From The Highest Branches

On a walk this morning with the dog I noticed, at the triangle park two blocks from our house, apples smashed on the ground. These were full-size apples, not the crab apples I see beneath our neighbor's tree. Kids, I thought, shaking my head which has been filled with thoughts of rotten kids since yesterday. Why would they smash so many apples? Then I looked up.

The tree, which has been there longer than I've lived here, is a real apple tree filled with ripe apples. Maybe a hundred of them hang from the branches in singles and bunches. The tree is wild and overgrown unlike those I'm used to at the orchards. The apples are way up high, no way to reach them. I imagined having to wait until one decided to fall and then trying to catch it. The whole thing would be an exercise in luck or futility.

A squirrel could have one any time.

I stared at those apples in the high branches, the dog waiting patiently at the end of her leash. They were so beautiful. I have a thing for apples and apple trees. They speak to me of life and sweetness and possibly even love. I looked down sadly at the fallen apples, food now for worms and beasts. How have I failed to notice an apple tree so close to home? It's as if I haven't been looking.

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Our daughter has been diagnosed with an ear infection. My wife is taking her to the pharmacy for a prescription which should heal it. Harder to treat is all the difficulty of being a girl in high school with undependable friends who often ditch and then lie to her. She can't understand it and even though I can, I can't. It isn't that she is perfect, but she is devoted and she wants to be a real friend and have someone be a real friend with her.

I didn't much have this problem as a kid. I was blessed to meet someone when I was only a few months old and never again worried about having someone. My first wish for my girl would be to find that someone who will remain true and to whom she could remain true.

Teenage girls are often lying shits. I'm to the point of telling my girl to be brutally honest with her friends and maybe have them be the same with her. It might be a huge mistake. Honesty isn't necessarily always best. Still, this dance of "friendships" hasn't done her much good and I lean toward her stepping on a few toes. If they can't take it, she hasn't lost much.

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Carl Richards in The New York Times wrote of discussing this question with friends: "If we were having tea three years from now in this exact same place...what would need to happen for each of us to be happy with those three years?" My answer begins like this:

I would want my family happy. I would want to have moved onto a new job, be writing and publishing, and feel healthy.

Like those high-up apples, these things feel difficult to reach, but of course they aren't. I'll encourage my daughter to tell the truth, brutal or not, and help her work through these things. I will keep applying for other jobs. I'm writing and publishing the blog. That's progress. And I am running, walking, and trying to eat well.

I keep waiting for apples to fall, but they're likely to fall from the other side of the tree and smash into the ground. My daughter keeps waiting for the tree to be nicer and offer more than the just promise of sweet fruit. Instead of waiting, we can carry a ladder from the house, lean it against a branch full of ripe apples, and I can hold it steady as she climbs up into the crisp autumn morning.

I imagine her climbing slowly, unsure and afraid but moving one rung at a time. I tell her it's going to be alright, I've got you. She climbs higher. As I look up, she disappears into the light of the sun. She calls down that the apples are perfect. Here, she says, in a voice that carriers her smile and happiness. Catch!

The Right Direction

On Friday, a kid left our school. The kid was a handful, often challenging, usually draining, really loud or completely withdrawn, a bundle of nerves. At the end of the day, after the kid had said a final goodbye, a few of us stood in the hall talking. It was mostly rehashing old complaints and expressing relief to be free of the kid. I stood thinking that this was the kind of kid for which our school is designed. As they talked I felt a courseness developing within me.

Thoreau wrote:

As I go through the fields, endeavoring to recover my tone and sanity and to perceive things truly and simply again, after...dealing with the most commonplace and worldly-minded men, and emphatically trivial things, I feel as if I had committed suicide in a sense." (The Journal, pg. 80)

I left the group and went into my classroom and be alone. I'm not sure I recovered my tone or sanity, but it was a step in the right direction.

I noticed again how often the right direction is away from the crowd and trivial affairs.

Michiko Kakutani's The Death Of Truth

Overall, this was a pretty tough book. We elected something worse than a buffoon. We voted to dissolve most of what is good about our country. We didn't vote to make America great but to make America into something other than a democratic republic. We succumbed to trickery and a demagogue playing to our worst instincts and we are all suffering for it now.

Kakutani is a tremendous writer. Her prose is beautiful. This felt a bit too much like a book report or graduate thesis. I would have preferred to have just heard more from her, but it's still good to be aware.

Oh, one other thing: this confirms my decision to leave social media. That's a lot of what got us into all this trouble.

A few salient passages:

The tendency of Americans to focus, myopically, on their self-pursuits--sometimes to the neglect of their civic responsibilities--is not exactly new. In Democracy in America, written more than a century and a half before people started using Facebook and Instagram to post selfies and the internet was sorting us into silos of like-minded souls, Alexis de Tocqueville noted Americans' tendency to withdraw into "small private societies, united together by similitude of conditions, habits, and customs," in order "to indulge themselves in the enjoyments of private life." He worried that this self-absorption would diminish a sense of duty to the larger community, opening way for a kind of soft depostism on the part of the nation's rules--power that does not tyrannize, but "compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people" to the point where they are "reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." This was one possible cost of a materialistic society, he predicted, where people became so focused on procuring "the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives" that they neglect their responsibilities as citizens; it was difficult to conceive, he wrote, how such people who "have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed." (64-65, emphasis mine)

"With Google personalized for everyone," the internet activist Eli Pariser wrote in his book, The Filter Bubble, "the query 'stem cells' might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem cell research and activists who oppose it. 'Proof of climate change' might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil company executive. In polls, a huge majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they're increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click." (116-117)

The nihilism in Washington is both an echo and a cause of more widespread feelings: a reflection of a growing loss of faith in institutions and a loss of respect for both the rule of law and everyday norms and traditions; a symptom of our loss of civility, our growing inability to have respectful debates with people who have opinions different from our own; and our growing unwillingness to give others the benefit of the doubt, room for an honest mistake, the courtesy of a hearing. (155)

Casting My Dream Ballot

I'll gladly cast my ballot for the candidate who does not use social media, a group that clearly must number in the zeroes.

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I got a nice comment from a friend saying, "I don't like you not being on Facebook, I miss the updates, though I added you to my blog roll." I understand and I'm torn over being on and off social media which I quit in August. It led me to this thought:

I would like to be connected with the people on Facebook (and maybe Twitter), but I'm against providing corporations with free content for their platforms so they can then advertise next to what I've written and profit. Aside from the poison thoughtlessly sold by them during the 2016 election, their whole model offends me. I'm not interested in being someone's serf or slave.

This wasn't the primary reason I quit social media, but it has become one of the most important reasons I stay away. The Facebook/Twitter platform-economy is even worse for us than the gig economy. I want no part of that.

Still, I miss connecting with my friend and need to find other ways of doing that.

Any ideas?