Kindness of Strangers

My friend called me in distress; she was stranded with a flat tire in a rural part of the peninsula. I left a business lunch in Palo Alto to head north to help her, but the traffic was awful, and it took much longer than it should have to get there.

By the time I did, two young guys had stopped and changed the tire for her. "Neither of us had ever changed a tire before," one told me.

"Thank you, thank you," she kept saying, reverting to her Japanese upbringing by bowing as well.

"These angels have helped me,"she said.

The boys went on their way, riding bicycles near the Crystal Springs Reservoir. As we bid them ado, I gave her a hug. I felt wetness on her cheek.

It's hard to fathom the courage it takes for a single person in her mid-40s to leave Japan with all of its deep-rooted cultural restrictions and expectations, its "culture of dependence," and immigrate to the U.S.

Everything seems the opposite of what she knew in the past. Much of the time, cultural misunderstandings and language barriers confine her attempts to assimilate to confusing sidesteps and unpleasant encounters.

But then events like the flat tire enable her to experience the kindness of strangers that is one key element of American culture at its very best. It's enough to make her shed tears of gratitude.

And for me to be proud of my people.

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Pre-Digital History Washes Away in Flood

My return home from the desert was not stress-free. Somehow I managed to lose two credit cards, after some 20 years of never having lost anything of value -- with the costly exception of several relationships. I'd even memorized those 16-digit account numbers!

Any sequence of numbers eventually becomes like an old friend. But after searching my luggage, and checking with the resort, I concluded that they had vaporized or had been hijacked by aliens, so I canceled both accounts.

Out with the old; in with the new. Change is good. I'll just get cozy with two new 16-digit sequences.

At the house, the carpet in my laundry room was saturated with water. Turned out an ancient cast-iron pipe had fractured in an inside-out, rust-driven, jagged line north to south.

Rich came over today, cut the pipe high and low, and mounted a new PVC "band-aid" and tightened it over the remaining cast-iron original sections. Good as new, at least for now.

Anyway, the point of this story is that many of my old magazine stories and clippings were in cardboard boxes in that laundry room, along with various tax records, journals, and letters. Some of them were ruined beyond repair. As I tossed them into the garbage, I figured this is a good thing.

There is a major dilemma for those of us pack-rats whose lives and careers span the decades before the Internet era and today's world. Now, every bit of information is digital and theoretically able to be saved indefinitely -- or at least as long as the servers hosting this content remain viable.

What to do with all the old stories? They need to be scanned and digitized. The paper versions are rotting away anyway. I doubt anyone will ever want to sort through my old articles. There are literally hundreds of them, barely if at all indexed or even listed anywhere I'm aware of.

I can't help wishing I had a library intern volunteer, or somebody like that, who could scan in all of this stuff before it disappears form history. The flooding of my laundry room woke me up to the fact that being a pack-rat is not a wise strategy going forward.

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Desert Images

These grainy photos, I hope, speak for themselves. They were shot over the past few days outside of Tucson. We saw bunnies, coyotes, deer, and road-runners.

Who the hell would have imagined road-runners outside of an animated cartoon? It turns out they live in the southwestern U.S. and Mexico and a bit into Central America. I've simply led too sheltered a life to have known that -- until now.

I did not actually see one myself but one of my colleagues did, in fact he saw three. Apparently they can grow to two feet in height, and although they are capable of flight, they usually act much as they do in cartoons, simply outrunning any predators who show up in the open desert air.

Anyone who has ever watched a cowboy movie (which is everyone alive on earth by now, except perhaps the pathetic victims of North Korea's absurd dictatorship), would instantly recognize the scenes of the countryside where I have been since the middle of last week.

Movie studios in fact share a facility near here from which to shoot their flicks. Perception. Reality. This is the background for so many fantasies.

But the cacti don't know, the coyotes don't know, the road-runners are clueless. Only you and I, fellow humans, know how we have used their ecological niche as a set. I wonder whether the creatures who survive the coming global climate calamity will get a hold of the images we leave behind?

Somehow it comforts me to imagine an audience of road-runners, pausing for a moment at an outdoor theater, as a desert butterfly pushes the button, releasing the soundtrack and the moving image on the big screen -- yes, the show must go on.

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