You Never Know

I remain totally amazed at how many people have told me within the past few years that I was one of the bright lights in their life at times when I didn't know it, and could've used a penlight myself.

I posted that to my Facebook profile a few weeks ago, after I ran into a friend from college whom I hadn’t seen in over 30 years at a local theater performance. Actually, she ran into me. She said that she saw me in the audience, and figured that it had to be Keith Gatling. I’m still amazed, because looking at a picture of me from 1978 and a picture of me now, I’m not sure I’d see a resemblance, but she did, and picked me out immediately.

Anyway, we became Facebook friends, and in the subsequent correspondence I found out that I was one of the “bright lights” of her time at SU.

Wow. That was number three.

What do I mean by that? Within the past two years, two other people told me that I was a “bright light” in their lives. One was from high school and one was from elementary school. And all three times that I was being the bright light for someone else, I could’ve used a penlight myself because of how incredibly lonely I felt. This was during my “Charlie Brown” era, and I would never have guessed that I was that important to those three people. Three people who, coincidentally, I hadn’t seen in over 30 years, and had gotten back in contact with thanks to the miracle of the Internet.

And then a funny thing happened. Other people started responding to my little status update, telling how much I meant to them. Really, I didn’t post that to fish for compliments from people. I was simply commenting on how you never know who you’re influencing and who you’re important to, even when you’re feeling your worst. But still, the responses came in.

One from a college friend who said I was the best housemate she ever had, after all, who else would let her butter the kitchen table and pour beer in his spaghetti sauce (yes, you read that right). Another from a high school friend who said that she can’t think of Shakespeare without hearing the rock opera version of Macbeth that I wrote as a senior project. Wow, I didn’t know that anyone but me remembered that…and, by the way, I can still play it.

I’m well aware of the influence I’ve had on people for the past 19 years that I’ve been a teacher. But I’m still always just a little amazed at finding out what I meant to people back when I wasn’t sure that I meant anything to anyone at all.

And the point here is that you never know. You just really never know. You may be feeling the most depressed you’ve felt for months, you may feel that you don’t mean anything to people outside of your own family (and they’re contractually obligated to care about you), yet you’ve done some little thing that helped to brighten someone else’s life, something that keeps them going, against all odds, day after day. And you may not find out about until many years later.

So if you’re feeling like I was 30 years ago, just hang in there…because you never know.

Walk Him Up The Stairs

OK, I know I only put out new stuff on Tuesdays, but with the momentous news of Monday, I figured that this couldn't wait, and I really didn't want to bump what I had already written for yesterday. So here you have it; an "extra edition" as it were.

Growing up in North Jersey, we weren't far from New York City, and this meant that we could head in to Manhattan to see Broadway and Off-Broadway plays. In fact, my parents were regular theater-goers, and often brought home copies of the Playbill for the shows they had seen. But my sister and I didn't get to see a Broadway show until 1970, when they took us to see the show Purlie.

The show opens with a funeral in a black Baptist church. Now as if that weren't strange enough, it's a funeral for the most hated man in the county; Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee, who ran the plantation that the sharecroppers worked on, and despite the fact that emancipation had occurred 100 years earlier, still kept the workers in virtual slavery by the way he ran the "company store." Ol' Cap'n had done the black community a great favor by "dropping dead standing up."

But wait, there's more. This funeral was not a celebration like you would see in the Wizard of Oz, celebrating and gloating that the witch was dead. Quite the opposite, as much as every person in that church hated Ol' Cap'n's guts, the preacher talked about asking God to do the seemingly impossible, by redeeming him, and the opening number was a rousing gospel number titled Walk Him Up the Stairs. Yes, as sure as they were that Cotchipee would be frying in Hell "like a fresh-caught, fat-whiskered catfish in the skillet of the devil," the preacher goes on to say "that it would not be Christian for us to not pray even for what we know is impossible...his redemption."

So with the news that Bin Laden is finally dead, there's a large part of me that wants to join the Munchkins in singing, Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead, however, there's a much larger part of me that knows that I should be joining the people in that old church somewhere in rural Georgia, singing a rousing chorus of Walk Him Up the Stairs, and praying for what we feel is impossible.

And yet...this is no wimpy, feel-good forgiveness coming from me. You see, I believe that sometimes the cruelest thing you can do is to forgive a person; because then they're always looking over their shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop, not quite able to believe it. I'd also like to believe that meeting the people whose deaths he was responsible for, and being forgiven by them, would be almost unbearable to him. And worst of all, to have God tell him personally that he screwed it up big time...well, that's gotta hurt.

No...there are sometimes when I believe that Heaven can truly be Hell for someone, and I'm hoping that this is one of those situations.

But...I know that this isn't the right way either. I shouldn't be wanting him to be tortured by forgiveness. I should want him to be changed by it, and to truly understand the great evil he was responsible for. I know of people who've said that if Hitler made it to Heaven, then they wouldn't want to be there. But what they don't grasp is that if Hitler did indeed make it, it would be a greatly changed version of him.

So with that in mind, I'm praying for the seemingly impossible; that Bin Laden, as well as Hitler, and, of course, Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee, made it.

And I will sing Walk Him Up the Stairs!

Missing the Wedding

OK, I know the royal wedding was last week, but I’m going to write about it now anyway. Why? Because I missed most of the hoopla and hype. In fact, I missed the entire wedding itself. While other people were getting up at ungodly hours to watch Kate and Prince William tie the knot, I was nestled all snug in my bed, getting my beauty sleep. The only effect the Royal Wedding had on my life is that it resulted in my in-laws cancelling their long-planned trip to England because air fares had tripled as the airlines saw an opportunity to gouge people who wanted to be anywhere near the event (even though they would’ve had better seats in front of the telly).

Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not one of those curmudgeons who complained about all the press this wedding was getting, especially all the press it was getting when there were other, “more serious,” things going on in the world. I’ll be the first to admit that it was an event that comes along only about once in a generation.

The thing is…they weren’t talking about my generation.

That’s right, this wedding didn’t fit my demographic.

I set my clock for the wee hours of the morning and got up with my housemates to watch the “first” Royal Wedding 30 years ago, when Diana and Charles got married. This was the “fairy tale event” for my generation, when the commoner like us hit the jackpot and got to marry the prince. And everyone who was planning their own wedding, or hoped to be planning it soon, wanted to see this.

30 years later, those of us who got up early to watch it, sadly know how it all turned out in the end, and hope that a few things have been learned by everyone in the succeeding years.

But this isn’t about cynicism, or “realism,” as some people would like to think. It’s simply about my disinterest because I’ve already seen my Royal Wedding. But that doesn’t mean that I begrudge the current generation their obsession, I mean fascination, with it. As I said, this isn’t one of those things that happens every day, and Royal Weddings are known for the effect they have on weddings for generations to come. Just consider the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1840. She’s the one who started the tradition of wearing a white gown and using the music of Wagner and Mendelssohn. I wonder what new ideas will have come out of Kate and William’s wedding.

But as for those realists, those cynics, those curmudgeons, for whom it wasn’t enough to just sit quietly at home and ignore the whole thing, but who had to complain about the coverage it was getting, I think they should lighten up a bit. The people who complained that the American press was giving this more attention than was the BBC don’t understand that we don’t get to see a whole lot of pageantry here in the “colonies;” in fact that’s exactly one of the things we visit Great Britan to see. So when an event like this occurs, the American media goes after it whole hog, while the Brits, having lived with this day in and day out, tend to be a little more restrained about it. Think of the native New Yorker who has never seen the Statue of Liberty.

And let’s not forget those who complained, “Why is this wedding different from any other wedding…besides the fact it cost the taxpayers a fortune? And why do so many people care about this when there are more pressing things going on in the world?”

Well first of all, I’m pretty sure that these people wouldn’t be so snippy about their own weddings or the weddings of their children. Why do so many people care about this wedding? Because even though we don’t know the couple personally, we’ve heard about them, and have followed them in one way or another for quite some time. It may be a false intimacy, but it’s a real interest.

And as far as the issue of “more pressing” things going on in the world, I recall reading once that in Jewish tradition, when a wedding procession and a funeral procession meet at the same intersection, the wedding has precedence, while the funeral has to wait. Why? Because there’s always time for grief, but joy should be celebrated when you can.

So even though I didn’t get up early to watch the ceremony, I say to all the curmudgeons out there, “Get out of the road, you’re holding up the wedding party!”

And let’s hope that things work out a whole lot better for Kate and William than they did for William’s parents!

Struggling with Convenience

There I was 15 years ago, lying (Or is it laying? I’m never sure. Tell you what, we’ll just say that I was snuggled) comfortably in my bed, working on a brain-teaser problem from the Sunday paper. It was a problem that involved quite a bit of math, and I being too lazy and too comfortable to leave my cozy little nest to get my calculator from the next room, decided to solve the problem with the most convenient things there were: the pencil on the night table and scrap of paper from the floor.

It really would’ve taken much less time to get up out of bed, go get the calculator from the next room, come back and re-burrow myself in my comfy little nest, and then do the calculations; but the best tool for the job was inconvenient, and so instead, I struggled for a half hour with tools that weren’t quite up to the task, but happened to be right at hand. I forced myself to use this set of tools, not because they were the best ones for the job, but because they were “convenient.”

15 years later the situation hasn’t changed much. I’ll be snuggled comfortably in bed (there, I totally avoided the entire “lay/lie” problem), wanting to check my email, and rather than go downstairs to get my laptop, which I forgot to bring upstairs with me, I’ll reach for the iPod Touch sitting on the night table, and struggle with typing responses on that…because it’s “more convenient.”

You’d think I would’ve learned after all this time that maybe the most convenient tool isn’t always the best one, and that maybe it’s worth getting out of bed to go get the best tool for the job. But I haven’t. And the sad news is that I’m not alone. There are millions of other people out there who haven’t figured this out either, and who keep trying to do work on the “most convenient” tool rather than the best one.

Now, I understand about times when the “most convenient” tool is also the only one you have available. I don’t regularly schlep my laptop around with me all over the place. So when I want to take a quick note, or quickly look something up, the my handheld device is definitely the way to go. It’s the best tool at the moment, but not necessarily the best tool overall.

But there seems to be a big push among the digiterati to have all computing done on those convenient little handheld devices – even though they may not be the best tool for the job. These people believe so much in the future of handheld computing that they’re willing to ignore all the disadvantages of the devices; especially those that occur when you combine tiny keyboards with fat human fingers. They keep saying that the technology will get better, and that it’s just a matter of getting used to using the tiny devices.

I don’t know about that. I just recently moved from having a desktop and a laptop computer to having only a laptop. What made that move so seamless? The fact that the keyboard was pretty much the same size, and fat fingers weren’t an issue. I didn’t have to relearn anything. And…basically being a portable version of the desktop I’d been using for years, the laptop was still the right tool for the job. It was the full-blown computer that I could keep under my pillow, rather than having to schlep downstairs to use.

Call me silly, but I believe that for new technology to be truly useful to people, it should feel natural, and not forced. And I see too many tech-heads trying to force the latest cool thing too quickly onto a public that’s not ready for it - because that next cool thing isn't quite ready for the public. The tech-heads understand other tech-heads, but they don’t seem to understand regular everyday people, and how they use, or want to use, technology.

There’s no denying that I love my iPod Touch. It’s great as a PDA, and it’s the right tool for the job when it comes to tracking my glucose levels and teaching my eight-year-old her multiplication tables. But for other tasks, for many other tasks, I’d much rather have my laptop.

And that’s a very inconvenient truth.

A Different Reality

One of my favorite TV shows is Mythbusters, and for the first few seasons it would open up with a clip of Adam Savage saying “I reject your reality, and substitute my own.” I love that line, because it comes in handy so often. There are many times when someone else’s reality just doesn’t line up with what mine is. It’s not necessarily that their reality is wrong, but it’s different from mine.

That’s the case with Eric Deggans. In a piece he did for NPR earlier this month, he says that interracial couples on TV live in an all too perfect world, where the “elephant in the room” of their racial differences is almost never an issue. He says that he makes this observation based on his 20-odd years of experience as a black man married to a white woman.

I reject the reality of Mr Deggans…or at least I reject it as being universal. I’m also a black man with 20-odd years of experience being married to a white woman, and I can tell you that we don’t spend a whole lot of time discussing racial issues. Currently our biggest ongoing issue has been getting our eight-year-old daughter to practice piano and clarinet without whining and dragging her feet. In fact, in the almost 23 years that we’ve been married, there have been very few times when the fact that I’m black and she’s white have ever been points of contention. Not from our families, not from our friends, not from our co-workers. There may have been a few comments from strangers, but even then, if we had five bad experiences in the past 23 years, that’s saying a lot.

Of course, location probably matters a bit. I’ve lived in the Northeast all of my life, and in a college town for the past 38 years. I suppose things might be a bit different in Missisippi…or Florida, where Deggans writes from.

I think that who your friends and acquaintances are matters a lot too. If most of the people you know are fairly open-minded, then being an interracial couple isn’t going to be any more of an issue than being an Italian-Norwegian couple…and talk about the cultural differences there.

Moreover, as long as we’re talking about different realities, there are as many different realities here as there are people in relationships. Just looking at five of the white girls I’ve been involved with during the past 38 years, I can say that things have run the gamut from “Paula” who couldn’t even bring me home to meet her parents (that lasted about three weeks) to “Lisa,” whose Italian mother loved me like one of her own kids, and for six years always made a point to try to make my favorite food when I came over for dinner. Sometimes it really is that easy, and really is a non-issue.

Which brings me to my next point: as relatively easy as it was for me 30 years ago, things have changed a lot. I can tell you, from 19 years of being a teacher, that among the students and families I know, interracial relationships are no big deal. The people on the shows that Deggans complains about, and indeed the writers of these shows, reflect this new reality; they came of age in a much different era.

So, to be fair, as I’ve said before, I’m not going to reject Deggans’ reality out of hand. For surely there are people for whom his reality is their experience. Instead, I’ll just say, again, that he hasn’t considered that his reality doesn’t necessarily reflect that of the rest of us who’ve been in interracial relationships. There’s a lot of variation out there.

And that’s the reality.

Material Things

A friend of my posted on Facebook:

Children will not remember you for the material things you provided but for the feelings that you cherished them with.

I don't know. I remember the material things, and the trips. That's why I didn't want to have three, four, or more kids; I wanted to be able to do the same things with them that my parents did with me and my sister, and for them to enjoy it as much as the two of us did.

I remember the Playmobile dashboards that my sister and I each got one Christmas, and that we played together with all the time. I remember being the first family at our school to discover Lego, and introducing both Devra and Sofie to it decades later. I remember the Kenner girder and panel building sets that my father and I worked on, and was disappointed to find out that Kenner no longer exists. I've since found out that they've been revived by Bridge Street Toys. And of course, I remember something that wasn't even mine; the Magnus chord organ that my sister got for Christmas. This is what I taught myself how to play piano on, and we know how important that was.

What about the trips? We didn't venture far out of the northeast. Heck, we didn't venture far out of the NYC metropolitan area. But there was Palisades Amusement Park; the Flemington Fair (which is the closest thing New Jersey had to a state fair); three visits to the 1964-65 New York World's Fair; and a long vacation trip to Quebec, by way of Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and Montreal (which included my first pass by Syracuse, and seeing the big General Electric sign from the Thruway). There were also day trips to Bear Mountain, Gillette Castle, and Mystic Seaport.

And of course there was the beach. Unlike Jerseyans now, we didn't call it going to the shore. Our regular beach was Sandy Hook, but we also visited Lake Hopatcong, Cheesequake (which my sister and I always mispronounced as "Cheesecake"), and one visit to Cape May, which hooked me for life. Now that's the beach that the Gatlings of Syracuse have been going to for almost 25 years.

Let's not forget trips to New York (actually the St Albans section of Queens), Pittsburgh (really Braddock and Monroeville), Washington DC, and Hampton VA to visit relatives. That first three-day weekend in Hampton led to my sister and I spending the summer there a year later.

But my point, and I do have one, is that it’s not a simple choice between material things on the one hand and feelings on the other. Yes, there are far too many families where the parents try to replace affection and attention with the latest expensive gadget. I also know too many people who grew up with very little money, and seem almost perversely proud of the fact that they and their 11 loving siblings only had a rock and twig to play with…between them. They seem to believe that families with some disposable income can’t possibly be as happy as theirs.

But I think that the most fortunate people are those who, like me and my sister, grew up in families where we had both; where the material things we got and the experiences we were able to have were signs of our parents’ love, and not attempted replacements for it.

And those of us who remember, and treasure, those gifts and experiences will try to do the same for our own children.

Hmm…I guess that means it’s really time to plan that trip to Quebec with Sofie.

The Mother of Invention

No, I'm not talking about Frank Zappa.

I got a Facebook message from someone I knew in high school, asking why I didn't invent Facebook. My answer was very simple: I didn't invent it because I didn't need it.

Think about it, we tend to invent, or want to see invented, things that we see a personal need for; and I didn't have a personal need for something like Facebook. At least not from where I sat.

Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, was in a different seat, in a different world. Actually, his seat was in a world that I belonged to almost 40 years ago: that of a college student.

I don't remember what the official name of the 1974 pictorial guide to the freshman class at Syracuse University was called, but I do remember its nickname: The Pigbook, a nickname I heard it got because so many of the girls in it looked like pigs. Many other colleges had something similar, some other version of a "facebook" that was given out to all the freshmen. Back in the 70s, no one could've imagined turning the campus facebook into something you did through the school's computing systems, and definitely no one thought of connecting all the colleges, and even the whole world the same way. The technology just didn't exist. But the 21st century is a far different place than the 1970s, and now the idea behind Facebook seems like a no-brainer.

But still, it's not something that I particularly had a need to invent; because I wasn't a freshman guy trying to find out about that cute girl on page 43 anymore. Heck, the few times I actually tried to meet someone from the SU "facebook" ended up in disaster.

But there are things I would have invented, and actually did invent, because they were important to me.

First of all there's the backpack. Now I know what you're thinking. I can't possibly be taking credit for inventing something that soldiers and Boy Scouts had been using for decades before I was born. And you're right, I'm not. What I invented was using them for carrying books around in. After breaking off the handle of yet another briefcase by carrying too many books in it, I decided that I needed something that could handle all the stuff that this little geek was hauling around. So I went to the Boy Scout department at Muir's (our local department store), and got the smallest backpack I could find. After all, I wasn't going for a week-long hike, I was just carrying books and stuff around East Orange High School.

I was made fun of at first, but within 10 years everyone was using backpacks to carry their school stuff in.

Then there's the Walkman. Yes, I'm actually going to claim to have invented the Walkman...or at least to have come up with the idea behind it. I needed a way to listen to my cassette tapes on choir tour without disturbing anyone else on the bus. So I went out and bought a small cassette player and some large stereo headphones. Worked like a charm.

Sony introduced the Walkman a year later. I swear, someone from choir must've told them about it.

But the one really big thing I would've invented, or at least wanted to see someone invent, came from the fact that my house was being taken over by my collection of almost 1000 45s and a couple of hundred LPs and CDs not to mention 100 or so custom mix tapes by year or artist. Not only were all these records and tapes taking over my living room, but I had no good way to keep track of them. Even my Library Science skills couldn't help me.

Then in 2001 the iPod was introduced. I knew exactly what this was when I saw it. I knew that this would not only allow me to eventually get rid of every piece of vinyl in my house, but it would also allow me to clear out the space that had been taken up by $1200 of stereo equipment. An iPod and a set of $20 speakers from Radio Shack would do the trick.

Forget Facebook, the iPod is the thing I would've invented, not Facebook. Because this was the thing that was important to me.

Besides, with my teenaged history of stalking girls, it would've been just a little too creepy if I had invented Facebook.