Lift Up Your Hearts!

What was Hallowe’en like when you were a little girl, Grandma? 

No one has as yet asked me that question, but if things run true to form for most Americans, someone will, someday, after I am past being able to respond.  So I will answer it now.

My Hallowe’en formative years were in the 1950s and early 60s, in a small village in upstate New York.  Contrary to what we’d like to believe, it was not an idyllic and crime-free time.  One of my first (and worst) Hallowe’en memories was of the teenaged thugs who thundered onto our porch, grabbed our carefully-carved jack-o-lanterns, and smashed them to bits.  I lived a sheltered life:  this was my first view of senseless, wanton destruction; my first encounter with people who get pleasure from breaking the hearts of little children.  Our tiny village did not escape teen gangs and vandalism, which seemed to be more widespread, if much less dangerous, in those days.   At least they attacked property, not people.

That was the only scary thing about our Hallowe’ens.

The most important difference between Hallowe’en then and now is that the occasion was first, last, and always for children.   A few adults dressed in costume for the neighborhood parade and party, but the purpose of the event was to entertain the children.  The only excuse for anyone over 12 going out trick-or-treating was to escort the younger ones—every once in a while a compassionate homeowner would give us a piece of candy, too.  Now, when high schoolers come to my door, I give them candy if they’ve made any attempt at a costume, but I pity them, that at their age they are begging door-to-door for candy instead of helping younger children to have a good time.

On the other hand, teenaged trick-or-treaters is a clear improvement over teenaged vandals.

The Hallowe’en season began several weeks in advance of October 31.  No, not because Hallowe’en stores began popping up all over town, and shelves everywhere sprouted candy in yellow and orange.  Because of the costumes.  Store-bought costumes were largely unavailable, and anyway, who would have wanted one?  Hallowe’en was an occasion for great creativity.  Merely deciding what to be could take a month.  (Decisiveness, I’ll admit, was never my strong suit).  Those who come to our door today are mostly beings—a cat, a princess, a Star Wars character—but we favored things:  one might be a rocket ship, a pencil, or the whole Mad Hatter’s Tea Party (no relation to the present-day Tea Party, as mad—in either sense—as they may be).  The challenge was to create a costume from whatever we could scrounge around the house without actually having to spend money.  No problem—we had not yet forgotten what any five-year-old knows:  the cardboard box is the most universally useful of all materials. (More)

So.  I just spent all afternoon creating a Hallowe'en post.  A perfectly adequate Hallowe'en post.

On the way to the grocery store, I realized that it needs to be completely re-written.  And I'm going to do it.

If Thomas Mann was correct in saying that a writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people, maybe I really am on my way to becoming one.

What's the point of having a camera that takes videos if you can't share them?  Hence my venture into the world of YouTube as something more than a bystander.  If this one works, you can expect more from time to time.  This is Joseph, two months ago, playing on our brachiation ladder.

There is no way I'm going to write this without sounding corny or superficial, but I'm doing it anyway.  I caught a glimpse of God's love (and sense of humor) today.

Let me begin by noting that the event itself was, on God's scale of things, and even on the human scale, absolutely trivial.  But any human lover knows how much love can be expressed through trivia.  More disturbingly, I've experienced having trivial victories followed quickly by tragic defeats.  But it is what it is, and worth reporting.

To simplify the story, there's a store at which we get what can amount to a very significant discount by using a particular credit card.  The catch is that we never know what the discount will be until the purchase has been made.  I've seen discounts of greater than 50%, and yet on some items it may be only a few percent, or nothing at all.  Shopping at this store is my substitute for playing the state lottery:  it's a thrill to "win big," but there's no point in buying something that you wouldn't pay full price for, because you might have to.  Of course, you can always cancel the transaction, but I hate asking the checkout clerks to do that.

So here's what happened today.  There's an item I wanted to buy, but there's no way I could justify paying full price.  Still, I wanted it badly enough to grit my teeth and face cancelling the transaction just to learn what the discount would be.  So this morning, on my way from the church where I had a commitment to sing, to the church where I had a commitment to get a flu shot, I stopped at the store.

As I pulled into the parking lot, I realized that I was fretting, getting tense over the idea that there might be little or no discount on this item that I really wanted, and worse, over the potential embarrassment of having to tell the clerk that despite having wasted his time and that of those behind be in line, I didn't want to make the purchase after all.  The morning's excellent sermon on worry, however, was not entirely lost on me.  The featured text, Philippians 4:4-8 ("Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God") is one of my favorite Bible passages.  So, thankful for the opportunity, I made my requests and relaxed.  I know, I know.  It's trivia.  And most of you will have no idea why the thought of returning a purchase is so stressful for me.  But it is, and I know some of my readers will nod their heads with understanding.

I never did find out what the discount would have been.  But not because I wimped out at the last minute.

Having found the correct department, I pulled out my notes to ascertain the correct model number.  To my dismay I realized that I had neglected to write down that crucial piece of information.  Ah, not to worry; I was pretty sure I could figure it out.  Sure enough, I picked out what looked to be the right model, and if I'd had any doubts, they were removed when I noticed that this model, out of all the models and manufacturers on display, was the only one on sale, and the cost was just thirty percent of the regular price.  A seventy percent discount!  Our credit card at its best is never that good.  I stood there in awe for a few minutes; when I came back to earth, I bought two!

No, it wasn't anything earth-shattering, or even important.  But it was the unmistakable touch of a lover's hand that says, "I am here"; the completely unexpected, simple gift that proclaims, "I love you."  And maybe, perhaps, "You can trust me through the dark and doubtful times, also."

Our grocery budget has been taking a hit in the last several months, partly because of a significant general price increase at the stores, and partly because food costs a lot less when half the household has half his meals covered by an expense account, which hasn't happened for a while.  (That's not to say it's a bad trade-off for the privilege of working from home.)  So it's a very good thing that yesterday was in September, and today in October:  I've been having fun.

Yesterday I checked out the new grocery store in town:  GFS Marketplace.  When they offer you a coupon that takes $10 off a $50 purchase, it would be rude to ignore them.

I had already spent $50 at my regular grocery store this week, but was certain I would have no trouble finding another $50 worth.  What I didn't realize until stepping into the store is that GFS is a restaurant supplier.  The quantities and sizes would be attractive to a large family, or a large party, but not for everyday wear for a household of two.  But I decided to check out the whole store, anyway, and as you might guess my coupon did not go to waste.  My first big find was something new and irresistible:  three pounds of frozen Alaskan wild-caught salmon burgers for $18.  Then five pounds of frozen whole raspberries for $21.50.  In my regular store I can find large packages of frozen strawberries and blueberries, but raspberries are only sold in small, expensive packages.  And we love smoothies in this household! (More)

For the past week I have been reliving elementary school.

My inspiration was this TED lecture from Salmon Khan of Khan Academy.

As a concept, Khan's idea is at once important, brilliant and frightening.

Important—because he is part of a growing movement to put education within reach of everyone. Well, everyone with access to an Internet connection, anyway.

Brilliant—because he turns school upside down.  The teacher does not introduce the material; that's done via an online lecture, assigned for homework.  Class time, then, becomes available for what is traditionally thought of as homework—working problems, writing essays—and discussion.  Thus anyone who is confused or needs help has immediately at hand both the teacher and his fellow students.  The teacher's time is allocated more efficiently, being spent on those who need help rather than those who don't.  The time of the struggling student is also used more efficiently, because he can get problems cleared up on Exercise 1 rather than struggling uselessly through 2 - 20 or just giving up.  Potentially, this system also helps other students, who find the work easy, to advance quickly to work that challenges them.  Although experience has taught me that the last is not high amongst most schools' priorities, this system might make them more amenable to the idea.

Brilliant, also, is his insistence that everyone should be expected to master the material.  I never did understand why any grade less than A is considered passing.  In almost no subject in which I received an A did I feel I had mastered the material—how much worse is it for someone who earns a C?  Perhaps in some subjects it doesn't matter much, but if you "pass" a child with a C in reading, or in math, you handicap him for life.

Frightening—because the system Khan has developed, at least when applied to the classroom, strips the student of privacy in yet one more area of his already over-exposed life.  The teacher knows what videos he watches, what online exercises he has worked on, how he is spending his time, and where he is apparently struggling.  All with good intent, of course, but the potential for abuse is there.

But back to my elementary school revisit.

Khan Academy has videos available on subjects wide and varied, but practice exercises are currently limited to mathematics.  So just for fun I decided to try them out.  (Yeah, I know.  I have a weird idea of fun.)  Here's what I discovered.  Remember, I have done the exercises but not watched the videos, so this is not a fair review of the whole process.

1. The exercises are pretty good, but do not exhibit much variety, and favor people with good test-taking skills.  The program is cluttered with annoying "rewards" of the sticker-and-gold star type, which shouldn't be attractive to anyone over eight and which can have a negative long-term impact on learning.  Nonetheless, I found the exercises very helpful for reviewing old concepts and drilling in my areas of weakness.  Which brings me to
2. Now I remember why I hated math until eighth grade, when I finally discovered algebra.  Elementary school math is replete with the kind of exercises I loathe, such as multiplying and dividing large numbers with lots of decimal places, in which my propensity for understanding the concept but making careless errors is my undoing.  Addition mistakes, transposed numbers, and sloppy handwriting are disastrous when you must get 10 correct answers in a row before moving on to the next lesson.  I can't tell you how many times I completed nine problems correctly only to be reset to zero through a careless error on the tenth.  However, I have more tenacity and patience than I did 50 years ago, or even at college, when I would trudge through the snow on a midwinter's night to have access to the Wang calculators available in the physics department, rather than do my lab calculations by hand.  I made it through, not only the exercises that were supposed to show I could do such calculations, but the ones that anyone in his right mind would have used a calculator for, such as, An alien spaceship travels at 490,000,000 inches per second.  How many miles does it travel in one hour?  I did it, and my brain is better for it—but I have new sympathy for my grandson, who is currently finding math tedious.
   
   Arithmetic : mathematics :: practicing scales : playing a Bach concerto.

I plow on.  The exercises continue through the very beginnings of calculus.  I find doing a few math exercises (even arithmetic exercises) to be a mind-refreshing break when other work gets frustrating.  (See weirdness, above.)

And I love the idea of a mild-mannered nerd who leverages tutoring his cousins into changing the world.

Now that I have permission to use names (see Part 1), here's a photo (credit Joe Welby) of the wonderful Ashley Locheed (on the right) performing with Englebert Humperdinck at the Colorado State Fair. (click for larger view)

And here's a sample of Ashley's work not with Englebert Humperdinck.  :)  That's Chris Rottmayer on the piano.  Sorry, I don't know the other guys.

London, 1969:  I was lost, though I didn't know it yet.  For reasons I no longer remember, some friends and I had become separated from the rest of our group.  Certain that we were in the right place, and expecting them to show up at any moment, we sat and waited.  And waited, and stared at the wall-sized poster of a man, a singer.  It was emblazoned, "Englebert Humperdinck." 

The only Englebert Humperdinck I'd heard of was a composer.  Said composer being long dead, I suppose the up-and-coming singer thought the cool name was up for grabs.

I would have thought that by now the name was again available for recycling, but Englebert Humperdink, the singer, is alive and singing.  How do I know, and why do I particularly care?  Not for his music, for sure (I still prefer the dead composer), but because our friend AL is booked to sing three shows with him!  How cool is that!

(P.S.  After some negotiation of the British telephone system, we left the 1969 Humperdink behind and were reunited with our friends.)

My e-mail and blog activity will be curtailed, either somewhat or a lot, until we get a handle on some serious computer problems.  Let me just say this about that:  Computers ought to last at least long enough for them to become obsolete, which even in this fast-moving culture is more than 2 - 4 years.  And laptops should last longer than their batteries.

All that to say, if you need to reach me, e-mail might not be the best medium for a while.

I used to love shopping at Sears, insofar as someone who loathes shopping can, that is.  But today my frustration meter pegged.

I'm rather picky about my clothes.  Not in a fashion sense, but I want them to be comfortable, modest, and reasonably-priced.  That's a combination much harder to find than it should be.

After much trial and error, I found shoes, shorts, and bras that I really like, all at Sears, and I greatly enjoyed being able to order them online without dealing with travel, crowds, and (above all) dressing rooms.

Until now.

Now Sears does not carry my clothes.  Any of them.  Not my bras, not my shorts, not my shoes.  Now I must venture back out into the world of physical, retail stores and (ugh) Try. On. Clothes.  That might not be so bad if I had any confidence that what I want will be there to find.  Online searches have thus far revealed nothing equivalent.

Except, maybe, at K-Mart.

It appears that when Sears bought out K-Mart, they transferred the kind of clothes I like to the lower-class store.  I wouldn't mind so much, but there's no K-Mart nearby.  I'm guessing it may be worth the drive just to check it out, though.

Years ago, I volunteered at our local middle school.  From what I learned there, I knew it was not a place I wanted our kids to attend.  Most of the reasons were academic, but burnt into my brain still is the comment of one of the teachers to her class, in reference to someone I no longer remember:  She was the kind of girl who buys her clothes at K-Mart.

Having bought many a clothing item at said store, back when there was one nearby, I knew we wouldn't fit in—nor want to.

Still, it galls—that my taste in clothing isn't good enough for Sears!

My sister-in-law, ever the teacher, saw some children catching blue crabs from our bridge.  Walking over, she engaged them in conversation and taught them a bit about the crabs, in particular how to tell the males from the females.  One of the children, a ten-year-old from the District of Columbia, caught on right away:

Oh!  One is the Monument and the other the Capitol!

Brilliant.  Absolutely brilliant.

(Photo credit Hackensack Riverkeeper)

Welcome home, Atlantis.  A moment of silence, please, to mark the end of an era.

No more will we step out our front door to marvel at the soaring arc of light as a space shuttle climbs into orbit.  No more will our whole bodies thrill to the iconic double sonic boom as it returns to earth.  I'm glad that this morning we were able to hear the boom-boom one final time.

Listening to the prepared statements and commentary on the television reminded me of a funeral—or worse, of the kind of laudatory speeches you hear from organizations when a long-term, once-valued employee retires or takes another job and everyone tries to pretend that his departure was voluntary.

What would John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Nikita Kruschev think to know that for an American to get to the International Space Station he must now be transported there by the Russians?

I like to hope that the drive, energy, enthusiasm, sacrifice, daring, and sense of adventure that powered America's space program still exists, flowing into other, less visible but perhaps even more productive, channels.  I look around and am not convinced, but I'd be glad to hear of examples, especially from the young people who are almost always the beating heart of such endeavors.  Not that a full-range of age and experience is not also necessary—and I'm still eager to hear more of this hopeful story of a 95-year-old visionary from the Occasional CEO.

Where I see such dedication and enthusiasm these days has a decidedly non-technological bent, even though the science-and-engineering types are well represented.  I see it in homeschoolers, homebirthers, midwives, alternative medicine, radical homemakers, large families, family farms, local and sustainable agriculture, heritage breeders, small businesses—in short, among the outliers, rather than mainstream America.  But perhaps that's due to my own skewed persepective.

Where do you see life, drive, commitment, and energy these days?

From every room of our house we knew it was 5:45 in the afternoon, when my father’s fire radio announced the time as part of its daily test.  The radio was an exciting addition to our lives, because now we were not solely dependent on discerning the fire station’s loud siren to call my father to his duties as a volunteer fireman.  Even better, we could listen in on some of the activity.

For most if not all of the years we lived in the district, my father was a member (and usually an officer) of the Beukendaal Volunteer Fire Department in Scotia, New York.  It was a good time and place to be a fireman, as in our rural area there were few buildings more than two stories high, and most of the calls, while important, did not involve anything gruesome.

The whole family became involved, from making sure he heard the alarm (“Dad!  Dad!  The siren’s blowing!”), to pouring him hot coffee after an icy 3 a.m. call, to stuffing envelopes for the department newsletter he edited, to (my personal favorite) helping with the weekly fire engine inspections.

 The officers of the Beukendaal Fire Department, sometime between 1961 and 1967.  My father, Warren Langdon, is at the top left, with the mustache.  Unfortunately, I can’t identify the other men, but perhaps someone will see this post and be able to help.  Some possibilities (culled from old newspapers, alternate name forms in parentheses) are:  James Christopher, Lee Darby, Armond Dorazio, Wayne Duval, Bernie Fertal, Ernest Hitchcock, Ken Hitchcock, Kenneth Holden, William Lewis, Stanley Marynowski, Joseph Morette (Morrette), Charles Mowers, Barney (Bernard, Barnard) Revelia, James Ortoleva, Robert Revelia, William Riddle, Douglas Rifenburg, Phillip Schell, Paul Shatley, Charles Silva, William Spencer, Donald Stavely, John Thomas, Jay Woods, Milton Flansburg, Floyd Lewis, Robert Remus, James MacCracken, Gordon Streeter, Allen Tyler, Jeffrey Noonan, Kenneth Hitchcock, Roderick Rowledge, Willard Bailey, John Brennan.  If I had to guess, I’d say the person in the middle of the front row was Armond Dorazio, and the person to his left (right in the picture) Phillip Schell—but most of my readers know how face-and-name disabled I am.

It was a happy time.  Dad enjoyed the company of his fellow firemen, although the department didn’t, as far as I can tell, have the social functions it does now.  Or maybe Dad just preferred to do his duty and leave most of the socializing for family events.

In light of this, I am extraordinarily pleased and proud that our son-in-law has become a volunteer fireman.

Times have changed, of course.  Fire calls come via a tiny pager-radio, and instead of gathering around a crackling speaker, his family can follow the action on the Internet.  But the work is still important, and I’m thrilled to have a fireman in the family once again.

There's nothing like a small-town Independence Day parade, and when we're not attending weddings or births or other such out-of-town occasions, the Geneva (Florida) parade is where we like to be.  That's because we're privileged to march with the Greater Geneva Grande Award Marching Band, the parade's star attraction.  (Well, we think so.  Some of the other participants may disagree.)

I've written about the band and the parade before; this year we actually had a whole article about us in a real newspaper, albeit one i'd never heard of until the photographer introduced himself to ask my name.  No, the paper did not choose to run the photo of me, no matter how crazed I must have looked crashing the cymbals.  Instead they very appropriately featured Geneva's own Richard Simonton:  good man, good friend, and the one who makes the band happen (and gets us our free hot dogs). (More)

If you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all.

At no time was that old advice more pertinent than in this age of instant communication.

Not once, but twice in the past couple of months I have inadvertently sent an e-mail to the wrong person.  I rely too much on the auto-complete function of my mail program, and certain keyboard shortcuts, and don't always double-check.

In both cases, the unintended recipient was our daughter's mother-in-law; as near as I can figure out, some common typo for one of my other correspondents must auto-complete to her address.  The first e-mail would simply have confused her, but the second could have been a disaster, as I had written quite a bit about her and her family in an e-mail that was supposed to go to my sister.

Fortunately, I only said good things -- she's the kind of person about whom it's hard to find something bad to say.  But I can think of contexts in which I could have gotten myself in very hot water indeed.

When our kids were little, we had a record of children's songs (yes, vinyl -- I'm that old), one of which had verses that began, "Be careful, little eyes, what you see," "Be careful, little ears, what you hear," and "Be careful, little hands, what you do." 

Be careful, little fingers, what you type.