More, or less, travel funnies…(4)

More, or less, travel funnies…(4)
Torrey Orton
June 26, 2011


Fire, fire…

Walking around Bourg en Bresse in eastern France early the first morning of our five days there, having found a copy of the International Herald Tribune after a bit of a search, along the way noticing some fire trucks in fighting positions up a street which I avoided…and then wandering around the neighbouring streets until I came out a street away, out of their sight and into a strange smell – a wood fire at 7:30am before the wood-fired pizza joints opened…and suddenly realising it was 200+ year old wood burning…give or take a few years.

 

Spring

 

One repeatedly shared moment across a month's travel was spring constantly sprung on us at every turn, with backwards steps spread among the flow towards summer. Looming out of the memories are two visions: one of greens of infinite shadings but not yet the full ones of high summer, and, two, dogwoods in bloom showing off in the edges and depths of woods as flights of light in the surrounding green darknesses. From this picture you can get a sense of their suspension, unsupported by visible limbs. That's how they look where I grew up. Not the massed and florid specimens you will find if you Google 'dogwoods in flower'.In nature they illuminate their surrounds. This is how they appear in New England wilds, sprinkled across a wood, not massed.

 

The illumination strikes but the greenness dominates as the context for all things natural. And this is the story of the US ascension over Europe (the little bits we saw) in greenification. The northeast is increasingly covered with forest, growing in the relegated farmlands fallowed by refrigerated transport and short crowing seasons typical of continental climates. On the roads we saw chipmunks, squirrels, deer, turkeys, foxes, Canada geese just wandering around having a munch of this and that. But for the chipmunks and squirrels, these are animals I never saw in my 1950's youth in a small country town with lots of its own woods. Judging by the complaints of locals, and relatives, the deer and geese are taking over everyone's flower and vegie patches, as well as littering the freeway bounds like roos do some country roads in Oz – markers of the domain of the car.

 

In Europe the Alpine wild strawberries are still to be found – unfortunately we missed the ripening season by a week or two. The feeling for me in France – the Bourg-en-Bresse region above, as well as the Chamonix of Mont Blanc – was controlled exploitation with occasional spurts of wildness (4900 metres comes to mind). By contrast, the northeast of the US was more real wildness than I grew up with…a sense of nature taking the land back, swamping cultivation in goose droppings (the close relatives of those who brought down the AA flight into the Hudson two years ago).

 

My central plains and westcoast associates will remind me that northeast is not USA, and they might be pleased if it did fade back into its prepilgrim-invasion aboriginality. Cultural resentment notwithstanding, as they fear that fundamental American truth came from the east, a new truth may be on its way, revealed to them in the forced reintroduction of predator species in the face of bovine resistances. After all, the great American west was once the east, settled with a gun, etc., hiding its terrible past in the applied gentility of its age. But I regress.

 

Sprang

 

Fast forward to arriving at 11pm from Geneva with 30 minutes to spare between flights in Helsinki to be told the departure for HK was postponed uncertainly and indefinitely with next news at 1:15am.

 

As we waited for the next news cycle at 2:15am, already two hours plus beyond scheduled departure time, attempting a recuperative snooze on unoccupied bench seats, every three minutes a two-beep alarm went off – loud enough to hear and soft enough to be unworthy of complaint, and anyway not stoppable because coming seemingly from nowhere. Only an hour and half later of interrupted snoozes, more promises of eventual take off and beeps did I discover the source 25 meters away from us - a little electrified,two seat (2 year old size seats) car flashing lights in beat with the beeps and followed by a saccharine solicitation – "would you like to take a ride?"

 

I could have just pulled the plug on it but it was too late. The first call for boarding (now 4:15am) was echoing thru the waiting hall.

 

As we were taxiing for take-off the flaps, or something similar growled, with undiscernible purpose signalling the potential disaster our wait should have forestalled, sounding and feeling like a trap door opening and closing with a clank that made us wonder if the repairs had been made to the wrong parts of the plane. Lift-off was ponderous and climb slow…and here I am!

 

Sprung

 

9 days later I bumped into a dead ringer for the offending vehicle in the walkway to our local supermarket – not having noticed it sitting there for years probably until now – with a Wiggles logo on it and a similar supplication to jump in for a ride. At least I wasn't trying to sleep.

 

This is the last of these words.

“The worst class ever…”

"The worst class ever…"

Torrey Orton

May 31, 2011 Memorial Day

 

Taft School Class of 1961 50^th Reunion – 12-14 May, 2011

A Straight's View

 

We were the worst class ever we were told by the Headmaster at our graduation in 1961, or so I repeatedly heard from my classmates. I don't remember that moment 50 years ago. Nor did I remember a host of other events that came up in passing comments or explicit explorations by my classmates – even if I was centrally involved. Apparently, as JM regaled the diners on our first night, I was "killed" by a night time assault by HH in a 1959 precursor to Nightmare on Elm Street. Couldn't find the slightest trace of my death, then or now. So, maybe I should leave this summary effort to others with better neuronal qualifications.

 

Taft and me now

 

But, I can't. I have to write this for me on the way to creating my two continent 'home'. Some of that home is in the hands of you classmates of '61 who co-own my life from 1956 to 1961. I have to write to make sense of my now through the thens which underlie it. Taft was a home and I have to know it and them to know me. And anyway, I just have to understand. It's what I do. By fate's hand, my present home is also in the middle of a world historical event, I think.

    

What will be told here is mainly the story of my reunion. This better ring some bells for others of you, too, otherwise it's all in my mind (which is possible enough!). I'll try to structure the story through the main events – meals and associated functions. There are some themes which cross the whole domain, so they may be treated as such. People will be named by their initials. Fictionalising the real people who make the story what it is for me would seriously demean the reality. Initialising them should preserve privacy to the community of believers who can identify their owners.

 

Deciding what is really American is an important part of this reflection, so some of my choice of content will reflect what I think is really American, what is typical. That may be a matter of dispute for sure.

    

Paul C and us - The 50^th Reunion Dinner

 

Continuing with the theme of what can I say with some confidence to be true, I think KG noted that the kids at Taft now seem happy. This was on the bus on the way to the first event – the Thursday reunion dinner. He was contrasting their state with ours in our times. He brought into view the theme for the night – sadness, anger, disappointment – which I later characterised as "depressed affect" in the present group.

 

The intensity of speakers' feelings revealed a range of still present hurts which I had not noticed enough in their time to remember now. They were not my hurts at the time, which were strong enough to make it easy to say I hated the place for a few decades after leaving in '61 and to assure the Alumni office I would not be contributing ever and to stop sending me encouragements to do so. Some of the hurt – JH, JS and John S – arose from treatment by the school authorities (symbolised and sometimes personally fronted by Paul C) which branded them as misfits, defectives of some sorts. Their misfit was that their learning styles (kinaesthetic, tangible, etc.) and activity preferences (making and doing rather than observing and contemplating) and natural temperamental exuberance (throwing snowballs at plough drivers from open dorm windows, looking out to celebrate hits and getting caught forthwith!) did not fit the school mission: to produce college entrants on the way to professional or service (teaching, religion) careers housed behind white picket fences. How many of our classmates who got "lost" or chose not to return were also injured in the same regime?

 

The treatment reflected, in turn, institutional assumptions about human potential which still dominate schooling and professional entry. A further turn is that the era of our passage thru Taft was the leading edge of a decline of traditional authorities and boundaries, an edge which overflowed with the multi-dimensional socio-political movements of the '60's. These institutional assumptions fed on our parents' history of Depression scarcity (or its threat) and the titillating rush of post-war recovery. Our parents, too, contributed for some of us to denials of real vocational preferences like 'if you choose Yale Art you pay; if you choose Penn business, I pay' as RL explained part of his early life course to me. 50 years later he's got his art studio.

 

Historical footnote: Some of us wondered what was happening in our times at Taft that warranted or encouraged the negative attitude which was emblematic* of those times. Was it some shift in the foundations of modernity (or last seismic shuffles of pre-modern structures), perhaps? Here are some '50's precursors with potentially high impact items in bold:

Art – Pollock, Smith, and predecessors back to Picasso

Music – Jazz, blues, R and R and predecessors back to the atonal, etc.

Theater – The Sandbox; Death of a Salesman and back to Becket….

Novel / poetry – Catcher in the Rye; On the Road; Lord of the flies; Lady Chatterley's Lover…Ginsberg's Howl

Social – Brown vs. Board of Education, Rosa Parks' Montgomery bus ride, Little Rock High School integration

Political – McCarthyism; Freedom rides (first in the May of '61); Fear of the bomb (Mutual Assured Destruction, and such)

 

And, we could acknowledge that post-modernity was previewed variously by Heraclitus, Zeno, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Whitman, Einstein (relativity), Heisenberg (uncertainty), Berg, Cage, and the movement towards various personal freedoms (to be at the table, on the bus, in the school, on the job) which were denied / blocked for large parts of humanity by traditional thought and structures; and in tandem was the rise of new enemies: USSR and PRC, with boundary skirmishes starting from Korea and sliding into Vietnam under our noses as we left school.

 

*one of my brothers mentioned a week later that every second word out of my mouth in those days was 'duh', now rendered memorably in Homer's 'doh'. He was Taft '65; my brother, that is.

 

Undiscussables

 

All human organisations have undiscussables. These are sometimes fundamental assumptions like an organisation's justification for its existence or parts of its history which conflict with that purpose. They may be undiscussable because we cannot retrieve them easily from the depths of personal and collective consciousnesses. In addition, however, the undiscussable may be pieces of organisation history which compromise its justification and are undiscussed because we are implicated in the compromising. Such matters are often actively suppressed by organisation members.

 

Undiscussables ramble around in the foreground and background of life, appearing in moments like the Thursday dinner and then reappearing in voluntary, but personally compelling expressions like R, J and B's respective post-reunion emails about PC. I hope this access to each other (and indirectly to all the '61ers because the total email list has been used to carry the expression) will grow an understanding of our era, both what we shared and experienced differently!

 

Talking to HDL after the reunion raised another level of need at play in the PC discussion: that we all need a map for life, and suffer when there's none available or those on offer are felt to be corrupted – wrong guideposts, mismeasured distances, undisclosed dangers…you know what I mean. His wife recalled that her older brother had similar 'attitude' problems in his prep school times (close to ours) and that she heard similar reports of many schools like ours. We were living in mapless times led by people who had only worn options to offer. The new leaders were often to look like no map at all, and that's part of the story of our lives since them.

 

JC

 

For me an undiscussed event is around a now "lost" classmate – JC – who got disappeared in a flash of bureaucratic excess driven by now inconceivably narrow values (about drink and smoke, and not even dope). He doesn't appear in our public class records, but maybe lives in some minds because a couple of people told me bits of the story on the side. My own involvement is conflicted. At the time, I made it clear that I believed covert alcohol consumption should have been left where it was found – hidden among the co-drinkers. On the other hand, I believed that once exposed to the school's policing system, processes had to follow their course. I did not, I now can see, have the guts to confront the system's being based on a hypocrisy, even though a legal one (we were "under age" for drinking)!! With this issue we were engulfed in one of the longest standing contradictions of our culture – the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate intoxicants. This was a bit beyond my competence!! But…. it cost JC a price I still do not know.

 

Ethico-theological footnote: I wonder who decided I was the one for policing Sunday church attendance for 1960-61? I dropped into the stone church Friday morning on a wander around town for old times' sake, finding my seat in the balcony still available. From there I had ticked three hundred forty (??) boxes for attendance records every Sunday of the year.

 

At least one of our since "lost" classmates benefitted from sleights of my recording hand. I do not recall feeling the slightest compunction about this dereliction since the duty was merely formal and never audited. So, the missing member's benefit from my derelictions were never in public view, though how not is another wonder. In a similar vein (wonder at not being caught), I smoked in my monitorial suite, Level 4 Old Building, on out of hockey season evenings, using the ashtray facility of the steel frame bunks for butts. The floor master was a smoker, too, thus immune from detecting fellow travellers. As for the lower-mids surrounding us…thus were the young given their first training in institutionalised hypocrisies. Who compromised Taft values more seriously – JC or me? I vote for me.

 

Friday lunch at the golf club

 

One of the great things in life is when a group's conversation steps up to a different level of openness and vulnerability. This happened at lunch Friday at the table I was at with NP, BC, JBS, JH, and spouses, as appropriate. Obsessiveness was the subject and personal vulnerability the currency of participation. Somehow, S talking about husband JH's predilection for order elicited an unscripted opening by N about his own ADHD and the work of his foundation to support kids in developmental straits. Discussion flowed around the table from that start.

 

I imagine this kind and degree of openness would be very unlikely in a table of people who had met by chance on a cruise ship or walk in the park. Having history can block, but also open. For me the reunion was a quick opening to a wide variety of topics at significant depths. Whatever my relationships with individuals, having history of some kind with all of them allowed talking interesting / serious matters quickly. And, where there was unfinished business of various kinds it all progressed more quickly, often because I did not know there was unfinished business on others' parts with me!

 

A walk in the woods

Also contributing, as almost always, to fulfilling talk were activities like the walk in some woods near Washington, Conn (home of The Gunnery, if you remember) with NP and BC. This had been organised in advance to ensure some real exercise amid the reunion celebrations. It also allowed some more richly fledged discussion of matters raised earlier.

 

The old guard dinner Friday night

 

Some people came and went that night, visiting solely for that event. I missed them in detail, noticing them in passing. The same can also be said for the whole reunion. About this time I was beginning to get personal detail overload and re-explanation download. And my attention was directed towards what was coming next – this: saying goodbye with awareness that so much was yet to be said and done, and never could be within the time available formally. I was starting to rush conversations…

 

Proselyte's progress…KB and me

 

Talking of unfinished business, there was a promised engagement with KB which was announced to each other almost at first sight on the first bus Thursday evening. It took numerous re-enforcements and promises of continuing commitment to talk before we got to the after dinner bar bash Friday eve. Amidst a swarm of existing conversations we pushed aside the distractions and headed into our main act, which had been foreshadowed by KB's religious moments at the public lectern.

 

There followed an hour and a half nose-to-nose engagement around matters of faith and its possibilities to unfold with/for me – a question I am open to entertaining, but not driven to answering. There was a moment of feeling the engagement to be more than an entertainment, which led me to suggest some continuing virtual exploration. Three challenges of faith remained at the end for me as they had been from the start: that the Christian focus is individual profession more than collective; that Christianity is one of the religions of the Book with no greater or lesser claim than the other two on personal credibility; and, that expression of Christianity's message, like Judaism and Islam, is often perverted by the distortions of creating and, more impacting, sustaining its organisational forms – the denominations. These three are mutually reinforcing.

 

This was a classically American experience for me, offering direct access to a most distinctive American characteristic – religion and religiosity – with which I have never been comfortable, nor successfully completely indifferent. My failure to achieve confident indifference has repeatedly been fed by acquaintance with stunning personal models of faith like KB over my life course.

 

For me the main glory of this event was its basis in a mutual recognition more than 50 years ago of hidden talents, even though at the time we (KB and I) could not have seemed, to others and ourselves, to be on more different paths. These differences are the drivers of our actual paths (leaving matters of fate aside), yet are underpinned with a similar sense of truth or value or something like that. I am seeing now that this sense of truth exists with a number of other class members, though some were not visible to me in the past, notably NP and SM. I take this as a remark about me missing their capacities.

 

A class observed

 

Having tried Friday unsuccessfully, I pre-engineered a class visit for Saturday AM, which we actually got to near the right time. It was Upper-mid AP English with a focus on Whitman. Three thoughts: I wish someone had taught me poetry that way 54 years ago. It would have advanced my feeble grip of the form by a decade. Second, the class process was wonderfully flexible by offering space for individual contributions and reflection in balanced amounts and distribution across a small group. Third, the kids contributed freely and easily in about the worst setting imaginable: a bunch of short-term visitors ranging from age 8 to 68 hanging around their ears. Plus, I learned a fine point about the third line of the first stanza of Whitman's "I sing myself". What more can be wanted?

 

One counter-point: two or three times the teacher appended cautions to the room about not judging anything…as if a judgment were a moral failing…all the while expressing judgments himself implicitly in his directing students towards various aspects of Whitman (and correctly so, as far as I could tell; he both provided direction when pathways were fading in the process and when points of fact were abused).

 

Saturday lunch, after a walk to the quad

 

Publically joining the Old Guard

It's funny to be admitted to something I never aspired to join. I do not think of myself as old (more than once a day), though I do think of myself as guarding many things and people. Being formally admitted to the Old Guard by Wally MacMullen highlighted this conflicted condition. Guardians take care of things and people, and many guardians are not old. So, the 'old guard' is a special state reflecting our all carrying into age the guardianship of others and being recognised for this human service. While on the surface we are being recognised for surviving and showing up, more importantly we symbolise the worths that are to be guarded – nothing personal, of course!!

 

This reflection invites another – the guardian monitor me working in various ways like watching out for a little lower-mid who looked a bit like my brother who was to arrive at Taft the year after I left and I would not be there to watch out for him (he made out fine after thrashing a resentful types seeking to revenge his dislike of me on him) as I had not been for most of his growing up ever.

 

JS, and me

He was startling and striking from the first moment of the first night – a man realised in his release from life duties honourably sustained for decades (the family store) until able to step into the true shoes of his self: competitor and teacher/coach. I should have known all those years ago when his mother and mine somehow connected at a Mother's Day hockey game in'60 – a most unlikely pairing driven by mutual recognition. I'm sure I did not provide as much recognition to JS then and I am pleased I could amend for that somewhat now. Reunion is both of the old and the new.

 

JH the boundless

Finally, JH the boundless…I can express my extreme pleasure at being even in the vicinity of JH, but I am not sure why he is such a source for me. Well, I am sure: It is his mindless rambunctious lovingness, so unsuited to an IT design predilection he could (and can) no more change than he can his rambunctiousness; he who alone among us comes back to the place of his youthful humiliation with a gift which can only be made from one who has paid a high price for its acquisition. Aw shucks…I can't say it anywhere near so well as he did so long ago …Shucks!! And my thanks.

 

Closing openings

 

For me the reunion was confirmation that we belong to the first (?) generation of the unretired rather than our predecessors, the "undead". Many of us are still growing in different ways, some visible in encounters above. So, overall, a sense of only just having started conversations, with so long to go that will never, except in a few cases, be continued or completed. Sadness for that and gladness that I know this, which I did not before reunion. It complicates my life by anchoring my present as foreigner (in Australia) in my past as local (in USA), neither wholly resolvable.

 

Undiscussables revisited – challenging opportunities

 

When I started writing this three weeks ago, what comes next I sketched shortly after starting. The questions just emerged seeming to suggest the last step of my explorations – a collection of guideline directions for continued living. I had not yet formulated my undiscussables discussion, but since they are all part of one consciousness, I am seldom surprised by what emerges, only its order, colours and weights vary.

 

Challenges arising from reflecting on who / what we are:

• What to "out" and what not to? This is the whistle-blower question, critical to open doors into spaces which otherwise are relegated to dreams and/or recriminations.
• Telling illuminating stories to the young (and still young old) – this is the offering of lived lives requirement.
• Who did we forget? Did we forget some because they were too hard to remember in their time? What would we have to do to ourselves to open ourselves to what was previously forgettable, and how could we test our openness??
• What of ourselves did we lose on the way from then to now? We only became ourselves by both doing certain things and not doing others; some we could never have done for lack of interest or talent; others were not open to us for reasons of fate or active refusal by greater powers, though talent and interest were available; others had to be let go but still could be recovered to some extent…like my putting some time into learning to sing (which I'm considering).
• What's the price of the losses and who's paying it? (the forgotten?) My analyst once suggested I had dues to pay to receive benefits I am seeking. If I figure that one out I'll post it. Something to do with seeking forgiveness and offering it to others??
• How can we learn the answers given the frailties of our grasps on our pasts, the demands of our commitments in the present and the growing limitations of our energies for understanding? Perhaps the hardest challenge to turn into an opportunity since it seems we are surrounded by unavoidable constraints guaranteed to increase with time! How can the prospect of weakness be a strength?

For once I am going to say these are challenges that should be framed as opportunities precisely because they are so easily heard only in their confronting configurations. Maybe not so worst after all….

My warmest regards,

Straights

More travel funnies…(3)

More travel funnies…(3)
Torrey Orton
May 22, 2011


Habits for peace

It's rained something around 5 inches (120+mm) in the New York - New Jersey area in the last week or so. Every dip that can gather water is awash and the lowlands are flooding… but not news worthily. Net effect for us is to have worn our wet weather gear more often than a month in Melbourne. Each day is threatening, especially in the afternoon.

 

As so often, facts do not inhibit personal or organisational habits. Yesterday we were in Princeton New Jersey to watch some junior lacrosse being played by Noah, a niece's 11 year old. Nice day, first over 23C (75F approx.) since we arrived on east coast two weeks ago, sunny with slightly massing clouds….We headed back to the car and passed a university club's lawns being decisively (volume) and thoroughly (carefully set spray patterns) watered by ground staff. What to think?? Must have been on the work schedule. Always a good idea to follow the schedule. It is management's principal expression of both power and competence, the backdrop to premonitions of worker disregard, disrespect and disobedience.

 

Whenever a worker's acting dumb, there's probably a dumb reason. Just keepin' the peace.

 

Sign free zone

 

The Heritage Hotel in Southbury, Connecticut presents itself as a leading locale for spas and golf and all round luxe in the region. It's also the one which lost our reservation (they found it, too, after a few days stumbling!). Anyway, we had survived our first return to driving on the right in 15 years or so by arriving on the outskirts of the very well-advertised town of Southbury looking for signals of the Heritage. Finding it took another 30 minutes, a search exacerbated by my driving timidity for sure. But, there were no signs if you came from the south as we did that day. The first sign, which was too late to obey unless you knew it was there beforehand, only came into view around a corner of a four lane junction – the kind I was still a bit delicate about negotiating. Had to turn around after passing through the stop lights the sign was guarding to get to use its direction.

 

Pennies from..??

 

I imagine to modernise the currency would be seen as a part of the world socialist conspiracy to undermine American values. Otherwise why do they still have one cent pieces – and one dollar bills for that matter – in common use?? I've been collecting pennies in dribbles for two weeks.

 

The undermining aspect would be the implicit recognition the buck's hardly worth a bang anymore. It is promising for Australia's place in a world of failing advanced economies that we acknowledged that two decades ago. A decade later we got signed up for real advanced economy status with a GST, which might be seen now as a symptom of incipient socialism had it not been introduced by a conservative government. The fact that Swedish rounding was the mathematics of choice might have been an excuse if others were lacking for an indictment. The case would have been closed if it were known that New Zealand had been first by three years in this rush to rational self-management.

 

Penny wise, round foolish? This wouldn't have rated so much ink but for another fact: Americans are still wedded to the pathetic, though empirically reliable, pricing policy of trying to make any whole number look smaller by dithering with decimals. But, then so are we. Hence, Swedish rounding is a terrific late capitalist creation. Too bad about the name.

 

And then there is this screamer!

 

Note seen on front door of neighbouring house:

"I've gone; the house is locked. The key is

under the log, top left on the wood pile"

True story; unimpeachable sources; impeccable credentials; direct personal experience. Only in the USA??!!

 

 

 

 

More travel funnies…(2)

More travel funnies…(2)
Torrey Orton
May 19, 2011


"...the only white people on the train"

This is a race joke. It was told on himself by a 70 year old anglo friend who was on a New York City subway with his 13 year old son a few weeks back. He looked down the carriage and thought 'we're the only white people on the train'. Something stopped him saying it just in time. He remembered that he was the only white guy on the train. His son is a product of his second marriage. His mother is Sri Lankan; he's clearly not a white guy.

 

His father's not without deep experience in matters of race, having spent a number of years as a teacher in Harlem schools and as a curriculum consultant in many others in the late '60's where he was often the only white guy on the train. In between, I guess he forgot what he is. How anyone can do that you may wonder. He did, too. I still am.

"The last time I saw you…"
    

This is a sex joke masquerading as 'just between you 'n me, for your ears only' boy talk. Talk about giving it all away in a paroxysm of paranoia! C was on the door for new arrivals at the reunion. He had also been particularly solicitous of our travel comfort, accommodation arrangements and general well-being. He was not a guy I knew at all well in the day. I do a bit more now.

 

Having overseen our hotel registration from a distance, he rushed out to join us on the way back to our car (for luggage transfers) whispering (as he often did),

"I saw you play hockey once in Buffalo." (Western New York, near Niagara Falls).

Me: "When was that?"

He: "A few years after leaving school".

Me: "Oh yeah, against Yale in 1964. We got killed 13 to 3. I don't remember seeing you there."

He: "I just don't want you mentioning it to my wife. I was there with another girl."

Me: "Sure thing. No worries."

 

Of course carrying such a secret was difficult; it always lurked in the wings looking for a chance to sneak out. Two days of reunioning provided regular opportunities for sharing back. I was eased in my self-management by the fact the secret totally lacked salience for me, though gaining small traction from my wonder at the marvels of guilt and its persistent need for self-exposure. I can only hope his sharing it with us reduced the burden for him. It was big enough for him not to have heard that I never noticed him that day in '64. Perhaps the clang of the puck in our goal distracted my attention. Certainly paying attention did little to stop the clanging. Maybe I should have been there for C after all??

Tar pit triumph

In LA I saw a tar pit at last, fulfilling an unrecalled childhood (mid-primary age) dream arising from one of those enduring standalone impressions of a sabre-tooth tiger risen from the pits decades ago, with mastodons and ground sloths in the background. This was a totally unmediated perceptual success. Seen one, seen 'em all. I hadn't the slightest need to see a dozen more, which were easily at hand in the La Brea display ground. The need fulfilment was probably assisted by the smell-o-vision nature of the experience – I smelled the pit before I saw it. Primary sense trumps secondary. Not funny; just nice.

Streets of New Haven

We went back to the place of our first married year (and my first 7 years of adult life!) New Haven, CN for a few hours after the reunion. We knew it was likely to be disappointing because we had been there a few times over the last 20 years – another rust belt city bereft of manufacturing and host to long term urban poverties.

 

The story is this: the streets in, through and around the Yale University environs are clean and well-paved. Those in the areas to the north, west and east, largely black inhabited, were potholed from end to end. These holes were suspension clatteringly and control compromisingly pervasive. The south is Long Island Sound. Only a few fish pass there.

Not funny at all.

Appreciation (37) …learning to see, again

Appreciation (37) …learning to see, again
Torrey Orton
May 18, 2011

Closed mind, open heart – a wonder about travel blindness(es)

Walking around LA a week ago, and driving a bit, too, I couldn't see much of wonder but a jumble of visuals of mildly disappointing grades. After a few hours my distress resolved into a recurring view of faux New England houses spread around varieties of Mission Revival. Mission Revival fit the environs. The faux did not for me. They reached out like an ugly stick in my eyes.


The faux had a number of features. There were the inappropriate window sizes and styles, as if they had been borrowed from a different genre. Their scale was wrong to my eye. Then there was the fault of interbreeding: colonial mixed with ranch – two regenerations from the post-war era. Again a travesty of proportions signalling a bungle, arising perhaps from architects mixing pages from two standard issue design playbooks. In a related, later discussion with the architect of my two friends, he mentioned a similar construct as the design process of another local travesty (in his view, which I shared).


I was in the in the hands of two aficionados of local architecture, hence cautious with airing my disappointments. Rather, I managed to enquire about what I was seeing – its sources, ages, and social implications. After a few more hours my automatic rejection of the offending mis-proportions retreated almost unnoticed from the front of my awareness. It then became easier to explore with them. What's going on with me and this?


A Kimberley experience.


A few years ago I spent two weeks driving and camping around the Kimberley. I had looked forward to the experience with a mountains-and-seas anticipation - that is, my normal expectation of pleasurable visuals which has applied to every trip in my adult life: local, interstate or international. I had forgotten those formative visual experiences like learning to love the Australian bush which opened me to previously unknowable things in the world. It's hard to spontaneously like the Australian bush from a Massachusetts bush background – almost no congruencies other than being bush.


The upshot of the first few days in the Kimberley was a lingering disappointment with its failure to be alps – Australian or European! Now, I had no excuse for this. I have travelled fairly broadly and sometimes deeply in Australia for 35 years at this point. I have done so with enjoyment from my first exposure to the flat lands between Melbourne and Geelong in 1971 (my closest priors being a few glimpses of the Connecticut River valley in the 1950's and a day driving in Ohio in 1967) and can champion the deserted regions with energy and commitment to newbie travellers down under.


So, in some sense I had lost contact with this openness in myself…amazing failing, even more so because I did not even know I had lost it!! I still cannot follow how this happened, but happen it did. I underwent a covert regression or created it somehow. As I am writing I begin to see how, maybe! I brought to the Kimberley an unintentional biased eye – the one that announces itself with an act of disapproval of its field of vision.


Maybe it worked this way. My experience of the European Alps over 35 years, but more intensely in the time before the Kimberley, had coloured my expectations about great visual and physical experiences. A moment ago I was about to write it had coloured my preferences in such experiences, but that is not what it was; it was my anticipations blending into my expectations: I was looking forward to more Alps because I was only getting a taste for them, and wanted more, but did not quite know that then. The Kimberley, by choice at that time, fell across the pathways to that acquisition. It required special organising of many others to do the Kimberley as we thought best to do it, and the others turned out to sometimes be an unexpected experience in their own right. Another disturbing distraction.


Like the LA experience, the Kimberley emerged from the overlay of my inappropriate anticipations and expectations as one of the most memorable of my travel experiences, marked by my continuing desire to return for another run under the cold night skies and warm day ones of early winter there. Maybe it will be on our grey nomad agenda one day.


So what?


This has been a long detour from faux colonials falsely accused. The explanation of my visceral resistance to what reality was presenting is adequate; the pathway to less resistance is not so clear; its implications are worrying for learning…or, just a naturally occurring stage/phase in learning?

More travel funnies…

More travel funnies…
Torrey Orton
May 11, 2011


We're off to my 50^th boarding school reunion, a family reunion and a France reunion for a month, with various interludes and postludes along the way. I start with preludes.

 "No record of reservation…"
Travel funnies started before the travel this time with the news by email that our reservation for the reunion had never been received by the Heritage Hotel…a discovery thanks to a query from classmates about the state of our accommodation and such since the school had no record of them (not that they should have since I'd never sent them and no one had asked for them!). I was rabid about the news, driven by the fact I was awake at 3am to receive it and had dopily turned on the email.

I fired off a note of complaint to the school's event manager with my reservation number and date of approval (Feb 10, '11). …. And somewhat later set off for a morning's therapy at 7am by train and tram, whence another unfunny chapter opened unexpectedly, disappointingly and totally unnecessarily.

Back to the trams…where months ago I noticed that I often entertained myself with pre-work exercise in segments marked out by the train/tram route on the way there. There was a theoretical hitch at that time: that I occasionally almost got it wrong - "The almost is the lurking awareness that I could still mess up, or be messed up, by misjudgement plus fate" I noted at the time. Wait or walk, I wondered again this morning.

Well, this time, already angered by the accommodation screw up a few hours earlier, I walked and waited in vain. Arriving at one tram stop, I had five minutes to go to the next scheduled tram and was caught midway by an early arrival passing me by, stopping at the next stop and waiting for two minutes for its schedule to catch up with it, and then moving off just as I caught up with it!! This sequence was repeated two more times as my pre-work walk turned into a 40 minute, 3 kilometre quickstep to the clinic, arriving 12 minutes late. Fortunately, the expected client was s serial lateness offender and bore the wait well (forewarned by SMS of course). Still, I was smoking, but only wisps showed.

 (The accommodation bungle was recovered three days later, or so I was promised by email.)

 LA International Airport…incoming
There's a song which celebrates the West Coast entry to the US. Well, it was an undeserving entry this time. Apart from an eventual 1 hour wait in an incoherent and disorderly queuing system, we got a standing room only wait in the plane on arrival due to congestion in the entry hall. We were told there were a thousand just-arriveds standing in our way. I should have known we were really in for trouble when I sighted a sign saying something like: With our 140 years of customer service we know paying attention to customer needs counts! I read this as a line from the mouth of LA Tourism thinking they really have reached heights of self mockery. A few metres further up the passage I saw the words were an HSBC bank self-promotion, but then…

Joining their last members (maybe 500 folks or so) 15 minutes later, we started our passage in a hall with no toilets other than a pastel sign promising renovations of the previously available offerings were well under way…and this after 13 hours in the air.

The entry hall was itself quite new, with numbered ranks of passport control stations spread in a 150 meter array before us. Trouble was, they were less than half staffed, though they were armed with a terrific set of terrorist detection tools – both iris cameras and handprint capture machines. There was not even a hand-lettered sign telling us which line was for foreigners and which for returning natives, though there was a quite well-designed one for diplomatic and special business travellers, of course.

 LA …outgoing
A day later we got the AA treatment (no, not that AA; the American Airlines AA) on the way to our next stage. The boarding routine was a marvel of self-contradiction which seemed to work. There were stringent carryon bag limits clearly posted around the departure halls with explicit threats that oversized ones would be thrown into the hold (delicately by their experienced staff waiting hopefully below the plane to receive renegade bags from watchful cabin staff).

The warnings were enough to make me slightly antsy about the somewhat oversized backpack I was carrying. No need to worry. Others were carrying material for a beach party. Due to my abiding never-be-late phobia, we had arrived early and due to Jane's possessing a higher grade of Frequent Flyer, we boarded in the first rush scoring empty overheads for the effort. What came next was a scramble by the masses to grab space which was close to the unconscious meaning of unseemly…not quite pushing old ladies out of the way but an outbreak felt imminent.

Coaching from the sidelines was the chief speaker for the cabin staff - running through the outsized bag routine as a request for civil compliance rather than an order. She backed up the civility theme by encouraging the scramblers to "help each other" with the short, weak and maybe old as worthy targets for help (if they couldn't lift their overweight bags, couldn't get them to fit the compartments (quite a few), or just couldn't find space, though passing the weight and size reg's). After 20 minutes wrestling bags, jockeying for position and "helping" the place was cleared for take-off. Lots of bags disappeared under seats in front, to the point of leaving little foot space, but then whose fault was that.

Was I seeing another instance of a self-regulating system at work?? The last I remember was the response to the US Airways flight #5149 which crashed without loss of anything material but itself in the Hudson River in January '09 (just where we were heading!). Cameras monitoring the area of the crash (by chance) caught ferries and other boats turning to save passengers before formal rescue could have been organised. Local players had chosen to disregard their SOP's, city, state and federal regulations with probable risk to their licenses and captain's bars to do the obviously right thing. Perhaps an example of "giving forward", as my niece described an effort of hers to make a difference in some family matter. More another time.


Fly well, fly high.   

Appreciation (36) …out of Africa?

Appreciation (36) …out of Africa?
Torrey Orton
May 4, 2011

"Ask him when he came out of Africa?", she said quietly.

We were in the fourth day of four in a leadership program for journalists. The group of 9 held six women and three men from seven countries/regions: Indonesia, Fiji, Vanuatu, Irian Jaya(Papua) province of Indonesia, PNG, Timor Leste and Solomon Islands. They spoke 15 or twenty languages between them and no one language was competently held across the whole group. Individuals often had 5 or six, including English, pidgin, family or clan languages and a national language. So there was a constant play of interpreting throughout the learning activities. I was the only non-islander English speaker in the group. I was also 30 years older than everyone but Jason, who was about 50. Jason held down the darker end of the colour spectrum for which I anchored the lighter, with everyone else spread out in between* - the ethnic Indonesians closest to me, the Papuan next and the others following to Jason.


Our program included five segments, in this order, on personality, stress management, culture and leadership, negotiation and conflict management, and mentoring/networking, all with an orientation to the leadership demands of being a journalist in their respective contexts. The culture segment opened the door on a range of shared histories among us, and the overall shared history of European colonialism. In the process of exploring the cultures in the room I pointed out that we all come out of Africa. This was news to everyone.


At some later point in our excursion through negotiation and conflict management I mentioned to the group that there is published research evidence about the out-of- Africa claim and I had the book – Spencer Wells' The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey. Jason jumped at it, along with another – Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies – which explains cultural success in geographic terms, as well as the unintended depredations of Christian colonialism (germs, mostly).


On reflection, I have to admit that saying I come out of Africa has a very low face-value truthfulness about it. A case of the mind's eye getting it wrong to any unbiased observer. I just don't look anyone's 'black' or tan or Asian, or…Italian. The research shows (love that frame!) that my relatives are traceable to a female origin out of Africa quite a while ago. But it is demonstrably obvious that I'm not black or tan or anything other than fading lily whiteish. And it is even more incontrovertibly clear that I didn't come out of Africa in any comprehensibly practical sense. Talk about an inner truth?! The genes shape us but the appearances make us.


And so the quietest group member, and occupier of a prime position in the darker range, Fijian Dorothy said, pointing at the leader with no clothes running the training – me:

"Ask him when he came out of Africa?" she posed quietly.

 

And three of us – Diana, Jason and I - broke into unstoppable laughter, with tears, which lasted three or four minutes, reigniting as they do with recollections or repetitions of the cue line "Ask him…" I've since repeated it enough to drain the trigger of its tickle.

 

 

*I recalled as I was entering the culture segment of our work that I had first encountered the colour conundrum 45 years ago as a beginner high school teacher in New Haven, CN, USA. This was particularly the first time of my really being a minority person for a bit. Years later in China it was daily for two years – a more shaping experience. At that US time I devised a simple experiment. In English classes with a majority of blacks and an ethnic multitude of whites, I offered an exploration of the substance of the terms 'white' and 'black'.


We (including me) lined up in a horseshoe (so everyone could see everyone else) whose gradation from darkest to lightest, and back, was agreed by all. The result always was that some self-identified 'black' kids actually were over the line into 'white' and vice-versa, as agreed among the participants in any particular line-up. (This kind of perception is the empirical origin of the current identification 'mixed', which is established in the identity stats of the UK census and an ongoing subject of discussion in the US). The kids had little trouble agreeing on the fade from light to dark and vice-versa, yet clung energetically to the soundness of their practical judgment that the difference was black and white clear!! Black hung with black and white with white. Therein the dilemma of the difference which is not, but is!


This dilemma is played out in both light and dark communities as they privilege the other in their beauty gradings – for some purposes. The lights approve tannedness among themselves (even fake tan!), but get queasy with permanently tanned members of their 'community' (maybe they've got a bit of dark the lights suppose) and the darks approve with envy the lights of theirs while at the same time reserving true darkness membership to the darkest (nearest to Africa??). What a human mess. Was 'mixed' cooked up to bridge the unbridgeable distinctions without creating a discriminatory difference??