America: Bad English and Bad Policy

I fear I'm doing a really bad job, now, at blogging.

In order to do this (or any kind of writing) well, it should be a daily habit, as I've always told my students.

But I've allowed myself to grow distracted and not given this space the attention it deserves.

Consider the DMV. For those not in California or some other location that uses the same idiotic abbreviation, this would be the Department of Motor Vehicles.

I've been hanging out there a lot lately, as I try to help my 16-year-old get his "learner's permit."

In case you've not been lately, it's not a lot of fun at the DMV. Even my son, who's normally forgiving and rather sweet about people and their frail points, has begun to rail against bureaucrats.

He also, like me, has a serious problem with taking multiple-choice tests.

***

When I was young, most of the feedback I got from teachers and peers and from the others in our community who shape our early perceptions of who we are was that I was smart.

I had no independent concept of what "smart" meant.

I was just me. Where I lived, "smart" was not a good thing, actually, but the kind of quality that easily got you beat up.

My Dad, probably sensing all of this and more, taught me how to defend myself, should attacks be forthcoming, and I think I learned his lessons well.

***

As my son was told he had failed his first attempt at passing the DMV written test, he shrugged his shoulders, turned, looked at me with that knowing gaze, and we left the building.

Nonsensically, I know, the sound track playing through my head as we left was "Elvis has left the building."

Because, compared to that ridiculous test, those helpless bureaucrats who administer it, and most of all those terrible writers who actually wordsmith such documents, he is a rock star.

The questions he "missed" were the same ones I would miss -- questions so poorly worded, so ambiguous, incomplete and misleading that no true 16-year-old could guess at what the right answer might be.

Allow me to give you an example. I have his test results right here.

Consider Question 26:

Which of these statements is true about child passengers?

1. Children one or older and over 20 pounds should ride in the front seat.
2. Children under age of one should not ride in the front seat in air bag-equipped vehicles.
3. The front seat is generally safest for children six years of age and older.

The correct answer, of course, is (2). But consider the brain development of a 16-year-old, particularly one who has a lot of experience with little nephews in the age range of one to six.

Naturally, the manipulation of answer (2) eluded him, because he was seeking the least-worst answer, and easily chose a six-year-old to be in the front seat over anything mentioning a one-year-old.

His question to me, when he saw he had answered it wrong, tells it all: "Why did they ask about a one-year-old and air bags? Shouldn't a kid be, like 12, before they sit there, Dad?"

He's right, and the question-maker is wrong.

Case closed, but that also raises the issue of whether we should even be expecting kids his age to learn how to drive in our modern society.

Maybe the whole problem is that as a society have not bothered to develop a decent public transportation system. Like other parts of adulthood, voting and drinking, maybe the legal driving age should be raised too.

If I'm not mistaken, it was set at 16 at a time when we were largely a rural people. Even then, in my youth, it extracted a terrible toll to have teens behind the wheel.

Now? If the only way we can keep them from obtaining their permits is via bad writing, trick questions, and the like, maybe we need to find a better route to the destination we all,collectively, ought to be seeking.

Time Being Relative

There are reasons to appreciate the perspective of a twelve-year-old over that of someone four or five times older, and vice-versa, but in the spirit of the former, today I enjoyed driving my youngest daughter back home from a vacation with friends up in Sonoma County.

She sees everything with fresh eyes. She said she'd never seen the fog rolling over the Marin Headlands like a waterfall today. Or that house way up above Sausalito (probably because she's usually in the backseat.)

But my favorite was about the unripe pear we plucked from a tree up-country before we began our long drive south.

It was firm, too firm to eat, and I told her with a bit of time it would become nicely edible.

Apparently, she interpreted that to mean time in the short-term sense.

As we reached San Francisco, she grabbed the pear and pressed it. "Feels still the same, no softer yet."

No indeed. Not quite yet.

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Joe O'Donnell and His Photos After the Atom Bombs Were Dropped on Japan

This post is in honor of a wonderful American artist who has never, in my view, been properly honored in this country, as well as in memory of those many innocents who perished, and whose suffering he captured so movingly.

The reason his work has been largely ignored is due to the subject of his art -- a brilliant and deeply disturbing collection of photographs in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. military on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

Dog Days Wet

Our new buddy Brando fell into the fish pool this afternoon. As far as I recall, he is the first person, dog or cat to do so. The raccoons are afraid to go in there. Brando apparently mistook the green plants coating the top of the pond as evidence that it was a solid surface, not a watery hole.

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Is That You I See?

Note: I first published this a year ago today. It remains as true now as it was then, for me.



We've got lots of cliches about the passing of time in English. Some relate to how we forget.

We can forget how someone looks. We can forget how it felt to be with them. We quite easily, it seems, forget the good along with the bad.

It all goes away, somewhere far from here.

After a while, trying to recall, the only image we can summon is fuzzy. No matter how hard we try, nothing comes back into focus.

Maybe it's just as well, maybe the person and experiences we were trying to recall were never anything but illusions anyway.

So what's left to he who would try to see is -- nothing. Once you've been written out of the story, the story itself ceases to exist.

Stories are like plants, they can easily wither and die once no one is taking care of them any longer.

In time, the story may return in some sort of romanticized version or as a cautionary tale about the dangers of giving away too much to others. Or maybe it will just stay gone, which might be just as well.

What's left? That may be an empty field you see, a place to build a new beginning. Or it may be a truck barreling down on you to flatten you once and for all.

You can't tell. Most likely it is nothing at all, just an out of focus void. There is no field, there is no truck, there is no other, there only is you and you are alone.

So, you see, you better get used to it. That's what the world is trying to tell you now. You're on your own.

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Early Days of August

Lunch in our cafe.

Drawings by my youngest (3).

"Squidward."

Uncle and nephew.

Smiler.

Sibs.

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How the Light Strikes Us

"Grandpa, these binoculars are empty."

"I'm curious about your weapons."

"I have humoungus feet now I'm three."

Those were just three of my buddy's comments yesterday afternoon. He knows which edible plants in the garden to harvest when he visits, starting with butter lettuce this time through.

Family is the center of my life and has become the center of my identity. Once, like many successful men pursuing high-pressure careers, it would have been accurate to describe work as the center of my life, at least if you consider the amount of time spent at work as a determinative factor.

Fact is, though I loved some of my jobs, and became deeply engaged in all of them, work was never the central focus for me. Proportionality enters the picture here; where was my mind focused, at work or home or in-between?

Yet by "work," I do not mean writing. This may seem contradictory, as I am a writer, and have earned much of my keep for four decades by whatever skill at writing I may possess -- for better or worse.

For a long time now, that would be for worse.

But writing is not work to me; writing is an expression of being alive. It's how I continue to assert that I am still here, regardless of exterior circumstances, distractions, hopes, dreams, disappointments, and failures. And, as I age, increasingly what I choose to write about is my family.

So we have convergence of a sort. As his 16-year-old uncle towered over him and his Mom yesterday in the doorway of my apartment, I saw three generations backlit, as well as a vision of my life, framed by their love, each for the other.

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