Month: February 2012

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Who Do You Love?


Today is Valentine’s Day and millions of women are getting roses, diamonds, and lots of other goods.  Men, well, we get a card.  There seems to be some inequity there but, there is not!  I do not have any idea how this day began but it is a pretty nice thing.  But, it also truly is something we should practice everyday.  I try.

I have a very special love for my wife, and a different, but equally as special love for my three daughters.  I have been able to reconcile that age-old question about loving one best.  I love them all equally but differently.  I do not have a favorite.  Each of my daughters is special in her own way and endears me to her in that particular way.  My love for each is shaped by how they endear me which means comparisons are ridiculous.  I sent each a Valentine’s Day card to each.  And my wife gets her own special treatment too of course.

But what about all those other people in my life who I love but do not send cards to?  Where it may be all right to give a card to some, it would be inappropriate to give one to the rest.  That does not mean I have misplaced love.  It simply means it is a different sort of love, one which attempts to respect boundaries.

For some reason my thoughts today went all the way back to when I was in the 8th grade and thought I was in love with one of my classmates.  She was a wonderful person then and is the same today.  I have seen her in recent years and although I do not feel that childhood love, I see her in a very kind light.  She was important at a particular time.  My high school girlfriend gets more consideration.  I know I loved her but I was never in love with her, an important distinction.  Her kindness, gentleness, and understanding have allowed me to keep nice memories of those days.

Then there was my first true love.  I was 21.  She was absolutely wonderful, and even though we were engaged, briefly, to this day there is no doubt that we had a mutual love that was really good.

After that there was a woman who came into my life briefly.  She was in it for only a year but it was a troubling time for me, and a time I was far from home.  She was not only beautiful in appearance, she was particularly beautiful inside.  Try as she might, she was unable to get me to stop taking myself so seriously and have a little fun.  Nevertheless, she stole my heart.  But the relationship was never more than friendship, and not one “with benefits,” as people like to say today.  That is, unless you consider having such a person as a dear friend a benefit, which I do.  She had a heart as big as all outdoors, and she had a personality that attracted nearly everyone she came in contact with.  Once our ways parted I lost contact with her, but that has changed with the advent of facebook, and we have reconnected.  That feels good, just to make that connection, again, with a really good person.

Then there was my former wife.  Even though I married her for all the wrong reasons, I married an extremely good person.  She is a great mother.   She has a huge heart, is generous to a fault, and is a great person to have as a friend.  We are still friends and I value her friendship much more than most other people I know.

There are other people in my life now, friends, who are very dear to me.  I value their friendship hugely.  Those particular friends are ones I consider special, and who I would do most anything for.

My point is, I love all these people.  Some of them even though many years have intervened.  And there are plenty more who I have not mentioned here who I still feel strongly about in one way or another.  All these people either have made a difference or are still making a difference in my life.  I love them, all of them.  Today is a good day to remember each of them and be grateful.

I suggest any who read this take a little time and consider those who have made a difference in your life and consider the idea of having some love for them.  Having well placed love for another person is never a bad thing.

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America’s Ten Worst Presidents


This list is in the order they took office and not how badly a job I think they did.  I am certain at least one of my choices will cause some people to think me nuts.  But before you shunt aside any of my choices out of hand, consider the evidence offered.

1.  John Quincy Adams — Adams was seen by the Federalists as a natural to take office.  He was hugely popular in senate.  He was a successful Secretary of State under Monroe and held a number of other offices which seemed to make the case for his being president.  Once in office, however, Adams became impotent.  He had to fight sectionalism and factionalism that was rife in the congress of the day.  He did not take on either fight.  Charges of corruption were rampant during his term, and Adams proved to be entirely unfit for the office.  He was easily defeated by Jackson.  Adams was sent to the house of representatives in 1830.  His career as a U.S. representative was stellar and showed the initiative and statesmanship he lacked as chief executive.

2.  John Tyler — Most people in government did not take Tyler seriously.  Even though he was a Whig, he vetoed the entire Whig agenda.  He vetoed a bill that may have helped the country after the Bank Panic of 1837.  He was so hated by his own party members that he was expelled from the party prior to the next election cycle.

3.  Franklin Pierce — Pierce was in many ways like J. Q. Adams.  He was neither able to lead his party nor navigate the maelstroms of the day.  Issues like expansionism, states rights, slavery, the Kansas Nebraska Act, and a civil war in Kansas were his undoing.  Pierce found it difficult to gain a consensus on any issue and frequently found himself at odds with his own party, and Northerners in general, he was from New Hampshire.

4.  Andrew Johnson — The man Lincoln hand-picked to help bring the south back into the union failed in that respect, and many others.  When the Confederacy put down its arms it was the Johnson administration that oversaw the events that followed.  Northern men who saw a quick buck to be made at the south’s expense rushed to the defeated states and became known as carpetbaggers.  Johnson’s handling of the officers of the Confederate army was seen as particularly heavy-handed.  They were not allowed to hold public office and were forced to sign a pledge of allegiance.  Johnson’s rebuilding of the south was an abysmal failure.

5.  Ulysses S. Grant — Grant simply continued many of the failing programs started by Johnson, most of which are referred to as “radical reform.”  The radical spoken of is that of the “Radical Republicans.”  These were northern Republicans who were hell-bent on a continued punishing of the south for having started the civil war.  Grant was a scrupulously honest man but ill-suited for the office of the president.

6.  Warren G. Harding — Harding may have been the most corrupt president this country has ever had to suffer with.  Harding is best known for the “Teapot Dome Scandal.”  This scandal refers to the probably bribery involved with high government officials, possibly Harding himself, in the leasing of an oil field known as “Teapot Dome.”  But that was just one of many such charges pressed to the administration.  Well-known criminal elements were able to influence federal officials to make deals with them that helped them dodge probable arrests.

7.  Herbert Hoover — Hoover inherited the excesses allowed by the Coolidge administration.  These were excesses in the banking and asset trading community.  In March 1929 Hoover was warned that the stock market was in perilous danger of collapse.  But Hoover chose to ignore the warnings, possibly desiring to not anger industrialists he relied upon.  But even after the collapse of the market in October 1929, Hoover continued to insist that America stay the course, that recovery was near.  His intransigence was his ultimate demise.

8.  Jimmy Carter — One of the things Carter is accused of is having been too cerebral.  He lacked the ability to be pragmatic about the economics of the nation at the time.  Carter, for all his success with Israel and Egypt, was equally a failure in his handling of the economy.  Interest rates skyrocketed which greatly hurt the housing market as well as other markets.

9.  Ronald Reagan — People were so unhappy with what Carter had brought them they almost greedily embraced any change in economic course.  And Reagan offer just such a course.  Reagan started deregulation without any thought to its consequences.   Reagan put to flying public at immediate risk when he fired all the striking air traffic controllers and replaced them either with managers or poorly trained controllers.  Reagan, and his cronies, were responsible for the Iran-Contra affair which only LtC. Oliver North was convicted.   I can assure you a person at North’s rank does not have the power to pull off the deals done in Iran-Contra.  Reagan’s mishandling of economics and regulation almost brought the collapse of the stock market in 1987.

10.  George W. Bush —  Bush was not, in spite of what others may say, responsible for America’s lack of readiness on September 11, 2001.  Federal intelligence agencies have a long history of not sharing material, which still exists today, and that is what is most responsible.  But, Bush allowed falsehoods to be the reason we started a war in Iraq that eventually cost in excess of 4000 American lives.  There was ample proof that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, and had nothing to do with 9/11.  There is no doubt Bush knew this.   This unnecessary war in turned cost America trillions of dollars.  The Bush administration was advised as early as 2005 of improprieties in the mortgage market but chose to take no action.  Worst of all, the Bush administration pushed into law the “Patriot Act” which was mostly a scam to get Americans to give up some of their constitutional rights in the name of Patriotism.  This act ranks right up there with the Dred Scott decision the Supreme Court made.

 

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The Six U.S. Presidents Who Did the Most For America


This is, of course, just my opinion.  But, I hope I will show enough proof for you to consider them.

1.  George Washington — We all know that Washington more than any other commander during the revolution, helped America win.  But between 1783, when the English capitulated, and 1789 we really do not hear a lot about him.  That is because he felt his job was done and he wanted to go back to being the gentleman farmer.  But once Washington assumed the presidency he helped bring stability to the colonies.  His putting down the Whiskey Rebellion was his was of asserting the federal government as a central power.  There was doubt in the states that the federal government was strong.  The government needed income and put a tax on whiskey which brought about the insurrection.  Washington’s popularity with the general public helped reinforce the people’s trust in the government and its ability to act in their interests.

2.  Andrew Jackson — Jackson’s election set America on its ear.  People were outraged that a divorced woman would be the first lady.  Unfortunately, Rachel Jackson died before her husband took office.  Jackson also had to weather the dying Federalist Party that said a person of Jackson’s character would ruin the office of the president.  Jackson had been known for bar fights in his younger days and had an outstanding warrant for his arrest in the state of North Carolina from just such an event.  Jackson took on the powerful banking interests of the day.  A private bank, the Second National Bank, virtually had the nation’s finances hostage.  Jackson saw to it the charter of the bank was made null, and then oversaw the formation of the federal banks that exist to this day.

3.  Abraham Lincoln — It is difficult to imagine anyone would need to be convinced of his selection as one of the ten best.  Lincoln was a brilliant political tactician which is seldom talked about.  His first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, was a safe partner for him.  He was a Maine Republican, who helped Lincoln balance his mid-west roots with Hamlin’s northeast.  But in the election of 1864 Lincoln chose Andrew Johnson, a Democrat.  Johnson’s Democrat affiliation along with his North Carolina heritage was done to appease Southern Democrats who Lincoln saw rejoining the government.

4.  Theodore Roosevelt — Roosevelt was arguably one of the most ambitious presidents this country has ever had.  Roosevelt was William McKinley’s assistant secretary of the Navy when the Spanish-American war broke out.  Roosevelt resigned his office so he could fight in the war.  He saw it as an opportunity to bring glory to himself, which he did rather successfully.  Once he became president after McKinley’s assassination, Roosevelt focused on American expansionism.  He was responsible for the assumption of the Panama canal and America’s overseeing it for the next 99 years.  He established the Hawaiian Islands and Guam as American territories.  He assisted Panama in becoming its own nation.  That territory had formerly been Colombia.  He established the National Parks System with his good friend John Muir.

5.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt — Roosevelt made more changes to the federal government than any president in history either before or since.  Roosevelt was key in establishing the FDIC after the bank failures of 1931, he established the social security system, he brought electricity to rural America with projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and others.  He put desperately poor Americans back to work with his Works Project America.  He also skillfully guided America through World War 2.

6.  Dwight David Eisenhower — During his time in office, Eisenhower was criticised for what was seen as excessive time on the golf course, and his propensity to back problems which kept him from the Oval Office many times.  But Eisenhower took his European experience, having seen Germany’s modern highways, and brought those ideas to American.  He was behind the formation of America’s Interstate highway system.

I really wanted a list of ten but none of the rest achieved nearly as much as these six did.  What I will do next is post a list of the ten worst presidents of all time.  That is an easy list, and I am sure, a controversial one.

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Where is Home?


The poet Robert Frost answered that question by saying, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,  They have to take you in.” in his poem The Death of the Hired Man.  I have always liked that line.  It is very comforting.  It says, there are people who will welcome you in when you have nowhere else to go and no one else to turn to.

I was brought up in North Andover Massachusetts.  Its population was around 11,000 when I was young.  It is about double that now.  My family helped settle the town when it was still known as Andover.  That was 1644.  To be clear, North Andover is now a town of its own having been separated from a much larger Andover.  I lived in a house that had been in my family from around 1790.  But when I was just 16, I was sent to a private school in New Jersey.  And so began my many years of alternate “homes.”  I lived in Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, and Hawaii, as well as Europe and Asia.  But my heart was always in North Andover.

Living in Hawaii was great fun for a while, but there came a time when I knew it was time to go home.  And so I did.  I was married and had one daughter.  We first lived in Leominster Massachusetts, then Lawrence Massachusetts, Manchester New Hampshire, and finally Methuen Massachusetts.  If you are wondering why North Andover is not among the towns the reason is simple.  North Andover has become a rather expensive community to live in if you are looking to buy a house.  Today I live in Cambridge Massachusetts which may sound all well and fine, Harvard and MIT and all, but it is not home.  It just happens to be where I live at present.

I have friends from all those years who have moved and lived in towns, some far distances, from where they were born.  I have on occasion asked why the move but I have never found a definitive answer.  I have one friend who was from Maryland and now lives in remote northwestern Montana.  Another who lived in North Andover and has lived most of her life in Arizona.  I could not do that!  But I truly do not understand the differences in our motivations.

I am moderately happy to at lease living within a short drive from my hometown.  I can visit there any time I please.  My family no longer owns the house I grew up in.  My sister lives about 5 miles from there in Methuen, and both my parents are deceased.  But I cannot get past this strong desire to return to North Andover and live out my life.

I do not have any notions of it being like it was when I was a child.  That is ridiculous.  But I do feel like I belong there.  I wish I knew why that pull is so strong, not to overcome the pull, but to explain it.

The pictures are a few of the scenes around North Andover.  The last is of the old Bell Labs in North Andover which, if you note, has my family name.  We also have a mill, a hill, and a pond bearing our name.  The black and white picture gives a hint as to why.  That was the home of Samuel Osgood who was the first Postmaster General of the United States in Washington’s cabinet.  Maybe that is why there is such a pull.

Well, if any of you who read this have moved quite a distance from where you grew up, share with me your feelings.  Is where you are home, or are you like me, longing to return to the place of your birth?

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Are You Sober or Do You Just Think You Are?


During most of my adult life it never occurred to me that maybe I should be in Alcoholics Anonymous, and yet for over 13 years now I have been.  I did not get there via a detox, or an intervention.  I was not court ordered nor did it follow any incident after which I knew for a fact that I needed A.A.

What I had become expert at was denial of the obvious.  I was never a daily drinker.  I did lose one job because of drinking but otherwise I was fully functional.  No one ever suggested that I possibly had a drinking problem.  That was until July 3, 1998.  But I will get to that in a minute.

Until I joined the Army I was not a drinker nor had I ever gotten drunk.  I did love the taste of my father’s port sherry but I never stole any from him. I only took the sip offered and nothing more.  But from a young age when I first tasted it, I adored it.  I was in flight school at Fort Wolters Texas when I got drunk for the first time. I managed to drink myself into a blackout.  From then on, the next 30 years, I would drink for effect and that effect was to change how I was feeling.  I would binge.  And that is what my drinking career looked like.  I would drink for a while and then not drink for a while.  But I always drank as a means of self-medication.

On July 3, 1998 I was on the banks of the Charles River in Boston enjoying the day.  I had been sitting for a while with a friend talking and enjoying the day.  We got up to move on and after we had moved only a few feet I was overcome with the feeling that it was difficult to breathe.  My friend looked at me and told me I was ashen gray in color.  She offered to call an ambulance, suggesting it a very good idea.  I said I knew I could make it the short distance to Massachusetts General Hospital.  I made it but I was very fortunate.  It took every ounce of strength I had.  Once there it took the doctor examining me about 17 seconds to decide I was having a heart attack.  After he told me that he suggested I stop drinking and drugging.  I told him that I did not drink.  The truth was I had started drinking around 11 that day and had done a good deal of that.  I did not use drugs so that was not an issue.  But there it was.  Denial in the first degree.  It was not 24 hours later a cardiac surgeon had to do emergency surgery on me, that was a Saturday and a holiday, July 4.  He said I would not live if it was put off any longer.

Still, it was not until late October of that year that someone suggested I might want to try an A.A. meeting.  I did and the rest, as they say, is history.  My life truly sucked in October 1998 and I was certainly feeling the desperation for a change that I had no idea how to make.  I embraced the 12-step program because all my previous attempts to make things better had failed.  At that time I did not believe A.A. would actually help, nor did I believe I had a problem with alcohol, in spite of the fact that a certified physician had suggested that I did have a problem.

My life today is fabulous, in no small part due to my active participation in A.A. and my complete acceptance of its principles.  I have managed to turn around every thing that I viewed as negative.  I now view whether I had a drinking problem or not as being irrelevant.  I do know there is no down-side to not drinking, nor is there an up-side to taking a drink.  I am not going to mess with success.

The reason I am writing this is to hopefully get someone who reads it to do a self-assessment.  I have seen too many people struggle with the concept of whether or not they are an alcoholic only to die in the process.  Most recently I had a very dear friend die.  She was only 31 years old.  She was very athletically strong.  She was very smart, a Yale graduate.  She was a veteran having served as a Naval intelligence officer.  She came from a wealthy family so she did not want for money.  She had lots and lots of friends.  She also believed she had another drunk in her, but she was mistaken.  To look at her you would say, “no way she was an alcoholic.”  But she was.  Alcohol wanted her alone, and then it wanted her dead.  It got both.  The two pictures below are of her just before she died, January 6, 2012.

My point in bringing up someone who young is that age is irrelevant.  A person’s income, social status, education, and most other things are irrelevant.

People who do not have a drinking problem do not plan their next drink.  A person who does not have a drinking problem is unlikely to get a D.U.I.  A person who does not have a drinking problem does not lose family, friends, jobs, or anything else because they had a drink, or even a few drinks.  A person who does not have a drinking problem does not worry who sees them having a drink, nor do they hide their alcohol at home, nor do they lie about having a drink.  A person who does not have a drinking problem frequently has a problem remembering when they had their last drink.  A person who does not have a drinking problem does not see running out of beer or any other alcohol as a problem.

One of the biggest problems in any person’s life is their ability to deny the obvious.  People with alcohol problems are particularly good at it.  People with a drinking problem frequently try to shift blame for their own problems to other people, institutions, or things.  They are seldom interested in taking responsibility for their own actions.  They are someone who, when faced with a problem, decide they “need a drink.”  Whenever I hear someone say that, my ears perk up.  That is because I have the simple belief that no one “needs” a drink, ever, for any reason.  To the contrary, the well-adjusted, together person, wants to plow through the problem fully sober.  A drink only serves to muddle.

You do not have to drink every day to have a problem with alcohol.  You do not have to have been in jail as a result of drinking to have a problem.  You do not have to be homeless to have a problem.  Shortly after I stopped drinking I met a man who had a Harvard MBA, was a high-powered financier, and was getting ready to do some serious jail time which he admitted had been the result of his drinking.  Drinking never seems like a problem until it is.  And when it is denial comes to the rescue that permits the person to continue drinking.  Like any disease, untreated, it always gets worse.

I hope this makes an impression on someone who might be wondering about their drinking.  Feel free to contact me if you want more.  Better yet, go to an A.A. meeting, if only to gather information.  You have absolutely nothing to lose by doing so, and everything to gain.  If you do not know where meeting exist close to you, go to www.aa.org and you will find everything you need.

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Kissing Frogs, and Other Bits of Wisdom


Because of some of the organizations I am a part of, I know a lot of people of all ages.  I frequently hear women bemoaning their inability to find Mr. Right.  Too many of them get tangled up with “Mr Right Now” and of course they get a lot of heart ache and heart burn.  I like to tell them, “You know, you have to kiss a lot of frogs.”  The implication being that one day they kiss the frog who turns into their prince.  But some of these women decide they will opt for a “bad boy.”  I am not sure why they do that except that maybe they believe a bad boy will add excitement to their life.  That sort of logic escapes me but those same women who are bemoaning their inability to find Mr. Right have this weird attraction to bad boys.  I tell them, bad boys are bad news!

I never found much of any attraction to a “bad girl” but I can see how in fantasy such a person might be fun.  But she is definitely not the girl to marry.  In that respect, and even though I have been married more than once, I chose good women.  I look at my former wife and I see a wonderful person who was a very good mother to our children.  We are good friends today, and I love that.

Every now and then you will hear the question arise, “should you ever date your best friend?”   My response is an emphatic, “Of course!”  But that needs to be expanded just a bit.  My mistake, when I was younger, was to be looking for someone to marry without considering other more important things.  I have come to find that the person you marry should rise to the level of best friend long before you marry her, or him.  If that person you are with does not have that status then they are not someone you should marry.  The glow of early relationship and then honeymoon wears off.  Once that happens what are you left with?  Well, you better be left with your best friend, a person you want to be with and who you enjoy being with.  This is a person you are always comfortable with, and in whom you put complete trust in.  That means, when you cannot speak for yourself she will instinctively know your wishes and follow through.

There is another part to this that needs consideration.  That is the part where you love yourself, or at least like yourself, and not in a narsistic fashion.  Every person has a certain energy about them.  This is not some sort of new age philosophy.  To the contrary, it is fact.  As individuals our moods affect those we come in contact with.  People love being around happy upbeat individuals and move away from depressed morose individuals.

Before we get into any sort of love relationship with a person we need to feel good about ourself.  I can tell you from personal experience that if you are feeling weighted down by life then you need to get right with yourself before you bring someone else into your life.  I have never been big on loving myself but these days I really do like myself.  I do not worry about who likes me or dislikes me regardless of their reasons.  The world is no against me in any regard.  I am responsible for making my own happiness happen, and when I am bored or unhappy, then I need to fix that first before continuing on.  I can, and do, ask for help in that respect sometimes and that is a good thing.

Last night I heard a man say, “On your way to wonderful, you will first come to all right.  When you get there, look around and appreciate where you are because you will likely be there for a long time.”  That was Bill Withers who said that.  In case you do not know who Bill Withers is, he is a successful singer who wrote and sang songs like, “Just the Two of Us,” and “Ain’t No Sunshine.”  For such a successful celebrity, I was struck by his absolute humility.  Such a man, i believe, bears listening to and so i did.

I am living in “all right” and really enjoying myself.  At times I get moments in wonderful and always feel extremely fortunate.  I have a great life.

To bring all this together, I am suggesting those of you considering a relationship with someone or wishing for a relationship with someone, do an inventory of yourself and you condition.  If you cannot in totally honesty say that you are completely satisfied with where you are, where you are headed, and who you are, do not consider a romantic relationship until you can say all those things.  Have lots of friends, have lots of dates, but stay away from commitment until you can not only give that person a person you  really like, but a situation you live in that you also really like.

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A Kid in the 1950s


I was an adolescent in the 1950s.  I grew up in a small town 25 miles north of Boston.  We were not rural, far from it, but at the time we enjoyed many of the same things those in rural areas did.  The street in front of the house I grew up in saw two or three cars an hour pass by.  Today, that same location sees many more.  There were lots of fields we kids could play in, and in the winter some treeless hillsides we could sled down.  The town had a pond to swim in, a number of play grounds, and a place named “The Barn” where high school kids went to dances on Friday and Saturday nights.

For a boy, there were lots of trees to be climbed and adventures to be had.  Not far from my house there was a farm where they raised cows.  Ironically, the owner was a Boston financier who hired a family to take care of the cows and the pastures that surrounded the house.  For a boy cows are a bit of a fascination.  They are large slow animals that like to moo.  From my house I would walk across the common, the town green, cross a street and enter a field just adjacent to one of the cow pastures.   Cross that pasture, the street beyond it and enter another pasture next to the barn where the cows were kept.  This pasture was surrounded by an electric wire.  A small amount of electricity was pumped through the wire with the idea that when a cow bumped into it she would quickly back off.  It was also far less expensive than maintaining a more substantial fence.  The picture below is of the farm’s main house, and what cows looked liked as I remember them.  The third picture is what the electric fence looked like.

I made friends with the man who kept the cows.  He showed me how to milk them, how to feed them from the silo that was attached to the barn, and how to shovel manure from the wagon they collected it in and then spread on the pastures.  This was truly the original green farming, the environmentally safe farming, and that was well before any such term existed.  It was for New Englanders, common sense farming.  Of course, to this day I like the scent of cow manure, it takes me back to those days.  The farm I visited was not the only one in town, there were several.  Today, none are still in existence.

The milk from these farms was taken to a dairy in our town.  There it was pasturized for delivery to our homes.  They also had an ice cream stand attached to the dairy.  It was a popular place.  That too is gone now.  The building was converted into medical offices.

In addition to several crop farms there was also a turkey farm and a duck farm.  The old turkey farm was torn down in favor of yuppie condominiums.  The duck farm was sold and transformed into a wealthy person’s house.

We also had a place called the “Poor Farm.”  In my memory it was not a farm at all but rather a place where the poor went to live.  It was a remnant of 19th Century ways of dealing with poverty.  Do we do a better job today?  In some ways I do not think so.

When I was still very young, I can remember hearing the steam engines on the railroad as they blew their whistles.  The railroad skirted the town from east to west.  On a warm summer’s evening you could hear the whistle in the distance as the train traveled along.  That ended in 1956 when the railroad retired the last of such engines.  My father liked to go watch the steam engines go by, and he would take me on such trips.

My family was one of the original founding families of the town.  We were what was called “land poor.”  Lots of land and no money but I never thought we were poor.  We lived in a big house that was surrounded by large fields and a large wooded lot in the rear.  I all, I believe there existed over 12 acres of land between my house and my uncle’s house that was right next to us.  The fields were a record of the house’s past farmers.  There were still a number of apple trees, a smallish cranberry bog, and the ever-present wild blueberries.  The entire property was bordered by stone walls, a New England staple.

To the rear of our house were a number of tall pine trees.  Pine trees are great for climbing.  They have low-lying branches that allow a boy access to its highest point.  From the top of the tree I could see the city about three miles distant.  A landmark of the city was a clock tower atop one of its mill buildings.  As a kid I thought it was great I could see such a long distance.  In those days those mills were alive with spinning machines and looms turning out garments for America and the world.  Today, most of them lie silent, a ghost of the past.  The picture below is of the clock tower and mills I used to look at.

My town also had a couple of textile mills.  One of them was the longest continuously operating mill in America.  It was also one of America’s first textile mills.  That building, where my father had once worked, was torn down and replaced with very ugly condominiums.  They said the mill had no useful purpose once the textile company left it.  The pictures below are of the mill and the condos.

But those were the days before cinema complexes and even before malls.  There was one mall about 2o miles from us but the stores were only accessible from outside.  We still had a drive-in movie theater.  There was also a small family owned movie theater that had movies for kids every Saturday.  You bought everything you needed on Main Street and not a mall.  Movie buildings only had a single screen, and downtown business areas were still vibrant.

I do accept change but I cannot say I like all of it.  In some ways I think we are blinded by promises of things to come and fail to see what we already have.  And in that moment we give up things of great value for things of no value.  We are all guilty of such actions.  When I look back at my childhood days my only wish is that my children and grandchildren can experience some of those same things.  Once they are lost that is it.  There is no going back.

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How We Mess Up Our Children’s Minds Everyday


You do not have to be a parent for this post to be relevent.  Just be a member of the human race necessarily means you as an adult contribute to what children learn.  Parents, of course, are who a child models himself after. But children see everything around them and notice a lot more than many people give them credit for.  One way a child learns is through imitation.  They also form the value system through things they see, things they hear, and what any group of people they come in contact with are doing.

I wrote earlier about how we are failing our children in education.  What I did not include in that article is the education a child receives outside school.  Every human on earth learns from his environment, his experiences.  A simple example of this is how we refer to people having “street smarts.”  Anyone who grows up in an urban environment is intimate with that education while someone who grows up in rural America does not have it.  This may seem like simply a matter of where you grow up, which it is of course, but it is a great example of exactly how we learn.

In probably every country on Earth people discuss their future when they are looking towards their children.  But most of such discussions revolve almost exclusively around two things, formal education, and religious education.  I will not comment of religious education but I believe formal education to be an extremely large portion of any person’s ability to succeed in the world.  For argument’s sake I will put that portion at 51%.  But leaves another 49% to be accounted for.

From my experience in the primary education classroom, I can tell you there are informal activities that hugely affect every person’s life experience.  First among these is socialization.  In any group of kids you will find the full spectrum from the social butterfly to the wall flower.  But be warned, the social butterfly may not be any more self-confident than the wall flower.  Sometimes children act in one particular way as a means to cover up their fears.  The wall flower is afraid of rejection but it is possible the social butterfly acts as such because she fears not having friends.  One thing I know for certain, children always give clues as to why they are acting as such.  As much as we need to reassure the wall flower we need to ensure that the social butterfly is  simply having fun and not play acting to cover up a fear.

When I was a boy my mother caught me reading a girly magazine of some sort.  For an instant I thought I was in serious trouble.  My mother was a true disciplinarian.  But to my great surprise, and of course her credit, she told me the pictures of naked women were not in themselves bad things.  It was my reaction to those pictures, or as I think she put it, what  I did with those pictures that made the difference.  The message for me was, enjoy the beauty of the naked body but always respect women in person and in my actions.  I bring this up because as a society we have this predilection of hiding nudity from our children.  But most parent do nothing to hide all sorts of violence from children.  Children are bombarded with images of wonton killing but protected from nudity.  I find that absurd.  Worse,  children take violence as the norm and nudity as “bad.”  A teacher who happened to show young children a picture of Michelangelo’s “David” would chance firing but that same teacher showing a picture of one person engaged in killing another would probably not even be spoken to.  This shows a basic lack of good definition of right and wrong in our society.

What children need the most of are models and depictions of caring and love, of friendship, of good citizenship, of heroes.  These things are woefully lacking, in my opinion, in the lives of too many children.

In school yards today the rule is a child cannot in any respect put his hands on another child.  Boys rough-housing, wrestling, and other such activities are often outright banned.  Someone seems to have forgotten that this is exactly what boys do and it is usually very healthy.  When I oversee children at play I allow for a certain amount of rough-housing.  Even more, when a child comes to me crying about having fallen and hurt themselves I comfort them a little but I do not allow them to go running to the nurse.  I reassure them by noting that they are not bleeding but they are feeling the pain of having bumped themselves.  I send them off by promising them that if they are still hurting a lot after 5 minutes I will allow them to see the nurse.  Not a single child has ever gone to the nurse after that.  What I am teaching them is that you are going to fall, you are going to hurt, but you will be all right if you give things just a little time.  I always allow them their pain but always have them take some time with it just so they can see they will be all right.

What I have seen is too many parents at one end of the spectrum or the other.  There are, unfortunately, parents who protect their children from little or nothing.  These children become adults with bad attitudes, who are very defensive and worse who strike out at others, who are maladjusted and headed for a life of frustration and failure.  At the other end are the overprotective parent.  They will have a boy who wants to play football but the parent will not allow it because they think football too violent.  They are the parents who attempt to control who their children play with.  They are the parents who fawn over their child when the child is hurt and goes out of their way to end the hurt as quickly as possible.  They seem to have forgotten that living through hurtful things is a good thing when the child involved fully appreciates how they will be all right afterward.  They will not have such an experience if the parent takes it from them.

Some of the things no child needs to see are his parents have long verb altercations, or any physical altercations.  They need to see their parents hugging one another, and kissing.  They need to be disciplined.  There has never been a child who does not try to find and push boundaries.  It is a normal learning activity.  But when such boundaries do not exist, what do they learn?  They need to hear their parents apologise to them.  They need to know that telling the truth when they have been wrong is not a bad thing.  That is, they have to experience reward through truthfulness.  Parents should never, ever, lie to their children.  When the child walks in on the parents having sex, definitely do not chase the child out but tell him mommy and daddy were loving each other.  Then tell them it is private time and ask the child to leave.  Children need a healthy response to their missteps.  Most mistakes children make are innocent but they learn better when they are given gentle but firm correction and not being yelled at or worse.

The bottom line is, if we want our children to act responsibly we have to act responsibly.  We must acknowledge our mistakes in full view of our children.  We must never make hollow threats.  We must gently guide.  We cannot condemn failure as failure is a part of life.  We have to remind our children that frequently great success comes after a long series of failures.  We have to make it all right to be less than perfect.  We cannot afford to allow our children to be enamoured with physical beauty over inner beauty.  It is our duty to give good example as that gives our children the greatest chance of success.

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What is True Beauty?


This will be a mostly graphic posting.  Make your own conclusions.

Did you notice people are almost non-existent in these pictures?  That is simply because, in my opinion, man is hard pressed to compare to the ultimate beauty that is nature.  You do not have to live in or near any of the places pictured here, or have any of the animals in your neighborhood.  All you have to do is go to a park and sit quietly.  Nature will come to you and it is always beautiful.  Watch a squirrel scurry around, stop, look, and scamper off.  Every move is precise and beautiful.  Watch a cat or dog sleeping.  Watch the sun rise or set.  Consider any tree that you see.  Pick up a rock and study it.  Even what might appear to be the most uninteresting rock, or the most common of stones, once studied becomes beautiful in its own right.  Nature creates beauty everywhere.  Try not to miss it.

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Never Kill a Spider


My wife, and a lot of other people, see a spider and the first thing to go through their mind is how to kill it.  Now I do understand the desire of people to have spider-free homes but I do not agree with their techniques of ridding themselves of them.  You probably think I am some sort of tree-hugging liberal.  I do not hug trees.  I used to climb them but have never hugged one, nor do I have any desire to hug one.  But I have a principle that says “never kill anything that removes pests you do not like.”  Spiders feed on flies and mosquitos, two insects I have no problem killing.  If I could speak to a spider I’d say to her, “listen, you take care of those  pests on the outside and I will take care of them in here.”  Anyway, I take a paper towel, very loosely bunch it up, and gently remove it from the house to the outdoors where it can do some good.

People need to remember that the biggest pest in the entire animal kingdom is the human.  No animal, rats included, are dirtier.  I am sure you think I am crazy now because I included rats.  Not at all.  Zoologists point out, when asked, that the disease rats carry almost always is because of humans.  Rats are natural scavengers, and they go where the easiest food supply is.  Ergo, find where humans live and you will find a ton of “food” for the rat.  Take that very same rat, put him far out in the wild, and what you will find is an extraordinary neat and clean animal.  That includes the “rat’s nest.”  A squirrel’s nest, the rat’s cousin, is never thought of as being a dirty place even though he builds his house almost exactly the same way.  Now, as to killing rats, not a problem.  Their disease carrying tendency is why, unlike the poor spider which carries no diseases at all.

rat nest

squirrel nest

If you compare the two nests above you will find little difference between them.  In the wild the only difference is, squirrels nest in trees and rats nest on the ground.

I have absolutely no fear of snakes, nor do I look upon them as being evil. Many snakes feed on something we could do without, rats. Snakes are curious animals. Lacking teeth, they eat their prey whole and slowly digest it. Snakes are no in the least bit interested in living in close proximity of humans, anymore than most people are of them. When I lived in Italy, a couple of friends of mine came across a snake in the grass. Not fearing him I reached down and picked him up. Fortunately I knew about picking a snake up behind its head. Unfortunately, I picked him up about an inch too far behind his head. The snake whipped around and tried to sink his fangs into my thumb. Fortunately, for me, all he got was my thumbnail. I quickly dropped him but one of my friends, in spite of my protestations, stomped him to death. That was entirely unnecessary. The snake was rightfully protecting himself and had I left him alone nothing would have happened. The point is, to find a snake you generally have to be somewhere in the wild. There are exceptions, people who live in desert areas will tell you of encounters in their backyards with rattle snakes and others. But even so, we need to remember, it is we humans who have invaded their territory and not the other way around.

We human beings are supposed to be pretty smart but there is a wealth of information that tells a very different story. There is no better example of man’s insensitivity to the natural inhabitants of an area than in Southern California. There are few places in the world where man’s invasion has done more to hurt indigenous animals. The condor of California almost went extinct because of such human infestation and insensitivity. Californians complain about the coyotes and other desert dwellers who roam their backyards. Hey, they were there first! Time to learn to live with them. Even more, it is time to accommodate them.

California condor

California coyote

Hawaiians have an interesting way of looking at a reptile that likes to wander into their houses, the gecko. They claim geckos are good luck in your house and warn against killing them. Good for them! They do not bite and if you want them out, remove them but do not kill them.

gecko

One thing is a constant in the animal kingdom, except for those who think they are smart. Animals give very clear signals of their intentions. They are, if you take time to understand them, very easy to deal with, as a rule. Give a snake a wide berth, he will not bother you. Do not corner an animal, he will not likely attack.  If you stay away from a mother who is caring for her young, she will allow you to pass in peace.  Remove a spider from you house into the great outdoors, and he will do you a huge favor by killing a mosquito that might have bitten you or by killing a fly who might have landed on some of your open food.

Killing ants, cockroaches, hornets, bees and termites in your house is understandable.   But if you find that a squirrel has taken up lodging in your attic or wall you can be assured he found a defect in your roofing or walls.  Thank him for it and find how he got in.  Get someone out to your house who knows how to draw him out without killing him, it is possible.  Extermination should always be your last resort.