Calm Before the Storm

Hurricane Sandy is coming.  It’s going to be big, and destructive.  This much we know.  The details, as yet, are much less clear. 

The news mavens, always eager to dispense advice, said “prepare.”  Right.  So, prepare we have.  Window screens have been taken down, bathtub filled, gutters cleared of leaves, patio furniture brought inside, potential projectiles removed to the best of our ability. 

We really need to buy a generator.  We’ve been saying this for nearly twenty years – ever since building this house in a neighborhood with underground utilities, which we thought would be our salvation from ever enduring another blackout.  We could not have been more wrong.  The underground wires, you see, are “fed” by a network of above-ground supply wires.  A butterfly flaps its wings five miles to our west, and we go dark.  It's worse here than anywhere else I've lived.  Best laid plans.

We’ve been known to check into a hotel, a few miles closer to civilization, during protracted blackouts caused by winter storms.  That’s been our backup plan, as well as our rationale for not shelling out for an expensive generator (our reasoning being that we can spend many nights at the SpringHill Suites for the cost of the sort of sizable, built-in generator that would be required to power our well pump, furnace, and other essential systems.) 

This time, our backup plan has failed.  Trivia question:  Do hotels have backup generators?  I made several calls today to find out.  Trick answer: For the most part, yes, but only to power the emergency lights in the hallways.  Hot water for a shower, not so much.  With Sandy’s projected  800 mile swath of destruction, I reckon we’d need to head for Canada to be assured of having power.  So we’ll be camping at home this time.

 To be clear, I’m not complaining.  Folks to our south are far worse off.  I’m very concerned about my family of origin, living in New Jersey – Ground Zero for Sandy.  My mother, living alone at 90 years old, is terrified.  I’m powerless to help her, other than by talking by phone to try and keep her calm.  My cousin, living in a flood plain, will surely be evacuated from her home, if she hasn’t already been.  The news reports from the Mid-Atlantic region are becoming increasingly intense.  The Atlantic City casinos are closed, evacuated.  The New York City subway system is shut down.  Public transit into and out of the city will be halted.  The word “unprecedented” is being tossed about with abandon.

Here in Massachusetts, our governor has declared a state of emergency, and closed all schools in the state.  At this moment, all seems eerily normal.  Our elderly dogs are restless.  They know that something’s up.  My daughter, racing to complete her online college applications while we still have internet access, is mildly freaking out.  Poor kid – the deadline isn’t till Thursday (11/1) but, tech-dependent society that we have become, one can no longer apply to college in analog mode.

As for me, now I wait.  It’s going to be a hell of a week.  To my friends and family reading this – stay safe, we’ll all make it through, one way or another.  I don’t know when my little world will go dark, but I’ve no doubt it will be soon; so I’ll see you on the other side.

The Bad Guy

A crime story has been dominating the news headlines this week.   As originally reported, a young woman had gone missing.  A search ensued, with the usual helicopter-and-ground-crew efforts to find the local university student.  Days passed with no results.  Then came the awful news: a man had been taken into custody, charged with her murder.

In an odd twist, the arrest came without the woman’s body having been discovered.  As I write this, the search for the body continues, in the treacherous waters at the mouth of a river.  Details of the case remain largely undisclosed; the authorities are playing this very close to the vest. 

The victim’s family has appeared on television, exhibiting tremendous grace in the face of overwhelming grief.  Her father spoke softly and eloquently at a candlelight vigil, honoring his daughter’s memory by thanking virtually everyone in the town for their support.  If I were in his shoes, I’d be unable to function, let alone speak before a crowd of friends and neighbors, with TV cameras rolling.  My heart cried for this man. 

Each of us views the world through our own lens.  What we see is shaped by our experiences and biases, and by our own uniquely arranged personality traits.  Our capacity to feel empathy for someone, for example, is determined in part by how closely we are able to identify with that person.  This was one of those situations, I’m sure, to which those of us who are parents can easily relate.  “Every parent’s worst nightmare,” hackneyed phrase though it may be, is spot-on here.

 I have since become aware of another parent’s nightmare: the suspect in this case is the son of an acquaintance of mine.  I don’t know this gentleman well, nor do I know his son at all; but I’ve known him casually for many years – a seemingly nice guy.  And because we have this connection, tenuous at best, I’ve found my mind wandering into territory that would normally be far out of bounds: I began thinking about the “parent’s nightmare” that he is experiencing.

The blog comments on the news sites are already piling up, calling for the death penalty and worse.  “Innocent until proven guilty” is a concept understood by all, but ignored by most when forming opinions about news stories of this nature.  And typically, I’m right there alongside the snap-judgment crowd; the facts seem obvious, fry the bastard.

This time things seem strangely different.  I know the guy’s father.  I know what it is to be a father.  This is not abstract to me.  I’m reminded of the farmer’s daughter who names the cow that she has chosen as her pet.   The cow is destined to be slaughtered.  One day Bessie will appear on the girl’s dinner plate, and that, somehow, makes things different.   Personal.   Uncomfortably real. 

My breakthrough realization here is that not one, but two families have been torn apart.  I’m not suggesting that we blur the very clear distinction between victim and perpetrator, nor that society should deal with this case differently from others.  I guess I’m just viewing it all through a different lens.

The Curse of Competence

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”  ---Confucious

I’ve just returned from a three day weekend on Cape Cod.  Idyllic as that may sound, I am exhausted and sore from having spent the majority of that time sanding the wood shingle siding of our house.  Make no mistake, these were days spent working.

Faithful readers of this blog may recall that this began, a few weeks ago, as an exterior painting project.  That was then.  I had intended to start by “roughing up” the paint, preparing the surface for re-painting.  The previous owners of our house had, unfortunately, painted the cedar shakes a light shade of grey.  I say “unfortunately” because this is Cape Cod, where the prevailing architectural vernacular is the unpainted, weathered cedar shake.  ‘Round here, folks paint the trim and shutters, but leave the siding au naturale, the better to withstand the corrosive effects of salty air and wind-whipped storms.  When we bought the place, we had told ourselves that, from ten paces back, the light grey shingles could pass for “weathered.”  Over the course of time, the surface had deteriorated.  Ten paces became thirty.  The paint was peeling.  Those damned pilgrims had it right, after all.  Time to paint.

My first “summer job” as a teenager involved painting.  Specifically, painting motel rooms - in a seedy motel, located on a forlorn stretch of state highway, in New Jersey.  The owner of the motel, my boss, also happened to be our summertime next-door neighbor.  This made commuting convenient, as I was too young to drive.  Our deal was that I would paint every surface – ceiling, walls, alcove, bathroom – in as many rooms as I could complete, as quickly as possible, without spilling anything.  For this I earned $3 per hour, cash.

I became very good at painting motel rooms.  I developed a system.  It was a model of efficiency.  I reached a point where I was able to complete an entire room in one day.  That may not sound impressive, but it was all-inclusive, start to finish – moving furniture to the center of the room, laying down protective tarps, preparing the surfaces (which required copious amounts of Spic ‘n Span in those bathrooms,) one coat of primer, two of topcoat.  Everything cleaned up, brushes and rollers washed, grimy wall-mounted A/C unit left "on" to speed drying, the room back to rentable condition for the next day. 

By the end of the summer, I had become very good indeed at painting motel rooms.  And I promised myself I’d get a different job the following summer – something, anything other than painting.

Roughly a decade later, I bought my first house.  It was a “handyman’s special.”  That made me the handyman.  During the years I lived there, I frequently drew upon my latent skills as a painter, and expanded them to include hanging wallpaper (and very basic plumbing, carpentry, and electrical work also, but those will be subjects for future blog posts.)  By the time I moved again, I had single-handedly painted, papered, stained or varnished every inch of every surface, inside and outside of that house.  It looked great.  And I swore I’d never again pick up a paintbrush.

Suffice to say that this cycle repeated a few more times.  In each case, my mental calculus going in was along the lines of “damn, I can do that myself for MUCH less than a professional would charge.”  In each case, I was right.  And each time I completed a job, I promised myself I’d never do another.

Which brings me to present-day Cape Cod.

We had gotten bids on professional installation of new siding.  That would have looked great, and been so much easier; but for the prices quoted, I could instead have bought a new car.  In fairness, we had asked for new windows to be included in the mix; but still – it was serious sticker shock.  The math just wasn’t working for us.    

And so…

I pressed the electric sander very lightly against the first shingle.  The paint vaporized like chalk dust.  I was down to bare wood in no time.  Hmm.  I continued sanding.  Within a short time, I’d convinced myself that this would be not be a painting project after all – rather, I would sand the shakes bare, restoring them to something close to their original appearance (inasmuch as forty year old wood can be made to look as it did when new.) 

Not a painting project!  Sweet!  I’m not painting!  But it was a Pyrrhic victory.  What had seemed relatively easy at first became more complicated as the job progressed.  Cracked shingles, rusty nails, and multiple layers of near-impenetrably well-protected paint behind shutters all were impediments. And there’s still the trim, and those shutters in need of paint – work still to be done; but the end is in sight.

And I swear,  I’m never going to do this again.  Until next time.

Bang

"Happiness is a Warm Gun"  ---Lennon / McCartney


The young man had recently graduated from a prestigious private university.  He was biking across the country in this, his final summer before traveling to Russia, where he had planned to teach English as a Fulbright Scholar.  He made several stops at various waypoints along his route, staying with friends, soaking up the local culture.

It was a warm July night in Colorado. He and a friend decided to catch a movie.  It was one of those mundane decisions that, in the end, would forever change the course of his life.

James Holmes, 24, was in the audience that night.  Before the film ended, twelve people had died and 58 others were injured in what came to be known as the Aurora Massacre.

He was among the injured.  25 shotgun pellets were lodged in his face and neck. But Stephen Barton is a survivor.  His wounds still healing, he filmed a brief ‘public service announcement’ and launched a grassroots campaign to “demand a plan” to end illegal gun violence.  His video message and petition can be viewed here:  www.demandaplan.org.

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We have a problem with guns in this country.  Illegal guns are, of course, the biggest and most intractable problem.  They find their way into the hands of whack jobs.  They get the big headlines.  Waco (1993.)  Columbine (1999.)  Virginia Tech (2007.) The shooting of Gabby Giffords (2011.)  Aurora, The Empire State Building, The supermarket shooter.  All this year.  The trend is not good.

Then there are the accidental shootings, tragic in their own right.  Within the past week, there was the Connecticut man who killed his own son, mistaking him for an intruder, and the young man in Stoughton, Mass, who had just received his gun permit, and was showing his gun to his younger brother when it fired, killing him.

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“Take good care of your mother, son.”  It was a final goodbye.  The boy began to protest, but with that, the EMTs whisked the stretcher out of the house and into the ambulance. It was the last time the boy would see his father.

Hours passed. The boy crawled into bed in his parents’ room.  He wasn’t really sure why.  His mother returned, alone.  There was nothing she could do, she’d been told.  She accepted the ambulance driver’s kind offer of a ride back home from the city in the middle of the night, because the alternatives frightened her.

The inevitable phone call came. Tears flowed. The elderly aunt and the mother comforted each other.  The boy felt himself grow numb. His left arm reached out to the bedside table, the one beside the wall, out of sight of the others. He grasped the loaded gun. 

His father had spent the last part of his life as a paraplegic; he’d kept that gun at his bedside, thinking it might be the only way he could protect his family from an intruder. The boy had always known it was there. It had been drilled into his head for as long as he could remember, he was never to touch the gun.  And until this moment, he never had.

His mind raced.  At thirteen, he was overtaken by emotions that he could not handle. He knew that his mother was in agony, and that he could not help her. He couldn’t envision a future beyond that moment. Within a split second he had decided.  He would shoot his mother, then himself.  He would save them both from a life of never-ending grief.  His grip tightened. He closed his eyes.

Perhaps it was divine intervention.  More likely, it was simple cowardice.  The boy released his grasp on the gun. 

It really, truly could have gone either way.

This happened nearly forty years ago. The wounds of the moment eventually healed.  Lives went on.  The boy’s mother will go to her grave never knowing this story. 

Unless she reads his blog.