Loose ends, # 3

A Good Death

My fifth grade Sunday School teacher, Mr. Taylor, scolded us one Sunday morning for showing up without a writing instrument.

It was a small matter, I suppose, carrying a pen, but I remember his admonition; I am seldom without a pen.  Now, of course, I always carry a book too, just in case I have "down time." These days I am willing as well to speak in public on short notice or to write should the opportunity arise.

One such opportunity came this last winter just as the "Busan Journal" focus of my blog had, finally, run its course.

We received an email from my cousin Minda that one of my mother's twin sisters, Viola, had died after a period of failing health. Aunt Viola and Aunt Alberta, the surviving twin, were approaching 94; they had lived near each other, except for short periods, their entire lives.

Both of my aunts, like my mother, had lost their husbands decades ago. Both were feeble physically but sharp mentally. My mother, two years younger, has been losing ground to Alzheimer's for several years.

The only other bits of detail you might need for what follows is that my mother and her sisters had a brother, Dean, who died from an infection when he was fourteen.

Time, distance, circumstances, obligations being what they are, I did not go to my Aunt Viola's memorial service.

Instead, I wrote the following short piece, which my oldest brother read at the service as an expression of affection from our side of the family. I offer it here, now, because it is one of the more important -- and hardest -- things I have ever had opportunity to write.

In Memorium, with Gratitude

"We had anticipated that we would be hearing this news sooner rather than later.  Nevertheless, I found myself silenced by it.  For a person who works with words all the time,  I frequently find myself confronted by the need to be silent.  Let God work in that silence.  Let Aunt Viola continue to live in that space in my heart where she has been my whole life. I think I am ready, now, to offer some words.

"I have benefited many time, as we all have, by Aunt Viola’s good life.  Now, at this sad moment, I feel I am benefitting by her good death. I hope that will not be thought an insensitive thing to say. As always, she led by example, and it is a good example, to be honored, to be emulated even if it comes to that. Thank you, Aunt Viola.

"I have many memories of Aunt Viola, but the one that jumps to the foreground at this moment is from the early 1960’s.  My father was building a house for us on Faculty Road in Durham, NH, with Grampa Nordstrom’s considerable help.  During that construction filled summer, the two Aunts come to New Hampshire to help.  Maybe that was not the original plan, but true to their character once they arrived and saw that help was needed there was no question but that they had come to help.  They would help. Period.  Over what seemed to me (as a 12 year old) to be endless weeks, we had set up an assembly line in the living room to paint siding.  It is a big house, and there was a lot of siding.  How vividly I remember Aunt Viola painting strip after strip of siding set up on saw horses, starting early, staying late, working steadily and quickly, singing hymns, telling stories, arguing from time to time in that familiar way the sisters had, alternately encouraging and admonishing me to keep the pieces coming or to take them away, setting an example of hard work, cooperation, and good cheer for a boy who wanted more than anything to be done already. As a 63 year old man looking back 50 years, I must say, the memory and the lesson are vivid.  They have served me well. Thank you, Aunt Viola.

"My wife, Donna, remarked when we first shared your email, Minda, that Aunt Viola’s passing was the beginning of the passing of that generation.  A deeply sad beginning, however much expected. Aunt Albert has had health problems that have weakened her constitution.  We have been losing my mother slowly for some years now, a loss that creates a different kind of grieving.  I know what Donna meant; we always think of the three sisters together.  For all of their children, I imagine, it has been “Mom and her sisters.”  Now Aunt Viola is gone from our daily lives.

"What occurs to me now is that we have lost a lot of that generation already.  We lost Uncle Dean Nordstrom before we even had opportunity to know him.  We have lost all the husbands what seems like generations ago:  Uncle Anton first; Uncle Milford; my father.  All comparatively young men.  So it is not, for me at least, so much that Aunt Viola’s passing is the beginning of the loss of this generation; that began long ago.  For me, the remarkable thing is that God has granted us this long reprieve, this extra time.  We have had the sisters with us for far longer than we might have hoped.  What a blessing that has been.  For these extra years of Aunt Viola’s life, I am profoundly grateful. Well done, good and faithful Aunt.  You have blessed us in and through your life.  Now you have blessed us in leaving. Your note, Minda, that you heard a knock on your door that must have been Aunt Viola leaving, sounds exactly right.  She would have departed without fanfare, but letting you know “I’m going.”

 

Loose Ends, # 2, Geezer Rock

Are We Rollin', Bob?

Saturday, last, Stefan, my youngest son, and I went to a rock concert. Bob Dylan. Dylan.  The Bobster. Creator of the anthems of my generation.  Icon. Voice of Old Man River himself, in person.

Dylan was playing Tags in Big Flats, an outdoor venue that would be considered small by rock concert standards, capacity being in the neighborhood of six thousand or so.  Reserved seats, for which the concert goer pays primo prices, were white plastic lawn chairs set up in front of the stage and set off with a yellow rope. We bought cheaper lawn tickets, rented two white plastic lawn chairs for $5, and set them just outside the restricted area.

I am not much traveled as concert goer, but I have now seen a number of Dylan concerts and have the T-shirts as evidence.  Both Stefan and I wore concert Ts, as required, for this cultural exposure. 

A concert like this can prove to be a bonding experience between a grizzled boomer and his offspring.

"Tell me what it was like back in the day, Pop."

My take on the performance itself is essentially the same as Pete Seeger's response to Dylan's performance at the Newport Folk Festival all those years ago when Dylan plugged in and, thereby, offended nearly all the "folk music" purists. Seeger is reported to have said that he wanted an ax to cut the cables to Dylan's amplifiers.  Years later he explained that it was too loud -- he could not actually hear the music.

Little has changed in that regard.  Dylan is still kicking out the slats, blasting the faint of heart into the next county, rockin' with the best and baddest of the rockers.  All the cliches apply. Too loud for nuanced analysis. 

I listened hard during each number to catch a line, lyric or melody that would tell me what song I was listening to; but it was generally hard going. I leaned over to shout a title at Stefan when I figured out what we were hearing.  That happened for maybe half the numbers, although I know every song on the playlist that we found on Google later.  Consequently, I shall not evaluate the finer points of the concert.  A very clear, detailed, and presumably accurate assessment of Dylan's new arrangements, shifts in lyrics, and the implications of these things for Dylan-watchers appeared in the New York Times shortly after Labor Day for those who want a real review. For most of us at Tags, nuance was beside the point.

The audience was clearly a veteran Dylan audience, closer in median age to Dylan, who has passed 70, than to my son, who is 26. Most of us sat down for the concert, comfortable in our plastic lawn chairs. No crowd surfing that I am aware of, although several beach balls surfaced early in the concert, but they sank fairly quickly.

Most of the dancing in the aisles seemed to be in the direction of the latrines, which were a cultural experience in themselves.  For the men, at least, the latrine consisted mainly of long aluminum troughs that reminded me of junior high summer camp. The aisle dancing, beer drinking, and the latrines were linked in a direct and urgent way.  I caught only one brief whiff of grass during a concert that lasted the better part of two hours, not the now legendary saturation fogging that were rumored to produce contact highs. And I spotted only one forty-ish dude with the intense glazed deadpan look indicating he was experimenting with serious brain chemistry.

To be fair, a few other observations of the crowd are in order before I quit. There were many vintage concert T-shirt, most of which were tented out by paunches and broad hips. As one might expect, there was a high per capita incidence of bad grey pony tails, curiously braided beards, and geezer-hip clothing choices. On the whole we were generally a tame bunch; most of us looked just like middle class white people flirting with retirement.

Due to the 10 p.m. "noise curfew" in Big Flats, the concert ended on time. We called Bob and his band back for a new treatment of "Blowing in the Wind," and then we all responsibly left to find our cars. Most of us are cautious of the dangers of night driving these days. I suspect we are also more mindful of bed time than we were a half century ago when Dylan first plugged in and jolted the music scene.

Still, it was a fun night rocking in the free world with my boy -- tripping, musically speaking, in our plastic lawn chairs.  As another geezer band wrote in an earlier age, "I know it's only rock'n'roll, but I like it!"

Loose Ends, Number One

In late January I posted the last of my Busan travel blogs.

At the time, I had a new awareness that travel writing can only be convincing if one is actually traveling.  Once the traveling ends, the identity of the blog begins to fade; it loses urgency for both the writer and the reader.

Consequently -- the hiatus.

In 1998 -- at the end of the last communication-technology Ice Age -- I began writing a column for a local newspaper.  My column was one of four columns written by Houghton people to be published weekly, in rotation; each of us planned to write one column every four weeks.  We had contracted together with the newspaper and were to be paid, at least initially, $15 per column -- not quite enough even in 1998 to allow me to quit my day job, but enough to push our work into the professional category.

A newspaper column is a bit like a blog, or can be.

The four of us all did something a bit different, as one might expect. My column was called "Something to Chew on" -- what I thought at the time was a clever, though indirect, nod both to my tendency to choose eclectic subjects and to our location in dairy country.  I had charmed myself by imagining that I chose to observe the world around me in a kind of wide-eyed bovine wonder.

Don't think about that too long, please. My point here is actually with the end of that column rather than with its inception and intentions.

I submitted my last column in 2003.  By then I was the last columnist standing from the original four.  Two of the writers had, in a manner of speaking, written themselves out.  The third, Jack Leax, a well published local poet and writer, had already gotten a book out of his columns, Out Walking, and did not want the column deadline any more.

I will add that conditions at our newspaper had changed as well.  A new editor had replace the editor we had been working with and the money, for no apparent reason, had stopped coming.

I had hoped to continue writing my column.  But I discovered I could not. Something significant had changed.

[Views of St.Paul's from the far end of the Millennium Bridge, London, October 2010.]

My last column ran a month before the US military began its "Shock and Awe" operation in the Middle East. In that column I had suggested that if there were an alternative to war the Administration was obviously preparing us for -- if an alternative existed, we ought to try it.

I would like to think that had I continued to write my column, I would have tried to express the anguish I was feeling over the Administration's decision to fight. In any case, I was literally unable to continue writing the short pastoral essays that had been my column for five years.

Maybe not continuing was a bit of cowardice on my part. Maybe it was simply writer's block occasioned by my inability to detach myself from the horror of war, albeit from my safe side of the globe.  At any rate, although I wrote or started many drafts for columns, I was not able to submit any of them. They refused to come together.  I was not able to see my way forward from that point with that column.

Something of the same sort has happened with my travel blog.  Eight months ago I realized I could no longer find my way forward with my Busan Journal, given its focused identity and assumptions.

What I have determined is that I will launch a new blog in the old space, featuring the same old writer but with a new identity that will gradually make itself apparent.  While that is playing out, I thank you for reading past blog posts.  And I hope you will want to read the new ones.

Travel Impressions and Images

Crumbling Walls and Bare Naked Trees

When I began my blog in August 2010 at the outset of our year of travels, I hoped to learn from doing. I knew only that I did not want the blog to be a diary or a journal.  But beyond that limitation, I had no clear sense of what I would find myself doing.

The starting point for our trips, which I thought might be reflected in what I wrote, was to see and to listen; to understand without judging; and to record the places, the people, the events, and the culture as we encountered them. Or maybe I should say, as I understood them. I intended to experience without prejudice.

Built into our program was the possibility that we might settle, however temporary and however oblivious, into the cultures hosting us. But because we intended to be residents not tourists, I suppose you might say we began with prejudice:  that to be a resident would afford a better understanding, a clearer view of whatever the culture offered.

It was, I think now, a high ambition, full of hope and leavened with optimism. It required a kind of quiet patience, such as shown by the little dog who waits patiently on the doorstep of the vicarage at St. Augustine's Church. Or at least a willingness to adapt to whatever life requires, as, I suppose, is true of this vine we found at a Buddhist temple in Busan.

And after a post or two, someone suggested I add pictures, since people like pictures and without them the words have a tendency to pile up.  So I learned to include pictures. It took a while, despite the ease of the process, because even simple technologies do not seem at all obvious to my manually oriented mind.

I had been taking photographs already, first as a memory aid for the writing that would come later, and then once persuaded to use them, as a way to illustrate in my blog.  A picture may not be worth a thousand words exactly, but it is worth a handful of words at least if it can be managed properly.

Almost immediately I realized I did not want to use pictures simply to illustrate my narratives. I don't have a story to go with this very Korean stone wall, so un-British, so un-American, yet I find it fascinating. Clearly the photographs would never be just a memory spur or just a way to fill out my word pictures.  I somehow came to understand that photographs are a source of information, emotional as well as logical, in their own right. 

At some point, they simply became a way of seeing things.

All that to say, the photographs are their own reason for appearing in the blog.  It would be too disturbing, I suppose, to say that they are a window into my mind. They are, rather, partners with the writing in exploring the territory, whatever that is.

And sometimes, as with these pictures of Grace Oh's babies taken at a restaurant in Seoul last March, they tell their own stories.

New Year Book Review

 On Reading, Korea, and the Long View

 

End of the year commentators are in agreement apparently that 2011 was, well, bad news all around and we are well to be rid of it. Much of this badmouthing arises from national or global events about which there is little room to argue, although many people have felt personal unhappiness as well. Some would just like life to get better; others have gone to the trouble of making resolutions to correct their woes.

While there are areas of my life that might well benefit from improvement, I am not making resolutions myself.  And while 2011 had its share of catastrophes, I can't say that it was worse on average than many other years. By December most of us have grown tired of what we have and we'd like a fresh start. 

For me personally, however, 2011 was actually a wonderful year, the highlight of which was spending 19 weeks in Busan, Republic of Korea. 

2011 was also a bumper year for reading books --  for me, at least. I finished the year at 57, a total that may not be a personal record but is certainly in the top two or three totals for any year since I have been keeping track.

For nearly forty years, I have recorded the books I read.  I note down, usually, title, author, genre, and the month I finished.  For a while I did not include books that I finished for a second or third time; but now I do.A second reading is not necessarily a faster reading, and I am by nearly any measure a slow reader.  Not a promising characteristic in an English teacher.

It took me a few years to establish the habit -- the habit of recording what I read, that is -- and I have modified the particulars from time to time. I typed the titles on 4x6 cards for a few years, for example, which I then stapled into the notebook, a modification that clearly involved too many unnecessary steps.

There are some notable gaps in my record keeping as well, especially when I was getting started. The gaps pain me a bit now because I would love to know what books I actually read during my college years.  Or during high school, when presumably I actually did read a few books from cover to cover.

My first entry is dated December 1973, the year I finished my Masters Degree and also the year I began teaching -- which means I have no record of what I would like to think of as extensive reading for my Masters program, nor of what I read as I struggled to learn how to teach during that painful first year. Both of these "missing" lists of titles might provide insight given where my interests have taken me.

The fact that I finished 57 books in 2011, a tid-bit of personal trivia, is largely unremarkable. There are many faster and more prolific readers around. Furthermore, any literary detective worth her salt could easily point out that 9 of these books were poetry, which, as we all know, are usually thin volumes with considerable white space. Another half dozen are short fictions translated from Korean, no more than 100 pages or so.  Admittedly, 57 is a misleading number.  Still . . .

If the number is notable at all, it is notable for two reasons.  The first is practical:  I have no more room in the notebook that I have used since 1973 to keep my yearly lists. [A footnote here that may be of interest: the notebook itself was rescued from a friend who was discarding it as "smoke damaged" after a fire ruined it.  Apparently, a bag of garbage in his entryway smoldered for several hours and filled that end of his house with heavy black smoke.  The notebook still carries smoke marks on its cover.]

In a way, not surprisingly, my book count embraced and benefited from my months in Korea. In addition to the short fictions mentioned above, by such writers as Gong JiYoung, Kim Dong-Ni, Ch'ae Man-shik, and Hwang Soon-Won, and the poetry of Kim Chiha,So Chong Ju, and Ku Sang, I found myself drawn into the work of Korean-American writers in a way I had not anticipated. Reading Chang-rae Lee in Korea, for example, illuminated his characters in a way that simple reflection would not have afforded.

Most of the Asian poetry and some of the fiction was given to me by our good friend Lee Joo-yub, who understood that I needed a systematic grounding in a literature that I had been randomly picking at. So my reading, and my four month immersion in Korean life, and one of the people who made our time not only possible and profitable, but also enjoyable came together nicely to make 2011 a very good year, all in all. 

With the new year, I have closed the old notebook, so to speak, and begin a new one.  I made my first entry this morning, so I am off to a good start for 2012. I don't expect to read 57 books this year, nor do I expect to keep making entries into the new notebook for the next 39 years.  But I will give it a shot anyway.

Busan Journal, bloggus interruptus

Down at Heels

We sought advice before we left for London in 26 August 2010. What to take, what to anticipate, how to pack. Perhaps the best piece of advice that came from our seeking was Jim Wardwell's advice to take two pair of comfortable shoes.  Why two?  Because experience told him that one pair was bound to get wet in the well-know English rain and I would need a second pair as a dry backup.

He gave good advice. I took two pair of comfortable footwear to see me through an inclement English autumn. One pair was my New Balance cross-trainers, useful for running, walking, and just kicking around. I own several pair of what we call "school shoes" or dress shoes for wearing to the office or to church on Sunday.  But none of these actually fit the "comfortable" category when the walking, as I imagined it, would involve lots of city streets and sidewalks, the occasional journey to outlying towns and villages, and perhaps a hike or two somewhere in the country.

More recently -- over the recent Thanksgiving holiday my youngest son asked me if I had finished with my travel blog.  He may have used the word abandoned.

No, I responded, perhaps too quickly, I have plenty of material I want to write about.  I want to get back to the Busan Journal.

For complex reasons, however, I have let the blog suffer what I hope is not a career ending hiatus. As with the comfortable shoe story left unfinished above, I fully expect to return to the blog project, this travel account, my impressions of a year away from home. In making the adjustment back to my sedentary life of teaching in the little New York village I have lived in for 27 years, I have discovered that my paying job keeps getting in the way. Adjustment, like the blog, is incomplete, in process.

Well, now the semester is over, the papers are read, the grades have been agonized over and entered into the computer.  During this Christmas break, I plan to resume my blog, to finish my China story and to write a few pieces dealing with my impressions of Korea. I may also, before too much more time has elapsed, write a few pieces about this year of travels generally and, I think now, even compare London with Busan.

As with the blog, I must return to the story I began with. The end of the comfortable shoe story is simply this: following the good Wardwell's advice, I bought a pair of Merrill's before we left for London and I wore them every day.  They are by far the most comfortable and durable shoes I have ever owned.

The heels of these shoes showed very little wear after four months of tramping about London. Bearing in mind that I generally abuse the heels of my shoes, that I wore my cross-trainers only twice, and that we either walked or took public transport for our daily touring, the durability of my shoes, including heels, was remarkable.

So remarkable, in fact, that I took the same comfortable shoes to Korea and wore them for nearly five months, again without benefit of a car. In Busan we did get caught out in the rain on several occasions, and I came home with sopping feet.  But the shoes dried quickly.  If I loosened the laces and pulled the tongue forward, they always dried over night. I actually needed my back-up footwear on very few occasions.
 
I am still wearing the globe-trotting Merrill's, although they have developed a few worn spots in the usual places.

For those of you who have traveled with me from my first posts back in September 2010, thank you. I have a few more bits to write and post, so I hope you will come along.  My intention is to post more regularly and avoid the kind of gap that exists between this post and the last. That is, I hope to be a better person.  Starting now.

As for my trusty Merrill's, I will likely wear them until either the shoes or the comfort level disintegrate.  But I did buy a new pair last week, which will serve for the time being as my back-up pair.  It is my hope to raise their status to first pair the next time I am in London or Busan.

Busan Journal,China Adventure, Part IV: Edward's House

The Family House

When I picture a house in China, the image I usually summon is a quaint old single-story row house with a curving roof line on a crowded, crooked alley.Or maybe in a modern city, an apartment in a high rise with narrow hallways and small rooms. Like most people of our time who have not traveled, my brain pulls together a lot of notions from movies I have seen. Impressions of America are compiled in the same fragmented and haphazard way I should think.

Edward's family apartment, where we went to meet his grandmother on the evening of our second night in Shenzhen comes close to what I had imagined, although the rooms were bigger and more numerous.  It was good to see a real family dwelling to replace what I had inaccurately imagined
.

Just before noon of that day, after our visit to the cultural center of Shenzhen and meeting up with "our kids," we got into cars for a ride to the development where Edward's parents are building a new house. I use the word "development" here, but here too what we found is not what I usually think of in American terms as a development.  It is in fact a huge gated community, with the amenities of a city on the premises.

These amenities would include six golf courses and the "country club" complex where we had "lunch"  before we actually visited the house itself. I took pictures of everything in sight, of course, including the huge scale model of the community.

Lunch was a buffet that defies description.  I was so impressed that a noodle chef, one among many chefs, was actually making "fresh" noodles as we browsed the food options that I stopped to make a video of his performance.  My interest was greeted with laughter from the other chefs, who applauded when I finished. I think maybe the video may have brought him some teasing, too.

There was enough physical drama involved in turning a lump of noodle dough into the long thin uniform noodles we are used to eating to keep an army of kids entertained.

While I am aware that noodles do not originate in cellophane packages on grocery store shelves, I have never seen them made before.  I suppose it is a little like the proverbial city kid who has never gotten closer to a cow than the milk carton in a store. What a treat.

After eating we headed for the new Zhang house, which has a gate of its own off a cobblestone residential street. As one impressive sign of China's growing affluence, there are quite a few of these houses being built and occupied in this newly developed area.

The house has four floors with each floor being designated by its function or by the family members occupying the floor.  Edward and his brother, for example, have a floor, with their own bedrooms, sitting room, and game room.  His parents have another floor.  As the house was not yet occupied and at that point only partially furnished, many of the rooms have a similar look in my photographs. But we spent quite a bit of time touring room to room, floor to floor.

The central living room is dominated by a twenty foot ceiling and a huge chandelier. Midway to the ceiling along the back wall is the balcony overlook of the floor Edward and his brother will occupy.

Due to its stage in the process of being furnished, as I have said, much of what we saw had to be filled in with explanation as to what would be added before the family moved in, as with this bedroom.

The marble walls, hardwood floors, ornamented wood furniture styles are all apparent, although the stuff of family life had not arrived.

We were, of course, all impressed and envious of the video room with its high tech cushioned seats,

and the Olympic sized pool table,

and the sitting room between the two where Edward's mother served us tea and snacks.

It is hard to construct an adequate picture of the house even using pictures.  There was a huge kitchen, two dining rooms (dedicated to Chinese style eating or western style eating), laundry room, maids' rooms, sitting areas, an elevator, flat screen TVs on the wall in nearly every room in the house, bathrooms everywhere, a huge garage, and places we didn't even get to.

It seemed a little too much for one family of four, which is the way an American mind works.  But a better way to think about it is that it is a family home for the extended family.  This means that when uncles and aunts and cousins, brothers and sisters and spouses, grandparents, family friends and invited guests come, as is likely, on holidays or festival days, there is room for everyone to eat, play, talk, sleep, and hang out.  I'm not sure how the modern term "hang out" fits the traditional Chinese occasions to gather as a family, but it is a similar idea.

Outside, the house offers many different looks.  The architecture is interesting, and I got better photographs from the yard or looking toward the neighborhood than I did inside.  Sadly, my skills are not always up to the task at hand.

This view from the back yard almost shows the chandelier through the tall windows middle right. The central ground floor glass doors leads straight to the pool table. But the highlight of the back yard is the fish pond to the left of where this picture is taken,

an outdoor sitting area in the other direction,

and a golf course beyond the wall, giving the view from the house a feel of being out in the wild and well-tended countryside.

Then it was back to the Shenzhen center for another big royal feast and introductions to Edward's grandmother.

Probably the most astonishing thing about the house for us was when Edward told us that his father was under the impression that this was how most Americans lived.  An interesting observation, not all that different in its way from how I had imagined the Chinese live.