Archives for August 2017

Touching Lives
I think that touching another person’s life comes with responsibility but I am not sure how far it extends. As a teacher, you agree that you are going to touch the lives of others. Does a teacher have responsibility for the effects of their touches?
Suppose I taught someone that despised the very core of the principles for which I stood? I became just a transmitter of technique. I became a person who showed you what worked, nothing more. I had put my skills on the market and thereby given up claim to what became of them.
This is a truth for teachers everywhere: that is what happens when your skills are on the marketplace. Maybe it is always what happens. Maybe the teacher has no responsibility for the lessons taught. In quiet moments of reflection, do teachers believe that?
I taught so many young people. Does each come with a responsibility? Even the ones that I cannot remember? Maybe especially those.
I have made touching lives my faith, but not my religion. I feel the tendrils of my spirit reach out to those that I have touched. And I am not sure what to do with that information either. The people in my life might tell you that I gave my best to my students and some may even say that they resent not having more of me. I just know that I was about touching lives.
One way to learn is to look at those who have touched my life. To what extent do I hold them responsible for who I am and have been? The pat answer is to say that we are all responsible for our own lives.
As a somewhat ironic aside, my teacher Allen once read in a class the following: “There comes a time in a man’s life when he is responsible for even the look on his face.” My memory says that he attributed it to Abraham Lincoln. That does not seem to be the case. I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent trying to find the context and author of this line. Does my teacher share responsibility with my memory for this unanswered question?
My life has been touched by so many. Some were knowledgeable of the touches, some were unconscious and some just did not care about the effects of their influence. Some tell themselves that they just do not remember. We tend to remember that which is important to us. We tend to rework our memories, but they seem to sprout from the seeds of having been touched.
A difficult lesson is to learn that the touch of kindness must be its own reward. We tend to want something back, but this need often leads to disappointment. My mom was a generous woman but she needed to feel the gratitude of others for what she had to give. She gave gratitude readily and was severely challenged to understand why others did not.
The converse of that is when the recipient of touch needs to express gratitude and the giver is not comfortable with the acceptance of it. Leonard Cohen writes “I couldn’t feel so I learned to touch.” When does touch cross over into use? I think that use may need to be conscious.
It is not unlike when a tactic becomes a manipulation. Tossing a question in a class and then waiting is a tactic. Steering a student to where you have decided that you want to go is a manipulation. Use and manipulations are words that come, in this context, with baggage. There must not always be negativity attached to the baggage, but there is responsibility. Responsibility often feels like baggage.
Being touched by someone else’s life is not always a positive experience. The exchange of touch usually requires a degree of faith and sometimes faith is broken, sometimes faith never existed. Sometimes what was created was the illusion of faith.
Sometimes we are touched by a leader or an author or even a celebrity, but are these vicarious touches real? Do they come with any responsibility on the part of the participants?
Sometimes we are blind to circumstances but we touch anyway. I have made mistakes in touching, but I refuse to just lay them aside. Perhaps that is hubris, or maybe a blending of religious code that stretches across three related faiths. I am responsible for those I have touched.
Touching someone’s life is sometimes an unwelcome gesture. I knew this man named David. I was in college and he was corporate in a family business of financiers. I needed a place to work. My girlfriend worked there. He was married with a child but he and my girlfriend had been lovers.
The dynamics of that example of touching lives was complex and profound and stupid and ultimately destructive. For my part, I planted seeds of rebellion. It was a finance company and I was hired to talk money out of people who had fallen arears. I was good at it. I had done it before.
My girlfriend worked the desk and payments and David managed the company that was owned by his family. I was still able to muster my skills of persuasion with style in a way that extracting payments from delinquent accounts gave me a sense of satisfaction. I could touch them with my language. My goal was for them to send payments. Most of them did, but there were some who couldn’t.
Her name was Carrie. She was an older woman whose husband had procured a one thousand dollar loan and then died. Carrie never saw the money. She was struggling to raise children on her own. But I used my ability to touch lives and got into her head. She took my calls. She would send five dollars every other month while the interest had more than topped out at the $1700 limit then limited by law. The five dollars would do absolutely nothing towards reducing the debt.
One afternoon I refused to call her. I told David that I just wanted him to lose the account. He refused and directed me to call. I refused and was fired.
I knew that I had touched Carrie’s life and David’s life in ways that were selfish. I was always just trying to get what I wanted. The truth is that it may always be that way and the trick is refining what it is that you want.
It is about scales I suppose but you have to be able to read them. Have you helped more than you hurt? Do you truly know when you have helped or hurt?
I do not pray in the conventional sense, but I pray for the lives that I have touched. My prayers are simple and honest. They come out in the form of hopes. For a person like myself, have hopes replaced prayer?
Have I learned about the nature of touching lives? Was it totally silly to have tried to touch them all? Maybe at best it was naïve. Touch must be selective. Touch is as much a responsibility as it is a gift.
Early on my lovers wanted me to write about them. Later, that changed and they begged me to stop. Other people’s vision is often not flattering. And the early requests were for flattery and confirmation of feelings expressed in intimate times. Intimacy is a key component of touching lives. Intimacy walks a winding path. Is it only strange to me that the sung word “lives” often sounds like “lies” to me? Sometimes a listen again and again, wondering if it is lives of lies that are touching me. Sometimes the distinction between them blurs. Lives and lies both have a way of accomplishing that.
I touch in part because I am touched. We are all touched by each other’s lives and actions and in my silent moments I pray that we have been touched by each other’s words.

The word gesture dates back to the 15th century, but its origins are much deeper. An early experience with the concept was to read that a raised, open hand demonstrated that it carried no weapons. The concept of gestures is complex in meaning and simple in execution. They can be casual, intimate, meaningful, false, studied, and sometimes missed.
Successful gesture requires recognition. They are acts of communication. I am not sure if they can be solitary. Can you make a gesture to yourself? People often say that they are treating themselves or punishing themselves. Perhaps suicide is the ultimate internal gesture, but perhaps it too is a gesture to others.
Recognition is subjective. One message can be sent and another received. Communication of gesture is a risky process.
Do people reflect upon the gestures that they have made in their lives? Perhaps that is only true if they reflect, but I believe that everyone lives, in part, through memory and memories. I wonder which gestures have been most important in my life.
Sometimes I need to be told that I have made a gesture or that one has been made to me. Sometimes it isn’t important that I know because the gesture has already been communicated. I’m not good at a study of my own gestures. I sometimes miss those that have been made towards me.
In meetings, I used to take off my glasses and clean them before responding. It is a studied gesture that felt right at the time. When I am told that it is studied, I was genuinely surprised. I shouldn’t be. Can a gesture be studied if it is unconscious or only partially conscious? Upon reflection I think that cleaning my glasses was a gesture that communicated that I wished to be clear. Maybe I was just buying time.
I had that habit of rolling a piece of chalk between my hands and listening to the way that it clicked against my rings. It was a strategic, classroom pause while I let a question sink in. The chalk rolling was instinctive. Perhaps there is such a thing as an instinctive gesture that is different from covering your head if you are about to be hit; different from instinctive bodily response.
Animals are far more adroit at communicating through gesture. In a dispute between many mammals, a show of surrender is enough. But show your neck to a shark and it is more an invitation than a withdrawal. Run from a predator and you will be ended. If one stands one’s ground in these circumstances, survival is more likely. Fight or flight is hardwired into us all and is best expressed through gesture.
Unconscious gestures seem to be an internal strategy. They may be a more comprehensive expression of who a person is. A more encompassing view of the totality of a human being may be their gestures. Maybe the aphorism “actions speak louder than words” is meant to include gestures. Is there a hierarchy to them? It seems like there would be, but I am not sure what it is. I am not at all sure that studied gestures rise above the gravity of unconscious gestures.
Is there a significant difference between a gesture and a habit? Does the ritualistic nature of a habit make it something less?
Each morning, I begin my day by giving my dog Stella her meds and then her breakfast after letting her out after the long night’s wait. I don’t talk much at all, but I touch her. Then I water the plants and I do talk to them as I check the dryness of their soil and the health of their leaves. I believe that plants sense these acts of husbandry as gestures of good feeling, gestures of attention.
After that I do mouth care, water-pic, floss and brushing. This is definitely a habit. I grab my habitual bottle of water and sit at my computer to view, in the same pattern, the websites into which I daily check. I know that what I do with Stella and with the plants is a conscious gesture and I believe that the other stuff is habit.
Some gestures result in a wellspring of emotion. When a person reaches out for another’s hand and that hand is accepted, a myriad of possibilities blossom. When, after cutting you off and hearing your complaining honk, the driver in the car in front of you reaches out the window and raises only a middle finger, there is a rush of anger caused by insult. Each are gestures of communication and each transmit without the need for words. They are both significant gestures.
Declining an invitation without significant cause is also a gesture. Saying no because a member of your family is ill and needs care is far different from saying, “No, I’m just not feeling the need.” The result is not the same. Invitation comes with a certain sense of responsibility.
People have developed a language of gesture that is both complex and meaningful. Asking for a favor and having it declined without real, mitigating circumstances is a profound rejection. A meaningful offer of unsolicited help is different. Accepted, it creates a new kind of bond. Rejection creates a wall and sets boundaries that may have not before been fully realized.
Gestures follow us. They define us on multiple levels. They are intrinsic to who we are and may become. They also help to define who we aren’t and will not become.
Repeated gestures are a bit more like habits. It is harder to discover their significance. There is an expectation that reduces the significance of the gesture. Perhaps significant gestures require an element of the unexpected, of surprise.
Is it the sometimes vague nature of gestures that provides them with multiple meanings? Sometimes it seems so very clear, one gets flipped the bird. Sometimes they are served on a menu of complexity.
A salute is a profound gesture. So is a smile. The click on the other end of the phone is a culminating gesture. Now, defriending a person on social media has joined that group.
We look for and expect certain gestures from people in public life. When they come, we often feel bonded or alienated. Gestures can be polarizing.
We easily title something a gesture without being sure what it means. History does not seem to be capable of making gestures, they are acts of the living.
I think that I’m writing this to learn more about the nature of gestures. Perhaps it is my gesture to a form of communication that I sometimes struggle to master. I hope that it engenders greater questions or understanding for those who read it. It is my gesture.

Working with my Hands
I admire people who know how to work with their hands. Working with your hands is a different kind of intelligence. It is not one that comes naturally to me. The genesis of this was a decision that my father made. Because I only got to see him once a week, he took me to work with him most of the time. My dad fixed pool tables and juke boxes and pinball machines. He would open the back of a pinball machine and miles of wires would sprout. I was both fascinated and intimidated by his knowledge of where these wires went and what they did. I wanted to learn about the jukeboxes and pool tables as well.
My dad refused to teach me one thing about any of these machines. My job was to hold the flashlight or fetch the tool. He taught me to play pool and helped to teach me to love music, but he never taught me anything having to do with repair. It was a conscious refusal. He said, “I don’t want you to end up like me; learn to work with your brain.”
My hand eye coordination was very good. I could have learned. My dad said no. In one of our endless conversations, riding alone in the car, either transporting me or going from one job to the other, he told me that his dream was to have become a doctor. It was one of the few times that I saw tears in his eyes. “You’ll be better off learning to work with your brain.” That was what he said and I did not question it. Questioning my father about something like this was not a smart move.
My ability to work with my hands was manifested through sports. I was an ok pool player, except that I had glasses that I did not wish to wear. Glasses were not cool where and when I grew up. That did not translate into table tennis and I was a natural. It did not translate into football, and I showed talent there as well.
What I did very well was read and I knew how to talk. When my dad was being mean, he would say that I knew how to bullshit. That word stung like very few others. It made me feel inferior. At the same time that he encouraged me to be this way, it felt like he mocked me for it.
I was about to turn sixteen, and my dad got me my first fulltime, summer job. I would be helping to install aluminum siding. One of his friends had hired me. Two weeks into the job, I had to leave. I had flunked Latin and Geometry and would be required to attend summer school. My dad was incredulous. “If you did not pass these subjects, it was because you chose to fail, and now your failure is embarrassing to me. Don’t embarrass me again.”
I had hated Latin and Geometry. I had failed on purpose, but I did not understand that my failure would embarrass my dad. It appeared that the decision to rely on my brain had been a bad bet and my dad hated bad bets.
When young, I was pretty strong. I ripped the front a house away with a crowbar. I have dug ditches that were four feet deep. I enjoyed the labor. But there is a difference between brawn and working with your hands.
Working with my hands has always been elusive. I know how to take things apart but I am less successful at putting them back together. I always doubted that I took them apart correctly. Early on, that was particularly true of clocks. Later, there were other things. I did have brawn but I lacked skill in working with my hands.
That changed when I taught myself how to refinish furniture. I had a house filed with old furniture and I had the energy and need to refinish it. I stripped it and then sanded so late into the night that neighbors called and pleaded with my wife that I stop. I did, but the next day I was at it again, early in the morning. I stripped and sanded and discovered the magic of polyurethane. More than thirty years later, I have refinished almost each and every piece of wooden furniture in our home.
The sanding brought me comfort. It was like an unveiling. There were new worlds revealed from underneath the finishes laid on the wood. I could see visual progress each time I worked with the wood. I was finally working with my hands. I wore masks and goggles and gloves. I was relentless. Refinishing furniture became a love.
I worked with my hands in my gardens. There was the brawn of mowing the grass, both acres. My dog Keats would help me. He would sit just aside from the last pass of the mower and then move back just enough for the next pass. But in my gardens, it was both working with my hands and my brawn.
Working with your hands includes using your eyes in particular ways. It includes knowledge from your fingertips. Is the soil dry? Is the plant happy? Have you rooted out the aggressive, indigenous plants that tend to choke off what you wish to nourish?
There is that sense of tactile enjoyment when one works with hands. It is not unlike that sense of tactile enjoyment that comes from love-making. Knowledge and experience educate touch. Leonard Cohen wrote, “I couldn’t feel so I learned to touch.” That resonates in me. I always felt that I needed to learn to touch, After all, “I didn’t come all this way to fool ya.”
It’s that next line. “There’s a blaze of light in every word…* There is a blaze of light. There is a chance at furthering understanding in every word. It is closely related to working with your hands. They are integrated languages and intelligences. I love to caress wood. I love to caress flesh. There is so much knowledge in touch. Perhaps I am still working with my hands.
I imagine the feel the touch of the keys under my fingers and I wish fervently that it caresses the words. There is doubt. Is a clumsy sentence like a stubbed toe, or is it worse? Can a clumsy sentence mark you forever? It can for a time, not unlike the mistakes that one makes when first working with your hands.
I love the tricks that people who work with their hands learn. They come with adages like “measure twice cut once.” One also learns that the proper tool is an essential component to working with your hands. Tools sometimes replace strength but they do not replace knowledge. Feeling can sometimes substitute for knowledge, when you are lucky and the world bestows its magic upon you.
Dutch elm disease decimated the elms in the area where I made my home for twenty years. There was this dead tree that eventually split off and collapsed. I had a feeling about this once piece of the tree. It had once been a very, very large and thick branch but now it was about seven feet tall and a little more than three feet around.
I hauled it back to my barn slowly and with difficulty, using brawn and a good hand truck. Where it snapped away left an image that reminded me of a horse’s head. I sanded and filed the stump for hours and days. I shaped it to enhance what I had glimpsed. Then I added coat after coat of spar wax. I filled it with rocks to stabilize it and set it on an abandoned, slate circle, septic tank cover. It aged well. Birds and squirrels nested in it. I photographed it in the sun and in the snow. I looked at it every day and felt that swell of pride that comes from making something with your hands. In its second life at the age of ten, it collapsed. It was the rocks. I would have been smarter to weight it with sand. Inspiration can take you so far but, afterwards, knowledge can take you further.
The blend of aesthetics and working with your hands is an essential balance. Knowing what looks good and how to achieve it is a blending. Maybe it is a blending of form and function but maybe it is also a blending of imagination and reality.
Cooking is working with your hands and sometimes your imagination. My wife is an experimental cook. She loves to fly by the seat of her pants. Often, I have heard her say, “It doesn’t look great but I love the taste.” She never says that with a real swell of pride. When it is also beautiful to see she exhibits that pride.
Working with my hands will always be a fine mystery for me. For others, it is how they move through the world.

My ethnicity has always been a bit of a mystery. My great grandmother was Mina C. Lowell. Yeah, those Lowells. The ones who spawned Amy and Robert and have a spot in Massachusetts named after them. I know little else. It surprises me that I know that. She was the daughter of a minister. She married with a railroad man. They came to Newark, New Jersey. She spent the rest of her life there. I am her great –grandson; that is all I truly know about my lineage. The rest is subject to conjecture. I believe that she had five children. I got to know two of them, and I was told about a third. That was my grandmother. She died many years before I was born. I knew my great aunts and I loved them but not equally. I was taught that my ethnicity was that I was an American. Does anyone ever love equally?
Ironically, I have spent the majority of my life with people who felt otherwise. They were Italian-Americans. They were Hispanic-Americans. The Jewish- Americans were a bit different in that they did not really identify geographically as much as they did culturally and religiously. I think that I partially feel this way from having been the bastard son that would never be accepted as a Jew. Then Israel told me that I actually had “the right to return” mostly because Hitler would have considered me a Jew, not an American.
This is not the way that I expected this essay to go. Here’s what happened. I have become mildly addicted to this TV program called Shark Tank. People come there, after what I imagine is a fairly extensive, screening process and pitch entrepreneurial deals to wealthy people who may have an interest to invest. It is a form of reality TV. I console myself by saying that at least it is not the housewives of anywhere, or that it does sell itself by putting “America” in its title.
So, this kid from Croatia presented an idea for LED lighting on bicycles. It was a good idea. The young man was an immigrant. One of the panelists was also a Croatian Immigrant. Instead of bargaining, he gave the young man twice as much as he asked for and then sat patiently while he listened to others before giving him an answer.
It struck me that they shared a sense of ethnic identity that governed their behavior in a way that was not clear to others. No one mentioned the connection. It occurred to me that even mentioning it might go against a kind of code.
Ethnic identity came into my head as a subject that held intrigue. I had always been on the outside of it, looking in. My first experience with ethnic identity was that I was embraced. My second was that I was rejected. It had nothing to do with me, but then again ethnic identity cannot be readily shared.
I was just a kid. I could be told that I was loved and then not loved with impunity. That is one of the natures of ethnic identity that I have discovered. Either you are in or out, but it is always about blood. For a while, I detested ethnic identity for this reason.
I felt that who you are should matter more than your lineage. Boy was I wrong. It matters all the time. It never ceases to matter and if you do not believe that you are a fool who will be raped by it mattering or not mattering. Who you are is part of your lineage. It is not totally up to you. There are other rules.
How does that saying go, “Blood is thicker than water.” I have learned that there is blood and that everything else is water. But I was not deterred. I kept pursuing something stronger than blood. I’m not sure that I had a name for it, but I am sure that I was drawn to it.
The girls at Good Counsel loved me with something that I thought was at least as strong as blood. But I know that they also have genetic identity. I know that I am not part of that. It is good that I know this. We have stretched the limits of a non-sexual, non-genetic love. It lifts my heart to hear from them.
I needed to teach and they needed to learn, it was really all about that. About that and that I loved them and they loved me back. My identity will always be in part that I loved and taught them with an open heart. It would seem that they learned and loved back. How blessed we are to have come together in that time in that way.
I’m confused about how this relates to ethnic identity. We had different ethnicities and yet a shared identity. At least it feels as if we did. I am turned away at the altar of ethnic identity because I lack credentials. Most of these students had a strong sense of Hispanic American Identity. Some felt marginalized by not having that. I’m not sure how, but feelingly I managed to identify with most all of them. I was not Hispanic any more than I was Italian. But I knew one ethnic identity from experience and I learned the other through exposure.
So the question becomes, what have I learned? I learned that devotion to blood is something that I do not feel as others do. I feel blood, I will always remember and cherish my great grandmother and her daughters. It would seem that I did not choose to further the line through blood. If I had, I suppose that ethnic identity would have become much more natural to me.
My choice for a life partner was more inspired by my soul than my bloodline. My wife speaks to my soul, the greater person that I aspire to be. Very differently, my students have always reached my soul. There is no ethnicity to this identity except that the cultural mores seem to surface again and again.
I feel as if while I am writing this that I am standing on shifting sands. I’m trying to explore the birthright of an Identity that I do not share. I am trying to create the pathways for other forms of identity. I am far afield of where I began.
Maybe, I have answered my own question. I can say that I have the ethnic identity of being American. I believe it to be an embracing identity. I feel respect for the older world cultures but I have always been an outsider to them and I always will be. It is silly for me to look for ethnic identity there, simply because it is that to which I have been exposed.
I have felt the weight of the chains on others who are part of ethnic identity. I have felt their need to pay homage and to, at the same time, break loose of these chains. That process has mostly been one that women have undergone. Not always but it seems to me mostly. Perhaps this is because women tend to have more emotional courage than men.
I feel like I no longer have an ethnic identity. Maybe elections do that but maybe it is because I do not have anything to fall back on. I can only fall back on those people that I have touched and hope that they will catch me.