Seeing Things

One of my more embarrassing moments in grade school didn’t involve bad hairdos, outdated clothing, or anything that got me teased by classmates. It was my performance on the day of the standard “Eye Test” that brings a red flush to my cheeks.

When I was in third grade, they had an optician come around to administer a standard eye test to all of us. This included a test for color-blindness. I had to peer rather hard and deep into the Seurat-like pictures of colored dots to make out the 7, the 6, the 4, embedded in them. Then I came to that fateful card whose pattern appeared more obscure than the rest. I looked long and deep into the pointillist display, and finally pronounced that I discerned a number there. I think I said I saw a “3.”

The optician smiled indulgently at me and said no, actually that card had no number hidden. She cautioned me that I shouldn’t feel I had to identify a number on every card. “Just see what’s there,” her tone turned slightly monitory.

I felt ashamed of myself. I’d thought I was better than that. I didn’t think I could be so easily led into seeing things that weren’t there just because there was an assumption that such things existed. I had told myself that I would never go into a house and see ghosts just because the house had a reputation for being haunted. I felt rather condescendingly removed from all those people who see images of the Virgin Mary emerging from every water stain, just because they believe that holy presences are floating around, standing ready to manifest themselves and help guide believers through troubled times. I thought I was above being influenced by the preconceptions other people planted in every situation. Even at that young age, I had prided myself on being more independent-minded. Now here I was, seeing numbers in what was just a random spattering of parti-colored dots.

I swore - from that moment on, I would rely only on my own judgment. I wouldn’t be influenced by assumptions of what I was supposed to see and think. Yes, sure…

Skip ahead a few decades. I saw zigzag white flashes in one eye. Worried that this might be a sign of a detaching retina, I rushed in a flurry of anxiety to my regular eye care center, the only place I could get in without being referred by a primary care physician. As it turned out, this was the best possible place I could have gone. A majority of these franchise chains now have much the same kind of high-tech examining equipment that the most expensive ophthalmologist has. And you don’t need a referral. You can pretty much just drop in.

The optician, a comforting, pretty young woman, examined me with some impressive imaging equipment. What a relief when she told me that my zigzags were just normal aging, the result of pieces of the lining of the back of the eye peeling off and floating into the vitreous, the liquid of the eye. “It happens to almost everyone,” she reassured me. (Although after later taking a poll of my acquaintances and finding no one else had those kinds of floaters, I thought that perhaps the woman might have stretched the truth in order to be a little too reassuring. But I’ll settle for reassurances wherever I can get them.)

But after she had finished that more urgent exam of the inner workings of my eye, the Doctor proceeded to do a routine eye exam – which included, shades of yesteryear, a test for color-blindness. Once again, those pointillist paintings were presented to me on flash cards, one after the other.

The only excuse I can offer for what happened next is that I was still coming off the edge of my nervousness about losing my vision altogether, so I was eager to prove to myself and to the Doctor that nothing was really wrong with me. I peered deep into the heart of each one of those cards, looking for the “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” subject matter that I assumed a normally-sighted person should be able to discern in them. With the third or fourth card, I strained to see and finally, with false bravado, pronounced that it contained an embedded “7.”

In almost perfect replay of that exam I’d had decades before, the Doctor gently corrected, “No, that card actually has no figure in it. That’s OK. Just tell me what you actually see.”

I’d done it again! After all those intervening years of chiding myself for having been so easily led into making false reports, after a virtual lifetime of resolve to be true to what was actually true for me – I’d gone wrong again. At the first opportunity I’d been given to prove my stalwart honesty – I’d failed once more! It was a humbling experience.

Now I better understand how easily people can be led into making false confessions to the police, even when the police don’t use overtly intimidating methods. Just a persistent pressure of suggestion that a person is guilty can soon lead that person to assume guilt.

This whole experience recalls more specific ways in which police investigations go wrong. The danger is not only in leading suspects to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, but there’s a broader danger that lies in the way witnesses to a crime are interviewed. Procedural manuals for detectives are recognizing some of these pitfalls and are encouraging changes in the ways witnesses are presented with line-ups and mug shots. More and more care is being taken not to plant suggestions in the minds of witnesses.

One procedural recommendation I read about particularly addresses the kind of error I made during my color-blindness tests. It’s been found that making one small change in the way eye witnesses to crimes are presented with mug shots can make a large difference in the accuracy of their resulting identifications. When a witness is just silently presented with a series of pictures of likely offenders, or with a line-up - chances are high that the witness will identify some individual from among the group as having been the perpetrator she saw, and she’ll will a positive identification, an identification that later proves to be dead wrong. But if a witness is first cautioned that the person who committed the crime may or MAY NOT be among those presented to her in the mug shots or in the line-up, then the witness is much less likely to finger anyone they see in the assortment. Many fewer false arrests result.

In many other ways, police are being trained to carefully avoid planting any assumptions in the minds of witnesses or of anyone likely to testify about the way a crime went down. It’s so easy to float an assumption and to consequently skew people’s perceptions of what happened and their reports of what they saw.

So apparently I’m not alone in being easily influenced by what I think I’m supposed to see. But I’m going to be ready for them next time for sure. When, in another five or six decades, I have my color vision tested again – I’m going to be sure to be on the alert to see nothing. Of course, by then, I’ll be well over 100, and “nothing” might be literally all I can see!

                                                 


Can You See Me Now?

A Sweetish Hospital

I did volunteer driving for seniors for years, which took me to a lot of doctors’ appointments and a lot of hospitals. But I was only there as an onlooker. I hadn’t been to any hospital on my own behalf since I’d had my tonsils out when I was six years old. The prospect of being looked at rather than just looking made me freeze in terror.

I realized how cheap it was to give comforting advice, how easy to be optimistic - when it wasn’t me on the examining table. How annoyingly facile my consolations must have been to all those in the past who had really been facing the cold steel gaze of various hospital apparatuses. If anyone had accompanied me to this hospital appointment and had reeled off a rote “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right,” I knew I would have looked for the nearest custard pie to smoosh in her face. I realized that’s probably how the victims of my volunteer consolation must have felt.

But I soon saw there was a big difference between most of the hospitals I’d been to by proxy, and this very real and personal visitation. Most of the hospitals I’d visited vicariously had been large downtown complexes, spanning and sprawling over multiple wings, multiple high-rise parking facilities, and multiple “Centers” named after donors. In most cases, I could expect to have to leverage my charge in a wheelchair between distant outposts, sometimes even braving the outdoors in the process. We had to plot appointed meeting spots where I would pick her up again after her day’s rigors and after my rigors fetching my car from the 10^th level of whatever garage I’d used. These different parking levels were usually distinguished only by some forgettable color coding and by the kind of Muzak that filtered out from their audio speakers. As a result of all these precarious, protracted forays, I still smell antiseptic whenever I hear Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are…”

I assumed this was the kind of experience I’d again face when my family doctor sent me to have some outpatient hospital tests. But my experience turned out to be the opposite of the ones I’d ushered my friends through in the large, prestigious downtown hospitals of Chicago. My PPO plan had me assigned to a smaller neighborhood hospital, cozily embedded in residential city streets.

Swedish Covenant Hospital did have its own parking facility, but I avoided the $4 a day parking fee by leaving my car several blocks away on a tree-lined side street. Walking back to the Hospital under blossoming linden trees, past front yards with gurgling fountains – was a lot nicer than the harrowing downtown traffic snarls I’d faced in my earlier experience of hospitals.

I was in for a further pleasant surprise when I got into the Hospital itself. Rather than the scattered acreage of different departments, I found that the variety of tests I had to take were all sequestered in the same “Patient Testing” nook which was itself just a few yards to the right of the Hospital’s one-and-only entrance. I had blood drawn, then stepped a few feet over to have X-rays, then a few more feet brought me to the ultrasound room. This togetherness was like a delightful throwback to the days of the one-room school house. There was no need for making expeditions down long, forbidding corridors whose fluorescent lights eerily lit up as you approached, and then shut off after you’d passed – reminding you of the darkness of your mortality. There was no navigating across bridges to other buildings, other specialists. There was no need to go in search of wheelchairs, no need to be shuttled up and down elevators between distant terminals.

I did see that there were some other out-buildings connected with the hospital, in one case by a bridge. But I assumed those distances would only have to be traversed by people with some really unusual, specific needs. The average patient such as myself could find everything right there, at her fingertips.

This cozy warren of adjacent testing rooms was presided over by friendly staff that beckoned me forward almost the moment I arrived. Four barbers – no waiting! I had to go to the Hospital on several successive days because one set of tests required strict fasting while another set required that I down a gallon of water. (Well, it seemed like a gallon.) On these successive visits, I got to be almost chummy with one of the men at the “Testing” reception desk. By the time of my third visit, we greeted each other with all the eager curiosity of twins who’d been separated at birth.

I saw that the Hospital’s clientele was an enlivening mix of nationalities. During my brief waits on one of the couches outside the test labs, I saw a colorful parade of people wearing everything from turbans to dashikis to dirndls to serapes. So although this Hospital’s neighborhood had once consisted more strictly of immigrants from Scandinavia, the area had apparently blossomed into being a veritable international house. In keeping with this world-wide welcoming, there is a sculpting of a globe outside the Hospital’s revolving door entrance, showing the efforts of people on all the different continents to improve the environment. This all-embracing aspect of the Hospital adds a touching grace note to its appeal.

 

                                    

I was surprised and disappointed to read some of the very negative reviews that Swedish Covenant Hospital got on the Internet’s “Yelp.” But most of these reviews applied to its Emergency Room, so I felt as long as I could steer clear of that extremis, I could maintain my happy impression of the place’s friendly, efficient, pouched approach.

It wasn’t long before I coincidentally ran across another reference to the Hospital. Northeastern University is nearby. On one of my visits back to that school, my alma mater, I picked up the latest copy of the school newspaper and saw an article reporting a health fair to take place at the Hospital. Except - the student reporter who’d written this article seemingly wasn’t on a proper first-name basis with different parts of the community, and in all seriousness, she had written that the fair was to take place at the “Sweetish Covenant Hospital.”

I had also noticed that a smaller sign near the Hospital’s entrance makes a further culinary offering of the facility. The sign is missing a letter - so the place announces itself as “SW * DISH COVENANT HOSPITAL.”

                                     

In a world that increasingly centers on mega-stores and mega-medical centers, many of Chicago’s smaller neighborhood hospitals have had to close. I’m glad this source of neighborly health care has so far managed to hold-out against this tide of massive consolidation. Maybe the errors and dropped letters connected with its name aren’t really such misprints. The place is sort of a tasty “Sweetish Dish” after all.

Walking a Few Blocks Beyond

You might have lived on your same city street all your life, but never ventured down it past a certain point. Or perhaps you’ve explored up and down your own street, but there are many nearby streets you’ve never explored past the corner convenience store where you get your coffee, or past the gas station where you regularly fill up before you veer off to pursue your day’s business along farther avenues.

The other day I realized how many blocks right in my own neighborhood I knew nothing about. I would turn off the next main street and visit an acquaintance who lived just a few doors further down on a residential street near my house. But I had no idea what lay beyond on that typical-seeming street. For all I knew, it might have been labeled “Here be monsters,” as the old cartographers would label the terra incognita that no explorer had yet reached on our globe.

So the other day I made my own exploration. I passed my friend’s house and walked on down the street, farther than I’d ever been before. And there were wonders to behold.

After a while, I found the street was blocked off to cars. The only way anyone could have continued straight ahead was on foot, across an old bridge that spanned the Chicago River there at one of its shallowest, laziest stretches. The sidewalk led up onto the bridge with its picturesquely rusty cross-beams. Looking through the diamond-frame of those cross-beams, I saw some ducks. They weren’t paddling on the water. This early balmy spring day was too leisurely for any effort like that. They were letting the current just drift them along, taking them where it would.

 

                                            

Where the bridge rejoined the sidewalk on the far side again, there was a triangle of fenced-in land that seemed to belong to no one in particular. It was heaped with antique discard - with old bushel baskets, tires, and stove compartments. Some weedy vines had overgrown this ancient offal, running down to the water’s edge. But the overall effect was not one of ugly discord. In this context, the accumulated rubbish looked like a treasure trove that invited a searching eye.

I went on in the same unappointed spirit as the ducks. Many of the houses along here were neat bungalows, with catchy yard decorations. I passed miniature windmills and lighthouses. I walked along the coming block, and then the next. Then I was burst out onto another business street. I had driven along this street fairly often, but I’d never come at it from this angle before, or on foot. It was like lying down on your kitchen floor. There were unsuspected twists and turns, pipings and utilities. Looking at the workings of this ethnic neighborhood from such a different angle of approach, I saw things from a whole new perspective. I could see things that drive-bys often don’t give a person time to see.

I was immediately greeted by the big flapping dark wings of rugs posted out on the sidewalk for sale. There were rugs and blankets, hung on huge versions of newspaper racks. They waved me over, inviting inspection. Tigers and pandas waited to pounce out at me from this jungle of plush pile fabric. Some of the blankets were also imprinted with race cars and superheroes like Spiderman that zoomed out as I riffled through the racks. There was a big Justin Bieber looking with plush disinterest off into the distance.

                                                 

The street was lined with discount stores that had arrays of Spanish, Korean, and Indian knick-knacks in their windows. A man was waltzing a floor lamp with a faux Tiffany lampshade out onto the street. A fat Buddha candle-holder beamed out beatifically at me. Seen quickly from a distance, all this might have seemed like a clutter of kitsch. But on foot on the street that sunny spring day, I felt as if I was inside the object chamber of a kaleidoscope, morphing along with the other sparkling shapes and shards, forming new patterns of thought.

Most arresting of all was a line-up of just the lower halves of female mannequins out on the sidewalk. They were covered in brightly colored skin tight jeans and leotards. The mannequin’s derrieres were all plumply facing the public, an army of partial pin-ups. In unconsciously ironic reflection of this theme, there were several fruit carts parked nearby, laden with early peaches, mangoes, and other produce likely from south of the border. Restaurants with dancing tacos painted on their windows were interspersed with the discount shops.

 

      

The whole street was alive with quirky initiative. It all reminded me of the film biographies of American notables such as George Gershwin who grew up in Brooklyn in the early part of the 20^th century. Brooklyn then was usually shown as a complex harmony of immigrant energy and enterprise. There were always people calling to each other from fire escape stairways. There were peddlers hawking their wares, pitchmen, con-men, and pick-up artists brassing up every corner. And here it was again, a street that the young Gershwin would have recognized. Except – on this busy commercial street, a staccato Spanish clip predominated rather than Eastern European schmaltz.

That different note of immigrant music was sounded most strikingly as I walked back, off the main street, onto the leafy residential street again. As I passed along, approaching the bridge, I heard it – the clarion call of a rooster. Again and again, the rooster announced itself. It happily reminded me that keeping chickens and roosters had once again been made legal in Chicago, although the ordinance is always in danger of being rescinded.

Once having discovered this walk, I’ve returned along the same route several times since. And always, during either my coming or going, the rooster announces itself from behind some fence. I have never seen it, and I can never quite pin down which house and which fence it’s behind. It has become like the Wizard of Oz, a disembodied oracle whose reality I don’t quite want to expose. I just appreciate its greeting – and walk on.

Have you explored any of your neighboring side streets lately? Have you walked along one of them farther and farther, beyond where you’d ever gone before?

                                         

The Many Prejudices We Ignore

Most people who consider themselves to be liberal, educated citizens, are sensitive to any kind of prejudice against racial or religious groups. They guard against making any statements themselves that could be considered to fall in those categories, and they are quick to heap opprobrium on anyone they hear mouthing such prejudices. That’s all well and good. But meanwhile, these very same people are often guilty of harboring other forms of prejudice that can be just as destructive of our social fabric. Let me cite an awakening example.

A group of us from “Friends of the Library” had booked a bus tour to different branch libraries. Almost all the people in the group were retired women from more affluent Chicago neighborhoods or suburbs. However there was one somewhat younger person in the group, a demographic rarity in this context for being under retirement age, for being a man, and for being black.

We were all standing around outside the central library, waiting for the rented motor coach to get revved up. One of the more mature ladies in the group, a spruce matron in a neatly tailored suit, approached the black man and cheerily asked him if he was our bus driver. The moment froze. With vast indignation, the man issued a smarting correction. “No, madam,” he adjured. “I’m a member of the library group.”

The women immediately saw how she had been guilty of a terrible faux pas – and worse. She had been guilty of what might be construed as racial profiling and of the basest form of racial prejudice. She’d been guilty of assuming that the one black man in the group must of necessity be there only to perform some task regarded as being manual labor. A pall was cast over the day’s adventures for all of us who had been within earshot of this social blunder.

And yet, and yet – when I thought about it, it seemed to me that the man was more guilty of prejudice than the woman. Why did the suggestion that he was a bus driver affront him so much? Well yes, there might have been some legitimacy to his taking exception to the stereotyping of black men as laborers. But his indignation went beyond any such abstract historical considerations. He just did not want to be taken for a mere blue collar worker. It was obvious that he considered such work beneath him. He viewed himself as being a person with literary interests. He was an intellectual far removed from working stiffs who drove busses or wielded jackhammers and whom he no doubt automatically considered to be too dumb to appreciate any of the “finer” things in life.

But isn’t that sort of attitude as unworthy a prejudice as some of the other prejudices that we more often revile? There is perhaps something understandable about a black man taking that attitude. Black people were for so long generally confined to jobs involving hard labor, that now they want to distance themselves as much as possible from any such association. But white people feel the same way. Any banker, whether white or black, would likely be insulted to be taken for the janitor in his bank. But why? If it’s wrong to assume that anyone who is black has less worth than anyone who is white – why is it right to assume that anyone who is a bus driver has less worth than anyone who is a library patron? That sort of dismissal of bus drivers seems to be part of a larger class prejudice that lingers in this society and that is all the more pernicious because it is so widely held and even so socially acceptable.

There’s a similarly ubiquitous prejudice that virtually no one objects to. Men predictably want to dissociate themselves from anything feminine, because for them, femininity is a lesser state. In another essay on this Blog, I wrote how disappointed I was that President Obama spurned certain breeds of dogs because they were too “girlie.” If he had spurned some breed of dog because it was traditionally associated with African-Americans and if he had expressed that opinion by using some belittling term for young African-Americans – it’s likely his right to continue in the Presidential office would have been called into question. If he had said, “Oh yuck no! Not THAT kind of dog. That’s too pickaninny!” – there might even have been a call for his impeachment. But since his slur was only against women, everyone, including his wife sitting next to him, just chuckled indulgently.

This kind of devaluing of women is so widespread in our society and in most societies, that it’s part of the very air we breathe. Men routinely make a show of shunning anything pink, anything frilly, anything decorative, anything at all typically associated with women, because they consider it beneath them and because it would indeed make them the target of merciless ribbing and derision. But again, imagine replacing that display of aversion with an aversion to anything stereotypically associated with black people. By making that substitution, the level of prejudice inherent in the attitude becomes apparent.

Imagine a man refusing to eat collard greens because they’ve been associated with black people. “Oh no! I won’t eat THAT! That’s what black people eat!” If a man made such a remark, and if he were a public figure – the uproar against him would be immediate and massive. The man might be called to resign whatever post he held and he would be made to make a series of abject, tearful apologies. But when his aversion is only towards things associated with women, everyone smiles, colludes with, and even encourages, his repelling fervor. “Yeah man, you definitely gotta toss that apron!”

This sort of prejudice against women is so pervasive that it calls for treatment in a series of separate essays. Where is Gloria Steinem when we need her the most? For now though, it’s enough to note that there is widespread prejudice against members of the working class and against women, and against all kinds of people regarded as being unattractive. It’s OK to be vocally prejudiced against all these groups. Everyone feels free to voice these prejudices, knowing there will be no repercussions, only general understanding and endorsement.

But going even beyond these specific unacknowledged prejudices, there’s a still more encompassing prejudice that’s so embedded in the way we think that it’s virtually invisible and untouchable. I was brought up short and made to realize I harbored just such a prejudice by a particularly revolutionary remark that someone made to me. We were walking along near the University of Chicago when we passed a white couple who veering off to a parked car. The man leaned in to ominously warn the woman, “Lock all the car doors as soon as you get in, honey. There are lots of blacks around here.”

When my companion and I had passed beyond earshot of this other, so clearly benighted and stupid couple, I voiced my opinion of them. “Well, there are two I’d like to lock my doors against!” I sneered.

My companion looked at me with an admonishing twinkle in his eye and said, “Well, they’re good for something at least. They gave you a chance to feel superior.”

There it was! The word has become a cliché, but it’s the only one I can think of to describe what I had. The word is “epiphany.” Yes, I had felt superior to that couple. I’d felt a sweet little surge of “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. I’m better than you!” in the wake of the man’s remark. And isn’t that at the base of a lot of our vociferous condemnation of those who express any kind of politically incorrect sentiment? We are secretly glad of their infraction because it gives us a chance to feel so superior to them, and to demonstrate that superiority by denouncing them.

That’s the very definition of prejudice. It’s a reflex feeling of spurning superiority towards someone, not because of who they are in the fullness of their being, but because of some single stamped characteristic they exhibit, which is often a characteristic they’ve had little or no control over acquiring.

I don’t mean that we should condone racism or any of the other forms of prejudice to which our society is sensitive. But at the same time, we should recognize that there is an overarching, unacknowledged prejudice that might be operative in the very eagerness with which we dismiss others for their infractions. If all we do is make another’s person’s remark the occasion for us to gloat in superiority over them, then we are exhibiting the very kind of prejudice that we are ostensibly fighting. We’re using another person simply as a means of boosting our own egos by making a show of our rejection. Giving ourselves a satisfying fillip of superiority won’t do much do eradicate the other person’s prejudice, while at the same time it merely entrenches us in a more encrypted prejudice of our own.

This is all the more true because our allowance of prejudiced remarks is so unequally distributed. We applaud black rappers for saying the kinds of things that would cause us to permanently banish white suburbanites forever from our social circle. Black rappers are given free rein to make violently prejudiced remarks against women, against whites, against other blacks. Issuing from them, the remarks are considered artistic expression, or a commentary on their mean streets upbringing, or a complicated product of their history as members of a certain race.

But a white person making comparable remarks is given no such dispensation. We don’t stop to consider that they too might be products of very compromising environments. A good ol’ boy acquaintance of mine who’d been helping me with household repairs happened to drop in on a charity luncheon I was giving at my house. He was a fish out of water from the start, but then, in response to a strained attempt on the part of one of the other luncheon guests to reach out to him with a question about his work – he responded, sort of sheepishly abashed by this alien attention. He said that he did “a black man’s work, toting stuff, working off the strength of his back.”

That broke it. The society lady walked out of my house in high dudgeon. She called me the next day and said she would not tolerate that obvious kind of racial prejudice. She wondered why on earth I associated with such a person and she intimated that she had doubts about ever again visiting the home of anyone who did associate with such people.

Well, there was a lot wrong with that whole round-about of prejudice. While my handyman’s remark showed a habit of making a separate class out of blacks – the charity matron’s reaction showed an equal habit of making a special class out of rural whites. (Actually, the handyman was half Native American. If the society matron had known that, would she have taken a more lenient attitude towards him? Would status as a Native American, like the status of black rap artist, have been enough to have given him allowance to make prejudiced comments?) But in any case, as much as the handyman had demonstrated a habit of putting blacks in their place – the society matron showed a parallel habit of putting poor southern whites in their place, a place that she’d enforce as being distinctively separate from any place she ever occupied. I suspect that society matron, although she was white, would have also been offended if anyone had taken her for a maid in my household – showing how much she considered maids to be beneath her.

I knew the handyman better than just that one remark of his. I knew a little more of his context. He told me how growing up in the Carolinas sixty years previously, the adults in his family had instructed him in the social mores of the place. They had told him that he was always to address white people as “Mr. And Mrs …..,” but that he should address black people by their first names only. He had been the child of his father’s second marriage. When his father’s first wife had died at the age of twenty-one, after having given birth to the couple’s third child – his father had married a fourteen-year-old Cherokee woman although she didn’t reveal her Cherokee ancestry until years later because she was deeply ashamed of her non-White status. She promptly started to have children, one of whom was the handyman.

The handyman spoke highly of his father, mostly because his father had tried to bring him and his siblings up strictly according to the Bible. When his father had caught him and his brother playing during the time they should have been reading the Bible, the man had taken them out behind the barn and beaten them to a fare-thee-well with a chain. His younger brother had received a bad head injury in the process and had always been a little “slow” after that. But still the handyman respected his father for making such valiant efforts to set them on the straight and narrow. Later on, his sister had tried to poison their father because he was always “messing” with her. But the handyman thought his sister’s reaction had been extreme. He said all the fathers he knew back then had been likely to “mess with their daughters.” It was just the way of things.

Talk about mean streets! If black rappers have the right to make vicious, prejudiced remarks because of the hard way they and their people have come – it would seem my handyman might also qualify for such dispensation. But the point is certainly not to fight for the right to make prejudiced remarks. The point is that not all the prejudice we need to fight against is the kind of prejudice that has been so roundly defined and targeted over the last decades. When civil rights leaders say that we still have a long way to go in conquering prejudice – they’re right. But there’s a lot of prejudice that few people have even begun to recognize, much less started to address in their lamentations.

Again, the goal should not be to condone any sort of prejudice against minorities, but neither should our goal be to simply assume a high-and-mighty sense of superiority over someone who is struggling against ignorance and a bleak family background. If we judge people based on one snippet we hear issue from them, we do the very thing we inveigh against. If we in effect say to them, “Step off the sidewalk when I walk by. I, in all my glory, am superior and have the right-of-way,” we are hardly better than the many prejudiced white people who have come to symbolize southern society in the 1930’s. We are in effect becoming our own sort of clansmen.

Rather than immediately putting anyone in his place because of an errant remark or because of a perceived lifestyle that we reflexively dislike, we should strive to know that person more fully. Whether that person is black, white, a woman, Jewish, fat, gay, old, a teenager, a prostitute, a maid, a redneck, a Wall Street broker, or a bus driver – we shouldn’t give ourselves a cheap shot of self-satisfaction with a display of disapproval and distancing. Rather we should eagerly approach that person with a sense that a new adventure in knowing the human spirit awaits us.

A Different Kind of Moving Day

Spring and fall I face a different sort of moving day than others who might just be changing apartments or migrating to and from summer vacation spots. I face the more difficult job of relocating a giant lemon tree. Since I live in Chicago, the tree has to come inside during the winter where I place it near my front plate glass window. By spring, the tree is usually suffering from the stress of cabin fever and has to be moved back out into my yard.

This started as an easy enough routine. The tree was given to me as a 6-inch sprout that a friend grew from the seed of an everyday grocery store lemon. My friend was eager that I take good care of his one green thumb accomplishment. Every time he visited, he would inspect its progress. Under this kind of scrutiny, and also because of what is just my natural aversion to wasting anything or letting anything go – I perhaps tended the tree too diligently.

It grew and grew. And grew. Over the years, it became a 15-foot behemoth. I replanted it in a large city dumpster on wheels. Despite the wheels, it became a major project to escort it through its migrations. I luckily have cathedral ceilings, but the tree still had to be canted inside to accommodate its height. Then getting it in and out of doors was a dangerous operation that had to be carefully choreographed.

I couldn’t simply roll it along the length of my building from the front door and out the back into the garden. With its long bayonet thorns, that would have involved too much strafing of ceiling light fixtures and furniture along the route. The only logical way to move it was to take it out the nearest front door and walk it around the block to my back gate. But it was so heavy, I usually had to hire movers to help me.

Fifteen years of this exercise left me thoroughly put out with that “friend” who had visited this chore on me. And for all my trouble, the tree still showed not the slightest sign of producing a lemon. I finally felt I just couldn’t do it any longer. I made the wrenching decision to abandon the tree. Late that summer, I didn’t roll it indoors as usual. I rolled it out into the alley and abandoned it to its fate. I hoped some salvage man who had connections with a solarium or a conservatory somewhere would pick it up. But no such luck.

It languished out there. Then one morning I made the heart-rending discovery that in the night, someone had brutally uprooted it from the dumpster, heaved it aside, and made off with the dumpster. That was such a waste, because the dumpster could hardly have been of much use. I had drilled holes in the bottom of it to give the tree drainage.

So there the tree lay, a fallen soldier, victim of my war with my weariness. Its broken, mangled form rolled around from one side of the alley to the other. Occasionally, I would haul it out of the way of traffic and bank it back against my fence. But soon enough, it would tumbleweed down to the apron of some other property, its abject sear skeleton a constant rebuke to me. Its remains lingered for almost a year that way. Its main trunk looked like the desiccated mast of some Flying Dutchman appearing here and there, spiking through the effluvia of this industrial alley, haunting all my comings and goings.

This is hardly the end of the story though. I hadn’t been able to part with the tree without keeping some souvenir of it. I’d taken a cutting and put it in water. Miraculously, the cutting had grown roots. That usually doesn’t work, or it only works according to some complicated horticultural formula that I’ve never quite understood. But this offshoot produced enough of a root system to encourage me to in turn pot it – and in due course replant it into an industrial size garbage pail on wheels. So here we are again.

More years have passed, and once again I have a skyscraper lemon tree. The sight of its mother so tragically dying out in the alley has made me determined never to abandon a lemon tree again. I know I will stick by this baby – forever. What’s more, this hasn’t been in vain. The offshoot apparently had some genetic memory of the developmental phases its mother went through, and has picked up where she left off. In just a few years, after it had grown to about 10-feet, it started to produce blossoms – and then lemons. The lemons take a long time to ripen on the branches. Some are on there almost a year before they can be picked, and even then they have thick skins. But they are tangy lemons – fresh off the tree. They provide a valuable present come birthdays, Christmases. I can impress recipients with the value of my offering, telling them that the individual lemon I’m bestowing on them cost me about a thousand dollars, considering the moving costs and the daily fertilizing, watering, tending.

The tree’s readiness to produce actual lemons has inspired me to service it in yet another way. Now as soon as I see blossoms on it, I go around with a feather duster and tickle, tickle, tickle, from flower to flower, transferring pollen betwixt and between. I had heard about and even once seen ticklers in the fields - people supplementing the work of bees by cross-pollinating between blossoms since often the pistil of one blossom won’t be ready to receive the pollen from the stamen of the same flower. The organs of different blooms come ready at different times. I had thought that to be a rather rarified occupation, little suspecting that I would one day enter the ranks of ticklers myself.

 

 

I no longer have to hire outside help to move this progeny plant though. I rent a room to a neighborhood man, so now I have a helper handy to make the big haul around the block. Since this “baby” has itself grown to a bushy 12-feet though, my renter had to call on some barroom buddies to help him with the move the other day. The lads were already well lubricated when they attempted the move, so it got to be the occasion for a carefree careening, a bouncing from pillar to post along the side street and into the alley. It was risky business angling the tree out the front door and under a neighbor’s awning. My renter had attached a long rope to it to give him better leverage pulling it along on its wheels. This makeshift leash notwithstanding, the crew lost control of their charge more than once and the tree veered violently into a wall or some other upright. But the joviality of the moment readily loosened the tree from whatever entrapment it encountered, just as the men’s wits and limbs had already been loosened by whatever brew they’d imbibed.

We lost a few more unripe lemons than I would have liked, and a few more branches got snapped. But on the whole, the tree didn’t suffer too much damage. As I stood at the back gate, I rejoiced to see my renter rounding the bend from the side street. As he pulled his recalcitrant bulk along, it attempted to make one last foray to the side, scouring the margins of the alley. But then it was in the clear, heading for its home stretch into my garden.

Just then, a woman walking her dog on a leash came from the other direction. My renter and the woman recognized they were on kindred errands. As they passed each other, my renter cheerily observed, “You walk yours, and I’ll walk mine.” And that’s probably about as good a motto for life as I’ve heard.

The Importance of Being Ernesto

I went to Cuba in 2012 with a tour group. We were in the first wave of Americans to go to Cuba strictly as tourists, although we were cautioned that this wasn’t supposed to be typical tourist fun and frolic. Our tour director had to fill out reams of paperwork admitting us under the auspices of serious cultural exchange. We had to swear we were going for strictly educational purposes. So please - no laughing!

I had heard about the prevalence of old cars from the 40’s and 50’s on Cuba’s streets. So I wasn’t completely surprised to see Havana’s morning rush hour to be a re-creation of a busy street in America in 1950. But I was surprised to find that so much of Cuba as a whole was a frozen-in-time tableau of American circa 1959, when Castro came into power. This trip became an experience of time-travel even more than its intended “People-to-People” exchange.

                                  

When Castro took over, he ordered an end to most private enterprise, to most free market buying and selling. However he didn’t confiscate a lot of what ordinary citizens already had. So although Cuban citizens couldn’t buy new cars, machinery, or many large appliances in the ordinary way Americans are used to, they could still own the things that were in their possession as of 1959. Cubans have made an art and a science of keeping all those things repaired and running.

I was almost overcome with nostalgia when we were ushered through a print shop in Santa Clara. There was the printing business my parents had started in the 1940’s! There were the Linotype machines and the treadle flatbed presses. There was the manual cutting machine with the big bar-handle I used to hang on as a child to apply the weight needed to get the blade to lower and slice through the paper stack. Who says you can’t re-live your childhood – you can’t go home again? I found I was able to do both in Cuba.

 

Along with its evocation of a homesick melancholy, Castro’s ban on private ownership also had some humorous side effects. Cubans are allowed to own pigs and chickens – but they aren’t allowed to own cows. The cattle, which are mostly Brahmins, are government property. Farmers are only appointed as caretakers of the cow or two allotted to them. They are not allowed to slaughter or in any way personally use the products of the animals in their care. What little beef is available in Cuba is reserved for tourists.

But when Castro first put this edict against slaughtering and eating cattle into effect, many farmers found a sly way around the ruling. They would claim their cow had met with an unfortunate accident, or even that it had “committed suicide” by falling on a very sharp knife. Not wanting to see any meat go to waste, the farmer had claimed it his duty to eat the meat before it spoiled.

Castro soon put a stop to this risible evasion. Our guide read us the amended ruling that Castro had handed down. He now specified that farmers were not allowed to slaughter or consume any cow, no matter in what manner it met its demise. Any bovine death, whether by accident or by self-inflicted wound, had to be reported to government officials, who would then come and collect the carcass. Anyone caught eating the meat of such an animal was subject to a heavy fine and/or imprisonment. Anyone who saw someone eating such unauthorized meat and failed to report the crime, was similarly subject to heavy fine and/or imprisonment.

Apparently cows cheered up considerably after that more specific enactment. The suicide rate among Cuban ungulates has dropped to almost zero.

Another one of the dietary restrictions that has come about as the result of bans against private ownership was surprisingly – fish. As we tourists sat with the vast expanse of ocean in view out of our restaurant window, we were served mahi-mahi imported from Viet Nam. Of course! I suddenly realized what had been missing from all these scenic ocean views. Boats! There was beautiful Havana Harbor, with not a boat, not a dinghy, not a skiff, not a canoe in sight. I realized the problem. The average Cuban citizen is strictly forbidden from owning a boat or even so much as a plank of wood – for fear of more attempts to cross to Miami. So fishing is almost completely foreclosed as an occupation throughout most of Cuba. Even we tourists were reduced to eating fish imported from Viet Nam, or even something like Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks – imported from Canada.

But throughout all the beauty and melancholy and anachronism of Cuba – the primary message our tour guide was assigned to get across to us was the message of “The Revolution.” Everything begins and ends with the Revolution in Cuba. This is where we get down to Che (Ernesto) Guevara.

We saw Revolution Square; we saw the bullet holes that an early uprising had put in the Palace from which dictator Batista escaped through a secret door; we saw Granma, the boat which brought the Castro brothers and Che along with a ragtag band from Mexico to the Sierra Maestra region of Cuba to start their forward push to power; we saw the revolutionary car they’d used and the one plane they’d briefly had at their disposal. Those latter are in cordoned off areas of the Revolutionary Museum, guarded by functionaries with shrill whistles they’ll blow at you if you step off the designated walkway and get too close to one of these almost mythic artifacts of the Revolution. But mostly there was Che.

There weren’t any loudspeakers exhorting the citizenry to Revolutionary fervor in Cuba, as I heard there had been in Maoist China. Cuba is a quiet place, with no cell phones, no boom boxes, very little media noise of any kind. But there are posters and billboards everywhere, almost all of them containing a picture of Che and one of his classic quotes such as the somewhat ambiguous and grammatically skewed, “Hasta la Victoria Siempre” (Until Victory Always”).

I asked our tour guide if Fidel Castro might feel a little left out. There are ten public invocations of Che for every one there is of Fidel. Our guide said oh, no. It was customary to honor the dead. That’s why Che’s image is writ large all over, while Fidel waits in the wings when it comes to mythic representation.

                                

I wonder though. If Che had been less handsome, would he be featured as prominently? If Alberto Korda’s photograph of him hadn’t become a world-wide rallying point for anyone with a discontent – would his images have so markedly outnumbered those of Fidel in Cuba? Even I have one of those iconic posters of him on my wall at home. Seeing it for the first time, an acquaintance said, “What? Are you a Communist?” I told her no. A former flower child I knew had just been down-sizing, and I was the recipient of a lot of the “stuff” she unloaded. Besides, I explained, everybody has a picture of Che. It doesn’t reflect anyone’s political philosophy. I fall into that insouciant category of people described by the Argentine saying, “Tengo una remera del Che, y no sé por qué” (I have a Che T-shirt, and I don’t know why).

But for whatever reason, Che is the order of the day in Cuba. I hadn’t known much about what he did after his and Fidel’s band took over Cuba. Some of the other people in my tour group were better informed though, and they filled me in on details our Cuban tour guide could not, or dare not, mention. I learned that Che had ordered the execution of scores of people he considered to be Batista “loyalists,” or people who had simply been too successful as businessmen and were therefore assumed to be right-wing supporters. I learned that he had also been brutal to many of his own men as they fought beside him when he carried the revolution on to the Congo and then into Bolivia. When a man who’d been fighting through the jungles alongside Che for a long time decided he wanted to quit and “fight no more” in these harum-scarum battles – Che summarily shot him in the head and snatched the watch off the wrist of the dying man.

By the time we were ushered up the steps of Che’s Memorial in Santa Clara, I was thinking it best I take his poster down when I got home, as meaningless as that pin-up had been to me in the first place. But there wasn’t much time to consider my altered opinion of Che then. We were hurried along into the Memorial. No cameras, umbrellas, purses, or bags, were allowed inside, so we loaded all these accessories onto our tour guide. He ended up looking incongruously like a roving peddler standing out there at the entrance to the Mausoleum, weighed and bulging with hot items for sale.

The interior of the Memorial was designed like a grotto. It was dimly lit. A fountain provided the soothing sound of trickling water. There was an eternal flame. The walls were of stone and brick and I immediately saw the names of many men inscribed on them – men who had fought alongside Che in one place or another. But where were the remains of Che himself? Our tour guide had told us to “look for the star.”

Finally I saw it, just as the guards were hurrying us along to make way for other admirers, or curiosity seekers. The star was a small light projected near the top of one column of names. It confused me at first. Then I realized Che’s full name was inscribed as it had been given to him when he was born in Argentina in 1928 – “Ernesto Guevara de la Serna.”

His bones had only been found relatively recently in Bolivia after what many say was a combined decision made by the CIA and Bolivian officials to shoot him after capture in 1969. His burial spot was left a secret, presumably to prevent just what has happened – to prevent his martyrdom.

From the grotto we went into an adjacent room that was a Museum of his artifacts. People were allowed to linger there. So I took my time puzzling over his early family photos, over the instruments he’d used as a medical student in Argentina, over the books he’d read as a youth. Tom Sawyer was the most prominent among these. How could such benign beginnings lead to such a cruel character? That’s the eternal question.

                                 

However, seeing him personalized this way made me waver in my decision to rip down his poster from my wall when I got home. In fact, he’s still there. But his persistence in my field of vision is more the result of my lethargy and indifference to all home decorating projects than it is the result of my having given him a reprieve for his crimes against humanity.

This trip was to offer up one more small spotlight of humor. It wasn’t quite the guffaw of cow suicides, but it has given me an occasional chuckle. I started to do some follow-up research on Cuba when I got home. I viewed U-Tube interviews with Castro that spanned the decades, starting with his fervent avowals to Mike Wallace shortly after he took power that he was NOT a Communist and would certainly NOT lead Cuba in the direction of Communism. There were also some video of Che himself.

But the YouTube interview that has given me pause to laugh along the way was one with actor Benecio del Toro. Del Toro played Che in a film meant to be an epic re-enactment of Che’s post Motorcycle Diaries struggles. In reality the picture struck me as being a sort of flat account of fighting, fighting, fighting… But Benecio del Toro had just come off the high of this movie’s release when he did the interview I saw.

The interview was in Spanish, intended for a Spanish language TV station. But I was able to make out enough of what was said. The show’s host was a young woman who went on the attack the moment del Toro sat down opposite her. She asked him how he could possibly have lent himself to such a project – validating, glamorizing such a ruthless dictator as Che Guevara. She asked how del Toro could live with himself after so roundly betraying the public’s trust in him as an international star by sympathetically portraying such a monster as Che.

Del Toro began to fidget in his chair, in obvious disbelief that he was being challenged this way. He began to roll his eyes around, likely trying to search out the person responsible for booking him into this ambush. I imagined that his agent was summarily fired as soon as the show went off the air. But del Toro soldiered on for a while, talking about how it’s an actor’s job to portray all kinds of people, not just those whom the actor agrees with or those who are likeable. However, it was obvious that del Toro was at least somewhat well disposed towards Che and his revolutionary ideals.

The interviewer wouldn’t let up though. She was not appeased by any of del Toro’s vague answers about the role of an actor. She kept pounding home her objections. However, before he unclipped his mike and walked off the set, del Toro got in the rejoinder that has stayed with me, a model of unintended humor. When the show’s host demanded once more to know how he could portray a murderer, he responded:

                           “Che was not a murderer. He was just pro-capital punishment.”

So there it was – a motto I could live by. The next time someone displeases me, I can eliminate him with impunity. When they try to convict me of murder, I will protest, “No, you can’t do that. I am not a murderer. I was just exercising my Constitutional right to be pro-capital punishment.”

One small victory of absurdity over absolutism; one small star-shine of humor in the melancholy of Cuba’s blues.

Feeling Superior - All Day, Every Day

TV psychologists and the counseling professions in general attribute a lot to feelings of inferiority. They lay both timidity and aggression at the door of an inferiority complex. Whether you punch or cringe or do anything in-between, it’s because, at heart, you are feeling inferior. Whether clients have arachnophobia, agoraphobia, or anorexia – or at the other end of the alphabet, xenophobia - doctors will blame the condition at least in part on the fact that these individuals were made to feel inferior.

But I wonder about that. In many respects, I think just the opposite is true. I think most of us, myself included, leapfrog through our days animated by one little jolt after another of our sense of superiority.

It’s not that we often stop and consider ourselves to be superior in an overall, global sense. It’s that we feel superior to others in all our little choices and conditions. We feel assured of our superiority in all the daily details of the way we lead our lives.

The person who goes to a gym feels superior to the couch potato, while the couch potato usually feels superior to that eager beaver who’s up and out there running every morning. Every time one of these runners would overtake us on the sidewalk, a portlier friend of mine would scoff, “He’s worshipping the Great God Jog.”

The man in the mansion feels superior to the homeless bum. The homeless man feels superior to that toff in the mansion. By comparison to the coddled wealthy man, the homeless man feels his life on the streets to be gritty and “real.” The man in the Ferrari feels superior to the man in the old Chevy. But the man in the old Chevy knows how much better he is for the ecology because he’s not gas-guzzling around the streets in a phallic status symbol.

Cat owners feel superior to dog owners, and vice versa. The sixth grader feels superior to the fifth grader; the senior feels superior to the freshman. The thin feel superior to the fat. The husky feel superior to the scrawny. The one who reads books on philosophy feels superior to the one who reads comic books – and vice versa. The one who has no TV or computer feels superior to those who are connected – and vice versa. Beatles fans feel superior to Shania Twain fans. Fans of Toby Keith feel superior to fans of The Pet Shop Boys. The fans of every sports team feel superior to the fans of all other teams. People who recycle feel superior to everyone.

The one who buys brown eggs feels superior to the one who buys the boringly standard white eggs. Anyone who has a Picasso print hanging on his wall feels superior to anyone who has pictures of dogs playing poker. People who relish their home thermostat set at a bracing 65 degrees feel superior to those hot house plants who need the thermostat set to 74 degrees.

Those who are awake feel superior to those who are asleep. Those who are well feel superior those who are sick. The young feel superior to the old, but the old know they know more. The living feel superior to the dead.

Most of all, the man who drinks his coffee black knows he’s superior to the man who’s pouring in the cream and sugar.

I Have No McGuffin

Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term “McGuffin.” It’s the thing that sets the characters in a drama in motion. It’s the diamond that the thieves plan their heist in order to get. It’s the Ark of the Covenant Indiana Jones risks everything to find. It can be a lost dog or the Holy Grail. It’s whatever the characters want that makes them pull together (or pull apart) and launches them off on their adventures.

The problem is – I have no McGuffin. I’m not sure that I ever had one. Well yes, come to think of it, I did have one once. When I was younger, my McGuffin was love. I went out and met the day in hopes that I would find love. I knew that there must be some golden thread out there somewhere, trailing along, spooled off from someone else’s seeking. In fact I thought there might be many such threads, all leading back to a matrix of love, a matrix from which all sorts of good and wondrous people sprung. I pictured this secret society of enchantment out there somewhere, and I followed every possible lead. Whenever someone would smile at me, or seem kindly disposed, I took that to be a thread. I’d pick it up and follow it a long way, through dark woods, along mean city streets. I’d follow it to meetings of old car clubs and to political rallies. I’d follow it to poetry readings and rugby games.

But none of those threads ever led to love. They led to people who had completely different McGuffins from mine. They led to people who wanted sex or money, action, excitement, or titillation. They led to people who just wanted to sell me insurance. They led to people who wanted me to cater to their partialities, or to merely tend them through some oncoming down time. They never led to anyone whole and effulgent and luminous with the capacity for love. Our McGuffins never matched.

So, after a long time, I stopped following threads. I stopped even looking for them. I found myself without any McGuffin at all. And that’s all right, I guess. Except life does seem a little listless without any McGuffin to get me up in the morning. It’s like perennial early retirement for someone with no hobbies. I hate to admit this, because it makes me something of a hypocrite. I’m the one who had been spouting the Vedanta philosophy, maintaining that wanting is what makes you miserable – that the ideal is to live a life without desire or wanting.

Well, although I’d often recited this philosophy to myself as if I thoroughly believed it, as if I “owned” it - I actually only got a chance to spout it once. I was on an excursion train that takes tourists from Thunder Bay, Canada, up into the Algoma woods, a wonderland of fall foliage that September. It was a long ride there and back, and the people in my car soon formed a sort of closed companionship with some tacit bond, almost like the people on Christie’s Orient Express. We started to exchange dangerous confidences. The husband of a couple seated across the aisle from me became especially expansive about the things that most intimately drove him.

This couple was apparently very well-to-do. The man crowed about the expensive, exotic trips they had taken, about his membership in the best golf club at the best country club, about his refusal to take any second-rate room in the nearly fully-booked town that weekend. He’d insisted on the Hotel’s best suite – or nothing at all, and he was proud that his adamancy had eventually gotten them accommodated in the luxurious Honeymoon Suite. He’d had to spread some money around to get this accommodation, but he was triumphant that his bankroll allowed him to hold sway that way, in one situation after another.

He said he found that was the only way to go in life – first-class Or really, maintaining an interest in life demanded that he seek a successions of first-classes. He said that once he’d gotten the best of something of one kind, he always liked to move on and aspire to getting the best of something else. Once he had the best car, he set out to get the best sailboat. Once he had the best possible house, he set out to furnish it with the best, the most expensive furnishings. And so on. He said that’s what kept him moving and alive. There was always something more he wanted, always something more for him to go after and get by one means or another. He believed that’s the way human beings in general are built. He said that in order to be happy, a person has to want something, has to be driven by a desire to acquire the next thing – and the next.

This was too much for me. I rarely join in group conversation, but I felt this man had left me too wide an opening to ignore. I jumped in with the fact that most of the major religions of the world take an opposite view. The Hindu and Buddhist philosophies advise that the way to be happy is to be without craving, without wanting of any kind. I pointed out that the starving man can’t really enjoy anything, especially the aspect of the cow in front of him. He’s single-mindedly driven by his desire to get that cow’s meat. So he’ll be blind to the intrinsic beauty of the cow, to the intrinsic beauty of all his surroundings and the joy that this beauty could bring him. His wanting will enslave him rather than liberate him into any happy state. His wanting will foreclose him from ever achieving the higher happiness of bliss. Yes, I think I might actually have gone so far as to invoke “bliss.”

In any case, my outburst stunned the wealthy man into silence. I’m not sure if he was quelled by the shear outrageousness of my viewpoint, or whether he was just startled into seeing a possible deficiency in what he’d previously regarded as his own self-evident philosophy. Either way, he made no come-back. However, a young East Indian woman, who had earlier been regaling us with her dating misadventures, leapt into the fray with affirmation. My comments had sparked her to take an interest in me. It was rare for anyone to take an interest in me, and the woman’s subsequent respectful attentions made our trip into and out of the deep woods of Algoma a kind of surreal experience.

After we disembarked past twilight onto the platform of Thunder Bay’s eccentric little middle-of-the-mall train depot, the woman persisted in wanting to get to know me further. We spent our remaining day in town tooling around, seeing the sights, but mostly reinforcing our mutual appreciation of Eastern philosophy. She said she had never before in her life met any North American who understood about not-wanting. I found that a little strange in light of Deepak Chopra’s persistent appearance on bestseller lists. But I was glad to accept her view of my uniqueness, to bask in her glow for a while.

She said those very ideas had been the cornerstone of her life. She told me how she herself often went back to India to help establish an ashram. Everyone there understood her attitude. But where on earth had I, an American, ever acquired such a philosophy?

I hardly knew what to say. I’ve often suspected my attitude is not the result of any enlightenment, but inborn, a product of a natural indolence, of an abiding reluctance to move or exercise myself in any way. But I didn’t want to say that. I told her, truthfully, that I had studied Vedanta at the Vivekananda Center in Chicago. We chatted merrily away, supporting and amplifying each other’s commitment to not-wanting as we chatted. But all the while, there was lurking the suspicion in me that I was flying under false colors, that maybe there were times, more and more now that all hope of love had flown, that I felt the need of need.

Now especially that the challenges and distractions of travel are over, now that I’m back in my comfort zone of Chicago – I can wallow in my un-wanting. I have all the necessities - plenty to read, plenty to read. But frankly, I don’t find that has enabled me to appreciate the cow more keenly. I haven’t achieved bliss or ecstasy. I want for nothing. But there’s kind of a nothingness about this state. Now, without my eagerness to look for those threads of communion, I have no engine of enterprise at all. I’m just here.

I find myself almost envying that man on the train, almost thinking he might have been at least a little right. He had the empowerment of purpose. His ambitions gave him the zest for life that I lack.

I have to admit it. I miss having something to miss. I miss my McGuffin.

The Little Things in Spain

I recently went on an excursion through Spain with a popular tour company. When I’d read the brochure, I’d liked the fact that this tour concentrated on just one Country. But it still turned out to be a little too much too quickly. Instead of “If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium” – it was “If this is Tuesday, it must be Cordoba.”

Nevertheless, I’m glad I went. I learned a lot along the course of this almost military regimen of up-and-out at dawn and on to another city. But it isn’t the grand sights that I’ll probably best remember. It’s not the cathedrals, the palaces, the Prado, the Alhambra. It will probably be the little things that will stay with me - the caught conversations - the flow of a gypsy woman’s long chiffon skirt - the anguished look on the face of the aging flamenco dancer that exceeded even the proud pathos the dance calls for - the glimpse of a Valencia orange falling to the street and being kicked aside by a passerby.

The part of the planned itinerary that I enjoyed the most was our visit to an olive orchard where the yield was pressed into olive oil. Even though it was mid-November, the bougainvilleas were still in full bloom up the sides of several of the operation’s stucco buildings. As we walked through the orchard, one member of our group snapped an olive off a tree, chewed on it, and pronounced it awfully bitter. It seems a lot of processing has to take place to produce olives that are good to eat. As far as making olive oil, the workers have a narrow window of opportunity to pick the olives, when the drupaceous fruits are at their oiliest. When these are first pressed, virgin olive oil is the result. Subsequent pressings of the lees produce olive oil of lower grades.

The owner of the operation took us through the rooms of pressing equipment. He told us what to look for when buying olive oil back home. We should always get opaque glass containers, not the cheap transparent plastic containers that most grocery stores sell. We should store the olive oil in a cool place, so it wouldn’t turn rancid.

Then an unexpected treat. The owner said that in Spain, people put olive oil on EVERYTHING. He served each of us a dish of chocolate fudge nut ice cream with olive oil drizzled on top. The olive oil he used had been infused with orange essence. So maybe that was cheating a little, but either way - delicious!

Later, we took an off-schedule side trip to the home of a cave-dweller toward the north of Spain. Centuries before, caves had been carved out of the clay mountains in the region. Now the residences are by law passed down within families. It takes special dispensation to buy one of these dwellings.

We climbed a metal staircase and entered an earthy-smelling low vault of a room with white-washed walls. The friendly young family living in this cave had made a modest tourist attraction of their home, without in any way subverting their lives. We were conducted through the various rooms, including the children’s bedrooms, all branching off from that main vaulted dining room. Electricity was run in from the town’s main street and operated everything in the house. There was no need for heating or cooling. We were told the cave stayed at a nearly constant 69 degrees F. because clay is a wonderful insulator.

There was a second story to this cave residence. The family had made a museum out of those rooms, stocking them with artifacts showing how life was in their town in the 1800’s. But the main impression I walked away from this tour with was the overall sweet contentment of the family. They were independent illustrations of that sampler injunction to “Grow where you’re planted.” They were where their ancestors had been, but they had no sense of being stuck in place. They had added their own twist to the traditional lifestyle by allowing select tours through their home. And now they had it all – the old and the new – the inviting and the insular.

Having grown up in my family printing business, that select contentment with tradition is one of the aspects of European life that most touches me. I found that here again in Spain. Again when we went to Toledo, there were people carrying on the tradition of engraving the “best steel in the world” produced in the region. Our guide told us that no one has been able to pin down exactly what makes Toledo knives so keen, guaranteed for life. Many suspect it might be something secret in the waters of the Tagus River that lends itself to the annealing of the metal.

With all the exotic sights to absorb, it was however sometimes the conversations of my fellow travelers that informed me the most. It’s odd how different tour companies attract different clienteles. I’ve actually been on some tours where I was the most technologically advanced, where I could flummox other tour members by referring to “Googling.” However on this trip, I was the cave-dweller, in the old pejorative sense of the word. All my cohorts were on the cutting edge of technology, the Toledo steel cutting edge – the very sharpest of all. They had ultra-Smart phones, Internet access, a conjurer’s powers at their fingertips. Meanwhile, without even a cell phone with international access, I was pathetically incommunicado.

One couple demonstrated to me how, sitting there in Barcelona, they could control the thermostat in their master bedroom back in Tennessee by pressing a button on their phone. Everyone else was immediately emailing any interesting photos they’d snapped – to all their friends at home. One woman showed me how her SmartPhone had neatly labeled the location of every picture she took on it. There was the precise (and correct) label “West Wall of Alhambra Main Garden, Granada, Spain.” How did her phone know? “GPS,” the woman shrugged, as if her phone’s intelligence was a trifle. “I sometimes turn it off,” she elaborated. “I don’t like to be that closely tracked all the time.”

By contrast, my photos are in their usual merry mish-mash – with me often being in the dark even about what city they were taken in. Never mind exactly what wall is shown.

During some of our free time, one couple took the opportunity to tour a manufacturing plant that specialized in 3-D printing. They told me how they had seen a fully functional handgun “printed” right before their eyes. This was sort of old hat to them. They had known about this up-and-coming revolution in manufacturing for some time. When I got home and looked up likely investment opportunities, I indeed saw that that ship had already sailed. All the stocks that would give an investor some stake in 3-D printing action had already tripled in the course of the year.

But it isn’t generally so much what my fellow travelers could teach me about the technology of the world that has stuck with me. It’s the glimpses I got through the different windows they had onto the world and the snatches of their perceptions about life in general.

One man carried an elaborate ensemble of camera equipment with him, which led me to ask his advice on some aspects of picture-taking. Like most people asked to give their opinion when their superior knowledge is recognized, the man blossomed into his own 3-D Technicolor at my request. It turned out he was a professional photographer.  But he said he’d given up doing weddings. He couldn’t stand the “Bridzillas.” No, now he devoted himself exclusively to his true love – candidly photographing beautiful young women caught in the natural course of being themselves. He said he took his camera everywhere he went and approached likely subjects at every turn. After a few street shots, he’d hand them his card and invite them back to his studio to do nude sessions. He said as often as not, the women accepted his invitation.

Well, that suggestion of lechery the man revealed was a little concerning. I sensed the “nude sessions” probably went beyond innocent fun, perhaps all the way into some serious purveyance of pornography. How nude were these nude women? The long-suffering expression on the face of the man’s wife also hinted at an expected tendency for there to be “something going on” in that studio - something more than mere picture-taking.

After hearing this man expound on street photography techniques, I made a point of watching him in action as we traveled across Spain. Sure enough. He approached one lovely after another, the younger the better. Most of the women seemed flattered and were glad to lend themselves to his camera’s eye. Of course here in Spain there could be no after-hour sessions back at his studio. And since he was an older, unthreatening man, it could all be just innocent appreciation of beauty-in-passing.

The man approached one rather unlikely looking subject as she stood framed by architect Calatrava’s dramatic bridge/museum construct in Seville. I didn’t think this young woman would have been the man’s type. She sported spiky orange and pink hair and otherwise effected a rather Goth look. But the photographer did indeed solicit her to pose with Calatrava’s dramatic oceanic sweep as backdrop, and the girl was indeed amenable to being photographed. Although the photographer spoke almost no Spanish, and the girl spoke almost no English, they collaborated through what seems to be the almost universal medium of a desire to leave some record of oneself on this planet.

After this brief memorializing of the girl’s presence in front of the great whale-harp-arch of a building complex, the two parted ways forever and the man came over in gleeful satisfaction to show me the results of his shoot. As we peered together down at his camera viewfinder turned screen, he sighed in a sort of transport of appreciation, “Look, doesn’t she have beautiful green eyes?” I would never have noticed.

Perhaps this man’s activities weren’t always the most admirable, but he probably did more good than harm in the world. And truly, I envied him. His sexual impulse gave him ready access to a delight that would undoubtedly persist in him and sustain him. I once thought my own different sort of infatuation with the opposite sex would similarly be an eternal flame that would light my way out into the world. It impelled me to a hopeful outreach. Every bus I boarded, every corner I turned, held the possibility of that certain smile, that certain secret connection. But after decades of everyone else on all those busses being buried in their newspapers, then in their iPhones, with nary an answering eagerness or entente, that impulse died in me. Or maybe it wasn’t the lack of response. Maybe it was all just a matter of hormones. Whatever the cause, after having been warmed and lifted for so long by that prospect of my personal spark catching - the flame went out. It went out suddenly and no doubt permanently. Now I go through the motions of enthusiasm. But I sensed that photographer’s buoyancy, however questionable some of the explorations it might lead him to, was real and would carry him through to the end. And I wished I was him.

Actually, all the other group members seemed genuinely enthusiastic about taking in the sights. Although the day’s scheduled tour might have been grueling, most of our group members wanted to extend themselves to tour further on their own in the evenings. This unflagging determination resulted in the most memorable moment of the whole trip for me.

We had toured the Prado, where I learned a lot about El Greco, Velasquez, and Goya. I was especially surprised by the grotesque abstractions of the latter’s “black years.” But then after dinner, many people wanted to go on to the Queen Sofia Museum to see Picasso’s “Guernica” mural first-hand. But I’d been up for thirty-six hours by then, including all the hassle of the plane trip to Madrid. I declined the group sortie to Sofia. “Oh, but you’ll be dead for millions and millions of years,” reminded my fellow traveler. “You might never get here again. You have to do it all now.”

Somehow, the vastness of the void of death had never been brought home to me with such stark finality before. I felt myself standing on the precipice of that ultimate descent into blackness. Perhaps that was the same precipice that Goya had been standing on when he produced his macabre distortions. Perhaps that was the same precipice the anguished flamenco dancer had been standing on as she stomped out the last proud defiance that would collapse the earth out from under her.

Still, my laziness won out in the end, as it usually does. I skipped the Sofia and trudged back to the Hotel, where I fell into a profound sleep that lasted unbroken until our breakfast call the next morning. And so I added most of one more day to those unfathomable millions. I stretched my time of unconsciousness to eternity-plus-one.