Fathers and Sons

Brother teaching brother. My 11-year-old has never been drawn to competitive athletics, but under his 13-year-old brother's tutelidge, this fall he's been learning how to play basketball. He tried out for the school's JV team; their first game will be on the 17th.





If Dylan actually appears in some games, and should he take a shot and make one, he'll have his big brother largely to thank. Dad has not been much of a factor. Aidan knows the game better than I ever have, and he's a natural teacher. I suspect he'll be a great coach someday, should he choose to be.

The relationship between the boys is special, and nuanced on many levels. The younger one is the older one's tutor in non-sports areas. The older boy relies on his younger brother for help with math and science problems, computer game advice, and companionship.

As they grow up, their relationship constantly shifts. Sometimes one of them is feeling angry, or alienated, or confused. When that happens, the other often steps in, perhaps instinctively, to provide a protective support layer.

One thing I have learned as their father. If I get mad and blame one for some sort of misbehavior, as loyal as they are to me, the other will step in to defend his brother. That bond is so strong, and one, of course, I've never known. I have no brothers, and quite honestly, have never been able to trust another man that much.

I hope they can preserve their special bond going forward, given all the pressures they will face as teenagers and young men.

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Christmas Wishing

As much as possible, I hibernate this time of year, shut out as much of the holiday madness as is feasible, and keep my wallet in my pants.

It wasn't always so. Years ago, for reasons that are now hard to recall, I shopped with a frenzy, buying my children anything they expressed even a passing interest in owning. It was a strange period, my brief affair with consumerism, but it has faded along with the color of my hair.

Today's skies are clear blue with puffs of cumulus clouds sharply lit by the sun's radically low arc to our south. Migrating birds are stopping over in the Bay Area now, as they have for time immemorial.

Scientists worry whether many bird species can survive, however, due to diminished green zones in over-developed California.

Offshore, migrating whales and fish species face similar threats. A massive "dead zone" is expanding outward from the mouth of the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing can they live.

Scientists visiting the most remote atolls on the planet are shocked to find them coated with plastic trash. Japan's air pollution worsens courtesy of China's expanding truck fleet.

Anywhere, a natural disaster strikes -- earthquake, flood, hurricane, tornado, severe snow storms or rains -- the poor die in droves. Huddled together on the marginal lands, without defenses or the resources to escape, monster storms (like Katrina 2005) cull the human population of its young, old, weak, poor.

Like herds of antelopes followed by tigers, cheetahs, and other predators, monster storms stalk us, waiting for a chance to pounce. As I have done previously, I'll be presenting a list of non-profit grassroots groups down along the Mississippi Gulf Coast for those able and willing to make a charitable contribution this holiday season.

Two years and four months later, Bush's great shame remains a blot on our society's myths of equality. Many remain homeless; some kicked out of the cheap FEMA trailers by one ruse or another. Bush fought his illegal war in Iraq, leaving the Gulf Coast without any National Guard troops to cope with the staggering destruction Katrina leveled from Florida to Texas.

Whoever the next U.S. President turns out to be, (s)he will inherit an obligation to make the Gulf Coast whole again.

That can begin by withdrawing U.S. troops and National Guard units, and sending them home to Mississippi, where they should be constructing affordable housing, schools, and small businesses.

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We're all in this together

An old man in a restaurant today in Japantown overheard my conversation with two lovely Japanese ladies, and shared his stories about the books that move him and what he does when he gets lonely.

My best guess is that this old guy was a soldier in World War 2, who after hostilities ended, spent enough time there to fall in love with the place.

It's not all that hard to have this happen. When an American suddenly finds himself/herself in Tokyo, (s)he can be forgiven for thinking they have landed on the moon.

Yes, we are that different. Since my first visit to Japan 24 years ago, I have been driven to figure out how two peoples -- Americans and Japanese -- could have possibly evolved into such different cultures.

Now, I have an in-house tutor, my lovely girlfriend, Junko. Our languages are so different that many of the things we might wish to say simply cannot be said. Beyond that, our cultural assumptions are so contradictory that the easiest outcome of any conversation between us can easily be a fight.

But we rarely fight. She's a guest in my country, a weird place, led by maniacs like Dick Cheney, and dominated by movies good and bad, whose messages do not necessarily translate any better than our words.

I know this much. It gives me a type of pleasure that is ineffable to have a rapid-fire conversation in Japanese happening in my kitchen as I struggle to say something to you, dear reader, in English.


ありがとう

-30-

Loving

Today, in The New York Times, I read about a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is trying to eliminate spam from our email, even as he fights a rare cancer that has no known cure. What I take exception with from this man was his blunt prediction that we humans will be extinct as a species 90 years from now.

No. I do not accept that. We have the intelligence to have gotten ourselves into this admittedly precarious situation. So my assumption is that we are intelligent enough to find our way out of it. In the names of my grandson, James, and my second grandchild, due next July, I vow to spend the rest of my life helping our species find its way to survive.

The secret, I'm sure, is very simple. We need to understand that we are creatures just as dependent on the others who fly, crawl, slither, or slip within and around us as we are on each other. It's all about love.

My only reservation is: Do I really have to love spiders? I hope not. Toleration would seem to be enough. Sorry, E.B. White!

-30-

Learning Curves

Everybody's better around here. Our collective medications have kicked in. Five years ago, after dot.bust and 9/11, I was disconsolate about losing the greatest share of my life's savings...money built up slowly, painfully, initially penny by penny the way my Scottish grandparents taught me.

I still have most of the coins I earned as a paperboy, lawn mower boy, babysitter, tomato picker, and odd jobs guy in my early teens. Of course, I would have probably been wise to have invested that small (very small) fortune (less than $100) but the truth is I loved the coins too much to part with them.

I only saved "old" ones. I still do.

Even when I use a coin, such as today when I placed a 1969 quarter in a parking meter on 25th Street, so I could go into the school and watch the end of my third-grader's school day, I allow it to act as a sort of time machine, taking me all the way back to, in this case, the year I graduated college, got married, gave my first major public speech (an utter failure) and went into the Peace Corps.


***


Five years later, two stocks that remain, albeit in vastly reduced portions than I once held, have been on fire for over a year now: Apple and Amazon. I bought both early because I believed in the companies and their products. I've felt bad every time I had to sell to pay a bill or give the money to a family member, because it felt like eating seed corn.

But the smallish portions I've managed to keep have appreciated greatly. They are subject to the gyrations of the markets, naturally, but I continue to believe in these two businesses, and I hope I can afford to continue owning them.

In general, I've learned, when saving for your retirement, buying individual company stocks is not a good idea. Instead, one should go into mutual funds, especially indexed funds that spread risk and follow the market. They go up slower in a Bull but they fall slower in a Bear.

Your risk is reduced and the long-term prospects for stocks, as always, is positive, so as the rising tides lift all boats, your little rubber raft will be there too!

This financial advice, unasked for, is probably worth as much as you paid for it. :)

-30-

The News in Hotweirville

Here are the latest headlines in my world:

My oldest daughter, Laila, and her husband, Loic, today announced that they are expecting their first baby somewhere around Bastille Day next summer.

Yay!

As my 11-year-old son, Dylan, reportedly said, "I'm going to be a double uncle!"

That means I'm gonna be a double Grandpa!



Today was also my 13-year-old's first game on the varsity basketball team for his middle school. His team lost (20-15) but he was the top scorer (6) and played valiantly, despite his badly sprained left wrist, which was reinjured during the game.

But he played on, and gave us a glimpse of how good he might be in the future in this sport.

At home, we've been dealing with germs, American style. My Japanese companion has rarely encountered the types of viruses and bacteria that are common here, so it should not be surprising that she has gotten terribly sick this week from the stuff that is, as we say, "going around" in our community.

It makes me so sad to see her lying in bed, coughing and sneezing, sweating and chilling, trying to fight germs her body may not be well-suited to fight. I have been trying to take care of her but we have had all sorts of misunderstandings, mostly cultural and linguistic in nature.

When she is awake and talking, she misinterprets my comments so easily!

Who ever said this would be easy -- having a Japanese girlfriend? Maybe no one. But if someone did, Urusari!

New, Old, and Old, New.1

Today I was thinking that I should really be in the salvage business -- rescuing the old castoffs of this throwaway society, lovingly restoring them, and presenting them as the artifacts they truly are of our former culture, the one that existed before we encountered Future Shock.

After all, I've been collecting things for at least half a century. Old bottles, coins, stamps, magazines, books, photos, postcards, baseball cards -- the list goes on and on.

Tonight's major find was this old "compact" typewriter -- the laptop of its time. I used to work on a machine like this, and in fact, I still had one until relatively recently, when it found its way to the recycling bin. My kids have been asking me whether I have any old typewriters (they think they are "cool"), and I've only been able to answer, "I used to..."

Thanks to one of my neighbors, following the local custom of putting whatever you don't want anymore out on the sidewalk for anyone passing by to claim (We don't bother to add a "Free" sign, because we all know the language of our streets), I now have retaken possession of this sweet portable Remington.

It makes that old comforting sound, you know, clickety-click, that a century ago came from the open windows in Rudyard Kipling's compound in old India, as that masterful story-teller pounded out his stories at night.

Or Conrad, Hemingway, Faulkner, take your pick. For many decades, this was the sound of literature and the sound of journalism. Even as recently as the Watergate scandal of 1974, the signature film made of Woodward and Bernstein's legendary reporting that ended Richard Nixon's presidency, closes with a series of headlines typed on an old manual typewriter.

Because that's what most of us still used at that time. Even at Rolling Stone.

In the years immediately before I joined that magazine's staff, a group of us who were living collectively used to go out scavenging at night in our old Chevy van. I'd drive down the alleys of San Francisco, and my buddy Howard would jump out and claim the goods. His main passion was the lovely old art that graced the wooden fruit and vegetable boxes stacked outside of stores and restaurants, especially around Chinatown.

Hell, I've still got some of those around here!



They grace the small desk where my kids and I work on their math homework, and the colorful old labels remain firmly in place where Howard attached them over 30 years ago -- yet one more reminder of a world that has passed, yielding plastics, functionality, and digital technology in its wake.

Photo by Junko

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Math and Kids.1

Photo by Junko



If I had one Euro for every hour I've spent helping a kid with his/her math homework, I could probably afford a nice vacation along the Mediterranean. Of course, parenting doesn't work that way, unless perhaps one of your kids computes his or her way to early wealth, and decides to send you there.

On many an occasion, I've just about lost it when working with my kids on math problems. To be able to concentrate on logic problems, you need to not feel rushed, to not face distractions, and to not give up until you can find solutions.

The beauty of math is the correct answers must be logical. Often as not, if you find yourself stuck with an illogical answer, you've made an error earlier in the problem sequence.

I was trying to explain this to my 13-year-old today -- about the importance of working backwards from a wrong answer until you uncover the error; then you can correct it, and proceed to the right answer. At least at the lower levels of math, there isn't much ambiguity to worry about.

The other point I tried to get across today is that much of math is about recognizing patterns in numbers. So, the sequence 1-2-4-8-16-32-64-128-256-512 is a doubling pattern. (The upper realms of this binary sequence may be familiar to computer users when you stick a k behind them.)

Another sequence had him stumped for a while. It is 1-4-9-16-25-36-49-64-81-100. Do you recognize what this one is?*



Anyway, I'm far from an expert in math, and rarely do I get the opportunity to work with my kids under the optimal conditions. Normally, I'm cooking, cleaning, responding to requests from the other kids, answering the phone, and trying to contain the sense of panic that seems to grip many children when they cannot figure out their math homework.

I panic, too, but that isn't helpful, so usually I shut out all the white noise and sit down with the student and try to regain that perfect state of mind where the beauty of logical patterns becomes once again visible, digit by digit.

Maybe I should have been what my father wanted me to be: An actuary.

Duck with Fish (by Julia)

Nope, because I like the other kind of doodling just as much as numbers.

* Answer: The squaring sequence: 1 squared, 2 squared, etc.