Tag: Ragtag Daily Prompt

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Spree!!

I went to the greenhouse shop this week to clean and set up for the next ship portraits I’ll be carving. I cut the wood blanks in the fall, and the preliminary artwork was done in December. Usually, I clean and then begin work in February, but this has not been a typical year. Too cold and too icy.

While cleaning, I sort through tools I don’t expect to use. It’s mostly items for making chests and large boxes that fall into that category. For the time being, I’ll move them into the basement shop I rarely use. I need the room in the greenhouse for planned projects. Tool needs fluctuate with demand. While I do not think I’ll make another searchest or small chest, I’ve learned never is not a safe word.

While never is not a safe word, I feel safe in saying no more tool buying sprees are in the offing. Last year I made two very select purchases of used carving tools. Those rounded out the selection needed for my portrait carving. These were mostly small tools of odd profiles that are not manufactured anymore. I am probably their third owner.

But I still peruse my favorite catalog and website: Lee Valley Tools. For a woodworker, it qualifies as a sort of tool porn. “!!!Looka this one – Jeezz! I just hafta get that!”

These days, I try to be more restrained. When I go to their site, I hide the charge card. I force myself to have cooling-off time after I get excited and before I hit add to my cart. Then I hum a few bars of Amazing Grace or some such tune to distract myself. I go and have a cup of tea.

Who am I fooling? I need that new detail sander! The small tool sharpener! The tiny plane for groundwork and their work support kit is on sale. I’ll find some way to fit it into the budget.

Tool lust is a terrible thing to have.

Daily writing prompt
Where would you go on a shopping spree?
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Who?

Middle names are not just placeholders. They can be crippling additions to the burdens we carry in life. Just look at poor Patrice Ursula Pew. Nicknamed pew pew as a joke in childhood, the unfortunate moniker followed her into adulthood beset with scent-related jokes. I had a childhood friend whose name was Thomas Issac Cougan. Once the neighborhood wags got ahold of it he was forever known as Tick or the Tick. But better Tick than Ick, which happened to Isabella Clarise Kelley.

To add a wee bit of clarity here. My friends were no worse or better than the average middle school bunch of young felons whose core values included making anyone the least bit different miserable.

Now, my middle name is Nicholas. Thankfully, LNC does not provide a home-opener opportunity for a nasty nickname. I urge all parents to please consider the effect the middle name you choose will have on your child.

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Training

My wife is amazed. I can run a TV station, but not the television remote at home. Well, I DO television, but I don’t watch it. As a matter of fact, bank on the fact that I don’t like television very much. I’d instead be reading, working in my shop carving, or the garden.

Next week I have a ton of training to do at the station because the folks who provide the software that we use to run the computer equipment have come up with new and, one can only hope, better programs. So I’ll learn about software that can run multiple servers, three television stations, and a bulletin board, but I still won’t be able to to program or operate the home tv.

My wife has the grace to tolerate the situation and calls for our son when she can’t figure something out. I appreciate this tact because it is embarrassing.

Next week, I have an entire queue of videos and training programs to review and absorb. Will I spend any time on the home TV? Naw.

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Who Are Your People?

Does this one question give you the creeps like it does me? I wrote about this last year, but this is not going to be a repitition of how upset it makes me when I get this probing question.

No. I’ve found another, a bit dusturbing way of coping with the jerks who just have to weigh, measure and find others wanting. Family Folklore!

That’s right, Family Folklore. That’s right, folks, my family is chock full of cracka

jack adventurers, soundrels and wastrels. There was Captain Grey – hung for piracy in the Caribbean. He was a nice guy, but he took up with the wrong bunch.

Then, there was the first Robinson in my Mom’s Family. He sailed into Providence Island with Morgan on his way to sack Panama and left a family behind; yup. You might say Privateering was a way of life for the family. And by the way, it was privateering…see! Gentlemen of Fortune, mate, and don’t forget it, or you’ll be counting the family doubloons on a Deadman’s Chest. See!

The on my Dad’s side there were the members of the Catalan Company, some called them mercenaries…but they were good guys, and after all you had to support the family back in Barcelona; right?

My Grandmother’s kin were all Central European Steppe nomads who wanted to do good. Yes, they did help destroy the Roman Empire, but it was in such a bad state that a good thunderstorm would have knocked it down anyway! And besides, who could leave all that loot lying around?

There are lots more stories where those come from, but you say you have an appointment with your genealogist? Your family is boring? Just staid people who stayed home and were snotty? Don’t worry I’m sure that if you look hard enough You’ll find a version you’ll like. A nice Highwayman hunting the crossroads? A bank robber who hung around with Capone.

I know it’s tough to be whitebread when everyone else had fantastic Family Folklore!

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Bound for Failure

eagle weathervane

“Getting your nose bloodied once or twice is not a bad thing.” A friend told me this long ago when I had lost a fight with a neighborhood bully. I had been given a snow bath and sent home freezing and soaking wet. I didn’t think that losing in such a humiliating way was good, and I told him so. But, there is another saying that figures into this story. It’s that success is a poor preparation for failure. The following spring, a group of his victims got revenge on the bully. He didn’t expect it, was unprepared for it, and was humiliated by it. He never expected that he could become a victim.

The story has morals for perpetrators and the perpetrated alike. Former victims can overbalance the scales. In this case, I am thinking of the bully and his girlfriend, who were found at a local swimming spot, stripped, and left to find their nude way home. The girl was innocent. And the previous victims went too far in including her in the revenge. Thankfully, I was grounded that weekend by my father for not doing something idiotic, like taking out the garbage. But they were my friends, and I was included in the counter-revenge taken by the bully’s friends.

The little incident I have described shows an underlying problem in cycles of violence. Justice is not only meted out to the guilty but those around the guilty, related to them, or just standing nearby. Just think about the last time you heard of a drive-by shooting in which a bystander became a victim.

It shouldn’t take great genius to note that this cycle blights the human condition. Or that an alert and conscientious person would strive to avoid it. But I’ve decided that much of it is an actual tactic used by tin-horned rabble-rousers, would be dictators and psychopaths, to perpetuate hate and violence. Keep people firing, fighting, and maiming if it achieves your goals.

Instead of forging success, we continue to fail when the lessons are clear: cycles of revenge are a zero-sum game.

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It Was Not A Mistake

It’s like one of those personality tests. Write the first sentence of your biography. OK, here it is – None of your business. “Mr. Carreras, that’s not very cooperative. We are just trying to develop our AI program and need the native, honest, and innocent maunderings of idiots…errr, people like you. Can we try again?”

OK. It just happened. No, NO. Let’s try this: It was not a mistake.

Well ,I was told later that it was all a mistake. But I’m not sure that I believed Jerry. He was a friend but a problematic one. A small group of us played and sang folk music together through high school. I spent as little time there as I could. I was already driftin’ into another life. But Jerry inhabited the place; as an orphan, he had nowhere else to go. One of the things he did was work in the school office. He saw all the paperwork come in, and the letters go out.

One of the letters he said he saw go out was to my parents, saying that I was expelled. But at the time it happened, he told me that it was a mistake that it went out. First, you had to have a counseling session. And I had not.

This all came out a year later. I was in town for a brief blow-through on my way to some no-name town with a coffeehouse. Jerry ran into me outside of Rienzi’s. He insisted on our getting coffee. Unlike his usual belligerent look, he looked guilty. He told me that his new stepfather was very religious and had convinced him that he needed to ” get right” with people he had hurt.

But I told him, you never hurt me. He looked down at the cigarette burns on the tabletop and mumbled out something I couldn’t hear. “Yes, I did,” he mumbled. ” I was in the office the day they sent the letter expelling you from school.” Then, all in a rush, ” I knew that you’d never been called into the office to be counseled before they did it. I pulled the letter from the file and put it there for Mr. Johnson to sign.”

The letter had initiated a series of events that led to my leaving home and going on the road. But while it initiated my actions, the slow slide to a new path in life had already begun.

“Jerry, all that letter did was push me over the edge. I was already hanging by a finger. It just made me let go. It’s OK. They wanted me out of there after that song I wrote about the principal and all the other shit I pulled. He looked at me and said, “I put the stamp on the letter and mailed it. I felt good about it.”

My patience was expended, ” So you want me to forgive you?” He nodded. I got up and grabbed my pack and guitar case. ” Pay for the coffee if you feel that guilty. I can’t forgive you; you have to do that yourself. I didn’t pull a trigger; you did. We’re responsible for what we do. You did it, but I’m not going to forgive you. If I forgave you, that would let you off the hook for what you did. Forgive yourself.

So you see, it was not a mistake.

But the things we do have consequences. Over the years, I kept returning to what I told him about forgiving yourself. Years after the bonehead thing you did, no one is there to receive your confession. They are lost in the many miles and years gone by. The only one who can forgive you is yourself.

Then, you have to confront the entire issue of forgiveness. They’ve gone on about their lives despite your single act of malice that set them spinning off in a new direction. So forgiveness has to come from another source. It can’t be a simple pat on the back; you need to deserve it, or it’s a lie. And lying like that is just more guilt piled on top. So are you contrite?

I’ve thought about this stuff a lot because none of us get out of this life without a pile of errors of judgment and the occasional act of malice. Backtracking ten years after doesn’t always work. Some people can’t be found by using Google. And when, in great contrition, you call Suzy up and confess that you cheated on her many years ago and that you are sorry…there is a silence on the other end of the line… then she asks, “Do I know you? Who did you say you were?”

So let’s go with either ” It was not a mistake” or “Forgive yourself” for the first sentence in that biography. If our worlds spin around an axis, our petty malice and idiocies are the impetus that keeps things spinning. Sometimes, the expression that we should pay it forward is the best we can do. Pay forward the good, and redeem yourself by helping others.

“Well, Mr. Carreras, isn’t that the old pay alms for the forgiveness of sins routine?” It’s not if you’ve forgiven yourself and are intent on being proactive in the world about doing good and not bad. Guilt motivates the unforgiven. But the forgiven are motivated by the good that can be achieved.

You are the author, so take your pick of starting lines, but remember the most important lines in a bio are at the ending.

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Cataclysm

What’s my minimum to get along? What could I pare down to if I had to? That sounds easy until you start the reduction process. If we wax metaphysical, what could you do without a soul? Air? Gravity to hold me in place? It sounds trite, but, well, once you start the process, are you able to follow it to a sort of ultimate reduction?

I decided a long time ago that my life is a sort of evolving ecosystem. It’s evolved from the pack and guitar days to a wife and family, cats and dogs, a workshop, libraries of books, and bunches of other stuff.

But I’ve seen enough people with the pins knocked from underneath them to understand that this wonderfully evolved and complete little ecosystem can be reduced quickly to the pack and guitar level. Many wonderful people in Ukraine and California have had unpleasant experiences finding this out. From less traumatic experiences than those that they have suffered, I know that there comes a sort of resignation to rebuilding simply because there is no going back.

It’s such a first world sort of idiocy to play with the idea of simplifications. To idly pick three things you could not do without. Your world is an elaborately evolved ecosystem.

Rapid and cataclysmic simplification is much worse than letting Marie Kondo loose in your home. They are life-ending. The life you’ll live afterward will not be the one you lived before.

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EGO

A princess often must speak in the third person. Illeism is one of the marks of royalty. But I must say it sounds funny to refer to my brother as he while he is sitting right in front of me. Do I have it quite right? We must ask our father to clarify. Oh, wait that’s the imperial “WE”, isn’t it?

Why do humaans always complicate things!

Wait, maybe it’s speaking ex-cathedra. That must be wrong, it’s ex-cat-edra. I’ll have to look it up in the cat historical documents left by my predecessor cats: Clancy the Grey Menace, Smidgen the Great, and H.I.M. Xenia ( empress of all she surveys). You know, it’s sort of a cat Bible. All the wisdom of the ages can be found on how cats control……errrrrr. I mean, how do cats get along with humans?

In any case, SHE is about to demand a second breakfast!!

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One Dark and Rainy Night

One dark and rainy night, I met Tally at the Harvard Gardens. I have no idea what Tally was short for or derived from, but you need to understand that at that particular moment I could of cared less. There was this incredibly gorgeous redhead looking me in the eyes and telling me that we were fated.

It had been a terrible day. I was in Boston for the summer, working on an orthopedic floor across the street at Mass General Hospital. I was in a germy and very dirty set of “whites.” After three drinks, I might have believed the seventy-year-old waitress if she had told me we were fated. But here was a radiant young woman engaging me in conversation and declaring, after only an hour of conversation, that we were fated.

After a while, she suggested that we visit some friends in the Back Bay. I was game. So we started walking, and all the way she kept on about how a meaningful relationship was a sacred trust. And how the Mighty One sets us all along a path.

I was surprised when we arrived at a ratty storefront. Inside, we were greeted by an ebullient young man who introduced himself as Brother Phil, and by the way, would I be joining their community of faithful in service to their lord and master the One, the Unity and Mighty One? Tally stood by me, beaming happily, clasping my hand. But I was sobering up fast.

I looked at Tally and said,”Come on, honey, I know a better place than this where we can be alone.” She looked at me with love, “Oh, Wes, we are always together in the Unity. It’s our fate. Who’d want to be alone?”

Seeing an open path to the door, I made a beeline for it. Tally followed me out. She called out to me, “Wes, we are fated! Come back to the Unity!” I was a quarter of the way down the street before I saw Phil and three others following me. I sprinted the remaining distance to Charles Street and lost them in the crowd.

I walked over almost every inch of Beacon Hill for an hour, trying to figure out what had happened and why. It was one rocky and unhappy way to sober up. Then, I decided to backtrack to the Harvard Gardens to see if my friends had shown up. As I walked in, I spotted the Teahead, the Monk, and our Almost Friend John, the con artist. Taking a seat, I spilled everything that had happened.

The Monk looked vaguely uneasy and explained that the current age took the raw elements of religion and reconfigured them into mind control. John took another approach. He claimed that the group was called simply the Unity and had just shown up from California. They lured you in with the promise of a “sainted” or fated relationship with a young man or woman, and eventually, you gave all your property to the unity, lived in their community, and worked in one of their businesses. He seemed particularly cheesed off because they believed their own bullshit. ” Can you believe that! They really buy into that shit!”

Over the next weeks, I saw Tally several times from a distance in Harvard Square, distributing flyers and talking to those interested. I could feel the tug of attraction but decided that this once, I would not be the fool that goes where angels fear to tread. But I was tempted to.

There may be such a thing as fate, but I am not sure that it is inevitable, or unavoidable. I do however have a great belief in temptation, and it’s ability to make us believe that almost anything is fated if the reward is great enough.

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Scrub

My father had a favorite piece of advice – no matter how much education you have, always have a fallback trade. And Nick Carreras always had a wide variety of them. And admonished me to do likewise.

My father had passed on before I went to graduate school. But I frequently heard his voice offering advice. And in fact, I did have fallback skills in health care. I qualified as a surgical technician after years of working in the OR. During summers away from grad school, I earned a living as an aide on Medical/surgical floors at hospitals. Hard skills are always needed. It was soon found that my asceptic technique and ability to assist in minor surgical procedures were handy.

So, when I left grad school and found myself unemployed, I had a fallback plan. I returned to hospital work and eventually to the Operating Room. The OR is a small and close society. So it wasn’t long before everyone knew the particulars of a Tech with most of their doctorate completed, a cat ( the Grey Menace, who loves O-negative blood), and an employment problem.

The OR can be a chatterbox location. You can alternate between periods of intense quiet and concentration and periods when you are talking about almost any subject the surgeon finds interesting.

It was fun when anatomy was the subject. Having spent most of a year in anatomy and osteology classes in grad school, I had a better grip on some topics than the interns. One attending physician particularly liked to toss out questions on, say, cranial anatomy and have the interns flounder. He’d then turn to me and ask for a complete description of the sphenoid bone and have his surgical technician, me, rattle off the anatomical description. He smirked and suggest that they should review the relevant anatomy, while the chief resident rolled his eyes at me.

So, I spent two years in the OR as part of a team of intently focused caregivers. Sometimes, it was a grim environment. Some traumatic procedures still stay with me to this day. But other times, it was almost exhilarating.

One day, it all came to an end. I received a job offer that would start my career as an applied anthropologist. On Monday, I was looking forward to a whole week in the OR. On Friday, I began a psychological transition from the closed society of the OR to the larger community I would be serving for the next eight or so years.

I didn’t look back for almost two years. I was much too busy with a new career and responsibilities to review memories of the OR. But over the years, I better understood how that OR experience shaped and influenced me. Like my anthropology, it was not just a job but a calling.

I’ll never return to an OR except as a patient. But the last couple of times I’ve been wheeled into the OR for a procedure, there has been a lot of shop talk – which ORs have you worked in, changes in suture material, all sorts of nifty stuff.

I guess most patients don’t get it…it’s a sort of OR type thing.