Month: May 2019

Bruncle, part four

“Dirt isn’t dirty.”

As we grew up, and as the family grew in number, dinnertime at Bedside Manor I on Riverbrook Avenue was a semi-sacred ritual. The dining room — literally an extension of the kitchen floor — was home of the massive Fedders window A/C unit, the one Dad had a 220-volt outlet installed for. The only other electro-cooler in the house belonged to Bill and Julie; the rest of us either got our fill of chill at the evening meal, or pretended the attic fan actually got some air moving.

All year long, but especially in the warmer months, we crowded around the elliptical table with all three extension leafs jammed in, sitting in mostly matched chairs (but not all), elbow to elbow, scoping out the mixing bowls and pots and pans (why wash serving dishes as well as cooking pots), and hoping the nice ear of corn was still there when we got to grab.

Dad spent as much time as needed with each patient, which led to a crowded waiting room that lived up to its name, and which also led to irregular times for dinner. We always ate together; at least, that was the case until high school evening activities superseded the sacred supper.

Having Richard at the table with us was a treat because (a) he came pre-loaded with after-school activities (student council, basketball) and (b) he did a great job of translating and otherwise diplomatically shuttling between us kids and our parents.

He also was a font of quirky trivia.

One evening, when the air outside was easily 100 and the Fedders was huffing and puffing but far from blowing the house down, dinner became like a picnic.

Ants.

Fat black ones.

Fat black ones moseying across the dinner table, one of them on the back of my left hand.

I finger-flicked it with my right hand to somewhere in the living room and headed to the downstairs half-bath to wash my hands.

“You don’t have to,” Richard pointed out.

“Why not? Ants are dirty. They’re in the dirt all day.”

“Dirt isn’t dirty,” The Seventh Boy explained, detailing silicates and organics and dust and probably — memory fails me here — probably a few words about the billion-year-old carbon Joni Mitchell and CSN immortalized.

At this point, having mentioned those artists, I invoke the spirit of Arlo Guthrie to say that’s not really what this story’s about.

This story is about white knuckles, which shine through any amount of dirt, dirty or not.

In the early 1970s, as it had throughout the decade before, our driveway hosted a Ford Country Squire wagon, never more than 2½ years old, and some Volkswagen product.

Ford and Veedub. Veedub and Ford.

For a short while, Richard broke the string with a bit of swing.

A Dodge Dart Swinger, to be precise.

This metallic green coupe — not lime, not khaki — with a darker green vinyl roof, was all straight lines and rectangles and simplicity itself, and it was all his.

The Dart, with its slant-six engine and Torqueflite transmission and torsion bars and leaf springs, was cherished by engineers for its engineering and by economy-minded people for its economy.

Style mavens? Puh-leeze!

Did I mention, though, that it was all his? Muy importante.

The Day of the Ant with the Non-Dirty Dirt (we never did find it post-flick), as the evening was starting to soften into twilight, but not fully, Riverbrook was quiet; all the dads were home and their cars were in their driveways.

“You want to drive around the block?” Richard asked.

Every emotion known to humanity plus a few I invented on the spot flooded the 15-year-old me.

Thrill. Joy. Getting-away-with-something-ing. Nerdy-kid-doing-something-cool-ness.

“Wow! Yeah! Really? Can I?”

Richard started the Swinger, backed it out of the driveway into the wide-wide 90-degree curve of Riverbrook where our house sat, dropped it into Park, popped open the driver’s door and slid across the vinyl bench.

I climbed in, pleased that I didn’t have to adjust the seat or the mirrors, looked around, stepped on the brake and shifted to D. The Dodge idled forward.

I nudged the steering wheel slightly to the right so that we weren’t taking our half of the road out of the middle, then overcompensated, overcompensated again, and finally got the aim correct.

Mind you, I hadn’t touched the gas pedal yet.

“You can accelerate a little more,” Richard said, and my gentle (I thought) tap on the gas made the car jump. “OK, good, that’s enough for us to get going,” he said.

We eased down to the next 90-degree, and I braked. The original intent was to slow down, but my heart was revving more RPMs than the slant six, so instead of heading right, then another right, then another right and down the hill into our driveway — once around the block, remember? — I handed the wheel back.

Well, actually, Richard gently and lovingly pried my hands from the wheel. If there hadn’t been finger grips on it before this drive, I definitely squeezed them into the hard plastic.

Smiling, without a comment, Richard resumed the driver’s role and brought us home.

I remember the empathy — his knowing that any teen in Jersey wanted to drive so bad he could taste it like pork roll. His sympathy — not compounding my unexpected fear of wrecking his car or otherwise misusing a ton of Detroit iron. His calm — instructing without barking.

It may not have been much of a driving lesson, but it was an extraordinary lesson in life.

A gray (matter) area

Back in college (waaay back), a friend had a poster tacked to her desk’s bulletin board, sort of encapsulating the typical student attitude.

When I works, I works hard.

When I sits, I sits loose.

When I thinks, I falls asleep.

Yup.

We could joke about it then, because we were doing all three at the same time, each of us at our dorm desks or in the Boyd Lee Spahr basement after hours or in some lounge somewhere.

For students, thinking was work, work we could be proud of, work that even now we look back on and wish we had done more of, or done differently, or done at all. For students, thinking was going to lead to action, and many, many of my contemporaries did indeed turn those thoughts away from Morpheus and instead toward Hermes or Ares.

Since then, Morpheus seems to be in favor again.

It’s difficult to listen to what passes for political-economic discourse these days and not sigh, let alone despair.

We’ve descended into sixth grade, where eggheads are mocked and the notions of academic achievement and intellectual work are belittled in favor of manual labor.

This is not a model for success in the 21st century. It certainly wasn’t in the latter half of the 20th.

To be clear: There is extraordinary dignity in manual labor, done by folks who bathe after their day’s assignment, and not beforehand.

There is a great sense of achievement in having something physical to show for eight hours or more of sweat and aching muscles.

But those opportunities are disappearing, disappearing fast. And they’re vanishing quicker than they can be replaced by something equivalent — unlikely — or something that requires retraining. One of those “when I thinks, I falls asleep” opportunities.

We do everyone a disservice when economic policies (see how I avoided mentioning “trade war” or “tariff” here) focus on manufacturing or manual labor and diss intellectual efforts.

Agent Gibbs may be building yet another boat in his basement, but he always dopes out a plan when he is chasing a murderer or terrorist. And, besides, there are plans for that boat, too, even if they’re up in his gray matter.

Skilled craftspeople can fashion a deck or a desk or a dock with a carpenter’s square and a tape measure, but that’s because they’ve worked with enough sets of diagrams and schematics that they can infer a new set for the current circumstances.

In short, there’s always a plan.

That plan qualifies as intellectual property. On paper, on a hard drive, in the human mind, that plan came from thoughts and calculations and formulas, and lives on as thoughts and calculations and formulas that can be duplicated and extrapolated and improved upon.

Thoughts and calculations and formulas that came from intellectual pursuits first, and actions second. Think, then act.

I don’t care if X, Y or Z is manufactured in America as much as I care whether or not it was conceived here, designed here, if the manufacturing process was fashioned here. That’s the value in this equation.

When I hear how these so-called trade policies are supposedly designed to bring jobs back, I scoff, because if more of these items are again made here, they’ll be made by machines. Assembled by automatons. Riveted and ratcheted by robots.

And that’s only if Americans design the processes, the automation to achieve this. Because no American in Wisconsin — native, native-born or immigrant — is going to work for the same pittance that Foxconn pays in Taiwan. And if Foxconn does indeed do any manufacturing here, they’ll want extreme efficiency.

The solution must be a greater reliance on the kind of intellectual growth that teaches critical thinking, not how to pass standardized tests. 

Here’s another example:

Amazon is asking its workers to quit and start their own delivery services, to get work from Amazon. That’s in part because Amazon is rolling out machines that can pack delivery boxes 12 times faster than humans. There’s no arguing with efficiency.

It takes savvy to run your own business, and even one seemingly as simple as a delivery service has levels of complexity that call for brains.

The Luddites failed 200 years ago. They will fail even more spectacularly now, because these weaving machines are infused with artificial intelligence over and above their artificial brawn.

To love our workers, to deliver jobs, jobs, jobs, we must teach, teach, teach and teach some more.

And when we thinks, we needs to stays awake.

Manual labor

There’s a “Far Side” cartoon by Gary Larson in which some of his favorite subjects — cows — are sitting in the living room while a phone rings nearby.

They lament, “Well, there it goes again … and here we sit without opposable thumbs.”

Hey, cows:

Nyaa-nyaa!

The whole notion of human hands goes far beyond the biomechanical.

Hands figure heavily in relationships — holding hands, helping hands, hands that comfort, hands that caress, hands that clean up messes.

Hands given in marriage.

Hands that let go in death.

Recently, though, the act of Pontius Pilate washing his hands at the condemnation of Jesus, as retold leading up to Easter, made me think of how that looks.

We all know how to wash our hands, of course: one hand over, under, rubbing, soaping, fingers interlacing, squeezing, maybe making bubbles and definitely making suds.

So we may or may not go through the ritual at the sink when we wash our hands of something, but the action is there figuratively.

That same action, albeit usually without soap and water, is there when we wring our hands in frustration or helplessness. Ohmyohmyohmyohmy, what am I going to do? And often, if we’ve gotten to the hand-wringing stage, the answer is nothing, because we’re paralyzed by fear or insecurity or lack of belief in ourselves or the higher power’s ability to help us through.

Similar actions. Similar results.

All that’s different is the intentionality, and even that varies from one to the other only slightly.

Washing or wringing, our hands get us away from something annoying, something unpleasant, something difficult.

So why, then, do we need opposable thumbs? Or any of the other four fingers on each hand?

The index finger can point to the sunrise and the promise of a new day.

The ring finger can show the world we’ve bonded with a partner for life and continue to bare our souls in a way no one else can share.

The pinkie is a great place to tie a string as a reminder of something, even if we’re guaranteed to forget what it was. Hey, human, remember?

And that opposable thumb, which cooperates with the others so that we can get a grip? And heaven knows, we all need to get a grip.

On its own, the thumb is a perfect choice for blessing the forehead of people we meet, to remind them that whenever they want to wring or wash in times of trouble, they have a wellspring of Love to tap into.