Month: October 2013

The Lydster, Part 115: Honesty

The Daughter has a very strong sense of fairness and justice.

My wife, when some bit of my loose change would fall on the floor, would claim it as her own, if I didn’t pick it up in time, and put it in her change jar. It was this little game of hers and I didn’t much mind, though it’s not as though she needed the money; she now makes more than I do.

I would start getting a bit irritated, though, when I’d leave change on the table or the bed or my dresser, usually in order to take it out of one pair of pants, before putting it into another. Somehow, this was the game taken too far, and I said as much. Not only was it boring, but it also made being home a bit less of the sanctuary I wanted it to be.

The practice stopped, though, only when, at some point a few months ago, the Daughter was staying a couple of nights at her maternal grandparents’ house. She told them that Mama was always stealing from Papa (her current terms of endearment for us). My wife’s mother then relayed this message to her daughter. The Wife realized that, perhaps, she was not offering HER daughter the best role model, even in jest.

The Daughter has a very strong sense of fairness and justice, and by her taking the situation to a higher court, this worked out well for me also.

The eldest niece is 35 (tomorrow)

Rebecca’s been busy with lots of jobs to make a living, but it is the music that really matters.


The best part of Rebecca Jade’s early growing up was that she lived not that far away. I was in New Paltz or Albany (NY), and she and her parents (my sister Leslie and her now ex-husband) were living in Jackson Heights, Queens, NY, a couple-hour bus ride away. So I saw her a month after she was born, and then several times the next couple of years, including on her first and second birthdays.

Then they moved away, first to North Carolina, then to Puerto Rico for over six years, and I never made it down there, much to my regret, since the photos made their place seem beautiful. I’ve noticed, though, that when I did get a chance to see her – at my grandmother’s funeral, visiting New York City – there is photographic evidence that I was the one who was coloring with her or upon whose shoulders she sat. I’ve also mentioned that when RJ was three and four, she looks a lot like my daughter at three or four (or vice versa.)

She and her folks went to the San Diego, CA area, where I would visit as often as possible, but most often I’d see her at my parents’ house in Charlotte, NC. She is a dozen years older than Marcia’s daughter Alexandria, and she was a GREAT big cousin, just as Alex is a great big cousin to Lydia.

Even early on, Rebecca was interested in music, following in her mother’s footsteps. She was in some trio when she was about 16, and they even recorded some tracks. The problem was, and I say this not out of pride but in fact, she was the only one who could really sing.

Another thing was into was basketball. She was a star on her high school team, and a starter on her college team at U Cal Berkeley; I actually got to see her play live once when her team played in the NYC area. Of course, I made it to graduation from both HS and college.

She got married on 3/7/05, 37 being the uniform number of her husband Rico Curtis when he played football in college and subsequently. 5 was RJ’s uniform number in college.

Rebecca’s been busy with lots of jobs to make a living, but it is the music that really matters. She’s singing with so many different groups I have lost track; she’s quite eclectic. There’s Siren’s Crush, and the Soul Tones, and some jazz quartet.

She’s put out one album, thanks to Kickstarter, and is now working on a second one. Here’s her website. You can listen to a couple of cuts from her new project with Rebecca Jade and the Cold Fact.

She recently wrote her mantra on Facebook: “When we aren’t constantly trying to achieve and even surpass our creative potential, or we choose to give in to mediocrity, a part of our soul is neglected.”

Happy birthday, Rebecca. I love you.

Rebecca Jade with the Soultones

Avoiding conflict

I was always a GOOD kid. I had anger, but it was quite suppressed growing up.

Dan Van Riper, the Albany Weblog guy, first wrote to Ask Roger Anything:
Roger, I… I’m sorry, I can’t think of anything to ask. I really want to but… I can’t. Why not?

Because my life’s an open book? Because you’re having dental work done?

But then he came back and asked:
Wait, I just thought of a question. It’s actually been in the back of my head for some time. You’ve said more than once that you don’t like conflict between people, that when it happens you tend to shy away from it. I know several people who are like that. My question is, why? Do you have any idea where that comes from? Or is that too personal?

To answer the last, easiest, question, no, it’s not too personal.

I suppose I need to define the terms. My daughter’s favorite Beatles song is “We Can Work It Out,” which features the line: “Life is very short, and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friend.”

Watching the Sunday morning news shows, or Bill O’Reilly, or the like, I realize I would not do very well. People are rapidly throwing around facts and pseudo-facts, often yelling over each other. It would create in me too much agita to think clearly. Later, I’d have some treppenwitz moments, thinking of what I SHOULD have said.

I’ll state my positions – say on this blog – and I’m sure there are people who like them, and people who don’t, and that’s fine. People – you or others – will have a reasonable response. Maybe we’ll change each other’s minds or maybe we won’t, but it’s OK because it seems to be done with a level of mutual respect.

Whereas on the Times Union blogs, or national newspaper websites, the conflict tends to escalate, with one side trying to out-shout the other. No one will be convinced of the position of the other, so what’s the point, really? I’ve posted some things on the TU site, where I made my initial observation, then others blithely go off in directions I hadn’t intended. I let them, but after a while, I get bored with it all. It seems futile.

Then there’s the uncertainty thing, the sign of a good humanities student. I certainly don’t pretend that I know all the answers – others may think so, but it’s not true – and I put forth the possibility, in SOME topics, that I could be at least partially mistaken. I don’t have the need to badger others about those things.

I’m an old political science major, but political arguing I find demoralizing. Often, “victory” is seen as stopping government, or a corporate entity under its jurisdiction, from doing what it ought not to have been doing in the first place.

None of this, though, is the REAL answer. The REAL answer is how I was raised. My mother was great with the aphorisms such as “You get more bees with honey than vinegar.” My father’s message is that the angry young black man thing doesn’t work well in a primarily white society.

I was always a GOOD kid. I had anger, but it was quite suppressed growing up. I expelled a LOT of it in my twenties, no small portion of it at my rather controlling father. And once I let it go, a lot of it was just gone. I just don’t get as angry as I used to; sad, frustrated, even occasionally in despair about the world The Daughter is going to inherit – pollution, global warming creating ecological catastrophes, economic and cultural inequality, to name a few. But anger just doesn’t work for me, most of the time.

In fact, anger makes me feel out of control. It’s been known to give me a raging headache. I’ve been told I look like a crazy person (crazier person?).

Interestingly, then, it means that the rate times I REALLY get angry, it’s usually more effective. If I’m a known hothead, then its effectiveness is compromised.

The value of the humanities

A demand for saving art, keeping music, teaching civics in the schools is not asking for favors, Justice Souter proclaimed. Rather, it is vital for the stabiliity, even the very survival of the United States, which is hampered by a voting citizenry that is grossly unaware about how the government of the country is supposed to work.

Last month, I attended a lecture by former US Supreme Court Justice David Souter about the importance of the humanities. There was an article in the Times Union that was factually accurate. Still, I’m going to muse on what I got out of the talk.

Justice Souter assumed everyone in the room was his ally in the fight to save the arts, music, civics, and the like, so it was not his intention to persuade those of us who were already convinced of its efficacy. Instead, he spoke of poetry and its fundamental importance. Noting the famous poem, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, Souter said he got to see the poet recite without reading it; Souter did the same with this audience. The justice said that the cursory reading of the poem would suggest that we ought to take “the road less traveled by.” Yet, a study of the poem, its context, its history, would reveal that it was meant ironically, as it was a parody of an indecisive friend who always was uncomfortable with whatever choice he made.

Justice Souter’s observation is that our best thinking may in fact take us to the wrong conclusion. This sounds like an influence of one of his heroes, and predecessors on the Supreme Court, Learned Hand, who wrote in 1951: “‘I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken.’ I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, ‘I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, I think we may be mistaken.'” Hand is quoting Oliver Cromwell’s letter of August 1650 to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland. Moreover, that lack of certainty, Souter opined, is a good thing.

A book that has had a profound effect on Justice Souter is The Education of Henry Adams, something he has read thrice through already, and hopes for another read. It’s about, among other things, the constant need for an education that adapts to a changing world, which most certainly would include the humanities.

A demand for saving art, keeping music, teaching civics in the schools is not asking for favors, Justice Souter proclaimed. Rather, it is vital for the stability, even the very survival of the United States, which is hampered by a voting citizenry that is grossly unaware of how the government of the country is supposed to work.

In the question and answer period, Souter acknowledged his own limitations. He could not answer the question – OK, my question – about whether the instant Internet news cycle was interfering with rational thought because he’s not on the Internet, and doesn’t even have e-mail, though his secretary does. He’s also a man who would not miss the music post-Bach. This may mean that, in the Henry Adams context, he is the imperfect messenger, but aren’t we all?

I found the talk to be personally engaging, and more inspiring than I would have assumed from the plain-spoken man from New England.
***
The week I wrote this, Berowne used this in his weekly quiz.

O is for Oklahoma

Oklahoma USA is a little gem about a lonely spinster who avoids the harsh realities of post-war Britain by losing herself in Hollywood movies like “Oklahoma.”

JEOPARDY! category EVERYTHING’S OK
*This nickname for Oklahomans stems from those who jumped the homesteading starting gun in 1889
*It’s Oklahoma’s leading crop & is especially big in the north, near the Kansas border
*Tahlequah, Oklahoma is the tribal capital of this Native American nation
*This humorist & native son lends his name to Oklahoma City’s main airport
*The National Weather Service’s storm prediction center is in this city, also home to the University of Oklahoma
And here’s a Daily Double I got right when I was on the show:
PUT ‘EM IN ORDER: Oklahoma statehood, California statehood, Nebraska statehood
(Answers at the end)

I’ve long had an almost irrational affection for Oklahoma. Maybe it’s because, when I put together my states of the Union jigsaw puzzle when I was a kid, the piece for the state looked like a deformed saucepan. Or maybe it’s that odd history of being Indian Territory for a long period that fascinated me.

I have referred to my first wife, who I married in college, as the Okie because she was born in Durant. I had a difficult time connecting with her father until he realized that I was on the OK side when the University of Oklahoma or Oklahoma State played teams from Texas, and ESPECIALLY the Longhorns of Texas.

I’ve been to Oklahoma only once, in 1995, to speak with the state Small Business Development Center program and explain the reference services NYS SBDC was then providing for other SBDCs.

There was a woman I knew who worked for an SBDC in Oklahoma City. Her building was right across the street from the Murrah Building, which was blown up on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people. She suffered severe injuries from flying glass and other items that acted as shrapnel. She wrote a very moving story about her recovery the following year, which I published in a newsletter; I need to find that again.

The tornadoes in Oklahoma, especially those in 1999 and 2013, saddened me greatly.

Here’s a song about Oklahoma from a British band, the Kinks, Oklahoma U.S.A. [LISTEN] from the Muswell Hillbillies album. Oklahoma USA is a little gem about a lonely spinster who avoids the harsh realities of post-war Britain by losing herself in Hollywood movies like “Oklahoma.” “It namechecks Rita Hayworth or Doris Day, Errol Flynn (‘But in her dreams, she is far away/ In Oklahoma U.S.A./ With Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae’).”

And speaking of Jones and MacRae, here’s the title song to certain Richard Rodgers/Oscar Hammerstein II musical [LISTEN].

Finally, here’s Oklahoma Hills by Jack Guthrie [LISTEN], written by his famous cousin, Woody Guthrie, both Guthries coming from the state.

ANSWERS to JEOPARDY!
Sooners
wheat
the Cherokee
Will Rogers (more on him soon)
Norman
California statehood, Nebraska statehood, Oklahoma statehood (not until 1907, which I actually knew because of the musical)


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

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