"The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing... Is there anything of which one can say, 'Look! This is something new'? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time."
Ecclesiastes 1
23 May 2013
A lot of people don't get me at first. I'm not a big guy. I don't look particularly outdoorsy. I can't really grow a respectable beard and I'm a vegetarian. So they don't get it when they find out I've got a safe full of rifles. Sadly, there are a lot of people who can't conceive of shooting as a sport in itself. It never occurred to them that a person would ever pull a trigger other than to kill something or someone. They get a confused look and say things like "You mean, just target practice and stuff?" as if shooting at a target could not possibly be anything but "practice" for "the real thing". Which, of course, is killing something or someone.
This is what happens when you live in a country that is insistently selective in its coverage of things like the Olympics. The shooting sports have had an Olympic presence for decades, and Canada has athletes in virtually every shooting discipline. But Biathlon is the only one that you'll ever see on television; the glorious CBC simply refuses to provide coverage of any other sport involving a firearm. Most people here are completely oblivious to events like 50-meter Smallbore, Free Pistol, 10-meter Air Rifle/Pistol, and all of the shotgun events. So I guess it's no surprise that they can't see shooting as an end in itself, or a shooter as a dedicated and highly disciplined athlete. Their entire exposure to firearms has been what they see in movies, what they see on the news, and hunters they happen to know. Guns are for killing. That's all they can see.
I wonder if they would have the same opinion of knives, had they never encountered a chef or cooked in a kitchen themselves. Or baseball bats, had they never seen the sport. The javelin and the discus, both now regular events at any Track and Field day, began as weapons of war, yet neither of them has achieved the same reputation as the firearm. Granted, that's probably because no one uses a javelin or a discus to kill anyone anymore. But that might just be because humanity invented easier ways of doing it.
Kelly Bachand of Top Shot fame put it well when he said "In the hands of an angry person, it's a weapon. In my hands, it's a piece of sporting equipment." I suspect that many competitive shooters have never killed so much as a gopher in their lives. I attended a shooting match outside of Edmonton as a spectator once, and Lynda Hare, the Canadian Pistol Champion who I have the pleasure of knowing personally, had this to say when I asked her why she comes out for little competitions: "We're shooters. We love to shoot." Being a shooter wasn't a means to an end. It was a part of her identity. She didn't shoot because she was a soldier, and that involves shooting. Or because she was a hunter. She was a competitor in a sport.
The competitive shooting world is, of course, the other end of the spectrum. I guess I fall somewhere in the middle. I don't hunt, and I'm not one of the crazy paramilitary types we're starting to see frighteningly more of here in the western world. But I do find Olympic-style shooting more regulated and restrictive than I like. Olympic shooters train to make one shot, at the same distance, at the same target, under pretty much the same conditions, over and over again. Maybe I just don't have the attention span for that. I have all kinds of respect for it, but it's not quite my cup of proverbial tea. I prefer what I might call "practical shooting". I want to be able to pick up a plain rifle, without the bells and whistles, and hit anything I can see within reasonable range and under virtually any reasonable conditions.
The natural question, then, is "Why? Why develop an ability that you have no intention of using for any tangible purpose?" I'm not a hunter, and probably never will be. I don't anticipate that I'll ever need to defend myself with a firearm and I have no aspirations of becoming a military sniper. And I'm not venturing into the world of competitive shooting.
It was a question I had to ask myself, because for a long time, I didn't fully understand why shooting appealed to me as much as it did. I think I started to understand it one day at the range when I encountered three guys shooting from the table a few stations down from me. They were gathered around a semi-automatic Ruger SR-22 decked out with a bipod, red-dot scope, and a 25-round magazine. And it struck me that they were firing this thing sitting down, rifle rested with the bipod on the shooting table, looking through the red-dot, at a target a whopping twenty-five metres away. How this could have been in any way challenging I couldn't figure. They seemed to just enjoy squeezing the trigger and making an impressive pile of brass casings next to the table, but they couldn't hold a group to save their lives. This, to me, was not real shooting.
Which got me to thinking about what "real shooting" actually was. And it was then that I started to figure out why I love it. So I'll give you the closest thing to a personal definition of "real shooting" that I can come up with:
Real shooting means taking a good look at what is going on around you and within you, then making very deliberate decisions about what to do and how to do it. Know your rifle. Know your cartridge. Range your target and dope the wind. Put every part of your body in just the right place, breathe in just the right way, and move the trigger along exactly the right path. This is shooting. Until you strive to do these things, to make these decisions, to achieve that control, you're not really shooting. You're just making holes with a gun.
18 May 2011
It's been a long silence, I know.
'Busy' barely describes the past few weeks. It's all a bit of a blur, punctuated with clearer recollections of moments or events. Madly working on the 'Pin-the-thagomizer-on-the-dinosaur' poster for my boy's birthday party on my lunchbreak, still in my coveralls. Megan's haunting soprano as she chanted Psalm 22 while the altar was stripped on Maundy Thursday, and then again as she delivered the Exsultet at the Easter Vigil two days later. The general runaround that always accompanies doing our taxes. Making a paper flower with my son while my wife still slept upstairs on the morning of Mother's day. A series of orchestrations to pull off something for her birthday, involving staff at camera stores and restaurants.
And yet, in all of this, the sense of being buried under all of it has been strangely absent. For all that's gone on, I would have expected to feel like I was falling behind. That's what I'm used to feeling when things are busy: the growing shadow of things left undone.
But these past few weeks, I actually feel like I've been keeping up. Not, mind you, getting much further ahead, but keeping pace with the cloud, holding steady, keeping momentum and not tripping over my laces.
Being busy is not something I'm naturally good at. Getting things done on time, remembering things, planning ahead, are all skills I somehow failed to acquire in my youth. My mother always used to tell me to make a list of what I had to do, and I never wanted to. I think I always wanted to feel like I didn't have to, which is to say that I didn't want to feel like I had to do things the way she did them.
The years have demonstrated, sometimes painfully, that I do, in fact, have to make lists. I have a daytimer now, and things that don't make it into its pages typically don't get done at all. I've used daytimers with some success over the past four years or so, but it's always been an on-and-off sort of affair. The stupid thing didn't have a regular place where it was kept; sometimes it was in my lunchbox so I could use it at work, sometimes on the counter, sometimes in a bag in the basement or the mudroom. And even when I had it handy, never did I really have a space to sit down and look it over. Why the kitchen table wasn't good enough I'll probalby never know, but it just wasn't.
I have an office of sorts in the basement. It's a nice finished room, and my bookshelf, rifles, and tarantula all live down there. It even has a perfectly serviceable desk, and I never really did much work down there because I didn't have a stupid chair. I did, actually, but it was a cheap little task chair with no arms, and its backrest had long since broken off, making it more of a swivelling stool than a chair, and not at all comfortable to sit on for any length of time.
So I bought a chair.
Not just any chair. I scoured Kijiji for a deal, and came across one that caught my eye. It looked old, made in the stainless-steel-tubing style with arms and a high back, upholstered in leather. The description said 'one of a kind' and something about a flap, which I didn't completely understand from the ad's text. But it was 25 bucks, and the seller was in the neighbourhood, so I checked it out.
This was the coolest office chair I've ever seen. As the story goes, the owner loved the chair, and though it was still very comfortable, it had become a little ragged. At the same time, he had had a long, chocolate brown leather coat, which, though it had gone out of style, was still in good condition. So he got out his sewing machine and reupholstered the entire chair with the leather from the coat. So now, just to the right of centre on the high back, one can see the distinctive shape of a breast pocket flap, sewn shut, right about where the pocket would be on a person sitting in the chair.
Suddenly it's a pleasure to sit at my desk, which I've cleared off; it had been covered in junk for months.
Yes, I'm busy. But I'm not floundering. For once I feel like I'm steering the ship instead of drifting along aboard it, and that's refreshing. The leopard is learning. It's simple things, sometimes, that get in our way, like not having a stupid chair or keeping the alarm clock too close to the bed or not having shelves for your shoes. Sometimes things actually are more complicated than that, too. But less often than we think.
St. Patrick's Day, 2011
"I arise today by the strength of Heaven:
Brightness of sun,
Radiance of moon,
Splendour of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of wind,
Depth of sea,
Stability of earth,
Firmness of rock.
-St. Patrick of Ireland
9 March 2011. Ash Wednesday
"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
So said the priest tonight in the service, as he made the sign of the cross in ash and oil on the foreheads of the parishioners. It's one of those quiet, subdued, somber services, though nothing like Maundy Thursday. That's a ways off yet.
Here at the gate of Lent we meditate on our mortality. Father Steve made a number of points as to why this practice has a certain wisdom to it: appreciation, perspective, motivation. Of course, the idea came up of how to live day to day. I've always struggled with that somewhat. We hear all the time in songs and see all the time on posters or mugs or trendy shopping bags that we should live each day as though it were our last.
If I did that, I wouldn't get up and go to work tomorrow. And if the world didn't end, I would go broke and my family would starve. So this advice seems kind of absurd.
And so it was refreshing when Father Steve spoke to exactly that. We can't just ignore our responsibilities - we have to do what we have to do, and we have to assume that we're going to wake up tomorrow. But rather than decide what we are going to do today, perhaps it's more poignant to decide who we are going to be today. Because we can choose to change that, even drastically, without compromising the future that, in all likelihood, really does lay before us. We can get up and go to work and use a patience we didn't use yesterday. We can think of how to win an enemy over instead of how to strike back. We can be different people in the same places and doing the same things, and it will matter. And others will remember.
I propose a shift in the cliche. We can't live each day as though it were our last. But we can try to live each day as though it were the only one anyone would remember, and I imagine that if we could do that, we wouldn't go far wrong.
I know, I know. Easier said...
2 February 2011
So I'm about halfway through Dostoevsky's Demons (often incorrectly translated as The Possessed. It's the last of his major novels that I haven't read, so I'm fairly well acquainted with his methods. I love his writing - no other fiction author has influenced my thinking and my life more - but I won't deny he's kind of difficult. There are a few things I might suggest to someone embarking on his work for the first time:
1. Learn how Russian names work. The same character might be referred to as Rodion Romanovich, Rodion Romanych, Raskolnikov, Rodya, Rodka, or Rodechka. These are all the same dude. Roman, however, is not the same dude.
2. Either read quickly or take notes, because you will be expected to remember who borrowed money from whom, how much, and for what, as well as which unfortunate has-been academic was the illegitimate child of someone-or-other's tutor and was shipped off to the provinces as a child to be raised by aunts and who has now returned after decades of absence and general mediocrity to propose marriage to the daughter of whoever it was who lent the first guy money, what the motives are for the proposal, and how much the dowry will be. Also, expect the tutor to possibly make an appearance roughly three quarters into the novel. So keep up.
3. You might find it helpful to learn French (I'm led to believe this applies to Tolstoy as well).
4. Get an edition that has some notes. Google nihilism, determinism, slavophils, and various other -isms that appear. Also, read the introduction, especially if you have the excellent Pevear/Volokhonsky translations. This will clear up a lot of maddening mysteries, as well as give you a clue as to what on earth Dostoevsky was driving at.
Some absolutely delicious things about him, though, are his fascination with murder, the frequency with which his characters suffer "attacks of cholerine", and his habit of describing, when a new character suddenly shows up in a scene, not only his appearance or dress, but also his level of sobriety. Something like "All eyes turned to the door; there stood Jerk Loser-ovich, in a tattered waistcoat and a neatly pressed tie, silent, resolute, and not drunk" (that's not an actual quote, but you'll find lines like it).
Best of luck to you. Really, he's brilliant.
9 January 2010
So I had one of those "Man, I'm old" moments at work a few days ago. I was talking with an apprentice - who is perhaps twenty years old - about how exactly to do some little task that we both figured should be done. He offered what he thought was the best solution, and it made sense. "Make it so," I commanded in an affected voice. Then, continuing with the joke, I brought my right hand up to shoulder level, then gently flicked the hand forward at the wrist, pointing with my index finger and curling the other three as I did it. "Engage," I said.
It's not like I was expecting a roar of laughter or anything. But a chuckle, a bemused grin, even a rolling of the eyes, wouldn't be unreasonable to expect. But nothing came. Not the tiniest twitch save a little glance of the eyes away and back again in a slightly unnatural moment of silence.
"You don't even know what that's from, do you?" I finally said.
"No idea," was the response.
The fact that there are people old enough to drink in Saskatchewan who are yet too young to be familiar with the signature move of Captain Jean-Luc Picard astounds me. But that amount of time really has passed.
And I would hardly call myself old; I'm only thirty-two. I'm old if I'm at a Justin Bieber concert (at which point, I have much bigger problems than being old). But I'm relatively young, really. Still, I'm not in that phase of life that everyone tells you so emphatically to enjoy. "This is the best time of your life," we'd often hear when we were in high school, usually from people above forty or so.
I've always thought that there are few things you could say to a young person that could possibly be more depressing. Really, the upshot of that statement is "Enjoy being under twenty-one, because it's all downhill from here. In a couple of years, life will be a little less fun, and then it will be sort of OK, and then it will kind of suck, and after that, it will suck more and more every year until you're dead. Bye!"
And we won't even begin to talk about the people for whom High School was a nightmare of struggle or ridicule or humiliation. That kind of experience would make for a pretty crummy "high point" of anyone's life.
Now, whenever I hear someone giving that kind of advice, I feel a little bit sorry for them. I find myself wondering what kind of regret they carry with them about the last decade or two of their lives. I actually still hear people say similar things to me, even at my age now: "Ah, you're young." You can hear the sad wistfulness in their voice, and the fact that they miss their youth so much speaks to their dissatisfaction with their current circumstances. It's one thing when those words take the tone of a fond recollection; that I can understand and appreciate. But so often, the statements are full of sadness, disappointment, and perhaps most importantly, resignation.
It's that surrender, that resignation, that baffles me the most. They sound as though they have given up on any possibility of actually enjoying the lives they now have as much as they enjoyed the lives they once did. I have to wonder: what is it about their position now that is so oppressive or limiting? Responsibilities? Commitments? What barrier stands between them and real joy in living?
It's true that we take on more and more responsibilities as we grow up. I have a few myself. But we choose our commitments, and one would think we had reasons to do so when we did. We get married, we have children, we buy houses and establish careers. None of these things could we have done (ideally) when we were in High School. If the life we had then was so great, why do we give it up? If we love our spouses and our children, if we live where we like and have chosen careers we are interested in, then what about our lives as youths was so much better?
In my younger days, I couldn't have felt the warmth of the long-held companion that my wife is to me now. In my days before a child I could not have watched my own toddler reason something out that makes such perfect logical sense and is yet so completely and hilariously wrong. Not until now could I know the quiet elation of teaching an obscure tradesman's trick to a knee-knocking apprentice, or the satisfaction of telling him that he's done something well.
And I still have my pursuits. There is no birthday that stands as the deadline for dreams; be it writing a novel or shooting a four-inch group offhand at a hundred meters, there's plenty I have left to work toward, and I love working toward all of it.
My younger days weren't at all my best. They were different, to be sure, and there are plenty of memories that still make me laugh or smile. But there's wonder enough in the world to keep me busy for lifetimes to come, and I only get one. Maybe I groaned those few days ago when I felt my age so keenly, especially as "feeling old" is still a somewhat new feeling to me. But if I groaned, I did it with a grin.
12 December 2010
It comes out of nowhere, that moment when the view behind you becomes a sweeping panorama, rich and full of detail and nuance and theme.
We decorated the tree tonight. For a long time as we did it, I couldn't figure out what it was that was making me so quietly elated. There was nothing particular about what we were doing; they were the same things we'd done in years past. The struggle in the cold, cramped crawlspace under the basement stairs to get all of the Christmas boxes out and up to the main floor, eggnog and rum with a little nutmeg, M&M's in the shiny, red, M&M-shaped bowl we'd bought years ago, some Christmas music piped from the laptop through the stereo. The same tree decorations we'd used for years. There was nothing new about it, and yet there was something that came over me that I had not felt in previous years.
And then it occurred to me: this is the first Christmas in which these things didn't feel somewhat new. They felt established, they felt normal, they felt like the traditions they were originally meant to be. These things felt familiar in a way they never had before. Not novel or contrived or forced or even deliberate. Just natural.
In moments like these, you come face to face with the enormity of the life you have built with someone. Of course, it isn't just the tree. But the tree brings to mind for me the thousands of other things that have become our normal, with no thought to how anyone else does them.
And over the years, normal becomes more precious than novel. Not because we become set in our ways or are just more comfortable maintaining the status quo, but because that normal is the product of shared history, with its feasts and its famines, its war and its peace. It's a normal that was fought for, not stumbled upon or settled into.
So here's to you, honey. For the life we've built together and the immeasurable value it carries with it now. For working, sometimes fighting, alongside me for this normal. So that putting up the tree feels like it's supposed to.
And it's been less than eight years. I look forward to the rest of our lives.
25 October 2010
Feel free to blame me. I had half wondered, Saturday night, if perhaps the white stuff would show up Sunday morning; I had picked a hymn for the service that was all about the changing of seasons and the coming of winter. And sure enough, when I pulled back the curtain yesterday as I got out of bed, there it all was.
I'm sure many spent the day complaining. It wasn't just the snow; it was cold, cloudy, generally a grey and almost oppressive kind of day. I went to church and played the service (and did my bumbling best to handle a technical issue in the middle of the Eucharistic Prayer - anyone know how to fix a Roland KR-177?), then went home and had a simple lunch. We all went to a friend's place to pick up some photo equipment. He lives on the other side of town, and the long drive was notably, and comfortably, quiet. It was an easy sort of day, the kind where you don't get ambitious. Where you let the house or the blanket or even the car wrap you up with heat and stare outside.
My wife has, in the past, commented on the annoying obligation of good weather, the kind that makes you feel like you can't possibly waste such a beautiful day, and makes you feel compelled to do the things that only that kind of weather permits, whether you actually feel like it or not. This was not one of those days. This was a day blissfully free from suggestion.
Except, perhaps, the hint it gave of things to come. The quiet has arrived, and the cold with it. Soon will come the next beat in the rhythm of the year: Hallowe'en, and All Saints' Day, and then Advent, and the reverent joy it heralds.
It is the change, though, that moves me most. Every season, we become familiar, and the wonder is lost. In spring, we look around and marvel at the new life everywhere, the beauty of green grass and flowers and birds. By the end of summer, these things have become mundane. And now, the snow comes, new and fresh in its own right even if I have seen thirty-some winters. Creation becomes new again.
All beautiful, the march of days as seasons come and go.
The hand that shaped the rose hath wrought the crystal of the snow...
Complain if you want. But all the better if you don't want to.
24 August 2010
These past few mornings have been the first since summer came that I have driven to work in darkness. Granted, I started coming in earlier; I'm on the road at five-thirty now, but even so, until recently it was at least dawn by that time.
Not so anymore. It's black when I start the car, and the sky is just blueing by the time I arrive, just a couple of minutes before six. No shadows have yet been cast, and there's a new quiet to these mornings.
When I was fifteen, I had a job at the McDonald's in Spruce Grove. Most of the two and a half years I worked there was completely forgettable, but I remember very clearly some of the winter mornings I opened there. I forget exactly what time we had to be there, but it was around five, if memory serves at all. My dad would usually ask me, the night before, if I wanted a ride in the morning, and I almost always declined.
It had to be a forty-five minute walk. A long way, through the center of town and up by the highway where there was no sidewalk. You had to just walk on the shoulder where the snow was just getting deep. Trudging would be the best word for it.
And so it was that Christmas Eve morning, a little before five. It was probably twenty degrees below freezing and there was just a little snow falling. I was on the side of the highway and the sky was pitch black and the road glistened in the orange glow that the streetlights cast on it. And it was wondrously quiet. In December, birds don't sing and leaves don't rustle. And on Christmas Eve, no one travels the highway west of Spruce Grove at four thirty in the morning. The snow, in the absence of wind, came almost straight down and softly lighted on the ground without impact. I was a very rare and beautiful kind of alone.
It was like I hoped never to arrive and for the sun never to rise. I could have walked on in that dark stillness for ages.
These mornings now are reassuring. Though it comes with bitter cold and no small amount of inconvenience, that stillness will return. The slight chill in the air as I walked from the door to the car and the world between me and the sun were its first heralds.
The wind still rustles the leaves. It's a ways off yet. Give it time.
21 July, 2010
The Roman Catholic Church just can't seem to keep itself out of the news these days. For a minute there, things were sort of quiet, after Pope Benny made his statement that the child abuse cases were a result of sin within the church, not without, and that "forgiveness is not a substitute for justice". It was a step, albeit a small one, in the right direction, though miles remain to go. Even so, the critics quieted down for a little while, and seemed to be waiting. And watching.
What were they waiting and watching for? This, apparently.
I've had a couple of discussions regarding this now. What shocks me is how normally reliable media have treated this case. Both the New York Times and Time magazine ran articles online making the claim that the Vatican considers the ordination of women just as morally despicable as child molestation. Naturally, a lot of people are bent out of shape over this one.
One commentator made the observation that the Vatican seems to never miss an opportunity to shoot itself in both feet. While I'd hesitate to disagree, this one just doesn't seem to be their fault.
The Vatican never said the two offenses were equal. Where the confusion comes from is the fact that both are mentioned in the same document. That was enough, it seems, for the fine folks at the NYT and Time to presume the worst and announce it to the world with full conviction. They seemed oblivious to the fact that the two offenses against Canon Law were put in completely different categories, and were in no way equated morally. Kind of like bank fraud and rape - both are illegal, both will land you in jail, but there's no question that one is more reprehensible than the other from a moral point of view.
Of course, even if I'm right about this, the world still has plenty to be angry at the Vatican for. It's beyond dispute now that they deliberately concealed child molesters and shielded them from investigation. Of course, that has given some the idea that the Roman Catholic Church is a welcoming pervert club, and that they protect pedophiles because they like to. In reality, "protecting" pedophiles was an unforgivable by-product of their primary goal: protecting the Church from scandal. I doubt they were thrilled at the necessity of their actions (though I realize that necessity was only perceived, not real - they could have done right from the beginning).
I make no excuses for their past sins. It seems even the Pope himself has a lot to answer for, and I quite sincerely hope that he does. In the meantime, Benedict XVI has done more than any pope before him to tackle the child abuse issue head-on. He hasn't gone far enough yet, but the pieces seem to be moving on the board. Whatever else I may vehemently disagree with him on, he may yet do some good in the course of his term. Hopefully, more good than harm, though it remains to be seen.
Some would wonder why I would defend the Catholic Church, given that I'm not actually Catholic. My reasoning is something like this: they're what the world looks to when it thinks of the Christian faith. I'm associated with the Vatican whether I like it or not. And if they can get their house in order, they stand to do a great deal of good. I'm all for them getting their house in order, and I won't stand by and watch them get kicked while they're down, which is what this latest news story amounted to. Let them deal with their issues. Let them make their changes. Put pressure on them where it is needed, but don't needlessly throw rocks at them when they're trying to put the past to rights.
"Speak truth to power", goes the old Quaker saying, and Paul often reminds me of it. And amen to that. We've had enough of lies from all sides.
30 June 2010
It's fair to say a pattern has been established now. Every time I have a store order something in for me, either because they are out of stock or only get it in by request, there's a problem. It never goes smooth.
The first striking example was my telescope. The store had none in stock, but said they could get one. I ordered it, and was told it should take a couple of weeks. A month and many inquiring phone calls later, I was told that the distributor had them backordered from the manufacturer. A few weeks after that, it finally came to light that the manufacturer was no longer building the thing. I ended up with a different scope altogether.
I think that was where it started. It has happened a few times since. Now it's happening with my CZ 455.
I don't think I have ever ordered something and had it show up on time, without headaches.
Anyone wanna buy a curse off me? Five bucks.
We've all heard before that people change. Over the years I've become more and more convinced that people don't change as much as we suppose, and that the other adage, about leopards and spots, is probably much closer to the mark. Spots, though, do not a predator make.
Some things are more engrained in a person than others. Someone who just doesn't care about other people has a long road ahead of them before they start to. But a lot of things, little things, are more malleable. Bad habits. Not like smoking or excessive drinking, but things like hitting the snooze button too many times every morning or not putting things away when you're done with them. Or certain predispositions, perhaps to distraction, or procrastination, or forgetfulness. That last one always crept up and bit me. Actually, I've got some tooth marks from all three of them, but talk about people who can't remember to do a damn thing, and yeah, my name comes up.
It's not that I have a bad memory. In fact, it's quite good, in certain ways. I can remember lines from movies verbatim, and song lyrics stick with me. I think it's an auditory thing. And I can memorize information fairly well, like when studying for a test. Ask me a question, and I can dig the answer out of my brain. The problem for me has always been remembering things without a cue. Ask me to pick up milk on the way home from work and I'm hopeless. Ask me when I get home "what were you supposed to pick up?" and I'll be able to tell you, immediately. But there in the car, with nothing reminding me that there's something I'm supposed to be remembering, the milk is doomed to remain unpurchased in the store cooler. You might as well just hang a sign on the front door that says "MILK", just so that I can turn around and go back to the store before I even walk in. This would spare everyone the grating conversation and dirty looks that would be necessary if I actually entered the house.
I've got past a lot of that, though. But not because I changed. Those who know me well know that I wear a ring on the middle finger of my right hand. The one I have now is my second (the first was stolen - long story), but it is in every way identical to the first. I made both, the first at work and the second on my little lathe in the basement, out of Nitronic 50 stainless steel. Both were made to fit the middle finger. It turned out, though, that the rings would fit my index finger as well, though they never felt comfortable there.
That discomfort, as it happens, was useful. It first occurred to me a day or two after I had, yet again, forgotten some task that needed to be done, which had created no small amount of inconvenience. I don't remember what it was now (quelle suprise); I just remember feeling very frustrated with myself, sick of my own unreliability. I tried to think of ways to deal with it. For many, the solution to forgetfulness is to write things down. But that does no good if you don't remember that there's something you're supposed to remember - you won't look at the piece of paper to check what it is.
But then something hit me: in an adaptation of the old "tie a string on your finger" trick, I moved the ring from my middle finger to my index finger. It felt weird. It was supposed to. And sure enough, remembering whatever it was I'd needed to do became astonishingly simple. That weird feeling was like a constant reminder that there was something I was supposed to remember. It worked again and again.
I did it for months without my wife noticing the ring's subtle migration. What she noticed was that my memory had markedly improved. She didn't see a contrived sort of system or method; she saw a more reliable husband. And that was what mattered.
I'm still exactly the same forgetful person. But I found a way to deal with it that took the sting out of the weakness. I didn't actually change; I learned. There's no sense in the leopard just wishing, trying to live as though he has stripes instead of spots; the poacher with the rifle will just chuckle when he pulls the dead cat out of the tall, vertical grass. Better to understand the spots and figure out how to work with them. And that's why the spots on the leopard sometimes don't matter. Maybe the leopard can't change, and maybe that's okay. Because the leopard can learn.
I think I've been wearing that ring five years now. At first, I made it because I liked it. Then, it became a practical and important part of living my life. Now, it gives me a little hope that perhaps some of my other shortcomings could also be rendered inert, and a little more willingness to try.
I don't aspire to be a perfect leopard. I'm just learning to work with my spots.
I'd almost forgotten how much I loved shooting.
She's a fine piece of work, the Slavia 631. A .177 spring-piston air rifle, built by CZ in the Czech Republic. Low power and suitable for a basement range, but far and away one of the most accurate rifles in its class (and certainly in its price range). This is not the BB gun of "A Christmas Story" - she's a hefty bit of wood and steel built for the enthusiast who appreciates quality and precision.
I had taken the homebuilt aperture sight off the rifle to try to make some drawings of it, and had never put it back on. So it had lay locked in its case and inoperable for a long time. I don't know when the last time I'd put a pellet through it was.
I'd only meant to put the sight back on the rifle, in preparation for our trip out to the cabin; it was already getting late and I had to work the next day. But, as it seems is the case with anything in the basement, it turned into a somewhat longer affair. Sighting in a rifle is never just sighting it in. You spit some lead out of it for fun, too. It's inevitable.
My own experience with shooting sometimes makes me marvel at the near-complete association made between guns and violence. I know few things more tranquil than my own shooting sessions. Everything becomes about being still and slowing down, about generating a silence broken only by the sound of the shot itself, a loud thwack in the case of this rifle. And then it is quiet again, as I calmly break the barrel and put another pellet into the breech, consciously trying not to move too quickly and increase my heart rate. I cannot understand how some can see only violence in this zen-like activity. The world melts away as I look down the barrel over the sights, and patiently wait until my body settles and the rifle steadies and my lungs are just newly relaxed.
Of course, the groups were shaky after so long, with a lot of "flyaway" shots landing an inch or more from the ten-ring. But the groups tightened and the flyaways became less frequent after a few dozen shots. It started to come back to me, the attention to breathing and sight picture and trigger pull and hold. Spring-piston guns are particularly sensitive to how you hold them, since their recoil produces not only backward motion but also torque; you've got to hold them exactly the same way, with exactly the same pressure on every point of contact between the rifle and your body, shot after laborious shot.
And with the returning skills came the elation and the frustration, those companions with which every shooter is familiar. The disappointment that blankets you when you walk up to the target and find that the group is broader than you thought it was, and the wry satisfaction that lights on your face when it's tighter. Every group with one effort a little further from the mark than the others taunts you like a dare to go back to the line and reload. And back at the line you try. Over and over again. To stand more firmly, to grip the rifle more consistently, to breathe more precisely. And above all, you promise yourself that you won't let the next shot break until everything is perfect.
Usually, I find out that I don't have that kind of patience.
But a tight group in the paper is worth all that effort and more. It's not about the holes or the damage. It's about the intention, about exercising will at a distance, about not missing the mark. It is about achieving with precision something so deliberate. To do exactly what you mean to do. To achieve the goal with no wandering, though gravity and your respiration and your pulse and fatigue all align their wills against you.
My ego is far too fragile for me to dare make a list of all the things I meant to do. And even in those things I achieved, so often what actually materialized was something near what I meant, in the general area of. Seldom exactly. Even at my age, I'm still not that good at this yet.
Because to do as we intend to is far more difficult than we would suppose. Harder still is to do it over and over again, at will. So I keep going back to the line and reloading.
Sometimes your greatest allies are the unlikely ones, the ones you never expected to find beside you on the same side of the barricade. It's even a little humbling sometimes to turn your head and see the face of your old enemy, rifle in hand, wearing perhaps a bemused or ironic grin but no less invested in the new task at hand. You both wear scars that you likely gave each other. Your sense of moral superiority, perhaps overdue for a thrashing, gets knocked down a peg or two. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," the saying goes, though I'm not sure where it really comes from. And that's the funny thing about some enemies: they fight just as fiercely beside you as they ever fought against you.
We need this to happen to us once in a while. When our old, or merely presumed, adversaries surprise us, when we finally discover that unexpected common ground, there's a little bit of our badly-beaten but precious faith in humanity that is restored, almost always at the expense of our own sense of self-righteousness. None of us has a monopoly on the moral high ground; our harshest critics and most vocal opponents probably share our stance on something and would gladly storm the gates alongside us, given the right particular battle.
It forces us to think better of others. And when we do, something else unexpected happens: we realize that it brings us far more happiness to think well of someone else than it does to think well of ourselves. That self-righteousness carries with it both an emptiness and a subtle bitterness that we don't even realize is there.
Nick Cave might have been wrong. Perhaps people just ain't so bad. Sometimes.
She's up and eating now, after a week of recovering from the turmoil of getting out of her old skin. She looked so thin last night, so frail, when I dropped the cricket into the tank and sat down to watch, to make sure she was strong enough to hunt. But she didn't falter. She sat motionless as a stone until the prey was within striking distance. Then finally, swift and sure and with ferocious grace, she struck.
The insect was lucky the first two times, having found the remains of Bella's shed skin, still in the burrow, and darting beneath it. But Bella knew the cricket was there, and just waited like a sentry. The cricket always moves eventually, and the motion reverberates through the soil to the listening spider. And she seldom misses. Between her astonishing speed and surprising force, the hunt is a foregone conclusion as soon as the cricket hits the tank.
Thomas Merton once mused that the hawk knew its business. And in much the same way, I sometimes envy this spider, for she knows exactly how to be exactly what she is. She has a clarity of purpose and a certainty of means. She doesn't need to seek those things as we do or agonize over their existence. She senses the tremor in the earth and knows exactly how it ought to be struck. When a new skin is ready and the world is warm and moist enough she knows how to get out of the old one. No one taught her, and she will teach no one. She knows her business.
My grasp on what I am is tenuous at best, and my knowledge of how to be it is, in my own estimation, comically lacking. But I muddle through. And watch spiders.
You'd be amazed how cooperative a three year-old can suddenly be once you consent to address him as "Dino Piranha". And if you go as far as to refer to his mother as "Mommy Dinosaur" and yourself as "Sharptooth", you can get the kid to finish nearly everything on his plate.
This has been my life for a few days now.
Sometimes you've got to wreck a thing a little before you can fix it. And sometimes that means that you've got to fix the thing a little first, just so that when you wreck it, you don't wreck it beyond repair.
And that first fixing can look so forced, so artificial, so oblivious to the actual problem, because it doesn't address the problem at all. It can't. The thing won't yet survive the damage that addressing the real problem will do.
So you tighten the bolts. You change the bearings and you clean out the filters. You sand down the rusty parts and paint the whole thing shiny again. You talk about the weather and ask about the trip. You pour your efforts into anything that can be made better without making something else worse.
Only then, when the whole shabang is sturdy enough and might stand a chance, do you take the axe to it and start cutting out the part that really went wrong in the first place. The sledgehammer and the blowtorch do their merciless work, and you fight with the last fasteners that hold that troublesome element in place, wrenching it free with all the finesse of a wolf pulling the flesh off its kill. There's no other way to get it out. And it's only because of all your other, seemingly unrelated, work that the whole thing doesn't crumble to pieces in front of you; it holds together. It bends, it flexes, it groans and grumbles and complains, it shudders and shakes under the blows of your tools, but it doesn't fall apart. It holds.
And if you've done it right, when the whole thing lies broken again, you'll find yourself looking down at something that is, without question, worth fixing. Because you, and everyone else around you, can see it as it always could have been. The damage doesn't look so bad now. 'It just needs a new whatzit, that's all,' people will say. And they're right. They're endeared to it now, and want to see it brought back from the edge. Even the adjuster wouldn't write it off now.
The surgery is over; there's a nasty-looking wound, some blood has been lost, but the heart is still beating.
Sometimes your life explodes like a grenade, all violent and dramatic and loud. Other times, like now, it kind of explodes more like a ballpoint pen.
You don't even notice it's happened, at first. You feel your finger slip but you think it's just the oil on your skin. Then you notice a tiny smudge of blue. And quickly, to your horror, you realize that half your hand is covered in the stuff, and it's gonna take ages to get it off.
Of course, it happens right at the critical part of the lecture, right after the prof says something like "Write this down and go home and memorize it, because you will need to understand this from here on in, and it's complicated".
And I just know, I'll deal with my right hand and then find ink on my elbow. I'll think I'm done, but there's some on my chin.
It's tiring. But you've got to get the stuff off.
"That very night in Max's room a forest grew and grew and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are."
Maurice Sendak
Where the Wild Things Are
Just watched the promo video for the iPad last night.
How is it that Apple does not yet own the world?
Nearing the seven-year mark, I can't help but smile for where I find myself now, against all prophecies and warnings of boredom and mediocrity and divergence. Those naysayers are for me like so many doomsday preachers, screaming from a soapbox and barely able to contain their eagerness to say I told you so. Like I'm just not even really in the particular world they are lamenting the end of.
It isn't hope or optimism that comes when I think of it. Rather it is the exhilarating quiet that falls on you when you see that things are in their place. The comfort of a confidence in things to come. The fermented fondness for the scars of storms weathered and the matured appreciation for the DVD and bag of chips of a Friday night that is blissfully routine.
Very often, the difficult decision that a parent faces is not "Do I run over there and physically stop my child, or do I try to discourage this behaviour verbally?" but rather "Do I run over there and stop my child, or do I quickly but quietly grab the camera?"
Usually, it comes down to a question of sequence. First, photograph the behaviour, because it is hilarious. Then put a swift and stern stop to it and tell the kid to never, ever do it again.
I love being a dad.
If Ikea isn't a Behavioural Study masquerading as a furniture retailer, it should be.
First, their shopping carts. Most have two fixed wheels at the back, and will only travel in more or less the direction they're pointed. Not at Ikea. All four wheels on the cart swivel, which means you can point it straight ahead of you but sidestep to the left or right, and the cart still moves with you.
For three hours in that place today, all I could think was 'This is awesome. I feel like I'm flying a Viper'. And it would almost be a shame if there wasn't somebody watching on a surveillance camera, noticing how I would take unnecessary turns and circle things off-axis for no practical reason, all the while with my toddler in the cart.
Second, store layout = rat maze, complete with hidden shortcuts for the extra-smart. Not much more to say there.
Of course, then there's the assembly of Ikea products. I wonder sometimes exactly where in the packaging they put the camera. The funny thing about Ikea directions is that they actually do tell you exactly how to put the thing together, but they don't warn you about the subtle little never-in-a-million-years-would-you-notice detail in the picture that you've overlooked, and which won't become apparent until six pages later and usually involves a lot of disassembly and bad language to correct. Combine that with the fact that fourteen of the nineteen parts look virtually identical to anyone who isn't a mechanical engineer, and Ikea's senseless and irrational bias against the use of written instruction dissuades them from labeling the parts with stickers or something that say 'A' or 'LEFT', and you have hours of entertainment for clandestine observers, and heaps of fascinating data for psychological analysis.
Seriously, Ikea. If you're not watching us, it's a tremendous waste of an incredible chance.