miscmuseodd

[miscmuseodd]

On Growing Old

So here’s another thought.  In my earlier years I would have considered someone who was the age I am now to be an “old man.”  But as I have gotten older my personal definition of “old” has continued to advance, and it is still at least ten years out ahead of me, so at this rate, I’ll never get old, which has been my plan all along.  But I remember what I used to think about “old age,” so I thought I should explain to those of more tender years why I relish the age I’ve attained.  And for all of you out there who have just begun to reach those elder years, don’t ever regret growing old, for there are many who never had that privilege.

When I was younger, much younger, and did not think much of “old age,” I used to look at “old people” and think, “Man, I’d hate to be old.  How awful, to be that close to the end!”  Now that I’ve become one of those “old people” myself, I’ve acquired a different perspective.  Consider this: if you’re 18 years old, I have lived for more than four of your lifetimes.  Much has happened and I wouldn’t change any of it, because the sum total has made me into who I am.

 “So?” says the callous youth.

 Well . . . I once drove a Volkswagen Beetle from Fort Bragg, NC to the Mexican border and on down through Central America to the Panama Canal Zone.  Along the way I sank it into a river I was trying to ford and spent the rest of the day recovering it and drying everything out.  From my hammock in a Central American rain forest, I have listened to howler monkeys hooting at their territorial rivals and marveled at a toucan, sailing out of the morning mist with his big red and yellow beak, and gliding across a jungle clearing.  Naked and blindfolded, with my hands and feet securely tied, I have been thrown headfirst into a pit full of mud and water, where an interrogator worked me over for what seemed hours.  My later escape and mad dash through the jungle sparked exhilaration and fear that I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday.  I have dived through a waterfall at the head of Titrou Gorge on the island of Dominica in the Caribbean and stood on a narrow ledge in that same gorge, beneath a cascade of hot water bubbling up from a subterranean spring.

From a grassy field in England I have watched the sun go down behind Stonehenge.  I have watched the moon rise over the ocean as I bedded down for the night on a beach by the Aegean Sea, a few miles east of the temple to Poseidon in southern Greece.  I have climbed the hills of Meteora above the village of Kalembaka in north-central Greece and wandered amongst the ruins of monasteries perched atop seemingly inaccessible spires, once reached only by means of a basket the monks lowered down by hand.

I have been several hundred kilometers off the end of the last road, deep into the R’uub Al Khali, the Empty Quarter in the southeast corner of Saudi Arabia, across range after range of dunes that extend out beyond the horizon, and sat around the fire with friends, watching the occasional meteor trace a line across a sky filled with stars that seemed close enough to reach out and touch.  I have crawled into a crack in the side of a cliff in the Saudi Arabian desert and seen graffiti that was carved into the rock by some unknown tribe that lived there in the time before it was a desert, more than 5,000 years ago.  I have been to Petra, “the rose-red city half as old as time.”  I have driven down the Hejaz Railway, stood on the wreck of a Turkish train still lying on its side where it fell after Lawrence of Arabia attacked it during the First World War, and camped for the night in an abandoned stone fort the Turks built to guard the railway.

I learned to speak two foreign languages with reasonable fluency and picked up a smattering of several others.  I have written poetry in English.  I have white-water rafted down a river in western North Carolina and another in Colorado.  I have ridden a horse, trailing a string of pack mules, into the Bridger-Teton wilderness area in the north part of Wyoming, and while I was up there I watched a grizzly bear watching me, and wondered how hungry he was.  I have hiked along a portion of the Inca Trail and been awe-stricken at the ruins of Machu Picchu.  

On a black night with no moon I have stood in the open door of a C-130 at twelve hundred and fifty feet while loaded down with a rucksack, a weapon, and a parachute, felt the great thundering roar of four turboprop engines reaching into my bones, and stepped off into the darkness.  My body twisting and turning as I fell away from the bird and feeling the sharp tug of the harness as the canopy deployed and opened above me, kindled all the rush and excitement any one person needs for a lifetime.  Then swinging in the harness, the sound of the bird quickly receding in the distance, I floated down to the earth in silence, landed in the darkness, rolled into the fall, and lay there for a moment, getting my breath back.

I have been at that point in life when I could bare my heart and soul to someone, when I felt the connection so many spend a lifetime searching for and never find, when I just knew that my heart belonged with this one, and I made that leap into an uncertain future, trusting that it would be all I hoped it would be.  It did not always work out.  I have had several girlfriends and been married twice.  I have loved deeply and been rejected.  But I have also loved deeply and been loved in return.

I was there with my wife as she gave birth to one of our children (something I recommend to all fathers) and saw her even before her mother did.  That child is now a critical care nurse, and I have told her that since I was there with her when she took her first breath, I want her to be there with me when I take my last one.  I have told stories to my children before tucking them in at night.  I have seen a little girl’s face full of sunshine and a little girl’s eyes full of laughter, felt a little girl’s arms around my neck, and heard those words that will melt any man’s heart, when a little girl says, “I love you, Daddy.”  I have held my baby grandson in my arms and watched him sleep.  How could life possibly be any better than that?

These experiences, while very special to me, are not that unique.  There are many who have traveled further, risked more, and reaped greater rewards.  Just know that when you have explored the breadth, plumbed the depths, scaled the heights, soared with eagles, felt the terror, tasted the honey, and enjoyed all in life that is wild and mysterious, joyous and fearful, foreign and new, and even the old and familiar, you will have plucked music from your heart strings and opened the door into a world that cannot be adequately described or explained to one who has not been there. The years go by, and your past becomes a treasure house of memories, to be recalled in moments of quiet reverie.  

Now maybe I am just an incurable romantic, but it has been quite a ride . . . and no, not for anything on this green Earth, would I trade my “old age” . . . for your youth.

[miscmuseodd]

Rant to an on-line audio book service

Here is a note I sent to a certain on-line audio book service that my daughter got for me, but which I was totally unable to use.  I am finding Tumblr almost equally insufferable, so this is likely my last post.

First of all, I don't find any fault with your service representative, because she did the best she could with an irascible and out-of-sorts customer.  The problem with your program for listening to audio books is that it is unduly complicated and very frustrating to use, and your website only exacerbates the problem and makes it worse, which is a characteristic shared by most other websites.  Let me just give you a few of my thoughts on the subject of computers, the digital world they attempt to make available to us, and internet savvy in general.

I am pushing 80 years old and am of the wrong generation to understand computers, nor do I want to understand them, and despite several decades of owning and using one, I am unable to do more than barely make my word processor work and do some very basic “web surfing,” which is an archaic term referring to the act of searching the internet for random bits of useless information.  Graphics are absolutely beyond my ken.  I am typing this on a computer I do know how to use, but I cannot come near to accessing all the things it will do.  Nor do I care to.  True computer literacy requires attention to detail that I do not have and do not want.

I think people who are computer experts are probably idiot savants; those people who, if you give them a date like October 3rd, 1457, they can tell you right off the top of their head that it was a Thursday, or whatever day it was; I’m not an idiot savant, so I don’t know.  But I’m of the mind that if Columbus had had to use a computer to get funding from Queen Isabella for his trip, he never would have found the New World. Now mind you, in years gone by I used to fly aircraft as pilot in command, I used to teach electronics and nuclear instrumentation, and MENSA, the high IQ society, saw fit to accept me as a member, so I know perfectly well that I am not stupid.  But something has evidently snapped in my brain because my interest in most technological things has sunk down somewhere below the seventh level of Hell, and to where even Danté would fear to go.

Computer programs and online systems are touted as being “so user-friendly,” but I have yet to meet one that is.  The documentation and well-meaning instructions from people who seem to know what they are doing all assume knowledge I do not have, and the HELP files either do not address whatever problem I am having, or they do so in a language I cannot understand.  They do this by using words I generally do understand, along with reasonable grammar, but somehow manage to string them together into sentences that convey no meaning whatsoever.  I could sit up all night and not be able to think up some of the drivel I have heard and read on how to do this or that on some wazoo computer program that is supposed to simplify my life and make whatever it is so much more trouble free and uncomplicated.  And people have the gall to say, “It’s so easy!  Just a couple of clicks and there you are!”  What about flying an F-15, is that easy?  It must be; people do it every day.  They even land them on aircraft carriers in the dark, and when it’s pouring down rain to boot.  How easy is that?  Well, once you learn all the secret incantations, of course it’s easy!

Think of how photography was done in the 1860's, with all its chemicals that had to be mixed up on the spot and spread on a glass plate, then the photographer had to get under a hood and hold up a tray of magnesium flash powder to provide sufficient light for the photo, and so on.  Now compare that with the latest model point-and-shoot camera where all you have to do is aim it and push a button.  In my humble opinion, computers are still where photography was in the 1860's, and user-friendliness must be at least a century away - I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime.

My wife and kids tell me I’m just old fashioned and I guess I am.  I also refuse to use the self-checkout line at the grocery store.  Now I don’t really expect you to make your program and website any easier to use, and one day the self-checkout line at the grocery store will be the only option that is available.  But then one day I’ll be gone and it won’t matter anymore, so pardon the tirade of a stubborn old man who would rather things didn’t change.  I’ll just sit here by the fireplace with a real honest-to-God paper and ink book and a glass of wine, and one of my children or grandchildren can go to the grocery store for me so I won’t have to suffer through the self-checkout line.  I will not know what is going on with your website and listening program, nor will I care, because I can buy all the paper and ink books I want and get audio books on CD's from the local library for free without turning on a computer.

I hope you enjoyed reading my little rant, and perhaps it will provide a chuckle or two when you share it with your colleagues.  Just keep in mind that when you get to be 80 years old there will be something for you to rant about too - it comes with the territory.  Have a nice day.

[miscmuseodd]

Machu Picchu

In December of 2010, my wife and I went to Peru and spent some time at Machu Picchu, which is truly one of those places you need to see before you die.  It is situated on a ridge above the Urubamba River, almost nine thousand feet above sea level, and photographs absolutely do not do it justice.  The ambiance and mood of the place as you stand there in the middle of it, where you can see it and sense it and feel it all around you, has a mystical and overwhelming effect and produces a deep heart-felt impression that you cannot get from any description, photo, or video, no matter how well done.  

This ancient ruin is believed to have been built in the mid-1400s and abandoned for unknown reasons a century later.  Some of the local people have always known about it, but the colonial Spanish never did, and the rest of the world only became aware of it when Hiram Bingham stumbled onto it in 1911.  In his case it was, “I was looking for something else when I found it.”  

In the years since, we’ve talked about going back for another visit, but this time, instead of taking the train from Cuzco like we did last time, we want to hike the Inca trail.  You have to make reservations to do that, and you are not permitted to do it on your own. Quechua Indian guides must accompany all hikers and they transport all the gear, leaving hikers to carry nothing but perhaps a water bottle.  These guides have spent their entire lives at altitude high in the Andes, they are acclimated to the thin air up there, and even loaded down with rucksacks full of gear they can flit up the trail easier and faster than you can.  There are varying lengths of the trail that can be hiked, each taking several days and ending up at the mountain citadel of Machu Picchu.  That would be a grand way to see it next time.

 Machu Picchu

 High in the Andes, on to Machu Picchu,

So far above the clouds and near the stars;

We’re climbing further up the Inca Trail,

Enraptured, captivated, and enthralled.

The closely fitted stones in all the ramparts,

With not one drop of mortar in between,

Challenge all our modern understanding

Of cultures more ingenious than they seem.

It is a place of wonder and renown,

It is a place that stirs your secret soul,

It is a place that takes your breath away,

And speaks to you of splendor centuries old.

Lost ancient mysteries echo in my bones,

As ancient voices weep . . .  from all these stones.

[miscmuseodd]

Miscellaneous Musings

Some years ago I was the “scribe” for one of the Hashes that met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and wrote a weekly article for their newsletter, “The Footprint.”  It was an enjoyable and rewarding experience, and prompted an awakening of my interest writing essays and poetry.  Whether such will work here or not remains to be seen, but I thought I’d give it a shot.  Stay tuned while I figure out what to do next.