Yesterday, November 12, 2017, I attended a memorial service for Peggy Fern at Green’s Sanctuary on Ebenezer Avenue.  We worked together teaching at Northwestern High School. She was a kind of a queen as observed by her eulogizers.  To my mind she was a bit haughty and somewhat imperious.  I admired her professionalism, her dedication to her husband John who suffered from ALS, and her love of travel.  I saw her as proud but vulnerable, though definitely not one to invite sympathy.  She was outwardly very confident and secure in who she was.

That loops me back to this collection of my thinking.  It is who I am or was, should anyone care to know as per my statement “Why I Am Writing danielforrest.org.”  I will be found in these words in this blog, not in an auditorium such as Green’s.

Briefly former teachers formed a kind of quick-to-dissolve community at Green’s.  We shared admiration for our colleague and news about ourselves as we walked out of the service in small clusters.  I hankered for a way to further our exchange of news.

I am the news: not the breaking news rather the continuing on-going analytical news of the times that binds us together.  I like knowing what is going on and trying to understand current events.  Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian interference in our last election and the rapid warming of the planet are stories I come to again and again to puzzle over.  They represent what I think about during my time on Earth.

The news of our time is who we are as a people.  A week ago another mass murder occurred and there was just another ho hum.  I wrote my representatives in Washington and a letter to The Charlotte Observer to give some release to my deep anger at the idea that military assault weapons should be available for civilians.  The national nonresponse to yet another mass murder is news. It is who we are as a nation.

The news is a reflection of me; therefore I am out sorts in a weekly news cycle that features President Trump saying he believes President Putin is sincere in not interfering in our last election, mass murder becoming ordinary, climate change continuing to be ignored, and an old English teacher friend dying. .

If I could talk to you, I would not seek to bend your opinion my way on an issue by issue basis, but I would I like to converse about what is happening because what is happening–the news–is who we are as a people.  It is a journey and a chance to discover the world.  Why is talking about it so difficult?  Why am I thought odd for taking such a keen interest in it?  Why is it ignored or disbelieved and contorted by the likes of Fox and Breitbart?

Now you have a better idea of who I was and who you are because of the news.  We are news because news is communal.

Sheryl Tharpe’s eulogy included a report of Peggy’s love of television.  Sheryl and Peggy liked watching Poldark.  I liked hearing that because it bound me to the two of them.  By the way, I do not like that PBS series but Nita does.  My connection to that broadcast is small news but a way of understanding who Peggy was.  I end with that news that somehow soothes me a bit.

 

 

Today a jury is being convened in Denver to make a decision about whether Taylor Swift was inappropriately touched on her butt a few years ago.  President Donald Trump is hold up at one of his golf resorts sending out nasty Tweets about a Missouri Senator Roy Blount who has joined a bi-partisan effort to make sure the Special Prosecutor for the Russian investigation, Robert Mueller, is not fired for trying to produce a factual record of Trump’s association with Russia.

Then there is James Gorman, science reporter for The New York Times, and Lauren Esposito.  She is a scorpion expert from California whom Gorman interviewed at length for a written story via a twenty-five minute video that featured her showing three scorpions and sharing her research from the last ten years into a creature who preceded the dinosaurs on planet Earth.

Straight up reporting.  Arachnology  Fascinating.  The essence of The New York Times.

My first heroes were mainly Yankee players like Mickey Mantle and NBA stars like Bill Russell.  My first legitimate hero was Martin Luther King.  I came to him at the transition from boyhood into manhood just as has he was leading the most profound change in American life in the twentieth century.  He remains a pivotal figure in my life.

In my less emotional and more cynical years I still find enough wetness in my soul to keep the moist youthful dewy idea of hero alive.  About two weeks ago I watched Judy Woodruff’s extended interview of Warren Buffett on The Newshour.  A couple of days ago I finished my latest book, Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet by Carl Pope and Michael Bloomberg.

Buffett, Pope, and Bloomberg are heroes of mine.  What makes Buffett larger than ordinary to me is his ordinariness.  The interview was conducted in the world’s largest furniture store.  Buffett admired the Belarus immigrant lady who founded it and backed the  Nebraska store in the middle of Nebraska because he liked her philosophy: tell the truth and sell cheap.  Rose Blumkin’s original store sits on 70 acres of land and occupies  420,000 square feet.  The place has a real plain Buffett ambiance.

Were you to look up the interview(s), you would not be impressed by Buffett’s squeaky voice, appearance, and clothes sitting in a warehouse story in the middle of a mainly empty state.  You would likely come to be charmed by how very ordinary one of the richest men in the world is.  He still lives in the same modest house as he has for half a century.  He answers questions directly, avoids sharp criticisms, fails to preach, and speaks directly from his heart without deception.  His unaffected ordinariness and belief in fairness for all is what draws me to him.

Michael Bloomberg is among the planet’s richest billionaires himself, but his passion is the environment.  Cities are inherently superior places environmentally because of the their density.  Bloomberg harvests that idea through smart buildings, transportation systems and public policy initiatives.  He gives his money and expertise to city planners across the world who wish to emulate NYC’s reputation for saving the planet while improving life for its citizens.

Carl Pope, like many people’s heroes, represents an alternate self or version of me, a person close to my age I might have become if I had joined the Peace Corps and committed myself to the Sierra Club.  His fingerprints are all over big issues from saving the Grand Canyon to the shift away from coal as a primary energy source.  He led the organization that helped the environment more than any other.  The chapters of Climate of Hope alternate between the two but the tone of each man is the same.  Both project passion and idealism that is bound up in pragmatism.

I still have heroes.

 

 

Muslims follow the tradition of visiting the Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Mohammed and site of the revelation of the Quran, once in their lives.  It is a duty filled with spiritual meaning.  On Saturday, May 6, 2017, I went on my third Hajj, a site by the reservoir on Bonham Road.

Sixty-nine of us graduated from the Saluda High School Class of 1967.  Over forty showed up.  Nine are deceased, including my best friend Nathan Powell.  Some like my old buddy Johnny Wheeler could not attend.  Multiple sclerosis prevented him, big strong Johnny, excellent ball player, owner of the 1966 Chevy SS from attending.  Elliot Dominick, perhaps the wittiest and most self-aware of us all, was long dead having paid Nita and I visit out of the blue years ago.  I still see him standing on the porch of my first home in the Lakewood subdivision of Rock Hill about six years after our parting.

The visiting ceremony known as a class reunion has some of the trappings of the holy Islamic hajj.  The site is multiple and, as I am sure in the case of travelers to Mecca, not just a place and a date but an interaction with a collection of humanity.  To look into the eyes of someone, say Bonnie Boland, whom I had not seen in fifty years, and listen and talk is spiritual.  I saw her present form, the retired special education teacher, but simultaneously I saw her past presence, the girl who inhabited a house on the street behind mine.  Her father’s oil business came to mind along with vague thoughts of her mother and brother.  The carport on the left side of her house and my bicycle circling the pavement in front because it was wider than the rest and smooth and overhung with shade trees and far enough from my street to be somewhere else.

In the spring of 1967 my Wofford roommate was picked out and I had made preliminary plans for orientation for my pending life with Smith Holmes.  I backtracked on that plan to marry Jeanita May Pow on August 4 but Smith did not go away.  For the first or second time in fifty years I stared across at his visage.

His wispy flattop has given way to a modern cut it all off approach.  No wrinkles.  The young man was still very evident in the old man who was to be my closest associate post-high school.  Shaking hands with his wife, the study habits demanded words.  “I know I am going to fail.  I studied but enough.”  Those and other nearly exact fifty-year-old words of his jumped from my mouth as I made conversation with his wife.  Claiming to be underprepared, Smith was always prepared.  He was a diligent serious student.  I can almost see him taking a last look at his book and putting his extensive notes away at the last moment to nervously begin a test.  She smiles at me and says something to let me know that she, too, knows his careful ways well.

I would like to track each one of them down so that I could have a conversation that had a chance to go somewhere: a cup of coffee or a beer and words that flow back and to without a script in mind.  I am at the stage of my life when I would rather hear what each of them has to say rather than give a rundown of my life or share my perspective.  I would like capture some of who I was in the interchange by seeing who they have become.

 

Stay curious.  Why exactly did your car fail to start?  How much do know about anything?  Who made the clothes you are wearing?  If you are not curious, you are not really alive.  Curiosity engenders enthusiasm for living and makes each day more fun.The older I get, the more I know, the more I know how little I really know.

Be an active citizen.  You can vote.  Your female ancestors could not.  Your dark-skinned friends could not even have used the same public bathrooms you do when I was young.  Who changed that?  Why do the cars you ride in have shoulder harnesses?  Does your drinking water have harmful chemicals in it?  Why are U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan ready to die for you?  Who controls that?  A person who does not vote endangers life for all of us.  Government is the “we the people” of the Declaration of Independence.  It is our collective whole and more precious than any single commercial activity.   Citizen participation in our democracy gives us a chance to express a humanitarian good that benefits mankind.

Work hard. Working earns you money but more than anything it allows you to become a full person.  When you are working, you are part of something bigger than you are.  You are expressing who are by the way you work.  Every worker is important and deserves respect.  All work, especially blue collar work, should be dignified.

Engage your fellow your human beings in a positive way.  Push the up button on the personal relationship elevator.  How you act affects others.  You have an obligation to do no harm in contact with others.  Every small human contact is a chance to help someone even if all you do is act pleasant.

Realize your lucky circumstances.  Americans are a small fraction of all the people in the world.  We are lucky citizens in a country that was formed in a favorable geographical region in the Age of Reason.  By virtue of being born in this country we have natural advantages that few other people in the world have.

Be a good steward of the planet.  What right do you have to buy something and discard it in a landfill?  Why should your house be cool or warm if the energy demanded for your comfort damages the environment?  What do you recycle?  How efficient is your transportation?  We all need to breathe air.  Earth has just one atmosphere.

Seek common ground.  Conversation is an art and within the art you have an obligation to give the person you are speaking to a way to talk back.  Listen more than you talk.   In any controversial area look for some middle ground.

Change your mind.  Nothing and no one is constant.  Keep Emerson in mind: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds adored by philosophers and divines.”

Be comfortable with who you are.  Study the world and apply what you learn to yourself.  After you come to know who you are, be yourself.  If you are odd or out of step by nature in one way or another, live with the rhythm that you find within yourself over time.

Know history.  It is a tool that allows us to live better.  We all stand on the shoulders of others.  How did you get to be where you are now in your time?  What social actions, events, and inventions created the society you live in?

 

 

 

 

 

After five p.m. on a Saturday is not the best time to float a kayak at River Walk Park.  The Pump House Restaurant near the launch ramp was beyond packed because it was prom night.  The traffic on both the I-77 and U.S. 21 bridges was disturbing.  Somewhere in the background a voice from microphone at a nearby event made the irritating breathy sound I associate with certain ministers on local cable television.  I was exactly in the middle of the Catawba River that runs through the fastest growing county (2016) in the United States.

I gave up on casting around the big rocks near the launch ramp and headed a half mile down river toward Spratt Island and swung left into the flooded channel on the Fort Mill side of the river.  I found some noise relief and the privacy that comes from a canopy that encloses the waterway.

Just around the second bend I took my eye off the current and traced the flashing bright white of the bald eagle that took off aloft hard enough to rock the limb it was perched on just before I saw it.

Slightly right and then mostly up in it circled above the giant steel power transmission towers looking back toward the spot it had left.  I stared at to for awhile and left it perched again on one of the power lines to find my way into a more overgrown smaller branch of the Catawba River.

Ever seen an old photo of a well-dressed man from the 1950s wearing two-toned dress shoes?  The white tail feathers and white head bring that unexpected two at once experience to mind.  Nothing neutral there.  It is meant to stick out.

(April 23, 2017)

I built a quick crude seesaw this week to show Nita something I was thinking about.  In my mind I keep going back to the newly built Saluda Elementary School of my youth.

We first graders started off at the old three-story school that was just over two blocks behind my house toward the very edge of the town of Saluda.  Several months into the year we moved to the flat-roofed new school that was for grades one through six.  It still exists.  Zigzagging I walked about two blocks in front and across from my house to get to it.

Stand in front of it and look left to see what was the first and second grade side that was interrupted by the office and cafeteria near the middle.  To the right was the slightly longer upper grades side.  It had big bathrooms.  Our toilet facilities were in room.

What I struggle to remember with precision is the exactness of the lower grades playground that stood behind the building.  In line with the very end of the building and Mrs. Boozer’s room on the back–my first-grade home–stood the first of two or three steel swings.  I think each had four seats.  The piping was big and secure.  My hands would not come close to closing around it.

I’ll say there were three swings.  What came next in line as one moved down toward the cafeteria that jutted out from the rear of the low-slung modern contemporary building was the merry-go-round.  It could probably hold twenty kids.  The fine dust that piled up around it swept over shoes in the manner of a ballplayer sliding into a base.

The last piece of equipment was the see-saw, if my memory is accurate.  Like the previous structures it was heavy steel and had long wooden seats.  That is where I learned to seesaw.

Let’s say Tommy Rankin was opposite me.  All we had to do was assume a normal middle position and hold on the upright handle bars.  Automatically we were nearly balanced.  I could jack him up by moving backwards to the tip of my seat.  He could counter and do me one better by daring to lean way back.  Slight nudges forward or backward brought immediate big aerial changes.

Seesawing requires finesse and is limited to two.  I think that is why some of us had trouble with it.  I could ride with a big kid or a smaller one but I had to be willing to push back in my seat or slide up.  My bigger or smaller partner had to work within parameters to make the whole ride work.

Sometimes a lack of patience or just plain meanness resulted in a hard bump down.  Likely I wasn’t smart enough or lacked a good partner to ride it in a pleasing way often.  Come to think of it, I think girls were the best seesawers.  Being smart and cooperative comes more naturally to them.

Those swing, merry-go-round and seesaw rides soon gave way to my passion for throwing balls in the space in between the lower grade wing and the play equipment. I can remember consistently being among the last of the boys from the football game to grudgingly go in, testing the endurance of the waiting teacher.

For various reasons I go back to what I did not not work hard enough on in my halcyon days: the perfect balance of a seesaw ride that allows two people to be suspended perfectly in the air riding safely above the Earth but not quite touching it.  (March 5, 2017)

 

Protected by work and a busy life in general, I have avoided extensive reflective thinking all my life, yet I was a thinker by a profession, an English teacher.  Not having time to reflect provides a kind of safety net.  A person does the best he can given his circumstance.  In my case a melancholy spirit was held at bay.

My limited ability to think went out the door when I retired.  I fought it as I still do by staying a busy as possible.  I do embrace the new freedom to ponder, too.  The trouble is that a group of thoughts can stick around for along time.  My extensive reading is a kind of delivery system away from thinking about one topic too much.  On certain days I wear headphones all day to keep thoughts as bay.

Today I watched This Old House and saw a segment about a company in Boston that is developing what may become the first home-wide software to monitor individual appliance consumption.  Using a tablet or phone, a homeowner can see in real time what the effect of running a washing machine is, how much electricity a stove is using, and what is being consumed by the entire dwelling.  Turn on an appliance and a circle pops up on a screen to show what is being run. The long term data can be collected and managed in a way that far exceeds the month-by-month bar graph of consumption that shows up my electric bill.  The possibilities for such a system boggle my mind.  Having the free time to stick with such a fresh way to approach electric consumption interests from the grid to appliance monitoring to data analysis.  I can begin to see into what can be done.  Pleasurable for my brain.

A Texas immigrant who came here as an infant decades ago is in today’s news.  At last, she is proof  of illegal voting.  She voted in 2014 and 2016.  She was found out and convicted to eight years in jail and then deportation.  Deep in The New York Times story we learn that she thought her permanent green card status and over twenty years in Texas meant that she was a citizen.  She thought that working and paying taxes made her one of us.  My mind keeps fumbling with the notion of eight years in jail for voting.  My mind works her situation over and over.  Not pleasurable.

I have carried these thinking projects all day.  They go round and round my brain because I do not have children to attend to and a job that takes over thinking time.  Thinking is a pleasure and a curse.

 

 

Thanks to Nita I had visited most of the lower 48 states by accompanying her to conferences.  Those were great trips; however, sleeping in a hotel is not the same as sleeping on the ground.  For years I tent camped in nearby states in a Sears tent and then a Wal-Mart tent.  Close to the time I retired I bought a yellow and taupe two-man REI tent.  I have put it down on the soil of 47 of these United States and in Ontario, Canada.

To me that feels profound.  My head has been on the dirt of all of lower 48 states except Rhode Island.  I have hiked around, listened to the sounds, talked to people, and observed the flora and fauna of all those states.  Name a state.  Give me a few seconds.  There, now, I have a bundle of sensory experiences that comes to mind.  When I read or listen to the news and hear a story about California or Montana, or Maine, I go to where I tented.  My connection is as solid and firm as was the dirt I slept on.

I have two composition books filled with journal notes on my tent camping.  Using it, I was able to go back and add state names to some of the images I took and have stored in iPhoto.  Using search in iPhoto, I can find at least one image from every state and track down other associated images by checking the date in the information feature. At dmforrest.smugmug.com I can also go back to many of the places I camped.  Somewhere along my travels I started photographing my REI tent.  I like those unspectacular photos best in a way because they take me specifically to the dirt I occupied.

I fell into collecting states in 2012 by deciding to tent my way out west to see Elle in Colorado.  At first I stopped off for the first long day driving I-40 in Arkansas just past Memphis, Tennessee.  I got interested in the notion of camping in all of the states.  Interstates 80, 70, 40, 20, and 10 all head west.  I went straight up to Michigan once to trace the Canadian border and bend down through the Dakotas to Colorado.  I have traced the Gulf Coast and the Mexican border to get there, too. My list of camped in states grew and I was hooked on filling them all in.

My reading of history has led me to Civil War camp; that is to go to locations like Harper’s Ferry, Antietam,  Corinth, and Vicksburg.  I once traveled to Dayton, Ohio, based on my reading of David McCullough’s book about the Wright Brothers; I circled back through Kitty Hawk on that trip.  Camping near Springfield, Illinois, came from reading about Lincoln.  I like connecting reading and camping.

I sometimes take a notion to intensely camp through an area like every campground along the Blue Ridge Parkway or all the front country camping grounds in the Great Smokey Mountain National Park.   I have made annual camping trips to camp at Stephen C. Foster State Park in the Okeefeenokee Swamp, one of the quietest, darkest places on the East Coast.

My current big tent-camping idea is to trace America’s volcanos, an idea that came from a book I read and from pitching my tent in Craters of the Moon National Monument in southern Idaho last year.  The coarse black volcanic sand there will wear your shoes out.  Ruts from wagon train wheels still trace the pioneers route.  Likely I would follow the wagon train route to enter California to turn up to and maybe into Canada to see volcanoes.  Mount Saint Helens interests me in particular.  Being where continents split and magma shot out of the Earth to form what we now call a country somehow centers me. even more than standing by a free-flowing river.  I would like to travel with some roadside geology books and learn to see where I am in a new way.

Of course, I am always striving to fill in my ambition to visit all of our National Parks.  Stringing together a series of cities and towns I would like to walk around in is another vague idea I have in mind.  My thought is to always try to be just two weeks on the road, moving at a fast pace to get back to Nita.  I so wish she were able to travel with me.

 

 

Now my guilt is centered on my feeling of having too much.  I have a house worth something like $200,000 and three vehicles.  Other than utilities I have no payments.  Between Social Security and our state pensions, Nita and I have an income of about $75,000 a year.

I own more stuff than I need.  When I go to a store, I try be prudent, but I do not have to pinch pennies.  I suppose my  default is to save.  I have been poor during phases of my life and I have always been a person who refrained from gratuitous purchases.   I keep thinking I should buy a smartphone or a tablet because I think people are supposed to own those now.

Journalism is a pool I swim in.  I read it daily and like big national and international stories.  Last night as usual I watched the PBS Newshour.  Their stories take me places and I derive considerable satisfaction from traveling via reporting.  Last night I saw the second part of coverage of a refuge camp for refugees from Mogul, Iraq.  The reporter focused on children who were enjoying the novelty of playing and being able to go outside.  Some were drawing on paper for the first time in years.

They got into my head.  Why should the accidental circumstance of my birth in an affluent country give me such a tremendous advantage?  I am a mid-twentieth century born white person who was a child in the 1950s.  The world has always been my oyster.  I got farther than either of my parents in life.  Neither Harold nor Leona had a high school education.  I could have gone way further had I been more ambitious.  My public service side held my love of a big income in check.

As child I was separated from my father several times.  Those times were lean.  I was married at eighteen and lived with my in-laws for a while.  During my first few years of marriage, Nita and I truly counted every cent, but I have never know true poverty or hopelessness.  Why should I have so much?  I guess I expect struggle.  I suppose my immersion in the kind of journalism I get from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Newshour, and The New York Times has widened my perspective so much that I am self-conscious about not having to struggle.

Once when I was visiting my Grandmother Irvin on Leheigh Lane in Altoona, I walked around the neighborhood, stopped at each mail box, and raised the flags.  Was I eight or nine?  My mail at 513 West Church Street, Saluda, SC, was left in a box attached to the house.  I did not understand that raising flags on mailboxes was a big deal.  For sure I got into deep trouble.  The scolding was unnecessary.  I felt terribly guilty.  I can’t laugh about it even now.  I should have known better.

When I was in high school, maybe the tenth grade, I joined a fund for struggling children in foreign countries.  I received a photo of my child and sent money every month.  The subscription was similar to my Book of the Month Club enrollment.  I received literature that reported progress.  I kept that up for several years.  Why?  Guilt, I suppose.

My second term paper at Saluda High School came during my junior year.  Its thesis was something like “Hawthorne’s personal sense of guilt is evident in “Young Goodman Brown”, The House of Seven Gables, and The Scarlet Letter.  Where did that come from?  I tried to follow certain autobiographical facts from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life as they related to themes and characters in his fiction.

I think that some humans are born with a strong sense of morality that attaches to guilt.  My mind runs to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Major Barbara: both are clever studies on morality and social responsibility.  My years in Baptist Sunday School, Training Union, and Vacation Bible School come to mind.  Maybe my guilt is part of being born at the perfect time in the best country.  The serious idealism of the 1950s gave way to social activism as I grew into adulthood.  Ralph Nader and Martin Luther King were the heroes that replaced Johnny Unitas and Mickey Mantle as I hit puberty.

I suppose the cultural nuts and bolts of my guilt are derived from having lived through good times in a culture that seems to have affluence as its highest goal.  I think that the notion of being judged superior for having accumulated wealth is hollow.  Maybe my guilt is my curse of self-awareness in this new age of admiration of billionaires or maybe it is biological.  It unsettles me.