Boreal B[l]og

In 1953, I first picked up a telephone receiver, hearing, “Number, please” (notice the please, now an endangered word).  Our telephone number (we called it a telephone) was Hillside 2765.  It didn’t matter on the dial, because we didn’t have dials. We neither made nor received calls during dinner, and answering a telephone call was a priority.

Twenty years later, James Garner had an answering machine on The Rockford Files, and his car phone was then high tech.  I called my wife from the Philippines, when the USS ST. LOUIS was in port; it was a big deal.  Fifteen years later, we didn’t believe that long distance phone calls some day would not incur additional charges. My first cell phone was in 1990, the “brick era”.  Today, we need an answering machine to screen 95% of our telephone calls, which ask for money, call during dinner, and even late into the evening.

When I see people talking to themselves, it is not psychosis, which it used to be, or discussing one’s problems with oneself, but talking on the phone. Hello is more difficult to say in public, when many are listening to music or using their phone. Formerly, when we called a store, we spoke to a human. Today, we get a menu beginning with “unusually high call volume,” and ending with “your call is important to us,“ which it is not. Things used to be stock, before “just in time” inventory was invented.  Now, items must be ordered.

Smart phones allow us to access the world from just about anywhere in the world, although there are places where it is impossible to do so. Such places are interestingly the most beautiful I have ever seen:  Alaska’s Brooks Range, Arctic Canada, the Quetico-Superior, Isle Royale, and Great Basin National Park.

I turn my smart phone off at night, because I may get calls from those who aren’t aware of time zones or my sleep patterns.  Through Whatsapp, I have been asked–from Brazil– the difference between a scouring pad and a scouring towel, which may be found quickly on Google.  I listen to conversations in public about people and things I would just as soon not hear, and for the first time wonder whether my family history of deafness in late life might yet be a blessing.

On the bright side, headphones made boom boxes obsolete, so people can destroy their hearing silently, without bothering others.  Headphones do have a disadvantage, however.  While looking for a building on the University of Oregon campus; half the students didn’t know where it was, and the other half were wearing headphones.

Mail used to require pen, paper, an envelope, stamp, and going to the post office.  The stamp cost 3 cents. One corresponded with friends by mail; writing back was polite.  We wrote thank you and sympathy notes, saying specific things about the gift or the person who died.  More than one has commented my sympathy note was the best note they had received. I still have thank you notes from former patients; somehow, a CD containing them isn’t the same and may be unreadable in a decade.

Thank you notes for wedding presents were a necessity, not only for politeness, but to ensure the sender the gift arrived.  My wife and I wrote ours all before our wedding.  It was easy, and we personalized each one, for it was expected.  My parents used to have a large tray of Christmas cards, all personalized.  This year, I got four, two in mid-January. Back then, typed notes saying how stellar everybody in their family was were frowned upon.

We didn’t use calculators but slide rules, which got us to the Moon.  Calculators have  produced a generation of teachers who believe memorization of the multiplication tables is wrong, students who can’t subtract 8 from 10 without a calculator and can’t divide 3 into 12 by hand. I am not exaggerating.  Clerks counted change accurately.  Yesterday, a clerk at Dutch Brothers gave me an extra dollar in change. I gave it back, because I like the company.  Once, a clerk argued with me, so I kept the money.  Not knowing math is a tax on those who don’t.  Don’t expect Republicans to complain about that tax. They count on ignorance.

We taught writing: the act and the result. I can’t remember when I last saw a young person hold a pen properly.  Handwriting today is sloppy, and I say that as a physician.  Grammar is often not taught, because “people pick it up.”  No, they don’t.  “Whom,” one of my favorite words, is disappearing, and “gonna” and “wanna”  were considered by one language Website as correct, until I made a stink about it.  Nominative case is considered formal, rather than….nominative, and “these kind”  and “these ones” abound.  I find it ironic that many of the “English only” folks can’t write English properly.  If you don’t know English rules, please feel free to contact me.  I love teaching the most dynamic, beautiful language on Earth.

We can talk world-wide on Skype, making language instruction with a native speaker possible, once unheard of.  We may e-mail instantaneously and access information that used to be stored in large volumes of books called encyclopedias, which were once sold door to door.  On a German professor’s advice, I recently ordered a grammar book from Germany before I left his building.  Twenty minutes later, I sent my wife a picture of my standing on Autzen Bridge over the Willamette. This is great.

However, most of my e-mails go unanswered, ostensibly because “people are busy,” although “Dear Mr. Smith, We regret to inform you that we have no need for your skills to teach 6 subjects at our school.  Sincerely yours, xxxx” takes 24 seconds.  I timed it.  Much on the Internet is worthless, inaccurate, porn, and a forum for nasty people who formerly had no world-wide public voice.  I consider the routine daily emails from West Africa a price I pay for e-mail.

Tonight, an Asian woman, whom I had often helped, wanted to chat, proudly announcing she was currently chatting with a woman in Brazil.  I told her to continue; I felt it was time for dinner, I did not feel like being second in her priorities. Language websites are great for non-English speakers to learn English.  I have found them disappointing to learn German, French, or Spanish. These three languages are not nearly as tolerant of accents as we are; corrections are seldom explained. I explain mine. I am optimistic some day the Websites will improve. They are still new.

I have lived through changes in technology and the world that will continue in ways I can’t even dream of.  The winners will be those who adapt.  I hope that politeness, curiosity, willingness to change views in the face of new evidence, respect, friendship, and the ability to embrace diversity will thrive. The record suggests the opposite.  I hope I am wrong.

CRASH!  At 4 a.m., I am up to feed the cats and to listen to German videos.  As I opened the refrigerator, a beer bottle fell out and shattered on the kitchen floor.  The cats scattered; I cleaned up the mess.  Now the kitchen smelled like a fraternity house on Sunday morning.  And I wasn’t sure I had gotten all the glass.

I listened to a long video, understood more of an Austrian accent than I ever had before, but I still missed a lot.  I have seen close to 1000 German videos, and I’ve understood both the plot and German in 9.  Nine.  I received feedback about a post I made on a language site about the verb “umgehen,” which was completely demoralizing.  I did more work and realized that the verb, which I had been told had 3 meanings, really had two:  One was the separable form, which means to go around; the other, inseparable, where the um and gehen always stay together, and  pronounced differently, means to manage or to care for or to bypass, out of fear or concern.  The third meaning was prepositional, one of the most common expressions in German. This meaning, howevert was gehen um, which is very different from umgehen.  Trust me.

I replied politely to the comment in German, ending with that it was perhaps time to leave and study something else.

I have worked  3-6 hours a day for 3 1/2 years to learn the language.  I know many language Websites; I’ve read many grammar books, I have three dictionaries and a lot of books.  Lately, however, I have made little progress.  I am self-taught, because my trainer wasn’t, despite my living in a large city where a trainer was “guaranteed” by a company to whom I paid a good deal of money.  She had lived in the US 27 years and had never taught German. I didn’t know this fact immediately.

I am moving to a smaller town with a university, and my upcoming interview with the department head will likely decide whether I continue or just keep alive what I have done.  Something had become wrong; the language, once fun, had become work, and I wasn’t seeing results.  English students I have taught have not put in nearly the work I have, and yet they expect to become fully fluent. My expectations are far lower.

That afternoon, after correcting some English submissions, which I find relaxing, I received a note from a German reviewer.  He was honest, admitting that he and other reviewers often could not explain their grammar:  they just “knew” what was right and wrong.  While it didn’t help me learn, I appreciated his honesty. The writer continued, telling me to put the grammar book away.  I had done that a long time ago, but he said something else very important.  While I had put the grammar book away, I still was in prison: I was forcing myself daily to learn lists of words.  I suddenly realized that I didn’t have to do this.  Nobody was forcing me, and memorization was part of the day I did not look forward to.

It was a breakthrough.  Some people I talk to, in Iran, can’t change their lives, because others forbid it.  Some people here, like me, don’t change their lives, because of themselves.  Nobody was forcing me to learn these words.  I could stop and do what I wanted.

It was liberating.  A weight came off my shoulders.  Suddenly, I realized I was freer than I had felt for a long time.  It’s worth letting oneself out of prison periodically.  Life becomes a lot more fun.  Some never do; some never put themselves in prison.  I did, but I process slowly.  It took a verb called umgehen, frustration, thinking, and the right letter at the right time to open the lock.

I wrote the reviewer, thanking him for what really helped me.  What he advised I didn’t do; what he did advise, however, gave me the piece I needed to unlock the door.

I watched another video, then took a walk in a nearby playground.  I really want to run again, and my knee, which was bothering me, is cleared to do so.  I enjoy the walks, however, and the thinking I do on them.  Before leaving, I checked my email and logged on to Facebook.  I had a note from a young woman from whom I had not heard in 2 years.  Three years ago, she asked to befriend me on the advice of a mutual friend.  We had lost touch.

For whatever reason, on the last day of 2013, I wrote her and told her I had been in her neck of the woods last summer, while I was traveling.  I was too far away to visit, but I was at least in her general region.  I said nothing more of note, and forgot about it.  Yesterday came the response:

“I cannot tell you how much it meant to receive your message. I was so grateful, it came at the perfect moment when I needed a light in the dark.”

I hadn’t thought I had done much. I was obviously wrong.

I don’t know this woman well.  We’ve never met, and we may never will.  That doesn’t matter.  What does and did matter, is that something I said deeply resonated with her at a critical time and place in her life.  Maybe I gave her a key to something she needed, in order to unlock something that was holding her back.  I don’t know.

What I do know was I did exactly for her what hours earlier a young man, whom I will also never meet, did for me.

What goes around can come around.  While the connotation is usually used in a retaliatory sense, it need not be. Often, simple words from others have helped me greatly.  I hope that I have done the same often. I know now I have done it at least once.

I had read about Whoville, but I hadn’t seen it until the Friday before Christmas, when I walked about 4 miles from the house to a bar to meet a friend.  I can walk a lot of places in Eugene in 4 miles, even in the rain, which it was doing.

Once across the river, I walked by a lot, devoid of buildings, and saw many tents pitched.  This didn’t look like the right type of tents or the right time of year to be displaying them, and there was a sign: Whoville #9.  There was a Mission Statement and Rules.  Only in Eugene would the homeless have a Mission Statement and Rules in plain view.  One might say it made the city uglier, but to me it made the city more real.  Every city has homeless; any city that doesn’t is either lying or hasn’t looked.  I walked to the bar a little bit more muted, thinking about what I had seen.

These places are not pleasant to see.  The poor aren’t.  Many are down on their luck.  Some are mentally ill.  Others are alcohol or drug dependent.  Many are people that once were like the rest of us, until they got ill and couldn’t pay the medical bills.  This is the single biggest cause of bankruptcy.  We see the jars and the places for the dollar coins to fight leukemia, cerebral palsy, or help a family whose daughter just had a bad car accident, or whose son is in a coma.  These coins and singles may make us feel better, but realistically, they do nothing.  The cost of treating each of these diseases overwhelms the ability of the average person to pay for it, or even the average church.  I practiced medicine years ago, when the bills for a brief stay in the ICU could not be paid by more than maybe 1% of the people.  Even having insurance, which many decry, isn’t a panacea.

Why are people homeless?

Medical bills

Foreclosure

Domestic violence

Decline in public assistance

Lack of good jobs

Mental Illness

Addiction disorders

Look it up, if you don’t believe me.  Are all of these easily solved?  Nope.  But we could do something about medical bills with better insurance.  We could have and still could do something about foreclosures.  We are absolutely shoddy in our dealings with domestic violence.  Decline in public assistance can be reversed.   The last three are difficult, but so was getting to the Moon, and this country once did that, before a minority in Congress decided that we were going to stop any meaningful legislation, because big government was bad.

So was Lehman Brothers.  So was George Bush, when he took days to come to New Orleans after Katrina.  Big government includes Congress, so by deduction, those Congressmen have just stated they are bad.  Why don’t they resign, and let somebody who actually has a testable solution fill the seat?  I’d even move out of Eugene to a place where I could do that.  Even Texas, if I could have Ted Cruz’s seat. Here’s mine.  It doesn’t say “shut down the government”.

We can improve the situation to the homeless and end hunger.  I’m not talking food stamps here.  I’m talking about feeding the hungry who have virtually no place to take their groceries.  This thought doesn’t sit well with many, because we might be feeding a slacker for free, somebody who ought to get off his duff and find a job.  Sure.  Good luck in finding a job without connections.  I read the papers about how to interview, and somebody who doesn’t shower, has no experience, no recommendations, and had to drop out of school and out of sight, is not likely to land a great job.  Most of these people don’t have people skills.  I don’t either, which is one of the reasons I failed as a consultant, even when I paid a coach, who was no help at all. I was fortunate enough to have worked hard and had a career as a physician, otherwise I’d be in Whoville.

But a few might have people and other skills.  I would bet money on that, if one had a sign detailing a Mission Statement and Rules.  Given enough food, some of these people might start looking for work, looking for a way out of Whoville, a way to a better life.  If saving one child with leukemia is important, is not saving one homeless person from continued homelessness important?  Leukemia was once untreatable; much of it now is not only treatable but curable.  Some of the homeless are there because of medical costs.  Now, we are talking money, something we can print.  Sure, that is inflationary, but this is a lot easier than finding something better than vinblastine for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.

Lane County wants to eradicate hunger, and we can do this as a country.  Nobody in America should want from food.  Affordable housing is tough, because these people don’t have great skills in keeping homes clean, although I’ve seen plenty of neighborhoods that aren’t exactly stellar, either.

I hope the Whoville stays.  It changed how I thought about the homeless, and it puts a face on a lot of people that are faceless in America today.

Want to do something really radical?  Let’s take these people off the street and put them on the street, the highways and byways of America.  Let’s house them and teach them how to fix bridges, build roads, fix the deteriorating infrastructure of the country.  Let’s put them in the national parks, helping build trails and repair others.  Let’s put them with animals, in the humane societies of this country, because love of animals is a good thing for both the animal and the people.

Come to think of it, let’s require mandatory national service, so that everybody ought to serve the country that has given them so much.  I assume every flag waver does know what red, white, and blue stands for, but in case I am again wrong, which they love to say I am, the flag colors stand for courage, honor and justice.

Are some beyond saving?  Probably.  Are all beyond saving?  No, not at all.  It is a question of what America will become, and what we Americans decide.  At Market of Choice in Eugene there is a way to donate each time to eradicate hunger in one of the more than 3000 counties in the US.  It’s a small county in the 9th largest state.  To the City Council:  let’s keep the Whovilles, until we don’t need them, because we have found a solution.  Let’s show the nation that we are trying, because anything less is wrong.

To Rand, Ted, Rush, and the others.  That’s my testable solution.  I am waiting for yours, which would prove to me you have some courage, honor, and a sense of justice, rather than cowardly saying no, turning your back on millions of Americans, and as a lawyer, Mr. Cruz, a disturbing sense of what justice means.  Be sure to go to church next Sunday.