Intersection

One drizzly morning, a few years ago, a very dear friend of ours was walking, with umbrella in hand and over her head, to catch a bus a couple of blocks away to go to work.  She crossed the street just across from their home where her retired husband was just cleaning up after breakfast.  As she had done many times before she walked by the same tall pine tree when suddenly at that one instant lightning struck.  The bolt of heavily charged static electricity ran from the gently swirling clouds a mile or two above to the top of the tree down its upright trunk, leaped into our friend’s umbrella, and passed through her body before dissipating into the ground.  Her death was as instantaneous as the thunderbolt.

Had she been a minute late in leaving the house or one minute sooner she would have missed the strike without even a slight injury, except perhaps for a temporary hearing loss from the deafening boom of the thunderclap as masses of air surged back to re-occupy the vacuum created by trillions and trillions of electrons jumping from the upper atmosphere to the ground below.  Her life story and that of her family would have taken a different path.  Instead, just a few days later we all gathered together to see her for the last time.  To assuage their grief, friends recalled stories of happier times to lighten the heavy burden of mourning and lift everybody’s spirits at a time of one such tragic and sudden loss.  Then invariably each conversation would turn into everyone asking, “Why”? Why, indeed?  Why didn’t the lighting strike somewhere else?  What if she decided to stay home that morning?  It is the many “could haves, should haves” that make the question so difficult to answer.

Actuaries, whose job it is to assess risks and probabilities of these kind of events primarily for insurance companies, use science and mathematics to make their predictions, in terms ordinary people would not delve into in the normal course of their lives.  While we are asking, “why”, actuaries just know it will happen though not necessarily when, how or to whom.

Are we to feel helpless against the whims of probabilities and the maddening randomness of events in our lives?  Are we caught in the utter futility or senselessness of it all and resign ourselves and sigh, “These things happen”?  These are not just difficult questions, they are impossible to answer.  We can, of course, know the when, what, for the most part how, but not why.  Even in cases where injury or death is intentionally caused by another human being, we may still not know why.

“Every doorway, every intersection has a story.”

---- Katherine Dunn

The intersection of space and time, where ever we are, where ever anything is, makes an event.  In the universe that we know, the very one that we have, nothing ever stays put.  So, as every moment passes, intersections happen as time and space collide whether we are aware of it or not. Something is always happening whether one sits motionless in a darkened room waiting for dawn to break, or when one is hurrying up to catch the last train, or when a mother is not able to sleep until her two teenage daughters come home from the movies.  Actuaries can run all the algorithms in the world but they will not read the thoughts that go through in a woman’s head as she contemplates this morning’s visit to her doctor about that lump in her breast as she prepares herself on that one dark morning waiting but not wanting for the sun to come up; or the working single mom who had to work so late almost every night but catching that train is the difference between money spent on a cab or extra music lesson for a gifted child; or all the dreadful scenarios a mother has to go through in her head each Friday or Saturday night her daughters go out and are late for their curfew.

The lightning and our friend met at that intersection that fateful morning because she had to go to work and nature had to run its course.  Every day around the world about three million lightning strikes occur. Several millions of people go to work – a good many of them toil in the fields and open spaces in good and bad weather.  Millions of children go to school, only a fraction of them on school buses while a vast majority go on foot.  They walk in good or bad weather.

Actuarial science and the mathematics that go along with it can run calculations on all kinds of risk conditions.  Lightning strikes are one of those entered into computer databases to calculate risks involved with lightning striking passenger planes and boats, golf courses, sporting events and community swimming pools, etc.   What it does not calculate is the philosophical equivalence of pain and grief suffered by families and community had the lightning hit a group of school children huddled together at an intersection two blocks away that same fateful morning waiting for the school bus to arrive; or the pregnant housewife who came out to retrieve the morning’s newspaper at her front yard.

One asks, “Why hadn’t that lightning hit a vacant lot instead?”

Lightning does hit more empty land and water than people, animals and property by a huge margin.  The three million lightning strikes a day around the world have a purpose.  Nitrogen makes up 78 % of the atmosphere and with every breath we take the same percentage of it, along with oxygen and carbon, goes through our respiratory system.  The nitrogen in the air though exists as a molecule of two atoms (N2) bound with a triple bond between them.  That’s a good thing because this inorganic form of nitrogen makes it usable for breathing and it is quite an inert gas.  When lightning strikes, however, the temperature of the air around the spark can go up tremendously in a fraction of a second, followed by extreme pressure as the lightning bolt pushes the surrounding air apart rapidly.  High temperature and extreme pressure developing instantaneously in such a short period of just 30 microseconds are the conditions needed to break the bonds that hold the two nitrogen atoms.  At that point single nitrogen atoms will seek and combine with hydrogen, oxygen and carbon in the air.  The process creates compounds of nitrates, ammonia and urea – vital components of fertilizer.  They’re absorbed into the ground through rain water so grass, vegetables and fruit trees can flourish.  Livestock will eat the grass; poultry will consume grain, converting some of what they ate into protein. Additionally, vegetables and fruit trees will recycle the same compounds to produce carbohydrates and other nutrients.  Legumes will have protein as well.

Our life cycle and those of every living thing is thus intertwined with the endless intersections of recycled material with time.  These recycling processes go back to the dawn of time.  Early on when life first begun whether one believes in the Creator or not the first amino acids, or at least much of them, were produced through lightning. The image of sparks coming down from the heavens was an awe inspiring spectacle that made any doubters then to think deeply about where all that power comes from and how these processes all begun. Greek mythology was one of the ways early civilization coped with the phenomenon so Zeus was invariably portrayed wielding a lightning bolt. One thing we can be certain of is that eons before man had learned to make fertilizer lightning has been doing it for the past few billion years.

The pictures of three million lightning strikes every day around the globe when fast forwarded as film makers do in time lapse photography mimic the firing of electrical signals between neurons through the synapses in our brains where billions and billions of intersections occur endlessly.  Our thought processes, how and when we make decisions, our aspirations and our dreams even as we sleep are a result of those intersecting and interconnecting  neurons firing and dissipating to no end.  In fact, our life experiences from the day we made first sense of the world around us to the day we learned to talk or ride a bike, encountered our first moral lesson, meet friends, formed relationships, etc., all came about from the never ending series of intersections.  Our daily mundane activities from the time we wake up to preparing and going to work, to what we talk about at work, who we go to lunch with, the trip back home, etc. make an unbroken series of intersecting collisions.

Why a gentle person like our dear friend who spoke barely above a whisper, who was so generous to her family and friends and on several occasions showed so much kindness to strangers, who took care to have a healthy lifestyle was at that fateful intersection of time and space is unanswerable.  Synapses and neurons could go on over drive to grapple with the question, but the quandary is still impossible to answer.  There are countless similar stories, of course, some even more tragic and sadder.  Then there are accidents at home and in highways, being at the wrong place at the wrong time to be a victim of crime, etc.  We can contemplate, we can struggle to keep looking for answers but that is all we can do but an explanation will always evade us.

Then there is the story of McKenzie Morgan, the 17 year old pilot from Wyoming whose plane crashed into the side of a 12,000 foot high mountain while trying to complete a solo-three-airport-qualifying flight.  Search planes looked for her all afternoon of that same day but didn’t see the wrecked plane because she flew off course from her designated flight plan.  The area where her plane crashed was so isolated that even hunters barely go there.  But on that particular day it just so happened that two hunters on horseback were there scouting for game animals when they saw the plane go down.  One went for help and the other went down to the crash site.  It could have been tragic because in those mountains at that elevation temperature would turn frigid quickly into the night and she had no warm clothing or food or fire. The events, first, that she survived the crash and second, that hunters just happened to be nearby, made for a much happier intersection.

Actually, there are far more happy intersections than there are tragic ones, just as far more lightning strikes hit empty uninhabited areas than people and property.  There are millions of air miles flown by commercial airlines every year, ribbons of intersecting and heavily traveled highways and other transportation arteries, doctors doing major surgeries, missionaries and volunteers going to dangerous places, and so on and on.  Fortunately, every night billions of people go home safely to their families and many are comforted in many places after natural disasters had struck or human conflict had taken its toll.  By an overwhelming number, there are far more positive intersections of people helping people than those who mean harm to others.  Despite the horrors of many wars, atrocities committed by ruthless rulers, calamities of plagues and natural disasters, population flourished and civilization has advanced.

The World we live in, our very existence, in fact, depend on endless moments of intersections.  There are more happy events than tragic ones. There are far more good people than evil ones.  There are far more questions we are able to answer than we can’t.  The ones we can’t may remain unanswered but perhaps those are the ones we should stop asking.

For Richer or for Poorer

What is it like to be so poor when one has absolutely nothing, when assets are down to zero? What is it like to have a billion dollars?  Or, can I imagine what is it like to be worth fifty billion?  But how can one’s life be reduced to the anonymity of the homeless, or life in a remote shack somewhere, anywhere, a forgotten patch at which there is no one else who care or anyone to care for.  That forgotten point could be in the middle of a city, under a bridge, in the seclusion of a dead end alley, but it might as well be in a forest in Guatemala or desert in Sudan, or a patch of cardboard in bustling Phnom Penh or Rio de Janeiro, or Manila.  What is it like to be so dimensionless or to be as invisible as a freckle on a tanned and wrinkled skin or when one occupies an area of nothingness?  What is it like to live in a twenty thousand square foot home and travel in your own plane?

It is difficult to imagine what it is like to have nothing.  Conversely, for the majority of the people, it is just as hard to imagine what it is like to have everything.  What is it like to wonder where the next meal will come when the last one was three days ago; on the flip side, what is it like to have everything one can ask for, underscored by a life of lavish parties and extravagant vacations, a yacht  and private jet?  To anyone who has nothing – zero – he or she can only think of an infinite number of ways to imagine what it is like to have something, or anything.  Zero to infinity is sometimes that easy to grasp.

The state of zero and infinity can sometimes be temporary.  One can even go from one to the other in a day, while for others there could be years of bliss or a very long period of utter misery.  From zero to infinity and every moment in between.  A teenage love would feel like an infinite rhapsody when a boy or girl could think of nothing else.  A romantic breakup can bring everything so infinitely joyous down to the abyss of sadness, sorrow and despair.  If love were the height of infinite euphoria, falling out of it can sometimes feel like swirling into a bottomless whirlpool of oblivion.  Infinity to zero is also that easy to understand.

How is it then that the world allows for there to be this duality of everything? There are countless places and conditions where we see why it is this or that but there is nothing that vexes our human nature than the concept of rich and poor.  When some of us go to faraway places for an exotic vacation we sometimes spoil it by second guessing why we didn’t book the higher priced hotel room with an ocean view; we wonder during flight what they serve in first class as we get our own at the economy section; why we were picked up by a crowded shuttle bus while some were whisked away in stretched limousines. Do we wonder though that the waiter in his starched white uniform smiling at us to take our order for a sumptuous lunch at the resort woke up that morning at four, leaving two sleeping children and a wife in a mildewed two bedroom apartment where his mother also lived, took a long bus ride after a hurried breakfast of bread and weak coffee, walked eight blocks more to get to work, for wages that are just barely enough to make their lives possible?  When we travel to these places we should remember to tip generously because what little the amount may mean relative to our vacation budget it could be huge enough to make life a little bit better for a family of five for a day.

When we were in Palawan, a resort island in the Philippines, our tour guide/server was a scrawny kid named O’neal.  I inquired about the name; he told me his father named him after Shaquille O’neal.  I recall as a kid that one of the young post war babies I grew up with was named Lockheed, after the fighter airplane manufacturer.  Then there is a cousin-in-law who named his eldest son Aldrin, of space faring fame.  I remember a boardinghouse mate whose name was Eisen (it was short for Eisenhower). He became a doctor.  I’d venture to say that such naming choices were a means, wishful or even wistful, to connect with what is rich, powerful, adventurous, and to a nation with technological leadership.  How is it that much of the world would look to another place from a distance and say, “That is where I and my family want to be”? Of course, we who live in that place take this for granted.  Not for any particular reason but for an awful loss of perspective – a sort of collective myopia.

While on a taxi to the airport leaving Barbados years ago (it was on company business), the driver told me that he had never left the postage-size island, all of his forty year life.  We may find that hard to imagine but I say that as many as perhaps over ninety per cent of the world’s population has never left their country of birth.  I asked the driver why or had he ever wondered what it was like to go visit another country?  He said, “I’m happy where I am and I’m not about to spoil it by finding out what I am missing”. He said further that many of his fellow “Badians” who had traveled abroad would sometimes come home a bit unhappy when they couldn’t get in Barbados what they saw were common place in another island like Puerto Rico, for example.  On the other hand, somewhere or anywhere in the U.S. a trip to Wal-Mart or Costco is considered a chore like doing the laundry or yard work.

No one wishes to be poor.  Politicians all throughout history had and continue to espouse war on poverty, and to quote Ronald Reagan, “… poverty won”, despite the billions of dollars poured into the program.  I am not about to politicize this issue.  In every civilization, from two thousand years ago to today there had always been the poor and poorest among people just as certain as there were very rich ones – all still very true today. The poor who think they have nothing must look to how infinitely vast the wealth some folks have.  Zero to infinity.  But that is not all there is, isn’t it?

One thing we must recognize is that in this world the book ends of life are the great equalizers.  We do begin with zero at birth and we are met with an infinite number of options to live our lives. A person who lived a life from austere origins, with zero chance of moving out of the project, or the shanty towns of squatter homes, or even drug ridden neighborhoods, but struggled to free himself or herself from the bondage of poverty through sheer will power and industry will have achieved an infinitely greater amount of wealth the moment he or she had enough to own a small home somewhere in a better neighborhood than someone who went to an Ivy League law school and went on to own a mansion in Beverly Hills.

 

This is all about, “Zero and Infinity”.

I contend that zero and infinity are related, or that at least there is something in common between the two.  They are the book ends of a universe we live in but I will not get into how I derived that conclusion here. In the stage we call life, the character we make of ourselves and of whom we know, care for and love, have shelf lives that fall neatly between those book ends. The book ends of our life are merely that.  It is the pages that were written in between that make up what’s between zero and infinity.  Our zero beginnings, whether born to abject destitution or wealth, for poorer or for richer, will be enriched infinitely by how well we live the one life we have.  In the end, both rich and poor will ultimately go to their final destination the same way they began.  Zero to infinity to zero.  That’s how much easier it is to comprehend.

From the idle mind wishing y’all the richness of infinite moments,

Apples and Oranges

What is it about “apples and oranges” that blunt or end discussions when someone uses comparisons to make a point? This idiom is not necessarily universal, however, because in other languages (and culture for that matter) we find variations of the same theme. It is honey and butter among the Welsh, potato and sweet potato among the Spaniards, British English says chalk and cheese but in Serbia it is grandmothers and toads but the weirdest is in Romania where they say, the grandmother and the machine gun.  The French think it is apples and pears, although the two fruits are actually the most closely related.  This is from a country that tries very hard to be different in more ways than one.  But the French artist Paul Cezanne was so preoccupied with apples and oranges that he painted the subjects obsessively compared to his other points of interest.

As a yearning naturalist wannabe (I would have been a willing deck hand on the HMS Beagle when it sailed to the Galapagos) I’ve concluded that all living things have deep seated comparative senses in all of us, even plants.  Flora and fauna are conditioned to compare. One of Darwin’s not so well known discovery was on his study of finches (species of birds).  He found out that finches in the Galapagos evolved into several branches from a single species as they adapt to changes in or availabilities of food sources in the environment they inhabited.  Beaks lengthened or shortened and even reconfigured to deal with different seeds and nuts. I try to imagine two sub species of finches perched on a branch in animated conversation - chirping and twitting, if you will. I think I know how it always ends.  One finch will inevitably invoke, “but that’s like comparing nuts and seeds”.

       Is that how biases form and begin? Finches, of course, have no choice because natural selection forced their hands, or rather their beaks to choose seeds or nuts or grasshoppers.  Birds, however, are great at comparing when choosing their mates.  The females do the choosing and that’s the reason that male birds are the ones with the most attractive and flamboyant plumage.  So when peahens pick different mates we know that’s because they do compare.  Scientists are perplexed about how they do it or even come close to deciphering what goes on in those bird brains since all the males vying for their attention all look so elegantly and daintily beautiful.  The female selective instincts must be decidedly compelling because peacocks (only males can be called that if you haven’t noticed three sentences ago) spend a lot of their resources to look magnitude-of-ten prettier than the peahens.  Keep in mind the attractive peacocks make themselves garishly visible to predators so it is with great peril as well that they stand out. But it is all worth it because their prospective mates are predisposed to compare “apples and oranges” when discussing why they pick their mates one over the other.  Actually they use the phrase as a bragging tool about their choice and a put down of the other female’s pick.  Of course, only the idle mind can come up with this conclusion, completely fraught with runaway imagination.

            So to every gentleman out there, be not so worried that you may not be the apple of her eyes. If she happens to like oranges you’d glitter like the three golden apples Hippomenes, in Greek mythology, threw to the ground to win the race against the huntress Atalanta who was the faster runner but couldn’t resist stopping and picking up the throw-down fruits. Having lost the competition, Atalanta agreed to marry Hippomenes. You see that was the deal the hard-to-get Atalanta had agreed to with her father who decreed that she marry someone. She did agree but she would only marry the man who can outrun her in a foot race. Until Hippomenes - albeit with cunning subterfuge which sometimes men are wont to do - no man could. Now you know.

            On a sweet and sour note (apples and oranges), it was Aphrodite who gave the golden apples to Hippomenes, hence, we now have the word aphrodisiac. Now you know even more (if you didn’t already). Only an idle mind can go from “apples and oranges” to finches and Hippomenes to Atalanta and aphrodisiac.

Inevitably this takes us to Atlanta, Georgia. Supposedly this southeastern city was named after Martha Atalanta Lumpkin who was the daughter of the former state governor Wilson Lumpkin.  The story goes that J. Edgar Thompson, then the chief engineer of the Georgia Railroad Co., picked the middle name of the governor’s daughter for the then bustling railroad hub, which today is a major airline hub as well.  I don’t know how one letter (“a”) got dropped to give us the current Atlanta spelling.  As a matter of fact, I also do not know how a name associated with apples was picked for this major city in a State that is actually associated with peaches. I can’t go any further.  At some point idling has to stop.

           

Crabs and Other Crushed Asians

That is a malapropism from one tourist who wrote lamenting that, “Alan just can’t eat certain foods and crushed Asians” - we all know he meant crustaceans.  Now, I’m going to savage that - to which you will promptly say, “You mean salvage, don’t you?” Yes, that’s what I’ll try to do with some of these unfortunate misspoken gems. You see if there were European cannibals traveling in Cambodia and one of them was discussing another’s dietary restriction, the sentence may make sense.  I may have savaged it after all.  But that’s the world of malapropism.

Then there was someone quoting a Loretta Lynn’s song as, “Cool Minor’s Daughter” (correctly, Coal Miner’s Daughter). That can still be explained if one were describing a baby girl whose mom is a trendy teenager.  You have a few moments to think about that one… Got it?  You see, don’t be too quick to judge if you hear someone malaproping (if this is not a word, it should be. Or consider it a neologism – just a fancy way to say, making up a new word, inventing, if you will). That’s what I like about the English language because words get made up all the time.  I’ve come to embrace it though it is not my native tongue because it is a very efficient language. That will take up more to explain so we’ll stay with malapropism, meanwhile.

Mrs. Malaprop was a character in a 1775 play by R.B. Sheridan where the character would use the wrong words that sounded the same for the meaning she intended, to humorous effect. The comedic results in that play caught on and malapropism became an English word. That’s the beauty of the English language – what took one whole sentence at the beginning of this paragraph to explain was distilled into just one word. I read that the author Sheridan came up with the name, Mrs. Malaprop, from the French “mal a propos”, meaning “poorly placed”, hence the inappropriate use of words.  Of course, two hundred years prior to that Shakespeare had already used that technique for laughs on stage when one of his characters in the play, “Much Ado about Nothing”, officer Dogberry, butchered much of his speeches.  “Dogberryism”, though not as popular as malapropism, mean the same thing today.  Archie Bunker in “All in the Family” made malapropism his natural form of speech but I couldn’t find any that can be salvaged, tried as I could.  Try salvaging, “Buy one of those battery operated transvestite radios”. Or, “Last will and tentacle…”

I’ll try to salvage a few from others.  Comedian Norm Crosby said, “Listen to the blabbing brook”, a far cry from the more soothing “bubbling brook”.  But then he could have been talking about a tall model/actress who talked too much and whose last name was Shields. You may want that one to sink in slowly…take your time.  She was at one time married to tennis star Andre Agassi and she was known for the then controversially famous line she said of her blue jeans on a TV commercial.

Here’s a challenging one, “Having one wife is called monotony”. There is only one way and that is to make this a Freudian slip spoken by a Don Juan, or a Don Giovanni in Italian.  Speaking of Italian, how about, “Michelangelo painted the Sixteenth Chapel” (Sistine Chapel is a Vatican landmark).  Well, this malapropism works if there were more than fifteen chapels in Rome (very possible) and Michelangelo was indeed a very busy painter, who took on every commission to paint all the churches around.  “He is a wolf in cheap clothing” could be describing a philanderer who buys his suits from Goodwill or budget clothing stores. “He had to use a fire distinguisher” may require a lengthy explanation but a techno-geek may have no problem with it at all.  A thermal imager can determine accurately fire temperatures, as in furnaces, remotely with an optical sensor.  So a fire distinguisher would work to describe the thermal imager as the “iron horse” worked for Native Americans in describing the locomotive when they first saw it.  No need to call the Political Correctness (PC) police on this one, please.

By the way, genuine malapropisms (not the ones scripted in plays or television) are just mere mental lapses and not any kind of mental disorder. It’s not that difficult, for example, to say, “You don’t send me flour anymore”, mildly mutilating a love song. Of course, that could also come from a baker complaining to his supplier about not getting the most important ingredient for his business. Rest assured that if you’ve committed one you are perfectly normal (however, I’m not a psychiatrist, so don’t take my word for it). Speaking of normal, it is perfectly all right to add extra to your salad as when you say, "Be sure and put some of those protons on it."  However, if you were a particle physicist it would have been the thing to do if you were looking to stabilize a mix of sub-atomic particles that had way too much electrons in it.  And speaking of electrons Yogi Berra mused that, “Texas has a lot of electrical votes”.  As with many of Yogi’s gems, it’s best to just leave them alone and just smile. But when he did say, “When you see a fork on the road, take it”, he could very well have been referring to a silver ware of value, and we should take it indeed.

So when you hear a malapropos just smile, or better still try to think of a way to salvage it.