Pause for Purpose

Mark K August 3rd, 2009

I found a bee in my root beer today. This wouldn’t have been especially troubling, except for two things: the bee was still alive, and the root beer was in my mouth at the time.

My neighbor Mark had given me the root beer, telling me that it was the most delicious root beer that he had ever tasted. He pointed out all of the benefits that were touted on the can: no preservatives, no sodium, no caffeine, and real cane sugar in place of high fructose corn syrup.

Of course I didn’t know that I had a bee in my mouth – I just knew that when I poured the last little bit of the drink into my mouth there was something solid and kind of big that didn’t belong in my root beer. At the time I was sitting at a table on our patio and almost spit into the cactus display in front of me, but didn’t want to spoil the flowers.

Mark has been retired for many years and had been watching me slave over my repairs to my irrigation system. The two workmen who I had hired had just left and I was cleaning up and admiring my work when he slowly crossed the street with the can of ice cold root beer.

I had once had a bee sting me on the lip as it followed part of my roast beef sandwich into my mouth, so the thought crossed my mind that the mysterious object might be a bee that had crawled into the can while it was briefly unattended.

The day before, Mark had watched me swinging a pick in the hot sun, with sweat pouring down my face. After each eight or ten swings I would have to take a rest, mop off my face and get a drink. He motioned for me to come over and explain to him what the project was about and expressed concern about how exhausted I looked. That’s about the time that I decided I would hire someone younger and stronger to do the picking the next day.

I decided to run into the house to spit out the root beer in the kitchen sink. That’s when I saw the bee, looking dazed but still alive, though barely moving. I was grateful to him for not stinging me and thought he should have a chance to survive.

The reason Mark was home watching me was that he had just returned from the hospital and was recovering from a procedure in which the doctors run a scope through his arteries, looking for blockage. He had felt chest pains while doing yard work and the doctors where trying to determine if his arteries could be cleaned out or stretched wider by inserting a stent.

I let the bee crawl onto a spoon and took it outside to the table on the patio. He kept shaking himself, like a boxer who had just been knocked down and was trying to clear his head so he could get up and fight again. He took his tiny front legs and rubbed his head, as if trying to remove the sticky layer of root beer. He tried to move his wings, but they were stuck together.

The doctor had told Mark the same thing that another doctor had recently told my father – that it was too risky to do a surgical procedure – to try to clean the arteries or insert a stent – because a piece of plaque might break loose and cause a heart attack. Open heart surgery was also out of the question for someone in his eighties. Mark was advised to limit his physical activity and take medication to control his blood pressure. He returned home and was taking it easy by sitting and watching me work across the street.

The bee kept working to clean himself and liberate his wings. I put him on the spoon again and moved him to a flower in a sunny spot. He began to move about the flower a bit drunkenly at first, but amazingly, he seemed to be going about his business of collecting pollen.

I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect tonic to revive me after two days of hard labor than the ice cold can of root beer – it was every bit as delicious as advertised. As he handed me the root beer, Mark described just how much sweat he had seen pouring down my face as I labored in the sun. Assured that I was finished with my labors, he headed back across the street.

The bee had crawled to the blossom at the very top of a flower. A sudden breeze picked up and swept the bee off the blossom. He took flight, circling three times as he gained altitude and disappeared from my sight.

By the way, the root beer – the liquid part, anyway – was great!

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Mark K July 1st, 2009

Today is my birthday, I think.
You see, Dr. Hennig was the one who chose my birthday. He died this year – he was 100 years old.
He lived in Sedona in the last years of his life and must have been very happy there. Dr. Hennig loved to collect rocks and Sedona has some of the prettiest rocks in the world. Whenever he found an especially colorful rock that he wanted to share with you, he would  lick it, leaving a long, wide wet spot where the colors would break through. “What do you think?” he would ask as he handed it to you.
My dad was the doctor who delivered many of my future classmates in the small town we lived, but when it came time for my birth, he asked his friend, Dr. Hennig to deliver the baby. My parents made the trip to the hospital in the neighboring town – our town had no hospital – on the night of July 1 and my mother soon began labor.
The labor continued throughout the evening in the sweltering Sacramento Valley heat. My dad stood at the bedside throughout, but it was Dr. Hennig who finally brought me into the world.
He looked up at the clock and saw that it was midnight. “I’m not sure if he was born before, or after midnight,” he said as he handed me  to my mom, “but I think July 1st sounds better than July 2nd!”
Lloyd Hennig was always known for his mischievous sense of humor. When he was a teenager growing up in San Francisco, he and his friends would  take a ferry across the Bay and then catch the train to Mill Valley. They would stand at the train depot and wave to the tourists who were departing on the steam train bound for the top of  Mt. Tamalpais. As soon as the train left the station, the boys would hike straight up the mountain to the first switchback curve and wave again to the same passengers. By the third curve, the passengers would be rubbing their eyes, wondering if Marin county teenagers only came in three varieties.
I don’t know if Dr. Hennig applied this same sense of whimsy when he chose my birthday, but I do know that eighteen years later, during the Viet Nam War, the Selective Service Commision instituted a draft lottery, based on a person’s birthday. Each birthday was randomly matched with a number, and if your number was lower than one hundred, there was a good chance you would be sent to Viet Nam. July 1 was assigned the number 284 and I was able to remain a civilian and finish my college education.
Last month, by chance, I visited Sedona and was reminded of Dr. Hennig’s passing. It also made my curious about how things might have been different had he not assigned me my birthday. I did some research and found the answer to a question about which I have long been curious.
The draft lottery number for July 2 was 61.
Thanks, Dr. Hennig. July 1 sounds good to me, too.

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Mark K May 21st, 2009

You see grafitti everywhere – well, maybe not the spectacular mural pictured here, but you see the scribbling on a bathroom wall, the spraypainted tags on a bus shelter, or a political slogan on the side of a building. The strange thing, when I think about it, is that I’ve never really seen anyone creating the grafitti.

Maybe that’s not totally true – I’m pretty sure I’ve seen someone write something – a phone number, a joke, or a stick figure. The ones that amaze me are the huge murals that you see in cities. You’re driving down the freeway and there is a huge, multi-colored work of art – something that probably took hours to create with sophisticated equipment and perhaps a team of talented artists. They are often placed somewhere that seems almost impossible to reach – you would need a ladder, scaffolding, or mountain-climbing equipment. Beside that, you would have to remain perched, hanging over a freeway for hours. Surely, even in the middle of the night, someone would see you and the police would be notified. How is it possible for someone to remain in such a precarious position long enough to complete the task?

There are people who believe the lunar landing is a giant hoax, that NASA didn’t really send men to the moon, but rather created the illusion in some Hollywood studio. Do we really know that people create these masterpieces of street art? Is it possible that invisible aliens come in the dead of night and splash them on the wall with air brush light sabers in a instant when no cars are passing?

I wasn’t present on the moon in 1969, so I can’t say definitively whether or not the astronauts landed there. And to this day, I’ve never seen grafitti artists at work, so I don’t really know if there works are created by people.

But I’m still looking.

Tags: grafitti, street art, urban art

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Mark K May 15th, 2009

Is it possible to have too much empathy?

Not long ago I ran into a woman walking down the street of my hometown, who I recognized from a local greeting card shop. She was dressed in black, as always, with layers of clothing from her extra-long sweater down to her peasant skirt and old-fashioned lace-up boots. She looked almost like a person in mourning, but more thoughtful than sad.

I remember once when I bought a sympathy card at the store where she worked. She looked at the card and then at me with an expression of grave concern and then told me that she was sorry about my loss. The card was for a friend of mine who had lost his father. I had never met the father, so even though I appreciated her concern, I felt that I wasn’t really a deserving recipient, being so far removed from the loss.

When I saw the woman in black walking down the street, it reminded me that I hadn’t seen her at the store for a long time. I wondered if perhaps she had such an abundance of empathy that she could no longer tolerate the extremes of emotion that she experienced as people purchased cards to celebrate, grieve or give thanks. Had someone complained that she was too personable, that she was too curious about why customers were buying cards?

I was reminded of the character from “The Secret Lives of Bees” who took on the sorrow of those around her. In order to cope with the pain, she build a miniature wailing wall in her back yard. Whenever she absorbed the sadness of those she loved, she would write about it and then rush outside where she folded the paper and stuffed into a crack between the rocks of her wall.

The card shop closed recently. Perhaps the lady in black has found another way to put her gift of empathy to use. Hopefully she has her own version of a wailing wall to protect her when the feelings get too intense.

Tags: empathy

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Mark K September 9th, 2008

My daughter recently started her sophomore year of high school and came home complaining about a situation that had arisen at her school.  During the summer before her freshman year, the school had completed an extensive building project and among the additions was a brand new state-of-the art library.  The students loved the new library and began to gather there as a social meeting place at lunchtime, during breaks and after school.  The librarian and administration soon found that, with all of the socializing, the noise level was too high for those who intended to study.

The administration tried various solutions: asking students to be quiet, evicting offenders, and designating one room as the “quiet study” area.  The students countered that they had been promised a student center and since it had not yet been provided, it should be acceptable to use the library for socializing.  The administration felt that after spending a small fortune on the new library, those who actually wanted to study shouldn’t have to be confined to a separate room.  By the end of last year, no solution had been found.

This year, the administration decided to try a different strategy; that’s when they purchased “Ma’at”.

What, exactly, is Ma’at?  Ma’at is an electronic noise sensing device which lets you know when the noise in the room has passed a certain level.  The librarian can set the level and if the ambient noise is below that level, Ma’at displays a green light.  When the noise level approaches the set limit, the green light changes to yellow, as a warning.  When the noise level surpasses the acceptable level, Ma’at displays a red light and everyone is kicked out of the library!

My daughter explained (with much rolling of eyes) that it’s called Ma’at because it’s named after the Egyptian god of balance. It seems that Ma’ats duties included setting order in the universe out of the chaos of creation.

My daughter complained that when she studies in the library, she has trouble concentrating – not, mind you, because of all of the chattering – but because she has to keep one eye on Ma’at at all times as the light switches back and forth from green to yellow, and eventually to red.  She says that Ma’at is programmed to average the noise level every ten seconds, but that if a student is sitting close to the sensor and coughs at an inopportune time, this is enough to make Ma’at see red. Worse, she was convinced that the librarian was setting Ma’at at a lower noise threshold each day. What, she asked, will happen when cold season sets in?

The school is known for encouraging students to think for themselves, to question, and to speak up. Not surprisingly, many of them refused to give up without a fight.

A group of students banned together and started a counter-Ma’at insurgency, taking their case to Facebook and encouraging others to join their cause.  My daughter read to me the impassioned statement written by the leader.  I was impressed with how well written it was.  It was stated that the installation of Ma’at smacked of Big Brother and that the students were being deprived of their right to meet and socialize and that the administration had renegged on their promise to provide a student center.  It was further suggested that the school culture was slowly but surely changing – it was becoming more rigorously academic, pressure-filled and rule-oriented and less open-minded, student-centered and creative.  A new head of school had recently been hired and it was feared that this was just the beginning of more changes to come. The author – who boldly identified himself – encouraged others to leave their opinions and to join him in an act of civil disobedience in protest to Ma’at.

The idea was that every day, the students would purposely cause Ma’at to flash the red light.  Every day everyone would be asked to leave the library and no one would be able to use this brand-new, gorgeous facility.  They would make a mockery of Ma’at to the point where the administration would have to rethink their policy and return, it is presumed, to old-fashioned shushing.

I was intrigued by the whole story and was especially tickled when I found out if the device had a name.  I asked some questions that only served to further aggravate my daughter (Do they sell a home model?) and felt sympathy for the new head of school who might be facing a precedent-setting test case early in her administration.

I offered to enter my opinions on Facebook, but my daughter informed me that the cause of exercising one’s freedom of speech didn’t extend to meddlesome, embarrassing, ill-advised parents.  I’m hoping that I have accurately represented the opposition’s message, since I have been further advised  that “it would be really weird” for anyone my age to have anything to do with Facebook.

Meanwhile, Ma’at sits on the library wall passing  judgment, unaware that she might have created more noise than silence.

Tags: civil disobedience, freedom of speech, school library, student rights

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Mark K September 3rd, 2008

Years ago, when I was attending college in southern California, we were exposed to all kinds of avant-garde concepts which we readily accepted and incorporated into our personal beliefs. I remember taking a humanities course – I don’t even remember the exact topic now – taught by a young, hip professor named Sherry Webber.  She told us about a concept called the “pseudo-event”, which I have since learned was first proposed by Daniel Boorstin.

According to Wikipedia, a pseudo-event is “an event or activity that exists for the sole purpose of garnering media publicity and serves little to no other function in real life”.  Examples of pseudo-events include a press-conference, advertisement and even sitting for a family portrait.

Armed with this information, I left for a summer trip to Europe minus my camera.  I reasoned that if I had the camera with me, I would be so intent on recording pseudo-events that I would see everything through the viewfinder of my camera rather than experiencing the actual event.  I would constantly be asking myself, “Is this a good photo opportunity?” “I can’t wait to show the people back home,” rather than being in the moment and appreciating what I had seen.

I remember a few years later when a British friend of our family visited us in the San Francisco Bay Area.  He had heard about the giant redwoods just north of San Francisco and had asked me to take him for a visit to Muir Woods.  When we got there, he promptly took out his camera and lay down on the ground on his back, clicking pictures of a redwood tree from that perspective.  Then he got up and said, “Okay, we can go now.” We had been there for about five minutes.

Today I wish that I had some photos from that trip to Europe back in 1973 – the only ones I have were taken by my Italian relatives when I visited them.  But at the same time, when I travel I sometimes find myself spending too much time with my nose buried in a guidebook or my eye glued to my digital camera.

These might be two totally unrelated topics, but when I try to sort out what approach I should take to traveling, I am reminded of some advice I was given right before my first child was born.  The advice was this: Before your child is born, read every book about childbirth, babies and raising children that you can get your hands on – everything from the classics like Dr. Spock to the current favorite (Dr. T. Berry Brazelton in our case). Educate yourself until you are thoroughly familiar with all of the facts, theories, and philosophies.

Then, when your child is born, throw all the books away.

What this said to me was that as a parent, it’s important that you educate yourself and prepare yourself the best that you can, but when it’s “game day”, you need to think for yourself, use your intuition, and make the best decision for your child and your family.  Like the so-called experts, you won’t be right all of the time, but that’s life.

What does that have to do with traveling?  I’m traveling to Europe again next month and I think that I’ll adopt – let’s call it the T. Berry Brazelton approach to traveling.  I’ve started studying and preparing myself by studying the language, reading the guidebooks, and reading books and watching movies that take place in France.  I know where I’m staying and have helped plan the itinerary. I don’t know that I’ll go so far as to throw the books away, but although I plan to bring a camera, I want to avoid running around seeing sites with one eye focused on the guidebook, as if to say, “Now what is it I’m supposed to be seeing right now?”

I want to be fully present for the travel, even though I’ll have some “pseudo-events” to show friends when I return home.

Tags: pseudo-events, slow travel, travel philosophy

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Mark K September 2nd, 2008

I ran into my friend Tom the other day who was telling me about his trip to Ireland.  He told me that he had had a great time and the Irish were among the friendliest people he had ever met. They really seemed to enjoy chatting with and getting to know strangers and  the only thing that they required of you was that you bring good crack.  He quickly explained to me that this wasn’t a type of drug, but was a Gaelic word, (often spelled “craic”) that could loosely be defined as fun, good times, good conversation, or partying.  “How’s the crack?” or “What’s the crack?” is something like asking, “What’s up?”

Tom’s idea was that to be the beneficiary of good craic, you needed to bring something to the table – add something interesting to the conversation, have a good sense of humor, be a good listener at the same time that you share something of yourself. I’d been reading about the cafes of Paris and the Gertrude Stein’s salons to which she invited artists and writers that came to be known as the Lost Generation.  I imagined that she had similar criteria – bring your talents and an active, curious mind, and be prepared to jump into the lively conversation.

I asked Tom if being exposed to this concept of craic had changed him in any way – would he be more aware of bringing good craic to a conversation?  He said that it probably did help shift his thinking a little and if were choosing a guest list for a party, he would probably be more aware of the craic potential of each of the guests.

I don’t know if our discussion of craic really went along with how most Irish people would define the word – you can read some interesting definitions on the Urban Dictionary website – but it definitely made me think about finding, giving, participating in, and sharing some of the stuff sometime soon.

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Mark K May 24th, 2008

StoryCorps recently closed down their recording booth at New York’s Grand Central station. It had been open for nearly five years and more than 5000 interviews had been recorded there. I feel honored that due to a fortunate set of circumstances and a little persistence on my part, I was able to record an interview there during the last days when the booth was in operation.

StoryCorps plans to find a new home for the booth and has several other booths in operation, including another one in New York’s Foley square, so there are still plenty of ways to participate in the interviewing process.

StoryCorps gave me a taste for the interview and editing process and I love their concept that everyone has a story to tell. With that in mind, I have purchased a digital recorder and begun doing interviews. I’m working on the editing of my first piece and plan to post it as a podcast soon, right here on PauseforPurpose.

To learn more about StoryCorps, visit their website. To listen to my StoryCorps interview, click here.

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Mark K May 16th, 2008

I recently witnessed something while waiting in line at the pharmacy and I’m having trouble coming up with a plausible explanation of what I saw. I was hoping that you could help me out.

Kaiser healthcare is extremely busy in our city and I had to stop at the pharmacy to pick up some medication for my son, who had had his wisdom teeth extracted. The pharmacy was packed with people, the line snaking almost to the door. It was extremely confusing about where you were supposed to stand depending on whether you were dropping off a prescription or picking one up. Finally I was able to drop off my prescription and was told to take a seat and my name would be called when it was ready.

As I sat and waited, I was able to observe what happens whenever an overburdened bureaucracy comes in contact with a harried public, impatient to have their needs met. An elderly woman with a cane, obviously sickly and uncomfortable would make it to the front of the line after waiting 20 minutes. The clerk would explain to her very politely that her prescription was not available because she hadn’t picked it up soon enough and the elderly woman would become insensed. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but there was a good deal of head wagging and finger pointing and an occassional phrase such as “I’ve had this happen every time” or “I’m not going to leave here until…” or “You people…” (never an auspicious beginning to a sentence, in my opinion). The clerk would remain amazingly courteous throughout the interchange, but you got the feeling that she had this sort of confrontation a couple of times every hour.

While all this was going on, a woman – forty-ish, neatly dressed, relatively healthy-looking – enters the pharmacy and joins the long line waiting to drop off prescriptions. The thing that set her apart was not that she was talking on a cell phone (several other people were doing the same) but that she got down on her knees in her place in line as she was talking. I had the feeling that maybe the reception was bad inside the building and that it was better in just that one particular location. But then the next thing she did struck me as very odd.

As the line slowly moved forward, she remained on her knees, actually walking on her knees to move up behind the person ahead of her. She kept talking, completely unselfconscious, resting back on her haunches from time-to-time when the line wasn’t moving.

She remained on the phone (and on her knees) for the entire 15 minutes while she was in line and, as luck would have it, ended up at the window next to me when I was called up to the counter. I heard her say to the person on the other end of the phone, “I’ve been standing in line for 15 minutes at Kaiser Pharmacy.”

By now my curiosity was really getting the best of me and I felt like interrupting and saying, “No, you were actually kneeling in line for 15 minutes and at times crawling on your knees. Why? Can you please tell me why oh why you were doing this?

I remember when I was growing up; we visited a cathedral in Montreal where people with health problems would wait in a long line, which reached for blocks up a sidewalk and up the stairs into the cathedral. They were waiting on their knees, just like this woman, inching their way along, one step at a time. When you reached the shrine inside the cathedral, there was a collection of crutches, canes and braces from people who had crawled up there over the years, apparently miraculously cured of their afflictions.

Is this what this woman was doing? Would I return someday to Kaiser pharmacy and find her cell phone resting on the counter as a token of her appreciation for having received her prescription in a timely manner?

Alas, I failed to have enough nerve to ask her why she had chosen this method of navigating the Kaiser queue and so I turn to you, the readers, for help.

Please explain!

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Mark K May 7th, 2008

 

 StoryCorps [3:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The original StoryCorps booth, pictured here, is in Grand Central Terminal in New York. The idea behind StoryCorps is that regular, everyday people have compelling stories to tell, that we will find wisdom, wonder and poetry in these stories, that our lives matter and won’t be forgotten, and that listening is an act of love.

During a recent visit to New York, I was able to make an appointment at the StoryCorps booth and tried to persuade one of my family members to be my interview subject. Finally my two sisters-in-law, Hilde and Francia, agreed to participate, but only if they could be the ones asking the questions.

At the end of the recording session, you are given a recorded copy and a second copy is preserved at the Library of Congress. To find out more about StoryCorps, and how you can participate, visit their website, or read the book Listening Is an Act of Love.

Here is an edited version of the interview. It’s kind of a companion piece to my six-word memoir: Left smalltown, saw brightlights. Still blinking.

Tags: oral history, stories of everyday Americans

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