Narrative Reflections

The Perpetual Classroom

2011-08-05T02:22:00.000-07:00

I don’t know about you, but the day I don’t learn something new is a day totally wasted. First of all, I seem to have been born with a profound curiosity about life, particularly about what makes people tick. I am also fascinated with the mechanics of the world around me. I may not be a scientist, per say, but I find that the pace of new scientific discoveries that I read about daily keeps me in a constant state of wonder, wonder about what they will come up with tomorrow and the day after.

I kind of laugh when thinking back of just how little I knew the day I graduated from the university. I would be surprised if I currently use one percent of the engineering subjects I studied in my everyday work. Almost every bit of knowledge I find useful in my engineering profession, and in life in general, was taught to me experientially. I could try to claim that I graduated with a blank slate, but that wouldn’t really be true either. The fact is I had a head full of mush, and worthless information, and was fooled into thinking I actually knew something.

I can’t fault the university. The college of engineering did the best they could. They taught me the basics of engineering, and virtually nothing about the basics of life. It was a case of majoring in the minors, and minoring in the majors as far as I am concerned. Only after struggling with life for many years that I began to realize how profoundly ignorant I was about the rules of life. I had no idea what it meant to be human, and wasn’t all that sure what it took to be happy.

That realization was key to me becoming involved in several of the major self-awareness and human potential programs during the 1980’s and 90’s including “Life Spring” and “The Forum.” I got heavily involved in those programs, taking most of the courses offered, and even became involved in leadership training for a while. Each of those programs are intended to be intense, and they are, but from my standpoint, they offered me insight into the question, “What does it mean to be human?” This is a fundamental question that I think all of us need to explore. It is not a trivial question.

Someone once said, many of us have minds like concrete, totally mixed up and permanently set. We know what we know, or at least think we do, and are in no way open to looking at things in any other way than the way we know. Many of us cling to our beliefs as if they are a life raft, holding them to be beyond questioning. I, for one, believe that all of our fundamental beliefs need to be questioned. Another way of putting it is that the questions we raise in life are far more important than any answers we come to.

Another major influence in my life, something that taught me a lot about myself and life in general, was the death of my first wife. I can’t even begin to describe how difficult those six years between the time she was diagnosed with cancer and the time she died were for me, but out of that period came a lot of introspection. My attitude about everything in life changed as a result. My values changed. My relationship to life changed.

My wife was a fighter, with a will to live stronger than any person I have ever known. Her battle to live life on her own terms in spite of the cancer were an inspiration to those who knew her. She refused to give up even after I had long since conceded defeat. It is not easy watching someone I knew and loved die day by day before my eyes, but the disease was relentless. Before she finally passed away, she had been admitted to the hospital seventy-five times.

Even with medical insurance, the medical bills were gargantuan. We went from having two major incomes down to one, since she could no longer work. I really struggled to keep our heads above water during that time. I know the medical bills were over $100,000 a year, and I have no idea how I managed to stay afloat during that period. I didn’t enjoy any of it, but I felt I had no choice in the matter. Somehow I managed, but it certainly wasn’t easy.

My wife endured a brutal combination of chemotherapy and radiation, none of which seemed to slow the disease down. It was omnipresent from the moment it was detected in her ear canal. My guess is that someday they will look at the common medical practices of today with regards to cancer as barbaric at best, the treatment often being worse than the disease. This is one area, the treatment of cancer, where I expect rapid advances in the future. I believe all the research being done will eventually pay off, hopefully in my life time.

One primary lesson I learned from her death was that none of us are guaranteed a tomorrow. As a result of that experience, I decided to live life with a vengeance, to make each day count, to never assume that I would have a second chance. I also learned I was a lot stronger than I thought I was, and that I could endure just about anything. One thing for sure, I did not want to grow old without having a life worth remembering. I need to be able to seize opportunities whenever and wherever they present themselves. I never wanted to suffer the regrets of having things I failed to do while I had a chance.

I discovered out of this experience that one of the most important abilities we have as human beings is the power of rationalization. A big part of the healing process is the rational decision that whatever happened had to happen, and that somehow, someway, it was a necessary part of my overall educational process. Sometimes it takes a while to come to terms with, or rationalize, something like that, at least it did for me. In fact, it took years.

One of the most vivid reminders of the power of rationalization came about while I was volunteer teaching at the Braille Institute in Los Angeles some time after my wife’s death. I had three students in one of the classes I was leading. Each student had gone blind at a different point in their life, and each had made peace with their own blindness, concluding that the time they lost their eyesight was the absolute best time to lose their eyesight. One lost her vision when she was sixty-five years old, and she figured she had already seen all she needed to see by that time, so losing her eyesight was no big deal. Another lost his vision when he was seventeen, and never had to work a day in his life as a consequence. He thought that seventeen was the perfect age to lose his eyesight. Another student had been blind since birth, so she had no idea what she was missing, and was perfectly content with that.

Incidentally, I found doing volunteer work to be an excellent way of getting outside my inner turmoil . There were always others seemingly less fortunate than myself to serve, and quite often, they had something valuable they could teach me about life as well. Whenever I got too wrapped up in the issues and challenges of my life, volunteering tends to puts things in a better perspective.

Over the years I have been involved a number of volunteer programs. I was a US Peace Corps volunteer right after college. At the time, I was burned out with school, and not ready to pursue my master’s degree. I was even less ready for finding and working a normal job. It was the perfect solution for me. For a while, I was involved with Food Share there in Southern California. I did a lot of photography work for them documenting their operations and food distribution services. While I was involved in the human potential movement, I did a lot of volunteer work for them as well. I have also done volunteer English language teaching overseas, and found that I enjoyed that too. Life simply has more meaning when I am involved with others. People are a necessary part of my life. Being of service is what I am all about.

I spent a couple years in Turkey teaching English as a foreign language on a part time basis. Most of the students were university student or adults. One thing I noticed in the discussions I had with the students was that a very small percentage of them had ever done any volunteer work of any kind. What was distinctly missing was the sense of community that volunteering tends to generate.

The people in Turkey were going through a particularly tough time economically. Unemployment was at around 17%, as I recall, and even higher for young college graduates. There were very few jobs to be had, especially in the city of Adana. Many of the students were being trained in fields that had virtually dried up, like textile engineering. There was an obvious detachment from practicality, and a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness that pervaded the graduates, a crushing apathy about life.

I tried to encourage the students to consider doing volunteer work to get some practical experience, if nothing else. They basically had a choice. They could stay at home and feel sorry for themselves, or they could get some work experience that could possibly lead to future employment.

Part of the problem is that most students have no practical life experience. This is largely true of college graduates everywhere. They spent four or five years getting educated only to discover that they knew practically nothing about anything. They didn’t even know how to go about getting a job, or for that matter, what constitutes practical experience. They don’t know the basics of writing a resume. They have no sense of what they have to offer.

Most college graduates in Turkey spend several years after graduating trying to find work of any kind. The old system of waiting for their parents to find them a position through their contacts simply no longer works for most students. Their parents simply don’t have the contacts necessary. The old system of nepotism does not work in a complex modern technological society.

What I encouraged all the students to do was to identify the field they think they want to go into, and next to identify the key players in that field. They need to figure out what companies are doing what type of work, and which ones are the best to go to work for. I explained to them that in any given field, there are probably not more than 10 leaders in the whole country that are the movers and the shakers in their given field, the ones who determine the future of their industry. Those are the people and companies they need to identify, and focus on getting to know.

If doing volunteer work is a part of their pre-employment tactics, they need to figure out where the best place to volunteer would be. I am well aware that there is a major “Catch 22” in that they are dealing with in that companies will not hire them unless they have experience, and they can’t get experience unless a company will hire them. They could spend years trying to figure out which comes first, the chicken or the egg, and many of them do to no avail.

The first thing I wanted the students to know is that they weren’t as helpless as they feel, that they can do something to enhance their chances of securing a good position with an up and coming company. If a students wants to be a doctor, great, do some volunteer work at a local hospital. Hospitals are always looking for volunteers. If they want to work for a bank, try doing some volunteer work for one of them. If they want to work for the government, there are many government functions performed regularly by volunteers.

At least for me, teaching English was of secondary importance. Teaching about life was of primary importance. Besides, the only reason there were so many students studying English was that they hoped it might lead to more job possibilities.

Most of us don’t have a lot of skills at creating jobs out of nothing. It is easy to look out at the world and see all the problems. There are problems everywhere. It takes vision to see the opportunities inherent in the problems, and an attitude to see oneself as capable of doing something about them. If the students have both vision and attitude, they will seldom, if ever, be out of work. There is so much work to be done.

After returning to the US from Turkey, I ended up moving to Mountain Home, Arkansas to live with my brother. One thing I picked up on immediately was the powerful pride and sense of community of the people there. It is a small town of about 12,000 people, but there was a spirit about the people there generated by,or a product of, one of the highest volunteer rates in the entire country.

The place and the people fascinated me. I began a project interviewing the people of the community and capturing their life story. I was trying to get at the interwoven nature of the community fabric. I person had a unique story of how they became a part of that fabric, and what it meant to them. It was like looking at the essence of the community through a hundred different lenses. In three months I had interviewed fifty -seven people, and collected enough material for a rather heathy book, one that I will someday publish.

The idea occurred to me that I could find the same essence in any community I looked at. What lies at the heart and the sole of a community? There are a billion similar stories out there to be told, each one unique and somehow revealing of what it is to be human. Loving to write, this is something I could do anywhere I chose. Someday I will.

My writing career began in earnest with the death of my first wife. Her death led to a period of deep personal introspection. To wade through the turmoil of my emotions, I began reviewing the experiences of my life, and writing down some of the stories and observations. One thing that helped me was when I discovered that poetry doesn’t necessarily need to rhyme. I couldn’t stand force or contrived rhyme, and that had always prevented me from expressing myself in poetic form. Freed of that constraint, I came up with a form of prose I call a narrative reflection that seemed to work for me.

For the next four years, I spent at least one hour a day writing, and at the end of that time, I had written seven books. I spent the next ten or fifteen years editing them, yet never got a single one of them published. I printed a few copies that I lent out to friends and acquaintances, enough to test the market and know that my work could potentially be popular if I ever get it to the market. One of my dreams is to someday become a full time writer.

I was always an avid reader until I started writing. Once I started writing, it didn’t seem like I had time to read other people’s writing. I have learned this much about myself however, if I am not reading regularly, either my own writing or that of others, something dries up inside, affecting the depth and quality of my conversations. Reading provides diversity which in turn leads to more interesting conversations. I get bored talking about the same thing over and over again. I thrive on diversity.

On thing that working overseas, as I am doing now, gives me is more time. Even if I am working 10 to 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, I still have far more time to kill than I ever did working and living in the States. The important question is what do I do with that time. I suppose I am fortunate in that I have this opportunity to feed my curiosity, to read, and to write. A lot of people working in this type situation don’t really know what to do with all the time they have, and resort to gambling or drinking to keep themselves busy. Otherwise they quickly fall apart.

I have fortunately also discovered the world of on-line education. I can find classes on almost every subject imaginable, and can take those classes at my own pace. I don’t really care if the colleges are accredited or not I am fascinated in the course, and taking it only because I am interested. This is so much better than formal college enrollment, at least for me. I like to cultivate my mind, and the programs are quite inexpensive.

One of the things that is a drag in any professional career is that technology changes, forcing people to continually study just to keep up. A person can quickly become a dinosaur if they are not up on the latest, greatest tools of the trade, and they are always changing. The online courses allows a person to keep up.

For myself, I grew up in an age before AutoCAD drafting, even before personal computers, for that matter. I am always seeing new job listings with skill sets and qualifications I simply don’t have, just because those things weren’t available when I was going through school. With the on-line courses, I can gain the new skills I need easily.

I also recognize that I need a balance between job, recreation, exercise, reading, and studying. I am not a perpetual student in the sense that I am in school all the time, though in reality, I am. I am a life long student of the “School of Hard Knocks.” I find I can’t study indefinitely without some very specific goal in mind, and without periodic breaks and physical activity. Too much work and not enough play makes Jack a very bored boy.

Personal discipline is an important factor, however. Many of us can want to study, and do a lot of different things, but we don’t have the discipline to keep at it, or the knowledge of ourself to set a reasonable pace that we can live with. I have always been very cognizant of my need to get out and away from work. It helps prevent burn out. Burnout destroys more professional careers than anything else.

What do I want to do when I finally grow up?

2011-08-01T08:05:00.000-07:00

This is a question I ask myself frequently these days. What do I really want to do with the rest of my life? Where do I want to go from here? What do I really enjoy doing?

I have been an engineer for over 35 years, and the profession has been good, and I have enjoyed it. It has allowed me to work all over the world and make fairly good money in the process.

I struggled for quite a few years back stateside never quite making enough to feel that I wasn’t in financial bondage. That part was a drag. My salary pretty much leveled out and stayed that way for almost twenty years. Each year was more difficult than the last to keep my head above water.

Then a friend of mine challenged me to go to work in Iraq where I started earning over four times what I was making back in California. Suddenly, the engineering world looked a whole lot different than it ever did before. I was earning more in one week than I was in a month before, and the first $90,000 or so was tax free as long as I spent the requisite amount of time overseas, something like 335 days a year. Not only that, all my living expenses were taken care of. I was in hog heaven.

Work over here in the Middle East was exciting and challenging. If people knew how lucrative it is, they would be coming over in far greater numbers. Most people are just plain scared. The news services don’t paint a very good picture of what it is like over here, but it isn’t that bad.

I suddenly had more money than I knew what to do with, and with money came options. I could travel anywhere, for I had both the time and the money. I could invest in all sorts of different things. I literally got spoiled so it is nearly impossible for me to go back to the kind of income I made before. It doesn’t make sense.

One thing I was able to do was to cover the salary of my daughter, Becky, while she studied for her Architectural License. She was at a particularly difficult time in her life, and found herself working for a company she couldn’t stand, and I was able to step in and help out in a very big way. It gave her the freedom to focus on what she needed to concentrate on. I felt really good about that.

In spite of the money, I found myself with a marriage falling apart, and a house in California that was completely upside down. My mortgage payment went from $2000 a month up to $5000 a month overnight, and it’s resale valve went from nearly $600,000 down to around $200,000. I let the bank take it back.

One thing I discovered was that many of the overseas assignments are fairly short term, so I would have money for a while, but nothing coming in when I was out of work. This made it essential that I get rid of the house. I was never much of a saver.

I began to investigate some alternative options. I became fascinated with Persian rugs there in Iraq, and ended up with a collection of over 200 of them. I even got a warehouse over in Arkansas to store them. I had a dream for a while of opening up a Persian Rug business down in Sharm el Sheik, Egypt.

Later I started to diversify, getting into shoes and clothing, etc. and tried to get an import/export business going. That never quite worked out. It seemed I couldn’t find anyone reliable and trustworthy to work with, especially in Turkey. I eventually sold off everything at huge loss.

A wholesale/retail business of some sort still interests me since the potential profits can be very large, easily surpassing my engineering income, but it is totally dependent on finding local nationals I can work with and trust. That turns out to be the difficult part.

I really am not interested in operating a store. I could own one, but somebody else would have to operate it. I like being the purchaser though. That part is fun.

One thing that working over in the Middle East has done is open my eyes. There is so much going on over here and so much money being spent, the opportunities are almost limitless.

I see so much poor quality construction going on, and I recognize that there is a strong chance of succeeding in a very big way if a company works and acts with integrity in these parts. That company would stand out head and shoulders above the competition if they just did what they said they would do when they said they were going to do it.

Another thing is that the Arabs are getting pretty sophisticated too. They are not going to put up with inferior quality when they can afford the best. I think there will always be a market for quality.

I have had my own construction company, and I don’t want to do that again. I was the worst boss I ever had. I damn near worked myself to death. It was fun and challenging, but I need more freedom than that.

One area of interest to me is in construction materials supply. One of the most difficult things about building over here is the scarcity of construction materials. It is hard to find the materials and tools you need to get the job done. Much of the materials have to be shipped over from the United States which is both slow and expensive.

There are people over here who may be interested in establishing a construction supply business. They certainly have the money, and the connections. That is definitely a possibility I am looking into, but again I don’t want to do it by myself. A group of us would have to take it on.

I could go on working over here for a few more years, and basically set myself up for life financially, and that certainly is one valid option.

The truth is that I still don’t know where I want to live. I enjoy working overseas more than I do working in the States, but I am not sure how much longer I want to continue doing construction. It would be nice to have some other options.

A part of me also wants to be a writer. It has been a fancy of mine that I have been thinking more and more about the last ten years or so. I wrote a number of books after my first wife died, but never got them published. Some of the material was good, but it needed editing, and I never finished editing them. That is something I am thinking about doing now.

I am also thinking that one of these days I am going to meet someone who will present me with a whole different set of options. The future looks wide open. I better enjoy my freedom while I have it.

A Time for Reflection

2011-07-26T13:33:00.000-07:00

A Time for Reflection

I have been something of a wander and a wonderer pretty much all my life. I could never sit for long in one place, and wait for life to come to me. I concluded early on that I had to go out and make it happen, so that is largely what I did. I also knew I needed diversity to keep me focused and entertained, and as a consequence, I ended up living and working all over the globe, and having some fairly interesting adventures along the way.

Now that I am older, I get to sort and sift through those experiences trying to make sense of them all. I literally get to pull the strings of the tapestry of life out one by one, and examine them at my leisure, looking for any truths I might find.

Things seldom went the way I thought they would or should. I was often surprised at the difficulties I encountered. I suppose I thought life should have been easier than it turned out to be. Things had a way of working themselves out though, or maybe I was just lucky.

From a pseudo-religious point of view, I figured everything happens for a purpose. Life is no accident. Those difficulties I faced were necessary, though I often didn’t think so at the time. Each one of them contributed in some way or another to who I am today.

It seems a valuable exercise going back through and reflecting on the life I have lived. Things look much different in retrospect. I get to look at what happened, and rationalize why that had to happen. I have come to the conclusion that I can rationalize damn near anything.

Even with the difficulties, it has been a good life, all in all, one full of unexpected twists and turns, and I think I have learned something about life along the way. Maybe the real purpose of having lived the life I lived was to teach me a thing or two about life. I wasn’t always the best student.

Certainly my childhood years were not easy. I had a mother who hated herself and the life she lived, and apparently held me responsible since I was the oldest. It was I who got her into the mess she was in. If it hadn’t been for me, her life could have been so much better, or maybe just different. My father was married to someone else at the time, the niece of President Roosevelt I understand, and his and my mother’s relationship was something of an East Coast scandal. They eventually fled to California together, and took up residence near my father’s sister, who we called Dofeen, down in San Diego.

My mother tried at every opportunity to make my life a living hell, punishing me for some perceive fundamental transgression that I was only able to put together and understand years later. She was not the first woman to blame her first born child for her fate, nor would she be the last. All I can say is that her hatred manifested itself at every turn, and resulted in protracted physical and mental abuse that dominated the first fifteen years of my life.

What I endured defied all rational. There was no making sense of it. If I protested, it only got worse, so I learned the art of passive resistance. I developed a tendency to avoid dealing with intolerable situations head on. This became a problem for me later on because I would allow unacceptable conditions to fester, and become much worse than they would have otherwise been had I responded sooner. To this day, I am still working on when, where and how to stand up for myself. It was not the first defense mechanism I developed that became a liability later on.

I also developed a pretty vivid imaginary life that effectively isolated me from most of what was going on during that time, kind of an alter-reality. If I was being beaten or starved, I was off somewhere else, completely disassociated with what was happening to my body. While this was a valuable tool at the time, it took a lot of self-control to stay focused and in tune with what was going on in life later.

I would often find myself walking around in circles inside my room, doing little more than wearing a hole in the carpet, not really present to anything around me. I would look at the clock every now and then, and notice that the hands seemed to be skip-jumping around the clock. There were conspicuous gaps of time I simply couldn’t account for. I wasted a lot of time that way. It really became an issue for me while I was a student at the university. I could easily spend an hour and get only fifteen minutes worth of studying done. I had to learn to control my mental escapism in order to function effectively in the real world.

Escapism is one possible genesis of multiple or split personalities. I find that many of us are escape artists at heart. If we don’t like the reality we have, we invent another one. I suppose I could have gone that route, but I learned to control the urge once I left home. I discovered I couldn’t have the life I wanted if I wasn’t in it. I have witnessed countless others who sought an alternate reality provided or fortified by booze or drugs, but fortunately, that never appealed to me. I can understand, however, how some people would fall into that trap.

I left home when I was 15 and never went back again. I had to work through the sense that life should have been some other way than the way it was. That took a long time for me. It was 27 years before I talked to my mother again, and when I finally did, all her hate and bitterness had dissipated. She had found someone who genuinely loved her, and she had made peace with life. I suppose life is a pretty bitter pill to swallow when no one loves you, not even yourself. Today my mother is a long-term patient at an Alzheimer's Care facility, and has no recollection of who I am.

In reviewing my life, I realized that I had been trying to prove something to someone who wasn’t even watching all those years. I was driven to accomplish many things during that time, but nothing I accomplished seemed to matter all that much. Sure, I had gone on and gotten a masters degree in Civil Engineering, been a US Peace Corps volunteer, become a registered professional engineer, and engineered some fairly major projects around the world. In my mind at least, no project I did ever proved anything.

Living under the mistaken belief that I somehow had to prove myself to the world, and especially to my parents, gave me no sense of freedom. Every accomplishment seemed hollow. Later I concluded that none of us really have anything to prove, except to ourselves.

I also got married, and had two children and went on to become a widower during those twenty-seven years. My wife died of cancer after seventeen years of marriage. My mother never met my wife, and never saw my kids as they were growing up. My father had passed away many years before, so he missed out on that as well. Maybe it would have helped each of us find peace in our lives earlier if we had realized that things had a way of working out in spite of life not being like we thought it should have been.

All I knew was that it felt good being loved, and loving in return. Those kids sure had a way of wiggling their way into my heart, and making a nuisance of themselves all at the same time. I guess that is what kids are for. In one way or another, they challenge me every step of the way. I am sure I made my share of mistakes raising them, and each of them in some way thinks I didn’t do it entirely right, but I did the best I could, and in general it worked out either because of me or in spite of me.

I think learning to accept your parents exactly the way they are, and exactly the way they aren’t is essential to making peace with life, and learning to love the life you live. I have met far too many people reacting to their parents long after they are technically out of the picture. I know because I was one of them, and I see plenty of others with similar crosses to bear about the events of their childhood.

It really didn’t matter what happened. The choice I had was what to make of what happened. It was only later that I realized I actually had a choice in the matter. Now that I look back and review some of those memories, I let my relationship to those long ago events evolve. They had a hold on me just as much as I had a hold on them. What is important is that I survived, and through those experiences, gained strengths and character I might not otherwise have developed. It gave me some insight into human character and psychology.

It is not infrequent that I meet people who have been traumatized by things that happened to them, especially in the case of rape or childhood molestation. It seems a common thing these days. I have observed that they can go on being a victim of that experience virtually forever until they find a healthier way of viewing what happened. A person can go through years and years of psychological counseling, and still continue being a victim of that experience. They can become the “walking wounded.” It can haunt them until the day they die and it can color every aspect of their lives. We can’t look back and change what happened. We can only change our relationship to what happened, and what we have that mean about ourselves. This is the power we have over our circumstances.

I have observed that such traumatization is especially common in the realm of relationships. People get hurt when a relationship fails, and their natural reaction is to protect themselves from that pain in any future relationships they enter. Perhaps an element of vulnerability is necessary for us to truly be related to one another. I just know that for me it never worked to try to protect myself from possible hurt while simultaneously being open to relationship. I never figured out how to manage that.

One thing I know about myself is that relationships are critical to my sense of wellbeing and aliveness. If I don’t care much for anyone around me, I don’t care much for the life I have either. By myself, I don’t need much in life, but when I have other people I care for, I find myself wanting and demanding much more out of life. In spite of the hassle it sometimes is, I like being married and having kids.

Face it, I’m a sucker for relationship and in my humble opinion, I have spent far too much of my life lone. I like having someone to tease and please. I don’t always enjoy the process of getting related, but I sure enjoy being related. When my first wife died, I couldn’t believe how hard it was for me to find another relationship to take its place. It took a long, long time for the wound of losing her to heel. A widower may want another relationship soon after losing a spouse, but he or she is not apt to be really ready for one for quite a while.

Just like the death of a partner, the dissolution of a relationship can take a lot of healing before we are really ready for another relationship.

My second wife was also from the Philippines as was my first, but there the similarity seems to stop. We struggled from the first day we met being related, and somehow we never really got it to work. Neither of us got what we wanted, and I think we were both glad when it finally ended. It would be easy to find fault with each other, and claim that was the reason for the demise of the relationship, but that serves no useful purpose. We just weren’t right for each other, plain and simple.

I spent a lot of time contemplating what makes a good relationship good, and a bad one bad. Obviously it takes two to tango, but if the two don’t tango in sync, then it never works. Trust and respect are critical, for without those, there is no chance for the relationship standing the test of time. For me relationship always involved an element of vulnerability and compromise. We had to genuinely care for each other, and take the other into consideration in my decisions. Sometimes I was more prone to think only of myself.

For a while I even did some relationship coaching. It was a lot easier to see other people’s relationship shortcomings than it was to see my own. Coaching relationships was easy. Being in relationship was far, far more difficult. It was crystal clear when it involved someone else’s relationship, but the waters got muddy when it is my relationship on the line.

I have always been a cheerleader for relationship. I enjoy seeing relationships that work and take pride if I can help a relationship get going or stay going. Seeing couples fall in love with each other reminds me what life is all about. I remember what it was like for me when I was head over heels for someone, and I secretly envy the vitality of all new lovers.

I fondly remember how one of the proudest accomplishments of my first wife during her life was in the role of match maker. She connected two people who might never have broken the ice with each other had it not been for her, and they hit it off big time and eventually got married. I had the same experience with a couple friends of mine, and they are still happily married to this day.

Sometimes I think it is easier to match someone else than it is to find a suitable match for myself. The biggest challenge is to what extent I am willing to get involved. I meet so many people who would probably be good for each other, matching them should be easy. The only question is whether or not I am willing to risk their possible animosity should it not work out. Too many times in my life I have played safe.

What if I lived in a world where people assumed responsibility for the quality of each other’s life? Would I get more involved in putting relationships together? Would I be more active in helping couples work through their difficulties, and find happiness together? Maybe.

As I get older, I notice more and more how many opportunities I am given to make a difference in the world. It all depends on how involved I am willing to get in other people’s lives.

No Wonder!

2010-09-18T18:24:00.000-07:00

Many countries
Have developed
Unique varieties
Of bread
That complement
Almost every
Meal served locally,
Whether at home
Or in a restaurant.
This was certainly
True for both
Turkey and Iraq
Where I spent
The last few years.
I developed
An appetite for
Many of the
Local breads,
Especially when
The loaves
Were fresh out of
The oven.
I am also quite fond
Of Nan bread
From India too,
Especially when
Accented with garlic.
When I got
Back home
In America,
I was appalled
At the stuff
We pass off as bread.
It is almost all air
And absolutely no taste.
That reminds me
Of an astute comment
Reportedly by
One of the
Russian cosmonauts
Who was in
Our country
As a part of
The international
Space program.
He said that
The United States
Has got to have
The worst bread
In the Cosmos!
Truer words
Have never been spoken.

Bus Talk

2010-09-15T19:25:00.000-07:00

I am on a cross country
Bus trip
Soaking up the scenery,
And eavesdropping on
On some of the conversations
People are having.
Quite a few of
My fellow passengers
Are unemployed
Construction workers
Who are being retrained
By the government
As long haul truck drivers.
One of the guys
Was telling how his class
Started out with
Over 100 participants,
But was narrowed down
To less than thirty-five
After drug testing.
Speaking of drugs,
I witnessed two drug busts
During the course
Of our passage through Texas.
Some idiot had a stash of drugs
In his backpack,
And the sniffer dogs
Zeroed in on that immediately
At the immigration station,
So the police arrested him
And carted him off to jail.
What started off as
An excruciatingly long trip
Became a much, much
Longer trip than he had
Ever expected.
Another guy was caught
Trying to load
A backpack full of drugs
Onto the neighboring bus
At the Dallas bus station.
I guess the prevalence
Of drugs are a
Sign of the times.
These are certainly
Desperate economic times
For many people,
And several of the riders
Had been out of work
For over a year,
So they were keen on
Making extra money
Anyway they could.
What I found interesting
Were the comments
Of several of passengers
Regarding the drug busts.
There was a lot of discussion
On how the two guys
Should have
Transported the drugs.
Quite a few
Of the them seemed
All too familiar
With the purchasing
And the selling of narcotics.
There were also a few passengers
Who insisted on
Telling their life stories,
But most people
Tried to sleep their way
Across the country.

Counting Railroad Cars

2010-09-15T18:17:00.000-07:00

Along numerous cross country
Highways and byways
Here in the United States,
Railroad tracks parallel
The road way.
I remember as a child
Occupying myself
On cross country trips
Counting the number
Of railroad cars
On each train we passed.
Here I am
Over fifty years later
And I still feel
The compulsion to count
The number of railway cars
Whenever I pass a train.
I believe my record
Is a train with over
Two hundred fifty cars
And six locomotives.
Counting can be difficult
When the train is headed
In the opposite direction.
I must have counted the cars
On over a hundred
Different trains
Over the years.
Good old Union Pacific
And Southern Pacific Railroads
Have conspire to entertain me
Over many thousands of miles
Of otherwise
Monotonous roadways.

Stressed Out Working Mother

2010-09-15T17:12:00.000-07:00

The combination
Of being a new mother
And working for a living
Can stress any woman out.
If the woman doesn’t find
An effective release
For that stress buildup,
It will surface
Sooner or later
As an explosive outburst,
Typically instigated by
A minor problem
That is amplified into
A major issue.
No matter how rational
She may ordinarily be,
At the point of explosion,
Reason and sanity
Tend to take
A leave of absence.
In her outburst,
She is apt to do
Or say almost anything,
And it takes
A very understanding
And tolerant husband
Not to respond in kind,
For doing so
Only adds fuel
To her fire.

A Wordless Goodbye

2010-09-11T20:00:00.000-07:00

I see you standing
With that confused,
Forlorn look
Clouding your eyes,
Not knowing what
To say or do.
Neither of us
Have ever been
Very good at
Saying goodbye.
Each of us must
Read the other’s eyes,
And understand
That love is present
Even when no words
Are spoken.
We each wait for the other
To make a move,
To say something,
To do something,
To give us an excuse
To hug the other,
But neither of us
Can break the hold
That silence has
On our souls,
And so once again
We miss an opportunity
To bridge the chasm
That lies between us.

Plan of Action for Iraq

2010-09-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

The United States
Has expended
Billions of dollars
In the effort
To reconstruct
And stabilize Iraq.
The projects
Ranged from
Military bases
For the Iraqi army
And police stations
To hospitals, clinics
Schools and sewage
Treatment systems.
Now that the US
Is terminating its
Military mission,
Another phase
Of the reconstructive effort
Should be considered.
With Iraqi cooperation,
An organization
Of Iraqi engineers
Similar to the
US Army Corps of Engineers
That is dedicated to
The future of Iraq
Needs to be established.
Such an organization
Is essential to administer
Engineering design
And construction projects
Throughout the nation.
It should be
An organization strong enough
To set national
Construction standards,
And versatile enough
To handle almost any type
Engineering challenge
Facing the nation,
From design and construction
Of roads and highways,
To the revitalization
Of the railway system,
The upgrading
Of the electrical generation
And distribution systems
As well as national
Water distribution
And treatment systems.
In as much as possible,
The organization
Should foster
The growth of
Local construction
And construction
Support services,
And should be responsible
For establishing
And implementing
Material standards
For the Iraqi
Construction industry.

Third World Construction

2010-09-04T11:06:00.000-07:00

Some of many things
The Third World
Typically lacks
When it comes to
Building and construction
Are rigid design
And installation standards
And effective
Quality control inspections
To ensure that
The standards
Are followed.
Architects and contractors
Cut corners
Whenever and wherever
They can to save money.
Sometimes out of
Sheer incompetence,
But often due to
Flagrant corruption,
Serious and potentially
Dangerous flaws
Get constructed into
Structures being built
That could easily
Have been caught
If inspectors were
Doing their jobs.
As a result, structural failures
And electrical fires
Are fairly common,
And construction
In general
Is often far below
Internationally recognized
Standards.
A prime example of
The hazards involved
Is the death toll
And the damage
That occurred
As a result of
The earthquake that struck
Port O Prince, Haiti.
Hundreds of thousands
Died as a result
Structures collapsing.
The only structure
Left relatively undamaged
Was the US Embassy
Which had been constructed
To US seismic standards.
Interestingly enough,
A much more powerful
Earthquake struck Chile
Shortly after the
Earthquake in Haiti,
But the latter resulted
In very little death
Or construction
Because seismic standards
Had been implemented.

The Project Manager from Hell

2010-09-04T05:14:00.000-07:00

She is a nightmare
To work for,
As anyone who has had
The misfortune
Of being assigned to
One of her
Design projects
Can testify.
She treats subordinates
As if they are
Imbeciles instead of
As trained professionals,
And finds fault with
Almost every task done.
Whenever things go wrong,
Or redesign is necessary,
It is always the fault of
The idiots who work for her.
The truth is that
Most of the issues
Are the result of
Her own incompetence
And mismanagement.
She demands
Sacrificial overtime hours
Knowing full well
That everyone is salaried,
Thus are not compensated
For any overtime spent.
To ensure that everyone
Is maxed out on overtime,
She schedules
Frequent frivolous
Day long meetings
Forcing people to work overtime
To get the work done.
The company
Loves her though,
Even though her projects
Are difficult to staff,
For the company happily
Bills the client extra
For all the overtime spent,
Making her projects
Extremely profitable.

Maternal Oneupmanship

2010-09-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

New mothers
For the first time,
Eying every other
Baby they see,
And comparing
Them to theirs,
Each thinking
Their baby is
Somehow cuter,
Smarter, better
Than the other.
Even the outfits
The baby wears
And the stroller
They are riding in
Are grounds for
Maternal oneupmanship.
They beam
With obvious pride
While gloating
Over their baby's
Apparent superiority.

Do-It-Yourself Styles

2010-09-02T15:04:00.000-07:00

I am one of those guys
Who dives in
When I buy something
Requiring assembly,
And figure out from
The size and shape
Of those pieces,
How they should
Fit together.
I may cheat a little,
Once in a while,
And glance
At the instructions,
Or at least
At the pictures
To see if I am
On the right track,
But I usually trust
My builders instinct.
Some other people
I have observed,
Will study
The instructions religiously,
Not only looking
At the pictures and drawings,
But also reading
The document in its entirety
Before they even try
Assembling anything.
I will often have
The item put together
Before they are
Ready to begin.

An Outcast's Perspective

2010-09-02T12:18:00.001-07:00

He works the streets
Of the city,
Scrounging out a living
Begging for change
And dumpster diving
To collect
Bottles and cans
Which can be sold
To the recyclers.
His clothes are
Torn and tattered,
And he smells like
He hadn't taken
Taken a bath
Or a shower
For several months.
He has been living
On the streets
Without a shelter
Over his head
For eight to ten years,
Except for
Occasional brief stints
In the city jail
On charges of trespassing
Or disorderly conduct.
He survives on
Discarded food
Fished out of
Garbage cans
Supplemented by
Occasional meals
At one of the local
Soup kitchens.
Though his hardships
Are obvious,
He ironically
Views himself
As wining at
The game of life.
He takes pride
In the fact that
He can survive
Without working
A traditional job
Like normal people do.
He has a sense of freedom,
Of not being
Encumbered by possessions.
The only possession
He has besides the clothes
On his back
Is a shopping cart
From a local supermarket.
He thinks of himself
As self-sufficient.
What little he needs
In life
Can all be found
In a dumpster.
He sees himself as a rebel,
An outcast
Thumbing his nose
At society,
And in a perverse way
He is proud of
The life he lives.

The Making of a Bully

2010-09-01T15:28:00.000-07:00

He is just
Thirteen months old,
But he already had
His parents wrapped
Around his little finger.
He had figured out
Exactly how to get
What he wanted,
And he would badger
And bully them
Until he got it.
He lived entirely
In a ME centered world,
And his parents
Were rightfully concerned
As to how he would act
Once he started
Going to school.
What would he do
When there were
Other personalities
Just as demanding as his?
How would he react
When he discovered
He no longer
Ruled the roost?
My thought is
That they need to
Get him accustomed
To being around
Children his own age
Before that time.
If his behavior
Is left unchecked,
He could easily
Turn into a tyrant.
Or a school yard bully.

Corporate Bastard

2010-09-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

He is a good old boy,
Married to corporate life
With three bitter divorces
To show for it,
And a fourth on the way.
Work was his refuge
From the failures of his life,
And also his identity.
He had risen through the ranks,
Almost to the top,
And he felt and acted like
He owned the place.
He demanded nothing less
Than total dedication
From all who worked under him
And expected them
To willingly make
The same sacrifices
He had made in his life.
It was obvious that he felt
Woman were not cut out
For corporate life.
He justified his open hostility
To them by noting
How many of them
He had observed
Forsake their careers
For family life .
He saw woman as
Flaky and unreliable
And treated then accordingly,
And as far as he
Is concerned,
They have been
The ruin of many good men,
Men just like himself
Who knew where
To place their priorities.

About Face

2010-09-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

She had always done
All the things
She was told
Would make
Her successful,
Wealthy and wise.
She earned her way
Into one of the
Top universities
In the country
In her chosen field,
And worked
Her tail off
To graduate
At the top
Of her class.
On graduation,
She got a
Lucrative job with
A major corporation
And quickly worked
Her way up
The corporate ladder
To nearly a
Six figure income.
She had put in
Countless hours
Of unpaid overtime,
And sacrificed
Practically all
Of her social life
In the head-long rush
To get ahead.
She was just over
Thirty years old,
And still single,
But had topped out
And was getting
Frustrated with her life
And her career,
For she was
As far from
Her dreams
Of how life
Would someday be
As she had ever been.
Doubt had begun
To creep in.
Along about this time,
Her father whom
She had always
Been trying to impress
With her work ethic
And financial well-being,
Became gravelly ill,
And she took
Her annual two-week vacation
To spend with him.
Two weeks after she returned,
Her father passed away.
When she asked for
Additional time off
To take care of
Her father's funeral,
She was told that
She had used up
Her paid leave,
So she would
Have to take the time off
Without pay.
That was corporate policy,
But then there was
Corporate philosophy
To deal with.
It was also made
Abundantly clear to her
That the corporation
Expected her to
Dedicate her life
To the company,
And if she took
The extra time off,
Then she probably
Wasn't the right one
For the job
In the first place.
The corporation felt
That it owned her,
And could dictate her life.
Once she realized
That mentality,
She knew it was time
To declare her freedom.
In a career about face,
She took her leave
And never returned.
She ended up teaching
English as
A foreign language,
Earning a fraction
Of what she
Made previously,
But she is now happier
And freer
Than she had
Ever been before.
Though painful,
She doesn't begrudge
The road that led her
Where she is today.
Some people travel
Their entire lives
Searching to find
A purpose
Worthy of their life
And an activity
Worth the effort.
Now she has it all.

Teaching English Overseas

2010-08-31T21:45:00.000-07:00

For those college graduates
Who speak English
As a native language,
There are opportunities
To live and work overseas
In almost every
Non-English speaking country
In the world.
There is a huge demand
Because in most countries,
Speaking English is viewed as
A prerequisite for a good job.
In times of recession
And high unemployment,
Knowing how to speak English
Becomes essential.
Students are desperate to learn
And language schools
Are sprouting up
Almost everywhere.
Host country nationals
Who teach English
Often stress grammar
Above practical usage,
So students tend to learn the rules,
But not how to speak.
Native English speakers
Are in high demand
Because they can naturally
Teach students
To converse fluently in English.
Some people manage to
Land teaching positions
Without any teaching credentials,
Which is how I got started
Teaching English overseas.
Generally, however,
Some form of
Teaching certification is required.
The are many TEFL
(Teaching English as
A Foreign Language)
Certification programs available.
Courses are available
Both in classroom settings
And on-line,
With the on-line courses
Being considerably cheaper.
Basic certification
Can be obtained
For as little as
One hundred ninety dollars.
In addition to basic certification,
There are also
Specialized certifications
For teaching young students
And for teaching business English.
Obviously, the more
Certifications one has,
The better prospects
One should have
In landing a good position.
The pay you receive
Is usually quite low
By American standards,
But often sufficient
To live quite well in country.
There can be
A substantial difference in pay
Between working
In the nations key cities
And outlying areas.
Most schools have
A two to three month
Summer vacation
Which should give you
Time to travel
And see the rest of the country.
Most of the time,
There is no necessity
Or requirement to speak
The local language,
In fact, it can be a benefit
Not speaking the local language.
It forces the students
To use English
When conversing with you.
Most of the time,
Teaching positions are obtained
When you are already
Located in the country
In which you want to teach.
This makes it far easier
For you to interview them,
And for them to interview you.
Each country has
Their own rules and regulations
Applicable to teaching
And working within the country.
Generally the school
Will walk you through
The paperwork required
For you to legally teach
In that country.
Some teachers will choose to
Offer private tutoring
To supplement their teaching salary.
Generally the TEFL school
Will assist you in finding placement
And will advise you
On the best way to secure a position,
And on what salary
You should expect
In a particular location.
I have taught in Turkey,
And have met people
Who have taught English
In Vietnam, China and Thailand.
Many people seem to love
Their teaching experience,
And it is often
Far less stressful
Then corporate jobs
Back here in America.
I have met several
American English teachers
Who have left seventy to eighty
Thousand dollar/year
Corporate positions
To teach English overseas,
Who fell in love with the job
And the freedom it offered.

Architectural Chronology

2010-08-31T13:20:00.000-07:00

Out for a pleasant
Sunday morning stroll
On an remarkably cool
Mid summer day,
We zigzag our way
Through some of the
Older residential areas
Of San Jose, California,
Observing the various
Architectural eras represented.
The oldest place we passed
Was vintage 1890
Adobe brick house,
But there are a lot
Of the Queen Anne
Victorian style houses
From the 1900 – 1910 era.
Some are badly in need
Of care and maintenance,
But others have been
Renovated and repainted
To look stunningly beautiful.
Each decade seems to have
A recognizable style
Distinctly different from
That of the previous decade
As well as from
The decade that follows.
My least favorite houses
Are probably the ones
Build during the 50's and 60's,
For they seem to have
The least character
Of any period represented.
It is the tremendous variety
Of residences
That contribute enormously to
The flavor of this city.

San Jose Victorian Architecture

2010-08-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

I have enjoyed
Many a pleasant stroll
Along the streets
Of San Jose, California
Eying the numerous
Victorian style homes
Nestled in amongst
The houses and buildings
From later periods of time.
I like the Queen Anne style
With its lacy, ornamental
Eastlake structural details.
These houses are generally
Circa 1870 to 1910,
And a lot of them
Have have withstood
The ravages of time
And abusive neglect
Fairly well, and some
Have been renovated
And transformed into
Law offices or
Historical show pieces.
One thing is for sure,
A little detailed paintwork
Does wonders in emphasizing
The character of those old houses.
It will take a lot more than paint
To renovate most of them though.
All the plumbing,
Electrical work would
Have to be replaced,
And insulation would have to be
Added throughout.
Since much of the woodwork
Would also have to be replaced,
There is very little of
The original structure
That could be kept.
Renovating one of those
Elderly homes
Is a whole lot more work
Than I care to take on,
But I am glad there are
People out there
With the finances, stamina
And willpower
To carry through
Such monumental projects.
I don't think
I would ever want to
Live in one of them,
Since the room sizes
Tend to be too small
For my taste,
But those old homes
Have a classical character
Well worth preserving.

Hut Tub Round Table

2010-08-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

There is something magical
In the way a hot tub
Acts to breaks the ice
And lubricate the tongues
Of a group of strangers
Who chance to meet
Within its bubbling waters.
Perhaps it's an integral part
Of the California spirit,
Or at least of
The apartment complex
In which we dwell.
There are seven of us
Soaking in the pool,
And no one is from
Around these parts,
Mostly from diverse corners
Of the planet.
There is a guy from Morocco,
One from Macedonia,
Another from Armenia
And still another
From some place in India.
There is a girl from Mexico
A guy from Afghanistan
And then there is me
Who came here via
Turkey and Iraq.
What we have is a melting pot
Of people from all over,
Some young, college aged,
And a couple of us
What I would call
Middle aged!
We talked philosophy,
Dabbled in politics,
Even broached religion,
Plied the muddy waters
Of ancient history,
And aired our thoughts
Without trying to convince
Anybody of anything.
It was an oral free-for-all,
And I loved it.
It is fun sometimes to sit back
And converse about life.
I don't do that often enough
As far as I am concerned.
Usually I am just
Too busy living life
To slow down, mellow out,
And enjoy comparing notes
With others on exactly
What it is to be human.
This is as good a time to start,
I suppose, as any.

Noisy Neighborhood

2010-08-26T15:39:00.000-07:00

In the English language class
I was teaching in Turkey,
I was querying the students about
Complaints they had
Regarding the neighborhoods
Where they lived.
We are all human beings,
After all,
And when we are cramped in
Close proximity to each other,
Something or someone
Is bound to rub us
The wrong way.
One guy complained
That his neighborhood
Was too noisy,
And he couldn't get any sleep.
He had dark circles
Around his eyes to prove it!
On further questioning
I found out that his wife and him
Just had their first baby
A couple months before,
So I immediately realized
Where the noise was coming from.
It was his house that was noisy,
And I surmised that
He probably wasn't
Wasn't the only one
Complaining about the noise.

In for a Rude Awakening

2010-08-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

The girl is pregnant
With her first baby,
And has it all planned out
How it is going to be.
Handling the baby
Will be no problem,
She insists.
Her husband and her
Are very efficient!
Besides she states,
“All the baby does
The first year is sleep!”
I chuckled thinking to myself,
How little of the time
Will actually be spent sleeping,
Either for baby or parents.
She has no idea
What it will be like
Being transformed into a zombie
For the first year.
A new baby tends to be devoid of
Respect for parental efficiency,
And generally lays waste
To even the best made plans.
Then she tells me how
Her husband is working full time
And going to night school
To get his master's degree,
And I think to myself,
A lot of help he is going to be!
I wonder how much studying
He will get done
When he finally gets home each night
After work and school.
She is also working full time
And plans on returning to work
Almost immediately after
The baby is born,
Financial pressures being what they are.
She has no idea how much
Her perspective is bound to change,
All because of that baby.
She doesn't have any relatives
Conveniently close either,
So who is going to look after
The baby while she is at work?
Rather than rain on her parade,
Or be a proverbial profit of doom,
I walk off shaking my head,
Wondering if I was ever that naive.
Isn't first time motherhood awesome!
I have a sneaking suspicion
She and her husband
Are in for a major attitude adjustment.
They are about to undertake one of
Most difficult jobs in the world.
Sure, it is worth it,
If you survive the initiation.

A Most Imprudent Lad

2010-08-24T17:38:00.001-07:00

He was young,
Fresh out of college,
Single, and bound to
Stay that way for a while.
It didn't seem to matter to him
That the group of us
Were co-workers meeting
In a public restaurant,
Or that half of those present
Were women.
Sex was on his mind
And the only topic
He he apparently deemed
Worthy of conversation.
Once he got started,
Whatever restraint
He might normally have had
Quickly vanished
As he boasted of
His sexual exploits
And pontificated
His thoughts on the subject.
He told us where,
In his opinion,
The most beautiful
And promiscuous women
Could be found.
He mixed this
With reference to
A survey he had conducted
Of the local strip clubs
And massage parlors.
I have met plenty of guys before
Who had similar one-tract minds,
Especially when a bit lubricated,
But this guy was sober.
He obviously had no respect
For any of the females present,
Or perhaps he was
Trying to taunt them.
He topped all that off
With the comment that he was
Going to Palm Springs
For a weekend
With his girl friend,
And we all wondered
What kind of girl
Could put up with
A guy like him.
He somehow managed
To fulfill every
Negative stereotype
Of how guys think
That a woman,
Frustrated with
Male-female relationships
Might entertain
During the course of that meal.

Undercover Beggar

2010-08-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

Deep in the heart of Istanbul
A police officer
Was assigned to work undercover
Disguised as a beggar
To observe criminal activity
Near a particular corner.
After three months at his
Assigned begging station,
The stakeout was completed
And the criminals
He had been watching
Were apprehended.
The problem was that
That the policeman
Discovered he could make
Much more money as a beggar
Than he did as a policeman.
So he quit the police force
And returned to the corner full time
As a self employed beggar.
A local news service
Got a hold of the story
And had a field day with it.
As you might imagine
With the economy
In dire straights
And unemployment
At an all time high,
This resulting in a plethora
Of new copycat beggars.

Introduction to the Barracuda

2010-08-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

“Don't let her appearance
Fool you!” I was told.
“She can be ruthless
When she wants to be,
Especially if someone
Crosses her path,
Or tries to waste her time
With stupid questions.
She doesn't take kindly
To air-headed idiots.
She is a smart cookie,
And obviously knows
What she is doing,
And what she wants.
You be straight with her
And she will be
Straight with you as well,
But if you try
To feed her
A line of bullshit,
She'll see through it
In a nanosecond,
And is liable to
Bite your head off.
She has a knack
For cutting a man
Down to size
Who gets in her way
And butchering him alive
With her words.
If provoked,
She can and will
Extract blood
With her tongue.
She will cut you to shreds
Without hesitation
If you are anything
Less than candid with her.”
Then her informative assistant
Smiled and said,
“So go on in and try to sell her
On what you've got!”

Temporary Licenses

2010-08-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

I these times when
The majority of marriages
Fail the test of time,
And end up in divorce,
What if we were only
Given a temporary permit,
Or if the first time,
A learners permit
When we decided
To get married?
I wonder how many couples
Would renew
Their vows after
Their permit expired.
If a person was
Married before,
But he or she couldn't
Make it work,
Should they still be able to
Apply for a learner's permit?
I know it is a beautiful thing
When a couple who has been
Married for 20 or 30 years
Decides to renew their vows,
But does that mean
They got married
With a temporary license
In the first place?
Is that the secret
Of what made it work?
I wonder which should
Last longer,
A learner's permit
Or a temporary license.
Maybe part of the secret
Of having a great relationship
Is forever being
In the learning mode.
Maybe what is needed
Is lifetime learners permit!

Certified

2010-08-21T03:14:00.000-07:00

When does sanity
Cross the line
Into the realm
Of insanity?
Even the professionals
In the psychiatric field
Probably can't give
A clear answer
To that question.
Just what is sanity?
Is it permanent
Or temporary?
Is it something
We float into
And out of depending
On our mood,
Or the situation
We find ourselves in?
I have heard
Such terms as
Temporary insanity
As an excuse
For some pretty
Crazy acts,
But is there also
Temporary sanity?
Are some people
Lucid occasionally
And certifiably crazy
The rest of the time?
Most of us daydream,
And are very imaginative
In coming up with
Alternative possibilities
To what life is actually like,
But when we drift off
Into a fantasy world
Of our own creation,
Are we sane or insane?
We all get crazy notions
Floating around inside our heads
From time to time,
But generally we don't
Act on those impulses.
Sometimes we do,
And we are apt to
Suffer the consequences.
Is sanity a matter of restraint,
The reluctance to follow through
On our crazier impulses?
Is it a matter of self control?
Is insanity a conformance
To some established norm?
If so, then what is normal?
There are certain things
That drive us crazy,
But at what point
Are we really crazy?
I bring all these questions up
Because I once met a guy
Who carried around
A letter certifying his sanity,
And I thought that was
Pretty darn crazy!
It is difficult enough
For a psychologist
To certify someone as insane,
But how could they
Certify someone as sane,
And is that certification
Temporary or permanent?

Adolescent Power Plays

2010-08-20T17:23:00.000-07:00

Most children
Seem to be
Born with
An innate ability
To test the limits
Of their parents
Endurance.
They constantly
Probe to see
What they can
Get away with,
And in the process
They discover
Their parent's
Strong points,
As well as
Their weak points.
For instance,
A common occurrence
Is when a baby
Discovers a particular
Ear piercing scream
That obviously agitates
Its parents.
The baby will then
Use it with
Reckless abandon
Until made to stop
By one of the parents,
Then the other parent
Will be singled out
As the focus
For their vocal performance,
Especially if that parent
Doesn't also puts a stop to it.
The baby quickly learns
When and where
Discipline will be applied,
But equally important
When and where
It won't be as well.
A child may sense
That the parents
Are more restrained
When guests are present,
Or when they are
Out shopping,
And may choose
That opportune moment
To run the show.
The child quickly learns
How to get
What it wants,
And when a parent
Caves in to bad behavior,
They unconsciously
Reinforce the behavior
That annoys them the most.
Sometimes the children
Are well behaved
Around strangers,
But that may be because
They don't yet know
The stranger's limits.
I have seen numerous times
Where the child
Is clearly in control
And runs the household,
For the parents have failed
To set viable limits
To what is, and isn't acceptable.
By the time the child
Enters school, he or she
Is adept at sizing up adults,
And discovering what
He or she can get away with.
A child can easily spot
The new teacher's weaknesses
And will run wild unless
Limits are set immediately.
After all, the kids are
Used to pushing around
Their parents,
So why should any
Other adult be different?

Wacko with Conspiracy Theories

2010-08-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

She was a friend of mine
For a number of years,
And I respected her
For her sharp mind
And her generous hospitality,
But I watched
As she slowly drifted
Off the deep end,
Allowing her paranoia
To overwhelm common sense.
She convinced herself that
Behind every happening
Is a conspiracy of evil minded
And devious manipulators
At the highest levels of government.
In her mind,
She saw the assassinations
Of the Kennedy brothers
And Martin Luther King
As blatant conspiracies,
And not as the acts
Of deranged individuals.
She saw the Vietnam War
And the wars against Iraq
As nefarious plots by
Our military-industrial machine
To justify the expense
Of weapons development
For the sole benefit of
Major military contractors.
She also saw the Iraqi conflicts
As the Bush's attempt
To personally take control of
The Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil fields.
Then there was 911
And the attack
On the Twin Towers in New York.
She saw that as
A conspiracy perpetuated by
George Bush and cabinet
To justify the war in Iraq
And in Afghanistan.
Now I can understand
Her mistrust of politicians,
For I don't trust them myself,
But I have witnessed
Too much bungling
And outright incompetency
At all levels of government
To ever believe that anyone
In government or elsewhere
Has both the intelligence
And the ability
As well as the intent
To orchestrate effectively
Something so intensely bizarre.
As I see it, mostly we
Stumble bumble our way along
Largely in reaction to
The things that happen
As opposed to in control
Of what happens.
I see a lot of evil
In the world,
But I just don't see it
As the kind of
Grandiose conspiracies
That she does.

City Slicker

2010-08-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

Rick was born
And grew up
In the city,
And was used to
The hustle bustle
Of all kinds of people
Coming and going,
Frantically trying
Trying to get
Someplace quick.
He was single,
And had a small,
But relatively expensive,
Studio apartment
Conveniently located
A couple blocks
From his office,
In the heart of
The downtown area.
Rick walked to work,
And had a choice of
More than a hundred
Different restaurants
Within a ten minutes
Of his place.
It was also within
Walking distance
Of the university
Where he graduated,
And was surrounded by
Theaters, parks, museums
Hotels, fitness centers
Singles bars and discos,
As well as a healthy mix
Of high and low end
Shopping areas.
The area was trendy
And fashionable,
Populated by people
From almost every
Conceivable ethnic persuasion.
He was used to hearing
Six or ten different languages
During the course of a day,
Which added flavor
And an exotic mysticism
To his daily routine.
Public transit was available
All hours of the day,
Perfect for a city
And a young man
On the move.
He thrived on the noise
And the chaos,
And couldn't imagine
Living any other way
Then the way he was.
Life in the suburbs
Was not even in the realm
Of possibilities.
Life in the countryside
Was unimaginable.
His life consisted of
Work, working out,
Eating out, and socializing
Amidst fitful bouts of sleep.
He had occasional thoughts
Of finding someone
To share life with,
But he was having
Too much fun being single
To give that idea
Serious consideration.
Besides, he was still young,
Just twenty-seven years old,
And wasn't really ready
To get tied down yet.
He had had several
Possible encounters with fate
But they hadn't worked out,
Much to his mother's chagrin.
He kept slim and trim,
Unlike his friends
Who had gotten married.
He worked out at the gym
Four or five times a week,
And played basketball,
Baseball and football regularly,
Depending on the season.
On weekends
He frequented the jogging trails,
Often running for miles
Along the trails and parks
That magically intertwined
Throughout the city.
His pad was decorated
For comfort and style,
Elegant but practical.
Fancy enough
To impress almost anyone
If he chose to invite them,
Yet few had witnessed
That side of him.
He actually was
A fairly decent cook,
But never liked
Cooking for himself,
So he almost always ate out.
He preferred adventuresome
Ethnic fare
As oppose to fast food
And regular American cuisine.
He liked Thai and Indian food,
Greek and Persian delicacies,
Italian ice cream
And sushi restaurants.
He liked eating in
European style
Outdoor cafes
Where he could sit
For hours and hours
Watching people
As they walked by.
His life style
Afforded him
Both the time
And the opportunity
To contemplate
The world around him.
Sometimes he would
Drop in on
Poetry readings
Or go places where
Live music was
Being performed.
Though there were
Museums were all around,
He seldom, if ever, went.
They just weren't
His “cup of tea!”
Like everyone else,
He cursed the traffic
From time to time,
And complained
About the ever present pollution,
But in general,
He just ignored it,
And concentrated on
Enjoying living the moment,
No mater what
He was happened to be doing.
He liked the feeling
Of being an urban professional,
And was always well groomed
And impeccably dressed,
A class act, but one
He was extremely comfortable with
And proficient at.
He relished the company
Of scholarly minds,
Wiling away the hours
Discussing philosophy,
The economy and politics.
This was one of the benefits
To living in a university town,
And why he chose to stay.
He was as much a part of the city
As the city was a part of him.

Chess Hangover

2010-08-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

Oh No! I did it again.
I stayed up
Two-thirds of the night
Playing chess
And now I am suffering
The consequences.
I am dead tired,
And I feel
Completely wasted,
But a new day
Has already begun,
And is demanding
My attention.
Unfortunately
I never got
Into the habit of
Compensatory sleeping
Until noon,
No matter how late
I finally go to bed.
Every time I do this,
I swear I will
Never do it again,
But I am simply
An incorrigible chess nut,
And enjoy the game
Even when I have to
Pry my eyelids open
With toothpicks
In order to play.
I know I have
Things to do,
But I need today
To recover,
So I might as well
Give up the idea
Of getting anything
Worthwhile accomplished.
At least I can write.
I can practically
Do that with
My eyes closed,
But trying to do
Much beyond that
Has a very low
Probability of success.

Crazy Mama

2010-08-17T09:11:00.000-07:00

She was probably
A bit insane
Most of her life,
But she was
Distinctly senile
By the time
He got to know her.
She is his grandmother
On his mother's side,
A feisty independent,
And generally harmless
Little old lady,
Who still lives alone,
Though surrounded
By relatives.
Out of necessity,
The family has taken to
Locking the gate
In the fence
Around the property
To keep her inside.
She tends to
Wander off whenever
She gets a chance.
One time she was found
Walking alongside
The freeway out of town
Heading who knows where.
Another time someone
Recognized her strolling
On the far side of town
And kindly brought
Her back home.
Apparently “Mama,”
As all of the family
Likes to call her,
Has mentally erased
His mother from her mind.
It could have something
To do with the fact that
They never got along
All that well to begin with.
Anyway, his mother
Stopped by to check on Mama,
And see how she was doing.
Mama's response
Was to call the police
And report a strange woman
Inside her house.
Even when confronted
With old family photographs
Clearly showing
His mother as a part
Of the family,
Mama claimed not to know
Who her daughter was.
He rather imagines
The police officers
Responding to the complaint
Must have had a laugh
Out of that situation.
Mama is full of
Quirks and eccentricities,
And one of the most bizarre
Is that she has lately
Given birth to
A porcelain Christ figure
Which she carries
All over the place
Wrapped in a blanket,
Treating it like a baby.
She tells everyone
How good her baby is
Because it is so quiet,
And she dutifully
Cautions visitors
To be quiet
So they don't
Wake up the baby,
When anyone picks up Mama,
Someone has to
Stay behind and babysit
Her precious baby.
In spite of all that,
And maybe sometimes
Because of her wacky dementia,
She is loved by everyone.

The Mark of a Good Manager

2010-08-16T16:12:00.001-07:00

It fascinates me
Observing how
Different managers
Handle problems
Whenever they occur.
A good manager
Doesn't waste time
Trying to find
Someone to blame
When things go wrong.
He or she is too busy
Solving the problem.
The incompetent one
Is more interested
In finding a scapegoat
Rather than accepting
Responsibility for
The solution.
A good manager
Doesn't give
And doesn't accept excuses.
All a competent manager
Wants to hear is that
The problem is solved.

A Man of the Gutter

2010-08-13T21:06:00.000-07:00

He is one of those people
Who can't speak
Without every third
Or fourth word
Sounding like
A disgruntled whore
Talking shop.
He is a student
Of the gutter,
Proud of the way
He peppers his speech
With vulgarities.
He consciously abuses
The language,
As well as my ears,
With his profanity.
He seems to be broadcasting
His ignorance
And utter contempt
For social mores.
In the gritty underworld
Of city life,
His kind roam the streets
In force,
Thumbing their nose
At propriety,
Speaking in a dialect
All their own.

So, You Want to be a Writer!

2010-08-13T14:45:00.001-07:00

Like countless others,
You have imperial dreams
Of someday seeing
Your words in print,
Of the rest of the world
Suddenly waking up
To who you are
And what you have to say.
Well, if you want
To be a writer,
The secret, if there is one,
Is to write, write
And write some more.
Write about anything
And everything.
Experiment with language.
Try a different style,
Maybe a subject
You never previously considered.
Let people see
What you have written.
Let them criticize
And bleed all over it,
Then pick yourself up
By your boot straps
And write again.
Writing serves as
Food for thought,
So the more you write,
The more there is to write.
You need not fear
Ever running out of topics.
Take notice of what
Catches your eye,
And ask yourself why.
Also observe
How much of life
You tend to miss.
Notice the people
Around you,
Every one of them
Has a story
They're dying to tell.
Many of them
Have two or three
Good tales,
And aren't even sure
Which ones are true.
Learn to laugh with them
And at yourself.
Go where people talk,
And listen for the gold.
Capture what it is
To be human,
Taking in the good,
As well as the bad,
The beautiful,
As well as the ugly.
Have compassion
For those around you
As well as for yourself.
Explore life, love
And happiness,
Then take note of
The part that sorrow
Plays in life.
Observe the meaning
You give to things.
Learn what it is
To be fully alive,
And alert to life,
For only then
Will you have
A story worth telling.

Belching Steam

2010-08-11T11:05:00.000-07:00

She is obviously
Frustrated and angry
At the inequities of life,
But that is no excuse
For the language that gushes
From her mouth
Just because something
Has ticked her off.
Normally she comes across
As very sharp
And completely professional,
But when she is
In a foul mood,
Look out world!
She tends to lash out
With curses,
Spewing verbal venom
At whoever
Or whatever
Crossed her path,
And in the process,
She sounds neither
Educated nor erudite.
If she behaves
That way at home,
She is bound to act
The same at work,
And it will cost her
Far more than
She can possibly imagine.
We all have challenges
And our share
Of frustrations,
For that is
The nature of life,
But it is not appropriate
For any of us to splatter
Our discontent
On everyone around us
As she has been doing.

Reflections of Language

2010-08-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

Who you are,
Your education level,
And the kind of people
You associate with
Are all reflected
In the language you use.
It doesn't matter
What country,
Or what part of the country
You come from,
Or what language
You happen to speak,
Educated people tend to have
A much wider range
Of words they use
On a daily basis.
I have heard various numbers
Bantered about,
But let's say that out of
Roughly one million words
In the English language,
A high school dropout
Might use roughly 1500 words
In normal speech,
A college graduate,
Possibly as many as
Ten to fifteen thousand,
A writer or a poet,
Typically as many as
25,000 to 150,000 words.
You should also be
Aware of the pitfalls
Of repeating the same words
Over and over again,
Especially if those words
Are impolite or off color.
They add nothing
To your communication,
And subtract from
Your standing
In the ears of
The listener.
You should also avoid
Punctuating your sentences
With meaningless utterances
Such as "ahs" and "you knows"
Which certainly don't add to
Clarity of communication.
When learning a new language,
Be aware of who
You are learning from,
For you can easily pick up
Words and phrases
Which reflect badly
On your class
Or level of education,
Your language is a mirror
Reflecting who you really are.

The Taming of a She Wolf

2010-08-08T03:56:00.000-07:00

What I remember was
Her passion for architecture.
Perhaps it was the idealistic
Dream of a young woman
At the start of her career,
Eager to take on life,
Naively determined to leave
Her mark on the world,
With no sense of limitations
Or the difficulties
She would one day face.
All I know is that
She seemed utterly fearless,
And on fire with possibilities
Of what architecture could be.
Supremely self-confident,
The world was her oyster.
After all, what could I,
Or anyone else, logically expect
From a girl who,
On her own initiative
And hard work
Won a five-year
All-expense-paid scholarship
To one of the top three
Architectural schools in the US.
She had shown her mettle
On her first job
After graduating,
Becoming a shooting star
In the architectural world.
She lined up eleven interviews
For her next position,
And ended up with
Eleven job offers
To choose from.
Those were exciting times
And there seemed
No limit to how far
She could go.
She quickly obtained her license,
And was able to take on
More and more responsibility,
But something changed.
She was no longer the bright-eyed
Bushy-tailed, unstoppable woman
I fondly remembered.
It was almost as if
Someone else had
Taken over her spirit.
The global economic crisis
Had hit the US big time,
And the company
She worked for
Was struggling to survive.
She was forced to take
A ten percent pay cut
Along with everyone else.
Even with that,
More than half her co-workers
Lost their jobs during the recession
Which left those remaining
Profoundly insecure.
I could hear the change
In the way she talked,
And in what she said.
I started hearing her
Say things like,
"They don't pay
Architects very much!"
Or just as lethal,
"They pay woman less
Then they do men
For the same work."
Instead of talking about
All the things she wants to do,
She is now focused
On the things she has
Not yet done,
As if they are stopping her
From advancing further.
She even talks about
Getting out of the field altogether,
And pursuing art,
Or something else
She enjoys doing.
What I hear is burn out,
The slow death
Of a once passionate artisan.
I know,
For I have been there myself.
What I have observed
Is that life is largely determined
By our attitude,
And hers is obviously waning.
It is as if she is trapped,
With nowhere else to go.
The wolf she was
Has been defanged,
And unless something changes,
She may come to hate
Her job and profession,
And of course,
The turmoil she is in
Inevitably will be carried back
To plague her family.
Once a person's confidence is lost,
Can it ever be regained?
Is there anything I could say
That would ease her struggle?
It is times like these
That can easily make or break
A budding professional,
And I certainly don't
Want to see her spirit broken
Any more than
It already is.
She doesn't have to
Be an architect, as long as
She enjoys what she does,
But if she chooses not to be
An architect,
My hope is for her
To go out with
A blaze of glory
Verses a whimper.

SPAM

2010-07-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

Long before junk emails
Began to litter cyberspace,
Most people knew SPAM
As the classic American
Canned meat product
Manufactured by Hormel.
Even today it is still a staple
In most US grocery stores.
In several countries like
The Philippines and Korea
SPAM is extremely popular
Both as a regular dinner entree
And as a treat for special occasions.
In Korea, cans of Spam
Are thought of as ideal
Wedding gifts!
Over the years there has been
Much speculation
And many jokes told
As to the supposed source
Of the meat meat used in Spam,
Some people think that
SPAM stands for
"Specially Processed Animal Meats,"
And others believe it stems from
A contraction of "Spiced Ham."
I used to tell my kids
When they were growing up
That SPAM came from the "Spamalo",
A mythical half-breed pig.
All I know is that for sure
Is that it was impossible to find
There in Turkey
Where I lived
For the last couple years,
And I suppose,
Absence makes
The heart grow fonder.

Numerical Drift

2010-07-27T17:38:00.000-07:00

I find it takes
A lot of effort
For me to stay
Focused and alert
While counting.
I easily get distracted
Which often causes me
To lose count.
It doesn't help
That my mind
Has a natural tendency
To drift off,
Either in momentary
Lapses of sleep,
Or pursuing other
Lines of thought.
I have come up with
A slew of tricks
To help me in my
In my counting efforts,
But nothing is failsafe.
I will often
Group things
In piles of
A convenient number,
Then I can simply
Count the piles.
Occasionally I have
Counted something
Three or four times,
And each time,
Came up with
A different total.
That is a sure-fire way
To give myself a headache.
For those people
Subject to numerical slumber
As I am,
Counting sheep can be
An effective way
For them to put
Themselves to sleep.
One, two, three, four, snore.

A Man of Two Minds

2010-07-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

There have been
Many times in my life
That I have wrestled
With a set of problems
That seemed insolvable,
Only to go to bed
And wake up in the morning
With a solution in hand.
I have come to consider
It a fact that
My subconscious mind
Is quite a bit more
Powerful than
My conscious mind,
And can often
Figure things out
That I can't solve
When I am awake.
I have learned to trust
My subconscious mind
Whenever I have
A difficult problem
Or when I have to make
A major decision,
And can't decide
What I should do.
Maybe it is just that
I have learned
Not to trust
My conscious mind.
Most, if not all,
Of the mistakes
I think I have made,
Have been made
While I was awake.
In fact, I can't remember
A single mistake
I made while sleeping.

The Thoughtful Pacer

2010-07-26T18:57:00.000-07:00

He is a pacer,
Someone who thinks
While he paces,
Or at least
He thinks he's
Thinking when
He paces the floor.
At any rate,
He habitually
Circles round
And round
Inside his room
Wearing a circle
In the carpet,
While absentmindedly
Meandering
The fertile pathways
Of his mind.
He could be
Contemplating
All the things
He has to do,
Trying to prioritize
His activities,
Or he might be cogitating
Over a past moment,
Considering all the things
He could have,
Or should have done,
Instead of what he did.
More than likely though
His mind is
Somewhere else altogether,
Drifting off
In a fantasy world
Far from the confines
Of his room
Or the life he lives.
All he knows
Is that the clock
On the wall
Seems to leap
Forward sporadically,
And he can't account
For where any of
The time spent has gone.

The Racial Outcast

2010-07-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

The woman was of
Chinese descent,
But born here in
The United States,
A second generation
American immigrant.
Even though she grew up
And was educated here,
It is obvious that she
Never got comfortable
With the fact
Of being Chinese
In American society.
It didn't make
Any difference
That fifty percent
Of the office
Was also Chinese.
She still saw herself
As different
From everyone else,
And felt she had to
Defend China's honor.
She took offense
At anything mentioned
Either in the news
Or in general conversation
About China
Or Chinese people
That could be
Construed as
Remotely negative,
Acting as if that was
A direct attack on her.
The slightest comment,
No matter how innocuous
Would draw her ire.
She would become livid
Whenever shoddy or dangerous
Chinese merchandise
Made the evening news,
After all,
China wasn't the only place
That made poor quality goods.
When a Chinese student
At an Eastern university
Went on a rampage
And killed a number
Of people on campus,
She felt the emphasis
In the news coverage
Was the fact
That he was Chinese,
And she railed against
The apparent injustice
Of the reporting.
She talked about
How racist
This country was,
But she was
Far more race conscious
Than anyone else
I ever met.
Her hyper-sensitivity
Made her act like
A racial outcast,
And isolated her
From the rest of
Mainstream society.
It left her
In perpetual battle
With the world,
Pointlessly defending
Everything Chinese.

The Corporate Lizard

2010-07-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

She's the kind of boss
Nobody ever wants to have,
Someone hard to work with,
And even harder to work for,
But she's embedded herself
Within the corporate structure.
In fact, you could say
She's married to the company,
For it is apparently
The only family she has,
Thus she willing spends
All her evenings and weekends
Sequestered there at the office
And expects those
Working for her
To do the same.
Unfortunately for you,
She has been assigned
As the team leader
On a design project,
And you are a part
Of that team.
You quickly realize
Her principle concern
Is showing who is boss,
And rubbing it in.
Her concept of leadership
Is to treat those
Under her as idiots,
With barely concealed
Scorn and contempt,
To ask their opinion,
Then to completely ignore
Their responses.
She calls for frequent
And often pointless meetings,
A total waste of your time
And the rest of the team
As well as the time of
The consultants involved.
If you are a professional
And know what you are doing,
This really chafes you
The wrong way,
And it is people like her
That often cause
Experienced people
To break away,
And form companies
Of their own.

Finger Nail Drama

2010-07-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

As far as the toddler
Is concerned,
Finger nail clippers
Are terribly crude
Instruments of torture,
And he will never
Sit quietly and watch
His fingers
Being butchered by them.
He will scream
At the top of his lungs,
Turn purple
With indignant rage,
And twist and turn,
Trying to escape
His mother's
Bi-monthly inquisition.
In spite of her
Logical concern
That the neighbors
May one day
Call the police
To report his
Tortured screams,
She dutifully proceeds
On her periodic quest
To shorten his nails
To prevent him
From gouging either
Himself or others.

Cabin Fever

2010-07-17T22:10:00.000-07:00

He had been sitting
There at the computer
Much too long,
And was fighting
Against himself
To get anything done.
The fact was that
His mind was
In open rebellion
Against the task,
And screaming out
In boredom.
He had exhausted
All his usual tactics
Like reading the news,
Or even worse,
Playing mindless games
Like Spider or Solitaire.
He obviously needed a break,
Some kind of diversion,
Something to take him
Away from the tedium
Of the assignment
He was working on.
Really, he needed to get out,
Away from the computer,
Away from that room,
Away from it all.
The way his mind worked,
That translated to
He needed a woman
In his life!

The Best You Can

2010-07-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

As a parent,
You simply do
The best you can
Raising your children.
There is no guidebook
That tells you
Exactly what
You should do when.
You have to
Figure that out
As you go along.
You are only human.
You will make
A mistake or two
As you stumble
Bumble along,
And you just hope
And pray
That it all works out
Because of you,
As well as
In spite of you.
As your children grow
And take on
Lives and attitudes
Of their own,
Try not to haunt yourself
In retrospect
Of the things
You didn't do
When you had a chance.
Whether or not
Your children turn out
Good or bad,
You set the best example
You could
Knowing what you knew then.
Sometimes
You might confidently think
You taught them well,
But only time will tell .
Eventually each child
Will choose his or her
Own path
Largely independent of you,
And as always,
You hope for the best.
Sometimes
An older child
Will try to blame you
For what they judge
You did wrong
When they were
Growing up.
What was done was done.
You did the best
You could,
And until they realize
And accept that fact,
They will never
Really grow up!
Sometimes
Your children will do
Astounding things,
And you will feel
Rightfully proud,
And sometimes
They will do
Terrible things,
And you will
Feel deeply ashamed
And question
Everything you did
Raising them,
Trying to figure out
What went wrong.
Either way,
Passing blame
Helps neither you nor them.
Ultimately,
You can't take
Full credit for
Their successes
Any more than
You can take full credit
Their failures.

The Parenting of Personalities

2010-07-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

No two children
Are exactly alike,
Probably not even
Identical twins.
Parents need to adjust
Their parenting style
To what works with
Each particular child.
What works with one
Might not work
With the other,
For each child
Is motivated
By different things.
Each will have
His or her own
Unique way of seeing
And doing things.
As a parent,
There is no guidebook
That tells you how
To compensate
For differences
In personalities
Between your children.
Just as your children
Learn to recognize
And take advantage of
The differences
In personalities
Between you
And your spouse,
You must do the same
With them.

Accessing Our New Reality

2010-07-14T17:24:00.000-07:00

I have been away
For quite a while
And on coming back
To this old country,
It seems so much
Has changed.
It is not the same nation
As the one I left behind.
Gone are both
The arrogant pride,
And the perpetual optimism
For which we Americans
Were often noted.
There is a new
President in office
Elected on
A platform of change,
But something
Far more fundamental
Than a simple
Change of leadership
Has occurred.
I find it difficult to gauge
Just where we are
Because the news channels
Have become
So biaest for or against
The current leadership
That basic objectivity
I once expected
From the news services
Is a thing of the past.
When I talk to people
I chance to meet,
I observe that
A pervasive sense of
Dissolusionment
Has set in,
Those who wanted change
Are not happy with
The changes they see,
And those who
Liked the way things were
Are generally appalled
By what they see,
And the two sides
Are more polarized
Than ever before.
Our confidence
In ourselves
And where the future
Is taking us
Appears to have been
Profoundly shaken.
The economic ressession
The nation and the rest
Of the world endured
Is by no means over,
And its effect is visible
Almost everywhere I look.
Many people who once thought
They were secure,
Have awakened
To a new financial reality,
And few are optimistic
That things will
Rapidly turn around,
That the future
Will somehow be better
Than it is today.
More people are in
Survival mode
Than I have ever seen before.
Optimists seem to be
Few and far between.
Where are we really,
And where are we headed?
I am still trying
To figure that out,
And I sense
That now is a time
Our nation needs
Leadership more than
Ever before,
Someone we all
Can believe in.

Awaiting the Familiar Stranger

2010-07-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

They were there
At the airport
Impatiently waiting
For their child's
Grandfather to show up
After a protracted
Overseas absence.
The young couple
Proceeded to
Entertain themselves
Asking each other
If this person
Or that person
Exiting the gate
Was the one they
Were waiting for.
No, that person
Is too old,
No, That person
Is too young.
No, I think he has
More hair than that!
No, that one
Is too fat.
No, that one
Is too skinny.
Finally I showed up,
Looking somewhat
Like they remembered,
And after greeting
My daughter
And her husband,
Was introduced
To my newest grandson.

Regrets

2010-07-05T19:05:00.000-07:00

Regrets, I have to admit
I have had a few,
For I have done
A lot of crazy things,
And made my share
Of foolish blunders.
In retrospect,
I can see a multitude
Of mistakes I made,
Things I should have done
Or would have done
If I had only known,
But what is done is done
And I must move on.
At times I must swallow
My burdensome pride,
And ask those close to me
To forgive me
For those things I’ve done,
But inevitably
The one who must
Forgive the most
Is simply me,
For I know
I could have done better,
And each time
I feel those pangs of sorrow,
I vow it will be different
If and when I get
Another chance.

Riding Fury

2010-07-04T09:24:00.000-07:00

With eyes ablaze
Full of pent up fury
And righteous indignation,
She stormed into the room
Literally frothing
At the mouth,
Demanding an immediate search
For the missing key.
I, who knew exactly
Where I had placed it,
Deduced what might
Have happened,
But not wanting to
Incite her further,
Quickly left
And let her fume.
Had she been
Of a rational mind,
She could have reasoned
That the missing key
Was simply misplaced,
And could easily
Be replaced,
Or would simply
Turn up sooner or later.
Her blowup
Wasn't at all necessary,
But she was stuck on
Having me tear
The apartment apart
Looking for it.
The likely scenario
Was that she had
Absent mindedly
Picked up the key
And placed it
Where she often
Places her keys,
And that is where
It probably is
Even now.
I, who don't have
Neither the authority
Nor the audacity
To search her
Purses or pockets,
Can only wait until
She stumbles on it,
Or gets off the horse
She is riding.

The One Not Waiting

2010-06-27T22:45:00.000-07:00

The kind of woman
I am interested in
Isn’t waiting for me,
Or anyone else,
To come and free her
From the life she lives,
For she is already living
A life she loves.
She is someone
With the courage
To venture forth alone
If she has to,
But also someone
With the freedom
To commit to a relationship
If and when
A suitable mate
Comes along.
She is someone
Who doesn’t let
Her fears and anxieties
Stop her
From trying new things
Or exploring
What life has to offer.
She is someone
Who lives adventurously,
A person who
Challenges herself
At every turn,
Always seeking
To better herself,
Yet there is serenity
About her as well,
A certain calmness
Bred of confidence
In whom she is
And her mission in life.
This is the woman I seek.

Poison Mattress

2010-06-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

We were trying to get
The perfect mattress,
With the mystical quality
Of being simultaneously
Soft and firm,
All in the quest
For a perfect night's sleep.
What we got
Seemed to fit the bill
Without emaciating
Our checkbook too much,
Until we brought it home.
As soon as we brought it in
Everyone in the apartment
Started coughing
And developing
Respiratory distress.
We thought we had all
Come down with a bad
Case of the flu,
But it kept getting worse
And worse.
What we noticed
That seemed strange
Was that the coughing
Subsided the longer
We were away from
The apartment,
And started up again
As soon as we got back.
It was obvious
That something
In the apartment
Was making us sick.
It took a while until
We narrowed it down
To the new mattress.
We tried venting,
Putting in powerful fans
To blow the fumes out,
But that didn't help.
As soon as we
Placed the mattress outside
On the patio,
All of our symptoms
Began to disappear.
The mattress was offgassing,
Unbeknown to us
Giving off formaldehyde,
Poisoning us
While we slept,
Eat and breathed.
It was not a cheap mattress
Made in China,
But one manufactured
Here in the United States.
One possible solution
Would be to encase
The mattress in plastic,
But that has
Certain drawbacks as well.
What it highlighted
Was the danger
Of indoor pollution.
It turns out that
A multitude of things
Commonly found
In houses and apartments
Offgas volatile
Organic compounds.
The list includes
Paints, stains, varnishes,
Carpet, insulation, flooring,
Kitchen cabinets
And counter tops,
Plywood and particle board,
Paint and strippers,
Glues and adhesives,
Caulking compounds,
Soft or flexible plastics,
Shower curtains,
and many fire retardants.
Furniture and pressed wood
Are common culprits,
And even toys and tennis balls
Can give off
Toxic or irritant gases.
The new car smell
Is a product of offgassing.
Even the computer
On which I am writing
Offgasses.
Add cleaning supplies
And air fresheners,
Pesticides, packing foam
Synthetic fibers,
Fertilizers and fuels
To the mix,
And the home ends out
Far worse
Than the traffic bred smog
That envelopes
So many cities
Around the world.
This is especially of concern
When a new baby
Comes home.
His or her lungs
Are not fully developed,
And those VOC toxins
Can take a toll
On their health
And well being
Even more so
Than it does
On us adults.

Newspaper Obituary

2010-06-25T14:35:00.001-07:00

And so another regional newspaper
Bites the dust,
An apparent dinosaur
In the digital age,
A relic of a
Bygone era.
It died a slow
And painful death,
Brought on by
Anemic circulation
Sharply reduced
Advertising revenue,
Rising costs,
Competition from
Television news,
And strangulation
By Internet news
And classified services.
People now have choices
They never had before.
They can get
All the news they want
Through their computer
Or cell phone.
The paper is no longer needed
For editorials,
For sports results,
For local happenings,
For job listings,
Or for any of the other
Services the newspaper
Once provided.
Young boys no longer
Have the opportunity,
As I did when I was young,
To get up
In the early hours
Of the morning,
Wrap the papers
And deliver them
By bicycle
To local residences.
Much is lost
As much is gained
In the changing
Of the Times.

Turtle Commotion

2010-06-25T10:46:00.000-07:00

After a young girl
And her older sister
Boarded a plane
And took their seats,
A stewardess noticed
A plastic box
With a pet turtle inside
In the young girls lap.
The stewardess told her
To stow it
Under the seat in front
Which she did,
But another stewardess,
On seeing the turtle,
Demanded that the two girls
Exit the plane.
Apparently birds,
Dogs and cats
Are permitted,
But amphibians
Or reptiles are not.
The girls were told
That they had to
Get rid of their pet
If they wanted to fly,
So they called their father
To come back to the airport
And pick up the turtle.
Since no one
Was willing
To look after the turtle
Until the girls father arrived,
The girls were forced
To place their turtle
In a nearby trash can
To avoid further
Delaying the flight.
They were then
Allowed to re-board
And fly to their destination
When the father arrived
Back at the airport
The the turtle was nowhere
To be found,
And the explanation offered
Was that the trash
Had probably been dumped.
What had actually happened
Was that an airport worker
Observing the confrontation
Had rescued the turtle,
And taken it home
For his daughter.
Three days later,
After the confusion unraveled,
The young girl
And her pet turtle
Were reunited,
Compliments of the airline.
The airline's only excuse
Was that turtles
Have been known
To carry the salmonella bacteria,
So the little turtle
Was considered
A serious security violation.
They failed to mention
How they got the turtle
To her, however,
Or what happened to
The airport worker
Who “rescued” the turtle.
I wonder if it was
The airport security cameras
That implicated the worker.
I can only imagine
How infuriated the father
Must have been
When he had to return home
Empty handed.
In a world run by rigid rules
And regulations,
Little things often become
Major issues,
Especially in the absence of
Common sense.
In retrospect, none of
The turtle commotion
Was at all necessary.
I wonder if the stewardess
Who raised the issue
Was rewarded
For her diligence
Or reprimanded
For her steadfast rigidity.
Another possible way
To look at this incident
Is to wonder about
How newsworthy
The day must have been
For this to have made
The national news.

Disguised Insanity

2010-06-24T06:50:00.000-07:00

I remember when
The State began closing
The mental institutions
And flooding the streets
With all sorts of crazies.
It became quite common
To encounter people
Talking to the air,
Or to imaginary
Friends or adversaries.
I would see them gesticulating,
Sometimes mumbling,
Sometimes shouting,
Seemingly oblivious
To those of us
Who were really there.
Now that I have returned
Back stateside
After a long period overseas,
I observe that there are
More of those type people
Than ever before,
Only someone gave them all
The perfect cover,
They all have cell phones!
Everyone has one,
The neighborhood bums,
The skid-row derelicts,
And even the real crazies
Now have a cell phone,
Or at least a set of
Ear plugs that I assume
Are attached to either
And iPod or a cellphone.
What a stroke of genius!
Give the crazies
A cell phone or an iPod,
And they are instantly transformed
So that no one questions their sanity
When they see them
Talking to the air anymore.
Problem solved.

Rejoicing at the Questions

2010-06-24T05:48:00.000-07:00

Last night I saw a program
On the science channel
Summarizing the latest theories
On the nature of the universe
And the laws that govern
Its makeup and actions.
There were theorists
And mathematicians
From major universities
Postulating ideas
On how quantum mechanics
And the Theory of Relativity
Developed by Albert Einstein
Can be united into
A single unifying theory.
Quantum mechanics
Appears to apply to
Very small particles
And relativity applies
To very large bodies,
But the two theories
Break down
And seem mutually incompatible
When dealing with
What is happening inside
Black holes.
Some of the greatest minds
In the world
Are playing with this problem
And trying to
Theorize possible solutions.
One of the major
Theorists featured
Was a certified beach bum
Who spends most of his time
Surfing the waves of Hawaii
When he isn't wrapping his mind
Around complex formulations
And higher mathematics.
I can just imagine him
Catching a major wave
While toying with
The next evolution in
Mathematical logic.
At a time when
Much of the world
Seems absorbed in
The unworkability
Of our planet,
I found myself
Fascinated with the discussions,
And I rejoiced
In the knowledge
That there are people
Grappling with ideas
Few of us comprehend
Or even bother thinking about.
I was reminded
Just how mysteriously beautiful
And utterly complex
The world we live in
Really is.

Ready To Do It All Over Again

2009-11-17T04:59:00.000-08:00

He was middle aged,
Single and free,
Used to living alone
And taking care of himself,
But deep down
He had never forgotten
How much he enjoyed
Having someone
To share his life with
And care for him.
Besides, he liked being a father
And missed having
A wife and kids around.
His wife had passed away
A long time ago,
And his children
Were grown up and
Had children of their own
And were living far, far away.
I think he thirsted for
The intellectual stimulation
Of the conversations
He used to have
With those kids
As they were growing up.
They grew like weeds,
On a dietary mix of philosophy
And psychology,
Science and engineering,
Combined with
Practical wisdom
And simple common sense.
Maybe he had come
To the conclusion
That life was not meant
To be lived alone,
For when she showed up
And seemed to be
Emotionally available,
He was ready
To do it all over again.
He didn’t know if he had
Done it right the first time,
He just did the best he could,
And things kind of worked out.
He may have made
Any number of mistakes
Raising those kids,
And I suppose there are
A few things he would
Prefer to do differently
If he had to do it
All over again.
One thing he learned
Is that it is a lottery of sorts
How the kids turn out.
It’s part genetics,
Part parenting,
A good bit of luck
And a ton of retribution
For all the things
He did as a child.
Nonetheless,
He was ready.

The Fires of Youth

2009-11-12T02:19:00.000-08:00

With an amused smile,
I watch their frantic folly,
Reminiscent of my own
So many years ago.
University students,
Young, single and free
Full of angst about the future,
Concerned about
Landing a job,
And covertly focused
On finding a mate.
They sit there in class,
Boy, almost man,
Girl, almost woman,
Desperately seeking
Each other,
Yet though they sit
Opposite one another,
They seem oblivious
To the possibility
Each could be
For the other.

Tomorrow's Dreams

2009-10-05T03:15:00.000-07:00

Turkish university students
Enrolled in English Class
Hoping that will help
Land them a position
After they graduate,
But they sit in class
Staring through each other,
With heads filled
With multilingual dreams
Of the people
They hope to someday meet
In distant lands.
For the males,
Russian is the language
Of interest,
And for the women,
It is Italian, French
Or possibly Spanish.
They gaze absent mindedly
About the classroom
Oblivious of each other,
And I laugh at the comedy.

King Size Family

2009-04-07T16:25:00.000-07:00

As an English teacher at the
Turkish American Association
Here in Adana, Turkey,
I was asking the students
How many brothers
And sisters they each had.
Most students had two or three
Siblings to contend with,
But one student announced
That he had 27 brothers,
Five sisters and three mothers!
In the Eastern part of Turkey,
Men can have up to four wives,
And families frequently are very large.
I asked him if he knew
All of their names,
And the way he hesitated to answer,
It was obvious that
He wasn’t sure that he did!
With thirty-three children
They probably celebrated
A birthday almost every other week
If they could remember them all.
I wonder how many bathrooms
They had in their house!
For that matter,
I wonder how many bedrooms they had.
I have no idea how his father
Could support them all.
Having sired that many children,
He probably didn’t have
Much time left for working.
I am just trying to imagine
37 distinctly different personalities
Trying to live together
Under a single roof.
His father would have to be
An expert at mob psychology
To get that horde
To work together.
I think he must have had to
Referee an intra-sibling battle
A dozen times a day,
And I am sure
His wives got into a hassle
With each other
Frequently enough
To turn all of his hair grey.
When I asked the student
How many children
He would like to have.
He told me he would like to
Do what his father had done.
Now imagine if each
Of his brothers did the same,
What an extended family
They would have,
And who could possibly
Keep track of the multitude
Of nephews and nieces,
Much less remember their names
Or who they belonged to.

Sleeping on the Fringe

2009-04-06T10:38:00.000-07:00

When we got married,
We promised each other
To split everything
Fifty – Fifty,
So when it came to sleep
I obligingly gave her
Fifty percent of the bed,
Expecting that would
Leave me with fifty percent
For myself.
What I didn’t figure
Was that she would take
The middle fifty percent,
And leave me with
A quarter on each side.
Somehow or another,
That seems to be the way
It worked out
On almost everything
We tried to share.
She always got
The middle,
And I was left
On the fringe.

I Did It to Myself Again

2009-03-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

I have this tendency
To exercise regularly
For a period of time,
Then something
Invariably comes up,
That has be miss
A week or two,
Which will stretch
Into several months,
Where I do not exercise.
Each time I start up again,
I will suffer
About two weeks worth of
Aches and pains,
While my body readjusts to
The idea of working out.
I know it is critical
For my health and well being
To keep on a regular
Exercise regime,
But that is easier said
Then done,
So now I sit,
Sore all over,
Wondering why
I did that to myself again.

Cementing a Dream

2009-03-07T23:27:00.000-08:00

I remember a long time ago
Hearing about Charles Goddard,
The famous rocket scientist,
How when he was very young,
He wrote a list down of all
The things he wanted
To accomplish in his life.
Some of them were fairly simple
Like milking a rattle snake,
But others were quite imaginative,
And impossible to achieve
At the time he wrote them down,
Ideas like traveling in space,
Or going to the moon.
The list was found later in his life
And he realized that he
Had accomplished almost everything
He had listed and then some.
He had traveled to nearly every
Country in the world.
He had sailed the seven seas.
He had been responsible
For getting men into outer space
And to the moon.
He had become one of the most
Accomplished men in history.
All of that was largely the result of
His having cemented his dreams
By writing them down,
And then going out and living them.

The Downward Spiral

2009-03-04T13:36:00.000-08:00

Though I always
Try to stay positive,
Reality is creeping in,
And it has me concerned.
These are tumultuous times
We are going through.
The United States economy
Is in a tailspin
The likes of which most of us
Have never seen,
And the rest of the world
Is close on our heels.
It’s an avalanche
Gaining speed
As it tumbles down,
Crushing the hopes
And dreams of multitudes
Caught in its path.
In its wake, a residue
Of massive phony
Investment schemes
Comes to the surface,
And tales of unconscionable
Corporate waste
Compete with new
Jobless statistics
For center stage
On the evening news.
Our federal government attempts
To bail out the key players,
Throwing money at the problem
On a scale never before seen.
There is a foreboding feeling
That the worst is yet to come,
That the landslide
Is gaining momentum.

The Advantages of a Waggy Tailed Friend

2009-03-03T22:04:00.001-08:00

I was in class
And explaining
The reasons for
Having a pet,
Particularly a dog,
To a group of
Turkish students
Who have never
Had a pet,
And couldn’t imagine
Living in a house
With one.
My explanation was simple.
A wife will
Bark at you
When she becomes
Irritable or moody,
But a dog is excited
To see you
No matter what.
Sometimes you need
A dog to come home to.

Foolish Dreams

2009-03-02T10:15:00.001-08:00

If I had a dollar
For every foolish dream
I have ever had,
I’d be a rich man today.
All my life I’ve been a dreamer
And in those dreams
I envisioned so many things
That never were,
But could have been,
Or might have been if
Reality hadn’t gone
Some other way.
I spent a lifetime
Chasing rainbows
Hoping for the pot of gold
At the end,
But the only riches I found
Were in the experiences
I had along the way,
And if it wasn’t wealth
That motivated me,
And had me
Endlessly searching,
Then it was love.
I must have chased after
A thousand and one
Romantic illusions
Trying to find you.
I can’t count the times
I have imagined
What it would be like
When we found each other.
I embraced you in my mind
Long before I met you.
I went to sleep
Countless nights
Imagining you by my side,
The scent of your perfume,
The softness of your skin
And the feel of your embrace.
For all of these reasons,
And maybe more,
I gladly play the fool
And continue hoping
For a dream come true.

My Reason for Being

2009-02-28T10:57:00.000-08:00

It’s the question
I have asked myself
A thousand times
And maybe more,
What is my purpose
In being here,
What am I
Supposed to do?
I have always assumed
There was a reason
For everything
I had to go through,
That the any mistakes
I say I made,
Had to be made,
For there was always
A lesson to learn,
Or some insight to be gained.
Did I have to take
Such a circuitous route
To get where I am,
Or was it simply
The only path for me,
Given what I didn’t know?
I stumbled or tripped
Any number of times,
But each time I got up again,
And continued on the road.
I was never sure
If the path I took
Was the only one for me.
I could have gone
A million different ways
Then the way I went,
And I will never really know
Where any of the other
Paths might have led,
Except that my life probably
Would have turned out
Completely different.
Was some destiny
Predetermined for me,
And have I already
Fulfilled that destiny,
Or is my true purpose
Yet to come?
I think to the day I die,
I will always speculate
On why I am here,
And whether or not
The path I took
Was really right for me.

I Was There When

2009-02-25T19:01:00.000-08:00

It is incredible
The changes
I have witnessed
In the last 50 years.
I remember when
Color televisions
Were first introduced.
I was there
For the change over
From the old
Tube type radios
To transistors.
I saw tape recorders
Shrink from
Bulky reel to reel models
Down to handheld
Digital units.
I watched as
Records and record players
Disappeared.
I was there when
Cell phones
First became popular,
And I saw
Handheld calculators
And computers
Revolutionize the world.
I was there
Before fax machines,
And those infernal
Answering machines.
I saw the Internet
Pull the world
Closer together,
And I saw photography
Revolutionized
By the advent of
Digital cameras.
I was there
Long before Teflon
And microwave ovens,
And before men
Went to the moon.
I was there when
Fountain pens
Were still popular,
And stay pressed clothes
Were introduced.
I was there before
Skate boards
And roller skates
With Teflon wheels.
I was there when copy machines
Replaced the mimeograph.
I watched as VCRs
Came and went.
I was there when
Floppy disks
Actually flopped.
When I was in high school,
Computers used
Paper cards and tape,
And a single computer
Filled an entire room.
The PC had yet
Been invented.
I was there when
The computer monitors
Became flat screens,
And laptop computers
Were first introduced.
I was there when
John F. Kennedy
And Martin Luther King
Were shot.
I was there when
Paint was lead based
And so was gasoline.
I was there when
Asbestos was used
In almost everything,
And I was witness to
The Twilight Zone.
I was even there
For Elvis Presley
And the Beetles.
The world is changing
Faster and faster,
And who can say
What other changes
The next fifty years
Will bring.

Mental Playtime

2009-02-23T22:09:00.000-08:00

One of the many lessons
Life has to teach us
Is the art of using
Our time wisely.
None of us can claim
We are 100% efficient,
Or that we use our time
Being fully productively,
In fact, we are far from it.
We may try
Not to waste time,
But all to often,
We catch ourselves drifting off,
Loosing focus,
Disconnecting from
What we are doing.
Or just spinning our wheels
Lost in never-never land.
Most of us spend
Much more time
Then we care to admit
Simply daydreaming,
Our minds entertaining
Themselves and us
With wild imaginings
Seldom based on reality.
We may flip our computers on
And start playing solitaire
Instead of being productive,
Or we may be driving
And momentarily lose track
Of where we are
And what we are doing.
It happens to all of us.
While it is important
To pay attention to
What we are doing,
We must learn to accept
The need for a certain amount of
Mental playtime
In our daily routine.
The difficulty we frequently face
Is keeping our mental recreation
Within bounds
So that we actually accomplish
Something during our day.
Somewhere in life,
Most of us come up
With a balance of work and play
That allows us to get by
Without being too hard on ourselves
For the time we waste.

The Passion of Youth

2009-02-22T09:34:00.000-08:00

It was a class
Of 24 students
Ostensibly there
To learn English,
But I was there
To talk about life.
There was a mix
Of high school
Age students,
About half of the class
Were University students
Or had just graduated,
And the rest were
Adults of various ages.
What I was looking for
Were the passions
That motivated them in their lives,
The things they were
Enthusiastic about.
What truly amazed me
Was that each high school student
Had a very clear picture
Of what they wanted to do
With their lives.
One young girl wanted to be
A doctor,
And another boy was planning
To be a geneticist.
Even a fool could see
The power of their passion,
For their faces lit up
When they spoke of
The careers they intended to pursue.
I have no doubt
That each of those young students
Will eventually become
Leaders in their field,
But when I talked to the older ones,
Most were unemployed
And worrying about the future.
It seemed like all the passion
Of their youth
Had evaporated, and I wondered
Where it went.

The Shooting Gallery

2009-02-22T09:06:00.000-08:00

It was a class full
Of rambunctious, hyperactive
10 and 11 year olds,
In a Turkish-American
English language school
And they wore me down
With rapid fire questions.
I was brought in to teach
Conversational English
As a native speaker,
And the class was primed
And ready for me
With a steady barrage
Of inquiries only kids that age
Could come up with.
Some of the children
Could hardly stay
In their seats,
They so were excited
To interrogate me.
It is amazing how much energy
Kids that age have,
And I could barely keep up,
Shooting back answers
As fast as I could,
And was almost ready
To call it a day
And go back to bed
By the time the class was over.

Spider

2009-02-21T18:40:00.000-08:00

Spider is a card game
That comes on almost
Every computer sold,
And it may be
The most diabolically clever
Waste of time
Every invented,
For in every corner
Of the globe,
Men, women and children,
Scientists and engineers
Doctors and lawyers,
And even corporate executives
Are wiling away the hours
Repetitively playing
That foolish game,
Many addicted to
Its mindlessness
Just as I am.
I sometimes wonder
Who invented it,
And if they make
A small royalty
Off every copy sold.
Wouldn’t that be
A tidy fortune?
Just imagine
If someone could collect
All the hours spent,
And put that time
Towards something useful,
How much more
Could be accomplished.

Three Medical Students

2009-02-19T14:00:00.000-08:00

There were three
Young students
About to enter
Medical school.
There was one
Whose father
And grandfather
Were both doctors,
And it was
A foregone conclusion
Almost from the day
He was born
That he would also
Become a doctor,
So he never really had
Much of a choice
In the matter.
There was another
Who was excited
By the money
That doctors make,
And she was clearly
After the money.
The third student
Had a passion
For internal medicine
And a fascination
With the chemistry
Of the human body.
Medical school
Will be tough
For all of them,
But I am willing to bet
That the one
With passion
For the practice
Will be the one
Who ends out
Becoming the best
Medical practitioner.

As a Teacher

2009-02-17T21:19:00.000-08:00

Occasional in the course
Of our lives
We will have the opportunity
To be instrumental
In life of another person,
To be the pivotal point
At which a major decision
Is made by them
On which direction
They choose in life.
Sometimes we can be
Their inspiration,
Sometimes we can be
Their mentor,
Or sometimes we just
Happen to be
In the right place,
At the right time
With the right person,
And we read
The barometer of their passion,
And simply tell them
“Yes” You can do that.
We are in position
To see the future
Long before it unfolds,
And we merely tell them
What we see,
But in the telling,
The future is set.
This is an everyday possibility
In the life of a teacher,
And I think this is what
Every great teacher lives for.

Passion

2009-02-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

I think happiness is
A measure of the passion
We have in our lives.
I have noticed that the
Happiest people I meet
Are always the ones
Who have something
They love to do,
And are doing it,
Or a least they are
Studying to do it,
And they are so close,
They can virtually taste it!
Sometimes we can
Find ourselves in a position
Where our job
Is clearly not our passion,
But we can still be happy
If we have something else
We love to do.
Maybe we love to travel,
And each chance we get,
We escape our job,
And go to some place new.
We can endure almost anything
If we know that we will
Get to pursue our passion
In a little while.
Maybe the love of our life is music,
And each night
We get together with
Other musicians
To play and practice,
None of which occurs as work.
It is our life’s blood,
Our reason for being.
Life responds to passion,
Magically becoming
Brighter and more colorful
Under its influence.
Perhaps genius
Is nothing more than
Unbridled passion,
And if so, then
The possibility of being a genius
Lies within each of us.
All we need to do is to discover
And pursue our passion.
We may not know where
That passion will take us,
But we will surely enjoy the ride
While it gets us there.

Spirited Sidewalk Beauty

2009-02-16T07:50:00.000-08:00

Maybe you were just
An easy going girl,
The perfect stranger
Out for an afternoon stroll,
But there was something
About your style,
And the unmistakable
Way you were
That riveted my attention.
You won me over
In a moment’s glance,
Yet what could I have seen
That told me
So much about you,
And made me hunger
To know you better.
I think it might have been
The radiance of your smile,
And the twinkle in your eye
That I first noticed,
But it could easily have been
The proud and confident
Way you walked,
Oblivious to the many
Heads you turned,
Or the simple elegance
Of the clothes you wore,
Which emphasized the slender
Contours of your body.
There was a spirit about you,
A playful aliveness,
Missing in most others I see,
That captivate me completely,
And set my foolish mind to dreaming.

The Visa Stamp Circus

2009-02-15T20:01:00.000-08:00

On return from
A visa outing
To neighboring Cyprus,
A ritual escape
I am forced to do
Every ninety days
If I want to stay
Here in Turkey,
I was confronted with
A ridiculous
Battle of wits
With a mindless
Immigration official.
She had been told
That visa stamps
Must be sold
In the currency
Of the country
From which the traveler
Is a native of,
And in my case,
That meant
The United States.
The only problem was
I did not have any
US Currency
On me at the time.
All I had was local
Turkish Lira which
She wouldn’t accept.
Now I know in Istanbul
The stamp must be
Paid for in Turkish Lira,
And there is a handy
Currency exchanger
Available should I not
Have the local currency,
But this was Adana!
I was told that I would have to
Get my Turkish money
Exchanged into US Dollars
For her to sell me
The Visa stamp I needed.
This created a challenge
Because there wasn’t any
Currency exchange
In the airport,
And besides,
I couldn’t get through
Immigration Control
Without the stamp
To find one.
What would have happened
Had I been a citizen
Of Canada or Mexico,
And the same issue
Came up?
It became a circus
As the customs people,
And the immigration police
Tried to reason with
The obstinate official
On my behalf,
And it took
And hour and a half
Of our combined efforts
To get her to budge.
There I was,
Extremely tired
From having been up
And traveling
For the last 36 hours,
Trying to reason with
An intransigent bureaucrat.
This ended out being
A classic example
Of why it is so difficult
To do business
Here in Turkey.
Even the simplest
Of matters can become
A roadblock
In the absence of
Common sense,
A commodity which is
Apparently in short supply
In certain areas
Of government.

Wolves in Sheep's Clothing

2009-02-14T03:41:00.000-08:00

It seems I have
Grown accustomed to
The shy, demure type women
Who either by
Cultural programming,
Or by reticent nature,
Won’t even look
Directly into a my eyes
When we chance to meet
Out in public,
But give some of those
Same young women
An opportunity to meet
In a different setting
Where they feel free
To ask questions,
And to show their true colors,
I get pummeled with
Provocative questions like,
“Am I rich?”
And “Am I married?”
Or the roundabout version
“Do I have any children?”
Here I am a seasoned Grandfather,
And I still find myself flattered
By such unbridled interest.
It lets me know I am
Still alive and kicking.

The Communiy College System

2009-02-12T23:42:00.001-08:00

Back in the United States
I got used to having
Community colleges available
Almost everywhere.
They are places where
Students can pursue
A more economical education,
And they can often get
A two-year Associates of Arts
Degree that will get them
Into the job market
Far quicker than going through
A full university program.
The colleges usually offer
Flexible programs and courses
That allow students to
Work around their work schedule,
But they do much more than that.
They allow students to pursue
Special interests they have
Without the necessity
Of getting a degree in that field.
If someone is interested in
Fields as diverse as
Photography, cooking, weaving,
Pottery, acting, writing, journalism
Or even archeology,
They can take classes
In their area of interest.
This is just simple recognition
That education is a life long process,
And that people
Who act on their passions
Tend to be a lot happier
Than those who don’t.
More and more people
In the United States are opting
For community colleges
Over universities simply because
They can’t afford the latter.
Here in Turkey, and in fact,
Throughout most of the world,
There are no community colleges,
Nothing to compete with
The University system.
There is also very little
Available as far as
Continuing education,
And almost no flexibility
For people to consider
A change of occupation.
The community colleges
Are great for those people
You have a profession,
But want to try something else.
Students can even study
Foreign languages there.
If someone wants
To look to the future
Here in Turkey,
I believe that someday
Community colleges
Will be introduced
And become popular
Simply because
People need alternatives.

The Comedian Principle

2009-02-11T12:21:00.000-08:00

One thing I learned
A long time ago
Is that I can’t tease people
I don’t like,
And the more I like them,
The more fun I will have
Teasing them.
Anytime I try to tease
Someone whom I don’t
Like or respect,
It comes across as ugly
And disrespectful,
And there is no justification
For acting that way
Towards anybody.
If I don’t like somebody
For whatever reason,
I just stay away from them
Or ignore them altogether.
I imagine any good comedian
Would tell me
That I must
Love my audience
Or my performance
Is doomed from the start.
Whether I am on stage
Or simply joking with a friend,
The Comedian Principle applies.

My Mischievous Side

2009-02-11T11:37:00.000-08:00

There is a goofy,
Smart-alecky side of me
That comes out best
When I am feeling
On top of the world.
I might play with
The words I speak
So that there is
A double meaning
To what I say.
If someone is struggling
To come up with
The exact word they want,
I am apt to suggest
One totally opposite
Of what they intend.
If somebody asks
If they can go
To the bathroom,
I will emphatically
Say NO! just to see
Their reaction.
Around the people
I am most comfortable with,
I tend to poke fun at
Anything and everything
With completely
Irreverent humor,
And more often then not
My friends will
Join me with similar comments
Of their own.
I tend to elicit that a lot
From the people around me,
And that is probably why
We call ourselves friends.

Where is Home?

2009-02-11T05:17:00.000-08:00

Where is home?
That’s a good question.
I haven’t lived
In California
For quite a while,
And every time I return
It seems strange,
Like a place
I no longer belong.
Sure, the United States
Is my country,
And I am proud of it,
But I don’t choose
To live there any more.
I have gotten used to
Living and working
In foreign lands
To the point where
I am more comfortable there
Than I am
Back in the States.
I am in Turkey now,
So that is my home.
Before I was in Iraq,
So that used to be my home.
I have had a number
Of different places
I could call home
Over the years.
It is pretty much
Wherever I hang my hat
And decide to stay.
I move so much
That no place
Has an air of permanency.
I haven’t yet figured out
Where I ultimately want
To settle down,
But I assume some day
I will find a suitable place,
Or it will find me.
I don’t think it will be the place
That will have me settle down,
But more than likely
It will be someone special
Who makes me
Want to stay
In one place
Long enough to
Grow some roots.

Woman Unfolding

2009-02-10T22:09:00.000-08:00

She is a stunning beauty
With long brown hair,
A quick and ready smile,
And those Spanish eyes
That dance inside her head.

She knows how to dress
In the most elegant style
That always captures attention
The moment she enters the room
Stirring a ripple wherever she goes.

Yet she is a timid soul
Not quite owning
The power she holds
To mesmerize a guy
With a look from her eyes.

She hasn’t yet
Mastered the art
Of speaking her mind
And baring her soul
Or saying what is so for her.

But there is a tigress emerging
Once buried within,
Coming from a strength
She never knew she had,
Ready to make its presence known.

The moment she declares
“I am!”
By the power of her words
She will become
The leader she was meant to be!

Typhoon

2009-02-10T21:45:00.000-08:00

Not long after leaving
Fanning Island,
The winds started to roar
And the waves began
To build up to towering heights.
At one point I recall
Looking up at the mast
And seeing a wave
That looked to be twice its height
Come crashing over
And the next thing I knew
We were bobbing up
Like a giant cork
With the tilt meter
Registering an outrageous
Forty-five degree tilt.
That threw everybody around
And really wrecked havoc
In the kitchen.
Luckily no one
Wash washed overboard.
Those on deck
Had pretty much
Tied themselves down.
I was too excited
And too ignorant
To be scared,
But the truth was
We came very close to capsizing.
I had the indestructible
Naïve teenage faith
That if the boat sank
I would somehow survive
And end up washed onto
Some distant Polynesian shore
Where the local women
Would know how
To revive my spirits.
In three days of howling wind
And raging seas,
We raced nearly a thousand miles
At the incredible pace
Of 12 to 16 knots,
In a boat that couldn't
Have been designed
To sail more than eight.
The Araner may have been old
And in pretty sorry shape
But she sailed
Through that storm
With flying colors,
And did it under full sail.
I don't think any of us
Knew how to sheet in
Which would normally be done
In such rough weather.

Turtle Fever

2009-02-10T09:53:00.000-08:00

I always thought
Of the huge
Galapagos Turtles
As docile,
Slow and cumbersome.

I remember as a kid
Riding them
At the San Diego zoo.
They were like big boulders
That occasionally moved.

They appeared to be
Quiet beasts
So the last thing I expected
Was to discover them
Bellowing like bull elephants.

I was at the zoo in Honolulu, Hawaii
When I heard an incredible commotion
Coming from the Galapagos pen
Where a couple of turtles
Were in the heat of passion.

If you think we humans
Have complicated love lives,
You should have seen
What they were going through.
Nature didn’t make it easy for them.

They don’t appear to be
Anatomically designed
For any kind of active sport
But the vast numbers of them around
Is ample evidence that looks can fool!

What was really hysterical
Was how all the people reacted.
The Japanese tourists
Flashed their Nikons
And a young couple just smiled knowingly!

Some parents of young kids
Covered their children’s eyes,
Or at least tried to
Amid comments like
Look Mommy, One turtle is trying to ride the other!”

Some people tried to turn away
With embarrassed expressions
Written all over their faces
Yet their attention
Was clearly riveted by what was going on.

People are funny about sex
Even if it is just
A couple turtles
Doing their thing
In the “privacy” of their park.

Pieces of the Past

2009-02-10T09:49:00.001-08:00

Meeting Bill that evening
Had seemed at the time
Like the answer to her prayers,
The fulfillment of all her dreams.
She fell in love with his eyes
And the graceful way he moved
And was a goner
Before the last dance was through.
It was all so incredibly natural
Being swept up in his arms
And making mad passionate love
Later on that night.
It could have gone on forever
Just like he promised
And he probably meant it at the time,
But forever didn’t last too long.
It seemed so perfect,
So unimaginably exhilarating,
Yet in the end he left her
Moving on to someone else.
She was devastated for a while
Virtually giving up on love,
And particularly on men,
When along came Steve.
Now do you think she
Was now passionate and free,
Open and expressive,
And naturally trusting with Steve?
Not a chance!
Where she was aggressive before
Now she was timid,
Where she was boisterous
Now she was quiet!
Where she chased him
Now she made him chase her,
Where she once openly trusted,
Now she was cautious.
Whereas Bill and her
Used to go out to eat
Every single night,
She took cooking lessons
So they could eat at home.
In reality she was not
In a relationship to Steve
But with Bill–Steve
And that wasn’t all either
For there were others before.
There was Danny,
Her first true love,
The next door neighbor
Who suddenly moved away.
Then there was Clark,
Her high school sweetheart,
Who went away to college
And found another girl there.
Who she was in relationship with
In reality was
Danny–Clark-Bill-Steve
And she had already drawn the conclusion
That Steve will leave her too
Based on her experiences before.
The same holds true for Steve.
Who knows who he was in relation with,
And what conclusion
He had drawn
About the opposite sex!
Each one was dragging along
Pieces of their past
And allowing them
To color their present.

The Stamp Collection

2009-02-10T09:28:00.000-08:00

My Aunt Dofeen was the culprit
Who got me involved
In stamp collecting
Back when I was about
Seven or eight years old.
It was an old collection
That she gave to me,
And I dutifully added to it
For quite a number of years.
I spent many happy hours
Working with that collection.
I would go through phases
Where I would concentrate for a while
On US commemoratives
Then switch over to stamps of Italy
Spain, Germany or the Vatican.
I especially liked the stamps of Laos
Thailand and the Soviet Union.
At one point I bought a collection
Of more than 30,000 different stamps
Which got added to the pile.
There was a period when I spent
Nearly every penny I had
Enlarging my collection.
As time went on
I got interested in other things,
But whenever I got a chance,
I would still dump a few more in.
As I traveled through various countries
I also added their stamps
To my collection,
Building a legacy that someday
Will be passed on
As it was passed on to me
So many years ago.
I don’t think any of my kids
Are all that interested
In that old stamp collection
But some day
One of their kids
Just might be!
I smile to think
What a treasure they will find.

The Song Inside My Head

2009-02-10T09:25:00.001-08:00

There frequently is a tune
Rattling around
There inside my head
That I can’t seem
To get out of my brain.
It may only be a catchy
Advertising jingle,
Some old time ballad,
A song I heard somewhere,
Or some tune I concocted
But that darn thing
Will take hold
And jump onto
The endless do loop
Of my mind
Where it will be played
Over and over again.
I suppose I should be
More into music and song
If only to increase
The variety of the tunes
Stuck inside my head.

The Show Place

2009-02-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

The house was antiseptically clean,
Cold and sterile
With everything in its place
Except for me.
There was plastic covering the chairs
And not a speck of dust anywhere
As if hermetically sealed
And meant for
Some other time than this.
It was decorated
With exquisite taste,
Expensive artwork and lighting,
Yet flavorless all the same.
There was something missing
And I didn’t feel comfortable there.
It was a house meant for show
But definitely not for living.

The Shake Down Cruise

2009-02-08T21:34:00.000-08:00

We had accumulated
A cast of characters
That we called a crew
In preparation for
Sailing to the South Pacific.
My brother and I
Invited a couple island girls
To come along with us
And they were excited
About going.
In our minds
Those girls were
The only provisions we needed
And the fulfillment
Of all our fantasies,
But that was not to be.
The Diamonds,
Proud possessors
Of the Araner,
Decided that a preliminary
Shake down cruise
Was in order
To get a feel for the boat.
My brother went along
As a part of the
Skeleton crew
And I stayed back on shore
With my aunt
Getting her affairs in order.
They were only supposed
To take the boat out
For the day,
But when they didn’t show up
For two days,
We sounded general alarm
And called the Coast Guard
To search for them.
I don’t know how anybody
Could lose a boat that size
But they didn’t seem to be
Anywhere to be found.
I was mainly concerned
They had taken off and left us,
But the boat finally showed up
After three days.
By then the parents
Of the two girls
Had second thoughts
About the whole voyage
And wouldn’t let the girls go.
The parents just didn’t understand
How the boat’s disappearance
Added to the allure of the adventure.
Speaking for my brother and I,
We didn’t see how
Being lost at sea
With a couple girls like them
Would have been a problem.
At any rate,
The boat was ready
And in a day or two
We were on our way.

The Ocean Boil

2009-02-08T21:29:00.001-08:00

We had been at sea
For about two weeks
And were heading south
Approaching the equator
When I spotted something
Far off on the horizon.
I climbed up to the crows nest
To have a better look
And it appeared like
The entire ocean
Was turning white
And for whatever reason
It was coming in our direction.
By this time
Everyone was up on watch
And the whole ocean
Was beginning to boil.
It was a school
Of yellowtail tuna
That stretched
As far as the eye could see
In every direction.
They were big ones too,
Maybe forty pounds apiece.
A bunch of them
Played at the bow of the boat
For quite a while
And we could reach down
From the bow sprint
And touch their backs.
It almost seemed like
They were trying to
Jump into the boat
And all we needed to do
Was to figure out how
To give them a boost.
My aunt was great cook
When it came to fish,
And those fish
Looked like they would be
Mighty good to eat.
The only problem was
That the Diamonds insisted that
Their seven year old son
Should be the fisherman.
We had a little bit of tackle
And some make-shift bait
But their son
Only managed to
Sacrifice what little
Gear we had
To the Gods of the sea.
For most of a day
We passed through
That massive school of fish
Trying in vain
To find a way to land
One of them.
I suppose it was a proverbial
Fisherman’s dream.
It looked like there were
Enough there
To feed the whole country
For a year or more.
Apparently they were pursuing
A mass of flying fish
Because a few of those
Did manage to land
On our deck.

Pumpkin Personalities

2009-02-08T21:14:00.000-08:00

October is the month
When we used to take the kids
To the pumpkin patch
At one of the local farms.
It was always a lot of fun
For adults and kids alike.
There were hay rides
And farm animals to pet
And all kinds of pumpkins
To choose from.
The farmer always planted
A huge field of pumpkins
And each person was challenged
To pick the one
He or she liked best.
It was fascinating to watch
How different people
Went about choosing
The pumpkin that was right for them.
There were so many pumpkins
Of such varied size,
Character and shape,
That the choosing
Could be quite involved.
Some people would go for
The biggest one they could find,
Far bigger than they could carry.
Others seemed to feel sorry
For the tiny ones
And collected those.
Still others looked for
The oddest shape,
Taking pity on the sorriest ones.
Then there were the perfectionists
Finding a suitable one
Then searching throughout
The entire field
Trying to find a better one.
Some people chose
Those closest at hand
While others seemed to think
The farther away, the better.
There is definitely psychology involved,
And each person
Appears to have
A distinct pumpkin personality.

The Photographic Filter

2009-02-08T21:10:00.001-08:00

The art of photography
Is developing your eye
For seeing the available picture.
You could have
The best camera in the world,
But if you don’t know
Where to point it,
Or are not intrigued
By what you are looking at
Your photography will be flat
And unappealing.
Photography is an act of love,
An expression of passion,
Or nothing at all.
If you are not fascinated with the world
Don’t even bother trying
To capture a picture worth taking.
The camera only reflects
The mental filter through which
You see the world.

The Noise Inside My Head

2009-02-08T21:01:00.000-08:00

That mischievous little voice
Inside my head,
The pessimist within,
Warns of impending danger,
Sounds doubt at every turn,
Is critical of what was,
Questions what is
And second guesses
Every decision ever made.

It is all wrapped up
In the struggle to survive,
Convinced that life is hard,
Full of pain and sorrow,
Suffering and despair,
That evil lurks
Around every corner
And screams out
That it shouldn’t be this way.

It is constantly
Judging and comparing,
Trying to keep up
With the Jones’s,
Telling me that
I am not good enough,
That I should have,
Could have or would have
Done better if only…!

The voice tells me to avoid risk,
To play safe or not at all,
To settle for average,
Some mediocre standard
That is good enough to get by,
To avoid responsibility,
To stay in my comfort zone
To not even try
For fear that I might fail.

It tries to keep me indecisive
Or confused
As it entertains fear
In all its mischievous forms,
Betting that something is wrong,
Looking every gift horse
In the mouth,
Waiting, waiting
For the other shoe to drop.

It tries to make me think
That I should pretend
To know it all,
That I should be someone else
Than who I am,
That vulnerability is a sin,
That it is better to hide
So that nobody knows
Who I really am.

It constantly complains
Saying it is overwhelmed,
That there is too much to do
And no time to do it
That now is not the right time,
That tomorrow would be better,
That it doesn’t feel like doing it,
Doesn’t want to do it,
Or wants to do something else instead.

It challenges me to look good
No matter what,
To feign self confidence
Where there is none,
To hide my insecurity,
To cast blame
Or make excuses
Whenever things
Don’t quite turn out.

It is the self-proclaimed
Master of my limitations,
Telling me how far I can go
How much I can do,
When to give in
Or when to give up,
Telling me to take it easy,
Not to try too hard,
To give up on my dreams.

The voice is also vicious
In its attacks on me,
Calling me odious names,
Belittling my efforts,
Ridiculing my successes,
Reminding me of my failures,
Questioning who I think I am
That I should ever commit
To do something great.

Once in a great while
The voice might have
Something beneficial to say,
The danger it warns of
May actually be real,
But as a rule
It is not my friend.
It is just
The noise inside my head.

The Lonely Old Man

2009-02-08T05:28:00.000-08:00

Back when Cecilia and I
Were newly married
Before our first daughter
Was born,
Occasionally we would invite
Someone to join us
If we saw them sitting alone
At the restaurant.
This one time
We saw an old man
Who fit that bill,
So we invited him over.
You would have thought
That we had just done
The most miraculous deed
In the world
By the way his face lit up.
He was very lonely
And thirsted for some
Human companionship,
Someone to listen to his words.
He talked of the life he lived
And all the people
He once knew.
We were reminded that
This country often
Isn’t very kind
To older folks like him,
But who is this country
Made up of
If it isn’t people
Like you and me?
Anyone of us
Can help
Alleviate the loneliness
Just by taking time to listen.

The Little Hoer

2009-02-08T05:24:00.000-08:00

She was an earthy lady
That girl, my wife.
She could make anything grow
Indoors or out.
She just had a way with plants
And an affinity for soil.
Someone once bestowed on her
The honored title of
“The Best Little Hoer in Ventura”
And she laughingly
Accepted that title.
Under her magical touch
Roses bloomed, cactuses grew,
Orchids blossomed
And a multitude of trees prospered.
There were Eugenia Berries,
Lemons, oranges, pomegranates, pears
Plumbs, nectarines, peaches
Figs, bananas and an apple tree.
She even had boysenberries growing
Along with papaya, avocado
And a mango or two.
The house was green
Inside and out
And fully vegetated
Until she passed away.
The green stuff
Didn’t fare so well
Under my supervision,
Oh I watered them,
But it was her love
On which they thrived.
I suppose that goes for me as well.

The Letter

2009-02-08T04:49:00.000-08:00

Several months after returning
From the South Pacific,
While I was back at school
At Michigan State University
I received a letter
From a Samoan girl
Whom I met shortly before I left.
I must have made
Quite an impression
Or else she was awfully anxious
To get off that island.
She wanted me
To bring her to the States.
My aunt must have
Taken a liking to her
And passed on my address
Sensing the girl’s intense desire
To flee her island home.
It may have briefly
Been paradise to me,
But it obviously
Wasn’t quite the same
For that girl.
What was comical
About the letter
Was the circuitous route
It took to get to me.
The girl’s English
Was so bad
That the letter was read
By as many as
Thirty or forty people
In my dormitory
Trying to figure out
Who it was for
Before it finally
Made its way to me.
My aunt was always
Trying to be helpful
That way,
But there is no way
That could have worked out,
And it certainly wouldn’t
Have been conducive
To my studies.