me and the Church

‘Church’ is capitalized because I’m talking about the Catholic Church. It was without question the dominant social institution of my youth.

Mom and Dad were both devout Catholics. They both went to Catholic schools for their entire education. When I and my siblings went to school, it was to the local Catholic school at St Joseph’s in Cupertino. That was where we went to mass every Sunday.

At a certain age, I don’t remember exactly when maybe aged 10 or 11, I resisted going on Sunday. I remember my father telling me I should be able to dedicate an hour a week to god. I had no philosophic reason to not go. I just didn’t wanna. I don’t remember that I was ever excused.

In the early 1960s, the Church held a big conference called Vatican II. When it was over, many of the rules around going to church that I had grown up with were liberalized. Priests were allowed to say Mass in the local language. No longer did we have to fast before taking communion.

Mom and Dad bought into the liberalization completely. We started going to Mass in different places, not necessarily consecrated churches. One time we celebrated Mass at a park. Just out on the lawn with about 20 people and a priest. I found it interesting to experience the Liturgy stripped down to its essentials. Along with everything else going on in the world, it led me to a questioning of the established institution of the Church.

Around the same time, there was a lot of interest in music with guitars. We were avid watchers of the Hootenanny TV show which featured just about everyone playing guitars and singing. Then, of course, there were The Beatles.

So, somewhere in that time frame, the idea of music for a Mass using guitars was born. At St. Joseph’s, there was established a ‘guitar Mass’ led by a charismatic man who played guitar and sang.

As I recall, the songs were not liturgical, per se. ‘Blowing in the Wind’ and ‘Today’ were favorites.

My interest in the guitar was not due to the guitar Mass, or anyone on Hootenanny. It was The Beatles. Nevertheless, the guitar Mass was an acceptable outlet for my rudimentary playing at age 15. Mom and Dad had an acoustic guitar for some reason that I commandeered. I think Dad thought he was going to learn to play at one point but he never did. Come to think of it, I don’t know why we had that guitar. It was just there and I started playing it. I didn’t have to lobby for a guitar to play. Fate!

So, now I’m in high school. And by the way, I had run up against the limitations of the Catholic education in 6th grade and moved into the much more academically demanding local public schools. We were still very active in the church, though. The annual fall festival run by the Parish had always been fun and there was a youth group for high schoolers run by a Brother.

(Even now I’m not sure of the distinction between a Brother and a lay person. Brother Gary was not a priest but he had made some kind of commitment to the Brotherly order. For us, he was a fun guy who could be serious too. I learned a lot from him.)

Any American male in the 1967 -1971 time frame – my high school years – thought a lot about the draft. The Vietnam war was raging and quite aside from the prospect of coming home in a body bag, I felt strongly that there were better things to do with my life than to become a soldier and go to Vietnam. I enjoyed being in the Parish youth group but I had a lot of different ideas about faith and spirituality. I recognized the institution of the Church as just another power structure. I was planning on going to college, which included a deferment, but I was thinking longer term. I was laying the groundwork for a Conscientious Objector status with the draft board by staying active in this recognized religious organization.

In the end it didn’t matter because the draft was reconfigured to a lottery. I got a high enough number so the likelihood of my being drafted was very small.

There was never any particular moment when I ‘decided’ I wasn’t going to go to church any more. I graduated high school and went away to college. No one was bugging me to go to church every Sunday so I didn’t. I was playing guitar in a rock band! That was my new religion.

Over the years, I’ve been to Mass a few times. It all seems silly to me but I did it because I was with Mom and Dad and I respected their needs.

I have one more story. When I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, we were studying the Sacraments. One of the Sacraments is the Confession. Confession involved going down to the Church on a Saturday, waiting in the pews for a turn in the confessional, then entering the confessional and facing the priest through a screen. You could hear but not see the priest. It was all pretty intimidating plus it took a big bite out of a perfectly good Saturday afternoon. There was a formula of what to say, of course, followed by a recitation of whatever sins you had committed in the past week. You had to say something so there was some invention every Saturday.

So, one day my nun teacher handed out these little cards to the class. On them was printed something called the ‘Act of Contrition’. My teacher explained that it was for times when you couldn’t get to confession. You could just say the prayer and god would hear you and take care of it. Balance the books, as it were.

Well, even at my young age, I saw it immediately. Why go through the operator when you could direct dial? It was the beginning of the end of me and the Church.

Cognitive test

I don’t remember where I heard the story. I think it was about the time that I had to witness Dad go through a cognitive test. I think it was about two years before he died. Mom had been saying for a while that he was ‘losing it.’ and all of us kids didn’t believe it.

Watching the test made me a believer but it was heartbreaking. In hindsight, that could be considered his day of death for me. He was clearly no longer the man he was.

Anyway, I think the story is kind of funny. It couldn’t have been Dad, though. It’s not his style. He took the test seriously and tried his hardest to answer the questions correctly. Interestingly from this remove, I don’t remember any discussions with him about his condition. Of course there was nothing to be done but work around it.

So, the story goes that a man was being given a cognitive test. The tester asked questions like how how much time is there between 1:45 and 3:30 and the responder was clearly having trouble. Then the tester asked, ‘Who is the President?’ and the man responded quickly:

‘That asshole!’

Howard

I wrote about Bruce Johnson a while back. Bruce, who is sadly gone from this earth, was a friend in high school and a tremendous influence on me. Howard H was a guy who was one class ahead of me. He was not a science guy go we did not share any classes. I think I met him through John O, who was a neighborhood guy and a very talented artist. Howard was an artist too so that may have been the connection. This is my story about Howard and me.

Cupertino High School had kind of a multi-purpose room that featured a bench along one wall that was reserved for Seniors. I guess it was a tradition for each class to paint the bench. John, being known at school for being arty, was given the job of painting the bench in the summer before our senior year. Somehow, I got involved as did Howard.

Howard and John came up with a fantastical design that was very much rooted in the hippie style of the time. Think R Crumb, perhaps, although that is not fair to John and Howard. They were both very original thinkers. I am not aware of any photo of the completed bench. We didn’t think that way then and I suspect that the powers that be in the school were horrified by it. The yearbook had nothing about it.

As I went through my senior year, I hung out with Howard sometimes. I don’t remember having any sense of Howard being in college. None of what we did was associated with any class he was taking.

One ‘project’ he had – my modern term, not his – was to make up a rock band to play for this very straight-laced group. In my memory, it was some kind of Mormon girls group. Howard’s hook was that nobody in the band really knew how to play their instruments. I sort of knew and I recruited my friend Tom, who really did know how to play, but no one else did. We borrowed large amplifiers and a drum set and ‘played’ for these people. It was kind of theatrical. We didn’t have costumes or even a real plan. I guess we had some tunes . . .

So, it was perhaps related that Howard and I and a couple of other people ended up over the hill at UC Santa Cruz one weekend. The singer was in school at Merrill College so we went over there to ‘rehearse’. Again, my modern word, not Howard’s. I don’t remember how we got over there. I certainly didn’t have a car. We slept in a classroom that someone got us into on the QT. I don’t remember how we ate, just that we were there. I also don’t remember what I told Mom and Dad about being there but it wasn’t an issue. I had a lot of freedom. There was no sex or drugs; not even any alcohol. Howard was a very clean liver.

But I had a good time and as I was thinking about where to go to college, my weekend at UCSC seemed like a good omen so I applied there.

Even though my heart was in music, my academic strength was science and math so I applied as a Math major. The thinking was that it was hard to get into UCSC and my science cred was my best shot. Amazingly in hindsight, I did not have any academic music goals. I was going to be a rock star and you don’t need classes for that!

Later, when I left UCSC to concentrate on my band, Dad told me he thought I had identified a music community when I went over there the first time. I hadn’t, really. I was in my own little world. He was disappointed, of course, and thought I was making a mistake, but he gave me that freedom.

I reconnected with Howard on Facebook but we are not close. Like Bruce, he brought outside-the-box thinking to my life at a critical time and it has stayed with me. Thanks, Howard!

hairstyle

I got a haircut from Sepi’s niece last August. I don’t remember that it was particularly short but now it’s 3 months later and I don’t feel the need for a new haircut. Usually, two months is about right.

For some reason, I’ve started combing my hair straight back rather than to the side as I’ve been doing it since I was a child. In my mind, it’s the look of my Uncle Pat. Here’s a picture of him:

This picture was taken in 1979. Pat was in his 50s then. Now I’m 70 plus and every time I comb my hair back I think of Pat.

Various hair people in recent years have encouraged me to use ‘product’ to hold my hair in a certain place. I’ve tried it but it doesn’t feel right. I’m a natural guy! I don’t know if Pat was using such stuff. Knowing him, I’m guessing not. Anyway, my hair starts falling into my face after it dries out.

Here’s my look from before the last haircut:

The good looking gentleman in the white jacket is Sasha. You can read about this photo here.

Experience

I have fallen into the bad habit of watching football every Sunday. Especially the 49ers, who are my local team. I don’t consider myself a fan of football although I do have a general idea of how well the 49ers are doing during the season.

Anyway, they played early yesterday and I didn’t watch the game. We went for a walk and happened upon a parade. That’s another story.

Later I found out that they had won in dramatic fashion at the last second. This morning, Sepi was watching the news while I was half asleep. I heard the TV say that they were going to show some highlights of yesterday’s game. I thought that might be interesting so I started to perk up. Right about then Sepi turned off the TV. For a moment I was annoyed but then I realized that I really didn’t care that much and it all started me thinking about the experience of watching football on TV, which led to thinking about the experience of, well, anything live.

Live theatre or live music comes to mind first, but live Veteran’s Day parades would qualify as well. We ‘do’ things. Why? For the experience!

Now that I am retired, the large block of time that used to be dedicated to work, which is to say, supporting myself and my family, has been freed up. Now I am able to use it for more – or different – experiences.

The value each of us gets from those experiences varies. Missing out on the experience of the football game is not a big deal for me, especially since it was replaced by the experience of a nice walk on a sunny day that happened to coincide with a parade. Serendipity experience!

Thinking about writing in the last couple of months I have kept coming back to wondering why I am doing this. I have gotten a few new readers and they have given me very positive (and gratifying) feedback. That’s nice!

This started out as a tribute to Zach and keeping his memory alive is starting to dovetail into keeping my own memory alive. 10, 20, 50 years from now, who will care about my experiences? I still have all of his diaries but I haven’t read any in years now. Mom has a whole bookshelf full of journals she kept on the many travels she went on with Dad. What to do with those is a decision we children will have to face sooner or later.

A few years ago, Mom got out a diary that my grandfather had kept on a trip he took from Denver to Southern California. I found it interesting for a number of reasons but mostly because it gave an insight into the kind of person he was. He died when I was a pre-teen and we did not see him very often so we were not close. In fact, my recollection of him is as a rather remote figure.

So, I hope my writing here will interest someone in years to come. They might be looking for a different experience!

Daylight Savings Time

Have we just gone to ‘Savings’ or ‘Standard’ time? I don’t know and I don’t really care. It’s 5:30 in the morning and my body thinks it’s 6:30. The time change screws me up twice a year and it pisses me off every time. The TV news always makes some reference to having ‘another hour of daylight’. That’s so stupid I can’t believe I’m commenting on it. The length of the day (or night, if you prefer) changes throughout the year because of the actual physical characteristics of the planet we are living on.

There are plenty of reasons for humans to have a time system that we can all agree on but changing it twice a year is a relic of days gone by. Let it go, folks! Nowadays, we have work from home, we have 24 hour TV, let’s all be adults and deal with each day on it’s own terms. I mean, really, how many people are checking whether the sun is exactly overhead at noon?

I have seen more news items indicating that Americans are coming to their senses on this. Most of them say the proposals are for permanent ‘Daylight Savings Time’. So, whatever was ‘standard’ 100 years ago is now not standard. Whatever. Get it done Congress!

Sometimes I think I should research my own writing on a topic before going off. What’s the fun of that? The tag cloud has at least one other entry for ‘time change’. You are welcome to wallow in my ranting if you like, dear reader. At least I don’t have to go to work this week so maybe I can recover sooner.

I’m terrified

This isn’t a political blog and this isn’t a news blog, but I feel compelled to comment on the state of American Presidential politics today.

I totally recognize that ‘polls’ are almost always ideology driven. Whey are made by political parties, it is obvious. When they are made by news organizations, it is less so. In the days of Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley, national TV network news was considered more of a public service (and required to be so by the FCC). Now those rules are relaxed and news networks are profit centers. That means that there is an interest in generating views which means that careful reporting is increasingly rare.

News reporting of elections have been reduced to talking about ‘the race’. Breathless discussions of who’s ahead and who’s behind are everywhere. Issues? Whatever.

In this context, the Republican party is led by a man whose name I will not put in this blog. He’s been saying things for weeks that are either crude playground bullying, meandering off-topic statements, or outright lies. Often all three. He talks openly about using the US military to hunt down ‘enemies of the state’ (inside America) who he defines as anyone who disagrees with him. The Democratic candidate is a mainstream politician. She generally speaks coherently and has an actual platform that she tries to present to the electorate.

The Republican candidate for President was President before and his term was roiled by chaos, culminating in a loss in his attempt to be re-elected. Now, despite many legal decisions to the contrary, he claims that the election was ‘stolen’.

Now he is laying the groundwork for claiming the same thing again even though recent polls have shown him winning. What is he going to say if he wins? It was all a joke?

Whatever the actual numbers are, it is clearly a close race. I am frankly astounded that he has the support of as many people as he does. (I’m setting aside the issue of the Electoral College, which is why we’re even having this discussion. No one is expecting the Republicans to win the popular vote nationwide. A few thousand people in a few key locations will decide who the next President will be. My vote in California is essentially meaningless.)

So, I’m terrified. If he wins, he’ll go on a witch hunt against his political opposition. He has no interest in governing. If he loses, he’ll scream bloody murder that he was screwed, file hundreds of lawsuits against election boards all over the country and, worst of all, his followers who love guns and violence, will come out in the streets again.

The zeitgeist is funny. Who can say what makes people do what they do? A lot of people in America clearly think this behavior is ok for our leaders. We may be living in a new chapter of Barbara Tuchman’s book March of Folly. I’m not a praying man, but I hope that somehow the numbers come up such that he is turned away. Praying couldn’t hurt.

Dad’s house

When I was a teenager, I was highly annoyed (to say the least) at the arc of my father’s life. He went to college, found a girl, graduated, got a job, got married, had kids, bought a house and . . . lived happily ever after. He was completely devoted to my Mom. Any arguments they may have had were hidden from us kids. He retired from a job he held for over 40 years. Finally, he died in the same house he had bought over 60 years earlier.

Perhaps I’ll address those feelings here someday. Today I want to talk about his house that he bought in 1958, that he raised 6 kids in and that my mother still lives in.

Because she still lives there, I have the privilege of going back to this house of my early years and viewing it with a different perspective. It’s different in many ways. There was the major addition in 1965, which I lived through. There was the reconfiguration of what was originally a ‘den’ and later my bedroom into a ‘sun room’ that is now the location for all large family dinners. Outside, it’s even more different. I think there is one tree left that was extant when I was a youngster.

So, what am I getting at? I was out in the back yard yesterday and went into the little shed on the back corner of the house. Dad built that shed. We were looking at the dripper system that is all over the back. Dad laid that out and it is still functioning reasonably well. On the edge of the deck opposite where most of the plants are is a hose bib. Dad plumbed it in copper pipe. The concrete walk on the side of the house was poured by Dad. I remember him reading about how to do exposed aggregate and trying it on that walk. It didn’t work out so well but the walk is still there and hasn’t fallen apart.

In the garage, there are screws, nails, hooks, shelf brackets, and other useful hardware, all sorted into boxes and neatly labeled. His toolbox is filled with inexpensive tools that were good enough for him. I made a living using tools, so I look at these sometimes and sigh if I have to use one. I can get the job done with them, though.

The cabinets and shelves in the garage were all built by him, as were many of the cabinets and shelves in the bedrooms and ‘family room’ (now known as the office). The construction isn’t fancy, but it has held up. We got a contractor for the major addition I referred to, but Dad drew up the architectural drawings.

Those who are gone live on in our memories. My memories of Dad are many, but being at his house and seeing his work is a different kind of memory. If I wanted to, I could show any of those things to another person and say, ‘My Dad did that!’ and it would tell them the kind of person Dad was, even if they had never met him.

That’s pretty cool!

Fleet Week

I looked up my post from this time last year when I focused on the Blue Angels flying team. It’s an iconic phrase from my youth seeing them at Moffat Field in Sunnyvale. They’re coming back to SF this weekend but I thought this year I’d take a different slant on it. My current phrase is ‘war machines’.

We’re a little better tuned to the neighborhood this year and so we’re more aware of the Navy ships docked at the cruise ship pier and a couple of other places along the waterfront. We’ll probably go and tour at least one of them. We’ve seen a few sailors along the Embarcadero. They have all been scrubbed clean and in their natty uniforms. I made eye contact with a couple and smiled. They smiled back.

I really don’t want to be ‘that guy’ and I don’t hold anything against any of them personally. (How could I? I don’t know them at all.) But . . .

I want to ask them if they ever think about the core function of the organization they are a part of. It’s about killing or frightening people until they submit to your dominance. The US military does a lot of good things but never forget their main purpose.

The Republican candidate for President has been sounding increasingly unhinged lately. When I read about what he is saying, I can’t believe that he has the level of support that he does. I’ve reminded people that he got 73 million votes in the last election. That’s more than any candidate ever except for Biden.

Who are these people? There are even some in this liberal enclave of San Francisco! Like the sailors, they are probably nice on a personal level. Why do they support this jerk? And, to circle back around to my original topic, why do they support the gigantic sums we, as a country, spend on our military?

As a parent of a first responder, I am particularly sensitive to the adulation given to our military. ‘Support our troops.’ Color guards and flyovers at football games. The core purpose of these things is to destroy. Police and fire men and women are in our home towns actually protecting us from danger. I am aware of the many problems we have in America with policing. I’d still take a police officer over a soldier. At least the training for a police officer is not focused on killing people.

So, if we go one of of these ships, we’ll be nice to the sailors. There’s nothing to be gained by getting in a fight with a worker. I’m sure the ships will be very interesting from a technical standpoint. I’ll try to focus on that part.

My Bookshelf

I had this idea the other day . . .

I was looking at the bookshelf beside my bed. It’s rather small; essentially a nightstand. I have books in a couple of other places in the house but my total book count is about 10% of what it was when I was living in Grass Valley. Some of that attrition came through my divorce but most of it was making choices as I downsized through the last dozen years.

So, these books are important to me and I thought I would use a photo of them to talk (write) about why. It may be that details of the photo will be hard to see so I think I may have to list everything with comments. It’s not a big bookshelf but there are 20 or 25 books there nevertheless. This post will either be long or broken in installments. We’ll see . . .

So, here’s the photo:

Starting from the left, first group: Science Fiction:

Larry Niven: Protector, All The Myriad Ways, Tales of Known Space, A Hole In Space, The Smoke Ring, A Gift From Earth, World Of Ptaavs, Ringworld. So-called ‘hard SF’, Niven’s books take a couple of leaps from today’s science to get started but they are carefully crafted stories with interesting characters and realistic alien worlds and races.
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five. Needs no explanation
Pat Frank: Alas, Babylon. Somewhat dated now (written in 1959), it is the story of a small community in Florida that survives an all out nuclear exchange.
John Brunner: Stand On Zanzibar. I was introduced to this book when I was a junior in high school by fellow student Ted Hile. More recently, Ted and I were friends on Facebook until I got tired of his ultra-conservative screeds. I ‘unfriended’ him before I understood that I could ‘hide’ people from my feed. Ted, if you’re reading this, let’s try again. I never look at this book without thinking of you. The book is a dystopian novel about
John Varley: Demon. Third book in a trilogy imagining that a moon of Saturn (Titan, title of the first book) is actually a sentient being. The world of Titan is populated with more-or-less humanoid races with an Earth atmosphere so when the human crew of a NASA spacecraft (think 2001) arrives, there are many adventures. I have several other Varley titles on other bookshelves.
Joe Haldeman: The Forever War. Haldeman served in the US Army in Vietnam and came away with a cynical view of wars and the militaries who prosecute them. Also, he’s a physicist so his ‘hard’ science is solid.

Second group , , , well it’s kind of a hodge-podge after Science Fiction.

On High Steel by Mike Cherry. A book about an iron worker in New York in the 1970’s. He’s a union man so there is a lot of insight into East Coast unionism that I find interesting. He narrates several deaths due to a combination of drinking and pre-OSHA safety procedures.
The Seven Sisters by Anthony Sampson. Somewhat dated now but a great snapshot of the oil business in the early ‘70s along with some great history of the Middle East.
Basic Writings by Chang Tzu, trans Burton Watson. Le Guin (see below) was my entry point to this philosopher. Her book The Lathe of Heaven has chapter quotes from Chang Tzu and they resonated with me in a profound way.
The Way of Chang Tzu by Thomas Merton
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, trans by Ursula K Le Guin
The Land and Literature of England by Robert Adams. Kind of a strange conceit but it works. Adams uses the literature of England as a frame to write its history. One of the few books that weren’t mine that I got out of the divorce.

Then there’s the Tolkien. Copies of The Hobbit and the trilogy in editions that came out after the first Fellowship movie. I still have my copies of the paperbacks I bought while still in high school. I went at least ten years reading the trilogy annually. Despite my serious fandom for these books, I never read the other Tolkien books (Silmarilion). I do have an original paperback copy of the Harvard Lampoon’s Bored Of The Rings in storage. I find it hilarious. It takes nothing away from the original.

Herman Wouk’s Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Wouk refers to these books as a ‘romance’. There is a love story but the framework it hangs on is solid World War Two history. I recently saw a documentary on the Battle of Midway and I was able to refer to these books for solid perspective. The protagonist is in a difficult marriage that he ultimately escapes from so I identified with him during my own hard times.

A modern paperback edition of the complete Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne. Drawings by E. H. Shepherd. The hardcover set my father gave me in 1955 I still have carefully stored away Two books of stories and two books of poetry, for those who don’t know. Don’t ever watch the Disney version.

Hidden behind Winnie-the-Pooh is:

A Band Of Misfits signed by the author, Andrew Baggarly. About the 2010 SF Giants championship baseball team.
The Control Of Nature by John McPhee. Three essays originally published in The New Yorker. At one time, I had a bunch of stuff by McPhee, many concerned with natural things. Control of Nature examines three situations where humans attempt to control natural processes with varying degrees of success. The US Army Corps of Engineers trying to keep the Mississippi River in its course through New Orleans. The people of Iceland trying save a town threatened by a lava flow. Los Angeles dealing with the rocks and debris coming down out of the San Gabriel Mountains. Great stories and still relevant.
Bill Graham Presents, My Life Inside Rock and Out by Bill and Robert Greenfield. An oral history. Bill was one of my heroes when I dabbled in promotion in high school. He was running the Fillmore at that time. Years later, I worked for BGP many times and got to know some of the people in the book.
Things a Boy Can Do With Electrochemistry by Alfred Morgan. Copyright 1940 with Dad’s name on the inside front cover.

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