Not my son

Arrested in my workday by blue eyes staring earnestly up at me, as if to say
"I'm not your son anymore."
Those eyes are right, that straight line mouth almost smiling tells a grim truth:
That is not my son.
He was my son; my hand knew the curve of that head, the soft of those cheeks, gripped the impossibly
Tiny bones of that hand when crossing streets, but only for a time.
That boy was left behind by a mere two years and now I only see that face
pressed between sheets of glass, static, but holding in its stillness
all the vivacious energy that nearly pushed him out of the narrow frame,
propelling his legs up that grassy hill
to where he stands now, only slightly older but much taller, leaner.
Coming years hold a thousand unspoken goodbyes as each night
I kiss my child to bed and wake to find standing over me a new boy.

Connecting

In high school, my best friend moved to Las Vegas. We kept in touch for the rest of our high school years primarily through writing letters. Long letters where we played with type faces and colors and reveled in the glories of late 90's word processors. Who knows what I wrote about, probably just what I was up to those days, what I had read, who I had hung out with, what movies I had seen, and the like. It didn't matter, we were just keeping in touch.

I think we both had email accounts, though I don't clearly remember when I took that step, nor what my first email address actually was (my oldest email account now only dates back as far as 2004, when I returned from two years' missionary service in Italy). If I could somehow recover that high school email inbox, I would find the skeletons of those impossibly long forwarded email surveys, jokes still in circulation on new platforms, and other indications that my friends and I were riding the wave of this exciting channel of communication in the typical fashion for people in our generation.

I further connected with my friends via ICQ, with its colorful flowers and status indicators, all while playing freecell and listening to stolen MP3's on winamp. The freecell and the music were really just to keep my hands busy and to shut out other distractions while sending and receiving chats from my friends. I even vaguely remember having my own domain on angelfire, though the content and time frame of that site are even more lost to me than the origins of my email. After all, this was my internet infancy.

I graduated high school and went to college 10 hours away in eastern Idaho. Email became not just a secondary source of contact with my friends who stayed in Washington, but my primary one. To send and receive email, I would walk across the small courtyard of my apartment complex to the computer room, which boasted 4 internet-connected dinosaurs. My brother and I had brought my family's outdated HP with us for word processing (and freecell of course), but I don't believe there was a single internet connection in our apartment. This would have been the fall of 2000.

I also remember banking by phone during this time in my life, checking my balance via an 800 number I dialed on the corded phone in our apartment kitchen, while my easy mac cooked in the microwave.

At the end of 2001 I left the country, and for two years I emailed my family and a few friends, wrote a few snail mail letters, and called home about 3 times. I also used a film camera--not because digital cameras were not around, but because they were so expensive that it would have been difficult to replace one in case of loss. In retrospect, I'm glad I have the film negatives of my time in Italy as the miniscule digital images that I would have brought home with me would hardly have translated into quality prints.

When I got home in 2003, I got a laptop for Christmas, a now clunky Dell Inspiron 1500, which probably weighed at least 20 pounds. It had a 30 GB hard drive, which sounded impressively expansive, considering during my high school years, my Dad had allotted each of us kids with a 100 MB ZIP disk  for storing our personal files. I went back to school and could now email from my apartment, or even from the wireless network available on campus.

Email and Windows Instant Messenger were my main modes of online communication. I still have the chat archives in which the blossoming friendship with my future wife has been preserved. My children may eventually cherish those archives the way many regard bundles of dusty love letters written by their grandparents. We married in 2005 and continued emailing our families and friends updates about our married lives.

In April of 2007, we had our first son. I emailed a couple of pictures of him to my closest friends and old roommates.

Five months later, we "joined the bandwagon" and started our own family blog. It made sense: why send emails to everyone when you could create one update and invite everyone to catch up that way? Notice the shift from what were primarily personal modes of communication to a more public, one-size-fits-all-audiences genre. Traci did most of the posting in the early days, but I contributed, and I directed my friends there to "keep in touch," or at least, to keep tabs.

Maybe the problem with blogging was (is) that it was (is) so one way. You put a post up there and your audience engages with it very passively. There is the option to comment, but what a hassle, especially when you have to prove you are not a robot. You really have to want to leave a comment, and there is next to no obligation to do so. Eventually, instead of sending a targeted email to a friend, you are posting a story and pictures on a wall that you don't know if anyone is even looking at anymore.

I caved to the mounting pressure in early 2009 and felt like something of a latecomer to Facebook. Traci joined before me. Our second child had just been born. The joy of reconnecting! Finding old friends from multiple eras of my life--high school, mission, college--whose email addresses had been lost to me, or which I had never bothered to collect. Where blogging felt like a painted wall facing a void, this felt more like a room with a circle of chairs.

One key lesson I learned about using facebook: you have to interact with people to have people interact with you. The temptation to just be a fly on the wall, endlessly scrolling, never clicking or commenting, results in an empty notifications bar. So you have to like things, you have to leave comments, and you have to add your own updates.

Three years later, as Facebook's algorithms determine more and more of what and who I connect with, as advertisements continue to creep in, it all gets to feeling so hollow. It love to see pictures, to read status updates, to follow life events, to know what friends are thinking and doing, to read and share interesting articles, but it still feels empty.

It starts feeling like we are talking to the empty air, casting a status update or a picture out into the middle of the room and waiting for someone to grab onto it. You've got to have good enough bait to get a bite in their news feed, that endless list of hooks and lures. I start to discover that having someone on your friends list is not the same as having a real friend. Genuine human connection comes from one-on-one contact, which most modern social platforms discourage because they are too archaic, too reminiscent of the email or letter-writing days.

Maybe, no matter the medium, we've only been talking about ourselves the whole time, but something changes when you have an audience of just one person.

Blogs are fading out, but I keep posting there. Facebook growing obnoxious, and I am reluctant to try newer forms, which experience leads me to expect to be less and less authentic. I'm getting to feel like writing letters again, but how many relationships do I even have that could bear such a burden?

Winter

You have to know how to love winter. Much like you have to know how to love summer, but few people think about that. Precautions like sunscreen, light clothes, and afternoons at the beach or the pool seem to come naturally. But winter seems almost universally loathed.
You have to learn how to love the cold, or at least how to bear it, as one bears the 100 degree temperatures of summer. A fireplace, a heater, a heavy blanket--if you think about it, we have more protections from cold than from heat. A good coat, gloves, hat, ear-muffs. Thermal underwear. Hot cocoa. You can grow to love these things. Then, fully equipped, to love walking out in the frozen air and even find it healing.
What is not to love about a blue-sky day with the late-rising sun creating a brighter-than-usual morning thanks to the whiteness of the world and the thinness of the air? White mountains, white fields, white houses, white trees. Sparkling, crisp air. Watch your own breath rise from your mouth and marvel at your own internal locomotive, that coal-burning fire within.
You can learn to love the winter, love the cold, and embrace the early dark. To open your eyes on a frosted morning with joy and peace that no other season provides.
Winter is quiet. Winter is lucid. Winter is peace.

Toy airplanes

They float, drifting through any color sky, from pale morning blue to December afternoon gray. They are noiseless, at least through my windshield. Through the windows at the office I can sometimes hear a low, unobtrusive rumbling reaching me from what seems like the wrong direction. Something about the way they move, like bubbles, or like puffs from a dandelion, compels me to watch. I can't look away as the tiny shape crawls across the blank sky and eventually vanishes behind a mountain, or beyond the frame of my window.
It was evening a week ago that I saw one lifting from an air field some miles ahead of me. It climbed silently up over the lake whose surface threw a reflection of the sky, of the hills beyond. They are supposed to be fast, but they always seem so slow looking from the ground with a craned neck, eyes squinting, flattened hand standing up on my brows. The color of bone, or of tooth, they seem to hang impossibly long in space.

We own the Bison

I wonder if they know they are publicly-owned, those American
Bison roaming and grazing this hump of earth stranded
in a lake of salt.

"Don't grow sentimental over the seven," the director spat,
"The animals are worthless - there isn't worse meat
on earth to eat."

Enormous, shaggy, drifting nomads hoisting heads big
as car tires; dark glossy eyes peering below curls. Why
would we eat them?

Pencil Sharpener

It hung at the front of the class beside the blackboard, which was usually green or blue. A heavy metal foot anchored to the wall an oval casing, graced with a metal dial of holes, each waiting its turn to be rotated over the round black eye that stared a line paralell to the wall all the way to the teacher's desk. Within that thin casing, two twisted horrors lurked, bound together and turned by a crank. Every child feared those gears, picturing their own finger inserting that channel where it was chewed, and turned to pulp among the piles of shavings.
Between lectures, you could cross the carpet and insert your pencil, and turn that crank, interrupting the silence with the grinding of those gears. You'd pull back a precise point, gleaming beneath the flourescents, needing only a quick puff from your lips to remove the chaff. The newly crisp line on your paper would bring a satisfied smile to your face, well worth braving the ominous sharpener's stare.
Years of school, and lots of practice, bring with them the hubris of ink. Blues, blacks, reds stand out more boldly and more permanently on the page. These marks cannot be erased, and so we believe they needn't be. And if not a pen, the insubstantial media of 1's and 0's, mediated by the keyboard that occupies the primary work space. The printer translates those tappings with its crisp laser, shooting out sheets of paper hot off the custom press. At the very least, the pencils we use are now mechanical, with tiny sticks of .5 graphite, ready at the click of the eraser.
Another childhood terror diminishes, becomes obsolete. If you hunt around your office, you'll find the token, grudging presence of their electric counterparts, sitting for the most part on some table in a room down the hall from your desk, ready to growl your old fashioned PaperMate down to a fine point and reinvoke that ghost of the past.

Leftie

A plump, generously-glazed donut occupied my dominant right hand this morning when I sat down at my desk. It didn't take long to realize I'd have to transfer the donut to my left hand and lick off a fair amount of residual sugar in order to operate my mouse. It seemed a lot easier to reach across with my left and work the mouse that way until the donut was gone.
That maneuver got old quickly, so on a whim, I pulled the mouse to the other side of my keyboard, remembering even in the act that my dad had made the artificial switch to left-moused-ness years ago. So many years ago that he may have switched back by now, I'm not sure. I didn't make too big a deal of this: I am coming to grips with the increasing similarities I see between myself and my father. It comes as no surprise that the monotony of the office would eventually lead me down the same paths. I am willing to bet that somewhere around 80% of all office workers have toyed with left-moused-ness at some point in there inauspicious careers.
One of my first left-handed actions was to open up the Control Panel and invert the buttons on the mouse so my pointer finger was still performing primary functions while my middle finger would be in charge of secondary functions, or "right-clicking" with the left button. This of course sets off the buzzer, "Wait, why is it called right-clicking if at least 10% of the population may be using the mouse with their left hands? that's going to mess me up all day..."
It does mess me up all day.
It takes a couple of hours before I am back in the control panel looking for a way to flip the cursor so that it is pointing to the right instead of to the left, which is a bit disorienting to me. Since the mouse is on the left of the screen, it feels like the pointer should be coming from that side. I look through all the menus in the mouse control box and can't find such an option.
One of my coworkers passes by my desk.
"Hey Robert, you're left-handed aren't you?"
"Yes, I am."
"I thought so. Do you use your mouse with your right hand or your left?"
"I use it right-handed. I mean, when I first encountered computers, the mouse was always on the right side of the keyboard. It wasn't like a motor skill that I'd developed up to that point, so I don't think it was any different than learning to use a mouse with my left hand would have been."
"Huh, I never thought of that."
"Yeah, I was actually just barely listening to a podcast about left-handedness. You must have felt some left-hand vibes coming across the wall. I don't really think there are very many scenarios where it really matters which hand you use, you know?"
He's probably right.
My left hand my be a bit more dexterous than the left hands of my other right-handed peers, owing to my long years of piano lessons, saxophone lessons, and even experimentation with the guitar, all of which require a fair amount of fine motor control in both hands. I remember that Jimi Hendrix - or was it Carlos Santana? Or both? - learned to play the guitar backwards because he was left-handed.
Around lunch time, I realize my left forearm is a little sore. I never would have considered pushing a mouse around for hours a day to be strenuous, but I'm feeling some admittedly minor effects even in my upper arm. "Maybe this will help ease that knot in my shoulder," I think to myself. Of course it will - changing hands changes my entire posture. My left arm is not accustomed to resting on the desk the way my right arm is.
Eight hours go by and I don't notice a dramatic increase in my left-mousing skills. My speed is still probably around half as quick, and I feel like I pick the mouse up way more than I did with my right hand. I can't figure out which finger I'm supposed to use on the scrolling wheel in the middle of the mouse My right hand is not a team player on the keyboard, making all those little contributory keystrokes that are all but unconscious with my left hand (hey, ctrl+z, ctrl+x, ctrl+c, ctrl+v -- they are all in the lower left corner of the keyboard, much easier to pull off with the left hand). If the mouse is the steering wheel of this operation, than the keyboard makes up the gear shift, the pedals, turn signals, wiper blades, headlights, and all those other functions of driving that don't get as much credit as they're due.
Miniscule observations like these don't mean much on their own, but taken together, they are just another example of the steamrolling of a group of people because of the ignorance or inconsideration of the majority. With handedness, the differences amount to trivial inconveniences and irritations. With other factors that contribute to diversity and differentiate one person from another - sightedness, religion, culture, upbringing - those differences still exist, and try as I might, I will never fully appreciate what another individual experiences.