As the world spins faster, bigger, louder 

By Charles E. Kraus

Special to The Seattle Times  5-8-13

HAVE you ever watched a computer geek whip through assorted levels of code and programming, fixing, adjusting, creating technological miracles at the keyboard?

When I see this, I sometimes think, what would these guys be doing if there were no computers? It’s fascinating. Dormant superpowers were buried within their minds, just waiting for opportunities to unfold.

Then I look at the availability of guns, of twisted anthems and searchable belief systems lurking on the Internet, at the plethora of hallucinogenic and other mind distorters, at the roster of charismatic enablers.

I recall recent headlines: “Pressure-cooker bombs,” “School shooting in Newtown,” “Five dead In Federal Way.” I recall these, and wonder what latent inclinations are just waiting for an opportunity to emerge and generate more havoc.

When I was a teen, you could get a cup of coffee for a nickel. Later, I remember catching a meal at the International House of Pancakes and finding they sold coffee by the endlessly refillable pitcher. It wasn’t a nickel, but seemed like an excellent value.

Apartments were tiny. By the mid ’50s, we had moved into a house in the burbs. Compared with today’s floor plans, my childhood home was an elaborate garage. Houses have gotten much bigger these days. People seem to need more space.

Our first television had an extremely small screen with a magnifying lens in front of it that enlarged and somewhat distorted the black and white picture. There were a handful of stations; most signed off for the night around 11 p.m.

On television and in the movies, violence was insinuated. Fights were brief. Often a punch or two defeated the bad guy. Hostilities were not depicted graphically. A slam to the jaw equaled a knockout. No blood. No prolonged suffering. After the movie, we went to White Castle to enjoy 15-cent hamburgers.

Now, the hamburgers are supersized. Waiters refill your cup each time you take a sip of coffee. Or maybe you order the venti, half-soy, half-skim mocha with an extra pump of chocolate and some foam. That coffee costs about five bucks.
Movies do not only show close-ups of violent acts, they slow them down, 3-D them, HD them, cover them from every conceivable angle, exaggerate them, making sure viewers get the full-screen presentation.

We need more choices. Larger portions. More assertive, confrontational, emotional, doctrinaire talk shows and political theater.

When I was a youngster roaming the streets of New York City, there were gangs. The play and movie “West Side Story” turned the ’50s turf battles into jazz dancing.
The gangs were not companies of jazz dancers. They were pockets of alienation. Kids got beaten up, mostly with sticks, clubs and a variety of brass knuckles. There were switchblades. Later, there were pipe-guns.

Now, of course, gangs have automatic weapons. Some would call that technological progress. Apprentice sociopaths didn’t have a lot of tools back when I was in the school yard. They didn’t have an array of despicable homegrown models and attitudes, didn’t realize the range of sadistic options.
Life has speeded up. Sensation trumps. If you have enough perspective, you might think things have grown frantic. I do.


Charles E. Kraus lives and writes in Seattle.

Why write a personal essay?

OTHERTHANNOW, a blog of personal essays ........
By Charles Kraus

 

 

Why write a personal essay?

           Why write an impersonal essay?

           We who request the reader’s attention --  Attention,  Attention -  claim to have something so important to say, so urgent, so original, remarkable, essential, entertaining, or merely interesting, that folks need to pull themselves away from their own remarkable journeys  to feast on our extraordinary perceptions. 

What follows in my OtherThanNow blog is a bit of meandering well-seasoned with a dash of confusion, spots of compassion, dollops of redundancy, and just a pinch of originality. 

Attention, Attention – may I have your indulgence?   My Day, a new posting, is available below along with previous columns. 

 

My Day, with apologies to Eleanor*

My Day, with apologies to Eleanor*

By Charles Kraus

 I am trying to reacquaint myself with the concept of leisure time.  Linda is visiting in Northern California, and here I sit, no shows today, no predetermined agenda, mindless, blissfully unmoored, yet restless.  Curious, too, wondering if I can return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, those meandering, subterranean, reveries found on summer days of my unburdened youth.  Things were easier the last time I submitted to such an opportunity.

Back then, word processing took place in my mind, which instructed my fingers how and when to pound on the Smith Corona.   Accountable to no one, I conducted a life of free association, taking extended walks that began and ended at my desk.  Stimulated by whispers slipped into my thought process by life itself, non sequiturs would jostle about as I pursued my afternoons.  Occasionally, these would organize and become ideas.

I suspect I might attempt some writing today, or think something, or do something.   At the moment, I am looking out of a second story window.  Trees overwhelm the view, obscuring mountains, offering nature’s brand of protective sun block, trumping again and again every potential gap that might allow the sky to prevail.

A Sunday in the middle third of July, exclusively mine, uncorrupted by directives or expectations  … an aimless segment, a mishappenstance, a sector that powers failed to program, a lapse, a gaff, unregistered, unclaimed, except as revealed within my horoscopic particulars. 

Or course, it has been my intension to spend a day such as this listening to concertos while catching up on my correspondence.  Also, on my reading.  Possibly,  these worthy goals conflict with my vague plan to reorganize, or more accurately, to organize my music collection.  That is another thing I might just get to.  Or, I might not.

My dance card lists no responsibilities.  No pets, lawns, friends, foes, commercial enterprises, require my attention.  And, to advance this accounting, I’ll add that temperate sunshine compliments the view.  Out there, beyond my window, I am looking at the kind of day in which a person could get a lot accomplished.

You see my dilemma. 

Later I will know whether or not I talked myself into doing or not doing anything whatsoever.  For now, I am attempting to establish contact with the assorted components:  mind, body, soul -- a limited partnership -- that own the rights to myself.   I will take a census, conduct a survey.  Are there any serious demands?  Any immediate needs?  Any desires?  We take a vote.  The eyes have it.  The ears, feet, superstructure, the force field, unanimously in favor of absolutely nothing in particular. 

I am.  Therefore, I am.

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*  My Day was a newspaper column written by Eleanor Roosevelt six days a week from 1935 to 1962

FATHER IN THE NIGHT

FATHER IN THE NIGHT

By Charles E. Kraus

 

Before he left the house for good, which is perhaps a strange way to describe his departure, my
father left the house for extended periods.  A month, two months at a time -- no signs of dad.  Also, no calls, cards or communications of any kind.  These parental gaps were billed as vacations.

In retrospect, my father’s vaguely explained absences, remixed to include the woman he later married, make a more complete picture.  He was not, as reported, always out on remote lakes or in forests exploring, prospecting for gold or conducting geological reconnaissance.  There were assignations. 

He did go west once without Else.  When I was about ten, he drop me off for the first day of school, offered an extended hand shake signaling, see you in a few months, then meandered down the road to meet his buddy, Eddie.   The two drove from New York to Utah to search for uranium. 

They left town in an ancient panel truck with bad brakes, my collapsible Air Force paratrooper’s bike stowed away for emergencies, a geiger counter and a scintillometer - uranium detectors, on board.  They planned to use these to find the pot of radioactivity at the end of the rainbow.  About three months later, my father returned.  No bike, no truck, no Eddie.  Eddie had decided to remain in the west, sans his wife and kids, who resided in New Jersey. He was keeping my bike.

There are other grievances, but its Father’s Day, so I want to switch gears (my fold-up bike could do that).  Whenever I have doubts about my father’s love, or my love for him, I think about the following events:

I was six-years-old, and for some reason we were taking the cross-town subway.  It departed every five minutes or so.  Dad and I entered and sat down.   After what felt like a few seconds, he said, ‘ok, time to change trains.’  The doors hadn’t closed and we hadn’t gone anywhere.  But out of the car we raced, reentering from another door.  We returned to the same seats we had just vacated, but only for a moment, before we rushed out again.  This got repeated a few more times, “time to change trains!” and soon the more sedate passengers got into the spirit.  Seemed as if everyone enjoyed my father’s antics.  That was the first time I realized he had the ability to be joyful.

I think about my father taking me along to his chess games where I got to meet his ‘down-town’ friends.  No one else in our family knew them.  They were part of his other world. 

The bird-people, a husband and wife whose parrot and vast number of parakeets, had out-of-cage privileges all over their living room, were my favorite.

The fellow with books everywhere, an entire apartment of floor to ceiling shelves, walls obscured, free standing cabinets claiming any remaining floor space, an accumulation of printed matter dominating every vista.  The chess board sat on a stack of encyclopedias.

And, I recall walking down 8^th Avenue with my father when a guy coming from the opposite direction spotted him and said, “Hi Sparks.”

“Sparks?”

Dad had been a shipboard radio operator during WWII, a Morse coder.  The nickname for these communicators was “Sparks.”  This was explained to me after he spent a few minutes exchanging pleasantries with his old shipmate. 

The thought of my father having a nickname was revolutionary. 

Contrary to his cross-town train performance, dad was an extremely shy man, reluctant to place himself into situations requiring contact with strangers.  Somehow he had been manipulated into becoming Treasure of my Cub Scout Pack, an assignment that surely intimated him.  It was to a Pack board meeting that the baby sitter called to report my particularly insidious migraine headache.  Sensing an opportunity to get away from the gathering, dad left my mother and came home to comfort me. 

You have to understand.  My father did not hug, ever.  I have no memories of him kissing anyone, ever.  I have no memories of him proclaiming his love of anything or anyone other than by bestowing intellectual praise.   And so, when he arrived in the night, placing his arm around me, pulling me close and rubbing my throbbing head, he provided a kind of unprecedented relief that has lasted to this day. 

He opened the window and suggested I take a few deep breaths of the cool evening air.  My headache subsided and he returned to the meeting.  I think about that night.

 

Notes on Father’s Day To A New Dad

 

[one of two Father's Day pieces written 2013]

 

Notes on Father’s Day To A New Dad

By Charles E. Kraus

              There are several ways to state the good news – my daughter had a baby, my wife and I are finally grandparents, my other daughter is finally an aunt, her partner is an aunt, my son-in-law became a father just in time to receive his first round of Father’s Day cards.

And his first round of fathering advice.

I’ll save the childrearing suggestions for another day.  The gist of this column is to offer a few thoughts about the benefits of turning parent, specifically, being a recipient of Father’s Day salutations.

I never sent my father a Father’s Day card.  Only my mother did that, and I was under the impression he found the sentiment excessive.   His generation of dads considered any expression of sentiment excessive.  When I verbalized my best wishes, he nodded and went on with life.  I’m betting he thought formal Father’s Day endorsements, the specific setting aside of time and focus for what he rationalized as just another part of life, was yet another commercial intrusion into one’s personal affairs.

My take on Father’s Day initially mirrored dad’s skeptical view –  Hallmark expanding its market.  Such proclamations were not from the heart, they were from the store.  You bought a few nice generic words and sent them, as society and custom required, to your father. 

But then, I added a new entry to my resume.  I was no longer just a son.  I became … a father.  Moving up the ladder this way can change your perspective.   Everything I’d ever thought about for-profit holidays remained a part of my Father’s Day assumptions.  But I supplemented the research and revised my conclusions.

I realized that when my kids were little, they didn’t know anything about greeting card sales or Amazon gift certificates.  They knew about terrific art projects, about hands-on gift making that involved a lot of marking pens, glitter and glue.  About using their energies to craft more than what was in the gift wrapping, to create happiness.  They used Father’s Day as an opportunity to share love.

Suddenly, receiving Father’s Day acknowledgments felt great.  And the converse was also true – just the thought about not receiving them, foretold despair.  Would the day come when the cards, or the phone calls, would cease?  When that last minute, end of the day, just under the wire, email or text would not arrive, and a rush of dismay would wrench my stoic resolve?

Stand-by Thomas.  Little Alice Zarin is going to smile at you, and you will be under her spell.   I see you looking into her eyes, and I see her looking right back.  The two of you are beginning a dialogue.   It will be comprised of happy moments.  Sad ones.  Of joy, anger, encouragement, concern, appreciation, and a feeling so deep that calling it love is barely doing it justice.  This conversation is communicated with the eyes, with the heart, in silence, with gesture, with mysterious unexplainable perceptions, with the spoken word, and with written words such as “Happy Father’s Day..”

Welcome to the club.

 

Details from Dreamland

Details from Dreamland

By Charles Kraus 

For the first many decades of my life, I didn’t dream, or at least, I woke with no recollection of having pushed imagined casts, plots and hidden agendas around in my subliminal subtext.    Slowly, over time, the wall between here-and-now and Freud’s playground diminished.  Not completely.  But gaps appeared in the bricking, and I began waking up recalling details from dreamland. 

I am a thematic dreamer.  My protagonists are circumstances. The guy who plays me puts up with a hell of a lot of frustration.  I’m certain that if Sigmund had a link to my subconscious proceedings, his interpretation would depress the hell out of me.  When wide awake, I look at my life and am pleased with what I observe. My assessment is that I’m a rather lucky and contented individual.  A great many of the items on my life-time to-do list have earned check marks.  OK, I’ve yet to produce that best seller, and only hot water flows from the hot water spigot.  No liquid gold.  At least, there is hot water.  Ultimately, I find it remarkable that the world has made room for the likes of me.  I’m thankful.

It is difficult to square the results of my self-appraisal with the dreaming that takes place in this very same head.  Therein is promoted a minority report composed of moody, disquieting sleep-time adventures.  “Lost-my-way” sensations build throughout these escapades.  When dreaming, I misread my bearings.  I don’t know where the hell I am.   Commonly, I have a goal and am experiencing difficulty achieving it.  Mostly my objective is to get somewhere.   I’m late, you see, and doing my best to reach an unspecified place by an appointed hour. 

 

I’m unsure of the route.  Not that it matters, as trudging towards what I’m sensing is the appropriate general direction, my progress is thwarted by misunderstand and happenstance.  I end up experiencing all the acuities you might encounter if you were trying unsuccessfully to cross a busy intersection.  I mean, if you were attempting this endlessly.  Looking for openings in the traffic, waiting more and more impatiently for the light to change in your favor, searching in vain for alternative routes, underground passages, pedestrian bridges, traffic cops.   The hour grows late, then it grows later, and still I stand there, cold, tired, hungry, but more importantly, upset that I am a no-show, disappointing people who are counting on me, whoever they are, wherever they are.  They do not understand why I’ve failed to arrive.  No cell phone, no pay phone available to transmit the explanation, or relay my good intensions, bad luck, and apologies. 

Psychologists might find my subconscious meanderings symptomatic.  I see my dreams as sore losers and under appreciators.  I may just send an intervention into the depths of their origination.  Grow up!  Don’t you know there is a real world out there?  Don’t you understand that some goal posts are aspirational?

 You learn that during visits to the lucid light of day. 

 

On Not Being Interested In Sports

On Not Being Interested In Sports

By Charles Kraus

 

I don’t speak the language of sports.  Though I am not exactly shunned for my sacrilege, many consider this gap when sizing me up.  I am other.  I am incapable of appreciating athletic contests, and do not understand the fuss, the excitement, the heartache, the nuances, rules and jargon associated with tossing the old pig skin.  When such subjects are the topic of conversation, I often feel I’m a visitor to some exotic land where natives are trying to speak to me about urgent matters, only to discover I am unable to comprehend.  Pretty soon, my associates wander off, a little frustrated, somewhat bemused, often irritated.  I’m the fool who has not been capable of grasping the significance of yesterday’s player trade.

This is a life-long problem.  In school, teachers and students often discussed sporting events.  They seemed equals – 12-year olds advancing facts and opinions with conviction never displayed when class was in session.  The dumbest kid in math class might have been the smartest, or at least most compelling, when talk turned to baseball statistics.  I remained silent until the subject changed.

In the military, enlisted men and officers lived in different worlds – separate clubs, separate dining facilities, strict rules segregating swabbies from officers and gentlemen.  This firewall prevailed during war and peace, but not during sports-focused bull sessions.   I recall that during my Navy days,  a certain mess cook was encouraged to walk the golf links with the brass, speaking his mind about Monday Night Football.  I was ordered to remove cigarette butts from the field so the game could progress.

Sports are a great equalizer.  People of all ethnicities, religions, economic circumstances, sexual orientations – opposing counsel, political polar opposites – call time out from conflict to chat about Rose Bowl predictions.

“How about them Sea Hawks?” defense counsel said to plaintiff’s counsel during a short recess in what might otherwise be a contentious morning.  Overhearing the discussion, the judge offered a nonbinding non-judicial opinion.

I was going to be ironic by calling this piece Strike Five, my thought being that since there were only four strikes allowed to the fellow at bat, adding that extra one would quell any doubts regarding my noncompetitive naiveté.  My wife pointed out that four downs was the rules in football.  Baseball allowed three strikes.  We are very compatible.

There is a perverse pleasure, a snooty one, no doubt, in my aloof attitude.  I don’t participate in games – neither as a player nor a fan.  It’s a defect.  I’m baffled by the intensity of enthusiasm sparked by recreational competition. 

As we journey through our lives, we learn about a ourselves, our likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, interests, fears, joys, opinions, passions.  Early on, I realized I was klutzy.  That when I intended to throw the ball to my father, it would land in the bushes.  That when Dad threw it back to me, there was a good chance it would avoid my hands, but not necessarily my head.

I anticipated liking baseball.  Little boys were supposed to like it.  Heaven knows, I tried to like it.  But I did not succeed.  The very first book I recall reading – way back in the early 1950s, was Lucky To Be A Yankee, by Joe DiMaggio.

The truth be told, I did not find Mr. DiMaggio interesting until a few years later, when he and the playwright Arthur Miller vied for the affections of Marilyn Monroe.  That was quite a game.

 

 

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