Review of Destiny of the Republic (James A. Garfield bio)

The time you won your town the race,
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

- A. E. Housman, "To An Athlete Dying Young"

tl;dr:

"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." - Batman, The Dark Knight

As a child, I loved reading about the presidents. In second grade, I had a book that provided a two or three page description of each president. There was also a wonderful series of books that covered each president separately, though our school library only had Jefferson, Jackson, and a couple others. I memorized the terms and order of the presidents, and knew who died in office and was assassinated. The only thing I knew about James A. Garfield was that he was assassinated by an office seeker, followed Hayes, and was followed by Arthur.

He was shot four months into his presidency, and died two months later. Can we be blamed? He appears in that interregnum between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, where we suspect the presidents were crappy and America was particularly corrupt.

I just finished Candice Millard's book, Destiny of the Republic, and I can safely say that, with the possible exception of William Seward, he might be the most amazing American that history forgot. At least, he's one of the more remarkable and brilliant American Presidents. Theodore Roosevelt might have been more flashy, and perhaps rightfully has a stronger legacy. But Garfield might be more brilliant and, well, good.

Briefly, let me go over some of the amazing things Garfield did in his abbreviated, yet full, life.

His father died when James was two, leaving his mother and siblings to eke out a living on a tiny farm in Ohio. He was the younger brother, which oddly enough meant that it fell to him to go to school. (His older brother was needed on the farm.) He dropped out, became a canal man, and nearly died when he fell overboard one night. He decided it was a sign from Providence that he was meant for more. He returned home, and, with the family's entire savings of $17, went to a local, tiny, poor school known as the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute.

He paid his tuition by being the school janitor, and, admirably, didn't give a crap about who knew he was poor. He studied so hard, and so comprehensively, that he was promoted to assistant professor the next year. He ended up teaching classes in languages, philosophy, and mathematics, and was popular enough as a teacher that he expanded his teaching load. He went on to graduate from Williams College, and returned to teach at Western Reserve. He became its president at 26. He became a state senator, but then joined the Ohio milita.

With no military training, no artillery, and commanding an inferior force, he won a decisive victory against a seasoned Confederate general, who had graduated from West Point. This victory kept Kentucky in the Union. He recognized the need to be more aggressive well before the Union leadership.

He became a Congressman, and became known as an honest broker and an unmatched orator. While a member of the US Congress, he penned an original mathematical proof.

There's a lot more. I recommend a read. Although I found myself occasionally wishing for something a bit less, well, emotionally manipulative (or maybe just stylistically like Edmund Morris or Doris Kearns Goodwin), Millard's book left me absolutely fuming at the medical malpractice of Dr. Bliss. (Spoiler: Garfield dies!)

*Postscript: I had started, and never finished, this review. Finishing it now in response to my recent post on McKinley.

The Joy of Text?

I'm working with a couple students on SAT Critical Reading. Some are native English speakers. Some aren't. They all generally do better in science and math, though some are quite accomplished in the humanities.

But all of them -- all of them -- struggle with critical reading passages from the 19th century.

It's not just the diction -- though that, I'm sure contributes. The meanings of certain words have evolved a bit, and at least, have taken on different primary meanings in conversational English. And yet, it's a minor reason -- the SAT, by its nature, includes words that students may or may not know, and an entire class of reading passages questions requires students to determine the meaning of a phrase or word in context.

It's not just subject matter. Yes the passages are narrative and often divorced from the social, cultural, and racial reality of my students. But so are, say, the philosophical passages, or passages focused on a particular minority group. Some of the students struggle on these as well, though to a lesser extent.

I've decided that the primary challenge is due to the fact that these passages are heavy on dialogue.

I've reviwed nearly a score of official SAT tests of the current variety. And it appears that more modern narrative reading passages are characterized by omniscient narrators, detailed prose descriptions, and a boatload of adjectives.

The older passages, on the other hand, consist almost entirely of dialogue.

That got me thinking: why should that make it harder for students? Isn't this generation infamous for communicating via text messages? And although behavioral psychology suggests this leads to a loss of over 90% of the information provided by nonverbal (or at least non-linguistic) cues from direct, personal communication, haven't they adapted by becoming closer readers of dialogue?

But it's not an issue specific to millennials. I have trouble with these passages. Older SAT tutors I know -- people who don't text at all -- have similar issues.

Maybe then it has to do with a phenomenon that spans a couple generations.

Round up the usual suspects!

1. Television

Television is a favorite whipping boy. But it might be at least slightly responsible. Why? Well, it provides the viewer with abundant visual cues, which a block of text doesn't supply. So although a screenplay may need explicit directions for the actor, the gap between the naked dialogue and the viewer's brain is filled with a raft of nonverbal cues supplied by the directed actor.

We don't read dialogue. We watch it.

2. The decline of plays in classroom instruction

I read a lot of Shakespeare in the classroom. Although one of my more perceptive English teachers told us (correctly) that Shakespeare wasn't meant to be read silently, we often did. And yes, the dialogue was often witty, and monologues and chorus provide at least some narration and background. But it's hard, unless one already knows the general plot, to understand what a given piece of dialogue means.

In order to interpret the dialogue, you need to understand the plot. But in order to understand the plot, you have to know how to interpret the dialogue. It can be done, in an iterative process. But who has time for multiple re-readings, especially on a standardized test?

3. The decline of poetry.

We don't read poetry. There are lots of reasons. I loved poetry, but realized it was making me overly pretentious. Some hate its indirectness and subtlety (the very things that others, including myself, love it for).

But what it does do -- at least when done well -- is force us to appreciate the subtleties of language. It demands, upfront, vocabulary, and historical sensitivity to connotation. Narrative prose does this too, though the lower restrictions on structure often lead even great authors to be a bit lazy and less economical with words. Clarity, not brevity, is often the emphasis, which lowers the barriers to comprehension.

In other words, the very inaccessibility of poetry makes it better training for tests that seek to differentiate students based on reading comprehension ability.

I don't know if any of these are true. It's possible that culutral context matters way more --  I find it boring to read about the upper-middle class Victorian lives of Jane Austen's characters. But it's something that I'm mulling over, especially as it is currently a roadblock for some of my students -- a block I have to figure out how to move quickly.

The Eulogy That Will Never Be

There won't be a service for my father, so this is perhaps the closest thing to a eulogy that he will receive. It's rough, but so are the emotions. I think I can't bring myself to edit it, even though it probably needs it. Here then, it will rest, as thoughts formed, but unrefined, over the last decades.

I started, but never completed, a eulogy for him in 2009. He was bedridden and near death. But then, as he did so many times, he bounced back. Cats only have nine lives. I can recall perhaps a dozen instances where he sat at the edge of death, or was at least hospitalized for a serious condition, and he returned. Perhaps part of me felt that this time was no different. But I had been bracing for his death, and I find myself more or less ready for it.

In some ways, I lost my father a long, long time ago. He suffered from bipolar I disorder and schizophrenia for most of his adult life, though it became completely unmanageable shortly after my birth.

I am lucky, in many ways. A few years ago I realized how hard it must be for his sister and my mother. When they saw him, they were constantly reminded of the man he used to be. Free from such memories, perhaps he was free from my expectations.

Or at least somewhat free. Here's the thing with an almost-absent father. It allows children to project an ideal into the void of absence. I saw him so rarely that I was persistently, if subconsciously, managing that absence. In the absence of real presence, real perspective, I formulated an ideology that was too rigid -- whether as a fundamentalist Christian or a left-wing liberal or an ambitious student. And upon that edifice that substituted for substance, I broke, time and again.

When Roy, my stepfather, came into our lives, I think I readily gave him the title of father, though I didn't say so until their wedding, 15 years later. But how could anyone live up to decades of longing and wishing, at once vague and insistent? Disappointment was inevitable, and our present relationship, while cordial, perhaps suffered from the gulf between what I wanted and what he was capable of providing. He is a good man, a victim of the expectations of a child not fully grown up.

My father was possessed with real charm and humor. In some ways, it seemed that he "got" me more than my mother ever did. She is a wonderful woman who has given me everything, and yet I feel that the gap between her world and mine is nearly unbridgeable. For his flaws, he was more pragmatic, and yet more emotionally self-aware. He had the self-confidence to make jokes, bawdy ones.

So it was natural that I would relate to him a lot more than my mother. As part of that, I harbored a long, deep-seated fear of being bipolar. It didn't help that I was actively discouraged from expressing strong emotions, either positive or negative, in the presence of my mother and grandmother. God bless them, but they knew crap about psychology, and they thought that things like stress, or ambition, or improvised poetry, or seriousness, were all signs of impending and irreversible mental collapse. I exaggerate a bit, but my young mind did magnify the fears. By 7th grade I was aware of genetic predispositions, and was a little scared whenever I had trouble sleeping before a big Academic Decathlon competition, or stayed up to write an overlong English essay.

For the record, I've been cleared on that front. Bipolar disorder generally manifests itself in the teens, and whatever exuberance I may have exhibited was pretty natural. But the strains put on myself did show, and I became depressed. I dropped out of grad school. I developed addictions and antisocial habits. I ran away from home for two months. In the end, the diagnosis isn't bipolar disorder. It's depression coupled with bad coping habits. There is something laughable in how a fear of being mentally ill played a primary role in making me so.

But I am talking more about myself, and not about him. Eulogies are often more accurate reflections of the speaker than the one spoken of.

There were tremendously good things about him, too. Having lost everything, he relished simple things. We would go and get terrible strawberry shakes (before I learned that I was lactose intolerant), or Mountain Dew at Taco Bell. We'd walk around the not-too-great part of Norwalk, and he would say hi to his friends. Wherever he was, he needed to be, and generally was, a big man, known, "well-liked", as Willy Loman would put it. I did pick up insecurity in how he would freely dispense gifts (often going into a bit of debt to do so), but I'd say he was far more confident in social interactions than I ever was.

And his humor! He loved cracking jokes. They were often crude, (I'm packing a gun, and it's got a single chamber.) and occasionally racist (A Frenchman, an Englishman, a Texan, and a Mexican are on a plane. The plane is going to crash if the load isn't ligtened, and so the pilot calls for volunteers to sacrifice to save the others. The Frenchman shouts "Vive la France!" and jumps off the plane. The Englishman shouts "For Queen and Country!" and jumps. The Texan shouts "Remember the Alamo!" and throws the Mexican out of the plane.) But he was quick both to make others laugh and laugh at my own jokes. My students probably wonder where I get my weird sense of humor -- it comes, in part, due to positive reinforcement from my father laughing at my terrible jokes for many, many years.

Most of all, I know that he tried so hard to live up to what he imagined where the standards I set for him. He quit smoking so many times, and would tell me, with pride, how long he had stopped smoking for, and how much money he had saved. Inevitably, he'd start again -- there just wasn't much to do in the facilities in which he lived. And when it would come up, he'd look a little abashed, as if I were the father, and he were the misbehaving child. It was sad, but endearing, and I forgave him for his lapses.

His drug lapses were harder to forgive. He had been, for most of his life, a creature of chemicals, in one form or another. When I was about 10, he gave me a two-page, double-sided, double-column list of all the illegal drugs he had taken in his life. Granted, a lot of these were nicknames for the same sorts of drugs (barbituates, for instance), but it was still pretty impressive. Apparently, one of the problems with mania is that it feels good. He would enjoy feeling manic, and sometimes resort to illegal drugs. Apparently he bought meth a couple times, and was hospitalized for extreme blood pressure (220/180, I think). His strong heart saved him, then and many other times. He did always encourage me to stay away from drugs, a message which seems to have stuck.

His manic episodes were really hard to deal with. My mother would drop me off for visitation -- he didn't have formal visitation rights, but he had the expectation of seeing me once every two weeks. It was usually for a couple hours on a Saturday. Most of the time, he was fine. But sometimes, he was unbalanced, or full-blown manic. He'd rage about losing the house, or imagine getting back together with Mom and having us all live together. He'd make elaborate claims about his work as a senior scientist at Hughes, and his crypto-clearance security. Sometimes he'd make physically intimidating gestures, claiming to know martial arts. (For the record, as far as I know, he never, ever hit me or my mother -- a low standard of decency, to be sure, but I want to be absolutely clear on that point.) Twice -- it was only twice, but I remember each time -- he said he was disappointed in me and thought I was being raised badly.

He'd always ask forgiveness later. And it always came.

I don't know how I was supposed to react. I think I was told that it wasn't his fault, which is hard for a child. Children see things in terms of blame, and without some really subtle explanations, it's easy for a child to think it was his own fault. I don't think I blamed myself for his outbursts, but it felt odd not being able to criticize or judge him on his bad behavior. I don't know where that anger, or confusion, went -- but I know it didn't go away completely.

He was never without a girlfriend. He was charming, and even when obese, reasonably handsome. Some of his girlfriends were sweet and kind. Some seemed almost childlike or developmentally disabled. All suffered from mental illnesses. But they all loved him, and in time, I got used to Dad's girlfriends. Towards the end, we'd even have some decent man-to-man conversations about his relationships.

"Dad, she seems a bit obsessed with money."

"Yeah, she grew up poor."

"She also seems to have a thin skin. I think she gets easily offended by your jokes."

*smiles*

"Uh, are you sure she's the right match for you?"

*thinks* "We like to cuddle, and I can always eventually make her laugh."

Toward the end, his medication balance was decent enough for him to actually feel what normal humans feel, in normal amounts. Sometimes, he wasn't angry or depressed because of bipolar disorder, or becaue of schizophrenia. Sometimes, someone just pissed him off, or he was having an off day. I was actually happy toward the end when I could see that, and a bit disappointed that others in his life would try to medicalize every change in mood. For instance, he was a bit depressed a couple months ago when the managers at his retirement home were fired, because he liked them and cared about them.

In thinking about my father's life, I often focus on the hurt. It hurt having him in my life. It hurt not having him in my life. Sometimes I think it would've been easier if he had been completely out of the picture, or if he was a complete asshole, or if my mother hated him. But he was there, and wasn't an asshole, and my mom, sadly, never stopped loving him, even though they were divorced, and both had moved on. Two years ago I asked if they would've gotten divorced if I hadn't been around. I thought, maybe, she would've toughed it out on her own, but divorced to protect me. I don't remember her answer, but that I asked speaks to some lingering guilt that a child has when parents divorce, perhaps especially when they remain on reasonably good terms.

I've realized that, by focusing on the pain, and what was missing, I've become a worse person. Looking back especially on the last few years, I've lived as though I thought the world owed me something, that he owed me something. And, passively, or in fits of active self-destruction, I was waiting for payment.

Even with less experience, I think I was more wise as a child. I didn't have this attitude. I found gratitude, through my cousins, through the many wonderful role models I have, male and female. I found enjoyment in school. I made my world simpler, and more easy to handle -- yes, in response to chaos and complication and fear, but it was a correct instinct.

So I now know, that memory is a choice. I can dwell on the pain or the missed possibilities, and continue to live like I'm owed something. Or I can choose to remember the good parts, choose to highlight the good things that came from that relationship.

It's not historically accurate. It's not honest. But it's a better way to live. I don't advocate it for everyone -- I can't expect or ask someone, who, say, had an abusive parent to replace those memories with happy ones. But perhaps for those of us carrying around resentments for less serious sins, forgetting and selective memory might be part of the answer. The truth, such as it exists, magnified and distorted by our memories and motivations, is often too expensive to keep.

So I'm going to try, hard, to remember how I learned empathy and forginveness, how I learned the joy in the small and inexpensive. I'm going to remember how Dad showed me how to speak with women, how to make friends, and how to enjoy life. For he did enjoy life, in a way that I never did. Perhaps, seeing his past and future more clearly than I gave him credit, he chose to embrace the people, and places, and activities, available to him in the here and now.

Miles Yamada was a man who loved those around him, imperfectly, but intensely. He exhibited courage in facing his inner demons, and compassion in embracing his friends and family. He played an important role professionally as a successful engineer at Hughes Aircraft during the height of the Cold War, working on a number of civilian and military contracts that earned him the praise of his superiors. Disabled by bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, he still strove to exhibit a level of kindness, compassion, and humor that is worthy of emulation. He taught me that it's important to be kind to those who are different, and that a little charm and grace goes a long way in this world. I am grateful for the time spent with him, playing cards, drinking soda, and, most of all, talking. He will be missed.

Dinner with Neil

I once had dinner with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Not alone, of course. I'm not that well-connected or important. But I was one of a few astronomy and physics grad students who were lucky enough to be treated to a delicious dinner (Cornish game hen, if I recall) at the Cornell Hotel School. It was a relatively small setting, and, as I was still reasonably brash, I couldn't resist busting his balls a bit about Pluto. (Tyson, as director of the Hayden Planetarium, had recently and conspicuously demoted Pluto in the Hayden's planetary exhibit.) He responded with good humor, and, I believe, some semi-serious discussion about the reasons for it. (I might discuss this in a separate post, if there's interest, including some speculation as to the timing of the IAU decision -- after New Horizons had been launched.)

During his public talk, after the reception, he did make a great joke about Pluto -- "The real reason it got demoted? It was too small for New York! Ha ha!" He has an infectious laugh.

If memory serves, that same talk, he ventured into what then, and probably now, is controversial territory -- that scientific advances stop when an investigator self-limits, often by invoking God.

But what I remember most of all is running into Tyson and Jim Bell (our grad department chair and one of the lead researchers on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission) at the hotel bar afterwards. They were watching a baseball game.

It was interesting seeing Neil deGrasse Tyson "off". He is a presence, and a performer, and an educator. But like many, he has a stage personality and a normal personality. It wasn't a dramatic difference, but he was less jovial, and probably tired after a long day. I don't know if I was with another student, but we joined them and talked for a bit. He discussed some serious things -- about academia, about his wife and her experiences in it, careers in astronomy, etc. I think I must've confessed my unhappiness at some point.

Anyway, at some point, I think we, the grad students, realized we were intruding on their private time. They weren't, at the moment, lofty role models. They were just a couple guys drinking beer and watching a ball game.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is hated by some astronomers. Leading up to his arrival, a couple emails went around by some lower-ranking staff scientists and researchers (not professors), complaining that he wasn't a real astronomer and that he had done a crappy PhD thesis. At that point, I knew enough about the people on the email list to suspect something less than clear-eyed objective analysis in their judgment.

I encountered similar sentiments in a dinner at UCLA with a couple astronomy professors. I had become a lay person by then, but through a sequences of events, I ended up joining them. There was discussion that he hadn't, in fact, done a stellar job on his thesis, which I think had to do with galaxies -- possibly radio or UV observations. I forgot whether or not I weighed in, but given that I was a guest, and no longer an astronomer, I probably was less brash and more passive this time around.

I haven't seen Cosmos yet. I hope to get around to it. But, unlike many people I know, I never saw it growing up. I hadn't read a single Carl Sagan book before I attended Cornell, and didn't even know he had been a professor at Cornell until I showed up as a grad student. So I don't have a lot of emotional attachment to it.

Interestingly, one did get the impression that Carl Sagan himself was not particularly popular in Cornell's Astronomy department. There was a plaque and a photo. But he wasn't referred to often. No doubt some of the professors had worked in the shadow of his popular image, and that it probably was good for the department to not be anchored to the past. Still, it seemed odd, given the amount of effort made to do outreach, how little it was discussed. At this point, his absence was not deafening, but it was a discernable murmur.

(I once talked with an impressive Cornell grad alum who was active in both science policy and astro research, and one of Sagan's students. He said he had come back only once to the department, for Carl's funeral. I think his words were, "there's nothing left for me here." Perhaps an over-harsh indictment, especially given some of the amazing humans there. But that gives you a sense of the degree of alienation some of Sagan's students felt toward the rest of the department.)

There are people who decide and rank scientific research. It's generally done by peers, and is seen to be a decent system for sorting great ideas from good, and good ideas from terrible ones. It doesn't always work, and the pressures inherent may lead to a host of sins, cardinal and venal. But it's good enough, I suppose, for it to keep going. The process by which Pluto was downgraded was generally accepted within the astronomical community, even if it did arouse controversy within and outside of astronomy.

Yet it always irked me that some scientists -- generally not the best, mind you -- felt that this meant there was a clear measure of defining science in general, value in general, and value of people to science. I couldn't shake the notion that some of these critics of Tyson couldn't handle the idea that the value system they possessed, one ingrained into them since the beginning of their careers, one in which they were completely invested, one which, to varying degrees had rewarded them, might not be universally true. Maybe it takes a level of buy-in in order to make it far enough. But it seemed... myopic, and self-defeating.

How did Tyson's success take away from theirs? How was the popularization of astronomy damaging their work? It didn't make sense, but people do tend to react badly when you question their value system, even obliquely.

I left the faith a while ago, and so I don't have anything to say specifically on astronomy. What I do know is that, looking back, I remember the tired, quiet men at that hotel bar table.

And I realize now that I'm jealous of them -- not because they are successful, respected and reknown, each in his own way. I'm jealous because they can sit down and enjoy a ball game with a friend, and put aside all the other things associated with their jobs and lives. They valued their time, and their friends.

They valued baseball.

Once, one summer, Jim Bell gave me a ride to our Astro baseball team practice. (The team name: The Big Bangers.) I was incredibly depressed at that time, and all I could think of was how grateful I would've been for a dad like Jim to take me to baseball practice. But how could someone say that? So this someone never did, until this moment, though I think he noticed a few tears.

I failed to become a scientist, not because I didn't study enough, or try hard enough. I failed because at some point I separated science from being a person, and failed to build those relationships with other human beings that make a person whole. And part of that is putting aside everything else for time with people.

I'm going to see Cosmos. But I'm going to see it because it gives me a chance to spend time with my mom, and maybe, make up a bit of that lost time.

A Valentine's Day Story

Warning: this is actually very sad. I use **** instead of the man's name because I don't want to compromise his privacy any more than I'm already doing by writing this post.


I didn't have a valentine this year. I don't think there's been a single year where I really was in love or in a relationship. There are perhaps reasons for this, but needless to say I don't commit well.

Some people, some people really do commit.

I've lived in Hacienda Heights since about 2010. I have a large, south-facing window that looks out to the street. Often, I'm home during the mornings and early afternoons; most of my tutoring happens later.

I've gotten used to seeing an ambulance in our small cul-de-sac. For as long as we've been here, three times a week, an ambulance stopped by at the house across from us. Always, two young EMTs or paramedics would casually do their paperwork, open the rear doors, and take out a stretcher. They would go into the house, and retrieve a prone, quiet woman in her sixties. The husband, a quiet, completely healthy man in his sixties, would follow in one of the two cars that always sat in the driveway. He would leave in the Lexus on the right, the white one. The one on the left, the black one; that was never used.

I learned, after a while, that he was a real estate agent. He and his wife were Japanese, as in actually from Japan, which immediately made them important in my mother's eyes. His wife had suffered a stroke many years ago. I didn't know if she could speak or not. I never went into the house. But I do know that because of the medical bills, they lost their house. They rented the one across from us.

I also learned that the other car was his wife's. He never sold it. He never used it. I don't know why. I can imagine reasons for it, but I never really spoke to him. There are some Japanese stereotypes that are true, and one of them is that you tend not to discuss personal matters with, well, anyone.

Sometimes, on weekends, I'd see a Jaguar in front -- the kind of car driven by an older, wealthy person. From my own mindset, I thought that maybe my neighbor did have someone else, that after so many years, he did have an outside relationship. Again, however, I don't know, and based on my best guess, that person was a relative of either him or his wife.

I never even knew her name. She was just always ****'s wife, at least to me.

**** always seemed cheerful and reserved. The only time my mother caught him displaying anything other than polite Japanese civility was when she caught him shouting at our cat, who was, no doubt, sneaking into his backyard to take a dump.

The ambulance stopped coming two weeks ago. ****'s wife had been moved to a skilled nursing facility, which was not a good sign. But I forgot, and didn't notice the absence of an ambulance on our street.

A few minutes ago, the doorbell rang. It's an unusual event, and I was a little concerned by who would be ringing the door on a Saturday evening. (We're not as close to our neighbors as we probably should be.) I didn't recognize **** at the door; it was dark.

He said, "Is your mother or father here?"

Still not recognizing him, I said "No", with probably some unguarded apprehension. "What can I do for you?"

He said, "Hi, I'm ****." I relaxed and went to open the security door. "No, no, it's okay." I paused.

"I just wanted to let them know that I lost my wife. Nine years."

I expressed my condolences, and opened the door. But what could I do? I couldn't give him a hug; that would be inappropriate. I awkwardly shook his hand, and he bowed. I thought about offering to attend the funeral, but was that too forward? Was it too harsh, to say the word that had the cut of finality and formality?

"I'm so sorry, ****. You have my condolences."

"Thank you. Nine years... she was like that. Would you tell them? They know."

I told him I would.

"Oh! She's going to get out!" he said, pointing to my dog, smiling.

"She'll come back," I said.

He smiled. And then he left. Still polite. Still collected.

He had been with his wife his entire adult life. They had no children. For all I know, they have no close family in the area. But "nine years", and "tell them... they know" -- they rang in my ear.

I don't even know what it would be to love someone like that. Maybe it isn't even love... maybe it's duty. But it's something so foreign to the selfish world I inhabit.

"In sickness and in health" appears in the standard wedding vows. They are perhaps the cruelest portion of the vows, for embedded within it is real terror. My neighbor and his wife lived that, for nine years. But they had good years before that. And maybe those nine years were good, in their own way, in a way that warrants our respect, not our pity.

If I think of a Dylan Thomas poem, I usually think of "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." I've been thinking about it more lately, because my father is dying. But the Thomas poem appropriate here is "And Death Shall Have No Dominion", especially the first verse:

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon; 
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot; 
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; 
Though lovers be lost love shall not; 
And death shall have no dominion.

Happy Valentine's Day, **** and his late wife. Though lovers be lost, love shall not.

Failures in Secular Humanist Duty

There are times I can't help but wonder if I have failed in my Christian secular humanist duty.

I'm at Panera. There was a hunched, old white man sitting in a booth. He was bent; even walking, he bends over at almost a 90 degree angle. He reminded me of Edourad Manet's The Ragpicker. Like the subject of that painting, he was hunched over enough to obscure the face. Anonymous, old, solitary. He had a combover, oily but not filthy.

Initially, I couldn't tell if he was muttering, or praying, or having a medical episode. His mouth was moving, but I know that the occasional motion of the lips and mouth is a property of older people, especially those with dentures. He looked disheveled, but not quite homeless.

Perhaps I would've thought nothing of it, except for the possible medical angle. But I noticed he has a small suitcase with him. He also had a small backpack. If he wasn't homeless, he was some distance from home, in a restaurant, alone.

I would like to say that I approached him immediately. But I didn't. I hesitated. And then I distracted myself by working on a lesson summary.

Next to us were two middle-aged, middle-class women discussing a Christian book. They were discussing, if I recall, a story about hiring 100,000 Israelites to fight a battle. A subsequent search reveals that it's 2 Chronicles 25. And I couldn't help thinking "Pharisees!" in my head. "Here is a child of the God you believe, and you are too trapped in your false faith of personal salvation for you to live the life of service that is true faith!"

But was I any better? Why should I hold Christians to a higher standard than myself?

Eventually, I did approach him. I apologized for disturbing him.

"I'm sorry to disturb you sir. I don't know if you were praying or napping... but... is everythign alright?"

"We..."

"We... we can exchange..."

I thought he was going to say stories.

"We can switch seats in a second. I know you want to plug in your computer."

My first reaction, sadly, was to explain that there were no power outlets there. Fortunately, I caught myself and said,

"No no. I'm fine. I just... I just wanted to see if you were okay."

He replied, "I'm fine."

"Sorry for disturbing you."

I went back to my computer, a bit ashamed and embarassed. Maybe he thought I judged him just because he was old and bent. I confess that I was shocked that his words were clear and articulate. No slur, no quavering of the voice, other than initially. Maybe I had injured his pride.

He sat there for another ten minutes, hands clasped in a sort of prayer or murmur, occasionally moving his mouth. Then he bussed his plates, then left. I bid him farewell, and he responded with a short goodbye.

I watched him go. I thought about getting up and opening the door for him. But what if that was more patronization? He managed fine.

After I saw him disappear, slowly, around a corner, I looked back at his seat. There was a dark stain on the part of the cloth backing where he had been sitting. It wasn't just  Maybe he had been there a while. Maybe he had been sweating a great deal. Maybe his clothes were filthy. I thought about touching it to determine which it would be. But then I realized how ridiculous, and possibly weird, that might be.

But I did take a picture. It wasn't just an impression on the seat.

Sometimes, we try to do the right thing. But it almost never turns out the way we think it should. Maybe if I had phrased it as a request for company, instead of an inquiry into his status. I think Mr. Rogers would've done that; he had a way of making people feel that he needed something from them. Pope Francis appears to do that as well.

And now, I realize something.

Acts of kindness are often characterized as acts from a superior to an inferior. 

Maybe we couch it in different, kinder words, but it often presumes a difference in power, ability, or resources. Even as we celebrate them, we implicitly define things like generosity and grace in a way that diminishes the recipient. That's not the intention, of course, but it's deeply entwined in our appreciation of kind acts.

Here was someone who maybe resisted that, who didn't want pity or help, and didn't need it. Even if he did, maybe the way I communicated my offer was a bit too paternalistic, and while kind and open, with a touch of sanctimony.

It's like when I was feeding the homeless. I thought I would go out and help them. But as it turns out, I didn't save them. I couldn't. I had a lot of conversations. I saw some drunken ugliness. I heard these young kids talk politics, and silently judged the guys who had boom boxes but no food. I overheard them talking about their social security checks, and spending it on either necessities or booze. I heard about how things got rougher after the shooting of a police officer at the nearby courthouse, how the police, who had been more relaxed, were now drawing their guns on the homeless.

Through it all, I don't know if I made a damn of difference in their lives. The narrative is supposed to go that they made a difference in mine. But to be honest, the only thing I learned is that it's damn hard to make a difference in anyone's life. I'm more selfish than I was before I volunteered, but that could be to age, or other things in the last ten years.

Whatever good it did me, the experience has competed with, and lost to, a host of other influences that shaped my present character.

So today, I find that I am more inarticulate than I had realized.

And judgmental. I judged those poor women sitting a couple feet away. Maybe they had already asked. Maybe they just have different personal that I, a single, young male, don't appreciate. They were simply working together on their own spiritual betterment; perhaps they didn't notice him. They weren't Pharisees. I was the Pharisee.

Who have I helped lately? At least one woman was helping the other develop as a Christian. Who had I helped lately, except for pay, or because I was asked to?

I'm still judging. The couple sitting there after he left didn't bus their plates. And I have to stop myself into weaving it into some romantic narrative about the dignity of age and/or poverty and the lack of respect of the decently off Boomers. It's not data, and it's not the point. Leave it, Ryan.

And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, but not with a perfect heart. -2 Chron 25:2

I'm glad I spoke with him, however briefly. I gained no great insight into him. I didn't help him. And I learned that I'm a pretty flawed person.

And I did end up thinking a bit more about acts of kindness than I had expected. And maybe, next time, I'll both communicate it better, and be more mindful about what I offer, and what I ask. Even when I offer help, tangible or not, I am implicitly asking for a person's trust, a person's time, a person's courtesy.

That's a lot.

The Cornell Folder

I have a Cornell leather folder. It’s one of those interview folders sold in a student store. It was probably never meant to see such heavy use – I use it to hold my notes for tutoring. It’s a bit torn and ragged and beat up, and I suppose that’s appropriately symbolic. My time there was quite painful.

I don’t know why I keep it. Or I do, and I am afraid of the reason. There’s something possibly pathetic about clinging to this vestige of respectability, to a past that never was as impressive as is pretended. But it’s something that I excuse by saying that it impresses parents.

A few days ago, I was at a Starbucks. I had a few minutes before a tutoring session nearby, and planned on logging on to Facebook for a few minutes. I remember thinking in the parking lot- should I bring the folder? For whatever reason, it was a question, and for whatever reason, I answered in the affirmative.

I sat down, and powered up my computer. A man nearby noticed my folder, and asked me about it.

“Cornell? Did you go there?”

I answered that yes, I had gone there as a graduate student. Thinking the conversation was over, I went back to my computer.

“What did you study?”

Reflexively, I told him “astrophysics”. And I’ve done this enough to know that when I say “astrophysics”, I intend it as a conversation-stopper. I say “astronomy” or “space science” when I wish, consciously or unconsciously, for the conversation to continue.

“What’s that?”

I explained to him that it involved studying the stars, using physics. He sounded impressed, and claimed that that was far beyond him, though he did mention that he was a civil engineer.

He asked me what I did now. It’s a sore topic; I know I’ve fallen far down the social and economic hierarchy. But I did the best I could to muster my dignity and reply that I tutor students full-time.

He returns to the topic of Cornell, and elite schools. He mentions his cousins, graduates of Stanford and Princeton, respectively. I act appropriately impressed, and perk up a bit when he mentions his high school age nephew. Maybe there’s a tutoring job here.

We talk a bit more, my interest now focused more by greed and humanity. But it wasn’t completely cynical salesmanship; I had told myself at some point earlier in the day that I needed to engage more with people, and here was an opportunity. I remember feeling like a sociopath as I was thinking these things.

We spoke more. I found out he was 48, and hadn’t worked for a couple years because of cancer. He was currently undergoing chemotherapy.

At some point, I ask him if he’s changed anything about how he lived life because of cancer. I didn’t mean the practical and routine, or lifestyle changes due to physical limitations. I didn’t mean that, and he didn’t hear that.

“My brother has always said that I had a temper. I was angry a lot. Now, I try to be more calm.”

I would’ve never guessed that this was an angry guy, though he had plenty to be angry about. He had cancer. He lost his job. He didn’t have any kids to help him. He was sitting in a coffeeshop, on a Wednesday afternoon, while others were living, working, picking up their children, and not dying of cancer.

I told him that he seemed like he had a good heart, and that he was a better person now. I don’t know if it came off as trite, or hackneyed. But it seemed to fit, and the compliment, as is customary I suppose, evoked a response that combined polite dismissal with understated hope that it was true.

I had to excuse myself. I expected that tutoring and the rest of the day would fall into place, as it should if this were an allegory. But it was a chaotic mess of difficult students and long hours on the road between appointments. Life may give you these moments, but it rarely strings them together for you. You have to fight to extract perspective.

I don’t think he would’ve spoken with me had I not had that folder. I would’ve been just another guy in business casual on his laptop.

There’s some irony here; brand-name institutions like Cornell build their reputation on exclusivity, not inclusiveness. But that itself provides us something to talk about. It gave this man an opening to talk with a stranger. For a brief moment, both of us felt less alone.