewhat difficult to understand book that nevertheless was based on an idea that really appealed to me. It’s about a boy who now questions his place in the world because his mother will soon give birth to a sibling. She has gone off to the hospital and the boy is left alone with his grandmother who has come to take care of him in the absence of the boy’s parents. Wisely, the grandmother understands what the boy is going through, but rather than discuss the issue directly, she brings her photo album that shows her as a little girl the same age as the boy. What the boy discovers in the photo album is that his grandma had an older brother that he hadn’t known about, because this boy had died when he was still a child.

That night, the spirit of the grandmother’s older brother comes to the boy in a dream and takes him on an adventure floating in the sky, and acting like a big brother, teaches the boy how to ride a bicycle, something the boy had been having trouble learning, because he was afraid. But in the dream with this “big brother”, he loses his fear and rides the bicycle.

The next day, the boy asks his grandmother to take him to the park and he wants to bring his bicycle, which he finally masters in real life, thanks to the courage he received in his dream. As he successfully rides, he says, “Look at me, Grandma!”

That night he dreams of his grandmother’s big brother again, who this time takes him to the beach and teaches him to swim in the waves, something else the boy had wanted to do but, while he had had swimming lessons, was too afraid of the waves. But with his “big brother,” with him, he loses his fear.

The next day, he asks his grandmother to take him to the beach, and he says he wanted to swim in the waves. When he manages to do so, he calls out to his grandmother who is swimming next to him, “Look at me, Grandma!”

Again, that night he dreams of his grandmother’s brother once more, who this time takes him to the amusement park and together they ride in the bumper cars. (I remember, myself, being afraid of the bumper cars at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, but an older boy gave me the confidence and soon enough, it was something I came to really love.) So the next day, the boy asks his grandmother to take him the amusement park and he says he wants to ride the bumper cars. She lets him steer, and when he masters it, he says, “Look at me, Grandma!”

Later that day, the parents come back home with the new baby, a little girl. The boy wants to hold her and when he does, he loves her so much and swells with generosity and pride over being her "big brother”. Of course, without saying it, it is understood that he has now successfully repositioned himself from being “the baby” of the household to being the big brother, and he now knows how he can be in a position to help his sister with the challenging things in life. As he holds her, his final words in the book are, “Look at US, Grandma!” It is now no longer all about him, and yet he has gained something marvelous, instead.

I figured the best way to “read” this story was to basically semi-”tell” it, filling in the gaps with fuller explanations and using my voice to animate the magic and the thrill of it. So now I felt ready to give the kids some great enjoyment.

However, then the teacher e-mailed me and said that I would have only fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes--that’s hardly any time at all! Well, I didn’t really believe it...of course, once I got going, the kids would love it and the teacher would let me continue. I had no idea how long (or short) these two stories would be, but surely the two of them would be the right length.

No.

I got to the classroom a little early, so waited outside while the kids gathered after their lunch. Some of the more assertive ones told me they remembered me from before and said they were glad that I came. One boy reminded me that he had asked for me to come, and I said, “You asked, and here I am!”

Then the more aggressive ones wanted to see what I had brought to read, so I showed them and asked if they had already heard (or read) those books. It seemed that the majority of them already knew “Mr. Hatch.” Well, this disappointed me, but I said, “Well, I have another book, do you all know this one, too?” They didn’t know “Grandma,” but they all wanted me to read “Mr. Hatch” to them anyway. Several kids said, “We love that story and want to hear it again,” and one boy said, “It is my FAVORITE book.”

Frankly, I was less enthusiastic about reading a story they already knew really well (I was much more interested in presenting something more obscure), but that’s life. I said to the teacher hopefully, “Well maybe there’s time for me to do both...?” and she said, “Well, we will have to see, we really expect to allow only fifteen minutes.” I said, “Well, I’m not trying to interfere with whatever you’ve got set up,” but she said, “it’s not what we have set up, it has to do with their attention span.”

Oh, their attention span, well now I wasn’t worried...surely they would have enough of an attention span to want to hear both stories.

So then I read “Mr. Hatch” and they all listened with intense attention, as if they had never heard the story before. Maybe I did it differently enough (with different-sounding voices or inflections for the various characters) that it was almost as if it were brand new.

Since they already knew the story, I was less interested in showing the pictures and more interested in animating the story. However, the kids insisted on seeing the pictures, too, and the teacher explained to me how I had to do it. “We do what we call ‘the Fan’,” which consisted of holding the open book up and slowly panning across the width of the crowd of children sitting on the floor. If I moved too fast, one of them would say “the Fan,” which meant that I had passed them too quickly. It seemed to me that doing “the Fan” doubled or tripled the length of the story; however, I wanted to make the best of it and pointed out certain details that I liked, such as “There’s his prune that he brought for dessert,” or “see how the neighbor who was painting the shutters green fell off the ladder, drawing a green line down the wall.” When I did that, I had to fan twice, once for the kids to see the picture as a whole, and then again so that they could pick out the little detail that I thought to point out.

I believe the kids enjoyed my performance of this story. When I read about Mr. Hatch sharing his candy with the people at work, the kids looked at me with wide eyes, as if they could imagine somebody sharing candy with them. And when Mr. Hatch was so sad to learn that the package had been delivered to him by mistake, and he gave the heart-shaped box back to the mailman (minus the candy, of course, that had already been eaten), and then when Mr. Hatch says, “Oh, you better take this, too, it goes with it,” and handed the mailman the card that said “Somebody loves you,” the kids looked like they were going to cry. Even though they knew the story would turn out alright, they felt the poignance of this moment.

What the kids seemed to like the best, though, was when I decided to expand the part of Mr. Hatch playing the harmonica. Instead of simply reading the line, “Mr. Hatch played his harmonica,” I, too, “played a harmonica” using my fingers with a note-changing “bwooop” as if each finger was a different note. The kids seemed joyfully taken aback by that. So I said, “what kind of music do you think Mr. Hatch played? You think maybe it was like this,” and I began to wail a kind of bluesy “wah wah wawawaa” on my fingers (my favorite kind of harmonica music) and the kids all began “wah wah waw”ing on their hands, too, until the teacher finally had to settle them down again. (My bad! Except that I loved it.)

Then the story was over and one boy shocked me by saying, “That was a really long story. A REALLY long story.” I glanced at my watch and saw twenty minutes had gone by. Was that long by their estimation?

Well, I wasn’t through yet, I felt, and said, glancing at the teaching assistant, “So, do you now want to hear the other story?”

Several kids shouted, “Yeah!”, but many others said, “No!” Again, that took me aback (what do you mean No?), so the teaching assistant took a vote: “How many want to hear another story, raise your hands.” And it looked like a LOT of kids raised their hands. “How many want to go do something else?” And that was obviously the clear majority. So she said to me, “Well maybe we can save it for another time,” even though I knew there was going to be no other time, at least, not for these kids, as school ends next week.

I left the classroom feeling somewhat sad. I remembered the time I ran for class president in high school and in a field of three candidates, came in last with 32 votes. (Me, high school class president? What a joke.) My parents and friends all said, “Just think of those 32 who WANTED you.” And I thought that there were a heck of a lot of kids in the class who had wanted me to read the other story, even though the majority wanted to do something else--so let’s concentrate on those who had wanted it. However, what really made me feel better was my realization about how when I go to a movie, I don’t then want to see another one for a few days. I kind of want to live in or “veg” in that one movie for a while. Two movies in a row is just too much. So why would it be any different with the kids and the stories? See, I am still learning from kindergarten!

Then the next day, I was invited back into my beloved class of first graders, the ones who enjoyed the Australia lectures. The teacher had a gift for me, and all the kids had signed a card. Prior to receiving the gift, I thought of what might be the perfect gift that they would give me, and thought a coffee mug decorated in Aboriginal art, except I thought you could NEVER find such a thing. Well guess what, that is exactly what they gave me, a beautiful coffee mug painted with not only Aboriginal art, but with examples of ALL the styles of Aboriginal art. It was perfect!

And then something else that I thought was amazing happened. I should explain that there was an idea I had come up with several years ago after substituting in several of the middle school classrooms. It seems that whenever I went into those classrooms, the teachers hadn’t organized any particular lessons for me to teach (although sometimes they had), mainly because they had been called away suddenly and I was mostly being used as a baby-sitter, or maybe as some kind of adult resource to generally help the kids with whatever projects they were working on. But what I experienced was that many of the kids mostly just wanted to talk with me. It seemed that what was valuable to them at the time was not a “teacher” so much, but an adult who could explain things or answer things in an unrestrained way, and by unrestrained I mean an adult who doesn’t have a mandate to impart a particular lesson or curriculum point. Instead, this adult could be a freeflowing knowledgeable person who was completely off the track and yet willing to discuss whatever was on the kids’ minds.

This never actually happened in a formal, organized way, but more haphazardly (but no less valuable for that), yet I figured that what would really be cool would be if I would be able to say to them that while I was there, it was a time for “questions and answers" about whatever was on their minds. It is hoped that such a thing would have no limitations at all (although I guess that would be impossible), but my idea would be that if they were mature enough to ask, they were also mature enough to get a real answer. I think kids learn that they are NOT always going to get a real answer from an adult (and thus are separated from the very resource that they need), so how wonderful it must be to actually get reliably honest information for a change. At least ever since the beatnik 50s, youth have become members of what Robert Bly called “the Sibling Society,” which means that they are closed off from learning anything significant from older generations, but are left figuring everything out from only themselves. The semi-blind leading the semi-blind.

In first grade, receiving that gift, I was placed in a seat of honor at the front of the classroom and I did not simply sit there silently and receive the gift, but talked freely about various things, and my talking led to several children raising their hands and asking me various philosophical questions that they had been wondering about ever since my talks (and anyone who has experienced young children way more than I have certainly knows that children think philosophically and have an infinite number of esoteric questions!) and I gave answers, which led to more questions. While these questions were all logical stepping stones stemming off from the original subject, we did quickly get out into new territory and the children were quite delighted, as was I. We could have gone on until the children were quite exhausted, but schools are organized around periods and apparently this teacher had wisely allowed for one whole class period to be devoted to this “gift-giving” and the ultimate question-and-answer session that was bound to follow (this teacher knows both her students and me very well), but this period did have to come to an end, with snack time and a recess.

I later told this teacher about the difference between her class and the kindergarten class, just one year younger, and she said that there was a WORLD of difference between the two grades and the attention spans of each. For the kindergarten class that I read to, the maximum seemed to be 20 minutes, whereas for this first grade class, it seemed to be 75 minutes.

After having the pleasure of being in that class, I went back to my office to find several parents working on a project that involved double-sided copying color pages on our upstairs copying machine. They were having quite a lot of frustrating trouble getting the machine to produce the final product that they wanted. Well, I have produced several brochures or manuals that have involved various copying and formatting tricks, so I volunteered to help them figure out this very frustrating problem, and anything we could figure out would help me with later projects. What you put in is not what you get out, because the pages somehow get all turned around upside down and backwards when you do double-sided copying, and stapled in the wrong place. A quick statistical calculation revealed to me that with this particular project, there were something like 2,048 possible combinations of paper placement so that trial and error was basically not going to get you the result you want, and when several minds and voices are all throwing out their suggestions, the most certain result is that you will simply give up on the project--either that, or you will want to hurt somebody, or damage the machine. The parents had nearly gotten to that point when I got there, and pretty soon, I nearly got there, too.

Well, all this effort used up all the time that the parent in charge had allotted to the project and she had an appointment elsewhere and said that she would have to leave and come back later this afternoon. So I said that with everybody gone and everything all quiet, I would FIGURE THIS OUT and have it all ready for her when she came back. She seemed doubtful, but I said that I would have to do it with pen and ink and written notes and observations of what happened to each sheet, but ultimately I would end up with a pattern or template that she could follow in her duplicating.

It actually took me almost a whole hour, and the result (disappointingly) was that it was IMPOSSIBLE to do it exactly the way they wanted it, because the automatic stapling happened in only one place on the machine, stapling up from underneath into whatever corner was southeast (looking down on it) on the landscape pages presented to the machine’s staple. If your cover sheet was facing down, so the staple would be right-side up, when you took the finished product out and looked at it, the staple would be on the northeast corner, which is not where you want it. But if you disc-spun the pages around 180 degrees, the staple would then be on the southwest corner, which was again wrong. If you arranged it so that the cover sheet came out on top, you could have either the staple in the southeast (wrong again), or the northwest, which was the right SPOT, but the staple was upside down. That final position ended up being the best choice, if the parents could stand having the staple in the right place, but upside down. It was either that, or else staple them by hand, but as they were producing several hundred copies, hand-stapling was not a good option.

It was so frustrating, because I kept thinking that it absolutely HAD to work if only I could figure out how to make it do what I wanted, but it was only after careful observation that I saw that it was impossible. It’s like trying to find something that you think is lost, but is actually NOT there. How long do you keep looking. What I had to do was figure out a way to prove to the parent that it was impossible, not that I had given up--without spending another hour on the project.

I’m not sure if this mother ever completely got that it really was impossible, or did I settle on only a pretty-good measure and then call it a day. She had, however, appreciated my efforts (or what she expected to be my perfect result) that she arrived with a gift for me, a Starbucks bag filled with a large cup of coffee, another cup of milk, and two packets each of all three sweetening choices: Sugar in the Raw, Sweet ‘N Low, and Equal, plus stirring sticks and a package of chocolate-covered graham crackers. Certainly this isn't something she needed to do, but I thought that this was nice beyond belief and, of course, I noticed how thoughtful she had been to bring whatever I needed in the way of creamer and sweetener to match my choice regardless of whatever it was. I feel that very often this level of thoughtfullness matched with extreme detail orientation characterizes so much of what our school’s parents do for us and continually demonstrate in their actions.

It's fascinating how what seems a routine or simple human transaction can turn into a universal lesson. On a global scale, people who “do not have,” whether that is someone from an impoverished third world country or someone of “entitlement” mentality here in our own country, excuse their situation by blaming “the exploitative rapacity of the capitalistic west” or the "unfair advantage” that others have and therefore demand charity, reparations, or “equalization.” But it has been demonstrated time and time again concerning third worlders and the entitlement people in our country that these people have various attitudes, perceptions, or orientations that point the finger of failure directly at them. Basically, they are more concerned about the advantage of the moment and do not look forward or plan for the future. Examples in backward countries such as “localized corruption,” minor government functionaries demanding bribes for every task (and therefore never organizing their economy into a safe and protective rule of commercial law), or price-gouging whenever possible (such as it is a good idea for a westener to establish the price of a ride before getting into a taxi) and therefore killing trust and destroying repeat business, or operating via the inefficiency of bargaining or negotiating in every market transaction where the interest is more in cheating the buyer with a bad bargain than it is in providing the best product at a fair price, or being casual about appointments or deadlines and promises and therefore taking a very long time to accomplish very little, or being exploitative themselves of their OWN environmental resources by eating up every single bird egg that gets laid in a season or every seed instead of culling out some for the next generation of resources, or never planning an education or saving a portion of one’s money, but instead spending all the time and money now and therefore never having any means for advancement.

The people who are parents at our school are at the utter opposite of third world "never got theres" or American "I'm entitled to every kind of assistance because I am disadvantaged", but are extremely successful people who cannot be blamed for rapacity or unfair advantage; instead, they look beyond the moment toward a future they want to create for themselves, nurture their own talents, give generously, plant seeds, and think of every detail even in tiny, what might seem as insignificant tasks. We’re supposed to be the school, but so often the parents can be the teachers of the employees. Sure, a lot of what they understand are things we all already know, but they put these things into practice and to have their example is like having the textbook and the quizzes...it helps to have it all enhanced with actualized external models and the solidification of repetition via human interaction. Helping them helps us.

I so much love being “a teacher”, who can continually learn, so school, for an employee, is still a school. Besides, the kids are so darn cute.

Old and Young, Giving and Blue

I’m starting to miss them already, and we still have a week and a half to go. Well, I’ve said before that there is a final picnic for the students outside on the lawn and then suddenly around 2:00 P.M., there is absolutely no noise at all coming into my office window. It’s as if a neutron bomb had been dropped on the school grounds and all life has disappeared, but the structures still remain. The birds don’t even sing! And it’s amazingly depressing, even to those employees who had expressed eagerness at getting rid of the little devils for the summer.

Of course, the kids, themselves, are mentally pretty much through with school at this point. They’ve got to be occupied with various events, games, and other special activities to keep them grounded at all; otherwise, for sure they’d sail away like let-go helium balloons.

Last week was grandparents’ day, in which they got to have their grandparents spend the morning with them on campus, ending with a wonderful lunch on tables spread outside all over the campus. It’s one of the most beloved events of the school year.

Last night was the sports awards night when all the fathers were invited to a big ol’ steak barbecue and to see their kids’ teams pick up whatever trophies they had earned, and maybe even proudly watch their own son or daughter receive one of the very special sportsmanship awards.

Today for the kids was a pajama day--maybe our third one this year, but it’s always a popular event with everybody. We, too, can wear our pajamas if we want, but since I sleep in my birthday suit.... For the first pajama day, I did wear some sleepwear that I had gotten for a school overnight trip, but today I just had too much other stuff to do to fool with it. But the kids couldn’t possibly be cuter. I’ve said for a long time that it’s a matter of evolutionary survival that kids are cute, anyway. Otherwise, our species would never have progressed beyond the Paleolithic Era. Those screaming babies would have been left behind on the grass of the veldt as sabertooth tiger bait. But no, they were just too cute and our ancestral parents simply couldn’t let go of them. How much more helpless, sleepy-sweet, cuddly, and precious do the 21st century versions appear when they are in their soft flannels? Sponge Bob Square Pants, Little Mermaid, Super Heroes, Hello Kitty, Sesame Street, Army commandoes, Finding Nemo, frilly lavender robes for pretty blonde-haired princesses, it’s almost like a kinder, softer version of Hallowe’en.

Pretty soon, the school will have “Super Stars Day,” which will be kind of like an Olympic “multi-athalon” in which the school is divided into competitive thirds (the Red, Blue, and White teams) for a day of relay races, games of skill, and contests of strength. In my own personal “all I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten” vein, I used to be “on all sides” by wearing all three colors, but last year, I had forgotten about the event but wore a white shirt and happened to walk by a kindergarten class that particularly liked me because I had been a mystery guest reader in their class several times and had engaged them in some pretty lively discussions. These kids used to call out “hi” to me whenever they saw me (calling me by my first name!). I walked by them on the morning of Super Stars Day as they waited to go into class and saw me in my white shirt and asked me if I were a “White”. Sharp-eyed and quick, I saw from what they were wearing that THEY were “White,” so I said that yes, indeed, I, too was a "White". Well, I had hardly ever heard such cheering and excitement that I was on their team. I learned from that experience that in a contest, you HAVE to choose sides, and never had I enjoyed a Super Stars Day as much as I enjoyed that one. (The White team won, by the way, and of course I know it is because I was a White.)

This year with a whole new crop of kindergarteners, I didn’t get to read in that class more than once. So I didn’t get to develop the special relationship with this class that I had had with the class before. However, I developed a special relationship with a first grade class in which twice I had given guest lectures and twice I had been a guest celebrating their unveiling of special writing projects. So this year, I thought I would be on the team that this first grade class will be on, and that will be the “Blue” team. Yesterday morning, I e-mailed their teacher and told her that in their honor, I was going to be a “Blue” this year. She e-mailed back that she would tell the kids. As soon as lunchtime, I ran into several of the first graders who asked me what team I was going to be on. When I said, “the Blue team,” they cheered, saying that what their teacher had told them was right! So it’s happening again!

Also, today was a special thank-you luncheon for the lower school teachers and so that all of them would be able to enjoy the luncheon, it was asked if any office staff members (who don’t normally do lunch duty with the kids) would be willing to volunteer to do their lunch duty for them today. I had volunteered to do it last year, so this year said I would definitely be happy to do it again. Enough of us volunteered that all of the lower school teachers were free to go the luncheon, while we (about seven of us) got to watch hundreds of kids in their pajamas eat their lunch and play in the playground. I have to say it again--they couldn’t have been cuter!

While I was out there, several first graders came up to me on the playground and said that their teacher had told them that I was going to be a “Blue” along with them, was that true? I was amazed at the impact it had. One girl said that she was so glad to have Mrs.-- as her teacher, connecting the dots between having her as a teacher, the teacher having me as a guest lecturer, and me caring enough about them to choose to be on their team in spirit with them. They all know that their teacher is the only first grade teacher to have a guest lecturer, and the only guest lecturer is me.

Then another amazing thing happened, two different kindergarten boys, at different times, walked by me and said, “I remember you, you read to our class, I wish you would come read to us again.” I came across their teacher at the end of the lunch period and told her what the boys had said, so she said, “Well, then, we will have to get right on it!” Knowing that we probably have time for only one more mystery guest reader (whom I hope isn’t already scheduled), I did get right on it. I’ve already figured out one of the books I will read, but my assignment for this weekend is to find a second story to read (there’s time for me to read, and discuss, two).

You love them, and that’s what it’s all about--you love them. They are pure and know that love is what matters the most and that is what they appreciate the most.

Beyond all this, what I mostly got accomplished today was send out letters acknowledging the receipt of employment applications. We get so many, so I save them up and do them in batches. We have no teacher openings, having now filled all available slots, and that’s what most of the resumes I get are for. One guy really stood out and impressed me in several ways. For one thing, he wrote a very nice letter to me personally, because he had left me a voicemail asking if we had any openings and I had called him back and said that even though we didn’t, he should send me his resume anyway, “because you never know; I keep those resumes and when we need somebody, I pull them out for consideration.” He had liked my manner on the phone (first of all, the fact that I called him back), and apparently felt well-cared for and was now even more eager to get a job at our school if there ever were any opening (actually what he said was "if other people at the school are like you, I can tell what a wonderful place it would be to work.")

He also had his picture like a little logo on his resume, which was a good idea as he was extremely good-looking, almost as if he were being “cast” in the part of being the ideal young male teacher. Something about the photo said “head shot” to me, this was anything but a crappy little snapshot, but was professionally done with an eye to a particular effect.

He was, however, really a teacher, that is to say, he was beyond the student teacher phase (too bad, because we still do need several teaching assistants), and he now had his credential, but up to now had only done substitute teaching. I really wanted him working at our school, though, so instead of sending him my standard response letter, I wrote him a special letter suggesting that he might want to consider listing as a substitute teacher with us. It’s phenomenally hard to get a teaching job at our school, but successful subs not only get a foot in the door, they have a leg up toward getting hired (I’d say we hire any of our proven subs who actually want a full-time job--they’re actually the first ones we think of, as they’re practically “here” anyway).

But there were some other intriguing things on his resume, such as the stories he had published and the small film he had written, produced, directed, and starred in. When I got home, I did an Internet search for the film (which sounded very intriguing and was something I would like to be able to see) and was led to several small film festival sites that had awarded that film various “best director” or “best lead actor” awards, and also found his own website, full of photographs (and that photo on his resume was, indeed, a professionally-taken “head shot”), links to his theater, television, and film work, and other personal things. I was pretty sure that most of that work was “background player” work (more commonly known as “extra” work), and so to that extent his experience was similar to mine, although it looks like he had more actual speaking parts than I did, and he did have a starring role in one film (that probably was a straight-to-video production) beside the film that he wrote, produced, directed and starred in.

Seeing all this made me wonder if he were using teaching like most Hollywood-hopefuls use waiting on tables, a way to make some money until they make it big. But our school would be reluctant to hire a person as a teacher if show business were their true goal; however, working as a substitute teacher would be fine (if they are a good teacher).

I surmised that this guy was young enough (in other words, had enough time ahead of him) and already accomplished enough to be able to make it in the industry if he stuck with it and if it were what he really wanted. Many do get to where he is, though, and realize that it is not what they actually want after all.

I thought possibly he was a bit too much “young L.A.,” where he was so interested in the L.A. lifestyle and in a good enough position that he could reasonably see himself rising to some kind level in that dream-desirable life, which others have found to be putrefactive and rotten to the core. I know from experience that “Hollywood” is at once not as bad as some people think, and not as good.

In short, I figured that I liked him. His website was very funny and he’d write clever, self-deprecating things like, “I was cast in a small, but unimportant role...” which showed he understood more about it than he was, on the surface, letting on.

He’s also engaged to be married, to a woman who has the same initials that he has. One of his links was to a “wedding” website, but he had filled it with enough interesting and funny things that I was drawn to look through all of it. The story of his proposal (on a commercial airplane) was at once funny and heart-warming, where he recruited a stewardess to help him with champagne and to produce at the opportune time the engagement ring that he had entrusted with her, but somehow what he was going to do had enamored the whole crew of stewardesses, so with all their attention, he felt he was in danger of being considered a terrorist by the other passengers and whatever air marshall might have been secreted on board but who would not have been in the know about this proposal. However, all went well and he and his girlfriend who had tearfully said “yes” were treated to the pilot’s on-air congratulatory announcement and an airplane-full of thunderous applause.

The wedding website also led to their bridal registry and here was where I really got to liking them. For one thing, I loved their taste, very clean, modern, and trendy in a substantial way (almost as if their taste were Finnish or Scandinavian) and I was also impressed that everything they selected was, while beautiful, amazingly inexpensive: “Small serving plates, $.59 each, number desired: 2”; “Wine glasses, $2.25 each, number desired: 6”; “Bed sheets, $19.99, number desired: 2”; that kind of thing. I had gotten so used to other people’s bridal registries (and then, later, their even worse ‘Babies R Us’ registries) where every little can opener or candlestick seems to cost several hundred dollars, and where I have to comb through every page to find something that I can possibly afford to buy that I feel good about giving instead, of say, “linen napkin, 1, $79.00”, that I felt that I could manage to give to these lovebirds each and EVERY thing on their list. And they had selected so many things that I liked well enough that I WANTED to give them, that soon enough my brain hatched the idea of “well, why not, actually give them something?”

I mean, I certainly wasn’t invited to the wedding, the woman doesn’t know me at all and the man hardly does, short of one brief phone conversation and a note and resume he sent to me. But it was just too delicious of an idea, the idea of supporting who they were and what they are doing, so I went ahead and selected on-line a gift I thought was wonderful from their registry and had it sent to them. On the card I said, "I love what you're doing, so why not send some love from a 99% stranger (100% crazy and impetuous)?" and said my name and then "(WHO?)". I hoped that maybe my resume acknowledgment letter and the gift would arrive at approximately the same time so that they could figure out who the heck that gift is from (and the “why” I’ll just leave up to them).

Like I said in the earlier portion of this piece, children know that the most important thing is love, and I think that, for a time, newly-weds know that, too, and from being a guest lecturer in a child’s classroom to being a non-guest wedding gift-giver, giving love is what I like to do, and I do it whenever I can.